You don't need that, just go ahead and do not allow them to mount external drives by not putting them in a group (name of group is distribution-dependent), easy, right?

I disagree with all of you, the issue is not so much standards, but using a monopoly to force feed a browser, Apple does not have a monopoly, with their 8% of the computer market. If they ever reach 50%, then I agree, they should have alternative browsers in their OS. Until then, it does not really matter ... The thing with Media Player is that what MS was trying to do is kill MP3 and force-feed us WMA. The goal? modify wma once monopoly was reached so that alternate software cannot run it flawlessly or use patents to rid alternate software... Rockoon, please think before you type! The E.U. do not just pick on some company at will, they are pretty thick, but until now I have not seen them pick on a company unfairly....

The c:\Document and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures issue has been fixed in Vista, they were "inspired" by Apple. SP2 took care of hiding the Windows updates in the "Add/remove crapware" control. So that is fixed as well ... The registry is not fixed, though. ;-) The ms.com issues are far from fixed ... still bloated crap... I'll stick with Solaris ...

You do not get the point! If my daughter Emma (6 years) wants the latest tuxpaint, why can't she just install it into her home directory? Seriously, that is possible if you download the sources or the tgz and compile/expand, but apt should be able to do that,right? This has been the 'usual' way of installing software for 20+ years on Unix ... come on debian, you can do it, yes you can! Of course I do not want my 6 year old daughter installing stuff into /usr, doh!, But into her home directory, why not???? Maybe she fucks up her home dir, ok ... I have to fix it then, but still she should be able to install whatever she wants in her home ... where is the problem? Unlike on windows, on linux/unix installing elsewhere works great!

I use ubuntu, but why do you need admin rights to install software???? Should you not be able to do 'apt-get install' and it actually installs it into your home directory? You see, ubuntu/debian is flawed as well! I think the worst, though is why do you need admin rights to search for software????? That is cretin! 'apt-cache search' does not work under an unprivileged account ... as much as I hate windows and love linux, this is bad ... in OSX, easy, drag the application into you ~/Applications directory .... We have a lot to learn from MacOS X! PS: When I compile and it's only forme, I usually put into my ~/bin

I think this patent stuff is all just FUD, I mean seriously, imagine for one second that M$ had the magic patent that covers this or that GNU/linux technology, they would have brought that up long time ago, why wait ... they have been fealing the GNU/linux pain for years now?
I find it pretty weird as well, that the banks all of a sudden put a lot of pressure on Novell, saying they would have to pay all their loans back, 'just because' Novell, like many other Tech companies, was late in submitting their finacial results .... this sounds real fishy to me. I am not usually a conspiracy theorist, but this is weird!
Well, I guess Novell will die soon ... in 2 years time, Novell will be dead!
How many times must we partner with MS, until we all see that it's suicide?
The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind!
IBM(DOS), Apple(gui), IBM(OS2), Sybase(SQL Server), SGI(OpenGL) ..... Novell(Suse)