You are a problem of your own creation. Nothing anyone can do to help you as you are probably quite juvenile. My guess is that you are in your late teens. In life you are going to experience a lot of things and some of them highly unpleasant. You might want to consider all those unpleasant things before you go creating more of them yourself.
You are a troll. Maybe you'll grow out of that, who knows. I just hope it is early enough that you don't actually hurt anyone along the way.
Reading the article a month ago I was immediately alarmed by his initial tone. It was obvious that there are some real jerks out there in the linux world and there are a lot more jerks out there in the windows world (more in windows becuase there are more windows users). From his tone it was obvious he already had his head set against his own success. He was setting himself up for failure.
Some initial issues he experienced were due to two things. 1) he chose a laptop when he could easily have chosen the most highly used platform instead (the desktop), and 2) he used a borrowed laptop and an older one at that. You don't borrow a car and then drive it across the country. You have to build trust in it first. I would never buy a used car and then expect it to perform without a good going over and tuning.
His initial issue with the odd screen after downloading the necessary files through wubi and rebooting had to do with the fact that Windows itself locked up and he forced it off. If he'd gone back into windows, verified it was working correctly, then rebooted and went into Linux he absolutely positively would not have experienced that error.
The error was caused by an unclean shut down of the NTFS file system. Windows sets a flag indicating it has shut down properly. If the flag is set to indicated it didn't shut down properly then the ntfs-3g driver of Linux will read that flag and refuse to mount the file system. You have to do a repair OR reboot into Windows and shut down properly.
The rest of the article just showed that he was not as competent as he thought. Hell, those initial mistakes show us enough of that to know that he would be making many sophomoric error to come.
His comments regarding how software was installed is disingenuous as he wasn't giving a real assessment comparing the issues one has with installing Windows itself. The fact that Windows doesn't come with the drivers ready to go and that you often have to search the net for them, most commonly ending up on the drivers sites that are let's say less than reputable in most cases. In the case of those computers were you can obtain drivers from the manufacturer, such as ASUS, even their sites are messy and not well documented.
Linux at least works without the need for the additional drivers and in those cases where additional drivers are needed they are very rare.
Obtaining software to install on Windows can be much more difficult and much more prone to infection than anything that is part of a signed repository for linux. In those repositories you can easily search synaptic (the GUI front end for apt) and then click to mark a program to install and go from there. Much faster and much safer.
An example was a customer that needed to reinstall her printer driver after a wipe and reinstall of her OS took place. She downloaded the driver from the HP site but didn't know how to locate it nor how to install it once she did locate it. Suffice it to say that it was installed by someone else and then configured. The icon for the installer was on her desktop but she didn't know how to identify it. She isn't stupid. It just isn't in her field of expertise. The difficulties she experienced are common.
The guy that wrote the article expected to see linux as if it were a Windows clone. He approached it as if things should be done the same way that Windows does it, whether it is inferior or not.
He was biased, ill informed, inexperienced, and wouldn't do a fair comparison to the same difficulties found when doing a personal reinstall of Windows.
No version of Windows prior to Vista could play DVDs out of the box. They all required a commercial codec. The pre-fab hardware vendor usually provided it. The price of it is included in the price of the comp.
Not likely to happen that way. Your example is for software that is too old and most likely been abandoned. Same result happens for software abandoned on any platform. Anyway you give extreme examples implying its the norm.
I agree with your Mac example. I disagree with your linux examples. You are uninformed about linux. Apt and repositories eliminate almost all dependency issues. And the Mac has dependency issues of its own.
Peter Norton came from the mainframe world and created useful utilities for the end user of PCs and compatibles. He was a solid programmer and created a solid company. Symantec purchased him and his competition. We no longer have utilities designed by these companies.
Instead we have a company using his name. That's it. There really is no Norton any more. It's barely even a brand.
I tell people that when comparing the free antivirus utilities vs. the paid take the free, as long as they are of reputable means. The reason is that the antivirus side of things is pretty straight forward. Free does a very good job these days, and no matter how you look at it you always need a compliment of utilities anyway (e.g., Spybot S&D 1.6.2, Ad-Aware 2008 (the latest version is unstable), Windows Defender, and AV such as AVG 8).
The paid commercial product has to compete with these free competent products (and I should know I use them to clean computers every day). When the paid commercial products are released they full of bloat and attempt to integrate themselves do deeply into the OS, so much so that they become the cure worse than the disease.
Not only that the commercial products have tended over time to make customers paranoid. They need to to keep them purchasing their products. A realistic schedule for scanning, once you know your system is clean, along with continued updates for the OS, is all you need--you can be certain you don't need a paranoid schedule such as every day, every week or even every two weeks.
The flip side is that if you get so relaxed about your security you won't do it at all.
Stay away from Norton and McAfee. They are bulky, they are paranoid about their own customers constantly requiring verification of subscription just to get updates (McAfee anyone?).
Stay away from the gimmick. Do you need that toolbar? The 3rd or 4th one in your IE, or even FF? If you don't understand what the toolbars are doing you shouldn't be installing them. What are they doing? They want you to log in, just like Google and Yahoo. They want to track you and your web pages for targeted ads. I'm not saying that Google and Yahoo are gimmick software used to bait you to install malware, but I am saying that there are plenty of them that do and they are taking their directions from the likes of Google and Yahoo. The more toolbars you have the more search engine choices you install. Choose one and stick to it. Stay away from anything that's a gimmick because it is bound to get you in trouble. Windows itself never pops up a dialog box saying to buy this or that software product. Those are fake. Downloading codecs from an innocent site can also get you in trouble and you should set your system to ensure that you don't automatically download codecs.
The bottom line is that commercial software is bloated and creates paranoia, and for good reason--they die as a company if you don't resubscribe. The free products do just as good a job as the commercial. And you can't get away with just one product to defend your system anyway. It takes a compliment of them. Stay away from the gimmick. Uninstall your extraneous toolbars (or all of them for that matter). Your web browser is to browse pages not to be served ads or to be tracked by a product that you don't know is tracking you.
Though in beta it is buggy as all hell, and in so many ways. It doesn't look like safari of old. It isn't really any faster. Watching screen redraws, watching page scrolling, watching page load times, it just isn't any faster. Maybe javascript is, but overall it isn't.
I have Windows 7 on a computer and though it isn't a high end model it does run Windows 7 well. There were problems getting it up and running. But, there are other issues.
What Microsoft did was remove a bunch of security and that made it faster and they replaced the old task bar with another that has some features that you would find in other operating systems. That pretty much makes it an update where they removed the security and replaced the taskbar--thus making it a not so good upgrade afterall.
As well, they seem to have incorporated a bunch of additional DRM into it that Vista didn't have even though Vista had a huge amount of privacy violating DRM features.
There's no fucking profit in forcing me to use an upgrade that requires me to purchase more hardware. If I have to buy 2-3 more gigs of ram and I have to have a higher capacity HDD and I have to buy a flash device for readyboost, and I have to buy a better video card, well, that means that my costs are greater than the lack of profit Microsoft experiences.
This is a total crock of shit. Who cares if they make a profit. It's about me. It's not about me doing something for them. They shouldn't have produced such a piece of shit as Windows 7 if they didn't expect to have users desire the stalwart OS that they prefer.
Vista and Windows 7 are the same thing except some security features and a new taskbar. It still isn't worth upgrading.
As has been said, the problem with those types of devices are the expandability. In the case of the custom build there's enough room to grow for most everyone. The prefab's are limited and can't be reconfigured as technologies change.
In his case he spent too much but he has a nice device. In my custom build the costs are about $325.00 and I have significiant room to grow.
I'd been using an XBMC off an old modded XBOX for some time. It'd work well except that under certain circumstances it wouldn't perform. The library element of it was/is flaky at best.
Then I heard that XBMC was available for Linux. I downloaded it and got it up and running rather quickly. It seemed to handle those little annoying things that the XBMC for the XBOX couldn't. My reservation was that it took away some features from the XBOX and broke others. I found that when I played something and paused it it would cause the whole thing to crash. I traced it to two issues but that took time.
During this testing to resolve those issues I chose to try out BOXEE. I found it worse than XBMC. It isn't that it's different nor that it's incomplete, but that it's both. It's difficult to find things, difficult to get them to work. It crashes -- not as stable as the other choices. It has no where near the features (as if they are either hidden or have been removed).
What I found to be the best was this combo:
I bought a 32" LCD TV with 3 HDMI ports. I then took a spare AMD 5000+, 1.5gig of RAM, an used 250 gig HDD, a used wireless keyboard and mouse (with new batteries), old used DVD drive, a set of 5.1 logitech speakers, an NVIDIA 7800GT video card and installed Ubuntu Linux on it.
I bought a cheap $25.00 DVI to HDMI cable and used that as video out to the TV.
Then I installed XBMC, VLC, Libdvdcss2, win32codec, and flash, onto it. After that I bought the VLC remote control app from the Apple app store for the iPhone/iPod Touch for $2.00 and then bought the XBMC remote control for the same for about $2.00.
One more thing I did was buy a Logitech CAM w/microphone and I installed Skype. I then installed pidgin. I've been in the middle of phone conversations using Skype on Linux on that computer when customers come in. Most show some amount of awe at what I'm doing. The web cam part works flawlessly. Linux recognized the camera without any need for drivers. Sound and video are perfect on it.
I configured the VLC to allow control using the iPhone remote software. I configured the remote control programs to work with their respective software.
I then used smb4k to create shares to video and audio sources (though XBMC doesn't necessarily require this).
Using the VLC and XBMC remote control software I can manage either player to start and stop any video or music file in my library.
The XBMC issues that I spoke about earlier were resolved by ensuring that Pulse audio wasn't used and by ensuring that I didn't select an LCD type in the settings section. This made it quite stable.
I like VLC because I can use the mouse and manage it in full screen or windowed mode easily. The VLC remote allows me to switch easily enough. So does using the mouse.
I like XBMC because it helps in organizing the library though the library features seem to work inefficiently.
I use Firefox with flash to play shows from Hulu.com and Joost.com.
At first I was using gnome as the desktop manager but when KDE 4.2 came out I switched and have been pleased with not only it's aesthetics but also with it's features and stability (though I do get some crashes--certainly more than with gnome).
I set the desktop background to cycle every 10 minutes or so and went to www.interfacelift.com to get a bunch of desktop backgrounds that looked extremely sharp.
I have this running in my repair shop where my customers can come in and see how incredibly useful and beautiful Linux is. I'm not saying that Windows can't be made beautiful or useful but I put to rest that Linux can be both as well.
I most likely will install Boxee on that unit and play some with it, but right now my current configuration satisfies my needs greatly and looks incredibly sharp on the TV (due to the DVI to HDMI cable). The pictures look incredibly sharp.
One point I'm trying to make here is that something nice can be put together cheaply and the other is that you don't have to dedicate your computer to one program. Using Linux and XBMC/Boxee can provide an excellent platform for all your multimedia needs.
You have to be kidding us. You know nothing about Linux. You haven't a clue about how it works or it's design. You are spouting trite comments that you read about on the web. If you have no direct experience keep your mouth shut.
I'm never going to pay a subscription fee to hear an unlimited amount. I would pay a subscription fee to download and own all I want in any given month.
Mostly untrue. Linux does change, but from distro to distro and release to release the changes are in line or in order with progress toward ease of use and standardization. If you don't see it it is because you don't want to. Like the monkey with his hands over his eyes.
If a desktop doesn't appear to meet business needs for the next 3 years it is because it was never given a fair look. Clearly the statement above where you state you have never used Ubuntu demonstrates that. I've worked in IT for a number of years and watched management make decisions with a lack of knowledge which ultimately hurt their bottom line, but what can anyone say.
Ubuntu, in most forms, is stable and has solid performance. It also has LTS (long term support) releases every so often, which means it will be supported in that version with little modification for a number of years.
The unfortunate fact is that Linux has a ton of documentation. For instance, when you look for help on the web you are inundated with support for Linux. So many articles, so many Wiki pages, so many man pages, so many blogs, it's just hard to find out of that what you want.
All my videos play on linux (all of them).
Domain controller and codebase is a different animal than the desktop. That's apples and oranges.
Most of the high end SQL databases are available on Linux and some even started their life on Linux.
Most everything else is just business complaining and not doing anything about it. A couple years people such as you complained about drivers, etc. Those are now non-issues. Linux on the desktop is an elegant and capable solution.
XP had the same issue actually, unless you had the corporate version. 3 strikes and you're out. Vista was indeed reduced as far as I can tell. On the other side though, all of the disks are the same, so if you have a valid key (including the OEM key taped on a Dell machine), you can use it with any other disk (though it will only install the version matching the key, but all versions are included on disk for a given architecture), and it will work. You'll indeed have to call Redmond (which takes a few minutes at most), but it will work. And the key works for 32 and 64 bit, so you can switch between the two.
Gain some lose some, I actually prefer the new system, personally (though I hate both, and stuck with Win2k for the longest time because of it)
This information isn't just inaccurate it is misleading and somewhat biased (intentional or not).
The product key that is being spoken of is a set of 5 sequences of numbers and digits. These digits define the install and product types. For instance, the first 5 digits of the key can indicate whether it is a OEM, retail, or upgrade.
OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer. A systems integrator is someone that sells the parts or completed units to make a computer. A systems integrator defines themselves. It isn't Microsoft that defines them. Microsoft does define an OEM (of their product).
Any systems integrator can become an OEM through an agreement with Microsoft. Newegg.com is an OEM. That way they can sell the OS with some piece of hardware. Walmart is not an OEM as they don't sell parts, thus they only sell non-OEM copies of the OS.
Then there are Royal OEMs. Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, etc are royal OEMs. Their CDs are unique to them. This allows you to install from the CD on their hardware without the need to activate the product (activation is not the same as registration). How this is accomplished is through a set of files that are found on the CD that correlates the OEM hardware to the values on the CD.
There are also retail CDs. These can be uninstalled and reinstalled at any time. If you remove XP from one computer then install it on another you can reuse the retail product key any number of times. There are upgrade and non-upgrade retail product keys. If you attempt to use these product keys with a royal OEM CD during the installation it will fail to verify and you will not be able to complete the install. If you try to use a retail non-upgrade product key with an retail upgrade CD it will fail to verify and you will not be able to complete the install.
The lesson here is that the CDs are configured to only work with certain product keys.
If you try to use a Dell OEM CD on an HP computer the install will complete and you will not be prompted for a product key during the install. After about 10 minutes with it running on the HP computer you will be notified that you need to activate the install. If you attempt to activate it will fail.
There are mergers. One merger was HP and Compaq. Another was Gateway and e-Machines. When you read the recovery CDs you will note that the later releases of the CDs will state that they are only to be used by "HP or Compaq" or "Gateway or e-Machines".
The HP/Compaq merger resulted in one company but the company (HP) retained the other name for purposes of branding and product recognition. That's why you can buy an HP computer or a Compaq computer. But, keep in mind they are the same company and the same engineers, etc. In the case of HP/Compaq they pretty much are identical hardware as far as the installation CDs go but they do still require you to install drivers specifically to the hardware. So, in the case of the HP with an AMD CPU with an nVidia chipset vs. a Compaq with an Intel CPU and an Intel chipset, you wouldn't want to use a recovery partition unless it didn't install specifics about the hardware (except that that would negate the purpose of a recovery partition (which a failed hard drive does anyway
Yes, and the release of those products you mention seriously show that Microsoft lost lots of money in the process. The XBOX was a major cluster fuck. Vista less so, but only because of the bundling. On it's own merits it would not have faired as well as it has.
Slashdot Mirror
You are a problem of your own creation. Nothing anyone can do to help you as you are probably quite juvenile. My guess is that you are in your late teens. In life you are going to experience a lot of things and some of them highly unpleasant. You might want to consider all those unpleasant things before you go creating more of them yourself.
You are a troll. Maybe you'll grow out of that, who knows. I just hope it is early enough that you don't actually hurt anyone along the way.
Reading the article a month ago I was immediately alarmed by his initial tone. It was obvious that there are some real jerks out there in the linux world and there are a lot more jerks out there in the windows world (more in windows becuase there are more windows users). From his tone it was obvious he already had his head set against his own success. He was setting himself up for failure.
Some initial issues he experienced were due to two things. 1) he chose a laptop when he could easily have chosen the most highly used platform instead (the desktop), and 2) he used a borrowed laptop and an older one at that. You don't borrow a car and then drive it across the country. You have to build trust in it first. I would never buy a used car and then expect it to perform without a good going over and tuning.
His initial issue with the odd screen after downloading the necessary files through wubi and rebooting had to do with the fact that Windows itself locked up and he forced it off. If he'd gone back into windows, verified it was working correctly, then rebooted and went into Linux he absolutely positively would not have experienced that error.
The error was caused by an unclean shut down of the NTFS file system. Windows sets a flag indicating it has shut down properly. If the flag is set to indicated it didn't shut down properly then the ntfs-3g driver of Linux will read that flag and refuse to mount the file system. You have to do a repair OR reboot into Windows and shut down properly.
The rest of the article just showed that he was not as competent as he thought. Hell, those initial mistakes show us enough of that to know that he would be making many sophomoric error to come.
His comments regarding how software was installed is disingenuous as he wasn't giving a real assessment comparing the issues one has with installing Windows itself. The fact that Windows doesn't come with the drivers ready to go and that you often have to search the net for them, most commonly ending up on the drivers sites that are let's say less than reputable in most cases. In the case of those computers were you can obtain drivers from the manufacturer, such as ASUS, even their sites are messy and not well documented.
Linux at least works without the need for the additional drivers and in those cases where additional drivers are needed they are very rare.
Obtaining software to install on Windows can be much more difficult and much more prone to infection than anything that is part of a signed repository for linux. In those repositories you can easily search synaptic (the GUI front end for apt) and then click to mark a program to install and go from there. Much faster and much safer.
An example was a customer that needed to reinstall her printer driver after a wipe and reinstall of her OS took place. She downloaded the driver from the HP site but didn't know how to locate it nor how to install it once she did locate it. Suffice it to say that it was installed by someone else and then configured. The icon for the installer was on her desktop but she didn't know how to identify it. She isn't stupid. It just isn't in her field of expertise. The difficulties she experienced are common.
The guy that wrote the article expected to see linux as if it were a Windows clone. He approached it as if things should be done the same way that Windows does it, whether it is inferior or not.
He was biased, ill informed, inexperienced, and wouldn't do a fair comparison to the same difficulties found when doing a personal reinstall of Windows.
Extreme example. To fail on one person's product for a limited few does not mean it fails everyone.
Extreme example. Your example isn't a common occurance.
No version of Windows prior to Vista could play DVDs out of the box. They all required a commercial codec. The pre-fab hardware vendor usually provided it. The price of it is included in the price of the comp.
You can buy commercial codecs for Linux.
Not likely to happen that way. Your example is for software that is too old and most likely been abandoned. Same result happens for software abandoned on any platform. Anyway you give extreme examples implying its the norm.
I agree with your Mac example. I disagree with your linux examples. You are uninformed about linux. Apt and repositories eliminate almost all dependency issues. And the Mac has dependency issues of its own.
Exactly the same goes for Windows.
You can hurt your long term welfare by incompetence in software. You could get fired. You could bankrupt your company.
Peter Norton came from the mainframe world and created useful utilities for the end user of PCs and compatibles. He was a solid programmer and created a solid company. Symantec purchased him and his competition. We no longer have utilities designed by these companies.
Instead we have a company using his name. That's it. There really is no Norton any more. It's barely even a brand.
I tell people that when comparing the free antivirus utilities vs. the paid take the free, as long as they are of reputable means. The reason is that the antivirus side of things is pretty straight forward. Free does a very good job these days, and no matter how you look at it you always need a compliment of utilities anyway (e.g., Spybot S&D 1.6.2, Ad-Aware 2008 (the latest version is unstable), Windows Defender, and AV such as AVG 8).
The paid commercial product has to compete with these free competent products (and I should know I use them to clean computers every day). When the paid commercial products are released they full of bloat and attempt to integrate themselves do deeply into the OS, so much so that they become the cure worse than the disease.
Not only that the commercial products have tended over time to make customers paranoid. They need to to keep them purchasing their products. A realistic schedule for scanning, once you know your system is clean, along with continued updates for the OS, is all you need--you can be certain you don't need a paranoid schedule such as every day, every week or even every two weeks.
The flip side is that if you get so relaxed about your security you won't do it at all.
Stay away from Norton and McAfee. They are bulky, they are paranoid about their own customers constantly requiring verification of subscription just to get updates (McAfee anyone?).
Stay away from the gimmick. Do you need that toolbar? The 3rd or 4th one in your IE, or even FF? If you don't understand what the toolbars are doing you shouldn't be installing them. What are they doing? They want you to log in, just like Google and Yahoo. They want to track you and your web pages for targeted ads. I'm not saying that Google and Yahoo are gimmick software used to bait you to install malware, but I am saying that there are plenty of them that do and they are taking their directions from the likes of Google and Yahoo. The more toolbars you have the more search engine choices you install. Choose one and stick to it. Stay away from anything that's a gimmick because it is bound to get you in trouble. Windows itself never pops up a dialog box saying to buy this or that software product. Those are fake. Downloading codecs from an innocent site can also get you in trouble and you should set your system to ensure that you don't automatically download codecs.
The bottom line is that commercial software is bloated and creates paranoia, and for good reason--they die as a company if you don't resubscribe. The free products do just as good a job as the commercial. And you can't get away with just one product to defend your system anyway. It takes a compliment of them. Stay away from the gimmick. Uninstall your extraneous toolbars (or all of them for that matter). Your web browser is to browse pages not to be served ads or to be tracked by a product that you don't know is tracking you.
Isn't Windows on a Mainframe like saying:
Windows on mainframe -- Linux on a quad core?
Sort of pointless and an unnecessary product that again will go no where and wasted all those R&D dollars.
If it isn't in the beta it isn't being tested. They need to introduce this to the beta before they put it in the release candidate.
And, anyway, from what I understand and my experience with Win7 is that this is just Vista with reduced security and a new taskbar.
Though in beta it is buggy as all hell, and in so many ways. It doesn't look like safari of old. It isn't really any faster. Watching screen redraws, watching page scrolling, watching page load times, it just isn't any faster. Maybe javascript is, but overall it isn't.
I have Windows 7 on a computer and though it isn't a high end model it does run Windows 7 well. There were problems getting it up and running. But, there are other issues.
What Microsoft did was remove a bunch of security and that made it faster and they replaced the old task bar with another that has some features that you would find in other operating systems. That pretty much makes it an update where they removed the security and replaced the taskbar--thus making it a not so good upgrade afterall.
As well, they seem to have incorporated a bunch of additional DRM into it that Vista didn't have even though Vista had a huge amount of privacy violating DRM features.
There's no fucking profit in forcing me to use an upgrade that requires me to purchase more hardware. If I have to buy 2-3 more gigs of ram and I have to have a higher capacity HDD and I have to buy a flash device for readyboost, and I have to buy a better video card, well, that means that my costs are greater than the lack of profit Microsoft experiences.
This is a total crock of shit. Who cares if they make a profit. It's about me. It's not about me doing something for them. They shouldn't have produced such a piece of shit as Windows 7 if they didn't expect to have users desire the stalwart OS that they prefer.
Vista and Windows 7 are the same thing except some security features and a new taskbar. It still isn't worth upgrading.
If they do that they'll pay a significant price down the road. There are serious consequences to killing markets to keep a monopoly alive.
I think the only way to do that is to have you end it, you know, the cancer that is you. Grow up.
As has been said, the problem with those types of devices are the expandability. In the case of the custom build there's enough room to grow for most everyone. The prefab's are limited and can't be reconfigured as technologies change.
In his case he spent too much but he has a nice device. In my custom build the costs are about $325.00 and I have significiant room to grow.
I'd been using an XBMC off an old modded XBOX for some time. It'd work well except that under certain circumstances it wouldn't perform. The library element of it was/is flaky at best.
Then I heard that XBMC was available for Linux. I downloaded it and got it up and running rather quickly. It seemed to handle those little annoying things that the XBMC for the XBOX couldn't. My reservation was that it took away some features from the XBOX and broke others. I found that when I played something and paused it it would cause the whole thing to crash. I traced it to two issues but that took time.
During this testing to resolve those issues I chose to try out BOXEE. I found it worse than XBMC. It isn't that it's different nor that it's incomplete, but that it's both. It's difficult to find things, difficult to get them to work. It crashes -- not as stable as the other choices. It has no where near the features (as if they are either hidden or have been removed).
What I found to be the best was this combo:
I bought a 32" LCD TV with 3 HDMI ports. I then took a spare AMD 5000+, 1.5gig of RAM, an used 250 gig HDD, a used wireless keyboard and mouse (with new batteries), old used DVD drive, a set of 5.1 logitech speakers, an NVIDIA 7800GT video card and installed Ubuntu Linux on it.
I bought a cheap $25.00 DVI to HDMI cable and used that as video out to the TV.
Then I installed XBMC, VLC, Libdvdcss2, win32codec, and flash, onto it. After that I bought the VLC remote control app from the Apple app store for the iPhone/iPod Touch for $2.00 and then bought the XBMC remote control for the same for about $2.00.
One more thing I did was buy a Logitech CAM w/microphone and I installed Skype. I then installed pidgin. I've been in the middle of phone conversations using Skype on Linux on that computer when customers come in. Most show some amount of awe at what I'm doing. The web cam part works flawlessly. Linux recognized the camera without any need for drivers. Sound and video are perfect on it.
I configured the VLC to allow control using the iPhone remote software. I configured the remote control programs to work with their respective software.
I then used smb4k to create shares to video and audio sources (though XBMC doesn't necessarily require this).
Using the VLC and XBMC remote control software I can manage either player to start and stop any video or music file in my library.
The XBMC issues that I spoke about earlier were resolved by ensuring that Pulse audio wasn't used and by ensuring that I didn't select an LCD type in the settings section. This made it quite stable.
I like VLC because I can use the mouse and manage it in full screen or windowed mode easily. The VLC remote allows me to switch easily enough. So does using the mouse.
I like XBMC because it helps in organizing the library though the library features seem to work inefficiently.
I use Firefox with flash to play shows from Hulu.com and Joost.com.
At first I was using gnome as the desktop manager but when KDE 4.2 came out I switched and have been pleased with not only it's aesthetics but also with it's features and stability (though I do get some crashes--certainly more than with gnome).
I set the desktop background to cycle every 10 minutes or so and went to www.interfacelift.com to get a bunch of desktop backgrounds that looked extremely sharp.
I have this running in my repair shop where my customers can come in and see how incredibly useful and beautiful Linux is. I'm not saying that Windows can't be made beautiful or useful but I put to rest that Linux can be both as well.
I most likely will install Boxee on that unit and play some with it, but right now my current configuration satisfies my needs greatly and looks incredibly sharp on the TV (due to the DVI to HDMI cable). The pictures look incredibly sharp.
One point I'm trying to make here is that something nice can be put together cheaply and the other is that you don't have to dedicate your computer to one program. Using Linux and XBMC/Boxee can provide an excellent platform for all your multimedia needs.
You have no idea how to extrapolate? What's your education level?
You have to be kidding us. You know nothing about Linux. You haven't a clue about how it works or it's design. You are spouting trite comments that you read about on the web. If you have no direct experience keep your mouth shut.
I'm never going to pay a subscription fee to hear an unlimited amount. I would pay a subscription fee to download and own all I want in any given month.
Mostly untrue. Linux does change, but from distro to distro and release to release the changes are in line or in order with progress toward ease of use and standardization. If you don't see it it is because you don't want to. Like the monkey with his hands over his eyes.
If a desktop doesn't appear to meet business needs for the next 3 years it is because it was never given a fair look. Clearly the statement above where you state you have never used Ubuntu demonstrates that. I've worked in IT for a number of years and watched management make decisions with a lack of knowledge which ultimately hurt their bottom line, but what can anyone say.
Ubuntu, in most forms, is stable and has solid performance. It also has LTS (long term support) releases every so often, which means it will be supported in that version with little modification for a number of years.
The unfortunate fact is that Linux has a ton of documentation. For instance, when you look for help on the web you are inundated with support for Linux. So many articles, so many Wiki pages, so many man pages, so many blogs, it's just hard to find out of that what you want.
All my videos play on linux (all of them).
Domain controller and codebase is a different animal than the desktop. That's apples and oranges.
Most of the high end SQL databases are available on Linux and some even started their life on Linux.
Most everything else is just business complaining and not doing anything about it. A couple years people such as you complained about drivers, etc. Those are now non-issues. Linux on the desktop is an elegant and capable solution.
XP had the same issue actually, unless you had the corporate version. 3 strikes and you're out. Vista was indeed reduced as far as I can tell. On the other side though, all of the disks are the same, so if you have a valid key (including the OEM key taped on a Dell machine), you can use it with any other disk (though it will only install the version matching the key, but all versions are included on disk for a given architecture), and it will work. You'll indeed have to call Redmond (which takes a few minutes at most), but it will work. And the key works for 32 and 64 bit, so you can switch between the two.
Gain some lose some, I actually prefer the new system, personally (though I hate both, and stuck with Win2k for the longest time because of it)
This information isn't just inaccurate it is misleading and somewhat biased (intentional or not).
The product key that is being spoken of is a set of 5 sequences of numbers and digits. These digits define the install and product types. For instance, the first 5 digits of the key can indicate whether it is a OEM, retail, or upgrade.
OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer. A systems integrator is someone that sells the parts or completed units to make a computer. A systems integrator defines themselves. It isn't Microsoft that defines them. Microsoft does define an OEM (of their product).
Any systems integrator can become an OEM through an agreement with Microsoft. Newegg.com is an OEM. That way they can sell the OS with some piece of hardware. Walmart is not an OEM as they don't sell parts, thus they only sell non-OEM copies of the OS.
Then there are Royal OEMs. Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, etc are royal OEMs. Their CDs are unique to them. This allows you to install from the CD on their hardware without the need to activate the product (activation is not the same as registration). How this is accomplished is through a set of files that are found on the CD that correlates the OEM hardware to the values on the CD.
There are also retail CDs. These can be uninstalled and reinstalled at any time. If you remove XP from one computer then install it on another you can reuse the retail product key any number of times. There are upgrade and non-upgrade retail product keys. If you attempt to use these product keys with a royal OEM CD during the installation it will fail to verify and you will not be able to complete the install. If you try to use a retail non-upgrade product key with an retail upgrade CD it will fail to verify and you will not be able to complete the install.
The lesson here is that the CDs are configured to only work with certain product keys.
If you try to use a Dell OEM CD on an HP computer the install will complete and you will not be prompted for a product key during the install. After about 10 minutes with it running on the HP computer you will be notified that you need to activate the install. If you attempt to activate it will fail.
There are mergers. One merger was HP and Compaq. Another was Gateway and e-Machines. When you read the recovery CDs you will note that the later releases of the CDs will state that they are only to be used by "HP or Compaq" or "Gateway or e-Machines".
The HP/Compaq merger resulted in one company but the company (HP) retained the other name for purposes of branding and product recognition. That's why you can buy an HP computer or a Compaq computer. But, keep in mind they are the same company and the same engineers, etc. In the case of HP/Compaq they pretty much are identical hardware as far as the installation CDs go but they do still require you to install drivers specifically to the hardware. So, in the case of the HP with an AMD CPU with an nVidia chipset vs. a Compaq with an Intel CPU and an Intel chipset, you wouldn't want to use a recovery partition unless it didn't install specifics about the hardware (except that that would negate the purpose of a recovery partition (which a failed hard drive does anyway
Yes, and the release of those products you mention seriously show that Microsoft lost lots of money in the process. The XBOX was a major cluster fuck. Vista less so, but only because of the bundling. On it's own merits it would not have faired as well as it has.