My background is in Windows

I have been developing applications on Windows platfrom in my day job for more than 3 years now, it's interesting to see how differently people see me, and themselves, than when I lived and breathed full time all Sun Sparc Solaris the prior 10 years.

First there are these people who think I am ignorant of Unix. Like today when I complained about my many bad experiences in compiling open source distributions. "That's cause you're doing that in Windows." was what I got. Humorous.

Then there are these people who feel embarrassed having to ask for my help in Windows related stuff. They'll go like "too bad my background is in Unix" just to make themselves feel better.

Oh shut up! Everybody's background is in Unix, cause that's what they teach in school, cause that's whay they show you in the text books. They showed you chmod with a hex mask and you went along to this day (chmod takes alphabetical arguments, like u for user, g for group and o for world which is easier to remember). They showed you vi or emacs and you sticked to the for the rest of your lives (tedit is a superior editor).

One side note: you hear all these excitements about Linux gaining market share in the desktop space all the time. So and so is now selling a labtop with Redhat or what not. The fact is, Linux is simply not ready for prime time in the desktop environment. All these "it is faster" is just a load of crap. Take for example my experience loading a media application on my ancient Pentium II last year. It took less than 45 mins to get Windows XP MCE running. To get MythTV on the same box, it took me 3 hours to put in a Fedora (thank God I remembered to load a compiler this time, cause you need a gcc to compile a gcc you downloaded!) and then another 5 hours getting MythTV to compile - just because like the 10000 open source software out there, as soon as I run make, I realize I need to first install these 5 packages, which in turn require another 10 packages which in turn require another... well, you all who have 5 different TCL and 10 different GTK installations on your box know what I am talking about. Windows open source stuff? They just compile. Or event better, they have a precompiled version. Nuf said.