Like many of you, I am living on the edge of going completely broke. Last month, due to other people who shall not be named, I got dinged for some "overdraft" fees against my credit union account.
Now, you'd think that it's a credit union, it belongs to the members, it shouldn't have those huge, outrageous bounce (and, hence, overdraft) fees that the banks do.
You'd be wrong.
The credit union where I have most of my accounts, which I can no longer in good conscience call my credit union, charges $29 per bounce or overdraft
Now, if this is going to be charged for checks larger than $29, or for ATM/debit card "charges" in like amounts, fine, I can live with that. I don't make those kinds of mistakes very often, and they're painful enough that I do my best to remember and prevent them.
But these were credit charges (as in, like those made using a credit card), on a debit card, which means that they were approved for processing by the credit union based on how much money was in the account at the time the charge was made. Yes, they really do that. So do the credit card companies (i.e., banks). In the mean time, more charges than there was available money in the account piled up, so when they all came in, they mostly went over the account balance and nailed me for overdraft charges. There were five of them, totaling $145, on charges that totaled less than $20 - three of them under $5.
(Don't ask me why the person who did this did so - I cannot fathom the mind of people like that. All I can say is that it wasn't me, and they were warned.)
I know an elderly lady who has two Visa accounts that were overcharged similarly, only these were actual, real credit cards, with credit limits that the bank chose to ignore and approve the excess charges anyway. Some of them were pretty large, and now she has over-limit balances that exceed her ability to pay them back - NOT because she can't pay off the charges, but because they don't handle over-limit charges the same way as under-limit charges, even they were the ones who approved the over-limit charges while the card was already over the limit in the first place.
You read that right.
Then there's the matter of how long they take to process a credit card payment. Most of them "say" that they'll post the payment on xxx date, but if you read the fine print it can take anywhere from 4 to 14 days longer, effectively giving them the interest on that amount for that long and denying you the credit for the duration.
Well, says you, that's no big deal, it's only a few dollars for a few days. This is true, until you consider that the banks handle MILLIONS of accounts this way, which means BILLIONS of dollars in transactions. They can make MILLIONS of dollars on this kind of delay, and in today's world of electronic funds transfers that take fractions of a second to occur, this is effectively stealing your money.
(This is called the "float" of a transaction - the time between the fund transfer initiation and when it completes. Banks have been making tons of money off of this for years - the time between when your check is cashed at the recipient's bank and when the fund transfer clears yours. During that time, the money "exists" in both places and earns interest for the banks - both of them.)
What to do?
There is a movement afoot to ditch the banks. I believe we need to do that in the biggest way possible.
Banks only respond to the movement of money, and they notice really fast when that means less for them.
So, don't use them at all, if you can.
Okay, that's not easy - you have your paycheck going into direct deposit, half of your bills (or more) are paid automatically from your checking account these days, and so on.
On the other hand, you can't overspend what's in your pocket. If you don't absolutely have to have a bank account, get rid of it. Use cashiers checks and money orders to pay your bills (although, be warned, the banks make money off of the float on those, too). Or just pay them in cash wherever you can.
But wait! you cry - what about my interest???
Have you looked at your interest rate lately?
Your bank charges you 5% to 30% interest on loans, fees, credit cards, and so on, and they pay you, what, 0.5% interest on your savings? If you're "lucky" and have an orange account (or other online investment savings account), maybe you get 1-2%?
If your account has millions in it, then that's "real" money. If not, get serious. You lose more in fees and charges than you do by not wasting your money in an "interest-bearing" account that earns more money for the bank than they will ever give you.
So, ditch your banks. It's the only way they'll ever pay attention to how much they're ripping you off and the fact that there is something you can do about it.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Valentine's Day Lament
An acquaintance of mine sent this to me and asked if I'd post it somewhere. It is sad that there are people in this situation anywhere, particularly on VD, but so it is.
---
Once dearest one,
There was a time when we got along well, when I would do anything you asked, when I gave up all of my friends, hopes, dreams and aspirations because I thought you were my life partner, my friend and my loving support. There were times when I was sure we would be together forever and nothing could keep us apart.
Then things changed.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, "good" was no longer good enough for you. Buying what we wanted wasn't enough, we had to spend everything as quickly as possible because – well, I don't know why, exactly, but that is the reason we don't have a retirement account.
Somewhere along the way, what I wanted stopped mattering to you, and it became more important to you that you be right about everything than for us to be able to get along together. We even went through seven rounds of marriage counseling so you could get me fixed. You know why that didn't work? Because in the last go around on this matter, I figured out what you were doing.
Once, you seemed to care about me and my feelings. I remember, because I was crying about it, I think in the laundry room the apartment where you lived when I met you, and you didn't understand what was wrong. I suppose I should have realized it then, but it took me another decade or so.
There was a time when it seemed like I was the most important person in your life, and you certainly were in mine. I blew off my parents, my own family and a lot of other people who made indications that maybe things weren't all that perfect in "our town." I sure had enough chances to do that, and I fell into every last one of them. For you.
There was even a time when I could loan you money or have you hold it for me, and it would still be there when I needed it.
There was a time when you were nice to me, at least to my face, but somewhere along the way, you turned into a terrorist whose every demand had to be met or there was hell to pay, and I have paid by living in your hell for too long. Unlike the "real" terrorists, those suicide bombers who kill when they blow themselves up, when you blow up there's always more to come – unless and until you get what you want. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, cost be damned as well, and anyone who gets in your way..
It's too bad that, on this Valentines Day, 2010, I have to look back on those times and wonder where the hell they went. I know it wasn't me that turned away from you first, or decided that someone else was more important in my life than my spouse, or that you needed to sacrifice everything so I could accomplish any of my goals.
I'm not sure when it was, exactly, that your vision went from color and shades of gray to all black and white, so Bush-like in the distinctions of who stood where with whom.
It's sad because I honestly believed, through all our differences and our troubles, that we still had something of value, something to hold on to, something that would bring us together in the face of all adversity.
We could have gone anywhere, done anything, surmounted any obstacle, but we had to have an equal partnership, and that's something you no longer allow. Somewhere along the way, nothing I said mattered to you any more, and all you could see was what you want, what you need and how I wasn't important enough even to have a say in family decisions any more. I'm not even sure any more that we ever had anything like an equal partnership at all – you have to be in control and the center of everything, no holds barred, everything else be damned.
You claim that I control the money, but the truth is that you barely allow me any control at all, and I have to beg for house payment money or anything else that might help satisfy our legal obligations (debts), whereas all you have to do is raise the "it's for our kids" false flag and everything else is just deteriorating words, hurt feelings and your usual emotional blackmail.
I'm trying to remember a time in our relationship when I felt it was safe to be me, just me, and not some ideal image against which you always compared me, and I always failed. Now, I don't dare open my mouth because no matter what I say, it's bound to offend you. Gifts I give you are wasted – you either don't like them or you destroy them by neglect or outright damage.
I wish I could say something else, but frankly, that's the way I feel and think, now, and you've left me no choice and no other options.
You killed "us" before we even had a chance to be born, or grow, or blossom.
All you had to do was be an individual human being, but you had to be the dictator of all things in our lives.
Isn't it a pity? Isn't it a shame? Harrison got that part right, and he was married for life.
---
Once dearest one,
There was a time when we got along well, when I would do anything you asked, when I gave up all of my friends, hopes, dreams and aspirations because I thought you were my life partner, my friend and my loving support. There were times when I was sure we would be together forever and nothing could keep us apart.
Then things changed.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, "good" was no longer good enough for you. Buying what we wanted wasn't enough, we had to spend everything as quickly as possible because – well, I don't know why, exactly, but that is the reason we don't have a retirement account.
Somewhere along the way, what I wanted stopped mattering to you, and it became more important to you that you be right about everything than for us to be able to get along together. We even went through seven rounds of marriage counseling so you could get me fixed. You know why that didn't work? Because in the last go around on this matter, I figured out what you were doing.
Once, you seemed to care about me and my feelings. I remember, because I was crying about it, I think in the laundry room the apartment where you lived when I met you, and you didn't understand what was wrong. I suppose I should have realized it then, but it took me another decade or so.
There was a time when it seemed like I was the most important person in your life, and you certainly were in mine. I blew off my parents, my own family and a lot of other people who made indications that maybe things weren't all that perfect in "our town." I sure had enough chances to do that, and I fell into every last one of them. For you.
There was even a time when I could loan you money or have you hold it for me, and it would still be there when I needed it.
There was a time when you were nice to me, at least to my face, but somewhere along the way, you turned into a terrorist whose every demand had to be met or there was hell to pay, and I have paid by living in your hell for too long. Unlike the "real" terrorists, those suicide bombers who kill when they blow themselves up, when you blow up there's always more to come – unless and until you get what you want. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, cost be damned as well, and anyone who gets in your way..
It's too bad that, on this Valentines Day, 2010, I have to look back on those times and wonder where the hell they went. I know it wasn't me that turned away from you first, or decided that someone else was more important in my life than my spouse, or that you needed to sacrifice everything so I could accomplish any of my goals.
I'm not sure when it was, exactly, that your vision went from color and shades of gray to all black and white, so Bush-like in the distinctions of who stood where with whom.
It's sad because I honestly believed, through all our differences and our troubles, that we still had something of value, something to hold on to, something that would bring us together in the face of all adversity.
We could have gone anywhere, done anything, surmounted any obstacle, but we had to have an equal partnership, and that's something you no longer allow. Somewhere along the way, nothing I said mattered to you any more, and all you could see was what you want, what you need and how I wasn't important enough even to have a say in family decisions any more. I'm not even sure any more that we ever had anything like an equal partnership at all – you have to be in control and the center of everything, no holds barred, everything else be damned.
You claim that I control the money, but the truth is that you barely allow me any control at all, and I have to beg for house payment money or anything else that might help satisfy our legal obligations (debts), whereas all you have to do is raise the "it's for our kids" false flag and everything else is just deteriorating words, hurt feelings and your usual emotional blackmail.
I'm trying to remember a time in our relationship when I felt it was safe to be me, just me, and not some ideal image against which you always compared me, and I always failed. Now, I don't dare open my mouth because no matter what I say, it's bound to offend you. Gifts I give you are wasted – you either don't like them or you destroy them by neglect or outright damage.
I wish I could say something else, but frankly, that's the way I feel and think, now, and you've left me no choice and no other options.
You killed "us" before we even had a chance to be born, or grow, or blossom.
All you had to do was be an individual human being, but you had to be the dictator of all things in our lives.
Isn't it a pity? Isn't it a shame? Harrison got that part right, and he was married for life.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The Commonality of Zenteks
For reasons which I may never understand, I originally posted this in the wrong place!
Wow, [a week and] five days since my last post! I was thinking no more than two or three, but what the heck.
I picked the word "zentek" out of thin air when I wanted to name the class of characters that distinguished my world from others in the fantasy genre. I wanted these seekers of enlightened power, whose life path took them from the ability to control themselves through various internal abilities that ultimately lead to an ability to control everything around them, to have an unusual and unique name. I was looking for a couple of things when I came up with the name: something that would be alphabetically last in any ordered sequence, hence the "z," and something that implied a devout acceptance of life as it is. Zen fits both of these.
The "tek" part was half a reference to technology and half just what seemed like a cool sounding follow on to zen.
How little did I know.
I was introduced to the joy of Google Alerts a number of months ago, and you can probably imagine my surprise at just how common a word "zentek" is in the real world. I get at least one alert every day for it, and most of them are not my own. (Guess I should fix that, huh?)
Most frequently, I get references to the Zentek Corporation out of Minnesota. They even do business that relates to my professional career - computers. If I had any desire to spend half of the rest of my life freezing my tail off, Minnesota might not be such a bad place to do it.
Never mind - I came to California from Michigan for two reasons, and freezing weather had something to do with it.
Second most frequently, I see references to a Professor Jürgen Zentek, who is the Chairman of the Institute for Animal Nutrition in Vienna, Austria. Actually, Prof. Zentek was the first occurrence of the word in an alert that I received.
There's a Zentek House in Bolton (UK?). a Zentek Solutions Ltd., Zentek International, Zentek Technology, Zen-Tek Instruments and so on. If you want to know who these are and what they do, Google is your friend. Someone, or maybe more than one someone, uses zentek as their user name on one or two forums or game sites I've seen in the alerts.
There are a number of people with the last name Zentek listed at one site I saw: Ann, Barbara, Cynthia, David, Edward, James, Joseph, Kathleen, Margaret, Nicholas, Ronald E., Steven and Theodore (and the professor, above).
I also see references to my stories, web page, this blog, and others that actually have to do with this, my creation. I even found a page that included two reviews of my first book that were written by people who did not purchase the book (interesting, hm?) and used pseudonyms to write those reviews. Do me a favor, please, and don't read the reviews. Whether or not they were right, they are, well, let's just say unflattering. I have a fair level of feedback that the book was enjoyable, regardless of its quality.
But I digress.
Despite the frequent appearance of the word "zentek" in references to people or places not related to my stories, I plan to continue to use it. In this context, it is mine, and appropriate.
What I find most curious about this is that the name I originally used for my stories was Legend Hunters, until I decided to do a Google search for that a couple of years ago. I mean, who else would use that name for something unrelated to fantasy epics?
Apparently, at least two books already published have the name "Legend Hunter," not including mine. I began to understand why working titles don't always wind up on the cover of the stories they were meant to name.
"Zentek Ascendant" seemed like a good change of pace, and, at least so far, it's unique, although I'm not sure how much I plan to use that any more.
So, what does all this mean? I don't know - it might be frivolous. My point, though, is that when you create a name for something you think is new, don't be surprised if someone else already has or is using that name in a completely different context.
Even if the name starts with one of the least commonly used letters in the language.
TTFN.
Wow, [a week and] five days since my last post! I was thinking no more than two or three, but what the heck.
I picked the word "zentek" out of thin air when I wanted to name the class of characters that distinguished my world from others in the fantasy genre. I wanted these seekers of enlightened power, whose life path took them from the ability to control themselves through various internal abilities that ultimately lead to an ability to control everything around them, to have an unusual and unique name. I was looking for a couple of things when I came up with the name: something that would be alphabetically last in any ordered sequence, hence the "z," and something that implied a devout acceptance of life as it is. Zen fits both of these.
The "tek" part was half a reference to technology and half just what seemed like a cool sounding follow on to zen.
How little did I know.
I was introduced to the joy of Google Alerts a number of months ago, and you can probably imagine my surprise at just how common a word "zentek" is in the real world. I get at least one alert every day for it, and most of them are not my own. (Guess I should fix that, huh?)
Most frequently, I get references to the Zentek Corporation out of Minnesota. They even do business that relates to my professional career - computers. If I had any desire to spend half of the rest of my life freezing my tail off, Minnesota might not be such a bad place to do it.
Never mind - I came to California from Michigan for two reasons, and freezing weather had something to do with it.
Second most frequently, I see references to a Professor Jürgen Zentek, who is the Chairman of the Institute for Animal Nutrition in Vienna, Austria. Actually, Prof. Zentek was the first occurrence of the word in an alert that I received.
There's a Zentek House in Bolton (UK?). a Zentek Solutions Ltd., Zentek International, Zentek Technology, Zen-Tek Instruments and so on. If you want to know who these are and what they do, Google is your friend. Someone, or maybe more than one someone, uses zentek as their user name on one or two forums or game sites I've seen in the alerts.
There are a number of people with the last name Zentek listed at one site I saw: Ann, Barbara, Cynthia, David, Edward, James, Joseph, Kathleen, Margaret, Nicholas, Ronald E., Steven and Theodore (and the professor, above).
I also see references to my stories, web page, this blog, and others that actually have to do with this, my creation. I even found a page that included two reviews of my first book that were written by people who did not purchase the book (interesting, hm?) and used pseudonyms to write those reviews. Do me a favor, please, and don't read the reviews. Whether or not they were right, they are, well, let's just say unflattering. I have a fair level of feedback that the book was enjoyable, regardless of its quality.
But I digress.
Despite the frequent appearance of the word "zentek" in references to people or places not related to my stories, I plan to continue to use it. In this context, it is mine, and appropriate.
What I find most curious about this is that the name I originally used for my stories was Legend Hunters, until I decided to do a Google search for that a couple of years ago. I mean, who else would use that name for something unrelated to fantasy epics?
Apparently, at least two books already published have the name "Legend Hunter," not including mine. I began to understand why working titles don't always wind up on the cover of the stories they were meant to name.
"Zentek Ascendant" seemed like a good change of pace, and, at least so far, it's unique, although I'm not sure how much I plan to use that any more.
So, what does all this mean? I don't know - it might be frivolous. My point, though, is that when you create a name for something you think is new, don't be surprised if someone else already has or is using that name in a completely different context.
Even if the name starts with one of the least commonly used letters in the language.
TTFN.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
The Fantasy World of Free Computing - Linux (yep!)
One of the great benefits of not being stuck in any one particular paradigm is that one can be flexible enough to evaluate new ways of doing things. I've never been one to stick to traditional ways of doing things forever, although I can be difficult to change paradigms, even when I find one that looks like it's better.
I've been a software engineer now professionally for over 30 years. Actually, yesterday was my official 30th anniversary. I began that professional career with a class at UCSD in Pascal programming on a Terak PC, three years before the IBM PC appeared and changed computing forever. By the time 1981 rolled around for me, I had already used at least five different types of computers for work, mostly programming, but I really wanted a PC.
It took me a while, but I plunked down over $4000 for my first IBM PC, complete with an Intel 8088 CPU, 64KB (yes, that's not a typo - 65,536 bytes) of main memory on the motherboard, a 256KB memory expansion card with parallel and serial ports, and a clock! It came complete with two double-sided 5 1/4" floppy disk drives that could hold an amazing 360KB of data each, and two were good so I could boot from one and leave it in while I ran programs or did word processing from the other. Also, because 320x240 color graphics monitors were too expensive, I went for the higher resolution 640x480 (I think) monochrome text-only monitor, which looked much nicer in green and white than the color dots that were uglier and harder to read.
I still have that piece of nostalgia, although it's mostly a dust gatherer in the closet (duh). Heck, the thing doesn't even have the capability for a hard disk drive on the motherboard - I'd need new hardware for that. (Stop laughing - this was 28 years ago - jeez!)
I never really liked MS-DOS. For one thing, a new version came out about every six months, and it cost another $100 (from Microsoft) each time, which was ridiculous. I didn't actually pay for an OS upgrade until DOS 3.3 came out, then again for DOS 6.22 and I may or may not have paid for DOS 7.???. For another, DOS is not really an operating system at all - it's more of a single-user interface to the computer that allows you to run programs. As bad as it was from the start (and many say it still is), Windows was at least a stab at a real OS.
As for MS Windows, well, let's just say that Windows 3.0 was still so bad no one liked it. Not even Microsoft.
Windows 3.1 was a whole different story. It only crashed about once per program you ran, and it had this really neat looking interface that might stay up long enough for one to study it admiringly before it crashed again. Half the time, when it crashed, it needed to be reinstalled.
In the mean time, I was busy working at my first company, laughing at the ever-richer Bill Gates and his hideous products that people somehow actually paid money to get. At work, we used our own computers with our own editors and so on, and word processing was still in its infancy.
This could get really long and boring, so I'm going to cut to the chase.
I was introduced to Linux through work (of course) in 1998. Frankly, I was not impressed. Yeah, it was free, but if you weren't a first-class geek, it was impossible. The average computer user would never take to it. Never. Especially not since Microsoft and the PC had pretty much invaded every professional computing workspace in the US, and a lot of software houses were making tons of money writing and selling Windows programs.
(Not me - I was too proud for that, and that's one reason for where I am today, but I digress....)
If you wanted a professional, supported distribution of Linux, you had to buy it, and one of the market leaders even way back then was Red Hat, one of biggest players in the Linux community today. I liked Red Hat, but I couldn't afford their prices, and, as I said, Linux distributions were still kind of immature and cranky, although once you had one running, it would run forever. Linux is a solid, reliable, powerful OS for many computer architectures, and with the GNU software community based out of the Free Software Foundation, there is a ton of UNIX-like capability built into even the most basic distribution, if you know how to use it.
Skip forward to 2007. Linux was becoming a buzzword in the computing community. Okay, actually the buzzword was "FREE" but they were not talking about shareware or even freeware, they were talking about Linux.
Why?
Because, my friends and readers, Linux has grown up. While not fully mature as a general purpose, all comers welcome, covers the entire marketplace kind of product, it is getting really, really close. There is a distribution of Linux that is (still) free and can be configured to look almost exactly like Windows. (No, I don't know how to do that exactly, yet, but it's coming and if there's interest, I'll figure it out and publish it. Here. Free.)
I got hooked because, in the summer of 2006, while I was off work on disability, I invested $39 in a copy of SuSE Linux, which was in transition to Novell Linux. I fought with it for several months before I finally gave up. It wasn't so much that it was radically different from Windows (be it 98, 2000 or XP), it was just plain hard to work with, and I don't say this lightly. To this day, I don't like SuSE Linux, but a lot of people do.
(What is SuSE? There's a fine reference that covers all this - it's called the Internet, and Google has many, many ways to find answers like that.)
In January 2007, I landed a job where part of my job was to learn a "new" version of Linux called CentOS. CentOS stands for Community Enterprise Operating System, and it is essentially a free distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It comes with the GNOME desktop environment, a full-blown graphical user interface that has a lot of similarities to Windows in a general way, but it is stable, it comes with the OS, and, unlike the Windows OS and environment, it is also free. It was easy to use, easy to update, virtually all of the UNIX environment tools are included, and you can go off and customize the environment to your heart's delight.
I was hooked. I had the golden opportunity to install CentOS on my own desktop workstation as part of my employment (i.e., my employer paid me to learn this stuff) - what could be better than that?
Here's what - I upgraded my home computer to have enough hardware power to handle running CentOS almost exactly the same as my work computer, and took the plunge.
Now, like I said before, I'm a first class geek, so most of this was pretty simple to me. I've always been fascinated with this kind of technology, so poking around to see how it worked was a natural for me, and on top of that I was getting paid to do it.
Fast forward to today. I run CentOS on my primary desktop workstation at home, on both of my old, cheap laptops (I can't get rid of the older one 'cause the newer one's headset plug doesn't work - grr) and I strongly recommend it to all my friends. I even wrote a lousy book about it that you'll probably never see, but I learned a lot from writing the book.
Open your eyes back up, for heavens' sakes! I know I'm not that boring - that's why I put in the skips past the dull stuff.
And now, what you've all been waiting for: What's wrong with Linux?
Nothing. Really.
There are some disadvantages you need to know before you take the plunge, unless you're a techno-geek, too, in which case you probably already know about them (or already took the plunge).
Linux is different from Windows. This is actually not so much of a disadvantage in itself, but the reality is that most people who use computers are familiar with or hooked into the Windows methodology. Fortunately, Microsoft itself already started to make the break with Windows Vista and Office 2007 - it's all so different that Linux actually looks more familiar to the average 3.1/3.11/95/98/NT/2000/XP user than Vista or W7. Also, Linux is not written to use up every extra CPU cycle that Intel and AMD can squeeze out of their latest and greatest chips. The Aero look of Vista (that pretty, transparent sheen that eats your CPU) does, along with a lot of other, background stuff that takes up time behind the scenes. Finally, neither GNOME nor KDE, the other popular desktop environment GUI, changed for the main purpose of confusing the heck out of all users - they're just more feature-rich with more options you don't have to use.
Linux doesn't have a multi-billion dollar advertising corporation pushing for global dominance in the PC and business markets. None of the contributing corporations is pushing it that hard, either. Why not? There's no market share when all the software is free and anyone can get it. There's also the issue of the big software corporations that are already making a fortune on Windows-based software, the kind of fortune they can't make in a Linux-based, free software market. Finally, the vast majority of software available for Linux is open-source. If you just said, "Huh?" read on.
Open source software is software (meaning office productivity suites, games, graphics editors, entertainment software and so on - what you run on your computer after you log in and actually want to do something) that comes with the source code. That means, if you know what you're doing, you can modify it to fit your own personal or business needs. You can fix bugs in it if you find any. You can add your own features. The only thing you can't (legally) do is sell it or make a profit on it.
Software, even the games, that comes with Linux distributions is not the same as what runs on Windows. Actually, that's only half true. A fair amount of open source software does run on Windows, but it doesn't look like what the big products you're probably used to seeing do. For example, OpenOffice, a full office productivity suite that is free and competes more or less directly with Microsoft Office, does not look exactly the same as MS Office, and that can be a problem for businesses and people that are stuck on the MS Office way. But it runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux, MAC and other OS platforms, all the same way.
Another disadvantage is that, while there is great coverage for nearly all aspects of computing under Linux, there are some particular programs that aren't available. For example, Internet Explorer, Microsoft's flagship web interface, problems and all, does not run on Linux. Most Linux users are cheering about that even now. The problem comes in where businesses construct their web sites using Microsoft tools that are designed to use IE's non-standard features, and although Firefox and certain other browsers can make up for a lot of that, there are some things that just don't work. If you use Firefox at all, you've probably seen some already.
(There are also some sites I've seen where IE doesn't work right because of its non-standard behavior. They are by far the rarer, but they did exist at one time.)
Finally (oh, thank God, he's almost done!), Linux can be confusing. There are several different distributions of Linux, and they don't all work exactly the same way. Red Hat, which also includes the Fedora and CentOS derivatives, is three. Debian, which includes Ubuntu and some others I'm not familiar with, is several more (there are a number of different distributions of Ubuntu). Gentoo, Mandriva, Slackware, SuSE/Novell - there a plenty from which to choose, and each one is just a little different behind the veil of the GUIs, mostly GNOME and KDE, although there are others here, too.
Linux still has two huge advantages: it is free, and it runs on almost any hardware.
It's a complicated world, if you want to see it that way.
I like to simplify it like this: pick one and go with it. I recommend CentOS.
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I've been a software engineer now professionally for over 30 years. Actually, yesterday was my official 30th anniversary. I began that professional career with a class at UCSD in Pascal programming on a Terak PC, three years before the IBM PC appeared and changed computing forever. By the time 1981 rolled around for me, I had already used at least five different types of computers for work, mostly programming, but I really wanted a PC.
It took me a while, but I plunked down over $4000 for my first IBM PC, complete with an Intel 8088 CPU, 64KB (yes, that's not a typo - 65,536 bytes) of main memory on the motherboard, a 256KB memory expansion card with parallel and serial ports, and a clock! It came complete with two double-sided 5 1/4" floppy disk drives that could hold an amazing 360KB of data each, and two were good so I could boot from one and leave it in while I ran programs or did word processing from the other. Also, because 320x240 color graphics monitors were too expensive, I went for the higher resolution 640x480 (I think) monochrome text-only monitor, which looked much nicer in green and white than the color dots that were uglier and harder to read.
I still have that piece of nostalgia, although it's mostly a dust gatherer in the closet (duh). Heck, the thing doesn't even have the capability for a hard disk drive on the motherboard - I'd need new hardware for that. (Stop laughing - this was 28 years ago - jeez!)
I never really liked MS-DOS. For one thing, a new version came out about every six months, and it cost another $100 (from Microsoft) each time, which was ridiculous. I didn't actually pay for an OS upgrade until DOS 3.3 came out, then again for DOS 6.22 and I may or may not have paid for DOS 7.???. For another, DOS is not really an operating system at all - it's more of a single-user interface to the computer that allows you to run programs. As bad as it was from the start (and many say it still is), Windows was at least a stab at a real OS.
As for MS Windows, well, let's just say that Windows 3.0 was still so bad no one liked it. Not even Microsoft.
Windows 3.1 was a whole different story. It only crashed about once per program you ran, and it had this really neat looking interface that might stay up long enough for one to study it admiringly before it crashed again. Half the time, when it crashed, it needed to be reinstalled.
In the mean time, I was busy working at my first company, laughing at the ever-richer Bill Gates and his hideous products that people somehow actually paid money to get. At work, we used our own computers with our own editors and so on, and word processing was still in its infancy.
This could get really long and boring, so I'm going to cut to the chase.
I was introduced to Linux through work (of course) in 1998. Frankly, I was not impressed. Yeah, it was free, but if you weren't a first-class geek, it was impossible. The average computer user would never take to it. Never. Especially not since Microsoft and the PC had pretty much invaded every professional computing workspace in the US, and a lot of software houses were making tons of money writing and selling Windows programs.
(Not me - I was too proud for that, and that's one reason for where I am today, but I digress....)
If you wanted a professional, supported distribution of Linux, you had to buy it, and one of the market leaders even way back then was Red Hat, one of biggest players in the Linux community today. I liked Red Hat, but I couldn't afford their prices, and, as I said, Linux distributions were still kind of immature and cranky, although once you had one running, it would run forever. Linux is a solid, reliable, powerful OS for many computer architectures, and with the GNU software community based out of the Free Software Foundation, there is a ton of UNIX-like capability built into even the most basic distribution, if you know how to use it.
Skip forward to 2007. Linux was becoming a buzzword in the computing community. Okay, actually the buzzword was "FREE" but they were not talking about shareware or even freeware, they were talking about Linux.
Why?
Because, my friends and readers, Linux has grown up. While not fully mature as a general purpose, all comers welcome, covers the entire marketplace kind of product, it is getting really, really close. There is a distribution of Linux that is (still) free and can be configured to look almost exactly like Windows. (No, I don't know how to do that exactly, yet, but it's coming and if there's interest, I'll figure it out and publish it. Here. Free.)
I got hooked because, in the summer of 2006, while I was off work on disability, I invested $39 in a copy of SuSE Linux, which was in transition to Novell Linux. I fought with it for several months before I finally gave up. It wasn't so much that it was radically different from Windows (be it 98, 2000 or XP), it was just plain hard to work with, and I don't say this lightly. To this day, I don't like SuSE Linux, but a lot of people do.
(What is SuSE? There's a fine reference that covers all this - it's called the Internet, and Google has many, many ways to find answers like that.)
In January 2007, I landed a job where part of my job was to learn a "new" version of Linux called CentOS. CentOS stands for Community Enterprise Operating System, and it is essentially a free distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It comes with the GNOME desktop environment, a full-blown graphical user interface that has a lot of similarities to Windows in a general way, but it is stable, it comes with the OS, and, unlike the Windows OS and environment, it is also free. It was easy to use, easy to update, virtually all of the UNIX environment tools are included, and you can go off and customize the environment to your heart's delight.
I was hooked. I had the golden opportunity to install CentOS on my own desktop workstation as part of my employment (i.e., my employer paid me to learn this stuff) - what could be better than that?
Here's what - I upgraded my home computer to have enough hardware power to handle running CentOS almost exactly the same as my work computer, and took the plunge.
Now, like I said before, I'm a first class geek, so most of this was pretty simple to me. I've always been fascinated with this kind of technology, so poking around to see how it worked was a natural for me, and on top of that I was getting paid to do it.
Fast forward to today. I run CentOS on my primary desktop workstation at home, on both of my old, cheap laptops (I can't get rid of the older one 'cause the newer one's headset plug doesn't work - grr) and I strongly recommend it to all my friends. I even wrote a lousy book about it that you'll probably never see, but I learned a lot from writing the book.
Open your eyes back up, for heavens' sakes! I know I'm not that boring - that's why I put in the skips past the dull stuff.
And now, what you've all been waiting for: What's wrong with Linux?
Nothing. Really.
There are some disadvantages you need to know before you take the plunge, unless you're a techno-geek, too, in which case you probably already know about them (or already took the plunge).
Linux is different from Windows. This is actually not so much of a disadvantage in itself, but the reality is that most people who use computers are familiar with or hooked into the Windows methodology. Fortunately, Microsoft itself already started to make the break with Windows Vista and Office 2007 - it's all so different that Linux actually looks more familiar to the average 3.1/3.11/95/98/NT/2000/XP user than Vista or W7. Also, Linux is not written to use up every extra CPU cycle that Intel and AMD can squeeze out of their latest and greatest chips. The Aero look of Vista (that pretty, transparent sheen that eats your CPU) does, along with a lot of other, background stuff that takes up time behind the scenes. Finally, neither GNOME nor KDE, the other popular desktop environment GUI, changed for the main purpose of confusing the heck out of all users - they're just more feature-rich with more options you don't have to use.
Linux doesn't have a multi-billion dollar advertising corporation pushing for global dominance in the PC and business markets. None of the contributing corporations is pushing it that hard, either. Why not? There's no market share when all the software is free and anyone can get it. There's also the issue of the big software corporations that are already making a fortune on Windows-based software, the kind of fortune they can't make in a Linux-based, free software market. Finally, the vast majority of software available for Linux is open-source. If you just said, "Huh?" read on.
Open source software is software (meaning office productivity suites, games, graphics editors, entertainment software and so on - what you run on your computer after you log in and actually want to do something) that comes with the source code. That means, if you know what you're doing, you can modify it to fit your own personal or business needs. You can fix bugs in it if you find any. You can add your own features. The only thing you can't (legally) do is sell it or make a profit on it.
Software, even the games, that comes with Linux distributions is not the same as what runs on Windows. Actually, that's only half true. A fair amount of open source software does run on Windows, but it doesn't look like what the big products you're probably used to seeing do. For example, OpenOffice, a full office productivity suite that is free and competes more or less directly with Microsoft Office, does not look exactly the same as MS Office, and that can be a problem for businesses and people that are stuck on the MS Office way. But it runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux, MAC and other OS platforms, all the same way.
Another disadvantage is that, while there is great coverage for nearly all aspects of computing under Linux, there are some particular programs that aren't available. For example, Internet Explorer, Microsoft's flagship web interface, problems and all, does not run on Linux. Most Linux users are cheering about that even now. The problem comes in where businesses construct their web sites using Microsoft tools that are designed to use IE's non-standard features, and although Firefox and certain other browsers can make up for a lot of that, there are some things that just don't work. If you use Firefox at all, you've probably seen some already.
(There are also some sites I've seen where IE doesn't work right because of its non-standard behavior. They are by far the rarer, but they did exist at one time.)
Finally (oh, thank God, he's almost done!), Linux can be confusing. There are several different distributions of Linux, and they don't all work exactly the same way. Red Hat, which also includes the Fedora and CentOS derivatives, is three. Debian, which includes Ubuntu and some others I'm not familiar with, is several more (there are a number of different distributions of Ubuntu). Gentoo, Mandriva, Slackware, SuSE/Novell - there a plenty from which to choose, and each one is just a little different behind the veil of the GUIs, mostly GNOME and KDE, although there are others here, too.
Linux still has two huge advantages: it is free, and it runs on almost any hardware.
It's a complicated world, if you want to see it that way.
I like to simplify it like this: pick one and go with it. I recommend CentOS.
(All registered trademarks used herein are the sole property of the registrants.)
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