This shouldn't really piss people off (and no, I'm not an MS fanboy). You won't need to call them if you reinstall Windows. If your hardware hasn't changed, the activation will work. If you use your "OS Restore CD," It's already "pre-activated," so again, no phoning MS. If you scammed a key from a major vendor or you bought your computer from a sleazy computer store, then you will need to call MS. If you bought it from a sleazy store, I would make them phone MS for you. If you don't want to deal with ANY of this stuff, you can snag a copy of Corporate Ed, OR just use one of the many PA hacks out there. This will rewrte winlogon.exe and your new copy of XP won't need to be activated online. Screw the activation, the 30 day timer will not count down any more, AND you can still do updates.
You have to remember, some (legit) pages might link to these domains to load up images or something. They will try to contact these domains BEFORE loading the page you are trying to see, so if you block it, the page may not be displayed (or it may just take a long time to load). A lot of ad.doubleclick.com sites do this. This is why it would be nice to take ALL sites like this and route them to a webserver on your local network that just serves up a blank page. Boom, just white where the real ad would be. Also, it if you just blocked access to those domains at the router, it may take longer for IE to come up with an error, and be more confusing to the user than if you just let it bring up the ads... don't get me wrong though... I dislike the way the internet has evolved too (in the sleazy businessman sense).
That's easy, the State will just spend millions of dollars mapping out all dirt roads/private roads (so they will need to inspect your property) and designing custom software that will toss out any mileage on said roads/trails/etc. You will then need to go to "certified government GPS specialists" that will update your car for a fee so that you won't need to worry about spending money on your own property/unmaintained roads. Of course, once a hacker breaks the exception rules on the GPS device, you will be able to make it discard normal roads. I'm sure there will be yearly checks for your GPS when you go in to get a new expiry sticker for your license plates, and heavy fines dished out if your firmware doesn't match the State checksums. Let's also consider that college students will pay through the nose if they are trying to save money by living at home and commuting to school (instead of paying massive college residence fees). The people with less money that have to live in cheaper places further from work will also pay a heafty fee, while the rich that live downtown in lush condos close to their work will pay very little. Or none of this will happen and something else will...
BUT FUCK OFF USA. STOP FUCKING WITH THE IONOSPHERE. If you want to fuck around in your own country, and the resident Americans don't mind, that's fine, but DON'T fuck around with the entire planet. Don't pummel the ionosphere with obscene amounts of energy just to "see what might happen." Don't heat the ionosphere for missile defense, for better communication, for anything. We're (the majority of the world, i'm sure) tired of you cocky sons-of-bitches thinking you have the rights to do this sort of thing. If you trash the ionosphere, or somehow think you can improve upon it (just like we've improved so many other things on this planet), you CAN'T, so STOP IT.
When I drive while talking on my cell and shifting my 5-speed (rare, but it happens... also smoking;)), I let the conversation suffer instead of my driving. I tell people "ok, I'm driving, so you might have to repeat yourself." If people decide to keep talking then sometimes they have to wait for a respone ("ok, 1 sec, I gotta dodge this guy.... ok shoot."). I have no problem on an open stretch of highway but I imagine these tests have more to do with city drivers that have to constantly be on the lookout.
1. Your not physically bigger than everyone at all. Canada = bigger.
2. You are correct, we implemented a copper-based system early on whereas the East held off as much as possible and adopted fiber very early on. Now they can offer wicked services without having to replace the whole phone system.
3.Phone companies (Independent) in the States were a lot of mom-and-pop shops that had no idea how to design a phone system properly. What this lead to was not being able to offer these new-fangled services. Eventually they were purchased by large companies that then monopolized the industry.
Most telco's adopted ADSL because it's one of the only technologies with the reach to actually get to all of their customers. There are other, faster DSL technologies but the range is quite limited to attain those speeds. The problem is in the "A." Asynchronous means that it cannot transfer the same rate in both directions at the same time. The capping took place because they didn't want people to run servers AND they didn't want all the lusers with their infected PC's spewing out virii/spam at 3Mbit - so 256k is fine. Plus, most people really don't need a lot of upstream bandwidth unless they are sharing files AND performing another task like browsing the internet. I know on this particular website, I will get flak for these comments, but most of you probably know that upstream really isn't needed. By us, yes, but by Joe User, no. More upstream would just help the spread of ads/spam/virii become a lot more of a PITA than it is currently, IMHO. By the way, at 400k you can still host a website - you just can't host a really popular website.
... I have over 8MB at my place... 1024k upstram. I pay $0. This move came after I upgraded all of our "regular" DSL users (1.5Mbit/256k) to 3Mbit/512k. I just had to have my home connection faster so I pumped it up to 8MB/1024K. Goodtimes.
Don't worry, there are softswitch companies that are building pulse dial into their H248 VOIP lines. They may not like it, but it is still a feature in demand. You can keep that phone goin' for a long time yet!
Where I work (ISP), people have phoned in and said "That's it, i'm cancelling my internet because my computer sucks.. it just locks up all the time and the ads are driving me crazy!" I explain to them what spyware/adware is and how easy it is to get rid of it. After 10 minutes, they don't want to throw their computer out the door and they still want to stay on the internet.
Now, maybe it's just me, but for some reason computers seem to stand on their own when it comes to people trying to understand them. The reason that most people don't understand them is because most people haven't tried to learn anything, or haven't read anything about them. It's almost "cool" to say "Hell, I'm computer illiterate, I can barely turn it on." When I troubleshoot a DSL connection, before I can even say "Look at the phone cable," 9 out of 10 times the customer has already given up in their mind and has told me "Look, I don't know anything about computers so I can't do this." Little do they know, they don't NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THEM. They just need to know what a phone cable looks like and then they need to FOLLOW IT WITH THEIR HANDS. Pretty easy, right? Wrong. Before you get to that point, the person has gotten so used to saying that they don't know anything, that they don't even give themselves a chance. I really don't know why people will spend $1000+ on a new machine and then never learn anything about it. Would you spend $600 on a new stove and hit the buttons at random just to bitch because your food is under/over cooked, or would you read the package of the food and read the instructions of the stove to know how to use it properly? A few hours of learning to use your new investment will go a LONG way.
Mom and Pop don't need longhorn if they just need to check mail and surf the web. Also, by the time the OS is released, perhaps these graphics standards will be, umm... standard. Mom and Pop have no need to buy a new OS if they just need the basics. OTOH, if they do need Longhorn, then it will probably have come pre-installed on the computer they buy.
One being Tetris. This game is pretty darn addictive - I started playing it a few years ago when one of my roomates found her old Gameboy. We would have contests for high score etc. I had to stop after a few weeks because when I would go to bed I would be in between the sleeping and waking state and see Tetris shapes floating through the air. I would wake up in the morning and realize that I had Tetris music playing in my head and constant Tetris games being played as well. It was totally insane.
The newest, and only other game to have this effect on me is RTCW:ET (Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (Free and runs on Linux!)). If I play this for a couple of hours before going to bed, I have similar results to Tetris. I wake up and realize that I am playing a wargame in my head and yelling in German. Aha Sehr Gut!
I usually just stick in CD#1 of any linux distro that is sitting around - I just did this with Fedora Core 3 last week. Once the insall begins, I just switch to another terminal, mount my FS and make the changes I need to reboot the box.
Yeah I was checkin that out too... I also came across one that was a continuous electric beam of some sort - it had the output from the particle accelerator and had another camera watching "scientists" using the device
I believe there is a God (which I will define as a one-ness, connecting all of us and our subconscious minds to one whole mind of which we all partake. We think we are using our mind, but we are using a localized field of THE mind. But anyway...), and that this being is filled (rather, just IS) Love. The tsunami just IS. It is your reaction to it that makes the tsnuami SOMETHING. Is your opinion that it wiped out a bunch of the poorest people to end their suffering? Then this was a great thing that happened. Do you think it had more natural "reasons" like releasing pressure from tectonic plates that would have otherwise created far more death and destruction? Great. Did you think this was a horrible disaster that was made even worse by taking place in regions that are of the poorest in the world? Maybe the good side is that now you want to help these people. Perhaps you never would have appreciated their situation unless something like this happened.
Of course God is indifferent. God, the one-ness, the all-ness. IT is everything. It has no priorities or preferences. YOU DO. You are the all-ness that has being-ness (you are BEING human) in this world. You are the one that represents the One-ness for the other parts of the one-ness (other people) to see.
Once you decide that this particular tragedy means a particular thing to you, you tell others and soon you will find that others share your believe. You are One in the beliefs about this tragedy. The idea of what the tragedy means is in Mind. The only Mind that exists. See, the tsunami just IS. Then a plethora of thoughts, decisions, actions, manifestations will occur based on what is going on in your localized field of Mind.
Our thought manifests reality. This is Law. We may not know exactly how our thoughts will manifest, but they will. Perhaps this tsunami happened because of the tectonic plates. Perhaps the will to live in this world was strong enough that the earthquake occured to save us, but some had to die in the process, thereby bringing our population closer together - sharing the aid.
Of course these are all just examples. It is very to hard to explain my reasoning in a small thread on a forum for it would take a book to explain in every last detail why I think the way I do. This post is just meant to spark some ideas, or trolls;)
I work for an ISP and I get the abuse mail. When I get one of these emails from RIAA/MPAA agents it is usually filled with US LAW references (they point to where the rules are but don't cite the rules themselves). They usually list the offending files , such as Shrek2 - Vid CAM CD1.mpg (75MB), and give me an IP address, but no timeframe. Then they go on to explain that they want this activity to halt immediately so that it can benefit the whole internet community blah blah blah. I explain to them that I live in Canada. We can share files legally here. The RIAA/MPAA has not proven to me that my customer is sharing any files. They have simply shown me that someone with an IP address on my network offered up some files (75MB is NOT CD1 of Shrek2) that had names similar to movies/music that they have authority over. I then ask them how this benefits the internet community as a whole. I explain that without a time, I cannot track down any users and I wouldn't do it anyway. I ask them if they have proven that these files really are what they say they are (full movies or music titles), and I never, ever get a response back from any of these agents. I suppose they are off for easier targets (or are slowly building a case against us;) ). I will always stick up for my customers until I find they they really are damaging the internet community as a whole.
IANAL, but I thought you had to have a license agreement to install Spyware? If Overpeer is doing this and installing stuff on my computer without my knowledge, can I sue them for purposely infecting my machines and bill them my time for fixing them? MY fee will be $1 more than the amount I get sued for. Perhaps I was just confused. Perhaps I didn't know that Alisha Keys (or however you spell it) was an international superstar protected by copywright law... maybe I just thought the title of the song was catchy so I downloaded the file and got fucked in the ass by an evil corporation infecting my PC that I have to pay a computer store to fix. Yeah, the RIAA/MPAA will be even more popular for this move. Popular enough for a counter attack for sure.
After reading all of these posts (well the highly modded ones anyway) it seems that there just needs to be 2 *types* of UNIX and then various distro's modelled around these 2 types of systems. One is a user-based system (single user - as in at my house, for me and maybe one or two other people) and then a server type that has a more traditional layout. UNIX is great right now for managing many users. We don't need things to be in/usr/New Program/bin and then add that path to our $PATH. We need a/bin//sbin/usr/bin and/usr/sbin/etc blah blah blah because it works great the way it is. For home users, the current UNIX system sucks. It is made for people who like to constantly fiddle and tweak shit ALL THE TIME. Yes this post would have to be 100 pages to get my full point across but what I am seeing is that a lot of people are saying to use MacOSX because its the perfect UNIX. It's not. It's a pain in the ass for a lot of different things (windows interoperability...shares hang, you still have error messages hidden behind the GUI), but its very easy for a home user (drag the.APP to the APPS folder and voila). There almost needs to be a traditional system with the traditional layout (so stuff can be mounted via NFS, all the users are in/home,/etc might reside on another box, etc), that is easy for a sysadmin to administer. But the one main issue that I have with *NIX is that there are too many proverbial cooks in the kitchen. Everyone is doing things their own way, not everyone has the time to (freely) update their software to work with GTK2 when they already have something running on GTK1.x (same for QT) etc etc etc. Installers do not behave the same way, blah blah blah... there is just too much going on and not enough quality control. This means that we geeks have to have several versions of shared libs installed for the plethora of apps we have installed. I personally hate having a whack of GTK apps and then I find ONE that needs QT and a bunch of other libraries installed - now I just increased my system by 2MB for the program I want and 50MB for everything it (alone) requires. This is basically an disorganized rant, but you see where I'm going. It would take a lot of effort to standardize graphics libs, networking libs, FS layouts, default FS's, etc because THERE ARE TOO MANY WAYS TO DO THINGS - but you know what? WE LIKE THAT, but now its basically shooting us in the foot because once we download everything we want on our desktop (and customize all the menu's in our GUI because the menu's don't build themselves upon installation), we have a messy system that is not easy to rebuild without all that tinkering. Basically distros that are labelled as servers come with more server apps, security suites etc. The desktop distros come with more user utilities, games, graphics, pim, etc, but underneath they are both the same and this doesn't work well. We need a major overhaul.
Slashdot Mirror
This shouldn't really piss people off (and no, I'm not an MS fanboy). You won't need to call them if you reinstall Windows. If your hardware hasn't changed, the activation will work. If you use your "OS Restore CD," It's already "pre-activated," so again, no phoning MS. If you scammed a key from a major vendor or you bought your computer from a sleazy computer store, then you will need to call MS. If you bought it from a sleazy store, I would make them phone MS for you. If you don't want to deal with ANY of this stuff, you can snag a copy of Corporate Ed, OR just use one of the many PA hacks out there. This will rewrte winlogon.exe and your new copy of XP won't need to be activated online. Screw the activation, the 30 day timer will not count down any more, AND you can still do updates.
You have to remember, some (legit) pages might link to these domains to load up images or something. They will try to contact these domains BEFORE loading the page you are trying to see, so if you block it, the page may not be displayed (or it may just take a long time to load). A lot of ad.doubleclick.com sites do this. This is why it would be nice to take ALL sites like this and route them to a webserver on your local network that just serves up a blank page. Boom, just white where the real ad would be. Also, it if you just blocked access to those domains at the router, it may take longer for IE to come up with an error, and be more confusing to the user than if you just let it bring up the ads... don't get me wrong though... I dislike the way the internet has evolved too (in the sleazy businessman sense).
That's easy, the State will just spend millions of dollars mapping out all dirt roads/private roads (so they will need to inspect your property) and designing custom software that will toss out any mileage on said roads/trails/etc. You will then need to go to "certified government GPS specialists" that will update your car for a fee so that you won't need to worry about spending money on your own property/unmaintained roads. Of course, once a hacker breaks the exception rules on the GPS device, you will be able to make it discard normal roads. I'm sure there will be yearly checks for your GPS when you go in to get a new expiry sticker for your license plates, and heavy fines dished out if your firmware doesn't match the State checksums. Let's also consider that college students will pay through the nose if they are trying to save money by living at home and commuting to school (instead of paying massive college residence fees). The people with less money that have to live in cheaper places further from work will also pay a heafty fee, while the rich that live downtown in lush condos close to their work will pay very little. Or none of this will happen and something else will...
The US PTO can't even spell properly, let alone decide what should be patented or not:
Assignee Name and Adress: Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
BUT FUCK OFF USA. STOP FUCKING WITH THE IONOSPHERE. If you want to fuck around in your own country, and the resident Americans don't mind, that's fine, but DON'T fuck around with the entire planet. Don't pummel the ionosphere with obscene amounts of energy just to "see what might happen." Don't heat the ionosphere for missile defense, for better communication, for anything. We're (the majority of the world, i'm sure) tired of you cocky sons-of-bitches thinking you have the rights to do this sort of thing. If you trash the ionosphere, or somehow think you can improve upon it (just like we've improved so many other things on this planet), you CAN'T, so STOP IT.
When I drive while talking on my cell and shifting my 5-speed (rare, but it happens... also smoking ;)), I let the conversation suffer instead of my driving. I tell people "ok, I'm driving, so you might have to repeat yourself." If people decide to keep talking then sometimes they have to wait for a respone ("ok, 1 sec, I gotta dodge this guy.... ok shoot."). I have no problem on an open stretch of highway but I imagine these tests have more to do with city drivers that have to constantly be on the lookout.
1. Your not physically bigger than everyone at all. Canada = bigger.
2. You are correct, we implemented a copper-based system early on whereas the East held off as much as possible and adopted fiber very early on. Now they can offer wicked services without having to replace the whole phone system.
3.Phone companies (Independent) in the States were a lot of mom-and-pop shops that had no idea how to design a phone system properly. What this lead to was not being able to offer these new-fangled services. Eventually they were purchased by large companies that then monopolized the industry.
Ahem, make that Asymmetric.
Most telco's adopted ADSL because it's one of the only technologies with the reach to actually get to all of their customers. There are other, faster DSL technologies but the range is quite limited to attain those speeds. The problem is in the "A." Asynchronous means that it cannot transfer the same rate in both directions at the same time. The capping took place because they didn't want people to run servers AND they didn't want all the lusers with their infected PC's spewing out virii/spam at 3Mbit - so 256k is fine. Plus, most people really don't need a lot of upstream bandwidth unless they are sharing files AND performing another task like browsing the internet. I know on this particular website, I will get flak for these comments, but most of you probably know that upstream really isn't needed. By us, yes, but by Joe User, no. More upstream would just help the spread of ads/spam/virii become a lot more of a PITA than it is currently, IMHO. By the way, at 400k you can still host a website - you just can't host a really popular website.
... I have over 8MB at my place... 1024k upstram. I pay $0. This move came after I upgraded all of our "regular" DSL users (1.5Mbit/256k) to 3Mbit/512k. I just had to have my home connection faster so I pumped it up to 8MB/1024K. Goodtimes.
I don't find it a big deal. I just thought I'd snag first post, and since I really don't care about DirectX, I thought I'd whine about the grammar ;)
For more THAN just Gamers.
Don't worry, there are softswitch companies that are building pulse dial into their H248 VOIP lines. They may not like it, but it is still a feature in demand. You can keep that phone goin' for a long time yet!
I have an 86MB Seagate harddrive that has FreeBSD on it from the early 90's. It still runs fine... no bad clusters or anything. Fear my 86MB!
Where I work (ISP), people have phoned in and said "That's it, i'm cancelling my internet because my computer sucks.. it just locks up all the time and the ads are driving me crazy!" I explain to them what spyware/adware is and how easy it is to get rid of it. After 10 minutes, they don't want to throw their computer out the door and they still want to stay on the internet.
Now, maybe it's just me, but for some reason computers seem to stand on their own when it comes to people trying to understand them. The reason that most people don't understand them is because most people haven't tried to learn anything, or haven't read anything about them. It's almost "cool" to say "Hell, I'm computer illiterate, I can barely turn it on." When I troubleshoot a DSL connection, before I can even say "Look at the phone cable," 9 out of 10 times the customer has already given up in their mind and has told me "Look, I don't know anything about computers so I can't do this." Little do they know, they don't NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THEM. They just need to know what a phone cable looks like and then they need to FOLLOW IT WITH THEIR HANDS. Pretty easy, right? Wrong. Before you get to that point, the person has gotten so used to saying that they don't know anything, that they don't even give themselves a chance. I really don't know why people will spend $1000+ on a new machine and then never learn anything about it. Would you spend $600 on a new stove and hit the buttons at random just to bitch because your food is under/over cooked, or would you read the package of the food and read the instructions of the stove to know how to use it properly? A few hours of learning to use your new investment will go a LONG way.
Mom and Pop don't need longhorn if they just need to check mail and surf the web. Also, by the time the OS is released, perhaps these graphics standards will be, umm... standard. Mom and Pop have no need to buy a new OS if they just need the basics. OTOH, if they do need Longhorn, then it will probably have come pre-installed on the computer they buy.
One being Tetris. This game is pretty darn addictive - I started playing it a few years ago when one of my roomates found her old Gameboy. We would have contests for high score etc. I had to stop after a few weeks because when I would go to bed I would be in between the sleeping and waking state and see Tetris shapes floating through the air. I would wake up in the morning and realize that I had Tetris music playing in my head and constant Tetris games being played as well. It was totally insane.
The newest, and only other game to have this effect on me is RTCW:ET (Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (Free and runs on Linux!)). If I play this for a couple of hours before going to bed, I have similar results to Tetris. I wake up and realize that I am playing a wargame in my head and yelling in German. Aha Sehr Gut!
I usually just stick in CD#1 of any linux distro that is sitting around - I just did this with Fedora Core 3 last week. Once the insall begins, I just switch to another terminal, mount my FS and make the changes I need to reboot the box.
Here is some store where you can watch people try to shoplift. Pretty cool.
Yeah I was checkin that out too... I also came across one that was a continuous electric beam of some sort - it had the output from the particle accelerator and had another camera watching "scientists" using the device
Well if we explained what it is, you would still have to READ what we TYPE. This has already been done in the article, so GO RTFA.
I believe there is a God (which I will define as a one-ness, connecting all of us and our subconscious minds to one whole mind of which we all partake. We think we are using our mind, but we are using a localized field of THE mind. But anyway...), and that this being is filled (rather, just IS) Love.
;)
The tsunami just IS. It is your reaction to it that makes the tsnuami SOMETHING. Is your opinion that it wiped out a bunch of the poorest people to end their suffering? Then this was a great thing that happened. Do you think it had more natural "reasons" like releasing pressure from tectonic plates that would have otherwise created far more death and destruction? Great. Did you think this was a horrible disaster that was made even worse by taking place in regions that are of the poorest in the world? Maybe the good side is that now you want to help these people. Perhaps you never would have appreciated their situation unless something like this happened.
Of course God is indifferent. God, the one-ness, the all-ness. IT is everything. It has no priorities or preferences. YOU DO. You are the all-ness that has being-ness (you are BEING human) in this world. You are the one that represents the One-ness for the other parts of the one-ness (other people) to see.
Once you decide that this particular tragedy means a particular thing to you, you tell others and soon you will find that others share your believe. You are One in the beliefs about this tragedy. The idea of what the tragedy means is in Mind. The only Mind that exists. See, the tsunami just IS. Then a plethora of thoughts, decisions, actions, manifestations will occur based on what is going on in your localized field of Mind.
Our thought manifests reality. This is Law. We may not know exactly how our thoughts will manifest, but they will. Perhaps this tsunami happened because of the tectonic plates. Perhaps the will to live in this world was strong enough that the earthquake occured to save us, but some had to die in the process, thereby bringing our population closer together - sharing the aid.
Of course these are all just examples. It is very to hard to explain my reasoning in a small thread on a forum for it would take a book to explain in every last detail why I think the way I do. This post is just meant to spark some ideas, or trolls
I work for an ISP and I get the abuse mail. When I get one of these emails from RIAA/MPAA agents it is usually filled with US LAW references (they point to where the rules are but don't cite the rules themselves). They usually list the offending files , such as Shrek2 - Vid CAM CD1.mpg (75MB), and give me an IP address, but no timeframe. Then they go on to explain that they want this activity to halt immediately so that it can benefit the whole internet community blah blah blah. I explain to them that I live in Canada. We can share files legally here. The RIAA/MPAA has not proven to me that my customer is sharing any files. They have simply shown me that someone with an IP address on my network offered up some files (75MB is NOT CD1 of Shrek2) that had names similar to movies/music that they have authority over. I then ask them how this benefits the internet community as a whole. I explain that without a time, I cannot track down any users and I wouldn't do it anyway. I ask them if they have proven that these files really are what they say they are (full movies or music titles), and I never, ever get a response back from any of these agents. I suppose they are off for easier targets (or are slowly building a case against us ;) ). I will always stick up for my customers until I find they they really are damaging the internet community as a whole.
IANAL, but I thought you had to have a license agreement to install Spyware? If Overpeer is doing this and installing stuff on my computer without my knowledge, can I sue them for purposely infecting my machines and bill them my time for fixing them? MY fee will be $1 more than the amount I get sued for. Perhaps I was just confused. Perhaps I didn't know that Alisha Keys (or however you spell it) was an international superstar protected by copywright law... maybe I just thought the title of the song was catchy so I downloaded the file and got fucked in the ass by an evil corporation infecting my PC that I have to pay a computer store to fix. Yeah, the RIAA/MPAA will be even more popular for this move. Popular enough for a counter attack for sure.
After reading all of these posts (well the highly modded ones anyway) it seems that there just needs to be 2 *types* of UNIX and then various distro's modelled around these 2 types of systems. One is a user-based system (single user - as in at my house, for me and maybe one or two other people) and then a server type that has a more traditional layout. UNIX is great right now for managing many users. We don't need things to be in /usr/New Program/bin and then add that path to our $PATH. We need a /bin/ /sbin /usr/bin and /usr/sbin /etc blah blah blah because it works great the way it is. For home users, the current UNIX system sucks. It is made for people who like to constantly fiddle and tweak shit ALL THE TIME. Yes this post would have to be 100 pages to get my full point across but what I am seeing is that a lot of people are saying to use MacOSX because its the perfect UNIX. It's not. It's a pain in the ass for a lot of different things (windows interoperability...shares hang, you still have error messages hidden behind the GUI), but its very easy for a home user (drag the .APP to the APPS folder and voila). There almost needs to be a traditional system with the traditional layout (so stuff can be mounted via NFS, all the users are in /home, /etc might reside on another box, etc), that is easy for a sysadmin to administer. But the one main issue that I have with *NIX is that there are too many proverbial cooks in the kitchen. Everyone is doing things their own way, not everyone has the time to (freely) update their software to work with GTK2 when they already have something running on GTK1.x (same for QT) etc etc etc. Installers do not behave the same way, blah blah blah... there is just too much going on and not enough quality control. This means that we geeks have to have several versions of shared libs installed for the plethora of apps we have installed. I personally hate having a whack of GTK apps and then I find ONE that needs QT and a bunch of other libraries installed - now I just increased my system by 2MB for the program I want and 50MB for everything it (alone) requires. This is basically an disorganized rant, but you see where I'm going. It would take a lot of effort to standardize graphics libs, networking libs, FS layouts, default FS's, etc because THERE ARE TOO MANY WAYS TO DO THINGS - but you know what? WE LIKE THAT, but now its basically shooting us in the foot because once we download everything we want on our desktop (and customize all the menu's in our GUI because the menu's don't build themselves upon installation), we have a messy system that is not easy to rebuild without all that tinkering. Basically distros that are labelled as servers come with more server apps, security suites etc. The desktop distros come with more user utilities, games, graphics, pim, etc, but underneath they are both the same and this doesn't work well. We need a major overhaul.