You're right that you have to be careful that your teleporter isn't just a "fax machine with integrated shredder". On the other hand, just because it's easier to conceive of the fax machine doesn't mean that actual matter teleportation (i.e. where matter is moved rather than destroyed & recreated) isn't possible. Talking about "quantum teleportation" as a precursor to sci-fi style teleportation does sound like technobabble, but I don't know enough about physics to be sure that there aren't any location hacks.
Re:Hey you missed the *bad* news!
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 1
They'll do what they'll do and it will be what it will be.
"They" in this case was a large group of the Free Software community, not just RMS or the FSF.
From the looks of things the GPL3 could actually work to hurt FOSS in general, not help it.
That's definitely the impression that the anti-FSF astroturfers on Slashdot have tried to convey. More realistically, GPLv3 is a reasonably minor update to GPLv2 - most of the changes were more about legal technicalities than anything that seems relevant to most programmers. As long as you aren't trying to pull stupid crap with software patents or trying to sell people appliances with "malicious features", the differences are all obviously helpful & noncontroversial things like compatibility with the Apache license and improved international wording.
Well, let's see, perhaps because it is the right thing to do.
That ends up being circular reasoning, which isn't terribly helpful.
It makes society work so much better when everyone is a good guy.
Right, but maybe I can get a better result for me by not being a good guy. This boils down to simple game theory, and
leaves open a "prisoner's dilemma" sort of issue if there is some disadvantage to being a good guy.
That one turns right back around and benefits you for being a good guy, provided everybody else plays along.
The whole story of the world is people not wanting to play along. That's a bad bet.
Fortunately, being a "good guy" is actually a good deal. Usually its really easy, and what you get back is other people trusting you.
Trust is extremely useful, because it allows cooperation. It turns out that classical ethics is a reasonably good heuristic for choosing
actions that will tend to encourage other people to trust you.
Re:Hey you missed the *bad* news!
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
This isn't anything new - the public comment phase for GPLv3 has been going on for more than a year now. If you had participated in the process, you would have had an opportunity to help with that thinking.
I've followed the drafts pretty closely, and I agree with the reasoning behind this compromise. This isn't about appeasing large business vendors like IBM. Instead, the purpose of the exception for non-consumer devices is to appease a certain class of business buyer that wants to make the security / liability tradeoff of leasing tamper-resistant computer systems. The FSF has publicly stated that they think that's a dumb idea, but that if that's what those buyers want there's no freedom-related reason to stop them from purchasing their "tamper resistant equipment as a service" that they want.
Everything works? So you can use Firefox at a reasonable speed when logged in as a second user now? You can use Beryl now? Those things sure don't work on the X1300 I bought (a horrible mistake) a couple months ago.
It's really absurd - if they'd just release the programming info for their hardware the X.org drivers would support this stuff inside a week.
Re:Hey you missed the *bad* news!
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
Here's the thing: If you want to buy an IBM mainframe and hack it, they won't stop you. They'll probably even give you detailed documentation for all the interesting features of the product. You won't get software redistribution rights - IBMs mainframe OS is proprietary - but that's the product you bought. More relevantly - the FSF has seen no reason to believe that tivoization is especially relevant to that particular market, and the anti-tivoization tweak is meant to respond to real world threats to freedom rather than imagined threats.
If you take the northbridge heatsink off you will find (usually) 1) it's warped 2) The etruded surface has big gouges in it 3) it was mounted with some kind of TIM tape that is ineffective.
Who made the motherboards you're talking about? That's definitely a motherboard manufacturer problem, not an AMD problem - you want to pay a bit of attention to who's making your motherboard, since it's an important component in the functionality & stability of the PC.
Sorry, I'll admit I speed-read over "1733 MHz" and assumed that "Athlon" didn't mean "Athlon XP". So it was five years ago.
I'm still unconvinced by your vague anecdotal evidence that AMD processors are innately unstable. Like I said, I've personally seen a statistically significant number of computers built, deployed, and supported - and I've never seen processor stability issues that could be legitimately attributed to manufacturing quality. Are you 100% sure that your "unstable" Athlon XP didn't have bad RAM, or improper cooling, or a virus infestation?
Seriously, if there were some chronic stability problem with AMD processors I'm pretty sure I would have noticed it by now. I guess the last heat dependent crash I saw was an AMD... the processor was running at 90 deg C because the heat sink was clogged with cat hair. Surprisingly, the owner of that system hasn't complained about any residual stability issues since I vaccummed it out for him - I would have expected some lasting damage.
Your so called "freedom to tinker" just means that no company will be allowed any kind of protection for protected content.
You lost me at "protection for protected content". You're talking about bits on my hard drive, right? My hard drive, that happens to be in my DVR, that I own? I'm afraid that I can't summon up any tears over people not being able to prevent me from accessing the data on my own hard drive. Anyone who built a business model on that fantasy is an idiot - if they go broke it's not my problem.
As for "free software is anti-business" and "companies can't make money off their work" - bullshit. Sure, Free Software is incompatible with one specific business model - call it the "Adobe/Microsoft Model". In exchange, it makes contract software development (how the vast majority of programmers make a living) more profitable than ever by allowing *any* software development team to add features / fix bugs in applications. Economically, it's probably an improvement. And, the part you don't want to hear: Socially, it's definitely an improvement.
so limited in thought as to believe society suffers unless it works to further their political ends.
When your political end is freedom, society *does* suffer if that end is not furthered. Discounting anyone who promotes a political goal may make your life easier in the short term, but if everyone does it we won't be able to maintain a free society for very long.
Amazing... you had a bad experience almost 10 years ago, and then you had an issue with a heat sink, and now you're 100% sure that AMD products are "crap". All I have to suggest is this: Be a little less rabid about spreading that anti-AMD FUD. I may not currently be fixing computers for people as my primary job, but I frequently help a couple of friends who do - and I see no evidence of a significant reliability difference between Intel, AMD, or even VIA on consumer-level processors today.
As for historic processors, all I have to say is this: Make sure you get the heat sink mounted right on the original Athlons and the older Pentium IVs.
Is this a question, or is this Intel fanboy gibbering? Whatever, I'll just answer the question.
What is with the rinky dinky cache?
The Core 2 Duo E6700 has 4 megs of shared L2 cache and 2x64k of L1 cachee. All of the upcoming AMD chips will have 2 megs of shared L3 cache, 4x512k of non-shared L2 cache, and 4x128k of L1 cache. Nobody has rinky-dinky cache - it looks like everyone agrees about 4 megs of cache is the right answer at 65nm.
Historically, the reason that AMD has lagged behind Intel on cache is a combination of two factors: 1.) They've been a process generation behind a lot of the time and 2.) Their onboard memory controller lets them get away with cache misses easier than Intel's FSB plan. If they're lucky, this stuff (plus extra L1 cache, which is a really big deal) will let AMD regain the performance crown until Penryn happens.
As for "your computer doesn't crash", I have to say: Good job. You've managed to get on par with everyone else who doesn't have a defective computer. Can't say I've ever had a computer crash because of a defective CPU - defective ram? sure. Hard disk? all the time. CPU? Never. Not Intel, AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IBM, or any other CPU.
For the last time, no, 939 doesn't have anything to do with unbuffered RAM. Sockets have nothing to do with that. Unbuffered support is purely a function of the new CPUs' fixed memory controller.
That's great and all, but it doesn't actually help you in this case. The registered / unregistered thing still meant that there was no chip / board combination that would have worked had they not introduced a new socket. A lot of people complain about the numerous AMD socket changes, but new versions of the same socket that were incompatible with old chips (or vice-versa) wouldn't have been any better.
GIT is a neat tool, and I think it has a lot of potential. But like every other technological solution, it does not and cannot resolve fundamentally social issues.
On the other hand, it does allow for the web of trust / tree of merges solution that is impossible with a centralized SCM tool.
One way Eugenics is potentially bad for the species is that by weeding out undesirable characteristics we reduce genetic diversity. And if diversity decreases and some terrible disease hits the species it might be able to take a bigger bite out of the population.
That's exactly why any government mandated or otherwise near-universal social policy that reduces genetic diversity is a bad idea. But... we could easily allow half the population of, say, the United States the choice to abort their fetuses with genes for "dumb", "fat", or even "doesn't have red hair" without measurably impacting the diversity of the overall human gene pool.
Mandated eugenics is definitely bad. Eugenics through executions is sick and evil. But making choices about what child you want to have (i.e. "I want a boy with freckles") is mostly harmless - and I don't see any reason to step in and prevent other people from making their own decisions about that sort of thing.
Its not a baby or not a human life so its okay to kill it... unless your reason for killing it is wrong because then it is a human life.
There is an argument against selective abortions that does not rely on the humanity of the fetus at all. That argument goes like this:
Allowing people to abort their children based on genetic information is socially unacceptable. That's clearly an opening to human genetic engineering, and genetic manipulation is dangerous and poorly understood. That's the sort of thing that leads to Godzilla destroying Tokyo. You don't want Tokyo to be destroyed, do you?
You are right about one thing though: If abortion is murder, then abortion based on genetic information is still murder. It turns out that the "is abortion murder?" question is hotly debated...
This is dangerous on several levels, potential prejudices in both directions and gene pool reduction being two of the more important ones.
The makeup of the human gene pool is being influenced by human choices all the time. Women chose genetic characteristics for their children by selecting the father. Sure, there's the horror story of the human race losing the gene for red hair because it became unfashionable - or more relevently, losing the gene for sickle-cell anemia because it's usually harmful - but A.) there's no chance of that at all in the near future and B.) that would be better solved by a set of "endangered gene" laws or something.
The part that makes eugenics nasty is what it means for the remaining children.
What? Seriously - what, specifically, are you afraid of here? That schools will have to spend slightly less money on special education because a few less mentally handicapped kids were born? That our health care costs will go down slightly because there were a couple less fat kids? Sure, if this were government mandated or culturally expected then there would be a problem - but a couple of early adopters do not a social problem make.
I'm all for preserving genetic diversity - even sickle-cell anemia - but until a significant portion of parents have access to this sort of fetal genetic information the problem just doesn't exist.
Especially considering how a lot of processor intensive applications that most consumers use (games and other multimedia, and to a small margin running outlook, internet explorer, and MSN messenger together) get absolutely no benefit from SMP.
Don't underestimate how well supported SMP is already. It's true that there aren't that many single applications that get a linear speedup to 4 cores, but dual core processors have been common for a while now. All of the new games support multiple cores - they have to, neither the PS3 and XBox360 has one simple processor. All of the media encoding applications support 4+ cores. Some video playback programs support multiple cores. And, as AMD and Intel love to remind us, if you run more than one program at a time *that* can use multiple cores.
Abortions because of a likelyhood of low IQ or homosexuality? That doesn't abhor you? I'm all for a woman's right to choose not to have a baby (it's her body, it's her choice) but to make that choice available on the basis of likely intelligence or sexuality (or hair colour, or skin tone) is, to me and most people, a step too far.
No, using more information to make an important decision doesn't seem abhorrent to me at all. A pregnant woman has the right to chose to abort the fetus. It's her body, it's her choice, and what information she uses to make that choice is her business.
If there were government criteria for mandatory abortions, then that would be a completely different story - but there are a lot of things that people should be free to do but shouldn't be mandatory, bar code tattoos for example.
As for your "me and most people" comment, I doubt that most people have even legitimately considered this question. Sure, a lot of people's gut reaction would be to agree with you - but a lot of people would initially support the new New York law that makes selling violent video games to kids a felony. Hopefully, in both cases, a little bit of consideration would cause them to rethink their initial position. People should generally allowed to make choices for themselves - the choice of what information to use in deciding whether to carry a fetus to term isn't an exception.
More recently, he has called for genetic screenings before birth to weed out "really stupid" people (the bottom 10 percent or so), and he has a nice line in how to deal with homosexuality, too. He believes "that if the gene [for homosexuality] were discovered and a woman decided not to give birth to a child that may have a tendency to become homosexual, she should be able to abort the fetus." Not to put too fine a point on it, but that strikes me as being rather too close to Third Reich thinking for my liking.
I don't agree that anything that even vaguely resembles eugenics is always bad. I'm sure of the following: Government mandated executions based on genetic makeup is bad and pregnant women having the option to abort terminally-ill fetuses is good. There's a lot of ground in the middle. If we take "a woman's right to choose" as given, then I don't see any reason why aborting a stupid or gay fetus is any worse than aborting a generic unwanted fetus.
Your response is an excellent example of an ethical heuristic in action - the "anything that looks like what the Nazis did is bad" heuristic is probably a good one. But, you've got to remember the basic thing about heuristics - they're fast but don't always produce the correct result.
Let me put it this way. Is there any reason NOT to compare Ubuntu to a Vista Ultimate Server Edition?
Yes. Not everyone needs all the features that Ubuntu / Vista Extreme Base Jumper Edition offers. Some users will be happy with Vista Home Basic + Microsoft Works. Those users would also get everything they need from Ubuntu, but they would have no reason to pay more money for other proprietary software on Windows.
More relevantly, I'm comparing the prices of Dell PCs - not the feature sets and cost / benefit tradeoffs of different sets of software. The latter would be interesting, but it will realistically be different for every computer user.
GIMP is a more advanced version of Photoshop. Don't you hate it how new versions of software change things around? Ok, I call FUD on this one. I'm sorry on this, I use it for a living and Gimp is nowhere as powerful , easy to use/learn, or have the plugin-set and extras that Photoshop has. Sure, some of it's familiarity, but changes look/feel happen on both sides of open source and isn't a bad thing either - would you rather still be using X with Motif widgets?
You completely missed the point of my comment. All of my statements were examples of dodging the question with calculated misinformation. My point was that, for most users, the apps that come with Ubuntu by default will be fine as long as nobody tells them that they're worse than the commercial alternative. Sure, as a professional graphics guy you might need some specific feature of photoshop, or the photoshop UI might be better designed making you somewhat more productive. For the majority of computer users who aren't professional graphics people, that doesn't matter.
As for which is more powerful, easy to use/learn, etc between Photoshop and The GIMP - You're biased because you've invested time in learning Photoshop. I don't really know - as a dabbler, they both do what I want simply and easily. What I do know is this: Photoshop costs $600, and pirating software that requires an investment of time to learn is stupid - you're basically donating your time to give free market presence to Adobe.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right that you have to be careful that your teleporter isn't just a "fax machine with integrated shredder". On the other hand, just because it's easier to conceive of the fax machine doesn't mean that actual matter teleportation (i.e. where matter is moved rather than destroyed & recreated) isn't possible. Talking about "quantum teleportation" as a precursor to sci-fi style teleportation does sound like technobabble, but I don't know enough about physics to be sure that there aren't any location hacks.
"They" in this case was a large group of the Free Software community, not just RMS or the FSF.
That's definitely the impression that the anti-FSF astroturfers on Slashdot have tried to convey. More realistically, GPLv3 is a reasonably minor update to GPLv2 - most of the changes were more about legal technicalities than anything that seems relevant to most programmers. As long as you aren't trying to pull stupid crap with software patents or trying to sell people appliances with "malicious features", the differences are all obviously helpful & noncontroversial things like compatibility with the Apache license and improved international wording.
That ends up being circular reasoning, which isn't terribly helpful.
Right, but maybe I can get a better result for me by not being a good guy. This boils down to simple game theory, and leaves open a "prisoner's dilemma" sort of issue if there is some disadvantage to being a good guy.
The whole story of the world is people not wanting to play along. That's a bad bet.
Fortunately, being a "good guy" is actually a good deal. Usually its really easy, and what you get back is other people trusting you. Trust is extremely useful, because it allows cooperation. It turns out that classical ethics is a reasonably good heuristic for choosing actions that will tend to encourage other people to trust you.
This isn't anything new - the public comment phase for GPLv3 has been going on for more than a year now. If you had participated in the process, you would have had an opportunity to help with that thinking.
I've followed the drafts pretty closely, and I agree with the reasoning behind this compromise. This isn't about appeasing large business vendors like IBM. Instead, the purpose of the exception for non-consumer devices is to appease a certain class of business buyer that wants to make the security / liability tradeoff of leasing tamper-resistant computer systems. The FSF has publicly stated that they think that's a dumb idea, but that if that's what those buyers want there's no freedom-related reason to stop them from purchasing their "tamper resistant equipment as a service" that they want.
Music that is nonsensical is considered "Brilliantly Artistic". Science that is nonsensical isn't - mostly it's useless.
Everything works? So you can use Firefox at a reasonable speed when logged in as a second user now? You can use Beryl now? Those things sure don't work on the X1300 I bought (a horrible mistake) a couple months ago.
It's really absurd - if they'd just release the programming info for their hardware the X.org drivers would support this stuff inside a week.
Here's the thing: If you want to buy an IBM mainframe and hack it, they won't stop you. They'll probably even give you detailed documentation for all the interesting features of the product. You won't get software redistribution rights - IBMs mainframe OS is proprietary - but that's the product you bought. More relevantly - the FSF has seen no reason to believe that tivoization is especially relevant to that particular market, and the anti-tivoization tweak is meant to respond to real world threats to freedom rather than imagined threats.
Who made the motherboards you're talking about? That's definitely a motherboard manufacturer problem, not an AMD problem - you want to pay a bit of attention to who's making your motherboard, since it's an important component in the functionality & stability of the PC.
Does that plugin actually support signatures yet? Encryption is great and all, but has way less useful security properties without signatures.
Sorry, I'll admit I speed-read over "1733 MHz" and assumed that "Athlon" didn't mean "Athlon XP". So it was five years ago.
I'm still unconvinced by your vague anecdotal evidence that AMD processors are innately unstable. Like I said, I've personally seen a statistically significant number of computers built, deployed, and supported - and I've never seen processor stability issues that could be legitimately attributed to manufacturing quality. Are you 100% sure that your "unstable" Athlon XP didn't have bad RAM, or improper cooling, or a virus infestation?
Seriously, if there were some chronic stability problem with AMD processors I'm pretty sure I would have noticed it by now. I guess the last heat dependent crash I saw was an AMD... the processor was running at 90 deg C because the heat sink was clogged with cat hair. Surprisingly, the owner of that system hasn't complained about any residual stability issues since I vaccummed it out for him - I would have expected some lasting damage.
That's basically the reason to be a good guy. I can't think of any other reason right now...
You lost me at "protection for protected content". You're talking about bits on my hard drive, right? My hard drive, that happens to be in my DVR, that I own? I'm afraid that I can't summon up any tears over people not being able to prevent me from accessing the data on my own hard drive. Anyone who built a business model on that fantasy is an idiot - if they go broke it's not my problem.
As for "free software is anti-business" and "companies can't make money off their work" - bullshit. Sure, Free Software is incompatible with one specific business model - call it the "Adobe/Microsoft Model". In exchange, it makes contract software development (how the vast majority of programmers make a living) more profitable than ever by allowing *any* software development team to add features / fix bugs in applications. Economically, it's probably an improvement. And, the part you don't want to hear: Socially, it's definitely an improvement.
When your political end is freedom, society *does* suffer if that end is not furthered. Discounting anyone who promotes a political goal may make your life easier in the short term, but if everyone does it we won't be able to maintain a free society for very long.
Amazing... you had a bad experience almost 10 years ago, and then you had an issue with a heat sink, and now you're 100% sure that AMD products are "crap". All I have to suggest is this: Be a little less rabid about spreading that anti-AMD FUD. I may not currently be fixing computers for people as my primary job, but I frequently help a couple of friends who do - and I see no evidence of a significant reliability difference between Intel, AMD, or even VIA on consumer-level processors today.
As for historic processors, all I have to say is this: Make sure you get the heat sink mounted right on the original Athlons and the older Pentium IVs.
Is this a question, or is this Intel fanboy gibbering? Whatever, I'll just answer the question.
The Core 2 Duo E6700 has 4 megs of shared L2 cache and 2x64k of L1 cachee. All of the upcoming AMD chips will have 2 megs of shared L3 cache, 4x512k of non-shared L2 cache, and 4x128k of L1 cache. Nobody has rinky-dinky cache - it looks like everyone agrees about 4 megs of cache is the right answer at 65nm.
Historically, the reason that AMD has lagged behind Intel on cache is a combination of two factors: 1.) They've been a process generation behind a lot of the time and 2.) Their onboard memory controller lets them get away with cache misses easier than Intel's FSB plan. If they're lucky, this stuff (plus extra L1 cache, which is a really big deal) will let AMD regain the performance crown until Penryn happens.
As for "your computer doesn't crash", I have to say: Good job. You've managed to get on par with everyone else who doesn't have a defective computer. Can't say I've ever had a computer crash because of a defective CPU - defective ram? sure. Hard disk? all the time. CPU? Never. Not Intel, AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IBM, or any other CPU.
That's great and all, but it doesn't actually help you in this case. The registered / unregistered thing still meant that there was no chip / board combination that would have worked had they not introduced a new socket. A lot of people complain about the numerous AMD socket changes, but new versions of the same socket that were incompatible with old chips (or vice-versa) wouldn't have been any better.
On the other hand, it does allow for the web of trust / tree of merges solution that is impossible with a centralized SCM tool.
That's exactly why any government mandated or otherwise near-universal social policy that reduces genetic diversity is a bad idea. But... we could easily allow half the population of, say, the United States the choice to abort their fetuses with genes for "dumb", "fat", or even "doesn't have red hair" without measurably impacting the diversity of the overall human gene pool.
Mandated eugenics is definitely bad. Eugenics through executions is sick and evil. But making choices about what child you want to have (i.e. "I want a boy with freckles") is mostly harmless - and I don't see any reason to step in and prevent other people from making their own decisions about that sort of thing.
There is an argument against selective abortions that does not rely on the humanity of the fetus at all. That argument goes like this:
Allowing people to abort their children based on genetic information is socially unacceptable. That's clearly an opening to human genetic engineering, and genetic manipulation is dangerous and poorly understood. That's the sort of thing that leads to Godzilla destroying Tokyo. You don't want Tokyo to be destroyed, do you?
You are right about one thing though: If abortion is murder, then abortion based on genetic information is still murder. It turns out that the "is abortion murder?" question is hotly debated...
The makeup of the human gene pool is being influenced by human choices all the time. Women chose genetic characteristics for their children by selecting the father. Sure, there's the horror story of the human race losing the gene for red hair because it became unfashionable - or more relevently, losing the gene for sickle-cell anemia because it's usually harmful - but A.) there's no chance of that at all in the near future and B.) that would be better solved by a set of "endangered gene" laws or something.
What? Seriously - what, specifically, are you afraid of here? That schools will have to spend slightly less money on special education because a few less mentally handicapped kids were born? That our health care costs will go down slightly because there were a couple less fat kids? Sure, if this were government mandated or culturally expected then there would be a problem - but a couple of early adopters do not a social problem make.
I'm all for preserving genetic diversity - even sickle-cell anemia - but until a significant portion of parents have access to this sort of fetal genetic information the problem just doesn't exist.
Don't underestimate how well supported SMP is already. It's true that there aren't that many single applications that get a linear speedup to 4 cores, but dual core processors have been common for a while now. All of the new games support multiple cores - they have to, neither the PS3 and XBox360 has one simple processor. All of the media encoding applications support 4+ cores. Some video playback programs support multiple cores. And, as AMD and Intel love to remind us, if you run more than one program at a time *that* can use multiple cores.
No, using more information to make an important decision doesn't seem abhorrent to me at all. A pregnant woman has the right to chose to abort the fetus. It's her body, it's her choice, and what information she uses to make that choice is her business.
If there were government criteria for mandatory abortions, then that would be a completely different story - but there are a lot of things that people should be free to do but shouldn't be mandatory, bar code tattoos for example.
As for your "me and most people" comment, I doubt that most people have even legitimately considered this question. Sure, a lot of people's gut reaction would be to agree with you - but a lot of people would initially support the new New York law that makes selling violent video games to kids a felony. Hopefully, in both cases, a little bit of consideration would cause them to rethink their initial position. People should generally allowed to make choices for themselves - the choice of what information to use in deciding whether to carry a fetus to term isn't an exception.
I don't agree that anything that even vaguely resembles eugenics is always bad. I'm sure of the following: Government mandated executions based on genetic makeup is bad and pregnant women having the option to abort terminally-ill fetuses is good. There's a lot of ground in the middle. If we take "a woman's right to choose" as given, then I don't see any reason why aborting a stupid or gay fetus is any worse than aborting a generic unwanted fetus.
Your response is an excellent example of an ethical heuristic in action - the "anything that looks like what the Nazis did is bad" heuristic is probably a good one. But, you've got to remember the basic thing about heuristics - they're fast but don't always produce the correct result.
Yes. Not everyone needs all the features that Ubuntu / Vista Extreme Base Jumper Edition offers. Some users will be happy with Vista Home Basic + Microsoft Works. Those users would also get everything they need from Ubuntu, but they would have no reason to pay more money for other proprietary software on Windows.
More relevantly, I'm comparing the prices of Dell PCs - not the feature sets and cost / benefit tradeoffs of different sets of software. The latter would be interesting, but it will realistically be different for every computer user.
You completely missed the point of my comment. All of my statements were examples of dodging the question with calculated misinformation. My point was that, for most users, the apps that come with Ubuntu by default will be fine as long as nobody tells them that they're worse than the commercial alternative. Sure, as a professional graphics guy you might need some specific feature of photoshop, or the photoshop UI might be better designed making you somewhat more productive. For the majority of computer users who aren't professional graphics people, that doesn't matter.
As for which is more powerful, easy to use/learn, etc between Photoshop and The GIMP - You're biased because you've invested time in learning Photoshop. I don't really know - as a dabbler, they both do what I want simply and easily. What I do know is this: Photoshop costs $600, and pirating software that requires an investment of time to learn is stupid - you're basically donating your time to give free market presence to Adobe.