All the top guitar-amplifier makers' top-of-the-line pro-level models brag of being "all tube". DSP has not yet been able to equal the tone, "feel", and response to the player's nuances that vacuum tubes exhibit. It's really, REALLY hard to model all the variables that affect the sound of an electromechanical device like a vacuum tube with digital signal processing.
It has more to do with reputation than with "can't be done otherwise". A 50 cent-a-pop DSP probably has enough power to simulate the good ol' vacuum tube sound. Of course, that's today's reality, and not when transistorized power amplifiers started to be common. At that time, many respectable brands did produced superior high-power amplifiers using vacuum tubes, and people liked their sound. It also helped that most of those brands produced crappy transistorized amplifiers (often using generic switching power transistors, instead of high-quality audio ones), so the warm sound of tubes caused even more contrast with the metallic sound and lack of dynamic range of transistorized versions.
I build and sell custom vacuum-tube guitar amps myself, as well as provide service and repair for vintage & modern tube guitar and bass amps. I can also occasionally be found on a stage in a club, or on a festival stage somewhere, playing guitar. I've been doing both for about 4 decades now.
And yes, I do prefer the vacuum-tube amps, not only because of the sound, but also the warm feeling of old electronics:)
So, why not combine dozens (or hundreds) of transistor output stages to get the equivalent of a single valve-based amplifier?
To a smaller scale, that is already done. A darlington configuration will give you a nice amplifier (given that you don't mind about distortion). Class D amplifiers will usually have 2 symmetrical darlington sets that drive the output, but with a ton of other issues. Multi-stage darlington (H configuration?) will often give you a pretty powerful noise generator.
And some of the best microwaves out there. Oh wait, all?
Vacuum tubes are still common in high-power transmitters and amplifiers. Everything above a couple of KW starts to get tricky to do with transistors, and usually tubes are not only a more resilient tech, but also cheaper.
I'm sorry, but no everyone has a facebook account.
Did I even mentioned facebook?
Today, if you want to be "anonymous" (not the anti-piracy group), you still can, provided you have some knowledge at aviodance.
Shure, if you decide to live under a rock. By the age you decide to live under that rock, you probably had your fingerprints taken, had dental exams, had your picture taken multiple times, have a ton of people that can recognize/identify you, probably have some sort of identification, birth record, etc. Shure, maybe most of those methods cannot pinpoint you in the crowd, but they don't really need to, do they? Let everyone else point you out, just like they do with terrorists.
Squid (and the available content filtering plugins) will just forward the HTTPS requests untouched. For that, you can either run your own DNS server with a list of preaproved sites (white-listing) or use a DNS server that already filters malicious content (such as OpenDNS).
I know some houses that have concrete walls. And where I live, granite houses are pretty common (and they have some internal master walls made of granite). My house is made of bricks and a layer of concrete, and lots of apartments, office buildings and schools are built the same way.
The interwebs is filled with stories, articles and opinions about why getting in on the Facebook IPO is such a bad idea.
Because you are probably looking only to the interwebs appealing to a typical slashdot user. The kind of user that understands the consequences of misuse of personal data, and already knows several examples of big internet-related companies that went under. Also, it is easy to understand how facebook value is largely overrated - the _real_ payday is probably now, but only for (not so few) investors. Those are the same investors financing the stories about the opportunity that investing in Facebook is, and how it will be the largest IPO and how it is the next big thing.
so many people are actually ignoring the news and willing to put money down - surely there's something we're missing?
Smart investors will not buy on IPO. Smart investors will _sell_ on IPO (there are a lot of investors shielded as a single entity that will get a piece of the pie). Other smart investors will wait (at least)a week or two until the price settles and there is a clear tendency (both to buy or to decide to sell). Lots and lots of investment portfolio subscribers will make their money (or lose their money) on high-frequency trading and short-selling. Either way, there is plenty of money to be made. Stock exchanges aren't about the companies, they are just another form of gambling brokers.
I'm afraid you have #2 backwards friend, as in 2002 the FPS genre combined with the MHz wars was causing PC gaming to explode
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Developers_Choice_Awards:
2002: GTA III - PlayStation
2003: Metroid Prime - GameCube
2004: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - XBox
2005: Half-life 2 - XBox360/PlayStation
2006: Shadow the Collossus - PlayStation
2007: Gears of War - XBox360
2008: Portal - Windows/Xbox360
2009: Fallout III - Windows/Xbox360/Playstation
(...)
Do you see a pattern? I do. And, in 2002, you did have awesome games for PC, if you forked over about the price of a console for a graphics card that would become obsolete 6 months later. So, not that different from today.
whereas the consoles at the time were looked at as more "toys for teens" than for serious gaming.
You mean those state-of-the-art, almost noise-free entertainment boxes with a bundled ethernet connection, that people could use to play CDs, DVDs, play games and that didn't catch any of those nasty virus? And didn't took forever to boot?Those systems that a 3-year old can operate?
One could argue that this is one of the reasons for the design of the original Xbox which was nothing but a highly specialized Windows gaming PC
The problem was that DirectX, while a superior technology at some levels, wasn't that useful for gaming companies if you couldn't also use it on a console. And the competition (mostly OpenGL) not only was quite simple to program to (DX5 was fully OO), but easier to port to other platforms.
In any measure if you look at Ballmer's reign, even if you give him the Xbox as a success (which it is still debatable if they are in the black on the X360) and compare successes to failures most would say he has been a terrible CEO.
I did not say anything otherwise. I was just merely debating the "obvious fiasco of XBox". I do agree that Microsoft has, once again, missed on a gold mine by not being able to innovate. Maybe that's Ballmer's fault, but I've seen companies innovate the last decade and - while creating brilliant and inovative products - they failed miserably as a company. Yahoo and SUN are good examples of that.
So I'd say by whatever metric you use simply by the huge amounts of capital he has blown on one failed venture after another should put him squarely in the top 5 worst CEOs.
I don't know if you are aware that it was usual for game studios to have exclusive contracts with a given console brand. Before XBox, you didn't get many cross-platform titles, but now you do. There is the early release date (usually for a specfied console), but after a period of time, you usually can get a release for at least other platform (usually windows). I'm not aware of the exact fee for driver certification and to be able to display the Windows Logo on the box, but I'd say that probably a big chunk of those losses have been covered by graphic cards manufacturers.
Even retail copies of windows allows you to perform a custom/unattended/automatic install. With a little work, you can create your own installer with the operating system, drivers, application software and such. All legal.
A software license should never impact what hardware you can run it on, as long as the use and profitability of the software itself is not affected.
There is a lot of software with memory limits, cpu socket limits and core limits, and even if the hardware is real or virtualized. As an example, Vista Home Basic 64 has a limit of 8GB of memory and 1 socket, and Vista Business 64 has a limit of 128GB and 2 sockets. And they are essentialy the same product.
I'm not really into gaming, nor am I familiarized with the details of the consoles available, but it was expected from the start that XBox would not be a money maker. The way I saw it, the two main goals were 1) to get a foot on the home entrertainment business (and avoid colossal mistakes like the Microsoft Network thinggy) and 2) keeping game development companies interested in the Windows/PC market. 10 years ago, the tendency was that "top of the line" games would come out for consoles, and then several months later (if ever) to PC. In many cases, porting to PC wasn't a trivial task (because by then, OpenGL was already a second-class citizen), and many gamers were fond of the simplicity of the consoles (cheap big screen TVs and good sound systems also helped).
The royalty policies were (probably still are) quite appealing - specially when comparing to Sony, the SDK is full-featured and cheap (I'm not shure if it is free, but even if so, you'd pay the VS suite to get all the features), and developers can target multiple devices with almost no effort. So, to calculate the actual cost of XBox, you need to factor in the value of the development community, hardware certification fees and online services revenue.
Well they can continue to watch Microsoft and Apple pilfer their software stack usually giving nothing in return
You sound very worried about that. There are other cases, such as the ton of Linux distros that use BSD software (the big example is probably OpenSSH) and give nothing in return. Other companies (such as Apple and iXsystems), employ BSD developers and sponsor - directly and indirectly - development. What is your point?
while they can use GNOME or KDE or whichever other GPL or LGPLed project exists on their system (takes only a recompile)
I'm a BSD user, and I only have a (development) VM with X and Gnome. Every other system doesn't even have X installed. And if you think that running Gnome on BSD is a recompile away, you are sadly mistaken. Just because there is a port of it, doesn't mean it doesn't take a lot of effort (and in some cases, loss of funcionality). Also, many BSD desktop users are "advanced" users - I'd say it's way more common to see minimal/tab based windowmanagers than Gnome or KDE.
they don't have a useable desktop
What is a useable desktop? Because many opensource desktop applications aren't GPL, so the same principle applies to Linux. Because, you know, X/Xorg itself isn't GPL. And most of Mozilla Firefox. Did Microsoft and Apple also pilfer it?
Apple just wants to clamp down everything to be BSD so they can batter down all hatches eventually for the day when they give nothing back.
Yes, because BSD developers are usually paranoid about the possibility of maybe some evil company use their code. Or they just don't care, and choose a license that expresses that.
There has been some effort in replacing GCC in BSD systems at least since the 2.95 shift. The GPL licensing of GCC was always obviously a problem, but the discarding of some architectures and the bloat of the latest versions did not help either. A couple of years ago the OpenBSD team did a port of PCC to replace GCC as the base compiler for the system, and for a "big" operating system like FreeBSD, compile times do make a difference.
No only licensing issues, but also performance. While CLANG may not have all the bells and whistles of GCC, it does a good job compiling C code - and given that the base system is mostly C, even a small improvement in compile time (and memory usage) can make a big difference, specially for those who - like me - prefer to build and upgrade from source.
Another motive to seek alternatives (but not directly related to FreeBSD) is the lack of support of some architectures. Some "obsolete" architectures were removed post GCC 2.95, but some BSDs still support them today. Having a easy to port, actively developed, BSD licensed compiler is way better than to rely on some archaic GCC version.
You mean, like those 17" bulky Sony Vaio that are almost unreadable?
12point font should always be 1/6" tall reguardless of the DPI of the screen...
So what is the point of higher resolution if you don't get more detail or real estate? My eyes are about 50cm from a 23" 1920x1080 TFT, and I can't distinguish individual pixels. What would I gain by using a higher resolution, if I kept the font size the same?
In fact higher DPI screens should make smaller font sizes more readable
And slower to render. But that isn't true anymore. Most high-res laptops (>=1440x900) will provide you a near "pixel-free" image, at confortable distance you won't distinguish individual dots, so there is no real need for higher resolution displays _exept_ if you need the screen real estate (and if you need, you'll want smaller font sizes to go with that).
that is the equivalent of upgrading from windows 95 to windows 7/8 and having a stable system (hint: ain't going to happen).
Actually, is the equivalent of upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows 7. Have you tried it?
And, they are clean and stable machines post upgrade.
Depends on what you're running. Many many applications changed configuration parameters, paths and misc dependencies since 2000 (starting with X itself), so I don't think it will work that well for everybody.
No, he was one of the founders, and not even the most important. Without Wozniak's genious, the company would never started. Granted, we was the "guy with the vision", but you get those at dime a dozen. Very few of those who try succeed, but the relation of Steve Jobs and Apple is being at the right place at the right time.
and he founded Pixar
No, he bought what would become Pixar from LucasFilm. Regarding Pixar as we know today, he was one of the founders, and not even the most important (again!). Ed Catmull was the genious and the vision, Steve was the guy with a bag of money.
and he founded NeXT
Yes, he did. He founded NeXT by following an idea of Paul Berg, that suggested the market for a professional workstation. So, again, he was the guy with the bag of money. The inital team was composed of ex-Apple employees, and most of what we know as NeXT today is a mashup of multiple talents, such as Avie Tevanian (a Mach kernel engineer from Carnegie Mellon), Rich Page (Apple Lisa hardware division), and the case designed by Frog Design Inc (also used by Apple), but apparently under Job's supervision.
Yes, the guy wasn't an engineer, but he was certainly a visionary.
That's an opinion that I don't share. Apple probably started the personal computer revolution, but many others shared the same vision. Job's talent was to identify talent (every company mentioned had a genious), and being able to capture investment, aka being a marketeer. He was the frontman, and aparently very good at it. Just don't credit for stuff that wasn't made/invented/conceptualized by him.
If keeping myself informed of products of potential interest for me and my clients, being able to actually evaluate and test them is being brainwashed, then I guess I am.
Then again I hardly watch TV because it pisses me off
Who is talking about TV ads? The context was about slashdot ads, not TV.
Yes, the current PCC version is a major rewrite, and their target is mostly building the base system (make world). You can build OpenBSD kernels with PCC since 2009. FreeBSD has integrated CLANG/LLVM into the base system since the last version (v9), so it is expected that GCC will be moved to the ports tree as an optional package (like it was done with Perl).
As for the Portable C compiler, while it is now available under a BSD license, was it available that way in the 1980s? This link makes me wonder:
Please check http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/pcc_history/, and eventually the wikipedia page. PCC development started in the 70's, and was the BSD bundled compiler until 1994 (when it was replaced with GCC).
Start from the beginning of the Windows version release and count all of the remote exploits up to present day and compare that to OpenBSD for example.
Please also compare funcionality. Please do tell me how many OpenBSD versions offer MAC control.
How many so called remote exploits were patched this week in Windows?
And X/Xorg or related libraries? Or local exploits? What features does OpenBSD provide in that regard that no one else does? How will OpenBSD make my computer impervious to a specific libjpeg attack? Or a zip bug? ...And yes, I'm both an OpenBSD user and enthusiast, and a windows user. You are absolutely right on the point that people take for granted base technology, but you lose it on the creepy side. And given the non-trivial IPSEC OpenBSD allegations, you can have only one certainty - if you worry that much, trust no one.
Slashdot Mirror
All the top guitar-amplifier makers' top-of-the-line pro-level models brag of being "all tube". DSP has not yet been able to equal the tone, "feel", and response to the player's nuances that vacuum tubes exhibit. It's really, REALLY hard to model all the variables that affect the sound of an electromechanical device like a vacuum tube with digital signal processing.
It has more to do with reputation than with "can't be done otherwise". A 50 cent-a-pop DSP probably has enough power to simulate the good ol' vacuum tube sound. Of course, that's today's reality, and not when transistorized power amplifiers started to be common. At that time, many respectable brands did produced superior high-power amplifiers using vacuum tubes, and people liked their sound. It also helped that most of those brands produced crappy transistorized amplifiers (often using generic switching power transistors, instead of high-quality audio ones), so the warm sound of tubes caused even more contrast with the metallic sound and lack of dynamic range of transistorized versions.
I build and sell custom vacuum-tube guitar amps myself, as well as provide service and repair for vintage & modern tube guitar and bass amps. I can also occasionally be found on a stage in a club, or on a festival stage somewhere, playing guitar. I've been doing both for about 4 decades now.
And yes, I do prefer the vacuum-tube amps, not only because of the sound, but also the warm feeling of old electronics :)
So, why not combine dozens (or hundreds) of transistor output stages to get the equivalent of a single valve-based amplifier?
To a smaller scale, that is already done. A darlington configuration will give you a nice amplifier (given that you don't mind about distortion). Class D amplifiers will usually have 2 symmetrical darlington sets that drive the output, but with a ton of other issues. Multi-stage darlington (H configuration?) will often give you a pretty powerful noise generator.
And some of the best microwaves out there. Oh wait, all?
Vacuum tubes are still common in high-power transmitters and amplifiers. Everything above a couple of KW starts to get tricky to do with transistors, and usually tubes are not only a more resilient tech, but also cheaper.
I'm sorry, but no everyone has a facebook account.
Did I even mentioned facebook?
Today, if you want to be "anonymous" (not the anti-piracy group), you still can, provided you have some knowledge at aviodance.
Shure, if you decide to live under a rock. By the age you decide to live under that rock, you probably had your fingerprints taken, had dental exams, had your picture taken multiple times, have a ton of people that can recognize/identify you, probably have some sort of identification, birth record, etc. Shure, maybe most of those methods cannot pinpoint you in the crowd, but they don't really need to, do they? Let everyone else point you out, just like they do with terrorists.
Also, you really need to give your privacy away with shit like that?
What privacy? Unless you live under a rock, you are already being monitored - from surveillance cameras to cable channel preferences.
Direct all HTTP/HTTPS traffic
Squid (and the available content filtering plugins) will just forward the HTTPS requests untouched. For that, you can either run your own DNS server with a list of preaproved sites (white-listing) or use a DNS server that already filters malicious content (such as OpenDNS).
I know some houses that have concrete walls. And where I live, granite houses are pretty common (and they have some internal master walls made of granite). My house is made of bricks and a layer of concrete, and lots of apartments, office buildings and schools are built the same way.
Funny is so late 90's. Kids this days...
The interwebs is filled with stories, articles and opinions about why getting in on the Facebook IPO is such a bad idea.
Because you are probably looking only to the interwebs appealing to a typical slashdot user. The kind of user that understands the consequences of misuse of personal data, and already knows several examples of big internet-related companies that went under. Also, it is easy to understand how facebook value is largely overrated - the _real_ payday is probably now, but only for (not so few) investors. Those are the same investors financing the stories about the opportunity that investing in Facebook is, and how it will be the largest IPO and how it is the next big thing.
so many people are actually ignoring the news and willing to put money down - surely there's something we're missing?
Smart investors will not buy on IPO. Smart investors will _sell_ on IPO (there are a lot of investors shielded as a single entity that will get a piece of the pie). Other smart investors will wait (at least)a week or two until the price settles and there is a clear tendency (both to buy or to decide to sell). Lots and lots of investment portfolio subscribers will make their money (or lose their money) on high-frequency trading and short-selling. Either way, there is plenty of money to be made. Stock exchanges aren't about the companies, they are just another form of gambling brokers.
I'm afraid you have #2 backwards friend, as in 2002 the FPS genre combined with the MHz wars was causing PC gaming to explode
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Developers_Choice_Awards:
2002: GTA III - PlayStation
2003: Metroid Prime - GameCube
2004: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - XBox
2005: Half-life 2 - XBox360/PlayStation
2006: Shadow the Collossus - PlayStation
2007: Gears of War - XBox360
2008: Portal - Windows/Xbox360
2009: Fallout III - Windows/Xbox360/Playstation
(...)
Do you see a pattern? I do. And, in 2002, you did have awesome games for PC, if you forked over about the price of a console for a graphics card that would become obsolete 6 months later. So, not that different from today.
whereas the consoles at the time were looked at as more "toys for teens" than for serious gaming.
You mean those state-of-the-art, almost noise-free entertainment boxes with a bundled ethernet connection, that people could use to play CDs, DVDs, play games and that didn't catch any of those nasty virus? And didn't took forever to boot?Those systems that a 3-year old can operate?
One could argue that this is one of the reasons for the design of the original Xbox which was nothing but a highly specialized Windows gaming PC
The problem was that DirectX, while a superior technology at some levels, wasn't that useful for gaming companies if you couldn't also use it on a console. And the competition (mostly OpenGL) not only was quite simple to program to (DX5 was fully OO), but easier to port to other platforms.
In any measure if you look at Ballmer's reign, even if you give him the Xbox as a success (which it is still debatable if they are in the black on the X360) and compare successes to failures most would say he has been a terrible CEO.
I did not say anything otherwise. I was just merely debating the "obvious fiasco of XBox". I do agree that Microsoft has, once again, missed on a gold mine by not being able to innovate. Maybe that's Ballmer's fault, but I've seen companies innovate the last decade and - while creating brilliant and inovative products - they failed miserably as a company. Yahoo and SUN are good examples of that.
So I'd say by whatever metric you use simply by the huge amounts of capital he has blown on one failed venture after another should put him squarely in the top 5 worst CEOs.
I don't know if you are aware that it was usual for game studios to have exclusive contracts with a given console brand. Before XBox, you didn't get many cross-platform titles, but now you do. There is the early release date (usually for a specfied console), but after a period of time, you usually can get a release for at least other platform (usually windows). I'm not aware of the exact fee for driver certification and to be able to display the Windows Logo on the box, but I'd say that probably a big chunk of those losses have been covered by graphic cards manufacturers.
Even retail copies of windows allows you to perform a custom/unattended/automatic install. With a little work, you can create your own installer with the operating system, drivers, application software and such. All legal.
A software license should never impact what hardware you can run it on, as long as the use and profitability of the software itself is not affected.
There is a lot of software with memory limits, cpu socket limits and core limits, and even if the hardware is real or virtualized. As an example, Vista Home Basic 64 has a limit of 8GB of memory and 1 socket, and Vista Business 64 has a limit of 128GB and 2 sockets. And they are essentialy the same product.
(you know the ones with ECC memory.)
Even their high-end workstations (Mac Pro) come with ECC memory.
I'm not really into gaming, nor am I familiarized with the details of the consoles available, but it was expected from the start that XBox would not be a money maker. The way I saw it, the two main goals were 1) to get a foot on the home entrertainment business (and avoid colossal mistakes like the Microsoft Network thinggy) and 2) keeping game development companies interested in the Windows/PC market. 10 years ago, the tendency was that "top of the line" games would come out for consoles, and then several months later (if ever) to PC. In many cases, porting to PC wasn't a trivial task (because by then, OpenGL was already a second-class citizen), and many gamers were fond of the simplicity of the consoles (cheap big screen TVs and good sound systems also helped).
The royalty policies were (probably still are) quite appealing - specially when comparing to Sony, the SDK is full-featured and cheap (I'm not shure if it is free, but even if so, you'd pay the VS suite to get all the features), and developers can target multiple devices with almost no effort. So, to calculate the actual cost of XBox, you need to factor in the value of the development community, hardware certification fees and online services revenue.
Well they can continue to watch Microsoft and Apple pilfer their software stack usually giving nothing in return
You sound very worried about that. There are other cases, such as the ton of Linux distros that use BSD software (the big example is probably OpenSSH) and give nothing in return. Other companies (such as Apple and iXsystems), employ BSD developers and sponsor - directly and indirectly - development. What is your point?
while they can use GNOME or KDE or whichever other GPL or LGPLed project exists on their system (takes only a recompile)
I'm a BSD user, and I only have a (development) VM with X and Gnome. Every other system doesn't even have X installed. And if you think that running Gnome on BSD is a recompile away, you are sadly mistaken. Just because there is a port of it, doesn't mean it doesn't take a lot of effort (and in some cases, loss of funcionality). Also, many BSD desktop users are "advanced" users - I'd say it's way more common to see minimal/tab based windowmanagers than Gnome or KDE.
they don't have a useable desktop
What is a useable desktop? Because many opensource desktop applications aren't GPL, so the same principle applies to Linux. Because, you know, X/Xorg itself isn't GPL. And most of Mozilla Firefox. Did Microsoft and Apple also pilfer it?
Apple just wants to clamp down everything to be BSD so they can batter down all hatches eventually for the day when they give nothing back.
Yes, because BSD developers are usually paranoid about the possibility of maybe some evil company use their code. Or they just don't care, and choose a license that expresses that.
There has been some effort in replacing GCC in BSD systems at least since the 2.95 shift. The GPL licensing of GCC was always obviously a problem, but the discarding of some architectures and the bloat of the latest versions did not help either. A couple of years ago the OpenBSD team did a port of PCC to replace GCC as the base compiler for the system, and for a "big" operating system like FreeBSD, compile times do make a difference.
No only licensing issues, but also performance. While CLANG may not have all the bells and whistles of GCC, it does a good job compiling C code - and given that the base system is mostly C, even a small improvement in compile time (and memory usage) can make a big difference, specially for those who - like me - prefer to build and upgrade from source.
Another motive to seek alternatives (but not directly related to FreeBSD) is the lack of support of some architectures. Some "obsolete" architectures were removed post GCC 2.95, but some BSDs still support them today. Having a easy to port, actively developed, BSD licensed compiler is way better than to rely on some archaic GCC version.
where is the laptop with better than 1080P screen
You mean, like those 17" bulky Sony Vaio that are almost unreadable?
12point font should always be 1/6" tall reguardless of the DPI of the screen...
So what is the point of higher resolution if you don't get more detail or real estate? My eyes are about 50cm from a 23" 1920x1080 TFT, and I can't distinguish individual pixels. What would I gain by using a higher resolution, if I kept the font size the same?
In fact higher DPI screens should make smaller font sizes more readable
And slower to render. But that isn't true anymore. Most high-res laptops (>=1440x900) will provide you a near "pixel-free" image, at confortable distance you won't distinguish individual dots, so there is no real need for higher resolution displays _exept_ if you need the screen real estate (and if you need, you'll want smaller font sizes to go with that).
Facebook?
that is the equivalent of upgrading from windows 95 to windows 7 /8 and having a stable system (hint: ain't going to happen).
Actually, is the equivalent of upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows 7. Have you tried it?
And, they are clean and stable machines post upgrade.
Depends on what you're running. Many many applications changed configuration parameters, paths and misc dependencies since 2000 (starting with X itself), so I don't think it will work that well for everybody.
He founded Apple
No, he was one of the founders, and not even the most important. Without Wozniak's genious, the company would never started. Granted, we was the "guy with the vision", but you get those at dime a dozen. Very few of those who try succeed, but the relation of Steve Jobs and Apple is being at the right place at the right time.
and he founded Pixar
No, he bought what would become Pixar from LucasFilm. Regarding Pixar as we know today, he was one of the founders, and not even the most important (again!). Ed Catmull was the genious and the vision, Steve was the guy with a bag of money.
and he founded NeXT
Yes, he did. He founded NeXT by following an idea of Paul Berg, that suggested the market for a professional workstation. So, again, he was the guy with the bag of money. The inital team was composed of ex-Apple employees, and most of what we know as NeXT today is a mashup of multiple talents, such as Avie Tevanian (a Mach kernel engineer from Carnegie Mellon), Rich Page (Apple Lisa hardware division), and the case designed by Frog Design Inc (also used by Apple), but apparently under Job's supervision.
Yes, the guy wasn't an engineer, but he was certainly a visionary.
That's an opinion that I don't share. Apple probably started the personal computer revolution, but many others shared the same vision. Job's talent was to identify talent (every company mentioned had a genious), and being able to capture investment, aka being a marketeer. He was the frontman, and aparently very good at it. Just don't credit for stuff that wasn't made/invented/conceptualized by him.
You must have been brainwashed.
If keeping myself informed of products of potential interest for me and my clients, being able to actually evaluate and test them is being brainwashed, then I guess I am.
Then again I hardly watch TV because it pisses me off
Who is talking about TV ads? The context was about slashdot ads, not TV.
Yes, the current PCC version is a major rewrite, and their target is mostly building the base system (make world). You can build OpenBSD kernels with PCC since 2009. FreeBSD has integrated CLANG/LLVM into the base system since the last version (v9), so it is expected that GCC will be moved to the ports tree as an optional package (like it was done with Perl).
As for the Portable C compiler, while it is now available under a BSD license, was it available that way in the 1980s? This link makes me wonder:
Please check http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/pcc_history/, and eventually the wikipedia page. PCC development started in the 70's, and was the BSD bundled compiler until 1994 (when it was replaced with GCC).
Start from the beginning of the Windows version release and count all of the remote exploits up to present day and compare that to OpenBSD for example.
Please also compare funcionality. Please do tell me how many OpenBSD versions offer MAC control.
How many so called remote exploits were patched this week in Windows?
And X/Xorg or related libraries? Or local exploits? What features does OpenBSD provide in that regard that no one else does? How will OpenBSD make my computer impervious to a specific libjpeg attack? Or a zip bug?
...And yes, I'm both an OpenBSD user and enthusiast, and a windows user. You are absolutely right on the point that people take for granted base technology, but you lose it on the creepy side. And given the non-trivial IPSEC OpenBSD allegations, you can have only one certainty - if you worry that much, trust no one.