Not sure why I got modded Troll (well actually I know very well why and it kind of makes me sad) - I did actually go to the effort of installing YDL on the PS3 because I thought the idea was neat (surely that already pushes me into the vast minority), but came to the conclusion that it was effectively useless (it makes a raspberry pi look like a high end machine), even for decoding video (perhaps things matured later on in the PS3/Linux life cycle??). Using it as a 3D rendering node is a neat idea and one of few legit use cases (did it actually provide any real grunt?) I'd be interested to know what development work you were doing on the PS3 (were you writing code to target the ps3's weird cell architecture? Didn't think there was much call for that beyond ps3 development and you sure as hell wouldn't be doing that via other OS).

I suppose I just figured that those with a legit use case (e.g. universities doing research into cluster computing), probably wouldn't be playing games on their systems and thus wouldn't feel compelled to update their firmware.

I've really enjoyed all the car analogies in this thread, but for me it's not like that - it's much more like Jersey Shore being cancelled halfway through a season ... sure they promised me something and then took it away - but really, I don't give a flying fuck.

Did you ever use the other os feature? I did. Or at least I gave it a shot. It was awful and worse than useless. It sucks that it was stolen from us, but really - nothing of value was lost. Complaining about it is nothing but mindless point scoring against the evil corporation that is Sony, only the vast minority ever used it legitimately and those using it weren't forced to install the psn update. Other OS was nothing but a gimmick (or perhaps a cunning ploy to evade some tariffs). Complaining only shows that you have a preconceived axe to grind.

I'd happily give up 15% of my new shiny 1EB drive...

Mmmm 3D printed D3...

Rate of incoming missiles - rate of missiles being destroyed (dM/dt) ... ?

Nope. Is certainly language evolution. Doubleplusgood language evolution.

Not sure /. is that far behind Digg anymore.

To be fair, that's a list of OS shortcuts and application shortcuts. Looking at just OS shortcuts they're much of a muchness: https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=2ee8d462a8f365a0&id=2EE8D462A8F365A0!141

Terminate and stay resident programs were almost like multitasking... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_Stay_Resident

Fair call - ethics/morality is a personal thing... I've personally experienced both (in my immediate family) and could justify at ~80 that the person had by and large lived their life, where for the two year old it was just plain unfair.

What's sadder, a 2 year old dying of cancer or an 80 year old dying of cancer?

Common usage as opposed to etymology dictates meaning... Which is a shame really. Give it a couple of decades and even dictionaries will resign themselves to the fact that reticent does indeed mean reluctant. This will leave us with taciturn; a poor substitute.

Yeah, but just because you've given them cute names doesn't mean that it's easy to distinguish between the two polar extremes in all but the most trivial of cases. You'll tend to find that most 'marginalized' people are there because of both active and passive factors to lesser and greater degrees. Those to the left perhaps draw the line in a slightly different place to where you'd personally place it.

I don't quite get the hate. Firstly (and my god I'm going to get modded down - look at my comment history, I'm not a shill, I'm just dull) the ribbon is a better interface than a hierarchical menu system. It (at least in office 2010 - I never gave 2007 nearly enough of a play around with) behaves delightfully in the presence of different screen resolutions (seemingly) intelligently choosing which functionality to highlight on the ribbon within the space available and which functionality to push down into a menu. It also exposes more functionality at the 'one click' level than 2003 ever did, which makes discovering functionality vastly easier. The only thing the ribbon _REALLY_ needs is a 'search' option which is available as a power tool (plugin, or whatever it's called) which really should be vanilla. Sure it's different and requires you to learn new things, but it's not hard to learn, the benefits in learning make it worthwhile and surely learning is fun??

I express the same general sentiment towards Windows 8. The Metro start screen is just a glorified task bar that is much harder to accidentally click on. The number of times I've accidentally clicked on (and thusly lunched) a bloated java program (Aqua Data Studo, I'm looking at you) whilst actually trying to bring up an already open program (at the very least) frustrates me. Launching apps from the start screen (I suspect is better - there is a distinction between launching and multi-tasking) and switching to the desktop on login is just not that big a deal. You get to work - boot your computer up, log in (and then if using Windows 8 click the desktop icon/tile) load up Matlab, SPICE, Quicken or whatever then hell you use and then blow 8 hours tooling around with that program. Seriously - how big a deal is one extra click over 8 hours? Also, being able to press the windows key and see whether any of the applications/tiles you're running have received updates is kind of neat. I can imagine that will be very useful for checking email/facebook (more bad karama)/rss feeds.

New things are neat, aren't they? Computers are cool. Learning how to tool around in different operating systems be they Windows, OSX, Linux, BeOS, OS/2 or whatever is fun, isn't it? Where did we all lose our joie de vivre? Windows 8 will seriously not alter the fundamental way you interact with your PC, it brings (aside from the GUI) nice new technologies to the table - so why the rabid hate Slashdot?

>The Applications are now brain dead fullscreen horrors. You can't easily actually close them. Multitasking now is suddenly much more like some horrid 2012 throwback to OS9, or even Win3.11. Oh the system does multitask, but now the OS just feels like it doesn't.

For the record - you close Metro apps by dragging them to the bottom of the screen... Once I figured that out (and stopped wildly F4-ing) I was a much happier camper.