Lawyers, guns and money

Quoting:The harder they [Microsoft's LGM teams] fight the less resources they have to go into product. Customers are running away from Microsoft products. Everyday I see people dumping Windows for Linux or MacOSX. Even former Microsoft apologist, Don Dodge, has gone Google. From what I can see, Microsoft is shrinking. It would be to Microsoft’s benefit to get out of the FUD business and focus on selling out of Windows 7. That way it could be an example of a successful American company like Red Hat instead of General Motors.

Quoting:Vampires can still be stopped, with a silver bullet or a wooden stake.

Quoting:I'm becoming increasingly disenchanted with desktop Linux

Quoting:I could go on and on, but it seems this is turning into a book.

Quoting:Obviously Linux doesn't work for what Carla needs to do.

Quoting:So far none of them have worked particularly well on any hardware I have available. Either it won't install on hardware that Ubuntu (GNOME) runs quite happilly on - Kubuntu certainly won't) . Or it runs like a dog with one leg.

Quoting: As far as pulse being fine for normal use, but not things like recording studio use, then for the moment, people will have to use a Mac (or Windows).

Quoting:With FOSS of all stripes you have basically two choices: either fix it yourself (with your time or money), or don't use it. That's one more choice than you have with non-free software. Sure, you can complain, but that doesn't make the software work, and rarely does it convince anyone else to make the software work.

Quoting:I guess market research and understanding a users mind is what makes Apple more succesful than most FOSS-software.

Quoting:Lawyers, gus and money are not going to help the FOSS-movement [...]

Quoting:And the computer. T M and Michelle Chandrasekhar very nicely sent me disks with Ubuntu and Kubuntu 9.10, and I installed Kubuntu. Sigh. This is supposed to be one of the sharpest distributions of the Linux operating system, but it turned out to be a monster. It wiped out my modem connection; I can no longer go online. Oh, there are instructions for how to get back online. They begin by telling me to go online and download the program I need to do it. I kid you not; it's Catch 22. Apparently no one at Ubuntu ever actually tried to do it via dial-up on a new machine. Then I could not get my keyboard. I use the original Dvorak, but the computer folk randomly moved the punctuation around so that for example my “don't” comes out “don;t.” So I substitute my keyboard variant and use that. What we do is put it in place of the Denmark keyboard, because that abbreviates Dk, which then stands for Dvorak. But Kubuntu has hidden the keyboard files somewhere inaccessible to we can't access them, and I am stuck using the wrong punctuation, then painstakingly correcting it “by hand,” as I did when editing this column. Obviously I won't be typing a novel that way. Kubuntu also has no games. They surely existed, but again, there is no way to access them. I like to play the card game “Grandfather” to unwind. Now I can't unwind, as perhaps the ire of this paragraph shows. I have several macros I like to set up and use, such as for Date, Time, and the degree symbol. But when I try to assign a macro to a key, such as control D for Date, Kubuntu intercepts with a message that I need Java to do that, then locks up my system including the keyboard, which I have to crash and reset to get out of. Again, my patience with this sort of thing is limited. Nobody in Kubuntu has tried to post a macro? A prior edition of Kubuntu I used several years back did not have that problem: why does it suddenly need Java, and why won't it wait for me to try to get it? And I normally back up my material several times a day, because when I didn't, my system crashed and cost me irreplaceable material. But Kubuntu stopped letting me backup to my disk, claiming it was read-only. So I went to another disk and it worked several times, then locked up similarly. I had to go to a third disk. Then another day it started allowing me to use the first disk, a few times, before it locked up again. But you can see how I am loath to use a program that picks and chooses when it will let me back up. There are lesser nuisances, such as its occasional refusal to let me copy in a file to a particular directory, and its refusal to hold my defaults in the file handler Konqueror, and a very slow Open File facility in OpenOffice that I timed at two minutes and six seconds to open just one file. There are features I like, and I think it could be a nice system. But as it stands, it's a nest of scorpions, not at all suitable for serious use by a non-geek. Yes, we bought huge Ubuntu manuals; no, they didn't help. I expect to try Ubuntu next, to see if it has similar problems: if it does, I'll have to return to my years-old Xandros, which at least does work, if creakily. Meanwhile I had to do the Survey update on my wife's Windows computer. I believe I have remarked before on the folly of Open Source driving serious users back to Microsoft. I suspect I have fans at Microsoft who are seriously entertained observing my efforts to flee their corral.