In housing, the contractor is the one who puts it all together. Sounds like you're more of a subcontractor, e.g. a brick-layer. And a brick-layer uses a different set of tools compared to a painter or a plumber. Brick-layers, plumbers, roofers, painters have little interaction with each other and they constantly complain about how the shoddy job of one trade is stopping them from doing a good job themselves.
My point is, you can't compare a general-purpose computer accompanied by assorted software to a car. A car is too simplistic. A house is a better comparison, and yes, the construction industry has a lot of the same problems as the computer industry. BTW, brick-layers have choice words to say about dry-wallers, and today's plumbing never fits that of the 60's.
Isn't this how house construction works? If I want to build a house (or even a building) I can choose the different parts separately, wall coverings, light fixtures, plumming, etc. Then hire a contractor to put it all together. To be fair, I can also buy a townhouse with more limited choices.
I think housing is a better analogy than cars. Cars provide a single function (more like a PVR or gaming console), houses provide the shell and the instruments to perform a variety of functions just like computers.
If you compare a chess program to human mental capacity, I'd say the computer and its chess program are equal or better at being trained for something. Basically, the computer has been trained by a group of programmers to play chess really well.
But if you feed the computer the rules for poker, can the computer put two and two together and eventually learn to play poker with relative success, without specific training by programmers?
To me that's one requisite for intelligence, the ability to play a reasonable game with nothing other than raw rules and some practice.
In an ideal world yes, that'll be the common job listing. You post that on an on-going basis and as the job applications trickle in, you evaluate each of them carefully and go from there.
But the reqs you see for 3 years of this and 5 years of that are for filling specific (usually immediate) positions in today's market. You post one up on the internet and will get 500+ resumes. Do you have the time (and therefore money) to evaluate each of the 500 resumes based on your ideal job description? What you'll need is a way to screen the applications down to a manageable number, that's where the 2 years of this and 4 years of that come in.
Ahh, young nerds today, so full of righteous energy, so not very resourceful. Flash isn't too bad, it has no DRM (yet), it has no spyware or adware, no need to banish it forever. Grasshopper, this is how you access the few Flash sites that are actually useful:
You have one stripped-down browser to do safe surfing (I use Opera 5 with no JavaScript, no Flash, no nothing, nice and safe). You have one browser to do e-errands like banking, buying, whatever that requires JS (I use Mozilla). Then you have the plug-in browser, that you use as a last resort to browse sites with Flash, Java, etc (I use Netscape 4.5, it works well, believe me!)
When it's time to visit homestarrunner, or watch Dr. Who, you simply fire up the old plug-in browser, have your fun, and shut it down quick, and nobody's the wiser.
Oh and please, don't go telling me the world is screwed up, that one should be able to use just the one browser for everything. That world ended when the first marketing consultant was spawned.
I think the gun and car analogies are a bit too much here. In these analogies, the tool of the crime is obviously taken away from the owner, so it's relatively easy to compare the time of the crime to the alibis and figure out who did it.
I think a better analogy is that of possession of stolen goods. I can buy a used bike, for example, in good faith from a garage sale, use it for months, then one day the police stop me and tell me that bike was stolen. How can I prove that I didn't steal it myself? How can the police prove that I am the thief and I'm lying about the garage sale? Same goes for counterfeit money.
In this analogy, one continues to perform a crime (possession of stolen goods) cluelessly, just like in the case of a trojaned computer. How does the law handle possession of stolen goods? The same procedure should apply to trojaned computers.
You're assuming the only choices are to present 5 commands at a time or to present all commands in one big long list. There are other ways, you can present a screen-full of commands divided into small groups, each group presented in its own section.
Look at real menus in restaurants. Some restaurants have a lot of food choices, but the choices are presented under different sections, appetizers, soups, salads, noodles, etc. Once you find the right section, you can find your favorite food easily...
Now think about those menus that go on for pages, you have to flip back and forth between pages just to find the proper section. Other menus are presented as one big page (double-sided perhaps), to find the proper section you quickly scan the large-type headings and take it from there, it's just as easy minus the page-flipping.
Cascading menus are like multi-page restaurant menus. I'm saying that we now have enough space on the screen to present single-page menus (or perhaps 2-page).
Another example, say you're looking for the shrimp-noodle soup but you're not sure which section it is in. For the multi-page menu, you have to flip flip flip to the soup page, check there, then flip flip flip to the noodles page, check there, and so on. For the single-page menu, you quickly scan for the possible sections and look in each, if the particular meal doesn't jump out at you, you still have all sections in front of your eyes so you can locate another meal that is close to what you want.
This is like the preferences command. You never know if it's under File, Edit, or Tools, you have to visit each drop-down menu in turn. If all commands were presented in a single sectioned page, you'd have an easier time finding it. Furthermore, on subsequent visits, the visual clues of that particular menu help you remember where the preferences command is.
Another example, toolbars became popular about 10 years ago. Why? because, on one hand it was a one-click deal, and the other hand they presented all the commands at once (divided into small groups of course). Their only problem: because of space limitations, they use icons which get to be cryptic. With today's bigger screens and faster cpus, we can pop-up a giant version of the toolbar but with text to make it more usable.
So when is OSS going to invent something in the usability area for a change? Cascading menus were nice 10 years ago when screen resolutions were 640x480, but with the technology today, I don't see any reason why I have to look at a small subset of the available commands at any given time.
When do we get a new screen-size "menu" system that lists all the commands in one convenient overlaid window, just like, well, the Web Site Directory portion on yahoo.com's main page? How about something new and useful instead of more band-aids for 20 year-old technology?
Close, but not quite. This is what the world needs right now. NASA, USA, they're has-beens. Americans have all but stuck their collective heads in the sand, thinking they're the only superpower left, calling other countries "second world" etc.
Hopefully this'll spark more action in other parts of the world, like the European Community, India, Brasil. You laugh at India and Brasil? Look at it this way... the more these countries start getting into complex hi-tech projects on their own, the more they will mature as an economic force and the faster they will become superpowers.
You can tell it to only keep a certain number of copies.
True, and that's what everybody did, but that just kept the latest few versions. Good to restore from a "D'oh!" moment, but not very useful for long-term versioning.
You'd have to tell it do delete *.*;* to do that.
Well, *.*;* (or *.*.* you could use either '.' or ';' to delimit the version number) would delete all files in the directory. To delete one file, you'd use blah.blah.* (or blah.blah;*). There was no point just deleting the latest version since the previous version was sitting right there and would be picked up instead (as far as I remember, correct me if I'm wrong).
It's been quite a while since I used VMS... IIRC the problems we had we the VMS versioning:
- It created a new version every time you saved, so just going through a few change/compile/fix cycles (for example) would create lots of versions clogging up the disk.
- The old versions were in the same place as the latest version, and if you wanted to delete a file, you'd just say "delete blah.blah.*" to wipe out all versions (and therefore all traces of the file)... then say "oops!"
It was useful in many cases, but in a different way from CVS. A very useful solution would be to have file-level journaling with the ability to throw in comments and create tags and branches.
I wonder if this scenario will happen in the near future:
More and more people switch to cell phones only.
Since the phone companies insist that you have a land line to get DSL, these people also switch to cable modems.
The phone companies lose more and more business from home customers, get the idea, relax their restrictions on DSL, and eventually become internet companies also offering phone service instead of the way around.
BTW, I have only a cell phone and use cable modem, I'd switch to ADSL in a minute if the local phone company would let me.
But but... we have the internet now. One of the big advantages of the internet is that it can be a vehicle for anybody whether they're a big corporation or not.
For sure, internet.com will continue to act like the old days, when dissemination of info was reserved to a privileged few. Corporations are slow to change.
But there is always internet.org, where we can post any info we want anytime (within reason of course). Just like we're doing now, here in slashdot.
How can we keep the corporations honest? By patronizing more of internet.org and less of internet.com. The more we do this, the less power the corporations will have and the less options they will have to be dishonest.
They didn't pull the ad as a direct result of the complaints. The complaints started a new investigation, and they pulled the ad based on the results of that.
If the second investigation had not found anything wrong with the claims, the ad would not have been pulled, complaints or not.
As to acquiring patents (however ridiculous), the system is so broken that all companies are doing it these days, so that they'll have some defense if someone else sues them.
But that's a big problem. Acquiring patents costs time and money. On one hand, this makes the small guys vulnerable. The small guys can't afford to acquire a portfolio of ridiculous patents just in case someone sues them.
On the other hand, this is all just a total waste of resources. Companies are amassing these things that are totaly useless except to yell at each other "yeah? Well my patent portfolio is bigger than your patent portfolio!" None of this would be needed were the patent system fixed into something more reasonable.
In the end, the only thing this mess accomplishes is give money away to a few patent lawyers. Money that could be spent in a useful way, say to build the B Ark which will send these same lawyers off to settle on that new found planet;-).
He was on a tour of all the fringe festivals here in Canada. Here's the director's web site. I suppose now that he's finished with the festivals, and with the great reviews he's got, he's moving on to touring the States.
I saw this show at the Vancouver Fringe Festival. It's awesome, if you go to see it, believe me you won't be disappointed.
At the festival, the show sold out most of its performances, then sold out its "pick of the fringe" shows which is reserved for the best of the plays, and was held over again (not sure if it sold out there).
Charles Ross goes through the entire 3 movies, does a fantastic job of reenacting the battle scenes (yes without any props) and touches on all the aspects of the trilogy, including all the jokes we throw around here at slashdot.
Even if you're not a big Star Wars fan, the guy's performance is something to see. Oh and, it's not the kind of boring "theater" you might be thinking of.
Nope, you got it spot on. What the article misses, is that we use natural language to communicate with other humans, so it's important we all know it. But computers and software are tools and programming languages are used to make these tools.
The average person shouldn't need to know how to make the tool (ie learn the programming language), they should only need to know how to use it. If every person in the world needed to learn programming languages just to get by, it would be because the computer industry is creating awfully crappy tools for the world to use.
The problem is... before banner ads came along, the internet wasn't that popular. You could put up a popular server and it still wouldn't generate enough traffic to get slashdotted or to make your ISP bills skyrocket.
Nowadays, there are so many people on the net that a popular website needs a lot of good equipment and nice bandwith or risks getting "slashdotted" to oblivion. Good equipment and bandwidth costs money, and not everybody with useful info has the means to support a popular server without some financial help.
Yeah it'll be interesting to see how the info will be stored. Looks like they're also collecting CD-ROMs and other "non-print publications." I don't think they absolutely need to store it somewhere that'll last for 100 years. They could store it in redundant media and just replicate them over time as the media's lifespans expire.
As far as fast recall, the articles don't say if the info will be available on the net. If it's just for archival purposes, they don't need to put it anywhere that's quickly accessible. After all it's a government-run library, so nobody will expect to take less than a day or two to retrieve anything.
"Joe User" is going to use whatever his machine comes with, no questions asked, until he finds a reason to change his mind (virus, trojan, etc...).
Sure, that's because the machine has something on it already, but when it comes time to reinstall, "Joe User" can easily do it with Windows or Mac.
Buy a computer and get online. Now. Not after screwing around for hours (days?) installing an OS
Hours, days, give us a break... Windows installs pretty easily, maybe it takes an hour to copy the files but not an hour of user attention. And the Joe User who can't pop in the Windows install CD and click on a few choices, can't hook up the peripherals to the PC case either, so he won't be able to get online no matter what.
I have been using Linux since '99 and I have never looked back.
There it is... The OS you're most familiar with (your version of Linux) is most likely not as usable (great as it may be) to the average user. Outside of Linux/BSD, installing an OS is almost as easy as installing an application (say an office suite or an anti-virus program), it's only some Linux distros that are too complicated for the masses.
I think you're looking down way to much at the mortal user, and underestimating the usability of "other" OSs. I still say no way to any of your guestatistics.
Linux (BSD, etc): well since one can't buy many PCs with Linux pre-installed, I'd guess most of these users have installed the OS themselves.
Mac: it looks like a lot of people are upgrading to OS X, and then upgrading to Panther, by themselves. And many of these users are "upgrading" by doing a brand new install.
Windows: OK some will never touch their OS, but the others, at some point they will get a bad virus or spyware and to get rid of it, many will simply reinstall the OS (or have their geeky relative or friend do it for them).
So no, I don't buy your argument that 99% of the people can't install an OS on their computer. I'd say it's more like the opposite, 99% will be quite able to buy a "virgin" computer and install the OS of their choice on it themselves (or via a relative/friend). The other 1% can pay the vendor to do it.
Are we sure it'll cost nothing? Someone/something has to put the software on the machine and configure it for that particular box. This involves some time, maybe it's minimal, but it's still a cost that the XP user will have to absorb.
What I don't get is, why ship any software at all with the hardware? Sell the hardware and software separately, this will make the cost of software even more evident. After all, we don't buy toothbrush and toothpaste in a single package...
Slashdot Mirror
In housing, the contractor is the one who puts it all together. Sounds like you're more of a subcontractor, e.g. a brick-layer. And a brick-layer uses a different set of tools compared to a painter or a plumber. Brick-layers, plumbers, roofers, painters have little interaction with each other and they constantly complain about how the shoddy job of one trade is stopping them from doing a good job themselves.
My point is, you can't compare a general-purpose computer accompanied by assorted software to a car. A car is too simplistic. A house is a better comparison, and yes, the construction industry has a lot of the same problems as the computer industry. BTW, brick-layers have choice words to say about dry-wallers, and today's plumbing never fits that of the 60's.
Isn't this how house construction works? If I want to build a house (or even a building) I can choose the different parts separately, wall coverings, light fixtures, plumming, etc. Then hire a contractor to put it all together. To be fair, I can also buy a townhouse with more limited choices.
I think housing is a better analogy than cars. Cars provide a single function (more like a PVR or gaming console), houses provide the shell and the instruments to perform a variety of functions just like computers.
If you compare a chess program to human mental capacity, I'd say the computer and its chess program are equal or better at being trained for something. Basically, the computer has been trained by a group of programmers to play chess really well.
But if you feed the computer the rules for poker, can the computer put two and two together and eventually learn to play poker with relative success, without specific training by programmers?
To me that's one requisite for intelligence, the ability to play a reasonable game with nothing other than raw rules and some practice.
In an ideal world yes, that'll be the common job listing. You post that on an on-going basis and as the job applications trickle in, you evaluate each of them carefully and go from there.
But the reqs you see for 3 years of this and 5 years of that are for filling specific (usually immediate) positions in today's market. You post one up on the internet and will get 500+ resumes. Do you have the time (and therefore money) to evaluate each of the 500 resumes based on your ideal job description? What you'll need is a way to screen the applications down to a manageable number, that's where the 2 years of this and 4 years of that come in.
Ahh, young nerds today, so full of righteous energy, so not very resourceful. Flash isn't too bad, it has no DRM (yet), it has no spyware or adware, no need to banish it forever. Grasshopper, this is how you access the few Flash sites that are actually useful:
You have one stripped-down browser to do safe surfing (I use Opera 5 with no JavaScript, no Flash, no nothing, nice and safe). You have one browser to do e-errands like banking, buying, whatever that requires JS (I use Mozilla). Then you have the plug-in browser, that you use as a last resort to browse sites with Flash, Java, etc (I use Netscape 4.5, it works well, believe me!)
When it's time to visit homestarrunner, or watch Dr. Who, you simply fire up the old plug-in browser, have your fun, and shut it down quick, and nobody's the wiser.
Oh and please, don't go telling me the world is screwed up, that one should be able to use just the one browser for everything. That world ended when the first marketing consultant was spawned.
I think the gun and car analogies are a bit too much here. In these analogies, the tool of the crime is obviously taken away from the owner, so it's relatively easy to compare the time of the crime to the alibis and figure out who did it.
I think a better analogy is that of possession of stolen goods. I can buy a used bike, for example, in good faith from a garage sale, use it for months, then one day the police stop me and tell me that bike was stolen. How can I prove that I didn't steal it myself? How can the police prove that I am the thief and I'm lying about the garage sale? Same goes for counterfeit money.
In this analogy, one continues to perform a crime (possession of stolen goods) cluelessly, just like in the case of a trojaned computer. How does the law handle possession of stolen goods? The same procedure should apply to trojaned computers.
You're assuming the only choices are to present 5 commands at a time or to present all commands in one big long list. There are other ways, you can present a screen-full of commands divided into small groups, each group presented in its own section.
Look at real menus in restaurants. Some restaurants have a lot of food choices, but the choices are presented under different sections, appetizers, soups, salads, noodles, etc. Once you find the right section, you can find your favorite food easily...
Now think about those menus that go on for pages, you have to flip back and forth between pages just to find the proper section. Other menus are presented as one big page (double-sided perhaps), to find the proper section you quickly scan the large-type headings and take it from there, it's just as easy minus the page-flipping.
Cascading menus are like multi-page restaurant menus. I'm saying that we now have enough space on the screen to present single-page menus (or perhaps 2-page).
Another example, say you're looking for the shrimp-noodle soup but you're not sure which section it is in. For the multi-page menu, you have to flip flip flip to the soup page, check there, then flip flip flip to the noodles page, check there, and so on. For the single-page menu, you quickly scan for the possible sections and look in each, if the particular meal doesn't jump out at you, you still have all sections in front of your eyes so you can locate another meal that is close to what you want.
This is like the preferences command. You never know if it's under File, Edit, or Tools, you have to visit each drop-down menu in turn. If all commands were presented in a single sectioned page, you'd have an easier time finding it. Furthermore, on subsequent visits, the visual clues of that particular menu help you remember where the preferences command is.
Another example, toolbars became popular about 10 years ago. Why? because, on one hand it was a one-click deal, and the other hand they presented all the commands at once (divided into small groups of course). Their only problem: because of space limitations, they use icons which get to be cryptic. With today's bigger screens and faster cpus, we can pop-up a giant version of the toolbar but with text to make it more usable.
So when is OSS going to invent something in the usability area for a change? Cascading menus were nice 10 years ago when screen resolutions were 640x480, but with the technology today, I don't see any reason why I have to look at a small subset of the available commands at any given time.
When do we get a new screen-size "menu" system that lists all the commands in one convenient overlaid window, just like, well, the Web Site Directory portion on yahoo.com's main page? How about something new and useful instead of more band-aids for 20 year-old technology?
Close, but not quite. This is what the world needs right now. NASA, USA, they're has-beens. Americans have all but stuck their collective heads in the sand, thinking they're the only superpower left, calling other countries "second world" etc.
Hopefully this'll spark more action in other parts of the world, like the European Community, India, Brasil. You laugh at India and Brasil? Look at it this way... the more these countries start getting into complex hi-tech projects on their own, the more they will mature as an economic force and the faster they will become superpowers.
You can tell it to only keep a certain number of copies.
True, and that's what everybody did, but that just kept the latest few versions. Good to restore from a "D'oh!" moment, but not very useful for long-term versioning.
You'd have to tell it do delete *.*;* to do that.
Well, *.*;* (or *.*.* you could use either '.' or ';' to delimit the version number) would delete all files in the directory. To delete one file, you'd use blah.blah.* (or blah.blah;*). There was no point just deleting the latest version since the previous version was sitting right there and would be picked up instead (as far as I remember, correct me if I'm wrong).
It's been quite a while since I used VMS... IIRC the problems we had we the VMS versioning:
- It created a new version every time you saved, so just going through a few change/compile/fix cycles (for example) would create lots of versions clogging up the disk.
- The old versions were in the same place as the latest version, and if you wanted to delete a file, you'd just say "delete blah.blah.*" to wipe out all versions (and therefore all traces of the file)... then say "oops!"
It was useful in many cases, but in a different way from CVS. A very useful solution would be to have file-level journaling with the ability to throw in comments and create tags and branches.
I wonder if this scenario will happen in the near future:
More and more people switch to cell phones only.
Since the phone companies insist that you have a land line to get DSL, these people also switch to cable modems.
The phone companies lose more and more business from home customers, get the idea, relax their restrictions on DSL, and eventually become internet companies also offering phone service instead of the way around.
BTW, I have only a cell phone and use cable modem, I'd switch to ADSL in a minute if the local phone company would let me.
But but... we have the internet now. One of the big advantages of the internet is that it can be a vehicle for anybody whether they're a big corporation or not.
For sure, internet.com will continue to act like the old days, when dissemination of info was reserved to a privileged few. Corporations are slow to change.
But there is always internet.org, where we can post any info we want anytime (within reason of course). Just like we're doing now, here in slashdot.
How can we keep the corporations honest? By patronizing more of internet.org and less of internet.com. The more we do this, the less power the corporations will have and the less options they will have to be dishonest.
They didn't pull the ad as a direct result of the complaints. The complaints started a new investigation, and they pulled the ad based on the results of that.
If the second investigation had not found anything wrong with the claims, the ad would not have been pulled, complaints or not.
As to acquiring patents (however ridiculous), the system is so broken that all companies are doing it these days, so that they'll have some defense if someone else sues them.
;-).
But that's a big problem. Acquiring patents costs time and money. On one hand, this makes the small guys vulnerable. The small guys can't afford to acquire a portfolio of ridiculous patents just in case someone sues them.
On the other hand, this is all just a total waste of resources. Companies are amassing these things that are totaly useless except to yell at each other "yeah? Well my patent portfolio is bigger than your patent portfolio!" None of this would be needed were the patent system fixed into something more reasonable.
In the end, the only thing this mess accomplishes is give money away to a few patent lawyers. Money that could be spent in a useful way, say to build the B Ark which will send these same lawyers off to settle on that new found planet
Actually, my point of view is what Vlad_the_Inhaler said: "Corporations finance politicians' campaigns, corporations get to write the laws."
The way it's set up right now, corporations have become the lawmakers in the States. That's too much power for entities who are not people.
I would say...
SCO Story... BOO SCO and the American judicial system for allowing to let this farce go on for so long
Patent Story... BOO USPTO for allowing American corporations to behave like this.
Generally.. Boo the American government for giving corporations so much power.
He was on a tour of all the fringe festivals here in Canada. Here's the director's web site. I suppose now that he's finished with the festivals, and with the great reviews he's got, he's moving on to touring the States.
I saw this show at the Vancouver Fringe Festival. It's awesome, if you go to see it, believe me you won't be disappointed.
At the festival, the show sold out most of its performances, then sold out its "pick of the fringe" shows which is reserved for the best of the plays, and was held over again (not sure if it sold out there).
Charles Ross goes through the entire 3 movies, does a fantastic job of reenacting the battle scenes (yes without any props) and touches on all the aspects of the trilogy, including all the jokes we throw around here at slashdot.
Even if you're not a big Star Wars fan, the guy's performance is something to see. Oh and, it's not the kind of boring "theater" you might be thinking of.
Am I missing something here?
Nope, you got it spot on. What the article misses, is that we use natural language to communicate with other humans, so it's important we all know it. But computers and software are tools and programming languages are used to make these tools.
The average person shouldn't need to know how to make the tool (ie learn the programming language), they should only need to know how to use it. If every person in the world needed to learn programming languages just to get by, it would be because the computer industry is creating awfully crappy tools for the world to use.
The problem is... before banner ads came along, the internet wasn't that popular. You could put up a popular server and it still wouldn't generate enough traffic to get slashdotted or to make your ISP bills skyrocket.
Nowadays, there are so many people on the net that a popular website needs a lot of good equipment and nice bandwith or risks getting "slashdotted" to oblivion. Good equipment and bandwidth costs money, and not everybody with useful info has the means to support a popular server without some financial help.
Yeah it'll be interesting to see how the info will be stored. Looks like they're also collecting CD-ROMs and other "non-print publications." I don't think they absolutely need to store it somewhere that'll last for 100 years. They could store it in redundant media and just replicate them over time as the media's lifespans expire.
As far as fast recall, the articles don't say if the info will be available on the net. If it's just for archival purposes, they don't need to put it anywhere that's quickly accessible. After all it's a government-run library, so nobody will expect to take less than a day or two to retrieve anything.
"Joe User" is going to use whatever his machine comes with, no questions asked, until he finds a reason to change his mind (virus, trojan, etc...).
Sure, that's because the machine has something on it already, but when it comes time to reinstall, "Joe User" can easily do it with Windows or Mac.
Buy a computer and get online. Now. Not after screwing around for hours (days?) installing an OS
Hours, days, give us a break... Windows installs pretty easily, maybe it takes an hour to copy the files but not an hour of user attention. And the Joe User who can't pop in the Windows install CD and click on a few choices, can't hook up the peripherals to the PC case either, so he won't be able to get online no matter what.
I have been using Linux since '99 and I have never looked back.
There it is... The OS you're most familiar with (your version of Linux) is most likely not as usable (great as it may be) to the average user. Outside of Linux/BSD, installing an OS is almost as easy as installing an application (say an office suite or an anti-virus program), it's only some Linux distros that are too complicated for the masses.
I think you're looking down way to much at the mortal user, and underestimating the usability of "other" OSs. I still say no way to any of your guestatistics.
Really?! Hmm...
Linux (BSD, etc): well since one can't buy many PCs with Linux pre-installed, I'd guess most of these users have installed the OS themselves.
Mac: it looks like a lot of people are upgrading to OS X, and then upgrading to Panther, by themselves. And many of these users are "upgrading" by doing a brand new install.
Windows: OK some will never touch their OS, but the others, at some point they will get a bad virus or spyware and to get rid of it, many will simply reinstall the OS (or have their geeky relative or friend do it for them).
So no, I don't buy your argument that 99% of the people can't install an OS on their computer. I'd say it's more like the opposite, 99% will be quite able to buy a "virgin" computer and install the OS of their choice on it themselves (or via a relative/friend). The other 1% can pay the vendor to do it.
Are we sure it'll cost nothing? Someone/something has to put the software on the machine and configure it for that particular box. This involves some time, maybe it's minimal, but it's still a cost that the XP user will have to absorb.
What I don't get is, why ship any software at all with the hardware? Sell the hardware and software separately, this will make the cost of software even more evident. After all, we don't buy toothbrush and toothpaste in a single package...