madcrow

RPG Maker XP is a nice tool: highish-res 2D graphics and lots of flexibility. It's a shame that ASCII cracked down on fan translators / hackers, yet never bothered to release an official English version.

Most distros already include TCL and its GUI component TK, by default. If the program should have graphics, be sure to use the tk command rather than the tcl command.

If you have 500 to play with I would look at the high end of either NVidia or ATI. I personally like Nvidia but ATI is fine too unless you use Linux, in which case Nvidia is THE choice due to vastly superior driver support.

I would think space travel would be the main reason to do this. I can't see any real medical reason except for thatr same bizzare reason they give for cyrogenic freezing which always struck me as crud.

I've never had any problems with the Adobe version and it's out for all the platforms I use, so I think I'll keep using it.

Hey, this is cool. It's what I was talking about in my DTP post. Very nice...

Yeah, 8 hours of video on a CD is not going to look nice. I've gotten 4 hours to look nice though, at least at 320x240...

Yeah, GIMP is certainly the best free image editor. It's multi-platform, skinnable using the GTK skins engine (more noticable under Windows than Linux...) and has all the features you could ever want (more than Photoshop out of the box, you need to get extra plug-ins for tons of money to get all the features for PS that come with Gimp)

I don't see why FC4 would be so hard to get up and running. Any good install routine should enable you to dual boot and set up that menu...

The only problem with this is that aparently, Sony will be actually loosing money on each Ps3 they sell and will only make it back by the feesand royalties from games. If lots of people just buy ps3 to run linux, then sony might end up losing lots of money on it...

So you want to make fancy paper publications like a fanzine or something you'll need a DTP package. While most DTP packages are expensive pieces of crap, there are a few good programs available.If you're using Windoze, Serif's PagePlus SE is just about the best you can get. There are commecial versions that add things like PDF export, but those can easily be added by free print drivers...For Linux, go for Scribus: you won't be dissappointed.

Yeah, MySQL is probably the best database program on he market. It doesn't have the fancy features that some of he big commercial programs have, but for most web-based uses, that's actually a GOOD thing. I've heard some nice things about Firebird, though.

I'm more a fan of the modded xpstyle subsystem myself. It uses 0 extra resources and is free. Object Desktop was great back in the OS/2 era, but I've never liked the windows versions.

Why would you want to do that? Are you one of those evil admins who believes in killing users' abilities to customize their machines?

MIDI has been 100% supported in Linux for years. Just make sure that you have a hardware MIDI card. If all you have is the lame little fake sound "codec" built into your motherboard, you're never going to get proper MIDI support. Creative Labs makes good sound cards if you turn out to need one.

Yeah, this is a great program. I've used it to replace notepad on my Windows installation. The only thing it lacks is an autowrap for already-written text files. Otherwise, it's great.

Well, i tried it and it didn't really find any of things i was looking for. So i guess it's an interesting idea, but it just doesn't work that well...

Yeah, Syllable OS is nice project. It sort of reminds me of BeOS, but in some ways is more like a "real" *nix. Anyway, the idea of creating a GUI *nix system without that slow piece of 25 yo bloat known as X-Window is a good one.

How the heck did I miss this topic... Anyway, BeOS is great with nice UI and great features. It really deserved to do better than it did, but it came around at just the wrong time, A little earlier and it probably would have done better, but sadly it didn't come out until after the alternative community had already latched onto Linux.

Heh. This is just a way for M$ to use their customers to pay for their own bandwidth and distribution costs.

Heh, there's nothing wrong with customized kernels. It's always nice to have features from future version features rolled into the more or less current kernel.And don't diss SuSE. It's not JUST a beginner's distro. It's huge size makes it excellent for everyone from the total n00b to the ultimate hacker...

Heh, I've shifted to the PC DOS camp recently. DR DOS was just too problematic for too many of my games.

I've heard good things about this language, but I've never tried it because I refuse on principle to buy stuff like programming languages.

I installed Ubuntu recently on an older computer and I must say I would not reccomend it for a beginner to install. Once it's installed it's briliant for a beginner. The only real problem is the fact it's CD has very little software available.

Heheh. Solaris 10 goes a long way towards improving Solaris as a personal operating system, but it still comes nowhere close to the level of the best Linux distros on x86. If you have a SPARC system, though, Solaris is still the way to go.