PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
A lot of my problems came from my lack of research and failure to read the directions.  Being the tech-savvy person I am, I skimped on the research I did before installing the OS.  It turns out that I’m not as smart as I thought. When picking an edition of Ubuntu to download, I was presented with the following:

Is this thing on?
Amazon has a whole system of EBook managment that I can put my books on my Kindle, my computer, or my phone. If I spent half a grand or so, I can even run the Kindle software on an iPad! This means I could view my entire EBook library on either device.

People often ask “What if you lose your Kindle or iPad? Do you lose all your books? Can you back them up?” Because Kindle is a system, your books are stored on the internet. They are linked to your account, rather than your device, so if you, say, lose your Kindle, you can add the books back on to your new Kindle. You can put your books on a bunch of devices. You can also delete books, which transfers them to an archive so they don’t take up space on whatever device you’re using to read. Amazon keeps a list of archived items so that you can simply re-download them to your Kindle/Phone/iPad/Computer for free. Amazon really tried to make this as simple as possible.

Ok, for real now: Why a Kindle? Why not an iPad?
Cost is a big factor for me. I got my Kindle as a gift, but it’s exactly what I would’ve gotten anyhow. The price tag is important. OK, so the Kindle has fewer bells and whistles, but for (as of this writing) $189, I’m getting free 3g access in countries across the globe for as long as I own the device. This allows me to check Wikipedia or download a book pretty much whenever and wherever I want. To get the same privilege with the iPad, I would need the $15/month data plan for the iPad, and that only works in the US. To go to another country, I need to talk to AT&T or change SIM cards. By the way, that data plan at $15/month translates to $180/year. I bet a few of you just went “Holy fuck! For $10 more, I could’ve just bought a Kindle!”

Don’t forget: that’s just the lowest, 200MB data plan. You still need to spend over $600 just to get the 3g iPad itself. That’s right, you’re looking at over $800 in just in the first year of iPad ownership, all before purchasing a single book. I could buy one current-gen Kindle at the current price every year for four years and still not catch up to the cost of the 3g iPad in the first year. Of course, I could just buy 60 new releases from the Amazon store ($9.99 each) instead.

I’m sure Apple fans are ready to rip off my head and plant it on a pike. To be fair, the price of an iPad will likely drop a few hundred dollars in the next few years. The Kindle was nearly as expensive ($399?) when it came out, and is now hovering at about half its original price. Also important is the fact that the iPad is a lot more than an EBook reader. It can surf the web in full color, and run thousands of popular of apps. People are used to having their cell phone battery drain in about a day, and a laptop battery in just a few hours. Apple has capitalized on this, proudly touting the 10 hour battery life (9 hours on 3g) on the iPad and many of their new laptops.

I already have a netbook though. My $350 Dell Mini 1012 can actually run a full OS, has Flash, and it also has a 9 hour battery life. That $350 also covers 3g in the Netbook, had I decided to get it: The cost of the 3g card is covered by the carrier your choose. That’s right, you get to choose between AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon. I’m still below the cost of an iPad after buying both a Netbook and a Kindle. As if that wasn’t awesome enough for the Kindle, it can last four days between charges with 3g wireless on (usually more for me) and two weeks with wireless off. In your face iPad.

I feel like I’m gonna break this damn thing.
Cost is important for another reason: Are you going to take an electronic device that cost half a grand or more to the beach? Are you going to toss it in your backpack for a quick hike? I can throw my kindle in its soft cover and then in a bag with no hesitation. What about two years from now? How pissed off are you going to be in when the battery in your $500+ device only lasts 1 to 4 hours instead of 10 hours? In theory, I’ll still be getting two to five days per charge on my Kindle. Even if I break my Kindle or the battery dies sooner, I can buy three more Kindles and still have saved money. For me, the choice is pretty obvious.

Ooh, SHINY! Can I play with it yet?
Ok, lets be honest: The iPad looks pretty awesome. It’s all glassy and aluminumy. It’s really trendy. The iPad definitely wins in the “pretty” catagory. Everyone wants to be hip, and Apple has marketed the hell out of this thing. Normally practical people are shouting “Fuck the cost! I want to be cool!” and handing over their credit card. Now, you can drop by your neighborhood Apple store and buy an iPad right now! Pretty handy. Of course, if you don’t live near an Apple store, you’re ordering online, you have to go through the whole ordering process (name, address, credit card info, etc.) Then you’re waiting 7 to 10 days for shipping. When that shiny Apple box shows up, get ready to… sit in front of a computer for a while. You still have to connect your iPad to your computer, connect it to your iTunes account, and sync it. Then you’re ready to go! Unless of course you have a 3g iPad. Then you have to set up your 3g account, enter your credit card details again, etc, this time all on the iPad. Phew! That doesn’t sound very simple or elegant.

You can’t just walk in to a store and grab a Kindle, which kind of sucks. If you bought it for someone else, or someone gave you a Kindle, setup is a little complicated. Anyone who didn’t actually order the Kindle actually has to go to Amazon.com, set up an account (if they haven’t already), and register the kindle. They have to enter the serial number on the back of the Kindle (Also available in a menu on the Kindle). Finally, they have to set up a payment option. Once that’s done, it’s linked to their account. That doesn’t sound very simple or elegant either! Fuck!

Here’s the big thing: Most Kindle users never have to do that. Amazon tried to make getting EBooks really easy, remember? The first thing they do is give you two day shipping for free. Want your Kindle faster? Pay a few extra bucks for overnight shipping. While you’re waiting, you can download the Kindle reader application and get started reading books on your computer or phone or whatever right away. Don’t have a computer? Ordered from an Internet Cafe? Doesn’t matter. When you ordered that Kindle from Amazon, it became registered to you automatically. When that little box shows up on your doorstep, you can rip that fucker open, fire it up, and start getting books. You just start using your Kindle. Awesome!

Conclusion:
I think the Kindle is awesome and the iPad is stupid. Apple is trying to cram the iPad into its own niche, pretending it isn’t an expensive EBook reader/netbook. Amazon built a whole platform around EBooks, and the Kindle is just one, awesome part that does its job very well, and at a surprisingly low price.

Linux was really awesome for an unemployed kid who wanted to learn about computers. My PC was a hand-me-down, and really couldn’t run any games, but I could use it to email, watch YouTube, and chat on the internet. I hopped on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and started learning more about Linux. I tried a bunch of different distributions: Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, and Red Hat all ended up installed at various points. Gentoo lasted the longest, I think in part because it was such a pain in the ass to install. I switched randomly back to Windows XP for a few games, but always came back to Linux.

Back then, Linux was simpler. Gentoo required you to wait hours or days for packages to build, but it was still easier to manage updates for than Windows. Windows needed updates all the time, and you had to reboot to install most of them. You needed antivirus software to keep you safe, and that often didn’t work. You needed to install drivers by hand all the time. On Linux, most of my hardware just worked because of the Kernel, and updates only required a reboot once a month or so. No extra crap to download, and way less downtime.

The Good Times:
I was pretty dedicated to using Linux when Windows Vista came out. I had been using XP now and then, but it just wasn’t good enough for me to switch to: It still needed lots of reboots for updates and wasn’t as fast as Linux. Vista had some more eye candy, but I was getting Beryl/Compiz running and that blew Aero out of the water.

I almost always had one Windows computer running for games, but most of my time was spent using Linux. I could watch YouTube and browse the web and not worry about viruses. IRSSI was my chat client of choice, and it ran over ssh with screen: I could connect to my computer at home from anywhere and chat, without ever having to sign off. I filed a few bug reports here and there. Most things were fixed in the next release of whatever software I was running, and the distributions quickly picked that release up. Some of the bugs I filed would be marked as “Fix Released” because an early Alpha of the next version fixed the problem. This worried me, but not enough to do anything drastic.

The Decline:
I got a new laptop with an ATI video card. The ATI drivers for Linux were awful: I couldn’t run compiz or beryl very well. 3d stuff in general was slow. I swapped it for an NVIDIA card, but discovered that my screen would randomly go black while running compiz. I couldn’t really file bugs for these issues because the drivers were closed source, and therefore technically unsupported. Many of the problems were not consistent across distributions, so it probably wasn’t the graphics drivers that were the real problem anyhow.

I could watch YouTube and play some of my older PC games, but I was using my Vista PC more and more. It just ran smoother (despite all the crap Windows Vista was getting). Linux needed almost as many updates and reboots as Vista. I had to pay $60 for software to run some of my games because WINE didn’t cut it anymore. I bought a few different netbooks, but was never able to get any of them 100% working under Linux, no matter what distribution I used. Wireless N and Sleep/Suspend seemed to be a particular problem.

In February of 2010, I started filing bugs about things like screen brightness controls not working correctly, and posting about my problems with the ATI drivers. I dug through some source code and ran some tests. I found where the problem with the brightness was, but I had no fucking idea how to fix it, and the bug report was triaged as low priority. The last update was in March, by me. It’s nearly July, and there has been a full release of Ubuntu since then, but the bug has not been touched.

The Windows Revolution:
Windows 7 was at RTM, and I got my hands on it via Technet to try out. It was clean, simple, and functional. It had nice little features like snapping windows and a new, cleaner taskbar. The Vista instant-search feature had been refined and was awesome. A lot of my hardware just worked without installing drivers, just like in my early Linux days. The rest of my hardware was easy to install. My netbook’s touchscreen worked perfectly. When I gave that netbook to my mom and bought one with better battery life, I discovered that the new one had a touch pad with multi-finger scrolling in Windows, but not in Linux. Sleep worked in Windows, but was very broken in Linux. I got nearly twice as much battery life in Windows as I did in Linux when running normally.  Both my laptops would drain the battery in sleep mode in Linux, but in Windows they would automatically switch to hibernate after a few hours to save the battery. I tenaciously hung on to Linux, but I was already getting ready to jump ship.

The Death of Linux:
I dropped my old laptop while fixing a printer, and it was broken enough that Dell replaced it under my Complete Care. I tried to get an NVidia card, because the new NVIDIA drivers for Linux are pretty darn good, but that was not an option. I ended up with a monster laptop with a 1080p screen, an i7, wireless N, and an ATI Mobility Radeon 4570.

I fired up Ubuntu right away, but quickly noticed my wireless N card was flaky. Sometimes it would work fine, but after waking from sleep or rebooting, it simply would not work. It wouldn’t connect, and the network management utilities acted like I didn’t have a wireless card. There was already a bug filed for this issue, so I plugged in my wired Ethernet connection and tried various troubleshooting steps to no avail. My netbook had the same model of card, and had the same issue in Linux.

My graphics drivers were a mess too: I tried the open source graphics driver, but discovered that my laptop fan ran full speed when the laptop was on. The card was new enough that power management wasn’t fully supported on Linux’s open source drivers, so the card just ran full tilt and hot all the time.  ATI’s official driver got the fans and power management working correctly, but the actual graphics performance was slow and terrible, and made my laptop crash occasionally. I tried the open-source graphics driver in development, but using it meant compiling the fairly new 2.6.34 Linux Kernel, which Ubuntu didn’t have support for yet. I got some graphics power management, and fixed my wireless issues, but I lost the use of my eject key and the fans still ran at almost full speed. Every time the graphics card changed power modes, the screen would get graphics bugs.

I thought about filing some bugs over at Ubuntu’s bugzilla and a few other places. Some of the bugs I had filed during previous releases had been marked as “Fix Released” because the Alpha (pre-release software, still months from being ready) fixed the problem. Others had languished, quietly ignored or swept under the rug as “low priority”. I knew I was pretty screwed for for months if I stayed with Linux.

All that open source freedom was nice when I started using Linux. Now it seems like Linux and its maintainers are quietly telling me “We support freedom. Feel free to go fuck yourself.”

From the Ashes of Vista, Windows 7:
Tired of the bullshit, I installed Windows 7 exclusively on my desktop and laptops. Now my computers can share files faster and more easily. I can play videos over the network between all of my machines. My laptops suddenly have full multi-touch support on the touch pads. Games run without 3rd party support layers, and without crashing all the time. Office 2010 has been released, fixing most of my gripes with Office 2007 and all of my gripes with Office 2003. Outlook 2010 made managing more than one e-mail account easy again. Microsoft Security Essentials had made antivirus software free and unobtrusive. UAC (those “Cancel Or Allow” windows everyone hated) has been streamlined so it pops up less often than you have to type in your password on Linux or OS X. PowerShell has rapidly become an extremely powerful shell, on par with, if not better than any BASH or CSH clones. Microsoft isn’t fucking around: Windows 7 really is a great piece of software, and worth a bit of money to use.

Conclusion:
Linux is awesome if you have hardware that is supported in Linux, and you don’t game very much. It’s awesome if you want to run a super fast server. It’s awesome if you want to surf the web and not worry too much about viruses (for now). It’s awesome if you want to force yourself to learn more about how your computer works.

Windows 7 is awesome when Linux fails to meet your criteria, which won’t take long with the way Linux development seems to be going. Microsoft has finally got their shit together in the OS department, the application department, and the security department. Here’s hoping they don’t fuck it all up.

1. I buy as much local food as I can afford.

2. I have a small car and use my bike instead of it very often.

3. I fix my stuff instead of throwing it away.

4. I plant some of my own food.

5. I don’t own a boat or other large thing that uses tons of resources like a jet, or a motor home. (Fuck you John Travolta and Al Gore).

6. I compost.

7. I do most of my work by hand even if a machine is available to stay in shape and save fuel. If it is more efficeint to use a machine I evaluate the situation and do the most efficient thing.

8. I have used clean energy through my power companies for almost 5 years now.

9. I am one of the most green people that I know and am constantly trying to reduce my impact on the planet. I care about it and consider it a priority in my life.

10. I use CFL’s and many other devices to save energy, refurbish my own batteries, and probably have forgotten some of the things that I do, within reason, to save energy.

Now on to my Greenpeace experience today. I was at the farmer’s market in my town. Buying local produce and goods and signing up to use clean energy through my power company in my new town. On my way out of a used book store my family and I were harassed by Greenpeace agents. Now let me say that they were on a street corner in a town in the US that is very eco-friendly in the first place. I was actually on my way to work. Which I told them. I was then harassed by them, told that “they’re trying to save the Earth”, because they assumed that because I didn’t want to talk to them that I wasn’t, and then one of them started to insult us, telling us that we must have no sense of humor as well… I’m still not sure how they pulled that out of the situation. In general they assumed that because we didn’t want to talk to them that we just didn’t “get it” and didn’t care about “mother earth”. Fucking rich hippies.

In the end I just want to say that I didn’t want to talk to them because although saving the Earth should be a top priority for all Americans, I didn’t want to talk to a bunch of representatives from an often misinformed, militant group, like Greenpeace. Fuck you, you guys suck. I’ll keep saving the Earth the way I’ve been, by leading by example in my own life, and you can shove your self righteous, psychopathic, hippie BS up your fucking ass. There are plenty of other less militant organizations and people out there, actually doing something other than making assumptions on street corners of there fellow citizens. I suggest you do the same. Oh and in case you didn’t know what I meant for sure by my overall description in this post, let me make it clear, I mean fuck you!

Pros: It’s lightweight, it has a ton of useful apps., like productivity suites, streaming apps., and, well, you name it… (well almost) and since the SDK is free, we can expect tons of new stuff all of the time. The A4 processor is impressive for its size (but this technically is both a combination of correct coding and power), the visual keyboard is big (espeically in landscape mode) and makes immediate sense even to novice users, plus the VGA adapter and bluetooth keyboard add-ons are awesome, especially the keybaord and dock combination for those who want to use it almost like a laptop replacement. Plus, the no contract 3G plans are pretty cool. I can’t complain much about the pricing either, which is rare for $pple.

Cons: It’s not quite a laptop replacement yet, and although the line between a laptop and the iPad is pretty gray for most novice to moderate users, it kind of sucks that the thing has only one crappy iPod port which requires an expensive accessory to get a USB port out of (the “camera connector”) which is only really expensive because it’s functionality currently sucks. I’ll change my opinion on this if the adapter gets used for USB printers, etc. in the near future. It also is rumorred that it will have wireless printer support in the near future as well. I should also mention that it basically requires a “master” computer to sync with to really be useful. This seems pretty lame since it could basically take care of itself with just a little bit of extra OS support built-in (and almost does already). The final thing is the “Jobs” attitude towards Flash on it. Sure, I’m not going to make an argument for the efficiency of Flash on the device, but what is up with the Apple Jihad against it? If Apple doesn’t want to build it in, fine, but users shouldn’t be restricted from content by their hardware manufacturer especially if Adobe, etc. want to make an app. that supports Flash for it. This is probably just Apple having another pipe dream about pushing their own standards down users’ throats through the iPad, but I wonder how they’ll feel when the HP Hurricane comes out and supports flash while using a non-Crappy Windows Mobile based OS. It will run Palm’s webOS, so it will be efficient and not screw you on watching southparkstudios.com because Jobs got another outdated philosophy shoved in his pee-hole and is releasing his vengeance on the world through his legions of Appleites that do whatever he says without question. Honestly, I love most Apple products, but Jobs man…. I don’t know…. that guy sucks. Oh yeah, actually one more thing. Although 1.5 pounds is light, you’re not really meant to hold the iPad in your hand the way it is designed for many hours. 1.5 pounds on the end of your hand still fatigues the old arm if used often during a normal work day in that position. Still, this should be common sense knowledge.