elfs | *Snort* *Chuckle* *Guffaw*

"I shut down my Tablet PC most evenings and start it up from a fresh boot. Why do I do that? Because I've been using computers for 20 years and have learned that's the best way to work." - MS Blogger Robert Scoble, explaining why he loses valuable time every day dealing with a bug in his employer's software.

Holy Toledo, if I reboot my laptop it's a seismic event. A properly built operating system should never require a reboot for software-based reasons. Scoble defends his position arguing that crafting, certifying and deploying a single change, like the one needed to replace tabtip.exe, the program at fault here, is "hard".

Isn't that what your customers pay you for? Aren't your repeated growth in earnings over the past sixteen quarters there precisely because MicroSoft can do the "hard" things?

A security flaw was found in emacs yesterday. Emacs is my editor, word processor, news reader, and LJ posting engine (among many, many other things). The patch fixing it is already installed; I saw it and approved it this morning. Linux users can do the hard things, because they've made it easy to do the hard things. From what I've seen, Mac OSX users are getting similar benenfits.