Is that it has both GPS and WIMAX on board. That is what makes it a more interesting and forward looking design than Mac Air. Physically, it's boring. The cornucopia of ports is boring. Laptops have these things. It looks so like every other Lenovo laptop that there's nothing 'must have' about the appearance. But I am convinced that the next killer application will be location sensitive and require ubiquitous mobile connectivity. WiFi doesn't have it and 3G isn't very fast.
Steve Jobs isn't going to lie awake tonight kicking himself because Lenovo have brought out yet another dull black corporate laptop. He's going to be kicking himself about the GPS and the WIMAX.
I build a shiny widget, and release it under the GPL. Lots of people use my shiny widget - it becomes the gold standard for shiny widgets. Then some software house cuts a huge deal for software development with [insert name of immense multinational here]. The only trouble is, they need a shiny widget as part of the code. And damn, your one is the standard.
They come to you, and boy, you have them over a barrel. Because you were cunning enough to use the GPL, you can hold them to ransom, and charge them $1M for a limited license that lets them use your shiny widget in their new project. And whats more, you can sell it all over again the next time someone needs your shiny widget in a non-GPL setting.
Great imagination, laddie, shame about your grasp on reality.
The maximum value of any piece of software is what it would cost to do a clean-room reimplementation from scratch. Remember that a lot of the original GNU software was clean-room reimplementations of pre-existing UN*X utilities. On the whole it's always easier to do a clean-room reimplementation than to build the original system, because the re-implementors have a complete functional specification and a working prototype to test against.
In the past I've needed bits of commercial functionality which weren't available open source, so I simply reimplemented them from the specifications. It isn't hard to do - and it isn't hard to do the other way round either. So, sure, if you spent $1.5M equivalent in programmer hours developing your implementation, you might just get your $1M license fee. If it's something you knocked up in a weekend, they'll pay a programmer for a weekend.
Yes I'm oversimplifying, but to state it's the hardest part is ridiculous. As for the data, I'm pretty sure that my struct covers all the data you'd actually need for the items. I genuinely ask you, can you think of anything specific that's missing there?
Yes: an understanding of what you're doing, and what you're dealing with.
For a start, you're going to need to have an extensible object system to handle the sorts of things which can be stored in the inventory; a bottle has different properties than a sword. For a second thing, the limits to what can go in an inventory is not a fixed number of items; it depends on the size and on the weight of the items. When adding an item to the list, you have to determine whether there's physical room for it in the player's bag(s), and whether the player can carry the weight. You may also have to consider whether the object added contaminates, or is contaminated by, anything currently in the inventory. And then you've got to provide the user with a user interface which allows him to add to, search through, and select from the inventory.
I've written such systems (a long time ago, and in LISP); as Casey Hudson says, it's not trivial.
I've used QA/C and VectorCast recently when doing a safety audit on ancient C code the authors of which had long since left the company. VectorCast proved not useful, because it requires integration with a C compiler, and the (obsolete and non-standard) compiler for this particular code was not compatible with it. QA/C, however, proved very useful, not simply in quality analysis but also in navigating and understanding the interactions in the codbase, producing very useful interactive calling graphs.
Of course, it's a commercial tool and very expensive. I had a look for open source equivalents but didn't find anything as good.
You're conflating simple DNS queries with administrative DNS actions in an attempt to call me a troll and attack my technical knowledge. Of course DNS is a requirement for the modern Internet--to suggest otherwise would be absurd. And of course, if you couldn't have information which is included in the zone file, we wouldn't be able to navigate using domain names. What's essential is that one rarely needs all of the information in the zone file. Classical DNS management suggests that only related DNS servers need to do a zone transfer. It's traditionally a replication mechanism, not intended for end users.
Granted, one rarely needs all of the information in a zone file. But sometimes one does, which is exactly why people publish them. And it's a perfectly normal thing to request one. It isn't an 'administrative action', it's just a normal sort of thing one does when diagnosing some sorts of network problem. If you ask for the zone file for my domain, for example, you won't get the addresses of my unrouteable machines, because you don't need to know them. But if you ask for internal.[my domain], you will see my unrouteable machines, because they aren't secret.
Without reading deeper, I can see how you might infer this. However, part of the facts of the case included the fact that most zone transfers are not intended for the public internet. Given that as a fact in the case, the judge would have to rule in this way. Perhaps, if you disagree with that fact, you should argue against that.
The zone transfers conducted and attempted by Ritz were far outside the intended use of zone transfers. Ritz was never given authorization or permission by Sierra for the zone transfers. -- http://www.spamsuite.com/node/351
The intended purpose of a website is to display information. The intended purpose of an administrative page on a website is for the site manager to modify the settings of the website. Accessing the first pseudo-anonymously (as is the way of the Internet) is clearly the intended use. Accessing the second pseudo-anonymously (because the administrator forgot to set a password) clearly is not.
What matters most here, is the wording of the computer crime laws in North Dakota. So far, no one's bother to bring that up.
When you don't know what you're talking about, it's often a good idea to listen quietly.
A zone file is nothing like an administrative interface. For a start, it isn't an interface: it is publicly published data. If you don't want it to be published, you don't put it in the published zone file. For a second thing, if it wasn't possible to access the data which is summarised in the zone file, it would be impossible to navigate the internet using names - you'd have to use numeric addresses. OK, one doesn't normally ask for hte whole lot at once - but if it wasn't meant to be public, it shouldn't have been published.
Sheesh! Ten years ago, even the trolls on Slashdot were reasonably well informed. What the hell are you doing on this site if you don't understand the basics of how the net hangs together?
Errr... that's another way of saying 'there is no such thing as intellectual property'. Lawyers and other weasels who speak of 'intellectual property' are playing a classic quickness of the hand deceiveth the eye trick. Precisely, they're doing two things:
They're deliberately conflating the limited and short term contingent protections which Western states have found it pragmatic to offer creators or new ideas and products with the unlimited and long term protections which Western states have traditionally offered to property in land;
They're making a hegemonistic claim about the status of new ideas and expressions.
Whether property in land ought to be given the sorts of protections which Western society gives it is another question entirely. But that's beside the point. New ideas and expressions are not property, do not have the status of property, and do not have nearly the same degree of protection that property has. And it's in everyone's interest - that includes the 'content creators' - that it remains that way. Where would Walt Disney be now if all the classic fairy tales had been someone else's 'intellectual property'?
The act of putting up a website (or any other internet server) on the public internet should be enough to say the operator of the server gave you permission to access it. If you don't want people accessing your server, at least put a password on it for basic access control, or if it requires more security, than put it behind a VPN/Firewall box.
The act of putting up a DNS server is exactly the same. But we now know it's illegal to access a DNS server, therefore it must be illegal to access a web server.
Without written permission in triplicate, signed in longhand by the owner of the data using a quill pen and attested by the county registrar and the sheriff, of course.
This in effect means that you cannot set up a secondary DNS server in North Dakota. Any ISPs in the state should probably relocate!
Actually, it means more than this. It means you cannot look at a web page in North Dakota. WHOIS information, and other DNS information, is public data deliberately published on the internet so that other people may read it. If they couldn't read it, the modern internet as we know it - with meaningful names instead of dotted quad addresses - could not work. Web pages - public web pages - are also public data which is deliberately published on the Internet so that other people may read it. If reading DNS records without specific authorisation is illegal, so is looking at web pages. So if you're in North Dakota and you're reading this, you better run for them thar boondocks, boy. We're coming to git you!
Yeah, if Apple really wanted to make a great product, it should have made it a tablet. Then the thinness and lightness (and multitouch!) really would have mattered!
Tablets have been tried, repeatedly. Tablets have failed, repeatedly. I'm just about to start rewriting one system which was designed for a tablet, because the field engineers it was designed for do not like the tablets. Tablets are not great products, they're niche products - and that niche isn't anywhere near as big as the computer makers thought it would be.
I agree that the keyboard is a lousy user interface device, but like democracy it's a hell of a lot better than any of the alternatives.
No ethernet port, only ONE usb2 port, no microphone jack? Honestly, how are you supposed to use this thing? What if you need to use Ethernet and a flash drive at the same time? Are you supposed to carry around a USB-to-ethernet dongle and a hub... possibly a POWERED hub?
Apple would reply, 'how last century'.
The answer is you don't use a wired ethernet - Xerox designed ethernet to be wireless back in the seventies, that's why it's called ethernet. Running it over wires was only ever supposed to be a short term hack while they sorted out getting the radio link working. And Apple fanbois aren't expected to be technical enough to worry about security issues.
And, of course, you don't use a flash drive. You use that wireless ethernet to access your Time Capsule[TM], which it seems to me was the really interesting bit of today's announcement from Apple.
So, if you're so mind-bogglingly primitive that you still think digital watches^W^W wired networks are a really neat idea, then you aren't part of Apple's target market for this machine.
Oddly enough, it's the first Apple machine I've been tempted to buy. And although I like the form factor, the thing that sells it for me it the mouse-pad gestures, which are just so much richer and more intuitive than anything we've seen before. Next job, of course, is to hack something together so that that functionality is available in Linux/KDE...
The sad part is that most of the great advancements in computing, be it software or hardware, were not the result of a bureaucratic process such as this.
This isn't a great advancement in computing. It's a convicted monopolist's attempt to lock the world's documents up in a format which it can change arbitrarily at will to stifle competition.
I've been working with computers for a while now - I started in 1978 - and have a fairly clear idea of how much it costs to build a solid server that can support a typical primary school, provide a high level of robustness, be easily maintained, and be reasonably secure. Five hundred squid for a server is very impressive and would probably require access to wholesale prices or some help - at least for most people - but I've built very reasonable desktops for a shade under that at retail cost for parts, so I know it is an achievable goal. To actually achieve it for a server - ah, now that is the impressive part. The theory of custom-built machines is often different from the practice. I salute you for managing what is actually quite a challenging task.
You can buy a very reasonable desktop from Dell for under £300, so I really don't know what you're wasting your money on. I could certainly build a server with a raid array for £500, for the sort of loads a primary school is likely to need.
Hope? You just skimped on hardware, and warranties. A quote for £000's is money spent on peace of mind. If something goes bang, the warranties & support company will take care of it. Not every school has the resources to manage their IT equipment.
Look, this is bollocks.
Many years ago I used to be IT Manager for a UK local authority. When I came into post the first thing I looked at was where my budget was going; I found that we'd just spent £70,000 on new servers. What had we got for that? We'd got to 486dx66 boxes with (if I remember right) 64Mb of RAM and one 486dx40 with 32Mb, all running AT&T UNIX System V.4. My predecessor had gone to one of the big computer companies with a three-initial name and asked them to spec and deliver these things. And, of course, they did have good warranties. But the hardware value - even in those days - was less than £5,000. For a quarter of what the council had paid I could have installed similar hardware with two hot backup systems and instant failover - which would have provided far more 'peace of mind'.
The grossly inflated prices which get charged to public authorities in this country - and, I'm prepared to bet, the US too - aren't about peace of mind. They're about gouging bordering on the corrupt. Linker3000 (GP post) almost certainly installed better hardware than RM would have installed.
This is BECTA's final report, the result of a two year study. Last year, they practically begged M$ for case studies and pilot projects to prove Vista's worth. There are only two reasons M$ failed to answer BECTA's concerns:
VISTA and Office 2007 are not cost justified.
The UK school system is too small a customer for M$ to worry about.
M$ does not care about the study and they can push their software onto the UK school system anyway. This one is really condition #1.
No, three reasons:
VISTA and Office 2007 are not cost justified.
The UK school system is too small a customer for M$ to worry about.
M$ does not care about the study and they can push their software onto the UK school system anyway. This one is really condition #1.
and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope
Our four...no... Amongst our reasons.... I'll come in again.
What would "make you think it" would be the standard process of evaluating different mythological/religious claims and figures for a sense of harmony with life and internal consistency of the mythos, much like you do everything else. While Christianity is typically given a 9 or 10 on the "hunt for contradictions" gauntlet by present society, as someone familiar with a broad range of mythologies, and have debated many other proposed religious figures and metaphysical structures, most tend to fall completely apart at a 2 on the scale. I find many people willing to say "How do you know it isn't figure X or Y or Z instead?"--I find very few who actually will put their effort where there mouth is and actually argue figure X, Y, or Z. Which, if they truly are asserting they are of equivalent plausibility, they should have no problem with doing.
Basically, your question is conceptually identical to saying, "So, you believe in political stance X. How do you know political stance Y or Z or Q isn't actually correct?" Well, by evaluating it, like everything else in life, and this question is hardly a refutation of any stance one may hold for their notion of "X".
You're right, of course, that I can't produce a convincing argument that Thor is the one God. I can't, because the very idea that there can be a 'one God' is such obvious and risible bunk. Gods are created by peoples from time to time to suit their own contemporary social needs; it's simply not possible that one can have existential primacy over others.
"I can agree in principle with the presumption that faith in God is well-founded...."
The problem is, how would you know it was god and not some advanced life form? Ancient humans with smaller brains would consider us or our mysterious technology 'gods'.
When I was six, I used to walk a mile to school - and a mile back - every day. In the summer all through my chidhood, I'd make myself a sandwich before anyone else was up, and be out in the woods until evening - or else, later on, drop down river in my boat on the outgoing tide and come back in on the next. When I was twelve, I used to cycle twenty miles up into the hills with a friend - and, at the end of the day, twenty miles back. Kids these days aren't allowed to do that sort of thing. They're driven everywhere. They get no time to be out by themselves. The sea - the roads - the woods - are all suddenly 'too dangerous' for kids.
It isn't video games - at least, not mostly. It's over-protection. Of course, the over-protected, housebound kids then have to be entertained, so they get given video games. Diet doesn't help, this much is true. But the real problem is over-protection.
If you think I'm wrong, name one application area where you think Windows is ahead
Anything productive by Adobe? MS Office? iTunes? Cakewalk? Fruity Loops? Starry Night? How about some software for my Garmin iQue M5? There are just a few of the software packages I run that aren't on Linux and I don't see any Linux equivalent of. And please, if you're going to mention VMing I may as well just have a Windows machine. It doesn't count.
You can't have those particular proprietary programs. But with the exception of iTunes, you will find programs which do the same things exactly as well. The ones you are looking for are:
Flash player and PDF reader are available direct from Adobe. Additionaly, there are several open source flassh players, and PDF renderers are everywhere. Open source Action Script compiler here. Blender can directly generate Flash movies as good as anything produced anywhere, while lots of other Linux programs can produce some Flash output;
Starry nights? Hell! you know the professionals use Linux, don't you? Start here and stop somewhere beyond the horsehead nebula...
As for GPS software, the list is so long I don't know where to start. Anything you want to do with more or less any GPS - from professional navigation for shipping (although that's proprietary and expensive) to mapping your walks in the woods - is available. What is it you want to do?
As I said, for software support. Let's face facts, there is tons of software that is not on Linux that people want. How much longer is the Linux community going to ignore this fact? That's why I a main machine that runs Windows and a machine I play around with that has Linux.
What software?
There are some very specialist applications that are available for Windows with no Linux equivalent - not many, but some. And there are far more good quality games available for Windows than for Linux. But for 99% of all home user, small and medium business applications, there's ad good application software on Linux as on Windows. If you think I'm wrong, name one application area where you think Windows is ahead (apart from viruses and trojans, of course).
And remember, when you do so, that by no means all Linux applications are open source.
The allure of low priced PCs for the neophyte is a great one but one of two things are likely to happen: They'll either find out that they want more and end up willing to spend more and probably choose Windows for the software support...
If they find they like the security, the reliability, the wide availability of good software Linux offers, why would they downgrade to Windows?
Slashdot Mirror
Is that it has both GPS and WIMAX on board. That is what makes it a more interesting and forward looking design than Mac Air. Physically, it's boring. The cornucopia of ports is boring. Laptops have these things. It looks so like every other Lenovo laptop that there's nothing 'must have' about the appearance. But I am convinced that the next killer application will be location sensitive and require ubiquitous mobile connectivity. WiFi doesn't have it and 3G isn't very fast.
Steve Jobs isn't going to lie awake tonight kicking himself because Lenovo have brought out yet another dull black corporate laptop. He's going to be kicking himself about the GPS and the WIMAX.
I build a shiny widget, and release it under the GPL. Lots of people use my shiny widget - it becomes the gold standard for shiny widgets. Then some software house cuts a huge deal for software development with [insert name of immense multinational here]. The only trouble is, they need a shiny widget as part of the code. And damn, your one is the standard.
They come to you, and boy, you have them over a barrel. Because you were cunning enough to use the GPL, you can hold them to ransom, and charge them $1M for a limited license that lets them use your shiny widget in their new project. And whats more, you can sell it all over again the next time someone needs your shiny widget in a non-GPL setting.
Great imagination, laddie, shame about your grasp on reality.
The maximum value of any piece of software is what it would cost to do a clean-room reimplementation from scratch. Remember that a lot of the original GNU software was clean-room reimplementations of pre-existing UN*X utilities. On the whole it's always easier to do a clean-room reimplementation than to build the original system, because the re-implementors have a complete functional specification and a working prototype to test against.
In the past I've needed bits of commercial functionality which weren't available open source, so I simply reimplemented them from the specifications. It isn't hard to do - and it isn't hard to do the other way round either. So, sure, if you spent $1.5M equivalent in programmer hours developing your implementation, you might just get your $1M license fee. If it's something you knocked up in a weekend, they'll pay a programmer for a weekend.
Yes: an understanding of what you're doing, and what you're dealing with.
For a start, you're going to need to have an extensible object system to handle the sorts of things which can be stored in the inventory; a bottle has different properties than a sword. For a second thing, the limits to what can go in an inventory is not a fixed number of items; it depends on the size and on the weight of the items. When adding an item to the list, you have to determine whether there's physical room for it in the player's bag(s), and whether the player can carry the weight. You may also have to consider whether the object added contaminates, or is contaminated by, anything currently in the inventory. And then you've got to provide the user with a user interface which allows him to add to, search through, and select from the inventory.
I've written such systems (a long time ago, and in LISP); as Casey Hudson says, it's not trivial.
I've used QA/C and VectorCast recently when doing a safety audit on ancient C code the authors of which had long since left the company. VectorCast proved not useful, because it requires integration with a C compiler, and the (obsolete and non-standard) compiler for this particular code was not compatible with it. QA/C, however, proved very useful, not simply in quality analysis but also in navigating and understanding the interactions in the codbase, producing very useful interactive calling graphs.
Of course, it's a commercial tool and very expensive. I had a look for open source equivalents but didn't find anything as good.
Granted, one rarely needs all of the information in a zone file. But sometimes one does, which is exactly why people publish them. And it's a perfectly normal thing to request one. It isn't an 'administrative action', it's just a normal sort of thing one does when diagnosing some sorts of network problem. If you ask for the zone file for my domain, for example, you won't get the addresses of my unrouteable machines, because you don't need to know them. But if you ask for internal.[my domain], you will see my unrouteable machines, because they aren't secret.
The intended purpose of a website is to display information. The intended purpose of an administrative page on a website is for the site manager to modify the settings of the website. Accessing the first pseudo-anonymously (as is the way of the Internet) is clearly the intended use. Accessing the second pseudo-anonymously (because the administrator forgot to set a password) clearly is not.
What matters most here, is the wording of the computer crime laws in North Dakota. So far, no one's bother to bring that up.
When you don't know what you're talking about, it's often a good idea to listen quietly.
A zone file is nothing like an administrative interface. For a start, it isn't an interface: it is publicly published data. If you don't want it to be published, you don't put it in the published zone file. For a second thing, if it wasn't possible to access the data which is summarised in the zone file, it would be impossible to navigate the internet using names - you'd have to use numeric addresses. OK, one doesn't normally ask for hte whole lot at once - but if it wasn't meant to be public, it shouldn't have been published.
Sheesh! Ten years ago, even the trolls on Slashdot were reasonably well informed. What the hell are you doing on this site if you don't understand the basics of how the net hangs together?
Errr... that's another way of saying 'there is no such thing as intellectual property'. Lawyers and other weasels who speak of 'intellectual property' are playing a classic quickness of the hand deceiveth the eye trick. Precisely, they're doing two things:
Whether property in land ought to be given the sorts of protections which Western society gives it is another question entirely. But that's beside the point. New ideas and expressions are not property, do not have the status of property, and do not have nearly the same degree of protection that property has. And it's in everyone's interest - that includes the 'content creators' - that it remains that way. Where would Walt Disney be now if all the classic fairy tales had been someone else's 'intellectual property'?
The act of putting up a DNS server is exactly the same. But we now know it's illegal to access a DNS server, therefore it must be illegal to access a web server.
Without written permission in triplicate, signed in longhand by the owner of the data using a quill pen and attested by the county registrar and the sheriff, of course.
Actually, it means more than this. It means you cannot look at a web page in North Dakota. WHOIS information, and other DNS information, is public data deliberately published on the internet so that other people may read it. If they couldn't read it, the modern internet as we know it - with meaningful names instead of dotted quad addresses - could not work. Web pages - public web pages - are also public data which is deliberately published on the Internet so that other people may read it. If reading DNS records without specific authorisation is illegal, so is looking at web pages. So if you're in North Dakota and you're reading this, you better run for them thar boondocks, boy. We're coming to git you!
Tablets have been tried, repeatedly. Tablets have failed, repeatedly. I'm just about to start rewriting one system which was designed for a tablet, because the field engineers it was designed for do not like the tablets. Tablets are not great products, they're niche products - and that niche isn't anywhere near as big as the computer makers thought it would be.
I agree that the keyboard is a lousy user interface device, but like democracy it's a hell of a lot better than any of the alternatives.
Apple would reply, 'how last century'.
The answer is you don't use a wired ethernet - Xerox designed ethernet to be wireless back in the seventies, that's why it's called ethernet. Running it over wires was only ever supposed to be a short term hack while they sorted out getting the radio link working. And Apple fanbois aren't expected to be technical enough to worry about security issues.
And, of course, you don't use a flash drive. You use that wireless ethernet to access your Time Capsule[TM], which it seems to me was the really interesting bit of today's announcement from Apple.
So, if you're so mind-bogglingly primitive that you still think digital watches^W^W wired networks are a really neat idea, then you aren't part of Apple's target market for this machine.
Oddly enough, it's the first Apple machine I've been tempted to buy. And although I like the form factor, the thing that sells it for me it the mouse-pad gestures, which are just so much richer and more intuitive than anything we've seen before. Next job, of course, is to hack something together so that that functionality is available in Linux/KDE...
This isn't a great advancement in computing. It's a convicted monopolist's attempt to lock the world's documents up in a format which it can change arbitrarily at will to stifle competition.
In America, first you write the code, then you get the money, then you get the women!
Don't be silly. Geeks don't get women!
You can buy a very reasonable desktop from Dell for under £300, so I really don't know what you're wasting your money on. I could certainly build a server with a raid array for £500, for the sort of loads a primary school is likely to need.
Look, this is bollocks.
Many years ago I used to be IT Manager for a UK local authority. When I came into post the first thing I looked at was where my budget was going; I found that we'd just spent £70,000 on new servers. What had we got for that? We'd got to 486dx66 boxes with (if I remember right) 64Mb of RAM and one 486dx40 with 32Mb, all running AT&T UNIX System V.4. My predecessor had gone to one of the big computer companies with a three-initial name and asked them to spec and deliver these things. And, of course, they did have good warranties. But the hardware value - even in those days - was less than £5,000. For a quarter of what the council had paid I could have installed similar hardware with two hot backup systems and instant failover - which would have provided far more 'peace of mind'.
The grossly inflated prices which get charged to public authorities in this country - and, I'm prepared to bet, the US too - aren't about peace of mind. They're about gouging bordering on the corrupt. Linker3000 (GP post) almost certainly installed better hardware than RM would have installed.
Hardly.
Some people add spices, but this is peasant food so that's just wrong. In any case it's unnecessary; haggis is delicious.
This is BECTA's final report, the result of a two year study. Last year, they practically begged M$ for case studies and pilot projects to prove Vista's worth. There are only two reasons M$ failed to answer BECTA's concerns:
No, three reasons:
Our four...no... Amongst our reasons.... I'll come in again.
Basically, your question is conceptually identical to saying, "So, you believe in political stance X. How do you know political stance Y or Z or Q isn't actually correct?" Well, by evaluating it, like everything else in life, and this question is hardly a refutation of any stance one may hold for their notion of "X".
You're right, of course, that I can't produce a convincing argument that Thor is the one God. I can't, because the very idea that there can be a 'one God' is such obvious and risible bunk. Gods are created by peoples from time to time to suit their own contemporary social needs; it's simply not possible that one can have existential primacy over others.
The problem is, how would you know it was god and not some advanced life form? Ancient humans with smaller brains would consider us or our mysterious technology 'gods'.
In any case, if there is one true God, who is it? Aphrodite? Thor? the Morrigan? Siva? Anubis? Even if there were a God, what would make you think it was Jhwh?
Mind you, dead funny to see some of these rednecks rolling up to the pearly gates in their Humvees to find that Allah is in charge...
When I was six, I used to walk a mile to school - and a mile back - every day. In the summer all through my chidhood, I'd make myself a sandwich before anyone else was up, and be out in the woods until evening - or else, later on, drop down river in my boat on the outgoing tide and come back in on the next. When I was twelve, I used to cycle twenty miles up into the hills with a friend - and, at the end of the day, twenty miles back. Kids these days aren't allowed to do that sort of thing. They're driven everywhere. They get no time to be out by themselves. The sea - the roads - the woods - are all suddenly 'too dangerous' for kids.
It isn't video games - at least, not mostly. It's over-protection. Of course, the over-protected, housebound kids then have to be entertained, so they get given video games. Diet doesn't help, this much is true. But the real problem is over-protection.
... and looks somewhat like the reference image...
Opera 9.2.4 (Windows) reaches 55 (but looks horrible)...
Firefox 3 looks like the best shot at it so far.
Safari 3.0.4 (Windows) hangs at 60, Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.11 messes up so badly the result can't be read...
The test looks interesting, for sure. And it's going to raise the game for standards compliance!
Anything productive by Adobe? MS Office? iTunes? Cakewalk? Fruity Loops? Starry Night? How about some software for my Garmin iQue M5? There are just a few of the software packages I run that aren't on Linux and I don't see any Linux equivalent of. And please, if you're going to mention VMing I may as well just have a Windows machine. It doesn't count.
You can't have those particular proprietary programs. But with the exception of iTunes, you will find programs which do the same things exactly as well. The ones you are looking for are:
As I said, for software support. Let's face facts, there is tons of software that is not on Linux that people want. How much longer is the Linux community going to ignore this fact? That's why I a main machine that runs Windows and a machine I play around with that has Linux.
What software?
There are some very specialist applications that are available for Windows with no Linux equivalent - not many, but some. And there are far more good quality games available for Windows than for Linux. But for 99% of all home user, small and medium business applications, there's ad good application software on Linux as on Windows. If you think I'm wrong, name one application area where you think Windows is ahead (apart from viruses and trojans, of course).
And remember, when you do so, that by no means all Linux applications are open source.
If they find they like the security, the reliability, the wide availability of good software Linux offers, why would they downgrade to Windows?