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Eh? What about those of us whose extracurricular activities depend on the Internet? And those of us who colleges offer courses online? Those of us who take classes in the evening, and catch up with our social lives afterward?

Glad I don't live in a dorm.

I wouldn't want to work on Windows...Microsoft's quality control sucks balls. Linux developers enjoy working with a decent product and a decently-written codebase.

Exactly my point. You hate Microsoft. You may even be willing to do ANYTHING to get others to stop using it. Because, your mission to force people to use Linux is so much more moral than Microsoft's equivalent.

You're extrapolating a bit too far. I don't care if other people use Windows. You want to use it? Feel free. I'll fix your computer for you, if it breaks. For free, even.

Linux isn't for everyone, at least not yet. If I feel someone may be able to hold their own after a few weeks usage, I'll recommend they try a LiveCD. Otherwise, I'll let them continue running Windows. I might install some antivirus and antispyware tools for them.

Seriously, you should try trolling over there...you'll get a lot more bang for your buck

Trolling? So THAT'S what you call extinguishing hypocritical Linux FUD.

Nah. That's what I call posting messages intended to elicit an angered response. You've heard about the "silent majority" in politics? The same thing exists in the Linux community. Most Linux users don't really care if you use Linux or not.

.Does Windows not crash for you? Does it not run slow? Whenever I try doing things outside of the norm (or even "normal" things, if you're a gamer.), Windows gets unstable

Nope, and nope. Is that what this is about? Your pirated copy of Windows ME crashed once when you tried to use 64-bit drivers on it, and you lost your beastiality porn? And yes, I'm a gamer (and developer), and no, I'm not running on a pre-built or in any way 'average' PC.

I've never run a pirated copy of Windows in my life. I own licenses for Win3.11, Win95, WinME, Win2K and WinXP. I'm just not running any of those operating systems right now.

Congratulations on your uptime streak, and managing to secure your computer against bad video card drivers, network worms and email viruses.

Sure, there's things you can do to speed up Windows, but the fact remains it doesn't hold up well to advanced usage.

Sure, there's things you can do to increase the usability of Linux for the average user, but the fact remains it doesn't hold up well to the most basic of usage.

I like that line. :-)

While it's true that using the command-line requires one to learn new things, modern distributions like Ubuntu work pretty well.

You sound like you're on meth...

Avoiding the question I see. Nice move!

The question implied a logical fallacy.

A central, community-minded advocacy and software development organization?

Is that anything like the central development organization called Microsoft, and the community-minded advocacy group called the Windows developer community?

The Windows developer community is fine. I know a few people who develop exclusively on Windows; They're usually fine. I only know one or two advocates.

I wouldn't count Microsoft as community-minded, "developers!" chant aside. Perhaps it's a philosophical thing.

I don't hate them, but I don't respect them as a software development company.

Maybe you should read this [slashdot.org] and then get back to me when you've managed to remove your knee from the back of your throat.

How amusing that you point to a Slashdot post, of all places, for your desperate fact-finding mission which, even if true, is totally irrelevent to the discussion. Surely you've noticed the obvious bias Slashdot has? What are you waiting for, a negative karma moderation specifically for "Non-Anti-Microsoft Behaviour"? (At the moment, t

I run a free pc clinic, and I've seen people wait up to a year before getting their computer fixed. Usually, though, it's more like three or four months, and that's only if the computer is unusably slow.

While handing out fliers on Wednesday, I encountered people who were certain their computers had viruses, but hadn't planned to do anything about it.

The followup you're describing sounds like the ???? stage in the standard three-step business plan.

If you're sequencing, you're going to want a decent sound font. I highly recommend Musica Theoria 2 (scroll down to just above mid-page), for personal use. (I've seen it listed as having a non-commercial license attached to it..) You can use Wine to unpack the SfArk file.

You'll want to grab the Timidity configuration file, so Timidity will know how to use the sound font. A quick Google search isn't turning up the link, so here's the copy I use.

Finally look at Timidity's MAN page. You're going to want to look at setting up the ALSA MIDI loopback, so that your MIDI software's output gets redirected to Timidity.

I've never done much with MIDI sequencing, but I love my video game MIDI music. :-)

Yes. We ask them before we install antispyware and antivirus utilities, through our intake process.

As for undesired behavior...I run a free PC Clinic. People bring in their desktops and laptops for cleanup and repair, and we send them back the same day. With a good number of volunteers, we've fixed as many as 35 computers in a six-hour period.

Since they're peoples' personal machines, there's not a great deal of risk of adverse behavior from the tools we use.

I manage a student-run pc clinic. Earlier this year, we had a woman call us who wanted some forensic analysis of her hard drive done. The chief of our campus police was queried, and we were told in no uncertain terms that we were not to attempt forensic work, as the moment we touched the drive, any information on it would be unusable in court.

Of course, I wanted to know more, so I found out a few things about computer forensics as it applies to hard drives. First, every single step taken with the drive has to be documented, for review and potential dispute by experts hired by whoever would want to dispute the results. Second, merely mounting the hard disk may write data to it, making it useless as evidence. And there are other issues.

If the RIAA is being allowed to present their own analysis of the hard drive in the first place, they're being held to a very high standard when it comes to documenting not only the evidence they uncover, but what tools and procedures were used, who performed them, even who was in possession of the drive before it reached the lab.

If they're providing their own forensic evidence, that evidence can be put under very close scrutiny by any lawyer with the sense (and funds) to bring in an independent expert. And if even one of the defendants has an expensive enough lawyer who pulls in an expert who finds fault with the work of the RIAA's expert, RIAA's expert's work will come under fire in all of the cases.

In short, I expect the RIAA to behave itself. They won't fudge or falsify evidence; the stakes (the outcome of virtually every one of their civil infringement cases) are too damn high.

One of the projects at GRC4 is to create a simple MMOFPS. Modifying the Quake engine to allow a map to force the client to connect to another server would be very, very simple.

I'm going to do the dozen or so lines of code changes required, and a couple other members are going to do the level design.

At my computer club's PC Clinic, I set up Ethereal on our network gateway computer, to keep track of things. You can easily see this kind of crap going on.

We've got that going. Make sure you've got more than just yourself to pick up the slack when deadlines loom.

Pre-W2K systems are still in wide use in the home. I know this because my Computer Club regularly services them at PC Clinic. Dropping support for pre-W2K systems puts Firefox in a bad position for these systems. We may have to look at Opera instead.