Survey posted 2003-03-18 18:12 by Henrik.

Contribute ideas to surveys by sending a mail to survey@ticalc.org.

The thing is, why pay? If people were to pay for things, then people will try to create copies of the programs, or create something like it. Doing so would allow others to get basicly the same thing.

so basicaly, you vote no, like me. I bought a TI app once, organiser, before I got my palm m500 as a gift.

Look at Linux!! It's FREE and everyone loves it and it's growing and booming all the time! Now look at MS. Case closed.

MS products are actually useful... did you vote 'yes'? The only reason Linux is booming is 1.) Servers (i have to agree, Linux servers are better), and 2.) people are trying to be "better" than other people by using something that no one else uses. Everyone knows Linux sucks; but they still use it.

There is one probem with linux. The gap between the newbie, featureless, and the advanced, inpossible to learn without taking IT courses or something. I am trying to find a good dist for me, tried debian, worked well for a while, tried caldera, didn't have a lot of packages, and couldn't install the ones I needed, self recursive RPMs or something, GRUB confused me when I installed SuSE, Redhat was too slow to downoad, couldn't find a good mirror, downloading mandrake this instant. most peope say inux has no apps, personay I am setting up linux because it supposidy would run all the programs I coud ever want (lotsa good games, IMs, maybe set up a server on my DSL) and more stabe. Windows has a main point of having hardware vendors support it, rather than software support of the hardware, and in open source standards are sometimes hard to keep. other than that, afaik, linux is better than windows.

> Windows has a main point of having hardware vendors
> support it

I have an ASUS Sp97-V motherboard. I recently enabled the onboard USB controller. Linux automatically detected and installed it within 45 seconds, without a CD or anything. Windows has a driver that crashes every time I enable it, and doesn't work at all. ASUS has no support for it on their website (only 8 files for my motherboard _total_) and Microsoft has no idea that computers with USB exist, judging from their driver download website.

Would you recomend the ASUS A7M266-D for a dual proc graphics-workstation-type setup?

Oh, I see you use Windows. And who meant for us to look at our hard drive with a web browser? Also, OS'es can be made sucessful or killed by bussiness decisions. Also, until you admit that almost all of the useful things in Windows were stolen by Micro$oft from Apple, I woln't admit that Windows can be useful. Also, Mac is better than Linux is better than Windows, if you have the same applications (equally buggy, same basic interface) and comparable hardware. Apple falls on price, speed, and games.

Hey, I like viewing the hard drive in a web browser! Back_button=good Thousands_of_windows_open = bad

KDE's Konqueror has a back button, actualy, fyi, it is used as the browser and explorer

Here here... Linux sucks at doing anything useful short of running a server.
Hey, I'd rather run a W2K server though :)
I reckon Linux is free, 'cos if they tried to sell it no one would buy it.
Until someone gets cracking and releases a decent distro of Linux, I'll stick to Windows.
I've always thought that people who use Linux use it to be 'cool' - like people who use DOS to confuse people (like me! I use DOS on the old PCs at school with Win98 on them - Win98 truly sucks)

I always thought that was the main reason people used Linux also. I don't see why people hate MS so much... (the reasons really aren't that great). If you don't like the graphics of the taskbar... then CHANGE them or something.

Hey, if ya don't like what Windoze looks like, get WindowBlinds... Even the free version is better than nothing... The Web Page link above goes to the company's site I think (http://www.objectdesktop.com/). I personally like the ones that look kinda like WinXP (I know, I know... Windoze look = BAD != prgmBAD) and a small-ish one that has buttons to control WinAmp!!! (Only 2.xx though :( ).

Okay, as for changing graphics Linux can do that for you in the GUI's that they come with; no third party applicatoins needed. Just right click on the window bar and select customize.

M$ does suck. 2 weeks after I had ME installed it wouldn't run for more then 30 minutes without a restart due to poor RAM and application managment. 2K's a bit better, but it's still slow and buggy. I load Redhat 8.0 up on my system and never knew that my system could run that fast.

Linux does work. You just have to be willing to put some effort into learning how to use the more powerfull features. You'll get out what you put in.

WTF??? Redhat 8 runs slower than 2K and XP! (at least on a 500MHz K6 processor - I'm quite suprised at the performance, especially as it's an AMD!)

By default, the kernel is optimized for Intel processors. Install the kernel sources and the kernel manager thingy and rebuild with AMD optimizations.

I won't discuss the Linux versus Windows thing. Any Linux distro still lacks basic usability. That's a fact. It's rapidly improving, but that doesn't really matter at this point.
What I dislike about Windows though, is that it tends to become a piece of spyware. I also don't like the way MS implements industry standards, or doesn't implement standards for that matter. IE is the most common example of this, ACPI (power management) is another.
One thing you should know, is that all MS cares about is money. It doesn't care about bugs/security, because there's no money in a patch. IE is free, yeah, but how old is version 6 by now? All other browsers these days support a lot more than IE. Another thing is that MS changes the Office file formats every now and then to force everybody to buy a new version.
You don't have this with open source software. OSS will always go forward and become better each version, because it's driven by honor and pride and not by money. Actually I dare to say that MS software still improves these days, because of the pressure it feels from OSS. Without OSS, MS software could be compared to the TIOS as for amount of updates.

(note: I don't run either Linux or Windows.)

> MS software could be compared to the TIOS as for
> amount of updates.

IMHO, TI does better anyway (I use Win98SE).

>What I dislike about Windows though, is that it tends
>to become a piece of spyware.

For those wo use Windows download Ad-aware 5.83. Its freeware, dectects and allows deletion of all spyware type stuff in the memory, HDDs, and registry.

>>OSS will always go forward and become better each version, because it's driven by honor and pride and not by money. Actually I dare to say that MS software still improves these days, because of the pressure it feels from OSS. Without OSS, MS software could be compared to the TIOS as for amount of updates.
>>

So what happened with WinME?

Ehh? That piece of [bleep] has a huge-[bleep] memory leak... <strong>Needs</strong> rebooted as function roughly equivalent to T=1.01^RAM + 1.001^SWAP_FILE where RAM and SWAP_FILE are in MB and T is in hours (seconds? :p).

(Yes, I know HTML doesn't work.)

>>> "everyone loves it"

*cough* no_one doesn't ;)


Well, I never actually used it so I can't say for sure, but compatible software beats <insert linux advantage>, imo.

Stability? Huge-@$$ uptimes? Large hardware compatibility (once you write a driver :p )? Seeing how it was made (i.e., source code)? Free? Being able to screw up, err, make better, the kernel?

(Obviously, I LOVE Linux. :) I have Red Hat 8 kernel 2.4.18-14 on a 1781MB partition... Use Win98SE as primary though, free ISP needs it to connect, then I kill the ad program...)

You have to write your own drivers?
I pity the foo' who uses Linucks.

Only for really new or rare hardware... Most stuff has some written by other people already. Heck, some vendors make their own drivers (for example, Intel (for my gfx chipset) and HP (for my printers)).