just that there's a better way to do almost anything given the current requirement to get it moving at mach 8 before it even lights.
You just need to look at it as part of a system - e.g. your car is useless without sparkplugs, but an internal combustion engine is more efficent than anything you can run off a battery. Or think of the first stage rocket as a starter motor.
and oddly enough the US military might have a desire for.
And oddly enough they are not putting up the money for it (claim secret funding links via NASA and the Australian government if you wish, but if that existed there would have been the funding to finish it a decade ago). This is not happening in Austin Texas, but in a small university run by a government that has been busy cutting defence and research funding in a small city on the other side of the world. the US military industrial complex does not control the world, and probably doesn't come anywhere as near to controlling the US as many think.
I apologise for dismissing your idea out of hand, I thought that rockets have that problem fairly well solved. I've got no idea how well a scramjet would behave at low altitudes anyway and whether it would actually be feasable to run them at low altitudes. I suspect that a big enough rocket would still win, but burn vast amounts more fuel.
before missile defence there was nuclear deterence, and that still exists.
So when did this missile defence happen exactly? Was it in the movie "Return of Reagan's Brain", because I think you'll find that as of last year it only worked in carefully rigged tests.
On the other hand the scramjet's weight advantage from getting it's O2 from the atmosphere is just dandy for a missile.
So you can save fuel costs on a missile then? When has that ever been a major design criteria for a missile?
Non-Ballistic is important because you're very limited in what you can do with even conventional ballistic weapons without tripping off the early warning systems
Why, is it now possible to shoot down a ballistic missile now outside of a rigged test? The early warning will give you only a few minutes to "duck and cover".
The scramjet is of almost no peaceful use, but will make a fine missile engine.
Wait awile for the war histeria to go away and read about satellites, of some SF or something, and you'll think of a few.
the world we live in now is a lot more unstable than the cold war ever was
Last I heard the Taliban didn't have a missile defence sheild that worked either, or anything left to stop a determined tiger moth pilot with a box of grenades.
I think the evidence points to world being a far more stable place - we have yet another US police action, and no one is in military opposition to it apart from a bunch of fanatics that control half of a dirt poor war torn mountainous desert. There's no Cuban missile crisis or other similar brinkmanship, and there hasn't been for years. Things are bad in Israel and various other spots, but they have been worse.
The terrorist threat has escalated, but the world is a far more stable place than it was in any time the first ninety years of the twentieth century.
The main reasons these folks are using Linux are (a) it's stable, and (b) it's free.
Also (c) it runs on the serious hardware they need to use to do the film. Microsoft products can not yet run on that sort of hardware.
People need to realise that a pentium IV with win XP is not the most powerful computer on earth, and that things like make a film with terabytes of footage is not an application for a desktop computer.
Linux is not competing with M$ in this field, it is just being useful.
But the thing that's disturbing is that the Powerpuff Girls have a virus. It must be the work of that villain MoJo JoJo! Quick, call the mayor's secretary, she'll know what to do!
That will only work for those Australians who live in Townsville, Queensland.
"was not successful because the [United States-supplied] rocket experienced flight anomalies"
Translation for the thin skinned:
It wasn't our test rig that stuffed up, but this rocket we bought.
No-one is saying that US rockets weren't good enough to get to the moon (except for some extremely weird conspiracy theorists who can ignore enormous amounts of evidence).
If you're like most people who've used linux, you'll probably have a lot of stuff that you installed before you learned the "correct" places to put things, or you'll have old apps that depend upon old libraries. You won't just have the programs that Mandrake currently package, even if you've only put software from older Mandrake CD's on the machine. Deleting everything and having to work out which bits are missing is a pain, particularly weeks after the event.
Each time I install linux on a different box I spend a bit of time tracking down my favourite apps and loading them on. The home machine, however, has had linux progressively upgraded to avoid that, and there's still a bit of Slackware 2.0 lurking on the drive (which is a couple of drives newer that the original) under the RedHat 7.1 exterior. Doing a fresh install and copying a lot of old stuff over sometimes works, but you'll still spend a bit of time fixing all of the things that are broken.
The system I use now started on a P60, was cloned to a 486-100, was moved to a K5-133, then to another K5 on a board in better condition, then to a dual celeron 300. Frequent kernel compiles (hardware support gets better all of the time), numerous downloads and four software upgrades from CD later (RedHats 5.2, 6.0, 6.2, 7.1) and I have the current system. None of what I did was difficult, everything gave me a console on boot first try (using the kernel compiled on the previous configuration) and I never lost any data by accident. The slackware to redhat transition did require me to do a fresh install and copy my old files over the top, which worked happily.
Linux does not have DLL hell - libraries have version numbers. Every now and again it's worth deleting old programs, and moving old libraries out of the way to see if anything still uses them, but a full re-install will waste a lot of time unless you want to use a stock standard system. I have programs from 1996 that I still use every week, that have not had a line of code written since and won't recompile to use new libraries. Just keep the old ones - gtk tends to get upset if it finds old versions, but there's simple ways around that, and most other stuff is well behaved.
but this also means the test engine is usually destroyed instead of being saved for the next test run
An impact at mach 5 would make a mess of the test rig. The actual engine is not expensive, just the work that went into design. The one I saw twelve years ago at the University of Queensland can best be described as an oddly shaped nozzle machined out of a piece of aluminium alloy. There's an image of the current design
here.
AMD was recomending phase-change material instead of paste
Changing phase consumes a lot more energy than heating something that remains as the same phase. For example, assuming constant energy input, it doesn't take long to get the water in a kettle to 100 Celcius, but it takes a while to boil it all away (to change it's phase to steam). Plus, for all of that time the water is at 100 and the temperature doesn't climb again until it's all changed phase.
Could I have used a small slice of orange chew instead?
If it has high thermal conductivity you'll be OK until the ants get it. Maybe that's what he was using in "PI"?
The "open", standards-based web exists largely because Microsoft allows it to exist.
Somehow, the largest computer company on earth didn't really notice the net until someone else started to make money from it.
Microsoft could at any time move off to a "extended" web
Remember that MSN was originally going to be an alternative to the net - something like compuserve but a decade too late.
Microsoft have not yet taken over the web server market. The only way that such a "takeover" of the net could be enfoced is from the server side. There are always plenty of third-party developers around waiting to fill up the gaps in microsoft's products, so there will be software that supports the current standards even if MS doesn't support those standards.
The standards-based web will soon be relegated to a second-class experience, and its our collective fault for not moving more rapidly to create open standards that provide for a better user experience, and get the tools out there to support them.
What extra functionality has non-standard IE browser tags really given us? IE has the ability to display pages containing seriously broken HTML, which would be a virtue if fairly unskilled web page designers would stop using IE to display their pages during testing. Scripting is a different story, but MS is a very long way from getting a monopoly on server side scripting - and doing everything on the client side is the last thing you want to do in a financial transaction.
HTML is incredibly simple, a lot of the changable information on the net is rendered as text so it will most likely be around for at least another nine years.
The standards-based web will soon be relegated to a second-class experience
Why? MS don't actually own any of the current protocols, and have not yet released a significant one of their own (their new java - no sorry C#, isn't out and about yet and.NET is still vapour). Owning the leading web browser is not enough to dictate terms of the shape of the internet.
The scary thing is that as play by email games go this is still the state of the art. "Stars!" has a far better combat system (fleets - and no wierdness about firing order), but VGA planets seemed to work better for large groups, which probably has more to do with game length than anything else. Cheating can be a big problem in VGA Planets.
Something like imperial Starfire or a properly implemented star fleet battles would be nice - but it would take someone that would consider it more than nice and have the devotion of a fanactic to make it work.
but it's better than booting over into windows if you are a hardcore linux junkie
If I reboot the gateway, obviouly the internet connection goes down for the rest of the house. If I'm writing CD's I can't reboot to play a game while I wait. The alternatives are either another machine that matches or exceeds to original, linux games, do something useful or go away and read a book.
Every time they need a console, a make file or a configure command to install a simple piece of software they get a shock
There's a very easy solution to being annoyed about this. Stop using software that is in development.
the only people who are using it fully are tecnhincally competent
Or have someone technically competant to set it up for them - see also windows installs on new hardware.
The average user wants to pop in a cd, run the setup, have it install the files and then play the game
Playstation!
Personally, the only time I've ever had to use more than a really simple GUI to install a Loki game was when the CD was about a year old (written for kernel 2.2.*). All I had to do was download the new installer from the Loki site, and it worked perfectly in a GUI once I ran that. I was also surprised to find that features are still being added to Myth 2, well over a year after release (full screen openGL with full hardware aceleration on any cards that XFree86 likes!).
The idea of making a bunch of small parts in the Unix world/free software world is stupid.
It's worked well so far.
It's cathedral vs bazaar, the app that does everything vs lots of apps with different tasks.
An IRC client may well have a print system with drivers for 200 different printers and a web browser, but the typical *nix app would pipe those tasks off to something else that was written specificly to do that job.
This seems to encourage the making of 30 different window managers because X will not do that
The CDE didn't take off for a few reasons, one of which is that not everyone is looking for exactly the same thing. There seems to be two views:
1/ Diversification
2/ Bow down before me and use MY standard
Most people don't realise that standards are not there solely to make people conform, but to lay down minimum (and sometimes maximum) requirements. Some things are standardised, some things pretend to be, and some things probably should never be standardised.
do we want a watered down linux that everyone uses, or the linux we already have?
Both.
There's the Slackware approach - linux for unix users (compile most new stuff after the initial install), and the RedHat approach - linux for win* users (install new apps as binary packages). Once you've got the thing installed and added in a few things it gradually becomes linux for yourself - although hardly anyone compiles a kernel for their own hardware anymore (note to new users, you already have the device drivers that you are looking for - they are in the kernel source - but they do need to be set up)
Wine is a library. Things that depend upon it (or a variant) will depend on it, and things that don't won't. It won't be a problem unless someone does something brain dead like make gnome dependant upon it.
Well written native apps will run faster and more reliably than non-native binaries talking to a reinplemetation of their native API, if only because there will be better ways to do it on the native platform.
xp has a compatibility layer thing that allows programs to run as if they were win95 or winnt or win2k
When I first heard about this I thought "great, now my girlfriend can run all that cheap and nasty house design and lifestyle software she got that won't run on 98,ME,Win2k or wine." From what I've read the major "feature" is that it gives an incorrect answer when asked what version of OS is running - it won't stop calls to things that are no longer there, and there may be very strange results (and the program may have to be run with full permissions to everything). At least that will teach a few people the importance of backups.
One possibility is create a really big image in gimp and use the fractal explorer (Filter->Render->Pattern->Fractal Explorer) to get the image you want.
I gave it a shot here, but gimp on NT chokes with large images. Once you get the image the poster program mentioned above should be great.
Another option is Xaos, with the options "xaos -render filename -size widthxheight -antialiasing", but you'll have to write a script to get xaos to the point where you want to see some output. I don't know whether it would be easier to use this or fractint, but xaos does give you a few more options.
When M$ first realized that they miscalculated with the internet party and created msn, they would crash netscape browsers
They and just about any other site that tried to do something other than straight text-and-jpg HTML. The fact is that Netscape browsers were buggy pieces of trash. A browser should not crash, no matter how messed up the content it receives. Period.
Back then IE was only usable to download Netscape - remember that it was the first public release and very much in beta.
You may also remember that MSN was to be set up an an internet that M$ owned, until M$ realised that even they didn't have the cash to build the infrastructure or even rent major portions of it.
Defaming other peoples products is an old advertising tactic, going out of your way to stop them working is a bit of a different story. Whether this is akin to a contraceptive company going out and punching small holes in the products of their competitors may well be a matter for the courts.
Get your facts right. Microsoft has stated that they dont care how many times you install XP. When you activate it, a *hash* based on the hardware on your system is sent to a clearinghouse. If most of the hash matches, your computer becomes activated.
Hmm. I managed to use Win95 on three boxes (each sharing bits, but the last original part was retired when I needed a small drive to boot another box) since I obtained the thing, and had good hardwared support reasons not to use 98. If XP was around over that period of time, I probably would have had to obtain more than three licences (for the three different motherboards) due to the various bits and pieces that were added over time (at least six network cards for a start (testing) - something that is bound to eat licences).
I think I must be the sort of person that is "cheating the system" by moving my drives over to a new board, and not buying a whole new PC and a new M$ OS. It's just like those people the banks say are "cheating the system" by paying off their credit cards before the intrest kicks in.
Eventually ther troublesome SCSI hardware was replaced and I upgraded to Win2k on the win drive, but I can see that a move to XP will encourage replacement with bundled systems instead of the progressive upgrading that I've been doing.
The days of saying "throw in a US$15 stick of RAM with that mouse" will disappear if it is going to shorten the life of your licence. Also the practice of lending a friend a network card for a night of gaming will be more likely to do the same.
If you think windows is easy to use, try making a bootable floppy disk under NT, with system files on it - then try installing any MS OS that doesn't come on a genuinely bootable CD without it (because you won't be able to make the boot floppy - "/s" will not work in format). For this exercise you are not allowed to use anything other than an NT 4 machine, and a box with a bare drive. Have fun!
I spent a few years part time showing first year engineering students how to break things - and then evaluate their results. The two hour sessions became 15 minutes of demonstrating, and 1 hour 45 minutes of teaching the best and brightest how to plot graphs in MS Excel. The software is not as easy to use as the initiated would believe - brain dead default settings like recalculating only when you press F9 (or similar), and equally spacing data points on the X axis (not good if you have a gap of 3 between two points and 3e6 for the next) are a trap for the unwary.
I would say use an MS system for the secretary who has written a lot of macros and really knows the system - but ask the person first. A lot of highly skilled office staff would be using Wordperfect for DOS if office policy would let them - so let them if it gets the job done and the printers can handle it. Someone that just types and uses the GUI for formatting could be given any WSIWYG system with minimal (or no) retraining since they don't use the complex bits of the system.
I personally disagree with decisions to replace things like library terminals with PCs that run software that makes them look and act like a terminal. Also, on one campus I saw a room with dozens of PCs that run nothing but Netscape. In those cases it can only come down a "professional" not doing their job, or bribery.
The attitude to use the correct tool for the job and not a gold-plated swiss army knife should be used more in IT.
Look at the makeup of the world's computer market, 90+% Windows.
That's the world personal computer market. There's probably a computer in your car and it doesn't run windows. The computers that control the systems in the factory where the car was built don't run windows. The automatic teller at the bank doesn't either - and pray that it isn't just connected to a PC running windows at the bank end, or you have a very dodgy bank.
Think about the Motion Picture Ratings Board. They're completely self-created. They rate the movies according to their standards.
Some of the guidelines lead to weird results. Nudity in a Hollywood films needs some sort of valid plot reason for it to happen - like the female character is about to be murdered. Kubrick apparently took a bit of flak for the scene in "Eyes Wide Shut" where Nicole Kidman was naked because the character was talking while changing clothes. If something violent was going to happen, it would be OK, but because that didn't happen it was considered gratuitous nudity.
I believe the self-censorship in the US in the 1950's had a fairly dramatic effect and probably helped the demise of the small studios, (I should probably read some more of the history to back this up). The last people you want in charge of all film content are a bunch of Hollywood executives.
I think this is really a situation where you want the person that sets the standards to be someone that you can vote out of office, and not just the richest man on the board.
It won't happen... Linux zealots love X and will not give it up for whatever reason.
We just haven't heard a good reason yet.
It is not crisp at all. Window redrawing is horrible... everything is generally slow. Perhaps if we had some real non tech user input to the desktops we could move on... perhaps if we had a non X based gui that didn't suck
Window redrawing in an X thing, and if it's performing badly then theres a few options that can be turned on or off.
The "look and feel" is a window manager thing, so there it's a case of picking a theme or W.M. that matches what you are used to. Failing that you can run X without a window manager and run StarOffice, for the whole win* start menu look and feel. Just don't run Enlightenment with maximum eyecandy settings and complain that X is slow - of course it is in that situation: it's a demo of all the possible features the developer could squeeze in. Without spare time and inclination it's not worth it, I know a few people that use win3.1 because it works for them and don't have the time or interest to learn how to use something else.
I use an NT4 box at work for other reasons, but find that I need to run XFree86 in a window to do things on remote machines every now and again.
The only one that can make you use linux on your desktop is your boss, and since you're using java, there's no reason for that. Since there's also *nix boxes on your network, and you can run most (openGL stuff need support on your display) X applications on your desktop, there's no reason forcing you to change your desktop even if you are running *nix only applications.
They want stability, simplicity, reliabilty & compatibilty. That's it. (unless of course they are into things pedaphilic, or they are a drug dealers, or they take work home with them, or they are paranoid schizos)
Personally, I close the door and draw the curtains when I take a shower.
I let anyone who visits my house (invited by anyone that lives in my house) use my PC (I can't stop them if I'm not there), but I don't want them to have the ability to send emails out in my name, read any file or change any file on the system. There's login passwords to ISP's in plain text in there, and technical reports that should remain confidention, plus lots of role playing stuff that could be taken out of context (not to mention a lot of fantasy art that may make people think I have a thing for tall women wearing little strips of leather and carrying 7 foot long swords).
In the office security is essential, if only to stop pranksters or the disgruntled from changing your files and settings. In the home at least you want to be able to stop people from assuming your identity (or your new girlfriend reading five years of your email outbox and saying tearfully "why didn't you write letters like that to me?").
Back to BeOS - how much effort would it really take to enable SSL and have a secure login screen? I suspect that it wouldn't take a lot to make everthing that comes in either authenticate itself or not be able to do anything outside of the program that asks for the data. As for file permissions, I don't know much about BeOS, but I know that it can support a few different filesystems, so it becomes a case of using one that supports file permissions.
The audio geeks love BeOS for it's low latency.
The multimedia geeks love it for the applications.
The proto-geeks love it for it's ease of use and stability.
It would be very bad to see Palm let it die. BeOS doesn't fit in the organiser market, but tiny PC's like the iPac are a growing market, and BeOS could fit squarely into the market of organiser sized PCs if Palm goes that way.
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I apologise for dismissing your idea out of hand, I thought that rockets have that problem fairly well solved. I've got no idea how well a scramjet would behave at low altitudes anyway and whether it would actually be feasable to run them at low altitudes. I suspect that a big enough rocket would still win, but burn vast amounts more fuel.
So when did this missile defence happen exactly? Was it in the movie "Return of Reagan's Brain", because I think you'll find that as of last year it only worked in carefully rigged tests.I think the evidence points to world being a far more stable place - we have yet another US police action, and no one is in military opposition to it apart from a bunch of fanatics that control half of a dirt poor war torn mountainous desert. There's no Cuban missile crisis or other similar brinkmanship, and there hasn't been for years. Things are bad in Israel and various other spots, but they have been worse. The terrorist threat has escalated, but the world is a far more stable place than it was in any time the first ninety years of the twentieth century.
Also (c) it runs on the serious hardware they need to use to do the film. Microsoft products can not yet run on that sort of hardware.
People need to realise that a pentium IV with win XP is not the most powerful computer on earth, and that things like make a film with terabytes of footage is not an application for a desktop computer.
Linux is not competing with M$ in this field, it is just being useful.
That will only work for those Australians who live in Townsville, Queensland.
How about satellite launches?
We already have missiles faster than scramjet speeds with long ranges. The cold war is over, live with it.
It wasn't our test rig that stuffed up, but this rocket we bought.
No-one is saying that US rockets weren't good enough to get to the moon (except for some extremely weird conspiracy theorists who can ignore enormous amounts of evidence).
Very true. Fdisk and mkdosfs worked well for me as an alternative to the above.
Each time I install linux on a different box I spend a bit of time tracking down my favourite apps and loading them on. The home machine, however, has had linux progressively upgraded to avoid that, and there's still a bit of Slackware 2.0 lurking on the drive (which is a couple of drives newer that the original) under the RedHat 7.1 exterior. Doing a fresh install and copying a lot of old stuff over sometimes works, but you'll still spend a bit of time fixing all of the things that are broken.
The system I use now started on a P60, was cloned to a 486-100, was moved to a K5-133, then to another K5 on a board in better condition, then to a dual celeron 300. Frequent kernel compiles (hardware support gets better all of the time), numerous downloads and four software upgrades from CD later (RedHats 5.2, 6.0, 6.2, 7.1) and I have the current system. None of what I did was difficult, everything gave me a console on boot first try (using the kernel compiled on the previous configuration) and I never lost any data by accident. The slackware to redhat transition did require me to do a fresh install and copy my old files over the top, which worked happily.
Linux does not have DLL hell - libraries have version numbers. Every now and again it's worth deleting old programs, and moving old libraries out of the way to see if anything still uses them, but a full re-install will waste a lot of time unless you want to use a stock standard system. I have programs from 1996 that I still use every week, that have not had a line of code written since and won't recompile to use new libraries. Just keep the old ones - gtk tends to get upset if it finds old versions, but there's simple ways around that, and most other stuff is well behaved.
Microsoft have not yet taken over the web server market. The only way that such a "takeover" of the net could be enfoced is from the server side. There are always plenty of third-party developers around waiting to fill up the gaps in microsoft's products, so there will be software that supports the current standards even if MS doesn't support those standards.
What extra functionality has non-standard IE browser tags really given us? IE has the ability to display pages containing seriously broken HTML, which would be a virtue if fairly unskilled web page designers would stop using IE to display their pages during testing. Scripting is a different story, but MS is a very long way from getting a monopoly on server side scripting - and doing everything on the client side is the last thing you want to do in a financial transaction.HTML is incredibly simple, a lot of the changable information on the net is rendered as text so it will most likely be around for at least another nine years.
Why? MS don't actually own any of the current protocols, and have not yet released a significant one of their own (their new java - no sorry C#, isn't out and about yet andSomething like imperial Starfire or a properly implemented star fleet battles would be nice - but it would take someone that would consider it more than nice and have the devotion of a fanactic to make it work.
Personally, the only time I've ever had to use more than a really simple GUI to install a Loki game was when the CD was about a year old (written for kernel 2.2.*). All I had to do was download the new installer from the Loki site, and it worked perfectly in a GUI once I ran that. I was also surprised to find that features are still being added to Myth 2, well over a year after release (full screen openGL with full hardware aceleration on any cards that XFree86 likes!).
An IRC client may well have a print system with drivers for 200 different printers and a web browser, but the typical *nix app would pipe those tasks off to something else that was written specificly to do that job.
The CDE didn't take off for a few reasons, one of which is that not everyone is looking for exactly the same thing. There seems to be two views: Most people don't realise that standards are not there solely to make people conform, but to lay down minimum (and sometimes maximum) requirements. Some things are standardised, some things pretend to be, and some things probably should never be standardised.There's the Slackware approach - linux for unix users (compile most new stuff after the initial install), and the RedHat approach - linux for win* users (install new apps as binary packages). Once you've got the thing installed and added in a few things it gradually becomes linux for yourself - although hardly anyone compiles a kernel for their own hardware anymore (note to new users, you already have the device drivers that you are looking for - they are in the kernel source - but they do need to be set up)
Wine is a library. Things that depend upon it (or a variant) will depend on it, and things that don't won't. It won't be a problem unless someone does something brain dead like make gnome dependant upon it.
Well written native apps will run faster and more reliably than non-native binaries talking to a reinplemetation of their native API, if only because there will be better ways to do it on the native platform.
When I first heard about this I thought "great, now my girlfriend can run all that cheap and nasty house design and lifestyle software she got that won't run on 98,ME,Win2k or wine." From what I've read the major "feature" is that it gives an incorrect answer when asked what version of OS is running - it won't stop calls to things that are no longer there, and there may be very strange results (and the program may have to be run with full permissions to everything). At least that will teach a few people the importance of backups.Simple Direct Layer.
As you can see, Draekers does have a point.
I gave it a shot here, but gimp on NT chokes with large images. Once you get the image the poster program mentioned above should be great.
Another option is Xaos, with the options "xaos -render filename -size widthxheight -antialiasing", but you'll have to write a script to get xaos to the point where you want to see some output. I don't know whether it would be easier to use this or fractint, but xaos does give you a few more options.
You may also remember that MSN was to be set up an an internet that M$ owned, until M$ realised that even they didn't have the cash to build the infrastructure or even rent major portions of it.
Defaming other peoples products is an old advertising tactic, going out of your way to stop them working is a bit of a different story. Whether this is akin to a contraceptive company going out and punching small holes in the products of their competitors may well be a matter for the courts.
I think I must be the sort of person that is "cheating the system" by moving my drives over to a new board, and not buying a whole new PC and a new M$ OS. It's just like those people the banks say are "cheating the system" by paying off their credit cards before the intrest kicks in.
Eventually ther troublesome SCSI hardware was replaced and I upgraded to Win2k on the win drive, but I can see that a move to XP will encourage replacement with bundled systems instead of the progressive upgrading that I've been doing.
The days of saying "throw in a US$15 stick of RAM with that mouse" will disappear if it is going to shorten the life of your licence. Also the practice of lending a friend a network card for a night of gaming will be more likely to do the same.
If you think windows is easy to use, try making a bootable floppy disk under NT, with system files on it - then try installing any MS OS that doesn't come on a genuinely bootable CD without it (because you won't be able to make the boot floppy - "/s" will not work in format). For this exercise you are not allowed to use anything other than an NT 4 machine, and a box with a bare drive. Have fun!
I would say use an MS system for the secretary who has written a lot of macros and really knows the system - but ask the person first. A lot of highly skilled office staff would be using Wordperfect for DOS if office policy would let them - so let them if it gets the job done and the printers can handle it. Someone that just types and uses the GUI for formatting could be given any WSIWYG system with minimal (or no) retraining since they don't use the complex bits of the system.
I personally disagree with decisions to replace things like library terminals with PCs that run software that makes them look and act like a terminal. Also, on one campus I saw a room with dozens of PCs that run nothing but Netscape. In those cases it can only come down a "professional" not doing their job, or bribery.
The attitude to use the correct tool for the job and not a gold-plated swiss army knife should be used more in IT.
That's the world personal computer market. There's probably a computer in your car and it doesn't run windows. The computers that control the systems in the factory where the car was built don't run windows. The automatic teller at the bank doesn't either - and pray that it isn't just connected to a PC running windows at the bank end, or you have a very dodgy bank.I believe the self-censorship in the US in the 1950's had a fairly dramatic effect and probably helped the demise of the small studios, (I should probably read some more of the history to back this up). The last people you want in charge of all film content are a bunch of Hollywood executives.
I think this is really a situation where you want the person that sets the standards to be someone that you can vote out of office, and not just the richest man on the board.
The "look and feel" is a window manager thing, so there it's a case of picking a theme or W.M. that matches what you are used to. Failing that you can run X without a window manager and run StarOffice, for the whole win* start menu look and feel. Just don't run Enlightenment with maximum eyecandy settings and complain that X is slow - of course it is in that situation: it's a demo of all the possible features the developer could squeeze in. Without spare time and inclination it's not worth it, I know a few people that use win3.1 because it works for them and don't have the time or interest to learn how to use something else.
I use an NT4 box at work for other reasons, but find that I need to run XFree86 in a window to do things on remote machines every now and again.
The only one that can make you use linux on your desktop is your boss, and since you're using java, there's no reason for that. Since there's also *nix boxes on your network, and you can run most (openGL stuff need support on your display) X applications on your desktop, there's no reason forcing you to change your desktop even if you are running *nix only applications.
I let anyone who visits my house (invited by anyone that lives in my house) use my PC (I can't stop them if I'm not there), but I don't want them to have the ability to send emails out in my name, read any file or change any file on the system. There's login passwords to ISP's in plain text in there, and technical reports that should remain confidention, plus lots of role playing stuff that could be taken out of context (not to mention a lot of fantasy art that may make people think I have a thing for tall women wearing little strips of leather and carrying 7 foot long swords).
In the office security is essential, if only to stop pranksters or the disgruntled from changing your files and settings. In the home at least you want to be able to stop people from assuming your identity (or your new girlfriend reading five years of your email outbox and saying tearfully "why didn't you write letters like that to me?").
Back to BeOS - how much effort would it really take to enable SSL and have a secure login screen? I suspect that it wouldn't take a lot to make everthing that comes in either authenticate itself or not be able to do anything outside of the program that asks for the data. As for file permissions, I don't know much about BeOS, but I know that it can support a few different filesystems, so it becomes a case of using one that supports file permissions.
The audio geeks love BeOS for it's low latency.
The multimedia geeks love it for the applications.
The proto-geeks love it for it's ease of use and stability.
It would be very bad to see Palm let it die. BeOS doesn't fit in the organiser market, but tiny PC's like the iPac are a growing market, and BeOS could fit squarely into the market of organiser sized PCs if Palm goes that way.