Um, "selective extinction caused by someone/something" doesn't map to genocide - genocide implies intent, an actual crime. As I noted, droughts and meteors can't have an intent. I honestly don't grasp your apparent desire to hold "someone/something" "responsible". (Oh, and migration isn't "nearly always" an option - look up 'habitat tracking'; it can be awfully tough to track a habitat when a species is fairly specialized or the environment is restricted by geography - islands or mountains or whatever.)
Evolution would still happen in a universe of infinite resources, just in a different way. Things that reproduced faster/more prolifically would be more common, and the more of any one reproducing thing there is, the more mutants it would produce, and the even-faster mutants would in turn become more common...
Anyway, no, 'wealthier families having fewer children' isn't a universal truth - but in anything like the current social, political, and technical environment we're in, it's a strong overall tendency, and that's enough for a control input. Lots of perfectly stable, predictable systems can be built from stochastic, random-with-some-bias processes. See, e.g., here.
Evolution basically works due to a constant sequence of genocides.
Er... not exactly. That's the wrong word to use - it implies active attempts to eliminate whole classes of beings, and that's just not the case. (Sure, predators actively attempt to eliminate other animals, but it's very personal and on an individual basis.) 'Extinction' is the term you're looking for. That's a more neutral term, and includes things like environmental changes that can't reasonably be accused of 'genocide' - what, you're gonna prosecute a drought or a meteor?
Even then, extinction isn't the only way evolution proceeds. Sometimes a species hits on a really good, stable niche, and changes very little for a long time - alligators, sharks, etc. (The coelacanth almost qualifies, but the extant species live in salt water and the fossils we have are of freshwater fish.) And microbes use evolution very actively as a control mechanism - when they invade, say, a discarded bit of food they rapidly evolve different strains that live in different parts of the 'environment' - the strains on the surface are usually quite different from the ones deeper inside. Sexually-transmitted diseases have to adapt to at least two quite different environments (male and female genitals) and use evolution to help the adaptation process.
And then there's the long tradition in multiple species (including humans) of adapting the environment to their needs. Every nesting animal does this to some extent, and social species (like bees) do it even more profoundly - bees actively regulate the temperature of their hives.
Exactly what happens if we apply this to humans?...by competing for limited means and that there is nothing that can ever be done to stop it
The facts above (like environmental modification) give no reason to assume that "there is nothing that can ever be done". Further, evolution allows species to adapt by having a mix of strategies. There's the story of some frog species - big, bulky males make nice deep croaks, which are sexy to female frogs. When they hear a frog equivalent of Barry White, they answer. announcing their location. Then the big frog goes to find her. However, some males are small, with higher-pitched voices... but they're fast and agile, and often can get to the female faster and take care of business before Barry gets there. There are advantages and disadvantages both ways, and the specific circumstances will favor one size or another, but you'll always have a mix.
Wealthier families tend naturally to have fewer children, and invest more resources in their development. Poorer families tend to have more kids and put fewer resources into them, hoping that some will make it to maturity. By making everyone wealthier we can automatically decrease the birthrate. (That's assuming we don't find ways to open up new resources in space for example - not that hard with nuclear rockets instead of the chemically-fueled contraptions we're settling for now.)
If I may, I'd suggest reading David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution For Everyone". It's well-written, but not dumbed down and contains some surprising and profound insights. It changed my mind on a few topics (like the historical utility of religion), it might well help you refine your understanding too.
call your Representatives (and Senators, since they're on the conferencing committee too.)
I assume it's not the whole House and Senate - so who will actually be making the decision about whether the House or Senate version gets in the final bill?
My point about having a standard was: You can call it a Linux distribution whether or not you follow the Linux Standards Base,
Yeah, and Microsoft calls it "Windows Mobile", even though it won't run Windows programs. Any Linux distribution aimed at the "desktop" will be supporting both the LSB and the Freedesktop stuff. That's a non-issue.
Re:Linux will NEVER have a killer app
on
Hostile ta Vista, Baby
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I believe that the ultimate "killer app" for Linux would be native support for Windows applications.
Ask the OS/2 guys how well that worked out. Nobody developed for OS/2, since they could just write a Windows app and have it work on OS/2. But without native OS/2 apps, there was no real reason to adopt OS/2...
Linux wins by being easier and cheaper to develop for. Fortunately, there are good cross-platform libraries these days, which make porting a lot simpler. And the spread of such cross-platform apps for the key user needs (e.g. Firefox & Thunderbird) makes switching to Linux much less of a learning experience.
But I'll point out something - Windows, with all the latest drivers and everything, crashes in games on my dual-CPU box at home. Linux, nope. Not at all. Quite often, the same games, under Wine. Oh, well.
I just tried to duplicate the above bug (I typed "zooooooooooooooooooooo" into the Start menu search box), and it ran just fine for me.
Did you turn off Vista indexing first, as the post describes? Just asking, I can't even attempt to duplicate this bug - my wife demanded that I change our Vista to XP because it was so abysmally slow.
That's much less of a problem these days. Every damn gizmo in the world - cell phones, kiosks, even DVD players - comes with its own menu system and all that. People - particularly the younger crowd - are used to learning new interface variants all the time. And the GUIs for Linux are getting pretty dang polished by now. Speaking of which...
what about those people that never want to see a command line?
They don't have to; not any more than most Windows types ever have to hack their Registry. And for those that do, they usually just ask "their buddy/nephew/neighbor who's good with computers" to do either of those anyway. My elderly parents have been running Linux for years now and they don't even know how to bring up a command line. When I visit I spend a few minutes running the update tool and then I can actually spend time with them.
The rest of your points are just edge cases that are decreasing with frequency and severity all the time. Like Windows-only apps - more and more apps are moving to the web, and more are more games are moving to consoles. I already alluded to "dealbreakers" - I didn't say they were nonexistent, I just said there are "a lot fewer" of them.
Look at evolution - there's something called "genetic drift". Even a purely neutral mutation can spread and become common if there's no selection pressure against it, or even in the face of mild pressure if it's a simple, relatively common mutation to produce. In a whole lot of niches, the selection pressure against Linux is low or nonexistent (like those other cases you dismissed as irrelevant), and those niches are expanding over time, and there's an essentially immortal reservoir where Linux will always be present. Long-term, Linux expands on the desktop like it did on the server.
For the average user, the best Linux can offer is "mostly as good"
"Yes, but other than being useful, usable, reliable, extensible, free, and unencumbered, what does Linux have going for it?" - Hamilcar Barca
No, really, I get it. Linux needs a "killer app" and all that. For me, it's general media munging on the cheap. I can back up DVDs, transcode movies to other formats (like storing some cartoons and such on my Treo to keep kids entertained) and so forth. I can play practically any media format on Earth without having to install little background processes from various companies on my machine (Quicktime, Real, etc.) (Linux also ran most of my Windows games better than Vista did.)
That's not enough to make a bunch of people switch en masse, I totally agree. But the 'barrier to switching' has dropped enormously just in the last couple of years. There are a lot fewer dealbreakers, Linux is getting good at a lot of these little niche areas too, and more and more of the real action is moving to the web anyway. There won't be a "Year of the Linux Destkop" any more than there was a "Year of the Linux Server" - people will just switch over, a few here, a few there, and eventually it'll be a solid and respected option among many on the desktop, the same way it now is on the server. (Linux is effectively immortal, so it's got all the time in the world to wait.)
Vista sucking is a nice short-term bonus for Linux, but the long-term trends are what counts here.
But fortunately it was on dyndns.com and they pulled the stolen one for TOS violations. Now I have the same name, but in.net instead of.org. Nobody cared about it, anyway, but it was a major annoyance personally.
...doesn't mean we can't tell which side of it some things are on. There's no sharp dividing line between "day" and "night", but some periods are nevertheless unequivocally day and some are unambiguously night.
So far as I can see, consciousness requires a brain of sufficient complexity. It's conceivable that something else (e.g. a 'soul') is also needed, but a brain is a minimal requirement. Before about a month, there's nothing even arguably a brain present. After a month, from what I understand, the various parts of the brain are at least present in preliminary stages, though they don't all actually hook up together for a couple months yet. I don't have to like abortion before the first month, but I don't see how there's any actual other person to take into account then, and it's the woman's choice then. After that, there's at least a decent chance that there might be another actual person there, and I'm a lot less comfortable with abortions after that point. (Of course, if the mother's life is in danger, it's her choice - you can't force someone to risk their life to save someone else.)
Seriously - did I get the magic copy of Vista that works just fine or something?
Well, based on my own experience and reports from others, you do seem to be a statistical outlier. Our machine (Dell C510 upgraded to 1GB RAM) was unbearably slow with Vista Home Basic (no Aero), even with several CPU and RAM-hungry options disabled. It couldn't even play its own boot-up sound without skipping. I put XP on there and it's actually usable now.
Perhaps with a higher-end machine Vista runs better, but for just running Office 2K and no visual effects, shouldn't 1GB RAM be enough?
Ten million World of Warcraft subscribers would disagree with this assertion.
Take a look at the revenue and unit sales graphs here. Ten million is a lot for a PC game. It's a minority for the total gaming market.
Certain genres of games work best on the PC. As a fraction of the total gaming market, however, those genres aren't the majority anymore, and haven't been for a while, and aren't growing as fast as the rest. Hey, I'm not saying I'm happy about it, but that's what the data looks like to me.
it seems that every sector has an industry-specific software that only runs on Windows... It's kind of a chicken-or-the-egg dilema
That is a major issue, but there's also the trend for web-based apps to consider. More and more applications are being written to use a web browser as a front-end, and those apps are (or can relatively easily be made to be) OS-agnostic. I'm not trivializing that 'potential barrier' at all, but the height of that barrier is decreasing over time, and more and more 'tunnels' through it are opening up.
I just can't see a short-term road out of that conundrum.
Well, "short-term" and "a few years" are slippery terms.:-> The PS/2 was introduced in 1987 and it was about five years before brands like Dell and Gateway started getting big. IBM's PC business went into a long decline but it was a relatively gradual one. That's roughly the model I see for Microsoft.
The environment around Vista is very different from the environment that surrounded Windows ME. Except for hardcore gaming, inexpensive PCs are available that can do everything a home user would want to do already, and most things corporate desktops would want, too. Vista's price is a much bigger percentage of that hardware cost, and Vista itself simply cannot run well on typical computers - it needs high-end hardware to run acceptably. ME would at least run (as well as ME ever ran, anyway) on typical machines of the time.
Hardcore gaming is moving away from the PC, too, to consoles. Casual gaming has already largely moved away from the PC, except for Flash stuff that doesn't need Vista. Then there's the DRM fiascos.
The competition is also much more mature. Apple and Linux are "good enough" for most home use and many corporate desktops. More and more of the day-to-day stuff people use is web-based, anyway, and doesn't particularly care what OS the user is running. MS Office is still king, but even that's suffering its first serious competition in ages. Office is the main reason anybody needs Windows anymore, and the weaker Office's hold the weaker Windows gets.
Again, I am not predicting the demise of Microsoft or Windows. I do see them becoming increasingly marginalized over time, however.
IBM came out with the PS/2 and the Micro Channel bus. They fenced it with patents and wanted to charge high fees for people developing hardware and such for Micro Channel. IBM didn't want to get burned like they had before with the PC clones.
But people failed to beat a path to the PS/2; they waited, and used things like EISA until PCI came along and was roughly as good as Micro Channel. IBM finally learned that they didn't own the PC market anymore.
IBM's still around but isn't a colossus astride the computing industry. Microsoft has now discovered that the competition is "good enough" and the Microsoft name isn't enough to force people to follow along with whatever they say. Like IBM, MS isn't going away... but they'll be one option among many in a few years, not the single dominant giant.
Well, they don't all have to be 'educational' in the formal sense. My kids love the Humongous games like Pajama Sam and Putt Putt (yay ScummVM!). There's some moderately-challenging puzzle-solving in there, but even our almost-3-year-old has fun with Putt Putt. (They're 7.75, 5.5, 2.99178, and 7 months, all boys. Okay, the 7-month-old won't be playing for a while...)
We got a hand-me-down PS2, and I made sure to get games that would be fun for a wide age range. For example, Eye Toy - very cute, and with minigames ranging from 'just fun' to 'challenging', developing whole-body coordination. Or Dance Factory - a dance-pad game, but it makes up dances for any music CD at all. Gets them dancing to their Veggie Tales songs and stuff instead of the Pussycat Dolls.
Our oldest saved up a bunch of birthday and xmas money for a DS, and has a great time with it. My wife even borrows it to play Super Mario Bros from time to time, for nostalgia's sake. Only "E" rated games, of course, for now.
[Vista performance is poor] For the first 10 mins after you turn the system on (including from hibernate). After that it is fairly close in perforamnce to XP.
Not our experience. Dell C510 (1.8GHz AMD Sempron, bumped from the default 512MB to 1GB of RAM, Vista Home Basic). Startup was indeed horrible - it couldn't even play its own startup sound without skipping - but it never got much better. My wife (who's hooked on Office) finally demanded that I downgrade it to XP and she's much happier.
Sexy is sexy, and we all like sexy things. In the long run however, I want my computer to enable me to work, not prevent me from doing so.
What if you don't even have the sexy, and it's still slower? We had a cheap Dell with Vista Home Basic (no Aero, etc.) that I'd bumped up to 1GB of RAM. It was purely to run Office, which my wife is hooked on. Eventually she demanded that I downgrade it to XP and she's happier now. Vista was just dog slow, even without the sexy. I can't imagine how they thought such a disaster would fly.
I take exception to the idea that we have anywhere near 100% literacy in the U.S.
Gee, uh, so do I... when I said, quote, "we have multiple societies today where literacy approaches 100%", unquote - where did I say that the U.S. was one of those societies?
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Evolution would still happen in a universe of infinite resources, just in a different way. Things that reproduced faster/more prolifically would be more common, and the more of any one reproducing thing there is, the more mutants it would produce, and the even-faster mutants would in turn become more common...
Anyway, no, 'wealthier families having fewer children' isn't a universal truth - but in anything like the current social, political, and technical environment we're in, it's a strong overall tendency, and that's enough for a control input. Lots of perfectly stable, predictable systems can be built from stochastic, random-with-some-bias processes. See, e.g., here.
Again - "Evolution For Everyone", David Sloan Wilson.
You need to read this.
Er... not exactly. That's the wrong word to use - it implies active attempts to eliminate whole classes of beings, and that's just not the case. (Sure, predators actively attempt to eliminate other animals, but it's very personal and on an individual basis.) 'Extinction' is the term you're looking for. That's a more neutral term, and includes things like environmental changes that can't reasonably be accused of 'genocide' - what, you're gonna prosecute a drought or a meteor?
Even then, extinction isn't the only way evolution proceeds. Sometimes a species hits on a really good, stable niche, and changes very little for a long time - alligators, sharks, etc. (The coelacanth almost qualifies, but the extant species live in salt water and the fossils we have are of freshwater fish.) And microbes use evolution very actively as a control mechanism - when they invade, say, a discarded bit of food they rapidly evolve different strains that live in different parts of the 'environment' - the strains on the surface are usually quite different from the ones deeper inside. Sexually-transmitted diseases have to adapt to at least two quite different environments (male and female genitals) and use evolution to help the adaptation process.
And then there's the long tradition in multiple species (including humans) of adapting the environment to their needs. Every nesting animal does this to some extent, and social species (like bees) do it even more profoundly - bees actively regulate the temperature of their hives.
The facts above (like environmental modification) give no reason to assume that "there is nothing that can ever be done". Further, evolution allows species to adapt by having a mix of strategies. There's the story of some frog species - big, bulky males make nice deep croaks, which are sexy to female frogs. When they hear a frog equivalent of Barry White, they answer. announcing their location. Then the big frog goes to find her. However, some males are small, with higher-pitched voices... but they're fast and agile, and often can get to the female faster and take care of business before Barry gets there. There are advantages and disadvantages both ways, and the specific circumstances will favor one size or another, but you'll always have a mix.
Wealthier families tend naturally to have fewer children, and invest more resources in their development. Poorer families tend to have more kids and put fewer resources into them, hoping that some will make it to maturity. By making everyone wealthier we can automatically decrease the birthrate. (That's assuming we don't find ways to open up new resources in space for example - not that hard with nuclear rockets instead of the chemically-fueled contraptions we're settling for now.)
If I may, I'd suggest reading David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution For Everyone". It's well-written, but not dumbed down and contains some surprising and profound insights. It changed my mind on a few topics (like the historical utility of religion), it might well help you refine your understanding too.
I assume it's not the whole House and Senate - so who will actually be making the decision about whether the House or Senate version gets in the final bill?
So, since Linux is seeing desktop development - quite a bit of it in the last few years, as I said at the start of all this, what does that tell you?
UNIX has about 40 years of providing development tools for UNIX. And they've done a very good job.
Yup.
Yeah, and Microsoft calls it "Windows Mobile", even though it won't run Windows programs. Any Linux distribution aimed at the "desktop" will be supporting both the LSB and the Freedesktop stuff. That's a non-issue.
Ask the OS/2 guys how well that worked out. Nobody developed for OS/2, since they could just write a Windows app and have it work on OS/2. But without native OS/2 apps, there was no real reason to adopt OS/2...
Linux wins by being easier and cheaper to develop for. Fortunately, there are good cross-platform libraries these days, which make porting a lot simpler. And the spread of such cross-platform apps for the key user needs (e.g. Firefox & Thunderbird) makes switching to Linux much less of a learning experience.
But I'll point out something - Windows, with all the latest drivers and everything, crashes in games on my dual-CPU box at home. Linux, nope. Not at all. Quite often, the same games, under Wine. Oh, well.
Well, okay.
Did you turn off Vista indexing first, as the post describes? Just asking, I can't even attempt to duplicate this bug - my wife demanded that I change our Vista to XP because it was so abysmally slow.
That's much less of a problem these days. Every damn gizmo in the world - cell phones, kiosks, even DVD players - comes with its own menu system and all that. People - particularly the younger crowd - are used to learning new interface variants all the time. And the GUIs for Linux are getting pretty dang polished by now. Speaking of which...
They don't have to; not any more than most Windows types ever have to hack their Registry. And for those that do, they usually just ask "their buddy/nephew/neighbor who's good with computers" to do either of those anyway. My elderly parents have been running Linux for years now and they don't even know how to bring up a command line. When I visit I spend a few minutes running the update tool and then I can actually spend time with them.
The rest of your points are just edge cases that are decreasing with frequency and severity all the time. Like Windows-only apps - more and more apps are moving to the web, and more are more games are moving to consoles. I already alluded to "dealbreakers" - I didn't say they were nonexistent, I just said there are "a lot fewer" of them.
Look at evolution - there's something called "genetic drift". Even a purely neutral mutation can spread and become common if there's no selection pressure against it, or even in the face of mild pressure if it's a simple, relatively common mutation to produce. In a whole lot of niches, the selection pressure against Linux is low or nonexistent (like those other cases you dismissed as irrelevant), and those niches are expanding over time, and there's an essentially immortal reservoir where Linux will always be present. Long-term, Linux expands on the desktop like it did on the server.
"Yes, but other than being useful, usable, reliable, extensible, free, and unencumbered, what does Linux have going for it?" - Hamilcar Barca
No, really, I get it. Linux needs a "killer app" and all that. For me, it's general media munging on the cheap. I can back up DVDs, transcode movies to other formats (like storing some cartoons and such on my Treo to keep kids entertained) and so forth. I can play practically any media format on Earth without having to install little background processes from various companies on my machine (Quicktime, Real, etc.) (Linux also ran most of my Windows games better than Vista did.)
That's not enough to make a bunch of people switch en masse, I totally agree. But the 'barrier to switching' has dropped enormously just in the last couple of years. There are a lot fewer dealbreakers, Linux is getting good at a lot of these little niche areas too, and more and more of the real action is moving to the web anyway. There won't be a "Year of the Linux Destkop" any more than there was a "Year of the Linux Server" - people will just switch over, a few here, a few there, and eventually it'll be a solid and respected option among many on the desktop, the same way it now is on the server. (Linux is effectively immortal, so it's got all the time in the world to wait.)
Vista sucking is a nice short-term bonus for Linux, but the long-term trends are what counts here.
See here...
But fortunately it was on dyndns.com and they pulled the stolen one for TOS violations. Now I have the same name, but in .net instead of .org. Nobody cared about it, anyway, but it was a major annoyance personally.
So far as I can see, consciousness requires a brain of sufficient complexity. It's conceivable that something else (e.g. a 'soul') is also needed, but a brain is a minimal requirement. Before about a month, there's nothing even arguably a brain present. After a month, from what I understand, the various parts of the brain are at least present in preliminary stages, though they don't all actually hook up together for a couple months yet. I don't have to like abortion before the first month, but I don't see how there's any actual other person to take into account then, and it's the woman's choice then. After that, there's at least a decent chance that there might be another actual person there, and I'm a lot less comfortable with abortions after that point. (Of course, if the mother's life is in danger, it's her choice - you can't force someone to risk their life to save someone else.)
Well, based on my own experience and reports from others, you do seem to be a statistical outlier. Our machine (Dell C510 upgraded to 1GB RAM) was unbearably slow with Vista Home Basic (no Aero), even with several CPU and RAM-hungry options disabled. It couldn't even play its own boot-up sound without skipping. I put XP on there and it's actually usable now.
Perhaps with a higher-end machine Vista runs better, but for just running Office 2K and no visual effects, shouldn't 1GB RAM be enough?
Ah, it's no Galvanick Lucipher.
Take a look at the revenue and unit sales graphs here. Ten million is a lot for a PC game. It's a minority for the total gaming market.
Certain genres of games work best on the PC. As a fraction of the total gaming market, however, those genres aren't the majority anymore, and haven't been for a while, and aren't growing as fast as the rest. Hey, I'm not saying I'm happy about it, but that's what the data looks like to me.
That is a major issue, but there's also the trend for web-based apps to consider. More and more applications are being written to use a web browser as a front-end, and those apps are (or can relatively easily be made to be) OS-agnostic. I'm not trivializing that 'potential barrier' at all, but the height of that barrier is decreasing over time, and more and more 'tunnels' through it are opening up.
Well, "short-term" and "a few years" are slippery terms. :-> The PS/2 was introduced in 1987 and it was about five years before brands like Dell and Gateway started getting big. IBM's PC business went into a long decline but it was a relatively gradual one. That's roughly the model I see for Microsoft.
The environment around Vista is very different from the environment that surrounded Windows ME. Except for hardcore gaming, inexpensive PCs are available that can do everything a home user would want to do already, and most things corporate desktops would want, too. Vista's price is a much bigger percentage of that hardware cost, and Vista itself simply cannot run well on typical computers - it needs high-end hardware to run acceptably. ME would at least run (as well as ME ever ran, anyway) on typical machines of the time.
Hardcore gaming is moving away from the PC, too, to consoles. Casual gaming has already largely moved away from the PC, except for Flash stuff that doesn't need Vista. Then there's the DRM fiascos. The competition is also much more mature. Apple and Linux are "good enough" for most home use and many corporate desktops. More and more of the day-to-day stuff people use is web-based, anyway, and doesn't particularly care what OS the user is running. MS Office is still king, but even that's suffering its first serious competition in ages. Office is the main reason anybody needs Windows anymore, and the weaker Office's hold the weaker Windows gets.
Again, I am not predicting the demise of Microsoft or Windows. I do see them becoming increasingly marginalized over time, however.
But people failed to beat a path to the PS/2; they waited, and used things like EISA until PCI came along and was roughly as good as Micro Channel. IBM finally learned that they didn't own the PC market anymore.
IBM's still around but isn't a colossus astride the computing industry. Microsoft has now discovered that the competition is "good enough" and the Microsoft name isn't enough to force people to follow along with whatever they say. Like IBM, MS isn't going away... but they'll be one option among many in a few years, not the single dominant giant.
We got a hand-me-down PS2, and I made sure to get games that would be fun for a wide age range. For example, Eye Toy - very cute, and with minigames ranging from 'just fun' to 'challenging', developing whole-body coordination. Or Dance Factory - a dance-pad game, but it makes up dances for any music CD at all. Gets them dancing to their Veggie Tales songs and stuff instead of the Pussycat Dolls.
Our oldest saved up a bunch of birthday and xmas money for a DS, and has a great time with it. My wife even borrows it to play Super Mario Bros from time to time, for nostalgia's sake. Only "E" rated games, of course, for now.
Not our experience. Dell C510 (1.8GHz AMD Sempron, bumped from the default 512MB to 1GB of RAM, Vista Home Basic). Startup was indeed horrible - it couldn't even play its own startup sound without skipping - but it never got much better. My wife (who's hooked on Office) finally demanded that I downgrade it to XP and she's much happier.
What if you don't even have the sexy, and it's still slower? We had a cheap Dell with Vista Home Basic (no Aero, etc.) that I'd bumped up to 1GB of RAM. It was purely to run Office, which my wife is hooked on. Eventually she demanded that I downgrade it to XP and she's happier now. Vista was just dog slow, even without the sexy. I can't imagine how they thought such a disaster would fly.
Gee, uh, so do I... when I said, quote, "we have multiple societies today where literacy approaches 100%", unquote - where did I say that the U.S. was one of those societies?