What you really mean is....

Google isn't alone in being evil...they are all as bad.

Clear, logical thought isn't your forte, not really...

I don't know either, I didn't even know this article was still going. I don't usually make articles that keep going like this. Maybe I need to study what I did here to see if I can apply it on other articles.

May the best greedy corporate entity win.   BTW, why so much anti-linux sentiment here, is it because the Impulse client needs IE7 to run?

I used linux long before I even heard of Stardock - when I got a RedHat Pro box while working a tech investment conference in Scottsdale, where RedHat was public offering it's way to Wall St. legendary status.  Now, it's just an also-ran owned by another also-ran.  Since then, I've toyed with it with a hobbyist's interest and have tried a few dozen installs of various distros on a handful of computers I have on my home LAN.

But to answer your question, I feel that what you're observing is called "back-lash" driven by two issues:

1) It never matched the hype generated.  Ever. The world hasn't just moved on from the Linux bus - the world never got on board.  Sure, there are quite a few LAMP servers out there running commercial web sites and data warehouse portals, but who cares?  Mind-share here is coming largely from home users that think LAMP is what you turn off when it's time to go to bed.

2) The Linux community presents itself quite readily as a bunch of under-sexed geeks that are very willing to give a new user absolute grief for forgetting to phrase their help and support questions in the form of an answer.  RTFMan pages works for assembly language programmers.  It does not work for Bob & Sally from Peoria that just want to fire up a computer and run some apps, play some games, and MySpace themselves into identity theft.  There are exceptions, and some linux user communities actually go well out of their way to bring in and nurture new users, but they are just that: exceptions.  And they come too late.

More like humorous and innacurate.  Zealotry exists in every camp whether it's foss/Linux or propietary MS, and if you weren't trying to sound funny, you would have mentioned that a big exception to that "rule" is Canonical's Ubuntu boards.  They have done a lot and their distribution has advanced in strides to hide the nasty underworkings on the system from Bob & Sally so their plug-and-play wifi adapter and usb flash which they bought on BB works out-of-the-box, in most cases.  Technically there's nothing really windows  can do that a linux distro can't. Well, maybe give way to almost every virus/botnet/worm/spyware available out there. I give you that.

They're at the top of the vanishingly small list of exceptions that I had in mind.  I didn't think it necessary to name names, because - as you help demonstrate - everyone that has any experience with *nix knows they're the one's trying their hardest to promote linux in a positive way.  Any other examples?

Try getting Linux to support a mainstream tablet laptop.  By 'support' I don't mean 'boot'.  I mean support the hardware and the capabilities of the machine.  So, for example, Vista kicks Ubuntu's butt on things like:

* display panel feature buttons

* pen stylus precision

* voice and writing recognition

* battery/power management

And if your pen-computing laptop is using FinePoint digitizing hardware for the pen, you're hosed.  Perhaps that has changed by now... I hear OpenSuse 11 had something.  Great - it's only been about two years since some of the majors flipped from Wacom-based pens to FinePoint.

[EDIT TO ADD: And if there is a question about whether or not I'm an MS "zealot" I'll say this: I would guess that I've got a larger number of entirely different operating systems running on my home LAN that you do on your home and office networks combined.  I'm not vendor-oriented.  I like bits and pieces of many operating systems.  But when it comes to end-user suitability for Joe User, MS is producing some good stuff.]

Yes, it has, and if it hasn't changed enough, it's not because of Linux' shortcomings, but rather there hasnt been any GOOD driver SUPPORT from 3rd party companies, like the manufacturers of the peripherials you mention. ATI only recently published thousands of pages worth of documentation about their latests GPUs, and only recently are Linux users experiencing good open-source driver support for their HD 4000 cards on Linux.  The propietary flglx drivers are very poor quality, but that's because of ATI, not Linux.  A similar situation occurs with Nvidia.  Sometimes manufacturers have gone to be outright against Linux, for reasons no one knows. 

You can do that with ANY search engine.

I really don't want to insult but if someone posts personal info on the net than that's what happens. Price you pay for submitting personal info online. As an example I'm pretty sure I can dig up personal details on you as well Starkers.

As for the ads it's funny. I see no Google ads anywhere I go except a small handful of sites. And only one small one line ad in my Gmail.

Does your paranoia have no end?

Which Law_S exactly?

Trans-National CRC checks on packet received *and* flying by?

It's not FOR the Laws either... catchy, isn't it.

Google then took the information he was told . . and passed it along to other people that asked. 

Sometimes he offered other services . . like drugs. 

You didnd't have to take the drugs of course. 

But the truth is, that the more you talked to Google, the more specialized his drug offers were to you. 

He knew about yoru hard home life and your nut allergy and could hook you up.  Cheap.

Don't hate Google.  Just know the risks of talking to him.  Do the same with Linux and MS and Apple.

If you make enough source changes or dig through archaic settings, sure. But how many people really want to spend hours setting up an OS before they start using it?

I'm still wondering why, by default even on the Ubuntu distro, KDE isn't doing simple things like open the K menu when you hit the Start/Windows key, and why you can't even map it to open the menu in the GUI key mapping utility.

Linux has its strengths - it's focused very strongly on developers and on power users. If you love tweaking, then Linux is great. But if you want something anybody can use, if you want to just sit down and start working - Linux just isn't there yet.

Linux is still very unpolished. It still feels likean unfinished work in progress. Sure, is can do everything, but with more work than with Windows or MacOS. It doesn't have a polished interface out of the box, even with distros like Ubuntu.

In any case:

This Google OS looks like it may be a minimalist browser based OS, possibly with a simple application launcher.  Okay, so that's gonna work for smaller devices and for a lot of people who just don't do much on their computers except the basics.

But - for people who do more than the basics, and for those who tend to buy the more expensive, more powerful machines, I don't think that will work. They'll want something more like Windows.

Of course, that is merely guesswork - there's really not much information about the new OS right now.

. . . and yes, Google advertises everywhere it can. It is, quite frankly, an advertising company. That's how they make their money.

. . . and frankly, I'm getting sick of people who take a one-size-fits-all approach to computing. Especially the "oh, everything is moving to the web" crowd. No, not everything is moving to the web. Yes, it's a great mew medium with a lot of promise. No, it won't work for everything. One size does not fit all, and there are many things that do not fit the web model. Sure, you can shoehorn anything onto a web page, but my experience is that isn't really ideal for things like games or documents or multimedia.

Here are some things that drive me crazy about web based applications:

• Offline storage and computing. Either it's completely unavailable, or it's stored in some temporary cache that may or may not be there when you unplug.
• Feature sets have never, in my experience, matched non-web apps. Pegasus Mail and Thunderbird and Outlook and other non-web email clients are still far more powerful than Gmail, Yahoo mail, and Hotmail. Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org are still more powerful than Google Docs.
• Everything either grinds to a halt or starts throwing error messages when the network gets congested. How responsive the web app is depends completely on whether or not your neighbor is doing something that hogs bandwidth, like downloading video.
• 90% of the time, if I'm watching video, I frankly just download it. Streaming is a pain. It only takes a couple of dropped packets to kill the video, and it's annoying having frames stutter or switch to low-res every few seconds.
• This applies to anything realtime. It's far better to use local resources where you don't have to worry about the status of the network.
• I've seen web based games, and frankly they're no different from non-web games. This is an example of something just being shoehorned into a browser just because they can do it, and not because it's it's better in a browser.
• Frankly, the browser chrome isn't always needed or desireable. Do I really need all that in all of my applications?
• As a developer - web development is language soup. This may work well for large developers like Google, but for small developers and hobbyists, it's just too much to learn. I'd much rather work in one or two languages than in a dozen or so.

In conclusion: Just because you can do something in a certain way doesn't mean it's ideal, and IMHO even though the web has its place, I don't think it would be ideal to webify everything.

I don't believe that one size fits all. I don't believe that moving everything onto the "cloud" or the "web" or the "internet" is ideal for everything in our lives.

I keep telling you ANY search engine can do the same thing. Google isn't the ONLY one you know.

One bad experinence and they think the sky is falling down...