Certainly better performance is a Good Thing, everything else being equal, and in some projects execution speed is vitally important. For a great deal of purposes, however, Ruby's speed is more than adequate. Its benefits easily outweigh the cost of irrelevantly being slower than some other languages in such cases.
Apparently, NL = The Netherlands, in case anyone else didn't know that...
I'm seriously confused as to why so many of you consider this woman stupid. Yes, the solutions to her problems are obvious to us, but that doesn't make them inherently obvious. I know many people who I consider quite intelligent who don't know what an operating system is -- not because they're stupid, but because to them, computers are just a tool. If you didn't know what an operating system is, you'd expect a new computer to just work, and to work like you're used to.
I think the real problems highlighted here are not the woman's intelligence, nor the functionality or usability of Ubuntu (or Linux in general). The problems are 1) Verizon for some reason has an installation CD that requires Windows, and 2) her online classes for some reason require MS Word.
The first problem is silly, because there's no good reason for it. Comcast is very easy to set up with any browser on any OS. You plug in your cable modem, connect it to any computer (any architecture that supports an ethernet card will do), fire up your browser, plug in some numbers, bam. No need for custom software.
The second problem is also silly, because with standardized file formats and several cross-platform, stable, open-source office suites that support them, it's ridiculous for a school to require students to use proprietary, expensive software.
In short, many of you are being judgmental assholes who don't even seem to understand the situation.
Since when is 4186 "more than triple" 1424?
I'm pretty sure (almost) everyone who knows what GTK is knows that. The only people that don't know it are those who use Windows or a Mac and have never heard of GTK, anyway.
In any case, what does that have to do with making a Qt version of the GIMP? If it's an idea with technical merits, I'm sure the GIMP developers would consider it, regardless of the history behind their current toolkit.
If you're going to link to xkcd, you should link to the page, not to the image. The mouseover text is usually half the fun.
I didn't RTFA, but what a lot of commenters seem to be missing is the concept of economy of scale. The great idea here seems to be that using "off the shelf", mass-produced car parts to create an incubator with equal functionality to that of a standard incubator saves a great deal of money. Plus, the car parts have been better tested and are apparently more reliable. So this is kind of like building a software system by combining lots of preexisting, well-tested components rather than custom designing everything in-house.
I think you mean that you couldn't care less, not that you could.
Sorry to be anal, but that's one error that's not going to catch on and become standard if I can help it.
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
