This is the worst possible advice. It's a presentation, not a seminar. There's nothing more annoying than some blowhard trying desparately to get the audience involved. Present what needs to be presented and be receptive to questions if, when, and as they come. But don't block by trying to dig for responses.

If it's open source and *doesn't* have a GUI, it's probably fantastic. My email, programming, backups, version control etc. is all open source and I wouldn't have it any other way.

But as soon as you add a GUI and plug in a monitor, the quality drops away and things start to get iffy. What happened with KDE4, for example, was unacceptable. You can't just dump everything and expect users to accomodate that.

And stability. A lot of open source apps are fantastic but they have rough edges - little bugs and issues. The way media managers like Rhythmbox and Amarok handle an iPod, for example: sometimes I get weird errors about mounting the iPod, or it doesn't behave properly when there's no free space left, and other little issues. They may not be show stoppers, but they're enough to give you a bad impression. The quality just isn't quite there.

And you know what the worst part is? This isn't getting any better. Open source GUIs are about the same quality now as they were a decade ago. Sure they're more capable, but all the rough edges are still there and don't seem to be going away. I've been using desktop Linux since Redhat 5.2 and I can honestly say the standards and general incompleteness, relative to the competition, are about the same today as they were back then.

I still use Linux on my desktop but I'm tempted to buy a Mac next time and use it as a front-end, while keeping all the 'real' stuff on a Linux box. But I don't want to manage two computers if I can help it. Ho hum.

Just be thankful they didn't come up with something completely rotten, like, I dunno, "Phenom".

These chips have some kind of AES acceleration, called AES-NI.

Are there any benchmarks of this? I use dm-crypt on Linux w/ AES-128 and the throughput is pretty low, about 60MB/sec tops, not as fast as the disk itself.

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.