HOWEVER other functions of the iPhone (such as Visual Voice Mail) only work correctly on AT&T. The whole "registration" process only works on AT&T... you're buying a packaged product with functions other than a phone.
Sure the product works adequately on other carriers, but it does not work as Apple intended. Unless other carriers are willing to invest in the infrastructure required for the iPhone to function correctly Apple are in the clear, obviously no other carriers were willing to invest (at least as much as AT&T were willing to invest) - otherwise they would have negotiated a deal with Apple prior to the launch.
Video games won't get you laid? Well if you're at the top level and have a mob of fans from playing games, your chances of getting laid increase somewhat dramatically.
You say a determined google search turns up nothing? My guess is then that you're not determined enough!!
I'm a full time linux admin, and have rarely, if ever, had Google fail to answer my questions. Best start (if you're getting lots of irrelevant results) is to start with the linux search - http://www.google.com/linux - and from there start narrowing your search terms. Sometimes you might need to search some "newbie" sites to figure out what the term you should be using is.. eg. if you're looking for network configuration options scrap the search term "network" and try "eth0" or "ifconfig" or something, use the + and - operators, quote phrases, etc. I'll often run half a dozen searches adding and removing terms until I find what I want. Often the answers lie in forums, etc which google all indexes.. but if you've got a problem there's a 99% chance that someone else already has had the same problem and an answer has been found.
Closed source shareware, if you like it donate and get a license key. If you don't want to donate please stop using it. Give the demo to all your friends.
Open source shareware, if you like it donate, but even if you don't donate you can demand the source (he might make you pay for shipping of the CD rather than putting it on the web but legally he'll have to comply on request) and once you've got the source you might as well just copy the license key generating mechanism and give it away, or re-release the source without that mechanisim. All it takes is one smart programmer out there to actually enforce the gimmie-the-source portion of the GPL and they can re-release it.
PDF forms are easy as, only problem reader will let you enter the data, but only Acrobat will let you save the data back into the PDF.
The learning curve for setting up a PDF form isn't too bad, whoever creates these forms in the first place just needs to take their Word file, convert it to PDF and mark the form fields in Acrobat.
For the end user putting data into the form - if you've got a PDF printer driver under Windows then you can just print them back to a PDF, or under linux print as postscript and convert to PDF.
It all comes down to the initial effort, and if its worth it for those creating the form.
Even under perceived heavy I/O loads, the reality is often that the hard disk is under-used - I occasionally compress videos from miniDV to DVD, and my CPU would need a four or five fold increase in speed to even begin to put pressure on the single 7200 RPM hard disk.
But if you decided to edit that miniDV video before compressing it to DVD you'll be putting more strain on the hard drive.
When working with multimedia, video, etc any sane person will deal with the highest quality source they can use. For some people that may be editing the video before it goes to the PC, others may edit it on the pc before compressing, and yet others may compress (slightly) before editing.
Whatever the solution, you're only going to need to compress it once, the last step in the editing process to output to DVD, but while you're editing you'll be reading and writing various parts of that 11Gb file you mentioned (even editing a 4Gb DVD) and you'll easily put strain on your single 7200RPM hard drive. RAID-0 would provide a huge performance increase in that situation. And more and more people are editing their home movies on the desktop with applications such as Windows Movie Maker or NeroVision Express, any user, power user or not doing video editing would benefit from RAID-0 (well not much at low res 320x200, but at higher resolutions definetly)
Equally beneficial is any desktop that is doing print or prepress work, even a small increase in save and load times (presuming they're not CPU limited by saving/loading compressed formats) will increase productivity.
What if it were a street address ? But they use numbers so we don't have much affinity for those. How many times have you missed a street address by one, and pulled up in the neighbor's driveway then backed up ? Should your friend sue his neighbor because people are likely to miss the driveway ? Same thing on the net. If I make a typo and end up at the wrong site then it's MY TYPO and it's not 'wrong' site's fault, nor is it the lawyer's job to correct it for me.
Well your analogy is a bit off base, we have numbers on the internet - IP addresses. People get those wrong all the time and don't complain, they find the correct one.
You're right one the rest tho, if I look in the phonebook and drive to the wrong address its my fault not the business with the simalar name's fault.
Hourly apt-get? Thats a little overkill in my opinion, automated apt-get could be very nasty in some situations such as the broken version of lilo a couple of years back that left many people with unbootable systems, what if libc6 broke? Also most mirrors I've used seem to only update once or twice a day, as a few times I've had to manually grab packages from US mirrors that haven't made it to my local mirror yet (and still haven't a few hours later)
Personally I have a nightly apt-get update -qq && apt-get dist-upgrade -qqd which will do the update, and download but not install packages. Then I've already got the packages locally when I wish to install them.
You've gotta think that most "home" users probably want some kind of central support when things go bad.
Secondly and equally as important, someone has had to put their time and effort into creating that linux distribution. Wouldn't it be nice to put something back into the community?
Usually when you buy a commercial linux variant what you're paying for is support - and with Lindows many users pay for the convenience of the click-n-run warehouse.
As for a "free" version that works outta the box, give knoppix a shot. Hell you don't even need to install it! Or have a hunt around, some of the commercial linux distributions do have their CDs available for download but don't make it so obvious.
A couple of other people mentioned Knoppix as the wonderful work of Debian, with better usability.
Knoppix has a wonderful hardware detection wizard, a simple script to install to the hard drive, and is also mentioned in the same edition of LinMagAu, surprisingly the writer didn't include a reference to it.
Personally I'm starting to hand friends a copy of Knoppix, if they like it I'll point them to the hdd install script.
Debian is a great base for Knoppix, and once a user becomes competent they can take advantage of the underlying Debian power - but they dont need a geek on hand to get started.
The New Zealand Electoral Department is (apparently) moving all of their desktop machines nationwide to run Debian linux. Now if that goes ahead as planned, that'll be a HUGE victory for Debian.
This news coming just after the NZ Govt signed some huge Microsoft deal...
There are plenty of lost sales, take for example one non profit organisation I work with (name undisclosed) they used to spend approximately 5k/year with microsoft. And this is after we have moved most of their operations over to linux (custom apps, evolution, openoffice, wine suits most staff) but still there are a few windows servers. If we hadn't convinced them of linux, they would be spending at least three times that - instead that money is now being spent on training staff to use linux.
This is just one example, many non profit organisations still have plenty of budget to throw at IT, and will spend it on Microsoft products.
Sounds to me like you're a little confused with W4LTS and Windows TS.
AFAIK Client Access Licenses (CAL) are for Windows NT/2k/.NET Terminal/Advanced Server, which has the one machine and CALs for each connecting IP. (I wont even get into the technica problems with limiting via IP when you're using a remote X with rdesktop setup from one linux, and one windows server)
However W4LTS has a true windows license for each user, and exports the display remotely. It works almost identically to running 5PC's with VNC, if a 6th user tries to load up W4L they will get a "License not available" message.
You will also need a license for the software you are using as well, that is to say 5 MS Office Licenses, 5 Windows 9x/ME Licenses will cover this paticular W4L setup.
I belive NetTraverse (W4L developers) are exploiting the licensing mechanism for Windows 95/98/ME which was (and is) a desktop OS. By simply exporting the display remotely via VNC, or via Win4Lin you can still abide by the less restrictive licenses that these operating systems were released under.
Microsoft have cleaned up the licensing for their newer products, but cant retrospectively change existing product licenses. Which is why I dont think W4L will ever be available for Windows NT, Windows 2k, or Windows ME.
If they can't provide 3 meg/s to every person on the system at the same time with "always on" than maybe they need to re-think their business model.
There is residential grade service and there is business grade service. You pay a hell of a lot more to be guarenteed 100% availability of your bandwidth, a good 10 times as much.
The limit is not to stop software piracy, the limit is to protect their network from being completey broken by those few individuals who are using the service in excess.
As a side note, downloading 3 or 4 CDs to get a new copy of your OS? You might want to have a look into rsync'ing your isos instead.
A bit of possible misunderstanding in the article...
The company now limits its customers to one gigabyte of downloaded data per day despite advertising that an advantage of broadband is
"unlimited surfing".
1Gb per day will provide unlimited surfing. They're not advertising unlimited downloading and they do appear to be being nice about it.
Subscribers say the limit amounts to as little as two-and-a-half hours of use a day for a service that says it is "24/7".
Show me someone who can surf the web and take in 1Gb of information inside 2.5 hours.
Down here in New Zealand if you want full speed DSL it will cost you NZ$99 (~US$50) for 1Gb per MONTH. For 128k DSL its around NZ$60 (~US$30) all up per month. Some people dont know how lucky they are:(
As a user, I'm pretty confident in woody, I'm using it myself at work at at home, even on a production webserver. It's testing pretty damn solid as far as I can tell.
Been using woody on half a dozen desktops at work, for about 6 months and while at first there were definite gnome problems which thankfully have dissapeared waaay into the past. And it's a pity that galeon wont be there, but I suppose it is a little unstable (gotta love the crash recovery though!)
The really interesting thing to see is what kernel they're going to use with it, anybody know? I'm sure its on the mailing lists if I could be bothered to check.
Well, I doubt that to an extent, they don't need to pirate XP or Office, as OpenOffice runs damn well, and what real need is there to leave the savehaven of Win98. It's never crashed for me in over a year... granted it's been only running Dreamweaver, Photoshop, IE under VMWare or Win4Lin:D
Gimp is not a replacement for photoshop. It's more in comparisson with PaintShopPro IMHO.
OpenOffice and Linux are a great solution for the office and for students doing basic stuff and if there is a friend or someone to call on for free or very cheap tech support, you'll be suprised how many people will switch.
Content and content management systems aside, the big thing is usability over cross platforms. We all know about image formats and that optimization is a must these days.
The biggest mistake that designers continue to make is to use a huge table to layout the page - this gets ugly when degrading to low end browsers on handheld/wireless platforms. And if you muck up a table then netscape dies.
I use divs for the main layout, often in reverse order from the actual way they end up on the page so that if your browser doesnt support them you might get a menu or a banner or something at the bottom of the page instead.
HTML4 is great, stick a DTD in and keep your CSS in separate files. Degrading to lower end will work, they dont get the design but the content. I check my sites in Opera, Galeon/Mozilla, IE5.5, IE6 and Konqueror to make sure they look right in all of those browsers, and then in Netscape 4 to make sure that the content is still readable. A nice div with style="display:none" holds an unobtrusive message that notifys the user they might want to look at getting a newer browser.
Make sure you validate your HTML and CSS on w3.org, if its valid and well written it *should* degrade. Check it in lynx too, if you have to scroll through a page or two of menus to get to the content then bet that some wireless users will too.
There are some bugs you can exploit as well, to make certain versions of IE import additional sheets if you need to fix that padding bug, and others to make netscape not import your advanced sheet that could screw it up. Another nice thing if you are providing articles, is to include a print media style sheet which formats things for print, some suggestions there are display: none for banners and menus and other unimportant information.
A great place for some real examples of these is the New York Public Libraries style guide at http://www.nypl.org/styleguide/
Not all lexmarks are easy to install.
The low end lexmark ones have no linux support, nothing more than a paperweight. (as i found out to my disgust after purchasing a printer last week).
Some models are well supported, while some of the older lexmark printers dont perform to well, like you cant get the driver to use both the colour and b&w ink.
I also hear the developer for the drivers is looking for someone new to take over supporting them.
If the orginal developers of the code (be it yourself with less knowledge than you have
now or someone else) wrote the programme in such a way that its absurbly bloated, poor designed and
all the rest of it then theres nothing wrong
with the 'start from scratch' mentaility. If the
people at microsoft decided to redo dos in the early days and get rid of that 640k limit, if they
redid a lot of there less successful product lines
(there is a lot of them, like ms publisher, etc)
then these products wouldn't be useless.
The entire prototype theory comes from starting
from scatch. Its important cycle in software development
Bah windows. But Its easy for idiots to use. BeOS and QNX are also fairly easy for idiots. Linux is not.
This has been discussed numerous times in various forums on slashdot and almost any other *nix techie site, Microsoft has two major holds on the market that prevent the masses from moving away. Hotmail and Office.
Try accessing hotmail under a non windows machine, first you need to have the security modules for whatever browser installed, second it needs fairly complex javascript support, or none at all (Opera 3.62 for QNX just barfs and tries to make all input boxes active at once). Netscape works okay from experience, but it doesnt look very pretty. Konqueror and Mozilla work okay once you get security modules installed.
Office documents while portable, lose much of their formatting and when clients send you fancy documents, often they look pretty damn ugly when opened in staroffice.
Most people anyway receive a copy of windows with their PC, and they pay for it with the cost of their machine. Not buying it off the shelf. I do no many people that go out and pay for windows software to keep it running, antivirus software namely. On a side note, in my city I am only aware of two companys that actively promote linux machines, incidentaly I work for one of them. But still we sell many windows PC's because thats what the pc luser wants.
(Off topic: When you ask for emailed resume's for a network technician, or a *nix programmer, it helps to ignore the word docs. Personally I pay attention to the PDF's... once I received a.tex even, he was second in line for the job in the end )
Slashdot Mirror
HOWEVER other functions of the iPhone (such as Visual Voice Mail) only work correctly on AT&T. The whole "registration" process only works on AT&T... you're buying a packaged product with functions other than a phone.
Sure the product works adequately on other carriers, but it does not work as Apple intended. Unless other carriers are willing to invest in the infrastructure required for the iPhone to function correctly Apple are in the clear, obviously no other carriers were willing to invest (at least as much as AT&T were willing to invest) - otherwise they would have negotiated a deal with Apple prior to the launch.
Video games won't get you laid? Well if you're at the top level and have a mob of fans from playing games, your chances of getting laid increase somewhat dramatically.
You say a determined google search turns up nothing? My guess is then that you're not determined enough!!
I'm a full time linux admin, and have rarely, if ever, had Google fail to answer my questions. Best start (if you're getting lots of irrelevant results) is to start with the linux search - http://www.google.com/linux - and from there start narrowing your search terms. Sometimes you might need to search some "newbie" sites to figure out what the term you should be using is.. eg. if you're looking for network configuration options scrap the search term "network" and try "eth0" or "ifconfig" or something, use the + and - operators, quote phrases, etc. I'll often run half a dozen searches adding and removing terms until I find what I want. Often the answers lie in forums, etc which google all indexes.. but if you've got a problem there's a 99% chance that someone else already has had the same problem and an answer has been found.
Closed source shareware, if you like it donate and get a license key. If you don't want to donate please stop using it. Give the demo to all your friends.
Open source shareware, if you like it donate, but even if you don't donate you can demand the source (he might make you pay for shipping of the CD rather than putting it on the web but legally he'll have to comply on request) and once you've got the source you might as well just copy the license key generating mechanism and give it away, or re-release the source without that mechanisim. All it takes is one smart programmer out there to actually enforce the gimmie-the-source portion of the GPL and they can re-release it.
PDF forms are easy as, only problem reader will let you enter the data, but only Acrobat will let you save the data back into the PDF.
The learning curve for setting up a PDF form isn't too bad, whoever creates these forms in the first place just needs to take their Word file, convert it to PDF and mark the form fields in Acrobat.
For the end user putting data into the form - if you've got a PDF printer driver under Windows then you can just print them back to a PDF, or under linux print as postscript and convert to PDF.
It all comes down to the initial effort, and if its worth it for those creating the form.
Even under perceived heavy I/O loads, the reality is often that the hard disk is under-used - I occasionally compress videos from miniDV to DVD, and my CPU would need a four or five fold increase in speed to even begin to put pressure on the single 7200 RPM hard disk.
But if you decided to edit that miniDV video before compressing it to DVD you'll be putting more strain on the hard drive.
When working with multimedia, video, etc any sane person will deal with the highest quality source they can use. For some people that may be editing the video before it goes to the PC, others may edit it on the pc before compressing, and yet others may compress (slightly) before editing.
Whatever the solution, you're only going to need to compress it once, the last step in the editing process to output to DVD, but while you're editing you'll be reading and writing various parts of that 11Gb file you mentioned (even editing a 4Gb DVD) and you'll easily put strain on your single 7200RPM hard drive. RAID-0 would provide a huge performance increase in that situation. And more and more people are editing their home movies on the desktop with applications such as Windows Movie Maker or NeroVision Express, any user, power user or not doing video editing would benefit from RAID-0 (well not much at low res 320x200, but at higher resolutions definetly)
Equally beneficial is any desktop that is doing print or prepress work, even a small increase in save and load times (presuming they're not CPU limited by saving/loading compressed formats) will increase productivity.
Well your analogy is a bit off base, we have numbers on the internet - IP addresses. People get those wrong all the time and don't complain, they find the correct one.
You're right one the rest tho, if I look in the phonebook and drive to the wrong address its my fault not the business with the simalar name's fault.
Personally I have a nightly apt-get update -qq && apt-get dist-upgrade -qqd which will do the update, and download but not install packages. Then I've already got the packages locally when I wish to install them.
For books, I'd probably recommend rute
You've gotta think that most "home" users probably want some kind of central support when things go bad.
Secondly and equally as important, someone has had to put their time and effort into creating that linux distribution. Wouldn't it be nice to put something back into the community?
Usually when you buy a commercial linux variant what you're paying for is support - and with Lindows many users pay for the convenience of the click-n-run warehouse.
As for a "free" version that works outta the box, give knoppix a shot. Hell you don't even need to install it! Or have a hunt around, some of the commercial linux distributions do have their CDs available for download but don't make it so obvious.
For gnome 1.4 at the boot prompt type desktop=gnome or something.
Its also got icewm on there too.
A couple of other people mentioned Knoppix as the wonderful work of Debian, with better usability.
Knoppix has a wonderful hardware detection wizard, a simple script to install to the hard drive, and is also mentioned in the same edition of LinMagAu, surprisingly the writer didn't include a reference to it.
Personally I'm starting to hand friends a copy of Knoppix, if they like it I'll point them to the hdd install script.
Debian is a great base for Knoppix, and once a user becomes competent they can take advantage of the underlying Debian power - but they dont need a geek on hand to get started.
The New Zealand Electoral Department is (apparently) moving all of their desktop machines nationwide to run Debian linux. Now if that goes ahead as planned, that'll be a HUGE victory for Debian.
This news coming just after the NZ Govt signed some huge Microsoft deal...
There are plenty of lost sales, take for example one non profit organisation I work with (name undisclosed) they used to spend approximately 5k/year with microsoft. And this is after we have moved most of their operations over to linux (custom apps, evolution, openoffice, wine suits most staff) but still there are a few windows servers. If we hadn't convinced them of linux, they would be spending at least three times that - instead that money is now being spent on training staff to use linux.
This is just one example, many non profit organisations still have plenty of budget to throw at IT, and will spend it on Microsoft products.
Sounds to me like you're a little confused with W4LTS and Windows TS.
AFAIK Client Access Licenses (CAL) are for Windows NT/2k/.NET Terminal/Advanced Server, which has the one machine and CALs for each connecting IP. (I wont even get into the technica problems with limiting via IP when you're using a remote X with rdesktop setup from one linux, and one windows server)
However W4LTS has a true windows license for each user, and exports the display remotely. It works almost identically to running 5PC's with VNC, if a 6th user tries to load up W4L they will get a "License not available" message.
You will also need a license for the software you are using as well, that is to say 5 MS Office Licenses, 5 Windows 9x/ME Licenses will cover this paticular W4L setup.
I belive NetTraverse (W4L developers) are exploiting the licensing mechanism for Windows 95/98/ME which was (and is) a desktop OS. By simply exporting the display remotely via VNC, or via Win4Lin you can still abide by the less restrictive licenses that these operating systems were released under.
Microsoft have cleaned up the licensing for their newer products, but cant retrospectively change existing product licenses. Which is why I dont think W4L will ever be available for Windows NT, Windows 2k, or Windows ME.
There is residential grade service and there is business grade service. You pay a hell of a lot more to be guarenteed 100% availability of your bandwidth, a good 10 times as much.
The limit is not to stop software piracy, the limit is to protect their network from being completey broken by those few individuals who are using the service in excess.
As a side note, downloading 3 or 4 CDs to get a new copy of your OS? You might want to have a look into rsync'ing your isos instead.
1Gb per day will provide unlimited surfing. They're not advertising unlimited downloading and they do appear to be being nice about it.
Show me someone who can surf the web and take in 1Gb of information inside 2.5 hours.
Down here in New Zealand if you want full speed DSL it will cost you NZ$99 (~US$50) for 1Gb per MONTH. For 128k DSL its around NZ$60 (~US$30) all up per month. Some people dont know how lucky they are :(
I'm not complaining, it's in unstable. Weird that redhat has it in there (well the redhat install at my campus anyway)
:D
And you're right, it is much nicer than mozilla.
But download, build and run is against the debian ideals of apt-get install, run
> 1. su&&yes|rm -R /
;)
...
> 4. Insert Windows XP CD
...
> 6. USE YOUR COMPUTER WITH EASE
Give a mechanic a car that you can't open the hood on, and he'll find it sooo much easier
I wish I could open up my OS.. oh hang on... I can!
As a user, I'm pretty confident in woody, I'm using it myself at work at at home, even on a production webserver. It's testing pretty damn solid as far as I can tell.
Been using woody on half a dozen desktops at work, for about 6 months and while at first there were definite gnome problems which thankfully have dissapeared waaay into the past. And it's a pity that galeon wont be there, but I suppose it is a little unstable (gotta love the crash recovery though!)
The really interesting thing to see is what kernel they're going to use with it, anybody know? I'm sure its on the mailing lists if I could be bothered to check.
Well, I doubt that to an extent, they don't need to pirate XP or Office, as OpenOffice runs damn well, and what real need is there to leave the savehaven of Win98. It's never crashed for me in over a year... granted it's been only running Dreamweaver, Photoshop, IE under VMWare or Win4Lin :D
Gimp is not a replacement for photoshop. It's more in comparisson with PaintShopPro IMHO.
OpenOffice and Linux are a great solution for the office and for students doing basic stuff and if there is a friend or someone to call on for free or very cheap tech support, you'll be suprised how many people will switch.
Content and content management systems aside, the big thing is usability over cross platforms. We all know about image formats and that optimization is a must these days.
The biggest mistake that designers continue to make is to use a huge table to layout the page - this gets ugly when degrading to low end browsers on handheld/wireless platforms. And if you muck up a table then netscape dies.
I use divs for the main layout, often in reverse order from the actual way they end up on the page so that if your browser doesnt support them you might get a menu or a banner or something at the bottom of the page instead.
HTML4 is great, stick a DTD in and keep your CSS in separate files. Degrading to lower end will work, they dont get the design but the content. I check my sites in Opera, Galeon/Mozilla, IE5.5, IE6 and Konqueror to make sure they look right in all of those browsers, and then in Netscape 4 to make sure that the content is still readable. A nice div with style="display:none" holds an unobtrusive message that notifys the user they might want to look at getting a newer browser.
Make sure you validate your HTML and CSS on w3.org, if its valid and well written it *should* degrade. Check it in lynx too, if you have to scroll through a page or two of menus to get to the content then bet that some wireless users will too.
There are some bugs you can exploit as well, to make certain versions of IE import additional sheets if you need to fix that padding bug, and others to make netscape not import your advanced sheet that could screw it up. Another nice thing if you are providing articles, is to include a print media style sheet which formats things for print, some suggestions there are display: none for banners and menus and other unimportant information.
A great place for some real examples of these is the New York Public Libraries style guide at http://www.nypl.org/styleguide/
You'd think that the warped mind creating such a complex website, just might have the skills to make the password discovery at least somewhat tricky.
Imagine that - server side matrix... you can only access some interfaces at certain times of the day. They need a better geek on their webdesign team.
Not all lexmarks are easy to install.
The low end lexmark ones have no linux support, nothing more than a paperweight. (as i found out to my disgust after purchasing a printer last week).
Some models are well supported, while some of the older lexmark printers dont perform to well, like you cant get the driver to use both the colour and b&w ink.
I also hear the developer for the drivers is looking for someone new to take over supporting them.
If the orginal developers of the code (be it yourself with less knowledge than you have
now or someone else) wrote the programme in such a way that its absurbly bloated, poor designed and
all the rest of it then theres nothing wrong
with the 'start from scratch' mentaility. If the
people at microsoft decided to redo dos in the early days and get rid of that 640k limit, if they
redid a lot of there less successful product lines
(there is a lot of them, like ms publisher, etc)
then these products wouldn't be useless.
The entire prototype theory comes from starting
from scatch. Its important cycle in software development
Bah windows. But Its easy for idiots to use. BeOS and QNX are also fairly easy for idiots. Linux is not.
This has been discussed numerous times in various forums on slashdot and almost any other *nix techie site, Microsoft has two major holds on the market that prevent the masses from moving away. Hotmail and Office.
Try accessing hotmail under a non windows machine, first you need to have the security modules for whatever browser installed, second it needs fairly complex javascript support, or none at all (Opera 3.62 for QNX just barfs and tries to make all input boxes active at once). Netscape works okay from experience, but it doesnt look very pretty. Konqueror and Mozilla work okay once you get security modules installed.
Office documents while portable, lose much of their formatting and when clients send you fancy documents, often they look pretty damn ugly when opened in staroffice.
Most people anyway receive a copy of windows with their PC, and they pay for it with the cost of their machine. Not buying it off the shelf. I do no many people that go out and pay for windows software to keep it running, antivirus software namely. On a side note, in my city I am only aware of two companys that actively promote linux machines, incidentaly I work for one of them. But still we sell many windows PC's because thats what the pc luser wants.
(Off topic: When you ask for emailed resume's for a network technician, or a *nix programmer, it helps to ignore the word docs. Personally I pay attention to the PDF's ... once I received a .tex even, he was second in line for the job in the end )