Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
> ____/ Ben on Wednesday 05 November 2008 15:01 : \____
>> Compare that to sticking a CD in for each individual device on
>> Windows and installing the drivers from that. At least with a Linux
>> machine, the drivers come with the default kernel in most cases.
>
> ...And if anything goes wrong, you don't depend on the company with
> 'trade secrets' to fix it. :-)
A guy I know recently asked me the ominous and leading question: "Do you
know anything about computers?" Naturally he was having problems, in his
case his laptop was going BSOD every time he activated the WiFi. When he
asked me what was wrong, I just told him there was no way to know - it's
Windows. I could have given him the scripted reply about drivers, but is
it fair to lead people on wild goose chases based on hunches? And that's
the thing about proprietary software (especially when it's substandard),
if it doesn't work then there's absolutely nothing you can do, and it's
likely no one else can either, outside of the vendors who sold you that
software. If the vendor is unwilling or unable to help, then you have no
further recourse, except possibly expensive civil litigation.
Fortunately for him, his laptop is still under warranty with PC World,
but all their monkeys will do is ... Wipe'N'Reinstall as usual. They
won't actually /fix/ the problem, so the same set of circumstances that
caused the problem to begin with, will likely manifest again some time
in the near future. And round and round it goes.
What a mess ... and for what? So a bunch of paranoid megalomaniacs can
hoard "Intellectual Property" (i.e. "knowledge") and sell it, rather
than sell services based on Free Software.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "At the time, I thought C was the most elegant language and Java
| the most practical one. That point of view lasted for maybe two
| weeks after initial exposure to Lisp." ~ Constantine Vetoshev
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
23:40:10 up 7:23, 3 users, load average: 0.04, 0.19, 0.17
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