I believe the simplest solution is to use EXT2 or maybe even EXT3 and than have a small fat partition with autorun on it for installing the EXT2 MS Windows driver. Although my prefered solution is to just eliminate MS Windows altogether. Believe it or not it solves allot of headaches.

Get over yourself... nobody here cares what you think. This isn't the propaganda arm of MS so if people say things that you see as "anti-Microsoft" it is probably because is is true. Certainly a site that is a "Source for technology related news with a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues." clearly identifies itself and needs to be read with a bit of scepticism-even if a significant number of those you see as "anti-Microsoft" are right most of the time. I don't see BestBuy, Staples, PC World, or any other "MS Windows" propaganda arm identifying itself so blatantly as Microsoft for the good of the people.

You might be able to utilize wine + firefox. I was surprised to see a radio station streaming with quicktime worked fine with it. Even though I shouldn't be too surprised given wine has worked with quicktime plug-in for years. What surprised me was probably that the site didn't demand the latest version / or that maybe wine actually supported the latest version (Codeweavers Crossover Linux version of wine).

Stop killing the moment- sure we know about these things. We're still going to poke fun at MS for the BSOD stuff. They said BSOD was gone with XP. They said it was got with Vista. They said it was gone with MS Windows 7. At some point I stopped listening-cause I knew it was al crap.

Doesn't everybody? Even those who brag about it and sprout lies don't really like it. Being paid to like something and actually liking it are two different things.

Kutztown University is relatively GNU/Linux friendly some of the time. They recently outsourced the email system to MS Windows Live. That sort of baffled me. They basically have a war going on at the university in the IT department. The student help desk and IT do provide some level of assistance to GNU/Linux users. There are enough GNU/Linux users on campus to have a GNU/Linux user group- but ultimately that dissipated after some successes. The student help desk was providing GNU/Linux and open source software to students for a while. The user group also donated open source software discs to all of the faculty on campus too. It is still an uphill battle as incompetence remains strong at the university. The Computer Science department was supposedly going to move to GNU/Linux. Don't think that happened. Then again things take forever. It took 4 years to get Visual Basic removed as course requirement for one of the tracks offered. Surprisingly the few who graduate from the CS department are very smart- but not necessarily well terribly well versed. I blame that mostly on the incompetent instructors. The few who aren't idiots are just years behind the times in terms of technology.

Dude- If they support the "PC" you can demand support for GNU/Linux. MS Windows is NOT the only operating system for the PC.

It isn't real world at all. The real world does generally support GNU/Linux pretty well. The real world DOES NOT SUPPORT MAC. I hate to break it to you- but the USA is the only place where Apple has solid support. Pretty much elsewhere it doesn't exist. GNU/Linux has much better support in the places Mac doesn't. Just because your experience is GNU/Linux support sucks doesn't make it so and doesn't mean that is how it should be either.

You shouldn't have to train people any more than you train users for MS Windows. You simply deny applications with no knowledge or willingness to pick up GNU/Linux skills. GNU/Linux isn't that difficult. Supporting it isn't that difficult even if you don't support the distributions. You just have to NOT buy dumb appliances that deny access to non-MS Windows users and things like that. Your IT people can at a minimum ask the vendor if they support GNU/Linux and demand that in any contracts they sign with third parties. It doesn't cost more to support GNU/Linux if you have people with even half a brain. The real reason universities don't support it is people are lazy as hell. Most universities have people with basic computing skills (well, most user don't have basic skills, so don't go go saying this is non-sense) and that is all that is required to support GNU/Linux. Help desk people should be able to provide basic support for GNU/Linux. Lots of universities do it- even small publicly underfunded ones. To say it costs too much is utter BS. A far as non-standard stuff. Nobody is suggesting that they support recompiling a kernel. We're JUST demanding basic GNU/Linux support. Like connecting to the network. They shouldn't implement appliances without checking compatibility with non-ms windows platforms. When a GNU/Linux users isn't able to connect to the Internet at the school the help desk should have someone who can reasonably investigate the situation. Running a live-cd to test the network card isn't that hard. If it is a network card issue it'll be pretty obvious. If it is a software configuration issue the answer is pretty simple "reload GNU/Linux" if they can't figure it out. Supporting GNU/Linux is NOT that complicated.

http://ixnotes.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/microsoft-propaganda-handed-out-to-staples-employees/ I thought while we're talking about it I'd post these images of Microsoft's propaganda they've been distributing to Staples employees. Numerous lies like greater compatibility than GNU/Linux-when most of the older hardware won't work with MS Windows Vista. GNU/Linux is compatible with more hardware than any operating system in history. It may not work with some of the latest and greatest-but for the most part it works better. I don't spend 3 hours fiddling with installing my printer drivers. I plug it in- and it just appears as an option in whatever program I need to print with. The learning curve for GNU/Linux is generally not as high as it is for MS Windows Vista. Unlike what they claim MS Vista and MS Office 2007 software which customers would buy if they got Vista is more cumbersome, has a reduced feature set, is slow, lacks important features like PDF support, and so on. GNU/Linux has better support generally than MS Windows. GNU/Linux supports stuff out of the box whereas with MS Windows users hand to install lots of bloated software, drivers, and waste time figuring out how to use it. GNU/Linux on the other hand can generally be had without such support headaches. Once you're introduced to shut down, applications menu, saving in different formats, and exporting to PDF it is just simpler. Getting devices to work in MS Windows can require modification/and or troubleshooting. Hardware rarely works out of the box. Microsoft want's you to believe that GNU/Linux netbooks have a higher return rate. The fact is that some manufacturers screwed up their GNU/Linux introductions to customers and their particular return rates were higher. Overall GNU/Linux is on par with MS Windows.

Mac barely exists outside of the USA and like one other country which I forget. So even though your perception is GNU/Linux desktop doesn't exist it simply isn't true. What the situation really amounts to is that it isn't visible to you with the people and places you go. You can't even use Google's statistics and expect a decent estimate. Here is why: Google dominates in the USA and Germany mostly. Everywhere else it is a lesser player in the market. As a result you are seeing GNU/Linux desktop statistics for those countries. It is no wonder nobody develops for GNU/Linux. The numbers are skewed and then "tests" end up testing the populations which use it the least. Expanding the numbers to places where companies don't operate primarily would changes things drastically. You'd see Mac market share fall and GNU/Linux rise.

I've got a small project that will benefit allot of people moving to GNU/Linux. I could use some help on enhancing it if you are interested. It is a firefox plug-in that is finished to the degree it is ready for distribution. It lacks allot of desirable features you could work on. Nothing too complicated either. Send an email to jade -@- kglug do.t org.

this is why you should venture out into the real world sometimes and do what is demanded to the extent you can't avoid it-and all the while not avoiding it bitch and moan until they fix it. i bitched for 3 years about my computer science program's requirement that students take a course in visual basic. that was only a core requirement for one of the two 'tracks' or sets of core courses depending on which track you were in. choice was software development or information technology. both cs degrees. anyway. point is after pointing out how hypocritical it was to require a course in visual basic when professors were saying that the difference between a university and a tech school was that a tech school taught tools and a university teaches concepts. clearly vb is a tool not a concept. before i left they dropped vb as a core requirement of the IT track. i didn't win every battle but 1/10 still makes the world a better place.

What we really need is Wolfenstein for the Nokia Nxx series, Freerunner, and other GNU/Linux devices. I was disappointed to find the Nokia Nxxx had Doom and not Wolfenstein. Everybody knows Wolfensteign is the better of the two games! :) Now who wants to port it to the Nxxx so I can play it?

I tend to agree with the part about not filtering children's access to the world. I just have to wonder what you were thinking when you wrote "However, it's not fair for aggressive porn advertisers to splash sex in her face without her permission". Maybe you should first find out if the aggressive porn advertisements occur and if those actually irritate anybody beyond aggressive non-porn advertisements. If not then this is a problem of aggressive advertising in general and not porn. At which point you probably want software to block aggressive advertising rather than porn sites.