On 10/18/2011 2:20, Invisible wrote:
> I just said that not /many/ people are using it yet.

I think you're mistaken. I haven't seen any machines but my old ones running 
Win7, and even my old ones two generations back are running Vista at this point.

> I still don't get how you can take megabytes of unformatted raw binary and
> glean anything remotely useful from it, but hey. Apparently there's some
> kind of black magic that makes this possible...

"I can't do this. Thus, it must be magic."  I feel like playing Yoda here.

> If you try something, and it doesn't work, you can keep trying it over and
> over again, or you can try something else. Which option is the most rational?

The "something else" would be "ask someone."

Unfortunately, software development has turned into a social endeavor the 
last decade or so. You can no longer obtain, learn, and use software without 
talking to other people who have written or obtained, learned, and used the 
same software.

> latest Ubuntu basically asks you for a username and password, and then just
> *installs* itself. Next time the PC reboots, you have a fully-functional
> Ubuntu install.

And you know something funny? People who made that work get a lot of flak 
from the rest of the Linux developer community because they're working on 
user friendliness instead of on patching the kernel to frobulate 3% faster 
or something.

> Essentially, things have evolved to the point where you can compare Windows
> and Linux, and see that each of them actually have merits compared to the
> other. And the point we're currently arguing about is one of them. On
> Windows, you just *install* stuff, and it works. Under Linux, you try to
> install stuff, and mostly it just works... except when it doesn't. And then
> all hell breaks lose.

I've never had software from a repository not "just work" when I installed 
it. Certainly no worse than Windows, which will still occasionally get 
confused enough to need you to uninstall and reinstall a device driver.

> And it irritates me when people tell me I don't know what I'm talking about...

It would probably help if you less often proclaimed that you don't know what 
you're talking about in other fields. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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