the irrefutable fact that "regular" (as in, typical, normal, or average) people most certainly do not donate more than $200 to any political candidate, much less to Obama.
*How* much do regular people donate to any political candidate, then? with proper data please, if possible.
The fact that most of us didn't expect this, so when we say that Obama is an evil, incompetent fucktard we're not only saying it with anger (as it'd be with Bush), but also with a degree of sadness and dissapointment.
But your theory is that Apple's growth is based almost entirely on existing Mac fans? Hmmm...
Where did he say that it was only on *existing* Mac fans? all he said is that the lion's share of those new Mac users know perfectly well who Steve Jobs is. And from my own, entirely anecdotal experience I'd agree with him, the number of Mac fans seems to be rising at a surprising rate these past few years, all thanks to the media frenzy over the iPod and iPhone.
He bought the original iPhone. He began to understand how great a device can be when someone has control over the hardware and the software.
Off-topic comment, I know, but when I read that quote something inside me cried a little. Probably the part that monitors my faith in humanity.
There is a difference between "You guys aren't playing fair..." and "our operating system is your religion, either embrace it or go away".
You mean, like the endless bitching in BSD mailing lists when a company releases a product under the GPL and not BSD? or anything, everything involving the man called Theo de Raadt?
But unlike other, more political organizations, you will never see an Anti-$VENDOR_X clause added to a BSD license. That is the important bit.
Are you talking about the GPL's so-called "TiVo" section? that's just closing a legal loophole, and it is (informally) nicknamed as such because TiVo were the first ones to abuse it not because the FSF's goal was to wreck their entire business or something like that, as you imply.
BTW, one big peeve in BSD land is when the GPL guys will take BSD code like drivers. The GPL license will "infect" any modifications and prevent those changes from being send back to the original BSD code. Kind of a tease, don't you think?
And that *doesn't* happen when Microsoft takes it? or are they just bitching without reason?
Honestly, I love the BSDs, FreeBSD above all. But among the myriads of reasons I'd give for using them, "freedom from open source politics" definitely *isn't* one of them.
If you believe Perl, Python, Ruby, TCL and Vala are all conceptually identical, you obviously know too little about the matter to determine which one should be "THE one", let alone whether there should be one at all.
Re:Free Linux Docs Re:So much for free!
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
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· Score: 2, Interesting
the FREE documentation is going to have to be perhaps a bit more standardized, easier to find, easier to use, etc.
I don't think that would do much good for your alleged goal (getting Linux to be mainstream), but I kinda agree with you there. These days whenever someone asks me for help on learning Linux, I always point them to the FreeBSD Handbook and tell them to ignore anything with the word "ports" in it, however it's clearly aimed more at admins unfamiliar with UNIX-derived OSes than it is to Jane Grandma or Joe Geeky Grandson, so I'd also like to see something else to fill that niche.
Yeah, there's always the Ubuntu forums, but there's a psychological thing about having a book that makes you more confident about the content, and makes you feel all tingly inside. Though even considering the purchase of this book, they'd come out ahead compared to a Windows Vista license *and* they get to keep the book;)
I missed something in your post. The part where you explain *why* users are important for anyone not competing in a popularity contest or is Mother Theresa with a programming fetish.
Idealism is all well and good in the abstract, but when you need a piece of information that's hiding inside a Flash-covered web site, freedom should really be the last thing on your mind;
On the contrary: freedom should be the first thing on your mind in such case, and it will be if you're running anything other than x86.
Ohh, and MP3 decoders are only a bad thing if you live in a patent-encumbered country, which thankfully doesn't apply to all of us;)
If he meant that, he would've written it on the license itself. But to me, the fact that he explicitly allows distribution and use of GPL software alongside closed source software is a clear signal that he respects your right to use it, even if he thinks it's monumentally stupid for you to do so.
On all software projects, specially F/OSS ones, there's always a 'war' against stagnation, and things like Python 3 and Mono 2.0 are such huge advances compared to what came before, that they can easily be considered victories in such a 'war'.
Yes, it may sound a little like the "War on Terror", but at least in this case we all know it's just poetic language;)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Astronomy more about the study of a particular field of Physics rather than looking at stars per se? if so, as long as you get reliable data I don't see why it has to be optically, and as such it could be done using instruments other than telescopes were they to be available.
I would've said that the relationship between computers and CS is more like the one between *stars* and Astronomy, the object of study in itself, not just a tool to observate something else. In fact, they're both on the name of their respective sciences, priviledge that telescopes lack;)
Same reason you run NetBSD on your toaster: because you can. That, and I imagine it'd be more comfortable to test apps on a netbook than on a phone, thanks to the larger screen and real keyboard.
Well, I agree and disagree with you. For me, the more accurate quote would be "CS is no more about programming languages than astronomy is about telescopes", but computers are the reason CS exists in the first place so yes, it is about computers.
I, however, have trouble seeing what part of pure CS (meaning that which is different from a typical Software Engineering degree) isn't just "computer-specific math". In fact, I've always seen CS as the purest form of applied math instead of physics which is the usual contender, but dunno, I'll admit I'm not an expert in the field either, and for full disclosure I should mention I *am* a math student, however, and therefore are prone to see math anywhere and everywhere;)
I'm all for getting games away from Windows, because I remember DOS, I remember games running fine on DOS because the OS wasn't trying to do all kinds of crap under them
Crap like detecting the kind of hardware you owned, you mean? having to input the IRQ and DMA settings of your particular sound card on every app that desired to use sound was a *huge* PITA and one that I was glad was removed with Windows 95.
And really, this is a big reason PC gaming sucks compared to the consoles. Consoles don't have to worry about whether they need to be doing all kinds of other crap at the same time; PC's running Windows do (and this is more true with each version). Same goes for Mac, and frankly, same goes for any mainstream distro of Linux.
No, it's because console hardware has only one possible configuration available, whereas PCs have millions. Have you ever seen the NVidia tech demos? much better looking than *any* game of the same era, just because they can optimize their code for a single videocard instead of three dozens of them. Performance-wise, a good PC kicks the crap out of any console so no, it has nothing to do with that.
Get Linux to the point where things run better on it than on Windows or Mac, on equivalent hardware (since it is equivalent nowadays), and you might attract more game development.
They already do. No one cares. Diversity > performance for most regular users, and userbase > performance for most devs, and in both Windows wins hands down.
Which brings me to my last point: you want games on Linux? get it to have the biggest market-share around, simple as that. Games didn't win the desktop for Windows, business apps did, and games didn't win the desktop for DOS, cheapness did, in both cases the healthy gaming market was just a side-effect of being too freakin' popular, and it'll be the same for Linux.
Besides, games are by far the hardest thing to supply with an OSS philosophy, and "teh hardcorez" despite what they may claim are still a tiny minority of the whole PC Desktop market, so why care about them? let them come when Linux dominates the market and we don't have to do shit to attract gaming companies, no need to do it sooner.
Something must suck with your product, when people would rather pay a lot for the alternative than use yours for free.
Yup, the marketing department. Same thing as with Opera, btw.
I do find it interesting, however, that the "Other" category in OS stats has more than doubled its size during the last year. More people browsing on their non-iPhone cellphones? or are Amigas *really* making a comeback?;)
Usually, on a home PC, deleting the personal files is a lot worse than deleting the system files. The system files can easily be restored from the install media or the software repository. It's a minor inconvenience compared to losing your wedding photos or other important data.
Wrong. That's because in one case the user mistakenly deletes all his personal files, and in the other, he deletes all his personal files *and* renders his system unbootable. And while both are pretty bad for the average user, only in one case he has the chance to rewrite his entire homework between the deadline tomorrow morning, and *that* is the difference between things being bad, and things being hell.
And for the myriad software not in the "standard" repositories? Debian has the biggest software repository around, and I have to install things from source more than I'd like. The usual reasons being that the version in the repository is too old, or the software I'm trying to use is too obscure or too new.
I'd wager the "average user" wants Firefox, not Firefox 3.0.2, or even better, he wants something to write his homework with, not OpenOffice 3.11beta2, so it wouldn't be a problem for them. Power users are kinda fucked, however, but they wouldn't be power users if they weren't capable of following some simple instructions posted on a web forum.
Because "not losing" isn't the same as "winning" and *that* still takes effort.
Just look at Lucasarts' adventure games for example, like Full Throttle or as the sibling post mentioned, Monkey Island. Impossible to lose there, yet they're considered classics today and rightfully so.
It is, if the photo is a self-pic done by a known and identifiable teenager.
So all child abusers have to do is to blur the face of the kid in their videos?
It is far easier and less invasive to check the meta-data on a photo to determine it's date (particularly one from a camera, as it's not easy to modify the meta-data in a camera - camera or camera - email transfer) and compare that date to the registered birth date of the individual concerned.
It's not easy, it's *trivial*. I know, I'm a photographer and trust me, metadata isn't reliable enough for anything other than organizing your own photos (and even then it's not entirely trustworthy).
Age of Consent has already been determined by societies and the courts as the simplest and most accurate method of dealing with the "Puberty" issue. It has worked for hundreds of years and has survived multiple legal challenges.
It's not. There have been many cases where 19-year-old boys get prosecuted, labeled as 'child molesters' simply because they had sex with their 17-years-old girlfriends, and *any* law that allows such ridiculous cases, with innocents being unfairly punished due to a 'technicality' is a bad law and cannot be said to be "working" by anyone with any amount of common sense.
Who is to say a 9 year old is mentally ready for sex but a 16 year old, who had 7 YEARS more to psychologically mature, is not?
Now that's a good point. Easiest way to solve it then: make it a psychological exam instead of seeing whether they're past puberty or not. I mean, that's what they do with people with a mental illness, don't they? see if they were in condition to consent to sex, and if they weren't, regardless of age it's considered rape, isn't it? seems pretty fair to me, and an interview with a psychologist is hardly what you'd call "invasive".
No, but the idea of sex with children turns him on. That makes him a dangerous, very potential child predator and someone I don't want near my kids, or anyone else's kids for that matter.
So, wanna ban BDSM too? I mean, they get turned on by tying people up and hitting them with whips, if *that* isn't scary enough, I don't know what is.
Or, you could understand the difference between "gets turned on by" and "is willing to break both our society's laws and morality to get", and punish the act you fear instead of going in a witch hunt against anything that smells like it.
Arguing that because kids are not directly involved that therefore they are not being harmed is something that needs to be justified.
No. The negative, that even though they aren't involved they're being harmed is what needs to be proven, common sense dictates that if you had nothing to do with something, you shouldn't be affected by it so the burden of proof is on the other side. And so far all I've seen is "OMG ur so st00pid u should die!!!!!11111".
In the case of the criminal in the original article, he had real pictures along side the false one.
I have it from a very reliable source that he was also breathing. Do we ban breathing now, under the pretext of protecting our children?
The reality is that there are pedophiles that wouldn't ever molest a child, people that would molest a child aren't necessarily going to stop just because they can get images that are produced without doing so.
I *think* that the GP is right that there were studies confirming as such, but I'm not entirely sure and without that I'd tend to agree with you, it is what common sense dictates anyways. However, to argue for the ban on fictional images such as the subject of this story, the opposite needs to be proven: that in absence of these images, people that would molest a child *are* going to stop if they can't get these images. Which to my knowledge hasn't been proven (or even postulated as a valid hypothesis) yet by any reputable source.
It's interesting to note, however, that your post only works for praise. Criticism of OSX will usually get you modded down, cricism of Linux will *always* get you modded down unless it's to praise OSX in which case you and any "me too" reply will be modded up, and criticism of Windows will usually get you modded up unless it's a story about Office suites (don't ask me why, that's just what I've seen).
So essentially, the easiest way to gain karma on Slashdot is to praise whatever OS the article is about as long as it's not Vista, and if it's not about OSes praise anything but Windows, the more obscure the better. And never criticise anything, unless you *really* know what you're doing.
The fact that nobody mentions Apple in conjunction with the iPod and iPhone and, as such, means that Apple is stuck using the iThingie naming scheme if they wish to take advantage of their products' brand loyalty, unlike Samsung or Motorola?
Or the fact that Apple's marketing department seems to despise version numbers and are happy with people reffering to an ancient music player and a modern video player with the same name?
You are telling me that there is no performance improvement in having a *graphics card* handle *graphics* instead of a CPU?
When the CPU runs at 3+ Ghz and the graphic in question is a 2 Mpx, simple 2D image? fuck no, there isn't. The difference in performance only starts when you add the idiotic extra 'flash', but no modern (or even not-so-modern) computer should have any trouble displaying a Win2K-like interface regardless of the GPU.
We have powerful video cards these days and only a fool wouldn't exploit them to speed up the windowing system. Me thinks some are too blinded by hate and narrow imagination to appreciate cool things.
Not all of us *have* powerful video cards, and despite your own blind hate and narrow imagination, plenty of us prefer simpler interfaces rather than the garish piece of shit that's Vista's default theme.
Show me one pro-any OS post by a female. Female slashdotters, as rare as they are, seem to relegate themselves mostly to RIAA-related posts and the odd programming language flamewar from what I've seen, but they (wisely) tend to stay away from OS-related ones.
But for what its worth, my ex-gf, a violinist, was a very happy Linux user after being introduced to it by her brothers, and was even happier after I helped her set up Rosegarden and related apps (which, at the time, wasn't very "point and click"). She, however, would never read a website like Slashdot, let alone join only to declare her love for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
the irrefutable fact that "regular" (as in, typical, normal, or average) people most certainly do not donate more than $200 to any political candidate, much less to Obama.
*How* much do regular people donate to any political candidate, then? with proper data please, if possible.
The fact that most of us didn't expect this, so when we say that Obama is an evil, incompetent fucktard we're not only saying it with anger (as it'd be with Bush), but also with a degree of sadness and dissapointment.
But your theory is that Apple's growth is based almost entirely on existing Mac fans? Hmmm...
Where did he say that it was only on *existing* Mac fans? all he said is that the lion's share of those new Mac users know perfectly well who Steve Jobs is. And from my own, entirely anecdotal experience I'd agree with him, the number of Mac fans seems to be rising at a surprising rate these past few years, all thanks to the media frenzy over the iPod and iPhone.
He bought the original iPhone. He began to understand how great a device can be when someone has control over the hardware and the software.
Off-topic comment, I know, but when I read that quote something inside me cried a little. Probably the part that monitors my faith in humanity.
There is a difference between "You guys aren't playing fair..." and "our operating system is your religion, either embrace it or go away".
You mean, like the endless bitching in BSD mailing lists when a company releases a product under the GPL and not BSD? or anything, everything involving the man called Theo de Raadt?
But unlike other, more political organizations, you will never see an Anti-$VENDOR_X clause added to a BSD license. That is the important bit.
Are you talking about the GPL's so-called "TiVo" section? that's just closing a legal loophole, and it is (informally) nicknamed as such because TiVo were the first ones to abuse it not because the FSF's goal was to wreck their entire business or something like that, as you imply.
BTW, one big peeve in BSD land is when the GPL guys will take BSD code like drivers. The GPL license will "infect" any modifications and prevent those changes from being send back to the original BSD code. Kind of a tease, don't you think?
And that *doesn't* happen when Microsoft takes it? or are they just bitching without reason?
Honestly, I love the BSDs, FreeBSD above all. But among the myriads of reasons I'd give for using them, "freedom from open source politics" definitely *isn't* one of them.
If you believe Perl, Python, Ruby, TCL and Vala are all conceptually identical, you obviously know too little about the matter to determine which one should be "THE one", let alone whether there should be one at all.
the FREE documentation is going to have to be perhaps a bit more standardized, easier to find, easier to use, etc.
I don't think that would do much good for your alleged goal (getting Linux to be mainstream), but I kinda agree with you there. These days whenever someone asks me for help on learning Linux, I always point them to the FreeBSD Handbook and tell them to ignore anything with the word "ports" in it, however it's clearly aimed more at admins unfamiliar with UNIX-derived OSes than it is to Jane Grandma or Joe Geeky Grandson, so I'd also like to see something else to fill that niche.
Yeah, there's always the Ubuntu forums, but there's a psychological thing about having a book that makes you more confident about the content, and makes you feel all tingly inside. Though even considering the purchase of this book, they'd come out ahead compared to a Windows Vista license *and* they get to keep the book ;)
I missed something in your post. The part where you explain *why* users are important for anyone not competing in a popularity contest or is Mother Theresa with a programming fetish.
Idealism is all well and good in the abstract, but when you need a piece of information that's hiding inside a Flash-covered web site, freedom should really be the last thing on your mind;
On the contrary: freedom should be the first thing on your mind in such case, and it will be if you're running anything other than x86.
Ohh, and MP3 decoders are only a bad thing if you live in a patent-encumbered country, which thankfully doesn't apply to all of us ;)
If he meant that, he would've written it on the license itself. But to me, the fact that he explicitly allows distribution and use of GPL software alongside closed source software is a clear signal that he respects your right to use it, even if he thinks it's monumentally stupid for you to do so.
On all software projects, specially F/OSS ones, there's always a 'war' against stagnation, and things like Python 3 and Mono 2.0 are such huge advances compared to what came before, that they can easily be considered victories in such a 'war'.
Yes, it may sound a little like the "War on Terror", but at least in this case we all know it's just poetic language ;)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Astronomy more about the study of a particular field of Physics rather than looking at stars per se? if so, as long as you get reliable data I don't see why it has to be optically, and as such it could be done using instruments other than telescopes were they to be available.
I would've said that the relationship between computers and CS is more like the one between *stars* and Astronomy, the object of study in itself, not just a tool to observate something else. In fact, they're both on the name of their respective sciences, priviledge that telescopes lack ;)
Same reason you run NetBSD on your toaster: because you can. That, and I imagine it'd be more comfortable to test apps on a netbook than on a phone, thanks to the larger screen and real keyboard.
Well, I agree and disagree with you. For me, the more accurate quote would be "CS is no more about programming languages than astronomy is about telescopes", but computers are the reason CS exists in the first place so yes, it is about computers.
I, however, have trouble seeing what part of pure CS (meaning that which is different from a typical Software Engineering degree) isn't just "computer-specific math". In fact, I've always seen CS as the purest form of applied math instead of physics which is the usual contender, but dunno, I'll admit I'm not an expert in the field either, and for full disclosure I should mention I *am* a math student, however, and therefore are prone to see math anywhere and everywhere ;)
I'm all for getting games away from Windows, because I remember DOS, I remember games running fine on DOS because the OS wasn't trying to do all kinds of crap under them
Crap like detecting the kind of hardware you owned, you mean? having to input the IRQ and DMA settings of your particular sound card on every app that desired to use sound was a *huge* PITA and one that I was glad was removed with Windows 95.
And really, this is a big reason PC gaming sucks compared to the consoles. Consoles don't have to worry about whether they need to be doing all kinds of other crap at the same time; PC's running Windows do (and this is more true with each version). Same goes for Mac, and frankly, same goes for any mainstream distro of Linux.
No, it's because console hardware has only one possible configuration available, whereas PCs have millions. Have you ever seen the NVidia tech demos? much better looking than *any* game of the same era, just because they can optimize their code for a single videocard instead of three dozens of them. Performance-wise, a good PC kicks the crap out of any console so no, it has nothing to do with that.
Get Linux to the point where things run better on it than on Windows or Mac, on equivalent hardware (since it is equivalent nowadays), and you might attract more game development.
They already do. No one cares. Diversity > performance for most regular users, and userbase > performance for most devs, and in both Windows wins hands down.
Which brings me to my last point: you want games on Linux? get it to have the biggest market-share around, simple as that. Games didn't win the desktop for Windows, business apps did, and games didn't win the desktop for DOS, cheapness did, in both cases the healthy gaming market was just a side-effect of being too freakin' popular, and it'll be the same for Linux.
Besides, games are by far the hardest thing to supply with an OSS philosophy, and "teh hardcorez" despite what they may claim are still a tiny minority of the whole PC Desktop market, so why care about them? let them come when Linux dominates the market and we don't have to do shit to attract gaming companies, no need to do it sooner.
Something must suck with your product, when people would rather pay a lot for the alternative than use yours for free.
Yup, the marketing department. Same thing as with Opera, btw.
I do find it interesting, however, that the "Other" category in OS stats has more than doubled its size during the last year. More people browsing on their non-iPhone cellphones? or are Amigas *really* making a comeback? ;)
Usually, on a home PC, deleting the personal files is a lot worse than deleting the system files. The system files can easily be restored from the install media or the software repository. It's a minor inconvenience compared to losing your wedding photos or other important data.
Wrong. That's because in one case the user mistakenly deletes all his personal files, and in the other, he deletes all his personal files *and* renders his system unbootable. And while both are pretty bad for the average user, only in one case he has the chance to rewrite his entire homework between the deadline tomorrow morning, and *that* is the difference between things being bad, and things being hell.
And for the myriad software not in the "standard" repositories? Debian has the biggest software repository around, and I have to install things from source more than I'd like. The usual reasons being that the version in the repository is too old, or the software I'm trying to use is too obscure or too new.
I'd wager the "average user" wants Firefox, not Firefox 3.0.2, or even better, he wants something to write his homework with, not OpenOffice 3.11beta2, so it wouldn't be a problem for them. Power users are kinda fucked, however, but they wouldn't be power users if they weren't capable of following some simple instructions posted on a web forum.
Because "not losing" isn't the same as "winning" and *that* still takes effort.
Just look at Lucasarts' adventure games for example, like Full Throttle or as the sibling post mentioned, Monkey Island. Impossible to lose there, yet they're considered classics today and rightfully so.
It is, if the photo is a self-pic done by a known and identifiable teenager.
So all child abusers have to do is to blur the face of the kid in their videos?
It is far easier and less invasive to check the meta-data on a photo to determine it's date (particularly one from a camera, as it's not easy to modify the meta-data in a camera - camera or camera - email transfer) and compare that date to the registered birth date of the individual concerned.
It's not easy, it's *trivial*. I know, I'm a photographer and trust me, metadata isn't reliable enough for anything other than organizing your own photos (and even then it's not entirely trustworthy).
Age of Consent has already been determined by societies and the courts as the simplest and most accurate method of dealing with the "Puberty" issue. It has worked for hundreds of years and has survived multiple legal challenges.
It's not. There have been many cases where 19-year-old boys get prosecuted, labeled as 'child molesters' simply because they had sex with their 17-years-old girlfriends, and *any* law that allows such ridiculous cases, with innocents being unfairly punished due to a 'technicality' is a bad law and cannot be said to be "working" by anyone with any amount of common sense.
Who is to say a 9 year old is mentally ready for sex but a 16 year old, who had 7 YEARS more to psychologically mature, is not?
Now that's a good point. Easiest way to solve it then: make it a psychological exam instead of seeing whether they're past puberty or not. I mean, that's what they do with people with a mental illness, don't they? see if they were in condition to consent to sex, and if they weren't, regardless of age it's considered rape, isn't it? seems pretty fair to me, and an interview with a psychologist is hardly what you'd call "invasive".
No, but the idea of sex with children turns him on. That makes him a dangerous, very potential child predator and someone I don't want near my kids, or anyone else's kids for that matter.
So, wanna ban BDSM too? I mean, they get turned on by tying people up and hitting them with whips, if *that* isn't scary enough, I don't know what is.
Or, you could understand the difference between "gets turned on by" and "is willing to break both our society's laws and morality to get", and punish the act you fear instead of going in a witch hunt against anything that smells like it.
Arguing that because kids are not directly involved that therefore they are not being harmed is something that needs to be justified.
No. The negative, that even though they aren't involved they're being harmed is what needs to be proven, common sense dictates that if you had nothing to do with something, you shouldn't be affected by it so the burden of proof is on the other side. And so far all I've seen is "OMG ur so st00pid u should die!!!!!11111".
In the case of the criminal in the original article, he had real pictures along side the false one.
I have it from a very reliable source that he was also breathing. Do we ban breathing now, under the pretext of protecting our children?
The reality is that there are pedophiles that wouldn't ever molest a child, people that would molest a child aren't necessarily going to stop just because they can get images that are produced without doing so.
I *think* that the GP is right that there were studies confirming as such, but I'm not entirely sure and without that I'd tend to agree with you, it is what common sense dictates anyways. However, to argue for the ban on fictional images such as the subject of this story, the opposite needs to be proven: that in absence of these images, people that would molest a child *are* going to stop if they can't get these images. Which to my knowledge hasn't been proven (or even postulated as a valid hypothesis) yet by any reputable source.
It's interesting to note, however, that your post only works for praise. Criticism of OSX will usually get you modded down, cricism of Linux will *always* get you modded down unless it's to praise OSX in which case you and any "me too" reply will be modded up, and criticism of Windows will usually get you modded up unless it's a story about Office suites (don't ask me why, that's just what I've seen).
So essentially, the easiest way to gain karma on Slashdot is to praise whatever OS the article is about as long as it's not Vista, and if it's not about OSes praise anything but Windows, the more obscure the better. And never criticise anything, unless you *really* know what you're doing.
The fact that nobody mentions Apple in conjunction with the iPod and iPhone and, as such, means that Apple is stuck using the iThingie naming scheme if they wish to take advantage of their products' brand loyalty, unlike Samsung or Motorola?
Or the fact that Apple's marketing department seems to despise version numbers and are happy with people reffering to an ancient music player and a modern video player with the same name?
You are telling me that there is no performance improvement in having a *graphics card* handle *graphics* instead of a CPU?
When the CPU runs at 3+ Ghz and the graphic in question is a 2 Mpx, simple 2D image? fuck no, there isn't. The difference in performance only starts when you add the idiotic extra 'flash', but no modern (or even not-so-modern) computer should have any trouble displaying a Win2K-like interface regardless of the GPU.
We have powerful video cards these days and only a fool wouldn't exploit them to speed up the windowing system. Me thinks some are too blinded by hate and narrow imagination to appreciate cool things.
Not all of us *have* powerful video cards, and despite your own blind hate and narrow imagination, plenty of us prefer simpler interfaces rather than the garish piece of shit that's Vista's default theme.
a bathing suit
And a computer is just 'another calculator', right? don't oversimplify.
A slightly better consumer digital video camera
If you knew anything about how digital cameras are made, specially large-sensor SLRs, you'd know how significant it is.
Flexible displays that barely work!
Gee, I wonder, how good was GPS on 1978?
so glad I live in the age of technological miracles
The fact that we can create such a list out of a *single* year of our lifetimes proves this is the age of technological miracles.
show me one pro-linux post by a female.
Show me one pro-any OS post by a female. Female slashdotters, as rare as they are, seem to relegate themselves mostly to RIAA-related posts and the odd programming language flamewar from what I've seen, but they (wisely) tend to stay away from OS-related ones.
But for what its worth, my ex-gf, a violinist, was a very happy Linux user after being introduced to it by her brothers, and was even happier after I helped her set up Rosegarden and related apps (which, at the time, wasn't very "point and click"). She, however, would never read a website like Slashdot, let alone join only to declare her love for Linux.