I have an even better question for ID'ers. What does THIS say about their so-called intelligent designer?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_plant

Were we created by Beavis and Butthead? I can imagine the scene on Day 3 or thereabouts of the Creation:

[God] Huh-huhuhuh-huh-huh. Hey, Lucifer. Check this out, dude. *zap!* It's a schlong cactus.
[Lucifer] Heh-m-heh-heh. Yeah, that's pretty cool, m-heheh. Schlong. ...what's a schlong?

Disregarding that the 90% figure is dubious at best outside of the U.S.... Disregarding that Linux supports ARM, MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, x86_64, S/390, SPARC, PowerPC, VAC, and a bunch of others that Windows does not... Disregarding both of those points, it's still nearly impossible I am incorrect on this point.

Try getting support for your ISA modem on Windows. Not the Windows that came with the hardware, mind; the most recent Windows. Try getting drivers for Windows Vista on a motherboard made by a company that went out of business a decade ago. Try getting bugfix drivers for your Voodoo 3 these days. Hell, just try putting the newest Windows on computers that are more than four years old (something "casual" users are very good at) and you'll probably run into trouble. While it's nice to say "at least Windows support" doing so implies that every Windows is the same and that the support base is ever-increasing. Reality isn't that kind: Hardware generally has drivers in the Linux kernel that stay there more or less forever and drivers for the current generation of Windows at the time.

I'm not trying to beat you down or anything; it's just one thing to relate your experience casually and quite another to make sweeping generalisations that you're not qualified to make. :)

Well, why not?

What do you mean? It already has...

I'd just like to point out that this is patently false.

Screw that, I want sudo!

Wow, you get 1-up? (that's the green mushroom, right?) Sarcasm aside, in Columbus (OH), despite sitting on a huge fibre ring and having the OSC in our back yard, the best you can get is a 15/0.750 connection with such poor latency I've waited three seconds for single keystrokes to transfer over SSH. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Damn, I'm out of mod points...

Sure it will. Have you not seen latencies through the midwest lately?

At least you have a wizard there....

I'd just like to point out the absurdity of how outraged people get when the government spends a huge sum of money on them for a change.

Because all KDE 3.5 tarballs have had their contents replaced with videos of the Aaron Seigo imitating Rick Astley, right?

All sarcasm aside, what's with this big push people have to move to KDE 4.X? 3.X is no longer seeing major development, yes, but does it need to? I find the 3.5.10 maintenance release from August is plenty adequate while I wait for things to stabilize a bit. I waited about nine releases to switch to a 2.6 kernel, too, but switch I did. Stagnation is a dangerous road in technology, after all; you need look no further than Kodak for an example.

Sure, it's been a disaster for a good 50% of PR that I've seen, but I think things got overwhelming and they underestimated their timeframe. Consider the scope: "Let's discard everything we've spent the last five years working on and break all of our APIs and rebuild our desktop paradigm from the ground up." Would you have had the courage to make that call? To go along with it and spend your doubtlessly-limited time resource on a project of this magnitude? How do you estimate something like that when you have no idea if people are even going to buy into the ideas? So just this once, I will forgive the classically-clockwork-like KDE project for having a Knuth-level* estimation failure

I wonder if they could have done something like what the Python folks are doing? A 3.6 migration branch that backports some things and the 4.X development head. I think I saw talk of it at some point, but I guess it proved to be problematic (it's a bitch when no one understands how the build system works); at least it's improving rapidly.

*See: TeX. Sorry, Don!

The MS site saying that Windows has a lower TCO than Linux? Seriously? I say mod parent funny.

Indeed. I sort of actually started paying attention when I caught, "The ninja was flanked by a pair of Nazi frogmen...."

When people say they like Windows, what are they actually comparing against?

Yes, Linux is gaining some amount of traction with the techno-hipster crowd, but that's still a relatively small slice of the sum total of all computer users across history capable of forming opinions. There are people that have walked into an Apple store and played with one of the locked away, overheating iMacs with mushy keyboards and single-button mice for a few minutes without getting a feel for how the system is actually used. Students that used old Unix shell accounts and IT guys that work overtime fighting the server over a serial terminal with sh. People that remember DOS or their old SGI Irix workstations. People bitten badly by the BeOS and OS/2 generation and people that spend their days working with the arcana of the AS/400 and its legacy.

And then, there are people that have never done any of this and have no perspective by which to judge in the first place.

I suspect that a great many of people that are purpourted to "like" Windows fall into this latter category. (I suspect also that a lot of people will consider commenting at this point with a, "Well, I..."-type response before realizing that, as readers of slashdot, they are not even remotely to whom I refer :).

There are undoubtedly people that like Windows more than any other platform for various reasons ("Games" seems the most-often cited, to be sure), but that crucial set of statistics that outline how many have ever heard of, seen, or used another platform with any amount of rigour is sadly not accounted for in any of what I have seen. Until that point, we can only look at it with mass generalizations: there are likewise a lot of people that commonly use Linux or MacOS on their desktops and laptops and a lot that say they would switch from Windows to something else were it not for some piece of third-party software (engineers give me this often. A lot of the high-powered CAD stuff is shockingly platform restricted and doesn't run in Wine at all).