As for supporting PC hardware, it's a) very easy and b) already there anyway. Nope, not true for either case. Hardware manufacturers release buggy drivers constantly. And hardware manufacturers which are not targeting the Apple market do NOT release drivers, buggy or not, for OSX. All the hardware I need is supported. They support every mobo chipset for every current x64 CPU. There are drivers for half of all WiFi adapters (Asus WL-167G, for one). There is an ongoing project to write one for the Intel WiFi cards (IPW 2100/2200 working, 3945 and more recent still under development). There are drivers from ATI and nVidia (nVidia is better supported since that's what Apple seems to prefer to put in Macs). There are drivers for a LOT of webcams (see list on Macam project HCL). There are drivers for AC'97 and Intel HDAudio and such. There are drivers for Marvell and Intel and Realtek and Broadcom Ethernet chips. There is a driver for the (crap) JMicron IDE controller. What were you saying again? If you want to run OSX, on a non-Apple computer, just read the Supported Hardware lists and buy only that.
I've thought more fully, and I fail to see how stuffing the really overpriced 3GHz 4-core Xeons makes any sense when you can have an 8-core for half the price if you buy 1,86GHz. I'm talking from $10,000 to $4,000 there - and with the same specs.
That's a lot, and the top of the line. My point is, you CAN build an equivalent machine for cheaper... and that's not by being cheap on the graphics card (nVidia 8800GTS w/640M GDDR3@1600MZh vs. 7300 in Apple Macs) or the hard drives (Fuck el cheapo Maxtor that Apple loves, I only buy WD). I listed what hardware I needed to build a MacPro killing machine. Tyan mobo, good and recent nVidia card, 8-core dual Xeon, 8G RAM, water-cooled everything, some terabytes of HDs, WiFi that works OOTB, 720W PSU, and a pair of 20" 16:10 monitors. Price : $4,000. Want one? My email is just here above. (I'd wait for Leopard if I were you, but that's just me...)
What nightmare drivers? There even are community-provided software packages that install all the drivers you need for your mainboard, for example. (So did I install the drivers for my onboard things on my Asus P5B Deluxe) So that point is moot too. POS mobo, well, how are high-end Asus and Tyan "crap"? In the $200 - $500 range. That's too expensive for shit.
As for Windows 98 in stability, quality and responsiveness : no, that's the Mac Mini G4 on which I'm typing this. It's a slug next to my home rig. (Scrolling this pages produces 100% CPU usage while I'm counting the frames Firefox renders per second.) So much for Apple Q&A...
Well, it would guarantee that much more sales if they just sold unsupported OSX off-the-shelf. I never bought softare, but I'd buy Leopard on the first day at midnight even if I had to queue up two nights before. Because I can't buy a Mac, but I can happily spend 100 on OSX.
And that's just me. If HP, Asus or anyone sold OSX machines (for the usual price of equivalent Mac minus 50%) they'd be selling so many OSX licenses that it would more than make up for the loss of Mac sales. Apple does not sell enough macs that it would cut that much in their revenue streams... As for supporting PC hardware, it's a) very easy and b) already there anyway. MacOSX supports ATI and nVidia cards, runs on any CPU that has SSE3, supports Intel ICHn chipsets, Via, AMD, nVidia, and there is a very active community happily developing drivers for every piece of hardware that's common enough that someone with the skills to port or write a driver has one.
If Steve Jobs wanted to, he could choke Microsoft in a year. The technology is here just now... I really hope it's here to stay, and that it will dominate, some day. MacOSX is the best desktop Unix hands down... KDE on Linux is close, but there are a lot of things left that could be automated away, I felt it was too much work to keep it working Just Right(tm). Maybe in five more years?
Ah well, since OSX and Lunix can't compete on their merits, it seems like FUD is all they've got. Good luck with that. I dare you to try MacOSX, for a month, on your hardware if it supports it (any x64 CPU) and say that again. I just deleted Linux from my box BECAUSE MacOSX works just as well, if not better, and is less of a headache.
Typing this from a computer that runs MacOSX and wasn't bought from Apple. Just so you know...
(Using it makes me think that if Apple ever decided to sell their OS 1) boxed and 2) on other vendors' machines, they'd kill Microsoft in a year. While still selling macs, not "because THEY run OSX", but "because they're MACS" : they still iPods, they're beginning to sell iPhones, soon it will be iBrators, whatever... all at four times the normal market price. And they sell, "because it's Apple(tm)" )
Also if you think that the cost of the internet is the cost of the hardware and not the cost of support/maintenance/upgrade/design/installation of the hardware then you need to spend a little more time thinking about this industry as a whole.
I know that. And I think it should be free. Let each local community pay for that through taxes voted by direct referendum. With provisions on the order of "If you vote for the project you have to pay a part of it". Such a system would soon be completely outperforming the disguised fascism we now have. That would give my idea the evolutionary advantage, better tech, better weapons, and as soon as resources become scarce (if that ever happens, because humans with a high-tech lifestyle breed less than stone-age ones), the better equipped ones (with better tech and free minds that reason on science and results instead of bureaucracy and procedures) will win.
Trying again...
I know that. It essentially boils down to "who will pay for the operating costs of the infrastructure" well, who makes money off the infrastructure running? Tax them. That's the natural answer in the social-democratic system we all live under some copy of, except maybe in some countries where you never get to vote for anything...
If they're that puritan, how comes they get AIDS? Sex is the only way it could propagate that fast. Fucking a number of females won't give you AIDS if you're the only one they have sex with. Same for all other aspects enumarated in the parent, except obscurantism, and about that : sorry, I can't help people stupid enough to believe in God, especially when their religion makes them poor, sick, uneducated drones, who would kill anyone suggesting them to change their insane ways of life -because they'd get 72 virgins for doing so.
There is. The computer is connected by Ethernet to a DSL router in most cases, so creating a ramdisk to download updated definitions is very very possible. And all but a few computers that still run now have USB ports, so you can stick a key with up-to-date definitions in there too.
If the LiveCD is good enough, it will detect the minimal hardware needed to do its job... read the defs from the 'Net or USB device... scan, delete infected files... reboot. The whole process could be made to be automatic and never require user intervention.
Well, install MacOSX on their PCs and tell them "it's as much like Windows as a new mobile phone's interface resembles an older one." Install MS Office too, so they won't even have to try OpenOffice (and then inevitably ask why the hell it takes half an hour to load).
I don't want to preemptively answer the counter-arguments to this. I'm right anyway. Normal people don't NEED windows. There is software to do e-mail, web, chat, office, HTPC, taxes, office, whatever - on Linux. And if they need Adobe or other professional must-have software (sound, video, 3D, whatever), it's not like running OSX technically requires to buy a Mac... (and it's much easier to install than any real true BSD, too. I can tell, I'm posting this from my Hackintosh.)
You don't have to compile a custom kernel. sudo apt-get install linux-kernel-lowlatency (or something... search "lowlatency" in Synaptic or what-have-you)
We would all be using MacOSX if that were true. (It has the nicest possible package management system, too. Self-contained apps in folders that include everything they need that's not natively supported by the OS. That's the definition of "package management done right".)
People change their mobile phones all the time, they all have different interfaces, so how comes it is a problem on desktop computers and not even noticed in those in your pockets?
Maybe people really do shut off their brains when they are near a computer. Or they think that computers should read their thoughts and extrapolate the desired output from that.
But for now at least, that is the law in U.S. Well, fuck the law. Do an act of civil disobedience. Someone will get caught at some point, and it will go like this :
-"So, what did you do?"
-"I used a software that contained a patented technology. The distributor didn't pay royalties to the patent holder, because they are distributing it for $0.
Moreover, it was to watch a DVD : the media industry bought the law known as DMCA so that it would be illegal, among other things, to make a DVD player without buying a license from them, to legally circumvent the protection. As my media player software is developed by people who do it for free, they had no money to pay the license, and they illegally circumvented the protection. So I had to use a software that is twice illegal, only to enjoy a movie I've legally bought a copy of. At an artificially inflated price fixed by an illegal cartel that seems to focus very much on extortion these days. Oh, and, before I forget - the movie has recouped ten times its costs on the first week-end it was published, anyway."
Yeah... dreaming... wouldn't do in court... fuck it. I will do it if I'm ever punished for using software. Might as well do something good for once in my life.
So that no one will be able to read them? I don't think those codecs are pre-installed on MS Windows. (XviD, recent DivXes, WMV etc may not be pre-installed either, but everyone has them anyway. Go figure.)
Hmm... It depends what code would be easier to rewrite. I think that a new GUI to replace X would be a good idea, then yet-another Qt version, so KDE would work with next to no modification. Is it possible to rewrite a multi-threaded X? What would be needed to be replaced? I really don't know : do apps depend on the memory management of X and the fact that it only has one process? Or is it possible to write a fully multi-threaded X-compatible server? So there would just be that one package to rewrite... KDE/Qt has that nice signal/slot thing, it must be easy to write that in a way that makes use of multi-cores.
It is well-known that some software packages are impossible to uninstall because they replace system files with their own versions, which need the full package installed to work normally. You cannot roll back to a previous state without a disk image. Windows File Protection has been hijacked long ago... I'm speaking about softs such as anything Norton by Symantec, other AV software too : Kaspersky was uninstallable too, back when I still bothered using AV. Same as McAffee.
Other such software include, of course, any version of MS Office and Visual Studio. Or Windows Media Player. Or windows updates, but that's a feature. (Sometimes you need to uninstall them because you've just reinstalled Windows, you think it would be a good idea to update it right away, and you end up with a computer usable only as a paperweight.)
When the show has been paid for several times over by advertising and compulsory license, THEN MAKE THE THING PUBLIC DOMAIN, OR ELSE YOU'RE VAMPIRES.
How long will it take for everyone here on Slashdot to wrap their heads around the concepts of ZERO DISTRIBUTION COSTS! So, as long as everyone involved in the making has been paid for, WTF do they want? Perpetual revenue streams? Do YOU want to pay ME forever just because I put on a good show for you?
<pipe dream>
At some point we will have FREE MEDIA DISTRIBUTION. Not like we NEED them oceanic cables anyway. Yes, I know about enough physics to see it won't be WiFi either, but hey, gotta start somewhere... The idea is everyone begins in their towns, to set up the hardware for a New Internet. Just like the old, but Free. And to set up as many gateways as possible from one to the other. "Now we have covered the infrastructure costs, we truly have zero distribution costs, so FUCK YOU BIG MEDIA! Oh, we will not starve you. You will have TV (for the morons who still watch TV) and theaters as revenue streams, but video - forget about it. Now your shows will have to be paid for as they already are : by advertizing. And your movies will be paid for as they already are : with a gazillion ticket sales on first weekend."
</pipe dream>
So, lemme gezzat straight : Companies outsource their IT dev tems. Companies then need new IT teams to make sure the Indians at the other end really understood what was asked.
So they're NOW hiring LOCAL people because it was SO MUCH CHEAPER to outsource the job in the first place? Is that even profitable?
I must however add that CUPS has always been a torture to get working. (How do YOU add a local printer to the local setup using only the Web intardface ? Answer : either you use that http service to hack into your own machine, or you start a terminal and type sudo vim/etc/cups/cups.conf. Then you pray, read the Bible (man cups.conf) and get to work. Maybe someday your prints will come...
Apple has made CUPS painless. And if open source devs could never do that, then Apple devs are better devs, end of story. And as long as CUPS remains GPLv2, I really don't care who wites the code. Make it JUST WORK.
"MAKE IT JUST WORK" should have its own telethon, so that F/OSS devs could happily code away in their mom's basements, in their offices during or after hours, and the benefits of the show be given away to other dev teams, paid only to Make It Just Work.
And we would not depend on Apple finishing the half-baked jobs FOSS devs do. Sorry, guys, a product I can't use is worth zero, and thus never compares with any other software, Free, free, or other. I'll go back to Linux when my sensors and everything else work right out of the box. You know what? I found an OS that does exactly that to absolute perfection and beyond : BSD-based Mac OSX. First time I tried to install it on my box (pure Intel + nVidia setup), first time took about four hours, including setup, drivers and configuring every app I've been using in Linux or its local equivalent (which I had to learn to use). I used to spend more time than that every week to clean my Windows XP, or daily figuring out how every other Linux app I need works in a different way that that of every other. Never going back to Windows. Vista refused to work - only once, on the very first time I used it, in so disruptive a way that I'll never ever touch it again. If my workplace forces me to use $REAL_APP I'll build them a Mac. At one fourth of Apple prices, of course. Where REAL_APP is either "Microsoft *" or "Adobe *" or both. (What else do you need Windows for, anyway? Games. What else?)
What growth market? Linux has ownzored the server market long ago and still leads. (I'm not going to bother check the numbers when I remember about 70% marketshare for Apache) The growth market is on the desktop, and possibly in embedded...
I'm not concerned anyway : I've tested Vista, it told me it wouldn't play a standard DVD because "there was no protected path for HD content." Game Over, never again. "Vista is unusable forever, it's a crapware with a shiny skin."
Then I used Ubuntu some months, and while I really enjoy read/write support for every FS under the sun or in the Turing Tar-Pit, now that I installed MacOSX 'just to see' (and use Adobe software w/o Windows malware), *I'm never going back*. I'll just migrate my data to HFS+ partitions eventually... If you have a compatible PC, just try it (Hardware Compatibility List here)
Because when you prelink the binaries the wrong way, apps get faulty and SLOW. Like they take minutes to load. (Then we have to update glibc, so everything gets revdep-rebuilt anyway...)
Fuck You Real Hard. Only the vapid tripe that evolutionary rejects like you call "entertainment" ever gets in the bargain bin. Everything I download (and it's 100+G / month) is out of .
I don't pay for software because I'm yet to see $1 in return on investment.
I don't pay for movies because, if said movie hasn't made an obscene profit* in the first week-end, it is considered a commercial failure anyway. (I'm not buying into the "rental" racket : shop-owners who pay $150 for the right to rent a DVD without bonuses and sometimes even lacking the original audio! Boycott.)
*obscene profit : cost $ 10e6, makes ten times that in the two first days. Poor, poor Hollywood. Boohoo.
I do pay for every thing that can not be copied at zero cost. I believe in capitalism : everything is worth exactly its production cost, taking into account paying everyone involved in producing said thing, so that they can buy things.
Slashdot Mirror
What were you saying again? If you want to run OSX, on a non-Apple computer, just read the Supported Hardware lists and buy only that.
I've thought more fully, and I fail to see how stuffing the really overpriced 3GHz 4-core Xeons makes any sense when you can have an 8-core for half the price if you buy 1,86GHz. I'm talking from $10,000 to $4,000 there - and with the same specs.
That's a lot, and the top of the line. My point is, you CAN build an equivalent machine for cheaper... and that's not by being cheap on the graphics card (nVidia 8800GTS w/640M GDDR3@1600MZh vs. 7300 in Apple Macs) or the hard drives (Fuck el cheapo Maxtor that Apple loves, I only buy WD).
I listed what hardware I needed to build a MacPro killing machine. Tyan mobo, good and recent nVidia card, 8-core dual Xeon, 8G RAM, water-cooled everything, some terabytes of HDs, WiFi that works OOTB, 720W PSU, and a pair of 20" 16:10 monitors. Price : $4,000. Want one? My email is just here above. (I'd wait for Leopard if I were you, but that's just me...)
What nightmare drivers? There even are community-provided software packages that install all the drivers you need for your mainboard, for example. (So did I install the drivers for my onboard things on my Asus P5B Deluxe) So that point is moot too.
POS mobo, well, how are high-end Asus and Tyan "crap"? In the $200 - $500 range. That's too expensive for shit.
As for Windows 98 in stability, quality and responsiveness : no, that's the Mac Mini G4 on which I'm typing this. It's a slug next to my home rig. (Scrolling this pages produces 100% CPU usage while I'm counting the frames Firefox renders per second.) So much for Apple Q&A...
Well, it would guarantee that much more sales if they just sold unsupported OSX off-the-shelf. I never bought softare, but I'd buy Leopard on the first day at midnight even if I had to queue up two nights before. Because I can't buy a Mac, but I can happily spend 100 on OSX.
... As for supporting PC hardware, it's a) very easy and b) already there anyway. MacOSX supports ATI and nVidia cards, runs on any CPU that has SSE3, supports Intel ICHn chipsets, Via, AMD, nVidia, and there is a very active community happily developing drivers for every piece of hardware that's common enough that someone with the skills to port or write a driver has one.
... I really hope it's here to stay, and that it will dominate, some day. MacOSX is the best desktop Unix hands down... KDE on Linux is close, but there are a lot of things left that could be automated away, I felt it was too much work to keep it working Just Right(tm). Maybe in five more years?
And that's just me. If HP, Asus or anyone sold OSX machines (for the usual price of equivalent Mac minus 50%) they'd be selling so many OSX licenses that it would more than make up for the loss of Mac sales. Apple does not sell enough macs that it would cut that much in their revenue streams
If Steve Jobs wanted to, he could choke Microsoft in a year. The technology is here just now
Typing this from a computer that runs MacOSX and wasn't bought from Apple. Just so you know ...
(Using it makes me think that if Apple ever decided to sell their OS 1) boxed and 2) on other vendors' machines, they'd kill Microsoft in a year. While still selling macs, not "because THEY run OSX", but "because they're MACS" : they still iPods, they're beginning to sell iPhones, soon it will be iBrators, whatever... all at four times the normal market price. And they sell, "because it's Apple(tm)" )
Also if you think that the cost of the internet is the cost of the hardware and not the cost of support/maintenance/upgrade/design/installation of the hardware then you need to spend a little more time thinking about this industry as a whole.
I know that. And I think it should be free. Let each local community pay for that through taxes voted by direct referendum. With provisions on the order of "If you vote for the project you have to pay a part of it". Such a system would soon be completely outperforming the disguised fascism we now have. That would give my idea the evolutionary advantage, better tech, better weapons, and as soon as resources become scarce (if that ever happens, because humans with a high-tech lifestyle breed less than stone-age ones), the better equipped ones (with better tech and free minds that reason on science and results instead of bureaucracy and procedures) will win.
Trying again...
I know that. It essentially boils down to "who will pay for the operating costs of the infrastructure" well, who makes money off the infrastructure running? Tax them. That's the natural answer in the social-democratic system we all live under some copy of, except maybe in some countries where you never get to vote for anything...
Many of the areas of the world these things are going to are generally *less* liberal about sex than we are -- e.g. several are predominantly Muslim.
Then I'm all for shoving some of our morality down their throats. And my "our" I mean mine: sex is good, censorship is bad, and god does not exist.
How comes that was modded flamebait?
Okay, let's troll the happy happy field :
If they're that puritan, how comes they get AIDS? Sex is the only way it could propagate that fast. Fucking a number of females won't give you AIDS if you're the only one they have sex with. Same for all other aspects enumarated in the parent, except obscurantism, and about that : sorry, I can't help people stupid enough to believe in God, especially when their religion makes them poor, sick, uneducated drones, who would kill anyone suggesting them to change their insane ways of life -because they'd get 72 virgins for doing so.
There is. The computer is connected by Ethernet to a DSL router in most cases, so creating a ramdisk to download updated definitions is very very possible. And all but a few computers that still run now have USB ports, so you can stick a key with up-to-date definitions in there too.
... read the defs from the 'Net or USB device ... scan, delete infected files ... reboot. The whole process could be made to be automatic and never require user intervention.
If the LiveCD is good enough, it will detect the minimal hardware needed to do its job
Well, install MacOSX on their PCs and tell them "it's as much like Windows as a new mobile phone's interface resembles an older one." Install MS Office too, so they won't even have to try OpenOffice (and then inevitably ask why the hell it takes half an hour to load).
I don't want to preemptively answer the counter-arguments to this. I'm right anyway. Normal people don't NEED windows. There is software to do e-mail, web, chat, office, HTPC, taxes, office, whatever - on Linux. And if they need Adobe or other professional must-have software (sound, video, 3D, whatever), it's not like running OSX technically requires to buy a Mac... (and it's much easier to install than any real true BSD, too. I can tell, I'm posting this from my Hackintosh.)
Virus Creation Lab did not work. Does this one work?
You don't have to compile a custom kernel. sudo apt-get install linux-kernel-lowlatency (or something ... search "lowlatency" in Synaptic or what-have-you)
We would all be using MacOSX if that were true.
(It has the nicest possible package management system, too. Self-contained apps in folders that include everything they need that's not natively supported by the OS. That's the definition of "package management done right".)
People change their mobile phones all the time, they all have different interfaces, so how comes it is a problem on desktop computers and not even noticed in those in your pockets?
Maybe people really do shut off their brains when they are near a computer. Or they think that computers should read their thoughts and extrapolate the desired output from that.
-"So, what did you do?"
-"I used a software that contained a patented technology. The distributor didn't pay royalties to the patent holder, because they are distributing it for $0.
Moreover, it was to watch a DVD : the media industry bought the law known as DMCA so that it would be illegal, among other things, to make a DVD player without buying a license from them, to legally circumvent the protection. As my media player software is developed by people who do it for free, they had no money to pay the license, and they illegally circumvented the protection. So I had to use a software that is twice illegal, only to enjoy a movie I've legally bought a copy of. At an artificially inflated price fixed by an illegal cartel that seems to focus very much on extortion these days. Oh, and, before I forget - the movie has recouped ten times its costs on the first week-end it was published, anyway."
Yeah... dreaming
So that no one will be able to read them? I don't think those codecs are pre-installed on MS Windows. (XviD, recent DivXes, WMV etc may not be pre-installed either, but everyone has them anyway. Go figure.)
Hmm ... It depends what code would be easier to rewrite. I think that a new GUI to replace X would be a good idea, then yet-another Qt version, so KDE would work with next to no modification. Is it possible to rewrite a multi-threaded X? What would be needed to be replaced? I really don't know : do apps depend on the memory management of X and the fact that it only has one process? Or is it possible to write a fully multi-threaded X-compatible server? So there would just be that one package to rewrite... KDE/Qt has that nice signal/slot thing, it must be easy to write that in a way that makes use of multi-cores.
You lie.
It is well-known that some software packages are impossible to uninstall because they replace system files with their own versions, which need the full package installed to work normally. You cannot roll back to a previous state without a disk image. Windows File Protection has been hijacked long ago... I'm speaking about softs such as anything Norton by Symantec, other AV software too : Kaspersky was uninstallable too, back when I still bothered using AV. Same as McAffee.
Other such software include, of course, any version of MS Office and Visual Studio. Or Windows Media Player. Or windows updates, but that's a feature. (Sometimes you need to uninstall them because you've just reinstalled Windows, you think it would be a good idea to update it right away, and you end up with a computer usable only as a paperweight.)
Backbone bandwidth costs price of cable + electricity. If it's priced anywhere beyond that, it's theft.
When the show has been paid for several times over by advertising and compulsory license, THEN MAKE THE THING PUBLIC DOMAIN, OR ELSE YOU'RE VAMPIRES.
How long will it take for everyone here on Slashdot to wrap their heads around the concepts of ZERO DISTRIBUTION COSTS! So, as long as everyone involved in the making has been paid for, WTF do they want? Perpetual revenue streams? Do YOU want to pay ME forever just because I put on a good show for you?
<pipe dream> At some point we will have FREE MEDIA DISTRIBUTION. Not like we NEED them oceanic cables anyway. Yes, I know about enough physics to see it won't be WiFi either, but hey, gotta start somewhere... The idea is everyone begins in their towns, to set up the hardware for a New Internet. Just like the old, but Free. And to set up as many gateways as possible from one to the other. "Now we have covered the infrastructure costs, we truly have zero distribution costs, so FUCK YOU BIG MEDIA! Oh, we will not starve you. You will have TV (for the morons who still watch TV) and theaters as revenue streams, but video - forget about it. Now your shows will have to be paid for as they already are : by advertizing. And your movies will be paid for as they already are : with a gazillion ticket sales on first weekend." </pipe dream>
So, lemme gezzat straight :
Companies outsource their IT dev tems.
Companies then need new IT teams to make sure the Indians at the other end really understood what was asked.
So they're NOW hiring LOCAL people because it was SO MUCH CHEAPER to outsource the job in the first place? Is that even profitable?
I think you're right.
/etc/cups/cups.conf. Then you pray, read the Bible (man cups.conf) and get to work. Maybe someday your prints will come...
I must however add that CUPS has always been a torture to get working. (How do YOU add a local printer to the local setup using only the Web intardface ? Answer : either you use that http service to hack into your own machine, or you start a terminal and type sudo vim
Apple has made CUPS painless. And if open source devs could never do that, then Apple devs are better devs, end of story. And as long as CUPS remains GPLv2, I really don't care who wites the code. Make it JUST WORK.
"MAKE IT JUST WORK" should have its own telethon, so that F/OSS devs could happily code away in their mom's basements, in their offices during or after hours, and the benefits of the show be given away to other dev teams, paid only to Make It Just Work.
And we would not depend on Apple finishing the half-baked jobs FOSS devs do. Sorry, guys, a product I can't use is worth zero, and thus never compares with any other software, Free, free, or other.
I'll go back to Linux when my sensors and everything else work right out of the box. You know what? I found an OS that does exactly that to absolute perfection and beyond : BSD-based Mac OSX. First time I tried to install it on my box (pure Intel + nVidia setup), first time took about four hours, including setup, drivers and configuring every app I've been using in Linux or its local equivalent (which I had to learn to use). I used to spend more time than that every week to clean my Windows XP, or daily figuring out how every other Linux app I need works in a different way that that of every other.
Never going back to Windows. Vista refused to work - only once, on the very first time I used it, in so disruptive a way that I'll never ever touch it again. If my workplace forces me to use $REAL_APP I'll build them a Mac. At one fourth of Apple prices, of course. Where REAL_APP is either "Microsoft *" or "Adobe *" or both. (What else do you need Windows for, anyway? Games. What else?)
Actually, Beryl did make my Linux experience a happy game. The desktop cube is the only feature I find lacking in MacOSX.
What growth market? Linux has ownzored the server market long ago and still leads. (I'm not going to bother check the numbers when I remember about 70% marketshare for Apache) The growth market is on the desktop, and possibly in embedded...
I'm not concerned anyway : I've tested Vista, it told me it wouldn't play a standard DVD because "there was no protected path for HD content." Game Over, never again. "Vista is unusable forever, it's a crapware with a shiny skin."
Then I used Ubuntu some months, and while I really enjoy read/write support for every FS under the sun or in the Turing Tar-Pit, now that I installed MacOSX 'just to see' (and use Adobe software w/o Windows malware), *I'm never going back*. I'll just migrate my data to HFS+ partitions eventually... If you have a compatible PC, just try it (Hardware Compatibility List here)
Because when you prelink the binaries the wrong way, apps get faulty and SLOW. Like they take minutes to load. (Then we have to update glibc, so everything gets revdep-rebuilt anyway...)
Fuck You Real Hard. Only the vapid tripe that evolutionary rejects like you call "entertainment" ever gets in the bargain bin. Everything I download (and it's 100+G / month) is out of .
l ove/ and http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/albini .html
I don't pay for software because I'm yet to see $1 in return on investment.
I don't pay for movies because, if said movie hasn't made an obscene profit* in the first week-end, it is considered a commercial failure anyway. (I'm not buying into the "rental" racket : shop-owners who pay $150 for the right to rent a DVD without bonuses and sometimes even lacking the original audio! Boycott.)
*obscene profit : cost $ 10e6, makes ten times that in the two first days. Poor, poor Hollywood. Boohoo.
I do pay for every thing that can not be copied at zero cost. I believe in capitalism : everything is worth exactly its production cost, taking into account paying everyone involved in producing said thing, so that they can buy things.
Don't even think of replying before you've read http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/