Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

and with $60 HDMI cables.

Yep. That's what I was talking about. "Linux" is an unwieldy mess of various "metoo" distributions, "metoo" desktop environments, unstable and always changing APIs (starting down at the kernel, whose developers refuse to support a stable API for binary drivers all the way to desktop APIs who break all APIs with each major release), etc. Why would a mainstream desktop user want to track this mess? Nothing has really changed in the Linux world since the 90s. It's a great OS for the tinkerers and tweakers. I you're one of them, just shut up and enjoy this great OS instead of trying to show it down the throats of the mainstream. It never worked and will never work.

To make this work, some big company, like google or Intel, would have to throw its weight behind this idea (basically, like what happened with Android).

I came to this conclusion back in the year 1999 or so, when I saw the emergence of two major GUI systems for Linux, Gnome and KDE. Since then, the Linux desktop was an always changing hydra consisting of numerous GUIs, fast changing APIs, etc. Linux distributions fill pretty nice the nice of a power desktop user's OS. The kinds you run into academia, engineering, etc. But I don't see how it could become a mainstream OS. The only way for Linux distro to become mainstream is to have some kind of benevolent dictator in the form of a large company (like google) to create a working GUI and make all hardware vendors to ship it (e.g. Android).

They could have survived as a hobbyist store, but it would have been a small chain. Perhaps one radio shack store for a city of million. The way it was now, there is a radio shack at nearly every grocery store, shopping strip, and mall.

Well, for now after two months of ownership, I haven't seen any factory updates yet. To me it wouldn't be a big issue to keep rooting the device only every now and then. In fact, I am thinking of sticking with the KitKat when the Samsung Lollipop update appears. The 4.4.2 seems like a stable smooth OS. I'll let the other kids do the testing and update only when Lollipop has a killer feature that I need.

Also, don't forget that the custom ROM itself is a vector for security issues. I am talking about the custom ROMs that are uploaded on android forums by random unknown dudes, as opposed by well established projects, and then dozens of users can't install them fast enough.

Meanwhile, the Android KitKat 4.4.2 as shipped with my new Samsung Tab S 10.5 tablet is a mature, stable, and pretty smooth OS. I do not get the obsession with always chasing the latest version. I hang around XDA forums, and I feel like more than half of people who flash custom ROMs have no clue why they even need them, but it's some kind of badge of honor to get rid of the stock ROM. They complain about "lag" and "bloatware" which are supposedly fixed, yet no one ever cared to explained to me where I can reproduce that lag and why can't they just delete a couple of pre-bundled apps by hand.

Personally, I have run into three issues, two of which I fixed myself after rooting my device, and the third I can live with.

One thing I don't get is if you know your genes carry a decease that can affect your child's health, then why even try to reproduce? Why not drop the notion of having to continue your rotten genetic line, and instead adopt a healthy child? Jeez.

Without doubt, there is now some kind of liberal conspiracy to bring affirmative action into high-tech education and workplace. Now that they have mostly won the same sex marriage battle, it seems like this is now the top item on the agenda, considering we're seeing news articles on this issue nearly every other day, like this is this the top problem hindering our progress towards some kind of a utopian Star Trek society.

The problem with Perl is not just the time to learn it. The biggest problem is that Perl developers believe in TMTOWTDI (There is more than one way to do it) principle. As a result, numerous Perl idioms exist for doing the exact same thing. No matter how much time you spend reading Perl programming books and coding yourself, you keep running into idioms that look slicker and better (or just bizzare) relative to what you know.

Why is this bad? This is a difficulty for big application development projects where there are many developers working on the same code. The more expressive the language is, the harder it is for others to understand each others code. On the other hand, Python's inventor Guido van Rossum goes into great lengths to ensure that Python has one way for expressing a given task, and usually that it is the simplest of all alternatives. The result is a simple and tidy programming language that's easy to learn and understand.

Another problem with Perl is that it looks like an alien language for anyone who is not a unix wizard. At its core, the original idea of Perl was to have ONE language that combines the ideas of Unix shell programming, C, awk, grep, and other unix tools. To a unix wizard Perl makes total sense. To anyone who is not an expert in the unix environment, Perl looks like a gibberish. And even if they take time to learn what it means, they never understand the design decisions behind it without spending a good amount of time with unix and OS X command line tools.

IMHO, the big difference is that Microsoft has been historically focused on the enterprise. Very boring and business-like. User interfaces and usability have been decent since Windows 95, but still took a backseat to Microsoft's enterprise onslaught. The end users could wait because they were effectively captive customers. And once the web and internet went mainstream, Microsoft spent a whole lot of resources on trying to lock customers into closed Microsoft-only technologies (e.g. Java sabotage attempt, C#, IE, etc) instead of thinking what's going to be the next hottest thing. On the other hand, apple was able to see what's going on beyond the traditional desktop and laptop. Perhaps that was the only route Apple could take considering Microsofts dominance in the traditional PC and server market.

Interesting info, but it does not address one big issue. When you root your android device and upload a different ROM, how do you know this ROM doesn't do something malicious? You probably don't. The only way to be sure is to compile everything yourself.

Nonsense. Closed? Yes, for obvious reasons. Insecure by design? Why would any vendor want to do that?

If you live in LA you can surf and ski on the same day. You enjoy a mild-dry climate instead of a hot and humid Texas climate (at least in the summer). Authentic ethnic food is far easier and cheaper to find in LA than in Dallas. The same "LA" arguments apply to the Silicon Valley. California cities are a great place for bicyclists, but in Texas bicyclists are being moved down with big ass trucks like they're some sort of terrorists. I can tell you from my personal observations that a small Bay Area city like Berkeley or Oakland, has far more bicycle paths than San Antonio, a Texas city of 1 million and one of the fattest in the nation.

.. simply because the OEM disabled MSE/Defender and instead shipped the PCs with a trial version of Norton or some other commercial suite? At some point those trials expire, and there could be a lot of people who neither bought the full version nor enabled MSE/Defender.