It's a simple solution, much simpler than one might think
Here's the idea:
Capture the pendown event, ie every time a styles hits a specific area of the screen
Record the x-y co-ordinates of the event
Record the co-ordinates to a file
Write a simple routine to redraw the co-ordinates at a later date
Simple, and yes I have used this technique numerous times, it is much better than the Handwriting API as it records the actual points and you can do co-ordinate doubling for a faster response to the pen down event.
within the sheer numbers of Slashdot readers that so many people have so little experience. KVM over IP solutions will allow an administrator to have complete BIOS control over servers located at a NOC. Additionally these systems can be integrate into keypad lockable cases and power management systems for a very slick remote management system.
Rackit Technology
What you're looking for is a KVM over IP technology. There are numerous solutions out there for remote administration of multiple servers. The link provided is one vendor, but alot of vendors exist.
sounds to me like the real, and justified issue is people using stolen versions of blizzard games and being able to play them on a bnetd server. It sounds like the listed complaints in the history above are more like adding to the list so you can come away with the one thing that you want. Which is the ability for the company to sell the games they created.
If you think about it, going into court with one comlpaint gives extra scrutiny to it, however going in with 10 complaints, some of which are 30% justifiable will make the lawyers for blizzard look a bit more 'victimized'.
Having said that, some of the claims are silly, but the fact that you can play using stolen versions of the game isn't right. I would also like to propose a solution for blizzard.
Provide in a library (object form), the authentication system, ask that bnetd incorporate this into their builds. Now you might say, but the admins can yank out the authentication scheme! But heck most of these people are not coders and it would certainly reduce the number of illegal servers. Sure , you'll get some who can code enough to yank it out and recompile, but you'll always have cheaters.
Of course, if the main goal of the project is to be able to play blizzard games which have been stolen then it ought to be shut down, but I don't think that is the point anyhow.
On second though, maybe my idea sucks, but at least it's an idea - sometime people/companies/groups should try to communicate differences and resolve them out of court. Not to mention the fact that with all its money, Vivendi will mire the group into such a long protracted battle that they (vivendi) will most likely win.
Sad, but true.
Re:This is just flat out *wrong*
on
Lineo near Death
·
· Score: 2
There is a fairly nasty loophole at my (now former) institution. Research Associates/Assistants are not technically employed by the academic institution, we are hired by the 'supervising' professor. This gives the school a number of bonuses (from their POV) - no benefits for us, labour laws do not apply to us (and this is stated in the Ontario Labour Law guidelines too), no sick leave, no perks of a financial nature.
This is fairly easy for them to get away with as many of RA's do it for love and fun rather than financial gain (read: we are easy to mess with). I think most institutions might class RA's as 'staff' which would entitle them to normal staff treatment. But as it stands, we are essentially a group with no rights and no benefits. It's for that reason I have decided not to purse it as a 'career' (if you could call it that) any longer and am currently consulting and looking for a (preferably) research job in the private sector.
I have no idea what may come of it, and I continue to work on my own research at the school (grid, beowulf, distributed computing) but it's my own research , no pay , only for the love of the work.
Any available positions at the University of Florida? (much nicer climate than waterloo)
=)
*sighhhhhh*
Re:This is just flat out *wrong*
on
Lineo near Death
·
· Score: 2
hahaha....I'll keep that in mind in the future, but naturally like most people we were given the option to continue working the projects. Unfortunatley there would be no more funding, wonderful pill to swallow when it comes from a guy making in excess of 100K/year.
Also, since I was a lowly RA, no automatic paycheques into said bank account, had to have time sheets signed with work logs as well....
I am fairly sure you are glad you don't have my life:)
Re:This is just flat out *wrong*
on
Lineo near Death
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Cripes. People have bills to pay and families to feed. Doesn't anyone have a shred of decency anymore?
From my experience I can give a resounding 'no' to that. There is no decency unfortunatley. I was a research devloper at a Canadian University in the dept. of physics and computing. Our research group is/was a "Center for Excellence" and we developed two fully functional laser simulators of the Quantum Well and VCSEL variety. Things were progressing for 2 years, and the projects both reached decent beta stage.
Our entire research group was summarily laid of on a lovely friday afternoon at 5:30. No warning, no heads-up, no consideration.
Personally I was insulted but I can tell you, I am not the first, nor the last that this has happened to...
Mind you the educational institution referred to here had no problem highlighting our research group and some of my other research projects in glossy fliers in order to attract attention to new students and the general populace.
Oh the irony of being highlighted in promo material by the marketroids and concurrently bitchslapped by the accounting dept. in one fell swoop.
Bioware has released a model viewer that shows some of the models to be included in NWN. It's pretty cool, "Walk", "Run", "Attack", panning, zooming , etc.
Check out the following links for a taste of some of the models, according to the bioware forums they'll be releasing more models for the viewer. As it stands, they have the Flesh Golem and Bugbear, which can be added to the viewers default models...nifty...
I have been kind of wary of computer gaming to replace good ol' AD&D, IMHO they always fell short, although netHack does a decent job in the realm of adventure story lines and thought process (ie hacking and slashing everything is not the goal). NWN, although unlikely to displace me from an old tech AD&D game might be a cool complement. Now if we could host AD&D games for our (now) geographically dispersed group that would be cool. Of course it would be different than our old sessions, but it might be fun, and change (at times) can be good.
try Gentoo , it may have a slightly steeper learning curve to get it up and running, and you may have to wait for everything to compile, but you'll be glad you when you do it. You'll get only what you need and then you can "emerge" (you'll know what I meaan if you click through the gentoo link) the bits you want, instead of loading everything under the sun like alot of the more 'standard' distros end up doing. One of my lil' babies is a P150 64Mb ram and happily runs FluxBox and Rox
Mind you I have a number of higher end systems on which I like to play around with the newer desktop systems, but the beauty of linux, freeBSD, et al. is the ability to tailor the system the way you want it.
Personally, I am going to ignore the silly bloat arguments being thrown about. IMHO featureful desktop systems have a place, as do lightweight wm's with efficient filemanagers (I still love mc). It just comes down to what's practical and of course, what floats yer boat.
For the code that I work on, doxygen is the way to go, it generates a nice html document structure which is easily customizable through it's config scripts, you can place it directly in your cvs source tree, and have all users check it out. It expands brief and detailed code comments and puts those descriptions where they ought to be in the documentation tree, with links to the actual code. Since the documentation is part of the CVS module, it will always get checked out correctly by developers and the maintainer can update simply by running doxygen whenever needed.
In fact this doxygen was only part of the solution, our research projects had other documentation which required addition, however we simply had the developers get into using LyX and had the doxygen script merge in the static docs with the code documentation. Made for a nice doc tree which was easy to update (and if you really want to get fancy every once in a while, import into LyX and whip up a tasty DocBook). Of course the developers has to conform to the commenting style required, however if this is a problem for your development team, then the whole 'team' concept isn't going so well.
If you don't use CVS and/or doxygen, and those tools don't fit into your workplace (although CVS should be used, IMHO). You could easily whip up a php or perl script to merge TODO and Changelog files, this is of course assuming that all the developers use these files to track their work, which they should do anyhow (at least in some form). It would be trivial to whip up a parser in perl and merge those files into some sort of report. Thus the whole Practical Extraction and Reporting Lanuage thing...
This guy isn't just eccentric, from what the article is suggesting, he has symptoms of Oppositional Defiant Disorder and/or Oppositional Conduct Disorder. These are real disorders, which affect people across a broad range of society. Here's some info on ODD have a peek and tell me this guy is not suffering from a psychological disorder.
For those of you who would rather not click through:
A pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least six months during which four or more of the following are present:
often loses temper
often argues with adults
often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults' requests or rules
often deliberately annoys people
often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
is often touchy or easily annoyed by others
is often angry and resentful
is often spiteful and vindictive
Although the website has more info.
P.S. funny how that brief view of ODD describes alot of slashdot users! hahaha...smile, it's a joke
If you spend some time at most Universities in Canada, you will find a fairly decent amount of leeway in terms of language choices. Granted at the first year level, there is some imposition of language (either C or Java depending on the program), however at my school that is simply due to the sheer numbers of first year students. After the bloody mess that they generally make out of their first year studies ("You mean I'm not gonna be learning how to program Quake 4?") the numbers drop significantly. For instance my first year CS classes has ~190 students, Second year ~70, Third year ~10. Granted WLU is a tiny school in comparison to most, but the relative drop is fairly common across schools.
Anyhow, back to my point, in my program you generally had the option to approach the prof's and reason out why you wanted to use a different implementation scheme. Since the implementation was generally a smaller portion of the grade, also, it would make the student go a little bit further. There were numerous times I would set up an XSession using XWin32 for the profs to my workstation to login and run my projects (mind you I was a research assistant with my own workstation and static IP so it was easier for me, this could easily be solved at most faculties by setting up a linux box for that purpose).
So I suppose I should get to my point, many schools in Ontario, that I have seen and been exposed to do exactly what you are talking about, either formally of informally. In my case it was informal.
I have no clue about the state of Canadian Colleges (for the american audiences, colleges in canada are generally practical institutions which will not grant a BSc, rather a Diploma or Certificate and are not parallel with the American concept of a college), as my exposure was exclusively at the Univerisity level.
I have successfuly built the Morpheus Preview Edition from their source
My build is neither efficient or great, but it did end up working (had to fix their code, couple of missing declarations missing in class headers). I also had to create the icons and bitmaps (i did a horrible job, but they worked).
Set my targets in VC++, checked my paths, checked it all...
--------------------Configuration: Gnucleus - Win32 Release--------------------
Compiling resources...
C:\gnucleus1\Gnucleus.rc(1852) : fatal error RC1015: cannot open include file 'res\Gnucleus.rc2'.
Error executing rc.exe.
morpheusp.exe - 1 error(s), 0 warning(s)
Naturally, this makes sense since the contents of the zip contains no res\Gnucleus.rc2
Now I recall having read in one of the posts that the source doesn't include some of the major Morpheus components.
But, damn it...I want to exercise my right to be able to compile this project and breeze through all the source. Since the inclusion of the Gnucleus source will spread the GPL throughout the morpheus client, I would like to get a full source code distribution...
Then get yourself a copy of RedHat, Mandrake, or SuSe, click those big ol' buttons and don't be concerned with recompiling your kernel. Since that was the original poster's comments, had you taken the time to read the entire thread you would have known that.
Possible that that's the cause, but let's be realistic here. I also owned a Blueberry iBook, had it for about 20 months and an internal IDE cable broke on it. It didn't physically break, every OS on the face of the planet would simply not recognize any HD at all. Apple wanted a crapload of $$ for a repair, 500US just to look at it.
Now, I wouldn't go and jump on any bandwagon and start saying Apple makes *crap*, because I think they make good stuff. I still have my original Apple//c downstairs from when I was younger and it's still working. I was highly disappointed that Apple wanted so much just to pop it open and look.
Anyhow, when I mentioned 'superior', it has been superior in terms of usability and comfort compared to anything I have used. Now the trackball has come up, I'll try it. I already mentioned the Wacom Tablet. So, yes, the large grey intellimouse has been the best so far, but hey, I'm not closed minded about trying new things. Unlike many who would love to bash the intellimouse line and hardware simply because it is somehow associated with MSFT. But then again, this is slashdot.
I agree with your 3 button comment. I was actually expecting someone to flame with why I wasn't using vi in text mode:)
I am a lefty, but now that I think of it, I never acutally tried using my left hand to control the mouse. So, here I am trying to do it...I feel like I do when I try to write with my right hand. Pretty klunky and having trouble getting used to it. But certainly a thought....
I have never actually gone the way of the trackball. Whenever I tried them, they did the same as you say, felt clunky and I just couldn't get myself to adjust. If I do stuff in the gimp or any other image editing type app, I'll fall back to my Wacom writing tablet. After using a tablet, mice seem really crude. But I might try out a trackball, since they aren't all together too expensive...
Superior in terms of overall usage, comfort level and my personal opinion. Sure hardware sometime goes out faulty (little loose wires etc). Superior customer service, a phone call and reciept cleared up the problem. They paid for shipping and sent me a brand new mouse. This is the real world, things happen and sometimes hardware is defective. The question then comes down to, how does the company treat me as a customer if there is a problem? No horror story here, they were excellent. Now well more than a year later, all mice still run perfectly.
Might have been a bit vague, but I thought my point was made, sorry if it was not.
Still goes to my end point, the hardware is great. If something happens and it breaks due to manufacturer defect, they should replace it, and they did. So yes, it is a fine example.
I'm just sitting here wondering why you come off sounding like a knob?
Ever since I first saw them, I have oned a few MS Optical Mice. For some reason, MS Hardware is damn fine division. I had a faulty Intellimouse Optical, got a new one replaced, no charge. Had the smaller white one faulty, replaced, no charge. I now own 2 of the small, one of the large Grey ones...love my technical referrals? I also own the Logitech cordless optical mouse and cordless keyboard. First off , Optical is the way to go. Secondly, MS is good at hardware. Thirdly, Support is great for both W2K and Linux, no hassles anywhere. Except for programming those extra buttons for the logitech keyboard in Linux. Oh well, maybe someday I'll figure out the keycodes and write a little hack to make the buttons work.
I would like to try this no button mouse, when I am working (coding) I occassionally get serious serious hand pain (no jokes..lol).
It will last for days and is quite painful. All of us in tech jobs, spending long hours at computers should take a serious look at ergonomics. Also, your employer should pay for upgrading your chair, keyboard and mouse if you feel pain with your current setup. It's your health, your future, hell, go out and buy what you want and throw the bill at your boss if you're in pain (not literally throw it, figuratively). I would in fact suggest sitting down with your employer and going over ergonomics and how it can effect employee productivity.
I am gonna buy one, the tiny little muscles used in your hands to click the mice buttons place a huge strain on your arm over a period of time. It may not bother you now, but let's talk in 20 years....
so what the hell is someone who most obviously doesn't know how to add zip and CD-R support to your kernel build doing messing around with it and then complaining vehemently about the process? Most certainly without reading the HOW-TO's associated with a kernel build. Here's a hand, if you feel like learning something:
Now my first impression after reading your post, what benig so open minded about things, is that these HOW-TO's are most likely not for you. Much in the same way that Windows based OS'es are not for all of us (Read: Choice!).
However, you're not limited by that, wanna try Linux? Buy a distro, Redhat, Suse and Mandrake are all quite mature, quite *graphically* configurable and meant for end-users (Read: Binary Updates). Additionally if you spend the few bucks, (certainly not nearly as much as XP), you get something in the realm of 30 days technical, live installation support - I know many people who have used these services and been quite happy.
So as to maintain the topic thread, I would also suggest that you're miles off topic as MS releasing the source to a fellow such as yourself would make no difference whatsoever. Additionally, there is a huge difference between configuring a kernel, which is what you need to do and kernel hacking which is most certainly something you could never do
As for your final comment, agreed Linux should be easier for everyone, admittedly the community is not there yet. However, the above mentioned distributions have come a long way in the last year, patience. If you want easy and *NIX then don't be cheap, buy a Mac.
God, I can't believe I just did all that for such a trollish comment...
Slashdot Mirror
It's a simple solution, much simpler than one might think
Here's the idea:
Capture the pendown event, ie every time a styles hits a specific area of the screen
Record the x-y co-ordinates of the event
Record the co-ordinates to a file
Write a simple routine to redraw the co-ordinates at a later date
Simple, and yes I have used this technique numerous times, it is much better than the Handwriting API as it records the actual points and you can do co-ordinate doubling for a faster response to the pen down event.
within the sheer numbers of Slashdot readers that so many people have so little experience. KVM over IP solutions will allow an administrator to have complete BIOS control over servers located at a NOC. Additionally these systems can be integrate into keypad lockable cases and power management systems for a very slick remote management system.
Rackit Technology
What you're looking for is a KVM over IP technology. There are numerous solutions out there for remote administration of multiple servers. The link provided is one vendor, but alot of vendors exist.
it's: Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 7 years! tard.
If you think about it, going into court with one comlpaint gives extra scrutiny to it, however going in with 10 complaints, some of which are 30% justifiable will make the lawyers for blizzard look a bit more 'victimized'.
Having said that, some of the claims are silly, but the fact that you can play using stolen versions of the game isn't right. I would also like to propose a solution for blizzard.
Provide in a library (object form), the authentication system, ask that bnetd incorporate this into their builds. Now you might say, but the admins can yank out the authentication scheme! But heck most of these people are not coders and it would certainly reduce the number of illegal servers. Sure , you'll get some who can code enough to yank it out and recompile, but you'll always have cheaters.
Of course, if the main goal of the project is to be able to play blizzard games which have been stolen then it ought to be shut down, but I don't think that is the point anyhow.
On second though, maybe my idea sucks, but at least it's an idea - sometime people/companies/groups should try to communicate differences and resolve them out of court. Not to mention the fact that with all its money, Vivendi will mire the group into such a long protracted battle that they (vivendi) will most likely win.
Sad, but true.
This is fairly easy for them to get away with as many of RA's do it for love and fun rather than financial gain (read: we are easy to mess with). I think most institutions might class RA's as 'staff' which would entitle them to normal staff treatment. But as it stands, we are essentially a group with no rights and no benefits. It's for that reason I have decided not to purse it as a 'career' (if you could call it that) any longer and am currently consulting and looking for a (preferably) research job in the private sector.
I have no idea what may come of it, and I continue to work on my own research at the school (grid, beowulf, distributed computing) but it's my own research , no pay , only for the love of the work.
Any available positions at the University of Florida? (much nicer climate than waterloo)
=)
*sighhhhhh*
Also, since I was a lowly RA, no automatic paycheques into said bank account, had to have time sheets signed with work logs as well....
I am fairly sure you are glad you don't have my life :)
From my experience I can give a resounding 'no' to that. There is no decency unfortunatley. I was a research devloper at a Canadian University in the dept. of physics and computing. Our research group is/was a "Center for Excellence" and we developed two fully functional laser simulators of the Quantum Well and VCSEL variety. Things were progressing for 2 years, and the projects both reached decent beta stage.
Our entire research group was summarily laid of on a lovely friday afternoon at 5:30. No warning, no heads-up, no consideration.
Personally I was insulted but I can tell you, I am not the first, nor the last that this has happened to...
Mind you the educational institution referred to here had no problem highlighting our research group and some of my other research projects in glossy fliers in order to attract attention to new students and the general populace.
Oh the irony of being highlighted in promo material by the marketroids and concurrently bitchslapped by the accounting dept. in one fell swoop.
Check out the following links for a taste of some of the models, according to the bioware forums they'll be releasing more models for the viewer. As it stands, they have the Flesh Golem and Bugbear, which can be added to the viewers default models...nifty...
Biowares Model Viewer Page
I have been kind of wary of computer gaming to replace good ol' AD&D, IMHO they always fell short, although netHack does a decent job in the realm of adventure story lines and thought process (ie hacking and slashing everything is not the goal). NWN, although unlikely to displace me from an old tech AD&D game might be a cool complement. Now if we could host AD&D games for our (now) geographically dispersed group that would be cool. Of course it would be different than our old sessions, but it might be fun, and change (at times) can be good.
Having spent alot of time doing AI research, I definitley agree!
Mind you I have a number of higher end systems on which I like to play around with the newer desktop systems, but the beauty of linux, freeBSD, et al. is the ability to tailor the system the way you want it.
Personally, I am going to ignore the silly bloat arguments being thrown about. IMHO featureful desktop systems have a place, as do lightweight wm's with efficient filemanagers (I still love mc). It just comes down to what's practical and of course, what floats yer boat.
In fact this doxygen was only part of the solution, our research projects had other documentation which required addition, however we simply had the developers get into using LyX and had the doxygen script merge in the static docs with the code documentation. Made for a nice doc tree which was easy to update (and if you really want to get fancy every once in a while, import into LyX and whip up a tasty DocBook). Of course the developers has to conform to the commenting style required, however if this is a problem for your development team, then the whole 'team' concept isn't going so well.
If you don't use CVS and/or doxygen, and those tools don't fit into your workplace (although CVS should be used, IMHO). You could easily whip up a php or perl script to merge TODO and Changelog files, this is of course assuming that all the developers use these files to track their work, which they should do anyhow (at least in some form). It would be trivial to whip up a parser in perl and merge those files into some sort of report. Thus the whole Practical Extraction and Reporting Lanuage thing...
For those of you who would rather not click through:
A pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least six months during which four or more of the following are present:
Although the website has more info.
P.S. funny how that brief view of ODD describes alot of slashdot users! hahaha...smile, it's a joke
Anyhow, back to my point, in my program you generally had the option to approach the prof's and reason out why you wanted to use a different implementation scheme. Since the implementation was generally a smaller portion of the grade, also, it would make the student go a little bit further. There were numerous times I would set up an XSession using XWin32 for the profs to my workstation to login and run my projects (mind you I was a research assistant with my own workstation and static IP so it was easier for me, this could easily be solved at most faculties by setting up a linux box for that purpose).
So I suppose I should get to my point, many schools in Ontario, that I have seen and been exposed to do exactly what you are talking about, either formally of informally. In my case it was informal.
I have no clue about the state of Canadian Colleges (for the american audiences, colleges in canada are generally practical institutions which will not grant a BSc, rather a Diploma or Certificate and are not parallel with the American concept of a college), as my exposure was exclusively at the Univerisity level.
My build is neither efficient or great, but it did end up working (had to fix their code, couple of missing declarations missing in class headers). I also had to create the icons and bitmaps (i did a horrible job, but they worked).
Here's the screenshot.
I stand corrected. :)
--------------------Configuration: Gnucleus - Win32 Release--------------------
Compiling resources...
C:\gnucleus1\Gnucleus.rc(1852) : fatal error RC1015: cannot open include file 'res\Gnucleus.rc2'.
Error executing rc.exe.
morpheusp.exe - 1 error(s), 0 warning(s)
Naturally, this makes sense since the contents of the zip contains no res\Gnucleus.rc2
Now I recall having read in one of the posts that the source doesn't include some of the major Morpheus components.
But, damn it...I want to exercise my right to be able to compile this project and breeze through all the source. Since the inclusion of the Gnucleus source will spread the GPL throughout the morpheus client, I would like to get a full source code distribution...
Am I missing something here? This is simply wrong
Then get yourself a copy of RedHat, Mandrake, or SuSe, click those big ol' buttons and don't be concerned with recompiling your kernel. Since that was the original poster's comments, had you taken the time to read the entire thread you would have known that.
Now, I wouldn't go and jump on any bandwagon and start saying Apple makes *crap*, because I think they make good stuff. I still have my original Apple //c downstairs from when I was younger and it's still working. I was highly disappointed that Apple wanted so much just to pop it open and look.
Anyhow, when I mentioned 'superior', it has been superior in terms of usability and comfort compared to anything I have used. Now the trackball has come up, I'll try it. I already mentioned the Wacom Tablet. So, yes, the large grey intellimouse has been the best so far, but hey, I'm not closed minded about trying new things. Unlike many who would love to bash the intellimouse line and hardware simply because it is somehow associated with MSFT. But then again, this is slashdot.
I am a lefty, but now that I think of it, I never acutally tried using my left hand to control the mouse. So, here I am trying to do it...I feel like I do when I try to write with my right hand. Pretty klunky and having trouble getting used to it. But certainly a thought....
I have never actually gone the way of the trackball. Whenever I tried them, they did the same as you say, felt clunky and I just couldn't get myself to adjust. If I do stuff in the gimp or any other image editing type app, I'll fall back to my Wacom writing tablet. After using a tablet, mice seem really crude. But I might try out a trackball, since they aren't all together too expensive...
Cool, last time I tried to mess with keyboard mappings was when I had my iBook...thanks for the info!
Might have been a bit vague, but I thought my point was made, sorry if it was not.
Still goes to my end point, the hardware is great. If something happens and it breaks due to manufacturer defect, they should replace it, and they did. So yes, it is a fine example.
I'm just sitting here wondering why you come off sounding like a knob?
I would like to try this no button mouse, when I am working (coding) I occassionally get serious serious hand pain (no jokes..lol).
It will last for days and is quite painful. All of us in tech jobs, spending long hours at computers should take a serious look at ergonomics. Also, your employer should pay for upgrading your chair, keyboard and mouse if you feel pain with your current setup. It's your health, your future, hell, go out and buy what you want and throw the bill at your boss if you're in pain (not literally throw it, figuratively). I would in fact suggest sitting down with your employer and going over ergonomics and how it can effect employee productivity.
Maybe some of these links would be helpful:
Design/Layout
Ergonomics - A Practical Guide
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Computer Related Repetitive Strain Injuries
I am gonna buy one, the tiny little muscles used in your hands to click the mice buttons place a huge strain on your arm over a period of time. It may not bother you now, but let's talk in 20 years....
Kernel HOW-TO
CD Burning HOW-TO
ZIP Drive Mini HOW-TO
Now my first impression after reading your post, what benig so open minded about things, is that these HOW-TO's are most likely not for you. Much in the same way that Windows based OS'es are not for all of us (Read: Choice!).
However, you're not limited by that, wanna try Linux? Buy a distro, Redhat, Suse and Mandrake are all quite mature, quite *graphically* configurable and meant for end-users (Read: Binary Updates). Additionally if you spend the few bucks, (certainly not nearly as much as XP), you get something in the realm of 30 days technical, live installation support - I know many people who have used these services and been quite happy.
So as to maintain the topic thread, I would also suggest that you're miles off topic as MS releasing the source to a fellow such as yourself would make no difference whatsoever. Additionally, there is a huge difference between configuring a kernel, which is what you need to do and kernel hacking which is most certainly something you could never do
As for your final comment, agreed Linux should be easier for everyone, admittedly the community is not there yet. However, the above mentioned distributions have come a long way in the last year, patience. If you want easy and *NIX then don't be cheap, buy a Mac.
God, I can't believe I just did all that for such a trollish comment...