Slashdot Mirror

Yes he is saying that. So am I. Find me a reference that shows otherwise and I'll hear you out. This is the correct quote that the Bill Gates 640K meme likely originated from: "So that's a 1 MB address space. And in that original design I took the upper 340k and decided that a certain amount should be for video memory, a certain amount for the ROM and I/O, and that left 640k for general purpose memory. And that leads to today's situation where people talk about the 640k memory barrier; the limit of how much memory you can put to these machines. I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. . That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem." You can enjoy in audio format here: http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=39006

Well, I for one have been using these patches for months now and I haven't had any !@$%Gbmobv9842t.. .425u98345 14325l34598 kllklnlksgl gsn...

+++NO CARRIER

Seriously, these guys have a lively forum board up with a lot of users. I wouldn't call it 100% secure (what is?), but there is some semblance of peer review going on there. Nobody AFAIK has had any hackerish problems from using Autopatcher. All it is, is the MSI files pulled from Microsoft Update bundled together for the most part. Some registry tweaks and other good stuff, like the latest Java also bundled in.

I wouldn't recommend it for corporate use, for the exact same reason you brought up. But I think it's probably ok to load it onto your game machine at home and feel good about it.

It reproduces here in IE 6 and IE 7 (two different Parallels VMs) and works fine in Firefox 2.0.0.4. In Firefox hovering over the buttons and thumb triggers the hover effect for that scrollbar element. In both IEs there's nothing until you mouse down.

Good thing I don't use IE (except for testing what valid XHTML/CSS isn't working today) often otherwise this would really annoy me. FYI I'm using Watercolor 4.3's Ergonomic theme as I can't stand Luna.

Link? I fail it.

Trying again.

The neosmart guy just cares about getting hits to his site. So he posts his microsoft -ve blogs to slashdot.
He also posts on http://neowin.net/ but nobody gives a damn on that site.

Russia's space agency is preparing to launch eight satellites that will nearly complete a system designed to compete directly, by 2009, with the existing global positioning system technology of the United States. GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System), is expected to begin operations over Russian territory later this year, followed by coverage of adjacent parts of Europe and Asia. By controlling the only fully operational satellite navigation system in existence today, the United States holds a strategic advantage in times of conflict, according to Russian military officials. In theory, the United States could deny GPS navigation signals to countries with which it has a dispute. Such actions could affect industries as diverse as agriculture, oil production and banking, to say nothing of military operations. For the most part, the Russian system promises to be functionally equivalent to the existing GPS system, however it could be more accurate than GPS in regions where Russia has better access to terrestrial navigation aids. Some companies are already designing dual-chip navigation devices that support both systems.

While Russia attempts its own GPS alternative, China has already launched satellites for its own Baidu system. The European Union's Galileo positioning system is still in the planning stages, having hit a snag with its private contractors over potential profits. The European Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System is scheduled to come online in 2011 with higher precision than the existing GPS and GLONASS networks. However, delays put the Galileo project more than four years off schedule and still counting.

I'm looking forward to it, maybe it will lower the cost of aerial & satellite imagery in general - relying on IKONOS, SPOT is expensive

It is melancolie that once a typical person learns a desk top manager, that that person will stay with that desk top manager; Even when it means giving up big bucks, as opposed to just downloading a copy of Ubuntu 7.04 - For Free! Microsoft knows this, cold. When it comes to those who would exploit users sloth for purchasing a known product riddled with flaws, it only takes a enterprising few to ruin every microsoft user's day; Globally. One should notice that Microsoft's "Software Agreement" says you can not sue them for their negligence, but not the other way around. Mircrosoft may be many things, but foolish is not on that list.

No that guy is just keeping the low level of bug reporting that all are doing in that technet thread.

If you did google for the "bug" you might have come accross this

"Start >> Control Panel >> Programs and Features," Turn windows features on or off" ,Uncheck "Remote Differential Compression"

I think that is only for the network problems, not for the generic copy or delete problems (not sure, reports are not good)

I have seen also reports about vista that is has problems with large sparse files, but i haven't taken the time to reproduce. (will do later, but every 30 days it seems i have to evaluate windows vista again.... )

After getting burned by wgatray a few times (with fully legal installs, they were from HP's restore partition) I disabled automatic updates. I do this on all new installs now. For updates, I use Offline Update. Keep in mind, though, that all updates phone home. To prevent this I disable networking before installing them and block *.microsoft.com and 207.46.0.0/16 at the router.

An alternative to Offline Update is Autopatcher which does have releases for Vista. I used Autopatcher for XP for a while before switching to Offline Update. It works well. I haven't tried it for Vista yet, though.

(BTW, I exclusively use Linux and FreeBSD at home and have for the last 11 years. I have to deal with Windows for family and work)

Actually some analysts gave vista not so bright outlook. Microsoft on the other hand had expected to sell 200 million copies of Vista to consumers and businesses worldwide in its first two years. Windows XP, by comparison, sold 120 million copies in its first 24 months.

Not so much spin, as intentional clouding of the issue by MS.

Hello,

I shared my thoughts on this over here on Neowin.Net's forums, so I really don't just want to do a cut-and-paste job and post what I wrote in verbatim here.

This is one of the first of a series of comparisons to include Microsoft Windows Live OneCare that Virus Bulletin Magazine has been doing for many years. While I suspect it is more frustrating than embarrassing at this point for the team responsible for Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare, this is really Microsoft's first attempt at providing their own comprehensive anti-malware solution—MSAV, the product which shipped with DOS does not count, it was licensed from Central Point Software (who was later acquired by Symantec) who, in turn, had licensed the software from Carmel Software—and it is going to take some time and lots of signature release cycles in order to get their detection rate fine-tuned.

I don't expect this first Virus Bulletin product comparison to be the last, and the question really isn't how Microsoft did this time: It is how their product does over the next year or two that matters. If it gets worse or stays the same, they are just another competitor in the space (albeit the one with the deepest products). If, however, their detection rate improves, it is going to make it just that much more difficult for their competitors to compete against them.

As a disclaimer of sorts, I should mention that happen I work for one of the computer security companies that Microsoft competes against with this products, so this dicussion is far from academic for me. Frankly, though, I'm not expecting Microsoft's entry into this space to have any effect on my employer—we are good at what we do and have a very loyal customer base. Also, we tend to compete against other, similarly-sized companies in the field. What I do worry about, though, is how some of my friends and colleagues at the largest companies are going to handle Microsoft's entrance as they are going to be competing head-to-head against Microsoft for marketshare.


Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

FYI, an Adobe employee responded to some questions about this and especially how it relates to Microsoft's new XPS format here. (Nickull's reply should be at the top of that page)

Maybe 'standard' is the wrong word. Available and cheap, is what I mean. Not necessarily that the average person already has it.

Sweden was who I had in mind. Apparently the UK is very close to getting it as well.

http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=32304
http://www.betanews.com/article/100Mbps_Cable_Inte rnet_by_2006/1121875198

Apparently it's the current print edition of 'PC World' that ran the article. I still can't find an online version, but this blog references it:

http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/ t526459.html

* * * * *

Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.
--Josh Billings

Now hang on a minute. It's one thing to talk positively about what Mac OS 8.5 was accomplishing back in 1998, but if you're going to talk about Windows, at least get your facts straight!

First of all, nothing Apple has shipped up to now even comes close to what WinFS was trying to solve. It's not a search engine... it's a relational database store for arbitrary user data that presents content to the operating system as a series of "entities". Comparing WinFS to a content search indexer is missing the point. See WinFS. Frankly, it's a good thing that they waited, because they have piles of other things to fix with Windows before they introduce something this drastic.

Microsoft shippied the first version of their content indexing service in mid-1996, though it was really the Content Indexer component that was part of the Object File System aspect of Cairo. That was announced in 1991. It didn't ship as a standard component that would do system-wide indexing until 2000, but it has been there all this time. Microsoft did buy a company in July 2004 called Lookout to get their Outlook indexing capabilities, which was then rolled into MSN Desktop Search.

The problem, of course, was that the Indexing Service UI sucked horribly. Most Windows 2000 users haven't even seen it because they don't know it's there! Then again, most long-time Mac users will tell you that Sherlock has always sucked on OS X, and suffered from its own problems of not being sure if it was a program to search your local drive, or to search the Internet.

In short: Lame duck vs. lame duck.

Oh, and, MSN Desktop Search (the first non-crap search indexer from Microsoft) shipped before OS X 10.4 with Spotlight (the first non-crap search indexer from Apple), but that's not something a Mac user would say, right? :-) The content indexer included with Vista and MSN Desktop Search are almost identical code-wise, and is merely an evolution of what's been around in Windows for many years. See Windows indexing service. Now we just gotta wait a little bit longer and see what Apple does to top Microsoft's offering in Vista.

Should be interesting...

Of course I didn't RTFA

And everything you wrote was off topic, and yet people moderated you to +4 "Insightful".

What Microsoft has done differently this time is that it used its army of lawyers to trademark, patent, copyright, and protect every aspect of the "ribbon". This is a licence to use UI designs, which Microsoft has protected. Knowing infringing patents increases the damages a good deal. So by promoting this licensing agreement, Microsoft is basically ensuring that people know that there are patents. What Slashdot is doing is propagating that knowledge.

Here's what you wrote:
Seriously - would you lose any sleep because MS won't give you a new toy? Even if OO.o wanted it, and even if MS gave them it, they probably couldn't use it because it'll probably be Vista- (or at least Windows-)only.

Microsoft isn't giving you a new toy. It's licensing the right to use patents/other IP to people who don't compete with Office.

And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.

I doubt it. You haven't read enough. Obviously, you haven't RTFA so you don't know WTF you are talking about. Let me give you another FA not to read here.

"Software is not interchangable, as the StarOffice marketing team is learning. Even when the price is zero, the cost of switching from Microsoft Office is non-zero. Until the switching cost becomes zero, desktop office software is not truly a commodity. And even the smallest differences can make two software packages a pain to switch between."

And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.

Where do you read that? Microsoft is taking a gamble with the new UI by introducing a lot of change. You apparently don't read the same reviews that I do. Maybe you just don't read reviews. So let me look around for some Office 2007 reviews...

PC Magazine
"Pros: New interface give beginners the same power as experts. Dazzling new graphics engine. Massively improved security. Smoother collaboration.

Cons:
Not all applications get an interface overhaul. New interface can't be customized--yet. Potential for document-sharing problems with users of versions before Office 2003."

Pointer to 22 page review on NeoWin I found the comments following the link to the review interesting.

There is a reason why I don't read /. very often, and your +4 insightful reply is neither +4 nor insightful.

By replying to this, I know I'm giving up my moderating/meta-moderating power, so people who do meta moderate... please do your job and remove this gibberish...

I guess MP3 player owners really are thieves after all.

Any coincidence that they launch the first DX10 card the same day that Vista goes gold?

Unfortunatly someone tried this already and faced the swift hammer of justice...This is colloquially known as tampering with evidence, which i believe is a criminal offence. what you want to do is use TrueCrypt. You give them all your music in triple DES or AES encrypted format. What I think is pretty awesome is that they have fake out passwords that give the appearance of decrypting the volume, while actually hiding it!

I live in a rural area where most of the people are on dialup. I like to provide my friends and family with the security patches so they need so they don't have to spend weeks downloading them through dialup. A service pack would make this job a LOT easier, but as it is I have to rely on AutoPatcher to handle this.

Microsoft doesn't seem to want to make it easy. If you want to get your patches from Microsoft, you have to either use Windows Update on every single machine, or sift through hundreds of pages to individually download the updates you need. It shouldn't be that hard.

I have four computers running Windows. I want to download updates ONCE for all of them, without wasting bandwidth and without all the hassle that Microsoft wants to put you through to do that. AutoPatcher does this (and hats off to those guys for doing so) so why can't Microsoft get their act together and start putting out something similar?

Then maybe you should be removed form Windows support and reassigned or let go. Sorry but if you have these problems "all the time" then you are doing something wrong.

Yeah, right. It's my fault Microsoft patches often cause problems. My fault and the fault of thousands of others who just don't know what they're doing, I suppose. Let's see what a google search turns up:

• August 30, 2006 - IE patch breaks Exchange 2000
• August 16, 2006 - Microsoft patch may crash IE when certain websites are viewed.
• June 16, 2006 - Microsoft patch breaks dial-up networking
• April 18, 2006 - Microsoft patch breaks HP software
• April 16, 2006 - Microsoft patch breaks web pages ON PURPOSE (EOLAS problem passed on to their users)
• April 14, 2006 - IE patch breaks Siebel client
• October 29, 2005 - Another Black Eye for Microsoft Patch Creation Process
• May 13, 2005 - Faulty Microsoft Update Rekindles Patch Quality Concerns

I could go on. That's just the tip of the iceberg. It's a known issue. Has been for years. Many of those links point to articles saying things like "Patches have caused trouble at times, on occasion prompting Microsoft to fix already released updates" and "When we are dealing with Microsoft updates, one thing we always reiterate, then reiterate some more, is to test before deploying. The guidance is always to download, test, then deploy the patches. With Microsoft, the test section of our guidance has gotten larger and larger."

That you haven't experienced problems with ANY Microsoft patches but SP2 is at best an anomoly.

Where I work we've got about 500 windows computers, give or take. Those run on a rather eclectic mix of hardware, some as old as P2s, some as new as Core 2 Duos. Servers, workstations, you name it. We run a pretty eclectic mix of software too. Off the top of my head some examples would be Matlab, HFSS, Photoshop, Office, Vegas, Visual Studio, Metrowerks, Miktek and so on. A fairly diverse Windows environment, in other words.

Wow. I'm happy for you. Your parents must be so proud.

Wanna know how many patches ever came out that broke systems? One: SP2. How many broke? 2, both personal systems loaded to the gills with spyware. We wiped them to get rid of the spyware, they took the update and worked fine. That's a pretty good track record. Comparable to Solaris (which we also run a lot of)

So, is it your policy to automatically patch production servers using AutoUpdate? You've never run a competitor's database or application stack on any of your Windows servers? All the software you mentioned is desktop software. Because if you have, you'll find service packs breaking things aplenty. I'm not talking desktop apps. I'm talking backend. I'm actually fairly comfortable setting desktops (since XP stabilized) to auto update. I would never apply a patch to a production server without full testing on test servers to make sure things like, oh, let's see...the latest SQL Server service pack doesn't cause function FOO of product BAR to stop working...because that happens...frequently.

Now let's compare that to, say, Fedora, which we also run.

I never said anything about Linux. Patch management seems to be an equal

• http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000555.h tml
• http://geekswithblogs.net/cbreisch/archive/2006/04 /11/74818.aspx
• http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=34631

Check out AutoPatcher. Not nearly as elegant as a good slipstream, but it's great for getting an older install up to date without going through update-and-reboot-a-zillion-times hell.

They've been around for a couple of years now ... its - as they say - "The new site is under construction" Neowin's been around since 2000.

Look at the page views in the forums http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showforum=89

Yesterday's "AutoPatcher XP June 2006" announcement http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?s=cb19fcf468 bcd977d13b309c7a176c4d&showtopic=471109 already has over 150,000 reads.

Or do a search here on slashdot for comments about autopatcher: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=&query=autopatch er&author=&sort=1&op=comments and read what others have to aay. Lots of people here are already using it.

They've been around for a couple of years now ... its - as they say - "The new site is under construction" Neowin's been around since 2000.

Look at the page views in the forums http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showforum=89

Yesterday's "AutoPatcher XP June 2006" announcement http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?s=cb19fcf468 bcd977d13b309c7a176c4d&showtopic=471109 already has over 150,000 reads.

Or do a search here on slashdot for comments about autopatcher: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=&query=autopatch er&author=&sort=1&op=comments and read what others have to aay. Lots of people here are already using it.

Another tech site has an editorial article on this report.

From the editorial:
I administrate both Windows and Linux servers and was interested to see this report. However, reading into the article a bit more makes me question the validity of their assessment.

The Yankee Group states that Windows 2003 Server led Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20% more annual up time.

I had to do a double take when I saw that. 20% more!? Assume for a moment that you have two servers, one running Windows Server 2003 and one running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Assume that your Windows box ran non-stop, without rebooting (which means you probably are not loading any Microsoft security updates) for 365 days. For your Linux box to have 20% more downtime it'd have to only be up for 292 days. If that is the case, your machine is no longer a server and is nothing more than a space heater.

Yes but from what users? I have a friend who is a Vista beta tester that "like it the way it is :D."

Most of the betatesters seems to be neowin forum people.
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showforum=15 8

You make an interesting and valid point.

This is slightly off topic, but it might be usefull info:

XP supports skins withouth the need for third party apps like window blinds. The problem is that it only accepts signed skins. You can download a patch that allows you to use unsigned skins on windows at native speed. These skins are called Visual Styles.

The patch

My favorite skin (Industry compact)

A couple of others

About security: http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=43 2201&pid=587253062&st=0&#entry587253062

In recent months, there were numerous threads on the Bethesda Softworks message boards regarding whether TES: Oblivion would be released with Starforce as its copy protection scheme. Most people posting to these threads were steadfastly against the use of Starforce, and many stated that they would outright refuse to buy the product if it included Starforce.

Not too long ago, Neowin.net published a podcast interview with Pete Hines, the PR guy for the Elder Scrolls series. He was asked about the antipiracy scheme that Bethesda and Take Two planned to use on the PC version of Oblivion, and more pointedly, he was asked about Starforce.

He said (paraphrased) that while they couldn't comment on what antipiracy scheme they were going to use, they were not going to use Starforce.

Score one for the consumer.

Where did you get that list? According to Neowin's recent news, it's more like this:
- Windows Starter 2007
- Windows Vista Home Basic
- Windows Vista Home Basic N
- Windows Vista Home Premium
- Windows Vista Business
- Windows Vista Business N
- Windows Vista Ultimate
- Windows Vista Enterprise

No Basic/Premium of Business, and there's no "Corporate" listed there.

Anyway, it's still 8. :-) And I agree it's too many. It confuses more than it clarifies. When Joe User gets to decide, is he a Basic or Premium home user? Do a company need a Business edition or an Enterprise edition? The problem seem to be that you need to study feature lists and compare to know for sure what you need. I'd rather see just a Home vs Pro vs Ultimate (being the Home + Pro merge). Three editions (or more if you count N editions which Microsoft must do).

Current build doesn't have EFI enabled yet. *supposedly* the next CTP will have it enabled.

Rumor has it on one of the forums that they have Vista running on a Mac, internally but personally I take it with a grain of salt...

You might want to try the current version of AutoPatcher: AutoPatcher XP January 2006

It would be nice if Microsoft would make it easy to script the install onto one CD (or DVD). It is a sort of a drag to have to rely on a third-party for what Microsoft could do easily if they didn't want to sell MSCE and other worthless degrees by making sure Windows is (or seems) much more complicated than it can (or should) be. Case in point: here's how Microsoft expects you to "integrate software updates into your Windows installation source files" (please, read the document before you comment on how nice they were to make it easy for us).

A lot of people just use it to update with SPs, but you can use it for regular updates and drivers, too. If you need help, you can use a utility like AutoPatcher or nLite to get you started.

It's supposed to be released in January 10th...! :-p

A bit puzzling to me why the world's largest software developer has to do extensive regression testing (or whatever it's taking them all this time, testing sounds like the most excusable reason anyway) to simply cover a buffer overrun exploit. It's not exactly a bug in IE security zones or some logical flaw like that.

Wonder if Neowin will start posting slahdot dupes and then someone from slashdot can start posting the Neowin dupes that are dupes, etc.

I wouldn't trust their QA. I know it's just a beta, but it's clear by screenshot 1 that Media Player 11 has trouble properly labeling songs by The Who

Looks like the one who took the screeenshots have fuzzed out the window titles of the MSN discussion to hide his or his friends identity ?
Well, He has forgot to do it for the Startmenu list...
http://www.neowin.net/staff/cashman/vist5321_3.jpg

Windows (l)user... hehe..

What good is a leak. If nobody wants it?

This is a gross misconception and an attitude that is causing OSS to fall further and further behind commercial offerings from Apple and Microsoft. The fact is that millions or people want it! There are countless fan sites like Flexbeta, BetaNews, NeoWin, WinSupersite, PCWorld, ZDNet, and thousands more that are all breathless with anticipation of Vista. They and theirmillions of readers eagerly await Vista's release and the countless "innovations" that it will bring.

Meanwhile, back in the OSS camp, people are saying insightful stuff like Gaim is more than adequate and RTFM. Microsoft IE sucks, yet it is still the dominant browser and I guarantee that at least 50% of today's Firefox users will switch back to IE upon the release of Vista. That is very telling but, people don't seem to be interested in the message.

People, like you, need to get a better attitude. They need to look at what Microsoft is doing and meet or exceed its capabilities. It is not enough to rest on your laurels while being pretencious and self important. Microsoft is charging ahead and is positioning itself to unleash ten years of its concentrated effort, en mass. Right now, OSS is rapidly slipping behind while people pound their chests saying; "but, we're more secure!". This is not enough to prevent you from being marginalized into obscurity by Microsoft, as if OSS wasn't obscure enough already.

How many of your relatives know what Linux is? How many of them know what Windows is?

Ok. I gotta say it, unless it really was done already, the thumnail view for browser tabs is pretty neat. Tough to call it innovative since it's not a new concept or anything. In fact it's probably no different than OS-X's Exposé feature, just put into the browser. But it's new and it's something that might be useful.

The transparency effect against a black background .. makes the text hard to read (look at the IE window title in this one (note in some of the screenshots they intentionally blurred text, but not in the IE window in this shot):

http://www.neowin.net/staff/cashman/vist5321_2.jpg

• http://www.neowin.net/staff/cashman/vist5321_2.jpg
• http://www.neowin.net/staff/cashman/vist5321_3.jpg

• http://www.neowin.net/staff/cashman/vist5321_2.jpg
• http://www.neowin.net/staff/cashman/vist5321_3.jpg

I tried out this thing yesterday for a bit.

Here's the problems:

1) The domain name sucks. Who wants to be john@30gigs.com

2) The interface sucks. Hard. It's about as plain as it can get (it looks like they're just using Squirrelmail with their own stylesheet).

3) Their privacy policy is vague on what kind of information they share

4) There doesn't seem to be any reputable parent company behind it meaning it's chances of survival are questionable.

Overall rating: THUMBS DOWN.

(I posted this review to Neowin yesterday BTW).

Way to copy and paste my post from yesterday. Nothing quite like stealing other people's posts and claiming them as your own.

While moving between star, open or microsoft office is trivial for technical people, the average user has major problems with the gui being slighting different and commands being in different menus.

Ummm... you've seen these, right?

You shouldn't be trusting Slashdot articles either, given that this whole story looks like a work of fiction

My way of avoiding this sort of problem is just to allow other users to play with new releases of software for a few weeks before installing it myself.

New versions of Firefox, for instance, never contain anything too exciting

Trillian supports MSN Messenger as well as AIM/ICQ/Yahoo!/IRC/Jabber etc. It's basically the same as GAIM, and supports most protocols (also supports plugins).

What I don't understand is what the grandparent is talking about, why would he have to change to MSNger to stop having to fight the firewall? Trillian mimics MSN Messenger in order to connect to MSN servers. The only problems with Trillian for me are high memory usage (although not so bad when compared to MSNger 7.0), slow interface, and Audio/Visual capabilities that only work half the time.

I've switched to MSNger exclusively because I don't have anyone I chat with regularly on AIM or Yahoo, so the benefits of Trillian/Gaim are much less than the frustrations of incompatibility with MSNger buddies. Besides, you can always break the EULA and remove the ads and such from the MSN client, I recommend SpeedyMSN. Really cleans up the interface, if you can find the download for 2.0 (both speedymsn.tk and speedymessenger.net are down at the time of this writing.) You can bet Microsoft doesn't want people knowing that they can get rid of that pesky ad.... :)

The problem is Opera isn't immune from this arrogance IMHO. I'm an Opera user, and I've used it for about 4 years now. During that time, there have been some seemingly simple requests that have been contiunously asked for and ignored.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=36 9058&view=findpost&p=586499396

is where I am right now. Although, I'm figuring that no matter what browser you use, there will be some really annoying things about it.

> Practically every poll shows KDE has far more users[...]

I thought I'd do a quick test of this. I went to Google, and put in Gnome vs. KDE Poll. The first result was this poll.

I also found This Poll.

And then there's a recent OSNews Poll.

Two of these three showed Gnome winning.

Yes, I know this is not scientific, and doesn't prove that one desktop is better than the other, it's just the result of some random Googling.

But, I do think it is clear that there is NOT a clear winner in the Linux Desktop space right now, therefore the statement that "obviously most prefer KDE" is false.