Dash is the default in Ubuntu and Debian but that's about it. I don't know of any other major Linux distribution that defaults to it. Clang still has a long way to go. It still cannot compile some programs that GCC can and the binaries made from GCC tend to be faster even if the build process is not.

XP wasn't a substantial update of 2000. It couldn't have been. It came out shortly after Win2K. There is a reason Win2000 is NT 5 and WinXP is NT 5.1. Most of the changes were to the interface and the addition of some ease-of-use features. The underlying system is very similar.

Up until recently (Vista/Ribbon interface) and arguably even now, Microsoft has been able to provide more consistency than a lot of these Linux distros.

This has been a common meme for quite some time now but I find it completely illegitimate. Microsoft's interface has changed over time and they seem to have no interface guidelines, at least ones they stick to. On top of that almost all third party applications look and behave differently. Compare that with something like Gnome on Linux which has interface guidelines that are much more strictly enforced and many applications outside of Gnome core adhere to these guidelines and use the same toolkit. The more applications you install on a Microsoft operating system the less consistency you will have. Gnome provides many more applications than Microsoft and even more third party apps follow Gnome's HIG.

I don't really have too much time to mess around with my computer anymore but I'm using Gentoo and have very little issues. I don't think Ubuntu is the cure-all people seem to think it is. The Linux ecosystem has come a long way and is much easier to use in general than in the past. My installation is 4 years old and I'm not quite sure what the installation process is like now for Gentoo so I cannot comment on that but my point is that general usability is so much better for ALL distributions that even a source based distro is relatively easy to use and maintain. The most time consuming part of maintaining my system is reading the new options when I "make oldconfig" for a new kernel. Using a source distro is still not for everyone but it's amazing how simple it has become. I would be surprised to learn that any of the binary distributions would be difficult for someone to figure out.

I get your point but IE9 isn't required to get HTML5 on XP. There are other browsers out there that support HTML5 that also run on XP. There is even an HTML5 capable browser that runs on Win 9x and the large share that Firefox now garners is proof that people will swtich if there is a good reason to.

The only company that consistently does exactly what it says and and continues to blow people away with the quality of their products is Apple.

Are you serious? I don't count failing motherboards, antenna's that don't work, and insecure operating systems as "quality".

Now while at the same time Steve Jobs will get on stage and pull the future right out of his back pocket and "Oh, by the way, you can pick up one of these Monday morning."

You've got to be kidding me. The only thing Jobs does well is make a product that a trained monkey could use in a slim, easy on the eyes package. What exactly is revolutionary about any of the products Apple has produced?

It was very much a social networking platform. You had groups of people in your network that you could share things like media with. The benefit over other social networking systems was that it had very fine grained control of who had access to what. It wasn't setup like a facebook to be strictly a social networking site so I could see where it could seem like something else entirely but it definitely had all the elements of a social networking site. It just worked completely differently and had many more capabilities like real time collaboration that made it more than just a social networking site. Unfortunately it was very unintuitive and buggy as hell as people have already mentioned.

Isn't the term "true religion" an oxymoron?

Or maybe there is a difference between systemic voter intimidation and a couple of nutjobs standing in front of a polling place. You do realize the idiot with the baton was charged with a crime right? I see race-baiting as a tactic is alive as ever with the right wing.

I know this is a troll but what they hey it's Slashdot!

Since when is being a Harvard educated lawyer and professor, not to mention US Senator not a qualification? Which Presidents in recent memory have NOT read from a teleprompter? Were you born January 20, 2009? I know it seemed like Bush was just saying random shit at the podium but that's just because he has a hard time reading.

I personally believe that most, but not all, gay people choose that lifestyle.

You must have a vivid memory of the day you CHOSE to be attracted to people of the opposite sex. Personally I don't have such a recollection. I never even considered someone of the same sex. I didn't sit down and weigh the pros and cons. I just knew that I liked boobs. Considering your sexuality was purely a choice I wonder why you chose to be straight? What was the deciding factor? Do you ever have urges to have homosexual sex that you are forced to resist? Do you have NO urges but force yourself follow your decision of heterosexuality (as opposed to asexuality)?

After all, they are the only ones on any list of enumerated "protected classes" that have never been denied the right to vote.

Voting isn't the only right we should be worried about protecting for minority groups.

I suspect someone's jiggering with the money supply, or just gambling that the market is inherently "Bullish".

There's no such thing as an inherently bullish market, fools.

So you would rather all investment be based purely on the availibility of gold? It makes no sense in today's economy for something like the supply of gold to dictate lending. The whole reason we got off the gold standard is because the economy can only grow in fits and starts when you have to rely on a supply of gold to back up the money. There is nothing suspect about the growth of the economy outstripping the gold supply. It happened on its own and it is THE reason we had to deal with deflation before we dumped the gold standard. Raw materials and labor can be readily available even the when the supply of gold is not because the two are completely unrelated.

Reagan, despite his onset of senility and subsequent micro-management by handlers, was right.

If Reagan was right why did he triple the national debt? If he was right why did he have to raise taxes after cutting them?

Reagan took down the USSR! Suck it up!

Give me a break! the USSR was self destructing with or without Reagan. Reagan had the chance to eliminate nukes but he preferred to have a useless, untested, and unviable system (STAR WARS) stay on the table. This is getting off track though. What does this have to do with monetary policy and the gold standard? I don't care if Reagan cured cancer, he was still awful for the economy and the debt.