In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Homer
<usenet@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote
on Tue, 06 May 2008 21:19:05 +0100
<p2r6f5-u3n.ln1@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> Verily I say unto thee, that The Ghost In The Machine spake thusly:
>> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Moshe Goldfarb
>
>>> Linux is all about doing without.
>
> It's all about doing without Sweaty's bullshit, that's for sure.
Well, as far as is possible without second-order market
corruption, anyway. Dell in particular has botched their
website again; it probably works perfectly on IE and no
one's bothered to check, for example.
(To their credit, fifa.com has redesigned theirs; the
applet/layering issue is no more. It's still pretty
cluttered, but in a rather nice way.)
>
>>> Doing without proper Laptop power management.
>
> All 22 Linux machines on my network suspend/hibernate no problem. Of the
> two that are dual boot Linux/XP systems, XP fails to hibernate on one of
> them, and the other hibernates but fails to wake up. In fact, I have had
> considerably more hardware support problems with Windows over the years,
> than I've ever had with Linux. But then that is no surprise, considering
> Linux supports more hardware than any version of Windows. Heck, compared
> to Vista, a a twenty year old Amiga probably supports more hardware.
I've yet to get hibernate to work on my nx9010, but there's a lot
of issues involved -- starting with its priority. ;-) I'm not
sure Gentoo's startup scripts quite understand the restart. It
tries real hard, and I've even got the light to blink. [*]
>
>>> Doing without proper multimedia.
>
> MPlayer supports 360 a/v codecs. How many does that WMP garbage support?
>
> How many different media players and codecs do Windows users have to buy
> to reach that level of support? Good job that Free Software like MPlayer
> is available on Windows too, otherwise Windows victims would be stuffed.
>
> How many Windows Shareware and Freeware packages are just front-ends for
> Free Software like MPlayer and ffmpeg, Like e.g. eRightSoft's SUPER?
>
> As someone who has considerable experience of the tortures of codec-Hell
> on Windows, it seems much more like *Windows* that has to "do without".
>
>>> Doing without a proper Office Suite.
>
> If MS Office is what passes for "proper" in your book, then you're quite
> deluded.
I'd really like to know what "proper" is in this context.
As far as I'm concerned office work can be done with
little more than a good text editor, and a knowledge of
HTML, XML, XSL, and CSS. ;-) To be fair, most of that's
clutter for the real objective, which is clear, unambiguous
communication to the eventual user, with tasteful styling.
I've yet to see a writing tool that can do good English
grammar checking, though Microsoft Word is reputed to try.
> With Excel's arbitrarily rounding of numbers;
Rounding? It's worse than that; while the internal
computations are not compromised some Excel numbers will
display as 100000 when in fact they're closer to 65536,
if memory serves.
That's darned inexact rounding in my book. ;-)
> Outlook's utterly
> broken message headers, that make things like spam reporting impossible,
> not to mention the ridiculous (and totally unnecessary) proprietary TNEF
> garbage that litters messages with unreadable *.dat spam; and Word's odd
> habit of refusing to lay out documents the way one wants, by unhelpfully
> "correcting" what one types and where one types it,
At least they got rid of Clippy.
> it's a wonder anyone
> has the patience to use MS Office at all, much less throw away perfectly
> good money on it. If it were the only Office suite available, I'd revert
> to pen and paper, rather than subject myself to /that/ torture.
I suspect the reason MS Office is so prevalent is because
we don't buy it, but the managerial types do. There are
advantages to buying from Microsoft; one has someone to
scream at.
Of course, if one buys RedHat Enterprise, one can scream
at them, too, if something falls over, and presumably once
set back upright, it'll stay upright.
>
>>> Doing without proper web browser plugins.
>
> LOL! That's just funny. Have a look at the plugin repository for Firefox
> some time, and compare it to the pathetic offerings for the joke browser
> called IE. Mozilla browsers are *light years* ahead of Microsoft's slop,
> which isn't too difficult considering the source. As for "Doing without"
> ctiveX, that can only be a good thing, even the US government says so.
What is a proper web browser plugin in this context anyway?
My brain is starting to hurt, and Firefox to its credit
defined such some time back.
>
>>> Doing without.....that's the Linux way.
>
> We could "do without" you peddling the Big Lie®. You and DooFuS are like
> a tag team in a mental institute, chanting your Billy Liar fiction. Keep
> chanting ... it will never make it true.
Dunno for certain about that -- the problem is that the lay public is
very ignorant about Linux, and rather knowledgeable (in a general way)
about Windows. They can trust Windows to fall over. They can't trust
Linux to stay up, because they don't *know* that Linux will stay up.
(And I do mean Linux, the kernel. Even if the GUI falls
over, the kernel keeps running, absent issues such as
video driver failure.)
>
>>> ....and in the realm of Linux it != quality either.
>>
>> Perhaps you'd like to enumerate the bugs? That way, someone out
>> there might fix 'em.
>
> He should start by fixing the bugs in Windows Home Server File Corrupter
> Edition®. Oh that's right ... he can't. He can't because he doesn't have
> access to the source, but more importantly - he can't because the single
> braincell in his frontal lobe lacks the capacity for reason.
>
Reason? Who needs reason when one has Microsoft Windows
Vista? ;-) It'll do everything for you, especially with
the Swinging Watch Plugin(tm)...
[*] Yeah, yeah, I know that sounds weird. The general
idea is that a suspended laptop blinks its front light in
a characteristic fashion. While that part works, coming
out of the suspend, at least until I've figured out
how to do it properly, does a full reboot instead --
which is not exactly the point. I'll have to fiddle with it.
--
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Useless C++ Programming Idea #992398129:
void f(unsigned u) { if(u < 0) ... }
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
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