The Final Fantasy games aren't exactly a never-ending series like the rest of the games you mentioned. There is no continuity between the games, and pretty much the only (important) thing they share in common is the genre and the developers. Unreal has also pretty much defined itself as being a very genetic FPS that incrementally improves itself from year to year, which isn't exactly a bad thing.
I'd be happy if there were a Final Fantasy title on the Wii.
The Final Fantasy games that were on the SNES were arguably some of the best in the series, not to mention the most accessible.
Of course, since SNES was the last console I owned, I wasn't all that heavily exposed to the other games in the series. Perhaps one day I'll pick up a PS2 to catch up on them..
They might, but I doubt it. Unless they could potentially turn it into a media blitz, I genuinely doubt that Harvard (or any private institution for that matter) would pick up this sort of project.
If they did, they'd keep it private, and only share it amongst other institutions "prestigious" enough to be deserving of the blood and sweat of Harvard scientists.
I'm sorry, but the Ivy League has quickly degenerated into a billionaire's playground. If they turn away thousands of "perfectly qualified" applicants per year, and have all this money lying around, there are very few legitimate reasons not to capitalize on this, build up their capacity, and start being equitable about who gets to study/work there.
The Ivy League has become a game of prestige, and nothing more. I don't trust them with vital bits of science that could potentially go toward the public good. They've tarnished the name of academia.
Then, amazingly, I just quit caring about Iraq. Nobody I care about is over there fighting that honor-less conflict.
Bullshit.
What about the Iraqi civilians? What about the militants, who are pissed off to the point that scores of them fighting a battle they know they will never win by numbers alone? Sure, they're shooting at US soldiers, but you can't seriously consider that we wouldn't be doing the same exact thing if we were in their shoes.
What about our tax dollars? We've basically impoverished ourselves as a result of this war that has no end in sight. I'm still in college, and I can't possibly see us paying this debt off in my lifetime. We could have done so much good with those resources that we dumped into the middle east for the sole purpose of killing people.
The Darfur crisis isn't likely to directly affect me or anybody I know at any point during my life, but it's still a big deal to me, and I believe it has to be dealt with NOW.
I'd give GNOME a try if you use Ubuntu before jumping straight to KDE. It's come a very long way since I last used it -- I was a KDE person for a while, but Ubuntu's implementation of GNOME I feel is every bit as good as KDE.
KDE's just become too cluttered and messy. That "all-blue" icon theme that's there by default doesn't help things at all either. I can't stand Konqueror's default configuration because there are tons and tons of nondescript similar-looking buttons in the toolbar. It's simply not usable.
An excellent third option is Xfce, which I've been using on my mac (running Ubuntu Feisty PPC) for the past month or two. It does a really great job of leveraging the simplicity of OSX with the sort of extra features you'd come to expect from a Linux desktop. It's also lightning-fast, looks great, and uses hardly any memory. For me, it was kind of a no-brainer.
I don't know about you, but I view this as being a very GOOD thing.
Because the format was an "open" standard, the serious flaws present in the format were quickly and correctly identified by third parties outside of Microsoft.
If it had been a trade secret, it could have been bundled into a product, and assumed to be reliable by its users. Instead, it's been exposed for what it is.
If anything, this proves that open formats are a good idea.
And that's exactly how an Internet company should be run.
I remember reading an article a few months back about how Craigslist runs its offices out of an old Victorian-style mansion in CA that actually costs somewhat less than traditional "office space". They only keep a small staff on hand, pay them well (proportional to the success of the company), and accordingly, have never lost an employee.
Sure, this strategy won't make the owners/founders of the company uber-rich, but it does quite a bit to ensure the success of the company and ALL of its employees.
Facebook appears to have adopted the same strategy. What's more is that they don't seem to have experienced any noticeable growing pains. I've been using the site for quite a while (since the beginning), and it's always been decently fast and responsive. They had a few issues with their modifications to Squid in the *very* early days, but apart from that, I don't think I've ever been thrown to an error page (which Myspace does regularly, usually barfing up bits of their embarrassingly bad code with it because some sort of debugging switch was left on). Facebook even contributes to and maintains a few open-source projects, and are avid users of MemCached.
From what I understand, the use of a system like FUSE skirts around most licensing requirements...
Personally, I think that GPLv3 was a very stupid move on RMS's behalf for reasons such as this. Sure, he helped establish the free software movement in the 80s and 90s, but ever since then, he's been somewhat of a burden to the community.
Which is interesting, because you'd tend to think that descendants of Northern cultures would have weaker immune systems, given the fact that viruses tend to thrive in warmer climates.
Agreed. I've been a unix admin for a long time now, but only in the past few months have I started to use a Linux (Ubuntu) desktop full-time.
I'm amazed by how much it's matured in the past year alone. The big hurdles to overcome are, as you mentioned, OpenOffice (which, frankly sucks) and the GIMP (which, in addition to needing a new name, needs to replicate a few additional bits of photoshop before it becomes viable).
In an office environment, as long as the 'main' application that the user works in is supported on Linux, the rest of the supporting apps are already there. Gnome and XFCE have come an amazingly long way. Firefox, as we all know is an excellent browser on any platform, and KHTML isn't half-bad either. Apps like Pidgin, Nautilus, and AbiWord are all mature and are perfectly usable.
My favorite "quick and dirty" bandwidth test has always been to download a full bzipped linux kernel from
The link's always right there on the homepage, it's uncompressable, it's a pretty big file, and Kernel.org itself has more than enough bandwidth to saturate any connection you'd typically find at home.
You also won't catch the ISPs trying to cache it.
Of course, if you want a 'real' test, Speakeasy's great, although I'd be weary of an underhanded ISP caching the speed test.
All jokes aside, to me, this represents a HUGE step forward in terms of collaboration between the US and Russian space agencies.
NASA has shown that it's willing to use proven Russian technology in its own systems. Russia's got a whole array of heavily proven technology that I'm sure NASA would greatly benefit from. Soyuz and Progress being the two most obvious examples of areas where US technology is either nonexistent or greatly inferior. The Energia launch system is also a very cool bit of technology that's been sitting dormant for almost 20 years.
Heck.... even Russia's new Kliper crew module is looking more promising than anything the US has up its sleeve (not to mention that the next generation of Soyuz will be able to fly around the moon). Given Russia's current economic woes, I wouldn't doubt that they'd be interested in collaborating with NASA as long as NASA were willing to provide some sort of financial support.
My Mac Mini is also completely silent (in a quiet room you don't know that it's on)
It's also more than adequately powerful, with the exception of the dinky hard drive and graphics card. You could hypothetically make it *twice* as thick, and put in a really nice graphics card, and throw in a normal 3.5" hard drive. It'd still be smaller than the Shuttle SFF PCs (and you can work out creative ways to deal with noise and cooling. Underclocking (heresy, I know) by just a few percent can hut heat output dramatically.
If it weren't for the $@*#$#$(ing video card, the Mac Mini would be my ideal machine. Small, cheap, and more than adequately powerful. I have a feeling that apple's going to be ramping up its video offerings in its machines as it tries to break back into the gaming market.
Johnny Cash did a cover of a song by Nine Inch Nails that quickly surpassed the original in terms of popularity, and became the defining song of the final part of his career. The singer of NiN later went on to say that they believed Cash did such a better job on the song that they would no longer perform it live.
A good cover can be the ultimate sign of respect. Imagine if we stopped playing Bach in concert halls?
Sometimes covers can be unique and dramatically different from their originals. A Capella is also a lot of fun to watch and listen to.
Writing new music is great, but it's also very important to pay respect to good songs that have already been written. If anything, it's promoting the original....
It's far from 'no reason' -- the FiOS network was designed from the get go to be a REPLACEMENT for the copper infrastructure that would improve performance and reduce costs.
When it was installed at my house, they made us all aware that the copper lines were being disconnected (but left intact).
In a power outage, there is a battery backup that keeps the fiber gateway alive for a few hours. Any outage that lasts more than a few hours usually results in a failure of the copper infrastructure as well. The passive nature of the FiOS network would indicate that it's *less* likely to outages and failures. The pole-top components for routing and switching perform their functions utilizing optics, and require no power -- it's quite a cool system from an engineering standpoint.
The amount of FUD floating around this article is absurd. I'm no fan of huge corporations, but this is a clear-cut case of a monolithic corporation using its large size to actually implement an infrastructure that benefits consumers and reduces costs (and passes some of those reductions off to the consumer). It's a hell of a lot more than the cable company's ever done for us.
On the doors to the computer labs at the University of Alaska (Fairbanks), there are signs that say something to the effect of "Viewing porn on these machines is not illegal under Alaska state law, but please be courteous to those around you"
That said, according to the 2005 Census estimate, there are 103 males per 100 females statewide, which is actually a smaller gender gap than the rest of the country (the average is 96.3 males/100 females), albeit in the other direction.
So, although it sometimes feels like it, there's not really a big gap at all.
For one, any vaguely scientific publication would have phrased the title of the article Ten Politically Incorrect Theories About Human Nature.
Psychology's far from a perfect science, and is relatively young as far as the hard sciences go. I mean... GRAVITY is only a theory for crying out loud.
Not only is the article politically correct on all counts, I would go as far as to call most of its claims either wrong or severely skewed.
Their claims about how "men prefer blondes" certainly doesn't apply to all cultures today, nor has it in the past. If anything, it's a phenomenon limited to countries with a heavy Western European ancestry. Likewise, there is considerable evidence that shows that heavyset women were considered to be very attractive in ancient Rome and Greece.
Their argument about how humans are naturally polygamous feels erroneous. They argue economics, and seem to botch it up in the process. I'm no economist, so if somebody with a bit more knowledge could refute this one better than I, please do so -- it just feels intuitively wrong, even from the angle at which they spun it.
"Most suicide bombers are Muslim" -- I've studied this one quite a bit, and although it's very easy to mistake correlation for causation, the roots of modern "terrorism" are rooted in politics and economics rather than religion. If you read through the relevant verses of the Qu'ran and the Bible, you'll find that the Bible actually makes a better case for violent martyrdom than the Qu'ran does (and in both cases, it's still a pretty weak argument). Islam is completely pervasive in the Middle-East as both a religion and political system (even though there are many Islamic scholars who argue that Islam is *NOT* a substitute for a democratic political system). The political situation in the Middle-East has been extremely volatile and unstable for the past 100 years, which has actually been encouraged by the west to a good degree. It's no surprise that the people in these countries are pretty pissed off. Religion gets tied into it, simply because it's a pervasive element of their culture. That's it. Period.
They actually help refute their own argument by citing the Male/Female divide in the Middle East. Terrorism has virtually nothing to do with Islam. Islam indeed did have a somewhat "violent" phase, just like many other religions have. The problem is that that phase ended in the late 1800s. Throughout the 1900s, Islamic scholars advocated a move toward rationalism and democracy.
The rest of the arguments cite loads and loads of Freudian logic, without providing a single citation. The field of Psychology has been desperately trying to legitimatize itself by taking a statistical and mathematical approach to research. This sort of article is *exactly* the sort of thing that legitimate psychologists have been trying to avoid and move away from.
Actually, I've seen a pretty big backlash from "average" users regarding the DRM in Vista. It's noticeable and it's intrusive.
People do like that it's pretty (but only on FAST machines). My 700mhz PC runs Compiz Fusion under Ubuntu at nearly full-speed. It's even prettier than Vista:-)
The thing is that as far as the current "generation" of Operating Systems and GUIs go, Linux, Windows, and Mac are quickly approaching perfection of their respective paradigms. Microsoft and Apple are busy reinventing the wheel, whilst Linux has been playing a good game of catch-up.
As far as Windows goes, Windows 2000 was good enough for the vast majority of consumers. Put the average user on a Win2000 desktop, and as long as the suite of applications is current, they'll have absolutely no problem using the desktop.
Linux has reached the point, where Ubuntu + Gnome are very comparable to Win2000 in terms of usability.
I've used linux for the occasional task here and there, and have tried quite a few distributions, and have been extremely dissatisfied with the desktop experience each time. It was ugly, random stuff didn't work, and most of all, it was inconsistent.
This past month, my mac at work was acting up, and since the only apps I use on it are also available on PPC-Linux, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot. Somehow, in the past year or two, everything seems to have snapped into place, as Ubuntu is most definitely a coherent, and easy-to-use desktop. Everything "just works". I'd even go as far as to say that for a novice user, a stock Ubuntu install is far more useful than a stock XP install.
XOrg and FreeDesktop have obviously played a big role too, as X11 doesn't have any of the huge glitches that it used to. Configuration is automatic, and resolution can be changed on the fly with no ill effects. Compiz also offers some *very* pretty eye candy that even works on old hardware. The PC I'm running it on is a 700Mhz G4 with only 512mb RAM. It's barely usable under Mac or Windows running the latest software, but it absolutely flies with Ubuntu, and goes even faster with XFce (which is also refreshingly simplistic in its design, and is a great alternative to a full-blown Gnome or KDE desktop).
You're also making the assumption that Windows has gotten better with each release. Even among from novice users, there has been a big backlash against Vista. Even people who know very little about technology find the DRM intrusive and unnecessary. Apple's recent success has made the marketplace much more open-minded about Operating systems, and for the first time, the general public is realizing that there are viable alternatives to Windows.
I do a lot of Photoshop and Video work at home, so my Powerbook's staying just the way it is (unless we get Photoshop or Final Cut on Linux, which I don't think I'll be seeing in my lifetime). However, I do think that Ubuntu has almost completely edged out Windows by being an excellent desktop platform. If more commercial software were available, Ubuntu would take off like a rocket.
You bring up an interesting point with the StarTAC, as it was also the only phone for which I bought additional batteries.
The reason wasn't that the battery life was subpar... more often than not, it was excellent, especially compared to other phones in its day.
The reason I kept buying batteries for it, was that the phone lasted literally forever. It was extremely durable and well-built (unlike most of what Motorola has these days), sleek (especially compared to the rest of the phones at the time), and it only did one thing (make phone calls), and it did it very well.
I was very unhappy when AT&T made me upgrade to a GSM phone.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
It's a superiority complex versus an inferiority complex. Historically, they've existed in both countries for a long, long time.
The Final Fantasy games aren't exactly a never-ending series like the rest of the games you mentioned. There is no continuity between the games, and pretty much the only (important) thing they share in common is the genre and the developers. Unreal has also pretty much defined itself as being a very genetic FPS that incrementally improves itself from year to year, which isn't exactly a bad thing.
I'd be happy if there were a Final Fantasy title on the Wii.
The Final Fantasy games that were on the SNES were arguably some of the best in the series, not to mention the most accessible.
Of course, since SNES was the last console I owned, I wasn't all that heavily exposed to the other games in the series. Perhaps one day I'll pick up a PS2 to catch up on them..
I think you're confusing the profits of the artists with the profits of the labels.
AFAIK, Labels take the money from the CDs, and the artists take the money from everything else.
In an ideal world, this situation would be a bit more equitable, but alas, it is not.
That might be the first time post referring to Kitten Huffing has ever been modded as '+5 Insightful'
They might, but I doubt it. Unless they could potentially turn it into a media blitz, I genuinely doubt that Harvard (or any private institution for that matter) would pick up this sort of project.
If they did, they'd keep it private, and only share it amongst other institutions "prestigious" enough to be deserving of the blood and sweat of Harvard scientists.
I'm sorry, but the Ivy League has quickly degenerated into a billionaire's playground. If they turn away thousands of "perfectly qualified" applicants per year, and have all this money lying around, there are very few legitimate reasons not to capitalize on this, build up their capacity, and start being equitable about who gets to study/work there.
The Ivy League has become a game of prestige, and nothing more. I don't trust them with vital bits of science that could potentially go toward the public good. They've tarnished the name of academia.
Bullshit.
What about the Iraqi civilians? What about the militants, who are pissed off to the point that scores of them fighting a battle they know they will never win by numbers alone? Sure, they're shooting at US soldiers, but you can't seriously consider that we wouldn't be doing the same exact thing if we were in their shoes.
What about our tax dollars? We've basically impoverished ourselves as a result of this war that has no end in sight. I'm still in college, and I can't possibly see us paying this debt off in my lifetime. We could have done so much good with those resources that we dumped into the middle east for the sole purpose of killing people.
The Darfur crisis isn't likely to directly affect me or anybody I know at any point during my life, but it's still a big deal to me, and I believe it has to be dealt with NOW.
Since it seems to be in vogue on this thread, I should point out that our former President can very much attest to Item #4 on your list there.
I'd give GNOME a try if you use Ubuntu before jumping straight to KDE. It's come a very long way since I last used it -- I was a KDE person for a while, but Ubuntu's implementation of GNOME I feel is every bit as good as KDE.
KDE's just become too cluttered and messy. That "all-blue" icon theme that's there by default doesn't help things at all either. I can't stand Konqueror's default configuration because there are tons and tons of nondescript similar-looking buttons in the toolbar. It's simply not usable.
An excellent third option is Xfce, which I've been using on my mac (running Ubuntu Feisty PPC) for the past month or two. It does a really great job of leveraging the simplicity of OSX with the sort of extra features you'd come to expect from a Linux desktop. It's also lightning-fast, looks great, and uses hardly any memory. For me, it was kind of a no-brainer.
I don't know about you, but I view this as being a very GOOD thing.
Because the format was an "open" standard, the serious flaws present in the format were quickly and correctly identified by third parties outside of Microsoft.
If it had been a trade secret, it could have been bundled into a product, and assumed to be reliable by its users. Instead, it's been exposed for what it is.
If anything, this proves that open formats are a good idea.
And that's exactly how an Internet company should be run.
I remember reading an article a few months back about how Craigslist runs its offices out of an old Victorian-style mansion in CA that actually costs somewhat less than traditional "office space". They only keep a small staff on hand, pay them well (proportional to the success of the company), and accordingly, have never lost an employee.
Sure, this strategy won't make the owners/founders of the company uber-rich, but it does quite a bit to ensure the success of the company and ALL of its employees.
Facebook appears to have adopted the same strategy. What's more is that they don't seem to have experienced any noticeable growing pains. I've been using the site for quite a while (since the beginning), and it's always been decently fast and responsive. They had a few issues with their modifications to Squid in the *very* early days, but apart from that, I don't think I've ever been thrown to an error page (which Myspace does regularly, usually barfing up bits of their embarrassingly bad code with it because some sort of debugging switch was left on). Facebook even contributes to and maintains a few open-source projects, and are avid users of MemCached.
Couldn't it be implemented using a FUSE module?
From what I understand, the use of a system like FUSE skirts around most licensing requirements...
Personally, I think that GPLv3 was a very stupid move on RMS's behalf for reasons such as this. Sure, he helped establish the free software movement in the 80s and 90s, but ever since then, he's been somewhat of a burden to the community.
Which is interesting, because you'd tend to think that descendants of Northern cultures would have weaker immune systems, given the fact that viruses tend to thrive in warmer climates.
Agreed. I've been a unix admin for a long time now, but only in the past few months have I started to use a Linux (Ubuntu) desktop full-time.
I'm amazed by how much it's matured in the past year alone. The big hurdles to overcome are, as you mentioned, OpenOffice (which, frankly sucks) and the GIMP (which, in addition to needing a new name, needs to replicate a few additional bits of photoshop before it becomes viable).
In an office environment, as long as the 'main' application that the user works in is supported on Linux, the rest of the supporting apps are already there. Gnome and XFCE have come an amazingly long way. Firefox, as we all know is an excellent browser on any platform, and KHTML isn't half-bad either. Apps like Pidgin, Nautilus, and AbiWord are all mature and are perfectly usable.
My favorite "quick and dirty" bandwidth test has always been to download a full bzipped linux kernel from
The link's always right there on the homepage, it's uncompressable, it's a pretty big file, and Kernel.org itself has more than enough bandwidth to saturate any connection you'd typically find at home.
You also won't catch the ISPs trying to cache it.
Of course, if you want a 'real' test, Speakeasy's great, although I'd be weary of an underhanded ISP caching the speed test.
All jokes aside, to me, this represents a HUGE step forward in terms of collaboration between the US and Russian space agencies.
NASA has shown that it's willing to use proven Russian technology in its own systems. Russia's got a whole array of heavily proven technology that I'm sure NASA would greatly benefit from. Soyuz and Progress being the two most obvious examples of areas where US technology is either nonexistent or greatly inferior. The Energia launch system is also a very cool bit of technology that's been sitting dormant for almost 20 years.
Heck.... even Russia's new Kliper crew module is looking more promising than anything the US has up its sleeve (not to mention that the next generation of Soyuz will be able to fly around the moon). Given Russia's current economic woes, I wouldn't doubt that they'd be interested in collaborating with NASA as long as NASA were willing to provide some sort of financial support.
As long as it isn't the Speak 'N Spell voice.....
My Mac Mini is also completely silent (in a quiet room you don't know that it's on)
It's also more than adequately powerful, with the exception of the dinky hard drive and graphics card. You could hypothetically make it *twice* as thick, and put in a really nice graphics card, and throw in a normal 3.5" hard drive. It'd still be smaller than the Shuttle SFF PCs (and you can work out creative ways to deal with noise and cooling. Underclocking (heresy, I know) by just a few percent can hut heat output dramatically.
If it weren't for the $@*#$#$(ing video card, the Mac Mini would be my ideal machine. Small, cheap, and more than adequately powerful. I have a feeling that apple's going to be ramping up its video offerings in its machines as it tries to break back into the gaming market.
Johnny Cash did a cover of a song by Nine Inch Nails that quickly surpassed the original in terms of popularity, and became the defining song of the final part of his career. The singer of NiN later went on to say that they believed Cash did such a better job on the song that they would no longer perform it live.
A good cover can be the ultimate sign of respect. Imagine if we stopped playing Bach in concert halls?
Sometimes covers can be unique and dramatically different from their originals. A Capella is also a lot of fun to watch and listen to.
Writing new music is great, but it's also very important to pay respect to good songs that have already been written. If anything, it's promoting the original....
It's far from 'no reason' -- the FiOS network was designed from the get go to be a REPLACEMENT for the copper infrastructure that would improve performance and reduce costs.
When it was installed at my house, they made us all aware that the copper lines were being disconnected (but left intact).
In a power outage, there is a battery backup that keeps the fiber gateway alive for a few hours. Any outage that lasts more than a few hours usually results in a failure of the copper infrastructure as well. The passive nature of the FiOS network would indicate that it's *less* likely to outages and failures. The pole-top components for routing and switching perform their functions utilizing optics, and require no power -- it's quite a cool system from an engineering standpoint.
The amount of FUD floating around this article is absurd. I'm no fan of huge corporations, but this is a clear-cut case of a monolithic corporation using its large size to actually implement an infrastructure that benefits consumers and reduces costs (and passes some of those reductions off to the consumer). It's a hell of a lot more than the cable company's ever done for us.
I've heard it said that Dubai is more stereotypically American than anyplace actually in America.
Don't you love the (almost entirely wrong) impressions foreigners get of us?
On the doors to the computer labs at the University of Alaska (Fairbanks), there are signs that say something to the effect of
"Viewing porn on these machines is not illegal under Alaska state law, but please be courteous to those around you"
That said, according to the 2005 Census estimate, there are 103 males per 100 females statewide, which is actually a smaller gender gap than the rest of the country (the average is 96.3 males/100 females), albeit in the other direction.
So, although it sometimes feels like it, there's not really a big gap at all.
For one, any vaguely scientific publication would have phrased the title of the article Ten Politically Incorrect Theories About Human Nature.
Psychology's far from a perfect science, and is relatively young as far as the hard sciences go. I mean... GRAVITY is only a theory for crying out loud.
Not only is the article politically correct on all counts, I would go as far as to call most of its claims either wrong or severely skewed.
Their claims about how "men prefer blondes" certainly doesn't apply to all cultures today, nor has it in the past. If anything, it's a phenomenon limited to countries with a heavy Western European ancestry. Likewise, there is considerable evidence that shows that heavyset women were considered to be very attractive in ancient Rome and Greece.
Their argument about how humans are naturally polygamous feels erroneous. They argue economics, and seem to botch it up in the process. I'm no economist, so if somebody with a bit more knowledge could refute this one better than I, please do so -- it just feels intuitively wrong, even from the angle at which they spun it.
"Most suicide bombers are Muslim" -- I've studied this one quite a bit, and although it's very easy to mistake correlation for causation, the roots of modern "terrorism" are rooted in politics and economics rather than religion. If you read through the relevant verses of the Qu'ran and the Bible, you'll find that the Bible actually makes a better case for violent martyrdom than the Qu'ran does (and in both cases, it's still a pretty weak argument). Islam is completely pervasive in the Middle-East as both a religion and political system (even though there are many Islamic scholars who argue that Islam is *NOT* a substitute for a democratic political system). The political situation in the Middle-East has been extremely volatile and unstable for the past 100 years, which has actually been encouraged by the west to a good degree. It's no surprise that the people in these countries are pretty pissed off. Religion gets tied into it, simply because it's a pervasive element of their culture. That's it. Period.
They actually help refute their own argument by citing the Male/Female divide in the Middle East. Terrorism has virtually nothing to do with Islam. Islam indeed did have a somewhat "violent" phase, just like many other religions have. The problem is that that phase ended in the late 1800s. Throughout the 1900s, Islamic scholars advocated a move toward rationalism and democracy.
The rest of the arguments cite loads and loads of Freudian logic, without providing a single citation. The field of Psychology has been desperately trying to legitimatize itself by taking a statistical and mathematical approach to research. This sort of article is *exactly* the sort of thing that legitimate psychologists have been trying to avoid and move away from.
Actually, I've seen a pretty big backlash from "average" users regarding the DRM in Vista. It's noticeable and it's intrusive.
:-)
People do like that it's pretty (but only on FAST machines). My 700mhz PC runs Compiz Fusion under Ubuntu at nearly full-speed. It's even prettier than Vista
The thing is that as far as the current "generation" of Operating Systems and GUIs go, Linux, Windows, and Mac are quickly approaching perfection of their respective paradigms. Microsoft and Apple are busy reinventing the wheel, whilst Linux has been playing a good game of catch-up.
As far as Windows goes, Windows 2000 was good enough for the vast majority of consumers. Put the average user on a Win2000 desktop, and as long as the suite of applications is current, they'll have absolutely no problem using the desktop.
Linux has reached the point, where Ubuntu + Gnome are very comparable to Win2000 in terms of usability.
I've used linux for the occasional task here and there, and have tried quite a few distributions, and have been extremely dissatisfied with the desktop experience each time. It was ugly, random stuff didn't work, and most of all, it was inconsistent.
This past month, my mac at work was acting up, and since the only apps I use on it are also available on PPC-Linux, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot. Somehow, in the past year or two, everything seems to have snapped into place, as Ubuntu is most definitely a coherent, and easy-to-use desktop. Everything "just works". I'd even go as far as to say that for a novice user, a stock Ubuntu install is far more useful than a stock XP install.
XOrg and FreeDesktop have obviously played a big role too, as X11 doesn't have any of the huge glitches that it used to. Configuration is automatic, and resolution can be changed on the fly with no ill effects. Compiz also offers some *very* pretty eye candy that even works on old hardware. The PC I'm running it on is a 700Mhz G4 with only 512mb RAM. It's barely usable under Mac or Windows running the latest software, but it absolutely flies with Ubuntu, and goes even faster with XFce (which is also refreshingly simplistic in its design, and is a great alternative to a full-blown Gnome or KDE desktop).
You're also making the assumption that Windows has gotten better with each release. Even among from novice users, there has been a big backlash against Vista. Even people who know very little about technology find the DRM intrusive and unnecessary. Apple's recent success has made the marketplace much more open-minded about Operating systems, and for the first time, the general public is realizing that there are viable alternatives to Windows.
I do a lot of Photoshop and Video work at home, so my Powerbook's staying just the way it is (unless we get Photoshop or Final Cut on Linux, which I don't think I'll be seeing in my lifetime). However, I do think that Ubuntu has almost completely edged out Windows by being an excellent desktop platform. If more commercial software were available, Ubuntu would take off like a rocket.
You bring up an interesting point with the StarTAC, as it was also the only phone for which I bought additional batteries.
The reason wasn't that the battery life was subpar... more often than not, it was excellent, especially compared to other phones in its day.
The reason I kept buying batteries for it, was that the phone lasted literally forever. It was extremely durable and well-built (unlike most of what Motorola has these days), sleek (especially compared to the rest of the phones at the time), and it only did one thing (make phone calls), and it did it very well.
I was very unhappy when AT&T made me upgrade to a GSM phone.