On the contrary, he fairly recently changed his views on java and things that use it such as openoffice.org...
MS have demonstrated time and again they have no qualms about screwing partners, customers and competitors alike to further their own goals of domination and further profits... Is it any wonder that people treat them with extreme caution?
Also, the the "promise not to sue" only covers some core parts of the spec, there are still plenty of encumbered parts and MS actively encourages developers to use these parts... It's effectively a trojan horse, fool people with the the promise not to sue and get them hooked on the proprietary parts which aren't covered by it... Even if you or I avoid the encumbered parts, there are plenty of people out there who either don't know about the encumbrances or couldn't care less and will pump out all kinds of code that locks out non windows users.
With java to a great extent many applications are cross platform wether the original developer made any effort to be cross platform or not, and this is something MS really don't want.
Custom kinect port = it uses some proprietary connector so you won't be able to use it with anything else, will it even be possible to connect it to an original 360?
Gates is not the philanthropist you think he is, look at some of the strings that come attached when his foundation offers something... It's never a no strings attached donation of cash.
The GUI for xsane is perfectly adequate, if a little dated... And as you pointed out, most scanner manufacturers supply something similar but the problem is you get something different with every scanner... At least xsane is consistent across devices.
You only have the ability to not give a corporation your business *if* there is healthy competition, once you have a monopoly situation then a given company is either impossible to ignore or ignoring them causes you severe problems. You might be able to ignore Apple quite easily with very little detriment to yourself, but ignore your local monopoly telco and your without connectivity to the outside, ignore your local power company and you now have the hassle of being in darkness or running a generator...
Government on the other hand you are *supposed* to have some control over via the voting system...
Wether this works in practice is another matter, corporations have wormed their way into government because that is seen as a good way to increase profit, so now we have a highly corrupt government that works hard to benefit corporations rather than people.
A corporation is by its very nature a totalitarian entity, that doesn't care who else it harms in the pursuit of profit.
On the contrary, government intervention is often necessary and extremely good for the vast majority of people... Otherwise you get monopolies and cartels which lead to high prices and poor service... The "free market" just doesn't work without regulation to keep it free, a free market is bad for business and any business that becomes powerful enough will try to cement their position.
Perhaps not illegal, but extortionate profit margins are immoral and wrong... And the only other lines of business where it's possible to make profit margins anywhere close are most definitely illegal (and even then, the high profits are offset by high risks).
Any line of business where such extortionate profit margins exist needs government regulation to ensure that competition occurs and pushes those margins back to levels in line with other markets. There should be a cap on how much profit can be made relative to investment, noone should be able to do minimum work and receive massive payments on an ongoing basis.
If you allow open distribution (ala gpl) then even the bandwidth costs are minimised because users can distribute among themselves, and third parties can redistribute for you (eg mirror sites etc)...
Support costs are *rarely* included in the purchase price of software, and if they are the support options are extremely limited. Support usually costs extra, sometimes a lot more and there is no reason this support couldn't be offered alongside freely available software (see redhat).
I would rather not pay $39.99/month *or* $99 for your software... I would pay monthly for a service, and expect the service to continue being provided for as long as i continued paying. Wether that service is worth the price you try to charge is another matter.
I would also expect you to provide security fixes for as long as i was paying, no leaving me stuck with abandonware.
If you convert your app to a service and charge a monthly fee then no you're not ripping users off, because in exchange for the fee you have to provide servers, bandwidth, electricity etc on an ongoing basis and ensure that the service remains available and usable. It's a far cry from providing a one off download or even just a "license code" for a huge sum of money.
I would also demand that you provide an exit strategy before signing up for your service, ie you must make all the data stored in your service available to me in a standard format appropriate to the type of data so that i can move to a competing provider.
What i want is for the vast majority of software to be commoditized, and reduced to reasonable costs with similar margins to other business areas. Like hardware, the margins on that are razor thin and you can't possibly argue that the relative openness of the x86 hardware has been detrimental.... Or would you prefer a return to the days when proprietary vendors could charge thousands for a mediocre workstation?
Upfront costs are one off costs, and if software was to start expensive and rapidly reduce to near zero cost as the initial costs were covered that would make a lot more sense. Instead, it starts expensive and remains expensive until superseded, the upfront costs are rapidly recovered and then its pure profit from there on.
You may only have used 10 hours of support time, but you have support time available to you should you need it. Sure they make a profit, but they still need to have support staff on hand to answer your calls. Just because you aren't calling right now doesn't mean the call centre staff can pack up and go home.
The issue is that proprietary software allows ridiculous profit margins (close to 100% since the software costs nothing to distribute and economies of scale are pretty much linear since the upfront costs remain the same regardless of volume)... Now no industry could possibly achieve such margins if there is any competition, so proprietary vendors stifle competition through lock-in..
Open source vendors are unable to rip their customers off by selling zero cost goods at ridiculous markups because if they did someone else could come along and offer the same code for a cheaper price, instead they must make their money selling services... Services have a constant ongoing cost to actually provide the service, and these costs increase as you provide service to more customers.
The proprietary software market is effectively a scam, which sooner or later will come to an end... Customers will wake up and realise just how badly they're being ripped off, but until then the fraudsters will make as much as they can out of it.
The services market on the other hand is far more reasonable and although competition may eventually result in consolidation and razor thin margins, there is a lower limit.
What they should do then, is open source the player and let other people work on it... Considering how much effort has gone into workarounds to handle the binary flash player, i guess there are quite a lot of people who would be interested in contributing. Also the player itself is given away for free anyway, so why don't they open it up?
Troop movements are a pretty pointless thing to keep secret for a long time, sure it's important to keep them secret at the time the movements are taking place but once your troops have moved the enemy can simply see this for himself... Also once the war is over or the troops have moved on it's of little importance..
Yes but paper is a relatively inefficient storage mechanism, if converted to a sensible text+images format (ie not just scanned to a bitmap dump), this wouldn't be especially large as digital data... I bet you could fit all of it on a single modern HD... Take a few copies for backup purposes and all that paper could be recycled.
A decent windows admin costs just as much as a decent unix admin, the difference is that incompetent people are more likely to call themselves windows admins than unix admins... If you hire incompetent staff you will have a poorly functioning network regardless of what software it runs...
A competent unix admin should be able to maintain far more systems than an equivalent windows admin, meaning you need less of them.
There is also the cost of hardware and third party software to consider... Windows in a network tends to require third party addons like AV and software management systems which unix systems typically do not require (or include as standard)... Windows also typically requires greater hardware resources that unix to do similar tasks.
Things like AV, package management, competent (read: expensive) admins, etc are "optional" in that you can limp by without them....
A typical unix setup with typical expensive admins will include everything you need and cost less than a windows setup including competent (expensive) admins and all the ancillary "optional" addons that really are essential if you want things to run smoothly. On the other hand, a windows setup with cheap incompetent admins and none of the ancillary stuff may be cheaper, but will run extremely poorly, and the inevitable problems caused by this will almost certainly outweigh the initial savings.
While true, by the time MS became an expensive option it no longer mattered - millions of people were already locked in.
Back in the days, MS (and the cheap hardware they ran on) were a cheap option compared to Novell, Sun, DEC, SGI, IBM, Apple and all the other highend vendors... MS and x86 were massively inferior to everything else on the market, but with such a huge price differential they were able to make it up on volume...
Ford cars are clearly inferior to Rolls Royce or Ferrari, however you see a lot more Fords on the roads for the same reason. However, cars are standardised enough that its impossible to lock someone in, thus ensuring there is a healthy level of competition in the industry.
A standalone windows system is relatively easy to harden against external attack, after all windows was always designed as a single user workstation os so this is how it's meant to be configured...
However to do so requires various kludges, for instance using a firewall to prevent access to various listening network services, whereas on a unix system you would shut those services down as it makes no sense to keep something running if nothing needs to access it.
However once you start opening up MS protocols to the network (which you need to do to use things like exchange and active directory) the design flaws start to bite... You have a flawed authentication model where you can use the password hash instead of the actual password (which means the passwords are effectively stored as plain text)... you have extremely complex protocols which are poorly documented, provide no clear demarcation between authenticated and anonymous access and have far too much functionality in one place (some of which is completely unnecessary... You have things like the remote desktop protocol which establishes a full gui session (ie lets you move windows around etc) *BEFORE* you have logged in so all of this functionality is available to unauthenticated users to try and exploit.
Also having drivers running in kernel mode from a bunch of third parties is not a great idea... How secure/stable are those drivers? How will they play together? Will they continue to work if you upgrade the OS and if not, will the manufacturer bother to provide updates?
Linux has all the drivers in one place and Apple only provide a limited set of very well tested drivers... The only time i've seen stability issues with either is when loading third party drivers.
You can get equivalents to AD for Linux and OSX, Novell's current eDirectory product for instance which is descended from Novell (of which active directory is a rather crude clone), Sun/Oracle also makes something similar and there are various systems you can roll your own... Active directory is a HUGE security nightmare...
As for "enterprise" features - in a business you don't want millions of different hardware configurations, you want as few as possible, so long as suitable configurations are available it doesn't matter how many other choices exist.... You will typically standardise on one, and in the case of apple you can be sure that the few choices on offer are thoroughly tested and well supported. Companies buy highend z/OS and AIX kit from IBM for the same reason.
They make money by selling an overpriced product into a market that is locked in to their products and thus has to buy them regardless of quality or price. MS are really selling a second rate product at a premium price because they can get away with it.
The "have nots" are unimportant largely because their actions have little impact on anyone else, ie anything they do is on an extremely small scale. Tackle the big problems first and all that.
There is only financial incentive to make a good product if you are in a highly competitive market and your product needs to be better than the competitors... Otherwise, the financial incentive is to actually make a poor product so that you can sell upgrades more easily.
In the case of MS, lock-in ensures that competition is kept at bay enabling them to produce extremely poor quality products. Keeping customers locked in is also far more profitable for them than offering an open product and then having to face competition. This situation *ONLY* benefits MS, and is to the absolute detriment of everyone else, and so considering the importance of computers in todays society something should most definitely be done about it.
I'd recommend that you never start a business, as you seem to have missed the point that it's future updates that break it, and that returns kill retail. FAIL
All the machines i run ubuntu on, had all of their hardware supported out of the box and none of them have failed due to updating. The reason your machine on which you compiled wifi drivers from source failed after updating is because the system package manager is unaware of your self compiled drivers and is therefore unable to update them to match the other updated components. I would not sell a machine with ubuntu on it that required manual hacking like that to get something working, there are plenty of systems supported by an out of the box install and which will apply updates just fine.
If you need to read about how it works, then it's... FAIL.
No that's advertising, people are not psychic - you need to tell them why they should use your product and not something else which is better marketed... microsoft spends millions on advertising. Inferior products often outsell cheaper and superior alternatives because the inferior ones have huge marketing budgets behind them.
There's no "incidentally" about that. It's the GP's entire point. Utter and total FAIL.
Except that i was talking about windows updates breaking things as well - read the rest of the text (infact microsoft are quite famous for updates breaking things)... So why is it acceptable for windows updates to break things, but for ubuntu updates to break things is considered unacceptable?
Most joe average users never update their OS, and never install it... They purchase a machine with something preinstalled, and use it until it feels too slow for them at which point they replace it...
Most users would be unable to reinstall windows, especially if they need to find and install third party drivers for it, if windows lacks a driver for a given piece of hardware it doesn't even tell you what brand or model the card is, you get the raw pci device ids if you look hard but otherwise you just get "ethernet controller" or "vga display device" or similar.
The only place where a user is pretty much guaranteed to be able to reinstall without missing drivers or other problems is on a mac, where the hardware and software are designed together. If you replicate the same situation with linux or windows then you'd also be able to get a clean install with no driver issues.
There is also a very important reason why searching for help in forums gives you command line help... Forums and the web as a whole are primarily text based mediums just like a cli. Pretty much anything a typical user would want to do with ubuntu can be performed through the graphical interface but providing descriptions and screenshots to illustrate the point would be just as problematic as it is on other platforms (the users screen may look different to resolution issues, language, theme preferences, icons having been moved etc)... Take the following example - user wants to install a package called "blah" - a graphical explanation would show them where to find the synaptic package manager, how to search for blah or what category its located in, how to select it for installation, how to confirm it to process the install etc... A textual response would be "sudo apt-get install blah" which the user can simply paste into a terminal, enter his pass and be done.
Why go through hoops to explain a graphical process via a textual medium, when you can simply provide a block of text that the user can paste to get the job done? People are starting to provide help for OSX in this way too (old habits are hard to break, for years MacOS simply didn't have a cli at all), they don't do it for windows because the default cli is pretty weak compared to unix (and as you pointed out, powershell isnt always installed).
I have never had security updates in ubuntu break hardware, on the other hand i have had xp sp2 break various things including drivers. I can imagine that ubuntu security updates would break hardware that you had installed drivers for by hand (possibly requiring you to recompile the drivers for the updated kernel) but not for anything that came with the default install. And i would expect anyone providing machines with ubuntu preinstalled to select hardware which it is known to be compatible with out of the box.
My point is that the problems you talk about happen for windows too (and would for osx if it was installed on non tightly controlled hardware) and yet you accept the workarounds necessary for windows (even if those workarounds are harder than the equivalents for linux)... If you treat the two on a level playing field ubuntu fares pretty well.
To counter your example, i have the following machines running ubuntu:
a packard bell desktop (c2d 2.2ghz, 2gb ram, ati x1600 video etc) a self build desktop (q6600, 8gb ram, 64bit, nvidia 8600 video) a dell latitude c610 laptop (with a cisco pcmcia wireless card since theres no built in wireless) a dell latitude d600 laptop (the onboard broadcom wireless didnt work in 8.04 but does out of the box with later versions) an asus eee 901 (running the netbook version)
all of these machines get updated to the latest version when it comes out, and none of them have had any issues
what exactly were the 4 machines you used and what type of hardware did they have which didnt work?
as for returns, this is due to a number of factors... the linux distros installed on netbooks were typically second rate distros that were difficult to update, difficult to add additional apps to etc... they were also quite often mis-sold, people buying them often didnt realise they were getting linux and they were poorly promoted - even if linux was mentioned that was pretty much it, none of the advantages of linux were presented in the marketing literature (and in many cases those advantages were neutered by the crippled distros)...
If you are selling hardware, only offer ubuntu on machines which you know it is compatible with, and mark any addon peripherals like printers as ubuntu compatible or not... provide the customers with literature which explains the benefits of linux, especially the package management systems etc...
Incidentally, when it comes to updates breaking things - updating an xp box to windows 7 resulted in my hp printer/scanner no longer working as a scanner (it could still print)... i had to download new drivers from hp, but being an older model those drivers had never been updated to support anything newer than 32bit xp.
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On the contrary, he fairly recently changed his views on java and things that use it such as openoffice.org...
MS have demonstrated time and again they have no qualms about screwing partners, customers and competitors alike to further their own goals of domination and further profits... Is it any wonder that people treat them with extreme caution?
Also, the the "promise not to sue" only covers some core parts of the spec, there are still plenty of encumbered parts and MS actively encourages developers to use these parts... It's effectively a trojan horse, fool people with the the promise not to sue and get them hooked on the proprietary parts which aren't covered by it... Even if you or I avoid the encumbered parts, there are plenty of people out there who either don't know about the encumbrances or couldn't care less and will pump out all kinds of code that locks out non windows users.
With java to a great extent many applications are cross platform wether the original developer made any effort to be cross platform or not, and this is something MS really don't want.
Custom kinect port = it uses some proprietary connector so you won't be able to use it with anything else, will it even be possible to connect it to an original 360?
Gates is not the philanthropist you think he is, look at some of the strings that come attached when his foundation offers something... It's never a no strings attached donation of cash.
The GUI for xsane is perfectly adequate, if a little dated...
And as you pointed out, most scanner manufacturers supply something similar but the problem is you get something different with every scanner... At least xsane is consistent across devices.
You only have the ability to not give a corporation your business *if* there is healthy competition, once you have a monopoly situation then a given company is either impossible to ignore or ignoring them causes you severe problems. You might be able to ignore Apple quite easily with very little detriment to yourself, but ignore your local monopoly telco and your without connectivity to the outside, ignore your local power company and you now have the hassle of being in darkness or running a generator...
Government on the other hand you are *supposed* to have some control over via the voting system...
Wether this works in practice is another matter, corporations have wormed their way into government because that is seen as a good way to increase profit, so now we have a highly corrupt government that works hard to benefit corporations rather than people.
A corporation is by its very nature a totalitarian entity, that doesn't care who else it harms in the pursuit of profit.
On the contrary, government intervention is often necessary and extremely good for the vast majority of people... Otherwise you get monopolies and cartels which lead to high prices and poor service...
The "free market" just doesn't work without regulation to keep it free, a free market is bad for business and any business that becomes powerful enough will try to cement their position.
Perhaps not illegal, but extortionate profit margins are immoral and wrong... And the only other lines of business where it's possible to make profit margins anywhere close are most definitely illegal (and even then, the high profits are offset by high risks).
Any line of business where such extortionate profit margins exist needs government regulation to ensure that competition occurs and pushes those margins back to levels in line with other markets. There should be a cap on how much profit can be made relative to investment, noone should be able to do minimum work and receive massive payments on an ongoing basis.
If you allow open distribution (ala gpl) then even the bandwidth costs are minimised because users can distribute among themselves, and third parties can redistribute for you (eg mirror sites etc)...
Support costs are *rarely* included in the purchase price of software, and if they are the support options are extremely limited. Support usually costs extra, sometimes a lot more and there is no reason this support couldn't be offered alongside freely available software (see redhat).
I would rather not pay $39.99/month *or* $99 for your software... I would pay monthly for a service, and expect the service to continue being provided for as long as i continued paying. Wether that service is worth the price you try to charge is another matter.
I would also expect you to provide security fixes for as long as i was paying, no leaving me stuck with abandonware.
If you convert your app to a service and charge a monthly fee then no you're not ripping users off, because in exchange for the fee you have to provide servers, bandwidth, electricity etc on an ongoing basis and ensure that the service remains available and usable. It's a far cry from providing a one off download or even just a "license code" for a huge sum of money.
I would also demand that you provide an exit strategy before signing up for your service, ie you must make all the data stored in your service available to me in a standard format appropriate to the type of data so that i can move to a competing provider.
What i want is for the vast majority of software to be commoditized, and reduced to reasonable costs with similar margins to other business areas. Like hardware, the margins on that are razor thin and you can't possibly argue that the relative openness of the x86 hardware has been detrimental.... Or would you prefer a return to the days when proprietary vendors could charge thousands for a mediocre workstation?
Upfront costs are one off costs, and if software was to start expensive and rapidly reduce to near zero cost as the initial costs were covered that would make a lot more sense. Instead, it starts expensive and remains expensive until superseded, the upfront costs are rapidly recovered and then its pure profit from there on.
You may only have used 10 hours of support time, but you have support time available to you should you need it. Sure they make a profit, but they still need to have support staff on hand to answer your calls. Just because you aren't calling right now doesn't mean the call centre staff can pack up and go home.
The issue is that proprietary software allows ridiculous profit margins (close to 100% since the software costs nothing to distribute and economies of scale are pretty much linear since the upfront costs remain the same regardless of volume)... Now no industry could possibly achieve such margins if there is any competition, so proprietary vendors stifle competition through lock-in..
Open source vendors are unable to rip their customers off by selling zero cost goods at ridiculous markups because if they did someone else could come along and offer the same code for a cheaper price, instead they must make their money selling services... Services have a constant ongoing cost to actually provide the service, and these costs increase as you provide service to more customers.
The proprietary software market is effectively a scam, which sooner or later will come to an end... Customers will wake up and realise just how badly they're being ripped off, but until then the fraudsters will make as much as they can out of it.
The services market on the other hand is far more reasonable and although competition may eventually result in consolidation and razor thin margins, there is a lower limit.
What they should do then, is open source the player and let other people work on it...
Considering how much effort has gone into workarounds to handle the binary flash player, i guess there are quite a lot of people who would be interested in contributing. Also the player itself is given away for free anyway, so why don't they open it up?
Troop movements are a pretty pointless thing to keep secret for a long time, sure it's important to keep them secret at the time the movements are taking place but once your troops have moved the enemy can simply see this for himself... Also once the war is over or the troops have moved on it's of little importance..
Yes but paper is a relatively inefficient storage mechanism, if converted to a sensible text+images format (ie not just scanned to a bitmap dump), this wouldn't be especially large as digital data... I bet you could fit all of it on a single modern HD... Take a few copies for backup purposes and all that paper could be recycled.
Isn't it wrong when copyrighted material is protected longer than classified government secrets...
Cost is not just the wages either...
A decent windows admin costs just as much as a decent unix admin, the difference is that incompetent people are more likely to call themselves windows admins than unix admins... If you hire incompetent staff you will have a poorly functioning network regardless of what software it runs...
A competent unix admin should be able to maintain far more systems than an equivalent windows admin, meaning you need less of them.
There is also the cost of hardware and third party software to consider... Windows in a network tends to require third party addons like AV and software management systems which unix systems typically do not require (or include as standard)... Windows also typically requires greater hardware resources that unix to do similar tasks.
Things like AV, package management, competent (read: expensive) admins, etc are "optional" in that you can limp by without them....
A typical unix setup with typical expensive admins will include everything you need and cost less than a windows setup including competent (expensive) admins and all the ancillary "optional" addons that really are essential if you want things to run smoothly.
On the other hand, a windows setup with cheap incompetent admins and none of the ancillary stuff may be cheaper, but will run extremely poorly, and the inevitable problems caused by this will almost certainly outweigh the initial savings.
While true, by the time MS became an expensive option it no longer mattered - millions of people were already locked in.
Back in the days, MS (and the cheap hardware they ran on) were a cheap option compared to Novell, Sun, DEC, SGI, IBM, Apple and all the other highend vendors... MS and x86 were massively inferior to everything else on the market, but with such a huge price differential they were able to make it up on volume...
Ford cars are clearly inferior to Rolls Royce or Ferrari, however you see a lot more Fords on the roads for the same reason. However, cars are standardised enough that its impossible to lock someone in, thus ensuring there is a healthy level of competition in the industry.
A standalone windows system is relatively easy to harden against external attack, after all windows was always designed as a single user workstation os so this is how it's meant to be configured...
However to do so requires various kludges, for instance using a firewall to prevent access to various listening network services, whereas on a unix system you would shut those services down as it makes no sense to keep something running if nothing needs to access it.
However once you start opening up MS protocols to the network (which you need to do to use things like exchange and active directory) the design flaws start to bite... You have a flawed authentication model where you can use the password hash instead of the actual password (which means the passwords are effectively stored as plain text)... you have extremely complex protocols which are poorly documented, provide no clear demarcation between authenticated and anonymous access and have far too much functionality in one place (some of which is completely unnecessary...
You have things like the remote desktop protocol which establishes a full gui session (ie lets you move windows around etc) *BEFORE* you have logged in so all of this functionality is available to unauthenticated users to try and exploit.
Also having drivers running in kernel mode from a bunch of third parties is not a great idea... How secure/stable are those drivers? How will they play together? Will they continue to work if you upgrade the OS and if not, will the manufacturer bother to provide updates?
Linux has all the drivers in one place and Apple only provide a limited set of very well tested drivers... The only time i've seen stability issues with either is when loading third party drivers.
You can get equivalents to AD for Linux and OSX, Novell's current eDirectory product for instance which is descended from Novell (of which active directory is a rather crude clone), Sun/Oracle also makes something similar and there are various systems you can roll your own... Active directory is a HUGE security nightmare...
As for "enterprise" features - in a business you don't want millions of different hardware configurations, you want as few as possible, so long as suitable configurations are available it doesn't matter how many other choices exist.... You will typically standardise on one, and in the case of apple you can be sure that the few choices on offer are thoroughly tested and well supported. Companies buy highend z/OS and AIX kit from IBM for the same reason.
They make money by selling an overpriced product into a market that is locked in to their products and thus has to buy them regardless of quality or price. MS are really selling a second rate product at a premium price because they can get away with it.
The "have nots" are unimportant largely because their actions have little impact on anyone else, ie anything they do is on an extremely small scale. Tackle the big problems first and all that.
There is only financial incentive to make a good product if you are in a highly competitive market and your product needs to be better than the competitors...
Otherwise, the financial incentive is to actually make a poor product so that you can sell upgrades more easily.
In the case of MS, lock-in ensures that competition is kept at bay enabling them to produce extremely poor quality products. Keeping customers locked in is also far more profitable for them than offering an open product and then having to face competition. This situation *ONLY* benefits MS, and is to the absolute detriment of everyone else, and so considering the importance of computers in todays society something should most definitely be done about it.
I'd recommend that you never start a business, as you seem to have missed the point that it's future updates that break it, and that returns kill retail. FAIL
All the machines i run ubuntu on, had all of their hardware supported out of the box and none of them have failed due to updating. The reason your machine on which you compiled wifi drivers from source failed after updating is because the system package manager is unaware of your self compiled drivers and is therefore unable to update them to match the other updated components. I would not sell a machine with ubuntu on it that required manual hacking like that to get something working, there are plenty of systems supported by an out of the box install and which will apply updates just fine.
If you need to read about how it works, then it's... FAIL.
No that's advertising, people are not psychic - you need to tell them why they should use your product and not something else which is better marketed... microsoft spends millions on advertising. Inferior products often outsell cheaper and superior alternatives because the inferior ones have huge marketing budgets behind them.
There's no "incidentally" about that. It's the GP's entire point. Utter and total FAIL.
Except that i was talking about windows updates breaking things as well - read the rest of the text (infact microsoft are quite famous for updates breaking things)... So why is it acceptable for windows updates to break things, but for ubuntu updates to break things is considered unacceptable?
Most joe average users never update their OS, and never install it... They purchase a machine with something preinstalled, and use it until it feels too slow for them at which point they replace it...
Most users would be unable to reinstall windows, especially if they need to find and install third party drivers for it, if windows lacks a driver for a given piece of hardware it doesn't even tell you what brand or model the card is, you get the raw pci device ids if you look hard but otherwise you just get "ethernet controller" or "vga display device" or similar.
The only place where a user is pretty much guaranteed to be able to reinstall without missing drivers or other problems is on a mac, where the hardware and software are designed together. If you replicate the same situation with linux or windows then you'd also be able to get a clean install with no driver issues.
There is also a very important reason why searching for help in forums gives you command line help... Forums and the web as a whole are primarily text based mediums just like a cli. Pretty much anything a typical user would want to do with ubuntu can be performed through the graphical interface but providing descriptions and screenshots to illustrate the point would be just as problematic as it is on other platforms (the users screen may look different to resolution issues, language, theme preferences, icons having been moved etc)... Take the following example - user wants to install a package called "blah" - a graphical explanation would show them where to find the synaptic package manager, how to search for blah or what category its located in, how to select it for installation, how to confirm it to process the install etc... A textual response would be "sudo apt-get install blah" which the user can simply paste into a terminal, enter his pass and be done.
Why go through hoops to explain a graphical process via a textual medium, when you can simply provide a block of text that the user can paste to get the job done? People are starting to provide help for OSX in this way too (old habits are hard to break, for years MacOS simply didn't have a cli at all), they don't do it for windows because the default cli is pretty weak compared to unix (and as you pointed out, powershell isnt always installed).
I have never had security updates in ubuntu break hardware, on the other hand i have had xp sp2 break various things including drivers. I can imagine that ubuntu security updates would break hardware that you had installed drivers for by hand (possibly requiring you to recompile the drivers for the updated kernel) but not for anything that came with the default install. And i would expect anyone providing machines with ubuntu preinstalled to select hardware which it is known to be compatible with out of the box.
My point is that the problems you talk about happen for windows too (and would for osx if it was installed on non tightly controlled hardware) and yet you accept the workarounds necessary for windows (even if those workarounds are harder than the equivalents for linux)... If you treat the two on a level playing field ubuntu fares pretty well.
To counter your example, i have the following machines running ubuntu:
a packard bell desktop (c2d 2.2ghz, 2gb ram, ati x1600 video etc)
a self build desktop (q6600, 8gb ram, 64bit, nvidia 8600 video)
a dell latitude c610 laptop (with a cisco pcmcia wireless card since theres no built in wireless)
a dell latitude d600 laptop (the onboard broadcom wireless didnt work in 8.04 but does out of the box with later versions)
an asus eee 901 (running the netbook version)
all of these machines get updated to the latest version when it comes out, and none of them have had any issues
what exactly were the 4 machines you used and what type of hardware did they have which didnt work?
as for returns, this is due to a number of factors... the linux distros installed on netbooks were typically second rate distros that were difficult to update, difficult to add additional apps to etc...
they were also quite often mis-sold, people buying them often didnt realise they were getting linux and they were poorly promoted - even if linux was mentioned that was pretty much it, none of the advantages of linux were presented in the marketing literature (and in many cases those advantages were neutered by the crippled distros)...
If you are selling hardware, only offer ubuntu on machines which you know it is compatible with, and mark any addon peripherals like printers as ubuntu compatible or not... provide the customers with literature which explains the benefits of linux, especially the package management systems etc...
Incidentally, when it comes to updates breaking things - updating an xp box to windows 7 resulted in my hp printer/scanner no longer working as a scanner (it could still print)... i had to download new drivers from hp, but being an older model those drivers had never been updated to support anything newer than 32bit xp.