why would Badgers need broadband?
Because newer devices don't support Flash, and converting a Flash vector animation to H.264 would bloat it by several times. It's possible to download a Weebl animation such as "Badgers" over dial-up in a minute and a half, but downloading an H.264 conversion would take so long that the viewer would lose interest.
The best way to use them is to learn not to use them. Learn to use their superior counterparts that run on non-toy operating systems.
Which is sort of difficult if the publisher of the industry-standard application enforces patents, user interface copyrights, or anticircumvention rights against would-be developers of "superior counterparts". (I can provide examples of each of these three upon request.) It's hard even if the publisher of the industry-standard application just refuses to cooperate in documenting any file formats or protocols that would allow it to interoperate with "superior counterparts", which was true of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office for a long time.
Newer versions of desktop Windows you pedantic arse.
Microsoft is referring to Windows RT tablets as "PCs" on this page. This gives me a bad feeling about what Microsoft plans to do to versions of desktop Windows after 8.1.
Part of the problem is that users, especially tecchie users, insist on seeing the smartphone/tablet as a computer.
Except laptop manufacturers discontinued 10" computers at the end of 2012 in favor of what you call non-computers. That's part of why techies have been trying to press tablets into service as computer replacements.
If a linux box has a borked gconf, some dude across the world can make it magically boot a few minutes later.
If a Linux box behind NAT has a borked gconf, then how is "some dude across the world" going to connect to said Linux box to make it boot?
The turning point probably was that sony startet to put linux in all their products
Huh? Sony took Linux out of the PS3 as of system software 3.21 and sued George Hotz for putting it back in.
I must be really bored to fire up the email reader on my laptop. Usually all my communications go via my phone
Good luck typing a three-paragraph reply on a 4" sheet of glass. And good luck seeing your e-mail and something else on the screen at once. Or do you carry a Bluetooth keyboard for making replies?
What those people don't seem to realize is that, just because no one has made a "Linux for the layman" doesn't mean no one ever will. Android is Linux, and it's about as user-friendly as you can get.
Android has what I believe to be one fatal flaw: all maximized all the time. Because of a poor decision that Google made in the Honeycomb era, namely allowing applications to assume that the screen area never changes after installation, the user can't split the tablet's display down the middle and run a phone app on each side.
You mean Linux? What moron walks around saying "gee in yoo Linux"?
In practice, I've taken "GNU/Linux" to mean any Linux-based operating environment that is more similar to Fedora or Debian than to Android. What clearer term for Linux-that-is-not-Android do you recommend?
could use Cocoa
should have been "could use the subset of Cocoa supported by GNUstep"
If there was a compatibility layer to run OSX applications on Linux, that might actually be a viable option. [...] But I am not aware of any such project so far
GNUstep aims for source code compatibility with Cocoa. In theory, the publisher (other than Apple) of a Mac OS X application could use Cocoa when porting it to GNU/Linux.
End result? Either programs don't bother, and run as system
As I understand it, programs needing privileges are supposed to run as system (or a similarly privileged user) as a service, and then applications are supposed to make requests of that service.
The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
