"I doubt it will be long before a fantasy role-playing game featuring characters of multiple races, genders, and sexual orientations will not seem unusual or out of the ordinary."
The video game industry desperately needs death-dealing lesbian bird-women.
Because every time over the years that the Christian church has been proven to be wrong or completely ridiculous on a point, they fight as hard as they can to avoid losing. They always do in the end, but they fight in the meantime.
Look at it this way -- gay-bashing, lame as it is, is a whole hell of a lot less dangerous than the execution that Galileo faced if he didn't recant his idea of the Earth going around the Sun.
In Great Greed (For the Game Boy, a Nintendo system!) you could choose to marry any of the king's daughters (who are major characters in the game) after finishing the game.
You could also choose to marry either the king or the queen.
Granted, the king criticizes you to some degree if you marry him, but it *is* a homosexual marriage taking place on a Nintendo system some years ago.
You misread the article. He did not need a business license in one location (that's a new one on me, as I thought for *sure* that a business license was a state requirement). He did need it in another. Tom was complaining about him not having one in the second location.
i'd say that at a good half of the good (as in enjoyable to read, not classic) fantasy authors out there are women. Let's see (giving an example book and series, if I know it):
George R. Martin (A Game of Thrones), Raymond E. Feist (Magician - The Riftwar Saga), Robert Jordan (The Eye of the World - The Wheel of Time), J. R. R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Rings - The Lord of the Rings), Tracy Hickman (Dragon Wing - The Death Gate Cycle), Rodger Zelazney (Chronicles of Amber), Fred Saberhagen (A Sharpness in the Neck), Tad Williams (The Dragonbone Chair), David Eddings (Pawn of Prophecy), Terry Pratchett (Discworld), Lawrence Yep (Dragon of the Lost Sea [note: get the series with the hardcover or original covers, as the cover art is phenomenal IMHO]).
Compared to:
Ursula Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea), Paula Volsky (Illusion), Susan Cooper (Over Sea, Under Stone - The Dark is Rising Series), Margaret Weis (Dragon Wing - The Death Gate Cycle), Elizabeth Willey (A Sorceror and a Gentleman - Kingdom of Argylle Series), Andre Norton (Golden Trillium), Joan Aiken (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase), Robin Hobb (Assassin's Apprentice), Katherine Kerr (Daggerspell, Deverry), Mickey Zucker Reichert (The Last of the Renshai, The Last of the Renshai)
I'd say it breaks down about evenly.
BTW, I can remember a sort of book that seemed to be a fantasy take on perhaps the American Revolution? There were three people (a sort of bravo that carried dueling pistols, a boy who was a thief, and a girl of some sort) that were exiled to a continent across an ocean...once there the man sort of took over the people there in fighting happening on the other continent...darned if I can remember the name.
Okay, I'm just curious. Setting aside for a moment the rather disappointing (IMHO) religious ties Narnia has, did anyone actually enjoy reading it? As in, just as a story? It wasn't *awful*, and it certainly had character, but I really didn't like it nearly as much as a lot of other fantasy I've read. It's not something that I'd choose to read again unless I was stuck somewhere without anything else to read.
Yes, but see, if he comes over here and pushes his service, and then a bunch of people say "Oh, you can do much better than that -- that service sucks", then he loses out.
The Wizard of Earthsea series is one of the most underread fantasy series I know of. It isn't the best fantasy out there (that's reserved for Paula Volsky -- try Illusion and see what you think), but it's very good, and very different from most fantasy.
I'd read the first book before anything else. I was kind of disappointed with The Tombs of Atuan book 2), which was very different from the first book. The third book was okay, but not as good as the first -- sort of the Dune syndrome.
The setting is different from most fantasy -- a bunch of islands, lots of emphasis on sailing around. There are not a lot of epic things going on -- there's lots of pragmatic, down-to-earth people.
Java/C#: Good for vertical market, custom, rapid-development work. If people have a problem with the performance, they can run out and buy a new computer, because there are only 30 people using your software.
C/C++: Good for horizontal market stuff. You don't have 50 million users having to run out and purchase new computers.
Almost all of the core GNOME apps (Evolution, etc) are written for horizontal market use, and should be C/C++.
On Windows (what everyone's scurrying about and worrying that Linux is falling behind) we have:
* C (Win32) * C++ (MFC) * C# * VBScript (dunno a damned thing about it) * VB * Java
On Linux, popular languages are:
* C * C++ * php * perl * python * Java
I'd say that there are about six on each platform. Really, not a huge difference. In addition, there are scads of less-used languages on each platform: Delphi, Ruby, ocaml, Pascal, Objective C, Ada...
This is not what you'd call an overwhelming number of languages on each platform. Furthermore, it's *much* easier to reuse GTK+ (C) knowledge with GTKmm (C++) than it is to reuse Win32 (C) knowledge with MFC (C++).
With libraries, there are roughly the same number in use. ClanLib is mostly a fringe library, same as Allegro -- SDL is quite dominant. Heck, there are a ton of libraries, but it's not as if the system is wildly different from the Microsoft side of the fence.
I haven't heard of the Adobes, Macromedias, or Intuits of the world scrambling to rewrite their apps in.NET; what makes HP think that GTKmm or QT isn't good enough? Don't believe the hype dude; the MS marketing machine has been blowing a lot of smoke up a lot of asses.
Yup.
Java/C# are snazzy for:
* Custom application development
* Lightweight distributed and networked systems.
* (Java at least) Cross-platform GUI apps.
* Vertical market software development.
C/C+ are snazzy for:
* Libraries
* Horizontal market applications
Until Microsoft goes out and rewrites MS SQL Server, MSIE, and Microsoft Word in C# (not going to happen, for good reasons), I don't see any reason why there should be any interest in doing the same with the core GNOME apps.
The same goes for Sun and Java. When Sun decides that Java would make a really great language for Open Office and successfully writes an efficient Java-based Office release, then it might be worthwhile considering Java for said use.
Until then, I'd suggest rnning out and actually *using* one of the desktop apps that people have written with Java. Hey...they're slow, RAM-hungry, and annoying to run on systems with different JVMs.
There have been a zillion less efficient languages proposed to replace C (and later C++) over the years. All of them failed to replace C/C++ as a general application programming language. Efficiency matters. The fact that Microsoft is pusshing a high level language and Sun is pushing a high level language (at other people -- notice failure of Wordperfect Java port for an example of why Java/C# are not good choices for horizontal market apps) does not mean that *this* year is the time to move to a high level language. I don't think anyone here wants GNOME or KDE to have a *bigger* RAM footprint, which Java would do.
From what I've heard, the architechture of GNOME truly sucks.
Ah. According to Penny Arcade, the CEO of Infineon Systems can't have an orgasm unless he kills a dog -- apparently, Tycho heard it on the Internet somewhere.
to gnome being a project that you could code for in any language?
Err...it hasn't changed a bit. They added support for one more language, to the other ones out there. A lot of people that bitterly hate C# went nuts over it, and have been happily misquoting Miguel and thinking that the sky is falling.
If you don't like to use C#...hey, don't use it! Use C, or C++, or perl, or Java, or whatever language you like to code GNOME apps in. If you like Lisp languages, look at cl-gtk or clg.
Now, several years after Microsoft started promoting C#/.net as the way to write new Windows applications, Linux desktop developers are getting into a debate about whether to switch to C#.
GNOME is not "switching" to C#. Linux is not "switching" to C#. KDE is not "switching" to C#. the FSF is not "switching" to C#. Miguel de Izca is likely to produce his next app in C#. Much like the other eight million languages on Linux (including Java, rep, perl, ruby, and God knows what), C# now has Linux support. It also happens to have GTK/GNOME bindings, like a whole hell of a lot of other existing languages out there. That's *it*. Jesus.
C# is a good language, but it is a far cry from Python, for example.
Great. Use Python. There are GNOME and GTK Python bindings. I suspect KDE has Python bindings. Code in Python to your heart's content. There are a handful of people that would like to use C#, and now they will use C#.
where the same alphabetic representation can imply many meanings.
Okay. First of all, we are talking about the TLD structure and the TLD structure alone, not DNS as a whole. None of the TLDs have English meaning. "org" or "br" doesn't directly mean anything in Chinese. I do not understand what the benefit to Chinese speakers would be in modifying this. This may be an interesting argument above the level of TLDs, but it does not have merit WRT to the ISO and ICANN generic TLDs.
isn't allowing users in non-English languages access to computing technology in a form suited to their own skills a good thing,
This is a straw man argument. I have not at any point said that Chinese people should use technology in a form unsuited to their own skills.
and is there any hardwired technical reason why the TLD list can't be extended to become compatible with non-alphabetic encodings like Unicode?
(a) The complaints here have nothing to do with Unicode. The question of whether or not *higher* level domains should be provided with Unicode support is isomorphic to the question of whether the TLDs should be changed. If they are not changed, they do not require Unicode support, so Unicode support is a non-issue. If you were to introdue a new kanji-coded TLD, you would still have the same problem as before -- www.foobar.com is accessable by typing www.foobar.com. Names are *unique*. You could introduce a new kanji-coded TLD, but people would still have to access TLDs outside of it.
(b) While it's entirely irrelevant to my post, no, I don't think that DNS should be extended to have Unicode support. It would break a tremendous amount of software, introduce a naming system where many people cannot type names on their keyboard, break support for network access on all text-based systems (whether you like it or not, massive amounts of terminal-oriented hardware has been added to the global computer system for decades, and simply saying that "The PC ANSI charset can't represent this address...but we'll try to work without it" would cause chaos.
The current character set is not as complete as it could be. It is a subset of characters that even English speakers might like expanded. There are no accents or Greek letters. But that's okay -- the idea is to have a least-common-denominator naming scheme that works around the world.
One does not have to be an English speaker to be able to manipulate URLs in their current form.
Finally, English has become the lingua franca of the Internet. If one *must* choose a globally least-common-denominator system to use letters from, i would suggest using the characters used in English.
DNS is an easily spoofed protocol (and mapping *anything* to an IP address to do authentication is also a bad idea). Using it as an authentication system is an extremely bad idea from a security standpoint. Use certs with SSL if you want server-side authorization.
This sort of thing can be provided by many other mechanisms, but "the existence of a DNS record in a TLD" is *not* what you want.
Oh, and it also isn't hierarchical, which is a fundamental element of DNS.
Okay, *I* don't like people polluting the TLD namespace. *He* wants more names.
How about this -- there be a.l (for "L"ame) TLD added, and anything this guy wants to add as a tld can go under there, making him happy, since he gets all his wacky TLDs and the registrars can have their "you just bought blargh.com! Do you also want to buy blarg.wipo.l?" messages. If people get crabby about having to type two extra letters "It's not a *real* TLD!" they can add.l to their search domains and bump up ndots in resolv.conf. Furthermore, the conventional generics can be aliased into the.l domain (.com.l) if people *really* don't want to do another lookup.
Christ, I can't believe there are people attacking the DNS structure again. We have to put up with Verisign and their wildcards, the registrars and their ".aero" TLD, and now more crap.
1) Game dev houses do public post-mortems. I wonder what we'd find out if traditional software developers did public post-mortems? Maybe a lot of them wouldn't have the careful planning that you might expect.
2) Games are (I believe necessarily) *somewhat* driven in design by implementation issues that cannot be found out until implementation time. It may be that having 20 goat-riding banshees running around attacking you just plain uses too much CPU time, and the game has to be changed. A design document is *very* useful when you have to interface with someone else's code, but game developers aren't interfacing with code. The game field moves quickly, and they may want to include new stuff that comes out during the dev process.
That doesn't mean that game developers can't improve, but I suspect that there is a *reason* that they don't always work the same way more conventional developers do.
As for the term "unprofessional", I've found it to be a loaded term that rarely conveys useful information.
The difference between Adobe and Microsoft is product quality.
When I use Windows, I get pissed off at the sheer number of broken things (click, click, click, "Oh, Explorer seems to have hung", click, "Well, now it's crashed...") or things that are a tremendous pain in the ass to do under Windows that would be easy in Linux. (Try batch-printing 200 PS files, as I did once when pretty-printing an entire source tree -- on an *IX box the lpr call is nicely serialized, but Windows parallelizes everything, so if you just select all the documents in Explorer, right click and choose "print", Windows opens eighty zillion copies of Ghostscript or whatever you're using and then throws up all over itself.
When I'm using, say, Photoshop, I don't constantly get angry at the failings and random breakage of the program.
Slashdot Mirror
"I doubt it will be long before a fantasy role-playing game featuring characters of multiple races, genders, and sexual orientations will not seem unusual or out of the ordinary."
The video game industry desperately needs death-dealing lesbian bird-women.
Because every time over the years that the Christian church has been proven to be wrong or completely ridiculous on a point, they fight as hard as they can to avoid losing. They always do in the end, but they fight in the meantime.
Look at it this way -- gay-bashing, lame as it is, is a whole hell of a lot less dangerous than the execution that Galileo faced if he didn't recant his idea of the Earth going around the Sun.
In Great Greed (For the Game Boy, a Nintendo system!) you could choose to marry any of the king's daughters (who are major characters in the game) after finishing the game.
You could also choose to marry either the king or the queen.
Granted, the king criticizes you to some degree if you marry him, but it *is* a homosexual marriage taking place on a Nintendo system some years ago.
You misread the article. He did not need a business license in one location (that's a new one on me, as I thought for *sure* that a business license was a state requirement). He did need it in another. Tom was complaining about him not having one in the second location.
From the Tom's story: "I was thinking, WOW!!! I want this laptop!" Yeh baby! I want to fly the Space Shuttle too, think it's a possibility?
You know, just because you're not a fan of Tom doesn't mean that he wasn't being sarcastic.
Hi, Mike! Good to have you drop in!
[aka "Yes, dammit, women can write fantasy."]
i'd say that at a good half of the good (as in enjoyable to read, not classic) fantasy authors out there are women. Let's see (giving an example book and series, if I know it):
George R. Martin (A Game of Thrones), Raymond E. Feist (Magician - The Riftwar Saga), Robert Jordan (The Eye of the World - The Wheel of Time), J. R. R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Rings - The Lord of the Rings), Tracy Hickman (Dragon Wing - The Death Gate Cycle), Rodger Zelazney (Chronicles of Amber), Fred Saberhagen (A Sharpness in the Neck), Tad Williams (The Dragonbone Chair), David Eddings (Pawn of Prophecy), Terry Pratchett (Discworld), Lawrence Yep (Dragon of the Lost Sea [note: get the series with the hardcover or original covers, as the cover art is phenomenal IMHO]).
Compared to:
Ursula Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea), Paula Volsky (Illusion), Susan Cooper (Over Sea, Under Stone - The Dark is Rising Series), Margaret Weis (Dragon Wing - The Death Gate Cycle), Elizabeth Willey (A Sorceror and a Gentleman - Kingdom of Argylle Series), Andre Norton (Golden Trillium), Joan Aiken (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase), Robin Hobb (Assassin's Apprentice), Katherine Kerr (Daggerspell, Deverry), Mickey Zucker Reichert (The Last of the Renshai, The Last of the Renshai)
I'd say it breaks down about evenly.
BTW, I can remember a sort of book that seemed to be a fantasy take on perhaps the American Revolution? There were three people (a sort of bravo that carried dueling pistols, a boy who was a thief, and a girl of some sort) that were exiled to a continent across an ocean...once there the man sort of took over the people there in fighting happening on the other continent...darned if I can remember the name.
Okay, I'm just curious. Setting aside for a moment the rather disappointing (IMHO) religious ties Narnia has, did anyone actually enjoy reading it? As in, just as a story? It wasn't *awful*, and it certainly had character, but I really didn't like it nearly as much as a lot of other fantasy I've read. It's not something that I'd choose to read again unless I was stuck somewhere without anything else to read.
Yes, but see, if he comes over here and pushes his service, and then a bunch of people say "Oh, you can do much better than that -- that service sucks", then he loses out.
He asked for recommendations. Unless you're making false claims, go for it.
The Wizard of Earthsea series is one of the most underread fantasy series I know of. It isn't the best fantasy out there (that's reserved for Paula Volsky -- try Illusion and see what you think), but it's very good, and very different from most fantasy.
I'd read the first book before anything else. I was kind of disappointed with The Tombs of Atuan book 2), which was very different from the first book. The third book was okay, but not as good as the first -- sort of the Dune syndrome.
The setting is different from most fantasy -- a bunch of islands, lots of emphasis on sailing around. There are not a lot of epic things going on -- there's lots of pragmatic, down-to-earth people.
Java/C#: Good for vertical market, custom, rapid-development work. If people have a problem with the performance, they can run out and buy a new computer, because there are only 30 people using your software.
C/C++: Good for horizontal market stuff. You don't have 50 million users having to run out and purchase new computers.
Almost all of the core GNOME apps (Evolution, etc) are written for horizontal market use, and should be C/C++.
Well, let's just take a look here.
On Windows (what everyone's scurrying about and worrying that Linux is falling behind) we have:
* C (Win32)
* C++ (MFC)
* C#
* VBScript (dunno a damned thing about it)
* VB
* Java
On Linux, popular languages are:
* C
* C++
* php
* perl
* python
* Java
I'd say that there are about six on each platform. Really, not a huge difference. In addition, there are scads of less-used languages on each platform: Delphi, Ruby, ocaml, Pascal, Objective C, Ada...
This is not what you'd call an overwhelming number of languages on each platform. Furthermore, it's *much* easier to reuse GTK+ (C) knowledge with GTKmm (C++) than it is to reuse Win32 (C) knowledge with MFC (C++).
With libraries, there are roughly the same number in use. ClanLib is mostly a fringe library, same as Allegro -- SDL is quite dominant. Heck, there are a ton of libraries, but it's not as if the system is wildly different from the Microsoft side of the fence.
I haven't heard of the Adobes, Macromedias, or Intuits of the world scrambling to rewrite their apps in .NET; what makes HP think that GTKmm or QT isn't good enough? Don't believe the hype dude; the MS marketing machine has been blowing a lot of smoke up a lot of asses.
Yup.
Java/C# are snazzy for:
* Custom application development
* Lightweight distributed and networked systems.
* (Java at least) Cross-platform GUI apps.
* Vertical market software development.
C/C+ are snazzy for:
* Libraries
* Horizontal market applications
Until Microsoft goes out and rewrites MS SQL Server, MSIE, and Microsoft Word in C# (not going to happen, for good reasons), I don't see any reason why there should be any interest in doing the same with the core GNOME apps.
The same goes for Sun and Java. When Sun decides that Java would make a really great language for Open Office and successfully writes an efficient Java-based Office release, then it might be worthwhile considering Java for said use.
Until then, I'd suggest rnning out and actually *using* one of the desktop apps that people have written with Java. Hey...they're slow, RAM-hungry, and annoying to run on systems with different JVMs.
There have been a zillion less efficient languages proposed to replace C (and later C++) over the years. All of them failed to replace C/C++ as a general application programming language. Efficiency matters. The fact that Microsoft is pusshing a high level language and Sun is pushing a high level language (at other people -- notice failure of Wordperfect Java port for an example of why Java/C# are not good choices for horizontal market apps) does not mean that *this* year is the time to move to a high level language. I don't think anyone here wants GNOME or KDE to have a *bigger* RAM footprint, which Java would do.
From what I've heard, the architechture of GNOME truly sucks.
Ah. According to Penny Arcade, the CEO of Infineon Systems can't have an orgasm unless he kills a dog -- apparently, Tycho heard it on the Internet somewhere.
Read the posting history of the parent's account. It's a troll account.
to gnome being a project that you could code for in any language?
Err...it hasn't changed a bit. They added support for one more language, to the other ones out there. A lot of people that bitterly hate C# went nuts over it, and have been happily misquoting Miguel and thinking that the sky is falling.
If you don't like to use C#...hey, don't use it! Use C, or C++, or perl, or Java, or whatever language you like to code GNOME apps in. If you like Lisp languages, look at cl-gtk or clg.
Now, several years after Microsoft started promoting C#/.net as the way to write new Windows applications, Linux desktop developers are getting into a debate about whether to switch to C#.
H HH HHHHHHHHH!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHH
What is *wrong* with you people?
GNOME is not "switching" to C#. Linux is not "switching" to C#. KDE is not "switching" to C#. the FSF is not "switching" to C#. Miguel de Izca is likely to produce his next app in C#. Much like the other eight million languages on Linux (including Java, rep, perl, ruby, and God knows what), C# now has Linux support. It also happens to have GTK/GNOME bindings, like a whole hell of a lot of other existing languages out there. That's *it*. Jesus.
C# is a good language, but it is a far cry from Python, for example.
Great. Use Python. There are GNOME and GTK Python bindings. I suspect KDE has Python bindings. Code in Python to your heart's content. There are a handful of people that would like to use C#, and now they will use C#.
where the same alphabetic representation can imply many meanings.
Okay. First of all, we are talking about the TLD structure and the TLD structure alone, not DNS as a whole. None of the TLDs have English meaning. "org" or "br" doesn't directly mean anything in Chinese. I do not understand what the benefit to Chinese speakers would be in modifying this. This may be an interesting argument above the level of TLDs, but it does not have merit WRT to the ISO and ICANN generic TLDs.
isn't allowing users in non-English languages access to computing technology in a form suited to their own skills a good thing,
This is a straw man argument. I have not at any point said that Chinese people should use technology in a form unsuited to their own skills.
and is there any hardwired technical reason why the TLD list can't be extended to become compatible with non-alphabetic encodings like Unicode?
(a) The complaints here have nothing to do with Unicode. The question of whether or not *higher* level domains should be provided with Unicode support is isomorphic to the question of whether the TLDs should be changed. If they are not changed, they do not require Unicode support, so Unicode support is a non-issue. If you were to introdue a new kanji-coded TLD, you would still have the same problem as before -- www.foobar.com is accessable by typing www.foobar.com. Names are *unique*. You could introduce a new kanji-coded TLD, but people would still have to access TLDs outside of it.
(b) While it's entirely irrelevant to my post, no, I don't think that DNS should be extended to have Unicode support. It would break a tremendous amount of software, introduce a naming system where many people cannot type names on their keyboard, break support for network access on all text-based systems (whether you like it or not, massive amounts of terminal-oriented hardware has been added to the global computer system for decades, and simply saying that "The PC ANSI charset can't represent this address...but we'll try to work without it" would cause chaos.
The current character set is not as complete as it could be. It is a subset of characters that even English speakers might like expanded. There are no accents or Greek letters. But that's okay -- the idea is to have a least-common-denominator naming scheme that works around the world.
One does not have to be an English speaker to be able to manipulate URLs in their current form.
Finally, English has become the lingua franca of the Internet. If one *must* choose a globally least-common-denominator system to use letters from, i would suggest using the characters used in English.
DNS is an easily spoofed protocol (and mapping *anything* to an IP address to do authentication is also a bad idea). Using it as an authentication system is an extremely bad idea from a security standpoint. Use certs with SSL if you want server-side authorization.
This sort of thing can be provided by many other mechanisms, but "the existence of a DNS record in a TLD" is *not* what you want.
Oh, and it also isn't hierarchical, which is a fundamental element of DNS.
Wouldn't it be handy to have a .sex domain?
I can't figure out whether you're joking or trolling, but in any case, the "Interesting" mod was definitely not what I would have given the post.
Okay, *I* don't like people polluting the TLD namespace. *He* wants more names.
.l (for "L"ame) TLD added, and anything this guy wants to add as a tld can go under there, making him happy, since he gets all his wacky TLDs and the registrars can have their "you just bought blargh.com! Do you also want to buy blarg.wipo.l?" messages. If people get crabby about having to type two extra letters "It's not a *real* TLD!" they can add .l to their search domains and bump up ndots in resolv.conf. Furthermore, the conventional generics can be aliased into the .l domain (.com.l) if people *really* don't want to do another lookup.
How about this -- there be a
Christ, I can't believe there are people attacking the DNS structure again. We have to put up with Verisign and their wildcards, the registrars and their ".aero" TLD, and now more crap.
Two points:
1) Game dev houses do public post-mortems. I wonder what we'd find out if traditional software developers did public post-mortems? Maybe a lot of them wouldn't have the careful planning that you might expect.
2) Games are (I believe necessarily) *somewhat* driven in design by implementation issues that cannot be found out until implementation time. It may be that having 20 goat-riding banshees running around attacking you just plain uses too much CPU time, and the game has to be changed. A design document is *very* useful when you have to interface with someone else's code, but game developers aren't interfacing with code. The game field moves quickly, and they may want to include new stuff that comes out during the dev process.
That doesn't mean that game developers can't improve, but I suspect that there is a *reason* that they don't always work the same way more conventional developers do.
As for the term "unprofessional", I've found it to be a loaded term that rarely conveys useful information.
The Project Gutenberg 2 people are Nazis.
The difference between Adobe and Microsoft is product quality.
When I use Windows, I get pissed off at the sheer number of broken things (click, click, click, "Oh, Explorer seems to have hung", click, "Well, now it's crashed...") or things that are a tremendous pain in the ass to do under Windows that would be easy in Linux. (Try batch-printing 200 PS files, as I did once when pretty-printing an entire source tree -- on an *IX box the lpr call is nicely serialized, but Windows parallelizes everything, so if you just select all the documents in Explorer, right click and choose "print", Windows opens eighty zillion copies of Ghostscript or whatever you're using and then throws up all over itself.
When I'm using, say, Photoshop, I don't constantly get angry at the failings and random breakage of the program.