Off to an ironic start

2007-09-26 rant

Well, I said just today that I was going to write my own blogging scripts for my site, so I could start blogging. Well, as you can probably guess, I did NOT already write a blogging script. Nope, for now, it's good old manual intervention, until I can get the scripting done.

So, why exactly am I already blogging? Because I can't take it anymore. I've read way too many "Linux just isn't ready for the desktop" articles/blog posts/forum threads/... Now, they certainly make some good points. However, sometimes, they just don't think. Take this article by Michael Gartenburg. What are his two reasons that Linux isn't ready for the mainstream?

Now, these are both semi-valid points. However, they're not completely and totally valid. For example. I can share files between myself and my Microsoft-bound colleagues using Openoffice. True, I've found a couple of incompatibilities. For example, the letter I sent to a church we had performed at included our organization logo as a watermark. I worked very hard to make the watermark perfect, but when I sent it to my director, her word processor mangled it, making the watermark huge. Rather than fuss with it, I worked around it, by sending it to her as a PDF.

Let me stop for a moment here, and share something with you: PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It's meant to present the same view of a document to all recipients of that document, whether they are using Windows 95, Mac OS9, Vista, BeOS, FreeBSD, Linux... the list goes on. If you need to send business documents over the web, and need it to be presented exactly as you see it, you need to use a PDF. This even counts for users of Microsoft Word.

Now, let's tackle the issue of Itunes. Yes, it's rather nice music software. So is Windows Media Player. So are Winamp, and Rhythmbox, and Amarok. So what sets it apart? A friend of mine sold me an Ipod Nano a couple weeks ago. I figured that since I run Linux only, I'd have to slap Rockbox on the thing and play my music that way. However, it syncs up just fine with Amarok. While I miss a few nifty features of Rockbox, I'm to the point where I just want my portable music player to play music. Nothing more, thanks. Really, the main thing that you're missing by not having Itunes, is not having access to the Itunes store. Whoop-te-frickin-doo! If you're really worried about it, buy the song through Itunes in Windows, sync it to your Ipod, and then sync your Ipod to Amarok. Try it, it works.

Well, I think that's all the rant I have in me for now. I'll eventually get the scripting done for this thing, so anybody who actually takes the time to read my nonsense can let me and the rest of the world know what they think.

Update 10/05/2007:
I finally finished my comments code. I'll try to have the comments available for viewing by the end of the weekend, but rest assured that I will see anything you post here.

Comments:

Comment from JK - http://www.slaxer.com

Comment: This is a test post, just to prove that my comments scripts do in fact work.

2007-10-23 23:48:26

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