It's easy to say that there should be a policy in place, but it is basically impossible to come up with a policy that would cover all eventualities. In fact, if you are going to generalize the safest thing to do is almost certainly to walk everyone out to the parking lot immediately. For example, if you know that someone is leaving for your main competitor you simply can't allow them to have continued access to your systems, even if they are an honorable person. On the other hand, if the person is going to another industry and they have a lot of organizational knowledge that you might need you might be better off giving them the two weeks (or four as the case may be).
To use your example, many employers are especially worried when they lose popular managers. After all, it is not unheard of to have a popular manager recruit away the best of his former co-workers. Losing a single good employee is an expensive proposition for a business. Having an entire department gutted when a good manager leaves can be devastating.
When a popular manager leaves morale is going to decline no matter what the employer does. In many cases the best thing to do is to simply cut all ties as soon as possible.
In short, it is a tricky subject. One thing that is certain, however, is that it generally in the employers best interests to reduce their reliance on the soon-to-be former employee as soon as is possible.
What the organization really needs is some time to find out what sorts of things break when you aren't around to poke at them. For the next month they have the benefit of your knowledge, should they need it, but you won't be able to do stuff. This will allow existing staff members to learn to cover gaps while you are still around in case of an emergency.
You are leaving. The company is far less interested in what you can do for them in your last few weeks than they are in learning how to live without you. That basically requires that they cut you out of the loop as soon as possible.
In the U.S., at least, current copyright laws hinge on the distribution of copyrighted materials. Downloading songs is fine, distributing songs triggers massive fines and jail time.
This is basically a holdover from the days when bootlegging albums (or books or whatever) required extensive criminal operations with access to publishing facilities and the like. Essentially, copyright infringement on a massive scale required organized crime syndicates, and the criminal punishments reflect this.
These days anyone with a high speed Internet account can distribute copyrighted material on a magnitude that was previous unheard of, but the laws haven't really changed.
Email is a perfectly acceptable medium for exchanging encrypted messages. That's the beauty of public key encryption. Once the message is encrypted only the intended recipient can decrypt it. Even if the attacker has the message without the private key and the password that unlocks it the information is basically useless.
Yes, you could be truly paranoid and start worrying about the actual strength of pubic key encryption, but if the criminals had access to that sort of technology they'd have bigger fish to fry.
So don't blame email as a delivery system. Delivering the message securely isn't the problem.
The real problem, as you point out isn't getting the data to the consultant. It is trusting the consultant to be careful with the data once he has it in his possession. The fact of the matter is that no amount of firewalls or encryption is going to protect you from a dishonest employee or consultant. Heck, with the right training quite a bit of information can simply be memorized by the dishonest individual.
Having the consultant (or employee) directly under your thumb probably does help. That's why using email to send the data offsite is a bad idea. Attackers aren't going to get anything from an encrypted message, but being able to monitor what your employees do with important information is facilitated by forcing them to come to you.
There's nothing sadder than adults that go to a children's movie and then are surprised when the movie is "childish." My 6 year-old son thought the movie was great, and I thought that the movie was surprisingly good considering it is a movie featuring a talking semi-truck.
The reality of the situation is that the Transformers cartoon was only good because a) you were a kid, and b) the alternatives were shows like the Smurfs.
To be fair, a proprietary licenser is also free to fix the bugs ASAP and well, provide such fixes for free, also to provide new features for free if they like. I do this all the time with a commercial application. A PD author also retains such freedom. These are not benefits that exclusively arrive via the GPL. And it is well to consider that with a GPL, PD or commercial application, one is free to demand money to fix something, to add features to it, to explain or teach its use, or even to simply use it. Doesn't mean you'll get it, but it doesn't mean you won't, either.
The difference between Free Software and proprietary software is that if the software is Free the client has the source code they aren't dependent on you. If you aren't going to abuse the client, why not give them the source code?
I don't think you've really analyzed this far enough. Giving someone something, and then telling them what they can and cannot do with it, carries ethical problems in the form of imposing your will on someone else (and it also devalues the gift, in my personal opinion.)
End users of GPLed software are free to use the software however they wish. They only thing that they can't do is take away those same rights from anyone else they share the software with.
To use your crappy book example GPLed hackers are giving you a book and they are allowing you to copy it, share it with your friends, change it, and use it however you want. However, they do ask that if you share the book with your neighbor that he should get the same rights that you were given.
The whole point is that the right to use, copy, and modify the software is available to everyone that gets a copy.
You on the other hand want to take the book that was given to you as a gift, and share it with other people without giving them the same rights that you were given. You are the one "imposing your will" on others, and you didn't even write the software in the first place (otherwise it would have a different license).
"Here's a gift of a book; but you can only read it if you use LED lights." "Here's a gift of a cat; but you can only have it if you'll eat it." "Here's a gift of a some money, but you must spend it upon me."
You see? This is why the term "freedom" has always seemed to go so poorly with the coercive requirements that the GPL applies to the various recipients in the chain of "gifts."
Except that's not what the GPL does at all. You can use GPL software however you like. The only thing that you can't do is distribute GPLed software (or derivatives of GPLed software) under a license that takes away the freedoms that you were given.
The only time that the terms of the GPL become onerous is when someone wants to take software that someone else has written and release it as part of a proprietary program.
The classes (from what my wife tells me) teach the mothers how to teach their babies to nurse. My wife also insists that our second and third children were harder to teach than our first child. If it were really about teaching the mother that would hardly be the case.
Apparently "latching on" correctly is a learned skill in most children.
Besides, even if the classes were for the mothers and not for the babies that still shows that the nipple isn't particularly intuitive. My wife is intelligent, well-educated, and she's had breasts for years. If the nipple is so "intuitive" why would she need training on how to feed babies with it.
You've clearly never seen how much time and effort new mothers put into teaching their babies to breast feed. It's difficult enough that most hospitals offer classes.
One of the funny things about the software world, especially outside of the Windows community, is that the zealots generally end up winning. Java is actually a very good example of this principle.
Sun and IBM have been spending money right and left for years promoting Java, and yet in many ways it is a complete failure. As a technology for creating desktop applications Java never arrived, and as an technology for creating applets it has been completely dominated by Flash. It has achieved some level of success as a web development language, but even on this front it has had serious trouble competing.
When.NET and C# came out Sun finally realized that it's entire existence depended on the success of Java, and that success was in serious jeopardy. The only real saving grace that Java had over.NET was that Java had quite a bit of Free Software that had grown up around it, despite Sun's best efforts to discourage Free Software. As an example of how ridiculous things had gotten it was actually easier to develop desktop applications for Solaris using Mono and C# than it was to use Sun's own Java.
So at long last Sun realized that it had to start encouraging Free Software developers to use Java, and the only way to do that was to Free Java.
You might believe that sensible people don't care about these issues, but sensible people wouldn't choose Java if it weren't for the myriad Free Software tools that come with Java these days. Free Software is so important that even Microsoft is actively courting Free Software developers to work on its platforms.
I think this is mostly just Asus being cheap, because on Newegg you can get 4gb of DDR2 notebook memory for $50. Perhaps Asus shouldn't be trying to use 512MB or 1GB of RAM with XP when RAM is so cheap.
Would it be such a horrible thing for them to go crazy and put a full $25's worth of 2GB of RAM in an Eee?
First of all, this is a device that is 7 inches across. There is only so much room on the board. Second of all, part of the reason that the EEE PC has sold so well is that it delivers so much functionality at a price that is considerably less than even the lowest low end laptop.
After you add in the cost of Windows and the cost of the added hardware these machines take to run Windows you basically have a tiny laptop that costs as much (or more) than a 14" laptop.
What drugs are you smoking? Yes MS has invested quite a bit in XBox. But in 2007 XBox was profitable!
That's an interesting statement. Where did you get your information? Microsoft's financial statements say that the Entertainment and Devices Division lost over $1.89 billion in 2007. $1.06 billion of which was a charge recognized for faulty XBox 360s, but that still leaves nearly a billion in losses.
Now, for the first two quarters of 2008 the Entertainment and Devices Division has shown positive income of about $500 million (total). Even so Microsoft has lost over $4 billion on the Entertainment and Devices Division in just the last three fiscal years. That's a lot of money to pour down the drain. This is especially true considering that Nintendo is likely to do far better with a much smaller investment. Trust me, investors are not excited about the XBox360
Microsoft has lost billions of dollars on the XBox, and losses continue to mount. Worse, the original XBox played a distant second to the PS2 and it appears that the XBox360 will be upstaged by the Wii. Microsoft's investors don't think that the XBox is a success.
The good news is that your printer has Postscript 3 emulation, so it is will work. You might have a bit of trouble getting the duplexer to do the right thing, but it will work.
In fact a quick perusal of openprinting.org shows that you've got yourself a very nice printer that is well supported by Free Software. It's just new enough that Foomatic doesn't include it in its database yet.
I used Windows XP when it came out, and the fact that most Windows 2000 drivers would work in XP helped quite a bit. Besides, there is little doubt that upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows XP was a truly worthwhile upgrade, even if you had to chuck your crappy ISA sound card.
I suppose that I am a little bitter because both my scanner and my expensive printer didn't come with workable Windows Vista drivers. I'm not the only one that feels this way. If you read the Microsoft email from the class action Vista lawsuit you'll see that several Microsoft VPs had similar experiences. We aren't talking about ISA sound cards either.
On the bright side my wife hated Vista so much that I was finally able to get her to switch to Ubuntu (where the printer works flawlessly). That's worth the price of Vista for me, right there.
What I find truly curious is that so many Windows users apparently don't mind if their hardware doesn't work with Microsoft's new operating system. You paid good money for this software and there basically is no good technical reason that this hardware shouldn't be supported. After all, Linux manages to support ridiculously old hardware.
Either way, it's more than somewhat hypocritical to dismiss Linux for hardware compatibility issues, and then fail to point out that Microsoft faces many of the same problems with new versions of its software.
Because one of the major reasons Linux has driver problems is the refusal of the kernel developer to settle on a stable ABI so companies have something to develop for.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft doesn't offer a stable ABI either. It just releases new versions of its operating system kernel so slowly that it *seems* that there is a stable ABI. The fact that Vista has problems with hardware compatibility is proof of that. What's more, Microsoft's "black box" model is clearly at least partly to blame for Windows' stability problems. As part of the discovery in its Windows Vista class action lawsuit Microsoft was forced to reveal that 30% of Windows crashes in 2007 were the fault of nVidia's drivers.
If you include old but perfectly serviceable hardware that is never likely get a usable Windows Vista driver then a modern Linux distribution almost certainly supports more hardware than Windows Vista, and it does so without having to load questionable black-box drivers. In fact, if it weren't for a few companies that create popular hardware and seem to have an aversion to Free Software (nVidia and Broadcom being the most well known) it would be pretty clear that Linus' insistence on source code has paid off well for Linux users. After all, once a piece of equipment has Free Software drivers these drivers tend to work well with Linux even when new versions come out. Most other hardware manufacturers have basically decided to give the Linux developers what they need. These days you don't even have to be particularly careful in your choice of hardware to get hardware with Free Software Linux drivers. Heck, you can even order a laptop from Dell.
Not that any of this has anything to do with my original point. Hardware compatibility is a real problem for Windows Vista. Tons of perfectly good hardware doesn't work (or work very well) with the operating system. That's a real concern for people with investments in existing hardware. This Creative example is only one of many in which hardware that works perfectly well under Windows XP doesn't work or works poorly with Windows Vista. Microsoft pundits often use similar hardware compatibility problems as a reason to stay away from Linux. However, when Windows Vista has some of the exact same problems it apparently gets a pass.
Driver issues are one of the primary reasons why people stay away from Linux. Why, precisely, should Vista be any different?
When I purchased my first Vista computer I was amazed at the hardware that I had that didn't work with it. My printer had sub par drivers, and my scanner had no drivers at all. If you follow the email trail from Microsoft's current class action Vista lawsuit several executives at Microsoft had similar problems.
The fact of the matter is that Vista doesn't have nearly the level of hardware support that Windows XP does. This may change in the future, but it is certainly the case right now. Creative's drivers are merely one example of many of companies that have far better Windows XP drivers for its hardware than Windows Vista drivers.
Re:Artists should make the most money, not the lab
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
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· Score: 1
I worked at a startup that was the flipside of your example. It had tons of cool technology and no salespeople with sales experience. In the end it went bankrupt and we all had to find new jobs.
Technical folks like to think that the technology matters, and to an extent it does. However, Microsoft is proof that salesmanship matters more.
Your problem was basically the same as the one above. You can't blame Ubuntu or or Linux for the fact that Broadcom doesn't want to play nicely with its wireless chipsets. In fact, the real problem was that Ubuntu tried to support these basically unsupportable devices in the first place. If you would have purchased a laptop with a well supported wireless chipset then you wouldn't have these problems.
My actual point isn't that Linux is infallible, but rather that Microsoft's basic model makes it impossible for it to really do any serious quality control. Microsoft doesn't write the bulk of the drivers that people actually use. Instead it relies on the hardware manufacturers to provide binary-only drivers, and it has to hope that these drivers are well written. It shouldn't surprise anyone that when Linux vendors like Ubuntu try to follow a similar route they end up with similar problems.
The moral of the story for Linux users is that they need to buy hardware that is supported by Free Software drivers.
You've inadvertently highlighted the reason that Microsoft is having problems with this service pack. Microsoft has a problem with this service pack because it doesn't write all (or even most) of the drivers for Vista. Instead it created an set of APIs that allows Windows to load random binary drivers that may or may not be very good (or even completely compliant). So when Microsoft makes a major change things break.
Interestingly enough in your case Ubuntu fails because it is doing the same thing. ndiswrapper is nothing more than a tool to allow you to run binary-only Windows drivers on Linux. There's no way that the Linux developers or the Ubuntu packagers can know what those drivers are going to do when you update the kernel (and most parts of userspace). When you think about it carefully you'll realize that it is amazing that the drivers work at all, much less that the work after upgrading the Linux kernel.
I think that you would find that Linux works much better with hardware that is supported natively.
The question is what sort of person spends $500 to put a bigger screen and a semi-usable keyboard on a smartphone? I mean seriously. The EEE PC has access to better applications (including nearly anything Windows XP will run if you poke it hard enough), it has better hardware, and it costs about half as much.
Heck, a little googling even turns up a version of the vnc server for Windows Mobile. With a little hacking your EEE PC could probably even replace the Redfly for the one thing it is good at.
Here's the thing, if Jimmy Wales wanted to sell out with Wikipedia he could sell out BIG. He controls Wikipedia for crying out loud.
Jeff Merkey, on the other hand, is a complete crackpot and a liar. He's the sort of imbecile that starts his own church because he believes that it provides him with a loophole so he can smoke peyote legally. Take a look at the supposedly clean version of his Wikipedia page and you will see what I mean. Better yet, read the crap he has written to the Linux Kernel Mailing List and other public forums over the years.
I wouldn't trust Merkey if he told me the sun was going to come up tomorrow, and it is essentially his word against Jimmy's.
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It's easy to say that there should be a policy in place, but it is basically impossible to come up with a policy that would cover all eventualities. In fact, if you are going to generalize the safest thing to do is almost certainly to walk everyone out to the parking lot immediately. For example, if you know that someone is leaving for your main competitor you simply can't allow them to have continued access to your systems, even if they are an honorable person. On the other hand, if the person is going to another industry and they have a lot of organizational knowledge that you might need you might be better off giving them the two weeks (or four as the case may be).
To use your example, many employers are especially worried when they lose popular managers. After all, it is not unheard of to have a popular manager recruit away the best of his former co-workers. Losing a single good employee is an expensive proposition for a business. Having an entire department gutted when a good manager leaves can be devastating.
When a popular manager leaves morale is going to decline no matter what the employer does. In many cases the best thing to do is to simply cut all ties as soon as possible.
In short, it is a tricky subject. One thing that is certain, however, is that it generally in the employers best interests to reduce their reliance on the soon-to-be former employee as soon as is possible.
What the organization really needs is some time to find out what sorts of things break when you aren't around to poke at them. For the next month they have the benefit of your knowledge, should they need it, but you won't be able to do stuff. This will allow existing staff members to learn to cover gaps while you are still around in case of an emergency.
You are leaving. The company is far less interested in what you can do for them in your last few weeks than they are in learning how to live without you. That basically requires that they cut you out of the loop as soon as possible.
Actually, that's essentially the case.
In the U.S., at least, current copyright laws hinge on the distribution of copyrighted materials. Downloading songs is fine, distributing songs triggers massive fines and jail time.
This is basically a holdover from the days when bootlegging albums (or books or whatever) required extensive criminal operations with access to publishing facilities and the like. Essentially, copyright infringement on a massive scale required organized crime syndicates, and the criminal punishments reflect this.
These days anyone with a high speed Internet account can distribute copyrighted material on a magnitude that was previous unheard of, but the laws haven't really changed.
Email is a perfectly acceptable medium for exchanging encrypted messages. That's the beauty of public key encryption. Once the message is encrypted only the intended recipient can decrypt it. Even if the attacker has the message without the private key and the password that unlocks it the information is basically useless.
Yes, you could be truly paranoid and start worrying about the actual strength of pubic key encryption, but if the criminals had access to that sort of technology they'd have bigger fish to fry.
So don't blame email as a delivery system. Delivering the message securely isn't the problem.
The real problem, as you point out isn't getting the data to the consultant. It is trusting the consultant to be careful with the data once he has it in his possession. The fact of the matter is that no amount of firewalls or encryption is going to protect you from a dishonest employee or consultant. Heck, with the right training quite a bit of information can simply be memorized by the dishonest individual.
Having the consultant (or employee) directly under your thumb probably does help. That's why using email to send the data offsite is a bad idea. Attackers aren't going to get anything from an encrypted message, but being able to monitor what your employees do with important information is facilitated by forcing them to come to you.
There's nothing sadder than adults that go to a children's movie and then are surprised when the movie is "childish." My 6 year-old son thought the movie was great, and I thought that the movie was surprisingly good considering it is a movie featuring a talking semi-truck.
The reality of the situation is that the Transformers cartoon was only good because a) you were a kid, and b) the alternatives were shows like the Smurfs.
Why should the GPL hackers share with you if you aren't willing to share with them?
You don't like their license. That's fine, they don't like your license either.
To be fair, a proprietary licenser is also free to fix the bugs ASAP and well, provide such fixes for free, also to provide new features for free if they like. I do this all the time with a commercial application. A PD author also retains such freedom. These are not benefits that exclusively arrive via the GPL. And it is well to consider that with a GPL, PD or commercial application, one is free to demand money to fix something, to add features to it, to explain or teach its use, or even to simply use it. Doesn't mean you'll get it, but it doesn't mean you won't, either.
The difference between Free Software and proprietary software is that if the software is Free the client has the source code they aren't dependent on you. If you aren't going to abuse the client, why not give them the source code?
I don't think you've really analyzed this far enough. Giving someone something, and then telling them what they can and cannot do with it, carries ethical problems in the form of imposing your will on someone else (and it also devalues the gift, in my personal opinion.)
End users of GPLed software are free to use the software however they wish. They only thing that they can't do is take away those same rights from anyone else they share the software with.
To use your crappy book example GPLed hackers are giving you a book and they are allowing you to copy it, share it with your friends, change it, and use it however you want. However, they do ask that if you share the book with your neighbor that he should get the same rights that you were given.
The whole point is that the right to use, copy, and modify the software is available to everyone that gets a copy.
You on the other hand want to take the book that was given to you as a gift, and share it with other people without giving them the same rights that you were given. You are the one "imposing your will" on others, and you didn't even write the software in the first place (otherwise it would have a different license).
"Here's a gift of a book; but you can only read it if you use LED lights." "Here's a gift of a cat; but you can only have it if you'll eat it." "Here's a gift of a some money, but you must spend it upon me."You see? This is why the term "freedom" has always seemed to go so poorly with the coercive requirements that the GPL applies to the various recipients in the chain of "gifts."
Except that's not what the GPL does at all. You can use GPL software however you like. The only thing that you can't do is distribute GPLed software (or derivatives of GPLed software) under a license that takes away the freedoms that you were given.
The only time that the terms of the GPL become onerous is when someone wants to take software that someone else has written and release it as part of a proprietary program.
The classes (from what my wife tells me) teach the mothers how to teach their babies to nurse. My wife also insists that our second and third children were harder to teach than our first child. If it were really about teaching the mother that would hardly be the case.
Apparently "latching on" correctly is a learned skill in most children.
Besides, even if the classes were for the mothers and not for the babies that still shows that the nipple isn't particularly intuitive. My wife is intelligent, well-educated, and she's had breasts for years. If the nipple is so "intuitive" why would she need training on how to feed babies with it.
I happen to know that in Utah you have to have just delivered a baby to be eligible for these classes.
The rules might be different if you live somewhere else.
You've clearly never seen how much time and effort new mothers put into teaching their babies to breast feed. It's difficult enough that most hospitals offer classes.
I know, I was surprised too.
So much for intuitive interfaces.
One of the funny things about the software world, especially outside of the Windows community, is that the zealots generally end up winning. Java is actually a very good example of this principle.
Sun and IBM have been spending money right and left for years promoting Java, and yet in many ways it is a complete failure. As a technology for creating desktop applications Java never arrived, and as an technology for creating applets it has been completely dominated by Flash. It has achieved some level of success as a web development language, but even on this front it has had serious trouble competing.
When .NET and C# came out Sun finally realized that it's entire existence depended on the success of Java, and that success was in serious jeopardy. The only real saving grace that Java had over .NET was that Java had quite a bit of Free Software that had grown up around it, despite Sun's best efforts to discourage Free Software. As an example of how ridiculous things had gotten it was actually easier to develop desktop applications for Solaris using Mono and C# than it was to use Sun's own Java.
So at long last Sun realized that it had to start encouraging Free Software developers to use Java, and the only way to do that was to Free Java.
You might believe that sensible people don't care about these issues, but sensible people wouldn't choose Java if it weren't for the myriad Free Software tools that come with Java these days. Free Software is so important that even Microsoft is actively courting Free Software developers to work on its platforms.
First of all, this is a device that is 7 inches across. There is only so much room on the board. Second of all, part of the reason that the EEE PC has sold so well is that it delivers so much functionality at a price that is considerably less than even the lowest low end laptop.
After you add in the cost of Windows and the cost of the added hardware these machines take to run Windows you basically have a tiny laptop that costs as much (or more) than a 14" laptop.
That's an interesting statement. Where did you get your information? Microsoft's financial statements say that the Entertainment and Devices Division lost over $1.89 billion in 2007. $1.06 billion of which was a charge recognized for faulty XBox 360s, but that still leaves nearly a billion in losses.
Now, for the first two quarters of 2008 the Entertainment and Devices Division has shown positive income of about $500 million (total). Even so Microsoft has lost over $4 billion on the Entertainment and Devices Division in just the last three fiscal years. That's a lot of money to pour down the drain. This is especially true considering that Nintendo is likely to do far better with a much smaller investment. Trust me, investors are not excited about the XBox360
Microsoft has lost billions of dollars on the XBox, and losses continue to mount. Worse, the original XBox played a distant second to the PS2 and it appears that the XBox360 will be upstaged by the Wii. Microsoft's investors don't think that the XBox is a success.
I watched the full video, and I didn't see any hamburgers get made. Did I miss something?
The good news is that your printer has Postscript 3 emulation, so it is will work. You might have a bit of trouble getting the duplexer to do the right thing, but it will work.
In fact a quick perusal of openprinting.org shows that you've got yourself a very nice printer that is well supported by Free Software. It's just new enough that Foomatic doesn't include it in its database yet.
Good luck.
I used Windows XP when it came out, and the fact that most Windows 2000 drivers would work in XP helped quite a bit. Besides, there is little doubt that upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows XP was a truly worthwhile upgrade, even if you had to chuck your crappy ISA sound card.
I suppose that I am a little bitter because both my scanner and my expensive printer didn't come with workable Windows Vista drivers. I'm not the only one that feels this way. If you read the Microsoft email from the class action Vista lawsuit you'll see that several Microsoft VPs had similar experiences. We aren't talking about ISA sound cards either.
On the bright side my wife hated Vista so much that I was finally able to get her to switch to Ubuntu (where the printer works flawlessly). That's worth the price of Vista for me, right there.
What I find truly curious is that so many Windows users apparently don't mind if their hardware doesn't work with Microsoft's new operating system. You paid good money for this software and there basically is no good technical reason that this hardware shouldn't be supported. After all, Linux manages to support ridiculously old hardware.
Either way, it's more than somewhat hypocritical to dismiss Linux for hardware compatibility issues, and then fail to point out that Microsoft faces many of the same problems with new versions of its software.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft doesn't offer a stable ABI either. It just releases new versions of its operating system kernel so slowly that it *seems* that there is a stable ABI. The fact that Vista has problems with hardware compatibility is proof of that. What's more, Microsoft's "black box" model is clearly at least partly to blame for Windows' stability problems. As part of the discovery in its Windows Vista class action lawsuit Microsoft was forced to reveal that 30% of Windows crashes in 2007 were the fault of nVidia's drivers.
If you include old but perfectly serviceable hardware that is never likely get a usable Windows Vista driver then a modern Linux distribution almost certainly supports more hardware than Windows Vista, and it does so without having to load questionable black-box drivers. In fact, if it weren't for a few companies that create popular hardware and seem to have an aversion to Free Software (nVidia and Broadcom being the most well known) it would be pretty clear that Linus' insistence on source code has paid off well for Linux users. After all, once a piece of equipment has Free Software drivers these drivers tend to work well with Linux even when new versions come out. Most other hardware manufacturers have basically decided to give the Linux developers what they need. These days you don't even have to be particularly careful in your choice of hardware to get hardware with Free Software Linux drivers. Heck, you can even order a laptop from Dell.
Not that any of this has anything to do with my original point. Hardware compatibility is a real problem for Windows Vista. Tons of perfectly good hardware doesn't work (or work very well) with the operating system. That's a real concern for people with investments in existing hardware. This Creative example is only one of many in which hardware that works perfectly well under Windows XP doesn't work or works poorly with Windows Vista. Microsoft pundits often use similar hardware compatibility problems as a reason to stay away from Linux. However, when Windows Vista has some of the exact same problems it apparently gets a pass.
Driver issues are one of the primary reasons why people stay away from Linux. Why, precisely, should Vista be any different?
When I purchased my first Vista computer I was amazed at the hardware that I had that didn't work with it. My printer had sub par drivers, and my scanner had no drivers at all. If you follow the email trail from Microsoft's current class action Vista lawsuit several executives at Microsoft had similar problems.
The fact of the matter is that Vista doesn't have nearly the level of hardware support that Windows XP does. This may change in the future, but it is certainly the case right now. Creative's drivers are merely one example of many of companies that have far better Windows XP drivers for its hardware than Windows Vista drivers.
What keeps the fiddler on the roof. TRADITION!
Personally, I look forward to April 1st.
I worked at a startup that was the flipside of your example. It had tons of cool technology and no salespeople with sales experience. In the end it went bankrupt and we all had to find new jobs.
Technical folks like to think that the technology matters, and to an extent it does. However, Microsoft is proof that salesmanship matters more.
Your problem was basically the same as the one above. You can't blame Ubuntu or or Linux for the fact that Broadcom doesn't want to play nicely with its wireless chipsets. In fact, the real problem was that Ubuntu tried to support these basically unsupportable devices in the first place. If you would have purchased a laptop with a well supported wireless chipset then you wouldn't have these problems.
My actual point isn't that Linux is infallible, but rather that Microsoft's basic model makes it impossible for it to really do any serious quality control. Microsoft doesn't write the bulk of the drivers that people actually use. Instead it relies on the hardware manufacturers to provide binary-only drivers, and it has to hope that these drivers are well written. It shouldn't surprise anyone that when Linux vendors like Ubuntu try to follow a similar route they end up with similar problems.
The moral of the story for Linux users is that they need to buy hardware that is supported by Free Software drivers.
You've inadvertently highlighted the reason that Microsoft is having problems with this service pack. Microsoft has a problem with this service pack because it doesn't write all (or even most) of the drivers for Vista. Instead it created an set of APIs that allows Windows to load random binary drivers that may or may not be very good (or even completely compliant). So when Microsoft makes a major change things break.
Interestingly enough in your case Ubuntu fails because it is doing the same thing. ndiswrapper is nothing more than a tool to allow you to run binary-only Windows drivers on Linux. There's no way that the Linux developers or the Ubuntu packagers can know what those drivers are going to do when you update the kernel (and most parts of userspace). When you think about it carefully you'll realize that it is amazing that the drivers work at all, much less that the work after upgrading the Linux kernel.
I think that you would find that Linux works much better with hardware that is supported natively.
The question is what sort of person spends $500 to put a bigger screen and a semi-usable keyboard on a smartphone? I mean seriously. The EEE PC has access to better applications (including nearly anything Windows XP will run if you poke it hard enough), it has better hardware, and it costs about half as much.
Heck, a little googling even turns up a version of the vnc server for Windows Mobile. With a little hacking your EEE PC could probably even replace the Redfly for the one thing it is good at.
Here's the thing, if Jimmy Wales wanted to sell out with Wikipedia he could sell out BIG. He controls Wikipedia for crying out loud.
Jeff Merkey, on the other hand, is a complete crackpot and a liar. He's the sort of imbecile that starts his own church because he believes that it provides him with a loophole so he can smoke peyote legally. Take a look at the supposedly clean version of his Wikipedia page and you will see what I mean. Better yet, read the crap he has written to the Linux Kernel Mailing List and other public forums over the years.
I wouldn't trust Merkey if he told me the sun was going to come up tomorrow, and it is essentially his word against Jimmy's.