Anyone care to point out to me the difference between FIT and Intensive Conventional Therapy (ICT)? I'm on the latter. It also uses basis and bolus doses, usually scheduled four times a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a basis shot for the night). I have a rather irregular lifestyle myself, so ICT is flexible enough. The problem, rather, is that the body's insulin requirements change throughout the day, and more so when you don't have a very regular daily rhythm of getting up, going to bed and eating at roughly the same time every day. For me, the biggest problem is the "latency" between injecting insulin and seeing the effect, and the complication of doing repeated BG measurements. At times I end up being a bit high, only to discover that later my counteracting shot has taken me far too low despite being the correct dose. In a way it's always somewhat of a guessing game (although over all, I'm faring decently). Is FIT the same, or is there a significant distinction between the two? E.g., are there modifications that make FIT deal better with irregular lifestyles?
A great improvement for me would be a wristwatch-like continuous measuring device. In any case, I concur with most other posters that substituting insulin shots with immune suppressants does not pose a viable alternative for me.
Not only the company's, but also the submitter's claim seems to be bogus. Neither the Inquirer article nor the viralg.com website anywhere seem to be talking about hashes. Moreover, I'm kind of wondering where the Inqurer got their stuff from, since the viralg website contains... nothing. Nothing but blaah. No word at all on how they protect anything from anyone. A random link to the Finnish Top 40 allegedly showing how BMG became the market leader for domestic music. Umm, except that nothing whatsoever proves that Viralg had anything to do with it. (If you have evidence to the contrary, please post it!) Then there's some blurb about being insiders with mathematical knowledge up in the lonely north where there's nothing else to do is what got them where they are. So, where are they? Not like they actually tell us. No contact information besides the email address either (and nothing in the whois info). Apparently, being up in the lonely north with nothing else to do doesn't get you much further than producing a nonsensical website claiming you know how to save the world, find the question to the answer to life, the Universe and everything, with "stunning results."
And, breaking hashes, nonsense. If anything, maybe they are managing to manipulate P2P protocols to send you data you weren't supposed to be getting, but which is not actually going into the checksum?
Nothing for you to see here, methinks... and here I am wasting my time actually writing a reply to a trollish article.:)
On another random note, I kind of liked how their website looked in links.
Imagine (going off on a paranoid conspiracy-theory tangent here) that the FSF is, e.g., bought out by some company or so, which releases v4 stating that the program essentially becomes Public Domain.
It's not about what the user can choose, it's that this possibility of choice may in the worst case defeat the original purpose of requiring the software to remain Free. As a developer I wouldn't be happy about that. Imagine, then, that some company takes your nice Free software, applies the 0wn3d GPLv4 to it, and puts it in their proprietary product, never under any obligation to release the source code and give back to the community.
Are people going to choose this license, voluntarily, in droves? Yes! (At least those that don't know how to spell "ethics".) At that point all Free software would be 0wn3d... new projects could go under new licenses (e.g. a GPLv2 variant without the "at your option" statement), but projects that were at some point licensed under the real GPLv2 would effectively be lost.
I might be missing something, but I don't see why that's not possible (correct me please if I am wrong)... I mean, right now the FSF is Stallman's organization, but who knows what will happen to it in the future. And I think, this "any later version" statement is a truly dangerous statement that should be done away with for v3.
SCNR... sometimes I'm amazed at what kinds of typos make it through to the frontpage.
But besides that, very nice article. I personally found IR very useful for some surveillance-type situations. A few years ago, my father set up an IR-sensitive camera and an IR diode in a birdhouse in our garden, which allowed us to watch the new-born ones without creating any disturbance.
I agree on both Settlers and Puerto Rico being great games. The minor beef I have with Settlers is that the game, at least in the standard version, too strongly depends on the initial choice of settlements (which in turn depends on the tile distribution and numbering, and the order in which players get to place their settlements). But it's only a minor problem, the game is still excellent.
I can also recommend Tikal, which also uses hexagonal tiles and is turn-based, but has practically no random elements apart from the random distribution of tiles. Strategy and tactics play a more important role here, IMO. Great fun.
Map24 has only added North America rather recently. As far as I remember, they're actually a German company -- at least that's what I used them for quite some time ago; they also used to be just map24.de. So yes, the US maps are still inaccurate in quite a few places (last time I checked they didn't have PHL on them!). But their general applet is very neat, and in Germany I used it exclusively, with very good results. The cool thing about the Google interface is that they've managed to put similar interactive features into a JavaScripted HTML page -- no Java applet --, which is one of the areas where Google is a strong pioneer I think (think Google Suggest, or keyboard shortcuts in Gmail).
Yeah, it is a very cool interface. Also, it loads incredibly fast, and I think it's probably by far the clearest map rendering I've seen anywhere. Extremely good visual quality.
For other choices, I still love Map24. They've got Europe and North America, and the whole thing in a neat Java applet that is also very usable. But Google's map is gonna be tough competition for them...
Also, you gotta love the typically Google way of doing your address or directions queries... just say "Kansas City to Los Angeles" etc. and it works.
But of course it's still Beta. A simple test for "Wilmington, DE to Jersey City, NJ" in my case renders a misplaced blue line that I can't quite make sense of. But if that's the only problem...
Even better, for those with a landline or VoIP phone, would be a system that automatically picks the cheapest route out for any given call.
Basically, you're looking for something like Least Cost Routers (anybody wanna translate this?). These things have been very popular in Germany ever since the telecom market was deregulated. In Germany you can use other (landline) telecom providers through a Call-By-Call system, dialing the provider's prefix before your actual phone number if you want to use a provider other than your default one (e.g., 01033 for German Telekom, 01013 for Tele2). There's whole websites dedicated to providing lists of the cheapest call-by-call providers. These LCRs can store such lists of providers and their rates for different types of calls (i.e., local, long-distance, other countries, cell phone networks, etc.) at different times of the day/week, and the automatically prefix the number you dial with the cheapest provider's. Of course, lists can be updated manually or automatically. Now, I'm not sure if anybody has built such a device with cell vs. landline vs. VoIP in mind, but if that exists, other Slashdotters who can be bothered to look it up instead of working;-) will surely post links...
FWIW, there's also an isdn4linux-based LCR tool and corresponding phone rate databases (see English summary at bottom) available. For cell/landline/VoIP solutions, if there's nothing else available, there is probably a good starting point.
Yes, MacOS X is Mach-based. Mach, however, is not really a microkernel in the true sense of the word. Compared to L4's size, Mach is a huge monster. Somebody else already provided a link to an introductory (if old, from 1996) article by the L4 creator Jochen Liedtke.
would it make any sense for Apple to look at L4?
As a matter of fact, the L4KA group is looking into this. See, for example, this thesis currently in progress.
The main benefit is that L4 is actually a true microkernel. It has something like seven system calls that basically handle interprocess communication and address spaces. Everything else needs to be done by user-level processes. L4 separates policy from mechanism, that is, it provides the basic mechanisms and leaves it to the actual OS implementation what policies to implement. It has a very tiny memory footprint and about every optimization possible to operate extremely fast. This is important as in a microkernel environment, much more IPC takes place. Mach sucks here as their IPC operations are terribly slow. L4's IPC speed and its general size show that it's actually feasible to write a real microkernel without taking a non-negligible performance hit. L4Ka::Pistachio is an L4 implementation done completely in C++, which makes code maintenance much nicer, and goes to prove that it is in fact possible to create an efficient microkernel implementation in C++.
It would probably make sense for Apple to look at L4 (as it does for the Hurd), but of course L4 provides much, much less than Mach does (which is good! It's a microkernel after all) and therefore Apple (or, maybe, my friend working on that thesis I mentioned above) would have to reimplement all low-level system services besides address space handling and IPC around L4, in user-level processes. It is probably feasible, but still a long way away.
Yeah... and in the same vein (and maybe a bit more seriously), how can you mention BASIC, MS Basic, and Visual Basic, but none of the Commodore Basics (2.0, 3.5, 7.0, etc), GWBasic, and QBasic/QuickBasic? Hey, I want my early programming years represented!:-)
I was wondering, if these guys are so behind making it all Open Source, why didn't they just help writing proper Windows versions of GnuPG tools, including the necessary plugins for popular Windows mail clients where they don't exist yet, etc.? Why invent their complete own protocol and thereby forget about increasing availability of existing standards and improving interoperability?
Hopefully I'm wrong, but I have serious doubts about this thing. GPG, OpenPGP etc. are good things already -- in a true open source spirit you'd improve their availability, usability, etc., not come up with your own system...
Also, maybe if you locate all the APs and have a rough plan of your building, maybe it's possible to find a channel assignment for all APs to minimize the interference. Talk to your neighbors and see if you can work something out... in case your neighbors don't want to join in for a single connection, maybe some better thought-out channel allocation might also solve the problem.
Right. But if the DRM license needed is in a standardized format (no executable business... devise a proper crypto protocol) nobody would have to be redirected to a webpage and interact and be tempted to download any nonsense provided.
Of course, the only thing is that for some DRM content you may be required to go to some website so you can purchase the license. That of course can't be avoided... distinguishing legitimate sites from malicious ones here is a hard task, admittedly...
No no no. A day is the earth's rotational period, and always will be unless you want to change the meaning of the term 'daytime' to 'when it's dark outside' in a few million years...
The problem is, the earth's orbital period (a Year) just happens to contain about 365.25 rotations (see here). So if you want to keep the definition of day what it is now and you also want winter to still happen in winter (and not in summer), you need leap days to make up for it.
Now, leap seconds are needed because in deed the earth's rotational period is not exactly 86,400 seconds long. Now, the day is still defined astronomically. But the second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom (see here). That's close enough to make the rotational period almost exactly 86,400 seconds. It just does not fit perfectly. And since, as we see because of the quake, the rotational period can change easily enough, it's simpler to add leap seconds than to constantly redefine the second and to figure out how to update the clocks. You could also define the day to be, say, 86,400.00017422 SI seconds. No problem. Just remember to change it after the next quake. You go and start a business producing clocks for it...
(Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist or an astronomer, just a guy with some basic knowledge and, hopefully, some common sense. Correct me if I got anything wrong.)
I guess the question is, why is it even possible that downloading a _DRM license_ (which to me is just a piece of data in a certain format) allows downloading and installing of malicious _executables_ at all?!?
The only thing downloadable should be a valid DRM license. A simple data file basically. Why is it even possible to let it download executables?
It also seems that, since the vulnerability is still there after defacement and the google index of course isn't yet updated, an already defaced site can be hit again. Searching on MSN for Generation 24 defacements brings up a site which, at the time of this writing, reads "Generation 14".
Thus, the generation distribution does not allow too much interpretation -- there might have been generation-28 sites, but if the list of vulnerable web sites is coming close enough to being saturated with exploits, the generation distribution should somewhat stabilize. Maybe that's something interesting to study in terms of distributed systems behavior, actually...
It's an interesting video. Gotta love the 1984 reference in it*... while the video mostly talks about the media landscape, it's good to see them at least touching on the topic of privacy which would obviously be just as much an issue in the world that is painted in the video.
(*clue bat: the "ID card" mockup shown upon the Google/Amazon merger)
"Umm, except you shouldn't use IE. And if you use OE, please remember all these workarounds. And, remember to take care of the firewall. And, install all those updates! But don't use IE for that; rather, do it by hand by following these instructions here......."
There's a difficult concept to grasp here. You actually have to wait until the OS is booted and the firewall is enabled and _then_ plug the cable in.
Hmm. Seems that my DHCP request has to be sent using IP-over-Magic then...
If your interface is DHCP'd and you don't have the cable in, does the firewall still come up if the initial DHCP fails??
And, in any case, that's another workaround people get used to and learn to live with... it should not be like that. Microsoft claims that their operating system's usability is so good that you don't need much experience in using Windows. But the usability approaches zero with all these workarounds you have to know about just to get the system to a state where you can actually concentrate on what you really wanted to work on.
That adds a whole new perspective to the Linux-on-the-desktop discussion. Maybe Linux isn't as straightforward. Windows might be. But with all the crap you have to deal with in Windows (and it seems to just get more and more), it seems that in the end, Linux ends up being a MUCH better Desktop OS, even in its current state of relatively worse usability.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone care to point out to me the difference between FIT and Intensive Conventional Therapy (ICT)? I'm on the latter. It also uses basis and bolus doses, usually scheduled four times a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a basis shot for the night). I have a rather irregular lifestyle myself, so ICT is flexible enough. The problem, rather, is that the body's insulin requirements change throughout the day, and more so when you don't have a very regular daily rhythm of getting up, going to bed and eating at roughly the same time every day. For me, the biggest problem is the "latency" between injecting insulin and seeing the effect, and the complication of doing repeated BG measurements. At times I end up being a bit high, only to discover that later my counteracting shot has taken me far too low despite being the correct dose. In a way it's always somewhat of a guessing game (although over all, I'm faring decently). Is FIT the same, or is there a significant distinction between the two? E.g., are there modifications that make FIT deal better with irregular lifestyles?
A great improvement for me would be a wristwatch-like continuous measuring device. In any case, I concur with most other posters that substituting insulin shots with immune suppressants does not pose a viable alternative for me.
Not only the company's, but also the submitter's claim seems to be bogus. Neither the Inquirer article nor the viralg.com website anywhere seem to be talking about hashes. Moreover, I'm kind of wondering where the Inqurer got their stuff from, since the viralg website contains... nothing. Nothing but blaah. No word at all on how they protect anything from anyone. A random link to the Finnish Top 40 allegedly showing how BMG became the market leader for domestic music. Umm, except that nothing whatsoever proves that Viralg had anything to do with it. (If you have evidence to the contrary, please post it!) Then there's some blurb about being insiders with mathematical knowledge up in the lonely north where there's nothing else to do is what got them where they are. So, where are they? Not like they actually tell us. No contact information besides the email address either (and nothing in the whois info). Apparently, being up in the lonely north with nothing else to do doesn't get you much further than producing a nonsensical website claiming you know how to save the world, find the question to the answer to life, the Universe and everything, with "stunning results."
:)
:)
And, breaking hashes, nonsense. If anything, maybe they are managing to manipulate P2P protocols to send you data you weren't supposed to be getting, but which is not actually going into the checksum?
Nothing for you to see here, methinks... and here I am wasting my time actually writing a reply to a trollish article.
On another random note, I kind of liked how their website looked in links.
Empty.
But that's not the problem.
Imagine (going off on a paranoid conspiracy-theory tangent here) that the FSF is, e.g., bought out by some company or so, which releases v4 stating that the program essentially becomes Public Domain.
It's not about what the user can choose, it's that this possibility of choice may in the worst case defeat the original purpose of requiring the software to remain Free. As a developer I wouldn't be happy about that. Imagine, then, that some company takes your nice Free software, applies the 0wn3d GPLv4 to it, and puts it in their proprietary product, never under any obligation to release the source code and give back to the community.
Are people going to choose this license, voluntarily, in droves? Yes! (At least those that don't know how to spell "ethics".) At that point all Free software would be 0wn3d... new projects could go under new licenses (e.g. a GPLv2 variant without the "at your option" statement), but projects that were at some point licensed under the real GPLv2 would effectively be lost.
I might be missing something, but I don't see why that's not possible (correct me please if I am wrong)... I mean, right now the FSF is Stallman's organization, but who knows what will happen to it in the future. And I think, this "any later version" statement is a truly dangerous statement that should be done away with for v3.
Heh... I'm just waiting for all the LAST POST trolls now...
...and, soon to come, the THEMcam!
SCNR... sometimes I'm amazed at what kinds of typos make it through to the frontpage.
But besides that, very nice article. I personally found IR very useful for some surveillance-type situations. A few years ago, my father set up an IR-sensitive camera and an IR diode in a birdhouse in our garden, which allowed us to watch the new-born ones without creating any disturbance.
I agree on both Settlers and Puerto Rico being great games. The minor beef I have with Settlers is that the game, at least in the standard version, too strongly depends on the initial choice of settlements (which in turn depends on the tile distribution and numbering, and the order in which players get to place their settlements). But it's only a minor problem, the game is still excellent.
I can also recommend Tikal, which also uses hexagonal tiles and is turn-based, but has practically no random elements apart from the random distribution of tiles. Strategy and tactics play a more important role here, IMO. Great fun.
Map24 has only added North America rather recently. As far as I remember, they're actually a German company -- at least that's what I used them for quite some time ago; they also used to be just map24.de. So yes, the US maps are still inaccurate in quite a few places (last time I checked they didn't have PHL on them!). But their general applet is very neat, and in Germany I used it exclusively, with very good results. The cool thing about the Google interface is that they've managed to put similar interactive features into a JavaScripted HTML page -- no Java applet --, which is one of the areas where Google is a strong pioneer I think (think Google Suggest, or keyboard shortcuts in Gmail).
Yeah, it is a very cool interface. Also, it loads incredibly fast, and I think it's probably by far the clearest map rendering I've seen anywhere. Extremely good visual quality.
For other choices, I still love Map24. They've got Europe and North America, and the whole thing in a neat Java applet that is also very usable. But Google's map is gonna be tough competition for them...
Also, you gotta love the typically Google way of doing your address or directions queries... just say "Kansas City to Los Angeles" etc. and it works.
But of course it's still Beta. A simple test for "Wilmington, DE to Jersey City, NJ" in my case renders a misplaced blue line that I can't quite make sense of. But if that's the only problem...
Basically, you're looking for something like Least Cost Routers (anybody wanna translate this?). These things have been very popular in Germany ever since the telecom market was deregulated. In Germany you can use other (landline) telecom providers through a Call-By-Call system, dialing the provider's prefix before your actual phone number if you want to use a provider other than your default one (e.g., 01033 for German Telekom, 01013 for Tele2). There's whole websites dedicated to providing lists of the cheapest call-by-call providers. These LCRs can store such lists of providers and their rates for different types of calls (i.e., local, long-distance, other countries, cell phone networks, etc.) at different times of the day/week, and the automatically prefix the number you dial with the cheapest provider's. Of course, lists can be updated manually or automatically. Now, I'm not sure if anybody has built such a device with cell vs. landline vs. VoIP in mind, but if that exists, other Slashdotters who can be bothered to look it up instead of working ;-) will surely post links...
FWIW, there's also an isdn4linux-based LCR tool and corresponding phone rate databases (see English summary at bottom) available. For cell/landline/VoIP solutions, if there's nothing else available, there is probably a good starting point.
Yes, MacOS X is Mach-based. Mach, however, is not really a microkernel in the true sense of the word. Compared to L4's size, Mach is a huge monster. Somebody else already provided a link to an introductory (if old, from 1996) article by the L4 creator Jochen Liedtke.
As a matter of fact, the L4KA group is looking into this. See, for example, this thesis currently in progress.
The main benefit is that L4 is actually a true microkernel. It has something like seven system calls that basically handle interprocess communication and address spaces. Everything else needs to be done by user-level processes. L4 separates policy from mechanism, that is, it provides the basic mechanisms and leaves it to the actual OS implementation what policies to implement. It has a very tiny memory footprint and about every optimization possible to operate extremely fast. This is important as in a microkernel environment, much more IPC takes place. Mach sucks here as their IPC operations are terribly slow. L4's IPC speed and its general size show that it's actually feasible to write a real microkernel without taking a non-negligible performance hit. L4Ka::Pistachio is an L4 implementation done completely in C++, which makes code maintenance much nicer, and goes to prove that it is in fact possible to create an efficient microkernel implementation in C++.
It would probably make sense for Apple to look at L4 (as it does for the Hurd), but of course L4 provides much, much less than Mach does (which is good! It's a microkernel after all) and therefore Apple (or, maybe, my friend working on that thesis I mentioned above) would have to reimplement all low-level system services besides address space handling and IPC around L4, in user-level processes. It is probably feasible, but still a long way away.
Yeah... and in the same vein (and maybe a bit more seriously), how can you mention BASIC, MS Basic, and Visual Basic, but none of the Commodore Basics (2.0, 3.5, 7.0, etc), GWBasic, and QBasic/QuickBasic? Hey, I want my early programming years represented! :-)
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
No, but seriously... this MS statement is nothing more than a troll and/or flamebait. Should we even react to this?
I guess this was meant to be a press release candidate.
I was wondering, if these guys are so behind making it all Open Source, why didn't they just help writing proper Windows versions of GnuPG tools, including the necessary plugins for popular Windows mail clients where they don't exist yet, etc.? Why invent their complete own protocol and thereby forget about increasing availability of existing standards and improving interoperability?
Hopefully I'm wrong, but I have serious doubts about this thing. GPG, OpenPGP etc. are good things already -- in a true open source spirit you'd improve their availability, usability, etc., not come up with your own system...
Hmm. I'm a computer geek _and_ I play the guitar. Either I'm gonna be perfectly fine or one day my hands will just fall off. :)
;)
Hmm, you got me thinking now... does watching porn induce or relieve RSI?
Depending on where you look, a Windows/Linux MUD server, or a Mozilla project building a mail/news reader entirely in Java.
Who'd have thought they'd make a movie of that? ;)
True. But how is that an excuse for security flaws in Gmail's interface?
I'd love to hear you make the same statement when the next Outlook attack comes up...
Also, maybe if you locate all the APs and have a rough plan of your building, maybe it's possible to find a channel assignment for all APs to minimize the interference. Talk to your neighbors and see if you can work something out... in case your neighbors don't want to join in for a single connection, maybe some better thought-out channel allocation might also solve the problem.
Right. But if the DRM license needed is in a standardized format (no executable business... devise a proper crypto protocol) nobody would have to be redirected to a webpage and interact and be tempted to download any nonsense provided.
Of course, the only thing is that for some DRM content you may be required to go to some website so you can purchase the license. That of course can't be avoided... distinguishing legitimate sites from malicious ones here is a hard task, admittedly...
No no no. A day is the earth's rotational period, and always will be unless you want to change the meaning of the term 'daytime' to 'when it's dark outside' in a few million years...
The problem is, the earth's orbital period (a Year) just happens to contain about 365.25 rotations (see here). So if you want to keep the definition of day what it is now and you also want winter to still happen in winter (and not in summer), you need leap days to make up for it.
Now, leap seconds are needed because in deed the earth's rotational period is not exactly 86,400 seconds long. Now, the day is still defined astronomically. But the second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom (see here). That's close enough to make the rotational period almost exactly 86,400 seconds. It just does not fit perfectly. And since, as we see because of the quake, the rotational period can change easily enough, it's simpler to add leap seconds than to constantly redefine the second and to figure out how to update the clocks. You could also define the day to be, say, 86,400.00017422 SI seconds. No problem. Just remember to change it after the next quake. You go and start a business producing clocks for it...
(Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist or an astronomer, just a guy with some basic knowledge and, hopefully, some common sense. Correct me if I got anything wrong.)
I guess the question is, why is it even possible that downloading a _DRM license_ (which to me is just a piece of data in a certain format) allows downloading and installing of malicious _executables_ at all?!?
The only thing downloadable should be a valid DRM license. A simple data file basically. Why is it even possible to let it download executables?
It also seems that, since the vulnerability is still there after defacement and the google index of course isn't yet updated, an already defaced site can be hit again. Searching on MSN for Generation 24 defacements brings up a site which, at the time of this writing, reads "Generation 14".
Thus, the generation distribution does not allow too much interpretation -- there might have been generation-28 sites, but if the list of vulnerable web sites is coming close enough to being saturated with exploits, the generation distribution should somewhat stabilize. Maybe that's something interesting to study in terms of distributed systems behavior, actually...
It's an interesting video. Gotta love the 1984 reference in it*... while the video mostly talks about the media landscape, it's good to see them at least touching on the topic of privacy which would obviously be just as much an issue in the world that is painted in the video.
(*clue bat: the "ID card" mockup shown upon the Google/Amazon merger)
Of course you can. But... so much for usability.
"Windows is easy to use."
"Umm, except you shouldn't use IE. And if you use OE, please remember all these workarounds. And, remember to take care of the firewall. And, install all those updates! But don't use IE for that; rather, do it by hand by following these instructions here......."
Where has the ease-of-use gone?
Hmm. Seems that my DHCP request has to be sent using IP-over-Magic then...
If your interface is DHCP'd and you don't have the cable in, does the firewall still come up if the initial DHCP fails??
And, in any case, that's another workaround people get used to and learn to live with... it should not be like that. Microsoft claims that their operating system's usability is so good that you don't need much experience in using Windows. But the usability approaches zero with all these workarounds you have to know about just to get the system to a state where you can actually concentrate on what you really wanted to work on.
That adds a whole new perspective to the Linux-on-the-desktop discussion. Maybe Linux isn't as straightforward. Windows might be. But with all the crap you have to deal with in Windows (and it seems to just get more and more), it seems that in the end, Linux ends up being a MUCH better Desktop OS, even in its current state of relatively worse usability.