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If you claim some market share and even CNET which is known to be best friend of MS doesn't buy it and even laughs to it, it is time to re-consider your business.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10258576-2.html

IMHO you better go call MS, they may have some job for you.

No mention to the Zeebo console being tested in Brazil.
Zeebo is a download only console, meant for 3rd world countries (where pirating is high).
Though in my opinion it is a bit expensive (US$250, which is more than the monthly minimum wage in Brazil). If they don't make the games really inexpensive, it will fail miserably. Another missing feature is browsing the internet.
You can learn more about it here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10252999-17.html

that one is easy. http://news.cnet.com/terrafugias-flying-car-makes-maiden-voyage/

Actually yes...at least on the phone thing, most everywhere taxes phone service. At least, according to any bill I've ever had for a phone, landline or cell.

But these taxes are typically allocated to:

• government services provided via phone (such as 911)
• communication services for everyone
• the Spanish-American War
• general funds for state & local governments

don't think Mozilla would have the ressources to do it

In all probability, Mozilla is the best funded Open source project ever!

Hello,

Here is a list of data recovery programs I have put together. Some of them may be a little old, for floppies or optical media only, but should still be useful. Unless otherwise noted, they are all for Microsoft Windows.

A-FF Labs - NTFS Undelete and Partition Find and Mount
Access Data - FTK Imager
Acronis - RecoveryExpert
Advanced NTFS Recovery - NTFS Recovery (may handle FAT32 as well)
bitMART - Restorer Ultimate
Brant, Dmitry - DiskDigger
BriggSoft - Directory Snoop
CGSecurity - TeskDisk and PhotoRec
Convar - PC Inspector File Recovery
Digital Assembly - Adroit Photo Recovery (pictures only)
DiskInternals - NTFS Recovery
DIY Data Recovery - iRecover
DTI Data - Recover It All
DataRescue.Com - PhotoRescue (intended for flash RAM cards, which are typically formatted with FAT, may work with other devices as well)
EASEUS - Data Recovery & Security Suite
Fsys Software - DFSee
Gibson Research Corp. - Spinrite
Gillware - GillWare File Viewer
Higher Ground Software - Hard Drive Mechanic Gold
Kato, Brian - Restoration (also here)
LC Technology -
[Continued in next message, as for some reason, Slashdot would not let me post in its entirety (too many URLs?). AG]

Seriously. How can people spend so much time writing about "crying fanboys" or "xbots" or whatnot? Its a fucking *toy*. If you use terms like "xbot" you've already lost any rationality or sense of perspective.

I hate accusations of shills, but this certainly smells like it (and Sony has been caught with their pants down on this). No real gamer I've met has ever been this devoted to their toys, and I know a lot of gamers.

ARM + chipset runs at 0.5 watts, according to this CNET article from last June.

Phillip.

I've "accidentally" deleted many files that only had one copy over the years. If you are talking about recovering only a few specific accidentally delelted files, then the best tool is Restoration. It's free too. Enjoy. (As for "disaster recovery," unless you are making regular backups or willing to spend lotsa $$ for a professional clean room recovery, FORGET IT.)

Work your way through this list. Unless you're a corporate entity with a large purse, it's probably going to be a freeware app they use too (unless they have a suite which covers many types of media and file systems). They make money from companies, not end users.

Further Info: I phoned a Tamworth, UK-based company (Google it if you're bothered) regarding recovering a file from a USB drive for a teacher where I tech. They asked what I did so far to recover the file, I said I'd run some freeware recovery tool. They told me that's all they'd do, as they don't make money spending any more than about 5 minutes on it. If that can't find it, and you don't have hundreds / thousands of pounds to spend on engineer time, it's the best you'll get.

... you might prefer to read CNET instead.

Ooooh scorch of the burning flame,
a heavenly sea of napalm raining alight upon thy prey,
roasting flesh off bones, burning to ages eternal.

BURN!

Welcome to Slashdot, "News for Nerds". You may find that its readers tend to use lots of initialisms, acronyms and computer slang, especially when discussing computing issues. If you like everything spelled out and linked for you, then you might prefer to read CNET instead.

BTW (by the way), CNET doesn't appear to stand for anything but CNET. :-)

Oh the battles are REAL fun, with HUGE dragons and monsters that can take up the whole screen or hordes that can descend on you and really make you fight for your life. What I was describing is what happened afterward as I'm picking through the drops left by the monsters. Since you are only the one character if you are away from a village where you can sell the crap you just have to leave it, so I was only keeping the really expensive and/or "green" armor sets that would work on my character.

Each character also has these "battle skills" that you can trade your exp for that is awesome and allow you to customize your character to your fighting style. Like my vampress I had her blood magix cranked up so I could raise dead enemies to fight for me, call on the Blood God which caused enemies to jerk and bleed their life away, call on a wolf as a protector, etc. If you haven't given it a try, download the demo. Most fun in an RPG I've had since Diablo 2. And it is REALLY really long, with lots of sidequests, so you really get your money's worth. Two thumbs up!

What remotely modern plasma still has a problem with burn-in ?

They are all still susceptible. It is less of a problem than it used to be. I still want to be able to leave my TV on with a classic video game system hooked up to it on pause and run out of the house to deal with something right now and not come home to find burn-in.

See also Plasma burn-in: Seven things you need to know

Unfortunately that's not a phone. The only open phone (openmoko) has 2 buttons : power and aux. Not quite enough for a good game experience.

I keep wondering why this is so hard. Nokia's 5500 and 6820 have such useful and quick keyboards. Nokia Ngage is a freaking game console (didn't sell all that well though), and has lots of phones supporting it.

Nothing open source though. An ngage-style-controls phone with a few emulators, and a large screen ebook reader (perhaps simply by combining a pico projector and a screen flipping up or something*). Something that can run nes, snes, sega megadrive, and n64 would certainly cover all I want (psp games and the necessary controls for those would be a great bonus). And, of course, a pdf reader and some storage slot that isn't limited to 2 gigabyte.

* yes it wouldn't work well in direct sunlight. You don't get much of that up here though, besides you won't find me outside all that much either.

It was AOL who bought Time-Warner: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-235400.html

The iPod - the original iPod, when the alternatives were CD walkmen and minidisc players [...] If you believe otherwise, I'd like a hit of what you're toking on.

I see your Reality Distortion Field is turned up to 11.

What I'm "toking on" is called reality. You can get some here and here.

It probably should also be noted that even with all that has happened, the longest it can happen in the US under a single president is 8 years and there is the opportunity to end it every 4 years.

We also have most of what has happened under the previous administration like due process and so on administrated by the courts and more notably US Supreme Court which went against the administration on more then a couple of events.

So even when something does happen, it's not permanent nor is it out of the realm of being addressed. Look at how the courts went against some of these attempts to censor content.

No, it's not. Censorship is alive and well all over the world, and there are many governments who would love to excercise censorship beyond their own borders.

You mean like the US? http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/2940.cfm http://news.cnet.com/2100-1033-236255.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_States

Here's a question: if we give the UN control over the DNS system, what happens to Taiwan's TLD? You only have to look at the last Olympics to know how China views Taiwan, they weren't allowed to compete as "Taiwan", they were "Chinese Taipei". If China had a say over which TLDs are allowed, the first thing they'll do is get rid of the .tw domain so that it is effectively censored worldwide. They can block access to .tw inside their own country now, but they don't have a way to block access to Taiwan websites inside the US or EU. That would change if the US gave the UN control of DNS. And that's only the most obvious example. I'm sure Russia would also appreciate the power if they could revoke Georgia's TLD the next time they decide to invade, by claiming that Georgia is part of Russia, or maybe they would set up a new South Ossetia TLD to bolster their claim that South Ossetia is not part of Georgia.

You miss my point. My point is that even if this were true, there are enough countries with TLDs around the world of their own that anyone would be able to get a soap box without any problem using another tld. TLDs are not a free speach issue.

The only reason that it appears that censorship is not an imminent threat is because worldwide internet censorship is not being practiced. The reason that worldwide internet censorship is not being practiced is because the US controls the DNS system.

You give the americans far too much credit. I worry about their propensity to go after gaming sites, mod chip sites, and sites like IcraveTV. The americans aren't saints by any stretch.

Also excellent reasons not to use Vista and Windows 7.

Not really.

SolSuite Solitaire has been quietly - and successfully - migrating players to Vista and The Ribbon.

The solitaire player is as stereotypical a portrait of the Windows user as you'll find anywhere.

If the transition has been easy for him, it will be easy for anyone.

Logitech didn't, and they're competitor is already out: http://reviews.cnet.com/mice/logitech-mx-air/4505-3148_7-32509522.html

Instead of one central purchasing order they will go after each state/county and government organisation parallely and independently.

And they'll say "Whoa, you're thinking of using what filthy hippy app? ...

The 1990's called, they want their talking points back. Notice that after all these years, the best MSFTers can do to counter RMS is to call him names? Can't handle any of the ideas or technologies, can they?

We've known for decades that FOSS is about making money. Some discussions which might make the point that FOSS concepts dovetail with that:

• Open Source Means Business
• Open Source and Capitalism
• Capitalist view of Open Source
• Is Open Source capitalist or communist?
• • Open Distribution vs Open Source
  • Open source is a capitalist's game
  • It's about capitalism, not freebies

and so on...

Instead of one central purchasing order they will go after each state/county and government organisation parallely and independently.

And they'll say "Whoa, you're thinking of using what filthy hippy app? ...

The 1990's called, they want their talking points back. Notice that after all these years, the best MSFTers can do to counter RMS is to call him names? Can't handle any of the ideas or technologies, can they?

We've known for decades that FOSS is about making money. Some discussions which might make the point that FOSS concepts dovetail with that:

• Open Source Means Business
• Open Source and Capitalism
• Capitalist view of Open Source
• Is Open Source capitalist or communist?
• • Open Distribution vs Open Source
  • Open source is a capitalist's game
  • It's about capitalism, not freebies

and so on...

How can people make stuff up, like this? I mean, really, HOW?

Supposing that they go with BSD. It is ALREADY standards compliant, and secure. The government need only decide which programs are necessary for their uses, and MAYBE have them tailored and tweaked for thier purposes. Nothing more than what is necessary for any MS system.

Every single step required to put that BSD system to work for the government, would be required for an "equivalent" MS system. Or, Solaris, or Linux, or whatever. You seem to suggest that using MS systems eliminates some of the tedious work? I hardly think so.

Training is the single expense that will probably be higher with an open source system - but that is a ONE TIME expense, which is more than offset by the money saved (ie, not sent to Redmond)

More and more governments are switching to open source. Those that insist on proprietary continue to be embarassed. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13639_3-10129373-42.html http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Royal-Navy-Catches-a-Virus-from-Russia-With-Love-05256/

Having the adviser report to both the national security and economic advisers suggests that the White House is seeking to ensure a balance between homeland security and economic concerns, the sources said.

Economic concerns like what? The fact that internet commerce explodes on Cyber Monday as consumers and businesses enjoy a wealth of increased buying/spending? Or would you so happen to be referring to economic concerns like the MPAA/RIAA are short one ivory back scratcher? Perhaps the concerns that all that internet commerce is happening with most of it untaxed? Maybe concerns that used books, DVDs and games are being sold increasingly with a down-turned economy?

I am certain the economic concerns you speak of are only economic concerns of lobbyists when you should maybe be paying attention to what consumers are interested in?

You want to help the consumer, you should mandate that proprietary DRM violates anti-trust laws as it locks consumers into the software and hardware associated with their music service. Or maybe you should look into allowing people to use whatever level of encryption they want to secure their financial transactions? Nah, nobody's paying you for that.

Throw on top of that the fact that Biden's good friends with the MPAA and RIAA (and I'm sure Obama's not far behind) there may be cause for concern.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9808489-37.html
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/21/new-mac-os-x-malware-osx_lamzev-a/
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/trojan_osx_dnschanger.shtml
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/inqtana_a.shtml
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2418

to begin with a few.

You mean this bug? It was corrected in Windows 98 Second Edition.

The following post shows that Microsoft got hit with a $200 million patent verdict for custom XML tags! It's ironic that Microsoft abuses the patent system and is attacked by the same method it uses. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10245764-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

FREE-PC.COM was created by Idealab that used to exist in the late 1990s, when they started a bunch of Dot-COMs. It offered free PCs to individuals who agreed in exchange to use the PC at least 10 hours per month.

Free PCs were sponsored by advertisers, and ads were visible at all times. They shipped 30k+ units in 1999, their last year of operation.

They were merged with eMachines.

And about 5 years ago, eMachines got absorbed by Gateway.

There were some other companies to do similar things. And AOL has been infamous for "free computer" with long locked-in AOL subscription deals.

There are even a few references to Free PC/Free-PC on slashdot...

But I don't see any articles about it anymore. Perhaps the archives didn't go back farther than the year 2000??

> BSA has a methodology?

Yup. "Sue no matter what."

They break in to your place of business, having convinced federal marshals that you would destroy all the evidence on your computers if they didn't. Then they take all your computers, based on whatever tip they got from an ex-employee or other anonymous source and had a judge sign off on while you weren't there (hearing held ex parte). They run their own infringement finding software that attempts to scan your network and seize all the computers they can, shutting you down whether you were guilty or not.

Finally, they sue you unless you can provided dated purchase orders for each and every computer and piece of software. Yes, every. And no, the little "Genuine Windows" sticker on the PCs won't save you. It doesn't count.

After this, you get dragged into court and urge you to settle for $bignum while getting really expensive site license agreements that protect you so long as you pay them way more than all your software is actually worth. This has never happened to me personally, but I refer you to the case of Ernie Ball.

Whether or not that mentality actually will be implemented here in the US remains to be seen--I certainly hope Obama follows through.

I can assure you that Obama is not following that. Just look at the copyright treaty that is classified do to "national security" http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10195547-38.html

Yes, there are still a lot of things we're still waiting for. However (and I submitted this story so I may be biased), the congress and senate have their own YouTube channels. While this is by no means complete and some of these videos sound more like extended campaigns than real decision making, it's a start. YouTube has been around a long time and it's appalling to me that governments haven't been using it as a tool of transparency ... instead others blatantly censor it. To me, if this is a sign of things to come, I have some faith that we are moving in the correct direction.

Whether or not that mentality actually will be implemented here in the US remains to be seen--I certainly hope Obama follows through.

I can assure you that Obama is not following that. Just look at the copyright treaty that is classified do to "national security" http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10195547-38.html

Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce.

From what I understand Google licenses news from the big news wires as well as from some of the big newspapers. Some of that has been forced through lawsuits.

Before that, they would just crawl news sites and display headlines and summaries, just like in their normal search.

It seems odd. Google has to pay for the privilege of sending them traffic. I wish I could get a deal like that.

If I were Google, the next time the traditional news outlets came to me with their hands out I'd tell them I've decided that I'd be more than happy to remove all their content from my index and no longer "steal" their business. Thew newspaper execs wouldn't like that too much.

Now you can't get a lot of their more exciting offerings like Server 2008 Datacenter edition unless you buy SA. Which means if you don't buy SA, you have to buy a separate copy of Server 2008 for each virtual machine you might run. And you can only transfer the license every 30 days, so if your cluster fails over you have to wait a month before you fail back, and run your cluster in non-redundant mode for that month. So the non-SA versions of Server 2008 are crippleware because they can't do HA. Way to sell product by subscription! These reality enhanced individuals have no idea what their competition is doing to their value proposition. And even if you buy into that they only support VMs that run Windows and their Novell Linux lapdog, SUSE SLED. Ubuntu? Redhat? Mandrake? Oracle Unbreakable Linux? BSD? Debian? Never heard of that stuff.

For those who are paying attention, Software Assurance is the incredible deal where you pay Microsoft every year 1/3 the price of their full software stack and in return you get to use the useful upgrades they come out with every twelve years for FREE. Isn't proprietary licensing great? There are other rules too. You wouldn't believe what obscure rules in the license agreement these tards pulled up when they were trying to drive Ernie Ball out of business. What they got instead is that he paid them, deleted their software, and became a Linux fan.

Suing your customers isn't the best way to win friends and influence people.

...Gartner is an IT firm that spends a great deal of time advising businesses on how to best implement Microsoft products. They aren't the Mouth of Sauron, speaking what the Eye of Mordor wants spoken.

Gartner sure says what Microsoft wants: it wants users to buy Microsoft products just like "Directions on Microsoft". Good thing for Windows 7!!! In fact for large businesses who seem to have the least need for Vista Gartner actually recommended Vista. So this is the same analyst who in 2007 recommended Vista for large businesses, or is C-NET pulling another Microsoft and trying to up-sell another Microsoft product just like everybody is up-selling Windows 7? Oh yeah, about Linux never being ready for the corporate environment or Microsoft being too dominant: where is your faith man? I know my faith was personally crushed when the "failure" tag was removed from the article. What a bad day!

Geico sues Google, Overture over trademarks - CNET News The auto insurance company is taking the search engines to court for allegedly violating its trademarks by selling them as keywords in their advertising ...

Google wins in trademark suit with Geico - CNET News Dec 15, 2004 ... Judge rules that the search giant's use of trademarks in keyword advertising is legal. A CNET article by Stefanie Olsen, Staff Writer, ...

Geico sues Google, Overture over trademarks - CNET News The auto insurance company is taking the search engines to court for allegedly violating its trademarks by selling them as keywords in their advertising ...

Google wins in trademark suit with Geico - CNET News Dec 15, 2004 ... Judge rules that the search giant's use of trademarks in keyword advertising is legal. A CNET article by Stefanie Olsen, Staff Writer, ...

Wolfram Alpha encounters 'snag,' launch could be delayed

"We have several supercomputer-class compute clusters. One of our tests was to use one cluster to simulate traffic and run it against the other cluster. And when we did that last night, we found that the through-put we got degraded horribly when we increased the amount of traffic that we were pushing from one cluster to the other."

Remaining questions:

1. Why didn't they test first, then announce launch date?
2. Why are they building excitement towards a specific release day, hour and minute (which will surely cause availability issues even if they launched), instead of releasing it gradually with gmail-style invitation system?

That said, the project seems definitely worthwhile, I hope the internet community cuts them some slack so they can fix this in peace. Hopefully we see the project online soon.

as yes there actually ARE some things, like child porn, that SHOULD be censored, according to ANY ideology

Right! Life is never more complicated than an ultimatum!

yet you see people all the time, especially on slashdot, actually saying "country A censors child porn so how can it criticize another country for censoring political opinion?

Really? ALL the time? ESPECIALLY on slashdot? Lets see two examples. Not half-assed examples that might kinda sorta mean what you say if you looked at them from the most biased perspective, nor examples of people trolling, I want full-ass examples. Gotta be pretty easy to come up with since they happen ALL the time, ESPECIALLY here. Right?

Quoth Dr. Cheikh Modibo Diarra:

You buy Microsoft software, and you buy it once and for all, the cost that we tell you is the total cost for ownership.

Now consider Microsoft Money, as reviewed by CNet:

Unfortunately, you'll be forced to upgrade periodically if you rely upon either application's links to online financial institutions--that access expires every other year for Money and after every three versions for Quicken.

Most folks here knew the idea of "TCO is paid upfront" was disingenuous to say the least, for any software. There's training costs, upgrade costs ("our whole company just had to switch to Office 2007..."), and so forth. This is even true for open-source; just consider the time and energy spent by developers moving to new source control systems, ala CVS -> SVN -> (git,hg,bzr). But here, we also have the great fun of a bald-faced lie! So how many other MS products have explicit obsolescence logic?

Well, according to this article, it looks like it's still 2-CPU servers: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html Unless, of course, it's an April Fools day joke :) I am sure they are 2 and probably 4 core CPU's though.

Well, at least the city of Munich: http://news.cnet.com/Munich-fires-up-Linux-at-last/2100-7344_3-6119153.html

I am sure, though, that there are others.

I personally haven't heard of any exploit in the wild except the trojan, for which the user has to be willing to provide their password to any old bit of software with unknown providence - to be honest I don't know how one could protect against that on any system.

Luckily, Ivan Krstic knows how. From a CNET article about Bitfrost:

Instead of blocking specific viruses, the system (Bitfrost) sequesters every program on the computer in a separate virtual operating system, preventing any program from damaging the computer, stealing files, or spying on the user. Viruses are left isolated and impotent, unable to execute their code.

Actually it sounds like they hosed their BGP config. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10241126-93.html

Sublime already had a huge following in CA by the time IUMA was launched.

I said first commercial album exposure. Weasel words? Maybe. But I said them before you made your comment.

Additionally, MP3s were essentially nonexistent before 1996 (when Brad Nowell died), and uncompressed music could fill an entire hard drive in those days.

Because I used to use IUMA back then and in fact spent a day whacking files for them (could have done it in moments if I knew then what I know now about scripting... but anyway) I know that they used mp2 audio back then, and had player download links on their page. IIRC they also had some u-Law samples, but that might not be right. So the lack of mp3 and the size of uncompressed audio is quite irrelevant.

Anyway, I found a citation:

Patterson noted that industry executives already turn to IUMA as a source for new talent.

"Some of the labels--Geffen, for example--tell their people to come to our site regularly to find new talent," he said, adding that popular bands the Mermen and Sublime started on IUMA in 1994.

It got Sublime the exposure to the label that they needed to turn it into financial success. Too bad that wasn't good for the band... but that's a separate issue.

Huh? No, these aren't going anywhere. Windows netbooks are now outselling Linux netbooks.

This may be true, but there weren't any netbooks at all being sold 3 years ago. Since Netbooks are cannibalizing the laptop market segment, the net effect is an increase of Linux in overall market share.

OO isn't cutting into Office

Maybe in YOUR office, but given that whole nations are standardizing on OO.o, and even the newest MS Office contains (limited) support for ODF, it would seem you are just wrong, here.

Postgre isn't even in the same league as a database server,

Have you USED Postgres? I didn't think so. It's a *very* solid performer, with an excellent implementation of ANSI SQL, very low defect rate, excellent data validation, excellent multi-core support, and good fail over support.

and Chrome seems pretty much dead after an initial lovefest.

Chrome rose, then fell, and then has been rising consistently ever since. Since both FF and Chrome are gaining market share, and IE is LOSING market share, it's hard to argue that it's "pretty much dead".

Don't delude yourself into thinking that FOSS is taking off... the only thing denting MS at the moment is Apple and FF. We'll see how the recession shakes out Apple as well.

I don't have to delude myself. FOSS is making a killing in the server space, where I work most, anyway, and Linux is showing solid growth. No, it's not commanding the desktop marketplace - yet. But that's not the point. They are GAINING marketshare, posting solid growth numbers, and Windows, by default, is LOSING marketshare.

And it's the nerds that are leading the charge.

The blog entry is quite misleading (or maybe just assimilated). The market share of MSIE has only gone down as much as the market share of MS Windows has gone down. It can be that Windows has disappeared at a rate of 5% - 10% per year recently, but Microsoft is fighting back by tying IE to other products to block competition. That other product is MS Windows.

MSIE must be removed from MS Windows. Or better yet, just ditch MS Windows and save your economy.

Microsoft is currently working on a $40B stock buy back, having recently completed ANOTHER $40B stock buy back. That's the amusing thing about the people who say that Apple is getting bigger than MS, based purely on cash in hand. Yes, MSFT "only" has $25B cash. That's after buying back $80B of stock.

in most companies , the concept of stock buyback is flimsily misunderstood to say the least: let me go on and explain.
In the fiscal years from 2005 to 2008, MSFT retired about 66 billion dollars in its own stock; at the same time, it issued a bit less than 14 billion in stock. This is probably for the most part the result of the exercise of stock options by the employees. Net result, they retired about 42 bn.in their own equity.
as of end 2008, their return on equity has been about 48%.That comes from dividing about 17 bn net income by their 36bn stockholders equity. Now, if they had let the cash build up, their stockholders equity would have been 78 bn, and their return on equity a more down to earth 22%.
Going back to the stock option plans: if the employees are assigned a significant number of options, say 10% of the issued capital,they can force a massive dilution on other shareholders. a neat 10% stock buyback will set everything right, but on a practical level is the same as paying out 10% of the company to the employees involved.

Microsoft is currently working on a $40B stock buy back, having recently completed ANOTHER $40B stock buy back. That's the amusing thing about the people who say that Apple is getting bigger than MS, based purely on cash in hand. Yes, MSFT "only" has $25B cash. That's after buying back $80B of stock.

You have to understand the "ABC is dying/dead" mentality.

It doesn't matter how much market share you have, only that your market share is decreasing and some smaller technology which they favor has an increasing market share.

IE is dying because Firefox use is increasing in the market and IE is declining.

Unix is dying because Linux is growing and Unix is not.

It doesn't matter that at the rate of decline it would take 20 or more years for whatever it is to die. Or that the decline may be arrested. Saying something is dying is usually misinformed or more likely spreading FUD to hasten the decline.

Old technology with 80% market share drops down to 79% marketshare and new cool technology jumps up from 2% to 3% market share and old technology is declared dying. Here's a perfect example.