Thank you for the clarification. I shall now modify my statement:
Microsoft is not evil, it’s simply a very successful corporation that markets a very popular product extremely efficiently.
Better? 
Stranger on a train: I’m hardly the one who was frothing at the mouth here, but the OP reminded me of the immortal words of Socrates.
I drank what?
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I didn’t want you guys to think I was stuffy. You know, no fun. All brain no penis.”
Stranger
Did Auntbeast dump her thread or did her computer get Hacky Hacked again?
Sorry, been packing and working.
My machine had not been up for very long and I had not transferred any of my data on to it, so wiping was easier (By easier, me having a system I can zone out on and play solitaire with after dealing with obnoxious degenerate gamblers all night). My husband is a network administrator, so he usually knows what he is doing.
I’m not sure what all systems he checked, I didn’t particularly care, other than the fact I wanted a system that worked and I didn’t want anyone if they had access, to be able to get to the other machines on our network. If I didn’t state earlier, I’ll state it now. I didn’t want to spend the time figuring out all the why’s. I’ll probably reinstall Ubuntu once I have a little more time to fiddle. (about a 95% chance) When I can take the time to educate myself some more.
I certainly enjoyed running Ubuntu. I am all for it. I was amazed at how easy it was to use/configure/play with. I highly recommend it, beyond the font issue, it didn’t bug me at all.
Yes, I had edgy installed, and it tended towards the squirrely on some updates.
Yes, we are on a broadband router, but we assign internal IP addresses.
Things that stopped working: various websites, I didn’t see a correlation between them, just some sites would not work. (to ubuntu’s credit, I could never get to bank of america on my machine when it was windows) I was unable to open a terminal window. My user account would not login correctly. Firefox would crash constantly. My email program (evolution) would crash whenever I got a new email.
I do feel bad that I did not spend the time learning as much about Ubuntu as it deserves. I was prepared to, but damn, it was so easy to just start doing what I always do. It peeves me when folks do what I have done. I have no excuse.
Ubuntu is fantastic. I miss it and I cross my heart, as soon as my house is on the market, I’ll get it back and be a tad smarter.
Forgive my sporadic forays into this thread, it dropped off the page and got no responses for a while, so I’m kind of surprised at it’s longevity. Since my OP was basically a vent of frustration especially.
Think of part of it as us wanting to help, and part of it as us wanting to know what it was, cause it doesn’t match any familiar symptoms.
I was wondering myself because it sounded more like an element of DNS was wacked and not like a hack at all.
I also think it’s odd to blame other people for YOU installing a Microsoft product. You don’t like MS, you install linux, the linux install has issues and instead of fixing the problem or just doing a fresh install of linux you go back to MS because it is easy.
Well, guess what? That’s one thing MS did right. They made it easy for the average Joe to use an OS. Hell, even my mom can (mostly) use XP.
The fact YOU didn’t want to dive into linux is the reason YOU reinstalled MS. You didn’t want to fuck with it. You wanted something easy and something that worked. (If not, you would have rolled up, opened a can of Mountian Dew and worked the problem on the linux box.) Fair enough. But you hide behind this fact and blame it on some mystery hacky-hack scriptkiddie.
Now, this is what really bugs me. You are ashamed to use MS and you want to earn geek points by using linux. It’s just a fucking operating system!!! It’s like the stupid Mac vs Windows jerkoff-fests. It’s just an OS. Be proud of the OS you use. If you want to push yourself and learn the quirkiness that is linux… DO THAT. If not, just MS. Use both. Install VMware and run linux on MS. Hook a Commodore 64 up and use that. I don’t care. Most people don’t. I know I won’t think any different of you because of your OS.
Stand proud woman. Stand up and say “I’m using XP and you can suck my cock… if I had a cock.”
I don’t have a built in 'IT" guy so I have to do it myself and I’m not very good at it.On out in-house network behind a LinkSys r-81 router / switch connected to the satellite modem I have 2 Win-98se boxes, 1 older HP laptop running XP home and one Ubuntu 6.06 machine with Firefox 2.0.0.1 all working together. Desk is getting crowded. I have one more Win-98se machine out in the garage up and running. It is my test bed, parts checker, give away computer so a needy person that can’t afford one can get a computer.
If I can do all that, anyone can. I am no geek. Am bit stubborn. 
As far as I can tell, the first mistake anyone ever makes when they buy a digital camera is that they install the included software. I’ve almost never had a digital camera NOT automagically sync with Windows XP, not counting an older one that I got for Christmas when I was still using Windows 95. Plug the camera’s USB cable into the USB port and suddenly a menu pops up, asking you if you want to copy the pictures over, print them directly, or access it like a thumb drive. Very simple and easy to do.
The software provided by the camera maker, more often than not, sucks.
If your Olympus digicam didn’t work right in Windows XP, I think that just means you need to buy a camera that was at least designed decently enough to run on the most widely used operating system around, rather than having to rely on some slip-shod proprietary program.
I’d consider Macs if Apple’s PR didn’t encourage some kind of preppy snooty attitude about it. I’ve had some acquaintances who were Mac fanchildren, and I never met a bunch of people who gave off so much of an air of technical superiority based on their using an out-of-the-box PC in my life. Nothing personal, of course, I can entirely appreciate that your Mac works for you better than your PC does (did?), and what matters here is what works for you. Just saying, is all. 
Actually, Apple somehow promotes technical superiority combined with technophobia, which is really kind of weird. I’ve run into a few of Mac-ies who taut how their operating system is Unix…even though they’ve clearly never opened the command line and edited an rc.d script in their lives; they’re just repeating something they read in Mac promotional literature. Wowee!
Of course, that’s nothing compared to FreeBSD admins, who know that they-and only they–are running The Only True Unix. Just don’t confuse them with Linux hackers. “I’m BSD! I’m not f**king Linux! I’m sick and tired of people confusing us!”
Stranger
The ISP I ran was co-owned by a graphics firm that all ran Macs. Our systems were NT/Sun Solaris/Linux/Win200. We could bounce around any system, not to mention that we were often called upon to do tech support on whatever system the person calling may have. So I’m not even close to being an OS snob. Parts of me wishes I was, but oh well. In my secret heart of hearts, I could get that worked up about something that ideally, allows me to do what I want to do with as little interference as possible.
I’ve done enough tech support to have a real good idea of what kind of brain cells it takes to run your basic computer. We had a guy that would call in about every month, take up about 20 hours of time, just to check his email. Years of this guy, and we banned certain folks from taking his calls because the would get hung up on the fact this guy had been running windows for YEARS and did not know what an icon was, or a window.
I would like to back up the previous poster about included software in cameras. The crapfest of software that came with my camcorder was idiotic at best. Nothing on it was worth a tinkers dam.
Having in house IT is kinda nice, until he starts mashing my buttons. God knows, if there is one machine that does not have an uptime of over a week, it’s his. He’s the attorney that has himself for a client. I’m just glad for the most part, he screws up his stuff. I’ll even allow that he was out of his tree and that my system was fine and we overreacted, but I do fondly look forward to having the time to reinstall Ubuntu. I really liked it. And I am sorta sick of Windows.
If it’s any consolation, I put Bill Gates and Henry Ford in pretty much the same category and have been thinking about them a lot as I consider the kind of house I may want to have. Who is gonna win? The dude that can build a few $7mil houses or the guy that can pump out 7mil houses that most folks can afford?
Thank you all, this has been a very pleasant, informative and helpful pit. Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.
Interesting little tidbit I learned in a college computer class-if you type “I wish Bill Gates were dead” in Microsoft Word, highlight it, and run Spell-Check, or Thesaurus or whatever, it suggests, “I’ll drink to that!”
Don’t know if it still works, though, as I don’t have Word.
ETA: Oh wait-I do. Haven’t used it for awhile, though.
EATA: Damn, it doesn’t work anymore. Oh well.
I don’t think you got hacked, you just hosed your machine applying needless “updates” and “patches”, without knowing what you were doing. You don’t need to update a Linux system every fucking day to not get “hacked”.
Installing nightly builds willy nilly is a great way to trash a box.
why?
Presumably because you are more likely to get whatever bugs were coded into it before anyone can catch it and fix it like they would with a more finished release.
I once went from Mandrake Linux 8.2 to 9.0, and found that between the two versions, Linux evidently stopped supporting computer mice. Weird things happen if you don’t give the updated versions time to mature and get patched up.
Nightly builds are automatic. Whatever, and I mean whatever, changes done to the source code are built by a script, and if it compiles successfully, it gets put up. This is great if you’re actively working on the project, since you can dive right in and analyze the problems in the build and work out how to fix them. It sucks if you’re a normal user who just wants to get work done, and that’s why normal users shouldn’t install nightly builds or development releases.
Not a reasonable comparison. Back in the early days of personal computers, the OS was either included free with the computer (e.g., Apple ][) or sold cheap. As an example, a PC cost around $2,000 and a copy of DOS cost under $50, thus representing about 2-1/2% of the cost of the box.
Now, if you purchase or build a computer and wish to buy a copy of Windows, you’re looking at $1,000 or less for the computer, and $200 or more (depending on version) for the operating system. Gates is not responsible for lowering the price of software. His company’s marketing tactics are responsible for turning it into 20% of the cost of the system instead of 2%, and increasing the price by a factor of 4 while the rest of the electronics industry pricing dropped.
Out of random curiosity, how did the capabilities compare between Windows XP or Windows Vista vs. DOS?
Hm. Word processor…
Well, the major difference between the two is that 95 and later had integrated driver architecture, so you didn’t have to load drivers for sound and video every time you did something tricky.
I used the Dos graphic shell for ages, though… Pretty much the same as Explorer.
So… not that much. Oh, well, multiprocessing, sure, but not that much, given system capabilities.
Oh, about the way the capabilities compared between an 8088-based IBM PC and a modern 3 GHz PC.
Look at the difference between what we paid for the latest, greatest side-scroller game back then and what we pay for a 3D realtime raytraced game today. I think the difference in technology is comparable to the difference in operating systems, but the price hasn’t quadrupled.
The price of operating systems in hard dollars, in percentage of total system cost, and by just about any other measure, has increased far more than the price of hardware and most application software. But when you’re a virtual monopoly using a little bundling and some violation of the Sherman anti-trust act, you can do that kind of thing.