I agree entirely, there's even one point where I complain near constantly about windows where the article's author seems to consider a "feature"

No delayed loading of system services.

You know how you log into a GNU/Linux desktop of your choice and can immediately start using programs. You know how you log into windows (which takes the same amount of time to log into) and you click Firefox, Skype, and Thunderbird and have to wait a solid minute to minute and a half before any of them open?

How is this a shortcoming of Linux? This is clearly a flamebait article with no real substance.

If I'm handcuffed and driven to a police station against my will, you can just consider me arrested.

Here's a good definition of "arrest" http://dpi.wi.gov/tepdl/bgterms.html

What about the websites you look at for free which are ad supported? Wouldn't that same philosophy apply? Those sites are providing you with content in exchange for looking at their ads which pays their bandwidth, licensing, etc.

I wonder what the liability of the school would be if your cellphone came up missing...

I remember a friend showing up at my house with a box of 1.44" floppies in a shoebox telling me "You have to install this." It was Slackware for an old IBM 380XD which I'd had for about 6 months. After a weekend of Tequizas and using lycos to try to find answers to problems, we finally got it installed and running for the next 3 or 4 years before I updated to a newer version.

The earth has been everything from a frozen wasteland to a molten ball of superheated rock. If it wasn't for climate change, we wouldn't be on a hospitable planet, but in an unchanging sea of molten lava.

Not all salespeople lie. I worked for Radio Shack in San Antonio for a few years in my younger days. We were told to offer service plans to customers. If they didn't buy them, we just smiled and continued to ring their purchases up. The prices were a bit higher, so the margins had to be better, but we were honest and tried to be helpful to our customers and sell them what they needed as opposed to what would give us the best markup and commission.

The manager's theory was, if we make $20 (profit) off of a customer today and he never comes back, it misses out on the $100 we'll make on him in the next year by being sensitive to his needs.

Not all stores are out to screw the customer. But if you shop in a place with razor thin margins, be prepared to get cut in a few places. If you're interested in only getting the loss leader as cheaply as possible as opposed to what you really need though, caveat emptor.

I don't think it's laziness. This guy admittedly has been with windows since version 2.0. He has windows interface and doing things the windows way burned so deep into his skull that it would take a flamethrower and some napalm to remove it.

Imagine coming from windows and being used to windows updating just updating windows. Suddenly you click on something that updates every single piece of software on your entire computer. Imagine how scary that would seem to a windows user. I'd imagine it's much more complex for him, even using the gui, to update things that he doesn't understand like bind, tzconfig, or even allowing ubuntu to update his openoffice.

If windows update told me it had to update my firefox, I'd be more than a little leary. Coming from the windows world into linux and moving over to a completely different philosophy behind the word "update" would be hard enough.

Using apt (command line anything) is in an entirely different ballpark. Most windows users probably don't even know how to get to a command line, much less use it for anything useful. Trying to tell them to go to a command line interface to update their computer is even more alien than the computer updating all software at once.

It took microsoft years to teach people their interface and philosophy. Giving someone a cd and allowing them two weeks (referring to article) to learn an OS on their own is a ridiculous task. Imagine taking a clinical engineer from a hospital after 20 years of working on that equipment and putting him into a mechanical engineer in the aerospace field. Sure it's the same general job title "engineer" but they are vastly different jobs. Even though Linux and Windows are both OSs, they are vastly different in makeup, interface, philosophy, and interaction. Two weeks is hardly a primer.

Cellular phones don't last forever. Most prisons don't allow prisoners to have electrical appliances in their cells. Remove all electrical outlets inside the cells and let the cell phones die after a few hours of use.

It won't stop new ones from coming in, but it would damn sure have to increase the flow enough to cause a few more ripples.

Well, in WoW, you need a lot of gold to buy things like very fast mounts, land and air mounts. It takes months of farming and doing quests, or you can have a bot play for you 8 hours a day while you sleep.

For the people who can only play 2 or 3 hours a day at most, having your computer play for an additional 8 hours would be a huge help. Instead of farming, I spent most of my time in auction halls trying to buy low and sell high, but that really cut into the couple hours of play time I could put in every day.

WoW isn't a friendly game to the casual player. You're either addicted and play 10 hours a day, or you don't get far very quickly.

I'll just use fishing as an example.
30 second average to catch a fish
0-50 points in fishing, you get one per fish caught.
50-125 you get one per three fish caught
125 -250 you get one per five fish caught
250 - 375 you get one per ten fish caught

50 x 30 seconds = 25 minutes
75 x 30 sec x 3 avg = 112.5
75 x 30 sec x 5 avg = 187.5
125 x 30 sec x 10 avg = 625
950 minutes / 60 = 15.8 hours of fishing to level it.

So, on top of the regular playing that you do, you'd need to fish for 16 solid hours (not counting breaks or sleeping) in order to get it to max level... or what used to be when I was playing.

So, you can spend 2 nights of letting a bot fish while you sleep, or take 8 solid days of your play time leveling (grinding) something so you can get a higher level at it.

I'm sure my math is off, but you get the point.