...you need to start with the haystack.

I agree, he deserves the prize. He stopped Sarah Palin from becoming vice president.

The amount of damage at home and abroad that woman could have done with that much power is frightening. The rest of the world breathed a sigh of relief when Obama won the election.

There's a 4th category: People who are happy to install drivers, but expect them to work.

I've recently been trying to get a Broadcom NIC working on a Red Hat 5 installation. It didn't work out of the box - fine, I'm happy with that. Windows didn't recognise it either. But when I got the Windows driver on that system, it "just worked." After downloading and compiling about 4 different versions of the Linux driver, all of which claimed to support my kernel version, the only one that actually gave me an eth0 in my ifconfig listing would hard lock the system as soon as I tried to ping anything on my LAN.

Linux is not ready for prime time.

/facepalm

If you have to ask, you'll never know.

Seriously. After so many, many, many years of of "Linux desktop" development...

So, multiply number of potential problems by number of available distros all reimplementing essentially the same thing.

Yay for choice!

Funny you should mention the "pre-[Windows]95 command prompt" actually. Until I started using Linux a couple of years ago, that was the last time I'd ever needed to use a command prompt for anything. Says a lot about Linux IMO.

Citing problems with one system does not justify or excuse problems with another.

Do better.

Viruses/trojans run with regular user permissions wouldn't need a password to do malicious things with users' data. As a home desktop user, I couldn't give a flying fuck if a virus wiped out /bin, it's my personal data that I care about.

No, you whip up a little script. The kinds of user casual desktop user targeted by Vista and OSX does not. Perhaps if there were lots of little good quality easy to find/install/use apps for Linux, it would take off more. Like the iPhone app store, but repo based and free. Want a program to rotate all your images? There's an app for that. And you don't need to touch the command line to do it.

No that question is relevant. First you assert "he" (Bill Gates) is personally responsible for the for installing these apps (presumably you think he designed and coded them all himself too). Then you go on to say that actually it doesn't matter, lets bash Bill anyway.

I don't approve of invasion of privacy or illegal business practices any more than you do, and I agree with the principal that software should not be designed to spy on people. But if you actually read TFA you might have noticed it didn't have a great deal to do with any of that. What I take issue with is that you, like so many Slashdotters, take any article remotely linked to Microsoft/Gates as an opportunity to spin a cheap swipe at them. They guy is trying to get businesses engaged in projects that help the poor in ways that are mutually beneficial, hence sustainable. Yes it's idealistic, and he's not the first person to have such ideas, but it's good that someone as high profile as him is saying these things. I think it's pretty lame that people like you just take this as an opportunity to dig up past mistakes, pet peeves and post some off-topic rant on why you hate Bill.