If you are distributing binaries non-commercially and you got those binaries as is from elsewhere (ie didn't compile it yourself from source) then you can simply pass on the offer that you were given, as per 3c of the GPL.
Otherwise if I were giving a Ubuntu CD to a friend I'd have to be prepared to distribute the source to him too! As it is I can just refer him to the offer Ubuntu gave me. Interestingly, if you weren't given an offer of the source (because you were given the source itself), you'd be in violation if you just handed them the CD.
Although it seems to me that the doctrine of first-sale should apply here. You should be free to give or sell the unmodified source to anyone you please, under this doctrine.
The question is whether or not the perception of the strength of the company would go down due to increased security flaw reporting. Being a monopoly, Microsoft doesn't have to worry too much about selling copies of Windows. Their biggest and most important customers are businesses, who want business solutions. Right now, Microsoft has a stranglehold on that market. Apple just doesn't have enterprisey solutions for a lot of things like large-scale e-mail, caldenraring, workstation management, profile management etc. Linux can do these things, but I haven't seen a company make a Linux product that does it as easily and in a way that scales as Microsoft. They've basically got a monopoly on this market, and it is in part because they actually do good work in this area.
No large business is going to switch their desktops from Microsoft. A combination of enterprisey stuff above, familiarity, and application compatibility would be enough, but throw in the cost of migration (which includes no small amount of training and infrastructure modifications) and it's truly a lock.
Of course, most of that is actually irrelevant for stock. Stocks rise and fall because of publicity and press. Watch sometime--when a negative story hits the mainstream, stock will slip a bit. When a good story does, it rises. It doesn't matter if the story has nothing to do with sales or the status of the company--the CEO can be caught having an affair, and people will sell.
Apply that to Microsoft. If Microsoft published vulnerabilities that were found in-house, it could lead to a slip in their stock. It almost certainly wouldn't be huge, but when you're a company worth as much as Microsoft is, tenths of a percent can represent millions of dollars. And the problem is that whether the publications would even cause the slip is an unknown, but since it's almost certainly not going to increase faith in the company, it's best to not report it.
Knowledge is power, and corporations tend to realize this. The more you can keep a secret, unless you're going to receive some benefit, the better.
I could accept that publishing vulnerabilities might lead to a drop in sales if there were easy replacements for Microsoft's enterprise solutions. Enough bad press really might make some companies think about switching. As it stands, though, I just don't see it happening.
Conversion is mandated in some religions. If the religion you subscribe to demands that you convert non-believers into followers of your religion, then a follower would feel that they must do it.
Then s/he shouldn't have said:
There's no excuse for delaying a security patch, even a couple weeks. They have the ability to patch vulnerabilities in a timely fashion, and are deliberately not doing so.
In this case, the stock doesn't go down just because they had too many security holes, the stock goes down because too many security holes make their products harder to sell. Except that in this case, they don't, because Microsoft is a monopoly.
There are two reasons for delaying patches that, if they aren't "good", are at least debatably good.
One is testing. You don't want to issue a patch that breaks critical functionality. Since we're talking about the OS, that means that you don't want to break anything. Who knows what people out there might be relying on?
The other is business, Microsoft's core clientele. Businesses want to test patches with their installation, then deploy them, and they want to do it on a predictable schedule. Patch Tuesday works for businesses. Releasing patches to everyone else earlier would simply give the bad guys information to attack the businesses that aren't getting the patches until later.
It's not black-and-white. Anyone who claims that it is probably just hates Microsoft and is looking for more fuel to drive that hatred.
A few more people buy Apple computers, but developers don't. Developers mostly move to Windows, since it maximizes the market share.
Microsoft changes the API just enough to break compatibility with OS X. They release patches for their older OSes.
Microsoft releases new version of Office and Visual Studio, which use secret, undocumented API calls, incompatible with Apple. They also offer these free to their larger customers.
Unable to run the new applications, customers flock back to Microsoft OS in droves. Since no one develops for OS X anymore, the application base crumbles.
Apple stock drops.
Apple announces that it is dropping its computer line.
Why do you think that WINE is the reason that native applications aren't developed, as opposed to the tiny marketshare?
Like it or not, there just aren't that many Linux users out there compared to Windows users. In many cases, it just doesn't make sense to target Linux for commercial software.
You may be reading in a little based upon your own biases.
Sometimes we have to read things that we find distasteful: if we can't handle that we shouldn't frequent public forums like Slashdot. Right. I didn't say that you didn't have a right to say it. I didn't say that you shouldn't have said it. If you'll read what I said, and try not to read anything into it, I said that some people feel this way. It was a direct response to your comment about being moderated down, and your assumption that it was creationists who did it.
I'm not a religious person myself, and I've been ridiculed for that on numerous occasions by those same touchy, sensitive people you speak of. You're doing it again. You're lumping everyone into a the same category.
I'm sorry that you've had bad experiences with some religious people. I can't imagine why one would ridicule a person based on their atheist or agnostic choices--it doesn't make all that much sense, to me. That said, you're being pretty intolerant and unpleasant yourself, here. You're lumping all religious people together, assuming that if a person is religious that they must be intolerant, hypersensitive, and unpleasant. Guess what? There are a lot of religious people who just go about their lives--they don't berate you for your choices, they don't bomb abortion clinics, they don't demand that religion be taught in science class. It's really unfortunate that the fringe give the majority such a bad name in some people's (yours and others) eyes.
My point was that there may be Slashdotters who think that it's rude to blas religion as you did, and they modded you down. Taking it a step further, it's not even that bad a way to live. The world would be a much better place if people chose to be kinder to each other, even when their views differ, and even when they think that their neighbor is acting in a stupid way.
If it's unprovabal, it's not science This is not entirely true.
First of all, my understanding (and it's been a long time since I had a formal science class) is that science doesn't prove anything--rather, a hypothesis and null hypothesis are created, and you try to refute the null hypothesis. Correctly set up pairs of hytotheses and null hypotheses (and a rejected null hypothesis) is said to support the hypothesis. It sounds nitpicky, but it's an important distinction to make when dealing with irrational people.
Second, there is a great deal of "science" which is not "provable." For example, there's not really an experiment that can be set up to support the Big Bang theory--yet it is taught in science. A huge portion of biology and geology are devoted to nomenclature, which is not testable or provable. Yet almost no one would suggest that these shouldn't be a part of science classes because they are fundamental to later material.
I love the fact that ID people argue that evolution is just a "theory", "and even scientists call it that." All well and good, until you realize that "gravity" is also considered a theory. It's a symptom of the difference in vocabulary. Lay persons don't understand that theory means something different to scientists. Unfortunately, boards of education don't understand this, either.
(I love it when ID people act as if the entire concept of evolution is under speculation, simply because scientists aren't quite sure of the details) This is largely because they heard it somewhere else. They don't study the subject they argue against. Instead, they get information from their pastors to fight evolution. It sounds paranoid, but I have first-hand knowledge that supports it.
Of course, on the flip side, most evolutionists probably haven't read books on ID, either. When you do, some of it can sound pretty compelling. They throw a lot of statistics and probability in the mix so that it sound rational. But even with all of that, it's not science and that's exactly why it doesn't belong in science class.
No, but a person who has empathy might choose not to do or say something that is likely to cause a lot of people emotional distress. And in many countries, religion is a sensitive subject to a lot of people.
Not necessarily. There are religious people who don't believe in creationism. There are also people who consider religion to be something that you don't joke about, because it's a sensitive subject to other people. It's called empathy.
As a post-script, here is one other anecdote. In college I was party to a similar debate. One girl, arguing the ID side, was at one point confronted by another student with the statement, "This is basic logic!" To which she replied, "Yeah, human logic, maybe." Yeah, and that's the gist of ID. It's unprovable. Or more specifically, it doesn't have a provable null hypothesis. It's the same with all religion, and you know what? That doesn't bother me. I don't have a problem with a religion that isn't perfectly logical. I don't have a problem with a religion whose beliefs don't fit with the laws of physics or biology. This is a integral part of Christianity. You might as well attack Jesus' conception, or his many miracles throughout the Bible. Those are all just as impossible as the paradoxes you argued against. The nature of the miracle is that it is impossible, yet it happened.
What I do have a problem with is teaching inhuman logic in a human science class. The world works according to certain rules, and trying to inject extra-worldly concepts isn't appropriate.
If you read through the article, it's not just about crashes. He also complains about "fixing" an interface that didn't need fixing. That's one of my biggest complaints with Vista--and frankly, with every new Microsoft release. They changed the location of settings between Win2k, WinXP, and Vista. They constantly change the Start menu. Everything changes, but it doesn't seem to be for the better. It seems to be simply to differentiate the OS from its predecessor.
He complains about other things, but I don't know that I agree with them. His beef with glitz, for example: Vista went overboard with the glitz, in order to compete with OS X, whereas OS X's glitz has always seemed (and still seems) muted. Simple, unobtrusive, and nice looking. And it didn't change significantly from Tiger.
In school, your percentage grade is fairly objective. 50% means that you got 50% of the questions right. In order to get the students to fall half above and half below, you'd have to specifically design the test with this in min. Instead (ostensibly), tests are designed to determine mastery of the subject material. If everyone masters it, everyone gets 100%.
With reviews, it's a different ballgame. Although there may be metrics that some reviewers use to rate games, the purpose of the review is solely to give your subjective opinion on the game. While in school, there is meaning given to scores (level of mastery of the subject), with gaming, just about the only use for the rating is for comparison. Is this game generally considered better than that one? As such, it makes sense to use the entire scale.
...and if the NSA could crack AES-128, what would you expect to hear from them and any security-cleared academics involved? Let me lay it out for you bluntly. They'd say something along the lines of "The algorithm has been extensively critiqued and found to be strong." Though since the algorithm is public anyone can examine it, including people who are NOT under NDA.
Also, there's quite a difference between what Dr. Joe Honest, working on his stipend until 4pm each day with what he, his TA, and his mighty 3 GHz windows or linux machine can do, and an organization that has billions in budget normally, can get more anytime they ask, no difficult goals but breaking encryption and signal intercept, and which has made it a point to hire as many of the best minds in encryption as possible for, oh, say the last fifty years or so. And this in a world where quantum attacks are thought to be only a matter of sufficiently developed technology. If we're talking about a brute-force, the math is pretty easy to figure out. You decide that you protect your data from X computing power, and you realize that if someone has X^2 computing power, they're going to get your data. Generally speaking, that's the best that you can do.
If we're talking about flaws in the algorithm that allow someone with a "secret key" to decrypt the data, then we're talking about a whole level of conspiracy and obfuscation. I don't put it past the government to do this, but at the same time, this is a harder thing to do when the algorithms are publicly available. You can bet that other governments with big budgets want to break AES, too. So if the NSA approved it for US government use, they probably believe it to be secure.
Others have pointed out non-computational attacks on cryptography, such as keyloggers or interrogation. I don't think that these are good arguments against the use of cryptography in general--realistically, they're good arguments against ever making hard copies of extremely sensitive data in the first place.
I don't particularly want my government to have a profile on me. It's not that I have anything to hide, it's just that I value privacy. If I store data online, and the government makes a deal with Google to let them profile everyone's data, encryption will allow me to limit the profile a bit. If they can break the encryption, then I'm still not in a terrible situation. But if they really wanted my data, they'd get it, through subpoena or interrogation or some other method, so realistically, I'm just protecting against sweeps and the corporation itself reading my data. As long as a person understands all of this, it's really no big deal.
And uninstalling through the Control Panel doesn't do anything more than uninstalling from the application's "uninstall" application
Pretty damned lazy/iunprofessional on MS's part. Simply shoddy. No operating system that I'm aware of handles this in the way that you seem to want them to. Third party packages are well outside the operating system's control. It tends to work better on Linux because it's all packaged up by the distribution maintainer, but it's really quite easy to create a.deb or.rpm that doesn't fully uninstall when you tell it to. You're pretty obviously just trying to find something to bash Microsoft for.
Don't you need a driver from the manufacturer for this?
Linux has no problem with it. Yeah. And up until a few years ago, Linux driver support was crap. There's been a pretty big push lately to increase the quality and quantity of drivers on Linux. But a lot of that support comes from the manufacturer, too--it's just included with Linux because the kernel maintainer decided to include it.
With Windows drivers (from the manufacturer), there are typically non-redistribute clauses in the EULA. Microsoft would have to partner with the device maker in order to include the driver. This isn't something you can reasonably hold against them.
If you had sound working in Windows 98, I'd bet good money that you (or the previous owner, be that an individual or the company that sold you the computer) installed third-party drivers to get it working. Regardless, you can't blame XP for third-party hardware not working.
98 found the drivers from the CD that came with the motherboard. XP couldn't find them. Were there XP drivers on the CD?
I don't experience anybody else's life, I only experience mine. In my experiennce I can't speak for Apple, since I never owned one. I can speak for Windows and Linux. I have no problems whatever with Linux, despite only using it for a few years, while I've been using MS OSes since DOS 3.1. Right, but saying that something is crap based upon only your own experience is not being objective. You don't care for Windows XP? Fine. I'm not trying to change your opinion on whether the operating system is right for you. I'm trying to point out that your experiences are the aberration.
I'm glad that you're able to examine things so objectively, then. Being capable of understanding that you're in the minority, yet still making the claim that "it's crap." That was sarcasm, in case it didn't translate well into text.
Most of your problems don't sound like Windows problems, to me.
It disabled the Roxio drivers, and told me so every time the damned thing booted even though I uninstalled Roxio through Control Panel. Common Roxio problem. And uninstalling through the Control Panel doesn't do anything more than uninstalling from the application's "uninstall" application. "Add/Remove Programs" is just a central location for programs to register themselves and their uninstallers.
Its Automatic Update replaced a perfectly good ethernet driver with one that didn't work at all. I've never heard of Automatic Update installing Optional or Hardware drivers (which is what an Ethernet driver would fall under.) For those, you have to go to the Windows Update site, yourself. Are we getting the whole story here?
It won't recognize the onboard sound chip Don't you need a driver from the manufacturer for this?
even though 98 had no problem with it and Linux has no problems with it. Windows actually comes with very few drivers--something I wish that Microsoft could handle differently. It would be really nice if things worked out of the box on a new install without having to hunt down drivers. That said, I know a fair amount about Windows 98's driverbase, and sound just wasn't well supported there. If you had sound working in Windows 98, I'd bet good money that you (or the previous owner, be that an individual or the company that sold you the computer) installed third-party drivers to get it working. Regardless, you can't blame XP for third-party hardware not working.
Anyway, you seem pretty unwilling to look beyond your own experiences. Sounds like a typical American Slashdotter (I'm American, too, by the way.)
Well, yeah. For me, having everything on one screen is nice. But I usually work on a 1920x1200 desktop, so it works. I can have 3 xterms open on the left, and a full browser window on the right without overlap. With dual 1280x1024 monitors, I can get 6 xterms on one monitor without overlap.
The screen man page isn't the best, but it's got lots of useful gems. I like -x because I typically lock my workstation at work, and so I can just reattach from home without detatching remotely (since I typically have multiple xterms with the same screen session open, it's helpful to avoid detatching all of them just to get access to the screen remotely.) Although you can do without the multiple xterms by using screen regions, I find these to be clunky, so I avoid them.
My other favorite trick is using a special rc file to set up my screen session. For example:
vbell on startup_message off defscrollback 1000 screen -t epic 0 screen -t mutt screen -t firewall
This creates a screen with my default preferences and 3 terminals: one each named epic, mutt, and firewall. The whole config is a bit longer.
Slashdot Mirror
Otherwise if I were giving a Ubuntu CD to a friend I'd have to be prepared to distribute the source to him too! As it is I can just refer him to the offer Ubuntu gave me. Interestingly, if you weren't given an offer of the source (because you were given the source itself), you'd be in violation if you just handed them the CD.
Although it seems to me that the doctrine of first-sale should apply here. You should be free to give or sell the unmodified source to anyone you please, under this doctrine.
The question is whether or not the perception of the strength of the company would go down due to increased security flaw reporting. Being a monopoly, Microsoft doesn't have to worry too much about selling copies of Windows. Their biggest and most important customers are businesses, who want business solutions. Right now, Microsoft has a stranglehold on that market. Apple just doesn't have enterprisey solutions for a lot of things like large-scale e-mail, caldenraring, workstation management, profile management etc. Linux can do these things, but I haven't seen a company make a Linux product that does it as easily and in a way that scales as Microsoft. They've basically got a monopoly on this market, and it is in part because they actually do good work in this area.
No large business is going to switch their desktops from Microsoft. A combination of enterprisey stuff above, familiarity, and application compatibility would be enough, but throw in the cost of migration (which includes no small amount of training and infrastructure modifications) and it's truly a lock.
Of course, most of that is actually irrelevant for stock. Stocks rise and fall because of publicity and press. Watch sometime--when a negative story hits the mainstream, stock will slip a bit. When a good story does, it rises. It doesn't matter if the story has nothing to do with sales or the status of the company--the CEO can be caught having an affair, and people will sell.
Apply that to Microsoft. If Microsoft published vulnerabilities that were found in-house, it could lead to a slip in their stock. It almost certainly wouldn't be huge, but when you're a company worth as much as Microsoft is, tenths of a percent can represent millions of dollars. And the problem is that whether the publications would even cause the slip is an unknown, but since it's almost certainly not going to increase faith in the company, it's best to not report it.
Knowledge is power, and corporations tend to realize this. The more you can keep a secret, unless you're going to receive some benefit, the better.
I could accept that publishing vulnerabilities might lead to a drop in sales if there were easy replacements for Microsoft's enterprise solutions. Enough bad press really might make some companies think about switching. As it stands, though, I just don't see it happening.
You got me. I'm a hypocrite. Enjoy your win.
Way to look at it in black-and-white. And that right there is the problem with most people these days.
There's an exception to every rule.
Conversion is mandated in some religions. If the religion you subscribe to demands that you convert non-believers into followers of your religion, then a follower would feel that they must do it.
There are two reasons for delaying patches that, if they aren't "good", are at least debatably good.
One is testing. You don't want to issue a patch that breaks critical functionality. Since we're talking about the OS, that means that you don't want to break anything. Who knows what people out there might be relying on?
The other is business, Microsoft's core clientele. Businesses want to test patches with their installation, then deploy them, and they want to do it on a predictable schedule. Patch Tuesday works for businesses. Releasing patches to everyone else earlier would simply give the bad guys information to attack the businesses that aren't getting the patches until later.
It's not black-and-white. Anyone who claims that it is probably just hates Microsoft and is looking for more fuel to drive that hatred.
Why do you think that WINE is the reason that native applications aren't developed, as opposed to the tiny marketshare?
Like it or not, there just aren't that many Linux users out there compared to Windows users. In many cases, it just doesn't make sense to target Linux for commercial software.
Sun also gives away most of their OS, and they still make a pretty decent amount of money. Of course, they aren't targeting desktop users.
That was my thought.
If I saw a headline which read, "Windows Dev Team to foo" I would assume that it was someone associated with Microsoft.
I'm sorry that you've had bad experiences with some religious people. I can't imagine why one would ridicule a person based on their atheist or agnostic choices--it doesn't make all that much sense, to me. That said, you're being pretty intolerant and unpleasant yourself, here. You're lumping all religious people together, assuming that if a person is religious that they must be intolerant, hypersensitive, and unpleasant. Guess what? There are a lot of religious people who just go about their lives--they don't berate you for your choices, they don't bomb abortion clinics, they don't demand that religion be taught in science class. It's really unfortunate that the fringe give the majority such a bad name in some people's (yours and others) eyes.
My point was that there may be Slashdotters who think that it's rude to blas religion as you did, and they modded you down. Taking it a step further, it's not even that bad a way to live. The world would be a much better place if people chose to be kinder to each other, even when their views differ, and even when they think that their neighbor is acting in a stupid way.
First of all, my understanding (and it's been a long time since I had a formal science class) is that science doesn't prove anything--rather, a hypothesis and null hypothesis are created, and you try to refute the null hypothesis. Correctly set up pairs of hytotheses and null hypotheses (and a rejected null hypothesis) is said to support the hypothesis. It sounds nitpicky, but it's an important distinction to make when dealing with irrational people.
Second, there is a great deal of "science" which is not "provable." For example, there's not really an experiment that can be set up to support the Big Bang theory--yet it is taught in science. A huge portion of biology and geology are devoted to nomenclature, which is not testable or provable. Yet almost no one would suggest that these shouldn't be a part of science classes because they are fundamental to later material. I love the fact that ID people argue that evolution is just a "theory", "and even scientists call it that." All well and good, until you realize that "gravity" is also considered a theory. It's a symptom of the difference in vocabulary. Lay persons don't understand that theory means something different to scientists. Unfortunately, boards of education don't understand this, either. (I love it when ID people act as if the entire concept of evolution is under speculation, simply because scientists aren't quite sure of the details) This is largely because they heard it somewhere else. They don't study the subject they argue against. Instead, they get information from their pastors to fight evolution. It sounds paranoid, but I have first-hand knowledge that supports it.
Of course, on the flip side, most evolutionists probably haven't read books on ID, either. When you do, some of it can sound pretty compelling. They throw a lot of statistics and probability in the mix so that it sound rational. But even with all of that, it's not science and that's exactly why it doesn't belong in science class.
No, but a person who has empathy might choose not to do or say something that is likely to cause a lot of people emotional distress. And in many countries, religion is a sensitive subject to a lot of people.
Not necessarily. There are religious people who don't believe in creationism. There are also people who consider religion to be something that you don't joke about, because it's a sensitive subject to other people. It's called empathy.
What I do have a problem with is teaching inhuman logic in a human science class. The world works according to certain rules, and trying to inject extra-worldly concepts isn't appropriate.
If you read through the article, it's not just about crashes. He also complains about "fixing" an interface that didn't need fixing. That's one of my biggest complaints with Vista--and frankly, with every new Microsoft release. They changed the location of settings between Win2k, WinXP, and Vista. They constantly change the Start menu. Everything changes, but it doesn't seem to be for the better. It seems to be simply to differentiate the OS from its predecessor.
He complains about other things, but I don't know that I agree with them. His beef with glitz, for example: Vista went overboard with the glitz, in order to compete with OS X, whereas OS X's glitz has always seemed (and still seems) muted. Simple, unobtrusive, and nice looking. And it didn't change significantly from Tiger.
In school, your percentage grade is fairly objective. 50% means that you got 50% of the questions right. In order to get the students to fall half above and half below, you'd have to specifically design the test with this in min. Instead (ostensibly), tests are designed to determine mastery of the subject material. If everyone masters it, everyone gets 100%.
With reviews, it's a different ballgame. Although there may be metrics that some reviewers use to rate games, the purpose of the review is solely to give your subjective opinion on the game. While in school, there is meaning given to scores (level of mastery of the subject), with gaming, just about the only use for the rating is for comparison. Is this game generally considered better than that one? As such, it makes sense to use the entire scale.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/03/1241217
...and if the NSA could crack AES-128, what would you expect to hear from them and any security-cleared academics involved? Let me lay it out for you bluntly. They'd say something along the lines of "The algorithm has been extensively critiqued and found to be strong." Though since the algorithm is public anyone can examine it, including people who are NOT under NDA. Also, there's quite a difference between what Dr. Joe Honest, working on his stipend until 4pm each day with what he, his TA, and his mighty 3 GHz windows or linux machine can do, and an organization that has billions in budget normally, can get more anytime they ask, no difficult goals but breaking encryption and signal intercept, and which has made it a point to hire as many of the best minds in encryption as possible for, oh, say the last fifty years or so. And this in a world where quantum attacks are thought to be only a matter of sufficiently developed technology. If we're talking about a brute-force, the math is pretty easy to figure out. You decide that you protect your data from X computing power, and you realize that if someone has X^2 computing power, they're going to get your data. Generally speaking, that's the best that you can do.If we're talking about flaws in the algorithm that allow someone with a "secret key" to decrypt the data, then we're talking about a whole level of conspiracy and obfuscation. I don't put it past the government to do this, but at the same time, this is a harder thing to do when the algorithms are publicly available. You can bet that other governments with big budgets want to break AES, too. So if the NSA approved it for US government use, they probably believe it to be secure.
Others have pointed out non-computational attacks on cryptography, such as keyloggers or interrogation. I don't think that these are good arguments against the use of cryptography in general--realistically, they're good arguments against ever making hard copies of extremely sensitive data in the first place.
I don't particularly want my government to have a profile on me. It's not that I have anything to hide, it's just that I value privacy. If I store data online, and the government makes a deal with Google to let them profile everyone's data, encryption will allow me to limit the profile a bit. If they can break the encryption, then I'm still not in a terrible situation. But if they really wanted my data, they'd get it, through subpoena or interrogation or some other method, so realistically, I'm just protecting against sweeps and the corporation itself reading my data. As long as a person understands all of this, it's really no big deal.
And uninstalling through the Control Panel doesn't do anything more than uninstalling from the application's "uninstall" application
Pretty damned lazy/iunprofessional on MS's part. Simply shoddy. No operating system that I'm aware of handles this in the way that you seem to want them to. Third party packages are well outside the operating system's control. It tends to work better on Linux because it's all packaged up by the distribution maintainer, but it's really quite easy to create a
Linux has no problem with it. Yeah. And up until a few years ago, Linux driver support was crap. There's been a pretty big push lately to increase the quality and quantity of drivers on Linux. But a lot of that support comes from the manufacturer, too--it's just included with Linux because the kernel maintainer decided to include it.
With Windows drivers (from the manufacturer), there are typically non-redistribute clauses in the EULA. Microsoft would have to partner with the device maker in order to include the driver. This isn't something you can reasonably hold against them. If you had sound working in Windows 98, I'd bet good money that you (or the previous owner, be that an individual or the company that sold you the computer) installed third-party drivers to get it working. Regardless, you can't blame XP for third-party hardware not working.
98 found the drivers from the CD that came with the motherboard. XP couldn't find them. Were there XP drivers on the CD? I don't experience anybody else's life, I only experience mine. In my experiennce I can't speak for Apple, since I never owned one. I can speak for Windows and Linux. I have no problems whatever with Linux, despite only using it for a few years, while I've been using MS OSes since DOS 3.1. Right, but saying that something is crap based upon only your own experience is not being objective. You don't care for Windows XP? Fine. I'm not trying to change your opinion on whether the operating system is right for you. I'm trying to point out that your experiences are the aberration.
That was Eurotrip. You just admitted to watching Eurotrip.
Wait. So did I.
Most of your problems don't sound like Windows problems, to me. It disabled the Roxio drivers, and told me so every time the damned thing booted even though I uninstalled Roxio through Control Panel. Common Roxio problem. And uninstalling through the Control Panel doesn't do anything more than uninstalling from the application's "uninstall" application. "Add/Remove Programs" is just a central location for programs to register themselves and their uninstallers. Its Automatic Update replaced a perfectly good ethernet driver with one that didn't work at all. I've never heard of Automatic Update installing Optional or Hardware drivers (which is what an Ethernet driver would fall under.) For those, you have to go to the Windows Update site, yourself. Are we getting the whole story here? It won't recognize the onboard sound chip Don't you need a driver from the manufacturer for this? even though 98 had no problem with it and Linux has no problems with it. Windows actually comes with very few drivers--something I wish that Microsoft could handle differently. It would be really nice if things worked out of the box on a new install without having to hunt down drivers.
That said, I know a fair amount about Windows 98's driverbase, and sound just wasn't well supported there. If you had sound working in Windows 98, I'd bet good money that you (or the previous owner, be that an individual or the company that sold you the computer) installed third-party drivers to get it working. Regardless, you can't blame XP for third-party hardware not working.
Anyway, you seem pretty unwilling to look beyond your own experiences. Sounds like a typical American Slashdotter (I'm American, too, by the way.)
Well, yeah. For me, having everything on one screen is nice. But I usually work on a 1920x1200 desktop, so it works. I can have 3 xterms open on the left, and a full browser window on the right without overlap. With dual 1280x1024 monitors, I can get 6 xterms on one monitor without overlap.
The screen man page isn't the best, but it's got lots of useful gems. I like -x because I typically lock my workstation at work, and so I can just reattach from home without detatching remotely (since I typically have multiple xterms with the same screen session open, it's helpful to avoid detatching all of them just to get access to the screen remotely.) Although you can do without the multiple xterms by using screen regions, I find these to be clunky, so I avoid them.
My other favorite trick is using a special rc file to set up my screen session. For example:
vbell on
startup_message off
defscrollback 1000
screen -t epic 0
screen -t mutt
screen -t firewall
This creates a screen with my default preferences and 3 terminals: one each named epic, mutt, and firewall. The whole config is a bit longer.