Hmmm, lots of interesting opinions in these threads, and whereas I'm
certainly no MS proponent I do take issue with a few of your points, Canuck:
Rip [CDs] all the time in Linux. I don't have to worry about MS DRM and
being modified and tagged.
Any time I've ripped music CDs in Windows, I've never had to worry about
DRM. I either use a free third party ripper or Windows Media Player and rip
to MP3 format. No embedded DRM in those files, rips quickly, and gives good
quality.
Huh, I do this all the time. Some are huge. You can even get mySQL or
Postgress at no extra charge for the enterprise level stuff and run them
both at the same time without the chunking, stalling and thrashing of
Vista. In fact, I leave my MySQL engine up all the time as memory
management is efficient to a point where I am not concerned.
I'm not sure why you've referenced PostgreSQL and mySQL, unless you're
talking about them acting as backing stores for OpenOffice spreadsheets on
Linux? If so, Excel has had this functionality since at least 97, if not
earlier. Any ODBC data source can be used as a backing store on an Excel
spreadsheet, which includes everything from plain text files to a remote
Oracle data-server.
Funny, I use my Canon Camera to make videos. What, you lug your PC
around? LOL.
I may be being presumptuous, but I suspect your Canon camera won't edit
videos, add subtitles, and do the other stuff that Windows Movie Maker will.
That said, I'm almost certain there are free open-source Linux apps out
there that will do all that and more.
No idiot. Being Ubuntu/Linux is open source based on open standards it
endeavors to support multiple formats and does better than DRM/locking
Microshaft efforts. For example, I can open a Microsoft document and save
it as a PDF in one step using the word processor I am used too.
As can I in Windows. A free PDF printer driver and any document I can print
can become a PDF in one click.
Not sure where you're getting all this DRM stuff from either. Yes MS
supports it, but I've never had it rammed down my throat by them. The only
time it caused a minor hiccup was for playing DVD's from different regions -
until I installed the free VLC media player, and now I can play anything.
Vista Premium/Basic can't do that without added software, Linux it is
included at no extra charge.
Vista I'm not sure about. I do know the Fax service was included as part of
my XP Pro install though, and it's been around since the NT4 days. Maybe MS
removed it in Vista, but I'd doubt that.
Linux was doing screen shots before Microsoft had a GUI.
Linux, even in its earliest incarnation, didn't exist until 1991 - well
after Microsoft had a GUI. It's a significantly younger OS than Windows,
unless you count its Unix roots.
Your right, no big deal, even though MS got it 10-15 years after everyone
else did.
Err... screen shots has always been a feature of Windows with a simple push
of the Print Screen key. Also, it really depends on what you actually class
as being "Linux". If you're talking about a feature of the GUI, then you're
actually concerned with X Windows which technically isn't "Linux" per se,
it's the server for the graphical shell.
This is like saying "Linux can play chess better than Windows" - what you're
really saying is "the bundled chess game I used on a particular distribution
of Linux was harder to play against than the one that's bundled with
Windows".
Didn't IE8 finally get tabbed browsing?
Actually IE7 did, but I eventually caved and started using FireFox about 6
months ago - and yes, it is a lot faster and more stable.
You don't need to spend or learn another program to do this in Linux, it
is built right into OpenOffice. Why buy and learn another program if you
don't need too? You know, like a MS-Windows user has too?
I never paid for or learned anything - just installed a free PDF print
driver and now whenever I need to create a PDF I just fire up MS Word and
hit print when I'm ready. Nice, transparent way of doing it.
Neither does Vista create databases.
Quite true.
But I would put mySQL or PostgreSQL up against the costly MS-SQL effort
any day.
MS SQL Express Edition is free for desktop use.
Beats Microsoft in all ways,
I strongly doubt that.
can better use multiple processors and memory,
Can I see some statistical evidence of this please?
Again, I highly doubt this, and would love to see some evidence to back up
this claim. Oracle? Most likely faster. MySQL or PostgreSQL? Not from
what I've heard.
smaller, well documented, lots of books and info, no extra charge or CALs
to worry about. Even works on more than one OS, including MS-Windows
garbage although performance and reliability does suffer.
I develop LOB database applications that use SQL Server for their back end
and have never had any reliability or performance woes, and I'm talking
large user bases with demanding queries. Additional to that, the language
featureset and capabilities that SQL Server supports is FAR in excess of the
current Linux offerings, and that's before you get to thinks like Reporting
Services. If I had to write those parts myself or code around the lacking
featureset in mySQL, the cost to my clients would be astronomical - far in
excess of what they've paid for a few processor licenses, that's for sure.
Talk about primitive, the Vista CD burning is well, so last century. How
to make a trivial task a real CF and that is why most MS-Windows users buy
a CD-DVD burning package as an extra if the vendor does not already
include one.
Again, do you have evidence to support this? Most home users that buy from
Dell, HP/Compaq etc end up with bundled burning software from Nero or
similar whether they want it or not - they don't set out to specifically
purchase it. And yes, the ability to burn ISOs in Windows is sorely
lacking, but there are plenty of free Windows tools out there which will do
the trick. MS themselves provide tools for mounting ISO files, and if they
don't then once again - plenty of freely available utilities for it.
Windows is turning out to be pretty cheap, at least for me.
Wake up, there is more to computing than Microsoft.
Absolutely, and I think Microsoft themselves got a wake up call when Vista
was poorly received. In terms of day to day use though, Ubuntu and the
other flavours of Linux are still a mile away from being everyman home user
material - they're still in the realm of the technophile and hobbyist.
And before we get the usual responses of "err no, I installed it for my mom
and she uses OpenOffice every day and she has no problem", remember it was
you who installed it for her and convinced her to use it. Had she just
bought a computer with no intervention from you she'd be doing exactly the
same thing with Vista right now.
