Search Google for information on "global warming" and you will get 78 million returns.
Each attempt to refine your search will help reduce this number to something more manageable. But increases the risk that you will find what you want to find - not what you need to know.
The geek will hunt for the scenarios he can use to explain how his PC might have been hijacked the nineteen times over six weeks that he stands accused of having downloaded a DVD rip or pre-release screener of an A-list feature film.
Not one of them Twilight.
The problem is that the civil jury only has to decide whether the plaintiff's explanation seems reasonable enough.
Look at Ben & Jerry's, for example; while I don't agree with every stance they take, the corporation honestly tries to be good guys.
Ben & Jerry's makes ice cream.
Being a good guy here means that your product hasn't been allowed to melt and refreeze in transit, arrives in the stores properly labeled and uncontaminated by toxic chemicals or salmonella.
Like any other dairy product.
Beyond that, there isn't a heck of a lot of mischief they can do.
What if everyone used, say Freenet for publishing instead of http? The government would have much more trouble finding or censoring them.
Freenet demands significant space on your drive and significant inbound and outbound traffic.
Freenet needs as many active nodes and supernodes as it can get to remain efficient and secure.
I have often wondered precisely how many.
TrueCrypt can hide a file or folder. It can't conceal traffic moving in and out your home.
That marks the limit of "plausible deniability."
The secret police doesn't think geek. It has its own definition of what is "Plausible," its own definition of what is "Proof" - and its own definition of what is "Pain."
When profit is the motivation, then heck, by all means, go for the throat.
That isn't how the system works.
Civil law isn't about motive. It is about responsibility.
The recovery of damages for your wrongful or negligent actions.
When the damages total up to to $65,000, the jury awards $65,000. The jury never sees your bank account. Your credit rating. Evidence of hardship is simply not admissible. It is not a defense. The jury cannot provide equitable relief. Collection is not their responsibility either.
But a civil suit for copyright infringement that stems from a simple "I'm not paying for this", with no other financial motivations behind it, should never be able to reach such high figures.
"I'm not paying for this" is the argument of a thief.
The jury hangs Robin Hood.
This is the one lesson - well, to be truthful, one of the many lessons - about the law the geek never quite takes in.
Trials are public.
They are always intended to set an example.
The role of the jury "testifies" to the openness and legitimacy of what would otherwise be a closed-door proceeding.
The jury of your peers has accepted a minimum per diem in exchange for long hours and hard work.
That should tell you something.
$30K a track is a plausible estimate of the retail value of your unlicensed wholesale distribution or redistribution.
The problem for the geek who believes in jury nullification is that he also has to believe that the jury doesn't know how P2P really works.
That they don't understand upload and download ratios. The "cred" to be one by being the first to post a quality rip of The Transformers.
The problem is, lawmakers and the public are trying to make photoshops into a crime equivalent to actual child pornography. Yes, that is thought crime, and yes, it is here.
1 Recruit a child for a photo session.
2 Photoshop the head of the child on a similar child-like body of an adult.
3 Distribute the composite photo as a pornographic photo of a child.
The child.
For the illusion to be convincing you will of course have had to pose the boy or girl very carefully.
You will have taken equal care in the selection and positioning of your adult model.
It's a process that stinks of fraud and sexual abuse from start to finish.
4 Profit
These are actions not thoughts.
These actions have the potential to do enormous harm to the child. You wouldn't stand a chance defending yourself against a charge of criminal libel, of criminal misconduct involving a minor. A new article on criminal libel
The geek bends Orwell's words to his own purpose without the slightest hint of irony.
It's interesting, but at this point can Microsoft really convince anyone that they are serious about putting out a quality product?
Microsoft is strongly positioned as a client OS. On the server. In core business applications. In development tools. In console gaming....
In software software sales, MS Office is bigger than games.
Bigger than anything. It is the tail that wags the dog. The 900 pound gorilla. Choose whatever metaphor you like.
The Win 7 Beta opened to rock-solid reviews and has effortlessly claimed about half the market share of Linux on the desktop. Operating System Market Share
The geek knows all of this intellectually, but he can't process it emotionally. It is easier to live within the bubble.
I can remember articles talking about Windows Firewall in the past as being pretty darn good too, yet it seems the first thing a tech person does is to deactivate these days.
Windows Firewall wasn't designed for the techie.
It was designed for the user relentlessly nagged by requests to approve outbound access for the obscure subroutines of programs that already have his permission to access the net.
really all they are trying to do is fix their broken OS.
It isn't one OS.
Every OS is "broken" in the sense that there are always avenues of attack.
It can't be otherwise so long as mere humans have the final say on which programs can be installed and which programs can be run.
To call something "Malware" is fundamentally a value judgment.
I think the geek would be the first to howl if he could only install the apps approved and certified-safe by Redmond, Cupertino, or his favorite Linux distro.
This pretty much sums up why "Linux" gets a bare 1% of the client desktop. OSX and Windows are clearly defined products that are usable out of the box.
If Panasonic was concerned about 3rd party suppliers selling unsafe batteries, it could sell licenses with strict requirements or set up a certification program to test the safety of the batteries sold by these suppliers.
Six of one, a half dozen of the other.
Panasonic is a giant.
You might know it better as Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
Founded in 1918.
Revenues of $82 billion a year. 330,000 employees.
Merging with Sanyo - combined revenues $110 billion a year. Panasonic
The chances that your licensed - certified - battery will undercut Panasonic on price are negligible.
Apple is pretty good in the sense that they don't appear to criticize the competition (or if they do it doesn't make the news). They get on with what they do best.
It has become conventional to think that a corporation, for better or worse, takes on the coloration of its CEO--Jack Welch turns GE into a tribe of aggressive, rigorously unsentimental alpha dogs; Jeff Skilling populates Enron with nihilists expert in gaming the system.
But how strong is this power--or any executive power?
James March goes so far as to say that in any well-run company that's conscientious about grooming its managers, candidates for the top job are so similar in their education, skills, and psychology as to be virtually interchangeable. All that matters is that someone be in charge. "Management may be extremely difficult and important even though managers are indistinguishable. It is hard to tell the difference between two different light bulbs also; but if you take all the light bulbs away, it is difficult to read in the dark."
One problem with the idea of the transformative CEO, able to reshape corporate culture or inspire workers to new heights is that people simply don't feel allegiance to large entities like corporations, no matter who's at the helm. Their loyalties are far more localized. Like infantrymen, their sense of belonging extends to their own platoon but no farther. And in these postmodern times, employees are scornful of grandiose rhetoric about higher purposes and the nobility of their cause. From this perspective, the CEO's power to affect performance, while strong within the immediate team of top executives, rapidly diminishes as it extends beyond that team.
The highly localized nature of loyalty means that the real power to influence corporate performance resides not with the CEO but with middle management. In the The Truth About Middle Managers, Paul Osterman contends that middle managers are neither "victims," robbed of the ability to act independently by some faceless bureaucracy, nor "villains" like Dilbert's Bozo-haired boss, too clueless to do anything but gum up the works. In Osterman's view, the middle manager is the secret hero in the large corporation's rise to social and economic dominance. That rise "depended on middle managers, because you just couldn't achieve the scale that we have without people doing the kind of planning work that they do." As "craft workers," middle managers value their task, sense its importance to the larger cause, and feel great loyalty to the people they work with. But their loyalty to the corporation is fraying, largely because they see top management hogging all the rewards and glory. "There's more cynicism" in the middle-management ranks now, Osterman says. "There's less willingness to go the extra mile."
CEOs in some industries have a great deal of discretion. They're known as "Unconstrained Managers." In a company such as Apple, the CEO is the one who decides which new cell phone to release to a waiting public, which chip company will supply the integrated circuits that make it work, and which phone-service providers to partner with.
In hotly competitive industries where new-product development is crucial and choices about which markets to focus upon are difficult an Unconstrained Manager can have a big impact. Investors worry about Steve Jobs's health because they believe Apple needs his flair for making inspired choices.
Not every Unconstrained Manager is a Steve Jobs, of course. Donald Hambrick and Sydney Finkelstein, who coined the Titular Figurehead/Unconstrained Manager dichotomy in a 1987 article suggest that the world would be better off if leadership effects were always negligible. "If we had to choose as a society between doing away with Figureheads or Unconstrained Managers," they wrote, "it is the Figureheads we would keep."
"Good leaders can make a small positive difference; bad leaders can make a huge negative difference," Jeffrey Pfeffer told Fortune in 2006. Many Americans, surveying the aftermath of eight years with an Unconstrained Manager as their chief executive, might be tempted to agree.
I'm currently sitting here listening to an mp3 of the Symphony of the Seas, from the old album Hooked on Classics, along with mental flashbacks of the scene where the Jolly Roger was raised during Pirates of the Carribean.
In other words:
You are wholly a product of a pop culture in which strong copyright is the norm.
--- and how typically geek it is that your fantasies of piracy come second-hand from a Disney theme park ride.
Hooked on Classics was a series of record albums first introduced in 1981, toward the end of the disco era's peak in popularity. Louis Clark, former arranger for Electric Light Orchestra, conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing a collection of very recognizable extracts from classical music pieces played over a continuous beat (sometimes an overtly disco fast beat, sometimes a slower and more subtle rhythm) which linked the segments together. This is called the Symphonic Rock or Orchestrated Rock genre, like London Symphony Orchestra did in their Classic Rock series but with less electronic effects.Hooked on Classics
hollywood dominates the entertainment business worldwide - there are only a handful of countries were domestic movies regularly outsell hollywood productions at the box office...and some of that is helped by quota restrictions on foreign productions
I suspect that would be true across the board - music, books, games and videos of every sort.
But that has implications the geek may not like.
It suggests - first of all - that the small scale open-sourced "garage band" culture the geek imagines will never happen.
It suggests that your home-grown product, your ethnic or national culture will remain permanently under siege.
--- and that makes the political case for government intervention.
The suppression of piracy always has two roots:
The need to protect your export markets. The need to protect your domestic producers. When those two interests converge, the pirate doesn't stand a chance.
Because if only we could prevent this one particular stupid thing people can do while driving we will eliminate all driving-related injuries and deaths.
Every little bit helps.
But I can't help wondering why the multi-tasking geek always trots out this excuse for inaction.
It's a patently false dilemma.
We can do other things while we do this one thing.
You see, people are taking the coal out of the ground, not putting coal into the ground.
But coal has been binding carbon in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. That would seem to demonstrate that sequestration can be made to work.
A very large chunk of Firefox's developers have Linux as their primary platform. You're obviously not familiar with the comparative qualities of the compilers on different platforms or you would asking "why do the Linux compilers get beat so badly by the Windows compilers."
So why isn't the Moz Foundation investing in a better compiler?
---and what does this say about the performance of any app running under Linux compared to the Windows version?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe MSFT can copy Linux and make it a live distro so people can try it out before full install... wait, that'll never make them bite. Nevermind.
It may not be a "live distro," but Win 7 has already captured about half the desktop share of Linux. Operating System Market Share
Net Applications is mass-market oriented. If your gadget can access the web, Net Applications will track it.
W3Schools is developer-oriented. But even there Win 7 has 1/4 the share of Linux. OS Platform Statistics
It took Linux six damn years to move from 2% to 4% in the W3Schools stats.
Win 7 gets a 1% share in five months.
I'm sorry but honestly I like cold logic..
But is it cold logic?
Search Google for information on "global warming" and you will get 78 million returns.
Each attempt to refine your search will help reduce this number to something more manageable. But increases the risk that you will find what you want to find - not what you need to know.
The geek will hunt for the scenarios he can use to explain how his PC might have been hijacked the nineteen times over six weeks that he stands accused of having downloaded a DVD rip or pre-release screener of an A-list feature film.
Not one of them Twilight.
The problem is that the civil jury only has to decide whether the plaintiff's explanation seems reasonable enough.
Is it really that difficult for foreign embassies to create huge unfiltered Wi-fi spots that cover the city?
Iran Hostage Crisis
Technicians willing to maintain a repeater outside the safety of the embassy compound, please raise your hands.
We offer a nice recruitment bonus, excellent death benefits, a bullet proof vest, an armored vehicle with a hair-triggered paramilitary escort.
If you are caught or killed the Secretary will, as always, disavow any knowledge of your actions.
Look at Ben & Jerry's, for example; while I don't agree with every stance they take, the corporation honestly tries to be good guys.
Ben & Jerry's makes ice cream.
Being a good guy here means that your product hasn't been allowed to melt and refreeze in transit, arrives in the stores properly labeled and uncontaminated by toxic chemicals or salmonella.
Like any other dairy product.
Beyond that, there isn't a heck of a lot of mischief they can do.
What if everyone used, say Freenet for publishing instead of http? The government would have much more trouble finding or censoring them.
Freenet demands significant space on your drive and significant inbound and outbound traffic.
Freenet needs as many active nodes and supernodes as it can get to remain efficient and secure.
I have often wondered precisely how many.
TrueCrypt can hide a file or folder. It can't conceal traffic moving in and out your home.
That marks the limit of "plausible deniability."
The secret police doesn't think geek. It has its own definition of what is "Plausible," its own definition of what is "Proof" - and its own definition of what is "Pain."
When profit is the motivation, then heck, by all means, go for the throat.
That isn't how the system works.
Civil law isn't about motive. It is about responsibility.
The recovery of damages for your wrongful or negligent actions.
When the damages total up to to $65,000, the jury awards $65,000. The jury never sees your bank account. Your credit rating. Evidence of hardship is simply not admissible. It is not a defense. The jury cannot provide equitable relief. Collection is not their responsibility either.
But a civil suit for copyright infringement that stems from a simple "I'm not paying for this", with no other financial motivations behind it, should never be able to reach such high figures.
"I'm not paying for this" is the argument of a thief.
The jury hangs Robin Hood.
This is the one lesson - well, to be truthful, one of the many lessons - about the law the geek never quite takes in.
Trials are public.
They are always intended to set an example.
The role of the jury "testifies" to the openness and legitimacy of what would otherwise be a closed-door proceeding.
The jury of your peers has accepted a minimum per diem in exchange for long hours and hard work.
That should tell you something.
$30K a track is a plausible estimate of the retail value of your unlicensed wholesale distribution or redistribution.
The problem for the geek who believes in jury nullification is that he also has to believe that the jury doesn't know how P2P really works.
That they don't understand upload and download ratios. The "cred" to be one by being the first to post a quality rip of The Transformers.
The problem is, lawmakers and the public are trying to make photoshops into a crime equivalent to actual child pornography. Yes, that is thought crime, and yes, it is here.
1 Recruit a child for a photo session.
2 Photoshop the head of the child on a similar child-like body of an adult.
3 Distribute the composite photo as a pornographic photo of a child.
The child.
For the illusion to be convincing you will of course have had to pose the boy or girl very carefully.
You will have taken equal care in the selection and positioning of your adult model.
It's a process that stinks of fraud and sexual abuse from start to finish.
4 Profit
These are actions not thoughts.
These actions have the potential to do enormous harm to the child. You wouldn't stand a chance defending yourself against a charge of criminal libel, of criminal misconduct involving a minor. A new article on criminal libel
The geek bends Orwell's words to his own purpose without the slightest hint of irony.
When was the last time someone actually went out specifically to buy a copy?
Today:
The most popular items in Microsoft Windows. Updated hourly.
Software Best Sellers
24. Windows XP Home SP2 1056 Days In The Top 100.
the few people people that have legal copies have them because they were bundled with the computer they bought
In other words as close to 100% of the home and SOHO markets for the last twenty-five years as makes no difference.
sThe geek really, really, needs to spend less time looking in the mirror.
Healthcare is about making profit.
Of course it is about profit.
Someone has to make the investment. In research. Labor. Facilities and so on.
Someone has to pay the geek a competitive wage if they want him as a system administrator - or in any other role.
It's interesting, but at this point can Microsoft really convince anyone that they are serious about putting out a quality product?
Microsoft is strongly positioned as a client OS. On the server. In core business applications. In development tools. In console gaming....
In software software sales, MS Office is bigger than games.
Bigger than anything. It is the tail that wags the dog. The 900 pound gorilla. Choose whatever metaphor you like.
The Win 7 Beta opened to rock-solid reviews and has effortlessly claimed about half the market share of Linux on the desktop. Operating System Market Share
The geek knows all of this intellectually, but he can't process it emotionally. It is easier to live within the bubble.
I can remember articles talking about Windows Firewall in the past as being pretty darn good too, yet it seems the first thing a tech person does is to deactivate these days.
Windows Firewall wasn't designed for the techie.
It was designed for the user relentlessly nagged by requests to approve outbound access for the obscure subroutines of programs that already have his permission to access the net.
really all they are trying to do is fix their broken OS.
It isn't one OS.
Every OS is "broken" in the sense that there are always avenues of attack.
It can't be otherwise so long as mere humans have the final say on which programs can be installed and which programs can be run.
To call something "Malware" is fundamentally a value judgment.
I think the geek would be the first to howl if he could only install the apps approved and certified-safe by Redmond, Cupertino, or his favorite Linux distro.
Could this mean that ID is now going to become less OSS/Linux friendly?
Carmack has said before that the Linux port did not make much sense from a business point of view.
[The port to the Wii almost certainly does make sense. The cell phone. The portable media player.]
He has waffled now and then on DX vs OGL.
iD released game engines that were well past their commercial prime.
Never the games themselves.
The IP that makes a Commander Keen or Doom or Wolfenstein a unique and valuable property.
Bethesda's focus is on the sale of its games - and not on the sale of its game engines.
I can't see any very compelling reason for it to open source anything.
Seriously, /., it's about time they get their own icon.
It's time to retire the Borg and stained glass Window. They set the tone. They reinforce stereotypes that have not served the geek well.
Linux is the Kernel and only the Kernel.
This pretty much sums up why "Linux" gets a bare 1% of the client desktop. OSX and Windows are clearly defined products that are usable out of the box.
There goes Panasonic off my list for an upcoming camera buy.
You won't be missed.
The geek isn't their market.
If Panasonic was concerned about 3rd party suppliers selling unsafe batteries, it could sell licenses with strict requirements or set up a certification program to test the safety of the batteries sold by these suppliers.
Six of one, a half dozen of the other.
Panasonic is a giant.
You might know it better as Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
Founded in 1918.
Revenues of $82 billion a year. 330,000 employees.
Merging with Sanyo - combined revenues $110 billion a year. Panasonic
The chances that your licensed - certified - battery will undercut Panasonic on price are negligible.
There is no mechanized ground transportation before 1825.
You must build your roads - and canals - around the limitations of the horse, the mule and the ox.
The ordinary craftsman's materials are wood and leather.
Iron and steel is expensive.
That also sets a limit on what you can do with a sledge or wagon.
The American railroad didn't begin with a standard gauge. You changed gauge when you changed lines.
Wide gauge rail implies very gentle curves and gradients, broad cuts, bridges and tunnels.
Wide gauge demands sophisticated corporate fiance. Steam technology. Heavy industry. Heavy traffic.
The nineteenth century.
The Camino Real - The King's Highway - is a military road.
The army always wants a vehicle that can turn on a dime and give five cents change -
as does the farmer. The teamster.
Standards don't survive because they are historical curiosities. They survive because they make sense.
Apple is pretty good in the sense that they don't appear to criticize the competition (or if they do it doesn't make the news). They get on with what they do best.
1984 Apple's Macintosh Commercial
From The Atlantic. Ruthlessly compressed.
It has become conventional to think that a corporation, for better or worse, takes on the coloration of its CEO--Jack Welch turns GE into a tribe of aggressive, rigorously unsentimental alpha dogs; Jeff Skilling populates Enron with nihilists expert in gaming the system.
But how strong is this power--or any executive power?
James March goes so far as to say that in any well-run company that's conscientious about grooming its managers, candidates for the top job are so similar in their education, skills, and psychology as to be virtually interchangeable. All that matters is that someone be in charge. "Management may be extremely difficult and important even though managers are indistinguishable. It is hard to tell the difference between two different light bulbs also; but if you take all the light bulbs away, it is difficult to read in the dark."
One problem with the idea of the transformative CEO, able to reshape corporate culture or inspire workers to new heights is that people simply don't feel allegiance to large entities like corporations, no matter who's at the helm. Their loyalties are far more localized. Like infantrymen, their sense of belonging extends to their own platoon but no farther. And in these postmodern times, employees are scornful of grandiose rhetoric about higher purposes and the nobility of their cause. From this perspective, the CEO's power to affect performance, while strong within the immediate team of top executives, rapidly diminishes as it extends beyond that team.
The highly localized nature of loyalty means that the real power to influence corporate performance resides not with the CEO but with middle management. In the The Truth About Middle Managers, Paul Osterman contends that middle managers are neither "victims," robbed of the ability to act independently by some faceless bureaucracy, nor "villains" like Dilbert's Bozo-haired boss, too clueless to do anything but gum up the works. In Osterman's view, the middle manager is the secret hero in the large corporation's rise to social and economic dominance. That rise "depended on middle managers, because you just couldn't achieve the scale that we have without people doing the kind of planning work that they do." As "craft workers," middle managers value their task, sense its importance to the larger cause, and feel great loyalty to the people they work with. But their loyalty to the corporation is fraying, largely because they see top management hogging all the rewards and glory. "There's more cynicism" in the middle-management ranks now, Osterman says. "There's less willingness to go the extra mile."
CEOs in some industries have a great deal of discretion. They're known as "Unconstrained Managers." In a company such as Apple, the CEO is the one who decides which new cell phone to release to a waiting public, which chip company will supply the integrated circuits that make it work, and which phone-service providers to partner with.
In hotly competitive industries where new-product development is crucial and choices about which markets to focus upon are difficult an Unconstrained Manager can have a big impact. Investors worry about Steve Jobs's health because they believe Apple needs his flair for making inspired choices.
Not every Unconstrained Manager is a Steve Jobs, of course. Donald Hambrick and Sydney Finkelstein, who coined the Titular Figurehead/Unconstrained Manager dichotomy in a 1987 article suggest that the world would be better off if leadership effects were always negligible. "If we had to choose as a society between doing away with Figureheads or Unconstrained Managers," they wrote, "it is the Figureheads we would keep."
"Good leaders can make a small positive difference; bad leaders can make a huge negative difference," Jeffrey Pfeffer told Fortune in 2006. Many Americans, surveying the aftermath of eight years with an Unconstrained Manager as their chief executive, might be tempted to agree.
Do CEOs Matter? [June 2009]
The guy in the article however is guaranteed a minimum amount of power each year from his solar panels at a rate he knows.
Guaranteed by who and for how much? If the panels fail prematurely what are his real chances of recovery?
I'm currently sitting here listening to an mp3 of the Symphony of the Seas, from the old album Hooked on Classics, along with mental flashbacks of the scene where the Jolly Roger was raised during Pirates of the Carribean.
In other words:
You are wholly a product of a pop culture in which strong copyright is the norm.
--- and how typically geek it is that your fantasies of piracy come second-hand from a Disney theme park ride.
Symphony Of The Seas 89 cents.
Hooked on Classics was a series of record albums first introduced in 1981, toward the end of the disco era's peak in popularity.
Louis Clark, former arranger for Electric Light Orchestra, conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing a collection of very recognizable extracts from classical music pieces played over a continuous beat (sometimes an overtly disco fast beat, sometimes a slower and more subtle rhythm) which linked the segments together. This is called the Symphonic Rock or Orchestrated Rock genre, like London Symphony Orchestra did in their Classic Rock series but with less electronic effects. Hooked on Classics
hollywood dominates the entertainment business worldwide - there are only a handful of countries were domestic movies regularly outsell hollywood productions at the box office...and some of that is helped by quota restrictions on foreign productions
I suspect that would be true across the board - music, books, games and videos of every sort.
But that has implications the geek may not like.
It suggests - first of all - that the small scale open-sourced "garage band" culture the geek imagines will never happen.
It suggests that your home-grown product, your ethnic or national culture will remain permanently under siege.
--- and that makes the political case for government intervention.
The suppression of piracy always has two roots:
The need to protect your export markets. The need to protect your domestic producers. When those two interests converge, the pirate doesn't stand a chance.
Because if only we could prevent this one particular stupid thing people can do while driving we will eliminate all driving-related injuries and deaths.
Every little bit helps.
But I can't help wondering why the multi-tasking geek always trots out this excuse for inaction.
It's a patently false dilemma.
We can do other things while we do this one thing.
But coal has been binding carbon in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. That would seem to demonstrate that sequestration can be made to work.
A very large chunk of Firefox's developers have Linux as their primary platform. You're obviously not familiar with the comparative qualities of the compilers on different platforms or you would asking "why do the Linux compilers get beat so badly by the Windows compilers."
So why isn't the Moz Foundation investing in a better compiler?
---and what does this say about the performance of any app running under Linux compared to the Windows version?