Actually it's a struggle to think of any significant Microsoft product that hasn't won out by being more attractive to customers than the alternatives.

Xbox is probably the closest they've ever been to being genuinely competitive. Beyond that it's all monopoly or failure.

Clearly "free" means diddly squat to customers.

How can it? They buy a PC it comes with Windows. It's already factored in and can't be factored out. Not without a significant amount of effort anyway. It's simpler and usually no more expensive to just pay the fucking Windows Tax, wipe, and reload with your OS of choice. MS still gets the sale in most cases even if you don't use their OS.

That's the point of a Monopoly. The consumer doesn't have a choice. They practically can't chose free even if it does mean something to them.

Kernel drivers are not userspace.

That's true of any decent compiler targeting x86-64 since all x86-64 processors include SSE2 support. One of the nice things about targeting x86-64 is that you get a nice feature set that you don't have to detect support for at runtime and maintain a multiplicity of code paths to take advantage of features. If you know a feature will be there, it reduces complexity both in source and the compiled output.

I'd like to hear more here, I mean.

I read somewhere a while back that KDE was going to try to reduce the duplication of effort between KDE and Qt and rely more on Qt. I don't know where they're at with this but I'd like to here more.

That's true of any product release by any company. The releaser is always going to make the claim that it's better than before. It's up to you, the consumer, to look at the product and make a decision. If you want to make an informed decision you'll probably need to look at both what its promoters and its detractors have to say about it. This article is obviously about the promotion side of the product. You may find some detractors in the comments but so far they're doing a piss poor job. You'll have to try Google.

You should probably not click on articles that are obviously (from the subject line even) intended to promote a new version. They're going to upset you because they are by nature somewhat one sided. For the rest of us, that's not a major point of contention because we know who's point of view it's from and that we'll have to do some more looking if we want to be wholly informed.

Now sit down and shut up. People will think you're more intelligent that way.

If they would have said "hacker" there would have been another debate about if that word were used correctly. Neither debate matters because everyone but the stupid pendant gallery understood what was meant and that language is a mailable medium that relies heavily on context.

Also, the stereotyping certainly doesn't make your argument stronger. It simply makes you look like a clueless outsider that gets his bearings from Hollywood and Internet memes.

The only reason one needs a compelling argument in the first place is because it's hard to do on Windows. On other platforms, "because it's there" was compelling enough to make it happen for not just Firefox but thousands of other applications big and small. It's not so much that there was a good reason to do so; it was that there wasn't really a good reason not to.

Actually back in the day there were a few good reason to go 64-bit. You got things like SSE turned on in compiled code if you went 64-bit. Many of the 32-bit distributions were still being built for i386 compatibility and as such weren't compiled with such niceties. Now days everyone is targeting at least i686 processors in their 32-bit distributions so it's not as big of a feature gap.

If you're gonna build a WYSIWYG interface with all the capabilities of the normal interface, it'll probably end up more complicated than the normal interface.

Sure, but you don't have to incorporate every feature if you're targeting the novice like Wikipedia team is.

Oh come on now. I thought it worked just fine.

MS Exec: Should we get Skype?
Dylan Hunt: Lets bring it!
MS Exec: Pwnt!

They whined about not having the option to do more. The trouble now is that people feel like it's mandatory to do more than before. So they switched from not having the option of how many quests you do to not having the option of how many quests you do. People don't like feeling that they absolutely have to do X amount of quests a day if they want to stay relevant. Esp on a week day. People like the option to do more on their days off but that doesn't mean they want to always do more in their after-work time. So it's not about the upper hard cap it's about the softer minimum cap being too high for those that work for a living.

In previous expansions dailies didn't unlock content and gear to the extent they they do now.

Having said that, I don't feel it's that bad especially if you take advantage of the "massively online" part of WoW and group up. Dailies really do go fast in a group.

It's worse still if you play as a tank or healer. DPS players can at least blitz through individual enemies quite quickly. As a tank or healer, the health pools for enemies take so long to chip down that the daily quest grind can actually take hours. Plus the daily quests are tied into the valor point system, so unless you are a hardcore raider, you're more or less tied into continuing with daily quest grinds even after you max out your reputation. JOY!

Two things. 1. Blizzard has made it easier than ever to respec. 2. MASSIVELY ONLINE. Get some buddies to run with. If you don't have any in your guild or whatever, spam general chat as you are picking up the quests. "Heals LFG daily quests" I get invited almost instantly on pvp realms. The DPSers never have to stop... if there's PvP it results in major pwnage and fun. You may even make a new friend.

I know there's a tenancy to want to solo all the content you can... but it's not necessary. You don't have to compete for the same quest mobs. Blizzard even reworked the "loot x many items" quests so that you don't have to collect x many for each player in the group. If a creature drops a quest item, everyone in the group can loot it. That is to say, adding more to the group doesn't increase the amount you need to kill.

If we can queue for random BGs, random dungeons, random raids, random scenarios... don't you think you have acquired at least some tolerance for having random players in your party? If someone is in the area doing the same thing as you... just send an invite. Makes it quick easy and encourages your faction to work together. "Boring and repetitive daily quests" everyone says... group up and it you won't find them so boring... even if you do you'll find that you move through them fast enough that it's not such a big deal.

Rocco: [...] We could kill *everyone.*
Murphy: So what do you think?
Connor: I'm strangely comfortable with it.

Go back and read your post. You were talking about how different versions of "Apache, MySQL, PHP" would make a difference. Routers might be running different software than desktops but that doesn't seem to be what you were talking about. You were talking about running different versions of the same software.