Eh, I don't know about self-cleaning, but inherently less "dirty" feeling, probably. The body puts out oil rapidly after a shower largely due to the shower - the natural biological protective film has been washed off and it needs to be replaced. If you're not showering regularly, you're not washing it off regularly.
Kinda goes along with the fairly-recent Old World view that bathing regularly is bad for your health/sign of poor moral fortitude (they used to be largely synonymous.) (My aunt was an exchange student in France 30-odd years ago and that was their opinion on bathing then.
Except we're not talking about consumer toys and electronics (though some might argue that Windows XP is a 'toy OS'). We're talking about the OS with the largest corporate/business install base, ever. And there has been an official EOL date known for some time now - and this falls before that date.
The really irritating thing is that, while XP SP3 is being patched (apparently) they're not patching the earlier releases. That's really, really frustrating, because the main computers which will be running those earlier releases are the more expensive ones that you simply can't replace: things like $500 thousand medical scanner interface computers, industrial interface PCs, and the like. They need to be network connected for one reason or another, but it will be impossible to do so securely.
Actually, that isn't the only difference (as the topic for this thread illustrates): with Windows, not only are you paying for it, but you don't get it.
Kernel 2.4 was no longer 'current stable' as of sometime in early 2003, IIRC. Since that time, it's been in 'maintanance'. It's roughly the same age as XP, yet it is still actively maintained. XP isn't being maintained for one reason, and one reason alone: they're trying increase their costs by decreasing their maintenance overhead on XP and bringing fresh/increased revenue in with W7.
Meanwhile, the Linux 2.2 tree, which is actually a full 10.5 years old right now, has a patch for this. And what's more, there's modern, current, and secure support for quite a bit in the 2.2 tree due to patching.
I'm not saying MS should be doing this, and I wouldn't expect them to. I am saying your argument (or lack thereof) is full of shit, and that it is completely unacceptable for MS to EOL a product unofficially, while it is still being sold as "new" to customers, ~half a year before the "official" EOL date.
A good example of the "honest" reporting from non-Fox news organizations can be seen while examining this past weekend's 912 Project/Tea Party protest in DC. ABC News, specifically, was reporting 70k-80k people in attendance for a diverse base of reasons/no unified front. The reality, however, is that there was one primary (and very evident) unified front of "too much government/government spending", and that there were well over 1 million people present. While it might be difficult to prove there was over 1 million people in attendance, a review of the many stop-motion videos will show you that there was easily well over 100k people in attendance: people covering the 100' wide roadway all the way from the White House to the Capitol Building.
Sadly, this is just one of a handful of fraudulent reporting from CNN and ABC. They appear to be the worst offenders of late. Fox News isn't perfect, but anyone who's paying attention should be able to notice a bit of an echo chamber amongst the non-Fox news sources - and when Fox differs, an analysis of the information presented and facts available (photographic, independent 3rd party, etc.) tends to prove Fox in the right.
If my experience with fixing XP bugs or misfeatures is any indication, it should be relatively easy to strip the 2k3 binaries of identifier strings and simply use that. Many 2k3 binaries are 'portable' to XP, if not for their versioning information.
They've pretty much stopped doing that, though there are still some out there with XP. I suspect any we see coming out after the Win7 release date will have Win7 Starter on them.
'We're talking about code that is 12 to 15 years old in its origin, so backporting that level of code is essentially not feasible,'
Eh? You mean to say that Windows 2000 and Windows XP weren't "complete rewrites" like they claimed (at the time), and that that code goes back to NT4?
What about 2003 Server? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the same exact network codebase as XP. If you're going to patch 2k3, the amount of effort would be trivial to patch XP. (Often, the DLLs are even interchangeable, so it might be possible for a 'community' patch to be made.)
From where I'm sitting, this sounds like MS is putting a "real" EOL date (ie "today") on XP instead of "promised" EOL. That's a really crappy thing to do to your customers, as you can still get new Windows XP based devices (and they were commonplace as of a couple months ago). I'd suspect they're trying to push business clients to upgrade their networks due to the difficulty of "forcing" a customer to move from a 7-year-tested application framework to a new, yet-untested OS. I suspect it's been many years since small-medium businesses have given much money to Microsoft for OS licensing.
Many hospital staph infections are due to the over-sanitation of surfaces. Bacteria will become largely immune to many disinfectants and become "super bugs"; additionally, it will latch onto the hosts due to it being a much more receptive surface than something which has been disinfected.
I know that in some places in the US, they've only recently gotten water chlorination systems hooked up to the mains. Additionally, a lot of places (largely rural ones) still utilize wells for their water, so there will be no chlorination. I'd not be surprised if as much as 1/3rd of the households out there are in remote/non-mains water.
Not to be stereotypical here but I don't shower regularly right now, on account of the whole "unemployed, no need to interact with people right now" part of my life.
After a couple "cycles" of only showering once every other/third day, my body acclimated to the different bathing. I found/find that my skin is, overall, much clearer (lifelong acme sufferer) as well as substantially less oily. I no longer feel like there's grease in my eyes by the time I go to bed, and my skin feels 'healthier'.
I wonder if routine shower cleaning would help fix the problem? I'd think that the chlorine in the water would help dissuade bacteria from growing. I wonder if that 1/3rd can be accounted for by low chlorine levels, or well water? We have non-chlorinated well water here, as do both my parents and grandmother, all in different parts of the country.
That is exactly what I've been looking for - but not for desktop use, for a server on some old x86 hardware with 1G of RAM. I just love the debian packaging tools that much.
I don't know where you live, but the most likely places a geek is to live in the US all have pretty draconian 'wiretapping' laws which would make that activity highly illegal.
That'd be pretty neat. It's kind of embarrassing to Apple as things stand with their cameras only being 3 megapixel, with a crappy lens, when there are 5 megapixel WinMo phones out there in a similar price range that also have a markedly better glass lens. 3MP with a crappy lens doesn't do all that much for me.
Likewise, the screens on the iPhones. Compared to WinMo offerings, they're quite a bit lower res to what's available with a WinMo phone.
Look at it this way. If you've got a dispute as a buyer, you are (at worst) out the item and/or your money.
As a seller, you are, (at best), out the item and/or the money. In all likelihood, your Paypal account will be locked and the funds ceased/made inaccessible to you until the account is resolved. Sometimes, even after Paypal has sent the funds to the buyer to 'right' the situation, your account is still inaccessible.
I was an Ebay seller for several months, largely making my income off the site (buying things at auctions and turning them around on eBay). I supported myself, my wife, and baby son that way. Then I made the mistake of selling an unused copy of UT2k3 to someone in Southern California.
Well, this jackass asked for the cheapest shipping rate, and I obliged. That involved no tracking number, foolishly. And because I couldn't prove that I'd sent it, Ebay sided with this guy - with 3 transactions, while I had something like 70 at this point with a 100% approval rating. They locked my account and sent him the money without my permission and I've been unable to use that email account on eBay or Paypal - and neither have I been able to use those accounts (they're locked).
I don't think that'd work. They'd run out of food and we'd come back a week later to find broken chairs laying around the room, Jobs dead in a corner from blunt impact, Balmer self-hung in the middle of the room, with Torvalds and Stallman arguing about who gets the last morsels of Balmer's legs.
Really, this is a pretty trivial "jump" from the normal way of things.
You've got manually installed rootkits, and most of them have C&C tools. How is this much different, other than optimizing the C&C mechanisms? There's nothing here to suggest this is anything "new": the mechanisms, whatever used, still appear to be tightly constrained to "manual rootboxing" - a time consuming process compared to a "real" automated botnet.
All evidence points to this being more of someone's "pet" botnet than it does any sort of improvement on the malware concept. Same old thing, different implementation. Let me know when there's a polymorphic, multi-OS botnet with a non-distributed model and pluggable payload and vector - which uses traffic heuristics to hide its traffic on a network and runs "quiet" (compared to common botnets/worms). Then I'll start being concerned.
VMWares products exist because of Linux. They are built on Linux.
I can't think of a single MS product that exists because of Linux.
I can - quite a few, actually. Though, in most cases, it's not directly:
* Hyper-V itself exists because of Linux - because of VMWare and the like, which pioneered the VM market, using Linux. * A lot of the UI effects in W7 have been directly or indirectly 'stolen' from (primarily) Linux desktop environments * Office 2k7 exists, arguably, because OpenOffice has been able to support their older document formats mostly-flawlessly for some time now. * Silverlight was brought out because ASP.NET wasn't cutting it when competing to LAMP and similar software stacks for web development (as well as Flash). * IIS was a direct response to Apache, which has primarily been run on Linux and BSD.
How do you propose to fix the driver problem? The only way that gets fixed is when every hardware manufacturer writes their own drivers. That would only happen if Linux attained something like 10% market share.
Linux has "something like 10% market share" if you include servers. Yet even support there is seemingly marginal from the vendors.
Here's an idea, though: maybe if the various driver frameworks would stabilize - ie, nothing more than bug fixes - we'd see some drivers getting written for them. I know that's a bit of a cop out, because a lot of drivers don't necessarily need a stable API or the like (ie something like a USB camera which wouldn't take that much work to modify the driver for in the event of the USB driver framework changing). But in all seriousness, we've got frameworks for everything changing, often. And usually they're fairly drastic changes.
In 2003, we had 2.6 come out which was a completely - completely! - different driver model, so pretty much everything had to be rewritten (or ported, depending on how badly it was written to begin with). Then we had the Firewire framework written. The PCMCIA framework has been written/is being rewritten for the last couple years (my CF/PCMCIA slots were out of commission on my Thinkpad X30 for over a year before the machine was replaced). The driver framework for X - whether in kernel or in Xorg - has changed a half dozen+ or so times all told in the last 5 years, and that's not even including "small" revisions in X that make something like a 3rd party touchscreen driver no longer work. And then, for 6 months, my USB multi-card reader no longer worked due to a kernel upgrade (which was needed due to a remote exploit, IIRC). Oops! Somehow, that got fucked until -another- "major" point release in the kernel to get -properly- regressed.
I don't know how many times I've come across a driver that works on a version of the kernel or X 6 months or so ago, only to find that it doesn't work on any distros or kernels in the last couple months due to a weird regression in the kernel that the fucking devs decided to not acknowledge or tag as important because "it would get fixed downstream by the distros" or some such rot. Seemingly, this kind of thing has increased in regularity with the 2.6 model.
Technically, yes, but in practice, not really. It usually works, but not always.
I've found the biggest offenders are wireless cards, at least where it matters. You've got to get it in the same port, consistently. With Linux, this is typically not a problem because the system doesn't keep a "log" of past devices plugged in: you get a new wifi adapter plugged in, it gets the next available device name. "Next available" in this case, means one which is not currently recognized and in use by the system. Then wireless networks are kept independently, and are not associated with a specific device.
With Windows, on the other hand, you can often swap a wifi device back and forth between ports/hubs when (not if) the wifi device inexplicably "dies temporarily". Actually, you usually have to do it, because a reboot won't 'reset' things properly. It's a real pain in the ass.
Part of this is due to the USB spec allowing for a vendor to not properly ID their device - as I understand it. But it's also how Windows treats USB.
Uh, you realize that most computers that have USB onboard are going to have onboard Ethernet with autosensing ports, right? IE, plug any ethernet cable in (CX or straight TP) and you should be good to go. Oh yeah: not only will throughput with a GigE card at either side be vastly superior than USB 2.0, you're not limited to USB cable length specs, and you don't have to run your transfers over a CPU-hungry bus, but you'll be able to bridge over effortlessly to wireless (or anything else).
USB and Firewire networking has always seemed silly to me. Using something like next-gen Firewire, or even the SATA bus, as a "host bus extension" interface, on the other hand, sounds awesome: you could very easily turn a handful of systems into a true NUMA cluster without much cost OR effort (provided software support for using SATA as a controllercontroller interface bus, at least).
Probably a combination of factors. Firewire has always been primarily a "high speed, lower CPU utilization USB" - mainly for audio and video transfer from video cameras and the like. The fact that it was mostly an Apple-only interface for some time (and it's an Apple brand name anyway) probably has something to do with it. Now,
Don't get me wrong: I like Firewire, particularly when you compare it to USB. But it's slower than GigE for networking, not terribly common, and slower than something like eSATA (again, much more common). Most consumer PCs don't have it; servers don't have it; hell, I don't think Apple even ships with firewire anymore. I know I've had to specifically look for it in the past (so I can talk to my dvcams). It's just not on the "to do" list, I suppose.
I agree - Linux audio has gotten much worse, as a whole. Sure, back in '98, there were only a handful of cards supported. But it worked.
For the longest time (oh, 6 years or so) I used OSS with ESD. That worked splendidly for me and never had a problem; it was also (for the day) trivial to set up. Then Alsa came along and I had some initial problems, but nothing too substantial (a little crashing when multiple streams were playing, or some such thing). Then Pulse came along... what a clusterfuck. I can't play an MP3 and surf even a single slashdot instance with that crap without the audio skipping and jittering. And forget about window manager audio hints lagging, or causing the other stream to jitter. Pulse is worse than the audio implementation in Win95.
It's too bad they couldn't have changed the underpinnings while simply keeping the frontend, or something. If Alsa wasn't working fine for me right now as a "standalone" with a little creativity (flash crap doesn't work well if anything else is using alsa - I think flash is using OSS, but I'm uncertain), I'd be using ESD still.
It's really not all that surprising, because it's a complex topic with multiple and different answers, depending on which devices we're talking about.
Is it an ALSA capable card? Oh, it works with OSS too? But OSS piggybacks on ALSA? What's pulseaudio do? So on and so forth. I've been using Linux for over a decade and have gotten all this 'sound' stuff working on my systems w/ esoteric/glitchy hardware a number of times; I've rebuilt countless kernels and used beta ALSA crap once. If someone such as myself is confused by the broach of the topic, then the common Linux geek, nevermind the common Linux user, has little chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, I don't know about self-cleaning, but inherently less "dirty" feeling, probably. The body puts out oil rapidly after a shower largely due to the shower - the natural biological protective film has been washed off and it needs to be replaced. If you're not showering regularly, you're not washing it off regularly.
Kinda goes along with the fairly-recent Old World view that bathing regularly is bad for your health/sign of poor moral fortitude (they used to be largely synonymous.) (My aunt was an exchange student in France 30-odd years ago and that was their opinion on bathing then.
Except we're not talking about consumer toys and electronics (though some might argue that Windows XP is a 'toy OS'). We're talking about the OS with the largest corporate/business install base, ever. And there has been an official EOL date known for some time now - and this falls before that date.
The really irritating thing is that, while XP SP3 is being patched (apparently) they're not patching the earlier releases. That's really, really frustrating, because the main computers which will be running those earlier releases are the more expensive ones that you simply can't replace: things like $500 thousand medical scanner interface computers, industrial interface PCs, and the like. They need to be network connected for one reason or another, but it will be impossible to do so securely.
Actually, that isn't the only difference (as the topic for this thread illustrates): with Windows, not only are you paying for it, but you don't get it.
Kernel 2.4 was no longer 'current stable' as of sometime in early 2003, IIRC. Since that time, it's been in 'maintanance'. It's roughly the same age as XP, yet it is still actively maintained. XP isn't being maintained for one reason, and one reason alone: they're trying increase their costs by decreasing their maintenance overhead on XP and bringing fresh/increased revenue in with W7.
Meanwhile, the Linux 2.2 tree, which is actually a full 10.5 years old right now, has a patch for this. And what's more, there's modern, current, and secure support for quite a bit in the 2.2 tree due to patching.
I'm not saying MS should be doing this, and I wouldn't expect them to. I am saying your argument (or lack thereof) is full of shit, and that it is completely unacceptable for MS to EOL a product unofficially, while it is still being sold as "new" to customers, ~half a year before the "official" EOL date.
A good example of the "honest" reporting from non-Fox news organizations can be seen while examining this past weekend's 912 Project/Tea Party protest in DC. ABC News, specifically, was reporting 70k-80k people in attendance for a diverse base of reasons/no unified front. The reality, however, is that there was one primary (and very evident) unified front of "too much government/government spending", and that there were well over 1 million people present. While it might be difficult to prove there was over 1 million people in attendance, a review of the many stop-motion videos will show you that there was easily well over 100k people in attendance: people covering the 100' wide roadway all the way from the White House to the Capitol Building.
Sadly, this is just one of a handful of fraudulent reporting from CNN and ABC. They appear to be the worst offenders of late. Fox News isn't perfect, but anyone who's paying attention should be able to notice a bit of an echo chamber amongst the non-Fox news sources - and when Fox differs, an analysis of the information presented and facts available (photographic, independent 3rd party, etc.) tends to prove Fox in the right.
If my experience with fixing XP bugs or misfeatures is any indication, it should be relatively easy to strip the 2k3 binaries of identifier strings and simply use that. Many 2k3 binaries are 'portable' to XP, if not for their versioning information.
They've pretty much stopped doing that, though there are still some out there with XP. I suspect any we see coming out after the Win7 release date will have Win7 Starter on them.
'We're talking about code that is 12 to 15 years old in its origin, so backporting that level of code is essentially not feasible,'
Eh? You mean to say that Windows 2000 and Windows XP weren't "complete rewrites" like they claimed (at the time), and that that code goes back to NT4?
What about 2003 Server? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the same exact network codebase as XP. If you're going to patch 2k3, the amount of effort would be trivial to patch XP. (Often, the DLLs are even interchangeable, so it might be possible for a 'community' patch to be made.)
From where I'm sitting, this sounds like MS is putting a "real" EOL date (ie "today") on XP instead of "promised" EOL. That's a really crappy thing to do to your customers, as you can still get new Windows XP based devices (and they were commonplace as of a couple months ago). I'd suspect they're trying to push business clients to upgrade their networks due to the difficulty of "forcing" a customer to move from a 7-year-tested application framework to a new, yet-untested OS. I suspect it's been many years since small-medium businesses have given much money to Microsoft for OS licensing.
Many hospital staph infections are due to the over-sanitation of surfaces. Bacteria will become largely immune to many disinfectants and become "super bugs"; additionally, it will latch onto the hosts due to it being a much more receptive surface than something which has been disinfected.
I know that in some places in the US, they've only recently gotten water chlorination systems hooked up to the mains. Additionally, a lot of places (largely rural ones) still utilize wells for their water, so there will be no chlorination. I'd not be surprised if as much as 1/3rd of the households out there are in remote/non-mains water.
Not to be stereotypical here but I don't shower regularly right now, on account of the whole "unemployed, no need to interact with people right now" part of my life.
After a couple "cycles" of only showering once every other/third day, my body acclimated to the different bathing. I found/find that my skin is, overall, much clearer (lifelong acme sufferer) as well as substantially less oily. I no longer feel like there's grease in my eyes by the time I go to bed, and my skin feels 'healthier'.
I wonder if routine shower cleaning would help fix the problem? I'd think that the chlorine in the water would help dissuade bacteria from growing. I wonder if that 1/3rd can be accounted for by low chlorine levels, or well water? We have non-chlorinated well water here, as do both my parents and grandmother, all in different parts of the country.
That is exactly what I've been looking for - but not for desktop use, for a server on some old x86 hardware with 1G of RAM. I just love the debian packaging tools that much.
I don't know where you live, but the most likely places a geek is to live in the US all have pretty draconian 'wiretapping' laws which would make that activity highly illegal.
That'd be pretty neat. It's kind of embarrassing to Apple as things stand with their cameras only being 3 megapixel, with a crappy lens, when there are 5 megapixel WinMo phones out there in a similar price range that also have a markedly better glass lens. 3MP with a crappy lens doesn't do all that much for me.
Likewise, the screens on the iPhones. Compared to WinMo offerings, they're quite a bit lower res to what's available with a WinMo phone.
Look at it this way. If you've got a dispute as a buyer, you are (at worst) out the item and/or your money.
As a seller, you are, (at best), out the item and/or the money. In all likelihood, your Paypal account will be locked and the funds ceased/made inaccessible to you until the account is resolved. Sometimes, even after Paypal has sent the funds to the buyer to 'right' the situation, your account is still inaccessible.
I was an Ebay seller for several months, largely making my income off the site (buying things at auctions and turning them around on eBay). I supported myself, my wife, and baby son that way. Then I made the mistake of selling an unused copy of UT2k3 to someone in Southern California.
Well, this jackass asked for the cheapest shipping rate, and I obliged. That involved no tracking number, foolishly. And because I couldn't prove that I'd sent it, Ebay sided with this guy - with 3 transactions, while I had something like 70 at this point with a 100% approval rating. They locked my account and sent him the money without my permission and I've been unable to use that email account on eBay or Paypal - and neither have I been able to use those accounts (they're locked).
I don't think that'd work. They'd run out of food and we'd come back a week later to find broken chairs laying around the room, Jobs dead in a corner from blunt impact, Balmer self-hung in the middle of the room, with Torvalds and Stallman arguing about who gets the last morsels of Balmer's legs.
Really, this is a pretty trivial "jump" from the normal way of things.
You've got manually installed rootkits, and most of them have C&C tools. How is this much different, other than optimizing the C&C mechanisms? There's nothing here to suggest this is anything "new": the mechanisms, whatever used, still appear to be tightly constrained to "manual rootboxing" - a time consuming process compared to a "real" automated botnet.
All evidence points to this being more of someone's "pet" botnet than it does any sort of improvement on the malware concept. Same old thing, different implementation. Let me know when there's a polymorphic, multi-OS botnet with a non-distributed model and pluggable payload and vector - which uses traffic heuristics to hide its traffic on a network and runs "quiet" (compared to common botnets/worms). Then I'll start being concerned.
Yes! Awesome! It took long enough for one of these Linux botnets to manifest!
Now all we needd is for Windows to be ready for the Internet, and we'll be in the next era of secure computing!
VMWares products exist because of Linux. They are built on Linux.
I can't think of a single MS product that exists because of Linux.
I can - quite a few, actually. Though, in most cases, it's not directly:
* Hyper-V itself exists because of Linux - because of VMWare and the like, which pioneered the VM market, using Linux.
* A lot of the UI effects in W7 have been directly or indirectly 'stolen' from (primarily) Linux desktop environments
* Office 2k7 exists, arguably, because OpenOffice has been able to support their older document formats mostly-flawlessly for some time now.
* Silverlight was brought out because ASP.NET wasn't cutting it when competing to LAMP and similar software stacks for web development (as well as Flash).
* IIS was a direct response to Apache, which has primarily been run on Linux and BSD.
How do you propose to fix the driver problem? The only way that gets fixed is when every hardware manufacturer writes their own drivers. That would only happen if Linux attained something like 10% market share.
Linux has "something like 10% market share" if you include servers. Yet even support there is seemingly marginal from the vendors.
Here's an idea, though: maybe if the various driver frameworks would stabilize - ie, nothing more than bug fixes - we'd see some drivers getting written for them. I know that's a bit of a cop out, because a lot of drivers don't necessarily need a stable API or the like (ie something like a USB camera which wouldn't take that much work to modify the driver for in the event of the USB driver framework changing). But in all seriousness, we've got frameworks for everything changing, often. And usually they're fairly drastic changes.
In 2003, we had 2.6 come out which was a completely - completely! - different driver model, so pretty much everything had to be rewritten (or ported, depending on how badly it was written to begin with). Then we had the Firewire framework written. The PCMCIA framework has been written/is being rewritten for the last couple years (my CF/PCMCIA slots were out of commission on my Thinkpad X30 for over a year before the machine was replaced). The driver framework for X - whether in kernel or in Xorg - has changed a half dozen+ or so times all told in the last 5 years, and that's not even including "small" revisions in X that make something like a 3rd party touchscreen driver no longer work. And then, for 6 months, my USB multi-card reader no longer worked due to a kernel upgrade (which was needed due to a remote exploit, IIRC). Oops! Somehow, that got fucked until -another- "major" point release in the kernel to get -properly- regressed.
I don't know how many times I've come across a driver that works on a version of the kernel or X 6 months or so ago, only to find that it doesn't work on any distros or kernels in the last couple months due to a weird regression in the kernel that the fucking devs decided to not acknowledge or tag as important because "it would get fixed downstream by the distros" or some such rot. Seemingly, this kind of thing has increased in regularity with the 2.6 model.
Technically, yes, but in practice, not really. It usually works, but not always.
I've found the biggest offenders are wireless cards, at least where it matters. You've got to get it in the same port, consistently. With Linux, this is typically not a problem because the system doesn't keep a "log" of past devices plugged in: you get a new wifi adapter plugged in, it gets the next available device name. "Next available" in this case, means one which is not currently recognized and in use by the system. Then wireless networks are kept independently, and are not associated with a specific device.
With Windows, on the other hand, you can often swap a wifi device back and forth between ports/hubs when (not if) the wifi device inexplicably "dies temporarily". Actually, you usually have to do it, because a reboot won't 'reset' things properly. It's a real pain in the ass.
Part of this is due to the USB spec allowing for a vendor to not properly ID their device - as I understand it. But it's also how Windows treats USB.
Uh, you realize that most computers that have USB onboard are going to have onboard Ethernet with autosensing ports, right? IE, plug any ethernet cable in (CX or straight TP) and you should be good to go. Oh yeah: not only will throughput with a GigE card at either side be vastly superior than USB 2.0, you're not limited to USB cable length specs, and you don't have to run your transfers over a CPU-hungry bus, but you'll be able to bridge over effortlessly to wireless (or anything else).
USB and Firewire networking has always seemed silly to me. Using something like next-gen Firewire, or even the SATA bus, as a "host bus extension" interface, on the other hand, sounds awesome: you could very easily turn a handful of systems into a true NUMA cluster without much cost OR effort (provided software support for using SATA as a controllercontroller interface bus, at least).
Probably a combination of factors. Firewire has always been primarily a "high speed, lower CPU utilization USB" - mainly for audio and video transfer from video cameras and the like. The fact that it was mostly an Apple-only interface for some time (and it's an Apple brand name anyway) probably has something to do with it. Now,
Don't get me wrong: I like Firewire, particularly when you compare it to USB. But it's slower than GigE for networking, not terribly common, and slower than something like eSATA (again, much more common). Most consumer PCs don't have it; servers don't have it; hell, I don't think Apple even ships with firewire anymore. I know I've had to specifically look for it in the past (so I can talk to my dvcams). It's just not on the "to do" list, I suppose.
I agree - Linux audio has gotten much worse, as a whole. Sure, back in '98, there were only a handful of cards supported. But it worked.
For the longest time (oh, 6 years or so) I used OSS with ESD. That worked splendidly for me and never had a problem; it was also (for the day) trivial to set up. Then Alsa came along and I had some initial problems, but nothing too substantial (a little crashing when multiple streams were playing, or some such thing). Then Pulse came along... what a clusterfuck. I can't play an MP3 and surf even a single slashdot instance with that crap without the audio skipping and jittering. And forget about window manager audio hints lagging, or causing the other stream to jitter. Pulse is worse than the audio implementation in Win95.
It's too bad they couldn't have changed the underpinnings while simply keeping the frontend, or something. If Alsa wasn't working fine for me right now as a "standalone" with a little creativity (flash crap doesn't work well if anything else is using alsa - I think flash is using OSS, but I'm uncertain), I'd be using ESD still.
It's really not all that surprising, because it's a complex topic with multiple and different answers, depending on which devices we're talking about.
Is it an ALSA capable card? Oh, it works with OSS too? But OSS piggybacks on ALSA? What's pulseaudio do? So on and so forth. I've been using Linux for over a decade and have gotten all this 'sound' stuff working on my systems w/ esoteric/glitchy hardware a number of times; I've rebuilt countless kernels and used beta ALSA crap once. If someone such as myself is confused by the broach of the topic, then the common Linux geek, nevermind the common Linux user, has little chance.