I don't think he can understand the fact that Windows doesn't suit your needs.

Clearly, that's the case, but sometimes people just need to realize that each user has her own needs and preferences, and operating systems (like food, cars, spouses, cities of residence, universities, career choices, etc.) are not a one-size-fits-all deal.

Point is, if it was worth it, you wouldn't have to I have seen a lot of windoze rigs that had to be rebooted two or three times a day just to get some "resources" back. Linux doesn't seem to have that problem. You can also install software and not have to reboot either.

5 minutes is too long. I can go from grub to KDE up and running in about a minute and a half or less. I have a lot of server stuff running. I do like how windoze XP pops up the desktop like it is booted then you can't do anything while it finishes reloading. Real cute.



jens, Thanks. I'm getting to old for this crap. I started this reply several hours ago. I had to take my wife to the ER. That was so much fun. Big Doctors get a look Tuesday though. Maybe they will tell us what is going on. I hope so.

Crap, dalek! I hope she's doing ok!

Well, each Doctor says something different. On her first MRI they said two bulging discs, two pinched nerves and she was in early stages of degenerative spine disease. They did a new scan the other day and said the DSD has broken a piece of her neck bone off and it is just floating around in there. Tonight the ER doctor said the MRI was saying things were fine. That is the same MRI the other Doctor said a piece was broken off in her neck. Either the first Doctor lied, or the ER Doctor is blind.

Considering the Doctor that told her about the broke piece is a specialist, I tend to believe him. But, those ER Doctors should be able to see the same thing and see what the other Doctor said about it too. All the Doctors around here are linked together. They can see what each other is doing once you sign in.

I hope the Doctors in Memphis TN will know for sure what she has going on. I know she hurts so bad that she passes out and shakes like she is having a seisure or something. I also know it scares the crap out of me and I'm a worry wort to begin with.

Here's to the Doctors. They sure cleared up the muddy water for me.

Listen, all linux aside I hope your wife is okay.

scrutinize everything.

I'm not sure what happenned in your wife's case, but I figure I better share a story in relation to "degenerative" conditions since it might serve to help. It at least reminds one that doctors are far from infallible in their diagnosis of things.

About 3 years ago I was carrying something heavy up a steep stair case when I all of the sudden felt a sharp pain shoot through my lower right side of my back. That part of my back was in pain from there on.

I ended up taking many visits to different doctors since this pain wouldn't go away. The eventually diagnosis by them was that I had a bulging disc causes by degenerative disc disease. There of course was all sorts of analysis done before passing that final diagnosis. Everything from x-rays to MRIs. Throughout time they prescribed everything from muscle relaxers, anti-inflamitories, physical therapy, and EMPI (a device that sends small electical pulse to electrodes that you place around the pain effected area, that's purpose is to help with management of pain). Of all of the treatments prescribed, physical therapy helped the most, but even it only went only so far. The result has been pain for the past 3 years.

A few months back I went back to my home state on vacation to visit my father, mother, and sister. While I was there I saw my old chiropractor. He had a bit of a different diagnosis than the doctors. His diagnosis was that my right SI joint was out of alignment. So he adjusted it back into place and the pain was gone. Every now and then it still acts up and has to be re-adjusted, but it doesn't act up nearly as much as before he treated me. He told me that it may be that I do have a bulging disk, but that in my case, it probably wasn't what was responsible for my pain. Him adjusting my SI joint got get rid of the pain.

He told me that it's not uncommon for things like bulging disks to be blamed for the cause of pain, and that there is alot of people whose disks are in less than ideal condition that go on fine in life. There are of course situations where it can in fact end up being the cause of the pain. It's just the methodology of doctors is a bit different than chiropractors and what the two types are observing. A doctor knows that the patient is having back related pains and they look for any abnormalities like bulging disks etc. In my case they found one. So the blame is put on it as to being the cause, when in my case the cause actually ended up being my SI joint being out of alignment. Chiropractors are observing the body from how all joints are aligned so their focus is a bit different (usually in how vertebrae are aligned, but not necessarily solely depeding upon the chiropractor. Also there are many different types of chiropractors. Mine is a subluxation one). They don't really focus on the symptoms, but instead focus on whether your body's joints are aligned how they should be. So regardless of my problem with those back pains, the chiropractor is going to want to align anything that is mis-aligned and usually, counting on that the chiropractor is good, everything else tends to straightent itself out. In my case, the pain was gone as a result of the alignment which makes it clear what the real cause of the pain ended up being.

The morale of the story, in my particular case, was that with all the years of analysis and treatment from multiple doctors didn't help the pain go away since it wasn't addressing the actual cause of it. The treatment like physical therapy didn't hurt and probably was good regardless though. One visit to my chiropractor from back home and the problem was cured/fixed. 3 years of "conventional" treatment couldn't accomplish what a 10 minute visit to my old chiropractor did. The reason of course, was because the cause wasn't what was being treated by the MDs.

Anyway, alot of all of that, kind comes down to religious belief about medicine (there are different schools of thought when it comes to medicine much like anything else). It's kind of one of those things much like operating systems come down to religious or philisophical beliefs about computers.

Anyway, I hope your wife gets better. It's not really in my place to give any sort of medical advice to anyone, but I thought I would share my situation since it helped me. It shows me that it's important to get a broad scope of analysis since one form can end up being wrong. To use an analogy, you take a computer, and something wrong is going on with it. You ask a software specialist what wrong you get a different answer than your would get from hardware specialist etc. Their knowledge covers different areas and they view things from different scopes. So I feel it probably would be good to have both of them analyze the system.

dalek,
Well, I'd be more inclined to believe the specialist too; OTOH, everyone makes mistakes, and some people are incompetent.

I guess it's too high for her to be able to get a nerve block.

I hope things get better soon.

No one cares whether I prefer Pizza Hut over Taco Bell,
but if I went to Taco Bell and started telling the customers
there that their food sucks, and that I much prefer Pizza Hut,
and why Taco Bells stuff isn't more like Pizza Huts, I guess
there's going to be SOME reaction.

And now: stop p*ssing on my carpet.


Cheers,
Tink

Well, there are two specialists that she sees and they both were supposed to have looked at the MRI. One was a neuroligist and the other was a pain management Doctor. All I know is this, she hurts so bad that she passes out and shakes like a leaf in high wind. She has done this at the Doctors office several times as well. They have seen it. They point her all over the place but do nothing themselves. They also won't write her and prescriptions for pain. The neurologists says see the pain management doctor. The pain management says to see the neurologist. Her family Doctor doesn't treat chronic pain.

She has been to the chiropractor before but not with this problem. Because of the degenerative spine part she is scared to go. It may not hurt to go risk wise but I would still like a serious expert to look at this stuff first. If there is a chip broke off, it could hit her spine and paralize her from neck down, which is scary for sure.

I just want her to get better and them to fix it.

That's fine, I can see that linux is for some and not for others. I think it could be for me if I let it, i'll give it some more of my time. One reason why I think I might like Linux now more is because I just started my programming class with Java and Eclipse and am getting annoyed with Windows and this application in general. I can understand why programmers use linux and can understand the "linux is for users that wanna get work done," I was merely thinking of different work, I guess. The funny thing is when I think about it I don't see a need for Windows on the grand scheme of things, I mean with OS X covering media, Linux covering programming and other technical stuff and last the Xbox 360 covering gaming and online multiplayer, you could do everything Windows could and it would be more stable and secure.

I think Pizza Hut and Taco Bell are both owned by Pepsi Co.

Your analogy is more like Gnome Vs Kde than Linux Vs Windows.
Just pissin' on your carpet

You should instead go to windows forum and tell Linux user how their OS sucks. Not vice versa

I don't really care. Both is just an OS to me.

Actually it was intended for me to show the people of the forums that I can see their side of things, if you read my other posts they are much different.

Thought this would be a cool place to post my experience even if it is long:

I've been a Systems Engineer by profession for 10 years now, although 98% of that was with Windows, 2% Solaris. Just luck of the draw that my employers were anti-Linux. Earlier this year I decided its time to put Windows behind me and move to Linux, there is more demand for people how know it - especially if you know Linux & Windows So in April I picked up some books, downloaded some distros, wiped Windows XP off of my rig (see signature) and went into learning mode. My Linux experience and knowledge were poor at best. I tried FC3, then FC4 (hated both of them), CentOS, Gentoo and DSL before deciding I liked SuSE 10 better. Maybe because its so much like Windows in appearance, I don't know. Once I fumbled around for a bit I put Windows XP back on and moved my attention to my server (Dell Poweredge). I decided the best way to learn was to force myself to use it in "production". I backed up all my data, wiped out Windows 2003, SQL and Exchange and installed SuSe 10.1 x86_64 onto the server. I was forced to figure out Samba, NFS, logins, DNS, MySQL, etc. Once it was running I had to learn how to back up the system and the data. I do have to rely on some Windows programs so my solution was to install VMWare onto the server and run a virtual Windows server (I use this as a terminal server to connect to Windows apps from my Linux workstation). I'm happy to say that the original installation is still solid and exept for a power outage last month has never had to be shut down.

Next I moved back to the workstation. I put the same version of SuSE and had to figure out how to connect to the shares on the server, login, etc. Then came the joy of installing ATI 3D drivers. Once those were on I started learnign what applications I need, Kopete for IM, Kino and DVGrab for my video editing, Gimp for graphics, etc. I have had to re-install once but it was mainly because I didn't like my RAID setup. Since that 2nd install everything works (except TV Capture) and the system is completely stable. Last week I moved the wife's notebook to FC5 (just to be different I guess) and everything, even the wireless is now working.

So, what did I learn from all this?
#1 - Linux is not to be feared as a lot of Wintel engineers seem to think it is. My learning curve for Linux was actually faster than my original learning curve for Windows, and I got this SuSE server up and running (stable) much faster than I did 3 years ago when I first put Windows 2003 on.

#2 - Linux and Windows co-exist much better than I ever imagined. With proper Samba configuration Windows systems connect easily to Linux file and print shares. Many open source apps allow interaction with windows files, OpenOffice for example will actually open and allow me to edit all of my Office 2003 files.

#3 - Linux is harder to set up in some respects, but I see the beauty in this. Changing to su, having to make and make install to get a program running has some benefits. The su command makes it easy for me to switch out of user mode and be an administrator real quick, then go back to a harmless user. This is not as easy in windows. Having to actually configure and make the application makes it harder for me to install a program that has been hijacked, like so many Windows .exe files can be. Basically for these reasons I do think Linux is more secure.

#4 - Help is more readily available for Linux distros than Windows. Many times I still have to research Windows problems and the answers are harder to find (or on pay sites like Experts Exchange) or worst case having to call M$ and pay over $300 per incident. Seems that because Linux is open source and has such a strong community behind it answers to problems are much easier for me to find.

#5 - There is no comparison on the resource usage. This workstation under Windows XP always felt too slow, simple things seemed to take longer than they should with this kind of horsepower. Many times Windows would insist on using the page file on both XP and W2K3 server even though they have 4 & 8 GB of RAM respectively. Since moving to Linux neither of these machines have ever used their swap partition (according to KSysGuard anyway) and the speed at which it boots up and runs tasks is amazing!

If anyone asks me for an OS recommendation again I will still tell them Windows XP if they are not versed in how computers work. I can't imagine trying to teach one of those users why they have to run 5 commands as SU in order to install an IM client as opposed to cliccking a file and answering some questions. But for anyone who has a decent idea of what goes on under the hood I now think Linux is really the best choice. As for dependancies on M$ applications, well if you can't run a terminal server like I am, look into an emulator like Wine, using VMWare or at least dual-booting. I personally think the payoff is worth it.