When I read a fictional concept of something I'm already interested in I'm inspired in the sense that I tend to take that fictional version and nit pick it... oh that parts great.. that part is silly.. done that already.
Example: In Distraction (by Bruce Sterling) they have roaming bands of high-tech nomads. I happen to be a geek that likes to move around a lot and enjoys my freedom. I am interested in wireless computing and wearables. A lot of Sterlings described tech from this book was right down my alley. Based on his idea of decentralized wireless phones I designed and built my own that uses WiFi and a handheld Linux based system.
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson also really push my buttons.
How do light guns work? I've never actually tried to figure them out although I've often wondered. Why do they only work with CRT's? Inquiring minds want to know! (sorry, 80's thoughts)
Build it yourself. If you long for something that nobody else is doing then follow the codegeek road and do it yourself. Learn Python and check out Pygame. These genres aren't dead - they are only dormant.
Prediction.. two years from now the 3D shooter will be 'dying' or 'dead'.
Where did you grow up? I've been using personal countermeasures since the 2nd grade. Ranging from a bad attitude to toys that can zap annoying jocks to radio jammers to stop those damned freaks driving down the street with their radios blasting.
If someone misuses one of these in-your-head speakers on me I'll fry the damn things electronics. Oopsie.. did I do that?:)
Other than such annoying uses this actualy sounds like cool technology. I had one of those all-in-one earphone/microphone things at one time and it was awesome. I'd love to find one like it again for Net phone use.
True, but then coalitions are for people unwilling to just take responsibility for their own actions. You do what has to be done - not what can be agreed on by comittee. If we'd taken care of it last time a lot of lives and money could have been saved.
Our current coalition is laughable. We have the support of Colombia and Ethiopia? Oh yeh, that's a big surprise. Lots of help there. May as well list the clerk at the gasmart as being on our side.
I recently added css to my site to make it look nicer. Including that my home page is less than 3Kb. My average page is less than 5Kb. Only one page is very big and that is because I include several screenshots.. it still is only about 80Kb. The few images I use on my site are mostly redundant and should be reused.. so they shouldn't need to be retransmitted often.
Really it isn't THAT hard to keep bloat down. Less than 50K for the average page of a commercial site shouldn't be a big deal. I've had several such sites that were considerably less than that and still looked decent and provided good functionality.
Also can have a mirror server on other bandwidth that rejects connections that don't come through a known caching proxy server. I like to reject traffic from people this way if my load becomes to high. That way anyone that still wants to access my server can use IRCache.net or some other major proxy servers. Any decent ISP should also offer such a proxy their users can use.
Iraqis (is that really the right spelling? Seems sooo Dune.) would probably have cooperated.. I'm sure the average Joe there just wants to do their work and not hafta deal with to much extra shit on their heads. However, evil dictators don't have a good history of cooperating. They might try to appear to cooperate but they won't actually do so. Irrational need for power is sort of a defining factor in evil dictators.
The longer you delayed the war the more time you gave Saddam to prepare and to hurt others. We could have kicked his butt long ago but gave him years more to prepare. Not smart at all. Now we have to worry about lots of extras.
I can't stand IDE's really. Part of it is my dislike of wasted screen space. A tabbed console to program in is about as fancy as I like to get. The fancier tools I really like to have on a different screen. I've had object browsers, references, etc running on other monitors at times and I think that is a very nice way of doing it.
X can rotate your viewpoint (dunno about other OS's). If you can find a decent way to rotate your monitor such that it doesn't fall over then you could use it that way. Build yourself a special stand. Could be cool.
4. People who opposed the war until it started and now support it. -- "Support our troops, finish what we started."
I don't think we had a right to start this war at this time but since we have we should finish. We should have finished it during the last war with Iraq.
You really think diplomatic means were EVER going to work? You'd have had to offer him more power somewhere else to get him to let Iraq go. That's how evil leaders work. Damn didn't you ever watch Rocky & Bullwinkle?:)
In a way I wish the US would collapse all the oil wells. It'd make them harder to set on fire and without oil Saddam wouldn't have much use for Iraq. Sure they could eventually be drilled out again but it'd be a good short term fix. If it were me I'd even consider shooting a missle through the well and contaminating all the oil with radiation. Let that oil sit there underground.
He seems the type of guy that if he wasn't hurt by an attempted attack would be on tv bragging about how stupid we are to think we could reach him. Have we seen any such thing?
Not perfect evidence but that's the impression I get of the guy. Of course if someone tried to blow me up and failed I'd be on tv going "Missed me, missed me, now ya gotta kiss me!" so I can't blame him.:)
I don't have any icons or cruft like that. I am using HackedBox as my WM on my Linux system. Gave up KDE for Gnome a couple years ago. Gnome 2 pissed me off too so I switched to HackedBox. So far is working really well and has very little screen space wasted.
I'm happy with anything 800x600 or bigger for coding. I do most of it in a single term window with multiple tabs.:)
It'd REALLY piss me off to be arrested for doing something that most people don't consider a crime and that doesn't hurt anyone. I already think very little of our government and society. Doing this would kill what little respect I still have for their laws. If anything it'd make me what to get even for all the pain they'd given me.
Do you really want to take educated, possibly intelligent, people and turn them into thieves and terrorists? This is almost as bad as laws that make punishments for reverse engineering code and such. Let's take the brightest most productive citizens and make them hate us and make them willing to fight us? Great plan.
Does anyone else see laws like these as geek persecution on a grand scale? The bullys are unhappy that the geeks are gaining power in this society.. we won't let them steal our lunch money any more.. so they set out to make the things we do illegal.
What kind of work do you do? I can see a need for high-res for graphic artists but most of us don't need that much for something as small as 20". 1280x768 is fine for word processing, web browsing, coding, etc.
A good many people I know (clients) end up setting their resolution to 800x600 or 640x480 because it's easier for them to see and they don't know how to resize fonts and other screen elements. I find the machines painful to work on but it works for what they need.
I really agree with you. I am sitting here watching it in the background and find myself wishing something would happen just because it's boring. I thiink of playing Civ instead (as it's more fun). I know that is a horrible thing to think but it feels like a tv show.
I sit here feeling that if they want people to watch they'll blow more shit up and show some good mass destruction. Does this mean next year the new survival show will have six lucky contestants going into terrorist camps and trying to defeat the bad guy with out viewers voting them out of the show? (Makes me think of Snow Crash.)
There is just something wrong with watching a war take place in real time over the tv or Net. It lacks respect to the lifes being destroyed. I'd love all this data to hit the Net some time later as a history archieve but it shouldn't be streamed live. At least they could remove their logo and advertising so it'd have a little respect given these events.
IMHO if you're going to add electronics to a firearm you should make the damn thing so it can never miss. Have an advanced targeting computer and sensor array built into it. Then you can get an effective hit for every shot fired. Hell why even include a human behind the gun?;)
I must admit I had tape driven computers. I had to use one to write programs to drive a robotic arm for a while and they drove me nuts.
Yeh typing in programs out of magazines to make them run is doubtless one reason opensource seemed such a natural idea to me.
I'd agree about most 3D games. Which is partly why I play so little. I like RPG and strategy games better but even they are often to easy. I like developing little games of my own that are more intelligent but I get more fun out of developing them than playing them so I don't really know if they are fun or not. They'd never go mainstream though.
At least guns are halfway clean and quick. Most other methods criminals might use would be a lot more painful for the victim. Being knifed or clubbed hurts more than being shot. Being set on fire or tied to the bumper and drug down the road I'd think would be even worse.
Bad people will always find a way to do bad things. No use making it harder for the victim to defend themselves or more painful for them to be killed.
What'd be better would be more effective cameras for gasmart stores and other places that are frequently robbed. It would be useful to have some sort of device that'd detect probable weapons (hidden or not) on people entering and give the clerk a heads up warning. Give them time to press an emergency button or step into a secure room or something. Things as simple as unaccessable drop boxes under the floor etc for cash can go a long way.
An amazing method of keeping your kids from abusing your guns.. teach them about them until they find them the most boring topic ever invented.
When I was a wee boy my father went a step further and had me practice with a shotgun much to big for me. Knocked me on my ass and left me with a nasty bruise upside one whole side of my face.. kept me from ever treating guns as toys ever.
Other than that I think if someone shoots themselves it's just removing stupidity from our gene pool. Do we really want to make it so even the dumbest screwball can live forever with nothing keeping them from breeding?
If someone uses your gun to shoot you then I'd say you either waited way to long to pull the trigger or are a really bad shot.:)
Ideas like this and gun control laws never seem to grasp that a gun is in theory a very simple device. Even if they made all guns illegal and managed to seize every gun in existence it's still not hard to build a gun. I've built several ranging from handguns to a cannon.
Gun powder isn't especially hard to make either and you can design guns that fire without it. A gun that fires darts with compressed air can be just as deadly as one that uses explosive charges.
Sure your average criminal might make sucky guns that eventually blow up in their hand.. but not until after they've already robbed a couple hundred people. All you'll end up doing is taking away peoples right to defend themselves.
ll life's secrets can be answered by Weird Al.. "Gun control is for wimps and commies." "Guns don't kill people - I do!"
LOL the C64 CLI was about as raw as you could get. Something about it was fun though. You felt like a hacker God just to get a game running at all sometimes.
I think Apple will continue to make sales on the strength of MacOS and the fact that it isn't Windows. If they'd lower their prices I think the process would be a lot faster but they'll still make some significant gains as enough of the culture becomes computer literate enough to seek out something different. There is always a portion of the populace willing to spend more for the gee-whiz high-end product even if it just does the same ole thing.
I don't really think Microsoft's store of software really matters. I forsee them buying out a company that builds a Windows programming API on some sort of BSD. As ironic as it may sound I think Microsoft may become the biggest 'secret' user of Wine and will port those things they actually have innovated into a more standard BSD enviroment. I think they'll mostly move out of the OS development as it becomes non-profitable. They'll still sale a form of Windows but won't rag on it near as much as they do now.
I would agree I don't think they'll ever dominate the market so fully ever again. Opensource won't let them. They may continue to have the most popular programs but there will always be an alternative available.
True but that problem is because most web sites suck. If Mozilla was the one not following standards and not working I'd say Mozilla sucked but IE is the one breaking the open standards (to try to control the Net) so they suck. Sure you can't expect everyone to follow the open standard but you should expect developers to do so. If they don't then they just suck at their job. With the number of unemployed geeks right now I think we could find some people to fix such problems.
I haven't had any major problems with Mozilla's CSS support but would be interested to know what bugs you mean. Do you happen to have a list? Just because I haven't ran into them yet doesn't mean I won't. Is it Mozilla not following the CSS standard or Mozilla not breaking the standard the same way IE does? I really have never noticed a correct CSS page that didn't work on Mozilla but would on IE (or Opera or Konqueror).
I've been online for about half my life (I'm 25.) and was always a hardcore geek so back then I got to use a lot of HP-UX, AIX, SunOS/Solaris, etc. First real expossure to Linux was on some of the servers my friends gave me accounts on. Even back then Linux was pretty cool. I was an expert-level user of DOS/Win3.1 and pretty familiar with Novell, MacOS, and older computers ranging from the TRS-80 on. Really Linux was the best I'd seen even then for the PC (from a geek point of view). It even sucked less in most ways than AIX and especially HP-UX. I really liked SunOS/Solaris back then but it was really expensive to run at home. Irix, Alpha's, etc were fun and a lil easier to get your hands on (for a home user) but still not cheap.
The fact that back then I could install Linux w/ X on a 486DX w/ 4Mb ram and a 170Mb hdd and have a pretty usable little system says a lot. X was crap ugly and not user friendly but you could connect to the Net and telnet or web browse easier than under Windows. I had a 2400baud modem so browsing without images was pretty common. ASCII/ANSI/RIP artwork was pretty much the rule.
Linux on PPC works pretty much exactly like Linux on x86 except it takes a little more effort to find pre-compiled binaries sometimes. I can't say that it's really worth buying a Mac for but if you already have one and it isn't up to running MacOS I'd say to try Linux on it. SuSE installs and runs pretty well on Mac hardware last I checked. I think Mandrake and others also currently offer Mac versions.
I never used Amiga very much. Touched on it a little but not often enough to be very expert. I did do a lot with my C64 and C128 though.
I don't think we should have ONLY the command line but I think the command line should be a part of the user enviroment. I typically run under X (w/ Gnome) and do most of my work with the CLI. The GUI is great for apps (though they could use more CLI too) but not very effecient for complex actions like working with files. I have been thinking of making a shell script wizard though.. a lil program that makes a graphical interface to chaining together command line utilities. It'd be more work than typing the command in but easy to learn to use. Possibly a good introduction to the command line utils Unix offers.
I'd say Microsoft was a monopoly but is not anymore (but is still trying to be).. not because of any legal action that happened as much as because opensource changed the rules. Apple has always had a small but loyal following. The inroads Linux made against Windows gave Apple some breathing room to really clean up MacOS. With the fine work Apple and the BSD folks did MacOS is finally a kickass platform. I think Windows will continue to dominate the market but would not be surprised to see them gradually reduced to a more fair market share over the next decade or so. I'd expect to see MacOS make strong inroads on the home desktop and Linux make strong inroads on the enterprise/embedded desktop. I think we'll see Microsoft start producing some really high quality software too.. due largely to the new competition.
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When I read a fictional concept of something I'm already interested in I'm inspired in the sense that I tend to take that fictional version and nit pick it... oh that parts great.. that part is silly.. done that already.
Example:
In Distraction (by Bruce Sterling) they have roaming bands of high-tech nomads. I happen to be a geek that likes to move around a lot and enjoys my freedom. I am interested in wireless computing and wearables. A lot of Sterlings described tech from this book was right down my alley. Based on his idea of decentralized wireless phones I designed and built my own that uses WiFi and a handheld Linux based system.
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson also really push my buttons.
How do light guns work? I've never actually tried to figure them out although I've often wondered. Why do they only work with CRT's? Inquiring minds want to know! (sorry, 80's thoughts)
Build it yourself. If you long for something that nobody else is doing then follow the codegeek road and do it yourself. Learn Python and check out Pygame. These genres aren't dead - they are only dormant.
Prediction.. two years from now the 3D shooter will be 'dying' or 'dead'.
Ever tried some Japanese-style adult games? They aren't technological works of art but they are a lot funnier than most American adult games.
Try peachprincess.com if your bored enough.
Where did you grow up? I've been using personal countermeasures since the 2nd grade. Ranging from a bad attitude to toys that can zap annoying jocks to radio jammers to stop those damned freaks driving down the street with their radios blasting.
:)
If someone misuses one of these in-your-head speakers on me I'll fry the damn things electronics. Oopsie.. did I do that?
Other than such annoying uses this actualy sounds like cool technology. I had one of those all-in-one earphone/microphone things at one time and it was awesome. I'd love to find one like it again for Net phone use.
True, but then coalitions are for people unwilling to just take responsibility for their own actions. You do what has to be done - not what can be agreed on by comittee. If we'd taken care of it last time a lot of lives and money could have been saved.
Our current coalition is laughable. We have the support of Colombia and Ethiopia? Oh yeh, that's a big surprise. Lots of help there. May as well list the clerk at the gasmart as being on our side.
I recently added css to my site to make it look nicer. Including that my home page is less than 3Kb. My average page is less than 5Kb. Only one page is very big and that is because I include several screenshots.. it still is only about 80Kb. The few images I use on my site are mostly redundant and should be reused.. so they shouldn't need to be retransmitted often.
Really it isn't THAT hard to keep bloat down. Less than 50K for the average page of a commercial site shouldn't be a big deal. I've had several such sites that were considerably less than that and still looked decent and provided good functionality.
Also can have a mirror server on other bandwidth that rejects connections that don't come through a known caching proxy server. I like to reject traffic from people this way if my load becomes to high. That way anyone that still wants to access my server can use IRCache.net or some other major proxy servers. Any decent ISP should also offer such a proxy their users can use.
Iraqis (is that really the right spelling? Seems sooo Dune.) would probably have cooperated.. I'm sure the average Joe there just wants to do their work and not hafta deal with to much extra shit on their heads. However, evil dictators don't have a good history of cooperating. They might try to appear to cooperate but they won't actually do so. Irrational need for power is sort of a defining factor in evil dictators.
The longer you delayed the war the more time you gave Saddam to prepare and to hurt others. We could have kicked his butt long ago but gave him years more to prepare. Not smart at all. Now we have to worry about lots of extras.
I can't stand IDE's really. Part of it is my dislike of wasted screen space. A tabbed console to program in is about as fancy as I like to get. The fancier tools I really like to have on a different screen. I've had object browsers, references, etc running on other monitors at times and I think that is a very nice way of doing it.
X can rotate your viewpoint (dunno about other OS's). If you can find a decent way to rotate your monitor such that it doesn't fall over then you could use it that way. Build yourself a special stand. Could be cool.
Left out my group..
4. People who opposed the war until it started and now support it. -- "Support our troops, finish what we started."
I don't think we had a right to start this war at this time but since we have we should finish. We should have finished it during the last war with Iraq.
You really think diplomatic means were EVER going to work? You'd have had to offer him more power somewhere else to get him to let Iraq go. That's how evil leaders work. Damn didn't you ever watch Rocky & Bullwinkle? :)
In a way I wish the US would collapse all the oil wells. It'd make them harder to set on fire and without oil Saddam wouldn't have much use for Iraq. Sure they could eventually be drilled out again but it'd be a good short term fix. If it were me I'd even consider shooting a missle through the well and contaminating all the oil with radiation. Let that oil sit there underground.
He seems the type of guy that if he wasn't hurt by an attempted attack would be on tv bragging about how stupid we are to think we could reach him. Have we seen any such thing?
:)
Not perfect evidence but that's the impression I get of the guy. Of course if someone tried to blow me up and failed I'd be on tv going "Missed me, missed me, now ya gotta kiss me!" so I can't blame him.
I don't have any icons or cruft like that. I am using HackedBox as my WM on my Linux system. Gave up KDE for Gnome a couple years ago. Gnome 2 pissed me off too so I switched to HackedBox. So far is working really well and has very little screen space wasted.
:)
I'm happy with anything 800x600 or bigger for coding. I do most of it in a single term window with multiple tabs.
It'd REALLY piss me off to be arrested for doing something that most people don't consider a crime and that doesn't hurt anyone. I already think very little of our government and society. Doing this would kill what little respect I still have for their laws. If anything it'd make me what to get even for all the pain they'd given me.
Do you really want to take educated, possibly intelligent, people and turn them into thieves and terrorists? This is almost as bad as laws that make punishments for reverse engineering code and such. Let's take the brightest most productive citizens and make them hate us and make them willing to fight us? Great plan.
Does anyone else see laws like these as geek persecution on a grand scale? The bullys are unhappy that the geeks are gaining power in this society.. we won't let them steal our lunch money any more.. so they set out to make the things we do illegal.
What kind of work do you do? I can see a need for high-res for graphic artists but most of us don't need that much for something as small as 20". 1280x768 is fine for word processing, web browsing, coding, etc.
A good many people I know (clients) end up setting their resolution to 800x600 or 640x480 because it's easier for them to see and they don't know how to resize fonts and other screen elements. I find the machines painful to work on but it works for what they need.
I really agree with you. I am sitting here watching it in the background and find myself wishing something would happen just because it's boring. I thiink of playing Civ instead (as it's more fun). I know that is a horrible thing to think but it feels like a tv show.
I sit here feeling that if they want people to watch they'll blow more shit up and show some good mass destruction. Does this mean next year the new survival show will have six lucky contestants going into terrorist camps and trying to defeat the bad guy with out viewers voting them out of the show? (Makes me think of Snow Crash.)
There is just something wrong with watching a war take place in real time over the tv or Net. It lacks respect to the lifes being destroyed. I'd love all this data to hit the Net some time later as a history archieve but it shouldn't be streamed live. At least they could remove their logo and advertising so it'd have a little respect given these events.
IMHO if you're going to add electronics to a firearm you should make the damn thing so it can never miss. Have an advanced targeting computer and sensor array built into it. Then you can get an effective hit for every shot fired. Hell why even include a human behind the gun? ;)
I must admit I had tape driven computers. I had to use one to write programs to drive a robotic arm for a while and they drove me nuts.
Yeh typing in programs out of magazines to make them run is doubtless one reason opensource seemed such a natural idea to me.
I'd agree about most 3D games. Which is partly why I play so little. I like RPG and strategy games better but even they are often to easy. I like developing little games of my own that are more intelligent but I get more fun out of developing them than playing them so I don't really know if they are fun or not. They'd never go mainstream though.
At least guns are halfway clean and quick. Most other methods criminals might use would be a lot more painful for the victim. Being knifed or clubbed hurts more than being shot. Being set on fire or tied to the bumper and drug down the road I'd think would be even worse.
Bad people will always find a way to do bad things. No use making it harder for the victim to defend themselves or more painful for them to be killed.
What'd be better would be more effective cameras for gasmart stores and other places that are frequently robbed. It would be useful to have some sort of device that'd detect probable weapons (hidden or not) on people entering and give the clerk a heads up warning. Give them time to press an emergency button or step into a secure room or something. Things as simple as unaccessable drop boxes under the floor etc for cash can go a long way.
An amazing method of keeping your kids from abusing your guns.. teach them about them until they find them the most boring topic ever invented.
:)
When I was a wee boy my father went a step further and had me practice with a shotgun much to big for me. Knocked me on my ass and left me with a nasty bruise upside one whole side of my face.. kept me from ever treating guns as toys ever.
Other than that I think if someone shoots themselves it's just removing stupidity from our gene pool. Do we really want to make it so even the dumbest screwball can live forever with nothing keeping them from breeding?
If someone uses your gun to shoot you then I'd say you either waited way to long to pull the trigger or are a really bad shot.
Ideas like this and gun control laws never seem to grasp that a gun is in theory a very simple device. Even if they made all guns illegal and managed to seize every gun in existence it's still not hard to build a gun. I've built several ranging from handguns to a cannon.
Gun powder isn't especially hard to make either and you can design guns that fire without it. A gun that fires darts with compressed air can be just as deadly as one that uses explosive charges.
Sure your average criminal might make sucky guns that eventually blow up in their hand.. but not until after they've already robbed a couple hundred people. All you'll end up doing is taking away peoples right to defend themselves.
ll life's secrets can be answered by Weird Al..
"Gun control is for wimps and commies."
"Guns don't kill people - I do!"
LOL the C64 CLI was about as raw as you could get. Something about it was fun though. You felt like a hacker God just to get a game running at all sometimes.
I think Apple will continue to make sales on the strength of MacOS and the fact that it isn't Windows. If they'd lower their prices I think the process would be a lot faster but they'll still make some significant gains as enough of the culture becomes computer literate enough to seek out something different. There is always a portion of the populace willing to spend more for the gee-whiz high-end product even if it just does the same ole thing.
I don't really think Microsoft's store of software really matters. I forsee them buying out a company that builds a Windows programming API on some sort of BSD. As ironic as it may sound I think Microsoft may become the biggest 'secret' user of Wine and will port those things they actually have innovated into a more standard BSD enviroment. I think they'll mostly move out of the OS development as it becomes non-profitable. They'll still sale a form of Windows but won't rag on it near as much as they do now.
I would agree I don't think they'll ever dominate the market so fully ever again. Opensource won't let them. They may continue to have the most popular programs but there will always be an alternative available.
True but that problem is because most web sites suck. If Mozilla was the one not following standards and not working I'd say Mozilla sucked but IE is the one breaking the open standards (to try to control the Net) so they suck. Sure you can't expect everyone to follow the open standard but you should expect developers to do so. If they don't then they just suck at their job. With the number of unemployed geeks right now I think we could find some people to fix such problems.
I haven't had any major problems with Mozilla's CSS support but would be interested to know what bugs you mean. Do you happen to have a list? Just because I haven't ran into them yet doesn't mean I won't. Is it Mozilla not following the CSS standard or Mozilla not breaking the standard the same way IE does? I really have never noticed a correct CSS page that didn't work on Mozilla but would on IE (or Opera or Konqueror).
I've been online for about half my life (I'm 25.) and was always a hardcore geek so back then I got to use a lot of HP-UX, AIX, SunOS/Solaris, etc. First real expossure to Linux was on some of the servers my friends gave me accounts on. Even back then Linux was pretty cool. I was an expert-level user of DOS/Win3.1 and pretty familiar with Novell, MacOS, and older computers ranging from the TRS-80 on. Really Linux was the best I'd seen even then for the PC (from a geek point of view). It even sucked less in most ways than AIX and especially HP-UX. I really liked SunOS/Solaris back then but it was really expensive to run at home. Irix, Alpha's, etc were fun and a lil easier to get your hands on (for a home user) but still not cheap.
The fact that back then I could install Linux w/ X on a 486DX w/ 4Mb ram and a 170Mb hdd and have a pretty usable little system says a lot. X was crap ugly and not user friendly but you could connect to the Net and telnet or web browse easier than under Windows. I had a 2400baud modem so browsing without images was pretty common. ASCII/ANSI/RIP artwork was pretty much the rule.
Linux on PPC works pretty much exactly like Linux on x86 except it takes a little more effort to find pre-compiled binaries sometimes. I can't say that it's really worth buying a Mac for but if you already have one and it isn't up to running MacOS I'd say to try Linux on it. SuSE installs and runs pretty well on Mac hardware last I checked. I think Mandrake and others also currently offer Mac versions.
I never used Amiga very much. Touched on it a little but not often enough to be very expert. I did do a lot with my C64 and C128 though.
I don't think we should have ONLY the command line but I think the command line should be a part of the user enviroment. I typically run under X (w/ Gnome) and do most of my work with the CLI. The GUI is great for apps (though they could use more CLI too) but not very effecient for complex actions like working with files. I have been thinking of making a shell script wizard though.. a lil program that makes a graphical interface to chaining together command line utilities. It'd be more work than typing the command in but easy to learn to use. Possibly a good introduction to the command line utils Unix offers.
I'd say Microsoft was a monopoly but is not anymore (but is still trying to be).. not because of any legal action that happened as much as because opensource changed the rules. Apple has always had a small but loyal following. The inroads Linux made against Windows gave Apple some breathing room to really clean up MacOS. With the fine work Apple and the BSD folks did MacOS is finally a kickass platform. I think Windows will continue to dominate the market but would not be surprised to see them gradually reduced to a more fair market share over the next decade or so. I'd expect to see MacOS make strong inroads on the home desktop and Linux make strong inroads on the enterprise/embedded desktop. I think we'll see Microsoft start producing some really high quality software too.. due largely to the new competition.