Isn't it obvious? He's working with the secret remnants of the USSR who coordinate everything from their hollowed-out volcano lair on the dark side of the moon in cooperation with the reptilian overlords. Who are also communist.

Duh.

Indeed, we have distros for what he's suggesting.

I like having my desktop OS exactly the same as my server OS - it makes things easy: any command which works on my desktop is going to work on my server, as long as it's console-only and the appropriate software is installed there. If it's not installed, I know it's easily available, because it's available on my desktop.

If and when I ever run into a problem where I become convinced it's e.g the scheduler at fault and not my code, I'll go and read up on tuning and tune as required, or maybe look at a different distro. But in 99.9% of cases I can refactor a small piece of code and fix the problem without even going that deep. I've never ever tuned the kernel.

huh?
It's been more than 5 years since I did audio editing on something other than Linux.

systemd is written by the pulseaudio guy?!?

I totally didn't care about this debate until I read that, now I just want systemd away from me. eew!

Pulseaudio is indeed a really terribly horribly bad system. My favourite thing about pulseaudio is that even when you have a multichannel audio card capable of playing more than one sound simultaneously (i.e a good pro-audio card, or any 15 year old creative labs card), pulseaudio still does the mixing in software, because using my CPU to do something not-quite-as-well as the purpose-built hardware I have in my machine is a great idea. Another excellent feature of pulseaudio is the network transparency, because I love clogging up my LAN with uncompressed audio data, and jack didn't already do a better job of it.

Granted, it has gotten better - at least it works now, most of the time. 3 years ago it was the number 1 reason for me to reboot my system.

Based on my pulseaudio experience I don't want to be using systemd until at least 2030.

Just for the record, what you got is store credit, not the refund you were entitled to.

I'm Australian, and I think maybe the best thing about this place is the ACCC.

This time last year I was a super-hardcore valve fan, singing their praises and buying up pretty much every new game that came out for linux, including much of valve's catalog (which I had previously pirated). I was even thinking about trying to build a few steam boxes to sell on ebay.

One game I bought was Fez. It didn't work properly, making it unplayable. I emailled Fez support and recieved no response.

I emailled valve demanding the refund I am entitled to by law. I spent many, many emails back and forth explaining to them that I was entitled to my money back, since the thing being unplayable is clearly a major fault. They tried to tell me that the law doesn't apply to them and that I should write to their legal department and ignored my further emails... Rather than simply obeying the law and refunding the princely sum of $2.49.

The argument that our law doesn't apply to them is a joke - the law applies if you sell within australia. I was in Australia when I bought Fez. There are steam mirrors here. They are specifically marketing at Australians - If Australian laws don't apply to valve, where's my uncensored version of Left 4 Dead 2?

I complained to the ACCC and did a chargeback on my credit card - got my money back despite them. Interestingly, I still have Fez in my steam library, so it looks like i got it for free. I don't know whether the game-breaking bug has been fixed - I have no interest in playing it anymore.

I've not purchased anything through steam since, and Valve will never see another cent of my money - I don't support companies who think they're above the law.

The humble store and GOG have both made a killing off of me this year. I wonder if I can can get one or both to write Valve a nice thank-you note.

If you got a refund from valve without doing a chargeback, you were lucky. If you didn't get a refund, do a chargeback, then call the ACCC and tell them you love their work. And if you know somebody who works for the ACCC, hug them for me.

forgot to add obligatory link to Linux is not windows

Indeed - people are complaining simply because it's different to what they're used to. Mac users don't like windows. If you switch back you'll have the same problem to a certain extent.

I'd be very interested to see how the number of complaints about the open-source software stacks up against a huge MS-imposed change like the office ribbon. I'd expect the numbers to be similar. People will complain if you change the default colour or font of something - of course they're going to complain when you switch the software they're using.

This does scream fishy to me. We all know that Ballmer flew out to Munich to try to talk them out of switching in the first place. It would be naieve to think that MS has just given up on Munich - there's too much at stake - if it goes well for Munich, other cities will follow, and then open-source could spread into the corporate sector, and that would be BAD.

A lack of integrated email/contacts/calendar? That's not a complaint - try Thunderbird with the Lightning add-on. If that doesn't do what you need, look for another option - there are probably hundreds. Maybe you want something web-based? There are a bunch of those.

Another option would be to take e.g the cost of one license for a mid-sized MS exchange server and split it into bounties for the features you want - you'd probably have your features in a couple of days. $10k would buy A LOT of open-source development. And the rest of the world gets your features too, for free! Compared with the cost of Windows licenses it's small potatoes, and it's a community service. It's win-win for everybody. Except MS.

Define "Troll".

What you might call a Troll comment, I might consider an extremely insightful and positive contribution to human society.

If I put up an inflammmatory post on an astrology forum telling people that they're idiots for believing in astrology - a position borne out by science and IMHO entirely accurate - am I trolling, or trying to enlighten people?

Is it different if I "Troll" in the same way on an anti-abortion forum?
What if it's the westboro baptist church's website I'm "trolling"? What about the KKK or NAMBLA? At what point does trolling become noble?

How are you going to do away with the "Trolls" and maintain an open discussion where unpopular but correct points can be raised? I smell censorship.

So to answer your question, no - I wouldn't pay to read the same three safe opinions regurgitated over and over again.

If you feed trolls, you're an idiot. But to try to silence them would be even stupider.

What?
When?
Where?

Or did you mean "innovation" in the traditional microsoft sense ("borrowing" ideas)?

I'm still yet to see a single example of Microsoft innovating, ever. But then I stopped paying attention to what they were doing nearly 10 years ago now, so maybe I'm wrong.

I simply won't buy a phone without any real input methods - I drank that koolaid once and I'm not feeling particularly masochistic - I spent a year trying to type on a touchscreen, and I'd rather have my face torn off by ravenous wolves than try it again. Haptic feedback is essential as far as I'm concerned. There are the other usability issues, like a system which assumes that I didn't mean to type what I typed, but for me it's the sense of touch which makes all the difference. Your can feel the edge of a button and tell you when your finger is improperly positioned without looking at it. you know when it has been pressed because you feel it press down. And there are more than 26 buttons - ever tried to cat ~/file.sql.gz | pv | ssh user@host "gunzip | mysql db_name" on a touchscreen? You'll wish you had a gun.

At the moment I'm using a shitty nokia because I needed a new phone immediately and that was the only one in the entire shopping centre with actual buttons.

If my choice next time is a phone with touchscreen only or no phone at all, it'll be a tough decision - no phone at all has its advantages.

I blame Tom Cruise - this notion that touchscreens aren't a horrible idea all started with Minority Report.

There's your problem right there: you expect people who are demonstrably untrustworthy to do the right thing.

One thing that I can say is that if you're running a modern distro you'll likely run into problems with Unreal Tournament's sound support - it only supports OSS, and it expects that /dev/dsp exists.

On my Ubuntu 12.04 box, I have to use padsp when launching UT to get any audio, and when I do use padsp I get a ~500ms delay on the audio - it's unplayable. A real pity.

I think that this could probably be fixed by ripping out pulseaudio and installing the real OSS, but I don't know for sure and didn't want to get that drastic on my everyday machine. Also, you might find that the UT binary has old OSS libs compiled in statically, so it might not work even then.

I'd be really interested to hear anybody's solutions to this dilemma - I miss UT!

I was against this whole surveilance state thing until you pointed out that it could be used to find freaky girls...