... and I like them. I'm a geologist who got stuck handling all of the lab data for my company. We make building products (think stucco and plaster- lots of mixture designs and standardized test procedures). We're also a small business, and we don't have the money to hire someone solely to handle IT or even to buy one of the commercial packages.
What we've got: a PostgreSQL database that holds data for Manufacturing and R&D.
The problem this solved: reporting.
Originally, I wrote a custom program that queried the database and spat out reports in Word and Excel formats. It was a nightmare to maintain. Want a new template? Write more code. Did the database just get divided into separate schemas for Manufacturing and R&D? Alter source code. I used Pentaho's Metadata Editor to map the database to a set of virtual tables. My report templates (which are much easier to design graphically, even though Report Designer's mechanism for calculating values is rather awkward) query off the metadata, which means that I can make changes to the database itself and simply update the metadata rather than individually update a bunch of report templates. It was more work up front, but doing things this way has saved me *a lot* of time that I would otherwise spend packaging data into reports. This is not the sort of thing you would use for reports where the tests you run are highly tailored to a product being developed, and you need to write a detailed analysis of the project. This is for form reports (like pass/fail QC test reports) where you need something like a product code, a test result, and a red "fail" or green "pass" text color, or project reports where you run a set series of tests and are typically only changing the project name, customer/location, and about a paragraph of analysis.
I've used their ETL tool to batch import CSV files into databases, and it's reasonably straightforward. I do have the BI server set up, tested, and using PostgreSQL as a backend, but it's honestly just not something we use.
Who will do well with this stuff, if your business even needs a reporting solution: can you configure Tomcat, use a database, and muddle through tutorials? Are you reasonably good at teaching yourself new things? You'll probably be fine once you get the hang of it. (The documentation can be a little lacking.)
Who will not: in general, anyone who hasn't configured servers, used databases, or done a little ad-hoc programming is going to be completely lost. Are your coworkers trying to re-implement relational databases in Excel? They're going to have to be taught what any of this stuff even is before it begins to make sense to them.
... for cruising. If I need extra control, I'm still in the habit of 10:00 and 2:00. Honestly, I'd rather my arms or hands be hurt in a crash than my head crack the windshield or my ribcage break apart on the steering wheel, so I'll keep the airbags. (A seatbelt, while important to keep from flying out of the car and getting personal with the pavement, doesn't provide great protection against smashing against hard objects within the car.) My hands are softer than the steering wheel; if something's going to hit my face, I prefer the former over the latter.
Yes, this. Amazon's DRM-free mp3 store is what stopped me from pirating music. I could use them in exactly the same way as I did pirated mp3s (burn them to CDs for the car, back them up, put them on any portable player I wanted, etc.), and could download a high quality file of the exact song I wanted in all of six seconds. It's just more convenient than searching for people sharing the song at a decent quality and waiting for it to download, especially if it's from an artist that isn't very popular.
Amazon lets you download the music. It's DRM-free, which is how they originally differentiated themselves from iTunes. Since they launched Cloud Player, they've started saving copies there for you whenever you buy music. I haven't had occasion to download the same song more than once (as I have current backups and my hard drive has not yet moved on to the great beyond), but I'm under the impression that it's unlimited. You can also upload your own music and other files to your account.
If a particular action would be grounds for a restraining order if it occurred between private citizens, a warrant should be required before the police can engage in the same behavior.
... at least for the Desktop.
Right-click on the taskbar. Find the "toolbars" option. Add the Desktop toolbar. It doesn't put it in the place it's been since late 1994, but it's at least a useable menu.
In my case, it's because my long-haired pets, who stay in the house when I go to work, don't do so well when it gets above 85F. I can program the thermostat to let the temperature creep up to that level when I'm out, but, seeing as I live in Las Vegas, even when set at 85, the air conditioner is going to be on for most of the summer.
... Not to mention that flashing subliminal images of Osama bin Laden *at the airport* is going to generate a fair bit of detectable stress in people. In fact, if the departure screen suddenly flashed "jihad", I'd expect everyone who could read it to fly into an outright panic.
As has been pointed out, you didn't fix it; you broke it. Generally, != indicates that things are not equal. Study harder, young noob.
Are you the only person in that class? No? Is your community college the only school in your entire country that offers software engineering classes? No? What might that mean?
I work for a slowly growing (non-tech) startup. Periodically, we hire new people. For every single position advertised, we typically see upwards of 200 applicants. We only use the newspaper and Craigslist for job ads, too; we'd probably get over 1,000 if we used Monster or Careerbuilder. Ditching the submissions from people without any sort of college degree doesn't cut down on the number significantly, because most of the people applying have bachelor's degrees. What sets people apart is their experience. If you're not going to have any basements available to you after graduation, you're going to eventually have to deal with the fact that there are a lot of people studying the exact same things that you are, and that those with some sort of verifiable experience are going to be picked over you each and every time. If you've contributed some code to an open source project, you have something to put on your resume' that employers can verify. I.e., you have a portfolio of work done that does not consist of homework assignments.
Working on proprietary software does earn a paycheck, but, if you're not doing it now, to get the job, you're going to need to make yourself stand out from your competitors. Contributing to open source is a good way to do that.
Incidentally, we use PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, Plone, Openbravo, JasperReports, Samba, Apache, and a handful of other open-source offerings in this office in addition to Windows XP for the workstations. Some of these will eventually be replaced with proprietary solutions as we grow, but most won't. When we hire for IT or look for consultants, having a proprietary-only background is going to be one criteria for shortening the resume' stack. At this company, strict proprietary == "round-filed". I.e., the resume' gets thrown in the trash.
Don't several Trojans do this already? Seriously, they want people to offer anonymous access to their machines' drives for data storage, without even having any control over the data? They want people with purpose-built *desktop* operating systems, such as one popular one not really designed for multiple users, to volunteer to do this? Is this a social engineering attack? (Yes, I did RTFA. It reads like an advertisement, with no consideration to the security concerns the person whose drive is being used for storage may have.) A bunch of Windows machines effectively allowing anonymous accounts sounds like a wet dream for script kiddies.
I've done the U-PACK thing a couple of times. If you don't have anywhere for them to park the trailer, you can rent a truck for a day or two and load or unload the trailer at their drop lot. (If you're making multiple runs in the rental truck, make sure to secure everything in the trailer before you leave the lot, as they may move it.) Ryder has trucks with lift gates that you can rent for this purpose. Not only do the lift gates make getting large appliances into the truck much, much easier than dragging a hand truck up a tiny little U-Haul ramp, but Ryder's gates are at the same level as the floor of ABF's trailers. This means that, if the person driving the rental truck is okay backing up, one person can stand at the extended gate and give it a little nudge to help it into the trailer. In my case, the wide crossover space allowed my dad and I to move enough stuff to fill a 3-bedroom house from truck to trailer in a few hours, including all the tie-downs. We'd used a Budget truck for the transfer vehicle the first time, and had to move everything across on a provided tiny ramp. I would personally not do it again without a truck with a lift gate.
Plone has RSS support; NASA probably just didn't wish to have feeds. There's a decent, if biased summary of what some of Plone's high points are here. The CMS itself isn't geared towards any specific category of content; some organizations use it for their public website, whereas we use it to power a small Intranet web site where I work, primarily for the purpose of sharing documents rather than typical web content. It has relatively fine-grained security options built in regarding who can see what, and the Kupu editor is *extremely* easy to use for people who know nothing about markup languages, but who can at least use a word processor. The default site skin presents a very intuitive interface. The ability to manage documents in a workflow is helpful, too.
For me, the biggest downside to Plone has been the shear amount of conflicting documentation on the product. For a sortable table, documents for slightly older versions will say to mark it as a certain class (and different versions say different classes), and let Plone do the work. Newer documentation points the user to JQuery. A lot what works well with the current version seems to be located off the main Plone site; there are a lot of articles on the official project site itself that are our of date, and, since that's where a newbie is going to go first, it can be an exercise in frustration. Most of what applied to older versions still works on the current one, but, when it doesn't, sometimes reading the conflicting recommendations and averaging them is the best way to go. Overall, though, it suits our needs well.
So is gangsta rap going to be the new missile defense? Instead of dedicated stations, we could have a volunteer rapid response unit consisting of Honda Civics.
Most of the prestigious schools are need-blind, and admit regardless of what you can afford. This may seem like a ticket to a mortgage in loans, but it's actually not. Where I went to school, most of the financial aid came in the form of grants from the college endowment, which students were eligible for simply by virtue of being admitted. One of my classmates' mothers was a teacher, and her dad was unemployed. Her parents paid for her room and board, and that was it. The school covered the other $30,000 each year. For me, it was no small amount, either. My parents were convinced that their income level wouldn't qualify me for financial aid until finally, in my senior year, my dad sucked it up and filled out the forms. The result was $11,000 for the year in grants (and some wounded yuppie pride). It's part of the joy of having an endowment well in excess of $1 billion- if you can get in, a lot of the good schools really will help foot the bill. Yes, you might have loans (I came out with all of $4,000 of student loans), but not in an amount comparable to a house.
To be fair, $30,000 is a lot, and should cover most of your costs. Unless your last name is Gates and you live in Washington, you're probably eligible for more grant-based financial aid than your middle-class parents might like to think. The only other advice I would have is to also apply to schools that don't have the same general name recognition, but do have excellent departments in the field you'd like to study. If you don't get into the big name schools, you'll probably be offered a full ride or close to it at one of the others. If the department is genuinely that good, people hiring in that field will know of it, and that counts for heck of a lot when you first experience the joys of rent and utilities.
I've actually used it as an alternative desktop for the past few years. All I ever have to do on that particular machine is write documents, float around the net, and use some open-source science applications- there's no reason for me to upgrade the hardware for things that are that trivial. I tried installing Ubuntu later and Gentoo on the same box, but they both failed (not enough RAM, supposedly). FreeBSD went on without a hitch. Later, I picked up an old UltraSparc free from a friend. Debian and Gentoo both failed during the install; again, FreeBSD went on just fine. The ports system is quite nice, and my eight-year-old desktop was able to handle Blender and GRASS just as well as my recently deceased 4-year-old laptop running XP. The laptop was top-of-the-line when new; the desktop was not. Where FreeBSD seems to be lacking is in USB and wireless; USB printing wasn't well-supported until about two years ago, and not all wireless cards will work. The new laptop (smoke started coming out of the old Dell's case shortly after it came off warranty, so dude, I'm *not* getting another Dell) will likely dual-boot XP and one of the Linux distros if FreeBSD gives too much trouble, as, for a laptop, USB and wireless are absolutely essential to me.
Old hardware was my primary motivation, but, honestly... I just like it. The handbook is thorough, it works on all my old stuff, and the boot loader doesn't suck. For me, that's all I need.
Even beyond voting, volunteer for candidates you believe in, or even the ones that seem least frightening. I went to New Hampshire ahead of the '04 primaries for Dean, and before that, did local visibility-type things (manning Farmer's Market tables, registering people to vote, etc.). If the campaign has a reasonable level of organization on the local level, materials like buttons, stickers, and such come "free" (i.e., from wealthier volunteers), and the campaign itself should have fact sheets on their site that can be printed out. When I went to New Hampshire, all I paid for was my plane ticket- housing was provided free of charge with local volunteers, and some of the others who couldn't devote lots of time during the day brought us food at night. You can also potentially run for a local delegate position, where, if your candidate wins your state's primary, you go to the party convention to cast your district's vote. Basically, you have a greater chance that, as you talk to other delegates and such, your opinions will be heard.
As campaigns are increasingly being organized online, security becomes very important. Volunteers are needed there, too, both to configure and manage servers in local offices, and to make sure that the information stored in campaign databases is protected from other campaigns, who WILL try to crack it. Our security could have been better. Last time, one campaign had people from all over the country calling New Hampshire voters; people are needed to coordinate calling parties to make sure that the same people aren't being harassed over and over again, and that, say, people in California keep the time difference in mind. On election days, people are needed to give rides to supporters that otherwise couldn't make it to the polls, act as poll monitors, and help get that last turnout push. Even if your candidate doesn't win, if they're successful enough, others will be less nervous about expressing those same ideas down the line. Dean bombed in the primaries, but he enjoyed heavy support early on because he was against the war- an idea the other candidates didn't seem to subscribe to when they announced their candidacies.
Speaking as someone who uses it for a desktop, FreeBSD is great on *older* hardware (the Gentoo installer had no idea what to do with my network card, and the special "low" RAM version of Ubuntu somehow couldn't install GRUB correctly, making it rather useless), and it does seem to have good support for server setups, so it might be worth a shot. I've been following the 6.2 release candidates, and they've both been nice and stable. (No more kernel panics when powering up with a USB printer connected, like I experienced with 6.0 stable! Seriously, the operating system has come a long way even in just the past year.) One issue I have noticed is with the handbook itself- it's possible to do things, relatively common tasks, even, that the last time I checked, the handbook seems to discourage. You can print from USB printers just fine, for example (and could even under 6.0, despite the startup issue), but you wouldn't know it from reading the print section. This makes the forums and mailing lists the best source for configuration help, provided that they don't tell you to RTFM.
If there's one thing people are good at, it's anthropomophizing. Look at how many people extend their pets' emotions, wants, and desires to the entire human range (But the doggie wants to be a mommy! She'll be sad if she can't be a mommy!). For that matter, look at those who start to talk to their cars, computers, and other electronics. This other article gives more details about how the elderly have interacted with the robotic seal, and mentions some studies conducted with Aibo. It seems that, provided that something gives the appearance of having thoughts and emotions, people will begin to treat it as though it does. I think that's how Bush remained popular for as long as he did.
Honestly, my guess is that the NSA will come to the conclusion that this evil plot involves 387 Terabytes of Harry Potter mpreg fanfics and copious quantities of Spermamax.
Basically, if the average global temperature rises too much, those currents start to shut down. Under "normal" conditions, water freezes in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. This increases the salinity of the remaining, unfrozen surface water, thereby increasing its density, and causes the water to sink, helping to drive circulation. (Since the temperature of surface water there is often higher than that of the water below it, it would not ordinarily sink without that density change.) When the temperature rises, the ice melts, and, when combined with higher discharge from glacier-fed rivers and streams, the result is a sudden influx of comparatively low-density, warm surface water. This shuts down that mechanism.
As production of the high-salinity "Deep Water" lessens or ceases entirely, currents like the Gulf Stream weaken. For example, an influx of freshwater off the coast of Laborador in the late 1960s prevented the formation of Laborador Deep Water. The Gulf Stream weakened, and, during the period of the Great Salinity Anomaly, Europe experience a few cold years. Theoretically, if enough freshwater hit the system at the right time, the current could actually shut down, plunging Europe and the Northeastern US (and most of the Northern Hemisphere, as the effects rippled through other currents) into a mini ice age. Granted that it would eventually start up again, but not on human timescales. The last time such a thing supposedly happened, the frigid conditions lasted about 700 years (Younger Dryas).
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... and I like them. I'm a geologist who got stuck handling all of the lab data for my company. We make building products (think stucco and plaster- lots of mixture designs and standardized test procedures). We're also a small business, and we don't have the money to hire someone solely to handle IT or even to buy one of the commercial packages.
What we've got: a PostgreSQL database that holds data for Manufacturing and R&D.
The problem this solved: reporting.
Originally, I wrote a custom program that queried the database and spat out reports in Word and Excel formats. It was a nightmare to maintain. Want a new template? Write more code. Did the database just get divided into separate schemas for Manufacturing and R&D? Alter source code. I used Pentaho's Metadata Editor to map the database to a set of virtual tables. My report templates (which are much easier to design graphically, even though Report Designer's mechanism for calculating values is rather awkward) query off the metadata, which means that I can make changes to the database itself and simply update the metadata rather than individually update a bunch of report templates. It was more work up front, but doing things this way has saved me *a lot* of time that I would otherwise spend packaging data into reports. This is not the sort of thing you would use for reports where the tests you run are highly tailored to a product being developed, and you need to write a detailed analysis of the project. This is for form reports (like pass/fail QC test reports) where you need something like a product code, a test result, and a red "fail" or green "pass" text color, or project reports where you run a set series of tests and are typically only changing the project name, customer/location, and about a paragraph of analysis.
I've used their ETL tool to batch import CSV files into databases, and it's reasonably straightforward. I do have the BI server set up, tested, and using PostgreSQL as a backend, but it's honestly just not something we use.
Who will do well with this stuff, if your business even needs a reporting solution: can you configure Tomcat, use a database, and muddle through tutorials? Are you reasonably good at teaching yourself new things? You'll probably be fine once you get the hang of it. (The documentation can be a little lacking.)
Who will not: in general, anyone who hasn't configured servers, used databases, or done a little ad-hoc programming is going to be completely lost. Are your coworkers trying to re-implement relational databases in Excel? They're going to have to be taught what any of this stuff even is before it begins to make sense to them.
... for cruising. If I need extra control, I'm still in the habit of 10:00 and 2:00. Honestly, I'd rather my arms or hands be hurt in a crash than my head crack the windshield or my ribcage break apart on the steering wheel, so I'll keep the airbags. (A seatbelt, while important to keep from flying out of the car and getting personal with the pavement, doesn't provide great protection against smashing against hard objects within the car.) My hands are softer than the steering wheel; if something's going to hit my face, I prefer the former over the latter.
Yes, this. Amazon's DRM-free mp3 store is what stopped me from pirating music. I could use them in exactly the same way as I did pirated mp3s (burn them to CDs for the car, back them up, put them on any portable player I wanted, etc.), and could download a high quality file of the exact song I wanted in all of six seconds. It's just more convenient than searching for people sharing the song at a decent quality and waiting for it to download, especially if it's from an artist that isn't very popular.
Amazon lets you download the music. It's DRM-free, which is how they originally differentiated themselves from iTunes. Since they launched Cloud Player, they've started saving copies there for you whenever you buy music. I haven't had occasion to download the same song more than once (as I have current backups and my hard drive has not yet moved on to the great beyond), but I'm under the impression that it's unlimited. You can also upload your own music and other files to your account.
If a particular action would be grounds for a restraining order if it occurred between private citizens, a warrant should be required before the police can engage in the same behavior.
... at least for the Desktop. Right-click on the taskbar. Find the "toolbars" option. Add the Desktop toolbar. It doesn't put it in the place it's been since late 1994, but it's at least a useable menu.
Will an airline gate agent scan an iPad?
In my case, it's because my long-haired pets, who stay in the house when I go to work, don't do so well when it gets above 85F. I can program the thermostat to let the temperature creep up to that level when I'm out, but, seeing as I live in Las Vegas, even when set at 85, the air conditioner is going to be on for most of the summer.
There are probably thousands of people on slashdot that use linux/FOSS, but work
Doubtful.
Hell, in the US, it's going to cause anyone who can recognize it as Arabic to freak out, reading comprehension or no.
... Not to mention that flashing subliminal images of Osama bin Laden *at the airport* is going to generate a fair bit of detectable stress in people. In fact, if the departure screen suddenly flashed "jihad", I'd expect everyone who could read it to fly into an outright panic.
As has been pointed out, you didn't fix it; you broke it. Generally, != indicates that things are not equal. Study harder, young noob.
Are you the only person in that class? No? Is your community college the only school in your entire country that offers software engineering classes? No? What might that mean?
I work for a slowly growing (non-tech) startup. Periodically, we hire new people. For every single position advertised, we typically see upwards of 200 applicants. We only use the newspaper and Craigslist for job ads, too; we'd probably get over 1,000 if we used Monster or Careerbuilder. Ditching the submissions from people without any sort of college degree doesn't cut down on the number significantly, because most of the people applying have bachelor's degrees. What sets people apart is their experience. If you're not going to have any basements available to you after graduation, you're going to eventually have to deal with the fact that there are a lot of people studying the exact same things that you are, and that those with some sort of verifiable experience are going to be picked over you each and every time. If you've contributed some code to an open source project, you have something to put on your resume' that employers can verify. I.e., you have a portfolio of work done that does not consist of homework assignments.
Working on proprietary software does earn a paycheck, but, if you're not doing it now, to get the job, you're going to need to make yourself stand out from your competitors. Contributing to open source is a good way to do that.
Incidentally, we use PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, Plone, Openbravo, JasperReports, Samba, Apache, and a handful of other open-source offerings in this office in addition to Windows XP for the workstations. Some of these will eventually be replaced with proprietary solutions as we grow, but most won't. When we hire for IT or look for consultants, having a proprietary-only background is going to be one criteria for shortening the resume' stack. At this company, strict proprietary == "round-filed". I.e., the resume' gets thrown in the trash.
Don't several Trojans do this already? Seriously, they want people to offer anonymous access to their machines' drives for data storage, without even having any control over the data? They want people with purpose-built *desktop* operating systems, such as one popular one not really designed for multiple users, to volunteer to do this? Is this a social engineering attack? (Yes, I did RTFA. It reads like an advertisement, with no consideration to the security concerns the person whose drive is being used for storage may have.) A bunch of Windows machines effectively allowing anonymous accounts sounds like a wet dream for script kiddies.
I've done the U-PACK thing a couple of times. If you don't have anywhere for them to park the trailer, you can rent a truck for a day or two and load or unload the trailer at their drop lot. (If you're making multiple runs in the rental truck, make sure to secure everything in the trailer before you leave the lot, as they may move it.) Ryder has trucks with lift gates that you can rent for this purpose. Not only do the lift gates make getting large appliances into the truck much, much easier than dragging a hand truck up a tiny little U-Haul ramp, but Ryder's gates are at the same level as the floor of ABF's trailers. This means that, if the person driving the rental truck is okay backing up, one person can stand at the extended gate and give it a little nudge to help it into the trailer. In my case, the wide crossover space allowed my dad and I to move enough stuff to fill a 3-bedroom house from truck to trailer in a few hours, including all the tie-downs. We'd used a Budget truck for the transfer vehicle the first time, and had to move everything across on a provided tiny ramp. I would personally not do it again without a truck with a lift gate.
Plone has RSS support; NASA probably just didn't wish to have feeds. There's a decent, if biased summary of what some of Plone's high points are here. The CMS itself isn't geared towards any specific category of content; some organizations use it for their public website, whereas we use it to power a small Intranet web site where I work, primarily for the purpose of sharing documents rather than typical web content. It has relatively fine-grained security options built in regarding who can see what, and the Kupu editor is *extremely* easy to use for people who know nothing about markup languages, but who can at least use a word processor. The default site skin presents a very intuitive interface. The ability to manage documents in a workflow is helpful, too. For me, the biggest downside to Plone has been the shear amount of conflicting documentation on the product. For a sortable table, documents for slightly older versions will say to mark it as a certain class (and different versions say different classes), and let Plone do the work. Newer documentation points the user to JQuery. A lot what works well with the current version seems to be located off the main Plone site; there are a lot of articles on the official project site itself that are our of date, and, since that's where a newbie is going to go first, it can be an exercise in frustration. Most of what applied to older versions still works on the current one, but, when it doesn't, sometimes reading the conflicting recommendations and averaging them is the best way to go. Overall, though, it suits our needs well.
So is gangsta rap going to be the new missile defense? Instead of dedicated stations, we could have a volunteer rapid response unit consisting of Honda Civics.
Most of the prestigious schools are need-blind, and admit regardless of what you can afford. This may seem like a ticket to a mortgage in loans, but it's actually not. Where I went to school, most of the financial aid came in the form of grants from the college endowment, which students were eligible for simply by virtue of being admitted. One of my classmates' mothers was a teacher, and her dad was unemployed. Her parents paid for her room and board, and that was it. The school covered the other $30,000 each year. For me, it was no small amount, either. My parents were convinced that their income level wouldn't qualify me for financial aid until finally, in my senior year, my dad sucked it up and filled out the forms. The result was $11,000 for the year in grants (and some wounded yuppie pride). It's part of the joy of having an endowment well in excess of $1 billion- if you can get in, a lot of the good schools really will help foot the bill. Yes, you might have loans (I came out with all of $4,000 of student loans), but not in an amount comparable to a house. To be fair, $30,000 is a lot, and should cover most of your costs. Unless your last name is Gates and you live in Washington, you're probably eligible for more grant-based financial aid than your middle-class parents might like to think. The only other advice I would have is to also apply to schools that don't have the same general name recognition, but do have excellent departments in the field you'd like to study. If you don't get into the big name schools, you'll probably be offered a full ride or close to it at one of the others. If the department is genuinely that good, people hiring in that field will know of it, and that counts for heck of a lot when you first experience the joys of rent and utilities.
I've actually used it as an alternative desktop for the past few years. All I ever have to do on that particular machine is write documents, float around the net, and use some open-source science applications- there's no reason for me to upgrade the hardware for things that are that trivial. I tried installing Ubuntu later and Gentoo on the same box, but they both failed (not enough RAM, supposedly). FreeBSD went on without a hitch. Later, I picked up an old UltraSparc free from a friend. Debian and Gentoo both failed during the install; again, FreeBSD went on just fine. The ports system is quite nice, and my eight-year-old desktop was able to handle Blender and GRASS just as well as my recently deceased 4-year-old laptop running XP. The laptop was top-of-the-line when new; the desktop was not. Where FreeBSD seems to be lacking is in USB and wireless; USB printing wasn't well-supported until about two years ago, and not all wireless cards will work. The new laptop (smoke started coming out of the old Dell's case shortly after it came off warranty, so dude, I'm *not* getting another Dell) will likely dual-boot XP and one of the Linux distros if FreeBSD gives too much trouble, as, for a laptop, USB and wireless are absolutely essential to me.
Old hardware was my primary motivation, but, honestly... I just like it. The handbook is thorough, it works on all my old stuff, and the boot loader doesn't suck. For me, that's all I need.
Even beyond voting, volunteer for candidates you believe in, or even the ones that seem least frightening. I went to New Hampshire ahead of the '04 primaries for Dean, and before that, did local visibility-type things (manning Farmer's Market tables, registering people to vote, etc.). If the campaign has a reasonable level of organization on the local level, materials like buttons, stickers, and such come "free" (i.e., from wealthier volunteers), and the campaign itself should have fact sheets on their site that can be printed out. When I went to New Hampshire, all I paid for was my plane ticket- housing was provided free of charge with local volunteers, and some of the others who couldn't devote lots of time during the day brought us food at night. You can also potentially run for a local delegate position, where, if your candidate wins your state's primary, you go to the party convention to cast your district's vote. Basically, you have a greater chance that, as you talk to other delegates and such, your opinions will be heard.
As campaigns are increasingly being organized online, security becomes very important. Volunteers are needed there, too, both to configure and manage servers in local offices, and to make sure that the information stored in campaign databases is protected from other campaigns, who WILL try to crack it. Our security could have been better. Last time, one campaign had people from all over the country calling New Hampshire voters; people are needed to coordinate calling parties to make sure that the same people aren't being harassed over and over again, and that, say, people in California keep the time difference in mind. On election days, people are needed to give rides to supporters that otherwise couldn't make it to the polls, act as poll monitors, and help get that last turnout push. Even if your candidate doesn't win, if they're successful enough, others will be less nervous about expressing those same ideas down the line. Dean bombed in the primaries, but he enjoyed heavy support early on because he was against the war- an idea the other candidates didn't seem to subscribe to when they announced their candidacies.
Speaking as someone who uses it for a desktop, FreeBSD is great on *older* hardware (the Gentoo installer had no idea what to do with my network card, and the special "low" RAM version of Ubuntu somehow couldn't install GRUB correctly, making it rather useless), and it does seem to have good support for server setups, so it might be worth a shot. I've been following the 6.2 release candidates, and they've both been nice and stable. (No more kernel panics when powering up with a USB printer connected, like I experienced with 6.0 stable! Seriously, the operating system has come a long way even in just the past year.) One issue I have noticed is with the handbook itself- it's possible to do things, relatively common tasks, even, that the last time I checked, the handbook seems to discourage. You can print from USB printers just fine, for example (and could even under 6.0, despite the startup issue), but you wouldn't know it from reading the print section. This makes the forums and mailing lists the best source for configuration help, provided that they don't tell you to RTFM.
If there's one thing people are good at, it's anthropomophizing. Look at how many people extend their pets' emotions, wants, and desires to the entire human range (But the doggie wants to be a mommy! She'll be sad if she can't be a mommy!). For that matter, look at those who start to talk to their cars, computers, and other electronics. This other article gives more details about how the elderly have interacted with the robotic seal, and mentions some studies conducted with Aibo. It seems that, provided that something gives the appearance of having thoughts and emotions, people will begin to treat it as though it does. I think that's how Bush remained popular for as long as he did.
Honestly, my guess is that the NSA will come to the conclusion that this evil plot involves 387 Terabytes of Harry Potter mpreg fanfics and copious quantities of Spermamax.
As production of the high-salinity "Deep Water" lessens or ceases entirely, currents like the Gulf Stream weaken. For example, an influx of freshwater off the coast of Laborador in the late 1960s prevented the formation of Laborador Deep Water. The Gulf Stream weakened, and, during the period of the Great Salinity Anomaly, Europe experience a few cold years. Theoretically, if enough freshwater hit the system at the right time, the current could actually shut down, plunging Europe and the Northeastern US (and most of the Northern Hemisphere, as the effects rippled through other currents) into a mini ice age. Granted that it would eventually start up again, but not on human timescales. The last time such a thing supposedly happened, the frigid conditions lasted about 700 years (Younger Dryas).