Proof is not the same as possibility. Perception also needs to be taken into account. When it comes down to it, if something seems like it will be expensive, it may stop people from buying. Take a BMW. My experience shows that actual maintenance is about the same as an Acura or equivalent. People believe that the Acura (Honda) will be cheaper to maintain, when in my experience they're pretty similar overall.
too frequently do I see businesses spending over the odds for sub-quality software.
It's called spin. Linux has value. You know this and I know this and many Slashdotters know this. If you can tell a decision maker that it's got a huge cost associated with it by showing only some information to them, then you can get the purchase. Sometimes you have smart bosses, but other times you don't- and you're only as good as the Windows-loving bastard who is advising the upper manager, and the team of dollar-hungry Microsoft goons that come in to convince you to come to the dark side.
nothing seems to be done to actually work out if that perception holds with reality.
So? I'll tell you that California has a huge tech centre. A statement, made by me. Where do I get this idea? A few companies I know are there. The state and city and it's associated groups advertises and promotes this concept. Probably some studies support me. I'm sure some other studies may say other places are better as well. Use common sense and filter out information that works for you.
someone with an agenda has managed to pull numbers that support their agenda from a suitably biassed report
Bingo. Nothing is unbiased. I'll tell people Linux is handy as a server and much cheaper. It's because there are figures that you can't put money on. Like what beyond purchase price you ask? I'm sure they used some figures like this:
- training staff to solve problems in Linux- 52 weekend sessions at $2000/weekend by 10 administrators
- purchasing all new hardware that is certified compatible (because the current one only has a Windows sticker on it... which they already have... so $0) $20,000
- training users to use openoffice - $2250/person weekend seminar * 500 employees
See how I just spun those figures? $2,185,000 that you wouldn't have had to spend if you stuck with Windows.
In actuality? Many users would do fine with a day of inhouse training and the administrators will solve problems as they come and don't more than a few crash courses.
The problem is no one wants to pay $700 for an OS and $500 for a word processor. ITs just cost inhibitive so instead they just want to have the ability to sue thinking they can have this great stability at the same price. Its not going to happen
Why wouldn't they? If you could offer me a car that will make it 200,000kms without having problems or needing more than an oil change, would it be worth 80k instead of 55k? Possibly! Personally as a person who's time is valuable, I'd pay more for quality. Why is it that many American cars, despite in most cases being cheaper, are being outsold by Asian and European markets? Quality, reliability, and service [plus making a car that is desirable].
People are so quick to bash higher priced items. In the business world, we stress TCO: Total cost of ownership. If you waste gigabytes of bandwidth, time to clear off spyware, time to patch, upgrade, test, and deploy- time to update workstation images and deploy regularly. How much time does an IT manager spend doing this versus just installing a program and not thinking about it (the good ones of course)?
So offer me an OS at double the price that takes half my time to operate. Do realize that that $700 OS is probably worth about 7-10 hours of a good corporate sysadmin's time. If you put more 3.5-5h of time into each machine to perform upkeep, then you're wasting money.
I've always said- if Windows 95 came out right now, but never crashed, never froze, never leaked memory like anything, didn't have horrible hardware support, and worked- I'd be happier than getting crap for the past 10 years and having to upgrade it every 3 years and patch it every week.
Spamcop's benefit and problem are the same- content exposure.
I used to submit all of my Spam to Spamcop as well as a few other blacklists. Of course properly, all the real spam maintaining all of the important information. The issue?
It posted the message for the Spammer to see. It sent it to the ISP. As a part of an ISP, I'm pleased when I get that, as there's nothing worse than "someone submitted something" messages. At the same time, as a user, they put my e-mail addresses in the headers. They include the unsubscribe link. They include unique identifiers in e-mails or base64 encoded addresses placed in the body or headers for tracking purposes.
Why? Someone needs to make a system that hides the message and will, upon request of the Spammer/blocked user, send _you_ the message. You can then modify it. Include only some headers. Strip anything that looks odd. Strip unique IDs. Be an educated user and just submit the important information for them to get back at the user who did it and find the proper script.
DKMS stands for Dynamic Kernel Module Support. It is designed to create a framework where kernel dependent module source can reside so that it is very easy to rebuild modules as you upgrade kernels. This will allow Linux vendors to provide driver drops without having to wait for new kernel releases while also taking out the guesswork for customers attempting to recompile modules for new kernels.
For veteran Linux users it also provides some advantages since a separate framework for driver drops will remove kernel releases as a blocking mechanism for distributing code. Instead, driver development should speed up as this separate module source tree will allow quicker testing cycles meaning better tested code can later be pushed back into the kernel at a more rapid pace. Its also nice for developers and maintainers as DKMS only requires a source tarball in conjunction with a small configuration file in order to function correctly.
The latest DKMS version is available here. Also, you can read this Linux Journal article or this more recent Power Solutions paper or this even more recent Ottawa Linux Symposium paper about DKMS for more information. You may also participate in the dkms-devel mailing list. This project is maintained by Matt Domsch, and was formerly maintained by Gary Lerhaupt.
Of course, but if you can shield the baggage areas and cabin from wireless interference, then all is well. Within an isolated and predictable area, there's no issue... probably is will they do that? -M
Or you can protect the user in the first place by providing informed prompts and enabling the user to make the right and/or wrong choices. You can keep an outgoing firewall closed by default and authorize applications one by one, and be sure to protect the user from anything manipulating these dialog boxes.
Why start trying to identify it? Let the user identify it and you just keep it from doing any damage.
Jim Hope: Since Christmas is coming soon, I thought we could talk about our
favorite toys. Milhouse, what have you got there? Milhouse: My Busy Box! It's got everything! [turning steering wheel] Vroom!
Vroom, vroom! [dialing phone] I'm calling Daddy! Jim Hope: Good for you, not being bound by the recommended age. Milhouse: What are you talking about? [reads "ages 2-4"] Oh, jeez! Jim Hope: How 'bout the rest of you? What do you like about those toys of
yours? Sherri: [holding doll] They're special. Nelson: They're challenging. [cranks jack-in-the-box for a while]
Jim Hope: Very good. Now I want you all to imagine the perfect toy. What
would it be like? Terri: [holding stuffed animal] It should be soft and cuddly. Bart: Yeah, with lots of firepower. Milhouse: Its eyes should be telescopes! No, periscopes! No, microscopes!
Can you come back to me? Nelson: It should be full of surprises. Milhouse: It should never stop dancing. Martin: It should need accessories.
The other option is to send an encrypted file, for which there is only one key, but then once one person recovers the key, they can share it with everyone else who's downloaded the file and you lose a lot of security.
Basically it just doesn't seem like Bittorrent in general is really conducive to transmitting DRMed content, at least in the way that most companies are implementing DRM right now.
Ummm- how about licenses as a seperate component to the data? This integrates a player aspect of it as well. Your player connects to WB to purchase the movie via SSL sending a unique computer ID. It gets a unique key that's imported into the player and is meant to not come out of it. This is unique to your computer so it won't work with another. Embedded in this unique key is the decription for the data files, which are the same for all computers.
Many software companies have done similar things with registration codes, and it's just a matter of having something in the code that's common and used for the data.
At least their accountants will work out a way to write off the losses for the hardware, networking and other things required for this.
Isn't the point of BitTorrent that you steal bandwidth from your customers instead of spending the money on the hardware, networking, etc. Find a reliable shared/dedicated hosting provider, and implement a PHP/CGI/PERL/etc tracker. It sends http requests every 20-30 minutes with minimal data back and forth. You can have thousands upon thousands of concurrent users on a few thousand dollar a year budget.
Right- they forgot to mention that. Not only are you going to pay the full price, get less, be able to do less with it, but they'll also steal a few GB _upstream_ of your bandwidth so that you can reach the limits of your ISP faster.
Which reminds me- they don't let you know about the format itself. You know they're not going to send a DVD9 to you, but rather a 700MB WMV (wish it was XVID) file that they claim has 'quality equal to that of DVD', yet fails to live up to that promise as it adds filters upon filters to clean up the output and make it look sharp.
What customers plain and simply want if you are going to use _their_ bandwidth to distribute is:
a. DVD5 or DVD9 ___NATIVE__ content formats- not an xvid that uses your processing power and time to convert a lossy file to a guess as to what the DVD format should be.
b. the ability to remove it from the computer, via a burner or any video out. Not just on 'trusted content' displays (per Vista)
c. just as DRM protected as a regular DVD, capable of being played on all DVD players. I don't mind CSS on my DVDs or other core technology compatible with all (even older) players, however it's light DRM. It won't get in the way at all- which is how it should be. Not to mention, it's an easy one to add at burn time.
d. a verification that the DVD burnt successfully before removing the data from the computer. It should check the whole dvd for errors and compare a successful decode.
e. a cost that is less than the $20 I'd spend on a DVD. By less I mean compensating me for my time, my DVD media, my bandwidth for bittorrent uploads; and my lack of liners and extras. This is probably fairly equal to the cost of distribution and retail markup... bringing the cost down to $7.50-$10.00 or so per disc.
There are countless organizations that do auto sharing now, similar to rental, but in a pay as you use.
Example: http://www.autoshare.com/how.html
$6/hr including gas, insurance, etc.
a 'fleet' of cars all around the city.
You book a car, it gives you a code and a location at the time that you want it.
You pick up the car and drop it off in acceptable public parking lots.
It's expensive for a day, but great to get a car to go do groceries or make a trip you wouldn't normally do for downtown folk, such as a business meeting uptown or so on.
Keeping in mind this was while the mac was still just a 'macintosh' and the only product with the name 'pod' in it was a multi-million dollar NASA project. If only they could have seen ahead to how good that name really is when applied to the consumer-whore public.
Isn't all the time earnings time for a big public corporate entity? Wow- if they make all that money while only earning for a portion of the year, just think of what they could get if they did it year-round!
I was impressed by Firewall actually (despite being a medicore movie) that it actually used cisco ACLs to add a route for some supposed 'hacker'. Needless to say, that won't stop anyone for long these days, but it's nice to see that they're at least trying to accept that the right tools will be on the front-line.
Contrast that with Swordfish, where he's building some virus by moving blocks around on the screen. It reminded me of flying through the mainframe on hackers in order to pull up the garbage file. Swordfish was just sad technically, as it really made it look like something very strange. Either the blocks fit together or they don't... strange.
The difficulty is that there isn't the simplicity and more importantly the predictability as there is in normal voice recognition.
Voice recognition is all fun and dandy- it can look at where you are in a sentence, and narrow down it's choice. It has a list of words to choose from that it can narrow down based on soundex and other phoentetic algorithms. It will 'guess' at the closest match on a noun that sounds like 'fox'... maybe 'box'... Nah- the box wouldn't jump over the lazy dog, so the fox it is.
Programming can be anything though. Sure the simple structures are no worries (for variable i equals zero...) but what about variable naming? What about asterisk-asterisk-gppbbvar1? What about abridged words like cnt_results? There is no dictionary to compuse this one. Nothing to compare to. What it hears is what it'll type... and that's not good... as it's probably often wrong.
You can't beat the speed of typing. I've tried voice-recognition on many instances and in each of them even _after training_ the system, I can still type much faster than I can speak... and both of those are slower than I can think!
Voice recongition will never replace good computing habits. That's all there is too it.
PS: This this is programmed using only voices? What effect does that have on bugs?
Because astalavista.box.sk, and the assortment of keygen/crack sites, not to mention torrent sites don't automatically give me the 'save' box in FireFox (why is it sending me an EXE randomly?). Of course not.
But I'd bet countless Slashdotters have downloaded and executed at least one keygen executable from random sites or torrent sites over the day. Or a crack to randomly patch some program. Amazing how you 'trust' certain sites and release groups, meanwhile they're considered 'criminals'. These shoddy sites with porn banners everywhere, sending you executables and scripts constantly. Dialers being caught by virus scanners... yet you still go there, but use __safe habits__ in your browsing making sure that you only get what you want. That's the difference. Telling your computer want to do rather than letting some program do it for you.
BTW: YOU GOT 7 OF 8 QUESTIONS CORRECT Rating: Safety Guru. Strange. It still tells me that I'll probably get infected by that screensaver site. Damn them. Why would I ever download a screen-saver?
I don't understand why competitive advantage is so easily written off. Is the underlying assumption that software simply isn't important or relevant in business?
Software is important. Software does provide an advantage.
Nobody is saying that they should contribute the core banking systems and methods that makes them unique.
However, for the sake of argument, lets assume a bank's Web servers run on Linux. Why shouldn't they contribute apache patches? mailing system patches? utilities?
These are things that benefit society in itself, and many people can use. However, the banks horde these things.
There's two types of development and methods- those that do offer an advantage and those that just save other people time.
'Microsoft developed its own product-activation technologies well before z4 Technologies filed for its patent.'
And if that were the case and they had some evidence of this at all or any documentation then the patent would be invalid and they would have never lost... so it's a random claim.
Ever hear the phrase Plug 'n' Pray [note that's Pray for those of you who aren't reading closely].
Microsoft has come a long way since W95/W98 days where it really was Plug'n'PRAY. But that's through huge vendor support and a lot of funds from software vendors and Microsoft to make and package drivers.
Windows can 'just work' on so many workstations the way Linux works on so many servers out of the box... securely.
Slashdot Mirror
Proof is not the same as possibility. Perception also needs to be taken into account. When it comes down to it, if something seems like it will be expensive, it may stop people from buying. Take a BMW. My experience shows that actual maintenance is about the same as an Acura or equivalent. People believe that the Acura (Honda) will be cheaper to maintain, when in my experience they're pretty similar overall.
It's called spin. Linux has value. You know this and I know this and many Slashdotters know this. If you can tell a decision maker that it's got a huge cost associated with it by showing only some information to them, then you can get the purchase.
Sometimes you have smart bosses, but other times you don't- and you're only as good as the Windows-loving bastard who is advising the upper manager, and the team of dollar-hungry Microsoft goons that come in to convince you to come to the dark side.
So? I'll tell you that California has a huge tech centre. A statement, made by me. Where do I get this idea? A few companies I know are there. The state and city and it's associated groups advertises and promotes this concept. Probably some studies support me. I'm sure some other studies may say other places are better as well. Use common sense and filter out information that works for you.
Bingo. Nothing is unbiased. I'll tell people Linux is handy as a server and much cheaper. It's because there are figures that you can't put money on. Like what beyond purchase price you ask?
I'm sure they used some figures like this:
- training staff to solve problems in Linux- 52 weekend sessions at $2000/weekend by 10 administrators
- purchasing all new hardware that is certified compatible (because the current one only has a Windows sticker on it... which they already have... so $0) $20,000
- training users to use openoffice - $2250/person weekend seminar * 500 employees
See how I just spun those figures? $2,185,000 that you wouldn't have had to spend if you stuck with Windows.
In actuality? Many users would do fine with a day of inhouse training and the administrators will solve problems as they come and don't more than a few crash courses.
-M
Why wouldn't they? If you could offer me a car that will make it 200,000kms without having problems or needing more than an oil change, would it be worth 80k instead of 55k? Possibly! Personally as a person who's time is valuable, I'd pay more for quality. Why is it that many American cars, despite in most cases being cheaper, are being outsold by Asian and European markets? Quality, reliability, and service [plus making a car that is desirable].
People are so quick to bash higher priced items. In the business world, we stress TCO: Total cost of ownership. If you waste gigabytes of bandwidth, time to clear off spyware, time to patch, upgrade, test, and deploy- time to update workstation images and deploy regularly. How much time does an IT manager spend doing this versus just installing a program and not thinking about it (the good ones of course)?
So offer me an OS at double the price that takes half my time to operate. Do realize that that $700 OS is probably worth about 7-10 hours of a good corporate sysadmin's time. If you put more 3.5-5h of time into each machine to perform upkeep, then you're wasting money.
I've always said- if Windows 95 came out right now, but never crashed, never froze, never leaked memory like anything, didn't have horrible hardware support, and worked- I'd be happier than getting crap for the past 10 years and having to upgrade it every 3 years and patch it every week.
-M
*cough* Sounds _practical_!
-M
Spamcop's benefit and problem are the same- content exposure.
I used to submit all of my Spam to Spamcop as well as a few other blacklists. Of course properly, all the real spam maintaining all of the important information. The issue?
It posted the message for the Spammer to see. It sent it to the ISP. As a part of an ISP, I'm pleased when I get that, as there's nothing worse than "someone submitted something" messages. At the same time, as a user, they put my e-mail addresses in the headers. They include the unsubscribe link. They include unique identifiers in e-mails or base64 encoded addresses placed in the body or headers for tracking purposes.
Why? Someone needs to make a system that hides the message and will, upon request of the Spammer/blocked user, send _you_ the message. You can then modify it. Include only some headers. Strip anything that looks odd. Strip unique IDs. Be an educated user and just submit the important information for them to get back at the user who did it and find the proper script.
-M
Sounds like dkms from Dell:
Of course, but if you can shield the baggage areas and cabin from wireless interference, then all is well.
Within an isolated and predictable area, there's no issue... probably is will they do that?
-M
Or you can protect the user in the first place by providing informed prompts and enabling the user to make the right and/or wrong choices. You can keep an outgoing firewall closed by default and authorize applications one by one, and be sure to protect the user from anything manipulating these dialog boxes.
Why start trying to identify it? Let the user identify it and you just keep it from doing any damage.
-M
Jim Hope: Since Christmas is coming soon, I thought we could talk about our
favorite toys. Milhouse, what have you got there?
Milhouse: My Busy Box! It's got everything! [turning steering wheel] Vroom!
Vroom, vroom! [dialing phone] I'm calling Daddy!
Jim Hope: Good for you, not being bound by the recommended age.
Milhouse: What are you talking about? [reads "ages 2-4"] Oh, jeez!
Jim Hope: How 'bout the rest of you? What do you like about those toys of
yours?
Sherri: [holding doll] They're special.
Nelson: They're challenging. [cranks jack-in-the-box for a while]
Jim Hope: Very good. Now I want you all to imagine the perfect toy. What
would it be like?
Terri: [holding stuffed animal] It should be soft and cuddly.
Bart: Yeah, with lots of firepower.
Milhouse: Its eyes should be telescopes! No, periscopes! No, microscopes!
Can you come back to me?
Nelson: It should be full of surprises.
Milhouse: It should never stop dancing.
Martin: It should need accessories.
Ummm- how about licenses as a seperate component to the data? This integrates a player aspect of it as well. Your player connects to WB to purchase the movie via SSL sending a unique computer ID. It gets a unique key that's imported into the player and is meant to not come out of it. This is unique to your computer so it won't work with another. Embedded in this unique key is the decription for the data files, which are the same for all computers.
Many software companies have done similar things with registration codes, and it's just a matter of having something in the code that's common and used for the data.
-M
Isn't the point of BitTorrent that you steal bandwidth from your customers instead of spending the money on the hardware, networking, etc. Find a reliable shared/dedicated hosting provider, and implement a PHP/CGI/PERL/etc tracker. It sends http requests every 20-30 minutes with minimal data back and forth. You can have thousands upon thousands of concurrent users on a few thousand dollar a year budget.
Right- they forgot to mention that. Not only are you going to pay the full price, get less, be able to do less with it, but they'll also steal a few GB _upstream_ of your bandwidth so that you can reach the limits of your ISP faster.
Which reminds me- they don't let you know about the format itself. You know they're not going to send a DVD9 to you, but rather a 700MB WMV (wish it was XVID) file that they claim has 'quality equal to that of DVD', yet fails to live up to that promise as it adds filters upon filters to clean up the output and make it look sharp.
What customers plain and simply want if you are going to use _their_ bandwidth to distribute is:
a. DVD5 or DVD9 ___NATIVE__ content formats- not an xvid that uses your processing power and time to convert a lossy file to a guess as to what the DVD format should be.
b. the ability to remove it from the computer, via a burner or any video out. Not just on 'trusted content' displays (per Vista)
c. just as DRM protected as a regular DVD, capable of being played on all DVD players. I don't mind CSS on my DVDs or other core technology compatible with all (even older) players, however it's light DRM. It won't get in the way at all- which is how it should be. Not to mention, it's an easy one to add at burn time.
d. a verification that the DVD burnt successfully before removing the data from the computer. It should check the whole dvd for errors and compare a successful decode.
e. a cost that is less than the $20 I'd spend on a DVD. By less I mean compensating me for my time, my DVD media, my bandwidth for bittorrent uploads; and my lack of liners and extras. This is probably fairly equal to the cost of distribution and retail markup... bringing the cost down to $7.50-$10.00 or so per disc.
Have you seen the price of LaserDiscs? Not to mention the fragility of the disks, size of the player, and so on.
-M
You're right. Let's ammend the bible!
-M
There are countless organizations that do auto sharing now, similar to rental, but in a pay as you use.
Example:
http://www.autoshare.com/how.html
$6/hr including gas, insurance, etc.
a 'fleet' of cars all around the city.
You book a car, it gives you a code and a location at the time that you want it.
You pick up the car and drop it off in acceptable public parking lots.
It's expensive for a day, but great to get a car to go do groceries or make a trip you wouldn't normally do for downtown folk, such as a business meeting uptown or so on.
-M
Keeping in mind this was while the mac was still just a 'macintosh' and the only product with the name 'pod' in it was a multi-million dollar NASA project. If only they could have seen ahead to how good that name really is when applied to the consumer-whore public.
-M
Isn't all the time earnings time for a big public corporate entity? Wow- if they make all that money while only earning for a portion of the year, just think of what they could get if they did it year-round!
-M
But it's all about rebroadcasting with only the implied oral consent rather than the expressed written... talk about living on the edge.
-M
I was impressed by Firewall actually (despite being a medicore movie) that it actually used cisco ACLs to add a route for some supposed 'hacker'. Needless to say, that won't stop anyone for long these days, but it's nice to see that they're at least trying to accept that the right tools will be on the front-line.
Contrast that with Swordfish, where he's building some virus by moving blocks around on the screen. It reminded me of flying through the mainframe on hackers in order to pull up the garbage file. Swordfish was just sad technically, as it really made it look like something very strange. Either the blocks fit together or they don't... strange.
-M
The difficulty is that there isn't the simplicity and more importantly the predictability as there is in normal voice recognition.
Voice recognition is all fun and dandy- it can look at where you are in a sentence, and narrow down it's choice. It has a list of words to choose from that it can narrow down based on soundex and other phoentetic algorithms. It will 'guess' at the closest match on a noun that sounds like 'fox'... maybe 'box'... Nah- the box wouldn't jump over the lazy dog, so the fox it is.
Programming can be anything though. Sure the simple structures are no worries (for variable i equals zero...) but what about variable naming? What about asterisk-asterisk-gppbbvar1? What about abridged words like cnt_results? There is no dictionary to compuse this one. Nothing to compare to. What it hears is what it'll type... and that's not good... as it's probably often wrong.
You can't beat the speed of typing. I've tried voice-recognition on many instances and in each of them even _after training_ the system, I can still type much faster than I can speak... and both of those are slower than I can think!
Voice recongition will never replace good computing habits. That's all there is too it.
PS: This this is programmed using only voices? What effect does that have on bugs?
Quiet everyone, I can't even hear myself think...
"I want a Peanut"
That's better!
-M
Because astalavista.box.sk, and the assortment of keygen/crack sites, not to mention torrent sites don't automatically give me the 'save' box in FireFox (why is it sending me an EXE randomly?). Of course not.
But I'd bet countless Slashdotters have downloaded and executed at least one keygen executable from random sites or torrent sites over the day. Or a crack to randomly patch some program. Amazing how you 'trust' certain sites and release groups, meanwhile they're considered 'criminals'. These shoddy sites with porn banners everywhere, sending you executables and scripts constantly. Dialers being caught by virus scanners... yet you still go there, but use __safe habits__ in your browsing making sure that you only get what you want. That's the difference. Telling your computer want to do rather than letting some program do it for you.
BTW: YOU GOT 7 OF 8 QUESTIONS CORRECT Rating: Safety Guru. Strange. It still tells me that I'll probably get infected by that screensaver site. Damn them. Why would I ever download a screen-saver?
-M
Think it'll fog up if you're having sex... errr.. playing an intense game of Quake?
-M
Software is important. Software does provide an advantage.
Nobody is saying that they should contribute the core banking systems and methods that makes them unique.
However, for the sake of argument, lets assume a bank's Web servers run on Linux. Why shouldn't they contribute apache patches? mailing system patches? utilities?
These are things that benefit society in itself, and many people can use. However, the banks horde these things.
There's two types of development and methods- those that do offer an advantage and those that just save other people time.
-M
"Do you wish to allow 'Amanda Peet Naked.You_must_allow_to_see_her_naked.jpg.scr' to access the internet?"
[yes] [no] [cryptic help page]
-M
And if that were the case and they had some evidence of this at all or any documentation then the patent would be invalid and they would have never lost... so it's a random claim.
-M
Ever hear the phrase Plug 'n' Pray [note that's Pray for those of you who aren't reading closely].
Microsoft has come a long way since W95/W98 days where it really was Plug'n'PRAY. But that's through huge vendor support and a lot of funds from software vendors and Microsoft to make and package drivers.
Windows can 'just work' on so many workstations the way Linux works on so many servers out of the box... securely.
-M