If you're going to split hairs on what constitutes Slashdot-worthy science, then how about we post about all the newest Botox technologies while we're at it?

What's wrong with Slashdot these days? Are we just going to keep putting every marijuana-related story on the website now? Give me a fucking break. This has absolutely nothing to do with technology.

Take your drug garbage to Gawker where it belongs.

There's a big difference between being a hobbyist developer for an old platform and maintaining a ported operating system for it. It's time to let it go, folks. I have quite a bit of nostalgia for my old 8088, but it doesn't mean I'm going to put weeks or months of my life into writing code for it anymore. There's quite a lot of low-power modern architectures out there that a person could spend their time porting software to instead.

I guess I'm going to be asked to fix a lot more lawn equipment soon.

How are we saving the environment when we're destroying so much equipment in the process?

I'm sure this will work great, since all of the people who do these kinds of thing are very social people who love telling others what they're about to do, and in detailed ways that will trigger a detection.

And yet Bing still isn't the most popular search engine, despite how many times Hawaii Five-0 tries to demonstrate it to me.

Just because the people promoting a product think it's better doesn't mean it actually is.

No, the church example was a perfect comparison. Usually people a) already tithe to a specific church, b) don't go to the kind of church you're promoting, or c) don't go to church at all. So a pamphlet for a church rarely brings in any new people. It's the same with operating systems. More so, actually. If you use OSX or Windows, you're not going to just suddenly start using Linux because some guy handed you a CD. For all they know, the CD contains malware, even. People like what they're used to, and most don't have the technical confidence to even begin installing a completely new OS. These are the kinds of people who take their computers to Best Buy when something goes wrong. They're the last people who need to be running Linux to begin with.

Besides, what if Microsoft went and handed out free DVDs of a Starter Edition of Windows at a GNU event? Or at an Apple store? The people belonging to those respective OS groups would be pissed. Not to mention, they're not exactly going to convert many people to begin with. So GNU shouldn't do something that would put them into a hypocritical position if their competition did the same thing to them.

They're getting desperate. This is like a church handing out pamphlets outside of a movie theater or arcade. It'll all go in the garbage, and end up being a waste of time and resources.

The dropping of a near-30-year-old platform would normally be uneventful in most any other situation, especially given that the 386 simply lacks too many features to bother maintaining compatibility (to which I won't even apply nostalgia, because all of mine is attached to a 4.77mhz 8088 with CGA graphics, which certainly can't run Linux). Yet when it comes to the open-source world, we still always end up with bickering from a group of people who think they know better than the main developer of a project, who would propose wasting resources to either keep this compatibility, or actually assemble a team to fork the kernel and maintain support themselves. And this isn't referring to the people simply joking about the idea of doing it.

I imagine that if you could calculate all of the man hours of programming that went into these kinds of people forking every project imaginable, and thinking they can do better (which is normally not the case), that you could have written an entirely new OS with a full application suite by now.

There's a difference between "truth" and "attention-seeking tactless public outbursts." There's quite a few organizations and professionals out there who will deliver the former, where as RMS only delivers the latter. Censorship is not an issue, because anyone can still go to his website if they want to see the ramblings of a delusional man, much the same as one can find websites of all the truthers and birthers elsewhere if that's what they're after.

When you grow up and realize what the real world is like, you'll quickly realize that information can in fact be owned, and that it's important for this to occur for numerous reasons which you apparently fail to grasp. No amount of pseudo-techno-philosophy you choose to fill your head with will change how the world works, nor will it stop you from going to jail if you suddenly decide something belongs to you which doesn't.

Thinking you're more enlightened than the rest of society despite an overwhelming majority of them disagreeing with you is usually the first sign of a delusional mind. It's common in those who feel they should be able to have what other people possess, as a matter of fact.

Richard Stallman has been childish since the day Symbolics told him he couldn't have their source code anymore, to which he set out on an infantile mission of revenge by cloning their software to a tee to give away for free (which today would put him in a lot of trouble), not to mention threatened to blow up their building (which would get you into a whole different kind of trouble in post-911 America). These days, he simply revises the GPL whenever a company (like Tivo) sends him into one of his rages.

Can the tech media please stop posting RMS stories? Like with any other child acting out, you're only encouraging him.

There's a difference between monopolization and making something worth using. In case you forgot, alternative web browsers of the time were absolute crap, all the way into the early 2000s. Netscape (while alive) was awful, both interface and rendering-wise, not making any significant strides to improve for half a decade. Remember resizing the window and the whole damn page reloading? Yeah. And while Opera was actually pretty decent, it went from being a pay product to an ad-supported one, neither of which case particularly attracted users. A web browser was as important as a file browser by that point, and suggesting people pay for it, or go to the trouble of obtaining a 3rd-party one as ugly and clunky as Netscape, just to avoid using a conveniently provided IE, is ridiculous.

Standards support was relatively bad across all the browsers at the time anyway, so none of them are particularly to blame for how web developers did their jobs. If Netscape had become dominant, we would have had an entirely different mess. Developers supported IE predominantly not only because it was included with Windows, but also because it was the only browser with any chance of developing any marketshare in that environment. Anyone looking at the future of the web only saw IE, and that was in fact the case for many years. Appeasing the less than 2% of people who didn't use it was not only a waste of time, but a waste of potential capability for the website.

The websites you designed sound to be very open in terms of possibility of design, for banks and companies mostly displaying text. It was certainly possible for you to design a website that would get by for everyone regardless of browser. I worked on a website that was very media-based, everything had to be perfect down to the pixel without risking looking sloppy. That left either making the whole website in Flash, which I refused to do, or making choices on the website working based on the demographic who would be using it.

These days, things are different. I design a website to work in every browser. There's been no excuse to not do this over the last several years, because the workarounds to maintain compatibility have been minimal. So when Microsoft makes a complaint about something Webkit is doing, we shouldn't be pointing the finger and calling hypocrite. We should be listening to them, before we end up with the same situation we had ten years ago, when standards were lagging just as far behind then as they are now.

Funny how my post is flagged as a troll for stating an unequivocal fact. Such is Slashdot.

What some people saw as Microsoft trying to monopolize the web, the rest of us saw as them finding solutions to problems that nobody else offered.

The DirectX filter I mentioned? That was the only way to rotate web page content for a decade. And that was just the tip of the iceberg of its capabilities.