Sheila Tone has an interesting post on Econoholic about Nadya Suleman, otherwise known as the Mother O’Eight:

Come on sisters, where are all your usual snide remarks about “clown car vaginas?”

The difference is that Nadya Suleman is a single mother on public assistance. So we’re not allowed to be mean to her. If she were a married fundie like the Duggar mom (deft switcheroo, Richaro) she’d be fair game.

Why the hostility? Perhaps it’s because the married, employed Tones are in the process of carefully planning our second, and last, child. We have a 30-month-old. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I want to be a mother, if and why I’d want a second child. And, oh yes, I spend a lot of time working. And a lot of time soul-searching. What’s my purpose in life? Am I a worthy human being? Having a kid turned up those voices, and added “Am I a worthy parent?” to the chorus.

I had to work hard to find which portion to blockquote. Read it all. I chose that portion because it gets to the nub of one of the things that interests me most about this discussion, which is to say the difference in reaction to different situations. Some liberals are saying that if Suleman were a Christian couple like the Duggars, they’d be applauded as the Duggars are. That this is really a classist issue and, owing to Nadya’s last name, possibly a racist one.

But Sheila points out that there are a number of differences between the Duggars and Ms Suleman. Which is one of the things that bothers me about the sort of “If circumstances were different, you’d be saying something different” gotcha attitude that infects blogs from to time. Yes, when circumstances are different, people render judgment. That Suleman will not be remotely able to care for her children, as the Duggars do, makes it something of a different situation. That Suleman used technology and had them all at once – which increases risks to their health and makes caring for them more difficult – matters. There are plenty of reasons to approve of the Duggars and disapprove of Suleman. There are fewer reasons to do the inverse. Those reasons usually come down to “But they’re icky Christians!” and that the Duggars will inflict bad ideas into their kids (this is, of course, in marked contrast to the wonderful ideas that Suleman will pass on… if she has time to).

Truthfully, though, I don’t approve of either the Duggars or Suleman. I don’t know what the “right” maximum number of kids to have is, but it’s clearly fewer than fourteen. An acquaintance of mine, the second of seven, said that once you reach five or so you start running into a situation where the older siblings raise the younger siblings. So on one hand, that seems a good a place as any. It could be said that helping to raise a sibling could be a learning experience for the older siblings, but from my mother’s stories on raising her sisters they can often lose more than they gain from the proposition.

Clancy and I have talked a bit about the Suleman situation. She takes something of a harder line. I feel sorry for Suleman, though I should note that I feel sorry for her at a comfortable distance wherein I am not affected by her actions and compassion is extremely easy. Clancy, like Sheila, has to deal with the consequences of irresponsible behavior every day at work. And as a woman, Clancy (like Sheila) has had a lifetime of experience trying to do the responsible thing in terms of procreation and is less inclined to have much sympathy for someone so clearly reckless. Objectively, it’s hard to disagree with her.

I am a little softer on irresponsible reproduction than are Sheila and my wife. I do see a sort of right-of-reproduction (God willing) in at least a limited fashion. The first child because of the right to reproduce and the second because children need siblings. Had Suleman had the octuplets because she desperately wanted a child, couldn’t afford multiple attempts and so stocked up on her single attempt, and had a moral reason not to abort… I might be willing to chalk it up as an epic lapse in judgment rather than a lapse in morals. But that she already had six that she was not able to take care of on her own and thus knew that she was enlisting her parents in something they didn’t want makes me disinclined to forgive any further pregnancies because her tubes should be tied.

I noticed on the news that they’re investigatinng the fertility clinic, which is something that Clancy and I have been discussing. There aren’t laws, but there are (obviously ignored) guidelines that if followed prevent this sort of nonsense. If there is a positive result in all this, hopefully it is a clamping down on this to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. We shouldn’t even have to be discussing this because it shouldn’t be legally permissible (assuming that it is).

Addendum: Sheila has followed up with a post on three ways to discourage welfare mothers.

IT Management has a review up comparing Windows 7 to Ubuntu (to XP) on a new Netbook. If you’re getting a netbook, it might be worth your while. This post is about something from the comment section, though. Stuart notices that the writer made excuses for some of the failures on Windows 7 but admitted quick defeat when running into WiFi problems on Ubuntu:

OK so you go to the effort of fixing the broken Windows installation. But when Ubuntu has a problem with WiFi drivers you just criticize it. We all know that some WiFi chip makers have been very hostile to Linux.

Actually, I didn’t know that. I commented on a previous post that my WiFi works better with Linux than it does with Windows for both Ubuntu and Mandriva (not Mythbuntu, though). But I mentioned it to my friend Tony and he confirmed that WiFi is a bit of a problem area due to lack of cooperation on the part of chipmakers.

Here is the thing about the lack of cooperation by chipmakers and how much more difficult that makes it for Linux developers.

It. Does. Not. Matter.

That Linux has a good excuse for the fact that WiFi may have difficulty working will not make my WiFi magically start to work. When buying a Netbook, I’m not going to say “Well, I want WiFi, but it’s the chipmaker’s fault so I’m going to get the OS where WiFi doesn’t work right.”

Ten years ago we were having the same discussion about hardware drivers of the more basic sort (audio, video, etc). I couldn’t get Audio on RedHat and was told that it’s not Linux’s fault because Creative Labs didn’t make the drivers. As the saying goes about alcoholism, it’s not your fault but it is your problem. If Linux wanted people to make the transition, they had to take ownership.

Which, fortunately, they did. Linux driver support for my various and sundry computers exceeds Windows’s despite the latter’s inherent advantages. And I fully expect them to get there with WiFi chips, too. No doubt in my mind.

This is likely to be an ongoing problem for Linux, unfortunately. They’re likely to continue to be a step behind. Newer hardware will always focus on working with Windows first and Linux somewhere just before Amiga and Novell. I’m not sure what precisely Linux can do about this. But they’ve got to figure out something because it really doesn’t matter to the user that Linux developers are better at making lemonaid out of limes than are Microsoft developers. They care primarily about how it tastes.

The other problem with Stuart’s comment is that hitting walls with Windows 7 is excusable because it’s a beta product. The Ubuntu he installed was a release. If he’d been doing the same for Vista, that’d be a better argument. But nobody defends Vista.

-{Disclaimer: I may or may not be currently employed by an entity that is either mentioned in or competes directly or indirectly with an entity mentioned in this post. All positions I hold are independent of any such relationships and were held prior to the time that any such relationships began.}-

One of the lessons that keeps getting reinforced lately is “Don’t try to save money with discount products even with name brand stuff. Historically I’ve done well by buying the cheaper end of good brand names, but that’s been biting me in the rear lately. Maybe I’ll post more thoroughly on this. But right now I want to talk about the opposite, where the more I seem to spend for the better product, the worse the product seems to be.

Plantronics Bluetooth Headsets.

I bought my first Plantronics on a quick test at best Buy. I took my Pocket PC there, turned the Bluetooth search function on, and picked up the first product that responded, which was a Plantronics 330. I purchased it, brought it home with me, and it worked beautifully. The time came that I needed a new device. I accidentally dropped the 330 into a (thankfully unsoiled) toilet. Much to my surprise, the 330 never stopped working. The downshot, though, was that the volume was not as good. Since I listened to it frequently in a computer lab, this was not a minor thing. It worked, but it was time to get another one. I figured having two would mean that I could have one charging while listening to the other.

This time, knowing that I wouldn’t need to return the product because Plantronics headsets were perfectly compatible with my Pocket PC, I went to Newegg. This time I brought the next model up: Plantronics 340. The Pocket PC was running some old software, which did not have automatic Bluetooth detection. So having to direct the specific devices, I wanted to be able to tell them apart so I wouldn’t try to sync the wrong one.

The products are mostly identical in function. The first complaint is a superficial one, which is that the 340 doesn’t look as nice. Though both are made of plastic, the 340 has a gray color that makes it look more plasticky. Further, it has a slightly boxier shape that looks less sleek. Since I had the thing plastered to my head while working at Monmark/Soyokaze, I wanted it to look as ungoofy as possible. The upshot was that the sound was better. Most, though not all, of that can be attributed to the waterlog of the 330. The second downside, after appearance, was that the 340 was less comfortable on the ear. After about four hours or so my ear would start hurting a bit. That never happened with the 330. The third strike is that while I could listen to the 330 while it was charging, the 340 would drop the connection the second I plugged in it. Since in the old OS it is a bit of a pain to re-sync after a dropped connection (it requires a restart of the device as often as not), this is no small affair.

So having lost a couple of my headsets in the move and having purchased a Smartphone, I figured that it was time for me to get a better headset. This was originally the case because I thought that volume was going to be a problem, but even after I resolved that I thought that it might be better to have a headset that was specifically designed for both telephone and media capability. So I plunked down more money and bought a Plantronics Voyager 855.

It is the worst yet.

Since I started with superficiality before, I’ll do so again. Though this one has a neater design on the photo compared to the other two, it looks even goofier than the other two when put on my head. It’s the Will Smith’s Ears of bluetooth devices, extending outward and drawing attention to it. It also has a sliding panel that it says is for better microphone capability, though (a) the mic is fine on the cheaper devices and (b) it doesn’t fasten or anything meaning that it slides out half the time that I touch it. It also has a rubber ear thingie that’s supposed to make it more comfortable and reduce outside noise, but the result is that it seems to apply suction to my ear. Thirdly, it has all sorts of buttons that make using it rather complicated. I thought this would be a feature (as did they, I’m sure), but it’s turned out to be a bug. Fourthly, the device used to switch ears is detachable which means that getting it getting lost is an inevitability (though to their credit, they gave me two). Fifthly, though it comes with a neat thing “second ear” to provide stereo sound, it replaces the ear-hinge and it can’t be changed without taking the earpiece out (I’m not sure how I thought it would work, but I figured that I’d be able to managed it). Sixthly, nearly every Plantronics device (not just that I own, but in the lab at work) has uses the same power cord for charging… except this one… making it incompatible with the umpteen chargers I have. Seventhly, and this is almost as much my fault as Plantronics, the volume-setting device, the volume buttons don’t work. That last one is at least partially my fault because of how I accidentally rigged up the phone, but the 330 and 340 don’t seem to have that problem.

The 855 costs roughly twice as much as the 330. I wish I had bought two of the latter.

Will posits the issue of public transportation, and (more to the point) the discrepancy between his few stellar experiences with it, and the more-overwhelming negative set of experiences with it.

As a design case, public transportation is interesting. The problems of it are nothing new; decades ago, Monty Python famously made a pretty hilarious mockery of the convoluted nature of British commuter rail schedules. And it’s certainly the case that the tighter-packed a city is, the easier it will be for a city to make affordable/profitable trains and public transportation that get people where they need to go relatively quickly – certain Japanese cities coming to mind, or certain venues in New York. If you have a smaller city wherein there’s one main business (say, an agricultural or manufacturing plant), a “main street” where 90% of the businesses are located, and a residential district off to the side, then there’s a certain amount of sense in a bus or tram line running one end of the city to the other.

Then you have cities like Colosse. Colosse itself resembles nothing organized at all – it’s more like a giant amoeba sprawling over the landscape. “Population density” is pretty low, and growth in the city/metroplex has come in the form of newer and newer subdivisions being built outward, each further out of the city limits. Nearby to most of these subdivisions is an industrial park/business park/stripmall or three, because historically the “new subdivisions” pop up on unincorporated land, make a township of themselves for 5-10 years, and then only get annexed when their tax base is large enough that Colosse’s city council decides to gobble them up.

End result? Colosse has 3-4 major “downtown” areas as such, a number of sub-downtown areas, a smattering of businesses all over the place elsewhere, and then each little township (whether currently annexed, self-incorporated, or otherwise set up) its own little mini-downtown. It’s not all that unusual for people to work in Thessalonica or Mayne and commute all the way to Corinth or Cruston – it may not be the original plan, but personal employment changes (job loss/switch) or businesses relocations (usually there’s better rent in one of the mini-downtowns) can be fairly regular occurrences.

Being an original resident of Melleorki, I’ve seen two instances that have bearing. Both come out of the same deal: ~10 years ago, a group of “Mayors of large cities” were invited to another large city in the South to view that city’s “major works”, and one in particular, the city’s light rail system. The mayors of Melleorki and Colosse at the time both promptly got penis envy about this, because neither of their cities had Light Rail and “logically” if it worked so well for that city, well then it would have to work well for their city too!

In Melleorki, the city council went through the motions of figuring out where Light Rail would have to run, what sort of infrastructure would be needed, how much it would cost… and nixed it every time the mayor came back.

In Colosse, alas, “Light Rail” was going to happen whether we liked it or not – the Mayor had a number of his political cronies on the city council, enough to ramrod it through, and so Colosse took it right up Main Street. The net effect? Main Street, and the street it adjoins with later on, are now virtually impassible. Their traffic capacity was cut in half (to make room for ground-level rail), turning/crossing them is difficult at best, businesses along the streets struggle (hey, wouldn’t you if you ran a restaurant/store and nobody could get to you?) and nobody likes the rail line. Worse yet, the rail line runs for less than 8 miles, just barely enough to connect two of the “Downtown” areas to each other… and doing nothing to make parking any easier for anybody. In short, our Mayoral Penis Envy got us a Light Rail “system” that was too small, barely functional, and no fun.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Colosse Public Transportation (CPT) has recently been cutting rail times and bus lines all over the place, with the argument that the ones being cut are “not financially viable.” In my view, this is the biggest downside of CPT: the fact that it is run not as a public service, but as a business.

When public transportation is a public service – even if it operates “at a loss” and requires subsidizing – it can work. Run it as a “business” and cut “unprofitable” lines, and you quickly doom it. The logic isn’t hard to follow: public transportation will work best (and be used most) when it achieves something sorta-kinda near to the flexibility of normal commuting. The more limited it is, the less people are going to use it.

Take my normal day: I get up. I go to work. I may (or may not) have plans to be somewhere after work. These plans may (or may not) take me to various areas across Colosse. During my day, these plans may change. I may get a phone call, or email, indicating that I need to be in another place instead, or that plans are canceled. If I were married or had children (more to the point, especially with children involved), the dynamic would almost certainly be similar. With a car, I’ve got the option of adapting to changes.

If public transportation were to be (a) ubiquitous and (b) easily tracked, I could probably make do without a car. Change of plans? Get on a different set of buses, 2-3 connections tops, and get where I need to be. Where this breaks down is that CPT’s routes are not predictable, reliable, or usable. Getting where I would need to be is not a matter of 2-3 connections, more probably 5-6. Getting home (or even to the Park-n-Ride) via CPT and then going elsewhere via car is much more inefficient than simply having my car with me at work… and given the day, probably leaves me an hour behind schedule. The “alternate” option offered by the New York model, that of flagging down one of the city’s 13,000+ taxicabs, isn’t available in Colosse; hiring a taxi is more a matter of calling up a company, waiting 30 minutes or more, and then being charged $40+ to get where I need to be (and the same when I go home later).

The basic problem is adaptability. If you only service the “profitable” routes, adaptability isn’t there. Mornings are easy; you can predict that a certain critical mass of commuters need to get to work. In the afternoon or evening, you can predict a critical mass of commuters going home. If you have a vaguely centralized area where a great number of businesses are, you know where they’re going.

If you don’t service the “unprofitable” routes, however, you lose commuters in the morning. Anyone with a concern about being stranded is going to want to bring their transportation with them. The more commuters you lose in the morning, the less your available pool in the main evening hours. Thus, the “profitable” routes – the theoretically high traffic ones – need to be subsidized with the routes that may only carry 10 people, and perhaps even less from time to time, simply to be available should they be needed.

It’s my supposition that the balance for best commuter service, which maximizes the number of commuters and minimizes commuter automobile traffic, necessarily is going to operate at a loss (or at least closer to “break-even” than to a huge profit). The less options there are in the evening, the more people are going to have to ignore public transportation for the flexibility of their own vehicle. It’s one of those things that either the city/county needs to decide to just suck up and subsidize, or widespread usage will remain out of reach.

Annoyance of the Day:

People that seem to like Indian/Dominican/Brazillian/Taiwanese/{insert foreign food that isn’t Americanized Italian or Mexican} food primarily on the basis that it differentiates them from people that don’t foreign foods.

Web recently wrote a piece outlining his recent customer service experiences with various companies in the context of whether their service is outsourced to a foreign country. I figure I’ll do the same. You can see it below the fold, if you wish, but I’ll put the summary of my thoughts on the matter up top.

It is, generally speaking, my experience that Indian call center employees (with one major exception) are largely more pleasant and eager to help than American call center employees are. This is contrary to Web’s experience. Even with the below-mentioned problems with Western Digital, it was never that they didn’t care or weren’t interested in helping, it was that they genuinely couldn’t. This makes some sense to me since a call center job in India is probably a good one that you want to keep but call centers in the US are often somewhere between a professional job and a fast food job in pay and esteem. Even within the US it makes a difference. Call centers in Deseret are sometimes destination careers, but call centers in Colosse are for those that can’t find anything better.

I think that the Indian call centers are substantively hobbled by two things, though. First is language. They are difficult to understand and they have difficulty understanding us. Their language is very different from our own which makes accents unusually thick. This is very problematic when it comes to situations where you’re reading off serial numbers and the like or when you’re trying to explain a rather complex problem. This is one of the main reasons why Indian tech support will almost always be inferior to stateside.

The other thing touches on one of the big reasons I think that Web (and to a lesser extent I) have had so much more success getting our issues resolved with Americans at the other end than Indians. When a company outsources to India, they’re doing more than just saving a buck. They are purposefully declaring that customer service is not a priority for them. They have decided that if they’re going to cut corners, that’s where they are going to cut it. I suspect it is often the case that poor customer service and offshore call centers so frequently overlap not because offshore call centers cause poor customer service but because companies that are not interested in good customer service are most likely to offshore. I don’t know whether the ThinkPad person I talked to was in Atlanta or Africa, but IBM and Lenovo have historically placed such an emphasis on customer support with ThinkPads that even if it’s outsourced to Africa I am unusually confident that I will get good customer service. Linksys, it would seem, has different priorities. As does Dell, whether they outsource or not.

So what does “poor customer service” mean beyond the accent of the person that you’re talking to? Well, for one thing it means that they’re more interested in call-handling than issue-resolving. They want to take the easy calls and then let people with more difficult problems figure things out for themselves. It’s not just that the employees are Indian, but that they know little about the product itself and their job primarily consists of reading off a guide. Companies that care will make the guide very good. Companies that don’t, won’t. When I was working for a satellite TV company, our guide was so good that it wouldn’t have hurt so badly if they outsourced (which they apparently now do). On the other hand, if LinkSys didn’t care to put in the information about how I could bypass installing their software, it’s unlikely that the American call-handler would have been able to help me, either.

Some of this brings me back to something I believe when I hear people complain about poor customer service, offshored customer service, or both: Frequently, you get what you pay for. I have little sympathy for those people that decide to save money by buying a Dell and then are upset when their customer support call is answered by someone in India. That’s not to say that I don’t sometimes buy from companies with bad customer service (even when I have a choice, which sometimes I really don’t) and that’s not to say that I don’t get frustrated when it happens. I do, however, avoid getting indignant (except when I don’t have a choice but to deal with this particular company). One question that a lot of people are reticent to answer is “How much is good customer service worth to you?” If it’s not worth paying extra for, it’s not something that you should get too irate about.

My recent experiences below: (more…)

I really wanted to jot down a quick post before going to bed tonight, but quick jot-down idea I have has turned into a future, feature-length post to be written somewhere down the road.

All I got is this:

Sunday I was stuck in a pitch-black Loew’s parking lot I accidentally turned into for ten minutes. The exit the GPS kept telling me to take was a one-way street going the wrong way and the real exit was hidden in the one corner of the structure that I wasn’t looking in.

Hate it when that happens.

That’s the only short thought that I have.

Sorry.

A while back I discovered* the site Why Women Hate Men, which is a guy collecting the worst of the worst advertisements on dating sites that range from stunningly inept to extremely offensive. It’s a fun site. While reading it, I read the entire comment thread on a post that involved a man sending an email to a woman telling her not to mention the fact that she has a PhD on her ad because it’ll scare men off.

To the extent that there is a consensus in the comment thread, it is: Yes, men have a problem with smart women, but it’s their problem. All sorts of women have stories about how some relationship or another didn’t work out because he was threatened by her intelligence and some women suggest that their intelligence is why they have had difficulty landing a man. And how unwise it is of men to have the priorities that they do.

What this reminds me of, of course, is the whole perpetual Women Dig Jerks discussion. In one case, you have women declaring what men are really attracted to (they’re intimidated by intelligence, thus attracted to stupidity). In the other case, you have men declaring what women are really attracted to (they prefer jerks, which means they stiff nice guys). In both cases there are suggestions that it’s the priorities of the opposite gender that are the reason that they are alone. In both cases, they’ve all got stories to back up their perspective. And in both cases, it doesn’t matter what the side being talked about says because their “revealed preferences” don’t make their “stated preferences.”

I think that the comparison is valuable because the perceptions (regardless o the veracity of each) are held up by a rather similar set of pillars:

These comparisons are inexact, but you get the idea. It doesn’t take a whole lot of truth to provide support for someone to believe something that makes them look good. It’s not a tough sell to convince a guy that he has been rejected because he is too nice nor a girl because she is too smart. Especially when you start involving ideology with anti-feminism as a function of the first and anti-patriarchy as a function of the latter.

I’m not going to venture a guess as to how frequent it is that intelligence hurts a woman and kindness hurts a guy. In a vacuum, it’s unlikely that either hurts either, at least when it comes to more than impersonal hookings-up. Women with degrees are more likely to marry than women without them. Convicts don’t have good marriage rates. I do suspect that (1) is more frequently true in the intelligence context than the kindness one but that (2) goes the other way. Really, I have no evidence for any supposition. I think the more important thing to take away is that even when you think you know what’s up, things are often a lot more complicated.

* – I discovered this site through Phi, who apparently discovered it through somewhere that he went from here.

I periodically google to see if I can find any Lost watch parties in either Soundview (where I live) or Enterprise City (where I work). You know, a bar or restaurant or something that’s doing a showing. Sort of like the theater in Estacado.

No luck so far, but bizarrely, by putting in key words such as lost watch party enterprise city, the third link down was a posting on Monster.com that is, judging by the rather specific description, for a software testing position on the team that I’m working on.

What are the odds of that?

I’ve decided to give Linux another chance. I usually do once or twice a year. What always happens is that I run into some technical problem and rather than figure it out I end up moving back to Windows where I already know how to do it. I’ve recently come into the possession of some extra computers, which means that I won’t be able to say to myself “I need another handy Windows machine” and give up. I have ways to force myself to confront the haze that is my sudden ignorance of the computer that I am working on.

Below are the pros and cons of my early impressions. If I stick with it, I’ll do an update a few months from now.

Pro: Installation. It was a breeze. Unlike when you’re installing Windows and it feels the need to make sure that you’re keeping track of it and enforces this need by asking you random questions during the installation, Ubuntu asked me these questions at the beginning and end of the installations. Thus leaving me free for the concurrent Windows installation on a separate box.

Con: Updates. After booting up for the first time, I was informed that I needed to install updates. I figured “Okay, sure” and said yes to what was apparently 236 security updates. This is the kind of crap that Linux people make fun of Windows for. Keep in mind that the installation was from a CD that I downloaded and burned the day of the installation.

Pro: Wireless connectivity. It was a breeze. Much easier than with Windows. Both in setting it up and in the ability to reconnect at will. Windows mostly reconnects when the Automatic connection is available, but Linux always does.

Meh: Graphics. Linux usually looks slicker and generally nicer than Windows 2000 and XP (though Vista leapfrogged them). Not so much on the laptop. My laptop is probably to blame somewhat as well (What ever made IBM think that 1024×768 would suffice on a 15″ monitor?), but it looks even more uncomfortable than XP does given the poor resolution.

Pro: Ultimatix. A one-stop download that installs many of the essentials that they don’t put on the installation for licensing reasons.

Con: Ultimatix. Ultimatix felt the need to warn me in between installing each section that there could be complications. There needs to be a rule about any process that has the potential of taking two hours being able to run fine without being baby-sat.

Con: Application installation. This is a perennial Linux problem. With Windows it’s point, click, answer some questions, and install. If you want to install an application on Linux, how you go about it depends on a huge number of factors (Gnome or KDE? Debian or Other?) and unless its carried by a repository or has a special install pack, you have to go into the shell to install it. Apparently (?) this is necessary because of the wide variety of distributions out there. This means that you’re stuck with repositories, which are great in one sense (see below), but are limiting in a way that Windows is not (and if Windows were, it would be further proof to Linux buff as to why Windows sucks, but Linux people have no problem with Linux doing this and consider any problem I might have with it being my problem).

Pro: Repositories. Repositories are a sort of central server where you can go in and download and install applications automatically onto your machine. If the repository has what you’re looking for, it makes installation of software twice as easy than on Windows (if not… see previous entry). Further, you can put in some keywords and automatically download applications you didn’t know existed. I wanted a comic book reader and was very frustrated when I couldn’t find my favorite one (Comical, which has releases for Windows, Linux, and OSX). Repositories couldn’t help me with that, but they gave me three alternatives to choose from. Hopefully one of them is as good as Comical.

Pro: Application availability. Thus far I haven’t found any application I want that there aren’t at least a couple applications that can do. This is in stark contrast to a couple years ago. Thanks to Repositories, I’ve found applications that do what I want to do in minutes where it took me years to find for Windows. I often ask myself “Can I be the only Windows user that wants to do this particular task?” and often I feel like I am. Less the case with Linux.

Con: Shortcuts. No shortcuts to Windows network drives. You can make a shortcut to a local location that accesses a Windows drive, but to make a shortcut to the Windows drive you have to assign it locally. For Windows users, it’s the difference between having a network drive mapped to a local location vs accessing it through Network Places. In Windows, you can assign shortcuts either way. Not so with Linux (that I have been able to find).

Con: Network drives. This is a show-stopper unless I can figure out. At some point I may change my fileserver to Linux, but it’s Windows until I can have a high-degree of confidence in my ability to wade through Linux. I don’t want to get too deep into technical details (which would require charts), but I’ve found at least three different ways to meet these needs with Windows and precisely none (thus far) with Linux. The big problem being my inability to permanently assign local locations to network drives (like Mapping Network Drives in Windows). Linux used to be able to do this, but right now I can’t. I’ve found a half-dozen supposed solutions and none have (thus far) worked.

Con: Forum Support. The Ubuntu people have done a pretty good job of cleaning up the Help forums, which used to primarily consist of being called stupid and worse when you asked basic questions. But there is still the prevailing attitude that if Linux isn’t meeting your needs, your needs are the problem. And, if these problems at all involve Windows, it’s a Windows limitation.

Pro: Forum Support. There is lots of helpful information there. If you have a question, chances are somebody has asked it before. And unlike many Windows help forums, no accounts or fees are required to read solutions and only accounts are usually required to participate.

Con: Infinite Distributions. It’s great that so many people are working on different versions of Linux at the same time. Free competition and all that. The downside is that the answer to your question depends wildly on the specifics of your install. Who released your Distro? What version? What version of the interface are you running? What version of the networking interface? These are questions that come up with Windows, but not nearly so much.

Pro: Shells. Windows has the Windows UI. The Start Button, Start Menu, etc. You can download alternatives, but they’re rarely well-supported. Linux has two prominant ones and at least a handful of less prominant ones. It lets different people with different preferences use different interfaces instead of the one-size fits all Windows interface.

Con: Shells. It’s frustrating when you like different aspects of each one and you can’t merge them. So far neither are remotely as flexible as the Windows interface. It’s less customizable and more this-or-that.

Pro: Codecs. This is a biggie. A very biggie. When you want to play a video that it doesn’t have the codec for, it goes out and finds it. Without fail. Windows has features that are supposed to be able to do that, but it almost never seems to work. Unless that’s something Vista fixed.

Pro: Drivers. Another biggie. Automatic driver support for my hardware for Linux surpassed Windows a long time ago. That is remarkably impressive when you consider how much more eager hardware manufacturers are for Linux drivers than Windows ones. Windows 2000 was terrible about this. Windows XP is better. Maybe Vista figured that all out, though not from what I hear. Further, if the drivers aren’t already on the CD, it will go out and find them. Windows supposedly does this, but I can’t remember the last time it succeeded. It’s almost always that the drivers are on the initial installation or you have to find them yourself.

Pro: It’s free. This isn’t even entirely about saving the money, though that’s part of it. More than that, it’s about not having to worry about authentication. No OEM license vs standard license. I install it and it’s there. Simple as that.

Con: It’s not free. Free in the non-monetary sense, that is. Right now I feel hugely more constricted using Linux than Windows. Some of this is attributable to my superior Windows knowledge and inferior Linux knowledge, but not all of it. Some of the under-the-hood things with Linux are so complicated that I’m stuck with whatever they’ve GUIed. In some ways, they’ve out-Windows Windows in the rigidity of the way it thinks that you ought to want to do things. For power-users, the complexity under the hood ultimately means more freedom to do what they want (or so they say). For people just starting out, Linux is like that person that person that doesn’t tell you how to do something, tells you that you’re doing it wrong, then insists on doing it himself.

Linux is in that state that it’s been in for at least the last three or four years: Almost there. Almost comparable to Windows in ease-of-use. This time, on that front, they really are almost there. If I weren’t such an ambitious user and just wanted it for more normal usage, it would in many ways be easier than Windows. Not being unambitious, I couldn’t say.

How close Linux is to being “there” (a viable alternative to Linux for most users) is uncertain. Whenever I’ve quit Linux in the past, my friend Tony has said that it was my loss. I said that it was actually Linux’s loss because I’m a relatively early-adopter on a lot of these things. If I can’t be bothered to learn it, the average Windows user won’t be bothered.

Part of me wonders if Linux has performed an end-run around me. Making it really easy for the unambitious user, super-flexible for the hyper-ambitious user, with me stuck in the middle. They’ve really done a great job of making the easy stuff easy. Easier than Windows. So maybe they have and maybe with increasing exposure on netbooks Linux will start piquing interest. It’s long been my position to never, ever bet against Microsoft (after years and years of hearing about how they were due for a fall any… minute… now). With Vista’s utter failure, though, maybe all great things must indeed crumble.

I still doubt that it will be any of the current incarnations of Linux that does it.