I am just as frustrated with the "all information should be free" crowd as I am with the "all free information is stealing" crowd, since neither has a lasting solution to the problem.
Actually, the solution pre-copyright was the Patronage model. The state, and certain wealthy donors, made a purpose of funding artists in return for their producing entertainment that was accessible to them and to the public at large. This was the model under which some of the greatest Baroque and Classical art and music were produced, as well as the works of Shakespeare; the subsidization of the Queen allowed for the larger public to attend the Shakespearean performances for a relatively small sum.
It would not be that hard to re-institute such a model today, and there would definitely be a demand to do so if copyright terms were reduced. The structure for it still remains, and the public broadcasting system has shown that it can work quite well indeed.
So now the next time you want to say the "information should be free" crowd doesn't have a solution to the problem, I'll kindly thank you to shut your unqualified, worthless, ignorant pie hole.
Ever gotten an email from one of the scum-sucking subhumans we call lawyers? Chances are there's a bunch of boilerplate BS on the bottom of it, written up like "this email is private communication, by reading it you agree to the following terms, the lawyer retains copyright over this email, you may not retransmit this email without permission, etc etc."
Worth about as much as the electrons it takes to store it, but they certainly do TRY. The legal system is an ugly parasite, a leech on the rest of society.
Then get a clue about how medical science works, it presents stuff as fact that is really just the average. Did you know that for someone people their heart isn't on the left side? Not everybody has the same amount of vertebrae? People have different sensitivities in their senses?
And somehow, we manage, because every one of the things you mention involves severe edge cases, and even the severe edge cases can't go too far (the heart is much more centrally located than most people believe anyways, most idiots told to put their hand over their "heart" will put their palm over their left nipple FFS) before this thing called "death" tends to come into play due to other, far nastier congenital problems enter the picture. When you're talking about someone with eyesight of a slightly widened spectrum, or hearing that goes a tad above the standard (and most young kids can hear higher frequencies anyways, simply because of the lack of wear and tear), you're talking about variances in fractions of a percentage point outside the standard, measured zone that is normal for humanity.
There are people with severe longsightedness The GPP above who was bitching about how he can tell on his 37" TV the difference between 720p and 1080p content from 20 feet away MIGHT be one of these people, since he "used to wear glasses", or he might just be self-deluding, or he might just be viewing content on a crap TV with a crap scaler that renders anything other than native resolution with some pissy artifacting. The percentages lead towards #2 or #3 far more than #1, we would call #1 "Vegas Odds" at best.
it's about the amount of sensory information being displayed and the fact that it is moving. A pimple may show up in the 1080p source but not in the 720p source.
I'm fine with not seeing the pimple, really.
Seriously though, a pimple may not show up in one frame but as you said, the images are moving, which means in aggregate, the pimple WILL be shown and visible, and if it's so small that it's disappearing from some frames, then it's on a face so far back from the zero plane that I really don't give a rat's ass about one guy in a long shot having a pimple or not.
The rest of your description is likewise meaningless. At 12 feet from the TV on a 50" screen, you CAN NOT physically tell the difference. It is impossible, your eyes don't have the resolution to handle it, and telling yourself otherwise is like telling yourself you need some $10,000 ethernet cables for your home network too.
Given the size of my living room, a 720p 50" Sony I bought years ago is doing just fine. It doesn't need 1080p, because at the distance I'm sitting from it, the eye can't tell the difference anyways.
The problem is, XBMC 11 is a backwards motion; it hogs CPU for unnecessary things, causing previously usable systems that were near the hardware minimums to no longer meet them. XBMC 10 was good because it actually made the system leaner and eliminated a lot of the "gameloop" style coding that was necessary to run on an original Xbox but just caused Windows or Linux systems to waste power when it was "running but idle."
Yes, you can trick someone into running a virus by asking them to run a program that they downloaded, but you can't automatically run a virus just by loading a picture file, or by loading a document. (Actually you can get a kernel mod that will let viruses do that and it is a required feature of most Linux virus scanners. So the people least protected on Linux are the ones running the virus scanner.)
Virus: "You need to install this kernel mod for the free puppy screensaver." User: "Ok. I want my free puppy screensaver! Yay puppies!"
Does market share have anything to do with the fewer viruses for Linux? Yes, it does. Does the fact that it is much harder for a virus to spread itself around also have something to do with the fewer viruses? Yes, it does.
These are intertwined. I have no doubt that there are exploits to get around the "feature" you mentioned earlier. Why do I have little doubt of this? Because there have been privilege-escalation bugs that existed for YEARS in the linux kernel before anyone got round to fixing them. And a lot of that has to do with the complacency of most of the linux community thinking that their OS is "secure" when that's a load of bullshit.
How about this: I can switch my motherboard and video card out You are already far beyond the capabilities of most of the people you are trying to convince to switch.
I can even remaster onto a live-bootable USB drive and work on it on a completely different machine, long as it's i686 or x86_64. You are already far beyond the capabilities of most of the people you are trying to convince to switch.
Everything I need is a few clicks away in synaptic or in apt-get from the command line You have already LOST the people who you are trying to convince to switch.
A huge slew of apps are already bundled for free Funny, that's what they say about their new HP or Dell too.
and if I want to start getting creative codewise... You are already far beyond the capabilities of most of the people you are trying to convince to switch.
I get to be a free beta tester for software that will never ever be finished or have most of the bugs fixed, because fixing bugs isn't smexy as a community participant, FTFY
As you can see, most of your arguments are MEANINGLESS to the types of people you need to convince in order to get them to adopt Linux.
It doesn't have THE FREAKIN' ANNOYING RIBBON BAR!!! Funny, I don't find it annoying. I actually like having it, rather than umpteen dozen dropdown menus and confusion on what could and couldn't be made into a control bar of its own.
And to counter your argument, I'm still looking for the feature or features that Office has that Libre Office lacks. Fine. But you are trying to get people to switch to your preferred software.. "It does everything your current software does" isn't enough of an argument. You have to argue for why yours is superior either in ease of use or by doing things theirs doesn't.
Libre Office has gotten almost feature-compatible with MS Office and that's great for you. Now if you want to get people to switch you should show them what it does better, what it does faster, what it does with more ease of use, or what it does that MS Office can't do at all.
Oh, and the reason I use the word "almost": the moment you get beyond a bare-minimum spreadsheet and into any heavy duty stuff (actually, fuck the heavy duty stuff, just use some color coded cells) Libre Office will barf trying to import that Excel document, and will barf even harder trying to export it to something the MS Office user on the other end of the email needs to be able to read. So, if you want to be compatible with the people you're trying to work with or do business with using spreadsheets, Libre Office isn't up to the challenge yet. That's just one good example for you, your turn. Try to reply without frothing at the mouth and screaming this time.
Plenty. Ever fought with a linux distro that continually reassigned three SATA hard drives randomly to/sda,/sdb, and/sdc in maddening fashion every time it was power cycled, breaking scripts all over the place? They don't (or at least didn't back then) make it easy to lock them down.
GiMP -> Available on Windows. Also, Paint.Net is available for windows too. Acrobat -- CutePDF Writer and a slew of other open alternatives. PDFEdit is also on Windows. Alfresco Labs 3 - barf.
Call of Duty -> Hey, they actually want to play on their PC. You know, with keyboard and mouse, rather than with a gamepad. Guess what, you fail.
Mint -> Web service, usable just fine from Windows.
Turbotax vs Turbotax Online; sorry, but once you get past the 1040EZ, you want the real thing. Support for printer: glad yours worked. Mine works too but I know many people for whom it'd be a deal breaker.
So far you have yet to offer a good reason to switch off of Windows. Seems every tool you point to, is either available on Windows, or in the case of Call of Duty 3, all you had to offer was derision, which makes you a culty lame-ass.
#1 - OSX acquired a built-in base. They converted existing Mac (OS7, OS8, OS9) users, which depending on how you measured were somewhere between 6 and 8 percent of the market, over to OSX. This included the "Classic Mode" backwards compatibility environment for OS9->OSX conversion, and the Rosetta conversion interface when the PPC->x86 conversion happened. Apple running FreeBSD, unlike most Linux projects, understood that backwards compatibility is fucking important, at least for a long enough period that most users would upgrade/update the applications that otherwise would just break on an OS update.
#2 - They made their interface look goddamn pretty. This is something Microsoft's been struggling to achieve - though Win7 is actually damn good. This is also something Linux distributions have been fucking goddamn terrible at over the years. Admittedly, because Apple controls their own hardware spec, they have a leg up in that they charged a premium price for extremely high-res monitors (Cinema Display, etc) whereas most people experience Windows on much less high-resolution displays from manufacturers like Dell or HP where the "jaggies" can be a lot more noticeable.
#3 - Slick marketing campaigning around the "It Just Works" theme, combined with cross-marketing of other fad devices (iPod, iPhone, and the newest line of iFad tablets) to build a whole brand. Again, Linux has completely fucking failed to build itself as a true BRAND - most phone users with an Android phone don't even realize it's Linux-based, they think Google developed Android entirely on their own thanks to the Android marketing campaign.
Ten years ago, applications might have mattered. They still do.
However, OpenOffice (or whatever it is called today) is IMHO superior to Microsoft Office. That's fine for your opinion. Unfortunately, your opinion is solidly in the minority and you need to do more than just scream "IMHO THIS IS SUPERIOR" to get people to switch. WHY is it superior? WHAT makes it a better, more user-friendly program? WHAT can it do that MS Office can't?
Gimp and Inkscape are great drawing programs. Great. I can run GIMP on Windows just fine. I can also use Paint.Net. Or any of a number of other programs. Including, if I care to shell out $50, Adobe Photoshop Elements.
Casual games tend to be cross-platform while hard-core games don't universally work on Windows anyway - this is what a game platform is for. Actually, Windows is the platform to target for hardcore games, they don't target OSX.
The printer "just works" without any need for the user to fuss with drivers. Until it doesn't, and then you're up shit creek without a paddle, likely to find some Linuxite telling you "STFU Noob, ur printerz not supprted, go buy a diffrent printer nstead."
The good tax programs are all web-based now. Sure, until you get into filing anything more than the 1040EZ.
Sharepoint - seriously? - does anyone use that pile of crap? You're not going to get people to switch to your alternative - wait, what was your alternative anyways? - just by calling their current solution a "pile of crap."
Most importantly, videos and music plays without a fuss. Some of the time, other times not. Which is a lot like OSX and Windows come to think of it. Best experience I've had with video is running Windows with VLC 2.0.1 installed.
NFS networking actually works all the time, unlike tempermental CIFS. Right until you try to interact with OSX or Windows boxes.
There are no virus worries. Because so few people on the planet use Linux as their desktop that no sane virus writer would even bother. Get yourself any appreciable market share and watch that change in a nanosecond.
And Linux is so much simpler to use than Windows. Bullshit.
You just demonstrated why almost nobody wants Linux: linux advocates are assholes like you who tell everyone not using Linux that they are "clueless." Or "too stupid to own a computer." Or some other sort of put-down.
The reality is that to get people to switch to Linux, most of the common arguments of the Linux crowd are fucking retarded themselves. Such as the first two: #1 - "Free yourself from the Microsoft Tax!!! Build your own Machine!!!" - Most of the the buying public DOES NOT WANT to "build their own machine. They see the computer (inaccurately, but it's how they see it) as a fucking appliance. They think of computers as "I plug it in and it just runs and I get my stuff." This is why Apple's "it just works" campaign was so successful and Microsoft's ads tout "ease of use" as well.
#2 - "But Linux can do so much more..." - Actually, the problem is that out of the initial install it does so much less of what your average user wants it to do. Sure, there's plenty of "free software" out there, but someone a few comments above pointed out a list of software that Linux simply does not have a port for. The list of software not ported to Linux is pretty fucking long, and trying to get Wine/Cedega running and then run the software under that is just as much a pain in the ass. "Setting up Linux and getting comfy in it" takes a new user a hell of a long while. Which leads into my final point...
#3 - You don't understand the actual cost of switching. You say "hey we are giving away this thing and it's all FREE YAY." Fine and dandy. You dismiss the "total cost" idea as FUD. I dismiss your accusations of FUD as Fucking Retarded because I can quantify all the things involved in actually convincing someone to switch. Here is what you are convincing someone to do in order to switch:
1 - Learn how to interact with a new OS. And let's be honest here, most of the programmers in the Linux world are NOT professional GUI designers. Linux desktops, KDE/Gnome, are NOT nice on the eyes and they are not very happy to play around in. Here's one area I have to give Apple some props in: their OSX interface puts some damn pretty and friendly makeup on the pig that was the old FreeBSD interface.
2 - Learn how to interact with all the new programs they will have to use to "replace" the ones from their old Windows environment. This includes figuring out what the fuck they are called, in which of many disparate distribution groups or online package managers they're held with incredibly poorly written Engrish package descriptions, and then learning the interface for each of them because the last thing Linux programmers ever want to do is use a standard, consistent interface experience.
3 - Learn how to navigate an entirely new file structure. This is not trivial by any means. Windows and OSX both at least treat logical drives in a sane manner and clearly delineate what is housed where;/dev/sda1/sdb2/ and so on and so forth are a fucking travesty and confuse the ever-loving fuck out of new Linux users.
4 - Accept that a lot of old, favorite programs just don't exist and don't have substitutes on Linux. Ouch.
5 - Find out what of their hardware is "supported but not really" under Linux. Such as a perfectly good, perfectly working HDTV tuner card that I had in a windows-based HTPC a few years back. Had a friend who's a linux-head insist I should switch it over to Mythbuntu because it "works so much better" and "supports everything" and "uses so much less resources." Whoops. No support for my HDTV tuner card, no support for my stock ATi graphics board in the unit. Now imagine that for the non-techie you are trying to convince to switch that it's their sound card that won't work, or their joystick, or their printer. They're not going to buy new hardware, they're going to say "fuck you" and go back to Windows or OSX.
None of this is a trivial issue or a non-cost. And that's the real "cost of switching" you have to overcome to convince people to switch to Linux.
Step 1: Take franchise with loyal following. Step 2: Shit all over it. Step 3: Add CGI explosions.
Bonus points if you make the camera work so fucking terrible (Transformers 2 is a great example of this) that NOBODY HAS ANY FUCKING CLUE WHAT IS GOING ON in anything resembling an action sequence.
Not only that - if the law isn't so fucking convoluted and obtuse and hidden away, how the hell are the lawyer vampire class ever going to justify being a drain on society by requiring you to consult a lawyer before doing anything?
Regulatory capture was invented by the lawyer class. That's why the first thing a sane society would do is outlaw lawyers.
Any one large ISP that *doesn't* engage in anti-customer actions is sure to get a windfall of new signups.
Apparently you're new here. Over 90% of America has NO functional choice in ISPs. In the area I live in, we have Comcrap or AT&T and that's it. A few miles down the road it's Comcrap and Verizon FiOS, but no AT&T (their DSLAMs don't reach that far).
Go a few miles out of town, you're lucky to have any choice at all, you'll likely have whatever cableco bought monopoly rights from the city council 30 years ago and that'll be it.
There are some ISPs I've heard good things of. But they'll never serve my area, which is a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh fuck you.
I am just as frustrated with the "all information should be free" crowd as I am with the "all free information is stealing" crowd, since neither has a lasting solution to the problem.
Actually, the solution pre-copyright was the Patronage model. The state, and certain wealthy donors, made a purpose of funding artists in return for their producing entertainment that was accessible to them and to the public at large. This was the model under which some of the greatest Baroque and Classical art and music were produced, as well as the works of Shakespeare; the subsidization of the Queen allowed for the larger public to attend the Shakespearean performances for a relatively small sum.
It would not be that hard to re-institute such a model today, and there would definitely be a demand to do so if copyright terms were reduced. The structure for it still remains, and the public broadcasting system has shown that it can work quite well indeed.
So now the next time you want to say the "information should be free" crowd doesn't have a solution to the problem, I'll kindly thank you to shut your unqualified, worthless, ignorant pie hole.
Ever gotten an email from one of the scum-sucking subhumans we call lawyers? Chances are there's a bunch of boilerplate BS on the bottom of it, written up like "this email is private communication, by reading it you agree to the following terms, the lawyer retains copyright over this email, you may not retransmit this email without permission, etc etc."
Worth about as much as the electrons it takes to store it, but they certainly do TRY. The legal system is an ugly parasite, a leech on the rest of society.
(at least in properly designed systems)
Your mistake.
I sense you're a Republican. Probably a Santorum supporter.
Then get a clue about how medical science works, it presents stuff as fact that is really just the average. Did you know that for someone people their heart isn't on the left side? Not everybody has the same amount of vertebrae? People have different sensitivities in their senses?
And somehow, we manage, because every one of the things you mention involves severe edge cases, and even the severe edge cases can't go too far (the heart is much more centrally located than most people believe anyways, most idiots told to put their hand over their "heart" will put their palm over their left nipple FFS) before this thing called "death" tends to come into play due to other, far nastier congenital problems enter the picture. When you're talking about someone with eyesight of a slightly widened spectrum, or hearing that goes a tad above the standard (and most young kids can hear higher frequencies anyways, simply because of the lack of wear and tear), you're talking about variances in fractions of a percentage point outside the standard, measured zone that is normal for humanity.
There are people with severe longsightedness The GPP above who was bitching about how he can tell on his 37" TV the difference between 720p and 1080p content from 20 feet away MIGHT be one of these people, since he "used to wear glasses", or he might just be self-deluding, or he might just be viewing content on a crap TV with a crap scaler that renders anything other than native resolution with some pissy artifacting. The percentages lead towards #2 or #3 far more than #1, we would call #1 "Vegas Odds" at best.
it's about the amount of sensory information being displayed and the fact that it is moving. A pimple may show up in the 1080p source but not in the 720p source.
I'm fine with not seeing the pimple, really.
Seriously though, a pimple may not show up in one frame but as you said, the images are moving, which means in aggregate, the pimple WILL be shown and visible, and if it's so small that it's disappearing from some frames, then it's on a face so far back from the zero plane that I really don't give a rat's ass about one guy in a long shot having a pimple or not.
The rest of your description is likewise meaningless. At 12 feet from the TV on a 50" screen, you CAN NOT physically tell the difference. It is impossible, your eyes don't have the resolution to handle it, and telling yourself otherwise is like telling yourself you need some $10,000 ethernet cables for your home network too.
Given the size of my living room, a 720p 50" Sony I bought years ago is doing just fine. It doesn't need 1080p, because at the distance I'm sitting from it, the eye can't tell the difference anyways.
http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html
Your system is probably overpowered to run it.
The problem is, XBMC 11 is a backwards motion; it hogs CPU for unnecessary things, causing previously usable systems that were near the hardware minimums to no longer meet them. XBMC 10 was good because it actually made the system leaner and eliminated a lot of the "gameloop" style coding that was necessary to run on an original Xbox but just caused Windows or Linux systems to waste power when it was "running but idle."
Yes, you can trick someone into running a virus by asking them to run a program that they downloaded, but you can't automatically run a virus just by loading a picture file, or by loading a document. (Actually you can get a kernel mod that will let viruses do that and it is a required feature of most Linux virus scanners. So the people least protected on Linux are the ones running the virus scanner.)
Virus: "You need to install this kernel mod for the free puppy screensaver."
User: "Ok. I want my free puppy screensaver! Yay puppies!"
Does market share have anything to do with the fewer viruses for Linux? Yes, it does.
Does the fact that it is much harder for a virus to spread itself around also have something to do with the fewer viruses? Yes, it does.
These are intertwined. I have no doubt that there are exploits to get around the "feature" you mentioned earlier. Why do I have little doubt of this? Because there have been privilege-escalation bugs that existed for YEARS in the linux kernel before anyone got round to fixing them. And a lot of that has to do with the complacency of most of the linux community thinking that their OS is "secure" when that's a load of bullshit.
How about this: I can switch my motherboard and video card out
You are already far beyond the capabilities of most of the people you are trying to convince to switch.
I can even remaster onto a live-bootable USB drive and work on it on a completely different machine, long as it's i686 or x86_64.
You are already far beyond the capabilities of most of the people you are trying to convince to switch.
Everything I need is a few clicks away in synaptic or in apt-get from the command line
You have already LOST the people who you are trying to convince to switch.
A huge slew of apps are already bundled for free
Funny, that's what they say about their new HP or Dell too.
and if I want to start getting creative codewise...
You are already far beyond the capabilities of most of the people you are trying to convince to switch.
I get to be a free beta tester for software that will never ever be finished or have most of the bugs fixed, because fixing bugs isn't smexy as a community participant,
FTFY
As you can see, most of your arguments are MEANINGLESS to the types of people you need to convince in order to get them to adopt Linux.
It doesn't have THE FREAKIN' ANNOYING RIBBON BAR!!!
Funny, I don't find it annoying. I actually like having it, rather than umpteen dozen dropdown menus and confusion on what could and couldn't be made into a control bar of its own.
And to counter your argument, I'm still looking for the feature or features that Office has that Libre Office lacks.
Fine. But you are trying to get people to switch to your preferred software.. "It does everything your current software does" isn't enough of an argument. You have to argue for why yours is superior either in ease of use or by doing things theirs doesn't.
Libre Office has gotten almost feature-compatible with MS Office and that's great for you. Now if you want to get people to switch you should show them what it does better, what it does faster, what it does with more ease of use, or what it does that MS Office can't do at all.
Oh, and the reason I use the word "almost": the moment you get beyond a bare-minimum spreadsheet and into any heavy duty stuff (actually, fuck the heavy duty stuff, just use some color coded cells) Libre Office will barf trying to import that Excel document, and will barf even harder trying to export it to something the MS Office user on the other end of the email needs to be able to read. So, if you want to be compatible with the people you're trying to work with or do business with using spreadsheets, Libre Office isn't up to the challenge yet. That's just one good example for you, your turn. Try to reply without frothing at the mouth and screaming this time.
Plenty. Ever fought with a linux distro that continually reassigned three SATA hard drives randomly to /sda, /sdb, and /sdc in maddening fashion every time it was power cycled, breaking scripts all over the place? They don't (or at least didn't back then) make it easy to lock them down.
Who said I was an opponent advocate?
The question is why Linux isn't gaining marketshare. I'm giving an honest answer about how Linux fails to market itself to people.
GiMP -> Available on Windows. Also, Paint.Net is available for windows too.
Acrobat -- CutePDF Writer and a slew of other open alternatives. PDFEdit is also on Windows.
Alfresco Labs 3 - barf.
Call of Duty -> Hey, they actually want to play on their PC. You know, with keyboard and mouse, rather than with a gamepad. Guess what, you fail.
Mint -> Web service, usable just fine from Windows.
Turbotax vs Turbotax Online; sorry, but once you get past the 1040EZ, you want the real thing.
Support for printer: glad yours worked. Mine works too but I know many people for whom it'd be a deal breaker.
So far you have yet to offer a good reason to switch off of Windows. Seems every tool you point to, is either available on Windows, or in the case of Call of Duty 3, all you had to offer was derision, which makes you a culty lame-ass.
You mean Apple and Sony, don't you? Just say it, we all know that's who you mean.
#1 - OSX acquired a built-in base. They converted existing Mac (OS7, OS8, OS9) users, which depending on how you measured were somewhere between 6 and 8 percent of the market, over to OSX. This included the "Classic Mode" backwards compatibility environment for OS9->OSX conversion, and the Rosetta conversion interface when the PPC->x86 conversion happened. Apple running FreeBSD, unlike most Linux projects, understood that backwards compatibility is fucking important, at least for a long enough period that most users would upgrade/update the applications that otherwise would just break on an OS update.
#2 - They made their interface look goddamn pretty. This is something Microsoft's been struggling to achieve - though Win7 is actually damn good. This is also something Linux distributions have been fucking goddamn terrible at over the years. Admittedly, because Apple controls their own hardware spec, they have a leg up in that they charged a premium price for extremely high-res monitors (Cinema Display, etc) whereas most people experience Windows on much less high-resolution displays from manufacturers like Dell or HP where the "jaggies" can be a lot more noticeable.
#3 - Slick marketing campaigning around the "It Just Works" theme, combined with cross-marketing of other fad devices (iPod, iPhone, and the newest line of iFad tablets) to build a whole brand. Again, Linux has completely fucking failed to build itself as a true BRAND - most phone users with an Android phone don't even realize it's Linux-based, they think Google developed Android entirely on their own thanks to the Android marketing campaign.
Ten years ago, applications might have mattered.
They still do.
However, OpenOffice (or whatever it is called today) is IMHO superior to Microsoft Office.
That's fine for your opinion. Unfortunately, your opinion is solidly in the minority and you need to do more than just scream "IMHO THIS IS SUPERIOR" to get people to switch. WHY is it superior? WHAT makes it a better, more user-friendly program? WHAT can it do that MS Office can't?
Gimp and Inkscape are great drawing programs.
Great. I can run GIMP on Windows just fine. I can also use Paint.Net. Or any of a number of other programs. Including, if I care to shell out $50, Adobe Photoshop Elements.
Casual games tend to be cross-platform while hard-core games don't universally work on Windows anyway - this is what a game platform is for.
Actually, Windows is the platform to target for hardcore games, they don't target OSX.
The printer "just works" without any need for the user to fuss with drivers.
Until it doesn't, and then you're up shit creek without a paddle, likely to find some Linuxite telling you "STFU Noob, ur printerz not supprted, go buy a diffrent printer nstead."
The good tax programs are all web-based now.
Sure, until you get into filing anything more than the 1040EZ.
Sharepoint - seriously? - does anyone use that pile of crap?
You're not going to get people to switch to your alternative - wait, what was your alternative anyways? - just by calling their current solution a "pile of crap."
Most importantly, videos and music plays without a fuss.
Some of the time, other times not. Which is a lot like OSX and Windows come to think of it. Best experience I've had with video is running Windows with VLC 2.0.1 installed.
NFS networking actually works all the time, unlike tempermental CIFS.
Right until you try to interact with OSX or Windows boxes.
There are no virus worries.
Because so few people on the planet use Linux as their desktop that no sane virus writer would even bother. Get yourself any appreciable market share and watch that change in a nanosecond.
And Linux is so much simpler to use than Windows.
Bullshit.
Yes, but "under the hood" OSX is just FreeBSD with a fancy GUI attached.
You just demonstrated why almost nobody wants Linux: linux advocates are assholes like you who tell everyone not using Linux that they are "clueless." Or "too stupid to own a computer." Or some other sort of put-down.
The reality is that to get people to switch to Linux, most of the common arguments of the Linux crowd are fucking retarded themselves. Such as the first two:
#1 - " Free yourself from the Microsoft Tax!!! Build your own Machine!!! " - Most of the the buying public DOES NOT WANT to "build their own machine. They see the computer (inaccurately, but it's how they see it) as a fucking appliance. They think of computers as "I plug it in and it just runs and I get my stuff." This is why Apple's "it just works" campaign was so successful and Microsoft's ads tout "ease of use" as well.
#2 - " But Linux can do so much more... " - Actually, the problem is that out of the initial install it does so much less of what your average user wants it to do. Sure, there's plenty of "free software" out there, but someone a few comments above pointed out a list of software that Linux simply does not have a port for. The list of software not ported to Linux is pretty fucking long, and trying to get Wine/Cedega running and then run the software under that is just as much a pain in the ass. "Setting up Linux and getting comfy in it" takes a new user a hell of a long while. Which leads into my final point...
#3 - You don't understand the actual cost of switching. You say "hey we are giving away this thing and it's all FREE YAY." Fine and dandy. You dismiss the "total cost" idea as FUD. I dismiss your accusations of FUD as Fucking Retarded because I can quantify all the things involved in actually convincing someone to switch. Here is what you are convincing someone to do in order to switch:
1 - Learn how to interact with a new OS. And let's be honest here, most of the programmers in the Linux world are NOT professional GUI designers. Linux desktops, KDE/Gnome, are NOT nice on the eyes and they are not very happy to play around in. Here's one area I have to give Apple some props in: their OSX interface puts some damn pretty and friendly makeup on the pig that was the old FreeBSD interface.
2 - Learn how to interact with all the new programs they will have to use to "replace" the ones from their old Windows environment. This includes figuring out what the fuck they are called, in which of many disparate distribution groups or online package managers they're held with incredibly poorly written Engrish package descriptions, and then learning the interface for each of them because the last thing Linux programmers ever want to do is use a standard, consistent interface experience.
3 - Learn how to navigate an entirely new file structure. This is not trivial by any means. Windows and OSX both at least treat logical drives in a sane manner and clearly delineate what is housed where; /dev/sda1/sdb2/ and so on and so forth are a fucking travesty and confuse the ever-loving fuck out of new Linux users.
4 - Accept that a lot of old, favorite programs just don't exist and don't have substitutes on Linux. Ouch.
5 - Find out what of their hardware is "supported but not really" under Linux. Such as a perfectly good, perfectly working HDTV tuner card that I had in a windows-based HTPC a few years back. Had a friend who's a linux-head insist I should switch it over to Mythbuntu because it "works so much better" and "supports everything" and "uses so much less resources." Whoops. No support for my HDTV tuner card, no support for my stock ATi graphics board in the unit. Now imagine that for the non-techie you are trying to convince to switch that it's their sound card that won't work, or their joystick, or their printer. They're not going to buy new hardware, they're going to say "fuck you" and go back to Windows or OSX.
None of this is a trivial issue or a non-cost. And that's the real "cost of switching" you have to overcome to convince people to switch to Linux.
The Michael Bay formula, explained.
Step 1: Take franchise with loyal following.
Step 2: Shit all over it.
Step 3: Add CGI explosions.
Bonus points if you make the camera work so fucking terrible (Transformers 2 is a great example of this) that NOBODY HAS ANY FUCKING CLUE WHAT IS GOING ON in anything resembling an action sequence.
Well, someone has to step up to the moron plate now that what's-his-nuts has been disbarred and Joe LIEberman is retiring...
Over 50% of the US House of Representatives are lawyers. Likewise for the Senate.
You* are full of shit.
*Your profession and collective members, as such.
To say nothing about marketing people and upper management.
Not only that - if the law isn't so fucking convoluted and obtuse and hidden away, how the hell are the lawyer vampire class ever going to justify being a drain on society by requiring you to consult a lawyer before doing anything?
Regulatory capture was invented by the lawyer class. That's why the first thing a sane society would do is outlaw lawyers.
Any one large ISP that *doesn't* engage in anti-customer actions is
sure to get a windfall of new signups.
Apparently you're new here. Over 90% of America has NO functional choice in ISPs. In the area I live in, we have Comcrap or AT&T and that's it. A few miles down the road it's Comcrap and Verizon FiOS, but no AT&T (their DSLAMs don't reach that far).
Go a few miles out of town, you're lucky to have any choice at all, you'll likely have whatever cableco bought monopoly rights from the city council 30 years ago and that'll be it.
There are some ISPs I've heard good things of. But they'll never serve my area, which is a problem.
Remember, "they're all guilty of something" is the standard credo of cops and prosecutors. You can be guilty of something and not even know it thanks to the fucked up state of law in the USA.
The goal of a program like this is to DNA-code the entire populace, which is ridiculous.