The research on primary battery seems limited compared to rechargeable, I think because everyone seems to be stuck in the idea that EVs needs to be recharged. I'm not sure if that's necessarily the case. Two primary huddles in adoption of EVs are the energy storage and energy delivery. Often times when I hear about metal-air batteries, I hear about the problems of rechargability. Why not try to develop a battery focused on energy density only? If the energy density of a battery can get any where near gasoline, just swapping the batteries would be simpler and certainly much quicker than charging it. Not only that, building out a network of battery swap stations are much simpler than building out charging stations. The biggest huddle would be building out enough battery recycling plant, but I don't think that would be too hard to overcome. Decline in gasoline use would prompt oil company to divest their interest any way.
Of course, there could be a lot of active research going on to fit just the scenario. I just don't know. I think it's a path worth looking into if it is an overlooked idea.
I don't want to discuss the morals of prison labor, but as long as the constitution explicitly allow penal labor, why not make the best use of it? From little I know from penal labor system in US, it seems most of the benefits from penal labor goes to private business who gets labor contract below market. Can the system be overhauled to pay the prisoners near market pay? It seems there's benefit on both sides. The prison system can alleviate the cost of running the system, and the prisoners can have opportunity to learn trade and a chance to leave prison with some savings by allowing them a percentage of their pay. I don't have much knowledge about penal labor or even prison system in general, but it seems like it should be feasible at least.
I really hope russians somehow come up with mature, commercially viable fast neutron reactor. As an aside, is it really feasible to build a breeder reactor that can burn through most of the high level, long lasting waste?
Maybe it's not necessarily easier to develop higher density primary batteries as supposed to rechargeable ones, but it might not be a bad idea to approach density problem from a couple different approaches. Once batteries can approach 2-3 kwh/kg, 3-4 banks of say 10kg battery packs should be fairly easy to swap, negating charging problems. 30-40 kg battery packs should give similar range to gas burning cars, and they should be fairly easy to build out distribution network using existing gas stations. Of course efficient recycling also should be worked out.
Why are people so fixated on rechargeable batteries? However much batteries improve, the charging times for batteries would be substantially longer than refueling any way. Why not put more substantial effort into perfecting non rechargeable metal air batteries and have people just swap batteries at depots. It would require a least amount of investment into infrastructure since existing gas stations can simply add storage to distribute batteries, and the most expensive component-battery recycling plants- can be constructed as needed at strategic locations without having to be numerous. The battery cells would be standardized cell size that all cars can use, and cars can have small rechargeable batteries to recapture energy.
Metal-air batteries have the energy density to make this a workable solution making electric vehicles for most people. I just don't see why this option isn't explored more.
Who exactly? All the parties of the original war? I mean, technically speaking, is the US, UK, and South Korea at war with China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea, then?
(Genuine curiosity of the techincal details.)
The armistice is between UN (represented US) and NK with China. US would be automatically involved if the armistice was broken by treaty between SK and US. China would automatically be involved also though I'd imagine they'd be in a very uncomfortable position.
I've read up quite a bit on the fast reactor, so I understand quite a bit on the potential benefits at least in layman terms, but not being a nuclear engineer, I have no clue how well those potentials translates in practical terms.I believe they can be made much safer eventually, but I don't think I understand enough to see if they can really produce less long lived high level waste with cost factored in. Is it possible for them to transmute most of the long lived waste without affecting the economy of power generation too negatively.
Also, I think I understand most of the technical challenges associated with fast type reactors, and it seems to me that most of the challenges should be able to overcome with more trials. Yet, there really aren't production level trials besides BN-600/800 and some research reactors in India. Is it mostly political problems or is there still significant engineering challenges that prevents larger scale trials? And finally, how promising is the BN-600 design really? Is BN-800 off to pretty good start?
I wonder nuclear energy's chance to shine might be sailing away. I have to imagine it'd take another 10-20 years before fast/breeder reactors are ready to replace fossil fuel reactors in large scale, and solar energy probably would be ready for large scale generation by then.
Only violent criminals make real crimes then? You don't think monetary damage do not affect people's lives in general?
I'm glad to hear you don't concern yourself over monetary necessities, but I believe most people do.
I appreciate that you consider rapists and murderers worse criminals than embezzlers and fraudsters, and I imagine most people do. Yet, the gravity of their crimes comes from the fact that they affect millions of peoples lives.
Most of the victims probably would get on with their lives, albeit with worse qualities of lives. Some of them even might scoff at their losses and like to throw blanket statements while acting superior to people around. Still, there will be few that would be devastated and pillaged because their livelihood would had been destroyed.
Sure, you can view them as unworthy if you like, but please do a service for all of us and take time to explain the fleeting nature of materialism to them in person. Perhaps you can enlighten them before their desperation drives them to suicide or even violent crimes.
I think it still is. It had all the functions one would ever need for most students and more, it's compact, and it's intuitive in use(once you understand RPN). Why do you even need a graphing calculator for high school math or even underclass math courses?
Medfield was likely just an exercise of sort for Intel. I'm guessing they're going for a big splash with Airmont in 2014 since they're finally pulling up the Atom die size schedule along with the Core line. I'm not sure what Silvermont is going to be. If paired with Haswell graphics, Intel might be able to compete with ARM seriously, but I'm guessing they''re going to concentrate on Airmont design to create something that has a definite edge over ARM. Apple might be a wild card partner with Intel. They seem to have a cozy enough relation already, and Apple probably want to find a way to end their relation with Samsung somehow.
if I get to have health along with it of course.
I don't know if my mind would be capable of processing infinite time span, but I'd rather see what's going to happen tomorrow and live it even if I have to forget the past. Immortality would be a selfish and ultimately a dead-end for for the specie as a whole since never reducing population obviously isn't sustainable. Still, even if I have to become a last remaining human in the universe, I would still choose immortality if it's an option. I just want to know.
I always find it surprising that whenever the subject of backup comes up here, there're always only a one or two posts that suggest tapes only to be ignored. In the present day, tapes are still the best archival backup method readily available. Sure, the entry cost is rather high, but I think it would be worth it in your case since your data pool is only getting larger.
Keeping backup copies on HDDs are convenient, but I would keep a minimum of 4 copies, at least a pair in 2 different sites since HDDs always have a chance of failure when powered. Cloud is only an option if you have no issues with bandwidth. Even without bandwidth issue, I still don't feel completely comfortable subjecting my data to risks entirely out of my control.
Here's what I do personally. All my archival data is backed up on LTO Worm tapes, and I have most of those data on RAID-z2 for availability. Every online data is backed up incrementally daily on a separate array, and I do weekly full backup on tapes on monthly rotation along with month full backup on yearly rotation. Everything that needs permanent storage goes to WORM. While I won't claim my backup strategy is the best for everyone, but I go to bed each night satisfied with the level of safety with my data personally.
The AOL crowd showed up in the mid 90's and essentially destroyed the original internet culture. This was not an improvement.
Well, AOL was merely the beginning of what was probably inevitable any way. Besides, Usenet(where AOL crowd's presence were really felt) is only a small part of the internet, and I'd say the internet is overall more useful place now because of its universal access.
That said, I do miss the old Usenet. There just isn't anything quite like it, and I don't think there can ever be anything like it again./. probably comes closest but not quite.
Now immagine you are locked up between four concrete walls with a toilet and bed. The first few days (Week at the very most) will probably be nice and relaxing. Afterwards I will just simply be going insane from boredom..
I don't disagree that solitary confinement would suck, but for for me, it'd be because of the confinement part. Some people just does not have a problem with boredom part. Growing up as an only child, I have never really felt boredom much less any sense of loneliness. I'm not some weird anti social shut in either. I've always had friends and now a wife with a child. I don't think my social skill is terribly different from most people. I just never had a need to rely on it.
The main advantage for me is the inherent stability of tape medium over hard disks especially as an archival medium. Hard drives always have a chance for failure whenever you plug them in. Tapes are safer in that regard. It's not a significant advantage for home users, but I find it a nice luxury to have duplicate data both in always available medium (RAID6) and in archival medium (LTO3).
If you buy used at least. I bought a 16 tape LTO3 library and 20 LTO 3 tapes for around $500 used on ebay about a year ago. It might be even cheaper now. And if you don't mind changing tapes every hour or so, LTO3 stand alone drive can be had for $200. Also, if you're only going to deal with only 1TB worth of data for a while, LTO2 is more than enough, and a used LTO2 autoloader can be had for under $200.
Hard drives are never a proper backup solution. The data can be lost(without paying a few thousands for recovery at least) any time you plug in the hard drive. The tape solution is just so much more stable as a data storage platform, I'd say you look into getting used LTO2 autoloader at least. They really shouldn't cost more than a couple of hard drives.
I imagine solar storm of similar magnitudes as the on in 1859 would be recorded in history around the world as it would be a visibly noticeable event around the globe. Has solar storm of similar magnitude ever been noted in the history past couple thousand years, i.e. record of observable Aurorae near equator, bright night skys, etc?
Just being curious.
Actually, these are exactly the type of products that typify AMD's struggle against Intel. Something like i3-2100 is simply much more powerful AND draws less power. Of course, i3+cheap mobo cost about $50 more, and more SATA III ports and GPU performance are nice. The problem is that for general users, Intel platform just makes more sense, and AMD is forced to cater to niche markets.
In fact, Sandy Bridges are so good with power draw, I recently upgraded one of my home servers from Athlon II x2 to Xeon e3-1240, and I actually almost halved the idle power draw from around 40W to 22W. The most was more than double, but it was worth it for me with the added capability and the power saving.
AMD is going to have to tread very carefully in setting up their CPU/APU road map. HD4000 graphics on Ivy bridge and whatever Intel would put in Haswell can make AMD's niche even smaller.
I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying generally, but Amtrak's problem is completely different from that of USPS. Amtrak has been at least as expensive as air flight for a sometime, and it hadn't provided much of a benefit to general public, much less the poor population, for a while now. Amtrak needs a sizable influx of capital to ever hope to compete with other transportation services, and it likely won't get it as a government owned entity. I really do wish there could be a viable passenger rail system in US, but unless something like Union Pacific buys out Amtrak, I doubt it happens.
I'm guessing you're just being sarcastic as I find sifting through reviews on Amazon (whom I think has one of the better customer review system) annoying enough. I do wonder if these spam reviewers target websites in other major languages also. I mean it's fairly easy to find someone to write English semi-competently pretty much any where in the world. I'm not sure if that's true for even for a language such as Spanish.
Up to mid to late 90's, most of the internet users were mostly confined to members of academia, and the language used in internet forums were mostly kept as a particular vernacular used for net separate from their written or spoken language. Now, the internet use is ubiquitous, and I do believe there definitely is a blurring of written and spoken language especially for the younger population.
Obviously, it's only natural for a language to change especially in the face of entirely new medium of communication that's used by the population at large, and I do find it fairly interesting to see the new form of written language developing from verbal language.
As a personal rant, I find it a bit annoying that more and more people are completely disregarding spelling and grammar altogether. For a lot of people, texting and messaging are only forms of writing they do, and I kind of wish people put a bit more thought into their inputs at least in the internet forums. After all, writing in the internet forums is still a form of public speaking, and there should be some value in trying to accurately represent what you're trying to communicate. In that sense, I do miss the usenet of old. In a any given group, there were fairly informed representative of the topic, and the exchanges were usually thoughtful and relatively noise free. Even the flame wars were mostly entertaining. Of course, there's definite value in the sheer increase in the number of inputs, and I do think the changes in internet culture is mostly better and entirely inevitable. Still, porn just isn't the same without TIN and uudecode. I had to do a little work to see some boobies. Damn kids nowadays...
Every OS has its strengths and weaknesses, and at the end of the day, familiarity wins out for the most. You can do most common tasks in any environment of your choice if you put in enough effort. And I believe the main reason MS Windows environment is the most widely used is because it usually takes the least amount of effort for the most people to do the task they require. You can knock MS Windows for all the deficiencies it has, but the ubiquity and the huge user base of the environment is one advantage the other environments can hope to match up in a near future.
Here's a case in point with my experience as an example. I decided to centralize my home network a couple years ago, and I delved into setting up small active directory server for the first time in my life. I pretty much got everything set up in a couple of hours, and I didn't have to refer to any internet resources. All the set up tools and administration tools were where I expected, and a couple things I wasn't sure about were cleared up from the built in help files. Of course, I've been using Windows for just about 30 Years now, and I've had enough general knowledge about AD from being around in school and work environments. On the contrary, when I incorporated a Solaris server and an Ubuntu desktop into the network, it took me pretty much the whole day to get everything up and running, because I had to look up everything even doing something as simple as biding an address to an NIC. Of course, I haven't used Unix environment regularly since the 90's when I was in school, and most of the knowledge from back then were either forgotten or no longer applicable. Familiarity goes a long way to usability.
I want to make a couple comments regarding various OS choices though. As I mentioned, every OS has its strengths and weaknesses, and when a strength of one platform becomes compelling enough, a user will make necessary effort to learn the platform. For example, software RAID5 is just horrible under Windows, and since I didn't want to go with H/W RAID solution, I decided I would use Solaris for my file server. It was the first time I ever used Solaris since '95 in one of my CS classes fro one semester. I remember it being different from even Unix back then, and I came to find it's still different, in a different sort of way from back then. I still made an effort to learn it, and I'm still learning it because I really like ZFS. That said, I'm not sure if there's a compelling reason for most people to switch away from MS Windows. I couldn't get my wife to use the Ubuntu desktop much because she just doesn't see the point of learning it. And I can't really consider installing a Linux distro on my parents computer since I live some distance away from them and can't give the support they would invariably need. Of course, there's the cost consideration, and it would be a compelling reason for a lot of people once PC manufacturers sell PCs with open source OSes at a price point that would give considerable advantage over the ones with MS Windows. I think that is the only way open source OSes can make inroads to general users.
Finally, I just don't get the love affair some people have with Mac OS. I understand it's an OS with a lot of merits, but there seems to be more than a few people that just believes in vast superiority of OS X over everything else, especially MS Windows. I've had a few friends with MacBooks, and when I played with it for the first time back in 2006, I was impressed and actually recommended few people into buying Macbooks as I still do for right situations. Still, OS X still has its own problems, and I just don't see it as the second coming some people see it as.
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The research on primary battery seems limited compared to rechargeable, I think because everyone seems to be stuck in the idea that EVs needs to be recharged. I'm not sure if that's necessarily the case. Two primary huddles in adoption of EVs are the energy storage and energy delivery. Often times when I hear about metal-air batteries, I hear about the problems of rechargability. Why not try to develop a battery focused on energy density only? If the energy density of a battery can get any where near gasoline, just swapping the batteries would be simpler and certainly much quicker than charging it. Not only that, building out a network of battery swap stations are much simpler than building out charging stations. The biggest huddle would be building out enough battery recycling plant, but I don't think that would be too hard to overcome. Decline in gasoline use would prompt oil company to divest their interest any way. Of course, there could be a lot of active research going on to fit just the scenario. I just don't know. I think it's a path worth looking into if it is an overlooked idea.
I don't want to discuss the morals of prison labor, but as long as the constitution explicitly allow penal labor, why not make the best use of it? From little I know from penal labor system in US, it seems most of the benefits from penal labor goes to private business who gets labor contract below market. Can the system be overhauled to pay the prisoners near market pay? It seems there's benefit on both sides. The prison system can alleviate the cost of running the system, and the prisoners can have opportunity to learn trade and a chance to leave prison with some savings by allowing them a percentage of their pay. I don't have much knowledge about penal labor or even prison system in general, but it seems like it should be feasible at least.
I really hope russians somehow come up with mature, commercially viable fast neutron reactor. As an aside, is it really feasible to build a breeder reactor that can burn through most of the high level, long lasting waste?
Maybe it's not necessarily easier to develop higher density primary batteries as supposed to rechargeable ones, but it might not be a bad idea to approach density problem from a couple different approaches. Once batteries can approach 2-3 kwh/kg, 3-4 banks of say 10kg battery packs should be fairly easy to swap, negating charging problems. 30-40 kg battery packs should give similar range to gas burning cars, and they should be fairly easy to build out distribution network using existing gas stations. Of course efficient recycling also should be worked out.
Why are people so fixated on rechargeable batteries? However much batteries improve, the charging times for batteries would be substantially longer than refueling any way. Why not put more substantial effort into perfecting non rechargeable metal air batteries and have people just swap batteries at depots. It would require a least amount of investment into infrastructure since existing gas stations can simply add storage to distribute batteries, and the most expensive component-battery recycling plants- can be constructed as needed at strategic locations without having to be numerous. The battery cells would be standardized cell size that all cars can use, and cars can have small rechargeable batteries to recapture energy. Metal-air batteries have the energy density to make this a workable solution making electric vehicles for most people. I just don't see why this option isn't explored more.
Who exactly? All the parties of the original war? I mean, technically speaking, is the US, UK, and South Korea at war with China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea, then?
(Genuine curiosity of the techincal details.)
The armistice is between UN (represented US) and NK with China. US would be automatically involved if the armistice was broken by treaty between SK and US. China would automatically be involved also though I'd imagine they'd be in a very uncomfortable position.
I've read up quite a bit on the fast reactor, so I understand quite a bit on the potential benefits at least in layman terms, but not being a nuclear engineer, I have no clue how well those potentials translates in practical terms.I believe they can be made much safer eventually, but I don't think I understand enough to see if they can really produce less long lived high level waste with cost factored in. Is it possible for them to transmute most of the long lived waste without affecting the economy of power generation too negatively.
Also, I think I understand most of the technical challenges associated with fast type reactors, and it seems to me that most of the challenges should be able to overcome with more trials. Yet, there really aren't production level trials besides BN-600/800 and some research reactors in India. Is it mostly political problems or is there still significant engineering challenges that prevents larger scale trials? And finally, how promising is the BN-600 design really? Is BN-800 off to pretty good start?
I wonder nuclear energy's chance to shine might be sailing away. I have to imagine it'd take another 10-20 years before fast/breeder reactors are ready to replace fossil fuel reactors in large scale, and solar energy probably would be ready for large scale generation by then.
Only violent criminals make real crimes then? You don't think monetary damage do not affect people's lives in general? I'm glad to hear you don't concern yourself over monetary necessities, but I believe most people do. I appreciate that you consider rapists and murderers worse criminals than embezzlers and fraudsters, and I imagine most people do. Yet, the gravity of their crimes comes from the fact that they affect millions of peoples lives. Most of the victims probably would get on with their lives, albeit with worse qualities of lives. Some of them even might scoff at their losses and like to throw blanket statements while acting superior to people around. Still, there will be few that would be devastated and pillaged because their livelihood would had been destroyed. Sure, you can view them as unworthy if you like, but please do a service for all of us and take time to explain the fleeting nature of materialism to them in person. Perhaps you can enlighten them before their desperation drives them to suicide or even violent crimes.
I think it still is. It had all the functions one would ever need for most students and more, it's compact, and it's intuitive in use(once you understand RPN). Why do you even need a graphing calculator for high school math or even underclass math courses?
Medfield was likely just an exercise of sort for Intel. I'm guessing they're going for a big splash with Airmont in 2014 since they're finally pulling up the Atom die size schedule along with the Core line. I'm not sure what Silvermont is going to be. If paired with Haswell graphics, Intel might be able to compete with ARM seriously, but I'm guessing they''re going to concentrate on Airmont design to create something that has a definite edge over ARM. Apple might be a wild card partner with Intel. They seem to have a cozy enough relation already, and Apple probably want to find a way to end their relation with Samsung somehow.
if I get to have health along with it of course. I don't know if my mind would be capable of processing infinite time span, but I'd rather see what's going to happen tomorrow and live it even if I have to forget the past. Immortality would be a selfish and ultimately a dead-end for for the specie as a whole since never reducing population obviously isn't sustainable. Still, even if I have to become a last remaining human in the universe, I would still choose immortality if it's an option. I just want to know.
I always find it surprising that whenever the subject of backup comes up here, there're always only a one or two posts that suggest tapes only to be ignored. In the present day, tapes are still the best archival backup method readily available. Sure, the entry cost is rather high, but I think it would be worth it in your case since your data pool is only getting larger. Keeping backup copies on HDDs are convenient, but I would keep a minimum of 4 copies, at least a pair in 2 different sites since HDDs always have a chance of failure when powered. Cloud is only an option if you have no issues with bandwidth. Even without bandwidth issue, I still don't feel completely comfortable subjecting my data to risks entirely out of my control. Here's what I do personally. All my archival data is backed up on LTO Worm tapes, and I have most of those data on RAID-z2 for availability. Every online data is backed up incrementally daily on a separate array, and I do weekly full backup on tapes on monthly rotation along with month full backup on yearly rotation. Everything that needs permanent storage goes to WORM. While I won't claim my backup strategy is the best for everyone, but I go to bed each night satisfied with the level of safety with my data personally.
The AOL crowd showed up in the mid 90's and essentially destroyed the original internet culture. This was not an improvement.
Well, AOL was merely the beginning of what was probably inevitable any way. Besides, Usenet(where AOL crowd's presence were really felt) is only a small part of the internet, and I'd say the internet is overall more useful place now because of its universal access. That said, I do miss the old Usenet. There just isn't anything quite like it, and I don't think there can ever be anything like it again. /. probably comes closest but not quite.
Now immagine you are locked up between four concrete walls with a toilet and bed. The first few days (Week at the very most) will probably be nice and relaxing. Afterwards I will just simply be going insane from boredom..
I don't disagree that solitary confinement would suck, but for for me, it'd be because of the confinement part. Some people just does not have a problem with boredom part. Growing up as an only child, I have never really felt boredom much less any sense of loneliness. I'm not some weird anti social shut in either. I've always had friends and now a wife with a child. I don't think my social skill is terribly different from most people. I just never had a need to rely on it.
The main advantage for me is the inherent stability of tape medium over hard disks especially as an archival medium. Hard drives always have a chance for failure whenever you plug them in. Tapes are safer in that regard. It's not a significant advantage for home users, but I find it a nice luxury to have duplicate data both in always available medium (RAID6) and in archival medium (LTO3).
If you buy used at least. I bought a 16 tape LTO3 library and 20 LTO 3 tapes for around $500 used on ebay about a year ago. It might be even cheaper now. And if you don't mind changing tapes every hour or so, LTO3 stand alone drive can be had for $200. Also, if you're only going to deal with only 1TB worth of data for a while, LTO2 is more than enough, and a used LTO2 autoloader can be had for under $200. Hard drives are never a proper backup solution. The data can be lost(without paying a few thousands for recovery at least) any time you plug in the hard drive. The tape solution is just so much more stable as a data storage platform, I'd say you look into getting used LTO2 autoloader at least. They really shouldn't cost more than a couple of hard drives.
I imagine solar storm of similar magnitudes as the on in 1859 would be recorded in history around the world as it would be a visibly noticeable event around the globe. Has solar storm of similar magnitude ever been noted in the history past couple thousand years, i.e. record of observable Aurorae near equator, bright night skys, etc? Just being curious.
Actually, these are exactly the type of products that typify AMD's struggle against Intel. Something like i3-2100 is simply much more powerful AND draws less power. Of course, i3+cheap mobo cost about $50 more, and more SATA III ports and GPU performance are nice. The problem is that for general users, Intel platform just makes more sense, and AMD is forced to cater to niche markets. In fact, Sandy Bridges are so good with power draw, I recently upgraded one of my home servers from Athlon II x2 to Xeon e3-1240, and I actually almost halved the idle power draw from around 40W to 22W. The most was more than double, but it was worth it for me with the added capability and the power saving. AMD is going to have to tread very carefully in setting up their CPU/APU road map. HD4000 graphics on Ivy bridge and whatever Intel would put in Haswell can make AMD's niche even smaller.
I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying generally, but Amtrak's problem is completely different from that of USPS. Amtrak has been at least as expensive as air flight for a sometime, and it hadn't provided much of a benefit to general public, much less the poor population, for a while now. Amtrak needs a sizable influx of capital to ever hope to compete with other transportation services, and it likely won't get it as a government owned entity. I really do wish there could be a viable passenger rail system in US, but unless something like Union Pacific buys out Amtrak, I doubt it happens.
I'm guessing you're just being sarcastic as I find sifting through reviews on Amazon (whom I think has one of the better customer review system) annoying enough. I do wonder if these spam reviewers target websites in other major languages also. I mean it's fairly easy to find someone to write English semi-competently pretty much any where in the world. I'm not sure if that's true for even for a language such as Spanish.
Up to mid to late 90's, most of the internet users were mostly confined to members of academia, and the language used in internet forums were mostly kept as a particular vernacular used for net separate from their written or spoken language. Now, the internet use is ubiquitous, and I do believe there definitely is a blurring of written and spoken language especially for the younger population. Obviously, it's only natural for a language to change especially in the face of entirely new medium of communication that's used by the population at large, and I do find it fairly interesting to see the new form of written language developing from verbal language. As a personal rant, I find it a bit annoying that more and more people are completely disregarding spelling and grammar altogether. For a lot of people, texting and messaging are only forms of writing they do, and I kind of wish people put a bit more thought into their inputs at least in the internet forums. After all, writing in the internet forums is still a form of public speaking, and there should be some value in trying to accurately represent what you're trying to communicate. In that sense, I do miss the usenet of old. In a any given group, there were fairly informed representative of the topic, and the exchanges were usually thoughtful and relatively noise free. Even the flame wars were mostly entertaining. Of course, there's definite value in the sheer increase in the number of inputs, and I do think the changes in internet culture is mostly better and entirely inevitable. Still, porn just isn't the same without TIN and uudecode. I had to do a little work to see some boobies. Damn kids nowadays...
But then shouldn't you live without petroleum, cars, electricity, banking, mortgage, and so forth?
Every OS has its strengths and weaknesses, and at the end of the day, familiarity wins out for the most. You can do most common tasks in any environment of your choice if you put in enough effort. And I believe the main reason MS Windows environment is the most widely used is because it usually takes the least amount of effort for the most people to do the task they require. You can knock MS Windows for all the deficiencies it has, but the ubiquity and the huge user base of the environment is one advantage the other environments can hope to match up in a near future.
Here's a case in point with my experience as an example. I decided to centralize my home network a couple years ago, and I delved into setting up small active directory server for the first time in my life. I pretty much got everything set up in a couple of hours, and I didn't have to refer to any internet resources. All the set up tools and administration tools were where I expected, and a couple things I wasn't sure about were cleared up from the built in help files. Of course, I've been using Windows for just about 30 Years now, and I've had enough general knowledge about AD from being around in school and work environments. On the contrary, when I incorporated a Solaris server and an Ubuntu desktop into the network, it took me pretty much the whole day to get everything up and running, because I had to look up everything even doing something as simple as biding an address to an NIC. Of course, I haven't used Unix environment regularly since the 90's when I was in school, and most of the knowledge from back then were either forgotten or no longer applicable. Familiarity goes a long way to usability.
I want to make a couple comments regarding various OS choices though. As I mentioned, every OS has its strengths and weaknesses, and when a strength of one platform becomes compelling enough, a user will make necessary effort to learn the platform. For example, software RAID5 is just horrible under Windows, and since I didn't want to go with H/W RAID solution, I decided I would use Solaris for my file server. It was the first time I ever used Solaris since '95 in one of my CS classes fro one semester. I remember it being different from even Unix back then, and I came to find it's still different, in a different sort of way from back then. I still made an effort to learn it, and I'm still learning it because I really like ZFS. That said, I'm not sure if there's a compelling reason for most people to switch away from MS Windows. I couldn't get my wife to use the Ubuntu desktop much because she just doesn't see the point of learning it. And I can't really consider installing a Linux distro on my parents computer since I live some distance away from them and can't give the support they would invariably need. Of course, there's the cost consideration, and it would be a compelling reason for a lot of people once PC manufacturers sell PCs with open source OSes at a price point that would give considerable advantage over the ones with MS Windows. I think that is the only way open source OSes can make inroads to general users.
Finally, I just don't get the love affair some people have with Mac OS. I understand it's an OS with a lot of merits, but there seems to be more than a few people that just believes in vast superiority of OS X over everything else, especially MS Windows. I've had a few friends with MacBooks, and when I played with it for the first time back in 2006, I was impressed and actually recommended few people into buying Macbooks as I still do for right situations. Still, OS X still has its own problems, and I just don't see it as the second coming some people see it as.