And also the socialist minded society that lives there. An excerpt from a new story recently:

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PARIS - The head of US tyremaker Titan has mocked French workers for putting in only "three hours" a day and said his company would be "stupid" to take over a troubled French factory.

The letter from Titan CEO Maurice Taylor to French Industrial Renewal Minister Arnaud Montebourg was in response to a request for Titan to consider investing in a loss-making Goodyear plant in Amiens, northern France.

"I have visited that factory a couple of times. The French workforce gets paid high wages but only works three hours," Taylor said in the letter, dated February 8 and obtained by French business daily Les Echos.

"They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French way!"

Goodyear said last month it was set to close the plant, which employs 1,173 workers, following five years of failed talks with unions.

Valve hires incredibly self-motivated and talented people. Most people are *NOT* incredibly self-motivated so taking Valve as a role model for the rest of workplace environments is utter foolishness. As the late and famous physicist Einstein once eluded to, the only thing larger than the universe is human stupidity, that's what you're drawing from if you try to think "big picture". So um, no.

Or said plugins don't even exist (I mean, same code, same author) and the problem never has a chance to manifest itself in Chrome. In my experience plugin management, or lack thereof, by ignorant users is one big problem compounded by a-hole companies installing plugins that have major performance ramifications (not of the positive kind) without even asking -- "Skype anyone?". Then again, some people don't know any better so it goes back to the ignorant part.

Yes, Firefox did fall behind the curve but that was with the 3.6.x branch. I don't find arguments of "Chrome is faster" to hold up to scrutiny, just do a search on the topic and be objective about what's being divulged.

And if you ever find yourself tethering, Firefox for many years has been the only major browser that supported HTTP pipelining, something that's been part of the HTTP/1.1 specification since 1999... yet Chrome just got or is just getting around to it (I knew it was recently added in the Chromium channel). While I applaud Google with the SPDY extensions, the HTTP servers you speak to with Chrome have to explicitly support the SPDY extensions, i.e. there's still a LOT of web servers out there that do not do SPDY. HTTP/Pipelining on the other hand has been in place for forever and it is not a question of web server operators have to update their existing web servers for end users to benefit. If you are on a higher latency connection, HTTP/Pipelining can make a *BIG* difference.

Finally, if you use Akamai (Content Distribution Network) to delivery of web content to your customers, Akamai funnels traffic to your web servers via HTTP/Pipelining for performance gains which cannot be classified as "minor". Our TCP connection count dropped to 1/10th of what it used to be. I've been using HTTP/Pipelining in Firefox since 2004.

I concur.

Annoying that is. Your average person will likely welcome it.

aka Mediocrity-R-Us

If you don't like what Sony is charging... don't buy it. While it does seem like Sony is being a "prick", you aren't entitled to Whitney Houston music at some price. Worst case, just wait, it will go back down. However, it does seem a bit tasteless for Sony. But no one is forcing anyone to buy anything.

Even the only version of *NIX successful with consumers en masse, i.e., Mac OS X, is mediocre at gaming. (typing this up on my Mac).

And the other reason - Windows Media Center. Using the XBox360 as a media extender to watch things I've recorded with Windows 7 is very nice. Sorry, not interested in screwing around with MythTV et al.

I saw Skype character (executive) singing the praises of MS acquiring them and extolling the synergies because both Skype and MS innovated, blah, blah, blah. It was at that point I stopped the video, he had nothing meaningful to say. It was just rhetoric. MS hasn't innovated in 20 years. Windows 7 is good (whatever Mac OS X/LINUX people, it's great for gaming) but MS has drawn its revenues from product lines that are now decades old. That is not innovation.

Arguably one could give MS a point for the XBox360. However a gaming console isn't innovating. On a tangent they can be awarded points for XBox Live which is more robust for multi-player gaming and has engendered strong communities. Sony's PSN isn't as strong, something you'll consistently hear from many people, including those who cover the video game industry, e.g., Machinima.com.

There tends to be a lot of fanboy hatred against MS but the reasons people cite are generally crap. I live in Seattle and many tech people I've talked agree that MS' biggest problem is the person at the top - Steve Ballmer. He has no vision whatsoever and at best is a chief operating officer.

Ballmer can't even hire someone to find new locations for retail fronts... so what does he do, he opens stores by Apple's . Microsoft erected a big(ger) store just a few doors down from Apple's in one of the malls in the Seattle area (Bellevue Square). MS couldn't even pick some other part of the mall, it had to be close to Apple's. Wow, just wow.

We all know who the omega is here.

-M

"Why in my days..." (use your imagination to fill in the rest)

Not the 1% who use LINUX desktops. Spare me the trolling. I like Ubuntu a lot, but I'm a tech person. Most people aren't, get over it.

I stream lots of content off the Net. Beyond that, I have Windows 7 on a desktop with an HDTV tuner card and over the air antenna and record lots of content with it. I then watch the recorded content on my HDTV by way of the Windows Media Center extension capabilities of the XBox360. (Aside: Spare me fanboy stuff) If you have an iDevice, check out RemotePotato. You can control what Windows Media Center records and stream videos to your iDevice when you're afar from home. With Netflix (streaming + discs), Hulu+ and recording shows over the air, it's difficult to keep up with all the content choices afforded to me. You might consider also using PlayOn which allows you to view Hulu content on your HDTV by way of the gaming consoles which can act as DLNA clients.

The irony is that if open source people didn't have a target to emulate, there's tons of things that would have never been written since a baseline and mindshare in the overall tech market wouldn't have existed:

lex = flex
yacc = bison
sh = bash
UNIX = LINUX
vi = vim

To name just a few.

So your complaint about "proprietary" falls on deaf ears. If nothing else, what you call proprietary seeds things.

Some projects are worthwhile, this smells of things like "ReactOS", i.e. something I would never use. I would suggest to the people on this project to go contribute to open source projects that would get people to even have an inclination of using a LINUX desktop.

Take the 7 year old boy that was executed by the Taliban in Afghanistan some weeks ago for being a "spy". The mere fact that we're in America lulls us into thinking of "entitlement". We wind up taking for granted the things we do have vs. the things we don't.

As Cheryl Crow sang, "It's wanting what you've got." What you are eluding to is social engineering by the government ("forced" - your word not mine) which doesn't work. Go join the Taliban.