Common Sense

I will be moving my blog to http://nelson42.blogspot.com/
It can also be accessed by going ot http://blogs.nelson42.com
As for Rob I assume he will set up a blogger account and move his stuff there at some point.

At least in the new blog you can leave comments. I had to turn that off here because of spam problems.

OK that's it Windows and all MS products just plain suck. This last episode drove me over the edge to the point where I almost tossed a laptop through a window. I had to check my email so i went to open Outlook... here's where the problem starts. Click to open and PC freezes up for about 8 minutes with NO ability for input. Finally get an error message that Outlook could not connect to the exchange server and gives me that whole send / don't send error crap to MS. I try again and it asks if I want to start outlook in safe mode due to the previous failure. I say yes and lo and behold same thing as the first time. Third time is a charm, right? WRONG! I click to open after the second failure and get an option to run detect and repair. Well SCREW that! Nearly 20 minutes and no email and then it wants to run for who knows how long to try and fix itself? In the time I was waiting for it to die off the second time I fired up Evolution on my personal laptop and configured it to get my Exchange mail, two minutes later and I was in email heaven.

This then prompted me to just do it on my work PC. I created a VM from my physical machine and then installed Ubuntu Feisty on it and brought the VM onto the machine. The only reason I need this Windows VM is for the Sonicwall VPN client. But now that it is done I no longer have to deal with Windows, MS products or the ever so pleasant fuck you messages provided by failed MS products. For that matter I don't have to deal with any MS prodcuts which are all defective by design. Good Bye and good riddens to all that was MS on my work unit. Now at work I am in computing bliss running an all *nix environment.

Ooh in case you missed it.. FUCK MICROSOFT!!!

I have often had this conversation, sometimes heated debate, with friends and colleagues. I am of the firm belief as are many others that Linux should be the dominant desktop OS along with Mac OS X. Instead Windows is the dominant desktop OS for no other reason than marketing and the uneducated masses accepting it as the defacto standard. Linux is so far superior to Windows it isn't even a fair comparison. The security, speed and ease of use are all better than Windows can ever hope to be. To top it off the software available for Linux, free software I might add, is just as good if not better. For those applications that one NEEDS Windows for chances are they will run fine under Wine, Cedega or CrossOver Office. There are also more and more commercial linux apps. coming out due to recent uptake by end users and business as well as the recent offerings of preloaded linux machines from Dell and soon to follow HP. So I say to all that care to listen or read this, dump Windows and move on to the future of operating systems and enjoy computing as it should be, safe, fast and secure.

Well I would like to say that I have received my new Dell laptop, Inspiron E1505 with Ubuntu pre-installed from Dell on 6/27/2007. After unboxing it and powering it up for the first time it took all of 30 seconds to be online and working. The only thing I had to enter was my username and PW and that's it, DONE. Once online, wirelessly I might add, I installed the nVidia binary driver using the built in Restricted Driver control panel and it worked like a charm. I then rebooted, installed Automatix and all the goodies that comes with it, Cedega, VMware, Wine a few games from the repos., copied my /home dir from my old laptop and KDE and done. The longest part was installing the software and copying my old /home but even that only took about an hour and a half. Once done I was working on a duplicate of my old unit on new hardware without any hiccups. All I can say to this is WOW, WOW, OMGWTFBBQ! This has been the BEST computing experience ever. In the 27 years I have been using computers this has literally been the best experience I have had with a PC new or old. Kudos to Dell for making such a solid unit and offering it with a true OS. Oh, in case you're wondering the specs on the laptop are: Dual Core Pentium T2080 @ 1.73 Ghz, 1 Gig RAM, 256 Meg nVidia 7300LE graphics card, 80 gig HD, DVD-RW/CD-RW and a 15.4 in wide screen display. The cost after tax and shipping $823 and it was by far the best money I have ever spent on any piece of computing equipment to date.

How in God's name can anyone in their right mind run Windows or anything that Microsoft makes? From the desktop to the server it is nothing but absolute trash. I say this from experience, particularly those of this past week. I have never seen server products, Exchange to be exact, so unstable and kludged. Why the hell would they make a new version of their email/office collaboration software and still base it on the Jet database!? This DB is old and I mean OLD... they make a much more robust, albeit not to my liking, database known as MS SQL that would do a much better job at handling Exchange but NO.. They want to charge you separate for that. To top it off even IF you do purchase it you can't use it in lieu of the integrated Jet DB that Exchange uses, gotta love that lock in! Well back to work for me to see what other catastrophes MS has caused that I have to go fix.