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andy zebrowitz

andy zebrowitz

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andy zebrowitz

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andy zebrowitz

The biggest problem with using modems was that you had to let everyone in the house know you were on the "modem". This meant, sticking post-it notes to every phone in the house

Ah, smart. My solution was to just bellow really loudly that everyone should stay off the phone so I could use the modem. This was usually followed by my parents telling me to use the intercom instead of yelling, or telling me to stop tying up the phones, or asking if I'd done my homework yet.

You also couldn't tie up the phone for hours on end. There was very very few people that had an answering service ... You also had to remember, if you were one of those people that had it, disable call waiting

No way man. The call-waiting thing was, to me, a feature. It meant that I could assure my parents that I wouldn't be tying up the phone lines and preventing people from calling. It was an enormous hassle when the thing disconnected but it meant my parents couldn't use that as an excuse to tell me not to use it.

When I was 14 or so my parents felt comfortable enough to leave me home alone for four days when they went out of town. Still, they asked my uncle to check up on me periodically. Of course, since I didn't care about missing calls, I fired up the modem, logged on, and kept the call-waiting disabled. This meant that my uncle got a busy signal for a day and a half when he was trying to call to see how I was doing, until he finally drove over to see if I was just tying up the line with the modem, or if I was dead on the floor after a brutal break-in that knocked the phone off the hook.

Pointless nostalgia now concluded. More pointless nostalgia on this topic may be found here if anyone's interested.

So what do you do when you install Ubuntu and find that it doesn't recognize one or more pieces of hardware that worked with your Windows install?

I deal with it. I was careful to state that I would have "few if any" problems, not that "this will work 100% of the time". I don't expect anything to work all the time without a hitch.

However, I took detailed notes about installing Ubuntu versus Windows. Read them here if you care.

Never in my six-plus years of using Linux (Debian and Ubuntu) have I "hand picked" the hardware. I use whatever the hell I have around or whatever got issued to me by my employer. That's it, that's all she wrote, no exceptions.

In every case, Windows installs have been an endless cycle of hunting down drivers and rebooting and updating and finding more drivers and installing each one by one and more rebooting. In each case, Ubuntu has installed without any major issues. The biggest problem I've ever faced was Broadcom wireless cards which stopped being a problem after 6.06.

Ubuntu, and Linux in general, is not perfect, so stop acting like I ever said it was. But the driver problems it has at this point are so few and far between as to be beneath mention. Windows, on the other hand, will completely fail, guaranteed, unless you have the drivers handy on a disc or an extra computer with which you can go hunt them down and put them on a CD or USB key. It's pathetic.

The Brother printers we have at work? I was able to plug them into my Ubuntu laptop, and connect to it over the network. Both times, it just worked. In Windows I had to hunt down drivers and spend fun time with "Add Printers" and screwing around with ports or TCP settings for it to even see the printer, nevermind operate.

I bought an M-audio midi controller. I plug it into my Ubuntu machine and it works right away. In Windows I had to break out the driver CD, which didn't work, then hunt down drivers online, and half an hour later I got it to work.

I could go on and on. Examples exist on both sides of the fence. But don't act like Windows is some paragon of compatibility. Windows itself is compatible with nothing, because Microsoft depends on the vendors to provide all the drivers and if you don't have them, well, screw you.

I know that I can install Ubuntu on any random hardware -- any random hardware -- and most of it, maybe all if it, will work. I also know that if I install Windows on any machine, it will not work without an additional five hours of finding drivers and installing them one by one and cleaning up the party favors they leave behind.

And one more thing. In Ubuntu, those drivers and modules will update, along with every other aspect of my system, in one fell swoop. In Windows, every single vendor has their own little updater and I have to tend to each of them one at a time. That's assuming they even have an updater -- sometimes I just have to remember to check the vendor website and see if there are any updates available.


In conclusion:

So what do you do when you install Ubuntu and find that it doesn't recognize one or more pieces of hardware that worked with your Windows install?

I don't know, smartass. What do you do when you install Windows and nothing whatsoever works that worked with your Ubuntu install?

Hmm?

So what do you do when you install Ubuntu and find that it doesn't recognize one or more pieces of hardware that worked with your Windows install?

I deal with it. I was careful to state that I would have "few if any" problems, not that "this will work 100% of the time". I don't expect anything to work all the time without a hitch.

However, I took detailed notes about installing Ubuntu versus Windows. Read them here if you care.

Never in my six-plus years of using Linux (Debian and Ubuntu) have I "hand picked" the hardware. I use whatever the hell I have around or whatever got issued to me by my employer. That's it, that's all she wrote, no exceptions.

In every case, Windows installs have been an endless cycle of hunting down drivers and rebooting and updating and finding more drivers and installing each one by one and more rebooting. In each case, Ubuntu has installed without any major issues. The biggest problem I've ever faced was Broadcom wireless cards which stopped being a problem after 6.06.

Ubuntu, and Linux in general, is not perfect, so stop acting like I ever said it was. But the driver problems it has at this point are so few and far between as to be beneath mention. Windows, on the other hand, will completely fail, guaranteed, unless you have the drivers handy on a disc or an extra computer with which you can go hunt them down and put them on a CD or USB key. It's pathetic.

The Brother printers we have at work? I was able to plug them into my Ubuntu laptop, and connect to it over the network. Both times, it just worked. In Windows I had to hunt down drivers and spend fun time with "Add Printers" and screwing around with ports or TCP settings for it to even see the printer, nevermind operate.

I bought an M-audio midi controller. I plug it into my Ubuntu machine and it works right away. In Windows I had to break out the driver CD, which didn't work, then hunt down drivers online, and half an hour later I got it to work.

I could go on and on. Examples exist on both sides of the fence. But don't act like Windows is some paragon of compatibility. Windows itself is compatible with nothing, because Microsoft depends on the vendors to provide all the drivers and if you don't have them, well, screw you.

I know that I can install Ubuntu on any random hardware -- any random hardware -- and most of it, maybe all if it, will work. I also know that if I install Windows on any machine, it will not work without an additional five hours of finding drivers and installing them one by one and cleaning up the party favors they leave behind.

And one more thing. In Ubuntu, those drivers and modules will update, along with every other aspect of my system, in one fell swoop. In Windows, every single vendor has their own little updater and I have to tend to each of them one at a time. That's assuming they even have an updater -- sometimes I just have to remember to check the vendor website and see if there are any updates available.


In conclusion:

So what do you do when you install Ubuntu and find that it doesn't recognize one or more pieces of hardware that worked with your Windows install?

I don't know, smartass. What do you do when you install Windows and nothing whatsoever works that worked with your Ubuntu install?

Hmm?

It's a totally fair comparision. First, a shameless plug for my own "article" about Windows versus Ubuntu.

In a nutshell, Ubuntu comes with basically everything the average yob needs right off. Office suite, mail, multi-protocol IM client, browser, video player, music player, CD and DVD burner, music ripper, and the list goes on. Pretty much everything else you could want is available, for free, out of the repositories, with one simple click.

Windows has a terrible browser and a terrible media player (WMP) that barely works half the time. And MS Paint, I guess. That's about it. It doesn't even have a mail client anymore. Basically, if you want to do anything other than browse the web with IE, you are stuck either shelling out more money for applications, or you're responsible for finding, downloading, and installing all your applications.. by hand.. one at a time.

It doesn't hurt that Linux comes with all kinds of useful development and diagnostic tools. They're never going to be used by the "average user", I guess, but they're there.. unlike Windows where, again, you have to find 'em yourself, or open your wallet.

Amusingly, Ubuntu packs all that into about three gigs of drive space and a small memory footprint on boot. Windows 7 clocks in with something like eight or nine gigs of drive space, hogs a ton of memory just sitting there idle, and comes with nothing.

Here's my "article" on why Windows is not ready for the desktop.

And here's the tl;dr version.

These days I'd be okay giving my mother an Ubuntu CD and knowing she could install it and use it with very minimal assistance from me. There is no way in Hell she could set up Windows on her own, and if she somehow managed, it'd be nearly unusable a week later with all the extraneous crap she'd have to install to get her day-to-day stuff done. And securing that puppy is a task unto itself.

Okay, well, I documented some of my adventures right here. There are no screenshots because I didn't think to take any, but these were HP nx7400 machines. So we're talking, let's see...

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/
02:0e.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
10:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)

I think you'll agree none of this is unusual -- in fact, it's all pretty generic stuff. Neither Vista nor XP handled it and I had to, as documented, go download the driver installers one by one, and install them one by one. They all worked fine out of the box on my Ubuntu install (which is where I just pulled the above information, since I'm still using the same laptop, only now I'm on 8.04).

So, that's as much proof as I can give you. I admit it'd have been better if I'd thought to take some screenshots but whatever.

Virtually everything can use the fallback LAN driver in Windows.

And yet I've never seen that happen. I've had the same experience on my company's old Dell 600m laptops as well, by the way, so it's not just some fluke of the nx7400s. Come to think of it, I had to go through this dance when I installed Vista 64 on my custom-built workstation at home two years ago, and that thing also has some generic Intel on-board ethernet.

Are you serious? You've never seen an updated driver package on Windows Update?

Okay, true, I have seen drivers update, but I've never seen new drivers get installed during the whole "NEW HARDWARE DETECTED! WOULD YOU LIKE WINDOWS TO SEARCH ONLINE FOR DRIVERS?" thing. That's what I was talking about, so I guess I misread, but I stand by what I said in that context -- Windows claims to have this vast online repository of drivers, but nobody has ever actually gotten drivers that way to my knowledge. Being able to update drivers isn't all that impressive if I have to move mountains to get the drivers in the first place, you know what I'm sayin'?

You're not doing anything with Ubuntu.

Three years of using it as my only OS at work as a sysadmin for a mixed-platform environment would seem to disagree.

How about that Brother printer? Does the Linux driver support ALL the features of the Brother printer? I bet not.

Don't know. I only plugged my machine into it long enough to test the printer, and it worked, as far as printing and scanning using xsane. That's all I cared about -- what "features" am I missing? I have no idea because if I'm missing anything they're features so unimportant that I'd never give a damn. It prints, it scans, what the hell else do I need it to do?

Then here's a more detailed version for you -- three OS installs on identical hardware.

Ubuntu literally is "click install, select your partition, name, timezone, and password, and wander away for twenty minutes." When it comes up everything works out of the box. Customize your wallpaper and other visuals if you must, but your hardware and software works fine. Ooh, you might have to click "Enable Drivers" to get your Broadcom wireless working -- what a pain. And it comes with damn near everything an average user would care about. Want more software? Click on it. Hell, click fifty of 'em, and install them all simultaneously with almost zero interaction from you once you've kicked off the process.

Updates install all at once and never require a reboot except in the case of a kernel update, and even then, you can tell it to sod off until you're ready.

If you've previously used Ubuntu (or any other distro, really), unpack your home directory tarball and hey -- all your customizations and application settings just how they were before.

XP and Vista require you to hold their hands throughout the entire install process.

CLICK HERE TO ACTIVATE WINDOWS
RUN DESKTOP ICON CLEANUP WIZARD?

When they're done installing half the devices have no drivers -- hope you have that recovery disk, or enjoy tromping through endless vendor websites,

WARNING YOUR COMPUTER MAY BE AT RISK CLICK HERE

downloading the driver installers,

THIS DRIVER WAS NOT DIGITALLY SIGNED AND MAY RAPE YOUR GRANDMOTHER

and installing them one at a time (agreeing to god-knows-what EULA in the process).

30 DAYS LEFT FOR ACTIVATION

Got your hardware running now? Good, go install Windows updates and reboot five or six times.

ONE OR MORE WIRELESS NETWORKS DETECTED, CLICK HERE TO JOIN A WIRELESS NETWORK

YOUR COMPUTER MAY BE AT RISK, NO ANTI-VIRUS DISCOVERED, CLICK HERE TO OPEN WINDOWS SECURITY CENTER

Done with that? Great! Now write a letter to your boss. Oops, you can't. Go find/steal/crack Office/OpenOffice and have fun installing that.

WINDOWS NEEDS YOUR PERMISSION TO CONTINUE, CANCEL OR ALLOW?
HEY! HEY! CLICK HERE TO SAFELY REMOVE HARDWARE!
HEY! TAKE A TOUR OF WINDOWS XP!

Niiiiice, you wrote a letter to your boss. What's next? How about a little web-surfing? Oh, you're not seriously going to use IE, are you? Go get Firefox and install that.

WINDOWS IS CONFIGURING UPDATES... WINDOWS WILL NOW REBOOT...

Well, that's done. Why don't you make a CD for your girlfriend? Oh, gee, you can't, unless you think WMP is going to do it, which it won't. Go google for decent CD burning software and hope it's not trialware, crippleware, or installs some BS spyware alongside. Install it.

May as well chat with your friends, see what they're up to. What? No IRC or AIM client? Bugger, better go find those, install them, customize them the way you're used to.

See, this is easy and fast! Windows: Ready for the Desktop!

andy zebrowitz

I've never had to compile anything from source

I can't remember the last time I've "had to" compile anything from source under Linux. That's what apt (or whatever package manager) is for. The only times I compile things from source are when I feel like it because I'm being geeky, or when it's some really esoteric package that, frankly, you wouldn't even have under Windows (hydra comes to mind).

Nor do you "have to" use the command line in Linux these days for 99% of what I'll call "user operations". Things a typical user would do -- check email, use the web, chat online, watch a movie, write a paper, work on a spreadsheet. You know. Gnome and KDE both make it as point and click simple as Windows. The command line is only "necessary" when you're performing certain operations that a typical user would never, ever, ever do -- for example I use it for running network diagnostics and packet captures and so forth.

It seems to me, most Linux distro's only come with the bare necessities (Browser, Productivity Software, Media Player, Etc.). Windows typically has all of these,

You've got it backwards. A fresh install of, say, Ubuntu, has a nice mp3/music player, mail client, web browser, Office suite, multiprotocol IM client, photo manipulation program, and a bunch of other useful stuff already there, out of the box, ready to go. Most of it will serve the average user's needs already, without the need to go hunting around for additional software. If they do need something else, it's a few mouse clicks to get it installed, and you know it'll work. You don't have to search the web, find a boatload of corporate software that makes you register, pay, dance, and swear off your first born, then leaves all kinds of horseshit little icons, shortcuts, systray "helpers", and additional programs you don't want.

A fresh install of Windows has, well, nothing really. Windows Media Player is a freaking joke, but I guess it plays music. Outlook Express is also a joke, but okay, I guess it checks mail, sorta. Other than that, where's the "Office suite" -- Wordpad? Where's the DVD player? Where's the IM client? If you consider IE to be a viable browser, that's your own lookout, but really, Windows on a fresh install is about as bare-bones, minimally usable as can be. Anything you want, you have to go find for yourself, download, install, register, pay, crack, steal, and then clean up the mess each installer leaves behind.

Finally, you say "Installations are pretty intuitive in Windows." I had to laugh. Let me plug myself a moment and explain why Ubuntu is easier to install than Windows, both the OS and the applications. These are side-by-side comparisions I did while installing each, with what I hope are reasonable expectations.

But if you don't believe me, ask yourself this: Why are users always bitching that their computers are "slow" and so forth? Because Windows lets any application install anything it wants, anywhere it wants, screw with the registry however it wants, load whatever memory-hogging additional "features" it wants, and within short order, the user -- not knowing how to clean up -- ends up with a machine bogged down with ungodly amounts of crapware.

Linux distros, on the other hand, do not have this problem and never will. To screw up a modern Linux system in the same way you really, really have to know what you're doing, and go out of your way to do it.

Heh, I don't think so. I recently did a comparative install of XP, Vista, and Ubuntu on identical hardware. You can read all about it if you want (with a handy side by side chart).

Glossing over a Windows install with "Step one, install Windows" is absolutely absurd. Getting XP or Vista to a usable state (which I define in the "article") takes a tremendous amount of time, fidgeting with all kinds of settings, disabling all kinds of useless garbage and services, turning off notifications about everything, etc. And, as I state in my preamble, I don't believe these things are silly -- I don't consider an OS usable if it's nagging me about something every thirty seconds, has ten thousand startup services and systray helpers, gaping security holes, and the rest.

I'd give an Ubuntu CD to my mother any day of the week, confident that she could install it. There's no way in Hell she'd ever be able to get XP or Vista running without my help.

bzflag is total crap.

You got all that right. I run a darkwave and futurepop radio station myself and play stuff that most people have never heard of before outside the hazy drunkenness of a goth club somewhere. There are a few groups I have in rotation that have acheived some commercial success, but most of them, despite being signed to labels, are almost totally unknown beyond a pretty tight-knit circle.

I have personally had people email me and tell me they loved such and such song, this or that group, and ended up buying some songs off iTunes or CDs or whatever. I know one guy who attended the VNV Nation concert here in Atlanta, after hearing them on my station. Had he never tuned in he'd never have known who VNV Nation was, but he did, and paid for a ticket. What's that mean for VNV Nation? At least the sale of a ticket, plus whatever swag he may have picked up while he was at the show (shirts, albums, buttons, who knows).

This sort of thing happens all the time. Artists seek out net radio broadcasters and send them free tracks, promo kits, and other stuff to get exposure. I'm not even that big a player as internet radio goes, and I've gotten a bunch of CDs in the mail, mp3s, release kits, promotional tracks, and other goodies. More important broadcasters than I am, they get way more stuff.

And why would the artists do this? Because they want exposure, which is something that's actually pretty hard to buy. You can advertise but people learn to tune out and ignore advertisements pretty quickly, in any medium or format. Or you can just spread the word and let your work speak for itself, which is what the musicians are doing.

The RIAA really is killing off a fantastic source of free advertising, and I can't understand what their problem is. It's not as though anyone refrained from buying music because they can just listen to it on the radio. Hell, most of the music I own, I got because I heard it on the radio and just had to have it.

And it was usually internet radio that brought me to it.

So I ran my own test.

I transferred a 3.5 gigabyte file from my Ubuntu Fawn laptop to my Vista Ultimate workstation. Both are dual-core Intel processors; the Ubuntu laptop is a T5600 @ 1.83ghz, and the Vista workstation is an e6600 @ 2.4ghz. They are connected through a normal Belkin with a 100mbit ports.

(Amusingly, the file in question was a Vista Ultimate ISO.)

While the transfer took place I opened Vista's task manager and looked at the network utilization graph. Steady at 38% with almost no deviation. I let that go for a minute.

Then I played an mp3.

Immediately the utilization went to 27% and held steady. As soon as I stopped the mp3, it shot back up to 38%.

I did this all with WMP at first, thinking that'd be it. To double-check I ran my usual player, Winamp, with the exact same results.

Here is a screenshot of the network graph. Every single one of those dips you see was me playing an mp3. Disgusting!

Thinking that just maybe the problem was disk usage, I did two things. First, I forced a defrag on Vista while the transfer was underway. Network utilization was unaffected. Next, I tried streaming music from my own darkwave station (and then shamelessly plugged in on slashdot). Network obligingly dropped to 27% even though streaming shouldn't use the disk.

I'm convinced. This is a seriously messed up issue and I hope to whatever diety that Microsoft rectifies it quickly.

For the record, Vista has managed to annoy me a lot less than any previous incarnation of Windows, at least in userland, once I turned off the UAC crap. And I like some of the little extras that it does. But from a technical and administrative standpoint, this is highly obnoxious, and I'm pretty appalled.

I do have to say, though, that until I went out of my way to test this, I had never noticed the difference, and I'm a technical guy. The average user would probably never notice the difference under any circumstances. That does not excuse this type of idiocy, but it may explain why MS chose to do this. Just a guess.

Yeah, but most streaming radio stations aren't that high quality to begin with. There are a few out there that broadcast at 128k or sometimes even higher, but most don't. My own darkwave radio station (plug!) broadcasts at 96k, actually, and I do this for a few reasons, which are also the same reasons other broadcasters do it.

First, because it's a reasonably decent fidelity without hammering the connection (mine or yours). 96k isn't that fantastic but it's still quite a bang for the buck, as it were. Second, I don't believe you should get a perfect reproduction of the music I'm playing -- it's supposed to be analogous to an actual radio, where the fidelity isn't perfect either, and furthermore my station is free to listen to, and if you like the music you can go buy the albums or songs. I even provide a bunch of links to Amazon for currently featured artists I'm playing at the moment. My station is not intended to be a perfect copy.

All of this comes together to mean that you could streamrip mirrorshades radio all day long but you're not going to get something you'd want to burn to CD or put on your iPod. The quality is fine for a stream you're likely listening to at work or as background music for home, but if you were to rip it it'd be about the same as taping a song off the radio.

Most broadcasters I know or listen to operate the same way. Digitally Imported's free streams are 96k, Corrosion Radio streams at 64k mono, and most of the stations on live365 are 64k or below. I know afterhoursdjs goes up to 192k but they're one of few that do.

The main bullet point you should be taking away from my entire speech here is that despite SoundExchange's whinging, streamripping is an extremely minor concern. Most people don't know it can be done, most of those who know it can be done don't know how, and even if they do, who cares if they get a low-quality copy of a song?

Thanks I appreciate the exposure, it's hard to get the music out as an independent artist which is why I'm trying to get radioplay. The CD is the mail.

Yeah, that is what we are experiencing with Red Flag. The darkwave scene just loves the music but we need to really get the message out there.

Thanks I appreciate the exposure, it's hard to get the music out as an independent artist which is why I'm trying to get radioplay. The CD is the mail.

Yeah, that is what we are experiencing with Red Flag. The darkwave scene
just loves the music but we need to really get the message out there.

Not quite school teacher or business owner point of view, but I've tried to be fair to what the Average User can do with Windows versus Ubuntu in this link I'm shamelessly whoring for myself.

And, as an anecdotal aside, I tested my hypothesis after, by bringing my Ubuntu laptop to my mother's house where she humored me for ten minutes by doing things like "Okay, mom, let's say you want to check your email. See if you can figure it out," and "Now let's say you want to surf the web..." and letting her go at it without prompting from me. Once she saw the Applications menu (took her about three seconds) it was no problem. If it weren't for certain Windows-only propietary software she has to use for work, I'd feel perfectly comfortable giving her an Ubuntu CD and knowing that my "family tech support time" would be reduced by 90%. I dont' expect that she could do everything without any prompting from me, but she'd never call me again for "I think I have a virus" or "can you help me clean up my start menu again" or "the computer is being slow" because there's fifty gigaquads of spyware infesting it.

Before I started my own darkwave radio station (plug!) via shoutcast, I ran my station off live365. They made it easy, offered a pretty decent rate, and for the price I paid they handled the royalty issues, I had a fairly certain guaranteed uptime, and playlist management was easy. In return all I had to do was make sure all my songs were precisely and accurately ID3 encoded -- so that live365 could host ads and links for the artists I was spinning.

Sounds great for everyone, you ask me...I get to play music I love, people get to hear music they may never hear outside the drunken haze of a goth club, and the artists get free exposure, along with links and ads to their music if you wanted to buy it.

I know this model works because I was (and am) a live365 subscriber for years, and have bought at least two dozen albums based solely on the music I heard on particular stations, music to which I would not otherwise have been exposed. In fact, rips of those albums are a large part of what I spin today on my own station.

And as for that, today, with mirrorshades radio, I have artists sending me music asking to get put into rotation, and listeners, writing to tell me how great this track or that was and that they just grabbed it off iTunes. I know at least one guy who went to the VNV Nation concert here in Atlanta after hearing them on my station -- he'd never heard them before, and what's that mean for VNV Nation? A ticket sale they wouldn't have otherwise had, not to mention whatever swag he probably bought while he was there.

Artists get increased exposure and sales. Listeners get music and choice. I (and my fellow broadcasters) get to play to whatever niche market we choose. Everyone gains, and no one loses, except for the RIAA, hawking their antiquated and outmoded business model.

I've said it before but I'll say it again -- there ain't no Benjamens in the net radio trade. We broadcast for love of the music and artists enjoy the exposure. I was lucky enough to get free hosting for my stream, allowing me a great deal of versatility, but many small broadcasters turn to live365 and similar hosts for cheap, reliable broadcasts, for which they pay their dues and offer free advertising in exchange.

If the majority of people who use live365 as their broadcast platform could afford the rates that soundexchange is demanding, they wouldn't be on live365 to begin with -- they'd have their own dedicated servers with no ads and listeners limited only by bandwidth. As is so often the case, the Big Guys are beating up on the only segment of the population that can't defend themselves.

Stop treading on us, and let the music play.

Thanks I appreciate the exposure, it's hard to get the music out as an
independent artist which is why I'm trying to get radioplay. The CD is
the mail.

I've even written a brief article about how Ubuntu is better than Windows for Your Mother. The two key things the TFA seems to completely gloss over:

1. What do you get on a fresh install? On Windows, you get jack-all squat. A bug-ridden web browser, a word processor (Wordpad) that is next to useless, and an unbelievably ass-tacular media player (WMP). That's about it. Pray you don't need this codec or that.

Ubuntu? Comes with just about everything the average user would ever need or want. AIM, IRC, decent media player (I prefer Audacious and VLC but Totem works fine, really), fully functional office suite including email, slick web browser, PDFs supported natively, the works.

2. Want to install something? In Vista you have to either buy a CD, or google around till you find something that looks promising, download it, install it, and end up with fifty thousand icons all over the start menu and desktop, and god only knows where it'll install the files. Not to mention the bullshit startup helpers and systray crap hogging resources in your system. Pray you don't need this or that obscure nonsense to get it to install or run properly.

Ubuntu? Crack open Synaptic and within one or two clicks you can have just about anything you could possibly want, all dependencies taken care of for you, sorted into a nice, neat menu system even your grandmother would understand. (She can figure out that a game is in "Games", but she won't remember that it's in Programs > Sierra > Atari > Unreal Tournament > Play Unreal Tournament. Not that your grandmother's playing Unreal, but whatever.) No screwing around, no systray nonsense, no startup helpers, no icons littering your desktop.

All that's just for starters; read my little article if you really care about my opinion. Suffice to say that I, for one, would feel perfectly confident giving an Ubuntu CD to my own mother and trusting that she could handle both installing and using it without much questioning of me. Whereas I'm helping her figure Windows out once or twice a week.

I'll second that. I run a synthpop and darkwave radio station (plug!) myself, and I have had people tell me they've never heard this or that artist before, and then go check out their albums. One even went to the VNV Nation concert here in Atlanta after hearing them on my station.

I also have artists send me promo tracks, full albums, and other stuff -- mostly indie artists looking for some exposure. If they're good (and they usually are) I put them in rotation, so dozens of people get to hear someone they've never heard before.

The artists love it. The listeners love it. No one is losing and everyone is gaining -- except the labels, who, in this day and age, are totally unnecessary anyway.

Some of the artists that send me stuff are easily good enough to get signed, and I know some have been approached, but they steadfastly refuse. They'd rather remain independant of money-grubbing middlemen and idiotic contracts, and get their music to the fans with channels of distribution their target audience is likely to use.

I started this venture after years and years of listening to net radio on live365 and other assorted places. And I bought music after listening. I know the system works.

Frankly, there ain't no Benjamens in the net radio trade. We broadcasters do this for the love of the music and because it's fun. Don't penalize us for bringing the art to the people. Don't penalize us, the artists, or the audience.

Ease of installation. Windows requires constant attention, Ubuntu does not. Windows asks questions about partitioning but gives you no clue as to what's a useful choice, Ubuntu provides clear examples of who should use which option. Windows usually doesn't even have drivers installed on a fresh install -- and I'm talking things like ethernet controllers and VGA adapters.

What you get on a fresh install. Windows comes with, well, almost nothing. Wordpad and a shitty browser and an even shitter media player. Ubuntu comes with virtually everything the average user would ever want.

Ease of use. Subjective area, but at least in Gnome, the applications menu is neat, clean, and organized in a straightforward, logical manner. Contrast with the average user's Windows install where the Start Menu is three columns wide and everything makes its own little subfolder according to no plan at all -- sometimes the title of the app, sometimes the name of the software developer, or who fucking knows.

Installation of new things. Windows, you have to go find yourself (your mom can't do this), buy a CD (time consuming and expensive), and then wade through annoying "Setup Wizards" which nag you endlessly about where to install (like your mom knows?), EULAs, and usually all kinds of options Your Mom doesn't understand. God alone knows where it will install (Program Files? Root of C;? None of the above?), and it will leave fifty shortcuts all over the place, and probably in the systray. Contrast with Ubuntu's one-stop-shop of Synaptic, where you just check some boxes, hit "Apply", and it automatically installs, including dependencies needed, and places it in the logical menus. No screwing around.

Indeed, my synthpop radio station (plug!) is similar in scope, playing mostly things from non-RIAA labels and independant artists. I, too, have my server hosted in Germany, and the RIAA can kiss my ass. There isn't a place for people to get darkwave, ebm, futurepop type stuff from conventional radio, and net radio is often the only place to turn, outside the drunken haze of a gothic nightclub.

The thing is, there ain't no Benjamens in doing this; I, like most other webcasters, shell out our own money for our own servers or bandwidth or services like live365.com, and we do it for fun and for love of the music. So far as I know, "terrestrial" stations aren't required to pay royalties in the same way, so why are we?

Thanks I appreciate the exposure, it's hard to get the music out as an independent artist which is why I'm trying to get radioplay. The CD is the mail.

Thanks I appreciate the exposure, it's hard to get the music out as an
independent artist which is why I'm trying to get radioplay. The CD is
the mail.

This article explains why Ubuntu is ideal for new users, using criteria that users actually care about, instead of the usual holy wars surrounding distro of choice discussions amongst geeks. Check it out.

In one of my English courses we were required to write that old standby, the persuasive essay. Being in a somewhat snarky mood and rather tired of having to dish out the same damn essay year after year, I declared that my topic would be "unresolved controversial issue", wrote it, and turned it in. Rather pleased with myself for being such a punkass, I then posted it to my website, where it was discovered by the professor; he called me into his office to give me a big lecture.

I was utterly confused as to what his problem was until he turned the monitor towards me, showing me the familiar blue-and-gray, at which point I dissolved into insane giggles and pointed out not only the date and time it was posted, but followed the link of "kitten" back to the identifier of my real name.

I got an A on this paper.

It's fun to mail the quiz a http://www.mirrorshades.org/wc/archives/002813.php to Bush fanboys and watch them try to spin it. :)

So I guess all chimp cages should now come equipped with the famous Eric Estrada "You're a Homo" poster...