Well, they installed changes to another companies application without asking the user first
Are you purposely trying to mislead people, or are you just posting about something which you know little about?
Installing a plugin to a piece of software that explicitly supports plugins from 3rd parties in NO WAY qualifies as 'installed changes to another companies application". The JRE, Flash, and PDF plugins all do this.
these changes, while more convient, open up security holes (the down side of 'just work' technologies) that many people go to firefox specifically to get away from
Not really. As far as plugins like this go (JRE,Flash, PDF, etc), the.NET stuff has been nearly flawless from a security perspective. And despite the poor ass reporting from the article, ClickOnce is not ActiveX, its not even close. ClickOnce in no way allows websites to install software to your computer without your acknowledgement. Even software that you choose to download runs in a very tight sandbox, that has a dramatically better security history than Java (the nearest equivalent).
and then they make it difficult to uninstall
This was a mistake, but also an easy mistake to make given how the Firefox plugin mechanism works when installing system wide software.
Big deal or not I could see why people would be pissed, esp network admins that do not want this kind of functionality on their network.
Again, you're either being disingenuous or ignorant. Network admins run WSUS or some other patch management tool, and make an explicit choice of what software patches to run. And the vast majority of them want/need.NET service packs since so much business software runs on.NET.
Ignore the idiot AC who responded to you. Password storage has nothing to do with Kerberos. The two things are related, but orthogonal.
Windows still uses NTLM without a salt in the current versions.
There is a way to encrypt the SAM with a symmetric cipher, which requires that a floppy or USB key must be physically present for the SAM to be accessed. It's not widely used.
Dude, seriously. Its nice and all that you like to brag about multiple languages. Good for you.
But do you really know a language if you cannot communicate effectively with it?
Case in point, your post that I'm responding to.
It's fairly badly broken English. I've read worse, but its not good.
For example, how do you get 'too sticked to grammer', and what the hell does that mean? Is it some kind of dom/sub foreplay?
What is a 'juridical' document? Sounds kinky.
And I dont even have a clue what this is supposed to mean:
... when people try to teach grammar not by the error but by playing smarties.
Now there are alot of people who arent native english speakers here on/. And generally they only get minor grief, and only from idiots. You should have ignored the idiots. But oh no, you had to go get arrogant about it, and blame it on how you're so smart you are reading/. simultaneously in six languages including binary.
Bottom line, if you want to be able to be understood, and engage in conversation with people, then slow down a bit and at least try to make your posts intelligible. The couple of your posts I've read on this story are nearly incomprehensible. Strangely enough, the most clear you've been was in your bragging about how many languages you know, so that tells me you can speak clearly in English when you want to.
If your equipment supports x64, then the drivers are either freshly written for Vista, or have gotten quite a bit of work.
I think a big part of the problem before was that alot of low-end, consumer level equipment shipped with drivers that were minimally modified from XP so that they (just barely) worked. But if the equipment was to support x64, they had to put some real resources into developing the drivers.
This leads to another general rule of thumb for vista: You'll do MUCH better if you buy equipment that is officially supported in x86 or x64. Stuff that is NOT supported in x64 seems to be lower quality, and more shoddy in the drivers.
And since Vista is heavily sensitive to bad drivers...
The achilles heel of Vista is drivers. If the drivers have problems, then the whole thing falls over.
As a counter-example to yours, I'm running Vista x64 Business on an HP Compaq 8710w laptop. 2.4C2D, 4GB memory, 7200rpm hdd, and an Nvidia Quadro FX 1600M with 512MB onboard.
This machine shipped from HP as x64 ready, and has been the most flawless laptop I've ever owned. It runs basically until the once a month updates from MS, and I abuse it pretty heavily, running Oracle Enterprise 10g, Eclipse, and Tomcat with a couple big app servers, all a part of normal development. I actually am looking at moving up to 8GB of memory, as the 4 isnt really enough for that kind of use (I have the swappiness set really low).
It literally just keeps going, and keeps going, and keeps going, and never stops. It's also the most reliable Vista machine I've seen in the field, though I think that has more to do with it being a high-end engineering laptop from HP, so the drivers are high quality.
Be careful that many CAD/CAM/CAE apps dont really support 64-bit properly, though I cant speak specifically to SolidWorks. Too many apps in that space have near monopolies, and just never upgrade their software.
1. Group Policy management (the move to admx files has caused numerous backwards compatibility issues)
This is a pretty minor issue.
2. The ever-growing winsxs folder. There is no way to shrink or compress it.
Who cares? If you're trying to rollout Vista on machines with 20GB hard drives, then you made a bad choice to do so. Your equipment isnt ready for Vista, and there's no big rush, so why are you trying to move when you're not ready?
3. Try creating images with default software for imaging workstations due to #2.
I dont understand what #2 had to do with this. Creating images with default software works just fine. The size of the winsxs folder is irrelevant to that task.
4. In-house applications need to be recoded.
This means in-house apps were done wrong in the first place, and need to be fixed. This isnt a Vista problem, this is a lazy/incompetent/badly-managed in-house apps group problem. Thats like blaming your ISP because you have some users that are bottlenecking your internet connection with bittorrent.
5. Minimum requirements for Vista would require a major purchase of machines to be able to run it.
Then dont do it.
6. Activation process fails ~1/3 of the time, even when trying to use an in-house key server.
This is not the normal experience.
7. Random core dumps on Dell Latitude laptop line (have had 8 of them do this), even with the latest drivers and firmware.
Is this on the Dell Latitude E-series? If so, this is about Dell's problem, not Vista. There are BIG hardware problems with some of the E-lines, just do a quick google. It's all over the news.
That's not UAC. What you are talking about is the (simple) difference between a user and an administrator. Microsoft has never understood that difference.
And you clearly dont understand the software you're talking about.
Which leads us to the BS that is UAC... even with admin rights you still have to confirm every damned thing you do. It's a horrible stupid kludge. If you don't what people doing "admin" things, don't make them an admin. (it's a tough concept in the windows world.)
If you dont like UAC in that configuration, why not change how UAC behaves? Turn off admin-approval, and change the UAC behavior so it works more like sudo, or like the XP-style runas.
It seems to me like you didnt take 5 minutes to google how to tweak your UAC config from the grandma & grandpa home-user configuration it ships with to a more suitable one for yourself.
The reason Linux has (basically) no virii is not only because of its low market share, but because it's inherently secure, and requires permissions to do system-vital tasks. Unless you're running every application you open with sudo, in which case you're an idiot.
Depends what you mean by 'inherently secure', but if you mean it 'requires permissions to do system-vital tasks', well then every corporate windows version for quite a long time has had this as well.
Depends what your definition of 'virii' is. There is a massive amount of automated attacks going on specifically targeting linux systems on a constant basis. Higher volume than the automated attacks targeting windows vulns in my experience.
Your statements are only applicable if you consider virii things that target desktop applications or consist of social engineering attacks to convince users to run their malware with elevated privileges.
Could you not even be bothered to read the article you linked?
They have ~$25B in cash.
They're selling bonds to generate ~$3.75B in additional cash.
They clearly dont 'need the money', they're just leveraging the credit situation and their own good credit rating. It's no different than someone who borrows against equity against their home at 4.5% and re-invests that into the stock-market to earn 5-10%.
Not to mention the package manager keeps track of EVERY package on your PC (as long as it was installed via the package manager) as well as the core system itself, so updates are a one-click deal.
This is only true if the software you need is open source, packaged by your package manager, and is ported to your distro in a timely manner. I run into a _lot_ of situations where the package managers dont have what I need and I have to out and either compile the stuff myself or download and run some scripted installer.
So yeah, package manager is great for the base commodity desktop apps. But if its not in the package manager, and there's alot thats not, it sucks the big one.
With Windows the Windows updates system only does WINDOWS updates, nothing else. You have to do every application separately, which means a LOT of clicks, with a LOT of different GUI's to interact with to stay updated.
Actually, Microsoft Update updates nearly all Microsoft software. Office packages, development tools, database servers, exchange servers, web servers, utilities, driver packs, etc etc. It doesnt do everything, but on most windows installs it covers a great deal.
This is not to suggest that its perfect and does everything, but your representation of the situation was not accurate.
It goes both ways. I've literally never, in my entire life, been able to get a linux install to work with the wifi on a laptop. Ever. Even on my new hp compaq that has the intel abg card with open source drivers. Even on the 3 laptops before that, all dell before the hp.
And the last few laptops I tried to install linux on, I had to go through a fairly bizarre ritual involving only using the alternative setup disc, editing grub to suppress the splash screen, and then manually downloading nvidia drivers with wget.
I know not everyone runs into that, but the fact that I've run into the exact same set of problems with nvidia and wifi drivers across several different dell latitude generations and a brand spanking new hp compaq is worrisome.
On the flip side, HP ships a handy dandy driver disc that includes 32-bit and 64-bit drivers for both Vista and XP, so its kind of a stacked game.
In XP I had to click "Start" -> "Control Panel" -> "Network Configuration" to start he wizard. Now the freaky part begins. One has to click on several pages that show only some warning text. You need to click on a box to make it disregard disconnected network hardware (WHY? I'm not changing the hardware, just the network address). Enter the computer hardware description and name (WHY? I'm not changing that, just the network address). Type a workgroup name. Tell it if I want to change disk and printer sharing (NO! I just want to change the network address!!!). Another nag screen asking me if I want to create a configuration disk (NO!!!). Then it tells me I need to reboot the computer (WHY? I just want to change the network address...)
Are you just making random things up here?
The way you do it is to right click the network icon in the system tray, choose properties, double click on TCP/IP and then enter your IP.
You seem to have stumbled across some sort of deeply buried 'try to do everything' wizard that I've never even heard of or seen, and that nobody on earth uses.
Of course, your whole scenario was specious. If your machines and your network are setup correctly, the correct way to do that was to plug an ethernet cord into your computer, and you're done. The box gets an IP address from the router. Given that you can get an adequate router/firewall from your ISP for little to nothing, I havent heard of or seen anyone use a computer to share the network since the 1990's.
In any case most of things are done via the browser nowadays, so I don't really care about the OS much.
If you're a secretary or data-entry clerk, maybe. But for most jobs, no.
Let's look at what I'm running right now that isnt in the browser that is necessary:
Outlook (email & calendar)(no, gmail is not even remotely adequate for this) Pidgin (IM) Notepad++ that keeps my content when the laptop is in standby and offline OneNote Putty Thunderbird (for IMAP email accounts) Ruby IDE Eclipse MySQL Admin tools PasswordSafe MozyPro offsite auto-backup MediaPlayer Paint.NET SVN client FileZilla Lightscribe disc labeller Jing
Thats just a quicky list.
Mind you, most of those run on Linux or have something roughly equivalent that does. The problems that are hard to replace are Outlook (Evolution is a POS in my experience), OneNote (nothing like this out there in the OSS world that I am aware of), and Jing. Although there may be something like Jing out there I'm not aware of.
To answer your question, since nobody else seemed to:
AutomaticUpdates doesnt use IE directly, and is not dependent on having a specific version of IE on the system.
It's probable that AutomaticUpdates and IE share some underlying componenents like WinInet and similar things, but thats not quite what you're asking, I dont think.
WindowsUpdate and MicrosoftUpdate, which you do through the browser on XP, will work on any supported version of IE.
That assumes you actually have a digg account, or are willing to create one (which isnt necessary to use the site), and login.
Even then, there were so many javascript bugs in the login screen, in the diggbar disable button, etc, that it was problematic for anyone not using the current version of Firefox.
Which is sad, because although I use FF for all my webdev, and work stuff, I dont actually use it for any personal/fun reading, its too clunky and requires too many plugins to be useful.
Unfortunately, that means I use Opera, but boy oh boy does Digg have lots of problems with Opera, if you want to use any of their stuff buried behind a login (which I never have before).
I find the DiggBar to be one of the most abominable things I've seen on the web since the 90's (and MySpace, of course).
Who actually reads the comments or actually uses any of the features at Digg? I've never actually met anyone who does that, but I guess if you do, the DiggBar might be slightly useful.
My biggest complaint is that they used a whole bunch of 'stuff is broken' to make the diggbar almost impossible to remove if you're using Opera.
The little drop-down button to make it go away permanently didnt exist.
You had to create an account and always be logged in to disable the diggbar, but you couldnt login with opera, because they had to be tricky and do an all javascript lightbox login page, which of course didnt work under Opera.
Plus it put that horrible digg icon on all the tabs you open with it, and obscures the actual URL of the content. So when I go through and open 20 or 30 tabs of stuff to read from digg, now they all look identical in my tabs. Just horrible.
And what's the big deal about short URL's? Is there any piece of modern software (except idiotic twitter) that cant handle URL's of arbitrary lengths?
1. UAC. You may not be a fan, but its light years better than doing everything win RunAs and DropMyRights and MakeMeAdmin on XP.
2. Composited desktop display. No more tearing, no more desktop getting locked because of network issues, etc
3. Sandboxed IE.
4. Dramatically improved IO Scheduler, which doesnt bog down the whole machine as much when under very heavy disk load (desktops, laptops, with slow drive subsystems).
5. Search-type launcher in the start menu. Rather than navigating 1000 menus, you just type the name of what you want to launch and hit return. It 'just works'.
I don't want to learn what a sketchy site is, and I don't want to learn what every little thing that Windows wants to install is. How am I, an end user, supposed to know all about security? Windows makes the user responsible by asking all these complex questions that I don't know the answer to. Ubuntu takes responsibility for it's security, it doesn't push that onto the user.
It's quite easy to run windows in that kind of a mode, it just doesnt ship that way.
Run as non-admin, turn off UAC, dont use IE7 or lower.
AutoUpdates are on by default.
Thats all you have to do. You'll never have to think about it again, everything will just work, and you wont have to know or care what a sketchy site is.
The challenge isnt MS (or any company with the volume of XBL) having enough capacity at any one time, its in how fast they can grow their capacity.
Look at last christmas, when they couldnt keep up in capacity growth when CoD4 came out and everyone was home playing on the holidays.
That was just them hosting the login servers.
Imagine how bad it would have been if they not only hosted the login & matchmaking servers, but had to host reflectors/multicasters to host 2-12x the amount of traffic of every xbox player in the world (or region).
No, it doesnt have anything to do with the 'theme'. But it does have everything to do with Aero, which in addition to the surface level 'pretty' stuff, is (finally) a real compositing window manager for Windows.
Thats the primary reason for all those improvements I'm talking about.
If you disable Aero, and go back to the standard non-compositing desktop, you're back in the same tech as XP, with its problems that I noted were fixed/improved.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they installed changes to another companies application without asking the user first
Are you purposely trying to mislead people, or are you just posting about something which you know little about?
Installing a plugin to a piece of software that explicitly supports plugins from 3rd parties in NO WAY qualifies as 'installed changes to another companies application". The JRE, Flash, and PDF plugins all do this.
these changes, while more convient, open up security holes (the down side of 'just work' technologies) that many people go to firefox specifically to get away from
Not really. As far as plugins like this go (JRE,Flash, PDF, etc), the .NET stuff has been nearly flawless from a security perspective. And despite the poor ass reporting from the article, ClickOnce is not ActiveX, its not even close. ClickOnce in no way allows websites to install software to your computer without your acknowledgement. Even software that you choose to download runs in a very tight sandbox, that has a dramatically better security history than Java (the nearest equivalent).
and then they make it difficult to uninstall
This was a mistake, but also an easy mistake to make given how the Firefox plugin mechanism works when installing system wide software.
Big deal or not I could see why people would be pissed, esp network admins that do not want this kind of functionality on their network.
Again, you're either being disingenuous or ignorant. Network admins run WSUS or some other patch management tool, and make an explicit choice of what software patches to run. And the vast majority of them want/need .NET service packs since so much business software runs on .NET.
Ignore the idiot AC who responded to you. Password storage has nothing to do with Kerberos. The two things are related, but orthogonal.
Windows still uses NTLM without a salt in the current versions.
There is a way to encrypt the SAM with a symmetric cipher, which requires that a floppy or USB key must be physically present for the SAM to be accessed. It's not widely used.
Here here.
Anyone who says that recovering passwords is never necessary, since you can just change them, obviously has never done much work in this field.
Dude, seriously. Its nice and all that you like to brag about multiple languages. Good for you.
But do you really know a language if you cannot communicate effectively with it?
Case in point, your post that I'm responding to.
It's fairly badly broken English. I've read worse, but its not good.
For example, how do you get 'too sticked to grammer', and what the hell does that mean? Is it some kind of dom/sub foreplay?
What is a 'juridical' document? Sounds kinky.
And I dont even have a clue what this is supposed to mean:
... when people try to teach grammar not by the error but by playing smarties.
Now there are alot of people who arent native english speakers here on /. And generally they only get minor grief, and only from idiots. You should have ignored the idiots. But oh no, you had to go get arrogant about it, and blame it on how you're so smart you are reading /. simultaneously in six languages including binary.
Bottom line, if you want to be able to be understood, and engage in conversation with people, then slow down a bit and at least try to make your posts intelligible. The couple of your posts I've read on this story are nearly incomprehensible. Strangely enough, the most clear you've been was in your bragging about how many languages you know, so that tells me you can speak clearly in English when you want to.
I think the issue is more the drivers.
If your equipment supports x64, then the drivers are either freshly written for Vista, or have gotten quite a bit of work.
I think a big part of the problem before was that alot of low-end, consumer level equipment shipped with drivers that were minimally modified from XP so that they (just barely) worked. But if the equipment was to support x64, they had to put some real resources into developing the drivers.
This leads to another general rule of thumb for vista: You'll do MUCH better if you buy equipment that is officially supported in x86 or x64. Stuff that is NOT supported in x64 seems to be lower quality, and more shoddy in the drivers.
And since Vista is heavily sensitive to bad drivers ...
Actually, I think you'll find that in the corporate space, HP has some of the best kit out there.
In corporate-level laptops (ie, things branded Compaq, not the crap you buy in BestBuy), they're absolutely fantastic. Nearly flawless.
In x86 servers, the ProLiant's are also fantastic.
In particular, the high end HP laptops run x64 Vista quite well. Seems like that class of machine is one of the only ones to have quality drivers.
The achilles heel of Vista is drivers. If the drivers have problems, then the whole thing falls over.
As a counter-example to yours, I'm running Vista x64 Business on an HP Compaq 8710w laptop. 2.4C2D, 4GB memory, 7200rpm hdd, and an Nvidia Quadro FX 1600M with 512MB onboard.
This machine shipped from HP as x64 ready, and has been the most flawless laptop I've ever owned. It runs basically until the once a month updates from MS, and I abuse it pretty heavily, running Oracle Enterprise 10g, Eclipse, and Tomcat with a couple big app servers, all a part of normal development. I actually am looking at moving up to 8GB of memory, as the 4 isnt really enough for that kind of use (I have the swappiness set really low).
It literally just keeps going, and keeps going, and keeps going, and never stops. It's also the most reliable Vista machine I've seen in the field, though I think that has more to do with it being a high-end engineering laptop from HP, so the drivers are high quality.
Be careful that many CAD/CAM/CAE apps dont really support 64-bit properly, though I cant speak specifically to SolidWorks. Too many apps in that space have near monopolies, and just never upgrade their software.
1. Group Policy management (the move to admx files has caused numerous backwards compatibility issues)
This is a pretty minor issue.
2. The ever-growing winsxs folder. There is no way to shrink or compress it.
Who cares? If you're trying to rollout Vista on machines with 20GB hard drives, then you made a bad choice to do so. Your equipment isnt ready for Vista, and there's no big rush, so why are you trying to move when you're not ready?
3. Try creating images with default software for imaging workstations due to #2.
I dont understand what #2 had to do with this. Creating images with default software works just fine. The size of the winsxs folder is irrelevant to that task.
4. In-house applications need to be recoded.
This means in-house apps were done wrong in the first place, and need to be fixed. This isnt a Vista problem, this is a lazy/incompetent/badly-managed in-house apps group problem. Thats like blaming your ISP because you have some users that are bottlenecking your internet connection with bittorrent.
5. Minimum requirements for Vista would require a major purchase of machines to be able to run it.
Then dont do it.
6. Activation process fails ~1/3 of the time, even when trying to use an in-house key server.
This is not the normal experience.
7. Random core dumps on Dell Latitude laptop line (have had 8 of them do this), even with the latest drivers and firmware.
Is this on the Dell Latitude E-series? If so, this is about Dell's problem, not Vista. There are BIG hardware problems with some of the E-lines, just do a quick google. It's all over the news.
If you turn off UAC, how do you elevate to an admin account when you need to install new software or change system settings?
Runas doesnt really work right in Vista, so I'm betting that isnt it.
That's not UAC. What you are talking about is the (simple) difference between a user and an administrator. Microsoft has never understood that difference.
And you clearly dont understand the software you're talking about.
Which leads us to the BS that is UAC... even with admin rights you still have to confirm every damned thing you do. It's a horrible stupid kludge. If you don't what people doing "admin" things, don't make them an admin. (it's a tough concept in the windows world.)
If you dont like UAC in that configuration, why not change how UAC behaves? Turn off admin-approval, and change the UAC behavior so it works more like sudo, or like the XP-style runas.
It seems to me like you didnt take 5 minutes to google how to tweak your UAC config from the grandma & grandpa home-user configuration it ships with to a more suitable one for yourself.
The reason Linux has (basically) no virii is not only because of its low market share, but because it's inherently secure, and requires permissions to do system-vital tasks. Unless you're running every application you open with sudo, in which case you're an idiot.
Depends what you mean by 'inherently secure', but if you mean it 'requires permissions to do system-vital tasks', well then every corporate windows version for quite a long time has had this as well.
Depends what your definition of 'virii' is. There is a massive amount of automated attacks going on specifically targeting linux systems on a constant basis. Higher volume than the automated attacks targeting windows vulns in my experience.
Your statements are only applicable if you consider virii things that target desktop applications or consist of social engineering attacks to convince users to run their malware with elevated privileges.
Could you not even be bothered to read the article you linked?
They have ~$25B in cash.
They're selling bonds to generate ~$3.75B in additional cash.
They clearly dont 'need the money', they're just leveraging the credit situation and their own good credit rating. It's no different than someone who borrows against equity against their home at 4.5% and re-invests that into the stock-market to earn 5-10%.
Not to mention the package manager keeps track of EVERY package on your PC (as long as it was installed via the package manager) as well as the core system itself, so updates are a one-click deal.
This is only true if the software you need is open source, packaged by your package manager, and is ported to your distro in a timely manner. I run into a _lot_ of situations where the package managers dont have what I need and I have to out and either compile the stuff myself or download and run some scripted installer.
So yeah, package manager is great for the base commodity desktop apps. But if its not in the package manager, and there's alot thats not, it sucks the big one.
With Windows the Windows updates system only does WINDOWS updates, nothing else. You have to do every application separately, which means a LOT of clicks, with a LOT of different GUI's to interact with to stay updated.
Actually, Microsoft Update updates nearly all Microsoft software. Office packages, development tools, database servers, exchange servers, web servers, utilities, driver packs, etc etc. It doesnt do everything, but on most windows installs it covers a great deal.
This is not to suggest that its perfect and does everything, but your representation of the situation was not accurate.
This is only tru
It goes both ways. I've literally never, in my entire life, been able to get a linux install to work with the wifi on a laptop. Ever. Even on my new hp compaq that has the intel abg card with open source drivers. Even on the 3 laptops before that, all dell before the hp.
And the last few laptops I tried to install linux on, I had to go through a fairly bizarre ritual involving only using the alternative setup disc, editing grub to suppress the splash screen, and then manually downloading nvidia drivers with wget.
I know not everyone runs into that, but the fact that I've run into the exact same set of problems with nvidia and wifi drivers across several different dell latitude generations and a brand spanking new hp compaq is worrisome.
On the flip side, HP ships a handy dandy driver disc that includes 32-bit and 64-bit drivers for both Vista and XP, so its kind of a stacked game.
In XP I had to click "Start" -> "Control Panel" -> "Network Configuration" to start he wizard. Now the freaky part begins. One has to click on several pages that show only some warning text. You need to click on a box to make it disregard disconnected network hardware (WHY? I'm not changing the hardware, just the network address). Enter the computer hardware description and name (WHY? I'm not changing that, just the network address). Type a workgroup name. Tell it if I want to change disk and printer sharing (NO! I just want to change the network address!!!). Another nag screen asking me if I want to create a configuration disk (NO!!!). Then it tells me I need to reboot the computer (WHY? I just want to change the network address...)
Are you just making random things up here?
The way you do it is to right click the network icon in the system tray, choose properties, double click on TCP/IP and then enter your IP.
You seem to have stumbled across some sort of deeply buried 'try to do everything' wizard that I've never even heard of or seen, and that nobody on earth uses.
Of course, your whole scenario was specious. If your machines and your network are setup correctly, the correct way to do that was to plug an ethernet cord into your computer, and you're done. The box gets an IP address from the router. Given that you can get an adequate router/firewall from your ISP for little to nothing, I havent heard of or seen anyone use a computer to share the network since the 1990's.
In any case most of things are done via the browser nowadays, so I don't really care about the OS much.
If you're a secretary or data-entry clerk, maybe. But for most jobs, no.
Let's look at what I'm running right now that isnt in the browser that is necessary:
Outlook (email & calendar)(no, gmail is not even remotely adequate for this)
Pidgin (IM)
Notepad++ that keeps my content when the laptop is in standby and offline
OneNote
Putty
Thunderbird (for IMAP email accounts)
Ruby IDE
Eclipse
MySQL Admin tools
PasswordSafe
MozyPro offsite auto-backup
MediaPlayer
Paint.NET
SVN client
FileZilla
Lightscribe disc labeller
Jing
Thats just a quicky list.
Mind you, most of those run on Linux or have something roughly equivalent that does. The problems that are hard to replace are Outlook (Evolution is a POS in my experience), OneNote (nothing like this out there in the OSS world that I am aware of), and Jing. Although there may be something like Jing out there I'm not aware of.
To answer your question, since nobody else seemed to:
AutomaticUpdates doesnt use IE directly, and is not dependent on having a specific version of IE on the system.
It's probable that AutomaticUpdates and IE share some underlying componenents like WinInet and similar things, but thats not quite what you're asking, I dont think.
WindowsUpdate and MicrosoftUpdate, which you do through the browser on XP, will work on any supported version of IE.
You realize that you control whether PDF's open in the browser or not.
For the vast majority of people, there's no reason to have it open within the browser.
Just go into the preferences of Adobe Reader (or whtever you're using) and set it to not open within the browser.
That assumes you actually have a digg account, or are willing to create one (which isnt necessary to use the site), and login.
Even then, there were so many javascript bugs in the login screen, in the diggbar disable button, etc, that it was problematic for anyone not using the current version of Firefox.
Which is sad, because although I use FF for all my webdev, and work stuff, I dont actually use it for any personal/fun reading, its too clunky and requires too many plugins to be useful.
Unfortunately, that means I use Opera, but boy oh boy does Digg have lots of problems with Opera, if you want to use any of their stuff buried behind a login (which I never have before).
I find the DiggBar to be one of the most abominable things I've seen on the web since the 90's (and MySpace, of course).
Who actually reads the comments or actually uses any of the features at Digg? I've never actually met anyone who does that, but I guess if you do, the DiggBar might be slightly useful.
My biggest complaint is that they used a whole bunch of 'stuff is broken' to make the diggbar almost impossible to remove if you're using Opera.
The little drop-down button to make it go away permanently didnt exist.
You had to create an account and always be logged in to disable the diggbar, but you couldnt login with opera, because they had to be tricky and do an all javascript lightbox login page, which of course didnt work under Opera.
Plus it put that horrible digg icon on all the tabs you open with it, and obscures the actual URL of the content. So when I go through and open 20 or 30 tabs of stuff to read from digg, now they all look identical in my tabs. Just horrible.
And what's the big deal about short URL's? Is there any piece of modern software (except idiotic twitter) that cant handle URL's of arbitrary lengths?
Flash movies zoom in and out just fine, at least on IE7, FF3, and Opera 9.
I too run 1920x1080 on a small laptop screen and have most everything zoomed constantly.
Critical improvements of Vista/Win7 over XP:
1. UAC. You may not be a fan, but its light years better than doing everything win RunAs and DropMyRights and MakeMeAdmin on XP.
2. Composited desktop display. No more tearing, no more desktop getting locked because of network issues, etc
3. Sandboxed IE.
4. Dramatically improved IO Scheduler, which doesnt bog down the whole machine as much when under very heavy disk load (desktops, laptops, with slow drive subsystems).
5. Search-type launcher in the start menu. Rather than navigating 1000 menus, you just type the name of what you want to launch and hit return. It 'just works'.
6. Bidirectional firewall.
7. Integrity levels. Lower integrity processes cannot communite with higher integrity processes.
8. Massively improved AutoRun administration interface.
9. Requirement for the OEM/IHV ecosystem to provide x64 drivers if they want the label.
Thats just a quick 3-minute sample off the top of my head, and I came up with 9.
I don't want to learn what a sketchy site is, and I don't want to learn what every little thing that Windows wants to install is. How am I, an end user, supposed to know all about security? Windows makes the user responsible by asking all these complex questions that I don't know the answer to. Ubuntu takes responsibility for it's security, it doesn't push that onto the user.
It's quite easy to run windows in that kind of a mode, it just doesnt ship that way.
Run as non-admin, turn off UAC, dont use IE7 or lower.
AutoUpdates are on by default.
Thats all you have to do. You'll never have to think about it again, everything will just work, and you wont have to know or care what a sketchy site is.
The challenge isnt MS (or any company with the volume of XBL) having enough capacity at any one time, its in how fast they can grow their capacity.
Look at last christmas, when they couldnt keep up in capacity growth when CoD4 came out and everyone was home playing on the holidays.
That was just them hosting the login servers.
Imagine how bad it would have been if they not only hosted the login & matchmaking servers, but had to host reflectors/multicasters to host 2-12x the amount of traffic of every xbox player in the world (or region).
No, it doesnt have anything to do with the 'theme'. But it does have everything to do with Aero, which in addition to the surface level 'pretty' stuff, is (finally) a real compositing window manager for Windows.
Thats the primary reason for all those improvements I'm talking about.
If you disable Aero, and go back to the standard non-compositing desktop, you're back in the same tech as XP, with its problems that I noted were fixed/improved.