Amusing that OOXML will require "substantially more work", it reinforces what people have been saying about it being difficult to implement... And if Microsoft have trouble implementing it, when they wrote it in the first place, just think how difficult it will be for other parties?
Europe can also lean in hard on the US... The euro is going strong, the Dollar is comparatively weak... Who would give in first? The US to benefit Microsoft alone at the expense of the rest of the country, or the EU to benefit the whole of the EU? If really pushed, i think the US would have to back down.
It's no longer possible to write a commercial desktop or server OS and expect to turn a profit from it... BeOS was great, but it wasn't compatible with microsoft and ultimately doomed. Open source is barely competing, despite the obvious price advantage.
Similarly, you can't write a commercial office suite, just look at wordperfect, once the dominant player, now pretty screwed...
Novell faced a similar fate...
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft simply isn't viable... The only way to compete is very slowly through open source, leveraging the lack of cost and advantages of distributed development. Even then, the process of winning market share over from microsoft is far too slow to make a business selling competing software.
The unit cost is ridiculously low, so even selling at $1 per copy would be profitable... But with much lower prices, they could make it up in volume. Those who would have bought it anyway will still do so, and probably buy more games as well with the savings (ie they will still spend a similar amount of money, just not all on one product)... Many people will impulse buy because the risk is low (if its crap, you only lost $10 not $50), many people will buy because it's more convenient than pirating.
And how about all those people in the UK who are being bombarded by advertisements from american websites, and talk about doom3 from their american friends and americans on websites like slashdot... Why should the british be artificially restricted from playing something that's available to americans? That sounds like racism to me...
As the grandparent said, "when we were younger"... As a kid, i wasn't especially affluent, and neither were my school friends. So we had the choice, buy a small number of games and run them on older hardware, or buy more/newer/better hardware with our limited funds and play a larger number of pirated games. Obviously we chose the latter, since it was simply better value for money. The smaller number of games we could have afforded to buy legitimately wouldn't have kept us entertained for anywhere near as long, and we would have been doing other things instead (like hanging around on street corners with knives).
Sure, a Ferrari won't cost $200k in raw materials, but each Ferrari produced will cost a significant amount of raw materials and labor to assemble it, test it, and transport it.
On the other hand, each subsequent copy of a piece of digital media costs virtually nothing. You can even farm out the distribution to third parties (eg torrents, mirror sites) so that subsequent copies will cost you nothing whatsoever.
A Ferrari may not cost $200k in raw materials, but it would probably cost you more than that to build one yourself because of all the specialist tools and training required.
Software production is most definitely different, in many ways...
It is possible to design a car for free, It is possible to design software for free.
It is NOT possible to build a car for free since you need raw materials, It is possible to build software for free.
To build a car you need specialist equipment which can't be free, To build software you can use specialist tools (compilers/debuggers as opposed to manually entering machine code) but these can be obtained for free.
You can dismantle cars and reuse the parts for other purposes, but you still need to buy each part, you can't copy the parts easily without specialist tools. While it's perfectly possible to do the same with software, as well as easily duplicating the parts, vendors will often get in your way. Some software (eg open source) openly encourages you to reuse, modify and duplicate the parts.
Cars typically have after market parts available for them too, software makers often discourage this, either by clamping down on modders or simply by not publishing the inner workings of their software sufficiently to allow third parties to produce replacement parts. The auto industry is mature enough, such that most parts are standardised and you're not forced to buy replacements from the original vendor. Whereas there is a lot of lock-in among software vendors still, because the market hasn't matured enough for the majority of people to realise how badly they're being screwed yet.
// They wanted to sell it to you for a certain price.
Actually, this business model is completely broken under true capitalism... Under true free market capitalism, the fact that someone else is able to copy your product and sell it for lower cost will put you out of business.
Not sure how to describe the system of government we have, but the idea of artificial government intervention to prop up the broken business models of a small number of companies is quite anti capitalist.
Interestingly, if you get the £75 tariff from O2 you can get either the 8gb or 16gb iphone for free... Who in their right mind would get the 8, when the 16 is clearly superior for the same cost?
You also don't get detailed specs when purchasing a game... You get some (usually biased) magazine reviews with a few screenshots, and sometimes a demo which is often the best level of the game with the rest being quite half assed.
Interestingly, this would result in the kind of games the customers actually want, instead of the endless streams of dross you get today... Movies are the same BTW... Endless sequels, shameless merchandising or half assed copies of existing games.
You can also pay for a service - look at eve online for a good example.
There needs to be some accountability for continued availability, there are many old pieces of software people would like to buy, but the original suppliers simply refuse to sell or even give away copies, despite the trivial costs of doing so. I think copyright law should be changed so that the vendor must continue to make the work available, at the same or lower cost than it was available previously, until such time as the copyright expires. Or give up the copyright early, release the work into the public domain and be free of the obligations. Copyright shouldn't be a one way street, it should have obligations on both sides. With software, when copyright expires the source code should be released too. And the copyright lengths need to be shorter, 90+ years is ridiculous especially for software, look how much computers have changed, will we even be able to run current programs in 90 years?
If you read O2's site, they are making the phone available for "free" on the higher priced plans... the £45/month and higher I believe. It's £100 on the cheaper tariffs (30 or 35 per month).
They're also going to offer prepaid tariffs, but not sure how much the phone will cost then. Nothing really to stop you buying a prepaid sim with a minimum credit, then getting it unlocked... Even if you do have to buy £10 credit, you can still use it up...
I'm not sure where the law stands on unlocking, i think they're required to be able to unlock your phone when the contract expires, and charge you an administrative fee for doing so. Not sure about prepaid phones, but you should have more justification to demand an unlock with a prepaid as it's not been subsidised by a contract.
It seems existing UK iphone users will be able to upgrade before their O2 contracts expire... And the phone will be available in a far more similar fashion to standard contracts, namely...
The new iphone is available for a cost to people subscribing to the cheaper O2 contracts... It will also be available on prepay contracts, again at a cost... People subscribing to the more expensive O2 contracts can get the phone with no upfront cost, included in the price of the contract.
Interestingly, people who already have an iphone contract from O2 will be able to upgrade on the same terms as someone taking out a new contract, not sure if this will require renewing the contract at that stage tho.
I find CD keys to be a pain too... As an example, i bought a TomTom GPS unit, and it came preinstalled and ready to run, and with a backup copy of the software on CD, it also came with a tiny little sticker containing a registration code. It also came with 2 sets of maps, one of which was slightly too big to fit on the memory card. Some time down the line i tried to install a bigger memory card, and decided to put both sets of maps on there... Found the CD, installed it.. Now considering that the second map covers a foreign country, when i actually found myself in that foreign country i decided to switch to the foreign map. Here i hit a problem, i needed to enter that code from the tiny sticker to "activate" the map... Obviously i didn't have it with me in the hotel, and even if i was at home i'd have no idea where it was... TomTom weren't very helpful, and basically suggested i needed to buy a whole new device. So, i found a keygen online and problem solved.
I have big stacks of papers, CDs, DVDs and other junk here... It's way too much hassle to keep copies of all the various junk on hand. Games that require you to insert the media are an even bigger pain... I travel a lot, with my laptop, it uses an external DVD reader which i rarely take with me. Having to take the external dvd reader, plus a stack of game media with me is just asking for trouble... The hassle of carrying it all round, the risk of losing stuff...
I also don't like double dipping, where you are charged once for the game, but can't actually play it unless you pay again for a subscription... I believe world of warcraft is like this. A counter example is eve online, where you can download the game for free but you need to subscribe to a service to actually play it, you can also get a 2 week free trial. Tho the trouble with online games like these, is that once the vendors stops providing the service you will never be able to play the game again. I think vendors of such games should make an up front statement as to what happens when they end of life the game. They could open source it for instance, many people still play quake.
Copy protection schemes for offline games are ultimately useless tho. They only serve to stop casual pirates (ie schoolkids making copies for friends) and do nothing to stop the warez groups and street vendors. The end result is that the pirated copy is better (you can make copies for friends, the copy protection schemes are gone) and online protection schemes, while they can work, i would avoid such games unless they agree what to do once they're no longer going to run the registration servers. I play a lot of old classic games, what happens to current games when the registration servers go dark?
The byte order? Does it use the reversed byte order on PPC or just Intel? Perhaps this is simply a bug with the port to x86...
OSX also wants the IP Offset and packet length fields in host byte order when constructing raw packets, whereas every other OS seems to want them in network byte order... This was never an issue on PPC since the host and network byte orders are the same, but it broke a lot of apps when ported to x86.
Same flags maybe, but not the same compiler version, nor the same flags used when compiling the kernel or the libs the benchmark programs link against..
It has a lot to do with user perceptions... Mac users won't tollerate bugs, and will kick up a fuss until they get fixed... Windows users have simply come to accept bugginess as being normal, and so just sit and take it without causing a fuss.
Why would advertisers care? They want to advertise their product to as wide an audience as possible, and offering free MP3 downloads is a very good way to attract an audience. Why should the owners of the businesses paying for advertising from Baidu put the interest of another business (the RIAA) before their own? That's completely ridiculous, and incredibly arrogant.
How about the RIAA forego what's in their interests, and help the business of companies like Allofmp3 and backbone providers..
How much money do you think the tier1 carriers make every year due to the amount of warez being transmitted over their lines? How dare the RIAA get in the way of their right to make profit.
Yeah, apple do it but only for some performance critical programs... I believe Leopard was compiled for G4 and above only tho, while the x86 version is compiled for SSE3+...
A custom linux optimized for the hardware does make sense, but how long will that vendor want to keep maintaining it? A piece of hardware sold today will be obsolete in a year, and warrant it's own optimized distribution. If people want to keep using the hardware, do they run sub optimal binaries on it (which will make the already seemingly slow due to age hardware seem even worse) or stick with old software?
The site doesn't seem to offer a good way to compare systems side by side... You also need a lot of information to accurately compare linux benchmarks, not only the hardware configuration but also the compiler version and flags used to compile the kernel, test programs and dependant libraries.
For that reason, i'd like to be able to compare... The same distro/programs on different hardware Different distros / compilation options on the same hardware
I'm also curious about the speed and size of code output by various versions of GCC, from my limited testing 3.4.6 was much faster than 4.0 and 4.1, faster in *some* areas than 4.2 but gcc 4.3 was generally faster overall.
PHP is just a language, it's just as possible to write a vulnerable web application in C, ASP.NET, Java or Perl etc... PHP just happens to be very popular among the people writing webapps, because it's free, easy to learn, widely used and widely available from cheap webhosting companies.
PHP on the other hand has various features designed to mitigate web vulnerabilities, such as magic quotes, that some other languages lack. Tho these features can (and often are) turned off, while newbie coders often rely on them working.
So part of it's problem is that it's easy to pick up and learn, so a lot of people can create apps and often release them to the public, but you don't really want to be running apps written by an inexperienced coder...
It makes sense, having read some of the hackintosh forums, it seems the core of OSX uses SSE3 instructions because no intel based macs use a processor older than that.
By contrast, binary based linux distros typically set a minimum hardware platform a lot further back, 386 or 486 perhaps... Consequently, they can't take advantage of features present in modern CPUs, which could explain the recent ubuntu vs xp benchmarks where media processing (something SSE features in modern cpus are designed for) was faster on xp...
Windows sits somewhere between the 2 extremes, it has multiple codepaths for certain performance critical areas (eg video routines/drivers), where it uses the sse version if it can... This is fairly common among closed source programs, but very rare in the open source world because you can configure the cpu at compile time.
The problem is a lot less with 64bit, because the oldest possible x86_64 system is an athlon64, which has far more in common with a more modern cpu than a 386 does... Tho this will change in time.
The same issue hit apple too, they used to have multiple codepaths for G3/G4 (altivec mostly), and there is talk of the same thing happening with 64bit x86_64 too.
I'm not sure what the answer is... It would take up a lot of space and effort to have different binaries for different processors.. It's possible to do it with some critical pieces of code (kernel, glibc, x11, media/crypto programs, games) but the relatively minor benefits from recompiling everything do add up, despite what anti-gentoo people say.
People might try stupid things with gentoo, like -O9 -funsafe_untested_optimizations etc, but just setting -O2 or -Os and the CPU type helps a lot, -Os can actually be faster if you're short of memory or have a small cpu cache.
Source distributions solve the problems, but cause some of their own too... What about a hybrid system, that recompiles itself at low priority in the background without any user intervention.
similarly for me most offices I have worked in are poor environments. often no aircon, as there are laws about making people work in the cold but not in excessive heat. often lots of noise, or a silence policy which can be even worse. sometimes you are forced to listen to someone else choice of music, or suffer the noise smell and disease of someone who is ill. and then there could just be people in the office you don't like.
actually repeatedly moving between keyboard and mouse seems to be the biggest issue. many people I know were just fine for years with text based terminals but have started having problems since moving to GUI based systems, usually affecting the hand that operates the mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
Amusing that OOXML will require "substantially more work", it reinforces what people have been saying about it being difficult to implement... And if Microsoft have trouble implementing it, when they wrote it in the first place, just think how difficult it will be for other parties?
Europe can also lean in hard on the US...
The euro is going strong, the Dollar is comparatively weak...
Who would give in first? The US to benefit Microsoft alone at the expense of the rest of the country, or the EU to benefit the whole of the EU? If really pushed, i think the US would have to back down.
Simple...
It's no longer possible to write a commercial desktop or server OS and expect to turn a profit from it... BeOS was great, but it wasn't compatible with microsoft and ultimately doomed.
Open source is barely competing, despite the obvious price advantage.
Similarly, you can't write a commercial office suite, just look at wordperfect, once the dominant player, now pretty screwed...
Novell faced a similar fate...
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft simply isn't viable... The only way to compete is very slowly through open source, leveraging the lack of cost and advantages of distributed development. Even then, the process of winning market share over from microsoft is far too slow to make a business selling competing software.
Then why don't they price them lower?
The unit cost is ridiculously low, so even selling at $1 per copy would be profitable... But with much lower prices, they could make it up in volume. Those who would have bought it anyway will still do so, and probably buy more games as well with the savings (ie they will still spend a similar amount of money, just not all on one product)... Many people will impulse buy because the risk is low (if its crap, you only lost $10 not $50), many people will buy because it's more convenient than pirating.
And how about all those people in the UK who are being bombarded by advertisements from american websites, and talk about doom3 from their american friends and americans on websites like slashdot... Why should the british be artificially restricted from playing something that's available to americans? That sounds like racism to me...
As the grandparent said, "when we were younger"...
As a kid, i wasn't especially affluent, and neither were my school friends. So we had the choice, buy a small number of games and run them on older hardware, or buy more/newer/better hardware with our limited funds and play a larger number of pirated games.
Obviously we chose the latter, since it was simply better value for money. The smaller number of games we could have afforded to buy legitimately wouldn't have kept us entertained for anywhere near as long, and we would have been doing other things instead (like hanging around on street corners with knives).
Sure, a Ferrari won't cost $200k in raw materials, but each Ferrari produced will cost a significant amount of raw materials and labor to assemble it, test it, and transport it.
On the other hand, each subsequent copy of a piece of digital media costs virtually nothing. You can even farm out the distribution to third parties (eg torrents, mirror sites) so that subsequent copies will cost you nothing whatsoever.
A Ferrari may not cost $200k in raw materials, but it would probably cost you more than that to build one yourself because of all the specialist tools and training required.
Software production is most definitely different, in many ways...
It is possible to design a car for free, It is possible to design software for free.
It is NOT possible to build a car for free since you need raw materials, It is possible to build software for free.
To build a car you need specialist equipment which can't be free, To build software you can use specialist tools (compilers/debuggers as opposed to manually entering machine code) but these can be obtained for free.
You can dismantle cars and reuse the parts for other purposes, but you still need to buy each part, you can't copy the parts easily without specialist tools.
While it's perfectly possible to do the same with software, as well as easily duplicating the parts, vendors will often get in your way. Some software (eg open source) openly encourages you to reuse, modify and duplicate the parts.
Cars typically have after market parts available for them too, software makers often discourage this, either by clamping down on modders or simply by not publishing the inner workings of their software sufficiently to allow third parties to produce replacement parts.
The auto industry is mature enough, such that most parts are standardised and you're not forced to buy replacements from the original vendor. Whereas there is a lot of lock-in among software vendors still, because the market hasn't matured enough for the majority of people to realise how badly they're being screwed yet.
// They wanted to sell it to you for a certain price.
Actually, this business model is completely broken under true capitalism...
Under true free market capitalism, the fact that someone else is able to copy your product and sell it for lower cost will put you out of business.
Not sure how to describe the system of government we have, but the idea of artificial government intervention to prop up the broken business models of a small number of companies is quite anti capitalist.
Interestingly, if you get the £75 tariff from O2 you can get either the 8gb or 16gb iphone for free...
Who in their right mind would get the 8, when the 16 is clearly superior for the same cost?
You also don't get detailed specs when purchasing a game...
You get some (usually biased) magazine reviews with a few screenshots, and sometimes a demo which is often the best level of the game with the rest being quite half assed.
Interestingly, this would result in the kind of games the customers actually want, instead of the endless streams of dross you get today... Movies are the same BTW... Endless sequels, shameless merchandising or half assed copies of existing games.
You can also pay for a service - look at eve online for a good example.
There needs to be some accountability for continued availability, there are many old pieces of software people would like to buy, but the original suppliers simply refuse to sell or even give away copies, despite the trivial costs of doing so. I think copyright law should be changed so that the vendor must continue to make the work available, at the same or lower cost than it was available previously, until such time as the copyright expires. Or give up the copyright early, release the work into the public domain and be free of the obligations. Copyright shouldn't be a one way street, it should have obligations on both sides. With software, when copyright expires the source code should be released too. And the copyright lengths need to be shorter, 90+ years is ridiculous especially for software, look how much computers have changed, will we even be able to run current programs in 90 years?
If you read O2's site, they are making the phone available for "free" on the higher priced plans... the £45/month and higher I believe. It's £100 on the cheaper tariffs (30 or 35 per month).
They're also going to offer prepaid tariffs, but not sure how much the phone will cost then. Nothing really to stop you buying a prepaid sim with a minimum credit, then getting it unlocked... Even if you do have to buy £10 credit, you can still use it up...
I'm not sure where the law stands on unlocking, i think they're required to be able to unlock your phone when the contract expires, and charge you an administrative fee for doing so. Not sure about prepaid phones, but you should have more justification to demand an unlock with a prepaid as it's not been subsidised by a contract.
It seems existing UK iphone users will be able to upgrade before their O2 contracts expire... And the phone will be available in a far more similar fashion to standard contracts, namely...
The new iphone is available for a cost to people subscribing to the cheaper O2 contracts...
It will also be available on prepay contracts, again at a cost...
People subscribing to the more expensive O2 contracts can get the phone with no upfront cost, included in the price of the contract.
Interestingly, people who already have an iphone contract from O2 will be able to upgrade on the same terms as someone taking out a new contract, not sure if this will require renewing the contract at that stage tho.
So those of us who are unfortunate enough to live outside of these regions are somehow unworthy of having the cheap game, and have to pay full price?
Sounds like racism to me...
I find CD keys to be a pain too...
As an example, i bought a TomTom GPS unit, and it came preinstalled and ready to run, and with a backup copy of the software on CD, it also came with a tiny little sticker containing a registration code.
It also came with 2 sets of maps, one of which was slightly too big to fit on the memory card.
Some time down the line i tried to install a bigger memory card, and decided to put both sets of maps on there... Found the CD, installed it.. Now considering that the second map covers a foreign country, when i actually found myself in that foreign country i decided to switch to the foreign map. Here i hit a problem, i needed to enter that code from the tiny sticker to "activate" the map... Obviously i didn't have it with me in the hotel, and even if i was at home i'd have no idea where it was... TomTom weren't very helpful, and basically suggested i needed to buy a whole new device. So, i found a keygen online and problem solved.
I have big stacks of papers, CDs, DVDs and other junk here... It's way too much hassle to keep copies of all the various junk on hand. Games that require you to insert the media are an even bigger pain... I travel a lot, with my laptop, it uses an external DVD reader which i rarely take with me. Having to take the external dvd reader, plus a stack of game media with me is just asking for trouble... The hassle of carrying it all round, the risk of losing stuff...
I also don't like double dipping, where you are charged once for the game, but can't actually play it unless you pay again for a subscription... I believe world of warcraft is like this. A counter example is eve online, where you can download the game for free but you need to subscribe to a service to actually play it, you can also get a 2 week free trial. Tho the trouble with online games like these, is that once the vendors stops providing the service you will never be able to play the game again. I think vendors of such games should make an up front statement as to what happens when they end of life the game. They could open source it for instance, many people still play quake.
Copy protection schemes for offline games are ultimately useless tho. They only serve to stop casual pirates (ie schoolkids making copies for friends) and do nothing to stop the warez groups and street vendors. The end result is that the pirated copy is better (you can make copies for friends, the copy protection schemes are gone) and online protection schemes, while they can work, i would avoid such games unless they agree what to do once they're no longer going to run the registration servers. I play a lot of old classic games, what happens to current games when the registration servers go dark?
The byte order?
Does it use the reversed byte order on PPC or just Intel? Perhaps this is simply a bug with the port to x86...
OSX also wants the IP Offset and packet length fields in host byte order when constructing raw packets, whereas every other OS seems to want them in network byte order... This was never an issue on PPC since the host and network byte orders are the same, but it broke a lot of apps when ported to x86.
Same flags maybe, but not the same compiler version, nor the same flags used when compiling the kernel or the libs the benchmark programs link against..
It has a lot to do with user perceptions...
Mac users won't tollerate bugs, and will kick up a fuss until they get fixed...
Windows users have simply come to accept bugginess as being normal, and so just sit and take it without causing a fuss.
Why would advertisers care?
They want to advertise their product to as wide an audience as possible, and offering free MP3 downloads is a very good way to attract an audience.
Why should the owners of the businesses paying for advertising from Baidu put the interest of another business (the RIAA) before their own? That's completely ridiculous, and incredibly arrogant.
How about the RIAA forego what's in their interests, and help the business of companies like Allofmp3 and backbone providers..
How much money do you think the tier1 carriers make every year due to the amount of warez being transmitted over their lines? How dare the RIAA get in the way of their right to make profit.
Yeah, apple do it but only for some performance critical programs... I believe Leopard was compiled for G4 and above only tho, while the x86 version is compiled for SSE3+...
A custom linux optimized for the hardware does make sense, but how long will that vendor want to keep maintaining it? A piece of hardware sold today will be obsolete in a year, and warrant it's own optimized distribution. If people want to keep using the hardware, do they run sub optimal binaries on it (which will make the already seemingly slow due to age hardware seem even worse) or stick with old software?
The site doesn't seem to offer a good way to compare systems side by side...
You also need a lot of information to accurately compare linux benchmarks, not only the hardware configuration but also the compiler version and flags used to compile the kernel, test programs and dependant libraries.
For that reason, i'd like to be able to compare...
The same distro/programs on different hardware
Different distros / compilation options on the same hardware
I'm also curious about the speed and size of code output by various versions of GCC, from my limited testing 3.4.6 was much faster than 4.0 and 4.1, faster in *some* areas than 4.2 but gcc 4.3 was generally faster overall.
PHP is just a language, it's just as possible to write a vulnerable web application in C, ASP.NET, Java or Perl etc... PHP just happens to be very popular among the people writing webapps, because it's free, easy to learn, widely used and widely available from cheap webhosting companies.
PHP on the other hand has various features designed to mitigate web vulnerabilities, such as magic quotes, that some other languages lack. Tho these features can (and often are) turned off, while newbie coders often rely on them working.
So part of it's problem is that it's easy to pick up and learn, so a lot of people can create apps and often release them to the public, but you don't really want to be running apps written by an inexperienced coder...
It makes sense, having read some of the hackintosh forums, it seems the core of OSX uses SSE3 instructions because no intel based macs use a processor older than that.
By contrast, binary based linux distros typically set a minimum hardware platform a lot further back, 386 or 486 perhaps... Consequently, they can't take advantage of features present in modern CPUs, which could explain the recent ubuntu vs xp benchmarks where media processing (something SSE features in modern cpus are designed for) was faster on xp...
Windows sits somewhere between the 2 extremes, it has multiple codepaths for certain performance critical areas (eg video routines/drivers), where it uses the sse version if it can... This is fairly common among closed source programs, but very rare in the open source world because you can configure the cpu at compile time.
The problem is a lot less with 64bit, because the oldest possible x86_64 system is an athlon64, which has far more in common with a more modern cpu than a 386 does... Tho this will change in time.
The same issue hit apple too, they used to have multiple codepaths for G3/G4 (altivec mostly), and there is talk of the same thing happening with 64bit x86_64 too.
I'm not sure what the answer is... It would take up a lot of space and effort to have different binaries for different processors.. It's possible to do it with some critical pieces of code (kernel, glibc, x11, media/crypto programs, games) but the relatively minor benefits from recompiling everything do add up, despite what anti-gentoo people say.
People might try stupid things with gentoo, like -O9 -funsafe_untested_optimizations etc, but just setting -O2 or -Os and the CPU type helps a lot, -Os can actually be faster if you're short of memory or have a small cpu cache.
Source distributions solve the problems, but cause some of their own too... What about a hybrid system, that recompiles itself at low priority in the background without any user intervention.
similarly for me most offices I have worked in are poor environments. often no aircon, as there are laws about making people work in the cold but not in excessive heat. often lots of noise, or a silence policy which can be even worse. sometimes you are forced to listen to someone else choice of music, or suffer the noise smell and disease of someone who is ill. and then there could just be people in the office you don't like.
actually repeatedly moving between keyboard and mouse seems to be the biggest issue. many people I know were just fine for years with text based terminals but have started having problems since moving to GUI based systems, usually affecting the hand that operates the mouse.