The problem with that number is the data it's drawn from. The 16% is the number of internet connected computers not affected by viruses, and they just assume that all of them are Macs. What about Linux or BSD? Aren't they similarly unaffected by the Windows virus scourge?
I think the truth is that 16% is divided up among Mac, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and probably a few more. There have been other reports in the last few years showing Mac and Linux roughly even, at up to 7% each, which doesn't seem at all unlikely to me.
It's still good news though. Common wisdom is that Windows is something like 92% of the installed base. This article suggests it's more like 84%, and I find that encouraging.
First of all, Intel is not going to do anything that could jeopardize the x86 line.
What?
The whole point of Itanium was to ditch the legacy x86 kruft and go into the future with a clean, modern architecture. Intel would love to get away from x86 if the market would let them, because it's become a huge PITA to deal with, what with all the kludges and workarounds that have been tacked on over the years.
You seem to be under the impression that x86 is all Intel does, and manufacturing some other architecture would be some huge burden for them to take on. News flash: Intel isn't a one trick pony. Ever heard of something called the i960? How about StrongARM? Xscale? Intel does all those, and a host of other, non-CPU, chips as well.
Being sensative to flicker hardly makes me a jackass. It would take something like compulsive ad hominem attacks to achieve that.
Anyway, I didn't say NTSC was better. It has plenty of issues all it's own (Never The Same Color), I just happen to find them less annoying than flicker.
The decision for most PAL countries to go to a 50Hz standard was based on the same reasoning the US used to justify a 60Hz standard: that's the frequency of the existing electrical grid, and tying your refresh rates to it makes sync a lot easier.
After spending the last 3 years troubleshooting and repairing the best TV production equipment money can buy, I'm clearly completely ignorant of the workings of PAL.
For the record, I sometimes notice flicker at the movie theater as well, but I find it less irritating in a reflective medium.
And you may wish to brush up on the relationship between flourescent lighting a screen flicker some time.
What are you going to buy your kid for gaming - a $1000+ notebook, or a PS2/XBOX?
I will buy my kid a desktop PC, because it can be used to accomplish something worthwhile, doesn't cost much more than an "equivalent" console, and the additional expenditure to make it a decent gaming platform is fairly minimal. Indeed, if I want to make them play at SDTV quality (roughly equivalent to 800x600 at 30fps) my additional expenditure will most likely be zip!
Console v. notebook is an apples and oranges comparison, blatantly loaded in favor of the console if all you're looking at is price. You pay a premium for the portability of a notebook. While a PS/2 by itself might be similarly easy to transport, The TV it needs to be hooked up to isn't, nor, in most cases, are either of them battery powered.
How often are you walking through a park, or sitting in a coffee shop, and see someone pull a console and TV out of their backpack for a few minutes of gaming?
DLP seems to be a bit more limited in its capabilities, but then again it's pretty unlikely that you will ever recieve a 1080p broadcast signal. I didn't want LCD or plasma when I bought mine, so I didn't look into those.
Frankly, watching PAL (the Euro TV standard, 25fps, interlaced) makes me want to claw my eyes out. I can see the screen flicker, and it gives me headaches if I watch it for more than a minute or two.
For games it can really depend on the situation. For an shooter, 50fps is the minimum for playability, and I can see a difference up to around 100fps (~90fps is where the default machinegun in Quake3 becomes a viable weapon, for example, thanks to the ability to smoothly track the target).
Then again, 15-20fps is acceptable in Morrowind, largely because combat in that game doesn't rely on my reaction speed or precise tracking of a fast moving target.
It's not a game machine, it's supposed to compete with Hasbro's VideoNow, which is described as a "personal video player".
Basically, it costs way to much to watch a minute or two of low quality (240x160, 6fps, Hillary Duff) music video.
In other words, it's even more worthless than you thought, and frankly I have no idea why anyone would buy one of these things, except at clearance prices for hacking.
Before I was married I went to Lan parties 1-2 times a month.
Of course, I was also 5+ years younger, and in much better condition, so lugging my 21" CRT around wasn't as big of a deal as it is today. Still, I did eventually pick up a decent 15" CRT for those situations (and to have an extra monitor around for the regular repairing of family and friend's computers).
They have a cup of coffee; still not an addiction.
I agree with your general point, but you're wrong about this one. People feel like they need a cup of coffee in the morning precisely because they are addicted.
OSS means you potentially could write one, not that you can.
So what if I can't? Someone will, and if no one seems to be doing it on their own, there's nothing stopping me from finding someone who's able a convincing them to do so (like, say, by paying them).
Finding a capable CS student who could use a few bucks isn't that hard.
Some prior learning will always be necessary. There simply isn't any such thing as an intuitive interface. Of course, that doesn't mean that a redesign isn't warranted (just don't ask me what needs to change).
IMO, the main problem with the state of human interface design is that everyone is chasing Apple. Honestly, I've always found Apple's interfaces to be backwards and stupid, and I blame Apple for creating the paradigm where "user-friendly" is just a euphamism for "user-limiting".
You're proably right that the future of interfaces will involve some sort of user agent. I just hope they leave in the ability to turn it off for those of us that prefer a more direct method.
I went looking for Suse 9.3 but only found links to the live distro, but I dont really want to pay for a distro.
Suse doesn't provide isos for download. However, they do provide the whole thing (minus a few proprietary apps like MainActor) for free on their ftp site, usually about a month after the release of the boxed set, along with a boot iso that will allow you to install it directly via ftp. It's also mountable via nfs, or you could just download the whole thing and make your own bootable DVD (but I haven't tried it).
But, IMO, if you're a beginning to intermediate user, and want to get to know Linux, you won't find a better resource than the printed manuals that come with the boxed set. Those make it well worth the price once, anyway.
Of course, if you don't have a strong preference for dead trees, they're also provided in electronic form in/usr/share/doc/manual/
Ironicly, I've never been able to make one of their live distros work. Go figure.
Though, I googled that fact and LinuxWorld doesn't share your experience
Actually, the LinuxWorld article only makes vague references to an Inquirer article, which frankly is a bunch of crap. He doesn't say so directly, but it looks very much like he's trying to install via FTP, which is clearly not for newbies. He also makes several false claims about the simplicity of Windows (Installation takes only 45 minutes? Sure, as long as you aren't installing any drivers, or any updates, or any additional applications. Oh, and there are, in fact, media codecs which Windows won't handle automagically), and is apparently completely incapable of merely accepting the default settings, or of understanding that, for example, they might in fact pick one desktop environment to be the default one, rather than force a possibly inexperienced user to make a choice.
I like and use Linux, but I have to really question what is up when you say:
I have had far more problems with unsupported hardware in Win2k/XP than in Linux
That amuses and angers me, for the simple fact of, how many times have I tried to get some fancy hardware working in Linux (e.g. multi-format stick/card memory reader, webcam, multi-function printer/fax/scanner) and I spend days, weeks even pouring through lists and asking questions, and eventually get things 75% working, when it is about 3 mouse-clicks easy in Windows.
I won't claim I haven't had similar experiences, all I'm saying is I've had more of them on Win2k/XP.
A critical difference, though, is that fancy hardware is a rarity in my life, and on those rare occasions I have a hand in choosing it (and naturally I choose hardware that I know is supported, like nVidia-based products).
Most of the time I'm dealing with older hardware, though, and a lot of vendors simply don't feel a need to provide win2k/XP drivers. Sometimes winNT drivers will work, but maybe only 75% (like a plotter we had at a previous job, which would work if plugged in directly to your machine, but the only way to get it to share over the network was to replace the win2k parallel driver with the winNT one, which is a protected system file, and thus requires that you have a second machine running a kernel debugger hooked up via serial cable. I gave up on that one.)
Granted, people who have worked through these problems before, and do this stuff all the time, could probably do that faster, but that is not going to be a typical end-user experience.
I bet you went through the same thing getting to know Windows, it just happened long enough ago that you've forgotten. New things are always difficult to understand, that's just a fact of life.
Then again, I think a lot of people make false assumptions about what the "typical end-user experience" is. The TEU doesn't install Windows, or new hardware either; they pay someone else to do it (why do you think Best Buy bought out GeekSquad? There's serious money there.)
I feel quite comfortable claiming that Linux already has everything it needs to be more than competitive with Windows under those circumstances.
The only "grandma" class of people I know who are computer users usually used them a bit 30 years ago and then left them to secretaries or techies and are therefore able to master a bit of CLI every now and then with the right assistance.
Actually, most of the people who've said that to me have been people like my mom, who finally upgraded from her 1928 Underwood a few years ago, and even then it was only a side-effect of a career change. Mostly women, 45-65, who never really had a reason to use a computer until recently. People who grew up with books, not video games.
Certainly not "office people", and I've dealt with enough of those at my last job to know what you mean there (although, they seemed to be equally (un)comfortable in Excell as they were in our supply chain app, which ran on something like Solaris 5, and was accessed via telnet).
Actually, the woman who was most articulate about it was in her late 40's/early 50's and had decided a few years earlier she needed to "learn the computer". She got serious about it, too, as she was in one of my CIS classes (I think it was Network Operating Systems). She was the one who pointed out how "loud" the typical GUI is, and just how many options are thrown at you at once. It can be very confusing and intimidating.
It really pointed out to me the central fallacy of the "intuitive interface": that there is such a thing. (I should point out here that the cannonical example, the nipple, is in fact not intuitive. Both mother and child have to learn how to nurse, and most new mothers give up within the first few months.)
The funny thing about it is, we like to use Grandma and Aunt Millie as our justifications for this, but in my conversations with older people about computers, most of them prefer CLI. It's quiet, where a GUI, if you aren't familiar with them, is a lot like walking into a casino.
Yeah, they might have to cover their monitors with sticky notes with arcane commands on them, but that's actually more intuitive to someone who grew up reading and listening to the radio rather than watching TV.
4) Uncertianty in the display layer. Linux was almost exclusively XFree, now it's switching to Xorg, but hasn't completely. So driver developers are on the hook to support multiple upper level architectures on top of the multiple kernel architectures. Makes it even more complex.
This is a non-issue, and the only reason I can think of for you to inlude this is trying to make your list bigger by playing on the tired old "there are too many choices" arguement.
Now, I don't have any experince with ATI under Linux, since I ditched ATI before I started using Linux (almost 6 years ago now) because of their crappy Windows driver support. However, when I recently upgraded from SuSE 9.1 to 9.3, and thence from XFree to Xorg, I had absolutely no problem with nVidia drivers working. Then again, I had no problem getting the nVidia drivers installed in the first place.
It looks to me like you're trying very hard to make this a Linux problem when it is, in fact, primarily an ATI problem, and any remaining blame falls directly on the heads of the maintainers of your chosen distro.
Setting up the nVidia driver on my machine wasn't any more difficult than "emerge nvidia-glx". In Mandrake it would have been "urpmi nvidia-whatever", in Debian "apt-get nvidia-thingie" (once you setup a proper source for it), and so on.
Since I'm sure someone will read this and say something like "But using the command line is too hard!":
In SuSE I check a little box in Online Update, which runs automatically at the end of the installation (I'd bet at least Mandriva has something similarly easy).
Well, Panasonic doesn't provide Win2k drivers for the dot matrix printer my CFO needs to print our paychecks. Additionally, our plotter barely works, and to get a network enabled driver installed I need to hook up a second machine, via serial port, running a Windows kernel debugger (where the hell do I get one of those?), because it requires that I replace the Win2k parallel port driver with the WinNT one, and that's a protected system file.
So tell me: is that Microsoft's fault?
Or is it, just maybe, the fault of the hardware vendors who have failed to provide adequate driver support?
However, you can't neglect the value of time, especially for the non-tech savvy.
Indeed, you can't.
The last time I installed Linux (SuSE 9.3) it took about 30-40 minutes, and the drivers for my video card were downloaded with the first run of the Online Update utility, which ran automatically at the end of the install. Drivers for everything else were already there.
The last time I installed Windows (XP Pro, about 2 months ago) it took hours of seemingly endless reboots and CD-shuffling to get it to a similarly usable state, and I was even prepared! I already had all the drivers and updates downloaded and burned to CD, and all the application disks at hand.
And these aren't isolated incidents; my experiences have been pretty much consistent since the days of SuSE7.x and Win2k/ME, on a wide variety of hardware (and let me just say that I have had far more problems with unsupported hardware in Win2k/XP than in Linux).
That might be more "fair", but it's completely useless to anyone out in the real world, where everyone that needs one already has a computer, and it's running Windows.
You tell yourself what you like. When I tune to a station that sounds like crap, I keep going. My wife is even less tolerant (which is ironic, since I'm the musician in the family).
The best thing I've found for mouse-induced wrist pain is nunchuks. Seriously. Nothing fancy, just some basic spinning and catching excercises, maybe 5-10 minutes for each hand.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that number is the data it's drawn from. The 16% is the number of internet connected computers not affected by viruses, and they just assume that all of them are Macs. What about Linux or BSD? Aren't they similarly unaffected by the Windows virus scourge?
I think the truth is that 16% is divided up among Mac, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and probably a few more. There have been other reports in the last few years showing Mac and Linux roughly even, at up to 7% each, which doesn't seem at all unlikely to me.
It's still good news though. Common wisdom is that Windows is something like 92% of the installed base. This article suggests it's more like 84%, and I find that encouraging.
First of all, Intel is not going to do anything that could jeopardize the x86 line.
What?
The whole point of Itanium was to ditch the legacy x86 kruft and go into the future with a clean, modern architecture. Intel would love to get away from x86 if the market would let them, because it's become a huge PITA to deal with, what with all the kludges and workarounds that have been tacked on over the years.
You seem to be under the impression that x86 is all Intel does, and manufacturing some other architecture would be some huge burden for them to take on. News flash: Intel isn't a one trick pony. Ever heard of something called the i960? How about StrongARM? Xscale? Intel does all those, and a host of other, non-CPU, chips as well.
Being sensative to flicker hardly makes me a jackass. It would take something like compulsive ad hominem attacks to achieve that.
Anyway, I didn't say NTSC was better. It has plenty of issues all it's own (Never The Same Color), I just happen to find them less annoying than flicker.
The decision for most PAL countries to go to a 50Hz standard was based on the same reasoning the US used to justify a 60Hz standard: that's the frequency of the existing electrical grid, and tying your refresh rates to it makes sync a lot easier.
Ah, yes, of course...
After spending the last 3 years troubleshooting and repairing the best TV production equipment money can buy, I'm clearly completely ignorant of the workings of PAL.
For the record, I sometimes notice flicker at the movie theater as well, but I find it less irritating in a reflective medium.
And you may wish to brush up on the relationship between flourescent lighting a screen flicker some time.
Ignorant asshole, indeed.
What are you going to buy your kid for gaming - a $1000+ notebook, or a PS2/XBOX?
I will buy my kid a desktop PC, because it can be used to accomplish something worthwhile, doesn't cost much more than an "equivalent" console, and the additional expenditure to make it a decent gaming platform is fairly minimal. Indeed, if I want to make them play at SDTV quality (roughly equivalent to 800x600 at 30fps) my additional expenditure will most likely be zip!
Console v. notebook is an apples and oranges comparison, blatantly loaded in favor of the console if all you're looking at is price. You pay a premium for the portability of a notebook. While a PS/2 by itself might be similarly easy to transport, The TV it needs to be hooked up to isn't, nor, in most cases, are either of them battery powered.
How often are you walking through a park, or sitting in a coffee shop, and see someone pull a console and TV out of their backpack for a few minutes of gaming?
Any tube-based HDTV should be capable of 1080p.
DLP seems to be a bit more limited in its capabilities, but then again it's pretty unlikely that you will ever recieve a 1080p broadcast signal. I didn't want LCD or plasma when I bought mine, so I didn't look into those.
I have to agree.
Frankly, watching PAL (the Euro TV standard, 25fps, interlaced) makes me want to claw my eyes out. I can see the screen flicker, and it gives me headaches if I watch it for more than a minute or two.
For games it can really depend on the situation. For an shooter, 50fps is the minimum for playability, and I can see a difference up to around 100fps (~90fps is where the default machinegun in Quake3 becomes a viable weapon, for example, thanks to the ability to smoothly track the target).
Then again, 15-20fps is acceptable in Morrowind, largely because combat in that game doesn't rely on my reaction speed or precise tracking of a fast moving target.
My high school had an internship-like program.
It's not a game machine, it's supposed to compete with Hasbro's VideoNow, which is described as a "personal video player".
Basically, it costs way to much to watch a minute or two of low quality (240x160, 6fps, Hillary Duff) music video.
In other words, it's even more worthless than you thought, and frankly I have no idea why anyone would buy one of these things, except at clearance prices for hacking.
Before I was married I went to Lan parties 1-2 times a month.
Of course, I was also 5+ years younger, and in much better condition, so lugging my 21" CRT around wasn't as big of a deal as it is today. Still, I did eventually pick up a decent 15" CRT for those situations (and to have an extra monitor around for the regular repairing of family and friend's computers).
They have a cup of coffee; still not an addiction.
I agree with your general point, but you're wrong about this one. People feel like they need a cup of coffee in the morning precisely because they are addicted.
Actually, I know a few. Besides, that's what testing is for.
OSS means you potentially could write one, not that you can.
So what if I can't? Someone will, and if no one seems to be doing it on their own, there's nothing stopping me from finding someone who's able a convincing them to do so (like, say, by paying them).
Finding a capable CS student who could use a few bucks isn't that hard.
Well, those companies are hardly relevant in a discussion about companies with no IT infrastructure, are they?
Maybe I should have been more clear about which of the GP's points I was responding to.
Some prior learning will always be necessary. There simply isn't any such thing as an intuitive interface. Of course, that doesn't mean that a redesign isn't warranted (just don't ask me what needs to change).
IMO, the main problem with the state of human interface design is that everyone is chasing Apple. Honestly, I've always found Apple's interfaces to be backwards and stupid, and I blame Apple for creating the paradigm where "user-friendly" is just a euphamism for "user-limiting".
You're proably right that the future of interfaces will involve some sort of user agent. I just hope they leave in the ability to turn it off for those of us that prefer a more direct method.
I went looking for Suse 9.3 but only found links to the live distro, but I dont really want to pay for a distro.
/usr/share/doc/manual/
Suse doesn't provide isos for download. However, they do provide the whole thing (minus a few proprietary apps like MainActor) for free on their ftp site, usually about a month after the release of the boxed set, along with a boot iso that will allow you to install it directly via ftp. It's also mountable via nfs, or you could just download the whole thing and make your own bootable DVD (but I haven't tried it).
But, IMO, if you're a beginning to intermediate user, and want to get to know Linux, you won't find a better resource than the printed manuals that come with the boxed set. Those make it well worth the price once, anyway.
Of course, if you don't have a strong preference for dead trees, they're also provided in electronic form in
Ironicly, I've never been able to make one of their live distros work. Go figure.
Though, I googled that fact and LinuxWorld doesn't share your experience
Actually, the LinuxWorld article only makes vague references to an Inquirer article, which frankly is a bunch of crap. He doesn't say so directly, but it looks very much like he's trying to install via FTP, which is clearly not for newbies. He also makes several false claims about the simplicity of Windows (Installation takes only 45 minutes? Sure, as long as you aren't installing any drivers, or any updates, or any additional applications. Oh, and there are, in fact, media codecs which Windows won't handle automagically), and is apparently completely incapable of merely accepting the default settings, or of understanding that, for example, they might in fact pick one desktop environment to be the default one, rather than force a possibly inexperienced user to make a choice.
I like and use Linux, but I have to really question what is up when you say:
I have had far more problems with unsupported hardware in Win2k/XP than in Linux
That amuses and angers me, for the simple fact of, how many times have I tried to get some fancy hardware working in Linux (e.g. multi-format stick/card memory reader, webcam, multi-function printer/fax/scanner) and I spend days, weeks even pouring through lists and asking questions, and eventually get things 75% working, when it is about 3 mouse-clicks easy in Windows.
I won't claim I haven't had similar experiences, all I'm saying is I've had more of them on Win2k/XP.
A critical difference, though, is that fancy hardware is a rarity in my life, and on those rare occasions I have a hand in choosing it (and naturally I choose hardware that I know is supported, like nVidia-based products).
Most of the time I'm dealing with older hardware, though, and a lot of vendors simply don't feel a need to provide win2k/XP drivers. Sometimes winNT drivers will work, but maybe only 75% (like a plotter we had at a previous job, which would work if plugged in directly to your machine, but the only way to get it to share over the network was to replace the win2k parallel driver with the winNT one, which is a protected system file, and thus requires that you have a second machine running a kernel debugger hooked up via serial cable. I gave up on that one.)
Granted, people who have worked through these problems before, and do this stuff all the time, could probably do that faster, but that is not going to be a typical end-user experience.
I bet you went through the same thing getting to know Windows, it just happened long enough ago that you've forgotten. New things are always difficult to understand, that's just a fact of life.
Then again, I think a lot of people make false assumptions about what the "typical end-user experience" is. The TEU doesn't install Windows, or new hardware either; they pay someone else to do it (why do you think Best Buy bought out GeekSquad? There's serious money there.)
I feel quite comfortable claiming that Linux already has everything it needs to be more than competitive with Windows under those circumstances.
The only "grandma" class of people I know who are computer users usually used them a bit 30 years ago and then left them to secretaries or techies and are therefore able to master a bit of CLI every now and then with the right assistance.
Actually, most of the people who've said that to me have been people like my mom, who finally upgraded from her 1928 Underwood a few years ago, and even then it was only a side-effect of a career change. Mostly women, 45-65, who never really had a reason to use a computer until recently. People who grew up with books, not video games.
Certainly not "office people", and I've dealt with enough of those at my last job to know what you mean there (although, they seemed to be equally (un)comfortable in Excell as they were in our supply chain app, which ran on something like Solaris 5, and was accessed via telnet).
Actually, the woman who was most articulate about it was in her late 40's/early 50's and had decided a few years earlier she needed to "learn the computer". She got serious about it, too, as she was in one of my CIS classes (I think it was Network Operating Systems). She was the one who pointed out how "loud" the typical GUI is, and just how many options are thrown at you at once. It can be very confusing and intimidating.
It really pointed out to me the central fallacy of the "intuitive interface": that there is such a thing. (I should point out here that the cannonical example, the nipple, is in fact not intuitive. Both mother and child have to learn how to nurse, and most new mothers give up within the first few months.)
The funny thing about it is, we like to use Grandma and Aunt Millie as our justifications for this, but in my conversations with older people about computers, most of them prefer CLI. It's quiet, where a GUI, if you aren't familiar with them, is a lot like walking into a casino.
Yeah, they might have to cover their monitors with sticky notes with arcane commands on them, but that's actually more intuitive to someone who grew up reading and listening to the radio rather than watching TV.
4) Uncertianty in the display layer. Linux was almost exclusively XFree, now it's switching to Xorg, but hasn't completely. So driver developers are on the hook to support multiple upper level architectures on top of the multiple kernel architectures. Makes it even more complex.
This is a non-issue, and the only reason I can think of for you to inlude this is trying to make your list bigger by playing on the tired old "there are too many choices" arguement.
Now, I don't have any experince with ATI under Linux, since I ditched ATI before I started using Linux (almost 6 years ago now) because of their crappy Windows driver support. However, when I recently upgraded from SuSE 9.1 to 9.3, and thence from XFree to Xorg, I had absolutely no problem with nVidia drivers working. Then again, I had no problem getting the nVidia drivers installed in the first place.
It looks to me like you're trying very hard to make this a Linux problem when it is, in fact, primarily an ATI problem, and any remaining blame falls directly on the heads of the maintainers of your chosen distro.
Setting up the nVidia driver on my machine wasn't any more difficult than "emerge nvidia-glx". In Mandrake it would have been "urpmi nvidia-whatever", in Debian "apt-get nvidia-thingie" (once you setup a proper source for it), and so on.
Since I'm sure someone will read this and say something like "But using the command line is too hard!":
In SuSE I check a little box in Online Update, which runs automatically at the end of the installation (I'd bet at least Mandriva has something similarly easy).
Well, Panasonic doesn't provide Win2k drivers for the dot matrix printer my CFO needs to print our paychecks. Additionally, our plotter barely works, and to get a network enabled driver installed I need to hook up a second machine, via serial port, running a Windows kernel debugger (where the hell do I get one of those?), because it requires that I replace the Win2k parallel port driver with the WinNT one, and that's a protected system file.
So tell me: is that Microsoft's fault?
Or is it, just maybe, the fault of the hardware vendors who have failed to provide adequate driver support?
However, you can't neglect the value of time, especially for the non-tech savvy.
Indeed, you can't.
The last time I installed Linux (SuSE 9.3) it took about 30-40 minutes, and the drivers for my video card were downloaded with the first run of the Online Update utility, which ran automatically at the end of the install. Drivers for everything else were already there.
The last time I installed Windows (XP Pro, about 2 months ago) it took hours of seemingly endless reboots and CD-shuffling to get it to a similarly usable state, and I was even prepared! I already had all the drivers and updates downloaded and burned to CD, and all the application disks at hand.
And these aren't isolated incidents; my experiences have been pretty much consistent since the days of SuSE7.x and Win2k/ME, on a wide variety of hardware (and let me just say that I have had far more problems with unsupported hardware in Win2k/XP than in Linux).
That might be more "fair", but it's completely useless to anyone out in the real world, where everyone that needs one already has a computer, and it's running Windows.
You tell yourself what you like. When I tune to a station that sounds like crap, I keep going. My wife is even less tolerant (which is ironic, since I'm the musician in the family).
How do you track that?
The best thing I've found for mouse-induced wrist pain is nunchuks. Seriously. Nothing fancy, just some basic spinning and catching excercises, maybe 5-10 minutes for each hand.