No, you are applying your requirements to everyone. For a typical Slashdot user, computers are a requirement. For John or Jane doe, they are optional as they use them to browse occasionally, and to send joke e-mails to their grandparents down in Florida. Most could get by just using a PC at work, and failing that, they would simply do without.
Given normal use, and no uncaptured power surges, they could easily expect their PC to work for 10 years or more with maybe a hard drive replacement at some point.
Win 2000 suffered from the same sort of issues that Vista did. Compatibility. Although it was leaps above ME, it wasn't so great on application compatibility especially on the games side. XP offered better support for games, the same stability, and it simply had more eye candy. People had a good reason to upgrade to XP as a result.
Win2K also didn't have to deal with an economic collapse going on as the product rolled out.
Although they have since fixed the hardware issues with Vista and consequently, Windows 7, the only real reason that someone might want to upgrade would be the eye candy again. I don't know that eye candy alone is worth 300 bucks in times like these.
One minor point that they haven't 'fixed'. The economy still sucks. I doubt seriously people are going to drop for new hardware or another $300 bucks for an OS that offers nothing substantial that isn't already do-able in XP.
The only thing Vista/Win7 offers is a more secure environment and if someone is currently using a firewalled and v-scanned version of XP, they will see little value in the new offering for that price.
You can bet once Win7 releases, XP will die because MS forces it to. They will kill it by expiring product support faster than you can blink an eye.
I agree. I recently switched to Mac from Windows. It seemed painful for the first 2 weeks looking for specific apps I loved on Windows like MeGUI and NewsBin, but I quickly adapted and eventually found comparable or replacement apps on the Mac side. I've also been playing with Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I installed it on my parents laptop. They browse the web and check e-mail which makes Ubuntu ideal for them. Oddly enough, every time I upgrade them with a Windows OS I get a weeks worth of calls full of how-to type questions. I have had zero calls since I put Ubuntu on there. I'm honestly a bit shocked and pleased. I couldn't be more pleased with OS X either. It's rock solid, fast, and efficient. I also love the fact that I can bareback my Mac/Linux boxes;)
I doubt seriously if Windows fails that Citrix will be king. Citrix is kind of like the 7th son of a 7th son. It has a long line of succession before it will ever be King...
I haven't tried 4.2 yet. I tried Kubuntu with 4.1, but the interface was just too slow and buggy, so I switched to Gnome. It may not have all the tweaks, but I'm satisfied with what is there. Both are impressive, especially considering they cost nothing.
Sad news. I hate their tiered approach. They purposely cripple the cheap versions so that some key function you need requires you to pay a hundred bucks or more for a single feature.
I'm actually pleased enough with Ubuntu and Gnome that I think I have installed my last Windows image at home, except for my work box, and that license is paid for.
MS has simply become too expensive for too little in return, and the options out there in Open Source, and even on the Mac side with it's more up front cost for hardware offer more bang for the buck with less stress and lost time spent fixing the OS.
I almost forgot. Add to that all the folks who simply can't afford it because they must choose between food on the table for dinner, or pay a monthly bill in the event that they might need it. I can understand why so many of the poor are uninsured.
You forget that the folks who have or can get health insurance are not the problem. It relates more to the millions of uninsured or uninsurable due to chronic illness.
It's much like a loan. You have to prove you don't need it in order to get it. If it was a loan, I'd say 'so what', but you can't say that when it might involve someone's life.
I consider Bloat to be that which directly affects performance of the OS. I see comments on here about Outlook Express and such. These are not bloat as they take up minimal space and do not cause any performance hit to the PC to sit there on a hard drive. They don't even cause fragmentation if you don't use them. EVERY OS you put on a PC today for a common desktop comes with a basic e-mail client, browser, a firewall, etc. With today's TB drives, I could care less if the OS takes 3 GB or even 10 GB.
Others bits however do cause bloat when they are loaded/launched by default when I never asked for them to be, like Messenger, Offline Folders, etc. Services that I neither want, nor can I easily remove as they are constantly put back on with every service pack. In Vista, Offline Folders (MOBSYNC) thrashes the hard drive and takes anywhere from 30-60 percent of the cpu cycles, even though I've never even used it. I can't remove it. I was forced to remove permissions to the executable. How sick is that?
When MS disables these software/services by default, then I will consider it less bloated. Much like they did for Server 2003 when it came with most options disabled or not even installed by default. It was a step in the right direction.
How Baltar see's it is essentially irrelevant. It is how others perceive what he has done that is important. Rosalyn herself tried to kill him for it when she found out that he gave out the access to the mainframe.
I think your being totally unrealistic yourself.
I disagree. This isn't some minor little secret these people are keeping. Baltar's actions directly caused the destruction of 12 colonies and the loss of billions of lives. He is then left on the only ship in the fleet under something more akin to martial law where he can be killed out of hand for treason.
I certainly wouldn't be spilling my guts to anyone in such a situation. The same is true for the Cylon skin jobs hidden on the ship. Their lives would be at risk if they told.
I don't find your arguments that these characters are flawed very believable. I find them more realistic than your views on how they should be.
It is the voters responsibility to hold the politician responsible. Something as simple as picking up the phone and calling your representative to complain can work wonders. They will often gauge their response on the direct input from those that they represent.
People should stop reacting to every situation by immediately blaming someone else, and take a little responsibility for their government.
We only have ourselves to blame if a democracy fails...
Air conditioning is probably a key factor. Living in Texas I can attest to that. My summer bills are always well over $400 although I have a rather large two story house to cool.
I'm curios how long his solar system will take to pay for itself? Just the reduction in summer bills would be welcome if the return investment was decent.
Living in Texas, I would get a very good number of hours in solar energy.
They support wired Ethernet cards (integrated, PCI, etc). I've never seen them support a wireless card of any bus type for some reason. The wired cards tend to take a service pack or two before they show up as supported.
I dropped another Ubuntu install on a family laptop this weekend. I'm just amazed at how far they've come in the last 5 years. I would have never considered putting Linux on a family PC 5 years ago. The driver support is outstanding, and I could say even better than Windows for the laptops I've put it on. I didn't even have to install wireless drivers on a Dell, two Viao's, and a Macbook Pro. The Sony's and the Mac all worked out of the box, and the Dell (a cheaper model) only required me to install some updates for the OS to offer up a wireless driver that worked.
I've always been confused as to why MS doesn't offer up wireless driver support out of the box like they do for non-wireless cards. I can only assume this is the vendor?
In any case, Kudos to the developers! If it's not the year of the Linux Desktop, it has to be getting pretty damn close;)
The two are not mutually exclusive. Many of the technical advances civilians enjoy today are the direct result of military research. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing short term as long as NASA gets its house in order (something I think it desperately needs). Maybe a little infusion of military into the picture will accomplish that.
This has to happen at some point. As with any new technology, it must be adopted at some level by the public (albeit the rich public) to become cheaper, more refined, and generally available. Eventually some entrepreneur will find a way to make good money off of this regardless of the high costs.
Although this may not be the form that Joe Public finds useful, it will eventually lead to a vehicle that is.
Oh, almost forgot. Put him on WebMail!! Google, Yahoo, AIM, Hotmail, whatever your poison.
It will work across multiple partitions, system crashes, reinstalls, and any other unnatural disasters. My parents seem to take an extrememe liking to e-mail. They get very upset if they lose that 'elf bowling' game from 8 years ago in their inbox.
I use the basic firewall for protection, and decent free virus scanner to catch any boneheaded mistakes he may make in said e-mail. I don't think I have a problem with my dad browsing to major porn sites, and a firewall that prompts is a big NONO. Keep it simple.
Teach him or her to install the OS itself. I struggled for years with my father trying to walk him through the silliest processes (such as RIGHT CLICK), and would spend countless hours on the phone after ever upgrade dealing with questions. That doesn't include the system crashes, glitches, and failures (don't even start me with wireless;)
The various necessary reinstall after some failure or whatnot finally prompted me to show him how to wipe it and reinstall the OS itself. I made sure the CD build had all of the necessary drivers on it (XP by the way). Saves me from slaving over a PC for a few days when I go to visit.
A couple of other points I would stress...
Make sure he or she has the system software, and that you show him how to install it. Write him a basic how to doc with simple steps. Nothing elaborate. Just "Click Next" type stuff.
If possible, put remote control software on it with a strong password. It will save you many many hours of grief.
Last but not least, have endless patience for repeated questions like "Did you say right click? Is that with the right mouse button", "Where is My Computer?", "Which one is the DVD Drive?", and my personal favorite, "Which one is the computer and which one is the monitor?"
As to which OS you should use, I think they can learn any of them. You could always give them a multi-boot and let them decide, and then remove the loser at your next trip.
You should consider cleaning out your start menu. Most people rarely use most of the items on there. Why leave them there "just in case" when you can always access them via the search bar?
Bare with me, as this will seem somewhat like a rant, but it is a valid list of concerns I'd like to see addressed in Windows 7.
On the bright side, Vista wasn't all bad. The search bar is a great feature. Unfortunately I can't really think of any other really great features that I liked in Vista that you didn't get with XP. I actually did use it for over a year on 4 home machines (3 laptops and one desktop). I now have it on a single laptop for support for my family, so I've been using it since it released
As to what I hated, the list is a bit longer:
Can't customize the explorer bar like you could with XP (I really miss having the Delete button on there, or the ability to add it). Why did they remove that functionality?
Hard drive thrashes constantly. I HATE that, and it's all just in case I might use a program. Most people use 3-4 apps tops. We don't need 2 gigs of ram filled up with useless data. I also don't like the fact that it's putting all of that wear on my home PC. If it was a server, I wouldn't be overly concerned, but cheapo (read: non-server) store bought hard drives DO fail, and this certainly can't help.
My home desktop WD's failed within 2 years. Whether this is related to the Vista install or something else I don't know, but Western Digital drives have typically been problem free for me over the years. It was the first time I'd had one fail so young. I had repeated failures on the same desktop a year later.
I hate the networking config. It takes far to many levels just to get to a network connection properties. It's very unintuitive. I can only assume that the person who designed that part of the UI never actually needed it. XP was easy. Right click 'network' icon and select needed area from properties. If your a heavy wireless user on a laptop, this is important and it's key for me considering the wireless glitchiness I continue to experience under SP1
My Vista installs constantly create multiple copies of the wireless config I use, and those often refuse to connect, causing me to constantly have to go in and clean them up and recreate the needed profile. Sometimes it just refuses to connect all together for seemingly no reason. Could be driver related, but then again, the profile issue wouldn't seem to be since I'm using Vista to manage my connections. It shouldn't be so problematic.
Wireless transfers in general is still very flakey, even post SP1. I can put a vista machine on my wireless and if I connect it using 54n at 240Mb, it will crash my router within a few minutes on any big transfer (I'm talking 1GB+ of data). This doesn't happen with XP, OS X, or Kubuntu. I regularly transfer large video's over wireless. This is a real show stopper. I am not the only one with this issue. Over a year of looking for a fix and high hopes for SP1 and still no resolution.
Permissions Issues - Ok, so this one is more of a vendor issue, but if MS had stood up to the vendors and forced them to properly code their apps for a multiuser environment, it wouldn't be such an issue. I can't name the number of times apps didn't work, wouldn't install, wouldn't uninstall, etc because permissions were set improperly.
Slow Boot Times - Vista starts out great, for the first few weeks. They tweaked it so that it appears to boot the desktop in 20-30 seconds. That doesnt' make the desktop usable however. It quickly degenerates into a mind numbingly slow boot, even with the startup services trimmed to bare minimum using MSCONFIG or CCleaner. It boots up the desktop pretty fast, although I wouldn't call it 'useable' until 30-40 seconds after that. Throw in a virus scanner, firewall, and adware/spyware blocker and it's hosed for a good minute. Totally unacceptable considering what you can get with Linux or Leopard.
Windows Update Issues - I also had (and still have) endless update issues where they simply start failing, requiring me to google for some obscure 'failure' code only to find out that there is no immediate
I don't get it. Why do you need the RUN command? If you type "Start -> Run -> Notepad.exe", you get the exact same result as if you used the Start and typed notepad.exe in the search dialogue. They function exactly the same except you probably don't need to type all of notepad.exe to get it to run.
What is the benefit?
Besides, you can use the keyboard shortcut without cluttering up your Start menu (Windows + R).
Are these politicians actually popular with the people? Are they actually happy about this blatant censorship? I find it hard to believe that anyone would be so willing to accept giving away so much control to the government.
It's pointless. You buy it, you burn it, and you re-rip it and no DRM. I've even taught computer 'illiterates' how to do this. I don't understand why they continue to place DRM in iTunes music. Any technically competent person can easily remove said DRM with just a few minutes spare time. Even those that struggle with PC's can typically be taught how to do this in half an hour or so.
I understand that Apple probably has contracts with the recording studios, but are the studios so blind that they really think DRM works? Joe user probably doesn't care about sharing his music. He just wants it to work on his desktop, laptop, his MP3 player, etc. The ones who are serious 'pirates' will easily work around any DRM in music. It's a waste of time and resources, but then again, RIAA has never been known for seeing the forest for the trees.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you are applying your requirements to everyone. For a typical Slashdot user, computers are a requirement. For John or Jane doe, they are optional as they use them to browse occasionally, and to send joke e-mails to their grandparents down in Florida. Most could get by just using a PC at work, and failing that, they would simply do without.
Given normal use, and no uncaptured power surges, they could easily expect their PC to work for 10 years or more with maybe a hard drive replacement at some point.
Win 2000 suffered from the same sort of issues that Vista did. Compatibility. Although it was leaps above ME, it wasn't so great on application compatibility especially on the games side. XP offered better support for games, the same stability, and it simply had more eye candy. People had a good reason to upgrade to XP as a result.
Win2K also didn't have to deal with an economic collapse going on as the product rolled out.
Although they have since fixed the hardware issues with Vista and consequently, Windows 7, the only real reason that someone might want to upgrade would be the eye candy again. I don't know that eye candy alone is worth 300 bucks in times like these.
One minor point that they haven't 'fixed'. The economy still sucks. I doubt seriously people are going to drop for new hardware or another $300 bucks for an OS that offers nothing substantial that isn't already do-able in XP.
The only thing Vista/Win7 offers is a more secure environment and if someone is currently using a firewalled and v-scanned version of XP, they will see little value in the new offering for that price.
You can bet once Win7 releases, XP will die because MS forces it to. They will kill it by expiring product support faster than you can blink an eye.
I agree. I recently switched to Mac from Windows. It seemed painful for the first 2 weeks looking for specific apps I loved on Windows like MeGUI and NewsBin, but I quickly adapted and eventually found comparable or replacement apps on the Mac side. I've also been playing with Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I installed it on my parents laptop. They browse the web and check e-mail which makes Ubuntu ideal for them. Oddly enough, every time I upgrade them with a Windows OS I get a weeks worth of calls full of how-to type questions. I have had zero calls since I put Ubuntu on there. I'm honestly a bit shocked and pleased. I couldn't be more pleased with OS X either. It's rock solid, fast, and efficient. I also love the fact that I can bareback my Mac/Linux boxes ;)
I doubt seriously if Windows fails that Citrix will be king. Citrix is kind of like the 7th son of a 7th son. It has a long line of succession before it will ever be King...
I haven't tried 4.2 yet. I tried Kubuntu with 4.1, but the interface was just too slow and buggy, so I switched to Gnome. It may not have all the tweaks, but I'm satisfied with what is there. Both are impressive, especially considering they cost nothing.
Sad news. I hate their tiered approach. They purposely cripple the cheap versions so that some key function you need requires you to pay a hundred bucks or more for a single feature.
I'm actually pleased enough with Ubuntu and Gnome that I think I have installed my last Windows image at home, except for my work box, and that license is paid for.
MS has simply become too expensive for too little in return, and the options out there in Open Source, and even on the Mac side with it's more up front cost for hardware offer more bang for the buck with less stress and lost time spent fixing the OS.
Thanks but no thanks...
I almost forgot. Add to that all the folks who simply can't afford it because they must choose between food on the table for dinner, or pay a monthly bill in the event that they might need it. I can understand why so many of the poor are uninsured.
You forget that the folks who have or can get health insurance are not the problem. It relates more to the millions of uninsured or uninsurable due to chronic illness.
It's much like a loan. You have to prove you don't need it in order to get it. If it was a loan, I'd say 'so what', but you can't say that when it might involve someone's life.
I consider Bloat to be that which directly affects performance of the OS. I see comments on here about Outlook Express and such. These are not bloat as they take up minimal space and do not cause any performance hit to the PC to sit there on a hard drive. They don't even cause fragmentation if you don't use them. EVERY OS you put on a PC today for a common desktop comes with a basic e-mail client, browser, a firewall, etc. With today's TB drives, I could care less if the OS takes 3 GB or even 10 GB.
Others bits however do cause bloat when they are loaded/launched by default when I never asked for them to be, like Messenger, Offline Folders, etc. Services that I neither want, nor can I easily remove as they are constantly put back on with every service pack. In Vista, Offline Folders (MOBSYNC) thrashes the hard drive and takes anywhere from 30-60 percent of the cpu cycles, even though I've never even used it. I can't remove it. I was forced to remove permissions to the executable. How sick is that?
When MS disables these software/services by default, then I will consider it less bloated. Much like they did for Server 2003 when it came with most options disabled or not even installed by default. It was a step in the right direction.
How Baltar see's it is essentially irrelevant. It is how others perceive what he has done that is important. Rosalyn herself tried to kill him for it when she found out that he gave out the access to the mainframe. I think your being totally unrealistic yourself.
I disagree. This isn't some minor little secret these people are keeping. Baltar's actions directly caused the destruction of 12 colonies and the loss of billions of lives. He is then left on the only ship in the fleet under something more akin to martial law where he can be killed out of hand for treason. I certainly wouldn't be spilling my guts to anyone in such a situation. The same is true for the Cylon skin jobs hidden on the ship. Their lives would be at risk if they told. I don't find your arguments that these characters are flawed very believable. I find them more realistic than your views on how they should be.
It is the voters responsibility to hold the politician responsible. Something as simple as picking up the phone and calling your representative to complain can work wonders. They will often gauge their response on the direct input from those that they represent.
People should stop reacting to every situation by immediately blaming someone else, and take a little responsibility for their government.
We only have ourselves to blame if a democracy fails...
Air conditioning is probably a key factor. Living in Texas I can attest to that. My summer bills are always well over $400 although I have a rather large two story house to cool.
I'm curios how long his solar system will take to pay for itself? Just the reduction in summer bills would be welcome if the return investment was decent.
Living in Texas, I would get a very good number of hours in solar energy.
They support wired Ethernet cards (integrated, PCI, etc). I've never seen them support a wireless card of any bus type for some reason. The wired cards tend to take a service pack or two before they show up as supported.
I dropped another Ubuntu install on a family laptop this weekend. I'm just amazed at how far they've come in the last 5 years. I would have never considered putting Linux on a family PC 5 years ago. The driver support is outstanding, and I could say even better than Windows for the laptops I've put it on. I didn't even have to install wireless drivers on a Dell, two Viao's, and a Macbook Pro. The Sony's and the Mac all worked out of the box, and the Dell (a cheaper model) only required me to install some updates for the OS to offer up a wireless driver that worked.
;)
I've always been confused as to why MS doesn't offer up wireless driver support out of the box like they do for non-wireless cards. I can only assume this is the vendor?
In any case, Kudos to the developers! If it's not the year of the Linux Desktop, it has to be getting pretty damn close
The two are not mutually exclusive. Many of the technical advances civilians enjoy today are the direct result of military research. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing short term as long as NASA gets its house in order (something I think it desperately needs). Maybe a little infusion of military into the picture will accomplish that.
This has to happen at some point. As with any new technology, it must be adopted at some level by the public (albeit the rich public) to become cheaper, more refined, and generally available. Eventually some entrepreneur will find a way to make good money off of this regardless of the high costs. Although this may not be the form that Joe Public finds useful, it will eventually lead to a vehicle that is.
Oh, almost forgot. Put him on WebMail!! Google, Yahoo, AIM, Hotmail, whatever your poison.
It will work across multiple partitions, system crashes, reinstalls, and any other unnatural disasters. My parents seem to take an extrememe liking to e-mail. They get very upset if they lose that 'elf bowling' game from 8 years ago in their inbox.
I use the basic firewall for protection, and decent free virus scanner to catch any boneheaded mistakes he may make in said e-mail. I don't think I have a problem with my dad browsing to major porn sites, and a firewall that prompts is a big NONO. Keep it simple.
Teach him or her to install the OS itself. I struggled for years with my father trying to walk him through the silliest processes (such as RIGHT CLICK), and would spend countless hours on the phone after ever upgrade dealing with questions. That doesn't include the system crashes, glitches, and failures (don't even start me with wireless ;)
;)
The various necessary reinstall after some failure or whatnot finally prompted me to show him how to wipe it and reinstall the OS itself. I made sure the CD build had all of the necessary drivers on it (XP by the way). Saves me from slaving over a PC for a few days when I go to visit.
A couple of other points I would stress...
Make sure he or she has the system software, and that you show him how to install it. Write him a basic how to doc with simple steps. Nothing elaborate. Just "Click Next" type stuff.
If possible, put remote control software on it with a strong password. It will save you many many hours of grief.
Last but not least, have endless patience for repeated questions like "Did you say right click? Is that with the right mouse button", "Where is My Computer?", "Which one is the DVD Drive?", and my personal favorite, "Which one is the computer and which one is the monitor?"
As to which OS you should use, I think they can learn any of them. You could always give them a multi-boot and let them decide, and then remove the loser at your next trip.
Good Luck
You should consider cleaning out your start menu. Most people rarely use most of the items on there. Why leave them there "just in case" when you can always access them via the search bar?
Bare with me, as this will seem somewhat like a rant, but it is a valid list of concerns I'd like to see addressed in Windows 7.
On the bright side, Vista wasn't all bad. The search bar is a great feature. Unfortunately I can't really think of any other really great features that I liked in Vista that you didn't get with XP. I actually did use it for over a year on 4 home machines (3 laptops and one desktop). I now have it on a single laptop for support for my family, so I've been using it since it released
As to what I hated, the list is a bit longer:
Can't customize the explorer bar like you could with XP (I really miss having the Delete button on there, or the ability to add it). Why did they remove that functionality?
Hard drive thrashes constantly. I HATE that, and it's all just in case I might use a program. Most people use 3-4 apps tops. We don't need 2 gigs of ram filled up with useless data. I also don't like the fact that it's putting all of that wear on my home PC. If it was a server, I wouldn't be overly concerned, but cheapo (read: non-server) store bought hard drives DO fail, and this certainly can't help.
My home desktop WD's failed within 2 years. Whether this is related to the Vista install or something else I don't know, but Western Digital drives have typically been problem free for me over the years. It was the first time I'd had one fail so young. I had repeated failures on the same desktop a year later.
I hate the networking config. It takes far to many levels just to get to a network connection properties. It's very unintuitive. I can only assume that the person who designed that part of the UI never actually needed it. XP was easy. Right click 'network' icon and select needed area from properties. If your a heavy wireless user on a laptop, this is important and it's key for me considering the wireless glitchiness I continue to experience under SP1
My Vista installs constantly create multiple copies of the wireless config I use, and those often refuse to connect, causing me to constantly have to go in and clean them up and recreate the needed profile. Sometimes it just refuses to connect all together for seemingly no reason. Could be driver related, but then again, the profile issue wouldn't seem to be since I'm using Vista to manage my connections. It shouldn't be so problematic.
Wireless transfers in general is still very flakey, even post SP1. I can put a vista machine on my wireless and if I connect it using 54n at 240Mb, it will crash my router within a few minutes on any big transfer (I'm talking 1GB+ of data). This doesn't happen with XP, OS X, or Kubuntu. I regularly transfer large video's over wireless. This is a real show stopper. I am not the only one with this issue. Over a year of looking for a fix and high hopes for SP1 and still no resolution.
Permissions Issues - Ok, so this one is more of a vendor issue, but if MS had stood up to the vendors and forced them to properly code their apps for a multiuser environment, it wouldn't be such an issue. I can't name the number of times apps didn't work, wouldn't install, wouldn't uninstall, etc because permissions were set improperly.
Slow Boot Times - Vista starts out great, for the first few weeks. They tweaked it so that it appears to boot the desktop in 20-30 seconds. That doesnt' make the desktop usable however. It quickly degenerates into a mind numbingly slow boot, even with the startup services trimmed to bare minimum using MSCONFIG or CCleaner. It boots up the desktop pretty fast, although I wouldn't call it 'useable' until 30-40 seconds after that. Throw in a virus scanner, firewall, and adware/spyware blocker and it's hosed for a good minute. Totally unacceptable considering what you can get with Linux or Leopard.
Windows Update Issues - I also had (and still have) endless update issues where they simply start failing, requiring me to google for some obscure 'failure' code only to find out that there is no immediate
I don't get it. Why do you need the RUN command? If you type "Start -> Run -> Notepad.exe", you get the exact same result as if you used the Start and typed notepad.exe in the search dialogue. They function exactly the same except you probably don't need to type all of notepad.exe to get it to run. What is the benefit? Besides, you can use the keyboard shortcut without cluttering up your Start menu (Windows + R).
I'm surprised that the techies (i.e. you guys) haven't organized some sort of grass roots movement to make people aware. This is pretty scary stuff...
Are these politicians actually popular with the people? Are they actually happy about this blatant censorship? I find it hard to believe that anyone would be so willing to accept giving away so much control to the government.
It's pointless. You buy it, you burn it, and you re-rip it and no DRM. I've even taught computer 'illiterates' how to do this. I don't understand why they continue to place DRM in iTunes music. Any technically competent person can easily remove said DRM with just a few minutes spare time. Even those that struggle with PC's can typically be taught how to do this in half an hour or so.
I understand that Apple probably has contracts with the recording studios, but are the studios so blind that they really think DRM works? Joe user probably doesn't care about sharing his music. He just wants it to work on his desktop, laptop, his MP3 player, etc. The ones who are serious 'pirates' will easily work around any DRM in music. It's a waste of time and resources, but then again, RIAA has never been known for seeing the forest for the trees.