Three things you do not discuss in polite company: politics, religion, and operating systems. It can only get ugly.
Count the layers of irony: I had replied to your post with a lengthy defense of Windows NT/2k/XP that I typed up on Ubuntu Linux when Firefox crashed. Surely this, like my Windows 9x crashes (I've only used 95 and ME extensively, which may have jaded me), reflects a fault deep within myself. The short version:
I never claimed that XP was secure or fast (I said stable, which is the same as neither; Solaris is stable, secure, and slow, for instance), and I in fact said nothing about its higher-level components (and only briefly discussed its low-level guts) and even implicitly acknowledged that Longhorn has a lot of room with which to improve in this area. Although when you get right down to it--and this is an immensely unpopular opinion coming--it's plenty fast when you turn off all the visual noise and plenty secure when you firewall it and stay the hell away from IE. But I don't feel like arguing that anymore.
So chill out. If Windows 98 still works for you, keep using it. I said that in my original post. I think NT is an improvement 9x. You don't. We could play my-anecdote-is-bigger-than-your-anecdote all day, but there's nothing you can say to convince me that a glorifed DOS hack is better than the NT kernel designed mostly by ex-VMS engineers (which you called a kludge), and there's nothing I can say to convince you that there's anything out there better than your Windows 98 Godbox. La-la-la-la-life goes on.
I didn't mean that you were whoring for karma--you weren't complaining about bloat or any other egregrious instant-mod-up targets like that, heh--but that other comments that were got me thinking about this originally.
I was thinking about this earlier. It's a common karma-grab to post something about how software today is bloated and worthless and how all the interim upgrades have just been shoved down our throats. But in defense of the software giants, modern operating systems really are quite a bit better than the ones from ten years ago.
Windows, for instance, moved its low-level internals to a much more clean and stable codebase. Longhorn has the potential to do the same for the high-level components (and maybe even provide some fascimile of security).
Compared to its "Classic" releases, Mac OS has arguably regressed in terms of speed and UI consistency, but it's rock-solid stable now (and it's getting faster, and it's constantly getting useful new features such as Expose and Spotlight).
And on the Unix side, we didn't even have KDE or GNOME ten years ago.
And across the board, we have niceties such as USB, wi-fi, and journaling file systems that we take for granted now.
If an old system still works, then, by all means, keep using it, but personally, I'm glad I don't have to reboot my computer every day anymore.
You're confused. That's okay, though, it's confusing because there are so many things that use the "Mozilla" name.
The Mozilla Foundation supports the Mozilla Project. The Mozilla Project includes the Gecko rendering engine and associated technologies such as XPCOM and XUL. It's more than simply a browser; it's a framework for creating applications. It just happens that these applications are mostly browsers.
The Mozilla Suite (codenamed SeaMonkey), Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Camino are all examples of programs that use this framework and that are managed by the Mozilla Foundation.
Galeon, Epiphany, and K-Meleon are examples of programs that use this framework but operate outside of the Mozilla Foundation (it's all open technology, after all).
All of these programs use Gecko, the rendering engine and probably the most important part of the Mozilla Project. It not only renders the HTML of web pages but also the user interfaces of many of these apps (through an XML language called XUL). This adds quite a bit of flexibility (it's the reason why we can write Firefox extensions quickly and easily in XUL, JavaScript, and CSS).
The Mozilla Suite was something of a proof of concept for all these technologies. It's modeled after the old Netscape Communicator Suite. It has a browser, mail client, WYSIWYG editor, JavaScript debugger, IRC client, and probably some crap I forgot about. UI-wise, it hasn't changed in a long time; in fact, it still mostly looks like Netscape 4. It's existed all this time mainly because:
Some people prefer the UI. It's clean, conservative, and certainly functional.
That said, the UI isn't its purpose. Officially, the Mozilla Suite is a very fancy demo for Gecko, XUL, and so forth, and Firefox and Thunderbird are the actual, real-world implementations of all this technology.
Before Firefox and Thunderbird hit 1.0, the Foundation needed the Suite to have at least one stable shipping product to show.
You can imagine that people who have been using the suite since before Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox existed kind of find it a little silly that suddenly the Suite is considered a fancy demo when, for a long while, it was all the Project had to show (aside from Netscape, which is simply a half-hearted repackaging of the Suite).
Firefox and Thunderbird are basically forks of the browser and mail client components of the Suite respectively. They have arguably better interfaces and more features (both have RSS support, for instance, which is missing entirely from the Suite).
I'm a Firefox user, but I'll miss the Suite since it was the application that introduced me to the Mozilla Project, the best thing to happen to the web in a long time, but I accept that nostalgia doesn't pay the bills. Still, I think the Foundation should put out one last Mozilla Suite release. It's kind of cheap to pull the plug on it while the users are waiting for the next version.
A person of profound mental retardation having a mental age below three years and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive.
Likewise, "idiot savant" was the original term for what is now "autistic savant" (although, as someone on the Wikipedia talk page points out, "less than half of all savants are autistic").
In any case, I doubt the grandparent intended to offend. The worst you can say is that he hasn't kept up on his political correctness.
And Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down to cycle through the engines if you really don't want to grab the mouse.
Alternatively, if you don't want to use the keyboard at all, you can drag a piece of text off the page onto the search bar, and it'll automatically search with it.
If you go back even as far as the forties or fifties, you had a lot of groups that existed just to pound out singles and disappear. One-hit wonders aren't a new phenomenon.
Even in the sixties (the height of album-oriented rock), both albums and singles had their place. In 1967, the Beatles released the Sgt. Pepper's LP and "Strawberry Fields Forever" c/w "Penny Lane." Both formats have their strengths (and the Beatles certainly got the most out of both of them that year).
Last year, we had, to start, the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat, the Arcade Fire's Funeral, and Green Day's American Idiot, so clearly album rock isn't a dead form yet.
I'm reminded of this review of (of all things) Vanessa Carlton's first album. Basically, he says that her single, "A Thousand Miles," was great, but that the record company is a bunch of bastards for trying to milk an entire (horrible) album out of her. He makes a good point that some people just have one good song in them, and that's that. Why not simply allow them to make their statement and get on with their lives?
I think that's what the trend of digital music will help accomplish. A lot of artists only have one good song. People just want that song instead of the entire album, and now there's an easy distribution method in place for that.
(Of course, this may not be the case either. Why are single sales so bad in the U.S., I wonder? I miss B-sides.)
But there are also a lot of artists who are full of great songs and, moreover, know how to use the album format to form a complete and coherent artistic statement (and don't listen to the cynics here who say all modern music is crap, there's still a ton of good stuff out there if you look for it). They'll continue to do so, like they have been through all the other format shifts. Record companies will continue to support this since they can sell albums at higher margins than they can sell individual songs, iTunes or not.
As an addendum, I hope that the era of physical media for music isn't over yet. There's something nice about getting something tangible for your money (not to mention you get the freedom of ripping it in the format of your choice, given that the disc isn't crippled with copy-protection crap). I think this will always exist, if only as an audiophile niche (maybe SACD has a future after all?).
Yeah, amazing, isn't it? Look at the web itself; the internet didn't really take off until the web did, even though we had TCP/IP, DNS, FTP, e-mail, gopher, Usenet, and so forth before anyone knew who Tim Berners-Lee was. All the web did was add a simple mark-up language and tie it all together with hyperlinks.
It truly is amazing how far the little things go in this world. For another example, look at today's music and movie piracy situation. It's always been possible--I'd been scraping FTP sites for MP3s years before P2P was around, and people have been taping songs off the radio for longer still--but it took Napster to make it just a little easier and make the whole thing explode.
The internet is information, and information should be free IMHO. No browser is worth $39, especially a closed source one.
To be honest, I think a lot of the open-source faithful have gotten so caught up in the philosophy that they've forgotten the pragmatism. Open source isn't important, open formats are. When your file formats are open, your data is yours forever, you're not subject to vendor lock-in, and all that crap. Open-source software is simply a means to this end.
Both Mozilla and Opera support open standards. So what is the practical difference besides price? Is paying for software really that awful? There's obviously still a market for a pay-browser. The closed-source-phobia around here is silly.
Also, I think it's misleading to criticize the browser for costing $39 and then slam it for having ads (which are inobtrusive text ads by default) when there exists no version of the browser subject to both these criticisms.
Informative? WinXP _sucks_ with 128 MB of memory. It is really, really bad. There is nothing fine about it.
I'm running Windows XP with 128 MB of RAM right now (because the only SDRAM I have here is apparently too dense for this mobo), and it's very snappy, even with Firefox and Winamp running. This is from the perspective of someone whose primary machine is a 3 GHz P4 with the 800 MHz FSB and 1 GB of DDR400 RAM (dual-booting XP and FreeBSD 5.3). The only time the paging gets ridiculous is when I run Photoshop (all of my good computers are at college, so I have to do insane things like that occasionally when I'm home). Here's my MSInfo file, even (in case you want to see what processes or services I have running or just want to harvest my MAC addresses, heh).
I was running it with 64 MB over the summer, and it was still usable enough for the summer courses I was taking and the occasional web design project (although I had to use Opera instead of my beloved Firefox, and it did page out a lot when switching apps). No lie.
Windows XP is the best NT if stripped down properly. You can say a lot of things about it, but it isn't slow. There are plenty of benchmarks online (here's one) that demonstrate this. I can't think of any reason to use Windows 2000 instead of Windows XP if you have the choice.
I'd be more worried about that crappy VIA processor than the memory if I were trying to put Windows on this lappy.
I think we all agree that "w00, free movies!" is not the point.
Hell, I don't know anymore. The slashthink has gone from the rather reasonable "protect fair use, expire copyrights in realistic amounts of time" to the specious "all new music and movies suck, which is why it's okay for me to pirate them." Editors like michael don't help, I wouldn't think.
Truth is, the media conglomerates sucking doesn't excuse what is breaking the law (as it stands). If you don't like the law, then work to change it. Write your congressman, boycott the *AA to weaken their hold, whatever. I mean, breaking down these gigantic monopolies sounds impossible to me too, but let's be honest, most people don't even care. The overwhelming majority of BitTorrent trackers and P2P networks trade in unlicensed, copyrighted works, and the people downloading them--and there are a lot--aren't doing it as some sort of civil protest. They just want free stuff.
I think a lot of people come up with all these reasons why the big companies are evil to soothe their consciences. What was the consensus when the RIAA went after the networks? The RIAA is evil, they should be going after the uploaders. What was the consensus when the RIAA went after the uploaders? The RIAA is evil, they should adapt their aging business model or die. Downloading music and movies is so easy it doesn't even feel wrong, and this is where the *AA is ultimately fucked.
Admittedly, I download a heckuvalot of stuff I don't buy, so I'm not trying to get self-righteous on everyone. I just think that a lot of us need to re-evaluate our focus on the intellectual property issue because zingers like this...
Apropos of nothing, I saw a movie in the theaters a few days ago. At the official start time, the lights dimmed. Then there were 14 minutes of commercials (Pepsi, hair mousse, cologne, etc.) followed by 13 minutes of movie trailers (which are also advertising), followed by a few minutes of junk, followed by a 100-minute movie. I can't imagine why people would want to download movies when they have that great theater experience to compare against.
I know web design doesn't get much respect from the burly-men programmer-types, but I've been interested in it since elementary school because it lets me create neat, functional projects without the technology getting too much in the way. I think the grandparent has the right idea: kids want to use computers to create things. High school students have a lot of creativity, and web design is a good way to use both the left and right sides of the brain. The left handles the HTML, JavaScript, and server-side crap while the right designs and writes. I was mainly interested in exercising the right side, and the left side was simply a means to that end. Web design is also, for many people, a gateway drug to "real programming" (once you bite your teeth on the much more forgiving server-side lingos) and Unix (the first time I bothered to install Linux was because I wanted to make a web server).
It's kind of bizarre to think about how much effort has been committed to computers simply to make the damn things work. What's so bad about engaging young minds with computers as tools rather than as projects in and of themselves?
There's a thread below this one where a high school student says he finds simple calculator programs more interesting than robotics. So did I when I was in high school (not that I think Slashdot is a good sample for this question). I mean, again, TiBasic isn't exactly right-on-the-metal shit, but I got a kick out of making throwaway programs that did basic arithmetic such as the quadratic formula or solving systems. Most people only care about technology when it makes their lives easier, which is actually rather logical. That's the whole point of it. Technology isn't a primary pursuit in most people's lives, and it shouldn't be. You make it sound as if everyone who isn't an uberl33t hax0rer is worthless.
Basically, the way to make technology interesting to kids (or really, anyone) is to show them that they're tools they can use to pursue their real interests.
I think it's easier to strip XP down to "minimal services" than to turn 2k3 into a decent workstation OS. I tried that for a few months with an evaluation copy of 2k3 (using the same guide as the grandparent, even) and thought it was a pain in the ass.
The only feature you list that sounds compelling to a desktop user is shadow copies/file versioning, but you can use Microsoft Backup to make nightly incremental backups of your documents and get basically the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
You must have a natural affinity.
Three things you do not discuss in polite company: politics, religion, and operating systems. It can only get ugly.
Count the layers of irony: I had replied to your post with a lengthy defense of Windows NT/2k/XP that I typed up on Ubuntu Linux when Firefox crashed. Surely this, like my Windows 9x crashes (I've only used 95 and ME extensively, which may have jaded me), reflects a fault deep within myself. The short version:
I never claimed that XP was secure or fast (I said stable, which is the same as neither; Solaris is stable, secure, and slow, for instance), and I in fact said nothing about its higher-level components (and only briefly discussed its low-level guts) and even implicitly acknowledged that Longhorn has a lot of room with which to improve in this area. Although when you get right down to it--and this is an immensely unpopular opinion coming--it's plenty fast when you turn off all the visual noise and plenty secure when you firewall it and stay the hell away from IE. But I don't feel like arguing that anymore.
So chill out. If Windows 98 still works for you, keep using it. I said that in my original post. I think NT is an improvement 9x. You don't. We could play my-anecdote-is-bigger-than-your-anecdote all day, but there's nothing you can say to convince me that a glorifed DOS hack is better than the NT kernel designed mostly by ex-VMS engineers (which you called a kludge), and there's nothing I can say to convince you that there's anything out there better than your Windows 98 Godbox. La-la-la-la-life goes on.
I didn't mean that you were whoring for karma--you weren't complaining about bloat or any other egregrious instant-mod-up targets like that, heh--but that other comments that were got me thinking about this originally.
I was thinking about this earlier. It's a common karma-grab to post something about how software today is bloated and worthless and how all the interim upgrades have just been shoved down our throats. But in defense of the software giants, modern operating systems really are quite a bit better than the ones from ten years ago.
Windows, for instance, moved its low-level internals to a much more clean and stable codebase. Longhorn has the potential to do the same for the high-level components (and maybe even provide some fascimile of security).
Compared to its "Classic" releases, Mac OS has arguably regressed in terms of speed and UI consistency, but it's rock-solid stable now (and it's getting faster, and it's constantly getting useful new features such as Expose and Spotlight).
And on the Unix side, we didn't even have KDE or GNOME ten years ago.
And across the board, we have niceties such as USB, wi-fi, and journaling file systems that we take for granted now.
If an old system still works, then, by all means, keep using it, but personally, I'm glad I don't have to reboot my computer every day anymore.
You're confused. That's okay, though, it's confusing because there are so many things that use the "Mozilla" name.
The Mozilla Foundation supports the Mozilla Project. The Mozilla Project includes the Gecko rendering engine and associated technologies such as XPCOM and XUL. It's more than simply a browser; it's a framework for creating applications. It just happens that these applications are mostly browsers.
The Mozilla Suite (codenamed SeaMonkey), Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Camino are all examples of programs that use this framework and that are managed by the Mozilla Foundation.
Galeon, Epiphany, and K-Meleon are examples of programs that use this framework but operate outside of the Mozilla Foundation (it's all open technology, after all).
All of these programs use Gecko, the rendering engine and probably the most important part of the Mozilla Project. It not only renders the HTML of web pages but also the user interfaces of many of these apps (through an XML language called XUL). This adds quite a bit of flexibility (it's the reason why we can write Firefox extensions quickly and easily in XUL, JavaScript, and CSS).
The Mozilla Suite was something of a proof of concept for all these technologies. It's modeled after the old Netscape Communicator Suite. It has a browser, mail client, WYSIWYG editor, JavaScript debugger, IRC client, and probably some crap I forgot about. UI-wise, it hasn't changed in a long time; in fact, it still mostly looks like Netscape 4. It's existed all this time mainly because:
You can imagine that people who have been using the suite since before Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox existed kind of find it a little silly that suddenly the Suite is considered a fancy demo when, for a long while, it was all the Project had to show (aside from Netscape, which is simply a half-hearted repackaging of the Suite).
Firefox and Thunderbird are basically forks of the browser and mail client components of the Suite respectively. They have arguably better interfaces and more features (both have RSS support, for instance, which is missing entirely from the Suite).
I'm a Firefox user, but I'll miss the Suite since it was the application that introduced me to the Mozilla Project, the best thing to happen to the web in a long time, but I accept that nostalgia doesn't pay the bills. Still, I think the Foundation should put out one last Mozilla Suite release. It's kind of cheap to pull the plug on it while the users are waiting for the next version.
The bottom screen shot here even uses Microsoft's Tahoma font.
Anyone who's bored can try out the original proof of concept.
In Firefox 1.0, it displays as "http://www.paypal.com/"; in Firefox 1.0.1, it displays as "http://www.xn--pypal-4ve.com/".
"Idiot" was once a legitimate medical term:
Likewise, "idiot savant" was the original term for what is now "autistic savant" (although, as someone on the Wikipedia talk page points out, "less than half of all savants are autistic").
In any case, I doubt the grandparent intended to offend. The worst you can say is that he hasn't kept up on his political correctness.
And Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down to cycle through the engines if you really don't want to grab the mouse.
Alternatively, if you don't want to use the keyboard at all, you can drag a piece of text off the page onto the search bar, and it'll automatically search with it.
If you go back even as far as the forties or fifties, you had a lot of groups that existed just to pound out singles and disappear. One-hit wonders aren't a new phenomenon.
Even in the sixties (the height of album-oriented rock), both albums and singles had their place. In 1967, the Beatles released the Sgt. Pepper's LP and "Strawberry Fields Forever" c/w "Penny Lane." Both formats have their strengths (and the Beatles certainly got the most out of both of them that year).
Last year, we had, to start, the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat, the Arcade Fire's Funeral, and Green Day's American Idiot, so clearly album rock isn't a dead form yet.
I'm reminded of this review of (of all things) Vanessa Carlton's first album. Basically, he says that her single, "A Thousand Miles," was great, but that the record company is a bunch of bastards for trying to milk an entire (horrible) album out of her. He makes a good point that some people just have one good song in them, and that's that. Why not simply allow them to make their statement and get on with their lives?
I think that's what the trend of digital music will help accomplish. A lot of artists only have one good song. People just want that song instead of the entire album, and now there's an easy distribution method in place for that.
(Of course, this may not be the case either. Why are single sales so bad in the U.S., I wonder? I miss B-sides.)
But there are also a lot of artists who are full of great songs and, moreover, know how to use the album format to form a complete and coherent artistic statement (and don't listen to the cynics here who say all modern music is crap, there's still a ton of good stuff out there if you look for it). They'll continue to do so, like they have been through all the other format shifts. Record companies will continue to support this since they can sell albums at higher margins than they can sell individual songs, iTunes or not.
As an addendum, I hope that the era of physical media for music isn't over yet. There's something nice about getting something tangible for your money (not to mention you get the freedom of ripping it in the format of your choice, given that the disc isn't crippled with copy-protection crap). I think this will always exist, if only as an audiophile niche (maybe SACD has a future after all?).
Mark my words, 2005 will be the year of HURD on the desktop.
Oh my God, Slashdot is duping comments now? Taco, is that you?
Oh, and just buy the damn Mac mini already.
Yeah, Barbara, Jr. is obviously the cuter of the two.
This is stupid, but it bugs me that we're stuck with "Referer" in HTTP.
It opens an HTML Help document, then a command console that quickly closes (dunno what that did), then opens an IE page with this helpful document.
Slow day at work?
Yeah, amazing, isn't it? Look at the web itself; the internet didn't really take off until the web did, even though we had TCP/IP, DNS, FTP, e-mail, gopher, Usenet, and so forth before anyone knew who Tim Berners-Lee was. All the web did was add a simple mark-up language and tie it all together with hyperlinks.
It truly is amazing how far the little things go in this world. For another example, look at today's music and movie piracy situation. It's always been possible--I'd been scraping FTP sites for MP3s years before P2P was around, and people have been taping songs off the radio for longer still--but it took Napster to make it just a little easier and make the whole thing explode.
eXeem 0.16 beta screen shots.
To be honest, I think a lot of the open-source faithful have gotten so caught up in the philosophy that they've forgotten the pragmatism. Open source isn't important, open formats are. When your file formats are open, your data is yours forever, you're not subject to vendor lock-in, and all that crap. Open-source software is simply a means to this end.
Both Mozilla and Opera support open standards. So what is the practical difference besides price? Is paying for software really that awful? There's obviously still a market for a pay-browser. The closed-source-phobia around here is silly.
Also, I think it's misleading to criticize the browser for costing $39 and then slam it for having ads (which are inobtrusive text ads by default) when there exists no version of the browser subject to both these criticisms.
I'm running Windows XP with 128 MB of RAM right now (because the only SDRAM I have here is apparently too dense for this mobo), and it's very snappy, even with Firefox and Winamp running. This is from the perspective of someone whose primary machine is a 3 GHz P4 with the 800 MHz FSB and 1 GB of DDR400 RAM (dual-booting XP and FreeBSD 5.3). The only time the paging gets ridiculous is when I run Photoshop (all of my good computers are at college, so I have to do insane things like that occasionally when I'm home). Here's my MSInfo file, even (in case you want to see what processes or services I have running or just want to harvest my MAC addresses, heh).
I was running it with 64 MB over the summer, and it was still usable enough for the summer courses I was taking and the occasional web design project (although I had to use Opera instead of my beloved Firefox, and it did page out a lot when switching apps). No lie.
Windows XP is the best NT if stripped down properly. You can say a lot of things about it, but it isn't slow. There are plenty of benchmarks online (here's one) that demonstrate this. I can't think of any reason to use Windows 2000 instead of Windows XP if you have the choice.
I'd be more worried about that crappy VIA processor than the memory if I were trying to put Windows on this lappy.
Thanks, I turned sigs off when the free iPod thing got going.
Wait, you can get karma just for saying you have an idea? When did Paul Thurrott get mod points?
Hell, I don't know anymore. The slashthink has gone from the rather reasonable "protect fair use, expire copyrights in realistic amounts of time" to the specious "all new music and movies suck, which is why it's okay for me to pirate them." Editors like michael don't help, I wouldn't think.
Truth is, the media conglomerates sucking doesn't excuse what is breaking the law (as it stands). If you don't like the law, then work to change it. Write your congressman, boycott the *AA to weaken their hold, whatever. I mean, breaking down these gigantic monopolies sounds impossible to me too, but let's be honest, most people don't even care. The overwhelming majority of BitTorrent trackers and P2P networks trade in unlicensed, copyrighted works, and the people downloading them--and there are a lot--aren't doing it as some sort of civil protest. They just want free stuff.
I think a lot of people come up with all these reasons why the big companies are evil to soothe their consciences. What was the consensus when the RIAA went after the networks? The RIAA is evil, they should be going after the uploaders. What was the consensus when the RIAA went after the uploaders? The RIAA is evil, they should adapt their aging business model or die. Downloading music and movies is so easy it doesn't even feel wrong, and this is where the *AA is ultimately fucked.
Admittedly, I download a heckuvalot of stuff I don't buy, so I'm not trying to get self-righteous on everyone. I just think that a lot of us need to re-evaluate our focus on the intellectual property issue because zingers like this...
...miss the point by a long shot.
I know web design doesn't get much respect from the burly-men programmer-types, but I've been interested in it since elementary school because it lets me create neat, functional projects without the technology getting too much in the way. I think the grandparent has the right idea: kids want to use computers to create things. High school students have a lot of creativity, and web design is a good way to use both the left and right sides of the brain. The left handles the HTML, JavaScript, and server-side crap while the right designs and writes. I was mainly interested in exercising the right side, and the left side was simply a means to that end. Web design is also, for many people, a gateway drug to "real programming" (once you bite your teeth on the much more forgiving server-side lingos) and Unix (the first time I bothered to install Linux was because I wanted to make a web server).
It's kind of bizarre to think about how much effort has been committed to computers simply to make the damn things work. What's so bad about engaging young minds with computers as tools rather than as projects in and of themselves?
There's a thread below this one where a high school student says he finds simple calculator programs more interesting than robotics. So did I when I was in high school (not that I think Slashdot is a good sample for this question). I mean, again, TiBasic isn't exactly right-on-the-metal shit, but I got a kick out of making throwaway programs that did basic arithmetic such as the quadratic formula or solving systems. Most people only care about technology when it makes their lives easier, which is actually rather logical. That's the whole point of it. Technology isn't a primary pursuit in most people's lives, and it shouldn't be. You make it sound as if everyone who isn't an uberl33t hax0rer is worthless.
Basically, the way to make technology interesting to kids (or really, anyone) is to show them that they're tools they can use to pursue their real interests.
Are we talking about the same Microsoft? "final version"="it compiles"
I think it's easier to strip XP down to "minimal services" than to turn 2k3 into a decent workstation OS. I tried that for a few months with an evaluation copy of 2k3 (using the same guide as the grandparent, even) and thought it was a pain in the ass.
The only feature you list that sounds compelling to a desktop user is shadow copies/file versioning, but you can use Microsoft Backup to make nightly incremental backups of your documents and get basically the same thing.