Of course it will be useless for you if you already have some understanding of the UNIX heritage. As with all metaphors, its value is for people who know very little about the topic, in that it helps them relating the topic to something which they're already familiar with.

For someone without a previous knowledge in the history of UNIX, the metaphor provides a mental map to navigate intuitively what was perceived as an impenetrable technical mess. It can provide the idea that there is a heritage of branching from a common origin, a sense of what are the main branches, their relative antiquity and importance.

Moreover, it's funny and light-hearted. Why does everything has to have a practical purpose?

Sort of. I wouldn't call it a lie but, as it's true that all modern applications (the only parts of the computer the user interacts with) depend on the operating system to work.

s/trail/trial/
s/know how an OS /know how an OS works /

Because it conveys the right message for the people hearing it. That's why MS used it -it's a very good definition for someone who doesn't program computers for a living. MS tried to derail the trail by dumbing down the tech details, which shouldn't have been done at the Court. This doesn't mean that hiding tech details is always wrong.

End users don't get any direct benefit from the OS- it's a tool for the developers, so users don't require any detail about it's inner working; they literally don't need to know how an OS in order to accomplish their goals when using the computer.

Users only interact with the shell, the package system and maybe the file system; and those do not strictly belong to the OS, but are just applications bundled with it. And those are precisely the parts described in TFA.

That definition is not intended to win trials here, nor to be used in any technical context. Their choice of words means that their target audience is not the stereotypical Slashdot crowd.

It implies that we can install this environment to our families, and still hope to use it ourselves. Some of us believe it's a good thing, that the people who think "the beige box is the hard drive" can use computers. But not many developers know how to make a computer that they can use; making software easy to use is much more difficult than most programmers realize.

They have a main webpage with a clean design, and they explain what they do and why anyone in the target audience should care, without falling prey to corporate-speak. That alone bests more than 90% of previous desktop environments, yet is the bare minimum than any user-facing project should have. Plus, the FAQ and About pages actually explain their motivations rather than a few obscure technical details.

That "operating system, a suite of software that makes your computer run" made me shed tears of joy.

I'd treat it the same as any other currency transaction. It's fairly well defined how to handle gains while playing Forex.

A Russian can import goods from China into the United States. They pay duties and other fees at the border of the United States as the goods enter the country; even if they intend to pay Americans to take the product.

The internet needs some kind of enforced border to ensure duties and other fees are paid on content as they arrive. The ads, in this case, would require payment in order to be presented to an Italian client. The "good" is being consumed by an Italian and taxes/fees should be paid when it crosses the border or by the local company regardless of where the purchaser or the manufacturer are located.

They'll notice the same way they find out about other hidden income. Bank activity and assets in your possession.

True, but kernel deficiencies cannot be fixed that way.

You're just describing human nature there, not an essential difference between science and religion. Most people doing science don't follow their assumptions to their ultimate philosophical consequences, and remain at a comfortable pragmatical ground.

Conversely, there are rational theologians (starting with scholasticism, which existed prior to the modern scientific method) that make all assumptions explicit - they just happen to use a different set of assumptions than positivism. This doesn't make them less rational, although it makes them less scientific.

That, sir, is the best comment in this whole thread. It's so rare to find a real True Neutral alignment this days...

Exactly. And most of the time, disproving their whole axiomatic framework through logic is simply impossible to do, as that framework is self-consistent.

Note that this is true for religious beliefs, but it's also true for the scientific method and rationality - their core assumptions are non-falsiable.

I change my belief. This is what a rational being does

In that case, that "rational being" thing must be a mythical creature. Most of the time, human beings create rational explanations that match their pre-existing beliefs and subsconscious decisions they've taken, based on the emotions they evoke; not the other way around.

The shorter way to say that is rationalization, and it has a biological basis that has been studied through magnetic resonance imaging. There are some beliefs that can be discredited by careful assessment of axiomatic frameworks, looking for inconsistencies in them, but certainly the scientific method does not apply to non-falsifiable ideas like core religious beliefs; if you apply logic to them, you only get more and more complex and convoluted scholastic theories.

*sigh*

So now "between and man and a woman" is now "men paired with women." Even you can see those aren't the same thing.

But read up on it. You'll find that there have been Western institutions of pairing a man with multiple women. There have been institutions of pairbonding of men (specifically monks). There have been institutions of spouse ownership. You only have to go back a short way to find that the "traditional marriage" is a fairly recent invention. Again, read Coontz (yes, I know you won't, but she has a hell of a lot more documentation than I'm going to post here).

And hey, if we're going for "tradition," why not go whole-hog? Let's bring in all of the possible traditions. Widows must marry their brothers-in-law. Adulterers must be killed. Anyone who disgraces the family honor must be stoned. These are marriage traditions that go back thousands of years too.