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You are being funny but ironically the roles have reversed now, now its MSFT and IE that is making the standards complaint browser and Google that is putting in Chrome tags and making their own forks that break compatibility....EEE anyone?

I guess it doesn't really matter who is on top as being on top seems to automatically turn you into the evil asshole, I'd guess its one part greed mixed with 2 parts fear that someone will come along and beat you that makes these companies start turning nasty when they make it to the top.

As much as I hate Bezos, the patent arms race has been around for a LONG time, with sewing machines in the 1800s, for example.

In computers, in the 50s and 60s people were trying to patent computer instructions.

In the 80s, we have stuff like this story where IBM nearly destroyed Sun with patents. And by that time they were already experienced.

That might not even be the worst, in the 70s there were stories of companies starting fires in each other's warehouses, etc. (see Soul of a New Machine for a source to that rumor).

Obligatory comic

The WTF metric : http://www.osnews.com/images/comics/wtfm.jpg

Last SkyOS 5.0 beta released for free via http://www.osnews.com/comments/27260
has some torrent and magnetlink in the comments. Not sure if its a new version or the links work.

The same can be said of Windows except you'd be opening it up to malware and guess what? The same applies to Linux. How fricking sad is it that you will sit here with a straight face and tell me i should leave my users vulnerable with a badly out of date OS? And you HAVE to do the forced upgrade deathmarch because Linux don't support previous versions for shit because "Hey its free!" well so is that dogshit in the park but I don't want to be handling it either.

At the end of the day there is a reason why more people risk hefty fines and in some regions even jail time to steal the competitor's product than take yours for free by several orders of magnitude and that is because Torvalds is a shitty developer who refuses to let go of a broken driver model he ripped off of UNIX in 1993. I mean can you imagine how much you'd be laughing if Windows kept the creaking and buggy as fuck .VXD driver model in 2013? that shit would be hilarious, right? Well that is EXACTLY WHAT TORVALDS HAS DONE by keeping the ancient fucked up POS dependency hell breaks constantly "let the devs do it" driver model which in the end leaves you with shit like this, with drivers that are half assed, piss poor, and break often.

Again feel free to take the Hairyfeet Challenge and try for yourself and see if 1 or more drivers aren't completely trashed by the end. For extra points try it on a laptop and see how quickly Linux shits all over the wireless. the Hairyfeet Challenge actually rigs things in Linux' favor by asking for only HALF the support Windows gets and on top of that I didn't even use anything exotic, we are talking boring bog standard hardware that is in a good 90% of the desktops and laptops and it STILL shit all over itself. If the Linux community wanted to pay me for the bandwidth and time I'd be happy to film it live but frankly the challenge is so easy to replicate at home that anybody can do it, all you need is a bog standard desktop or laptop and a copy of whatever distro you want to test from 5 years ago which you will then upgrade/date to current through the GUI as Joe and Jane Normal would be expected to do.

At the end of the day the Linux driver model is deep fried tampons and as long as Torvalds is in the big chair it will stay that way because he is old and cares more about "purity of essence" than having a functional OS. Hell even basic common sense will illustrate that the math don't work when it comes to drivers, when Torvalds adopted that driver model you could fit every Linux driver on a single floppy, now you have over 100,000 drivers, hundreds of new drivers released each month and MAYBE 300 devs (I'm pretty sure it isn't even half that, just giving Torvalds the benefit of the doubt) that are qualified to do low level driver debug and testing. If you mainlined pure coke into their veins and kept them working 24/7 then you would MAYBE have each driver looked at once every 6 years MAYBE.

There is a reason why every B&M shop that has tried Linux has dropped it, from little shops like mine to giants like Walmart, why simply shopping for devices to use with Linux quickly becomes a game of hardware roulette and why drivers get shit on constantly when you update/grade and that is because the driver model just doesn't work. But when you get any of the devs on here the only explanation you get is either Torvalds "It wouldn't let me just tweak whatever I want at any time" (yeah jackass, that is kinda the damned point, to keep you from breaking shit) or worse that kernel dev who said, I swear to God, that "I hope every non free driver breaks often!". Yeah because users don't want functional hardware, all they care about is the racial purity of the GPL. BTW in a case of irony moist and delicious what does every forum tell you to buy for video? Nvidia because their proprietary drivers actually fucking work!

After nearly 5 ye

Really? Then you better not tells the guys at VLite who have been doing it since Win2K (formerly NLite for NT) or the guys at RT7Lite who have made a tool so simple your grandma can use it. Oh and FYI but you have been able to uninstall IE since XP SP2, its under Windows Components in Add/Remove on XP or Programs and Features on Vista on up.

So maybe you ought to actually try something before you go spreading FUD since its obvious you probably have touched a Windows machine since WinME considering how badly out of data your supposed info is. Oh and in case you are wondering Yes Virginia you CAN change Windows Shells, there are about a dozen free ones to choose from but I prefer AstonShell for their secure desktop which is light and easy peasy to lock down with GPOs.

So I'm sorry but the ONLY thing Linux has going for it is "free as in beer" and that is if and ONLY if your time is worthless, otherwise you get the "fun" of breaking updates or the "interesting challenge" of Black Screens Of Death thanks to Linux hanging onto a 40 year old client/server paradigm that hasn't been relevant for the vast majority in over 25 years. I'm sorry but there is no comparison, I can place Windows and OSX in the "Hairyfeet Challenge" and they'll both come out with flying colors, Linux will have at least one if not several drivers crapped on and wasted thanks to updates not caring about drivers. Don't say "If they were only in the kernel" because that is bullshit the kernel drivers are ONLY decent on relatively new and relatively popular devices, the rest are half baked and poorly maintained.

Now I could set down and show you mathematically why Linus' "Let the kernel devs do it" can never work in a billion years but since you are just gonna call me dirty names anyway why bother? I'm sure any response i get will just be the circular logic Linux fans love which is why I have all Linux articles blocked. isn't it funny how we give the FOSSies their own section yet that isn't good enough, they HAVE to come preach their religion in articles that have nothing to do with them? I think the fact that more people are willing to risk thousands in fines and even jail time to steal the other guy's OS rather than take yours ought to frankly be all that needs to be said, your product simply doesn't measure up, sorry.

Really? Then you better not tells the guys at VLite who have been doing it since Win2K (formerly NLite for NT) or the guys at RT7Lite who have made a tool so simple your grandma can use it. Oh and FYI but you have been able to uninstall IE since XP SP2, its under Windows Components in Add/Remove on XP or Programs and Features on Vista on up.

So maybe you ought to actually try something before you go spreading FUD since its obvious you probably have touched a Windows machine since WinME considering how badly out of data your supposed info is. Oh and in case you are wondering Yes Virginia you CAN change Windows Shells, there are about a dozen free ones to choose from but I prefer AstonShell for their secure desktop which is light and easy peasy to lock down with GPOs.

So I'm sorry but the ONLY thing Linux has going for it is "free as in beer" and that is if and ONLY if your time is worthless, otherwise you get the "fun" of breaking updates or the "interesting challenge" of Black Screens Of Death thanks to Linux hanging onto a 40 year old client/server paradigm that hasn't been relevant for the vast majority in over 25 years. I'm sorry but there is no comparison, I can place Windows and OSX in the "Hairyfeet Challenge" and they'll both come out with flying colors, Linux will have at least one if not several drivers crapped on and wasted thanks to updates not caring about drivers. Don't say "If they were only in the kernel" because that is bullshit the kernel drivers are ONLY decent on relatively new and relatively popular devices, the rest are half baked and poorly maintained.

Now I could set down and show you mathematically why Linus' "Let the kernel devs do it" can never work in a billion years but since you are just gonna call me dirty names anyway why bother? I'm sure any response i get will just be the circular logic Linux fans love which is why I have all Linux articles blocked. isn't it funny how we give the FOSSies their own section yet that isn't good enough, they HAVE to come preach their religion in articles that have nothing to do with them? I think the fact that more people are willing to risk thousands in fines and even jail time to steal the other guy's OS rather than take yours ought to frankly be all that needs to be said, your product simply doesn't measure up, sorry.

You do realize Windows Phone market share is growing faster than any other currently?

Why, yes, they could double their market share by selling a relatively small amount of units, but that doesn't mean that there is really a significant amount of them in use.

According to this:

Over the past 12 months, Windows Phone went from 3.1% market share to 3.7%. This means that while shipments of Windows Phone devices are growing, they're barely growing any faster than the industry as a whole.

Ooooh, Microsoft has gained 0.6% of the market over the last 12 months. I'm impressed, and I can only imagine the competitors are all running scared.

And in case you'd like to claim that's not what it says, let's go straight to IDC here, it's the first table on the page. They may have shipped 8.9M units this year vs 4.7M units last year, but how many of them have actually sold?

Jesus fanboys are terrible.

Yes, especially when they cling to a lame statistic which doesn't say what they think it says. Next you'll try to tell me the Zune was a raging success.

It's true that, as a percentage increase from what they had last year, Microsoft phones are 'growing faster' relative to itself (NOT faster relative to the overall market), but in terms of overall magnitude in the market, it's still a dud. Compared to what it did last year, it make huge gains ... compared to what everybody else did last year, Windows phone is a drop in the bucket.

That doesn't equate to "Windows Phone market share is growing faster than any other" -- not by a bloody longshot.

But, hey, you keep consoling yourself that it's the fanboys of competing technologies who are spreading lies and propaganda that Windows Phone is a joke and a failure. You console yourself that, if they'd only listen to the statistics which demonstrate it's a superior phone, we could all get along.

And I'll keep assuming you're a drooling idiot who doesn't know how to read the statistics. All that stat says is how fast Microsoft's share increased over the last year compared to where Microsoft's share was last year.

But growing from 3.1% of a market to 3.7% of a market isn't the success story you seem to think it is.

Linux avoids them by simply not generating an 8.3 name.

I've read about a patch by Andrew Tridgell implementing a design-around to generate 8.3 filler names that are not valid filenames. Has this patch made it into mainline Linux? And has this design-around been tested in any court?

You know why you hate TMRepo, which BTW you should be fucking ASHAMED of comparing a JOKE SITE to Stromfront you douchebag, but you know why you hate it? Because like all good jokes its FUNNY BECAUSE ITS TRUE.

I can answer ALL of your arguments with the top 20 TMRepos, you know why? Its the SAME FUCKING EXCUSES the FOSSies have been using for a fricking decade, that's why! How do you think TMRepo came to be? a guy got tired of hearing the same old FOSSie bullshit and decided to just start listing them and tada! TMRepo.

So go back to your circle of loon, go back to pretending that the OEMs haven't all walked away from your broken mess because they got tired of the broken shit which even ESR can't make work while claiming that android is Linux.

Know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result and that is Linux in a nutshell which is why me and every other B&M retailer and OEM have run away screaming from your mess, why even Dell hides it on a back page and gives you multiple warning before they will even sell it to you and just FYI unlike the Windows versions NO SUPPORT because even they know that shit is gonna break. I mean for the love of God fricking God Windows 8, the most hated windows since MSBob, got more users by its second month than Linux has in its entire history, what more proof do you fucking need that your current bullshit direction ain't working?

BTW know why I can produce so many citations and all you can produce is insults? because just like TMRepo I've heard the same excuses from FOSSies for so damned long i know EXACTLY what to type into a search engine to cut through your lies, but you hang onto your bullshit but if you have the balls take the Hairyfeet challenge, I dare you, double dare you to film it and upload it, you'll find that even giving Linux just HALF the support cycle of Linux it WILL fail, know why? Because the "let the devs do it" driver horseshit is just that,total fucking horseshit and IT DOES NOT WORK, it will NEVER work, and THAT is why even the other free OSes refuse to use his fucked up driver model!

I'll get hate but screw it, the reason linux goes nowhere is the same reason you name the distro and it won't pass the "Hairyfeet Challenge" which is already tilted badly in Linux' favor, and that is Linus Torvalds gives more care about religious dogma than designing an OS that works and since the vast majority of the public are NOT what I call "FOSSies" and do not give a rat turd about GPL purity Linux goes nowhere. I mean for God's sake guys, there is several orders of magnitude more people willing to risk tens of thousands in fines and possible jail time to steal the other guy's product than take yours for free, doesn't that set off a lightbulb above your head?

The simple fact of the matter is that NOBODY uses Torvalds fucked up "Let the devs do it" driver model, not even the other free as in freedom OSes like BSD and Solaris and the reason why is it DOES NOT WORK, hell you can use basic math to show why it'll never work, ready? You have MAYBE 400 guys working with Torvalds and qualified to write and debug low level systems drivers, following so far? Now add in the fact that there is probably a good 10,000 new devices coming out per quarter MINIMUM and a good 100,000+ drivers that are ALREADY in the tree....see the problem yet? if you mainlined those devs on Bolivian Marching Powder so they NEVER slept and ONLY worked on drivers you'd have each driver getting around 20 minutes worth of time every 3 years or so, which is why you end up with drivers like these that were half assed and piss poor to begin with, only having half the hardware functional, and are poorly supported on top of that.

But what do we get when we point this out, and what I'm sure to hear here? We don't need no steekin ABI and then you expect, with a straight face and without a trace of irony, for Joe and jane Average to do forum hunts, google for fixes, and be able to tweak piles of CLI crapola because thanks to Torvalds fucked up way of dealing with drivers, which worked in 93 when you had a couple of hundred drivers but just can't scale to the number we have today, leaves even Eric Raymond unable to get a printer to work over the network, a feature that the other guy has been doing since WinXP in 01 trivially. In fact the ONLY response you can show from the kernel devs is a RELIGIOUS argument, in fact the dev even wrote "and I hope we break none free drivers often!" which if that doesn't show you its about the GPL religion over having a functional OS then I don't know what will.

At the end of the day you have to be either the most arrogant prick on the planet or fucking deluded to look and see that EVERY SINGLE OTHER OS does it one way, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS, fuck even OS/2 and your "dear leader" goes for the exact opposite approach, one that NOBODY other than him uses, and then to believe he is actually right and they are wrong, that he is fucking smarter than ALL those OS devs put together? I'm sorry but that is bullshit and ironically the community knows it too even if they won't say it out loud. after all what does everybody on the forums tell you to buy from graphics? Nvidia a NON FREE DRIVER because what do you know, the driver actually WORKS. sadly Nvidia is the only company it seems willing to blow that much money supporting Linux, the rest aren't gonna pay an entire dev team to fix what Torvalds and Co. break and Joe and jane sure as fuck ain't gonna put with updates shitting all over drivers and forum hunts for fixes.

Riiight, because Linux doesn't have problems which is why it did so well on netbooks, but that is to be expected with Linux having such a well thought out roadmap. Of course to have remote assistance you'd have to have functional hardware acceleration but who needs that, right? Why Linux is so secure and so much more stable than Windows why even needing that feature is unthinkable!

Riiight, because Linux doesn't have problems which is why it did so well on netbooks, but that is to be expected with Linux having such a well thought out roadmap. Of course to have remote assistance you'd have to have functional hardware acceleration but who needs that, right? Why Linux is so secure and so much more stable than Windows why even needing that feature is unthinkable!

Dude I'll say the same thing I've been saying for years, Linux ain't done shit, ain't doing shit, and ain't GONNA do shit until that egomaniac Torvalds is punted like a 30 yard field return because his ass refuses to let go of that tired, worthless, POS, early 90s throwback of a driver model that NOBODY, not even the other FOSS OSes like BSD and OpenSolaris supports.

I mean you can use fricking math to show how is old fart 90s attitude isn't gonna work, you have MAYBE 400 guys that are qualified to write low level device drivers working on the kernel,right? That number BTW is pulled out of my behind and is probably a LOT smaller but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt here. So you have 400 guys, and average TEN THOUSAND or so devices released every.single.quarter. from your cheapo printers to webcams to all the USB crap, and then you look at the back catalog you probably have nearly 100,000 drivers by now...starting to see the problem? if you gave those 400 devs a mountain of coke and made them work 24/7 for the rest of their days they'd MAYBE touch every driver.....oh I'd say about every 4 years. Meanwhile you got Linus fiddling with shit, the guys that run the network stack fiddling with shit, the DE guys, the audio guys...see the problem? What you get is this kind of crap where the drivers you end up with are half assed, don't support most of the features the device has, and are piss poor at best.

There is A REASON why every single other OS on the planet uses ABI and the ONLY one that doesn't is Torvalds, because ABIs are good design, what Torvalds had worked when Linux was a class project but it just don't cut the mustard now. You can look up "The Hairyfeet Challenge" and try it for yourself, it simulates a 5 years install which is HALF the amount of support you get from Windows and also doesn't use a single bit of exotic hardware and even then Torvalds model just doesn't fucking work. The ONLY reason it works in enterprise is companies like HP paying out the ass for dev teams to keep rebuilding their drivers when they get crapped on, that shit ain't happening in the consumer space.

So you see it isn't Windows holding Linux back, its those at the top of Linux that treat it like a FOSSie religion (see the rant from one of the kernel devs when asked about an ABI, and I quote,"And I hope we break non free drivers constantly!" which if that doesn't prove they care more about "racial purity" than having a functional Operating System i don't know what does) that keep holding onto a backwards ass broken system that even 5 minutes of thought and common sense would show its not gonna fucking work, and hasn't worked well since the late 90s. Believe me as a retailer I wished it did work but it don't so its not even worth talking about until it has an ABI, its a waste of time.

Exactly, every article we get with MSFT in the title we get what I call the "FOSSie faction" which frankly live on Mars if they think the entire population is gonna deal with CLI, Googling for fixes, bi-annual death marches, and all the bullshit.

I mean I just retired a Sempron that served 9 years in the shop, that is TWO service packs and over 1500 patches and not a SINGLE driver screwed up, with windows you get the drivers working they will work for the LIFE of the OS, I have given the "Hairyfeet challenge" to a good 15 Linux distros, and I have YET to have a single one pass. You always end up with dead Wifi, dead sound, all that talk about "Oh if the driver is in the kernel its all good" is a load of horseshit as this post shows quite clear.

Believe me as a retailer there is NOTHING I want more than to have a viable third way, if you think MSFT fucks the consumers they REALLY fuck us system builders, but with every Linux out there it ends up being neither free as in beer or freedom, it ends up free as in worthless as all the time I end up wasting because some damned update shit all over somebody's laptop or put their graphics in single user mode makes the cost of Windows trivial compared to how much Linux costs.

And please don't waste your breath trying to hype LTS, or as I call it "here is some old shit that most will never get backported to" because not only is Ubuntu going rolling release (thus making LTS just marketing bullshit) but you NEVER seem to be able to just go to the store and buy a printer or wifi adapter or anything because it ALWAYS ends up needing kernel blah blah blah and you have kernel blah blah. which to me just shows how damned crappy that old driver model Torvalds refuses to let go of is, no damned reason I should have to KNOW what kernel I need just to buy a piece of hardware, all i should need to know is like whether its Debian or ubuntu, making the consumer know all this trivial shit just makes it more a PITA.

So there is a REASON why nobody has challenged MSFT in the desktop and laptop space, and that is because nobody has offered a product that is as easy to use, stay stable and have the drivers work for the life of the OS, nothing sadly comes close and believe me I've tried, you name the release I've given it the challenge, I probably blew a good $400 in bandwidth and never had a single one that could last without something shitting itself, not one.

Assuming they aren't leaving all of Windows behind

That is where you go wrong.

VP9 is still a work in progress, so no hard numbers as yet. One of its goals is to achieve 50% better quality with the same bitrate compared to VP8. Another goal is to provide a better encoding efficiency than H.265 which has the same approach on achieving a better quality around 50% compared to H.264.

Google actually did a direct comparison between VP9 and H.264 on a sample file at its recent I/O event and showed off a 63% reduction in file size. As for the quality, see the pic for yourself.

As for the licensing issue, Google cut a deal with the MPEG-LA consortium that controls H.264 to licence their patents for VP8 and VP9. So there is low possibility of any user of VP9 of being bogged down by patent lawsuits.

Why should you care? Unlike H.265, VP9 is free for commercial use . If your use is non-profit, there is no difference between the two.

Where or where are my mods points when I need them? Intel is a dirty filthy company who plays dirty filthy pool debasing the whole idea of a free market and undermining the progress of CPUs in the process.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/184882/A_History_of_Intels_Antitrust_Woes.html

http://www.osnews.com/story/21468/Source_Intel_To_Be_Found_Guilty_of_Monopoly_Abuse

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=7574976&page=1#.Ua94NkDrz4M

and plays hardball against even the smallest of critics-

http://www.faceintel.com/kenwonintellost2.htm

All the while sucking as hard as any monopoly at the public teat:

http://www.faceintel.com/tax$subsidizeintel.htm

Intel is a dirty, disgusting company that debases the whole idea of a free market.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25547/Apple_Restricts_Certain_APIs_to_Mac_App_Store_Applications
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/29/windows-store-metro-mode-no-sideloading-psa/

Do you know that you're likely not allowed to use video shot on your camera commercially? Read the EULA.

Thanks to the codec cartel MPEG LA http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA

MPEG LA consists of several corporations, including Apple, Microsoft and Sony. http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx

Which shows a complete lack of understanding in how UAC and other new features were implemented. XP was a tangled mess of shit. That's why it was so hard for them to secure it, and that's why they didn't just continue on with that effort. Did you forget that changing a graphics drive in XP required a reboot? Sound card locks up? BSOD. Etc. etc. etc. To say that XP was complete sounds like someone who knows just enough about computers to think they have a clue without actually bothering to research what changes went into vista and 7. Here's a hint: it wasn't just pretty graphics.

http://www.osnews.com/story/19793/No_New_Kernel_Builds_on_Vista

Microsoft released it's Hyper-V code due to the GPL. They wouldn't have if the kernel had been BSD licensed. Many mobile companies only release the modifications to Android that are required under the GPL. If it weren't for the GPL, they likely wouldn't release the drivers either, and projects like CyanogenMod would be a lot harder. There's a long list of source code that we have because of the GPL.

Microsoft released the hyper-v drivers for Linux to gain market share in a new market. Just like they made hyper-v server available for free, with less restrictions than the free version of vmware's esx. They could easily have done an nvidia and only released blobs. Microsoft want to own the cloud, that means making everything, including linux work well on their cloud platform.

It's a matter of trust - I trust that generally others will do the right thing, and good changes will come back.

This is optimistic, like the tragedy of the commons. It's also worth mentioning that there are several times in history when companies used open source code, and wouldn't have given back if it weren't for the GPL requiring it. For example, that is why GCC includes Objective-C support. NeXT wouldn't have given that back at all if they weren't required.

Microsoft released it's Hyper-V code due to the GPL. They wouldn't have if the kernel had been BSD licensed. Many mobile companies only release the modifications to Android that are required under the GPL. If it weren't for the GPL, they likely wouldn't release the drivers either, and projects like CyanogenMod would be a lot harder. There's a long list of source code that we have because of the GPL.

http://www.osnews.com/print/26838/Palm_I_m_ready_to_wallow_now ... instead of page by page view.

It has 200M of RAM available to the system.

Expect that most of it's capability is going to be used in running the display. Here are the stats in case someone else needs to understand how limited it is:

http://www.osnews.com/story/24619/Review_MID_M80003W_Tablet_with_Android_2_2/

HTC's problems werent from Microsoft.. HTC was the target of the opening salvo of mobile patent lawsuits, initiated by Apple.

N.B. I'm not saying that Microsoft's patent attacks directly went against HTC. HTC's poblems seem to be largely from redirecting R&D in the direction Windows Phone. Have a look at exactly when the competitiveness of their phones went down and it's exactly the time when they must have been directing a large effort to porting Windows to their hardware. What I'm saying is that it was partnering with Microsoft that damaged HTC. That at least partly will have

When the first wave of the mobile lawsuit armageddon geared up, the three companies distinctly absent from either end of these lawsuits were Google, Palm, and Microsoft (citation.)

A long time ago Microsoft even opposed patents. That attitude, however changed much earlier than people realise. Please remember that Microsoft v. TomTom took place in 2009 noticably before Apple started suing HTC.

To accuse Microsoft of being somehow a big offender is ignoring the history of these battles. Patent lawsuits wasn't how Microsoft operated, and to a large extent still isn't because nearly every lawsuit that targets Microsoft or is initiated by Microsoft ends in a (cross)licensing deal rather than a judgment and that includes Microsoft taking the short end of it (ex: licensing from Acacia Research.)

Microsoft has repeatedly spun off or supported companies like intellectual vendors which are archetypal patent trolls. Microsoft funded SCO in several direct and indirect ways (see groklaw.net for details) and it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that soon after Microsoft funding SCO started talking of patents. Microsoft claimed in 2007 that "Linux violated 235 of their patents" and it took years to prove that they were lying. They are circumspect; they do attempt to do most of their patent extortion behind NDAs. However that does not make things better. The opposite in fact. Microsoft is trying to use patents to set up a system where it alone has control of all software. Companies like Google which stand up to this should be seen as heroic.

I do understand that Microsoft is one of the only companies that have gone after Linux, and its probably unforgivable, but that doesnt make them one of the big offenders in mobile patent lawsuits. Making that claim just doesnt hold up to reality.

Microsoft extorted more from Android vendors than they charged for Windows 7. Most of this action was done under NDA and it wasn't until Barnes & Noble exposed this that it was clear how outrageous and ridiculous Microsoft's patent claims that they managed to get away with elsewhere are. Even then, Barnes & Noble were forced into selling off part of their E-reader business to Microsoft and investigating windows for tablets. Where Apple is a street punk, Microsoft is a mafia don. You hear more noise from Apple's legal action than Microsofts simply because the level of intimidation is lower and so people are more likely to stand up to them.

U.S. patents subsisting as of the effective date of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (June 8, 1995), or whose applications were still pending on that date, expire 17 years after issue or 20 years after filing, whichever is longer. U.S. patents applied for after that date expire 20 years after filing, plus term extensions for undue examination delay or regulatory approval delay. The last of the MP3 patents, U.S. Patent 6009399, was filed in 1997 and is believed to expire in 2017 according to the list in this article.

I submitted this flaw to Slashdot in late 2011 (with a one word search term I believe!) and it never appeared in any story. I did post up about the story rejection on OSNews a few months later.

If I could find out how to search for old Slashdot submissions I would do, but I can't see anything in my Slashdot account settings/profile that lets me see all the atempted submissions I made.

They say numbers about Windows 8 and Symbian, but what about Meego/N9? If a platform that they declared dead and buried basically at the moment of launching it, in just one phone, performed in a not so different way than Win8 phones, that would be a big message. There were some numbers around N9 sales for Q4 2011 and Q1 2012 that could point that it was selling better than Lumias, but not sure how it evolved. What is possible is that if Sailfish or Ubuntu gets ported to it (have a good shape for the swipe gestures used in those incoming mobile OSs) it could be even start selling back.

Anyway, speaking about dead and buried OSs, Microsoft killed and buried the Window OS bundled in most Lumia Phones when announced Windows Phone 8, saying that present and close enough in time Lumias won't be able to run it, and that apps for Windows 7.x won't be compatible with it neither. Is not so amazing that it sells badly, even for being a Windows phones. You had to wait till Lumia 920 to have a Windows 8.

The extremely heavy fonts (the text "Allows the manipulation..." in this screenshot) catches my eye in a really bad way.

This software is protected by both United States copyright law and international copyright treaty provisions. Therefore, you must treat this software just like a book, except that you may copy it onto a computer to be used and you may make archival copies of the software for the sole purpose of backing-up our software and protecting your investment from loss.

...

s/it/them

Comment on OSnews:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?546002
Laurence:

Apple sue nearly every manufacturer over generic shapes and actions, and the government just give a green light for dumb intellectual property to be registered.

Samsung sue Apple over actual inventions, and they get investigated.

This world is going to the shits.

(yes I know Samsung's patents were dubious because of being FRAND, and in an ideal world they shouldn't have used them. But in an ideal world they shouldn't have had to counter sue because Apple generic design patents).

I agree. This is what patents are for after all. Why only have shitty patents for things not important and punish people who've got the real stuff? Make sense? Remove them already.

See here and here for a sampling. Canonical is listed, but they're hardly the only one. Then there's also the famous (infamous?) Gnome Census from a couple of years ago.

This friendly fire stuff is uncalled for. Everyone who claims to be the only one who really cares about Linux, on the desktop or as a whole, should be reminded of the Judgment of Solomon.

For anybody wondering:

Switching from GCC to LLVM is not planned. From what I gathered so far, LLVM is pretty intriguing and I am tempted to explore it. But on the other hand, we are actually quite happy with our current GCC-based tool chain.

http://www.osnews.com/story/26483/Windows_RT_Office_RT_takes_up_12GB_disk_space

I can't believe people actually think this garbage.

I can't believe people in glass houses use a stone throwing gattling gun with such abandon.

http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/samsung-vs.-apple-e1313955567548.jpg

And there you go like a true fanboi using that widely debunked graphic which only shows a small selection of Samsung phones.

If you were hones, you would have shown this one:

http://www.osnews.com/img/26230/s-comp.PNG

What's also key is that the better points of ReiserFS, such as journaling, have migrated into other file systems. The experiment wasn't a failure, it was a darn good idea that has led to an overall improvement in reliability and speed of other file systems.

WTF have you been smoking? JFS1 and XFS predate ReiserFS by 10 and 7 years respectively. Both are journaling filesystems. There are probably mainframe journaling FSes that predate these. In short, Hans borrowed the journaling idea from others, same goes for most of his FS concepts. Hans had no original filesystem concepts of his own, none that were ever implemented or proven any good in production. Optimizing a filesystem for high performance with small files isn't a concept, but an execution and tuning detail.

All filesystem developers borrow ideas from prior work, and Hans was no different than others in this regard. In fact there is frequent cross pollination of concepts. Proof of point: Ted Ts'o borrowed from the allocation group concept in XFS and implemented something similar in EXT4. Dave Chinner borrowed a concept from the journaling mechanism in EXT3 and implemented something similar in XFS. Note the praise Hans piles on the XFS devs for schooling him in delayed allocation, which prevents fragmentation (AIUI, Resier3 was pretty horrible about fragmenting files and free space):

From: http://www.osnews.com/story/69
Hans Reiser: This is an area we are still experimenting with. We currently do what ext2 does, and preallocate blocks. What XFS does is much better, they allocate blocknrs to blocks at the time they are flushed to disk, and this allows a much more efficient and optimal allocation to occur. We knew we couldn't do it the XFS way and make code freeze for 2.4, but reiser4 is being built around delayed allocation, and I'd like to thank the XFS developers for taking the time to personally explain to me why delayed allocation is the way to go.

Hans Reiser was no visionary. Like all kernel developers, he borrowed from others' ideas, improving on some. Note that Reiser4 was to be built around delayed allocation. This interview was published in 2001. It's 11 years later and still no Reiser4. On the other hand, we've seen constant full blown development of XFS and EXTx in these 11 years, by large teams of dedicated developers. Both XFS and EXT4 steamroll the small file performance of Reiser3 by a large margin, and we've seen the introduction of a copy on write FS, BTRFS, which doesn't even use a journal. Though the true performance metrics of a mature BTRFS have yet to be realized, nor the level of fragmentation, which is sure to be an issue with COW.

Don't link to the LG Prada

"Just ignore this evidence that pretty much blows up all of the rest of this rant I'm about to give."

Phones had been converging on these interfaces and designs for years before Apple released the iPhone. Here, have some knowledge:

http://phandroid.com/2012/07/31/pre-iphone-design-concepts-add-weight-to-samsungs-defense-in-patent-trial/

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_

--Jeremy

So its just another 2 minutes of hate? Meh if you want that OSNews as an epic flamewar happening called what killed the Linux desktop that is at 165 and climbing by the second. The sad part is the things the guy is pointing out, distros not being compatible, constant futzing making it impossible for third party software to find a home, busted drivers, its the same stuff guys like me have been pointing out for years.

Look its really simple folks, does Win 8 Metro suck big hairy balls? Yes, yes it does, which is why there have been so many articles pointing out what a disaster it is. Will that help Linux gain even 1/2 of 1% share? Not a chance in hell because it takes less than 3 minutes with Google to kill metro dead and its even free. You've got Classic Shell, You've got Start8, hell if you are really picky and don't even want the Win 7 UI pay a whole $30 and Astonshell will let you turn the Windows UI into any damned UI you like, even KDE 3 or Gnome 2.

Linux has its niches but those niches will NEVER be the desktop. Its good on servers where the insane cost of Windows CALs make it a better option, great for embedded and HPC because you're not dealing with drivers and can strip the living hell out of it to leave more cycles for your apps, but for desktops it HAS to be simple, easy, and work for years and years with little to no thought required. I'm sorry but that ain't Linux folks, never has been, never will be, and that is how the devs like it so that's that.

A little bit more on the Dutch case if you will. Apple appealed the ruling for the tablet and lost (the article), but in the original case, Apple also lost on look and feel (community design in Europe) on the phones, but I guess they didn't appeal that part.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25098/Apple_Scores_Meaningless_Dutch_Court_Victory_Against_Samsung

I'm sorry, I didn't think I needed to clarify the statement that "Bulldozer is AMD's netburst" but since it is obvious that I do need to clarify allow me to do so.

What I meant is that in both cases the company threw out good design practices chasing a single metric, higher clocks in the case of Intel, higher core count per TDP in the case of AMD, and both paid/are paying for it. In both cases you get chips that run hotter, suck more power, and give less IPC.

And having good Linux support really doesn't help when more than 90% of your market is NOT running Linux, you might as well say "Well if the world switched to netBSD all the problems would disappear!" because the world isn't gonna switch to Linux or NetBSD thanks to all the mission critical programs that are Windows only and will never be ported.

And while I agree that theoretically the problems could be partially fixed by the scheduler, in reality MSFT has made it clear they WILL NOT FIX in ANY version of their OS except...Windows 8. Considering Windows 8 is getting press such as Windows 8...Yes its THAT bad and is the source of parody and ridicule you again have the NetBSD problem, as the majority of your potential customers won't run the "fixed" OS so will be gimped if they take your product. If I refuse to run Win 8, would I be better off with Intel or AMD? The choice is obvious as AMD will be crippled on my OS while Intel won't.

In the end I truly believe the only hope left we have for AMD, and this is from someone who hasn't built a single Intel PC since finding out about the bribery and compiler rigging, is that the new chief chip architect they hired away from Apple will right the ship. Because XP is supported until 2014, Vista until 2017, and Win 7 until 2020 and the new chips will run like ass on all of the above. Can AMD afford to literally sit on ass for THAT long, until all the other OSes are no longer used? I don't think so and since they were stupid enough not to give MSFT the heads up as to what was going on and by killing Thuban and the successor to Brazos they've locked themselves into a path where the most hated Windows OS since MS Bob is the ONLY hope they have...bad move AMD, seriously bad move.

Nice Troll A/C. Now get your head out of your ass. Unless you like chewing on your inner moron. The first browsers on mobile phones came out in the late 1990 with the UP Browser by a company now known as OpenWave. Here is an article from 2006 that will clue you in. My crappy Samsung in 2005 could surf the web and had apps. Apple just waited till bigger and more rugged touch displays were out that were reliable.

http://www.osnews.com/img/26230/s-comp.PNG

Why were the linux based Razrs failures? I owned a Motorola A780 which was one of their early linux based smart phones and it was a great phone for it's time. It was one of the first phones with a GPS chip built in and had a pressure based touch screen in a clam-shell design which I really liked as it protected the screen in your pocket and had real buttons on the outside.

The main problems I had with it were the chunky size and the battery life wasn't great. It didn't have many apps, but had a full version of linux under the hood. In a lot of ways, I think it was ahead of it's time.

a780 isn't one of those. a780's problem was that it was too exotic and moto didn't really push it or support 3rd party dev for it, so it was sort of a clusterfuck money drain at the time as well. I remember finding it and it's siblings interesting devices at the time but one could find even less info about them than what you could find about motos symbian-uiq phones, so as developer they weren't terribly interesting.

but I was referring to razr2 v8 and it's siblings as the clusterfuck http://www.osnews.com/story/18475/Review_The_Linux-based_Motorola_RAZR2_V8
and that's problem was that it couldn't compete with s60 and seemingly needs beefier cpu/ram than what motos own older os needed whilst providing only just about identical feature set.

android is like 432432 miles away from this pos.
the real main problem for these was price, nokia just ate motorola in the global segment those phones(razr2's etc.) were supposed to compete in. so moto exited featurephone and got chopped up to the pieces of which one(what was the unprofitable portion) is now being bought by google.

A quick glance around Google will find a completely different set of cherry picked "before iPad/iPhone" and "after iPad/iPhone" images that show that, hey, their design isn't actually all that original

Cue the usual search for earlier unsuccessful attempts at touch devices--unsuccessful precisely because they did not come close to implementing the full set of features that made Apple's products a hit (and that Google is now arguing is essential for a usable touch-based tablet or phone)--which may happen to resemble Apple's products in one or two superficial respects, but do not even come close to reproducing the combination of many physical, interface, and even packaging details that are covered by Apple's design patent.

And then you have things like the LG Prada that you conveniently forget.

Actually, I think the LG Prada is a good example of my point, that there is a lot more to an iPhone (and Samsung and other makers of iPhone knockoffs have copied a lot more) than just the shape and the concept of a touch phone.

Similarly, did you know that Android has always been designed to run on a full touchscreen? Here's a bit of history [osnews.com] to cure your ignorance. Added bonus is the bit about Google voluntarily withholding the pinch-zoom gesture at Apple's behest.

I notice you don't cite the same author's follow-up article in which he admits that the article you cite was inaccurate, and that the pre-iPhone Android did in fact resemble the Blackberry

There's no point in debating you morons any more. The only real hope is to keep your bullshit from infecting someone else.

so:

It is instructive to look at tablet design before and after iPad [osxdaily.com]

The iPhone similarly challenged conventional wisdom and completely transformed cell phone design

A quick glance around Google will find a completely different set of cherry picked "before iPad/iPhone" and "after iPad/iPhone" images that show that, hey, their design isn't actually all that original. (Though, to be fair, so many Apple blogs have picked up these images that the ones making Apple look better are much easier to find) For instance, linked in one of the very first comments of your iPad story, is this. And then you have things like the LG Prada that you conveniently forget.

Similarly, did you know that Android has always been designed to run on a full touchscreen? Here's a bit of history to cure your ignorance. Added bonus is the bit about Google voluntarily withholding the pinch-zoom gesture at Apple's behest.

--Jeremy

Slow story day, /.? This flamebait is a lot like saying "right, we've got street signs, now let's get rid of speech - noone needs to ask directions!"
It's in a similar category to the regular "let's stop using X" arguments, and tends to come from an ignorance of what is being dissed. For a basic understanding of what a CLI is, I suggest The Command Line - The Best Newbie Interface?.

all 3... you forget that the N900 has outsold Windows Phone so far, so much so that Nokia and Microsoft refuse to say just how many have been activated.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25569 ... In other words, the Nokia N9 outsold the Lumia by 3 to 1 - even though the N9 is considerably more expensive. I'm starting to see why Elop was trying so hard to turn the N9 into a failure. As a Microsoft exec, he knew that the device and its MeeGo operating system were better than he let on. ...

There's still no hard evidence for all this, but it's looking less and less like a crazy theory.

Apple fans love that version of events but it just isn't so. The Blackberry-esque device was only one prototype. There were fully touch enabled prototypes being tested in the same time frame:

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_