It's not yet released, but Fedora 8 Test 3 has been running the 2.6.23 kernel code. I suspect that within days (hours?) the RC labels will be pulled from the RPMs.
Don't be melodramatic. She'd be allowed living expenses even if ordered by a bankruptcy court to pay up the full amount. If that wasn't possible, we'd have around five million people per year added to the homeless rolls due to individuals and families declaring bankruptcy.
For whatever reason, I simply couldn't latch onto anything in the book, even though I read through the first four books of the H2G2 trilogy in one weekend. It took me six tries to get through the book, and I was frustrated at the end that I'd spent the time to read it, especially after all the adulation poured on it by my friends. (Then again, some of them think Red Dwarf is the pinnacle of comedy, and one of them even thinks AbFab is a great show, too.)
I sometimes think I should give it another try, since it's been the better part of a decade since I last read it. I just can't bring myself to even look for the book, though.
You guys are missing a critical fact here. The US and Japan both operate AWACS, leaving the active scanning to those aircraft until firing position is achieved, and perhaps not even that when modern datalinks are factored into the equation. Nobody cares if they're blasting the skies with a radar signal that the entire theater can see, because they're doing it from so far beyond missile range that anyone that tries to pop them will be seen by the AWACS and intercepted by intervening escorts aircraft which are vectored in without using their own radars until the last moment. It's like the days of old, standing high up on a hill, out of range of catapults and archers, and directing the battle in relatively high safety.
In modern air combat where AWACS are involved, by the time you're lit up by the enemy fighter's radar, it's too late, and you'd better be praying that your chaff, evasive action, and your ejection seat work.
What are you talking about? CSI pulled a Star Trek with this, predicting its availability before it came about, except that it was locked in the lab building.
Of course, in order to keep up, CSI will have to make these pocket-sized and taking only four seconds to complete, with instant radio uplinks to a database that magically has the DNA information of every single person that has ever lived in the last sixty years.
And then when that becomes reality, they'll have computers so good they'll know who committed the crime before they commit it, and will then be sued by Philip Dick, Scott Frank, and Jon Cohen.
Exactly my thoughts. I'm constantly told things like, "There's no memory leak! It's a feature to help you undo closed tabs!" When my memory usage routinely passes 250MB with an average of only 4-6 tabs open through a session (with many tabs being closed along the way), it's not a feature. It shouldn't be remembering 12 tabs past.
Or they blame my "extensive" list of plugins, even when on one system I have only about a dozen total, most of them minor functionality enhancements like Copy Plain Text and PDF Download.
Memory utilization hasn't gotten any worse from the later stages of 1.x, but it certainly hasn't gotten much better. It's really hard to convince people of the superiority of Firefox when they see those kind of performance numbers.
Actually, there's a good chance that you will. I suspect that we'll see a resurgence of the NSA Security Configuration Guides (which already have seen a little bit of a spike in the last couple of months) as this spreads out, including information on how to pick firewalls and IDS, additional information about securing a DMZ and even when to use them, and further recommendations on how to lock down clients. Microsoft has picked up some of the heavy lifting when it comes to the major portions, as its security guides for Windows 2003 and Vista are considered acceptable to the NSA, and the follow-up for Windows 2008 will probably be similarly considered good enough. But there are still topics that are not dealt with as well (or at least as concisely) by other vendors, and as such, the NSA will probably help to pick up the slack.
If nothing else, the documents provide valuable positive public relations, and (all pseudo-conspiratorial snickering aside) are widely considered to be very well-written documents that can and often do serve as the security base for many network environments.
Unless they thought her boobs were filled with plastic explosives there's really not much there.
While this incident may have been an overreaction, two Russian airliners were brought down on the same day in 2004 with explosives suspected to have been hidden in the bras of two female passengers. It's not that far-fetched.
Ermey hosts Mail Call on the History Channel. He's referring to Richard Machowicz, ex-SEAL and current host of Discovery Channel's Future Weapons show. While I enjoy Mail Call on occasion, Machowicz is far more hands-on with the technology.
Legislation on its own will not stop stupidity. The mistakes made by the MediaDefender employee that led to the leak of its internal messaging is a prime example. However, it may lead to solutions to help protect those who don't understand or know better from making stupid mistakes. A more complete overhaul of the system requires a great deal of time and energy, and will take much longer to address than locking down some of the existing issues. In the meantime, something should be done to mitigate the flaws in the current system as much as possible.
"Casual mailing" of SSNs can (theoretically) get a company in trouble under federal HIPAA laws and under certain state laws like California's SB1386. Many companies are working on locking down their e-mail, often with smart filters that look for strings like SSNs or driver's license numbers, among other things, and automatically encrypting them before going out, sometimes even before leaving the department while remaining within the company.
This doesn't stop the need for laws which are much more clear and restrictive on the use and control of personally identifying information, and which have more bite when they are enforced.
You must have been running a very tiny partition for your system drive. Most people have been using 10GB partitions at a minimum for many years now. Even a 4GB partition is enough for every version of Windows through XP with space enough for all of the patches plus the swap file.
That aside, you're correct with the overlay issues. I'm not sure how often GDI32.DLL has been replaced, but it's been pretty frequent, and hence why I think releasing roll-up packs two to four times per year would be advisable.
I will give Windows one small bit of credit: removing a problematic patch is easier than Linux. In Windows, you find the patch in Add/Remove Programs (most of them are uninstallable) and remove it. In Linux, that's not always so easy, as you have three choices: remove current version and install older version; install older version over the top; or for when dependencies bite you badly, recompile from scratch and watch for a better fix later. Normally this is not an issue -- I've only run into a bad update once or twice -- but it can get a bit frustrating.
Install the latest Ubuntu or Fedora only a few months after release, or especially something like CentOS 4.5 or Ubuntu 6.06, in either case even with a minimum installation, and you're going to have a large list of downloads ranging from a few dozen to possibly over a hundred patches. There are some different mechanisms that can be used to download the archives for a Linux or BSD distribution and install them from local sources, but it's still a large download and it still takes a fair amount of time.
This is just a fact of life for modern software. There are so many parts that get updated that given a few months the patch list is going to be lengthy. It would be nice if Microsoft created quarterly or biannual roll-up packages, since many of the files updated are covered by multiple patches, but the roll-ups can still get relatively large (more than 30MB for the Windows 2000 roll-up pack released after SP4).
Are you implying that foreign citizens are afforded US Constitutional protection?
No, but people in the United States are afforded such protection. I should have been clearer in stating that warrants should be issued when one end of the call originates or terminates in the US.
Soviet citizens were well educated by comparison and wanted a better life for themselves. The people we are fighting now came from a world of shit and want to make the whole world that way.
Many of those involved in terrorism are well-educated. Ayman al-Zawahiri is a trained medical doctor, Osama bin Laden may hold one or two degrees, and Muhammad Atta held a doctorate in civil engineering. Other hijackers with higher education experience included:
a law student
a teacher
a teacher in training
four former college students (most of whom left to focus on religious studies)
a college graduate
That's nearly half of the hijackers with some level of higher education in their past. Labeling all terrorists as uneducated loonies helps us set ourselves apart from them, but does not acknowledge the reality that those who subscribe to their beliefs span the socioeconomic spectrum. Failure to understand the enemy dooms us to defeat.
The attacks are alleged to have been planned to target Americans, including nightlife and airports frequented by US soldiers. Whether they had the ability to actually carry out the attacks is suspect; police apparently were able to switch out high-strength hydrogen peroxide with 3% solution well before the arrests, suggesting that the plotters didn't have the knowledge to tell the difference.
I have no problem in concept with tapping calls made to people outside of the US provided that warrants are drawn up and signed by a judge, even if it's a FISA judge. The laws that were drawn up worked well enough for a decade against the Soviets, so there's little reason to think that they wouldn't work against would-be terrorists who are almost always far less sophisticated. Some tweaks may be needed here and there, but the wholesale, permanent rewrite advocated by the Bush administration is far too overreaching, and backdating by Congress the legality of past programs which were conducted without getting warrants is simply reprehensible.
In RFC terms, "should" has the following definition in RFC 2119:
This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
I interpret this to mean that if the traffic is understandable, then it should be permitted unless there is some technical reason why it should not -- and RFC pedantry is not automatically a reason to prohibit it. For example, if it is interfering with the network or other hosts in some way, such as overloading a system or causing traffic disruptions, that is a valid technical reason for preventing use of the network.
Your definition of "it would be nice if" falls closer to the RFC definition of "may":
This word, or the adjective "OPTIONAL", mean that an item is truly optional. One vendor may choose to include the item because a particular marketplace requires it or because the vendor feels that it enhances the product while another vendor may omit the same item. An implementation which does not include a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does include the option, though perhaps with reduced functionality. In the same vein an implementation which does include a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does not include the option (except, of course, for the feature the option provides.)
I am counting Win98SE, since you couldn't throw a patch onto Win98 to get it, and it was advertised as a step up. It was closer in concept to SP2 for WinXP -- some new features and a package of fixes -- but it was still considered a separate product.
Only WinME sales seemed worse, on a basis of percentage of short term uptake, than Vista. Windows 2000 did will in its intended segment, and XP and the first three Win9x versions also did extremely well. Microsoft may well take some education from this, learning that WinME was not just a freak occurrence of poor sales or timing, but instead that Microsoft is capable of shipping products that even the drones will not flock to en masse.
Fine, I went and looked it up. Proposition 224 in 1998, rejected by the voters 38% in favor to 62% against, would have altered the process for bidding as the following text from the proposition states:
This section shall apply to contracts for engineering, architectural, landscape architectural, surveying, environmental, or engineering geology services awarded by the State of California or by any state agency to any public or private entity.... Prior to the award of any contract covered by this section, the Controller shall prepare and verify an analysis of the cost of performing the work using state civil service employees and the cost of the contract. In comparing costs, the cost of performing the work using state civil service employees shall include only the additional direct costs to the State to provide the same services as the contractor, and the cost of the contract shall include all anticipated contract costs and all costs to be incurred by the State, state agencies, and the contracting entity for the bidding, evaluation, and contract award process and for inspecting, supervising, verifying, monitoring, and overseeing the contract.
Emphasis added.
As I stated, CalTrans wanted to skip the cost of using its own staff, thereby artificially lowering the overall cost of their bid through deliberate understatement of the true cost. That is all the required data, with a straight story. I should have done a quick bit of research to find out what the result was, but the fact that it was put forward by CalTrans and some of the legislators of California strongly suggests an attempt to undermine the process and channel almost every contract to CalTrans for no practical reason. That is why I consider it a reason to distrust California government.
Do you have any evidence to back up this 11-fold increase in costs? Some real-world example?
Here in California, CalTrans does have its own engineers and crews. It waged a bitter battle a few years ago where it wanted to be able to exempt the cost of worker salaries in bids on contracts, with the justification that it was already going to pay them, so they shouldn't have to factor in their costs. Outside contractors, of course, argued that this was only a method to guarantee that CalTrans would underbid every project they wanted to bid on because a huge portion of their costs would never appear on the bid. I don't recall how it turned out, but it was yet one more reason to distrust California government.
Vista is a failure by every measure and 2007 may be the Year of Linux [slashdot.org] that we have all been waiting for.
This is just a rephrasing of what we've been hearing forever:
Windows is a failure by every measure and 1999^w 2000^w 2001^w 2002^w 2003^w 2004^w 2005^w 2006^w 2007^w 2008 may be the Year of Linux that we have all been waiting for.
I've got three Linux systems that I use directly on a regular basis. I routinely compose reports in OpenOffice Writer running on either Fedora or Kubuntu, and make use of nearly a dozen Linux systems at work. I've watched Linux make major strides in easing the experience for the end-user, particularly in terms of wireless networking and general interface friendliness. But there are still things that are terribly frustrating for me -- wireless still has some work to be done -- and that would result in disowning by my friends and family if I tried to force them to use Linux. I'm hoping that it's only a couple more years before home user levels of Linux reach those of Macintosh, and where the majority of users, like those of OS X, are people who just want to get things done without worrying about compiling or odd dependencies. Even with that accomplishment, Windows is unlikely to be displaced as the majority OS anytime in the next decade.
Vista has its issues. If the one presented in TFA is accurate, then it's another example of how Microsoft's model of programming-by-committee is badly broken. Microsoft will probably learn from this some very painful lessons, and either get its act together, or begin a long and painful decline.
There's a hidden point in your words, which is that there are cases where the Core2Duo is a better buy. There are applications where the Intel architecture does beat up on AMD's (video and some rendering come to mind), and so it's a better purchase there. Some people run farms (even small ones of only a half-dozen systems), and a 10% performance difference may mean a 10% difference in their income for contract work.
For most of us, it's not nearly as important, as you say. If my system runs my games 5fps slower, I'm unlikely to notice unless I'm playing something for which it is underbuilt entirely. I recently bought the parts for a core system for my brother (only his drives came along), and the total cost was only about $325. For that, he got an Athlon X2 4200, 2GB RAM, 7800 GS video card, a basic case, and a decent (but not spectacular) motherboard. I priced out an Intel system, and it would have come in around $125 more. Would he know the difference? Probably not. But he's happy enough that most of his games run at spectacular speeds compared to what he had before, and that's what matters.
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It's not yet released, but Fedora 8 Test 3 has been running the 2.6.23 kernel code. I suspect that within days (hours?) the RC labels will be pulled from the RPMs.
Don't be melodramatic. She'd be allowed living expenses even if ordered by a bankruptcy court to pay up the full amount. If that wasn't possible, we'd have around five million people per year added to the homeless rolls due to individuals and families declaring bankruptcy.
For whatever reason, I simply couldn't latch onto anything in the book, even though I read through the first four books of the H2G2 trilogy in one weekend. It took me six tries to get through the book, and I was frustrated at the end that I'd spent the time to read it, especially after all the adulation poured on it by my friends. (Then again, some of them think Red Dwarf is the pinnacle of comedy, and one of them even thinks AbFab is a great show, too.)
I sometimes think I should give it another try, since it's been the better part of a decade since I last read it. I just can't bring myself to even look for the book, though.
You guys are missing a critical fact here. The US and Japan both operate AWACS, leaving the active scanning to those aircraft until firing position is achieved, and perhaps not even that when modern datalinks are factored into the equation. Nobody cares if they're blasting the skies with a radar signal that the entire theater can see, because they're doing it from so far beyond missile range that anyone that tries to pop them will be seen by the AWACS and intercepted by intervening escorts aircraft which are vectored in without using their own radars until the last moment. It's like the days of old, standing high up on a hill, out of range of catapults and archers, and directing the battle in relatively high safety.
In modern air combat where AWACS are involved, by the time you're lit up by the enemy fighter's radar, it's too late, and you'd better be praying that your chaff, evasive action, and your ejection seat work.
AT&T Wireless was bought by Cingular, which was then bought out by AT&T after the SBC buyout, and renamed AT&T Wireless.
AT&T: Same familiar name, but now with new, enhanced crappiness from SBC and Cingular.
What are you talking about? CSI pulled a Star Trek with this, predicting its availability before it came about, except that it was locked in the lab building.
Of course, in order to keep up, CSI will have to make these pocket-sized and taking only four seconds to complete, with instant radio uplinks to a database that magically has the DNA information of every single person that has ever lived in the last sixty years.
And then when that becomes reality, they'll have computers so good they'll know who committed the crime before they commit it, and will then be sued by Philip Dick, Scott Frank, and Jon Cohen.
Exactly my thoughts. I'm constantly told things like, "There's no memory leak! It's a feature to help you undo closed tabs!" When my memory usage routinely passes 250MB with an average of only 4-6 tabs open through a session (with many tabs being closed along the way), it's not a feature. It shouldn't be remembering 12 tabs past.
Or they blame my "extensive" list of plugins, even when on one system I have only about a dozen total, most of them minor functionality enhancements like Copy Plain Text and PDF Download.
Memory utilization hasn't gotten any worse from the later stages of 1.x, but it certainly hasn't gotten much better. It's really hard to convince people of the superiority of Firefox when they see those kind of performance numbers.
Actually, there's a good chance that you will. I suspect that we'll see a resurgence of the NSA Security Configuration Guides (which already have seen a little bit of a spike in the last couple of months) as this spreads out, including information on how to pick firewalls and IDS, additional information about securing a DMZ and even when to use them, and further recommendations on how to lock down clients. Microsoft has picked up some of the heavy lifting when it comes to the major portions, as its security guides for Windows 2003 and Vista are considered acceptable to the NSA, and the follow-up for Windows 2008 will probably be similarly considered good enough. But there are still topics that are not dealt with as well (or at least as concisely) by other vendors, and as such, the NSA will probably help to pick up the slack.
If nothing else, the documents provide valuable positive public relations, and (all pseudo-conspiratorial snickering aside) are widely considered to be very well-written documents that can and often do serve as the security base for many network environments.
Unless they thought her boobs were filled with plastic explosives there's really not much there.
While this incident may have been an overreaction, two Russian airliners were brought down on the same day in 2004 with explosives suspected to have been hidden in the bras of two female passengers. It's not that far-fetched.
Ermey hosts Mail Call on the History Channel. He's referring to Richard Machowicz, ex-SEAL and current host of Discovery Channel's Future Weapons show. While I enjoy Mail Call on occasion, Machowicz is far more hands-on with the technology.
Legislation on its own will not stop stupidity. The mistakes made by the MediaDefender employee that led to the leak of its internal messaging is a prime example. However, it may lead to solutions to help protect those who don't understand or know better from making stupid mistakes. A more complete overhaul of the system requires a great deal of time and energy, and will take much longer to address than locking down some of the existing issues. In the meantime, something should be done to mitigate the flaws in the current system as much as possible.
"Casual mailing" of SSNs can (theoretically) get a company in trouble under federal HIPAA laws and under certain state laws like California's SB1386. Many companies are working on locking down their e-mail, often with smart filters that look for strings like SSNs or driver's license numbers, among other things, and automatically encrypting them before going out, sometimes even before leaving the department while remaining within the company.
This doesn't stop the need for laws which are much more clear and restrictive on the use and control of personally identifying information, and which have more bite when they are enforced.
You must have been running a very tiny partition for your system drive. Most people have been using 10GB partitions at a minimum for many years now. Even a 4GB partition is enough for every version of Windows through XP with space enough for all of the patches plus the swap file.
That aside, you're correct with the overlay issues. I'm not sure how often GDI32.DLL has been replaced, but it's been pretty frequent, and hence why I think releasing roll-up packs two to four times per year would be advisable.
I will give Windows one small bit of credit: removing a problematic patch is easier than Linux. In Windows, you find the patch in Add/Remove Programs (most of them are uninstallable) and remove it. In Linux, that's not always so easy, as you have three choices: remove current version and install older version; install older version over the top; or for when dependencies bite you badly, recompile from scratch and watch for a better fix later. Normally this is not an issue -- I've only run into a bad update once or twice -- but it can get a bit frustrating.
Install the latest Ubuntu or Fedora only a few months after release, or especially something like CentOS 4.5 or Ubuntu 6.06, in either case even with a minimum installation, and you're going to have a large list of downloads ranging from a few dozen to possibly over a hundred patches. There are some different mechanisms that can be used to download the archives for a Linux or BSD distribution and install them from local sources, but it's still a large download and it still takes a fair amount of time.
This is just a fact of life for modern software. There are so many parts that get updated that given a few months the patch list is going to be lengthy. It would be nice if Microsoft created quarterly or biannual roll-up packages, since many of the files updated are covered by multiple patches, but the roll-ups can still get relatively large (more than 30MB for the Windows 2000 roll-up pack released after SP4).
If a person is a public employee, then that's part of the public record.
No, but people in the United States are afforded such protection. I should have been clearer in stating that warrants should be issued when one end of the call originates or terminates in the US.
Soviet citizens were well educated by comparison and wanted a better life for themselves. The people we are fighting now came from a world of shit and want to make the whole world that way.
Many of those involved in terrorism are well-educated. Ayman al-Zawahiri is a trained medical doctor, Osama bin Laden may hold one or two degrees, and Muhammad Atta held a doctorate in civil engineering. Other hijackers with higher education experience included:
That's nearly half of the hijackers with some level of higher education in their past. Labeling all terrorists as uneducated loonies helps us set ourselves apart from them, but does not acknowledge the reality that those who subscribe to their beliefs span the socioeconomic spectrum. Failure to understand the enemy dooms us to defeat.
The attacks are alleged to have been planned to target Americans, including nightlife and airports frequented by US soldiers. Whether they had the ability to actually carry out the attacks is suspect; police apparently were able to switch out high-strength hydrogen peroxide with 3% solution well before the arrests, suggesting that the plotters didn't have the knowledge to tell the difference.
I have no problem in concept with tapping calls made to people outside of the US provided that warrants are drawn up and signed by a judge, even if it's a FISA judge. The laws that were drawn up worked well enough for a decade against the Soviets, so there's little reason to think that they wouldn't work against would-be terrorists who are almost always far less sophisticated. Some tweaks may be needed here and there, but the wholesale, permanent rewrite advocated by the Bush administration is far too overreaching, and backdating by Congress the legality of past programs which were conducted without getting warrants is simply reprehensible.
He flew out of a strip near Reno. Reno is fairly far from Arizona. It's more likely that he's in Nevada, California, or perhaps even Utah.
I interpret this to mean that if the traffic is understandable, then it should be permitted unless there is some technical reason why it should not -- and RFC pedantry is not automatically a reason to prohibit it. For example, if it is interfering with the network or other hosts in some way, such as overloading a system or causing traffic disruptions, that is a valid technical reason for preventing use of the network.
Your definition of "it would be nice if" falls closer to the RFC definition of "may":
I am counting Win98SE, since you couldn't throw a patch onto Win98 to get it, and it was advertised as a step up. It was closer in concept to SP2 for WinXP -- some new features and a package of fixes -- but it was still considered a separate product.
Only WinME sales seemed worse, on a basis of percentage of short term uptake, than Vista. Windows 2000 did will in its intended segment, and XP and the first three Win9x versions also did extremely well. Microsoft may well take some education from this, learning that WinME was not just a freak occurrence of poor sales or timing, but instead that Microsoft is capable of shipping products that even the drones will not flock to en masse.
Fine, I went and looked it up. Proposition 224 in 1998, rejected by the voters 38% in favor to 62% against, would have altered the process for bidding as the following text from the proposition states:
...
This section shall apply to contracts for engineering, architectural, landscape architectural, surveying, environmental, or engineering geology services awarded by the State of California or by any state agency to any public or private entity.
Prior to the award of any contract covered by this section, the Controller shall prepare and verify an analysis of the cost of performing the work using state civil service employees and the cost of the contract. In comparing costs, the cost of performing the work using state civil service employees shall include only the additional direct costs to the State to provide the same services as the contractor, and the cost of the contract shall include all anticipated contract costs and all costs to be incurred by the State, state agencies, and the contracting entity for the bidding, evaluation, and contract award process and for inspecting, supervising, verifying, monitoring, and overseeing the contract.
Emphasis added.
As I stated, CalTrans wanted to skip the cost of using its own staff, thereby artificially lowering the overall cost of their bid through deliberate understatement of the true cost. That is all the required data, with a straight story. I should have done a quick bit of research to find out what the result was, but the fact that it was put forward by CalTrans and some of the legislators of California strongly suggests an attempt to undermine the process and channel almost every contract to CalTrans for no practical reason. That is why I consider it a reason to distrust California government.
Do you have any evidence to back up this 11-fold increase in costs? Some real-world example?
Here in California, CalTrans does have its own engineers and crews. It waged a bitter battle a few years ago where it wanted to be able to exempt the cost of worker salaries in bids on contracts, with the justification that it was already going to pay them, so they shouldn't have to factor in their costs. Outside contractors, of course, argued that this was only a method to guarantee that CalTrans would underbid every project they wanted to bid on because a huge portion of their costs would never appear on the bid. I don't recall how it turned out, but it was yet one more reason to distrust California government.
This is just a rephrasing of what we've been hearing forever:
Windows is a failure by every measure and 1999^w 2000^w 2001^w 2002^w 2003^w 2004^w 2005^w 2006^w 2007^w 2008 may be the Year of Linux that we have all been waiting for.
I've got three Linux systems that I use directly on a regular basis. I routinely compose reports in OpenOffice Writer running on either Fedora or Kubuntu, and make use of nearly a dozen Linux systems at work. I've watched Linux make major strides in easing the experience for the end-user, particularly in terms of wireless networking and general interface friendliness. But there are still things that are terribly frustrating for me -- wireless still has some work to be done -- and that would result in disowning by my friends and family if I tried to force them to use Linux. I'm hoping that it's only a couple more years before home user levels of Linux reach those of Macintosh, and where the majority of users, like those of OS X, are people who just want to get things done without worrying about compiling or odd dependencies. Even with that accomplishment, Windows is unlikely to be displaced as the majority OS anytime in the next decade.
Vista has its issues. If the one presented in TFA is accurate, then it's another example of how Microsoft's model of programming-by-committee is badly broken. Microsoft will probably learn from this some very painful lessons, and either get its act together, or begin a long and painful decline.
There's a hidden point in your words, which is that there are cases where the Core2Duo is a better buy. There are applications where the Intel architecture does beat up on AMD's (video and some rendering come to mind), and so it's a better purchase there. Some people run farms (even small ones of only a half-dozen systems), and a 10% performance difference may mean a 10% difference in their income for contract work.
For most of us, it's not nearly as important, as you say. If my system runs my games 5fps slower, I'm unlikely to notice unless I'm playing something for which it is underbuilt entirely. I recently bought the parts for a core system for my brother (only his drives came along), and the total cost was only about $325. For that, he got an Athlon X2 4200, 2GB RAM, 7800 GS video card, a basic case, and a decent (but not spectacular) motherboard. I priced out an Intel system, and it would have come in around $125 more. Would he know the difference? Probably not. But he's happy enough that most of his games run at spectacular speeds compared to what he had before, and that's what matters.