Of course Slashdotters will tell you Ubuntu just like they want you to encode your music in ogg, but the answer is XP, clearly. It's still the standard, for better and (mostly) worse, so if the machine can run it, run it. If it's a donated machine, there are low/no expectations for future support other than scrub-and-reinstall, so XP makes the most sense. But also, what they said re: what's the machine's target use, maybe Ubuntu is a good route... but XP is unfortunately the best bet.

Citation PLEASE?! I suppose you don't like vaccines in general. For the sane people: get a flu shot-- any flu shot-- and don't worry about your cell phone.

For that matter, maybe life has and continues to spontaneously emerge on our warm, wet, densely living planet in different nooks and crannies but hasn't found the right conditions to start sprouting in other places at all... as far as we can tell... yet. With the "chemicals for life" and every imaginable condition spread across the universe, the suggestion that life spontaneously emerged on the Earth implies that the universe has sprouted life millions or billions of other times; in other words, that the universe itself "is alive."

First came MySpace, and when people realized Facebook suited them better, they saw MySpace as the pile of crap software that it really was. Now Facebook is falling victim to its own success, and people are seeing its limits and pitfalls, looking for the next thing as Facebook tries to monetize their personal information. What will it be? Probably not something called "diaspora*" in spite of its founders' apparent good intentions: despite the upbeat definition they picked, most people associate diaspora with slavery, oppression, and other painful historical memories. Seriously: what's next?

Somebody needs to tell them that the person on the other end can't appreciate their grinning and nodding.

Those pleated pants do go nicely with the headset, though-- nice look, bluetard.

A film camera shooting at 24fps typically has an exposure of 1/48 of a second. The other 1/48 of a second is used to move the exposed bit of film out of the way and to position the next bit of film in the gate for exposure. This is referred to at a 180-degree shutter, since the shutter is open for 1/2 of the 360 degrees of the camera movement's rotation. When the film is shot overcranked-- at 48fps or 72fps or whatever for a slo-mo effect-- the shutter is still usually 180 degrees, so the motion blur looks about the same when played back at 24fps.

Your test doesn't indicate as much about frame rate as it points to flaws in your rendering technique.

With accurate motion blur, your viewers would have a very hard time telling the difference between 24fps, 30fps, and 60fps.

Whatever-- I know you never sent that check.

NOES!!! We like our USPS very much, thank you... er, some of us do. The ones who send mail. In my experience, things do /not/ get "lost in the mail"-- that's just a slacker's excuse for not having sent something. In this case, stuff's getting /stolen/ in the mail-- different issue, and I'm sure the USPS has federal agents on the case. Given the size of the US, and that a first class stamp will send your letter across town or from Miami to Honolulu, I consider the USPS (1) a bargain and (2) a poster-child for the idea that government /can/ do things very, very well. Them, and the, um, Flowers By Irene.

I'd like to know what the original /. post refers to, but perhaps it was posted from Windows 7, which did not approve the "unauthorized" posting of a critical URL.

Anyway, with Linuxes getting better and easier to run every day, more data and apps in the cloud and Apple leading the usability charge, let's hope Windows continues its agonizing death spiral.