A lil upset with zdnet.com

I do a lot of commenting on zdnet.com. Recently, I've been having trouble finding some of my comments, I like to check back to see if anyone has responded to them. Today I posted three comments to this zdnet article. I checked back after work, all three of my comments had been removed! Often my comments are well thought out and multiple paragraphs (okay, many times they are longer than the article they are in response to). Today, not so much.

The article in question, in case you didn't click thru and read it, is about how Adrian Kingsley-Hughes squeezed the new Windows 7 release candidate onto a netbook. I mentioned in my first comment, responding to another comment about wiping the netbook and installing Ubuntu, simply stated I would wipe Ubuntu and install a very optimized copy of VectorLinux. Another comment I posted said something about purchasing a $300 Win7 site license for a $300 netbook, might as well just buy a $600 laptop with Win7 preinstalled. My third comment was a link to a $400 laptop from Everex running gOS.

I spent about 20 minutes looking through my extensive list of bookmarks to find that link. I still don't understand the point in removing it. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes had written a very poor article, really more of a long comment, about installing a very expensive Operating System onto a very cheap netbook. Total cost being about the same as similar laptop hardware. I was simply pointing out how rediculus the idea was. Why would you want to even consider a full blown Windows OS on an 8 inch screen. We're talking about trying to do real computing on a device about the side and shape of a portable dvd system.

Come on, it's ridiculous. Only Adrian would even consider it. I would consider VectorLinux, simply because it's optimized for just such low end hardware. VectorLinux is built from the ground up to run in less than 256MB of ram on processors clocking in under 1GHz. Total install is less than 2GB. I am running VectorLinux on two different HP Vectra's both clocking in at 450MHz with only 256MB physical RAM. Vector runs as well on these machines as Windows Vista runs on a 2GHz system with 2GB physical RAM. Granted Microsoft has put Win7 on a serious diet. System requirements are not that much higher than good old WinXP. Well, the real unpublished requirements anyway.

All that is to say, I believe I made reasonable comments to the story and other responders. Apparently, zdnet disagreed. There was no sense removing my comments. That served no purpose, except to hush up the fact that there is a Linux Distro (VectorLinux) that makes Windows look like the over fed pig that it is. Or the fact that Adrian is more of a propagandist than a journalist.

That's my two cents.