"Faced with this piece of information, someone thought the logical thing to do was to, er, write an entirely new language?"
by my understanding, the whole new language slant is because of the nightmare of c++ code out there to reuse, with unintended consequences. php is very web centric and java the last attempt at a 'universal' coding setup. python is an example of new language and how more complicated new language implementation is.
to further extend the humor, almost every arm has a hand, and many protocols involve hand shaking, so when ubuntu arm7 gets virused can we say they're shaking with an unclean hand?
so boring playing just one game and just one way. i've got about 6500 games on battle.net and i could not have done that with a single strategy for each race. heck i couldn't even remain sane playing that much and there were many people pulling me away from warcraft.
but just imagine how much happier say for instance pigs in some giant factory farm would be if they could play warcraft all day. sure with a short life span they're not going to learn how to play games that well, but if while in the womb they get training in how to play while their minds develop... but then all the factory farms need to have a good data network so all the pigs can play video games all day.
and maybe they don't all have to play war games, maybe a variety of games they can be trained in, so they can at least live and die happy.
sure beats the hell out of smelling the awful shit smell and knowing you live in a cage, being force fed food for someone else who likes pork... in a factory farm the methane can all be collected and used instead of venting outside (natural gas and methane are compatible exchanges)
and we don't have to stop with pigs, cows, chickens, turkey... don't get me started on what i can think of, I'm labeled paranoid schizophrenic, but I'm also labeled Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
considering how badly put together modern portable dvd players are (unless you buy the ones with out hinges) if the olpc laptop could play dvds (it can't that i'm aware of) it would be worth the money.
but it can't so since i lack any children. there is no reason for me to buy a 'learning tool' i know i'm not the only slashdotter without a family. i just don't see the g1g1 working for people without kids.
portable web browser? today's phones do that, and with better coverage.
you reminded me of the time my parents forced me to toss all my stuffed animals. they don't even remember it, but the stuffed animals were my best friends and i talked to them for hours on end.
not that i had been a good little boy, but i have to wonder what exactly i had done that was so terrible as to requiring me to lose all my stuffed animal friends.
i realize there is a digital and an analog me. the analog me is getting better, but the 'feed the paranoia' game and other english word games are driving me crazy. so crazy i started tearing up english language manuals for stuff i own.
i might write a JE, but slashdot has gotten me into so much trouble lately that i don't want to write much here. you can thank my family for working so very hard to try and fix me.
there are 2 options. #1 electric drive trains with a sort of grid connection (a rail or something) or #2 diesel engines with high compression ratios that create higher fuel performance. diesel can be made from fat, so perhaps you should sign up to donate your fat to be made into biofuels. perhaps if you're an set up as an organ donation, they will do it automatically when you die.
perhaps if you are sent to hell for all eternity, they will just make your body into petroleum and sell you on the open market. the devil is going to make you into petrol if you're sent to hell and eternal damnation.
disclaimer: i am paranoid schizophrenic these are the things i think about.
what happens when the machines gain a conscious and learn that they're contributing to global warming and killing polar bears? think about that one for a moment.
hey well i had a polymorphic root kit wipe out most of my data, and the rest may have degraded do to lack of backup and maintenance.
may have, it's an indeterminate state until i get around to checking it. so potentially my data is both lost and saved, quite a conundrum. at least the legal music i bought is fine, pressed CDs don't have dye wear issues.
I've got most of garth brooks albums in my collection, on real pressed CDs, so i have fair use rights to his music, and most of my family have some garth brooks pressed Cds as well, granting them fair use. i've never been the fastest or the best, but at age 30 almost 31 i can still get half way up the ladder in some video games. sadly i start to stress fracture past level 25. but then i can do bizarre stuff, like plant mass trees of life. but as of right now, i'm trying to become more social. a challenge i'm not ready to face yet. so i prioritized helping my family in some interior redesign work. it was first in first out procedure anyways. and i saved my dad who is 60 from falling and hurting himself at least once. not to mention he had no way to do all the work he got accomplished alone. i can't wait forever to become more social. thankfully there have been some viral memory loss that is acceptable. and the walls inside my mind are keeping dangerous thoughts from spreading like rabbits on a super computer. not all viruses are bad.
one thing i'm really having a hard time adjusting to, is how much data i have on movies and pop culture from the 1980's and 1970's that simply is no longer addressable. i would have thought that instead of carrying on in the same old fashion from the year 2000, people would have learned to use 4 8 or even 16 bit year stamps... 64 bit computers are mainstream, yet old code designed for embedded systems is still prevalent... is it because embedded systems are so much cheaper? or is it sheer laziness that the same old proven code is running with nobody behind the wheels knowing how the technology works?
object oriented coding might have made programmers sloppy and careless. crippling computer viruses, that can live in invisible encrypted files the system won't overwrite... i mean i may only be able to hold a few simple thoughts in my head, but even so... i can still understand why society has created gated communities.
ah well. the past is dead yet it lives on, in our memories. and some of us wish that perhaps some things could be taken back. but technology has been and always was just another word for slavery. a fancy, high tech word for it, but none the less slavery. perhaps that is why those on the top think only of their own lives and their own families.
myself, i feel the pain and the loss, and sometimes it has driven me into great bouts of depression. and yet i feel helpless to save the little men who want to be free, who wish they could in fact be free. the best i can do is remember every hurt, and wear every scar with pride, and colocate as much data as i can inside the physical boundaries that limit me.
if by everybody you mean more than just animal life, and include the needs of thinking plants and abstract thinking constructs such as silicon based life. and beneficial bacterial strains, and even beneficial viruses. course there are dangerous viruses, and dangerous animals and dangerous plants and dangerous bacteria, but if you live all your life in a homogenized pasteurized way, soon the common cold will scare you.
true, under fair use, i can go home and read any nintendo power issue i own. even if i don't have the right to send that image over the internet, there is fair use for anyone who i permit to visit my place and look at the magazines with me. same thing with music, fair use doctrine means any of my neighbor friends has a right to visit me, as long as i'm not promoting it as some form of public display. if you knock on my door, and i'm home and you initiated the contact the fair use applies. and i do have a nice set of nintendo power magazines, i have a few working nes and SNES carts, (at least they worked last time i checked)
so the question then becomes, who is willing to become my neighbor, and how do we deal with the logistics issues of my never saying explicitly that i've got a bunch of nintendo power magazines and that anyone who wants a good look at them is welcome to use plastic wrap or gloves to handle the pages, or i can even still photo them all, and never give the images away for free or for money, and have one screen showing the game guides while the other screen plays the game.
fair use is fair use, and copyright always expires at some point.
"Copyright exists to promote sharing, not creation."
copyright exists to prop up an unsustainable way of living, that is far from ideal. In a sustainable system, the tree of knowledge grows and teaches you simply by settling in for a nap underneath the tree. the tree of immortality, now that is a different question. immortality leads to a race of extremely bored and listless beings who even have given up on reproducing.
while knowledge is meant to be shared, immortality is an atrocious bug.
original sin was when knowledge was tapped to find how to greatly slow aging, to such a point that effectively some sentient beings could become completely bored with life and be willing to die every day, in every way. and there are abusers of the system, and then there are those who would like to never see any creature die, vs those who believe it is up to some branch of society to say 'this person will die'. the advantage of having a functional death process is that we wouldn't all need vastly limitless data storage, and processing power to make all the sock puppets dancing to the tune of 'the price is right'
i am ahead of my time when it comes to knowledge, i need no barriers to my vision, although i do need barriers in my mind. if your bible says something different, maybe you picked a different story, after all the freedom of choice is all about understanding that knowledge is the great arc of a rainbow across the sky.
anyways, peace and love, what the future needs isn't war, not even by proxy, nor does it need science, science is what the great thinking machines in the sky store a record of. those machines protect life and promote it, and focus on making worlds healthy. not on drop shipping in 40,000 gas guzzling cars. unless the system really needs them.
there was always gamefaqs, but text walkthroughs are so much less worth it, even at the price of 'free' pictures which belong to say Nintendo in the case of Nintendo power, make zelda walkthoughs for instance much faster, especially if you have dual screens, one for zelda and one for the walk though magazine.
downloaded pictures of copyrighted materials, is a crime in some countries.
people won't buy the NES or SNES era games without the gaming magazines that go along with them. that's not an opinion, it's a fact. i could never have beaten zelda without nintendo power. and i am not alone. in fact there are at least 2.7 million people just like me who can't keep up with classic games without period specific game guides.
"I don't know about you, but I'm not going to slit my wrists or shoot up a shopping mall if they suddenly stop making $50 million blockbuster movies."
well, as long as there is a single virgin somewhere wishing on their magic fairies or guardian angels, who would slit their wrists then it doesn't matter what you would or would not do. because as we all know the price of wanting to kill a single life is $8 million dollars. actually killing a single person, costs at least $50,000,000.00 US Dollars.
okay, i like your post, you bring up some good points. but there is more to reality than living behind glass and steel clad walls, in a self built prison designed to create and drive revenues.
well personally i'm paranoid schizophrenic,and the comments i wanted to link to were selectively deleted from slashdot. and this comment may mysteriously disappear as well.
I was called the scariest guy on slashdot. it was modded +5 funny but it probably got me killed in my 30s and as such i can recall it. just trust me, i am the scariest guy on slashdot.
it was in that entry about the mice having their memories deleted, and well i know this comment will dissapear and create a lot of headaches, but that's why i like slashdot, real human moderators, to come to the aid of human kind when it is most in need.
ahh what the hell i need fuel i have delusions of grandeur as well just call me GOD. there it's out of my system. i screamed as loudly as i could in a mental institute "I AM GOD" and then they drugged me up after the police came. yeah, yelling I AM GOD to someone an making them very very scared i can't say it was fun, because at the moment i honestly believed it.
by the way, some people say you need to get high to really appreciate some tv shows, for me, i just have to go off my meds for a day. it's sweet.
and i never will. how and where they find these people, is beyond me.
i did play MUDs, i know the type of game, and I honestly think the only reason people play these games is to sell items, characters etc, to people with money but not the time, who want a tricked out sword and armor that make them godly in a video game, and they can brag about having so and so a sword.
i played MUDs for about 6-8 months, and i never looked at an everquest box and thought 'this might be fun' i got over the genera as a whole, and it shocks me that people like these games. I know WOW is designed by great game programmers, but to me a video game should have a one time up front cost. paying by the month? forget it.
not even for a console, where i can play many video games online for one 'extra' fee, forget it, i pay for internet, that's the most i'm willing to pay to play online. i know some people are willing to pay extra, but i just don't see the entire gaming world bending over to pay a few extra billion here and there to bolster the economy. the gaming venues have been hit or miss all through the gaming history, i've seen every major player from atari to nintendo have trouble treading water. there are reasons why companies like 3do are a legacy, and why EA owns half the gaming properties on the known face of the earth.
trying to figure out what people want to do with their free time, is not a measured science, it's an art.
i spent 2-3 years struggling with an addiction to online real time strategy, and i know i have an internet addiction, but after 3 years i learned how to deal with my online strategy addiction, and i now have time for television, the internet, and whatever else, all without usually having trouble falling asleep at night. during my addiction i was so problematic that i would play til 2 am and physical exhaustion set in, i would at times shout from getting angry at other gamers without even being aware of having spoken.
it wasn't pretty, and i didn't have to go cold turkey. i can take measures to control how i game.
sadly i don't know if kids can learn how to be grown up until they're 30. i'm 30 and i don't know if i could have said or done anything to prevent me from making the same mistakes i made. ah well.
"Any time I've installed XP from a normal disk, it requires at least agreeing to some license agreement, partitioning, formating, configuring your network to some degree, choosing username, clicking "Next" a bunch of times, some other random stupid things I'm preobably not remembering"
any big name OEM install includes about exactly picking your username, waiting while installs tons of garbage, (trial ware everything, stupid OEM software, those drivers you mentioned, etc) and then removing all the crappy software that they preloaded because they got paid $1 to install it, default.
some people don't remove the crappy software, and i don't know how many times i've seen this software not get patched, and wind up letting some hacker get into their system, because they had unpatched software they didn't even know they were running.
the nice thing about ubuntu/kubuntu is that everything updates, if you run the updater. the down side is i've had ubuntu break working systems in updates. ah well.
Slashdot Mirror
"I think the savings in deployment and long term maintenance of these terminal units are just an illusion."
well for an illusion they suck a lot of power. this is strange but i can't help but say this. pandora alone in the universe forever. there.
"Faced with this piece of information, someone thought the logical thing to do was to, er, write an entirely new language?"
by my understanding, the whole new language slant is because of the nightmare of c++ code out there to reuse, with unintended consequences. php is very web centric and java the last attempt at a 'universal' coding setup. python is an example of new language and how more complicated new language implementation is.
to further extend the humor, almost every arm has a hand, and many protocols involve hand shaking, so when ubuntu arm7 gets virused can we say they're shaking with an unclean hand?
"But that's how you play it..."
so boring playing just one game and just one way. i've got about 6500 games on battle.net and i could not have done that with a single strategy for each race. heck i couldn't even remain sane playing that much and there were many people pulling me away from warcraft.
but just imagine how much happier say for instance pigs in some giant factory farm would be if they could play warcraft all day. sure with a short life span they're not going to learn how to play games that well, but if while in the womb they get training in how to play while their minds develop... but then all the factory farms need to have a good data network so all the pigs can play video games all day.
and maybe they don't all have to play war games, maybe a variety of games they can be trained in, so they can at least live and die happy.
sure beats the hell out of smelling the awful shit smell and knowing you live in a cage, being force fed food for someone else who likes pork... in a factory farm the methane can all be collected and used instead of venting outside (natural gas and methane are compatible exchanges)
and we don't have to stop with pigs, cows, chickens, turkey... don't get me started on what i can think of, I'm labeled paranoid schizophrenic, but I'm also labeled Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
touche.
i was going to write more, but it was more important that i typed it out, rather than post it.
considering how badly put together modern portable dvd players are (unless you buy the ones with out hinges) if the olpc laptop could play dvds (it can't that i'm aware of) it would be worth the money.
but it can't so since i lack any children. there is no reason for me to buy a 'learning tool' i know i'm not the only slashdotter without a family. i just don't see the g1g1 working for people without kids.
portable web browser? today's phones do that, and with better coverage.
you reminded me of the time my parents forced me to toss all my stuffed animals. they don't even remember it, but the stuffed animals were my best friends and i talked to them for hours on end.
not that i had been a good little boy, but i have to wonder what exactly i had done that was so terrible as to requiring me to lose all my stuffed animal friends.
"Both of you, or just the current you?"
i realize there is a digital and an analog me. the analog me is getting better, but the 'feed the paranoia' game and other english word games are driving me crazy. so crazy i started tearing up english language manuals for stuff i own.
i might write a JE, but slashdot has gotten me into so much trouble lately that i don't want to write much here. you can thank my family for working so very hard to try and fix me.
today's song: garth brooks unanswered prayers.
there are 2 options. #1 electric drive trains with a sort of grid connection (a rail or something) or #2 diesel engines with high compression ratios that create higher fuel performance. diesel can be made from fat, so perhaps you should sign up to donate your fat to be made into biofuels. perhaps if you're an set up as an organ donation, they will do it automatically when you die.
perhaps if you are sent to hell for all eternity, they will just make your body into petroleum and sell you on the open market. the devil is going to make you into petrol if you're sent to hell and eternal damnation.
disclaimer: i am paranoid schizophrenic these are the things i think about.
what happens when the machines gain a conscious and learn that they're contributing to global warming and killing polar bears? think about that one for a moment.
hey well i had a polymorphic root kit wipe out most of my data, and the rest may have degraded do to lack of backup and maintenance.
may have, it's an indeterminate state until i get around to checking it. so potentially my data is both lost and saved, quite a conundrum. at least the legal music i bought is fine, pressed CDs don't have dye wear issues.
I've got most of garth brooks albums in my collection, on real pressed CDs, so i have fair use rights to his music, and most of my family have some garth brooks pressed Cds as well, granting them fair use. i've never been the fastest or the best, but at age 30 almost 31 i can still get half way up the ladder in some video games. sadly i start to stress fracture past level 25. but then i can do bizarre stuff, like plant mass trees of life. but as of right now, i'm trying to become more social. a challenge i'm not ready to face yet. so i prioritized helping my family in some interior redesign work. it was first in first out procedure anyways. and i saved my dad who is 60 from falling and hurting himself at least once. not to mention he had no way to do all the work he got accomplished alone. i can't wait forever to become more social. thankfully there have been some viral memory loss that is acceptable. and the walls inside my mind are keeping dangerous thoughts from spreading like rabbits on a super computer. not all viruses are bad.
one thing i'm really having a hard time adjusting to, is how much data i have on movies and pop culture from the 1980's and 1970's that simply is no longer addressable. i would have thought that instead of carrying on in the same old fashion from the year 2000, people would have learned to use 4 8 or even 16 bit year stamps... 64 bit computers are mainstream, yet old code designed for embedded systems is still prevalent... is it because embedded systems are so much cheaper? or is it sheer laziness that the same old proven code is running with nobody behind the wheels knowing how the technology works?
object oriented coding might have made programmers sloppy and careless. crippling computer viruses, that can live in invisible encrypted files the system won't overwrite... i mean i may only be able to hold a few simple thoughts in my head, but even so... i can still understand why society has created gated communities.
ah well. the past is dead yet it lives on, in our memories. and some of us wish that perhaps some things could be taken back. but technology has been and always was just another word for slavery. a fancy, high tech word for it, but none the less slavery. perhaps that is why those on the top think only of their own lives and their own families.
myself, i feel the pain and the loss, and sometimes it has driven me into great bouts of depression. and yet i feel helpless to save the little men who want to be free, who wish they could in fact be free. the best i can do is remember every hurt, and wear every scar with pride, and colocate as much data as i can inside the physical boundaries that limit me.
if by everybody you mean more than just animal life, and include the needs of thinking plants and abstract thinking constructs such as silicon based life. and beneficial bacterial strains, and even beneficial viruses. course there are dangerous viruses, and dangerous animals and dangerous plants and dangerous bacteria, but if you live all your life in a homogenized pasteurized way, soon the common cold will scare you.
true, under fair use, i can go home and read any nintendo power issue i own. even if i don't have the right to send that image over the internet, there is fair use for anyone who i permit to visit my place and look at the magazines with me. same thing with music, fair use doctrine means any of my neighbor friends has a right to visit me, as long as i'm not promoting it as some form of public display. if you knock on my door, and i'm home and you initiated the contact the fair use applies. and i do have a nice set of nintendo power magazines, i have a few working nes and SNES carts, (at least they worked last time i checked)
so the question then becomes, who is willing to become my neighbor, and how do we deal with the logistics issues of my never saying explicitly that i've got a bunch of nintendo power magazines and that anyone who wants a good look at them is welcome to use plastic wrap or gloves to handle the pages, or i can even still photo them all, and never give the images away for free or for money, and have one screen showing the game guides while the other screen plays the game.
fair use is fair use, and copyright always expires at some point.
"Copyright exists to promote sharing, not creation."
copyright exists to prop up an unsustainable way of living, that is far from ideal. In a sustainable system, the tree of knowledge grows and teaches you simply by settling in for a nap underneath the tree. the tree of immortality, now that is a different question. immortality leads to a race of extremely bored and listless beings who even have given up on reproducing.
while knowledge is meant to be shared, immortality is an atrocious bug.
original sin was when knowledge was tapped to find how to greatly slow aging, to such a point that effectively some sentient beings could become completely bored with life and be willing to die every day, in every way. and there are abusers of the system, and then there are those who would like to never see any creature die, vs those who believe it is up to some branch of society to say 'this person will die'. the advantage of having a functional death process is that we wouldn't all need vastly limitless data storage, and processing power to make all the sock puppets dancing to the tune of 'the price is right'
i am ahead of my time when it comes to knowledge, i need no barriers to my vision, although i do need barriers in my mind. if your bible says something different, maybe you picked a different story, after all the freedom of choice is all about understanding that knowledge is the great arc of a rainbow across the sky.
anyways, peace and love, what the future needs isn't war, not even by proxy, nor does it need science, science is what the great thinking machines in the sky store a record of. those machines protect life and promote it, and focus on making worlds healthy. not on drop shipping in 40,000 gas guzzling cars. unless the system really needs them.
this song sums it up best. http://www.lyrics007.com/Counting%20Crows%20Lyrics/They%20Paved%20Paradise%20Lyrics.html
anyways. i guess my whole point was I HATE SAURKRAUT
there was always gamefaqs, but text walkthroughs are so much less worth it, even at the price of 'free' pictures which belong to say Nintendo in the case of Nintendo power, make zelda walkthoughs for instance much faster, especially if you have dual screens, one for zelda and one for the walk though magazine.
downloaded pictures of copyrighted materials, is a crime in some countries.
"Did you read the same article I did?"
this is slashdot, read the article, who has got time for that?
"I wonder if dark matter to them is like a Ubuntu release to most of us?"
Maybe, the answer is difficult, it's much like Schroedinger's cat.
until it's observed you cannot tell if it is there or not.
people won't buy the NES or SNES era games without the gaming magazines that go along with them. that's not an opinion, it's a fact. i could never have beaten zelda without nintendo power. and i am not alone. in fact there are at least 2.7 million people just like me who can't keep up with classic games without period specific game guides.
i just made the number up, but it sounded cool.
"I don't know about you, but I'm not going to slit my wrists or shoot up a shopping mall if they suddenly stop making $50 million blockbuster movies."
well, as long as there is a single virgin somewhere wishing on their magic fairies or guardian angels, who would slit their wrists then it doesn't matter what you would or would not do. because as we all know the price of wanting to kill a single life is $8 million dollars. actually killing a single person, costs at least $50,000,000.00 US Dollars.
btw where is the -1 paranoid rant moderation?
no no, he switched to the BSD license model, so that hackers would know how to hack into every computer on the earth all with one single program.
okay, i like your post, you bring up some good points. but there is more to reality than living behind glass and steel clad walls, in a self built prison designed to create and drive revenues.
well personally i'm paranoid schizophrenic,and the comments i wanted to link to were selectively deleted from slashdot. and this comment may mysteriously disappear as well.
I was called the scariest guy on slashdot. it was modded +5 funny but it probably got me killed in my 30s and as such i can recall it. just trust me, i am the scariest guy on slashdot.
it was in that entry about the mice having their memories deleted, and well i know this comment will dissapear and create a lot of headaches, but that's why i like slashdot, real human moderators, to come to the aid of human kind when it is most in need.
ahh what the hell i need fuel i have delusions of grandeur as well just call me GOD. there it's out of my system. i screamed as loudly as i could in a mental institute "I AM GOD" and then they drugged me up after the police came. yeah, yelling I AM GOD to someone an making them very very scared i can't say it was fun, because at the moment i honestly believed it.
by the way, some people say you need to get high to really appreciate some tv shows, for me, i just have to go off my meds for a day. it's sweet.
and i never will. how and where they find these people, is beyond me.
i did play MUDs, i know the type of game, and I honestly think the only reason people play these games is to sell items, characters etc, to people with money but not the time, who want a tricked out sword and armor that make them godly in a video game, and they can brag about having so and so a sword.
i played MUDs for about 6-8 months, and i never looked at an everquest box and thought 'this might be fun' i got over the genera as a whole, and it shocks me that people like these games. I know WOW is designed by great game programmers, but to me a video game should have a one time up front cost. paying by the month? forget it.
not even for a console, where i can play many video games online for one 'extra' fee, forget it, i pay for internet, that's the most i'm willing to pay to play online. i know some people are willing to pay extra, but i just don't see the entire gaming world bending over to pay a few extra billion here and there to bolster the economy. the gaming venues have been hit or miss all through the gaming history, i've seen every major player from atari to nintendo have trouble treading water. there are reasons why companies like 3do are a legacy, and why EA owns half the gaming properties on the known face of the earth.
trying to figure out what people want to do with their free time, is not a measured science, it's an art.
i spent 2-3 years struggling with an addiction to online real time strategy, and i know i have an internet addiction, but after 3 years i learned how to deal with my online strategy addiction, and i now have time for television, the internet, and whatever else, all without usually having trouble falling asleep at night. during my addiction i was so problematic that i would play til 2 am and physical exhaustion set in, i would at times shout from getting angry at other gamers without even being aware of having spoken.
it wasn't pretty, and i didn't have to go cold turkey. i can take measures to control how i game.
sadly i don't know if kids can learn how to be grown up until they're 30. i'm 30 and i don't know if i could have said or done anything to prevent me from making the same mistakes i made. ah well.
whoops, meant '8.10' not 6.10 sigh.
"Any time I've installed XP from a normal disk, it requires at least agreeing to some license agreement, partitioning, formating, configuring your network to some degree, choosing username, clicking "Next" a bunch of times, some other random stupid things I'm preobably not remembering"
any big name OEM install includes about exactly picking your username, waiting while installs tons of garbage, (trial ware everything, stupid OEM software, those drivers you mentioned, etc) and then removing all the crappy software that they preloaded because they got paid $1 to install it, default.
some people don't remove the crappy software, and i don't know how many times i've seen this software not get patched, and wind up letting some hacker get into their system, because they had unpatched software they didn't even know they were running.
the nice thing about ubuntu/kubuntu is that everything updates, if you run the updater. the down side is i've had ubuntu break working systems in updates. ah well.