Similar connundrum about "main computer".

Home Web/Mail/etc server - Debian on RPi; Laptop - dualboot Ubuntu/Win 10, with gaming on Ubuntu(wine), Win10 for functionality testing; Work laptop - Oracle Linux with Win7 VirtualBox.

I have not played FPS for over a decade but I have a soft spot for "stompy robots". I bought Crossover at the end of last year, just to run Mechwarrior Online(and support Wine/Crossover) and it installed Steam and MWO without a hitch and it works really well. It is the 32bit version(DirectX 9). DirectX 11 is a work-in-progress.

Voices of sanity in a sea of snark. Which keyindings do people use for their shell?

When I started as a sysadmin and wanted to muscle-memorise the vi commands, I would run 'set -o vi'. Worked a treat. After I discovered the joy of emacs, it was 'set -o emacs' .

Slowly, ideas from Plan 9 are being adopted by other systems. Plan 9 was the first operating system with complete support for the UTF-8 Unicode character set encoding

Perhaps Slashdot should take a leaf out of this OS

Perfect for a written record of all your changes.

This is my experience as well. I have supported a shared memory system and now a distributed memory cluster, the resilience of the latter means job resubmission of jobs related to the failing node is the standard response. A failed blade (Altix brick in my case) meant the entire numalink connected system would go down. Component-level resilience and predictive diagnostics help. Job suspension and resumption and/or migration is also useful to work around predicted or degraded component failure.

Followed by a curmudgeonly - " ...and take your imported rubbish with you. Stop getting your "cultural traditions" from Hollywood TV and movies."

NASA have a map for that.

Naturally yes. I like the early-bed time, but the sun never sets on Slashdot.

My favourite French expression. Haven't met a French person who gets it though.

The cladists have won. Birds are dinosaurs. Willful ignorance is unforgivable. Creationists keep their kids in a fact and logic-free bubble long enough for them to breed.

Agreed. I enjoyed listening to him at the Perl Conference 1997 and his "Cathedral and the Bazaar" and, to a lesser extent "Homsteading the Noosphere", essays were useful. I used fetchmail when I had dialup. Everything he has uttered since has been unenjoyable.

Thanks for the links, especially the SIAM one. Some of those ideas I touched on in my Honours thesis as my project was directly affected by the issues of lost programs; old media storage where was were parts of programs found; a paper with an idealised function only described with a graph; incomplete mathematical description of a model component. I have begun planning future research along with a methodology to avoid a lot of the above issues.