>>>> OK. So remind me... who is it that wanted to be constantly nagged 
>>>> about the unused desktop icons? 
>>>
>>> You get offered once, and you click the box that says "stop asking."  
>>> It's only nagging if you can't read.
>>
>> So why does it ask me once a month?
> 
> I can only assume it's because you didn't turn it off. I got asked 
> exactly once.

On every PC I set up at work, it asks once, waits 30 seconds, asks 
again, and then goes away for a while. I don't know if it comes back 
after a month; I'm usually only there for the initial setup. But my PC 
had some does. (Interestingly, Vista seems to have fixed this bug...)

>> Windows is fundamentally based on the concept that only one person is 
>> using the PC.
> 
> Not really.  Maybe 15 years ago that was true, but not now.

Sure, they're slowly changing it. But it still does stuff like (for 
example) setting the first user as administrator so you can constantly 
run your PC in admin mode. But hey, piles and piles of old software 
fails to work unless you do this.

(To some extent I have sympathy with M$ here; before networks existed, 
"security" was a non-issue. If you want your computer to be secure, put 
it in a locked room. So the original insecure designs were appropriate. 
But now M$ can't really break backwards compatibility too horribly, 
which does somewhat limit what they can do with security - even if it is 
debatable how much they actually care...)

>>> People think getting some small number infected with malware is 
>>> preferable to spending 30x as much for the software.
>>
>> And I think that if I have to pay hundreds and hundreds of pounds for 
>> a mere operating system, it should at least work properly. But 
>> apparently that's just me...
> 
> I dunno. Why are you getting virus infections?

I'm not, but other people certainly are.

> Heck, I've seen more viruses on 8-bit machines than I've seen on Windows.

Interestingly, I've never seen a virus on an 8-bit machine. But then, 
I've seen few on Windows machines, to be honest. (In particular, I've 
never seen any of the Word macro viruses rumoured to exist.)

>> When Linux goes wrong, it's annoying. But given that I spent £0 on it, 
> 
> No, you didn't pay $0 for it. You simply didn't pay *cash* for it. Most 
> of the companies I worked for payed hundreds of thousands of dollars a 
> year to the people keeping the Linux systems running.

Sure, if you want to use it for serious work, it's going to cost you 
something. It always does. My actual *point* is that when something 
cheap breaks, it's annoying, but when something astronomically expensive 
breaks... it makes me very frustrated, to say the least.

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