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About $60 - 70 and it would fly off the shelves.

Did it fly off the shelves when it was $50?

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9134802/Microsoft_discounts_Windows_7_Home_Premium_to_50_deal_to_last_two_weeks

Yep, couldn't agree more. Facebook just had an outage of eight+ days for 150,000 users (I was one of them), and couldn't even be bothered to give status updates on the situation (or even confirm there was a problem for the first three days). Twitter regularly has its own problems, as well.

Anybody who wants email replaced with either of these (or their ilk) needs their head examined.

Sendo did take them to court. The suit was settled in 2004 for money and Microsoft giving up their ownership stake. In 2005 Sendo finally went under and what's left was bought by Motorola.

This is in no way related to Microsoft's outright buyout of SideKick and Danger, which at last report was a square deal for cash and going swimmingly except for the minor data loss issue, the defections and the total absence of morale since the Pink Slips incident.

So apparently this whole SideKick/Danger thing had gotten completely out of hand even before they lost everyone's data, and people aren't being shy about calling the whole thing dead. The first link even calls doom on Windows Mobile according to Gartner. That's a shame. I really liked WiMo except for the performance, the interface, the reliability, the paucity of third party apps, the retro hardware compatibility, the need for a stylus and the utter lack of any compelling features.

Microsoft really needs to bust into the phone market and now it ain't gonna happen. They're not gaining share anywhere else and their stock is tracking the S&P for the last decade while Apple has grown from nobody to a $170B company. And now they've demonstrated their fickle partnership loyalties to every single player in the phone market and brilliantly demonstrated their inability to execute as their attempts at an own-brand phone erupt into flames. The complete loss of opportunity in the massive growth smartphone market really has to sting. Between this and the field of dreams that is Zune they're completely discredited in the CE space. I really wish I was a furniture salesman in Redmond today.

I had never heard of Roz Ho before today. I think I'll send her flowers.

As far as I can tell from here:

http://www.ciozone.com/index.php/Blogs/view/5485/.html
http://tinyurl.com/yh3d59w

The "2009" figures are actually from Q1 2009, first published in May:
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=985912

The original "article" doesn't seem to be the Reg one but a plug for Gartner's October conference:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139026/Android_to_grab_No._2_spot_by_2012_says_Gartner

Gartner's Mystic Megs haven't always been spot-on before. For example, in 2006:
http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_152911_11.html

they seemed to forget to mention the imminent drop of Motorola from number 2 in the list in 2006. They warned about Samsung, who improved their position.

My forecast? In 2012 one of the dominant smartphone OSes will be some Chinese thing that no-one reading this has heard of yet.

it failed in the middle of a convoluted project to tie the system in to another system in Italy.

It failed early on one of one of the biggest trading days in history - when the US federal government announced it was taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was down for 6 hours and 45 minutes. Let me quote from that article:

Somehow "we couldn't have foreseen" and "we're confident it will not happen again" don't fit very well together.

At the time, Reuters quoted a trader:

"We have the biggest takeover in the history of the known world ... and then we can't trade. It's terrible," one trader said.

The kind of folks who write software for this type of system like to audit the source for the scheduler, optimize the network stack for their own use and examine every library to figure out how to squeeze out a few extra microseconds here and there. This is not the type of stuff you do on Windows and .Net.

The prior system had 6 years of 0-nines uptime. No failures in six years. Windows and .Net couldn't squeek through three years without a catastrophic failure that shut down the entire system for nearly an entire trading day - and it failed when it mattered most.

Yeah, maybe it wasn't .Net. Maybe it wasn't Windows. I haven't seen any proof either way. Somehow I doubt they care. The company they bought cost half as much as the .Net system, and in addition to superior performance it does not have that history.

Don't be silly. Windows 7 will be out on Oct 22nd. Just as with the TCP/IP vulnerability, the fix from Microsoft will only be to recommend upgrading to Vista or Windows 7. This couldn't have been timed better if they had planned it.

Can't blame them, at least not according to the rumors from the article:

The cause of the failure remained shrouded in mystery yesterday, though most observers believed a combination of a surge in trading and a complex integration project to tie up the LSE's systems with Borsa Italia, which it purchased last year, had left the exchange open to a computer failure.

Someone in house could have easily have thrown in an uncaught exception as they have screwed around internally. .NET is not to blame for a poor implementation. A poor implementation is to blame. A finer issue here is that Microsoft and Accenture developed it, which means Accenture developed it. The system had proven to be 100% resilient since 2006, until the first crash. I am not defending the crash in the slightest, but to suggest that it is somehow .NET's fault is a joke.

I cannot help but relate this terrible article on the exact same crash, which assumes facts not in evidence.

July 1, 2009
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform


Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE (London Stock Exchange)'s Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day. While the LSE denied that the collapse was TradElect's fault, they also refused to explain what the problem really wa. Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect.

Since then, the CEO that brought TradElect to the LSE, Clara Furse, has left without saying why she was leaving. Sources in the City-London's equivalent of New York City's Wall Street--tell me that TradElect's failure was the final straw for her tenure. The new CEO, Xavier Rolet, is reported to have immediately decided to put an end to TradElect.

TradElect runs on HP ProLiant servers running, in turn, Windows Server 2003. The TradElect software itself is a custom blend of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. On the back-end, it relied on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Its goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times, real-time system speeds, for stock trades.

It never, ever came close to achieving these performance goals. Worse still, the LSE's competition, such as its main rival Chi-X with its MarketPrizm trading platform software, was able to deliver that level of performance and in general it was running rings about TradElect. Three guesses what MarketPrizm runs on and the first two don't count. The answer is Linux.

It's not often that you see a major company dump its infrastructure software the way the LSE is about to do. But, then, it's not often you see enterprise software fail quite so badly and publicly as was the case with the LSE. I can only wonder how many other Windows enterprise software failures are kept hidden away within IT departments by companies unwilling to reveal just how foolish their decisions to rely on archaic, cranky Windows software solutions have proven to be.

I'm sure the LSE management couldn't tell Linux from Windows without a techie at hand. They can tell, however, when their business comes to a complete stop in front of the entire world.

So, might I suggest to the LSE that they consider Linux as the foundation for their next stock software infrastructure? After all, besides working well for Chi-X, Linux seems to be doing quite nicely for the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), etc., etc.

_______________________________________

You should pay more attention ;-) Here's a couple I've unearthed with very little digging : "Is the iPhone a Failure? Maybe!", "The iPhone is a Beta Product", "iPhony - Why Apple's new cell phone isn't really revolutionary", "Why the iPhone is a ripoff", "THE LONG VIEW: Why the iPhone will fail", "iPhone Fever: Not Everyone Buys the Hype", "Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone" and "Apple iPhone Doomed To Failure -- Windows Mobile 7 Plans For 2009 Leaked"

It's easy to point and laugh now, except that all those people are still making predictions as analysts.

Seems to hold true on both ends of the wire: Hackers Pay 43 cents per Hijacked Mac

U.S. Bank picks IBM's Lotus platform over Microsoft's SharePoint

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138020/U.S._Bank_picks_IBM_s_Lotus_platform_over_Microsoft_s_SharePoint

I found the original article, but it still didn't have the numbers from the test. What it does have is a bar graph jpeg of the results. So I measured them, and the two scores are 24 pixels and 232 pixels. 232/24=9.68, which is close to that 9.6 number they're giving.

But, they were saying it was 9.6 times faster. That is wrong. It is 9.6 times as fast, or 8.6 times faster. It bugs me when people get that wrong.

security features don't matter if you don't use them

The difference between Linux and Windows is not in terms of security features that you do or don't use. The key difference is that Microsoft deliberately channels "not-quite-what-you-wanted-ware" to your system and those channels are used by others for putting malware on your system. The entire point of ActiveX is to put software on your computer you didn't ask for. The reason why autorun wasn't disabled when you thought it was is because MS wants to be able to automatically install software. The .Net/Silverlight system has the same idea behind is and will turn out to be a similar disaster. At the very least it will be used to inflict DRM you don't want.

No amount of astroturfing will change the fact that when you get a Linux system, you get to choose exactly what is there and exactly what isn't. Since you only choose the bits you want you don't tend to choose the bits (except flash) that are designed to automatically install malware. I'll agree that this isn't a fundamental difference between the security Linux Kernel and Windows kernel's security mechanisms. VMS, which Windows copied was certainly more secure than UNIX. However, that's a purely academic discussion. The actual Linux system you install is less likely to deliver software you don't want than the Windows system.

Nah it just sounds like the advice of someone who sucks at what they do: and by sucks, I mean not constantly working to improve. I've seen this: people don't realize they suck and don't realize that others don't, and therefore assume the only way to get ahead is by politics and dirty tricks... even when it's not. Of course, I'm sure sometimes it is, but if so, it's time to find someplace else to work. Managers firing their resources (especially valuable ones) is more detrimental to them than to their former employees, so they need to learn how to do their job, too. There was a decent article the other day on managing geeks that may be a close miss in some cases, but ties into all of this and "why we do what we do."

In any case, no, it's not that bad. It may be that bad some places---I haven't seen it---but there are definitely other places. It sounds more like bad stereotyping for a slow weekend story to generate some hits and sound profound. Maybe the author is serious, or maybe he just couldn't come up with better material.

If XP was free software, people wouldn't be forced to upgrade their OS, they could just download a patch from a third party instead of being held hostage by Microsoft.

The arguments were covered more than exhaustively in the Slashdot discussion which resulted from Charlie Miller pwn2owning the MacBook in two minutes because it was "easiest" of the machines in the competition and I should not have to hold anyone's hand in this case. Asking me to explain something which has been so exhaustively covered here in the past is trolling or it is incompetence but it is nothing else. If someone makes a claim, I will generally make at least a cursory effort to find out if they are right because it is necessary to be informed in order to debate intelligently.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that TFA is about this very issue. I know this is Slashdot, but come on. I guess you could read this article, it pretty much sums up the argument.

Since XP is still being shipped and supported on netbooks this seems a little strange. What's the message - spend extra on memory and hard drive so that you can run XP instead of Linux but we won't give you security patches?

Um, not exactly. Evidence of Linux botnets and OS X variants with confirmed infections in the wild.

The 'botnet' consisted of about 100 Linux servers, none of whom could be proven to have been infected via automated means. Indeed, the man who discovered this threat speculated that they were compromised by sniffing FTP passwords. Not included in the report was how many actual machines were compromised. Individual Linux web servers can host hundreds of accounts or more.

As a proportion of Linux servers, this number is vanishingly small. Compared to the rate of infection of Windows PCs, both in real numbers and per capita, there's almost no comparison to be made.

The target of the malicious iframes that the Linux machines were serving up? Windows.

Methinks you're buying a bit too much into the late 90s / early 2000s era FUD against Microsoft.

Methinks thou dost protest too much.

EVERY country needs to be doing this, and not making it voluntary either. Any problem on the internet affects everyone connected to it. Cutting off PCs in one country has limited effect in isolation. Considering botnets are an exclusive Windows problem, Microsoft should be forced to pay for the scheme too. It's their mess after all.

Um, not exactly. Evidence of Linux botnets and OS X variants with confirmed infections in the wild. Methinks you're buying a bit too much into the late 90s / early 2000s era FUD against Microsoft. Maybe if this was ten years ago your sabre-rattling might have been acceptable. But these days, to categorically deny the leaps and bounds at which Microsoft has improved security in both Windows Vista and Windows 7, and not realizing that malware is more and more becoming a user education problem than anything else, is not only foolish but ignorant. Not to mention claiming that neither Linux nor Mac OS is susceptible to the same threat is... well, along the same lines, really.

I'm not saying Windows is perfect. Far from it. But please, let's put it into perspective.

The link seems to start on page 2!

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks?taxonomyName=Management&taxonomyId=14 for one print page.

... it has removed the final reason for the open source world to care about Sony.

I thought ImageWorks (of Sony Pictures) had recently opensourced OSL, Scala Migrations, Field3D, PyString and Maya Reticle or at least made them community endeavors. I can't seem to find the source code for browsing on OSL and some of the other projects are pretty tiny but if that's true it's a good sign on ImageWorks' part.

I'm certain they by and large use GPL LGPL in their products like their TVs and SOE using PostgreSQL over Oracle.

Writing off the PS3? Probably. They probably realized Linux support buys them little over the Wii and XBox360 despite what I and everyone else thinks. But the rest of Sony might have hope.

Copyrights are not enough. If X is the new innovative piece of code within a program, a competitor can buy the program, fire up a debugger, and look at the disassembled code for X.

At this point he's infringing copyright just as much as when he'd making unlicensed copies.

No, he's not.

Yes, he is, at least in the EU. Reverse-engineering is forbidden by software copyright law here, except if all of the following conditions are true:

• it's solely for the purpose of interoperability
• the information you need is not readily available otherwise
• you do not publish the information that you discovered this way (although you can sell programs making use of this information; not sure how this would work with open source)

See article 6 of the EU software copyright directive.

The output of his reverse engineering will be the abstract method that can be covered by a patent, but not by copyright. For example, after looking at the disassembly for X, and performing more analysis using a debugger, he figures out the steps to perform X are:

At the very least, you are tainted when you do stuff like this. Phoenix didn't do clean room reverse-engineering for nothing when they re-implemented IBM's BIOS.

Then there are cases where the code is not that hard, and you can copy the idea by just looking at the end product. Therefore having patents is necessary.

Well, no. It's only necessary if the competition stemming from this imitation kills the market rather than stimulate it. In general, more competition is better.

Right, but competition usually means performing to equal or exceed your competitor.

And this can be in many ways: customer service, price, time to market, branding, offered products etc.

If you simply sit by and wait, then copy (steal) something innovative created by your competitor, that's not performing at all.

Actually, that is exactly how competition works. You take what already exists, duplicate it and presumably add value in one way or another (from the list above). A certain amount of imitation is mandatory to have a competitive market.

Thanks to copyright and to the complexity of making well-working and polished software, innovators automatically have a limited lead-time advantage. Artificially extending this by many years using patents is only justifiable if otherwise the entire innovation of the industry would collapse. And there are simply no indications that this is the case, on the contrary.

It's just leeching off someone else's work to profit yourself. Soon inventors will get tired of getting taken advantage of, and only pursue inventions that take little time and money. That way, if someone copies their ideas, the loss won't be much. But society, as a general, will suffer more because many good inventions take more time and money, and those won't be created without sufficient protection.

It turns out that the above is simply not true in case of the software world. Competition (i.e., what you call copying, stealing and whatnot) is what drives innovation in the software industry, and the traditionally mild IP-regimes have been very conductive to this. See the overview of studies I posted in a previous comment.

>Government supported malware...

I dont see a problem with this as long as it requires a warrant, like how the US uses programs like CIPAV.

USB isn't going anywhere fast, and even 16 years from now, the hardware will still be plentiful enough to ensure it's still readily available. The form factor may change, but the fact that everyone has a USB device of some kind (all with the same computer-side "A" connector) would ensure that even 16 years later, they'll still be on the front of at least some computers. USB has already lasted over 10 years in its current form... ;)

So that's a starting point. I'd say get yourself a high quality (read: lower capacity; look for a "single-level cell") USB Flash drive. Flash chips are used on all PC motherboards, even on the oldest (>10 year old) ones and they still work fine, so I don't think there'd be an issue with it losing its data over time. Try looking for a Flash drive with low capacity that claims high-speeds (the signs of SLC Flash), but stay away from cheap Chinese ripoff junk.

MP3 and JPEG have both stood the test of time - once again, they're both standards that are well over 10 years old (I think over 15, even). Your music and pictures would be safe with them. And, of course, TXT files are just plain ASCII data with no formatting, the de facto standard for storing any plain readable information on a digital system.

Or... you can just toss a netbook in there, new in box. It might just be as good as opening a brand-new-in-box Apple IIc. That would definitely be a cool gift, as long as she understands the value of nostalgia and doesn't just think "gee, what a piece of junk, thanks". :P

The good news is that this doesn't mean that SCO owns UNIX. It just means that the appeals court thought that SCO deserved a jury trial. SCO would need to present their evidence to a jury and convince them that SCO purchased the copyrights. Meanwhile, Novell would be shooting down SCO's arguments and presenting their own evidence. If the previous trial is any indication, SCO will stumble and delay it's way through always acting as though Novell was holding back on giving them that crucial piece of evidence that they had proving SCO's case.

The bad news is that this means more years of SCO saying "We own UNIX and, by extension, LINUX!"

The good news, however, is that Darl's lost control of SCO's rudder ( http://blogs.computerworld.com/14597/the_sco_zombie_wins_one ). The Chapter 11 court has seized control of the company and is appointing a trustee. The likely outcome is that SCO will enter Chapter 7. There, it will be ripped to shreds and sold off piece by piece.

Of course the the 'CAN SPAM act' act was never about canning spam, but legalising spam, providing safe harbor for spam and preventing end users from suing ISPs and mass marketeers. The only part of the CAN SPAM act that actually referred to canning SPAM was in the title.

Hotmail puts squeeze on spam

the federal government could set up a "safe harbor" program

I think drawing any conclusions based 51 exploit-kit using hackers, from which only 15 IP addresses and browsers could be determined using a forged referer field, is a prime example of bogus methodology ;)

The Bush's administration's recent Emergency rule change extended the post grad employment period for F-1 visa holders from 12 to 29 months.. This so called emergency rule change has been the subject of a lawsuit by US citizens who are the victims of wholesale discrimination.

This rule change potentially added another 400,000 workers to the US tech employment pool, which US citizens must compete against. Universities pointing out tax advantages of foreign grad hiring increases the suffering US citizens and GC holders must endure at the hands of the globalists.

The Bush's administration's recent Emergency rule change extended the post grad employment period for F-1 visa holders from 12 to 29 months.. This so called emergency rule change has been the subject of a lawsuit by US citizens who are the victims of wholesale discrimination.

This rule change potentially added another 400,000 workers to the US tech employment pool, which US citizens must compete against. Universities pointing out tax advantages of foreign grad hiring increases the suffering US citizens and GC holders must endure at the hands of the globalists.

Darn it, that was supposed to be a link

...is Microsoft's lack of comment on video and audio. Who cares about the aside element?

The future of HTML 5 in terms of hardware, software and the law is difficult to predict:

• Mobile devices, gaming consoles, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and other consumer platforms continue to take internet market share from desktop or laptop computer browsers. (It's worth remembering that Xbox 360 TV and movie downloads consume nearly half as much bandwidth as YouTube.)
• Within the next two years, movie downloads are predicted to amount to around one billion DVDs' worth of traffic per month.
• Under European law, Microsoft may be forced to offer users a choice of browser when they install Windows.
• Firefox, Safari and Chrome have all had significant recent updates. All now support the video and audio elements, along with other HTML 5 technologies. This may boost market share as developers dream up more HTML 5 applications.
• The Adobe Air platform, Microsoft Silverlight and JavaFX and other RIA platforms are competing for dominance and blur the distinction between browser and desktop applications.
• Three increasingly popular smartphone platforms – iPhone, Palm Pre and Android – run WebKit and not Flash or Silverlight. Microsoft has, as yet, been less successful with consumers on mobile platforms.
• If widely implemented, HTTP Live Streaming might reduce the cost of video hosting and enable segmentation and clipping.
• Google Wave could encourage take-up of the Google Chrome browser and the forthcoming web-oriented Google OS could make the HTML media element and other HTML 5 technologies far more ubiquitous.
• The biggest and least predictable change may come from take up (or not) of push technologies such as Comet or Web Sockets.

They appear during online and offline play. However, that's a pretty bullshit disclaimer for them to use though. That is like the "your contract terms may change without notice" that got certain companies sued. Sorry, that's the easiest dig, but there are other examples.

It's called the "you're fucked clause", and companies love it.

There are viable alternatives, temporary as they may be...

The EU's antitrust agency says that bundling shields IE from competition with other browsers, such as Opera.

(And Opera probably doesn't have a prayer of making money from their desktop product unless they can get more than the 0.7% marketshare they have.)

I hate to go Godwin on the thread here, but it isn't like IBM hasn't found ways to use data to do evil things before.

Yes, and IBM has a thing about getting into bed with governments, although not always with good results. And you can be pretty sure nothing IBM is up to will be good for Americans given their tendency to take the money and run.

I'm not sure what you mean with your PPC comparison? ARM have shipped 10 billion CPUs. Intel have shipped between 1 and 2 billion. ( http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9131098/ARM_Heretic_in_the_church_of_Intel_Moore_s_Law ) I'm not sure what total PPC sales, but they're not even remotely close to ARM.

What market are they going after with this, netbook's with ARM instead of Atom cpus?

Presumably. As TFS points out, the line between PCs and mobiles is becoming less distinct. I must admit, personally I'd have a preference for x86, because of compatability with PCs (which I will always prefer as a platform over locked down phones), but it's not like ARM are some niche player here.

First off, the install base counts for nothing. This is a from-scratch implementation, with an install base of zero cpu's and applications, just like Windows PPC. The number of existing systems with ARM embedded in them that can be "upgraded" to run this new OS is approximately zero. And given that Windows 7 is only slightly less cpu intensive than Windows Vista, which is what ARM wants for their CPU, and that "high-end" ARM cpu's seem to be comparable to Intel cpu's used in low-end netbooks, I don't see how people will like using it in this fashion. And it'll suffer the same problem as the PPC version of Windows did, no applications. When people read the specs and it says "Windows 7", they will expect to run Windows apps on it. Many will be disappointed when, AFTER they buy the netbook, they find out they can only run a few other applications besides whatever the system came with. And if people are just going to get stuck with using the pre-installed apps, why bother with the OEM fee to Microsoft?

I'm not sure what you mean with your PPC comparison? ARM have shipped 10 billion CPUs. Intel have shipped between 1 and 2 billion. ( http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9131098/ARM_Heretic_in_the_church_of_Intel_Moore_s_Law ) I'm not sure what total PPC sales, but they're not even remotely close to ARM.

What market are they going after with this, netbook's with ARM instead of Atom cpus?

Presumably. As TFS points out, the line between PCs and mobiles is becoming less distinct. I must admit, personally I'd have a preference for x86, because of compatability with PCs (which I will always prefer as a platform over locked down phones), but it's not like ARM are some niche player here.

This was detailed a few days ago -- more details on http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136008/Some_SMS_networks_vulnerable_to_attack

How many times it needs to be said.. *never* trust the client.

There's more where that came from: Microsoft revenue declines 17% in fiscal Q4. Notice that the spinmeisters are talking about revenue declining. Profit, if there is any, is hit even harder especially if that profit is based on pump-n-dump of MSFT stock.

Most exchanges aim for that kind of speed now, but fail to make it. Some of them, like the London Stock Exchange, http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform, which made the idiotic mistake of relying on Windows Server and SQL Server, don't even come close to delivering that kind of performance.

For those that come closest, the servers tend to be transaction-optimized RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Solaris. The networks are fiber optic-based. While they may connect to the Internet, the core systems, like those provided by AboveNet, are usually private 10GBe networks. In short, to really take advantage of this kind of high-speed trading you're not going to be doing this from your basement. You need to have a trading station either co-located at the market, or just down the street on a high-speed network no more than a link or two from the exchange's servers.

And, yes, network speed does matter here. So does server, storage and DBMS access speed.

Needless to say, none of the exchanges are exactly forthcoming about what their particular magic technology formula is since being able to deliver high-speed trading consistently has become an important sales point. I know many traders on Wall St. and the City in London who will move from one Exchange to another based purely on their ability to deliver faster trades. For this group, what's being traded is besides the point. It's all about keeping an edge in trading speed over their competitors.

Steven

I am forced to buy with it a license for Windows xp. If you know how to buy this particular model new with Linux or no OS preloaded, please do post back with directions.

Maybe because the 1% that would buy it with Linux isn't a big enough minority for Dell to care about? I'd yell at Dell, not Microsoft.

It's a metaphor for a non-optional fee that gives me nothing of value in return

Then that tax is put on by Dell, not Microsoft.

I just don't get it. If you are dead set on certain hardware provided by Dell, why is it Microsoft's fault for them not providing it with Linux pre-installed (or nothing pre-installed)? It's Dell's fault. Unless Microsoft is forcing them to only use Windows.

Interestingly, Windows on netbooks is increasing, not decreasing, Which seems to support Dell's decision that offering both configurations (I have no clue how much overhead that entails) may not be profitable enough... or may result in an increase of customer issues who see the cheaper option and get, having no clue with Linux is or something like that.

Don't get me wrong. If I bought a netbook it'd have Linux on it. I couldn't find the MSI Wind linux editions either, which was frustrating. But that's MSI's fault, not MS.

I just downloaded Google Chrome 3.0.192.0 for Mac and it crashed before I could even open a page. There is no excuse for this; my Mac Pro is perfect in every way with eight 2.93 GHz cores, 32 GB RAM, and a fresh install of Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7. Ergo any crashing Google Chrome does is Google Chrome's own fault!

Why is it that Apple and Mozilla can do this but Google can't? I ran Internet Explorer 8 for months before its final release, Firefox 3.5 since its 3.1 days, and found Safari 4 Developer Preview more stable than Safari 3. In fact, even WebKit is more stable than Chrome.

What really baffles me, however, isn't the instability I've come to expect from Google, but that Google has the audacity to ask for personal user info to improve its browser. Is the search engine maker datamonger really so desperate for my private information that it's stooped to the level of Trojan horses to get it?

They should ask me that when it doesn't crash on launch.

Everything Google does is just another way to sieve personal data away for targeting ads. This kind of Big Brother crap is more repulsive than the fat programmers that make it possible. Google, with its deep pockets and doctoral scholars, thinks that by holding user data hostage it can maneuver around Apple and Microsoft. While this may be true, I'm not willing to be a part of it.

In using Google's search, Gmail, Chrome or whatever else the faceless robot of a company invents, the user is surrendering their personal information to a giant hivemind. No longer are their personal preferences some choice they make; they're a string of data processed by a Google algorithm: Google dehumanizes its users!

So while Google is arrogant enough to paint spyware shiny so it can parse our browsing habits, the least they could do is make sure it doesn't crash. If Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla can get their preview releases right, why can't Google? And now they're making their own operating systems?

Get real, Google! I'll use your crashing codebloat when my Mac is cold and dead and I'm looking for handouts. Until then, quit mining my personal data!

Well, after 2008, the year of the Windows.NET stock exchange, I think 2009 is already the year of the Linux stock exchange. At least it's clear now that people do get fired for buying Microsoft.

While campaigning against President George W. Bush, Barack Obama had pledged that there would be "no more wiretapping of American citizens," but Obama's administration has continued to use many of his predecessor's arguments when it comes to warrantless wiretapping.

Ok, perhaps the reporter of that story got a few of the facts wrong. (George W. Bush != John McCain)

Seth

I just downloaded Google Chrome 3.0.192.0 for Mac and it crashed before I could even open a page. There is no excuse for this; my Mac Pro is perfect in every way with eight 2.93 GHz cores, 32 GB RAM, and a fresh install of Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7. Ergo any crashing Google Chrome does is Google Chrome's own fault!

Why is it that Apple and Mozilla can do this but Google can't? I ran Internet Explorer 8 for months before its final release, Firefox 3.5 since its 3.1 days, and found Safari 4 Developer Preview more stable than Safari 3. In fact, even WebKit is more stable than Chrome.

What really baffles me, however, isn't the instability I've come to expect from Google, but that Google has the audacity to ask for personal user info to improve its browser. Is the search engine maker datamonger really so desperate for my private information that it's stooped to the level of Trojan horses to get it?

They should ask me that when it doesn't crash on launch.

Everything Google does is just another way to sieve personal data away for targeting ads. This kind of Big Brother crap is more repulsive than the fat programmers that make it possible. Google, with its deep pockets and doctoral scholars, thinks that by holding user data hostage it can maneuver around Apple and Microsoft. While this may be true, I'm not willing to be a part of it.

In using Google's search, Gmail, Chrome or whatever else the faceless robot of a company invents, the user is surrendering their personal information to a giant hivemind. No longer are their personal preferences some choice they make; they're a string of data processed by a Google algorithm: Google dehumanizes its users!

So while Google is arrogant enough to paint spyware shiny so it can parse our browsing habits, the least they could do is make sure it doesn't crash. If Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla can get their preview releases right, why can't Google? And now they're making their own operating systems?

Get real, Google! I'll use your crashing codebloat when my Mac is cold and dead and I'm looking for handouts. Until then, quit mining my personal data!

I would think that a program that stores and plays music that prompts you to install a new web browser could well be considered obnoxious without that being holy war talk. It presumptuously asks to do more than the user may want it to do, similar to Java prompting to install an office suite. In neither case does it mean the software isn't good at what it is intended to do, but in thinking you would like it to do way more completely unrelated things sure could be called obnoxious.

Further, and even on topic, when its updates render a feature of hardware you own broken, I think that could fairly fall into the obnoxious category. Regardless of whether or not Apple was completely in its rights to prevent the Palm from synching with iTunes, the software update places Palm Pre owners who used the feature squarely in the middle of Apple's quarrel with Palm.

I just downloaded Google Chrome 3.0.192.0 for Mac and it crashed before I could even open a page. There is no excuse for this; my Mac Pro is perfect in every way with eight 2.93 GHz cores, 32 GB RAM, and a fresh install of Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7. Ergo any crashing Google Chrome does is Google Chrome's own fault!

Why is it that Apple and Mozilla can do this but Google can't? I ran Internet Explorer 8 for months before its final release, Firefox 3.5 since its 3.1 days, and found Safari 4 Developer Preview more stable than Safari 3. In fact, even WebKit is more stable than Chrome.

What really baffles me, however, isn't the instability I've come to expect from Google, but that Google has the audacity to ask for personal user info to improve its browser. Is the search engine maker datamonger really so desperate for my private information that it's stooped to the level of Trojan horses to get it?

They should ask me that when it doesn't crash on launch.

Everything Google does is just another way to sieve personal data away for targeting ads. This kind of Big Brother crap is more repulsive than the fat programmers that make it possible. Google, with its deep pockets and doctoral scholars, thinks that by holding user data hostage it can maneuver around Apple and Microsoft. While this may be true, I'm not willing to be a part of it.

In using Google's search, Gmail, Chrome or whatever else the faceless robot of a company invents, the user is surrendering their personal information to a giant hivemind. No longer are their personal preferences some choice they make; they're a string of data processed by a Google algorithm: Google dehumanizes its users!

So while Google is arrogant enough to paint spyware shiny so it can parse our browsing habits, the least they could do is make sure it doesn't crash. If Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla can get their preview releases right, why can't Google? And now they're making their own operating systems?

Get real, Google! I'll use your crashing codebloat when my Mac is cold and dead and I'm looking for handouts. Until then, quit mining my personal data!

I just downloaded Google Chrome 3.0.192.0 for Mac and it crashed before I could even open a page. There is no excuse for this; my Mac Pro is perfect in every way with eight 2.93 GHz cores, 32 GB RAM, and a fresh install of Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7. Ergo any crashing Google Chrome does is Google Chrome's own fault!

Why is it that Apple and Mozilla can do this but Google can't? I ran Internet Explorer 8 for months before its final release, Firefox 3.5 since its 3.1 days, and found Safari 4 Developer Preview more stable than Safari 3. In fact, even WebKit is more stable than Chrome. So what's with Google's Chrome?

What really baffles me, however, isn't the instability I've come to expect from Google, but that Google has the audacity to ask for personal user info to improve its browser. Is the search engine maker datamonger really so desperate for my private information that it's stooped to the level of Trojan horses to get it?

They should ask me that when it doesn't crash on launch.

Everything Google does is just another way to sieve personal data away for targeting ads. This kind of Big Brother crap is more repulsive than the fat programmers that make it possible. Google, with its deep pockets and doctoral scholars, thinks that by holding user data hostage it can maneuver around Apple and Microsoft. While this may be true, I'm not willing to be a part of it.

In using Google's search, Gmail, Chrome or whatever else the faceless robot of a company invents, the user is surrendering their personal information to a giant hivemind. No longer are their personal preferences some choice they make; they're a string of data processed by a Google algorithm: Google dehumanizes its users!

So while Google is arrogant enough to paint spyware shiny so it can mine our browsing habits, the least they could do is make sure it doesn't crash. If Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla can get their preview releases right, why can't Google? And they're going to come out with their own operating system?

Get real, Google! I'll use your crashing codebloat when my Mac is cold and dead and I'm looking for handouts. Until then, quit trying to syphon off my personal data in between crashes!

This is quite astute.

I'd also like to point out another story detailing a strong statistical anomaly in the speed at which anti-microsoft and pro-linux stories get "buried" on social news sites.

For future reference:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135199
is a better URL

Just like:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/12/2324216/Windows-7-Hits-Build-7600-Possible-RTM?art_pos=1
is only:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/12/2324216