That "spectacular failure" is selling about 300,000 copies per day. IOW - MSFT brings in more revenue in one week is OS sales than RedHat and Novel do in 52 weeks. Sure, but that was inevitable given MS's hold on the market. I don't thin anyone is seriously suggesting that Linux will be outselling any version of Windows any time soon. It's a question of momentum rather than raw numbers. While Vista might be selling a lot of copies, its momentum in the markt, compared to previous versions, is not looking so good. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a spectacular failure, but it has been rather underwhelming, and has certainly failed to generate any enthusiasm or real interest. It is getting sales by default as OEM installs rather than actually winning over customers, and ultimately that's a bad sign for the long term.
The thing that bugs me the most is the additional system resources it hogs - i buy a pc to run applications not run an OS. Actually I'm pretty happy about it -- what now gets sold as the cheap bottom level spec PCs are actually very fast with Linux. The extra resources that Vista hogs has helped drag down hardware costs on an economy of scale basis (because now every machine needs at least 1GB of RAM etc.). As long as you don't use Vista that just means a free performance boost when you buy a new PC. I've certainly enjoyed it.
At first glance this doesn't appear that bad for Microsoft -- so businesses wait, and then buy a different product from Microsoft; it delays income, but isn't that bad. The problem for Microsoft here is that it gives desktop linux an extra year or two to keep improving. The reality is that Linux on the desktop, whethr you consider it "ready" yet or not, has been improving at a far faster rate than Windows has. Just compare Windows98 and the contemporary releases of Linux (around Redhat 5.2 I think, back when they were still using Afterstep as the default environment) and then compare Vista to Ubuntu 7.10: any gaps have narrowed dramatically. Give linux another couple of years to make comparative gains and things may look inteesting when it comes time for businesses to look at OS upgrades -- do you move to Windows 7, or Linux? Both will probably represent almost equally large changes and require as much retraining as each other, and by that point Linux may well be a very good desktop option. Combine that with the fact that Linux (via wine) might actually be as good as Windows 7 at running your old win32 software (given Vistas difficulties with such things) and Microsoft may have a potential revolt on their hands.
The simple reality is tht, once you all out of step on the treadmill, then working to stay on it doesn't continue to look as attractive as it used to. Lock in is quite important to Microsoft's business model, and failing to keep businesses in step with current MS trends is actually quite a serious potential problem brewing.
Theoretically, if we had candidates that represented us instead of the interests of corporations and special interest groups, our right to vote would be worth a great deal. Ah, but there's the real key: if someone gives you enough money to join the ranks of corporations and special interest groups then you won't need to worry about voting anymore. I have to say that $1 million is rather low balling it -- I expect several hundred million would be better minimum in this day and age. Of course if you don't live in a country where politicians consistently support rich corporations and wealthy individuals you might want to keep your right to vote...
It looks as if the usual sorts of issues of spacing, delimiters and parentheses coming out not quite right is still there. It's nice that they've set up a "smart" system to try and infer grouping, but ultimately they've just shifted the character from { to (, which isn't that big a win unless you are in your situation and a keyboard layout that makes entering { hard. I would suggest the easiest solution would be to have a simple macro in your editor that would let you enter { more easily, but I do understand your annoyance.
Now, MS Word has its own multitude of problems, but I must say that I *greatly* prefer the "Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics" input method, as opposed to the {}-hell from TeX. To be honest I care far more about the quality of the output. Can you post a link to a screenshot of exactly how Word2007 renders what you entered? My experience (though I haven't looked at Word Processors equation formatting for a while) is that TeX's extra {} are quite valuable for getting things to actually look really good when formatted. I've still never seen equations formatted as well as TeX unless it has been professionally typeset.
It isn't surprising that monkeys can understand an abstraction like 'numbers' Personally I think it is pretty surprising, given that the abstraction of "number" is actually quite a tricky and remarkable one. Sure, in this day and age when we are immersed in a world of numbers we come to take the idea for granted, but when you aren't brought up with it and constantly exposed to it, it isn't as obvious an idea as you might think. There's actually quite a bit of subtlety to the full abstraction of "number". It is a testament to primates intelligence that they can grasp such an abstraction -- it is far from trivial.
The numbers 1 and 0, although fundamental to our numerical notation, are not really 'interesting' in nature - 0 is simply 'nothing' and 1 is 'anything', they sort of fade into the background. Indeed, the ancient Greeks didn't actually recognise 0 or 1 as numbers. They didn't recognise 0 because they didn't really accept the concept of nothingness. The concept of 1 existed for them, but they didn't consider it "a number", rather it "just was" -- to be a number it actually had to be a plurality, so 2 or anything larger was a number, but not 1.
...there still remains the question of how Microsoft would convince owners of XO laptops to buy and install Windows XP over the functional Linux-based OS already on it. It's doubtful that Microsoft could encourage or coerce Negroponte to put XP on the machine, so whose arms will they twist?" I expect Microsoft will be going after the governments that are buying the XO laptops and then distributing them. It makes for a juicy target as it allows Microsoft to have Windows on the laptops in an entire country. It also has the advantage that it gives Microsoft a good leverage point: they can take a two pronged approach to convincing governments that they should do a mass reinstall of all the laptops with Windows before distributing them.
Microsoft can pitch the whole "Windows is the standard, and you need to prepare your children to compete on the global market", suggesting that anything but Windows is going to cripple the children once they use anything other than the laptops. The usual FUD.
Microsoft can have side negotiations about bulk deals on Microsoft software for the government. Discounts won't cost MS that much, but they could represent a decent chunk of change to some of the countries that are looking to be involved in this program.
That makes for an easy point of attack, and allow Microsoft to subvert the XO laptop scheme quite effectively. Essentially they just go straight to the middleman with a combination of FUD and bribes, with the result that many of the laptops end uyp training the kids in Windows.
When I was at university I was talking to an old engineering lecturer and he was complaining that they had to lessen the difficulty levels of the courses even more because students were getting dumber. I gather this is indeed the case, at least as far as certain states go (Each state having its own standards etc. makes it all somewhat variable). This video has a nice example with falling test scores, followed by a new exam which had test scores going back up (see about 2 minutes in).
And, if it isn't "correct", then what else has scientists written that isn't "correct" yet still remains because it DOES support the current dogma (eg Global Warming/Cooling)? The point I'm making isn't pro-creationist/anti science or pro-science/anti creationist but rather trying to make the case that conclusions of science can be wrong, and yet still be accepted by scientists, who are blinded by current dogma. Sure, science comes to incorrect conclusions all the time; that's how it works. The catch is that we can't go around assuming whatever science we have on the table is therefore wrong. It may well be, but who is to say which particalur bits of the current understanding will turn out to be right, and which will turn out to have been dead end roads? Yes we may well be wrong, but that doesn't alter the fact that the understanding we have right now is the very best available, and second guessing that won't help. All we ever have is guesses, so at any given time, we have to just go with the best guess we have so far.
...the idea of trusting the government to keep the net neutral doesn't appeal to me any more than having Comcast do it. What happens when the next elections come, and a new party/interest is in power? What happens when X lobby group petitions to sway the government's control of the network? You currently trust the government to keep tolerance of different religions neutral. What happens when the next elections come, and a new party/interst is in power? What happens when X lobby group petitions to sway the governments support to their preferred religion, or to outlaw other religions, or institute an official state religion? Okay, so checks agains that are in the US constitution, but then the government can amend that any time they want. In fact you currently trust the government to handle a lot of things*. In general the government does a decent job of protecting such things and remaining neutral, and hopefully any government that would move to change that would get bounced in the next election (although of late this seems a little less likely). To say that you don't trust the government is to say that you don't trust the people, since ultimately it is the responsibility of the people to remain neutral and protect such things for their own sake -- it is a democracy after all. If the people come to see net neutrality as an important principle then we can trust the government with it, since any government that went against it would not survive the next election round (anymore than any government that decided to declare a state religion would).
So why would the government be better, or more trustworthy, than Comcast?
Because the government is, in principle, more transparent in its operation: Comcast can simply do what they want, and potentially people will not find out easily, while the government would have to enact legislation -- a very public process.
Because the government can centrally enforce such rules: we wouldn't just be trusting Comcast, but all the ISPs to each independently enforce NN; you can suggest that market forces would correct for ISPs that don't, but while the market will ultimately be effective, it can be far from eifficient in making such a correction -- which bring us to the last point.
Because the government has a faster feedback cycle on moves away from neutrality: market forces are a lot slower to adapt than election cycles.
Combine the relative transparency, centralisation of enforcement, and efficiency of correction, and the government makes a better choice than the market.
* Perhaps you don't trust the government with any of these things, but then, presumably you are busy enforcing such ideas yourself -- I'm not sure how exactly. I suspect, however, that ultimately you trust the government with these things, even if you claim you don't.
The only time I kind of liked such programs (and the only program I liked) was when I used Coopernic Pro agent, which indexed PDFs and CHM books, but you could indicate (graphically, not via some obscure config file editing) which folders you wanted to check. Of course, Beagle does not index CHM. Unless you have a very odd install of Beagle it provides a graphical tool (beagle-settings, which should be in the preferences menu if you're running GNOME as "Indexing preferences" or similar) which allows you to specify eaxactly which files and folders you want indexed, or excluded from indexing quite easily. You can even throttle indexing to use either more memory, or more CPU time, or turn of watching altogether (index and be done).
The other issue is whether Beagle is useful for PDFs and CHM files. Strangely enough it is -- it will index the contents of both. Yes, ?it does index CHM files! So it seems Beagle does all the things you want it to do already, so apparently it is useful to you, if you would actually bother to use it.
I don't know how Spotlight compares to Windows' built-in search or to Beagle, but I do know one reason why it's great to have... From your description I would say it isn't very comparable to Beagle, at least as far as front-end goes: for the sort of tasks you are talking about Deskbar works very well, and is pleasantly extensible (my understanding is that it is not yet quite on par with Quicksilver, but still pretty useful). Beagle provides the search capabilities that deskbar can hook into, but the basic beagle frontend is rather more search oriented rather than quick access like Deskbar.
When you consider China and India doing nothing to pass those costs on to their users, you don't have a free market. You have the US destroying their competitiveness... while doing little to solve the problem on a global scale On the other hand it is rather hard to ask India and China to do much of anything in the way of reducing emissions, or making polluters pay the costs, if you don't do anything yourself. Either you just spiral down into a lose lose situation for everyone, or someone decides to stand up and take the first step. As long as the US, which is by far the largest source of CO2 on a per capita basis, is doing nothing to curb emissions it is rather hard to put much pressure on China to step up to the plate. If the US is serious about being a world leader then they'll be brave enough to step up and do what is right, rather than cower with paranoia.
Build the orbital satellite factory and you have the infrastructure to get anywhere. Err, you've lost me. Why would we want that exactly? To build a satellite you need raw materials. Raw materials to make satellites don't, generally, exist in orbit. That means you need to ship the raw materials to your satellite factory in orbit. Now if we're shipping those raw materials up from earth... explain to me why we'd want to do that again? Why not leave the raw materials down here until the been processed put together into a satellite, since ultimately you're going to have waste material in such a process so the finished satellite is going to be lighter (and hence) cheaper to ship up to orbit.
If you're not talking about getting the raw materials from earth... well where then? The moon? The asteroid belt? Those aren't exactly nearby. Perhaps we could build a nice spacecraft factory on the moon, in or the asteroid belt, but that's really quite another step again above an orbital factory.
For contrast, my ISP in Ottawa is non-profit co-op. They are rather more organised however. There are usage caps (40GB per month, which seems pretty reasonable), but the service is great, they encourage sharing your connections and costs with neighbours, and are significantly cheaper than Bell, while providing (ultimately) better service. Thus, while the particular group singled out in the article are a bit dodgy, line sharing has resulted in a number of other non-profit organisations providing cheap internet service in Canada (I know, for example, that equivalents of my ISP exist in several other cities, and I expect it is generally quite common).
In other words, you don't need a PhD in physics to contribute to physics articles. Sure, but you then have to accept that you might think you know more than you do, and someone who knows better will revert your well intentioned but incorrect edits. I see this sort of thing happen a lot on the mathematics articles: well intentioned, but misinformed individuals add material to a page that is simply wrong, or ultimately more confusing than helpful. It gets reverted. Yes you can contribute to physics articles without a PhD in the subject, but (particularly in already well developed articles) you might unknowingly be making it worse instead of better. Knowing a lot about a subject is not a pre-requisite for editing, but it certainly helps a lot.
The idea of a reluctant Aragorn is the biggest change in the story. It leads to many of the unpopular changes in the story, particularly the amplification of the Arwen character. Interestingly I suspect that the changes on that front worked the other way around: that is, it was felt necessary to amplify Arwen's role in the films. Certainly that's a defensible decision: she has little or no role in the books (save the appendices) and certainly no dramatic role, thus what little she does feature through the books in the way of asides was going to be cut for the purposes of film; furthermore I believe that there was a decision made, early on, to try and provide more female roles for the films, and Arwen is a natural choice on this front -- female characters were certainly one of Tolkien's weak points, so I can certainly see some merit in attempting to address this. Given the need to bolster Arwen's role, some degree of change was then required elsewhere, and this had natural flow on effects to Aragorn and Elrond. I think you'll find, in fact, that strengthening or expanding female roles was an underlying factor inaa great many of the changes made for the films.
The ubiquitous nature of windows makes it very easy to fix your machine should something go wrong. In as much as it means it's more likely that you know someone who can come and try and fix it for you, yes. But let's be clear, most "average" users like you are talking about do not fix their windows machines, they either get a friend to come, or they call the local computer fixit company. Windows is not easier than linux, it is just more common, and so has a greater chance of finding someone who knows enough to fix it.
Which is the point: the largest barriers to linux making desktop inroads these days are, quite simply, dependent on getting greater market share. If linux on the desktop becomes more common, then you'll find more people who can help you fix it, and the local computer fixit companies will start including linux in their services. If linux on the desktop is more common you can expect hardware companies to start ensuring their hardware works with linux and comes with easy to install drivers. If linux on the desktop becomes more common you can expect to see more commercial software vendors porting their software to linux. And those are the biggest barriers right now for home users: technical support, hardware support, and the availability of their favourite commercial software.
So is there more, other than becoming more popular, that linux can do to fix those problems? Not really. You can argue about "too many distros" making the tech support harder, but they're similar enough under the hood that it mostly doesn't matter, and ultimately only a very small handful are actually popular with people who need tech support (Ubuntu mostly, Fedora and SUSE maybe) so ultimately we're only talking about a few versions anyway. So how about hardware? Linux already does pretty well at reverse engineering, and there's the Novell sponsored driver project going right now -- linux is already going well out of its way to support hardware -- all that is lacking is enough widespread adoption to make hardware manufacturers start taking notice. How about encouraging commercial software vendors? This is the one area where linux could maybe still do more. There aren't, yet, easy channels for commercial software on linux. That, however, is changing. With Click'N'Run integration into Ubuntu you'll have an easy way for commercial vendors to make their software available and easily installable and manageable by a vast chunk of desktop linux users in one fell swoop. So mostly this is taken care of as much as is feasible, it just hasn't fully come online yet...
So really linux has done most of what needs to be done to be a viable home desktop option -- what it lacks can only really be provided by wider home desktop adoption. This is the barrier to entry that has served Microsoft so well, but it is crumbling. Linux has managed to stay on the playing field long enough, and retain a developer community despite its relative unpopularity, and slowly but surely it is gaining wider acceptance. That acceptance will only snowball. There will never be a "year of the linux desktop" when linux suddenly "arrives". Instead there will simply be the slow crawl of wider and wider adoption, coupled with better and better support for linux from third parties, until eventually, without anyone quite realising it had happened, linux will have arrived on the desktop.
Part of the problem is that there isn't a good solution yet, so there's a lot of effort being put into trying to find a way for a bad solution to be more comfortable...Old-school iterative languages are a clumsy fit...New-hotness functional languages are insane. I think you're looking at the wrong dichotomy there. If you want languages that make concurrency easy to write, easy to reason about, and easy to get right, then you want languages that are based on message passing and no-shared state. That can be either functional, like Erlang, or iterative OO like E.
The problem is more that iterative programmers are used to using shared state as a crutch, and having message passing systems that incurred significant overhead. FP solves the shared-state problems by eliminating state, but that only introduces new problems: it is very hard to reason about and write some software using state, so you either have to contort your thinking, or re-introduce state on some level (be it by kluging it in, or via monads). Just ditch the shared-state and get lightweight message passing and things will look up. Hell, it even integrates with OO elegantly if you're willing to view method calls as message passing (which, let's be honest, it was originally intended as -- see Smalltalk). Check out SCOOP for Eiffel for an example of adding easy concurrency to an OO language using this approach.
Okay, fp!=parallel, but, e.g., one of the big selling points of Erlang is supposed to be that it lends itself to completely transparent use of parallel processors. Mostly what makes Erlang good for parallel programming, however, it is its Actor model, no shared memory, message passing, based approach to concurrency that provides that; the FP side is somewhat incidental (it certainly doesn't hurt, but it isn't required). You can have similarly clean and easy parallelism, as long as you take a message passing style approach, in a non-FP language: take a look at SCOOP for Eiffel which provides fairly transparent parallel code with an OO language.
this is just a retarded pissing contest about word definitions Which you started. Reading some of your other replies, it seems that any set of ideas that anyone "believes" is a "religion"; which is stretching the definition well beyond common discourse. Excuse me for confusing your personal definition of religion (of which any philosophy whatsoever, involving absolutely no "spiritual" concept or otherwise, would qualify as) with the generally accepted one which refers to established schools of thought with specific spiritual beliefs. Saying "Religion and Science are not in conflict" and retorting, whenever anyone calls you on it, with "that's not what I mean by religion" and pointing to what actually just amounts to philosophy is rather disingenuous. The reality is that you mean that philosophy and science are not in conflict. Religion, as in specific actual schools of thought that call themselves religions, are very much in conflict with science. Sure "religion" needn't be in conflict with science if it gives up all its dogma and beliefs and becomes philosophy, but then its hardly religion anymore is it? Well, it is for you when you play word games.
I'm not claiming religion has no value, I'm simply arguing with you about where its value lies, and it certainly isn't in the field of providing answers to anything -- for that we have science and philosophy. If you want to talk about what religion is in a way that talks about its value, then talk about social cohesion, and giving glib but comforting answers to questions that remain unresolved. Don't talk about fairness and justice, don't talk about answering "why" questions: that's not something religion does well.
Science addresses questions of WHAT? and HOW? of the world and events. Indeed, and philosophy addresses questions of WHY?, and religion shuffles in and treads on everyone's toes. Some people's view of religion puts it very much in conflict with science, because they see religion as answering WHAT and HOW questions. Those, like you, who wish to pare religion back to WHY questions, simply reduce it to bad philosophy.
Religion addresses what science cannot - RIGHT and WRONG, GOOD and BAD, (and the debate rages over the definition of those terms). Morals, Spiritual understanding, things which cannot be defined or observed in the physical world. Questions of right and wrong, good and bad -- these are questions for ethics and moral philosophy, and there has been a great deal said in those fields that makes no mention of religion or God. Questions of consciousness are also an active field for philosophers. Religions answers to these questions, rather than being profound, tend to be both glib, and completely lacking in any grounded argument or justification. Religion and theology are, these days (since religion lost the battle over WHAT and HOW with science) simply bad philosophy that has a strong hold because it has been around a long time, and modern philosophy still doesn't have all the answers. That doesn't make it good, nor valuable, other than as a security blanket (which, I admit, it does very well at for now) until we actually make progress on real answers.
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At first glance this doesn't appear that bad for Microsoft -- so businesses wait, and then buy a different product from Microsoft; it delays income, but isn't that bad. The problem for Microsoft here is that it gives desktop linux an extra year or two to keep improving. The reality is that Linux on the desktop, whethr you consider it "ready" yet or not, has been improving at a far faster rate than Windows has. Just compare Windows98 and the contemporary releases of Linux (around Redhat 5.2 I think, back when they were still using Afterstep as the default environment) and then compare Vista to Ubuntu 7.10: any gaps have narrowed dramatically. Give linux another couple of years to make comparative gains and things may look inteesting when it comes time for businesses to look at OS upgrades -- do you move to Windows 7, or Linux? Both will probably represent almost equally large changes and require as much retraining as each other, and by that point Linux may well be a very good desktop option. Combine that with the fact that Linux (via wine) might actually be as good as Windows 7 at running your old win32 software (given Vistas difficulties with such things) and Microsoft may have a potential revolt on their hands.
The simple reality is tht, once you all out of step on the treadmill, then working to stay on it doesn't continue to look as attractive as it used to. Lock in is quite important to Microsoft's business model, and failing to keep businesses in step with current MS trends is actually quite a serious potential problem brewing.
It looks as if the usual sorts of issues of spacing, delimiters and parentheses coming out not quite right is still there. It's nice that they've set up a "smart" system to try and infer grouping, but ultimately they've just shifted the character from { to (, which isn't that big a win unless you are in your situation and a keyboard layout that makes entering { hard. I would suggest the easiest solution would be to have a simple macro in your editor that would let you enter { more easily, but I do understand your annoyance.
...there still remains the question of how Microsoft would convince owners of XO laptops to buy and install Windows XP over the functional Linux-based OS already on it. It's doubtful that Microsoft could encourage or coerce Negroponte to put XP on the machine, so whose arms will they twist?" I expect Microsoft will be going after the governments that are buying the XO laptops and then distributing them. It makes for a juicy target as it allows Microsoft to have Windows on the laptops in an entire country. It also has the advantage that it gives Microsoft a good leverage point: they can take a two pronged approach to convincing governments that they should do a mass reinstall of all the laptops with Windows before distributing them.- Microsoft can pitch the whole "Windows is the standard, and you need to prepare your children to compete on the global market", suggesting that anything but Windows is going to cripple the children once they use anything other than the laptops. The usual FUD.
- Microsoft can have side negotiations about bulk deals on Microsoft software for the government. Discounts won't cost MS that much, but they could represent a decent chunk of change to some of the countries that are looking to be involved in this program.
That makes for an easy point of attack, and allow Microsoft to subvert the XO laptop scheme quite effectively. Essentially they just go straight to the middleman with a combination of FUD and bribes, with the result that many of the laptops end uyp training the kids in Windows.
...the idea of trusting the government to keep the net neutral doesn't appeal to me any more than having Comcast do it. What happens when the next elections come, and a new party/interest is in power? What happens when X lobby group petitions to sway the government's control of the network? You currently trust the government to keep tolerance of different religions neutral. What happens when the next elections come, and a new party/interst is in power? What happens when X lobby group petitions to sway the governments support to their preferred religion, or to outlaw other religions, or institute an official state religion? Okay, so checks agains that are in the US constitution, but then the government can amend that any time they want. In fact you currently trust the government to handle a lot of things*. In general the government does a decent job of protecting such things and remaining neutral, and hopefully any government that would move to change that would get bounced in the next election (although of late this seems a little less likely). To say that you don't trust the government is to say that you don't trust the people, since ultimately it is the responsibility of the people to remain neutral and protect such things for their own sake -- it is a democracy after all. If the people come to see net neutrality as an important principle then we can trust the government with it, since any government that went against it would not survive the next election round (anymore than any government that decided to declare a state religion would).So why would the government be better, or more trustworthy, than Comcast?
Combine the relative transparency, centralisation of enforcement, and efficiency of correction, and the government makes a better choice than the market.
* Perhaps you don't trust the government with any of these things, but then, presumably you are busy enforcing such ideas yourself -- I'm not sure how exactly. I suspect, however, that ultimately you trust the government with these things, even if you claim you don't.
The relevant words were per capita.
The other issue is whether Beagle is useful for PDFs and CHM files. Strangely enough it is -- it will index the contents of both. Yes, ?it does index CHM files! So it seems Beagle does all the things you want it to do already, so apparently it is useful to you, if you would actually bother to use it.
If you're not talking about getting the raw materials from earth... well where then? The moon? The asteroid belt? Those aren't exactly nearby. Perhaps we could build a nice spacecraft factory on the moon, in or the asteroid belt, but that's really quite another step again above an orbital factory.
For contrast, my ISP in Ottawa is non-profit co-op. They are rather more organised however. There are usage caps (40GB per month, which seems pretty reasonable), but the service is great, they encourage sharing your connections and costs with neighbours, and are significantly cheaper than Bell, while providing (ultimately) better service. Thus, while the particular group singled out in the article are a bit dodgy, line sharing has resulted in a number of other non-profit organisations providing cheap internet service in Canada (I know, for example, that equivalents of my ISP exist in several other cities, and I expect it is generally quite common).
Which is the point: the largest barriers to linux making desktop inroads these days are, quite simply, dependent on getting greater market share. If linux on the desktop becomes more common, then you'll find more people who can help you fix it, and the local computer fixit companies will start including linux in their services. If linux on the desktop is more common you can expect hardware companies to start ensuring their hardware works with linux and comes with easy to install drivers. If linux on the desktop becomes more common you can expect to see more commercial software vendors porting their software to linux. And those are the biggest barriers right now for home users: technical support, hardware support, and the availability of their favourite commercial software.
So is there more, other than becoming more popular, that linux can do to fix those problems? Not really. You can argue about "too many distros" making the tech support harder, but they're similar enough under the hood that it mostly doesn't matter, and ultimately only a very small handful are actually popular with people who need tech support (Ubuntu mostly, Fedora and SUSE maybe) so ultimately we're only talking about a few versions anyway. So how about hardware? Linux already does pretty well at reverse engineering, and there's the Novell sponsored driver project going right now -- linux is already going well out of its way to support hardware -- all that is lacking is enough widespread adoption to make hardware manufacturers start taking notice. How about encouraging commercial software vendors? This is the one area where linux could maybe still do more. There aren't, yet, easy channels for commercial software on linux. That, however, is changing. With Click'N'Run integration into Ubuntu you'll have an easy way for commercial vendors to make their software available and easily installable and manageable by a vast chunk of desktop linux users in one fell swoop. So mostly this is taken care of as much as is feasible, it just hasn't fully come online yet...
So really linux has done most of what needs to be done to be a viable home desktop option -- what it lacks can only really be provided by wider home desktop adoption. This is the barrier to entry that has served Microsoft so well, but it is crumbling. Linux has managed to stay on the playing field long enough, and retain a developer community despite its relative unpopularity, and slowly but surely it is gaining wider acceptance. That acceptance will only snowball. There will never be a "year of the linux desktop" when linux suddenly "arrives". Instead there will simply be the slow crawl of wider and wider adoption, coupled with better and better support for linux from third parties, until eventually, without anyone quite realising it had happened, linux will have arrived on the desktop.
The problem is more that iterative programmers are used to using shared state as a crutch, and having message passing systems that incurred significant overhead. FP solves the shared-state problems by eliminating state, but that only introduces new problems: it is very hard to reason about and write some software using state, so you either have to contort your thinking, or re-introduce state on some level (be it by kluging it in, or via monads). Just ditch the shared-state and get lightweight message passing and things will look up. Hell, it even integrates with OO elegantly if you're willing to view method calls as message passing (which, let's be honest, it was originally intended as -- see Smalltalk). Check out SCOOP for Eiffel for an example of adding easy concurrency to an OO language using this approach.
I'm not claiming religion has no value, I'm simply arguing with you about where its value lies, and it certainly isn't in the field of providing answers to anything -- for that we have science and philosophy. If you want to talk about what religion is in a way that talks about its value, then talk about social cohesion, and giving glib but comforting answers to questions that remain unresolved. Don't talk about fairness and justice, don't talk about answering "why" questions: that's not something religion does well.