"Background services? What are those to the average user?"

What are the opinions of average users to me, as a user? They probably just think "I have a slow computer" even though its multiple times faster than $3000 computers were 6 years ago.

Maybe iTunes is pretty fast for you. But I have an ultraportable with a 1GHz core 2 duo and 1GiB of RAM, 2lbs, 8 hours battery life, good screen. And my computer is very snappy! But I had to put a custom stripped down ubuntu on it to get it that way.

So... typical users don't know and don't care... but that doesn't mean I can't complain about my use cases, which are satisfied by reasonable software, including rockbox firmware on my (old) ipod.

Your undergrad simple MIPS processor was an in-order design. Part of the point of TFA is that modern processors work totally differently - they have a register renaming unit, and tagged microcoded instructions taking multiple paths of various lengths through the pipeline, and an instruction retirement unit, oh and the branch predictor and the pipeline flush and rollback stuff... in fact real modern processors are much more complicated than even that. So there is no single physical flags register in there, but there are versioned copies of it floating around...

Anyone feel free to correct me if you have more specific knowledge of how the flags are actually handled these days.

No, the funny thing is that Slackware is the _opposite_ of what the grandparent implies... All packages are included on the CDs and users are encouraged to install the majority of them, because Slackware doesn't have a dependency-resolving package manager, and thus installing a new package isn't a single terminal command...

1) Why did / does Microsoft outsource their core competency, desktop and server software development, to contractors?

2) Why didn't Microsoft develop this in house and save time in this case by using the open source software that was used to accelerate the development of this tool, and then release the source along with it? The core functionality was already open source, and their additional work mostly only increases the value of their closed-source cash-cow Windows, anyway. It sounds like they actually haven't figured out this open-source thing yet.

Go ahead and call me an Ayn Rand Asshole, but I think employers should be able to fire employees, and conversely, employees should be able to quit.

It sounds to me like your problem is that your employer can be sued for keeping you hired for a longer term, due to some sort of "fairness" issue. You have no need for a union to get you a multi-year contract if your employer likes what you do. Engineers with no long-term-employment contract often work for one company for tens upon tens of years at a time! I have no problem with people unionizing in general, and they should be free to do it. But I wouldn't do it, because often these unions create more of these "fairness" issues that disrupt mutually beneficial arrangements between employers and employees.

PS I actually no nothing about Ayn Rand.

Actually, not all keys have keycaps, ctrl doesn't, for example. I learned this when I wanted to order black key caps for my unicomp and they sent whole keys, and sure enough, I needed them. I was pretty disappointed, it was much more work to yank the entire keys out.

Yes, intel graphics (except for GMA500) and wireless chips are very well supported for linux in every sense.

Unfortunately, one cannot just buy any of these chips in a form which can be added to an existing laptop or desktop, they only come built into a motherboard or laptop.

Yeah I used to format my home partitions with an inode per 128k or so for this reason, as I had a bunch of mp3s and such. Then one day I wanted to build firefox. Well it turns out that there are more files in a firefox source archive than I had inodes on that particular partition, and the only way to get more inodes is to reformat.

Lesson learned. On ext3, go with the default inode frequency.

Does anyone else find this amusing? It's the game of security cat and mouse which is typical of microsoft (and other) software, in reverse!

If it turns out that the botnet creators are "better" with security updates than microsoft, well... that would make my day.

Jeez, what is it with proprietery software and 64 bit support?

Frankly, widely-used open source software on linux or bsd, these days, never pulls this shit. I run a 64bit linux desktop and laptop and never see this with open source apps. 64bit doesn't seem to be a big deal except when proprietery software gets involved.

It's somewhat true that, due to the fact that x86(_64) are just virtual machine languages to modern processors which actually work much differently inside than the instructions would imply, the instruction set advantages to long mode are very small and sometimes negative (need twice as much space to store an address).

However, the much larger address space is a huge advantage. Address way more memory in total, and way more per app. I'll even make the very dangerous bet that it won't run out of address space within 20 years for desktop systems. In fact mapping shared libraries and memory operations in general are just way simpler / more elegant... it's even easier too debug running programs because the stack starts at a convenient address. All the alternatives you mention are dirty hacks. Lack of support for 16-bit mode is actually a bonus.

Finally, the open source community only took a year or two to transition to perfect 64-bit support, and it's been fine since at least 2005. In fact, you might find that the majority of software for windows available in a 64-bit version is... open source!

Flash worked fine with nspluginwrapper + flashblock for years, but since the 64-bit version came out I've been running pure 64-bit linux systems.

Anyway, my point is: I would consider myself to be pragmatic, but I'm sure many would consider me to be an idealist free-software advocate, because it seems clear to me that the big commercial powers in the personal computer world greatly hinder technological advancement, something I'm rather fond of. This is slashdot, after all. 64 bit support is a perfect example.

Adobe, Microsoft... see, this is why we can't have nice things!

Tomato has all the features I want and a slick web interface; in comparison, DD-WRT has craploads of random features, many of them inferior to those in Tomato (QOS in particular), in a less than perfectly reliable and not well organized web interface. Thus I was very dissapointed to find that Tomato would reboot every 30 hours on average on my WRT54GLs, despite trying different versions and clean settings etc, including on a brand-new WRT54GL I had. I had to use DD-WRT so my appartment mates and I could keep track of our Comcast quota. It's been up for over 100 days now (pathetic, in my opinion, but still an improvement).

Lots of computers have problems, there are downsides to every platform available, this part of your story is not new to me.

What strikes me is that you complain about core 2 duos running like mollasas and needed 6 gigs of memory for vista.

If you were the typical user with loads of vendor-preinstalled ass-ware on your computer, perhaps this would be realistic, but you apparently have experience with linux and computer component installation as well, so your apparent lack of adeptness at managing your own computer is surprising to me.

As a point of comparison, I have a convertible tablet with 1gb of memory, which I boot into windows for using OneNote to take notes in classes. Frankly, 1gb is enough if you remove all the crap (and replace lots of it with open source alternatives that don't suck), and the intel graphics are enough if you turn off aero transparency and don't play games. So, I understand if you claim you need 2Gb to run vista, but 4? 6? What are you running, iTunes + antivirus + official AIM + updaters for 20 odd apps? You could have skipped the ram upgrades and have a faster computer than you do now if you get the bloatware and the services and "helpers" under control. This has been the case with windows since at least 98. You should know better.

PS pidgin is pretty good, and I've heard of a windows alternative to quicksilver