You sir deserve mod points.

Relevant

Stop talking shite. You obviously don't know what you're talking about, all disciplines of science are difficult and complex. If I so wished I could be just as dismissive and say chemistry is just dirty, poorly explained physics (as some physicists up their own arses think). The boundary between physics, material science, and chemistry is very blurred. We use many of the same techniques, just with different approaches, language, and mathematical models. What the chemist is interested in the physicist doesn't care about, and vice versa.

I have worked in physics, material science, and electrochemical labs over the last 10 years (hint, that's not as a student). It's typical of organic chemists to have a poor grasp of physics.

burning mod points for this...

The problem with Arch is that it got too popular, and the forums got overrun by people who wanted to be spoon fed. The devs got sick of being friendly and nice to people, and the more ignorant of the newbies who stuck around turned into something like Gentoo ricers (note: I like Gentoo, and it's users, some very knowledgeable people on the mailing lists and forums). These days the Arch forums can get pretty hostile if you criticise Arch in any way, but it's because of the barrage of stupid posts the moderators had to deal with.

The devs do make one good point though, if users don't want to use systemd there needs to be a working alternative. A few Archers tried to do this, but it mostly ended up as talk, and descended into a flamewar.

rc.conf and the BSD style init* were two of the many things that attracted me to Arch, I don't like it's current direction, or dumping the install scripts, but there's nothing else that has the same configurability in a binary distribution, coupled with the AUR that interests me.

*I started on FreeBSD in 2001 and SuSE 8 shortly after. I've been using Arch on my computers since 2007.

I used to use the magnetometer in my HTC Legend to measure the field outside a 5 T superconducting magnet. Of course I had proper magnetometers in the lab, but it was convenient being able to use my phone.
Some of the relays in a device I used were very sensitive to magnetic fields, plus I didn't the HD in my laptop to get screwed up. It was linear up to +/- 2 mT which was enough for a solenoid type superconducting magnet (i.e. the normal kind), and it allowed me move my devices closer to the magnet, and shorten my cables.

Very useful indeed.

Sorry for my harsh reply, tone is always difficult to judge in text.

He could be a changed man, I can respect someone who can change their mind in the face of contrary evidence [appropriate given our little conversation and misreading of each other :) ]. I went from liking him years ago, to very seriously doubting him, and now I'm back to being very unsure of what is true about him.

As I said before, he is a do-gooder opportunist. He speaks of secularism to the Pakistani middle class and pro-Taliban views to the mullahs, and it is the same with many other policy areas. He used to be famous in the 80s as a playboy, now he presents himself as a sober Muslim, similar to how you will find no reference to Jinnah, the first Governor-General's, drinking of alcohol as it is un-Islamic. To some he is a man of contradictions, to others he is a hypocrite. I agree with his stance on drones and the damage to the local economy in the borderlands. What I don't agree with is his flip flopping and choosing to speak of out both sides of his mouth.

And get your head out of your ass, there is no need for such arrogant pomposity, it does you no favours.

Sadly he seems to be more of an opportunist than idealist. He preaches secularism to the Pakistani middle class and pro-Taliban views to the mullahs, and it is the same with many other policy areas. He used to be famous in the 80s as a playboy, now he presents himself as a sober Muslim, similar to how you will find no reference to Jinnah, the first Governor-General's, drinking of alcohol as it is un-Islamic.

This:
Imran Khan says Taliban's 'holy war' in Afghanistan is justified by Islamic law

You make some good points, KDE does look a bit too plastic, but the "control panel" is one of the first options in the start menu. You don't have to go hunting for it, and it's also very easy to turn the start menu back to classic 3.5 style. In my defence, I use Openbox on my netbook, Awesome on my laptop, and KDE on my desktop so I've no particular attachments to KDE.

Sadly you're right. I moved to Arch from FreeBSD four years ago and I was amazed at the amount of clueless arrogant fanboys which diluted the signal-to-noise of the people who know what they're talking about. Don't get me wrong, I love Arch and I still use it over any other distro on my personally owned PCs, but you're right that some of the community are idiots, especially the zealous, newish members who can't take any criticism of Arch.

Irrelevant, the Dreamcast was Sega's console not MS, and they stopped making it two years before HL2 was released. What were the other console options at the time? An under-powered Gamecube or Wii? Remember, HL2 struggled on the original Xbox, porting it to the Wii would have been silly, and now you can get HL2 on the Xbox360 and PS3.

You need to decrease the hyperbole, they had a Mac OS 9 port of HL1 that was never released. Obviously they realised that there was no profit to be made in it. Likewise it's only since OS X has grown in popularity that is it worth their effort to port HL2 to it. It doesn't sound like an act of desperation, rather a smart move to gain some extra customers, or old ones with shiny new macs.

Linux geeks are not the ideal market to Valve, we're too small compared to the main Windows market and most of us dual boot or use Wine where we can. Carmack could never make money out of us, but I am hoping that Valve can.

(My wife....)

I wish I still had mod points for that.

posting to remove an incorrect mod. Meant to mod funny not overrated (sorry)

Whiskey = Ireland