Besides that after re-reading I still don't really understand what you are saying, it seems like quite a procedure to go through just to have a security certificate accepted.
I'll even go as far to say your post perfectly illustrates the whole problem with these certificates. No-one but security experts understand what's going on, no-one but the site's owner or a computer/security expert (at the client side) can manually check/install a certificate, and the rest of us common people will just get used to having a serious number of web sites throwing irritating and largely useless warnings at us.
When telebanking (Bank of China (HK)'s business banking) the first time I got security warnings. The web site says that I have to make sure to select "Yes" in the Security Warning dialogue (that has to do with some e-cert system). I forgot what it was, but it is indeed some javascript thingy that throws a "security warning". On my e-banking web site. Ugh. And yes I'm sure it's the correct one because I typed it in myself at first and later bookmarked it. That whole VM is used for telebanking only.
If my bank already had a "security warning" that I just have to accept, then what is the value of such a warning?
But SSD doesn't win enough in those areas to justify the incredibly high price of the drive. So it is a bit premature to start waving the banners right now.
As with all new technologies, it is a matter of supply and demand. SSD only just a few years ago reached critical mass: this is when Apple started to equip ipods with them, and Asus got the runaway success with the SSD based EEE-PC. That were only 4 GB or 8 GB drives, now we're already talking about 160 GB drives at prices that are affordable for most people. Yes they are more expensive than the platter based ones, but they are affordable. And that is a big thing. When your 80 GB SSD drive has to cost you USD 2,000 it is not affordable. Now it is only about USD 300. And 160 GB is more than enough storage for all but the craziest movie buff.
iPods and EEEPCs led the charge. They caused the volume of SSD drives to skyrocket, making per-unit manufacturing much cheaper, and boosting research and investment in the area. And that is what was needed. Now we start seeing bigger ones in laptops, and in the high end I expect the SSD will quickly push out the HD. The low end will follow soon after.
I think the era of the SSD is there already. They are widely deployed, not yet as proven as HD tech but getting there really fast, and have great advantages. At this rate cost difference will get smaller and smaller really fast, especially if they start selling smaller drives. I'd love to be able to get cheap 10-20 GB drives for my work stations that only have the OS and applications installed. They have now 120 GB drives, the smallest the shop had in stock. And SSD price vs size will scale almost linearly as bigger size means mainly more flash chips on board.
I'm really convinced SSD has reached critical mass already, prices are falling very fast, and may even start to fall faster with increasing sales volume due to the lower prices. The era of SSD is there, absolutely. HD will remain the choice for large storage deployment for a while to come for sure, but for the smaller and medium sizes SSD is the way to go.
I wonder why anyone would want to make a RAID5 out of SSD drives. Or even a RAID1. I can imagine a RAID0 to couple drives as it makes partitioning more flexible, but not more than that.
Why I think so? Failure mode and performance. As many other posters pointed out: a traditional hard drive will fail catastrophically, and totally. It simply suddenly becomes completely unreadable. In such a case a RAID1 or RAID5 can be your lifeline, as the data is still recoverable from another unit. However SSD drives tend to fail bit-by-bit, literally. A bit (sector?) fails, usually upon write, failure is easily detected and that sector can be marked bad and the data written elsewhere. There will be no catastrophic disk failures, making redundancy far less important. Speed improvements will also be very small due to the negligible seek times compared to platters.
The only reason to use RAID5 I guess would be the hot swapping of drives, but then there may be better solutions for that issue when using SSD drives.
You can be forced to pay the refund because Microsoft, in their EULA, offers the refund to anyone who doesn't want to use Windows. If you don't like that you will have to negotiate with MS to have a special EULA for the copies you sell.
This will be hard for the simple fact that Apple sells only combinations. You can not get the same hardware without OS. You can not install the OS (according to Apple at least - not sure about whether it's legally OK or not) on anything but Apple branded hardware. Apple indeed limits your choice to maybe a dozen laptops at the time, and all come with OSX. They do not offer refunds on OSX, you are not even charged for it separately. Their computers are sold complete and as-is, take it or leave it. You can get similar hardware (save the nicely designed white case with a glowing Apple logo in it) from many other suppliers and then you do not get OSX with it.
Windows you almost never buy directly from Microsoft. You normally buy it together with a Dell or HP or IBM branded PC. That is a major difference of course. Dell and HP do not produce their own chips, they do not design their own motherboards, they maybe design their own cases but that's about it. They cobble together machines from parts sourced everywhere, and even often let you choose exactly which components you want in your computer. Then the O/S comes from yet another party and is indeed charged separately (even if included in a package price).
This makes imho a major difference. One is a complete system, the other is the sum of parts.
I never heard about this - and honestly I don't find it exactly likely that a computer tech would go that far to recover files on a laptop given in for repair. And then the laptop was broken in the first place, which makes me wonder how he could delete files in preparation of taking it to a repair shop. May depend on what was broken but as it was an Apple it is almost for sure the hardware. Malware is simply not really an issue for macs.
This explanation is more like Edison saying "I did all I could to prevent this from happening" and trying to make himself look less stupid.
Just an example of in this case images copied from a laptop that was taken for repair. For anyone living in Hong Kong or following Cantopop, just think "Edison Chen". You will know what I'm talking about, it has been all over the media for a long long time.
For the rest of us: this is a famous singer/actor/etc around here. He took his laptop for repair once, and a year or so ago photos of him having sex with female stars started to appear on the Internet. Copied off of his laptop by the repairman who started snooping around the data on the hard disk after the repairs were finished. This repairman has got a jail term for that, by the way. And it all ballooned in the biggest entertainment story of cantopop in 2008, and probably the biggest in cantopop history.
For links: just search for "edison chen" on google. The first top-100 or so are about this scandal.
So true. Everyone running a business will know that a fax number is essential. Sending faxes is still a very easy, fast and reliable way of sending simple documents. And giving a fax number over the phone is so much more reliable than an e-mail address.
It's old tech, but it's still very useful, so it's still used. There is really no true replacement for a fax to receive simple documents. That varies from arrival notices by shipping lines that my containers arrive to order forms and even name cards can be faxed easily - again since the death of compuserve it's not become easier to give an e-mail address over the phone.
Even then it would make sense to put it on wikipedia or so. Put up the photo on the page, with larges size say 640x480 - just enough to make a reasonable looking postcard sized print. Licensing an image to wikipedia doesn't mean they can not keep the high-res version for themselves and sell prints of it. Having it on wp even may make the photo more famous, allowing them to sell more prints.
In the Netherlands at least, and I think many parts of Europe, we have had two tier pricing for very long. Lower cost of electricity at night. And we didn't need smart appliances, just a timer clock here or there!
Clothes washing: just switch it on when you go to sleep. Not many families have more than one load a day. And if you must well then that second load during the day, can't have it all.
Dishwasher: meh. Don't need.
Water heater for shower: get one with a 70-90l reservoir, and have it heat up to 90 C or so overnight. A properly isolated one and you have piping hot water all day long at night-rate electricity.
It was as simple as that. No need for Internet connection or so, just a double meter in the closet downstairs and some common sense.
and I think the 15 dudes BBQing under a tent during the afternoon doesn't look much like a nighttime rave. The police were acting against the law.
This is where the part making preparations comes in play. From the face of it the law is pretty much on the police's side. They see some people setting up a tent, building up music equipment, arranging some catering - there you go, looks just like preparations for a rave party.
And of course ravers are very scary, extremely dangerous and highly aggressive people who are likely to be totally high on whatever drug is in fashion nowadays which is why there is clearly a need for a helicopter, body armour, and the rest. (/sarcasm)
In case the terms of service are against the law, they can be invalidated. Or at least the part that is against the law. Often a ToS/contract will contain a line like if a part is deemed invalid under applicable law, the rest of the agreement will remain standing.
So even stating in the sales contract that they sell you something but may take it back later at their own discretion doesn't mean that it is legal to do so, no matter whether they pay a refund or not.
Now reading the quoted part of your message they say they give you a permanent copy of the book, with some restrictions on how to view it. It does seem now that they are breaking their own sales contract. Messy, no matter what. Pulling back the book is certainly bad for their image, though I do give them credit for refunding their customers. That makes it less bad at least.
Most mice used for lab experiments are very very susceptible to disease, including cancer, because they have been bread to have virtually no active immune system. For normal mice indeed their lifespan is basically too short for cancer to develop. However without immune system cells that turn cancerous are not cleaned up and will cause actual cancer.
To continue on your argument: cells get damaged by radiation, want to suicide, drug prevents that, cells repair, but not all repair correctly and may cause cancer.
This cancer risk might actually be quite low. This drug will work for a certain amount of time before it is removed from your body naturally, as happens to all medicine. When this drug is gone, the incorrectly repaired cells will suicide after all. Now if I'm interpreting this correctly we would hope that say 95% of the cells with radiation damage can fully repair themselves, leaving with 5% with unrepairable damage which will suicide in the end. And that were the potentially cancerous cells of course.
If my idea is correct then indeed the risk of cancer is increased only slightly. I can't imagine there is no increased risk, as there are so many cells that need repairs that there are probably quite some cells that are repaired not perfectly but good enough to not commit suicide. After all ageing also has mainly to do with "wearing out" of DNA after too many cell divisions, and the DNA picking up too many errors. And cancers are more prevalent in older people for exactly that reason.
[...]the Mac really needs to play better in what is really an MS world to acheive inroads in the enterprise.
Honestly I wonder who is to blame here, and I think MS is at least as much to blame as Apple, if not more. It is quite commonly said "Windows works fine with Windows, everything else works with everything else". MS is not known to be happy to have other computers cooperate with them after all.
You are obviously also someone who is only looking at the top-5% of businesses: those that are big enough to need to hire an admin. Please come back to the real world where most businesses are small, have a few computers, and want things to work. They don't care about active directory. Maybe central storage for backups - if they make backups in the first place. Or maybe you are one of those admins... but then of course you're only hired ever by big companies that are so big that they need that. Then you have never experienced a small business. I'm running one myself, one employee, two desktops, one server. I don't admin, I set up and forget about it - just keeping half an eye on everything that I know of. My business is not about computers, they are just a tool, like my phone and fax. A means of communication (mail, web, chat) and typing invoices and keeping my finances and doing e-banking. That's about it. Fiddling with the systems is for at home.
He is probably in the range of big enough to care about their computers and having too many that everyone can take care of their own (more than say five of them) but too small to hire a dedicated system administrator (less than say 200 of them). About 95% of all businesses will fall in that range, there are very few businesses that are really big. It's just that they hire so many people that it seems most businesses are big.
Going for an all-Apple solution may work well for them. From my experience they seem to be low-maintenance (certainly compared to Windows which keeps you busy all the time), and saves the high cost of hiring a dedicated admin. Or admins even.
Your comment is really not insightful or anything. The real world is just different. Most companies simply do not have the means or the needs for a dedicated admin so going for a bunch of systems that Just Work makes total sense. And for the most part: Apple Just Works. Can't say that about Windows. Linux is even better at that point these days.
Yes there are competing products but most do not gain much (commercial) traction. Most companies don't gain much outside of their core businesses. And it is hard to come with a product that really can compete and dethrone a firmly entrenched player.
However there are exceptions.
A new browser came out, finally settled on the name "FireFox", and in a few years time got like 30% of the market.
A new mobile phone came out of a company that had never ventured in the mobile phone market before, got a lot of hype, and now is the reference to which all other phones are compared. This is Apple's iPhone of course.
Asus' EEEPC came out and virtually overnight created a new market, and now every manufacturer wants to have a cheap netbook on the market, in the 10" size range.
So there are more examples. Google itself is one: without any advertising it became the de-facto standard for searching, the name even became even a verb.
Who knows what this GoogleOS will do. Maybe it is really that much better than Windows. Google has the media attention already, that helps a lot to at least attract publicity. We are all expecting ARM processor based netbooks soon (prototypes have been demoed already), and Windows simply does not run on that processor. Whether ARM based netbooks/notebooks with GoogleOS or some Linux distro (e.g. NetBuntu) will make it remains to be seen. It would surprise me if it really makes a big impact on the market, though it would make things very interesting if it does.
And unfortunately no user stops and asks themselves "why do I have to pay more to a company that sold me a product that breaks this easily? Shouldn't it come with warranty or so?" followed by the question "are there any alternatives?"
This is something people do with many if not all other products. Cars, TV sets, telephones. If it breaks too easily, look for alternatives. Even if it isn't broken, look at the competition. For some strange reason this doesn't happen for software.
People can be held liable for criminal negligence (this happens a lot, not sure about computer related crimes though). In case of your examples that is not too hard to prove/disprove: did the person keep the computer reasonably up to date? Can't expect installing patches the minute they are released but at least within a reasonable time span. Did the person have anti-virus, anti-spyware or other security software installed, running and kept up to date? Did they read the manual that came with said wireless device before plugging it in?
So yes you can hold someone responsible for what they did not do, when it is common knowledge that these things should be done. Reading a manual is one. I don't know how much manual comes with Windows but these days most people should know about antivirus software and so, I think that can be expected by now. Windows Update I suppose is on by default nowadays, warning users when updates are there. OS-X and Mandriva at least warn me automatically about available updates, and installing is a few clicks away.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides that after re-reading I still don't really understand what you are saying, it seems like quite a procedure to go through just to have a security certificate accepted.
I'll even go as far to say your post perfectly illustrates the whole problem with these certificates. No-one but security experts understand what's going on, no-one but the site's owner or a computer/security expert (at the client side) can manually check/install a certificate, and the rest of us common people will just get used to having a serious number of web sites throwing irritating and largely useless warnings at us.
When telebanking (Bank of China (HK)'s business banking) the first time I got security warnings. The web site says that I have to make sure to select "Yes" in the Security Warning dialogue (that has to do with some e-cert system). I forgot what it was, but it is indeed some javascript thingy that throws a "security warning". On my e-banking web site. Ugh. And yes I'm sure it's the correct one because I typed it in myself at first and later bookmarked it. That whole VM is used for telebanking only.
If my bank already had a "security warning" that I just have to accept, then what is the value of such a warning?
But SSD doesn't win enough in those areas to justify the incredibly high price of the drive. So it is a bit premature to start waving the banners right now.
As with all new technologies, it is a matter of supply and demand. SSD only just a few years ago reached critical mass: this is when Apple started to equip ipods with them, and Asus got the runaway success with the SSD based EEE-PC. That were only 4 GB or 8 GB drives, now we're already talking about 160 GB drives at prices that are affordable for most people. Yes they are more expensive than the platter based ones, but they are affordable. And that is a big thing. When your 80 GB SSD drive has to cost you USD 2,000 it is not affordable. Now it is only about USD 300. And 160 GB is more than enough storage for all but the craziest movie buff.
iPods and EEEPCs led the charge. They caused the volume of SSD drives to skyrocket, making per-unit manufacturing much cheaper, and boosting research and investment in the area. And that is what was needed. Now we start seeing bigger ones in laptops, and in the high end I expect the SSD will quickly push out the HD. The low end will follow soon after.
I think the era of the SSD is there already. They are widely deployed, not yet as proven as HD tech but getting there really fast, and have great advantages. At this rate cost difference will get smaller and smaller really fast, especially if they start selling smaller drives. I'd love to be able to get cheap 10-20 GB drives for my work stations that only have the OS and applications installed. They have now 120 GB drives, the smallest the shop had in stock. And SSD price vs size will scale almost linearly as bigger size means mainly more flash chips on board.
I'm really convinced SSD has reached critical mass already, prices are falling very fast, and may even start to fall faster with increasing sales volume due to the lower prices. The era of SSD is there, absolutely. HD will remain the choice for large storage deployment for a while to come for sure, but for the smaller and medium sizes SSD is the way to go.
I wonder why anyone would want to make a RAID5 out of SSD drives. Or even a RAID1. I can imagine a RAID0 to couple drives as it makes partitioning more flexible, but not more than that.
Why I think so? Failure mode and performance. As many other posters pointed out: a traditional hard drive will fail catastrophically, and totally. It simply suddenly becomes completely unreadable. In such a case a RAID1 or RAID5 can be your lifeline, as the data is still recoverable from another unit. However SSD drives tend to fail bit-by-bit, literally. A bit (sector?) fails, usually upon write, failure is easily detected and that sector can be marked bad and the data written elsewhere. There will be no catastrophic disk failures, making redundancy far less important. Speed improvements will also be very small due to the negligible seek times compared to platters.
The only reason to use RAID5 I guess would be the hot swapping of drives, but then there may be better solutions for that issue when using SSD drives.
You can be forced to pay the refund because Microsoft, in their EULA, offers the refund to anyone who doesn't want to use Windows. If you don't like that you will have to negotiate with MS to have a special EULA for the copies you sell.
This will be hard for the simple fact that Apple sells only combinations. You can not get the same hardware without OS. You can not install the OS (according to Apple at least - not sure about whether it's legally OK or not) on anything but Apple branded hardware. Apple indeed limits your choice to maybe a dozen laptops at the time, and all come with OSX. They do not offer refunds on OSX, you are not even charged for it separately. Their computers are sold complete and as-is, take it or leave it. You can get similar hardware (save the nicely designed white case with a glowing Apple logo in it) from many other suppliers and then you do not get OSX with it.
Windows you almost never buy directly from Microsoft. You normally buy it together with a Dell or HP or IBM branded PC. That is a major difference of course. Dell and HP do not produce their own chips, they do not design their own motherboards, they maybe design their own cases but that's about it. They cobble together machines from parts sourced everywhere, and even often let you choose exactly which components you want in your computer. Then the O/S comes from yet another party and is indeed charged separately (even if included in a package price).
This makes imho a major difference. One is a complete system, the other is the sum of parts.
Quotation needed.
I never heard about this - and honestly I don't find it exactly likely that a computer tech would go that far to recover files on a laptop given in for repair. And then the laptop was broken in the first place, which makes me wonder how he could delete files in preparation of taking it to a repair shop. May depend on what was broken but as it was an Apple it is almost for sure the hardware. Malware is simply not really an issue for macs.
This explanation is more like Edison saying "I did all I could to prevent this from happening" and trying to make himself look less stupid.
It's apparently a good example of the whole being worth more than the sum of the parts.
Just an example of in this case images copied from a laptop that was taken for repair. For anyone living in Hong Kong or following Cantopop, just think "Edison Chen". You will know what I'm talking about, it has been all over the media for a long long time.
For the rest of us: this is a famous singer/actor/etc around here. He took his laptop for repair once, and a year or so ago photos of him having sex with female stars started to appear on the Internet. Copied off of his laptop by the repairman who started snooping around the data on the hard disk after the repairs were finished. This repairman has got a jail term for that, by the way. And it all ballooned in the biggest entertainment story of cantopop in 2008, and probably the biggest in cantopop history.
For links: just search for "edison chen" on google. The first top-100 or so are about this scandal.
So true. Everyone running a business will know that a fax number is essential. Sending faxes is still a very easy, fast and reliable way of sending simple documents. And giving a fax number over the phone is so much more reliable than an e-mail address.
It's old tech, but it's still very useful, so it's still used. There is really no true replacement for a fax to receive simple documents. That varies from arrival notices by shipping lines that my containers arrive to order forms and even name cards can be faxed easily - again since the death of compuserve it's not become easier to give an e-mail address over the phone.
Your average thief will try to resell it as soon as he can. Most thieves are not interested in the loot as such but in the money they can get for it.
Even then it would make sense to put it on wikipedia or so. Put up the photo on the page, with larges size say 640x480 - just enough to make a reasonable looking postcard sized print. Licensing an image to wikipedia doesn't mean they can not keep the high-res version for themselves and sell prints of it. Having it on wp even may make the photo more famous, allowing them to sell more prints.
But then I'm not a professional photographer.
In the Netherlands at least, and I think many parts of Europe, we have had two tier pricing for very long. Lower cost of electricity at night. And we didn't need smart appliances, just a timer clock here or there!
Clothes washing: just switch it on when you go to sleep. Not many families have more than one load a day. And if you must well then that second load during the day, can't have it all.
Dishwasher: meh. Don't need.
Water heater for shower: get one with a 70-90l reservoir, and have it heat up to 90 C or so overnight. A properly isolated one and you have piping hot water all day long at night-rate electricity.
It was as simple as that. No need for Internet connection or so, just a double meter in the closet downstairs and some common sense.
and I think the 15 dudes BBQing under a tent during the afternoon doesn't look much like a nighttime rave. The police were acting against the law.
This is where the part making preparations comes in play. From the face of it the law is pretty much on the police's side. They see some people setting up a tent, building up music equipment, arranging some catering - there you go, looks just like preparations for a rave party.
And of course ravers are very scary, extremely dangerous and highly aggressive people who are likely to be totally high on whatever drug is in fashion nowadays which is why there is clearly a need for a helicopter, body armour, and the rest. (/sarcasm)
In case the terms of service are against the law, they can be invalidated. Or at least the part that is against the law. Often a ToS/contract will contain a line like if a part is deemed invalid under applicable law, the rest of the agreement will remain standing.
So even stating in the sales contract that they sell you something but may take it back later at their own discretion doesn't mean that it is legal to do so, no matter whether they pay a refund or not.
Now reading the quoted part of your message they say they give you a permanent copy of the book, with some restrictions on how to view it. It does seem now that they are breaking their own sales contract. Messy, no matter what. Pulling back the book is certainly bad for their image, though I do give them credit for refunding their customers. That makes it less bad at least.
Most mice used for lab experiments are very very susceptible to disease, including cancer, because they have been bread to have virtually no active immune system. For normal mice indeed their lifespan is basically too short for cancer to develop. However without immune system cells that turn cancerous are not cleaned up and will cause actual cancer.
To continue on your argument: cells get damaged by radiation, want to suicide, drug prevents that, cells repair, but not all repair correctly and may cause cancer.
This cancer risk might actually be quite low. This drug will work for a certain amount of time before it is removed from your body naturally, as happens to all medicine. When this drug is gone, the incorrectly repaired cells will suicide after all. Now if I'm interpreting this correctly we would hope that say 95% of the cells with radiation damage can fully repair themselves, leaving with 5% with unrepairable damage which will suicide in the end. And that were the potentially cancerous cells of course.
If my idea is correct then indeed the risk of cancer is increased only slightly. I can't imagine there is no increased risk, as there are so many cells that need repairs that there are probably quite some cells that are repaired not perfectly but good enough to not commit suicide. After all ageing also has mainly to do with "wearing out" of DNA after too many cell divisions, and the DNA picking up too many errors. And cancers are more prevalent in older people for exactly that reason.
[...]the Mac really needs to play better in what is really an MS world to acheive inroads in the enterprise.
Honestly I wonder who is to blame here, and I think MS is at least as much to blame as Apple, if not more. It is quite commonly said "Windows works fine with Windows, everything else works with everything else". MS is not known to be happy to have other computers cooperate with them after all.
You are obviously also someone who is only looking at the top-5% of businesses: those that are big enough to need to hire an admin. Please come back to the real world where most businesses are small, have a few computers, and want things to work. They don't care about active directory. Maybe central storage for backups - if they make backups in the first place. Or maybe you are one of those admins... but then of course you're only hired ever by big companies that are so big that they need that. Then you have never experienced a small business. I'm running one myself, one employee, two desktops, one server. I don't admin, I set up and forget about it - just keeping half an eye on everything that I know of. My business is not about computers, they are just a tool, like my phone and fax. A means of communication (mail, web, chat) and typing invoices and keeping my finances and doing e-banking. That's about it. Fiddling with the systems is for at home.
He is probably in the range of big enough to care about their computers and having too many that everyone can take care of their own (more than say five of them) but too small to hire a dedicated system administrator (less than say 200 of them). About 95% of all businesses will fall in that range, there are very few businesses that are really big. It's just that they hire so many people that it seems most businesses are big.
Going for an all-Apple solution may work well for them. From my experience they seem to be low-maintenance (certainly compared to Windows which keeps you busy all the time), and saves the high cost of hiring a dedicated admin. Or admins even.
Your comment is really not insightful or anything. The real world is just different. Most companies simply do not have the means or the needs for a dedicated admin so going for a bunch of systems that Just Work makes total sense. And for the most part: Apple Just Works. Can't say that about Windows. Linux is even better at that point these days.
Yes there are competing products but most do not gain much (commercial) traction. Most companies don't gain much outside of their core businesses. And it is hard to come with a product that really can compete and dethrone a firmly entrenched player.
However there are exceptions.
A new browser came out, finally settled on the name "FireFox", and in a few years time got like 30% of the market.
A new mobile phone came out of a company that had never ventured in the mobile phone market before, got a lot of hype, and now is the reference to which all other phones are compared. This is Apple's iPhone of course.
Asus' EEEPC came out and virtually overnight created a new market, and now every manufacturer wants to have a cheap netbook on the market, in the 10" size range.
So there are more examples. Google itself is one: without any advertising it became the de-facto standard for searching, the name even became even a verb.
Who knows what this GoogleOS will do. Maybe it is really that much better than Windows. Google has the media attention already, that helps a lot to at least attract publicity. We are all expecting ARM processor based netbooks soon (prototypes have been demoed already), and Windows simply does not run on that processor. Whether ARM based netbooks/notebooks with GoogleOS or some Linux distro (e.g. NetBuntu) will make it remains to be seen. It would surprise me if it really makes a big impact on the market, though it would make things very interesting if it does.
You mean other parts of the world are smarter than that? When an American's computer breaks they will buy a non-MS based one?
Or you just trying to troll?
I think the average Asian who you imply is stupid is way smarter than you, if this comment is anything to go by.
And unfortunately no user stops and asks themselves "why do I have to pay more to a company that sold me a product that breaks this easily? Shouldn't it come with warranty or so?" followed by the question "are there any alternatives?"
This is something people do with many if not all other products. Cars, TV sets, telephones. If it breaks too easily, look for alternatives. Even if it isn't broken, look at the competition. For some strange reason this doesn't happen for software.
There is a difference between "the device works out of the box" and "the user knows how to use it". Big difference.
People can be held liable for criminal negligence (this happens a lot, not sure about computer related crimes though). In case of your examples that is not too hard to prove/disprove: did the person keep the computer reasonably up to date? Can't expect installing patches the minute they are released but at least within a reasonable time span. Did the person have anti-virus, anti-spyware or other security software installed, running and kept up to date? Did they read the manual that came with said wireless device before plugging it in?
So yes you can hold someone responsible for what they did not do, when it is common knowledge that these things should be done. Reading a manual is one. I don't know how much manual comes with Windows but these days most people should know about antivirus software and so, I think that can be expected by now. Windows Update I suppose is on by default nowadays, warning users when updates are there. OS-X and Mandriva at least warn me automatically about available updates, and installing is a few clicks away.