Microsoft products got where they are now on the back of tech folks copying them and using them at home. Those tech folks then took to helping friends and family by installing those same products for them. Nowadays, as MS becomes better and better at locking down their products with DRM and more and more tech folk start coming to grips with linux you will find that this will eventually trickle down to the non tech users.

Personally, I sick and tired of fixing malware infestations for my relatives. These days I just stick dual boot ubuntu on their PC's, show them how it works and tell them they can use the non infested ubuntu or their old broken Windows. It's their choice. So far most people are quite happy as long as they don't want to run games, which mostly they don't.

Most of them just want to browse the web, send emails and write simple documents and you don't need windows for that.
 

" c) Set download caps- [...] Personally, I'll gladly take c."

Spoken like someone who hasn't had the "thrill" of surfing the net and wondering at every click "golly, I hope this will be worth the download" only to discover you have just streamed 150Mb of utter crap which you will never get back again.

You'd be surprised how crappy the Internet gets when you start having to micromanage every little thing you do just to conserve your bandwidth.

I have to resort to downloading ubuntu updates at work and then fucking sneaker-netting them on a USB key just to save on downloading bits.

You can forget streaming MP3's from my home server to my girlfriends place over the net like any self respecting geek would do. No, we can't do that because arsehole ISP's don't know how to run their businesses properly and have oversubscribed their networks in the rush to snare more customers than the competition using lies and obfuscation about the services they can provide to said customers.

And what point is there in having a blistering fast ADSL2 connection that is capable of filling your monthly download quota in an afternoon session?

I mean FFS, this is the 21st century and we are talking about just shifting bits around here. How fucking hard can that be?

Today we have networking tech available to us that was not even imaginable by past generations yet I'm still operating like its the goddamn 1980's and shifting crap around in my pocket on the modern day equivalent of a floppy disk.

What the fuck is up with that?

Can you imagine paying for cable TV and being sold "157 Channels" but discovering later that you can only watch 4 programs a week or else you have to pay for the "extra content". Nope, nobody would go for that because it is a retarded idea. Yet we are letting ISP's get away with it. Why is that?

ISP's should sell download speeds. The fatter your pipe the more you pay. Period.

Other than that you should be able to do whatever you damn well like with that pipe. Anything less is downright con artistry and smoke 'n' mirrors marketing bullshit.

Don't stand for it people.

"I actually think MS is changing"

I actually think you are quite wrong. Didn't they just recently manage to bribe a standards body into ratifying their totally unimplementable document standard just so they could muddy the waters and try to fool people into thinking that MS cares about standards? Even though they themselves don't even have a working implementation of their own "standard"?

I hope most geeks have better memories than geekoid here for all our sakes.

Cool. Given that slashdot readership is quite high, then the 5% of 'dotters who apparently do care will come out to be quite a large number.

Solr_Flare must be quite chuffed with that.

Well, firstly, I would think that the users of those applications would think "godamm this app is slow, maybe I'll go look for an alternative"

Hmmm, I may be wrong but I'm sure I recall MS suing camera makers for using FAT in their cameras and that was thrown out of court.

This is more about the long filename hack rather than FAT itself.

I'm sure it will end with the same result tho

"UAC basically changed Windows so that you weren't expected to run as an administrator by default"

Not really. Users still effectively run as Administrator, it's just that now UAC pops up with (on average) 17 "are you sure you want to do that?" messages every time the user clicks on something.

"Personally, I'm looking forward to desktop file sharing and synchronization, as it will mean I can stop running all these FTP servers everywhere."

Uh, FTP servers? For desktop syncing? Have you not heard of rsync?

The mind boggles.

Ummm, will you have my babies?

"They used to release as they patched, but that was even more problematic"

Translation: Admins were sick and tired of rebooting servers on a daily basis.

Rather than do the impossible and redesign their OS from the ground up to make the constant rebooting issue irrelevant, they did the only thing possible wh

Clump all their updates into bundles so that reboots were "scheduled" and admins got used to the cycle.

Unfortunately, that is true.

I've been trying to get Matrox Dual Head running with dual Acer P191w LCD's for two days straight now and can't even get a single screen to work in anything but vesa low graphics mode @800x600.

Actually, that is not entirely true. I recently discovered that if I turn off framebuffer support I can get it to work at higher resolutions but still only in 4:3 aspect ratio. Unfortunately, without Frame Buffers things like video do not work.

The latest Ubuntu release comes with the newest iteration of xorg which does away with xorg.conf completely in favour of a "everything is automagically configured by the system and you can't change things" approach, which is fine if in fact the system can make things work properly.

In cases like mine however it just plain sucks. Ubuntu fails to configure X and for the life of me I can't find any documentation that describes where the stuff that used to be found in xorg.conf is now kept in an editable text format.

Maybe oneday when this new xorg system matures and everything does indeed "just works" the Linux experience will be improved, but right now I'm actually finding myself wishing that I could still hack about in xorg.conf when i want to.

Yeah, you often hear windows fanbois telling linux fanbois that Windows is just as good as Linux because they use server 2K8 and have none of the problems that linux fanbois are wont to point at and laugh.

What none of the windows fanbois seem to want to acknowledge is that;

a) They have paid at least several hundred dollars for a copy of win2k8 or

b) They are using a pirated copy that they stole from work or dl'ed from TPB

Personally, neither one of those options really appeal to me so I'll stick with Ubuntu I think

So Optarse are volunteering for the trial eh?

I couldn't ask for a better test case really. Those cretins are so goddamn incompetent that they have not a hope in hell of getting it working to an acceptable level.

Roll on the trial I say!

P.S. Yes, I realise the NTUSER.DAT is a problem for moving the profiles rather than My Doc's, I should have proof read my post before hitting submit

"Right click My Docs and see if you can't figure out how to do that on Windows."

Been there, done that. Once you reinstall you have to go through (every user) and reinstate those "non-standard" My Documents locations manually, all the while hoping that each NTUSER.DAT file doesn't spit the dummy because something has changed in the god-forsaken clusterfuck that is the registry that it doesn't like.

No thanks.

"if you want the profile you'll have to right click my computer and change some settings in Computer Management."

You have obviously never had to re-instate a Windows box with multiple user accounts. You make this process sound easy, whereas in reality it can be a huge pita, which multiplies by the number of accounts you have to do it for.

By contrast, on Linux, you have to do . . . ummm, nothing

"On a network there is something called group policy and active directory that lets you set this for the entire domain"

Yes, well, when you have a domain at your grandmothers house please get back to us, until then you are nothing but a tosser with an overpriced MS certification looking to justify your ill-advised training investment.