One remaining option is impact by a large asteroid. We now have to come up with a reasonable impact scenario that can produce a feature similar to the one seen on Iapetus, which is indeed very strange.
Easy: two big asteroids struck the moon simultaneously on both poles!
My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and getting to use the computer is a big motivator for kids to learn their ABC's (as simple as typing their name in Word is a big thrill).
When I was that age we had a Commodore 64 at home, and needing to be able to type LOAD"*",8,1 and RUN to play a game was a big motivator for me to learn my ABCs:-) (To this day I still pronounce that as "L-O-A-D-quote-asterisk-quote-comma-eight-comma-on e"--it took me a long time to realise it spelt "load"!)
My dad started teaching me BASIC a couple years later--which was a relevant thing to do since being able to copy games into the computer or write my own basic stuff was one of the only ways to pass time with that computer. But I believe that learning programming along with reading was a huge advantage in latter life, one I'm still benefitting from compared to kids who didn't grow up with computers at home in the 80s.
Nowadays though things are different. Programming has become esoteric whereas back then it was pretty much synonomous with "using a computer" (at school we did LOGO programming so dad teaching me BASIC wasn't a big deal at the time). Back then I was getting a huge advantage over other kids by learning to use a computer, now it's more like your duty as a parent not to let your kids get behind (in North America; in Europe it isn't that way yet but it will be soon enough.)
I'll try to get my future kids interested in Scheme programming at that age (probably best for kids IMO), but I'm worried it won't hold their interest since they can just pop their Disney interactive DVD in there and do "cooler stuff" without any effort...
Some important points the Slashdot summary didn't mention:
1) This is because E-bay forbids auctions in the name of a charity as there have been people in the past who have used this as a con.
2) According to the article, Crazy Joe is in agreement with this policy and is not upset that the auctions were pulled.
3) He's putting the auctions back up without mention of the Red Cross or his website so everything should still go smoothly for those who have donated.
Of course if everybody reads TFA there's no problem, but the way the write-up puts it makes things seem as though things are a lot more outrageous than they are. Besides, on slashdot "if everybody reads TFA" is a pretty laughable suggestion...
On the OP's criticism "of those interminable fantasy or SF series that are pumped out at regular intervals for cash": Fans of Sci-Fi and Fantasy genre fiction should all be aware of the Baen free library, a simple and admirable approach to genre fiction. Check out the first (few) books of a series free, and if you like it, you can buy the rest on paper or electronically and in a non-DRM'd format. Finally a publisher who gets it!
So, if you're a fan, check out the site, and if you're a writer looking to get published in Fantasy/Sci-fi fiction, look to Baen first and foremost as a geek-friendly and utterly avant-guard publisher. I will grant that I've only paid for 1 e-book from Baen heretofore (having read 4-5 freely), but that would definately have been 0 sales instead of 1 if they had not instituted the free library, so I still hold that the concept works and is fair. This is a system where you only pay for quality genre writing and I think that's exactly what a lot of readers have been waiting for.
Well, to break the silence, I'll chip in my two cents:
1) It's really really cool to think that that far out into the solar system there could be geological activity going on. The sun's gotta be something like only -3 magnitude from out there.
2) This has got to be really hard to verify or know much about; although at least now when we get around to sending further probes into the Kuiper belt Quaoar will probably be way up there on the priority scale, which is a good thing.
Come to think of it, isn't there a probe that was recently launched headed to the Kuiper belt? Anyone know if by some great surrendipity it might be travelling in this region? I look forward to theories as to why Quaoar rather than Pluto or Sedna would be the first signs of geo activity in the outer solar system.
Just some random thoughts from an amateur astronomer...
I know this is "make ourselves feel better" humour, but I must point out that photocenter.ru is not the official website of the Russian space programme:-)
Durand heads to the cocktail bar, reaches behind it and grabs a brand-new $200 Nokia N-Gage. Any self-respecting geek knows it's the coolest combination cellphone, e-mail device and video game around.
As a group response to everyone who says this is still creating an illegal derivative work: I don't think you realise how bad the final result of this procedure is:-) At least in my case, unless I were copying a logo or something there's no way anyone would know that the final image started out as the source image.
I meant this advice for someone who, for example, wants to draw a fighter plane for a mobile phone game and has no artistic ability. But if you take a photo of a fighter plane, trace its outline, and fill it with grey you have something totally acceptable for a mobile phone game. I can not imagine that if a copyrighted photo were used for the original that the photographer would look at a mobile phone, see the tiny airplane, and say "hey, he stole my picture!"
IANAL, of course, and I'm not in the USA, but if the above scenario actually is illegal, you've got some strange laws.
If the other suggestions given here are still beyond what you can realise, here's one no-cost solution that can work in a pinch (depending on the requirements of your application, of course):
1. Use Google images, a scanner, or any similar appropriate source to get stuff that looks as much like what you want as possible. 2. Open that image in GIMP, add a new layer over it and trace the outline of that image. 3. Delete the original layer (which you have no right to appropriate), and colorise the new layer with all your knowledge of gradiants, textures, etc. that you can muster. (Read up on what the GIMP has to offer in this department if necessary.)
This works especially well when you're developing for mobile applications or other situations where the loss of fine artistic ability is not likely to be noticed. If your needs go beyond this, however, it will not be adequate and many of the other suggestions presented here are far more appropriate.
Remember that "Ask Slashdot" the other day where the guy wanted to know how to keep up on all the technical reading his job requires, and included Slashdot on his list of stuff he had to keep current on?
Ingres is going to have its work cut out for it building momentum in its developer community; open source DB coders are already divided up between MySQL, Postgres, Firebird, Cloudscape, plus some others like Berkeley and HSQL.
On the commercial side, Sybase has been going after Linux deployments in a big way with a 'lots of advertising and free beer' approach. DB2 and Oracle are hardly neglecting Linux as a platform either...
I can see the wisdom of open sourcing Ingres--in such a heavily competitive area as databases, any edge you can get is a good one. But it's getting to where it's just as competitive recruiting open source developers as it is finding customers, so that's going to be tough for them. At least Cloudscape fills a niche that others don't by being pure Java; Ingres has to try to lure community interest away from Firebird and Postgres--not easy.
That said I do think that MySQL holds more community mindshare than it merits (weighed either by features or by freedom), so Gaughan is definately on the right track going after them foremost in this interview.
The simple fact that the lion's share of a given niche is clearly held by one F/OSS offering (think LAMP), does not mean that there aren't parts of every F/OSS application that cannot be improved upon by anyone. Look at the bug trackers and todo lists of the projects that interest you; contributing, even to a well-entrenched project, is not impossible!
Dreams of geek celebrity status aside, making Linux/Apache/OO.org/YourFavouriteProject better does just as much for 'advancing the cause' as starting a new "killer app" from scratch does (and in 99% of cases, probably more).
Okay, not happy with my previous response, I've got it working with video & sound now. mplayer is a dead end since it barfs on loading the qdmc codec, which is what this clip is using.
Xine plays the movie just fine, however, on my system, so I would check that you're using a recent enough version of it. (I don't know anything about Xine internals so I can't give any more relevant detail than that.)
Mock all you want: the salesman at the computer parts store where I bought this system assured me that I would never be able to view DVDs on it (when I took a DVD-ROM drive without taking an expensive video card). Thanks to mplayer and me knowing my way around a computer I can prove him wrong today: but if you prefer spending money for ignorance rather than gaining it through competence that's your business, the end result is the same.
And to bring this back to the original question, it's not Linux's fault Apple is behind the times with its software support--and this is from someone who would have loved to buy an iPod if only he could use iTMS on his computer...
Well, I can get the video but no sound using just a fresh compile of mplayer (pre5 but this goes back at least a few versions earlier) and the codecs from mplayer.hu. I'd be as happy as you to find a way to get sound in quicktime though...
Try different video outputs if you're getting a blue screen, sometimes when SDL gets screwy it does that. mplayer -vo help to get availible choices. FWIW I have to use mplayer -vo x11 -zoom -framedrop on this machine but this isn't as nice as some of the more advanced options if and when they work. But it beats aa:-)
(I have a habit of changing my X11 resolutions all the time when movies are playing and if I do this using xv I get a snow crash.)
Right (and thanks for the link since I was just looking for that yesterday and didn't find it), but that leads to a couple points:
1. My original position is that "add-on" means "not part of the distribution". So both/opt and/usr/local ought to be empty following a default install, unless there is 'bonus' third party software in the equation.
Arch obviously interprets "add-on" differently, but as their use of/opt is different from most, it raises the question of whether a non-standard interpretation of a standard is really standard. Or something.
2. The standard itself says that apps in/opt are in their own/opt/provider directory, in other words basically self-contained. Whereas when Arch puts things like Gnome there, it's not in the least bit self-contained in that your gtk libraries affect how it functions and (more importantly) people compiling other applications need to use its development headers. If anything, Gnome should be in/usr/local since that implies an interrelated hierarchy rather than a "separate from everything" zone.
In other words, IMVHO, nothing that you installed for/usr/local should depend on anything that's in/opt to compile or run. Big third-party binary applications go in/opt. Now, everybody has their own notion of what's counterintuitive, but all the same I don't think Arch's kind of usage is going to catch on--it's certainly counterintuitive to me.
Not to be picky or anything, but I posted this tidbit first; later another thread that mentioned shred got modded higher and someone reposted the same thing, so most of you are reading mine second even though I wrote it first. Check those timestamps! No karma for plagiarism!
(Posted w/o karma bonus since probably no one cares:-) )
/opt is my area where I can install my big self-contained stuff and not worry about it getting changed or overwritten at the next upgrade or apt-get. If Arch puts half of/usr in/opt, where is non-distro related software supposed to go? ~/stuff?
Part of it is of course personal preference, but as a design decision it seems to be asking for trouble to take away a "safe area" (that a lot of distro-independent software installs to by default) like this. If a distro is "bundled with" 3rd party software, but those packages are not considered "part of the distribution", it can put them in/opt, but not core stuff like Gnome and KDE, which are hardly self-contained from other apps.
I'm not about to give up on SysV booting either, so neither distro would be for me in the first place, but I'll admit for the sake of not beating a dead horse that that is subjective...
Note that (unless you're shredding a device file as in parent, presumably) you shouldn't shred files using a journalled file system. From the man page (for version 5.0.91):
CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the filesystem overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this assumption. The following are examples of filesystems on which shred is not effective:
* log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
* filesystems that write redundant data and carry on even if some writes fail, such as RAID-based filesystems
* filesystems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance's NFS server
* filesystems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS version 3 clients
In my experience 99 out of 100 apps are run with $ java -jar appname.jar from the command line, or else they come with an installer that sets up a launch script for you. It's not any more complicated than programs written in any other language: CLASSPATH is annoying when it doesn't 'just work' but so is libfoo.so. And actually many of the programs in/usr/bin are scripts that launch the binary with lots of command line flags and environment variables needing to be set.
I agree that some of the defaults on the command line are questionable decisions (requiring -source 1.4 instead of the other way round, -ea being off by default), but these are hidden from the end user in distributed applications.
Or to put it more succinctly: which is quicker to install, Apache or Tomcat?
Studies like this are wrong-headed: car lovers would ridicule the suggestion that all models should be made alike, maybe we should think of our computer's WM 'dashboard' the same way.
Simplified, standard business UIs are like station wagons--practical, easy to use, automatic transmision all the way.
KDE is more like a Porsche--fine tuned control, manual transmision, yet still fully polished, appealing to a broad category of enthusiasts who take their vehicle more "seriously". You can argue all you want about manual transmission not being necessary anymore, the people who drive these cars *want* it and don't care that it's less 'accessible' to others.
The smaller, more exotic WM's are like the cult classics--Ford Cobra, classic Mustang, etc. These are for people who have a fascination with mythical features that goes far beyond the desires of the general public. The fans of these cars look down on the mainstream "enthusiasts" as wanna-be's, and take pride in the long and esoteric learning curve that has allowed them to develop this closeness with their machine. Try explaining to one of these guys that an automatic transmission station wagon is a superior design!
My point is that none of these groups are 'right' or 'better'. The only way to go wrong is in trying to be all things to all people.
(With apologies to "In the beginning was the command line" for stealing a good metaphor.)
Good riddance, as I agree with OsViews that the statistic was scarcely credible. All the same, I'd like to see a more finely-tuned version come out someday that does reflect the OS of google users come out someday. That truly would be a useful rubric with which to track the 'zeitgeist' of the net.
Slashdot Mirror
One remaining option is impact by a large asteroid. We now have to come up with a reasonable impact scenario that can produce a feature similar to the one seen on Iapetus, which is indeed very strange.
Easy: two big asteroids struck the moon simultaneously on both poles!
Just anecdotal advice (no kids yet):
:-) (To this day I still pronounce that as "L-O-A-D-quote-asterisk-quote-comma-eight-comma-on e"--it took me a long time to realise it spelt "load"!)
My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and getting to use the computer is a big motivator for kids to learn their ABC's (as simple as typing their name in Word is a big thrill).
When I was that age we had a Commodore 64 at home, and needing to be able to type LOAD"*",8,1 and RUN to play a game was a big motivator for me to learn my ABCs
My dad started teaching me BASIC a couple years later--which was a relevant thing to do since being able to copy games into the computer or write my own basic stuff was one of the only ways to pass time with that computer. But I believe that learning programming along with reading was a huge advantage in latter life, one I'm still benefitting from compared to kids who didn't grow up with computers at home in the 80s.
Nowadays though things are different. Programming has become esoteric whereas back then it was pretty much synonomous with "using a computer" (at school we did LOGO programming so dad teaching me BASIC wasn't a big deal at the time). Back then I was getting a huge advantage over other kids by learning to use a computer, now it's more like your duty as a parent not to let your kids get behind (in North America; in Europe it isn't that way yet but it will be soon enough.)
I'll try to get my future kids interested in Scheme programming at that age (probably best for kids IMO), but I'm worried it won't hold their interest since they can just pop their Disney interactive DVD in there and do "cooler stuff" without any effort...
Some important points the Slashdot summary didn't mention:
1) This is because E-bay forbids auctions in the name of a charity as
there have been people in the past who have used this as a con.
2) According to the article, Crazy Joe is in agreement with this
policy and is not upset that the auctions were pulled.
3) He's putting the auctions back up without mention of the Red Cross
or his website so everything should still go smoothly for those who
have donated.
Of course if everybody reads TFA there's no problem, but the way the
write-up puts it makes things seem as though things are a lot more
outrageous than they are. Besides, on slashdot "if everybody reads
TFA" is a pretty laughable suggestion...
On the OP's criticism "of those interminable fantasy or SF series that are pumped out at regular intervals for cash": Fans of Sci-Fi and Fantasy genre fiction should all be aware of the Baen free library , a simple and admirable approach to genre fiction. Check out the first (few) books of a series free, and if you like it, you can buy the rest on paper or electronically and in a non-DRM'd format. Finally a publisher who gets it!
So, if you're a fan, check out the site, and if you're a writer looking to get published in Fantasy/Sci-fi fiction, look to Baen first and foremost as a geek-friendly and utterly avant-guard publisher. I will grant that I've only paid for 1 e-book from Baen heretofore (having read 4-5 freely), but that would definately have been 0 sales instead of 1 if they had not instituted the free library, so I still hold that the concept works and is fair. This is a system where you only pay for quality genre writing and I think that's exactly what a lot of readers have been waiting for.
Well, to break the silence, I'll chip in my two cents:
1) It's really really cool to think that that far out into the solar system there could be geological activity going on. The sun's gotta be something like only -3 magnitude from out there.
2) This has got to be really hard to verify or know much about; although at least now when we get around to sending further probes into the Kuiper belt Quaoar will probably be way up there on the priority scale, which is a good thing.
Come to think of it, isn't there a probe that was recently launched headed to the Kuiper belt? Anyone know if by some great surrendipity it might be travelling in this region? I look forward to theories as to why Quaoar rather than Pluto or Sedna would be the first signs of geo activity in the outer solar system.
Just some random thoughts from an amateur astronomer...
Sounds interesting. Where can I get a book that teaches this "human language"?
I know this is "make ourselves feel better" humour, but I must point out that photocenter.ru is not the official website of the Russian space programme :-)
Durand heads to the cocktail bar, reaches behind it and grabs a brand-new $200 Nokia N-Gage. Any self-respecting geek knows it's the coolest combination cellphone, e-mail device and video game around.
Greatest unintentional humour of the year!
As a group response to everyone who says this is still creating an illegal derivative work: I don't think you realise how bad the final result of this procedure is :-) At least in my case, unless I were copying a logo or something there's no way anyone would know that the final image started out as the source image.
I meant this advice for someone who, for example, wants to draw a fighter plane for a mobile phone game and has no artistic ability. But if you take a photo of a fighter plane, trace its outline, and fill it with grey you have something totally acceptable for a mobile phone game. I can not imagine that if a copyrighted photo were used for the original that the photographer would look at a mobile phone, see the tiny airplane, and say "hey, he stole my picture!"
IANAL, of course, and I'm not in the USA, but if the above scenario actually is illegal, you've got some strange laws.
If the other suggestions given here are still beyond what you can realise, here's one no-cost solution that can work in a pinch (depending on the requirements of your application, of course):
1. Use Google images, a scanner, or any similar appropriate source to get stuff that looks as much like what you want as possible.
2. Open that image in GIMP, add a new layer over it and trace the outline of that image.
3. Delete the original layer (which you have no right to appropriate), and colorise the new layer with all your knowledge of gradiants, textures, etc. that you can muster. (Read up on what the GIMP has to offer in this department if necessary.)
This works especially well when you're developing for mobile applications or other situations where the loss of fine artistic ability is not likely to be noticed. If your needs go beyond this, however, it will not be adequate and many of the other suggestions presented here are far more appropriate.
Remember that "Ask Slashdot" the other day where the guy wanted to know how to keep up on all the technical reading his job requires, and included Slashdot on his list of stuff he had to keep current on?
I hope that guy learns a lot from this story.
Ingres is going to have its work cut out for it building momentum in its developer community; open source DB coders are already divided up between MySQL, Postgres, Firebird, Cloudscape, plus some others like Berkeley and HSQL.
On the commercial side, Sybase has been going after Linux deployments in a big way with a 'lots of advertising and free beer' approach. DB2 and Oracle are hardly neglecting Linux as a platform either...
I can see the wisdom of open sourcing Ingres--in such a heavily competitive area as databases, any edge you can get is a good one. But it's getting to where it's just as competitive recruiting open source developers as it is finding customers, so that's going to be tough for them. At least Cloudscape fills a niche that others don't by being pure Java; Ingres has to try to lure community interest away from Firebird and Postgres--not easy.
That said I do think that MySQL holds more community mindshare than it merits (weighed either by features or by freedom), so Gaughan is definately on the right track going after them foremost in this interview.
The simple fact that the lion's share of a given niche is clearly held by one F/OSS offering (think LAMP), does not mean that there aren't parts of every F/OSS application that cannot be improved upon by anyone. Look at the bug trackers and todo lists of the projects that interest you; contributing, even to a well-entrenched project, is not impossible!
Dreams of geek celebrity status aside, making Linux/Apache/OO.org/YourFavouriteProject better does just as much for 'advancing the cause' as starting a new "killer app" from scratch does (and in 99% of cases, probably more).
Okay, not happy with my previous response, I've got it working with video & sound now. mplayer is a dead end since it barfs on loading the qdmc codec, which is what this clip is using.
Xine plays the movie just fine, however, on my system, so I would check that you're using a recent enough version of it. (I don't know anything about Xine internals so I can't give any more relevant detail than that.)
Mock all you want: the salesman at the computer parts store where I bought this system assured me that I would never be able to view DVDs on it (when I took a DVD-ROM drive without taking an expensive video card). Thanks to mplayer and me knowing my way around a computer I can prove him wrong today: but if you prefer spending money for ignorance rather than gaining it through competence that's your business, the end result is the same.
And to bring this back to the original question, it's not Linux's fault Apple is behind the times with its software support--and this is from someone who would have loved to buy an iPod if only he could use iTMS on his computer...
Well, I can get the video but no sound using just a fresh compile of mplayer (pre5 but this goes back at least a few versions earlier) and the codecs from mplayer.hu. I'd be as happy as you to find a way to get sound in quicktime though...
:-)
Try different video outputs if you're getting a blue screen, sometimes when SDL gets screwy it does that. mplayer -vo help to get availible choices. FWIW I have to use mplayer -vo x11 -zoom -framedrop on this machine but this isn't as nice as some of the more advanced options if and when they work. But it beats aa
(I have a habit of changing my X11 resolutions all the time when movies are playing and if I do this using xv I get a snow crash.)
Right (and thanks for the link since I was just looking for that yesterday and didn't find it), but that leads to a couple points:
/opt and /usr/local ought to be empty following a default install, unless there is 'bonus' third party software in the equation.
/opt is different from most, it raises the question of whether a non-standard interpretation of a standard is really standard. Or something.
/opt are in their own /opt/provider directory, in other words basically self-contained. Whereas when Arch puts things like Gnome there, it's not in the least bit self-contained in that your gtk libraries affect how it functions and (more importantly) people compiling other applications need to use its development headers. /usr/local since that implies an interrelated hierarchy rather than a "separate from everything" zone.
/usr/local should depend on anything that's in /opt to compile or run. Big third-party binary applications go in /opt. Now, everybody has their own notion of what's counterintuitive, but all the same I don't think Arch's kind of usage is going to catch on--it's certainly counterintuitive to me.
1. My original position is that "add-on" means "not part of the distribution". So both
Arch obviously interprets "add-on" differently, but as their use of
2. The standard itself says that apps in
If anything, Gnome should be in
In other words, IMVHO, nothing that you installed for
Not to be picky or anything, but I posted this tidbit first; later another thread that mentioned shred got modded higher and someone reposted the same thing, so most of you are reading mine second even though I wrote it first. Check those timestamps! No karma for plagiarism!
:-) )
(Posted w/o karma bonus since probably no one cares
/opt is my area where I can install my big self-contained stuff and not worry about it getting changed or overwritten at the next upgrade or apt-get. If Arch puts half of /usr in /opt, where is non-distro related software supposed to go? ~/stuff?
/opt, but not core stuff like Gnome and KDE, which are hardly self-contained from other apps.
Part of it is of course personal preference, but as a design decision it seems to be asking for trouble to take away a "safe area" (that a lot of distro-independent software installs to by default) like this. If a distro is "bundled with" 3rd party software, but those packages are not considered "part of the distribution", it can put them in
I'm not about to give up on SysV booting either, so neither distro would be for me in the first place, but I'll admit for the sake of not beating a dead horse that that is subjective...
Note that (unless you're shredding a device file as in parent, presumably) you shouldn't shred files using a journalled file system. From the man page (for version 5.0.91):
CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the filesystem overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this assumption. The following are examples of filesystems on which shred is not effective:
* log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
* filesystems that write redundant data and carry on even if some writes fail, such as RAID-based filesystems
* filesystems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance's NFS server
* filesystems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS version 3 clients
* compressed filesystems
You mean like HavenCo, on the principality of Sealand?
(You can read a lot more about Sealand over at the Wikipedia article.)
In my experience 99 out of 100 apps are run with $ java -jar appname.jar from the command line, or else they come with an installer that sets up a launch script for you. It's not any more complicated than programs written in any other language: CLASSPATH is annoying when it doesn't 'just work' but so is libfoo.so. And actually many of the programs in /usr/bin are scripts that launch the binary with lots of command line flags and environment variables needing to be set.
I agree that some of the defaults on the command line are questionable decisions (requiring -source 1.4 instead of the other way round, -ea being off by default), but these are hidden from the end user in distributed applications.
Or to put it more succinctly: which is quicker to install, Apache or Tomcat?
Studies like this are wrong-headed: car lovers would ridicule the suggestion that all models should be made alike, maybe we should think of our computer's WM 'dashboard' the same way.
Simplified, standard business UIs are like station wagons--practical, easy to use, automatic transmision all the way.
KDE is more like a Porsche--fine tuned control, manual transmision, yet still fully polished, appealing to a broad category of enthusiasts who take their vehicle more "seriously". You can argue all you want about manual transmission not being necessary anymore, the people who drive these cars *want* it and don't care that it's less 'accessible' to others.
The smaller, more exotic WM's are like the cult classics--Ford Cobra, classic Mustang, etc. These are for people who have a fascination with mythical features that goes far beyond the desires of the general public. The fans of these cars look down on the mainstream "enthusiasts" as wanna-be's, and take pride in the long and esoteric learning curve that has allowed them to develop this closeness with their machine. Try explaining to one of these guys that an automatic transmission station wagon is a superior design!
My point is that none of these groups are 'right' or 'better'. The only way to go wrong is in trying to be all things to all people.
(With apologies to "In the beginning was the command line" for stealing a good metaphor.)
Good riddance, as I agree with OsViews that the statistic was scarcely credible. All the same, I'd like to see a more finely-tuned version come out someday that does reflect the OS of google users come out someday. That truly would be a useful rubric with which to track the 'zeitgeist' of the net.
I think this is exactly the message the gaming community has to offer the 31 new lay-offs: credit where credit's due