>> It just urks me that I'm part of a team of so-called computer experts,
>> and everybody's answer to everything is "did you try rebooting it?" Not
>> "hey, let me engage my brain for 15 seconds and see if I can come up
>> with a real answer", just "did you try rebooting it?"
>
> That's a Windows answer to most problems, sadly.  That's not necessarily
> a function of your teammates or their nationality, it's the way Microsoft
> has trained people to "troubleshoot".

*sigh* Yeah, there is that...

>> And yes, being the only person in the team who works geographically
>> isolated really puts the "me" in "team".
>
> Of course I agree with that.  It can be done, but it takes effort on
> everyone's part, and it seems that your teammates don't think of you as
> part of the team or try to include you.

To be fair, I don't think they try to exclude me on purpose. It's just 
that they all work in the same room, and I don't.

> Finding another job would probably be a good way to do this, but you seem
> to lack the flexibility to make a change - you're rooted to a place and
> are unwilling to relocate, even if the money is far, far better.

Is it really worth abandoning everything I've ever cared about just to 
have more coins in my pocket?

That's not a rhetorical question. The answer I suppose depends on your 
priorities. If you value happiness more than money, then I guess that 
fixes the answer...

>> Of course, that's an exaggeration. But those guys do seem reluctant to
>> throw any real thought power at the problem when you can just replace
>> stuff and see if that fixes it. Maybe they're just busier than me...
>> seems to be a cultural thing though.
>
> No, it's not particularly cultural.  Just the type of people they've
> hired in your company's US organisation.

Well, I suppose there is something to be said for just replacing the 
entire car... It's potentially a lot quicker than a lot of complex 
troubleshooting. But to me, it just seems like the "wrong" answer.

>>> So it sounds to me like you're either stuck back in 1990, or you're
>>> still using an 8088 to compile with.
>>
>> No, this was on the same PC I'm using right now - AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+
>> 2.2 GHz with 3 GB RAM.
>
> What else was the system doing?

It was getting late at night. I told Gentoo to "emerge mozilla", and 
went to bed. By the morning, it has nerly finished compiling.

Note that at this point, I didn't even have an X server running. No 
services running. Nothing. I literally had a terminal screen running 
Bash and the build. It took many, many hours to finish. It actually 
quite surprises me that a mere web browser takes longer to compile than 
something complicated like X11. But there we are...

> I've got a similar system, and I'm sure
> it would compile FF faster than that if nothing else was using the
> system.

Hmm, OK. Apparently I imagined it then. o_O

>>> That's kinda the point of "Free Software"
>>
>> Sure. That's the general idea of a free license. But some licenses are
>> freer than others. And different distros have different ideas about
>> that. (See, again, Debian classifying POV-Ray as non-free.)
>
> But not when it comes to the GPL.  The kernel and many of the utilities
> and programs that make up a distribution also are.  I can't arbitrarily
> decide that you can't have access to it because I want to charge you for
> my particular collection.

Well, that's true enough. But without looking at the license for every 
single component in the OpenSUSE system, I don't know if there's some 
customer SUSE-only thing in it which has a less permissive license or 
something. So I was just asking.

>> Sure, but presumably they only *support* your products if you pay for an
>> expensive support package?
>
> It depends on the product.  You might look into it (there's no reason for
> me to do so for you, you can navigate the HP site as well as I can).

OK, well let me put it this way: I would be /surprised/ if HP are 
interested in helping anybody not paying for the priviledge.

>> The fact that I'm running from the standard ISO image of the live CD
>> tells you it doesn't have any VM tools installed. (Unless there are any
>> present on the disk itself.) I'll admit I forgot to include the version
>> numbers.
>
> "Standard ISO image of the live CD" doesn't tell me which one (there are
> at least two for openSUSE).

And I said somewhere earlier that I'd tried both the GNOME and KDE live CDs.

> I'd have to look, but the hardware detection
> may well see that it's in a VM and run the GPL'ed VMware tools (I'd have
> to look).

Well, yes at any rate, this is a question for the correct forum. 
Presumably there will be people there who don't even need to look this up.

>>> Computers don't tend to do things for "random" reasons.
>>
>> This is why it disturbs me so when a computer does something for no
>> apparent reason. Like booting the same VM multiple times, when it can
>> have no record of what happened before, and yet seeing a different
>> result each time...
>
> That can mean there's a hardware issue (e.g, bad memory), or in the
> program that's running in the VM there's a memory leak or some other
> oddity.

I would suspect it's a VMware glitch. Every other VM works just fine, so...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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