Another Windows vs Linux "Gotcha"

that gotcha.
they made the library to play dvds illegal for inclusion, saying that the backwards engineered open source library violated the copyright of the content. It doesn't respect regional encoding, and will play a dvd no matter where it was encoded for.

try installing libdvd manually [ by looking for it in the "contribs" section of the distro mirror ]

I have heard that phrase used to describe a few Live CD distributions. I have to agree with you that Linux can be a challenge to get this or that specific thing to work. The Linux interest web pages seem to be flooded with cries for help to get WiFi working, even if they already know that their card may require that they use ndiswrapper. Another wide spread problem is getting high performance graphic card drivers to work. (ATI and Nvidia, mostly ATI). I didn't have any problem but apparently a lot of people do.

It wasn't all that long ago that the same thing was true about Windows. It is only in the last three or four years that this kind of problem has been reduced in Windows because hardware manufacturers make their drivers for Windows and then allow Microsoft to include those drivers in the Windows installation kit.

Could someone tell me why you'd want to watch a movie on a computer monitor instead of a television?

"All people on their journet to Linux enlightenment will, by nature, have to learn alot about how a computer works ... Why do we have to make Linux more stupid, why don't we work on making the people smarter?"

For most home users, the computer is an entertainment device. They don't care how it works or what's under the hood any more than most of them care about working on their car engine or building their own furniture. I'm not saying Linux should be configured to suit them, just that they have different interests from us geeks.

HAHAHA, good point.

It is a legal thing and not a Linux thing. If you don't like it talk to the MPAA.

If you have a distro with a package manager you can install xine and libdvd quite easily...something like:
apt-get xine
apt-get libdvdcss

OR

emerge xine
emerge libdvdcss

OR

yum xine
yum libdvdcss

trying to come up with a BETTER wheel all the time, even in the TIRE industry. Because of that, we have much better tires than were on the road 40 years ago.

MS is ALWAYS coming out with new versions of THEIR "wheel", yet people don't say anything about that?

Linux isn't reinventing the wheel, it is making a BETTER wheel.

Lugs are optional.....

we are talking BUSINESS here. That "arguement" belongs in the home discussion as it would be valid that there are lots of people out there with more money than brains that LOVE their AOL because it is designed to be id10t proof, even for the id10ts that we have today! :D

I know people on dialup BECAUSE they think they would have to give up being an AssholeOnLine if they go to broadband.

They would rather continue to pay for a second phone line AND $22/month for dialup. oh my. how do you reason with that kind of logic? Even after I inform them that they CAN get AOL service ON their cablemodem/dsl line. (sigh) :O

I added the mirror [ ftp.nluug.nl is the one I use ] site to the media and libdvdcss was not available for mandriva 2006
fortunately I went to freshmeat and got the rpm from there to install it.

I think patents are necessary, however, the system currently is broken.

The system is being abused but is plays a vital role if done correctly.

I've noticed that Windows is made by just one company.
Maybe one day Linux will have a 'one size fits all' distro.

I say easier because, for example take my favorite game (America's Army), I get this 750MB+ text file. What the heck is that all about? I have no idea what to do with it.

I'm sure after reading some more of this book about Linux that I got and doing some online searching, I'll figure it out.

But with Windows, I either put in an autorun CD or double click on the setup.exe. That's easy.

With Linux, there are source files, binaries, RPM's, whatever all this stuff is.

With Windows, I'm playing the game in 5 minutes or less with no learning, no reading, no online searching, etc.

I know there are a lot of programs easily installable by Linux...I used the repository thing for OpenOffice. But really, for the "best" games that are ported to Linux, I am no where near able to install them.

You are slightly off in your conclusion, you must actually su to root to cause the level of damage you infer.

Yes the Basic macosx user has more priviledges than the basic linux, irix, bsd user does but they are still not completely unrestricted like root is.

Windows brought computers to the people.
Speaking as a Linux systems admin in the webhosting industry, these people are my bread and butter.
We've all seen the growth in internet activity post windows 95 and I would like to thank every single windows user for the food on my table and the roof over my head.
Alright so they're not geeks, and many are dare I say it *whispers (AOL users)
But without them I wouldn't be as comfortable as I am today.

IMHO Linux is the easiest O/S around to use, The latest CentoS 4.2 distro loads up smoothly and there is even a GUI setup screen for windows users to try.
I run both windows and Linux here, and both have their advantages, but there is something about a Linux root command prompt that fires my soul.

This age old arguement will go on forever, one persons meat is anothers poison.
But thanks to the point and click users that made the internet what it is today.
May they forever keep buying those little webhosting accounts with Frontpage Express pages containing pictures of little Joey and the dog.
Am I selling out here? I think not :)

Isn't it a license issue, the same for MP3 , where the distributor can't include the mp3 layer in its distro. Because if he would , he would have to pay a royalty fee for it.

A patent for a physical object is easier to prove that a competing product doesn't violate the terms of the patent. it is the specific design of the physical object that is patented.

with Software, you are patenting an implementation of, as well as, an idea. the Code base between two similar applications will be extremely hard to differentiate, it could be as minute as a change in one algorithm, yet that algorithm makes the two disticntly different, it's the foundation of the patent, yet the patent is seen as being the concept behind the software, not the implementation of it.

"since patents are designed to stop competition, ..."

And here I thought they were designed to stop the competition from using my ideas for their profit without paying me for my work. Thanks for enlightening me.

Microsoft is, for its MSN messenger, trying to patent graphical emoticon representations in IMs. This would ensure that everyone's stupid little emoticons wouldn't be able to be replaced by stupid little smilie faces in their IMs when they send them to other people on non-MSN IM clients, on pain of severe financial hardship.

Emoticons are a trivial example, but they're a good introductory example. Another example: Microsoft has been trying to patent the double-click. I think that one got thrown out, but I'm not sure, and it could just as easily have been accepted. How would you like for all GUI software in the world to be prevented from using double-clicks unless the software authors pay licensing fees to Microsoft?

Microsoft just got its FAT filesystem patent upheld. This means that many types of software tools that deal with VFAT filesystems require licensing. While that type of filesystem generally sucks rocks, this greatly reduces the interoperability of other OSes with Microsoft OSes, because NTFS is a moving target and generally difficult to work with, thus rendering VFAT filesystems the de facto standard for sharing data between Microsoft OSes and other OSes.

There was a patent on a device used to control blade pitch on helicopter rotors. In order to fly worth a damn, basically every helicopter on the planet had to have this device. Because someone patented it, nobody else was able to create a competing product before the patent ran out.

Directory structure consistency? Please elaborate. If you use an FHS-compliant distro, you're set for consistent directory structure -- unless you mean something I'm not getting. What, exactly, do you mean?

I'd like to see more working examples in documentation as well. You have a point there. Still, Google helps in that regard somewhat.

It seems that FreeBSD has all the cute babes pushing the software: http://tinyurl.com/c7m3f

the ease of editing text files that is the issue.
it's the ignorance of assuming that runlevel 3 means start the gui if it's installed, when runlevel 3 is defined as console with full network support.

that is why I don't use debian, they assume that having the xserver installed with a default runlevel of 3 [ console with networking ] means run it. [ which is runlevel 5, not 3 ]

I wouldn't use gnome or [ since I found out this saturday ] Suse, for the reason of wasted resources to have the smb stack for them.

Mandriva 2006 also added a "dependancy" for firefox to any gui tool in the distro.
[ if I wanted an internet explorer look and feel to a browser I could use wine and install internet explorer. And yes, half the "features" of firefox that made it popular are ui design aspects to mimic internet explorer, like the yellow bar across the top of the page when a site wants to install something ]

"Because someone patented it, nobody else was able to create a competing product before the patent ran out."

I'll use your last example to display my ignorance again. I thought a patent prevented someone else from doing the same job in the same way, to express it in the simplest terms my mind can comprehend. In your helicopter example, couldn't someone else have built a competing product that did the same thing in a different way?

The patent was for the control of blade pitch to compensate for turbulence caused by the motion of the blades themselves. You could conceivably compensate by using "force fields" to compensate, except that the science doesn't exist for that. You could conceivably compensate by using a different method for moving air around than the use of rotor blades, but then you're not really competing with the device in question -- you're just competing with the rotor blade in general (leaving you with something like a jet engine, or antigravity, perhaps). The scope of the patent pretty much prevents you from competing directly with that product, however, in making helicopters work worth a damn.

1. Patents prevent building a better mousetrap because you can't improve on prior art. The best you can do is create a mouse poison, or a mouse raygun, or whatever. The process -- in this hypothetical example, "trapping" -- has been patented.

2. Technology progression is going to slow down one hell of a lot if you have to reinvent everything from the ground up every time you want to make some money. Oh, wait, it's already happening, and has been for decades. It's just getting worse as more and more stuff is deemed patentable.

3. Completely aside from your question (yes, taking a tangent), I find the very concept of telling me that I can't use ideas I've developed, just because they use someone else's idea as a jumping-off point, to be entirely, incomprehensibly wrong.

using the "pause" button while watching a porno! :O

The whole idea about technology is that it is supposed to make our lives easier, right? Why should someone, who isn't looking to be an IT pro, learn how their computer works?

For most people, computers are a convenience / entertainment device, not a science project.

I don't think it has anything to do with lack of intelligence in the "younger generation." If anything, they are smart enough to realize that the computer should just do the tasks they ask it to do. They shouldn't have to tear it apart to understand how it does the tasks.

No they don't want to know anything about their computers and they just want them to do the stuff they are requesting them to do. In short they want a computer to behave like their cars except even a car needs air in its tires and gas to run on. A lot of kids do not understand the differences between Macs and PCs or Gasoline and Diesel vehicles. Ever watch a kid trying to use Mac software in a PC or pour gas into his daddy's diesel Mercedes. The results would be hilarious if they weren't so pathetically sad. IT isn't for everyone, thankfully but if you drive a car everyone needs toknow where the gas goes on a car or how to check your oil from time to time. Likewise on a computer the user could start by learning where the on switch is and what is meant about hitting any key. Afterwards he can learn the pitfalls of what happens when you don't have a firewall or any antivirus protection. I agree he shouldn't have to know how computers work but like driving a car a certain modicum of knowledge is called for to operate one. That is all I was saying or meant. You would be surprised how many don't have any idea of the most rudimentary of basics whether it's cars or computers. Ask your self this; how hard is it to learn how to defrag a hard disk, forget why it should be done.

[b]Dawg[/b] ]:)

Excellent POINT!!!! Even I, with my "little above average knowledge" shop for computers for the entertainment value. But then, I'm a gaming geek. I also shop for business purposes. I wound up building my own system so I can get the ultimate speed etc that I need for games while at the same time be able to seriously multitask on the same system.

They're following standards just fine. Runlevels 0, 1, 2, and 6 are the only runlevels with standards-defined purposes. Runlevel 5 is traditionally GUI. While a lot of people use 3 as console-only with networking, that's not a defined standard, technically.

"I find the very concept of telling me that I can't use ideas I've developed, just because they use someone else's idea as a jumping-off point, to be entirely, incomprehensibly wrong."

I don't like the idea of someone profiting from an improvement on a concept I developed without compensating me for the developing the original concept. It might have taken me years to get the idea to a marketable / useful stage. Then somebody slaps a better battery in it, starts outselling me in two weeks, and I get nothing. That may encourage competition, but it will sure squelch innovation.

Go and try playing a dvd on a Windows machine "WITHOUT" installing a DVD player software. It doesn't work there either. Windows does not include the decoding drivers for DVD's. That comes with the DVD drive, or in the spyware ridden DVD software that comes on some of the DVD's themself.

The guy who came up with an improvement is innovating, too.

People innovate whether they'll be able to rest on their laurels and collect licensing fees for the rest of their lives or not. Necessity is the mother of invention, not monopolistic business practices. The patent system doesn't actually encourage innovation -- it discourages it in many ways by making innovations that aren't twenty years obsolete financially unfeasible and legally impossible. All the patent system actually encourages is clever ways to describe things in patent applications to corner the market on something that market forces are showing to be newly in demand.

Generally speaking, the only people who use the patent system are would-be monopolists, people who want to protect themselves against would-be monopolists, and people who want to sell things to would-be monopolists for millions of dollars.

"Generally speaking, the only people who use the patent system are would-be monopolists, people who want to protect themselves against would-be monopolists, and people who want to sell things to would-be monopolists for millions of dollars."

You say that like those are bad things :-) We clearly have different views of the American Dream, but we've both known that for a while now.

1. Monopolists (and would-be monopolists) are people who try to use strongarm tactics to generate revenue through extortionary business practices rather than actually producing anything of value.

2. People wouldn't need to use the patent system to protect themselves from would-be monopolists if the patent system didn't exist. Patenting for self-protection from would-be monopolists is a preemptive act to protect against having something patented out from under you. Eliminate the threatening patents, and you don't need the defensive patents.

3. People who are just in it to sell a patent to a would-be monopolist for millions of dollars are contributing to extortionary business practices, engaging in such practices themselves, and generally not producing anything of actual value.

I guess our views of the American dream are indeed different, if yours doesn't take ethical business practice into account. I dream of an America where people don't have to be trodden underfoot for someone to prosper. You seem to dream of an America where you prosper, regardless of the ethical cost.

There is still a plethora of hardware that the various Linux flavors still do not detect or support, most notably in the video card arena but also in the DASD arena.

I would like to know which Linux distribution you're using. The VM that I use runs the following OS's without problems:

MS-DOS 6
PC-DOS 7
PC-DOS 2000 (7 w/Y2K fixups)
OS/2 v3
OS/2 v4
BEos 5
Windows NT4
Windows 2000
Windows 2000 Server
Windows 2003 Server

Further, I can run any three simultaneously (with a small but measurable performance hit on the host) complete with file system shares, device shares, and networking.

Even before installing up-to-date drivers in each OS for my hardware, the OS is able to boot and I'm able to use it.

If I could get a Linux distribution to load and run successfully, with or without a GUI, I'm certain that I could get it going the way I want it to, but to date, I haven't located one that will boot (kernel failure every time).

** for those who haven't heard the term before:
DASD = Direct Access Storage Device
More commonly known today as a Hard Disk in the PC realm.

I see one where I can profit from my work, not one where someone else will profit from it without compensating me, possibly putting me out of business before I have time to recoup my development costs. I'm sorry, I don't see what's wrong with wanting to be compensated for my work.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to be compensated for work. The problem I have is with [b]expecting[/b] compensation just by virtue of the fact you worked hard, without considering things like whether your work is something someone can't do for him or her self, or what kind of measures must be taken to extract payment. As trite as it may sound, the ends don't justify the means when the means are your effect on other people's lives. As Immanuel Kant would have it, people must never be treated merely as means, but also as ends in themselves.

Legalities like the patent system treat people merely as means to the end of personal prosperity.

Put another way, patents involve governmentally enforced artificial scarcity. Artificial scarcity invites abuse: there's no way to institutionalize a system of artificial scarcity without leading to abuses on the scale seen under the patent system. It is, in short, inevitable that a patent system would foster rights violations.

I recently had to buy and install, for various clients and myself four OSs, none of which played DVDs out of the box. In each case additional software had to be obtained and installed, in two cases that was provided by software supplied with the DVD-ROM hardware with a Windows based player.

The latest OEM version of MS Win XP Pro with SP2 had no inbuilt DVD player and no info on why or about how to get one. No compatible drivers for my 5 button intellimouse but allowed my 32 bit driver program to work.

The latest OEM version of MS Win 64 bit XP Pro with SP2 has no DVD player inbuilt and no info on why ro where to get one. It also had no compatible drivers for my 5 button MS Intellimouse and refuses to allow the 32 bit drivers to work.

Fedora Core 4 no DVD player built in but a help file explaining why and where I can go to get a free player from the Internet. Included a driver for my 5 button Intellimouse

Mandrake 10 no DVD player built in but weith a help file explaining why and where I can get a free one. Included a driver for my 5 button intellimouse.

Since the DMCA and the rabid way that RIAA have gone after people that software is not included by default for legal reasons. I found it interesting that Linux had fully functional drivers for a MS mouse that was auto detected and installed while the MS OS does not.

Don't worry when Vista comes out all your peripherals will become instantly redundant and need replacing as you need new gear for which hardware manufactures are prepared to pay for having new MS Vista drivers created for.

Get ready to be flamed.

I agree with most of what you said, unfortunately, the Linux crowd doesn't allow any opinion in the world but their own.

Read through these posts. Most of them are all about how Windows users can't walk and chew gum, we are too stupid to even know we're stupid, we're inefficient, we're clueless, blah blah blah.

And I'm really tired of the "free as in beer". Did they all read the same book? Is that the official motto of Linux? It must be in the official Linux playbook "what to say to a Windows users".

Bottom line, like most things in life, we are all free to choose what serves our purpose best. And I find it rather elistist for them to pretend they know what is better for me than me myself.

1) The SUSE install included applications. The XP install was one CD, but all you got was the operating system. You had to get another CD for Office, and another for each additional application you wanted to install. I'm betting that requires more than 5 CDs.

2) See above. It may have been slower, but it installed more. Compare the time for an XP install with all applications, not just the OS.

5) Your Windows servers do not let you know when they need to be patched. They let you know when Microsoft says there is a new patch available. There's a big difference.

6) There a GUI tools for most Linux utilities. You don't have to use the command line if you don't want to. It's a matter of preference.

8) The point is that Linux services / daemons don't have to be stopped / restarted since they don't get hung.

You may find Windows easier; great. You should use the tool that enables you to get the job done. That just means -you- don't find Linux easier; others do. I'm not one of them, but I don't have the same level of experience with Linux that I do with Windows. I think ease of use comes more from experience than from OS design.

rickk will probably consider this an anti-MS flame. FYI, all my boxes at work are Windows: desktops, laptops, servers, handhelds. I don't have a single Linux machine in my shop. (Okay, they've got a few in our main facility on the WAN side.) That doesn't keep me from being aware of the capabilities of the OS.

<>

This gotcha is a red herring.

... is still 32 bit, your argument has no value.

Since you pointed it out, Windows Vista (like Windows XP) is targeted at the business and home end user market, not the server market. These markets don't care a lick about 64 bit computing. In fact, they don't even care what the network servers are, much less what OS they run.

You just carry around that Microsoft baseball bat and can never wait to give it a swing.

No, I'm not high. Never have been, never will be, and proud of it.

I. Thank you rickk for making a post that contributes exactly zero of any positive worth to this discussion.

II. Thank you Palmetto for adding that bit of Exorcism imagery at the end of your generally helpful and accurate post. I haven't laughed that hard in days.

III. I'll address pweegar now.

- - - - -

I suspect you didn't quite catch on to the distinction between "accessibility" and "ease of use" in my previous post(s). That having been said, I'll now address your points.

1. As Palmetto pointed out, you're getting far, far more than a desktop OS on those 5 CDs. Imagine if one CD could provide Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003, MS Internet Information Server, MS SQL Server, all the goodies for Active Directory servers, an enterprise-class firewall, MS Exchange, MS Office Professional Enterprise Edition, Adobe Photoshop, Quark Xpress, Adobe Illustrator, enterprise class AV, Litestep, Quicken, Norton Ghost, Visual Studio, Roxio and Nero, Adobe Acrobat (not just the viewer), WinAmp, and a TiVo. How many CDs would that take up in the Windows world? While we're at it, you can imagine adding basically the entire catalog of freeware and shareware on Download.com to those CDs. Now make them all unlimited use free software -- even the stuff like Office, Photoshop, and Quicken. How well do you think those five CDs stack up to Windows' one CD now?

2. I haven't used SuSE in a while, so I can't much comment on the install process. It's not the fastest Linux install around, though, so I wouldn't be surprised it it was a little slower on some hardware than the Windows XP install. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was a little faster on other hardware. Then again, as Palmetto pointed out, there's a lot more stuff being installed. Did you include install time for Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, and all your third-party security software on the Windows system in your estimate?

3. What, you've never had to update Windows? Did you happen to notice how bloody fast software updates are with Linux? Did you happen to think about the fact that you're getting patches not only for the OS, but for all the software that's installed on it, too?

4. You don't. Where do you get the notion you have to build things to install them? I've built from source a grand total of about six applications on Linux, ever, and of those I didn't really have to build two or three of them, and another couple were brand spankin' new so they just weren't available as binary packages yet. The only reason I've had to build stuff from source at all is simply that I'm a pretty advanced user. I guess you're not very familiar with the concept of a package manager, and are probably getting the idea that you have to build from source to install things from some random skimming of an online forum where someone was asking for help with building something from source.

5. As Palmetto pointed out, there's a huge difference between needing a patch and being told there's one available. Patches are released quickly in the Linux world, not monthly -- and even when released monthly, they tend to be released more than a month after they are needed. The fastest-ever security patch release time in Windows Updates was ten days. Ten days is greater than the [b]average[/b] for major Linux distributions. In any case, the package managers on major Linux distributions are far easier to use than Windows Update, regardless of how often you use them, and you don't have to check for updates every day if you don't want to. You could check once a month if you like, to simulate the slow patch release cycle of Windows. I don't know why you would, but if that's to your taste, go for it.

6. Linux doesn't force you to learn "archaic commands". Use the GUI if you don't like the shell. The shell is there for more power and flexibility. The GUI is there for people who prefer the Windows approach to things. As for vim (the new vi), it's an exceedingly powerful tool. It's just not for casual newbie-type users. It's a tool for experts. If you don't like it, use Kate instead -- it's a GUI text editor in the KDE toolset, similar in concept to Notepad but far, far more functional.

7. Good for you. I've compared Debian on a 450MHz Pentium II to XP on an Athlon 1600 and found they actually matched up pretty closely in responsiveness and performance. I've run both WinXP and Win2k on a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 and found that Win2k far outperformed XP after making performance-boosting tweaks to both, then I installed Debian GNU/Linux on it and it blew my socks off without even doing much tweaking. I'm sure there are times XP outperforms Linux, but I don't run into those circumstances much. I guess you're just lucky. Thank you for your anecdotal evidence.

8. Windows is fraught with memory leaks. Hell, Wordpad has a memory leak older than Wordpad itself, left over from the original MS Write codebase. Some of the memory leaks that develop in a Windows environment are cleaned up when you shut down the application or service that's leaking, and some are not, requiring the entire computer to be restarted to clear out the RAM -- the Wordpad leak is a prime example of a memory leak whose detritus is never cleaned up by the OS. Unlike Windows, Linux cleans up RAM even after software that leaves crap in RAM due to poor garbage collection, so, while the initial problem is an application issue and not an OS issue, the fact that Windows hasn't "learned" to clean up after its software is definitely an OS issue. As for your servers not needing reboots for weeks, I'm happy for you -- my Linux server at home hasn't been rebooted since August 2005, the month I moved to this town.

laptop system, 233 MHz PII
128 mb sdram
linux os
corel photo paint version 9

desktop system 600 MHz PIII ( Cyrus chip )
768 mb sdram
winxp pro os
corel photo paint version 9

why the corel version 9 in the list?
I used both systems and the exact same program to perform a 3 step operation on the exact same image

I increased the dpi of the image from 72 to 600, in three steps for quality control.

time on the laptop roughly 4 seconds [ including menu access and selection / keyboard work. ]

time on the desktop roughly 4 seconds [ including menu access and selection / keyboard work ]

hmm, same amount of time on a system that is substantially slower [ 1/3 the clock speed and ram ] to begin with.

says that linux actually performs 3 times better than windows doesn't it?

On the contrary. I have found your comments to be very fair, very level, very non-side taking.

I appreciate your openess, your comments and I actually am closer to your opinions than you think.

I don't think there is an answer except for allowing all to choose acording to their wants, needs, etc. Choice is good whether it be about Linux vs Windows or even which distro to use.

My comments have only gotten more aggressive since this entire debate has been so one sided.

I was hoping to start this discussion and keep it objective, professional, etc but it's obvious that won't happen...what was I thinking?

The Linux crowd has taken over and I'm simply trying to counter the lopsided nature that this discussion is taking.

And I will never allow someone to go on and on about how I can't chew gum and walk at the same time or whatever.

If sleepy dawg would never hire me, that's great. I haven't needed a job in 6+ years.

This discussion has sunk to new levels. There are moments like Apotheon's comments today about Bazooka's product which I thought was great but those types of comments are just too far and few in between.

There are times when you and I agree and there are times when you and I don't agree but I don't recall seeing any personal attacks against me by you.

For that, I appreciate and that speaks mountains about the type of person you probably are.

His point is and Linux users just don't get it, that the vast majority (99%) of the world doesn't care about their PC as long as it is inline with their expectations and fulfills their needs.

And trying to discount the opinions of the 99% is nonsense.

Yes, Linux probably is better. Yes, 64 bit computing is better.

But there are reasons (real reasons) why the 99% aren't listening.

And, I might say, that 99% includes some Linux users. They use Linux for some reason and since it is working for them, they are happy and I can't blame them. I'm happy for them.

Maybe it's time for the Linux PR machine to be fired. They are out of touch with the everyday Joe.

and it doesn't run in mandriva. it's only coded for the least standard distro, fedora.

Once again, attack me instead of debate me. You should be a politician.

I gave a real world example and you discount it just like you discount the opinions of the majority of the world using Windows.

I seriously doubt, OS immaterial, that any 450Mhz PC can compete using a fair test against a Athlon 1600. Sounds like FUD.

Too many other factors...bus speed, hard drive speed, RAM capabilities, cache, etc. And don't just bring the 1600 down to the level of the 450. The 1600 is capable of things that the 450 can't.

What kind of AGP capabilites does the 450 have? Does it have USB 2.0? Does it have SATA drive ability? PCI-Express?

No, no, no, no. It's a multimedia world and the 450 just won't cut it.

Your other points are all actually fairly good except for the download.com part. Yes, it is just a catalog...one still must download the software from a repository.

Not sure if you intended to mislead, but not all that software is included. Merely the ability to browse and then download is there.

That's too bad. It is a great game.

I appreciate you checking it out.

The only thing I waste entirely too much time on other than replying to this discussion is playing that damn game.

Great reviews, lots of $ developing it, tons of servers worldwide, and FREE!

It's my addiction. I've built up a mean ass character, passed all training, top 1.5% in the world in honor, marksmanship, etc.

Hey, it's my stress reliever. I kill to relieve stress...I hope I never find myself employed at a post office.

What I brought up was quite relevant to the preceding direction of discussion. You were saying that Linux is behind the times, wasn't able to keep up with technology advances like Windows. I pointed out a concrete example of how you're wrong.

I don't see how the percentage of people who are aware of the functional differences between 32-bit and 64-bit computing has any bearing on that.