Featured Comments: Week of 2010 November 21

I want to apologize for not having posted this yesterday as usual. I was traveling back to college (more on that in an upcoming post) and didn't have computer access all day.
There were quite a few comments on posts this week, so I won't repost all of them.

Adafruit Bears Fruit for Microsoft

In response to my question about why Microsoft seemed so defensive, an anonymous reader had this to say: "Because Microsoft stir hackers' defiance whenever they say they have protected their products. For Microsoft, it was just saying "I challenge you to hack my ultra-securized device", and some hackers successfully took in the challenge. the Microsoft PR guys are just brilliant, they just took advantage of the company's reputation and the situation actually did beget creativity, the sort of creativity that will eventually benefit the Redmond-based behemoth."
Another anonymous commenter counters this: "Why do you think the developer at Microsoft who claimed that it would be easy to hack really telling the truth? I think it is just a post-construction when they realized that it was impossible to stop. And then everything is back to normal again, MS is and will remain evil :-)"
Another anonymous reader thinks it's because of sheer ignorance on Microsoft's part: "The data format was not "ultrasecurized" at all. They didn't know what was going on they just heard "kinect hacking" and gave a generic response which applied to a physical type hacking, with soldering and all. This was not a physical hack but a reverse engineering of the data format."

Ubuntu to Become a Rolling Release Distribution

In response to the update about the news being not-quite-true, reader T_Beermonster wrote, "I think that's a shame that they back-pedalled. Since I went rolling release with aptosid I don't think I'd be willing to go back to a step-change release model. I can see why it may be easier to sell support contracts for a step-release model but I don't think it actually offers any benefit to a desktop user."

Linux Mint: Good for Low-Requirement and Paranoid Users

Reader Arjun Krishna had this to say about it: "Windows is one of the worst OSes I have ever had. Linux Mint 10 "Julia" is definitely one of the most stable and user-friendly Operating systems in the world! Open SUSE is also a good alternative to Linux Mint, in case the system is older, and has less RAM. In any case, any Unix based OS would be much better to work with than a Windows based OS."
Also, commenter herbalfroot wrote, " Everyone for whom I have installed *buntu and mint have nothing but praise for the desktop they now have. These include non-technical users. I roll my eyes to the sky whenever I hear 'Linux is too difficult for the average user'."

Thanks to everyone who commented this week. Unfortunately, for the next two and a half weeks, I'll be quite busy, so don't expect to see a whole lot of new posts. In any case, as always, if you like what I write, please subscribe!