And what's the worst part is *why* they're doing it - because they want better visual effects. Obviously *their* idea of being competitive with Windows is "adding more visual effects". What a bummer. If they said "to make games work and eat Windows' lunch in that field", yeah, I'd understand that. But "visual effects"? If I were younger, I'd have had a seizure reading that stupid blog entry of Shittleworth, but I just shrugged and thought "well, that's going to have a lot of knowlegdeable people use something else".

BTW, Ubuntu's decision isn't all that bad - X11 isn't going nowhere as long as "graphical" means X11 for apps. AIUI Wayland runs X11 as a Wayland client, so X11 remains in the system and can be used just as in the old times. And if applications in the long term really abandon X11 for Wayland, that will take years and you can bet somebody will implement network transparency for Wayland until then, or X11 will just remain usable.

I hear you. I really do. But I suggest you change your strategy just like I did.

No physical access to the machine? People living far away? Bad luck. I don't repair computers via phone. Key phrase is: "You can't fix computers via the phone." Because, really, you can't.

Magical Doomsmachine Believers? I agree this is a hard one. My Ubuntu convertites are all from this crowd. Being able to remotely access the machines and fix them via screen sharing is nice, because you can simply show them what's wrong. Remind them regularly that you support them free of charge, and if they keep calling every other day you *will* charge them for your time. And please, for the love of God, DO SO if they persist. And a *real* consultancy fee, preferably with an official invoice. Key phrase: "Those computer skills didn't fall from the sky. You wouldn't expect a lawyer to help you with your legal stuff for free, would you?"

Actually I have stopped supporting Windows altogether (except for some very old friend). If people want my advice, they can get Ubuntu and have me support it remotely, or be on their own. It's your life and you can and should choose what you want to do with it. Becoming all grey because of "having to" support ignorants using Windows probably isn't among them.

If you still spend *any* significant amount of time with "tracking down" stuff or "delousing", I guess the clue train hasn't stopped at your station yet. *DING DING DING*

Hint 1: As soon as a machine is compromised, there can be *anything* installed in *any* way possible, and just missing one single thing will leave the machine vulnerable. So it's futile anyway. Swallow your geek pride and go pro. This brings me to

Hint 2: Booting off an Ubuntu CD, copying user data to an external drive or some online server and reinstalling Windows is the quickest way, and the only one to be sure anyway (see hint 1). If the user doesn't have that much data, it will be accomplished in less than 1 hour. Bonus points for making an image of the machine to use later for even quicker recovery. If you're cheap, you can just boot that Ubuntu CD again and do a simple dd piped to ssh and there's your image.

Of course, if your friends aren't gamers, but of the e-mail/Office/browsing type, just installing Ubuntu will go a much longer way. Nowadays it's friendly enough really, and they usually already know Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice etc. I just show them Ubuntu for five minutes and ask them whether they want Windows or Ubuntu (and that it's perfectly okay to want Windows). I haven't had a single person choose Windows. The machines running out of the box with the live CD without having to hunt down drivers and installing stuff helped a lot, of course (the live CD even autoinstalls the printer). Put a shell script onto the desktop called "Let [your name] fix the computer" that phones home to your ssh server and gives you secure remote access without having to poke holes into their network. Voilà. C'est formidable.

That said, a fresh Windows install with MSE will do just fine, if that's what they need. But stop toying around and complaining. Really. Reinstall, make an image, be done with it.

Yes, absolutely do so, DOSbox is great, and it works fine under Windows, OSX and Linux.

Hm, by which means did you try running it? DOSbox? I haven't tried running games THAT old, but the "newer" ones run just fine. Well, most of them. *g*

LOL. Way to go, Slashdot. :-) I loaded the article, it showed 0 replies at -1, replied immediately, and there they are, 250+ comments.

Either Slashcode sucks big hairy donkey balls, or 250+ motherfuckers just jumped in to destroy my first fp try in about ten years. I'll go with the motherfucker theory because Perl code can never, ever fail.

So, this is proof that Mary was actually a Boa Constrictor?

Oh, and FP, I think.

Ah, the memories. The original SimCity, running under DOS 3.3 with Hercules graphics, was the first game on a PC that really flashed me. The graphics were incredibly detailed for the day, the idea was gorgeous, and it made for a nice playground. Loved it.

I played SC2000 under DOS (very nice), and later under Windows 95, and having seen the newer ones, I really prefer that one, it's on the sweet spot between possibilites and burdening complexity. Unfortunately I lost my original disks, but I'd love to play it again under XP. I have, um, "found" SC4 in the Intarwebs, but didn't like it, so I deleted it after 20 minutes or so of really trying to like it...

I agree! What I meant is that you can buy well in the low end of the market and still get a machine that will last 6, 7, 8... years. We've talked about it, I find the Mac you bought for your wife completely crazy. It's going to be *high end* for several *years* compared to the bread-and-butter computers, and probably seriously overpowered for anything the two of you can think of *together* until its EOL. Given Apple's pricing of the high end machines, you could have bought a MacBook for every room of your place for the value of that single Mac, I guess. (Depending on your place, obviously. *g*)

BTW, moving from one machine to the next has been absolutely pain-free with Apple at least since 10.4 (2005) when Apple bundled the Migration Assistant (which was available only for certified technicians before) with the OS. I've yet to see it fail, and I've migrated users with all their software and data over several machines and architectures. In fact it is so reliable that in one of my former jobs, we would often give the high-end users (3D artists, Photoshop people) the newest high-end machines migrating their old machine to the new one, then giving the machine to another user (again migrating), sometimes shifting around up to ten machines in one batch. Migration itself only involves connecting the machines with a FW cable, booting the old machine in target mode, and starting the Migration Assistant on the new machine. (It even restores Adobes legendary piles of shit without having to reactivate them, but that wasn't always working because Adobe's licensing itself doesn't work well (mostly it doesn't work at all unless you have your own license server in-house).)

If you happen to do Time Machine backups (and who doesn't?), you can even just reassign the old machine and "restore" the new one from the TM backup. Yes, of course that also works with backup servers in the network, even with Windows servers. No need for Time Capsules or OSX Server.

But I digress. It's hard to not get excited about the ease of administration Apple delivers with bundled tools. I might sound like a fanboy, and OSX Server's got lots of bullshit going on at times, but I can just say that I've never had any trouble with my OSX boxen at work I couldn't fix within a few minutes and with bundled tools. (Hardware failure obviously excluded.)

Ah, I think we know different kinds of gamers. I know quite some hardcore and professional gamers, among them ESL pros, and their graphics cards are all in the 400+ camp, with multiple identical cards per system to further boost performance. This is both the amateurs and the pros. And those cards are usually exchanged after one year at *most*, and all at once to minimize problems. Mixing cards can be a compatibility nightmare, I've been told. And once you've seen Battlefield: Bad Company 2 or the new Medal Of Honor on a 30" screen at 2560x1600 with full details and compare that to my 1440x900 at medium detail (which already looks great!), you know that power is really needed. If you get the chance to look at the games in that resolution and detail, absolutely do so. It's incredibly real, to the point of being photorealistic. Oh and yes, it makes a LOT of a difference, too - you can spot and shoot people before they even notice you, just because of the higher resolution.

I agree, however the smaller chains and shops usually offer rigs without all of that (and most importantly, without unneeded Windows licenses). I've gone and bought some of them for friends needing new hardware, and it has the advantage of getting a pre-built machine (usually with good components, too) without having to hunt down every individual part. Plus, you get warranty for the whole system, which is nice. In the store where I usually buy, you can bring the machine in, wait 30 minutes max while they fix it for free, and take it back home. You don't need an appointment for that, just bring in the machine. I never had to argue with them.

Windows 7 isn't so bad, BTW. I only have one friend running it (one of the gamers, but he's got no computing skills whatsoever, having started at 42 and being a truck driver), and he hasn't managed to break it yet, IIRC almost one year now. It's an ugly train wreck concerning the admin UI (of course everything has been moved around AGAIN), but it's pretty solid. The only problems he had came from insufficient cooling. (Yes, this can still be insufficient for a gaming rig. I couldn't believe it myself.)

I'm looking forward to updates on how your brothers fares with 7! I think he won't get many problems unless he installs everything he stumbles upon, which is not very probable given he's your brother.

If he's a gamer, give him Windows. If he only games occasionally, WINE seems to support lots of games just fine, and you can set them up for him via ssh from your home desk.

As for longevity of systems, screw that. As you've noticed, we're at "comfortable speeds" since the P IV. Nobody updates computers any more except for storage (volatile and non-volatile). So you can build a new computer for under EUR 200 that will last five to eight years without any need to upgrade.

As for being a "power user", I'm definitely in that camp and until this summer had a PIII/Ubuntu as my non-Mac that sufficed for everything. The Mac also only is a 2.4 GHz Dual Core with 2 GB RAM that will run just fine another six or seven years (I have it around one year now). I know, my last Mac was a G4 which lasted almost ten years in my house. I gave it away to my niece, who is still happily using it since more than a year. It won't get any OSX after 10.5 (being PPC), but it works just fine. In case there won't be any more software running on PPCs (maybe in five, six years), she can still run Debian/PPC. To be fair, I don't think the machine will cross the 15 year mark without exchanging the fans though, they're getting noisy.

All that said, he's a gamer, and gamers constantly "need" to upgrade their machines. But all others, including power users (excluding 3D artists and the like), can just buy any 200 machine and run it for at least half a decade. So I know *I* wouldn't buy what I can afford, but what I must absolutely spend. Nowadays that would involve two cores and 4 GB RAM, and that's it. Onboard sound and graphics will do for the home user (mail, web, music).

Oh, and my wife is using my old Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600, which is about ten years old and would only need some more RAM and a new HDD, the old one is getting a bit noisy. Yeah, I know, I need to email your dad. :) Except for that, it runs nicely, the newer Linux distros just, well, need more than 256 MB RAM. *g*

Six cores will last some years for your brothers, but he'll have to update his graphics card during that time. So it's more important to have the fastest and newest bus on the board than anything else. I'm under the impression nowadays they deprecate slots almost every year to fuel sales.

Nah, that's nowhere near a feudal system. People can just quit if they don't like the new owners. In feudal systems that isn't possible.

That is also why I think buying a company for the people is only useful if the buyer has a good reputation, because otherwise the people he's "bought" will just quit in droves, and there's nothing the buyer can do about that.

This applies not only to reputation, but also to culture. If for example Microsoft bought a company with a hard-core F/OSS culture, I'd doubt many people would stay.

...you could have installed Debian and still have enough beef to run the games in a VM or WINE. :-P For example, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 looks photorealistic on my dual-core with a nice graphics card.

Congratulations! You've just found out which prefix my native language uses for the adjective "elegant"! You win as many washing machines as you can carry at once. Collect at the exit to your left. ;P

You know, this is Slashdot, and I am among those who use AdBlock Pro, NoScript and /etc/hosts autoupdated via cron for a nice, clean surfing experience. So I hear what you're saying concerning Google Analytics going to the loop interface. Not allowing GA via NoScript also works well.

But being a freelance consultant with multiple web sites using GA (and Piwik, mind you), it's not feasible, because if you block GA via *any* method, you can't query your own statistics any more. Allowing and disallowing GA every time isn't very practical, as is using a different browser just for accessing one web site.

If someone has a nice idea concerning this dilemma, I'm open for suggestions. Until then, I'll keep using Safari for my commercial needs, but boy, this is unelegant.

The linked article has a lot of things wrong, BTW. We only get four weeks of vacation, not six, University isn't free any more for quite some years, and health care also is *far* from being free. In fact, it eats up approx. 20% of my income.

Also we (Germany) have been the World's #1 exporter for decades, and not "since 2003". Actually we're only going to lose that title this or next year when China will be #1.

All of these errors and misconceptions are in the first few paragraphs, and frankly I don't feel like reading the rest after those.

I've written something about our "socialism" in another comment. For the record, our unemployment rates are only going down because a considerable part of the workforce has been forced into temporary employment and self-employment, resulting in lower wages (often below the poverty line for a 60 hours a week job) and even more pressure on those who have managed to retain a regular job.

Yeah, we're totally great.~