Now, I'm not really much of a fan-boy for much of anything these days. My loyalty with software, hardware, and computers in general is only limited by what is going to offer me the best bang for my buck.
Case 1: I own an iPod. Yes, I caved and spent the money to get a 30GB iPod for myself after years of “thinking” about getting one. I absolutely love it. I especially love the scrolling wheel it makes playing with the settings that much funner. But, I've also been looking at other devices on the market, and at the time when I purchased mine there wasn't much in the way of competition to the iPod in a feature for feature comparison. In about 3 months I'll have changed my tune because I know there are newer items in development soon to be released to the market place that I would gladly replace for my iPod.
Case 2: I own my very first official copy of Windows. I loathe XP, and all subsequent Operating Systems offered by Microsoft. Its not the fact that they're the dominant OS on the market. I spent two solid weeks searching the Internet for drivers to replace my wifes installation of Vista with the more user friendly XP. I had almost given up and installed the latest version of Ubuntu Linux when I found one in a last ditch effort.
Case 3: I won't use Office 2007, ever. Now, I know that O2k7 was developed to be integerated seemlessly into the Vista environment, but you think they might have included a guided tour of how the new interface and “menu” structure correspond to the older interface. I know many people who can't find a bloody thing in the software and have given up completely on it. A good solid recommendation for someone like that would be OpenOffice, it fully supports Office 2003 files and even has a built-in export to PDF.
Case 4: OOXML. I'm of course referring to Office Open XML, which is Microsoft's attempt at an international standard for documents. Notice how its OpenOffice backwards? I think that they did that so that they could try to hook users of OpenOffice without knowing. Their first attempt at a standard failed as many of the voting countries refused to adopt it (Canada, India, China). The main problem, you can't have an open standard that requires a user to use one and only one product, that defeats the point of being open. Note: you should be informed that OpenOffice had their document format approved by ISO almost 2 years ago.
If you couldn't tell I'm a huge fan of Open Source software. Software should be free, hell, many people pirate software to begin with because it is too expensive to buy. Open Source software allows a community of users to develop and provide input in creating alternatives to off the shelf software. What people are scared of with Open Source is they feel it is not secure and contains spyware, Open Source contains less spyware and harmful code than regular off the shelf software. If thats true, what is everyone scared of? Their own shadow? Or Change?
I've given XP a deadline of 3 months to get the hell off of my systems so that I can use something a little more “real” and affordable. I'm referring to installing Linux on my computer. The only thing at this point that is holding back from installing is the lack of Wi-Fi support for my wireless card. I have a newer card that is not readily available, if I had a standard wireless card the installation of Linux would pick it up in most cases. The problem with mine is that there are NO drivers at all for me to use. My iPod works great, my camera card reader works great.
I've got time to kill while waiting for the new files to become available, until then I plan on finding all of the replacement software that I can find.
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