Alex A. Hutnik

Yes I am, thanks. Foxworthy’s jokes are stale. There’s only so many ways you can incorporate your aging redneck commentary in to contrived game show banter. He even borrows the predictable commercial-break suspense tactic Howie Mandel employs on Deal or No Deal. I actually wish American Idol was 30 minutes longer to take up this show’s time slot. In the words of Simon Cowell, Are You Smarter… is “completely unoriginal.”

My prediction: Not gonna last long.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Google and Yahoo! are comptetitors on every front.  There’s Google Maps/Yahoo! maps, Google Video (the ubiquitous YouTube)/Yahoo! Video, and GMail/Yahoo! Mail.  As far as the last two go, I have played with both and I have to say I think Google is the clear winner here.  I’m sorry, Yahoo!, but your ads are so obtrusive.  You might have a fancier interface (in the Beta testing mode) but GMail is just so much simpler and cleaner.  Yes, drag and drop and tabbed e-mail messaging is great, but your ads are a HUGE eyesore.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Upgraded my main desktop to 2GB of RAM, yet Firefox still manages to take up a ridiculous amount of memory. ~300MB of RAM to be exact. Before, with 1GB of RAM, it was around 240MB of RAM.

Unreal.

I have no idea what all that memory is going towards. JS memory leaks in Gmail? Caching to memory every page I visit, plus 10 levels worth of child links from those pages? I have no idea.

Unset the page file, so things are kinda speedy. For some reason Windows wasn’t automagically using as much physical memory as I had, so I had to tell it to scrap the swap file. Makes me want to switch to Linux.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Linux can be a real pain to work with sometimes, but the benefits are pretty substantial.  For one, the operating system itself is incredibly secure.  There’s no question about it.  If you properly configure your Linux server and follow security best-practices (task segregation based on users, keeping applications updated, setting mindful permissions, etc.), you will never have any problems.

In spite of it’s recent update, Windows is becoming very antiquated.  There isn’t as much innovation in Vista as there has been in previous releases.  The fancy Aero theme? Linux has been on top of that for a while.  SideShow? Not impressed.  Safer kernel? Linux has boasted that for years.

But, I still use Windows as my main operating system.  Why?

• I don’t want to jump through 3 different programs just to get my e-mail out of Outlook and in to Evolution/Thunderbird.  Maybe the next version of Ubuntu could include a simple IMAP server that I could put all of my mail on?
• Getting something like Remote Desktop (a feature of Windows for years) to work on Linux (like FreeNX) shouldn’t be so complicated.  It should be just as easy to set up a remote session as it is in Windows.
• Video card support needs to improve.
• I can’t sync my PocketPC PDA with Evolution/Thunderbird.  I wouldn’t mind running a session of Windows XP in Parallels, but I’m not sure if it will connect to USB devices.  This also brings up the issue of…
• Is there anything that allows connections to Exchange servers?  Or is there an Exchange replacement in Linux?

Once these issues get resolved, I’ll move my computers to be 100% Linux.

Popularity: 5% [?]