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GNOME seems to be about on par with Mac OS X in terms of configurability, and I hear that Apple is barely selling any machines these days.

But, seriously.... customization doesn't even need to occur via preference panels (if it needs to happen at all). Developers should strive to write apps that are both simple and intuitive. KDE apps tend to suffer from feature-bloat.

Look at Transmission versus Azureus: Azureus does a whole lot more, but suffers from *serious* feature bloat. Transmission does almost everything you'd want a torrent client to do, but has a dead-simple UI, and uses about a tenth as much RAM. Azureus isn't a KDE application, though it does seem to suffer from the same pitfalls as most KDE apps do.

While I'm ranting, I should add that KDE's tendency to put toolbars with dozens of tiny identical-looking blue icons is absolutely maddening.

GNOME's user interface guidelines seem to be much clearer and consistent than those used by KDE. For now, this is a clear reason to pick one over the other for desktop usage.

*Note that none of this applies to the abomination that is the GIMP.

Are your users simply using Word or are there a lot of Excel users also? Because Excel has always been the hang up when I have tried to convert a SMB or SOHO. If they don't use Excel it usually isn't a problem to switch. But if you have a lot of Excel users, especially if the Excel spreadsheets have a lot of VBA macros, then you will be in a world of hurt.

Because IMHO while Writer has come a long way to catching up with Word, and as some users point out with corrupted docs it even beats it, and Impress can have templates added to it(such as OxygenOffice, which IMHO is a better OO.o for professionals and SMBs) but the big stickler is Calc just doesn't compare to Excel. So it will all depend on your users more than anything else. I hope this helps. Good Luck!

I will say that although I have not had the joy of opening Office 2000 files with OO.o 3.0, I do recall there being some serious issues between powerpoint slides.

I've heard that about prior versions of OO.o, but I don't know if the same is true of 3.x. I have had problems with some older Word documents not showing some images when opened in OO.o, including 3.0. If your main concern is viewing or converting old files, why not keep Office 2000 around? What's the point of getting rid of it completely?

Just use OpenOffice.org to create all new or revised files, as they can be opened universally, in part because free ODF plug-ins and converters are everywhere. If you have an older file that needs a revision, convert it to an older or more consistent format (Office '95 and '97 formats work for me most of the time), and then open the converted file in OO.o, without losing any formatting or data. A variety of external or command-line format converters also exist, which are useful for batch converting legacy files.

I have several old copies of Office 2000 and 2003 floating around the office, mainly to convert between old file types ad-hoc. Microsoft also offers read-only Office document viewers and converters of their Office line, for free:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/HA010449811033.aspx

I think most of these tools, and some versions of the full MS Office Suites, also work on other OS platforms via WINE.

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=31
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/differences/

I regrettably give you the option of getting Novell's OO.o distribution (here) in which you can install an extension for OpenXML.

Why the regret? Novell maintains a good package of OpenOffice installers and extensions. There are also Open Source ODF and OpenXML converters:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter

And OpenXML support comes with OpenOffice.org 3+ "out of the box":

http://blog.mypapit.net/2008/04/openofficeorg-30-supports-microsoft-openxml-docx.html

Going forward, the ability to convert almost every legacy document format that ever existed, to an International Standard like ODF, makes most file format differences a non-issue.

Not everyone has caught up with current standards, so we make it company policy to use ODF formats internally, but we convert files down to Office '97 or PDF when sharing them with external contacts. Everyone with any Office suite from the last 10 years can open our converted files without installations or issues.

Calc also rocks, and is better then Excel for my usage pattern anyway.
But agreed, Impress stinks. Most of the problems seem to be due to the fact it doesn't handle transparently correctly in PPT, but it's also a resource hog when presenting in its own format also. I use Impressive now for all my presentations, no matter what program produced them, but most of my new presentations are being made with LaTeX Beamer.

Calc also rocks, and is better then Excel for my usage pattern anyway.
But agreed, Impress stinks. Most of the problems seem to be due to the fact it doesn't handle transparently correctly in PPT, but it's also a resource hog when presenting in its own format also. I use Impressive now for all my presentations, no matter what program produced them, but most of my new presentations are being made with LaTeX Beamer.

For my usage, Calc has been better then Excel, Writer about the same as Word, and Impress blows chunks compared to PowerPoint. I don't use Base or Access enough to compare, but Base is the newest member of the OO.org family, and probably has room to grow.

For me, it's not a big deal that the presentation software stinks. I've switched to LaTeX Beamer and Impressive, which I've been very happy with, but my GUI loving boss won't touch with a 10 foot pole.

For my usage, Calc has been better then Excel, Writer about the same as Word, and Impress blows chunks compared to PowerPoint. I don't use Base or Access enough to compare, but Base is the newest member of the OO.org family, and probably has room to grow.

For me, it's not a big deal that the presentation software stinks. I've switched to LaTeX Beamer and Impressive, which I've been very happy with, but my GUI loving boss won't touch with a 10 foot pole.

Fight back: http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/ :)

There are Cocoa bindings in a variety of other languages.

Two examples, from vastly different languages:

The first is Chicken Scheme, with an extended tutorial showing iTunes processing using Chicken:

http://3e8.org/zb/cocoa/manipulating-itunes-plist.html

The second, with a less extended set of examples, is HOC - a Cocoa bridge for Haskell:

http://hoc.sourceforge.net/examples.html

Note that Apple is involved several bridges from other dynamic languages (ECMAScript, python, ruby) to Cocoa.

The point is to be able to reuse the Cocoa frameworks, which are largely written in Objective-C and C++, and in some cases build entirely new frameworks using a non-C-derived language.

If you're allergic to Objective-C, you don't actually need to use it directly, although it's helpful to understand it in order to follow how the bridges use syntactic sugar to make the mapping to Cocoa seem more Objective-C-like.

Admittedly, shoving this into the iPhone at this point is incredibly awkward, but Apple is not actively opposing the use of other controller languages on the iPhone, as long as they are well behaved (mostly wrt well-defined bounds on CPU and space use, and a clear understanding of the change to the attack surface of the program and the phone as a result of the language choice, and so forth).

This is good news, since JavaScript is a good language. I've been working on a pet project for a while, which could perhaps be combined with this, to simplify the inclusion of snippets of C code where performance is an issue. Have a look at http://jsext.sourceforge.net/Including%20C%20functions.html

How about sql-fairy http://sqlfairy.sourceforge.net/ that's open source and very complete?

This is a laptop and has always had a 2.5" drive. :D

# smartctl --all /dev/sda|grep Load_Cycle
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 021 021 000 Old_age Always - 790117

Here's a server that never gets shut down:

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 559

Now, *this* is interesting to me:

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0

Notice that the "value" seems to be greater than the threshold, but SMART still claims that this drive (from my server) is healthy. I bet that there are a lot of misconceptions about the data from smartctl.

Given that this Load_Cycle is described by this guy as "Number of cycles into Landing Zone position", I really can't see how this number is *really* significant. The armature flies allover the drive allthetime. I'm calling this a tempest in a teapot. :D

Use TeX/LaTeX/MetaPost for the drawing and layout engine(s). Use you favorite language as a front end to turn the input data into source files for these programs. Plus, the result output is PDF, which means you can avoid the crap-fest that is Word. http://tug.org/

Alternatively, you can use Asymptote, which is like a modern version of MetaPost. http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/

This is one of the reasons Colemak and Asset were invented. Asset and Colemak both keep ZXCV and nearly all punctuation keys in the same place as Qwerty. This means that clipboard hotkeys don't need remapping, and the layouts are easier to learn for those that already know Qwerty.

(note: I designed Asset, but recommend Colemak because it is better maintained and promoted - I'm lazy.)

Well, the same is true also for Perl, PHP, Python and even Lua, so that's nothing radically new.

Shameless plug: I wrote an open-source program to convert from FLAC to Ogg Vorbis or MP3. In my case, the motivating factor was that I could put Oggs on my Rockbox'd Sansa, and my work laptop. http://sourceforge.net/projects/flacsquisher

(link provided for those with sigs turned off)

I definitely would go for teaching young children, who would benefit (and need it) more and also be more receptive to technology. If every child learned some basic programming (say, Python or some shell scripting), they would grow up into much more savvy end users.

For younger kids, things like LittleWizard and EToys are a good way to introduce the concept of programming without worrying about syntax.

I have both of these, and some good Python-based games, as part of a Linux distro for kids at:
http://www.quinncoincorporated.org/

#3. Provide a "known good" list of files (names, date/time, multiple checksums) for ALL of the OS files. This way, at least infections can be removed easier. It's easier to find a file that is NOT on the known good and remove it than it is to find a file that MAY be a newly obfuscated version of an old virus.

You can't trust anything on the computer once it's been compromised - it's basic computer science theory. You can hope for the best, but that's about it.

The tripwire folks figured out how to do this well over a decade ago. All you have to do is cryptographically sign your hashes, preferably with a key that is not readily available to the system (either it's kept elsewhere or there is a password on it). Sure, the intruding SW could corrupt or delete the hash list, but it couldn't fool you into thinking a binary was good.

Unfortunately, the last time I had it working, tripwire was a PITA to setup and use. It seemed to check the wrong things (I didn't care that /dev/tty0 changed because someone logged in, or something like that) and always had to be updated after system updates were installed. I don't know if anyone has done any tripwrite + package manager integration since I last used it, but that would probably make it easier to use.

A wide selection of music, and more importantly, a wide selection of formats, from MP3, WAV, to OGG.

You'd have to be mad to insist on WAV, try for FLAC instead. Typically compresses to 30-50% the size of WAV, the best hardware and software support of any lossless codec, can be tagged with Vorbis comments, and supports Replay Gain.

Also, the last codec you're thinking of is Vorbis. Ogg is a container format.

GOsa is worth a look but in my experience is VERY hard to implement. It's a web based LDAP front end that manages posix accounts, Samba, email/groupware, Asterisk, fax, automatic installation (via FAI), DNS, DHCP and much more. I think the target market is large organisations with existing inhouse skills in the base technologies and plenty of man hours. I tried getting this working as a lone generalist, and I only got as far as getting posix, Samba, SOGo (a groupware solution), DHCP and DNS working. Scripts to get something working on Debian Lenny are on sourceforge (I finally found a use for my sourceforge project:) : https://sourceforge.net/projects/wfstt/ .

..because it's the only one that will allow you to migrate from Active Directory. FDS does Active Directory user and group synchronization. I will say that Active Directory is still a pretty darn good LDAP server. However, switching is a good idea simply because you can use FOSS LDAP user self-service tools like http://lam.sourceforge.net/

Gravitation is the best happy game I've ever played, entertainment games included. It's a small art game by Jason Rohrer, a leading figure in video game art. Download it and try it for yourself first (it's only 500KBytes). http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/gravitation/

I came to this game skeptical about it, after having played Passage, from the same developer, a few months ago, ending it dumbfounded about how the game meant anything at all and completely unconvinced about it being any good. So I was ready to dismiss it and only started playing it for time killing purposes.

When you start playing Gravitation, you'll notice a timer relentlessly counting down. This obviously means the time you have left to live in the game. The screen is limited and you only see yourself and a fireplace. I moved around and saw a ball flying, and instinctively pressed SPACE to jump at it; I missed the ball. There was this little girl and I saw she had thrown me the ball. There wasn't anything else to see, so I reasoned I had to play with her to move the game forward. She threw me the ball again, and I jumped and grabbed it; it went back to her and a little heart appeared. My own heart warmed a little. I played with her some more and, suddenly, the music got wilder, the screen got bigger and I was on fire: I saw an exit where, before, only darkness existed, and when I jumped for it. I forgot the little girl and I flew through space; leapt from platform to platform collecting stars that seemed to get me more energy, and I leapt and leapt; until it all came crashing down. The screen got smaller and I got weaker. I had to go back down to the little girl, I reasoned, and play with her some more; she's useful to me. But when I came back, there were these blocks of ice blocking the way and I couldn't play with her. I pushed them, which wasn't easy, and they melted in the fireplace. For the effort, I lost a little life, but for the effort, I got to play with the girl. She was beginning to be more than just useful: I was beginning to get fond of her. But still, I wanted to see more, so when the music got crazy, I left her for the heights again. A routine started to emerge: I would go exploring, then I would get back, break some blocks of ice and play with the girl.

I thought it would last forever.

But, some time later, when I came back from my frenzy, she was gone; only her little ball remained. It struck something deep in me, a loss and lost kind of feeling. She was gone. While I was going on a manic spree, climbing platforms in search of achievements, I dismissed her. She was what kept me going through all this and I abandoned her. I thought I could just work a little harder to melt the ice and she would take me back, and love me. But no.

She was gone.

I still had 20 more seconds to live and plenty of energy to jump, but it seemed pointless to go on. I just stood there, looking at where she once was, regretting ever leaving her. After a while, I went to the fireplace in tears. The timer reached zero. My life faded. Gravitation.

All this in under 5 minutes. Notice that I kept saying "I", as if it happened to me. I think that's key to the reason I was completely immersed in the experience so quickly, and I think that's something no other art medium can do. You're not just seeing it, or reading it, or hearing it: you're living it.

And that is why Gravitation is the best game I've ever played.

Well, I wrote this on reddit.com (a likes-to-think-it's-classier-than-Fark-or-Digg-or-Slashdot-but-doesn't-even-come-near-Metafilter site), and have since came back to the game to play through it again.

The second time, I stayed playing with the girl. You feel energetic the whole time, but nothing else happens. Really cute and boring; I was expecting more from the girl.

The third time, I decided ignoring the girl. She didn't go away and cried all the time, and asides from alternating between manic and depressed, nothing happened. She

Qt beats wxWidgets by a wide margin. The API is much cleaner, documentation is a lot better, and wxWidgets has nothing like QGraphicsView

Being a wx developer, I don't know Qt well but wxArt2d seems to be similar to QGraphicsView, doesn't it?

And for those kind words I'm going to post a follow up to my original post of more relevant changes between the 2.4 and latest 2.6 kernels (I'll try and add a few more words after each point).

Kernel configuration was overhauled. Outside support for more GUI menus, it now means you no longer have to do make dep after changing something. Further building modules outside the kernel tree is now not so baroque. The time to build and partially rebuild kernels also dropped. Building a kernel in parallel (i.e. using more than one CPU during the build process) works better.

Better support for configuring out unneeded parts of the core kernel on embedded systems. You can see the seeds of this going mainline in a git commit on 2.5.70. There is an outside project called Linux Tiny that produces patches aimed at being able to configure out features not needed for embedded systems. Over the course of 2.6 many of these patches have trickled into the mainstream kernel.

I mentioned that 2.6 scales better under load in my previous post. Here are some benchmark comparison graphs of 2.4 versus 2.6 kernels (the graphs also include comparisons against the BSDs but you can see that Linux 2.4 had some serious problems that Linux 2.6 addressed).

The kernel is now (on systems where there is reliable device discovery) able to automatically load the modules it needs to drive hardware. No more having to adjust static lists of which modules need to be loaded.

udev was introduced. This change meant that the entries in /dev were no longer static. In 2.4 all possible device entries (even for devices you didn't have) were shown in /dev and their major/minor numbers were fixed (which was causing problems as new devices were turning up - what major/minor number do you give them?). Additionally the other dynamic /dev system (devfs) was whittled away and killed off.

FUSE support (LWN article about FUSE). Allows filesystem drivers to be written in userspace. Currently the best Linux NTFS driver is written using FUSE and it allows fun things like sshfs. Might be handy if you need users to be able to configure where data is stored remotely, you are writing your own filesystem or you need to support writing to NTFS formatted USB disks...

There is better CFS (Samba/SMB/Windows File Sharing) support. NFS version 4 support was also added.

cpufreq support. The kernel can clock down the CPU speed (usually by changing voltages via some hardware interface) to save large amounts of power. This can be done in response to work load so you run at full speed as often as possible and then when things are quiet you scale down to the lowest setting (you often save the most power when doing absolutely nothing so it pays to finish things as quickly as possible).

Any switch from 2.4 to 2.6 will of course require userspace changes (updated modutils, udev, later gcc, later glibc).

There is also davej's post Halloween document discussing changes from 2.4 to 2.5. This is very detailed and is another excellent reference.

Many many other things have changed too (e.g. ALSA support for sound has been added) but I have tried to keep the ones mentioned at least tangentially related to the original scenario :)

Brain Workshop is a free open-source version of the Dual N-Back mental exercise.

What if a simple mental exercise could improve your memory and intelligence?

A recent study published in PNAS, an important scientific journal, shows that a particular memory task called Dual N-Back actually improves working memory (short term memory) and fluid intelligence. This finding is important because fluid intelligence was previously thought to be unchangeable. The game involves remembering a sequence of spoken letters and a sequence of positions of a square at the same time.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the dual n-back task also enhances focus and attention and may help improve the symptoms of ADHD/ADD.

For one small crowd of the internet (anime watchers), h.264 in MKV is the de-facto standard for soft-subs

Actually, you're wrong there. The de facto standard there is ASS (or more politely SSA, but you have to love the name of the library libass), and SRT. MKV just proves to be a very handy container supporting ASS which was designed with various typographic features in mind (colors, positioning, etc, which is such a requirement for subtitling cartoons that I can't fathom how I spent my younger years staring at white text on the television). You can use any of the supported codecs, including MPEG-1 or 2 (heavens forbid), Theora, or whatever is supported.

incompetant

Your incompetence at spelling is showing.

Right, and if the 1 MB limit per email is too small for a particular request, you could tie in some of the advanced technologies, such as PAR, which were originally invented to circumvent similar difficulties in transmitting ridiculous quantities p0rn over usenet in spite of small message size limits.

Here

when you inspect the song in iTunes it shows you the date of purchase and email fields. They're just standard MP4 atoms, so other apps can see and remove them.

The article referred to "not visible as ID3", so I'm guessing the OP has the files in mp3 format.

Tidymp3 is a (Win, command-line) utility that will strip everything out of an mp3 except the sound frames. It rebuilds the file, so it may even correct some errors, though it comes with warnings that occasionally it may destroy a file trying.

MP3 Tag Tools will remove all non-ID3 tags.

I don't do iTunes, so I haven't actually tried it with one of those files, though.

I agree with you for the most part. This isn't anything new. Apple has embedded identifying information about the purchaser since iTunes Plus was launched on May 30, 2007.

The only situation where I could see this being a problem is if your equipment is stolen (MacBook, iPod, etc.) and it resulted in your iTunes Plus files being loosed into the wild. There is the potential for the recording industry to come at you with a lawsuit stating that you willfully infringed copyright. However, it has been over a year since iTunes Plus has been around and I haven't heard of any problems like this, so I suppose it isn't really something one should worry about.

By the way, AtomicParsley can already remove the identifying information from the files.

There's Infantry from Sony Online Entertainment. It's a free gateway game. Old school, top down, 2D arena game. Still has an okay population. The game's been around for about 10 years now.

There's also Subspace (originally created by the same guys that made Infantry), which is now abandonware and taken over by some elitists who created their own client (and don't share the source, but is the main client used nonetheless) called Continuum. Continuum is top down, 2D arena game kind of like asteroids, but against other ships and a whole lot more fun. Still has a very healthy population. Been around for about 12 years now.

And then there's Discretion, which is an open source version of the client. It got a lot of flak and crap from the guys who made Continuum, but it has survived and is maturing nicely. Also, since this client is OSS, it has huge potential to add in a ton of nifty features and such that the Continuum client will never have: OpenGL explosions, NEW weapons, etc.

Recent versions of VLC have left me very disappointed. Video quality is just bad; VLC isn't even doing decent upsampling (I just get nearest neighbor!). Plus performance is abysmal on Linux. Hence, I have switched allegiances and now use SMPlayer* on both my Linux and Windows machines. SMPlayer has better video quality, a nicer GUI, and proper subtitle support. There is a codec pack to download, but installation is trivial.

(* It's really just a nice frontend for MPlayer.)

It's a pity, because VLC can do a bunch of awesome network streaming stuff. Sometimes I get the feeling that VLC's mission isn't very clear. There was a time when it set out to be something more interesting than just another movie player.

Windows Media Player on Windows 7 will let the blind see and the lame walk. The tears of Windows Media player will cure cancer, but this will not help Steve Jobs because he will refuse to use it.

This is an almost 2 year old story: Apple's DRM Whack-a-Mole (Posted by CmdrTaco on 10.06.2007 17:08)

If it bothers you to have an identifying tag in your music files, well remove it or overwrite it.
As far as I understand, it's stored in a standard MP4 atom.

And if you don't know how to do it, ask Google, or try this suggestion which explains how to use AtomicParsley for windows or mac.

This is an almost 2 year old story: Apple's DRM Whack-a-Mole (Posted by CmdrTaco on 10.06.2007 17:08)

If it bothers you to have an identifying tag in your music files, well remove it or overwrite it.
As far as I understand, it's stored in a standard MP4 atom.

And if you don't know how to do it, ask Google, or try this suggestion which explains how to use AtomicParsley for windows or mac.

Virtual Dimension. It's way better than VirtuaWin. Minimal interface. Does use quite a bit of RAM and maybe CPU, though. My system sped up after I stopped using it.

Grid Move. This is not virtual desktops but partitions your screen into grids. Windows are then easily dragged into trigger regions to be resized into grids. This is very useful for large or multiple screens. If you have nVidia or ATI then your drivers already come with screen grid features. This tool is more flexible and works without nVidia or ATI drivers (such as with a VM or through Remote Desktop). This one I use all the time.

It took me years, but I have finally found these 2 window/desktop tools I've always wanted!

Recent versions of VLC have left me very disappointed. Video quality is just bad; VLC isn't even doing decent upsampling (I just get nearest neighbor!). Plus performance is abysmal on Linux. Hence, I have switched allegiances and now use SMPlayer* on both my Linux and Windows machines. SMPlayer has better video quality, a nicer GUI, and proper subtitle support. There is a codec pack to download, but installation is trivial.

(* It's really just a nice frontend for MPlayer.)

It's a pity, because VLC can do a bunch of awesome network streaming stuff. Sometimes I get the feeling that VLC's mission isn't very clear. There was a time when it set out to be something more interesting than just another movie player.

Genius code is elegant code

Thinking Forth is a book about how to write elegant code. It is a skill that can be learned.

Times New Roman is still part of the Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts. Microsoft removed the download from their site, but they can still be downloaded in an unaltered form.

...EULA allows redistribution if the packages are kept in their original format and filenames and not used to add value to commercial products

Sources:
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

Filters will never solve the spam problem.

Not collectively, that is true. However, they can make a huge difference at the individual level, provided that one is savvy enough to configure and use a Bayesian filtering tool, such as SpamBayes. Most people don't have the same non-spam keywords or patterns in their regular e-mails so the spammers are not able to poison filters on a large scale when individuals use personal spam filtering. Spam will never go away in the global sense because the world will never run out of idiots so the best that we can do as individuals is to use the technology at our disposal to limit our personal exposure (I haven't seen a spam in my inbox for months, and it is now a very rare occurance for one to slip past my filters).

I am using Fedora Core 8 on a laptop with a Atheros AR5212/AR5213 Multiprotocol MAC/baseband processor. The drivers wrk perfectly.

First of all, the broadband router was not configured to enable wifi - that required some grokking of the installation manual to get the IP address, username and password to access the configuration menu, all on the same channel/frequency.

Then there was the configuration to follow various Security Tips.
Regardless of my location, six or seven different wi-fi networks will show up on the configuration manager.

The default setting for the wifi configuration menu was "ad-hoc", but nothing would happen until "managed" mode was selected.

Ad-hoc vs Managed mode

Then there was the problem of getting the wifi driver to be automatically seleted upon startup (there are two possible communications modes: Ethernet RJ45 vs. wi-fi).

Until thes security key was set using iwconfig, nothing would work.

Setting up a WPA pass phrase

And cracking a WPA passphrase, which makes the above seem a bit pointless.

In all probability, the need for all of this has probably gone away with more recent distro's - I had similar problems in the past with various other drivers.

Followup 3:

It seems that xpaddr converts gamepad button presses to keystrokes, and autohotkey is used to send those keystrokes to the correct windows. These guys have gotten this much working. Yet although dual-mouse drivers exist, I have not found people who have gotten two mice working independently in different instances of the game. That said, if you're content with using a gamepad instead of a mouse, this seems to work.

It'd be nice if this mishmash of different software could be bundled together as a single "play games splitscreen" program -- which one could imagine also doing other things, like stripping game windows of borders and decorations, and aligning them all to precisely fill the screen automatically.

A completely different approach would be to use the split-screen desktop software that Microsoft should be releasing before too long, which should (hopefully) make this easy.

Finally, in all of this I haven't considered tricks with Wine and Linux; I assume that some things (like multiple mice) might be easier in such a framework. But I think that for games, a Windows-based approach is probably, if we're honest and not too ideological, much more practical.

Try VirtuaWin. http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/

Anyhow, try VirtuaWin. http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/ I use it a lot and love it. It consistently amazes all the Windows-only folks at my office.

You could put the disk image on a usb drive with UNetBootIn.

Having a cloud in your own house would be nice, so everyone could share computing power across multiple computers.

Yeah. That would be nice. If you have the hardware all you need is the right software.

I don't know why more people don't do it -- not just homes, either. All sorts of orgs could use their desktops as a grid for on-demand supercomputing if only they would configure it to do that.

Can you name a single game where you can just decide to not to play while in the middle of any given level, and the game will play for you?

Ur-Quan Masters. You can either fly through hyperspace by yourself, or let the autopilot guide you. The former has advantages if you're flying through enemy territory and want to avoid confrontations. The old Elite games also have an autopilot available. Coming to think of it, World of Goo's "skip this level" feature could be considered effectively the same as a self-playing feature.

And doesn't Eve Online have time-based skill increase even if you're not logged in ? For that matter, don't most MMORPGs have bots that auto-grind the character for you ? That would indicate that the whole concept of MMORPG needs to be reconsidered, since the whole point of a game is to e fun, but that's another discussion entirely.

For that matter, what about multiplayer strategy games which allow players to come and go ? The computer takes over any empty seats and gives over to a human player upon request. And then there's ProgressQuest. Heck, the automatic trading systems in real-life stock market could be considered prior art. This whole patent is utterly ridiculous, even for a software patent.

(I haven't quite figured out this Slashdot Tag thing).

Right now, it is essentially a way to get a small comment on the front page.

Those of us who dislike comments are, however, forced to view them.

True enough (packages like Folder Size are excellent), but there's no compelling reason to tie a web browser to a given platform. Free software should be able to run on a free OS.

Of course, I haven't had the problems syncing you have. I can't recall a time I lost data from it. Of course, I mostly use Linux (pilot-xfer, JPilot), so perhaps they're more reliable about that.

None of this applies to the new phone, of course, since it's not running Palm OS. Still, while PalmOS has many faults, I've never see the sync as one of them.

Not really what you're asking for, but here's an idea for you to chew on.

I currently use an older laptop with my HTPC via Synergy a software based virtual "KVM" (though it's a little different than that). The downside is the quality of a notebook's keyboard (I'm happy with the one I use). I don't have experience with the OSX version, but it's there for you to play with and free.

http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

Upsides are it works just fine over 802.11 and works with multiple computer screens. I assign the HTPC's HDTV to the top of my notebook screen, and use between the two is pretty seamless.