No, no, no. The war takes place on the Wired and we can't win because Lain will inevitably kick our asses. That's why terrorists are using cell phones to build their own Lain-free networks. Obviously.
Hmm. Don't install the latest Tomcat (5.0.28) - the ebuild has a list of dependencies longer than the kernel source. The next-to-latest version (5.0.27) does not have that problem. Also, be cautious with using Java 1.5. Half the packages in the Portage tree don't build when using the 1.5 JDK. You can, however, install the 1.4 and 1.5 JDKs side by side and tell the system to use the 1.4 one.
Modular X is still a bit flaky. You might want to stick to X11R6 for the time being.
Oh, and since recently the Apache and PHP ebuilds are a bit strange, especially the latter ones. You might not have problems, I have some after migrating from the old ebuild layout to the new one.
Apart from that... Most stuff should work, even though you have to enable ~amd64 for some packages (I recommend against enabling ~amd64 by default; the tested packages are usually pretty up-to-date).
I run Gentoo, so all my software is compiled with the latest C compiler on my box. I'm not running 64-bit Linux and 32-bit userland tools like you might in the Windows world.
Except if you want to play Windows Media movies without having to boot the emulated Windows. Or you want your Firefox to do Flash. In both cases you have to install mplayer/Firefox in 32-bit mode or the Flash plugin/win32codecs will not work. Quite annoying.
(Note: I'm a Gentoo/AMD64 user myself. If one doesn't mind playing around with/etc/portage/package.keywords AMD64 is a great platform to use Gentoo on, but some stuff is distributed in i386 binary form and getting that stuf to work usually includes installing the program using it in 32-bit form.)
No flash card support. Doesn't do OGG. Jack of all trades, master of none. Lame.
I would pay for the following devices:
- rugged cellphone with SMS support (ideal device: Nokia 6210, even though it's suffering from feature creep)
- flash card-based MP3 player that does OGG (probably ideal device: Nex Black)
- compact, rugged Notebook (ideal device: 12" G4 iBook/13" Macbook)
- a Nokia 6210 USB interface
Everything else (except for the GPS, which I don't need) can be done by hooking up the 6210 to the iBook/MacBook. Yes, that doesn't do streaming that well, but streaming is overrated - after all it'd mean that you'd have to keep the connection. If you have enough money to maintain a several-hour wireless connection from your server to your music player you can as well invest in a subnotebook, a USB card reader and one or two huge external harddrive. Your music is with you, no streming needed.
BTW, I know exactly no one who uses their mobile as an MP3 player. USB sticks is what it's all about. And iPod Shuffles.
Okay, you're right. I should have said "That sentence is always true". "Always" implies that there's always someone who finds your behaviour weird; "universally" implies that you do so, too.
BTW, yes, Americans are weird. As are Germans (guess where I'm from). As is pretty much everyone.
Or you take the shotgun approach: You "manufacture" phages for all known strains and just administer them all in one combined shot. If that doesn't prove useful (the phages would probably trigger an immune reaction, with the useless phages increasing the strength of the reaction but not the effectiveness of the shot) you could take a blood sample and use that to test against multiple phage variants at once. That's still more effort than just administering a generic antibiotic, but for certain bacteria (those with multiple resistances) it might be feasible.
22 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord, you know that I like you." He said to him, "Feed my lambs."
23 He then said to him a second time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord, you know that I like you." He said to him, "Tend my sheep." He said to him, "But I just fed them." He said to him, "I don't care, feed them again."
24 He said to him the third time, "Simon, son of John, do you like me?" Peter was distressed that he was going to have to feed the sheep again and he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I like you." (Jesus) said to him, "My sheep need feedin', so get movin'."
25 To that Peter replied, "Look man, those sheep are full to the brim. I couldn't feed them any more if I wanted to." And he said to him, "So what, I want to see you work."
26 In that moment a shepherd with a herd of one thousand sheep passe by. And Jesus said to him, "Yo, shepherd! I'm Jesus, the son of God; you might have heard of me. Mind if I borrow your herd for a moment?" And he said to him, "No problem, go ahead."
27 And Jesus pointed to the borrowed herd and said to Peter, "Those sheep don't look fed to me. Get your lazy ass moving!" And the shepherd said to him, "Whoa, Jesus. You're a real dick."
Excerpt from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls entitled "Jesus was a dick and unlike those sycophantic apostles I have the guts to write it down", accredited to an author only known as "Bob".
Heh. That would be a nice program... You give it block devices (or just generic files) as parameters, the first one being as big or bigger than the second one, and it will calculate a one-time pad that decrypts the contents of former into the contents of the latter, with the excess bytes being filled with a user-determinable pattern.
Yeah, but, you know, black is the new black. That might figure in, as well. Also, it's probably due to patent licensing costs.
Or maybe they realized that the iBook was not aimed at their stereotypical target audience: Pretentious snobs who think that the higher cost of their computer makes them superior. So they released a black iBook to differentiate the Mac snobs from the people who just want a great entry-level notebook.
Yeah, but it comes with the bigger hard drive *by default*. You know, upping the hard drive cpacity by yourself is nice if your time is worth nothing, but some people lose more than a measly 150 bucks in the time it takes them to select the hard drive popup box and select a bigger drive. And those people are exactly the target audience for the new iBook. I'm not pulling absurd non-arguments out of my ass just so I don't have to admit I talked nonsense, no sir!
Come on! Considering Microsoft's infatuation with backwards compatibility giving away the code to Windows 98 would probably mean giving away 3/4 of the code found in Vista...
I have two explanations:
1.) Applartheid. The white and black MacBooks are "separate but equal".
2.) The hard drive is black as well. Do you know how much it costs to get a hard drive manufacturer to give you a shipment of drives with a custom paint job?
Interesting. Do you have any info on how the card looks with regard to Linux drivers? Or any non-Creative sound cards that run under Linux and give me at least 5.1 sound?
Hmm. So Sony wants to leverage the PS3's popularity to get Blu-ray a foothold in the market, but the very inclusion of Blu-ray makes the PS3 so expensive that many people won't buy it, thus diminishing its popularity.
Wow. Until today I have never thought of the term "self-defeating scheme"...
1) Wireless support. You have to do by-hand configuration for a vast majority of cards.
Can't comment on that one, don't use wireless on the Linux box.
2) There is a problem with init. If I have a java process running when I try to halt the system, it hangs. Manual power off. On reboot it says I have to run/sbin/depscan.sh. I had to read through depscan.sh to find out that I really have to run "/sbin/depscan.sh --update".
I never encountered that error, even when shutting down with a running Tomcat.
3) module autoloading is not documented.
Well, it works, at least for me. Which is about everything most users will want to know. But still, this could certainly be improved.
4) emerge --update world gets a compile error halfway through. Whats a newbie to do? emerge --resume --skipfirst. You are right, of course. Gentoo is not a newbie distro, but it does have great documentation.
5) The X Window System Disaster. I have a fairly common card. The ATI drivers crash the kernel sometimes when I ctrl+alt+F1. The ATI drivers crash the kernel always if I try to use xdm and log out. The ATI drivers crash the kernel if I try to run X on:0 and:1 simultaneously. It took me 3 days to come up with a combination of kernel configurations and xorg.conf that would let me playback DVDs without being jumpy, and I had to disable DRI to do it. Oh, and don't you dare try to compile the RadeonFB with the kernel and then use the ATI drivers.
Are you sure that shouldn't read "The ATI Display Driver Desaster"? I'm using X11 on AMD64 with an NVidia card and I have no of the problems you have. There are some problems, true, but none that crash the system.
If you want messed up ebuilds look at Apache httpd and PHP. Those definitely got worse with the new ebuild layout.
6) Fonts. Ugly by default.
Can't comment, emerged different ones and then imported the old Windows TTF folder.
7) Linux apps are generally very buggy. KDE's Konqueror gets very slow when I have the navigation panel open. It stumped everybody in #kde. Enlightenment forgets what size my gVim windows should be if I have more than 4 of them open. Nobody can explain it. Java crashes Firefox. Gaim dumps core at random intervals. Screen one day forgot how to kill windows. Xorg occassionally stops drawing the left 1" of the top row of pixels. XMMS occasionally can't open CD drives.
Apart from Firefox being somewhat unstable when Java applets are loading (but not always crashing) I have experienced none of your problems. Your installation seems to be somewhat fucked up in general.
8) Printing with a non-postscript printer.
I have given up printing unter Linux in general, at least as long as the printer I use is attached to a Windows box. Networking with Windows is pain.
Well, we did have the Holy Roman Empire before, but that doesn't quite matter; what reminds me of 19th century Germany is that in both cases we have people who (mostly) share one language (German, TCP/IP) and culture and who live in one area but who are divided, with toll stations between the individual areas. And, in both cases there were/are people who (audibly) complained that the partitioning was/is a Bad Thing.
Being a 'casual' Linux user, I'm not familiar with all of the buzz words but Windows has 'DLL Hell' and I'm sure there is a term for Linux 'Package Hell'. This and hardware configuration are the two biggest complaints I have against Linux. The only common installation prerequisite warnings I see in Windows are either 'This OS is not supported' or 'You need the.NET framwork installed'. In Linux, you will receive a 'package not installed' error then go install that package only to find that it needs another package that you don't have. It's a mess.
Dependency Hell, also known as RPM Hell because it mostly occurred on older RPM-based distros (or Fedora Core with third-party packages after an upgrade). Depending on the package manager used it's pretty hard to get dependency conflicts without breaking the system on purpose.
For example, Gentoo's Portage automatically downloads, compiles and installs all dependencies for the package you ask it for. You can only run into problems when installing a new version of a package that is a dependency of something else - but that is rarely a problem and with most problematic packages you get warned in advance.
Just to compare the "mess" of modern package management to the installation procedures on Windows and OS X I compare how to install Psi (a cross-platform Jabber client): Windows: Be a system administrator, open your browser, go to http://psi-im.org/, click "Download", download the newest installer, run the installer, click "Next" until the installer is done OS X: Be a system administrator, go to http://psi-im.org/, click "Download", download the newest disk image, double-click it in the Finder, drag Psi to where you want it, eject the disk image Gentoo Linux: Open a shell, become root or use sudo, type "emerge psi" Debian Linux: Open a shell, become root or use sudo, type "apt-get install psi" Fedora Core: Open a shell, become root or use sudo, type "yum install psi" ...and so on.
Except for the pictures, Gentoo offers pretty much what you ask for. Yes, it's an advanced distribution for tech-savvy users, but the documentation (both official and unofficial) is top-notch and good enough to allow even advanced Win users who have never touched a Linux to set up a box.
The problem with a full-fledged OS switch (even if you use the new OS in parallel with the old one) is that you really have to sit on your butt and learn. You go from {regular|experienced|power} user to newbie, which can be either quite frustrating or really fun, depending on how much you like to play with new stuff.
When I went from Windows to Linux (out of fear of Longhorn/TCPA) I wasn't really productive. I had some command line experience from MS-DOS, but that was about everything. I just changed my desktop to a dualboot WinXP/Fedora Core 2 system and slowly transitioned to Linux, learning as I went. First I just toyed around with Fedora, then I learned how to properly use yum, then I migrated my mail and browser apps over, making FC2 the main OS. Then I just spent more and more time there. I frequently had to google for help, but as I grew accustomed to the OS the number of weird problems declined.
Now, about two years later, I'm using Linux and OS X (which I learnt as a *nix with a nice GUI), with Windows being reduced to a compatibility platform for some games and the homebanking software. When I go back to Windows I wonder how I could stick with it for so long - most of the thigs I learnt as a Windows user are just unneccessary under the other OSes. Editing the Linux config files is just much better than writing arcane hex strings into undocumented Registry keys. So is using a packet manager instead of having to manually download an installer. And using symlinks instead of those horrible Explorer links. Sure, it took quite some learning and some things are a hassle, but moving from Windows has definitely paid off.
That reminds me an awful lot of German history in the 1800s. During ~1800 and ~1870, Germany has spent most of its time fragmented into about forty tiny countries. If you wanted to go from the coast to Bavaria you'd cross at N (at least ten or so) borders, paying taxes each time. Also, you had to consider N different legislations. Like the internet, the German countries spoke one language and had one culture. People didn't quite like the concept of having arbitrary borders runnig through what was a single country everywhere except on paper.
The result, after various small revolutions, was that Prussia essentially took over Germany, declaring itself the Deutsche Reich. (Oddly there doesn't appear to be a translation, at least according to the 'Pedia.) The fragmented country was not stable - just as a tiered internet probably might not be.
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Well, I tried, but the Apple Store doesn't carry any. Are you sure non-iPod MP3 players exist?
No, no, no. The war takes place on the Wired and we can't win because Lain will inevitably kick our asses. That's why terrorists are using cell phones to build their own Lain-free networks. Obviously.
Hmm. Don't install the latest Tomcat (5.0.28) - the ebuild has a list of dependencies longer than the kernel source. The next-to-latest version (5.0.27) does not have that problem. Also, be cautious with using Java 1.5. Half the packages in the Portage tree don't build when using the 1.5 JDK. You can, however, install the 1.4 and 1.5 JDKs side by side and tell the system to use the 1.4 one.
Modular X is still a bit flaky. You might want to stick to X11R6 for the time being.
Oh, and since recently the Apache and PHP ebuilds are a bit strange, especially the latter ones. You might not have problems, I have some after migrating from the old ebuild layout to the new one.
Apart from that... Most stuff should work, even though you have to enable ~amd64 for some packages (I recommend against enabling ~amd64 by default; the tested packages are usually pretty up-to-date).
I run Gentoo, so all my software is compiled with the latest C compiler on my box. I'm not running 64-bit Linux and 32-bit userland tools like you might in the Windows world.
/etc/portage/package.keywords AMD64 is a great platform to use Gentoo on, but some stuff is distributed in i386 binary form and getting that stuf to work usually includes installing the program using it in 32-bit form.)
Except if you want to play Windows Media movies without having to boot the emulated Windows. Or you want your Firefox to do Flash. In both cases you have to install mplayer/Firefox in 32-bit mode or the Flash plugin/win32codecs will not work. Quite annoying.
(Note: I'm a Gentoo/AMD64 user myself. If one doesn't mind playing around with
And while you are bickering over the perceived relevance of your toys real men write their code in ed and use FTP as their versioning system.
No flash card support. Doesn't do OGG. Jack of all trades, master of none. Lame.
I would pay for the following devices:
- rugged cellphone with SMS support (ideal device: Nokia 6210, even though it's suffering from feature creep)
- flash card-based MP3 player that does OGG (probably ideal device: Nex Black)
- compact, rugged Notebook (ideal device: 12" G4 iBook/13" Macbook)
- a Nokia 6210 USB interface
Everything else (except for the GPS, which I don't need) can be done by hooking up the 6210 to the iBook/MacBook. Yes, that doesn't do streaming that well, but streaming is overrated - after all it'd mean that you'd have to keep the connection. If you have enough money to maintain a several-hour wireless connection from your server to your music player you can as well invest in a subnotebook, a USB card reader and one or two huge external harddrive. Your music is with you, no streming needed.
BTW, I know exactly no one who uses their mobile as an MP3 player. USB sticks is what it's all about. And iPod Shuffles.
Okay, you're right. I should have said "That sentence is always true". "Always" implies that there's always someone who finds your behaviour weird; "universally" implies that you do so, too.
BTW, yes, Americans are weird. As are Germans (guess where I'm from). As is pretty much everyone.
Or you take the shotgun approach: You "manufacture" phages for all known strains and just administer them all in one combined shot. If that doesn't prove useful (the phages would probably trigger an immune reaction, with the useless phages increasing the strength of the reaction but not the effectiveness of the shot) you could take a blood sample and use that to test against multiple phage variants at once. That's still more effort than just administering a generic antibiotic, but for certain bacteria (those with multiple resistances) it might be feasible.
22 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord, you know that I like you." He said to him, "Feed my lambs."
23 He then said to him a second time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord, you know that I like you." He said to him, "Tend my sheep." He said to him, "But I just fed them." He said to him, "I don't care, feed them again."
24 He said to him the third time, "Simon, son of John, do you like me?" Peter was distressed that he was going to have to feed the sheep again and he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I like you." (Jesus) said to him, "My sheep need feedin', so get movin'."
25 To that Peter replied, "Look man, those sheep are full to the brim. I couldn't feed them any more if I wanted to." And he said to him, "So what, I want to see you work."
26 In that moment a shepherd with a herd of one thousand sheep passe by. And Jesus said to him, "Yo, shepherd! I'm Jesus, the son of God; you might have heard of me. Mind if I borrow your herd for a moment?" And he said to him, "No problem, go ahead."
27 And Jesus pointed to the borrowed herd and said to Peter, "Those sheep don't look fed to me. Get your lazy ass moving!" And the shepherd said to him, "Whoa, Jesus. You're a real dick."
Excerpt from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls entitled "Jesus was a dick and unlike those sycophantic apostles I have the guts to write it down", accredited to an author only known as "Bob".
The Japanese have been weird [...] for a long time.
That sentence is universally true. That's what makes them so interesting.
See, that's why they're getting grants for this. Ahh, research with unfalsifiable results is the best research.
Heh. That would be a nice program... You give it block devices (or just generic files) as parameters, the first one being as big or bigger than the second one, and it will calculate a one-time pad that decrypts the contents of former into the contents of the latter, with the excess bytes being filled with a user-determinable pattern.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts You just stepped in it!
Well, I certainly didn't step the facts in it.
Yeah, but, you know, black is the new black. That might figure in, as well. Also, it's probably due to patent licensing costs.
Or maybe they realized that the iBook was not aimed at their stereotypical target audience: Pretentious snobs who think that the higher cost of their computer makes them superior. So they released a black iBook to differentiate the Mac snobs from the people who just want a great entry-level notebook.
Yeah, but it comes with the bigger hard drive *by default*. You know, upping the hard drive cpacity by yourself is nice if your time is worth nothing, but some people lose more than a measly 150 bucks in the time it takes them to select the hard drive popup box and select a bigger drive. And those people are exactly the target audience for the new iBook. I'm not pulling absurd non-arguments out of my ass just so I don't have to admit I talked nonsense, no sir!
Come on! Considering Microsoft's infatuation with backwards compatibility giving away the code to Windows 98 would probably mean giving away 3/4 of the code found in Vista...
I have two explanations:
1.) Applartheid. The white and black MacBooks are "separate but equal".
2.) The hard drive is black as well. Do you know how much it costs to get a hard drive manufacturer to give you a shipment of drives with a custom paint job?
The black and white iPods don't have a price difference, why would they charge a premium for something like that on the MacBook.
They don't charge mor because it's black, they charge more because the black one comes with a bigger hard drive by default.
Interesting. Do you have any info on how the card looks with regard to Linux drivers? Or any non-Creative sound cards that run under Linux and give me at least 5.1 sound?
Hmm. So Sony wants to leverage the PS3's popularity to get Blu-ray a foothold in the market, but the very inclusion of Blu-ray makes the PS3 so expensive that many people won't buy it, thus diminishing its popularity.
Wow. Until today I have never thought of the term "self-defeating scheme"...
1) Wireless support. You have to do by-hand configuration for a vast majority of cards.
/sbin/depscan.sh. I had to read through depscan.sh to find out that I really have to run "/sbin/depscan.sh --update".
:0 and :1 simultaneously. It took me 3 days to come up with a combination of kernel configurations and xorg.conf that would let me playback DVDs without being jumpy, and I had to disable DRI to do it. Oh, and don't you dare try to compile the RadeonFB with the kernel and then use the ATI drivers.
Can't comment on that one, don't use wireless on the Linux box.
2) There is a problem with init. If I have a java process running when I try to halt the system, it hangs. Manual power off. On reboot it says I have to run
I never encountered that error, even when shutting down with a running Tomcat.
3) module autoloading is not documented.
Well, it works, at least for me. Which is about everything most users will want to know. But still, this could certainly be improved.
4) emerge --update world gets a compile error halfway through. Whats a newbie to do?
emerge --resume --skipfirst. You are right, of course. Gentoo is not a newbie distro, but it does have great documentation.
5) The X Window System Disaster. I have a fairly common card. The ATI drivers crash the kernel sometimes when I ctrl+alt+F1. The ATI drivers crash the kernel always if I try to use xdm and log out. The ATI drivers crash the kernel if I try to run X on
Are you sure that shouldn't read "The ATI Display Driver Desaster"? I'm using X11 on AMD64 with an NVidia card and I have no of the problems you have. There are some problems, true, but none that crash the system.
If you want messed up ebuilds look at Apache httpd and PHP. Those definitely got worse with the new ebuild layout.
6) Fonts. Ugly by default.
Can't comment, emerged different ones and then imported the old Windows TTF folder.
7) Linux apps are generally very buggy. KDE's Konqueror gets very slow when I have the navigation panel open. It stumped everybody in #kde. Enlightenment forgets what size my gVim windows should be if I have more than 4 of them open. Nobody can explain it. Java crashes Firefox. Gaim dumps core at random intervals. Screen one day forgot how to kill windows. Xorg occassionally stops drawing the left 1" of the top row of pixels. XMMS occasionally can't open CD drives.
Apart from Firefox being somewhat unstable when Java applets are loading (but not always crashing) I have experienced none of your problems. Your installation seems to be somewhat fucked up in general.
8) Printing with a non-postscript printer.
I have given up printing unter Linux in general, at least as long as the printer I use is attached to a Windows box. Networking with Windows is pain.
Well, we did have the Holy Roman Empire before, but that doesn't quite matter; what reminds me of 19th century Germany is that in both cases we have people who (mostly) share one language (German, TCP/IP) and culture and who live in one area but who are divided, with toll stations between the individual areas. And, in both cases there were/are people who (audibly) complained that the partitioning was/is a Bad Thing.
Being a 'casual' Linux user, I'm not familiar with all of the buzz words but Windows has 'DLL Hell' and I'm sure there is a term for Linux 'Package Hell'. This and hardware configuration are the two biggest complaints I have against Linux. The only common installation prerequisite warnings I see in Windows are either 'This OS is not supported' or 'You need the .NET framwork installed'. In Linux, you will receive a 'package not installed' error then go install that package only to find that it needs another package that you don't have. It's a mess.
...and so on.
Dependency Hell, also known as RPM Hell because it mostly occurred on older RPM-based distros (or Fedora Core with third-party packages after an upgrade). Depending on the package manager used it's pretty hard to get dependency conflicts without breaking the system on purpose.
For example, Gentoo's Portage automatically downloads, compiles and installs all dependencies for the package you ask it for. You can only run into problems when installing a new version of a package that is a dependency of something else - but that is rarely a problem and with most problematic packages you get warned in advance.
Just to compare the "mess" of modern package management to the installation procedures on Windows and OS X I compare how to install Psi (a cross-platform Jabber client):
Windows: Be a system administrator, open your browser, go to http://psi-im.org/, click "Download", download the newest installer, run the installer, click "Next" until the installer is done
OS X: Be a system administrator, go to http://psi-im.org/, click "Download", download the newest disk image, double-click it in the Finder, drag Psi to where you want it, eject the disk image
Gentoo Linux: Open a shell, become root or use sudo, type "emerge psi"
Debian Linux: Open a shell, become root or use sudo, type "apt-get install psi"
Fedora Core: Open a shell, become root or use sudo, type "yum install psi"
Except for the pictures, Gentoo offers pretty much what you ask for. Yes, it's an advanced distribution for tech-savvy users, but the documentation (both official and unofficial) is top-notch and good enough to allow even advanced Win users who have never touched a Linux to set up a box.
The problem with a full-fledged OS switch (even if you use the new OS in parallel with the old one) is that you really have to sit on your butt and learn. You go from {regular|experienced|power} user to newbie, which can be either quite frustrating or really fun, depending on how much you like to play with new stuff.
When I went from Windows to Linux (out of fear of Longhorn/TCPA) I wasn't really productive. I had some command line experience from MS-DOS, but that was about everything. I just changed my desktop to a dualboot WinXP/Fedora Core 2 system and slowly transitioned to Linux, learning as I went. First I just toyed around with Fedora, then I learned how to properly use yum, then I migrated my mail and browser apps over, making FC2 the main OS. Then I just spent more and more time there. I frequently had to google for help, but as I grew accustomed to the OS the number of weird problems declined.
Now, about two years later, I'm using Linux and OS X (which I learnt as a *nix with a nice GUI), with Windows being reduced to a compatibility platform for some games and the homebanking software. When I go back to Windows I wonder how I could stick with it for so long - most of the thigs I learnt as a Windows user are just unneccessary under the other OSes. Editing the Linux config files is just much better than writing arcane hex strings into undocumented Registry keys. So is using a packet manager instead of having to manually download an installer. And using symlinks instead of those horrible Explorer links. Sure, it took quite some learning and some things are a hassle, but moving from Windows has definitely paid off.
That reminds me an awful lot of German history in the 1800s. During ~1800 and ~1870, Germany has spent most of its time fragmented into about forty tiny countries. If you wanted to go from the coast to Bavaria you'd cross at N (at least ten or so) borders, paying taxes each time. Also, you had to consider N different legislations. Like the internet, the German countries spoke one language and had one culture. People didn't quite like the concept of having arbitrary borders runnig through what was a single country everywhere except on paper.
The result, after various small revolutions, was that Prussia essentially took over Germany, declaring itself the Deutsche Reich. (Oddly there doesn't appear to be a translation, at least according to the 'Pedia.) The fragmented country was not stable - just as a tiered internet probably might not be.