I'm willing to bet that one student, armed with one or more guns, caused the death toll.
Re:I were one of the cracking groups...
on
AACS Cracked Again
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· Score: 1
There are only a handful of keys out there. What happens when all the current ones are exposed and revoked?
It's my understanding that there are actually quite a few keys being used in current discs, far far more that have actually been assigned to players yet. Presumably when the player that gets their key revoked fixes the flaw that let it get cracked, the AACS LA will grant them use of one of the other keys. I'm guessing that if AACS will be abandoned well before all the used device keys are cracked.
Re:I were one of the cracking groups...
on
AACS Cracked Again
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's not a matter of one cracked key being easy, and another being hard. The fact of the matter is that once you crack a device, it's wide open, there is no more cracking left to be done on that device. It also means that once you crack one device, you have access to all the movies published to date, so cracking another device doesn't gain you anything.
From my understanding, the AACS system is already a very well understood system. It is actually documented and available for public viewing. The way these people are obtaining keys is by finding design flaws in the way different devices implement the system. For WinDVD, it was found that one of the keys is available in system memory at a given point while loading the disc content, and could be captured by reading the right memory address. I'm sure something similar is happening with the XBox360 keys.
The WinDVD key was revoked by AACS, and future movies will not be playable on the cracked version of WinDVD, but a free upgrade to WinDVD will use a new key that cannot be obtained the same way. Revoking the XBox key for future movies will be more problematic, since it would presumably require a firmware upgrade, and making the HD-DVD's most popular playback device unable to play the newest blockbuster movie won't be good for HD-DVD sales.
Brute-force cracking all, or even a small number, of the AACS device keys would take years, probably tens or hundreds of years (I'm not sure exactly what the device key length is). Finding ways to make a playback device give up that information is much faster and easier. Further more, once you crack a single device key, you can get the encryption key for the content of any movie, then anybody can decrypt that movie based on that key, without need of the device or device key. Going back to the WinDVD keys, any movie encrypted with the old WinDVD key can now be decrypted, making a whole generation of HD movies available DRM-free.
For a) Have you tried contacting Intel customer support? They are responsible for clear and easy to understand documentation right? I don't see Microsoft writing docs for installing Intel wireless NIC hardware on Windows, but you can try contacting Novell customer support if Intel doesn't give you anything. You might also try the Ubuntu* LiveCD for 7.04, it has a nice and easy way of detecting and installing proprietary drivers for things like this.
For b) This is likely your only option for switching to say Mac OS X. The fact that Linux is even likely to run on a machine designed specifically for Windows, it a noteworthy accomplishment in my book.
* For anyone trying Ubuntu that just hates the default look, install the Blubuntu package, it gives you a much nicer cool blue theme, wallpapers, GDM screen, etc.
if Linux worked out of the box then it would be ready for desktop.
Well that all depends on the box, doesn't it? I can name many platforms where Windows doesn't work out of the box, and many platforms where Mac OS X doesn't work out of the box. In fact, I can name more platforms where either of these "ready for the desktop" operating systems won't work, than where Linux won't work.
On my PC, Linux (Ubuntu specifically) worked "out of the box", therefore it is ready for my desktop.
So the moral of the story is, if your choice in operating system doesn't support your choice in hardware, it won't work, makes no difference if that OS is Linux, Windows or Mac OS X.
Contrary to your assumption, you are not the primary target for Thunderbird+Lightning. Thunderbird+Lightning will first target home users and small business users who are not held to corporate mandates to use everything Microsoft, people who are looking for cheaper alternatives. You may want an alternative to MS, but your company doesn't, so they, and by extension you, are not Mozilla's target users.
Exchange interaction is difficult and messy, standards are (for the most part) easy and clean, which is why they are implemented and Exchange functionality is not. Just as Firefox did not add ActiveX to compete with corporate IE6, Thunderbird isn't incorporating Exchange protocols to compete with Outlook. And there were plenty of people saying that for Firefox to be a "serious competitor" to IE, it had to include ActiveX.
Perhaps you should try Evolution, I and many other people have had good results using it to interact with Exchange. It does email and calendaring just fine. Otherwise, if all you care about is Exchange integration, use MS Outlook. It may suck as a mail client, but then again not sucking wasn't one of your requirements.
This design might lose some energy to friction, but that can be made insignificantly small by using a smooth surface. The energy you lose from redirecting the airflow depends on the new speed and direction of the airflow. In this design, the speed and direction remain almost completely unchanged due to the Coanda effect, so there is very little energy loss.
Consider the 2 designs, and think about where you would place the payload, and how much of it you can have.
In your link, the craft needs the central area clear of obstacles to allow airflow, leaving only the perimeter available for payload. In the article's craft, the air is directed around the perimeter of the craft, leaving the central area available for payload.
If your RTWA (Read the Wikipedia Article) you'll learn that the "blockage" isn't at all a blockage, and the air blown down by the fan runs along the side and then straight down, instead of being deflected back up, which means there is no "sapping" of power. This gives you the entire center cavity for payload, instead of making it a hollow cylinder like a ducted fan would require.
Is it fair that some government officials are being viewed more on YouTube than others or is it simply leveling the playing field for anyone with a message since it costs very little to put a video on YouTube?.
YouTube is not a broadcaster, it doesn't "air" anything. It is a source of goods for consumption. I don't like the idea of governments forcing me to "consume" candidates equally. If I want to watch more videos of one candidate over another, that should be my right.
Broadcast is a content limited resource, which is why those resources are required to be shared evenly among candidates, the internet isn't limited in that way, so forced rationing doesn't make sense. I can't choose what is broadcast on NBC, but I can choose what I watch on YouTube, that's the difference between the two.
I tried this line of reasoning once, but on a much larger scale. I proved that an automated system could save hours of work each day. Adding in the hourly equivilent of the effected employees salaries, I could show a cost savings in the tens of thousands of dollars annually.
My response was this: "If we can't fire someone or cut someone's pay, it doesn't save any money". It made me furious, how could the reject the logic behind my math? Only later did I come to understand their reasoning: All the work that needed to be done was being done for what they are paying the employees. Taking away work to be done, without taking away pay going to the employees would not save money.
So to justify your second monitor you either have to show a real money reduction of cost, or a real money increase in revenue. Your efficiency is your responsibility, not the company's responsibility. After all, why should they pay more tomorrow get you to do the same job you did yesterday? Its often easer to replace you with someone more efficient at the same cost, than to increase your cost to make you more efficient.
As an aside, whenever I make proposals for automating processes now, I don't calculate how much work I reduce, or how much more efficient I can make it, I calculate how much revenue they are missing out on because their processes can't handle the extra work, then show them how automation would let them handle it, and therefore gain the extra revenue.
Ok so let me get this correct, in order for his scanners to even detect Vista on the network he had to totally disable the built in firewall.
The list of open ports was THREE.
No vulnerablities were detected even with the firewall totally OFF.
Seems like (for now) Vista wins this one.
Vista wins? How exactly did Vista do better than the desktop setup of OSX, Fedora, Suse or Ubuntu? Heck, even FreeBSD with all it's 12+ services running and no firewall had no vulnerabilities. If you consider being as good as everyone else to be "winning" (maybe you have low standards, I don't know), then yes Vista is a winner.
I believe every system tested, except Windows XP and Vista, included specific user actions to enable services. OS X was not treated unfairly and I don't see how the conclusions are flawed because of this.
Note that the article didn't call services listening on their appropriate port a vulnerability.
They disabled the firewall on Windows XP SP2 and Vista Ultimate, and opened up ports on the Fedora and Suse firewalls for the services they were testing, the point was to test the binaries as well, not just the firewall. So stop acting like they treated OS X unfairly.
That's all kind of beside the point. To use the horrible car analogy, you're saying that it's impossible to standardize the position of the steering wheel without also standardizing the buttons on the car stereo and amount of trunk space.
To further abuse the car analogy, you want every car from a manufacturer to have the gear-shift in the same place, the turn-blinkers and wipers in the same place, etc. I'm ok with that. Additionally, you want all the radios to support the same minimum inputs (AM, FM, CD, iPod), which I could also agree with. But you are extending it to say that the car manufacturer should enforce that all child-seats should be designed to operate the same way, all air-fresheners are the same shape, and that all beverages used in the car's cup holders be at least 32oz and have a straw 6 inches in length.
Just like the car manufacturer, there is only so much uniformity the desktop environment can enforce. Windows and even MacOS X have the same problems. If I write a program for Mac where Control-V prints something, that doesn't mean that OSX isn't a good desktop, it means I wrote a non-standard program and there is nothing that Apple can do about it. Not every Linux program is written by the KDE or Gnome teams, but you'll probably find that the ones that are conform pretty well to that desktop's UI guidelines.
You don't seem to understand how the GPL2 "or, at your option, a later version" clause works. If Linus were to have licensed the kernel under a "GPL2 or, at your option, the yet to be created Linus Public Licenses to be created by Linus Torvalds", then the second Linus started selling copies of Linux under his LPL v1--which allows companies to not distributing source--*anyone* could fork the current code base under the GPL2 *only* and take away Linus' "dictatorship" over the kernel. Would this be a large upset to the kernel community? Of course--just as would be true if Linus decided to take all the "GPL2 or at your option, later version code" and work to form a GPL3 kernel; no matter what the license change or possibly even the *lack* of a license change will motivate forks, as forks of the Linux kernel are happening all the time.
Here is why Linus stripped the "or, at your option, a later version". What if the FSF decided that the GPLv3 would be BSD-style? Then Microsoft could take the Linux kernel, "innovate" it, and sell it as the closed source NT10 Kernel, then decided to sue people for adding the same "innovations" to the open source version because they violate MS intellectual property. Linus didn't want his OS to go the way of Mach/BSD. As it happens, the FSF is moving the license in the opposite direction, but Linus had no way of knowing what "a later version" would come to mean.
With luck, we will never see the fourth pricing option which lurks malevolently in the background: 4. Linux, with bonus enhanced-value mega-cool selected premium packages
No, but hopefully they will advertise it as:
4. Linux, with full Office Suite, full Photo Viewer/Catalog and Editor, full Media Players and Editors, full Email and Calendering with Spam Filter, full Virus Scanner (even if you don't need it) with Free updates for life, free program upgrades for life, free security updates for life, etc.
They make them ooh and aah over the awesome 3D eye-candy that is Compiz/Beryl and you can sell it at the same price or even more than their standard Windows install. Linux doesn't have to be the cheaper option to get people interested.
Bottom line is, this experiment will sink or swim based solely on Dell's advertising commitment. If they run commercials talking about how Linux is "the new hotness" that is also more secure, easy to upgrade, and comes with lots of great software (you know, like the Mac commercials do), then sell them for the same price as a Wintel PC (you know, like Mac doesn't), you've got a winner on your hands.
Don't ignore the power users, that's solving the wrong problem. The reason that all you hear from are power users is because it's really not that hard to become a power user on Linux. Some will disagree, but it took me the better part of a decade to become a "power user" on Windows where I was willing to muck around in the registry without a guide, but only about a year on Linux to accomplish the same level. The advice I would give is to understand what the power users are getting you to do, not just copying and pasting to the command line. Once you start to understand (and please don't hesitate to ask what the commands mean, it won't get you flamed), you are on the road to being a power user yourself.
Two years ago when I started really using Linux, I was afraid to type "yum" on the command line (Yum is the Redhat world's equiv to Apt, I was using CentOS at the time). Now I'm running pre-alpha versions of Ubuntu while manually editing my xorg.conf and tweaking my 3D desktop in the gconf database. It really is easier to become a power user on Linux than it is on Windows, so don't be intimidated into not trying. I'm not saying you need to be able to do all these things to use Linux, but really, why not learn them when it's so easy?
Updates and patches will come through the update-notifier, which will periodically check your repos and put an icon in your notification tray when updates are available (Or you can click System->Administration->Update Manager to run it directly). Both this and synaptic use apt in the background.
There is also Applications->Add/Remove Programs which provides a subset of what Synaptic does, but give popularity ratings and better details about the package, better for average users who are browsing for new software to play with.. This also uses apt, isn't it a wonderfully versatile system?
Right, I think Cairo is being used specifically because it would allow Firefox to finally add features like full page zoom (no just text resizing) that has been available in other browsers for a while now. It should also improve page printing.
It doesn't support older Windows because it uses Cairo for faster rendering, which I've read doesn't support older Windows versions. I'm not sure if it's the same reason older versions of OS X are not supported.
To "turn on" the upstart benefits in 6.10 you need to convert your init.d scripts over to upstart scripts. There isn't any automated method to do this as far as I'm aware. I think that has been the biggest delay in converting fully to upstart, just getting all the scripts converted with the right dependencies and what not. Feisty does seem to have more in upstart than Edgy did, I see a noticeably faster boot (I haven't timed it though).
Lets put things into a little perspective here. Will your mom, girlfriend, or neighbor be upgrading Windows? I'm guessing probably not, because a Windows upgrade isn't dead simple either, and they're likely to encounter problems along the way. I don't understand why people say Linux isn't ready for their [non-computer literate relation] because it is not simple to do something they won't be doing in the first place. My mom doesn't know how to upgrade Windows. She couldn't install vanilla windows on her PC. She can't buy some cheap hardware at Best Buy and make it "just work" in windows. So why should I (or you) expect her to be able to do, or even want to do, those same things in Linux?
For Linux to be ready for the desktop, it has to let average desktop users do what they do. This means browse the web, send email, write documents and simple spreadsheets, and upload their digital pictures and put them on CD. They don't need to be able to install or upgrade Linux because they don't need to do that in Windows. The only things Linux is missing right now is hardware vendor support and software vendor support, we know that, and it's getting better slowly. But don't knock Linux because your girlfriend doesn't suddenly become a computer expert when she's using it.
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One of them was, unfortunately he was the shooter, so now your theory requires that at least 2 people in the room are carrying guns.
I'm willing to bet that one student, armed with one or more guns, caused the death toll.
It's my understanding that there are actually quite a few keys being used in current discs, far far more that have actually been assigned to players yet. Presumably when the player that gets their key revoked fixes the flaw that let it get cracked, the AACS LA will grant them use of one of the other keys. I'm guessing that if AACS will be abandoned well before all the used device keys are cracked.
It's not a matter of one cracked key being easy, and another being hard. The fact of the matter is that once you crack a device, it's wide open, there is no more cracking left to be done on that device. It also means that once you crack one device, you have access to all the movies published to date, so cracking another device doesn't gain you anything.
From my understanding, the AACS system is already a very well understood system. It is actually documented and available for public viewing. The way these people are obtaining keys is by finding design flaws in the way different devices implement the system. For WinDVD, it was found that one of the keys is available in system memory at a given point while loading the disc content, and could be captured by reading the right memory address. I'm sure something similar is happening with the XBox360 keys.
The WinDVD key was revoked by AACS, and future movies will not be playable on the cracked version of WinDVD, but a free upgrade to WinDVD will use a new key that cannot be obtained the same way. Revoking the XBox key for future movies will be more problematic, since it would presumably require a firmware upgrade, and making the HD-DVD's most popular playback device unable to play the newest blockbuster movie won't be good for HD-DVD sales.
Brute-force cracking all, or even a small number, of the AACS device keys would take years, probably tens or hundreds of years (I'm not sure exactly what the device key length is). Finding ways to make a playback device give up that information is much faster and easier. Further more, once you crack a single device key, you can get the encryption key for the content of any movie, then anybody can decrypt that movie based on that key, without need of the device or device key. Going back to the WinDVD keys, any movie encrypted with the old WinDVD key can now be decrypted, making a whole generation of HD movies available DRM-free.
For a) Have you tried contacting Intel customer support? They are responsible for clear and easy to understand documentation right? I don't see Microsoft writing docs for installing Intel wireless NIC hardware on Windows, but you can try contacting Novell customer support if Intel doesn't give you anything. You might also try the Ubuntu* LiveCD for 7.04, it has a nice and easy way of detecting and installing proprietary drivers for things like this.
For b) This is likely your only option for switching to say Mac OS X. The fact that Linux is even likely to run on a machine designed specifically for Windows, it a noteworthy accomplishment in my book.
* For anyone trying Ubuntu that just hates the default look, install the Blubuntu package, it gives you a much nicer cool blue theme, wallpapers, GDM screen, etc.
Well that all depends on the box, doesn't it? I can name many platforms where Windows doesn't work out of the box, and many platforms where Mac OS X doesn't work out of the box. In fact, I can name more platforms where either of these "ready for the desktop" operating systems won't work, than where Linux won't work.
On my PC, Linux (Ubuntu specifically) worked "out of the box", therefore it is ready for my desktop.
So the moral of the story is, if your choice in operating system doesn't support your choice in hardware, it won't work, makes no difference if that OS is Linux, Windows or Mac OS X.
Contrary to your assumption, you are not the primary target for Thunderbird+Lightning. Thunderbird+Lightning will first target home users and small business users who are not held to corporate mandates to use everything Microsoft, people who are looking for cheaper alternatives. You may want an alternative to MS, but your company doesn't, so they, and by extension you, are not Mozilla's target users.
Exchange interaction is difficult and messy, standards are (for the most part) easy and clean, which is why they are implemented and Exchange functionality is not. Just as Firefox did not add ActiveX to compete with corporate IE6, Thunderbird isn't incorporating Exchange protocols to compete with Outlook. And there were plenty of people saying that for Firefox to be a "serious competitor" to IE, it had to include ActiveX.
Perhaps you should try Evolution, I and many other people have had good results using it to interact with Exchange. It does email and calendaring just fine. Otherwise, if all you care about is Exchange integration, use MS Outlook. It may suck as a mail client, but then again not sucking wasn't one of your requirements.
This design might lose some energy to friction, but that can be made insignificantly small by using a smooth surface. The energy you lose from redirecting the airflow depends on the new speed and direction of the airflow. In this design, the speed and direction remain almost completely unchanged due to the Coanda effect, so there is very little energy loss.
One word: payload.
Consider the 2 designs, and think about where you would place the payload, and how much of it you can have.
In your link, the craft needs the central area clear of obstacles to allow airflow, leaving only the perimeter available for payload. In the article's craft, the air is directed around the perimeter of the craft, leaving the central area available for payload.
If your RTWA (Read the Wikipedia Article) you'll learn that the "blockage" isn't at all a blockage, and the air blown down by the fan runs along the side and then straight down, instead of being deflected back up, which means there is no "sapping" of power. This gives you the entire center cavity for payload, instead of making it a hollow cylinder like a ducted fan would require.
YouTube is not a broadcaster, it doesn't "air" anything. It is a source of goods for consumption. I don't like the idea of governments forcing me to "consume" candidates equally. If I want to watch more videos of one candidate over another, that should be my right.
Broadcast is a content limited resource, which is why those resources are required to be shared evenly among candidates, the internet isn't limited in that way, so forced rationing doesn't make sense. I can't choose what is broadcast on NBC, but I can choose what I watch on YouTube, that's the difference between the two.
I tried this line of reasoning once, but on a much larger scale. I proved that an automated system could save hours of work each day. Adding in the hourly equivilent of the effected employees salaries, I could show a cost savings in the tens of thousands of dollars annually.
My response was this: "If we can't fire someone or cut someone's pay, it doesn't save any money". It made me furious, how could the reject the logic behind my math? Only later did I come to understand their reasoning: All the work that needed to be done was being done for what they are paying the employees. Taking away work to be done, without taking away pay going to the employees would not save money.
So to justify your second monitor you either have to show a real money reduction of cost, or a real money increase in revenue. Your efficiency is your responsibility, not the company's responsibility. After all, why should they pay more tomorrow get you to do the same job you did yesterday? Its often easer to replace you with someone more efficient at the same cost, than to increase your cost to make you more efficient.
As an aside, whenever I make proposals for automating processes now, I don't calculate how much work I reduce, or how much more efficient I can make it, I calculate how much revenue they are missing out on because their processes can't handle the extra work, then show them how automation would let them handle it, and therefore gain the extra revenue.
I think he's implying that given all the "the conclusion isn't fair to Mac OSX", that the vocal uber-geeks are switching from Linux to Macs.
Vista wins?
How exactly did Vista do better than the desktop setup of OSX, Fedora, Suse or Ubuntu? Heck, even FreeBSD with all it's 12+ services running and no firewall had no vulnerabilities. If you consider being as good as everyone else to be "winning" (maybe you have low standards, I don't know), then yes Vista is a winner.
I believe every system tested, except Windows XP and Vista, included specific user actions to enable services. OS X was not treated unfairly and I don't see how the conclusions are flawed because of this.
Note that the article didn't call services listening on their appropriate port a vulnerability.
They disabled the firewall on Windows XP SP2 and Vista Ultimate, and opened up ports on the Fedora and Suse firewalls for the services they were testing, the point was to test the binaries as well, not just the firewall. So stop acting like they treated OS X unfairly.
To further abuse the car analogy, you want every car from a manufacturer to have the gear-shift in the same place, the turn-blinkers and wipers in the same place, etc. I'm ok with that. Additionally, you want all the radios to support the same minimum inputs (AM, FM, CD, iPod), which I could also agree with. But you are extending it to say that the car manufacturer should enforce that all child-seats should be designed to operate the same way, all air-fresheners are the same shape, and that all beverages used in the car's cup holders be at least 32oz and have a straw 6 inches in length.
Just like the car manufacturer, there is only so much uniformity the desktop environment can enforce. Windows and even MacOS X have the same problems. If I write a program for Mac where Control-V prints something, that doesn't mean that OSX isn't a good desktop, it means I wrote a non-standard program and there is nothing that Apple can do about it. Not every Linux program is written by the KDE or Gnome teams, but you'll probably find that the ones that are conform pretty well to that desktop's UI guidelines.
Here is why Linus stripped the "or, at your option, a later version". What if the FSF decided that the GPLv3 would be BSD-style? Then Microsoft could take the Linux kernel, "innovate" it, and sell it as the closed source NT10 Kernel, then decided to sue people for adding the same "innovations" to the open source version because they violate MS intellectual property. Linus didn't want his OS to go the way of Mach/BSD. As it happens, the FSF is moving the license in the opposite direction, but Linus had no way of knowing what "a later version" would come to mean.
No, but hopefully they will advertise it as:
4. Linux, with full Office Suite, full Photo Viewer/Catalog and Editor, full Media Players and Editors, full Email and Calendering with Spam Filter, full Virus Scanner (even if you don't need it) with Free updates for life, free program upgrades for life, free security updates for life, etc.
They make them ooh and aah over the awesome 3D eye-candy that is Compiz/Beryl and you can sell it at the same price or even more than their standard Windows install. Linux doesn't have to be the cheaper option to get people interested.
Bottom line is, this experiment will sink or swim based solely on Dell's advertising commitment. If they run commercials talking about how Linux is "the new hotness" that is also more secure, easy to upgrade, and comes with lots of great software (you know, like the Mac commercials do), then sell them for the same price as a Wintel PC (you know, like Mac doesn't), you've got a winner on your hands.
Don't ignore the power users, that's solving the wrong problem. The reason that all you hear from are power users is because it's really not that hard to become a power user on Linux. Some will disagree, but it took me the better part of a decade to become a "power user" on Windows where I was willing to muck around in the registry without a guide, but only about a year on Linux to accomplish the same level. The advice I would give is to understand what the power users are getting you to do, not just copying and pasting to the command line. Once you start to understand (and please don't hesitate to ask what the commands mean, it won't get you flamed), you are on the road to being a power user yourself.
Two years ago when I started really using Linux, I was afraid to type "yum" on the command line (Yum is the Redhat world's equiv to Apt, I was using CentOS at the time). Now I'm running pre-alpha versions of Ubuntu while manually editing my xorg.conf and tweaking my 3D desktop in the gconf database. It really is easier to become a power user on Linux than it is on Windows, so don't be intimidated into not trying. I'm not saying you need to be able to do all these things to use Linux, but really, why not learn them when it's so easy?
Updates and patches will come through the update-notifier, which will periodically check your repos and put an icon in your notification tray when updates are available (Or you can click System->Administration->Update Manager to run it directly). Both this and synaptic use apt in the background.
There is also Applications->Add/Remove Programs which provides a subset of what Synaptic does, but give popularity ratings and better details about the package, better for average users who are browsing for new software to play with.. This also uses apt, isn't it a wonderfully versatile system?
Right, I think Cairo is being used specifically because it would allow Firefox to finally add features like full page zoom (no just text resizing) that has been available in other browsers for a while now. It should also improve page printing.
It doesn't support older Windows because it uses Cairo for faster rendering, which I've read doesn't support older Windows versions. I'm not sure if it's the same reason older versions of OS X are not supported.
To "turn on" the upstart benefits in 6.10 you need to convert your init.d scripts over to upstart scripts. There isn't any automated method to do this as far as I'm aware. I think that has been the biggest delay in converting fully to upstart, just getting all the scripts converted with the right dependencies and what not. Feisty does seem to have more in upstart than Edgy did, I see a noticeably faster boot (I haven't timed it though).
Lets put things into a little perspective here. Will your mom, girlfriend, or neighbor be upgrading Windows? I'm guessing probably not, because a Windows upgrade isn't dead simple either, and they're likely to encounter problems along the way. I don't understand why people say Linux isn't ready for their [non-computer literate relation] because it is not simple to do something they won't be doing in the first place. My mom doesn't know how to upgrade Windows. She couldn't install vanilla windows on her PC. She can't buy some cheap hardware at Best Buy and make it "just work" in windows. So why should I (or you) expect her to be able to do, or even want to do, those same things in Linux?
For Linux to be ready for the desktop, it has to let average desktop users do what they do. This means browse the web, send email, write documents and simple spreadsheets, and upload their digital pictures and put them on CD. They don't need to be able to install or upgrade Linux because they don't need to do that in Windows. The only things Linux is missing right now is hardware vendor support and software vendor support, we know that, and it's getting better slowly. But don't knock Linux because your girlfriend doesn't suddenly become a computer expert when she's using it.