Yeah, $100/month/customer for what? The executives all need new Chris-Craft luxury yachts because last year's model is going out of style? New artificial 3-story waterfall and helipad for the mansion?
My 3mbit Internet connection costs less than the price of cable, and provides me more service.
I block pretty much all the ads and annoyances I see on the web with Privoxy taking care of most of it, and RIP (Remove It Permanently), and Greasemonkey dealing with the rest.
As long as I keep it updated (which apt seems to do nicely), Privoxy rids me of probably 99% of the ads out there. I'm always surprised at the ridiculous number and content of ads I see when I connect from a machine which doesn't run Privoxy (or some other ad-blocking agent).
RIP and Greasemonkey help to remove any details Privoxy misses, and are particularly nice for fixing the web design mistakes of others. Even things which aren't ads can be annoying: floaty toolbars which are more distracting than useful and sidebars which combine to take up 75% of the screen so that text flows down the middle in a little nearly unreadable column.
I was on the web since before the ads were around, and I've always been annoyed with them. Why can't people learn not to be annoying? Sincere recommendations will always mean more to me (and I'd hope to most people) than paid advertisements.
Check your Extensions, there are a few of them which cause large startup slowdowns. I seem to recall SwitchProxy in particular having this problem on my machine.
"I want to be able to walk about in places like Shinjuku and Shibuya [shopping districts] in the future without bumping into people and cars," Pal told reporters.
Is it referring to motor control systems? Or something more sinister?
"It is surprising how this awesomely CD burning suite has not been ported to run on Windows; for it would also give the Windows version of Linux a run for its money; or at least a tie."
Re:lets do it the hard way 'cause we got computers
on
Programming Puzzles
·
· Score: 1
the discussion was about the 15 puzzle, not the puzzle in the article.
One way to defeat their tactics is to use the Web Developer Extension for Firefox. Disable both JavaScript and Styles, and browse away. Don't bother to turn off privoxy, either:)
I'd write it as sum [1..8] in Haskell, where sum is defined by the standard prelude as sum = foldl (+) 0 which means essentially "fold the operator + in between the elements of the list, with 0 at the end to deal with the empty list case". That is [1,2,3] would be turned into ((0+1)+2)+3 = 6.
Most of the loops that people tend to write are usually to express one of a few basic idioms. Having functions as first class allows these idioms to be recorded and reused without the need to rewrite them all the time, which is really handy. These are referred to as higher-order functions, and cover things such as map (applying a function to each thing in a list), fold (mixing in an operator as above), zip (pairing elements from two lists with each other), and filter (picking things out given some condition) being a few of the most common.
Part of the trick to becoming good at functional programming I think is learning to not just think "I'm going to loop over this list.", but to recognise straight away what sort of goal your "loop" will accomplish. Almost all of the time, you won't have to think about direct recursion, because what you're trying to do is an application of a higher-order function, letting you express directly what you want to do with the list rather than thinking so much about what happens to the individual list elements.
Personally, I use Debian unstable on my machine, which takes a slight bit of config at the start, but is incredibly easy to maintain, and you can get updates continuously through apt. Gentoo is also supposed to be quite good, and apparently has a nicer default setup than debian at the moment - the only downside being that you seem to actually have to compile everything (some people consider that a feature, though I don't really see the point). There are some people who swear by slackware - but they tend to be a slightly masochistic lot:) -- still, it might be what you're looking for. If you bring some blanks to the CSC sometime, someone should be able to burn some stuff for you.
Actually, the reason that I think you'll see people doing that (if at all - I haven't seen much of it) is that the default config on the MFCF user accounts is stupid (the admins really should do something about it), and some people are too lazy to go to the trouble to change it on their own accounts. There's no good reason that MFCF couldn't create a decent user environment for people to use. I also go to UW, I'm in pure math, and I use the unix machines -- actually, I more commonly use the CSC's Linux machines, as they're better configured and generally faster than the machines in the labs. If you think that linux isn't useful out of the box, then you should try out a modern linux distribution -- these days they generally come with a nice GUI setup and lots of useful software.
Another thing that bothers me about the remark is that knowing whether the Poincare conjecture is true or false would merely prevent bifurcation of theories. Without knowing, one could make the conjecture (or its negation!) and still reason about it just as well without knowing if the conjecture is true or false. If you hit a contradiction, then, good for you, you've proven the negation of what you assumed - a major result, in this case.
Of course, one can go too far in this. Results based on a mathematical conjecture can suddenly become irrelevant if the conjecture turns out to be false. Somehow I wouldn't think Poincare would be such a log-jam for physicists though. Assuming it's true can't hurt too much, as if it's false, you can deal with the additional complexity later.
In the context of knowing the shape of the universe, despite not being a physicist, I think the interesting case would really be a counterexample to the conjecture - that is a simply connected compact 3-manifold that's not homeomorphic to S^3.
If such a thing existed, it would have been completely overlooked, and it would be the physicists' job to determine whether this manifold could indeed be used to construct a better model of space.
This is all just speculation though, and given what people have been saying about the proof, it would appear that Poincare is true anyway.
The Thurston Geometrization Conjecture on the other hand, is a much stronger result - it goes a long way to characterise the geometries that 3 dimensional manifolds can have. This might be more applicable to physicists, but I'm entirely unfamiliar with the physics involved, so I can't really speculate.
This is not mathematics. This is questionable speculation combined with a few calculations. A few of the calculations may have even been done correctly, though with inputs like "Fun Factor" the results are probably almost meaningless.
The parent is true, but the reasoning given is somewhat weak.
I think that all of the confusion that appears to crop up all the time around this consideration is that highschools rarely, if at all, give a rigourous definition of the reals. Often I see them defined as simply the set of infinite decimal expansions. While it is possible to define the reals in terms of infinite decimal expansions, it is necessary to actually define every number with trailing 9's to be equal to a number with trailing 0's and otherwise each digit being equal, but the one right before the trailing starts incremented by one. (i.e. 5.7499999... = 5.75000...) Thus, every number of the form n*(10^m) where n, m are integers, gets two decimal representations by definition.
This however, is not considered by many to be the most elegant definition of the reals available. The simplest way to express what the real numbers are, is as the unique ordered field satisfying the least upper bound property, but this is not very constructive. To actually talk about real numbers, you need some construction that meets these requirements. Most mathematicians use either Cauchy sequences of rationals or Dedekind cuts of rationals to define the real numbers.
Please see PlanetMath's entry for Real Number for a definition in terms of Cauchy sequences, and their entry on Dedekind Cuts
has a very nice, thorough explanation and definition in terms of Dedekind cuts. Both of these are more elegant and easier to reason about than digit strings if you actually want to prove some property about the reals.
If you have any questions about this topic, or would like me to clarify or expand on something, reply to this, and I'll try to respond. Alternately, I'm available on irc.freenode.org or irc.slashnet.org as Cale. On FreeNode, I'm usually idling in #math.
The issue in question here is not whether to use some form of messaging service, but which service to choose.
It's easy enough to switch to some other system if necessary, and there are a good number of other options available for semisynchronous communication, for example Jabber.
Nobody is going to lose friends over this, except possibly Microsoft.
I also think it would be physically more taxing to type on a keyboard that didn't physically exist. The keys allow your hands to rest while they're not actually typing, and after pushing down a key, your finger gets pushed back up by the springiness of the key. Flat keyboards have long been possible, but nobody with a choice would want one, as they're much more difficult to use for any length of time.
Well, I'm unfamiliar with Windows, not having used it in quite some time now (I'm a Debian user). I was sort of amazed that it would take 20 minutes and 10-15 lines of code for an experienced programmer to check if a directory exists and if not, create it. It took me about 5 minutes searching on MSDN to find the Win32 calls "GetFileAttributes" and "CreateDirectory". The following should work (I can't test it, I don't have Windows):
if (!(GetFileAttributes(filename) & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY)) CreateDirectory(filename, NULL);
Which is admittedly not as pretty, but it is a single line of code.
Also, what's wrong with simply calling CreateDirectory and checking for failure after the fact with GetLastError? You'd probably get back ERROR_ALREADY_EXISTS if the filename already existed.
However, as has been mentioned, this is a matter of the library that you're using and not an intrinsic property of the language.
There are plenty of nice programming languages out there if you're not going to tie yourself down to C/C++. Personally, I think that from a programming language perspective, C# is a bit boring. Too little credit is given to programming languages like Python and Ruby, both of which are very clean and nice to use. Both bring in nice aspects of OO and functional programming, and blend them in ways that make code easy to read and write. Better yet, get away from imperative languages for a while and try a functional language or two such as Haskell, O'Caml, or Erlang. (I highly recommend Haskell.) Writing code in a functional style takes a bit of getting used to, but once you've acclimatized, you probably won't want to switch back.
I strongly agree with this. The only Microsoft products I presently use are an Intellimouse Explorer, one of their keyboards (not the split kind), and a gamepad. I suppose that I also use some of their fonts.
The hardware is all really decent and solid, unlike their OS, or most of their software. I especially like the mouse: 7 buttons comes in really handy under X (moreso than under Windows!), I never have to worry about it getting dirty, and it's quite comfortable to use (even if wrong-handed for me).
Another thing that Microsoft should also stick to doing is research. MS funds and supports a lot of really decent research in a lot of areas, including mathematics/combinatorics, user-interface design, privacy/security, computer learning and programming language design, that unfortunately generally ends up overly watered down by the time it hits their products, or is masked by other failures. The good part is that there are a lot of publications that people can read as a result.
Their typography is also generally very good, though I wish that they would relicense the core fonts under a somewhat less restrictive license.
Apart from these areas (i.e. in their commercial software business), MS is really failing to do much of anything interesting, IMO, and in some cases are actually doing harm to the advancement of computing in the short run. The sooner more people find GNU/Linux or other Free alternatives as welcome on their desktops, the better.
Did you actually check out what popup prism does, or watch the accompanying video? Please actually visit the posted links before posting some uninformed gut reaction. Moderators, this goes double for you.
It's pretty hard to hijack a more visual version of "Find Text In Page" for the purposes of advertising.
The user has to type their own keywords, and that is what's being highlighted, and it's only highlighted in the preview pane and on the normal pane while the user holds the mouse button down in the preview pane (to aid transitioning from the preview to the main text).
Using this for advertising would be pretty much impossible. What, are the ads going to hypnotise us into typing the keywords of their ad into our "Find Text In Page" textbox, then get us to hold down the mouse button in the preview pane so that the words in the ad show up larger? Come on.
Not only that, but this doesn't use any more bandwidth at all either, as it is a nice, fairly simple, though well thought out, client-side feature of the user's web browser.
The cut and paste issue has mostly (if not entirely) been solved. Applications now use the X clipboard in a consistent way. (Selection produces a primary which middle mouse button pastes, Copy (C-c) goes to clipboard which Paste (C-v) pastes.) That argument no longer applies. As for the multiple user interfaces, KDE and Gnome are now similar enough to each other that anyone familiar with using one (or Windows for that matter) shouldn't have huge problems using the other. It might be a bit uncomfortable, but not very much.
XMMS is an acronym. It stands for X Multimedia System - that sounds like it might play audio. The real problem here is the menu - that's easy enough to fix. I'll agree that some programs are given strange names, but it's up to those who design the user interfaces to deal with directing users to the right programs. There might be some failings here, but they're not hard to fix. Putting the audio players into a menu called "Audio Players" would be enough to solve that, now wouldn't it? I'm pretty sure some, perhaps even most Linux distros are already doing this.
Er, software on store shelves? That implies that it costs money. I'd rather download it for free (as in beer). Free Software doesn't necessarily have to be free as in beer, but it usually is, and that's why you don't see it on store shelves.
For support, try IRC or e-mail. Both work quite nicely. Free Software is a community, there are people that will help you, and they're easy to reach.
We have some games. The game situation is rapidly improving. I see no real reason to complain about it at this point. I certainly have enough games to keep myself entertained.
Dependencies? They're much easier to deal with than Windows dependencies, in my experience. You want a program? If you're on Debian, you just apt-get install whatever, and it'll download the program, all of it's dependencies, then install and configure them in order, while making sure that nothing else will break as a result. Easy. Other distributions such as Mandrake have similar tools for dealing with dependencies. On Windows, programs generally include their dependencies, as there is no other way to tell the system to get them, and the installers are flaky enough to just trample over whatever other versions of these dependencies were already there. It's primitive, and it just barely works, sometimes it doesn't.
So tell us what else you hate about Linux - there might be stuff that needs fixing, but you haven't exactly nailed it. Also, rather than complain, why not just fix the problems? Free Software means freedom to change what you want. Submit patches if you think something doesn't work the way people would want it to, and feel free to change stuff around just for yourself as well.
I've been using Linux almost exclusively for a couple of years now, and not-exclusively for longer. My user interface is fairly customised to me. Most other people might have problems using my machine, but that doesn't matter, because it's very fine tuned to work almost exactly the way that I want it. You can have that with Free Software. It actually hurts for me to use Windows now, as its user interface seems so klunky and ineffective.
So get out there and actually *try* Free Software for a while. You'll probably find that most of the problems you mentioned are not problems, and that the freedom it brings is worth it.
What? What Linux circles are these? I find many Linux users to be helpful and considerate. When I was first learning to set up Linux back a few years ago, a few minutes on IRC were all that was needed to solve most any problem I ran into. Most of the people at the computer science club at my university are also Linux users, and I'd say we're all helpful to anyone who comes in wanting to know something about Linux.
Even now, if I run into a problem getting a piece of software to work, or something that might be a bug, or if I need help with pretty much anything, I can generally log onto IRC and either a developer, or an advanced user of that piece of software will be there to help out.
I'm not sure which circles it is that you're getting all the apathy and offensive comments from - I most likely haven't run into them - I recommend trying some other circles.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, $100/month/customer for what? The executives all need new Chris-Craft luxury yachts because last year's model is going out of style? New artificial 3-story waterfall and helipad for the mansion?
My 3mbit Internet connection costs less than the price of cable, and provides me more service.
I block pretty much all the ads and annoyances I see on the web with Privoxy taking care of most of it, and RIP (Remove It Permanently), and Greasemonkey dealing with the rest.
As long as I keep it updated (which apt seems to do nicely), Privoxy rids me of probably 99% of the ads out there. I'm always surprised at the ridiculous number and content of ads I see when I connect from a machine which doesn't run Privoxy (or some other ad-blocking agent).
RIP and Greasemonkey help to remove any details Privoxy misses, and are particularly nice for fixing the web design mistakes of others. Even things which aren't ads can be annoying: floaty toolbars which are more distracting than useful and sidebars which combine to take up 75% of the screen so that text flows down the middle in a little nearly unreadable column.
I was on the web since before the ads were around, and I've always been annoyed with them. Why can't people learn not to be annoying? Sincere recommendations will always mean more to me (and I'd hope to most people) than paid advertisements.
Another trick I find myself using is to simply drag the interesting links to the tab bar while I read, which opens them in the background.
Check your Extensions, there are a few of them which cause large startup slowdowns. I seem to recall SwitchProxy in particular having this problem on my machine.
"I want to be able to walk about in places like Shinjuku and Shibuya [shopping districts] in the future without bumping into people and cars," Pal told reporters.
Is it referring to motor control systems? Or something more sinister?
"It is surprising how this awesomely CD burning suite has not been ported to run on Windows; for it would also give the Windows version of Linux a run for its money; or at least a tie."
the discussion was about the 15 puzzle, not the puzzle in the article.
Note that in neither case was the user afforded the chance to shoot themselves in the foot.
We're making progress here.
One way to defeat their tactics is to use the Web Developer Extension for Firefox. Disable both JavaScript and Styles, and browse away. Don't bother to turn off privoxy, either :)
Don't forget that Xerox is a multi-national Corporation and I'm sure some european DMCA style-laws would apply to this case also.
Yeah, I know what you mean. They really need to get Spain out of there.
- Cale Gibbard, 1814
I'd write it as
sum [1..8]
in Haskell, where sum is defined by the standard prelude as sum = foldl (+) 0
which means essentially "fold the operator + in between the elements of the list, with 0 at the end to deal with the empty list case". That is [1,2,3] would be turned into ((0+1)+2)+3 = 6.
Most of the loops that people tend to write are usually to express one of a few basic idioms. Having functions as first class allows these idioms to be recorded and reused without the need to rewrite them all the time, which is really handy. These are referred to as higher-order functions, and cover things such as map (applying a function to each thing in a list), fold (mixing in an operator as above), zip (pairing elements from two lists with each other), and filter (picking things out given some condition) being a few of the most common.
Part of the trick to becoming good at functional programming I think is learning to not just think "I'm going to loop over this list.", but to recognise straight away what sort of goal your "loop" will accomplish. Almost all of the time, you won't have to think about direct recursion, because what you're trying to do is an application of a higher-order function, letting you express directly what you want to do with the list rather than thinking so much about what happens to the individual list elements.
- Cale Gibbard
Personally, I use Debian unstable on my machine, which takes a slight bit of config at the start, but is incredibly easy to maintain, and you can get updates continuously through apt. Gentoo is also supposed to be quite good, and apparently has a nicer default setup than debian at the moment - the only downside being that you seem to actually have to compile everything (some people consider that a feature, though I don't really see the point). There are some people who swear by slackware - but they tend to be a slightly masochistic lot :) -- still, it might be what you're looking for. If you bring some blanks to the CSC sometime, someone should be able to burn some stuff for you.
Actually, the reason that I think you'll see people doing that (if at all - I haven't seen much of it) is that the default config on the MFCF user accounts is stupid (the admins really should do something about it), and some people are too lazy to go to the trouble to change it on their own accounts. There's no good reason that MFCF couldn't create a decent user environment for people to use. I also go to UW, I'm in pure math, and I use the unix machines -- actually, I more commonly use the CSC's Linux machines, as they're better configured and generally faster than the machines in the labs. If you think that linux isn't useful out of the box, then you should try out a modern linux distribution -- these days they generally come with a nice GUI setup and lots of useful software.
Good point.
Another thing that bothers me about the remark is that knowing whether the Poincare conjecture is true or false would merely prevent bifurcation of theories. Without knowing, one could make the conjecture (or its negation!) and still reason about it just as well without knowing if the conjecture is true or false. If you hit a contradiction, then, good for you, you've proven the negation of what you assumed - a major result, in this case.
Of course, one can go too far in this. Results based on a mathematical conjecture can suddenly become irrelevant if the conjecture turns out to be false. Somehow I wouldn't think Poincare would be such a log-jam for physicists though. Assuming it's true can't hurt too much, as if it's false, you can deal with the additional complexity later.
In the context of knowing the shape of the universe, despite not being a physicist, I think the interesting case would really be a counterexample to the conjecture - that is a simply connected compact 3-manifold that's not homeomorphic to S^3.
If such a thing existed, it would have been completely overlooked, and it would be the physicists' job to determine whether this manifold could indeed be used to construct a better model of space.
This is all just speculation though, and given what people have been saying about the proof, it would appear that Poincare is true anyway.
The Thurston Geometrization Conjecture on the other hand, is a much stronger result - it goes a long way to characterise the geometries that 3 dimensional manifolds can have. This might be more applicable to physicists, but I'm entirely unfamiliar with the physics involved, so I can't really speculate.
Mathematicians do mathematics.
This is not mathematics. This is questionable speculation combined with a few calculations. A few of the calculations may have even been done correctly, though with inputs like "Fun Factor" the results are probably almost meaningless.
Can you imagine a mosix cluster of these?
The parent is true, but the reasoning given is somewhat weak.
I think that all of the confusion that appears to crop up all the time around this consideration is that highschools rarely, if at all, give a rigourous definition of the reals. Often I see them defined as simply the set of infinite decimal expansions. While it is possible to define the reals in terms of infinite decimal expansions, it is necessary to actually define every number with trailing 9's to be equal to a number with trailing 0's and otherwise each digit being equal, but the one right before the trailing starts incremented by one. (i.e. 5.7499999... = 5.75000...) Thus, every number of the form n*(10^m) where n, m are integers, gets two decimal representations by definition.
This however, is not considered by many to be the most elegant definition of the reals available. The simplest way to express what the real numbers are, is as the unique ordered field satisfying the least upper bound property, but this is not very constructive. To actually talk about real numbers, you need some construction that meets these requirements. Most mathematicians use either Cauchy sequences of rationals or Dedekind cuts of rationals to define the real numbers.
Please see PlanetMath's entry for Real Number for a definition in terms of Cauchy sequences, and their entry on Dedekind Cuts has a very nice, thorough explanation and definition in terms of Dedekind cuts. Both of these are more elegant and easier to reason about than digit strings if you actually want to prove some property about the reals.
If you have any questions about this topic, or would like me to clarify or expand on something, reply to this, and I'll try to respond. Alternately, I'm available on irc.freenode.org or irc.slashnet.org as Cale. On FreeNode, I'm usually idling in #math.
Your statement is poorly thought out.
The issue in question here is not whether to use some form of messaging service, but which service to choose.
It's easy enough to switch to some other system if necessary, and there are a good number of other options available for semisynchronous communication, for example Jabber.
Nobody is going to lose friends over this, except possibly Microsoft.
I also think it would be physically more taxing to type on a keyboard that didn't physically exist. The keys allow your hands to rest while they're not actually typing, and after pushing down a key, your finger gets pushed back up by the springiness of the key. Flat keyboards have long been possible, but nobody with a choice would want one, as they're much more difficult to use for any length of time.
Yeah, we had better watch out, or SCO might claim that they own the rights to the idea of joking about themselves and try to sue us.
Well, I'm unfamiliar with Windows, not having used it in quite some time now (I'm a Debian user). I was sort of amazed that it would take 20 minutes and 10-15 lines of code for an experienced programmer to check if a directory exists and if not, create it. It took me about 5 minutes searching on MSDN to find the Win32 calls "GetFileAttributes" and "CreateDirectory". The following should work (I can't test it, I don't have Windows):
if (!(GetFileAttributes(filename) & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY)) CreateDirectory(filename, NULL);
Which is admittedly not as pretty, but it is a single line of code.
Also, what's wrong with simply calling CreateDirectory and checking for failure after the fact with GetLastError? You'd probably get back ERROR_ALREADY_EXISTS if the filename already existed.
However, as has been mentioned, this is a matter of the library that you're using and not an intrinsic property of the language.
There are plenty of nice programming languages out there if you're not going to tie yourself down to C/C++. Personally, I think that from a programming language perspective, C# is a bit boring. Too little credit is given to programming languages like Python and Ruby, both of which are very clean and nice to use. Both bring in nice aspects of OO and functional programming, and blend them in ways that make code easy to read and write. Better yet, get away from imperative languages for a while and try a functional language or two such as Haskell, O'Caml, or Erlang. (I highly recommend Haskell.) Writing code in a functional style takes a bit of getting used to, but once you've acclimatized, you probably won't want to switch back.
I strongly agree with this. The only Microsoft products I presently use are an Intellimouse Explorer, one of their keyboards (not the split kind), and a gamepad. I suppose that I also use some of their fonts.
The hardware is all really decent and solid, unlike their OS, or most of their software. I especially like the mouse: 7 buttons comes in really handy under X (moreso than under Windows!), I never have to worry about it getting dirty, and it's quite comfortable to use (even if wrong-handed for me).
Another thing that Microsoft should also stick to doing is research. MS funds and supports a lot of really decent research in a lot of areas, including mathematics/combinatorics, user-interface design, privacy/security, computer learning and programming language design, that unfortunately generally ends up overly watered down by the time it hits their products, or is masked by other failures. The good part is that there are a lot of publications that people can read as a result.
Their typography is also generally very good, though I wish that they would relicense the core fonts under a somewhat less restrictive license.
Apart from these areas (i.e. in their commercial software business), MS is really failing to do much of anything interesting, IMO, and in some cases are actually doing harm to the advancement of computing in the short run. The sooner more people find GNU/Linux or other Free alternatives as welcome on their desktops, the better.
sorry s/popup prism/Popout Prism/
Did you actually check out what popup prism does, or watch the accompanying video? Please actually visit the posted links before posting some uninformed gut reaction. Moderators, this goes double for you.
It's pretty hard to hijack a more visual version of "Find Text In Page" for the purposes of advertising.
The user has to type their own keywords, and that is what's being highlighted, and it's only highlighted in the preview pane and on the normal pane while the user holds the mouse button down in the preview pane (to aid transitioning from the preview to the main text).
Using this for advertising would be pretty much impossible. What, are the ads going to hypnotise us into typing the keywords of their ad into our "Find Text In Page" textbox, then get us to hold down the mouse button in the preview pane so that the words in the ad show up larger? Come on.
Not only that, but this doesn't use any more bandwidth at all either, as it is a nice, fairly simple, though well thought out, client-side feature of the user's web browser.
The cut and paste issue has mostly (if not entirely) been solved. Applications now use the X clipboard in a consistent way. (Selection produces a primary which middle mouse button pastes, Copy (C-c) goes to clipboard which Paste (C-v) pastes.) That argument no longer applies. As for the multiple user interfaces, KDE and Gnome are now similar enough to each other that anyone familiar with using one (or Windows for that matter) shouldn't have huge problems using the other. It might be a bit uncomfortable, but not very much.
XMMS is an acronym. It stands for X Multimedia System - that sounds like it might play audio. The real problem here is the menu - that's easy enough to fix. I'll agree that some programs are given strange names, but it's up to those who design the user interfaces to deal with directing users to the right programs. There might be some failings here, but they're not hard to fix. Putting the audio players into a menu called "Audio Players" would be enough to solve that, now wouldn't it? I'm pretty sure some, perhaps even most Linux distros are already doing this.
Er, software on store shelves? That implies that it costs money. I'd rather download it for free (as in beer). Free Software doesn't necessarily have to be free as in beer, but it usually is, and that's why you don't see it on store shelves.
For support, try IRC or e-mail. Both work quite nicely. Free Software is a community, there are people that will help you, and they're easy to reach.
We have some games. The game situation is rapidly improving. I see no real reason to complain about it at this point. I certainly have enough games to keep myself entertained.
Dependencies? They're much easier to deal with than Windows dependencies, in my experience. You want a program? If you're on Debian, you just apt-get install whatever, and it'll download the program, all of it's dependencies, then install and configure them in order, while making sure that nothing else will break as a result. Easy. Other distributions such as Mandrake have similar tools for dealing with dependencies. On Windows, programs generally include their dependencies, as there is no other way to tell the system to get them, and the installers are flaky enough to just trample over whatever other versions of these dependencies were already there. It's primitive, and it just barely works, sometimes it doesn't.
So tell us what else you hate about Linux - there might be stuff that needs fixing, but you haven't exactly nailed it. Also, rather than complain, why not just fix the problems? Free Software means freedom to change what you want. Submit patches if you think something doesn't work the way people would want it to, and feel free to change stuff around just for yourself as well.
I've been using Linux almost exclusively for a couple of years now, and not-exclusively for longer. My user interface is fairly customised to me. Most other people might have problems using my machine, but that doesn't matter, because it's very fine tuned to work almost exactly the way that I want it. You can have that with Free Software. It actually hurts for me to use Windows now, as its user interface seems so klunky and ineffective.
So get out there and actually *try* Free Software for a while. You'll probably find that most of the problems you mentioned are not problems, and that the freedom it brings is worth it.
What? What Linux circles are these? I find many Linux users to be helpful and considerate. When I was first learning to set up Linux back a few years ago, a few minutes on IRC were all that was needed to solve most any problem I ran into. Most of the people at the computer science club at my university are also Linux users, and I'd say we're all helpful to anyone who comes in wanting to know something about Linux. Even now, if I run into a problem getting a piece of software to work, or something that might be a bug, or if I need help with pretty much anything, I can generally log onto IRC and either a developer, or an advanced user of that piece of software will be there to help out. I'm not sure which circles it is that you're getting all the apathy and offensive comments from - I most likely haven't run into them - I recommend trying some other circles.