Whaaaa? God forbid! Dolphin is a great file manager, as I type this I am actually in the process of installing KDE for Windows just so I can use Dolphin instead of Windows Explorer. Explorer doesn't even have a split-pane mode that I can find, and it seems to go out of its way to hide useful things from me. God knows there are many good ideas Gnome/KDE could borrow from Windows/OS X (and vice-versa) but Windows Explorer definitely isn't one of them. Jeeez. PS I don't have Dolphin to hand (installing it right now as I said before) but I'm almost 100% certain it has a list/detail view type thing.

Here on Slashdot today, not only did two people make a joke about an obscure techincal configuration option of the Linux kernel, we both made the same joke, and we made it one minute apart. This place is terrifying.

Depends if they set CONFIG_NO_HZ=y :P

I think you're making a reasonable point, but I have to disagree. I'm not sure why I should have to come up with the answers for the content providers, since there are presumably a number of people who are employed by those companies to devise a suitably profitable business model which actually attracts some paying customers. Now I do agree that in saying this I'm probably being a bit intellectually lazy, but I say it's no more lazy than those content providers who are just trying to hang on to the same old way of doing business by offering a single, undesirable course for the future (DRM everywhere) which few informed customers seem to actually want.

However, I'm going to offer a solution anyway, because I think it's an interesting discussion. I'd say that it would be better to offer streaming, on-demand content. If the network capacity isn't up to it today, it should be in a few years' time. I watch Channel 4's on-demand service, which even includes ad breaks. I could probably find a way to rip the streams and fast-forward through the adverts, or I could download the shows on BitTorrent. But all that's too much hassle, the streaming web service is convenient, so I just use that instead and watch the ads, along with many other people I know. Instead of each network having its own site, they could re-sell content to central distributors, where you could go to one site and view content from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and everyone else. Make it free, supported with ads (for BBC content people can get it ad-free by going to the BBC site direct, there would have to be a link next to every BBC show) or have a subscription service with fewer ads or none at all. For uninterrupted films, maybe have a surcharge of a couple of quid (not a flippin' fiver to watch bloody Die Hard one time only, thankyouverymuch) which just gets added to your monthly bill.

If access to content is easy and reasonably priced, then I don't think piracy should be too much of a worry. It will always happen to some extent, but as long as they can turn a decent profit, then that's just one of those facts of life. No need for all of this protected path DRM BS then. However, I still think that DRM is crappy enough that consumers are right to reject it out of hand, without equivocation or writing the content providers' business model for them. We're the ones paying, after all.

You could also have tabbed through the buttons (just like on Windows) til you reached apply. It takes a bit of guesswork, but it's certainly a lot easier than reinstalling. More advanced users would be able to shift-tab, knowing the apply button is near the end (I correctly guessed this at two shift-tabs on my first attempt). Also I suspect many users would have guessed that Apply has a keyboard shortcut, and that the shortcut would be Alt-A. That is standard underliney shortcut behaviour like on Windows, what do they call them, accelerators or something? Anyway, no offence mate, but you really ought to have figured a solution out without having to reinstall the whole flipping OS.

I do agree with you to a point though, Windows does handle this situation a bit better. However, you can't just take a single pet peeve and use it to claim that one OS is better than the other. Do you think WIndows is entirely without similar usability screw-ups? Or Mac OS? As a long-time Linux user, Windows frequently leaves me fuming, simply because it insists on doing so many things in a way that seems brain-dead from a Linux user's perspective.

Maybe Linux isn't as beginner-friendly as Windows. Maybe not though. Comments such as yours do nothing to prove it either way.

Well that sounds like a good reason just by itself, and you don't really give any reason for the US to maintain control other than some strange possessive instinct. The internet is a global system now, so it makes sense that ICANN should be accountable to global interests. Even though I'm British, I don't actually have a problem with the way ICANN has been run by the US, but the last thing I want is for everyone to start coming up with their own crazy system because of the kind of pointless, divisive behaviour which the US is thankfully avoiding with this new decision.

In fact, you mention the telephone system, but I bet it's a pain to have to parse all of the different crazy international phone number formats! Maybe a global system would be better for that too, if we could start from scratch :)

Perhaps "called into question" wasn't the best choice of phrase. I certainly don't mean that if absolutely anyone, anywhere cries BS about a benchmark then the benchmark is instantly void, rather I mean that once a benchmarker starts to look like they don't know what they're doing then since I don't have enough time to pick through every inch of their technique and raw data, it's easier just to file the whole thing under "useless" in my brain and move on with my life.

The problem is that there are so many poorly-conducted benchmarks around that really end up saying nothing that it can make one jaded and perhaps quicker to reject a benchmark than would be proper. Good benchmarks are certainly worth their weight in gold (erm, or maybe more. I don't know how much a benchmark weighs!).

Yeah there are loads of configuration options that are relevant on servers. Going with the defaults might be sensible when comparing desktop OSs (since Mr Noobey doesn't know how to select a more suitable IO scheduler) but we've already established that they're looking at server OSs here. I think Phoronix show here that they really haven't thought this comparison through. Once the competence of a benchmarker is called into question all of a sudden I feel a massive urge to completely ignore everything they say.

It's good though that Phoronix have found a way to unite us Linux and BSD users in a joint criticism of their crappy benchmarks :)

FTFA:

So they are comparing FreeBSD to the Ubuntu server version, but not really for the right reasons.