...which is absolutely meaningless in the real world. He has the knowledge and he has the skills. And gets paid for it. What do you do? Oh, right, you post on slashdot. Believe it or not, when it comes to software, an expert can be pretty much any age.

> value_added (719364)

THIS. I find it extremely unsettling how many people who have never been in a situation like this glibly spout "well, smart shopping will help them" and such. When you have $20 a week, in a nation where the purchase power of the dollar for food and basic living expenses is constantly dropping, this is a grim scenario. The above poster's comment on the hierarchy of foods is spot-on, as well.

I know because, while not quite badly off enough to qualify for food stamp, etc, I shop as if I am. My weekly grocery list tends to look like:
2x Dried pinto beans - $0.99 for 8 servings
2x Queso da papa cheese - $1.50 for 8 servings
2x Non-trans-fat peanut butter - $1.00 for 10 servings
1x Quaker Oats oatmeal cylinder - $4.50 for 20 servings, don't usually need this every week, so let's say $1.50 amortized over 3 weeks.
1x Small bottle of olive oil for cooking - $6.00, again amortized to $2.00 a week.
3x white ball onion - $2.50
1x off-brand OJ concentrate - $2.50
Which leaves $5.50 from that $20 for vegetables and fruit, and you're lucky if you get one serving of each a day. Invest it in tomato sauce and the cheapest frozen veg you can find for best results.

Imagine trying to eat like that all week, every week, forever. Plain oatmeal for breakfast, PB and cheese for lunch, and beans and cheese for dinner, with whatever fruit or veg you could afford. That's *all* you get, aside from what you can beg or dumpster-dive. If you deprive yourself even more, you may be able to afford some yeast and flour, so you can make some bread...IF you have time to.

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.