Posts by Sean

Creative threatens developer over home-brewed Vista drivers

M/B sound from now on

Damn, and I thought it was MY fault I couldn't get the sound to work properly with my Xtreme Gamer! Glad to know it was the original drivers, and that my onboard sound actually sounds just as good. No more Creative products for me, either...

Pentagon says sat-smash smithereen cloud almost gone

Spacecraft Kill Capability

Looks to me like the US has the capability to destroy spacecraft, even if it's low altitude. Oh, and by the way, how does it make more sense to break up toxic chemicals in the atmosphere vs. a restricted area on the ground? Seems to me this exercise risked spreading the satellite and it's cargo over an area of miles, not the two football fields expected by a direct impact.

French court says non to pre-loaded Windows on Acer laptop

Thanks, France.

Never thought I'd be saying "Thank God for the French," but there you go. I agree, why do we have to put up with having all this crap pre-loaded on our machines? An OS, fine. Anything else--screw that.

Could Linux become the dominant OS?

No games, but solid

Yes, many people (most computer users?) don't care about playing games on their PC. But the fact that most games do not run under Linux (I'm talking FPS or RPGs here, not Solitaire...) is a major reason why Linux is still a dual-boot option, at best, on many PCs. To say you don't care about that feature is fine, but you have to consider it when assessing the chances of Linux taking more of the desktop from Windows.

I've been using Windows since 1990, and tried several installs of Linux (most recently SuSe 10.0); the most recent install was simple, painless and fast. It had all the apps I needed (word processing, spreadsheets, graphics/imaging, email and internet access), and was 100% reliable. I'd even recommend a modern distro of Linux to any of my friends and family. They don't play games, so they could probably do anything they wanted to on a Linux system.

I would think the installed base of an OS would have an impact on its support by developers; if the Chinese government were to adopt Linux as a standard, that would have an impact on the installed base, don't you think?