Re: [tlug] playing real video with an open source player

[Godwin Stewart <gstewart@example.com>]

On Tue, 4 May 2004 02:54:46 -0700, Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>
wrote:

> And here I was thinking it might be the aristocratic-sounding
> "J. Godwin Stewart" :-)

Yeah, well my name being Stewart I should be able to trace my ancestry back
to the Scottish royal family, or does that *really* sound like I'm scraping
the barrel?

> I dunno.  A lot of people seem to not like it much, even as they
> keep on buying it.  The fact that they believe they have no alternative
> seems to make at least some of them resent it more.

Also, many have /heard/ of Linux but hesitate to use it because they think
they need a degree in computer science to be able to. "Oh yeah, Linux, I've
heard of that. It's that funny thing for geeks, right?" A message about
usability really needs to be sent out, especially with the advent of
newbie-friendly distros like Mandrake and RH/Fedora (I know, I know...)
Also, let's not forget live CD's like Knoppix et al. which enable people to
try out the system without b0rking their (already b0rken by definition)
Windoze setups.

> Sadly true.  Basically, they've come to think that computers are 
> basically supposed to suck, and there isn't much they can do.  They
> don't even know about the Mac. This is indeed a sad state of affairs.

I gave up on the Mac around the days of MacOS 8.1. Up until that point at
least they were slow, buggy and unstable in my experience. Easy to use, yes,
no arguments there (you don't even have to think which mouse button to
press), but still slow, buggy and unstable.

Also, Mac hardware is comparatively expensive, which is another reason
people prefer to suffer the inadequacies of Microslop. Speaking of which...
Nobody in the mainstream media seems to point out that M$ knew about the
LSASS vulnerability 5 months ago, and that the patch released a few weeks
ago to plug it basically hosed the computers on which it was installed
(lockups with the system process using 100% CPU time repeatedly trying to
load drivers). Admins therefore had to backpedal and leave their machines
vulnerable if they wanted to use them. There was quite a lot of chatter
about this on bugtraq.

-- 
G. Stewart   --   gstewart@example.com -- gstewart@example.com
Registered Linux user #284683 (Slackware 9.0, Linux 2.6.5)
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What's the definition of a will?   (It's a dead giveaway).

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