This isn't true at all. I can name plenty of non-clone applications. The Helix Player for instance is an open source player that is not a clone of anything. Firefox isn't a clone of anything. OpenOffice isn't a clone of anything. Certainly many applications start based on ideas from other applications that people are trying to scratch an itch over- but calling them clones is absurd. You may say GIMP is a clone of Adobe Photoshop- but anybody who has ever used it knows it is nothing like it-which is why so many people who lock themselves into it dislike it.
I believe the simplest solution is to use EXT2 or maybe even EXT3 and than have a small fat partition with autorun on it for installing the EXT2 MS Windows driver. Although my prefered solution is to just eliminate MS Windows altogether. Believe it or not it solves allot of headaches.
Get over yourself... nobody here cares what you think. This isn't the propaganda arm of MS so if people say things that you see as "anti-Microsoft" it is probably because is is true. Certainly a site that is a "Source for technology related news with a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues." clearly identifies itself and needs to be read with a bit of scepticism-even if a significant number of those you see as "anti-Microsoft" are right most of the time. I don't see BestBuy, Staples, PC World, or any other "MS Windows" propaganda arm identifying itself so blatantly as Microsoft for the good of the people.
You might be able to utilize wine + firefox. I was surprised to see a radio station streaming with quicktime worked fine with it. Even though I shouldn't be too surprised given wine has worked with quicktime plug-in for years. What surprised me was probably that the site didn't demand the latest version / or that maybe wine actually supported the latest version (Codeweavers Crossover Linux version of wine).
Stop killing the moment- sure we know about these things. We're still going to poke fun at MS for the BSOD stuff. They said BSOD was gone with XP. They said it was got with Vista. They said it was gone with MS Windows 7. At some point I stopped listening-cause I knew it was al crap.
Doesn't everybody? Even those who brag about it and sprout lies don't really like it. Being paid to like something and actually liking it are two different things.
Kutztown University is relatively GNU/Linux friendly some of the time. They recently outsourced the email system to MS Windows Live. That sort of baffled me. They basically have a war going on at the university in the IT department. The student help desk and IT do provide some level of assistance to GNU/Linux users. There are enough GNU/Linux users on campus to have a GNU/Linux user group- but ultimately that dissipated after some successes. The student help desk was providing GNU/Linux and open source software to students for a while. The user group also donated open source software discs to all of the faculty on campus too. It is still an uphill battle as incompetence remains strong at the university. The Computer Science department was supposedly going to move to GNU/Linux. Don't think that happened. Then again things take forever. It took 4 years to get Visual Basic removed as course requirement for one of the tracks offered. Surprisingly the few who graduate from the CS department are very smart- but not necessarily well terribly well versed. I blame that mostly on the incompetent instructors. The few who aren't idiots are just years behind the times in terms of technology.
It isn't real world at all. The real world does generally support GNU/Linux pretty well. The real world DOES NOT SUPPORT MAC. I hate to break it to you- but the USA is the only place where Apple has solid support. Pretty much elsewhere it doesn't exist. GNU/Linux has much better support in the places Mac doesn't. Just because your experience is GNU/Linux support sucks doesn't make it so and doesn't mean that is how it should be either.
You shouldn't have to train people any more than you train users for MS Windows. You simply deny applications with no knowledge or willingness to pick up GNU/Linux skills. GNU/Linux isn't that difficult. Supporting it isn't that difficult even if you don't support the distributions. You just have to NOT buy dumb appliances that deny access to non-MS Windows users and things like that. Your IT people can at a minimum ask the vendor if they support GNU/Linux and demand that in any contracts they sign with third parties. It doesn't cost more to support GNU/Linux if you have people with even half a brain. The real reason universities don't support it is people are lazy as hell. Most universities have people with basic computing skills (well, most user don't have basic skills, so don't go go saying this is non-sense) and that is all that is required to support GNU/Linux. Help desk people should be able to provide basic support for GNU/Linux. Lots of universities do it- even small publicly underfunded ones. To say it costs too much is utter BS.
A far as non-standard stuff. Nobody is suggesting that they support recompiling a kernel. We're JUST demanding basic GNU/Linux support. Like connecting to the network. They shouldn't implement appliances without checking compatibility with non-ms windows platforms. When a GNU/Linux users isn't able to connect to the Internet at the school the help desk should have someone who can reasonably investigate the situation. Running a live-cd to test the network card isn't that hard. If it is a network card issue it'll be pretty obvious. If it is a software configuration issue the answer is pretty simple "reload GNU/Linux" if they can't figure it out. Supporting GNU/Linux is NOT that complicated.
http://ixnotes.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/microsoft-propaganda-handed-out-to-staples-employees/
I thought while we're talking about it I'd post these images of Microsoft's propaganda they've been distributing to Staples employees.
Numerous lies like greater compatibility than GNU/Linux-when most of the older hardware won't work with MS Windows Vista. GNU/Linux is compatible with more hardware than any operating system in history. It may not work with some of the latest and greatest-but for the most part it works better. I don't spend 3 hours fiddling with installing my printer drivers. I plug it in- and it just appears as an option in whatever program I need to print with.
The learning curve for GNU/Linux is generally not as high as it is for MS Windows Vista. Unlike what they claim MS Vista and MS Office 2007 software which customers would buy if they got Vista is more cumbersome, has a reduced feature set, is slow, lacks important features like PDF support, and so on.
GNU/Linux has better support generally than MS Windows. GNU/Linux supports stuff out of the box whereas with MS Windows users hand to install lots of bloated software, drivers, and waste time figuring out how to use it. GNU/Linux on the other hand can generally be had without such support headaches. Once you're introduced to shut down, applications menu, saving in different formats, and exporting to PDF it is just simpler.
Getting devices to work in MS Windows can require modification/and or troubleshooting. Hardware rarely works out of the box.
Microsoft want's you to believe that GNU/Linux netbooks have a higher return rate. The fact is that some manufacturers screwed up their GNU/Linux introductions to customers and their particular return rates were higher. Overall GNU/Linux is on par with MS Windows.
Mac barely exists outside of the USA and like one other country which I forget. So even though your perception is GNU/Linux desktop doesn't exist it simply isn't true. What the situation really amounts to is that it isn't visible to you with the people and places you go. You can't even use Google's statistics and expect a decent estimate. Here is why: Google dominates in the USA and Germany mostly. Everywhere else it is a lesser player in the market. As a result you are seeing GNU/Linux desktop statistics for those countries. It is no wonder nobody develops for GNU/Linux. The numbers are skewed and then "tests" end up testing the populations which use it the least. Expanding the numbers to places where companies don't operate primarily would changes things drastically. You'd see Mac market share fall and GNU/Linux rise.
I've got a small project that will benefit allot of people moving to GNU/Linux. I could use some help on enhancing it if you are interested. It is a firefox plug-in that is finished to the degree it is ready for distribution. It lacks allot of desirable features you could work on. Nothing too complicated either. Send an email to jade -@- kglug do.t org.
this is why you should venture out into the real world sometimes and do what is demanded to the extent you can't avoid it-and all the while not avoiding it bitch and moan until they fix it. i bitched for 3 years about my computer science program's requirement that students take a course in visual basic. that was only a core requirement for one of the two 'tracks' or sets of core courses depending on which track you were in. choice was software development or information technology. both cs degrees. anyway. point is after pointing out how hypocritical it was to require a course in visual basic when professors were saying that the difference between a university and a tech school was that a tech school taught tools and a university teaches concepts. clearly vb is a tool not a concept.
before i left they dropped vb as a core requirement of the IT track.
i didn't win every battle but 1/10 still makes the world a better place.
What we really need is Wolfenstein for the Nokia Nxx series, Freerunner, and other GNU/Linux devices. I was disappointed to find the Nokia Nxxx had Doom and not Wolfenstein. Everybody knows Wolfensteign is the better of the two games!:) Now who wants to port it to the Nxxx so I can play it?
I tend to agree with the part about not filtering children's access to the world. I just have to wonder what you were thinking when you wrote "However, it's not fair for aggressive porn advertisers to splash sex in her face without her permission". Maybe you should first find out if the aggressive porn advertisements occur and if those actually irritate anybody beyond aggressive non-porn advertisements. If not then this is a problem of aggressive advertising in general and not porn. At which point you probably want software to block aggressive advertising rather than porn sites.
I didn't read the article- but is this the WINE supported version or an actual x86 compiled native build for GNU/Linux they refer? Or is this something completely different altogether? Based on the few comments I actually read it sounds like this isn't Google's browser even.
I'm 20 years old and I've worked IT for 25 years. Now. I know a bit more than you do. So let me tell you why you are ALL wrong.....
Really. This is stupid. I can't believe I'm even replying to it.
If you are going to try to convince others that you know something they don't you probably best not talk about credentials or "qualifications". At least without them you might have a chance at sounding a little less dumb.
That makes me sick. To think people are actually putting MS Windows on a system. Such a disturbing thought. It is bad enough we GNU/Linux users are forced into getting MS Windows on notebooks if we want anything half decent hardware wise. I can see why they would load Mac OS X since nothing similar exists in the Apple world-although not why they would want Mac OS X in the first place.
When I started my business I knew that there would be challenges sticking with free software / open source principles and solutions. Having been in business for several months now I realize just how challenging it is not to do things like open word documents. For instance HP won't authorize me to be a reseller if I don't fill out document X. Document X may not be in MS Word format, however it requires me to have Y. Geting Y is only possible by gong through company D. Company D only supports MS Internet Explorer to get an account that would let me get Y.
I can't exactly avoid HP. HP is the only company that actually supports GNU/Linux well in the printer world at the low end of the market.
OK- Next thing I need are high quality custom labels for a particular product I've developing. I look into doing it myself. Turns out I can't make them myself since printers with white ink are too expensive. The product I'm developing is based on a third party case that can't be changed-since nobody else produces cases that will work for my particular product. The black case means the labels I need for my product must be black with white lettering. The only way to get black labels with white lettering of the size I need them is through one or two particular companies. So- I contact these companies. I spend months talking to them about what they can do for me. Each day I get a new email and respond. Each day I get a little further. Finally after a month or two I find out that they have to order custom dies for my labels since they are non-standard. Instead of taking several weeks to produce they now will be several weeks plus the time it takes to get the dies made. That adds months to the time. However, they will have to get back to me on the dies so in addition to the months it will take weeks or months just to find out how to get them made by the third company. Several more weeks go bye. No emails. I email them. They say they are working on it. Finally I give up and find a less desirable solution. The thing is the whole time I was interacting with them they were sending me MS Word documents. I couldn't afford not to open them if I wanted to get this project done. It just wasn't going to happen. Each question I had to ask took them a day to respond as it was. How on earth would I have gotten it done if I had to do this with every business I contacted? This is not to say I shouldn't be trying to correct bad habits of users and other businesses. I do that every day. It just isn't always realistic that I'll be able to correct every body.
If they put out a an open source graphics driver that worked well with suspend to ram in GNU/Linux then I would be one of them using their chipsets. When I was looking at laptops recently one of the few notebooks I found that was light weight, slim, available without MS Windows, and fully supported in GNU/Linux with open source drivers was a notebook that used an S3 graphics chipset. The only problem was it lacked support (at least an open source 3d accelerated driver) for that chipset.
The computer security industry makes me sick. It is nothing other than one big fraud. No single company is able to detect all or even a sufficent number of threats to be able to protect users from the dangerous that lurk on the Internet. Now these same people are making these ridiculously outrageous claims.
The underlying problem is not anonymity. The problem is the protocols and programs that run on top of TCP/IP largely. The other significant problem is the dangerous default settings and policies of market leading commercial closed source software companies. That's basically Microsoft. Deviate even a little and you've significantly reduced the risk. Deviate some more and you are almost guaranteed not to notice anything other than occasional (although unsettling more often real problems) problems related to a failure of industry to patch a few very important underlying protocols like TCP/IP & DNS. The Internet doesn't need to be overhauled or replaced. It just needs companies to act a little less egregiously by not selling security such as anti-virus and the Internet service providers to actually maintain and upgrade routers, DNS, mail and the likes.
The closest thing to a problem today is spam. If this is at the heart of the problem then we simply need to migrate to an open authenticated mail solution where receivers have to white list senders first. That doesn't mean you can't email somebody you don't know. All anonymous communication from entire continents doesn't need be blocked either. We just need to standardize on an authentication protocol for e-mail so that we know the same 'person' is sending us mail that we talked to last week. An initial e-mail communication may require other means. Or where that can't be done maybe a user needs to be directed to a website instead to answer a few questions.
I know people who refused to move to XP from ME. I was one of them. I abandoned MS Windows at the time ME was being kicked to the wayside (well, XP was being introduced then). I wasn't about to switch to what I considered an even worse OS. You have to remember XP is horrible even if people swear at Vista and think XP better.
I can name a number of things that I couldn't stand with ME too. One being that it disabled the restart is MS DOS mode.
MS Windows 98SE was probably the best version of MS Windows that Microsoft made. It had its own set of issues that I didn't like. Crashing being one of them. Regularly needing to reinstall, and so on.
Some of the complaints about XP that I had was it's fisher price interface. They then went and changed My Computer around in an awful way. There was no option to revert back to the way it was like existed for other parts of the UI. They also added a bunch of wizards to the desertion of traditional manual configuration screens. You ended up having to go through as many as 12 screens to do what could do with JUST ONE with screen with every prior version of MS Windows. Talk about overdoing ease of use. The worst part about it is users still can't figure it out and it takes the technical users several times as long to fix when things go awry. Of course with MS Windows they always do.
What is amazing is that Microsoft continued this downward spiral with Vista. I see as many Vista computers where I work as XP systems coming in for repair despite the market share being significantly higher with XP.
If you are going to suggest that MS Windows 7 isn't just Vista SP2 (with a new set of bugs) then I'm calling you crazy. Microsoft has the money, lock-in, and control over vendors and sellers to make it stick regardless of its worthiness. If it wasn't for that I don't believe MS Windows would not be around today.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't true at all. I can name plenty of non-clone applications. The Helix Player for instance is an open source player that is not a clone of anything. Firefox isn't a clone of anything. OpenOffice isn't a clone of anything. Certainly many applications start based on ideas from other applications that people are trying to scratch an itch over- but calling them clones is absurd. You may say GIMP is a clone of Adobe Photoshop- but anybody who has ever used it knows it is nothing like it-which is why so many people who lock themselves into it dislike it.
I believe the simplest solution is to use EXT2 or maybe even EXT3 and than have a small fat partition with autorun on it for installing the EXT2 MS Windows driver. Although my prefered solution is to just eliminate MS Windows altogether. Believe it or not it solves allot of headaches.
Get over yourself... nobody here cares what you think. This isn't the propaganda arm of MS so if people say things that you see as "anti-Microsoft" it is probably because is is true. Certainly a site that is a "Source for technology related news with a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues." clearly identifies itself and needs to be read with a bit of scepticism-even if a significant number of those you see as "anti-Microsoft" are right most of the time. I don't see BestBuy, Staples, PC World, or any other "MS Windows" propaganda arm identifying itself so blatantly as Microsoft for the good of the people.
You might be able to utilize wine + firefox. I was surprised to see a radio station streaming with quicktime worked fine with it. Even though I shouldn't be too surprised given wine has worked with quicktime plug-in for years. What surprised me was probably that the site didn't demand the latest version / or that maybe wine actually supported the latest version (Codeweavers Crossover Linux version of wine).
Stop killing the moment- sure we know about these things. We're still going to poke fun at MS for the BSOD stuff. They said BSOD was gone with XP. They said it was got with Vista. They said it was gone with MS Windows 7. At some point I stopped listening-cause I knew it was al crap.
Doesn't everybody? Even those who brag about it and sprout lies don't really like it. Being paid to like something and actually liking it are two different things.
Kutztown University is relatively GNU/Linux friendly some of the time. They recently outsourced the email system to MS Windows Live. That sort of baffled me. They basically have a war going on at the university in the IT department. The student help desk and IT do provide some level of assistance to GNU/Linux users. There are enough GNU/Linux users on campus to have a GNU/Linux user group- but ultimately that dissipated after some successes. The student help desk was providing GNU/Linux and open source software to students for a while. The user group also donated open source software discs to all of the faculty on campus too. It is still an uphill battle as incompetence remains strong at the university. The Computer Science department was supposedly going to move to GNU/Linux. Don't think that happened. Then again things take forever. It took 4 years to get Visual Basic removed as course requirement for one of the tracks offered. Surprisingly the few who graduate from the CS department are very smart- but not necessarily well terribly well versed. I blame that mostly on the incompetent instructors. The few who aren't idiots are just years behind the times in terms of technology.
Dude- If they support the "PC" you can demand support for GNU/Linux. MS Windows is NOT the only operating system for the PC.
It isn't real world at all. The real world does generally support GNU/Linux pretty well. The real world DOES NOT SUPPORT MAC. I hate to break it to you- but the USA is the only place where Apple has solid support. Pretty much elsewhere it doesn't exist. GNU/Linux has much better support in the places Mac doesn't. Just because your experience is GNU/Linux support sucks doesn't make it so and doesn't mean that is how it should be either.
You shouldn't have to train people any more than you train users for MS Windows. You simply deny applications with no knowledge or willingness to pick up GNU/Linux skills. GNU/Linux isn't that difficult. Supporting it isn't that difficult even if you don't support the distributions. You just have to NOT buy dumb appliances that deny access to non-MS Windows users and things like that. Your IT people can at a minimum ask the vendor if they support GNU/Linux and demand that in any contracts they sign with third parties. It doesn't cost more to support GNU/Linux if you have people with even half a brain. The real reason universities don't support it is people are lazy as hell. Most universities have people with basic computing skills (well, most user don't have basic skills, so don't go go saying this is non-sense) and that is all that is required to support GNU/Linux. Help desk people should be able to provide basic support for GNU/Linux. Lots of universities do it- even small publicly underfunded ones. To say it costs too much is utter BS. A far as non-standard stuff. Nobody is suggesting that they support recompiling a kernel. We're JUST demanding basic GNU/Linux support. Like connecting to the network. They shouldn't implement appliances without checking compatibility with non-ms windows platforms. When a GNU/Linux users isn't able to connect to the Internet at the school the help desk should have someone who can reasonably investigate the situation. Running a live-cd to test the network card isn't that hard. If it is a network card issue it'll be pretty obvious. If it is a software configuration issue the answer is pretty simple "reload GNU/Linux" if they can't figure it out. Supporting GNU/Linux is NOT that complicated.
http://ixnotes.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/microsoft-propaganda-handed-out-to-staples-employees/ I thought while we're talking about it I'd post these images of Microsoft's propaganda they've been distributing to Staples employees. Numerous lies like greater compatibility than GNU/Linux-when most of the older hardware won't work with MS Windows Vista. GNU/Linux is compatible with more hardware than any operating system in history. It may not work with some of the latest and greatest-but for the most part it works better. I don't spend 3 hours fiddling with installing my printer drivers. I plug it in- and it just appears as an option in whatever program I need to print with. The learning curve for GNU/Linux is generally not as high as it is for MS Windows Vista. Unlike what they claim MS Vista and MS Office 2007 software which customers would buy if they got Vista is more cumbersome, has a reduced feature set, is slow, lacks important features like PDF support, and so on. GNU/Linux has better support generally than MS Windows. GNU/Linux supports stuff out of the box whereas with MS Windows users hand to install lots of bloated software, drivers, and waste time figuring out how to use it. GNU/Linux on the other hand can generally be had without such support headaches. Once you're introduced to shut down, applications menu, saving in different formats, and exporting to PDF it is just simpler. Getting devices to work in MS Windows can require modification/and or troubleshooting. Hardware rarely works out of the box. Microsoft want's you to believe that GNU/Linux netbooks have a higher return rate. The fact is that some manufacturers screwed up their GNU/Linux introductions to customers and their particular return rates were higher. Overall GNU/Linux is on par with MS Windows.
Mac barely exists outside of the USA and like one other country which I forget. So even though your perception is GNU/Linux desktop doesn't exist it simply isn't true. What the situation really amounts to is that it isn't visible to you with the people and places you go. You can't even use Google's statistics and expect a decent estimate. Here is why: Google dominates in the USA and Germany mostly. Everywhere else it is a lesser player in the market. As a result you are seeing GNU/Linux desktop statistics for those countries. It is no wonder nobody develops for GNU/Linux. The numbers are skewed and then "tests" end up testing the populations which use it the least. Expanding the numbers to places where companies don't operate primarily would changes things drastically. You'd see Mac market share fall and GNU/Linux rise.
I've got a small project that will benefit allot of people moving to GNU/Linux. I could use some help on enhancing it if you are interested. It is a firefox plug-in that is finished to the degree it is ready for distribution. It lacks allot of desirable features you could work on. Nothing too complicated either. Send an email to jade -@- kglug do.t org.
this is why you should venture out into the real world sometimes and do what is demanded to the extent you can't avoid it-and all the while not avoiding it bitch and moan until they fix it. i bitched for 3 years about my computer science program's requirement that students take a course in visual basic. that was only a core requirement for one of the two 'tracks' or sets of core courses depending on which track you were in. choice was software development or information technology. both cs degrees. anyway. point is after pointing out how hypocritical it was to require a course in visual basic when professors were saying that the difference between a university and a tech school was that a tech school taught tools and a university teaches concepts. clearly vb is a tool not a concept. before i left they dropped vb as a core requirement of the IT track. i didn't win every battle but 1/10 still makes the world a better place.
What we really need is Wolfenstein for the Nokia Nxx series, Freerunner, and other GNU/Linux devices. I was disappointed to find the Nokia Nxxx had Doom and not Wolfenstein. Everybody knows Wolfensteign is the better of the two games! :) Now who wants to port it to the Nxxx so I can play it?
I tend to agree with the part about not filtering children's access to the world. I just have to wonder what you were thinking when you wrote "However, it's not fair for aggressive porn advertisers to splash sex in her face without her permission". Maybe you should first find out if the aggressive porn advertisements occur and if those actually irritate anybody beyond aggressive non-porn advertisements. If not then this is a problem of aggressive advertising in general and not porn. At which point you probably want software to block aggressive advertising rather than porn sites.
I didn't read the article- but is this the WINE supported version or an actual x86 compiled native build for GNU/Linux they refer? Or is this something completely different altogether? Based on the few comments I actually read it sounds like this isn't Google's browser even.
I just opted out via the automated 800 number. Quick and easy; 1 800 333 9956.
I'm 20 years old and I've worked IT for 25 years. Now. I know a bit more than you do. So let me tell you why you are ALL wrong..... Really. This is stupid. I can't believe I'm even replying to it.
If you are going to try to convince others that you know something they don't you probably best not talk about credentials or "qualifications". At least without them you might have a chance at sounding a little less dumb.
That makes me sick. To think people are actually putting MS Windows on a system. Such a disturbing thought. It is bad enough we GNU/Linux users are forced into getting MS Windows on notebooks if we want anything half decent hardware wise. I can see why they would load Mac OS X since nothing similar exists in the Apple world-although not why they would want Mac OS X in the first place.
When I started my business I knew that there would be challenges sticking with free software / open source principles and solutions. Having been in business for several months now I realize just how challenging it is not to do things like open word documents. For instance HP won't authorize me to be a reseller if I don't fill out document X. Document X may not be in MS Word format, however it requires me to have Y. Geting Y is only possible by gong through company D. Company D only supports MS Internet Explorer to get an account that would let me get Y.
I can't exactly avoid HP. HP is the only company that actually supports GNU/Linux well in the printer world at the low end of the market.
OK- Next thing I need are high quality custom labels for a particular product I've developing. I look into doing it myself. Turns out I can't make them myself since printers with white ink are too expensive. The product I'm developing is based on a third party case that can't be changed-since nobody else produces cases that will work for my particular product. The black case means the labels I need for my product must be black with white lettering. The only way to get black labels with white lettering of the size I need them is through one or two particular companies. So- I contact these companies. I spend months talking to them about what they can do for me. Each day I get a new email and respond. Each day I get a little further. Finally after a month or two I find out that they have to order custom dies for my labels since they are non-standard. Instead of taking several weeks to produce they now will be several weeks plus the time it takes to get the dies made. That adds months to the time. However, they will have to get back to me on the dies so in addition to the months it will take weeks or months just to find out how to get them made by the third company. Several more weeks go bye. No emails. I email them. They say they are working on it. Finally I give up and find a less desirable solution. The thing is the whole time I was interacting with them they were sending me MS Word documents. I couldn't afford not to open them if I wanted to get this project done. It just wasn't going to happen. Each question I had to ask took them a day to respond as it was. How on earth would I have gotten it done if I had to do this with every business I contacted? This is not to say I shouldn't be trying to correct bad habits of users and other businesses. I do that every day. It just isn't always realistic that I'll be able to correct every body.
If they put out a an open source graphics driver that worked well with suspend to ram in GNU/Linux then I would be one of them using their chipsets. When I was looking at laptops recently one of the few notebooks I found that was light weight, slim, available without MS Windows, and fully supported in GNU/Linux with open source drivers was a notebook that used an S3 graphics chipset. The only problem was it lacked support (at least an open source 3d accelerated driver) for that chipset.
The computer security industry makes me sick. It is nothing other than one big fraud. No single company is able to detect all or even a sufficent number of threats to be able to protect users from the dangerous that lurk on the Internet. Now these same people are making these ridiculously outrageous claims. The underlying problem is not anonymity. The problem is the protocols and programs that run on top of TCP/IP largely. The other significant problem is the dangerous default settings and policies of market leading commercial closed source software companies. That's basically Microsoft. Deviate even a little and you've significantly reduced the risk. Deviate some more and you are almost guaranteed not to notice anything other than occasional (although unsettling more often real problems) problems related to a failure of industry to patch a few very important underlying protocols like TCP/IP & DNS. The Internet doesn't need to be overhauled or replaced. It just needs companies to act a little less egregiously by not selling security such as anti-virus and the Internet service providers to actually maintain and upgrade routers, DNS, mail and the likes. The closest thing to a problem today is spam. If this is at the heart of the problem then we simply need to migrate to an open authenticated mail solution where receivers have to white list senders first. That doesn't mean you can't email somebody you don't know. All anonymous communication from entire continents doesn't need be blocked either. We just need to standardize on an authentication protocol for e-mail so that we know the same 'person' is sending us mail that we talked to last week. An initial e-mail communication may require other means. Or where that can't be done maybe a user needs to be directed to a website instead to answer a few questions.
I know people who refused to move to XP from ME. I was one of them. I abandoned MS Windows at the time ME was being kicked to the wayside (well, XP was being introduced then). I wasn't about to switch to what I considered an even worse OS. You have to remember XP is horrible even if people swear at Vista and think XP better. I can name a number of things that I couldn't stand with ME too. One being that it disabled the restart is MS DOS mode. MS Windows 98SE was probably the best version of MS Windows that Microsoft made. It had its own set of issues that I didn't like. Crashing being one of them. Regularly needing to reinstall, and so on. Some of the complaints about XP that I had was it's fisher price interface. They then went and changed My Computer around in an awful way. There was no option to revert back to the way it was like existed for other parts of the UI. They also added a bunch of wizards to the desertion of traditional manual configuration screens. You ended up having to go through as many as 12 screens to do what could do with JUST ONE with screen with every prior version of MS Windows. Talk about overdoing ease of use. The worst part about it is users still can't figure it out and it takes the technical users several times as long to fix when things go awry. Of course with MS Windows they always do. What is amazing is that Microsoft continued this downward spiral with Vista. I see as many Vista computers where I work as XP systems coming in for repair despite the market share being significantly higher with XP. If you are going to suggest that MS Windows 7 isn't just Vista SP2 (with a new set of bugs) then I'm calling you crazy. Microsoft has the money, lock-in, and control over vendors and sellers to make it stick regardless of its worthiness. If it wasn't for that I don't believe MS Windows would not be around today.