I think we're saying the same thing here... Note I said "unfettered, unsupervised" access. Without an adult there to provide context, interpretation, and moral clarity, their pliable young mind might that that it's normal to perform some unspeakable act on a neighborhood cat. Like you, I think you cannot completely shield children from the world, but they should only be exposed at the time and age of the PARENT'S choosing... ie. when they are mature enough to learn the necessary lesson.
I think I got the impression from your other post that you were in favor of an automated method of censorship.
One of my basic problems is that I don't know that I'm qualified to determine when my kid is mature enough for something. As an example, I'm certain that I was mature enough for the typical sex talk when I was 10 or 11, but my parents didn't think it was an issue unless I actually had a girlfriend, which didn't happen until I was 17. So for 6-7 years I sputtered around in a great deal of confusion in the worst part of puberty. Now, I'm not laying claim to any lingering scars from the period.:) However, when the time comes, how will I know when my kids are mature enough for the discussion? Typically I base it on how well they understand related concepts. Obviously, at 4, my daughter who's playing "I'm getting married to my brother!" isn't quite ready. I have tried to talk to her about DNA, recessive genes, and so forth and the dangers of inbreeding. She just gets real confused.
The basic problem I have with automated methods of dealing with human problems is that I've seen quite a few parents use similar techniques (and the old-school copouts, like "they should learn that in school, it's not my fault if the school didn't teach it", or "The school should've kept their mouth shut, because I don't wanna deal with this problem, it'll never happen to *my* kid") as an excuse to not raise their kids. It's too easy. "Oh honey, we don't have to talk to them about sex, they just don't have to know about it. Look, we've got filtering in place for the internet, the tv, the windows on the house, and even the windows on the car! We don't ever have to mention it to them, and they'll learn about it in school."
OTOH, an automated tool like the ones the article is about might be a good parenting tool, as long as it's not leaned on. Kind of like the windows administrator installing his event log monitor, and then he immediately quits reading his event logs. Why? He's still gotta look at them every now and then, doesn't he?
You are absolutely correct; kids will come across this kind of stuff... it just shouldn't be left to them to try understanding/interpreting on their own
When it comes down to it, I think we're more or less on the same page.:) You're right about that.:)
As a parent myself, I think any parent who gives their child unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet is a fool; you might end up raising a kid who's a combination of Benny Hill and Ted Bundy. Kids too young to understand the difference between good/bad, normal/abnormal, etc don't need to be downloading hard-core pr0n, and faces-of-death pics.
As a parent myself, I have to disagree completely with you on this point. I think that education is the key to raising health kids capable of adjusting to their environment. Censorship is not education. It is, in fact, anti-education. I do not censor the internet from my kids (of course, neither of them are old enough to read, quite yet, so they don't use the computer anyway) and I have no intention of doing so. I've gone out and looked at the stuff on the internet that you would censor, and I'll admit that I don't want them to see it. However, consider this: Kid downloads kiddie porn. Says "Daddy, what's this?" I say "That's why you don't talk to strangers." Easy enough, right?
Sure, I make it sound easy, but as with all parenting issues, it's a lot more complex than that. The point, though, is that you never get to talk about the hard stuff if it never comes up. My parents practiced censorship on me, and I found myself at 18 ready to take on the world, but unprepared for the world as it really is.
Leave the filtering to the parents, if they so choose. As long as it's in the privacy of their own home, and as long as it's not kiddie pr0n, I'd say let adults download what they want.
Luckily, I agree very strongly with this.:) So you won't hear me trying to actually legislate my ideas of parenting.:)
Normally I don't respond to Anonymous Coward, because the bastard isn't listening.
Do you even realize how Lindows is funded???
As a matter of fact I don't, and I think it would be extremely helpful for the discussion if someone who does know would post the details.
I'm inclined to think that it's funded by the CEO's own private fortune that he made at mp3.com or something like that, but I don't know that for a fact.
BTW, most of you are undoubtedly also ignorant of the fact that the english word "gullible" is a colloquialism that is typically omitted from dictionaries.
What about the Internet Explorer case, that Microsoft won because its a generic term. Yet they claim Windows is a trademark, gee why didnt they sue the X Consortum.
Um, because XWindows totally predates MS Windows? Keep in mind, Microsoft didn't do anything that hadn't already been done with Windows. Neither did Apple or the X guys. I don't think Xerox even was doing anything that hadn't already been done, really.
The basic problem here is that in the mid-80s it was fairly obvious to anybody paying attention that computers were all going GUI. AFter spending hours trying to explain to my mom that in order to play her stupid card game she had to type "LOAD "cardgame",8,1", but in order to play sea route to india she only had to type "LOAD "searoute",8", but she also had to type "RUN" when it was done.
With everything going GUI, how else would you do it? Personally, I tried pretty hard to come up with something that wasn't Mac-like, and failed.:(
I know it would be risky to try to point out Microsoft as a 'good guy' in any context here, but they've generally adopted a corporate strategy of winning in the marketplace, not the courtroom. The Lindows lawsuit is unusual for them.
I recall rooting for MS back then, because if they won then Apple wasn't going to go after Commodore for the Amiga OS. Maybe commodore had licensed the stuff from APple, but I've never heard anything of the sort. In any case, MS was the good guy back then standing up to the evil anti-competitive Apple.
But the Lindows lawsuit is not unusual. They're making spurious claims and taking a small startup into court. How is that unusual for Microsoft?
I just hope that the court at least considers the case logically, if not idealistically. Either way, I reckon MS is in the wrong on this one.
Do you really think MS cares about winning? Startup companies notoriously don't have a lot of money, and they need every penny to get out of the red. By taking Lindows into court and making them spend their venture capital on a stupid court battle, Microsoft is effectively making them spend their investment capital on garbage, rather than producing a product. MS doesn't care about winning, they only care about the attritional effects a long and expensive court case will have on a startup.
This is just one of the ways they work to maintain their monopoly. If they win, great. If they lose, no loss for them. The important thing is that Lindows is screwed.
I don't actually know if Lindows is screwed or not, but I suspect that if they didn't think they could fight, win, and continue producing their product, then they would have just changed their name and settled. OTOH, it's entirely possible that the entire purpose of Lindows is to fight this court battle, and they created LindowsOS just for the sake of this fight. Why they would do it is unclear to me, but that someone would view it as a needed action is quite clear.
BTW, any of you folks use Lindows? Any reason for me to abandon Mandrake in favor of Lindows?
None that I can see. I'm not using Lindows, but I understand that Lindows is targetted at Windows users as a step towards migrating to a free OS. It provides a Windows-like look and feel on top of a Debian GNU/Linux. If you're already using Mandrake, then likely you don't need the baby-step migration that Lindows provides.
I definitely think it's worth looking into Lindows as a distribution to recommend to grandma and all the other people in your life that use Windows but don't want to contribute to the monopoly anymore. I just haven't done it. It's not worth $200 to me to find out right now. Instead, when I next go to buy a computer I'm thinking seriously of buying a Walmart Lindows-loaded PC, trying out Lindows, and then wiping it when I'm satisfied in favor of Mandrake.:)
I respect the GIMP project, but calling it the "GIMP" is like naming a car the "Ford Lemon" or "Mercury Clunker".
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but your simile fell quite short. If you were to name a car the "Ford Lemon", you would just be repeating yourself. Same with "Mercury Clunker". Keep in mind, though, that Mercury is made by Ford, and the cars are the same. For example, the Mercury Sable is just a dressed up Ford Taurus, and they're both big pieces of shit.
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but your simile fell quite short. If you were to name a car the "Ford Lemon", you would just be repeating yourself. Same with "Mercury Clunker". Keep in mind, though, that Mercury is made by Ford, and the cars are the same. For example, the Mercury Sable is just a dressed up Ford Taurus, and they're both big pieces of shit.
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but your simile fell quite short. If you were to name a car the "Ford Lemon", you would just be repeating yourself. Same with "Mercury Clunker". Keep in mind, though, that Mercury is made by Ford, and the cars are the same. For example, the Mercury Sable is just a dressed up Ford Taurus, and they're both big pieces of shit.
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but your simile fell quite short. If you were to name a car the "Ford Lemon", you would just be repeating yourself.......
Well, there's a bad example if I've ever seen one. Just because Linux is newer doesn't mean it's better.
Idiot. That wasn't an argument for LInux being better, that was an argument for hardware manufacturers to make drivers for it. Next time, read the whole thread, dude.
umm I take offense,
"us crackheads" are smart enough to add/edit stuff ourselves witch in reality if you know what you are doing is 10-20x faster than waiting on a stupid os wizard.
huh....its like soap. you can get many flavours. The most popular is RedHat but you know this driver is supported better in the other distro but you know the security is best in Bastille but you know debian is the best in stability so you have to decide what you want to do
Looks to me like you failed to provide a unified front. People ask me about Linux and I say "It's a free OS, you can download several for free." Then they say "Where?". I just tell them "Well, you should check out Mandrake first. It's the one I use, so I definitely recommend it. There's a lot of choice in distributions, but they're all built on the same stuff, so they interoperate well. Mandrake's a great one to start with, and you may never need another one. The beauty of choice, though, is that if you like Linux but you're dissatisfied with Mandrake, you can check out the others."
It's every bit in how you present it. Just make sure you're telling them the truth, and you're doing everything you can to help them (and charging an appropriate fee if you prefer).
From a university's standpoint, say they want their students to use Linux, but they don't want to support a few different distributions? Fine, roll their own and tell the kids "use this one or find someone else to support it. You're tuition covers this one." Anything unreasonable about that? They can give their kids something that installs out of the box and works on their network. Can they do that with Windows? Nope. They can achieve a close approximation, but not the real deal. Linux is the way...
You are too busy demanding the next thing to appreciate what you have and how far this whole thing has come (I say this as someone who has been using linux for only about 3 1/2 years).
Dude, I've only been at it for about a year now, and I've already seen HUGE leaps forward! I'm hooked....:)
As a testimonial, I've spent the last 10 years or so writing music for fun and games, and I promised myself a long time ago that whenever I was able to record these songs I would. Linux and free software has made that possible for me. Check out my sig.:)
Windows couldn't do it for me. Period. Sure, I could have spent hundreds of dollars on some app that *might* have done it. Then I could've spent the next 3 months learning how to use it. Instead I've got two apps that make a killer combination, and both have user interfaces that are familiar to me (one of them uses the command line!).
LOL, I think that's sort of the point - the end user shouldn't have to think about interfaces, sound servers, and replacing one with the other!
Luckily, that problem has been solved with ALSA being merged into the code, and ALSA seems to support every sound card.
iirc, the problem with OSS as a sound interface was that in some instances you had to pay some money for better stuff.
As far as the sound servers go, perhaps you should consider looking at the projects that actually use the sound interfaces you're talking shit about. The ones I'm working with (as an enduser), both ecasound and Audacity, have OSS interfaces. Audacity is adding ALSA as portaudio gets it. They're looking to add Jack and Arts support as well. Ecasound already has alsa, jack, and arts support. From the end-user's point of view, it doesn't matter, the apps both support something you already have on your computer. From the audiophile's point of view, it doesn't matter, the apps both support the one you want.:) (Audacity's is forthcoming, btw)
This is a classic example of people not knowing what the fuck they're talking about, that's all.:)
I'm spoiled by my 'Setup.exe, [Ok], [Ok], [Ok] *bam* you're up and running' expectation I've developed from using Windows 2000.
That's funny, this is an experience I've *never* had with windows 2000. Software yes, drivers no. maybe now, 3 years after the initial relase of the new hardware abstraction layer, maybe NOW companies are finally getting it right, but not back when I actually used that stupid OS.
Aside from that, the Linux kernel scans the hardware at boot time and loads whatever modules it needs. It's got some conf files in etc to configure the modules with. So all the hardware vendors have to do is give us a 2.2.x and a 2.4.x module with some basic instructions on installing it. It's just not that hard to do, especially comparing it to making Windows drivers.
For windows, sure you can click your setup.exe and it's up and running, but did you bother to consider that your installer had to see if it was win95/95, winMe, win2k, nt4, or winXP before it installed a driver? That's FIVE (count'em) different HALs they provide for! With Linux, there's only 3 relevant stable kernels at the moment. Lots of subversions of them, certainly, but only 3 when it comes down to it. Write for the LCD of each of them and make a driver for 2.0.x, 2.2.x, and 2.4.x.
BETTER YET. Get your driver programmers to submit the drivers directly to LKML and see if they're accepted. I imagine they would be if there wasn't a better one already available. They might rewrite it, they will almost certainly audit it. If you are serious about supporting Linux, you'll check with the kernel developers.
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I think we're saying the same thing here... Note I said "unfettered, unsupervised" access. Without an adult there to provide context, interpretation, and moral clarity, their pliable young mind might that that it's normal to perform some unspeakable act on a neighborhood cat. Like you, I think you cannot completely shield children from the world, but they should only be exposed at the time and age of the PARENT'S choosing... ie. when they are mature enough to learn the necessary lesson.
I think I got the impression from your other post that you were in favor of an automated method of censorship.
One of my basic problems is that I don't know that I'm qualified to determine when my kid is mature enough for something. As an example, I'm certain that I was mature enough for the typical sex talk when I was 10 or 11, but my parents didn't think it was an issue unless I actually had a girlfriend, which didn't happen until I was 17. So for 6-7 years I sputtered around in a great deal of confusion in the worst part of puberty. Now, I'm not laying claim to any lingering scars from the period. :) However, when the time comes, how will I know when my kids are mature enough for the discussion? Typically I base it on how well they understand related concepts. Obviously, at 4, my daughter who's playing "I'm getting married to my brother!" isn't quite ready. I have tried to talk to her about DNA, recessive genes, and so forth and the dangers of inbreeding. She just gets real confused.
The basic problem I have with automated methods of dealing with human problems is that I've seen quite a few parents use similar techniques (and the old-school copouts, like "they should learn that in school, it's not my fault if the school didn't teach it", or "The school should've kept their mouth shut, because I don't wanna deal with this problem, it'll never happen to *my* kid") as an excuse to not raise their kids. It's too easy. "Oh honey, we don't have to talk to them about sex, they just don't have to know about it. Look, we've got filtering in place for the internet, the tv, the windows on the house, and even the windows on the car! We don't ever have to mention it to them, and they'll learn about it in school."
OTOH, an automated tool like the ones the article is about might be a good parenting tool, as long as it's not leaned on. Kind of like the windows administrator installing his event log monitor, and then he immediately quits reading his event logs. Why? He's still gotta look at them every now and then, doesn't he?
You are absolutely correct; kids will come across this kind of stuff... it just shouldn't be left to them to try understanding/interpreting on their own
When it comes down to it, I think we're more or less on the same page. :) You're right about that. :)
As a parent myself, I think any parent who gives their child unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet is a fool; you might end up raising a kid who's a combination of Benny Hill and Ted Bundy. Kids too young to understand the difference between good/bad, normal/abnormal, etc don't need to be downloading hard-core pr0n, and faces-of-death pics.
As a parent myself, I have to disagree completely with you on this point. I think that education is the key to raising health kids capable of adjusting to their environment. Censorship is not education. It is, in fact, anti-education. I do not censor the internet from my kids (of course, neither of them are old enough to read, quite yet, so they don't use the computer anyway) and I have no intention of doing so. I've gone out and looked at the stuff on the internet that you would censor, and I'll admit that I don't want them to see it. However, consider this: Kid downloads kiddie porn. Says "Daddy, what's this?" I say "That's why you don't talk to strangers." Easy enough, right?
Sure, I make it sound easy, but as with all parenting issues, it's a lot more complex than that. The point, though, is that you never get to talk about the hard stuff if it never comes up. My parents practiced censorship on me, and I found myself at 18 ready to take on the world, but unprepared for the world as it really is.
Leave the filtering to the parents, if they so choose. As long as it's in the privacy of their own home, and as long as it's not kiddie pr0n, I'd say let adults download what they want.
Luckily, I agree very strongly with this. :) So you won't hear me trying to actually legislate my ideas of parenting. :)
Normally I don't respond to Anonymous Coward, because the bastard isn't listening.
Do you even realize how Lindows is funded???
As a matter of fact I don't, and I think it would be extremely helpful for the discussion if someone who does know would post the details.
I'm inclined to think that it's funded by the CEO's own private fortune that he made at mp3.com or something like that, but I don't know that for a fact.
i think he wanted you to look it up.
Wouldn't have been funny if I looked it up. ;(
BTW, most of you are undoubtedly also ignorant of the fact that the english word "gullible" is a colloquialism that is typically omitted from dictionaries.
You're full of shit.
Now where did my linux go....
What about the Internet Explorer case, that Microsoft won because its a generic term. Yet they claim Windows is a trademark, gee why didnt they sue the X Consortum.
Um, because XWindows totally predates MS Windows? Keep in mind, Microsoft didn't do anything that hadn't already been done with Windows. Neither did Apple or the X guys. I don't think Xerox even was doing anything that hadn't already been done, really.
The basic problem here is that in the mid-80s it was fairly obvious to anybody paying attention that computers were all going GUI. AFter spending hours trying to explain to my mom that in order to play her stupid card game she had to type "LOAD "cardgame",8,1", but in order to play sea route to india she only had to type "LOAD "searoute",8", but she also had to type "RUN" when it was done.
With everything going GUI, how else would you do it? Personally, I tried pretty hard to come up with something that wasn't Mac-like, and failed. :(
I know it would be risky to try to point out Microsoft as a 'good guy' in any context here, but they've generally adopted a corporate strategy of winning in the marketplace, not the courtroom. The Lindows lawsuit is unusual for them.
I recall rooting for MS back then, because if they won then Apple wasn't going to go after Commodore for the Amiga OS. Maybe commodore had licensed the stuff from APple, but I've never heard anything of the sort. In any case, MS was the good guy back then standing up to the evil anti-competitive Apple.
But the Lindows lawsuit is not unusual. They're making spurious claims and taking a small startup into court. How is that unusual for Microsoft?
I just hope that the court at least considers the case logically, if not idealistically. Either way, I reckon MS is in the wrong on this one.
Do you really think MS cares about winning? Startup companies notoriously don't have a lot of money, and they need every penny to get out of the red. By taking Lindows into court and making them spend their venture capital on a stupid court battle, Microsoft is effectively making them spend their investment capital on garbage, rather than producing a product. MS doesn't care about winning, they only care about the attritional effects a long and expensive court case will have on a startup.
This is just one of the ways they work to maintain their monopoly. If they win, great. If they lose, no loss for them. The important thing is that Lindows is screwed.
I don't actually know if Lindows is screwed or not, but I suspect that if they didn't think they could fight, win, and continue producing their product, then they would have just changed their name and settled. OTOH, it's entirely possible that the entire purpose of Lindows is to fight this court battle, and they created LindowsOS just for the sake of this fight. Why they would do it is unclear to me, but that someone would view it as a needed action is quite clear.
BTW, any of you folks use Lindows? Any reason for me to abandon Mandrake in favor of Lindows?
None that I can see. I'm not using Lindows, but I understand that Lindows is targetted at Windows users as a step towards migrating to a free OS. It provides a Windows-like look and feel on top of a Debian GNU/Linux. If you're already using Mandrake, then likely you don't need the baby-step migration that Lindows provides.
I definitely think it's worth looking into Lindows as a distribution to recommend to grandma and all the other people in your life that use Windows but don't want to contribute to the monopoly anymore. I just haven't done it. It's not worth $200 to me to find out right now. Instead, when I next go to buy a computer I'm thinking seriously of buying a Walmart Lindows-loaded PC, trying out Lindows, and then wiping it when I'm satisfied in favor of Mandrake. :)
Actually Bush has known for ages where the button is but only recently has he worked out how to use it.
Luckily, he didn't use trial and error to figure it out.
No! Huygens [esa.int] will not be studying "that planet". It will land on Titan, a moon.
If those bastards at NASA bring that thing back after it lands on titan, I'll rip their guts out. Ain't no slug riding on *my* back!
Your brain is wired to skip over mistakes like that... it helps you parse the sentence more efficiently!
Were you trying to say that "Dogs in the ass are a nice treat?" 'cause that's what I read....
Er, ok. yeah.
because spagetti with a spoon just ain't right.
Um, spaghetti is best eaten with chopsticks. :)
I respect the GIMP project, but calling it the "GIMP" is like naming a car the "Ford Lemon" or "Mercury Clunker".
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but your simile fell quite short. If you were to name a car the "Ford Lemon", you would just be repeating yourself. Same with "Mercury Clunker". Keep in mind, though, that Mercury is made by Ford, and the cars are the same. For example, the Mercury Sable is just a dressed up Ford Taurus, and they're both big pieces of shit.
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but your simile fell quite short. If you were to name a car the "Ford Lemon", you would just be repeating yourself. Same with "Mercury Clunker". Keep in mind, though, that Mercury is made by Ford, and the cars are the same. For example, the Mercury Sable is just a dressed up Ford Taurus, and they're both big pieces of shit.
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but your simile fell quite short. If you were to name a car the "Ford Lemon", you would just be repeating yourself. Same with "Mercury Clunker". Keep in mind, though, that Mercury is made by Ford, and the cars are the same. For example, the Mercury Sable is just a dressed up Ford Taurus, and they're both big pieces of shit.
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but your simile fell quite short. If you were to name a car the "Ford Lemon", you would just be repeating yourself.......
Gimp is a name subject to ridicule, at least now I can use something that dosen't sound lame.
Obvious question:
How do you encode your mp3's?
Well, there's a bad example if I've ever seen one. Just because Linux is newer doesn't mean it's better.
Idiot. That wasn't an argument for LInux being better, that was an argument for hardware manufacturers to make drivers for it. Next time, read the whole thread, dude.
Am I the only one that read the headline and wondered how you can embed a massage into an executable?
Only one reasonable response to this post.
YOU ARE SO FIRED.
Linus works as a desktop for me.
How do you get him to keep still?
Two answers:
1. Pay him.
2. Don't call him RMS/Linus.
umm I take offense, "us crackheads" are smart enough to add/edit stuff ourselves witch in reality if you know what you are doing is 10-20x faster than waiting on a stupid os wizard.
Add new drive: echo /dev/sda1 /fire vfat \ rw,users,auto,showexec,umask=000,quiet 0 0 >> /etc/fstab
time: 2 seconds
sit and wait for gui time: 2-5 minutes
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's GNU/Linux.
huh....its like soap. you can get many flavours. The most popular is RedHat but you know this driver is supported better in the other distro but you know the security is best in Bastille but you know debian is the best in stability so you have to decide what you want to do
Looks to me like you failed to provide a unified front. People ask me about Linux and I say "It's a free OS, you can download several for free." Then they say "Where?". I just tell them "Well, you should check out Mandrake first. It's the one I use, so I definitely recommend it. There's a lot of choice in distributions, but they're all built on the same stuff, so they interoperate well. Mandrake's a great one to start with, and you may never need another one. The beauty of choice, though, is that if you like Linux but you're dissatisfied with Mandrake, you can check out the others."
It's every bit in how you present it. Just make sure you're telling them the truth, and you're doing everything you can to help them (and charging an appropriate fee if you prefer).
From a university's standpoint, say they want their students to use Linux, but they don't want to support a few different distributions? Fine, roll their own and tell the kids "use this one or find someone else to support it. You're tuition covers this one." Anything unreasonable about that? They can give their kids something that installs out of the box and works on their network. Can they do that with Windows? Nope. They can achieve a close approximation, but not the real deal. Linux is the way...
If Linus and RMS had stopped to worry about whether they were duplicating someone else's efforts, where would we be? Nowhere.
I disagree with your answer. :) We'd be in handcuffs along with the rest of the Windows lusers....
Pardon my elitist attitude. :)
You are too busy demanding the next thing to appreciate what you have and how far this whole thing has come (I say this as someone who has been using linux for only about 3 1/2 years).
Dude, I've only been at it for about a year now, and I've already seen HUGE leaps forward! I'm hooked.... :)
As a testimonial, I've spent the last 10 years or so writing music for fun and games, and I promised myself a long time ago that whenever I was able to record these songs I would. Linux and free software has made that possible for me. Check out my sig. :)
Windows couldn't do it for me. Period. Sure, I could have spent hundreds of dollars on some app that *might* have done it. Then I could've spent the next 3 months learning how to use it. Instead I've got two apps that make a killer combination, and both have user interfaces that are familiar to me (one of them uses the command line!).
LOL, I think that's sort of the point - the end user shouldn't have to think about interfaces, sound servers, and replacing one with the other!
Luckily, that problem has been solved with ALSA being merged into the code, and ALSA seems to support every sound card.
iirc, the problem with OSS as a sound interface was that in some instances you had to pay some money for better stuff.
As far as the sound servers go, perhaps you should consider looking at the projects that actually use the sound interfaces you're talking shit about. The ones I'm working with (as an enduser), both ecasound and Audacity, have OSS interfaces. Audacity is adding ALSA as portaudio gets it. They're looking to add Jack and Arts support as well. Ecasound already has alsa, jack, and arts support. From the end-user's point of view, it doesn't matter, the apps both support something you already have on your computer. From the audiophile's point of view, it doesn't matter, the apps both support the one you want. :) (Audacity's is forthcoming, btw)
This is a classic example of people not knowing what the fuck they're talking about, that's all. :)
I'm spoiled by my 'Setup.exe, [Ok], [Ok], [Ok] *bam* you're up and running' expectation I've developed from using Windows 2000.
That's funny, this is an experience I've *never* had with windows 2000. Software yes, drivers no. maybe now, 3 years after the initial relase of the new hardware abstraction layer, maybe NOW companies are finally getting it right, but not back when I actually used that stupid OS.
Aside from that, the Linux kernel scans the hardware at boot time and loads whatever modules it needs. It's got some conf files in etc to configure the modules with. So all the hardware vendors have to do is give us a 2.2.x and a 2.4.x module with some basic instructions on installing it. It's just not that hard to do, especially comparing it to making Windows drivers.
For windows, sure you can click your setup.exe and it's up and running, but did you bother to consider that your installer had to see if it was win95/95, winMe, win2k, nt4, or winXP before it installed a driver? That's FIVE (count'em) different HALs they provide for! With Linux, there's only 3 relevant stable kernels at the moment. Lots of subversions of them, certainly, but only 3 when it comes down to it. Write for the LCD of each of them and make a driver for 2.0.x, 2.2.x, and 2.4.x.
BETTER YET. Get your driver programmers to submit the drivers directly to LKML and see if they're accepted. I imagine they would be if there wasn't a better one already available. They might rewrite it, they will almost certainly audit it. If you are serious about supporting Linux, you'll check with the kernel developers.