Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
I was adding two integer variables of single digit value. That's how I happened to become suspicious. Normally I wouldn't have noticed an arithmetic error, or have attributed it to "something about rounding that I don't understand".
I'm fairly certain that I could have corrected that particular problem. (In fact I did.) I can't give many details because: 1) it was about a decade ago and 2) I couldn't reproduce it intentionally.
I'm reporting my personal experience. MSBasic is the only language that I've ever had do something like that to me. Not Lisp, not Fortran, not Algol, not Compass, not Snobol, not FAP, not Python, not Ruby, not Smalltalk, not Java, not Ada,... (well, you can see I have no loyalty to any particular language). For each one I could talk for longer than anyone would want to listen about it's defects. None of them lied to me this way. (OK, admittedly in the very first class I took in programming the computer would occasionally lie in this way...but a. that was because of flakey vacuum tubes and b. it didn't make the same error if you resubmitted the job.)
Why do you think it's growing? Society has always been biased against those who weren't sociall apt.
WRIW, it's my general feeling that discrimination against shyness has decreased over the decades. This doesn't mean it's decreased very much. It's more that people now are generally more isolated than they were in earlier decades, and that (most kinds of) shyness is less of a problem when you are interacting over the net than in person.
OTOH, it used to be that shy or not, you were forced out into social situations. I'm not sure that's as true as it used to be. A part of the more general isolation is that those who naturally have trouble with overly isolating themselves aren't coerced as much (by external factors) to interact. So they don't do it as much, and get less practice. Perhaps this means that they become, relatively, even more inept.
However, don't interpret this as discrimination, or an increase in discrimination. I don't think that's what's happening at all. (Well, at least in my neck of the woods.)
Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You never heard of Python, Ruby, or Smalltalk? That explains your problem.
For years even though I swore at VB I didn't really hate it. Then I caught it in an arithmetic mistake. I, a human, caught a computer at an arithmetic mistake. Understand, I'm not talking about the program, I traced the error down to one specific statement in a program, placed print statements before and after it. VB made an arithmetic mistake. Then I started to wonder about all the larger numbers that I hadn't checked over the years.
That was the last program that I ever wrote that used VB for arithmetic. The next one I used an external Eiffel program to do the arithmetic. The one after that I had it all happen in an Excel spreadsheet. Since them I've moved to Python and Ruby...and totally off of MS systems.
I don't believe that anyone who is a decent programmer likes VB, though many use it due to coercions of various forms. (You mention interesting jobs.) Most people probably haven't noticed that it sometimes lies. (And maybe they've stopped doing that. This happened in MSAccess2000, around 2000.)
No dialect of BASIC has ever been a decent programming language, throughout it's history. (Well, there are lots of versions that I haven't tried, so that's excessive. Some people said that Pick Basic was quite good.) It strongly encourages bad programming habits and discourages several good ones. There are dialects of BASIC in which it is actually impossible to write a decent program. Or a stable one (different group). This isn't to assert that it can't be very convenient. Especially in environments that are designed to encourage it's use.
Remember that this isn't the paper. This is some reporter's idea of what would make a good story based on the paper.
I'm attempting to find the original article, but I haven't yet been successful. (It's not listed in the current table of contents, and there's no obvious search for articles.)
Search failed. (Lots of references to it, but not the original article.)
One significant difference is that Transgaming advertises that Cedega runs Civilization3, and CrossOver doesn't. Transgaming is lying.
Well, perhaps it does work on some systems, but it sure didn't work on mine, and they gave me less than no help. This is the more annoying as they had it working a year or two ago, and then dropped it.
CrossOver doesn't advertise running as many of the programs that I'm interested in (not many, mainly games or VERY old), but they don't appear to lie about what they do run.
I may think the patents should be thrown out, but at least this time the targets are companies that deserve the grief of dealing with the lawsuits. Perhaps one of them will sue the USPTO for malfeasance. (That's probably not possible, but I can dream.)
Well, the lifespan has to be approximately right. It could be longer, but much shorter and there isn't that much reason to evolve intelligence. Mind you, if they run their bodies hotter or colder this is subject to variation. (Chemical reaction speed being thermally determined.)
If their lifespan is longer, one needs to wonder what part of their lifespan is longer? Childhood or adult? It would make a big difference as to their nature. Long childhood would lead to more flexible thinkers. Long adult would lead to great emphasis on stability (presuming both adults were charged with rearing the children). OTOH, if intelligence were a sex linked display, like a peacock's tail, IP would be EXTREMELY jealously protected...and the non-displaying sex would be relatively (grossly?) stupid.
A large part of what we are is determined by evolving in small groups of individuals who were close kin to each other. Without this we probably wouldn't have evolved altruism or mercy. It's still rather unreliable, but we exhibit more of it than almost any other animal. As it is, it is sufficient to enable us to evolve rather complex societies. (We *do* need to keep a constant eye out to prevent cheaters. [Mr. Gates.] But this is the expected result from game-theoretic simulations.)
Do we assume the same thing for aliens? How else could you evolve a planetary civilization? Is THAT the answer to Fermi's paradox? ("Where is everybody?")
Where did you get it? The last portable I got with Linux installed came with a MSWind install disk. (IBM...quite awhile ago.) Under Linux the modem didn't work. (I still didn't install MSWind, I just bought a modem card...but ***.)
At least now I know enough to ask the right questions. I won't buy a portable that doesn't support Linux. I believe that Emperor Linux tells you what of the hardware doesn't work on the Linux they install. That's better than IBM did.
Still, where did you get your computer with Linux pre-installed. I want to check it out.
Sorry, it's been years (decades?) since I read my original source, and the only reference that I was able to track down on the web is a book by John Cash (Johnny Cash?) called Man in White, which I've never read, so I'm depending on a book review as to it's coverage.
If it helps I suspect that my source was a college level history text -- and not one aimed at history majors... but I long ago discarded all my college texts. Even the math. (I even had to replace Knuth at one point. Too many moves with no place to store stuff.)
I believe that long before the "Christians" became the official state religion of Rome, there was a Roman army lead by a "Christian" general who, based on his own judgment and initiative, exterminated the Nazarenes living in Judea.
There wasn't official state support, but the persecution was sporadic, and depended highly on a) what your political connections were and b) who was emperor. (At certain periods even well connected Christians found it wise to "go underground". Often they were able to resurface later.)
Ah.. because I accepted the statement of an ancestral post that the effectiveness would be limited to animals bearing the same set of tRNA molecules. Granted, depending on the particular target chosen this might not limit itself to people, but it easily could. And if it did, then the area conquered would be worth more later, presuming that there was anyone left to take it.
I can understand that you are in a hurry, but academic research generally takes several years to turn into products even when federal regulators *don't* get involved. Since this is medical, then you can be certain that they will. That probably means around a decade even if they don't run into any problems. Given the area, one can be fairly certain that they WILL run into problems. So figure that this might turn into a real product in 10-20 years. (There are other approaches that, while less general, are further along. I can't guess whether any of they will be helpful to you, but they things to research are things that were announced around 10 years ago, or a bit longer.)
This is only true when they actually release the relevant technical information. For software patents that would, at MINIMUM include complete source code and sufficient datafiles to allow a compiled system to be created. It should also include theoretical arguments as to why various design choices were made.
Generally, as a short-hand for "that ain't gonna happen" I just say software should not be patentable. When I explain in longer form, I also assert that holding a patent on something should exclude the right to hold a copyright on it.
Your list is considerably different than mine would have been. However, I am shifting over to D (Digital Mars D, http://www.digitalmars.com/d/index.html ) as something that fits more closely with what I think C++ should have developed into.
I don't know the current relative status of Gnome vs. KDE in ram limited machines. OTOH, I can definitely state that when KDE2.(0?) came out, I was forced to shift one of my machines from KDE to Gnome. (Later Gnome also fattened up, and I had to revert to an earlier system. Red Hat 6.0, I believe.)
There was definitely a period of time when KDE was considerably bloated WRT Gnome. Admittedly, that says nothing about current relative sizes, but it would have sufficed to establish a belief that might well persist. (I still tend to believe that Gnome is smaller. [It had better be, given it's relative lack of friendliness.])
That said: As an end user I prefer KDE, but as a developer I prefer Gnome. Partially this is licensing. (I find myself offended, and can't say why, that if I start developing a program with the GPL version of Qt, I am forbidden to later switch it over to the commercial version. This is clearly stupid, as: 1) I can't imagine being in circumstances when I would want to make that switch, and 2) With Gnome there ISN'T a commercial version to switch to. Nonetheless, I find that it repels me from developing with QT. What ought to be more important, but is actually secondary, I don't like depending on linking C++. I want to be able to link C code (and more importantly, from other languages that use the C calling conventions).
So, anyway, as a developer I prefer Gnome, even though as an end-user I prefer KDE. This means I have a HUGE install on my systems, but in recent years that hasn't been a significant problem.
To be totally fair, most major countries that are powerful show no restraint in leveraging their use of power. The US is unique only in that it was the first country to implement weapons theoretically capable of wiping out all mammals, or at least all large ones.
We have no reason to believe that any other country would have acted less extremely than we did. If anything, history appears to label us as unusually hesitant in deploying brute force. (Doubt it? Read some history. Learn about the Assyrians, the Romans, the Mongols, etc.) We have generally been as peaceful as the Egyptians, which some attribute to ours being a commercial empire more than a military one.
That doesn't make this weapon concept any less dangerous. (Although, it might be less vile than atomic weapons, as it would primarily kill off only people. That could save evolution several million years, and the sun won't last forever.)
P.S.: This is kind of thing is one of the less pleasant answers to the Fermi paradox.
Requiring that information be easily available MIGHT me more of a burden, but it's justifiable anyway. One can't make informed choices without information.
OTOH, I already see lots of things that advertise "0% TransFats!" in brightly colored letters. So it can't be THAT much of a burden.
On what basis do you assert that the change will be slow? So far it has been, but that's not evidence that things will continue this way.
E.g., it has been observed that liquid water is leaking from *under* the Greenland ice cap. That implies that the ice cap is lubricated. If some major part of it starts to slide the friction will create heat, melting more ice near the base. This could quickly lead to a large amount of ice moving from being supported on land to floating. What's large? Nobody knows what a reasonable guess for how much could move at once. Probably not all of it, likely less than half. How much less? ??
It could happen that the next event is a 2 foot rise in the ocean level, all at one go. *!NO!* coastal city is prepared (or not that I know of). And 2 feet isn't the maximum. It's a "small chunk". And that small chunk would cause much ice that hadn't been about to leave to quickly depart (since now it's base was under water, and it's starting to float).
We don't know how rapidly the change can come on. We've records that some of the past shifts have been "very quick", but paleontological dating usually considers anything that happens in only a century to be too fast to measure.
Sorry, sanitation gets the prize for most effective medical intervention. Vaccines are up there, but not at the top. (I forget what's in second place. Indoor heating? Water pipes? Something we don't think of as medical.)
Occasionally greedy companies can act to block something "too good", but nimble smaller groups by concept have to stake their claim at being better than the behemoth.
Blocking the nimble smaller groups is one of the purposes of patents.
I haven't tried alacarte. I have tried an earlier Gnome menu editor (don't know the name) and was quite underwhelmed. It was significantly less capable than the one that shipped with Gnome around 1999...before they started dumbing it down. (Sawfish? Sawmill? around that time.)
Whatever. If it requires mono I'm not going to be looking at it...otherwise I'll check it out.
I haven't been taking Java seriously as a programming language because there hasn't been a libre version. Only a gratis one. I'm also rather glad that of the various plausible licenses they chose the GPL, but that's an "optional extra".
It's conventional to claim that OS/X is a more "user friendly" desktop than Ubuntu... but I don't think I agree. I've used both, and I've helped my wife with both. Neither of us like OSX, and I like Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu).
The problem is in applications. Animation programs, iMovie, iTunes, etc. Linux just can't compete there as far as the end user is concerned. Worrying about the perfection of the desktop is wasting time. Let it get better as it is improved, but worry more about stability and fixing bugs. Leave added glitz to the applications. (The exception here is that Gnome *REALLY* *REALLY* *REALLY* needs a menu editor. It's unusable to many people without easy customization.)
OTOH, Gnome may be aimed at commercial users who don't want the end user desktop to be customizable. If so, I fee that this is a mistake, but fortunately KDE exists.
On the contrary, hot air is always lighter than air unless you pressurize it.
The problem is that the vehicle weighs something, and as the air gets thinner the relative displacement achieved by heating air internal to the surface decreases. I.e., the air inside has to weight enough less than an equal volume of the air outside to support the weight of the casing + any desired cargo. As the air outside gets thinner, any particular volume of it gets lighter, until, at the end, a good vacuum wouldn't be light enough to counterbalance the weight of the casing+cargo. (Of course, expecting a balloon to be blown up using a good vacuum is a trifle silly, but even if you could it wouldn't work.)
OTOH, balloons have gotten up into the stratosphere, and that would be beyond most of the air friction, so it might make an interesting disposable launch pad. But you'd either need a very light rocket, or a truly enormous balloon.
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I was adding two integer variables of single digit value. That's how I happened to become suspicious. Normally I wouldn't have noticed an arithmetic error, or have attributed it to "something about rounding that I don't understand".
... (well, you can see I have no loyalty to any particular language). For each one I could talk for longer than anyone would want to listen about it's defects. None of them lied to me this way. (OK, admittedly in the very first class I took in programming the computer would occasionally lie in this way...but a. that was because of flakey vacuum tubes and b. it didn't make the same error if you resubmitted the job.)
I'm fairly certain that I could have corrected that particular problem. (In fact I did.) I can't give many details because:
1) it was about a decade ago and
2) I couldn't reproduce it intentionally.
I'm reporting my personal experience. MSBasic is the only language that I've ever had do something like that to me. Not Lisp, not Fortran, not Algol, not Compass, not Snobol, not FAP, not Python, not Ruby, not Smalltalk, not Java, not Ada,
Why do you think it's growing? Society has always been biased against those who weren't sociall apt.
WRIW, it's my general feeling that discrimination against shyness has decreased over the decades. This doesn't mean it's decreased very much. It's more that people now are generally more isolated than they were in earlier decades, and that (most kinds of) shyness is less of a problem when you are interacting over the net than in person.
OTOH, it used to be that shy or not, you were forced out into social situations. I'm not sure that's as true as it used to be. A part of the more general isolation is that those who naturally have trouble with overly isolating themselves aren't coerced as much (by external factors) to interact. So they don't do it as much, and get less practice. Perhaps this means that they become, relatively, even more inept.
However, don't interpret this as discrimination, or an increase in discrimination. I don't think that's what's happening at all. (Well, at least in my neck of the woods.)
You never heard of Python, Ruby, or Smalltalk? That explains your problem.
For years even though I swore at VB I didn't really hate it. Then I caught it in an arithmetic mistake. I, a human, caught a computer at an arithmetic mistake. Understand, I'm not talking about the program, I traced the error down to one specific statement in a program, placed print statements before and after it. VB made an arithmetic mistake. Then I started to wonder about all the larger numbers that I hadn't checked over the years.
That was the last program that I ever wrote that used VB for arithmetic. The next one I used an external Eiffel program to do the arithmetic. The one after that I had it all happen in an Excel spreadsheet. Since them I've moved to Python and Ruby...and totally off of MS systems.
I don't believe that anyone who is a decent programmer likes VB, though many use it due to coercions of various forms. (You mention interesting jobs.) Most people probably haven't noticed that it sometimes lies. (And maybe they've stopped doing that. This happened in MSAccess2000, around 2000.)
No dialect of BASIC has ever been a decent programming language, throughout it's history. (Well, there are lots of versions that I haven't tried, so that's excessive. Some people said that Pick Basic was quite good.) It strongly encourages bad programming habits and discourages several good ones. There are dialects of BASIC in which it is actually impossible to write a decent program. Or a stable one (different group). This isn't to assert that it can't be very convenient. Especially in environments that are designed to encourage it's use.
Remember that this isn't the paper. This is some reporter's idea of what would make a good story based on the paper.
I'm attempting to find the original article, but I haven't yet been successful. (It's not listed in the current table of contents, and there's no obvious search for articles.)
Search failed. (Lots of references to it, but not the original article.)
One significant difference is that Transgaming advertises that Cedega runs Civilization3, and CrossOver doesn't. Transgaming is lying.
Well, perhaps it does work on some systems, but it sure didn't work on mine, and they gave me less than no help. This is the more annoying as they had it working a year or two ago, and then dropped it.
CrossOver doesn't advertise running as many of the programs that I'm interested in (not many, mainly games or VERY old), but they don't appear to lie about what they do run.
I may think the patents should be thrown out, but at least this time the targets are companies that deserve the grief of dealing with the lawsuits. Perhaps one of them will sue the USPTO for malfeasance. (That's probably not possible, but I can dream.)
Well, the lifespan has to be approximately right. It could be longer, but much shorter and there isn't that much reason to evolve intelligence. Mind you, if they run their bodies hotter or colder this is subject to variation. (Chemical reaction speed being thermally determined.)
If their lifespan is longer, one needs to wonder what part of their lifespan is longer? Childhood or adult? It would make a big difference as to their nature. Long childhood would lead to more flexible thinkers. Long adult would lead to great emphasis on stability (presuming both adults were charged with rearing the children). OTOH, if intelligence were a sex linked display, like a peacock's tail, IP would be EXTREMELY jealously protected...and the non-displaying sex would be relatively (grossly?) stupid.
A large part of what we are is determined by evolving in small groups of individuals who were close kin to each other. Without this we probably wouldn't have evolved altruism or mercy. It's still rather unreliable, but we exhibit more of it than almost any other animal. As it is, it is sufficient to enable us to evolve rather complex societies. (We *do* need to keep a constant eye out to prevent cheaters. [Mr. Gates.] But this is the expected result from game-theoretic simulations.)
Do we assume the same thing for aliens? How else could you evolve a planetary civilization? Is THAT the answer to Fermi's paradox? ("Where is everybody?")
Where did you get it?
The last portable I got with Linux installed came with a MSWind install disk. (IBM...quite awhile ago.) Under Linux the modem didn't work. (I still didn't install MSWind, I just bought a modem card...but ***.)
At least now I know enough to ask the right questions. I won't buy a portable that doesn't support Linux. I believe that Emperor Linux tells you what of the hardware doesn't work on the Linux they install. That's better than IBM did.
Still, where did you get your computer with Linux pre-installed. I want to check it out.
Sorry, it's been years (decades?) since I read my original source, and the only reference that I was able to track down on the web is a book by John Cash (Johnny Cash?) called Man in White, which I've never read, so I'm depending on a book review as to it's coverage.
... but I long ago discarded all my college texts. Even the math. (I even had to replace Knuth at one point. Too many moves with no place to store stuff.)
If it helps I suspect that my source was a college level history text -- and not one aimed at history majors
I believe that long before the "Christians" became the official state religion of Rome, there was a Roman army lead by a "Christian" general who, based on his own judgment and initiative, exterminated the Nazarenes living in Judea.
There wasn't official state support, but the persecution was sporadic, and depended highly on a) what your political connections were and b) who was emperor. (At certain periods even well connected Christians found it wise to "go underground". Often they were able to resurface later.)
Ah.. because I accepted the statement of an ancestral post that the effectiveness would be limited to animals bearing the same set of tRNA molecules. Granted, depending on the particular target chosen this might not limit itself to people, but it easily could. And if it did, then the area conquered would be worth more later, presuming that there was anyone left to take it.
I can understand that you are in a hurry, but academic research generally takes several years to turn into products even when federal regulators *don't* get involved. Since this is medical, then you can be certain that they will. That probably means around a decade even if they don't run into any problems. Given the area, one can be fairly certain that they WILL run into problems. So figure that this might turn into a real product in 10-20 years. (There are other approaches that, while less general, are further along. I can't guess whether any of they will be helpful to you, but they things to research are things that were announced around 10 years ago, or a bit longer.)
This is only true when they actually release the relevant technical information. For software patents that would, at MINIMUM include complete source code and sufficient datafiles to allow a compiled system to be created. It should also include theoretical arguments as to why various design choices were made.
Generally, as a short-hand for "that ain't gonna happen" I just say software should not be patentable. When I explain in longer form, I also assert that holding a patent on something should exclude the right to hold a copyright on it.
Your list is considerably different than mine would have been. However, I am shifting over to D (Digital Mars D, http://www.digitalmars.com/d/index.html ) as something that fits more closely with what I think C++ should have developed into.
I don't know the current relative status of Gnome vs. KDE in ram limited machines. OTOH, I can definitely state that when KDE2.(0?) came out, I was forced to shift one of my machines from KDE to Gnome. (Later Gnome also fattened up, and I had to revert to an earlier system. Red Hat 6.0, I believe.)
There was definitely a period of time when KDE was considerably bloated WRT Gnome. Admittedly, that says nothing about current relative sizes, but it would have sufficed to establish a belief that might well persist. (I still tend to believe that Gnome is smaller. [It had better be, given it's relative lack of friendliness.])
That said: As an end user I prefer KDE, but as a developer I prefer Gnome. Partially this is licensing. (I find myself offended, and can't say why, that if I start developing a program with the GPL version of Qt, I am forbidden to later switch it over to the commercial version. This is clearly stupid, as:
1) I can't imagine being in circumstances when I would want to make that switch, and
2) With Gnome there ISN'T a commercial version to switch to.
Nonetheless, I find that it repels me from developing with QT.
What ought to be more important, but is actually secondary, I don't like depending on linking C++. I want to be able to link C code (and more importantly, from other languages that use the C calling conventions).
So, anyway, as a developer I prefer Gnome, even though as an end-user I prefer KDE. This means I have a HUGE install on my systems, but in recent years that hasn't been a significant problem.
To be totally fair, most major countries that are powerful show no restraint in leveraging their use of power. The US is unique only in that it was the first country to implement weapons theoretically capable of wiping out all mammals, or at least all large ones.
We have no reason to believe that any other country would have acted less extremely than we did. If anything, history appears to label us as unusually hesitant in deploying brute force. (Doubt it? Read some history. Learn about the Assyrians, the Romans, the Mongols, etc.) We have generally been as peaceful as the Egyptians, which some attribute to ours being a commercial empire more than a military one.
That doesn't make this weapon concept any less dangerous. (Although, it might be less vile than atomic weapons, as it would primarily kill off only people. That could save evolution several million years, and the sun won't last forever.)
P.S.: This is kind of thing is one of the less pleasant answers to the Fermi paradox.
Requiring that information be easily available MIGHT me more of a burden, but it's justifiable anyway. One can't make informed choices without information.
OTOH, I already see lots of things that advertise "0% TransFats!" in brightly colored letters. So it can't be THAT much of a burden.
On what basis do you assert that the change will be slow? So far it has been, but that's not evidence that things will continue this way.
E.g., it has been observed that liquid water is leaking from *under* the Greenland ice cap. That implies that the ice cap is lubricated. If some major part of it starts to slide the friction will create heat, melting more ice near the base. This could quickly lead to a large amount of ice moving from being supported on land to floating. What's large? Nobody knows what a reasonable guess for how much could move at once. Probably not all of it, likely less than half. How much less? ??
It could happen that the next event is a 2 foot rise in the ocean level, all at one go. *!NO!* coastal city is prepared (or not that I know of). And 2 feet isn't the maximum. It's a "small chunk". And that small chunk would cause much ice that hadn't been about to leave to quickly depart (since now it's base was under water, and it's starting to float).
We don't know how rapidly the change can come on. We've records that some of the past shifts have been "very quick", but paleontological dating usually considers anything that happens in only a century to be too fast to measure.
Sorry, sanitation gets the prize for most effective medical intervention. Vaccines are up there, but not at the top. (I forget what's in second place. Indoor heating? Water pipes? Something we don't think of as medical.)
Occasionally greedy companies can act to block something "too good", but nimble smaller groups by concept have to stake their claim at being better than the behemoth.
Blocking the nimble smaller groups is one of the purposes of patents.
OK, now I've tried it.
/usr/local/bin it locked up as soon as I tried to get out of /home/~.
It looks nice, but twice when I tried to add a program from
Now it wasn't so badly locked up that I couldn't kill it, but this ISN'T what I think of as friendly behavior.
I haven't tried alacarte.
I have tried an earlier Gnome menu editor (don't know the name) and was quite underwhelmed. It was significantly less capable than the one that shipped with Gnome around 1999...before they started dumbing it down. (Sawfish? Sawmill? around that time.)
Whatever. If it requires mono I'm not going to be looking at it...otherwise I'll check it out.
Yes! Congratulations to Sun.
I haven't been taking Java seriously as a programming language because there hasn't been a libre version. Only a gratis one. I'm also rather glad that of the various plausible licenses they chose the GPL, but that's an "optional extra".
It's conventional to claim that OS/X is a more "user friendly" desktop than Ubuntu ... but I don't think I agree. I've used both, and I've helped my wife with both. Neither of us like OSX, and I like Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu).
The problem is in applications. Animation programs, iMovie, iTunes, etc. Linux just can't compete there as far as the end user is concerned. Worrying about the perfection of the desktop is wasting time. Let it get better as it is improved, but worry more about stability and fixing bugs. Leave added glitz to the applications. (The exception here is that Gnome *REALLY* *REALLY* *REALLY* needs a menu editor. It's unusable to many people without easy customization.)
OTOH, Gnome may be aimed at commercial users who don't want the end user desktop to be customizable. If so, I fee that this is a mistake, but fortunately KDE exists.
On the contrary, hot air is always lighter than air unless you pressurize it.
The problem is that the vehicle weighs something, and as the air gets thinner the relative displacement achieved by heating air internal to the surface decreases. I.e., the air inside has to weight enough less than an equal volume of the air outside to support the weight of the casing + any desired cargo. As the air outside gets thinner, any particular volume of it gets lighter, until, at the end, a good vacuum wouldn't be light enough to counterbalance the weight of the casing+cargo. (Of course, expecting a balloon to be blown up using a good vacuum is a trifle silly, but even if you could it wouldn't work.)
OTOH, balloons have gotten up into the stratosphere, and that would be beyond most of the air friction, so it might make an interesting disposable launch pad. But you'd either need a very light rocket, or a truly enormous balloon.