VMware doesn't have a problem with doing these things, and it's largely because it isn't nearly as complicated as you believe. There is no need to write hooks for any of the X toolkits. You write a video driver for x.org and then you are done. If the idea of updating it for new versions is annoying, then provide specs for the virtualized video API that Parallels offers, and contribute it to x.org. Either way, it isn't a big deal.
Yes, *HOME* versions of Vista have an even more restrictive EULA than XP Home. Now you have to spend $400 to run Vista in VMware or Parallels, rather than $200. MS took the position that they can make virtualization less attractive by arbitrarily making it more expensive. With that change, now you can buy a computer with a copy of Vista Home for less than a copy of Vista Ultimate to use in Parallels.
How can you dilute yourself by pretending there is some difference between the OS in Home versus Ultimate that makes one more suited for virtualization? They are the *same* kernel, with the *same* drivers. It's all about screwing you for more money by making the EULA worse.
And we all want to rush out and drop $400 on a copy of Vista Ultimate, rather than $200 for Home. They're the same program. MS went out of their way to make Windows more expensive for people that want to emulate. There is *NO* reason for the anti-virtualization terms in those EULAs other than making it more expensive to emulate rather than run native.
I didn't need "permission" to run XP Home in a VM, but because of that license change, now I do with Vista.
On my Firefox 2 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20060601 Firefox/2.0 (Ubuntu-edgy)), I definitely have that option. It's in Preferences, Privacy, "Keep Until: ask me every time".
I find that even my accounting department has no trouble doing everything they need to with OpenOffice Calc rather than Excel. This isn't to say that there aren't missing features, or poorly implemented features. It is, however, a perfectly usable, functional, and powerful program. It is well known that charting support is poor, though. The next version of charting will be much improved.
If you still want to use OpenOffice, and need to do fancy charting, you can use Graph on Windows, or gnuplot on anything. Do your chart in one of them, and then import the PNG files to your document. It isn't the most simple and elegant method, but it does work.
You just misinterpreted my method a little; I was writing about the EU, and various countries therein. I think we agree that today, at least, no country is really the land of the free. Hopefully we can change that in all of our respective countries.
Excuse me, but you don't live in the land of the free by any means. As much as I hate what the governments in the United States have become, we still have a bit further to go until we're as bad as much of Europe. England is one of the worst first-world countries I can think of for restrictions of freedom, with France and Germany not being much better. It doesn't help that most of Europe is socialist, with all of the additional problems *that* brings. Gotta love all the freedom of choice you have when the government forces you to buy in. I know *I* love it when my government pulls that crap.
Perhaps you can explain how cameras on every corner, the national banning of any trade involving anything that might sort of be Nazi related, attempts to censor search content of international corporations, or a copyright system where you can be sued, and billed, by someone not involved are improvements? Of course, we can't forget the compulsory licensing, and fees, on anything capable of receiving broadcasts. Then again, anything deemed not nice to the Jewish is illegal to broadcast in France, anything bad for the children is illegal in Germany, and so on.
Remember, the citizens of the Colonies had that little revolution because England was overtaxing, not providing representation, and generally preventing the residents of America from governing themselves, even a little. A situation that England never learned from, I remind you. The current government in the US is well down that path, but certainly not to the point of risking causing a revolution. You know, it seems to me that there has been a few war-like periods in Europe over the last 75 years. Didn't they have something to do with preventing people from governing themselves? Maybe a little something about overtaxation, too...
We all have our problems; please don't pretend that Europe is some kind of paradise.
1. Don't be an idiot. You can just as easily carry thousands of things that would trivially kill that entire school. Columbine was a tragedy, but that it was done with a gun is not why. A gun can shoot one person at a time. Chlorine gas kills everyone in the room. Do we now ban pool chlorine?
2. See point one.
3. You had the means to be alerted to someone breaking into your home, and no way to do anything about it. *THAT* seems downright stupid.
Comparing a pool to a gun to a hammer is stupid. The hammer and the gun are tools, and they can both be used to kill or defend. The pool is for entertainment, but it can still kill. All things *can* be used to kill someone. Your way leaves us chained up in a padded room being fed by machines. Honestly, you can shove that up your ass.
Given the costs to have Vista capable systems, and paying the non-volume price tags for your licensing, I would say that it isn't useful for small business. Like most of the rest of Vista, customers that cared about these features already bought solutions for them. You can get a packet tagging switch with QoS for a lot less than it will cost to upgrade your dozen Windows systems to Vista. Of course, the vast majority of small businesses don't even really needs those functions.
Vista is just where MS bundled into the OS half of the products their VARs sold.
It has a "check for updates" option, but it just notified me the last time it was updated.
BTW - I'm a full time Ubuntu user, and still run uTorrent. It's much better than anything available on Linux, as far as I've found. KTorrent is nice, but not very fast, and Azureus is a horrid pig. uTorrent runs fine through Wine, though.
The point that you are missing is the assumption that because you are a "sex offender" you will prey upon and stalk children. Someone arrested and convicted of a "sex crime" for getting drunk and streaking across their college campus is treated equal to someone that has habitually raped 10 year old boys. That there is a registry for these acts, in and of itself, is a miscarriage of justice. If you are not safe to return to society, then why were you released?
Also, there is a good point to note that we do not have a registry of murderers, people who have repeatedly violently assaulted others, and many other things. Many, *many*, of these crimes carry higher repeat offense statistics, and these crimes are much worse than "sex crimes". Which is worse: being raped, or being dead?
The case of the man killing his wife's killer vs. a serial killer is likely one of manslaughter vs. second degree murder. They are both killing someone, but the situations are very different. The murder version of these "sex crime" lists would equate the two, since they both involved killing someone.
Additionally, consider that doing theft the "sex crime" way would mean calling the serial burglar, who has been convicted of hundreds of thousands in thefts, the same thing as the kid that stole a video game from the mall. If you're convicted of either, you go on the list, and are called a thief.
In all of these cases, it would now be *IMPOSSIBLE* to repay your debt to society and rejoin the world as a productive citizen. A drunken mistake when you were 17 can force you to poor living conditions and low pay work, or simply force you to become a criminal to have a decent life. BTW - refusing to inform your community that you are on one of these lists would be grounds for arrest, since *that* would be a crime. So trying to have a normal life after paying penance becomes illegal.
You might not have intended it that way, but you manner of thought simply causes intolerance and creates more criminals. You create a life of intolerance and unforgiveness. There is a reason why every major religion teaches forgiveness, and it's not because someone's god said so.
Unfortunately, if you go after the product the spam offers, then it turns into a vehicle to damage a third party. Now when someone doesn't like a company/product, they will pay to have a few millions spam messages sent out, and destroy their competition. Or they will threaten to do the same if said company doesn't pay a large amount of money.
This happens today with email viruses and botnet attacks, and don't think that it wouldn't happen if you attacked products advertised in spam.
Take a look at www.promash.com or www.beersmith.com for what I mean. Personally, I'm a ProMash user. There's also QBrew at www.usermode.org/code.html but it is pretty basic.
Having a piece of software for your homebrew is definitely not necessary, but it makes keeping track of what you have on hand easier, and take care of calculations. That way you just know how many calories your beer has, what color it will be, how many IBUs, etc. Nothing that you can't do on paper and with a little experience, of course.
I was one of the respondents to this survey. I don't know what their selection strategy was, but I'm surprised to find out that under a thousand took the silly thing. I just figured that they emailed requests bugging everyone that they were sending their free magazines to. IIRC, they offered a contest for something or other if you filled it out.
Not everyone that participates in these surveys is a total Office Space style incompetent twit.:)
(I'll have to check out GovConnection. I've been using Florida Micro and been happy, but I'm always on the lookout for the best prices.)
As I mentioned elsewhere, you don't have to replace the desktops to change the servers. There are several products that would let you migrate your servers to more flexible, reliable, and maintainable systems. There is *no* rebuilding involved, you migrate what you already have. You can even do it piecemeal.
If you change the servers, there is no district-wide retraining. You only have to worry about your IT staff. If you do the server migration right, nobody will even notice a difference.
I don't know why you are so caught into this mistaken idea that you would have to rebuild your infrastructure. I have done exactly what I'm talking about before, and I'm sure that I'll do it again. After migrated most of my servers away from Windows, I have definitely found that I can do a lot more with a lot less resources than a Microsoft network requires. I have a few applications that require Windows on the client, and one that is running on a Windows server. That's likely to change, since it's just housing a database in Oracle.
Give Novell GroupWise, Novell eDirectory, and Novell ZenWorks a try instead of Exchange and AD. They'll cleanly migrate your data from the Microsoft tools, and provide more functionality than what you had before. You'll be able to interoperate very nicely with many other UNIX/Linux variants, MacOS, and Windows. That way you don't have to rebuild everything, nor do you have to modify their classroom by more than switching from Outlook to the GroupWise client, and you aren't even required to do *that* much. You will still maintain compatibility with other districts.
Additionally, you don't need to get rid of your Windows clients and go to Linux just because you aren't using a Microsoft server.
As far as the 10 year old, well, you can't play PlayStation games on your Windows computer, either. Does that mean you should do all of your office work on your PlayStation? Just use the right tool for the job. Windows isn't better than Linux similarly to how the PlayStation isn't better than Windows. It should not be a surprise that you can't use software specifically written to one platform, and that platform only, under another platform. If that is a requirement, then use the platform that the software runs on. Just use the right requirements. For example, if your requirement is "must run MS Office", you've done it wrong; the requirement should be "office software with following capabilities."
Can't argue with it being cheaper to just not change anything, though. However, it'll be just as bad to migrate to Vista and friends as it would be to change to something focused more on Linux servers. You'll have retraining, migration costs, likely some downtime, new hardware, etc, doing either of those things. The only reason that MS comes in slightly better than the Novell kit is that MS offers ridiculous discounts for schools, to the order of $2.00 for something that's normally around $30, or $65 for something that's well over $600. MS gives discounts to government, too, but education pricing is an order of magnitude under even that. However, that discount ends up costing you more, because you end up with higher support costs, more expensive related software, and more expensive hardware requirements, as well as a lack of flexibility.
A note on the teachers... letting them do whatever they want is just a way to avoid confrontation. Many times, teachers have very unreasonable requests that are founded on misguided assumptions, or just a general lack of related knowledge, or just because they're being a jerk. You shouldn't give them a brand new quad-core desktop because they decided it will let them teach better, since you know that it almost certainly isn't true. You shouldn't let them just demand Adobe PhotoShop to edit a couple of pictures, and then give them their way. You still need to examine what they're asking for and provide what they actually need. Maybe they do need PhotoShop, or maybe the software that came with their camera is all they need. Your way just creates huge costs with no benefit, and wastes a lot of money in an institution that is supposed to be painfully strapped for cash.
I do that with Windows applications under Ubuntu at home, at work, and on my laptop. Get installer, double-click, install, and execute. It works under both Wine and Crossover Office (wine). As pointed out, it works with Cedega (wine), too. I use uTorrent this way, with no troubles. I occasionally use IE6 to access poorly designed sites, I run my brewing software, fire incident tracking software, GIS data viewer, a few games, and so on. The only software that I've had trouble with is stuff based on.NET, but that software doesn't work all that well under Windows, either.
FWIW, autorun is a horrible idea. The only action that should ever start a program is electing to start a program. If you want to pop up a directory browser or something similar, that's fine. I know very few people that don't disable autorun after the first time they put a CD in their computer. The way Ubuntu does it is correct: pop up a windows asking if it should start a viewer for the media type inserted.
You can retrieve a substantial amount of information from your display by using EDID/DDC data. Perhaps some distributions do magic with that information.
Here is are some examples of how to do it on Linux, primarily with Ubuntu:
64 bit support - which breaks support for all of your legacy hardware by requiring signed drivers, and also is not needed for anyone's existing (and functioning) applications
Better centralized management tools - that you already bought for previous versions of Windows
Improved security - which is unproven at being better, and proven at being highly intrusive to users
These things *could* be useful, but they aren't anything people are going to rush out and spend hundreds to thousands on, per workstation, ever. We've all already worked around many of MS' deficiencies and made due with the old broken stuff. The desire to deal with new broken stuff isn't very strong.
The majority aren't using.NET to do web development. I would guess that this means that they simply don't bother with.NET, and so don't have to develop for it, or test with it.
Yes, font smoothing (sub-pixel) was integrated into at least X.org and XFree86 for X11. MacOSX does this, as well. I don't know how long either has been around, though, but probably ClearType was before those three.
I agree completely that software shouldn't be patentable.
MS ClearType is a logical extension of an existing invention, but using newly available tech. It's like buying things, but using the Internet! Neither are deserving of patents, and neither are particularly novel. I'm sure other companies would have done the same much sooner, had it been possible to do with the displays of the time.
All MS did was be the first one to implement a slight feature change that, at the time, most people could not use. Now that LCD panels are common, every windowing system does this. Besides that, MS' implementation has some problems, given that you have to download an unsupported and unpublicized applet to tune ClearType to not cause eye strain. You also can't disable per display on a multi-head system if, like me, you have a CRT and a LCD. Not that anyone else has fixed those problems, though...
MS claims a lot of other things that aren't true, too. The truth is that Office formats are *mostly* compatible between versions. There are parser differences that cause Office products to fail to read complex documents between versions on occasion. I have trouble reading documents from Office2003 in Office2000 suite products. I have infrequent problems reading Office97 files in Office2000, and have frequent trouble reading Office98 (Mac) files on Office2000.
People that seriously use Office frequently see compatibility problems. It's the occasional users, like you, that don't see the issues.
FWIW, the filters that MS has sponsered for OpenDocument are terrible, and I can't use OfficeML because most people can't read it without downloading additional software. Besides, if I'm going to consider switching products from Office2000/DOC to Office2007/XML, I might as well save 500$/person and just switch to OpenOffice/OpenDocument.
You wouldn't really want to do that, either. If you simply make port 25 traffic really slow, then legitimate use is severely impacted. This will lead to people wide-scale circumventing your restriction to get work done. Just as ISPs blocking port 25 caused people to use alternate ports, so too would making port 25 traffic slow.
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VMware doesn't have a problem with doing these things, and it's largely because it isn't nearly as complicated as you believe. There is no need to write hooks for any of the X toolkits. You write a video driver for x.org and then you are done. If the idea of updating it for new versions is annoying, then provide specs for the virtualized video API that Parallels offers, and contribute it to x.org. Either way, it isn't a big deal.
Yes, *HOME* versions of Vista have an even more restrictive EULA than XP Home. Now you have to spend $400 to run Vista in VMware or Parallels, rather than $200. MS took the position that they can make virtualization less attractive by arbitrarily making it more expensive. With that change, now you can buy a computer with a copy of Vista Home for less than a copy of Vista Ultimate to use in Parallels.
How can you dilute yourself by pretending there is some difference between the OS in Home versus Ultimate that makes one more suited for virtualization? They are the *same* kernel, with the *same* drivers. It's all about screwing you for more money by making the EULA worse.
And we all want to rush out and drop $400 on a copy of Vista Ultimate, rather than $200 for Home. They're the same program. MS went out of their way to make Windows more expensive for people that want to emulate. There is *NO* reason for the anti-virtualization terms in those EULAs other than making it more expensive to emulate rather than run native.
I didn't need "permission" to run XP Home in a VM, but because of that license change, now I do with Vista.
On my Firefox 2 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20060601 Firefox/2.0 (Ubuntu-edgy)), I definitely have that option. It's in Preferences, Privacy, "Keep Until: ask me every time".
I find that even my accounting department has no trouble doing everything they need to with OpenOffice Calc rather than Excel. This isn't to say that there aren't missing features, or poorly implemented features. It is, however, a perfectly usable, functional, and powerful program. It is well known that charting support is poor, though. The next version of charting will be much improved.
If you still want to use OpenOffice, and need to do fancy charting, you can use Graph on Windows, or gnuplot on anything. Do your chart in one of them, and then import the PNG files to your document. It isn't the most simple and elegant method, but it does work.
This is the OpenOffice Chart module that is under development:
http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html
You just misinterpreted my method a little; I was writing about the EU, and various countries therein. I think we agree that today, at least, no country is really the land of the free. Hopefully we can change that in all of our respective countries.
Excuse me, but you don't live in the land of the free by any means. As much as I hate what the governments in the United States have become, we still have a bit further to go until we're as bad as much of Europe. England is one of the worst first-world countries I can think of for restrictions of freedom, with France and Germany not being much better. It doesn't help that most of Europe is socialist, with all of the additional problems *that* brings. Gotta love all the freedom of choice you have when the government forces you to buy in. I know *I* love it when my government pulls that crap.
Perhaps you can explain how cameras on every corner, the national banning of any trade involving anything that might sort of be Nazi related, attempts to censor search content of international corporations, or a copyright system where you can be sued, and billed, by someone not involved are improvements? Of course, we can't forget the compulsory licensing, and fees, on anything capable of receiving broadcasts. Then again, anything deemed not nice to the Jewish is illegal to broadcast in France, anything bad for the children is illegal in Germany, and so on.
Remember, the citizens of the Colonies had that little revolution because England was overtaxing, not providing representation, and generally preventing the residents of America from governing themselves, even a little. A situation that England never learned from, I remind you. The current government in the US is well down that path, but certainly not to the point of risking causing a revolution. You know, it seems to me that there has been a few war-like periods in Europe over the last 75 years. Didn't they have something to do with preventing people from governing themselves? Maybe a little something about overtaxation, too...
We all have our problems; please don't pretend that Europe is some kind of paradise.
On the chance that you're *not* a troll.
1. Don't be an idiot. You can just as easily carry thousands of things that would trivially kill that entire school. Columbine was a tragedy, but that it was done with a gun is not why. A gun can shoot one person at a time. Chlorine gas kills everyone in the room. Do we now ban pool chlorine?
2. See point one.
3. You had the means to be alerted to someone breaking into your home, and no way to do anything about it. *THAT* seems downright stupid.
Comparing a pool to a gun to a hammer is stupid. The hammer and the gun are tools, and they can both be used to kill or defend. The pool is for entertainment, but it can still kill. All things *can* be used to kill someone. Your way leaves us chained up in a padded room being fed by machines. Honestly, you can shove that up your ass.
Given the costs to have Vista capable systems, and paying the non-volume price tags for your licensing, I would say that it isn't useful for small business. Like most of the rest of Vista, customers that cared about these features already bought solutions for them. You can get a packet tagging switch with QoS for a lot less than it will cost to upgrade your dozen Windows systems to Vista. Of course, the vast majority of small businesses don't even really needs those functions.
Vista is just where MS bundled into the OS half of the products their VARs sold.
It has a "check for updates" option, but it just notified me the last time it was updated.
BTW - I'm a full time Ubuntu user, and still run uTorrent. It's much better than anything available on Linux, as far as I've found. KTorrent is nice, but not very fast, and Azureus is a horrid pig. uTorrent runs fine through Wine, though.
The point that you are missing is the assumption that because you are a "sex offender" you will prey upon and stalk children. Someone arrested and convicted of a "sex crime" for getting drunk and streaking across their college campus is treated equal to someone that has habitually raped 10 year old boys. That there is a registry for these acts, in and of itself, is a miscarriage of justice. If you are not safe to return to society, then why were you released?
Also, there is a good point to note that we do not have a registry of murderers, people who have repeatedly violently assaulted others, and many other things. Many, *many*, of these crimes carry higher repeat offense statistics, and these crimes are much worse than "sex crimes". Which is worse: being raped, or being dead?
The case of the man killing his wife's killer vs. a serial killer is likely one of manslaughter vs. second degree murder. They are both killing someone, but the situations are very different. The murder version of these "sex crime" lists would equate the two, since they both involved killing someone.
Additionally, consider that doing theft the "sex crime" way would mean calling the serial burglar, who has been convicted of hundreds of thousands in thefts, the same thing as the kid that stole a video game from the mall. If you're convicted of either, you go on the list, and are called a thief.
In all of these cases, it would now be *IMPOSSIBLE* to repay your debt to society and rejoin the world as a productive citizen. A drunken mistake when you were 17 can force you to poor living conditions and low pay work, or simply force you to become a criminal to have a decent life. BTW - refusing to inform your community that you are on one of these lists would be grounds for arrest, since *that* would be a crime. So trying to have a normal life after paying penance becomes illegal.
You might not have intended it that way, but you manner of thought simply causes intolerance and creates more criminals. You create a life of intolerance and unforgiveness. There is a reason why every major religion teaches forgiveness, and it's not because someone's god said so.
Unfortunately, if you go after the product the spam offers, then it turns into a vehicle to damage a third party. Now when someone doesn't like a company/product, they will pay to have a few millions spam messages sent out, and destroy their competition. Or they will threaten to do the same if said company doesn't pay a large amount of money.
This happens today with email viruses and botnet attacks, and don't think that it wouldn't happen if you attacked products advertised in spam.
Take a look at www.promash.com or www.beersmith.com for what I mean. Personally, I'm a ProMash user. There's also QBrew at www.usermode.org/code.html but it is pretty basic.
Having a piece of software for your homebrew is definitely not necessary, but it makes keeping track of what you have on hand easier, and take care of calculations. That way you just know how many calories your beer has, what color it will be, how many IBUs, etc. Nothing that you can't do on paper and with a little experience, of course.
I was one of the respondents to this survey. I don't know what their selection strategy was, but I'm surprised to find out that under a thousand took the silly thing. I just figured that they emailed requests bugging everyone that they were sending their free magazines to. IIRC, they offered a contest for something or other if you filled it out.
:)
Not everyone that participates in these surveys is a total Office Space style incompetent twit.
(I'll have to check out GovConnection. I've been using Florida Micro and been happy, but I'm always on the lookout for the best prices.)
Oh yeah, ProMash is great! BeerSmith works fine under Wine, too.
As I mentioned elsewhere, you don't have to replace the desktops to change the servers. There are several products that would let you migrate your servers to more flexible, reliable, and maintainable systems. There is *no* rebuilding involved, you migrate what you already have. You can even do it piecemeal.
If you change the servers, there is no district-wide retraining. You only have to worry about your IT staff. If you do the server migration right, nobody will even notice a difference.
I don't know why you are so caught into this mistaken idea that you would have to rebuild your infrastructure. I have done exactly what I'm talking about before, and I'm sure that I'll do it again. After migrated most of my servers away from Windows, I have definitely found that I can do a lot more with a lot less resources than a Microsoft network requires. I have a few applications that require Windows on the client, and one that is running on a Windows server. That's likely to change, since it's just housing a database in Oracle.
Give Novell GroupWise, Novell eDirectory, and Novell ZenWorks a try instead of Exchange and AD. They'll cleanly migrate your data from the Microsoft tools, and provide more functionality than what you had before. You'll be able to interoperate very nicely with many other UNIX/Linux variants, MacOS, and Windows. That way you don't have to rebuild everything, nor do you have to modify their classroom by more than switching from Outlook to the GroupWise client, and you aren't even required to do *that* much. You will still maintain compatibility with other districts.
Additionally, you don't need to get rid of your Windows clients and go to Linux just because you aren't using a Microsoft server.
As far as the 10 year old, well, you can't play PlayStation games on your Windows computer, either. Does that mean you should do all of your office work on your PlayStation? Just use the right tool for the job. Windows isn't better than Linux similarly to how the PlayStation isn't better than Windows. It should not be a surprise that you can't use software specifically written to one platform, and that platform only, under another platform. If that is a requirement, then use the platform that the software runs on. Just use the right requirements. For example, if your requirement is "must run MS Office", you've done it wrong; the requirement should be "office software with following capabilities."
Can't argue with it being cheaper to just not change anything, though. However, it'll be just as bad to migrate to Vista and friends as it would be to change to something focused more on Linux servers. You'll have retraining, migration costs, likely some downtime, new hardware, etc, doing either of those things. The only reason that MS comes in slightly better than the Novell kit is that MS offers ridiculous discounts for schools, to the order of $2.00 for something that's normally around $30, or $65 for something that's well over $600. MS gives discounts to government, too, but education pricing is an order of magnitude under even that. However, that discount ends up costing you more, because you end up with higher support costs, more expensive related software, and more expensive hardware requirements, as well as a lack of flexibility.
A note on the teachers... letting them do whatever they want is just a way to avoid confrontation. Many times, teachers have very unreasonable requests that are founded on misguided assumptions, or just a general lack of related knowledge, or just because they're being a jerk. You shouldn't give them a brand new quad-core desktop because they decided it will let them teach better, since you know that it almost certainly isn't true. You shouldn't let them just demand Adobe PhotoShop to edit a couple of pictures, and then give them their way. You still need to examine what they're asking for and provide what they actually need. Maybe they do need PhotoShop, or maybe the software that came with their camera is all they need. Your way just creates huge costs with no benefit, and wastes a lot of money in an institution that is supposed to be painfully strapped for cash.
I do that with Windows applications under Ubuntu at home, at work, and on my laptop. Get installer, double-click, install, and execute. It works under both Wine and Crossover Office (wine). As pointed out, it works with Cedega (wine), too. I use uTorrent this way, with no troubles. I occasionally use IE6 to access poorly designed sites, I run my brewing software, fire incident tracking software, GIS data viewer, a few games, and so on. The only software that I've had trouble with is stuff based on .NET, but that software doesn't work all that well under Windows, either.
FWIW, autorun is a horrible idea. The only action that should ever start a program is electing to start a program. If you want to pop up a directory browser or something similar, that's fine. I know very few people that don't disable autorun after the first time they put a CD in their computer. The way Ubuntu does it is correct: pop up a windows asking if it should start a viewer for the media type inserted.
You can retrieve a substantial amount of information from your display by using EDID/DDC data. Perhaps some distributions do magic with that information.
t ter-font-rendering-on-my-lcd-yes-in-linux/
Here is are some examples of how to do it on Linux, primarily with Ubuntu:
http://jmason.org/howto/subpixel.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=235526
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=20976
http://diego.aureal.com.pe/archives/2006/05/25/be
64 bit support - which breaks support for all of your legacy hardware by requiring signed drivers, and also is not needed for anyone's existing (and functioning) applications
Better centralized management tools - that you already bought for previous versions of Windows
Improved security - which is unproven at being better, and proven at being highly intrusive to users
These things *could* be useful, but they aren't anything people are going to rush out and spend hundreds to thousands on, per workstation, ever. We've all already worked around many of MS' deficiencies and made due with the old broken stuff. The desire to deal with new broken stuff isn't very strong.
The majority aren't using .NET to do web development. I would guess that this means that they simply don't bother with .NET, and so don't have to develop for it, or test with it.
Yes, font smoothing (sub-pixel) was integrated into at least X.org and XFree86 for X11. MacOSX does this, as well. I don't know how long either has been around, though, but probably ClearType was before those three.
I agree completely that software shouldn't be patentable.
MS ClearType is a logical extension of an existing invention, but using newly available tech. It's like buying things, but using the Internet! Neither are deserving of patents, and neither are particularly novel. I'm sure other companies would have done the same much sooner, had it been possible to do with the displays of the time.
All MS did was be the first one to implement a slight feature change that, at the time, most people could not use. Now that LCD panels are common, every windowing system does this. Besides that, MS' implementation has some problems, given that you have to download an unsupported and unpublicized applet to tune ClearType to not cause eye strain. You also can't disable per display on a multi-head system if, like me, you have a CRT and a LCD. Not that anyone else has fixed those problems, though...
MS claims a lot of other things that aren't true, too. The truth is that Office formats are *mostly* compatible between versions. There are parser differences that cause Office products to fail to read complex documents between versions on occasion. I have trouble reading documents from Office2003 in Office2000 suite products. I have infrequent problems reading Office97 files in Office2000, and have frequent trouble reading Office98 (Mac) files on Office2000.
People that seriously use Office frequently see compatibility problems. It's the occasional users, like you, that don't see the issues.
FWIW, the filters that MS has sponsered for OpenDocument are terrible, and I can't use OfficeML because most people can't read it without downloading additional software. Besides, if I'm going to consider switching products from Office2000/DOC to Office2007/XML, I might as well save 500$/person and just switch to OpenOffice/OpenDocument.
You wouldn't really want to do that, either. If you simply make port 25 traffic really slow, then legitimate use is severely impacted. This will lead to people wide-scale circumventing your restriction to get work done. Just as ISPs blocking port 25 caused people to use alternate ports, so too would making port 25 traffic slow.