HL men: > 80% of the population

HL women: < 0.000000000000001% of the population

I don't want a Stepford Wife, but damn it would be nice to be with someone who occasionally dressed in lingerie to surprise me or jumped me when I got home.

They’re giving us parents of eight a bad name. . .

I try to studiously avoid these tabloid story lines. And I don’t even have cable, so I’ve never seen an episode. But, what little I know (and it ain’t much), I’d tend to agree with your assessment, Digger – seems like giving up awfully easy. How the hell do you go from renewing your vows to ‘irreconcilable differences’ in less than a year?

And of course Tom is right, too – there’s more than ample evidence available that, if you care about your marriage, you don’t even think about letting the cameras into your home. I mean, cameras in the home did for the Osbornes what decades of Ozzie’s drug abuse couldn’t, knowwhatImean?

I mean, WTF is wrong with people who agree to let the cameras in? Don’t they realize that practically every other family or couple that has been filmed has split up? Haven’t they heard about Shroedingers cat? Sheesh.

Would anything less than 1G RAM work with VMWare?

I think it depends on what you’re doing with it. VMWare allows you to specify the amount of memory used by the virtual machine, and I set mine to 256 MB. However, those VMs don’t run any GUI apps. All they do is host a LAMP environment (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) with memcached thrown in for good measure. I don’t run into memory issues because that Mac is running 4 GB of RAM. However, I have noticed that my system can bottleneck when I’m running two Linux VMs and a Windows XP VM to do browser testing.

I wonder: would I still have to call the Mother$hip if if I installed Office XP using WINE?

I knew you were way into Linux, 2am. Yeah, for testing out new distros (like I like to sometimes do) virtualization is a good way to go and I have seriously thought about wading into that and trying it out. But the majority of my Linux needs, like Tom, involve keeping legacy machines running and useful. Would anything less than 1G RAM work with VMWare? For sure, if one can afford a Mac, that really is the best of both worlds. Relatively good software support without as many malware hassles. Of course, in the last couple of pwn to own contests. the Mac did not do so well. But I think that’s more because the competitors wanted a Macbook more than the other two machines!

My employer from two jobs was, and still is, very Linux dependent. They were using it when I hired on back in 1996, both for IT and product functions. Moreover, they had a port of their software for Linux.

It goes without saying that the ability to use and develop on Linux was an essential skill in those days. I installed my first distribution (Slackware 3) on a Packard Bell Pentium 120, on a November weekend in 1996. I would play around with SuSE 6 and 7 in the late 90s, RedHat 6 in 2000, Debian in 2001, and PinkTIe (a free build of RedHat Enterprise 3) in 2004.

I stopped running Linux on my home hardware after my frankencomputer desktop died in early 2005. I wound up installing Windows XP when I replaced its motherboard. I used Linux some at the Titanic, but most of my development was on Windows XP, using Visual C++ 2003.

At my current job, my computer is a MacBook pro, but development is for Linux. We have VMWare images of Linux that are remotely administered by our systems engineer with Puppet. I log into them via the Terminal app on my Mac, and point my browser to them for testing.

If someone is unwilling to tear down their PC to worry about setting up a full blown Linux host, going virtual is the next best thing. For Windows user, VMWare player is free (as in beer), and you can get preconfigured appliances that allow you to bypass the whole charade of installation.

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2amsomewhere

I installed PCLinux 2009 – the Gnome version. I liked Ubuntu, but after 10 or 12 distros, PCL was theonly one that recognized my wifi card. I don’t have enough Linux skillz to mess with ndiswrapper and win drivers, so I’m leaving it alone until I get time to learn more. It also doesn’t recognize my power settings, but since it’s only a 2 minute boot up, I can live with that.

Here’s the thing – I started messing with PCs way back in the day, and I know my way around Win machines pretty well. Linux is a lot more tweakable, but frankly, I don’t want to spend hours and hours relearning an OS; I just want to press the power button and go to it.

That said, I put Ubuntu on my home office machine and my work office machine, just to play with them a bit. I haven’t figured out how to network yet, and when I do, I’ll use them more frequently.

MS Office isn’t that important anymore; I can use Open Office (v3 is very, very nice), and I find that I’m using Google Docs most of the time, simply because it’s easier than carrying around a thumb drive. I’ve seen netbooks with Linux and I’m seriously considering buying one.

Great post, Dr. D.

Being true to one’s self – maintaining our integrity – is the number one rule in life.