Shows like "Deadwood" or "Rome" are far more entertaining to me than most movies, because a much richer story can be told in 12 hours than can in 2.
That same perspective has led to my watching anime series, which can tell even richer stories than most television series since the production costs are so much less.
More and more anime fansubs are appearing in H.264, which my 2.6 GHz Celeron cannot decode in real time. To be able to watch any of these releases, I've had to re-encode them into Xvid (using the awesome mencoder). Whatever quality advantage H.264 has over Xvid, it's not visible to my eyes on my 1280x1024 monitor. To me it's currently just a pain in the neck.
I am, however, happy to see H.264 will probably remain an unemcumbered format.
In his testimony before Congress the other day, incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated that the US has no intention of maintaining permanent bases in Iraq. When asked by a Congressman why the President has yet to make such a blunt statement of our purposes there, Gates had no reply.
I think some portion of the motivation for this war always been about bases, especially after 9/11. The US abandoned its bases in Saudi Arabia after that event, which told me that Al-Qaeda had actually succeeded in its primary objective. We just needed to find another good place to base them.
(The US removed missiles from Turkey that the Soviet Union opposed after the Cuban Missle Crisis. Many scholars think the USSR "won" that round of the Cold War.)
As I said, it's easy to imagine it updating itself regularly, say once an hour or so. Many spambot trojans do exactly this when determining what to mail out today. In many places it's common to leave one's computer on at night (for backups, etc.) so it would be fairly easy to stay current in this situation.
Oh, come on. Loli characters in hentai often look like their 8-10 years of age and are purposely designed to look that young.
That doesn't mean I support this type of legislation. Like you, I think that stopping real child pornography is a worthwhile activity because I oppose the abuse of real children. Nevertheless I think it's pure obfuscation to suggest someone can't tell how old a loli character is supposed to be by looking at the pictures.
I also don't think, as some have suggested here, that hentai artists need to look at real-life children to figure out how to draw animated child porn. Somehow they've managed to figure out how to draw large tentacled monsters raping women without any real-world referents. Human imagination is (thankfully) a very powerful thing.
Why can't the malware simply poll some offsite server and ask what it should masquerade as the next time it's booted? I don't see any way to keep a well-written piece of malware from staying current with Windows patches.
I think the problem is a bit more difficult if we're including antivirus signature levels in the mix since there's a diversity of AV programs in use. However just updating the Norton and McAfee levels would probably cover over half the machines in use in corporate environments.
Burning CDs and DVDs became more difficult around kernel 2.6.11 or so. The kernel developers discovered that ordinary users could to blow away the burner's firmware and decided to make this impossible. You can always burn as root, but not as an ordinary user. I've configured the KDE launchers for K3b on my machines to run as root.
I assume this problem exists on Windows as well but is ignored. Because Linux is by nature multi-user these sorts of problems are more serious. You wouldn't want someone to be able log into your machine remotely and destroy your burner.
For more on the issue, see this and related postings by Alan Cox on the Linux kernel developers list (http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/8/2/290).
What's all this about closing up your current work? You don't need to log out of your graphical desktop every time you want to do something as another user.
Want to become the shoutcast user? Open a terminal (or Konsole in KDE), enter
su -
and give the root password. Now type
su shoutcastusername
and you're the shoutcast user. Restarting apache is just as easy. Open a terminal, become root, then type
/sbin/service httpd restart
(on RedHat-flavored machines; other distros have similar commands). Apache gets restarted, and you go back to doing whatever you were doing before. If you need to use a graphical application to manage Shoutcast, just run the program from the command prompt. If it complains about permissions, you need to make sure you're in the same group as the shoutcast user and have equivalent permissions. Otherwise the application's display should pop up on your desktop.
With X-Windows, you can also run application on another machine but have the display on your workstation. I run Azureus this way. Because it's a bit of a memory hog, I run it on my file/print/mail server and export the display to my workstation.
In some cases you can maintain multiple GUI sessions each logged in as a different user. On my Fedora/KDE box, there's a "switch user" menu command that lets me start another complete graphical session as another user. It does not work reliably on all systems; it depends on the particular hardware you have. (It works on my Dell desktop with an NVidia card, but not on my daughter's generic Intel laptop). With this feature, I can assign complete desktops to Ctrl-Alt-Fn keys and switch among them at will. Obviously having a lot of physical memory helps with this.
And, I agree with the other commentator who said there are often perfectly respectible reasons to run a root shell. When I'm mucking around in things like sendmail, SpamAssassin, or other complex applications with lots of textual configuration files, I run as root. I've got enough experience to know how to avoid deleting anything important, and I've got backups.
Any chance these are DRM issues? I'm not too familiar with Windows software any more, but these are all issues with media devices, no? The ones you mention (Nero, some recording program, a web cam, photo software) seem to all fall in the audio/video category just exactly the things that DRM is designed to control.
Of course, as others have suggested, they just may not yet have released the driver updates for your hardware. However, in the case of Nero, it's website touts the new Vista-ready version and encourages current users to upgrade. http://ww2.nero.com/enu/index.html Did you upgrade your non-working applications to Vista-ready versions? I'd guess that something like Nero would have to use the DRM subsystem in Vista when it needs to access a CD or DVD writer. (If that's not true, then I don't understand how the combined hardware/software DRM system works. Seems to me disc writers are precisely the type of device you'd want to enforce controls over in a DRM'ed system. Otherwise, what's the point?)
I so glad I don't use proprietary software any more or run an operating system that enforces DRM rules.
A Thai friend once explained to me why Bangkok has both a monorail system and an underground railway. I think the same principle is at work here: a new government always abandons the projects started by the previous government, and starts new ones.
And, remember that the current Thai government is the result of a military coup that ousted a civilian government they claimed was deeply corrupt. So, of course, there's a strong incentive for the "new broom sweeps clean" approach.
Although it's hard to see how taking swipes at a free resource like OSS could be viewed as an anti-corruption approach? It's a bit hard to imagine Linus flying in to Bangkok every few weeks to spread a few Franklins around the Thai ministries in an effort to get them to buy into Linux.
What's especially remarkable is that this guy is some kind of IT academic. It sounds as though he's never heard of sendmail, apache, or perl.
You know, stupid fanboy comments like this are really annoying. My comment was hardly of the "Windows rocks, Linux sucks" variety. I've been using Linux on servers since kernel 1.0.9 or so, and Linux desktops for nearly two years. The health center I'm talking about has Linux servers and Windows desktops. We're considering migrating to something like LTSP for security reasons.
I'm not asking whether someone (not me) could rewrite the kernel USB drivers to accomplish this; I know the answer to that question. What I asked is whether anyone knows if this capability already exists in the kernel and has a relatively transparent interface (even an entry in sysctl.conf is fine) that I, as an administrator, can use to turn off USB mass storage.
If you can answer that question, then please do so.
From TFA: you can control device insertion to the point where you can prevent USB sticks from being used while allowing use of a USB keyboard and mouse
I've been wondering recently if such a functionality is available in Linux. One of my clients is a health center that would like to migrate toward a thin-client solution. We'd like to keep people from storing, or worse carrying out, "protected health information," so being able to block USB storage devices would be a good feature.
"A service provider is defined as "an entity offering transmission, routing, or providing connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received" or "a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities thereof." [my emphasis]
I think MySpace clearly qualifies as a "provider of online services." The definition of "ISP" in the law is much broader than entities providing Internet access services. For instance, the Napster decision specifically excluded Napster from the safe-harbor provisions of this law. Section 512(c) specifically mentions "the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider."
So, yes, with respect to the DMCA, I believe MySpace is an ISP.
Who the heck did they survey for this? A bunch of teenage girls?
Probably. Worldwide they represent a substantial portion of the market for cellphones because they change the handsets so often. I read somewhere that the average Japanese teenaged girl goes through two cellphones per year in order to keep pace with changes in styles.
Under the terms of the DMCA, ISPs cannot be held liable for copyright infringments by their users if they follow certain procedures, particularly the "take-down" procedures whereby a copyright holder can request the removal of allegedly infringing material.
This provision applied a "common-carrier-like" regime to ISPs, treating them as conduits rather than as publishers or editors. Once you start reviewing uploads for potential infringment, doesn't this undermine the conduit model and open the ISP to potential claims of contributory infringement? Once ISPs begin reviewing content, they become editors and not simply conduits. I would think this is a dangerous road for an ISP to tred.
Linux servers + Windows desktops = happy clients
on
Will Red Hat Survive?
·
· Score: 1
Weren't we just talking about servers in the postings above? These reasons all seem oriented toward workstation users.
Most Linux servers don't need much care after they're set up. A small business with a Linux box running Samba and (perhaps) an IMAP server and Apache can be all many companies need in the way of a server. Throw in Webmin and show the person how to add/delete users, and you're pretty much done.
The only missing ingredient is group calendaring, but there are a number of free web-based calendar applications, or you can use a calendaring program that shares data via ical files.
Most of these companies don't store their data in an SQL server; any databases they have usually live in Access or Excel. And, I'm not sure what "integration" problems you're going to have with a combination of Windows on the desktop and a Linux box in the back room. Most of the devices you mention would be connected to the Windows machines, not the Linux server.
(Even if you have Linux desktops, they fully support any USB device that looks like mass-storage, my Archos mp3/video player for instance. For cameras, there are even custom drivers for certain models like Canons.)
Finally, of course, if you use a totally-free distro like CentOS you're not paying for the software, and you're especially not paying per-seat for CALs.
Have you actually run a Linux server in a small-office setting? Most of the machines I've installed have uptimes in the hundreds of days and never need service. (Which is great for the client, but not so good for me!)
Anybody who can rank FF VIII as a worse "sequel" in the Final Fantasy series than FF X-2 (which is an actual sequel) needs his or her head examined. I particularly despised how Yuna was converted from a shy, modest, yet strong-willed and powerful woman in FF X into a gun-toting, skimpily-dressed songstress just to satisfy the marketing department's request that the sequel provide more fan service. The Yuna of FF X was a good role model for my then eleven-year-old daughter; I don't think I could say that about of the women in FF X-2.
I actually enjoyed VIII quite a bit. I liked the larger character models, and I didn't even mind the draw system all that much. I also don't agree with reviewer's dismisaal of Rinoa, whom I see as a much more intelligent and feisty heroine than the reviewer makes her out to be. (She's also an awesomely powerful sorceress in the later stages of her development.) Why Squall refuses her attempts at seduction on the space ship is beyond me.
I just started replaying Chrono Cross for the third or fourth time the other evening. It is a truly beautiful game that pushes the graphics of the PS1 to the limits. The backgrounds are lush, and the character models remarkably detailed, more so than those in FF VIII and Paradise Eve which came out at about the same time. I played Cross and Trigger in reverse order, so I didn't view Cross as a sequel. It's really only a sequel in that it shares the "Chrono" name and some of the design staff, but it's pretty much a stand-alone game. (The link with Schala isn't all that important to the CC plot.) One of my favorite aspects of Cross is having the characters meet their counterparts in the parallel universe. Also some of the musical selections are as good as any I've heard in a videogame.
I haven't read the details but for the sake of argument let's say that the judge told both parties they couldn't do media interviews. Jack then turns around and does an interview with a family-friendly web site. That would be a contempt of court issue.
Can one be held in contempt for actions taken outside the court after the case has been decided? Isn't that a First Amendment problem? I can understand restricing the behavior, and even perhaps the speech, of litigants during a proceeding, but I can't see how a judge can restrict your speech rights beyond that.
This is obviously all theoretical since the article, if one can call it that, provides no clue as to what Take-Two's lawyers have requested.
Perhaps you should have watched last week's Bill Moyers's special on PBS where the proponents of net neutrality were identified as Microsoft, Google, trade unions, and advocacy groups like both MoveOn and the Christian Coalition. I don't see much of "Stallman and his ilk" in this list, and most of these folks have substantial ties to K Street.
you only need a thing like DaemonTools not working, and big portion of MS home target market will drop the 64 bit version like a rotten fruit
I recommend we take a poll of home users of Windows and ask them what "DaemonTools" is. If 5% of the users answer this question correctly, I'll eat my monitor.
While Slashdotters may think that everyone is playing Quake from dawn till dusk, the reality is that most folks use their computers for browsing, mail, managing photos and songs, balancing their checkbooks, and writing the occasional letter. Gaming isn't on their horizon.
Contemporary viruses and worms aren't designed to "screw with your startup settings, slow down your computer, [or] seem to take inexplicable glee at replicating themselves so you can't remove them." They are designed to make your computer part of a botnet so it can be used to send spam, run denial-of-service attacks, and the like. Good malware doesn't make itself known to the computer user at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Shows like "Deadwood" or "Rome" are far more entertaining to me than most movies, because a much richer story can be told in 12 hours than can in 2.
That same perspective has led to my watching anime series, which can tell even richer stories than most television series since the production costs are so much less.
More and more anime fansubs are appearing in H.264, which my 2.6 GHz Celeron cannot decode in real time. To be able to watch any of these releases, I've had to re-encode them into Xvid (using the awesome mencoder). Whatever quality advantage H.264 has over Xvid, it's not visible to my eyes on my 1280x1024 monitor. To me it's currently just a pain in the neck.
I am, however, happy to see H.264 will probably remain an unemcumbered format.
In his testimony before Congress the other day, incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated that the US has no intention of maintaining permanent bases in Iraq. When asked by a Congressman why the President has yet to make such a blunt statement of our purposes there, Gates had no reply.
I think some portion of the motivation for this war always been about bases, especially after 9/11. The US abandoned its bases in Saudi Arabia after that event, which told me that Al-Qaeda had actually succeeded in its primary objective. We just needed to find another good place to base them.
(The US removed missiles from Turkey that the Soviet Union opposed after the Cuban Missle Crisis. Many scholars think the USSR "won" that round of the Cold War.)
As I said, it's easy to imagine it updating itself regularly, say once an hour or so. Many spambot trojans do exactly this when determining what to mail out today. In many places it's common to leave one's computer on at night (for backups, etc.) so it would be fairly easy to stay current in this situation.
Oh, come on. Loli characters in hentai often look like their 8-10 years of age and are purposely designed to look that young.
That doesn't mean I support this type of legislation. Like you, I think that stopping real child pornography is a worthwhile activity because I oppose the abuse of real children. Nevertheless I think it's pure obfuscation to suggest someone can't tell how old a loli character is supposed to be by looking at the pictures.
I also don't think, as some have suggested here, that hentai artists need to look at real-life children to figure out how to draw animated child porn. Somehow they've managed to figure out how to draw large tentacled monsters raping women without any real-world referents. Human imagination is (thankfully) a very powerful thing.
Why can't the malware simply poll some offsite server and ask what it should masquerade as the next time it's booted? I don't see any way to keep a well-written piece of malware from staying current with Windows patches.
I think the problem is a bit more difficult if we're including antivirus signature levels in the mix since there's a diversity of AV programs in use. However just updating the Norton and McAfee levels would probably cover over half the machines in use in corporate environments.
I guess I'm underpaid. That works out to $150 per line. I'm happy making $150-200 per hour.
Burning CDs and DVDs became more difficult around kernel 2.6.11 or so. The kernel developers discovered that ordinary users could to blow away the burner's firmware and decided to make this impossible. You can always burn as root, but not as an ordinary user. I've configured the KDE launchers for K3b on my machines to run as root.
I assume this problem exists on Windows as well but is ignored. Because Linux is by nature multi-user these sorts of problems are more serious. You wouldn't want someone to be able log into your machine remotely and destroy your burner.
For more on the issue, see this and related postings by Alan Cox on the Linux kernel developers list (http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/8/2/290).
Want to become the shoutcast user? Open a terminal (or Konsole in KDE), enter and give the root password. Now type and you're the shoutcast user. Restarting apache is just as easy. Open a terminal, become root, then type (on RedHat-flavored machines; other distros have similar commands). Apache gets restarted, and you go back to doing whatever you were doing before. If you need to use a graphical application to manage Shoutcast, just run the program from the command prompt. If it complains about permissions, you need to make sure you're in the same group as the shoutcast user and have equivalent permissions. Otherwise the application's display should pop up on your desktop.
With X-Windows, you can also run application on another machine but have the display on your workstation. I run Azureus this way. Because it's a bit of a memory hog, I run it on my file/print/mail server and export the display to my workstation.
In some cases you can maintain multiple GUI sessions each logged in as a different user. On my Fedora/KDE box, there's a "switch user" menu command that lets me start another complete graphical session as another user. It does not work reliably on all systems; it depends on the particular hardware you have. (It works on my Dell desktop with an NVidia card, but not on my daughter's generic Intel laptop). With this feature, I can assign complete desktops to Ctrl-Alt-Fn keys and switch among them at will. Obviously having a lot of physical memory helps with this.
And, I agree with the other commentator who said there are often perfectly respectible reasons to run a root shell. When I'm mucking around in things like sendmail, SpamAssassin, or other complex applications with lots of textual configuration files, I run as root. I've got enough experience to know how to avoid deleting anything important, and I've got backups.
Any chance these are DRM issues? I'm not too familiar with Windows software any more, but these are all issues with media devices, no? The ones you mention (Nero, some recording program, a web cam, photo software) seem to all fall in the audio/video category just exactly the things that DRM is designed to control.
Of course, as others have suggested, they just may not yet have released the driver updates for your hardware. However, in the case of Nero, it's website touts the new Vista-ready version and encourages current users to upgrade. http://ww2.nero.com/enu/index.html Did you upgrade your non-working applications to Vista-ready versions? I'd guess that something like Nero would have to use the DRM subsystem in Vista when it needs to access a CD or DVD writer. (If that's not true, then I don't understand how the combined hardware/software DRM system works. Seems to me disc writers are precisely the type of device you'd want to enforce controls over in a DRM'ed system. Otherwise, what's the point?)
I so glad I don't use proprietary software any more or run an operating system that enforces DRM rules.
A Thai friend once explained to me why Bangkok has both a monorail system and an underground railway. I think the same principle is at work here: a new government always abandons the projects started by the previous government, and starts new ones.
And, remember that the current Thai government is the result of a military coup that ousted a civilian government they claimed was deeply corrupt. So, of course, there's a strong incentive for the "new broom sweeps clean" approach.
Although it's hard to see how taking swipes at a free resource like OSS could be viewed as an anti-corruption approach? It's a bit hard to imagine Linus flying in to Bangkok every few weeks to spread a few Franklins around the Thai ministries in an effort to get them to buy into Linux.
What's especially remarkable is that this guy is some kind of IT academic. It sounds as though he's never heard of sendmail, apache, or perl.
No, they said they wouldn't sue Novell's customers. Quite a different thing entirely.
Thank you, rs.
You know, stupid fanboy comments like this are really annoying. My comment was hardly of the "Windows rocks, Linux sucks" variety. I've been using Linux on servers since kernel 1.0.9 or so, and Linux desktops for nearly two years. The health center I'm talking about has Linux servers and Windows desktops. We're considering migrating to something like LTSP for security reasons.
I'm not asking whether someone (not me) could rewrite the kernel USB drivers to accomplish this; I know the answer to that question. What I asked is whether anyone knows if this capability already exists in the kernel and has a relatively transparent interface (even an entry in sysctl.conf is fine) that I, as an administrator, can use to turn off USB mass storage.
If you can answer that question, then please do so.
From TFA:
you can control device insertion to the point where you can prevent USB sticks from being used while allowing use of a USB keyboard and mouse
I've been wondering recently if such a functionality is available in Linux. One of my clients is a health center that would like to migrate toward a thin-client solution. We'd like to keep people from storing, or worse carrying out, "protected health information," so being able to block USB storage devices would be a good feature.
From: http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID 127
"A service provider is defined as "an entity offering transmission, routing, or providing connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received" or "a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities thereof." [my emphasis]
I think MySpace clearly qualifies as a "provider of online services." The definition of "ISP" in the law is much broader than entities providing Internet access services. For instance, the Napster decision specifically excluded Napster from the safe-harbor provisions of this law. Section 512(c) specifically mentions "the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider."
So, yes, with respect to the DMCA, I believe MySpace is an ISP.
Who the heck did they survey for this? A bunch of teenage girls?
Probably. Worldwide they represent a substantial portion of the market for cellphones because they change the handsets so often. I read somewhere that the average Japanese teenaged girl goes through two cellphones per year in order to keep pace with changes in styles.
Under the terms of the DMCA, ISPs cannot be held liable for copyright infringments by their users if they follow certain procedures, particularly the "take-down" procedures whereby a copyright holder can request the removal of allegedly infringing material.
This provision applied a "common-carrier-like" regime to ISPs, treating them as conduits rather than as publishers or editors. Once you start reviewing uploads for potential infringment, doesn't this undermine the conduit model and open the ISP to potential claims of contributory infringement? Once ISPs begin reviewing content, they become editors and not simply conduits. I would think this is a dangerous road for an ISP to tred.
Weren't we just talking about servers in the postings above? These reasons all seem oriented toward workstation users.
Most Linux servers don't need much care after they're set up. A small business with a Linux box running Samba and (perhaps) an IMAP server and Apache can be all many companies need in the way of a server. Throw in Webmin and show the person how to add/delete users, and you're pretty much done.
The only missing ingredient is group calendaring, but there are a number of free web-based calendar applications, or you can use a calendaring program that shares data via ical files.
Most of these companies don't store their data in an SQL server; any databases they have usually live in Access or Excel. And, I'm not sure what "integration" problems you're going to have with a combination of Windows on the desktop and a Linux box in the back room. Most of the devices you mention would be connected to the Windows machines, not the Linux server.
(Even if you have Linux desktops, they fully support any USB device that looks like mass-storage, my Archos mp3/video player for instance. For cameras, there are even custom drivers for certain models like Canons.)
Finally, of course, if you use a totally-free distro like CentOS you're not paying for the software, and you're especially not paying per-seat for CALs.
Have you actually run a Linux server in a small-office setting? Most of the machines I've installed have uptimes in the hundreds of days and never need service. (Which is great for the client, but not so good for me!)
[mild spoilers ahead]
Anybody who can rank FF VIII as a worse "sequel" in the Final Fantasy series than FF X-2 (which is an actual sequel) needs his or her head examined. I particularly despised how Yuna was converted from a shy, modest, yet strong-willed and powerful woman in FF X into a gun-toting, skimpily-dressed songstress just to satisfy the marketing department's request that the sequel provide more fan service. The Yuna of FF X was a good role model for my then eleven-year-old daughter; I don't think I could say that about of the women in FF X-2.
I actually enjoyed VIII quite a bit. I liked the larger character models, and I didn't even mind the draw system all that much. I also don't agree with reviewer's dismisaal of Rinoa, whom I see as a much more intelligent and feisty heroine than the reviewer makes her out to be. (She's also an awesomely powerful sorceress in the later stages of her development.) Why Squall refuses her attempts at seduction on the space ship is beyond me.
I just started replaying Chrono Cross for the third or fourth time the other evening. It is a truly beautiful game that pushes the graphics of the PS1 to the limits. The backgrounds are lush, and the character models remarkably detailed, more so than those in FF VIII and Paradise Eve which came out at about the same time. I played Cross and Trigger in reverse order, so I didn't view Cross as a sequel. It's really only a sequel in that it shares the "Chrono" name and some of the design staff, but it's pretty much a stand-alone game. (The link with Schala isn't all that important to the CC plot.) One of my favorite aspects of Cross is having the characters meet their counterparts in the parallel universe. Also some of the musical selections are as good as any I've heard in a videogame.
I haven't read the details but for the sake of argument let's say that the judge told both parties they couldn't do media interviews. Jack then turns around and does an interview with a family-friendly web site. That would be a contempt of court issue.
Can one be held in contempt for actions taken outside the court after the case has been decided? Isn't that a First Amendment problem? I can understand restricing the behavior, and even perhaps the speech, of litigants during a proceeding, but I can't see how a judge can restrict your speech rights beyond that.
This is obviously all theoretical since the article, if one can call it that, provides no clue as to what Take-Two's lawyers have requested.
Perhaps you should have watched last week's Bill Moyers's special on PBS where the proponents of net neutrality were identified as Microsoft, Google, trade unions, and advocacy groups like both MoveOn and the Christian Coalition. I don't see much of "Stallman and his ilk" in this list, and most of these folks have substantial ties to K Street.
That's why Symantec's angry. Whenever Ed holds a Fight Club event with Microsoft employees, they bring chairs!
you only need a thing like DaemonTools not working, and big portion of MS home target market will drop the 64 bit version like a rotten fruit
I recommend we take a poll of home users of Windows and ask them what "DaemonTools" is. If 5% of the users answer this question correctly, I'll eat my monitor.
While Slashdotters may think that everyone is playing Quake from dawn till dusk, the reality is that most folks use their computers for browsing, mail, managing photos and songs, balancing their checkbooks, and writing the occasional letter. Gaming isn't on their horizon.
Contemporary viruses and worms aren't designed to "screw with your startup settings, slow down your computer, [or] seem to take inexplicable glee at replicating themselves so you can't remove them." They are designed to make your computer part of a botnet so it can be used to send spam, run denial-of-service attacks, and the like. Good malware doesn't make itself known to the computer user at all.