I think the poster should take the log out their eye, because the US is no better! Massive amounts of homelessness, 50% of bankruptcies due to healthcare costs, something that is considered a basic human right in the rest of the western world. MUCH higher prison population per capita than any other country. The government is literally stealing social security. Gerrymandering making elections all but a foregone conclusion. Voter suppression that isn't very different than ballot box stuffing that happens in Russia. I think this is the single stupidest post ever on slashdot.

This is a wonderful book diving into the nature of what it means to _be_ Homo Sapiens; from how we conquered the Neaderthals to industrialism, capitalism and the modern economy. Top notch stuff. very thought provoking.

After nearly 20 years doing this, I believe that what software developers actually do all day long is primarily ontology, and secondarily engineering. Conceptually fitting the real world into a little box filled with transistors is hard. You can't automate thinking (at least not yet). The computer world is a limited representation of the real world, and that translation, deciding which things to take and which things to leave, and what shape they take in the virtual, is something that a computer cannot do, and sure won't be able to in 10 years time, possible even in a 100 years time. Until then, programmers will be doing the same thing they do today, just in a slightly faster format with slightly updated tools and slightly slicker interfaces: crafting a virtual and limited representation of the real that allows modeling and the generation of knowledge and value from information from data.

The JCP under Sun was completely broken. Java 7 was YEARS late. Under Oracle, we got Java 7 released, OpenJDK sorted out, and Java 8 released with Java 9 on its way. As a Scala developer, I don't feel like the Java world has stagnated, but then the Open Source "Community" has been proclaiming the death of Java since Java 1.5. The Open Source "Community" could learn a hell of a lot from the Java community, like how to actually have and maintain large open source libraries that work for years and years. How to build systems and platforms that mature and age and function for decades without needed to be rewritten. I'd bet there are far far more programmers developing on Java than there are for Linux as a desktop OS, and I shudder to think how a post submitted to Slashdot that declared Linux as a Desktop OS is dead would fare.

OpenSSL much?

Or you could decompose it like an actual software engineer, getting readability and testability and avoiding goto into the bargain:

bool a() { ... }
bool b() { ... }
bool c() { ... }

void thing()
{
    a && b && c;
}

My C syntax is a bit rusty, but you get the idea. GCC will likely inline them if they are small anyhow, so you probably won't suffer functional call overhead.

You sir are an idiot. You are arguing with a user with a five digit ID, telling them that computers may not be their thing, and then your replies are idiotic, you sound like a member of the tea party spouting meaningless rhetoric citing anecdotal experience and not supportable facts. "It works for me" isn't a good way to convince others to use Linux, as much as "Word locks up my computer" isn't a good way to get people to abandon Windows. Windows, which is in decline, is an odd place to draw evidential experience given that the author specifically mentions using OS X. I think what you consider "obscure requirements" are fairly standard, perhaps you need to join us in the real world where employment agencies test people on their use of keyboard short-cuts for example, but you're probably too young to have a job, unlike the person with a five digit ID who was probably using computers whilst you were sucking on your moma's titties, and that was if you were lucky, which by the sounds of it you probably weren't.

You hit the nail on the head with : "a way to launch my favorite applications", none of which run on Linux. Take an OS X user and watch them use a Windows box for five minutes and hope it doesn't end up in pieces. Now put them in front of a Linux desktop and witness the blank stare on their face as they can find absolutely nothing. I used to use Linux, but I'm one of those OS X people today. I write a lot of code, but I also take pictures and compose music. Linux is so far away from usable at this point for me and millions of others, that I just laugh when somebody asks with seriousness why I don't use Linux.

You can deny it all you want, but when I look around in my office of developers, I see a room filled with Macs, none of them are running Linux. It was true in my last job, in my current job and in my next job (I recently switched), none of these companies produce Mac software. These people would have been using Windows ten years ago. They were offered a choice that was better, and they took it. That choice wasn't Linux. Why not? Answer me that? Apple did it, they went from almost zero market share and today, their machines and OS is sitting on the desk of just about every non-microsoft developer I know today! Those developers develop for the web, which is run predominantly on Linux boxes. The Linux _desktop_ community is so riddled with petty infighting and pointless pontification and stone throwing that in its current form, it has no chance of producing a viable desktop environment. It has a proven track record of failure. The Linux community couldn't beat Microsoft who had a shit product that nobody liked! Now you face a great product that users love; good luck prying my mac from my cold dead hands, because that's about as easy as it will be to get folks like me to use Linux in anything like its current incarnation.

Not that complicated. Simply implementing the applications people need would get you in the race. Figuring out how to make them compelling only makes sense if you are already in the race. Today, for most of us, Linux is a non-starter.

It's much simpler than this. Until Linux can provide the same tools and out-of-the-box works, it will struggle with adoption. Apple clearly has the products with the best polish, but they aren't the market leader, so I think your premise is demonstrably incorrect.

If Linux has the set of tools I need to both get my job done, and make my life easier - I'll be the first to switch back. Right now, it doesn't come close, not by a mile.

Only partially true I think. There are many people buying phones because they are "Android" phones. That is _purely_ an OS choice, despite what they might actually say or believe their choice is based on. A demonstration of this is that people ask "Do you have an Android phone or an Apple phone". Good, until recently, didn't make any hardware at all, and is still not the biggest selling of phones that run Android.

You also can't get away with a single killer app. You have to have a single killer app _and_ all the other stuff that people need. Linux could have the best damn photo tool in the world, but most people will still use OS X or Win because it has MS Word, Illustrator and all the other things Linux doesn't, plus a photo app that might not be the best, but it does get the job done.

What Steve jobs did was come along and give people a killer app that worked with everything they already had - arguably the iPod. Then he worked on making everything that we already have better such that we got sucked into an Apple world and have little interest in leaving. The day that Apple makes products that aren't easier to work with that another vendor or they achieve market saturation, is the day their market share will start declining.

Unfortunately, you are in the vast vast minority. Most of us only care that we can get a days work done so we aren't fired, or fix 200 photos from a shoot without having to retune our drivers. Our security and privacy is a secondary concern at best, because having a job is more important than digital security for us. That's why we want commercial Linux, because of people in the open source community whose motivation is very very different from most of us. Commercial companies interesting in selling product will implement what the majority of its customers need, or they go out of business. Put simply, that is usable product, digital security and freedoms be damned. Is this a short-term view, is this wrong-headed thinking? Maybe it is, but, it is the status quo, and it takes very big things to happen to change the status quo. Modern America taking time to stop and think would be a pretty radical shift from the status quo.

Define "acceptable". Word 2007 in my day-to-day is not acceptable for instance. I'd be interested to see how quirky they are in this configuration too. I'd kinda believe that Photoshop might run in WINE as Adobe are notoriously bad at keeping their software abreast of the latest APIs. It's still an awful lot of faff to do it either way. You CAN do a lot of things, it's just wether it's worth the time and effort. And don't tell me how you can set up wine and photoshop in 10 minutes, for those of us who haven't done it (recently), it's probably not gonna take ten minutes.

Beyond Photoshop and Word are a whole bunch of less critical stuff too. Some of which many folks don't care about, some of which many folks do. Things like iMovie, Logic, Aperture, iTunes, Safari, IE, Lightroom, Skype (who know if this will keep working anywhere though) and others. This is outside the scope of my original point I admit, and you may have a reasonable point with WINE here. Last time I used WINE it couldn't run much of anything, at least not well.

Two simple questions:

Does it run Photoshop?
Does it run Word?

And two more for fun

Can it print?
Can it scan?

The answer to the first two will be no unless it's a) running Windows, b) running OS X. Given that Ubuntu is neither of the above, then it's a no.

Open Office isn't Word compatible. It's somewhat Word compatible. Gimp isn't Photoshop, it just isn't. As for the latter, last I checked, printing and scanning on Linux was pretty bad, scanning worst of all.

People will send you PDFs, Word Docs, Excel spreadsheets and Photoshop files, maybe even Illustrator. If you can't deal with them, then you can't do business with them. It's that simple. If you do most of it in a VM, it doesn't count. You might as well just run OS X and have your cake and eat it.

Most of the people who want to run Linux that badly, are already running Linux.

Blame your crappy tools not the laptop. Plenty of folks around here got development done on an 80x25 terminal. Why do you think it's called screen? Heck, I run a full IDE on my MacBook Air, 13 inches of supreme development awesomeness. If browsing is "barely usable", how come the vast majority of the web is at that resolution or lower (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_resolution_higher.asp shows around 67% of web users are 1440x900 or below).

You statement is clearly so full of holes and elitist hubris, I think the score must be mostly from amusement, or maybe from other chest-thumpers.