eBook readers are perhaps a flop in that few will invest a device that does solely that, but eBooks as a whole gain in popularity every year.
One of the things that I really love about my Palm Treo is the ability to carry a small library around with me on an SD card. Wonderful for those 'downtime' moments like waiting at the mechanic or the doctor's office or useless meetings.
The format issues are a problem, but I figure they'll eventually all just be available as HTML and be converted to whatever "native" format is needed later. Sort of like what Baen Books is doing. (They're successful, too.)
I read a book called Darwin's Black Box, which I found extremely compelling. He posts some very devastating evidence against gradualistic evolution, which I have never heard really answered.
There actually is quite a bit of evidence for a young earth.
Well, actually, no there isn't. On the other hand, here's a bit of evidence to consider for conventional geology:
Take oil companies. Finding oil is a very important and high-stakes issue for them. Literally
hundreds of billions of dollars are riding on it. When the chips are down and they need to find the most likely spots to drill - what kind of geology do they use? Flood geology, or mainstream? Which one
actually delivers the goods?
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or
perhaps it really did form from dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Either way you look at it, a young Earth would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
If "Young Earth" geology actually fits the facts better, how about some of the believers pool their money and invest in looking for oil or valuable minerals? They don't have to do all the development and extraction themselves, they can settle for a percentage of the gross. It'd still be a wonderful investment. How about you start such a venture?
I'd consider paying for and downloading DRM-free music, but it sounds pretty risky to me.
I have ready access to all the games I could want thanks to a friend I know who's a very big pirate. I also know about GameCopyWorld.
However, I still buy games. I don't pirate them. (Then I use the stuff at GameCopyWorld to allow them to be played without the original CD, but that's because I have small kids all over the place and I keep those valuable archival media on a high shelf.) Similarly, I buy CDs and rip them (on the rare occasions that any new music actually appeals to me). I've technically 'pirated' some music, but that was only for music I already had paid for in older analog formats.
In my experience, the people who would pirate stuff, would pirate stuff if it cost any amount greater than zero. But there are plenty of people who will be honest, too. I'm sure there's a sliding scale and everyone's somewhere on the spectrum, but I think there's enough people toward the honest side to enable a successful business.
I've got a little time to respond to a troll, so what the heck:
Every major attack against Christianity in the US...
There are no major attacks against Christianity in the US. So long as I'm quoting comics, I might as well quote Jon Stewart: "Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely, in broad daylight, openly wearing symbols of their religion, perhaps around their necks. And maybe - dare I dream it - maybe one day there could even be an openly Christian president. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively."
...and the 3rd Amendment wasn't to protect us against having to quarter foreign soldiers in our homes, it was to prevent us from having to quarter US military in our homes and private property.
<Firefly>Yeah, I know. It was just funny.</Firefly>
"Liberals must stop saying President Bush hasn't asked Americans to sacrifice for the war on terror. On the contrary, he's asked us to sacrifice something enormous. Our civil rights... so when it comes to sacrifice, don't kid yourself. You have given up a lot. You've given up faith in your government's honesty, the goodwill of people overseas, and six-tenths of the Bill of Rights. Here's what you've sacrificed: search and seizure, warrants, self-incrimination, trial by jury, cruel and unusual punishment. Here's what you have left: hand guns, religion, and they can't make you quarter a British soldier. If Prince Harry invades the Inland Empire, he has to bring a tent...
But, look, George Bush has never been too bright about understanding 'fereigners.' But he does know Americans. He asked this generation to sacrifice the things he knew we would not miss: our privacy and our morality. He let us keep the money. But he made a cynical bet that we wouldn't much care if we became a 'Big Brother' country that has now tortured a lot of random people...
In conclusion, after 9/11, President Bush told us Osama bin Laden could run but he couldn't hide. But, then he ran and hid. So, Bush went to Plan B: pissing on the Constitution and torturing random people...
They say evil happens when good men do nothing. Well, the Democrats prove it also happens when mediocre people do nothing."
Cultural erosion is a fact in our case, and we have sacrificed many of our most prized ideals under pressure from Islam and those who fear the actions of that culture's most violent proponents... We reacted so badly...
Indeed. We reacted badly, precisely because people perceived the "Islamists" as an existential threat instead of the annoyance (and occasionally, fair-to-middling problem) they actually pose. The threat is not the "Islamists", it's the reactionaries freaking out within our culture.
Pointing that out, and pointing out better ways to handle the situation, is an important part of correcting that.
Islam isn't a culture defined by a nation the way the US is, it is a belief system spread across many nations, including the USA.
No duh. (You'll note that I didn't couch my reply in terms of just the U.S., but the more broad category of "the West".) But the vast majority of funding for Islamists comes from the oil-producing countries. Reduce their budgets (and disengage from the area so that the thugocracies in the area don't have a readily-available scapegoat to blame all their problems on), and they will have a much harder time doing harm.
Disengagement from the area is in our long-term interest. That place
is radically unstable, and so long as we're dependent on resources
from there, we're going to spending inordinate amounts of cash and
materiel trying to keep the place from falling over, and we'll be
vulnerable when bad things happen there - not just terrorism but
natural disasters and more.
Your assertion that "Islam produces second rate science" is completely irrelevant
Not at all. The point is, that whole region simply cannot compete economically or militarily. (You need science and technology to compete in either sphere.) So the only threat they pose is in the area of terrorism. And that's not a big deal. 3,000 people dead in 9/11? Tragic but an order of magnitude less than the 200,000 or more who've died in traffic accidents since 2001.
Sure, they can occasionally kill people, sometimes even large numbers. However, the best steps for minimizing that consist mostly of beefing up physical security. Reinforced cockpit doors, more intelligent arrangement of parking and security at airports. How about Bill Maher's suggestion of a "people's Secret Service"? A corps of trained security professionals who patrol airports, big sporting events, public gatherings, etc. The existing Secret Service doesn't attempt to check everyone in a crowd, they intelligently focus their attention on known risk factors. And it works.
Let me make something else explicit: you can't protect against all
terrorism, any more that you can protect against all natural
disasters. Too many potential targets, finite resources and time. But
there are steps that can be taken to improve resilience greatly. What
if the government spent some money to train lots of people in CPR,
first aid, and basic emergency response? Some volunteers (remember the
Civil Defense types from WWII?) could get additional training in
triage to be ready to be called up to help in a major incident. That
would help protect against accidents (like the traffic accidents mentioned above), natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
I am all for nuclear power. However, it doesn't address the problem.
By itself, no. As part of an overall strategy... hell yes.
What you are talking about here are collisions of culture, which you are conflating with the idea that morals are absolute - which they certainly are not. In the past, when a severe collision occurred, the survivor's answer was to fight until only one culture survives. The Islamists still understand this, but the (quite different) morals of the west reject the idea of putting down an entire culture, even though that culture is polarizing against them in the most obvious manner possible, and has no such scruples. The answer that beckons with survival as the prize - from history - is clear and obvious (and it is the same answer the Islamists have come to.)
Except the "Islamists" can't threaten the survival of our culture.
Terrorists are not an existential threat to the "West". They can cause harm, occasionally a
lot of it. But they do not threaten our culture's existence in the slightest.
Personally, I think the obvious choice is to spend billions on working out economical technology that doesn't involve depending on oil (as opposed to, say, military adventurism, which doesn't change the long-term picture at all - at least, for the better). If we weren't dependent on the oil, we wouldn't have to care what they think. (For better or worse, humanitarian crises in Africa don't affect pocketbooks elsewhere, for example.) If we cut our consumption, and sold products and technology that cut worldwide demand for oil, the price would drop and the "Islamists" would face a funding crisis.
Pretty straightforward, really. Get over the stupid aversion to nuclear power (which can be made safe) and we gain a lot more interesting advantages - like serious exploration of space, (no, that's not an Orion, no fallout at all), which leads to orbital power generation, etc.
Which existing power would that be?
The one that lets them ask, and hope the corporation helps?
I was thinking more along the lines of a search warrant. It's possible to get them through in an expedited way... if you've got probable cause. If you don't have probable cause, why do you want to search someone?
The last I heard, the most recent case of any judge anywhere in the U.S. refusing a police wiretap request was in 1997. The FISA court, which allows up to 72 hours of retroactive permission, has fielded literally tens of thousands of requests, and has denied... wait for it... four of them.
This is the regime that's too bogged down in red tape to function in an emergency?
see your angle, but doesn't that make kidnapping an almost unpunishable crime? You can almost rely on the police using emergency powers thereby guaranteeing that even if you get caught you can't be prosecuted?
Aren't kidnapping cases solved already, today? With the existing powers?
The challenge is to make law enforcement accountable *without* making the accounting so onerous that they are unable to respond effectively in time sensitive situations. "Due Process" is great when time isn't a big deal, but sometimes it needs to be set aside for the greater good -- the trick is to ensure that it only happens when its actually needed. Simply banning 'emergency responses' isn't going to get rid of emergencies, and without emergency responses those emergencies are going to end badly.
How about this then - you can get the records and such in an emergency, but those records can't be used for prosecuting someone later, once the emergency is past?
Let's take the scariest hot-button case, some child is missing and phone records are needed to track down the presumed abductor. There are three alternatives here:
No exceptions in emergencies, you've got to wait. The kid gets killed, and the delay might even allow the abductor to escape.
Agents can do whatever they like. The abductor's captured, the kid's saved... and grows up in a world where the government can basically spy on everyone all the time. COINTELPRO all over again. Of course this will be misused heavily, and politically.
Agents can get the records, and save the kid, but they can't prosecute the adbuctor. They'll be reluctant to use this power unless there really is an emergency.
I'm a parent, and yesterday I had a bad scare where my oldest son disappeared for about twenty minutes (turned out he'd just gone to a different friends' house than we'd thought). I tell you true, I don't care nearly as much about prosecuting an abductor as about getting my kid back. And I want my son to grow up in an actual democracy rather than a police state. So I'm all for option number three.
In the same way, given the choice between having terrorists "not thwarted" or "thwarted but anyone can be surveiled and harrassed and blacklisted and stuck in prison forever with no habeas corpus" or "thwarted but not prosecuted", I'll take option 3 again.
Police like prosecutions, and have personal and professional motivations to ensure them when possible. If they have motivation to only use exceptional powers when the circumstances warrant - when there's an immediate threat and normal channels aren't fast enough - then there's some feedback in the system.
And you won't want it. Got the cheapest possible Dell desktop last week, except I bumped it up to 1GB RAM. It runs Vista Home Basic.
Holy crap what a pig! It's visibly sluggish - w/1GB of RAM. I'm seriously thinking about wiping it and installing XP. Apparently 4GB really is the sweet spot. Or at least, 1GB really really isn't.
waited until his thoughts were sluggish and he started seeing things as if through a tunnel (hypothermia setting in)
Man, they must be confident in their stuff. When I worked with industrial robots we never let non-engineers within the safety fence during demos. One mistake could kill you with those things. Letting a reporter get to the edge of hypothermia... well, what if the Glove breaks just then?
Apparently I heard a rumour about someone I don't know told some guy that Microsoft was releasing an X Box 720! It'll have robotic legs and kick you in the ass whenever you fail at something!
didn't do a "geek fix". I couldn't. The fix required internet access, and I don't have internet access with no wi-fi.
Okay, so you bought an iBook with no Ethernet port or Bluetooth (do such beasts exist?), and neither you nor any of your friends could download the necessary file(s) for the fix and get them onto the iBook where Ubuntu could read it? Not one person had a flash drive or CD burner? (One wonders how you got a copy of Ubuntu in the first place...) No one on the Ubuntu forums had any helpful advice?
In that case, I release you from any onus to try Linux. You have much more important worries. Best of luck!
Perhaps I'm missing something, though. You haven't actually described or indicated the "fix", except to indicate that you didn't like it.
I shouldn't have to BUY hardware to get an OS working-- especially an OS that people constantly tell me is the greatest thing since sliced bread!
And you should know, since you run OSX, which runs on... hey, wait a minute...
The iBook only takes one kind of wireless card, because of it's under-the-keyboard PCMCIA slot and special antenna plug. Which means to buy a different wireless chipset, I'd need to buy an entire new LAPTOP!
You didn't. As you said yourself, you did a "geek fix" and it worked. But it's kind of hypocritical to bash Linux for not running on any random hardware out there while using hardware specifically designed to run with a specific OS.
Last I used Linux, you couldn't copy a set of cells from a spreadsheet into a graphics program and see a bitmap of the cells.
When was that, anyway? I just did it with oocalc and the Gimp...
There was also no program to do Gantt charts.
As has been pointed out, that's not true. But, again, you seem to have an interesting definition of 'mainstream'.
It's a problem, whether it's legal, technical, or anything else.
So pick a wireless chipset that does work. I gave you a link to a bunch. And it's not that hard. I didn't do any special searching and I have three different ones that work. There are legal issues with video cards, too. But it's not like you appear to be implying, that there aren't any working options.
Yet another "we don't need to fix Linux because Windows is already just as bad!" argument.
Um, no. Man, this is just like back on comp.os.linux.advocacy with all the wintrolls. I enjoy easily-configured stuff that works immediately. And when Linux doesn't provide that, it's room for improvement. But it's not as common as you seem to want to imply. Linux could even better... but the competition isn't all that impressive.
If you want Linux accepted in the mainstream, it needs to be *better* than Windows or OS X.
And I assert that, in actual practice, it is. My Linux systems have been easier to install, maintain, and debug than my Windows systems for several years now, along with being less expensive and dramatically more secure. I have my elderly parents on Ubuntu and they are just fine, and I don't have to clean a crappy Windows box every time I visit anymore. The only remark they had after the switch was that Linux had much nicer screensavers.
My kids have no problems with Linux. My wife doesn't like OpenOffice and wants MS Office back. Fine, we're testing Crossover Office now, we'll see.
...in Linux, my wireless card doesn't work *at all* without the "geek fix."
And that is a legal problem, not a technical one! It's the whole FCC regulation thing. It's not something that has to be (or even can be) fixed solely in Linux, when it's the legal and regulatory system that's screwed up. Even acknowledging that, I have three Wifi cards (1 laptop, 2 desktop) that work just fine in Linux.
Dell makes sure that wireless card works when the computer is shipped out.
And Dell could easily ship Linux computers with supported chipsets. There are plenty enough of them.
And no, for what it's worth I don't end up doing tech support for friends and relatives. My relatives all use Macintosh, and my friends are all good enough with computers that they don't ask me for help.
Ah, yes, I can see you're an expert on the 'mainstream'.
No story here, unless the subtext is that Palm OS is going to start looking like System 7
From a programmer's perspective, it already does. Resources, event-driven, extraordinarily painful multitasking, etc. It's not as bad as some claim, but it's certainly a blast from the past to develop for.
An "easy" fix for this crowd would be, say, "I threw iTunes in the trash and then used Apple Software Updater to download a new copy of iTunes." Anything more complicated than that is a geek fix, and is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Because no one ever has to resort to a 'geek fix' on Windows or OSX, right?
If Microsoft or Dell were forced to actually pay for all the tech support Windows really requires, even their deep coffers would be empty in short order. What, are you saying you don't end up doing free tech support for your friends and relatives?
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm hoping for a new verb, like "SCOpuku" (from 'seppuku') or at least "SCOicide". To wit:
SCOpuku: Destroying one's company by launching frivolous legal action against Open Source developers and/or companies. See SCO.
Not yet, but I've got a little Xmas money left. I'll be donating tonight...
One of the things that I really love about my Palm Treo is the ability to carry a small library around with me on an SD card. Wonderful for those 'downtime' moments like waiting at the mechanic or the doctor's office or useless meetings.
The format issues are a problem, but I figure they'll eventually all just be available as HTML and be converted to whatever "native" format is needed later. Sort of like what Baen Books is doing. (They're successful, too.)
Maybe you're not looking hard enough.
Well, actually, no there isn't. On the other hand, here's a bit of evidence to consider for conventional geology:
Take oil companies. Finding oil is a very important and high-stakes issue for them. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars are riding on it. When the chips are down and they need to find the most likely spots to drill - what kind of geology do they use? Flood geology, or mainstream? Which one actually delivers the goods?
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Either way you look at it, a young Earth would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
If "Young Earth" geology actually fits the facts better, how about some of the believers pool their money and invest in looking for oil or valuable minerals? They don't have to do all the development and extraction themselves, they can settle for a percentage of the gross. It'd still be a wonderful investment. How about you start such a venture?
"[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Isaac Asimov
I have ready access to all the games I could want thanks to a friend I know who's a very big pirate. I also know about GameCopyWorld.
However, I still buy games. I don't pirate them. (Then I use the stuff at GameCopyWorld to allow them to be played without the original CD, but that's because I have small kids all over the place and I keep those valuable archival media on a high shelf.) Similarly, I buy CDs and rip them (on the rare occasions that any new music actually appeals to me). I've technically 'pirated' some music, but that was only for music I already had paid for in older analog formats.
In my experience, the people who would pirate stuff, would pirate stuff if it cost any amount greater than zero. But there are plenty of people who will be honest, too. I'm sure there's a sliding scale and everyone's somewhere on the spectrum, but I think there's enough people toward the honest side to enable a successful business.
<Firefly>Yeah, I know. It was just funny.</Firefly>
But, look, George Bush has never been too bright about understanding 'fereigners.' But he does know Americans. He asked this generation to sacrifice the things he knew we would not miss: our privacy and our morality. He let us keep the money. But he made a cynical bet that we wouldn't much care if we became a 'Big Brother' country that has now tortured a lot of random people...
In conclusion, after 9/11, President Bush told us Osama bin Laden could run but he couldn't hide. But, then he ran and hid. So, Bush went to Plan B: pissing on the Constitution and torturing random people...
They say evil happens when good men do nothing. Well, the Democrats prove it also happens when mediocre people do nothing."
Full text here.
Indeed. We reacted badly, precisely because people perceived the "Islamists" as an existential threat instead of the annoyance (and occasionally, fair-to-middling problem) they actually pose. The threat is not the "Islamists", it's the reactionaries freaking out within our culture.
Pointing that out, and pointing out better ways to handle the situation, is an important part of correcting that.
No duh. (You'll note that I didn't couch my reply in terms of just the U.S., but the more broad category of "the West".) But the vast majority of funding for Islamists comes from the oil-producing countries. Reduce their budgets (and disengage from the area so that the thugocracies in the area don't have a readily-available scapegoat to blame all their problems on), and they will have a much harder time doing harm.
Disengagement from the area is in our long-term interest. That place is radically unstable, and so long as we're dependent on resources from there, we're going to spending inordinate amounts of cash and materiel trying to keep the place from falling over, and we'll be vulnerable when bad things happen there - not just terrorism but natural disasters and more.
Not at all. The point is, that whole region simply cannot compete economically or militarily. (You need science and technology to compete in either sphere.) So the only threat they pose is in the area of terrorism. And that's not a big deal. 3,000 people dead in 9/11? Tragic but an order of magnitude less than the 200,000 or more who've died in traffic accidents since 2001.
Sure, they can occasionally kill people, sometimes even large numbers. However, the best steps for minimizing that consist mostly of beefing up physical security. Reinforced cockpit doors, more intelligent arrangement of parking and security at airports. How about Bill Maher's suggestion of a "people's Secret Service"? A corps of trained security professionals who patrol airports, big sporting events, public gatherings, etc. The existing Secret Service doesn't attempt to check everyone in a crowd, they intelligently focus their attention on known risk factors. And it works.
Let me make something else explicit: you can't protect against all terrorism, any more that you can protect against all natural disasters. Too many potential targets, finite resources and time. But there are steps that can be taken to improve resilience greatly. What if the government spent some money to train lots of people in CPR, first aid, and basic emergency response? Some volunteers (remember the Civil Defense types from WWII?) could get additional training in triage to be ready to be called up to help in a major incident. That would help protect against accidents (like the traffic accidents mentioned above), natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
By itself, no. As part of an overall strategy... hell yes.
Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's Theorem:
"Every majoy philosophy that attempts to make life seem meaningful is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg's Theorem. To wit:
Of course, that was before the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, etc.
Except the "Islamists" can't threaten the survival of our culture.
They can't field a competent army, and Islamic culture also produces second-rate science. Their whole social system bears more than a passing resemblance to feudalism. The only thing that supports it is the reserves of oil there. Their economies can't be productive (or stable) any other way.
Terrorists are not an existential threat to the "West". They can cause harm, occasionally a lot of it. But they do not threaten our culture's existence in the slightest.
Personally, I think the obvious choice is to spend billions on working out economical technology that doesn't involve depending on oil (as opposed to, say, military adventurism, which doesn't change the long-term picture at all - at least, for the better). If we weren't dependent on the oil, we wouldn't have to care what they think. (For better or worse, humanitarian crises in Africa don't affect pocketbooks elsewhere, for example.) If we cut our consumption, and sold products and technology that cut worldwide demand for oil, the price would drop and the "Islamists" would face a funding crisis.
Pretty straightforward, really. Get over the stupid aversion to nuclear power (which can be made safe) and we gain a lot more interesting advantages - like serious exploration of space, (no, that's not an Orion, no fallout at all), which leads to orbital power generation, etc.
I was thinking more along the lines of a search warrant. It's possible to get them through in an expedited way... if you've got probable cause. If you don't have probable cause, why do you want to search someone?
The last I heard, the most recent case of any judge anywhere in the U.S. refusing a police wiretap request was in 1997. The FISA court, which allows up to 72 hours of retroactive permission, has fielded literally tens of thousands of requests, and has denied... wait for it... four of them.
This is the regime that's too bogged down in red tape to function in an emergency?
Aren't kidnapping cases solved already, today? With the existing powers?
How about this then - you can get the records and such in an emergency, but those records can't be used for prosecuting someone later, once the emergency is past?
Let's take the scariest hot-button case, some child is missing and phone records are needed to track down the presumed abductor. There are three alternatives here:
I'm a parent, and yesterday I had a bad scare where my oldest son disappeared for about twenty minutes (turned out he'd just gone to a different friends' house than we'd thought). I tell you true, I don't care nearly as much about prosecuting an abductor as about getting my kid back. And I want my son to grow up in an actual democracy rather than a police state. So I'm all for option number three.
In the same way, given the choice between having terrorists "not thwarted" or "thwarted but anyone can be surveiled and harrassed and blacklisted and stuck in prison forever with no habeas corpus" or "thwarted but not prosecuted", I'll take option 3 again.
Police like prosecutions, and have personal and professional motivations to ensure them when possible. If they have motivation to only use exceptional powers when the circumstances warrant - when there's an immediate threat and normal channels aren't fast enough - then there's some feedback in the system.
And you won't want it. Got the cheapest possible Dell desktop last week, except I bumped it up to 1GB RAM. It runs Vista Home Basic.
Holy crap what a pig! It's visibly sluggish - w/1GB of RAM. I'm seriously thinking about wiping it and installing XP. Apparently 4GB really is the sweet spot. Or at least, 1GB really really isn't.
Man, they must be confident in their stuff. When I worked with industrial robots we never let non-engineers within the safety fence during demos. One mistake could kill you with those things. Letting a reporter get to the edge of hypothermia... well, what if the Glove breaks just then?
Well, there are worse possibilities.
Okay, so you bought an iBook with no Ethernet port or Bluetooth (do such beasts exist?), and neither you nor any of your friends could download the necessary file(s) for the fix and get them onto the iBook where Ubuntu could read it? Not one person had a flash drive or CD burner? (One wonders how you got a copy of Ubuntu in the first place...) No one on the Ubuntu forums had any helpful advice?
In that case, I release you from any onus to try Linux. You have much more important worries. Best of luck!
Perhaps I'm missing something, though. You haven't actually described or indicated the "fix", except to indicate that you didn't like it.
And you should know, since you run OSX, which runs on... hey, wait a minute...
You didn't. As you said yourself, you did a "geek fix" and it worked. But it's kind of hypocritical to bash Linux for not running on any random hardware out there while using hardware specifically designed to run with a specific OS.
When was that, anyway? I just did it with oocalc and the Gimp...
As has been pointed out, that's not true. But, again, you seem to have an interesting definition of 'mainstream'.
So pick a wireless chipset that does work. I gave you a link to a bunch. And it's not that hard. I didn't do any special searching and I have three different ones that work. There are legal issues with video cards, too. But it's not like you appear to be implying, that there aren't any working options.
Um, no. Man, this is just like back on comp.os.linux.advocacy with all the wintrolls. I enjoy easily-configured stuff that works immediately. And when Linux doesn't provide that, it's room for improvement. But it's not as common as you seem to want to imply. Linux could even better... but the competition isn't all that impressive.
And I assert that, in actual practice, it is. My Linux systems have been easier to install, maintain, and debug than my Windows systems for several years now, along with being less expensive and dramatically more secure. I have my elderly parents on Ubuntu and they are just fine, and I don't have to clean a crappy Windows box every time I visit anymore. The only remark they had after the switch was that Linux had much nicer screensavers.
My kids have no problems with Linux. My wife doesn't like OpenOffice and wants MS Office back. Fine, we're testing Crossover Office now, we'll see.
And that is a legal problem, not a technical one! It's the whole FCC regulation thing. It's not something that has to be (or even can be) fixed solely in Linux, when it's the legal and regulatory system that's screwed up. Even acknowledging that, I have three Wifi cards (1 laptop, 2 desktop) that work just fine in Linux.
And Dell could easily ship Linux computers with supported chipsets. There are plenty enough of them.
Ah, yes, I can see you're an expert on the 'mainstream'.
From a programmer's perspective, it already does. Resources, event-driven, extraordinarily painful multitasking, etc. It's not as bad as some claim, but it's certainly a blast from the past to develop for.
Because no one ever has to resort to a 'geek fix' on Windows or OSX, right?
If Microsoft or Dell were forced to actually pay for all the tech support Windows really requires, even their deep coffers would be empty in short order. What, are you saying you don't end up doing free tech support for your friends and relatives?