Too bad you make no mention of the lackluster performance of the ATI drivers for Linux, it seriously sucks compared to the Windows drivers. Sure you get hardware accellerated 3D with the drivers, but it's laughable how they perform.
I really wanted to keep my 9800 Pro, but this GeForce 6600GT just performs worlds better in 3D under Linux, and it performs just about equally in Windows. Plus the drivers are a bit of a PITA under Linux, imho, but that's just me.
We are off-topic here but my observation had much more to do with how it's incredibly rude to even put that in a sig to propogate it wherever you post than why you put it there. This is a largely tech-oriented discussion site, quotes like that serve no purpose other than to draw attention that you most certainly have drawn.
I will say this, not only is that verse part of the hebrew scriptures, but it's translation is still in constant dispute. Nevermind the fact that these scriptures were written by humans, and the Bible has seen a large amount of edits over time, with exclusions and inclusions being made. It has been altered to suit the tastes of those in power in the religious structure.
As the anonymous coward questioned, when did you speak with God personally and discover his exact views on the subject matter, or do you just like to presume to know these things and spread bigotry without understanding the full context of the passage (Remember, context is always important)? Blindly following something is never wise, whether it regards religion or not, and this is not a slam on any form of organized religion. It's pretty strange to presume to know things one cannot possibly know, and claim that your preferred interpretation is the one true one. I'm not saying it's not true, but to proclaim it as such is foolhardy at best.
Besides, have we not all sinned, and isn't the ultimate purpose of the teachings of Christ to lead a good life? Cute how you put quotes around Christian as if you're any less a follower of the teachings because you interpret one thing differently, it really gives your contention that extra umph of truth and finality.
Aside from your post indeed being interesting and informative (It would be even moreso with more information related to exactly what's going on), I can't believe you'd choose a sig like your own. Do you have some sort of vendetta? Are you Fred Phelps or just have a sick obsession with what other people do in their private lives? Sheesh.
First off, spell it right, it's the United States of America. There's a preview button, use it.
Secondly, the points you make here as well as in another post of yours comparing the wrongdoings of the American government to the wrongdoings of the Chinese government are valid but two wrongs do not make a right, and you ignore the simple logic that hey, just because one is a citizen of a specific place, doesn't necessarily mean they agree with the leaders! Far out concept, I know, but once you grasp it, you'll find a lot less people think you come off as a complete jackass who's flaming for the sake of flaming, or playing devil's advocate with no supporting statements. That is, unless you consider "FUCK YEAH!!!" a supporting statement.
Besides, the dude you replied to has the handle AlthalusUK (901826). Notice that UK there? It means he's probably not from America, especially when UK also appears on his userpage. Get a fscking clue.
And for the record, I'm an American who despises most every aspect of the government, and has for a while. Does it make sense to belittle the concern for the plight of the Tibetan people and the poor of China by saying "Well America did this...!" when nobody said anything like "Hey it was awesome when we performed genocide on the Native American population but really, China, it's just not cool when you pseudo-commies do it." Don't expect to make any logical sense to anyone but your circle-jerk buddies who don't seem to think any intervention should occur with regards to what's going on, what the government of China continues to do. Hell, I don't even care if anyone directly intervenes, the least we could do is stop having them as our #1 trading partner while at the same time seemingly begging for more caring about basic human rights (And if you would argue there are no such things, well, sucks to be you with an outlook like that I guess).
I have to agree, I even installed the RealPlayer 10 release that's available for Linux here in Gentoo and it's quite a nice little app. I don't like it enough to have it replace my Beep Media Player, XMMS or amaroK as far as my music collection is concerned, but for videos it may be a nice departure from Totem and others like it. For some reason I don't seem to like any media players in Linux except for gmplayer.:)
So do any other filesystems work like this because it seems like your post is specifically speaking of Ext3. I'm just curious because I've yet to be burned by a sudden loss of power to the system as opposed to a shutdown operation, but I'm still not going to make a habit out of it. I mean really, it doesn't take much time to do a restart, and I don't see why you would need a system shut down immediately. In that much of a hurry to make it to the LAN party or something?
Oh, right, the reason Linux hasn't hit it big yet on the desktop is because it's software is not as customizable and skinnable, not because of how said software behaves and interacts with software written for differing toolkits. Give me a break, for theme and style lovers you're already able to make your applications appear to seamlessly blend with one another, with a wide selection of visually appealing styles for lots of software, not to mention you can hack your own theme into pretty much any environment if you had the will to. You can either use a look-and-feel that was designed to bring the desktops together (Ala Bluecurve/Wonderland) or you can even use your QT-styles in GTK+ apps using the qt theme engine. I'm not aware of any way to bind QT to use GTK+ widgets and appearances, but I really wish they would get to developing a way, because it seems silly to be able to have my GTK+ apps use my QT style, but I can't use my GTK+ style with my QT apps.
If anything, the last thing needed is a billion different interfaces to choose from (Speaking from an average end-user standpoint who's looking for sane defaults). What we've needed for a long time is an acceptable standard that most distributions build upon for user interface design, and more cooperation between projects to ensure that simple necessities like drag-and-drop function properly, that enabling the eye-candy for high-end systems doesn't crash the system or cause other glitches (COMPOSITE extension, anyone?), and overall that performance refinements become a higher priority. Memory usage, CPU usage, there are many areas for improvement other than appearance.
QT is already extremely customizable in appearance and behaviour, and GTK+ is just as good as QT if not slightly improved (GTK+ sure does seem to get a lot more themes that get attention, at least).
P.S. -- What the heck do you mean by flavours of GNOME/KDE/Englightenment? I would think a flavour of a specific desktop environment means a theme/style, but if that were the case, then your post defeats itself.
Have you taken a look at Abiword or Gnumeric lately? Really good office apps for Linux, they're what I use when I'm not in my Windows-land, and I have yet to have compatability issues with the simple.doc files I create in Word 2003, or even the spreadsheet I use for budgeting originally created in Excel 2003.
Clean interfaces, sweet performance, and none of the bloat that OpenOffice.org brings (Even though I have it installed, just because, I guess).
Lots of people use those bitrates still when there's disk space to save, and OGG Vorbis works great for streaming because you can get a better sound out of less bandwidth.
PS: There's really no need to be such a butthole when you're defending your format. It doesn't exactly make people want to go out and try it when it appears to be the choice of bitchy little fucksticks.
That's funny coming from an apparent Apple-freak, since lots of Mac fans come off as just that, including yourself. All bark, no bite, "superior" player my ass.
Your 3 computers make me drool, indeed. Distcc and ccache are wonderful tools, I remember the good 'ol days of hijacking other people's machines with a distcc bootable disc while they're away to steal the CPU cycles to help my system compile faster. Heh, that's so incredibly geek, but it was when I had my K6-III/450, so at least it was warranted.
I'm running Reiser4 right now on my ~amd64 Gentoo installation and just am curious as to where this 6+ second lag to rebalance the filesystem tree occurs? ReiserFS v3, Reiser4, JFS, ext3 and XFS have never given me any weird delays, and it makes me wonder if it might be an issue with the kernel you're using, or some loopy CFLAGS. I'll wager you're smarter than the CFLAGS thing, though.
I wouldn't be surprised if I was misunderstanding your post, clarification would be nice, though.
Thanks for the story, sounds a bit like mine, except for the kernel configuration bit, since I started out with Mandrake and then Slackware.:)
One of the best things about Gentoo is from step 1 you're having to understand what you're doing to your system. This causes some newcomers distress but that's what the forums are for! I know I'm not the only one that scours the forums for posts with no replies to see if I can't help a straggler who got lost. And the most underrated feature of Gentoo is stage3, IMHO.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you're always able to tell portage which packages you do and don't want on the system. If an upgrade breaks something and you don't feel comfortable delving into the unstable/masked packages, all you have to do is tell portage that you don't want any version of apache newer than the one that was working for you last, or you could've just blocked the one specific version that was giving you problems.
These are annoyances, to be sure, but they're not that hard to manage once you get the hang of portage itself. And for what it's worth, I've been using the unstable branches as long as I can remember, things rarely break on me (Heck, I had more trouble with LFS than Gentoo, decided to run back to my comfortable distro I've grown accustomed to).
I agree with most people here that a LiveCD is generally for speed and convenience with test-running a distro to see if it's something you'd enjoy. However, I don't think the Gentoo LiveCD project was aiming to do that, it was aiming to do exactly what you do with Gentoo -- End up with a system optimized (Very simply, I would imagine, in this case) for your own computer. If you want any other sort of LiveCD, you can always try the ones the members of the community regularly release. My favorite right now is ahorn's, but your mileage may vary. And no, these LiveCDs released by people are not officially sanctioned by Gentoo, but they tend to be constructed with Gentoo as a base utilizing the catalyst tool.
Look at it this way -- what would be gained by showing people a default GNOME desktop with a minimal set of apps as a trial of Gentoo? What about a default KDE desktop? The main thing you get out of Gentoo is optimization and customizability (that you must perform!), and that's what the LiveCD shows/enables you to accomplish. If you want a quick Gentoo system, there's always been stage3, and VidaLinux has been around for a while now.
PS -- Be glad it's only 3 hours in a ramdisk, it takes me a little while longer to get the system setup on my A64, but once it's there, minimal maintainence is required, especially if you stick with the stable branch where updates are much more planned.
BTW, I officially take back my statement regarding multimedia support in SuSE, it looks like it's a pretty big pain in the arse (For your typical user who couldn't care less) to get things setup for something as simple as mp3 playback. To quote the review from MadPenguin:
From what it looks like, GStreamer, Arts, and aKode (the latter two are both included in the kdemultimedia packages) were all compiled without MP3 support. Unlike Red Hat, where all you need to do is install a single file to resolve, SUSE has crippled their distro in such a way that it's extremely difficult to fix. Considering the main components are part of a larger package set, you'd need to recompile KDE's multimedia section in order to properly right the situation. The problem with this would be that you're throwing off the balance of package management at that point, so future upgrades might have unpredictable results. It's also a nightmare to recompile these packages on SUSE, as you'll end up installing many development packages for the likes of KDE, Xorg, etc... not to mention the need to grab source code for other key pieces such as lame, flac, and taglib. The fastest way I was able to cure the problem was to grab the SUSE 9.2 kdemultimedia packages from a reliable KDE mirror. While this cured the problem temporarily, the next time I installed something from YaST, it reinstalled its multimedia packages. Frustrating.
*sigh* I really hope SuSE/Novell fix this up by the time the next release hits the mirrors. If RedHat/Fedora's stance on mp3 support should've taught distributors anything, it should've taught them that even the small inconvenience those two distributions provide is more than a lot of users are willing to put up with.
Of all the major distributions, SuSE has always been ahead in supporting multimedia for the average user. As far as IMing, well, that shouldn't be any sort of a problem as long as GAIM or some other client finds it's way onto the install. Keep in mind that these applications may need updating, as is common practice on any system, obviously. This is where YaST helps a lot with easy upgrading. I personally don't like YaST for much else, but I'm a configuration file freak.
Note that http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/lofiversion/inde x.php/t14991.html seems to indicate that 9.3 may not be as simple as I seem to remember SuSE being for multimedia, but in any case, mplayer has never failed me (Well, except for those win32codecs I miss a little bit).
Overall, your best bet would be to check out some reviews and see for yourself how the distribution's out-of-the-box experience is.
Explain to me how the most successful Linux distro in Europe has failed? Especially when it attracted the attention of a company as large and well-known as Novell? I don't use SuSE anymore (I've got AMD64 Gentoo) but it was a great distribution last time I tried it via FTP install, and it's always been a very user-friendly one to boot. Besides, associating a distribution like SuSE with the term "crappy software" implies that all Linux distributions are "crappy" since they're basically all the same with some minor changes or architectural differences, wouldn't you agree? They're all perfectly capable of running the same software library (Excepting where something won't run because it's for a different architecture).
No I had not heard of that, I guess because I was probably still in the lower grades when that happened? That and pagers have never really been popular anywhere I've lived with any age group.
People are using a communications medium for drugs and it's something newsworthy? I would think the proper response would be duh. Careful guys, next thing you know they'll start using IRC networks even, or maybe IM services like AIM and ICQ! Criminal liability? What a joke. What next, holding telephone service providers accountable when a drug deal goes down on their network? Give me a break.
A gig of RAM but what are the other specs if your system is -that- slow? From the sounds of things it's a sub-500MHz box, maybe even worse. This goes for whether you're talking about Windows XP or any Linux distribution worth beans.
Most likely a reference to the HK-47 unit in the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series of games. The way he speaks in the game is quite similar to how grub wrote "Sheer conjecture:" and then the rest of his statement. Really amusing character to speak with, especially when you start bothering him and he lets you know. "Exasperated statement:"
The problem is, on my system, I don't really often have spare CPU cycles, I almost always have an application like the @Home ones, or a really intensive (Read: modern, I'm spoiled) game. For people like me who would like to still be able to help out with these causes and not have to worry about general usage problems on the computer, these dual/quad core CPUs are a dream come true. When they become cheaper and more widely available, I'll definitely be purchasing one. The market, while being a niche market, is still there.
Nobody's claiming these are necessary for anyone or everyone, goodness knows it's not necessary for me to be comfortable in accomplishing these tasks all at the same time, but there is a demand that cannot be ignored, Intel and AMD are realizing this.
P.S. -- I strongly suspect most of these CPUs will not be going anywhere near a desktop environment, they're far more useful to businesses and research institutions, I'd imagine. Thus, one could argue even if the desktop market never ended up wanting these chips, there are plenty of others that will.
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Too bad you make no mention of the lackluster performance of the ATI drivers for Linux, it seriously sucks compared to the Windows drivers. Sure you get hardware accellerated 3D with the drivers, but it's laughable how they perform.
I really wanted to keep my 9800 Pro, but this GeForce 6600GT just performs worlds better in 3D under Linux, and it performs just about equally in Windows. Plus the drivers are a bit of a PITA under Linux, imho, but that's just me.
We are off-topic here but my observation had much more to do with how it's incredibly rude to even put that in a sig to propogate it wherever you post than why you put it there. This is a largely tech-oriented discussion site, quotes like that serve no purpose other than to draw attention that you most certainly have drawn.
I will say this, not only is that verse part of the hebrew scriptures, but it's translation is still in constant dispute. Nevermind the fact that these scriptures were written by humans, and the Bible has seen a large amount of edits over time, with exclusions and inclusions being made. It has been altered to suit the tastes of those in power in the religious structure.
As the anonymous coward questioned, when did you speak with God personally and discover his exact views on the subject matter, or do you just like to presume to know these things and spread bigotry without understanding the full context of the passage (Remember, context is always important)? Blindly following something is never wise, whether it regards religion or not, and this is not a slam on any form of organized religion. It's pretty strange to presume to know things one cannot possibly know, and claim that your preferred interpretation is the one true one. I'm not saying it's not true, but to proclaim it as such is foolhardy at best.
Besides, have we not all sinned, and isn't the ultimate purpose of the teachings of Christ to lead a good life? Cute how you put quotes around Christian as if you're any less a follower of the teachings because you interpret one thing differently, it really gives your contention that extra umph of truth and finality.
Aside from your post indeed being interesting and informative (It would be even moreso with more information related to exactly what's going on), I can't believe you'd choose a sig like your own. Do you have some sort of vendetta? Are you Fred Phelps or just have a sick obsession with what other people do in their private lives? Sheesh.
The Penny Arcade formula always proves true.
First off, spell it right, it's the United States of America. There's a preview button, use it.
Secondly, the points you make here as well as in another post of yours comparing the wrongdoings of the American government to the wrongdoings of the Chinese government are valid but two wrongs do not make a right, and you ignore the simple logic that hey, just because one is a citizen of a specific place, doesn't necessarily mean they agree with the leaders! Far out concept, I know, but once you grasp it, you'll find a lot less people think you come off as a complete jackass who's flaming for the sake of flaming, or playing devil's advocate with no supporting statements. That is, unless you consider "FUCK YEAH!!!" a supporting statement.
Besides, the dude you replied to has the handle AlthalusUK (901826). Notice that UK there? It means he's probably not from America, especially when UK also appears on his userpage. Get a fscking clue.
And for the record, I'm an American who despises most every aspect of the government, and has for a while. Does it make sense to belittle the concern for the plight of the Tibetan people and the poor of China by saying "Well America did this...!" when nobody said anything like "Hey it was awesome when we performed genocide on the Native American population but really, China, it's just not cool when you pseudo-commies do it." Don't expect to make any logical sense to anyone but your circle-jerk buddies who don't seem to think any intervention should occur with regards to what's going on, what the government of China continues to do. Hell, I don't even care if anyone directly intervenes, the least we could do is stop having them as our #1 trading partner while at the same time seemingly begging for more caring about basic human rights (And if you would argue there are no such things, well, sucks to be you with an outlook like that I guess).
I have to agree, I even installed the RealPlayer 10 release that's available for Linux here in Gentoo and it's quite a nice little app. I don't like it enough to have it replace my Beep Media Player, XMMS or amaroK as far as my music collection is concerned, but for videos it may be a nice departure from Totem and others like it. For some reason I don't seem to like any media players in Linux except for gmplayer. :)
So do any other filesystems work like this because it seems like your post is specifically speaking of Ext3. I'm just curious because I've yet to be burned by a sudden loss of power to the system as opposed to a shutdown operation, but I'm still not going to make a habit out of it. I mean really, it doesn't take much time to do a restart, and I don't see why you would need a system shut down immediately. In that much of a hurry to make it to the LAN party or something?
Surely you mean GNOME 2.12 and 2.8, eh? :) I'd hate to think I'd missed that many releases overnight.
Oh, right, the reason Linux hasn't hit it big yet on the desktop is because it's software is not as customizable and skinnable, not because of how said software behaves and interacts with software written for differing toolkits. Give me a break, for theme and style lovers you're already able to make your applications appear to seamlessly blend with one another, with a wide selection of visually appealing styles for lots of software, not to mention you can hack your own theme into pretty much any environment if you had the will to. You can either use a look-and-feel that was designed to bring the desktops together (Ala Bluecurve/Wonderland) or you can even use your QT-styles in GTK+ apps using the qt theme engine. I'm not aware of any way to bind QT to use GTK+ widgets and appearances, but I really wish they would get to developing a way, because it seems silly to be able to have my GTK+ apps use my QT style, but I can't use my GTK+ style with my QT apps.
If anything, the last thing needed is a billion different interfaces to choose from (Speaking from an average end-user standpoint who's looking for sane defaults). What we've needed for a long time is an acceptable standard that most distributions build upon for user interface design, and more cooperation between projects to ensure that simple necessities like drag-and-drop function properly, that enabling the eye-candy for high-end systems doesn't crash the system or cause other glitches (COMPOSITE extension, anyone?), and overall that performance refinements become a higher priority. Memory usage, CPU usage, there are many areas for improvement other than appearance.
QT is already extremely customizable in appearance and behaviour, and GTK+ is just as good as QT if not slightly improved (GTK+ sure does seem to get a lot more themes that get attention, at least).
P.S. -- What the heck do you mean by flavours of GNOME/KDE/Englightenment? I would think a flavour of a specific desktop environment means a theme/style, but if that were the case, then your post defeats itself.
And this relates to COM or trying Linux for 10 days... how?
Have you taken a look at Abiword or Gnumeric lately? Really good office apps for Linux, they're what I use when I'm not in my Windows-land, and I have yet to have compatability issues with the simple .doc files I create in Word 2003, or even the spreadsheet I use for budgeting originally created in Excel 2003.
Clean interfaces, sweet performance, and none of the bloat that OpenOffice.org brings (Even though I have it installed, just because, I guess).
Lots of people use those bitrates still when there's disk space to save, and OGG Vorbis works great for streaming because you can get a better sound out of less bandwidth.
PS: There's really no need to be such a butthole when you're defending your format. It doesn't exactly make people want to go out and try it when it appears to be the choice of bitchy little fucksticks.
That's funny coming from an apparent Apple-freak, since lots of Mac fans come off as just that, including yourself. All bark, no bite, "superior" player my ass.
Your 3 computers make me drool, indeed. Distcc and ccache are wonderful tools, I remember the good 'ol days of hijacking other people's machines with a distcc bootable disc while they're away to steal the CPU cycles to help my system compile faster. Heh, that's so incredibly geek, but it was when I had my K6-III/450, so at least it was warranted.
I'm running Reiser4 right now on my ~amd64 Gentoo installation and just am curious as to where this 6+ second lag to rebalance the filesystem tree occurs? ReiserFS v3, Reiser4, JFS, ext3 and XFS have never given me any weird delays, and it makes me wonder if it might be an issue with the kernel you're using, or some loopy CFLAGS. I'll wager you're smarter than the CFLAGS thing, though.
I wouldn't be surprised if I was misunderstanding your post, clarification would be nice, though.
Thanks for the story, sounds a bit like mine, except for the kernel configuration bit, since I started out with Mandrake and then Slackware. :)
One of the best things about Gentoo is from step 1 you're having to understand what you're doing to your system. This causes some newcomers distress but that's what the forums are for! I know I'm not the only one that scours the forums for posts with no replies to see if I can't help a straggler who got lost. And the most underrated feature of Gentoo is stage3, IMHO.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you're always able to tell portage which packages you do and don't want on the system. If an upgrade breaks something and you don't feel comfortable delving into the unstable/masked packages, all you have to do is tell portage that you don't want any version of apache newer than the one that was working for you last, or you could've just blocked the one specific version that was giving you problems.
These are annoyances, to be sure, but they're not that hard to manage once you get the hang of portage itself. And for what it's worth, I've been using the unstable branches as long as I can remember, things rarely break on me (Heck, I had more trouble with LFS than Gentoo, decided to run back to my comfortable distro I've grown accustomed to).
I agree with most people here that a LiveCD is generally for speed and convenience with test-running a distro to see if it's something you'd enjoy. However, I don't think the Gentoo LiveCD project was aiming to do that, it was aiming to do exactly what you do with Gentoo -- End up with a system optimized (Very simply, I would imagine, in this case) for your own computer. If you want any other sort of LiveCD, you can always try the ones the members of the community regularly release. My favorite right now is ahorn's, but your mileage may vary. And no, these LiveCDs released by people are not officially sanctioned by Gentoo, but they tend to be constructed with Gentoo as a base utilizing the catalyst tool.
Look at it this way -- what would be gained by showing people a default GNOME desktop with a minimal set of apps as a trial of Gentoo? What about a default KDE desktop? The main thing you get out of Gentoo is optimization and customizability (that you must perform!), and that's what the LiveCD shows/enables you to accomplish. If you want a quick Gentoo system, there's always been stage3, and VidaLinux has been around for a while now.
PS -- Be glad it's only 3 hours in a ramdisk, it takes me a little while longer to get the system setup on my A64, but once it's there, minimal maintainence is required, especially if you stick with the stable branch where updates are much more planned.
BTW, I officially take back my statement regarding multimedia support in SuSE, it looks like it's a pretty big pain in the arse (For your typical user who couldn't care less) to get things setup for something as simple as mp3 playback. To quote the review from MadPenguin:
*sigh* I really hope SuSE/Novell fix this up by the time the next release hits the mirrors. If RedHat/Fedora's stance on mp3 support should've taught distributors anything, it should've taught them that even the small inconvenience those two distributions provide is more than a lot of users are willing to put up with.
Of all the major distributions, SuSE has always been ahead in supporting multimedia for the average user. As far as IMing, well, that shouldn't be any sort of a problem as long as GAIM or some other client finds it's way onto the install. Keep in mind that these applications may need updating, as is common practice on any system, obviously. This is where YaST helps a lot with easy upgrading. I personally don't like YaST for much else, but I'm a configuration file freak.
Note that http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/lofiversion/inde x.php/t14991.html seems to indicate that 9.3 may not be as simple as I seem to remember SuSE being for multimedia, but in any case, mplayer has never failed me (Well, except for those win32codecs I miss a little bit).
Overall, your best bet would be to check out some reviews and see for yourself how the distribution's out-of-the-box experience is.
Explain to me how the most successful Linux distro in Europe has failed? Especially when it attracted the attention of a company as large and well-known as Novell? I don't use SuSE anymore (I've got AMD64 Gentoo) but it was a great distribution last time I tried it via FTP install, and it's always been a very user-friendly one to boot. Besides, associating a distribution like SuSE with the term "crappy software" implies that all Linux distributions are "crappy" since they're basically all the same with some minor changes or architectural differences, wouldn't you agree? They're all perfectly capable of running the same software library (Excepting where something won't run because it's for a different architecture).
No I had not heard of that, I guess because I was probably still in the lower grades when that happened? That and pagers have never really been popular anywhere I've lived with any age group.
People are using a communications medium for drugs and it's something newsworthy? I would think the proper response would be duh. Careful guys, next thing you know they'll start using IRC networks even, or maybe IM services like AIM and ICQ! Criminal liability? What a joke. What next, holding telephone service providers accountable when a drug deal goes down on their network? Give me a break.
A gig of RAM but what are the other specs if your system is -that- slow? From the sounds of things it's a sub-500MHz box, maybe even worse. This goes for whether you're talking about Windows XP or any Linux distribution worth beans.
Most likely a reference to the HK-47 unit in the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series of games. The way he speaks in the game is quite similar to how grub wrote "Sheer conjecture:" and then the rest of his statement. Really amusing character to speak with, especially when you start bothering him and he lets you know. "Exasperated statement:"
The problem is, on my system, I don't really often have spare CPU cycles, I almost always have an application like the @Home ones, or a really intensive (Read: modern, I'm spoiled) game. For people like me who would like to still be able to help out with these causes and not have to worry about general usage problems on the computer, these dual/quad core CPUs are a dream come true. When they become cheaper and more widely available, I'll definitely be purchasing one. The market, while being a niche market, is still there.
Nobody's claiming these are necessary for anyone or everyone, goodness knows it's not necessary for me to be comfortable in accomplishing these tasks all at the same time, but there is a demand that cannot be ignored, Intel and AMD are realizing this.
P.S. -- I strongly suspect most of these CPUs will not be going anywhere near a desktop environment, they're far more useful to businesses and research institutions, I'd imagine. Thus, one could argue even if the desktop market never ended up wanting these chips, there are plenty of others that will.