When my father became terminally ill, I finally talked my Mother into letting me give her a computer. Instead of Solitare, I used Bejeweled and a couple of other games to teach her mouse movement, clicking, etc.
It's been a few years now, and she still plays Bejeweled every single night. Heck, maybe she should enter.
Before you dismiss it based on the name, please do yourself a favor and check it out. It's not just Mahjongg. It's about 6 different games all rolled into one 2D/3D app and is very nice with tons of tweaking options, tiles, nice music, etc. My wife and I actually used to have little competitions playing Rivers (part of Kyodai Mahjongg). There's even a two player mode if you're interested.
Obviously there are good ones out there. My comment reflected the approximate 99.999% of the ones I've dealt with who've typically had to be taught both business rules as well as technical information, turned out products that didn't even meet the initial goals, got paid about 3 times what other staff did, and were seen by upper management as the 2nd coming.
The company I work for typically hires a consultant or third party vendor to get something "done". About 2/3 the way through the development, they have us start writing version 2 due to the bugs, lack of attention to detail, and non-existant foresight for how to make the product scalable. While one can say that a consultants job is to get it done, not get it done right, or make it scalable, that still doesn't make them seem any more attractive. Unfortunately during our creation of version 2, we're generally having to fix all the crap they designed/coded into their version.
We generally hire them to get a product out the door (first to market) so staff can work on the real version. The staff hate it because if the company would simply offer a 5th of the money going out to the consultants, they'd be willing to do it in off hours. Upper management have heard this numerous times yet still choose not to do it.
We've got a consultant in the door right now. Our work hours are 8 to 5. She shows up somewhere between 8:15 and 8:45 and leaves whenever she wishes. On more than one occassion she has spent over 6hrs of the day on her cell phone in our break room. She has been seen 3 times on Monster.com or an equivalent, signing up, etc., and finally had to be told to leave existing staff alone. She was spending a lot of time simply asking how to do things she should obviously know how to do. Oddly, she went through a technical interview just fine. She seemed confident in her answers, they weren't questions she could guess on, and yet when she actually had to sit down to do the work, it's like she was brain dead. Since she's a consultant, I can't have her work particular hours, all I can do is make sure she meets deadlines and delivers the product (regardless of how sadly it's designed or coded). Unfortunately, staff don't exactly love watching her do whatever she wants making more money than them.
Consultants have their place, I just wish it wasn't where I work.
I definitely agree that any instability in Windows won't necessarily be tracked down to faulty hardware, or even faulty non-Microsoft drivers for that matter. They're human, they write buggy code just like the rest of us. I do have to say though, that I really don't ever have crashes/blue screens, etc. in XP.
I'm trying to think of whether or not I've gone in and modified code in any open source apps. I've of course modified code that I've put into my own applications, but if I've modified any open source app code, it's been a rarity (sp?) I'm sure. I don't doubt you have though. I'm sure many many people have, I just don't know that I'd use the fact that people "can" as an argument backing up that the code simply "must be better" because people have the ability to see the code.
I'd like to ask you a question if you don't mind. Back in the Win98 days, the/. crowd continually bashed MS for "building Windows on top of DOS". There were a lot of posts about how the OS wasn't actually a graphical OS at all, but simply a GUI loaded after the fact. Since Win2k however, people seem to bash MS "because" the GUI is "attached" to the OS. Another complaint that was heard a lot then as well as today is that Windows requires too many reboots. You may know where I'm going with this, but with Linux, the GUI is of course loaded "on top" of the OS (KDE, Gnome, etc.). Strangely, changing extremely minor things such as mousepointers requires a restart of X (aka reboot to "newbie" users). Even getting a time format change (24hr to 12hr) on the panel requires a restart of X before the change is reflected. Why on earth is that the case? The double standard mentioned first I can sort of understand I guess...it's MS so it must be bad. However, what would be the reason and entire OS with "almost no restarts" as a bragging point would require restarting the GUI just to change such minor things? Does OSX require those same "restarts"?
A little off topic, but...I'll be honest with you, myself, and most of the people I know would be more open to trying OSX/Linux if we were discussing things from someone who communicates the way you do versus the typical "Winblows/Windoze" types. I often find myself biting my tongue on/. because I know anything positive about MS or negative about anyone else is a Karma killer.;-)
:) This has definitely been a nice discussion to be in. To be honest, I've picked up a couple of Mac tidbits from this. Something like that just doesn't happen when each party is always looking to nitpick details from their "opponent" as opposed to actually discussing things.
Regarding my proprietary everything comment, I replied to a similar question about it, but I'll reply here as well. I'm referring to the lack of being able to visit NewEgg, purchase a set of hardware, then load OSX up on it. To use their OS, I have to purchase their hardware. I think they're going to have a whole new view on things when their OS has to work on 1500 different pieces of hardware and is expected to retain it's holy status of being a solid OS that never "blue screens". People can say what they want to about Microsoft, but given the sheer amount of hardware their OS is compatible with it's amazing that it even works, much well as nicely as it does.
As for it being closed source, even as a professional developer that doesn't bother me in the least. People can tout the whole "anyone can fix bugs" statement all they want, but how many people do you know have the knowledge to debug kernel code? How many could go into Open Office and fix something without it breaking 10 other features? That's a great argument until you try to apply it.
I'm not against Linux, BSD, or open source at all. I have a Linux box running on my network, but it's mostly for playing around and learning Linux, not because it does something Windows can't. OSX just seems like Apple took an open OS, made it proprietary, vastly limited the hardware you could run it on, then (for some reason) looked like Gods to the/. community. I really just don't get it.
When I said proprietary, I'm saying that to get their OS you have to buy their hardware...that's how it's been thus far anyway. I can't mix and match a bunch of different components and then load their OS on it. I think that's been one thing holding back their market share.
As for how much ACDSee and Photoshop Album are vs iPhoto being a part of OSX, that's one argument I absolutely hate. People always change their argument based on their hate for Microsoft. If microsoft doesn't bundle a particular piece of software people argue that "look, that's free with operating system 'x'". However, if they do bundle something the same person will argue that Microsoft is squashing competition by giving away an "inferior product" with their OS for free. With many./ readers, they simply can't win.
I checked out the "borrow one" site. Typically, borrowing something doesn't require me to spend over half a grand.;)
You raise a good point. Regardless of whether or not it really is more secure, there are fewer attacks on it right now, so use it until it's no longer more secure.
I guess I am a pro-Windows guy, but that's probably partially due to the fact that it's paid the bills for the past decade. Personally, I don't spend any time whatsoever messing around w/malware. I typically use Maxthon (uses IE engine) for browsing, Thunderbird for email, and run two apps for maintaning security - Avast (antivirus) and Sygate (firewall) both free and very nice. Sometimes I use Firefox, but until version 1.06, performance sucked. Version 1.06 is much better though.
I don't know what iApps or FCP are, so I can't really respond to those. Are there equivalent apps for the Mac relating to GetRight? How about ACDSee, or Photoshop Album? How well does iPicture (or whatever it's called) deal with 20K+ pics categorized with people/pet names, etc.? Note that I'm referring to a single processer XP box, so don't compare it to a dual proc Mac.
As for wizards, I don't typically deal with them in Windows, so I'm not sure what ones are bugging you, but I'd be willing to bet most of them can be turned off.
As for trying OSX, that's probably not going to happen. I'd never spend what they want for them, and as a Windows software developer, there's really no draw there for me to. It's like a Chevy mechanic buying a Ford.
Given what from an outsiders perspective seems like "proprietary everything" I just have a bad taste in my mouth regarding Apple. IMO their machines are under-powered and overpriced. I think the iPod is overpriced as well, but that's a whole other discussion I guess.
If I knew someone with one, I might use it for a few minutes, but I just can't imagine I'd be as impressed as many people seem to be.
Why switch? What's the big reason? Stability? No. XP never crashes, and if it's crashing repeatedly for you, you've got other issues.
Reboots? No. XP only requires reboots after certain hardware and/or software installs, and runs. Why is it I have to restart X to change my mousepointer? How about if I want to switch the panel clock from 24ht time to 12hr time? Why the heck would that require a restart of the GUI?
Security? Talk to me when your OS has 95% of the market share. We can argue it all day, but neither of us really knows for sure until that's the case.
Software? Show me something for the Mac where there isn't a Windows version that as good or better.
To me, there's just no reason to switch. They can port OSX to anything they want, unless there's a real reason to switch, I won't do it.
I've not dug into the nuts and bolts of XP or Vista, but if Vista is making more extensive use of DirectX and hardware acceleration for graphical effects than XP that would make sense.
When XP was first released, there was still a very large # of PC's coming out that didn't have hardware acceleration on the video "card". If it's more common to have that today, then offloading from the CPU onto the GPU will garner at the very least an increase in perceived performance.
No, it doesn't. Consider the possibility that the operation you're performing is simply returning a dataset. Take for example - (select CompanyID, CompanyName from tbCompany)
There's no filtering, etc. performed on that statement at the database. It's a table/index scan that will return all of those rows (not records) from that table.
The only way the resulting set would be smaller than the original set of data is with a where clause or inner join.
Not to nitpick, but there are a couple of things here that don't quite go along with your post...
First of all, if you're specifically referring to stored procedures within SQL Server, simply having code in a stored procedure doesn't necessarily make the entire process more efficient. In most scenerios, the stored proc is precompiled, but the actual compilation time is a non issue unless you're running that proc thousands of times.
Meaning, if I have a process written to do some work, and that process runs a few times a day, it really wouldn't buy me much time (minutes/hours/etc.) to have the code in a stored proc. However, if it's code that gets ran extremely often, it would be beneficial to have it as a stored proc. The actual real world time spent compiling a stored proc would never be noticed by us humans on a proc by proc basis.
When I stated that in "most" scenerios, the stored proc would be precompiled, that's because you are able to do dynamic SQL within a stored procedure, and those are not generally precompiled.
There are other reasons to choose stored procedures over dynamic/inline SQL. Security and maintainability are two important ones that come to mind. Where I work, it's stored procedures for everything. While that locks us in more tightly with SQL Server, it's a well received tradeoff when compared to maintaining code in files on webservers and more often than not, opening yourself up more to SQL Injection attacks.
I may not be telling you anything you don't already know, but hopefully this will squash some of the "Procs are much faster, I read it on a webpage!" thoughts that are out there.
Tried http://www.freesbie.org/ on my desktop last night. While it doesn't have a wireless card meaning I couldn't test that, I couldn't find a way to change my desktop refresh rate/resolution either. Being pretty much a Linux newbie, I don't want to have to hack up XF86Config files just to change resolutions, so I didn't do much more than check it out for a few minutes
It did seem fairly fast, but that could have been FluxBox I think. Slax (another distro) allows you to run it entirely in RAM, something all of the LiveCD's should allow IMO. That lets you really see what they can do performance wise.
While people typically do turn their standalone DVD players off, they don't typically turn their HTPC "dvd player" off, because it's also doing DVR/PVR duties as well.
Not to mention the fact that they don't typically get turned off anyway, they just have to return from standby mode (if you've opted for that to happen). Which is probably not much slower than powering up your standalone DVD player.
Also, if you've ripped your DVD collection to DivX AVI's (typical for HTPC users), and don't have to mess with DVD's at all when it comes time to watch something, the HTPC is now actually MUCH faster than the standalone DVD player that makes you retieve your DVD, open the player, put it in, close the player, wait for it to spin up, wait for 15 minutes of advertisements, and finally begin watching your movie. By that point, I'm 15 minutes into the movie on my HTPC, don't have to put anything away when the movie is over, and my original DVD is locked safely away in the DVD cabinet.
You're exactly right. It really isn't up to the OS community to write drivers for hardware manufacturers. However, as an end user, I don't care.
The pro-Linux camp will tell you "Use Linux", "Windows Sucks", etc. etc. When you have trouble getting something working, they say "RTFM". When you do read it, (knowing that 4 clicks and it would have worked in Windows), and find out it just won't work in Linux, they tell you it's the manufacturers fault.
Believe me, I'd switch at least some of my friends/family over to Linux if these issues weren't the case.
Thanks for posting that link. I tried it out, and it was ok, but on the page you linked to, there was a distro called Slax. I'm in it right now:)
What's interesting is, (and maybe this is common, but if so, I didn't know it) you can run this small but full featured distro completely in RAM. It even ejects the CD when during bootup. It's pretty fast to begin with, and even more so when it's running entirely from RAM.
Honest question, not trolling, etc. Why is it that every Linux distro looks the same?
Windows comes with theme management locked up so you can't do themes without "hacking" some DLL's, but with everything in Linux being open, why don't the distributions customize their looks more?
In the last couple of days, I've downloaded and tried 5 or 6 LiveCD's, utilizing mostly different underlying distro's, and they all look generally one of two ways, which I assume is either Gnome or KDE.
Slashdot Mirror
When my father became terminally ill, I finally talked my Mother into letting me give her a computer. Instead of Solitare, I used Bejeweled and a couple of other games to teach her mouse movement, clicking, etc.
It's been a few years now, and she still plays Bejeweled every single night. Heck, maybe she should enter.
For those in a similar situation, check out Kyodai Mahjongg http://www.kyodai.com/
Before you dismiss it based on the name, please do yourself a favor and check it out. It's not just Mahjongg. It's about 6 different games all rolled into one 2D/3D app and is very nice with tons of tweaking options, tiles, nice music, etc. My wife and I actually used to have little competitions playing Rivers (part of Kyodai Mahjongg). There's even a two player mode if you're interested.
Are you referring to your desktop lineup? Obviously OS X isn't on top in the real world.
Obviously there are good ones out there. My comment reflected the approximate 99.999% of the ones I've dealt with who've typically had to be taught both business rules as well as technical information, turned out products that didn't even meet the initial goals, got paid about 3 times what other staff did, and were seen by upper management as the 2nd coming.
The company I work for typically hires a consultant or third party vendor to get something "done". About 2/3 the way through the development, they have us start writing version 2 due to the bugs, lack of attention to detail, and non-existant foresight for how to make the product scalable. While one can say that a consultants job is to get it done, not get it done right, or make it scalable, that still doesn't make them seem any more attractive. Unfortunately during our creation of version 2, we're generally having to fix all the crap they designed/coded into their version.
We generally hire them to get a product out the door (first to market) so staff can work on the real version. The staff hate it because if the company would simply offer a 5th of the money going out to the consultants, they'd be willing to do it in off hours. Upper management have heard this numerous times yet still choose not to do it.
We've got a consultant in the door right now. Our work hours are 8 to 5. She shows up somewhere between 8:15 and 8:45 and leaves whenever she wishes. On more than one occassion she has spent over 6hrs of the day on her cell phone in our break room. She has been seen 3 times on Monster.com or an equivalent, signing up, etc., and finally had to be told to leave existing staff alone. She was spending a lot of time simply asking how to do things she should obviously know how to do. Oddly, she went through a technical interview just fine. She seemed confident in her answers, they weren't questions she could guess on, and yet when she actually had to sit down to do the work, it's like she was brain dead. Since she's a consultant, I can't have her work particular hours, all I can do is make sure she meets deadlines and delivers the product (regardless of how sadly it's designed or coded). Unfortunately, staff don't exactly love watching her do whatever she wants making more money than them.
Consultants have their place, I just wish it wasn't where I work.
Heh, you got me there.
And that would be different than every other consultant/customer relationship how?
(hardware statement) Exactly.
/. crowd continually bashed MS for "building Windows on top of DOS". There were a lot of posts about how the OS wasn't actually a graphical OS at all, but simply a GUI loaded after the fact. Since Win2k however, people seem to bash MS "because" the GUI is "attached" to the OS. Another complaint that was heard a lot then as well as today is that Windows requires too many reboots. You may know where I'm going with this, but with Linux, the GUI is of course loaded "on top" of the OS (KDE, Gnome, etc.). Strangely, changing extremely minor things such as mousepointers requires a restart of X (aka reboot to "newbie" users). Even getting a time format change (24hr to 12hr) on the panel requires a restart of X before the change is reflected. Why on earth is that the case? The double standard mentioned first I can sort of understand I guess...it's MS so it must be bad. However, what would be the reason and entire OS with "almost no restarts" as a bragging point would require restarting the GUI just to change such minor things? Does OSX require those same "restarts"?
/. because I know anything positive about MS or negative about anyone else is a Karma killer. ;-)
I definitely agree that any instability in Windows won't necessarily be tracked down to faulty hardware, or even faulty non-Microsoft drivers for that matter. They're human, they write buggy code just like the rest of us. I do have to say though, that I really don't ever have crashes/blue screens, etc. in XP.
I'm trying to think of whether or not I've gone in and modified code in any open source apps. I've of course modified code that I've put into my own applications, but if I've modified any open source app code, it's been a rarity (sp?) I'm sure. I don't doubt you have though. I'm sure many many people have, I just don't know that I'd use the fact that people "can" as an argument backing up that the code simply "must be better" because people have the ability to see the code.
I'd like to ask you a question if you don't mind. Back in the Win98 days, the
A little off topic, but...I'll be honest with you, myself, and most of the people I know would be more open to trying OSX/Linux if we were discussing things from someone who communicates the way you do versus the typical "Winblows/Windoze" types. I often find myself biting my tongue on
:) This has definitely been a nice discussion to be in. To be honest, I've picked up a couple of Mac tidbits from this. Something like that just doesn't happen when each party is always looking to nitpick details from their "opponent" as opposed to actually discussing things.
Regarding my proprietary everything comment, I replied to a similar question about it, but I'll reply here as well. I'm referring to the lack of being able to visit NewEgg, purchase a set of hardware, then load OSX up on it. To use their OS, I have to purchase their hardware. I think they're going to have a whole new view on things when their OS has to work on 1500 different pieces of hardware and is expected to retain it's holy status of being a solid OS that never "blue screens". People can say what they want to about Microsoft, but given the sheer amount of hardware their OS is compatible with it's amazing that it even works, much well as nicely as it does.
/. community. I really just don't get it.
As for it being closed source, even as a professional developer that doesn't bother me in the least. People can tout the whole "anyone can fix bugs" statement all they want, but how many people do you know have the knowledge to debug kernel code? How many could go into Open Office and fix something without it breaking 10 other features? That's a great argument until you try to apply it.
I'm not against Linux, BSD, or open source at all. I have a Linux box running on my network, but it's mostly for playing around and learning Linux, not because it does something Windows can't. OSX just seems like Apple took an open OS, made it proprietary, vastly limited the hardware you could run it on, then (for some reason) looked like Gods to the
When I said proprietary, I'm saying that to get their OS you have to buy their hardware...that's how it's been thus far anyway. I can't mix and match a bunch of different components and then load their OS on it. I think that's been one thing holding back their market share.
./ readers, they simply can't win.
;)
As for how much ACDSee and Photoshop Album are vs iPhoto being a part of OSX, that's one argument I absolutely hate. People always change their argument based on their hate for Microsoft. If microsoft doesn't bundle a particular piece of software people argue that "look, that's free with operating system 'x'". However, if they do bundle something the same person will argue that Microsoft is squashing competition by giving away an "inferior product" with their OS for free. With many
I checked out the "borrow one" site. Typically, borrowing something doesn't require me to spend over half a grand.
You raise a good point. Regardless of whether or not it really is more secure, there are fewer attacks on it right now, so use it until it's no longer more secure.
I guess I am a pro-Windows guy, but that's probably partially due to the fact that it's paid the bills for the past decade. Personally, I don't spend any time whatsoever messing around w/malware. I typically use Maxthon (uses IE engine) for browsing, Thunderbird for email, and run two apps for maintaning security - Avast (antivirus) and Sygate (firewall) both free and very nice. Sometimes I use Firefox, but until version 1.06, performance sucked. Version 1.06 is much better though.
I don't know what iApps or FCP are, so I can't really respond to those. Are there equivalent apps for the Mac relating to GetRight? How about ACDSee, or Photoshop Album? How well does iPicture (or whatever it's called) deal with 20K+ pics categorized with people/pet names, etc.? Note that I'm referring to a single processer XP box, so don't compare it to a dual proc Mac.
As for wizards, I don't typically deal with them in Windows, so I'm not sure what ones are bugging you, but I'd be willing to bet most of them can be turned off.
As for trying OSX, that's probably not going to happen. I'd never spend what they want for them, and as a Windows software developer, there's really no draw there for me to. It's like a Chevy mechanic buying a Ford.
Given what from an outsiders perspective seems like "proprietary everything" I just have a bad taste in my mouth regarding Apple. IMO their machines are under-powered and overpriced. I think the iPod is overpriced as well, but that's a whole other discussion I guess.
If I knew someone with one, I might use it for a few minutes, but I just can't imagine I'd be as impressed as many people seem to be.
Why switch? What's the big reason? Stability? No. XP never crashes, and if it's crashing repeatedly for you, you've got other issues.
Reboots? No. XP only requires reboots after certain hardware and/or software installs, and runs. Why is it I have to restart X to change my mousepointer? How about if I want to switch the panel clock from 24ht time to 12hr time? Why the heck would that require a restart of the GUI?
Security? Talk to me when your OS has 95% of the market share. We can argue it all day, but neither of us really knows for sure until that's the case.
Software? Show me something for the Mac where there isn't a Windows version that as good or better. To me, there's just no reason to switch. They can port OSX to anything they want, unless there's a real reason to switch, I won't do it.
I've not dug into the nuts and bolts of XP or Vista, but if Vista is making more extensive use of DirectX and hardware acceleration for graphical effects than XP that would make sense.
When XP was first released, there was still a very large # of PC's coming out that didn't have hardware acceleration on the video "card". If it's more common to have that today, then offloading from the CPU onto the GPU will garner at the very least an increase in perceived performance.
And yet somehow, the /. community will find something wrong with what Microsoft is giving away.
No, it doesn't. Consider the possibility that the operation you're performing is simply returning a dataset. Take for example - (select CompanyID, CompanyName from tbCompany)
There's no filtering, etc. performed on that statement at the database. It's a table/index scan that will return all of those rows (not records) from that table.
The only way the resulting set would be smaller than the original set of data is with a where clause or inner join.
Not to nitpick, but there are a couple of things here that don't quite go along with your post...
First of all, if you're specifically referring to stored procedures within SQL Server, simply having code in a stored procedure doesn't necessarily make the entire process more efficient. In most scenerios, the stored proc is precompiled, but the actual compilation time is a non issue unless you're running that proc thousands of times.
Meaning, if I have a process written to do some work, and that process runs a few times a day, it really wouldn't buy me much time (minutes/hours/etc.) to have the code in a stored proc. However, if it's code that gets ran extremely often, it would be beneficial to have it as a stored proc. The actual real world time spent compiling a stored proc would never be noticed by us humans on a proc by proc basis.
When I stated that in "most" scenerios, the stored proc would be precompiled, that's because you are able to do dynamic SQL within a stored procedure, and those are not generally precompiled.
There are other reasons to choose stored procedures over dynamic/inline SQL. Security and maintainability are two important ones that come to mind. Where I work, it's stored procedures for everything. While that locks us in more tightly with SQL Server, it's a well received tradeoff when compared to maintaining code in files on webservers and more often than not, opening yourself up more to SQL Injection attacks.
I may not be telling you anything you don't already know, but hopefully this will squash some of the "Procs are much faster, I read it on a webpage!" thoughts that are out there.
Tried http://www.freesbie.org/ on my desktop last night. While it doesn't have a wireless card meaning I couldn't test that, I couldn't find a way to change my desktop refresh rate/resolution either. Being pretty much a Linux newbie, I don't want to have to hack up XF86Config files just to change resolutions, so I didn't do much more than check it out for a few minutes
It did seem fairly fast, but that could have been FluxBox I think. Slax (another distro) allows you to run it entirely in RAM, something all of the LiveCD's should allow IMO. That lets you really see what they can do performance wise.
Here's to hoping there's a LiveCD version. So far, the only LiveCD that recognizes my wireless card (Broadcom in an HP laptop) is Simply Mepis.
You aren't comparing apples to apples.
While people typically do turn their standalone DVD players off, they don't typically turn their HTPC "dvd player" off, because it's also doing DVR/PVR duties as well.
Not to mention the fact that they don't typically get turned off anyway, they just have to return from standby mode (if you've opted for that to happen). Which is probably not much slower than powering up your standalone DVD player.
Also, if you've ripped your DVD collection to DivX AVI's (typical for HTPC users), and don't have to mess with DVD's at all when it comes time to watch something, the HTPC is now actually MUCH faster than the standalone DVD player that makes you retieve your DVD, open the player, put it in, close the player, wait for it to spin up, wait for 15 minutes of advertisements, and finally begin watching your movie. By that point, I'm 15 minutes into the movie on my HTPC, don't have to put anything away when the movie is over, and my original DVD is locked safely away in the DVD cabinet.
Great, now they're building the bugs into the chips on purpose? What next?
Assuming you're here in the states; if you have small children, I'd skip the VOIP and stay w/the telco.
It's the law that the telco provide your phone with power, meaning even in a power outage, you can use your phone (dial 911, etc.).
Your broadband provider isn't under that same law. No power = no service.
You're exactly right. It really isn't up to the OS community to write drivers for hardware manufacturers. However, as an end user, I don't care.
The pro-Linux camp will tell you "Use Linux", "Windows Sucks", etc. etc. When you have trouble getting something working, they say "RTFM". When you do read it, (knowing that 4 clicks and it would have worked in Windows), and find out it just won't work in Linux, they tell you it's the manufacturers fault.
Believe me, I'd switch at least some of my friends/family over to Linux if these issues weren't the case.
Thanks for posting that link. I tried it out, and it was ok, but on the page you linked to, there was a distro called Slax. I'm in it right now :)
What's interesting is, (and maybe this is common, but if so, I didn't know it) you can run this small but full featured distro completely in RAM. It even ejects the CD when during bootup. It's pretty fast to begin with, and even more so when it's running entirely from RAM.
Give it a shot if you haven't seen it yet. http://slax.linux-live.org/
Honest question, not trolling, etc. Why is it that every Linux distro looks the same?
Windows comes with theme management locked up so you can't do themes without "hacking" some DLL's, but with everything in Linux being open, why don't the distributions customize their looks more?
In the last couple of days, I've downloaded and tried 5 or 6 LiveCD's, utilizing mostly different underlying distro's, and they all look generally one of two ways, which I assume is either Gnome or KDE.
There's no need to drool, just run to your nearest Staples, BestBuy, Circuit City, etc. and pick yourself up a copy of Windows XP.
See, now wasn't that easy?
You should spank your monkey.