That's too bad - it sounds like you don't enjoy travel jobs.
I have a job that takes me all over rural areas and overseas and I enjoy it all immensely. Culture fascinates me - even the subtle differences between a place like Kansas and Washington or the major differences like US versus China. I enjoy meeting new people and socializing with them. I like traveling in a new city, where normally simple things become challenging feats. The free meals and drinks are really just the icing on the cake, not the reason I love it.
If I had obligations to a family, I would not have even considered a travel job in the first place. Your domestic relationships are definitely going to suffer.
These are features that you may not want, but plenty of other people do. In fact, _most_ of the general web surfing populace wants things like "print this page" and "email to a friend". Localizing a web page to a specific region is very important, especially to big corporations that are attempting to provide support for their software or hardware.
Although I agree that a simple, intuitive design is always best, this does not mean we need to "dumb down" all the other features that some people find very useful.
I think a possible solution to these problems is separating the presentation from the content. This is already starting to happen - CSS/XHTML is a step in the right direction, but it's only a small step.
The images I'm getting clock in at about 5 to 10k, which is about the average size of an email with HTML tags.
I don't think it would be beneficial to the spammers to be sending 200k images, since the goal is as much spam as possible in a user's email inbox, not to knock down their mail servers.
Woah there Cowboy.
I never claimed to know a lot about Linux.
My graphics card is an ATI Radeon x800, and I'm not nearly cutting edge enough to consider that 'cheap' by my standards. I would assume, if anything, I'm pretty well in the mid range for your average computer -- something that an OS shouldn't have a problem detecting and installing on to.
It couldn't possibly have anything to do that virtually every common OS besides Windows IS a *nix variant?
Linux is far simpler than Windows?
Yesterday, I reformatted my hard drive. I decided, after 10 years on a Microsoft operating system I would dual boot XP Pro and a generic install of Ubuntu.
Reinstalled XP Pro in about 40 minutes, including time spent downloading and installing drivers.
To get Ubuntu to install on my machine, I had to manually edit a config file to get the screen to display correctly, but could only do so *after* the Ubuntu installer crashed (like, duh?). I found this out after digging through Ubuntu forum posts for about an hour (there was nothing in the Wiki related to this).
I like the idea of moving to open source software, but the reality is it is not as universal or simple as Windows. XP crashes for me (in the last 4 years of using it) have been rare, and when it is it is usually a memory leak from a particular application, not XP itself.
So far, every machine I've installed Linux on I've had serious compatibility issues in every case. I'm not trying to install Linux on my alarm clock here, these are every day, very common PC parts. I've yet to have a smooth Linux installation. It's simply not for mom and pop yet.
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That's too bad - it sounds like you don't enjoy travel jobs. I have a job that takes me all over rural areas and overseas and I enjoy it all immensely. Culture fascinates me - even the subtle differences between a place like Kansas and Washington or the major differences like US versus China. I enjoy meeting new people and socializing with them. I like traveling in a new city, where normally simple things become challenging feats. The free meals and drinks are really just the icing on the cake, not the reason I love it. If I had obligations to a family, I would not have even considered a travel job in the first place. Your domestic relationships are definitely going to suffer.
These are features that you may not want, but plenty of other people do. In fact, _most_ of the general web surfing populace wants things like "print this page" and "email to a friend". Localizing a web page to a specific region is very important, especially to big corporations that are attempting to provide support for their software or hardware. Although I agree that a simple, intuitive design is always best, this does not mean we need to "dumb down" all the other features that some people find very useful. I think a possible solution to these problems is separating the presentation from the content. This is already starting to happen - CSS/XHTML is a step in the right direction, but it's only a small step.
Spam images are 200k? I have yet to see that.
The images I'm getting clock in at about 5 to 10k, which is about the average size of an email with HTML tags.
I don't think it would be beneficial to the spammers to be sending 200k images, since the goal is as much spam as possible in a user's email inbox, not to knock down their mail servers.
Woah there Cowboy. I never claimed to know a lot about Linux. My graphics card is an ATI Radeon x800, and I'm not nearly cutting edge enough to consider that 'cheap' by my standards. I would assume, if anything, I'm pretty well in the mid range for your average computer -- something that an OS shouldn't have a problem detecting and installing on to.
It couldn't possibly have anything to do that virtually every common OS besides Windows IS a *nix variant? Linux is far simpler than Windows? Yesterday, I reformatted my hard drive. I decided, after 10 years on a Microsoft operating system I would dual boot XP Pro and a generic install of Ubuntu. Reinstalled XP Pro in about 40 minutes, including time spent downloading and installing drivers. To get Ubuntu to install on my machine, I had to manually edit a config file to get the screen to display correctly, but could only do so *after* the Ubuntu installer crashed (like, duh?). I found this out after digging through Ubuntu forum posts for about an hour (there was nothing in the Wiki related to this). I like the idea of moving to open source software, but the reality is it is not as universal or simple as Windows. XP crashes for me (in the last 4 years of using it) have been rare, and when it is it is usually a memory leak from a particular application, not XP itself. So far, every machine I've installed Linux on I've had serious compatibility issues in every case. I'm not trying to install Linux on my alarm clock here, these are every day, very common PC parts. I've yet to have a smooth Linux installation. It's simply not for mom and pop yet.