What you are saying makes no sense. There are tons of things in this world that are "flawed" or imperfect. Do you really want to legislate or create a fix for all of it? For example, doubt it's practical to come up with a "traceable" post or e-mail.
Here's my point. A criminal can walk up to you and kill you right now. Yes, we have police, but nobody's really going to stop someone who is determined enough. With your mentality, we'd be forced to say that any system that lets someone kill someone else is "imperfect". The solution? Let's give you a body guard 24/7 to protect you from any would-be criminals. Does this make sense to you?
The point is that we can't prevent every unwanted action others can perpetrate in society. Would you really want to live in a society where this is the case? Basically, you'd be giving up a whole lot of freedom. At some point, we have to rely on the goodwill of and trust of others for society to run smoothly.
At some point, we have to draw the line at how much restriction we can tolerate to prevent others from doing harm. I wouldn't say that e-mail or post are flawed at all any more than I'd say that a society in which someone can kill someone else is flawed. We have to rely on moral values taught by parents and society to each our children to do the right thing. And the right thing to teach our children is that Spam is a scourge on society.
You sir, are an idiot. Can I take it that you like getting paper junk mail too? What's your address? I have a load of crap to send to your house. What's your e-mail address? Let me send you some e-mails. Are you on the do-not-call list? I would guess you aren't: what's your phone number?
I go to the USPS website and look up any address in the US. Does that mean I should send random people loads of crap they don't want? According to you, that's the fault of the USPS since the mail isn't traceable -- just like e-mail. E-mail was modeled after post: both are more or less untraceable. Just because e-mails are untraceable doesn't give others the right to abuse that.
Unsolicited paper mail, phone calls, or e-mail are all in the same category. They are rude, disrespectful annoyances. If you want to get that crap fine; in your case, the advertisements, spam, and phone calls at dinner time would be solicited.
To live in a free and peaceful society, people have to respect the privacy and rights of others. We should not purposefully annoy our neighbors or cause them harm. These are basic rules of social conduct.
I hope that I never have to be your neighbor. Your reckless disregard for the well-being, time, and privacy of others is shocking.
I'm sure you're right. But if they can't figure out how to get that working on Linux, we're in big trouble -- we have to question their competence. After all, this isn't 1997. Linux should be easy to use.
Who knows. I can't understand those Mozilla people. They abandoned Mozilla, which had good performance and integrated e-mail for the piles-o-crap that are Firefox and Thunderbird. It's not since Gnome 1.0 that I've seen such buggy software. And not only that, but there is no integration between the two products at all. I have to manually configure Thunderbird by editing some obscure configuration to tell it that my web browser is Firefox. Thunderbird can't even open up a frigging JPEG by itself. Give me a break. If it weren't for the fact that they dropped support for Mozilla, I'd definitely go back.
The Mozilla folks have no business creating new products when they can't even get the products that they do produce right.
Is their support for UFS better now? The last time I used OS X (v10.2) their support for UFS was crap. I chose UFS to have a true Unix-like filesystem with case-sensitivity that didn't corrupt itself. Boy did I make a mistake! UFS was dog-slow and lots of Mac OS X software won't run on it. Nice.
When I comment to my Mac friends that OS X is slow as a dog, their response is always the same "well,you need to upgrade your hardware". That's interesting since I don't have to upgrade my hardware to get good performance out of Linux or Windows.
I'm glad you find your old G4 machines useful. That's great for you.
The performance of Mac OS X is crap compared to Linux. I have a G3 iMac for which Apple dropped support for Mac OS X. Running Linux, this machine beats the pants off of G4 machines running OS X for just about any work I've thrown at it.
The difference between Mac OS X and Windows is that Windows XP will run apps all the way back to the dark DOS days all the way forward to the latest apps. The same is definitely not true of Mac OS X. Can you run the latest Mac apps on Mac OS X 10.2 (the last version to support G3 iMacs without the slot CD-ROM drive)? The answer is no. Adobe CS3, for example, requires Mac OS X 10.4.8. I can run CS3 on my Pentium III machine with Windows XP, if I want to.
I stand behind my original statement. A Pentium III running Windows can run the latest apps. A 7-year old Mac cannot. I'm not a troll -- I'm just stating facts that the Mac fanbois don't want to admit.
This is exactly why I'll never buy a Mac. I've got two Pentium III class machines at home and they work great. A 7-year old Mac is a doorstop. I don't have a wallet fat enough to keep up with Apple's upgrade cycle. The advantages of a Mac are few anyway -- and there are tons of negatives.
I completely agree. Every single version of Gnome I've ever used (various 1.x, 2.x versions) have been as rickety as a 3-legged chair. With every version, I was expecting an increase in stability and performance. Instead what I got was increased dependencies, crap performance, and instability.
I finally switched to KDE and I haven't looked back. I haven't experienced a crash with KDE yet. Unlike Gnome, the KDE Control Center will actually give you advice on how to enable features and make your system work properly. I can't believe I waited so long to make the switch -- I could have saved myself countless hours of frustration.
GTK+/Gnome and this OO C stuff is all a big steaming pile of crap written by developers whose egos are bigger than their brains. Write the stuff in C++ and be done with it. I can't understand why the engineers are doing a bad-job of re-writing C++ when they can just bite the bullet, learn C++ and have a decent API with some decent code. Look at the performance of GTK+ 2.X apps compared to the performance of KDE apps! KDE apps are MUCH MUCH faster. You can tell just by pulling down menus and opening dialog boxes. The C code is slower than the C++ code. Imagine that.
> Instead of considering the deeper, underlying issues, the SVN team >just cloned CVS's behavior and made it cleaner. Too bad.
Made it cleaner? Or made it worse. SVN is crap and it's a downgrade from CVS in virtually every way. It doesn't support branches or tags (sorry, SVN fanbois, SVN's copy feature does not suffice). SVN far slower than CVS and has tons of quirks that CVS didn't have. Yes, there are a few new features there, but none of them are worth the drawbacks. SVN is not now and never has been a replacement for CVS. SVN is a different kind of centralized SCM with different features.
I agree with Linus, however, that distributed SCMs (e.g git, Mercurial), are better than centralized ones (e.g. CVS, SVN).
As ubuwalker31 says, anyone familiar with Apple shouldn't be surprised by this. Yes, other vendors make proprietary power supplies. Big deal.
Apple's tradition of screwing over customers is much bigger than someone's experience with a Performa power supply. I've worked as an Apple repair technician and have over 20 years of experience with Macs. Here are a few examples of Apple screwing over its customers:
1. Mac IIfx. Customers paid a pretty penny for this machine and there were tons of stability problems. Not to mention the Quadra 700 followed it shortly with a much better processor.
2. Powerbook G3 (NOT G3 Series, i.e. Wallstreet). Customers paid over $3500 for this piece of garbage that ran hot, was unstable, and, if I remember it correctly, caught on fire. Apple dropped the product only a few months later for the G3 series at $1000 less in price. I feel sorry for those PB G3 purchasers who got screwed.
3. PowerBook 3400 (G3 upgrade capable). Remember this one? When the G3 upgrade was finally released (to make it into a PB G3, see #2), the upgrade was almost as expensive as a new laptop. In addition, it couldn't be used with Mac OS X. Nice waste of money if you were suckered into that.
4. G3 iMac (with tray-loading CD). Inexplicably, Apple dropped support for this oldie-but-goodie in recent versions of Mac OS X. These things are great for running Linux (Yellow Dog Linux works well).
5. G4 Cube. These things look cool at first, but the lucite cracks, they lock up randomly (even with Mac OS X requiring you to turn the damn thing over to hunt for the hard reset button), and often get confused with regards to whether or not a CD is inserted making it a fun experience to get it out.
6. 20th Anniversary Mac. This cool-looking computer was unbelievably overpriced and Apple dropped OS support awfully quickly for a machine that was supposed to be celebrating Apple's heritage.
I'm not even getting into the strong-arm tactics that Apple uses to screw over its ISVs. Even Steve Jobs himself has participated in this mayhem. He makes Bill Gates look like a nice guy. You want to know more? I have stories to tell.
The point is that Apple's been screwing over its customers for years. The Mac "fanbois" won't admit this fact, however. Those of us who've been around long enough know that there's nothing new here. Apple has made/does make some great products, but I'd never buy one. Give me a cheap-ass Dell any day and I'll call it a day. So far, my Dell at work and my 7-year old IBM laptop at home have been more reliable than any Apple product I've ever owned/used. And the upside is that I can still run Linux or Win2k/WinXP on these machines and it works great.
Try running Mac OS X on a 7-year-old Macintosh. It runs like crap, if you're lucky enough to have a machine that's still supported. Way to go Apple! The only way they can survive is they provide built-in obsolescence to keep the fanbois coming back for more beatings.
Nice - I'm a troll because you don't agree with me or an article that brings up valid points. So this is how we avoid intelligent debate now? So, unless you're following the trendy lemmings, you're a troll. Give me a break... it's disgusting how narrow minded you slashdot parrots are.
How about you use some reading comprehension skills? The article is talking about all costs: both environmental and ownership.
See the quote from the article:
"Through a study by CNW Marketing called "Dust to Dust," the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid."
It's nice to be modded a troll for quoting facts instead of enviro-wacko hybrid FTW propaganda. Maybe you all will grow up some day and move out of your parent's basement.
Last time I used Mac OS X was version 10.2, so yes, I suppose my experience is out of date.
Tunneling is the feature where you can double-click a folder holding down the option key and the folder window behind it closes as the new one opens up. Imagine that you have a folder called "letters" inside of a folder called "docs" and have the "docs" window open. Double-click on "letters" holding down the option key. You'll see that docs closes and letters opens instead of keeping both windows open on your desktop.
There's a whole lot of stuff that Mac OS X should have borrowed from Mac OS 7/8/9. A few examples are window speed/performance of the finder, tunneling, speed/performance of the finder, fast open-apple-f find, application switch menu in the upper right corner of the screen, file labels, and speed/performance of the finder. At least the OS is more reliable than Mac OS 7/8/9... I've always been a Mac fan until I became a daily user of the trainwreck that is Mac OS X.
I am quite happy with the performance of Windows 2000 (and of course Linux) on relatively slow hardware such as a Pentium 133Mhz. Mac OS X is sluggish on a G4 cube. Go figure. It makes me want to run out and buy a used PowerMac 6100/66 and run Mac OS 9 on it.
Exactly. And not only that, Apple has been handed the opportunity to gain market share multiple times and never capitalized on those opportunities. Remember the 90's? Apple had made inroads in the enterprise: many large corporations had switched to Mac. But due to Apple's complete inability to realize that enterprise customers need enterprise applications, high-speed reliable networking, reliability in the OS, and reasonable prices, they lost tremendous market share.
By the end of the '90s and into the '00s, Apple lost marketshare not only in the enterprise, but in education (which had long been its stronghold). Try to find a Mac at a school these days? You may find an old iMac, but all the new computers are IBM-compatibles. Macs are just too expensive and don't deliver on performance for the price.
Jobs or no Jobs, the magnitude of Apple's misunderstanding of how to make money is unbelievable. There are no number of iPods, iPhones, or iWhatevers that will bring back Apple's lost marketshare in the PC world -- it's gone forever. Apple could have been a contender.
I had exactly the same experience as you had. My frustrations with FC3/FC4 reached fever pitch and I switched over to Slackware and I've never looked back. Slack is the way Linux was meant to be (at least in my opinion).
I installed FC4 some time ago on the computer I use at work and I'm still fighting with it to this day. The Fedora folks need to start fixing bugs and they need to take a serious look at software quality.
Where are you getting this information? Cars keep getting more efficient year after year. Look at the average fuel consumption for cars in the 80s, 90s, and today.
To say that "Cars keep getting more powerful and more wasteful" is ignorance and stupidity. Cars on today's market, at least in the US, have better fuel economy at the same (or improved) power levels as models 5, 10, 15, or more years ago. Even those "gas guzzling SUVs" such as Suburbans and such get around 20 or more MPG now.
The focus IS on efficiency. You can see the number of economy cars on the road in the US. The number of SUVs is small by comparison. I understand that the "SUV craze" is affecting Europe as well. Why? Because the cars are damn practical. Come to the table with facts -- and post with your username not as an AC.
I said that "China is the largest polluter" and I believe that to be true. Pollution comes in many different forms including dumping waste in lakes, streams, and rivers, air pollution, ground waste pollution, etc. The US is quite clean compared to China when you look at the big picture.
As for CO2, plants and trees can be used to absorb CO2, so I believe that it is the most innocuous of the pollutants out there. Let's plant more trees and stop deforestation in tropical areas. Why does everyone try to blame the US for everything? The US has done more to improve the world's economic and environmental situation than any other country out there.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are saying makes no sense. There are tons of things in this world that are "flawed" or imperfect. Do you really want to legislate or create a fix for all of it? For example, doubt it's practical to come up with a "traceable" post or e-mail.
Here's my point. A criminal can walk up to you and kill you right now. Yes, we have police, but nobody's really going to stop someone who is determined enough. With your mentality, we'd be forced to say that any system that lets someone kill someone else is "imperfect". The solution? Let's give you a body guard 24/7 to protect you from any would-be criminals. Does this make sense to you?
The point is that we can't prevent every unwanted action others can perpetrate in society. Would you really want to live in a society where this is the case? Basically, you'd be giving up a whole lot of freedom. At some point, we have to rely on the goodwill of and trust of others for society to run smoothly.
At some point, we have to draw the line at how much restriction we can tolerate to prevent others from doing harm. I wouldn't say that e-mail or post are flawed at all any more than I'd say that a society in which someone can kill someone else is flawed. We have to rely on moral values taught by parents and society to each our children to do the right thing. And the right thing to teach our children is that Spam is a scourge on society.
Your comment made me laugh. Right on.
You sir, are an idiot. Can I take it that you like getting paper junk mail too? What's your address? I have a load of crap to send to your house. What's your e-mail address? Let me send you some e-mails. Are you on the do-not-call list? I would guess you aren't: what's your phone number?
I go to the USPS website and look up any address in the US. Does that mean I should send random people loads of crap they don't want? According to you, that's the fault of the USPS since the mail isn't traceable -- just like e-mail. E-mail was modeled after post: both are more or less untraceable. Just because e-mails are untraceable doesn't give others the right to abuse that.
Unsolicited paper mail, phone calls, or e-mail are all in the same category. They are rude, disrespectful annoyances. If you want to get that crap fine; in your case, the advertisements, spam, and phone calls at dinner time would be solicited.
To live in a free and peaceful society, people have to respect the privacy and rights of others. We should not purposefully annoy our neighbors or cause them harm. These are basic rules of social conduct.
I hope that I never have to be your neighbor. Your reckless disregard for the well-being, time, and privacy of others is shocking.
I'm sure you're right. But if they can't figure out how to get that working on Linux, we're in big trouble -- we have to question their competence. After all, this isn't 1997. Linux should be easy to use.
That's interesting. I assume you're being sarcastic... what do you mean regarding the ethics of foundations such as Apache?
I know that many slashdotters are frustrated with Firefox/Thunderbird like I am. I'm really excited to see what the open-source Eudora will look like.
Who knows. I can't understand those Mozilla people. They abandoned Mozilla, which had good performance and integrated e-mail for the piles-o-crap that are Firefox and Thunderbird. It's not since Gnome 1.0 that I've seen such buggy software. And not only that, but there is no integration between the two products at all. I have to manually configure Thunderbird by editing some obscure configuration to tell it that my web browser is Firefox. Thunderbird can't even open up a frigging JPEG by itself. Give me a break. If it weren't for the fact that they dropped support for Mozilla, I'd definitely go back.
The Mozilla folks have no business creating new products when they can't even get the products that they do produce right.
Is their support for UFS better now? The last time I used OS X (v10.2) their support for UFS was crap. I chose UFS to have a true Unix-like filesystem with case-sensitivity that didn't corrupt itself. Boy did I make a mistake! UFS was dog-slow and lots of Mac OS X software won't run on it. Nice.
I'm a troll, but you're posting as an AC. Nice.
,you need to upgrade your hardware". That's interesting since I don't have to upgrade my hardware to get good performance out of Linux or Windows.
When I comment to my Mac friends that OS X is slow as a dog, their response is always the same "well
I'm glad you find your old G4 machines useful. That's great for you.
The performance of Mac OS X is crap compared to Linux. I have a G3 iMac for which Apple dropped support for Mac OS X. Running Linux, this machine beats the pants off of G4 machines running OS X for just about any work I've thrown at it.
The difference between Mac OS X and Windows is that Windows XP will run apps all the way back to the dark DOS days all the way forward to the latest apps. The same is definitely not true of Mac OS X. Can you run the latest Mac apps on Mac OS X 10.2 (the last version to support G3 iMacs without the slot CD-ROM drive)? The answer is no. Adobe CS3, for example, requires Mac OS X 10.4.8. I can run CS3 on my Pentium III machine with Windows XP, if I want to.
I stand behind my original statement. A Pentium III running Windows can run the latest apps. A 7-year old Mac cannot. I'm not a troll -- I'm just stating facts that the Mac fanbois don't want to admit.
What the hell are you talking about? What is your point?
This is exactly why I'll never buy a Mac. I've got two Pentium III class machines at home and they work great. A 7-year old Mac is a doorstop. I don't have a wallet fat enough to keep up with Apple's upgrade cycle. The advantages of a Mac are few anyway -- and there are tons of negatives.
I completely agree. Every single version of Gnome I've ever used (various 1.x, 2.x versions) have been as rickety as a 3-legged chair. With every version, I was expecting an increase in stability and performance. Instead what I got was increased dependencies, crap performance, and instability.
I finally switched to KDE and I haven't looked back. I haven't experienced a crash with KDE yet. Unlike Gnome, the KDE Control Center will actually give you advice on how to enable features and make your system work properly. I can't believe I waited so long to make the switch -- I could have saved myself countless hours of frustration.
GTK+/Gnome and this OO C stuff is all a big steaming pile of crap written by developers whose egos are bigger than their brains. Write the stuff in C++ and be done with it. I can't understand why the engineers are doing a bad-job of re-writing C++ when they can just bite the bullet, learn C++ and have a decent API with some decent code. Look at the performance of GTK+ 2.X apps compared to the performance of KDE apps! KDE apps are MUCH MUCH faster. You can tell just by pulling down menus and opening dialog boxes. The C code is slower than the C++ code. Imagine that.
The statement from the article seems so silly to me:
"Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,"
Isn't that like the old quote commonly attributed to Dan Quayle: "If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure"?
> Instead of considering the deeper, underlying issues, the SVN team
>just cloned CVS's behavior and made it cleaner. Too bad.
Made it cleaner? Or made it worse. SVN is crap and it's a downgrade from CVS in virtually every way. It doesn't support branches or tags (sorry, SVN fanbois, SVN's copy feature does not suffice). SVN far slower than CVS and has tons of quirks that CVS didn't have. Yes, there are a few new features there, but none of them are worth the drawbacks. SVN is not now and never has been a replacement for CVS. SVN is a different kind of centralized SCM with different features.
I agree with Linus, however, that distributed SCMs (e.g git, Mercurial), are better than centralized ones (e.g. CVS, SVN).
As ubuwalker31 says, anyone familiar with Apple shouldn't be surprised by this. Yes, other vendors make proprietary power supplies. Big deal.
Apple's tradition of screwing over customers is much bigger than someone's experience with a Performa power supply. I've worked as an Apple repair technician and have over 20 years of experience with Macs. Here are a few examples of Apple screwing over its customers:
1. Mac IIfx. Customers paid a pretty penny for this machine and there were tons of stability problems. Not to mention the Quadra 700 followed it shortly with a much better processor.
2. Powerbook G3 (NOT G3 Series, i.e. Wallstreet). Customers paid over $3500 for this piece of garbage that ran hot, was unstable, and, if I remember it correctly, caught on fire. Apple dropped the product only a few months later for the G3 series at $1000 less in price. I feel sorry for those PB G3 purchasers who got screwed.
3. PowerBook 3400 (G3 upgrade capable). Remember this one? When the G3 upgrade was finally released (to make it into a PB G3, see #2), the upgrade was almost as expensive as a new laptop. In addition, it couldn't be used with Mac OS X. Nice waste of money if you were suckered into that.
4. G3 iMac (with tray-loading CD). Inexplicably, Apple dropped support for this oldie-but-goodie in recent versions of Mac OS X. These things are great for running Linux (Yellow Dog Linux works well).
5. G4 Cube. These things look cool at first, but the lucite cracks, they lock up randomly (even with Mac OS X requiring you to turn the damn thing over to hunt for the hard reset button), and often get confused with regards to whether or not a CD is inserted making it a fun experience to get it out.
6. 20th Anniversary Mac. This cool-looking computer was unbelievably overpriced and Apple dropped OS support awfully quickly for a machine that was supposed to be celebrating Apple's heritage.
I'm not even getting into the strong-arm tactics that Apple uses to screw over its ISVs. Even Steve Jobs himself has participated in this mayhem. He makes Bill Gates look like a nice guy. You want to know more? I have stories to tell.
The point is that Apple's been screwing over its customers for years. The Mac "fanbois" won't admit this fact, however. Those of us who've been around long enough know that there's nothing new here. Apple has made/does make some great products, but I'd never buy one. Give me a cheap-ass Dell any day and I'll call it a day. So far, my Dell at work and my 7-year old IBM laptop at home have been more reliable than any Apple product I've ever owned/used. And the upside is that I can still run Linux or Win2k/WinXP on these machines and it works great.
Try running Mac OS X on a 7-year-old Macintosh. It runs like crap, if you're lucky enough to have a machine that's still supported. Way to go Apple! The only way they can survive is they provide built-in obsolescence to keep the fanbois coming back for more beatings.
Your comment made my day. I couldn't have said it better myself.
Nice - I'm a troll because you don't agree with me or an article that brings up valid points. So this is how we avoid intelligent debate now? So, unless you're following the trendy lemmings, you're a troll. Give me a break... it's disgusting how narrow minded you slashdot parrots are.
How about you use some reading comprehension skills? The article is talking about all costs: both environmental and ownership.
See the quote from the article:
"Through a study by CNW Marketing called "Dust to Dust," the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid."
It's nice to be modded a troll for quoting facts instead of enviro-wacko hybrid FTW propaganda. Maybe you all will grow up some day and move out of your parent's basement.
I don't think disappointed is the world I'd use. I think idiotic is more like it. See this article:
l _item.asp?NewsID=188
http://clubs.ccsu.edu/Recorder/editorial/editoria
The Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer. I'm sick of the Hybrid propaganda that's based on trendiness instead of science.
Last time I used Mac OS X was version 10.2, so yes, I suppose my experience is out of date.
Tunneling is the feature where you can double-click a folder holding down the option key and the folder window behind it closes as the new one opens up. Imagine that you have a folder called "letters" inside of a folder called "docs" and have the "docs" window open. Double-click on "letters" holding down the option key. You'll see that docs closes and letters opens instead of keeping both windows open on your desktop.
There's a whole lot of stuff that Mac OS X should have borrowed from Mac OS 7/8/9. A few examples are window speed/performance of the finder, tunneling, speed/performance of the finder, fast open-apple-f find, application switch menu in the upper right corner of the screen, file labels, and speed/performance of the finder. At least the OS is more reliable than Mac OS 7/8/9... I've always been a Mac fan until I became a daily user of the trainwreck that is Mac OS X.
I am quite happy with the performance of Windows 2000 (and of course Linux) on relatively slow hardware such as a Pentium 133Mhz. Mac OS X is sluggish on a G4 cube. Go figure. It makes me want to run out and buy a used PowerMac 6100/66 and run Mac OS 9 on it.
Exactly. And not only that, Apple has been handed the opportunity to gain market share multiple times and never capitalized on those opportunities. Remember the 90's? Apple had made inroads in the enterprise: many large corporations had switched to Mac. But due to Apple's complete inability to realize that enterprise customers need enterprise applications, high-speed reliable networking, reliability in the OS, and reasonable prices, they lost tremendous market share.
By the end of the '90s and into the '00s, Apple lost marketshare not only in the enterprise, but in education (which had long been its stronghold). Try to find a Mac at a school these days? You may find an old iMac, but all the new computers are IBM-compatibles. Macs are just too expensive and don't deliver on performance for the price.
Jobs or no Jobs, the magnitude of Apple's misunderstanding of how to make money is unbelievable. There are no number of iPods, iPhones, or iWhatevers that will bring back Apple's lost marketshare in the PC world -- it's gone forever. Apple could have been a contender.
It's a good thing my preferences are set to give trolls +3... otherwise I would have missed your post. So true, so true, what you say.
I had exactly the same experience as you had. My frustrations with FC3/FC4 reached fever pitch and I switched over to Slackware and I've never looked back. Slack is the way Linux was meant to be (at least in my opinion).
I installed FC4 some time ago on the computer I use at work and I'm still fighting with it to this day. The Fedora folks need to start fixing bugs and they need to take a serious look at software quality.
Where are you getting this information? Cars keep getting more efficient year after year. Look at the average fuel consumption for cars in the 80s, 90s, and today.
To say that "Cars keep getting more powerful and more wasteful" is ignorance and stupidity. Cars on today's market, at least in the US, have better fuel economy at the same (or improved) power levels as models 5, 10, 15, or more years ago. Even those "gas guzzling SUVs" such as Suburbans and such get around 20 or more MPG now.
The focus IS on efficiency. You can see the number of economy cars on the road in the US. The number of SUVs is small by comparison. I understand that the "SUV craze" is affecting Europe as well. Why? Because the cars are damn practical. Come to the table with facts -- and post with your username not as an AC.
I said that "China is the largest polluter" and I believe that to be true. Pollution comes in many different forms including dumping waste in lakes, streams, and rivers, air pollution, ground waste pollution, etc. The US is quite clean compared to China when you look at the big picture.
As for CO2, plants and trees can be used to absorb CO2, so I believe that it is the most innocuous of the pollutants out there. Let's plant more trees and stop deforestation in tropical areas. Why does everyone try to blame the US for everything? The US has done more to improve the world's economic and environmental situation than any other country out there.