/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

Dear Fellow Driver,

I’m sure you are in a hurry, like most people on the road. Your shiny car with the big V8 just aches to get up to speed quickly, and you just have to be doing at least twice the speed limit to be happy, but, was it really necessary to speed up, cut me off, then almost come to a complete stop just to turn into the gas station before me? Is my Dodge so horrible that you couldn’t wait the three extra seconds to make the turn after I did? I’m curious as to what was going through your mind, and what possessed you to pull off such a risky move, and then have the nerve to flip me off when I blew the horn at you. If you’re wondering why I blew the horn, it was to alert you that you almost bought a portion of my Magnum, and you almost caused some unsuspecting driver behind me to almost meet my bumper. It turns out your efforts were all just a plot to get to one of the gas pumps before someone else.

Sincerely,
A concerned driver

So, let me get this straight. Holding up a sign that mentions who or who you didn’t vote for in an election is an act of treason now? Well, according to some reactionary bridge players, it is. If that’s the case, then I guess I’m committing treason right now, too, because I sure as heck did not vote for Bush. I don’t normally talk politics on here, but the things that get people upset sometimes amazes me. The bridge group wants the players involved to be suspended from play for a year, put on probation for another year, and wants them to do 200 hours of bridge-related community service. *sighs*

Windows Vista launches today for businesses. I’m not a big fan of Windows to begin with. The only two reasons I have it are so I can play some games and so I can VPN into work and do what I need. I’m going to begin working on a way to eliminate the need for it to VPN into work shortly. As far as games go, the next couple of months should prove to be interesting. Microsoft is set to release DirectX 10, and what a surprise, it’s Vista only. Now, I’m not one for conspiracy theories or the like, but to me, this seems like a veiled attempt at forcing at least one segment, the gamers, to upgrade their machines. Granted, it’s really up to the game developers on whether or not they’re going to embrace this technology out of the gate, but there will be a time where you won’t have a choice.

Personally, I really do not want Vista. What’s the point of it? It’s larger, sucks up more resources, and that’s more money I have to shell out. “But Brad, what about the cool new features?”. Well, most of the new features are things I already use or don’t need in the Linux world. Again, I don’t use Windows for anything else other than games. Time will tell how this all plays out, but for now, I’ll just keep XP and not worry about Vista.

Wow.. just.. wow. Normally I don’t post much along the lines of commentary or responses to flame-inducing comments, but this one struck me. It’s the usual comment I see in a lot of these new distro release comment threads: Windows does this better, OSX does that better. The one major thing that irks me about this comment, however:

Quote:

You can make it very plain jane or super snazzy. Win2k, OSX, XP (and hopefully Vista and Leopard when they’re done) are stable, fast, easily customizeable, have so much support from software and hardware vendors, and most importantly, just work once you install them.

The support from software and hardware vendors comes from MS being dominant on the desktop. Had OS/2 or even Amiga taken off, then either of those platforms would have the most support. But I do take exception with Windows ‘just working once it’s installed’. My real world example has to do with my XPS box. When I reinstalled Windows, just Windows by itself, half of the hardware did not work because the drivers were not loaded. I had to either download drivers or throw CDs into the drive and load the drivers. In contrast, when I loaded Ubuntu (at the time), everything, with the exception of 3D, worked out of the box. My sound, my mouse, my video was acceptable, burning was all set to go out of the box. Printing was a matter of a couple of clicks. For reference, I have the same sound card as the commenter, so I’m not sure what his issue is. Another thing I’d like to mention in response to the video format issues. If any of those videos were Divx, then yes, even on Windows you would need to install a codec before you could view those. Obviously WMV needs codecs on Linux as well.

Granted, this commenter may have been looking for flames, but I figured this would make a good topic for a blog entry.