How about they just leave a pile of instruments by the front door and you just go and play the stuff yourself for yourself?
If you need to "pick and mix" all of your tracks then, I'm sorry, but you're not listening to good music. Get used to it.
Go research your music better, you *WILL* find music albums in any genre that are *FILLED* with good songs, not just the one or two chart toppers you want for your compilation CDs.
Finding good music is sometimes *HARD* work but it's more than paid off by the great *THRILL* of finding an absolutely fantastic album.
I bet that you and all the other people that make this argument (and there seems to be a lot) really just don't want to pay anything for music at all.
Ahem! I have a personal CD collection of over 800 CDs, every one original, and I *don't* want downloadable music. I'm more than happy hunting out good CDs at the best prices, getting a shiny disk, a set of sleeve notes and a plastic case. I *love* my music, it's a *fantastic* value product for me because I research and preview every CD before I buy it - therefore, I own the *best* music and the price of a CD is well worth the product quality.
I'm more than happy to rip my own CDs to play on my unbranded MP3 player or on my laptop while I work but that's *my* decision - I'll rip at the quality *I* want and I'm certainly not paying anyone else to do it for me.
So please *do not* equate a dislike of "pay per download" music with piracy - in the 30+ years I have been buying music as an enthusiastic music listener, I have probably put more money the record companies and artists way than most people.
but anything that gets someone in "creation mode" rather than "consumption mode" is a good thing
Excuse me, but I spend around 40 hours a week being "creative" at work - plus a bit more additionally either writing a shell-script, buying and arranging new plants in the garden or working out a strategy to defeat a game I'm currently playing.
So I don't need to do anything other than "consume" music and movies - bearing in mind also that I'm actually *VERY* picky about the music I listen to so every CD in my collection is a superb piece of music (in my opinion) anyhow so there's absolutely no need to change it.
At some point, all of those people you consider more knowledgeable about their respective arts started by knowing nothing about it.
Agreed - but only a minority of those who start out end up being successful. And, quite frankly, an artist that just plagiarises somebody else's work, rather than coming up with something original:
a) Doesn't deserve to be called an "artist" in the first place, and
b) Doesn't deserve success.
As a fan of artists like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Beatles, I feel *exactly* the same way about tribute bands that go round copying these (and other) artists. If they're good enough to play their music correctly *note for note* then they're good enough to come up with something new and original.
You're not alone - I don't get this "everything needs to be interactive" shit either.
What's wrong with just coming in from a hard day's work, opening a bottle of beer and chilling out to a good piece of music or a movie, rather than wanting to "change it" or "fiddle with it"?
My view is that musicians, movie producers & actors probably know more about their respective arts than I do so they can just get on with it and I'll throw some money at them when they turn out something worse listening to or watching.
Life's too short and I've too many other interests to worry about customising everything to the way I think it should be.
...after one of the relations bought a new laptop with Vista on it and asked me to help her set up wireless.
Okay, so I'm an experienced computer user who already finds the default XP GUI tiresome, bloated and patronising and therefore always puts on the "classic" Windows view - but I found Vista was even worse. Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty and once I found the applications that I was looking for, no different to configuring XP (at least as much as I could see).
However, whilst we got the wireless working fairly easily, there were too big unforeseen problems that my relation suffered:
1. She has a legitimate 3 PC student licence for Office 2003 and has used only one of those licenses on the family desktop PC so far. Vista would not accept the license key for Office 2003 no matter what I tried and in the end I had to tell her to call Microsoft to get them to sort it out.
2. There are no drivers for her Lexmark printer and Lexmark have no plans to release any.
So, overall, I cannot say I was particularly impressed with Vista - it's got some quite nice eye-candy but not a lot else going for it.
With all respect, the USA is not the rest of the world.
I also travel a lot, mainly European airports, and the last time I saw anyone using a Mac was on a training course in Germany where the tutor was from the US and had a laptop. Still, if I discount my own Linux laptop, that's one more Mac laptop than I've seen Linux ones so I'll give you that one.
But please don't over-estimate Mac penetration, especially here in Europe - they are few and far between over here.
If you really want Vista to truly fail, then as a computer geek (and let's face it, if you read this on Slashdot then you *are* a geek), do your utmost to go and educate all the Joe Averages in the world.
No, don't try to convert them to Linux (unless they ask you to) but go help them when their computers fail. When you hear a friend or a relative suggest that they're going to buy a new PC because their old one is getting slow, go and help them out. Tell them it probably just needs a reinstall, maybe a bit more memory, a bigger hard disk... But *STOP* them buying new computers just for the sake of it.
And when you've helped them out, help them to install Firefox and Thunderbird, install OpenOffice for them and set it up.
People need to be educated properly about what it is to own a PC and what they need to do on a regular basis to keep it running relatively fast. We need to take control of our PCs - not buy every Microsoft upgrade, remove the Norton and McAfee Nagware crap that comes installed on every new PC.
Here, here... but please don't discount Brits in the 35-45 range either! (And I only just fall in that range now.)
Endless fun games - apart from Jetpac and Jet Set Willy, honourable mentions should go to Highway Encounter, Alien Highway, TLL (Tornado Low Level), Cyclone, Wheelie, and all of the Level 9 adventure games.
And it was the first machine I learned to (machine code) in - endless fun hacking the wierd and wonderful audible headers that were on game loaders in order to work out where in the memory data blocks were being loaded to.
I went through the original 48K machine, the Spectrum + and the Spectrum +2. I also remmber owning an Opus Discovery disk drive that store about 90K on a 3.5" floppy.
And who remembers typing in program listings from magazines? And one in particular that was about 3 pages to type in, took about 2 hours to input, and just printed "April Fool" to the screen!:-)
I don't consider myself a total gaming geek but I do play a few games without wanting to spend too much money on hardware upgrades.
About a month ago, I replaced the aging nVidia 6800 card in my aging 3.5 GHz desktop PC with an ATI X1950 graphics card that I picked up for about £120 ($200 approximately). I then put on Far Cry, a game from 2004-odd, was able to turn up all the graphics options to full on a 1280x1024 LCD monitor and ended up playing a game that, in my middle-aged view, was giving me almost photo-realistic graphics - and all this within DirectX 9.
I appreciate that people might want to play on big screens and wide screens these days, meaning that they possibly want 1600x1200 (or whatever) displays, but I'm finding it difficult to understand what DirectX 10, and therefore Vista, can possibly bring to the "gaming table" anyway.
Yes, I accept that some people quite like the idea of accelerated 3D desktops (I personally cannot think why) but the fact is that a lot of people use XP (myself included) purely because of it's ability to run games. And if games graphics are already *THAT* good, what more do gamers actually want that isn't currently being done by a reasonable graphics card, a recent game and DirectX 9?
I'd love someone to explain it to me because I really don't see what the great "hooha" is about DirectX 10.
I'm not so sure that new PC games are that big a thing any more - if I go into my local game store these days, there really aren't that many new game releases and the budget game sections for PCs seem to have grown much larger.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that PC gaming is dying, far from it - I just think a lot more people are playing online games like World Of Warcraft and there are a huge number of freely available mods for games that just extend the lives of the games that they have bought.
I also don't think that since about late 2003 and early 2004, there really hasn't been that great an improvement in PC game graphics - get a half-decent video card and you have almost perfect photorealism. Are people *really* clamouring for even better graphics?
I personally believe that games will not sell Vista. If you look at the price of buying a Vista upgrade, you can almost buy a games console like a low-end X-Box or a Wii for the same money. And if you're looking to buy a new PC with Vista OEM on it and you're a gamer, then surely a console *MUST* look more attractive for the money.
...so we can forget about all this nonsense of a bunch of American sounding people flying around in silver grey starships called the "USS Enterprise" owned by "The Federation".
Our British Starships will all be called the "HMS Ark Royal" (Her Majesty's Starship) and we won't need any of this complicated "NCC-1701" rubbish - just a nice big Union Jack on her bows.
Our starships will be crewed by stout and hearty jolly Jack Tars who wear red jackets for the only reason that we are British.
And when we first encounter the Vulcans, we shall of course be most polite to them, not stare at their pointy ears and invite them in for tea, scones and a game of table tennis.
As a fan of "The Simpsons" who buys the series boxed sets when they're released, I emailed Fox about the logic of putting their "Piracy Is A Crime" video at the front of every DVD (a video which is impossible to skip through) when the first thing any pirate will do is remove that same video on any copied disks.
I also told Fox that I considered it fair use to rip those DVDs to AVI format to store and watch on my media PC and that the anti-piracy video was contrary to what I bought that product for - namely the ability to use the "Digital Versatile Disk" format as and when I chose to watch Simpsons episodes, without having that blasted video popping up every time.
That was over a year ago and despite two follow-up emails, I have never even got any acknowledgements from them, let alone a reply.
Whilst I agree with your sentiment (and I myself do not buy anything by Sony), most people just want "something that works" and don't care about DRM as long as they can see their hi-res movies and play their protected CDs on their hifi.
It's not a case of "forgive and forget" - far too many people are too damned lazy to keep themselves well informed which is precisely what the DRM-supporting corporations are banking on to get DRM in quietly through the back door.
If someone uses encryption, then obviously they are trying to hide somthing illegal or unlawful.
As someone who works in telecomms security, I find your statement above laughable.
Whilst I agree a lot of people are worried about security to point of paranoia, encryption is usually implemented to *stop* those with criminal intent from getting information you don't want them to see.
About 18 months ago, I worked with a major financial organisation in tracking down someone who was using "man in the middle" attacks to try to intrude on some of their VoIP calls. Fortunately, the calls were themselves encrypted and, as such, the attack failed (although it was causing a one-way speech problem which is what highlighted the issue in the first place). I dread to think what that person could have done had he/shs been able to intrude on calls.
Perhaps for all the reasons you just mentioned: You don't have to spend hours getting the window manager to work right. It doesn't want to run in only 1024x768@60hz. You don't need to manually edit an xorg.conf, or have the experience required to do so. You can watch movies on it very easily. Configuring the shell isn't a pain. There is plenty of choice in hardware.
From the outset, I'm not going to in any way deny that Linux isn't ready for the "Joe Bloke" user and my personal feeling is that it never will be - unless "Joe Bloke" is prepared to put some work into learning how to configure text files and read man pages. If he's not prepared to do that then he shouldn't touch Linux.
However, with that said, none of the reasons you've given are "showstoppers".
Configuring xorg.conf can be a pain the first time around but there are plenty of people offering help with doing it on the Web. And once you've got Xorg working correctly, just make sure you keep a copy of the working xorg.conf to go back to if subsequent changes you make stop it working - that's just common sense.
As for desktop functionality, there's no problem with it. Aside from the small range of native commercial games on Linux, OpenOffice works pretty much "out of the box" and gives a very good compatibility with MS Office documents if, like most people, you're just writing a few letters, creating a few simple presentations and a simple spreadsheet for finances and the like.
For movie players, xine and mplayer again work easily, provided, like in Windows, you have the right codecs installed.
Configuring the shell? Yep, you've got to change a few text files sometimes but this is far outweighed by the power the shell gives you once you start creating pipelines and simple scripts.
I should also say that I use Windows XP and I do quite like it (though not in preference to Linux). But with that said, I have to spend a long time configuring XP to get it to work the way I want it to - the default GUI is the most appalling piece of bloatware I have ever had the displeasure of using, much better is the classic Windows 2000 interface. Additionally, all the redundant CPU-consuming features like menu fading all need to be turned off and then, when you've installed the applications you like, you have to spend time configuring filetypes to make sure that the app you want to use opens the file. (And this is something you continually have to watch as you install new apps.)
Then there are tools like registry cleaners, spyware and virus apps, all of which need to be run and updated regularly and none of which are needed on Linux.
Put this all together with the fact that I use Gentoo Linux, which takes a long time to initially set up and tweak, but once it's done, it's just a case of using an "emerge" command to automatically install what software you want, I would say that overall I spend more time keeping Windows clean and working than I do Linux.
PCs and operating systems are *ALWAYS* about having to spend some time getting the best out of them. If you're "Joe Bloke" who just wants to surf the web, play a few games and download a few pictures, then you can buy yourself a pre-installed Windows PC that will do all of that the moment that you power it on - but unless you're prepared to spend some time administering Windows, then in a year's time you'd better be prepared to reinstall Windows or, if you're ultra-lazy, just buy a new PC.
This whole argument is "horses for courses" and entirely subjective. I know many people who use Windows XP and are happy with it enough to never want to consider trying Linux - and good luck to them.
But if you're really into running a PC "your way", then nothing beats the power and configurability of a Linux system - if nothing else, you've countless desktop environments to choose from and, once a few dependencies have been sorted out, you can run just about any application in any shell or GUI that you like.
But I'm just a simple "Joe Bloke" with no real interest in corporate practices as long as what corporations do doesn't adversely affect me.
I want the freedom to run what applications and operating systems I choose to run - I'm happy to pay anyone (including Microsoft) for good quality, useful and value for money products but I don't want to be forced into using products from a specific vendor.
As a computer geek in both my work and hobbies, the biggest fact stopping me from fully choosing what software I can use are proprietary file formats that try to lock me in to specific software packages. Since MS file formats are the most popular (specifically those used in MS Office) then their business practices make what I want to do that much more difficult - whereas what Google does makes what I want to do easier.
So from my limited view of the world, I have little sympathy for MS anyway - they don't do much for me so why should I care about them?
From the point of we normal mortal users, if Google gets hold of DoubleClick then (as we've seen historically with them) they'll keep to low key advertising that isn't in your face - unlike Microsoft who will no doubt use any means to ram Vista down our throats with Flash-based adverts.
I do agree that Google isn't necessarily the "sweet-faced cherub" in all of this, but from my own personal perspective as a general computer geek who uses non-Microsoft products (Linux and Open Source) more than Microsoft ones, so far Google have given me free of charge a good search engine with minimal advertising, an email system with almost 3 GB of storage space that (unlike Hotmail) is pretty good at catching spam and doesn't keep emailing me with useless adverts, the very useful Google Earth tool and "Docs and Spreadsheets" which I have found very useful for collaboration and for converting Word docs (albeit simple ones) to PDF. Plus I've not even looked at all the other Google services that I could subscribe to.
I do accept that MS does give quite a bit away to VB/DotNET/Whatever developers but for me, as an occasional coder in Perl, Python, shell scripts and a little C, there's nothing of any use to me that MS gives away.
So from my own selfish viewpoint, I'd rather Google was left to get on with it and MS kept their hypocritical noses out of it - and if Google does ever start pulling their monopolistic weight, I'll worry about it then.
Congratulations on your BA in "Being a loud mouthed pillock".
Perhaps if you gave your brain the opportunity to engage, you'd realise that maybe there are people out here who just simply ***ENJOY GAMING*** rather than caring about making fashion statements.
My friend, I'm 45 years of age and I was probably playing computer games when you were just a twinkle in your dad's eye. At the moment I'm working my way through "Halo" on the PC, last night I had a semi-drunken evening with a few good buddies playing "Super Monkey Ball" on the Gamecube and having a "Speedball 2" league with them on a PC emulating a Commodore Amiga.
If you're short-sighted enough to only care about modern games, then that's your problem - just leave the rest of us to our fun.
And as for the "Donkey Kong" thing? Yep, a complete waste of paper but it's a few people having a bit of fun and not just sitting there moaning at what everyone else is doing...
I'm not in the same league with the guys that collect the old Crays and DEC PDP11s but I went through a phase about 4 years ago of collecting both Sinclair ZX Spectrums and Commodore Amigas from eBay, both machines that I owned during my younger years - I even got given an Acorn Archimedes and a RISC PC by people who heard I was into old computers.
For a while it's great fun sorting through boxes of Spectrum tape software and Amiga disks and reliving some good gaming memories - but when you get to 25 "TAPE LOADING ERRORS" in a day, in can get a bit wearing.
Suffice it to say, about 2 years later I sold it all back on eBay for about the same money I paid for it. I still love the old games on those machines, as well as the C64, but these days it's far easier to play them in a PC emulator.
I admire the guys who collect as a hobby but I couldn't find enough hours in the day to do it.
Admittedly, I am in the UK but I'm told that our own Inland Revenue tax people have already started looking at eBay sellers also.
But I don't see how this affects most of us anyway. I've personally done a lot of selling on eBay - no trading, just emptying a lot full of years of accumulated junk. All the stuff I sold was stuff I bought over the years and therefore paid tax and VAT ("Sales tax" in US speak) on the items already so I'm not sure I needed to pay any additional tax.
And as for those who trade on eBay, then join the club with the rest of us. None of us like paying taxes, do what we can to minimize our tax bills but have to pay them - so why should you be an exception if you trade on eBay?
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If you need to "pick and mix" all of your tracks then, I'm sorry, but you're not listening to good music. Get used to it.
Go research your music better, you *WILL* find music albums in any genre that are *FILLED* with good songs, not just the one or two chart toppers you want for your compilation CDs.
Finding good music is sometimes *HARD* work but it's more than paid off by the great *THRILL* of finding an absolutely fantastic album.
Ahem! I have a personal CD collection of over 800 CDs, every one original, and I *don't* want downloadable music. I'm more than happy hunting out good CDs at the best prices, getting a shiny disk, a set of sleeve notes and a plastic case. I *love* my music, it's a *fantastic* value product for me because I research and preview every CD before I buy it - therefore, I own the *best* music and the price of a CD is well worth the product quality.
I'm more than happy to rip my own CDs to play on my unbranded MP3 player or on my laptop while I work but that's *my* decision - I'll rip at the quality *I* want and I'm certainly not paying anyone else to do it for me.
So please *do not* equate a dislike of "pay per download" music with piracy - in the 30+ years I have been buying music as an enthusiastic music listener, I have probably put more money the record companies and artists way than most people.
Excuse me, but I spend around 40 hours a week being "creative" at work - plus a bit more additionally either writing a shell-script, buying and arranging new plants in the garden or working out a strategy to defeat a game I'm currently playing.
So I don't need to do anything other than "consume" music and movies - bearing in mind also that I'm actually *VERY* picky about the music I listen to so every CD in my collection is a superb piece of music (in my opinion) anyhow so there's absolutely no need to change it.
At some point, all of those people you consider more knowledgeable about their respective arts started by knowing nothing about it.
Agreed - but only a minority of those who start out end up being successful. And, quite frankly, an artist that just plagiarises somebody else's work, rather than coming up with something original:
a) Doesn't deserve to be called an "artist" in the first place, and
b) Doesn't deserve success.
As a fan of artists like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Beatles, I feel *exactly* the same way about tribute bands that go round copying these (and other) artists. If they're good enough to play their music correctly *note for note* then they're good enough to come up with something new and original.
What's wrong with just coming in from a hard day's work, opening a bottle of beer and chilling out to a good piece of music or a movie, rather than wanting to "change it" or "fiddle with it"?
My view is that musicians, movie producers & actors probably know more about their respective arts than I do so they can just get on with it and I'll throw some money at them when they turn out something worse listening to or watching.
Life's too short and I've too many other interests to worry about customising everything to the way I think it should be.
I thought that was "W.A.S.P." - "F*ck Like A Beast" or something like that?
Okay, so I'm an experienced computer user who already finds the default XP GUI tiresome, bloated and patronising and therefore always puts on the "classic" Windows view - but I found Vista was even worse. Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty and once I found the applications that I was looking for, no different to configuring XP (at least as much as I could see).
However, whilst we got the wireless working fairly easily, there were too big unforeseen problems that my relation suffered:
1. She has a legitimate 3 PC student licence for Office 2003 and has used only one of those licenses on the family desktop PC so far. Vista would not accept the license key for Office 2003 no matter what I tried and in the end I had to tell her to call Microsoft to get them to sort it out.
2. There are no drivers for her Lexmark printer and Lexmark have no plans to release any.
So, overall, I cannot say I was particularly impressed with Vista - it's got some quite nice eye-candy but not a lot else going for it.
I also travel a lot, mainly European airports, and the last time I saw anyone using a Mac was on a training course in Germany where the tutor was from the US and had a laptop. Still, if I discount my own Linux laptop, that's one more Mac laptop than I've seen Linux ones so I'll give you that one.
But please don't over-estimate Mac penetration, especially here in Europe - they are few and far between over here.
No, don't try to convert them to Linux (unless they ask you to) but go help them when their computers fail. When you hear a friend or a relative suggest that they're going to buy a new PC because their old one is getting slow, go and help them out. Tell them it probably just needs a reinstall, maybe a bit more memory, a bigger hard disk... But *STOP* them buying new computers just for the sake of it.
And when you've helped them out, help them to install Firefox and Thunderbird, install OpenOffice for them and set it up.
People need to be educated properly about what it is to own a PC and what they need to do on a regular basis to keep it running relatively fast. We need to take control of our PCs - not buy every Microsoft upgrade, remove the Norton and McAfee Nagware crap that comes installed on every new PC.
That's the *PROPER* way to make Vista fail...
Endless fun games - apart from Jetpac and Jet Set Willy, honourable mentions should go to Highway Encounter, Alien Highway, TLL (Tornado Low Level), Cyclone, Wheelie, and all of the Level 9 adventure games.
And it was the first machine I learned to (machine code) in - endless fun hacking the wierd and wonderful audible headers that were on game loaders in order to work out where in the memory data blocks were being loaded to.
I went through the original 48K machine, the Spectrum + and the Spectrum +2. I also remmber owning an Opus Discovery disk drive that store about 90K on a 3.5" floppy.
And who remembers typing in program listings from magazines? And one in particular that was about 3 pages to type in, took about 2 hours to input, and just printed "April Fool" to the screen! :-)
About a month ago, I replaced the aging nVidia 6800 card in my aging 3.5 GHz desktop PC with an ATI X1950 graphics card that I picked up for about £120 ($200 approximately). I then put on Far Cry, a game from 2004-odd, was able to turn up all the graphics options to full on a 1280x1024 LCD monitor and ended up playing a game that, in my middle-aged view, was giving me almost photo-realistic graphics - and all this within DirectX 9.
I appreciate that people might want to play on big screens and wide screens these days, meaning that they possibly want 1600x1200 (or whatever) displays, but I'm finding it difficult to understand what DirectX 10, and therefore Vista, can possibly bring to the "gaming table" anyway.
Yes, I accept that some people quite like the idea of accelerated 3D desktops (I personally cannot think why) but the fact is that a lot of people use XP (myself included) purely because of it's ability to run games. And if games graphics are already *THAT* good, what more do gamers actually want that isn't currently being done by a reasonable graphics card, a recent game and DirectX 9?
I'd love someone to explain it to me because I really don't see what the great "hooha" is about DirectX 10.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that PC gaming is dying, far from it - I just think a lot more people are playing online games like World Of Warcraft and there are a huge number of freely available mods for games that just extend the lives of the games that they have bought.
I also don't think that since about late 2003 and early 2004, there really hasn't been that great an improvement in PC game graphics - get a half-decent video card and you have almost perfect photorealism. Are people *really* clamouring for even better graphics?
I personally believe that games will not sell Vista. If you look at the price of buying a Vista upgrade, you can almost buy a games console like a low-end X-Box or a Wii for the same money. And if you're looking to buy a new PC with Vista OEM on it and you're a gamer, then surely a console *MUST* look more attractive for the money.
Our British Starships will all be called the "HMS Ark Royal" (Her Majesty's Starship) and we won't need any of this complicated "NCC-1701" rubbish - just a nice big Union Jack on her bows.
Our starships will be crewed by stout and hearty jolly Jack Tars who wear red jackets for the only reason that we are British.
And when we first encounter the Vulcans, we shall of course be most polite to them, not stare at their pointy ears and invite them in for tea, scones and a game of table tennis.
Profit!!!
As a fan of "The Simpsons" who buys the series boxed sets when they're released, I emailed Fox about the logic of putting their "Piracy Is A Crime" video at the front of every DVD (a video which is impossible to skip through) when the first thing any pirate will do is remove that same video on any copied disks.
I also told Fox that I considered it fair use to rip those DVDs to AVI format to store and watch on my media PC and that the anti-piracy video was contrary to what I bought that product for - namely the ability to use the "Digital Versatile Disk" format as and when I chose to watch Simpsons episodes, without having that blasted video popping up every time.
That was over a year ago and despite two follow-up emails, I have never even got any acknowledgements from them, let alone a reply.
It's not a case of "forgive and forget" - far too many people are too damned lazy to keep themselves well informed which is precisely what the DRM-supporting corporations are banking on to get DRM in quietly through the back door.
As someone who works in telecomms security, I find your statement above laughable.
Whilst I agree a lot of people are worried about security to point of paranoia, encryption is usually implemented to *stop* those with criminal intent from getting information you don't want them to see.
About 18 months ago, I worked with a major financial organisation in tracking down someone who was using "man in the middle" attacks to try to intrude on some of their VoIP calls. Fortunately, the calls were themselves encrypted and, as such, the attack failed (although it was causing a one-way speech problem which is what highlighted the issue in the first place). I dread to think what that person could have done had he/shs been able to intrude on calls.
From the outset, I'm not going to in any way deny that Linux isn't ready for the "Joe Bloke" user and my personal feeling is that it never will be - unless "Joe Bloke" is prepared to put some work into learning how to configure text files and read man pages. If he's not prepared to do that then he shouldn't touch Linux.
However, with that said, none of the reasons you've given are "showstoppers".
Configuring xorg.conf can be a pain the first time around but there are plenty of people offering help with doing it on the Web. And once you've got Xorg working correctly, just make sure you keep a copy of the working xorg.conf to go back to if subsequent changes you make stop it working - that's just common sense.
As for desktop functionality, there's no problem with it. Aside from the small range of native commercial games on Linux, OpenOffice works pretty much "out of the box" and gives a very good compatibility with MS Office documents if, like most people, you're just writing a few letters, creating a few simple presentations and a simple spreadsheet for finances and the like.
For movie players, xine and mplayer again work easily, provided, like in Windows, you have the right codecs installed.
Configuring the shell? Yep, you've got to change a few text files sometimes but this is far outweighed by the power the shell gives you once you start creating pipelines and simple scripts.
I should also say that I use Windows XP and I do quite like it (though not in preference to Linux). But with that said, I have to spend a long time configuring XP to get it to work the way I want it to - the default GUI is the most appalling piece of bloatware I have ever had the displeasure of using, much better is the classic Windows 2000 interface. Additionally, all the redundant CPU-consuming features like menu fading all need to be turned off and then, when you've installed the applications you like, you have to spend time configuring filetypes to make sure that the app you want to use opens the file. (And this is something you continually have to watch as you install new apps.)
Then there are tools like registry cleaners, spyware and virus apps, all of which need to be run and updated regularly and none of which are needed on Linux.
Put this all together with the fact that I use Gentoo Linux, which takes a long time to initially set up and tweak, but once it's done, it's just a case of using an "emerge" command to automatically install what software you want, I would say that overall I spend more time keeping Windows clean and working than I do Linux.
PCs and operating systems are *ALWAYS* about having to spend some time getting the best out of them. If you're "Joe Bloke" who just wants to surf the web, play a few games and download a few pictures, then you can buy yourself a pre-installed Windows PC that will do all of that the moment that you power it on - but unless you're prepared to spend some time administering Windows, then in a year's time you'd better be prepared to reinstall Windows or, if you're ultra-lazy, just buy a new PC.
This whole argument is "horses for courses" and entirely subjective. I know many people who use Windows XP and are happy with it enough to never want to consider trying Linux - and good luck to them.
But if you're really into running a PC "your way", then nothing beats the power and configurability of a Linux system - if nothing else, you've countless desktop environments to choose from and, once a few dependencies have been sorted out, you can run just about any application in any shell or GUI that you like.
I want the freedom to run what applications and operating systems I choose to run - I'm happy to pay anyone (including Microsoft) for good quality, useful and value for money products but I don't want to be forced into using products from a specific vendor.
As a computer geek in both my work and hobbies, the biggest fact stopping me from fully choosing what software I can use are proprietary file formats that try to lock me in to specific software packages. Since MS file formats are the most popular (specifically those used in MS Office) then their business practices make what I want to do that much more difficult - whereas what Google does makes what I want to do easier.
So from my limited view of the world, I have little sympathy for MS anyway - they don't do much for me so why should I care about them?
I do agree that Google isn't necessarily the "sweet-faced cherub" in all of this, but from my own personal perspective as a general computer geek who uses non-Microsoft products (Linux and Open Source) more than Microsoft ones, so far Google have given me free of charge a good search engine with minimal advertising, an email system with almost 3 GB of storage space that (unlike Hotmail) is pretty good at catching spam and doesn't keep emailing me with useless adverts, the very useful Google Earth tool and "Docs and Spreadsheets" which I have found very useful for collaboration and for converting Word docs (albeit simple ones) to PDF. Plus I've not even looked at all the other Google services that I could subscribe to.
I do accept that MS does give quite a bit away to VB/DotNET/Whatever developers but for me, as an occasional coder in Perl, Python, shell scripts and a little C, there's nothing of any use to me that MS gives away.
So from my own selfish viewpoint, I'd rather Google was left to get on with it and MS kept their hypocritical noses out of it - and if Google does ever start pulling their monopolistic weight, I'll worry about it then.
Perhaps if you gave your brain the opportunity to engage, you'd realise that maybe there are people out here who just simply ***ENJOY GAMING*** rather than caring about making fashion statements.
My friend, I'm 45 years of age and I was probably playing computer games when you were just a twinkle in your dad's eye. At the moment I'm working my way through "Halo" on the PC, last night I had a semi-drunken evening with a few good buddies playing "Super Monkey Ball" on the Gamecube and having a "Speedball 2" league with them on a PC emulating a Commodore Amiga.
If you're short-sighted enough to only care about modern games, then that's your problem - just leave the rest of us to our fun.
And as for the "Donkey Kong" thing? Yep, a complete waste of paper but it's a few people having a bit of fun and not just sitting there moaning at what everyone else is doing...
For a while it's great fun sorting through boxes of Spectrum tape software and Amiga disks and reliving some good gaming memories - but when you get to 25 "TAPE LOADING ERRORS" in a day, in can get a bit wearing.
Suffice it to say, about 2 years later I sold it all back on eBay for about the same money I paid for it. I still love the old games on those machines, as well as the C64, but these days it's far easier to play them in a PC emulator.
I admire the guys who collect as a hobby but I couldn't find enough hours in the day to do it.
But I don't see how this affects most of us anyway. I've personally done a lot of selling on eBay - no trading, just emptying a lot full of years of accumulated junk. All the stuff I sold was stuff I bought over the years and therefore paid tax and VAT ("Sales tax" in US speak) on the items already so I'm not sure I needed to pay any additional tax.
And as for those who trade on eBay, then join the club with the rest of us. None of us like paying taxes, do what we can to minimize our tax bills but have to pay them - so why should you be an exception if you trade on eBay?
Up until Samsung's announcement, I was planning to NOT buy two players - a HD-DVD one and a BluRay one.
Please don't forget - these Apple people are simple folk with oversized designer coffee tables...