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NEWSFLASH – I like Vista….

I’m pretty tired of the Vista bashing bandwagon, and to be honest it confuses me.  Sure it’s different than XP, and I will admit that like most new OSes, it may have suffered from opening day jitters.  But I’ve been running Vista for almost 2 years now and I’m perfectly happy with it.  In fact there is more than one feature of Vista I can’t live without – the Start Search being the biggest (How do non Vista people find things anyway?)

To try to be competantly equipped to defend my position, I decided to google “why people hate Vista”, and was very surprised at the results.  At the end of the day it would seem people hate Vista because it allows a user to do whatever they want…

Wait… did you catch that?  People hate that Microsoft, the evil monopoly that force fed everyone Internet Explorer “illegally”, curmudgeon of the dungeon of OSes, lets you use your computer the way you want, even to your detriment.  They dared to come up with a user experience that would get you as safe as you can be and still be an id10t l’user.

I have news for you – Joe Average User is not technically literate. I know – it’s a really hard concept to grasp, but your grandma can’t use linux out of the box.  She will call you on the phone 500x, everytime she tries to run a program and it quits with no explanation why – usually because she doesn’t have the rights to execute it.  She will call you when her favorite application doesn’t work anymore after the kernel upgrade you applied to make her safer, because her app needs to be recompiled with new libraries to take your changes into account.   Bet you wished someone had thought of an alert that asked her if she wanted to elevate her priveleges when she is making calenders at 4am….

When you installed slackware for her, did you have to login to an admin account first to set up an appropriately dumbed down user account? Mhm – thought so…  Did you have to scour the intarweb looking for the right driver before her scanner-printer-fax-souffle maker worked properly?  Ah, check.  I postulate the following – The problem with Vista isn’t Microsoft …

What Vista needs is a distrib.

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What is it with these eBikes anyway?

What is it with these eBikes anyway?

The ads are profuse and the sightings are climbing. Ebikes are the next big thing for the gasoline disgruntled among us. They are clean, cheap modes of transportation for those of us that prefer to arrive at work a little less sweaty than the tri-athlete set. For short commutes and the odd running around they are the perfect solution to save on gas.

But damn are they ugly!… …or they were. The new crop of ebike however is stylized much differently than your crazy uncle’s retrofit. Starting at about $1295 CAN and sporting a scooter like appearance, the sleak lines, and fully operational turn signals and high beam headlights sometimes make it diffcult to tell the difference between these and their gasoline powered cousins. In fact the only real tell tale sign are by the pedals sticking out the side.

Most advertisements will also claim, somewhat truthfully, that ebikes require no insurance, licensing or other restrictions. Although that may be true by the letter of the law, there is still a bit of smoke and mirrors going on once you dig deeper.

[More after the jump]