This just makes the case for the game even further.
If empirical, real life evidence shows that flooding popular culture with violence reduces crime rate while tabooing nudity and sex increases teen pregnancy then that only stands to reason that we should remove these silly restrictions.
From the link (emphasis mine): Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing.
Also (emphasis mine): it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term
Also: it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so
Yeah, they're vindicated all right.
As for not meaning "not regardless", again, you are wrong. As shown from the second excerpt the negative ir- prefix means "not", therefore irregardless means "not regardless" in the same fashion that irrespective means "not respective". The writers intention is opposite of what they are writing because they are combining negative prefixes and suffixes on the same word, that is why this is considered a blunder.
GP is again correct and you are completely wrong. Please see this note about how it is a blend of "irrespective" and "regardless" and is non-standard, blunderous speech.
Did you even read the comment? Customers want unrealistic things. It is impossible for someone to email a website URL for instance. It is also completely unresaonable to expect a company to exchange a 3-4 month old unit for one that just shipped.
Where do you get off telling the GP he is part of the problem? It's like bitching at your electrician because you have to actually plug devices in to power sockets instead of having power delivered wirelessly or wanting the car dealership to trade in your 2004 chevy for a 2005 which just came out.
The problem is uninformed customers expecting the moon.
No, I'm saying look at the timeline. Europe in the Renaissance era was more like 7000-8000 years into civilization. It took them that long. What's before rebirth?
Sorry bud, I don't really call the babylonian practice of taking a man out into the fields, burning him and spreading his ashes over the farms to promote fertility every spring to be that civilized. As far as civilization goes, Africa and the Middle East haven't really enjoyed much, if any, yet.
As for your literary works, what's so great about print, when all you print is lies, propaganda, and marketing schemes? Did you know that Aesop was an Aethiopian? How old are those stories?
Statements from the truly ignorant. Pick up a good paperback of A Tale of Two Cities, War and Peace, To Kill a Mocking Bird, or even Enders Game or Dune if you're into SciFi. There are a great many literary works both ancient and modern. As for Aesop, there are 4 cities which claim to be his birthplace and none of them are in Ethiopia. The cities are: Sardis, the capital of Lydia; Samos, a Greek island; Mesembria, an ancient colony in Thrace; and Cotiaeum, the chief city of a province of Phrygia. Lydia and Phrygia are in what is now Modern Turkey. Thrace was carved up and is now parts of modern Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria. No African there.
What's so great about print? We've made these things called Encyclopedias, they have facts in them about a lot of stuff. You might even want to try reading a little bit about various subjects you speak about so you don't end up looking like a complete retard as you are now. We even moved these encyclopedias on to this whole internet thing! Check out www.wikipedia.com and www.britannica.com!
What is Europe and the U.S. doing about Africa's ailments? Nothing- except making money apparently.
Maybe we should stop doing anything at all and let the whole continent die off? Africans don't seem to be too greatful for what we do for them. UN Peacekeepers dying to try to make Africa a better place, not to mention the billions in economic and humanitarian aid and a wipe out of all debt announced by the G8 that you hate so much recently. That means you don't pay us back, ie: we're loosing money and lives, not gaining them.
The point about Colombus, , is that how can Europe/Europeans claim Aviation if they really didn't know where they're going?
Do you even know what Aviation is? Here, let me define it for you:
aviation ('v-'shn, v'-) pronunciation n.
1. The operation of aircraft.
2. The design, development, and production of aircraft.
And here's a Wikipedia excerpt:
Finally, on Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first piloted airplane off the beach near Kitty Hawk, N. C. Henri Blériot and Glenn H. Curtiss made significant improvements in airplane design and, as more powerful engines became available, flew successively longer distances. In 1909 Blériot flew across the English Channel; ten years later a Curtiss-designed flying boat crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, are you going to tell me the Wright brothers were African?
And the point of my whole post is that you don't know what you're talking about, so STFU.
I think I've made it sufficiently clear that it is you who doesn't know what he is talking about. You have pretty much proved what everyone else thinks about Africa to be true. A continent full of hateful people who would rather look backwards instead of forward.
From the words of the very notable literary artist Mark Twain: "It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
There's another invention we came up with, it's called the enter key. You should use it more often.
Until the anti-DMCA crowd accepts and acknowledges that, even though they produce crappy music, people are actively stealing significant quantities of music/movies, they will NEVER gain traction against the well organized lobbying groups.
That sir, is because it is not theft, it is copyright infringement.
Theft is depriving the rightful owner of a tangible object. Making a copy of something does not do this.
I will readily admit to you, right now, that many people infringe copyright simply because they do not want to pay for it. Do I think that is wrong? No. Do I think it is illegal? Gray area, not in my country but maybe yours, YMMV.
Now you may be wondering why I do not think it is wrong to infringe copyright. Let me ask you a question: Why do you think it is wrong to infringe copyright? Is it because it's the law, is that why it's wrong? Is it because eomeone owns the work and deserves to be paid for it, is that why?
Many things are or have been in various states of legality, alcohol at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States was illegal for one, slavery before the US civil war was legal for another. Do morals change simply because of the law? No. You cannot legislate morality and these two examples prove it.
What about someone owning the work? Well the work in this case isn't tangible, it's not an object, it's a construct built into law, specifically Intellectual Property law. This law basically legislates that someone owns every idea and you're not allowed to share them without the permission of the owner. Not allowed to share an idea? How rediculous. What did we learn from the first paragraph? You cannot legislate morality. First we're taught to "share and share alike" and now law makers wan't to tell us that sharing is wrong?
Lets move on from that question of sharing being wrong and into the notion that ideas behave like property. If I come up with an idea and I tell that idea to you then you also have the idea. I can't take it back, I can't make you forget, you can't voluntarily forget it either, it's in your memory. We both have the idea in our heads. You or I could tell countless people and everyone would have the idea, no one would be deprived of it, no one could voluntarily forget it, no one could take it away from you.
Not only do ideas duplicate but two different people can come up with the same idea at the same time in different areas of the world. It's happened before and it will happen again. How do we come up with ideas anyways? We take from our experience: people, places, things. Artists call this "inspiration", inventors are guilty of using it as well. So lets recap: multiple individuals can come up with the same idea at the same time without collaborating and they use other people, places and things as inspiration to do it. If this is so, how can any one idea have an owner?
Intellectual Property is a farce. It is certainly not theft and it is a fundamentally flawed system in which its flaws are currently being revealed to the world.
The rennaisance: 1500-1600s? Compare that with Egypt or Ankor Waat, or Timbuktu. That's why it's called a rennaisance- a renewing. Of what? old Europe? when they just reached that level? Try the Black Plague.
Actually Renaissance means "rebirth" or "revival" not "a renewing", as in the humanistic revival of the sciences, art and learning? As for the plague, are you insinuating Africa has never had any type of biological epidemics?
Printing press- ooh- more propaganda, Christianity promotion with a Bible revised by Europeans that was based upon African texts.
Actually I was refering mainly to literary works, non-fiction, news publications and journals however you spin it any way you like, it sure didn't come out of Africa.
Penicillin- to fight syphilis?
And any number of bacterial infections, it was the first mass produced anti-biotic, it was used to treat wounded soldiers on D-Day during WWII and it allowed us to further the state of the art in medicine. What is Africa doing about it's ailments?
Aviation? Why are Native Americans called Indians?
Because that's what Columbus called them when he landed, he thought the Americas was India, the name kind of stuck. Are you insinuating that the Natives of America flew there?
Space exploration- 1960's "We made it to the moon!" When Africans in Mali (near Timbuktu) could've told you what the moon was made of, how it was created, and there's nothing there a long time ago. They knew about Pluto and stars that existed, and their composition, before the stars could be seen in the 20th century.
That's great, almost useless unless you can put that information into practice. The point of space exploration is to further the state of human knowledge and to spread humanity off of this one world, something Africans haven't been able to do.
And yes, the internet does suck especially when you have this ARPA-created b.s. spreading more and more disinformation and propaganda by moronic Americans raised on Willie Lynch proverbs in their stupid public schools designed to keep them ignorant consumers looking to buy a solution for their every malady.
Yeah, African schools these days are just so much better, they teach you that East Indians flew to America, that is while they're not being used by genocidal rebels of various creeds as bunkers and recruitment camps.
As for ignorance, I'm not American so I hope that comment wasn't directed at me. This comment is directed at you however: you are not free of ignorance yourself, you should watch your words.
I suppose the rennaisance, the printing press, penicillin, the modern use of electricity, the telephone, aviation, nuclear power, space exploration, and this whole internet thing we're conversing over kinda suck, huh?
Gentoo for me has never been about performance increases, it's been about packages compiled with the options I wanted, instead of what the maintainer wanted.
No, I didn't want mysql when I installed postfix, no, I didn't really need libjpeg/libtiff/libpng to install samba, no, this box is a server and I don't want X, why is php dependant on X! (and other weird package dependencies I've noticed in various distribs)
The flipside of the coin is that perhaps I want php or something compiled against postgresql or some other combination of modules which, for instance, fedora or debian won't allow me to have? Gentoo gets around this rather well as everything is compiled and you can link packages against the libs that you want. Also since you're compiling it yourself for your system you know it'll work whereas you can't be sure with rpms these days as they can be made for any number of distribs.
Gentoo is for advanced users who don't mind compile times and like having things customized the way they want it. It's not a bad distrib, don't knock it because of some of the users.
By overusing cookies causing browser caches to get clogged up with them making users regularly remove them to keep performance up they did it to themselves. Their own greed is their undoing.
When I see no less than 3 cookies for every advertising site recorded in my cookies file, something is seriously wrong.
By default, my friend. By default. Adding repositories is not something the general computer using person is going to be able to do.
and nothing prevents people from packaging up a.deb and offering it on their site.
Except that there's so many damn package formats for linux nobody does it, they distribute in source or redhat rpm.
The contrast is the fact that the central repository simply doesn't even exist for Windows or MacOS, so everyone's had to use a different distribution method.
No, the distribution method is the same, you go to the vendors website, download the app (usually in a.dmg disk image) and drag it into the applications folder.
Why do you think that it's a sensible idea for users to be installing software in the first place? Do you refuse to buy electrical appliances which have a "No user servicable parts" sticker on them...
No, I'd much rather have to pay someone else to administer my home PC for me. What a dumb statement you made.
The great thing about open source is that if you don't like they way something is done you can change it. Unlike proprietary software, where it's a case of "like it or lump it".
I can see it right now: "Here you go grandma, here's some information on how to build your own linux distribution from scratch, have fun!"
In which case you can simply build the software to work in that environment.
Again, you seem to be missing the point of the thread, were you born stupid or do you have to work at it? We're talking about *ease* of installation, not how to make it actually harder.
Yes, as demonstrated by the glacial release cycle of Ubuntu, versus the incredibly rapid turnover of Windows and OS X. Or rather, not.
As of my last check, Ubuntu still has a 3 release out of date ATI driver, arguably the second most popular video card used, a driver that has significant performance problems. Installing your own from ATIs RPM breaks a couple packages in ubuntu which require the use of dpkg --force* commands, which nobody should have to use. They are not doing a very good job of keeping all of their packages up to date. This is part of the problem, the distro devs don't have enough time to keep all the packages up to date because they're packaging everything including the kitchen sink so either packages get left behind, the releases become slow, or both.
I've never actually seen this happen myself, but I'll take your word for it:). Anyone have any horror stories to share? Does it happen with actual packages, or only if you install from source?
Say you want to install a different (read: newer, different compile time options, etc) version of a library on your system. Sure, you can spend days figuring out how to package it for your distribs package format or you can install it from source in minutes. Since you installed it from source the package system doesn't know about it, you try to install something from a package that depends on this source compiled library and what happens? The system says "that library isn't installed, hey, I'll install it for you" and then proceeds to overwrite the one you just installed.
Unfortunately the problem with this is that all packages have to be located in one or more repositories and maintained by the distrib maintainers for apt to work. Independant developers not associated with debian can't make packages and have them available to apt by default.
This causes two problems: 1) Distros take longer to release (uhh, sarge?) as they're maintaning not just the OS but all the applications that go with it too. 2) If you install something that isn't packaged with your distros packaging system you break the package management completely, there is NO EASY FIX for this currently.
Mac OS X's system is good considering the alternative, the package IS the application and everything to do with maintenance is super easy.
I work for an ISP. I get maybe 2 or 3 calls from Mac people in a 5 day week. I handle more than 40 calls in a day. And in my professional opinion, you have to be completely retarded to think that PC/Mac usage is anywhere even in the same ballpark to 50/50.
While I agree it's nowhere near 50/50, your anecdotal evidence makes a few assumptions. The biggest assumptions it makes would be that macs break down at the same rate PCs do and that mac users require the same amount of technical support PC users do.
Speaking as a mac user I've got to say 16% sounds high, but your 1.5% sounds quite low.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux is not a copy of minix, thanks for playing, you fail at life.
"Revampled" in the same way that a Ferrari is a "revampled" horse drawn covered wagon.
The US did not invent the UN, thanks for coming out, you fail at life.
This just makes the case for the game even further.
If empirical, real life evidence shows that flooding popular culture with violence reduces crime rate while tabooing nudity and sex increases teen pregnancy then that only stands to reason that we should remove these silly restrictions.
Name one other than "irregardless".
That is what people mean when they improperly use the word. The word itself means "not regardless".
If you think any differently then you need to learn a few things about how languages work.
Backs up their position 100% huh?
From the link (emphasis mine):
Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing.
Also (emphasis mine):
it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term
Also:
it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so
Yeah, they're vindicated all right.
As for not meaning "not regardless", again, you are wrong. As shown from the second excerpt the negative ir- prefix means "not", therefore irregardless means "not regardless" in the same fashion that irrespective means "not respective". The writers intention is opposite of what they are writing because they are combining negative prefixes and suffixes on the same word, that is why this is considered a blunder.
Do not post about things you know nothing about.
GP is again correct and you are completely wrong. Please see this note about how it is a blend of "irrespective" and "regardless" and is non-standard, blunderous speech.
Why do you bother posting at all here?
Did you even read the comment? Customers want unrealistic things. It is impossible for someone to email a website URL for instance. It is also completely unresaonable to expect a company to exchange a 3-4 month old unit for one that just shipped.
Where do you get off telling the GP he is part of the problem? It's like bitching at your electrician because you have to actually plug devices in to power sockets instead of having power delivered wirelessly or wanting the car dealership to trade in your 2004 chevy for a 2005 which just came out.
The problem is uninformed customers expecting the moon.
No, I'm saying look at the timeline. Europe in the Renaissance era was more like 7000-8000 years into civilization. It took them that long. What's before rebirth?
Sorry bud, I don't really call the babylonian practice of taking a man out into the fields, burning him and spreading his ashes over the farms to promote fertility every spring to be that civilized. As far as civilization goes, Africa and the Middle East haven't really enjoyed much, if any, yet.
As for your literary works, what's so great about print, when all you print is lies, propaganda, and marketing schemes? Did you know that Aesop was an Aethiopian? How old are those stories?
Statements from the truly ignorant. Pick up a good paperback of A Tale of Two Cities, War and Peace, To Kill a Mocking Bird, or even Enders Game or Dune if you're into SciFi. There are a great many literary works both ancient and modern. As for Aesop, there are 4 cities which claim to be his birthplace and none of them are in Ethiopia. The cities are: Sardis, the capital of Lydia; Samos, a Greek island; Mesembria, an ancient colony in Thrace; and Cotiaeum, the chief city of a province of Phrygia. Lydia and Phrygia are in what is now Modern Turkey. Thrace was carved up and is now parts of modern Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria. No African there.
What's so great about print? We've made these things called Encyclopedias, they have facts in them about a lot of stuff. You might even want to try reading a little bit about various subjects you speak about so you don't end up looking like a complete retard as you are now. We even moved these encyclopedias on to this whole internet thing! Check out www.wikipedia.com and www.britannica.com!
What is Europe and the U.S. doing about Africa's ailments? Nothing- except making money apparently.
Maybe we should stop doing anything at all and let the whole continent die off? Africans don't seem to be too greatful for what we do for them. UN Peacekeepers dying to try to make Africa a better place, not to mention the billions in economic and humanitarian aid and a wipe out of all debt announced by the G8 that you hate so much recently. That means you don't pay us back, ie: we're loosing money and lives, not gaining them.
The point about Colombus, , is that how can Europe/Europeans claim Aviation if they really didn't know where they're going?
Do you even know what Aviation is? Here, let me define it for you:
aviation ('v-'shn, v'-) pronunciation
n.
1. The operation of aircraft.
2. The design, development, and production of aircraft.
And here's a Wikipedia excerpt:
Finally, on Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first piloted airplane off the beach near Kitty Hawk, N. C. Henri Blériot and Glenn H. Curtiss made significant improvements in airplane design and, as more powerful engines became available, flew successively longer distances. In 1909 Blériot flew across the English Channel; ten years later a Curtiss-designed flying boat crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, are you going to tell me the Wright brothers were African?
And the point of my whole post is that you don't know what you're talking about, so STFU.
I think I've made it sufficiently clear that it is you who doesn't know what he is talking about. You have pretty much proved what everyone else thinks about Africa to be true. A continent full of hateful people who would rather look backwards instead of forward.
From the words of the very notable literary artist Mark Twain: "It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
There's another invention we came up with, it's called the enter key. You should use it more often.
Until the anti-DMCA crowd accepts and acknowledges that, even though they produce crappy music, people are actively stealing significant quantities of music/movies, they will NEVER gain traction against the well organized lobbying groups.
That sir, is because it is not theft, it is copyright infringement.
Theft is depriving the rightful owner of a tangible object. Making a copy of something does not do this.
I will readily admit to you, right now, that many people infringe copyright simply because they do not want to pay for it. Do I think that is wrong? No. Do I think it is illegal? Gray area, not in my country but maybe yours, YMMV.
Now you may be wondering why I do not think it is wrong to infringe copyright. Let me ask you a question: Why do you think it is wrong to infringe copyright? Is it because it's the law, is that why it's wrong? Is it because eomeone owns the work and deserves to be paid for it, is that why?
Many things are or have been in various states of legality, alcohol at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States was illegal for one, slavery before the US civil war was legal for another. Do morals change simply because of the law? No. You cannot legislate morality and these two examples prove it.
What about someone owning the work? Well the work in this case isn't tangible, it's not an object, it's a construct built into law, specifically Intellectual Property law. This law basically legislates that someone owns every idea and you're not allowed to share them without the permission of the owner. Not allowed to share an idea? How rediculous. What did we learn from the first paragraph? You cannot legislate morality. First we're taught to "share and share alike" and now law makers wan't to tell us that sharing is wrong?
Lets move on from that question of sharing being wrong and into the notion that ideas behave like property. If I come up with an idea and I tell that idea to you then you also have the idea. I can't take it back, I can't make you forget, you can't voluntarily forget it either, it's in your memory. We both have the idea in our heads. You or I could tell countless people and everyone would have the idea, no one would be deprived of it, no one could voluntarily forget it, no one could take it away from you.
Not only do ideas duplicate but two different people can come up with the same idea at the same time in different areas of the world. It's happened before and it will happen again. How do we come up with ideas anyways? We take from our experience: people, places, things. Artists call this "inspiration", inventors are guilty of using it as well. So lets recap: multiple individuals can come up with the same idea at the same time without collaborating and they use other people, places and things as inspiration to do it. If this is so, how can any one idea have an owner?
Intellectual Property is a farce. It is certainly not theft and it is a fundamentally flawed system in which its flaws are currently being revealed to the world.
The rennaisance: 1500-1600s? Compare that with Egypt or Ankor Waat, or Timbuktu. That's why it's called a rennaisance- a renewing. Of what? old Europe? when they just reached that level? Try the Black Plague.
Actually Renaissance means "rebirth" or "revival" not "a renewing", as in the humanistic revival of the sciences, art and learning? As for the plague, are you insinuating Africa has never had any type of biological epidemics?
Printing press- ooh- more propaganda, Christianity promotion with a Bible revised by Europeans that was based upon African texts.
Actually I was refering mainly to literary works, non-fiction, news publications and journals however you spin it any way you like, it sure didn't come out of Africa.
Penicillin- to fight syphilis?
And any number of bacterial infections, it was the first mass produced anti-biotic, it was used to treat wounded soldiers on D-Day during WWII and it allowed us to further the state of the art in medicine. What is Africa doing about it's ailments?
Aviation? Why are Native Americans called Indians?
Because that's what Columbus called them when he landed, he thought the Americas was India, the name kind of stuck. Are you insinuating that the Natives of America flew there?
Space exploration- 1960's "We made it to the moon!" When Africans in Mali (near Timbuktu) could've told you what the moon was made of, how it was created, and there's nothing there a long time ago. They knew about Pluto and stars that existed, and their composition, before the stars could be seen in the 20th century.
That's great, almost useless unless you can put that information into practice. The point of space exploration is to further the state of human knowledge and to spread humanity off of this one world, something Africans haven't been able to do.
And yes, the internet does suck especially when you have this ARPA-created b.s. spreading more and more disinformation and propaganda by moronic Americans raised on Willie Lynch proverbs in their stupid public schools designed to keep them ignorant consumers looking to buy a solution for their every malady.
Yeah, African schools these days are just so much better, they teach you that East Indians flew to America, that is while they're not being used by genocidal rebels of various creeds as bunkers and recruitment camps.
As for ignorance, I'm not American so I hope that comment wasn't directed at me. This comment is directed at you however: you are not free of ignorance yourself, you should watch your words.
I suppose the rennaisance, the printing press, penicillin, the modern use of electricity, the telephone, aviation, nuclear power, space exploration, and this whole internet thing we're conversing over kinda suck, huh?
I think I would call 200-300 years a long time, especially since it is approximately 5 human generations long.
Care to name the last thing that africa did for the world?
Gentoo for me has never been about performance increases, it's been about packages compiled with the options I wanted, instead of what the maintainer wanted.
No, I didn't want mysql when I installed postfix, no, I didn't really need libjpeg/libtiff/libpng to install samba, no, this box is a server and I don't want X, why is php dependant on X! (and other weird package dependencies I've noticed in various distribs)
The flipside of the coin is that perhaps I want php or something compiled against postgresql or some other combination of modules which, for instance, fedora or debian won't allow me to have? Gentoo gets around this rather well as everything is compiled and you can link packages against the libs that you want. Also since you're compiling it yourself for your system you know it'll work whereas you can't be sure with rpms these days as they can be made for any number of distribs.
Gentoo is for advanced users who don't mind compile times and like having things customized the way they want it. It's not a bad distrib, don't knock it because of some of the users.
By overusing cookies causing browser caches to get clogged up with them making users regularly remove them to keep performance up they did it to themselves. Their own greed is their undoing.
When I see no less than 3 cookies for every advertising site recorded in my cookies file, something is seriously wrong.
...may I turn your attention, ladies and gentlemen, to it's usurper.
Boondoggles? Wow, exact wording used by the latest Conservative party request for funding mailing. Mr. Harper, is that you?
You can add third-party repositories any time
.deb and offering it on their site.
.dmg disk image) and drag it into the applications folder.
By default, my friend. By default. Adding repositories is not something the general computer using person is going to be able to do.
and nothing prevents people from packaging up a
Except that there's so many damn package formats for linux nobody does it, they distribute in source or redhat rpm.
The contrast is the fact that the central repository simply doesn't even exist for Windows or MacOS, so everyone's had to use a different distribution method.
No, the distribution method is the same, you go to the vendors website, download the app (usually in a
Why do you think that it's a sensible idea for users to be installing software in the first place? Do you refuse to buy electrical appliances which have a "No user servicable parts" sticker on them...
No, I'd much rather have to pay someone else to administer my home PC for me. What a dumb statement you made.
The great thing about open source is that if you don't like they way something is done you can change it. Unlike proprietary software, where it's a case of "like it or lump it".
I can see it right now: "Here you go grandma, here's some information on how to build your own linux distribution from scratch, have fun!"
In which case you can simply build the software to work in that environment.
Again, you seem to be missing the point of the thread, were you born stupid or do you have to work at it? We're talking about *ease* of installation, not how to make it actually harder.
Yes, as demonstrated by the glacial release cycle of Ubuntu, versus the incredibly rapid turnover of Windows and OS X. Or rather, not.
:). Anyone have any horror stories to share? Does it happen with actual packages, or only if you install from source?
As of my last check, Ubuntu still has a 3 release out of date ATI driver, arguably the second most popular video card used, a driver that has significant performance problems. Installing your own from ATIs RPM breaks a couple packages in ubuntu which require the use of dpkg --force* commands, which nobody should have to use. They are not doing a very good job of keeping all of their packages up to date. This is part of the problem, the distro devs don't have enough time to keep all the packages up to date because they're packaging everything including the kitchen sink so either packages get left behind, the releases become slow, or both.
I've never actually seen this happen myself, but I'll take your word for it
Say you want to install a different (read: newer, different compile time options, etc) version of a library on your system. Sure, you can spend days figuring out how to package it for your distribs package format or you can install it from source in minutes. Since you installed it from source the package system doesn't know about it, you try to install something from a package that depends on this source compiled library and what happens? The system says "that library isn't installed, hey, I'll install it for you" and then proceeds to overwrite the one you just installed.
Not a very good system.
Unfortunately the problem with this is that all packages have to be located in one or more repositories and maintained by the distrib maintainers for apt to work. Independant developers not associated with debian can't make packages and have them available to apt by default.
This causes two problems: 1) Distros take longer to release (uhh, sarge?) as they're maintaning not just the OS but all the applications that go with it too. 2) If you install something that isn't packaged with your distros packaging system you break the package management completely, there is NO EASY FIX for this currently.
Mac OS X's system is good considering the alternative, the package IS the application and everything to do with maintenance is super easy.
See the USB ports on the side and back? Plug mouse in there.
Interesting, the mouse hooked up to the mac I'm typing this on has 8 buttons.
I work for an ISP. I get maybe 2 or 3 calls from Mac people in a 5 day week. I handle more than 40 calls in a day. And in my professional opinion, you have to be completely retarded to think that PC/Mac usage is anywhere even in the same ballpark to 50/50.
While I agree it's nowhere near 50/50, your anecdotal evidence makes a few assumptions. The biggest assumptions it makes would be that macs break down at the same rate PCs do and that mac users require the same amount of technical support PC users do.
Speaking as a mac user I've got to say 16% sounds high, but your 1.5% sounds quite low.