two major political parties in Australia are the Labor party (left-center) and the ironically named Liberal party (right conservative).
I'd say that labor would be center-right and Liberals would be center-right-right.
Considering that current PM got in by saying 'we will do exactly the same thing as the liberals, but with more kittens!' means we had a choice between a party with conservative economic policy, tough (but fair) border protection, tuff on crime tuff on the cause of slogans - OR - a party with conservative economic policy, tough (but fair) border protection, tuff on crime tuff on the cause of slogans, but we are heaps different from that other party!
(pretty much the same situation around most of the western world I see.)
I wonder what its like to have different political parties to choose from. (And yes, I do tend to vote independent/minor parties first, big rubbish parties mostly last and nutbag parties lastest!)
But whatever... it doesn't matter. Because at the end of the day, the techie nerds will continue to have no respect for management... and then they'll wonder why they're treated with no respect in return.
So you think the techies that have taken the time to explain all the reasons *why* something needs to be done are stupid.
But you can sit back and say 'loose 8% from your budget - go do it'. No reasons, no explanations just a demand. (Brillant!).
I'm guessing your also the same arsehole that screams at the 'stupid' techies for not being able to restore that sales contract from two months ago that you accidentally deleted - Forgetting about that replacement broken tape drive you refused to pay for last quarter.
As a manager you have got to be the conduit between the workers and the directors. Here's a tip, how about try talking to your techies. No seriously, talk to them. Show them your budget, show them your overheads. Ask them to provide assistance in setting the priorities instead of telling them to get stuffed.
You may end up *earning* some respect from the people who are actually keeping your company running and who don't play musical employers when things start getting to hard.
You pay taxes that build roads you never use. You pay taxes to pay public servants whose work never impacts you. You pay taxes to build a weapons that will never see combat. you pay taxes to fund politicians whose contributions do not (or negatively) affect you. you pay taxes that fund research into diseases you'll never get.
Why suddenly get upset because you pay taxes to pay teachers for kids you don't have?
(Slightly on topic) As for private schools not getting tax payers money - I can tell you that is absolutely false in Australia (where some private schools receive MORE funding than their public equivalents) and I would be very very surprised if there were many US schools that haven't ever received some sort of "operational assistance" from your local/state/federal governments.
Would you buy a car that didn't have a steering wheel?
huh? wot? wtf do steering wheels have to do with software interfaces? Bugger All thats what.
But seeing I've bitten I might as well chew for a bit.
The steering wheel is like the big white bit that you type stuff into. All word processes have this and they operate exactly the same - put cursor over white bit, click mouse button, press buttons. The stuff that gets people is the more obscure things - like merging, tables blah de blah.
Guess wot, the rest of the world doesn't have a standard interface for these little extra bits either. Sure the steering wheel is the same (sort of) in all cars, but how about the button/lever that opens the fuel tank? Or the thing that adjusts your seat. Or even the gear stick (manual, auto, flappy paddle, lift up to reverse, 4WD). These buggers are in different places in all cars. Case in point: Our house sitter borrowed my car and had to give me fuel money because she AND THE PETROL STATION ATTENDANT could not figure out how to pop open the fuel tank.
Why does this "ALL INTERFACES MUST BE THE SAME STFU LA LA LA" rule only apply to software?
Can free/open software do with better UI. Damn right it could, but so can just about every comerical software Ive used as well (don't get me started on the ribbon, or outlooks text editor, or SAPS universe designer, or biztalk's everything....)
PS: Analogies are like cars, eventually they break down.
Just out of interest, do you have the actual final figures of what the airline pilots negotiated and got. Do you also have the total renumeration for all the Delta executives and money spent on 'non core business'.
I'm not saying that the pilots didn't get greedy or that the executive were themselves overpaid or spending frivolously but I think it would be an interesting comparison. After all, the pilots and the planes are the money earners and probably deserve the most attention in an airline business.
Unions, like business, aren't evil. However, like anything with humans involved, once they got to much power they both seemed to be. We lived in an interesting time when both the unions and business got powerful, greedy and hurt themselves (and a heap of bystanders) in the wash up.
Blaming unions for the downfall of a business is not fair or accurate (unless of course the unions had stated 'we are brining this company down because of reason X).
And I hated the ribbon, with passion... for about two weeks, until I grudgingly admitted that, once you get used to it, it is quite easy to use and it puts the similar functions together in a intelligent way.
Well I'm on week 8 of using it and it is still driving me bat shit insane. Just yesterday it took me ages (several minutes) of clicking through every 'tab' to find the 'insert file' button (which ironically is hidden in a DROP DOWN MENU)
What possible reason is there for not making it an option switch between the 'old fashioned' menus and the new ribbon is beyond me.
If OO.o is adding a ribbon, i really really really hope they make it optional.
For example, if I want to fetch all customers and all their bids in one query I have to use inner join. And that results in LARGE number of rows (Cartesian product of customers and their bids)
You might want to explain yourself a bit more there, if I want all customers and all their bids I would expect a LARGE number of rows. What magic algorithm is out there that will give you all your data, but at the same time make it less than what it is?
Or do you want just one row of customer data and then all there orders under that? Good luck getting your admin staff creating reports off that spreadsheet.
I think what you are interested in reporting tools - they do the things you ask for often in a nice drag and droppy way - but you still need to get the data to those reports and I haven't found anything better for that job than SQL (yet).
Data is hard work, eventually any solution to querying databases is going to be as complicated as SQL because there is a infinite number of ways people will eventually want to look at it.
Fair enough, but you should probably include some links to a few of these 'millions' of well conducted experiments. Ill settle for 100.
To be frank, millions of posts with 'quoted words' and CAPITALS making UN-substantIATED claims ending up being 110% WRONG have made me cautious of taking such posts seriously at all.
In my own experiences, men are just a mentally differently-abled to other men as they are to women. There are plenty of gender based differences, but I don't think 'being good at [insert mental discipline here]' is one of them
Up until that pissy little snippit you made some interesting arguments with references, then you enter crazy 'i belong to this camp and every one else is wrong' mode. Extremes are bad - please stop.
you would think: Will I make a bucket load of cash in this market? As the value of "yes" increases, the less qualms you will have of investing in the country - regardless of the social/political situation.
For every successful OSS project, I'd say there are at least 10,000 pitiful ones
Ive worked in government it for the last 13+ years. You can easily swap 'OSS' with 'government' and your sentence will still be correct. Be aware that your government is riddled with just as many pitiful, mismanaged IT projects as those OSS one, the only difference being *you* are paying for these failures.
(And that's just at the operational level, you would be horrified to know just how much of your life is actually governed by poorly put together excel spreadsheets.)
I hear you bro! Last year I finished moving our companies fleet system from a home made access jobby to a nice sql/.net system. One of the features that the system "needed" to do was produce 2 spreadsheets each month. One when to the finance area in our parent corp, the another went to our local finance area. Both spreadsheet where exactly the same, except for some column heading names and that the one that went to our fiance area had an additional column (the vehicle identifier)
Turns out the business process was: parent company finance area got spreadsheet, they manually stripped some columns of information they didn't need then emailed it to our company finance area. Our finance people would MANUALLY find the matching vehicle id from their spread sheet, log into the old access database and find that vehicles record, then copy a particular field from the database to the 'new' spreadsheet, which was then sent back. They had been doing this for EIGHT YEARS!!!!!! Total time spent each month: 1-2 days. Time taken for me to put the required field into the original spreadsheet extract: 30 seconds.
Why hadn't any one spotted the obvious waste of time? Because EVERY SINGLE THING THEY DID WAS THE SAME! Spread sheet after spread sheet filled their finance lives, the data ceased to have meaning, it was just numbers that needed to be copied, tallied and moved. The manual effort required numbed the brain and made work so horrible that no one cared any more. They did what they always did and the in-efficiencies of it all meant they just kept getting further behind, which meant they had less time to step back and say "hang on, this is bollocks - what the hell are we doing?"
Spreadsheets turn data into isolated islands of *disconectivity* and people just assume this is how it is. I used to think that access was the most abused software in the world, but no, it is excel, because any bugger can fire up that spreadsheet and put the entire orgs financials in their easy as you like and suddenly the companies payroll depends on Mark in accounting whose magical macro (and additional manual tidy upping) that only exists on his desktop is the only way for people to get paid!!
As someone living in the tropics, let me assure you that trying to watch a VHS from the 1980's is not a pleasant experience. Hell, after 5 years most tapes were hazy rubbish unless you took extra special care and had a spare house to store the immense bulk of each tape.
Sure, you might occasionally run into a nice bit of non-moldy tape, but by then your heads are so dirty with filth that it doesn't matter anyway - not to mention the stuttering constantly dropping out sound.
Sure, we have the same problems with our CD/DVD media, but at least we can make a 100% accurate copy of them every year or so if they are so important. 3 copies down with a VHS movie and you'll be trying to figure out how to take the gauze wrapping off your telly.
VHS was always only tolerated because there was nothing better, let them go man, let them go.
but.. but.. but.. Hasn't this collapse showed us that it doesn't matter if you've got insurance because its perfectly OK for your insurer to say "whoops, we cant actually cover that", declare bankruptcy and have the CEOs drown their sorrows on their private yachts? (I know bugger all about the bizarre and wonderful world of accounting, money and polities so please enlighten me to how insurance 100% guarantees my money)
Well guess what this is a democracy (representative in most) and if you don't make yourself heard then it is your FAULT, not the politicians, nor the "clueless" voters who do vote and make themselves heard.
A little while back a certain popular red head had a go a making a difference. She was a real right wing kick the foreigners out nut job but had a massive amount of support. (personally Im glad she is out of the picture)
Support the Australian Post Office and mail everyone CDs.
No way dudes, Australia post currently wont allow *perfume* through their network because its to dangerous. You think they will allow data (it might contain an image of a cartoon of a perfume bottle)!!!!
I can easy see our minister for Luddites embarking on a great postage filter to prevent naughty dvd's and images from getting to their destinations. (Or even better, just a great mail firewall, burn all the letters, the evil cant get us then!)
If you can, watch a few episodes of a great Aussie tv show called "The Hollow Men" which I think sums up our workings of government perfectly.
Our government(s) aren't so much as evil plotting overlords as much as they are self interested career minded politicians with an eye to winning the next election at what ever cost. If the nerd vote was larger than the combined footy mum and religious votes then they would be beating their chests about how they are standing up to censorship, free speech and the right of privacy.
The saddest thing is, just like the U.S., both our political parties are pretty much exactly the same. Our ex chief minister summed it up perfectly "Oppositions don't win elections, Governments loose elections" - We don't vote for who we want in, we vote for who we least 'do not want'.
1. They decide they like it so much they buy it.
2. They decide not to buy it, but wouldn't have bought it anyway.
3. They decide not to buy it, but would have done if they didn't (or couldn't) pirate it.
You forgot a point between 1 and 2:
1.5: They like the game and will play it through, but since they have a copy why shell out the cash.
Me, I think its all about the price. 100$AU for a new game - That is crazy. Drop the price and people will buy more games.
10$ games on steam is my weakness. Ive bought games I haven't played yet just cause they are cheap. Get the price right and youll get less piracy.
This is a drop in the ocean compared to that. Heck, the snack foods consumed while watching the movie will probably create more garbage than the DVD. I think you mean: This is another drop in the ocean. All these drops add up.
Bruce Perens wasn't the head of a multi billion dollar company being accused (and eventually convicted) of monopolistic behavior.
That email (if accurate) has Mr Gates "wondering" if something could be done to lock down an open technology to their own proprietary product, with the abuse of the patent system being a valid option.
MS has done plenty of good things, and plenty of bad things. I think this email is a perfectly valid demonstration of the later. Remember, companies are not "people" and are not bound by the same laws/subject to the same punishments as us and as a consequence, tend to be behave in a sociopathic manner. To me, this letter does suggest something dodgey in the state of Redmond.
Perhaps a better response to the parent post would have been to include some of the emails from the case's archive that show condemnation/concern of monopolistic behavior by the company executives/managers.
I recently had to rebuild my work pc - An 'IBM' lenovo think centre plastered with Windows Vista stickers.
Result of default XP (We haven't moved to vista yet - thank god) install: No sound, no dual screen, no usb. To install these I had to search the lenovo web site for drivers - made difficult because my particular model number was not listed meaning I had to guess and use the closest matching one. Eventually I had to download a 'lenovo auto updater' application and run that to install my driver. wtf. To get dual screen I needed to visit the AMD/ATI site. Not exactly plug-n-play.
So no, windows installs are not necessarily easy - only when you have that magic combination of supported hardware - just like gnu/linux.
Slashdot Mirror
two major political parties in Australia are the Labor party (left-center) and the ironically named Liberal party (right conservative).
I'd say that labor would be center-right and Liberals would be center-right-right.
Considering that current PM got in by saying 'we will do exactly the same thing as the liberals, but with more kittens!' means we had a choice between a party with conservative economic policy, tough (but fair) border protection, tuff on crime tuff on the cause of slogans - OR - a party with conservative economic policy, tough (but fair) border protection, tuff on crime tuff on the cause of slogans, but we are heaps different from that other party!
(pretty much the same situation around most of the western world I see.)
I wonder what its like to have different political parties to choose from. (And yes, I do tend to vote independent/minor parties first, big rubbish parties mostly last and nutbag parties lastest!)
Oh noes, I'm feeding the trolls again.
But whatever... it doesn't matter. Because at the end of the day, the techie nerds will continue to have no respect for management... and then they'll wonder why they're treated with no respect in return.
So you think the techies that have taken the time to explain all the reasons *why* something needs to be done are stupid.
But you can sit back and say 'loose 8% from your budget - go do it'. No reasons, no explanations just a demand. (Brillant!).
I'm guessing your also the same arsehole that screams at the 'stupid' techies for not being able to restore that sales contract from two months ago that you accidentally deleted - Forgetting about that replacement broken tape drive you refused to pay for last quarter.
As a manager you have got to be the conduit between the workers and the directors. Here's a tip, how about try talking to your techies. No seriously, talk to them. Show them your budget, show them your overheads. Ask them to provide assistance in setting the priorities instead of telling them to get stuffed.
You may end up *earning* some respect from the people who are actually keeping your company running and who don't play musical employers when things start getting to hard.
*News Flash*
You pay taxes that build roads you never use.
You pay taxes to pay public servants whose work never impacts you.
You pay taxes to build a weapons that will never see combat.
you pay taxes to fund politicians whose contributions do not (or negatively) affect you.
you pay taxes that fund research into diseases you'll never get.
Why suddenly get upset because you pay taxes to pay teachers for kids you don't have?
(Slightly on topic) As for private schools not getting tax payers money - I can tell you that is absolutely false in Australia (where some private schools receive MORE funding than their public equivalents) and I would be very very surprised if there were many US schools that haven't ever received some sort of "operational assistance" from your local/state/federal governments.
thank *you* for playing
Would you buy a car that didn't have a steering wheel?
huh? wot? wtf do steering wheels have to do with software interfaces? Bugger All thats what.
But seeing I've bitten I might as well chew for a bit.
The steering wheel is like the big white bit that you type stuff into. All word processes have this and they operate exactly the same - put cursor over white bit, click mouse button, press buttons. The stuff that gets people is the more obscure things - like merging, tables blah de blah.
Guess wot, the rest of the world doesn't have a standard interface for these little extra bits either. Sure the steering wheel is the same (sort of) in all cars, but how about the button/lever that opens the fuel tank? Or the thing that adjusts your seat. Or even the gear stick (manual, auto, flappy paddle, lift up to reverse, 4WD). These buggers are in different places in all cars. Case in point: Our house sitter borrowed my car and had to give me fuel money because she AND THE PETROL STATION ATTENDANT could not figure out how to pop open the fuel tank.
Why does this "ALL INTERFACES MUST BE THE SAME STFU LA LA LA" rule only apply to software?
Can free/open software do with better UI. Damn right it could, but so can just about every comerical software Ive used as well (don't get me started on the ribbon, or outlooks text editor, or SAPS universe designer, or biztalk's everything....)
PS: Analogies are like cars, eventually they break down.
Just out of interest, do you have the actual final figures of what the airline pilots negotiated and got. Do you also have the total renumeration for all the Delta executives and money spent on 'non core business'.
I'm not saying that the pilots didn't get greedy or that the executive were themselves overpaid or spending frivolously but I think it would be an interesting comparison. After all, the pilots and the planes are the money earners and probably deserve the most attention in an airline business.
Unions, like business, aren't evil. However, like anything with humans involved, once they got to much power they both seemed to be. We lived in an interesting time when both the unions and business got powerful, greedy and hurt themselves (and a heap of bystanders) in the wash up.
Blaming unions for the downfall of a business is not fair or accurate (unless of course the unions had stated 'we are brining this company down because of reason X).
Well I'm on week 8 of using it and it is still driving me bat shit insane. Just yesterday it took me ages (several minutes) of clicking through every 'tab' to find the 'insert file' button (which ironically is hidden in a DROP DOWN MENU)
What possible reason is there for not making it an option switch between the 'old fashioned' menus and the new ribbon is beyond me.
If OO.o is adding a ribbon, i really really really hope they make it optional.
I don't think so, piracy is so high because people like free stuff better than stuff that costs money - especially if its an optional luxury.
'Pirated' electronic media is a tempting way of getting a (relatively) expensive luxury for free.
For example, if I want to fetch all customers and all their bids in one query I have to use inner join. And that results in LARGE number of rows (Cartesian product of customers and their bids)
You might want to explain yourself a bit more there, if I want all customers and all their bids I would expect a LARGE number of rows. What magic algorithm is out there that will give you all your data, but at the same time make it less than what it is?
Or do you want just one row of customer data and then all there orders under that? Good luck getting your admin staff creating reports off that spreadsheet.
I think what you are interested in reporting tools - they do the things you ask for often in a nice drag and droppy way - but you still need to get the data to those reports and I haven't found anything better for that job than SQL (yet).
Data is hard work, eventually any solution to querying databases is going to be as complicated as SQL because there is a infinite number of ways people will eventually want to look at it.
If computer software is not a digital good, what the hell is it? Do legislators live on a planet even remotely similar to ours?
Fair enough, but you should probably include some links to a few of these 'millions' of well conducted experiments. Ill settle for 100.
To be frank, millions of posts with 'quoted words' and CAPITALS making UN-substantIATED claims ending up being 110% WRONG have made me cautious of taking such posts seriously at all.
In my own experiences, men are just a mentally differently-abled to other men as they are to women. There are plenty of gender based differences, but I don't think 'being good at [insert mental discipline here]' is one of them
20%
stop it, Stop It, STOP IT, FOR FRICKS SAKE STOP IT!!!!
Up until that pissy little snippit you made some interesting arguments with references, then you enter crazy 'i belong to this camp and every one else is wrong' mode. Extremes are bad - please stop.
you would think: Will I make a bucket load of cash in this market? As the value of "yes" increases, the less qualms you will have of investing in the country - regardless of the social/political situation.
For every successful OSS project, I'd say there are at least 10,000 pitiful ones
Ive worked in government it for the last 13+ years. You can easily swap 'OSS' with 'government' and your sentence will still be correct. Be aware that your government is riddled with just as many pitiful, mismanaged IT projects as those OSS one, the only difference being *you* are paying for these failures.
(And that's just at the operational level, you would be horrified to know just how much of your life is actually governed by poorly put together excel spreadsheets.)
I hear you bro! Last year I finished moving our companies fleet system from a home made access jobby to a nice sql/.net system. One of the features that the system "needed" to do was produce 2 spreadsheets each month. One when to the finance area in our parent corp, the another went to our local finance area. Both spreadsheet where exactly the same, except for some column heading names and that the one that went to our fiance area had an additional column (the vehicle identifier)
Turns out the business process was: parent company finance area got spreadsheet, they manually stripped some columns of information they didn't need then emailed it to our company finance area. Our finance people would MANUALLY find the matching vehicle id from their spread sheet, log into the old access database and find that vehicles record, then copy a particular field from the database to the 'new' spreadsheet, which was then sent back. They had been doing this for EIGHT YEARS!!!!!! Total time spent each month: 1-2 days. Time taken for me to put the required field into the original spreadsheet extract: 30 seconds.
Why hadn't any one spotted the obvious waste of time? Because EVERY SINGLE THING THEY DID WAS THE SAME! Spread sheet after spread sheet filled their finance lives, the data ceased to have meaning, it was just numbers that needed to be copied, tallied and moved. The manual effort required numbed the brain and made work so horrible that no one cared any more. They did what they always did and the in-efficiencies of it all meant they just kept getting further behind, which meant they had less time to step back and say "hang on, this is bollocks - what the hell are we doing?"
Spreadsheets turn data into isolated islands of *disconectivity* and people just assume this is how it is. I used to think that access was the most abused software in the world, but no, it is excel, because any bugger can fire up that spreadsheet and put the entire orgs financials in their easy as you like and suddenly the companies payroll depends on Mark in accounting whose magical macro (and additional manual tidy upping) that only exists on his desktop is the only way for people to get paid!!
As someone living in the tropics, let me assure you that trying to watch a VHS from the 1980's is not a pleasant experience. Hell, after 5 years most tapes were hazy rubbish unless you took extra special care and had a spare house to store the immense bulk of each tape.
Sure, you might occasionally run into a nice bit of non-moldy tape, but by then your heads are so dirty with filth that it doesn't matter anyway - not to mention the stuttering constantly dropping out sound.
Sure, we have the same problems with our CD/DVD media, but at least we can make a 100% accurate copy of them every year or so if they are so important. 3 copies down with a VHS movie and you'll be trying to figure out how to take the gauze wrapping off your telly.
VHS was always only tolerated because there was nothing better, let them go man, let them go.
but.. but.. but.. Hasn't this collapse showed us that it doesn't matter if you've got insurance because its perfectly OK for your insurer to say "whoops, we cant actually cover that", declare bankruptcy and have the CEOs drown their sorrows on their private yachts? (I know bugger all about the bizarre and wonderful world of accounting, money and polities so please enlighten me to how insurance 100% guarantees my money)
A little while back a certain popular red head had a go a making a difference. She was a real right wing kick the foreigners out nut job but had a massive amount of support. (personally Im glad she is out of the picture)
This person was SENT TO JAIL for minor electoral fraud by lawyers allegedly acting on behalf of a federal government minister. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Hanson#Fraud_conviction_and_acquittal
We are far from being an anarchistic African state, but we are also far from a shining example of freedom and democracy.
No way dudes, Australia post currently wont allow *perfume* through their network because its to dangerous. You think they will allow data (it might contain an image of a cartoon of a perfume bottle)!!!!
I can easy see our minister for Luddites embarking on a great postage filter to prevent naughty dvd's and images from getting to their destinations. (Or even better, just a great mail firewall, burn all the letters, the evil cant get us then!)
8 - Get arrested and charged on incest/child porn related charges in Australia, because cartoon porn kids are real and so are pooter porn kids too damit! http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,24767202-2,00.html
If you can, watch a few episodes of a great Aussie tv show called "The Hollow Men" which I think sums up our workings of government perfectly.
Our government(s) aren't so much as evil plotting overlords as much as they are self interested career minded politicians with an eye to winning the next election at what ever cost. If the nerd vote was larger than the combined footy mum and religious votes then they would be beating their chests about how they are standing up to censorship, free speech and the right of privacy.
The saddest thing is, just like the U.S., both our political parties are pretty much exactly the same. Our ex chief minister summed it up perfectly "Oppositions don't win elections, Governments loose elections" - We don't vote for who we want in, we vote for who we least 'do not want'.
1. They decide they like it so much they buy it.
2. They decide not to buy it, but wouldn't have bought it anyway.
3. They decide not to buy it, but would have done if they didn't (or couldn't) pirate it.
You forgot a point between 1 and 2:
1.5: They like the game and will play it through, but since they have a copy why shell out the cash.
Me, I think its all about the price. 100$AU for a new game - That is crazy. Drop the price and people will buy more games.
10$ games on steam is my weakness. Ive bought games I haven't played yet just cause they are cheap. Get the price right and youll get less piracy.
Bruce Perens wasn't the head of a multi billion dollar company being accused (and eventually convicted) of monopolistic behavior.
That email (if accurate) has Mr Gates "wondering" if something could be done to lock down an open technology to their own proprietary product, with the abuse of the patent system being a valid option.
MS has done plenty of good things, and plenty of bad things. I think this email is a perfectly valid demonstration of the later. Remember, companies are not "people" and are not bound by the same laws/subject to the same punishments as us and as a consequence, tend to be behave in a sociopathic manner. To me, this letter does suggest something dodgey in the state of Redmond.
Perhaps a better response to the parent post would have been to include some of the emails from the case's archive that show condemnation/concern of monopolistic behavior by the company executives/managers.
I recently had to rebuild my work pc - An 'IBM' lenovo think centre plastered with Windows Vista stickers.
Result of default XP (We haven't moved to vista yet - thank god) install: No sound, no dual screen, no usb. To install these I had to search the lenovo web site for drivers - made difficult because my particular model number was not listed meaning I had to guess and use the closest matching one. Eventually I had to download a 'lenovo auto updater' application and run that to install my driver. wtf. To get dual screen I needed to visit the AMD/ATI site. Not exactly plug-n-play.
So no, windows installs are not necessarily easy - only when you have that magic combination of supported hardware - just like gnu/linux.