OT: Smarter people do exist

[Fairlight]

Y'all catch dis heeyah?  Walter Vaughan been jivin' 'bout like:
> Two things surprised me this Christmas.

I lived without Krispy Kremes for five days.  That alone surprised me!!!
However, I had some of -the- best pecan pie I've ever had, and I've had a
-lot- of pecan pie in my lifetime.  :)  Man, that was heaven.

> 2) Slashdot on Christmas Eve had a topic on Knoppix Games CD. It seemed 
> to run 99% in favor of including it in every Geek's stocking, so I fired 
> up the bittorent and a few hours later I had her burned.

See--a perfectly legit use for p2p.  I don't know why the regulatory
agencies even consider throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

> However this "Knopped" my socks off. In about the time it takes to load 
> WindowsXP on this laptop, I had a shiny KDE desktop with snowflakes 
> streaming down (running DebianLinux instead). What knocked my socks off 
> is that without any intervention it also connected to my local wireless 
> network. Detected and properly worked with ALL the hardware on this 
> Toshiba Laptop. Heck, I fought for days when I got this Netgear wireless 
> card for this laptop to even work without locking up the computer.

How'd it know your encryption key automatically?  Which scheme are you
using?

> that the PC also has a TV card that's hooked to cableTV so my wife can 
> watch TV in a window while checking her email. Bingo, TV viewing app works.

Ooh...that's kind of neat!

> Of course all the Linux games work perfectly.

Yeah, well...get back to me when they (re)start porting -real- games to
linux.  That's a large part of its desktop failing for me and many other
people.  The only reason some people (not me--I don't mind 'doze on the
desktop) keep 'doze around is because games aren't readily (and/or
officially) ported to linux.  If the game companies would just port them,
they could make more money, and linux would get a tremendous boost.  That,
and Adobe releasing a native Photoshop would be a huge plus.

The last -real- game I can remember them porting linux was Quake 2.  They
ported the Half-Life server, but the client was impossible as VALVe took a
huge shortcut and wrote the UI in MFC, which is just not portable, period.
I know Descent was eventually released for linux by Parallax.  But all this
stuff was many moons ago.  They all really need to try again.  Sometimes I
think Blizzard Games alone would be a huge booster for linux--and their
games are -really- popular in just about every circle, including amongst us
linux folks.

Desktop productivity has come a ways.  Multimedia is "getting there",
although just about every package has bugs and/or unsupported (or
incomplete) codecs.  Games is stagnant-to-nonexistant.  And therein lies
the major problem for some people to switch entirely.

Games and multimedia are the two huge reasons Windows is still a better
desktop choice for me.  But, as I said, things like Photoshop would help.
Lots of people know PS.  Lots don't want to relearn doing things in GIMP,
no matter how far it's come.  I wouldn't want to run something that beefy
in emulation, either.

mark->
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