Windows behind closed doors..

This weekend I did some work on our little notebook. Trying to get a webcam working in windows 98. It's a cool little notebook, super tiny and all. It's a PII 266 running win98, though, and it's a bit slow compared to my Athlon 1.8 desktop system.

Needless to say it took me a bit to even get the bloated drivers installed, then it hung up so bad I had to restart and restart and well.. restart. Well, so that's why I'm not the biggest fan of windows. You start out with a perfect install, and then as you use it the thing becomes horribly bloated and self destructs. That's what happened ages ago with my poor mother's HP (that she still uses that way - despite endless frustration) and really any windows machine I've ever encountered. Days of maintenance and it's good for another week.

On a side note, my XP home partition on my main system hasn't booted for over a month. Linux loads the bootloader and it would boot fine, but.. once it's handed over to windows it won't even let me boot into safe mode without restarting the computer. I've seriously had it with Windows. Had it.

Been looking at the Ubuntu distro. Seems to be catching alot of media attention lately. Seems to be an altruistic premise, which is nice. I'm really feeling encouraged with all of these companies popping up with the appearance of selfless motives. It's something we've needed for a long time coming. I hope they all survive.

I believe that Google was the beginning. A company that just seems to help people become more and more productive, time and again. They even seem to be taking on the big companies like Yahoo and Microsoft.. challenging them to follow the leader and start doing the right thing by thier customers. They seem to be bringing us all together to collaborate and make the web more intelligent. I'm all for a more intelligent web, connecting mroe intelligent people and sharing incredibly useful information.

The precept would be scary if it came from a position of corruptible power. You might argue that all power is corruptible. Indeed you would be right, be it not for fair and equal distribution. I guess that's why I see open source as such a powerful force. Not only are the tools set in place by those with a propensity to share with the world (geedless/needless), but they are also freely available for public review and scrutiny.

I think the UK may have a good perspective and message with thier commonlaw. They have the understanding that a society develops it's own law with time, and knowledge or awareness of these laws bind them together. They have no constitution, or universal text.. they just learn from their own history, from their own mistakes.

I will stop there for now.. as I need to rebuild my resume in XML in order to wow the google elite. And if I don't succeed in wowing, at least I'll have a foundation for a far more configurable resume.
-len