No, the church example was a perfect comparison. Usually people a) already tithe to a specific church, b) don't go to the kind of church you're promoting, or c) don't go to church at all. So a pamphlet for a church rarely brings in any new people. It's the same with operating systems. More so, actually. If you use OSX or Windows, you're not going to just suddenly start using Linux because some guy handed you a CD. For all they know, the CD contains malware, even. People like what they're used to, and most don't have the technical confidence to even begin installing a completely new OS. These are the kinds of people who take their computers to Best Buy when something goes wrong. They're the last people who need to be running Linux to begin with.

Besides, what if Microsoft went and handed out free DVDs of a Starter Edition of Windows at a GNU event? Or at an Apple store? The people belonging to those respective OS groups would be pissed. Not to mention, they're not exactly going to convert many people to begin with. So GNU shouldn't do something that would put them into a hypocritical position if their competition did the same thing to them.

They're getting desperate. This is like a church handing out pamphlets outside of a movie theater or arcade. It'll all go in the garbage, and end up being a waste of time and resources.

The dropping of a near-30-year-old platform would normally be uneventful in most any other situation, especially given that the 386 simply lacks too many features to bother maintaining compatibility (to which I won't even apply nostalgia, because all of mine is attached to a 4.77mhz 8088 with CGA graphics, which certainly can't run Linux). Yet when it comes to the open-source world, we still always end up with bickering from a group of people who think they know better than the main developer of a project, who would propose wasting resources to either keep this compatibility, or actually assemble a team to fork the kernel and maintain support themselves. And this isn't referring to the people simply joking about the idea of doing it.

I imagine that if you could calculate all of the man hours of programming that went into these kinds of people forking every project imaginable, and thinking they can do better (which is normally not the case), that you could have written an entirely new OS with a full application suite by now.

There's a difference between "truth" and "attention-seeking tactless public outbursts." There's quite a few organizations and professionals out there who will deliver the former, where as RMS only delivers the latter. Censorship is not an issue, because anyone can still go to his website if they want to see the ramblings of a delusional man, much the same as one can find websites of all the truthers and birthers elsewhere if that's what they're after.

When you grow up and realize what the real world is like, you'll quickly realize that information can in fact be owned, and that it's important for this to occur for numerous reasons which you apparently fail to grasp. No amount of pseudo-techno-philosophy you choose to fill your head with will change how the world works, nor will it stop you from going to jail if you suddenly decide something belongs to you which doesn't.

Thinking you're more enlightened than the rest of society despite an overwhelming majority of them disagreeing with you is usually the first sign of a delusional mind. It's common in those who feel they should be able to have what other people possess, as a matter of fact.

Richard Stallman has been childish since the day Symbolics told him he couldn't have their source code anymore, to which he set out on an infantile mission of revenge by cloning their software to a tee to give away for free (which today would put him in a lot of trouble), not to mention threatened to blow up their building (which would get you into a whole different kind of trouble in post-911 America). These days, he simply revises the GPL whenever a company (like Tivo) sends him into one of his rages.

Can the tech media please stop posting RMS stories? Like with any other child acting out, you're only encouraging him.

There's a difference between monopolization and making something worth using. In case you forgot, alternative web browsers of the time were absolute crap, all the way into the early 2000s. Netscape (while alive) was awful, both interface and rendering-wise, not making any significant strides to improve for half a decade. Remember resizing the window and the whole damn page reloading? Yeah. And while Opera was actually pretty decent, it went from being a pay product to an ad-supported one, neither of which case particularly attracted users. A web browser was as important as a file browser by that point, and suggesting people pay for it, or go to the trouble of obtaining a 3rd-party one as ugly and clunky as Netscape, just to avoid using a conveniently provided IE, is ridiculous.

Standards support was relatively bad across all the browsers at the time anyway, so none of them are particularly to blame for how web developers did their jobs. If Netscape had become dominant, we would have had an entirely different mess. Developers supported IE predominantly not only because it was included with Windows, but also because it was the only browser with any chance of developing any marketshare in that environment. Anyone looking at the future of the web only saw IE, and that was in fact the case for many years. Appeasing the less than 2% of people who didn't use it was not only a waste of time, but a waste of potential capability for the website.

The websites you designed sound to be very open in terms of possibility of design, for banks and companies mostly displaying text. It was certainly possible for you to design a website that would get by for everyone regardless of browser. I worked on a website that was very media-based, everything had to be perfect down to the pixel without risking looking sloppy. That left either making the whole website in Flash, which I refused to do, or making choices on the website working based on the demographic who would be using it.

These days, things are different. I design a website to work in every browser. There's been no excuse to not do this over the last several years, because the workarounds to maintain compatibility have been minimal. So when Microsoft makes a complaint about something Webkit is doing, we shouldn't be pointing the finger and calling hypocrite. We should be listening to them, before we end up with the same situation we had ten years ago, when standards were lagging just as far behind then as they are now.

Funny how my post is flagged as a troll for stating an unequivocal fact. Such is Slashdot.

What some people saw as Microsoft trying to monopolize the web, the rest of us saw as them finding solutions to problems that nobody else offered.

The DirectX filter I mentioned? That was the only way to rotate web page content for a decade. And that was just the tip of the iceberg of its capabilities.

I wish people would stop offering the "well Microsoft used to do this so who are they to complain" excuse. Not only is the internet a different place, but so is Microsoft. They tried very hard to become as standards-compliant as they are now, and it took the risk of breaking existing websites along the way, despite the compatibility mode they offered. But the fact is, they made that decision. I still don't care about using IE, but I still give credit where credit is due.

Where the problem lies is mostly with the W3C. This is who we should be blaming. This is 2012, and all that ever happens with these people is bickering and squabbling, while the web still stagnates with a technology level of five years ago, and couldn't even decide on a standard for something as basic as rounded corners. This is the Achilles' Heel of the free software world, where everything is treated far too much as a democracy, so every nerd with an over-inflated ego has an idea for how something should be done and they're absolutely certain that theirs is the best way to do it. It not only results in the dozens and dozens of forks of major pieces of software in the free software community, but also results in any kind of standards decisions being delayed for literally years while everyone acts like babies instead of ratifying something already.

I can remember almost ten years ago when I was developing a very graphics-oriented website, and part of what I was being asked to do was to rotate a section of the page by 90 degrees. Except the content on this area was dynamic, containing an avatar and the user's name and stuff. There was no web standard for doing something like this at all, and my only option was going to be using Flash. But since Flash was prone to not line up perfectly among every browser (and I needed pixel-perfect alignment), not to mention was overkill for what I needed, even that was a problem. So eventually, after looking at our statistics, a good 98+% of the users used IE. The rest was Opera or Safari. So I made the decision to implement IE's proprietary DirectX filter extension, which allowed rotation of any HTML object in the page, and would apply this to any content normally inside of this object as well. The resulting effect was excellent.

Over time, I wasn't entirely satisfied with this single-browser solution (which had something to do with the fact that I'd switched to Opera myself!). But web technology still never caught up. So my way around this was to generate this section of the website on the server itself, using Perl and the GD library. I cached the resulting image for every user, only regenerating it when they changed their icon or any of their information. I was able to recreate the original DirectX filter version with 99% accuracy this way. But this was all only because our web host had been kind enough to install GD for me to begin with, since this was before we were running our own server.

The point of this story is, the ability to rotate components in a DOM tree has only recently become possible in HTML5. And HTML5 is still unfinished! Expect to see plenty more browser-dependent extensions over the decade, just like what happened last decade, all because the organization we rely on to give us these standards is dragging its heels and arguing every detail along the way.

I wasn't being misleading, I was pointing out that these devices all have a standard app store which the majority of all owners will only ever use, mostly because the average consumer is too dumb to use anything different. Therefore, what Microsoft is doing here is exactly the same.

As for installing applications from elsewhere in Windows RT, look into side-loading. And Microsoft has never really been much for locking users down in terms of applications they can run, so I don't really see them pulling an Apple here on a platform they're trying this hard to promote. I can, however, see Apple eventually turning OSX into a glorified iOS.

There's so much whining about the ARM version of Windows 8. Android and iOS already lock the user down to one app store. Microsoft is doing the exact same thing. If you want to install non-app store software, you'll just have to "root" your device (or rather, the equivalent of bypassing such normal operation, just in this case for such a non-Unix-based OS), which you know as well as I do will be possible in no time. And are we really complaining about the restrictions on getting an app published by Microsoft after all of the debacles we've seen with Apple's service thus far?

Seriously, all of this is a non issue. Technically it will probably end up actually benefiting Windows desktop users, because you'll finally have a cross-platform application format. It won't be great for everything, of course, but for popular mobile games and certain apps it'll be handy.

I don't think this post could be loaded with any more blatant bias if they tried. Instead of simply informing people of the information, it essentially went on a rant on why Intel sucks, why ia32 sucks, and that ARM is simply better in every way imaginable, so who needs that stupid stinky Intel meanie head anyway?

Next time, leave the crying for the comments.

The irony is that many years ago KDE seemed to be what the majority of people ran. Gnome just didn't seem to have the features, or whatever the case. Then somehow Gnome took off somewhere along the way and got a lot of footing, then we started seeing lots of distros preferring it instead. Now that they've effectively ruined it, doing everything from cloning OSX to making "Tablet OS, desktop style" perhaps it's time to just use KDE as the default on the major distros and be done with it. Efficient hardware support should always be priority. When times change and something gets so many layers of bloat that it stops working as desired, dump it and move on. That's been the Linux philosophy from the start, even if that meant some headaches along the way until the system was inevitably better.

While it's certainly fascinating to hear about the machine itself, it's easy to forget part of why it exists: simulating destruction. The Manhattan Project also came from Oak Ridge, if you recall.

As someone who lives in the region, nobody is particularly keen on what possibly goes on at these places. There are various "secret" military installations scattered around here, from Oak Ridge to Holston Army Ammunition. Between what we factually know is buried under and developed at these places, and what is rumored to, it can be a bit unnerving at times to consider that you live in what amounts to one of the ground zeroes of the country if anyone ever decided to start trouble. Or, likewise, ground zero if anything were to go catastrophically wrong.