That's just it. BleepingComputer doesn't understand the difference between a DV and an EV certificate and falsely assumes that Lets Encrypt is not doing exactly what a Certificate Authority issuing a DV certificate is supposed to do: Verify the requester is capable of administering the domain in question and nothing more.
Maybe this is just a problem with the latest Chrome beta (I haven't checked others) but it seems to display both EV and DV certificates in exactly the same way to me. On/. the certificate is issued by "Let's Encrypt Authority X3", therefore it's DV but on my bank's website it's "Symantec Class 3 EV" yet both of them display in the URL bar exactly the same way.
How is your average internet user supposed to know the difference when someone can get a DV for a phishing website that looks just like their bank website and the URL bar looks exactly the same (bar the easily-missed URL difference)?
I checked PayPal as well and that shows the URL bar differently (with PayPal, Inc. in the green box) even though that's also "Symantec Class 3 EV", so there seems to be something odd going on there. To be honest, even with that, I don't think the average user would know the difference between a green box containing "Secure" vs. the name of the company, they're just looking for that green box/padlock.
I'm guessing those people have searched Beauty and the Beast while signed in to Chrome at some point. And just like Google Now cards, it's an update to a product that showed interest in, so it is brought up with the question of what's happening today. One part Ad yes, but I don't think they would do it specifically for Beauty and the Beast, it may very well be a new regular response with others like: "That console you've been researching is released today" "That TV you price checked is on sale today", "That show you like has a new episode today", etc.
You'd think that, but I very recently got a Google Now card right at the top of the list (ahead of weather etc. whereas that's normally the very top) which told me Nicki Minaj had a new album out. I've never listened to, searched for, bought or in any way shown an interest in that, and I've never been alerted to any band that I do actually listen to/search for having a new album out.
It was immediately obvious that was 'sponsored content' and probably pushed out to millions of people, right on their home screen and right at the top where they can't miss it. If that's the kind of shit they want to start pulling, I'll stop using Google Now. It'd be a real shame as well because it actually finds things I genuinely am interested in every day
You're right, 150 times per year at 3+ hours per sex session is completely normal and practical for the average American, as the study clearly shows. How foolish of me to think that wasn't the case. In other news, people who drink 40 beers a night 150 times a year are just having a great time!
Unless of course, I was right when I said that 3+ hours was just a huge outlier. Here's the Wikipedia page backed by a medical study which found that median time is 5.4 minutes of penetration (3.4 minutes for over 50s). Of course that's only the penetration part, but if you're spending 3 hours on 'the rest' then I'd hardly call that having sex for 3 hours. If you spend 40 minutes warming up, run for 10 minutes and spend 40 minutes stretching afterwards you can't really say you ran for an hour and a half.
Congratulations to the OP on enjoying himself, but for me if I can run a marathon faster than I can have sex, that's just too long. I wouldn't be enjoying myself after even half that time and I'd just be going through the motions for some kind of macho claim that I can. 40-60 minutes from start to finish is just fine for me.
I'm very happy with my sex life, but thanks for going straight for the strawman and ad hominem all-in-one.
I know exactly what I'm saying: that spending 3 hours on average having sex every single time is just so far to the right of the bell-curve it can't even see the middle any more. That's also not accounting for sex being off-the-table 1 week out of every 4 for most men in monogamous relationships, plus things like times when you are ill, one of you is away without the other (e.g. a business trip) or if you are working different shifts. If you factored all that in, the average would be north of 4 hours in a single session every single time every other day.
Try working an 8 hour day plus commute time, fulfilling your basic needs (like eating, washing and sleeping) and potentially those of your children, doing chores and then find the time and energy for a 4 hour romp... There literally aren't enough hours in the day for the average person to do that.
You better not have any other hobbies or interests either or you'll have no chance of getting those 9 hours per week in and you will have failed at sex.
Averaging 150 times per year = ~3 times per week, so 9 hours per week = ~3 hours each time. That sounds more like an addiction instead of genuinely, fully enjoying that all the way through and just happening to take that amount of time. Very few people have 3 hours to spend 3 times a week after they've got home from their long day at work, got the kids fed, washed and asleep and tended to their own personal needs.
I'd look towards blaming long work hours, lower average pay and fast ubiquitous access to the Internet for the decline rather than people just not doing it right.
Them lines go out the door but he is not making any money so far because of his labor costs as they are a lot higher than his business model forecasts predicted. But damn does he work his ass off!
If he can't keep up with the queue of potential customers and he can't find good staff, it sounds like he needs automation then, surely?
That's not really a fair comparison because your average Linux user and your average Windows users probably have very different skill sets when it comes to computers.
Your average Linux user probably installed it themselves and therefore admin their own PC. This makes them much more likely to have upgraded to a kernel >2.6. Your average Windows user got it pre-installed when they purchased their laptop/desktop and has absolutely no idea how to upgrade it. They'll stick with whatever it had when it first arrived and only upgrade when they get new hardware with a new version pre-installed.
The large Windows 7 install base also has to take into account the number of business users which are still buying brand new hardware (which probably comes with Win10) but then installing Windows 7 on it from some kind of image. Large companies take a very long time to upgrade to the latest version of even simple software, never mind an entire OS upgrade with all the regression testing that involves. My last company had over 60,000 employees worldwide and was just rolling out a huge Windows 7 upgrade when Windows 8.1 had already been released!
Was I the only one left thinking this is a good thing, despite the article seeming to nudge towards the opposite?
A new standard came along, some people pointed out a problem with it so it wasn't adopted and now a better standard has come along which is unaffected by those problems but retains the original benefits.
This is an attitude that I see a lot and no doubt will come up multiple in times in this thread, and I've got to say - I just don't get it.
When Gnome 3 came out I hated it as well so I switched to Xfce and I've been happy with that. I didn't rant and rave about the Gnome guys though because the way I see it, they're volunteers. The attitude above is tinged with a real sense of entitlement like they owe you something, but they absolutely don't.
I'm sorry that you don't like their changes, I didn't either. However, it's not their responsibility to do things the way you want. These guys have an offering and they're competing with a number of others. It's up to you to either pick the one that most suits you (which will never provide with you with a perfect fit) or make your own solution that does things exactly as you like it. You can then make it available to the public and who knows other people might use it as well!
How will you feel when they tell you that they want you to change it do something else though but you don't want to go that way? You'd be well within your rights to say "I'm a volunteer, this is the way I want to go, if you don't like it then I'm sorry but take a look at one of our competitors".
You are perfectly entitled to ask them to do things differently and try to influence the future direction but if they don't agree with you, sorry but they're the guys writing the code so they'll do it the way they think is right. If they get that wrong too many times then nobody will use their product and people will flock to the better alternatives. That's the beauty of open source.
How can you genuinely consider switching to Microsoft in response to this - how much choice do they give you exactly?
One interesting side effect of having a legitimately fast SSD is even though you save power power on not spinning a platter around you can end up using that power (or more) with increased CPU usage. Ex: Semi-Random reads from mechanical drive might be pulling data ~40MB/sec on a good day... the CPU doesn't have a lot to process at once or just does in chunks so all that nice power saving tech comes into play (reduced clock or cores or what have you). Now, pop an SSD in and start getting 300-500MB+ semi-random read speeds and your CPU will find itself a hell of a lot more busy having to actually process all of that.
It's a good "problem" to have, if you can even call it a problem;)
If you need to read 1GB of data off disk (say, loading a game or something) wouldn't you use exactly the same amount of CPU power whether you load it at 40MB/s or 400MB/s? Either way all of that data needs reading from storage and 'processing', why does reading it slower mean it takes less power?
If anything I would've thought and SSD takes less power overall because you can wake up the full CPU, do any processing and then put it back into a low-power mode. If you're streaming data slowly you need to keep at least 1 core active to handle the stream.
Clearly going forward, there will be just two resolutions that developers need to worry about. One for the iPhone/iPod, and one for the iPad, as the older resolutions are being phased out and don't exist in any new products.
The old iPhones/iPods/iPads don't cease to exist just because Apple brings out a new one. There is an absolutely enormous installed base of "old" resolutions out there that might still buy your apps, so you can't just start ignoring them.
If you want to develop an iOS app you now need to consider whether you accept your app being run in "black bars" mode on the new phone (almost certainly not), or handle the fact that resolution changes depending on which device your app is installed on. I haven't looked at the API so I don't know how much of a PITA that may or may not be, but it definitely needs to be taken into account.
The fragmentation is not nearly as bad as on Android, but it definitely exists and needs to be catered for.
Were they testing each distribution on exactly the same hardware?
If so, that sounds completely fair to me that it would be slower. Go and (try to) install Vista on a machine that originally came with XP (pre-SP1) and see how much slower it is. Is that a fair test either? I think not.
As software gets more useful (and Ubuntu has, Vista not so much) it gets bigger and thus gets slower on the same hardware. Hardware advances at the same time though, so in real terms they keep about equal. When you test new software on old hardware of course it's going to be slower though.
Funnily enough there was a program on TV here in the UK last night about producing electricity from CO2 and water.
Two guys in the New Mexico desert had a huge mirror array the focussed the sun into a really intense beam (they could melt steel with it) and directed it into a giant furnace, which I think got to 2400 degrees C, but could have been 4200. This heated the air inside to separate the CO2 which they could then use to create hydrocarbons.
This all worked on a huge scale of course, but they also had a smaller version that could produce 2-3 gallons of fuel a day that was about the size of a pretty young small tree.
So I agree that the energy has to come from somewhere in order to separate the CO2, but who says that energy can't come from solar power eventually? Of course this is more expensive now, but it'll be getting cheaper all the time as oil gets more expensive.
The summary clearly fails to realise that not all broadband in the UK goes through BT's network. Virgin Media offers cable broadband through fibre optic. Don't know what their take on IPv6 is though.
You would still be communicating through someone else's network though.
Are you relying on any chips from anyone else or are you constructing all the hardware yourself (including RAM, hard drive, network card etc)?
Point is, unless you build everything in the entire loop (including the machines on the other end of the link) you can't know that there aren't secret backdoors built in or eavesdroppers on your network. Even then, who says that what's on the other end of the link is the person you were supposed to be talking to and not Officer Smith?
Isn't there a way to only stream frames if they are changing? I would have thought that's how it's done now anyway - so that only useful, changing data is transmitted. When both kitchens are empty, the video stream isn't sending any data.
Better not have a clock in the background or something then...
Are you with a decent ISP? (If there is such a thing)
If you are with Virgin Media then you will easily exceed their bandwidth limits which you can find at the bottom of this page.
I'm not sure what other ISPs set their limits at (or if they publish them at all like VM do) but I'm pretty sure you would exceed them also.
I'd think about the possibility of other options, such as simply using a video-call when required. Most of the time you would simply be streaming video of 2 empty kitchens to each other wouldn't you?
I'm using AppTrap (which is free) and Steermouse (which was $20 or so.)
Especially the mouse thing is just wrong. Acceleration settings are perfect for the touchpad, but for an external mouse (which is not Apple's, in my case) it's just annoyingly bad. I could not get used to it. Steermouse made the mouse usable again, nice and snappy but not overly sensitive.
I'm sure we could both come up with plenty of anecdotes about 'hacking' either OS and why one is better than the other. For me, I use the right tool for the right job.
All that I would say is that when a 'hack' is required for Ubuntu, I usually have to go and edit some config files by hand (such as xorg.conf) and play around at the command line (such as installing VMWare Tools). When hacks are required for OSX, they tend to have attractive GUIs instead.
For most users, and we were supposed to be talking about a mobile phone here, you will find that ease-of-use and shiny will always win the war on the shelves.
In contrast, most people buying a Mac end up having to fiddle around for hours choosing and installing the applications they need. And many people end up buying and installing one little Macintosh hack after another to work around the limitations and annoyances of the Mac interface.
Do you actually have anything to back that up?
If we're talking 'installing hacks' you honestly think that Macs need that more than Linux? You've never had to mess with xorg.conf or samba configs then? I have to do it every single time I install Ubuntu in a virtual machine.
The only thing I've ever done on a Mac that could be considered a 'hack' of the OS is create my own keyboard mapping because I'm too used to the UK layout where " is shift+2 and @ is over near enter
So, if you want a no-hassles, consistent user interface that just works, go with a major Linux distribution, don't waste your time on the Mac.
Once again, I'm sorry but I disagree. One anecdote I have about Ubuntu and it's lack of consistency is with the system tray. All the little widgets can be right clicked and 'locked' to the bar so that you can't move them. All except the network widget that is... When I changed screen resolution (because it auto-detected the wrong one, no hassle at all right?) the network widget didn't move over with the clock, it stayed in the middle of the bar!
Since there's no way to 'unlock' it from the bar, I can't move it, so it's still stuck there now, very very annoyingly. I also can't work out a way of getting rid of it.
The most obvious failure? Nobody quotes the new star wars to honor it. "These are not the droids you are looking for" "I am your father" "I find your lack of faith disturbing" "It is a trap".
If FOSS were a restaurant, it would be of a type that if you don't like what's on the menu you may use the kitchen to make something else you prefer, with your choice of ingredients in stock or BYO. Since I doubt there are any restaurants like that, I believe your analogy fails.
And if you can't cook then you shouldn't eat presumably?
The analogy works quite well I think. Just because you can't do better yourself doesn't mean that you can't tell when someone else does it badly.
The chef makes food that makes me puke. I can't cook. Does that, therefore, mean I can't say the chef did a bad job of cooking? That doesn't hold.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just it. BleepingComputer doesn't understand the difference between a DV and an EV certificate and falsely assumes that Lets Encrypt is not doing exactly what a Certificate Authority issuing a DV certificate is supposed to do: Verify the requester is capable of administering the domain in question and nothing more.
Maybe this is just a problem with the latest Chrome beta (I haven't checked others) but it seems to display both EV and DV certificates in exactly the same way to me. On /. the certificate is issued by "Let's Encrypt Authority X3", therefore it's DV but on my bank's website it's "Symantec Class 3 EV" yet both of them display in the URL bar exactly the same way.
How is your average internet user supposed to know the difference when someone can get a DV for a phishing website that looks just like their bank website and the URL bar looks exactly the same (bar the easily-missed URL difference)?
I checked PayPal as well and that shows the URL bar differently (with PayPal, Inc. in the green box) even though that's also "Symantec Class 3 EV", so there seems to be something odd going on there. To be honest, even with that, I don't think the average user would know the difference between a green box containing "Secure" vs. the name of the company, they're just looking for that green box/padlock.
I'm guessing those people have searched Beauty and the Beast while signed in to Chrome at some point. And just like Google Now cards, it's an update to a product that showed interest in, so it is brought up with the question of what's happening today. One part Ad yes, but I don't think they would do it specifically for Beauty and the Beast, it may very well be a new regular response with others like: "That console you've been researching is released today" "That TV you price checked is on sale today", "That show you like has a new episode today", etc.
You'd think that, but I very recently got a Google Now card right at the top of the list (ahead of weather etc. whereas that's normally the very top) which told me Nicki Minaj had a new album out. I've never listened to, searched for, bought or in any way shown an interest in that, and I've never been alerted to any band that I do actually listen to/search for having a new album out.
It was immediately obvious that was 'sponsored content' and probably pushed out to millions of people, right on their home screen and right at the top where they can't miss it. If that's the kind of shit they want to start pulling, I'll stop using Google Now. It'd be a real shame as well because it actually finds things I genuinely am interested in every day
You're right, 150 times per year at 3+ hours per sex session is completely normal and practical for the average American, as the study clearly shows. How foolish of me to think that wasn't the case. In other news, people who drink 40 beers a night 150 times a year are just having a great time!
Unless of course, I was right when I said that 3+ hours was just a huge outlier. Here's the Wikipedia page backed by a medical study which found that median time is 5.4 minutes of penetration (3.4 minutes for over 50s). Of course that's only the penetration part, but if you're spending 3 hours on 'the rest' then I'd hardly call that having sex for 3 hours. If you spend 40 minutes warming up, run for 10 minutes and spend 40 minutes stretching afterwards you can't really say you ran for an hour and a half.
Congratulations to the OP on enjoying himself, but for me if I can run a marathon faster than I can have sex, that's just too long. I wouldn't be enjoying myself after even half that time and I'd just be going through the motions for some kind of macho claim that I can. 40-60 minutes from start to finish is just fine for me.
I'm very happy with my sex life, but thanks for going straight for the strawman and ad hominem all-in-one.
I know exactly what I'm saying: that spending 3 hours on average having sex every single time is just so far to the right of the bell-curve it can't even see the middle any more. That's also not accounting for sex being off-the-table 1 week out of every 4 for most men in monogamous relationships, plus things like times when you are ill, one of you is away without the other (e.g. a business trip) or if you are working different shifts. If you factored all that in, the average would be north of 4 hours in a single session every single time every other day.
Try working an 8 hour day plus commute time, fulfilling your basic needs (like eating, washing and sleeping) and potentially those of your children, doing chores and then find the time and energy for a 4 hour romp... There literally aren't enough hours in the day for the average person to do that.
You better not have any other hobbies or interests either or you'll have no chance of getting those 9 hours per week in and you will have failed at sex.
Averaging 150 times per year = ~3 times per week, so 9 hours per week = ~3 hours each time. That sounds more like an addiction instead of genuinely, fully enjoying that all the way through and just happening to take that amount of time. Very few people have 3 hours to spend 3 times a week after they've got home from their long day at work, got the kids fed, washed and asleep and tended to their own personal needs.
I'd look towards blaming long work hours, lower average pay and fast ubiquitous access to the Internet for the decline rather than people just not doing it right.
Them lines go out the door but he is not making any money so far because of his labor costs as they are a lot higher than his business model forecasts predicted. But damn does he work his ass off!
If he can't keep up with the queue of potential customers and he can't find good staff, it sounds like he needs automation then, surely?
It won't compile. You will notice.
What if they start the line with a single-line comment then a big splurge of random data to cause the collision? It'd still compile fine.
That's not really a fair comparison because your average Linux user and your average Windows users probably have very different skill sets when it comes to computers.
Your average Linux user probably installed it themselves and therefore admin their own PC. This makes them much more likely to have upgraded to a kernel >2.6. Your average Windows user got it pre-installed when they purchased their laptop/desktop and has absolutely no idea how to upgrade it. They'll stick with whatever it had when it first arrived and only upgrade when they get new hardware with a new version pre-installed.
The large Windows 7 install base also has to take into account the number of business users which are still buying brand new hardware (which probably comes with Win10) but then installing Windows 7 on it from some kind of image. Large companies take a very long time to upgrade to the latest version of even simple software, never mind an entire OS upgrade with all the regression testing that involves. My last company had over 60,000 employees worldwide and was just rolling out a huge Windows 7 upgrade when Windows 8.1 had already been released!
Was I the only one left thinking this is a good thing, despite the article seeming to nudge towards the opposite?
A new standard came along, some people pointed out a problem with it so it wasn't adopted and now a better standard has come along which is unaffected by those problems but retains the original benefits.
Ermmm, what's the problem?
This is an attitude that I see a lot and no doubt will come up multiple in times in this thread, and I've got to say - I just don't get it.
When Gnome 3 came out I hated it as well so I switched to Xfce and I've been happy with that. I didn't rant and rave about the Gnome guys though because the way I see it, they're volunteers. The attitude above is tinged with a real sense of entitlement like they owe you something, but they absolutely don't.
I'm sorry that you don't like their changes, I didn't either. However, it's not their responsibility to do things the way you want. These guys have an offering and they're competing with a number of others. It's up to you to either pick the one that most suits you (which will never provide with you with a perfect fit) or make your own solution that does things exactly as you like it. You can then make it available to the public and who knows other people might use it as well!
How will you feel when they tell you that they want you to change it do something else though but you don't want to go that way? You'd be well within your rights to say "I'm a volunteer, this is the way I want to go, if you don't like it then I'm sorry but take a look at one of our competitors".
You are perfectly entitled to ask them to do things differently and try to influence the future direction but if they don't agree with you, sorry but they're the guys writing the code so they'll do it the way they think is right. If they get that wrong too many times then nobody will use their product and people will flock to the better alternatives. That's the beauty of open source.
How can you genuinely consider switching to Microsoft in response to this - how much choice do they give you exactly?
One interesting side effect of having a legitimately fast SSD is even though you save power power on not spinning a platter around you can end up using that power (or more) with increased CPU usage. Ex: Semi-Random reads from mechanical drive might be pulling data ~40MB/sec on a good day... the CPU doesn't have a lot to process at once or just does in chunks so all that nice power saving tech comes into play (reduced clock or cores or what have you). Now, pop an SSD in and start getting 300-500MB+ semi-random read speeds and your CPU will find itself a hell of a lot more busy having to actually process all of that.
It's a good "problem" to have, if you can even call it a problem ;)
If you need to read 1GB of data off disk (say, loading a game or something) wouldn't you use exactly the same amount of CPU power whether you load it at 40MB/s or 400MB/s? Either way all of that data needs reading from storage and 'processing', why does reading it slower mean it takes less power?
If anything I would've thought and SSD takes less power overall because you can wake up the full CPU, do any processing and then put it back into a low-power mode. If you're streaming data slowly you need to keep at least 1 core active to handle the stream.
Clearly going forward, there will be just two resolutions that developers need to worry about. One for the iPhone/iPod, and one for the iPad, as the older resolutions are being phased out and don't exist in any new products.
The old iPhones/iPods/iPads don't cease to exist just because Apple brings out a new one. There is an absolutely enormous installed base of "old" resolutions out there that might still buy your apps, so you can't just start ignoring them. If you want to develop an iOS app you now need to consider whether you accept your app being run in "black bars" mode on the new phone (almost certainly not), or handle the fact that resolution changes depending on which device your app is installed on. I haven't looked at the API so I don't know how much of a PITA that may or may not be, but it definitely needs to be taken into account. The fragmentation is not nearly as bad as on Android, but it definitely exists and needs to be catered for.
Were they testing each distribution on exactly the same hardware?
If so, that sounds completely fair to me that it would be slower. Go and (try to) install Vista on a machine that originally came with XP (pre-SP1) and see how much slower it is. Is that a fair test either? I think not.
As software gets more useful (and Ubuntu has, Vista not so much) it gets bigger and thus gets slower on the same hardware. Hardware advances at the same time though, so in real terms they keep about equal. When you test new software on old hardware of course it's going to be slower though.
Funnily enough there was a program on TV here in the UK last night about producing electricity from CO2 and water.
Two guys in the New Mexico desert had a huge mirror array the focussed the sun into a really intense beam (they could melt steel with it) and directed it into a giant furnace, which I think got to 2400 degrees C, but could have been 4200. This heated the air inside to separate the CO2 which they could then use to create hydrocarbons.
This all worked on a huge scale of course, but they also had a smaller version that could produce 2-3 gallons of fuel a day that was about the size of a pretty young small tree.
So I agree that the energy has to come from somewhere in order to separate the CO2, but who says that energy can't come from solar power eventually? Of course this is more expensive now, but it'll be getting cheaper all the time as oil gets more expensive.
The summary clearly fails to realise that not all broadband in the UK goes through BT's network. Virgin Media offers cable broadband through fibre optic. Don't know what their take on IPv6 is though.
Yet more FUD?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore designed his own language (Forth), an OS, chip design software and designed his own CPUs.
I'd say he's well on his way to achieving this.
You would still be communicating through someone else's network though.
Are you relying on any chips from anyone else or are you constructing all the hardware yourself (including RAM, hard drive, network card etc)?
Point is, unless you build everything in the entire loop (including the machines on the other end of the link) you can't know that there aren't secret backdoors built in or eavesdroppers on your network. Even then, who says that what's on the other end of the link is the person you were supposed to be talking to and not Officer Smith?
A truly paranoid person would be suspicious of absolutely everyone and everything. That would mean writing your own OS on your own hardware etc etc.
Since this is impossible, go and live in hiding with no human contact or chance thereof.
Why would you download this 'super-safe' OS from some people you never met, through a public unencrypted network, if your life depended on it?
By posting, you have removed your moderation, so you already did it yourself ;)
You can't post and moderate in the same story, otherwise you could post and then mod yourself, or mod down people who disagree with you etc.
Isn't there a way to only stream frames if they are changing? I would have thought that's how it's done now anyway - so that only useful, changing data is transmitted. When both kitchens are empty, the video stream isn't sending any data.
Better not have a clock in the background or something then...
Are you with a decent ISP? (If there is such a thing)
If you are with Virgin Media then you will easily exceed their bandwidth limits which you can find at the bottom of this page.
I'm not sure what other ISPs set their limits at (or if they publish them at all like VM do) but I'm pretty sure you would exceed them also.
I'd think about the possibility of other options, such as simply using a video-call when required. Most of the time you would simply be streaming video of 2 empty kitchens to each other wouldn't you?
Ah-ha!!! Major geek points for you.
I really never saw that little grey handle on the grey background at 1680x1050. Thanks again!
Unfortunately, I have no mod points today.
I'm using AppTrap (which is free) and Steermouse (which was $20 or so.)
Especially the mouse thing is just wrong. Acceleration settings are perfect for the touchpad, but for an external mouse (which is not Apple's, in my case) it's just annoyingly bad. I could not get used to it. Steermouse made the mouse usable again, nice and snappy but not overly sensitive.
I'm sure we could both come up with plenty of anecdotes about 'hacking' either OS and why one is better than the other. For me, I use the right tool for the right job.
All that I would say is that when a 'hack' is required for Ubuntu, I usually have to go and edit some config files by hand (such as xorg.conf) and play around at the command line (such as installing VMWare Tools). When hacks are required for OSX, they tend to have attractive GUIs instead.
For most users, and we were supposed to be talking about a mobile phone here, you will find that ease-of-use and shiny will always win the war on the shelves.
In contrast, most people buying a Mac end up having to fiddle around for hours choosing and installing the applications they need. And many people end up buying and installing one little Macintosh hack after another to work around the limitations and annoyances of the Mac interface.
Do you actually have anything to back that up?
If we're talking 'installing hacks' you honestly think that Macs need that more than Linux? You've never had to mess with xorg.conf or samba configs then? I have to do it every single time I install Ubuntu in a virtual machine.
The only thing I've ever done on a Mac that could be considered a 'hack' of the OS is create my own keyboard mapping because I'm too used to the UK layout where " is shift+2 and @ is over near enter
So, if you want a no-hassles, consistent user interface that just works, go with a major Linux distribution, don't waste your time on the Mac.
Once again, I'm sorry but I disagree. One anecdote I have about Ubuntu and it's lack of consistency is with the system tray. All the little widgets can be right clicked and 'locked' to the bar so that you can't move them. All except the network widget that is... When I changed screen resolution (because it auto-detected the wrong one, no hassle at all right?) the network widget didn't move over with the clock, it stayed in the middle of the bar!
Since there's no way to 'unlock' it from the bar, I can't move it, so it's still stuck there now, very very annoyingly. I also can't work out a way of getting rid of it.
The most obvious failure? Nobody quotes the new star wars to honor it. "These are not the droids you are looking for" "I am your father" "I find your lack of faith disturbing" "It is a trap".
Where are the episode 1-3 quotes?
"NNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!"
If FOSS were a restaurant, it would be of a type that if you don't like what's on the menu you may use the kitchen to make something else you prefer, with your choice of ingredients in stock or BYO. Since I doubt there are any restaurants like that, I believe your analogy fails.
And if you can't cook then you shouldn't eat presumably?
The analogy works quite well I think. Just because you can't do better yourself doesn't mean that you can't tell when someone else does it badly.
The chef makes food that makes me puke. I can't cook. Does that, therefore, mean I can't say the chef did a bad job of cooking? That doesn't hold.