Hey, I needed that advice 13 years ago when I was 19 in the Marines with a bunch of my friends! It doesn't do me any good now that I am married with two kids. My wife would bitch-slap me if I drank that stuff again ; )
Sorry to reply to myself. But for those who have never heard of it, I heard it pronounced as oooooh-zoe to where it rhymes with you-zoe. Any Greek-Geeks, please correct ; )
Hey, what about Greek Ozo! When I was in the Marines and went over to Greece, that stuff was killer. Strangely, a search on Google mostly shows stuff about people with bad breath. Did I spell Ozo wrong?
When has Linus ever sued over the use of his mark? Do you think every non-profit Linux XYZ out there is paying him? Rock Linux, Arch Linux, ASP Linux, College Linux, etc. Do you think any of them are paying to use Linux(R)?
Thanks for the tips! This is too true. I wish I could find a PHB buzz word site so I could use some words that are sure to get them all listening. ; )
Let's see, so far we have Power Point, leveraging and synergy. Any other big terms to use? I am just glad I don't have to do many PHB type meetings. I am lucky I just get to program most of the time and let the PHB's work among themselves.
Sure, than you lose the Solaris name. With Linux you get to enjoy the Linux TRADEMARK to your advantage. To a business PHB, they hear Dork Linux or Geek Linux, it is still Linux to them. If they hear Open Helios, well what the hell is that? Never heard of it, no thanks.
If a PHB has heard of Solaris and has experience with Solaris and hears of "Geek Solaris 1.0", they would be more willing to give it a try over some never before heard of OS called Open Helios. The same goes for Linux. If a PHB has had a positive experience with Linux, they would be more willing to try "Geek Linux 1.0" over some unknown OS named Open Foo. Try to explain to a PHB that some unknown OS is based on Linux/Solaris and you will just get a blank stare.
I actually had this experience recently at the fortune 500 I work for. We are rolling out a few thousand POS systems nation wide and in Canada. The POS software is Java based and is very good. The vendor we bought the software from _supports_ Linux and MS Windows XP Pro. The vendor of the software actually _recommended_ to us to use Novell/SuSE Linux for deployment. However, myself (a programmer) and an admin both have experience building Linux from scratch based on LFS. We tossed the idea to the PHB's and they all just looked dumbfounded. "Huh? build Linux? How can you build Linux?". Our LFS builds would have been mean-n-lean with only the required software. However we were shot down because the PHB's didn't know what the "OS" we were going to use would be and never heard of "LFS". Debian was also not an option because the PHB's had no clue what "a debian" is.
Not quite. Can you take the Open Solaris source code and release "Geek Solaris 4.2"? Nope. Sun would kill you over the Solaris trademark. Yet anyone can take Linux and make "Geek Linux 4.2 (The best Linux yet!)".
Oh, and there is the whole problem of there are not many open source programmers out there that are skilled in the Solaris kernel. So if Sun dies, Open Solaris won't be "ticking" too much. Why would the 10' or 100's of thousands of developers in the Linux community suddenly drop Linux to switch to Open Solaris? Why would all those open source programmers want to port all those drivers to Open Solaris just to get it on par with where Linux is now wrt hardware support?
The latest Linux kernel has extreme capabilities that even surpass things Solaris can do. SGI has a single image Linux kernel scaled to more processors than Solaris has ever supported. Sure Solaris may have some features not in the Linux kernel, however I just see Linux kernel devs grabbing anything good out of the Open Solaris kernel and porting it to the Linux kernel instead of trying to get Open Solaris on par with the current Linux kernel.
That depends on where you live. In CA and the East coast, prices are going up fast. For example, I recently bought a 3,000 sqft home right near Orlando FL for $300,000. The price for the house now (a few months later) is $400,000. In comparision, my sister just bought a new 2,600 sqft home in Texas for about $155,000.
Basically my newly built home right outside of Orlando FL costs $133.34/sqft while in Texas my sister got her newly built home for $59.62/sqft. It is insane.
I never claimed trademark law is unconstitutional. I said common phrases would be smacked down by the Supreme court. Not being able to say "games" is pretty bad. Heck, even not being able to say or use "olympic" is pretty sad since the olympic games predated this by many, many centuries.
There are some lawyers/organizations who would take such a high-profile case for no charge knowing they will be paid one way or another.
Intelligent Climate Control states that the movement of celestial bodies is too complicated to understand through the laws of physics, and therefore climate changes must be the result of arbitrary control by a higher being.
Huh? What the HELL are you talking about? The Earth is closer to the Sun during winter for the Norther hemisphere. Are you that stupid to know that in the USA, during OUR summer, we are actually further from the Earth than during the winer in the USA? This has nothing to do with "Intelligent" _anything_! The Norther hemispher is tilted tword the Sun during Summer yet we are a little further away. Go and do something called reading before you spout out your crazy crap.
But sometimes people wonder if seasons have anything to do with the distance of the Earth from the sun. We know that can't be the case, because the seasons are opposite in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. However, if we look at the Earth's orbit closely,we find that it is not exactly circular. Rather, it is an ellipse, which is an oval shape, or a very slightly flattened circle. The sun is at one focus of the ellipse. This means that the Earth's distance from the sun does vary.
The point where the Earth is closest to the sun is called perihelion (from the Greek peri, close or near, and helios, meaning sun). Perihelion takes place on January 3, which, of course, is during _winter_ for the __Northern Hemisphere__, and summer for the Southern Hemisphere.
What the HELL are you talking about with all this "Intelligent Climate Control" crap?
The USA has the Constitution. This would _never_ stand up at the Supreme court level, never.
Basically, the USOC owns these words and symbols exclusively, by Act of Congress
Yeah? When has the USOC tried to stop a citizen from uses those words like in this article? As I just said, the Supreme Court would smack this down in no time if someone took it to that level.
However, I will concede that it is pretty freakin sad that our "representatives" would even pass something like that knowingly violating our constitutional rights!
As far as the olympic symbols I personally do not have a problem. However, wrt the words I do. Any competent lawyer should be able to beat a case like this showing that Freedom of Speech has been violated and that the word olympic games has been around for _ages_!
I might watch the games, but I now have respect only for the athletes- the games themselves have proven holllow.
Why even watch the "2012" "Olympic" "Summer" "games"? I won't. How can you respect an athlete that will sell out to such an organization as this? I for one will not watch the "2012" "Olympic" "Summer" "games"! I will boycott the "2012" "Olympic" "Summer" "games" and I think maybe even put a web site with nothing but "2012" "Olympic" "Summer" "games" all over the page!
You gotta love it. No matter how much the Europeans cry about America, they are becoming more and _more_ like us EVERY DAY! Heck, even this "bill/law" would be too much for us in the USA.
As I read TFA, I cannot help but think you Europeans have surpassed the USA in 'slim-ness'. You Europeans won't even be able to use the words "summer", "gold" or "games"! Damn! That is pretty bad! So umm, how exactly will you Europeans describe the period of the year where it is warmer and the Earth is farther from the Sun? Did you get a new code-word to use until after 2012? What about the word "games"? What will European kids call what they play? What will all the home-boyz call those metal teeth they have if they can't say gold? Will "bling" still be in style in 2010 + 2?
Yes, she said Bill has a very small p3n1s. However, she will stay with him for the money. She said she can get good d1ck anywhere, but you can't come by billions so easily.
I am not disagreeing with you, I am just wondering if Apple really sued over "putting too much candy-coloured translucent plastic on a computer case". If so, that is pretty sad!
To me that depends on how the ad is done. For example, I recently watched an ad for SubWay(tm). In the ad, that Gerrid (name?) guy has some Buger King(tm) sandwiches next to a SubWay(tm) sub. He states that the BK burger has like 50g of fat while the SubWay(tm) sub has 6. I know that made me not want to eat any BK (or McD's) for a long time. I have actully been eating more SubWay(tm) now.
Discovery Commander Eileen Collins spoke last Thursday of the environmental destruction visible on Earth, likening the atmosphere to "an eggshell on an egg, it's so very thin".
Huh? Is this chick for real? Scientists have been studying the atmosphere for decades, and yet have a _very_ small understanding of the dynamics of our Earth and especially it's atmosphere. I live in central Florida, if Earth Scientists knew more, I would not have been beat up by THREE MAJOR hurricanes last year! However, we are supposed to believe this chick that get to be "commander" of the shuttle because of PC, somehow knows better? Please!
Oh, and what about this "great" quote from this "commander""
She added: "We know that we don't have much air - we need to protect what we have."
Huh? What is this freak talking about? Where are all the scientific data showing the concentration of O2 that would substantiate "we don't have much air"? I am breathing just fine. Should I start taking smaller breaths?
Call me old-fashion, but I miss the days of _real_ Astronauts! Those guys were kick-ass pilots that risked their lives in planes. They "pushed-the-envelope" and were what I considered Astronauts. Not all these Politically Correct scientists that get to go for a ride. Look at some of the pictures of the shuttle missions over the last 5 years or so. They look like your typical PC photo. A couple of men, a couple of women, a few white guys, a few Asians, a black or two and throw in some other nationality and your have the "perfect" shuttle crew!
I am not prejudice. I DO NOT care what your race, sex, religion, etc is when it comes to picking a shuttle crew (or president or king or whatever). However, I think we need to get back to the basics of only the "best of the best" make the grade. At more than a BILLION per mission, we cannot afford to be PC. If the "best of the best" happens to be a black dude from Africa, or an Asian chick from Mongolia, so be it. I just am sick of seeing crews picked to fit your typical "tree hugger" profile.
Oh, and to make sure I am "on-topic", does anyone _really_ think the few shuttle missions that we have had so far will cause any "harm" to the environment? The funny thing to me is that _all_ of the people screaming about the environment DRIVE CARS, and LIVE IN HOMES, and USE ELECTRICITY and USE WATER, and ETC. _What_ in the world makes these tree-huggers tick? How can someone be sooooo anal to complain about others usage of natural resources when the people complaining are using just as much.
Give me a call when _one_ of these vocal tree-huggers actually walk-the-talk and live in an adobe home with _no_ electricity (unless 100% of it is generated by wind/solar/etc) and does not drive _any_ vehicle unless they know it is 100% natural/etc. Tree-huggers hold no salt with me because they complain about things they are doing! When I find _one_ vocal tree-hugger that is living off the land and using 0% of the resources they are complaining about, then I will give them some of my time to hear their side. Until then, all I have to say is STOP BEING A HYPOCRITE!
And to answer your last question:
What else could be done to get to space with minimal harm to the planet?
Why don't we first worry about getting _some_ type of peace-on-earth going and getting our natural resource usage under control (on a global scale) _before_ we try to get NASA/ESA to be even more PC and tie thier hands further. The original goal of NASA was SCIENCE and now it seems like NASA does very little science for the money spent.
Browsers should be able to realize that since the url is the same, diff the previous stream, and the current one, and modify the current page inline.
Why don't you submit the code to re-parse the DOM tree and update the page in-line? You could submit it as BSD-licensed code so all browsers could use it, you would be famous!
As it stands now, web developers have to jump through a lot of hoops to get that sort of functionality. They shouldn't.
AJAX is _really_ not that hard as another poster pointed out. Search Google for "AJAX library" and have fun : ) Oh, I like Sarissa!
XMLHttpRequest is pretty much a defacto standard in the major modern browsers. All the modern browsers are the same except (of course) for IE which doesn't implement it internally and requires an ActiveX instantiation. However, that is very easy to code around and then you have a cross-browser implementation of XMLHttp such as Sarissa.
As long as you don't need to support 4-5 year old browsers, XMLHttp works fine. If you need to support 4-5 year old browsers, either force your users to upgrade (by not supporting them) or use old techniques like form posts and hidden variables or cookies.
Re:Why do it yourself?
on
DHTML Utopia
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but as a practice I'd be more inclined to have a few people invest time in developing components that the majority of people can use, rather than having lots of people trying to understand the complexities, and buggering it up.
Did you RTFA or even the post? An Open Source cross-browser implementation called Sarissa does that.
Sarissa Oveview:
Sarissa is an ECMAScript library acting as a cross-browser wrapper for native XML APIs. It offers various XML related goodies like Document instantiation, XML loading from URLs or strings, XSLT transformations, XPath queries etc and comes especially handy for people doing what is lately known as "AJAX" development.
Why do I hear this _same_ stupid response time and time again from single, young geeks? Can you name one technology that has come from the pr0n industry? Did that industry create any major new video codec to help stream their crap better/faster/cheaper? Nope. Did the pr0n industry create any new web standards that have made web browsing in general better? Nope.
All the pr0n industry has done is to _use_ technology that real software/hardware research companies have produced. Most of the pr0n industry just wants to take advantage of some exploit to stick dialers and other crap that takes control of your system to try to force their crap down on you. The pr0n industries actions have been nefarious at best.
Maybe it is time you grew up and realized that there is much better things to do than look at naked pictures of chicks, like looking at the real thing perhaps (i.e. wife/girlfriend)? What are they teaching in schools these days!
What? I can't get arrested for intending to commit a crime. Attempting and intending are two different things.
Sure you can. Say I was intending to blow up a bomb in NYC. I spend weeks planning it all out. Some how the FBI find out about it and raid my home a week before I was going to attempt to do it. They find the great details of what I was going to attempt, plans on building a bomb, get away plan, location of attack, etc. Do you think the FBI will just let me go free even though I never attempted the crime yet?
Behind corporate hardware and software costing 10's if not 100's of thousands, yes, you have a point.
On your typical Joe User system with broadband, your point is laughable at best. I have seen far too many typical Joe Users with system that are just "owned" by spyware/adware/malware/viruses. I live 1,300 miles from most of my family. Their systems are really, really bad. Every time I fly up to see everyone, I really an just doing "Windows admin" tasks for everyone. It is pretty sad that MS Windows allows a typical Joe User to totally destroy their system so easily, especially if those Joe Users use the "recommended"/"preferred" MS software of IE and outlook express.
Yes, technical users can lock down their home WinXP systems. My corporate WinXP dev workstation has not been rebooted for a long time and runs well (with the exception of explorer.exe crashing every time I log out!); This is at a fortune 500 that has spent 100's of thousands if not more on security (on a side note, we just spent a lot on an SSL VPN (in addition to our traditional VPN) solution so that any of our users that want to access our intranet from home need to go through that SSL VPN. Why did we buy this? Because we have 140,000+ employees and the _majority_ of those home users had viruses that were trying to get into our network and we had to protect our MS Win based servers (not our Linux or Solaris servers)! The majority of our non-technical home users had viruses running MS Windows!). My home WinXP system runs very well because I have protected it with a hardware firewall and a Linux firewall and locked down my wife's login account to just "Power User" so she cannot totally kill the system.
Now try to get the millions of Joe Users to implement these types of restrictions/securities/etc and see the backlash. They just won't/can't do it. The tasks are just too technical for most. The funny thing about all of this is that most Joe Users _do_ have some type of security. Many of them have Norton "firewall" or some other end-user type "protection". It is just funny how most of them _still_ are able have their systems destroyed in an average of 2-3 months or so.
Of my family members, so far I have gotten my brother-in-law to switch to Mac OS X (he is a photographer and wanted Mac anyway) and my sister to switch to Linux (web/email junkie only). I wrote down the root password for both of them, though they have no clue what to do with that root password. Both of their systems are still chugging along without issue. I can logged into each system every so often thanks to dyndns.org and I apply patches. I tried to do dyndns.org on some of my families WinXP boxes, however, they were getting infected faster then I could patch/clean them. It really is much easier for me to go North once a year with a bootable Linux CD and burn backups of their personal files and then do a restore, than to try to admin all their systems remotely.
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Hey, I needed that advice 13 years ago when I was 19 in the Marines with a bunch of my friends! It doesn't do me any good now that I am married with two kids. My wife would bitch-slap me if I drank that stuff again ; )
Sorry to reply to myself. But for those who have never heard of it, I heard it pronounced as oooooh-zoe to where it rhymes with you-zoe. Any Greek-Geeks, please correct ; )
Hey, what about Greek Ozo! When I was in the Marines and went over to Greece, that stuff was killer. Strangely, a search on Google mostly shows stuff about people with bad breath. Did I spell Ozo wrong?
Let's see, so far we have Power Point, leveraging and synergy. Any other big terms to use? I am just glad I don't have to do many PHB type meetings. I am lucky I just get to program most of the time and let the PHB's work among themselves.
If a PHB has heard of Solaris and has experience with Solaris and hears of "Geek Solaris 1.0", they would be more willing to give it a try over some never before heard of OS called Open Helios. The same goes for Linux. If a PHB has had a positive experience with Linux, they would be more willing to try "Geek Linux 1.0" over some unknown OS named Open Foo. Try to explain to a PHB that some unknown OS is based on Linux/Solaris and you will just get a blank stare.
I actually had this experience recently at the fortune 500 I work for. We are rolling out a few thousand POS systems nation wide and in Canada. The POS software is Java based and is very good. The vendor we bought the software from _supports_ Linux and MS Windows XP Pro. The vendor of the software actually _recommended_ to us to use Novell/SuSE Linux for deployment. However, myself (a programmer) and an admin both have experience building Linux from scratch based on LFS. We tossed the idea to the PHB's and they all just looked dumbfounded. "Huh? build Linux? How can you build Linux?". Our LFS builds would have been mean-n-lean with only the required software. However we were shot down because the PHB's didn't know what the "OS" we were going to use would be and never heard of "LFS". Debian was also not an option because the PHB's had no clue what "a debian" is.
Oh, and there is the whole problem of there are not many open source programmers out there that are skilled in the Solaris kernel. So if Sun dies, Open Solaris won't be "ticking" too much. Why would the 10' or 100's of thousands of developers in the Linux community suddenly drop Linux to switch to Open Solaris? Why would all those open source programmers want to port all those drivers to Open Solaris just to get it on par with where Linux is now wrt hardware support?
The latest Linux kernel has extreme capabilities that even surpass things Solaris can do. SGI has a single image Linux kernel scaled to more processors than Solaris has ever supported. Sure Solaris may have some features not in the Linux kernel, however I just see Linux kernel devs grabbing anything good out of the Open Solaris kernel and porting it to the Linux kernel instead of trying to get Open Solaris on par with the current Linux kernel.
Basically my newly built home right outside of Orlando FL costs $133.34/sqft while in Texas my sister got her newly built home for $59.62/sqft. It is insane.
I think that was a little of the brew talking : )
I never claimed trademark law is unconstitutional. I said common phrases would be smacked down by the Supreme court. Not being able to say "games" is pretty bad. Heck, even not being able to say or use "olympic" is pretty sad since the olympic games predated this by many, many centuries.
There are some lawyers/organizations who would take such a high-profile case for no charge knowing they will be paid one way or another.
However, I will concede that it is pretty freakin sad that our "representatives" would even pass something like that knowingly violating our constitutional rights!
As far as the olympic symbols I personally do not have a problem. However, wrt the words I do. Any competent lawyer should be able to beat a case like this showing that Freedom of Speech has been violated and that the word olympic games has been around for _ages_!
As I read TFA, I cannot help but think you Europeans have surpassed the USA in 'slim-ness'. You Europeans won't even be able to use the words "summer", "gold" or "games"! Damn! That is pretty bad! So umm, how exactly will you Europeans describe the period of the year where it is warmer and the Earth is farther from the Sun? Did you get a new code-word to use until after 2012? What about the word "games"? What will European kids call what they play? What will all the home-boyz call those metal teeth they have if they can't say gold? Will "bling" still be in style in 2010 + 2?
Yes, she said Bill has a very small p3n1s. However, she will stay with him for the money. She said she can get good d1ck anywhere, but you can't come by billions so easily.
I am not disagreeing with you, I am just wondering if Apple really sued over "putting too much candy-coloured translucent plastic on a computer case". If so, that is pretty sad!
To me that depends on how the ad is done. For example, I recently watched an ad for SubWay(tm). In the ad, that Gerrid (name?) guy has some Buger King(tm) sandwiches next to a SubWay(tm) sub. He states that the BK burger has like 50g of fat while the SubWay(tm) sub has 6. I know that made me not want to eat any BK (or McD's) for a long time. I have actully been eating more SubWay(tm) now.
At least there is one old-timer around on /. with some wisdom ; ) Too bad the /. mods didn't pick up what you did.
Oh, and what about this "great" quote from this "commander""
Huh? What is this freak talking about? Where are all the scientific data showing the concentration of O2 that would substantiate "we don't have much air"? I am breathing just fine. Should I start taking smaller breaths?Call me old-fashion, but I miss the days of _real_ Astronauts! Those guys were kick-ass pilots that risked their lives in planes. They "pushed-the-envelope" and were what I considered Astronauts. Not all these Politically Correct scientists that get to go for a ride. Look at some of the pictures of the shuttle missions over the last 5 years or so. They look like your typical PC photo. A couple of men, a couple of women, a few white guys, a few Asians, a black or two and throw in some other nationality and your have the "perfect" shuttle crew!
I am not prejudice. I DO NOT care what your race, sex, religion, etc is when it comes to picking a shuttle crew (or president or king or whatever). However, I think we need to get back to the basics of only the "best of the best" make the grade. At more than a BILLION per mission, we cannot afford to be PC. If the "best of the best" happens to be a black dude from Africa, or an Asian chick from Mongolia, so be it. I just am sick of seeing crews picked to fit your typical "tree hugger" profile.
Oh, and to make sure I am "on-topic", does anyone _really_ think the few shuttle missions that we have had so far will cause any "harm" to the environment? The funny thing to me is that _all_ of the people screaming about the environment DRIVE CARS, and LIVE IN HOMES, and USE ELECTRICITY and USE WATER, and ETC. _What_ in the world makes these tree-huggers tick? How can someone be sooooo anal to complain about others usage of natural resources when the people complaining are using just as much.
Give me a call when _one_ of these vocal tree-huggers actually walk-the-talk and live in an adobe home with _no_ electricity (unless 100% of it is generated by wind/solar/etc) and does not drive _any_ vehicle unless they know it is 100% natural/etc. Tree-huggers hold no salt with me because they complain about things they are doing! When I find _one_ vocal tree-hugger that is living off the land and using 0% of the resources they are complaining about, then I will give them some of my time to hear their side. Until then, all I have to say is STOP BEING A HYPOCRITE!
And to answer your last question:
Why don't we first worry about getting _some_ type of peace-on-earth going and getting our natural resource usage under control (on a global scale) _before_ we try to get NASA/ESA to be even more PC and tie thier hands further. The original goal of NASA was SCIENCE and now it seems like NASA does very little science for the money spent.As long as you don't need to support 4-5 year old browsers, XMLHttp works fine. If you need to support 4-5 year old browsers, either force your users to upgrade (by not supporting them) or use old techniques like form posts and hidden variables or cookies.
Sarissa Oveview:
All the pr0n industry has done is to _use_ technology that real software/hardware research companies have produced. Most of the pr0n industry just wants to take advantage of some exploit to stick dialers and other crap that takes control of your system to try to force their crap down on you. The pr0n industries actions have been nefarious at best.
Maybe it is time you grew up and realized that there is much better things to do than look at naked pictures of chicks, like looking at the real thing perhaps (i.e. wife/girlfriend)? What are they teaching in schools these days!
On your typical Joe User system with broadband, your point is laughable at best. I have seen far too many typical Joe Users with system that are just "owned" by spyware/adware/malware/viruses. I live 1,300 miles from most of my family. Their systems are really, really bad. Every time I fly up to see everyone, I really an just doing "Windows admin" tasks for everyone. It is pretty sad that MS Windows allows a typical Joe User to totally destroy their system so easily, especially if those Joe Users use the "recommended"/"preferred" MS software of IE and outlook express.
Yes, technical users can lock down their home WinXP systems. My corporate WinXP dev workstation has not been rebooted for a long time and runs well (with the exception of explorer.exe crashing every time I log out!); This is at a fortune 500 that has spent 100's of thousands if not more on security (on a side note, we just spent a lot on an SSL VPN (in addition to our traditional VPN) solution so that any of our users that want to access our intranet from home need to go through that SSL VPN. Why did we buy this? Because we have 140,000+ employees and the _majority_ of those home users had viruses that were trying to get into our network and we had to protect our MS Win based servers (not our Linux or Solaris servers)! The majority of our non-technical home users had viruses running MS Windows!). My home WinXP system runs very well because I have protected it with a hardware firewall and a Linux firewall and locked down my wife's login account to just "Power User" so she cannot totally kill the system.
Now try to get the millions of Joe Users to implement these types of restrictions/securities/etc and see the backlash. They just won't/can't do it. The tasks are just too technical for most. The funny thing about all of this is that most Joe Users _do_ have some type of security. Many of them have Norton "firewall" or some other end-user type "protection". It is just funny how most of them _still_ are able have their systems destroyed in an average of 2-3 months or so.
Of my family members, so far I have gotten my brother-in-law to switch to Mac OS X (he is a photographer and wanted Mac anyway) and my sister to switch to Linux (web/email junkie only). I wrote down the root password for both of them, though they have no clue what to do with that root password. Both of their systems are still chugging along without issue. I can logged into each system every so often thanks to dyndns.org and I apply patches. I tried to do dyndns.org on some of my families WinXP boxes, however, they were getting infected faster then I could patch/clean them. It really is much easier for me to go North once a year with a bootable Linux CD and burn backups of their personal files and then do a restore, than to try to admin all their systems remotely.