That same Dell you referenced was less then $700 from the small business section earlier in the week with an 80GB drive, free printer, free shipping, XP Pro, and a 17in LCD.
Sure, for a discontinued or refurbished model. You can also go to Apple's store, click on the "Special Deals" link, and pick up a 40 GB iPod for $329 ($70 off) or a 17" Powerbook for $2399 ($400 off).
While the kernel might be worked on and might improve by leaps and bounds, MANY of the programs available through open source is f---ing terrible and certainly nothing more than a free knockoff of a Windows/etc counterpart
But MANY commercial programs aren't innovative, either. Microsoft Money is just a poor clone of Quicken, Norton AV does the same thing as McAfee, EZ CD Creator is a clone of Toast, etc. I don't think it's fair to compare the best, most innovative commercial software, with all of the thousands of mediocre open-source programs out there. Some of the best open-source programs are incredibly innovative: BitTorrent, Python, Subversion - and others, while they superficially act similar to popular commercial programs, have dozens of innovative features: Gimp, OpenOffice, Audacity
...wasn't that the entire point of Linux in the first place?
Linux was meant to be a Unix-like operating system for PCs. It presents a Unix-like interface because that makes it possible to easily port zillions of programs written for Unix operating systems. Internally, Linux was designed from scratch, and though it uses the basic Unix model (for processes vs threads, file-based devices, etc.), it has very little in common with any other Unix in the way it actually does anything nontrivial. Want to talk about innovation? Linux scales down to little handheld devices with 8 MB of RAM, and all the way up to 1024-CPU supercomputers. All with the same kernel (and different compile-time options). No other operating system can claim to do that. Is that not innovation? (Windows CE is NOT the same kernel as Windows XP, and no version of Windows scales up to supercomputers nearly as well as Linux.)
The point is, there should NEVER be any editing of articles by anonymous people, or for that matter, any non-expert people. This is downright stupid. It doesn't matter how much process you have in place, you simply don't give "commit bits" to random, anonymous and/or inexpert persons. No open source project has EVER done this and survived.
I beg to differ. Open source projects routinely give commit bits to anyone who emails the developers with an interesting patch. Why not? It's trivial to watch diffs of all of the code they check in, and if you see anything you don't like, you can just back it out using CVS, then revoke their permission later. Same thing with a Wiki. 90% of people who contribute make the Wiki better, and since a complete history is always kept, it's easy to detect and reverse vandalism.
I'm certainly curious about what this means to the market for iPod accessories. When the 3G came out third-party manufacturers immediately dropped support for 1G and 2G iPods in most cases.
As long as this model uses the same Dock connector (no reason to believe it wouldn't) and isn't a dramatically different size (it appears to be just a few millimeters smaller), almost all accessories will still work. Plus, Apple has done a good job of giving some of the larger accessory manufacturers (like Belkin) early access to new models, so it's quite possible they're already selling accessories that are compatible with both old and new models.
2. I don't want to have switch user each time I need to do an administrator-level activity -- particlulary since brain-dead windoze takes a minute or more to do this even on a fast machine.
Then I guess even linux cannot save you from trojans/virus. Having different users for different purposes is the essence of security. Lusers who impulsively click every.exe and.scr need no admin rights.
You're missing the point. On Linux you can just type "sudo" and execute any command as an administrator. On Mac OS X, when a command need administrator priveleges, it pops up a dialog asking for your password.
On Windows, much of the time, you have to actually switch to a different user, which is time-consuming and annoying. There's no good reason it should have to be done that way.
There is a widely adopted "open" standard (VST-Virtual Studio Technology).
I'm glad that you put "open" in quotes. VST is free-as-in-beer, but not free-as-in-speech. Namely, you're not allowed to redistribute the VST SDK sourcecode. This makes it very, very difficult to include VST support in open-source programs, which is very annoying.
Re:Double spin example. Bin Laden and Saudi flight
on
Fahrenheit 9/11 Discussion
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Moore spin: Highest levels of government made arrangements to get the Saudis out of the country on 9/13 when no other regularly scheduled flights were in the air.
Conservative spin: Moore is lying, the airspace was re-opened on 9/13.
Liberal response: you missed the whole point. The point is that the U.S. government should have detained and interviewed these people to learn as much as possible about Osama bin Laden. But someone very high up owed these people a favor, and though it to be more important to make them happy than to get to the bottom of the 9/11 terror attacks. So they got to board flights out of the country long before many other important people did, not to mention regular travelers.
I have one suggestion to Bush's critics: If Bush is so bad, what would you do better? Even his opponent in the presidential race can't answer that question. Stop hating so much and start coming up with answers of your own. I'm so sick of hearing what's wrong with the USA and the current administration with no reasonable alternatives being offered except "Hate the rich!" and "Kowtow to the U.N.!"
I'm not saying I like every thing about John Kerry, and I wish he could be more articulate, but he has definitely presented some reasonable alternatives to Bush's policies. Just read his website and you will see his vision:
"We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them in Brooklyn. America's homeland security needs to take steps as big as the threats we face - and give our front lines the resources they need."
"Our nation needs a leader who has the courage to take on the big insurance and drug companies to make that same health care plan affordable for every American." (Bush's tax cuts have hurt most people more than they helped, because the money they saved on taxes was more than offset by increases in health care costs in the same period.)
"John Kerry has proposed a Military Family Bill of Rights that will provide our military families with competitive pay, good housing, decent health care, quality education for their children, first rate training, and the best possible weaponry, armor, and state-of-the-art equipment." (Meanwhile Bush has cut military pay and veteran's benefits while he's been in office.)
It's not like this software has to be on board the spacecraft. It's well under a second to do a round trip communication with a satellite, so there isn't much value to having the camera steered on board vs. from a ground computer unless you are photographing things that are over in 1/2 a second. Most anything large enough to see from orbit is going to unfolding slowly over days, not seconds.
The Hyperion instrument aboard EO-1 takes images about 512 pixels wide, at 30x30 meter resolution, in ~240 spectral bands. EO-1 does not even have close to enough bandwidth to send all of that data back to Earth at the rate it collects it - not to mention the fact that polar orbiting satellites do not usually transmit the data they collect continuously anyway - rather they burst it once per orbit. This instrument is targeting, meaning that scientists need to specify ahead of time which scenes it should capture.
The idea of the ASE project is for the satellite to process all of the data it is generating, run some simple AI, and detect things that would otherwise be missed because the images never would have been sent back to Earth.
In 22 channel surround you might be able to hear some way that Ice Ice Baby's beat is different from Under Pressure's. That video clip of Vanilla Ice explaining how his song is nothing like Under Pressure is one of the funniest things MTV has ever shown. For those of you who havn't seen it, Vanilla Ice says "Their version goes like this...ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding...and my version goes like this...ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding". I've probably seen that clip a dozen times and I have yet to tell any difference between his two renditions.
I've seen that clip. It was hilarious, but there was a difference, that only shows up when you repeat the phrase twice, like this:
Their version: ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding, ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding
My version: ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding, *ding* ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding
The added "ding" comes just before the "ding" on the first beat of each measure (on the "and" of 4, for any musicians out there!).
I can't believe this is still an issue! I can't think of a single Linux app that I still use regularly that doesn't support Windows-and-Mac-style copy and paste. I just copied some text from OpenOffice to Mozilla to Konsole, no problem. The GNOME and KDE folks agreed on a common clipboard standard years ago, and probably 90% of popular Linux desktop apps conform.
Complaining because some free Linux apps still don't support the clipboard is like complaining that the Windows clipboard is broken because some freeware text editor doesn't copy and paste between programs.
He was fired, his Ph.D was invalidated, and all the student he taught had to retake that class or their degrees would also be nullified.
I find that hard to believe. Lots of classes are taught by T.A.'s, so why would a class be invalid just because it was taught by a prof without a Ph.D.?
Considering the Ph.D. has nothing to do with your ability to teach, I think that's pretty ridiculous.
(regarding Pi) What I have to wonder is, how do we know it goes on forever? The answer is we will never know (unless it starts repeating in some big way, which doesn't seem likely), because we can always calculate more digits for it. Thus we can only saw for sure that so far we know it isn't a finite number:-)
Actually it has been proven that Pi is a transcendental number, which means that it is not the solution to any polynomial equation. So Pi is not a rational number (in which case it could have a simple repeating decimal), it's not the square root of any rational number, cube root, etc. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be some sort of pattern in the data, for some interesting definition of pattern, but it's impossible for the digits of Pi to suddenly start repeating themselves and then go on like that forever.
OK, I'm too lazy to RTFA, but, if there are infinite numbers, why would there not be infinite prime numbers, and infinite prime twins? Are there also not infinite perfect numbers, or...?
That's a good question.
The fact that there are an infinite number of numbers doesn't immediately imply that there are an infinite number of primes, but Euclid figured out how to prove this is true in about 300 BC. It only takes a few sentences to explain it; here's one example.
It is definitely not obvious that there are an infinite number of twin primes. It has been an open question for more than a century, and some of the greatest minds in mathematics have worked on it. If this proof is correct, it will be a major result.
I was trying to think of a good example of something that there is not an infinite number of. Browsing through MathWorld, I found Truncatable Primes - there are only 83 of these.
Can anyone think of any other examples of a type of number that only has a finite number of them, even though at first glance it seems like there might be an infinite number of them?
Serious question: why do Americans think prison rape is amusing?
I'm with you. I don't think it's funny and I don't think anyone deserves that.
Even if you do think that some criminals deserve it, what about the tens of thousands of innocent people who were wrongly convicted and ended up in prison?
...the scientists in JPL are already in an unhealthy state due to the difference between Earth's and Mars' day...
This particular disequilibrium of sleep will accentuate the reactions to the loss.
Actually to the best of my knowledge (I work at JPL, though not on MER) everyone is back to working on Earth time for the rest of the mission. It just means they have to plan ahead more.
I have no idea what it will be, but I'd be willing to bet that 10.4 "Tiger" includes a new major OS feature that takes advantage of Quartz Extreme.
For those that aren't familiar with it, Quartz Extreme, which was introduced in 10.2, uses OpenGL to "composite" your screen image. In other words, all application windows are bitmaps on your graphics card, and your graphics card puts them together to make the overlapping windows that you see.
In 10.2, the result was a 30% speed improvement for many operations, because the CPU no longer needed to spend as much time redrawing the screen. Eye candy like soft drop shadows on every window and on the mouse cursor, the Genie effect, and Dock magnification got a lot faster and smoother.
In 10.3, they added Expose and Fast User Switching (with a cool rotating animation) - neither of which would have been realistic without Quartz Extreme. Thanks to Quartz Extreme, my 733 MHz G4 had no problem Expose-ing 18 windows instantly, perfectly smoothly, including continuing to play a QuickTime movie while rearranging the windows! (Hint: hold down Shift while you press your Expose shortcut to watch it in slow motion!)
So anyway, in 10.4 I expect to see some major new OS feature that takes advantage of Quartz Extreme. Just think: they have the ability to instantly make any window partially transparent, rotate any window in 3-D, warp the whole desktop under the mouse, you name it - so I think there's a good chance they've come up with a clever new way to exploit this. Anyone could implement Expose on any OS - but without Quartz Extreme you couldn't possibly make it so fast and so smooth.
I trust Google as it stands today, but after the IPO I will trust them as far as I can throw a server farm. Any public company has a fudicial responsibility to their investors
Everything I've read says that Google is not selling anything close to 50% of the company. They would still be privately controlled by the same people who have been running it all this time.
Any 3D GUI is going to have to account for 2D programs running around its environment, just like Windows had to account for DOS programs and Linux GUIs always let you have command line windows.
Somebody's got to get a 3D desktop environment stable before anybody bothers developing on top of that platform.
I see what you're getting at, but I don't fully agree. People use a computer because of applications, not because of window managers and desktops. When the applications you need are available on multiple platforms, that's great, you can choose the best OS, but the applications come first.
I think there needs to be a killer app that is truly 3D and only makes sense in a 3D desktop environment. Then it will be worth changing.
I think Apple has it right in the meantime. They're starting to use 3D effects in the OS to help reinforce metaphors, like user switching, but the desktop is still fundamentally 2D.
Slashdot Mirror
That same Dell you referenced was less then $700 from the small business section earlier in the week with an 80GB drive, free printer, free shipping, XP Pro, and a 17in LCD.
Sure, for a discontinued or refurbished model. You can also go to Apple's store, click on the "Special Deals" link, and pick up a 40 GB iPod for $329 ($70 off) or a 17" Powerbook for $2399 ($400 off).
For decades, science fiction writers and futurists alike have been predicting the day that laser technology would finally come to fruition.
<Monty Burns>Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the Sun. I will do the next best thing... block it out!</Monty Burns>
But MANY commercial programs aren't innovative, either. Microsoft Money is just a poor clone of Quicken, Norton AV does the same thing as McAfee, EZ CD Creator is a clone of Toast, etc. I don't think it's fair to compare the best, most innovative commercial software, with all of the thousands of mediocre open-source programs out there. Some of the best open-source programs are incredibly innovative: BitTorrent, Python, Subversion - and others, while they superficially act similar to popular commercial programs, have dozens of innovative features: Gimp, OpenOffice, Audacity
Linux was meant to be a Unix-like operating system for PCs. It presents a Unix-like interface because that makes it possible to easily port zillions of programs written for Unix operating systems. Internally, Linux was designed from scratch, and though it uses the basic Unix model (for processes vs threads, file-based devices, etc.), it has very little in common with any other Unix in the way it actually does anything nontrivial. Want to talk about innovation? Linux scales down to little handheld devices with 8 MB of RAM, and all the way up to 1024-CPU supercomputers. All with the same kernel (and different compile-time options). No other operating system can claim to do that. Is that not innovation? (Windows CE is NOT the same kernel as Windows XP, and no version of Windows scales up to supercomputers nearly as well as Linux.)
The point is, there should NEVER be any editing of articles by anonymous people, or for that matter, any non-expert people. This is downright stupid. It doesn't matter how much process you have in place, you simply don't give "commit bits" to random, anonymous and/or inexpert persons. No open source project has EVER done this and survived.
I beg to differ. Open source projects routinely give commit bits to anyone who emails the developers with an interesting patch. Why not? It's trivial to watch diffs of all of the code they check in, and if you see anything you don't like, you can just back it out using CVS, then revoke their permission later. Same thing with a Wiki. 90% of people who contribute make the Wiki better, and since a complete history is always kept, it's easy to detect and reverse vandalism.
I'm certainly curious about what this means to the market for iPod accessories. When the 3G came out third-party manufacturers immediately dropped support for 1G and 2G iPods in most cases.
As long as this model uses the same Dock connector (no reason to believe it wouldn't) and isn't a dramatically different size (it appears to be just a few millimeters smaller), almost all accessories will still work. Plus, Apple has done a good job of giving some of the larger accessory manufacturers (like Belkin) early access to new models, so it's quite possible they're already selling accessories that are compatible with both old and new models.
Then I guess even linux cannot save you from trojans/virus. Having different users for different purposes is the essence of security. Lusers who impulsively click every
You're missing the point. On Linux you can just type "sudo" and execute any command as an administrator. On Mac OS X, when a command need administrator priveleges, it pops up a dialog asking for your password.
On Windows, much of the time, you have to actually switch to a different user, which is time-consuming and annoying. There's no good reason it should have to be done that way.
There is a widely adopted "open" standard (VST-Virtual Studio Technology).
I'm glad that you put "open" in quotes. VST is free-as-in-beer, but not free-as-in-speech. Namely, you're not allowed to redistribute the VST SDK sourcecode. This makes it very, very difficult to include VST support in open-source programs, which is very annoying.
Moore spin: Highest levels of government made arrangements to get the Saudis out of the country on 9/13 when no other regularly scheduled flights were in the air.
Conservative spin: Moore is lying, the airspace was re-opened on 9/13.
Liberal response: you missed the whole point. The point is that the U.S. government should have detained and interviewed these people to learn as much as possible about Osama bin Laden. But someone very high up owed these people a favor, and though it to be more important to make them happy than to get to the bottom of the 9/11 terror attacks. So they got to board flights out of the country long before many other important people did, not to mention regular travelers.
I have one suggestion to Bush's critics: If Bush is so bad, what would you do better? Even his opponent in the presidential race can't answer that question. Stop hating so much and start coming up with answers of your own. I'm so sick of hearing what's wrong with the USA and the current administration with no reasonable alternatives being offered except "Hate the rich!" and "Kowtow to the U.N.!"
I'm not saying I like every thing about John Kerry, and I wish he could be more articulate, but he has definitely presented some reasonable alternatives to Bush's policies. Just read his website and you will see his vision:
"We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them in Brooklyn. America's homeland security needs to take steps as big as the threats we face - and give our front lines the resources they need."
"Our nation needs a leader who has the courage to take on the big insurance and drug companies to make that same health care plan affordable for every American." (Bush's tax cuts have hurt most people more than they helped, because the money they saved on taxes was more than offset by increases in health care costs in the same period.)
"John Kerry has proposed a Military Family Bill of Rights that will provide our military families with competitive pay, good housing, decent health care, quality education for their children, first rate training, and the best possible weaponry, armor, and state-of-the-art equipment." (Meanwhile Bush has cut military pay and veteran's benefits while he's been in office.)
It's not like this software has to be on board the spacecraft. It's well under a second to do a round trip communication with a satellite, so there isn't much value to having the camera steered on board vs. from a ground computer unless you are photographing things that are over in 1/2 a second. Most anything large enough to see from orbit is going to unfolding slowly over days, not seconds.
The Hyperion instrument aboard EO-1 takes images about 512 pixels wide, at 30x30 meter resolution, in ~240 spectral bands. EO-1 does not even have close to enough bandwidth to send all of that data back to Earth at the rate it collects it - not to mention the fact that polar orbiting satellites do not usually transmit the data they collect continuously anyway - rather they burst it once per orbit. This instrument is targeting, meaning that scientists need to specify ahead of time which scenes it should capture.
The idea of the ASE project is for the satellite to process all of the data it is generating, run some simple AI, and detect things that would otherwise be missed because the images never would have been sent back to Earth.
In 22 channel surround you might be able to hear some way that Ice Ice Baby's beat is different from Under Pressure's. That video clip of Vanilla Ice explaining how his song is nothing like Under Pressure is one of the funniest things MTV has ever shown. For those of you who havn't seen it, Vanilla Ice says "Their version goes like this...ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding...and my version goes like this...ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding". I've probably seen that clip a dozen times and I have yet to tell any difference between his two renditions.
I've seen that clip. It was hilarious, but there was a difference, that only shows up when you repeat the phrase twice, like this:
Their version: ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding, ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding
My version: ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding, *ding* ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding
The added "ding" comes just before the "ding" on the first beat of each measure (on the "and" of 4, for any musicians out there!).
Will they use the money saved to use better meat?
McDonald's burgers. Not meaty enough for carnivores. Not meatless enough for vegetarians. Why do people eat them? Oh yeah, fast and cheap.
I can't believe this is still an issue! I can't think of a single Linux app that I still use regularly that doesn't support Windows-and-Mac-style copy and paste. I just copied some text from OpenOffice to Mozilla to Konsole, no problem. The GNOME and KDE folks agreed on a common clipboard standard years ago, and probably 90% of popular Linux desktop apps conform.
Complaining because some free Linux apps still don't support the clipboard is like complaining that the Windows clipboard is broken because some freeware text editor doesn't copy and paste between programs.
He was fired, his Ph.D was invalidated, and all the student he taught had to retake that class or their degrees would also be nullified.
I find that hard to believe. Lots of classes are taught by T.A.'s, so why would a class be invalid just because it was taught by a prof without a Ph.D.?
Considering the Ph.D. has nothing to do with your ability to teach, I think that's pretty ridiculous.
(regarding Pi) What I have to wonder is, how do we know it goes on forever? The answer is we will never know (unless it starts repeating in some big way, which doesn't seem likely), because we can always calculate more digits for it. Thus we can only saw for sure that so far we know it isn't a finite number :-)
Actually it has been proven that Pi is a transcendental number, which means that it is not the solution to any polynomial equation. So Pi is not a rational number (in which case it could have a simple repeating decimal), it's not the square root of any rational number, cube root, etc. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be some sort of pattern in the data, for some interesting definition of pattern, but it's impossible for the digits of Pi to suddenly start repeating themselves and then go on like that forever.
OK, I'm too lazy to RTFA, but, if there are infinite numbers, why would there not be infinite prime numbers, and infinite prime twins? Are there also not infinite perfect numbers, or ...?
That's a good question.
The fact that there are an infinite number of numbers doesn't immediately imply that there are an infinite number of primes, but Euclid figured out how to prove this is true in about 300 BC. It only takes a few sentences to explain it; here's one example.
It is definitely not obvious that there are an infinite number of twin primes. It has been an open question for more than a century, and some of the greatest minds in mathematics have worked on it. If this proof is correct, it will be a major result.
I was trying to think of a good example of something that there is not an infinite number of. Browsing through MathWorld, I found Truncatable Primes - there are only 83 of these.
Can anyone think of any other examples of a type of number that only has a finite number of them, even though at first glance it seems like there might be an infinite number of them?
Serious question: why do Americans think prison rape is amusing?
I'm with you. I don't think it's funny and I don't think anyone deserves that.
Even if you do think that some criminals deserve it, what about the tens of thousands of innocent people who were wrongly convicted and ended up in prison?
It would be great if you could add PowerPC and UltraSparc processors to that list.
...the scientists in JPL are already in an unhealthy state due to the difference between Earth's and Mars' day...
This particular disequilibrium of sleep will accentuate the reactions to the loss.
Actually to the best of my knowledge (I work at JPL, though not on MER) everyone is back to working on Earth time for the rest of the mission. It just means they have to plan ahead more.
*rinse* *lather* *repeat*
Ummmm, I think you have a bug in your shampooing code.
Proper programming perspective? Please. People-centered programming? Pretty pathetic.
Programmer's purpose: problem-solving. Programmers prefer power - parallelizing, profiling, pushing pixels. Programmers prefer Pentium PCs - parsimonious processing power. Pentium-optimization passes Python's popularity.
Ponder.
[Previous painful posts: P, D]
I have no idea what it will be, but I'd be willing to bet that 10.4 "Tiger" includes a new major OS feature that takes advantage of Quartz Extreme.
For those that aren't familiar with it, Quartz Extreme, which was introduced in 10.2, uses OpenGL to "composite" your screen image. In other words, all application windows are bitmaps on your graphics card, and your graphics card puts them together to make the overlapping windows that you see.
In 10.2, the result was a 30% speed improvement for many operations, because the CPU no longer needed to spend as much time redrawing the screen. Eye candy like soft drop shadows on every window and on the mouse cursor, the Genie effect, and Dock magnification got a lot faster and smoother.
In 10.3, they added Expose and Fast User Switching (with a cool rotating animation) - neither of which would have been realistic without Quartz Extreme. Thanks to Quartz Extreme, my 733 MHz G4 had no problem Expose-ing 18 windows instantly, perfectly smoothly, including continuing to play a QuickTime movie while rearranging the windows! (Hint: hold down Shift while you press your Expose shortcut to watch it in slow motion!)
So anyway, in 10.4 I expect to see some major new OS feature that takes advantage of Quartz Extreme. Just think: they have the ability to instantly make any window partially transparent, rotate any window in 3-D, warp the whole desktop under the mouse, you name it - so I think there's a good chance they've come up with a clever new way to exploit this. Anyone could implement Expose on any OS - but without Quartz Extreme you couldn't possibly make it so fast and so smooth.
The original Mac was 640x480 or less, on a tiny 12 or 13 inch screen.
FYI, the original Mac had a black-and-white monitor with a resolution of exactly 512x342 pixels.
I trust Google as it stands today, but after the IPO I will trust them as far as I can throw a server farm. Any public company has a fudicial responsibility to their investors
Everything I've read says that Google is not selling anything close to 50% of the company. They would still be privately controlled by the same people who have been running it all this time.
Any 3D GUI is going to have to account for 2D programs running around its environment, just like Windows had to account for DOS programs and Linux GUIs always let you have command line windows.
Somebody's got to get a 3D desktop environment stable before anybody bothers developing on top of that platform.
I see what you're getting at, but I don't fully agree. People use a computer because of applications, not because of window managers and desktops. When the applications you need are available on multiple platforms, that's great, you can choose the best OS, but the applications come first.
I think there needs to be a killer app that is truly 3D and only makes sense in a 3D desktop environment. Then it will be worth changing.
I think Apple has it right in the meantime. They're starting to use 3D effects in the OS to help reinforce metaphors, like user switching, but the desktop is still fundamentally 2D.