Yes, that is exactly the point and it's the typical misinterpretation of the "truth" that so much of their FUD employs.
Decent analogy in principle.
Windows does have more security mechanisms in place, because they need them to prevent things from interacting in ways that should not have been possible in the first place. Band Aids. Some of these mechanisms take the form of nagging dialog boxes and arbitrary things like driver signing.
Also, Microsoft's security methods tend to make it more difficult for the legitimate admin more than making the system more secure. It's a crock of shit.
Like deliberately making password recovery difficult. Of course it's not really difficult to blank or change the stored hash in the SAM if you have physical access to the machine and unsupported third party utilities, but MS won't help you.
The filesystem and registry key permissions (using ACLs) are ridiculous too, such that even the user "System" (which is the only real "god" account in NT based Windows, not Administrator) can be denied all access. It can be a royal pain, even while accessing the disk from off system, to gain access to delete files that rootkit enabled malware has jacked the permissions of. (nested levels of bullshit that you have to take ownership of and add System to the ACL and propagate down)
Most of these Microsoft people believe their own FUD. They'll argue that the sun is the moon to discredit alternatives. One of the best that I've heard from someone I used to think highly of is that "Windows has far more security mechanisms in place than Unix"
I think that part of the driving force for the attitude among Microsoft enthusiasts is that they are scared of change. They are happy in their safe little world (safe, in terms of job security etc.) and it makes them angry that better systems exist and people are taking an interest in them.
Note that I'm an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Solitaire Engineer) but please don't hold that against me:-)
They may indeed have a "special connection" to your ISP, in the form of a mirror within your ISP's (or their upstream provider in the case of smaller ones) own network.
Other distribution services do that too... akamai for example. (Steam may even contract such download services... I never checked who I have actually been downloading from.)
What Direct2Drive is doing with new titles that require Steam now is just selling you an activation code. (They had stopped selling games that require steam for a while and now this). I didn't even find out until after my purchase, that there was no download (you do know it's a Steam game of course).
They warn that a "one time internet connection is required to activate the game on Steamworks". That's a stretch by the way, it assumes offline mode. I even got a stupid email saying "Go to your My Account page on Direct2Drive to download the full client version of $game"
You get that activation code, and instructions to install Steam and go to "Activate a product" in the Games menu. You then download the game through Steam.
That angered me... I chose Direct2Drive for that purchase because I wanted a big zip file download (didn't want to reboot to Windows at the time... I just wanted a normal http download while I continued on with my work). What did I need D2D as a middle man for?
So no more D2D for me after that tactic... I'll just buy all my games from Steam now, and make backups of the Steam directory. (It's pretty slick... if moving to a new rig just extract the Steam directory to where it was before, install the Steam client to the same location and Bob's your uncle. It's not even hard to move Steam to another partition or drive later... delete a few files, everything but the Steam executable and games, then launch the Steam exe and it repairs itself in the new location and all your games work.)
Yes, Steam holds all the cards, but with the DRM schemes nowadays you're always hostage to someone. At least Steam works, and doesn't install rootkit-like garbage that scans your system for tools it doesn't like, or make you download missing pieces of the game as you play.
I too hate using optical drives to install games, so I'll never be buying them in "brick and mortar" stores. I used to drive 40 minutes to get to an EBGames store when a new title I wanted came out.
Speaking of which, I absolutely refuse to buy COD multiplayer maps as "DLC" on principle.
This was something the community used to create, with the tools provided with the games. Some of the best COD/COD2/COD4/CodWaW maps were made by enthusiasts. Since they took that all away in the name of greed, I'm certainly not going to reward them for it.
I do buy DLC for my games, but only if it's worthwhile. Extra missions, more game play... not just bling like costumes, vehicles or different guns that aren't even that advantageous.
I also hated KDE 4, but found it getting progressively better with every 4.x release.
I prefer XFCE and I have been using it for many years (and I'm old school at that... configuring it the way XFCE used to be, rather than all Gnome-like and stupid) but I do use some of the KDE apps so I always have to keep a KDE build around.
I've recently just started using Slack again and the KDE that shipped with Slackware64 13.1 still left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, so I grabbed the sources and build scripts for KDE 4.5.1 from slackware-current and rolled that up to my liking.
I think it's almost there, it's got much better configuration dialogs now and stuff. It performs well and seems to be decently reliable. Still not for me, but I could use it.
At least they've made improvements to the Mr. Potato Head game (ktuberling)
I'm not having some fucking camera in my vehicle that's keeping track of my eyes. I would poke the camera's eye out and bypass it if necessary, if I bought a car and it had that fitted as a mandatory "feature".
The same with some mandatory intoxication detection device.
People don't even necessarily close their eyes when they first start going hypnagogic so this isn't even going to be all that effective.
It seems there are a lot of righteous, fearful people who think this is a good idea. Typical idiots who empower governments to make stupid laws such that you can't even have a drink or two anymore.
You all make your own beds. I used to blame governments for the state of things... now I blame the public for being so idiotic and letting their freedoms and control of their own lives be subverted.
You vote for these people. You defend and condone their actions in the name of safety and security for you and your family and your money. You are anything but safe or secure and the nanny state that you think is protecting you is the greatest of enemies.
I completely agree. I didn't run that "diagnose" program from Ksplice, because I'm not compiling ANYTHING that uses obfuscated code. Anyone who does that can just fuck off... real hard.
I still use LILO on my workstations... I hate Grub and especially Grub 2. LILO is simple, file system agnostic and has no choice but to work. Of course the only thing is that it needs to be reconfigured and reinstated when you change your kernel, but it's simple enough to do even if you have to boot with other media and chroot (it doesn't need/proc or anything, so you don't need to worry about mounting that first in the chroot environment. It will simply skip the partition check)
That autoconfiguring Grub 2 in *buntu is a good idea for most users, but it leaves something to be desired. (It's only good when it works. I have it on my netbook, and I have to manually edit the grub.cfg file anyway, because it gets my Windows boot entry wrong)
As for it using that "embedding area", as already said, I too believe that they are just as guilty of arbitrarily doing unexpected things, as that foul adobe DRM.
Fuck that... I have a $600 BFG video card here (9800 GX2 OCX edition) that died after less than two years of use. Why should I have to put myself and my needs below the employees of the company that fucked me? I hope everyone involved is having the worst day of their lives.
This is just after announcing, about two months ago, that they would be honouring warranties and RMA policies.
They went out of business (left the graphics card market) because they couldn't get their own way with Nvidia. Funny how other graphics card manufacturers are still getting Nvidia's chips and making money. BFG cards were among the most expensive because they tweaked the clock speeds and stuff (all things you could have done with software, through the driver) They could have also diverged and started making some ATI based cards as well (which is where the better quality is nowadays and it took me a long time and having to see it for myself, to believe it)
A bios flash program will abort if the checksum doesn't match, and then you have to get a new floppy. I have no problem trusting a floppy immediately (you'll know if its bad), it's when they have sat for a long time and/or won't read on another drive.
I know how to use USB storage and you don't need any fancy "floppy to usb" converter. You can format a flash drive as a floppy and write a floppy image to it if you really need to. I have a utility from HP that does that. (you'll have to repartition/reformat it again properly to fix it... there are utilities for that too)
As for limiting myself, why should I limit myself to not having a floppy drive? That's the point.
There were two versions of FreeBSD (5 and 6) whose boot loader on the installation CD crashed on my system. I was glad to have a floppy drive, to easily write the three floppy images (boot.flp, kern1.flp, kern2.flp) to get the installs started. FreeBSD 7 didn't have that problem anymore on that system.
I actually like them just because it's yet another alternate method of booting a computer. (I don't store stuff on them... they are horribly unreliable) I still use them for bios and various device firmware flashing too. For the cost of a $7 floppy drive I wouldn't do without. When I look for a motherboard it's going to have a floppy controller, ps/2 ports and now I'll have to make sure they have PCI slots. (My current Gigabyte motherboard has one PCI slot lol). My current board doesn't have serial ports, but my last one did and that system is still in use. For the most part I don't need them, but I do still have a good old fashioned US Robotics external serial modem for my backup dialup connection.
Don't worry, as stated in the article, motherboard manufacturers will bridge PCI bus functionality onto an i/o controller just like they do for ISA bus hardware like floppy drives and some sensors. It will be some years before we'll have to throw our favourite PCI cards in the garbage. As long as there are people like us who still want to use floppy drives (I personally refuse to buy a motherboard that doesn't have a floppy controller), rtl8139 PCI NICs, existing PCI SCSI host adapters etc. someone will step up to the plate.
Thanks, yes, I realize there are metadata streams involved as well. The underlying protocol is/was http though, they didn't invent that transport.
Ultravox, multicasting etc. I wasn't aware of that stuff. When I thought of shoutcast, I was thinking in terms of "good old xmms" being able to handle those.pls files and connect to the streams URLs.
I don't waste my time listening to streaming. If I want to hear something, I just go and get it. What annoys me is that this is just basic stuff that audio players have been doing for a very long time and now AOL wants to pull a heavy over it.
Shoutcast isn't any special protocol. It's smoke and mirrors... it's really just http. Identify the protocol as penis:// or whatever you want, but it's still just http:///
The mp3 file format lends itself to "streaming" because it is continuous data. Click a link to play an mp3 file with playback starting immediately and you are streaming it. A "shoutcast" radio station is just mp3 data. Write it to disk as it's streaming and you have an mp3 file.
A web site directory that uses javascript to launch a player is really all there is to it. They don't host the "radio stations" or anything.
Some of those older Compaqs had the pointy-clicky bios setup program on the diagnostic partition. If you erased/repartitioned or replaced the hard disk, you had to download an "F10 boot floppy" that ran the setup program to change bios settings, or optionally allowed you to recreate the diagnostic partition and restore the F10 setup functionality. I used to hate that, and never put back the diagnostic partition. If later configuration was needed I just booted the machines using the F10 setup floppy.
They stopped doing that before the turn of the century though.
I find the use of replacement characters for profanity offensive because it insults our intelligence. As if it makes it OK to replace characters in the words with asterisks and the like.
Don't say f*ck, just come right out and say FUCK like you mean it.
I won't even bother with any forum that censors swearing, or has righteous nanny moderators that go around deleting and admonishing for it.
Try renaming c:\windows\system32\drivers\intelppm.sys to something else when that happens on a system with an AMD processor.
A lot of lazy OEMs ship an image with support for both intel and amd processors (which are normally detected by setup). Installation of the service pack causes that intel power management driver to load, and AMD machines blue screen.
I check for that file on AMD systems before installing a service pack, but it can be renamed after the blue screen if you boot to Safe Mode (where it won't load). Reboot normally and the service pack install will complete (you'll be at that "Please Wait..." screen with the windows logo on it)
I have to do both now, because of a gaming addiction that has developed over the last several years. Back before 2005, I wouldn't have let Windows come in contact with real hardware of mine (only run in a VM for testing and support reasons). Back then, there were decent games titles being ported to Linux (which I still have and still play occasionally) but I soon learned that if I wanted to play the new games, I needed Windows.
But I have a nice installation of Windows 7 x64 that runs my games and I'm quite happy with it. I run it in a fairly insecure manner though. As a full administrative user (with UAC turned off). System Restore disabled. Security Center and firewall services disabled (I have firewall hardware though) at the service level. No antivirus or other security software. I never have any trouble because I just use it to play my games and go to a few sites like slashdot and my forums with a 64 bit firefox that has no addons or plugins.
The two systems have their place. Linux is for doing work, the bulk of my surfing, email and multimedia. (Windows sure is crippled in that respect out of the box... and that Windows Media Player is an abomination). I can confidently have a dozen or more applications and tasks spread out over 8 virtual desktops without crashing and losing work too. Windows is for goofing off and playing full screen games that use DirectX.
I have a feeling that if I stick to that, I'll be fine.
I have read that same document and most of the rest of the handbook too. I understand the concept but that doesn't tell me any specifics and nor could any document. As I said, I know how to list the USE flags for each package. Basically, either enable all of them for anything you're linking against, or anything being used as a front end or pay later. The point is that it shouldn't need a USE flag to ENable something like jpeg support in a graphics editor (e.g. -jpeg to disable it is more sensible). That's what I am calling out here.
No, I didn't want the "desktop" profile. I wanted no-multilib (amd64 arch). Even so, anyone installing Gimp would want jpeg support. Don't even pretend that's perfectly logical to have jpeg support disabled by default. That will never make sense. The USE flag method is confusing, seems arbitrary and causes a lot of recompiles. (not even my doing... but when a package needs other USE flags for its dependencies. For example deciding to add Gnome later caused a lot of shit to be recompiled with different USE flags)
So you'll have to go and find someone else to brow beat with your condescending "are the 10 minutes to RTFM too much for you" crap. I have done my homework, I just don't like that aspect of it.
I am also familiar with the BSD Ports system, which portage was based on. It has the opposite approach... enable all optional features (and build dependencies accordingly) unless you explicitly disable them. I don't much like that approach either, but at least it doesn't build me non functional packages, like image editors that can't handle jpegs.
I am a Gentoo user now (because when I got a new box, I was too lazy to do a new Linux from Scratch setup and my current one on the other box wasn't practical to port over. I figured I'd take a shortcut with the automated ebuilds) and I'm very happy with the end result. It's a kick ass Linux setup.
I know I'm going to run into snags some day with portage because I don't install packages just for the sake of it (and I've deviated from portage on some things... some things just have to be done MY way) and then I'll re-evaluate what I'm going to do. (Fix/upgrade everything necessary? New gentoo build? Linux from Scratch time again? etc.)
One thing I do find a bit odd is the way the USE flags work. For example, I still haven't figured out how I'm supposed to keep track of what USE flags I want or do not want to use (these can affect other packages both now and in future). I know to do a --pretend and see which are available but I've missed the significance of a few things. For example, I first built a Gimp without jpeg support. Who the fuck would want Gimp without the ability to even open jpg files? That's stupid. This is the default unless you explicitly add jpeg to the USE variable. I also managed to build GTK+ (GDK) without jpeg support. I found out when I went to use gqview and it wouldn't open jpegs even though jpeg was in make.conf USE= at the time of install
I used to hate *buntu (K, U, Mint etc. and also Debian based distros in general) and the silly way they did things. That is, until I needed a good packaged distro for my netbook (Acer Aspire One), where compiling shit isn't practical and things like a good, reliable network manager are essential (I use the netbook mostly for configuring network appliances and testing and troubleshooting so I need to change networks a lot on the fly). I used PCLinuxOS for a while, but the updates were too unstable (clobbering configs, changing behaviour/incompatible, even breaking things etc.)
I switched to Xubuntu 9.10 on my netbook (XFCE is my favourite desktop and what I always use) and I have been very happy with it. No breakage, and the only thing I deviate from the repos on is the kernel. Compared to some other so called "easy" distros, the buntu boys do a pretty good job and I have revised my opinions. I think I'll stay with 9.10 for a while even though it's tempting... why change what's working perfectly.
I have played Nexuiz and I have experimented with the graphics settings. Turning on some of that stuff is heavy on the CPU (not the GPU... it's very poorly implemented) without any worthwhile benefit. You can't really graft modern features onto an old engine. I probably know more about it than you seem to.
Go buy a shotgun, kid, and use it to give yourself a much needed enema.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that is exactly the point and it's the typical misinterpretation of the "truth" that so much of their FUD employs.
Decent analogy in principle.
Windows does have more security mechanisms in place, because they need them to prevent things from interacting in ways that should not have been possible in the first place. Band Aids. Some of these mechanisms take the form of nagging dialog boxes and arbitrary things like driver signing.
Also, Microsoft's security methods tend to make it more difficult for the legitimate admin more than making the system more secure. It's a crock of shit.
Like deliberately making password recovery difficult. Of course it's not really difficult to blank or change the stored hash in the SAM if you have physical access to the machine and unsupported third party utilities, but MS won't help you.
The filesystem and registry key permissions (using ACLs) are ridiculous too, such that even the user "System" (which is the only real "god" account in NT based Windows, not Administrator) can be denied all access. It can be a royal pain, even while accessing the disk from off system, to gain access to delete files that rootkit enabled malware has jacked the permissions of. (nested levels of bullshit that you have to take ownership of and add System to the ACL and propagate down)
Most of these Microsoft people believe their own FUD. They'll argue that the sun is the moon to discredit alternatives. One of the best that I've heard from someone I used to think highly of is that "Windows has far more security mechanisms in place than Unix"
I think that part of the driving force for the attitude among Microsoft enthusiasts is that they are scared of change. They are happy in their safe little world (safe, in terms of job security etc.) and it makes them angry that better systems exist and people are taking an interest in them.
Note that I'm an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Solitaire Engineer) but please don't hold that against me :-)
They may indeed have a "special connection" to your ISP, in the form of a mirror within your ISP's (or their upstream provider in the case of smaller ones) own network.
Other distribution services do that too... akamai for example. (Steam may even contract such download services... I never checked who I have actually been downloading from.)
What Direct2Drive is doing with new titles that require Steam now is just selling you an activation code. (They had stopped selling games that require steam for a while and now this). I didn't even find out until after my purchase, that there was no download (you do know it's a Steam game of course).
They warn that a "one time internet connection is required to activate the game on Steamworks". That's a stretch by the way, it assumes offline mode. I even got a stupid email saying "Go to your My Account page on Direct2Drive to download the full client version of $game"
You get that activation code, and instructions to install Steam and go to "Activate a product" in the Games menu. You then download the game through Steam.
That angered me... I chose Direct2Drive for that purchase because I wanted a big zip file download (didn't want to reboot to Windows at the time... I just wanted a normal http download while I continued on with my work). What did I need D2D as a middle man for?
So no more D2D for me after that tactic... I'll just buy all my games from Steam now, and make backups of the Steam directory. (It's pretty slick... if moving to a new rig just extract the Steam directory to where it was before, install the Steam client to the same location and Bob's your uncle. It's not even hard to move Steam to another partition or drive later... delete a few files, everything but the Steam executable and games, then launch the Steam exe and it repairs itself in the new location and all your games work.)
Yes, Steam holds all the cards, but with the DRM schemes nowadays you're always hostage to someone. At least Steam works, and doesn't install rootkit-like garbage that scans your system for tools it doesn't like, or make you download missing pieces of the game as you play.
I too hate using optical drives to install games, so I'll never be buying them in "brick and mortar" stores. I used to drive 40 minutes to get to an EBGames store when a new title I wanted came out.
Speaking of which, I absolutely refuse to buy COD multiplayer maps as "DLC" on principle.
This was something the community used to create, with the tools provided with the games. Some of the best COD/COD2/COD4/CodWaW maps were made by enthusiasts. Since they took that all away in the name of greed, I'm certainly not going to reward them for it.
I do buy DLC for my games, but only if it's worthwhile. Extra missions, more game play... not just bling like costumes, vehicles or different guns that aren't even that advantageous.
I also hated KDE 4, but found it getting progressively better with every 4.x release.
I prefer XFCE and I have been using it for many years (and I'm old school at that... configuring it the way XFCE used to be, rather than all Gnome-like and stupid) but I do use some of the KDE apps so I always have to keep a KDE build around.
I've recently just started using Slack again and the KDE that shipped with Slackware64 13.1 still left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, so I grabbed the sources and build scripts for KDE 4.5.1 from slackware-current and rolled that up to my liking.
I think it's almost there, it's got much better configuration dialogs now and stuff. It performs well and seems to be decently reliable. Still not for me, but I could use it.
At least they've made improvements to the Mr. Potato Head game (ktuberling)
No? I thought it was in the post I was replying to. (There are more than one advocating it to be mandatory) I must have replied to the wrong one.
You're right though it was just a rant. I don't mean to offend (only) one specific person :-)
I'm not having some fucking camera in my vehicle that's keeping track of my eyes. I would poke the camera's eye out and bypass it if necessary, if I bought a car and it had that fitted as a mandatory "feature".
The same with some mandatory intoxication detection device.
People don't even necessarily close their eyes when they first start going hypnagogic so this isn't even going to be all that effective.
It seems there are a lot of righteous, fearful people who think this is a good idea. Typical idiots who empower governments to make stupid laws such that you can't even have a drink or two anymore.
You all make your own beds. I used to blame governments for the state of things... now I blame the public for being so idiotic and letting their freedoms and control of their own lives be subverted.
You vote for these people. You defend and condone their actions in the name of safety and security for you and your family and your money. You are anything but safe or secure and the nanny state that you think is protecting you is the greatest of enemies.
I completely agree. I didn't run that "diagnose" program from Ksplice, because I'm not compiling ANYTHING that uses obfuscated code. Anyone who does that can just fuck off... real hard.
I still use LILO on my workstations... I hate Grub and especially Grub 2. LILO is simple, file system agnostic and has no choice but to work. Of course the only thing is that it needs to be reconfigured and reinstated when you change your kernel, but it's simple enough to do even if you have to boot with other media and chroot (it doesn't need /proc or anything, so you don't need to worry about mounting that first in the chroot environment. It will simply skip the partition check)
That autoconfiguring Grub 2 in *buntu is a good idea for most users, but it leaves something to be desired. (It's only good when it works. I have it on my netbook, and I have to manually edit the grub.cfg file anyway, because it gets my Windows boot entry wrong)
As for it using that "embedding area", as already said, I too believe that they are just as guilty of arbitrarily doing unexpected things, as that foul adobe DRM.
Fuck that... I have a $600 BFG video card here (9800 GX2 OCX edition) that died after less than two years of use. Why should I have to put myself and my needs below the employees of the company that fucked me? I hope everyone involved is having the worst day of their lives.
This is just after announcing, about two months ago, that they would be honouring warranties and RMA policies.
They went out of business (left the graphics card market) because they couldn't get their own way with Nvidia. Funny how other graphics card manufacturers are still getting Nvidia's chips and making money. BFG cards were among the most expensive because they tweaked the clock speeds and stuff (all things you could have done with software, through the driver) They could have also diverged and started making some ATI based cards as well (which is where the better quality is nowadays and it took me a long time and having to see it for myself, to believe it)
Ahh, thank you for coming back to clarify. I missed that.
A bios flash program will abort if the checksum doesn't match, and then you have to get a new floppy. I have no problem trusting a floppy immediately (you'll know if its bad), it's when they have sat for a long time and/or won't read on another drive.
I know how to use USB storage and you don't need any fancy "floppy to usb" converter. You can format a flash drive as a floppy and write a floppy image to it if you really need to. I have a utility from HP that does that. (you'll have to repartition/reformat it again properly to fix it... there are utilities for that too)
As for limiting myself, why should I limit myself to not having a floppy drive? That's the point.
There were two versions of FreeBSD (5 and 6) whose boot loader on the installation CD crashed on my system. I was glad to have a floppy drive, to easily write the three floppy images (boot.flp, kern1.flp, kern2.flp) to get the installs started. FreeBSD 7 didn't have that problem anymore on that system.
I actually like them just because it's yet another alternate method of booting a computer. (I don't store stuff on them... they are horribly unreliable) I still use them for bios and various device firmware flashing too. For the cost of a $7 floppy drive I wouldn't do without. When I look for a motherboard it's going to have a floppy controller, ps/2 ports and now I'll have to make sure they have PCI slots. (My current Gigabyte motherboard has one PCI slot lol). My current board doesn't have serial ports, but my last one did and that system is still in use. For the most part I don't need them, but I do still have a good old fashioned US Robotics external serial modem for my backup dialup connection.
Don't worry, as stated in the article, motherboard manufacturers will bridge PCI bus functionality onto an i/o controller just like they do for ISA bus hardware like floppy drives and some sensors. It will be some years before we'll have to throw our favourite PCI cards in the garbage. As long as there are people like us who still want to use floppy drives (I personally refuse to buy a motherboard that doesn't have a floppy controller), rtl8139 PCI NICs, existing PCI SCSI host adapters etc. someone will step up to the plate.
Thanks, yes, I realize there are metadata streams involved as well. The underlying protocol is/was http though, they didn't invent that transport. Ultravox, multicasting etc. I wasn't aware of that stuff. When I thought of shoutcast, I was thinking in terms of "good old xmms" being able to handle those .pls files and connect to the streams URLs.
I don't waste my time listening to streaming. If I want to hear something, I just go and get it. What annoys me is that this is just basic stuff that audio players have been doing for a very long time and now AOL wants to pull a heavy over it.
Shoutcast isn't any special protocol. It's smoke and mirrors... it's really just http. Identify the protocol as penis:// or whatever you want, but it's still just http:///
The mp3 file format lends itself to "streaming" because it is continuous data. Click a link to play an mp3 file with playback starting immediately and you are streaming it. A "shoutcast" radio station is just mp3 data. Write it to disk as it's streaming and you have an mp3 file.
A web site directory that uses javascript to launch a player is really all there is to it. They don't host the "radio stations" or anything.
AOL can kiss the very middle of my ass.
Some of those older Compaqs had the pointy-clicky bios setup program on the diagnostic partition. If you erased/repartitioned or replaced the hard disk, you had to download an "F10 boot floppy" that ran the setup program to change bios settings, or optionally allowed you to recreate the diagnostic partition and restore the F10 setup functionality. I used to hate that, and never put back the diagnostic partition. If later configuration was needed I just booted the machines using the F10 setup floppy.
They stopped doing that before the turn of the century though.
I find the use of replacement characters for profanity offensive because it insults our intelligence. As if it makes it OK to replace characters in the words with asterisks and the like.
Don't say f*ck, just come right out and say FUCK like you mean it.
I won't even bother with any forum that censors swearing, or has righteous nanny moderators that go around deleting and admonishing for it.
Try renaming c:\windows\system32\drivers\intelppm.sys to something else when that happens on a system with an AMD processor.
A lot of lazy OEMs ship an image with support for both intel and amd processors (which are normally detected by setup). Installation of the service pack causes that intel power management driver to load, and AMD machines blue screen.
I check for that file on AMD systems before installing a service pack, but it can be renamed after the blue screen if you boot to Safe Mode (where it won't load). Reboot normally and the service pack install will complete (you'll be at that "Please Wait..." screen with the windows logo on it)
I have to do both now, because of a gaming addiction that has developed over the last several years. Back before 2005, I wouldn't have let Windows come in contact with real hardware of mine (only run in a VM for testing and support reasons). Back then, there were decent games titles being ported to Linux (which I still have and still play occasionally) but I soon learned that if I wanted to play the new games, I needed Windows. But I have a nice installation of Windows 7 x64 that runs my games and I'm quite happy with it. I run it in a fairly insecure manner though. As a full administrative user (with UAC turned off). System Restore disabled. Security Center and firewall services disabled (I have firewall hardware though) at the service level. No antivirus or other security software. I never have any trouble because I just use it to play my games and go to a few sites like slashdot and my forums with a 64 bit firefox that has no addons or plugins. The two systems have their place. Linux is for doing work, the bulk of my surfing, email and multimedia. (Windows sure is crippled in that respect out of the box... and that Windows Media Player is an abomination). I can confidently have a dozen or more applications and tasks spread out over 8 virtual desktops without crashing and losing work too. Windows is for goofing off and playing full screen games that use DirectX. I have a feeling that if I stick to that, I'll be fine.
I have read that same document and most of the rest of the handbook too. I understand the concept but that doesn't tell me any specifics and nor could any document. As I said, I know how to list the USE flags for each package. Basically, either enable all of them for anything you're linking against, or anything being used as a front end or pay later. The point is that it shouldn't need a USE flag to ENable something like jpeg support in a graphics editor (e.g. -jpeg to disable it is more sensible). That's what I am calling out here.
No, I didn't want the "desktop" profile. I wanted no-multilib (amd64 arch). Even so, anyone installing Gimp would want jpeg support. Don't even pretend that's perfectly logical to have jpeg support disabled by default. That will never make sense. The USE flag method is confusing, seems arbitrary and causes a lot of recompiles. (not even my doing... but when a package needs other USE flags for its dependencies. For example deciding to add Gnome later caused a lot of shit to be recompiled with different USE flags)
So you'll have to go and find someone else to brow beat with your condescending "are the 10 minutes to RTFM too much for you" crap. I have done my homework, I just don't like that aspect of it.
I am also familiar with the BSD Ports system, which portage was based on. It has the opposite approach... enable all optional features (and build dependencies accordingly) unless you explicitly disable them. I don't much like that approach either, but at least it doesn't build me non functional packages, like image editors that can't handle jpegs.
I am a Gentoo user now (because when I got a new box, I was too lazy to do a new Linux from Scratch setup and my current one on the other box wasn't practical to port over. I figured I'd take a shortcut with the automated ebuilds) and I'm very happy with the end result. It's a kick ass Linux setup.
I know I'm going to run into snags some day with portage because I don't install packages just for the sake of it (and I've deviated from portage on some things... some things just have to be done MY way) and then I'll re-evaluate what I'm going to do. (Fix/upgrade everything necessary? New gentoo build? Linux from Scratch time again? etc.)
One thing I do find a bit odd is the way the USE flags work. For example, I still haven't figured out how I'm supposed to keep track of what USE flags I want or do not want to use (these can affect other packages both now and in future). I know to do a --pretend and see which are available but I've missed the significance of a few things. For example, I first built a Gimp without jpeg support. Who the fuck would want Gimp without the ability to even open jpg files? That's stupid. This is the default unless you explicitly add jpeg to the USE variable. I also managed to build GTK+ (GDK) without jpeg support. I found out when I went to use gqview and it wouldn't open jpegs even though jpeg was in make.conf USE= at the time of install
I used to hate *buntu (K, U, Mint etc. and also Debian based distros in general) and the silly way they did things. That is, until I needed a good packaged distro for my netbook (Acer Aspire One), where compiling shit isn't practical and things like a good, reliable network manager are essential (I use the netbook mostly for configuring network appliances and testing and troubleshooting so I need to change networks a lot on the fly). I used PCLinuxOS for a while, but the updates were too unstable (clobbering configs, changing behaviour/incompatible, even breaking things etc.)
I switched to Xubuntu 9.10 on my netbook (XFCE is my favourite desktop and what I always use) and I have been very happy with it. No breakage, and the only thing I deviate from the repos on is the kernel. Compared to some other so called "easy" distros, the buntu boys do a pretty good job and I have revised my opinions. I think I'll stay with 9.10 for a while even though it's tempting... why change what's working perfectly.
I have played Nexuiz and I have experimented with the graphics settings. Turning on some of that stuff is heavy on the CPU (not the GPU... it's very poorly implemented) without any worthwhile benefit. You can't really graft modern features onto an old engine. I probably know more about it than you seem to. Go buy a shotgun, kid, and use it to give yourself a much needed enema.