Originally Posted by Kenny_Strawn

I know you don't like Ubuntu, but mocking it like that is downright juvenile...

Ubuntu really means "humanity towards others" in various southern African languages and it happens to be the name of a Linux distro geared for more ease of use and ease of migration especially for Windows and Mac OS X users, in case any of you haven't realized that it *is* only so popular that people who don't even know what Linux is still use it... LOL @ you if you *really* don't know.

Originally Posted by foodown

It's a word from some African language or another ... I think it means "I can't configure Slackware; or even Debian."

Originally Posted by Kenny_Strawn

I know you don't like Ubuntu, but mocking it like that is downright juvenile...

Originally Posted by foodown

Ubuntu ... not because I would ever use it if I had a choice, but because that distro came a long way in 2010. I have even installed Ubuntu on several users' computers over the past year who had hosed their systems and did not own a legitimate copy of Windows. If I hand over an Ubuntu machine that I've installed WINE on and placed some handy icons on the panel for them on, they don't bother me all the time asking me questions, and they never complain.

That's quite an accomplishment for that project.

Originally Posted by foodown

I can't refute your second statement ... I may be downright juvenile sometimes.

However, nobody ever said I didn't "like" Ubuntu ... I even voted for it!



Why do Ubuntu users on these forums get upset when you make a joke or otherwise point out that their distribution is unbelievably easy to configure and use? Isn't that the aim of the project?

You'll never see me complain about people making jokes about Slackware being more vanilla than the bean itself, or about the smug sense of self-satisfaction that its users tend to radiate. How could I complain? It's all true.

Originally Posted by foodown

Well ... in 1980 there were only like five million people outside of the UK under British rule, as opposed to like seven-hundred million at the end of World War II.

Nowadays, you still have your Bermudas and Gibraltars of the world, but it's safe to say that the Empire as it was at its height has gone from this world.

So it is with Microsoft now; I believe that their "stranglehold" heyday of being the single most powerful and important computer software company in the world are in the process of ending, and for the most part are already completely over, like with the Empire around 1980.

My freakin' phone is a computer, as are most of them now. In fact, my current phone outclasses the PC I had on my desk eight years ago by several powers of ten, and it doesn't have a lick of Microsoft code on it. (Neither does my PC, except for Office, but the phone's 100% commercial and untouched by me, whereas I built the PC.)

It doesn't take a prophet to see that most "consumer computing" will soon be taking place on non-traditional devices; devices more like my phone than my PC. "Real" computers will go back to their old 1980s role of being seen as "for work." Only hobbyists like us will see them as anything else 20 years from now, assuming that "real" computers as we think of them now even exist outside of data centers by then. Microsoft's code doesn't run on very many of those non-traditional devices these days, and they don't seem to be doing a very good job of horning in on that market.

Being bitter about Microsoft's current "evil" levels of "control" over computer users is very silly. That situation was real about fifteen years ago or more, but since then it has changed a great deal, and you are only really "stuck" with MS software on a PC for as long as you don't care about being stuck with it. As soon as it irritates you, you have options. This was not really true for me in 1991, when I bought my first PC.

So ... as far as the dates on the Empire goes, I'll defer to those who would know better. Perhaps I should have said 1945 instead of 1980, as the metaphor could be more apt, since MS today still has a very large market share, but I was going for a bit of an exaggeration.