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Vista Family Discount Keys Found Not Compatible
acousticiris writes "Many (if not all) users who took advantage of Microsoft's Vista Family Discount have been issued invalid installation keys and cannot install Windows Vista Home Premium. Microsoft says, 'There is no expected time period for a fix at this time.' According to the article, the keys are valid for something, just not Windows Vista. Perhaps it's just too simple to issue these folks new keys and send them on their way."
You didn't answer my question...
That's because it's a straw man.
Last I checked, each Windows program handles its own installation, its own updates (or not), and its own removal. There's often no consistency between software from the same company, much less in general.
This is because Windows (and OS X) programs are, almost to a unit, distributed in a self-contained fashion - all you need to make them work is whatever they come with and whatever version of Windows they say they support.
On Linux, installation with a package manager is identical for all software. Upgrades are handled automatically with the rest of the system. And all software removal is handled identically, from the same place.
And when the software isn't handled by the PM the whole house of cards is exposed for the fragile hack that it is.
One of those is a hack, and it's not the package manager. I'd love to hear why you think package managers are a hack. What are the deficiencies they're supposedly working around?
Firstly, the lack of any sort of consitent, reasonable level of base functionality across a reasonable number of Linux distributions. Secondly, the significant lack of interest in the Linux developer community for maintaining backwards compatibility.
When I install Program A, I shouldn't need to go out and track down specific versions of programs B and C, and support libraries D, E, F and G - nor should a "package manager" have to do so on my behalf - to make it work.
Package managers haven't been "an ugly hack" in quite a while either.
The whole damn _concept_ is little more than an ugly hack. Doesn't matter how much you polish that turd, it still stinks. It's still just working around fundamental stability and feature definciencies in the platform itself.
If you want to be taken seriously, you should probably try a "modern" distro other than LFS before making comments about Linux in general.
Your reading comprehension needs to improve. We don't use LFS. I said I had "done the whole LFS thing" in the past, I never said anything about using it today, or even recently.
(You also inadvertently highlight another problem with the Linux community - in a textbook example of circular reasoning, you need a "modern distro" to install $SOME_APPLICATION via the package manager, but if it can't handle it, it's because your distro isn't "modern" enough.)