Thus marking the first time Slashdot has posted a breaking news story. ;)

The RIAA's actions continue to provide amusement for me. But it's all increasingly irrelevant in my life. Just like when I watch a DVD at someone else's place and I realize there's all kinds of wanings against copying and commercials at the beginning. At home, I just use VLC and immediatelly get the main menus.

The RIAA has to face the court of public opinion eventually. I think the Amazon.com MP3 store and iTunes show what remarkable success DRM-free music can have online. Unfortunately for the RIAA, so do Jamendo and Magnatunes....

No, SFTP is the SSH File Transfer Protocol and has nothing to do with FTP. If you like scp, you'll love SFTP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSH_file_transfer_protocol

Frankly, the ease of transferring files back and forth is really one of the things I miss most when using other operating systems.

Not really, since if you can log in via SSH, there's an SSH server on the other side. :)

fish:// is great because you don't need SSH, it'll work over rlogin sessions, too, which is excellent. I didn't remember about this one. Thanks!

That's one of my favorite features, too. In Nautilus, just type 'sftp://SOMEADDRESS' and you're all set.

Ah! I believe that Ubuntu's (and so Debian's) update is fantastically better, but mainly in that they cover the entire distro (and any third-party repos that you explicitly enable), whereas Windows's updates only cover the OS.

But since it's "Windows Update", that's fitting enough. The article claimed Windows didn't have an automatic update feature, which I found absurd. Ignoring scope, I also felt that they're extremely similar (although I spent two hours last night trying to play a fullscreen game while fighting 15-minute Windows update reboot reminders--that's a feature I don't miss in Ubuntu).

When I said that Windows' update feature "rivaled" Ubuntu's, I meant that it was similar enough to merit a comparison, not that one was better than the other.

You claimed that my assertion that Windows offers automatic updates was wrong. You talked about what Ubuntu and Debian are capable of, but you did not seem to explain why you felt my assertion is wrong.

I am not challenging you to a game of semantics, I am genuinely interested in your opinion.

I am curious. Windows offers automatic updates and the default if you click through is to enable them.

Ubuntu and Debian offer automatic updates but it is not default and you have to either set a crontab or in Ubuntu dig under the Updates tab in System > Administration > Software Sources.

In what manner is this substantially different?

As I said, there is no match in scope, but that is a limitation of proprietary software.

But for OS components--and Microsoft considers IE such--the automatic updates feature is on par with anything offered by the leading Linux distros. And by default it is completely automatic.

I don't believe that Windows' update system is anywhere near as nice as Ubuntu's, but that's not really the point. Microsoft has tried to make it as painless as possible to have critical updates applied to a system. You are free not to trust them (I check every update from Microsoft as well), but that wasn't really the point. The article summary said that Windows didn't have an update feature, and this is simply not true.

Internet Explorer may not have an auto-update system, but Microsoft Windows has an update system rivaling that of Ubuntu and OS X in automaticness, if not scale.

Since Windows encourages users to allow automatic updates installed at 3am every morning and also by default installs any pending critical updates at system power down, it doesn't seem like any supported version of Internet Explorer should remain unpatched for too long.