They have all been full, working, non-upgrade versions.
It depends on the system you use to get it. I was specifically ranting against the Campus Software Program (it may be called differently at your school, and I may have the name wrong). While the Office and other software is a full license, the Windows is an upgrade license. As I said, read the papers you signed carefully! While the CD they give us is a full copy, the license itself is for an upgrade.
There are other avenues of getting Windows at a campus; apparently those CompSci departments who have joined MS's program can give away full verisons of Windows to those in CompSci too. And they apparently (all of this hearsay from those I know in CompSci) are also not terminated if you leave the school sans sheepskin.
They're also spending $12 million on a "student wellness center" this year...i don't get to take my share of that and spend it on a gym membership instead, do i?
Good point. That said, for one, they need to stop adding all this crap to our tuition. (you don't complain every time they raise the tuition by faster-than-inflation?)
Additionally, I'm not arguing about the student wellness center crap; I'm specifically addressing the argument that the Microsoft Campus Software Program is a good deal; I don't believe that it is.
For a college student on a budget, those cheap MS offers can be a godsend.
Why? Because they didn't get a copy of Windows (likely, the latest version of Windows!) with their computer? (Esp. given the tendency to buy new computers when starting college and during college for college). Because they didn't get a word processor and spreadsheet bundled with their computer, or can't go down to the store and snag a copy for $100 academic? I honstly don't see the need for paying $300-$700 over five years for software one has or can less expensively aquire.
loves the $15 Windows they can get, even if its got no manual, or support. and that $10 Office is important when they are using Word in every class.
Once again, I wish to point out that, at least under the Campus Software Program, Windows and Office don't cost $10! To believe so is fallacy; they actually are costing you $60-$140 per year, and you don't get to keep 'em if you don't graduate (i.e. the money goes down the crapper) or if your school decides to stop (more money down the crapper).
File format lockin aside, why would most people need Windows or Office? Most people get an office suite of some variety with their Windows computer. That is sufficient for most of what people need to do. If they don't get Office or WP Office or Works or whatever with their computer, the academic prices are $100 or so for a full copy of Office. So, in the end, they're paying $200+ more than they need in the best (most value-saving) case!
Hasn't it been proven enough times that Linux is only more cost effective than Windows when its support cost(i mean cost in time as well as money) is less than for Windows?
Linux is outside the scope of this argument. I am solely addressing the fallacy that people are getting a great deal with the Campus Software Program.
Windows comes for free on almost any new computer unless you go out of your way to buy one without it (which is next to impossible).
Incorrect. The price of Windows is included with the computer. More accurately, you're claiming that the price of Windows comes bundled in with the cost of the computer, and you have to go out of your way to avoid paying for a copy of Windows with every new PC. This is what you may hear being referred to as the "Microsoft Tax".
Also my campus bookstore sells copies of Windows XP Pro for $20. When coupled with a $20 copy of Office 2003 Pro, there's not much reason for my to use Linux for my office computing needs.
While not impossible, this is highly unlikely. According to Pricewatch, XP Pro Academic Upgrade is currently running $68 ($80 for the boxed version).
More likely is that your university has joined Microsoft's Campus Software Programs (either willingly or because it was coerced by Microsoft; more details if you want). Essentially, the students all pay $30-$70 per semester and, in return, they can go to their local bookstore, show proof of ID, and get an upgrade version of Windows XP (read your license carefully!), and one copy of MS Office. Other software may also be included (at my uni, Publisher and Visual Studio are also included). You then go down to the bookstore and plunk down more money for software you probably don't need anyway on top of the per-semester payments!
Pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Well, for Microsoft anyway--universities shell out even more money for software they likey don't need (as you pointed out, Windows is gonna be installed anyway), and the school will find it even harder to switch away from Microsoft (since that'd require recalling (and auditing the recall of!) every piece of software given out under the programme).
What's worse is hearing people, being fleeced $150-$350 over 5 years,--not counting summer school-- for software they don't need anyway, and hearing them say it's such a great deal because they get Windows XP Pro for $7!
I have to wonder how much more effective the local LUG may be towards closing the Digital Divide by providing Free and Open Source Software for Windows, Mac, Linux, and other OSes for the community through the library. And tutorials on how to use it for free to the community!
Additionally, I wonder how much more effective local LUG support would be for helping the Library convert and maintain newer and older PCs as Linux boxes, either as thin clients for those machines that are too slow, or as full-blown workstations on those that aren't.
I think the we local LUGs could be much more effective than Bill and Melinda!
There is no reason to rely of the fact that most people have [WMP] installed.
Well, actually, there is. If you're developing software and you don't want to have to develop your own player, you can use the WMP components to do that stuff for you.
Now, I'm going to now double back and say that I agree with you.;)
Instead of writing to WMP components, one should (and in an unencumbered (i.e. monopoly-free) ecosystem/market, one could) rather write an open, standard set of APIs for interfacing with media components. This would then be an open standard shared by all media playing vendors and it'd not matter a whit to the programmers (and thus the end users) whether WMP or iTunes or QuickTime or Real or Xine was installed, so long as they met the API.
The question, though, is whether if MS only had 40% market share and they still integrated media player to the (effective) exclusion of alternative components, would people still buy their OS?
Actually, it's more complicated than that.
The minority players are, in fact, bundling different media players with their OSen (e.g. MacOS, BeOS, Linux, BSD). That said, they can't use this bundling to produce enough pressure to really change the market discernably. That would require more marketshare than they have. So it's not the bundling itself that's the issue; it's the side effects of the bundling. As an example, OGG (for the Linux players) and AAC (for iTunes) have extremelylittle market penetration outside of their respective applications, esp. compared with Microsoft's WindowsMedia format. Microsoft only has to sneeze and the OEMs and other hardware/software vendors jump, because when Microsoft sneezes, 90+% of computer users are gonna hold the Kleenex. This is in addition to the licensing issues.
Now it seems to me that end users don't give a crap about any of this and would be happy to buy an OS that forced the use of it's own media player component or its own TCP/IP component or its own zlib library, to the exclusion of competing equivalents.
Agreed; this is the source of Microsoft's power.
If instead of one dominant OS, there were, say, 4 OSes with about 25% market each, I imagine resellers would simply offer to pre-load PCs with whatever end users asked for, thereby shifting the real market force back to end users.
Indeed. However, the users would be
More familiar with competing products, since they will come across other products roughly 1/4 of the time.
Much more free to choose the OS that fit them best, due to networking effects (or, rather, lack thereof).
In addition, the OS maker and vendor takes much more of a risk in offering exclusive bundling deals, since, if they're too exclusive, the users won't buy that and they lose money in the deal. The OS vendor will push for greater interoperability to lower their probability of failure and increase the probability of other users coming over to their system. The OEMs will also be much freer to push back on the OS vendors to modularize, since one OS is effectively as good as another w.r.t. marketshare.
There are plenty of sharp practices that MS engages in such as restrictive licensing deals. They really should focus on those and drop this whole bundling argument.
Indeed. Both should be investigated, since the bundling, as I believe I have shown above, has a real effect on the ecosystem!
I remember a female co-worker spending 2 hours trying to fix a problem, it took me about 30 seconds to point out the network cable was unplugged, and she was the network admin!
Were I her, I'd be waiting and waiting for your "duh" moment to hit, then she can gleefully point out how you're dumb.
Seriously, I would tend to agree; there are dumb and smart females out there just as there're dumb and smart males out there. But you need a better example--we all have "duh" moments where we missed the obvious!
All we need is for someone to release a verion of InstallShield and for app vendors to actually frickin use the sucker. (instead of the command-line-only basic stuff they distribute now (Mathematica, MatLab, macromedia, I'm talking to YOU!) (FWIW, java recently has gotten this right! Nice pretty InstallShield installer)
Double points if the InstallShield version also checks existing libs and programs and then only installs the deps that are not already installed, and even more points if it isolates those deps to its own subdir. Even more points if it interfaces with the distro in question to install what deps it can via that route.
Via that route, we get pretty point-n-click installers and sidestep DLL, nee so, hell.
Well, you may look at this article for a little info. What little I know of it atm (I'm not a java zealot; just someone who's written a few apps and think its reputation for slowness and inconsistency is highly archaic and overrated (like the BSoD and Windows, no?))
It's of course no panacea; you trade off between consistency across platforms (the strength of java) and looklike like you "belong" on the platform, for whatever that may be worth.
The app I mentioned was quite responsive on my K6-2 450 I developed it on; I was surprised, since it had to calculate the eigenstates and eigenenergies of a quantum well (educational app).
To be fair, I've also tried to use the NetBeans and Eclipse IDEs and found them to be pretty slow on the same hardware, so I'm not sure where the problem lies exactly. That said, they seem pretty responsive on my new hardware (even when the pentium-m is scaled down to 600MHz); maybe owing to having much more RAM.
While perceived usability of Linux is certainly a factor, it is just one of many. Much more prominent at the moment, imho, is lack of vendor support in hardware and software.
Heck, my dad (definitely not a computer geek!) uses Linux. So long as it's not tax time, he's very happy and virus-free. So long as it's been set up pretty much "out of the box" (I set it up, same as a vendor would on a pre-installed Windows sytem, plus the stuff that he'd have me do anyway, like set up his email and dialup info (which imho was much, much easier under Linux than Windows 98!).
On the end-user usability front, I think Linux and Windows are equals. Admin usability is still questionable, though I've been very impressed with SuSE thus far. I actually think it could work out well for those users who can figure it out under Windows, provided they don't blindly assume everything's identical between Linux and Windows.
Indeed. FWIW, NT's 16 is less secure than the traditional Unix crypt (there's a paper on it around here somewhere). Although I'd argue that a longer insecure password is still about as insecure as a short insecure password, just takes a *bit* more dictionary digging.
The fairly standard (at least under Linux) MD5 passwords seem better. Though SHA-1 would likely be even more secure (MD5 has a method of causing a collision, although there's no real sploit for it atm, iirc.).
I'm still befuddled as to the upwards moderation you consistently get, however.
Just guessing, but I'd say it's either:
Moderated +1: critical of/.
(since/. always is of unified thought and holds exactly the same opinions)
Moderated +1: critical of Linux/FOSS
(since linux/foss enthusiasts are obviously zealots and closed-minded/ignorant).
Just my own Bitter Experience, freshly ground in the Coffee Mill of Life, filtered through the Filter of Mediocre Opinions, to bring the Fresh, Invigorating Aroma of the Coffee of Cynicism to your Breakfast Table of Thought....
Wow... what a bad metaphor. Definitely bedtime.;) Very interesting post of yours, tho....
Indeed. I agree. I use Linux for 99% of my yearly computing tasks. Exceptions: tax software is really the only thing I'm lacking on Linux.
That said, not all highways (websites), nor parking garages/lots (programs) will work on any car (OS). Most (95%) require Ford (Microsoft). Finally, other drivers (computer users) are scared of the Saturn (Linux), since they've only ever seen and driven Fords and therefore find a Saturn un-intuitive (the light's over there?!). Furthermore, since everyone's garage came with a Ford pre-installed, few people feel the need to buy anything but a Ford, since they've generally already bought one. Finally, the gas stations (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, etc.) are predominantly owned by Ford, so when you go to work, you generally have to either be driving a Ford, or have a Ford-compatible gas tank. So, while you can use Linux quite successfully (indeed, except for a rare exception, I and many others do), a parallel can be drawn between living as a non-Ford, erm, Microsoft user in a Microsoft world and being eaten by ants--lots of small annoyances because one company has the whole industry by the cojones.
Ah, thankye. Actually, having thought further about it, the same systems that were being discussed with the Gelatin Professor are likely to be used in airports as well. Dumb. Thanks for the article. Very informative.:)
I dont think badly about the US; having lived there for an extended period, and visited many times and having many american friends I rather like it. I may not like the current direction of the country, nor the actions of the current administration, but that's not the country itself, and most definitely not the people.
Ah. Good to hear that you like the people and the place itself. There seem to be an awful lot of people out there who just blindly hate the US and hold us to be gun-toting Neanderthals. That said, keep up the informative discussion and we'll see what we US citizens can do to fix the direction we're headed, 'cause lots of us don't like it much either.:)
To be fair, there's a lot of internal scrutiny, too. And Europe (and every other set of countries) has its own, similar problems. We're working on ours just like your working on yours.
[...] the chance of getting mistakenly identified as a criminal is. And as that chance falls into the range of better than one in a thousand, in my opinion it just isnt worth it to visit the US anymore.
What is your source of info?
I agree that computerized biometric systems are easily fooled (see the Gelatin Professor), fingerprint databases have been used extensively and successfully for quite some time.
It's rather sad you all think so badly of the US; it really isn't that bad of a place.
Seems like the Microsoft money ran out, and they need to get a linux investment real quick now so Microsoft can pay 'em to drop it again.;) <tinfoilhat mode="off">
Actually, 1998 wants its Blue Screen of Death back. "M$" is a perennial favorite, esp. given MSFT's penchant for a) charging exorbitant prices for its stuff and b) making unheard-of fortunes (to the tune of $4 billion per quarter).
Taskbars existed before Microsoft. They were in the form of icon collection boxes under various WMs (Window Managers).
Minimize, maximize, and close button locations have varied widely, and are extremely configurable under Linux and are very arbitrary. The only "intuitiveness" about the location is where people have been programmed to look for 'em.
Print dialogs are standardized to various things. Again, "intuitiveness" is (almost) entirely pre-programming.
Browser file integration has existed before MSFT got involved (via the file:/// URL). MSFT upped the ante, though. Whether this is due to trying to crush the competition and dominate an important software sector or enhancing the end user desktop experience depends on whose kool-aid you drink.
"Start" menus again are of dubious intuitiveness. Personally, I found the click-on-root-window-to-bring-up-menus method of various WMs to be much more useful..Net is Java (and indeed the concept of "virtual machine") rehashed and refined and (in the case of most of what people consider ".Net") Microsoft-only. Not a terrible lot of actual innovation there.
I'm not saying MSFT doesn't come up with interesting stuff, just that you need to come up with better examples.;)
One example I'm curious about is tear-away/docking toolbars. I know toolbars/palettes existed before MSFT, but I don't know if the tear-away/docking kind did. Anyone have more info?
Given BB to every house, VoIP can be used for phone communication.
Personally, I think it may take a government mandate to get the phone companies to take out the twisted pair infrastructure and put in fibre to every home.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on the system you use to get it. I was specifically ranting against the Campus Software Program (it may be called differently at your school, and I may have the name wrong). While the Office and other software is a full license, the Windows is an upgrade license. As I said, read the papers you signed carefully! While the CD they give us is a full copy, the license itself is for an upgrade.
There are other avenues of getting Windows at a campus; apparently those CompSci departments who have joined MS's program can give away full verisons of Windows to those in CompSci too. And they apparently (all of this hearsay from those I know in CompSci) are also not terminated if you leave the school sans sheepskin.
Good point. That said, for one, they need to stop adding all this crap to our tuition. (you don't complain every time they raise the tuition by faster-than-inflation?)
Additionally, I'm not arguing about the student wellness center crap; I'm specifically addressing the argument that the Microsoft Campus Software Program is a good deal; I don't believe that it is.
Why? Because they didn't get a copy of Windows (likely, the latest version of Windows!) with their computer? (Esp. given the tendency to buy new computers when starting college and during college for college). Because they didn't get a word processor and spreadsheet bundled with their computer, or can't go down to the store and snag a copy for $100 academic? I honstly don't see the need for paying $300-$700 over five years for software one has or can less expensively aquire.
Once again, I wish to point out that, at least under the Campus Software Program, Windows and Office don't cost $10 ! To believe so is fallacy; they actually are costing you $60-$140 per year , and you don't get to keep 'em if you don't graduate (i.e. the money goes down the crapper) or if your school decides to stop (more money down the crapper).
File format lockin aside, why would most people need Windows or Office? Most people get an office suite of some variety with their Windows computer. That is sufficient for most of what people need to do. If they don't get Office or WP Office or Works or whatever with their computer, the academic prices are $100 or so for a full copy of Office. So, in the end, they're paying $200+ more than they need in the best (most value-saving) case!
Linux is outside the scope of this argument. I am solely addressing the fallacy that people are getting a great deal with the Campus Software Program.
Erm, sorry. Is late. :) At $30-$70/semester, this translates to $300-$700 over 5 years (2 semesters/year). Blah. Am tired.
Incorrect. The price of Windows is included with the computer. More accurately, you're claiming that the price of Windows comes bundled in with the cost of the computer, and you have to go out of your way to avoid paying for a copy of Windows with every new PC. This is what you may hear being referred to as the "Microsoft Tax".
While not impossible, this is highly unlikely. According to Pricewatch, XP Pro Academic Upgrade is currently running $68 ($80 for the boxed version).
More likely is that your university has joined Microsoft's Campus Software Programs (either willingly or because it was coerced by Microsoft; more details if you want). Essentially, the students all pay $30-$70 per semester and, in return, they can go to their local bookstore, show proof of ID, and get an upgrade version of Windows XP (read your license carefully!), and one copy of MS Office. Other software may also be included (at my uni, Publisher and Visual Studio are also included). You then go down to the bookstore and plunk down more money for software you probably don't need anyway on top of the per-semester payments!
Pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Well, for Microsoft anyway--universities shell out even more money for software they likey don't need (as you pointed out, Windows is gonna be installed anyway), and the school will find it even harder to switch away from Microsoft (since that'd require recalling (and auditing the recall of!) every piece of software given out under the programme).
What's worse is hearing people, being fleeced $150-$350 over 5 years,--not counting summer school-- for software they don't need anyway, and hearing them say it's such a great deal because they get Windows XP Pro for $7!
I have to wonder how much more effective the local LUG may be towards closing the Digital Divide by providing Free and Open Source Software for Windows, Mac, Linux, and other OSes for the community through the library. And tutorials on how to use it for free to the community!
Additionally, I wonder how much more effective local LUG support would be for helping the Library convert and maintain newer and older PCs as Linux boxes, either as thin clients for those machines that are too slow, or as full-blown workstations on those that aren't.
I think the we local LUGs could be much more effective than Bill and Melinda!
Well, actually, there is. If you're developing software and you don't want to have to develop your own player, you can use the WMP components to do that stuff for you.
Now, I'm going to now double back and say that I agree with you. ;)
Instead of writing to WMP components, one should (and in an unencumbered (i.e. monopoly-free) ecosystem/market, one could) rather write an open, standard set of APIs for interfacing with media components . This would then be an open standard shared by all media playing vendors and it'd not matter a whit to the programmers (and thus the end users) whether WMP or iTunes or QuickTime or Real or Xine was installed, so long as they met the API.
iirc, this is what the Real Helix DRM stuff does.
Link to Real Helix DRM brochure
Actually, it's more complicated than that.
The minority players are, in fact, bundling different media players with their OSen (e.g. MacOS, BeOS, Linux, BSD). That said, they can't use this bundling to produce enough pressure to really change the market discernably. That would require more marketshare than they have. So it's not the bundling itself that's the issue; it's the side effects of the bundling. As an example, OGG (for the Linux players) and AAC (for iTunes) have extremelylittle market penetration outside of their respective applications, esp. compared with Microsoft's WindowsMedia format. Microsoft only has to sneeze and the OEMs and other hardware/software vendors jump, because when Microsoft sneezes, 90+% of computer users are gonna hold the Kleenex . This is in addition to the licensing issues.
Agreed; this is the source of Microsoft's power.
Indeed. However, the users would be
In addition, the OS maker and vendor takes much more of a risk in offering exclusive bundling deals, since, if they're too exclusive, the users won't buy that and they lose money in the deal. The OS vendor will push for greater interoperability to lower their probability of failure and increase the probability of other users coming over to their system. The OEMs will also be much freer to push back on the OS vendors to modularize, since one OS is effectively as good as another w.r.t. marketshare.
Indeed. Both should be investigated, since the bundling, as I believe I have shown above, has a real effect on the ecosystem!
Were I her, I'd be waiting and waiting for your "duh" moment to hit, then she can gleefully point out how you're dumb.
Seriously, I would tend to agree; there are dumb and smart females out there just as there're dumb and smart males out there. But you need a better example--we all have "duh" moments where we missed the obvious!
"red weed situation"?
Not necessarily.
All we need is for someone to release a verion of InstallShield and for app vendors to actually frickin use the sucker. (instead of the command-line-only basic stuff they distribute now (Mathematica, MatLab, macromedia, I'm talking to YOU!) (FWIW, java recently has gotten this right! Nice pretty InstallShield installer)
Double points if the InstallShield version also checks existing libs and programs and then only installs the deps that are not already installed, and even more points if it isolates those deps to its own subdir. Even more points if it interfaces with the distro in question to install what deps it can via that route.
Via that route, we get pretty point-n-click installers and sidestep DLL, nee so, hell.
wondered about that. s/ 400MHz/ 450MHz/. :)
Well, you may look at this article for a little info. What little I know of it atm (I'm not a java zealot; just someone who's written a few apps and think its reputation for slowness and inconsistency is highly archaic and overrated (like the BSoD and Windows, no?))
It's of course no panacea; you trade off between consistency across platforms (the strength of java) and looklike like you "belong" on the platform, for whatever that may be worth.
The app I mentioned was quite responsive on my K6-2 450 I developed it on; I was surprised, since it had to calculate the eigenstates and eigenenergies of a quantum well (educational app).
To be fair, I've also tried to use the NetBeans and Eclipse IDEs and found them to be pretty slow on the same hardware, so I'm not sure where the problem lies exactly. That said, they seem pretty responsive on my new hardware (even when the pentium-m is scaled down to 600MHz); maybe owing to having much more RAM.
Actually, the Swing widgets are neither ugly nor slow. They replicate the native widgetset if you tell it to, and it ran quite well on my K6-2 400MHz.
While perceived usability of Linux is certainly a factor, it is just one of many. Much more prominent at the moment, imho, is lack of vendor support in hardware and software.
Heck, my dad (definitely not a computer geek!) uses Linux. So long as it's not tax time, he's very happy and virus-free. So long as it's been set up pretty much "out of the box" (I set it up, same as a vendor would on a pre-installed Windows sytem, plus the stuff that he'd have me do anyway, like set up his email and dialup info (which imho was much, much easier under Linux than Windows 98!).
On the end-user usability front, I think Linux and Windows are equals. Admin usability is still questionable, though I've been very impressed with SuSE thus far. I actually think it could work out well for those users who can figure it out under Windows, provided they don't blindly assume everything's identical between Linux and Windows.
Indeed. FWIW, NT's 16 is less secure than the traditional Unix crypt (there's a paper on it around here somewhere). Although I'd argue that a longer insecure password is still about as insecure as a short insecure password, just takes a *bit* more dictionary digging.
The fairly standard (at least under Linux) MD5 passwords seem better. Though SHA-1 would likely be even more secure (MD5 has a method of causing a collision, although there's no real sploit for it atm, iirc.).
Just guessing, but I'd say it's either:
Just my own Bitter Experience, freshly ground in the Coffee Mill of Life, filtered through the Filter of Mediocre Opinions, to bring the Fresh, Invigorating Aroma of the Coffee of Cynicism to your Breakfast Table of Thought....
Wow... what a bad metaphor. Definitely bedtime. ;) Very interesting post of yours, tho....
Actually, I do buy different brands. I like selection and choice.
Indeed. I agree. I use Linux for 99% of my yearly computing tasks. Exceptions: tax software is really the only thing I'm lacking on Linux.
:)
That said, not all highways (websites), nor parking garages/lots (programs) will work on any car (OS). Most (95%) require Ford (Microsoft). Finally, other drivers (computer users) are scared of the Saturn (Linux), since they've only ever seen and driven Fords and therefore find a Saturn un-intuitive (the light's over there?!). Furthermore, since everyone's garage came with a Ford pre-installed, few people feel the need to buy anything but a Ford, since they've generally already bought one. Finally, the gas stations (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, etc.) are predominantly owned by Ford, so when you go to work, you generally have to either be driving a Ford, or have a Ford-compatible gas tank. So, while you can use Linux quite successfully (indeed, except for a rare exception, I and many others do), a parallel can be drawn between living as a non-Ford, erm, Microsoft user in a Microsoft world and being eaten by ants--lots of small annoyances because one company has the whole industry by the cojones.
Just to pull a (not very great) parallel here.
Actually, having thought further about it, the same systems that were being discussed with the Gelatin Professor are likely to be used in airports as well. Dumb.
Thanks for the article. Very informative.
Ah. Good to hear that you like the people and the place itself. There seem to be an awful lot of people out there who just blindly hate the US and hold us to be gun-toting Neanderthals.
That said, keep up the informative discussion and we'll see what we US citizens can do to fix the direction we're headed, 'cause lots of us don't like it much either.
Then you should boycott the EU as well; they will soon have their own passenger tracking info, and fingerprinting their own citizenry via biometric passports (fingerprints and other stuff) are in the works.
To be fair, there's a lot of internal scrutiny, too. And Europe (and every other set of countries) has its own, similar problems. We're working on ours just like your working on yours.
What is your source of info?
I agree that computerized biometric systems are easily fooled (see the Gelatin Professor), fingerprint databases have been used extensively and successfully for quite some time.
It's rather sad you all think so badly of the US; it really isn't that bad of a place.
Seems like the Microsoft money ran out, and they need to get a linux investment real quick now so Microsoft can pay 'em to drop it again. ;)
<tinfoilhat mode="off">
Actually, 1998 wants its Blue Screen of Death back. "M$" is a perennial favorite, esp. given MSFT's penchant for a) charging exorbitant prices for its stuff and b) making unheard-of fortunes (to the tune of $4 billion per quarter).
Taskbars existed before Microsoft. They were in the form of icon collection boxes under various WMs (Window Managers).
Minimize, maximize, and close button locations have varied widely, and are extremely configurable under Linux and are very arbitrary. The only "intuitiveness" about the location is where people have been programmed to look for 'em.
Print dialogs are standardized to various things. Again, "intuitiveness" is (almost) entirely pre-programming.
Browser file integration has existed before MSFT got involved (via the file:/// URL). MSFT upped the ante, though. Whether this is due to trying to crush the competition and dominate an important software sector or enhancing the end user desktop experience depends on whose kool-aid you drink.
"Start" menus again are of dubious intuitiveness. Personally, I found the click-on-root-window-to-bring-up-menus method of various WMs to be much more useful.
I'm not saying MSFT doesn't come up with interesting stuff, just that you need to come up with better examples.
One example I'm curious about is tear-away/docking toolbars. I know toolbars/palettes existed before MSFT, but I don't know if the tear-away/docking kind did. Anyone have more info?
Not necessarily.
Given BB to every house, VoIP can be used for phone communication.
Personally, I think it may take a government mandate to get the phone companies to take out the twisted pair infrastructure and put in fibre to every home.