I find these glowing reviews of Windows 7 to be, on the whole, quite humorous. After all, this is a continuation of the decades old MS tradition of tailoring software to maximize the demo impact. Specifically, a users first 5-15 minutes is the most important. First impressions and all that rot.

Eye candy certainly plays a part in this, but it's more the subtle hint that the software can do "a lot more than your seeing" that's important. After all, when it comes to software marketing, implied functionality is far more important than actual functionality.

But at the end of the day, what are we really looking at. It looks nicer! For most users, that's about it.

Not to detract from their success. This is a serious psychological coup to pull off.

A bigger issue is a desktop misbehaving because memory is being slurped up (ie. 1Gig) by pulseaudio, even when we're not explicitly using sound! For example, Firefox pauses all the time, OpenOffice takes forever to startup, etc, etc.

It's this collateral disruption that has many hot under the collar.

Gee, an article from canada.com that's Canada centric. Who'd of thought!

What? Where did you get that. I think you need to check your facts.
From the wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser

>Schmeiser's principal defence at trial was that as he had not applied >Roundup herbicide to his canola he had not used the invention. This >argument was rejected;

The main reason for defection: Linux is too complicated.

Too complicated to install and upgrade.
Too complicated to download new apps for.
and worst of all, too complicated to
to develop and maintain applications.

Seriously! I too have experienced this screen
resolution snafu. But the real problem here is
I really can't fix it because
too much of Linux is hard coded C or C++
to Gnome/KDE/Xfce/whatever. For a dynamic system
(like Linux) this really just ends replacing the
dependancy to proprietary vendors with a dependancy
on Linux distribution providers.

 

Another big problem with Rogers is that casual
users are coerced into paying ~$40/mo, even if
they make no calls. If you do make calls,
"additional charges" just seem to appear
and the liability is scary.

Oh sure Pay-As-You go is offered, however:

  - You pay .40 per minute.
  - Top-ups typically expire after 30 days
  - No way can you setup auto topping-up
  - Top-up via the web fails 9 out of 10 times

Partial workarounds can sometimes be found,
but most users give up and just pay the cell tax.

BTW: I switch to 7-11 speakout (which is over Rogers GSM)
and pay .20 per minute, where all topups last a year.

All the above is true. However, it ignores one factor: inertia. Non-MS solutions must also counter the inertia of the widespread conventional wisdom of the MS way is the only way.

As a long time system admin of mission critical HA systems, the most difficult problems I've encoutered were associated with making critcal OS config changes without rebooting. Then 6 months later when the system did reboot, it wouldn't come back. Worse, by then no one could remember what had been changed. So finding the cause of this was usually a bitch. The lesson: always reboot after any change significant system change. And don't make system changes unless you are willing to reboot. Sure, Ksplice may be making well controlled changes, but it can be very difficult to guarantee this won't happen.

Isn't the length/stength issue more significant? After all, if we could jerk a 100k ribbon safely, why wouldn't we just make a 200k loop like a conveyer belt.

The consequense of a 'loses files once in a while' becomes surreal when Rieserfs's was used with Mythtv. With files several meg each, after a month or so half the disk is gone...