MajesticTreeFrog

Go to http://www.slate.com/, they were recently running a special on intelligent investing. Simply put, you should mainly ignore a lot of the daily 'financial news' because it exists not to help you but to sell ads. As such, it is very panicky and following the 'picks of the day' is not good investing strategy. If it was as easy as listening to the guys yapping on the daily financial times, everyone would make a ton of money. In the end, responsible investing means diversifying your stocks, both in terms of markets and bluechip vs more risky prospects, and then sitting on them. Which is to say not doing much.

Wow, who is your cable provider??Here in NC(in the triad), cable is $40 a month and you get about 500k down and 40kup.That is through time warner, and without any uncapping or anything like that. You can get even faster DSL if you are willing to may a lot more money($80 a month) from speakeasy or Bellsouth.If you are getting crappy speeds at an apartment, it may be because the apartment complex leases a business class line and then splits the feeds to all the different apartments. This was what happened to some friends of mine. The cable company can install a separate line for $40 a month, if where you live is anything like here, or you can check with the local phone company about getting a DSL line. 12k up and down is terrible. I would go out of my mind.

I am aware that Gentoo is patched agressively for speed, part of that patching is that each packaged is compiled for your specific system. You can do this with flavors other than gentoo, as far as I know, it just takes a bit more work.Still, thanks for the info, in the next week when I begin work transitioning to linux, It will hopefully come in handy.

I keep wondering how people find the Mac OS hard to use. I can only assume they don't use it much and because its 'not windows' it is therefore hard.

I think Mozilla or Firefox is the best bet for browser compatibility tests. You can test for IE, and i suggest doing so(because it breaks stuff due to its crappy design and lack of updates for a while). That being said, Firefox or Mozilla both use the same codebase for mutliple platforms. Building a site that looks good on them should look good to most people on most OS's. If people still DEMAND to use IE then just load a page saying go get firefox and make em download it.

Interesting. I may then try gentoo at some point. I think I will start with debian since I have a reasonably fast system already. If I need debian to be faster I will just download the newer kernel, compile it myself a la gentoo, and then use that kernel. that way I get the ease of apt-get and the speed of custom compiles.

the portage thing in Gentoo sounds a lot like apt-get in debian, what are the differences and advantages/disadvantages to the two methods? I am currently planning to put linux on my desktop and try it out, since I would really like to drop windows altogether. I understand that crossover office allows me to run photoshop under linux, and with that one of my main objections is gone.

Ok, the president is the commander in chief. That means he is the person in charge. Now, if you were in a company, where your livelyhood depended on that company's continued existence, would you like it if you had a CEO who did something like spend all the Corp's money on something with no value, threatening your economic structure, as well as your ability to interact and bargain with other corporations? Or, would you interupt this by replacing the CEO with someone who is actually competent and at least will ATTEMPT to fix things as opposed to making them worse? I personally, would HOPE the board would fire the idiot. Its an analogy that may or may not work for you. But hopefully you will see what Im getting at.

Perhaps I will. However, I refuse to refer to linux as GNU/linux. Because thats just idiotic. The spirit of open source software is contribution and bug fixes by everyone. I am taking this to the name as well. I am fixing the bug named "GNU/", because its annoying and serves no purpose.

yeah, for a while, I was hot stuff cause I got a Gmail account early(A girl who blogged a lot knew some of the guys at google and got an account, a friend from highschool knew her and got one, and he of course knew me so I got one. REALLY early.) Now they are worthless

I don't see why not. With 5.1 or headphones, in the end, its all pressure waves hitting your eardrums. I know with my Audigy, the soundcard can use my 2 front speakers and still make it sound like something is behind me. I doubt it would be hard to adapt such a technique to headphones. It might even be easier, since in this case you know precisely where the speakers are relative to the person listening to them.

Firefox on Mac runs fine, it pops up a dialogue which says 'a script is causing firefox to run slowly, wanna kill the script?'and you say yes.

It will only be helpfull if we use it. Are there guidelines for when we should give someone a reputationu point?

Yes, Linux is 'just the kernal', but thats not how most people talk about 'linux'. When people mention linux they mean the whole deal, the kernal+xfree86/x.org and some windows manager like KDE or Gnome. That together is what is usually meant when a person casually mentions 'Linux'. Which is what I did. That being said, the things that make KDE/Linux/etc 'hard' are dealing with things that don't work perfectly the first time. Sometimes, when you plug something in, if you have a nice distro then linux detects it and everything works just fine. When this doesn't happen, things can get irritating, such as messing with config files. In terms of KDE, I remember installing KDE on my laptop and having it show the screen a few pixels to the right, so that the right edge of teh screen was gone. At the time(this may have changed, this was a few years ago), there was no simple option to adjust the screen image a few pixels left to fix the problem without doing some low level config hacking. I never ended up bothering, too much work to get something simple to happen. Other things are basic HCI issues. I remember the options/preferences/settings(whatever its called) in KDE was terribly organized, making it hard to find or do what I wanted. Using RPM's to install programs works, but was less intuitive, or at least less familiar than the windows installer type method or the OSX 'Drag the icon to the applications folder and its installed' method. This is even more true when something goes wrong with an RPM. Apt-get is nicer, but isn't on a number of major distros.Finally, on a personal preference level, I think KDE is ugly. I haven't played with KDE 3 though, so that may have changed. Granted, Windows is almost as ugly, but thats not a nice comparison.

this "documentary" sounds like anti-stem cell propaganda to me. Stem cells should be self replicating if managed correctly, the idea is that you won't have to have a second baby, but instead once stem cells have been harvested and studied enough, we will be able to produce them in whatever ways are needed.

darren, if you are looking for a good cheap gaphics design program(assuming you are buying this not downloading it), then go get a copy of photoshop elements. Even better, go buy a wacom graphire 3 tablet 4x5(will make your life MUCH easier). It costs a bit more than elements but it (I believe, check before buying) comes with a copy in the box. If it does that is a perfect buy.

hmm, you say you cannot access the drive? Are you running 2k or XP? it could be a permissions problem. I say this since the utilities for checking for physical damage came out ok but the software basic fixes such as chkdsk and fixmbr don't work. Have you tried looking at the properties of the drive in windows? BTW, does it show up in windows or can you see the icon but it won't let you actually access it?

I have an audigy 2, and while you are correct that it is a 'gaming' card, it works just fine for whatever is needed. for 45 bucks or so(OEM, took some searching), it was quite a good buy.

clearly all of us space hogs need to go get DVD burners and use them(the second half is my issue). DVD-/+Rs have gotten pretty cheap these days. I got a 25pack of DVD-R memorex disks for 8 bucks on sale at compUSA a few weeks ago.

Point, though so are the intel and Amd 'motherboards' simply motherboards with intel/amd chipsets also manufactured by intel/amd. I thought chipset was the obvious point of comparison, since saying ASUS or something of the sort strikes me as silly, since they are all just variants of a chipset.

Solaris is Sun's Unix variant. It is indeed closed source, but only for a bit longer. Sun recently decided to open source Solaris. Even before it became OSS however, it was still unix, and therefore based off unix source and architexture, which means programming for it wasn't nearly as hard as something more truly proprietary like windows. MacOS X has a similar approach, Apple opensourced darwin, the OSX unix core, and made assorted other pieces available to others. So, Apple is trying for the best of both worlds approach.

??? No PythonI hereby vote for python, due to ease of use, capability, ease of legibility, etc.

Well, the way you wrote your post led me to believe that you took those books literally rather than a description of the times or a set of morality tales. Not quite. Modern physics does indeed have lots of theories, but these are not meant to be taken as fact. They exist to be tested, Science rests on positing theories that explain the data that has been gathered, and then attempting to show that the theory is false. thus, nothing(well, almost nothing) is ever proven to be true, but instead proven to not be false(so far). The important thing here is that in order for a theory to be scientific, it MUST be disprovable. In order to be disprovable it must be a proscriptive as well as descriptive theory. As in, it most predict what will happen in the future, not just what has happened in the past. Then, when the future comes around, we can tell if the theory was correct(so far). This is a methodology, which does not require faith. You can wait around and see, for yourself, whether or not a theory is correct(it just might take a while, or some work). There is no demand to 'believe' a theory outside of how well it has stood up to tests. Religion, OTOH, works nothing like this. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all require faith. They contain moral codes, factual descriptions(though what is fact and what is parable is completely up in the air), as well as some philosophical viewpoint. All of these aspects are based on a couple of a priori assumptions(assumptions they assume to be true), such as the existence of god, the existence of only one god, the omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence of god, that god's communication(s) to his chosen people, who his chosen people are(always a point of violent contention), and the authority of religious texts to be accurate in their descriptions of all of this. Beyond this, some adherents to these religions take their texts literally, as another layer of a priori assumptions. None of these things in religion are easily testable, and the times that things have been discovered that contradict these assumptions(and certain ideas derived from them), there has been much nashing of teeth and yelling on the part of the believers. To contrast this with modern physics, the modern physical theories, as strange as some of them are, came into being in order to both explain and predict the strange and interesting things that have been discovered. At the same time, other theories, such as that of the ether, have gone down into the history books, and few even remember them(note the comparative lack of knashing of teeth and yelling). That being said, religions outside of the dominant 3 western traditions have very different approaches to the whole matter, and are closer to what is considered philosophy, but thats a different post.

hmm, I don't like cathedrals, and Bazaars are too loud.Can I vote buddhist monastery?

Sadly, since apple considers itself a hardware company rather than a software company(which is sad, since software seems to be what they are best at), it is very unlikely that a PC version of macOS will come out. that being said, PearPC is a program trying to emulate the PPC chipset that macs run on. You could run Pear PC and install MacOS on a PC that way, but it would be a pain, and take a performance hit.