"Linux has a harder time with some of the ultra-small notebooks; they use weird proprietary drivers which Linux does not support a lot of the time."
Enh. I'm running an ultra-small (Portege 2000 and the only thing that won't work is the modem. Which sucks for just about every laptop out there, regardless of size.
"You could maybe fool them with some kind of specialized pump, but it's not something the average thief could concoct."
Right, because the average thief is also cool with wandering around lopping off people's limbs.
Yo. Men don't all think like each other. Women don't all think like each other. It's hardly surprising that a specific instance of a man and a specific instance of a woman also don't think like each other. If one were to make a map of men and women in personality space, one would find significant overlap.
Saying something like "Most game developers are male, so why should these games appeal to women?" is like saying "Most authors of literary classics are male. So why should literature appeal to women?" Demonstrably, it does.
I heard once that women aren't supposed to be competitive. We aren't supposed to like violence or gore. Ha, ha. Seriously. Anyone who thinks women aren't competitive doesn't know many women very well. And everyone has ways in which they're violent, regardless of whether they're male or female.
It's not that great a Scrabble word. It can't possibly compete with "demisemiquavers" which, with an extremely improbable board arrangement, could be placed on three triple word scores, netting over 1100 points. It's a Q word, sure, but it uses a U, so it's nowhere near as cool as "qat" or "faqir" or "qi". It uses no other cool letters.
Of course, it can't be used in Scrabble because it's a proper name. Maybe they hope an element will get named after it for Scrabble purposes. But quaoarium just isn't that euphonius.:)
That's an unfair characterization. Sure, you get to compile your own kernel and set up a network and all that stuff. But installing new software is always as easy as typing "emerge ". Saying "everything else needs to be installed from scratch" is pretty unfair. There are scripts and ebuilds written so that pretty much all you do by hand is set up the file systems, handle networking, and compile the kernel. You don't need to worry about where to download things, or what to download, or which patches to apply or anything like that.
There is no way the Supreme Court will award this one to the plaintiff (Eldred). The Constitution implies a sort of limit on copyright, but unfortunately it is totally ambiguous.
You missed the whole point of Eldred v. Ashcroft.
Eldred v. Ashcroft is not predicated on the
argument that copyright must be limited. The argument goes like this. The copyright clause in the Constitution is trumped by the First Amendment. The First Amendment holds supremacy. The only reason copyright has subsequently been held to be constitutional is that on balance it promotes expression. That is, the Constitution establishes a quid pro quo--it gives copyright holders a temporary monopoly; in exchange, it encourages sharing of art and science. Thus, on balance, copyright promotes expression, and it's constitutional.
The argument Lessig makes is not that the "limited term" clause is violated. It is that the act violates the quid pro quo. It gives to copyright holders without maintaining anything in return. In fact, it takes from the public, which is in direct contradiction to the spirit of the founders. He argues that the extension of copyright does not make anyone more likely to express themselves. In fact, they retroactively extend copyright, which makes no sense in the context of the spirit of the Constitution. The point is to encourage expression, but the Sonny Bono Copyright Act applies to works which have already been expressed. As such, it does absolutely nothing to promote progress (and in fact may hinder it), and therefore it is an unfair limitation of the freedom of expression.
Lessig's argument is a first amendment one; the "limited term" argument really is just peripheral.
Two-fold reverse nitpick here. Number one: There ain't no such thing as "delta Q". Saying "delta Q" implies that you're comparing the heat for the initial and the final states. But heat is not a state function. Heat is associated with a path, not with a change in states.
Number two. The entropy change of a process is not equal to q/T, unless the process occured reversibly.
As for the rest, I'm completely baffled that other people seem to think there's no such thing as macroscopic entropy which can be associated with books. You can. Absolutely. One hundred percent. The only reason we haven't yet is that I haven't defined an energy associated with my model. In the case where all states have the same energy, temperature is irrelevant. For background, see
a previous post where I map the books analogy onto a particle-like system. Once I define an energy for my system, I can determine exactly what the entropy is (assuming I'm sufficiently clever to solve the model, which I won't be unless I make it really simple).
The connection you're missing is the Gibbs Entropy formula. This is going to look familiar to you:
S = - k_B sum_i p_i ln p_i
I can take any system I want, macroscopic or not. If I can figure out the energy associated with a state, I can use the Boltzmann distribution to determine its relative probability. I can write a partition function, and I can determine an entropy.
Now you're right that rooms don't get messy because of the second law. Of course not. My room is not a closed system. This is because my room contains me, and I am most definitely not a closed system. So the second law of thermodynamics doesn't apply.
However, one can use macroscopic examples such as messy rooms and disordered books to bolster our intuition. As long as we're counting states and being simplistic (or sufficiently careful) about the dynamic behaviour we're describing, we should be safe.
Nevertheless, entropy is a statement of volume of phase space. If you can define your system well enough to understand what your phase space is, you can define an entropy. Once you do that, you can come up with analogues to temperature. An article in (fer cryin out loud) the Journal of Chemical Education which has only hand-wavy refutation of some things which have been defined and explained in a careful, logical, scientific and mathematical fashion is singularly unconvincing.
I'm being more careful than you give me credit for. Entropy is a statement of volume of phase space. Now, in the example of the books above, I've picked a discretized space (book arrangements) with a finite number of positions. I claim that placing a restriction on where I can be in my phase space--namely, forcing me to be in only *one* position--means that I have reduced entropy. The important point to note in my above example is that I did *not* say that a disordered arrangement had more entropy than an alphabetical arrangement. A single disordered arrangement is still only one way to arrange the books. However, if you restrict your books to some ordered arrangements (like alphabetized or Dewey Decimal), you are decreasing the number of configurations available to it.
Now consider arrangements of clothing. There is some number of ways that I can arrange all my clothes in my closet. But if I do not restrict my clothing to be in my closet, there are more ways to arrange it, because now not only do I have the arrangements of clothes in my closets accessible to me but I also have arrangements of clothing which includes the floor, the bathroom, hanging from a telephone wire, et cetera. So the fewer restrictions you have on the space available to you, the greater the entropy. So you can make the statement that a "clean" room is more ordered than a "messy" one, because the "clean" criteria places a greater restriction on the number of available arrangements.
The subtle point to which you are alluding is that it doesn't really make a lot of sense to discuss the entropy of a point in phase space. Sure. But you can definitely talk about volumes. And it's incorrect to say that you can't apply it to macroscopic examples. You can.
Specifically, I can say that a "clean" room--a room in which my clothes are restricted to my closet, my books to my bookshelf, and my laptop computer is nicely on a desk--has more entropy than a "messy" room where my books are on my floor, my clothes hanging over my chair, and I'm sitting on my bed with my laptop typing an e-mail about entropy.
If you're still unhappy with applications to books, consider the following model. I have N distinguishable particles which I place on a 1 dimensional lattice of size N. To make it easy, let's say that all configurations have the same energy. Now the entropy of this system is just k_B ln W, where W=N!, the number of ways you can arrange N distinguishable particles. So S(unrestricted) = k_B ln N!
Now imagine that we restrict ourselves to one of those orderings. Then S (restricted) = k_B ln W', where W' = 1, So S(restricted) = 0. As you expect, S(unrestricted) > S (restricted). In other words, the application of a constraint away from an equilibrium distribution reduces entropy.
perhaps someone should attempt to define order or disorder, without being circular in their definitions.
Someone did. His name was Boltzmann. The more ordered a system is, the fewer microstates available to it. What does that mean? Well, a macroscopic example is this: imagine you have a bunch of books you're putting on a shelf. There's only one way to put the books alphabetically (assuming you have no duplicate copies). But there's a really large number of ways to put them on if you put them every which way. So let's compare the order of two systems. Our first system is our books on the shelf, restricted to alphabetical ordering. The second is our books on the shelf. The first system has only one way it can be arranged; the second (assuming we have more than one book) has more. So the first system is more ordered.
This is a little simplistic, but it gets the point across.
Trust me, entropy really is a well-defined concept. Or don't trust me; read for yourself.
Keep the cool stuff on the outside, but make "guts" work better on the inside.
You can't do that. We're talking urban planning here. If you want a really fascinating read on how Robert Moses fucked up New York traffic while screwing the indigent, read Robert Caro's most excellent biography The Power Broker an extraordinarily detailed and well-researched book about the making of New York City.
As a few examples of how fucked Robert Moses was, when he built some of his highways/access roads he specifically built the overpasses to be so low that buses couldn't fit beneath them. This is because he didn't want poor people driving on them. He built a lot of parks, let's say order hundreds. Of these parks, approximately order one of them was in an area which was predominantly African American. He specifically designed several of his bridges to exclude mass transit, such as subways or trains, even though after EVERY bridge was built, traffic in New York only increased.
In order to avoid rebuilding mistakes, you have to change the fundamental infrastruture. This means that the outside's gonna have to change fundamentally.
Of course, if New York is destroyed and rebuilt, it'll probably be done by committee and it would be even worse than its present incarnation.
Every minute and a half, approximately, for the Archos. At least, that's my guess--if you're recording with the crappy built in mic you can hear the hard drive spinning up every minute and a half.
Second the Archos. Or as it is at this point, third or fourth.:) I have the 10 GB Jukebox Recorder. The recorder doesn't have the jostle-off problem that the original poster mentioned. I bike into work with it every day and it never complains, not even the time I slammed on my brakes to avoid getting hit by a car, fell off, and landed on the side carrying it. It works like a charm under Linux. In fact, it's really just a USB hard drive, and I used it to carry files to and from work before I got a laptop. Plus, they're working on an open source firmware version for it: Rockbox. Maybe (hope, hope) they'll figure out enough to get them to play Ogg too.
Finally, you may not believe it but the recording features on the recorder are *really* useful. I can plug my recorder into an LP player and get MP3s... instantly, no work on my part.
There are a bunch of people on here whining about the unfair treatment of the workers in the mines and all that political unrest stuff. There isn't a damn thing you can do to change any of that.
You may be right. Personally, though, I think that any man who gave me a rock that was extracted by workers under near-slavery like conditions and told me it was because he loved me needs to get his head, and his ethics, checked. The whole point of a diamond is that it's a symbol of something. What is it a symbol of? Well, it's been made into a symbol of love, fidelity, affection, devotion. But it is also a symbol of the company who infused it with those meanings: de Beers. And they're rotten through and through.
Now, I don't think that the fact that one woman--myself--says "do not EVER buy me a diamond" is going to make a damned bit of difference to the cartel that runs the diamond market in circles. I don't think it'll improve working conditions for one person in Africa. I don't think it'll make one person's life even slightly better.
But a diamond is a symbol, yes? If a man bought me a diamond I would honestly feel ill. Sick. Disgusted. Because what a diamond symbolizes to me is greed, commercialism, the rapacity of western civilization, and the still-intolerable reek of colonialism. A diamond symbolizes our culture's ability to turn a blind eye to the things we don't want to see. It symbolizes the power of acquisition, as if love, like a diamond ring, is something that you could purchase. No, folks, this is not love you're seeing. This is not love at all.
Now, you want to know what *will* make a difference? Let me tell you what I'm going to do if I ever get married. First of all, I already have everything I need for a household. So rather than getting wedding presents, I'm going to ask that people donate to some of my favorite charities. And if he wants to drop ten thousand dollars on me, this is what we're going to do. We're taking a honeymoon to Africa, and we're teaching. I have a lot of useful skills--I'm sure any man I marry will, too--and I know that we can do some good, make differences in some people's lives, and help build infrastructure in places that badly badly need it. Now, that, folks, is a wedding ring I can be proud of: several thousand dollars, six months, and who knows how many lives changed.
Now, I realize that there are many women in the world who aren't like me. They want rings, and they want rocks, and I guess that's fine with me, as they don't see a diamond the way I do. But for god's sake, it's not the diamond that proves you love her--it's the fact that she wants the diamond, and you're willing to do it for her.
For the record, it's not just the ugly rock that's the proof of love. It's an ugly rock whose value has been artificially inflated by a cartel whose shaky ethics lead it to extremely abusive worker practices, child labor, fomenting political unrest in countries with hostile governments, all for the point of exporting natural resources from an area while giving back as little as possible to aforementioned area. And you want to stick that on a ring and call it love. Hell, no. Not for me.
Diamonds are not romance. Even flowers are not romance (although they're far better than diamonds). Dinner at a great restaurant isn't romance. Nothing you can buy her is romance, ever, period. Romance isn't about what you spend and her wearing black slinky dresses. It's about the two of you, and as such, whatever trappings you use are specific to you.
Now, in your case you happen to think that women think differently than men on some issues. This pretty much guarantees that you're going to have relationships with women who *do* think differently. That's fine. You want to buy flowers and diamond rings, the whole while you mutter to yourself that this is stupid? Go ahead. And you think this proves that you love her, because women think differently than men and you're pandering to their point of view which is--in your words--fucking stupid?
Get over your self righteousness. The other guy is right. An ugly rock != proof of love. Proof of love is paying attention to the other person. If it so happens that she really *wants* the diamond ring (ugh), maybe buying her the ring she wants demonstrates affection. But it's not the ring, and it's certainly not your condescending attitude.
For all that Red Hat and others would hope, the vast majority of computers running Linux are running unpaid-for licensed copies.
Worse than that. My laptop running an unpaid-for licensed copy of Linux (and only that) also has an unused-yet-paid-for copy of XP attached to it. The M$ market includes probably thousands of PCs running no Microsoft software, which is a travesty. With this inherent disadvantage, it's doubly impressive that Linux is on the charts.
Slashdot Mirror
"Linux has a harder time with some of the ultra-small notebooks; they use weird proprietary drivers which Linux does not support a lot of the time." Enh. I'm running an ultra-small (Portege 2000 and the only thing that won't work is the modem. Which sucks for just about every laptop out there, regardless of size.
Some of them do. In complete defiance of the actual content of the books.
"You could maybe fool them with some kind of specialized pump, but it's not something the average thief could concoct." Right, because the average thief is also cool with wandering around lopping off people's limbs.
Saying something like "Most game developers are male, so why should these games appeal to women?" is like saying "Most authors of literary classics are male. So why should literature appeal to women?" Demonstrably, it does.
I heard once that women aren't supposed to be competitive. We aren't supposed to like violence or gore. Ha, ha. Seriously. Anyone who thinks women aren't competitive doesn't know many women very well. And everyone has ways in which they're violent, regardless of whether they're male or female.
Actually I just like the word "euphonious". It's one of my favorite words. Along with snollygoster. And cachet.
Of course, it can't be used in Scrabble because it's a proper name. Maybe they hope an element will get named after it for Scrabble purposes. But quaoarium just isn't that euphonius. :)
Exactly. That's what Linux is all about. I can run Gentoo, and my mom can run RedHat.
That's an unfair characterization. Sure, you get to compile your own kernel and set up a network and all that stuff. But installing new software is always as easy as typing "emerge ". Saying "everything else needs to be installed from scratch" is pretty unfair. There are scripts and ebuilds written so that pretty much all you do by hand is set up the file systems, handle networking, and compile the kernel. You don't need to worry about where to download things, or what to download, or which patches to apply or anything like that.
You people are being redundant and repeating yourselves.
No, that says that if they get sued for something you do, you'll pay.
Damn. You beat me too it. I always thought that was a weird picture. Where's the other thief that he's screwing? What's the source of the dishonor?
You missed the whole point of Eldred v. Ashcroft.
Eldred v. Ashcroft is not predicated on the argument that copyright must be limited. The argument goes like this. The copyright clause in the Constitution is trumped by the First Amendment. The First Amendment holds supremacy. The only reason copyright has subsequently been held to be constitutional is that on balance it promotes expression. That is, the Constitution establishes a quid pro quo--it gives copyright holders a temporary monopoly; in exchange, it encourages sharing of art and science. Thus, on balance, copyright promotes expression, and it's constitutional.
The argument Lessig makes is not that the "limited term" clause is violated. It is that the act violates the quid pro quo. It gives to copyright holders without maintaining anything in return. In fact, it takes from the public, which is in direct contradiction to the spirit of the founders. He argues that the extension of copyright does not make anyone more likely to express themselves. In fact, they retroactively extend copyright, which makes no sense in the context of the spirit of the Constitution. The point is to encourage expression, but the Sonny Bono Copyright Act applies to works which have already been expressed. As such, it does absolutely nothing to promote progress (and in fact may hinder it), and therefore it is an unfair limitation of the freedom of expression.
Lessig's argument is a first amendment one; the "limited term" argument really is just peripheral.
Two-fold reverse nitpick here. Number one: There ain't no such thing as "delta Q". Saying "delta Q" implies that you're comparing the heat for the initial and the final states. But heat is not a state function. Heat is associated with a path, not with a change in states.
Number two. The entropy change of a process is not equal to q/T, unless the process occured reversibly.
As for the rest, I'm completely baffled that other people seem to think there's no such thing as macroscopic entropy which can be associated with books. You can. Absolutely. One hundred percent. The only reason we haven't yet is that I haven't defined an energy associated with my model. In the case where all states have the same energy, temperature is irrelevant. For background, see a previous post where I map the books analogy onto a particle-like system. Once I define an energy for my system, I can determine exactly what the entropy is (assuming I'm sufficiently clever to solve the model, which I won't be unless I make it really simple).
The connection you're missing is the Gibbs Entropy formula. This is going to look familiar to you:
S = - k_B sum_i p_i ln p_i
I can take any system I want, macroscopic or not. If I can figure out the energy associated with a state, I can use the Boltzmann distribution to determine its relative probability. I can write a partition function, and I can determine an entropy.
Now you're right that rooms don't get messy because of the second law. Of course not. My room is not a closed system. This is because my room contains me, and I am most definitely not a closed system. So the second law of thermodynamics doesn't apply.
However, one can use macroscopic examples such as messy rooms and disordered books to bolster our intuition. As long as we're counting states and being simplistic (or sufficiently careful) about the dynamic behaviour we're describing, we should be safe.
Nevertheless, entropy is a statement of volume of phase space. If you can define your system well enough to understand what your phase space is, you can define an entropy. Once you do that, you can come up with analogues to temperature. An article in (fer cryin out loud) the Journal of Chemical Education which has only hand-wavy refutation of some things which have been defined and explained in a careful, logical, scientific and mathematical fashion is singularly unconvincing.
Talk to Jaynes.
Now consider arrangements of clothing. There is some number of ways that I can arrange all my clothes in my closet. But if I do not restrict my clothing to be in my closet, there are more ways to arrange it, because now not only do I have the arrangements of clothes in my closets accessible to me but I also have arrangements of clothing which includes the floor, the bathroom, hanging from a telephone wire, et cetera. So the fewer restrictions you have on the space available to you, the greater the entropy. So you can make the statement that a "clean" room is more ordered than a "messy" one, because the "clean" criteria places a greater restriction on the number of available arrangements.
The subtle point to which you are alluding is that it doesn't really make a lot of sense to discuss the entropy of a point in phase space. Sure. But you can definitely talk about volumes. And it's incorrect to say that you can't apply it to macroscopic examples. You can.
Specifically, I can say that a "clean" room--a room in which my clothes are restricted to my closet, my books to my bookshelf, and my laptop computer is nicely on a desk--has more entropy than a "messy" room where my books are on my floor, my clothes hanging over my chair, and I'm sitting on my bed with my laptop typing an e-mail about entropy.
If you're still unhappy with applications to books, consider the following model. I have N distinguishable particles which I place on a 1 dimensional lattice of size N. To make it easy, let's say that all configurations have the same energy. Now the entropy of this system is just k_B ln W, where W=N!, the number of ways you can arrange N distinguishable particles. So S(unrestricted) = k_B ln N!
Now imagine that we restrict ourselves to one of those orderings. Then S (restricted) = k_B ln W', where W' = 1, So S(restricted) = 0. As you expect, S(unrestricted) > S (restricted). In other words, the application of a constraint away from an equilibrium distribution reduces entropy.
This is isomorphic to the ordering of books.
Someone did. His name was Boltzmann. The more ordered a system is, the fewer microstates available to it. What does that mean? Well, a macroscopic example is this: imagine you have a bunch of books you're putting on a shelf. There's only one way to put the books alphabetically (assuming you have no duplicate copies). But there's a really large number of ways to put them on if you put them every which way. So let's compare the order of two systems. Our first system is our books on the shelf, restricted to alphabetical ordering. The second is our books on the shelf. The first system has only one way it can be arranged; the second (assuming we have more than one book) has more. So the first system is more ordered.
This is a little simplistic, but it gets the point across.
Trust me, entropy really is a well-defined concept. Or don't trust me; read for yourself.
You can't do that. We're talking urban planning here. If you want a really fascinating read on how Robert Moses fucked up New York traffic while screwing the indigent, read Robert Caro's most excellent biography The Power Broker an extraordinarily detailed and well-researched book about the making of New York City.
As a few examples of how fucked Robert Moses was, when he built some of his highways/access roads he specifically built the overpasses to be so low that buses couldn't fit beneath them. This is because he didn't want poor people driving on them. He built a lot of parks, let's say order hundreds. Of these parks, approximately order one of them was in an area which was predominantly African American. He specifically designed several of his bridges to exclude mass transit, such as subways or trains, even though after EVERY bridge was built, traffic in New York only increased.
In order to avoid rebuilding mistakes, you have to change the fundamental infrastruture. This means that the outside's gonna have to change fundamentally.
Of course, if New York is destroyed and rebuilt, it'll probably be done by committee and it would be even worse than its present incarnation.
Every minute and a half, approximately, for the Archos. At least, that's my guess--if you're recording with the crappy built in mic you can hear the hard drive spinning up every minute and a half.
I don't think that'll be a problem. Really. Watch.
(grab Archos Jukebox Recorder sitting next to me, while playing music. Shake extremely vigorously)
Nope. Not a skip. It's really resilient. Don't worry about jogging with this one. It'll do just fine.
Finally, you may not believe it but the recording features on the recorder are *really* useful. I can plug my recorder into an LP player and get MP3s ... instantly, no work on my part.
You may be right. Personally, though, I think that any man who gave me a rock that was extracted by workers under near-slavery like conditions and told me it was because he loved me needs to get his head, and his ethics, checked. The whole point of a diamond is that it's a symbol of something. What is it a symbol of? Well, it's been made into a symbol of love, fidelity, affection, devotion. But it is also a symbol of the company who infused it with those meanings: de Beers. And they're rotten through and through.
Now, I don't think that the fact that one woman--myself--says "do not EVER buy me a diamond" is going to make a damned bit of difference to the cartel that runs the diamond market in circles. I don't think it'll improve working conditions for one person in Africa. I don't think it'll make one person's life even slightly better.
But a diamond is a symbol, yes? If a man bought me a diamond I would honestly feel ill. Sick. Disgusted. Because what a diamond symbolizes to me is greed, commercialism, the rapacity of western civilization, and the still-intolerable reek of colonialism. A diamond symbolizes our culture's ability to turn a blind eye to the things we don't want to see. It symbolizes the power of acquisition, as if love, like a diamond ring, is something that you could purchase. No, folks, this is not love you're seeing. This is not love at all.
Now, you want to know what *will* make a difference? Let me tell you what I'm going to do if I ever get married. First of all, I already have everything I need for a household. So rather than getting wedding presents, I'm going to ask that people donate to some of my favorite charities. And if he wants to drop ten thousand dollars on me, this is what we're going to do. We're taking a honeymoon to Africa, and we're teaching. I have a lot of useful skills--I'm sure any man I marry will, too--and I know that we can do some good, make differences in some people's lives, and help build infrastructure in places that badly badly need it. Now, that, folks, is a wedding ring I can be proud of: several thousand dollars, six months, and who knows how many lives changed.
Now, I realize that there are many women in the world who aren't like me. They want rings, and they want rocks, and I guess that's fine with me, as they don't see a diamond the way I do. But for god's sake, it's not the diamond that proves you love her--it's the fact that she wants the diamond, and you're willing to do it for her.
Bingo! And if you're shelving your ethics for sex--guess what? It's not really love, so why are you spending two months salary again?
Diamonds are not romance. Even flowers are not romance (although they're far better than diamonds). Dinner at a great restaurant isn't romance. Nothing you can buy her is romance, ever, period. Romance isn't about what you spend and her wearing black slinky dresses. It's about the two of you, and as such, whatever trappings you use are specific to you.
Now, in your case you happen to think that women think differently than men on some issues. This pretty much guarantees that you're going to have relationships with women who *do* think differently. That's fine. You want to buy flowers and diamond rings, the whole while you mutter to yourself that this is stupid? Go ahead. And you think this proves that you love her, because women think differently than men and you're pandering to their point of view which is--in your words--fucking stupid?
Get over your self righteousness. The other guy is right. An ugly rock != proof of love. Proof of love is paying attention to the other person. If it so happens that she really *wants* the diamond ring (ugh), maybe buying her the ring she wants demonstrates affection. But it's not the ring, and it's certainly not your condescending attitude.
Worse than that. My laptop running an unpaid-for licensed copy of Linux (and only that) also has an unused-yet-paid-for copy of XP attached to it. The M$ market includes probably thousands of PCs running no Microsoft software, which is a travesty. With this inherent disadvantage, it's doubly impressive that Linux is on the charts.