Hahaha i gatta download this and try it on VTI it looks awesome!

Thanks for your support. I sent in an update with lines and scores for anyone that really wanted to have them. I'm glad so many people enjoyed it.

Thanks for giving me a great laugh with this awesome game! It took me about 5 minutes to get one line completed...I'm surprised I managed it!

Also, since you have updated it to show lines and scores you probably should send some pictures showing lines and scores, so people will realize that it has been updated. Just a suggestion.

That game is hilarious.

AAAAhhahahaha! BEAUTIFUL! I love it.

Not as unique as previously thought:
Look on the Web Page link for "Pixel Tetris"

Those are for Windows. Also, which one are you specifically talking about?

This reminds me of that voxel demo a few months ago.

Look at the volex things that were uploaded recently. Amazing stuff, I tell you what.

-W-

Excellent programming at work.

Excellent program! It needs a save function, since actually doing a tetris would take around an hour. :-)

wow what a great idea.

....that was sarcasm, people.....

Check out the link. I'm very scared.

Yes, Passport is a bit dodgy. It's too bad it's so convenient.

Damn Micro$oft tries to take over the world again! This is why I switched to FireFox. Will the tyranny ever end?!?!?!?!?!

IMHO, Windows/IE/OpenOffice is the best three basic programs. They do everything OK-not everything spectacularly, but everything OK. They make ggod products, overall. Definitely world-class products.

Before you flame me, please consider how hard it is to program better than what they've done.

Firefox is far better than IE, you realise? Just ask anyone who's used both IE and Firefox, read all about its good security, see its very useful features (such as tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking that works), etc. It renders PNG images correctly without ugly hacks in the source. It also adheres very closely to real standards and has excellent support (it's a popular Free Software project).

IE is old and decrepit by comparison.

Firefox does some things much better than IE.
Mozilla does some things much better than IE.
IE does everything imperfectly. I'd rather have something that sort of works than something that's 100% incompatible with half of what I do.

What do you do -- a bunch of ActiveX stuff?

ticalc.org
nasa.gov
oahat.org (pending)
cubs.com
unitedmedia.com/dilbert

All those websites work just fine in Mozilla (I'm on a system without the newer and better Firefox, so I can't test it specifically). The NASA site uses but doesn't require Flash, which I just don't have installed on this system right now, so I can't test that right now; Flash works in Firefox, though. The dilbert page returns a 404 error, but other than that it works perfectly in Mozilla.

Were you basing your statement on pure speculation, or have you actually used the software you're bashing?

I have actually tested that software. However, you make my point with the problems that you point out. Let me also add that I'm not bashing any of that software. It is great software that does a very good job with a few specific tasks as well as the generally agreed upon basic tasks. IE is better, though, for what I do.

What problems did I point out that apply only to Firefox and not to IE?

For one, the error I get with the dilbert page is not the browser's fault; that resource is not on the unitedmedia.com server, and Firefox renders whatever the server sends it (which happens to be an error page).

Also, the problem with Flash is only that I don't have it installed on the system in which I'm writing this and the previous message (with only the older Mozilla browser and not Firefox, by the way) and not in the system where Firefox lives. There are also good reasons I don't want to install Flash for Mozilla either.

You're really grasping at straws looking for support for your arguments. How sad.

You are in fact badmouthing the software, so do you want to be the pot or the kettle?

Whaa? Pot or kettle? Seriously, what does that mean?

Anyway, I said the software was great, Dilbert *is* on unitedmedia.com, and I'm not making desperate straw man arguments. I am saying that the software is not what I need. It may be what you need, but it is not what I need. I am also standing up for:
-Good BASIC (and other scorned but useful languages)
-Professionals, the profession, and professionalism
-Small business
-Personal private property
-Fair business practices (i.e., not selling below cost-*cough* Linux *cough* WalMart *cough*-but there's not really much you can do about that in a deregulated economy, is there? If you want to permanently undercut the professionals who need to put food on the table with your hobby, who's to stop you? Here dies more tech jobs.)
-Users

and I always seem to get caught in the crossfire. Why do programmers hate users and vice versa? Why do amateurs hate professionals and vice versa? Why is there a growing contingent of programmers who are in fact but not in name communists? And why is this place so unprofessional, short-fused, and hostile (in general)?

You're scared of Free Software or what it represents.

You argue that Free Software is bad economically (or otherwise) because it kills tech jobs, but you fail to realise that it is creating jobs to support it or use it as it gets more popular, and this trend will continue in the future as it continues to gain popularity.

Surely you don't want to use the tired old "communism" argument? If you're going to use it, then which model is more communistic: one in which copying is allowed and encouraged freely so that improvements may be made rapidly (model of both the sciences and of Free Software), or one in which copying is heavily discouraged with harsh penalties and only one (or very few) central entity has complete control over something (model of proprietary software)?

Free Software strongly agrees with capitalism: anyone can sell it for however much they can sell it. Your general complaint seems to go along the same lines as "I'm in the horse-and-buggy business, and automobiles are putting me out of work. Woe is me" of somebody in the early 1900's. That's something I like to call "competition" in the "free market". Have you heard of them?

I'm not short-fused, and I'm not (usually) hostile to anyone. I _am_ hostile, though, to obviously ridiculous or bogus claims and arguments which completely lack any relevant supporting points.

BTW, pot/kettle == you called me black, but you're black too; you said I was badmouthing some software, but you're doing the same thing. Also, I said that you're grasping at straws, which is very different from making straw man arguments.

Just to be somewhat on-topic, that Tiny Tetris game looks interesting. It's not good for a challenge, but it might be fun to play when you're bored. It's like Towers of Hanoi in that aspect (I've solved up to only 7 or possibly 8 discs).

OK...
Comparison:
Proprietary: programming, support, documentation administration
Free: Documentation, administaration

Obviously, you don't know what communism is. Free software is incongruous with capitalism, as it subverts competition because there is no reward for work. Basic capitalism. Please read my post, also, I said the software you mentioned was GREAT (a verbatim quote). I do not recall any statement that badmouths something using the word 'great.' Finally, I'm not for typewriters and card catalogs. I am for the proper implementation of computers. If programmers (I'm not talking about anyone else right now) lost their jobs, they lose their jobs. Do you realize that jobs are not just a number, but people's livelihoods? Once the code is out there, it's out there. You can't take it back and copyright it. This is irreversible; a comparison to the death penalty is appropriate. Please note that a job hemmorhage is not proper implementation and that this software concept is not new technology; rather it is highway robbery. Selling below cost ($0 for $15-$35) is ILLEGAL and DUMB in the long run, like slavery.

Yes, I am scared of free software. It threatens my job and the jobs of hundreds of thousands of others. It threatens the economy in the form of immediate lost cash flow (reversing 15 years of progress-or at least breaking even-in the economy). It threatens users, who would use a gaggle of incompatible software (look at the TI-89 programs, for example) which might be unsupported after six months if the writers vaporize or the community becomes 'disinterested.'

(Part 1)

You make several incorrect assumptions.

1. Free Software is not covered by copyright.
It is. The authors CHOOSE to release it under a very unrestrictive license, though.

2. There is no reward for working on Free Software.
There is. It comes in the form of money or ego (programmers have egoes too). You still don't believe me that people can and do actually SELL Free Software, so it's probably pointless for me to tell you this third (fourth? fifth?) time.

3. Free Software is sold below cost.
Where did you get that idea? It doesn't follow from any sort of reason. I sold two copies of Slackware CD's and recovered half of what I paid for it. It didn't cost me anything to copy them, so I made some profit (which can't happen if it were below cost).

4. Free Software reverses many years of progress.
It doesn't. In fact, proprietary software is catching up to Free Software in most ways. Apache is Free Software, and even MS's IIS can't compete with it. TCP/IP and related programs (e.g., ping) are all Free Software; they came from BSD in the early 80's, and the same implementation is used in Windows to this day. Does the Internet, which came because of and depends very heavily on Free Software, cause you to lose your job? Is the Internet a bad thing? I would argue it's not. Free Software enables many useful things like the Internet to be created because it doesn't put up artificial barriers on its use.

I re-read your post.

Here's my corrected point 4 and a subpoint 4a:

You assume that:

4. Free Software reverses many years of progress.
It doesn't. Apache is Free Software. TCP/IP and related programs (e.g., ping) are all Free Software. They enable many new technologies to occur which otherwise could not happen with proprietary software. Does the Internet, which uses Free Software very heavily, cause you to lose your job? Is the Internet bad for the economy? I would argue it's not. Free Software doesn't put up artificial barriers on its use, so anyone can use it, improve it, make new things out of it, or build things on it (you can do this with proprietary software but with greater difficulty).

4a. Commoditisation is a bad thing.
In the short run, commoditisation might be bad but almost always is good in the long run. Should we be short-sighted and focus only on the immediate future (say, within this year)? Commoditising software allows many new things to build upon it (see point 4), and this helps the economy greatly. Where would we be if TCP/IP were not a commodity? (Hint: no Internet). Where would we be if Apache were proprietary (and thus not a commodity)? (Hint: fewer useful Web sites). This is partly speculation, but there's little reason to doubt it's true (be my guest to give supporting reasons for why it's not).

Free Software is a Very Good Thing(tm). It benefits programmers. Users love Free Software (even if they don't know it's FS): TiVo uses FS; it's a good application *built upon* FS. There are countless other applications (routers, etc.) which rely on FS and probably would not be possible without it. They contribute to the economy, and someone (many people) has to make those applications (programmers, documenters, electronics engineers, etc.).

1. I know that most free software is covered by a copyright. However, the source code is still available, which means that proprieary software cannot compete. For example, a person asked me once to email him the Morvlon 3.00 (proprietary) source. I told him that once it was released, he could buy it for $25 on www.oahat.org. The response to this (by a different person) was that they would be sticking with free software because they didn't want to pay $25 and not be able to copy it.

2. There is no monetary incentive for a business (and thus the professionals working at such a business) to make free software. You cannot make a profit as a free software manufacturer, just like Edgar Allan Poe couldn't make any money. It's the same situation. Basement tinkerers are starting to dent the bottom lines of companies.

3. Free software is sold below cost. Assuming that you're a professional, how much did your computer cost? How much did your compiler cost? How much did the rest of your software cost? What is your salary that you get from making this software, or the salaries of your colleagues? How much did the infrastructure that supports this cost? What I'm saying is that a business/nonprofit/whatever can't make money competing with downloads made by basement tinkerers. If the entire programming profession collapses, you (a) will not have a booming sector to offset the poor management of the economy and (b) will decrease the overall cash flow in the economy, which leads to collapse of other sectors.

Your Edgar Allen Poe analogy is extrememly flawed. It could be argued that Poe did not have the choice to protect his work from copying. In stark contrast, proprietary software makers can and do, within reason. Free Software makers can but *choose* not to, but they still can make money off of their works (this has been demonstrated many, many times).

To whom are you trying to compare Poe? Neither proprietary software makers nor Free Software makers can seriously be compared to him or to his situation. They're completely different. Is there a different entity I have overlooked to which you are comparing Poe's situation? Users? Computer manufacturers? Politicians? Little starving kids in India?

If I don't reply again to you in the near future you should take it to mean that I'm just tired of repeatedly pointing out obvious flaws in your arguments and analogies -- usually the same ones several times. Please sort out your arguments and analogies before you write any more in this discussion.

OK...

Poe was unable to prevent people from outright copying his work because in the 1830s the laws did not protect his work. Proprietary developers may soon be unable to choose not to release source code because they have to do it to be competitive. If they do that, they're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Believe me. I work for one. We've conducted much market research and that is the very strong indication that we're getting.

If I'm not clear, please tell me. I, too, can sense that this is going nowhere.

It's still flawed. It would be better if Poe prevented people from copying, but others chose to sell their works and allow copying.

The works would need to be evolutionary and useful not only the way it's published (other authors can base similar books on it which do other useful things). This distinguishes the copying-restricted and the copying-allowed works.

The buyers would find the copying-allowed books to be more useful and would buy them; Poe could not compete because he chooses to be restrictive. Developers can still choose the proprietary model, but it would be a bad choice with the way the industry is going now.

Opening up the source code doesn't kill the goose. Many times the goose is strengthened. If the goose gets sick, it likely was sick (unobviously) before the software was freed; freeing software sometimes exposes problems. If you stay with the proprietary model, the goose will go elsewhere. It's how business works: give your consumers what they want if you want to keep them.

If you want to stay competitive down the road with an easy transition, you could gradually sell software and license it freely; sell a program here and there as free software until the time is right for selling all or most as free software.

See the link for a page detailing why and when to open up your software. See also <http://opensource.org/ advocacy/jobs.php> which answers or dispels many of the points you've made against free software. Lastly, read <http://opensource.org/ advocacy/case_for_business.html> for ways that free software is good for business. (remove spaces from the URLs)

You simply cannot make money allowing copying. It is that simple. None of your web pages address any of my points, which are related to developers and their development of software. My point is that whatever money you can make from free software you can make from proprietary software plus more. As a proprietary developer, you are also less vulnerable to retail-market short-term volatility because you don't need to interface with end-users.
Please state how these web pages apply yourself because I don't see how they do.
Please also remember that we (OAHAT) CANNOT give away software and control distribution (or any of your other schemes). We are using it as a fundraiser and thus need to use it to raise funds, which we cannot do by artificially limiting what parts of what we sell we can sell. When you consider it in context, it is really ridiculous.
Please do not lecture me on how business works. I know how business works. You cannot make a profit selling below cost. It doesn't matter how good your customer support is. Your main scheme has the effect of turning a company from a developer into a distributor of their own software (and, ironically, they usually end up undercutting themselves).
I am discussing the effects on developers. If you aren't, please make that clear.

What do you mean by "turning a company from a developer into a distributor of their own software"? Doesn't a developer already distribute their own software, or do consumers pay them for nothing?

You still claim that money cannot be made while allowing copying. This simply is not true, in theory and practise. Is Red Hat just a figment of my imagination? Did IBM lie when they said they've made a billion dollars with their Linux campaign (beyond recovering the billion they spent on it)? Do SuSE and Mandrake not exist? They all exist and make money selling something which they allow to be copied and on related services (such as tech support). It happens whether you understand how it works or not.

I believe the web pages address your points well. For example, the page titled "Jobs for Hackers: Yes, You Can Eat Open Source" answers the developer's question "How can I make a living doing open-source software?" and makes good cases against arguments similar to those you've made like "Programming will collapse if software has no market value", "Open-source software has no market value", and others like "Open-source software has no monopoly value".

Selling proprietary software is becoming like selling horse carriages. Soon (hopefully within a decade or so) very few buyers will buy proprietary software (horse carriages), and companies who sell it will no longer be profitable. Buyers will buy free software (automobiles) instead, so selling free software will be much more profitable than selling something which almost no one will buy.

The legality of selling below cost is irrelevant in this discussion, as companies who sell free software don't do it. It should be obvious that they don't, as they can and do sustain themselves selling free software and related services (they wouldn't stay in business for long otherwise).

You can't compete with something that is being given away if you charge for what you sell. You also cannot give away your trade secrets and survive. It is that simple. IBM is huge. It is an economy in its own right. Small business (and large business in the long run) cannot absorb the market fluctuations that retailing your own manufactured products causes. If you don't understand why, I'll explain it to you.

BTW, if you have something to say, say it. Explain it. I don't understand how these web pages address my points, and 'Trust me, they do' is insufficient explanation.

4. One of the central points in my argument is that free software is in the same range of quality as that produced by professionals.

4a. I think that whenever you say something like this, you should imagine yourself as an author looking at this same thing happening to your books. Let me make my point again: when you have proprietary, professionally made software, you have to pay programmers, infrastructure people, tech support, documenters/writers, customer IT reps, and all the administrative and management personnel involved in an operating business entity. When you have free software, you need only to pay documenters/writers and people to implement the software. If, in a free market, there was a free software alternative to every proprietary work, the free software will always win. This eventually probably will mean a loss of billions of dollars per year of cash flow. That is exactly why slavery is an economically short-sighted and overall bad idea.

PS: I was talking about communism, not bolshevism. Communism was never practiced in the USSR.

Soviet Russia actually called themselves Socialists (and they were too), but Communism was their goal. Socialism was expected to evolve (and probably would have) into Communism.

Your credibility really suffers when you claim that selling below cost is both illegal and dumb. Sometimes it is dumb, but it most definitely is (in most circumstances) not illegal. A sale is selling something below cost. So is a clearance. Are sales and clearances illegal? Of course they're not.

I suggest you stop making these kinds of claims before you lose all credibility.

Free Software sometimes is sold below cost, but usually it's not; if it were, then how could it support itself? If it couldn't support itself enough to become popular and cause the industry to collapse, then what are you worried about?

***Either Free Software is sold below cost and the industry will not collapse, or it's not and it won't.***

Also, you state that if Free Software wins, it "eventually probably will mean a loss of billions of dollars per year of cash flow", but you don't say *who* will lose billions of dollars. If it's exclusively the software makers, then so what? It's a good example of the Broken Window fallacy anyway. The money would be spent elsewhere to better effect.

I see no reason to believe they would lose billions each year, though. Perhaps you should see it the other way around: software producers can produce more/better software with the same costs. This is how Free Software tends to work. Companies who sell Free Software can produce a lot of high-quality software for about the same costs as companies who sell proprietary software.

I don't care what they called themselves. Giving half of your pants to the government is not communism. We agree on this. End of argument.
---
Look it up. It's illegal. WalMart has been sued for doing it countless times. Also, a sale is not selling below cost. Look up wholesale prices and compare them to sale prices. Sale prices are almost universally bigger than wholesale. They just reduce their profit margin, and occasionally take a hit when it comes to infrastructure (not usually overhead). However, by the time a company has a sale, the profits usually do not go towards capital investments; thus, they are not really selling below cost.
---
I do say who will lose billions of dollars. The economy in general. If you cannot pay programmers (and others indirectly affected), the programmers (and others indirectly affected) cannot pay others for as many goods, so retailers take a hit from this, which ripples to wholesalers and eventually manufacturers. Everybody loses when people lose wages and jobs. You surprise me with such economic tunnel vision.

Regardless of the legality of selling below cost (which I still hold is legal in general), lets look at three typical cases of Free Software distributors.

Case one: casual redistributor, such as me. I burn CD's with a lot of cool software and hand them out to people. Sometimes I charge a few bucks. You can't seriously call this selling below cost, because I got the software for nothing. It didn't cost me *anything* (besides a CD-R), so unless I *pay* people to take it, I cannot sell it below cost.

Case two: free (as in beer) mass redistributor, such as ticalc.org. In most cases this is very similar to the casual redistributor, except it's usually over the Internet (web, FTP, BitTorrent, etc.). Unless you can convince me that doing something as harmless as making some files legally available to anyone with an Internet connection is illegal, I maintain that it's legal.

Case three: commercial redistributor, such as Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, IBM, etc.. These companies sell their own brands of GNU/Linux and other Free Software, usually with services attached (warranty, tech support, etc). Many times the software packages are comparable in price to similar proprietary offerings, but more times than not there is *much* more software included, and it allows *much* more uses. Nevertheless, it costs *less* to the distributor (e.g., Red Hat) to package up the software than it does for a proprietary vendor, because the FS vendor doesn't have to write and support everything directly themselves. It *costs* them less. Besides, you seem to forget that mere copying costs nothing, and that's mostly what they're doing, so you can't sell below cost very easily when the cost is very low.

I forgot to mention one thing about selling below cost: even if it *is* illegal, should you not whine about the ones committing the crime instead of about the "product" being sold by them? Do you whine about a brand of potato chips if Wal-Mart sells them below cost? That brand of chips might be competing directly with *your* brand of chips, so you would whine about the company who makes the chips instead of Wal-Mart, right? It seems to follow your reasoning.

You can't stop people from writing and distributing Free Software. It will be legal (in the US at least) as long as the first amendment of the US Constitution holds intact.

To those who resist Free Software, I quote Thomas C Greene: "And if the rules of the marketplace suddenly change and make it difficult for them [proprietary software vendors], well -- tough. Adapt or die. Don't moan." It seems to me that you are moaning about something you can't change and choose to experience the negative consequences by opposing it. Either get on the speeding train or get run over by it (or let it pass you by and be stuck with the dinosaurs, er, Microsoft).

On your last point: you assume that whatever money DOESN'T go to programmers is not spent ELSEWHERE. This is obviously not true, though. The money would be transferred to other industries or even within other areas within the software industry (such as documentation and maintainence, as you talk about so much).

What this means is (most likely) that there might be fewer programming positions and more documentation and maintainence (non-programming) positions. Is this really a bad thing? I think it's not, as there still is a shortage of good programmers in the software industry.

The end result of this is that more/better (a tradeoff) software can be produced for a given amount of money, and there can also be more/better (also a tradeoff) documentation written. That's just *within* the industry. Think of the effects outside the industry: since there'd be less money wasted in software and related services, more money can go towards other stuff.

In your own words, you surprise me with such economic tunnel vision.

BTW, my computer has been running for 72 days (since about the last power outage) without any major problems. I'm running Knoppix 3.4 FROM CD, and it runs very smoothly.

Also, looking back on your past responses, it seems that you almost never directly answer my direct questions, and you almost always go back to your same arguments that, for the life of me, I can't figure out why you're still trying to use. They're tired and OLD. Please find NEW arguments that can stand up to some reasoning.

(Part 2)

I will assume by "communism" you are referring to the Communism as practised in Soviet Russia. In that case, proprietary software is very close to that. It really is. The "state" (some centralised entity) owns the means of production. Free Software, if anything, is an ideal form of communism and is in no way incongruous with capitalism (again, the reward for the work for Free Software can come in the form of money). Nobody really "owns" the software (which is much different from communism), but no one who uses it is obligated to give up their work to anyone, as it was in USSR communism.

What do you mean by typewriters and card catalogs? Do you believe I want those to be widely used again? If yes, then that's another false assumption you have. I want more technology, just like you. I want Free Software, because without it computing would be much more expensive and difficult (take away the Internet, for one). With only Free Software software almost everything is still possible and many times is easier.

You make a good point in my favor at the end of your post: "[software] which might be unsupported after six months if the writers vaporize....". This problem exists with proprietary software. You don't have the source code, so no one else can step in to fix it or improve it down the road. With Free Software, if the author decides to scrap his software, anyone can take it and continue supporting it. This has happened numerous times already.

What does the above post have to do with the topic at hand? These open-source browsers (and, yes, OpenOffice, but Word is unusable) take jobs and make the profession less professional and more amateur. People need to have control over their computers, but people also need to make a living and to get money from professional work. These systems undercut this. I don't know how old you are and I don't want to know, but I think that you will curse the open-source movement when you can't get a job. That is the other reason for not using these programs that I was hinting at: I try to avoid this short-sighted concept whenever possible. However, that is not to say that they are any better, or even equal to, IE for my purposes.

My list of sites:

artofproblemsolving.com
ohsodef.com
m-w.com
collegeboard.com
ticalc.org
detachedsolutions.com
microsoft.com
download.com
lavasoft.de
zonelabs.com
ca.com
mail.yahoo.com
msjhs.org
nasa.gov

My parents' list of sites:

bbsland.com
wenxuecity.com
sina.net
amazon.com
usps.com
ebay.com

I partially retract that. There is an extension which allows ActiveX scripting to work in Firefox. ActiveX is insecure by design, so the extension makes Firefox a little less secure (but not as insecure as IE). Microsoft just doesn't understand security well enough to practise it.

This is a perfect time to bring up the 'browser war'. The reason IE does most of that stuff is because Micro$oft creates it's own F#cking tags and expects you to use them ! It's another world domination scheme coutesy of MS.

Why shouldn't it? Why can't it do something better or introduce new features?

They're not really for new features or to do something better. They're for vendor lock-in.

Face it: they want to control the Internet, and proprietary "features" like non-standard tags in IE are just one way MS is trying to control it.

So reverse-engineer the tags if they're undocumented. Legally, you can't make a protocol that it is illegal to disassemble or reverse-engineer when it causes a monopoly.

I'm probably going to get myself into trouble for this--feel free to express any points I missed or got wrong:

- The HTML standard is already set in place.
- Adding proprietary features to an already established standard, especially if it's done by a company that's a monopoly, breaks other software.
- I think CSS is supposed to be used for adding extended formatting information now. But any attributes of proprietary features are supposed to be named using a specific scheme, according to the W3C standard. As I understand, some (or all) of the IE features are not named using this scheme.

Why would you get yourself in trouble for this?

They should be reverse-engineered. It would be completely legal (AFAIK) and would be defensible because they are a monopolization tactic. However, I think it would probably require a court order.

First off, you assume that Windows is the 'best basic program'. You are wrong. Very wrong. Windows XP is insecure and very suseptable to viruses and bloatware. The family XP computer must be restarted every week or so because of the proformence decrease. By comparison, my Linux box has been running for nearly 3 weeks now with no proformence loss, *and* it runs faster then it did when windows was on it. Windows XP also repetedly sends info about your computer to microsoft. Even if you have dialup, it will connect all by itself and "talk" to microsoft. I have firewall logs to prove it, and there is actuly an option buried 10 option dialog boxes deep that admits to the fact and allows you to turn it off. It's highly obsucre though, and no normal user would even know that such an option even existed.

Secondly, You assume that IE is better then FireFox. You have only to proform a 3 minute download/install operation to see how wrong you are. Firefox is faster, more stable, less prone to viruses and such, and more standards complient. If any websites don't work with FireFox, its because they are not standards complient and because they are using IE's broken artifical standards.