Even worse is that "Edit->Stroke" is not only hard to figure out and hard to use, it doesn't even work the same as a real shape tool would, when you want to get a simple one-pixel width cicrle you will have a real hard time with Gimp, since it will always give you a ugly two or more pixel width one.
No need for a study, just go to some school with small children and watch them fighting over some Pokemons. Video games affect us in both good and bad ways, children probally quite a bit more then adults. There is no need to completly ban them, but some regulation to not let certain games get into the hand of children can be bad. After all it would give control back to where it belongs, into the hands of the parents.
The problem is that a idealistic problems quickly turn into practical ones. When distros no longer can package things due to licensing throuble, when users have to manually track and download dependencies, when bugs can no longer be fixed cause they are happening in the closed-part of a programm then you know that using a idealistic solution might have avoided you a lot of throuble over a practical one down the road.
### You contradict yourself here. Or else, you really mean an average user (who is no developer in your terms) needs ten different versions of a lib on their machines (given they know what a lib actually is)?
Probally not ten versions of a library, but two versions of a programm are quite common. Its simply about keeping the old version around while playing around with the new one. Sure your grandmother might not care about that, but anybody who uses its computer for more than just very basic email and web will love the ability to switch to a new version when they want not when the manufactor or distro maker forces it on them. Remember that a lot of computer users out there are neither clueless grandmothers nor hack-everything yourself hackers, many of them are just users who want to get their work done and yet now the basics of how a computer works.
Nintendo won't die out so soon, even if all fails they could still turn into a software-only company like sega and lets not forget that even so they are no longer market leader in the non-handheld console business they are still making money out of it.
180EUR isn't the price of the PSP, its the amount of money that you have to pay more then for the DS, meaning the DS is at 150EUR and the PSP at 330EUR!
### Cute idea, could result in a handful of fun games like Wario Ware, but we're talking glorified palm pilot games here, not console hand held quality.
While it is true that the current range of games definitvly makes the DS look far to gimicky (too many simple stylus driven games), its not the fault of the hardware, but just of the gamedesigners. The DS can do games like any other handheld too, the second screen is just an addition that the gamedesigners should use for the benefit of a game, not as a purpose in itself to write a game around it. I for one find the second screen extremly comfortable for navigating menus or for looking at the map, it for sure could be quite usefull for managing the inventory in a RPG or for switching weapons in some actions games. It gives the game a much more confortable field when one doesn't has to switch forward and backward through different modes. The second screen should be seen as a configurable keypad, not as a analog stick or mouse replacment.
I think the biggest mistake Nintendo did was making the second screen equally large to the first one, that way it basically forces the designers to use it for something useless, just so that it doesn't look wasted. IMHO it would have been much better if the second screen would have been quite a bit smaller then the first one.
Actually its not a no-brainer, far from it. The GBA support in the DS is actually quite limited, no link support, thus no multiplayer, no Gamecube-link, very unconfortable button mapping for GBA games and complete lack of GBC and Gameboy support. Those limitations might be acceptable for some people, but for others they render the DS as GBA replacement useless. The lack of good DS games and the higher price make the GBAsp still quite attractive in comparism.
Nothing is stopping them, but then nothing is stopping somebody else from correcting their doings. Such a thing is called Edit War and if it happens frequenctly on a article that article is either locked for a period of time to give the parties time to cool down or one of the parties banned if their doing is clearly abusive.
### Wikipedia would have a revolutionary social technique on its hands if it could resolve such conflicts
Wikipedia doesn't have a magical way to solve these conflicts, but its neutral point of view simply prevents those conflicts to arise in the first place, well, at least most of the time. So instead of writing "God created the earth in seven days", a Wikipedia article reads more like "There are people who believe that God created the earth in seven days, they call themself creationist..." and "Evolution has become widly accepted by the mainstream scientific community and evolution is about this and that.". So it simply doesn't state evolution is 100% right and creationism is all bullshit, but simply what evolution and creationism is about, who believes in it, what proves for it exist, etc.
### If two people have very different definitions of a controversial subject, like "terrorists" vs. "freedom fighters" for a single guerilla group, which becomes "definitive"?
Neither of those becomes definitive, if there is controverisy, then simply both points of view are explained. Its called Neutral Point of View.
### If I post an article, clearly linked, reporting a new scientific discovery, are the "wikipeers" qualified to process the "peer review" that filters most scientific reports?
No, such an articel wolud either be rewritten or removed, since Wikipedia is not the place for original research.
### I mean, debian is the only distro that supports all the exotic architectures.
Well, no, they don't. What Debian does is running their deb Packages through a autobuilder for the given arch and do some surrounding work to get it going. In practice the result is not all that good, since you end up with either a bunch of packages dropped for that arch or simply build into a non-working state. At least that was my experince with trying Debian on Alpha, sure it somehow worked but it was a whole lot less smooth then x86 Debian.
So their step now to drop them from stable isn't something spectacular, but just adjusting their doing to face the reality. They simply can't get all the archs into stable state and especially not in time so that the packages in stable stay usefull, so its simply better not wasting time with it when past has shown that the result will be useless anyway for most of the people out there.
Beside from that it doesn't mean that Debian is all of a sudden purging the other archs from their ftp servers, just that those archs won't make it into the 'stable' release process.
Last not least what Debian really need is more frequent releases, if dropping a few seldomly used archs helps, then it helps Debian as a whole and in turn maybe even those archs. I for one prefer some exotic arch well supported in 'unstable' then badly supported in 'stable'.
The answer to the question how OpenSource business models work is that they don't. If you today are making money by selling boxes with your software going OpenSource will sooner or later make you go bankrupt.
The reason why OpenSource works for Redhat and SuSE is because they don't write much OpenSource, the community does, they just pick the whole work of other, package it nicly, write some installer programms, fix some remaining bugs and then sell it. If there wouldn't be a large community to actually write the software they wouldn't have much of a chance, since there wouldn't be much that they could package. Supporting their products is another source for there income, for which their OpenSource activity is of course a great way to advertise it.
So if you expect to write original OpenSource software and expect to get a large return from it, you can basically forget it. If everybody can download your software for free you won't stand much of a chance to sell it. If you however sell a service and not a piece of software there is a good chance that OpenSource won't hurt you, since people will still buy your service. There are also models which work by releasing older versions as OpenSource and selling the current version as close source.
Overall making money by writing OpenSource doesn't work, what works however is using OpenSource as advertisment to services you sell. However selling services doesn't work for all kinds of software, so if your software doesn't require much service around it, you are out of luck. If you want to make money with your software there are probally better ways then OpenSource, you should see OpenSource as a way to ensure the users freedom, not to ensure yourself a larger income.
### Why are we still limited to mice that move in only 2 dimensions.
They aren't, basically every mouse you can by these days has at least 3 dimensions (x,y and the wheel), the newer microsoft mice now even have a wheel that you can twist sideways, so you have 4 dimensions. Add the little extra-buttons which are often mapped to forward/backward into the mix and you got 5 dimensions, still not your 6 dimensions, but its getting close.
I for one would love a trackpoint, trackpad or even trackball on my keyboard, not because its a better pointing device then my mouse, but because for a lot of things I simply don't need all the precision that I get with a mouse. To move a window, move focus to another window or to move my pointer to another input box in some webform I don't find it much effective to reach out and grab my mouse, it would be much more effective if I could simply get control over my pointer via a little finger move. A split keyboard offers more then enough room to place some kind of pointing device inbetween the split, however most keyboards simply waste that space for nothing. And sadly this little prototype never hit the shelves either.
ST:TNG, yes, thats probally better then ST:ENT, however ST:ENT is the closest we get to TNG at the moment and reairing the same TNG episodes again and again sooner or later gets boring.
Firefly, while a great show, is something complete different then StarTrek. StarTrek is about exploring space, go where no man has gone before, Firefly is more or less a Buffy-In-Space. The surrounding doesn't matter all that much, its just there to give some initial starting point to drive the characters and drama in that show. You could have let Firefly play on a sailing boat or on a farm and it wouldn't be much different.
Same with Battlestar Galactica, its not about exploring space, its about the running away from the Cylons, some religous vodoo and some Cylon mind-games. Nice show, but not a StarTrek replacement either.
Babylon 5 might be the only one to get a bit closer to StarTrek, but I haven't seen enough of it to comment on that.
The point is to save StarTrek, not to get a good show in space into TV.
### how difficult is it to acknowledge that for a human being to not be able to distingusih between reality and fantasy
Just because one can distinguish between reality and fantasy doesn't mean that fantasy doesn't affect us. How many people cried at the end of Titanic? Well, I don't know, but I bet quite a few, are all those mentally ill, unable to distunguish between reality and fantasy? Probally not.
That of course doesn't mean that GTA is the cause here, but video games, tv or any media in general affects us, if we want or not. That doesn't mean that we all turn into mass murderers, but they change socity as a whole. If they do it to the better or worse of socity is of course another question, but they certainly affect us somehow.
The throuble is not building the controller, but building applications that work with it. Building a controller that might be better for typing might not be that difficult, but will it be equally good at gaming, at pressing shortcuts and similar things or will have people to fall back to keyboard use? Same with special game controllers, they work good for games designed for them, but are awefull for others and a pain to configure for the rest of the games. If you look at Nintendo for example they have designed games specifically for the controller, Mario64 without an analog controller would have been a quite different game, so would have Luigis Mansion without two of them and the analog shoulder buttons, same with Pikmin and a bunch of others of their games. With the NintendoDS its the same again. On the other side Nintendos controller can be quite a pain for games first developed for PS2 and then just quickly ported to the Gamecube, 'action-buttons' mapped to Z-trigger, Analog shoulder buttons used for non-analog events and similar things, it can still be played, but its only half the fun as with the controller the games where designed for.
I still find it sad that there isn't much new stuff happening in the controller world, but without applications to back up the controller its near impossible to get something new happening.
### That everyone says MMORPG players have no life?
MMORPG players can of course have a life, the thing that MMORPGs however offer that other games doesn't, is an alternative life in a virtual world. In CounterStrike you play a few rounds, exit and are done, your character doesn't evolv and doesn't persist, it gets reset each and every game you play. The whole 'world' is made up of a few very small maps compared to the large ones that MMORPGs offer, so there is nothing to explore, no special events to happens, its always the same, just tactics and player change.
On the other side you also have clans in Counterstrike, which work somewhat similar like a party in a MMORPG, however such stuff isn't part of the game itself, but something the community does outside of the game, in a MMORPG most stuff can be done in the game itself.
Not saying that MMORPGs necesarrily are more addictive than casual games, but the persistence of the world makes them quite a bit different from a random round of CounterStrike or SuperMarioBros.
Discussions about "my OS is more secure then yours" are completly pointless if both OSs have buffer overflows every few days and remote root exploids every few weeks or month in either the kernel or an important and widespread application. Neither OS is secure and requires regular patching, if you don't then its just a matter of weeks before your computer gets some new owners.
The only thing that might be worth to discuss is maybe which OS is easier to patch, but I don't see any clear winner there either, while some Linuxs have apt-get, in practice one often ends up compiling software oneself, so byebye apt-get and hello manually reading bugtrack. Windows has its update service too, but that basically fails for the same reason, since a bunch of software isn't tracked by it.
Talking about patch frequency, well, OSS might be a little bit faster here sometimes and a bit slower at other times, but so far for each worms that widespread used a leak for which a patch was already available weeks or month ago, so patch frequency doesn't seem to matter that much.
And when talking about targetted attacks neither OS seems to be much good either, a whole bunch of popular Linux (Debian, Savannah, Gentoo-mirror, lots of PHPBB sites, etc.) and Windows server got cracked in the past.
So well, wake me up when there is an OS out there that really is secure and doesn't instantly give root to everyone just because a programmer made a tiny mistake. grsecurity at default on all distros, every app written in Java and running on a VM or whatever might be something worth to reconsider the question which OS is more secure, but for now both are insecure if you like it or not. After all there is a reason why truely sensitive data isn't connected to the internet at all most of the time.
Knowing that Boomer is a Cylon is of course rather obvious, the thing that so far hasn't been explained is why Boomer is going crazy from time to time (blowing up the water reservers, shooting Adama) and why she herself doesn't know that she is a Cylon. She has probally found out now by herself, but she didn't seem to know it from the beginning.
### My take on this is that the Cylons *aren't* ready to destroy humanity yet.
I kind of agree on this, however while this viewpoint fits well with the series, it doesn't mix much good with the pilot. In the pilot the Galactica for most part only got away due to pure luck (and due to the outdated tech on board), if Starbuck wouldn't have shot down two of the three nukes that were flying towards Galactica, Galactica would most likly be toast now. The Cylons seem to be quite ready to erase menkind in the pilot, but in the serie they seem to not been much more interested it. On the other side its also not clear what happend to all those survivors on the colonies, the whole city looked kind of empty (no dead bodies), but for most part still rather intact. So either the Cylons 'cleaned up' or captured them. So maybe what they planed was something along the lines of "erase menkind for most part, pick up what is left and do 'something' with the", whatever that 'something' means. Boomer being pragnant makes it look like breading a new Cylon/human-mix race or whatever. Its also not really clear why the Cylons are so organic, they started out as walking toasters more or less, while they are now almost indistinguishable from humans.
Oh well, so many open questions, maybe next season will answer some, we will see.
Well, not really. It just doesn't make sense. If the point is to destroy men kind and thus the Galactica, then why waste time to kill Adama? They could just have asked for the coordinates of Galactica, send the base star and destory it, quick&easy, or Boomer takes the nuke back and detonates inside Galactica, equally easy.
Cylons are playing for to much cat&mouse with the humans for my taste without much explantion why, maybe that will follow in seasons two, but I kind of doubt that the writers will get something really believable patched together.
Slashdot Mirror
They also tend to suggest switching the window manager... which not only is rather chumbersome, but also rather hard to do on Mac and Windows...
Even worse is that "Edit->Stroke" is not only hard to figure out and hard to use, it doesn't even work the same as a real shape tool would, when you want to get a simple one-pixel width cicrle you will have a real hard time with Gimp, since it will always give you a ugly two or more pixel width one.
### altered behavior
No need for a study, just go to some school with small children and watch them fighting over some Pokemons. Video games affect us in both good and bad ways, children probally quite a bit more then adults. There is no need to completly ban them, but some regulation to not let certain games get into the hand of children can be bad. After all it would give control back to where it belongs, into the hands of the parents.
The problem is that a idealistic problems quickly turn into practical ones. When distros no longer can package things due to licensing throuble, when users have to manually track and download dependencies, when bugs can no longer be fixed cause they are happening in the closed-part of a programm then you know that using a idealistic solution might have avoided you a lot of throuble over a practical one down the road.
### You contradict yourself here. Or else, you really mean an average user (who is no developer in your terms) needs ten different versions of a lib on their machines (given they know what a lib actually is)?
Probally not ten versions of a library, but two versions of a programm are quite common. Its simply about keeping the old version around while playing around with the new one. Sure your grandmother might not care about that, but anybody who uses its computer for more than just very basic email and web will love the ability to switch to a new version when they want not when the manufactor or distro maker forces it on them. Remember that a lot of computer users out there are neither clueless grandmothers nor hack-everything yourself hackers, many of them are just users who want to get their work done and yet now the basics of how a computer works.
Nintendo won't die out so soon, even if all fails they could still turn into a software-only company like sega and lets not forget that even so they are no longer market leader in the non-handheld console business they are still making money out of it.
180EUR isn't the price of the PSP, its the amount of money that you have to pay more then for the DS, meaning the DS is at 150EUR and the PSP at 330EUR!
### Cute idea, could result in a handful of fun games like Wario Ware, but we're talking glorified palm pilot games here, not console hand held quality.
While it is true that the current range of games definitvly makes the DS look far to gimicky (too many simple stylus driven games), its not the fault of the hardware, but just of the gamedesigners. The DS can do games like any other handheld too, the second screen is just an addition that the gamedesigners should use for the benefit of a game, not as a purpose in itself to write a game around it. I for one find the second screen extremly comfortable for navigating menus or for looking at the map, it for sure could be quite usefull for managing the inventory in a RPG or for switching weapons in some actions games. It gives the game a much more confortable field when one doesn't has to switch forward and backward through different modes. The second screen should be seen as a configurable keypad, not as a analog stick or mouse replacment.
I think the biggest mistake Nintendo did was making the second screen equally large to the first one, that way it basically forces the designers to use it for something useless, just so that it doesn't look wasted. IMHO it would have been much better if the second screen would have been quite a bit smaller then the first one.
Actually its not a no-brainer, far from it. The GBA support in the DS is actually quite limited, no link support, thus no multiplayer, no Gamecube-link, very unconfortable button mapping for GBA games and complete lack of GBC and Gameboy support. Those limitations might be acceptable for some people, but for others they render the DS as GBA replacement useless. The lack of good DS games and the higher price make the GBAsp still quite attractive in comparism.
Unless the price which Amazon lists are incorrect, the PSP is 180EUR(!) more expensive then the DS over here in germany.
Nothing is stopping them, but then nothing is stopping somebody else from correcting their doings. Such a thing is called Edit War and if it happens frequenctly on a article that article is either locked for a period of time to give the parties time to cool down or one of the parties banned if their doing is clearly abusive.
### Wikipedia would have a revolutionary social technique on its hands if it could resolve such conflicts
Wikipedia doesn't have a magical way to solve these conflicts, but its neutral point of view simply prevents those conflicts to arise in the first place, well, at least most of the time. So instead of writing "God created the earth in seven days", a Wikipedia article reads more like "There are people who believe that God created the earth in seven days, they call themself creationist..." and "Evolution has become widly accepted by the mainstream scientific community and evolution is about this and that.". So it simply doesn't state evolution is 100% right and creationism is all bullshit, but simply what evolution and creationism is about, who believes in it, what proves for it exist, etc.
Neither of those becomes definitive, if there is controverisy, then simply both points of view are explained. Its called Neutral Point of View.
### If I post an article, clearly linked, reporting a new scientific discovery, are the "wikipeers" qualified to process the "peer review" that filters most scientific reports?
No, such an articel wolud either be rewritten or removed, since Wikipedia is not the place for original research.
### I mean, debian is the only distro that supports all the exotic architectures.
Well, no, they don't. What Debian does is running their deb Packages through a autobuilder for the given arch and do some surrounding work to get it going. In practice the result is not all that good, since you end up with either a bunch of packages dropped for that arch or simply build into a non-working state. At least that was my experince with trying Debian on Alpha, sure it somehow worked but it was a whole lot less smooth then x86 Debian.
So their step now to drop them from stable isn't something spectacular, but just adjusting their doing to face the reality. They simply can't get all the archs into stable state and especially not in time so that the packages in stable stay usefull, so its simply better not wasting time with it when past has shown that the result will be useless anyway for most of the people out there.
Beside from that it doesn't mean that Debian is all of a sudden purging the other archs from their ftp servers, just that those archs won't make it into the 'stable' release process.
Last not least what Debian really need is more frequent releases, if dropping a few seldomly used archs helps, then it helps Debian as a whole and in turn maybe even those archs. I for one prefer some exotic arch well supported in 'unstable' then badly supported in 'stable'.
The answer to the question how OpenSource business models work is that they don't. If you today are making money by selling boxes with your software going OpenSource will sooner or later make you go bankrupt.
The reason why OpenSource works for Redhat and SuSE is because they don't write much OpenSource, the community does, they just pick the whole work of other, package it nicly, write some installer programms, fix some remaining bugs and then sell it. If there wouldn't be a large community to actually write the software they wouldn't have much of a chance, since there wouldn't be much that they could package. Supporting their products is another source for there income, for which their OpenSource activity is of course a great way to advertise it.
So if you expect to write original OpenSource software and expect to get a large return from it, you can basically forget it. If everybody can download your software for free you won't stand much of a chance to sell it. If you however sell a service and not a piece of software there is a good chance that OpenSource won't hurt you, since people will still buy your service. There are also models which work by releasing older versions as OpenSource and selling the current version as close source.
Overall making money by writing OpenSource doesn't work, what works however is using OpenSource as advertisment to services you sell. However selling services doesn't work for all kinds of software, so if your software doesn't require much service around it, you are out of luck. If you want to make money with your software there are probally better ways then OpenSource, you should see OpenSource as a way to ensure the users freedom, not to ensure yourself a larger income.
### Why are we still limited to mice that move in only 2 dimensions.
They aren't, basically every mouse you can by these days has at least 3 dimensions (x,y and the wheel), the newer microsoft mice now even have a wheel that you can twist sideways, so you have 4 dimensions. Add the little extra-buttons which are often mapped to forward/backward into the mix and you got 5 dimensions, still not your 6 dimensions, but its getting close.
I for one would love a trackpoint, trackpad or even trackball on my keyboard, not because its a better pointing device then my mouse, but because for a lot of things I simply don't need all the precision that I get with a mouse. To move a window, move focus to another window or to move my pointer to another input box in some webform I don't find it much effective to reach out and grab my mouse, it would be much more effective if I could simply get control over my pointer via a little finger move. A split keyboard offers more then enough room to place some kind of pointing device inbetween the split, however most keyboards simply waste that space for nothing. And sadly this little prototype never hit the shelves either.
ST:TNG, yes, thats probally better then ST:ENT, however ST:ENT is the closest we get to TNG at the moment and reairing the same TNG episodes again and again sooner or later gets boring.
Firefly, while a great show, is something complete different then StarTrek. StarTrek is about exploring space, go where no man has gone before, Firefly is more or less a Buffy-In-Space. The surrounding doesn't matter all that much, its just there to give some initial starting point to drive the characters and drama in that show. You could have let Firefly play on a sailing boat or on a farm and it wouldn't be much different.
Same with Battlestar Galactica, its not about exploring space, its about the running away from the Cylons, some religous vodoo and some Cylon mind-games. Nice show, but not a StarTrek replacement either.
Babylon 5 might be the only one to get a bit closer to StarTrek, but I haven't seen enough of it to comment on that.
The point is to save StarTrek, not to get a good show in space into TV.
### how difficult is it to acknowledge that for a human being to not be able to distingusih between reality and fantasy
Just because one can distinguish between reality and fantasy doesn't mean that fantasy doesn't affect us. How many people cried at the end of Titanic? Well, I don't know, but I bet quite a few, are all those mentally ill, unable to distunguish between reality and fantasy? Probally not.
That of course doesn't mean that GTA is the cause here, but video games, tv or any media in general affects us, if we want or not. That doesn't mean that we all turn into mass murderers, but they change socity as a whole. If they do it to the better or worse of socity is of course another question, but they certainly affect us somehow.
The throuble is not building the controller, but building applications that work with it. Building a controller that might be better for typing might not be that difficult, but will it be equally good at gaming, at pressing shortcuts and similar things or will have people to fall back to keyboard use? Same with special game controllers, they work good for games designed for them, but are awefull for others and a pain to configure for the rest of the games. If you look at Nintendo for example they have designed games specifically for the controller, Mario64 without an analog controller would have been a quite different game, so would have Luigis Mansion without two of them and the analog shoulder buttons, same with Pikmin and a bunch of others of their games. With the NintendoDS its the same again. On the other side Nintendos controller can be quite a pain for games first developed for PS2 and then just quickly ported to the Gamecube, 'action-buttons' mapped to Z-trigger, Analog shoulder buttons used for non-analog events and similar things, it can still be played, but its only half the fun as with the controller the games where designed for.
I still find it sad that there isn't much new stuff happening in the controller world, but without applications to back up the controller its near impossible to get something new happening.
### That everyone says MMORPG players have no life?
MMORPG players can of course have a life, the thing that MMORPGs however offer that other games doesn't, is an alternative life in a virtual world. In CounterStrike you play a few rounds, exit and are done, your character doesn't evolv and doesn't persist, it gets reset each and every game you play. The whole 'world' is made up of a few very small maps compared to the large ones that MMORPGs offer, so there is nothing to explore, no special events to happens, its always the same, just tactics and player change.
On the other side you also have clans in Counterstrike, which work somewhat similar like a party in a MMORPG, however such stuff isn't part of the game itself, but something the community does outside of the game, in a MMORPG most stuff can be done in the game itself.
Not saying that MMORPGs necesarrily are more addictive than casual games, but the persistence of the world makes them quite a bit different from a random round of CounterStrike or SuperMarioBros.
Discussions about "my OS is more secure then yours" are completly pointless if both OSs have buffer overflows every few days and remote root exploids every few weeks or month in either the kernel or an important and widespread application. Neither OS is secure and requires regular patching, if you don't then its just a matter of weeks before your computer gets some new owners.
The only thing that might be worth to discuss is maybe which OS is easier to patch, but I don't see any clear winner there either, while some Linuxs have apt-get, in practice one often ends up compiling software oneself, so byebye apt-get and hello manually reading bugtrack. Windows has its update service too, but that basically fails for the same reason, since a bunch of software isn't tracked by it.
Talking about patch frequency, well, OSS might be a little bit faster here sometimes and a bit slower at other times, but so far for each worms that widespread used a leak for which a patch was already available weeks or month ago, so patch frequency doesn't seem to matter that much.
And when talking about targetted attacks neither OS seems to be much good either, a whole bunch of popular Linux (Debian, Savannah, Gentoo-mirror, lots of PHPBB sites, etc.) and Windows server got cracked in the past.
So well, wake me up when there is an OS out there that really is secure and doesn't instantly give root to everyone just because a programmer made a tiny mistake. grsecurity at default on all distros, every app written in Java and running on a VM or whatever might be something worth to reconsider the question which OS is more secure, but for now both are insecure if you like it or not. After all there is a reason why truely sensitive data isn't connected to the internet at all most of the time.
### Still SPOILER ###
Knowing that Boomer is a Cylon is of course rather obvious, the thing that so far hasn't been explained is why Boomer is going crazy from time to time (blowing up the water reservers, shooting Adama) and why she herself doesn't know that she is a Cylon. She has probally found out now by herself, but she didn't seem to know it from the beginning.
### My take on this is that the Cylons *aren't* ready to destroy humanity yet.
I kind of agree on this, however while this viewpoint fits well with the series, it doesn't mix much good with the pilot. In the pilot the Galactica for most part only got away due to pure luck (and due to the outdated tech on board), if Starbuck wouldn't have shot down two of the three nukes that were flying towards Galactica, Galactica would most likly be toast now. The Cylons seem to be quite ready to erase menkind in the pilot, but in the serie they seem to not been much more interested it. On the other side its also not clear what happend to all those survivors on the colonies, the whole city looked kind of empty (no dead bodies), but for most part still rather intact. So either the Cylons 'cleaned up' or captured them. So maybe what they planed was something along the lines of "erase menkind for most part, pick up what is left and do 'something' with the", whatever that 'something' means. Boomer being pragnant makes it look like breading a new Cylon/human-mix race or whatever. Its also not really clear why the Cylons are so organic, they started out as walking toasters more or less, while they are now almost indistinguishable from humans.
Oh well, so many open questions, maybe next season will answer some, we will see.
Well, not really. It just doesn't make sense. If the point is to destroy men kind and thus the Galactica, then why waste time to kill Adama? They could just have asked for the coordinates of Galactica, send the base star and destory it, quick&easy, or Boomer takes the nuke back and detonates inside Galactica, equally easy.
Cylons are playing for to much cat&mouse with the humans for my taste without much explantion why, maybe that will follow in seasons two, but I kind of doubt that the writers will get something really believable patched together.