Yes, let's make the system even more complicated by adding more exceptions to the system. That will solve it's problems?

Seriously though, the electoral college system actually makes the most sense for the US. The popular vote is not a good statistical sample because a greater fraction of people from some regions may vote than from others.

A popular vote over a territory as large as the united states wouldn't work because local weather conditions, or local ballot box stuffing would have a disproportionate effect on the popular vote, whereas in the electoral system they are weighted against the local population.

The only "unfair" aspect of the electoral system is that states with low populations get disproportionate representation.

Very hard.

Why don't you pick up a random Linux game that was made 5 or six years ago and see if it runs on a random Linux box. Just go grab some Doom or Quake demo and put it on some random box with a different distro than the one the demo was tested against.

If you can even get the thing to install and launch, sound definitely won't work.

The reason people have a hard time developing complicated commercial software on Linux is that said software is distributed in binary form, and Linux is *not* built for binary distribution.

Libraries break their ABI periodically on Linux because no one really thinks about binary developers. Think about this: a deb package for Ubuntu from a release six months ago will probably not work on the next release.

Aside from that, sound is an enormous clusterfuck on Linux. Sound is kind of important for games.

Considering all these problems, the return on investment is very low. There are very few Desktop Linux users. The mac has about 10% desktop marketshare now, but Linux is under 1%

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8

and most Linux users, including myself, just dual boot to play games. So why should a game company pay a bunch of developers full time for a year to port the game? That's hundreds of thousands of dollars they will *never* make back on a market like that.

and do all of my development work on it... and periodically I reboot into Windows to play Fallout 3.

I like Linux for development, but the fact is that it is not as good of a gaming platform as Windows is.

Windows has better video drivers, and it has a tons of teams at Microsoft working on things like directx that directly support gaming. Aside from that it has an enormous industry devoted to developing windows games.

Oh, and sound just works on Windows, did I mention that? That's pretty important for games. I have surround sound working on my Linux install, which took some doing, but as soon as I plug in my USB headset so I can use skype, the Linux sound system explodes. That means that even if left for dead was on Linux, I still wouldn't be able to play it.

Really, I don't see what the big deal with dual booting is and since people like me are just going to dual boot, I can't imagine why any game maker would waste money on a Linux port.

If I can play my game even marginally better on windows I have no reason not to get the windows version.

Here's what it is:
1. A VM based system, doesn't actually execute native code.
2. Has only one address space for some bizarre reason.
3. Persists everything in ram to disk...

So... your programs will run super slow because every memory write is written to disk, it you can't really run it on 32 bit hardware, and it doesn't run programs written in any existing programming languages.

So what is actually good about this operating system? Oh, it's super object oriented *rolls eyes*. As if that were a goal in and of itself.

This looks like another solution in search of a problem. Someone thought "wouldn't it be cool if" but didn't think about why anyone would care.

I think it almost doesn't matter now with firefox marketshare at over 25%. Any serious company has to support web standards now, and there are no longer nearly as many IE only websites as there once were.

The truth is, I'm not convinced bundling was really that important to begin with. What firefox adoption has shown, is that people *will* pick up on a better browser.

I think what killed netscape originally was that Microsoft released IE for *free*, and that netscape 4 and 6 really sucked compared to IE back in the day. A lot of people seem to have selective memory about that though...

IE is an awful browser by modern standards, but in IE 5 vs netscape 6, IE 5 won hands down.

If anything, I'm iffy about people trying to legislate firefox into the market. No matter what microsoft does, that's still a really commie move. And don't give me this "anticompetitive" crap. Microsoft has done real anticompetitive things in the past (like pressuring hardware vendors not to ship other OS's), but bundling IE was not one of themn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

Oh... wait.

Well, software patents still suck.

"provide a means for the public to give feedback on the performance of contracts awarded for purposes of carrying out this Act"

and I've had good luck with it in thunderbird.

However, I don't think there's linux program that handles exchange calendaring well. There's a plugin for thunderbird, but it doesn't work very well.

My advice is to use outlook web access for calendaring if you don't have a windows box on hand... although honestly I just keep my corporate laptop with winxp next to my linux workstation for when I need the calendar.

If you get sick of switching back and forth between windows, a good option is to use rdesktop:
http://www.rdesktop.org/

to log into your windows machine and keep a window open with outlook. Alternatively, there's always vmware, although it's a bit pricey and sucks up ram.

I've never heard of anyone ever getting it to work with a real world program.

The problem is that different linux distros are *not* binary compatible with each other. Some of the core libraries like glibc are compatible, but most binaries link a ton of other stuff. You might as well try installing windows programs or osx programs.

Alien cannot fix ABI incompatibilities.

>What to do when a developer distributes a
>.rpm but not a .deb, or the other way around?

Install from source.

On the other hand proprietary developers have a different system for installing their software. They use a minimal set of shared libraries like glibc and the x libraries that don't change their ABI often, then they statically compile everything else.

They also typically provide a shell script based installer instead of an rpm. Those that provide rpm's typically also provide a fairly generic deb.

It's a bitch getting inter distro compatible binaries on linux, so unless the developer put the initial work in, don't expect to be able to force it to run on your distro.

On ubuntu you really don't need an ftp or sftp client because gnome applications already speak those networking protocols.

Just open up nautilus, and give the networking path instead of the file system path. sftp://my_username@myserver.com/my/path

Using gedit or other gnome programs you can even open up the files remotely without manually copying them to the local disk.

This also makes setting up an smb server unnecessary since as long as you have ssh access you can access the whole remote filesystem through nautilus.

Yes, PHP is suitable for writing websites... doing HTML processing. Not surprising for the PHP: Hypertext Preprocesor.

I think what most people who hate PHP have a problem with is that it is not a good general purpose programming languages... nor was it ever intended to be. I have literally never seen anyone use PHP for something that was not a website. It's good for simple inline hypertext processing, and that's about it.

Personally, I'd rather use Python, simply for the fact that I can use python for *other* things than web programming, and get code reuse across application domains. I'm not opposed to *learning* lots of different languages, but I'd rather segregate the code I write into as few languages as possible.

Why was she stupid? From TFA, she couldn't use her ISP because they had a windows only setup disk. She couldn't do her school work until the issue was fixed because her school explicitly said "Microsoft Word Required".

Yes, there are ways to work around these issues... but she did not know about them.

Your definition of stupid seems to be "doesn't know something basic about Linux". I happen to know plenty of things that you don't know... probably plenty of things about *LINUX* you don't know, in fact as it's my job to write software for Linux...

By your definition, doesn't that make *you* stupid?

Huh... so tell me, do you think you know how your computer works? Really? Because most people I know who use computers and "think they know how they work" couldn't explain to me how an arithmetic logic unit works.

People aren't "required" to know how their computers work, and it doesn't make you "smarter" because you know open office can read doc files.

In short, please put your intellectual dick back in your pants. No one is impressed.

The main reason I've avoided QT in the past is the licensing... I can understand releasing an application under GPL, but it's very obnoxious when it is used for a library.

Even among open source developers, not everyone wants to release under GPL. People like myself like apache, BSD, MIT, etc, but using a GPL library forces us in practice to release under GPL terms as well.

I've heard a lot of people on slashdot say the model M is awesome, but why? Supposedly annoyingly loud clicky noises are... good? Huh?

Here's what I look for in a keyboard
1. Easy to pop the keys in and out so I can keep the thing clean.
2. Thin laptop style keys.
3. QUIET, I don't need a loud click to let me know I typed a letter. I can see it on the fricking screen.
4. not too hard to press down
5. Doesn't gum up.
6. Control key, windows key, escape key are in reasonable positions.

I then take that keyboard, and remap the capslock key to be a second control key. After all, when was the last time you needed to use capslock? Never.

Uh, good luck with that.

So, after you've tanked moral by paying your developers way less than they think they are worth, what do you think is going to happen when the economy picks up? They are all going to jump ship, and you are going to be left with code written by people who hate their job. Hint: not quality code.