The one complaint I've gotten from people that I switched over is that ESPN motion doesn't work. Most of ESPN, of course, is fine, but the Motion thing (which is a kind of cool streaming video deal) requires Media Player and IE.
Hmm, I've actually been thinking about setting up something similar. The catch is that I have a Sony Picturebook with a built in camera. I'm thinking about setting it to automatically take a picture any time someone opens/boots it and emailing me the picture. Maybe also if they type a bad password? (How do I set a script to run on bad password entry??) Possibly helping the situation is that I just leave a wireless card plugged in and here on campus anywhere I take the laptop is likely to have wireless.
I could imagine a scenario where I accidentally leave it somewhere for a minute, someone walks up to it, sees it, opens it up, likes what he sees, and runs away with it. As long as they don't pull the wireless card before opening it and open it while still in an area with wireless coverage, I think I should be golden. Also, if they ever try to use the wireless card anywhere on campus again I could easily find out where the MAC address is being used from through the DHCP server's logs. Anyone see any holes in my plan?
While the accessibility benefits you mention are nice, I think the key to this that most people seem to be missing is the usefulness on PDAs. I seem to recall Opera being most successful with the embedded version of their browser, and I'd say that is probably where voice interaction has the most usefulness.
Imagine a PDA that you can actually talk to instead of having to struggle with "Graffiti" or the little thumb keyboards. Hell, if it's good enough, you could even get rid of the need for a screen and just interact entirely through voice - here's how we could finally get a useable web browser/email client/schedule program in a watch!
One step closer to some of the concepts explored in Snowcrash, maybe?
Google puts a lot of emphasis into making sure its ads are *good* results.
What are you talking about?!?
Umm, did you actually READ my post before deciding to reply with yet another generic rant about Google getting worse? My point has nothing to do with the accuracy of non-advertising search results.
I was simply pointing out that while many (all?) other sites will accept any advertiser willing to pay the right price, Google will choose which ad to display not based on the amount the advertiser pays but based on the relevance of the ad to the search. This relevance is evaluated based on user click-through rates of the ad - if the rates aren't high enough, the ad will not be displayed. The ads are in some sense "user-moderated", a la Slashdot. As a result of this, sometimes the ads even wind up better than the normal search results!
Everyone's talking about how Google clearly separates its ads from its search results, and yes, that is nice, but I think Google has something else going for its advertising service that nobody seems to be noticing.
Google puts a lot of emphasis into making sure its ads are *good* results. More important than just indexing the advertised pages and doing the usual IR analysis on the content of the page, it also takes into account the click-through rate of the given ad. An ad with a higher click-through rate is probably more relevant since more users are clicking on it. Displaying ads which have historically high click-through rates benefits everyone involved - Google benefits by being more likely to get the money for the click-through, the user benefits by seeing more relevant ads, and the advertisers benefit by having their ad shown in relevant situations where people actually want to see it (hmm, I guess this last point is a bit weaker, but the benefit to the advertisers is not really important - they wouldn't be advertising if they saw no benefit).
One final point is that it's tempting to think this type of "user-moderation" system would work well for normal search results as well (and I suspect there's room to grow in this area), the reason it works especially well for ads is that there's less incentive for the advertiser to try to cheat the system - if they clicked their own links a lot, they might raise their ad's rank but also have to pay for all of those useless clicks.
We've been planning to post the source for a while now but we wanted to clean it up a little before posting and then we all got sidetracked with other work. I think we're keeping track of who wanted to get notified when we do release the source, so if you want to get added to that list send me an email.
Oh, and I'm with you on the multiplayer version - the AI has a few weaknesses that make the game a bit too easy once you figure them out. Multiplayer is without doubt the killer feature we'd like to add once we do get the source out there.
I've played the same game in both OpenGL and DirectX (Unreal 2003 or Unreal2...I forgot which one) and they flawlessly. [sic] In fact, I can't tell which one is better.
You can't tell the difference because for that particular game, they are used in essentially identical ways. I would assume that if the Unreal series is going to bother supporting both APIs, they simply added a layer of abstraction to their graphics code, coded the engine using that abstraction, and then created implementations of the abstraction for both OpenGL and Direct3D that look exactly the same by design.
This, however, implies nothing about the quality of either API, it merely suggests that the developers coded to the greatest common subset of both APIs. Of course, it does seem that this subset is good enough to make a nice-looking game, which seems to suggest that it doesn't really matter from an end-user perspective which API the developer chooses. Therefore...
But if your going to program a game in an API, why not DirectX? It handles Video, Audio, and input. OpenGL is nice, but it only does video (that I know of).
This is totally irrelevant - we just saw that Direct3d and OpenGL are equally capable so why choose the one that limits you to a single platform? The fact that DirectX handles other things is totally irrelevant - you can use OpenGL alongside the other components of DirectX without a problem (and this is in fact what Carmack has done in the past). You can also just use other libraries for other aspects - for example, SDL works just great. While certainly not of the scope of these commercial games, I found that SDL+OpenGL was more than adequate for my own game, and I got the bonus of being able to make Linux, Mac, and even Windows versions with only about 2 total lines of code changed (had to switch where the #include's pointed for each platform, though a more clever build environment probably could've handled that). Offhand, about the only thing we couldn't do with SDL + OpenGL that DirectX provides is the network coding/matchmaking stuff from DirectPlay, but AFAIK most commercial games don't use this anyway.
That's awesome - I can definitely think of a few times it would have come in handy for me.
Another new feature of 3.2 I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone here mention yet is the new hotkeys system. It is amazing in its flexibility - you can tell it to do anything from starting a program to performing a DCOP call to pressing a button in any open window in response to just about any type of input - a mouse gesture, a keyboard shortcut, a window opening up. For example, I used it to make mouse gestures to change tracks in XMMS. You can make the input "global" or "local" to any specific program (with the option to set it to only be triggered if a particular window has focus). My only complaint is that the new LIRC remote control setup doesn't integrate into this framework.
Umm...can you say The Matrix? The series was loaded with references to Neo as some sort of God-like figure (mainly Jesus, I suppose). Granted, a lot of people didn't really like Revolutions, which seemed to lay it on the heaviest, but the allegory was there even in the first one. Perhaps subtlety is the key to making it work on film.
The first article mentions a rewritten NTFS driver that supports read/write - I thought that the NTFS driver is still (and always will be, aside from the recent story about using Windows' ntfs.dll) considered "experimental", right? Perhaps it will still be labeled that way but will actually be solid enough to use? Anyone know?
Also, the second article mentions potential problems with usb mass storage devices (flash card readers, digital cameras, etc.) but never really draws any conclusions about how they will work - any ideas here?
I have Joust for NES, though it's on a bootleg Japanese cartridge along with 62 other games - I'd assume this means they did at some point release it, but not necessarily in the US. While Balloon Fight is clearly a rip-off of it, I'd say Balloon Fight is also a bit more fun.
Incidentally, the cartridge also has a bunch of these other top 30's - Super Mario 1, Mario Bros, Ice Climber, Balloon Fight, Excitebike, Twinbee, Mappy, Lode Runner, and Bomberman. I never knew Twinbee was popular, but I always loved that game so it's cool to see it up there.
The other comment about the importance of 2 players playing simultaneously (like Twinbee) is definitely right on the money. Another game like this that comes to mind that I haven't heard anyone else mention is Bubble Bobble.
I looked for this a few months ago and the only site I managed to find it on was one that had it as part of a really long real audio stream with a bunch of other stuff, so I ripped it out of that and converted to mp3. (Yeah, yeah, I know, bad quality, blah blah blah. This is a McDonald's jingle, do you really care about its sound quality?)
Enjoy.:)
Of course, I have to wonder why these companies continue to apply for such stupid patents.
Bezos came to my school to give a fluffy little talk, after which I asked him about his views on patents. He was kind of rushed so he only gave a brief answer, but basically, he said that "Certain companies try to innovate and take risks and lead the way, while other companies just copy the innovators ideas and reap the reward without having to take the risk. Patents help reward the innovators for their risk-taking."
I'd say his overall point is somewhat valid, but I do have to wonder how much "research" and "risk-taking" Amazon really had to put into all their stupid little obvious-yet-patented features.
Just wanted to throw in a quick plug for iRATE radio. I've only been using it for a day or two but it seems pretty decent so far. It uses collaborative filtering to find free, legally available music that it thinks you will like, based on your ratings of previous songs. The first 7 or 8 songs were pretty bad, but it's definitely getting a lot better pretty quickly. Oh, and it works for Windows, Linux, and Mac. http://irate.sourceforge.net/.
I think the way it works here is that if your computer appears to be compromised, you first lose DNS service. When you call to find out what's up, they tell you to type in an IP address in your browser which has instructions on fixing your computer. Once you've fixed it, they rescan your computer and let you back on the network. If you haven't fixed your computer within a few days, they revoke all internet access from your computer, at which point you can contact a "resident computer consultant" who will help you out.
That said, even with this procedure in place, I'm sure it will be hell for the first couple weeks of school when suddenly, say, 5000 compromised computers join the network (and of course it will be even worse at some bigger schools).
Disclaimer: that the following applies only to US colleges; obviously the situation is entirely different in other countries.
Is there really a surprise when schools that cost $30,000 per year rank at the top?
$30,000? That is soo 5-10 years ago - it's more like $40k now:). Though honestly, it's a lot better than that sounds once you consider the amount of financial aid these schools give out. I found it interesting to see that the "best values" were dominated by the same private schools with stereotypes for being overpriced and full of rich yuppies. A lot of people assume I pay some ungodly amount of money just to get a nice prestigious name on my record, but I think in the end it's probably not much more than I'd be paying to go most other places. If you're paying the full tuition to these schools, then you probably can afford to (though again for foreigners the situation is entirely different - I think it's much harder to get aid if you're not American).
I've always wondered how Paul Graham has managed to get so much hype built up about his work. The idea of using Bayesian filters to classify spam had been around about 5 years prior to his "A Plan For Spam" - check out, for example, this paper by Mehran Sahami (a very cool guy who works here at Stanford as well as at Google) from 1998: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/sahami98bayesian.html (and if you search around on Citeseer you'll undoubtedly find many other papers on spam classifying from even earlier, though not all use Naive Bayes).
Mathematically, Graham's version of Naive Bayes is pretty weak - look at the original A Plan for Spam, he chooses all kinds of random numbers based purely on trial and error, rather than backing them up with mathematical reasoning:
I want to bias the probabilities slightly to avoid false positives, and by trial and error I've found that a good way to do it is to double all the numbers in good. This helps to distinguish between words that occasionally do occur in legitimate email and words that almost never do. I only consider words that occur more than five times in total (actually, because of the doubling, occurring three times in nonspam mail would be enough). And then there is the question of what probability to assign to words that occur in one corpus but not the other. Again by trial and error I chose.01 and.99. There may be room for tuning here, but as the corpus grows such tuning will happen automatically anyway.
That's just one paragraph, stuff like that is all over the paper. There are many more logical ways to bias the classifier away from false-positives, which I'm not sure if it's worth getting into. Having spent the summer implementing many different variations on spam filtering, I can say confidently that Graham's variation is definitely far from the best.
Surprised I haven't seen any posts specifically describing this yet, but in KDE 3.1 (at least the version in Debian, but I think it's distro-independent) there's a "Start new session" option in the k-menu which opens up kdm in a new x session. You can also access this when the screen is locked - there's a button in the password prompt to start a new session.
Cases are like $35 now, including power supply. That's too cheap to care about.
Sorry, but I have to disagree. While I wouldn't advise going all-out, don't just get the cheapest one you see either. A bad case can make putting together your own computer a far less pleasant experience...example: a friend of mine got a cheap case and within a day managed to accidentally break the connection between the power button and the wire that goes to the motherboard. Ever since then, he's had to manually touch the two ends of the wire to complete this connection every time he wants to turn on his computer!
I have had good experiences with Enlight cases. They're pretty inexpensive and, while not particularly exciting looking, function well - the drive bays all slide in and out, and the case is the perfect size (not huge but enough room for expansion and cooling). Relatively easy to take apart, too (snap off the front and take out one screw...not quite on par with the thumb-screws you find on some other cases but the next best thing).
I think you're right on, except for the "it's still the best source-based distro out there" comment. Though I haven't really been following it recently (ever since I saw the light and switched to Debian, I haven't really looked back to the source-based distros), I suspect Source Mage might give Gentoo a run for its money.
When Source Mage was first being formed (which itself was after a series of ugly fork-related situations) everyone made sure to put a lot of effort into creating strong Debian-like guidelines to ensure that it would be controlled by its community and not have to deal with the corruption that seems to be present at Gentoo. It will be interesting to see if this controversy will push any users toward switching to Source Mage. More info about it here.
Though of course, I must say, you should probably save yourself the trouble of compiling all that crap anyway and just get yourself a real distro.
Even if Apple keeps all of it's current customers, it could still end up 3rd behind Linux.
Exactly. I can't believe how few people here seem to be getting this point. The issue is not if Linux will steal users from OS X, nor is it if Linux is better or easier or more friendly than OS X. All that is being questioned is (when) will Linux have more users than OS X. I think it's probably safe to assume that most people who are already using Linux or Mac will stick with either Linux or Mac (perhaps a few Linux users will convert to Mac). Still, Linux gets most of its users from people sick of Windows. As long as Microsoft keeps making shit and people keep buying PC's, there will always be plenty of potential new Linux users - it's just a question of convincing someone to download a free copy.
Contrast that with Mac, where all those Windows users would have to throw out their old machines and plunk down a couple thousand in order to start using it. Even if OS X is superior, Linux has a larger base of supported hardware already in the marketplace, so it is a lot easier for people to try it out.
As far as I know, there are no accurate statistics on the desktop breakdown - all attempts to count this are heavily flawed (if counting based on computer sales, for example, then you are neglecting the longer shelf-life of the Mac and the large number of people who buy computers with Windows only to later install Linux). I'm pretty sure, though, that Linux has seen faster growth than Mac OS, so it seems reasonable to guess that Linux will eventually get bigger.
Is that even really necessary? Is what they did actually illegal?
It seems to me comparable to all the "brand-x" stuff you see in a grocery store. Look at all the Dr. Pepper rip-offs [quick google search...] - here - most have names that start with Dr. and end with something similar to Pepper. Those are legal, right? How is this any different?
Slashdot Mirror
The one complaint I've gotten from people that I switched over is that ESPN motion doesn't work. Most of ESPN, of course, is fine, but the Motion thing (which is a kind of cool streaming video deal) requires Media Player and IE.
Try Motion. I've messed around with it in the past and it seems to work great.
Hmm, I've actually been thinking about setting up something similar. The catch is that I have a Sony Picturebook with a built in camera. I'm thinking about setting it to automatically take a picture any time someone opens/boots it and emailing me the picture. Maybe also if they type a bad password? (How do I set a script to run on bad password entry??) Possibly helping the situation is that I just leave a wireless card plugged in and here on campus anywhere I take the laptop is likely to have wireless.
I could imagine a scenario where I accidentally leave it somewhere for a minute, someone walks up to it, sees it, opens it up, likes what he sees, and runs away with it. As long as they don't pull the wireless card before opening it and open it while still in an area with wireless coverage, I think I should be golden. Also, if they ever try to use the wireless card anywhere on campus again I could easily find out where the MAC address is being used from through the DHCP server's logs. Anyone see any holes in my plan?
Imagine a PDA that you can actually talk to instead of having to struggle with "Graffiti" or the little thumb keyboards. Hell, if it's good enough, you could even get rid of the need for a screen and just interact entirely through voice - here's how we could finally get a useable web browser/email client/schedule program in a watch!
One step closer to some of the concepts explored in Snowcrash, maybe?
I was simply pointing out that while many (all?) other sites will accept any advertiser willing to pay the right price, Google will choose which ad to display not based on the amount the advertiser pays but based on the relevance of the ad to the search. This relevance is evaluated based on user click-through rates of the ad - if the rates aren't high enough, the ad will not be displayed. The ads are in some sense "user-moderated", a la Slashdot. As a result of this, sometimes the ads even wind up better than the normal search results!
Google puts a lot of emphasis into making sure its ads are *good* results. More important than just indexing the advertised pages and doing the usual IR analysis on the content of the page, it also takes into account the click-through rate of the given ad. An ad with a higher click-through rate is probably more relevant since more users are clicking on it. Displaying ads which have historically high click-through rates benefits everyone involved - Google benefits by being more likely to get the money for the click-through, the user benefits by seeing more relevant ads, and the advertisers benefit by having their ad shown in relevant situations where people actually want to see it (hmm, I guess this last point is a bit weaker, but the benefit to the advertisers is not really important - they wouldn't be advertising if they saw no benefit).
One final point is that it's tempting to think this type of "user-moderation" system would work well for normal search results as well (and I suspect there's room to grow in this area), the reason it works especially well for ads is that there's less incentive for the advertiser to try to cheat the system - if they clicked their own links a lot, they might raise their ad's rank but also have to pay for all of those useless clicks.
We've been planning to post the source for a while now but we wanted to clean it up a little before posting and then we all got sidetracked with other work. I think we're keeping track of who wanted to get notified when we do release the source, so if you want to get added to that list send me an email.
Oh, and I'm with you on the multiplayer version - the AI has a few weaknesses that make the game a bit too easy once you figure them out. Multiplayer is without doubt the killer feature we'd like to add once we do get the source out there.
You can't tell the difference because for that particular game, they are used in essentially identical ways. I would assume that if the Unreal series is going to bother supporting both APIs, they simply added a layer of abstraction to their graphics code, coded the engine using that abstraction, and then created implementations of the abstraction for both OpenGL and Direct3D that look exactly the same by design.
This, however, implies nothing about the quality of either API, it merely suggests that the developers coded to the greatest common subset of both APIs. Of course, it does seem that this subset is good enough to make a nice-looking game, which seems to suggest that it doesn't really matter from an end-user perspective which API the developer chooses. Therefore...
But if your going to program a game in an API, why not DirectX? It handles Video, Audio, and input. OpenGL is nice, but it only does video (that I know of).
This is totally irrelevant - we just saw that Direct3d and OpenGL are equally capable so why choose the one that limits you to a single platform? The fact that DirectX handles other things is totally irrelevant - you can use OpenGL alongside the other components of DirectX without a problem (and this is in fact what Carmack has done in the past). You can also just use other libraries for other aspects - for example, SDL works just great. While certainly not of the scope of these commercial games, I found that SDL+OpenGL was more than adequate for my own game, and I got the bonus of being able to make Linux, Mac, and even Windows versions with only about 2 total lines of code changed (had to switch where the #include's pointed for each platform, though a more clever build environment probably could've handled that). Offhand, about the only thing we couldn't do with SDL + OpenGL that DirectX provides is the network coding/matchmaking stuff from DirectPlay, but AFAIK most commercial games don't use this anyway.
Another new feature of 3.2 I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone here mention yet is the new hotkeys system. It is amazing in its flexibility - you can tell it to do anything from starting a program to performing a DCOP call to pressing a button in any open window in response to just about any type of input - a mouse gesture, a keyboard shortcut, a window opening up. For example, I used it to make mouse gestures to change tracks in XMMS. You can make the input "global" or "local" to any specific program (with the option to set it to only be triggered if a particular window has focus). My only complaint is that the new LIRC remote control setup doesn't integrate into this framework.
Umm...can you say The Matrix? The series was loaded with references to Neo as some sort of God-like figure (mainly Jesus, I suppose). Granted, a lot of people didn't really like Revolutions, which seemed to lay it on the heaviest, but the allegory was there even in the first one. Perhaps subtlety is the key to making it work on film.
Also, the second article mentions potential problems with usb mass storage devices (flash card readers, digital cameras, etc.) but never really draws any conclusions about how they will work - any ideas here?
Incidentally, the cartridge also has a bunch of these other top 30's - Super Mario 1, Mario Bros, Ice Climber, Balloon Fight, Excitebike, Twinbee, Mappy, Lode Runner, and Bomberman. I never knew Twinbee was popular, but I always loved that game so it's cool to see it up there.
The other comment about the importance of 2 players playing simultaneously (like Twinbee) is definitely right on the money. Another game like this that comes to mind that I haven't heard anyone else mention is Bubble Bobble.
I looked for this a few months ago and the only site I managed to find it on was one that had it as part of a really long real audio stream with a bunch of other stuff, so I ripped it out of that and converted to mp3. (Yeah, yeah, I know, bad quality, blah blah blah. This is a McDonald's jingle, do you really care about its sound quality?) :)
Enjoy.
Bezos came to my school to give a fluffy little talk, after which I asked him about his views on patents. He was kind of rushed so he only gave a brief answer, but basically, he said that "Certain companies try to innovate and take risks and lead the way, while other companies just copy the innovators ideas and reap the reward without having to take the risk. Patents help reward the innovators for their risk-taking."
I'd say his overall point is somewhat valid, but I do have to wonder how much "research" and "risk-taking" Amazon really had to put into all their stupid little obvious-yet-patented features.
Just wanted to throw in a quick plug for iRATE radio. I've only been using it for a day or two but it seems pretty decent so far. It uses collaborative filtering to find free, legally available music that it thinks you will like, based on your ratings of previous songs. The first 7 or 8 songs were pretty bad, but it's definitely getting a lot better pretty quickly. Oh, and it works for Windows, Linux, and Mac. http://irate.sourceforge.net/.
That said, even with this procedure in place, I'm sure it will be hell for the first couple weeks of school when suddenly, say, 5000 compromised computers join the network (and of course it will be even worse at some bigger schools).
Is there really a surprise when schools that cost $30,000 per year rank at the top?
$30,000? That is soo 5-10 years ago - it's more like $40k now :). Though honestly, it's a lot better than that sounds once you consider the amount of financial aid these schools give out. I found it interesting to see that the "best values" were dominated by the same private schools with stereotypes for being overpriced and full of rich yuppies. A lot of people assume I pay some ungodly amount of money just to get a nice prestigious name on my record, but I think in the end it's probably not much more than I'd be paying to go most other places. If you're paying the full tuition to these schools, then you probably can afford to (though again for foreigners the situation is entirely different - I think it's much harder to get aid if you're not American).
Mathematically, Graham's version of Naive Bayes is pretty weak - look at the original A Plan for Spam, he chooses all kinds of random numbers based purely on trial and error, rather than backing them up with mathematical reasoning:
That's just one paragraph, stuff like that is all over the paper. There are many more logical ways to bias the classifier away from false-positives, which I'm not sure if it's worth getting into. Having spent the summer implementing many different variations on spam filtering, I can say confidently that Graham's variation is definitely far from the best.Whoops - serves me right for posting before noon. Guess I'm the dumb one here. Disregard the parent, please.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, shouldn't that be "without"?? Seems like a pretty ridiculous statement otherwise.
Surprised I haven't seen any posts specifically describing this yet, but in KDE 3.1 (at least the version in Debian, but I think it's distro-independent) there's a "Start new session" option in the k-menu which opens up kdm in a new x session. You can also access this when the screen is locked - there's a button in the password prompt to start a new session.
Sorry, but I have to disagree. While I wouldn't advise going all-out, don't just get the cheapest one you see either. A bad case can make putting together your own computer a far less pleasant experience...example: a friend of mine got a cheap case and within a day managed to accidentally break the connection between the power button and the wire that goes to the motherboard. Ever since then, he's had to manually touch the two ends of the wire to complete this connection every time he wants to turn on his computer!
I have had good experiences with Enlight cases. They're pretty inexpensive and, while not particularly exciting looking, function well - the drive bays all slide in and out, and the case is the perfect size (not huge but enough room for expansion and cooling). Relatively easy to take apart, too (snap off the front and take out one screw...not quite on par with the thumb-screws you find on some other cases but the next best thing).
When Source Mage was first being formed (which itself was after a series of ugly fork-related situations) everyone made sure to put a lot of effort into creating strong Debian-like guidelines to ensure that it would be controlled by its community and not have to deal with the corruption that seems to be present at Gentoo. It will be interesting to see if this controversy will push any users toward switching to Source Mage. More info about it here.
Though of course, I must say, you should probably save yourself the trouble of compiling all that crap anyway and just get yourself a real distro.
Exactly. I can't believe how few people here seem to be getting this point. The issue is not if Linux will steal users from OS X, nor is it if Linux is better or easier or more friendly than OS X. All that is being questioned is (when) will Linux have more users than OS X. I think it's probably safe to assume that most people who are already using Linux or Mac will stick with either Linux or Mac (perhaps a few Linux users will convert to Mac). Still, Linux gets most of its users from people sick of Windows. As long as Microsoft keeps making shit and people keep buying PC's, there will always be plenty of potential new Linux users - it's just a question of convincing someone to download a free copy.
Contrast that with Mac, where all those Windows users would have to throw out their old machines and plunk down a couple thousand in order to start using it. Even if OS X is superior, Linux has a larger base of supported hardware already in the marketplace, so it is a lot easier for people to try it out.
As far as I know, there are no accurate statistics on the desktop breakdown - all attempts to count this are heavily flawed (if counting based on computer sales, for example, then you are neglecting the longer shelf-life of the Mac and the large number of people who buy computers with Windows only to later install Linux). I'm pretty sure, though, that Linux has seen faster growth than Mac OS, so it seems reasonable to guess that Linux will eventually get bigger.
It seems to me comparable to all the "brand-x" stuff you see in a grocery store. Look at all the Dr. Pepper rip-offs [quick google search...] - here - most have names that start with Dr. and end with something similar to Pepper. Those are legal, right? How is this any different?