Exactly right. Manufacturers all sell cars that are capable of driving faster (much faster usually) than 100KM/Hour (65MPH). Nearly every country (Germanys fine autobahns excepted) have a speed limit of ~100KM/hour. This is analogous to saying these companies are aiding and abetting speeders. They should be held responsible for all violations of the speed limit because they made a machine capable of violating this limit.
Just because a mod could be used to violate copyright does not mean it will. You can be imprisoned for intent (intent to cause harm, intent to kill) but can you now also be imprisoned for intent to copy movies/games/media?
Dictionary.com has the following to say about the word gay:
1. Of, relating to, or having a sexual orientation to persons of the same sex.
2. Showing or characterized by cheerfulness and lighthearted excitement; merry.
3. Bright or lively, especially in color: a gay, sunny room.
4. Given to social pleasures.
5. Dissolute; licentious.
You'll note that only one of those meanings has anything to do with homosexuality...and even that is only through recent usage, it is not the original meaning of the word. If GenY (or whatever the new gen is) want to re-purpose a word, that's up to them;-)
Re:It's big, it's old, and we're stuck with it
on
XFree86 Politics
·
· Score: 1
I'm probably screwing this up somehow, but my/usr/bin/X11 is only 8M in size.
The size is in reference to the source code files - since I always pull it down in source form and compile it. I just quickly did a du -sm on my X11R6 directory and it is 306 MB in size. Holy crap, I think it's time I did a fresh install on that one - it's been re-installed over the top of for the last two years and is probably a little bit krufty.
Don't get me wrong here - I really love X11 and what it has done for us all. The network transparency is keen and driver support is excellent on the whole. My comment is in reference to the age of the code. All programmers know, as code gets older and is worked upon by more and more developers the code develops a condition known as "kruft". Sections of code are repeated, some drops out of use by remains, multiple functions are used to do slightly different things where one function could have been used with parameters to control the actions. X11 is quite old now, and has certainly had it's share of developers - like any codebase what it could really benefit from is a "refactor". Alan's comments indicate that Keith is already keen on doing this and making good progress.
Personally I'd like to see X11 get a good refactoring, but not at the cost of severly impacting compatibility with the tens of thousands of programs that rely on it. Perhaps it's time to evole an X12 protocol - keep X11 compatibility layer but allow use of the newer (improved) protocol for upstream applications. This would give us a chance to refactor the code, reduce the footprint, improve speed (maybe), and possibly get some of the cool stuff in too.
He's probably never left the US before, why start now. Of course, even if we foriegners convict and jail him; his get out of jail free card/law will spring him straight back out again;-)
It's big, it's old, and we're stuck with it
on
XFree86 Politics
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The binaries for XFree86 are over 70MB in size, what on earth are they putting in there? Maybe it is time to fork this project or start again from scratch and apply modern design techniques. How about modularising the engine? Why do you have to download every driver for every stinking card out there when you only have 1 video card in your machine? This thing's bigger than early versions of Windows, and it's only a display driver. With a modular design the individual companies could produce their own driver which could simply drop into the main X engine. That would free up the developers from worrying about approving all the patches from each of the major vendors, and they could concentrate on writing some useful core software.
I clear them down every few weeks so I don't "slowly block the whole internet" as you say. I think you give the cracker kids too much credence. Most of these hits are just dumbfucks with a scanning tool or script kiddies. They're firewalled within a second of starting their scan (all the interesting ports on my machine except for the very few that have legitimate services are firewalled and port sentried). A serious cracker would compromise another host first and then use that to get mine - regardless, the effect is the same. The box that is attacking/probing mine is locked out and can't come back again until next time I reset my firewall. Since I don't give a crap about serving up content to any but a few friends (and friends don't let friends portscan other friends machines) it's no loss to me to be restricting access to compromised machines.
I do see attacks coming from familiar netblocks in the logs - many from the segment I am on as they portscan the whole x.x.x.x/16 range. These rogue nodes get shutdown until they get assigned another address from their DHCP server - which might be several days or longer. Mine only changes every few weeks.
I could conduct an experiment to see if allowing them to continue their work uninterupted would result in more hits against portsentry, but I like knowing that they're locked out before they get too much intel.
Yeh, that'll work - just hoping that because there's so many machines out there no-one will want to attack yours. Unfortunately, as the number of machines increases, so too does the number of crackers. Here's an extract from my portsentry logs for the last week:
These are all good examples of speech that might be considered harmful. Now let's talk about speech that is in serious danger from your government.
Strong encryption: people were able to be arrested as terrorists for publishing encryption algorithms or moving through customs with one printed on their t-shirts. Fucking terrorists - how dare they comprehend mathmatics!
Apple computers - weapons because their CPUs are too fast.
CSS - don't put that on your site or even link to a site with it on - those seven lines of Perl come direct from Satan
Adobe e-books - don't even think about talking to your neighboor about how weak the encryption is because you are in serious danger of revealing the algorithm to him without even thinking about it. Prison for you - you evil terrorist!
Reverse Engineering - DMCA says you can't talk about it, can't do it, can't even buy the results of it. Certainly don't try and do anything to that Playstation you *bought* because it's not your machine. Prison for you.
Slander - don't even think of calling the US president a stupid rascist monkey faced war mongering butcher or you might be getting a visit from lawyers or the FBI.
You had freedom over there once, and even still have a reasonable amount compared to some countries, but watch out, it's all moving away from the common man and into the hands of your government and big business. Be vigilant - your freedom is disappearing a thread at a time.
1. Distributing pornography (immoral and in many cases a breach of copyright, in addition the lack of policing means that children as young as 3 can see this stuff)
Hey, some of us adults like porn and since it harms no-one should be allowed to enjoy it. If you can't keep your kids from getting into your liquor cabinet and porno collection then put a key on the cabinet door and supervise your children better. Or maybe - let your kids decide for themselves what they want.
2. Movie/Mp3 sharing (stealing: and don't give me that rubbish about legal MP3s, go do a search on Kazaa for any commercial record and you will get literally thousands of hits)
Fair use allows me to share the video/sound with friends who drop over to my joint - or lend the record/DVD to them. Peer2peer is going too far but maybe there is a nice middle ground. I should be able to share (and have shared with me) my digital collection with my "peer group" without threat from the copyright holders.
EXAMPLE: imagine a peer network where instead of connecting anonymously to millions of others you only connect to your friends - and they to theres - six degrees of seperation they say. Now, you digitise your content and make it available to your friends (and perhaps tag it to allow them to lend it to their peer group - maybe letting this go 3-4 groups deep). When they borrow something from you, you can't watch it again until they return it. Of course, my friends are slackers and will doubtless lend it on to mates of theirs. I should be able at some point be able to revoke the loan so I can watch it again, but that will prevent whoever currently has the "copy/licence". Now we have a system where we enjoy all the current freedoms, without stepping on the right to profit of copyright holders. Even better, since you loan the digital copy (a backup) your original is not in danger of being fscked up. The companies would complain that we could loan it twice/encode it twice, or watch it on DVD while a mate watches the copy - but compared to the alternative that is meaningless whimpering. Fair use already allows us to make a copy, and good sense says that is kept offsite at a friends place - this would simply allow it to be done digitally.
Circumventing goverment restrictions
17th century Japan placed restrictions on the rights of it's people to carry weapons (which thankfully is thought responsible for the sudden emergence of really cool weapons from Okinawa (Suri Karma, Nunchuku, etc). This led to a police state that made it hard for the people to resist further and more destructive abuses from their government. Free speech is a greater weapon than any sword - to lose it (and America is already on the way towards this) is to embrace an abusive state/goverment - whether this be fascism/capitolism/totalitarism or other. Free speech means the right to *unpopular speech* not the right to popular speech, which is already protected by the consent of the hurd.
You can get arrested and throw in prison in China for being a member of Falun Gong (IIRC) or do the same thing in the US just by selling mod chips for Playstations or telling people how to remove the copy protection on their e-books. There's human rights abuses and freedom violations in every country in the world now. At least encryption gives like minded people the chance to talk about reform without threat of violence from their own government...and yes, a prison sentance is a form of violance, even when you get colour TV and clean showers.
Sure, but then they could also just use an insecure plain old unencrypted email. God damn...am I using a weapon that terrorists also use...maybe they use browsers also...am I a terrorist?
Seriously, terrorists could use the public phone system and (yes I know about Echelon) there's a good chance that their communications would be lost in the noise. The NSA is so crap they'd be lucky to track down terrorists using a phone with GPS on it and shouting "KILL THE PRESIDENT...KIDDIE PORN...PROFIT!" at the top of their voices.
I've had to give up eating French Fries since France became a communist based country that supports terrorism and globalisation! Worse still, I can't wear after shave now either cause it's all made by those facist Frenchies!
SuSE still provide this, although it does tend to trail behind the CD release...but what the hey, they do need to get paid every so often, so this seems a decent compromise to me i.e. if you simply *must* have it as soon as it is released then be ready to pony up a little cash - otherwise, it'll be there soon enough.
Remember, all the stuff they provide (except YAST/etc) can be downloaded/compiled/installed at any time.
Windows can also have debug symbols compiled in, and if you have a development environment installed it will give you the option to debug using that environment when protection faults occur. Mostly however that is just plain irritating - since no-one ships commercial products with debug code, you would only be able to see a disassembly instead of the code itself. Also, the requirement for having an expensive development environment installed takes it out of the hands of most people. Linux just does this better.
Only as long as you use Windows Advanced Server (for the Windows people) otherwise you are restricted to 4GB RAM total!
Re:But it makes up in one huge way....
on
Has GNOME Become LAME?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
$1500 buys you 1 day of programming time at my company. I don't think I could write the entire QT toolkit in 1 day, so it's probably worth paying the licence fee.If your clients are having problems raising this sort of cash then they are going to have worse problems paying you a decent wage. I'd suggest getting better clients;-)
XML can encode graphics and video in exactly the same way as every mail client in the world manages to...base-64 encoding. It will expand the size of the file, but compression should help reduce that down again.
Your example is so trivial that it wouldn't even be worth having a config for such software. You could pass that in as a command line parameter.
Using an XML library makes parsing this stuff trivial. Try SAX or DOM out and see how quick and reliable it can make getting at this data.
The overheads for parsing configs that you speak of would not even turn up in a code profile unless you were *constantly* re-reading these values. In which case, you would be better off putting these values into variables.
XML is human readable - if you can program you shouldn't have an issue with the format. It can be stored in source control, diff'ed, printed, and edited with any text editor.
XML is overhyped, that's true, but that doesn't mean that it's no good at storing configuration information.The hiarachial storage alone makes up for any verbosity that it may have IMHO.
Wow, given the relative speed of a Sun workstation of 1986 and the current desktops that makes it only about 100 times slower than the desktops back then.
You can't really directly compare the features offered by KDE 3.1 with those of fvwm or their like. I use KDE because it does more than the DE of 1986, and that takes more computing resources. It's the old axiom, "the OS will expand to consume all the resources of the PC you use it on".
Yup, it's quick. That doesn't mean it's efficient, though, it just means that it is fast enough given current hardware.
It must be reasonably efficient to operate on my hardware with the degree of responsiveness that I experience. We're not all using 1mhz 6502 processors now, so coding efficiency rules don't need to be so heavily evangelised. Coding for maintenance is now the norm in my code house. This is because it is more important to be able to diagnose and maintain a package over it's likely lifespan (5-10 years typically) than to save a few bytes of space or execution cycles.
What's your point? I don't have a technical preference between them either.
I don't have a technical preference either, but I do have a user preference for KDE. On my machine it runs quicker, looks better, and is a rich environment to work with. I like the applications that come with it (Konqueror, KMail, etc) and rarely use any GNOME apps other than Grip/MPlayer. That said, I haven't yet tried GNOME2, the install fucked up on me, and I ran out of time/patience that evening - I'm always willing to have another look.
My uptime/stbility with Linux is a perfect record so far (2.5 years of solid use at home, no crashes). I have bluescreened/execeptioned/GPFed/protection faulted/hung every version of Windows I have ever come across. I have a fucked memory socket on my PC at home - so I can only use 512MB of the 768MB that should fit. If I put the extra 256MB in, Linux works just fine, and Windows will boot, but as soon as I run DirectX WHAM, the machine freezes. That's probably because Linux doesn't ever get up enough speed to use the last 256MB RAM...but maybe not.
And while some users get all pushed out of shape about inconsistent appearances, consistency just isn't a big deal to many users either.
The consistency of the Windows environment is one of that platforms most compelling features. If you have worked in support for any length of time or as a developer then you would know exactly how much people like consistency. How would you like it if the tokens and rules for regular expressions were different for every package that provided RegEx? People need a common base of idioms on which they can building their computing experience.
And Gtk+ and Qt both make very inefficient use of the X11 APIs, giving X11 an undeserved reputation for being slow.
Seems pretty damn quick on my PC. Beats Windows 2000 to the desktop by a good 2 minutes...and Windoze doesn't even use X11 or gcc! My KDE 3.1 desktop is up and fully running (KMail, Konsole and Konqueror all launched and in their standard window positions) 30 seconds after I "startx".
P.S. I use both KDE and GNOME...
Microsoft are not well known for innovation. They are well known for buying companies that are innovative or for fairly good implementations of someone elses innovation. Some examples might help here:
DoubleSpace/Stacker
DOS/CPM
Windows/X11/MacOs/Next
Excel/Visicalc/Lotus
Word/Word Perfect
IIS/Apache
IE/Netscape/Mosaic
There's tons more examples available for the interested. Also, Microsoft are well known for bad early releases (1.0-2.0) but getting it right the third time - hey, let's have some more examples:
Dos 3.0
IE 3.0
Word 6.0
Windows 3.0
See the pattern - all pretty suckful on first release (also all copies of someone elses IP) and yet all matured by version 3.0.
I gotta agree. Try getting out of the house and seeing some live bands. Try getting down to the Ballet or see some live dance or performances. See some plays, broaden your entertainment horizons.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because a mod could be used to violate copyright does not mean it will. You can be imprisoned for intent (intent to cause harm, intent to kill) but can you now also be imprisoned for intent to copy movies/games/media?
http://www.ozxchip.com/
You'll note that only one of those meanings has anything to do with homosexuality...and even that is only through recent usage, it is not the original meaning of the word. If GenY (or whatever the new gen is) want to re-purpose a word, that's up to them ;-)
The size is in reference to the source code files - since I always pull it down in source form and compile it. I just quickly did a du -sm on my X11R6 directory and it is 306 MB in size. Holy crap, I think it's time I did a fresh install on that one - it's been re-installed over the top of for the last two years and is probably a little bit krufty.
Don't get me wrong here - I really love X11 and what it has done for us all. The network transparency is keen and driver support is excellent on the whole. My comment is in reference to the age of the code. All programmers know, as code gets older and is worked upon by more and more developers the code develops a condition known as "kruft". Sections of code are repeated, some drops out of use by remains, multiple functions are used to do slightly different things where one function could have been used with parameters to control the actions. X11 is quite old now, and has certainly had it's share of developers - like any codebase what it could really benefit from is a "refactor". Alan's comments indicate that Keith is already keen on doing this and making good progress.
Personally I'd like to see X11 get a good refactoring, but not at the cost of severly impacting compatibility with the tens of thousands of programs that rely on it. Perhaps it's time to evole an X12 protocol - keep X11 compatibility layer but allow use of the newer (improved) protocol for upstream applications. This would give us a chance to refactor the code, reduce the footprint, improve speed (maybe), and possibly get some of the cool stuff in too.
Do you have her phone number? I want to see if she'd like some underage sex as well ;->
He's probably never left the US before, why start now. Of course, even if we foriegners convict and jail him; his get out of jail free card/law will spring him straight back out again ;-)
The binaries for XFree86 are over 70MB in size, what on earth are they putting in there? Maybe it is time to fork this project or start again from scratch and apply modern design techniques. How about modularising the engine? Why do you have to download every driver for every stinking card out there when you only have 1 video card in your machine? This thing's bigger than early versions of Windows, and it's only a display driver. With a modular design the individual companies could produce their own driver which could simply drop into the main X engine. That would free up the developers from worrying about approving all the patches from each of the major vendors, and they could concentrate on writing some useful core software.
I do see attacks coming from familiar netblocks in the logs - many from the segment I am on as they portscan the whole x.x.x.x/16 range. These rogue nodes get shutdown until they get assigned another address from their DHCP server - which might be several days or longer. Mine only changes every few weeks.
I could conduct an experiment to see if allowing them to continue their work uninterupted would result in more hits against portsentry, but I like knowing that they're locked out before they get too much intel.
1047482497 - 03/12/2003 15:21:37 Host: 211.22.92.214/211.22.92.214 Port: 1433 TCP Blockedr s.com/24.42.75.140 Port: 1433 TCP Blocked
1047525721 - 03/13/2003 03:22:01 Host: CPE00045a92c3ba-CM014280100907.cpe.net.cable.roge
1047532272 - 03/13/2003 05:11:12 Host: 206.muka.htfd.washdctt.dsl.att.net/12.101.58.206 Port: 1433 TCP Blocked
1047632475 - 03/14/2003 09:01:15 Host: pD9512AC9.dip.t-dialin.net/217.81.42.201 Port: 1433 TCP Blocked
1047637241 - 03/14/2003 10:20:41 Host: p5083F99D.dip.t-dialin.net/80.131.249.157 Port: 1433 TCP Blocked
1047761332 - 03/15/2003 20:48:52 Host: 217.166.59.67/217.166.59.67 Port: 1433 TCP Blocked
1047779059 - 03/16/2003 01:44:19 Host: 61-221-147-250.HINET-IP.hinet.net/61.221.147.250 Port: 6667 TCP Blocked
1047779552 - 03/16/2003 01:52:32 Host: a213-22-7-237.netcabo.pt/213.22.7.237 Port: 1433 TCP Blocked
1047782754 - 03/16/2003 02:45:54 Host: 1Cust39.tnt1.ladue.mo.da.uu.net/65.239.144.39 Port: 1080 TCP Blocked
1047893734 - 03/17/2003 09:35:34 Host: 195.243.243.19/195.243.243.19 Port: 1433 TCP Blocked
1047995484 - 03/18/2003 13:51:24 Host: 63.211.23.16/63.211.23.16 Port: 1080 TCP Blocked
1048017581 - 03/18/2003 19:59:41 Host: 211.217.75.89/211.217.75.89 Port: 1433 TCP Blocked
1048052387 - 03/19/2003 05:39:47 Host: 196.3.64.50/196.3.64.50 Port: 1433 TCP Blocked
1048061209 - 03/19/2003 08:06:49 Host: 208.186.1.175/208.186.1.175 Port: 3389 TCP Blocked
I used to get about 50 scans/day six months ago but apparently firewalling the little creeps out on first port scan is working a treat.
Strong encryption: people were able to be arrested as terrorists for publishing encryption algorithms or moving through customs with one printed on their t-shirts. Fucking terrorists - how dare they comprehend mathmatics!
Apple computers - weapons because their CPUs are too fast.
CSS - don't put that on your site or even link to a site with it on - those seven lines of Perl come direct from Satan
Adobe e-books - don't even think about talking to your neighboor about how weak the encryption is because you are in serious danger of revealing the algorithm to him without even thinking about it. Prison for you - you evil terrorist!
Reverse Engineering - DMCA says you can't talk about it, can't do it, can't even buy the results of it. Certainly don't try and do anything to that Playstation you *bought* because it's not your machine. Prison for you.
Slander - don't even think of calling the US president a stupid rascist monkey faced war mongering butcher or you might be getting a visit from lawyers or the FBI.
You had freedom over there once, and even still have a reasonable amount compared to some countries, but watch out, it's all moving away from the common man and into the hands of your government and big business. Be vigilant - your freedom is disappearing a thread at a time.
Hey, some of us adults like porn and since it harms no-one should be allowed to enjoy it. If you can't keep your kids from getting into your liquor cabinet and porno collection then put a key on the cabinet door and supervise your children better. Or maybe - let your kids decide for themselves what they want.
2. Movie/Mp3 sharing (stealing: and don't give me that rubbish about legal MP3s, go do a search on Kazaa for any commercial record and you will get literally thousands of hits)
Fair use allows me to share the video/sound with friends who drop over to my joint - or lend the record/DVD to them. Peer2peer is going too far but maybe there is a nice middle ground. I should be able to share (and have shared with me) my digital collection with my "peer group" without threat from the copyright holders.
EXAMPLE: imagine a peer network where instead of connecting anonymously to millions of others you only connect to your friends - and they to theres - six degrees of seperation they say. Now, you digitise your content and make it available to your friends (and perhaps tag it to allow them to lend it to their peer group - maybe letting this go 3-4 groups deep). When they borrow something from you, you can't watch it again until they return it. Of course, my friends are slackers and will doubtless lend it on to mates of theirs. I should be able at some point be able to revoke the loan so I can watch it again, but that will prevent whoever currently has the "copy/licence". Now we have a system where we enjoy all the current freedoms, without stepping on the right to profit of copyright holders. Even better, since you loan the digital copy (a backup) your original is not in danger of being fscked up. The companies would complain that we could loan it twice/encode it twice, or watch it on DVD while a mate watches the copy - but compared to the alternative that is meaningless whimpering. Fair use already allows us to make a copy, and good sense says that is kept offsite at a friends place - this would simply allow it to be done digitally.
Circumventing goverment restrictions
17th century Japan placed restrictions on the rights of it's people to carry weapons (which thankfully is thought responsible for the sudden emergence of really cool weapons from Okinawa (Suri Karma, Nunchuku, etc). This led to a police state that made it hard for the people to resist further and more destructive abuses from their government. Free speech is a greater weapon than any sword - to lose it (and America is already on the way towards this) is to embrace an abusive state/goverment - whether this be fascism/capitolism/totalitarism or other. Free speech means the right to *unpopular speech* not the right to popular speech, which is already protected by the consent of the hurd.
You can get arrested and throw in prison in China for being a member of Falun Gong (IIRC) or do the same thing in the US just by selling mod chips for Playstations or telling people how to remove the copy protection on their e-books. There's human rights abuses and freedom violations in every country in the world now. At least encryption gives like minded people the chance to talk about reform without threat of violence from their own government...and yes, a prison sentance is a form of violance, even when you get colour TV and clean showers.
Seriously, terrorists could use the public phone system and (yes I know about Echelon) there's a good chance that their communications would be lost in the noise. The NSA is so crap they'd be lucky to track down terrorists using a phone with GPS on it and shouting "KILL THE PRESIDENT...KIDDIE PORN...PROFIT!" at the top of their voices.
;->
Chapter 11 is not backruptcy but protection from creditors. It's a bad sign, but not the same as actually being bankrupt.
Remember, all the stuff they provide (except YAST/etc) can be downloaded/compiled/installed at any time.
Windows can also have debug symbols compiled in, and if you have a development environment installed it will give you the option to debug using that environment when protection faults occur. Mostly however that is just plain irritating - since no-one ships commercial products with debug code, you would only be able to see a disassembly instead of the code itself. Also, the requirement for having an expensive development environment installed takes it out of the hands of most people. Linux just does this better.
Only as long as you use Windows Advanced Server (for the Windows people) otherwise you are restricted to 4GB RAM total!
$1500 buys you 1 day of programming time at my company. I don't think I could write the entire QT toolkit in 1 day, so it's probably worth paying the licence fee.If your clients are having problems raising this sort of cash then they are going to have worse problems paying you a decent wage. I'd suggest getting better clients ;-)
XML can encode graphics and video in exactly the same way as every mail client in the world manages to...base-64 encoding. It will expand the size of the file, but compression should help reduce that down again.
Your example is so trivial that it wouldn't even be worth having a config for such software. You could pass that in as a command line parameter.
Using an XML library makes parsing this stuff trivial. Try SAX or DOM out and see how quick and reliable it can make getting at this data.
The overheads for parsing configs that you speak of would not even turn up in a code profile unless you were *constantly* re-reading these values. In which case, you would be better off putting these values into variables.
XML is human readable - if you can program you shouldn't have an issue with the format. It can be stored in source control, diff'ed, printed, and edited with any text editor.
XML is overhyped, that's true, but that doesn't mean that it's no good at storing configuration information.The hiarachial storage alone makes up for any verbosity that it may have IMHO.
You can't really directly compare the features offered by KDE 3.1 with those of fvwm or their like. I use KDE because it does more than the DE of 1986, and that takes more computing resources. It's the old axiom, "the OS will expand to consume all the resources of the PC you use it on".
Yup, it's quick. That doesn't mean it's efficient, though, it just means that it is fast enough given current hardware.
It must be reasonably efficient to operate on my hardware with the degree of responsiveness that I experience. We're not all using 1mhz 6502 processors now, so coding efficiency rules don't need to be so heavily evangelised. Coding for maintenance is now the norm in my code house. This is because it is more important to be able to diagnose and maintain a package over it's likely lifespan (5-10 years typically) than to save a few bytes of space or execution cycles.
What's your point? I don't have a technical preference between them either.
I don't have a technical preference either, but I do have a user preference for KDE. On my machine it runs quicker, looks better, and is a rich environment to work with. I like the applications that come with it (Konqueror, KMail, etc) and rarely use any GNOME apps other than Grip/MPlayer. That said, I haven't yet tried GNOME2, the install fucked up on me, and I ran out of time/patience that evening - I'm always willing to have another look.
My uptime/stbility with Linux is a perfect record so far (2.5 years of solid use at home, no crashes). I have bluescreened/execeptioned/GPFed/protection faulted/hung every version of Windows I have ever come across. I have a fucked memory socket on my PC at home - so I can only use 512MB of the 768MB that should fit. If I put the extra 256MB in, Linux works just fine, and Windows will boot, but as soon as I run DirectX WHAM, the machine freezes. That's probably because Linux doesn't ever get up enough speed to use the last 256MB RAM...but maybe not.
The consistency of the Windows environment is one of that platforms most compelling features. If you have worked in support for any length of time or as a developer then you would know exactly how much people like consistency. How would you like it if the tokens and rules for regular expressions were different for every package that provided RegEx? People need a common base of idioms on which they can building their computing experience.
And Gtk+ and Qt both make very inefficient use of the X11 APIs, giving X11 an undeserved reputation for being slow.
Seems pretty damn quick on my PC. Beats Windows 2000 to the desktop by a good 2 minutes...and Windoze doesn't even use X11 or gcc! My KDE 3.1 desktop is up and fully running (KMail, Konsole and Konqueror all launched and in their standard window positions) 30 seconds after I "startx". P.S. I use both KDE and GNOME...
DoubleSpace/Stacker
DOS/CPM
Windows/X11/MacOs/Next
Excel/Visicalc/Lotus
Word/Word Perfect
IIS/Apache
IE/Netscape/Mosaic
There's tons more examples available for the interested. Also, Microsoft are well known for bad early releases (1.0-2.0) but getting it right the third time - hey, let's have some more examples:
Dos 3.0
IE 3.0
Word 6.0
Windows 3.0
See the pattern - all pretty suckful on first release (also all copies of someone elses IP) and yet all matured by version 3.0.
I gotta agree. Try getting out of the house and seeing some live bands. Try getting down to the Ballet or see some live dance or performances. See some plays, broaden your entertainment horizons.