As far as I learned in my practical law class, *all* criminal prosecutions involve both motive and action. You can't try them without proving that they both did the action, AND that they meant to do it. This is why drunk drivers aren't typically tried with murder when they run someone over.
However, IANAL, and don't know how negligence fits in all this, as I believe negligence can be tried in criminal court. Regardless, negligence CAN be tried in civil court.
Re:I hate math...
on
Making Change
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Close, but I dont think the multiples-of-five is the reason why it works. As someone else said, it has to do with greedy algorithms, and our coin system was specifically designed so that you'd be able to start from the biggest coin and work your way down. We went over it briefly in one of my CS courses. I think it may have been that each coin must be at least twice the value of the previous coin. Something like that.
And as many people have mentioned, the current system is probably the best because of the ease of addition/subtraction. An 18-cent coin would be a nightmare for most minimum-wage cashiers. The only problem with our current monetary system is that inflation has made pennies freakin worthless.
Because the final product already exists, and still uses the name Mozilla browser. When the Firebird/Thunderbird codebase is ready to replace the monolithic Mozilla suite, that is when they release it as the next version of Mozilla. People who don't want to use unstable unfeatureful browsers keep downloading Mozilla, and keep getting a good stable product. The name never changes. If you like using development browsers that don't work well, you always use firebird. The name doesn't change for regular users, it doesn't change for developers. All that happens is Mozilla (as always) moves to a newer better codebase once it's ready for mainstream use.
Yes, indeed, just because the person is being charged with murder automatically means they're guilty and don't deserve an equal chance to defend themselves.
What's the point in "innocent until proven guilty" if the prosecution has tons more than the defendant? Sure, it feels good to pretend the suspect is indeed guilty, but too often this isn't the case, and innocent men are jailed (or executed!) because they couldn't afford a good lawyer and the Public Defender is wholly incompetent compared to the District Attorney.
I'm not saying his suggested solution is the right one, only affirming that there is indeed a problem.
I've heard this too actually, though I don't know the details. It was something like they made it illegal to possess(or was it sell?) marijuana without a special stamp, then they (intentionally i'm sure) made no way for people to get the stamps.
At least for me the problem is being able to use the same data from both operating systems. I have to use Fat32 for most of my data so I can cross between linux and windows XP. I wouldn't even have XP installed right now if there was no file system that both Windows and Linux could read. I'd never even be able to give Windows a fair try for my desktop if i couldn't access my school work, mail, bookmarks, etc.
"Trademark law recognizes software as a class unto itself."
This is something that will clearly have to change soon, as computers are becoming ubiquitous and the number of different programs out there has multipled exponentially since the 60s or whenever it was that they decided to recognize all softare as one class.
Yea, well the name was already taken before the database used it too. Face it, it's a totally unoriginal and stupid name. Mozilla should probably change the name for that reason, but they have every bit as much right to use the name as the other 100 products that are using it...
I'd just like to point out that Windows is in no way better for gaming than linux.
There's a big difference between being "the right tool for the job", and "restricting the job to a single tool". Native linux games like Quake3 and Unreal Tournament run great. Even under WINE many games run perfect.
I'v found linux to be far more stable running games than Windows. Most lockups are caused by the graphics drivers, which in NVidia's case are nearly identical in performance and stability between platforms. But most of my other crashes in windows are from trying to alt-tab out to do other things while playing. In linux I can run games in a separate X server and easily switch back to my desktop without interfering with the game at all. In my opinion, linux is a far superior tool for the job of gaming because of it's flexibility and stability.
Then again, if by "right tool for the job" you meant the job of running Windows executables, of course. But that one should be obvious enough not to post.
Now if you said "Windows for my mom" I would probably agree...
"My point is that Valve wasn't doing anything original."
That is very incorrect - I think you're missing the parent poster's point. Allowing mods is not original, *supporting* them is. There may have been mods for Quake or Quake2 that got sold retail, but none good or popular enough for me to remember despite all that I played those games. With counter-strike, Valve helped the team tremendously, and started selling Counter-Strike on store shelves at Wal-Mart and etc. for 30$, not even requiring the purchaser to own the original Half-Life.
I'm not sure where all the popularity came from, but Counter-Strike is the first multiplayer game I've seen reach the masses. My girlfriend's RA in her dorm has played Counter-strike. My brother owns and plays Counter-strike. As some of the other posts show, there are people who play Counter-strike who haven't even *heard* of Half-life.
This is a truly remarkable and original thing for Valve to do, to take a popular mod and help it grow beyond an add-on to being a separate retail product, completely dissasociated from the single player game.
Your "call to action" is silly. Both Phoenix and Firebird are far from original names. Nor is anyone going to confuse a web browser with a database. I agree the post here on slashdot looks pretty "spun" about the matter, but still. You can take any name and find another product with the same name. Just because it runs on a computer doesn't mean it's the "same space" - hell, in 10 or 20 years EVERYTHING will be running on computers. If there's no overlap in the market (as with databases and web browsers) there is no basis for complaining about the similar names.
Now if they tried to steal your sourceforge URL, that would be lame.
This is a stupid argument against Wine. The thing is Wine emulation will never be perfectly compatible with all programs, nor will it ever run as fast as native executables. If Wine is used to make sure the most popular games without linux ports (like Counter-Strike) can run under linux, then there will grow to be enough market for native games under linux that companies take the time to port.
I've never heard any indication that companies are saying "Well, we could do a linux port, but they already have that WineX emulation that runs at 10-40% of the FPS along with many stability problems."
However it IS helping to show companies that there is a linux market. For instance the Half-Life engine simply won't be ported to Linux. They don't care, it's too old, whatever. But they've gotten hassled so much by Transgaming and linux users over VAC (anti-cheat) and other problems that broke Wine compatibility that they're doing some work now to keep Counter-Strike at least working under Wine. I think there's a good chance with Half-Life 2 they're going to have Linux support natively, because they've seen from Winex with Counter-Strike that the users are there.
(personally I still reboot for Counter-Strike because of the VAC problems and because my frame rate is too low in winex on this comp)
I love the irony. We finally get some religion in schools ("witchcraft") from Harry Potter, and suddenly the Christian bigots think religion in school is a bad idea! Can ya believe that? Now if only they weren't so goddam stupid, they might have a revelation about how they're trying to do the same thing to other religions as they claim Harry Potter was doing to them...
Who was it again, that said "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" ?
I'm pretty sure this isn't true. The versions of nvidia drivers are pretty darn close to equivalent between linux and windows. I had common hard locks on windows, and found when i installed linux that I had the same thing there. As soon as v2960 drivers came out, and i installed them for both OSes, the hard locks stopped in both OSes.
Couldn't you get around this by transferring some of your own copyrighted livejournal angsty poetry on the same network? If they crack the code to their own music, they're also cracking the code to your bad poetry, and therefore violating the DMCA?
Or if not, what about, as far as DVDs, why doesn't someone put out a movie (even a bad one) using the DVD encryption, then crack the encryption on their own movie?
"Jamie needs to bite the bullet and spend the cash for a good Powerbook or G4 tower. Linux on the desktop is dead. It will never get to the level that OS X is currently at. Face the facts."
Your post was pretty good up until there. Linux on the desktop is *far* from dead. It's been getting better and better for years. How can it suddenly be dead when it's now available pre-installed on PCs at Wal-Mart? It's not like there's a company making linux that can just "die". As long as there are users and developers using linux, it will continue to improve. You could easily argue that it isn't improving as fast as commercial OSes, but that's an entirely different thing from claiming Linux suddenly keeled over and died.
He was trying to make the point that the cable company will know what you're watching regardless, and perhaps that what they do with it is the issue. However that isn't true, I'm fairly certain, because cable is broadcast, ie: they send you everything, and YOU choose what to watch on your end. So they would need to add in specific monitoring functionality to their box to send usage data back upstream. which is indeed odious to some extent, as you're saying. they would need some kind of privacy policy or something saying they only use aggragate(sp?) usage data, and not individual usage data, and with no way to correlate a Real Live Person to the usage data. I don't know if that's even really possible. Anyway....
Your point is flawed in that: What if everyone watched that TNT show on the first airing? Or, how is it any different than if I recorded that first showing with my VCR?
Unrealistic assumption. If everyone watched it the first time, then the ratings would be non-existant for the subsequent showings and they would stop doing it, thereby losing that ad revenue.
He already covered this - it's the same as if everyone watched it the first time without PVRs. The second showing will have bad ratings, but the first showing will have all the viewers that would otherwise be viewing the second show. Hence the ad revenue stays the same by having more viewers the first time.
The station can show a different movie at the second time slot, giving it the opportunity to earn extra money, because all the viewers of the second showing have shifted to the first showing. Now they get to show two different movies, both with the maximum number of viewers.
Re:Trade 50 more MPG for your life?
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2
You're completely right. That's why I made sure to buy an Expedition for my 16-year-old as soon as she got her license. Sure, it cost an arm and a leg, and costs 40$ a week in gas, but she's safe! She's been in four accidents so far (she's 18 now) and hasn't even had to go to the hospital. And she's still in the same SUV too! The car barely even got hurt when she ran into those people! Some people say that I shouldn't be putting a new driver like her in a humongous and dangerous SUV, but what do they know. I have to work 50 hours a week, so I don't have time to teach my kid how to drive safely. The next best thing I can do is put her in a safe car, like her Expedition. It's too bad the parents of the kids in the other cars she hit didn't care about their children enough to buy an SUV. But they're dead now, so that's what they get. Any good patriotic American should buy an SUV that gets 14mpg and keeps their kids safe, just like I did. Not only will your daughter thank you, but most importantly, she'll be ALIVE to thank you. Don't worry about the children in those small cars who die because your child ran over them with her tank - it's evolution. Survivial of the biggest. Thank God we have George W. in the White House protecting our oil interests by bombing third world countries and removing funding for alternative fuels. God Bless America.
(Yes, i'm exaggerating on purpose to get your wheels spinning. Don't bother flaming me because I really don't care that much.)
I've had quite the opposite experience, being amazed at how welcoming and helpful the linux irc channels are. Of course there's the occasional asshole or even channel full of assholes, but it's no more common than it is for Windows software. Just look at how much Mplayer got/gets bashed for being assholes to newbies...
I'm sorry, but I can't believe you about the 99% uptime thing. I was very hopeful for Windows XP to be stable, but it just isn't. Of course it's leaps and bounds of Windows 98, but if I try keeping my Windows XP box up for more than a week, especially with multiple programs running, everything gets hosed all to hell.
In linux, the only time I ever have to reboot is to player counter-strike:) I've gone months in Linux without rebooting. Considering I can't go more than a few days even in Windows XP, I won't believe for a second that anyone has 99% uptime on a Windows desktop PC that actually gets used.
Windows is definitely coming along though. 2000/XP was a major step. Who knows...in a few iterations MS might have a stable OS! ^_^
I think your problem was probably your window manager, not with X. I use X with Blackbox on a Pentium 233 and it *never* has any problems, whereas even on my 1ghz Athlon Windows XP will lag moving windows. In the case of Windows I think it's more due to their poor process scheduler than the graphics code.
But anyway, seriously, KDE and Gnome are crap. They're slow and buggy as hell. Don't confuse them with X. My friend used KDE and complained all the time that Linux is buggier and slower than windows.
What Linux really needs is just some decent configuration tools for the GOOD simple window managers like Blackbox. I love my Blackbox set up, but I had to a bunch of hand-editing of config files, which sucks.
Of course there's some truth to apps being buggy. Some apps, like XMMS, Xchat, Mozilla, E-Roaster, etc. have never crashed on me, ever. But I've had a hell of a time trying to find a decent graphical FTP client for Linux. all the ones I could find were horribly buggy because they're still under heavy development. And while I love gaim, it still crashes on me occasionally, maybe once a week.
Yea, not to mention: Internet Explorer (netscape, opera), MSN Messenger (AIM, of course), Hotmail (bought, right?), DirectX (opengl), MSN (just another isp, but i expect some day they'll use some monopoly leverage to force people to use it).NET (this is a ripoff of Java, right?) ActiveX,VBscript (javascript, if i'm not mistaken) Windows Media Player (expanded to copy Winamp)
Those are just off the top of my head, i might have the Java+javascript ripoffs mixed up, but i know Sun had to sue them and all for taking Java and adding MS proprietary non-platform-independent extensions.
So, what you have here is MS sees some good software, makes a near-exact copy of it, and starts including it in their OS. IE, Media Player and Windows Media files, Messenger, hotmail, etc. How is a company like Netscape or AIM supposed to compete when MS can not only charge money for their products, but also *force* everyone to buy their products, whether they use them or not. (you know all these "free" MS products are being paid for by the increasing price of Windows, right?)
Yet people pretend like MS is a good-guy in wanting AIM to share its userbase with MSN Messenger. bullshit. Within a year of AIM opening their userbase, MSN Messenger would have most of the userbase due to it being shipped with Windows, and Microsoft would feel the sudden need to break the compatibility for some BS reason. Result? MS just used its monopoly to take over Instant Messenging. Thank god AOL is working its damnedest to keep MS away. I somehow don't think MSN will be too kind to letting GAIM use its network after its taken over the IM world. Just another technology in addition to web browsing, video gaming, word processing, and all the others, that MS wants to turn into their own proprietary format to force people into continuing to use Windows.
Of course its hard to blame MS for doing these things. After all, corporations exist only to profit, not to do good for mankind. But the government has already taken way too long to break MS up, and now it looks like MS might just get a slap on the wrist. Kindof like how the government was trying the music industry for price-fixing, but instead settled for some $$$. Leaving the record industry, i'm sure, wringing their greedy hands and laughing, saying "ha! that isn't even half the profit we made from price-fixing!"
The government needs to go after these monopolies and other BAD companies and FIX them instead of charging them money for being unethical/illegal.
You're right - the idea is to kill two birds with one stone. Portable music players are very useful, and when you've already got a 20gb portable hard drive, it'd be a shame the company to prevent or make difficult the use of it as such.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I learned in my practical law class, *all* criminal prosecutions involve both motive and action. You can't try them without proving that they both did the action, AND that they meant to do it. This is why drunk drivers aren't typically tried with murder when they run someone over.
However, IANAL, and don't know how negligence fits in all this, as I believe negligence can be tried in criminal court. Regardless, negligence CAN be tried in civil court.
Close, but I dont think the multiples-of-five is the reason why it works. As someone else said, it has to do with greedy algorithms, and our coin system was specifically designed so that you'd be able to start from the biggest coin and work your way down. We went over it briefly in one of my CS courses. I think it may have been that each coin must be at least twice the value of the previous coin. Something like that.
And as many people have mentioned, the current system is probably the best because of the ease of addition/subtraction. An 18-cent coin would be a nightmare for most minimum-wage cashiers. The only problem with our current monetary system is that inflation has made pennies freakin worthless.
Because the final product already exists, and still uses the name Mozilla browser. When the Firebird/Thunderbird codebase is ready to replace the monolithic Mozilla suite, that is when they release it as the next version of Mozilla. People who don't want to use unstable unfeatureful browsers keep downloading Mozilla, and keep getting a good stable product. The name never changes. If you like using development browsers that don't work well, you always use firebird. The name doesn't change for regular users, it doesn't change for developers. All that happens is Mozilla (as always) moves to a newer better codebase once it's ready for mainstream use.
Yes, indeed, just because the person is being charged with murder automatically means they're guilty and don't deserve an equal chance to defend themselves.
What's the point in "innocent until proven guilty" if the prosecution has tons more than the defendant? Sure, it feels good to pretend the suspect is indeed guilty, but too often this isn't the case, and innocent men are jailed (or executed!) because they couldn't afford a good lawyer and the Public Defender is wholly incompetent compared to the District Attorney.
I'm not saying his suggested solution is the right one, only affirming that there is indeed a problem.
I've heard this too actually, though I don't know the details. It was something like they made it illegal to possess(or was it sell?) marijuana without a special stamp, then they (intentionally i'm sure) made no way for people to get the stamps.
At least for me the problem is being able to use the same data from both operating systems. I have to use Fat32 for most of my data so I can cross between linux and windows XP. I wouldn't even have XP installed right now if there was no file system that both Windows and Linux could read. I'd never even be able to give Windows a fair try for my desktop if i couldn't access my school work, mail, bookmarks, etc.
"Trademark law recognizes software as a class unto itself."
This is something that will clearly have to change soon, as computers are becoming ubiquitous and the number of different programs out there has multipled exponentially since the 60s or whenever it was that they decided to recognize all softare as one class.
Yea, well the name was already taken before the database used it too. Face it, it's a totally unoriginal and stupid name. Mozilla should probably change the name for that reason, but they have every bit as much right to use the name as the other 100 products that are using it...
You were looking forward to Unreal2?
- 12 -15
Oh, I guess you never played the first one, nor Unreal Tournament...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999
(wow, look at how much better gabe's drawing has gotten since then)
I'd just like to point out that Windows is in no way better for gaming than linux.
There's a big difference between being "the right tool for the job", and "restricting the job to a single tool". Native linux games like Quake3 and Unreal Tournament run great. Even under WINE many games run perfect.
I'v found linux to be far more stable running games than Windows. Most lockups are caused by the graphics drivers, which in NVidia's case are nearly identical in performance and stability between platforms. But most of my other crashes in windows are from trying to alt-tab out to do other things while playing. In linux I can run games in a separate X server and easily switch back to my desktop without interfering with the game at all. In my opinion, linux is a far superior tool for the job of gaming because of it's flexibility and stability.
Then again, if by "right tool for the job" you meant the job of running Windows executables, of course. But that one should be obvious enough not to post.
Now if you said "Windows for my mom" I would probably agree...
"My point is that Valve wasn't doing anything original."
That is very incorrect - I think you're missing the parent poster's point. Allowing mods is not original, *supporting* them is. There may have been mods for Quake or Quake2 that got sold retail, but none good or popular enough for me to remember despite all that I played those games. With counter-strike, Valve helped the team tremendously, and started selling Counter-Strike on store shelves at Wal-Mart and etc. for 30$, not even requiring the purchaser to own the original Half-Life.
I'm not sure where all the popularity came from, but Counter-Strike is the first multiplayer game I've seen reach the masses. My girlfriend's RA in her dorm has played Counter-strike. My brother owns and plays Counter-strike. As some of the other posts show, there are people who play Counter-strike who haven't even *heard* of Half-life.
This is a truly remarkable and original thing for Valve to do, to take a popular mod and help it grow beyond an add-on to being a separate retail product, completely dissasociated from the single player game.
Your "call to action" is silly. Both Phoenix and Firebird are far from original names. Nor is anyone going to confuse a web browser with a database. I agree the post here on slashdot looks pretty "spun" about the matter, but still. You can take any name and find another product with the same name. Just because it runs on a computer doesn't mean it's the "same space" - hell, in 10 or 20 years EVERYTHING will be running on computers. If there's no overlap in the market (as with databases and web browsers) there is no basis for complaining about the similar names.
Now if they tried to steal your sourceforge URL, that would be lame.
This is a stupid argument against Wine. The thing is Wine emulation will never be perfectly compatible with all programs, nor will it ever run as fast as native executables. If Wine is used to make sure the most popular games without linux ports (like Counter-Strike) can run under linux, then there will grow to be enough market for native games under linux that companies take the time to port.
I've never heard any indication that companies are saying "Well, we could do a linux port, but they already have that WineX emulation that runs at 10-40% of the FPS along with many stability problems."
However it IS helping to show companies that there is a linux market. For instance the Half-Life engine simply won't be ported to Linux. They don't care, it's too old, whatever. But they've gotten hassled so much by Transgaming and linux users over VAC (anti-cheat) and other problems that broke Wine compatibility that they're doing some work now to keep Counter-Strike at least working under Wine. I think there's a good chance with Half-Life 2 they're going to have Linux support natively, because they've seen from Winex with Counter-Strike that the users are there.
(personally I still reboot for Counter-Strike because of the VAC problems and because my frame rate is too low in winex on this comp)
I love the irony. We finally get some religion in schools ("witchcraft") from Harry Potter, and suddenly the Christian bigots think religion in school is a bad idea! Can ya believe that? Now if only they weren't so goddam stupid, they might have a revelation about how they're trying to do the same thing to other religions as they claim Harry Potter was doing to them...
Who was it again, that said "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"
?
I'm pretty sure this isn't true. The versions of nvidia drivers are pretty darn close to equivalent between linux and windows. I had common hard locks on windows, and found when i installed linux that I had the same thing there. As soon as v2960 drivers came out, and i installed them for both OSes, the hard locks stopped in both OSes.
Couldn't you get around this by transferring some of your own copyrighted livejournal angsty poetry on the same network? If they crack the code to their own music, they're also cracking the code to your bad poetry, and therefore violating the DMCA?
Or if not, what about, as far as DVDs, why doesn't someone put out a movie (even a bad one) using the DVD encryption, then crack the encryption on their own movie?
"Jamie needs to bite the bullet and spend the cash for a good Powerbook or G4 tower. Linux on the desktop is dead. It will never get to the level that OS X is currently at. Face the facts."
Your post was pretty good up until there. Linux on the desktop is *far* from dead. It's been getting better and better for years. How can it suddenly be dead when it's now available pre-installed on PCs at Wal-Mart? It's not like there's a company making linux that can just "die". As long as there are users and developers using linux, it will continue to improve. You could easily argue that it isn't improving as fast as commercial OSes, but that's an entirely different thing from claiming Linux suddenly keeled over and died.
He was trying to make the point that the cable company will know what you're watching regardless, and perhaps that what they do with it is the issue. However that isn't true, I'm fairly certain, because cable is broadcast, ie: they send you everything, and YOU choose what to watch on your end. So they would need to add in specific monitoring functionality to their box to send usage data back upstream. which is indeed odious to some extent, as you're saying. they would need some kind of privacy policy or something saying they only use aggragate(sp?) usage data, and not individual usage data, and with no way to correlate a Real Live Person to the usage data. I don't know if that's even really possible. Anyway....
Your point is flawed in that: What if everyone watched that TNT show on the first airing? Or, how is it any different than if I recorded that first showing with my VCR?
Unrealistic assumption. If everyone watched it the first time, then the ratings would be non-existant for the subsequent showings and they would stop doing it, thereby losing that ad revenue.
He already covered this - it's the same as if everyone watched it the first time without PVRs. The second showing will have bad ratings, but the first showing will have all the viewers that would otherwise be viewing the second show. Hence the ad revenue stays the same by having more viewers the first time.
The station can show a different movie at the second time slot, giving it the opportunity to earn extra money, because all the viewers of the second showing have shifted to the first showing. Now they get to show two different movies, both with the maximum number of viewers.
You're completely right. That's why I made sure to buy an Expedition for my 16-year-old as soon as she got her license. Sure, it cost an arm and a leg, and costs 40$ a week in gas, but she's safe! She's been in four accidents so far (she's 18 now) and hasn't even had to go to the hospital. And she's still in the same SUV too! The car barely even got hurt when she ran into those people! Some people say that I shouldn't be putting a new driver like her in a humongous and dangerous SUV, but what do they know. I have to work 50 hours a week, so I don't have time to teach my kid how to drive safely. The next best thing I can do is put her in a safe car, like her Expedition. It's too bad the parents of the kids in the other cars she hit didn't care about their children enough to buy an SUV. But they're dead now, so that's what they get. Any good patriotic American should buy an SUV that gets 14mpg and keeps their kids safe, just like I did. Not only will your daughter thank you, but most importantly, she'll be ALIVE to thank you. Don't worry about the children in those small cars who die because your child ran over them with her tank - it's evolution. Survivial of the biggest. Thank God we have George W. in the White House protecting our oil interests by bombing third world countries and removing funding for alternative fuels. God Bless America.
(Yes, i'm exaggerating on purpose to get your wheels spinning. Don't bother flaming me because I really don't care that much.)
I've had quite the opposite experience, being amazed at how welcoming and helpful the linux irc channels are. Of course there's the occasional asshole or even channel full of assholes, but it's no more common than it is for Windows software. Just look at how much Mplayer got/gets bashed for being assholes to newbies...
I'm sorry, but I can't believe you about the 99% uptime thing. I was very hopeful for Windows XP to be stable, but it just isn't. Of course it's leaps and bounds of Windows 98, but if I try keeping my Windows XP box up for more than a week, especially with multiple programs running, everything gets hosed all to hell.
:) I've gone months in Linux without rebooting. Considering I can't go more than a few days even in Windows XP, I won't believe for a second that anyone has 99% uptime on a Windows desktop PC that actually gets used.
In linux, the only time I ever have to reboot is to player counter-strike
Windows is definitely coming along though. 2000/XP was a major step. Who knows...in a few iterations MS might have a stable OS! ^_^
I think your problem was probably your window manager, not with X. I use X with Blackbox on a Pentium 233 and it *never* has any problems, whereas even on my 1ghz Athlon Windows XP will lag moving windows. In the case of Windows I think it's more due to their poor process scheduler than the graphics code.
But anyway, seriously, KDE and Gnome are crap. They're slow and buggy as hell. Don't confuse them with X. My friend used KDE and complained all the time that Linux is buggier and slower than windows.
What Linux really needs is just some decent configuration tools for the GOOD simple window managers like Blackbox. I love my Blackbox set up, but I had to a bunch of hand-editing of config files, which sucks.
Of course there's some truth to apps being buggy. Some apps, like XMMS, Xchat, Mozilla, E-Roaster, etc. have never crashed on me, ever. But I've had a hell of a time trying to find a decent graphical FTP client for Linux. all the ones I could find were horribly buggy because they're still under heavy development. And while I love gaim, it still crashes on me occasionally, maybe once a week.
Yea, not to mention: .NET (this is a ripoff of Java, right?)
Internet Explorer (netscape, opera),
MSN Messenger (AIM, of course),
Hotmail (bought, right?),
DirectX (opengl),
MSN (just another isp, but i expect some day they'll use some monopoly leverage to force people to use it)
ActiveX,VBscript (javascript, if i'm not mistaken)
Windows Media Player (expanded to copy Winamp)
Those are just off the top of my head, i might have the Java+javascript ripoffs mixed up, but i know Sun had to sue them and all for taking Java and adding MS proprietary non-platform-independent extensions.
So, what you have here is MS sees some good software, makes a near-exact copy of it, and starts including it in their OS. IE, Media Player and Windows Media files, Messenger, hotmail, etc. How is a company like Netscape or AIM supposed to compete when MS can not only charge money for their products, but also *force* everyone to buy their products, whether they use them or not.
(you know all these "free" MS products are being paid for by the increasing price of Windows, right?)
Yet people pretend like MS is a good-guy in wanting AIM to share its userbase with MSN Messenger. bullshit. Within a year of AIM opening their userbase, MSN Messenger would have most of the userbase due to it being shipped with Windows, and Microsoft would feel the sudden need to break the compatibility for some BS reason. Result? MS just used its monopoly to take over Instant Messenging. Thank god AOL is working its damnedest to keep MS away. I somehow don't think MSN will be too kind to letting GAIM use its network after its taken over the IM world. Just another technology in addition to web browsing, video gaming, word processing, and all the others, that MS wants to turn into their own proprietary format to force people into continuing to use Windows.
Of course its hard to blame MS for doing these things. After all, corporations exist only to profit, not to do good for mankind. But the government has already taken way too long to break MS up, and now it looks like MS might just get a slap on the wrist. Kindof like how the government was trying the music industry for price-fixing, but instead settled for some $$$. Leaving the record industry, i'm sure, wringing their greedy hands and laughing, saying "ha! that isn't even half the profit we made from price-fixing!"
The government needs to go after these monopolies and other BAD companies and FIX them instead of charging them money for being unethical/illegal.
You're right - the idea is to kill two birds with one stone. Portable music players are very useful, and when you've already got a 20gb portable hard drive, it'd be a shame the company to prevent or make difficult the use of it as such.