Re:cheap for a reason...
on
A PC For Tightwads
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's obviously not intended to be a gaming or development machine. It's intended to be a standard office machine.
An ECS motherboard, onboard video, small PSU, 256MB of RAM is exactly (it's creepy how exactly actually) the machine we buy for most people in our office. If I could tell my boss that a new computer was $159 (or $200... we're in Canada after all) including all the software, he'd be a lot more willing to replace the Celeron 333's we're still using. This can only help Linux by getting it into more homes and offices.
You're just being silly. It's much harder for one user to destroy a digital book that's stored on Google's massive RAID array in a secured building than it is for one user of a library to destroy or lose a book they have taken out.
Near here, there was a big bunker built for the Canadian Prime Minister during the cold war. A few years ago, they decided they should sell it. When the first group to show some interest in buying it was the Hell's Angels (a biker gang that traffics a lot of drugs FYI), they realized that selling it probably wasn't such a good idea.
I, for one, welcome our new subscription licensing overlords.
Seriously, though, I think that subscription licensing would be a huge boost for free and open source software. Right now, many people are willing to pay for software since it's a one time cost. A lot of other people are perfectly willing to pirate software, which is fairly easy since all you need is a key. Now, some of the first group may be willing to go with subscription licensing: it's kind of like leasing a car, they'll say. However, for the rest of this group, paying for software every year when it hasn't changed will seem ridiculous. Why pay for something that isn't even new and that I won't really own? The second group, however, will have a lot of trouble with the hosted software, since hosted means that something about you (your IP for example) can be easily logged every time you use the software, which makes piracy inherently more dangerous and more difficult.
Thus, I welcome subscription licensing. It will wake a significant number of people up to the alternatives that are available to them, strengthening free and open source software by improving it and widening its user base.
Speaking of implementing multi-protocol clients...
How long until Google implements Jabber's nice transport features in Google Talk? This would allow people to use Google Talk to IM their MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM buddies. While they would still have to have an account with each service, at least the client would be centralized, and to most people, that's the same thing as having one account. Google would gain huge market share (even though people are still using other protocols), and it would basically cost them nothing.
Trying to install from a Limited Account in Windows brings up a dialog "highly recommended that you install as Administrator."
There are two cases I'm considering here: Case 1: You think that it should let you install without warning you if you try to install it as a regular user. Case 2: You think that it shouldn't let you install at all as a regular user, since that's what the admin account is actually for.
In case 1, you are an idiot. One of the biggest security problems in Windows is that any regular old user can install software system-wide. In case 2, I agree whole-heartedly.
In either case, it's just one more reason you shouldn't use Windows. There's no such popup in Linux.
Very true, and well said. However, the problem in most companies lies much deeper than this. It's a lack of thought in IT policy in general.
I work at a construction company. We have a growing office where many of the employees have computers. However, the people running the company treat IT as sort of a sidebar - something that doesn't actually affect the business, and thus there is a lack of corporate policy regarding computers and their use. All employee files are kept on their individual workstations, most of which are not backed up at all, let alone well. The email, too, is kept on individual workstations and the sending and receiving of email to/from company addresses is not monitored or controlled. We don't even control our own email server, our email resides on the server of a contracted IT guy and no one from our company actually has access to it (not even me, the in-office IT guy). Our networking is a mess, so someone wanting to take down our network could easily plug a laptop into a port somewhere (we don't even know where all the cables go) and put viruses or other malware onto any computer in the building, as well as steal all sorts of sensitive information.
So, with all these problems, what is the question that my boss (the president of the company) asks me most often? Am I sure that everyone's Norton Antivirus is getting updates every four hours, or is it just going once a day? Again - treating the bandaid solution as a cure.
Basically, there has been no thought put into the IT policy at this company. The technology grew faster than the company could handle, and they have no control over their computers or their network. If corporate IT policies, even in medium-sized businesses like the one I describe here, had more thought put into them, computers everywhere would be much more secure.
If they stick to their 6-month release cycle (which they did, roughly at least, for Hoary), Breezy will be out in October. Gnome 2.12 will ship with it.
Upgrading from Hoary will, of course, be as easy as doing a dist-upgrade.
I work for a paving company, and our equipment shop uses a laptop for vehicle diagnostics. We bought them a Compaq two years ago or so (right after they were bought out by HP) and have had no problems at all with it. It's no battleground, but it is a fairly dirty environment (oil, grease, bit of asphalt, gravel, etc.. all over the place) and it gets tossed around a fair bit when it's being hooked up to and unhooked from machines all the time. People always bash Compaq on quality, but this laptop has really held up well.
If you can't get a basic Linux desktop running in about an hour, you're doing something wrong. Install Ubuntu. It takes 20 minutes, and all your hardware will work out of the box. I've had it recognize and automagically setup such evil things as ATI graphics cards and Intel SATA controllers, so I think it'll recognize whatever you're throwing at it.
Re X, I've been using Linux as my only desktop OS for around seven years. In that time, I've never had to manually setup X. Even the Mandrake 6.0 I installed back in 1999 setup X automatically when you installed it. The only thing I've ever edited my X config for is my fancy dual-monitor setup, and that only involved adding a couple of lines, which were clearly documented in the nVidia driver information. Ubuntu even guesses resolutions and refresh rates pretty accurately, although if it gets it wrong, it's easy enough to change using Gnome config tools.
He claims that you "occasionally" need to edit a configuration file in Linux, and implies that this is no more frequent than doing so in Windows.
Bullshit. Since I've installed XP, I've never had to edit a configuration file OR registry data. Ever. I can install pretty much any PC-compatible hardware on the market and have it running quickly. Why? Because parts vendors make damn sure their stuff works in Windows.
Since installing Ubuntu on my girlfriend's laptop (which I use as an example since, unlike my home system, it is a typical desktop), I have had to edit exactly one configuration file (the WPA configuration to get it on her secured wireless network at home). Everything else worked great out of the box.
Of course, I'm completely ignoring the fact that for power users like myself, it's usually easier to edit a config file in Linux than it is to figure out how the hell to get the clumsy Windows GUI to do what I want.
When it comes to drivers and hardware, I've had far more trouble in Windows than in Linux. Whenever I install new hardware on a Windows box, it opens up some dialog box, tries to find drivers, fails, asks me for a disk, fails to find the drivers on the disk, makes me find the drivers manually, warns me that they're not XP certified, then installs them and asks me to restart! And that's the best-case scenario! Often it won't even tell me what it's trying to find drivers for. It just says "multimedia device," which when you've installed a motherboard with onboard sound, video, game controller, etc. is not very helpful at all. When I installed a new SATA card in my Linux server last month it just worked as soon as I put it in. I hotplugged in a drive and mounted it with no trouble. No finding and loading drivers and no rebooting.
I decided to try out Linux, so I downloaded Ubuntu and ran the boot disk. Unfortunately, both my hard drives are NTFS, and Ubuntu doesn't know how to partition them. After half an hour looking around the net for a way to partition an NTFS drive without endangering the data on that drive, I gave up. No Linux for me, because I'm not willing to endanger all my system files or buy a new hard drive just to play around with another OS. "Insert disk and press Enter" my ass.
What? This paragraph is just lies. Or ignorance. I've done many Ubuntu installs, and most of them included resizing NTFS partitions. They all worked flawlessly. No problems at all. I have yet to even *hear* of data loss with the Ubuntu installer. If you already have Windows setup and you install Ubuntu, it sets up the dual-booting automagically. As soon as you reboot, you are presented with a choice of what OS to use.
Compare this to Windows. The Windows installer doesn't even recognize filesystems other than FAT and NTFS, and it won't even resize those. Now, suppose that you have another OS installed and have left room for Windows. You install Windows just fine, but when you reboot - shits! - you can only get into Windows. Unless you have a boot disk for your other system, you're fucked.
The author points out that there are a bunch of freeware programs for Linux. Of course, almost all the ones he lists have equal or better counterparts freely available for Windows. Is the argument that those Windows programs aren't packaged with the OS? Guess what, quite a few of them are, when you buy from a big vendor like Dell. And since you're gonna have to download or purchase your Linux distro anyway, it's not like you're saving install time by running Linux.
The first thing that I always seem to need to do when I get a new Dell/eMachines/Toshiba/HP here at the office is uninstall all the absolute garbage that comes pre-installed on it. Then I go about installing things like the all-vital anti-virus and going through the arduous Windows Update process (made even more arduous recently by Windows Genuine Advantage, which I usually just bypass even on legit machines because it's a pain in the ass).
Why do we need reviews at all? To re-affirm the choices we make after trying both out and choosing the better product?
In this age of broadband and piracy, it's easy enough to acquire both MS Office and OpenOffice and try them both out in your own unbiased comparison. If you decide MS Office is better, you can go and buy a copy. If you decide OpenOffice is better, you can just trash MS Office and be done with it.
On the topic of OpenOffice vs. MS Office: I use OpenOffice.org and have been using pre-2.0 for a while now (since the Ubuntu developers added it to their repository). I actually started using OpenOffice back when it was StarOffice 5.0. Every time I use MS Office I seem to find some little bug or "feature" that just pisses me right off and makes me want to kill something. Whether it's Word's inability to create numbered lists properly or Excel's inability to validate data using data from another worksheet, there's always something that makes my life difficult. Sure, I find something in OpenOffice now and then that I don't like, but it's certainly not every time I use it.
Which, of course, makes far more sense. Intel can provide Apple with processors worthy of their low-end machines today, so they could switch any time, whereas there's still some R&D to be done to come up with the G5-replacement.
My GP's office writes prescriptions on the computer, then they print them out and the resident (or doctor) signs it and gives it to you. Now, they still have to go in and put what's on the prescription on the computer, but that could be easily automated if you needed to do 72,000 that were all for Viagra.
So just because we don't all enjoy what people enjoyed in the 1930's, there's something wrong with us? Movies have evolved and viewers have evolved with them.
Now, I'm not saying that this summer's movies were good - most of them looked terrible (I say looked because the only ones I actually saw were Star Wars, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and 40-year-old Virgin, which were all decent). However, I consider a good modern film like American Beauty just as "genius" and a hell of a lot more entertaining and interesting than Chaplin. I'm sure 70 years down the road people will look at the modern movies we consider genius today and think that they're boring or whatever too.
You must live in a retirement community in Florida or something.
If I want to see a movie rated less than R these days, I have to go late at night so there won't be annoying little kids there. They don't just scream or talk, they walk around in the aisles, go to the washroom frequently and are generally disruptive. The junior-high aged kids (12-15) are the worst, especially big groups of girls. They come and sit at the back and talk amongst themselves and on their cellphones and constantly text message the whole time. If you turn around and give them a dirty look now and then sometimes the smart one in the group will tell the rest to shut up, but that's if you're lucky. And you can't even get away from that age group by going late at night. Sometimes they even show up in R-rated films.
Honestly, it'd be nicer if all movies were rated NC-17 and only showed at midnight. I still go to movies now and then, but only if I have cheap passes or if I can get in on staff-only early showings. It's just not worth $26 for two of us to see a movie.
The people involved in our education systems seem to have missed the point of having computers in the classroom. It's stupid and counter-productive to try and teach regular subjects using the computer. Even if you find an effective way to do it, it's just going to make kids think that they can't do it without the computer and that'll screw them royally when they get to college and are told they can't use calculators for their math classes. Rather, we should be teaching kids how to USE the computers properly to help them with their regular work. There are so many people today who could do about 300% more work every day if they knew how to make and use a spreadsheet (I do IT for a paving company so I've seen this first hand). I just hope that in 20 or 30 years, when the work world is full of people who grew up with a computer in every classroom, this has changed and people are able to use computers effectively. The only way this will happen is if we start teaching kids to be computer literate at an early age.
"The Atlantic is a very large body of water as well."
Not as large as the pacific. Flying from the east coast to central Europe only takes 8ish hours, which is not too bad, even in coach (on a European airline that gives you free wine with your meal it's almost pleasant even). To London it's only 7ish hours. It takes something like 12 hours to get to Japan and even longer to get to Australia. For that long a flight far more people would be willing to pay extra to get there in only a few hours (not to mention that Japanese and Chinese business is booming a lot more these days than European business).
My best computer mishap was back in about 2000 when I had only been using Linux on my desktop for a year or two. In an attempt to get Apache acting as I expected it to (or something, I don't really remember why) I created a folder called ~adam somewhere on my system. It didn't work, so I went rm -rf ~adam. Ooops!
And that's how I learned to fear and respect the power and glory of our lord savior, the Bourne Again Shell.
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It's obviously not intended to be a gaming or development machine. It's intended to be a standard office machine.
... we're in Canada after all) including all the software, he'd be a lot more willing to replace the Celeron 333's we're still using. This can only help Linux by getting it into more homes and offices.
An ECS motherboard, onboard video, small PSU, 256MB of RAM is exactly (it's creepy how exactly actually) the machine we buy for most people in our office. If I could tell my boss that a new computer was $159 (or $200
You're just being silly. It's much harder for one user to destroy a digital book that's stored on Google's massive RAID array in a secured building than it is for one user of a library to destroy or lose a book they have taken out.
Near here, there was a big bunker built for the Canadian Prime Minister during the cold war. A few years ago, they decided they should sell it. When the first group to show some interest in buying it was the Hell's Angels (a biker gang that traffics a lot of drugs FYI), they realized that selling it probably wasn't such a good idea.
There's an easy way to get around the import tax: drink all 1000 beers while you're there!
I, for one, welcome our new subscription licensing overlords.
Seriously, though, I think that subscription licensing would be a huge boost for free and open source software. Right now, many people are willing to pay for software since it's a one time cost. A lot of other people are perfectly willing to pirate software, which is fairly easy since all you need is a key. Now, some of the first group may be willing to go with subscription licensing: it's kind of like leasing a car, they'll say. However, for the rest of this group, paying for software every year when it hasn't changed will seem ridiculous. Why pay for something that isn't even new and that I won't really own? The second group, however, will have a lot of trouble with the hosted software, since hosted means that something about you (your IP for example) can be easily logged every time you use the software, which makes piracy inherently more dangerous and more difficult.
Thus, I welcome subscription licensing. It will wake a significant number of people up to the alternatives that are available to them, strengthening free and open source software by improving it and widening its user base.
Speaking of implementing multi-protocol clients...
How long until Google implements Jabber's nice transport features in Google Talk? This would allow people to use Google Talk to IM their MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM buddies. While they would still have to have an account with each service, at least the client would be centralized, and to most people, that's the same thing as having one account. Google would gain huge market share (even though people are still using other protocols), and it would basically cost them nothing.
Trying to install from a Limited Account in Windows brings up a dialog "highly recommended that you install as Administrator."
There are two cases I'm considering here:
Case 1: You think that it should let you install without warning you if you try to install it as a regular user.
Case 2: You think that it shouldn't let you install at all as a regular user, since that's what the admin account is actually for.
In case 1, you are an idiot. One of the biggest security problems in Windows is that any regular old user can install software system-wide.
In case 2, I agree whole-heartedly.
In either case, it's just one more reason you shouldn't use Windows. There's no such popup in Linux.
Very true, and well said. However, the problem in most companies lies much deeper than this. It's a lack of thought in IT policy in general.
I work at a construction company. We have a growing office where many of the employees have computers. However, the people running the company treat IT as sort of a sidebar - something that doesn't actually affect the business, and thus there is a lack of corporate policy regarding computers and their use. All employee files are kept on their individual workstations, most of which are not backed up at all, let alone well. The email, too, is kept on individual workstations and the sending and receiving of email to/from company addresses is not monitored or controlled. We don't even control our own email server, our email resides on the server of a contracted IT guy and no one from our company actually has access to it (not even me, the in-office IT guy). Our networking is a mess, so someone wanting to take down our network could easily plug a laptop into a port somewhere (we don't even know where all the cables go) and put viruses or other malware onto any computer in the building, as well as steal all sorts of sensitive information.
So, with all these problems, what is the question that my boss (the president of the company) asks me most often? Am I sure that everyone's Norton Antivirus is getting updates every four hours, or is it just going once a day? Again - treating the bandaid solution as a cure.
Basically, there has been no thought put into the IT policy at this company. The technology grew faster than the company could handle, and they have no control over their computers or their network. If corporate IT policies, even in medium-sized businesses like the one I describe here, had more thought put into them, computers everywhere would be much more secure.
If they stick to their 6-month release cycle (which they did, roughly at least, for Hoary), Breezy will be out in October. Gnome 2.12 will ship with it.
Upgrading from Hoary will, of course, be as easy as doing a dist-upgrade.
I agree, ruggedized stuff is very expensive.
I work for a paving company, and our equipment shop uses a laptop for vehicle diagnostics. We bought them a Compaq two years ago or so (right after they were bought out by HP) and have had no problems at all with it. It's no battleground, but it is a fairly dirty environment (oil, grease, bit of asphalt, gravel, etc.. all over the place) and it gets tossed around a fair bit when it's being hooked up to and unhooked from machines all the time. People always bash Compaq on quality, but this laptop has really held up well.
I'm glad the parent was modded funny.
Wordpad is like a crippled version of vi. And I hate vi.
If you can't get a basic Linux desktop running in about an hour, you're doing something wrong. Install Ubuntu. It takes 20 minutes, and all your hardware will work out of the box. I've had it recognize and automagically setup such evil things as ATI graphics cards and Intel SATA controllers, so I think it'll recognize whatever you're throwing at it.
Re X, I've been using Linux as my only desktop OS for around seven years. In that time, I've never had to manually setup X. Even the Mandrake 6.0 I installed back in 1999 setup X automatically when you installed it. The only thing I've ever edited my X config for is my fancy dual-monitor setup, and that only involved adding a couple of lines, which were clearly documented in the nVidia driver information. Ubuntu even guesses resolutions and refresh rates pretty accurately, although if it gets it wrong, it's easy enough to change using Gnome config tools.
He claims that you "occasionally" need to edit a configuration file in Linux, and implies that this is no more frequent than doing so in Windows.
Bullshit. Since I've installed XP, I've never had to edit a configuration file OR registry data. Ever. I can install pretty much any PC-compatible hardware on the market and have it running quickly. Why? Because parts vendors make damn sure their stuff works in Windows.
Since installing Ubuntu on my girlfriend's laptop (which I use as an example since, unlike my home system, it is a typical desktop), I have had to edit exactly one configuration file (the WPA configuration to get it on her secured wireless network at home). Everything else worked great out of the box.
Of course, I'm completely ignoring the fact that for power users like myself, it's usually easier to edit a config file in Linux than it is to figure out how the hell to get the clumsy Windows GUI to do what I want.
When it comes to drivers and hardware, I've had far more trouble in Windows than in Linux. Whenever I install new hardware on a Windows box, it opens up some dialog box, tries to find drivers, fails, asks me for a disk, fails to find the drivers on the disk, makes me find the drivers manually, warns me that they're not XP certified, then installs them and asks me to restart! And that's the best-case scenario! Often it won't even tell me what it's trying to find drivers for. It just says "multimedia device," which when you've installed a motherboard with onboard sound, video, game controller, etc. is not very helpful at all. When I installed a new SATA card in my Linux server last month it just worked as soon as I put it in. I hotplugged in a drive and mounted it with no trouble. No finding and loading drivers and no rebooting.
I decided to try out Linux, so I downloaded Ubuntu and ran the boot disk. Unfortunately, both my hard drives are NTFS, and Ubuntu doesn't know how to partition them. After half an hour looking around the net for a way to partition an NTFS drive without endangering the data on that drive, I gave up. No Linux for me, because I'm not willing to endanger all my system files or buy a new hard drive just to play around with another OS. "Insert disk and press Enter" my ass.
What? This paragraph is just lies. Or ignorance. I've done many Ubuntu installs, and most of them included resizing NTFS partitions. They all worked flawlessly. No problems at all. I have yet to even *hear* of data loss with the Ubuntu installer. If you already have Windows setup and you install Ubuntu, it sets up the dual-booting automagically. As soon as you reboot, you are presented with a choice of what OS to use.
Compare this to Windows. The Windows installer doesn't even recognize filesystems other than FAT and NTFS, and it won't even resize those. Now, suppose that you have another OS installed and have left room for Windows. You install Windows just fine, but when you reboot - shits! - you can only get into Windows. Unless you have a boot disk for your other system, you're fucked.
The author points out that there are a bunch of freeware programs for Linux. Of course, almost all the ones he lists have equal or better counterparts freely available for Windows. Is the argument that those Windows programs aren't packaged with the OS? Guess what, quite a few of them are, when you buy from a big vendor like Dell. And since you're gonna have to download or purchase your Linux distro anyway, it's not like you're saving install time by running Linux.
The first thing that I always seem to need to do when I get a new Dell/eMachines/Toshiba/HP here at the office is uninstall all the absolute garbage that comes pre-installed on it. Then I go about installing things like the all-vital anti-virus and going through the arduous Windows Update process (made even more arduous recently by Windows Genuine Advantage, which I usually just bypass even on legit machines because it's a pain in the ass).
You need not purchase
Why do we need reviews at all? To re-affirm the choices we make after trying both out and choosing the better product?
In this age of broadband and piracy, it's easy enough to acquire both MS Office and OpenOffice and try them both out in your own unbiased comparison. If you decide MS Office is better, you can go and buy a copy. If you decide OpenOffice is better, you can just trash MS Office and be done with it.
On the topic of OpenOffice vs. MS Office: I use OpenOffice.org and have been using pre-2.0 for a while now (since the Ubuntu developers added it to their repository). I actually started using OpenOffice back when it was StarOffice 5.0. Every time I use MS Office I seem to find some little bug or "feature" that just pisses me right off and makes me want to kill something. Whether it's Word's inability to create numbered lists properly or Excel's inability to validate data using data from another worksheet, there's always something that makes my life difficult. Sure, I find something in OpenOffice now and then that I don't like, but it's certainly not every time I use it.
Which, of course, makes far more sense. Intel can provide Apple with processors worthy of their low-end machines today, so they could switch any time, whereas there's still some R&D to be done to come up with the G5-replacement.
1) Figure out the perfect balance of caffeine and milk.
2) Genetically modify cows to produce caffeinated milk.
3) ???
4) Profit.
I just put them in my fireplace pile and a few times a year we actually have a fire and it all goes up in smoke.
Just as effective as a shredder, with nearly twice as much chance of getting you laid!
1) Have shuttle missions.
2) Fuck up shuttle missions.
3) "Discover" stuff on Mars so people think they're useful again.
4) ???
5) Profit!
My GP's office writes prescriptions on the computer, then they print them out and the resident (or doctor) signs it and gives it to you. Now, they still have to go in and put what's on the prescription on the computer, but that could be easily automated if you needed to do 72,000 that were all for Viagra.
So just because we don't all enjoy what people enjoyed in the 1930's, there's something wrong with us? Movies have evolved and viewers have evolved with them.
Now, I'm not saying that this summer's movies were good - most of them looked terrible (I say looked because the only ones I actually saw were Star Wars, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and 40-year-old Virgin, which were all decent). However, I consider a good modern film like American Beauty just as "genius" and a hell of a lot more entertaining and interesting than Chaplin. I'm sure 70 years down the road people will look at the modern movies we consider genius today and think that they're boring or whatever too.
You must live in a retirement community in Florida or something.
If I want to see a movie rated less than R these days, I have to go late at night so there won't be annoying little kids there. They don't just scream or talk, they walk around in the aisles, go to the washroom frequently and are generally disruptive. The junior-high aged kids (12-15) are the worst, especially big groups of girls. They come and sit at the back and talk amongst themselves and on their cellphones and constantly text message the whole time. If you turn around and give them a dirty look now and then sometimes the smart one in the group will tell the rest to shut up, but that's if you're lucky. And you can't even get away from that age group by going late at night. Sometimes they even show up in R-rated films.
Honestly, it'd be nicer if all movies were rated NC-17 and only showed at midnight. I still go to movies now and then, but only if I have cheap passes or if I can get in on staff-only early showings. It's just not worth $26 for two of us to see a movie.
They have. It's called Internet2.
100% agreed!
The people involved in our education systems seem to have missed the point of having computers in the classroom. It's stupid and counter-productive to try and teach regular subjects using the computer. Even if you find an effective way to do it, it's just going to make kids think that they can't do it without the computer and that'll screw them royally when they get to college and are told they can't use calculators for their math classes. Rather, we should be teaching kids how to USE the computers properly to help them with their regular work. There are so many people today who could do about 300% more work every day if they knew how to make and use a spreadsheet (I do IT for a paving company so I've seen this first hand). I just hope that in 20 or 30 years, when the work world is full of people who grew up with a computer in every classroom, this has changed and people are able to use computers effectively. The only way this will happen is if we start teaching kids to be computer literate at an early age.
"The Atlantic is a very large body of water as well."
Not as large as the pacific. Flying from the east coast to central Europe only takes 8ish hours, which is not too bad, even in coach (on a European airline that gives you free wine with your meal it's almost pleasant even). To London it's only 7ish hours. It takes something like 12 hours to get to Japan and even longer to get to Australia. For that long a flight far more people would be willing to pay extra to get there in only a few hours (not to mention that Japanese and Chinese business is booming a lot more these days than European business).
My best computer mishap was back in about 2000 when I had only been using Linux on my desktop for a year or two. In an attempt to get Apache acting as I expected it to (or something, I don't really remember why) I created a folder called ~adam somewhere on my system. It didn't work, so I went rm -rf ~adam. Ooops!
And that's how I learned to fear and respect the power and glory of our lord savior, the Bourne Again Shell.