I know that these are your specific complaints against Windows, and that's fine, but I am going to piggyback on this to talk more generally since most of your complaints are fairly generic or can be generalized.

1. Windows has a terrible interface, both Windows 7 and 8 have ugly, inflexible displays.

"ugly" is in the eye of the beholder - frankly, I find KDE and Gnome to be ugly (especially the font rendering... shit, it's 2013, can't you figure out how to render fonts yet?) As far as flexibility, Windows is a lot more flexible that any Linux I've tried when it comes to multi-monitor setups without me having to muck with configs. And my settings don't randomly get lost.

2. Windows still doesn't have proper package management. Which leads to... 3. With Windows every app has its own update process that takes up resources and nag the user.

No doubt. It's a serious issue. However, can you imagine hell that everyone would raise if Microsoft wanted to offer such a service? They catch flak for almost everything they do.

4. Malware and adware is thick on Windows.

Windows 7 has made tremendous strides forward when it comes to security. I'm no Microsoft apologist, but when they try to improve things three things bite them in the ass: (a) backwards compatibility (aka "my Windows 95 program can't do X! Why doesn't it work, stupid Microsoft!"); (b) users who insist on running with elevated privileges. (c) complaints when good stuff gets implemented (such as PatchGuard, which antivirus vendors went crazy about).

5. Windows doesn't come bundled with common tools I use, such as a compiler, OpenSSH, productivity suite, etc.

And cars don't come bundled with gasoline. And houses don't come bundled with furniture. And groceries don't come bundled with chefs. You are seriously complaining because Windows doesn't come bundled with stuff? And wasn't bundling stuff what got Microsoft into trouble before?

9. Windows lacks containers/jails.

"The esoteric feature that I want is missing. It serves no practical purpose and isn't needed in the product's target market, but I want it. And it's not there. Why is it not there!?!?"

10. Windows lacks a good, advanced file system like ZFS.

NTFS is a pretty decent filesystem. It doesn't have flashy features and it's not hip, but it gets the job done, it's reliable and you know what... those are the two primary considerations for a filesystem. At least for most people.

11. Windows has poor driver support, requiring hardware be bundled with driver discs that take a long time to load and include apps that nag the user.

You're joking, right? Windows hardware support is excellent and it comes bundled with not only a boatload of drivers, but offers a way of automatically downloading and installing drivers for new devices. Don't blame Windows if some vendors don't want to allow Microsoft to ship drivers, or if their hardware requires a super-special driver to set a hardware register to the length of the lead hardware engineers penis before it will work. As for the driver discs, you'll find that they almost always bundled with crap - the vendor's "custom" scan toolkit, a copy of Acrobat, a manual in PDF form, etc.

12. I can't hack on the Windows source code.

Don't take this personally, but your programming skills almost certainly make that a good thing. And let's be realistic - for the overwhelming majority of computer users, the computer is an appliance. They don't need or want to know how it works. They just want it to work. So you can imagine how they feel about "hacking source code."

What's a gross underestimate is "reinstalling one machine per hour". Maybe if you're lucky and can do image-based deployments, where everything is already on the image and all you do is image it onto the drive. Then an hour per machine would be a realistic estimate.

But chances are they would have to install Windows separately on each machine, followed by the tedious process of downloading and waiting for update after update to install, then installing virus and security software, "productivity suites" and any other software that they need, each likely to have its own updates. Don't forget installing drivers for hardware, which may differ from machine to machine, setting up printers (local and network), mounting network shares, applying security policies, and so on and so forth.

So yeah... 1 machine per hour isn't a "gross overestimate". It's a gross understimate.

All they need is the funding to get the first of devices built - devices they plan on shipping as soon as they can assemble them. Look at the Kickstarter. Something tells me that the DUO will be more widely available before the LEAP, despite the "headstart" that LEAP has - they've been at this for how long now and all they have to show is a pretty webpage and a press onslaught in response to a Kickstarter project.

You can argue that the price of the DUO is high, but the DUO guys aren't funded by venture capitalists and are trying to put out an open solution with Creative Commons licensed components and drivers for Linux. The LEAP guys got a few million and spent a ton of money designing a fancy enclosure and have been limiting who can access the SDK. Perpahsp you like that sort of thing - fancy enclosures and limited access. But working hardware, that I can tweak is more important to me.

They aren't just making claims - a simpe look through their videos demostrates that the device has ridiculously low latency - check out this Youtube Video recorded at 240 frames per second and see how accurately the tracking is. As for hard numbers, I'm curious exactly what numbers you're looking for? What units would such accuracy numbers be reported in? I tried a LEAP first hand, and it doesn't seem nearly as fast or as precise.

Amen to that. That's why I'm excited about the DUO. Even at $110 it's a great deal if you look at the specs of the hardware, the capabilities it has and what their software does according to the video highlights (their tracking of a hand through a 180 degree turn is very impressive). I don't get why LEAP is restricting their SDK and limiting who can be a developer and what people can use the device for.

I'll say it before and I'll say it again, if we as members of a community that values open-source projects (whether it be open hardware or open software) want to have more open source projects then we should back the projects we have now. That's why I contributed to the DUO and that's why I think you should too, on Kickstarter.

Right... so why not support the DUO instead, which is a solution that promises to be open, so you can take the hardware and the driver and modify them and then playing with OpenCV? And by the way, since you mentioned OpenCV: from the looks of it, the guys behind the DUO seem to have a long history of contributing to that project too - have the guys behind LEAP done the same?

It their driver open source, or is it going to be more binary blobs ala nvidia for me to link into my kernel?

Even if they do have Linux support, will it be open, or will it still more proprietary stuff? And haven't we heard this tune before anyways? An upstart (in this case, the duo) appears, and all of a sudden these guys that have been sitting pretty with their thumb out of view somewhere make a lot of noise about "hundreds of thousands of preorders"... yeah, well... preorders are fine and dandy, but when do we see the product? Those other guys seem to have everything ready to go and I'm going to vote with my dollars on kickstarter.

The DUO is pretty sleek and seems to have extremely high accuracy while tracking. Disclosure: I contributed to their kickstarter.

In my defense, I don't think the summary is misrepresenting because of any fault of my own - I more or less quoted the actual article.

That's not to say that the article isn't misrepresenting the situation. Someone else here already pointed out that mega de-duped submissions, and that they may have continued making the files available. This would make the subsequent action taken by the FBI "reasonable" (in the sense that they didn't force them to retain something only to then legally pursue them for complying and retaining it).

"If the program dynamically links the plug-in [...] they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plugin.".

To understand just how nonsensical this position is, let's flip things around a bit: You distrubute a program you wrote, let's call it coolprog. It's free, but released under a proprietary license that allows arbitrary redistrubition.

A year later, I begin work on implementing a glibc replacement completely from scratch. I code furiously for a weekend, fueled by copious amounts of Shasta and an all-Rush mixtape, and finally release my new masterpience: an ABI compatible glibc replacement. I license it to the world under the GPL. Next, I download a copy of your program, package it up with a copy of my library and a script to launch it, and release it. Per your license, this is perfectly fine: after all, you allow redistribution.

Except, one of the things my script does is to use LD_PRELOAD to force-load my glibc-replacement, which, if you will remember, I have released under GPL, instead of the standard LGPL version. One person downloads my release and proceeds to run it. Your program now gets dynamically linked with my GPL'd glibc replacement. And now what?

Under the "if the program dynamically links the plug-in [...] they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plugin." interpretation of the FSF, your program has linked against my GPL work and, therefore, is a derived work... Right?

This is just one small example of why the "linking creates a new derived work" notion is bullshit..

I specifically quoted OPs statement about Explorer, a core Windows component, and Adobe, a popular, non-Microsoft program, and was responding to that. I don't know if various Office programs exhibit this behavior, but if they do, the people at Microsoft responsible should be blamed. But not the people at some unrelated division.

The point was that this isn't something inherent to the design of Windows. It was something that was caused by the choice of flags used by the programmers when calling the Windows API. With that said, there's a legitimate issue in renaming under Windows, caused by the operating system itself, but it doesn't involve files; it involves directories: you cannot rename a directory if a file inside that directory is open.

Oh look, I can't rename that file in Explorer until I close the file in Word (repeat for any other program and file). [...] Hell, I can't even rename a PDF file that I happen to simultaneously have open in Adobe Reader, and it's read-only!

Don't blame Windows for that. Blame the programmers who coded the app in which you opened the file. Because they are the ones who called CreateFile to open the file, and set the share mode to either 0 (which means that nobody else can open the file) or to FILE_SHARE_READ (which means others can only open the file to read its contents). If they had set the share mode to FILE_SHARE_DELETE in one API, you could delete and rename the file to your heart's content!

But I guess it's just easier to just blame Microsoft.

TNG certainly showcased a tablet like device (the "PADD") in most of the shows.