I was on a chat site where someone frome SE Asia made a comment about the internet service they had: 100Mb Ethernet! For 5 years, I paid $50/month for 5Mb download and 384kb upload (aside from an occasional discount when moving)! After 5 years, I finally got moved up to 7Mb download and 512kb upload, and for another $10/month I can upgrade to 10Mb download and unknown upload. Woo Hoo:(. I'm sure they do bandwidth throttling on some sites because it's not unusual for me to have trouble streaming videos from Google or YouTube, and it was a huge mess when they upped the speed around Christmas. (anyone offer any input on that?)
In the same amount of time, Ethernet has gone from being able to get an 8-port 100Mb switch for ~$100 (don't remember for sure what I paid) to getting a 5-port for $16 or 8-port for $40. I wish the FCC would get their facts straight about broadband, so they could know how much the US offerings suck!
Why should my ISP be able to throttle and charge websites for me using MY bandwidth anyway? I've already bought it from them. It's my bandwidth! I paid for it! I have the bills to prove it's mine! Since we're a free country with a free market, I'll just cancel my Time Warner Roadrunner service and go to the competition, Time Warner's Roadrunner Turbocharged! *sigh*...goes looking for better access...Roadrunner Business Class *DOH!!*:(
If they used the area code and the prefix (second set of 3 digits) that would work better, but you're still left with some problems. Rural areas would still have a large amount of land covered by the same prefix, not all of which would be within range for DSL, and cell phone prefixes have little to do with your location. Also, fiber has to be run all the way to your door. There isn't any pre-existing infrastructure that can be used.
I think we should start a class action lawsuit against AOL for hampering the development of such fine software and making them change their name from something I liked to something I and my friends don't.
It doesn't seem that AOL would have ever had a legitimate case against GAIM. It would be a big win for open source development to successfully sue a company for harassing them, and show the world that you can't win just because you have money to hire enough lawyers to keep your competition from doing anything useful. Maybe AOL would finally get enough bad press and lose enough money that it would finally die like they needed to long, long ago.
Maybe someone could resurrect gaim as a patch set to rename Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple (what in the world do these name have in common anyway). If I knew more of what I would be doing and had more free time, I would do it myself.
It's based on radio-carbon dating, when the amount of C-14 is known to not be constant. They have charts that are supposed to correct this but they're based on things like a tree's annual rings (which aren't always annual) and ice core samples (where the markings dated WWII planes at thousands of years old). I can't comment on the other methods used (deep ocean sediment cores, lake sediment varves, coral samples, and speleothems (cave deposits)), since no one has ever explained how they work, but I can't imagine them being any better since they use two methods known to be inaccurate.
I like your method better. That way we would have more energy to run my heater. Those scientists obviously didn't check the morning weather. It's April and still freezing in Kansas City. Our highs are what the lows should be.
Global warming is a fact. You can pull all the temperature records over the last 100 years and clearly see that the average temperature has gone up 1 degree farenheight. But don't look too carefully, temperatures have been receding since sometime in the late 90's.
In the 70's we were concerned about the impending ice age.
Penn and Teller did a show about the environment. Someone was so concerned about saving a tree that they lived up there for many months. They even built themselves a wooden tree house that they nailed in place.
Imagine it more like someone is power hungry and a genius at marketing produce, livestock, dairy, and anything else a farm would produce. Eventually they own 90% of the farms worldwide and have snatched up all everything that could be used as new farmland, but they SUCK at farming. Food prices go through the roof with 25% inflation, and the quality goes down the tubes. They even set up a distribution system that works well for them, but does nothing but exasperates everyone and pisses them off. The worst is that many diseases and mal nutrition have become rampant because this BAD farm monopoly, and many people have died because of it.
Wouldn't it be the job of a good government to fix this situation? Microsoft has never innovated. They happened to start off with a lucky deal, and do an astounding job marketing their crappy software. I suppose many MS Office apps have had their short-lived time of awesome, but they're hardly revolutionary and have had a much longer life of just plain SUCCCKKKXXXXSSS. Printing 75 copies of one page in Excel 2003 takes 20-25 minutes on a 100 page per minute printer!! I can't believe Windows 95 (in my experience, less stable than ME) got named a top tech invention either! After 3 or 4 months (most of which I was using NT4), I was lucky to get enough uptime to run my DVD player, which was the only reason I had it and would miraculously keep things running). Watching my roommates 486 DX2-66 w/8MB RAM run circles around my Pentium II-300 w/ 128MB RAM, a 9GB Cheetah and workstation-caliber graphics card was truly appalling. Especially when his OS and browser were quite firm on the 32MB minimum RAM!!!
A more fair comparison (the world hasn't died out from using Windows 95) would be that if a bunch of companies developed incompatible hover cars and special roads they have to work with. Microsoft does a good job marketing something sub-par, that while has some bright spots, is never very good on the whole. They, on their own, manage to get their proprietary roads everywhere, through their own money and their customers', which sometimes includes some large government agencies that blindly go with the "Industry Leader," but it's never anything worse than taking advantage of people caught in tough spots. Now, any competition is just a niche market, because they can't drive anywhere because they can't quite figure out Microsoft's BROKEN roads well enough.
Although, sometimes the competition does better at it than MS themselves, every few years, Microsoft changes the roads to something different and we're back at square one of building something compatible. I would say they upgrade the roads, but they're still broken and sometimes worse than before, and we're all stuck buying new cars!! Once a competitor invents a compatible car, they can start building better roads, which will only work with their cars at first, but others can read all about how these work and even make improvements. But, that's assuming they aren't squished by mighty MS. Eventually, a group of companies will negotiate a great set of standards for everybody, but we need to get out of monopoly mode before the company buys the government and turns it into 1984. The quickest way is by forcing Microsoft to release their standards.
Isn't Linux 90%+ socialistic? Most of the software is released for free (free beer), only generating donations, and done for fun and the benefit of all. I was under the impression that the distributions that cost a fee had a small market share.
And apparently, socialism can work. A few years ago (after the release of AMD64 Linux and before the release of XP x64), I remember seeing $40,000+ workstations running mostly open-source (free speech and free beer) software for Hollywood level video editing/creation (CinePaint and Cinerella, along with Maya, which is commercial). The market was blown open because the relatively cheap (compared to say SGI or SUN) AMD64 hardware platform usually runs 10-20% faster with 64-bit code, which Microsoft couldn't (or wouldn't) get to market. Intel's Netburst was a failure on 64-bit, and couldn't compete at 32-bit. Apple couldn't compete either. The G5 might have an edge on the Opteron per core (benchmarks here and here), but you can't stick 4 or 8 physical G5 cpu's in a machine like you can with Opteron.
Anti-trust? We're talking about Microsoft, the epitome of anti-trust. They don't trust me to own a legal copy of Windows XP (I change all my hardware enough it accuses me of pirating it), and I don't trust them with my computer.
The current process is extracting it from a bio-fuel. I'm not sure how efficient it is, but it only produces about the same waste as letting the biomass rot. I wish I had some idea of how to track this down again, but I remember a company that was going to market them to gas stations at $5000 each. If you don't like the gas station's prices, open your own hydrogen refinery.
Sweet!!!! I'm gonna fly out to California and drive one home to Kansas City. All I have to do is stop every 200 miles or so and recharge for 3-4 hours. [checking to make sure there's a town at least every 200 miles in Wyoming where the car won't blow the power grid]
Seriously, they won't really catch on with the average person until you can at least take a road trip with them.
Try a live CD (or DVD) for Linux (http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php unfortunately the voting isn't worth much -- I like running e17 on Elive, despite it's very immature status). No install, no setup, everything auto-magically works. It probes for what you have and installs the drivers. Most hardware is supported to some degree under linux.
I put Win2k on a Compaq (lost the XP license) and it doesn't support my sound card, and many system bugs are because of bad vendor drivers (linux considers a bad driver a system bug that needs to be addressed). It's not like the windows drivers are perfect. We'll talk stability when you get to 6 months (shut down by power outage), but I'll agree that windows has gotten MUCH better. Anyone ever heavily use NT4 for 5 weeks without rebooting? My roommate's 486 with 8MB of ram was running X11 and Netscape out of swap space (X11 alone used 16MB) and it was running circles around my 300 MHz Pentium II with 128 MB ram and a 9GB Cheetah.
Retail price for XP Pro is $299 (previous pro OS's were more expensive)
Some of the Visual Studio software costs about $11,000 for a server (amazon.com)
I'm sticking with linux and win2000 for now, but I'm sure that will have to change when IE7 comes out. As a web developer, I'm tired of supporting broken versions of IE and v7 won't be ported to win2000.
Please, I've tried Windows on my desktop. It's no where close to 'being there' as a good system, in terms of having a good user-friendly interface, usable software, stability, and easy install. I can't count the number of times I've been asked computer questions as to what they're doing wrong on a computer, and the problem is in the MS software is broken (Anyone understand Outlook and.dat attachments?). Linux is very rapidly evolving, and you should check out some of the live CD's and DVD's before dismissing it as a piece of junk (I think you can even save your files and settings on some of them, making them a full OS). I can't imagine why someone would want to deal with a system that requires 2 to 4 different media players to play all your videos; requires two web browsers to surf the internet; requires you to pay for upgrades to get your bug fixes (my Win2000 will never have a working copy of IE); costs $300 for a bare OS (XP Pro -- would have spent ~$1700 for 95, 98, NT4.0, 2000 to support games and dual processors), $400 for some office software (Office 2003 Standard), as much as $3500 for a compiler (Visual Studio® 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription), $65-$650 for photo editing (Digital Image Pro, Photoshop),...; requires you to click a second button to see all the options when you open a menu; runs a little sluggish on a 3GHz machine (on something that fast, I want the menu open now, not in.2 seconds); you tell to shut down and come back in the morning to find it asking you if you want to close a program (if I didn't want to close it, then why would I tell the machine to shut down?); don't get me started on the mess that opens up when you click on programs in the start menu (they had to add a search!!!!!!! linux usually has them categorized); and it accuses you of stealing after you've spent countless hours dealing with your power supply frying your motherboard. I'm waiting for someone to sue the software for slander:-D.
Linux is a great OS for games. Every review I've heard involves people getting higher frame rates under Linux. The problem is that MS in there monopoly wrote a proprietary graphics API (Direct-3D), when there was a much better alternative (OpenGL). Many companies can't port their games now, and most companies don't care. Personally, I think Windows is HORRIBLE for games. I stopped playing them after I couldn't keep it from resetting my refresh rate to 60Hz and almost giving me a seizure. Can't I tell it that my CRT doesn't support anything less than 85Hz?
P.S. I'm sick of people saying it won't due for hypothetical Grandma because of its difficulty. She has to invite you over and write down a list of instructions to open her email. She can't even think in terms of administering a system, and the system trying to think for itself, adapt, and do stuff on its own (a web pop-up) will baffle her. My linux box running e17 is just 1 or 2 settings away from being great for someone like that. Click the speaker to play music, click the globe to go online, click the movie film to play a movie...
P.P.S. I guess you're right. Linux is nowhere close to 'being there' as an average user desktop OS. That would be an insult to the system's beauty.
I can crash Windows XP Professional any time I want at work by printing an entire excel workbook to our Xerox Doc-12 printer. 2000 is pretty stable, but if you like running everything at once, it's no match for the speed and stability of Linux. At college, something went wrong that required at least a reboot about once a week. I've had Linux going for 9 months without a reboot, which was ended when I moved to a new apartment. Even if it can be rather stable, Windows (any version) is extremely far from being bug free. If it weren't for bugs (mostly security holes), viruses wouldn't work very well.
Google is so simple that they could never cripple IE so it wouldn't render the html code correctly, without just maiming anything from www.google.com. That would be too easy to track down and get them in too much trouble. I've heard they're hurting Google with web bots that cause irrelevant pages to go up in score, something that a punk teenager could probably lose internet privileges over (see the section on Microsoft's Search Technology).
Now THE browser (for anyone computer literate) is FireFox, the son of Netscape. It's funny how MS can't win. They have no computer tallent, just immorral business aggression.
It's quite the failure in East Asia. Almost all of their sales are US and Europe. It started as an all-around failure because of PS2's head start, but it's finally recovering.
At least Apple supports their hardware. How late to market was a 64-bit Windows for AMD? (does it even offer driver support competitive with Linux?) They had x86-64 software from Linux running on processor simulators before anyone had even made a processor in a lab. I have friends who are beginning to rave about the new iMac's (the ones in an LCD screen). I've gone through Linux installs with considerably less trouble than Windows, and for someone first learning to do some basic computing, like surfing the web, email and word processing, a linux system would probably be easier (coming from a talented computer science major who just spent 3 hours getting MS-Word to save a 70 page document and re-open it without making any changes).
I've helped people in their 70's and 80's with learning to use computers (is it easy enough for my grandma?). They're content to just send an email or type up a paper. All the "easy to use" features of something like AOL confuse them, and they get lost every time a computer steps in to automatically help them with something that isn't on their hand written list of commands and mouse clicks (wizards automatically popping up, etc.). Some older adults even have such a hard time with the mouse, they would be better off with a command line interface. Linux scores major points here.
I think Microsoft's niches of hardware support and ease of use are eroding, and they better have something big up their sleeve for Longhorn if they want to stay on top. Power users ($20,000-$40,000+ workstations for Hollywood level video editing and 3D rendering) have been switching to Linux for x86-64 for a couple of years now (or running Mac). About the only thing left for Microsoft to hold on to is market-share.
Movies need motion blur because they're done at 24 fps. TV is a little better at 25 or 30. Gamers usually want 60 fps, which is close to the refresh rate of a monitor. If a monitor is refreshing the screen fast enough, you don't see the picutre flashing on and off like a strobe light, even though your eyes are very sensative to changes in contrast and brightness. Word is flashing on and off, and it still looks like a blank piece of paper. Why wouldn't an object moving across the screen look real?
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I was on a chat site where someone frome SE Asia made a comment about the internet service they had: 100Mb Ethernet! For 5 years, I paid $50/month for 5Mb download and 384kb upload (aside from an occasional discount when moving)! After 5 years, I finally got moved up to 7Mb download and 512kb upload, and for another $10/month I can upgrade to 10Mb download and unknown upload. Woo Hoo :(. I'm sure they do bandwidth throttling on some sites because it's not unusual for me to have trouble streaming videos from Google or YouTube, and it was a huge mess when they upped the speed around Christmas. (anyone offer any input on that?)
...goes looking for better access...Roadrunner Business Class *DOH!!* :(
In the same amount of time, Ethernet has gone from being able to get an 8-port 100Mb switch for ~$100 (don't remember for sure what I paid) to getting a 5-port for $16 or 8-port for $40. I wish the FCC would get their facts straight about broadband, so they could know how much the US offerings suck!
Why should my ISP be able to throttle and charge websites for me using MY bandwidth anyway? I've already bought it from them. It's my bandwidth! I paid for it! I have the bills to prove it's mine! Since we're a free country with a free market, I'll just cancel my Time Warner Roadrunner service and go to the competition, Time Warner's Roadrunner Turbocharged! *sigh*
If they used the area code and the prefix (second set of 3 digits) that would work better, but you're still left with some problems. Rural areas would still have a large amount of land covered by the same prefix, not all of which would be within range for DSL, and cell phone prefixes have little to do with your location. Also, fiber has to be run all the way to your door. There isn't any pre-existing infrastructure that can be used.
Thanks for the explanation. Now I don't have to brand the people who came up with the names (espeically libpurple) as stupid, just the names.
I think we should start a class action lawsuit against AOL for hampering the development of such fine software and making them change their name from something I liked to something I and my friends don't.
It doesn't seem that AOL would have ever had a legitimate case against GAIM. It would be a big win for open source development to successfully sue a company for harassing them, and show the world that you can't win just because you have money to hire enough lawyers to keep your competition from doing anything useful. Maybe AOL would finally get enough bad press and lose enough money that it would finally die like they needed to long, long ago.
Maybe someone could resurrect gaim as a patch set to rename Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple (what in the world do these name have in common anyway). If I knew more of what I would be doing and had more free time, I would do it myself.
Don't you mean "I prefer pidgin"? *sigh* What good is a name if no one can get it right?
It's based on radio-carbon dating, when the amount of C-14 is known to not be constant. They have charts that are supposed to correct this but they're based on things like a tree's annual rings (which aren't always annual) and ice core samples (where the markings dated WWII planes at thousands of years old). I can't comment on the other methods used (deep ocean sediment cores, lake sediment varves, coral samples, and speleothems (cave deposits)), since no one has ever explained how they work, but I can't imagine them being any better since they use two methods known to be inaccurate.
I like your method better. That way we would have more energy to run my heater. Those scientists obviously didn't check the morning weather. It's April and still freezing in Kansas City. Our highs are what the lows should be.
Global warming is a fact. You can pull all the temperature records over the last 100 years and clearly see that the average temperature has gone up 1 degree farenheight. But don't look too carefully, temperatures have been receding since sometime in the late 90's.
In the 70's we were concerned about the impending ice age.
Penn and Teller did a show about the environment. Someone was so concerned about saving a tree that they lived up there for many months. They even built themselves a wooden tree house that they nailed in place.
Imagine it more like someone is power hungry and a genius at marketing produce, livestock, dairy, and anything else a farm would produce. Eventually they own 90% of the farms worldwide and have snatched up all everything that could be used as new farmland, but they SUCK at farming. Food prices go through the roof with 25% inflation, and the quality goes down the tubes. They even set up a distribution system that works well for them, but does nothing but exasperates everyone and pisses them off. The worst is that many diseases and mal nutrition have become rampant because this BAD farm monopoly, and many people have died because of it.
Wouldn't it be the job of a good government to fix this situation? Microsoft has never innovated. They happened to start off with a lucky deal, and do an astounding job marketing their crappy software. I suppose many MS Office apps have had their short-lived time of awesome, but they're hardly revolutionary and have had a much longer life of just plain SUCCCKKKXXXXSSS. Printing 75 copies of one page in Excel 2003 takes 20-25 minutes on a 100 page per minute printer!! I can't believe Windows 95 (in my experience, less stable than ME) got named a top tech invention either! After 3 or 4 months (most of which I was using NT4), I was lucky to get enough uptime to run my DVD player, which was the only reason I had it and would miraculously keep things running). Watching my roommates 486 DX2-66 w/8MB RAM run circles around my Pentium II-300 w/ 128MB RAM, a 9GB Cheetah and workstation-caliber graphics card was truly appalling. Especially when his OS and browser were quite firm on the 32MB minimum RAM!!!
A more fair comparison (the world hasn't died out from using Windows 95) would be that if a bunch of companies developed incompatible hover cars and special roads they have to work with. Microsoft does a good job marketing something sub-par, that while has some bright spots, is never very good on the whole. They, on their own, manage to get their proprietary roads everywhere, through their own money and their customers', which sometimes includes some large government agencies that blindly go with the "Industry Leader," but it's never anything worse than taking advantage of people caught in tough spots. Now, any competition is just a niche market, because they can't drive anywhere because they can't quite figure out Microsoft's BROKEN roads well enough.
Although, sometimes the competition does better at it than MS themselves, every few years, Microsoft changes the roads to something different and we're back at square one of building something compatible. I would say they upgrade the roads, but they're still broken and sometimes worse than before, and we're all stuck buying new cars!! Once a competitor invents a compatible car, they can start building better roads, which will only work with their cars at first, but others can read all about how these work and even make improvements. But, that's assuming they aren't squished by mighty MS. Eventually, a group of companies will negotiate a great set of standards for everybody, but we need to get out of monopoly mode before the company buys the government and turns it into 1984. The quickest way is by forcing Microsoft to release their standards.
Isn't Linux 90%+ socialistic? Most of the software is released for free (free beer), only generating donations, and done for fun and the benefit of all. I was under the impression that the distributions that cost a fee had a small market share.
And apparently, socialism can work. A few years ago (after the release of AMD64 Linux and before the release of XP x64), I remember seeing $40,000+ workstations running mostly open-source (free speech and free beer) software for Hollywood level video editing/creation (CinePaint and Cinerella, along with Maya, which is commercial). The market was blown open because the relatively cheap (compared to say SGI or SUN) AMD64 hardware platform usually runs 10-20% faster with 64-bit code, which Microsoft couldn't (or wouldn't) get to market. Intel's Netburst was a failure on 64-bit, and couldn't compete at 32-bit. Apple couldn't compete either. The G5 might have an edge on the Opteron per core (benchmarks here and here), but you can't stick 4 or 8 physical G5 cpu's in a machine like you can with Opteron.
Anti-trust? We're talking about Microsoft, the epitome of anti-trust. They don't trust me to own a legal copy of Windows XP (I change all my hardware enough it accuses me of pirating it), and I don't trust them with my computer.
The current process is extracting it from a bio-fuel. I'm not sure how efficient it is, but it only produces about the same waste as letting the biomass rot. I wish I had some idea of how to track this down again, but I remember a company that was going to market them to gas stations at $5000 each. If you don't like the gas station's prices, open your own hydrogen refinery.
I think hydrogen fuel cells would work here. It's still all electric, but the electricity comes from a replenishable liquid.
Would that include hydrogen fuel cell cars?
Sweet!!!! I'm gonna fly out to California and drive one home to Kansas City. All I have to do is stop every 200 miles or so and recharge for 3-4 hours. [checking to make sure there's a town at least every 200 miles in Wyoming where the car won't blow the power grid]
Seriously, they won't really catch on with the average person until you can at least take a road trip with them.
I thought Neanderthal was classified as a large modern human that had arthritis.
Try a live CD (or DVD) for Linux (http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php unfortunately the voting isn't worth much -- I like running e17 on Elive, despite it's very immature status). No install, no setup, everything auto-magically works. It probes for what you have and installs the drivers. Most hardware is supported to some degree under linux.
I put Win2k on a Compaq (lost the XP license) and it doesn't support my sound card, and many system bugs are because of bad vendor drivers (linux considers a bad driver a system bug that needs to be addressed). It's not like the windows drivers are perfect. We'll talk stability when you get to 6 months (shut down by power outage), but I'll agree that windows has gotten MUCH better. Anyone ever heavily use NT4 for 5 weeks without rebooting? My roommate's 486 with 8MB of ram was running X11 and Netscape out of swap space (X11 alone used 16MB) and it was running circles around my 300 MHz Pentium II with 128 MB ram and a 9GB Cheetah.
Retail price for XP Pro is $299 (previous pro OS's were more expensive)
Some of the Visual Studio software costs about $11,000 for a server (amazon.com)
I'm sticking with linux and win2000 for now, but I'm sure that will have to change when IE7 comes out. As a web developer, I'm tired of supporting broken versions of IE and v7 won't be ported to win2000.
Please, I've tried Windows on my desktop. It's no where close to 'being there' as a good system, in terms of having a good user-friendly interface, usable software, stability, and easy install. I can't count the number of times I've been asked computer questions as to what they're doing wrong on a computer, and the problem is in the MS software is broken (Anyone understand Outlook and .dat attachments?). Linux is very rapidly evolving, and you should check out some of the live CD's and DVD's before dismissing it as a piece of junk (I think you can even save your files and settings on some of them, making them a full OS). I can't imagine why someone would want to deal with a system that requires 2 to 4 different media players to play all your videos; requires two web browsers to surf the internet; requires you to pay for upgrades to get your bug fixes (my Win2000 will never have a working copy of IE); costs $300 for a bare OS (XP Pro -- would have spent ~$1700 for 95, 98, NT4.0, 2000 to support games and dual processors), $400 for some office software (Office 2003 Standard), as much as $3500 for a compiler (Visual Studio® 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription), $65-$650 for photo editing (Digital Image Pro, Photoshop), ...; requires you to click a second button to see all the options when you open a menu; runs a little sluggish on a 3GHz machine (on something that fast, I want the menu open now, not in .2 seconds); you tell to shut down and come back in the morning to find it asking you if you want to close a program (if I didn't want to close it, then why would I tell the machine to shut down?); don't get me started on the mess that opens up when you click on programs in the start menu (they had to add a search!!!!!!! linux usually has them categorized); and it accuses you of stealing after you've spent countless hours dealing with your power supply frying your motherboard. I'm waiting for someone to sue the software for slander :-D.
...
Linux is a great OS for games. Every review I've heard involves people getting higher frame rates under Linux. The problem is that MS in there monopoly wrote a proprietary graphics API (Direct-3D), when there was a much better alternative (OpenGL). Many companies can't port their games now, and most companies don't care. Personally, I think Windows is HORRIBLE for games. I stopped playing them after I couldn't keep it from resetting my refresh rate to 60Hz and almost giving me a seizure. Can't I tell it that my CRT doesn't support anything less than 85Hz?
P.S. I'm sick of people saying it won't due for hypothetical Grandma because of its difficulty. She has to invite you over and write down a list of instructions to open her email. She can't even think in terms of administering a system, and the system trying to think for itself, adapt, and do stuff on its own (a web pop-up) will baffle her. My linux box running e17 is just 1 or 2 settings away from being great for someone like that. Click the speaker to play music, click the globe to go online, click the movie film to play a movie
P.P.S. I guess you're right. Linux is nowhere close to 'being there' as an average user desktop OS. That would be an insult to the system's beauty.
I can crash Windows XP Professional any time I want at work by printing an entire excel workbook to our Xerox Doc-12 printer. 2000 is pretty stable, but if you like running everything at once, it's no match for the speed and stability of Linux. At college, something went wrong that required at least a reboot about once a week. I've had Linux going for 9 months without a reboot, which was ended when I moved to a new apartment. Even if it can be rather stable, Windows (any version) is extremely far from being bug free. If it weren't for bugs (mostly security holes), viruses wouldn't work very well.
Google is so simple that they could never cripple IE so it wouldn't render the html code correctly, without just maiming anything from www.google.com. That would be too easy to track down and get them in too much trouble. I've heard they're hurting Google with web bots that cause irrelevant pages to go up in score, something that a punk teenager could probably lose internet privileges over (see the section on Microsoft's Search Technology).
Now THE browser (for anyone computer literate) is FireFox, the son of Netscape. It's funny how MS can't win. They have no computer tallent, just immorral business aggression.
It's quite the failure in East Asia. Almost all of their sales are US and Europe. It started as an all-around failure because of PS2's head start, but it's finally recovering.
At least Apple supports their hardware. How late to market was a 64-bit Windows for AMD? (does it even offer driver support competitive with Linux?) They had x86-64 software from Linux running on processor simulators before anyone had even made a processor in a lab. I have friends who are beginning to rave about the new iMac's (the ones in an LCD screen). I've gone through Linux installs with considerably less trouble than Windows, and for someone first learning to do some basic computing, like surfing the web, email and word processing, a linux system would probably be easier (coming from a talented computer science major who just spent 3 hours getting MS-Word to save a 70 page document and re-open it without making any changes).
I've helped people in their 70's and 80's with learning to use computers (is it easy enough for my grandma?). They're content to just send an email or type up a paper. All the "easy to use" features of something like AOL confuse them, and they get lost every time a computer steps in to automatically help them with something that isn't on their hand written list of commands and mouse clicks (wizards automatically popping up, etc.). Some older adults even have such a hard time with the mouse, they would be better off with a command line interface. Linux scores major points here.
I think Microsoft's niches of hardware support and ease of use are eroding, and they better have something big up their sleeve for Longhorn if they want to stay on top. Power users ($20,000-$40,000+ workstations for Hollywood level video editing and 3D rendering) have been switching to Linux for x86-64 for a couple of years now (or running Mac). About the only thing left for Microsoft to hold on to is market-share.
Movies need motion blur because they're done at 24 fps. TV is a little better at 25 or 30. Gamers usually want 60 fps, which is close to the refresh rate of a monitor. If a monitor is refreshing the screen fast enough, you don't see the picutre flashing on and off like a strobe light, even though your eyes are very sensative to changes in contrast and brightness. Word is flashing on and off, and it still looks like a blank piece of paper. Why wouldn't an object moving across the screen look real?