First I glance at the title. If it immediately registers as something completely irrelevant to my existence (e.g., anything that sounds like court news or politics), I proceed to the next one. Otherwise, I start reading the summary. If the summary tells me more than I actually needed to know (which is typical when the article is genuinely IT-related but concerns software I do not use, administer, or care about), I proceed to the next headline. If the summary leaves me wanting to know more, I read either the article or the comments, depending on the nature of the subject matter and whether I imagine the source would be more knowledgeable about it than the average Slashdot commenter. (All sources are not equal in this regard.)

> Almost everybody simply regurgitates what they see on
> cable TV, or talks about their offspring.

That would actually be an improvement (though, admittedly, a small one). Around here, 92.7% of all conversation, among people over age 30 or so, consists of complaining about medical problems.

I've actually come to the conclusion that children are more interesting to talk to than adults. I don't remember that being the case when I was younger.

Indeed.

My stats (from the website of the public library where I work) for the entire second quarter show Eight lagging a couple percentage points behind Vista, but since it's increasing, that may no longer be the case at the end of the quarter. (The traffic volume on our site doesn't, in my judgment, really support looking at very much less than a quarter at a time, so I generally don't.)

But yeah, what you said: Vista has been on the decline here since early 2010. It peaked at about 25% usage share (a little more than half of what the then-leading version, XP, had) sometime in the second quarter of that year. 25%, incidentally, is several (perhaps five) times as much share as Eight has now.

It's also worth pointing out that Vista has less than two-thirds the usage share that XP has, and XP has less than one-third the usage share that Seven has. (Again, that's all for the whole second quarter.) Eight has roughly a tenth as much share as Seven.

Also, Eight is in a dead heat with Snow Leopard (Eight comes out slightly ahead of Snow Leopard on my numbers, but statistically, at our level of traffic, it's a wash) and has about twice as much usage share as Jelly Bean.

I suspect Eight adoption will pick up a bit when 8.1 comes out. In a couple more years, it may even manage to attain a higher usage share than XP.

Eight does not, however, appear to be much threat to Seven yet.

> > fly Berlin - Frankfurt - Huston - Austin, with the train
> > solution I get the additional ride to the center of town
>
> ...at which point you find out that there's no way to
> get anywhere else without waiting ... for a bus,

According to Google maps, there are four car-rental places within easy walking distance of downtown Austin. (I used the corner of Fifth and Congress as "center of town", on the grounds that that's where Google plonks me if I just search for Austin, TX. Never having visited Texas personally, I didn't know of a better estimate for where the "center of town" is, so I just used Google's.)

Of course, there are more like a dozen car rental places within walking distance of the Austin-Bergstrom airport terminal, which sort of makes the proposed train thing look like a solution in search of a problem, but let's not quibble over details, eh?

Humans can also hear the difference, if they're listening to actual *music* (as opposed to all that wretched noise that's been so popular with the kids for the last few decades).

If you're listening to the latest bondage-metal mashup of Bieber and dubstep, MP3 won't make it any worse. OTOH, if you've got a clean recording of e.g. Feltsman's BWV 1080 (or Munchinger's for that matter), MP3 compression will do rather horrible things to it. It's possible to set the compression-to-quality ratio so that this isn't very noticeable, but the file will then be larger than MP3 users generally want, and you might as well just go lossless.

Similarly, if you compare JPEG to PNG using a photo of a pile of raisins on black velvet, you won't notice much difference. If you compare using an image that contains a lot of clearly visible patterns, such as straight lines (e.g., because it has text in it), the difference immediately becomes rather obvious.

I tried being a Wizard, but if I used my starting spell of force bolt very much I always ended up fainting from hunger and getting killed by low-level monsters (jackals and whatnot) before reaching Sokoban. The people on rgrn say you're supposed to be able to use it without having that happen, something about hungerless casting, but it never seems to work for me.

I find that I actually do better playing as a Tourist, because then I at least start with a stack of +2 darts. They break eventually, but hopefully by then I've picked up a half a dozen assorted daggers and maybe even a decent melee weapon (by which I do NOT mean a quarterstaff, thank you very much).

I've also had success as a Valkerie, and currently I'm a Samurai (with the square marked already, so the chances of meeting with success are becoming quite good).

I got a Knight as far as the Castle once, but then I made the mistake of standing too near the drawbridge, and something inside zapped a wand of striking, which hit the bridge, and it was curtains for me.

The main think keeping me off Windows at this point is the complete and utter lack of any meaningful ability to customize how the GUI works. I mean, you can change the colors and, umm, pin different stuff to the taskbar, so I guess that's something. But it's not enough. I like being able to change how my OS actually *behaves*, in addition to the appearance.

Oh, and also panel applets, and drawers.

On the plus side, I do wish the clock panel applet in my current OS had certain of the options that the Windows one has. The ability to show both local time and another timezone (or, usefully, UTC) in the hover tooltip, for instance, would be nice to have. So Windows does get some things right.

But like I said, it's not enough to bring me over.

That's an interesting idea. I'd kinda like to follow it, but my Hebrew isn't *quite* that good. Okay, my Hebrew is nowhere near that good. I still need a lexicon just to read basic gradeschool-level stuff, *with* the vowel pointings, and without vowel pointings I am completely lost.

> Metro should have been put inside of Explorer, as an optional component

Actually, I think Metro on the Desktop would have been better received if implemented as a thing you can bring up in front of the rest of your UI, when you want it, sort of like the Dashboard in OS X.

As it stands, it was received even less enthusiastically than the horribly mishandled Vista Gadget Sidebar. Seven moved the non-resizable Gadgets to the desktop and eliminated the sidebar; I don't know if Eight even supports the gadgets at all. If you want to see how the sidebar *should* have been implemented, look at Gnome's panel applets.

> Dubbed dialog is invariably out of lip sync.

Well, yes, but *all* movie dialog is out of sync these days. It has been ever since the demise of VHS. Have you *ever* watched a DVD and had the sound track be fully in sync with the video?

> worse, it is low budget, performed by low quality
> actors under the direction of a low quality director
> without any supervision from the original direction

That's not inherent to dubbing. Insofar as it's true (which, admittedly, is frequently the case), it's a consequence of the fact that the market for the dubbed version is generally much smaller than the original market for which the piece was filmed.

More to the point, while some tribes (e.g., the Sioux) quickly incorporated horses into their culture, others did not. As far as I know, the Navajo are in the latter category (perhaps partly because of where they lived). I think their culture may even have embraced *cars* before horses.

I think you just described Perl6.

At the current rate things are going, it may be just about finished in time for your grandchildren to use it.

> ReactOS is a project to build a free,
> open-source clone of Windows,

I think you just answered your own question.

> Why on earth hasn't this received more
> support from the OSS community?

Most of us in the open-source community don't *like* Windows all that much. We aren't particularly interested in a clone of it, no matter how it's licensed. I find myself vaguely curious about whether ReactOS will ever reach a point of actually being a meaningful competitor for Windows, but this is the same kind of purely theoretical curiosity that leads me to wonder whether stovepipe hats might someday make a fashion comeback. It's a purely abstract curiosity. I don't actually *care*.

> Linux is fine for servers, portable devices, and
> embedded systems, but trying to stick it on the
> desktop is a foolish dream that has failed for
> over 10 years.

Whatever, dude.

Linux was *designed* for the desktop. The fact that it's good on servers and embedded systems is just a nice bonus. I've been using Linux on the desktop since the late nineties. My computer does what I want it to do, and the OS stays out of my way and lets me do whatever I'm doing, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of stupid hoops all the time. This is partly because I have my desktop significantly customized -- it wouldn't be so good on an out-of-the-box install; but said customization is *possible* because I'm using an inherently customizable system. Windows allows you to customize the color scheme and mouse pointers and stuff, but anything that would actually have a major impact on how the software operates, forget it.

Now, granted, a lot of people prefer Windows. But most of those people aren't open-source developers. This is not a coincidence. Windows was *designed* to appeal to people who are NOT computer geeks. That was kind of the whole point, actually: regular people wanted to type up papers and stuff but didn't want to learn technical stuff (e.g., the command line -- which is significantly simpler than programming but still overwhelmingly more technical than anything most Windows users will touch with a ten-foot pole). Windows was made for regular people.

But most programmers, it turns out, don't really think that way, and Windows tends not to appeal so much to most of them.

There are, of course, exceptions.

> I've never had a fresh water outage in my life, but there's always a first time.

This sort of depends where you live, I guess. Here in Galion, I would be fairly comfortable boiling river water and drinking it, in a pinch. We're within walking distance of the Mississippi/St.Lawrence divide. There's literally nothing upstream from here. Ipso facto, the only non-airborne pollution we really have to worry about is whatever happens here locally. And the prospect of a drought is pretty alien to this part of the country -- there would have to be some kind of *extremely major* climate change, such as would make all the "global warming" we've seen thus far look submicroscopic, for a lack of precipitation to be a serious problem for anyone but farmers.

> It would be cool to have some of the dried bulk grains and dried fruits

Only if you can count on having a decent source of potable water during your extended power outage or other disaster scenario. Otherwise stick with the canned stuff. It's got more water in it.