Hardare is easier...

[Void Main]

Sunday the motherboard went out on my main desktop. It was my fault. I have/had a motherboard with an Athlon 1600. One of the fans on one of the chips (not the CPU) started making a lot of noise and wasn't turning very good so I just unplugged it. :) The machine ran for another day and then shut down. It would do nothing more than make a lot of beeping noises when trying to start it after that, even after it cooled down.

No problem, Tiger Direct to the rescue. I ordered a new Soyo Dragon with an Althon 2400, CPU fan, and a couple of 3" fans to replace the other fans in the case that I unplugged previously for making too much noise. :) It would have been much cheaper just to spend the 3 bucks per fan to replace the bad ones in the first place but it just didn't work out that way. :)

At any rate, last night when the parts came in it took me about 10 minutes to swap the board and CPU and get the new fans installed. Turned on the power and clicked OK a couple of times on the Kudzu hardware detection screen and it's been up ever since. Didn't have to reconfigure or reinstall anything. I didn't even have to call in and get any kind of activation code. I'm not sure but I have heard this task isn't quite as easy on the more recent releases of some "other" OS.

[dishawjp]

Void,

I dunno,... I was pretty upset about Linux and hardware detection and configuration a few weeks back. I managed to scrape a few extra bucks together and went to a computer show and picked up a new video card, a printer and an external modem to replace the PCI one that had gotten fried in a thunderstorm.

Since the new printer was USB and I'd never used my USB ports, and I anticipated trouble configuring the video card, and I was replacing a PCI modem with a serial one, I figured it would take a bit of time to sort it all out. So I bought a 12 pack to keep me company for the process. Well, I plugged the printer in first, and kudzu did its thing... detected it and all, and even got the right manufacturer and series of the printer. After it finished booting, I had to type a very tough-to-remember command, I think it might have been "system-config printer" (I guess you have to be a real geek to remember a command like that) and then I had to select model from a list. It then asked me if I wanted to print a test page, and it was perfect. I hadn't even finished my first beer!

Undaunted (and still thirsty) I shut the computer down and ripped the video card out popped the new one in and rebooted. Didn't that damned kudzu find that too! No CD's to put into it, just rerun the nVIDIA shell script and I had 3D and everything just worked. And I still hadn't finished the first beer! Seriously pissed, I downed the rest of my first beer, cracked another and forged on to replace the modem. I *knew* htis would be a bit of work. By this time I already had 5 or 6 CD's full of crap that I didn't need. At least I could use them as coasters for my beer, But then I would have had to worry about things like "beer rings" on my computer desk... not going to happen. They were just gettiing piled up on a corner of my desk.

Well, I shut the computer down, took the PCI modem out, attached the external one to com1... errr... ttyS0, typed "ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/modem" once the computer was booted and then that damned thing just worked! I used minicom to connect to my work network and everything did what it was supposed to. I added another couple of CD's to my growing pile. (How much less would hardware cost if the manufacturers didn't have to create and supply those damned things?) And I was just starting my second beer! If I had been using some other expensive proprietary system, I would have been feeding my computer CD's playing with wizards and rebooting and crap like that for at least 8 or 10 beers!

This is why Linux will never beat MSWindows as a desktop operating system. You can just plug hardware in and go with it. And you never need to run "scandisk" or "defrag." It's close to impossible to get a virus so you don't have to updare virus definition files. Or even have "AV" software in the first place. There are no "popups" so you don't have to install special software to eliminate them.

How the heck are men supposed to justify spending hours sitting in front of a computer drinking beer (and swearing at it) to their wives if everythng is so darned easy. What will men do when their wives start using Linux and then find out they never have call us to fix a broken operating system? This Linux stuff may well be the end of us.

Then think of the workers. Will they have to spend 8 hours a day being productive? Instead of sitting in front of half-dead computers rebooting them several times a day and dealing with random crashes and redoing lost work, they will just have to produce. It could be the end of civilization as we know it. Men will be devalued and employees will be more productive. Breweries will go out of business and the farmers that provides them with raw materials will fail.

Or maybe not. I'm doing my very best (tonight for example) to drink lots of beer and be very unproductive (although I could be productive if I chose to be) happily sitting in front of a Linux computer doing what I want to do instead of wet nursing a broken operating sytem.

Anyway, time will tell, but don't say I didn't warn you...

Jim Dishaw

[worker201]

Then think of the workers. Will they have to spend 8 hours a day being productive? Instead of sitting in front of half-dead computers rebooting them several times a day and dealing with random crashes and redoing lost work, they will just have to produce. It could be the end of civilization as we know it. Men will be devalued and employees will be more productive.

Haha, you jest. But you are telling more truth than you know. Most things we buy today aren't meant to last. Disposable everything. Cd players that work for about 6 months and then die. Light bulbs and pencils and screws and bolts and other products that are meant to be thrown away, not fixed. Cars (er, trucks in my town) are built so shoddily, that anything longer than a 1year lease is pushing the limits. Everything battery-powered, so you can throw away and replace the batteries. This sort of thing has been going on since the 50s. Is there any reason to think that Microsoft hasn't cashed in on the game? Little contracts with Symantec, contracts with Intel. Your computer is outdated and out-virused within a year!

Loved your post, but like I always say, you can never theorize too many conspiracies.