...to patent my new design for the "Feline Cellphone Backpack"!
Imagine this is your boss's office as he tracks you on his computer screen:
"Okay, so he's just gone out through his kitchen door... he's climbing the fence into his neighbour's garden... now he's squatting down in their rose bed???"
I don't think I've ever really understood what happened to strategy gaming on the PC around about the turn of the new Millennium.
I was (and still am) a huge fan and player of Heroes Of Might & Magic (I, II, and III), Master Of Orion (2), Total Annihilation and Civilization (I, II, Call To Power and Test Of Time) - likewise I've played and enjoyed PC FPS games from original Doom & Duke Nukem 3D through to STALKER, Half-Life 2 and Fallout 3 today.
Clearly, the FPS genre exists *BECAUSE* of good 3D graphics but who decided that they were needed for strategy games? Fortunately I totally avoided Master Of Orion III but at various points when they were cheap enough to justify rebuying some games I already had, I bought boxed compilations of all the HoMM and Civilization series, the C&C "10 Years" box set (that has everything up to C&C Generals) and Supreme Commander. In each and every case, the introduction of 3D in those games series has felt, to me, like a "dumbing down" of the games...
Firstly, let's look at HoMM and Civilization. These are both traditionally turn-based games where essentially you need to find and control resources at an "empire" level, as well as defeat enemy armies. They are not solely about combat, they are about using your armies to their best advantage - so what in hell does the game gain from a playability perspective by being able to zoom in to see each individual unit in the middle of a fight, i.e. Civilization III/IV and HoMM IV/V?
Secondly, Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander and C&C/Red Alert. There are RTS games but solely focused on small unit skirmishes and resource management, where development speed is core to winning each game... in which case, why in hell do I want (or even need) to mess around with zooming in and twiddling camera views? Just give me a single isometric view with sprite graphics...
These days, as half-Linux half-Windows user, I tend to play Freeciv quite a lot and IMHO it feels more of a logical progression from the original Civ I/II games.
I just wish that if games companies have finished with sprite-based RTS games, then they'd hand out the source code of the games on the Internet to let some good programmers loose on them. The great thing about the pre-3D games is they've low resource requirements and power consumption so great for laptops, netbooks & long flights.
Incidentally, there are a couple of exceptions to the rule - Stardock's Galactic Civilizations II and Sins Of A Solar Empire are fantastic strategy games with built-in 3D but presumably were designed from the ground up with 3D in mind......but otherwise 3D graphics have killed any idea of buying any new strategy games.
Like me, he could be playing commercial (Windows) games on Linux through WINE or Cedega; if it's the latter then he's paying for a Cedega license as well.
Sure, it'd be nice to have some games run natively on Linux but, apart from a bit of messing about (that you probably do anyway as a Linux user), most games that can be made to run do run as well as they do on Windows.
As a Brit working for an American company, all I can say is that all my boss cares about is that he has a pretty graph at the end of each week, month & quarter that shows me and his other guys are utilised as highly as possible and making money for the company.
He's a decent American bloke but constantly stressed out by the managers above him and I wouldn't do his job for all the tea in China (or coffee in Starbucks). Plus he doesn't have either the time or inclination to check up on me any more than he does currently (once a week at most).
If you do work for a company that has managers needing to do this level of granular "surveillance" of staff then it's time to get another job - because if they're going to those depths then they're probably going to get rid of you anyway....
I'm all for giving Microsoft a chance with Windows Mobile 7 (or whatever they're calling it) but as someone who has used phones & gadgets running Android, Symbian & Apple embedded OSes, as well as various incarnations of Windows Mobile on HTC and iPAQ devices, I just don't believe Windows is a suitable OS for embedded devices. The rest "just work", Windows devices need rebooting once a month or so, they sometimes slow to a crawl occasionally for no readily apparent reason & there always deployed far too bloated with no easy way of removing the trash you don't need.
On a slightly related topic, I've been a Linux and Windows guy for some years now and having just got hold of a HTC Hero phone (running Android), I've now finally been able to ditch MS ActiveSync and Outlook to the point where my desktop of choice can now be (Gentoo) Linux with the ability to run the same apps (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc.) equally well on Linux or XP - if Microsoft is serious about Windows Mobile then they have to stop tying users up to their own desktop OS and products just because they use a Windows-based mobile phone.
I'm with you on waiting for games to get cheaper before buying them - not to mention the fact that most games these days seem to be unplayable out of the box and you need to wait six months for a patch or two to appear.
As for MMOs, I'd never played one until two weeks ago after finally relenting to my close buddies and joining them in WoW. Bearing in mind that these are the very same buddies I socialise with and have (very enjoyable) board game evenings with, I'm distinctly underwhelmed with WoW.
I'm a huge fan of FPS/RPG games like Fallout & the STALKER series, and IMHO WoW comes nowhere near close to the enjoyment I get playing those games - or even just going online for an hour or two for Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2 or Unreal Tournament.
Firstly, there's the issue of being "forced" to play the game. I like to take my gaming chunks as and when I feel like it, not necessarily at a time when all my buddies want to meet up online together.
Secondly, I know there are restrictions in MMOs but the realism just isn't there for me. In WoW, you start levelling up by taking on missions to, say, kill someone or go explore a kobold mine.
Yet when you find the NPC you need to kill, you discover someone else is doing the same mission - so you wait for him/her to kill that NPC, whereupon the NPC dies and then stands up again for you to kill him...
Or you go explore a kobold mine, start fighting your way through it & killing off kobolds one by one, whereupon you get halfway into the mine and the ones you've killed stand up again so it's impossible to beat a hasty retreat to heal up and go in again...
And finally, the saddest thing about WoW is that despite it supposedly being a "social" game, I don't think I've ever felt so "alone" when playing it when my buddies aren't there. Sure, there's plenty of players about, stood in groups posing or running around... but despite my having joined a "role playing" server, nobody bothers to communicate with you (unless it's to hurl abuse) and when you try and speak with anyone new, you're just ignored if you're not already part of their little gaming group.
At least now I can have an opinion of WoW based on actual experiences but you're really not missing that much.
I'm a telecoms consultant billed at $300 per hour, my head is not so far up my backside that I cannot find time to continually hone my skills & play about with operating systems (whether Linux, Windows, whatever) and last but not least, someone who demands as much for their time as you do probably should learn to control your language and temperament a little better.
I'm not a great fan of eBay but the positive/negative feedback thing they use does help weed out untrustworthy sellers on there.
So why not extend this as a karma system into gaming? If I have had a really enjoyable half-hour Unreal Tournament fragfest on an online server, I certainly wouldn't mind putting a tick against other players names, or a cross against someone who I thought was cheating...
Take it a stage further and have game servers with minimum karma limits before you can get on them...
I don't play WoW, friends of mine do, and they moan about being pestered by annoying players - so, again, introduce a karma system and make certain areas of the game, or game items, unobtainable until you have a certain karma level...
I have never, ever, ever, understood the point of cheating unless there is something to be gained (like money) - whether it's a board game or an online game, the sheer *FUN* of using your wits to use the game rules to your advantage is what it's about, and winning is just the icing on the cake.
Yes, but you know as well as I do that games (and movie) companies aim to make most of their sales within a week or two of release dates, during a time when "cautious" people like you and me are holding back and waiting to read initial reviews, looking for cheapest prices, etc.
Unfortunately, this doesn't include the hordes of moronic parents who are prepared to queue up outside game stores at midnight on release day just to appease their screaming kids...
The problem I have with free DLC, despite it being a much better alternative to DRM, is that nothing stops the publisher from just holding back some original game content as DLC in the first place - meaning you just end up paying the same money for less of the original game until you get the DLC.
I'll give Valve some credit here - I purchased Half-Life 2 quite soon after it was released, then Valve released "The Orange Box" which had Portal, Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2 in it which I also bought. I was able to transfer my original Half-Life 2 license over to somebody else.
And can I also add that I have made the mistake of purchasing games like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, for example, which are ultimately great games to play but totally unplayable on the day of release and only become playable 3 or 4 patches later - hence another reason for holding off on buying games at full price.
This is precisely the reason why I have a problem with so many people on here...
There is *NO*, repeat, *NO* war being waged by Linux to defeat Microsoft. If there was, then it would have already won several battles when it comes to its penetration into server space and into embedded devices - but in the case of servers, it has done far more damage to displacing Sun Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and other "paid for" UNIX implementations.
So there is no *desire* for Linux to be accepted, it's there as an alternative and some people who write apps or GUIs for it do look at how things are done in Windows and emulate it in Linux, because they assume that anyone who *chooses* to try it and is from a Windows background will at least have some familiarity.
If anything, the fact that Linux is there and, in many cases, now a viable alternative to Windows, it has given Microsoft a "kick up the backside" to focus more on giving Windows users a better experience - I seriously doubt a Windows OS as reliable and as liked as XP would have existed without Microsoft fearing the uptake of Linux...
Incidentally, I object to being a called a zealot purely because I happen to utter words in support of Linux.
I do use both XP and Linux, and, for example, I have a handful of killer apps on Windows that I don't have on Linux - so there's a plus for XP to balance it out a bit, if that makes you happier.
As I'm both a Windows XP and Linux user (and I like them both for their own reasons), let me explain this to you in more detail.
Any Linux application I use holds it configuration in a text-based file somewhere on the system - either in my home directory, or globally under/etc somewhere. Whenever I want to change the configuration of an app, I can back up the old configuration just by making a copy of a text file.
So if I'm messing about with the configuration of, say, Xorg (the modern implementation of the X-Windows GUI) to get a particular graphics card feature to work, it's quite possible I break Xorg and have to go scanning through log files to find out why what I did broke it. But I can also just copy back in the original/etc/X11/xorg.conf file and it will work again...
If I'm messing about with some new kernel features, then I can end up putting in place a kernel that panics when I try to boot. But it's very easy to configure the GRUB bootloader to give you the option of booting from the last working kernel that you always keep a copy of, so if my new kernel borks then I can always boot back on the old kernel and try compiling a new one again.
Yes, this stuff is all complicated, even to a Linux veteran like me, but as long as you act responsibly, think about the ramifications about what you are doing, and make sure you have a backout plan, it's not really a problem.
Now explain to me how this would work in Windows? Don't get me wrong, XP is a bloody reliable OS (I can't comment on Vista or 7 because I've never used either) and uninstalling an application usually works to get you out of any mess you're in.
But what about if that app trashes the registry, what do you do then?
And why is it such a big deal whenever I try to backup my "Documents and Settings" directory in Windows, that it won't let me backup a lot of the files unless I boot into safe mode? Or how about I want to take my app settings from one XP machine to another? Presumably I have to use some convoluted backup program, whereas in Linux I can just use "cp" or "scp" over the network to send my home directory and all it's config contents somewhere else.
I'm sorry, but if something happens on an OS that the user cannot prepare a reasonable backup plan for, then it's a flaw in the OS. No, it doesn't happen often in XP but even as recently as last week, there were reports of some automatic updates trashing users' PCs...
Actually, your comment tells me that you've never used Linux - or at least not recently.
I have all manner of USB disks, webcams, drives, phones, etc. at home and use them all on dual-booting Gentoo Linux and Windows XP machines. The biggest problem I have had with USB recently (and strictly speaking it's not a USB issue) is how to get NTFS-formatted external USB disks to mount with proper permissions using the ntfs-3g user space driver.
The reason this problem came about in the first place was because Microsoft don't allow you to format any drive over 32GB with FAT32 in recent Windows versions (even though FAT32 partitions have a size limit of 2TB) and I needed to have USB disks readable/writeable by both OSes.
In the end I found fat32format which does allow me to use FAT32 on big external disks (even PartitionMagic sets an arbitrary 200GB FAT32 partition limit) and ditched NTFS completely.
I suggest you go ahead and try a modern Linux distro with built in daemons like hal and udev running on startup - because with a modular kernel these days, hardware detection is pretty much automatic....
...you make decisions about how you want to configure it, you put some work into researching how it should be configured correctly, and you face the consequences of what can go wrong if you mess it up.
If you need to be nursemaided in your computer use, stick with a Mac or Windows. If you're prepared to put some effort into learning how a computer works and how to search forums and asks questions of people who are more than willing to help you out free-of-charge, then try Linux.
You can click the link and install the compatibility pack. Then the docs open and look exactly as you'd expect.
Yep, exactly right. But to a newbie user what's more difficult? Locating and installing the Microsoft Compatibility Pack or just doing a "Save As" in a suitable format in OpenOffice.org?
Piracy is a means of protest - showing that the games are worth playing, but the DRM is totally unacceptable.
Right, in which case an excellent way of protesting would be to demonstrate you have enough money to buy the game in the first place but prefer to hand that money over to a charitable cause rather than using it to pay for the game.
Okay, so if it's not about getting something for free, how about every time you pirate a copy of a game you make a donation to a charitable cause? Then maybe honest folk will start seeing you as the "Robin Hood" characters you think you are.
Piracy and DRM both suck - and people like me with real backbones just don't by the stuff in the first place if it isn't worth the money and hassle.
The first time Joe Newbie tries to open a Shockwave web page, send an OpenOffice document to his buddy (who uses MS) that opens with crapped-up formatting, or tries to connect to an Exchange server (and no, OWA light is not a good alternative), he's going to have a bad taste in his mouth.
If the machine is being targeted at newbie users, then I take that to be retired old folks or home users - in which case it's highly unlikely they're going to be connecting to an Exchange server for email; more likely IMAP, POP or Webmail.
And why is the doc format issue any different to my receiving an Office 2007 format document when I only use Office 2003?
Slashdot Mirror
...to patent my new design for the "Feline Cellphone Backpack"!
Imagine this is your boss's office as he tracks you on his computer screen:
"Okay, so he's just gone out through his kitchen door... he's climbing the fence into his neighbour's garden... now he's squatting down in their rose bed???"
I don't think I've ever really understood what happened to strategy gaming on the PC around about the turn of the new Millennium.
I was (and still am) a huge fan and player of Heroes Of Might & Magic (I, II, and III), Master Of Orion (2), Total Annihilation and Civilization (I, II, Call To Power and Test Of Time) - likewise I've played and enjoyed PC FPS games from original Doom & Duke Nukem 3D through to STALKER, Half-Life 2 and Fallout 3 today.
Clearly, the FPS genre exists *BECAUSE* of good 3D graphics but who decided that they were needed for strategy games? Fortunately I totally avoided Master Of Orion III but at various points when they were cheap enough to justify rebuying some games I already had, I bought boxed compilations of all the HoMM and Civilization series, the C&C "10 Years" box set (that has everything up to C&C Generals) and Supreme Commander. In each and every case, the introduction of 3D in those games series has felt, to me, like a "dumbing down" of the games...
Firstly, let's look at HoMM and Civilization. These are both traditionally turn-based games where essentially you need to find and control resources at an "empire" level, as well as defeat enemy armies. They are not solely about combat, they are about using your armies to their best advantage - so what in hell does the game gain from a playability perspective by being able to zoom in to see each individual unit in the middle of a fight, i.e. Civilization III/IV and HoMM IV/V?
Secondly, Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander and C&C/Red Alert. There are RTS games but solely focused on small unit skirmishes and resource management, where development speed is core to winning each game... in which case, why in hell do I want (or even need) to mess around with zooming in and twiddling camera views? Just give me a single isometric view with sprite graphics...
These days, as half-Linux half-Windows user, I tend to play Freeciv quite a lot and IMHO it feels more of a logical progression from the original Civ I/II games.
I just wish that if games companies have finished with sprite-based RTS games, then they'd hand out the source code of the games on the Internet to let some good programmers loose on them. The great thing about the pre-3D games is they've low resource requirements and power consumption so great for laptops, netbooks & long flights.
Incidentally, there are a couple of exceptions to the rule - Stardock's Galactic Civilizations II and Sins Of A Solar Empire are fantastic strategy games with built-in 3D but presumably were designed from the ground up with 3D in mind... ...but otherwise 3D graphics have killed any idea of buying any new strategy games.
I heard the CPU is optimised for the Christmas 2010 release of Daikatana II for OS/2.
Damn, I'm really showing my age now...
Gearlog paying out good money for a fake CPU?
And what are the listing fees to put up a joke eBay sale starting at $288?
but I'd rather keep my data and the applications I need to manipulate it on my own machine, under my own control.
and then:
hyades1@hotmail.com>
Need I say any more?
Like me, he could be playing commercial (Windows) games on Linux through WINE or Cedega; if it's the latter then he's paying for a Cedega license as well.
Sure, it'd be nice to have some games run natively on Linux but, apart from a bit of messing about (that you probably do anyway as a Linux user), most games that can be made to run do run as well as they do on Windows.
As a Brit working for an American company, all I can say is that all my boss cares about is that he has a pretty graph at the end of each week, month & quarter that shows me and his other guys are utilised as highly as possible and making money for the company.
He's a decent American bloke but constantly stressed out by the managers above him and I wouldn't do his job for all the tea in China (or coffee in Starbucks). Plus he doesn't have either the time or inclination to check up on me any more than he does currently (once a week at most).
If you do work for a company that has managers needing to do this level of granular "surveillance" of staff then it's time to get another job - because if they're going to those depths then they're probably going to get rid of you anyway....
I'm all for giving Microsoft a chance with Windows Mobile 7 (or whatever they're calling it) but as someone who has used phones & gadgets running Android, Symbian & Apple embedded OSes, as well as various incarnations of Windows Mobile on HTC and iPAQ devices, I just don't believe Windows is a suitable OS for embedded devices. The rest "just work", Windows devices need rebooting once a month or so, they sometimes slow to a crawl occasionally for no readily apparent reason & there always deployed far too bloated with no easy way of removing the trash you don't need.
On a slightly related topic, I've been a Linux and Windows guy for some years now and having just got hold of a HTC Hero phone (running Android), I've now finally been able to ditch MS ActiveSync and Outlook to the point where my desktop of choice can now be (Gentoo) Linux with the ability to run the same apps (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc.) equally well on Linux or XP - if Microsoft is serious about Windows Mobile then they have to stop tying users up to their own desktop OS and products just because they use a Windows-based mobile phone.
I'm with you on waiting for games to get cheaper before buying them - not to mention the fact that most games these days seem to be unplayable out of the box and you need to wait six months for a patch or two to appear.
As for MMOs, I'd never played one until two weeks ago after finally relenting to my close buddies and joining them in WoW. Bearing in mind that these are the very same buddies I socialise with and have (very enjoyable) board game evenings with, I'm distinctly underwhelmed with WoW.
I'm a huge fan of FPS/RPG games like Fallout & the STALKER series, and IMHO WoW comes nowhere near close to the enjoyment I get playing those games - or even just going online for an hour or two for Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2 or Unreal Tournament.
Firstly, there's the issue of being "forced" to play the game. I like to take my gaming chunks as and when I feel like it, not necessarily at a time when all my buddies want to meet up online together.
Secondly, I know there are restrictions in MMOs but the realism just isn't there for me. In WoW, you start levelling up by taking on missions to, say, kill someone or go explore a kobold mine.
Yet when you find the NPC you need to kill, you discover someone else is doing the same mission - so you wait for him/her to kill that NPC, whereupon the NPC dies and then stands up again for you to kill him...
Or you go explore a kobold mine, start fighting your way through it & killing off kobolds one by one, whereupon you get halfway into the mine and the ones you've killed stand up again so it's impossible to beat a hasty retreat to heal up and go in again...
And finally, the saddest thing about WoW is that despite it supposedly being a "social" game, I don't think I've ever felt so "alone" when playing it when my buddies aren't there. Sure, there's plenty of players about, stood in groups posing or running around... but despite my having joined a "role playing" server, nobody bothers to communicate with you (unless it's to hurl abuse) and when you try and speak with anyone new, you're just ignored if you're not already part of their little gaming group.
At least now I can have an opinion of WoW based on actual experiences but you're really not missing that much.
I'm a telecoms consultant billed at $300 per hour, my head is not so far up my backside that I cannot find time to continually hone my skills & play about with operating systems (whether Linux, Windows, whatever) and last but not least, someone who demands as much for their time as you do probably should learn to control your language and temperament a little better.
I'm not a great fan of eBay but the positive/negative feedback thing they use does help weed out untrustworthy sellers on there.
So why not extend this as a karma system into gaming? If I have had a really enjoyable half-hour Unreal Tournament fragfest on an online server, I certainly wouldn't mind putting a tick against other players names, or a cross against someone who I thought was cheating...
Take it a stage further and have game servers with minimum karma limits before you can get on them...
I don't play WoW, friends of mine do, and they moan about being pestered by annoying players - so, again, introduce a karma system and make certain areas of the game, or game items, unobtainable until you have a certain karma level...
I have never, ever, ever, understood the point of cheating unless there is something to be gained (like money) - whether it's a board game or an online game, the sheer *FUN* of using your wits to use the game rules to your advantage is what it's about, and winning is just the icing on the cake.
Yes, but you know as well as I do that games (and movie) companies aim to make most of their sales within a week or two of release dates, during a time when "cautious" people like you and me are holding back and waiting to read initial reviews, looking for cheapest prices, etc.
Unfortunately, this doesn't include the hordes of moronic parents who are prepared to queue up outside game stores at midnight on release day just to appease their screaming kids...
The problem I have with free DLC, despite it being a much better alternative to DRM, is that nothing stops the publisher from just holding back some original game content as DLC in the first place - meaning you just end up paying the same money for less of the original game until you get the DLC.
I'll give Valve some credit here - I purchased Half-Life 2 quite soon after it was released, then Valve released "The Orange Box" which had Portal, Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2 in it which I also bought. I was able to transfer my original Half-Life 2 license over to somebody else.
I'm in complete agreement with you.
And can I also add that I have made the mistake of purchasing games like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, for example, which are ultimately great games to play but totally unplayable on the day of release and only become playable 3 or 4 patches later - hence another reason for holding off on buying games at full price.
This is precisely the reason why I have a problem with so many people on here...
There is *NO*, repeat, *NO* war being waged by Linux to defeat Microsoft. If there was, then it would have already won several battles when it comes to its penetration into server space and into embedded devices - but in the case of servers, it has done far more damage to displacing Sun Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and other "paid for" UNIX implementations.
So there is no *desire* for Linux to be accepted, it's there as an alternative and some people who write apps or GUIs for it do look at how things are done in Windows and emulate it in Linux, because they assume that anyone who *chooses* to try it and is from a Windows background will at least have some familiarity.
If anything, the fact that Linux is there and, in many cases, now a viable alternative to Windows, it has given Microsoft a "kick up the backside" to focus more on giving Windows users a better experience - I seriously doubt a Windows OS as reliable and as liked as XP would have existed without Microsoft fearing the uptake of Linux...
Incidentally, I object to being a called a zealot purely because I happen to utter words in support of Linux.
I do use both XP and Linux, and, for example, I have a handful of killer apps on Windows that I don't have on Linux - so there's a plus for XP to balance it out a bit, if that makes you happier.
As I'm both a Windows XP and Linux user (and I like them both for their own reasons), let me explain this to you in more detail.
Any Linux application I use holds it configuration in a text-based file somewhere on the system - either in my home directory, or globally under /etc somewhere. Whenever I want to change the configuration of an app, I can back up the old configuration just by making a copy of a text file.
So if I'm messing about with the configuration of, say, Xorg (the modern implementation of the X-Windows GUI) to get a particular graphics card feature to work, it's quite possible I break Xorg and have to go scanning through log files to find out why what I did broke it. But I can also just copy back in the original /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and it will work again...
If I'm messing about with some new kernel features, then I can end up putting in place a kernel that panics when I try to boot. But it's very easy to configure the GRUB bootloader to give you the option of booting from the last working kernel that you always keep a copy of, so if my new kernel borks then I can always boot back on the old kernel and try compiling a new one again.
Yes, this stuff is all complicated, even to a Linux veteran like me, but as long as you act responsibly, think about the ramifications about what you are doing, and make sure you have a backout plan, it's not really a problem.
Now explain to me how this would work in Windows? Don't get me wrong, XP is a bloody reliable OS (I can't comment on Vista or 7 because I've never used either) and uninstalling an application usually works to get you out of any mess you're in.
But what about if that app trashes the registry, what do you do then?
And why is it such a big deal whenever I try to backup my "Documents and Settings" directory in Windows, that it won't let me backup a lot of the files unless I boot into safe mode? Or how about I want to take my app settings from one XP machine to another? Presumably I have to use some convoluted backup program, whereas in Linux I can just use "cp" or "scp" over the network to send my home directory and all it's config contents somewhere else.
I'm sorry, but if something happens on an OS that the user cannot prepare a reasonable backup plan for, then it's a flaw in the OS. No, it doesn't happen often in XP but even as recently as last week, there were reports of some automatic updates trashing users' PCs...
Actually, your comment tells me that you've never used Linux - or at least not recently.
I have all manner of USB disks, webcams, drives, phones, etc. at home and use them all on dual-booting Gentoo Linux and Windows XP machines. The biggest problem I have had with USB recently (and strictly speaking it's not a USB issue) is how to get NTFS-formatted external USB disks to mount with proper permissions using the ntfs-3g user space driver.
The reason this problem came about in the first place was because Microsoft don't allow you to format any drive over 32GB with FAT32 in recent Windows versions (even though FAT32 partitions have a size limit of 2TB) and I needed to have USB disks readable/writeable by both OSes.
In the end I found fat32format which does allow me to use FAT32 on big external disks (even PartitionMagic sets an arbitrary 200GB FAT32 partition limit) and ditched NTFS completely.
I suggest you go ahead and try a modern Linux distro with built in daemons like hal and udev running on startup - because with a modular kernel these days, hardware detection is pretty much automatic....
...you make decisions about how you want to configure it, you put some work into researching how it should be configured correctly, and you face the consequences of what can go wrong if you mess it up.
If you need to be nursemaided in your computer use, stick with a Mac or Windows. If you're prepared to put some effort into learning how a computer works and how to search forums and asks questions of people who are more than willing to help you out free-of-charge, then try Linux.
It's that simple.
You can click the link and install the compatibility pack. Then the docs open and look exactly as you'd expect.
Yep, exactly right. But to a newbie user what's more difficult? Locating and installing the Microsoft Compatibility Pack or just doing a "Save As" in a suitable format in OpenOffice.org?
Piracy is a means of protest - showing that the games are worth playing, but the DRM is totally unacceptable.
Right, in which case an excellent way of protesting would be to demonstrate you have enough money to buy the game in the first place but prefer to hand that money over to a charitable cause rather than using it to pay for the game.
Okay, so if it's not about getting something for free, how about every time you pirate a copy of a game you make a donation to a charitable cause? Then maybe honest folk will start seeing you as the "Robin Hood" characters you think you are.
Piracy and DRM both suck - and people like me with real backbones just don't by the stuff in the first place if it isn't worth the money and hassle.
The first time Joe Newbie tries to open a Shockwave web page, send an OpenOffice document to his buddy (who uses MS) that opens with crapped-up formatting, or tries to connect to an Exchange server (and no, OWA light is not a good alternative), he's going to have a bad taste in his mouth.
If the machine is being targeted at newbie users, then I take that to be retired old folks or home users - in which case it's highly unlikely they're going to be connecting to an Exchange server for email; more likely IMAP, POP or Webmail.
And why is the doc format issue any different to my receiving an Office 2007 format document when I only use Office 2003?
When Google release the Nexus outside of the USA? Oh, sorry, not *THAT* kind of Counterstrike...
By the way, I'm not normally finnicky but since you're an Apple user, I'm allowed to be - the Valve game is called "Counter-Strike", note the hyphen.