Geeky Baldisms

I used to hear that a lot back in the 60's and 70's. Not only would every home have a computer, but it would be doing things like controlling our appliances, lights, and security systems.

Well, some of us have managed to accomplish that scenario. But the rest of us simply have computers that are used for things like eBay and playing games while our houses continue to be run by good old humans.

But what are the ramifications of the fact that non-computer people are buying computers in droves?

Sadly, with Microsoft dominating the operating system market, it means that there are millions and millions of computers out there that are doomed to eventual takeover by malware to the degree that the Storm bot will continue to get larger and larger. Want to spam? Rent the Storm bot. It's available for hire.

It's just a shame that computers must be sold with Windows, unless you want to jump through some hoops. The thought of supporting Linux is a scary one for PC manufacturers. It shouldn't be. Sure, it's different, but once a system is up and running, keeping it going under Linux is a snap. I personally like living on the "bleeding edge" and running Ubuntu, but there are many more stable releases out there for those who aren't into upgrading so often.

What's even more sad is that Dell will sell you a PC with Ubuntu on it, but it costs more than a Windows-equipped one. Why? Because of the lack of crapware kickbacks.

I woke up feeling funny yesterday morning.

The sun was shining brightly through the window, but it was the same window that the setting sun uses to illuminate my bedroom! Strange...

I went to the sink to shave. Being slightly OCD, I tend to notice small things. Thus, I noted that the water was swirling counterclockwise down the drain. I live several thousand miles north of the equator, this made no sense at all.

So I thought I would log on and check out the news. But when I moved the mouse to wake up my sleeping system, it looked...different.

The start button was gone, replaced by a little orange circle.

My brand-new machine that I had brought home from Best Buy two days earlier had come with Windows Vista. This didn't look anything at all like Vista.

I pressed the little orange circle. The menu popped up, but again, it looked...different. It was leaner, I guess. It was more to the point. But I missed all of the cool visual stuff that Vista would do.

Where was my Vista? What had happened? I looked for Internet Explorer but couldn't find it. But the Start button had a menu choice called “Internet,” and there was something called Firefox Web Browser there. I opened it, and sure enough, there was my Google home page. Thank goodness not EVERYTHING had changed. I went to cnn.com to try to find out why things were so weird all of a sudden.

The headlines looked pretty much the same, wars, typhoons, outrage over gas hitting $2.00 a gallon...HUH? It was nearing $4.00 when I filled up last Monday!

Again, strange, but by now my slightly OCD eye had been caught by an ad for TigerDirect.com: Get a loaded PC for $199! Wow, that sounded cheap. So I clicked on it.

The TigerDirect site gave the details: Intel dual-core E2200, 1 gig of RAM, 200G hard drive, speakers, multimedia reader, DVD burner, and Ubuntu 8.02.

I was familiar with everything but this Ubuntu. What was that? I typed Ubuntu into Google and was directed to their website. The site was pretty cool, actually, until I started reading about this Ubuntu thing. Then, I became puzzled.

Ubuntu was an operating system. That rang a bell. I had heard the techies at work refer to Windows XP as an operating system, and how much better it was than Vista. It seemed like I had even heard them mention Ubuntu, as well, in those breakroom conversations that they had that I had eavesdropped on and found nearly impossible to keep up with.

I looked the site over for Vista machines. I didn't find any! There were Macs, bare-bones systems with no operating systems, and others with operating systems like Fedora, PCLinux, and SUSE. But no Vista, XP, or Windows anything.

Well, my mama didn't raise no fool. That 200 buck computer must be missing some pretty important features to be that cheap. So I read the fine print.