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hi all...
hope everyone's holidays are going well ...
there were the usual tech gifts under the tree this year at Mahlah's parents'
place (where we hide out for the holidays ;) ... it was an interesting peek
at how well linux is doing in the world of consumer electronics and home
computing. for instance:
Mahlah's parents got a nice big flatscreen monitor; super gorgeous. and it
came with installation instructions for two families of operating systems:
Windows and Linux.
they also got a webcam. but the box they got didn't have the CD with the
software in it, just the cam and documentation. they wanted to try it out
right away so i suggested they look for the driver online. the fellow who did
so gave up after about 20 minutes of searching the Net. he joined us in the
living room and informed everyone that the only help documentation and links
to drivers/software that he could find for the webcam on the popular search
engines were for Linux. of course, a visit to the cam manufacturer's website
revealed the Windows drivers/software, but it was immensly pleasing to hear
how much easier it was to find support for Linux as opposed to Windows.
another gift was a CD burner. it listed linux on the side of the box as
supported. nothing surprising about the fact that it works under linux, but
what was nice is that they actually listed it along with various versions of
Windows (95 -> XP) and DOS (3.1+).
DVDs recieved play on linux too, of course...
a bunch of cellphones were given as well, and they were activated via the
company's website. which ran Apache on Linux. i haven't tried hooking the
phone up to a Linux computer yet, as they didn't come with any sort of
computer connectivity (that's an extra aparently), but with apps like Kandy
available i'm sure it would work fine.
in fact, the only non-linux friendly tech gift was Peyton's Dora the Explorer
computer game. i bet it would work with Wine these days, but again i just
haven't tried.
so it was definitely a good holiday for Tux. =)
happy new year, everyone!
- --
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"
- Albert Einstein
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