"Linux? Oh, you mean those idiots dressed as animals in the mall?"
Yes, this'll go well. If you're going to do something memorable make sure it's not something stupid.
Unfortunately it does seem to be the case nowadays. The FSF have done some great things in the past but this is just stupid, giving people copies of a distro which won't act at they expect, and when they search for help they won't find it as it's a marginal distro. They'll just think they've given Linux a try and throw it away, whereas at least with something like Ubuntu or Debian they'd be more able to find forums where they'd be more likely to get given help and less likely to have ideology preached at them for wanting to sin by watching some funny cat videos in Flash, or talk to their relatives abroad using Skype. I really hope Microsoft are paying them a lot for demonstrating that breaking a perfectly good desktop OS to make it work like a tablet OS isn't the stupidest thing you can do.
Oh, and remember the FSF ideology is likely to be completely alien to them- these are people who were in the Microsoft store.
I can see now why my mother told me never to take operating systems from men dressed as animals.
No, it's still an awful name. There is a history of computer products using non-English words as names, such as Ubuntu, Adobe, and Amiga, but the words themselves have to sound good or catchy, and ideally have a strong definition behind it which those who look into it will identify with. 'Trisquel' is a weak-sounding word and given the definition I don't see why people outside of the Isle of Man and Galacia would be interested enough to remember it.
As for me the first time I heard it I assumed it was something to do with SQL, possibly doing something unholy with three different SQL backends.
I'm pretty sure that there isn't one of you, who'd not give his right-nut, for just ONE of John McAfee's weekends...
I have heard good things about the weekends in Guatemalan prisons but I doubt they're worth a whole nut.
..and it'd have been so hard for Canonical to disable them by default in order not to annoy their target users? Did they really think that the people who'd choose Linux over Window or OS X on their desktop were the type to happily accept advertisements in their operating systems?
You're right though that extremists do come in all sizes, shapes, and colours. At the time the views of someone like Martin Luther King were pretty damn extreme.
He also childishly started the free software movement and wrote the original GPL, which he revises when he thinks it's broken in some way.
A lot of what he writes annoys me, I think his views are very black-and-white and have an overly idealised slant. I also think he's right quite often though, as in this case, and is able to raise the profile of things such as this a lot better than those of who seem to care what others think of them would be able to do so.
There is a reason that stories about him are posted by the tech media.
Windows is ultimately there for Microsoft's profit, and yet there are a lot of people who put time and effort into building communities for both developers and users on Windows without being employed by Microsoft. These people would, quite rightly, be offended if you said they were just doing it to improve Microsoft's profits- they're there to help others, share their knowledge, talk with others who have similar interests, and other similar personal goals.
It's still true though that Windows is ultimately there for Microsoft's profit.
The non-profits they invest are those which directly benefit themselves. These are the people who're writing the code which Canonical are going to be marketing, is it too surprising that they're throwing them some money? It's practical in that they can't afford for Linux to fall behind Windows or OS X, and they also want to keep community feeling onside as they don't want to lose support from those who recommend their distro.
I'm not saying I dislike Canonical, I am saying they are a business. Without that they probably wouldn't have achieved what they have, a few people with great intentions can't achieve as much as a few people with great intentions and the money and organisation to back them up with. That money has to come from somewhere too, it doesn't just magically appear, but deals like this- especially when give spin this poor- are likely to cost too much goodwill from their audience to make them worthwhile.
The majority of desktop machines run Windows, does yours? If not then it's not like the Presidential election where the votes of others count just as much as yours towards who you personally are governed by.
When it comes to choosing which OS to run you are allowed to make your own decisions, in Presidential elections you aren't allowed to choose your leader- you'll be getting the same one as the rest of your nation. As you point out issues with more mainstream OSes will bleed over to affect you but that's in no way the same.
Exceptions are intended to be used when a program hits unexpected or fatal issues which cannot be handled locally, and often the low-level library code isn't in a position to be able to judge whether something qualifies as worthy of an exception or whether it's an expected part of the processing cycle and can be safely be ignored.
Take for example asking to open a file for reading and the file not being available for some reason. If I'm just copying a large directory structure then I can reasonably expect to not be able to open a few files due to permissions and, while I'll likely want to log these and display them, treating it as an exception wouldn't be suitable. If my code is part of an online application and it was failing to open a configuration file which it needed to connect to the database then the error would be worthy of promoting to an exception if it could not rectified in the code which detected it. Ultimately though for this type of 'It could be serious, it could be nothing' then the decision should be left to the client code rather than the library.
In my mind a better approach to fixing these type of errors is better support of types which cannot be set to null. For example if I have a FileHandle variable which cannot be set to null and the File.Open() method returns a nullable type then there's going to be a compile-time error, which is the best type of error. This will point out where I'm 'assuming' that the value is not null and as I'm fixing the compile error I'll naturally add the correct checks as the 'This could be null..' issue has been highlighted for me.
fortune: No such file or directory