You really have to meet the people I know than..lol...It is all about elitism, and I do apologize for categorizing so many into one heap.

I to use commands for quite a few "non user friendly" utilities and programs, but not to any degree that probably some of you do.

Hmmmmm.....

I won't be rude and ponder what the nick of
digiot might be an abbreviation for

Seriously, I think you may have taken umbrage at WebX unnecessarily... one of the problems shared by both forums and IRC is that humour is difficult to portray.

Now with my AutoCAD background I felt completely at home with his comments, particularly about the library of enormous heavy books that came with each successive release of AutoCAD - so many and so heavy you really could do with a fork-lift !

However, the point he was making was very valid (imho) and if we can please try not to take peoples' thoughts as personal attacks, I've found that we tend to learn quicker, and understand the other guy's point of view.

Honestly, mate, (yes, I'm an Ozzie hehe) I don't think he was having what we would call "a lend of you" but a forum should be a place where we can respond off the top of our heads.

Thankyou for your nice comments... I was just calling it as I saw it at the time. Tomorrow I may wake up with a grudge against the world, or maybe just Lycoris and Xandros users lol!!

Yeah, the people you describe definitely exist, unfortunately. Just as it's true that there are many people who are utterly lost without a GUI. It's a shame that sometimes people get taken for idiots just for liking a GUI or taken as elitist just for liking the command line. It's the extremes that give everybody else a bad name. But most people are just trying to use their systems the way they like or know and that's all good.

You're the first person to bring it up, but I think you've got it.

But, nah, I didn't take umbrage in the sense of getting upset or anything - just wanted to strike a blow in defense of command-line oriented idiots and GUI gurus.

I think we're *all* on the same wavelength now.

/me hands round a tray of chocolate iced donuts, freshly cooked, with a liberal sprinkling of those tiny spherical coloured things we call "hundreds and thousands"...

Oh man...the agony.....The worst part of the whole experience of Autocad in college was not only reading those manuals, but actually buying those things for the class.

$600.00 to $800.00 a pop, and that was pretty much my whole check from financial aid. Of course, when it came time to "resell" those books back to the college, their value dramatically dropped within 3 months, and usually garnered a whopping $100.00 refund in mint condition if that.

College to me, is worse than a pawn shop when it comes to books and their resale values.

*Homer voice* "MMmmmmmmmmm.....donuts..............."

Anyone see that great film "Life of Brian" by the Monty Python team. I am minded of the bit where Brian is at a meeting and they ritually chant: "Who are we? The Judean People's Front! Who do we hate? The People's Front of Judea!". Meanwhile the Romans continued to rule!

Microsoft is in much the same position. Different distros serve different purposes, we all have our favourites and ones we wouldn't use.

However, there is no point in flame wars. What are Windows users going to make of a rabble of Linux fans squabbling amongst themselves?

If people want to pay for handholding and ease of use whilst they get used to Linux, then fine!

Personally, I started with Mandrake (Download Edition) and managed fine...

I remember that piece of quite brilliant insight into the often closed minds of activist groups.

Sadly the situation in the Holy Land over many years has been almost identical, so maybe Cleese and Palin and company spoofed that?

It reminds me of the "Yes, Minister" culture in governments patterned (even loosely) after the so-called "Westminister System".

You can find a proliferation of Sir Humphrey Applebees in the majority of the bureaucracies around the world, and certainly in my country.

I am led to believe that the BBC (who created it) were leaned upon to stop the series very early on. Hmmm.

The only difference, perhaps, between the BBC's representation and real life could be that Humphrey did it in a nice, educated, way, whereas latter-day ones seem to be more bombastic and visibly more determined to plunge knives in backs.

Which brings us back to flamers, lol...

Happy New Year, btw. It's 6.15am New Year's day as I type this

I would love to see how many professional journalists could convey those thoughts as eloquently as you did.
It ties in everything that basically is wrong with this whole argument, and if you will, this country as a whole. The key word being 'contradiction'.

Windows is now on the move to include a open source type of 'linux' environment within their OS for their enterprise servers because of security/firewall capabilities, and have (since the massive rise of IE users dropping out in favor of Firefox) paid for the technical properties and securities to overhaul IE.

Even though on a daily basis, I seem to acquire emails that state supposed "independent" laboratory testing that pins Windows v.s Linux in cost and security, as Windows the 'clear cut winner', I cannot help but laugh that there are actually people that will believe those statistics.
What is more surprising, is that if Windows is "not afraid of the open source movement, nor Linux" why it is that they feel they need to somehow try and control the movement, by including open source with open arms into their architecture all of a sudden.

Another episode that I am reminded of that falls upon the same premise of "Brian" is a episode of South Park, in which Peta comes to their school, throwing blood on the children, and calling them killers because they use a cow as their school mascot.

The new choices for their school mascot, after Peta forces them to change their "glorification of killing cows" is a douche, and a turd sandwich.

I wonder how long they will allow us to use this thread as a sandbox ? And thanks for the compliment too

Note that I incorrectly started the sentence with a preposition. I remember Sir (then he was Mr.) Winston Churchill saying to a group of pedants about grammar... "This is the kind of thing up with which I shall not put" when faced with a challenge about ending a sentence with a preposition, lol.

You know I have had and used a third-party customisation of MSIE for two years called MyIE2 which apart from the problems of the core application (MSIE) being integrated with the OS and therefore having all the nasty security prone problems, does everything that Firefox does, and faster too. I suspect it has been around a lot longer than that.

MyIE2 has the hovering mouse thing (originally from Opera), multiple tabbed interfaces, a fully customisable pop-up blocker that already has a host of nasty addresses included, full preferences accessibility including cleaning it completely or in part...

It seems that so often, Microsoft only half designs and then half fixes software, relying on others to complete the job. This is actually a terrific little example of such. How long has MSIE existed? Probably in its present look for nearly 10 years, and complacency about being the "only game in town" and not listening to users keeps it just the same...

Oh, I stand corrected, MyIE2 still uses the sloppy approach to the display of pretend html as well as the MSIE engine is what renders pages.

On that basis, why does Microsoft Inc blare its trumpets saying it's finally going to fix the pop-up blanking etc, that it deliberately never included? The technology is there for the stealing, after all, with MyIE2.

Another point I missed responding to about "open source" concepts is the community which needs to know it can sound off to the developers about things that just plain don't work, or don't work right. Hoo-blooming-ray for Linux and its forums and feedback. Even from one-eyed flamers!!!

I believe that the claims in those phoney evaluations were obviously exagerated if you look at them with the eyes of someone who is not a corporate bean-counter who may be immediately put off by even the suggestion of higher cost... to the point of perhaps being infected by even evaluating the badly organised data. I remember being told 40 years ago about being able to prove anything by statistics manipulation

I don't think that you even need to be a techno-phobe (or is it techno-phile?) to logically deduce where they have altered the truth to preserve the myth that Microsoft is Beautiful

I have never watched any episode of South Park, though I don't know if I need to apologise by adding "sorry" lol!

So, if we need to move this ongoing exchange of witty and erudite pleasantries somewhere else, I'm sure that jeremy will tell us. How about a sandbox jeremy, does the forum need one?

I think for the most part, Jeremy and the mods are probably more than relieved that the conversation has gone in the direction that it has, simply based off the fact there is what most would call, a conversation commencing, rather than a flame war.

In the past, I have tried several browsers that were based off the IE architecture that in some ways ripped off Opera. This was some time back, but it allowed a whole new download manager, popup blocking, tabs, mouse gestures, cookie and image blocking, flash blocking, and it even (God forbid) allowed you to change the look of the browser itself with themes that you, or others could create and exchange.
It had a very nice integrated mail manager within it to, in which I ran Pegasus from.

I really do not know if it even exists anymore. All I can remember from it, was the silver smile icons that the default browser had included, and the wealth of options and security it inhibited.

What should be pointed out however with M$ and its lack of attention to security, browsers or otherwise, is that with M$, one has to wonder if they purposely left those little holes within their browser and Outlook to fatten other's pockets for a "price".

After all, where would many of the top virus and spy-ware companies be without those "holes"?

I think there is more to M$ than just a "Oh shucks, we left the barn door open again" type of thought process. I think it was purposely left open.

One would think, that with a much anticipated SP2 release patch, that all of those problems would of been taken care of, but within hours of its release, there were hackers already tearing apart SP2 with complete disregard.

Of course, using a OS that allows a person to be logged in as Admin or Root, as the default user account has little to be desired as well.

While we are happy that this thread has stayed polite and well mannered, it has gone startlingly off-topic. The General forum is a good place for this sort of conversation - feel free to start a thread there, refer back to this one and carry on your conversation.

Happy New Year guys.

This is just a new thread picking up from the earlier thread "LindowsOS is not Linux"......

Firstly, I'm not a complete newbie to these things - I've had all the Microsoft OS's since DOS 6.22, and I've had machines with Mandrake, Suse and RedHat distros on them. Now the debate which was raging on the other thread seemed to revolve around the usual 'my distro's better than yours' waffle which is one of the things I find the most tedious about the Linux community in general but it DID remind me of a couple of points worth mentioning....

1) Most computer users are just that - computer USERS! They don't want to know how their OS works, or program new plug-ins for it. They don't want to learn a new language just to install it. They don't want to develop new drivers for it, or streamline it but trimming it down. They just want to play games, write letters, surf the net, edit their photos and videos and listen to their favourite music. That's why Microsoft has the monopoly it has, not because of any great global conspiracy, but because they've made their stuff EASIER TO USE with each successive release.

Is it overpriced? Hell yeah! Is it bloated?? Definitely! But none of that matters to Mr and Mrs Joe Public because all they want to do is switch on and get on with the GOOD STUFF!

2) The other reason for the Microsoft monopoly is not their monolithic crushing of the opposition, it's the lack of it! How the hell will the public make a decision between 20-odd OS's when one belongs to Microsoft and the other belongs to 19-odd different companies, all of whom are essentially selling the same product, but all of whom are arguing, along with their supporters that theirs is the 'right one'?

Now I'm all in favour of a powerful, customizable OS, regularily updated and maintained by people who care about the product and the ideal, but...

Well, the point I'm making is that, if a product like Linspire gets people away from the Microsoft fold, that's a good thing. If it's not as immediately 'in-depth' as a Linux distro, that's good too. As long as the user knows that they CAN tinker 'under the hood', if they want to, then that's great!

Put it this way - not everyone who drives a car knows how to fix and tune one, but that doesn't make them, or their vehicle, any worse that the alternatives.... Stop fighting amongst ourselves and putting off new users with snobbery and superiority complexes, because you'll only succeed in making Linux MORE of a minority choice, and that's just putting money in Bill's pockets......

So, what do you think? I'm just downloading a Linspire distro now. I'll try it and see what I think... Why? Because I'm open minded......

Both threads merged - there isn't any need to have two threads about the same thing going.

If I'd thought of that I'd have done it - DOH!

And there's me saying I'm not such a noob.....