I'm glad I have both a) a cable modem and b) amazing luck to have seen this about 30 seconds after post. So I'll beat the/. effect and grab it fast/first:-)
First, I cringe with every misquote. My friends and I can't go 10 minutes without some obscure Python-ism (Ditto for Star Wars tho). So I darn all thee misquoters to heck (unless it's actually applied in satirical context)
But enough of that. What I wanted to say what that it's great to see something like Python so alive and well today. It is THE classic. Heck, a few months ago, a local radio station did a Monty Pyton special. Great it was too, a lot of skits in vocal form, spliced to all hell.
It was great to hear them, and I must say, that the entire 'Cat License' skit, including the song 'Eric the Half a Bee' was just as great on the radio as on the tube. I'd go into a tirade of quotations, but that's not really necessary right now =) Everyone else already have.
Bet you expected me to though. Nobody expects the silence of a deranged Python fan! And I must say that that was nearly obscure enough to still render my comment quote-free.;-)
What do you think USB really is? PC's have been begging for something as quick and easy (chainable, hot-swap, etc) as ADB for years. That's why Apple went to heavily into USB, because it made a beautiful replacement for the aging ADB interface.
ADB is one of the examples of Macs had such superiour hardware for so damn long. It was easy to use. Better then AT/PS2/Serial mouse/keyboard connectors ever were. I mean, can you even plug your PS2 mouse into your PS2 keyboard today? That would be one less wire going back behind the computer.
(P.S. The author of this statement, in fact, hates Apple computers and most of what they do. So his praising them probably means a fair bit)
Re:No, it is not a great news...
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 1
And in case you hadn't noticed, modems are going out. Cable and xDSL are moving in, and while it's not like modems are going to disappear in the next year or two, it's obvious that the number of ethernet cards out there will start going up in the home user's computers.
Had it at the high school I just graduated at. It was an unquestionalbe load of garbage. Some form of transparent proxy and it appended to any HTML file you loaded.
What I enjoyed was discussing the legal issues of this software with my friends. After all, my homepage isn't "Powered by N2H2" as it says when loaded. This neat little banner is added to every page. So tell me, can they legally DO that? Modifiy the look of MY webpage?
It was quite a fun topic, the administrators at the school library HATED the thing, they just had to install it, orders from above.
Gee, and WITH patents we have absurd claims on amazingly obvious technologies. I'd say that patents DO have their place, but not with how utterly idiotic the US Patent Office tends to be. Lets see what I can recall from recent memory:
#1. The recent 'Digital Audio' patent. #2. Microsofts apparent patent on anything resembling Style Sheets.
I'd like to see this list extended, and while were at it, find the patents that EMachines has been violating and see if they fit the 'bonehead' descriptor too.
Wow, so they made the 'net. (Or was it Al Gore?;-}) More accurately, a network was made as an experiment. This network grew to connect major universities. Some people liked it and it grew. The rest is history. That doesn't mean that the US is the sole driving factor behind the net. The web itself came from Europe, as did Linus' kernel.
In fact, I'd have to say that today, the US is actually SLOWING the propogation of the net. There have been recent attempts at 'regulation', but thankfully have all been struck down. Moreso though, is the issue of the crypto export laws. With widespread crypto, the net would be a more secure place and more people would feel safe using it. But with these laws, crypto is left to be something that's not easy and not included with major computing products.
And as far as Internet egos go, yeah, ESR ranks up there in my books =)
I'd beg to differ. Though I'd have to say that BSD is more relevant to the net itself (BIND anyone?), some of the best software that the net itself runs on is either BSDL or GPL.
One of the driving forces behind the orginal propogation of the net was it's freedom, in both Beer and Speech. Without these free licenses, I have no doubt that some other free license would be taking their place right now. But still, these are the free licenses that made the software that made the internet itself.
Remember, commercialization came to the Net, the net wasn't formed by commercialization. So free software itself is a major factor in the birth of the 'net. And if not in it's birth, then it's upbringing. I still follow the (somewhat dated) ideal that anything I want I should be able to find on the net for nothing, be it entertainment, operating systems, music, anything.
Speaking of whom, I saw The King rocking it up with Linus at a nightclub recently. It was funny to see a whole gaggle of geeks dancing to it too. Strangely, I can't seem to recall RMS or ESR in the croud;) Probably had something to do with the dance being called the Penguin and not the GNU/Penguin.
Actually, despite this very flammie and trollie comment, it brings up a counterpoint.. Could a company set up anti-sites? Competition sets up a large number of 'fan' sites that just slam the product in question.. FUD applied on a different level.
So instead of plugging your own product, you slander a competitors. Food for thought.
The Canadian built CANDU reactor is another story however. As a heavy water reactor, neutrons are slowed to a point where the U-238 (the most abundant Uranium, especially since CANDU's use straight ore for fuel) is converted to Pt-239 through a short and fun nuclear reaction.
Thanks to this reaction, CANDU reactors have a very high Plutonium output. Which I imagine the Canadian government exploited by selling the spent fuel rods (with all that nice Pt) to the states.
This also explains how countries like India now have an ample supply of nuclear weapons. We sold 'em CANDU reactors.
The lesson to be learned? Canucks are smart. We got electricity AND got to sell that pesky nuclear waste to the bombmakers. (I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic, sorry)
Pardon me for saying, but most people are like this anyway. You don't want to live next to transmission lines for similar reasons. You don't want to live downstream from things like Pulp and Paper mills. This is just one more thing people won't want to live next to. There's nothing new here.
List of things people won't live close to:
Transmission Towers Nuclear Plants Pulp and Paper Mills Sour Gas Wells etc.
Actually, be afraid. Look at Squaresoft's current work towards the Final Fantasy movie. It's so lifelike it scared me the first time I saw it. I don't know if there is newer sriff, but check this out.
Yes, yes, yes. Why don't you tell me what makes the Minidisc any different from a portable device with a harddrive? Take it to court, here's the dialog:
Q - Does this patent cover MD (Minidiscs)?
A - No
Q - But a minidisc uses rewritable data, on a disk, not THAT dissimilar to a harddrive. Does this mean that the Minidisc is not a storage system of similar nature?
A - It is of similar nature
Q - Then why is a minidisc NOT covered by this patent? It is in fact prior art.
So there:P In fact, it's a surprise that someone hasn't bothered wipping together software to just go mp3->minidisc using the MD's digital input and doing whatever decode/encode is needed?
Are those the same people working 8 hour days and putting out Windows 95? What about those 'shit' open source crews, that with no motivation but what they decide to motivate themselves with, have built a kernel, a set of tools to run on it and finally, a desktop?
And maybe, Mr. AC-FUD man, you should check out Mozilla. It is a testament to open source. It looks, feels, runs good, even in it's development state. And all IE5 is, is a small update on IE4 (which is a somewhat larger update on IE3, which was a rip of Netscape's superior browser).
What about the right NOT to vote? That's my small protest against government sometimes. If they don't suit me, I won't vote for them. And out of the few elections I've ever participated in, I've casted even fewer ballots.
Another problem with mandatory voting is that even when everyone has to register/vote, it's not the law for everyone that's voting to be properly educated and informed.
Yay..! I love this country. Intelligent law (sometimes), we aren't trying to moderate the unmoderatable.. We even know how to poke fun at ourselves better then the Americans ever could insult us (Air Farce!!)
Yes, this past Canada Day was a good one, and Canada seems better by the day.
A) Spend money I don't have buying something overpriced. B) Steal it and cheat/swindle/rob The Man outta a few bucks. C) Buy it at the right price, maybe online, in MP3 form, from an artist you LIKE.
As cool as option C is, it's not that prolific an option. So I'll kick The Man in the teeth and go for B. As soon as C is mainstream and these monolithic corporations have accepted reality, I'll gladly send my money to the ARTISTS who deserve it.
Incidently, why bother trying to encrypt music? It's not like CD's are encrypted or anything. The RIAA has been whining about piracy ever since people started buying boom boxes with 2 cassette decks. Trying this SoDoMI (gawd that's funny) won't help anything, you can't just create a standard noone wants to participate in and expect it to fly.
It's also not like burners aren't prolific nowadays. I still like my music on the move so I just burn a CD. Why aren't they trying to control the physical medium? Why do these corporations insist on attempting to control the LEAST tangible, LEAST physical form of music? It's like governments thinking they can successfully control the Internet when it's not even something that exists as a tangible entity.
It seems down. Not even Netcraft will look it up for me:-) I'm just hope that/. won't one day be found legally to be performing DoS attacks, just through the/. effect.
They are on our side. They're trying to get people to see just how utterly insecure Windows products are. If MS would accept responsibility for the flaws in their OS, then something could be done. If MS would take these things seriously and properly secure up their products, then programs like these would no longer be an issue.
Besides, it's not like you can take a look at the NT source code and write a patch for the hole. That's one of the greatest advantages of an Open development environment. Things get done to FIX things. They can't patch NT or 98 or anything so they instead point out the problems.
It's not the greatest way to solve the worlds problems, but sometimes there's just no easy way to fight against Evil(tm)
(And please take the last paragraph with a sense of humor;-D)
I know what would scare me.. A Transparent Proxy. Very sneaky way to deal with the problem. Of course, they couldn't USE linux.. Our source code has dirty words;-)
What?! NT is just as stable as Linux. My NT box at work has now an uptime of something like 8 months. As long as your hardware is up to scratch and you don't mess up the registry by hand NT is rock solid.
Well, I have a 486 with an uptime of well near a year and a half. NT wouldn't even install on that hardware. No reason that old hardware should be written off so quickly. As for Registries, I don't really like the concept of them, I've seen Windows boot too many times whining about a corrupt registry to be healthy. Then again, a lot of the conf files in/etc are damn cryptic too (Sendmail anyone?).
Well.. Here's a nice quick MS vs Linux.. (All points are in no order, just as I thought them up)
Pro's of Linux
1) Affordability. The OS, the apps, free. And more then just free beer, free code too. 2) Portability. Runs across most any platform.. Arm, PPC, x86, Alpha, Sparc, etc. 3) Development. Always growing, updates quickly available. Sure it's not complete and buggy in parts, but it's being fixed! Plus, all devel tools (gcc, etc) are free too (see 1) 4) Community. This means a LOT actually. The community not only comments, critiques, assists and what not, it contributes through coding. This makes support free. 5) Configurability. Linux can be a DNS/SMTP server on a 486 in a closet. It can be a file sharing intranet server. It can be a webserver of large size (/. anyone?). It can also be a workstation, a development box, etc. Also, how can you not like themeable wm's and widget sets?
Linux's Cons 1) Software. Sure, we're working on it. But we aren't there Just Yet(tm). Sure we have apps that wordprocess (Abiword, StarOffice, WP, etc), but nothing quite as nice as Office (Please, I don't like WordPerfect's Motif feel) 2) Development. It's a con too, not everythings finished, and it's not going to change. Well, it is changing, all the time. It's a growing OS, always growing, making holes and filling them. 3) Install. (Way)Less of a point then it used to be, but it's not easy to, say, take your average WinBox and add Linux. You have to deal with partitions, installation, configuration, etc.
Pros for Windows 1) Community. If a lot of people use it, even if that's because it's all that's out there, this will mean people will know it. This makes for a lot of books, software, etc. 2) Software. Just about everything sold on the average computer store shelf is for Windows. This includes one of the Holy Grails, games. Sure, we have Civ:CTP and Q1/2/3 and a few more for Linux. But Windows has the rest. Not to mention the popular Office. 3) Compatibility. While not on as many platforms as Linux, you do get a lot of hardware support within the x86 architecture. Vid cards that don't have Linux support work in Windows, same with some sound cards (A3D anyone?). Sure, this is because noone needs release specs/source, many hardware companies are reluctant to do this.
Cons for Windows 1) Stability. Any OS that can be crashed simply because an app crashes is NOT good. Any OS that can crash for no real reason is NOT good. Need I go on? 2) Proprietary. Where's the source? Why's there a price tag? It's not open. If it breaks, you can't look at the source code to find out what's wrong and fix it. 3) Install. Hey, come on, Windows 95 had you click the mouse button on Next and decide on easily as much crap as my Debian install does. People don't notice this though, as it's always preinstalled.
As for learning curves? I remember when EVERYONE had a CLI. Remember DOS? Joe User could learn DOS. Heck, sit someone clueless down in front of Windows and they won't be totally effecient. I know people who have used computers for a year or two and all they know how to do is turn it on, launch IE/ICQ/Word and shut it down. Linux may take a little more base knowlege to use, but both systems must be learned. Both systems have to be configured at some point. Plug & Pray still doesn't exist on a level that lets devices work flawlessly on insertion (with maybe the exception of a USB mouse).
Bottom line? I'd rather not say, my bottom line doesn't like Joe User and his I-Just-Want-It-To-Work and I-Can't-Be-Bothered-To-Learn-Anything attidudes. Computers are tools, powerful ones too. People should treat them as if they were as dangerous as a car or a buzzsaw. In the end though.. I prefer Linux. So please note a slight bias;-)
And all I could think of when I read that was 'Wizards First Rule.' After all, people are stupid. People will believe anything you tell them if they A) want it to be true or B) are afraid it's true.
Slashdot Mirror
I survived a /.'ing!
/.'ing to MY data!
/. effect and grab it fast/first :-)
or maybe
I beat the
I'm glad I have both a) a cable modem and b) amazing luck to have seen this about 30 seconds after post. So I'll beat the
But the shirts would be a good comedy geek item.
First, I cringe with every misquote. My friends and I can't go 10 minutes without some obscure Python-ism (Ditto for Star Wars tho). So I darn all thee misquoters to heck (unless it's actually applied in satirical context)
;-)
But enough of that. What I wanted to say what that it's great to see something like Python so alive and well today. It is THE classic. Heck, a few months ago, a local radio station did a Monty Pyton special. Great it was too, a lot of skits in vocal form, spliced to all hell.
It was great to hear them, and I must say, that the entire 'Cat License' skit, including the song 'Eric the Half a Bee' was just as great on the radio as on the tube. I'd go into a tirade of quotations, but that's not really necessary right now =) Everyone else already have.
Bet you expected me to though. Nobody expects the silence of a deranged Python fan! And I must say that that was nearly obscure enough to still render my comment quote-free.
What do you think USB really is? PC's have been begging for something as quick and easy (chainable, hot-swap, etc) as ADB for years. That's why Apple went to heavily into USB, because it made a beautiful replacement for the aging ADB interface.
ADB is one of the examples of Macs had such superiour hardware for so damn long. It was easy to use. Better then AT/PS2/Serial mouse/keyboard connectors ever were. I mean, can you even plug your PS2 mouse into your PS2 keyboard today? That would be one less wire going back behind the computer.
(P.S. The author of this statement, in fact, hates Apple computers and most of what they do. So his praising them probably means a fair bit)
And in case you hadn't noticed, modems are going out. Cable and xDSL are moving in, and while it's not like modems are going to disappear in the next year or two, it's obvious that the number of ethernet cards out there will start going up in the home user's computers.
Die Jar Jar, Die.
/me waits for moderation for being redundant =)
Had it at the high school I just graduated at. It was an unquestionalbe load of garbage. Some form of transparent proxy and it appended to any HTML file you loaded.
What I enjoyed was discussing the legal issues of this software with my friends. After all, my homepage isn't "Powered by N2H2" as it says when loaded. This neat little banner is added to every page. So tell me, can they legally DO that? Modifiy the look of MY webpage?
It was quite a fun topic, the administrators at the school library HATED the thing, they just had to install it, orders from above.
Gee, and WITH patents we have absurd claims on amazingly obvious technologies. I'd say that patents DO have their place, but not with how utterly idiotic the US Patent Office tends to be. Lets see what I can recall from recent memory:
#1. The recent 'Digital Audio' patent.
#2. Microsofts apparent patent on anything resembling Style Sheets.
I'd like to see this list extended, and while were at it, find the patents that EMachines has been violating and see if they fit the 'bonehead' descriptor too.
Wow, so they made the 'net. (Or was it Al Gore? ;-}) More accurately, a network was made as an experiment. This network grew to connect major universities. Some people liked it and it grew. The rest is history. That doesn't mean that the US is the sole driving factor behind the net. The web itself came from Europe, as did Linus' kernel.
In fact, I'd have to say that today, the US is actually SLOWING the propogation of the net. There have been recent attempts at 'regulation', but thankfully have all been struck down. Moreso though, is the issue of the crypto export laws. With widespread crypto, the net would be a more secure place and more people would feel safe using it. But with these laws, crypto is left to be something that's not easy and not included with major computing products.
And as far as Internet egos go, yeah, ESR ranks up there in my books =)
I'd beg to differ. Though I'd have to say that BSD is more relevant to the net itself (BIND anyone?), some of the best software that the net itself runs on is either BSDL or GPL.
One of the driving forces behind the orginal propogation of the net was it's freedom, in both Beer and Speech. Without these free licenses, I have no doubt that some other free license would be taking their place right now. But still, these are the free licenses that made the software that made the internet itself.
Remember, commercialization came to the Net, the net wasn't formed by commercialization. So free software itself is a major factor in the birth of the 'net. And if not in it's birth, then it's upbringing. I still follow the (somewhat dated) ideal that anything I want I should be able to find on the net for nothing, be it entertainment, operating systems, music, anything.
Speaking of whom, I saw The King rocking it up with Linus at a nightclub recently. It was funny to see a whole gaggle of geeks dancing to it too. Strangely, I can't seem to recall RMS or ESR in the croud ;) Probably had something to do with the dance being called the Penguin and not the GNU/Penguin.
Ok, I'm done being offtopic now.
Actually, despite this very flammie and trollie comment, it brings up a counterpoint.. Could a company set up anti-sites? Competition sets up a large number of 'fan' sites that just slam the product in question.. FUD applied on a different level.
So instead of plugging your own product, you slander a competitors.
Food for thought.
The Canadian built CANDU reactor is another story however. As a heavy water reactor, neutrons are slowed to a point where the U-238 (the most abundant Uranium, especially since CANDU's use straight ore for fuel) is converted to Pt-239 through a short and fun nuclear reaction.
Thanks to this reaction, CANDU reactors have a very high Plutonium output. Which I imagine the Canadian government exploited by selling the spent fuel rods (with all that nice Pt) to the states.
This also explains how countries like India now have an ample supply of nuclear weapons. We sold 'em CANDU reactors.
The lesson to be learned? Canucks are smart. We got electricity AND got to sell that pesky nuclear waste to the bombmakers. (I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic, sorry)
Pardon me for saying, but most people are like this anyway. You don't want to live next to transmission lines for similar reasons. You don't want to live downstream from things like Pulp and Paper mills. This is just one more thing people won't want to live next to. There's nothing new here.
:P
List of things people won't live close to:
Transmission Towers
Nuclear Plants
Pulp and Paper Mills
Sour Gas Wells
etc.
Just add Microwave Receiever to the list
Actually, be afraid. Look at Squaresoft's current work towards the Final Fantasy movie. It's so lifelike it scared me the first time I saw it.
I don't know if there is newer sriff, but check this out.
Yes, yes, yes. Why don't you tell me what makes the Minidisc any different from a portable device with a harddrive? Take it to court, here's the dialog:
:P
Q - Does this patent cover MD (Minidiscs)?
A - No
Q - But a minidisc uses rewritable data, on a disk, not THAT dissimilar to a harddrive. Does this mean that the Minidisc is not a storage system of similar nature?
A - It is of similar nature
Q - Then why is a minidisc NOT covered by this patent? It is in fact prior art.
So there
In fact, it's a surprise that someone hasn't bothered wipping together software to just go mp3->minidisc using the MD's digital input and doing whatever decode/encode is needed?
Are those the same people working 8 hour days and putting out Windows 95? What about those 'shit' open source crews, that with no motivation but what they decide to motivate themselves with, have built a kernel, a set of tools to run on it and finally, a desktop?
And maybe, Mr. AC-FUD man, you should check out Mozilla. It is a testament to open source. It looks, feels, runs good, even in it's development state. And all IE5 is, is a small update on IE4 (which is a somewhat larger update on IE3, which was a rip of Netscape's superior browser).
What about the right NOT to vote? That's my small protest against government sometimes. If they don't suit me, I won't vote for them. And out of the few elections I've ever participated in, I've casted even fewer ballots.
Another problem with mandatory voting is that even when everyone has to register/vote, it's not the law for everyone that's voting to be properly educated and informed.
Blah.
Yay..! I love this country. Intelligent law (sometimes), we aren't trying to moderate the unmoderatable.. We even know how to poke fun at ourselves better then the Americans ever could insult us (Air Farce!!)
Yes, this past Canada Day was a good one, and Canada seems better by the day.
Because I CAN!
Given the alternatives:
A) Spend money I don't have buying something overpriced.
B) Steal it and cheat/swindle/rob The Man outta a few bucks.
C) Buy it at the right price, maybe online, in MP3 form, from an artist you LIKE.
As cool as option C is, it's not that prolific an option. So I'll kick The Man in the teeth and go for B. As soon as C is mainstream and these monolithic corporations have accepted reality, I'll gladly send my money to the ARTISTS who deserve it.
Incidently, why bother trying to encrypt music? It's not like CD's are encrypted or anything. The RIAA has been whining about piracy ever since people started buying boom boxes with 2 cassette decks. Trying this SoDoMI (gawd that's funny) won't help anything, you can't just create a standard noone wants to participate in and expect it to fly.
It's also not like burners aren't prolific nowadays. I still like my music on the move so I just burn a CD. Why aren't they trying to control the physical medium? Why do these corporations insist on attempting to control the LEAST tangible, LEAST physical form of music? It's like governments thinking they can successfully control the Internet when it's not even something that exists as a tangible entity.
It seems down. Not even Netcraft will look it up for me :-) I'm just hope that /. won't one day be found legally to be performing DoS attacks, just through the /. effect.
(;
They are on our side. They're trying to get people to see just how utterly insecure Windows products are. If MS would accept responsibility for the flaws in their OS, then something could be done. If MS would take these things seriously and properly secure up their products, then programs like these would no longer be an issue.
;-D)
Besides, it's not like you can take a look at the NT source code and write a patch for the hole. That's one of the greatest advantages of an Open development environment. Things get done to FIX things. They can't patch NT or 98 or anything so they instead point out the problems.
It's not the greatest way to solve the worlds problems, but sometimes there's just no easy way to fight against Evil(tm)
(And please take the last paragraph with a sense of humor
I know what would scare me.. A Transparent Proxy. Very sneaky way to deal with the problem. Of course, they couldn't USE linux.. Our source code has dirty words ;-)
What?! NT is just as stable as Linux. My NT box at work has now an uptime of something like 8 months. As long as your hardware is up to scratch and you don't mess up the registry by hand NT is rock solid.
/etc are damn cryptic too (Sendmail anyone?).
Well, I have a 486 with an uptime of well near a year and a half. NT wouldn't even install on that hardware. No reason that old hardware should be written off so quickly.
As for Registries, I don't really like the concept of them, I've seen Windows boot too many times whining about a corrupt registry to be healthy. Then again, a lot of the conf files in
Well.. Here's a nice quick MS vs Linux..
;-)
(All points are in no order, just as I thought them up)
Pro's of Linux
1) Affordability. The OS, the apps, free. And more then just free beer, free code too.
2) Portability. Runs across most any platform.. Arm, PPC, x86, Alpha, Sparc, etc.
3) Development. Always growing, updates quickly available. Sure it's not complete and buggy in parts, but it's being fixed! Plus, all devel tools (gcc, etc) are free too (see 1)
4) Community. This means a LOT actually. The community not only comments, critiques, assists and what not, it contributes through coding. This makes support free.
5) Configurability. Linux can be a DNS/SMTP server on a 486 in a closet. It can be a file sharing intranet server. It can be a webserver of large size (/. anyone?). It can also be a workstation, a development box, etc. Also, how can you not like themeable wm's and widget sets?
Linux's Cons
1) Software. Sure, we're working on it. But we aren't there Just Yet(tm). Sure we have apps that wordprocess (Abiword, StarOffice, WP, etc), but nothing quite as nice as Office (Please, I don't like WordPerfect's Motif feel)
2) Development. It's a con too, not everythings finished, and it's not going to change. Well, it is changing, all the time. It's a growing OS, always growing, making holes and filling them.
3) Install. (Way)Less of a point then it used to be, but it's not easy to, say, take your average WinBox and add Linux. You have to deal with partitions, installation, configuration, etc.
Pros for Windows
1) Community. If a lot of people use it, even if that's because it's all that's out there, this will mean people will know it. This makes for a lot of books, software, etc.
2) Software. Just about everything sold on the average computer store shelf is for Windows. This includes one of the Holy Grails, games. Sure, we have Civ:CTP and Q1/2/3 and a few more for Linux. But Windows has the rest. Not to mention the popular Office.
3) Compatibility. While not on as many platforms as Linux, you do get a lot of hardware support within the x86 architecture. Vid cards that don't have Linux support work in Windows, same with some sound cards (A3D anyone?). Sure, this is because noone needs release specs/source, many hardware companies are reluctant to do this.
Cons for Windows
1) Stability. Any OS that can be crashed simply because an app crashes is NOT good. Any OS that can crash for no real reason is NOT good. Need I go on?
2) Proprietary. Where's the source? Why's there a price tag? It's not open. If it breaks, you can't look at the source code to find out what's wrong and fix it.
3) Install. Hey, come on, Windows 95 had you click the mouse button on Next and decide on easily as much crap as my Debian install does. People don't notice this though, as it's always preinstalled.
As for learning curves? I remember when EVERYONE had a CLI. Remember DOS? Joe User could learn DOS. Heck, sit someone clueless down in front of Windows and they won't be totally effecient. I know people who have used computers for a year or two and all they know how to do is turn it on, launch IE/ICQ/Word and shut it down. Linux may take a little more base knowlege to use, but both systems must be learned.
Both systems have to be configured at some point. Plug & Pray still doesn't exist on a level that lets devices work flawlessly on insertion (with maybe the exception of a USB mouse).
Bottom line? I'd rather not say, my bottom line doesn't like Joe User and his I-Just-Want-It-To-Work and I-Can't-Be-Bothered-To-Learn-Anything attidudes. Computers are tools, powerful ones too. People should treat them as if they were as dangerous as a car or a buzzsaw.
In the end though.. I prefer Linux. So please note a slight bias
And all I could think of when I read that was 'Wizards First Rule.' After all, people are stupid. People will believe anything you tell them if they A) want it to be true or B) are afraid it's true.
the foundation of FUD is the fear.