Unwanted technical advice is common at conventions [part two]

[feren]

I was talking a bit with points after posting the previous entry and I thought I'd share this small snippet of conversation. Points, I place the blame for the repressed memory you triggered squarely upon your shoulders.

Points says, "At least it wasn't a whole line of people going 'y'know, if you let me take everything over and redo everything from scratch, I could do it better.'"

Feren says, "I had that last year."

That's when I realized I'd forgotten to mention in the previous diatribe that I actually had people recoil and fucking hiss like cornered, rabid weasels when they heard the Windows "Booting up" chime come from my laptop. Seriously people, what the fuck is your damage? Every operating system serves a niche. I am not about to use your favorite flavor of Linux just because it gives you a warm chubby one and allows you to delude yourself into thinking that you're running your operating system without all that "bloated, poorly-coded overhead." What the hell is your problem, you sacks of disease? Don't tell me you really think that window transparency and antialiased fonts shouldn't count as overhead? Get a goddamn grip!

Allow me to make this painfully clear (I even promise I won't use big words as I try to explain this to you): I use the tools that meet my needs. Some of those tools run under Windows. In the words of The Great Sage and Eminent Junkie (I speak of the character "Henry Dean," from Stephen King's Dark Tower series) you need to accept this fact and just "deal." Acting like a complete idiot who just shit his pants all because of a SOUND FILE isn't going to convince me to "convert," and it sure as hell doesn't endear me to your cause. Mostly it just reaffirms my belief that you have the personality of a wet gym sock and makes me wish I had the power to get you forcefully sterilized for the good of our species.

Seriously, I think I'll put in a line item in the budget for a tazer. First person to be "clever" in a similar manner next year gets 50,000 volts to the reproductive organs.

Comments

[sylverfox.livejournal.com]

*applauds*

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Hehheh.

I consider it a good sign for humanity, though, that I went to Linucon (an SF/Linux convention) recently, and there was a guy there wearing a Microsoft T-shirt, yet he did not get beaten up or hunted down or torn to pieces or pelted with broken computer parts or any of that nonsense like that there. Instead, he and everybody else there, as far as I'm aware, had a fun weekend!

Every OS sucks

[yakko.livejournal.com]

The "cause" or the (lack of) practicality of running something that didn't come with the laptop aside, I really have to wonder why people still feel the need to dictate the needs of others. I've gotten along all these years running what I want, not trying to impose my choices on anyone else and cheerfully ignoring unsolicited jeers from others for my choices. Some folks feel they're "saving the world" by evangelizing their choice. Most of the time they're acting like complete fuckchops.

The default Windows sounds are amongst the first things to go on my setups, so people will have to do with hearing the startup sound from a Defender arcade game instead :o)

[donaldson.livejournal.com]

I run XP. It does what I want it to do. I don't see the need to change. The end. Yeehaw.

[tinbender.livejournal.com]

Amen!

That's when I realized I'd forgotten to mention in the previous diatribe that I actually had people recoil and fucking hiss like cornered, rabid weasels when they heard the Windows "Booting up" chime come from my laptop.

I was in there once when someone's machine was fired up, so I could have been one of those people that "recoiled and hissed." In my case, it wasn't the OS, but the fact that the MS startup sound makes me cringe for some reason, sort of a musical equivalent of running fingernails down a blackboard. :)

[fiskblack.livejournal.com]

Oh, you too?

Sometimes you just want to tell them to stop being so goddamned furry. That usually earns a double-take.

And hate. Mm, sweet delicious hate.

Jay Naylor

rantward

[doomsey.livejournal.com]

I wrote a rant for posting here, but I decided it should go in my journal instead.

[roho.livejournal.com]

And don't forget, I'm writing the artshow software in Microsoft Visual Studio! Every time I finish a line of code, Bill Gates bites the head off a duckling.

YES!

[neuracnu.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to remember that one the next time someone gives me shit for coding c#.

[linnaeus.livejournal.com]

I think he punches a baby too, but in his defense the baby is being kind of a dick.

[yotogi.livejournal.com]

Won't somebody think of the domo-kuns?

[feren.livejournal.com]

Not if I can help it.

[lcremeans.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I ended up gravitating back to Windows on my desktop because gee, it's nice to have things working on the first try (though I have to admit that part of that was because I was using FreeBSD on this machine then, and most of the desktop goodies are for either Linux or Windows), and I also have been playing games more since then, and most of those games are (gasp) for Windows. I've also been programming kernel-mode drivers for Windows 2000/XP in the ensuing years, and it's really not that bad of an OS under the hood (though Microsoft must have been smoking crack in some parts of the Win32 API, but that's a rant for later. And IE needs to be rewritten or trashed).

As for bloat, well, I wonder if they've ever tried running KDE 3 on anything with a CPU speed under a gigahertz and with less than 512MB RAM. It's just tolerable in 256MB, and sloooooooow on my K6/233 with 128MB...and while it does okay on my ancient Power Mac with a 400 MHz G3 and a 50 MHz memory, it really wants 500 MHz on a 100 MHz bus, or better. (There's always Xfce for low-spec stuff like that, but KDE has most of Windows XP's bells and whistles, so it's a better comparison.)

-lee

[captain18.livejournal.com]

Two, two bitchy panther rants in one perusal!

All is suddenly right in my world.

[posicat.livejournal.com]

I have 2000 on my desktop, 98 on my laptop, and Linux on my server, in my car, on my pda. I much prefer to run Linux, but there are some things you need windows for. The combination that I have works well, I can run Linux programs right along with windows programs on my windows machine with an Xserver.

That being said, there's no love in my heart for Microsoft. I dispise many things the company has done from lack of security, to hostility towards the market.

I'm of the mindset that the best tool for the job is the one you are most familliar with. Windows, Mac and Linux people all have their prefered OS, and seem to acomplish what they want to acomplish. I'm happy doing my thing, and letting people do their thing, but I'm not shy about volunteering my opinion either.

[ronbar.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should use a Mac boot sound or chime (if there is one these days) along with a KDE startup screen to throw them off the scent.

[discopanda.livejournal.com]

I set the startup sound on my computer to tada.wav

I use Win2k Pro, in case you were wondering, although really my system would have no problem with XP. (3200+ 400fsb, 1GB ram (2x512MB, dual channel), 200GB HDD (partitioned to 130-something-GB for C: and the rest on F:), DVD+-RW drive, DVD-rom drive, some other fun stuff too)

I'm thinking of setting the startup sound to the non-Dolby THX sound. (prefer the non-Dolby version over the Dolby-THX sound)