Red Hat Diaries/0000

Uh-oh I

Hi,

I'm not supposed to be here. This is Sydney's page. She's out right now. I'm not supposed to type in anything here. She's going to kill me. Oh well.

We never got around to buying any Linux boxes because we came upon better and worse things and because Tom Greene at The Register did it for us and did it so much better. Tom tried out Mandrake and Red Hat and SuSE and he says Red Hat really sucks. Of course he doesn't like Microsoft Windows any better, but then again who does. Some of us are just employed to live in the belly of the Beast.

Anyway, I got to looking around at the desktops for Linux, at KDE and Gnome and then Ximian, and the thought struck me that they were all trying to look fancy schmancy and imitate MacOS and OS X. Now I didn't know much about MacOS back then, and I don't know much more today either, but a single stinking mouse button? Oh come on. Maybe Windows 3.x was fragile there, it used basically a single mouse button (one of our programmers used the right button for Hexview, that was it) but since 1995 (ok, 1994 if you were on the beta team) Microsoft has made extensive (and good) use of the 'secondary' mouse button.

Funny how things like that go. When 95 came out the word was we couldn't discriminate against left handed people. And who would want to - I mean aside from all the Mr & Ms Twists out there who think parsley is the devil's dandruff and stuff. But anyway, we were supposed to call the left mouse button the 'primary' button and the right one the 'secondary'.

As if that stuck. With the home computer revolution the newbies and the clueless took over and gave everything a name of their own. GIF files became icons even though they weren't icons, the system notification window became the system tray, and so forth. Installable programs became rote (yes, Martha, before 95 you just ran them - they weren't as clumsy and didn't guzzle RAM like they do today - there were less bozos operating under the guise of being programmers).

So anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. We never did drive down to Red Hat in the Triangle. Screw Red Hat - they can't even make a decent installer. As if Dell computers are rare too. What are they thinking over there at Red Hat World Headquarters in the Triangle anyway? One thing is for sure - that's got to be one of the dinkiest world headquarters I've ever seen. So screw Red Hat - they're wimps.

But Linux though? Keep on with Linux?

Well you see, Sydney and I want a new fleet of computers. Which is rough as we're constantly on the move. We're heading down to the Caribbean and who knows what will happen there. Better have a box with a battery. In other words a laptop.

Hey gotta go now, see you soon.

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