On 10/8/2011 14:21, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sat, 08 Oct 2011 09:42:26 -0700, Darren New wrote:
>
>> On 10/8/2011 5:40, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> It's hard to understand why people have trouble affording a single hard
>>> drive when you buy in such bulk quantities.
>>
>> And remember that you're not really their big customer. When 85% of your
>> sales go to the OEMs, worrying about whether this one guy can afford to
>> upgrade his disk doesn't really make sense. Especially since if you
>> can't afford a $50 disk, you can't afford a $200 OS. :-)
>
> That's certainly true.  But chances are if you bought the machine,
> Windows was included.

That's kind of my point exactly. :-)

> is kinda disingenuous.

I don't know "disingenuous" is the word I'd use, but sure. There are 
benefits to having one entity saying "here, it's solved, do it this way." 
There are problems with that too, when you want to do it a different way.

>>> upgraded to each incremental pre-release alpha, beta, and release
>>> candidate on several of their internal servers.
>>
>> I can imagine that would screw stuff up. Most people don't design
>> upgrades to deal with every intermediate release of the software.
>
> The guys at Microsoft I talked to (this was back in 2002/2003) said it
> was a complete nightmare.

Sure. But "the guy who installs every pre-release version over top of the 
previous pre-release version" isn't the target audience. It's much more 
efficient to design an upgrade to replace the previous production system 
than to design an upgrade to replace every previous version of every 
unreleased upgrade.

> It is perhaps more common in Linux than it should be, though.

I'm saying it's because it hurts Linux less. You don't actually lose sales 
due to having your software pull in too many prerequisites. As opposed to 
(for example) having to distribute on a DVD rather than a CD if you are 
close to the edge. (Of course, much more worrisome with downloads or with 
floppies or other low-capacity media.)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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