Mainstream Linux? Will never happen.

In my post yesterday I mentioned I might play with Unbutu Linux on one of my spare machines. Well in the process of looking up information to do it I decided that Linux will never be mainstream.

As much as I bash M$ the simple fact is they will always be the dominant OS. Not because of some crooked things or getting rid of the competition. The reason M$ will always be the dominant OS is because of ease of use.

The reason Linux will never be mainstream can be summed up in three lines:

$ ./configure
$ make depend && make
$ sudo make install

No. Mainstream people do not want to go to a command line to compile and install stuff. We want to click on a happy little icon, hit next three or four times, then hit finished.

Now I've been in the command line world. I know how to do it, I've done it before. There is no reason for it any longer with today's computers. Linux has GUI available, but still gotta go to the command line to install it or run it, then gotta go to the command line to install anything onto the GUI, then gotta go to the command line to remove anything, etc etc.

Until Linux gets away from requiring the command line it will never ever be mainstream.

Now all you Mac people are of course going to say that Mac's are easy to use. Yea for the end-user but ever notice that there isn't very much software support for the Mac? Ever try to buy a non-Mac machine with OS/X on it? Go away.

Windows Vista is the Ten Plagues of Egypt

Window$ Vista is the Ten Plagues of Egypt.

I purchased two brand new Dell notebook computers yesturday. One for my wife and one for me.

We turned them on, did all the setup stuff, uninstalled Norton (the little Satan), installed AVG Free (I almost decided to pay for their full version I like them so much), installed AD-Aware Free, uninstalled all the AoL and Earthlink crap, and installed Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.

Then we sat back and marveled at the pretty features of Window$ Vista. And it was good. Then much like the telling of Revelations we slowly discovered that Vista was actually the Anti-Christ and had fooled us.

The notebook computers' processor is twice as fast as our desktops, they have FOUR TIMES as much memory. The notebook computers for all intents and purposes should be running circles around the desktops.

My wife tried to run World of Warcraft and the frame rate was TERRIBLE. Even using synergy was painful as when the mouse was on the client computers it was jumpy and choppy instead of nice and smooth like we were used to. We didn't even bother trying any of our other software (just getting WoW installed on a new computer takes a few hours)

It took pretty much all day (from about 2pm to 10pm) to set up the computers with just the stuff we want and need without all the crap given to us. We decided before going to bed that we were going to have to exorcise Vista from the computers and install our Windows XP in order to get the brand new computers to run to their best performance.

(btw now that I have yet another spare computer I think it's time to mess with Ubuntu or some other Linux flavor)

Free M$-Works....sorta

ZDNet ran a story today that Microsoft was going to go ad-funded MS-Works in the next version. For those that don't know MS-Works is a stripped down basic featured office suite. Think MS-Office without the office.

All fine and good because MS-worksbroke was too expensive anyways. Even at $49.99 retail it wasn't worth it. Why you ask? Enough software for college papers at only $49.99 as compared to the obscene price of MS-Office? So take some crappy suite and put advertisements on it. That's why we use FireFox is to get rid of ads.

As a PSA check out OpenOffice. Free, powerful, low overhead. While it is missing a few advanced features I haven't found anything that an average user would need that is missing.



Check it out. You won't be sorry.
(money back guarantee, not applicable in any areas)

When good things go wrong

So I posted an article about the Cessna Skycatcher over at FreeRepublic. Of course someone had to photoshop the panel shot.



I thought it was pretty funny so had to share.

Security on the Net - MS Antispyware?

Last year about this time I was beta testing Microsofts Antispyware. Let me tell you first of all that it sucks. It was great at detecting things but was crap for actual removal of things. Even if you told MS Antispyware to remove it completely no matter what it said the spyware would come back on the next reboot. I wrote it off as just usual crap from MS and removed Antispyware from my system and went back to my tried and true standbys of Ad-aware, Spybot S&D, and Hijack This.

So today I was doing some research here at work and I stumbled on some interesting information. I wasn't researching spyware I was researching something completely different, but yea that's the nature of the internet.

Anyway I found some blog posts about a software company called Claria. Claria before their name change some years back was called GAIN, and before that Gator. GAIN and Gator are both well known spyware/malware companies.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Claria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation

So now that I have established Claria's presence in the spyware world let me describe what happened around the time I stopped using MS-Antispyware.

Antispyware originally had any products from Claria (GAIN and Gator) flagged as high risk and quarantine remove. At some point in time the default settings for those spyware programs were changed BY MICROSOFT to ignore and moderate risk. So what this meant is that is you used scheduled spyware scans MS-Antispyware would completely ignore anything by Claria and allow it to pass. If you used manual scan and removal then the next day MS-Antispyware would not flag the incoming reinstallation of Claria software as hostile, and again allow it to pass by.

This problem was of course easily remedied by ignoring the MS-Antispyware settings and setting them manually to remove/quarantine for the particular spyware. However on the next update (usually weekly during beta) the settings for those particular spywares would go back to the Microsoft settings of ignore moderate threat and the whole process would start over again.

Interestingly enough Claria is not the only company that MS has let skate by on their spyware/malware.

WeatherBug, which ships WITH AOL software (including AIM and ICQ), is considered spyware. While it seems to serve out weather information it also collects surfing habits and feeds that information back to a server for serving up directed advertisements. Yep spyware.

So MS-Antispyware originally had Weatherbug flagged as spyware for removal. Again the same thing happened. They updated the spyware database to show Weatherbug as a moderate threat, ignore. Here is the twist on this one though. AOL THEMSELVES threatened to sue Microsoft on the spyware classification of WeatherBug. Yea AOL, the guys with all the commercials touting their service and supposedly protecting their users agains spyware/malware. Microsoft instead of fighting, caved and deflagged WeatherBug as spyware.

It goes on more. WhenU, WebHancer and Ezula Toptext have also been autoflagged as ignore on MS-Antispyware. WhenU in particular was the program I was having the most fits with trying to remove.

Take a look at this screenshot from one of the reports:

http://www.sunbelt-software.com/ihs/alex/ignore1small.jpg

That is pretty much what my MS-Antispyware report would look like every morning, even AFTER spyware removal with MS-Antispyware.

So the point of all this is just because something is made by a company supposedly looking out for you remember that with enough money and scratch through back channels, or in some cases threat of lawsuit, changes everything.

Current Setup:

Firefox + Adblock + Filterset.G
Thunderbird
Grisoft AVG
Lavasoft Ad-Aware

Virus and Adware Free since August 2005.

Various links and references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation
http://getoutfoxed.com/about/spyware
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13793423
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdewk/is_200501/ai_n8671127
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/update-on-clariamicrosoft.html
http://www.pchell.com/support/weatherbug.shtml