Are you forced to buy windows in order to solve certain tasks on the internet e.g. like certain banktasks and to update garmin gps maps and other

[David Fletcher]

On Thu, 2014-07-31 at 16:16 +0000, user1 wrote:
> What you really say here is that you ARE forced to buy windows? whatever 
> way you obtain -or use windows

Nobody is forcing me to use windows. When I eventually figured out how
to get the Brother updater to work, there was no update available
anyway.

It is bloody annoying though when companies do this - publish printer
drivers for Linux then have some other function only work with windows.
It is completely unnecessary too. For instance the firmware update for
my Cisco/Linksys router works through the administration web interface,
so it doesn't give a damn what OS I'm using. There's probably no reason
Brother could not do this.

The other bad example that comes to mind is the Toshiba net book I
bought a couple of years back. It's a lovely little computer but AFAICT
the damn thing can't be BIOS updated without having a copy of bloody
windows installed. There's absolutely no excuse for this crap - this
desktop computer I'm using now is years older then the net book yet all
I needed to do was plug in a memory stick with the BIOS update file
copied onto it, boot into the BIOS settings, press a button and it did
everything for itself. That's the way it should work on all computers.

What I tried a few years ago, was ask one of the mailing lists if maybe
anybody interested could contact Meade, saying they would really like to
buy a telescope but were prevented from doing so by dependence on
windows. I got no response.

Even if manufacturers do want to have their own software to do updates,
there's no reason they can't use a cross platform GUI tool kit to write
it, and just supply it at very little cost to themselves for windows,
Mac, Linux, and anything else that happens to be around. Is wxWidgets
still around? I heard that's what Audacity for example is written in,
and that's got to be way more complex than a firmware update program.

Dave


-- 
Lisa Simpson:- "They must have programmed it to eliminate the
competition."
Bart Simpson:- "You mean like Microsoft?"