OT: Smarter people do exist

[Walter Vaughan]

Two things surprised me this Christmas.

1) bought a new inket printer for my wife. They now have a sensor in the 
  Canon (maybe other models now) pixma series where you print an 
alignment page as part of the installation, it's own internal sensors 
calibrate the printhead. Made me shake my head asking why we didn't have 
this earlier.

2) Slashdot on Christmas Eve had a topic on Knoppix Games CD. It seemed 
to run 99% in favor of including it in every Geek's stocking, so I fired 
up the bittorent and a few hours later I had her burned.

Last spring I dl'ed a Knoppix CD, so I was kinda familiar with them.

However this "Knopped" my socks off. In about the time it takes to load 
WindowsXP on this laptop, I had a shiny KDE desktop with snowflakes 
streaming down (running DebianLinux instead). What knocked my socks off 
is that without any intervention it also connected to my local wireless 
network. Detected and properly worked with ALL the hardware on this 
Toshiba Laptop. Heck, I fought for days when I got this Netgear wireless 
card for this laptop to even work without locking up the computer.

Just to see if it was a fluke, I booted it on the "family's PC" where I 
just installed that Canon inkjet, and it automatically detected and was 
able to print without any configuration. What was even more magical is 
that the PC also has a TV card that's hooked to cableTV so my wife can 
watch TV in a window while checking her email. Bingo, TV viewing app works.

Of course all the Linux games work perfectly.

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/04/12/24/222232.shtml?tid=106&tid=10

--
Walter