Even if you are in a rush it can often be better. As I mentioned, I used to take it just across the state (Pennsylvania). I live a bit over an hour from the airport. Had to plan to get there around two hours before the flight (or at least an hour and a half or they won't let you check in), then you sit on the runway for half an hour, then you've got a 2-3 hour flight, then another half hour at least on the runway before you can get off, then from the airport to whever you're actually going...
With Amtrak, there was a station less than half an hour away. Planned to arrive 20 minutes before the train did, that was plenty of time. Spent around 5 hours on the train, got off at a station within ten minutes of where I was going. There's really only two airports in the state (if you ignore the tiny regional ones that'll add $300 to your ticket,) but there's probably close to two dozen train stations.
So, add all that up, you get 6-7 hours to fly, vs. 5-6 hours on the train. Which is why I said I'd take the train every time if it was under a 10 hour trip -- because odds are, the airport itself is going to add so much time to your flight that at that point the time difference is negligable. Of course, that does assume the train actually departs and arrives at the time you want it to, but usually I have more trouble getting a good time on flights than on trains...
Hah, I would _love_ to take the train across an ocean if I could. Flight from NYC to London is absolute hell; even if it took an extra 12 hours I'd pick the train on that one every time.
I didn't say that it would be easy to get that, but I guarantee you it's going to happen. Well, that, massively increase government welfare, or artificially reduce efficiency. That seems the most likely of the options (though artificially reducing efficiency is up there too, sadly...)
What you're really saying is that you belong to the majority that gets their news from sources that are not as good as newspapers. Sources like crappy local TV news, Fox News, and that story about the cute bunnies that your sister emailed you the link to.
While I know you don't directly say this, the implication here seems to be that newspapers are in general better than the news you'd be getting on TV or the Internet. Which is, quite frankly, absurd. I don't read newspapers because I find that, at best, they're around 90% garbage pop culture and sports. And I'm talking about papers like the New York Times. Was in a hotel recently for a couple weeks and got a free USA Today every morning -- there was maybe one article in the entire paper that was actually worthwhile.
Sure, your average paper will probably be better than your average cable news source...but not by much. I find what actually determines the quality of a news source isn't how it's distributed, but who owns it. For example, In my opinion, the best reporting about national US news comes from NPR, the BBC, or RT. They cover stories that none of the domestic corporate media would dare touch.
Last time I used Amtrak (admitted, a few years ago, though fairly regularly at the time) it was cheaper, faster (for a trip across the state) and FAR more comfortable than an airline. And more convenient. And more accessible. And there was better food. And no baggage fees. Basically everything was better. I probably wouldn't do it cross country, but if my choices are Amtrak or a flight, I'm probably picking Amtrak for anything up to ten hours. I'd LOVE to see what it could become if they invested more in it, but it's certainly holding it's own.
Producing goods with higher efficiency is itself a benefit. That's why our work day is now 8 hours, instead of 12. And if things keep going at their current rate, it may soon be 6. Maybe 4. Actually it would probably make more sense to shorten the week, but you get the idea.
It may be dead, but you'll probably still be able to use it. USB is around 15 years old, so in 25 years it'd be a 40 year old standard -- partially. USB 1.0 will be 40 years old; USB 3.0 will be around 25 years old. PS/2 is 25 years old right now, and you can still easily find adapters for it. You can still buy computers that use it. 9-pin serial ports are...well, I can't even seem to find an age on them, but wikipedia references them existing at least through the 80s, so we'll put that at 30 years old...and you can still buy computers with a 9-pin jack. Parallel ports are over 40 years old, and you can still buy computers with jacks for those as well, or an adapter. Hell, the last desktop I bought (around three years ago) had a parallel port, and trust me, that was NOT on my list of priorities. I think it's pretty safe to assume that, even if your computer doesn't have a USB jack on it in 25 years, you'll be able to buy an adapter for it.
You post it on your "wall" because it's your post. In G+, your page is for things YOU want to share, not for things other people want you to share. If your friend tags you in something and you want to share it with all of your friends...well, that's what the 'share' button is for. Why should someone else have control over what's on your page?
OK, I won't defend Facebook as a shining example of good UI design, but Google? How do I write on someone's wall? That is, how do I say something directed to someone, but in a public way?
Same way you do it on Twitter -- you don't. You post things to your own page and tag the other person. You don't post something on someone else's page -- which actually makes a lot of sense. The problem here is not their UI, but the fact that you've gotten used to doing things the Facebook way.
?!? You weren't a sovereign nation, and the other foreign nations had a direct interest in wanting to wrest control from the British, or at least diminish their control with a view to increasing their own influence. It was never a just some civil war, it was always a disagreement involving European powers. They couldnt *stay* out of it, because they never were out in the first place.
You say that as though no nation would have any interest at all in installing a new, "friendlier" government in the US...err, sorry, I meant "liberating the people"
I've said the same thing on my facebook, but 99% of the responders tell me I'm nuts. For example they defend the Obamacare Mandate saying it's "reasonable" and that TSA employees are just doing their job. ("Would you rather be blown up?") That when I was pulled-over in Texas by DHS, I should have left the police look inside my trunk, instead of saying no/no/no for an hour. ("If you've done nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?") Perhaps I am wrong and the government really isn't heading towards tyranny.
Yea, sounds like many of the responses I get. The government is heading that direction, and the general public is following like good little sheep.
Do you honestly think that you could fight the U.S. government with any amount of weapons you as an individual, or even organized with your buddies, could ever accumulate?
Sure, get enough buddies, enough organization, and eventually enough military hardware and you can beat the pants off the federal government.
Do you honestly think you and your buddies could stand up against the full wrath of the US military, against unrelenting 24/7 aerial bombardment, against battalions of tanks, against biological and chemical agents, and nuclear strikes? Unless your "buddies" include major superpowers like China and Russia, you haven't got a prayer.
How long do you expect the federal government to continue to exist after they decide to use biological, chemical, and nuclear strikes in a genocidal extermination of their own cities? Which soldiers do you expect to push the button to launch a nuke at, say, Ohio? And were that to happen, do you think the rest of the world WON'T get involved? They didn't stay out of our first revolution, they didn't stay out of our civil war, they didn't stay out of Libya...
Were there to be some kind of large and violent revolutionary movement, there would be FAR more resistance from the police forces than the military. Most soldiers would probably go AWOL. They joined to _protect_ the citizens, not kill them. That's the police's job. Aside from the fact that any soldier fighting a domestic insurrection would be in violation of federal law (though I'm sure that would change.) Yes, there are some SWAT teams with tanks, but we wouldn't be facing A1M1s, we wouldn't be facing aerial bombardment, and we CERTAINLY wouldn't be facing chemical/biological/nuclear weaponry. And if we did, that is exactly the point at which we would win. Just look at recent events in the middle east.
Most people I know DO use multiple browsers. Hell, my girlfriend, a college student majoring in food science (not quite a tech field) has Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on her macbook -- and uses all three. Personally I ALWAYS have at least two browsers open -- Chromium and Firefox. Use it to have multiple sessions of the same website open; or because some pages load faster in one browser than another; or because it's easier to remember certain tabs are in Chromium while others are in Firefox, rather than having multiple windows or trying to scroll through dozens of tabs. And not a single one of those wouldn't apply to a casual user -- I'm not talking things like testing or debugging websites...though I commonly switch and add browsers for that too.
I think you may also be underestimating the cases of people switching over for a specific website, and then leaving that browser up for a while. I just graduated from PSU and can tell you that on their course management system (ANGEL -- which is used by several other universities) you can't do certain tasks from Firefox (like sending emails); other tasks won't work on Safari (don't remember specifics, since I don't own a mac.) So any student there who prefers Firefox or Safari will probably end up switching browsers frequently -- I know some people who have to do that multiple times a day. And this is generally from their home computer, so it's likely they'll continue surfing with that browser until they close it. My highschool's website didn't work on certain browsers. My current work webmail and portal system won't work on certain browsers -- and it's a freakin IT company! Point being, there's never been a time in my life when I DIDN'T need to switch browsers on a near daily basis, for reasons that have nothing to do with being a 'power user' or web developer. And I don't know a single college student -- business major, agriculture, engineering, whatever -- who doesn't have a preferred browser.
Of course, all of this does miss the point that they should be able to take that into account in their statistics. If you view a site 5 times in IE and 95 times in Firefox, add.95 to Firefox and.05 to IE. Statcounter has the data to do that...though I'll admit I haven't read this thing fully -- someone please enlighten me if they explain a reason they couldn't do that.
Major software packages are sold with support. Oracle, for instance, gives their salesfolk lots of discretion to negotiate price, but *not* to discount the monthly support contract. That should tell you something about how the big boys think.
But remember that in that case the software is already created and paid for. So if they're not going to pay $x, but they will pay $x/2, you make more profit selling for $x/2 than not selling at all. But if you're doing custom software, if it's going to take you 100 hours and they only want to pay $200 for it, it's not worth your time. Support isn't paid for yet, so it's the same as custom software.
Hmmm. This is a new spam decoy method I wasn't familiar with; Appears Google has numerous ways of doing it. You can also insert periods anywhere into the front of your address. Not quite the same thing, but that will give you a number of extra addresses (depending on the length of your username) that spammers probably won't be smart enough to notice.
See the medical marijuana users who, even though they followed California law, were arrested anyway by U.S. police violating the 9th and 10th amendments.
The constitution also states that federal law overrules state law, so the California law isn't actually valid...assuming the federal law is. Of course, the federal law is unconstitutional itself...but it's not the fact that these people are obeying state law that makes these arrests unconstitutional, it's the fact that the federal government is busting people for drug use. It'd be equally unconstitutional if they did it in Texas, and it would be equally unconstitutional if the person smoking the dope didn't have a medical card.
Agreed. They've never been much for marketing -- I first found them by finding some guy who ran a website about Linux and emailing him asking what the best distro was for newbies. I've never heard of anyone using Madriva for any reason other than word of mouth (not that I know that many Linux users to begin with...) And that probably is why they're struggling. They focus heavily on corporate -- which makes sense, since they're trying to be a business -- but that doesn't really seem to be where the strength of the distro is. At least not in my experience.
The one thing I will add is that if they are aiming their marketing at newbies, advertising things like Firefox and LibreOffice probably do make some sense. They just need to add to that. To people who see Linux as something foreign and alien and where they can't run any of their existing software, those things may actually be new information. To the experienced Linux user it doesn't give much of a reason to pick it up -- but neither would advertising as the best distro for new users.
1) Its got a control center. Find me an OS without one?
I haven't seen a single other Linux distro with a control center. At least not one of the scale and functionality of Mandriva's. My current distro (Arch) doesn't have one at all. Unless you count the KDE panel, which is pretty much useless by comparison. Can't set up printers (well, it claims you can, but it never works), you can't set up wifi, you can't set up system services, you can't even adjust the display to the same extent that you can in the Mandriva control center. Maybe they need to emphasize what it is a bit more -- because I've tried a dozen or so distros and never seen anything remotely close.
4) RPM based. OK so its repackaged redhat.
There's also URPMI, the easiest package manager I've yet seen. Easier than pacman/yaourt, easier than apt-get.
It's a distro for newbies. The best one out there. Best hardware autodetection and autoconfig I have ever seen in a Linux distro. Back a couple years ago when getting a broadcom wifi package to work on Ubuntu required downloading ndiswrapper, installing it from source, and configuring all that in the terminal -- the same hardware worked on Mandriva right out of the box. I had a friend recently with some weird graphics card glitch that meant Arch, Ubuntu, Gentoo -- nothing she tried could start X, and googling the error messages came up with forum posts that essentially said 'it's a bug in this hardware version -- good luck, you're on your own.' Mandriva? Worked flawlessly.
Maybe they're advertising it wrong. They should probably be focusing on things like this. But personally, I've been using Linux for around eight years now, and from day one the distro I recommend for newbies is Mandriva (well, on day one it was Mandrake....) I still haven't found another distro -- hell, I haven't found any other OS -- that's as easy as Mandriva to get started with.
Yup. I started using Linux right as Mandrake 9.2 was released. I was still using Mandriva (on and off) until a year or two ago, when I switched to Arch. I still recommend Mandriva to any new users -- I find it has an easier installer and works on a much wider array of hardware configurations than Ubuntu or any other distros. I hadn't heard they were having financial problems like this -- it's a shame. Might have to go make a purchase or two just to help keep it alive.
Except it's not. I'm all for rasing taxes on the wealth -- any a high national sales tax (like Europe's VAT) would be a GREAT way to do that. First, sales tax usually isn't collected on necessities -- food, clothing, things like that. Which is the majority of expenses for low income individuals. Secondly, with sales tax, the more you buy the more you pay. It's as close as you can feasibly get to a wealth tax. Who buys the most? Those with the most money. It doesn't matter if your money is direct income, capital gains, inheritance, or even "under the table" -- you still pay the sales tax when you spend it. It'd be nice to have a moderate sales tax on everything but necessities, plus an additional luxury tax (which we already have in some sense with "sin" taxes on things like alcohol and tobacco,) but sales tax as currently implemented alone would be an improvement over our current tax system.
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I could actually see that being really good...yea...
Archos devices have both standard connectors and support docking...
Yes...until things get bad enough that those workers begin to fight back.
Even if you are in a rush it can often be better. As I mentioned, I used to take it just across the state (Pennsylvania). I live a bit over an hour from the airport. Had to plan to get there around two hours before the flight (or at least an hour and a half or they won't let you check in), then you sit on the runway for half an hour, then you've got a 2-3 hour flight, then another half hour at least on the runway before you can get off, then from the airport to whever you're actually going...
With Amtrak, there was a station less than half an hour away. Planned to arrive 20 minutes before the train did, that was plenty of time. Spent around 5 hours on the train, got off at a station within ten minutes of where I was going. There's really only two airports in the state (if you ignore the tiny regional ones that'll add $300 to your ticket,) but there's probably close to two dozen train stations.
So, add all that up, you get 6-7 hours to fly, vs. 5-6 hours on the train. Which is why I said I'd take the train every time if it was under a 10 hour trip -- because odds are, the airport itself is going to add so much time to your flight that at that point the time difference is negligable. Of course, that does assume the train actually departs and arrives at the time you want it to, but usually I have more trouble getting a good time on flights than on trains...
Hah, I would _love_ to take the train across an ocean if I could. Flight from NYC to London is absolute hell; even if it took an extra 12 hours I'd pick the train on that one every time.
Of course, based on your talk of crossing the Baltic...your trains are probably something like this:
http://blogs.bootsnall.com/BBQBOY/files/2009/06/train1.jpg
Where the trains I'm familiar with are more like this: ...and I STILL prefer those old rustbuckets...
http://cdn4.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/25_01_1-Amtrak-Locomotive-Boston.jpg
I didn't say that it would be easy to get that, but I guarantee you it's going to happen. Well, that, massively increase government welfare, or artificially reduce efficiency. That seems the most likely of the options (though artificially reducing efficiency is up there too, sadly...)
What you're really saying is that you belong to the majority that gets their news from sources that are not as good as newspapers. Sources like crappy local TV news, Fox News, and that story about the cute bunnies that your sister emailed you the link to.
While I know you don't directly say this, the implication here seems to be that newspapers are in general better than the news you'd be getting on TV or the Internet. Which is, quite frankly, absurd. I don't read newspapers because I find that, at best, they're around 90% garbage pop culture and sports. And I'm talking about papers like the New York Times. Was in a hotel recently for a couple weeks and got a free USA Today every morning -- there was maybe one article in the entire paper that was actually worthwhile.
Sure, your average paper will probably be better than your average cable news source...but not by much. I find what actually determines the quality of a news source isn't how it's distributed, but who owns it. For example, In my opinion, the best reporting about national US news comes from NPR, the BBC, or RT. They cover stories that none of the domestic corporate media would dare touch.
Last time I used Amtrak (admitted, a few years ago, though fairly regularly at the time) it was cheaper, faster (for a trip across the state) and FAR more comfortable than an airline. And more convenient. And more accessible. And there was better food. And no baggage fees. Basically everything was better. I probably wouldn't do it cross country, but if my choices are Amtrak or a flight, I'm probably picking Amtrak for anything up to ten hours. I'd LOVE to see what it could become if they invested more in it, but it's certainly holding it's own.
We're going to focus on all the important stuff...as soon as people start focusing on the important stuff. So go do it.
Producing goods with higher efficiency is itself a benefit. That's why our work day is now 8 hours, instead of 12. And if things keep going at their current rate, it may soon be 6. Maybe 4. Actually it would probably make more sense to shorten the week, but you get the idea.
Shipping costs. If manufacturing gets cheap enough, the ideal situation would be a manufacturing shop in the back of every WalMart.
It may be dead, but you'll probably still be able to use it. USB is around 15 years old, so in 25 years it'd be a 40 year old standard -- partially. USB 1.0 will be 40 years old; USB 3.0 will be around 25 years old. PS/2 is 25 years old right now, and you can still easily find adapters for it. You can still buy computers that use it. 9-pin serial ports are...well, I can't even seem to find an age on them, but wikipedia references them existing at least through the 80s, so we'll put that at 30 years old...and you can still buy computers with a 9-pin jack. Parallel ports are over 40 years old, and you can still buy computers with jacks for those as well, or an adapter. Hell, the last desktop I bought (around three years ago) had a parallel port, and trust me, that was NOT on my list of priorities. I think it's pretty safe to assume that, even if your computer doesn't have a USB jack on it in 25 years, you'll be able to buy an adapter for it.
You post it on your "wall" because it's your post. In G+, your page is for things YOU want to share, not for things other people want you to share. If your friend tags you in something and you want to share it with all of your friends...well, that's what the 'share' button is for. Why should someone else have control over what's on your page?
OK, I won't defend Facebook as a shining example of good UI design, but Google? How do I write on someone's wall? That is, how do I say something directed to someone, but in a public way?
Same way you do it on Twitter -- you don't. You post things to your own page and tag the other person. You don't post something on someone else's page -- which actually makes a lot of sense. The problem here is not their UI, but the fact that you've gotten used to doing things the Facebook way.
?!? You weren't a sovereign nation, and the other foreign nations had a direct interest in wanting to wrest control from the British, or at least diminish their control with a view to increasing their own influence. It was never a just some civil war, it was always a disagreement involving European powers. They couldnt *stay* out of it, because they never were out in the first place.
You say that as though no nation would have any interest at all in installing a new, "friendlier" government in the US...err, sorry, I meant "liberating the people"
I've said the same thing on my facebook, but 99% of the responders tell me I'm nuts. For example they defend the Obamacare Mandate saying it's "reasonable" and that TSA employees are just doing their job. ("Would you rather be blown up?") That when I was pulled-over in Texas by DHS, I should have left the police look inside my trunk, instead of saying no/no/no for an hour. ("If you've done nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?") Perhaps I am wrong and the government really isn't heading towards tyranny.
Yea, sounds like many of the responses I get. The government is heading that direction, and the general public is following like good little sheep.
Do you honestly think that you could fight the U.S. government with any amount of weapons you as an individual, or even organized with your buddies, could ever accumulate?
Sure, get enough buddies, enough organization, and eventually enough military hardware and you can beat the pants off the federal government.
Do you honestly think you and your buddies could stand up against the full wrath of the US military, against unrelenting 24/7 aerial bombardment, against battalions of tanks, against biological and chemical agents, and nuclear strikes? Unless your "buddies" include major superpowers like China and Russia, you haven't got a prayer.
How long do you expect the federal government to continue to exist after they decide to use biological, chemical, and nuclear strikes in a genocidal extermination of their own cities? Which soldiers do you expect to push the button to launch a nuke at, say, Ohio? And were that to happen, do you think the rest of the world WON'T get involved? They didn't stay out of our first revolution, they didn't stay out of our civil war, they didn't stay out of Libya...
Were there to be some kind of large and violent revolutionary movement, there would be FAR more resistance from the police forces than the military. Most soldiers would probably go AWOL. They joined to _protect_ the citizens, not kill them. That's the police's job. Aside from the fact that any soldier fighting a domestic insurrection would be in violation of federal law (though I'm sure that would change.) Yes, there are some SWAT teams with tanks, but we wouldn't be facing A1M1s, we wouldn't be facing aerial bombardment, and we CERTAINLY wouldn't be facing chemical/biological/nuclear weaponry. And if we did, that is exactly the point at which we would win. Just look at recent events in the middle east.
Most people I know DO use multiple browsers. Hell, my girlfriend, a college student majoring in food science (not quite a tech field) has Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on her macbook -- and uses all three. Personally I ALWAYS have at least two browsers open -- Chromium and Firefox. Use it to have multiple sessions of the same website open; or because some pages load faster in one browser than another; or because it's easier to remember certain tabs are in Chromium while others are in Firefox, rather than having multiple windows or trying to scroll through dozens of tabs. And not a single one of those wouldn't apply to a casual user -- I'm not talking things like testing or debugging websites...though I commonly switch and add browsers for that too.
I think you may also be underestimating the cases of people switching over for a specific website, and then leaving that browser up for a while. I just graduated from PSU and can tell you that on their course management system (ANGEL -- which is used by several other universities) you can't do certain tasks from Firefox (like sending emails); other tasks won't work on Safari (don't remember specifics, since I don't own a mac.) So any student there who prefers Firefox or Safari will probably end up switching browsers frequently -- I know some people who have to do that multiple times a day. And this is generally from their home computer, so it's likely they'll continue surfing with that browser until they close it. My highschool's website didn't work on certain browsers. My current work webmail and portal system won't work on certain browsers -- and it's a freakin IT company! Point being, there's never been a time in my life when I DIDN'T need to switch browsers on a near daily basis, for reasons that have nothing to do with being a 'power user' or web developer. And I don't know a single college student -- business major, agriculture, engineering, whatever -- who doesn't have a preferred browser.
Of course, all of this does miss the point that they should be able to take that into account in their statistics. If you view a site 5 times in IE and 95 times in Firefox, add .95 to Firefox and .05 to IE. Statcounter has the data to do that...though I'll admit I haven't read this thing fully -- someone please enlighten me if they explain a reason they couldn't do that.
Major software packages are sold with support. Oracle, for instance, gives their salesfolk lots of discretion to negotiate price, but *not* to discount the monthly support contract. That should tell you something about how the big boys think.
But remember that in that case the software is already created and paid for. So if they're not going to pay $x, but they will pay $x/2, you make more profit selling for $x/2 than not selling at all. But if you're doing custom software, if it's going to take you 100 hours and they only want to pay $200 for it, it's not worth your time. Support isn't paid for yet, so it's the same as custom software.
Hmmm. This is a new spam decoy method I wasn't familiar with; Appears Google has numerous ways of doing it. You can also insert periods anywhere into the front of your address. Not quite the same thing, but that will give you a number of extra addresses (depending on the length of your username) that spammers probably won't be smart enough to notice.
See the medical marijuana users who, even though they followed California law, were arrested anyway by U.S. police violating the 9th and 10th amendments.
The constitution also states that federal law overrules state law, so the California law isn't actually valid...assuming the federal law is. Of course, the federal law is unconstitutional itself...but it's not the fact that these people are obeying state law that makes these arrests unconstitutional, it's the fact that the federal government is busting people for drug use. It'd be equally unconstitutional if they did it in Texas, and it would be equally unconstitutional if the person smoking the dope didn't have a medical card.
Agreed. They've never been much for marketing -- I first found them by finding some guy who ran a website about Linux and emailing him asking what the best distro was for newbies. I've never heard of anyone using Madriva for any reason other than word of mouth (not that I know that many Linux users to begin with...) And that probably is why they're struggling. They focus heavily on corporate -- which makes sense, since they're trying to be a business -- but that doesn't really seem to be where the strength of the distro is. At least not in my experience.
The one thing I will add is that if they are aiming their marketing at newbies, advertising things like Firefox and LibreOffice probably do make some sense. They just need to add to that. To people who see Linux as something foreign and alien and where they can't run any of their existing software, those things may actually be new information. To the experienced Linux user it doesn't give much of a reason to pick it up -- but neither would advertising as the best distro for new users.
1) Its got a control center. Find me an OS without one?
I haven't seen a single other Linux distro with a control center. At least not one of the scale and functionality of Mandriva's. My current distro (Arch) doesn't have one at all. Unless you count the KDE panel, which is pretty much useless by comparison. Can't set up printers (well, it claims you can, but it never works), you can't set up wifi, you can't set up system services, you can't even adjust the display to the same extent that you can in the Mandriva control center. Maybe they need to emphasize what it is a bit more -- because I've tried a dozen or so distros and never seen anything remotely close.
4) RPM based. OK so its repackaged redhat.
There's also URPMI, the easiest package manager I've yet seen. Easier than pacman/yaourt, easier than apt-get.
It's a distro for newbies. The best one out there. Best hardware autodetection and autoconfig I have ever seen in a Linux distro. Back a couple years ago when getting a broadcom wifi package to work on Ubuntu required downloading ndiswrapper, installing it from source, and configuring all that in the terminal -- the same hardware worked on Mandriva right out of the box. I had a friend recently with some weird graphics card glitch that meant Arch, Ubuntu, Gentoo -- nothing she tried could start X, and googling the error messages came up with forum posts that essentially said 'it's a bug in this hardware version -- good luck, you're on your own.' Mandriva? Worked flawlessly.
Maybe they're advertising it wrong. They should probably be focusing on things like this. But personally, I've been using Linux for around eight years now, and from day one the distro I recommend for newbies is Mandriva (well, on day one it was Mandrake....) I still haven't found another distro -- hell, I haven't found any other OS -- that's as easy as Mandriva to get started with.
Yup. I started using Linux right as Mandrake 9.2 was released. I was still using Mandriva (on and off) until a year or two ago, when I switched to Arch. I still recommend Mandriva to any new users -- I find it has an easier installer and works on a much wider array of hardware configurations than Ubuntu or any other distros. I hadn't heard they were having financial problems like this -- it's a shame. Might have to go make a purchase or two just to help keep it alive.
Except it's not. I'm all for rasing taxes on the wealth -- any a high national sales tax (like Europe's VAT) would be a GREAT way to do that. First, sales tax usually isn't collected on necessities -- food, clothing, things like that. Which is the majority of expenses for low income individuals. Secondly, with sales tax, the more you buy the more you pay. It's as close as you can feasibly get to a wealth tax. Who buys the most? Those with the most money. It doesn't matter if your money is direct income, capital gains, inheritance, or even "under the table" -- you still pay the sales tax when you spend it. It'd be nice to have a moderate sales tax on everything but necessities, plus an additional luxury tax (which we already have in some sense with "sin" taxes on things like alcohol and tobacco,) but sales tax as currently implemented alone would be an improvement over our current tax system.