And what do you impersonally think?

This isn't such an annoying issue anymore. Most BIOSes these days have a built-in flasher, and can read the BIOS from any local FAT filesystem, including a USB drive. If not, you can format a USB flash drive so that it appears as a floppy and boots DOS normally. You definately don't need a real floppy or CDROM drive anymore (praise Vishnu).

Shame about the God talk. Wonder what they'll think of that in a thousand years.

You login, which you don't actually have to do anymore because it was too complicated, and you're presented with a fullscreen dialog box that says:

"You are too fucking stupid to use this computer. You don't understand files and folders and things. Click OK to shutdown your computer. Your computer will shutdown in 28 seconds anyway, because you're probably too stupid to work the mouse. That's the thing underneath your hand. What? That's the thing attached to your arm. Ah, fuck it. 20 seconds."

That's pretty much the entire GNOME 3.0 experience. The dialog box has been in development for the last 18 months, but obviously there's still a lot of usability testing left to do, mostly by Redhat and Canonical "engineers". The OK button logic was originally written in C but they've redone that in C# running on Mono, and Miguel de Icaza is already calling the work "superb".

Meanwhile, the KDE people have been busy readying the next batch of widgets that you will never add to your exciting K desktop experience.

Future plans for GNOME involve reducing the 3.0 dialog box down to a single pixel, then translating the status of that pixel into the power LED on your computer. This will remove the need for a display, further simplying the desktop experience and reducing enterprise costs. KDE plans to turn its entire desktop into a widget of itself, allowing you to remove it entirely with a single right-click.

Yes, my friends: the future of the Linux desktop is no more fucking Linux desktop. What a relief.

Perhaps not, but your fuming and rhetorical method of delivery certainly does.

No, that doesn't make him a troll at all. "a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant, or off-topic messages in an online community" -- wikipedia. Not liking someone's tone or method of delivery doesn't make them a troll.

There should always be sound mixing, with no ifs, buts, exceptions, or configuration required. It should be there by default for anything that tries to play sound

There is. ALSA's dmix has been enabled by default for a long time, years. Have you even tried Linux? I can't remember the last time I had to 'configure' sound on Linux. Insert sound card, mixer shows up, play sounds. From the ALSA wiki: "NOTE: For ALSA 1.0.9rc2 and higher you don't need to setup dmix. Dmix is enabled as default for soundcards which don't support hw mixing."

The result of this nonsense is that crap like pulseaudio continues to exist

No. Sadly, pulseaudio exists simply to copy Vista. Vista introduced per-application mixers and apparently this is a Cool New Feature that everybody supposedly wants, even if it's a shitty implementation that slows down what was a perfectly working sound system.

Is there any document out there which explains why /dev/dsp doesn't get mixing with ALSA?

If you bothered to try, you'd find that it does.

This is why you use mplayer.

mplayer is by far the fastest and best player. Instant seeking and low CPU draw even on my old P3 866. This is on Linux though, it seems Windows users have to f**k about with codec packs or VLC.

I'm a recent (a few years back) convert

lol. I hope she's worth it.

"Chi so ha, bing do wa!"

Translation: I use Google.

Take Amarok, for example. That situation practically begs for a fork

What's the situation with Amarok?

Also happens on trans-ocean flights relatively often

Relative to the planets aligning, yes.

The fungus took my baby!

Are you actually old enough to remember that story, or are you just regurgitating what you've heard somewhere?

It always amazes me how popular that reference is. Most recently I heard it in the movie "Tropic Thunder".

People who have actually sat down and compared both libraries, and went with GTK.

I'd love to hear the reasons.

You'd be nuts to use GTK for any new project. I fear it'll be propped up for quite a while to come, though, mainly by Redhat.

Seriously.

Huh, no shit? I thought you were joking. Seriously.

He's already being courted by advertizers like this, and is apparantly willing to work with them - he can't be trusted.

That's taking it a bit far. The guy doesn't even accept donations for his work, so I don't think we need to worry about his motivation. He knows he's treading a very fine line between keeping his users and pushing them to a fork; the recent NoScript issue shows what happens to authors who stretch it too far.

My take is that he just wants the attention. When the NoScript issue arose, Palant suddenly found himself with a soapbox to stand on. Maybe he's milking the attention a little, wants to raise his profile - no big deal. Maybe he wants to become a fully fledged Mozilla developer, rather than an extension author on the 'outside'? Maybe he'd like to see ABP's functionality included in Firefox by default? That would mean reducing its power somewhat.

I dunno, but this isn't a big deal right now.

Why the hell do I need a diagram of my computer, my house, and the globe to explain how my computer is connected to my network and the internet?

Because, as a busy mother, you don't have time to figure out the mumbo-jumbo of networking. Microsoft's Windows Vista Home Premium edition is designed to streamline your online experience, helping you get your work done faster, easier, and more secure than ever.