and it doesn't have a death clock before destroying all your work by restarting).
You know something? It's even worse than that.
You can disable auto-reboot as part of group policy - perhaps have a scheduled task do the job overnight or something. However, it is still possible for an update to override group policy and say "No, reboot now".
Net result - even if you're doing everything in your power to administer a bunch of Windows machines properly, you are more-or-less guaranteed to still get the occasional case where an end user complains that their PC rebooted while they had left it doing something important. Yet the whole fricking point of group policy is to guarantee that every PC behaves in a known manner.
The "Bundestrojaner" will only be used as a last resort and in defense to terrorism, as you can read here in an article posted today, denying the Bavarian request to use it for other crimes not directly related to terrorism.
I did try to read the Google translation (which, as you say, was not very good), and I immediately see a problem.
It's a translation of a news report. Not of the actual legislation. Now, I'm not a lawyer - I'm not even German - but AFAIK the legislation and the interpretation the courts give it is the important bit. News reports are rather less so. And if the law is only intended to be used in a very limited subset of cases, then it should damn well be worded so it can only be used that way otherwise you wind up with things like this:
So Dell's primary business is selling laptop insurance?
I don't think so...
Then you've never priced up Dell equipment.
Dell's primary business is not PCs, it's not servers and it's not laptops. It is "optional extras".
Optional extras being things like CPUs, RAID cards and more than one hard disk in a server (even when the server is a 4U model which exists purely so you can fill it with CPU and disks), 3 year onsite 24x7 support, upgraded monitor and, of course, laptop insurance.
It's a sad day for liberty when the customers of a company get to use force to determine the policies of that company.
That option's always been available to customers. As far as a business is concerned, there's not a lot of difference to the bottom line between lots of customers walking away and swingeing fines imposed by regulatory bodies.
In theory, a free market means that you don't need the regulatory bodies because all the customers walk away long before it gets to that. In practise, so many things can happen to make some aspect of the market rather less than free that regulations are sometimes necessary.
Once Trusted, what happens regarding any "Fuck You!" hiccups or burps?
"Trusted" applies to the computer, not the media and is intended (among other things) to prevent copyright infringement.
The media is encrypted, all well and good. Much like with any current DRM scheme.
Current DRM schemes fall over because the end user has complete control over their PC and there isn't a great deal that the application that does the media playing can do about that. This means that the end user has a (relatively easy) route to hacking the DRM.
Trusted computing does away with this by providing a chip in the computer itself which takes a certain amount of that control away from the end user.
Now, imagine if you will a scenario where every consumer ISP in the country states "Your computer must be Trusted(tm) to connect to our service", where every new PC and motherboard has the chip fitted, where consumer operating systems such as Windows and MacOS disable chunks of their functionality if for whatever reason there's no "trusted" chip. And even when the "Trusted" aspect is enabled, some things just don't work - you try copying a file you downloaded from Netflix, error message "You do not have permission to copy this file", end of story.
Limewire? Bittorrent? Good luck with that, they won't run because the OS will be able to check if the application's signed and if not, it won't run. Sure, you may be able to override this but as soon as you do your computer will no longer be trusted by your ISP - so, following the logic in the above paragraph that your computer must be trusted, your Internet connection is promptly dropped. (And yes, "checking a PC is trusted remotely" is part of the spec).
It sounds like a crazy dystopia and 20 years ago there were so many computer makers and wildly different systems that it would have been impractical. Today, there are only a handful of OEMs with the capability to manufacture motherboards, only two operating systems in common use on the desktop (Yes I know about Ubuntu. I said "common use"), only two chip manufacturers producing CPUs that go into PCs, only four big movie studios. Getting all the manufacturers to agree to such changes is not only possible, most of the groundwork's already been done.
Hah! Unbeliever. As a true FSMer I would gladly give your life for my religion!
You're not much of an FSMer then because the second "I'd really rather you didn't" reads:
I'd really rather you didn't use my existence as a means to oppress, subjugate, punish, eviscerate, and/or, you know, be mean to others. I don't require sacrifices, and purity is for drinking water, not people.
If you think that they do can you please be specific about which part of which document you think says that.
Well, not so much a contradiction as the building blocks for one:
Where provisions of this Directive can be implemented only by
requiring specific technical features in electronic communications
networks, Member States shall inform the Commission in accordance
with the procedure provided for by Directive 98/34/EC of the European
Parliament and of the Council of 22 June 1998 laying down a procedure
for the provision of information in the field of technical standards
and regulations and of rules on information society services(9).
The way I read it, in the event that member states find that it's unenforceable without such equipment, they are to report back. Presumably the EU aren't asking for the feedback just for fun.
I would also draw your attention to the last line in the paragraph which you quoted:
which could impede the placing of equipment on the market and the free circulation of such equipment in and between Member States.
Notice it says nothing about banning such equipment if it impedes how the customer may want to use it - it's only concerned with impeding "placing equipment on the market".
The way I read that, governments can't legislate compulsory TPM into anything which connects to the Internet if doing so would make it more awkward to get things which connect to the Internet on the market. I can't see that being a problem for PCs because they mostly ship with TPM onboard these days anyhow. Routers, maybe, but I'm not sure if a TPM-compliant router is necessary to enforce "user can only connect to the Internet from a TPM-compliant PC" - I suspect with all the encryption TPM employs it may not be.
The second part of that clause is also interesting to me, though I'm not sure how to interpret it. If country A says "Any consumer ISP must ensure connecting equipment is TPM enabled." (ie. you can bring in whatever equipment you like but don't expect it to work) but country B doesn't - is that OK? What if country A said "You can't import anything without a TPM chip" but country B didn't? That certainly sounds off limits.
I know it is probably too much to ask on Slashdot but could someone else read the proposed amendments carefully, think about them and if they think I have got it wrong explain exactly how and why they interpret the words in that way.
This is something I was unclear about. The paragraph immediately below that directly contradicted it - whether or not those amendments are proposed or they've been written into the legislation I don't know.
One thing I would point out - legislated TPM or not, if every ISP in the country is legally obliged to do everything in their power to prevent customer copyright infringement and TPM offers this promise, how long before the ISP makes "you must have a TPM-enabled PC" a condition of service, at least for domestic connections?
Everyone's already gone off on one saying "How are they going to police encrypted networking?".
I hate to break it to you, but the legislation as proposed accounts for that. It suggests that countries would have to make it a legal requirement that terminals allowed to connect to the Internet had the technical means to ensure that they don't do anything illegal.
In other words, it legislates for mandatory Trusted Computing (the infamous "Palladium" chip).
In the UK, the Telecom Regulator OFCOM recently (as in a few days ago) started pushing our mobile operators to reduce the cost of sending and receiving text messages while abroad, where the price was often around 30p (60c!) or more just to send one.
I hope this sets a precedent and they start to clamp down on the cost of sending regular, local messages as well.
If the regulator states "you must stop gouging your customers in this way", they have two options:
1. Stop gouging customers this way, take a huge hit on their profits and have investors all over them.
2. Stop gouging customers this way, find some other way to gouge them.
All true, but all sufficiently esoteric in the real world as to be safely ignoreable for 99.9% of businesses that want background music for whatever reason.
My house was a licensed premises in a former life, and yesterday I received a letter from the Performing Rights Society (UK), explaining that if music was played on the premises (whether recorded or performed live) then I was obliged to pay them for a license.
The letter strongly implies that ALL music is in scope. I just have to decide whether I have the energy and inclination to enter a debate with them about out of copyright works, or works with a permissive license.
This would all be for my own entertainment. Any suggestions?
My understanding (ICBW, IANAL) is that copyright on the sequence of notes, the arrangement, the book in which they may be published and any performance of it are all different.
So you'd either have to play a record which is out of copyright (good luck finding such an old record and hooking up a suitable record player to a modern amp - few modern decks will play at 78RPM) or find 100 year old sheet of music and pay a performer to play that alone.
In other words, there are exceptions but they're sufficiently esoteric that it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone will take advantage of them. (You just know someone who owns a cafe which has a policy of playing records on a wind-up gramaphone and has successfully challenged the PRS over the matter will crawl out of the woodwork now).
What's funny is much of the sheet music I've aquired over the years has copyrights on it, even though much of it was written well over 200-300 years ago. I have piece by Vivaldi that actually says "Do not copy." I'm not sure how they can get away with such things or think anyone will take it serious, but apparently publishers try anyways.
IIRC, while the sequence of notes is out of copyright the design and layout of the page on which they're printed isn't. So technically the publisher could well be in the right.
IANAL, though.
The rest is going to either require 1) a "magic bullet" - some relatively simple pan organism aging switch that we can engineer a mechanism to interfere with and hope to hell it doesn't cause more problems downstream</quote>
We have already discovered "problems downstream" simply with better nutrition, clean water and vaccination.
For instance, many forms of cancer take a long time to progress. 100 years ago it was reasonably likely you'd die of something long before you developed a fatal tumour.
As average life expectancy has increased, so we find that there are conditions to deal with that 100 years ago were hardly known about simply because few people lasted long enough to develop them.
I hear people often say that its important for Wine to be able to run major applications like Office and Photoshop. However, from a migrate to Linux point, I think the thing that holds people up the most is the small propreitary applications that are written for a specific function. Is there going to be any focus on those programs in the future? Disclaimer, I realize that there are tens of thousands of such apps, but maybe many have something in common.
A lot of these apps are sold complete with some sort of support contract. Good luck getting support when they ask what version of Windows you're running and you answer "Er... actually I'm running it under Wine".
Only about 1/2 the population objects to Guantanamo.
Not to mention there is a world of difference between "I object, I don't think it's very nice" and "I object so strongly I'm prepared to take up arms against those in power".
In Britain, the Iranian Embassy hostage crisis was resolved by sending in the SAS. These are NOT guys you want to mess with, no matter HOW good you think you are on the shooting range. Concussion grenades and SMGs by some of the most highly trained commandos versus whatever.45's or shotguns you might have... I'm sorry, but it's going to be one-sided. A lot depends on where the popular support lies.
Though Zimbabwe I think proves that people will put up with a hell of a lot before they overthrow their president.
As far as I'm concerned, the height of Technic was set 8880, the original Super Car set. Made almost entirely with "standard" parts, took me all day to build it and it's built in such a way that one can easily add swinging doors and a hood, body panels, a V-12 engine, etc. Ah yes, my brother had that one. Cracking set.
Sorry, what steps does Windows take to "encourage" people to click away the dialog box without reading it?
People do it, but I didn't realize that was somehow Microsoft's fault. I must be new here.
Then you've probably never watched a computer newb at work.
The first few hours, they'll read every dialogue box, engage brain and make a considered decision before choosing what to click on.
Sooner or later, though, they conclude that the correct answer to any "Yes/No" is always yes and they stop reading the boxes.
What doesn't help is that most of the yes/no, abort/retry/cancel boxes are part of the Windows API - the developer doesn't have to design the box, they just ask Windows to throw up such a box and come back to them with the user's answer. So every question is worded with a "Yes/No" answer. Sooner or later a developer does this but sets up the question so that "No" is actually more likely to be the correct answer and the user can't figure out why the application doesn't work.
A self-signed certificate doesn't detract from the security, this is true. But a real certificate does place an (admittedly low) barrier to entry against fraudulent sites.
Windows has spent the last 15 years encouraging people to click away the dialogue box without reading it. Encouraging the use of self-signed certificates will lower this barrier to entry by encouraging people to think "ah, it's still secure so it's OK".
You know what sucks? I hate microsoft a LOT. More than most people possibly, but it doesn't matter how screwed up their OS's get, I will never switch to Linux which I love dearly (in its use and philosophy).
In that case, all I can say to you is that you don't hate Microsoft (or, more accurately, their products) anything like as much as you claim to.
Some years ago, Muggins here spent a year administering a network of 120 Windows '9x systems, at least 40 of which were built out of the most elderly clapped-out hardware I'd had the misfortune to encounter. I had no copy of Ghost (or similar imaging software), things like g4l simply didn't exist at the time.
By the end of that year, I was quite prepared to live with any inconvenience and damn well learn Linux well enough to drop Windows - and this was in the days when any vaguely complicated graphics setup (such as dual monitors, which were pretty esoteric back then) had to be hacked into xfree86.conf by hand - long before Ubuntu was even dreamt of.
That, my friend, is "hating Microsoft more than most people". What you describe is just mild annoyance.
When I read posts like this, I am glad that I am the IT manager and the business I work in is small and agile enough that I can talk to my end users to find out what they want rather than just thrust something at them.
Though to be fair I've worked as a cog in a much larger IT department and in my experience the great majority of poor purchasing decisions within IT come from project managers who don't understand IT, the business or both. Those at the very top don't say "we're buying THIS", they delegate a project to find a solution to the problem.
I'm sure there is more to it, but I have a suspicion most of the work is dealing with PEBKAC. I'm going to offer you a piece of advice which applies to pretty much all IT systems, be they software or hardware.
If the user is consistently running into the same sort of PEBKAC problems, in my experience that's 70 or 80% because the software is lousy to use and 20-30% because the end user is either stupid or ignorant. I'd be willing to gamble that if my figures are out, they're out in the direction of "I'm being too hard on the end user" rather than "I'm being too hard on the system".
Slashdot Mirror
and it doesn't have a death clock before destroying all your work by restarting).
You know something? It's even worse than that.
You can disable auto-reboot as part of group policy - perhaps have a scheduled task do the job overnight or something. However, it is still possible for an update to override group policy and say "No, reboot now".
Net result - even if you're doing everything in your power to administer a bunch of Windows machines properly, you are more-or-less guaranteed to still get the occasional case where an end user complains that their PC rebooted while they had left it doing something important. Yet the whole fricking point of group policy is to guarantee that every PC behaves in a known manner.
The "Bundestrojaner" will only be used as a last resort and in defense to terrorism, as you can read here in an article posted today, denying the Bavarian request to use it for other crimes not directly related to terrorism.
I did try to read the Google translation (which, as you say, was not very good), and I immediately see a problem.
It's a translation of a news report. Not of the actual legislation. Now, I'm not a lawyer - I'm not even German - but AFAIK the legislation and the interpretation the courts give it is the important bit. News reports are rather less so. And if the law is only intended to be used in a very limited subset of cases, then it should damn well be worded so it can only be used that way otherwise you wind up with things like this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/7343445.stm
So Dell's primary business is selling laptop insurance?
I don't think so...
Then you've never priced up Dell equipment.
Dell's primary business is not PCs, it's not servers and it's not laptops. It is "optional extras".
Optional extras being things like CPUs, RAID cards and more than one hard disk in a server (even when the server is a 4U model which exists purely so you can fill it with CPU and disks), 3 year onsite 24x7 support, upgraded monitor and, of course, laptop insurance.
It's a sad day for liberty when the customers of a company get to use force to determine the policies of that company.
That option's always been available to customers. As far as a business is concerned, there's not a lot of difference to the bottom line between lots of customers walking away and swingeing fines imposed by regulatory bodies.
In theory, a free market means that you don't need the regulatory bodies because all the customers walk away long before it gets to that. In practise, so many things can happen to make some aspect of the market rather less than free that regulations are sometimes necessary.
Once Trusted, what happens regarding any "Fuck You!" hiccups or burps?
"Trusted" applies to the computer, not the media and is intended (among other things) to prevent copyright infringement.
The media is encrypted, all well and good. Much like with any current DRM scheme.
Current DRM schemes fall over because the end user has complete control over their PC and there isn't a great deal that the application that does the media playing can do about that. This means that the end user has a (relatively easy) route to hacking the DRM.
Trusted computing does away with this by providing a chip in the computer itself which takes a certain amount of that control away from the end user.
Now, imagine if you will a scenario where every consumer ISP in the country states "Your computer must be Trusted(tm) to connect to our service", where every new PC and motherboard has the chip fitted, where consumer operating systems such as Windows and MacOS disable chunks of their functionality if for whatever reason there's no "trusted" chip. And even when the "Trusted" aspect is enabled, some things just don't work - you try copying a file you downloaded from Netflix, error message "You do not have permission to copy this file", end of story.
Limewire? Bittorrent? Good luck with that, they won't run because the OS will be able to check if the application's signed and if not, it won't run. Sure, you may be able to override this but as soon as you do your computer will no longer be trusted by your ISP - so, following the logic in the above paragraph that your computer must be trusted, your Internet connection is promptly dropped. (And yes, "checking a PC is trusted remotely" is part of the spec).
It sounds like a crazy dystopia and 20 years ago there were so many computer makers and wildly different systems that it would have been impractical. Today, there are only a handful of OEMs with the capability to manufacture motherboards, only two operating systems in common use on the desktop (Yes I know about Ubuntu. I said "common use"), only two chip manufacturers producing CPUs that go into PCs, only four big movie studios. Getting all the manufacturers to agree to such changes is not only possible, most of the groundwork's already been done.
Hah! Unbeliever. As a true FSMer I would gladly give your life for my religion!
You're not much of an FSMer then because the second "I'd really rather you didn't" reads:
I'd really rather you didn't use my existence as a means to oppress, subjugate, punish, eviscerate, and/or, you know, be mean to others. I don't require sacrifices, and purity is for drinking water, not people.
If you think that they do can you please be specific about which part of which document you think says that.
Well, not so much a contradiction as the building blocks for one:
Where provisions of this Directive can be implemented only by requiring specific technical features in electronic communications networks, Member States shall inform the Commission in accordance with the procedure provided for by Directive 98/34/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 June 1998 laying down a procedure for the provision of information in the field of technical standards and regulations and of rules on information society services(9).
The way I read it, in the event that member states find that it's unenforceable without such equipment, they are to report back. Presumably the EU aren't asking for the feedback just for fun.
I would also draw your attention to the last line in the paragraph which you quoted:
which could impede the placing of equipment on the market and the free circulation of such equipment in and between Member States.
Notice it says nothing about banning such equipment if it impedes how the customer may want to use it - it's only concerned with impeding "placing equipment on the market".
The way I read that, governments can't legislate compulsory TPM into anything which connects to the Internet if doing so would make it more awkward to get things which connect to the Internet on the market. I can't see that being a problem for PCs because they mostly ship with TPM onboard these days anyhow. Routers, maybe, but I'm not sure if a TPM-compliant router is necessary to enforce "user can only connect to the Internet from a TPM-compliant PC" - I suspect with all the encryption TPM employs it may not be.
The second part of that clause is also interesting to me, though I'm not sure how to interpret it. If country A says "Any consumer ISP must ensure connecting equipment is TPM enabled." (ie. you can bring in whatever equipment you like but don't expect it to work) but country B doesn't - is that OK? What if country A said "You can't import anything without a TPM chip" but country B didn't? That certainly sounds off limits.
I know it is probably too much to ask on Slashdot but could someone else read the proposed amendments carefully, think about them and if they think I have got it wrong explain exactly how and why they interpret the words in that way.
This is something I was unclear about. The paragraph immediately below that directly contradicted it - whether or not those amendments are proposed or they've been written into the legislation I don't know.
One thing I would point out - legislated TPM or not, if every ISP in the country is legally obliged to do everything in their power to prevent customer copyright infringement and TPM offers this promise, how long before the ISP makes "you must have a TPM-enabled PC" a condition of service, at least for domestic connections?
I hate to break it to you, but the legislation as proposed accounts for that. It suggests that countries would have to make it a legal requirement that terminals allowed to connect to the Internet had the technical means to ensure that they don't do anything illegal.
In other words, it legislates for mandatory Trusted Computing (the infamous "Palladium" chip).
In the UK, the Telecom Regulator OFCOM recently (as in a few days ago) started pushing our mobile operators to reduce the cost of sending and receiving text messages while abroad, where the price was often around 30p (60c!) or more just to send one. I hope this sets a precedent and they start to clamp down on the cost of sending regular, local messages as well.
If the regulator states "you must stop gouging your customers in this way", they have two options:
1. Stop gouging customers this way, take a huge hit on their profits and have investors all over them.
2. Stop gouging customers this way, find some other way to gouge them.
Which do you think they'll do?
Or music published by the author under a Creative Commons licence. Or my own compositions played by myself. Or folks songs performed by myself without reference to sheet music.
All true, but all sufficiently esoteric in the real world as to be safely ignoreable for 99.9% of businesses that want background music for whatever reason.
My house was a licensed premises in a former life, and yesterday I received a letter from the Performing Rights Society (UK), explaining that if music was played on the premises (whether recorded or performed live) then I was obliged to pay them for a license.
The letter strongly implies that ALL music is in scope. I just have to decide whether I have the energy and inclination to enter a debate with them about out of copyright works, or works with a permissive license.
This would all be for my own entertainment. Any suggestions?
My understanding (ICBW, IANAL) is that copyright on the sequence of notes, the arrangement, the book in which they may be published and any performance of it are all different.
So you'd either have to play a record which is out of copyright (good luck finding such an old record and hooking up a suitable record player to a modern amp - few modern decks will play at 78RPM) or find 100 year old sheet of music and pay a performer to play that alone.
In other words, there are exceptions but they're sufficiently esoteric that it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone will take advantage of them. (You just know someone who owns a cafe which has a policy of playing records on a wind-up gramaphone and has successfully challenged the PRS over the matter will crawl out of the woodwork now).
What's funny is much of the sheet music I've aquired over the years has copyrights on it, even though much of it was written well over 200-300 years ago. I have piece by Vivaldi that actually says "Do not copy." I'm not sure how they can get away with such things or think anyone will take it serious, but apparently publishers try anyways.
IIRC, while the sequence of notes is out of copyright the design and layout of the page on which they're printed isn't. So technically the publisher could well be in the right. IANAL, though.
What has Bill Gates personally achieved? Note that personally ripping off the ideas of others is not an achievement.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_write_code/
The rest is going to either require 1) a "magic bullet" - some relatively simple pan organism aging switch that we can engineer a mechanism to interfere with and hope to hell it doesn't cause more problems downstream</quote>
We have already discovered "problems downstream" simply with better nutrition, clean water and vaccination.
For instance, many forms of cancer take a long time to progress. 100 years ago it was reasonably likely you'd die of something long before you developed a fatal tumour.
As average life expectancy has increased, so we find that there are conditions to deal with that 100 years ago were hardly known about simply because few people lasted long enough to develop them.
I hear people often say that its important for Wine to be able to run major applications like Office and Photoshop. However, from a migrate to Linux point, I think the thing that holds people up the most is the small propreitary applications that are written for a specific function. Is there going to be any focus on those programs in the future? Disclaimer, I realize that there are tens of thousands of such apps, but maybe many have something in common.
A lot of these apps are sold complete with some sort of support contract. Good luck getting support when they ask what version of Windows you're running and you answer "Er... actually I'm running it under Wine".
Only about 1/2 the population objects to Guantanamo.
Not to mention there is a world of difference between "I object, I don't think it's very nice" and "I object so strongly I'm prepared to take up arms against those in power".Though Zimbabwe I think proves that people will put up with a hell of a lot before they overthrow their president.
Sorry, what steps does Windows take to "encourage" people to click away the dialog box without reading it?
People do it, but I didn't realize that was somehow Microsoft's fault. I must be new here.
Then you've probably never watched a computer newb at work.The first few hours, they'll read every dialogue box, engage brain and make a considered decision before choosing what to click on.
Sooner or later, though, they conclude that the correct answer to any "Yes/No" is always yes and they stop reading the boxes.
What doesn't help is that most of the yes/no, abort/retry/cancel boxes are part of the Windows API - the developer doesn't have to design the box, they just ask Windows to throw up such a box and come back to them with the user's answer. So every question is worded with a "Yes/No" answer. Sooner or later a developer does this but sets up the question so that "No" is actually more likely to be the correct answer and the user can't figure out why the application doesn't work.
A self-signed certificate doesn't detract from the security, this is true. But a real certificate does place an (admittedly low) barrier to entry against fraudulent sites.
Windows has spent the last 15 years encouraging people to click away the dialogue box without reading it. Encouraging the use of self-signed certificates will lower this barrier to entry by encouraging people to think "ah, it's still secure so it's OK".
You know what sucks? I hate microsoft a LOT. More than most people possibly, but it doesn't matter how screwed up their OS's get, I will never switch to Linux which I love dearly (in its use and philosophy).
In that case, all I can say to you is that you don't hate Microsoft (or, more accurately, their products) anything like as much as you claim to.Some years ago, Muggins here spent a year administering a network of 120 Windows '9x systems, at least 40 of which were built out of the most elderly clapped-out hardware I'd had the misfortune to encounter. I had no copy of Ghost (or similar imaging software), things like g4l simply didn't exist at the time.
By the end of that year, I was quite prepared to live with any inconvenience and damn well learn Linux well enough to drop Windows - and this was in the days when any vaguely complicated graphics setup (such as dual monitors, which were pretty esoteric back then) had to be hacked into xfree86.conf by hand - long before Ubuntu was even dreamt of.
That, my friend, is "hating Microsoft more than most people". What you describe is just mild annoyance.
When I read posts like this, I am glad that I am the IT manager and the business I work in is small and agile enough that I can talk to my end users to find out what they want rather than just thrust something at them.
Though to be fair I've worked as a cog in a much larger IT department and in my experience the great majority of poor purchasing decisions within IT come from project managers who don't understand IT, the business or both. Those at the very top don't say "we're buying THIS", they delegate a project to find a solution to the problem.
One of my all-time favourites has to be the great-great grandson of that, the Test Car:
http://www.nd.edu/~lego/grp2/www/graphics/lego/8865.jpg
I've still got that, fully built as the car. And it still looks absolutely fantastic.
If the user is consistently running into the same sort of PEBKAC problems, in my experience that's 70 or 80% because the software is lousy to use and 20-30% because the end user is either stupid or ignorant. I'd be willing to gamble that if my figures are out, they're out in the direction of "I'm being too hard on the end user" rather than "I'm being too hard on the system".
Apple understand this. So do Canonical.