Dithering over

It's newer and more expensive therefore it's better :-)

To be fair though, the kind of people who are tempted by Linux are geeky sorts, and as a rule they're bright enough to need more user friendly than Windows. Windows is seriously user friendly, if you can't operate it you have to be some kind of mong :-) My 61 year old father uses it and stores an MP3 collection on there and connects it to his iPod!

Got a link to this DELL machine you are looking at??

Tim.

If only.

The North Sea Air Combat range used 64-bit processors many years ago, but then the system had to deal with a (at the time) utterly silly amount of physical memory.

Um. It was a Dell 530N IIRC. That's available with Ubuntu but it's pretty pointless IMO - it's dearer than the 530 with XP, and it does have slight hardware differences (different graphics card) to ensure compatability, there are better specced machines than the 530 for less, available from Dell, namely the Vostro 200MT - put D08V03 into the search box and it'll come straight up. Here's a link but I'm not sure it'll work:

You say that like it's a bad thing...

ROFL. Or DOS. Don't forget, you're not a real computer user until you take that 2007 PC, throw away decades of R&D into user interfaces and use it using a way that died the death over a decade ago - or so the Loonix brigade keep telling me.

Shockwave can make real applications, flash just pretends to, but needs to talk to other things to do it.

You can write much more complex secure and practical apps with shockwave that would make the average flashurbator have screaming fit trying to work out how load the cut scene video intro in sync with retrieving the account data and making sure all online accounts are ready to go at the same time.

Didn't you use Ubuntu a while ago? IMO it's a leap forward from how things used to be - you get a decent looking, logical UI from the start, and it finds and sets up your hardware most of the time. Certainly better than throwing away decades of R&D into producing a secure, reliable OS for the sake of a UI you're used to....

Yes - still do.

My point is that the Loonix Advocacy Zealots bleat on about how people should be using a command line to perform tasks instead of a GUI. For example, setting up shares on Samba. They'd have you opening up a CLI, running nano, navigating to where the .conf file is, editing that with nano, then over to the other conf. files that need altering as well whereas someone using a GUI would fire up the GUI for Samba and tick a few boxes.

One takes a few seconds. The other takes quite a while - usually determined by how many man pages you need to read to find the switches you need for a command.

Who gives a f*ck about what they think? In the real world, sane people do it the easy way.

The thing is, something like Ubuntu does what most people need to do very simply, and pretty much anything you want if you fiddle, considerably more reliably than Windows can. It's a big selling point in my book, I like things to just work.

A lot of people do - I even know people who use windows who deliberately don't install anything on their PC other than their essential productivity stuff because they know that bitrot will happen and in a year or two they'll need to fix it.

If you do you are officially invited around my place for a curry.

Fraser

I love the ipod. Brilliant bit of kit.

Fraser

F*ck Nano - it's too simple, bring on Vi or Tex!

At University, I had to write an EPOS front-end in Pascal, using Vi.

I bow to your superior perseverance.

But if you did that, you would lose the deterministic hardware and associated minimal unnecessary driver overheads, and have all the same kind of compatibility and bloat-ware issues that windows has.

They were the days - clicky keyboards, green screen terminals and f*ck-off big 160 column dot-matrix printers.