The problem, I think, is that despite (most of) the bitching that goes on here, no *real* change ever takes place. In my experience - both as an activist and a student - effective change is not a matter of holding signs, or yelling, or writing letters to anyone.
Substantial change needs to be an process that grows out of a large number of people, each of whom makes the decision to live differently. Every movie that you pay $7 for, every $15 you shell out for a CD, every time you Consume, you're putting money into someone's pocket. The product you get in return is *supposed* to be appealing - and when you make the decision to take part in that exchange, you support whoever is responsible for its creation and/or distribution.
Most of us have a pretty solid dislike for the MPAA and the RIAA. They are nasty companies - they're out not just for their own profit, it seems, but for the complete control over how people will be exposed to the music they choose to promote. A lot of people here seem upset by this now, but nothing changes; the/. audience and editors roll over and grab their ankles every time something shiny is waved in front of their eyes. Warcraft III was a great demonstration of this - a company that performed in a nasty manner, was derided for it, but now is forgiven. Why? It's Fun! It's New! What They Did Wasn't That Bad!
I don't know if it's a trend that can be reversed, except on an individual basis. I saw Minority Report in the theatres last night. I've made the decision to not go to the theater again - there are enough independent films shown in my area to satisfy my hobby, and given the crap coming out, I'm not missing anything. The few exceptional movies do not justify my giving money to the same people responsible for stocking the movie billboards with trite, cliched nonsense. I don't need the MPAA grabbing me by the balls and trying to massage an emotional response out of me anymore. I don't buy CDs except from independent artists. I *like* difficult books and films and music - if that makes me an intellectual elitist, so be it. At least I don't feel dirty about where my money is going.
It depresses me, but I simply can't believe that even a sizeable minority of *any* population segment, let alone/., would agree to not be consumers, even in a small way, for any length of time. The carrot is just too appealing for most people - and if the man holding the stick is an ass, well, so what? Right?
Re:'Ask Slashdot' has taught me something.
on
Cheap KVM Over IP?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What I think you're seeing is the difference between the "I don't want to think about it" mentality and the "Let's hack this!" mentality. The former is a fine one for the corporate world - you do something quickly, and it's Someone Else's Problem. You (generally) aren't paying out of your own pocket, and you're free to use the time saved to do other things.
However, this doesn't make for "The Right Way". Hacking at something - figuring out how it works, seeing how you can do it better (or less expensively), and enjoying the process - is the source of solutions that Just Work.
"[G]eneral lackluster performance of the contraption in question" is the result of not understanding something enough to do it well. Many off-the-shelf solutions suck - Windows 98, anyone? So do many home-brew setups. The problems doesn't come from the nature of a rig, it comes from the effort and intelligence of the creator.
If you prefer to not think about things, and just have them work, fine - but don't disparage people who are interested in learning and improving with sweeping and inaccurate generalities about DYI projects. Most of your "proven solutions" only got to that point because enough people (or sometimes, one intelligent person) was willing to hack at something until they were satified.
Because you must, must, must have the latest version? Bah.
Anyways - you might be able to get around that problem by not enabling versioning information on all modules - I've resolved a fair share of "unresolved symbols" problems by doing so in the past, most recently with my webcam.
...if you discover someone distribution [sic] your stuff on a p-p network, you should be able to take reasonable steps to prevent it.
Exactly. The sentiment that I think many of us hold is that a DOS attack is *NOT* "reasonable" - it's utterly ridiculous.
Nor does the absence of an alternative make the insane solution being offered acceptable. The RIAA/MPAA claims, "LOOK! We're being CRUSHED! We must do SOMETHING!" - and then go *way* overboard in their definition of Something. The onus is on them to come up with a reasonable solution - and this it not it.
I live in Western Massachusetts, where I split a three bedroom apartment with two friends. My share of the rent (with the smallest room) is $250; the most expensive room (and obviously the largest) is $325. Bills come to about $250 a month (food, utilities, gas, aikido lessons, etc.). Throw another $100 a month in for sundry expenses.
I figure that $600 a month isn't bad for a student living on the cheap; diet is actually pretty easy (being a vegitarian), and when you're not spending a lot on food you have some extra cash to throw about.
I don't know a ton about the market - making money simply doesn't interest me. I'd rather go hiking.:)
Who says he planned on using KDE or GNOME? I'm running a 486 laptop without X installed, and it's blazingly fast - and very useful. I write papers on it with vim, print from it, connect to the net via links, check my email, and even play the occasional game of nethack.
A slightly beefier system sits to my left - a P75, running Ion, which uses very few system resources. It has X installed, and is quite nice for doing development work.
$200 is still a significant chunk of change - that's two months of food for me, or almost a month's rent, for example. A free system is not something to be turned up - you just don't install the bloatware that most people are clamoring for.
*ANY* journally filesystem can recover from an unexpected power loss. With an ext3 system, if you're seeing a check taking place (and you want to prevent such), disable them - in general, they are a holdover from ext2:
tune2fs -c 0 -C 0
However, you should also read this, from the tune2fs man page:
You should strongly consider the consequences of
disabling mount-count-dependent checking entirely.
Bad disk drives, cables, memory, and kernel bugs
could all corrupt a filesystem without marking the
filesystem dirty or in error. If you are using
journaling on your filesystem, your filesystem will
never be marked dirty, so it will not normally be
checked. A filesystem error detected by the kernel
will still force an fsck on the next reboot, but it
may already be too late to prevent data loss at
that point.
I cannot speak to the inode issue - I've never run into it myself.
Have you ever checked out the Happy Hacking keyboard line? They offer keyboards with the Sun Type 3 layout and only 60 keys - none of this "windows" key nonsense.:)
Nah. My reccomendation? Go to the Blarney Rock Pub on West 33rd street - walking distance to the hotel, most of the hackers worth hanging with hang there, and it's CHEAP.:)
$1000 a month is a fairly substantial amount, in my opinion. I wouldn't want to try to support a family on it, but a moderately sized shared apartment and a modest diet, along with average bills and even some luxuries (high-speed 'net access, cable television, and the occasional unneeded purchase) come in well under $700 a month in my budget.
It's not living "the American dream" (ahem), but it's low-impact and quite comfortable. The best part of living on the cheap is not slaving away in an office for 40+ hours a week.:)
Actually, if the sentence is "I have stopped beating my wife", we can simplify it - "I have taken action X". You have *not* taken action X - you have not stopped beating your wife. This statement is false.
Why? Because you have no wife to beat. That is irrelevant to the *logic* of the sentence, however . You either have stopped laying your fists on someone, or you have not. There is a distinction between the validity of a logical construct and the soundness of a logical construct. Something that is logically sound - ie, it conforms to the rules of logic - may be based on incorrect information.
To everyone else: I stand corrected on the plural of virus. Thanks - there is no need for anyone else to point it out.:)
You might want to reconsider your use of logical terminology. The law of the excluded middle does not represent a simplification of a multivariate system down to only two options.
Quoting from Barker's The Elements of Logic: "One well known type of tautology has the form 'P v -P'. This is sometimes called the 'law of the excluded middle', because it reflects the fact that any given sentence must be either true or false, there being no third alternative."(Barker, p. 91, 5th ed.)
Regardless, I can't decipher the point you were trying to make. Yes, most posters are aware that not all virii are due to buggy Microsoft code. Aside from the logic error (which isn't that big a deal, as your point doesn't depend on what you call it), you're saying that such an awareness is flawed, because *other* vectors of infection - which you say exist in any Turing-complete system - merely exist?
Ease up on the tech-speak, friend, and you've arrived at one of the fundamental points of computer security: it is a process, never an endpoint. I don't know anything about virii "ramping up the exponential part of the logistics curve", but I do know that the posters who are aware that other problems exist besides Microsoft vulnerabilites are not guilty of any flaw in their reasoning. Whether they cite past infections, myths, or actual virus problems, they are demonstrating an awareness of the nature of virus infections. Perhaps you'd like to clarify your prediction?:)
You meant to say:
Is this true, or will the United Linux specification inherently include closed source code?
No, I did not. I use free in the truest sense of the word: I imply both open-source and freely redistributable. Anything in the base install that has source available will presumably (as it is part of a GNU/Linux system) be free; my interest lies in whether the UL spec will call for non-free code.
I couldn't care less about United Linux if source was available but I couldn't do as I saw fit with it.
There has been a rather heated thread over at monolinux in which an important question has been raised and batted around, and I was hoping you could answer: Will source code be available for *every* piece of software included on the United Linux CDs? If so, when? If not, what will not be made available?
My understanding is that the United Linux base will be a set of standards (based off of the Linux Standard Base) which companies will use as the foundation for their own corporate-oriented "United Linux compatible" distributions, to which they *may* add binaries for which source is not available. Is this true, or will the United Linux specification inherently include non-free code?
RMS is not actively trying to "kill" anything, and he definately isn't tackling something being distributed "under the GPL". He is making a very intelligent point about the non-GPL'd distribution of binaries that UL intends:
"[United Linux] cannot restrict the GPL-covered programs in the system [with per-seat licensing], because that would violate the GNU GPL, but the system also contains non-copylefted programs which are points of vulnerability. Free software developers, please don't let them license YOUR program per seat. Use the GNU GPL!"
That isn't hubris, it's consistency with the same message that RMS has been putting out for as long as I can remember: "Restrictive licensing doesn't respect the non-side-constrained freedom of individuals to do as they see fit with software and source."
Doom 3 will be released for Linux; Carmack has mentioned in one of his.plans that while id will not be putting a boxed version out (as was the case with Quake 3), they will at least have an unsupported binary.
Had it been 640x480, it would have been worthwhile. Unfortunately, most of the headsets were in the low 200x300 range, often much less. The sheer technical difficulty of getting an LCD that small to give a reasonable resolution is a big barrier to doing neat things with VR headsets.
Not a dead technology, but an expensive and slow-growing one.
College is not "for slacking off, getting drunk, and scoring hot chicks", it's for personal development. That might mean doing those things for the author, but it certainly isn't universally true. I personally find that college is one of the few times when you can really devote yourself to nothing else but studying - you pay a good bit for it, but you free yourself of the majority of the obligations that most other people have for at least four years so that you can essentially be a monk.
I've gotten drunk a few times, to be sure, but there's no reason to pay >= $30,000 for that singular experience. It's probably more true on a campus than anywhere else: what you receive will be equal to what you give. Dedicate yourself to a hedonistic life simply for the memories, and you'll miss out on a *lot* of personal growth and knowledge.
It is a telling comment on the original poster's behalf is that he views the wealth of the United States as being good not for allowing its young to be educated more universally than most of the world, but that it's good for "[slacking] off and [enjoying] college". *sigh*
Even the daunting DOOM3 or RtCW get handled quite well by a G3.
I'd be very interested in how you determined that Doom3 runs well on a Geforce3, as the game is still in development. Carmack, in one of his.plan updates, noted that was planning for the superior cards that would be available (not the GF3's, even) when Doom3 came out. A G3 will run it, but it won't neccesarily be the best card for the job.
A Geforce3 will run your games, and will give you a hedge, but gaming is an expensive hobby. If you can't or won't upgrade, expect things to be kludgy until you do. Other important considerations, such as RAM architechture, CPU speed, motherboard, and bus width all come into play - nothing taxes the entirety of your system like a new 3D engine. The best rule of thumb is to buy the most expensive hardware you can afford when you upgrade - cutting corners now will simply make the period before you need to upgrade again shorter.
Have you tried exercising briskly every day? A regimine that hurts - I personally do 3 sets of 50 crunches, 25 diamond pushups, 25 regular pushups, 25 curls (at 25lbs.), and 25 hammer curls - but doesn't leave you unable to move could do wonders for you energy level.
Another thing to look at is diet; incorporating more greens and less fat into your food intake (especially at lunch) can have serious and positive effects on how alert you feel during the day.
Finally, are you sleeping a consistent 8 hours every night? Variances in how much sleep you get is apt to make you feel fuzzy; more than 8 hours invited sluggishness. A solid schedule, combined with good exercise and a healthy diet, could eliminate that "constantly sleepy" feeling.
"to those who'll inevitably rant on about freedom and free-speech, don't all the parents of the world deserve the freedom to let their kids roam the 'net without having to explain why tons of dodgy Japanese pr0n is appearing on the kids' screens"
Well, I wouldn't say so. I'd be interested in seeing whatever version of the Constitution you're reading, however - it obviously has a number of freedoms that mine does not. The one I've read is based on a conception of *negative* rights - freedom from having my speech restricted, freedom from being prevented to assemble, freedom from having a religion imposed upon me, and so on. In fact, I would even move to argue that there is *no moral basis* for parents to restrict what their children see. It's out there, and they will see it eventually; surely discussing questionable material is better than pretending it's not there?
Regardless of whether you accept my opinion, however, you must defend an assertion that gives parents a positive right to "let their kids" do something - which still seems like an impossibility, as rights are personal things. Until you do that, you haven't defended yourself against someone who calls you on your desire to brand everything that makes you uncomfortable and shove it into a conceptual closet.
It's a murky situation. Lindows is charging for access to their program - the so-called "Beta" program that costs $99, and comes with its own NDA. Although Robertson claims that this is not commercial distribution, it is a *very* dubious claim. A few links to some of the code-trees they claim to have released code back into does not seem to meet GPL requirments. A GPL complient program must make *all* source modifications available; one of the telltale signs of a GPL violation, in fact, is whether or not the situation is such that "some of the source available, but not all", to quote from GNU's GPL violation page (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem, I think, is that despite (most of) the bitching that goes on here, no *real* change ever takes place. In my experience - both as an activist and a student - effective change is not a matter of holding signs, or yelling, or writing letters to anyone.
/. audience and editors roll over and grab their ankles every time something shiny is waved in front of their eyes. Warcraft III was a great demonstration of this - a company that performed in a nasty manner, was derided for it, but now is forgiven. Why? It's Fun! It's New! What They Did Wasn't That Bad!
/., would agree to not be consumers, even in a small way, for any length of time. The carrot is just too appealing for most people - and if the man holding the stick is an ass, well, so what? Right?
Substantial change needs to be an process that grows out of a large number of people, each of whom makes the decision to live differently. Every movie that you pay $7 for, every $15 you shell out for a CD, every time you Consume, you're putting money into someone's pocket. The product you get in return is *supposed* to be appealing - and when you make the decision to take part in that exchange, you support whoever is responsible for its creation and/or distribution.
Most of us have a pretty solid dislike for the MPAA and the RIAA. They are nasty companies - they're out not just for their own profit, it seems, but for the complete control over how people will be exposed to the music they choose to promote. A lot of people here seem upset by this now, but nothing changes; the
I don't know if it's a trend that can be reversed, except on an individual basis. I saw Minority Report in the theatres last night. I've made the decision to not go to the theater again - there are enough independent films shown in my area to satisfy my hobby, and given the crap coming out, I'm not missing anything. The few exceptional movies do not justify my giving money to the same people responsible for stocking the movie billboards with trite, cliched nonsense. I don't need the MPAA grabbing me by the balls and trying to massage an emotional response out of me anymore. I don't buy CDs except from independent artists. I *like* difficult books and films and music - if that makes me an intellectual elitist, so be it. At least I don't feel dirty about where my money is going.
It depresses me, but I simply can't believe that even a sizeable minority of *any* population segment, let alone
What I think you're seeing is the difference between the "I don't want to think about it" mentality and the "Let's hack this!" mentality. The former is a fine one for the corporate world - you do something quickly, and it's Someone Else's Problem. You (generally) aren't paying out of your own pocket, and you're free to use the time saved to do other things.
However, this doesn't make for "The Right Way". Hacking at something - figuring out how it works, seeing how you can do it better (or less expensively), and enjoying the process - is the source of solutions that Just Work.
"[G]eneral lackluster performance of the contraption in question" is the result of not understanding something enough to do it well. Many off-the-shelf solutions suck - Windows 98, anyone? So do many home-brew setups. The problems doesn't come from the nature of a rig, it comes from the effort and intelligence of the creator.
If you prefer to not think about things, and just have them work, fine - but don't disparage people who are interested in learning and improving with sweeping and inaccurate generalities about DYI projects. Most of your "proven solutions" only got to that point because enough people (or sometimes, one intelligent person) was willing to hack at something until they were satified.
End of rant.
Because you must, must, must have the latest version? Bah.
Anyways - you might be able to get around that problem by not enabling versioning information on all modules - I've resolved a fair share of "unresolved symbols" problems by doing so in the past, most recently with my webcam.
...if you discover someone distribution [sic] your stuff on a p-p network, you should be able to take reasonable steps to prevent it.
Exactly. The sentiment that I think many of us hold is that a DOS attack is *NOT* "reasonable" - it's utterly ridiculous.
Nor does the absence of an alternative make the insane solution being offered acceptable. The RIAA/MPAA claims, "LOOK! We're being CRUSHED! We must do SOMETHING!" - and then go *way* overboard in their definition of Something. The onus is on them to come up with a reasonable solution - and this it not it.
I live in Western Massachusetts, where I split a three bedroom apartment with two friends. My share of the rent (with the smallest room) is $250; the most expensive room (and obviously the largest) is $325. Bills come to about $250 a month (food, utilities, gas, aikido lessons, etc.). Throw another $100 a month in for sundry expenses.
:)
I figure that $600 a month isn't bad for a student living on the cheap; diet is actually pretty easy (being a vegitarian), and when you're not spending a lot on food you have some extra cash to throw about.
I don't know a ton about the market - making money simply doesn't interest me. I'd rather go hiking.
Who says he planned on using KDE or GNOME? I'm running a 486 laptop without X installed, and it's blazingly fast - and very useful. I write papers on it with vim, print from it, connect to the net via links, check my email, and even play the occasional game of nethack.
A slightly beefier system sits to my left - a P75, running Ion, which uses very few system resources. It has X installed, and is quite nice for doing development work.
$200 is still a significant chunk of change - that's two months of food for me, or almost a month's rent, for example. A free system is not something to be turned up - you just don't install the bloatware that most people are clamoring for.
*ANY* journally filesystem can recover from an unexpected power loss. With an ext3 system, if you're seeing a check taking place (and you want to prevent such), disable them - in general, they are a holdover from ext2:
tune2fs -c 0 -C 0
However, you should also read this, from the tune2fs man page:
You should strongly consider the consequences of disabling mount-count-dependent checking entirely. Bad disk drives, cables, memory, and kernel bugs could all corrupt a filesystem without marking the filesystem dirty or in error. If you are using journaling on your filesystem, your filesystem will never be marked dirty, so it will not normally be checked. A filesystem error detected by the kernel will still force an fsck on the next reboot, but it may already be too late to prevent data loss at that point.
I cannot speak to the inode issue - I've never run into it myself.
Have you ever checked out the Happy Hacking keyboard line? They offer keyboards with the Sun Type 3 layout and only 60 keys - none of this "windows" key nonsense. :)
Check them out!
(Sorry to sound like an infomercial. Sometimes, you just find something really spiffy, and *want* other people to dig it, too...)
Nah. My reccomendation? Go to the Blarney Rock Pub on West 33rd street - walking distance to the hotel, most of the hackers worth hanging with hang there, and it's CHEAP. :)
$1000 a month is a fairly substantial amount, in my opinion. I wouldn't want to try to support a family on it, but a moderately sized shared apartment and a modest diet, along with average bills and even some luxuries (high-speed 'net access, cable television, and the occasional unneeded purchase) come in well under $700 a month in my budget.
:)
It's not living "the American dream" (ahem), but it's low-impact and quite comfortable. The best part of living on the cheap is not slaving away in an office for 40+ hours a week.
Actually, if the sentence is "I have stopped beating my wife", we can simplify it - "I have taken action X". You have *not* taken action X - you have not stopped beating your wife. This statement is false.
:)
Why? Because you have no wife to beat. That is irrelevant to the *logic* of the sentence, however . You either have stopped laying your fists on someone, or you have not. There is a distinction between the validity of a logical construct and the soundness of a logical construct. Something that is logically sound - ie, it conforms to the rules of logic - may be based on incorrect information.
To everyone else: I stand corrected on the plural of virus. Thanks - there is no need for anyone else to point it out.
You might want to reconsider your use of logical terminology. The law of the excluded middle does not represent a simplification of a multivariate system down to only two options.
:)
Quoting from Barker's The Elements of Logic: "One well known type of tautology has the form 'P v -P'. This is sometimes called the 'law of the excluded middle', because it reflects the fact that any given sentence must be either true or false, there being no third alternative."(Barker, p. 91, 5th ed.)
Regardless, I can't decipher the point you were trying to make. Yes, most posters are aware that not all virii are due to buggy Microsoft code. Aside from the logic error (which isn't that big a deal, as your point doesn't depend on what you call it), you're saying that such an awareness is flawed, because *other* vectors of infection - which you say exist in any Turing-complete system - merely exist?
Ease up on the tech-speak, friend, and you've arrived at one of the fundamental points of computer security: it is a process, never an endpoint. I don't know anything about virii "ramping up the exponential part of the logistics curve", but I do know that the posters who are aware that other problems exist besides Microsoft vulnerabilites are not guilty of any flaw in their reasoning. Whether they cite past infections, myths, or actual virus problems, they are demonstrating an awareness of the nature of virus infections. Perhaps you'd like to clarify your prediction?
You meant to say: Is this true, or will the United Linux specification inherently include closed source code?
No, I did not. I use free in the truest sense of the word: I imply both open-source and freely redistributable. Anything in the base install that has source available will presumably (as it is part of a GNU/Linux system) be free; my interest lies in whether the UL spec will call for non-free code.
I couldn't care less about United Linux if source was available but I couldn't do as I saw fit with it.
Ransom,
There has been a rather heated thread over at monolinux in which an important question has been raised and batted around, and I was hoping you could answer: Will source code be available for *every* piece of software included on the United Linux CDs? If so, when? If not, what will not be made available?
My understanding is that the United Linux base will be a set of standards (based off of the Linux Standard Base) which companies will use as the foundation for their own corporate-oriented "United Linux compatible" distributions, to which they *may* add binaries for which source is not available. Is this true, or will the United Linux specification inherently include non-free code?
RMS is not actively trying to "kill" anything, and he definately isn't tackling something being distributed "under the GPL". He is making a very intelligent point about the non-GPL'd distribution of binaries that UL intends:
"[United Linux] cannot restrict the GPL-covered programs in the system [with per-seat licensing], because that would violate the GNU GPL, but the system also contains non-copylefted programs which are points of vulnerability. Free software developers, please don't let them license YOUR program per seat. Use the GNU GPL!"
That isn't hubris, it's consistency with the same message that RMS has been putting out for as long as I can remember: "Restrictive licensing doesn't respect the non-side-constrained freedom of individuals to do as they see fit with software and source."
Hurray, it's fun to bash RMS, isn't it?
Doom 3 will be released for Linux; Carmack has mentioned in one of his .plans that while id will not be putting a boxed version out (as was the case with Quake 3), they will at least have an unsupported binary.
Had it been 640x480, it would have been worthwhile. Unfortunately, most of the headsets were in the low 200x300 range, often much less. The sheer technical difficulty of getting an LCD that small to give a reasonable resolution is a big barrier to doing neat things with VR headsets.
Not a dead technology, but an expensive and slow-growing one.
Ah, I misread. Blame it on replying just after waking up.
:)
Mea culpa.
Go to www.google.com. Click "Preferences". Change the drop-down box next to "Number of Results" from its default (10) to anything up to 100.
This feature has been there for years.
Bullshit. Plain, simple.
College is not "for slacking off, getting drunk, and scoring hot chicks", it's for personal development. That might mean doing those things for the author, but it certainly isn't universally true. I personally find that college is one of the few times when you can really devote yourself to nothing else but studying - you pay a good bit for it, but you free yourself of the majority of the obligations that most other people have for at least four years so that you can essentially be a monk.
I've gotten drunk a few times, to be sure, but there's no reason to pay >= $30,000 for that singular experience. It's probably more true on a campus than anywhere else: what you receive will be equal to what you give. Dedicate yourself to a hedonistic life simply for the memories, and you'll miss out on a *lot* of personal growth and knowledge.
It is a telling comment on the original poster's behalf is that he views the wealth of the United States as being good not for allowing its young to be educated more universally than most of the world, but that it's good for "[slacking] off and [enjoying] college". *sigh*
Even the daunting DOOM3 or RtCW get handled quite well by a G3.
.plan updates, noted that was planning for the superior cards that would be available (not the GF3's, even) when Doom3 came out. A G3 will run it, but it won't neccesarily be the best card for the job.
I'd be very interested in how you determined that Doom3 runs well on a Geforce3, as the game is still in development. Carmack, in one of his
A Geforce3 will run your games, and will give you a hedge, but gaming is an expensive hobby. If you can't or won't upgrade, expect things to be kludgy until you do. Other important considerations, such as RAM architechture, CPU speed, motherboard, and bus width all come into play - nothing taxes the entirety of your system like a new 3D engine. The best rule of thumb is to buy the most expensive hardware you can afford when you upgrade - cutting corners now will simply make the period before you need to upgrade again shorter.
I wonder who said that. Bill Gates was dead wrong when he tried to cap things at 640k - but 56k? Old Billy-Boy may be vindicated! :)
Have you tried exercising briskly every day? A regimine that hurts - I personally do 3 sets of 50 crunches, 25 diamond pushups, 25 regular pushups, 25 curls (at 25lbs.), and 25 hammer curls - but doesn't leave you unable to move could do wonders for you energy level.
Another thing to look at is diet; incorporating more greens and less fat into your food intake (especially at lunch) can have serious and positive effects on how alert you feel during the day.
Finally, are you sleeping a consistent 8 hours every night? Variances in how much sleep you get is apt to make you feel fuzzy; more than 8 hours invited sluggishness. A solid schedule, combined with good exercise and a healthy diet, could eliminate that "constantly sleepy" feeling.
"to those who'll inevitably rant on about freedom and free-speech, don't all the parents of the world deserve the freedom to let their kids roam the 'net without having to explain why tons of dodgy Japanese pr0n is appearing on the kids' screens"
Well, I wouldn't say so. I'd be interested in seeing whatever version of the Constitution you're reading, however - it obviously has a number of freedoms that mine does not. The one I've read is based on a conception of *negative* rights - freedom from having my speech restricted, freedom from being prevented to assemble, freedom from having a religion imposed upon me, and so on. In fact, I would even move to argue that there is *no moral basis* for parents to restrict what their children see. It's out there, and they will see it eventually; surely discussing questionable material is better than pretending it's not there?
Regardless of whether you accept my opinion, however, you must defend an assertion that gives parents a positive right to "let their kids" do something - which still seems like an impossibility, as rights are personal things. Until you do that, you haven't defended yourself against someone who calls you on your desire to brand everything that makes you uncomfortable and shove it into a conceptual closet.
Rant, indeed.
It's a murky situation. Lindows is charging for access to their program - the so-called "Beta" program that costs $99, and comes with its own NDA. Although Robertson claims that this is not commercial distribution, it is a *very* dubious claim. A few links to some of the code-trees they claim to have released code back into does not seem to meet GPL requirments. A GPL complient program must make *all* source modifications available; one of the telltale signs of a GPL violation, in fact, is whether or not the situation is such that "some of the source available, but not all", to quote from GNU's GPL violation page (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html).