Well he is getting paid overtime to fix the bug. Some would say that's a plus. :P

Having worked for startups, I can guarrantee that we never hired people for the personnel department let alone first. A small company is not going to waste it's resources on people who are not contributing directly to the growth of the company. They hire people to design and sell their products first not HR personnel. HR departments do not come along until a company has move well past the startup stage.

TIVO can call it anything they want. They still can't make you buy their service just because you own their hardware.

Like Blaster was the only worm that Windows has seen in the past 5 years. How about Conficker? That affected SP2 machines.

And how many people are going to know how to slipstream a windows install? I know IT people who have no clue how to do it.

Yeah well run RedHat EL and you won't have those problems. Most new applications can be compiled for older distributions though sometimes it requires upgrading Libraries as well but that happens on Windows too. As long as you are running a currently supported version of a distro, you can most likely find a repository with an rpm or deb for your new app along with any libraries and perl packages it might require.

As for sound, well RHEL and Centos 5.4 are running alsa with some oss support for legacy apps. Which has pretty much been the standard for a while now. Now I will grant you that sound on linux needs work but that looks to be coming with OSS 4. OSS 4 isn't mainstream yet but it's getting rave reviews so it shouldn't be long before it becomes the standard.

Maybe I shouldn't respond because you are obviously clueless but anyway. Most consumer routers run Linux, Unix or Maybe Qnx so the percentage is way higher.

The issue is that viruses on Linux, Unix and OS X are less destructive because they can only effect the individual user account unless they are able to first infect the user account and then escalate their priviledges to root.

This is, at best, insignificant semantics. What, exactly, do you think the average piece of malicious code needs elevated privileges for ?

Without elevated privileges all the virus is going to do is mess up the user account it was installed in. And that should be backed up.

I am pretty sure it was XP with Service Pack 2 that got owned. SP2 is not a replacement for a good firewall. Windows is just plain crap.

There are root kit scanners for Linux. Most wise administrators run them periodically to search for root kits.

That's baloney. I have installed Windows XP without a proper firewall and before you can finished updating the system to the newest patches, the system will be infected. The only way to properly secure a new install is to put on all the patches before putting the machine on the net. I have no such problems with Linux.

Umm, Linux is the most popular OS for web servers so I would dare say it's popular enough. The issue is that viruses on Linux, Unix and OS X are less destructive because they can only effect the individual user account unless they are able to first infect the user account and then escalate their priviledges to root. With that said Linux/Unix tends to be infected more by worms than viruses. Worms being self propagating software that affects services offered by the OS such as dns, http, ftp, smtp, irc, ssh, etc. As such most desktop Linux boxes do not need to offer these services because they are not servers and thus can be secured even more than a Linux server.
   

When did you install? 5 years ago? While there are still Windows only hardware devices around, it's easy to build a system that is Linux compatible. I even have a Nforce board that has had full Linux support for years and yet isn't fully supported in Vista and I assume Windows 7 too. In fact if you consider the hardware that Windows Vista/7 has dropped support for and the lower system requirements of Linux, a case could be made that Linux has better hardware support now.

How recently? I recently re-installed windows on several HP systems with only the stickers and they passed the WGA no problem. With a couple, I did need to call in with but I had no problem getting them validated. Just told them I was reinstalling which was the truth. I am guessing with those someone copied the license key from work used it at home.

I am sure I read when they announced that the free upgrade doesn't include shipping. Also the Vista upgrade, I got with my laptop didn't include shipping. Maybe the manufacturers and sales reps aren't being clear, I don't know. I do know when I was talking to my sister about free upgrade when she purchased her new computer, I definitely told her she would need to pay the shipping.