I have seen that link before, although it must have been before he added the Nintendo edit at the end. I did know about the Dreamcast, so perhaps I should have said that the only company that has ever sold a console at a sustained loss was Microsoft. At any rate, while I'm not trying to claim that Sony will be making a profit at $500, I really doubt that they will be bleeding money at the rate that everyone seems to assume. It seems more likely to me that they would follow the GameCube path- a slight to moderate loss at first, and after a while a growing profit as production ramps up and the cost of some of the currently hard to get parts comes down.
At any rate, the author of this particular article lost a lot of credibility with me by claiming and implying respectively that the Playstation and Plastation 2 were sold as loss leaders, a myth which has been debunked many times over by now.
Well, of course. He wouldn't want to be infected by it, just like people who work in a hospital have to be up to date on vaccinations most of us have never heard of...
1) Sony doesn't make the consoles as the order comes in. Sure, they won't make 6 million right away if nobody is buying them, but they still have to have enough on hand for the initial launch to fill demand. So if they make two million consoles and manage to get half of those onto store shelves before stores realize that nobody wants them, then Sony is out $600*1M + $100*1M = 700M. If they make 6 million and they sell out, they are out $100*6M = 600M, and even that is assuming that there are really 6 million people out there who are willing to spend $600 on a console and nothing else just to spite Sony. Sorry, don't think so.
2) Does anybody actually know that Sony is selling these consoles at a loss, or is this all just wild speculation? So far as I know, the only company that has ever sold a console at a loss was Microsoft, and they explicitly were not interested in making money on the console, but rather spending a boatload of money to make their way into a new market. The razor blades analogy is so bad for this market for a variety of reasons, but the most obvious one is that razor blades are consumed. You can't buy a razor and just one blade, because the blade will wear out and you have to either buy a new one or you're left with a worthless plastic stump. Console games are not consumed- you can buy just one, and it will last you the lifetime of the console. I know a couple of people who bought a PS2 just for the GTA games. If Sony had been selling that console at a loss, they would have never made their money back from three games, when one or two of them were purchased as "Greatest Hits" for $20. All of the estimates that I remember seeing for the "per console" cost to Sony of the PS3 included sunk costs such as the cost to develop the BluRay drives, which is misleading because Sony has already spent that money, whether they sell 1 PS3 or 100 million.
Anyway, I think Sony really blew it on this generation. They are too expensive to compete with Nintendo, and they are a year later on the market than the XBOX. Unless they have some really good exclusive games, (which it's been a long time since they have had) they are in for a world of hurt pretty soon.
If you provide the encryption keys and the instructions to required to use customised versions of the supporting libraries, than you can't really trust those libraries, can you? I mean, anybody who has the keys could integrate uberRootkitV1.1 into the library that you depend on and then sign it with your key, and any one who uses your software would have no way of knowing that they had been compromised.
The requirement of providing your keys makes "Trusted Computing" outright impossible. If anyone who has a copy of your software also has a copy of your key, than there's no way anyone can trust software signed with that key; that's the nature of cryptographic signing. This should be obvious to anyone who has been paying any attention at all, as we know very well what RMS thoughts on Trusted Computing are, and he's been very vocal about his intentions regarding Trusted Computing and GPL v3. People are free to disagree on the virtues or lack thereof regarding Trusted Computing- obviously the grandparent poster and RMS don't see eye to eye on that issue- but to try and say that the current draft of GPL v3 doesn't pose a problem to people who are interested in using it is a little ridiculous.
Let's look at this for a second. By you'r numbers, to get the energy capacity of a 15 gallon gas tank, you have to carry around the equivalent of a standard size SUV just in battery weight, using the very best batteries we have to offer. Of course that's not including any of the car's structure or drivetrain, which then has to be suitably hefty up to haul around the weight of a standard size SUV. Now you're in full size pickup territory (but without the carrying capacity, because you've used it all up on the batteries). Do you know how far a large SUV or full size pickup can go on 15 gallons of gas?
It seems pretty obvious to me why we don't have more electric cars on the road...
this must be the perfect example of the old physics experiment rule: "When you need to ensure a close fit to a line, make sure that you use only two data points."
OK, so you mentioned three open source projects that are having trouble right now, and two commercial companies that aren't.
What happens when you add Ubuntu, KDE, FreeBSD, or Firefox to your list. (OK, nix Firefox. Bad example).
Or for that matter, look how much corporate structure and financial incentive have helped Microsoft to get Vista, IE 7, and Office 12 out the door on time.
Any group can be run badly, and any group can be run well if there is enough interest and leadership. This incident reflects poorly on the leadership and members of the Gentoo project, nothing more and nothing less.
I guess it depends on where you went to high school then. Aside from computer science (which I did as independent study because I already arguably knew more about computer programming than any of the teachers at my high school) I would say that classes that I took in high school were probably better then the college classes that I tested out of, and I went to a fairly respected engineering school. I found myself wishing I had tried taking the AP Chemistry test because my freshman Chem course in college was a terribly boring rehash of stuff I had already learned in High School chem. Unfortunately, my high school didn't start offering an AP Chem course until my senior year, and I had already taken Chemistry as a sophomore.
You know, if you really want vi, it's still out there, along with a number of clones which have stayed more true to the original (nvi comes to mind). Obviously there are enough people that do want these features that somebody found it to be worth their time to add them. I've seen a number of comments along the lines of "this feature makes ViM not vi- take it out!" on the ViM website, and it just seems ridiculous(*). How do features like syntax highlighting, autoindent, and multi level undo "point away from vi"?
(*) I have seen people complain that Linux distros shouldn't be using ViM as/usr/bin/vi unless is it strictly compatible, and while I can concede that they may have a point there, they should be taking that up with the distro maintainers, not the Vim maintainers.
Getting off topic here, but I had an English teacher whose handwriting was so bad that even he couldn't read it much of the time. Your best bet, if you wanted to know what he actually thought of one of your essays, was to ask his son (who happened to be a year older than me and attending school at the same place) what his comments were, as he was actually somewhat better than his father at deciphering his father's handwriting.
He also told us once that somebody had gotten a hold of his checkbook and tried to forge a few checks. The bank refused to honor them- they knew something was wrong when they could actually read them.
In order to argue that this statement is wrong you would have to argue that PostgreSQL is faster than MySQL in situations that are ideal for MySQL.
That's a very good point, and I'm glad somebody called that out. Hold on for a minute while I rack my brain for situations that are ideal for MySQL...
nope.
still nothing.
wait!
no, never mind...
In all seriousness, MySQL does have some uses. I've worked for a company that had great success using about a dozen MySQL servers for fast access to temporary data while aggregating all of the critical data to a pair of Oracle databases. When the MySQL databases threw up, all you lost was the CPU time required to recalculate whatever was in the database at the time. In essense an L2 cache for a server farm.
OK, so you live in New York City. So do 8 million other people (including several close friends of mine when the attacks happened). 288 million Americans do not live in New York city. I'm going to repeat what I said yesterday in response do a different conversation.
How many Americans have died in terrorist attacks in the last 5 years (plus three^Wfour days)? How many Americans die every month in automobile accidents?
I'm not trying to invalidate your feelings or those of anyone else who was directly affected by the September 11th attacks, and I am not trying to claim that it wasn't a terrible moment in our nation's history. But it has been blown terribly out of proportion by our government and the media for their own benefit, whether intentionally or not.
Regarding the question in the orignal post ("Are the terrorists laughing at us?") I couldn't help but be just a little bit amused at Bin Laden's tape that he released before the last election, making fun of how easy it was to goad President Bush in particular and Americans in general into fighting Al Qaeda on their terms. Of course his criticism of George Bush had the predictable effect of a last minute increase in support for the incumbent president. The irony is almost unbelievable- by telling us exactly what he thought, he was able to talk his sworn enemies into playing right into his hands. If I found it amusing (if sad), I can only imagine how it looks from the other side.
Does it still show the same behavior if use a string representation of a number:
i.e.: var y = { '8388607': 1, '8388608': 3, '16777215': 5, '16777216': 7 }; document.write("8388607:"+ y[String(8388607)] + " ");// The string cast here may document.write("8388608:"+ y[String(8388608)] + " ");// or may not be necessary
I don't have a recent version of Opera handy to try it out, and honestly given JavaScript's typical behavior with ints-as-strings, neither answer would surprise me, but it may be an easy way to work around the bug if they don't fix it (or provide support for older Opera versions even if the most recent is fixed), and less performance intensive than concatenating strings.
And to answer the question somebody else asked: Yes, string concatenation in JavaScript is SLOW. It varies from implementation to implementation, with IE being by far the worst but not only offender. It's slow enough that we have a standard JS library where I work that performs string concatenation via a combination of array pushes and joins, which is more than an order of magnitude faster on IE, and about the same to slightly faster on most other browsers.
If "do no evil" was anything more than clever marketing the shareholders would have every legal right to seek the removal of Larry Page et al and have them replaced with people who will seek to maximise profits.
They would have every legal right, but I suspect they would have a hard time getting anywhere. In case you forgot, the voting shareholders at Google are basically Larry, Sergey, and the other guy whose name I've forgotten. So one of those three would have to piss off the other two something fierce in order to be removed by "the shareholders".
Yeah, that ad-hoc wireless idea is pretty neat. I'll bet there's a whole dozen people jumping up and down waiting to try it out. Color me underwhelmed. In every way.
And seriously... Brown? They practically wrote Apple's next commercial for them.
How many Americans were killed in terrorist incidents in the last five years (and three days)?
How many Americans die in car accidents every month?
I'm not saying that the terrorist threat isn't real, but it seems to have been blown far out of proportion by our current leadership as a way of consolidating government power that would never before have been allowed. (Not that Bush and Co. are the only ones guilty of this. I seem remember Clinton pushing for a lot of the same powers after the Oklahoma City bombing, but appearently that did not generate a sufficient level of public outrage.)
Isn't a college degree just a symbol that says, "Look, a whole bunch of people with good reputations threw a bunch of puzzles at me. Some were hard, some were easy, but overall I did well enough to pass through these puzzles. I retained some of the information and processes but that's not really important. What's important is the fact that I'm able to solve problems and paid to do it for four years."
After having gone, and seeing the caliber of many of the people who graduated with (or ahead of) me, I'm pretty sure that a college degree is more along the lines of a symbol that says "I was able to jump through hoops for four (or more) years without giving up and declaring it a waste of time".
Don't get me wrong, a lot of people get very good college educations (I like to think that I was one of them, even if my grades don't necessarily speak to that fact) but a diploma is certainly not evidence of one.
One thing to point out- it sounds like the problem that these companies is having is not so much granny going out on Kazaa and downloading all of their software and patterns. The big problem is small shop owners or individuals who buy the patterns and then sell copies via their shop or ebay, or whatever.
In this case, it's not 'granny' who is violating copyright, but rather the ones who actually made the copies. Those are the ones that ESPC should be sending the letters to. And telling people that 'ignorance is no defence' isn't really true. (Actually, it's the worst kind of untruth- it's literally completely true, but also completely irrelevant in the context) If a person buys a product that they believe to be legitimate, and it turns out that the seller violated copyright, then as far as I know buyer hasn't done anything wrong. (Note that this is different from the case of buying stolen goods- despite what the 'ad' on the begining of my new DVDs tells me, theft and copyright infringement are still very different things. If they really are the same, then why isn't shoplifting a federal offense punishable by up to $750,000 and 10 years in prison?)
The rationale is that the crimes of powerful people are much more likely to hurt -- or even kill -- people. If a messed-up dude from the ghetto steals a high-end Acura that is worth 3x of his annual salary, then he is injuring principally the owner of the car. On the other hand, if a conniving money manager steals 3x of his annual salary ($300,000) from a mutual fund that he is managing, then he is hurting a large number of people on a large scale ($900,000). We are talking abou completely different orders of magnitude.
Yes they are completely different orders of magnitude. One is stealing $45,000, the other is stealing $900,000. If the money manager stole a $45,000 car, he should be subject to the same punishment as the guy from the ghetto. If he steals 20 times as much money, the penalty should be correspondingly severe. I don't see any reason that the people of power/wealth would need to be held to a higher standard- holding them to the same standard should be sufficient.
The problem, of course, is that most of the time we don't even do that.
So MS as a company needs to throw away their mature codebase and build a new operating system from scratch?
Why not? They have (or so they claim) already done it twice in the last 10 years. Weren't Win2k and Vista both touted as complete rewrites of the OS? Everyone always says Microsoft finally gets things (more or less) right the third time around...
Ever try to support desktop software? Yes, it's getting worse on Windows, but it's still not too bad, compared to supporting some XYZ linux flavor:
Q. What Operating System are you using? A. Linux
You've already got it wrong on the first line. If you ask my wife what Operating System is installed on my laptop, she'll answer without hesitation "ooboontoo". She didn't realize Ubuntu was actually Linux until I told her- after it had already been on the laptop for almost 6 months. She knew all that time what Linux was- (because I used it in college and it frustrated her to no end that she could never figure out how to do anything on my computer) she just never realized they were the same thing. I would bet you money that anyone who says only "Linux" when you ask them what "Operating System" they run knows perfectly well whether they are running Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Enlightenment, etc.
And since you mention it, try asking a windows user what operating system they run sometime...
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen that link before, although it must have been before he added the Nintendo edit at the end. I did know about the Dreamcast, so perhaps I should have said that the only company that has ever sold a console at a sustained loss was Microsoft. At any rate, while I'm not trying to claim that Sony will be making a profit at $500, I really doubt that they will be bleeding money at the rate that everyone seems to assume. It seems more likely to me that they would follow the GameCube path- a slight to moderate loss at first, and after a while a growing profit as production ramps up and the cost of some of the currently hard to get parts comes down.
At any rate, the author of this particular article lost a lot of credibility with me by claiming and implying respectively that the Playstation and Plastation 2 were sold as loss leaders, a myth which has been debunked many times over by now.
Well, of course. He wouldn't want to be infected by it, just like people who work in a hospital have to be up to date on vaccinations most of us have never heard of...
Two things:
1) Sony doesn't make the consoles as the order comes in. Sure, they won't make 6 million right away if nobody is buying them, but they still have to have enough on hand for the initial launch to fill demand. So if they make two million consoles and manage to get half of those onto store shelves before stores realize that nobody wants them, then Sony is out $600*1M + $100*1M = 700M. If they make 6 million and they sell out, they are out $100*6M = 600M, and even that is assuming that there are really 6 million people out there who are willing to spend $600 on a console and nothing else just to spite Sony. Sorry, don't think so.
2) Does anybody actually know that Sony is selling these consoles at a loss, or is this all just wild speculation? So far as I know, the only company that has ever sold a console at a loss was Microsoft, and they explicitly were not interested in making money on the console, but rather spending a boatload of money to make their way into a new market. The razor blades analogy is so bad for this market for a variety of reasons, but the most obvious one is that razor blades are consumed. You can't buy a razor and just one blade, because the blade will wear out and you have to either buy a new one or you're left with a worthless plastic stump. Console games are not consumed- you can buy just one, and it will last you the lifetime of the console. I know a couple of people who bought a PS2 just for the GTA games. If Sony had been selling that console at a loss, they would have never made their money back from three games, when one or two of them were purchased as "Greatest Hits" for $20. All of the estimates that I remember seeing for the "per console" cost to Sony of the PS3 included sunk costs such as the cost to develop the BluRay drives, which is misleading because Sony has already spent that money, whether they sell 1 PS3 or 100 million.
Anyway, I think Sony really blew it on this generation. They are too expensive to compete with Nintendo, and they are a year later on the market than the XBOX. Unless they have some really good exclusive games, (which it's been a long time since they have had) they are in for a world of hurt pretty soon.
If you provide the encryption keys and the instructions to required to use customised versions of the supporting libraries, than you can't really trust those libraries, can you? I mean, anybody who has the keys could integrate uberRootkitV1.1 into the library that you depend on and then sign it with your key, and any one who uses your software would have no way of knowing that they had been compromised.
The requirement of providing your keys makes "Trusted Computing" outright impossible. If anyone who has a copy of your software also has a copy of your key, than there's no way anyone can trust software signed with that key; that's the nature of cryptographic signing. This should be obvious to anyone who has been paying any attention at all, as we know very well what RMS thoughts on Trusted Computing are, and he's been very vocal about his intentions regarding Trusted Computing and GPL v3. People are free to disagree on the virtues or lack thereof regarding Trusted Computing- obviously the grandparent poster and RMS don't see eye to eye on that issue- but to try and say that the current draft of GPL v3 doesn't pose a problem to people who are interested in using it is a little ridiculous.
Let's look at this for a second. By you'r numbers, to get the energy capacity of a 15 gallon gas tank, you have to carry around the equivalent of a standard size SUV just in battery weight, using the very best batteries we have to offer. Of course that's not including any of the car's structure or drivetrain, which then has to be suitably hefty up to haul around the weight of a standard size SUV. Now you're in full size pickup territory (but without the carrying capacity, because you've used it all up on the batteries). Do you know how far a large SUV or full size pickup can go on 15 gallons of gas?
It seems pretty obvious to me why we don't have more electric cars on the road...
this must be the perfect example of the old physics experiment rule:
"When you need to ensure a close fit to a line, make sure that you use only two data points."
OK, so you mentioned three open source projects that are having trouble right now, and two commercial companies that aren't.
What happens when you add Ubuntu, KDE, FreeBSD, or Firefox to your list. (OK, nix Firefox. Bad example).
Or for that matter, look how much corporate structure and financial incentive have helped Microsoft to get Vista, IE 7, and Office 12 out the door on time.
Any group can be run badly, and any group can be run well if there is enough interest and leadership. This incident reflects poorly on the leadership and members of the Gentoo project, nothing more and nothing less.
If that were their reasoning, wouldn't they make you start over if you transferred in from a different school as well?
I guess it depends on where you went to high school then. Aside from computer science (which I did as independent study because I already arguably knew more about computer programming than any of the teachers at my high school) I would say that classes that I took in high school were probably better then the college classes that I tested out of, and I went to a fairly respected engineering school. I found myself wishing I had tried taking the AP Chemistry test because my freshman Chem course in college was a terribly boring rehash of stuff I had already learned in High School chem. Unfortunately, my high school didn't start offering an AP Chem course until my senior year, and I had already taken Chemistry as a sophomore.
You know, if you really want vi, it's still out there, along with a number of clones which have stayed more true to the original (nvi comes to mind). Obviously there are enough people that do want these features that somebody found it to be worth their time to add them. I've seen a number of comments along the lines of "this feature makes ViM not vi- take it out!" on the ViM website, and it just seems ridiculous(*). How do features like syntax highlighting, autoindent, and multi level undo "point away from vi"?
/usr/bin/vi unless is it strictly compatible, and while I can concede that they may have a point there, they should be taking that up with the distro maintainers, not the Vim maintainers.
(*) I have seen people complain that Linux distros shouldn't be using ViM as
Getting off topic here, but I had an English teacher whose handwriting was so bad that even he couldn't read it much of the time. Your best bet, if you wanted to know what he actually thought of one of your essays, was to ask his son (who happened to be a year older than me and attending school at the same place) what his comments were, as he was actually somewhat better than his father at deciphering his father's handwriting.
He also told us once that somebody had gotten a hold of his checkbook and tried to forge a few checks. The bank refused to honor them- they knew something was wrong when they could actually read them.
That's a very good point, and I'm glad somebody called that out. Hold on for a minute while I rack my brain for situations that are ideal for MySQL...
nope.
still nothing.
wait!
no, never mind...
In all seriousness, MySQL does have some uses. I've worked for a company that had great success using about a dozen MySQL servers for fast access to temporary data while aggregating all of the critical data to a pair of Oracle databases. When the MySQL databases threw up, all you lost was the CPU time required to recalculate whatever was in the database at the time. In essense an L2 cache for a server farm.
Yes, and maybe if they had showed up in court to make that argument, the judge wouldn't have granted the plaintiffs a default judgement.
I'm not trying to invalidate your feelings or those of anyone else who was directly affected by the September 11th attacks, and I am not trying to claim that it wasn't a terrible moment in our nation's history. But it has been blown terribly out of proportion by our government and the media for their own benefit, whether intentionally or not.
Regarding the question in the orignal post ("Are the terrorists laughing at us?") I couldn't help but be just a little bit amused at Bin Laden's tape that he released before the last election, making fun of how easy it was to goad President Bush in particular and Americans in general into fighting Al Qaeda on their terms. Of course his criticism of George Bush had the predictable effect of a last minute increase in support for the incumbent president. The irony is almost unbelievable- by telling us exactly what he thought, he was able to talk his sworn enemies into playing right into his hands. If I found it amusing (if sad), I can only imagine how it looks from the other side.
Sorry, forgot to escape the br tags. Guess I should have previewed...
Does it still show the same behavior if use a string representation of a number:
// The string cast here may // or may not be necessary
i.e.:
var y = { '8388607': 1, '8388608': 3, '16777215': 5, '16777216': 7 };
document.write("8388607:"+ y[String(8388607)] + "
");
document.write("8388608:"+ y[String(8388608)] + "
");
I don't have a recent version of Opera handy to try it out, and honestly given JavaScript's typical behavior with ints-as-strings, neither answer would surprise me, but it may be an easy way to work around the bug if they don't fix it (or provide support for older Opera versions even if the most recent is fixed), and less performance intensive than concatenating strings.
And to answer the question somebody else asked: Yes, string concatenation in JavaScript is SLOW. It varies from implementation to implementation, with IE being by far the worst but not only offender. It's slow enough that we have a standard JS library where I work that performs string concatenation via a combination of array pushes and joins, which is more than an order of magnitude faster on IE, and about the same to slightly faster on most other browsers.
They would have every legal right, but I suspect they would have a hard time getting anywhere. In case you forgot, the voting shareholders at Google are basically Larry, Sergey, and the other guy whose name I've forgotten. So one of those three would have to piss off the other two something fierce in order to be removed by "the shareholders".
Yeah, that ad-hoc wireless idea is pretty neat. I'll bet there's a whole dozen people jumping up and down waiting to try it out. Color me underwhelmed. In every way.
And seriously... Brown? They practically wrote Apple's next commercial for them.
How many Americans were killed in terrorist incidents in the last five years (and three days)?
How many Americans die in car accidents every month?
I'm not saying that the terrorist threat isn't real, but it seems to have been blown far out of proportion by our current leadership as a way of consolidating government power that would never before have been allowed. (Not that Bush and Co. are the only ones guilty of this. I seem remember Clinton pushing for a lot of the same powers after the Oklahoma City bombing, but appearently that did not generate a sufficient level of public outrage.)
After having gone, and seeing the caliber of many of the people who graduated with (or ahead of) me, I'm pretty sure that a college degree is more along the lines of a symbol that says "I was able to jump through hoops for four (or more) years without giving up and declaring it a waste of time".
Don't get me wrong, a lot of people get very good college educations (I like to think that I was one of them, even if my grades don't necessarily speak to that fact) but a diploma is certainly not evidence of one.
One thing to point out- it sounds like the problem that these companies is having is not so much granny going out on Kazaa and downloading all of their software and patterns. The big problem is small shop owners or individuals who buy the patterns and then sell copies via their shop or ebay, or whatever.
In this case, it's not 'granny' who is violating copyright, but rather the ones who actually made the copies. Those are the ones that ESPC should be sending the letters to. And telling people that 'ignorance is no defence' isn't really true. (Actually, it's the worst kind of untruth- it's literally completely true, but also completely irrelevant in the context) If a person buys a product that they believe to be legitimate, and it turns out that the seller violated copyright, then as far as I know buyer hasn't done anything wrong. (Note that this is different from the case of buying stolen goods- despite what the 'ad' on the begining of my new DVDs tells me, theft and copyright infringement are still very different things. If they really are the same, then why isn't shoplifting a federal offense punishable by up to $750,000 and 10 years in prison?)
Only twice?
Pfft. Amateurs...
Yes they are completely different orders of magnitude. One is stealing $45,000, the other is stealing $900,000. If the money manager stole a $45,000 car, he should be subject to the same punishment as the guy from the ghetto. If he steals 20 times as much money, the penalty should be correspondingly severe. I don't see any reason that the people of power/wealth would need to be held to a higher standard- holding them to the same standard should be sufficient.
The problem, of course, is that most of the time we don't even do that.
Why not? They have (or so they claim) already done it twice in the last 10 years. Weren't Win2k and Vista both touted as complete rewrites of the OS? Everyone always says Microsoft finally gets things (more or less) right the third time around...
You've already got it wrong on the first line. If you ask my wife what Operating System is installed on my laptop, she'll answer without hesitation "ooboontoo". She didn't realize Ubuntu was actually Linux until I told her- after it had already been on the laptop for almost 6 months. She knew all that time what Linux was- (because I used it in college and it frustrated her to no end that she could never figure out how to do anything on my computer) she just never realized they were the same thing. I would bet you money that anyone who says only "Linux" when you ask them what "Operating System" they run knows perfectly well whether they are running Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Enlightenment, etc.
And since you mention it, try asking a windows user what operating system they run sometime...