Out of curiosity, what triggered the BSOD? The only one I've gotten in Vista since release was caused by an extremely unstable nVidia driver - "Experimental" I think they called it. It gave nearly 50% better framerates and the control panel was actually good for something (at the time, the official control panel was garbage) but the user-mode code would crash every hour or so - usually switching in or out of the secure desktop, or when logging in - although only in Windows, almost never in EVE Online (the most graphically intensive program I run). It only crashed to bluescreen once, even then - I guess even the kernel-mode portion was a little too experimental - and I've been running Vista on this machine for roughly 9 months. My card is a GeForce Go 7600, incidentally.
Two quick side notes: To reduce disk thrashing, try using a ReadyBoost device; most USB 2.0 flashdrives or cardreaders are good enough. At the current prices for 1 or 2 gigs of flash memory, it's cheaper than a RAM upgrade that you can't use anyhow (without going 64-bit). You'll notice that lack of intelligent prefetch in Linux, incidentally; although the SECOND time I start a program it usually starts right up, the FIRST time (after rebooting to my openSuse partition) I load almost any application I must sit and watch my mouse cursor turn into its bouncing icon for a while. On Vista, even large programs like EVE load instantly.
I haven't RTFA, but the impression I got, and the message I took away from this, was about switchers/new adopters. The point is no that there are more systems in use - that is an absolute given since both the global population and comuter-using percentage of the population are increasing. The point is one of marketshare. If Windows' percentage overall grows and OS X's doesn't (or not as much) then the truth is that MS is (re)gaining the upper hand. It really doesn't matter how many machines Apple sold as an absolute number.
Mind you, I don't see any sign of Apple going away, and I believe they will remain above 5% for the forseeable future. That said, if their competitors continue increasing marketshare, it will put a real squeeze on Apple because, leaving aside the fanboys, people make buying decisions based on things like low cost, high visibility, and product quality. Right now, Apple is doing great in those areas (well, less poorly than usual in the first) and that is largely because they have been able to scale up production so much (faster than the market itself is growing, thus leading to increased marketshare). If they can't keep growing, though, they cannot continue dropping prices relative to their competition and may be forced to choose between low costs and high profit margins to sustain R and D.
There's another problem with losing marketshare even if sales are good for the time being: loss of mindshare. The computer industry is not yet saturated, so Apple has a decent chance right now to increase marketshare just by pulling in new people (as opposed to switchers from other platforms). It's noticeable; I'm seeing FAR more Apple computers than I ever have before, and there enough older-model Macs (now that people are upgrading) that some of my friends who can't afford new ones are buying the older computers (this also increases marketshare, since the only new computer bought is the new Mac for the upgrader). BUT... what if Apple started losing marketshare again? What if, even though they continued to sell well by Apple's past standards, Vista or Linux or whatever else started really sweeping up the new users? Eventually, Macs would once again become elusive and out of the public mind.
My point in all this is simply that the math isn't bad, it's just not the numbers you were trying to find. You want to see sales as absolutes, or relative to past performance (growth). Instead, TFA is giving you marketshare across current competitors, compared to marketshare in the past. To put it another way, it's your math that is bad; the summary, at least, isn't even talking about growth, it's talking about ratios - but if you look at it in terms of growth, Apple is growing less than its competitors, so in the race to saturate the market, it is losing ground.
Worth mentioning here that Vista DID manage to move the video drivers to userland with only a minimal kernel-mode shim and an API for the userland driver. I'm not a Windows driver dev, let alone one who understands the new WDDM drivers, but as a gamer I can tell you the framerate has barely dropped - a few percent, which I can live with in exchange for system stability.
Vista does actually support many kernel-mode drivers using Compatibility Mode installers or modified INF files, so I am fairly sure that the Vista kernel still supports Kernel-only drivers. Besides, as with this Linux driver model, Vista's WDDM drivers and such still need a bit of kernel-mode code since, due to the architecture of the x86, you can't get direct hardware access with protected (user-mode) software. The idea is that the kernel code can be minimal and hopefully bug-free, and there is an API to allow the userland driver to access the kernel-mode shim.
You're probably joking, but just in case you aren't, the version number represents the NT Kernel version. Since 9x/ME weren't based on the NT kernel, they didn't use the same numbering. It's a bit strange because the first versions of the NT kernel were numbered 3.x (I forget if there was actually a 3.1 or something, the first one I know of is 3.5) because that's the version number that the DOS-based versions were at. Since then, the versioning on the DOS-based (9x/ME) and NT (3.5, 4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista) have been unrelated.
I need to download a new copy of Ubuntu and give it another try, I guess. The last one I tried (something 6.x) had enough noticeable flaws and so insulted my idea of what pre-installed software a Linux distro needs (this being fairly important when running live, of course) that I simply gave up on it for a full version release. (The previous version I had tried, 5.10 I think, had serious showstopper bugs in Kubuntu - specifically, KDE tried to use su rather than sudo for privilege escalation, which is a simple configuration switch when building I guess that they had forgotten to make - and lets just say I was thoroughly un-impressed with the distro's quality).
Mind you, my version of Knoppix is the LiveDVD, and aside from an insanely long K Menu, I think this is the best approach for demos or fixing random issues. The reason I use isn't because it's the only live distro, not by a long shot; I use it because it has the best pre-installed package selection of any live distro that I've ever found.
You forgot Mandriva (which is a great distro for people who want lots of shiny eye candy and the ability to use Red Hat packages - at least, I think it's still compatible with them - and it's relatively newcomer-friendly) and Knoppix (which almost nobody would install, but most Linux types and more then a few Windows users will have a copy of it somewhere). Mepis deserves mention as well, I'd say... its package selection could be better, but it's a great distro in terms of hardware support, pioneered the install-from-LiveCD approach Ubuntu uses, and uses KDE, which in its default layout is more comfortable to Windows users than GNOME (of course, there is always Kubuntu as well).
I have never used RHEL, is it really that different from Fedora?
Somebody actually went and pulled out an old MS Word 2 document, and found that it opened just fine in the copy on their current machine (2003 or 07, I forget... this was a while ago on Slashdot). Microsoft cares a LOT about backward compatibility. Most other companies don't bother so much. This is probably a portion of why Office's install footprint has gotten much larger with recent versions; not just new features, but inability to remove any feature used by any previous version. I challenge you to find anything that MS has dropped, support-wise, from Office. Even FrontPage (which has been discontinued) pages, with lots of proprietary FrontPage Server Extension tags, are read and handled properly by Expression Web, which is a professional tool of a rather different stripe from FP (Expression Web is much closer to DreamWeaver, and targeted more at the web programmer and web designer crowds than the mom-and-pop website builders that FrontPage catered to).
While I understand what you're saying with regard to wine (I hate Cedega on philosophical principles and don't use it) I can't think of a single program that runs on wine but not on XP or Vista. Certainly I've enver had problems with a program written for 2000 (or any other version of NT). Occasionally DOS/Win3x programs give me hassles, usually because they can't understand my video card, but even there you might be surprised how much I've gotten to work. Yes, I've been gaming all the way back to the DOS days, though I don't have many of them still available (even if I still can find the disks, no floppy drives).
Microsoft has been funding a SourceForge project developing an ODF plugin and converter for Office. You can read a bit more about it from Ars Technica (notice the date - this thing has been out for over half a year). It's stable and quite functional, produces small files, and includes a batch converter. Downloads here.
I've lost count of the number of times I've posted this...
You said it yourself: the anti-TiVo-ization clause is there for consumers. However, the voters aren't the consumers of a voting machine; the users, but not the buyers. The buyers are the government entites that set up and oversee voting. Governments are run by politicians, the very people who have the most desire to control the outcome of elections. So, under GPLv3, some official would receive the voting machines, including all of the (carefully examined for fairness and security) source code, and the ability to install their own patches to the code on the machine and have it run. Do you honestly not see why this is a problem? Heck they woudln't even be in violation of the GPL for doing it in secret and vnever releasing the patches, so long as they only did it to the machines they bought for themselves (as you pointed out, the voters never even temporarily own the machines, so it's not redistribution).
I personally think voting machines are actually a pretty good idea - so long as they ship with a hard-coded and completely UN-patchable software verifier. They should even release the code for the verifier, to make sure it is fair and secure - where secure means that there is NO way to get unauthorized modifications to the code to run on the machine. Obviously, this flies in the face of the GPLv3. Sometimes, trusted computing is a good thing.
Virus may have negative connotation, but it also has a definition that the GPL fits fairly well.
If somebody created a biological virus that immunized people against AIDS by infecting skin cells, reproducing, entering the bloodstream and spreadying throughout the body until it reached the lymph nodes and other other relevant areas, then modifying the immune system to make it immune, would it be any less of a virus? Sure, people with this would be encouraged to spread it, it would be a good thing, but it still meets the definition of a virus. The GPL (but not the LGPL) behaves very much like this.
In fact, the difference between GPL and LGPL is the viral clause. LGPL code must remain free and be distributed in source form with anything that contains it, but it can be comiled into proprietary modules. GPL code CANNOT! If I wrote a faster or safer or whatever version of printf and licensed it under the GPL, any source code using that method would need to be entirely licensed under the GPL! Insert one handy method, and it affects everything. Now imagine what it's like for things like LAME, one fo the best MP3 encoders available... and widely used even outside the free software world, because it is LGPL code and people don't need to make their entire ripping program or whatever open source just to use a really good free encoder.
Please explain to me how you think the GPL is not viral? You're free to use an alternate term if you like, provided it is at least as accurate in terms of definition.
I have no objection to the GPL (v2, I'm a bit less comfortable about v3) and in fact use it myself, but I'm thinking of switching to the LGPL because, while I would like more people to open their source code, as long as people keep MY code open and contribute back any and all changes they make to it, I don't really feel I should restrict what they do with the rest of their code even if it uses something I wrote.
(Mind you, AFAIK nobody is using any of my code in anything like that anyhow, but that could change.)
No comparison of Linux distros released more than 12 months apart is valid, frankly. Mandriva in 2005 was shiny but limited . In 2006 it was fundamentally broken. In 2007 it kicked ass... and yet I still switched away for openSuse because it had the types of features and interface I wanted. That said, the difference from 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 is incredible.
Back in 98, a popular Desktop Linux was a nerd dream. In 2005 there were a few distros that were gettign there. In 2007 there are quite a few. Ubuntu may be one of them, but it's not neccessarily the best and you have no right to suggest it is unless you've tested the other top runners, in their current incarnations, and preferably helped Linux newbies with different distros as well (I have: openSuse, Mandriva, and Ubuntu. The Ubuntu was the worst, but since it was just over a year ago I don't pretend to know what the current versions are like).
I didn't get a single UAC prompt in this, though it didn't work either so it might be more accurate to say it doesn't work if you aren't running as Administrator. IE7 also hits you with a big warning message about a website trying to open a program on your computer...
Demonstration still doesn't work
on
Firefox Quickies
·
· Score: 1
on Vista, using IE7.
Click link from IE7:
IE7 says it needs to launch another program (Firefox) to handle this URL, that said program will open outside of Protected Mode, and that I should only do so if I trust the website.
Click OK, and Firefox starts to open, either with a blank window or the Restore Session dialog followed by a blank window.
Firefox says it needs to open an external program (itself, ironically), gives me a few seconds of unintelligible URL reading before it lets me click the OK button.
Click OK... and nothing happens in Firefox and no program opens in Windows, so I close Firefox.
IE7 tosses up a pair of error dialogs stating that the URL doesn't go anywhere and that the helper application rejected the protocol (firefoxurl).
Terrifying, ain't it! You could trick me into... closing error messages!
I run Vista, have both IE7 and FireFox 2 installed, and at present am browsing using IE7.
Clicking the link first caused IE7 to ask permission to open a program outside Protected Mode (Firefox, in this case). Click OK, and Firefox opens (well, it waits a while then prompts me to restore a session that ended when I last rebooted into Linux). Ok, so I finally get a blank Firefox window, and Firefox prompts me to open an external program (Firefox again, ironically). Click OK to that... and nothing happens. Meanwhile, IE7 throws out an error message stating it can't find the URL "firefoxurl:test" and I should make sure I typed it correctly. I click OK to that, close Firefox, and IE7 states that it can't even find a program that will handle the request.
Overall, I'm not too terrified of these firefoxurl: links. Two dialog boxes (not counting the session restore one), and in the end it did... nothing at all. Oh, the horrors; you might trick me into needing to close error messages! Bah... I really can't say I'm worried.
As somebody who recently traveled to south-ease Asia, you are exactly correct. Heck, in one airport (Bangkok?) I saw a sign advertising a particular carrier, with the instructions: Pick up a SIM from the desk, then select the network you want to connect to based on the features! They not only assumed that any phone could use their SIMs (mine couldn't, of course... very few SIMS would work, although I finally found a few) but they had no concept of phone service contracts that lock you in and bill you monthly. Instead, you go into any 7-Eleven (yes, they have them) and on the back wall will be hundreds of phone refill kits. Buy one for the network you want to use, follow the simple instructions, and viola! you have paid for your cell cervice. Oh, and yes, my (very limited T-Mobile branded) phone supported this novel method of payment, including the features to report how much money is remaining.
Imagine that in the USA:
Need faster mobile web browsing? Grab a T-Mobile SIM from the table beneath this sign, put it in your phone, and select T-Mobile Data Plus network! Only 99 cents per megabyte!
SIM comes preloaded with 2 dollars. Pick up refill kits at over 100 thousand locations, including major convenience stores.
Of course, for those who want something other than data speed, they would connect to a different network or use a different provider altogether; the SIM cards are the next best thing to free and use the Refill cards to only buy as much service as you need.
I don't know HOW many times I'm going to nned to say this, and I wish I'd hit this post earlier, but MS has been funding an open-source ODF blugin for months now (notice the date)... since Office 2007 was in beta, in fact (I know, because I tested it). I've had ODF support in MS Office since before Sun even appeared on the project's SourceForge page... in fact, I was quite surprised when I checked a few weeks ago (for a Slashdot post, incidentally) and found Sun there, as I do not believe they were initially a project contributor (but that's what I recall, no guarantees there). At best, though, news of a ODF converter for MS Office is old news.
Even if it turns out that this project is Sun's, exclusively (their license says so, but the liecnese on the SOurceForge project is extremely liberal) I'm not sure what all the hype is about. Supposedly the Sun plugin uses Java (or, according to the license, "may contain Java technology") whereas the MS/SourceForge one uses.NET (C# I believe) but otherwise they look about identical, right down to which versions of Office are supported and what file formats are supported.
It'd be interesting to see a comparison of the two plugins, but whoever thinks MS doesn't want Office to support ODF is, quite simply, wrong.
No offense, but as somebody who, in his constant searchfor better video drivers, probably has the X server fail to start at least 20% of the time, Windows is WAY better at this. Bad driver? Oops, switch to safe mode (which you'll most likely be prompted to do automatically, and you will have to offer of a basic graphical system or a fairly crappy command line), roll back the bad driver, reboot.
Yes, I can modify xorg.conf manually using vim and try to fix it that way (or just keep a known good backup, and substitute to get un-hardware accelerated video back) or, since I use openSuse, either run sax2 (X server configuration utility) or yast (system control software, including a very good package manager for updating/uninstalling driver packages; runs very well in a terminal using a ncurses-based UI) and try to fix things that way. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't (nvidia's official driver claims it's no longer compatible with my kernel, despite not having installed any kernel updates and the version numbers matching...)
Admittedly, the nv driver is good enough for most users, and the standard steps to install the proprietary nVidia driver work for most people (they used to work for me, too...) but if you want Linux to get widespread desktop use, it'll need to get comparable framerates and graphical capabilities to Windows, at least good enough for the most common games, and if installing a driver update not only breaks the system in ways most users would have NO idea how to fix (the updated driver package didn't update xorg.conf; it was a trivial fix but something very, VERY few people I know could have fixed without help) but doesn't allow a rollback to the old driver (I *still* can't figure out why... I've run depmod and even rebooted rather than just restarting X like I normally do, but loading the driver still fails whether done at startup, xinit, or manually modprobing) then you're going to have some very unhappy people who will spread what quite frankly will be termed "horror stories" about Linux's hardware support and general usability.
Posted from Vista. Lynx doesn't cut it for Slashdot, and I got bloody tired of wrestling with the configuration and wanted to take a break.
The AV comment is pure bullshit. Absolutely 100% incorrect.
For quite a while Live OneCare wasn't even available for Vista. AFAIK it STILL hasn't been released for the 64-bit edition, though there is a port in progress.
By comparison, Trend Micro had a public beta of their PC-Cillin 2007 by the time Vista was in public beta (build 5384, well over a year ago). It supports Vista 32-bit and 64-bit editions (as well as XP and 2000).
When I installed the Vista beta and Security Center suggested I install an AV, I clicked the link to recommend one (just for the heck of it, I wasn't going to pay for one as was expecting that's what I'd get... but I also knew Vista's kernel security was going to play havoc with things like Norton Internet Rootkit). Microsoft's own link directed me to PC-Cillin (which I did in fact install, as it was a free beta). I believe OneCare was in beta at the time as well, but was 32-bit XP only. What I am quite sure of is that this was BEFORE Symantec and McAfee strong-armed MS (using this exact type of thing, the "We know that it's not about making your OS better, it's about shutting out compatitors and that's not OK because you were a monopolist say play nice with us!") into opening up PatchGuard. MS, fully aware that PatchGuard was going to interfere with the standard kernel-level hook for realtime AV scanning, had released an API to allow an antivirus program to scan files as they were accessed... and even before Symantec, McAfee, of MS themselves managed to do so, Trend Micro had a perfectly viable product based on that API.
While I don't run PC-Cillin anymore, I can certainly say it was a well-designed program and I experienced none of the numerous problems and annoyances surrounding its better-known competitors. If I were to pay for any AV program, it would probably be that one.
The thing that gets me about this isn't that the battery isn't user-replaceable, it's that it isn't user-removable. The primary reasons to remove the battery: Hard reset (without some other physical off switch, you may need this - yes, OS X does crash, and I can't see any reason the iPhone version should be any different.. certainly other devices have been known to hard lock themselves). On most phones, fixing this kind of a hard reset literally takes less time than holding down the power button (which doesn't always work); slide a latch or cover on the back of the phone and the battery pops out. Water damage prevention. Phones get wet. Hopefully not often and hopefully not thoroughly, but it does happen. Hell, just a few nights ago (the 4th) a (fairly drunk) friend of mine got himself bodily tossed into the swimming pool with his phone in his pocket. When he pulled it out of his pocket the vibrator motor was going full tilt, the screen was behaving VERY oddly, and the buttons weren't responding properly. I got the battery out, put the phone and battery somewhere dry and warm to dry out, and hoped for the best. At least it wasn't submerged long - after corrosion (preventable by rapidly drying it out, flush with fresh water first if it was salt water), the most common issue is that Li-ion batteries aren't designed to have a bunch of (chlorinated, in this case) water enter them. The battery may swell up, leak, corrode its contacts (if they aren't gold-plated), or get its chemistry so disturbed it loses most or all capacity. If you can't open the case of the iPhone up and remove the battery easily, you will neither be able to prevent the battery from shorting out nor get it out of the water until the entire inside of the case dries (a prospect that may take some time).
How many times have I needed to do one or the other? A couple times per year. I would hope there's some form of hard reset available on the iPhone - the "wait for the battery to drain" method required by some devices is very annoying - but the iPhone is certainly not waterproof and yet there's no reason that a bit of water need guarantee the destruction of your phone (although the most common component to fail, aside formt eh battery, is the screen... which would destroy the iPhone's usability).
Believe it or not, not only does such a converter exist, it is an open-source project sponsored by Microsoft, and has produced both an independent converter and an Office 2007 plugin. Using the plugin, ODF files can be opened in MS Office, saved in either XML-based format (I don't think it allows direct conversion to legacy formats), and OOXML files can be opened in Office and saved as ODF (or legacy versions). The conversion is largely done with XSL transformations.
It also appears that Novell is working on a Linux port and OpenOffice.org plugin as part of the same project. The whole project is.NET code so presumably Linux's version will use Mono.
I've been using IE7 since its beta days when Vista was too buggy for day-to-day use (though back then I was so fed up with XP I ran Linux almost exclusively) and I'm not sure what your issues are. Yes, the white/gray/darkgray box that should be on the far left floats out a bit, and every now and then text from one comment will overlay another incorrectly, but the first isn't a real problem and the latter can usually be corrected by resizing the window even slightly, which will cause IE to re-position everything (usually correctly). The D2 checkbox is not only clearly visible and functional, I turned it on using IE7 and I have, in the past, temporarily turned it off the same way.
My biggest complaints are the render time (IE's JS engine certainly isn't the fastest out there, though it renders static HTML fast enough according to tests) and the tendency to, when expanding a partially-hidden discussion, scroll halfway down the page for some reason. That is the worst bug, and even then it's hardly that terrible; when using Slashdot on IE7 I just note where the slider is before clicking any such expand link.
It has been explained elsewhere, but the box on the upper left is D2's equivilent of threshold controls. The top slider controls how much is fully visible: drag it to the bottom to show all comments in full, or to near the top to only automatically expand those that are highly modded. The lower slider controls how much is hidden as just "X hidden comments" links; for moderating I keep it at the far bottom but moving it up a notch or two will hide the stuff that got modded down (or started there, I apply an automatic downmod to ACs). The in-between (the light gray region) represents comments that will be abbreviated as a subject, score, username, and the first line of the comment. This is similar to the comments that fall above your threshhold but below your "always expand comments scoring above X" setting in the old system. The nice thing with the slider box is that it can be adjusted on a page-by-page basis, at any time, with decently fine control. I estimate it takes about 1 second per 100 comments for IE7 to re-render after moving the slider on a 1.8GHz machine. It's not great but it is certainly usable.
A final note: both D2 and IE7 have seen improvements over the last 9 months, so you might want to try again. It used to be a LOT worse... these days it's tolerable, though Firefox/Konqueror are much better. I just realized I've never tried in Linux.
Do NOT attempt to use D2 in either Lynx or Links.:-)
WTF is up with the mods today? This is the third blatant troll I've seen thus far in this article... I guess this kind of topic brings them out.
Your subject is bullshit; although (as with Linux) it is possible to install things that will run with admin/root privileges at system startup, you A) Need admin privileges to do such an installation. Without it, the best you can get is something that will prompt to run with elevated permissions every time that particular user logs in. B) Need to be quite stupid, and do things like install from untrustworthy sources. That can get you in all kinds of trouble on either platform; slipping an unobtrusive trojan installer into a tarball and adding an extra line in the Makefile's install target to run said installer when the user runs make install (as root) is arguably easier than modifiying a program's binary installer to also install your malware in a Windows trojan. The fact that there are far more such trojans for Windows than Linux is a matter of userbase, both size and tech-savviness.
Your first paragraph is logically sound but you haven't provided any evidence that either Vista or Linux have either type of vulnerability. In case you were wondering, there have been a handful of Firefox vulnerabilites that allowed local access (and they were completely cross-platform).
Your second paragraph is so much shit I'll break it into pieces to make it easier to flush. "Vista still encourages users to run with higher privileges than necessary": What The Fuck?!? Have you ANY evidence or reason for this argument? Aside from the default setting for UAC only requiring a button press (which defaults to Cancel) rather than a password (incidentally, it can be changed to behave more like Linux) that statement is simply absurd. Many argue that it runs as too limited of a user by default (I disagree, but I have yet to hear ANYBODY else argue that it runs with too MUCH permission!) "The platform is still host to over 99% of the viruses and malware ever created": Vista most certainly isn't! A hell of a lot of those wont even work on a fully patched copy of 2000, for $DEITY's sake! XP SP2 cuts out an even larger sweep, some due to its firewall and some due to sinply better design. Vista... a two way firewall, defaulting to non-admin privileges, all known previous holes closed before release, ASLR, Windows Defender integrated... sure, many trojans will still work, and some won't be stopped by the firewall or detected by Defender, but your statement is stoll completely inaccurate. "It is not even recommended... without third-party security enhancements...": Leaving aside the fact that MS now has a first-party AV, this is simply a logical precaution for those people too foolish or ignorant to not open worm email attachments or download and run trojaned software. It also helps break up a software monoculture a bit, especially if you use one of the less-well-known variants. Or you could do what I did until I was invited to beta test Live OneCare for free (this was long ago, and it's still free. Uses far fewer resources than Norton as well) and just don't bother with AV. The fact that MS recommends their "Simple file sharing" doesn't mean I need to use that either! "Many will tell you to run it only in a virtualizer": Bullshit. Some will tell you that. Far more will tell you to never use Linux because it doesn't support hardware very well. People will tell you any damn thing, but the vast, extreme majority of Windows installs are not virtualized. Also, you're once again confusing Vista, Windows in general, and every other OS for that matter (there are arguments for when each OS ought to be run virtually - for example, in some server environments). "Microsoft will tell you to do that, it's what VirtualPC is for": I really hope you don't believe this, because I'm assuming you're human and I don't like to think any of us are that dumb. From MS's own
Were any of those last 4 installs Vista installs? If not, your comparison doesn't even count; even assuming the XP disc was SP2 it's Plug and Play drivers would be several years old. Feisty Fawn's are brand new.
My personal experience (Video): Vista has always autodetected my video card (and loaded WDDM drivers, no less - full Aero OOB experience) since the RC2 days. A Knoppix disk from the same era recognized that the card was an nVidia but nothing beyond that, so it ran in 1024x768 (which looks horrible on a high-res widescreen) and wouldn't go higher without manually editing xorg.conf (very irritating hen I just want to demo Linux for somebody or fix a minor problem). Newer (last 6 months) versions of Knoppix work correctly, and openSuse 10.2 also works flawlessly (I currently dual-boot). Audio: Vista required downloading the driver from Windows Update, which it did automatically on first startup and had dound running BEFORE the first reboot. openSuse's sound played but the microphone didn't until I patched ALSA, and it stil has issues. Network: Both Vista and openSuse worked correctly with both wired and WiFi (Intel Pro Wireless). Broadcom worked correctly on Windows but required rebooting once before it worked on openSuse (the BT daemon started, but the HID service - which I need for the bluetooth mouse - wouldn't connect). Install time: Just the part that runs off the disc, Vista was faster than either openSuse or Mepis (from which Ubuntu's install method is derived). This is because Vista's installation is image based - more-or-less decompress a nearly complete system image onto the drive, then customize it slightly for things like the user name, localization settings, etc. It is also mostly unattended, unlike XP (or openSuse). I haven't installed Ubuntu 7.x though, and the last time I installed 6.x was on different hardware. I realize it's unfair to compar openSuse's installer to Ubuntu's, sicne they operate differently, but it's worth mentioning that after installation my openSuse system is already set up with almsot exactly the software I want (a few packages, mostly for things like nVidia's accelerated driver, must be added later) while Ubuntu, by comparison, doesn't even have a working build toolchain in its default install. Sudo apt-get blah-de-blah... suffice to say I don't like their standard package selection, so I need to add a lot of other stuff, and uninstall a lot as well if I want the disk space back and/or a reasonably concise application menu. Add in that YaST has a far better package manager than Synaptics and there is a very noticable difference. Of course, there's a lot more than the disc installation - Windows needs more software installed later - so overall it does take longer to get a fully functional system. The basic system install is incredibly fast, though.
Anybody who thinks installing Linux is easier than Windows hasn't tried Vista. YMMV, however. As above, sorry for the OT.
The share size being specific to the hub makes sense, but IIRC UW only has one or two hubs - the get shut down occasionally but from what I've overheard there are only a couple options since external hubs are blocked. Avoiding being tagged for illegal uploads by using Linux imagaes was brilliant, but while I wouldn't call UW's user base "small" I know the admins did kick people frequently enough... usually for language though, I think; no idea how often they were blocked from the upload/download network.
I wouldn't call you a coward, though I have no idea how anybody could come to the conclusion that it's OK to download that which is not acceptable to upload... as a matter of scale I can certainly understand, but as a matter of what is considered morally or legally right I don't see the difference.
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Out of curiosity, what triggered the BSOD? The only one I've gotten in Vista since release was caused by an extremely unstable nVidia driver - "Experimental" I think they called it. It gave nearly 50% better framerates and the control panel was actually good for something (at the time, the official control panel was garbage) but the user-mode code would crash every hour or so - usually switching in or out of the secure desktop, or when logging in - although only in Windows, almost never in EVE Online (the most graphically intensive program I run). It only crashed to bluescreen once, even then - I guess even the kernel-mode portion was a little too experimental - and I've been running Vista on this machine for roughly 9 months. My card is a GeForce Go 7600, incidentally.
Two quick side notes: To reduce disk thrashing, try using a ReadyBoost device; most USB 2.0 flashdrives or cardreaders are good enough. At the current prices for 1 or 2 gigs of flash memory, it's cheaper than a RAM upgrade that you can't use anyhow (without going 64-bit). You'll notice that lack of intelligent prefetch in Linux, incidentally; although the SECOND time I start a program it usually starts right up, the FIRST time (after rebooting to my openSuse partition) I load almost any application I must sit and watch my mouse cursor turn into its bouncing icon for a while. On Vista, even large programs like EVE load instantly.
I haven't RTFA, but the impression I got, and the message I took away from this, was about switchers/new adopters. The point is no that there are more systems in use - that is an absolute given since both the global population and comuter-using percentage of the population are increasing. The point is one of marketshare. If Windows' percentage overall grows and OS X's doesn't (or not as much) then the truth is that MS is (re)gaining the upper hand. It really doesn't matter how many machines Apple sold as an absolute number.
Mind you, I don't see any sign of Apple going away, and I believe they will remain above 5% for the forseeable future. That said, if their competitors continue increasing marketshare, it will put a real squeeze on Apple because, leaving aside the fanboys, people make buying decisions based on things like low cost, high visibility, and product quality. Right now, Apple is doing great in those areas (well, less poorly than usual in the first) and that is largely because they have been able to scale up production so much (faster than the market itself is growing, thus leading to increased marketshare). If they can't keep growing, though, they cannot continue dropping prices relative to their competition and may be forced to choose between low costs and high profit margins to sustain R and D.
There's another problem with losing marketshare even if sales are good for the time being: loss of mindshare. The computer industry is not yet saturated, so Apple has a decent chance right now to increase marketshare just by pulling in new people (as opposed to switchers from other platforms). It's noticeable; I'm seeing FAR more Apple computers than I ever have before, and there enough older-model Macs (now that people are upgrading) that some of my friends who can't afford new ones are buying the older computers (this also increases marketshare, since the only new computer bought is the new Mac for the upgrader). BUT... what if Apple started losing marketshare again? What if, even though they continued to sell well by Apple's past standards, Vista or Linux or whatever else started really sweeping up the new users? Eventually, Macs would once again become elusive and out of the public mind.
My point in all this is simply that the math isn't bad, it's just not the numbers you were trying to find. You want to see sales as absolutes, or relative to past performance (growth). Instead, TFA is giving you marketshare across current competitors, compared to marketshare in the past. To put it another way, it's your math that is bad; the summary, at least, isn't even talking about growth, it's talking about ratios - but if you look at it in terms of growth, Apple is growing less than its competitors, so in the race to saturate the market, it is losing ground.
Worth mentioning here that Vista DID manage to move the video drivers to userland with only a minimal kernel-mode shim and an API for the userland driver. I'm not a Windows driver dev, let alone one who understands the new WDDM drivers, but as a gamer I can tell you the framerate has barely dropped - a few percent, which I can live with in exchange for system stability.
Vista does actually support many kernel-mode drivers using Compatibility Mode installers or modified INF files, so I am fairly sure that the Vista kernel still supports Kernel-only drivers. Besides, as with this Linux driver model, Vista's WDDM drivers and such still need a bit of kernel-mode code since, due to the architecture of the x86, you can't get direct hardware access with protected (user-mode) software. The idea is that the kernel code can be minimal and hopefully bug-free, and there is an API to allow the userland driver to access the kernel-mode shim.
You're probably joking, but just in case you aren't, the version number represents the NT Kernel version. Since 9x/ME weren't based on the NT kernel, they didn't use the same numbering. It's a bit strange because the first versions of the NT kernel were numbered 3.x (I forget if there was actually a 3.1 or something, the first one I know of is 3.5) because that's the version number that the DOS-based versions were at. Since then, the versioning on the DOS-based (9x/ME) and NT (3.5, 4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista) have been unrelated.
I need to download a new copy of Ubuntu and give it another try, I guess. The last one I tried (something 6.x) had enough noticeable flaws and so insulted my idea of what pre-installed software a Linux distro needs (this being fairly important when running live, of course) that I simply gave up on it for a full version release. (The previous version I had tried, 5.10 I think, had serious showstopper bugs in Kubuntu - specifically, KDE tried to use su rather than sudo for privilege escalation, which is a simple configuration switch when building I guess that they had forgotten to make - and lets just say I was thoroughly un-impressed with the distro's quality).
Mind you, my version of Knoppix is the LiveDVD, and aside from an insanely long K Menu, I think this is the best approach for demos or fixing random issues. The reason I use isn't because it's the only live distro, not by a long shot; I use it because it has the best pre-installed package selection of any live distro that I've ever found.
You forgot Mandriva (which is a great distro for people who want lots of shiny eye candy and the ability to use Red Hat packages - at least, I think it's still compatible with them - and it's relatively newcomer-friendly) and Knoppix (which almost nobody would install, but most Linux types and more then a few Windows users will have a copy of it somewhere). Mepis deserves mention as well, I'd say... its package selection could be better, but it's a great distro in terms of hardware support, pioneered the install-from-LiveCD approach Ubuntu uses, and uses KDE, which in its default layout is more comfortable to Windows users than GNOME (of course, there is always Kubuntu as well).
I have never used RHEL, is it really that different from Fedora?
Somebody actually went and pulled out an old MS Word 2 document, and found that it opened just fine in the copy on their current machine (2003 or 07, I forget... this was a while ago on Slashdot). Microsoft cares a LOT about backward compatibility. Most other companies don't bother so much. This is probably a portion of why Office's install footprint has gotten much larger with recent versions; not just new features, but inability to remove any feature used by any previous version. I challenge you to find anything that MS has dropped, support-wise, from Office. Even FrontPage (which has been discontinued) pages, with lots of proprietary FrontPage Server Extension tags, are read and handled properly by Expression Web, which is a professional tool of a rather different stripe from FP (Expression Web is much closer to DreamWeaver, and targeted more at the web programmer and web designer crowds than the mom-and-pop website builders that FrontPage catered to).
While I understand what you're saying with regard to wine (I hate Cedega on philosophical principles and don't use it) I can't think of a single program that runs on wine but not on XP or Vista. Certainly I've enver had problems with a program written for 2000 (or any other version of NT). Occasionally DOS/Win3x programs give me hassles, usually because they can't understand my video card, but even there you might be surprised how much I've gotten to work. Yes, I've been gaming all the way back to the DOS days, though I don't have many of them still available (even if I still can find the disks, no floppy drives).
Microsoft has been funding a SourceForge project developing an ODF plugin and converter for Office. You can read a bit more about it from Ars Technica (notice the date - this thing has been out for over half a year). It's stable and quite functional, produces small files, and includes a batch converter. Downloads here.
I've lost count of the number of times I've posted this...
You said it yourself: the anti-TiVo-ization clause is there for consumers. However, the voters aren't the consumers of a voting machine; the users, but not the buyers. The buyers are the government entites that set up and oversee voting. Governments are run by politicians, the very people who have the most desire to control the outcome of elections. So, under GPLv3, some official would receive the voting machines, including all of the (carefully examined for fairness and security) source code, and the ability to install their own patches to the code on the machine and have it run. Do you honestly not see why this is a problem? Heck they woudln't even be in violation of the GPL for doing it in secret and vnever releasing the patches, so long as they only did it to the machines they bought for themselves (as you pointed out, the voters never even temporarily own the machines, so it's not redistribution).
I personally think voting machines are actually a pretty good idea - so long as they ship with a hard-coded and completely UN-patchable software verifier. They should even release the code for the verifier, to make sure it is fair and secure - where secure means that there is NO way to get unauthorized modifications to the code to run on the machine. Obviously, this flies in the face of the GPLv3. Sometimes, trusted computing is a good thing.
Virus may have negative connotation, but it also has a definition that the GPL fits fairly well.
If somebody created a biological virus that immunized people against AIDS by infecting skin cells, reproducing, entering the bloodstream and spreadying throughout the body until it reached the lymph nodes and other other relevant areas, then modifying the immune system to make it immune, would it be any less of a virus? Sure, people with this would be encouraged to spread it, it would be a good thing, but it still meets the definition of a virus. The GPL (but not the LGPL) behaves very much like this.
In fact, the difference between GPL and LGPL is the viral clause. LGPL code must remain free and be distributed in source form with anything that contains it, but it can be comiled into proprietary modules. GPL code CANNOT! If I wrote a faster or safer or whatever version of printf and licensed it under the GPL, any source code using that method would need to be entirely licensed under the GPL! Insert one handy method, and it affects everything. Now imagine what it's like for things like LAME, one fo the best MP3 encoders available... and widely used even outside the free software world, because it is LGPL code and people don't need to make their entire ripping program or whatever open source just to use a really good free encoder.
Please explain to me how you think the GPL is not viral? You're free to use an alternate term if you like, provided it is at least as accurate in terms of definition.
I have no objection to the GPL (v2, I'm a bit less comfortable about v3) and in fact use it myself, but I'm thinking of switching to the LGPL because, while I would like more people to open their source code, as long as people keep MY code open and contribute back any and all changes they make to it, I don't really feel I should restrict what they do with the rest of their code even if it uses something I wrote.
(Mind you, AFAIK nobody is using any of my code in anything like that anyhow, but that could change.)
No comparison of Linux distros released more than 12 months apart is valid, frankly. Mandriva in 2005 was shiny but limited . In 2006 it was fundamentally broken. In 2007 it kicked ass... and yet I still switched away for openSuse because it had the types of features and interface I wanted. That said, the difference from 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 is incredible.
Back in 98, a popular Desktop Linux was a nerd dream. In 2005 there were a few distros that were gettign there. In 2007 there are quite a few. Ubuntu may be one of them, but it's not neccessarily the best and you have no right to suggest it is unless you've tested the other top runners, in their current incarnations, and preferably helped Linux newbies with different distros as well (I have: openSuse, Mandriva, and Ubuntu. The Ubuntu was the worst, but since it was just over a year ago I don't pretend to know what the current versions are like).
I didn't get a single UAC prompt in this, though it didn't work either so it might be more accurate to say it doesn't work if you aren't running as Administrator. IE7 also hits you with a big warning message about a website trying to open a program on your computer...
- Click link from IE7:
- IE7 says it needs to launch another program (Firefox) to handle this URL, that said program will open outside of Protected Mode, and that I should only do so if I trust the website.
- Click OK, and Firefox starts to open, either with a blank window or the Restore Session dialog followed by a blank window.
- Firefox says it needs to open an external program (itself, ironically), gives me a few seconds of unintelligible URL reading before it lets me click the OK button.
- Click OK... and nothing happens in Firefox and no program opens in Windows, so I close Firefox.
- IE7 tosses up a pair of error dialogs stating that the URL doesn't go anywhere and that the helper application rejected the protocol (firefoxurl).
Terrifying, ain't it! You could trick me into... closing error messages!I run Vista, have both IE7 and FireFox 2 installed, and at present am browsing using IE7.
Clicking the link first caused IE7 to ask permission to open a program outside Protected Mode (Firefox, in this case). Click OK, and Firefox opens (well, it waits a while then prompts me to restore a session that ended when I last rebooted into Linux). Ok, so I finally get a blank Firefox window, and Firefox prompts me to open an external program (Firefox again, ironically). Click OK to that... and nothing happens. Meanwhile, IE7 throws out an error message stating it can't find the URL "firefoxurl:test" and I should make sure I typed it correctly. I click OK to that, close Firefox, and IE7 states that it can't even find a program that will handle the request.
Overall, I'm not too terrified of these firefoxurl: links. Two dialog boxes (not counting the session restore one), and in the end it did... nothing at all. Oh, the horrors; you might trick me into needing to close error messages! Bah... I really can't say I'm worried.
Imagine that in the USA: Of course, for those who want something other than data speed, they would connect to a different network or use a different provider altogether; the SIM cards are the next best thing to free and use the Refill cards to only buy as much service as you need.
I don't know HOW many times I'm going to nned to say this, and I wish I'd hit this post earlier, but MS has been funding an open-source ODF blugin for months now (notice the date)... since Office 2007 was in beta, in fact (I know, because I tested it). I've had ODF support in MS Office since before Sun even appeared on the project's SourceForge page... in fact, I was quite surprised when I checked a few weeks ago (for a Slashdot post, incidentally) and found Sun there, as I do not believe they were initially a project contributor (but that's what I recall, no guarantees there). At best, though, news of a ODF converter for MS Office is old news.
.NET (C# I believe) but otherwise they look about identical, right down to which versions of Office are supported and what file formats are supported.
Even if it turns out that this project is Sun's, exclusively (their license says so, but the liecnese on the SOurceForge project is extremely liberal) I'm not sure what all the hype is about. Supposedly the Sun plugin uses Java (or, according to the license, "may contain Java technology") whereas the MS/SourceForge one uses
It'd be interesting to see a comparison of the two plugins, but whoever thinks MS doesn't want Office to support ODF is, quite simply, wrong.
No offense, but as somebody who, in his constant searchfor better video drivers, probably has the X server fail to start at least 20% of the time, Windows is WAY better at this. Bad driver? Oops, switch to safe mode (which you'll most likely be prompted to do automatically, and you will have to offer of a basic graphical system or a fairly crappy command line), roll back the bad driver, reboot.
Yes, I can modify xorg.conf manually using vim and try to fix it that way (or just keep a known good backup, and substitute to get un-hardware accelerated video back) or, since I use openSuse, either run sax2 (X server configuration utility) or yast (system control software, including a very good package manager for updating/uninstalling driver packages; runs very well in a terminal using a ncurses-based UI) and try to fix things that way. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't (nvidia's official driver claims it's no longer compatible with my kernel, despite not having installed any kernel updates and the version numbers matching...)
Admittedly, the nv driver is good enough for most users, and the standard steps to install the proprietary nVidia driver work for most people (they used to work for me, too...) but if you want Linux to get widespread desktop use, it'll need to get comparable framerates and graphical capabilities to Windows, at least good enough for the most common games, and if installing a driver update not only breaks the system in ways most users would have NO idea how to fix (the updated driver package didn't update xorg.conf; it was a trivial fix but something very, VERY few people I know could have fixed without help) but doesn't allow a rollback to the old driver (I *still* can't figure out why... I've run depmod and even rebooted rather than just restarting X like I normally do, but loading the driver still fails whether done at startup, xinit, or manually modprobing) then you're going to have some very unhappy people who will spread what quite frankly will be termed "horror stories" about Linux's hardware support and general usability.
Posted from Vista. Lynx doesn't cut it for Slashdot, and I got bloody tired of wrestling with the configuration and wanted to take a break.
The AV comment is pure bullshit. Absolutely 100% incorrect.
For quite a while Live OneCare wasn't even available for Vista. AFAIK it STILL hasn't been released for the 64-bit edition, though there is a port in progress.
By comparison, Trend Micro had a public beta of their PC-Cillin 2007 by the time Vista was in public beta (build 5384, well over a year ago). It supports Vista 32-bit and 64-bit editions (as well as XP and 2000).
When I installed the Vista beta and Security Center suggested I install an AV, I clicked the link to recommend one (just for the heck of it, I wasn't going to pay for one as was expecting that's what I'd get... but I also knew Vista's kernel security was going to play havoc with things like Norton Internet Rootkit). Microsoft's own link directed me to PC-Cillin (which I did in fact install, as it was a free beta). I believe OneCare was in beta at the time as well, but was 32-bit XP only. What I am quite sure of is that this was BEFORE Symantec and McAfee strong-armed MS (using this exact type of thing, the "We know that it's not about making your OS better, it's about shutting out compatitors and that's not OK because you were a monopolist say play nice with us!") into opening up PatchGuard. MS, fully aware that PatchGuard was going to interfere with the standard kernel-level hook for realtime AV scanning, had released an API to allow an antivirus program to scan files as they were accessed... and even before Symantec, McAfee, of MS themselves managed to do so, Trend Micro had a perfectly viable product based on that API.
While I don't run PC-Cillin anymore, I can certainly say it was a well-designed program and I experienced none of the numerous problems and annoyances surrounding its better-known competitors. If I were to pay for any AV program, it would probably be that one.
The thing that gets me about this isn't that the battery isn't user-replaceable, it's that it isn't user-removable. The primary reasons to remove the battery:
Hard reset (without some other physical off switch, you may need this - yes, OS X does crash, and I can't see any reason the iPhone version should be any different.. certainly other devices have been known to hard lock themselves). On most phones, fixing this kind of a hard reset literally takes less time than holding down the power button (which doesn't always work); slide a latch or cover on the back of the phone and the battery pops out.
Water damage prevention. Phones get wet. Hopefully not often and hopefully not thoroughly, but it does happen. Hell, just a few nights ago (the 4th) a (fairly drunk) friend of mine got himself bodily tossed into the swimming pool with his phone in his pocket. When he pulled it out of his pocket the vibrator motor was going full tilt, the screen was behaving VERY oddly, and the buttons weren't responding properly. I got the battery out, put the phone and battery somewhere dry and warm to dry out, and hoped for the best. At least it wasn't submerged long - after corrosion (preventable by rapidly drying it out, flush with fresh water first if it was salt water), the most common issue is that Li-ion batteries aren't designed to have a bunch of (chlorinated, in this case) water enter them. The battery may swell up, leak, corrode its contacts (if they aren't gold-plated), or get its chemistry so disturbed it loses most or all capacity. If you can't open the case of the iPhone up and remove the battery easily, you will neither be able to prevent the battery from shorting out nor get it out of the water until the entire inside of the case dries (a prospect that may take some time).
How many times have I needed to do one or the other? A couple times per year. I would hope there's some form of hard reset available on the iPhone - the "wait for the battery to drain" method required by some devices is very annoying - but the iPhone is certainly not waterproof and yet there's no reason that a bit of water need guarantee the destruction of your phone (although the most common component to fail, aside formt eh battery, is the screen... which would destroy the iPhone's usability).
Believe it or not, not only does such a converter exist, it is an open-source project sponsored by Microsoft, and has produced both an independent converter and an Office 2007 plugin. Using the plugin, ODF files can be opened in MS Office, saved in either XML-based format (I don't think it allows direct conversion to legacy formats), and OOXML files can be opened in Office and saved as ODF (or legacy versions). The conversion is largely done with XSL transformations.
.NET code so presumably Linux's version will use Mono.
u p_id=169337
It also appears that Novell is working on a Linux port and OpenOffice.org plugin as part of the same project. The whole project is
The license is BSD-like and very simple.
SourceForge project site: http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/
Download site: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?gro
I've been using IE7 since its beta days when Vista was too buggy for day-to-day use (though back then I was so fed up with XP I ran Linux almost exclusively) and I'm not sure what your issues are. Yes, the white/gray/darkgray box that should be on the far left floats out a bit, and every now and then text from one comment will overlay another incorrectly, but the first isn't a real problem and the latter can usually be corrected by resizing the window even slightly, which will cause IE to re-position everything (usually correctly). The D2 checkbox is not only clearly visible and functional, I turned it on using IE7 and I have, in the past, temporarily turned it off the same way.
:-)
My biggest complaints are the render time (IE's JS engine certainly isn't the fastest out there, though it renders static HTML fast enough according to tests) and the tendency to, when expanding a partially-hidden discussion, scroll halfway down the page for some reason. That is the worst bug, and even then it's hardly that terrible; when using Slashdot on IE7 I just note where the slider is before clicking any such expand link.
It has been explained elsewhere, but the box on the upper left is D2's equivilent of threshold controls. The top slider controls how much is fully visible: drag it to the bottom to show all comments in full, or to near the top to only automatically expand those that are highly modded. The lower slider controls how much is hidden as just "X hidden comments" links; for moderating I keep it at the far bottom but moving it up a notch or two will hide the stuff that got modded down (or started there, I apply an automatic downmod to ACs). The in-between (the light gray region) represents comments that will be abbreviated as a subject, score, username, and the first line of the comment. This is similar to the comments that fall above your threshhold but below your "always expand comments scoring above X" setting in the old system. The nice thing with the slider box is that it can be adjusted on a page-by-page basis, at any time, with decently fine control. I estimate it takes about 1 second per 100 comments for IE7 to re-render after moving the slider on a 1.8GHz machine. It's not great but it is certainly usable.
A final note: both D2 and IE7 have seen improvements over the last 9 months, so you might want to try again. It used to be a LOT worse... these days it's tolerable, though Firefox/Konqueror are much better. I just realized I've never tried in Linux.
Do NOT attempt to use D2 in either Lynx or Links.
WTF is up with the mods today? This is the third blatant troll I've seen thus far in this article... I guess this kind of topic brings them out.
Your subject is bullshit; although (as with Linux) it is possible to install things that will run with admin/root privileges at system startup, you
A) Need admin privileges to do such an installation. Without it, the best you can get is something that will prompt to run with elevated permissions every time that particular user logs in.
B) Need to be quite stupid, and do things like install from untrustworthy sources. That can get you in all kinds of trouble on either platform; slipping an unobtrusive trojan installer into a tarball and adding an extra line in the Makefile's install target to run said installer when the user runs make install (as root) is arguably easier than modifiying a program's binary installer to also install your malware in a Windows trojan.
The fact that there are far more such trojans for Windows than Linux is a matter of userbase, both size and tech-savviness.
Your first paragraph is logically sound but you haven't provided any evidence that either Vista or Linux have either type of vulnerability. In case you were wondering, there have been a handful of Firefox vulnerabilites that allowed local access (and they were completely cross-platform).
Your second paragraph is so much shit I'll break it into pieces to make it easier to flush.
"Vista still encourages users to run with higher privileges than necessary": What The Fuck?!? Have you ANY evidence or reason for this argument? Aside from the default setting for UAC only requiring a button press (which defaults to Cancel) rather than a password (incidentally, it can be changed to behave more like Linux) that statement is simply absurd. Many argue that it runs as too limited of a user by default (I disagree, but I have yet to hear ANYBODY else argue that it runs with too MUCH permission!)
"The platform is still host to over 99% of the viruses and malware ever created": Vista most certainly isn't! A hell of a lot of those wont even work on a fully patched copy of 2000, for $DEITY's sake! XP SP2 cuts out an even larger sweep, some due to its firewall and some due to sinply better design. Vista... a two way firewall, defaulting to non-admin privileges, all known previous holes closed before release, ASLR, Windows Defender integrated... sure, many trojans will still work, and some won't be stopped by the firewall or detected by Defender, but your statement is stoll completely inaccurate.
"It is not even recommended... without third-party security enhancements...": Leaving aside the fact that MS now has a first-party AV, this is simply a logical precaution for those people too foolish or ignorant to not open worm email attachments or download and run trojaned software. It also helps break up a software monoculture a bit, especially if you use one of the less-well-known variants. Or you could do what I did until I was invited to beta test Live OneCare for free (this was long ago, and it's still free. Uses far fewer resources than Norton as well) and just don't bother with AV. The fact that MS recommends their "Simple file sharing" doesn't mean I need to use that either!
"Many will tell you to run it only in a virtualizer": Bullshit. Some will tell you that. Far more will tell you to never use Linux because it doesn't support hardware very well. People will tell you any damn thing, but the vast, extreme majority of Windows installs are not virtualized. Also, you're once again confusing Vista, Windows in general, and every other OS for that matter (there are arguments for when each OS ought to be run virtually - for example, in some server environments).
"Microsoft will tell you to do that, it's what VirtualPC is for": I really hope you don't believe this, because I'm assuming you're human and I don't like to think any of us are that dumb. From MS's own
Were any of those last 4 installs Vista installs? If not, your comparison doesn't even count; even assuming the XP disc was SP2 it's Plug and Play drivers would be several years old. Feisty Fawn's are brand new.
My personal experience (Video): Vista has always autodetected my video card (and loaded WDDM drivers, no less - full Aero OOB experience) since the RC2 days. A Knoppix disk from the same era recognized that the card was an nVidia but nothing beyond that, so it ran in 1024x768 (which looks horrible on a high-res widescreen) and wouldn't go higher without manually editing xorg.conf (very irritating hen I just want to demo Linux for somebody or fix a minor problem). Newer (last 6 months) versions of Knoppix work correctly, and openSuse 10.2 also works flawlessly (I currently dual-boot).
Audio: Vista required downloading the driver from Windows Update, which it did automatically on first startup and had dound running BEFORE the first reboot. openSuse's sound played but the microphone didn't until I patched ALSA, and it stil has issues.
Network: Both Vista and openSuse worked correctly with both wired and WiFi (Intel Pro Wireless). Broadcom worked correctly on Windows but required rebooting once before it worked on openSuse (the BT daemon started, but the HID service - which I need for the bluetooth mouse - wouldn't connect).
Install time: Just the part that runs off the disc, Vista was faster than either openSuse or Mepis (from which Ubuntu's install method is derived). This is because Vista's installation is image based - more-or-less decompress a nearly complete system image onto the drive, then customize it slightly for things like the user name, localization settings, etc. It is also mostly unattended, unlike XP (or openSuse). I haven't installed Ubuntu 7.x though, and the last time I installed 6.x was on different hardware. I realize it's unfair to compar openSuse's installer to Ubuntu's, sicne they operate differently, but it's worth mentioning that after installation my openSuse system is already set up with almsot exactly the software I want (a few packages, mostly for things like nVidia's accelerated driver, must be added later) while Ubuntu, by comparison, doesn't even have a working build toolchain in its default install. Sudo apt-get blah-de-blah... suffice to say I don't like their standard package selection, so I need to add a lot of other stuff, and uninstall a lot as well if I want the disk space back and/or a reasonably concise application menu. Add in that YaST has a far better package manager than Synaptics and there is a very noticable difference. Of course, there's a lot more than the disc installation - Windows needs more software installed later - so overall it does take longer to get a fully functional system. The basic system install is incredibly fast, though.
Anybody who thinks installing Linux is easier than Windows hasn't tried Vista. YMMV, however.
As above, sorry for the OT.
The share size being specific to the hub makes sense, but IIRC UW only has one or two hubs - the get shut down occasionally but from what I've overheard there are only a couple options since external hubs are blocked. Avoiding being tagged for illegal uploads by using Linux imagaes was brilliant, but while I wouldn't call UW's user base "small" I know the admins did kick people frequently enough... usually for language though, I think; no idea how often they were blocked from the upload/download network.
I wouldn't call you a coward, though I have no idea how anybody could come to the conclusion that it's OK to download that which is not acceptable to upload... as a matter of scale I can certainly understand, but as a matter of what is considered morally or legally right I don't see the difference.