Is there a problem with this? Community development is a great thing, but some things are better done on their own. That's one thing I really appreciate about open source software, that I can make modifications to the software for yourself with no strings attached. Some solutions are simply not worth the effort it takes to be merged back with the original code. It would be better to spend you time solving more useful problems.
Did it ever occur to you that a word might have more than one meaning? It's pretty similar to what we call overloading in Computer Science. When we talk about noses running, it's obviously not the same as when athletes are running. Indeed, it would take a special kind of retard to think that we think the two are conceptually the same.*
* Excluding ESL people. They are often very intelligent, but learning a language is terribly difficult, particularly since most people teaching English these days is nowhere near qualified.
It's more consistent. A file has one location, the location is always represented in the same way. Magic is evil.
It's easier to manage. Under my home directory I have a dozen other directories (and many subdirectories). As it is, it's fairly easy to navigate; but if I didn't have this hierarchy, it would be a complete mess trying to organize the thousands of 'tags' or whatever.
I'm sure there are better ways to organize files and such, but don't dismiss hierarchical directories. They're actually fairly powerful and scalable.
I have tried AbiWord and it has some really great things going for it. In definitely improves a lot where OO.o is lacking, but as of last time I still couldn't use it as a replacement. The two big things that were missing for me where good OpenDocument support (which is critical for me) and good support defining and modifying classes or styles.
You failed to do my job for me by protecting my child from my own inability to monitor their activity and teach them how to make good decisions. Now you must make me rich.
I'm going to guess you've never actually had children. I haven't either, but from looking at my parent (who are certainly not bad) and my siblings and I, I can tell you it's a lot more complicated. Parents can't control everything their children do. If they tried, they would certainly do more harm than good.
In the end, the parents have to do the best job they can with training their children and hope the children make the right decisions latter on. Sooner or later, you have to relinquish control (the sooner the better, at least you'll still be around if they screw up), and when they're given the freedom to choose, that means they might choose badly. There's no formula for it, even model children can end up screwing themselves up.
Can you please cite some examples of Microsoft using submarine patents.
It's not so much that they actually go out and sue people over patents. Rather, they use a technique known as FUD and they go around and intimidate their competitors about how they might use their patents. The competitors then have to scramble all about to save their stock from falling into oblivion and spend effort ensuring they are not in violation of some patent they don't know about. Whether there's anything to Microsoft's patent claims remains to be demonstrated.
Is it fair to compare these stats? Most IE users don't choose to upgrade, it's simply foisted on them by Windows' Auto Update. When I returned home this Christmas both my mum and sister asked me to "fix the internet" because IE7 had been installed and its new layout confused them. They certainly didn't choose in the way that someone chooses to download and install Firefox does, so the victory is even more in FF's favour.
This is simply what the stats are trying to confirm. You see the primary reason for the development if IE7 was to stem off all the people switching to Firefox an hopefully get most of their back and stuck on IE*. The study seems to show that IE7 isn't working. Firefox converts are not switching back to IE, in fact, Firefox growth continues to rise.
* You may remember a time, not so long ago, when software was actually created to be useful and not just used. Forget it, it will only make you depressed.
You upgrade IE6 with the assumption that MS will require it for one thing or another. We don't actually use it but we install it just in case.
Actually, the most common answer I get from normal users who go and install it is that they did it because IE7 is 'new', and they want to make sure they keep up with all the new stuff so that they can stay 'cool'. In many cases they don't even actually like it all that much, but they use it (sometimes even over firefox) simply because it's 'new'.
So what happens when the state sets the speed limit of a road that is safely driven at 55MPH to 45MPH? People still drive faster because that's what the road is built for and their habits are, there's no safety issue, but all of a sudden people are inconvenienced and the state fills it's coffers off of a change that had no reason to be made. That's why people get upset at things like that.
With driving, there is always a safety issue. It's just a matter of how negligable the issue is. Most drivers aren't that concerned about safety. After all, the average person doesn't get in a car accident every day, so its easy to think of it as something that doesn't effect them. On the other hand, the people who make the laws are over on the other side. They see that thousands of cars are having accidents every year and if they set speed limits that could be considered harmful, they'll be haunted by lawyers for the rest of their lives (and then some). As a result, they are a bit paranoid some times. It's not a science though and it's difficult to find any objective way to set speed limits.
I'm a Free Software user and the goals of DRM and the goals of Free Software are fundamentally incompatible. In short, the only way I will ever be able to use your DRMed stuff unless someone goes to the effort to crack it (which, by the way, is against the law). So I will not, and can not, support the ability to use DRM.
For the majority of people, it's already as good as Windows.
Except for application support. This is the only real problem my parents have with Linux. They are linguists and they rely on several Windows-only tools to do their work. This is an issue for a good number of other people to.
Yes, theoretically. Practically, you don't see or feel the difference. Citing this as #1 reason to use gentoo is stupid.
In certain cases there actually is some truth to that, but unfortunately some Gentoo users horribly exaggerate it. There's a good summary on the Gentoo Forums.
2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation.
Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install
He worded this badly, but to a certain extent it is true. Binary distributions need to keep certain packages at particular versions. If you try to upgrade glibc make sure you keep the old version otherwise there's no way on earth your system will stay running. With Gentoo, once you've rebuilt everything that depends on glibc, you can remove the old edition and move on with life. As a result, you can upgrade incrementally and still stay current.
This is also slightly true in another way because portage is extremely cool!:P Ok, enough fanboyism, portage is definitely not perfect, but it allows you to exercise a lot of control with fairly little effort (as long has you know what your doing, which admittedly does require some RTFM).
3. It teaches you more about Linux.
Yes, because watching compiler output scrolling by for 8 hours gives me super linux skillz!
I think he is right about this, but I think it's actually a bad thing. A distribution should exists to let their users get work done, not to teach them about arcane Unix tools. Following the Gentoo manuals involve a fair amount of work on the command line and so even the mildly curious will learn a thing or two by experimenting. Fortunately, the Gentoo people are working on this and I'm expecting more user-friendly installs and tools.
4. You can update it whenever you want, don't have to wait for the latest version of the distro like Fedora Core 5/6, Yellow Dog Linux 5
Ah, you mean it's like with the other distros who let you download the latest and greatest. Debian testing is usually pretty bleeding edge, and Debian is considered to be one of the slowest distros to upgrade....
I agree. That's a horrible, horrible reason. First of all, you have to wait for things to get in portage (or an overlay if you using one), and if you're slightly sane you'll wait till it gets marked stable instead of unmasking it. That generally takes a while.
But for some reason I fail to understand, there are dozens of games glorifying WW2 combats, or simulating the Iraq war. Millions have died during WW2, and hundred of thousands died in Iraq and continue to do so. Yet nobody finds reasons to be upset when you incarnate a G.I. killing German soldiers in a game. It's all perfectly normal to them.
The primary reason I hate (real) war as much as I do is from my experience in video games about war
I do not think that all war games are good and health, but as a whole I think that the games out there about our wars are a Good Thing. Westerners these are losing site of what war is like. We haven't been involved in a serious war since WW2 which happened before most of us were born. The Korean Conflict, Vietnam War, and those little excursions in the Middle East have all been fairly low-key. While the media has done a lot to demonstrate the ugliness in war, it hasn't been enough. We still wear our poppies every November, but we've forgotten Hemingway's words:
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason
We don't see our friends come home with missing arms or legs. We don't have to be careful when walking in 'that' field because it might still have land mines. Anyone whose suffered from Agent Orange poisoning is either dead or too senile to say anything. We're completely guarded from the horrors of war, and as bad as it sounds, our movies and games are about the closest thing we get to understanding war (hardly anyone reads these days). What we need is not less war games, but ones that show our kids what war is like: where good people die, where you lose 4 buddies (forever) because the American fighter jet thought your training operation was enemy fire, where civilians are fire-bombed because some guy whose been awake for 3 days straight makes a small mistake.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like it was just about 100 years ago, before the 'war to end all wars'. A handful of optimistic, large powers interested in spreading their domination and a population that doesn't understand war.
The guy will never get over it, because, in that particular issue, he is right, and the people who think different from him are just wrong. There's no way he will change his opinion on that issue.
I beg to differ. The term 'Linux' has gained a second meaning as a short form for 'an OS that uses the Linux kernel' which is almost always the GNU system with a Linux kernel. Language and words change so we can talk more efficiently. It happens all over the place in our language: 'refrigerator' became 'fridge', 'windows' instead of 'Microsoft Windows', even the notorious "where's the internet" is short for "where's the icon to open my web browser". Of course, it causes ambiguity and confusion sometimes, I have a hard time talking to new people about windows as in that box your graphical apps open up in, but that's the price we pay for shortening our language. In the end, it's all about efficiency.
I understand that RMS wants the extra publicity, and I think they really deserve it. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen unless you turn GNU/Linux into a two syllable word: people are too lazy.
Sex is simply a necessary part of life, much as eating or sleeping is a part of life.
That statement is wrong on two accounts. First, pornography is not the same thing as sex. C.S. Lewis came up with a somewhat better analogy here:
Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act--that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or bit of bacon, would you not think that in the country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
The second problem is that even sex not the same as the other natural instincts. To quote Lewis again:
But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.
...
There is nothing to be ashamed in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips. I do not say you and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance. God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.
They don't want little kids staring at this anymore then parents do. They are not the tobacco industry. They want to protect their interests which means not showing it to kids which is against the law.
As far as I can tell, they're exactly like the tobacco industry in this repect. Sure, they play the law-abiding game, but so does the tobacco industry. Some tobacco companies have even run campains to persuade kids to not smoke. To them it's the cost of doing business. Of course, both of them will do as little as possible to stop minors from getting hooked on their content.
Now you might say that pornography isn't harmful as tobacco (and you might be right). But that's beside the point. The fact is that they would love to have little kids staring at their stuff, but breaking the law is a bit expensive. The tobacco compaines are the same way and they have cleaned up their act alot in the past few decades as the law has put clamped down on their malarky.
P.S. I'm talking about tobacco companies in North America. Tobacco companies in South-East Asia are quite different. I'm not sure about the rest of the world.
Actually, it's more than just "security through obscurity". There are some nasty things that Microsoft products do that tend to get them into trouble (executing '.exe' files, ActiveX, etc) and makes their products more vulnerable.
Also "security through obscurity" is a valid practice, but it is not sufficient for good security. I don't tell strangers my computer's IP address (although, I'm pretty certain it would be useless to them and there are many ways to figure it out). The problem is when people are suckered into thinking that if they can't see something, nobody else can. Obscurity can be pretty effective when defending agains automated attacks too.
Gecko supports it, although the documentation doesn't make it clear that it's from DOM Level 3
I don't know where you got that from, but 1 search on the Mozilla developer website and I found their element.textContent documentation. Notice the linky at the bottom that takes you to the DOM 3 specs.
I'm not an expert on physics but AFAIK I don't think anyone knows much at all about dark matter. It seems to me like it's just a poor excuse for why the observed facts don't fit our lovely theories.
Except that then it takes a long time for someone to become an 'Advanced User'. Most Advanced Users didn't learn what they know by reading some Advanced Users manual chalk full of al sorts of arcane knowledge of keyboard shortcuts and stuff. They were just regular users who accidently pressed tab one day on an found that it cycled through the form elements. Experimentation is *the* way that users learn stuff. We all know that getting them to read the manual is about as likely as getting a slashdotter to RTFA.
They are similar, but not identical, and there are a number of important differences. There is a library called wxWidgets that tries to provide a cross-platform UI library. Gnome and KDE are fairly similar and are based off of standards created by the freedesktop.org project, but OSX and Windows don't really follow any stardard (i.e. the implimentation *is* the standard).
Even with Gnome and KDE there are some differences. Gnome tends to be pretty religious about minimalism, KDE is exactly the opposite having menus and buttons all over the place in various directions. On prompts Gnome arranges the buttons in the order [No] [Yes]; KDE, [Yes] [No]. Little things like that can get your users confused when they expect a button to be in a particular place. Most of us are vary meticulous in our reading. Gnome has a fairly large document called Human Interface Guidlines that Gnome applications ought to follow. I don't think KDE does, but it really ought to because standarization amount one desktop makes life much easier for the end user.
Funny, I always thought it was the opposite. The KDE users always seem to come around proclaiming their C++ code is so much cleaner than Gnome's C code. But after trying KDE I eventually gave up because of all the UI bloat. I'm not saying that the programs themselves are bloated, just their UIs. Way to many buttons and menu's and I spent ages trying to find out how to do stuff. I've only had a few problems with things failing in Gnome, and that's normally when I'm running unstable versions of Gnome. These days I take a more pragmatic view. Ideoligally, KDE may be better. In practice, Gnome takes the cake.
This is one of the things I hate about the direction the Human Race. "I got used to it this way and, even though the new way is probably FAR more intuitive, I'm going to sit here and complain about how much productivity is going to go down, belly-aching the entire time."
People have always been resistant to change in many places. Think of all the English teachers who can't accept the fact that split infinitives are now valid English grammar. The reason for our obstinance is that change causes more work. You have to get used to it, often you need to develop new tools when the old ones relied on things that have changed. Often the new system has complications and negative effects that you couldn't see at first.
Also, from my experience, most of the productivity problems in the paper-pushing industry are sociological, not technological. The little droids feel under-appreciated and uncared for. As a result, they stop caring about their work and end up playing solitare or browsing the web all day.
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Is there a problem with this? Community development is a great thing, but some things are better done on their own. That's one thing I really appreciate about open source software, that I can make modifications to the software for yourself with no strings attached. Some solutions are simply not worth the effort it takes to be merged back with the original code. It would be better to spend you time solving more useful problems.
Did it ever occur to you that a word might have more than one meaning? It's pretty similar to what we call overloading in Computer Science. When we talk about noses running, it's obviously not the same as when athletes are running. Indeed, it would take a special kind of retard to think that we think the two are conceptually the same.*
* Excluding ESL people. They are often very intelligent, but learning a language is terribly difficult, particularly since most people teaching English these days is nowhere near qualified.
I can think of two reasons.
I'm sure there are better ways to organize files and such, but don't dismiss hierarchical directories. They're actually fairly powerful and scalable.
I have tried AbiWord and it has some really great things going for it. In definitely improves a lot where OO.o is lacking, but as of last time I still couldn't use it as a replacement. The two big things that were missing for me where good OpenDocument support (which is critical for me) and good support defining and modifying classes or styles.
I'm going to guess you've never actually had children. I haven't either, but from looking at my parent (who are certainly not bad) and my siblings and I, I can tell you it's a lot more complicated. Parents can't control everything their children do. If they tried, they would certainly do more harm than good.
In the end, the parents have to do the best job they can with training their children and hope the children make the right decisions latter on. Sooner or later, you have to relinquish control (the sooner the better, at least you'll still be around if they screw up), and when they're given the freedom to choose, that means they might choose badly. There's no formula for it, even model children can end up screwing themselves up.
It's not so much that they actually go out and sue people over patents. Rather, they use a technique known as FUD and they go around and intimidate their competitors about how they might use their patents. The competitors then have to scramble all about to save their stock from falling into oblivion and spend effort ensuring they are not in violation of some patent they don't know about. Whether there's anything to Microsoft's patent claims remains to be demonstrated.
This is simply what the stats are trying to confirm. You see the primary reason for the development if IE7 was to stem off all the people switching to Firefox an hopefully get most of their back and stuck on IE*. The study seems to show that IE7 isn't working. Firefox converts are not switching back to IE, in fact, Firefox growth continues to rise.
* You may remember a time, not so long ago, when software was actually created to be useful and not just used. Forget it, it will only make you depressed.
Actually, the most common answer I get from normal users who go and install it is that they did it because IE7 is 'new', and they want to make sure they keep up with all the new stuff so that they can stay 'cool'. In many cases they don't even actually like it all that much, but they use it (sometimes even over firefox) simply because it's 'new'.
With driving, there is always a safety issue. It's just a matter of how negligable the issue is. Most drivers aren't that concerned about safety. After all, the average person doesn't get in a car accident every day, so its easy to think of it as something that doesn't effect them. On the other hand, the people who make the laws are over on the other side. They see that thousands of cars are having accidents every year and if they set speed limits that could be considered harmful, they'll be haunted by lawyers for the rest of their lives (and then some). As a result, they are a bit paranoid some times. It's not a science though and it's difficult to find any objective way to set speed limits.
Well, I don't.
I'm a Free Software user and the goals of DRM and the goals of Free Software are fundamentally incompatible. In short, the only way I will ever be able to use your DRMed stuff unless someone goes to the effort to crack it (which, by the way, is against the law). So I will not, and can not, support the ability to use DRM.
No, but I did find a dead badger HOWTO. Maybe you could try substituting the nephew for the badger.
Except for application support. This is the only real problem my parents have with Linux. They are linguists and they rely on several Windows-only tools to do their work. This is an issue for a good number of other people to.
In certain cases there actually is some truth to that, but unfortunately some Gentoo users horribly exaggerate it. There's a good summary on the Gentoo Forums.
He worded this badly, but to a certain extent it is true. Binary distributions need to keep certain packages at particular versions. If you try to upgrade glibc make sure you keep the old version otherwise there's no way on earth your system will stay running. With Gentoo, once you've rebuilt everything that depends on glibc, you can remove the old edition and move on with life. As a result, you can upgrade incrementally and still stay current.
This is also slightly true in another way because portage is extremely cool! :P Ok, enough fanboyism, portage is definitely not perfect, but it allows you to exercise a lot of control with fairly little effort (as long has you know what your doing, which admittedly does require some RTFM).
I think he is right about this, but I think it's actually a bad thing. A distribution should exists to let their users get work done, not to teach them about arcane Unix tools. Following the Gentoo manuals involve a fair amount of work on the command line and so even the mildly curious will learn a thing or two by experimenting. Fortunately, the Gentoo people are working on this and I'm expecting more user-friendly installs and tools.
I agree. That's a horrible, horrible reason. First of all, you have to wait for things to get in portage (or an overlay if you using one), and if you're slightly sane you'll wait till it gets marked stable instead of unmasking it. That generally takes a while.
The primary reason I hate (real) war as much as I do is from my experience in video games about war
I do not think that all war games are good and health, but as a whole I think that the games out there about our wars are a Good Thing. Westerners these are losing site of what war is like. We haven't been involved in a serious war since WW2 which happened before most of us were born. The Korean Conflict, Vietnam War, and those little excursions in the Middle East have all been fairly low-key. While the media has done a lot to demonstrate the ugliness in war, it hasn't been enough. We still wear our poppies every November, but we've forgotten Hemingway's words:
We don't see our friends come home with missing arms or legs. We don't have to be careful when walking in 'that' field because it might still have land mines. Anyone whose suffered from Agent Orange poisoning is either dead or too senile to say anything. We're completely guarded from the horrors of war, and as bad as it sounds, our movies and games are about the closest thing we get to understanding war (hardly anyone reads these days). What we need is not less war games, but ones that show our kids what war is like: where good people die, where you lose 4 buddies (forever) because the American fighter jet thought your training operation was enemy fire, where civilians are fire-bombed because some guy whose been awake for 3 days straight makes a small mistake.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like it was just about 100 years ago, before the 'war to end all wars'. A handful of optimistic, large powers interested in spreading their domination and a population that doesn't understand war.
I beg to differ. The term 'Linux' has gained a second meaning as a short form for 'an OS that uses the Linux kernel' which is almost always the GNU system with a Linux kernel. Language and words change so we can talk more efficiently. It happens all over the place in our language: 'refrigerator' became 'fridge', 'windows' instead of 'Microsoft Windows', even the notorious "where's the internet" is short for "where's the icon to open my web browser". Of course, it causes ambiguity and confusion sometimes, I have a hard time talking to new people about windows as in that box your graphical apps open up in, but that's the price we pay for shortening our language. In the end, it's all about efficiency.
I understand that RMS wants the extra publicity, and I think they really deserve it. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen unless you turn GNU/Linux into a two syllable word: people are too lazy.
Hey, don't give them any ideas
That statement is wrong on two accounts. First, pornography is not the same thing as sex. C.S. Lewis came up with a somewhat better analogy here:
The second problem is that even sex not the same as the other natural instincts. To quote Lewis again:
As far as I can tell, they're exactly like the tobacco industry in this repect. Sure, they play the law-abiding game, but so does the tobacco industry. Some tobacco companies have even run campains to persuade kids to not smoke. To them it's the cost of doing business. Of course, both of them will do as little as possible to stop minors from getting hooked on their content.
Now you might say that pornography isn't harmful as tobacco (and you might be right). But that's beside the point. The fact is that they would love to have little kids staring at their stuff, but breaking the law is a bit expensive. The tobacco compaines are the same way and they have cleaned up their act alot in the past few decades as the law has put clamped down on their malarky.
P.S. I'm talking about tobacco companies in North America. Tobacco companies in South-East Asia are quite different. I'm not sure about the rest of the world.
Actually, it's more than just "security through obscurity". There are some nasty things that Microsoft products do that tend to get them into trouble (executing '.exe' files, ActiveX, etc) and makes their products more vulnerable.
Also "security through obscurity" is a valid practice, but it is not sufficient for good security. I don't tell strangers my computer's IP address (although, I'm pretty certain it would be useless to them and there are many ways to figure it out). The problem is when people are suckered into thinking that if they can't see something, nobody else can. Obscurity can be pretty effective when defending agains automated attacks too.
I don't know where you got that from, but 1 search on the Mozilla developer website and I found their element.textContent documentation. Notice the linky at the bottom that takes you to the DOM 3 specs.
I'm not an expert on physics but AFAIK I don't think anyone knows much at all about dark matter. It seems to me like it's just a poor excuse for why the observed facts don't fit our lovely theories.
Damned facts, always getting in the way.
Except that then it takes a long time for someone to become an 'Advanced User'. Most Advanced Users didn't learn what they know by reading some Advanced Users manual chalk full of al sorts of arcane knowledge of keyboard shortcuts and stuff. They were just regular users who accidently pressed tab one day on an found that it cycled through the form elements. Experimentation is *the* way that users learn stuff. We all know that getting them to read the manual is about as likely as getting a slashdotter to RTFA.
They are similar, but not identical, and there are a number of important differences. There is a library called wxWidgets that tries to provide a cross-platform UI library. Gnome and KDE are fairly similar and are based off of standards created by the freedesktop.org project, but OSX and Windows don't really follow any stardard (i.e. the implimentation *is* the standard).
Even with Gnome and KDE there are some differences. Gnome tends to be pretty religious about minimalism, KDE is exactly the opposite having menus and buttons all over the place in various directions. On prompts Gnome arranges the buttons in the order [No] [Yes]; KDE, [Yes] [No]. Little things like that can get your users confused when they expect a button to be in a particular place. Most of us are vary meticulous in our reading. Gnome has a fairly large document called Human Interface Guidlines that Gnome applications ought to follow. I don't think KDE does, but it really ought to because standarization amount one desktop makes life much easier for the end user.
Funny, I always thought it was the opposite. The KDE users always seem to come around proclaiming their C++ code is so much cleaner than Gnome's C code. But after trying KDE I eventually gave up because of all the UI bloat. I'm not saying that the programs themselves are bloated, just their UIs. Way to many buttons and menu's and I spent ages trying to find out how to do stuff. I've only had a few problems with things failing in Gnome, and that's normally when I'm running unstable versions of Gnome. These days I take a more pragmatic view. Ideoligally, KDE may be better. In practice, Gnome takes the cake.
People have always been resistant to change in many places. Think of all the English teachers who can't accept the fact that split infinitives are now valid English grammar. The reason for our obstinance is that change causes more work. You have to get used to it, often you need to develop new tools when the old ones relied on things that have changed. Often the new system has complications and negative effects that you couldn't see at first.
Also, from my experience, most of the productivity problems in the paper-pushing industry are sociological, not technological. The little droids feel under-appreciated and uncared for. As a result, they stop caring about their work and end up playing solitare or browsing the web all day .