Of how old I am at the same time as reminiscing about every crashed Operating System experience Iâ(TM)ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing.

So, the truth here is also non-binary. This is so meta!

Cowboy Neal needs no phone

Yeh! Nice reply. Careful though. That guy was just a troll. Keep up the good work.

Still, it's just one pixel on a map. I am so glad to see progress in the area of battery chemistry that I am making my first post here in years. Slashdot is returning to its roots, by making stories that are meaningfull get posted. It is so exciting to see electric powered everything from houses, to cars, to skateboards, not to mention all of our personal embedded systems devices. Soon, I'll be able to look at my watch and read a report about my health just as regularly as I check the weather forecast... Partly snotty and a chance of cholesterol this week.

I for one welcome my all in one pc overlords.

Your comment about keeping a spare plane is ridiculous. There is no way even to conceivable have a 2 percent spare in the current market because there is maybe 3 flights per day to a location. To have a spare would be like leaving 30 percent of your capacity unused. This means hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue (every day) for the airline inside a market space with very thin margins already. Not to mention that these jets are hundreds of millions of dollars to buy. It's not like an extra bus, taxi, train trip. Those are cheap vehicles with many more repeated trips daily. It's important to think things through before you comment. There are a lot of impressionable minds that look up to people that use numbers to inflate the meaning of their statements. I'm sure that's not what you intended. So, just help us out and be careful. Thanks for the post though. It definitely leads in the right direction. Maybe there is something that the airline can do to cover the problem... such as not booking all of their flights beyond capacity every trip.

Where's the proof? Your evidence is just as lacking as any govt official's.

I'm a Linux user myself, and I have installed both on many desktops. (A couple dozen linux, and 1000s of windows) I've never run into a problem that I couldn't solve on either system. I have to say though that it takes on averaage 70% (number I just made up based on my own usage) longer to solve a problem on Linux because it is basically that much harder to do, whether due to out of date documentation, rtfm culture, hacker elite mentality, or just stupid UI design... sometimes meaning no UI at all except for a command line. I usually try not to feed a troll, especially one that uninformed people seem to be applauding as insightful. IMHO I have to point out that XP may have its share of problems, but it has a lot of drivers out of the box or downloadable and they are easy to install. Basically good install is a strength, and one Linux could well continue to try and learn from. XP, Vista, 2k, 2k3, 2k8, 7 are very easy to install on the average. There are also some Linux versions that are easy to install. I like those too. But if you want good performance out of Linux you need to go the extra mile. Linux comes out of the box performing crappy usually. Windows comes out of the box performing good. I like Linux because I don't mind tweaking and recompiling until I get the excellent performance potentail that I deserve. I like windows because sometimes I don't want the hassle of tweaking and recompiling everything.

I can't wait to see a Beowolf cluster of one of these... oh wait...
Sorry.

Couldn't help it.

Your Question: Why is virus fighting software so sucky?

The reason is that viruses are plentiful and always changing or mutating if you will. This is difficult to combat with one software package.

This makes for a moving target that can only be hit as an after thought, sort of like a vaccine developed for a real virus after it has been around for a while.

There are several layers to security. Different attacks need to be filtered out at different layers. Each scan takes time and adds to the suckiness of the virus fighting software. Especially given that most stuff is not virus related.

• Point of entry.
• Input
• Processing Execution
• Output
• Point of exit

I wish I had some more time to go into it now, but sadly I have too much to do right now. Just compare it to your own home security and look for the ways to break through it and you'll get some more insight that way. Think about how much easier it is to bypass security efforts such as strong doors by going through a whole in the wall, etc.

Maybe the drivers just sucked. Remember that these were basically new embedded hardware systems and that some embedded systems engineer who usually gets paid big bucks because he has like 20 years of experience in the area had to have enough free time and desire to develop some free open drivers as a hobby for a month or so for there even to be drivers for the system at all. Given all that, and given that new hardware tends to have crappy drivers just because new hardware usually has machine level defects in it, maybe you can see the problems here. Now compare that to Microsoft. Why are their drivers good. They were made by real engineers and not by really smart teenagers with a hobby obsession. (There's nothing inherently wrong with this. It's just not as good.) Real engineers and a real lab bench means that hardware level defects can be worked around more robustly. This also leads to some code bloat that few people comprehend. I personally enjoy graceful systems that have a clean code base and a symmetry to be admired in the design. All my projects start that way. Then shit happens as is always the case. Sometimes bad shit that means I should start over. But from business perspective... that would usually take too much time or money.

The bright side is that the more experience that I gain, the better the chances are that my original design had fewer errors in it, and the better its chances of turing out closer to the vision.

Anyway, I'm just trying to add some clarity and bring in a human factor to the discussion. There are feelings and issues that almost always boil down to less than a handful of people's motives and desires that produce a given result.

While wikipedia is good, you are wrong about the meaningfulness of its content relative to good reference material that has been correctly organized and available in a printed tome of work. Wikipedia might one day provide this level of information by they are not even close to that goal today. The "C Programming Language" by K & R is small compact and inclusive of much valuable information. It takes me about 40 minutes to read it cover to cover. It takes me about 2 or 3 hours across several references to find that same material online. The main difference is the internet is a mish-mash of information with no real organization. Knowledge is basically organized information and is typically represented in books. When there are more online books, I'll be satisfied.

By the way, I'm a computer professional and not some idiot that barely knows how to use the internet. I've written webservers and email servers and basically done more technical crap than 99 percent of the people on this forum.

So, feel free to have whatever opinions that you want about this subject and my post, but also be conscience that I'm not speaking from a mal-informed perspective.

I was thinking about posting my war stories here, but after reading this I realize that I'm not in the same realm as some. Sorry, for your loss.