No, see, YOU missed MY point. I was ONLY saying I didn't buy that broadcom cards are still causing your problems these days, since I've not known one to not work since after 8.04. I'm only saying LATELY they do seem to work great, if not even better than the supposed open source ones like atheros. I never told you you should use linux. I never said it wasn't hell sometimes (it is), and I haven't had to compile anything to get ANYTHING working in 3 years. That's why I said I don't believe you, because I haven't heard of a problem with a broadcom card by someone who had seriously just clicked the damn hardware applet and told it to use the broadcom driver. you could be having trouble...that's very possible, I just don't believe you cause everyone I know has a broadcom card and hasn't has issues in years. And I'm not a dev, I don't have to care. Do you care that my touchpad won't scroll in windows 7 on my dell laptop? No, and that's fine.

I gotta say, I don't believe you. I have a dell, with a broadcom card, and I also have a different broadcom card from a compaq/hp laptop that died on me just outside of warranty. BOTH of these cards work nearly out of the box in ubuntu, and have since 8.04, which is what I was running on the laptop that fried on me. The ONLY setup required, is to activate the driver for broadcom wireless cards on the restricted-drivers-manager thing that pops up when you first run ubuntu. I have never had an issue with this since 8.04 (I'm currently running 10.04, and have used every version in between). Previous to 8.04, yes, it was an issue, and I remember compiling ndiswrapper from source to get it working, which was hell, as I was new-ish to linux back then. Interestingly, I also have a atheros 5006 card, which supposedly works great in ubuntu, and did for a while, but since 9.04, when they went to the hal-less driver, it won't come up from resume, drops my signal all the time, and sometimes I have to cold boot my laptop to fix it, after removing all power...ONLY in linux though, not in windows, doesn't happen in windows. Broadcom cards for me have never had any of these issues, so I am using it. Go figure. Can't speak for realtek, never owned anything of theirs.

People that prefer linux will like to believe that windows will not ever be reliable, and people who prefer windows tend to believe that linux won't be.

I've seen this time and time again, both through myself, and my friends/acquaintances.

Just two recent examples of this:

A friend of mine bought a really nice Asus i5 gaming laptop with win7 home premium preloaded on Thur last week. I envy his laptop. It's awesome. Anyway, on Friday, after only running the laptop 2 times, he turned it on, only to find that win7 wouldn't boot. Luckily Asus provided a recovery disk (some OEMS require you to burn your own, he wouldn't have done that that soon). My very first reaction (as I do prefer linux, and I myself happen to have many issues just like this one with any and all windows oses, my friends will confirm that I do for some reason, whereas they do not usually...) was to start laughing, and I remember saying "When will MS get their ^(&# straight?". Now, we all know that it's possible it was his fault, not win7, but it wasn't my first reaction.

Likewise, a different friend of mine has a win7/ubuntu dual boot setup on his desktop, and at one time had xp and ubuntu via wubi on his laptop. He very very rarely uses ubuntu, and I honestly don't even know why he insists on having it installed. His antivirus program thought the wubi virtual disk of ubuntu was a virus, and deleted/broke it. He instantly blamed ubuntu for being unstable (who wouldn't). It was only later, after it happened again and we caught his antivirus in the act that we figured out what was happening. This same friend had a sata cable fail on his desktop which was hooked up to the drive with ubuntu on it. Because of this, his computer wouldn't boot, although oddly enough the drive did show up in bios. He blamed ubuntu instantly for the grub error that appeared when grub couldn't find that drive, and had me come over and help him "fix ubuntu". Well, we figured out pretty quick that he just had a bad sata cable, and after replacing it, everything was perfect.

In both cases, the operating system might not have been at fault. (ok, so ubuntu wasn't in these cases, but I've seen it become unbootable on a netbook after a regular "apt-get upgrade" too..., and the win7 issue might have been my friends fault too, I don't know.) However, it just goes to show how our personal feelings about our favorite operating systems get in the way of factual information about them, and many times people say things and bash them before they think about it. The same goes for both windows and linux.

If the Ipad is going to revolutionize anything, it's going to be big media. Itunes pretty much did it a while ago with the hurting music industry, and I believe the Ipad is another venture to keep big media happy and make apple a fortune. I personally don't think the ipad is that appealing, and I will probably never own one, but I DO think it's an attractive platform for big media, and maybe that is why it is being hyped so much. Big media sees it as a possible answer to some of it's problems, so if it can make this thing popular enough, then it has a way to prolong it's survival.

What I think is interesting about this though, is that if advertising via big media still works, then obviously big media is doing just fine. If newspaper is failing, fine, just move it to a more current medium. I don't see an issue here. There is plenty of room to expand to digital mediums instead of printing everything. If you don't want it to be a (mostly) open technology like the internet, fine...pretty sure there is enough similarly-minded money out there to back whatever your silly idea is. I believe this is exactly what the ipad was created for.

you sir, you just made my day!

Shouldn't slashdot be using html5 instead of flash for this? Some people can't use flash at work and doing it in html5 would make it possible because every browser is compatible with the html5 devices tag that enables webcams in html5.

Also, there should be a mute button, or volume controls. I'm too stupid to mute only the player, and I want to be able to listen to my own music and watch at the same time.

And finally, I love today. (My new i9 super gaming desktop from dell came in the mail today!)

Also, lets not forget that (at least a year ago) something like 80% of Firefox's funding was from google. You could argue that it's only because firefox defaults to google for search...but funding 80% of their expenses is a pretty large stake in a company (firefox/mozilla) that doesn't really have to exist for google to still turn a huge profit. Especially now that chrome exists and is doing pretty well for itself. Yeah, they might stop funding firefox now that they have a competing product...but who cares...chrome is open too...and recently I'm actually really starting to like it more anyway.

I see another scenario... Google stops supporting IE, Microsoft is justified in forcing bing as the default search on ANY IE install, all the people who just use IE cause it's installed (quite a few I believe) will use bing, and see how pretty bing is, and be seduced into thinking google is crap. (bing does look good, I prefer google though, for many reasons) So if anything, I believe a move like that would hurt them.

I so much agree.

I didn't realize how much windows forces you to reboot until I had been running linux pretty much exclusively for over a year...and then windows tanked. I had tried out MULTIPLE distros of linux, and yeah, pretty much never had to reboot more than once to get them completely up and running with every bit of software I would ever want. Also, there is something nice about knowing that you can use your home dir/partition on ANY linux and never have to worry about "migrating" your data like you do in windows.

Also, window's installers (including win7) just aren't as nice as the leading linux ones. They usually install a working system in about 15 mins, without rebooting until you want to run the new install. With windows it has to reboot in the middle...and if something happened to go slightly wrong, you have to start all over again. And let's not forget the hell of getting a laptop running in windows if you don't have the OEM disk for the drivers. Yes...linux is hell when drivers aren't already supported by default, or not at all, but I honestly find this to happen less often then it does with windows (name the version) on my laptops. For instance, try installing win7 64 bit on an inspiron 1525, and then try installing any major 64 bit linux... EVERYTHING works great in linux (one reboot for wireless broadcom card to work...). Windows 7 though? Still don't have a webcam driver that works right...my touchpad does all kinds of odd stuff, and it took me forever to find a driver that let me scroll properly on the touchpad. There was other stuff too...but I can't remember now. I gave up and went back to 32 bit win7. This is a common experience for me though with windows and laptops vs linux. it may not work for linux, but if it does, it's amazingly simple usually. I wish I would have counted the reboots trying to get my hardware to work on 64bit win7..I bet nobody would even believe the number...I know it was pretty large. Windows works better/has more support for more hardware/more software/ etc...but getting it working and maintaining it is not worth the cost in time for me in many cases...especially on laptops which I can't use for gaming...

That, and do forget that more bodies doesn't always relate to getting a project done any faster. You have to consider training the new employee/s in and the time it takes them to become familiar enough with the project to become productive. Also, nobody that has been on the team for a while is going to want to spend time helping the new guy if he is being rushed to get important things done. It's going to be a while before the team is more productive due to the new hire/s. That, and sometimes more people just means more people will be in the way.

This guy is pulling numbers out of his butt, assuming random ratios of speed differences...
I know it's already all been said but really...the author needs to try this:

Program a small application in php, and one in c++. All the data must be stored in a database, on a remote machine (which is the way it would be done for a huge site). Now, hardcode in some data for your first benchmark of php vs c++ to get an idea for raw php vs c++ performance doing the same task, now, comment all that out, and get the data from the database, and time that. Guess what, I bet the times become pretty darn similar in the latter test. No, php isn't going to be QUITE as fast...but it's gonna be really close for REAL web-application type workloads where latency from your sql server and loading all the other page content come into play. Your clients are never going to notice the difference on the majority of applications, and I don't believe that most time is spent processing php or c++ code on a web application either. It's waiting for the DB, and uploading content to clients. If you truely are doing extremely data heavy tasks and lots of floating point math or something, then yes...C++ is probably a better tool, but even then, there's no reason not to use php for the non-data heavy stuff...

I know I'm just a youngster web programmer who only graduated from college a while ago and who deserves little respect on slashdot compared to some of you, but I do have a decent amount of experience with quite a few programming languages. I learned C++ first, and know it pretty well for someone who doesn't use it constantly any more. I think I'm very very good with PHP...and so does my boss. Given that information, I have something to say.

If someone told me to program an entire web application from top to bottom in C++, I'd probably quit on the spot, and walk out laughing all the way to the parking lot. I like C++ for lots of things, but there is no way in hell you would EVER get me to program an entire web application in c++. It would take 10x longer at LEAST to develop than it would for me to do in even Java, with which I actually have less knowledge of (but still a good working knowledge of), and I don't consider ideal for web apps. The debugging for C++ on something like that would probably drive me completely insane. I say me, because I'm assuming that I'm building this web app and only me...like I can do very quickly in php or python or nearly any other language that does web stuff well, otherwise it would be me and all my co-workers.

Languages that are traditionally used for web development are used for a reason...and it's not how fast/efficient they run. It's for the difference in expense of the developers (HUGE factor really), for how well the language suits the web in it's core libraries, and how well it integrates with web servers, database abstraction libraries...well I could go on forever really. I'm not saying that C++ couldn't get libraries built for it that made its appealing as say, ruby (on rails), php, or python, but lets face it, it would take a very long time to get to that point where everything was as seamless and easy as it is in current web languages...not to mention getting hosting companies to let you run a c++ app YOU programmed on their servers (they'd have to be stupid...really freakin stupid). C++ will just never be popular enough for web stuff to be attractive to developers...that's the bottom line. Lack of efficiency is such a tiny price to pay compared to these other factors.

You just CANNOT have geeky programmer types figure out human body language well enough to create a set of working rules to program into a robot! Why? Well let's see, most geeky programmer types (myself included) already have a certain social awkwardness and trouble recognizing/reacting to human social quirks as it is, for the main reason that they generally don't associate as often with non-geeky people. Now, I'm not saying this is always true of course, but I think it's at least generally the case, and probably more so with people who mess around with robots all day. I think before we see robots that act and seem human, will be the day that normal cheerleaders and soccermoms can work on robot's AIs without realizing what they are doing(which I'm guessing is going to be a long while, unless you count the furby...).

My sister was throwing out a 1.6ghz celeron M based laptop because she bought a new laptop, and the display was broken on the old one (she never bothered to have anyone fix it, even though it wasn't that expensive to fix...). I just completely removed the screen, since I don't care to use it as a laptop, and fixing it costs money I don't want to spend. Anyway, I've been running it as a web server/NAS/file server for about 4 months now, and it does really well. I don't know the numbers for power usage, but I know it's better than the dell thin-client machine with a p3 at 1ghz I was using before. It's also quicker, as this celeron M is basically a core2 solo... Can't do much better than free... Although I would LOVE to get my hands on a sheevaplug. I just may buy one...

I will definitely agree that release quality of ubuntu has deteriorated but I'm pretty sure some of your issues are hardware specific (I realize this doesn't make it any better...). For example, I have a crap laptop with intel965 graphics, and 9.04 and 9.10 are the only releases that actually made hack free multi-monitor support a reality for me. Before that, I always had to hack xorg. Also, Kubuntu 9.10 alpha 6 worked with both vga and svideo out for me out of the box (you have to go into system settings...), but I didn't test hdmi yet cause I dont' have a cable right now. Pulse audio was TERRIBLE in 9.10alpha 6, and not good at all in 9.04 either, and crapped out on me almost weekly, but right now (9.10beta) it's working impressively well, so much so that I'm actually not hating pulseaudio (that's saying alot). So, for me, pulse and my video are MUCH better than they have been in the past. I agree though, ubuntu needs MUCH better regression testing, and also they need to make sure that things actually work as they are supposed to before they try to put it in a distro. I think fedora tends to do better with this, but that said, I've personally had better luck getting ubuntu working in the end than I have with fedora. Generally ubuntu works a bit better with my hardware(I've tested/run every single fedora release since 4)...but I know for a fact this isn't true for everyone.