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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."
A fresh Ubuntu install? I hear those guys will accept it :)
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
...these are the same people who think it's okay to be "inspected" prior to leaving Fry's
mod parent down for goatse
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
No shit? Linux From Scratch is hard to maintain? I'm shocked! Shocked! Did you really just say that Linux From Scatch was hard to maintain, so you stopped using Linux?
No.
I don't think Linux From Scratch is your problem here.
I never said it was.
I'm sure you'll point out some reason the average user is too stupid to do that, but it's a hell of a lot easier than LFS.
The issue is not that they are "too stupid" to do that, it is that they neither want to, nor should have to.
Why should I, as a user, have to worry about libraries?
You shouldn't. which was my whole point. "Package managers" are a massive kludge, not a solution.
I shouldn't. And with a distro like Debian or SuSe, I don't. I open Synaptic, click on the application I want, click "Apply", and the application is installed along with any necessary libraries. Oh, and it'll automatically get updated along with the rest of the system.
Yep, the kludge usually works fine if the software you want is maintained in the repositories. Tough luck if it isn't, though.
Try doing that on Mac or Windows.
I don't need to, because it's almost universally unnecessary. Typical Windows and Mac software either only uses the functionality built into the respective systems, or ship with all of it included.
As a developer, I still don't see your point. It makes very little difference to me if I'm using the API built into the OS, or a third party library. In one case I'll have to add a line to the build scripts. Big fuckin' deal.
If you're the poor end user who has to try and resolve the dependency hell that "third party library" usually produces, it *is* a "big fucking deal". Combined with the typical Linux developer's disinterest in maintaining any sort of decent binary compatibility or API stability ("because they can just grab the latest code from CVS and recompile") and you have one of the primary reasons Linux is having such difficulties penetrating past the tech-savvy userbase. Companies like Red Hat and SuSe have made heroic efforts to try and mitigate the problem, but most of the community simply isn't interested.
Having just wasted an entire day trying to configure a new RT server, this massive problem Linux has is fresh in my mind, since dealing with the typical clusterfuck of cascading dependencies inherent to any non-trivial perl program is something I've only just recently finished doing. However, I don't expect another idiotic "developer" like yourself[0] to understand why an entire day of lost productivity wasted on something that should be completely fucking trivial, without kludges like "package managers" isn't a "big deal".
[0] And I know exactly what you're like, because we've got a whole group of people like you here with much the same attitude, who think using some third-party library just for the hell of it is A-OK, since "it's just another line in a config file" - or, in our case, just another bit of software that needs to be rolled out to every desktop. No fucking concept whatsoever about actually _running_ an IT infrastructure.