What's it take to recognize lame humor these days? A BA in English? Giving computer scientists a bad name? Pointing out that I don't need to be a physicist to do multiplication?
Holy cow, you have opened my eyes. Thanks for clearing that up. Things which were unknown to me are now known. You have expanded my horizons with insight into things which could not be more obvious if they were on set on fire in a gun powder factory.
Maybe it had something to do with my hardware, but there was no option to test my X setup while in the installer. I absentmindedly picked the wrong monitor (mine is old and wasn't properly probed) and my setup was screwed.
Now, I am the type of guy who doesn't mind editing some config files by hand and has plenty of Big Heavy Books about *nix. However, almost every piece of documentation on configuring X recommends using Xconfigurator. I naively believed what I read and never bothered with manually editing X's config files. Big mistake. Xconfigurator does not come with Psyche. I poked around for a few hours before getting so furious with the thing that I simply repartitioned and started from scratch. This time I picked the right monitor.
I know that people with a higher wisdom stat than I would have been just fine in this scenario, and I never claimed to be an expert, but the simple ability to test my X setup in the installer would have turned this 3 hour hangup into a 10 second goof. But like I said, this option might be present for people with more up to date hardware. (Doh, I use linux partially because my hardware is older.)
Other than that, I love Psyche. Mostly I'm enamored with the latest versions of all the included software, but the sum is composed of the parts.
But I'm not a KDE enthusiast. I used Gnome exclusively until I installed RH8.0, at which point I switched to KDE just to see how it had changed since I used it last. It's not bad, but to be honest, I'd just as soon use Gnome if KDE annoyed me twice.
I couldn't really care about the KDE League, and it's quite possible that LinuxandMain have a perfectly valid point. But hey, maybe some KKK members had some really good economic policies. If you're going to reach an audience and expect to be taken seriously, you're going to have a tough time if it appears that extreme political views are your motivation. That's exactly how this scenario looks at this point.
If MSNBC ran a story about KDE League's finances, I'd think, "Sure, they might be biased toward Microsoft for business reasons, but the story might check out." Instead, we get LinuxandMain, a few mailing list posts, and I'm left thinking that LinuxandMain have some extreme middle east political agenda against the KDE League.
To be blunt, I'd rather hear Microsoft blast the KDE League because I expect them to. The bias is a result of the market. I distrust anybody who blasts anything software related potentially because of the political opinions of the members. I distrust Diskeeper because it is developed strictly by Scientologists; I distrust LinuxandMain's articles because of the political undercurrent.
And if LinuxandMain is proud of this publicity, and stands behind this guy, it reflects on the whole organization.
I previously had no experience with LinuxandMain. This fiasco has firmly convinced me that the site is a sensationalist gossip haven. I will certainly laugh whenever anyone uses the site or its contributors as a reference.
Somehow, I think this was not the type of publicity LinuxandMain wanted to stir up. Unfortunately for them, the damage is done. I really couldn't care if the KDE League has been less than admirable in their business practices. The unprofessional hack job that LinuxandMain has done on this story is the only thing I'm going to remember about it.
Flamebait? Sure, maybe. Maybe I'm just offering a clue to anyone over at LinuxandMain that the potential audience for a Linux website is slightly more critical and clever than the average tabloid reader. Edward Said was right. The media is self-serving and self-perpetuating, but that doesn't mean that smart people won't see through it.
Good comment. That was my reaction after watching that video tape. I mean, you couldn't even SEE what was going on inside the vehicle. You certainly couldn't establish a history of this behavior from the video tape. I never heard any audio for the tape (though there may have been in court).
Was the mother over the line? Sure, but even my mother kicked my ass once in awhile and I'm sure it did me good. Should the woman receive punishment for it? Probably. Was it right to smear her face all over national media, take her child from her custody, and make such a big deal about it? In my opinion, absolutely not. How were the interests of that child met by removing her from her home that some supervision and counselling for the mother would have failed to provide?
I'm all for protecting the children in vicious cases of child abuse, but I'm not talking about the stuff I saw on that video tape. This was a case of mob justice in a courtroom, where a single instance of a non-brutal but admittedly bad situation has split a family apart. Was it Thomas Jefferson said it was better to let a thousand guilty men go free than to wrongly convict one innocent man? It just seems to me that in this case we made an example of one mother so that millions had a chance to say, "Child abuse, how sinful!" rather than question whether their behavior resembled what they saw on that tape.
A pellet gun would be ideal for this, in fact. A CO2 canister.177 or.22 caliber pellet gun is one of the most accurate weapons you can get up to about 50 yards. Some more expensive models claim a.25" spread at that range. They're also very quiet, about as loud as dropping a rock onto the sidewalk. They're also far less regulated than powder burning weapons, often legal within city limits in less-than-metropolis areas.
I have a cheap pellet rifle with a 4x scope, and I'm sure I could take out the lens of a camera at 30 paces, about 70 feet or so. It might not be on the first shot, but I could do it, and I'm certainly not an expert with the thing.
Now, does the right to bear arms mean we can vandalize property? Um... I dunno, but hell fahr if shootin stuff ain' funner 'an turn two at Bristol!
Come on, like there was anyone on Earth who thought that Afghanistan was going to destroy the US... or that Iraq has an ace in the hole that's going to bring us down... or that anyone, anywhere, has enough strictly military might to mess with the West. You've got to be kidding.
The only place where a military conflict is actually a contest is in between the second and third world, now that many third world nations have nuclear weapons. The second world is not of a mindset that any type of computer simulation would be an acceptable substitute, and even simulating the morale of billions of starving Communists is a staggering proposition.
So we're right back to the third world countries. Ignoring the export ban, do you really think India and Pakistan (who are hardly third world countries anymore) are the types of people who will say, "Look, the computer says we'll win, so why don't you surrender now?"
And I am using the accurate definitions of first, second, and third world. No need for anyone to get offended by whatever false implications they attach to terms like "third world".
Most Chinese fear and distrust their government? Are you speaking from an "I've been to China" point of view?
It's a big place and I'm sure that opinions run the gamut from area to area, but when I was there, the people seemed pretty proud of their system and thought we Americans were quite the novelty. They thought it was great that the occasional tourist comes by, but they were firmly convinced that they were better off without all the evil sinfulness in the States.
What would really break the Chinese people would be a 2 week vacation to America to see what it's really like over here. Even Hong Kong, with which many of them are familiar, gives only a slight glimpse into what the Western lifestyle is all about.
I'm pretty certain that it's about 12 light hours to Jupiter, but my reference is my foggy memory of some dusty Arthur C. Clarke books.
It's not like it would be tough to figure it out. The article mentioned 6x10^9 kilometers, so at a rate of 3x10^5 m/s (light speed, no?) it would be 55.56 light hours from the sun, a little over two Earth days.
Good for them. I previously had no opinion of linuxandmain and likewise of this KDE league. This has served to paint linuxandmain as a pit of propagandist filth. I hope this attack falls off like water on a duck, and wonder if it accomplished what the author intended.
Terrorism includes ethnic cleansing, of course. No reputable military force regularly shoots children in the streets outside their homes. The Israeli military does.
I didn't mean that the law uses scare tactics. People trying to protect copyright holders use scare tactics. A copyright infringement isn't such a horrible thing, afterall it's a modern convention used to support our fast paced and capital (as in ideas and investment) driven economy.
Theiving, on the other hand, is downright filthy. You can discourage people from doing something without taking them to court if it's dirty, like stealing.
The guy here isn't going to jail for 33 months for stealing. He's going to court for copyright infringement. The legal issues are one thing, but the concept of the act and ethics are entirely different. I don't deprive the owner of his product if I crack the software encryption and distribute it, but I do impede his ability to sell the product and make a product. That's a world away from stealing my neighbor's car. Stealing a car is what scum do. Copyright infringement? Well, that's not exactly good, but it isn't the same act as stealing, no matter what the dictionary says.
I didn't bother with the counterargument, but I don't exactly feel compelled.
He says geeks used to argue over the standard stuff, vi vs. emacs, keyboard vs. mouse, X vs. console, PC vs. microcomputer. Fair enough. Now he says that nobody argues against DRM, the DMCA, and invasions of privacy.
I suppose Soviet Communists in the olden days would argue about whether rubber or leather boots were better in springtime, but nobody felt justified saying, "Those capitalists aren't that bad!" Likewise, these days in America, there is plenty of talk about whether N'Bizkit is better than Limp Korn, or whatever retarded ear-shit people listen to. Yet nobody stands up and says, "You know, we really should let the state run all of our industry."
So big surprise, we're all in agreement about things that threaten the foundation and definition of the group. What an insight, you might as well go write an internet editorial about it and get Michael to post on Slashdot.
Ya know, it really is telling when I got halfway through this post and thought to myself, "Well goddamn, this must have been another piece of drivel that Micheal thought was really clever, like that time he shared with us the story about adjusting your TVs brightness control to play PS2." What crap.
Copyright violations are called "copyright violations" and not "theft" for a reason. Blurring the two is a scare tactic used by copyright holders to inflate the perceived moral injustice.
By the very same logic, anyone who provides a product that competes with mine and "steals" my business would be guilty of theft. The only difference in this case is whether the potential customer has my software or my competitor's, which appears, functions, and performs similarly. Clearly this is theft!
Except that it isn't. In the worst case, it's a copyright violation. Unauthorized duplication of software is a copyright violation. It is not theft.
How useful is that friendly firewall going to be once every cracker interested in breaking into Windows boxes knows what the failings of it are? That user friendly firewall becomes a user friendly waste of time.
It would be fantastic if their user friendly firewall did all the work rather than part of the work, but the ability to root a box in 5 ways instead of 10 is still the ability to root. The real danger is in convincing the users that the firewall makes them safe and therefore need not be vigilant or suspicious. That creates users who do not patch their software, making the inevitable breach more disasterous.
In fact, your quote, "Microsoft is winning the user-friendly security tool war, even though their software is not secure," is rather telling. They aren't winning anything related to security. They're succeeding in generating revenue through marketing and slogans, which they've always done. The security of their products is not enhanced in any fashion by their user friendly firewall in the long run. If you think it takes a public relations department and TV commercials to win the security tool war, you simply don't have a clue and probably don't want one.
I can do the same paragraph test with a modern, softer, silent keyboard. In all fairness, in real life I would glance at the output now and again because maybe 0.5% of my characters feel like they might be typos. Compare that rather acceptable rate to the racket made by older keyboards, especially to a person who cannot tolerate humming flourescent lights or even almost inaudible scream put out by aging CRTs, and I'll pitch the old keyboard in a heartbeat.
I suppose the ultimate solution is an old mechanical typewriter and some good OCR software, eh? Honestly, though, the MS Natural style keyboards are the greatest improvement since the shift button. I especially like the reorganized Insert-through-PageDown keys, which puts them all within lightning fast pinky reach.
Don't forget that (virtually?) all human languages are not context free, meaning that they cannot be parsed by a Turing machine without some outside assistance. In his example, this fact is obscured by issuing voice commands to a human, who can interpret their meaning and context, before interacting with the computer.
So yes, it's true that the example assumes that no one would develop an improved voice interface, but the much larger issue is that having a conversation-style interaction with your computer would require far more computation than its worth, and even then would take years to refine.
In all, I think it's a fair example of what could be done with existing technology, but that might change in a few years.
"Remember, the future is unknown, and we must always approach the unknown with fear and hatred." -SomethingAwful.com
I read Slashdot at home exclusively on linux. I read Slashdot at work exclusively on Windows. I would like to read Slashdot at work with linux, however circumstances beyond my control make that impossible. Conversely, there is practicaly no realistic chance that someone would read Slashdot against their will on a linux box. Further, I know that I am not alone.
So though it makes a lame joke and your mom thinks it's funny, the statistics are worthless - but by all means, don't let me discourage you. Cling to them with all the desperation of someone who is really going to make a difference in the world, not like some half-wit spouting untruths in a venue that couldn't care less. Aim high, man.
The problem here is that the DMCA violates the fair use clause of the existing copyright laws. The solution is NOT a law that defeats a portion of the DMCA. The solution IS to repeal the DMCA and replace it with a non-fascist alternative.
It is our duty as citizens to disobey unjust laws and to push them through the judicial system to the Supreme Court. It is counterproductive to that duty to prop up the unjust laws with exceptions and clarifications. Further, between the DMCA and the proposed DFCA, all that has been accomplished is a wordy reiteration of the existing copyright laws. I'm no legal eagle, but I firmly believe in having a few concise and necessary laws rather than redundant spaghetti legal code.
Like I said... Is linux tougher to administer? Sure. Is it tougher to use? Absolutely not.
Hardware support for linux has always lagged behind Windows because drivers are typically produced by benevolent third parties. With regards to playing an encrypted DVD, you should probably take this up with your state representatives.
The point I'm making is that once a linux box has the desired software and proper drivers, it will operate basically flawlessly forever. A Windows box, on the other hand, will continually pester the user, accumulate cruft, behave erratically, crash, collect spy ware, ad ware, virii, and do hundreds of infuriating things "just to help you out".
So, if the question is which is harder to administer, I fully agree that linux wins. But once the initial setup is completed, let's be honest. Which is easier to use?
How to Optimize your Commodore Cassette Tape Drive
Tips for getting the most out of a Walmart Keyboard
Is your toast the best it can be? Read on to find out...
Super Mario Bros. Tips and Tricks - How to run AND JUMP in COMBINATION!
And finally:
Screws: Righty-tighty or do they work better if you use hammers?
Re:So.... can my wife finally use linux?
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Isn't it slightly unfair for someone to experience a single problem and say, "How is this better than Windows?" I mean, problems are going to happen, and their nature will be different on different systems, but Windows people have grown accustomed to Windows problems and are oblivious to their pervasiveness. When they are given a single new problem, their universe collapses.
So everytime a friend comes to me, their resident "computer genius" (their term for me, obviously) and say, "Why does Windows do this?", be it driver problems, IE crashing, blue screens, MS Word screwing up the document, CPU utilization going crazy, start menu randomly vanishing, and so on, I give them the true answer.
"Because Windows is SO easy to use."
This whole nonsense about Linux being tougher on the end user is absurd. Is it more difficult to administer? Sure. Is it more difficult to use? Absolutely not.
Last night, my brother was using his Windows box and Explorer screwed up 3 times in a row, IE crashed, his file associations made opening a file complicated, and rearranging programs on the start menu infuriated him. He was fuming, I was snickering. "Hey man, don't be mad. It's just that Windows is so easy to use. Be glad you aren't running linux."
Anyway, this isn't meant to flame, preach, or correct you, but just to share my observation that the real problem with linux converts is that they suffer a mental breakdown when they experience a new problem, and have very little appreciation for the utter lack of their old problems. My solution? Mock their old problems to death.;)
This is obviously old news to anyone who cared in the first place, but anyhow...
I was struggling with ftp transfers for the last two days. They are miserably clogged, as we all expect. I was surprised to find a perfectly legitimate use for P2P file sharing networks in this - gtk-gnutella has found all five isos for me with download speeds about 40 times greater than I was getting on ftp.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy cow, you have opened my eyes. Thanks for clearing that up. Things which were unknown to me are now known. You have expanded my horizons with insight into things which could not be more obvious if they were on set on fire in a gun powder factory.
Now, I am the type of guy who doesn't mind editing some config files by hand and has plenty of Big Heavy Books about *nix. However, almost every piece of documentation on configuring X recommends using Xconfigurator. I naively believed what I read and never bothered with manually editing X's config files. Big mistake. Xconfigurator does not come with Psyche. I poked around for a few hours before getting so furious with the thing that I simply repartitioned and started from scratch. This time I picked the right monitor.
I know that people with a higher wisdom stat than I would have been just fine in this scenario, and I never claimed to be an expert, but the simple ability to test my X setup in the installer would have turned this 3 hour hangup into a 10 second goof. But like I said, this option might be present for people with more up to date hardware. (Doh, I use linux partially because my hardware is older.)
Other than that, I love Psyche. Mostly I'm enamored with the latest versions of all the included software, but the sum is composed of the parts.
I couldn't really care about the KDE League, and it's quite possible that LinuxandMain have a perfectly valid point. But hey, maybe some KKK members had some really good economic policies. If you're going to reach an audience and expect to be taken seriously, you're going to have a tough time if it appears that extreme political views are your motivation. That's exactly how this scenario looks at this point.
If MSNBC ran a story about KDE League's finances, I'd think, "Sure, they might be biased toward Microsoft for business reasons, but the story might check out." Instead, we get LinuxandMain, a few mailing list posts, and I'm left thinking that LinuxandMain have some extreme middle east political agenda against the KDE League.
To be blunt, I'd rather hear Microsoft blast the KDE League because I expect them to. The bias is a result of the market. I distrust anybody who blasts anything software related potentially because of the political opinions of the members. I distrust Diskeeper because it is developed strictly by Scientologists; I distrust LinuxandMain's articles because of the political undercurrent.
And if LinuxandMain is proud of this publicity, and stands behind this guy, it reflects on the whole organization.
Somehow, I think this was not the type of publicity LinuxandMain wanted to stir up. Unfortunately for them, the damage is done. I really couldn't care if the KDE League has been less than admirable in their business practices. The unprofessional hack job that LinuxandMain has done on this story is the only thing I'm going to remember about it.
Flamebait? Sure, maybe. Maybe I'm just offering a clue to anyone over at LinuxandMain that the potential audience for a Linux website is slightly more critical and clever than the average tabloid reader. Edward Said was right. The media is self-serving and self-perpetuating, but that doesn't mean that smart people won't see through it.
Was the mother over the line? Sure, but even my mother kicked my ass once in awhile and I'm sure it did me good. Should the woman receive punishment for it? Probably. Was it right to smear her face all over national media, take her child from her custody, and make such a big deal about it? In my opinion, absolutely not. How were the interests of that child met by removing her from her home that some supervision and counselling for the mother would have failed to provide?
I'm all for protecting the children in vicious cases of child abuse, but I'm not talking about the stuff I saw on that video tape. This was a case of mob justice in a courtroom, where a single instance of a non-brutal but admittedly bad situation has split a family apart. Was it Thomas Jefferson said it was better to let a thousand guilty men go free than to wrongly convict one innocent man? It just seems to me that in this case we made an example of one mother so that millions had a chance to say, "Child abuse, how sinful!" rather than question whether their behavior resembled what they saw on that tape.
I have a cheap pellet rifle with a 4x scope, and I'm sure I could take out the lens of a camera at 30 paces, about 70 feet or so. It might not be on the first shot, but I could do it, and I'm certainly not an expert with the thing.
Now, does the right to bear arms mean we can vandalize property? Um... I dunno, but hell fahr if shootin stuff ain' funner 'an turn two at Bristol!
The only place where a military conflict is actually a contest is in between the second and third world, now that many third world nations have nuclear weapons. The second world is not of a mindset that any type of computer simulation would be an acceptable substitute, and even simulating the morale of billions of starving Communists is a staggering proposition.
So we're right back to the third world countries. Ignoring the export ban, do you really think India and Pakistan (who are hardly third world countries anymore) are the types of people who will say, "Look, the computer says we'll win, so why don't you surrender now?"
And I am using the accurate definitions of first, second, and third world. No need for anyone to get offended by whatever false implications they attach to terms like "third world".
It's a big place and I'm sure that opinions run the gamut from area to area, but when I was there, the people seemed pretty proud of their system and thought we Americans were quite the novelty. They thought it was great that the occasional tourist comes by, but they were firmly convinced that they were better off without all the evil sinfulness in the States.
What would really break the Chinese people would be a 2 week vacation to America to see what it's really like over here. Even Hong Kong, with which many of them are familiar, gives only a slight glimpse into what the Western lifestyle is all about.
Hehe, one man's order of magnitude is another man's rounding error. Thanks for the correction - I'm a computer scientist, not a physicist.
I'm pretty certain that it's about 12 light hours to Jupiter, but my reference is my foggy memory of some dusty Arthur C. Clarke books. It's not like it would be tough to figure it out. The article mentioned 6x10^9 kilometers, so at a rate of 3x10^5 m/s (light speed, no?) it would be 55.56 light hours from the sun, a little over two Earth days.
Parent is already at 5, and I'm not a moderator, but here's my write in vote for this question.
Terrorism includes ethnic cleansing, of course. No reputable military force regularly shoots children in the streets outside their homes. The Israeli military does.
Theiving, on the other hand, is downright filthy. You can discourage people from doing something without taking them to court if it's dirty, like stealing.
The guy here isn't going to jail for 33 months for stealing. He's going to court for copyright infringement. The legal issues are one thing, but the concept of the act and ethics are entirely different. I don't deprive the owner of his product if I crack the software encryption and distribute it, but I do impede his ability to sell the product and make a product. That's a world away from stealing my neighbor's car. Stealing a car is what scum do. Copyright infringement? Well, that's not exactly good, but it isn't the same act as stealing, no matter what the dictionary says.
He says geeks used to argue over the standard stuff, vi vs. emacs, keyboard vs. mouse, X vs. console, PC vs. microcomputer. Fair enough. Now he says that nobody argues against DRM, the DMCA, and invasions of privacy.
I suppose Soviet Communists in the olden days would argue about whether rubber or leather boots were better in springtime, but nobody felt justified saying, "Those capitalists aren't that bad!" Likewise, these days in America, there is plenty of talk about whether N'Bizkit is better than Limp Korn, or whatever retarded ear-shit people listen to. Yet nobody stands up and says, "You know, we really should let the state run all of our industry."
So big surprise, we're all in agreement about things that threaten the foundation and definition of the group. What an insight, you might as well go write an internet editorial about it and get Michael to post on Slashdot.
Ya know, it really is telling when I got halfway through this post and thought to myself, "Well goddamn, this must have been another piece of drivel that Micheal thought was really clever, like that time he shared with us the story about adjusting your TVs brightness control to play PS2." What crap.
By the very same logic, anyone who provides a product that competes with mine and "steals" my business would be guilty of theft. The only difference in this case is whether the potential customer has my software or my competitor's, which appears, functions, and performs similarly. Clearly this is theft!
Except that it isn't. In the worst case, it's a copyright violation. Unauthorized duplication of software is a copyright violation. It is not theft.
It would be fantastic if their user friendly firewall did all the work rather than part of the work, but the ability to root a box in 5 ways instead of 10 is still the ability to root. The real danger is in convincing the users that the firewall makes them safe and therefore need not be vigilant or suspicious. That creates users who do not patch their software, making the inevitable breach more disasterous.
In fact, your quote, "Microsoft is winning the user-friendly security tool war, even though their software is not secure," is rather telling. They aren't winning anything related to security. They're succeeding in generating revenue through marketing and slogans, which they've always done. The security of their products is not enhanced in any fashion by their user friendly firewall in the long run. If you think it takes a public relations department and TV commercials to win the security tool war, you simply don't have a clue and probably don't want one.
I suppose the ultimate solution is an old mechanical typewriter and some good OCR software, eh? Honestly, though, the MS Natural style keyboards are the greatest improvement since the shift button. I especially like the reorganized Insert-through-PageDown keys, which puts them all within lightning fast pinky reach.
So yes, it's true that the example assumes that no one would develop an improved voice interface, but the much larger issue is that having a conversation-style interaction with your computer would require far more computation than its worth, and even then would take years to refine.
In all, I think it's a fair example of what could be done with existing technology, but that might change in a few years.
So though it makes a lame joke and your mom thinks it's funny, the statistics are worthless - but by all means, don't let me discourage you. Cling to them with all the desperation of someone who is really going to make a difference in the world, not like some half-wit spouting untruths in a venue that couldn't care less. Aim high, man.
Hehe, nice reply. Good satire.
It is our duty as citizens to disobey unjust laws and to push them through the judicial system to the Supreme Court. It is counterproductive to that duty to prop up the unjust laws with exceptions and clarifications. Further, between the DMCA and the proposed DFCA, all that has been accomplished is a wordy reiteration of the existing copyright laws. I'm no legal eagle, but I firmly believe in having a few concise and necessary laws rather than redundant spaghetti legal code.
Hardware support for linux has always lagged behind Windows because drivers are typically produced by benevolent third parties. With regards to playing an encrypted DVD, you should probably take this up with your state representatives.
The point I'm making is that once a linux box has the desired software and proper drivers, it will operate basically flawlessly forever. A Windows box, on the other hand, will continually pester the user, accumulate cruft, behave erratically, crash, collect spy ware, ad ware, virii, and do hundreds of infuriating things "just to help you out".
So, if the question is which is harder to administer, I fully agree that linux wins. But once the initial setup is completed, let's be honest. Which is easier to use?
Tips for getting the most out of a Walmart Keyboard
Is your toast the best it can be? Read on to find out...
Super Mario Bros. Tips and Tricks - How to run AND JUMP in COMBINATION!
And finally:
Screws: Righty-tighty or do they work better if you use hammers?
So everytime a friend comes to me, their resident "computer genius" (their term for me, obviously) and say, "Why does Windows do this?", be it driver problems, IE crashing, blue screens, MS Word screwing up the document, CPU utilization going crazy, start menu randomly vanishing, and so on, I give them the true answer.
"Because Windows is SO easy to use."
This whole nonsense about Linux being tougher on the end user is absurd. Is it more difficult to administer? Sure. Is it more difficult to use? Absolutely not.
Last night, my brother was using his Windows box and Explorer screwed up 3 times in a row, IE crashed, his file associations made opening a file complicated, and rearranging programs on the start menu infuriated him. He was fuming, I was snickering. "Hey man, don't be mad. It's just that Windows is so easy to use. Be glad you aren't running linux."
Anyway, this isn't meant to flame, preach, or correct you, but just to share my observation that the real problem with linux converts is that they suffer a mental breakdown when they experience a new problem, and have very little appreciation for the utter lack of their old problems. My solution? Mock their old problems to death. ;)
I was struggling with ftp transfers for the last two days. They are miserably clogged, as we all expect. I was surprised to find a perfectly legitimate use for P2P file sharing networks in this - gtk-gnutella has found all five isos for me with download speeds about 40 times greater than I was getting on ftp.
Just check the MD5 and enjoy.