And that's why when I installed Fedora 10 instead of Ubuntu and realised I would have to go back to hours of fucking around to get my wifi working instead of having a simple 2 click process that pops off to get the proprietry firmware as Ubuntu does, I shoved in the Ubuntu CD and snapped the Fedora 10 one in two, never to darken a computer I own again.

Does it work? Yes. Therefore I don't give a flying fuck whether it's closed source or not. Being prevented from being able to do something even though there's a freely available solution there simply on the grounds that you can't look at the source code where you wouldn't know what the fuck you were looking at or what to do with it in the first place is utter madness.

What the article fails to mention is that there is hardly anyone in the UK who cannot get broadband. My parents live in a small 10 house hamlet 5 miles from the nearest town and get 2MBit. You have to be basically living in a solitary house half way up a mountain in the middle of Scotland not to get broadband in the UK.

Compare this to a country like the USA where even a town with a population of 30,000+ is deemed unworthy of getting broadband by the telcos.

...2002

I doubt it. Although IE has it's issues, Chrome has some real show stoppers and then there's the fact it phones home with shedloads of data about your browsing.

But it's not a different market, is it? Microsoft are a software company. Antivirus products are software. It's a different sector of the same market.

I'm sorry but I fail to see the problem. You have Avast, AntiVir, AVG,Bitdefender, Clamwin, Comodo, F-Prot etc etc etc so it's not as if a free antivirus product is something new.

In the light of all the above being available, plenty of people still pay for anti-virus software. I do. I use Esets NOD32 and will continue to.

Microsoft offer Windows Defender yet people still prefer to use Spybot S&D et al in their droves thus proving that just because MS offer something for free in a sector, it doesn't automatically follow that people will go for it.

..once you've edited the channels.conf file for DVB-T (because there's only a handful of transmitters included in the package) which requires you to know a lot of not easy to find information on MUX frequencies, what mode each MUX is transmitting in, channel spacing, offsets, error correction rates, channel bitrates etc for the particular transmitter you're using.

It's really simple, fire it up, follow the prompts to set up your TV. DVB-T is really simple. You put in your postcode, it gives you a list of possible transmitters in your region, you select the one you receive and then it goes off and scans the channels. Once it's done that, it connects to the internet and downloads a full EPG that spans 14 days AFAIR. Job done.

MythTV needs a lot more than an interface makeover. For a start, DVB-T channel searching and setting up an EPG is a joke. WTF do you need to run a server just to get a sodding programme guide?

The whole thing is such a PITA to set up and keep going without something or other packing up (usually the programme guide) that it makes it worthwhile paying £60 for Windows MCE just to save your sanity.

TBH, I for one am getting sick of the whole patch, upgrade hardware, upgrade drivers cycle of PC gaming just to play a game at a decent framerate without it crashing.
The minute they add mouse and keyboard support to 360 and PS3 games, PC gaming is stone dead.

I don't actually think that a lot of people using OSS actually realise this. I get the impression that the recent comers to Ubuntu for example, have an image in their mind of teams of people working on the software and that if you told them it was one bloke doing a bit of coding on something he fancied having a go at every now and again after work, they'd call you a liar.

As you said, many projects are basically things people are writing for themselves and have put out in the wild as a "Well it's useful for me, I'll stick it up on the interweb in case anyone else finds it useful for them"