Yes, they are two different things. But in the world of Windows, no one really cares that they are two things.

It's Windows. Period.

The real question is: does any other popular consumer OS need that level of support?

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If Microsoft did not mess up the "next version" as much as they have done, there wouldn't be the need to stick with a particular version for so long.

As an alternative case in point, my three Windows PCs tend to stay with a version until that version is no longer supported. While my single Macmini has had the OS upgraded to the newer version a few times, and all at no cost or bad experiences to me.

With the Macmini, the OS upgrade to the next version has been a fairly smooth experience, as opposed to a Windows OS upgrade to the next version which is more of a traumatic experience.

Maybe that is the cause to the need to have long support cycles for Windows OS versions?

Probably because Microsoft messed up the "next version" and people do not want to upgrade.

Outside of the enterprise world, is Microsoft really dominant on the desktop anymore?

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Anecdotally, it looks like Microsoft is losing its dominance in the consumer desktop world to Apple, i.e., Microsoft no longer enjoys the 90+% marketshare on the consumer desktops that it once had.

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Now, if I could also stop those &*()&(^%^ political calls.....

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What is so difficult about the FCC understanding that I do not want calls on my mobile from robocallers and/or telemarketers.

Your error occurred in the very first words of your post, "According to wikipedia..."

If they do (and that's a big if, as I'm not convinced they will), then I would expect the BSD maintainers to arrive at a better solution.

You're in a dwindling minority.

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It looks like Firefox started 2014 with a 26.9% market share, and ended 2014 with a 23.6% market share.

Yup, those Mozilla people must be doing something right.

Should be:

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Krauss describes how public acclaim is often uncorrelated to accomplishment and depends more on communication skills and personality traits.

Working as designed. The purpose of the installers is to get the secondary software installed, so why make it easy not to meet that goal?

OK, if it's working as designed, then let's call it a design bug instead of a coding bug.

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On my internal network, I used ntp as the ntp server for my house. I put "listen interface" in the ntp.conf file, and instructed it to listen only on the 10.1.1.1 interface. yet netstat showed that ntp was still listening on *:123. It's sloppy design and sloppy coding.

When I see things like that right in front of me, I am left to wonder about the quality of the code that I cannot see.