RealPlayer easier to setup than mini-PCI NIC in Windows

[Martin Maney]

Okay, there's probably some totally stupid reason the 3com NIC just
won't work in Windows (the Megalomania edition, which some folks would
say was alone enough to explain anything, but it's really been quite
well-behaved for me on the Inspiron), but it turned out to take a lot
less time than I had wasted trying to get Windows to accept the drivers
I downloaded from 3com.com to fetch and install RealPlayer10, and then
it just worked.

Which may all by itself be enough to convice Cally to let me switch her
to the new Athlon box with Ubuntu - she likes to listen to a number of
radio shows that are most conveniently available on the net, and she's
always having trouble with the older version of Real that works on her
Woody machine.  Tonight she's listening to (well, taping, for later
listening to) that new Hitchiker's series from the BBC, which just
flat-out refused to work with the older player.

Oh yes, the shutdown only says it's going to power off.  I wonder if
that's fixed since the preview release (which may be the most recent
versions I've put on the Inspiron - it's mostly the Iron Dragon machine
these days).  One of these days I have to spend a bit of time on that.

-- 
...and of course you must be careful not to overwrite the bounds of
memory blocks, free a memory block twice, forget to free a memory block,
use a memory block after it's been freed, use memory that you haven't
explicitly allocated, etc.  We C++ programmers have developed tricks
to help us deal with this sort of thing, in much the same way that people
who suffer severe childhood trauma develop psychological mechanisms to
insulate themselves from those experiences.  -- Joseph A. Knapka