Reflections of a new ABMer (Anyone/thing But Microsoft):

Okay, so I'm not strictly "new" to the ABM (Anyone But Microsoft) crowd, but I am new to the growing Linux crowd. Even before I made the switch to Linux, I was switching to non-Microsoft and largely platform-independent formats and programs. For example, there's still stuff in Firefox that you can't do in Internet Explorer 7, and OpenOffice is a complete, fully functional office suite that's available for the best price of them all, and I've been using that for months now.

Anyway, I've been reflecting on the new and idiotic change to the new start and stop times for Daylight Savings Time. I'm an opponent to DST in principle, but I find this particular change to be one of the more mundanely moronic things done by the current administration. The sun will rise when it rises, and it will set when it sets, and the Earth, Sun, and tilt of the Earth's axis will not consult a clock to determine how many hours of daylight there will be in a given day at a given latitude. That said, I've been engaging in a bit of schadenfreude looking at these Micro$ucks Windoze users who are starting to freak out over the new daylight savings time. I currently use Ubuntu "Edgy Eft", and you know what it took for me to verify that the fix was already in place? One line of code copied and pasted off of the Ubuntu forums, and I knew I was good to go. Then, a few days later via Update Manager, I got a software update that took next to zero time to download (not more than 300-400 kB, but I can't remember exactly what), and the rest of it was fixed in far less time than it took me to write this post. I've read that unsupported versions of Microsoft (I'm not sure when that cutoff point is, but I think it's either Win95 or earlier) will have to shell out $4000 for the official patch for their crapware, and they'll have to go through all sorts of hoops for something I did in a minute or two for free. Perhaps I'm wrong for this, but I find this enormously funny. I curse Micro$ucks, and I pity those who currently are suffering through the WGA fuckup with XP and Windoze Visduh. Think Windows Vista looks all nice and shiny? Take a look at the Beryl project for Linux. That desktop environment does far more with far less hardware overhead than Visduh can even think of doing. Some prefer GNOME, others KDE, others still Beryl, Fluxbox, or Xfce, and I'm sure I'm leaving out a few. I relish the choice, and the knowledge that my computer would still behave in a stable fashion even if I were to work on it for a solid week without any rest, without having to worry about whether or not Visduh would accuse me of being a pirate simply because I added memory to my computer, and with older hardware still being able to run like something made more recently than 1992. Go Micro$oft go... straight into oblivion. I won't miss you when you're gone.