Windows XP Lives, Thanks to Linux

CWmike writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols puts his thumb on what really happened to spur Microsoft's change of mind on sparing Windows XP: The smashing success of Asus and others' Linux-powered UMPCs and mini-notebooks caught Microsoft completely by surprise. It turned out people wanted inexpensive, hard-working Linux laptops rather than overpriced, underpowered Vista PCs. If anyone thought this was a flash in the pan, that Asus just hit it lucky once, they haven't been paying attention. Intel is putting big bucks into its Atom family of processors, which have been designed for UMPCs, or as Intel would have it, MIDs. Intel has encouraged both the computer makers and the Linux companies in its Moblin initiative to run desktop Linux. The Linux companies have picked up on this. Canonical, Ubuntu's dad company, has come up with an UMPC-specific version of Ubuntu 8.04, the latest version of this popular Linux distribution, for Intel Atom UMPCs. At Computex, by my count, more than a dozen new UMPCs were announced both from vendors you've never heard of and from big name companies like Acer and Asus. You can also expect to see Dell releasing its 'mini-Inspiron' with Ubuntu by June's end."

Comments

Cool.

[AltGrendel]

I'll be checking out the new systems to see if they would make great portable multi-media systems.

Re:Cool.

[pure_chownage]

For their size (and power) the EEE's seem to be excellent value for money. They seem perfect for most of the things I'll ever have to do on the move.

Great for taking to university as it was such a swine to lug around my current laptop all the time (until it died).As I've got limited funds the EEE seems to be a good choice for me.

...A sub £200 subnotebook that's able to handle itself running Half-Life 2 (yes I know it's fairly old now...but still :P) and a variety of other games just seems impressive to me.

If it can handle those it's powerful enough for what I need to do (coding in Python, Java and C++, word processing, music etc).

I could have some great lunchtime LAN games.

...Oh, and do my work.

ultra-rugged umpcs?

[dAzED1]

anyone know of an ultra-rugged umpc out there? The sort of thing the military would use, or whatnot?

Hmmm...

[Stanistani]

I wonder, with the surge in this UMPC form factor, if not only efficient OS's are favored, but perhaps new networked games with cross-platform ports (and a smaller footprint).

I scent a market opportunity for game companies to port more games to Linux...

Re:Hmmm...

[sskagent]

Or a functional windows emulator would be nice

Re:Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's wrong to assume that it's a surge in the UMPC form factor. That design remained stagnant and unaccepted forever. The catalyst was the introduction of *cheap* machines that fulfilled reasonable needs. Original UMPCs priced themselves out of relevancy, and if the designers of these new machines keep with the trend of trying to out-do one another in terms of hardware with disregard to the delicate price point, they'll again price themselves out of the game.

Re:Hmmm...

[ohcrapitssteve]

Or a functional windows emulator would be nice Wha?

VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop, for my money, are 100% functional (and there's more out there than just those two.) 100+ % functional if you count the functions that a hardware PC couldn't do, like say, undo-disks (you have the choice to not commit any changes you made to a VM's boot volume when you shut down.)

As for things that aren't emulators, there's Wine. Wine supports tons of games and other Windows apps natively on Linux by making the Windows binary "feel at home" by simulating a Win32 environment.

Re:Hmmm...

[Stanistani]

Well, I was using 'surge' to denote the spike in popularity.

I agree it's price driven to a large extent.

The industry needs to kepp 'em inexpensive and increase the battery life, and durability.

I'd like to see these things in plastic capsules in drugstores, like MP3 players (note: MP3 player not in this case to include iPods), or cheap cameras.

Re:Hmmm...

[kilgor]

Doubtful. There is already a big push in the gaming industry toward more web based games (a great example is Iron Dukes). Tiny laptops and more capable phones (with varying operating systems) will likely push the market even further.

Re:Hmmm...

[tepples]

but perhaps new networked games with cross-platform ports (and a smaller footprint). But most of the major PC game publishers are locked into the mentality of one PC per player, even if all players are in the same room and even if not all game designs would benefit from a separate view per player. So you'd buy one console, one TV, and three extra gamepads to play a 4-player game, or you'd buy four UMPCs to play a 4-player game. Which will home users prefer?

Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[It doesn't come easy]

So Microsoft has to keep XP going to slow the adoption of Linux? Yet malware writers are now using Microsoft's patch cycle for XP at least (and can Vista be far behind?) to rapidly create exploits. And of course XP is still rife with security issues. I wonder how long XP can stay afloat with malware on one side and Linux on the other? (especially if Microsoft stops fixing XP security issues)

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[rodgster]

I haven't checked recently, but I thought MS was going to remove XP from all distribution channels June 30th, 2008.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[Lumpy]

At least that's the press release.

Real reason? Vista sucks. Almost EVERY business I consult for ask for me to get them copies of XP for any new PC they get that has Vista on it.

Business and most people DO NOT WANT vista. That is what is keeping XP alive. MSFT refuses to admit it so they use another reason.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[dave420]

It's very easy to keep an XP install running. Especially since SP2, now that the firewall is on by default. I've run XP for years without a firewall of its own (just a NAT denying inbound connections), and no anti-virus, and I didn't have virus problems. I'm not suggesting you're spreading some FUD, I'm merely hinting that the reality you've painted isn't reflected in some, if not many people's 'eXPerience'.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[MightyYar]

I think that they will still sell it for these tiny PCs, since they won't run Vista. For them not to do so would mean forfeiting the market to Linux - something they are not prepared to do.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[peragrin]

except for the low powered machines. in fact MSFT is trying to put artificial limits on these machines in terms of speed, ram, storage, etc so that they don't eat into the vista hardware.

While still claiming that XP is done with on june 30th, there are so many exceptions it won't even been funny.

I fully expect to be able to buy a full spec machine running a new copy of XP in 6 months.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[JoeStreet]

So Microsoft has to keep XP going to slow the adoption of Linux? ... I wonder how long XP can stay afloat with malware on one side and Linux on the other? Or how long can Vista stay afloat with UMPCs on one side and Linux on the other? The hot new hardware won't run Vista and UMPC vendors are choosing Linux over the almost dead XP. The best thing Microsoft can do to speed the adoption of Linux is to kill XP and not have an OS offering on UMPCs. And extending XP Home is of little use to corporate sys admins.

Didn't Balmer recently say that Microsoft would consider extinding the life of XP if the market demanded it? Well it seems as if the market is screaming for XP but Microsoft can't hear because they have their collective heads up their asses.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[Anonymous Coward]

...remove XP from all distribution channels June 30th, 2008. all distribution channels except TPB.org, that is...

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[Debug0x2a]

While in my case I'd agree with you, as I'm running SP2 with no firewall/AV and no issues, I see more to the contrary in most computers. I used to work at a computer repair shop, and I'd have to say that most people aren't as smart as the average slashdot user when it comes to knowing what to download and use and what not to. I'd contend that the average XP user runs IE, executes scripts, and installs spyware ridden programs on occasion. Now I'm not saying the average user goes and downloads freeporn.exe or opens every attachment sent to them, but I'd suggest that most users don't have quite as nice of an experience as we do. Of course its possible that with the uptake of linux we could start seeing some Ubuntu specific malware appear, but I doubt that'll be for quite some time.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[Anonymous Coward]

And how is it you know that you do not have a virus if you have no indicator telling you otherwise? ;)

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[It doesn't come easy]

Actually, automatically developing an exploit is probably the next big thing for malware writers (if it doesn't already happen, who knows). And considering that better than 50% of all XP systems have known unpatched flaws (search Google -- some of the research puts the percentage at over 90%) and that a huge number of users don't know how to (or choose not to) update their system with the patches Microsoft puts out, it seems a foregone conclusion that matters will only get worse.

It is inevitable -- assuming these conditions do not improve (and there's surely no evidence that things are improving) -- that XP will eventually be buried under the task load imposed by the malware running on the average user's machine.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know that you aren't infected if you are not running AV software? Most viruses these days aren't out to cripple the host computer (or to even be a "problem" for them). YOU may not have a problem with your system sending out a few e-mails an hour, but I do have a problem with it. Botnets are more effective if they go undetected. No firewall, no AV, thanks for the spam. You're an ass, but you probably don't have a problem with that either.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[MojoStan]

I thought MS was going to remove XP from all distribution channels June 30th, 2008 except for the low powered machines. in fact MSFT is trying to put artificial limits on these machines in terms of speed, ram, storage, etc so that they don't eat into the vista hardware The new end-of-life date for Windows XP Home sales (for low-cost PCs) "will be the later of either June 30, 2010, or one year after the general availability of the next version of Windows."

Since I expect Windows 7 to be released after June 2009, I'm expecting XP to be available for even longer (for low-cost PCs).

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is XP Home you're talking about.

It lacks Software Restriction Policy or SRP (as found in XP Pro), that can help with security issues tremendously. If you want SRP, you need to add that by "unofficial means".

XP Pro SP2 with Limited User + SRP + SuRun is the way to go. (SuRun is kind of like Sudo in concept).

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[dbIII]

I would like to make the point that many have the experience of observing large number of XP machines instead of a single one.

I have also seen serveral XP machines that rarely have problems - those are the ones set up well for a paticular task and used by the operators for only those tasks. The opposite extreme are the machines that are used as toys - large numbers of attached gadgets and the user downloading and installing anything that looks shiny or will enable them to more quickly pirate porn DVDs at work. The MS Windows world is not forgiving of this behaviour by those that are unwilling to get any idea of what they are doing. After a few weeks with such a user any machine that is not completely locked down is barely usable due to disk fragmentation even if there is no actual malware.

The real classic was the user that deleted MS Office to make room for more porn.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[Yvanhoe]

I have believed for long that this was enough. I refused to install an antivirus background process on my PC and had sane practice of opening only trustworthy executables on my PC. And one day, I made a transfer with a USB key. And I discovered a new vector I didn't know : USB keys autoexecute transparently some types of autorun scripts. I got stuck with what looked like a troyan. Something I could not detect without an antivirus before it is too late. Apparently Windows consider that any autorun script on any USB key will be safe to execute. Another madness I suppose.
Now I need an antivirus updated just in order to make USB transfers. And I keep it updated in case the next XP patch brings some new marvelous ideas...

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[harry666t]

You're a geek, sir. ~99.99% of society are not. "Very easy" is still black magic to them, and they employ the neighbor's kid to cast the spells. And the world that I see is that he often fails to cast them properly or without unwanted side-effects.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[mgblst]

How do you know, if you don't have any anti-virus running, that you don't have a virus? They don't all print stoned on your computer screen anymore.

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[Anonymous Coward]

and no anti-virus, and I didn't have virus problems.

But how do you know?

Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place?

[MightyYar]

Since we're wildly speculating here... I think they were caught off-guard by the appeal of limited machines like the EeePC. I think that it would be tough for them to scale Vista down to work on such hardware, and even though they COULD do it they won't bother since it would mean pulling people off of the next Windows product.

With those assumptions, I speculate that they are going to hold off Linux with XP until the next Windows version is ready. This next version will almost certainly have a "fast and light" version for lower-performing PCs. I think that they will extend XP support for the low-end PCs that ship with it from now until the next version of Windows comes out. To discontinue support less than 1 year after making a sale is really crappy, even for MS.

I knew it

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally this is the year of desktop linux.

Re:I knew it

[russlar]

Finally this is the year of desktop linux. Didn't you say that last year?

Re:I knew it

[Archangel Michael]

He is mistaken. This is the year of the Laptop Linux!

Desktop Linux isn't scheduled for release yet. Perhaps next year.

Re:I knew it

[meringuoid]

Finally this is the year of desktop linux.

This isn't the desktop. It's the micro-laptop. But it's a beginning.

We had one of the women from upstairs come down to the IT dungeon a couple of weeks ago. Wanted to get her (personal) laptop set up so she could read email while on the road, which meant configuring it to connect through a 3G USB stick, then bookmarking the company's webmail in the browser.

She'd bought it, having done without laptops in the past, because it was small and cute and pink and cheap and fit in her handbag. Yep, it's an Eee.

In case anyone's wondering, yes, they work perfectly, at least with the Vodafone sticks; there's a free download of the necessary software, with a version especially for the Eee that adds an icon in the Internet pane, and Vodafone even run an apt repository for it. I was expecting to get to play the Unix guru, but this was simpler than it is on the bloody Windows boxes!

So: someone wholly clueless bought this machine because of its size and price and cute factor. She wouldn't know what Linux was if you beat her about the head with a plump contented well-fed penguin. Wouldn't know an operating system from a hole in the ground. But she'd been playing happily with it for days and loving the damn thing. Best of all, the usual question of 'what happens when they try to install [INSERT DUMB USER PROGRAM HERE]' doesn't arise: Eee's got no disk drives :-)

These machines are going to produce an army of users who are used to Firefox and OpenOffice.org and all the rest of our beloved open-source applications. Once they've found that they can do everything they expect of a computer with these systems... well, Joe Public isn't tech-savvy, but he'll notice the price premium for Windows, remember how their geeky nephew Timmy said it was because those ones go to pay Bill Gates The Richest Man In The World even more money but these don't, and make the obvious decision.

Re:I knew it

[Virmal]

No. They wrote down "Next Year" is the year of desktop linux. That way, they are never wrong :>)

Re:I knew it

[Anonymous Coward]

Every year is the year of desktop linux.

Re:I knew it

[Falconhell]

"She wouldn't know what Linux was if you beat her about the head with a plump contented well-fed penguin" Dammit, laptop keyboards are not cheap, and now mine full of coffee.

EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Odder]

EEE PC already has enough horsepower to play movies and music as well as anything else. Battery life could be improved and it already is up to 7.5 hours.

Apple dominates the high end market and GNU/Linux rules the low. Soon the ends will meet and M$ will be squeezed out. Vista is a failure and it has taken M$ down with it.

The change is permenant. Vendors have revolted, M$ won't be able to come back. Good riddance.

More like a stay of execution..

[s31523]

I do not think MS is going to completely spare XP, more likely it is just delaying it's execution. As time goes on, the hardware will be caught up enough to run Vista and MS will have had time to "fine tune" it enough to make people get along with it, then they will kill XP.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[jeiler]

Or they'll make a "Vista Lite" that will run on the lower capabilities of UMPCs.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[Paranatural]

You can bet they will be pushing the hardware 3 kinds of ways from Sunday to develop one that is 'Optimized' for Vista. The good news is that this will probably force M$ to come up with a pared-down version. Unfortunately they'll probably keep the 'security' features and Aero stuff. Thus a deal with NVIDIA for that ultra-small GPU.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[s31523]

Which will be an XP box with a black marker 'X' through it and "Vista Lite" written underneath it!

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[TheNarrator]

Microsoft was expecting Vista's increased hardware requirements to align with Moore's law. The only problem was that hardware performance is not increasing as quickly as it was in the 90s. Multi-core CPUs are coming out but CPU mhz are not really going anywhere. Thus Microsoft cannot add features like they used to and expect the reduced performance to be acceptable as it once was, due to continuous hardware improvements.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[jeiler]

I have no mod points, but please accept an honorary "+1, Funny".

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[homer_ca]

Depends which EOL date you're talking about. XP license availability was supposed to be discontinued 6/30/08, but Microsoft extended that to 1/20/09 for System Builders and probably longer than that for UMPCs. XP Home, Pro and MCE are all supported with bugfixes and security updates through 4/8/14. There's another good 6 years left in XP.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[Anonymous Coward]

Because what Vista really needs is another version.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[sayfawa]

I'd say the effects of Moore's law are still going strong and hardware is improving steadily. It's just that instead of faster chips, the hardware improvements come in the form of smaller and more efficient. So we are reaping the rewards not in faster and more powerful, but in cheaper, smaller, better battery life, etc. Of course, the result is still the same for MS; like you say, they incorrectly thought that CPUs would be faster by now.

Which makes me think of another theory as the cause for this phenomenon. People are satisfied with existing software. I think the majority of people would be ok if operating systems and major applications stayed exactly the same as they are. So as technology gets better the only thing about a computer that should change is the hardware. But since it's already good enough to run existing software, then it should just get cheaper and more reliable. I think this is what consumers expect nowadays, not the hardware treadmill of the past.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[gbjbaanb]

I don't think it is down to CPU Mhz, they're pretty damn good nowadays to run far more demanding apps than Vista. What's hindering Vista takeup is RAM, they just don't make the chips in the density required, or motherboards with enough slots.

Then they add stupid things like continuous indexing of every file and a WinSxS folder that seems to grow exponentially, and a System Restore that stores many copies of every file, and people wonder why their computer seems to be sluggish.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[pandrijeczko]

It could be worse...

Ditch the "P" and reverse the name so Microsoft "Windows XP" becomes Microsoft "X Windows"...

I think I just felt a great disturbance in The Force...

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[Just Some Guy]

The only problem was that hardware performance is not increasing as quickly as it was in the 90s. Multi-core CPUs are coming out but CPU mhz are not really going anywhere. Ummm, what? First, MHz is just one component of performance; think of it like voltage. Another hugely important data point is instructions per cycle; think amps. Sure, MHz isn't rising dramatically (although you need to approximately multiply it by the number of cores), but IPC is doing just fine.

I assure you the two-way dual-core 1.8GHz Opteron I have here is a whole lot faster than the two-way 2.4GHz Xeon (Pentium 4 model) next to it.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[mgblst]

Exactly. They are problably working on getting a Vista theme going for XP, and chucking on a few extra bits. Microsoft, you are a joke.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[rwalton]

The GUI's may be good enough, but we still have work to do on the speech recognition and visual recognition fronts.

Ultimately GUIs will be thought as, as something that is just there, the primary form of input will be a hybrid of Touch, Speech, and the computer understanding facial expressions.

That is why MSR has so many projects open for alternate human to computer interfaces, and why speech recognition improvements what been increasing in Windows for the last few versions. Multi-touch going in for Windows 7. It wouldn't surprise me to find some of the facial recognition stuff making it in after that.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[HuguesT]

this is true, but the killer is Win64. To get over the memory hurdle one has to go 64-bit and 8GB+. Unfortunately the Win64 driver and applicaiton situation is bad and is likely to remain that way for long.

Meanwhile Linux has done its 64-bit aggiornamento more than a decade ago and all is well now.

Re:More like a stay of execution..

[darkonc]

You really can't 'fine tune' Vista very much. Most of the cost of what slows down vista is tha basic design decision to build in the cross-checking intended to make the DRM relatively bullet-proof (or, at least, bullet resistant). The only way to 'fine tune' that out would be to reverse the DRM decision and allow driver makers to make DRM-less drivers... but you wouldn't be able to use a vista machine with DRM-less drivers unless ALL of the drivers were DRM-less.

This would, effectively, be more like the XP with a Vista skin that another responder alluded to, than a fine-tune of Vista.

XP Home Only

[russlar]

OK, so they're extended the life of XP Home Edition until 2010 to capture more of the mini-laptop market. So? Name me one network admin who will use XP Home on an ultra-portable. These things are perfect for someone who needs a small, lightweight laptop to administer a network rack, and XP Home is practically useless for that.

The target market for XP Home has had Vista pushed on it for the past year and a half, and most of that target market probably doesn't know enough about Windows to care about XP vs. Vista.

Only extending the life of XP Pro will have any meaning.

Re:XP Home Only

[Goaway]

Name me one network admin who will use XP Home on an ultra-portable. Remind me again why anybody would care what network admins do with their ultraportables?

Re:XP Home Only

[gad_zuki!]

Most admins probably have a volume disk and serial ready, but yeah youre right MS is doing this so it doesnt cannibalize vista too much.

Re:XP Home Only

[RulerOf]

Name me one network admin who will use XP Home on an ultra-portable.
Find me a reason to provision an ultraportable to a user when he already has a standard laptop (running XP Pro or Vista Business) and a mobile phone running Windows Mobile?

Further, if the UMPC is for the admin himself, why not XP home? Who says you have to bind your machine to a domain?

...For as much MS hate as is deserved in this place, the same or larger portion is unjustified.

Re:XP Home Only

[Yetihehe]

Name me one network admin who will use XP Home on an ultra-portable.

My friend Robert Parck. He uses XPHome even on his dog!

Re:XP Home Only

[petermgreen]

These things are perfect for someone who needs a small, lightweight laptop to administer a network rack, and XP Home is practically useless for that.
If you are running a rackfull of windows servers I would have thought you would have been in some form of MS volume licensing program. Volume licenses for windows come with generous downgrade rights (all the way to windows 95 iirc).

I do find it odd that ASUS doesn't offer the machines with a vista buisness license pre-downgraded to XP pro (as big brand OEMs are now allowed to do) though.

Re:XP Home Only

[wvmarle]

So? Name me one network admin who will use XP Home on an ultra-portable. For a network admin it doesn't matter what the UMPC comes with, first thing they do is format it and put on their OS of choice. They are not important in this.
I bet 99% or more of the buyers of the EEE doesn't do network administration, if they even know what the word means. And that's the market where Microsoft has a lot of mind share to lose: these people know Windows only, and exposure to the competition is dangerous. Microsoft doesn't want their core market to wisen up.

Re:XP Home Only

[sjvn]

I make that point in the story actually. For a business, it actually makes much more sense to use Linux on a UMPC. You can't do a thing with XP Home on a serious network--well, not without breaking security and that rather defeats the 'serious' part--whereas you can use Linux with LDAP and so on without any trouble and with Active Directory with a bit of work.

Oh the irony, for Windows business users, Linux on a UMPC makes more sense than Windows.

Steven

Re:XP Home Only

[Sleepy]

All the network admins I know want the smallest possible laptop that will run:
  Remote Desktop
  VNC
  ssh
  VPN support

I challenge you to name one - JUST ONE - 'network a admin requirement' that XP "Pro" provides that XP Home can't do.
The famed "Microsoft Backup" utility (hahaha)?
Do you REALLY need the "Support for 2 CPU" that only XP Pro provides?

"Demanding" XP Pro might inflate your self worth, and I can see that being important. Especially since you are not aware that there are very few "technical" differences between Home and Pro.

I have no issues using XP Home for remote admin, although I'd rather be running Ubuntu. I'll even forsake the laptop altogether, and POCKET my trusty $200 Nokia N800, $30 bluetooth keyboard and phone. (that said, these Acer and other UMPC's are pretty sweet).

Re:XP Home Only

[Anonymous Coward]

Name me one network admin who will use XP Home on an ultra-portable. These things are perfect for someone who needs a small, lightweight laptop to administer a network rack, and XP Home is practically useless for that. Hrm, XP Home. Let's see. I can still run VPN, SSH, telnet, FTP, and RDP to any damn system within range of TCP/IP (oh yeah, XP Home does TCP/IP too). For general sysadmin work, tell me again why you "need" Pro?

Re:XP Home Only

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

I'd ask the same thing. I used XP Home for a full four years and can't recall a single instance where I ended up missing something I would've had in XP Pro. So why the hell does everyone talk about XP Home like it's some unusable pile of shit?

Re:XP Home Only

[multipartmixed]

No Kidding!

I don't know what this guy's job is like -- but I can do mine from ANY PC which can run ssh, a web browser, and a serial terminal.

And the web browser part is optional if it has an X server.

Re:XP Home Only

[dave562]

I challenge you to name one - JUST ONE - 'network a admin requirement' that XP "Pro" provides that XP Home can't do.

I haven't used XP Home since XP first came out, but can you connect to a file share using Home? I seem to remember that you can't. Basically anything that requires network credentials doesn't work on XP Home.

Re:XP Home Only

[Anonymous Coward]

Not fully aware of the differences myself, but domains/groups and dynamic disks (??) might be some biggies to admins?

http://windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=20536&DisplayTab=Article

by the GP's post, it seems like he's more of a linux admin than a windows admin -- no wonder he doesn't care about home vs pro ;)

Re:XP Home Only

[jgaynor]

> These things are perfect for someone who needs a small, lightweight laptop to administer a network rack

The dirty secret of network engineers is that laptops without serial ports are completely useless to us, unless we want to carry around a seperate (and usually large) usb-serial adapter that decreases battery life.

Re:XP Home Only

[BlackSnake112]

Have you actually used xp home? I know a few people with it and the biggest issue is home leaves programs running under a different user when they switch or log out. User A logs in opens email is finished logs out. Computer stays on. User B log on open the email program. (different user same email program) The email program complains that they do not have permission to user A's email. This is with thunderbird, outlook express, and what ever verizon uses. Rebooting solves this issue on xp home. Switched them to xp pro. No issue with switch user or log out anymore. If the machine single user, this is a non issue, but it it has multiple users, I say go with xp pro over home.

Re:XP Home Only

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd ask the same thing. I used XP Home for a full four years and can't recall a single instance where I ended up missing something I would've had in XP Pro. So why the hell does everyone talk about XP Home like it's some unusable pile of shit?

Because without XP Pro, networking is a bitch. If your not a network admin or business user, of course you wont miss it.

EEEPC

[willeyhill]

Any UMPC using SSDs is already tougher than the "toughbooks" currently in use. Just buy a EEE PC and silicone some rubber and foam onto it.

Re:EEEPC

[MightyYar]

A man "silicone augmenting" his computer... hmm, pretty soon you'll have something to make into a movie.

Re:EEEPC

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

We use them exclusively in the field, when somebody drops it or somehow breaks it (and people can get very creative about what they do) we're only out a few hundred dollars compared to the over $2,000 we used to spend on toughbooks.

Re:EEEPC

[oodaloop]

Uh, no. There are no military-grade UMPCs available. Try that EEE mod then drop from shoulder height on concrete and let me know how it works out for you. Toughbooks get dropped out the back of C130s and survive. The EEE would probabky shatter if it fell off my desk. And that's not even getting into the water, dust, shock, freezing tests.

Working in the intelligence community, having deployed to Iraq et al, and being a former Marine, I've seen a lot of the systems we use. For rough field use, there's the toughbook, and pretty much very little else. There have been some attempts at deploying a rugged PDA-type device to troops, but technical difficulties and cost, among other things, have kept them from gaining widespread use. I have seen some, uh, unconventional forces use the Sony Vaio Micro PC 280P in a padded case. For light field use, it gets the job done, but it's hardly rugged. I happen to have one myself, and I wouldn't imagine dropping it or getting it wet.

I hope as these UMPCs or MIDs become more powerful and more popular, we'll see some rugged versions designed for military use. There's so much we could use them for. It might even spur the use of Linux in DoD, godforbid.

Re:EEEPC

[zsouthboy]

Wrong about the EEE and falling off your desk:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4dhhl_tests-resistance-chocs-chaleur-froi_tech

I have also thrown mine around a bunch, and it works perfectly still.

It isn't dust or weather sealed like a toughbook, and you can't run over it and expect it to survive like one, but falling won't hurt it.

And it's also not thousands of dollars, so if I DID bork it, I don't cry as much.

Re:EEEPC

[Anonymous Coward]

And if I had any, I'd mod you insightful, just for the signature alone.

Re:EEEPC

[compro01]

actually, a friend of mine has been working on creating a durable-ized eeepc. Current method he's trying is encasing pretty much the entire outside of the thing in about a 2" layer of modified (mixed with some kind of metallic powder to allow decent thermal qualities, as it would have to be passively cooled.) soft silicone, along with a sealed keyboard, watertight plugs for all the ports, and gasketing around the edge of the screen and keyboard interior, covered in some army surplus untearabillium-infused fabric (same fabric as the older green Canadian combat uniform pants) to protect the silicone from abrasion.

No idea how well it's going, as I haven't talked to him in a few weeks (He's currently working with the base forces for the summer, but is doing this project on his own time), but it seems like a workable idea. The eeepc is sufficiently cheap that it's almost ideal for this kind of prototyping.

Re:EEEPC

[oodaloop]

I stand corrected on the falling off the desk test, then. In addition to the weather and dusts tests, there's also vibration, which I failed to mention. Military grade rugged computers and PDAs have to withstand a great deal of vibration from riding in helos, planes, tanks, Hummers, etc. I don't know about the EEE, but most laptops probably wouldn't have a long shelf-life at a tank battalion.

Re:EEEPC

[zsouthboy]

Oh, of course, and I didn't mean to sound like I was calling you out. They're not built for the military, but they're damn cheap and can take a decent *around the house* beating.

Re:EEEPC

[SiChemist]

Having a solid state drive would probably help out quite a bit with the vibration since the hard drive is the laptop part most susceptible to vibration damage. Not saying it's a toughbook, but it would probably outlast an ordinary laptop by a good margin.

media-centered

[pha7boy]

well, microsoft had been moving toward a media-centered model for years now, and vista was supposed to deliver just that - a way for users to use their computers not just for computing, but for media applications, home networking, etc. None of the UMPCs would really be able to deliver that, so microsoft never paid much attention to the issue.

XP really fills that niche for people looking for an ultra-mobile but also not willing to move to a linux OS. Which really is a much larger market then those who would gladly use linux on their mobile machine. I'd be surprised if microsoft will not fight hard to regain control of that market.

Re:media-centered

[Overzeetop]

If they are, then they are a horrible failure at it. Vista, while useful for simple tasks, is a steaming pile for anyone other than users who don't mind doing it the one way the Vista engineers envisioned and enjoy the sub-par interface included in the package. I run Vista Media Center because it has better hardware support than XP MCE (mostly due to the poor programming in XPMCE and total lack of follow-on support). Yes, it works. No, it is neither intuitive nor useful. Just scroll through The Green Button forums to find out how many usability issues there are. And what's worse, most user requests fall on deaf ears or worse - often the MS people who try to help out honestly indicate that many critical features will never be added. Vista still doesn't ship with most of the common audio and video codecs. I'd say it's for licensing reasons, but they don't even include free codecs (and with their muscle, you'd think they could get most of the for-pay decoder codecs for next to nothing).

As for networking - sure there are some positive steps, but overall it's a convoluted mess to administer as a layperson, with half a dozen different dialogs controlling networking functions, and many bits of information are still only available from the command line.

MS will still dominate because of their position with a few business apps (calendaring and contacts come to mind as must-haves), but if someone really put some time into a desktop-mobile combination with an out-of-the box virtual machine to run the few necessary MS-bound applications, MS would need to take a good hard look at operations to figure out how to prevent a serious market shift. (Okay, that might be a little bit of wishful thinking)

Re:media-centered

[jedidiah]

It's funny that you should mention this "failure" since some members of the
MythTV crowd are already using the EEE PC in this capacity. Those kinds of
people LOVE cheap, quiet and compact PCs.

Infact, with nearly zero internal storage capacity a machine like the EEE PC
seems to be the "perfect" sort of machine for "home networking". It's the sort
of machine that looks to make the perfect X terminal or compact media extender.

Re:media-centered

[Anonymous Coward]

vista was supposed to deliver just that - a way for users to use their computers not just for computing, but for media applications, home networking, etc

But it failed miserably! Media applications are a disaster - most importantly beacuse Vista slows everything down soooo much that it cannot play music or video seemlessly. Add to that the complications that their damned DRM adds to any filesharing (what? I don't own the pictures that I took with my camera? The camera-maker does?)and Vista really is a crippled media OS. Home networking? Hahaha! With all the problems that their new take on wireless connecting caused (Google it - you'll find reams of it) sometimes it is just easier to say no. And I dare you, I just f'ing dare you, to talk a clueless user through connecting two Vista computers together on the same wired or wireless network.

Just keep stalling..

[whodkne]

Just like with ME, I'll contiue to use XP until a sutiable replacement comes about. Maybe W7 will prove to be that.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[Fx.Dr]

Just like with ME, I'll contiue to use XP until a sutiable replacement comes about.

Whoa, you waited for a "suitable replacement" for Millennium Edition?

Head Asplode

Re:Just keep stalling..

[fitten]

No joke... ME is universally known as the worst of the Windows versions of all time (even worse than Vista).

Re:Just keep stalling..

[homer_ca]

I'm pretty sure he meant keeping 98SE and skipping ME to wait for a suitable replacement.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[KGIII]

I am not sure why they were modded down really. It seems reasonably on-topic and they should be welcome to their opinion. I suspect that they are a bit like myself and one of the six other people who actually had sustained enjoyable productive experiences on Windows ME. Sometimes we even had stable machines.

I was never sure if WinME was a SP for the 9x line or a beta for XP but I, and the afore mentioned six people, really enjoyed it.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[LWATCDR]

"No joke... ME is universally known as the worst of the Windows versions of all time (even worse than Vista)."

I don't know about that. ME was a stinker but people where not spending $200 to buy Win98SE to install over it.

In all me years I have never seen an OS get level of resistance that Vista is.

I think Vista is a waste but the shear hate that normal people are showing for it is shocking too me.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[meringuoid]

I was never sure if WinME was a SP for the 9x line or a beta for XP

It was the last of the 9x series. Windows XP was delayed again and again, as you'll recall. '98 was pretty much '95 with FAT32, and even with the SE update it was showing its age. ME was a stopgap to fill the space between Win98 and WinXP.

Of course all the talent at the time was working on Windows 2000 and on XP - the NT lineage which Windows follows today. So ME was a half-arsed mess of an OS, and it's only a mercy its lifespan was so short.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[goltzc]

Out of curiosity what is keeping you in the windows world anyways? Have you considered the non MS alternatives?

Re:Just keep stalling..

[ckaminski]

By who. By my estimation, the only thing that ME had against it was that broke a shit-ton of DOS apps by removing some compatibility, exactly as planned. Paving the way for the nearly 7 year reign of WindowsXP.

Sure didn't crash on me like 95, or 98 did.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[Esvandiary]

Just like with ME, I'll continue to use XP until a sutiable replacement comes about.

Well, I think it's safe to say we just found where the Vista userbase came from...

Re:Just keep stalling..

[whodkne]

It's really time and interest. I manage a lot of windows servers and so it's best to keep in the world I know and can relate to. I manage some *nix as well, but much less. To find equlivilent solutions for my needs in the *nix world takes time and I don't have much to spend right now.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[whodkne]

Exactly.. that's what I get for posting before running out to lunch. I kept with 98 since ME was not even close to being capable.. same with XP, I'll stick to XP until something better than Vista comes along. The "Can Vista allow this?" popup is enough on it's own to kill the deal.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[cp.tar]

However, if you had one of the lucky configurations, ME worked just fine.

Then again, if you had one of those, you could just as well have played some lottery or bet some money on horse races.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[fitten]

I only have seen ME on a few machines and on every one of them, ME leaked memory like a sieve. Some so badly that the machine had to be rebooted every couple hours to recover.

I've only had very limited exposure to Vista and am kind of just neutral towards it. Yeah, everything is in a new place (which is what I think most complain about) and the dialog box comes up sometimes asking if you really want to do what you asked it to do, but other than that, it works (granted, I've only seen it on two machines, one of them is my wife's machine and she likes it).

Re:Just keep stalling..

[toddestan]

I don't know about that. ME was a stinker but people where not spending $200 to buy Win98SE to install over it.

Well, the home users just got a pirated copy of 98SE to install over it, which was easy back in the day without activation. Corporate users, for the most part didn't care because they were either running NT or were starting to move to 2000.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[CopaceticOpus]

I had a great experience with ME too, after all sorts of troubles with 98. So that makes three of the six of us just in this thread. What are the odds? We should start a secret society or something.

Re:Just keep stalling..

[syousef]

Whoa, you waited for a "suitable replacement" for Millennium Edition?

What's so strange about waiting for the next roll of toilet paper? It isn't scarce in my part of the world.

Well... It was actually the "Not Windows" bit

[arivanov]

So far anything on the market ran either both Windose and Linux or just Windoze.

IMO what got MSFT really scared is that many of the crop of the new and cheap PCs went as far as not being bothered to be Windows compatible on release. Asus is a prime example - it could not run Windows XP as shipped without MSFT doing some work on it. Half of the UMPCs are on its heels as well.

This is not something Microsoft has ever experienced in its history since the days of DOS vs CPM - the hottest PC product on the market based on customer demand for the Christmas season to be Windows incompatible.

It is not the linux market penetration that they are worried about, it is the change of attitude in major OEMs. The entire MSFT business is based around a B&D relationship with OEMs which keeps OEMs doing exactly what MSFT wants. An OEM rebellion is what MSFT is most scared of and it will do anything and give out any candy it can to prevent it.

Re:Well... It was actually the "Not Windows" bit

[plague3106]

You're right; PC sales have historically been for faster, more capable computers. These "UMPCs" seem to be the opposite; not as powerful or capable, and so if you're shooting for your OS to run on PCs NOW and in the future, and not targeting older ones, there will be issues.

That said, MS isn't stupid, and they'll make sure SOMETHING MS runs on these.

Re:Well... It was actually the "Not Windows" bit

[secPM_MS]

Actually, I think you have it backwards.

It is not MS forcing the vendors to produce more cycle and memory intensive systems, but the vendors trying to sell new HW to people who already have existing systems looking to MS to provide some set of features that can provide a marketing justification for "upgrading" your system. To the extent that users are content with basic functionality, even 10 year old systems are quite functional.

The ISV's are still going to want to sell users new systems, regardless of the choice of OS. I expect that they will find the open source community to be much less supportive of their ambitions that it appears MS has been.

I found my old Dell Win ME system (1.7 P4), which I had upgraded to XP 3 years ago, could be upgraded to be able to run Vista Home Basic for ~$50 in parts (no Vista drivers for the old parts). Performance is more than acceptable, but I am not doing video transcoding on it and I am not a gamer.

Windows is over.

[Odder]

No one is going to spend $400 on an OS so they can run a $450 word processor. The Microsoft era is closed.

Re:Windows is over.

[boxxertrumps]

Why would that be modded flamebait?

It's true.

Re:Windows is over.

[Calinous]

Flamebait, but it seems people will pay $400 for an OS so they can run a $40 game (next year, or maybe two years from now) - as DirectX 10 is not available in Windows XP

Re:Windows is over.

[strabes]

I like microsoft just as much as the next linux/OS X user, but in order to avoid the flamebait mods you should reduce the prices by about 50%.

Re:Windows is over.

[pdusen]

*Cough*

Re:Windows is over.

[bigstrat2003]

You mean a $100 OS (probably even less if you get it bundled with a PC from a big-name manufacturer), and a $100 office suite. Nice troll, though.

Re:Windows is over.

[jedidiah]

Frys is currently selling the current version of MS Office standard for $350.

The original price was closer to reality than yours.

The $400 pricetag has a long history behind it.

My first WP cost me $50 bux and didn't have lots of bloat and unused crap.

Here's hoping that open standards bring those days back.

Re:Windows is over.

[An ominous Cow art]

Disclosure: I hate Microsoft: the company, its products, Bill Gates, everything about it. I would rate myself as 0.9 on the twitter scale.

But, after thinking about it, I decided to have Vista put on a high-end gaming machine I bought last week - only for the DirectX 10 'benefit'. I don't plan to actually use the OS or the machine for anything but to install and run games. I'm not going to be watching movies, surf the web outside of game sites, or develop on it. Though I suppose if I ever need to test some code under vista, I can do that now.

I turned off the UAC crap ASAP, and set everything to Classic mode. It's been about the same as XP for me so far: sucky, but sucky in known Windows ways. It did choke on one of its own updates, but the update went through after a reboot (I hadn't rebooted it after a previous update, as it hadn't asked me to do so; I should have known it seemed to good to be true). As for speed: this is a very fast system, and I've disabled the aero junk, so any slowness isn't apparent to me. I've only had the machine for 2 days, which really isn't long enough to form a strong opinion. Certainly it runs Age of Conan very well, but that's about all I've tried.

I should mention that the vendor gave me 50% off the price; that made the choice quite a bit easier.

Re:Windows is over.

[abigor]

twitter, you work at a university (LSU). You have no idea what businesses use and what they pay for Windows and Office. You also have no idea of the number of massive deployments or the conservative nature of large corps. Going on Slashdot and making broad, ridiculous claims and insulting people who actually know what they're talking about isn't going to convince anyone.

Re:Windows is over.

[strabes]

You are correct, although I tend to buy the cheap versions of things so I was thinking of the Home/Student version which I believe is cheaper. Same goes for Vista/proprietary software in general (for me).

Re:Windows is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

No one is going to spend $400 on an OS so they can run a $450 word processor. The Microsoft era is closed.

Yeah. Let me know how that goes at your Corporate job, OK? When you succeed, give me a buzz. I'll be down here snowboarding in Hell.

Re:Windows is over.

[MarkvW]

People may not spend big bucks for an OS to run an expensive word processor, but they would spend the money to edit graphics and multimedia. I think that is the last frontier. Windows is over when you can use first class software to make movies/audio/photos in LINUX. Until then, all this LINUX RULES stuff is just BLAH, BLAH, BLAH . . .. P

Re:Windows is over.

[MojoStan]

No one is going to spend $400 on an OS so they can run a $450 word processor. The Microsoft era is closed. Why would that be modded flamebait?

It's true.

Because, at best, it's a huge exaggeration. At worst, it's untrue or a lie.

Even the most expensive retail version of Windows for PCs (Vista Ultimate) at non-upgrade pricing is at most $320 (directly from Microsoft) and available for as low as $220. The retail version of Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $200-$260. Upgrade and OEM versions are even cheaper.

Microsoft Word 2007 is at most $230 (retail, non-upgrade) or $110 (upgrade) for non-volume business users ($193 and $90 at Amazon). Home users (up to three per household) can get Office 2007 Home & Student (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) for at most $150 ($95 at Amazon).

I agree that many people will be just fine with cheaper (or free) alternatives for their OS and word processor, but exaggerating and bullshitting like O'Reilly or Michael Moore doesn't help make the point.

Ubuntu's dad company?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Dad company? I thought it was just a hurriedly written, apathetically edited slashdot crud. Turns out the gem was in the original presumably well written article. So the question is who did that "dad" sleep with to spawn Ubuntu?

Re:Ubuntu's dad company?

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian.

Re:Ubuntu's dad company?

[morgan_greywolf]

Dad company? I thought it was just a hurriedly written, apathetically edited slashdot crud. Turns out the gem was in the original presumably well written article. So the question is who did that "dad" sleep with to spawn Ubuntu?

Deb and Ian Murdoch, of course.

Re:Ubuntu's dad company?

[cptnapalm]

Debian: That Saucy Little Mynx

Those new "little" CPUs aren't so little

[Animats]

Those new "little" CPUs coming out aren't so little. They're above 1GHz now, they're going into machines with 1 GB of memory, and some of them are superscalar. They even have GPUs. That's more than enough power for any reasonable portable system. Mail, web browsing, video playing, the occasional PowerPoint presentation - you don't need a quad-core 3 GHZ CPU part for that.

What you need is battery life. The next frontier may be less CPU power but a full day of operation or more between recharges. Note that phone battery life was a huge issue until it reached a day or two of moderate to heavy use. After that, it stopped being a major factor in buying decisions.

Re:Those new "little" CPUs aren't so little

[Anonymous Coward]

Tech is that way. Will wait for more of it

-----
www.gameloo.info - www.softwareloo.info

Re:Those new "little" CPUs aren't so little

[jabjoe]

Which is why ARM is going to be laughing. ARM and Linux is going to be huge on the UMPC market if the battery life is going to be as good as promised. If you running Linux why do you care about chip architecture? Users want a cheap machine with a battery that lasts for ages with a powerful fully functional operating system. That must scare Intel as well as MS. MS will do what? Port XP to ARM, upgrade CE to full OS standards? What advantage has Windows over Linux without being able to run standard Windows software? Intel, well er, really they should have a line of processor where power use is the number one issue, not x86 compatibility (though x86 chips that need less power are also needed, just not in the UMPC market). Could be very interesting times.

Re:Those new "little" CPUs aren't so little

[marcosdumay]

People want x86 because of (Macromedia's) Flash, and, since the screen is the bigest power sink now, there isn't so much hush into a more efficient processor.

Now, I wouldn't mind one ARM based UMPC...

Re:Those new "little" CPUs aren't so little

[jabjoe]

You can get Adobe Flash on the ARM (you think Adobe are going to miss the mobile market that's all ARM?) Plus there is Gnash that's cross platform....

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[bennomatic]

And in the mobile phone market, it seems like Google and Apple (Goople?) are playing nice with each other, which will allow iPhone to rule the high end and Android to dominate the middle-to-low-end phone market. I don't know anyone who loves Windows Mobile, but a lot of people are pretty excited about their iPhones and/or the promise of Android.

Great for linux...

[sucker_muts]

... but I'm still dissapointed that most of those laptops are promoted with XP on it anyway.

Here in Belgium I saw an ad voor an asus EEE last week, but with shiny happy 'Windows XP' logo and specification besides it.

I'm afraid too many users (and stores) over here are too lazy to try something new. It makes sense that supermarkets (the ad was from one) might try to sell XP rather than linux, so they can sell some other software that's needed.
With linux, a lot needed software is installed by default, and that does not translate in money to earn. :-(

(The day when proprietary software wil be perfect against piracy will be a day to rejoice: Empty your wallets, or stop being lazy and try something like open source for a while, it's not that bad when you only need basic stuff done!)

Re:Great for linux...

[reynaert]

Which supermarket was that? I completely missed it.

Re:Great for linux...

[meringuoid]

I'm afraid too many users (and stores) over here are too lazy to try something new. It makes sense that supermarkets (the ad was from one) might try to sell XP rather than linux, so they can sell some other software that's needed.

The market must be different over there. I keep an eye out for Eees wnenever I'm out shopping for kit, and I've only ever seen the Linux ones. I reasoned that it was (a) people familiar with XP on a bigger screen will think the Eee's screen small and cramped, while the custom Linux interface fits just fine, and (b) these are cheaper, and this end of the laptop market is all about price. I don't really get the point of Windows on these machines; they're not your primary workstation, nor are they in any way a gamer's box; they're portable net terminals and maybe media players.

Never bought one, because I'd heard about the bigger screen of the 900 series; the wasted space at the sides of the 700s is ugly. But then the 900s got too expensive for a cute-little-laptop impulse buy. Now I'm hanging on a little longer for the Acer Aspire One, which is about my perfect spec. Linux box, 1024x600, eight gig storage, one kilo mass, two hundred quid. Sold.

Re:Great for linux...

[sucker_muts]

Carrefour.

I made a screenshot (The text on it is Dutch):
http://muts.sin.khk.be/asuseee.jpg

Re:Great for linux...

[reynaert]

Thanks.

Re:Great for linux...

[qoncept]

"I'm afraid too many users (and stores) over here are too lazy to try something new. It makes sense that supermarkets (the ad was from one) might try to sell XP rather than linux, so they can sell some other software that's needed."

It's not called lazy, it's called unproductive. When I sit down on my computer at work, they pay me to produce. When I sit down on my computer at home, I want to do something specific (my days of sitting at the computer for the sake of it are long past), not fight with an OS that isn't familiar to me. And that's exactly what I've been doing for the last couple weeks since I installed Ubuntu. I've spent hours trying to do extremely simple things. It's a learning curve, and for all of the trouble Windows has given me, for at least the forseeable future it's a whole lot more useful to me.

Re:Great for linux...

[Homer1946]

I'm afraid too many users (and stores) over here are too lazy to try something new. Realizing that I am NOT a Windows fan and do not use it myself. It is not lazy to go with a product you are familiar with. We all have limited time in our lives and therefore most of the time we choose that which is familiar, only occasionally investing the time to go with something new.

Not only is it human nature, it is also prudent. Implying that those who don't choose to put their time and energy where you would are lazy is condescending at best, or implies you must be lazy for not putting your time where others might think important at worst.

Re:Great for linux...

[pandrijeczko]

So presumably you have all but forgot about the initial learning curve that you underwent to become productive on Windows in the first place then? Or are they bio-engineering embryos these days with an ability to write Word macros the moment they emerge from the womb?

I'm not trying to be pedantic here but let me reverse your argument. I cut my programming teeth writng assembly on Z80 CPUs, then some BASIC and AREXX programming on the Commodore Amiga and gravitated to shell-programming, PERL and a little C on UNIX and then Linux. I'm happy using the shell and churn out (in my opinion) some pretty neat stuff.

I've never programmed in Visual Basic or Dotnet. So what kind of learning curve would I need to go through to learn about how to program using Windows as an environment?

Your argument works both ways and leads to the same conclusion - if you don't want to put in extra effort, then don't change in the first place.

Re:Great for linux...

[jamesh]

Here in Belgium I saw an ad voor an asus EEE last week, but with shiny happy 'Windows XP' logo and specification besides it.

Almost all the ad's i've seen for eeepc's recently have shown them running XP, but the product being advertised is for the Linux version. In the fine print it says it is running Linux, and 'XP Compatible' is there too. The XP version is about $100 more almost everywhere I look.

Re:Great for linux...

[dallaylaen]

Even worse here in Russia. You can only get a Linux-driven EEE off the internet, all retailers are selling the XP model only.

The XP model costs about $400 (10000 RUR to be precise), and the Linux-powered one is about $100 more expensive.

I know at least two people who bought the XP one with an intention to install Linux, but I guess statisticians don't.

Re:Great for linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK, I saw quite a few adverts for the EEE PC in the major newspapers.

The funny thing is, the screen of the EEE in the ad was never ever showing the Xandros desktop.

It often appeared to be running Safari on OSX, which I guess is what the graphic designers who make the ads are used to seeing. You'd think they would boot it up and maybe take a picture. :P

Re:Great for linux...

[marcosdumay]

Now, if you tell me how long is the battery life, it may have another sell :)

Re:Great for linux...

[meringuoid]

According to El Reg, Acer reckon three hours on the standard battery, seven on the optional bigger one (which presumably adds weight and bulk).

XP Pro.

[westbake]

You will have to buy Vista Business or Ultimate to get that, but neither of those is selling as well as EEEPC with Xandros.

One Pair of Glasses

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't Slashdot's constant stream of "OMG M$ iz doing dis cuz of teh lunix!!!11!" seem a bit incredulous? Surely Microsoft must be making decisions, somehow, based on what they think is best for their company rather than based on what Linux is doing, right?

I mean, you have a company with about 94% of the market... and Slashdotters keep saying that, amazingly, Microsoft is making decisions based upon what an operating system with LESS than 1% share of the market (0.64%, to be precise) is doing. Seems a little... crazy, maybe?

I can see maybe MS paying attention to what's going on, and more than likely watching what a company with actual GAINS in market share over the past decade or so is doing (namely, Apple, which has around a 4% market share, maybe a bit more). But Linux? Really? Why? How does that help them in any way?

The FUD just doesn't add up, or make any sense. Feel free to explain it, however. Because IMO, it seems like a one-worldview kind of problem. Slashdot spends SO much time and energy thinking about Linux, to the exclusion of everything else... that people here have convinced themself that EVERYTHING in the world somehow relates to Linx. Because they only have that one pair of glasses with which to look at the world.

Re:One Pair of Glasses

[masterzora]

It's not so much that MS is saying "ZOMG Linux is doing this therefore we must do it with Windows" as it is "Some vendor wanted to make this and, in order to make it as cheap as possible, they used Linux. Now that this has proven successful, we believe we can find a way to use Windows in this context and be successful, too." So, it's not so much responding to Linux as it is doing something that Linux proved possible.

Re:One Pair of Glasses

[zappepcs]

Well, let me have a stab at this. For some time now, it 'seems' like MS business decisions might have been made by looking at the chairs scattered in the hallway outside the boardroom like so many tea leaves in the bottom of a cup.

Whether you like MS or not, clearly Vista was not the big deal it was supposed to be, and has failed to live up to expectations of even many MS fanbois. With users and businesses requesting XP be installed on new machines, and requests for longer lifecycle for XP added to the growth in GNU/Linux marketshare plus GNU/Linux shipping on some big name OEM machines. The trend here is not a positive one for MS. MSN is not making money, Zune is not making money, XBox isn't making any real money, XP is not causing the finance group to be all smiles either. Clearly the bid for Yahoo was a sign to everyone that MS does not plan to innovate it's way out of the maelstrom they find themselves in right now. When you get caught bluffing at poker, your hand is played out.

MS will have to do something rather extraordinary to turn the current trend around. Trying to do that in the midst of a recession might be difficult. There are very large organizations (whole countries even) that have decided to dump MS Windows products for various reasons. It really doesn't matter how good XP was or is, MS marketshare is leaching away in many areas. Wii helped with that. Ubuntu et al have helped with it. Dell et al helped too. In a recession Free sounds a lot better than 350 bucks, especially when it runs better on your old hardware than Vista does on brand new hardware. Of course there is the whole DRM thing to think of also. Then there is the iPod halo effect bringing more Mac customers.

There are plenty of reasons for NOT choosing Vista or MS products. Linux is one alternative, and it does deserve some of the lime light in this situation. If Linux wasn't working so good, MS would be making money off of Vista de facto.

The fact that there is only a very minute chance that you managed to post your message without relying on some version of Linux sort of technically means that Linux *IS* related and germane to a whole lot of things in the world today.

Re:One Pair of Glasses

[LehiNephi]

I think the truth lies in a combination of both stories. You're correct that Microsoft is responding to an emerging market opportunity--it is, after all, a chance to sell more Windows licenses. Don't believe for a minute, however, that they're not afraid of Linux making inroads.

Look at it this way: what happens if they don't bother with that market? Well, consumers (particularly less-informed ones) tend to choose the less-expensive option, which definitely describes these machines. If they get used to Linux on these ultraportables, it's a very small step indeed to start using linux on other computers, whether they be notebooks or desktops.

In other words, one of the keystones of the Microsoft monopoly is the fact that people are familiar with Windows and Windows only. If they get familiar with something else, they'll realize that they don't have to pay for their operating system and applications.

Re:One Pair of Glasses

[Goobergunch]

The fact that there is only a very minute chance that you managed to post your message without relying on some version of Linux sort of technically means that Linux *IS* related and germane to a whole lot of things in the world today.

In fact, given that Slashdot runs on Linux, I'd say that it's impossible to post a message here without relying on Linux.

Re:One Pair of Glasses

[cp.tar]

Doesn't Slashdot's constant stream of "OMG M$ iz doing dis cuz of teh lunix!!!11!" seem a bit incredulous? Surely Microsoft must be making decisions, somehow, based on what they think is best for their company rather than based on what Linux is doing, right?

Not all of Slashdot is twitter and his sockpuppets, though in threads like this it sure seems like that.

Don't let yourself get fooled with appearances.
Next thing you know, you'll be installing Vista and loving the way it looks.

Re:One Pair of Glasses

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... so much FUD, where do I begin?

First off, Vista is growing by at least the same rate XP did when it was released.
Secondly, Vista's market share exceeded the market share of Linux THE DAY IT WAS RELEASED. So seriously, if Vista is a failure... what is Linux?

Also, the reason companies aren't going with Vista isn't, as anyone with a background in enterprise level IT knows, a failure with Vista (as the FUDdites here are desperate to get everyone to believe). Rather, it's due to the glacially slow rate at which enterprise IT works. For example, I can name several VERY large organizations which have only switched to XP in the last few years. OBVIOUSLY those organizations aren't ready to do all that work all over again- they would rather wait a bit until their next en mass conversion project, which is really only once every ten years (if even that short amount of time).

MSN is not making money, Zune is not making money, XBox isn't making any real money, XP is not causing the finance group to be all smiles either.

MSN is making money, Zune is making money, and XBox is REALLY making money. You might want to go out and find actual information, rather than relying on Slashdot FUD. I would recommend looking at the financial disclosures MS has to make at least once every fiscal year.

As for XP not "causing smiles"... why not? XP has long since paid for it's R&D. Any money MS makes on it now is just gravy. And, if you know anything about MS's financial situation, which you obviously don't, you would know that MS makes VERY little profit on Windows (exactly as how Apple makes very little profit on OSX). The lion's share of their profit is made from MS Office (and Apple's is made from hardware: they aren't a software company, as you can tell just by looking at their buggy software [QuickTime, Safari, Leopard, etc]).

Clearly the bid for Yahoo was a sign to everyone that MS does not plan to innovate it's way out of the maelstrom they find themselves in right now.

I don't know how you draw that conclusion. All the repeated attempt to buy out Yahoo proves, as it did when they made an even higher offer last year, was that MS sees it can make money by buying out a competitor than waiting around for Yahoo to go out of business all by themselves (which Yang has been managing to do quite well).

IMO, MS walking away from the offer just proves they have a firm idea of what Yahoo is worth, and aren't willing to overpay. That's why since that time, MS's stock price has increased, and Yahoo's hasn't. In fact, the ONLY think keeping Yahoo's stock from bottoming out is the hope that Icann can get MS to follow through on the buyout if he can kick Yang and the board out.

It really doesn't matter how good XP was or is, MS marketshare is leaching away in many areas. Wii helped with that. Ubuntu et al have helped with it. Dell et al helped too. In a recession Free sounds a lot better than 350 bucks, especially when it runs better on your old hardware than Vista does on brand new hardware. Of course there is the whole DRM thing to think of also. Then there is the iPod halo effect bringing more Mac customers.

Wow. So in your worldview, the NES and the Playstation somehow drove people away from Windows? I hardly see what the Wii has to do with anything.

Furthermore, as I've already said about Ubuntu, Linux STILL has less than a 1% marketshare. Their share has actually remained EXACTLY THE SAME for YEARS. There has been zero growth in their market share. So what has Ubuntu accomplished, besides grabbing market share from other Linux distros? Nothing at all, and the numbers prove that.

There are various reasons why Apple's market share is growing, but they still only have, at most, a 5% market share. People are switching, but they were REALLY hurt by the faiure that is Leopard. All the FUD they spent years building up about how they were so much better than Mi

Re:One Pair of Glasses

[nawcom]

Let me know where Leopard became a failure and where Apple's software is extremely buggy. I use 4 different unix-based OSs including Leopard along with XP for the sad but true reasons. What you used to describe MacOS sounded alot like Vista. You sure you are talking about the right OS? If you can show specifics that would be nice, because right now you sound like some person wiping your tampon blood over a bad Copland experience.

Re:One Pair of Glasses

[Anonymous Coward]

The company has lost your address because Leoptard blue screened again. Can you please give Mr. Jobs a call and let him know where to send your weekly check?

Re:One Pair of Glasses

[linhares]

You must be new here.

There's No Surprises

[mpapet]

Only complacent management at Microsoft.

Here's the loong tale of how this stuff happens.

This is how it works people. Smaller companies hit on a good idea all of the time. Every once in a while, the idea appeals to a very large group of consumers. Big companies just wait. Sometimes for quite a while.

All big companies, Microsoft included, have one guy running around corporate going "This UMPC thing is going to be big! We need to target it." This guy is completely ignored because there's no market data and Management pretty much ignores him because he's saying stuff like this all of the time.

Meanwhile, Asus figured out how to deliver the goods on the cheap. Microsoft's Asus rep ignored Asus's info about UMPC's because Microsoft's rep is used to waiting for corporate to deliver the pinata filled with money.

When Asus gets things rolling, Management panics because their high-priced market research has just come back with a new report saying cheap UMPC's are growing into a huge market. Some ass-kisser in Marketing is then tasked with stomping on the Linux Distro by preparing a pinata filled with money to deliver to Microsoft's Asus rep.

There's more waiting. More market research. More waiting. Presentations. Approvals. Meetings. More waiting.

Microsoft corporate delivers pinata to Asus rep. Microsoft's OS is then available as a SKU worldwide ~1-3 years after Asus's product launch.

Re:There's No Surprises

[jason.sweet]

You're right. Except Microsoft was not complacent and did not panic. Microsoft has never had a problem with following the lead of smaller companies. IE was the MS answer to Netscape. Windows 95 was the Microsoft answer to the Mac. Don't make the mistake of filing "playing catch-up" under "bad business plans". Microsoft's market share and revenue directly contradict that notion. Both have been waning slightly, but Microsoft is far from failing.

Re:There's No Surprises

[foobsr]

All big companies, Microsoft included, have one guy running around corporate going ...

I hope you are not one of those :) (the position is the best starting point to develop a condition of ill health (as you know, I am sure)).

CC.

Re:There's No Surprises

[$1uck]

Microsoft corporate delivers pinata to Asus rep. Microsoft's OS is then available as a SKU worldwide ~1-3 years after Asus's product launch. 1 to 3 years after? really when was the first Asus EEE pc available with Windows XP? I mean the original EEE pc has been out for what a year now? and an XP version has been available for how long? If only MS was that complacent...

Re:There's No Surprises

[Surur]

Isnt UMPC an abbreviation created by Microsoft?

Re:There's No Surprises

[ArhcAngel]

Smaller companies hit on a good idea all of the time. Every once in a while, the idea appeals to a very large group of consumers. Big companies just wait. Sometimes for quite a while.

You mean like IBM and HP did when Jobs and Woz developed the Apple?

If it weren't for IBM's missteps Microsoft would never have gotten their foot in the door. Just think if IBM had picked up QDOS what the PC landscape would look like now. We'd probably still be doing everything from the command line like those poor Linux users ;)

Re:There's No Surprises

[mgblst]

Yes, smaller companies, like ASUS with 100,000 employes and $16.5 Billion in revenue in 2006. That is pretty damn big for a hardware company.

Microsoft ain't over

[an.echte.trilingue]

Nah. Just because they were caught by surprise doesn't mean that they won't adapt. They don't even have to do anything beyond maintain XP. I am happy that Linux has been able to provide the competitive pressure to keep Microsoft on its toes, but to suggest that MS is going to keep reinforcing failure is a pipe dream. They are already on the OLPC, you can get the EEE with XP if I remember correctly, and so on. I predict that there will soon be a windows "light" based on XP or even NT, and the cycle starts all over again.

Still, it's nice to see that after 10 years or so of stagnation, the free market in software is finally healthy again and doing its job.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[MightyYar]

A++ for the level-headed response. I would have just called him either delusional or a troll :)

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[flanksteak]

Just because they were caught by surprise doesn't mean that they won't adapt.

Exactly. Microsoft misses everything. They always have. What makes them who they are is their response. Vista is a big slip, but they have too much money to just fade away.

The question is, what will be the response to the ultra mini segment? Can Vista be downsized or does Windows Mobile come up? I see Windows Mobile coming up.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[Calinous]

I'm not sure Microsoft will develop a version of Windows non compatible with Windows XP. Those new mini computers are fast enough for Windows XP, and they will be even faster in the future. And nobody seems to want Windows Mobile on their new mini laptops.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[HigH5]

Nah. Just because they were caught by surprise doesn't mean that they won't adapt. They don't even have to do anything beyond maintain XP. I am happy that Linux has been able to provide the competitive pressure to keep Microsoft on its toes, but to suggest that MS is going to keep reinforcing failure is a pipe dream. They are already on the OLPC, you can get the EEE with XP if I remember correctly, and so on. I predict that there will soon be a windows "light" based on XP or even NT, and the cycle starts all over again. Still, it's nice to see that after 10 years or so of stagnation, the free market in software is finally healthy again and doing its job. I think they were caught off guard. Why they would then use an 8 years old and battered OS to fight this new market. Sure, it's proven, and welcomed by the users, but it still doesn't fit so well into the niche as GNU/Linux does. I believe that GNU/Linux will soon dictate the pace in the emerging OS platforms, because it's much more flexible and versatile than Windows. Sure, there's the confusion with hundreds of distros, but who would know which one will catch Microsoft off guard in the next emerging market.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[tmcmsail]

Microsoft always misses the first bus, but they come back with a vengeance. Remember when they thought the internet was not important? Many times, they let someone else lead the way and step in later to take over the market. I loved Word Perfect, Lotus 123, d-Base, and many others, now I am stuck with a work computer with Word, Excel and Access.

Back to making money, supporting the MS systems manufactured to break and need IT pros to keep running...

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[LehiNephi]

I think you may have missed the title of the submission--Vista's too big, Mobile's too small, but XP may be about right. Personally, I still think XP's on the pudgy side, but it's the best fit out of the current microsoft OSes

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[LehiNephi]

I assume you meant to ask "why would [the manufacturers] use [XP]?" The reason is that people will see a line of mini notebooks, see one with a familiar interface, and say "I know how to use that one!" In other words, the manufacturer stands to make a lot more sales if the user thinks it's more familiar or easier to use. And considering the market penetration of Windows, that will apply to a very large potential customer base.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[wvmarle]

I predict that there will soon be a windows "light" based on XP or even NT, and the cycle starts all over again. And if that means a security enhanced, updated Windows 2000, I'd be at least tempted to try it out. After using Linux since OS/2 died.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[Vancorps]

XP is generic, XP Embedded is not pudgy at all and is quite well suited for this type of application.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[kjkeefe]

Remember when they thought the internet was not important?

Yeah, they still haven't come back from that mistake. That's a big part of the motivation to buy Yahoo. If there is one thing that Microsoft has proven they are good at, it is buying a company and diminishing its value as they try assimilate it.

Embrace, extend, extinguish...

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[cp.tar]

Besides, the slimmed-down kernel that won't be getting into Windows 7 may well become a base for a light OS for low-end devices.

I wouldn't dismiss Microsoft as dead and buried, much as I'd sometimes like to.

Then again, we got hooked in twitter's thread, where normal things don't get posted very often.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[amliebsch]

Excuse me, but Microsoft was clued into the "UMPC" trend back when everyone on Slashdot poo-pooed the idea. It went a slightly different direction than they imagined but they obviously saw it coming for some time now.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[niko9]

...Vista's too big, Mobile's too small, but XP may be about right. Personally, I still think XP's on the pudgy side... Hey Goldilocks, why don't you slide on over next to me and I'll show you that XP is not the only thing around these parts that is pudgy... ;)

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[kesuki]

Remember when they thought the internet was not important?

Yeah, they still haven't come back from that mistake. That's a big part of the motivation to buy Yahoo. If there is one thing that Microsoft has proven they are good at, it is buying a company and diminishing its value as they try assimilate it.

Embrace, extend, extinguish...

With microsoft in charge of yahoo, 10 years down the road $40 a share is going to sound an expensive price, whereas i am wagering that 10 years from now, left in the capable hands who run yahoo now, it'll be worth more than quadruple that figure. Yahoo is a strong #2 in the internet space, some might argue with the number of market ares they've penetrated that google has no space in they're really number 1, kinda like how pepsi cola as the #2 soda company, has a vastly diverse set of holdings, while coke the number one has stayed more focused on the beverage industry and have had to do less diversification.

people don't say pepsi is going to be gone next year because they can't beat coke in annual sales, but some fools are suggesting the same about yahoo, driving share prices down with FUD.

Yahoo is a far more diverse company than google, even if they're not the #1 search engine anymore, i expect them to continually beat the street year after year as long as 'but what about google' keeps holding analysts from evaluating yahoo's real worth.

and yahoo in their own estimates down play their own value, Why? to get headlines saying they beat their own estimates, and nobody on wall street calls them on it because they're all locked in a foolish mindset about Google being #1 in search engines.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[symbolset]

Just because they were caught by surprise doesn't mean that they won't adapt.

Microsoft didn't just get caught flat footed here. There is no doubt they got product briefs a year in advance and samples warm from the first batch. That they still have no answer besides XP Home is evidence they got nuthin. They're still screaming nanananaVistaIcan'thearyou. We would have heard of an Alpha by now.

Some of these things run Vista Home - and as I predicted here they don't do it well. Giving their customers this Vista experience is the pinnacle of advertising for Linux. They are consumed by the dumb.

I hope Intel managed to ramp the volume early enough to get a few of these things under my tree. There's no way I'm paying $1000 on ebay for a $400 notebook just because they're scarce.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[hairyfeet]

Actually using NTLite to strip out the "bloat" you can make XP pretty darned small. I can't remember the exact size of the last one I made but IIRC it was less than 500Mb and I had left a bunch in I could have stripped. IMHO they will most likely add a new theme to XP SP3 and possibly either license or simply buy out NTLite and have an easy to customize image for the OEMs to use on UMPCs. Either that or use the embedded code base of Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs. Which I have gotten to play with and can say would be perfect for the UMPC market. All it is is XP Embedded optimized for memory and CPU starved situations. Why they are offering XP instead of re-branding WinFLP for the job is beyond me,as I have used WinFLP on a 733Mhz P3 with 384Mb of PC100 RAM and it is VERY responsive. But that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[jonbryce]

Yahoo are the no. 1 email provider, and people are less likely to switch email provider than switch search engine.

To switch search engine means changing a setting in your search box. To switch email provider means telling everyone your new email address.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[Heddahenrik]

Of course Mircosoft will strike back, but the open source competition is something totally different today than it was 5 years ago. Mircosoft can never match the combined power from the Linux-developers in the long run, except in a few selected areas. The area is the middle range computers, and that will be smaller and smaller in the future as the cheap computers become better.

The ones developing these small devices are quite content with that they have control over their software, so start buying closed source is a big step. Better to buy adjustments to the open source stuff they already are using then.

Microsoft is in the same situation as the Roman Empire was in the end of the 4th century when Rome isn't sacked yet, but the barbarians have the same military technology as the Romans, but more manpower and will.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[Not The Real Me]

Microsoft, like Ford and General Motors, thought that everyone wanted a fully loaded gizmo with all the bells and whistles. Since consumers have been dealing with price inflation in food and energy for quite a number of months, consumers have to cut back somewhere. Microsoft, like Ford and GM, finally realizes, begrudgingly, that they need a product for the budget conscious person.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[vikstar]

Just because they were caught by surprise doesn't mean that they won't adapt. They'll finally upgrade to a linux kernel? I hope :)

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[Anonymous Coward]

Come back with a vengeance? Wishful thinking.

Back in 2005, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer vowed to bury Google. Its 2008...Google hasn't been buried yet.

If you actually read about the various anti-trust court cases MS is involved in (especially the evidence made available to the public...The various memos and such), not to mention their 10-K form submission...You'd realise MS is crapping themselves when it comes to Open Source.

They've tried...
(1) FUD => Failed
(2) Emulate => Failed
(3) Olive Branching => Failing

In fact, when it comes to actual competition. They're struggling. They have to resort to using "incentives" to encourage their partners, lobbying, and other business tactics to curb the tide. In Europe, they got their asses handed to them with a big ass fine!

Its not "if" MS falls apart, its "when".

All it takes is more polishing and more open source projects that take on commercial equivalents (applications), and MS is in the gutter.

Just think about how much MS has burnt in trying to counter open source. They've done heaps since 2001, and its all been ineffective.

All they can do is respond...Just like in this case with WinXP Home on these "Net-tops" and "EeePC-like" solutions.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to say it. But Microsoft recovering is a bit inconceivable. That company is hemorrhaging money at every turn the last couple of years. There is only about 4 years you can hide these mega blunders on corporate paper and recover. By my guess there is one year left for them to. A) Sell enough Zunes to pay for their research, development and marketing. B) Some how magically turn a penny after the miraculous blunder of the overheating Xbox 360. While the sales circle the drain as it being a entertainment-center-in-a-box thanks to Toshiba yanking the plug on HD DVD. C) Recover face on Excel not being able to do simple math (or at least display it) while their competitors are releasing the same functioning products for free. D) What commercial potential is Yahoo to them? How will buying Yahoo make them anything more than buying more crap that will be worthless to them. E) Vista is a turd. DX10 who cares? A few fanboys? eh whatever. Most of these sales are retail sales. If they are selling the crap out of Vista than why do they sound so nervous and are trying so desperately to convince us of some crap. I call BS. They are playing number games. I don't know how or what but I would bet big bucks they are just fiddling with numbers and statistics. When in the past did Microsoft try so desperately convince you that everyone is running it. Meanwhile majority of the people you know aren't running it. Face it. Vista is a flop. As food prices rise so we can save the planet. (from what I have no clue. Sure isn't saving the world from starvation but we are saving something. I guess we are saving our resources for future foreign invaders to sack and spoil.) But as these prices keep soaring people want cheaper more efficient tech.
Bottom line. If Microsoft is going to come back with a vengeance they better hurry as they only have about one year left as I see it before the real truth about their earnings surfaces and investors start pulling out. Mark my words. 2009 if MS doesn't pull off a Christmas miracle it is over.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[marcosdumay]

Lets see how well they adapt when their competition costs nothing and the world goes into a recession. Remember that MS always was the inexpensive low-quality competitor.

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[linhares]

Windows Vista Ultimate: $318

Windows XP on the OLPC: $3

Microsoft becoming microprofits: priceless

Re:Microsoft ain't over

[linhares]

Furthermore, to switch house means telling everyone your new address, and move a lot of junk also.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[dave420]

Vista is not a failure. I'm not trolling (though many will see it that way) - vista has made MS a bunch of money, and if anything, has given them a great wake-up call to shape up or ship out. It'll only be a failure if they never release another version of Windows, and don't learn from their mistakes. +5, Troll expected - slashdot, don't let me down!

MSFT investors aren't lovin it

[Anonymous Coward]

Computex was a total disaster for Microsoft. The stock is down about 4% in the last few days.

The headline

[eebra82]

Mobile: Windows XP Lives, Thanks to Linux I wouldn't say it's [..] thanks to Linux, but rather [..] due to Linux. It's fairly obvious that Microsoft wants people to use Vista rather than XP, so the fact that XP still lives is hardly something Microsoft would thank Linux for.

I also doubt that Microsoft didn't foresee this since companies like ASUS surely talk to Microsoft about their future. The only part I think they got wrong was to tout Vista as a serious operating system for ultra portables.

Re:The headline

[gbjbaanb]

I also doubt that Microsoft didn't foresee this since companies like ASUS surely talk to Microsoft about their future

true, but also Microsoft sometimes decides that they know better than their "partners". The Atom chip cannot run Vista (except for the most expensive model, which Intel are marketing at a uncompetitive price..). Apparently Intel doesn't care about this because they partnered with MS a while back on Origami and were screwed by them:

Kedia said that Intel is "working with Microsoft", but he has no idea what Microsoft's strategy for MIDs is. "It will be interesting to see which way they will go. But right now, we really don't know."

This story certainly sounds different than what we heard at the UMPC launch. Back then, Microsoft's Origami marketing campaign virtually screwed Intel and device manufacturers when it promised a product that had nothing to do with the products that were coming to market. Today, it looks like Intel has decided to do what it thinks is the best software approach for MIDs this time, regardless of what is available from Microsoft.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

Actually I'm pretty pleased with my Treo 750. The ability to SSH, change providers, and easily develop software is what made the decision over an iPhone. I'm not trying to start a flamewar, just saying that there are plenty of people out there that are quite happy with Windows Mobile. That isn't to say however that I wouldn't by an Android capable phone the minute it came out.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[TTURabble]

What?

Exactly, but...

[russlar]

You will have to buy Vista Business or Ultimate to get that, but neither of those is selling as well as EEEPC with Xandros. Bingo.

1. Sell these umpc's vith a Vista Business license

2. Ship them pre-installed with XP Pro

3. ?????

4. PROFIT!


Seriously though, for this platform I say roll all the way back to Windows 2000.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista has made MS a bunch of money, if you count the people who bought Vista, didn't like it, and then bought XP. MS sold a bunch of site licenses to businesses which allow them to install XP over the Vista that their new computers came with.

This is not sustainable growth, and their customers are massively pissed. MS is going to have a really hard time ever selling anything to these customers again.

Computers that just plain work

[spaceyhackerlady]

I feel part of this is a reaction of people to slow, buggy computers that crash all the time: a computer is useless if it doesn't actually work. User don't care how fast the computer is. They don't care how fancy the OS is or how many bells and whistles the applications have. As long as it does what they need it to do, they're happy.

I've actually met people who are suspicious of Macs. They're too easy. They're too reliable. They're not like other (i.e. Windows) computers. There has to be a catch, somewhere. Us Mac fans just say this is how computers are supposed to work, and it's Windows that has it wrong.

...laura

Re:Computers that just plain work

[wvmarle]

I totally agree with your point. I bought this iBook G4 laptop because I want my laptop to just work - and that's what it did. It just worked. I have to say that this is in contrast to my desktop but I'm fiddling too much with that one. I don't fiddle much with my laptop, I enjoy just using it, no need to change things all the time.
My EEE PC I love also partly for the fact that it just works. It has quite some rough edges though, but for the most part it just works. It's fast enough, more than fast enough for what I'm doing with it: websurfing and e-mailing mostly. I was doing that on a 386DX40 with 16 MB memory already, so whatever hardware there is in a modern UMPC, it's for sure enough for that.
It even runs OpenOffice, very convenient for the odd document to view or to edit. It has some games, to kill the time. It connects easily to the 'Net over WiFi or my mobile phone (3G). I can stick the memory card of my camera in it and start e-mailing out the photos instantly. When connected to my office network, my printer is available automatically (CUPS server). It works, cheap, and portable, and that's all I'm asking for.
That it runs Linux is a nice extra, more nerd points. And it makes it easier for me to start fiddling. Oh no I'm not supposed to do that with my EEE. Ah well...

Re:Computers that just plain work

[evil_aar0n]

I'll second that. I ran my own business for five years supporting Windows, primarily, and a custom-app of Linux for one client, though I was into Linux when Linux wasn't cool (circa '94-ish). And, having since become a corporate prostitute - paperwork of running my own business was too much hassle - working on Solaris apps, I've dumped Windows for Mac. The interesting thing, and I noticed this the other day, is that I don't have to be an expert to get the Mac to do what I want. It just does it - except for Numbers, which is really weird, coming from OpenOffice. I totally don't care what goes on under the hood, anymore, really; I don't have to. "Edit the registry"? What's that?

Call me a fanboi, if you want - though you're wrong - but I can focus on what I need to do, rather than the stupid platform. And installing software on a Mac is light years ahead of Linux - sorry, guys, I know that's sacrilege on this site. Drag-and-drop. Bing! Done.

Anyone know if the Hackintosh will support UMPCs? I use a MBP, but I'd like Mac OS on one of those itty-bitty PCs.

Re:Computers that just plain work

[lophophore]

There is a catch to Macs. Apple is one of the most proprietary companies making computers today.

Proprietary == Expensive.

Do you want to run OS X? You better be prepared to shell out 30 to 50% more on hardware than on an equavalent power "commodity" computer. (Never mind lawsuit-bait Psystar. They won't be around much longer, once Apple's lawyers get their teeth into them.)

I just bought a new Lenovo Thinkpad with suse linux on it for under $950. An equivalently equipped MacBook is $1300.

Re:Computers that just plain work

[pandrijeczko]

I've actually met people who are suspicious of Macs. They're too easy. They're too reliable. They're not like other (i.e. Windows) computers. There has to be a catch, somewhere. Us Mac fans just say this is how computers are supposed to work, and it's Windows that has it wrong.

How about those of us who just don't plain want a Mac?

I don't want to pay a premium price for a hardware/software platform that is as locked down as an Apple is and where a sizeable proportion of the money I pay goes into making it "just look nice". I can tweak XP pretty heavily and ditch all the Microsoft-included apps with the FOSS ones I prefer using and it really doesn't bother me that every piece of software doesn't look the same - as long as it's logical and works, I can learn how to use it.

With Linux, I can pretty much "wipe the drawing board" and design my OS environment pretty much how I want it so it's tailored to the way I work, not the other way round.

If you like OS X then great - knock yourself out.

But I've never owned an Apple computer and really cannot ever see a reason to buy one.

Re:Computers that just plain work

[syousef]

I've actually met people who are suspicious of Macs. They're too easy. They're too reliable. They're not like other (i.e. Windows) computers. There has to be a catch, somewhere. Us Mac fans just say this is how computers are supposed to work, and it's Windows that has it wrong.

I'm really REALLY sick of hearing this crap from Mac "fans". Macs have bugs too. Both hardware and software. They're not minor irritations - stuff like your ultrathin airs overheating, or file move losing data on both source and target. These aren't little backs. You prefer Macs? Fine. You think they're easier? Fine. You want to tell me they're bug free and that everyone's a freakin' idiot because they're "suspicious" of their simplicity? Well you're a liar and you can take your turtle neck and your brown nose and shove it pal.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just purchased an HTC 6800 (WM6) and I'm really happy with it. I'm pretty sure I'd like an iPhone, android, or blackberry device too.

It's a pretty good time to be alive if you're a geek.

Re:Apple needs to make overpriced underpowered min

[MightyYar]

Well, that was random.

Coke needs to come out with a blue-flavored cola.

does this make it.....

[OutOnARock]

The Year of the Linux UMPC?

...ducks... :) ....

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[petermgreen]

ROFLMAO

The EEEPC series runs XP just fine, the XP GUI is perfectly usable on a 1024x600 screen (the only time I have had to go into top/bottom scroll mode was the settings dialog in iTunes) and should be pretty usable even on the smaller screen (I would imagine third party apps will be more of an issue than windows itself). and MS has agreed to let vendors of such machines keep shipping XP on them for the forseeable future.

Fact is apple has a niche of people who either happen to fit thier very narrow hardware selection or are prepared to put up with apples hardware selection to get OS-X legally.

Linux is doing fairly well in the market for smaller than laptop devices which people don't expect to be able to run thier normal apps on.

MS still dominates the market for ordinary desktops and laptops and I don't see any evidence that will change anytime soon.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Calinous]

Microsoft would have liked Vista on all new retail computers (which is happening), but they would also have wanted it adopted in corporate world (which is not really happening) and purchased as upgrade (also, not a big sell).
      So, Vista had brought them money on the low estimate, and probably costed them quite a bit more than the initial estimates.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[felipekk]

I have a Windows Mobile powered PDA and I love it. I frequently have to solve problems on Blackberries and I would hate my phone if I had half of those problems. iPhone is not a valid contestant right now because of no Exchange support. Plus, I'm on CDMA, so...

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[silgaun]

You're right. It's not a failure, it's a feature

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[spottedkangaroo]

Yeah, seriously. Who compiles it anymore? Gentoo is pretty hardcore. I think regular people can install ubuntu in an hour or so, probably much faster than vista.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[m.ducharme]

vista has made MS a bunch of money This is true, but success/failure depends on how much money was made, and whether it was enough to justify the expense and/or unintended consequences.

[Vista] has given them a great wake-up call to shape up or ship out. People usually say this about failures.

It'll only be a failure if they never release another version of Windows, and don't learn from their mistakes. MS will probably release another (newer, as opposed to just updating XP) version of Windows, but it's not obvious that they will learn from their Vista mistakes. Either way, it's certainly too early to tell if it's been a total failure. I think it's safe to say that from a marketing standpoint, it's been a failure.

Re:Ubuntu 8.04

[strabes]

Well, if it's being used instead of XP, the overall level of the computer's suck would be scaled down along with the scaled-down version of ubuntu.

Stupidest os release?

[fluffy99]

From the article

...and Vista is looking more and more like Microsoft's stupidest operating system release ever. Yes, even counting Windows ME and MS-DOS 4.0.

I think that honor belongs to Microsoft Bob http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

Re:Stupidest os release?

[Technician]

stupidest operating system release

I thought Bob was an application, not an operationg system.

Re:Stupidest os release?

[twmcneil]

Technically, Bob wasn't an OS. Bob was a shell environment designed to run on top of the OS.

Re:Stupidest os release?

[UnknowingFool]

In terms of strategic planning, Vista was a stupid move. Unlike Bob and ME, MS does not have an alternative for Vista ready for their customers. For Bob, Windows 95 was released 5 months later. For ME, Windows 2k was 6 months earlier and XP was a year later. Vista was released in Jan 2007 and the earliest Windows 7 release is projected for 2010. Strategically, MS has to hope that Windows 7 can convince their customers to stay with them and not use other OS's as companies evaluate upgrades.

Re:Stupidest os release?

[StrawberryFrog]

From your link: Microsoft Bob was designed for Windows 3.1x and Windows 95 and intended to be a user-friendly interface for Microsoft Windows, replacing the Program Manager.

So at best Bob was a shell, not an OS.

Re:Stupidest os release?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know a lot, but I know this. Bob is not an operating system. Bob is an insurance salesman, from Topeka, Kansas. You meet Bob in an airport cocktail lounge, because the airport's been using Windows ME...

Re:Stupidest os release?

[lewiscr]

Technically, Bob wasn't an OS. Bob was a shell environment designed to run on top of the OS. Like Windows is a shell that runs on top of DOS?

Re:Stupidest os release?

[rubenerd]

Microsoft Bob wasn't an operating system. Still, I think it was one of the more interesting and innovative things to come out of Microsoft in a long time, I had lots of fun playing around with it when it came out. Problem was, I was 9 when it did. I can't imagine people with things to do would have found it useful.

How much longer can Windows really stick around?

[HomerJ]

XP does the two things you really want an OS to do well. Run all the software you want, on the hardware you want. But XP is getting long in the tooth.

The market is going to things like these UMPCs. It's going to tablets and other exotic hardware. Windows is losing one of the two things here. Vista doesn't run at all on them. Microsoft's only answer is keep putting out XP. On these systems, even XP doesn't run on the hardware as well as Linux.

Next up is software. These aren't gaming PCs. Linux is running the software people want to run. Firefox, Pidgin for IMs, It plays media without hassles. It has an office suite. Toss wine on there, and it will even run Office. Look at all the solutions that mac users use to run a couple Windows programs on OSX. The market is coming around to just using emulation for that last 5% of Windows software they want or need to run.

If Windows loses the only two reasons people put up with it, why would they continue to run it? OEMs are seeing this as well, and are just putting out Linux machines. Dell is going "If people buying Apple machines will use Parallels to run Windows stuff they can't in OSX, why can't they just use Crossover to run them on Linux"? In a market like PC, that $20 they spend on that Windows license is $20 they can't lower the price to compete with others. That $20 is a difference in someone buying a Dell, and going elsewhere.

Windows may end up being a niche market, with business that just need native Windows for one reason or another. But considering they are losing the two reasons home users RUN Windows, and then the added headaches associated to running it, why are they going to continue to bother?

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Gat0r30y]

Goople? oh dear, I just threw up a little.

Thanks to Vista, too

[Junior J. Junior III]

If Vista didn't suck so much and wasn't as bloated as a dead whale carcass, Windows XP wouldn't have a reason to stick around. It's not just Linux, give credit where it's due.

The fact that Vista took 6 years to get here meant that the minimum specs for running Windows.CurrentVersion didn't change for 6 years, which created a market for ultra-cheap subnotebooks that would run like shit if they had to run Vista. Linux wins there, and XP's Microsoft's stopgap to try to compete with it.

The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[Odder]

No one is going for the same old shit anymore. Vista IS a maintained XP. All they did was gloss the GUI and gum up the core with constant indexing and DRM madness. Every version of Windows has been like that but the market has wriggled free. Who's going back to paying M$ for SDKs when GNU/Linux does the same or better for free? As hardware makers go, so customers will follow. Ballmer declared developers as all important, but only as "pawns and one night stands". The same reasoning applies to hardware makers, customers, and everyone else. The whole OOXML attack at ISO proves that nothing has changed at Microsoft.

Yeah right.

[magamiako1]

Unfortunately this headline is very sensationalist, and provides a very limited scope of the entirety IT industry as a whole.

Basically, the person who blogged this has been reading too many internet blogs surrounding these products.

Intel's ATOM CPU was not aimed at the "UMPC" market, though most certainly can be used in this fashion. Intel's Atom is aimed at the ARM market. They targetted it for the mobile phone/handheld device market.

Sure, your random IT geek bloggers are going to talk about the latest "smallest mobile gadget" and everything like that because that's what they do. That's their job. They're not going to talk up how Dell rolls out a new line of high end laptops because guess what? It doesn't sell their blog. These people are "gadget geeks" and not IT nerds.

Microsoft's spurred change on XP has a lot to do with the fact that companies rolling out desktops want to continue rolling out desktops that they know will work with their existing infrastructure. Why move to Vista, for example, when all of your servers are running Server 2003?

Having the option there is certainly not a bad thing, and it's by no means an admittance by Microsoft that "Vista sucks". Software-wise, Vista and Server 2008 are light years beyond the Server 2003/XP combination and continue to grow.

Where Microsoft is going to grow their market, however, is through a more "peer to peer" "social" computing concept, which they are experimenting with the Live Mesh project.

The biggest problem facing very large IT environments today is how to find data that you've got stored? You can have Z:\shares\commonshares\departments\finance\finance documents\marys finance documents\2008\march\monthly sheet for April.xls (multiply this by 1000000x and this is what most IT environments have) and be completely unable to find it.

So they're working on improved searching features, and again, things like Live Mesh are going to help this even more. They're also working on Sharepoint to provide even easier management of such items.

Microsoft isn't going anywhere, Linux and Apple aren't going to squeeze them out, and the EEE PC is just a fad. As soon as the "average joe" gets his hands on one and realize it won't play his video games, he's going to take it back and that's that.

Re:Yeah right.

[jnadke]

Intel's ATOM CPU was not aimed at the "UMPC" market, though most certainly can be used in this fashion. Intel's Atom is aimed at the ARM market. They targetted it for the mobile phone/handheld device market.

Atom WAS meant for the Mobile Internet Device / Low power laptop market. NOT the handheld market. UMPCs were a niche market that is halfway between the two above. They did neither well, and will die appropriately.

ARM is, and always will be, in a market that is completely different from Intel. Their chips consume 10x less power than the Atom ever will. For every die shrink that brings Atom's power consumption down, will bring ARM's down as well.

Microsoft isn't going anywhere, Linux and Apple aren't going to squeeze them out, and the EEE PC is just a fad. As soon as the "average joe" gets his hands on one and realize it won't play his video games, he's going to take it back and that's that.

The average joe DOESN'T PLAY WARCRAFT. The average joe plays Yahoo games. Or [insert online gaming portal here]. The average joe checks his e-mail. The average joe shares pictures. The average joe uses youtube.

All of these things can be done EASILY by ANY OS. Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, or Linux [insert distro here].

OS's are becoming irrelevant. The world is going connected, people will be storing their information online. Games are played on consoles. People just need something cheap, that will connect them to the internet and read e-mail. Sometimes play web games and browse youtube.

Re:Yeah right.

[feranick]

"As soon as the "average joe" gets his hands on one and realize it won't play his video games, he's going to take it back and that's that."

Of course your claim is very well unsupported by strong sells of eeePC, with no returns. I wonder who's your average joe...

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[LWATCDR]

Humm. I wonder. If you take all the Tivos, WAPs, Cellphones, and other embedded devices that come with Linux install on them you might actually beat Vista "Sales"
You might also beat Vista sales if you only count retail boxes of Vista vs sales of Linux :)

BTW
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
They will ship you a Linux CD for free.
So no download, no compile, and if you really don't want to you don't even have to install it to use it. It will work as a live-CD.
Should be as easy to install as Vista if not more so.

Lenovo now charges an upgrade fee for XP

[Anonymous Coward]

1) http://shop.lenovo.com/
2) Select X series
3) Select X61
4) Click customize&buy
5) To upgrade from Vista, pick:
  " Genuine Windows XP Professional [add $59.25] "

The writing is on the wall. Pretty soon Lenovo will probably offer an upgrade from Vista to Ubuntu for $30 or so...

Re:Lenovo now charges an upgrade fee for XP

[tknd]

The model you selected comes with Vista Basic preloaded. Microsoft considers this license equivalent or less than XP home. XP Professional is considered equivalent in value to Vista Business. In fact, if you purchase a retail Vista Business license, you legally have downgrade rights to XP Professional. Of course if you purchase XP pro, you do not have upgrade rights to Vista Business.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[pdusen]

And the Twitters shall inherit the earth.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[bennomatic]

I heard that Exchange support is coming next week...

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[compro01]

Vista has made a bunch of revenue. Whether that revenue will offset the sizable development cost of vista along with the spreading "I don't like it" sentiment that it has brought upon (both actual and perceived) is the question, which I don't have an answer to.

Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Who's going back to paying M$ for SDKs when GNU/Linux does the same or better for free?"

Everyone...Never bet against Microsoft. If you don't believe me just ask IBM or Netscape or AOL or Novell or Sun or ...(and the list goes on and on).

Re:Not even close, try in 8 hours as many as Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is no way 50 thousand PCs were sold with Linux installed on them."

There, I fixed that for you. Winblows users... sigh.

Godammit, twitter!

[Anonymous Coward]

twitter, this sock puppet shit is getting really old.

You know as well as I do that MS is going the way of IBM: they are a stable company with a halfway decent product mostly oriented toward businesses. To suggest that thousands of engineers won't come up with anything of value is ridiculous. Oh, and the OOXML proves not only that MS is the same company that it always was, but it also proves that their tactics work.

In other news...

[Gilmoure]

...consumers prefer small, inexpensive devices that do a few things well and don't try to be all things to all people (and aliens).

Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[pdusen]

Hello, Twitter, how's the weather in la-la-land?

Thanks to Linux?

[FireXtol]

It's called Vista. Duuuuuuh.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[bennomatic]

You know, that's the third post I've made this week that someone has responded with the "I just threw up a little." Is this a meme, or do I just have some magical skill?

The other posts were on other sites, which makes it even more intriguing.

Interesting to note that "Goople" is just "Google" with the second 'g' turned around and straightened up. I'm not sure Apple would approve of that joint name. Maybe AppGoo?

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Deanalator]

I don't know, I still think that Linux on the desktop will never happen. I tried to install slackware once, and it was really HARD. What kind of OS makes you go out and download drivers just to get your wireless card working?

IT industry operates in cycles.

[Anonymous Coward]

This represents a major shift in the IT industry as a whole. The IT industry itself works on a cycle; we started with an operational cycle in the 70's where we developed basic functionalities, miniaturized it in the early 80's, towards the early and mid 90's we added more functionalities such as media processing capabilities, databasing, server clusters, the internet, etc. Again, we miniaturized during the late 90's as cellphones, PDA's, etc came out. The last 3 or 4 years more core functionalities have been being created; We're now on the butt-end of a hardware craze that started in the late 90's with 3d gaming and has ended us up in the late 00's with hardware that can produce realistic pictures. We are now ready for another minitaturization phase. We've been getting things like mobile internet devices, and other equipment.

There will still be a market for the high-end machines, there is always a market for the high end no matter where you go. Part of the reason this industry keeps going is because intel and AMD always change their hardware which forces mobo manufacturers to change their designs which causes investment in R+D in chipsets and therefor, in every thing else. Demand is always on capacity and the thing with these phases is the manufacturers will still increase capacities but they'll do it by making things smaller. Imagine stacking 10 100GB flash drives in a machine and doing RAID with them. Once they have the size taken care of they'll re-engineer their designs and manufacturing requipment, put more into the space, then repeat. Imagine having processors that snap together like lego's. Imagine having a backplane that holds 10 EEE-PC's.

Microsoft is positioning themselves in a developer oriented position. MS office has been completly rewritten and from the publishing features in access to the coding arcitecture they've built from the ground up to streamline production; it's a good product and that is what is going to keep them afloat because it is businesses and especially businesses designing, publishing, manufacturing and just plain creating content are going to find cost-effective to use. Everyone else will find a cheap, useful, streamlined Linux machine to use that works like everything else; 50% of people who use machines don't need a super expensive uberbox, they just need something to use e-mail, browse the web, watch porn, mabye play a flash game, etc. And those machines, with just basic core functionality, because they are inexpensive and because they are more accessable will become the secure delivery platform of choice. This is why DRM is so heavy in vista; the EEE-PC's core API functionalities are so basic using it to decipher a DVD requires a lot of work. Mind you, the right .Net and Linux modules exist and you can string something on to it, but are you going to do it for Abit's flavor? Or Macintosh's flavor? The cheap machines, because they are cheap, won't have a standard API which means making pirates works on them will be difficult, and they will have to adhere to a DRM Standard. So unless Linux really standardizes some sets of API's; unless Torvalds says "Thus we created a Kernel, let us agree upon an API, series of modules, a driver infrastructure, and basic GUI", Linux is doomed to have most of the market but the markets it does have will be fragmented.

Re:IT industry operates in cycles.

[MarkvW]

If I had mod points to give, you would get them. Windows provides a standard and the market craves standards--especially when it comes to high end products with really long development cycles. Developing for one standard operating system is a lot easier than developing for multiple operating systems.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[LehiNephi]

It's worse than just the retail numbers. Microsoft takes credit for every machine that is sold with Vista, whether or not that machine is sold with an XP install or whether the user subsequently wipes Vista and replaces it with something else. So basically every laptop sold to a business with a site license has counted as a sale of Vista, even though almost every large business replaces it with their own image.

My company (over 50k employees) took four years after the release of XP to adopt the new OS. They're moving more quickly on Vista, however, with rollout scheduled for 2009. It'll be really interesting to watch--about 50% of our entire workforce and 80-90% of our management are over 47 years old. There's going to be a great deal of bellyaching when users are suddenly confronted with the brand new user interface for both the shell (Aero will be on by default) and office suite (2007). I'll adapt fairly easily, I expect, since I'm still in my 20's, but I feel sorry for the poor folks at the Helpdesk when it hits.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Andy Dodd]

Actually I know quite a few people who love Windows Mobile, including myself.

Many of those people are hardcore Linux users on the desktop, too.

The iPhone is a toy. It's shiny and cool but it isn't very flexible. My AT&T Tilt blows it out of the water in every aspect except user interface, and the UI of the Tilt is good enough for me, especially considering the significantly better functionality.

Android looks like it's going to cater to the Lords of Lockdown (carriers).

It's really sad that the most open mobile phone platform out there is Windows Mobile. Everything else is a nightmare of signed applications and lockdown.

(Yes, Windows Mobile has application signing, but every WM device I know uses this for warning purposes only, not lockout. In addition, WM will remember when you say "yes, I want to run this unsigned app" and not bother you again.)

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple dominates the high end market and GNU/Linux rules the low. Soon the ends will meet and M$ will be squeezed out. Vista is a failure and it has taken M$ down with it.

The change is permenant. Vendors have revolted, M$ won't be able to come back. Yes, M$ won't be able to come back. They are dead. They've passed on. They've ceased to be. They've expired and gone on to meet their makers. They're collectively a stiff. Bereft of life, they rest in peace. If Vista didn't require so much power from modern computers, they'd have some energy left to be pushing up the daisies. Their metabolic processes are now history. They're off the twig. They've kicked the bucket. They've shuffled off this mortal coil. They've run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-company.

The tide has turned. The bridges have been burned. The show is over. The day is done. The war is won. The keg is drained. The horse is dead. The sun has set. The goldfish has gone belly-up. The farm is bought. The fat lady's sung. The house lights have gone on. The toast is burnt. The grounds crew has taken the field. The disco is over. The next sound you hear will be the sound of the ambassador's phone melting. The parade has started. The spark is gone. The magic has left. The phone is ringing. The speeches are done. This premise is wearing thin.

Windows and OSX

[labmonkey09]

Without a doubt these machines will run XP, maybe VISTA, and also OSX if it is available. Beyond early adopters, everyday users are not going to run Linux on these things anymore than on their desktops. The clear commercial trend is more and more devices running Windows and Apple product lines not less. I'd bet LINUX runs on more device types than Windows and Apple together, but not total devices in use by consumers with an interface. People want what they know and what the TV pushes them.

Re:Windows and OSX

[pandrijeczko]

I wish you Apple people would learn about that word called "perspective".

Okay, let's have a reasoned logical argument about where OS X is going - you from the point of (I suspect) an OS X user and me, someone who uses mostly Linux, a bit of XP (and quite likes it) and has never yet found the need to ever own an Apple product.

Yes, Apple is gaining market share and over here in the UK, even I have seen a new Apple store open in my local shopping centre. But here in the UK, and I suspect in the rest of Europe, for desktops Apple is still pretty much in third place - behind Windows and Linux. Yes, that may change in the future but the fact is I see a lot more people using Ubuntu than I do OS X, the main reason being that here Apple machines are not the equivalent in pounds or euros that they are in dollars in the US - invariably a lot more expensive here.

In the USA, the demographic is different and I'll accept that over there Apple's share probably puts them in second place, maybe as high as 12% with Linux in third place.

So, having established that as a premise, then where are the new Apple users coming from?

In the first instance, they're coming from the Windows user base. Whether or not Vista is actually a great OS or a piece of crap, the fact is that it has had a really bad press in the eyes of most people. On top of that, it's a lot more expensive than XP was (if you're a home user who wants all the features in the Ultimate Edition or whatever it's called) and it's just not that easy any more to copy a disk at work of all the Microsoft software you want. Therefore, you have to buy Microsoft software now which means that the price difference between buying a PC with Windows and an Apple with OS X is closing.

Secondly, there's the "cool" factor of Apple. Personally, I completely fail to understand why a "tool" that is a computer has to be "cool" but I won't deny that some people are that way inclined.

And finally, who uses Windows, OS X and Linux on the desktop? Well, for starters, if you're going to pigeon-hole everyone, then write the three down as "OS X------Windows------Linux".

In other words, OS X is a diametrically opposite alternative to Linux. Some people don't want to use Windows and have no interest in understanding about how a computer and software work, they want to get jobs done and entertain themselves, they don't mind paying a premium price and so they gravitate to an Apple.

Other people want more power and control over their computers, they don't mind steep learning curves and tinkering with their machines, so they gravitate to Linux. They may also not want to (or be able to) pay for software and brand new hardware so they too will take the Linux path. Yes, some may try out Ubuntu, find it to be too hard to work with and maybe go back to Windows or even buy an Apple.

So what I'm trying to say is that you should not make any direct comparisons between OS X and Linux because they are complete opposites. OS X users generally see Linux as "primitive" and like the eye-candy and GUI an Apple gives them, whereas Linux users see OS X as a locked down operating system that can only run on very specific machines and cannot be "tailored" to run as a desktop, server or however they want on whatever they want.

As I said at the start, I've never found any reason to buy an Apple computer. Any OS I touch (whether Windows, BSD or Linux) I tweak and streamline to ditch all they eye-candy and just get "maximum bucks for CPU cycles" so any machine where that ability is locked away from me just doesn't interest me.

So please stop hailing OS X as "The Great White Hope" of operating systems because it isn't, just like Linux isn't. The two of them are "alternatives" to not having to be entirely reliant (or ever reliant) on Windows. And bearing in mind that I personally do everything from playing games & media, writing documents and spreadsheets, a little photo-editing, some shell and Perl programming, supporting Linux servers at work and for some private clients, OS X just doesn't get a look in and probably never will do.

Yes, some people like OS X and good luck to them - but at least an equal number of people don't give it a second thought.

Re:Windows and OSX

[uffe_nordholm]

I dont agree.

Some people will actively try to get some version of Windows running on their hardware, but I think a greater number will simply not notice that they are not running Windows.

And the reason is that if they can do all the work they want to (check email, write letters, do some maths, play simple games...) they won't bother with asking about the operating system. After all, I don't care what's inside the rear hub on my bike, as long as the gears work. Why should a computer user be that different?

Unfortunately, there will be some people who will not buy a computer unless it has Windows on it, because that is the only thing they know and they fear change more than death itself.

Despite the above, I think you are right when it comes to the TV: that which is seen on commercials (and not only on TV, but anywhere) will do better than that which is not seen.

Re:Windows and OSX

[labmonkey09]

I don't have a Mac or any Apple device. I use Windows, Linux, and Solaris on a daily basis, but my choice for base OS on my notebooks is Windows. I run Linux and Open Solaris in VMs.

In other words, OS X is a diametrically opposite alternative to Linux - Only to me and you(and many people on /.), because users, average users, make no distinction between closed source and open source, locked down(ish) and not locked down, big or small. They just look at a device and answer any number of these questions 1) can I afford it, 2) is it cool/hip (or maybe not for anti-trenders), 3) does it do what I want, 4) can I use it. These new Linux devices do not, for these users, add anything new to these equations. If XP or OS X alternatives exists, they will buy them.

Smashing?

[noewun]

The smashing success of Asus and others' Linux-powered UMPCs and mini-notebooks. . .

Smashing? Out of curiosity, does anyone have any numbers to back up the "smashing" from above? Is it really "smashing" or just better than expected?

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Mr. Underbridge]

vista has made MS a bunch of money

Has it? Has Vista made MS money that XP wouldn't have made them? You have to eliminate cannibalistic sales here. If someone's new computer came with Vista, that doesn't count since it would have had XP before.

The hardware companies are benefiting more from Vista than anything. You can hardly find a new machine with XP, which means if you want a new computer it better come with 2GB minimum.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of the money MS is making from Vista would have been made from XP sales instead. Vista is a failure. There was a huge investment with minimal return. While I agree that MS may learn from mistakes made with Vista, that doesn't mean that Vista isn't a huge failure.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[labmonkey09]

Apparentley Vista has taken MSFT down alright, down to the bank.

Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[kjkeefe]

Funny, they used to say the same thing about IBM...

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[initdeep]

Have you ever installed Vista?

i thought not.

umpc's are one trick ponies

[Savior_on_a_Stick]

I don't see gaming any time soon for umpc's - that a 'convergence' or two down the road.

UMPC's don't have the gusto to replace a desktop, or even a notebook.

Run one app on it and it pretty much takes the wind out of it's sails.

What I've been using one for is to rdp to a win box running some timeclock software.
Basically, it's a not-so-thin client.

I expect to see more of this type of activity, especially if solid state disks become more cost effective.

Re:Not even close, try in 8 hours as many as Linux

[jedidiah]

Vista sold on the same number of machines that XP would have sold on otherwise.

Don't try to confuse anyone into believing that Vista is a real product in it's
own right. It's just another version of Windows. So what if the latest version of
MonopolyOS sells as many copies of the latest version of MonopolyOS.

Even the current version of MacOS selling as many copies as the last wouldn't be
terribly exciting.

Pointing out the fact that Vista is the latest iteration of a monopoly that
stretches back to DOS doesn't alter the fact that alternative(S) are growing.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[cp.tar]

The change is permenant. Vendors have revolted, M$ won't be able to come back. Good riddance.

Now, now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that.

Vendors have seen a way to sell their low-end products cheaper with a lower-priced (OK, free) OS that can run better on lower-specced machines.
That's all there is to it.

And even as I become aware I'm replying to Yet Another twitter's Sockpuppet (YAtS) -- yes, all the M$s should have been a dead giveaway -- I still think this has to be said.
Linux on the desktop may be finally coming. Soon. We promise. Linux on the (low-end) laptop is already here.

Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[jedidiah]

...you mean the same IBM that came back with a vengance as a server company. ...or the same Sun that's still around as one of the dominant server vendors. ...or Netscape which is starting to chip away the monopoly/OEM acquired marketshare of IE?

Even Novell is doing pretty well by way of SLES.

AOL is the same sort of dinosaur as Microsoft. Microsoft never eliminated them. The internet
made them both look foolish. Although AOL was enough of a success based on it's own merits
before to linger on for awhile anyways.

Vista seems not bad on the high end

[Colonel Korn]

I recently tried Ubuntu as my first foray into Linux on my home computer after asking Slashdot for some related advice. I got tired of not having the software I'm used to using from XP (Endnote, Kaleidagraph, etc, and games) and the biweekly crashes (certainly caused by my noobishness, I'm happy to admit), and went back to XP full time after about a month.

After a few days of XP I realized that my OS wanderlust hadn't yet been sated, and since I had a free Vista 64 license sitting around I thought I'd try that out for awhile on a second hard drive. I installed it without a problem (Ubuntu installed very smoothly, too, I should note) and disabled the things that seemed like they'd be annoying, like UAC (you've tried to copy a file. [Cake?] or [Death?]) and system indexing, and then installed my normal stuff and started using it.

Two weeks later and I've yet to have a crash and the thing boots faster than Ubuntu did (Vista seems to be about the same as XP) and is much more responsive than either XP or Ubuntu. Firefox loads like instantly, as do most of the apps I use regularly. Unlike in my XP32, I'm now using all of my 4 gigs of RAM, too, which makes me more comfortable running things like the HL2 cinematic mod, which at least claims to need 4 gigs of available memory. I'm generally not very impressed by the GUI's new look, and my Creative sound card no longer does EAX or any sort of hardware acceleration at all as far as I know, but the system is the snappiest thing I've used since Windows 2000. I'm still getting used to having ~0 megs of memory free at any given moment, but the caching that's using that memory does seem to pay dividends in terms of performance, and when I run something memory intensive it seems like the memory is released without a hint of delay.

From what I've heard, Vista sounds like a slug on low end machines, especially those with 1 gig or less of memory, and also a lot of people have hardware that just makes Vista a nightmare of crashes. However, for high end systems with kosher hardware, it's pretty nifty.

I don't really gain any new features over XP, but 1) it's snappier and 2) mainly it satisfies the need for a new OS that drove me to Linux without requiring me to reboot to XP to run the programs I'm used to using. I guess 2) is an example of evil MS vendor lock-in for those applications.

Re:Vista seems not bad on the high end

[pandrijeczko]

In my home office I have four desktop PCs - two run XP and two run Linux.

Up to two weeks ago, the XP machines had Athlon 64 CPUs in them whilst the Linux machines had Athlon XP CPUs in them.

Two weeks ago, I bought two new (cheap) Intel Dual Core motherboards to put in the XP machines to get a little more power for gaming. So I put the Intel motherboards in the XP machines and moved the Athlon 64s to the Linux machines.

After migration, the Linux machines booted absolutely fine - a ten minute kernel recompile on both machines, job done.

On the XP machines, they wouldn't boot the original XP installations, they blue-screened. I had to reinstall Windows on both and, even though both of my XP licenses are entirely legitimate, I had to ring Microsoft to get different license keys. It took me the best part of a day to reinstall Windows and longer to reinstall all the other games and apps that now wouldn't work because of registry bits missing.

I've decided that I'm going to change the Linux PCs to run 64-bit Linux. I use Gentoo Linux so I accept I'm probably going to need to do a reinstall using a 64-bit bootdisk and I suspect there will be some headaches getting everything to compile properly as 64-bit Gentoo is a bit less mature than 32-bit Gentoo. But I'll copy off all the config files in home directories and /etc, rebuild and copy all the stuff back and most of it should pretty much work as before. Plus I can build one machine, get it running okay, then just copy everything over to the other and do another simple kernel recompile because the two AMD 64 motherboards are different.

With Windows, I have to buy two new 64-bit XP licenses or, if I completely lose my sanity, by two Vista licenses. Yes, maybe the included migration tool will do a lot of the hard work for me but ultimately it's another two rebuilds, no chance of just rebuilding one and copying across.

Oh, and BTW, using all of 4 gigs of ram is simply about how much memory a 32-bit environment can address - 64-bit Linux can address and use 4 gigs of RAM equally as well as (64-bit) Vista.

Re:Vista seems not bad on the high end

[Colonel Korn]

I
On the XP machines, they wouldn't boot the original XP installations, they blue-screened. I had to reinstall Windows on both and, even though both of my XP licenses are entirely legitimate, I had to ring Microsoft to get different license keys. It took me the best part of a day to reinstall Windows and longer to reinstall all the other games and apps that now wouldn't work because of registry bits missing. Next time boot off the Windows XP cd and run a repair install (different from recovery console). It will automatically fix the Windows installs and you won't have to reactivate. And yes, I hate that motherboard upgrades break Windows.

With Windows, I have to buy two new 64-bit XP licenses or, if I completely lose my sanity, by two Vista licenses. Yes, maybe the included migration tool will do a lot of the hard work for me but ultimately it's another two rebuilds, no chance of just rebuilding one and copying across.

Oh, and BTW, using all of 4 gigs of ram is simply about how much memory a 32-bit environment can address - 64-bit Linux can address and use 4 gigs of RAM equally as well as (64-bit) Vista.

Sounds like Linux is your best bet. I do know that there are 64 bit OSs other than Windows. As I stated in my post, my Vista experiment is driven by the desire to mess with a new OS, whereas you are justifiably tired of installing and configuring operating systems when you don't feel you should be forced to do so. Enjoy your new hardware!

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I have and Ubuntu is a lot faster to install on a new 1200$ PC.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Poorcku]

Android will have a very hard time against this: Ericsson , Nokia , Panasonic , Samsung , Siemens and Sony Ericsson. And no, they are not using windows mobile. They are all shareholders at Symbian.

May I remind all of you that windows mobile is a smartphone OS. Not middle to low phone market. It is a "niche" OS. "Everybody else" just landed 18.5m Symbian mobile phones shipped to consumers. That is 73% market share.

On what phones will Android be shipped? Only on Motorola? If that is the case, Android is dead before it was born.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

The BSD is dead (or so Netcraft says).

Office

[pagaboy]

And in the mobile phone market, it seems like Google and Apple (Goople?) are playing nice with each other, which will allow iPhone to rule the high end and Android to dominate the middle-to-low-end phone market. I don't know anyone who loves Windows Mobile, but a lot of people are pretty excited about their iPhones and/or the promise of Android. Yup, but the business market will find the ability to open and edit Office docs on the fly very tempting. Unless of course the move to XML allows everyone to write simple document viewers/editors, in which case it's anyone's game.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple dominates the high end market and GNU/Linux rules the low. Soon the ends will meet and M$ will be squeezed out. Lets illustrate that

  LowEnd==================MarketShare==================HighEnd
[-Linux5%-][-------------Microsoft90%--------------][-Apple5%-]

Yeah, any day now & MS will fold :|

Re:Apple needs to make overpriced underpowered min

[superslacker87]

Coke needs to come out with a blue-flavored cola. Why? It didn't work for Pepsi! That stuff was terrible!

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Windows XP? Try using it Pre SP1 where many drivers cards, especially 802.11b cards were new. Windows 2000, still a major player in the corporate market, does the same thing.

How lazy have we become when "I have to download a driver for my sound/video/network?" is a dealbreaker? Most often, the incorporated driver on MS platforms is older, feature reduced and possibly buggy, due to it being 2 or more revisions older than release drivers.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a total fucktard. How many giant corporations have actually diappeared over the course of the last century? Take 2 doses of reality and call me in the morning. Dumbass zealot. You're all the same. STUPID.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, Vista is a failure. Now that will get me a -5 Troll rating, but my journal entry I just pointed to has links to every tech and mainstream press organization saying the same things. There you go, fixed that for you twitter.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Dog-Cow]

Ford Motor is planning to upgrade desktops to Vista. No large corporation switches overnight, but don't fool yourself into thinking that it's not going to happen at all.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[DittoBox]

Gentoo is not hard core. Any monkey that can use a command line can do a Stage 1 Gentoo install (I'm proof!). Linux From Scratch is hard core.

emerge "teh hardcorz"

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[limaxray]

I have the same phone and IMO the phone is great except for WM sucks big time. I like OSX on the iPhone, but at the end of the day it lacks a lot a very basic functionality that WM has. When Android come out though, I'll be on that bandwagon in a heartbeat

Anyway, I strongly suggest looking into flashing it with a new radio and WM6.1 ROM. You can enable all sorts of great functionality like GPS, EVDO Rev A, and ICS (if you have VW and the bastards disabled it). Check it out here

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[Chiaro Meratilo]

Vista takes, quite literally, 20 minutes to install from the minute I put the DVD in the tray and reboot the computer...

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Dog-Cow]

I don't know what you consider a large business, but where I am, Dell provides the PCs (and laptops) with the company image pre-installed. There is no reinstall needed, nor are they counted as XP (and soon to be Vista) sales. We have a site-license.

The number of licenses used are, of course, tracked. But I am sure that's true for your business as well.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a meme. Original form is "I just threw up a little in my mouth."

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[limaxray]

And lets not forget that embedded computers are an order of magnitude more common than PCs and Linux is a VERY popular embedded OS.

Re:How much longer can Windows really stick around

[LehiNephi]

considering they are losing the two reasons home users RUN Windows, and then the added headaches associated to running it, why are they going to continue to bother?

Well, familiarity, for one. People are used to Windows. In fact, that's how some iterations of Windows became so popular in the home market. For example, people really liked Windows 2000 at work, so they started bringing it home and using it at home.

In other words, if businesses are stuck on Windows, then a large portion of the population will always be familiar with Windows, and that will bias them towards purchasing Windows on their home computer. However, if they also become more familiar with other OSes, that means that the value of that familiarity is lower i.e. they won't be willing to pay $100/$200/$300/$400 to stick with Windows. Microsoft will either have to lower prices or find some other way to make their product more competitive.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

Thanks for the link! It's saved me I'm sure several hours and website sign-ups trolling the tubes.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[UnknowingFool]

Financially Vista isn't a failure because every new PC is sold with Vista. Even those that downgrade to XP count as Vista revenue. Many companies who buy new licenses have to buy Vista licenses and downgrade them to Vista. With Vista, companies are now seriously considering alternatives if they have to purchase new PCs. Give that process a few more years and MS revenue might hurt a lot if Windows 7 offers no compelling upgrade reason.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

True or False:
Microsoft has more money than all of its OS competitors put together. ... yeah, they're pretty doomed alright, lets just hope they don't trip and accidently buy EVERYONE.

no wonder...

[whopub]

From the summary:

It turned out people wanted inexpensive, hard-working Linux laptops rather than overpriced, underpowered Vista PCs. Yep, that's weird. No wonder Microsoft didn't see it coming...

Re:Talk about la-la-land.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you are twitter, twitter. Your writing style, complete with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, is unmistakeable.

ill get one of these myself

[unity100]

im a web dev, working in front of a 28", i also believe that i should make every computer i acquire as strong as possible so i can play games, so i generally go for xp even for personal stuff. yet, this Eee thing made me think again - im thinking of acquiring one of these so that i can use it while traveling - something lightweight, reliable, hardworking, enough to do some collaboration stuff.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Khuffie]

Apple dominates the high end? Since when?

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[hostyle]

XP takes 15 (streamlined SP3 googness included). Debian about the same (final update to todays version depends on your internet connection speed though). You say Vista takes 20, I've seen Ubuntu take 30 minutes plus. Anyone noticing a pattern here? Peak oil^Winstall!?

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[sabre3999]

Many of the other Linux flavors are just as simple... I consider myself a Linux noob yet I've smoothly installed OpenSuSe, Fedora Core, and Ubuntu. OpenSuSe was so easy that I even had my little brother convert to it. As a matter of fact, I'm still using my OpenSuSe install... no one wants random Windows crashes during a CS lecture or compiling your exam programs right? I also use IPCop on an old 486 as my router, replacing a Dlink that had to re restarted every 10 minutes. 5 months up with no restarts. A user can definitely be happy with that, even if the install wasn't smooth ^.^

Re:Not even close, try in 8 hours as many as Linux

[hostyle]

Have you tried ordering from the likes of Dell recently? Just go through the motions, no need to actually buy. You can still get XP, but its specified as "Genuine Windows® Vistaâ Ultimate with XP Professional installed". Says it all about Vista sales figures as far as I'm concerned.

Not in all markets

[DrYak]

Keep in mind that those rebates aren't available in all market (Europe, among other, seems to have higher prices - OTOH, I still have to see with my own eyes a European buying a boxed Windows)

Whereas, there are major Linux distributions available for free (as in beer in addition to freedom) world wide.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[bennomatic]

I'm glad to hear that I'm wrong; my experience with WM is limited and not all that pleasant, and I have never personally heard anyone gush over the interface of any WM device. Your point is well taken, though, and that openness is certainly enough of a difference to weigh the balance towards WM for some people.

Of course, for a lot of people, the interface, web 2.0, and "filtered" applications are going to be enough. With the right application--some sort of a scripting sandbox, maybe--it's possible that there may be a way to do some pretty powerful on-phone apps without resorting to jailbreak.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[quickgold192]

Soon the ends will meet and M$ will be squeezed out.

That's like saying California dominates the west coast and the Carolinas dominate the east, and soon the ends will meet and the rest of the US will be squeezed out.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[oakgrove]

Yeah, but how long does it take to install all of the software and updated drivers for your various hardware including multiple reboots? And what about your favorite apps? How long does it take to install those what with swapping out the install CDs and such? Sticking in the Vista DVD and waiting the 20 or so minutes to get to a desktop is just the beginning.

On my Ubuntu box, I just install the OS pull up Add/Remove software, click a few boxes for the stuff I want, hit apply and I'm done.

Anybody who uses Linux on a regular basis I'm sure can identify with the groan inducing tediousness you prepare yourself to put up with when a friend or family member asks you to help them install Windows.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Darkness404]

It's a pretty good time to be alive if you're a geek.

I disagree. Now, it seems like you don't ever "own" any of your devices, your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider, your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux, the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you if you use a modchip, and all your media you haven't pirated or downloaded off of a DRM-Free site is tied to your account. So no, it isn't the greatest time, because now, you don't own a single thing.

Re:Talk about la-la-land.

[willyhill]

I'm not Twitter

No, of course you're not. You're just some dude that created a Slashdot account three weeks ago with a grand total of 60 comments, most of which are spent shilling twitter's posts and those of his other nine accounts.

It's just all a big misunderstanding.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[BlackSnake112]

One still has to download, uncompress, install all of the software that is selected to be installed. Granted if nothing conflicts (or the source is down), it can less steps. But there is time involved.

Dude, get an OLPC

[Anonymous Coward]

They are already water resistant, waterproof keyboard and ports can be sealed. Ruggedised enough for kids use in rough areas. Thermal dissipation about 4 W compared with about 15 W for the best EEE PC, so coat that sucker if you want, you have less power to conduct out.

Re:Dude, get an OLPC

[compro01]

What's the fun in that?

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[kesuki]

shipit is definitely cool, but i can dl and burn 8.04 lts in under an hour, waiting 10 weeks to get a cd of ubuntu is really only for those who have no access to either high speed internet, or else a cd burner, a few people fall into that category, but how many of them want ubuntu that much?.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[famewolf]

First off...I'm a linux ONLY user on my desktop but I'll be the first to admit right now windows mobile gives you the MOST bang for your buck on the pocketpc type phones...most software available etc....with custom roms available on many sites you can basically make the phone do anything you want. That doesn't mean I'm not eagerly awaiting linux for my phone via android or another method but it will still be quite a while until the software base is able to compete with windows mobile.

This was exactly the same case with linux vs windows on the desktop initially.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Vectronic]

The funny part, is him replying to himself, on his own journal entry, which he linked to from himself.

He might be a troll sometimes, but I certainly give him credit for his weird psychopathy, even to the point where I'm strangely growing fond of it for his dedication.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[kesuki]

well there is a lot better name too, 'gapple' sounds trendier, or maybe you could just call them iGoogle, or something... goople is the worst by far.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[oakgrove]

This is absolutely true. However, keep in mind, that first of all, it's generally set and forget. You click the boxes, hit apply, then walk away. When you get back all of your software is installed and ready to go. No, next, next, next, etc. like on Windows. There are exceptions, java, VirtualBox, and a few others come to mind where you actually have to do something during the install but not very many apps are like that. Also, on *nix with so many shared libraries, the downloads for a particular piece of software tends to be much smaller than for a comparable piece of software on Windows.

Re:Talk about la-la-land.

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter, commenting about himself not being Twitter. Shouldn't that be redundant, or circular, or something?

XP is end of life too.

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you want support you have to pay out the nose.

Microsoft is missing the boat yet again on this one. This is a multi billion dollar market and it's mostly Linux because the brilliant people at MS are pushing Vista or bust. And bust it has.

Amazing that a company can make major mistake after major mistake and still be able to survive. Xbox was a 4 billion dollar loss, Xbox 360 is losing money like it's going out of style, because of the hardware replacement on all the cheaply built units, Windows Me failed, Vista has failed, at the cost of billions.

Without the illegal monopoly and the closed standards they have promoted using monopoly tactics for going on two decades now, MS would have failed with DOS.

Microsoft has not made money on Vista.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how Vista has made money for MS. It seems to me that without Vista, every Vista sell would have been an XP sell. XP is a higher margin product than Vista.

It is possible that Vista has lower maintenance costs for MS than XP does, but I don't believe so. If anything, MS is now strapped with Vista maintenance costs and XP maintenance costs.

As of today, MS has probably not broken even on the costs of developing and maintaining Vista. If they had continued to just sell XP, they would have been working on almost pure profit. They could have gotten by with a much less expensive development staff all these years.

In fact, they might have sold more copies of XP for two reasons:
1. There would not have been a 6 month hesitation in buying a new PC before Vista was released. Also, there would not be some many people hesitant to buy a PC today because of the rumors about Vista horrors.
2. An XP PC could cost 30-50% less than a Vista PC, enticing more people to buy a new PC instead of stick it out with their old PC.

In short, Vista increased the fixed costs for MS, while lowering volume. That's a tough way to make money.

Re:Microsoft has not made money on Vista.

[Anonymous Coward]

XP is a higher margin product than Vista. This is doubtful. The marginal costs of each should be about equal. So unless XP sold at a higher price, it should not have a higher margin.

Perhaps you meant that from 2001 through 2007, MS faced significantly higher costs to develop Vista than to not develop Vista. Those costs shouldn't be factored into the margin.

I don't disagree that the costs of 6 years of development are a whopping front-loaded offset to any revenue.

If they had continued to just sell XP, they would have been working on almost pure profit. They could have gotten by with a much less expensive development staff all these years. Not to mention the huge budget it requires to market Vista. Although it was getting more and more expensive for MS marketing to spin the beating XP was taking on security. Since Vista, XP's approval rating has risen considerably.

get the summary correct...

[EdelFactor19]

did he really say "dad company"? I know what he meant, and I'm sure plenty of others did but the expression is "Parent Company" this has been the case long before the concept of gender neutral writing and PC-ness were as rampant as they are today.

and seeing as Ubuntu isn't a company this is only made more inaccurate. Taken straight from the horses mouth: About Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a community developed and supported project. Since its launch in October 2004, Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world.

Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem.
About Canonical Ltd

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is a global organisation headquartered in Europe committed to the development, distribution and support of open source software products and communities.

Canonical staff and software have deep roots in the open source community and a proven track record of success in the commercial software industry. Team members include leaders from the Gnome, Linux, Debian and Bazaar open source projects, helping Canonical to stay at the forefront of the rapidly changing open source software world.

World-class 24x7 commercial support for Ubuntu is delivered through the Canonical Global Support Team and its worldwide network of partners.

Canonical currently sponsors the development of a number of important technology products. See sponsored projects for further details.

Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[kesuki]

"..or Firefox which is starting to chip away the monopoly/OEM acquired marketshare of IE?"

There fixed that for you, netscape, owned by AOL Time Warner whatever is basically dead, as now even AOL is shipping firefox, instead of netscape. both were based off gecko, and firefox is to date developed by a grant from netscape that was paid for when AOL bought out netscape as one of the deal clauses.

it's a complicated thing, but right now google is paying for more of firefox's development than AOL is, because firefox is independent of the company that AOL acquired known as 'netscape'

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[Jello B.]

My God, what a horrible experience. Don't bring it up again. I've had nightmares. I'm not shitting you.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[MarkvW]

This is insightful? Come on now! Microsoft is over? Come, let us engage together in GROUPTHINK and wish away all the troubles of the world!

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[LWATCDR]

Well this was in the post I was replying to.
"You have to be a geek and download, compile, install, and hope you are geek enough to get it right before the sun goes down."

So Shipit was a great way to dose that flame.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[asylumx]

I think your definition of "soon" is off. You forgot to mention that you're referring to the top 5% and bottom 5% and the 90% in the middle is MS still. Also, it sounds like you're expecting mid-range purchasers to either give up functionality or give up a lot of extra dollars to move to either that top or bottom part. Good luck with that. Linux isn't going to get those users until the developers stop giving them what they want to give them and start giving them what the buyers really want -- lots of flashy lights & sounds, little or no required keyboard use, etc.

"EEE PC already has enough horsepower to play movies and music" ... come on, an iPod can do that.

- Your friendly neighborhood troll, who is sick of linux nerds claiming to have won the battle that they haven't even started fighting yet.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[iamhassi]

"Who BUYS a PC with Linux?"

did you not read the article summary above?

"It turned out people wanted inexpensive, hard-working Linux laptops"

The entire story is about XP being kept alive simply because people are BUYING a PC (er, laptop) with Linux. So yes, people are buying Linux PCs, enough so that M$ is scared.

Smoking gun

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought there was something odd (pun intended) about Odder. I saw another post of him yesterday and it reminded me of twitter, but of course I had no proof of that whatsoever. It's the same "M$" thing, the same weird style, the "Microsoft is dying and has been for the last twenty years" exaggeration and out-of-context quotes and links. Identical.

Seeing him reply to himself and complain about the moderation on the other threads, it's pretty obvious they're the same person.

I don't have a problem with people having more than one account. Many use one to post from work and another from home, or whatever. But replying to yourself with four different accounts and using a fifth one to whine about being modded down is pretty lame and dishonest. That should be enough to get him modded down to -1 on sight. I know I'll be doing that whenever I get points and spot any of his posts, regardless of how on topic or interesting they are. You just can't go around Slashdot doing that, the whole thing goes to the dogs like *shudder* reddit or Digg or kuro5hin.

Plus if I wanted to foe him to ignore him, how would I do that? He just creates more accounts every week!

Well you have a smoking gun here, but your post is offtopic ;p

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[kesuki]

"This is not sustainable growth, and their customers are massively pissed. MS is going to have a really hard time ever selling anything to these customers again."

I was one of the people very pissed off at windows 95, at the time i swore i'd never pay for a windows OS again... so i used my 95 install floppies over and over again and again... with 98 and xp i used pirate software, the anger was still there, but then in 2006 commercial hackers got into my 'warez' windows installs laughing at my complete lack of security, and since then, i caved and now only pay for windows OSes and even then keep them behind a smoothwall machine or vm properly configured to protect them from perennial windows vulnerabilities. the VM would be on a linux system, that is also a linux desktop, since doing so on windows doesn't protect you from hackers, as even with a software firewall, and default routes through a VM hackers can still force packets through if the core OS is infected with a rootkit. i have had a desktop linux machine since i got the rootkit on windows in 06, and i have yet to find an AV/AR/suite that can block the one i got in 06, although i can detect the 06 problem in Linux using diff.

btw i started using freebsd in 1996 because of how bad windows 95 was, i just got lazy and stopped 'putzing around' with linux and BSD because it was hard keeping up with everything especially the x.org fiasco... and besides linux never supported my gaming addiction quite the way I'd like it too. so I've always been stuck with at least 1 windows machine.

until OEMs push for linux support, gaming companies won't switch to linux. it doesn't matter how many people switch to apple, or ubuntu, gaming companies won't go without a serious gamer base and early efforts to make a linux based console tanked. If nintendo decided, for whatever reason to go with a linux/open GL console for the next generation and did dev tools for it, there would be a chance... i know the PS2 and PS3 can run linux, but it's not the same, it's a mod to the console, real games don't actually run in linux... and i seriously doubt that nintendo or sony would ever be convinced to make a console where you boot up a linux distro to install and play games.

sony has already made it possible to use linux as well as games, but that's the most anyone has done towards making linux synonyms with a real gaming platform. BTW yes i know of transgaming, etc i know of wine, transgaming forked wine, and could play some copy-protected games wine wouldn't ever run... but they're in limbo now with not enough cash to keep going, and new wine releases are reported to support more 'new' games than transgaming's efforts.. a double edged blade, and they were just trying to make windows games run in linux, not make a 'real' native linux gaming platform.

freeciv and the like are great too, but freeciv has nothing on civ3/4. linux just isn't going to cut it as a real windows replacement til they get game support (everyone ditches direct x for open gl, for instance) and it's kind of a chicken/egg problem, without a chicken you can't have eggs, without eggs you can't have chickens... and linux gaming won't come without the real lure of money to be made, and there won't be a real gaming switch to linux by end users without a horde of modern cool games already running on linux platforms.

a truly linux based console would be sweet, but the console market is too competitive for a 'linux' console to work unless a 'billionaire with something to prove' backs a linux based game console using opengl and modern gaming hardware etc..

maybe with the vista fiasco gaming companies will switch to windows+ open GL, so they can have modern graphic features in XP, so long as microsoft keeps directx 10 on vista, and so long as vista is hated by all.. that much of a push to open GL might make linux gaming one step closer, one step easier, with all these knowledgeable Open GL programmers that would be created by shifting away from directx...

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[jonbryce]

I have no major complaints with my windows mobile device. I may consider an iphone if it had a keyboard. Symbian, Linux + QTopia and whatever Blackberries run on are the main competitors to Google and Apple.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[mewsenews]

I disagree. Now, it seems like you don't ever "own" any of your devices, your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider, your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux, the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you if you use a modchip, and all your media you haven't pirated or downloaded off of a DRM-Free site is tied to your account. So no, it isn't the greatest time, because now, you don't own a single thing.

This is total tripe and pessimism! One of the defining characteristics of a geek in this age is that they are able to discern what a load of garbage this stuff is. They use unlocked GSM phones, they avoid DRM like they've been born to do so, and they do all these things with the full knowledge of what makes Quality.

And this wonderful Internet that lets us discuss this, allows them to share their ideas and feelings with similar-minded people from around the globe!

How is this not a golden age?!

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than just the retail numbers. Microsoft takes credit for every machine that is sold with Vista, whether or not that machine is sold with an XP install or whether the user subsequently wipes Vista and replaces it with something else. So basically every laptop sold to a business with a site license has counted as a sale of Vista, even though almost every large business replaces it with their own image.

My company (over 50k employees) took four years after the release of XP to adopt the new OS. They're moving more quickly on Vista, however, with rollout scheduled for 2009. It'll be really interesting to watch--about 50% of our entire workforce and 80-90% of our management are over 47 years old. There's going to be a great deal of bellyaching when users are suddenly confronted with the brand new user interface for both the shell (Aero will be on by default) and office suite (2007). I'll adapt fairly easily, I expect, since I'm still in my 20's, but I feel sorry for the poor folks at the Helpdesk when it hits. Hey dickhead, cut the age crap, if you are in your twenties stop talking shit.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[jonbryce]

Who cares how long it takes to install. This article is about computers where the installation is already done for you at the factory.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[PitaBred]

If there's not a critical mass of people avoiding DRM and working with unlocked hardware, it just won't be available any more. That's the point. It'll become a very niche, if still existent, market. The golden age will be when everyone has proper, unencumbered information sharing.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[thetoadwarrior]

I had an Orange SPV M3100 which is an HTC windows mobile 5 based phone and it was quite honestly the biggest hassle I've ever had with a phone.

It was glitchy and had issue with displaying jpg backgrounds but only sometimes. It would completely forget it's calibration settings but not on a consistent basis. It'd be fine for months then it would forget them every time I turn it on for a week. It is also the only phone I've ever had that, if it loses the signal for any extended period of time it has to be turned off to find a signal.

Having said all of that it wasn't the worst phone I've ever had. I loved having Wifi on a phone. However Nokia's N95 phones offer the same sort of features but run better and have better game support. My biggest problems with the phone stem from the fact Orange is quite possibly the shittiest phone company ever.

People may expect problems with their desktop but with phones and similar devices they expect it to just work and Windows Mobile doesn't offer that as well as the others.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[4D6963]

Translation : "WAAAH! WAAAH!". That's what your post sounds like.

your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider

Sure, if it's an iPhone. And yet. Otherwise just buy an unlocked one/unlock it yourself.

your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux

You know, there are other alternatives to Linux than Windows Vista, which is all you can possibly be refering to. Anyone using Vista on their home computer needs to hand their geek badge over anyways. So your point is moot.

the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you if you use a modchip

Oh no, the makers of a product try to ruin your experience with their product if you try to ruin their business model which is sell underpriced hardware for no profit (even loss) to make money on games which the only purpose of a modchip is to play for free.

all your media you haven't pirated or downloaded off of a DRM-Free site is tied to your account

Oh noes, the only alternatives to DRM-free solutions are.. DRM-based solutions! WAAAH!!!

I'll tell you why it's a great time to be a geek, I can watch TV shows that are not broadcasted in my country on a device that fits in my pocket, for free. I can play every game I would play on Sega Genesis as a kid on the same type of device, for free as well. And I can administrate the company that employs me's infrastructure from my bed, with the same wireless device. Oh my, what an awful time to be a geek!

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

gaggle?

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[PitaBred]

And my wife has a Motorola Q that reboots itself periodically, and I have a Blackberry 8800 (GSM/EDGE, which is the worst part) that just keeps running with plenty of nifty 3rd party apps like Trapster and Google Maps tied to the GPS. I sync to Linux and use as a bluetooth modem for my Linux-based laptop, and it just works... no way you could do that with a Windows Mobile device. An anecdote does not data make.

Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[jonbryce]

Firefox is funded by their advertising revenue from Google. If you look at their accounts, they are actually pretty profitable.

http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2006-audited-financial-statement.pdf

At 2006 (2007 is not published yet):

Surplus for the year $28m, total unrestricted funds $58m.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[PitaBred]

Which is from the movie Dodgeball, which, I am sorry to say, I actually saw. It wasn't that bad... it just wasn't that good, either.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[PitaBred]

Can you back up/sync your Tilt in Linux? Use it as a bluetooth or USB tethered modem? If not, Blackberry has WM beaten with Linux compatibility.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

EEE PC already has enough horsepower to play movies and music as well as anything else. Battery life could be improved and it already is up to 7.5 hours.

Apple dominates the high end market and GNU/Linux rules the low. Soon the ends will meet and M$ will be squeezed out. Vista is a failure and it has taken M$ down with it.

The change is permenant. Vendors have revolted, M$ won't be able to come back. Good riddance.

Must be amazing living in your world.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[dave420]

Sure, if you listen to the sensationalist, bandwagon-leaping-on news stories about Vista raping cats and giving people AIDS, then you're going to get a very jaded view of the OS's adoption. I doubt you've read many articles covering people who are very happy with Vista, yet those users (and those stories) are out there. Those folks will probably buy Windows again. Vista has been doing rather well in stores, too. Sales have picked up rapidly, and couple that with the number of companies who are buying Vista VLKs (cue the tried and tested "ooh monopoly/vendor-lock-in/FUD-victims/linux-haters/whatever" response), and non-hardware-bundled Vista sales are doing very well. Those folks will probably buy Windows again, too. It is sustainable growth. You might not think it, if all you read is the aforementioned sensationalism, but that doesn't change reality. Making massive generalisations like "their customers are massively pissed" betrays the tenuous foundations (maybe wishful thinking) your argument is based on.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[zeromorph]

I happen to disagree with you both, it's always good time to be a geek. It was when my father brought home a Sharp MZ whatever. It was a good time when he was soldering in his first transistor radio. It was when my grandfather bought his first motorcycle in the 1920s and crossed the Alps with it. It was when one of my ancestors got his first water driven hammer mill. It probably was when the first person was tinkering with steam, gun powder, paper or fire.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please increase your dosage, old man.

Siege

[Anonymous Coward]

- ODF fighting OOXML
- Firefox attacking IE
- Linux attacking Windows for low spec computers
- Macs attacking Windows for high spec computers
- Wii trashing Xbox with PS3 fighting for the second place
- Google trashing MS on web
- Ipods obliterating Zune
- Iphones and Androids for mobiles
- Big fines in Europe
- Revenue falling

Yeah, seems that something is changing. Not sure what to expect though.

Re:Siege

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you are giving Microsoft's competition far more credit than they deserve. Linux has less than a 1% market share, and their market share has remained the same for the past decade. Apple has gained market share... but they still languish around a 4% market share. I hardly think MS is going to even notice a difference between 96%, 95%, or 94%.

And, aside from that, MS makes more money from MS Office than it does from Windows.

So, let's look at Firefox. A free application... competing with a free application from Microsoft. So wow... if Firefox "wins"... how is it a loss for Microsoft? They don't make a penny on IE. In fact, one could even a victory for Firefox as a win for Microsoft, since they could stop spending money on a free application.

As for Zune, that's been doing well, but it's actually been grabbing most of the non-Apple MP3 market (primarily away from Creative). And maybe that's their strategy, who knows?

With the XBox... MS's only goal was to beat Sony's Playstation, which they've accomplished. Most people have an XB360 AND a Wii, since they both make different games which appeal to different kinds of gamers. And besides that, MS's XBox strategy is to sign people up for Live... which they make money from. How much money does Nintendo make from people using it's (crappy) online service? And I can attest to it's crappiness, since I own a Wii. It's extremely sub-par compared to XBox Live... and IMO Nintendo REALLY dropped the ball.

As for the rest... so what? MS doesn't start at #1 in new markets. MS's strategy has always been the same: enter the market, steadily improve your product, and eventually your competitors will choke on their own hubris and self destruct. Rinse, wash, repeat. IBM, Novell, Word Perfect, Lotus, Netscape, and on and on and on.

If you want to see a company REALLY self destructing, look at Google. They don't make money on ANYTHING except for advertising. Eventually, real business people are going to come in (probably at the behest of the shareholders), and start cutting out all the Legos, time wasting, and projects which don't make money. If advertising execs come in, expect them to slash to the bone everything which isn't search or adverts.

Another Linux Convert

[AttillaTheNun]

I've been dreading the day when I'd bork my WinXP and I'd have to consider ponying up for Vista. Even with a dual boot WinXP/Linux, I'd become dependent on WinXP out of laziness once I bought Warcraft III and discovered DOTA :)

Well, it finally happened a few weeks ago. No looking back now - I bit the bullet and reformatted the whole kit and kaboodle and installed Ubuntu 8.04 as my only OS to see how long I could go without Windows. Getting Warcraft/DOTA working on Wine was the point of no return. Boot up time is a fraction of what it used to be without all the usual Windows and antiVirus/spyware overhead crud. Everything else is much snappier and I no longer need to fear the day when I have to deal with Vista.

Add one more to the converted masses.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[npsimons]

It's really sad that the most open mobile phone platform out there is Windows Mobile. Everything else is a nightmare of signed applications and lockdown.

Funny, but the last dozen times I installed unsigned apps on my Treo 650 (running PalmOS), it never pestered me about running an unsigned app. AFAICT, PalmOS is still by far the most open mainstream mobile platform out there. The only reason Linux doesn't beat it is because of that qualifier "mainstream" (which Linux is not yet mainstream for mobile platforms).

MS Gavage and Netbook limitations

[nostriluu]

I've been trying to make this point on gadget blogs for a while. In fact, I would suggest calling MS Vista "MS Gavage," what MS wanted everyone to do is switch to Vista immediately and XP to become a memory, never mind most hardware isn't ready for Vista (and lighter alternatives will always run faster/have better battery life). Yay for open and free operating systems.

Speaking of which, the new netbooks are nice, more than decent for what most people need, but they mostly have low memory limits, which is strange considering how cheap memory is and how much of a performance boost it can bring. I can understand only including 512MB or a GB, but why not allow more?

Battery life also sucks, give me a netbook with an option for 7 hour life please, good enough for all day.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[rickb928]

Actually, my tired old 7105t does SSH, Gmail, Google Mobile Maps, 2 different RSS readers, and a pretty sucky poker game (I lose a lot of $ in that game). I d/l them all, not a bit of help from my carrier, and no interference. If only it had a better browser.

I'm thinking of a Curve, since the Bold will drive prices down. Pearl is not enough. I think of a Dash or some other WM phone, but feh. I would rather have a fold-out, half-size EEE-ish phone.

Actually i want what can't be. An iPhone that folds out a screen twice the size. Open loadig of apps. Unlocked. And a bit lighter. Better voice quality. Half the price. Not too much to ask for, is it?

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[felipekk]

no way you could do that with a Windows Mobile device. No way you could do what? Use as a bluetooth modem? Sync? Use Google Maps with GPS?

You should really research about Windows Mobile the first place.

Can you use your Blackberry to provide Wi-Fi access to wireless devices near by (access point mode)? Thought so.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[master5o1]

And Nokia/Symbian to rule the bits in between...

Re:Not even close, try in 8 hours as many as Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried ordering from the likes of Dell recently? Just go through the motions, no need to actually buy. You can still get XP, but its specified as "Genuine Windows® Vistaâ Ultimate with XP Professional installed". Some moderators will just believe anything negative said about M$.

Go through the motions at Dell's "Small & Medium Business" store. You can still get XP without any "Vista bundle" on all of their Vostro/Latitude/Precision laptops and Vostro/Optiplex/Precision desktops and workstations.

You can do the same for almost every other PC maker that sells "business" PCs.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[yelvington]

I installed Ubuntu Linux and did a "first run" of Microsoft Vista, side by side, and Ubuntu won the race. I assume that means Vista didn't really come "installed," but rather with just an installer pointed at some .CAB files.

There really wasn't a significant difference either way, and I didn't do much other than wait and confirm an occasional dialog/default. The idea that Linux is harder to install than Vista has never been true. Linux installations became insanely easy long before Microsoft shipped its Edsel.

By the way, the Vista installation was on my teen daughter's new laptop. Performance was so poor that I reformatted and switched her to Ubuntu. The original Ubuntu installation was on her grandmother's PC. Both are working out just fine.

No one installs Vista.

[willeyhill]

This is what it looks like when they do. Those few people unfortunate enough to have Vista got it on a new computer and many of those quickly changed it to something else. People hate Vista because it sucks.

Re:Not even close, try in 8 hours as many as Linux

[hostyle]

Interesting. Thats just what I did, just not on dell.com. On dell.co.uk or dell.ie for instance - XP is only an option with a cheap vostro desktop as posted above - "
Genuine Windows® Vistaâ Ultimate with XP Professional"

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[yelvington]

On what phones will Android be shipped? Only on Motorola? Motorola, Samsung, LG and HTC are members of the alliance, so don't be in haste to bury Android.

You're absolutely right that Symbian dominates the past.

I had an S60 phone, and it was a frustrating experience. I also had a Windows Mobile phone, and it was an infuriating experience. On balance, Symbian won. Both phones really needed more hardware power than was available at the time. And with more hardware power, you open the way to a much more capable system, which the Linux-based Android promises.

At the moment, I have a Nokia, but it's a dumb phone, not a Symbian. If I need more than that, I pull out my Linux-based Nokia N800 and connect via Bluetooth.

Linux on the laptop...

[beemishboy]

So this could be the year for linux on the laptop or the UMPC? Kind of like Google doesn't bother creating a desktop OS. They would rather make an OS for the mobile market. Forget the current Microsoft controlled desktop, go to where there are greener pastures and open fields.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft takes credit for every machine that is sold with Vista, whether or not that machine is sold with an XP install or whether the user subsequently wipes Vista and replaces it with something else. So basically every laptop sold to a business with a site license has counted as a sale of Vista, even though almost every large business replaces it with their own image. I smell bullshit (or incompetence). What "business" laptop maker gives no other options except Vista when they sell their business laptops? Any large business order should have the option of ordering business laptops with Windows XP, no OS, or their own image preinstalled.

Heck, even small businesses can order laptops without Vista. Check Dell's Small & Medium Business laptop store. Or HP's Small & Medium Business laptop store. Or Lenovo's ThinkPad store. At all of these "small business" stores, it's just as easy to order a laptop without Vista as with Vista.

twitter, please read this

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be appreciated if you post a reply to this thread, as well as being decent enough to apologize to George Ou for insulting him.

Thank you.

Re:Talk about la-la-land.

[pdusen]

If by "believe" you mean "think they exist", I certainly believe in Vista and SP1, since I see them both every day.

The Easter Bunny and Santa Claus are things I'm skeptical about, along with your comprehension of reality.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[zuperduperman]

You know, I would agree with you *if* Linux had not shot itself in the foot by making it nearly impossible for hardware vendors to write drivers that work across kernels. But by removing any guarantee that a binary driver written today will work tomorrow, Linux has made closed source hardware almost impossible to support. Therefore adoption of Linux is blocked until the hardware industry itself adopts open source which may well be *never*.

So say goodbye to your dreams of an open source world until the zealots ruling Linux development overcome their insane religious beliefs and start allowing a small hint of practicality into their world.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I've installed Ubuntu in a bit under 12 minutes, and this is on a 2.5-year-old laptop.

Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's going back to paying M$ for SDKs You mean .net? The SDK is free (as in beer, obviously).

Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[kesuki]

thanks for the numbers, but they started up with money from aol, i did say today they get their $ from google, but i didn't know the $$$ involved, wow... with $58 million they have more money than Canonical Ltd...

no wonder Opera went free and did the same deal with google as firefox has.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[pdusen]

lmao, I'll keep my geek badge, thanks. There's nothing wrong with Vista.

I would switch to Linux (probably of the debian variety), but there are certain things not available that I really like. I already dual-boot as it is.

how dumb can you be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the reason that Windows outsells Linux (whatever this generic Linux may be) is that....wait for it....

LINUX

IS

FREE

it's pretty hard to outsell something if your product is free and ... well ... not sold!

Re:How much longer can Windows really stick around

[hot soldering iron]

XP is long in the tooth, eh? Maybe you should look into ReactOS, for a "new" OSS version of XP.
Myself, I prefer the new hotness of Ubuntu, wrapped around a linux kernel modeled after 1970's Unix.
Older code simply means that (hopefully) most of the bugs have been hammered out of it.

"Fresh" code is like "fresh" wine: it may do the job, but the older stuff is probably more enjoyable!

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
They will ship you a Linux CD for free.
So no download, no compile, and if you really don't want to you don't even have to install it to use it. It will work as a live-CD.
Should be as easy to install as Vista if not more so. I hate to call this an asshole move, but I don't have a choice. Asking Canonical to send you a cd will cost them a pretty penny. Too many people do it and that's it for Ubuntu. If you do choose to have them send it, at the very least, make a donation. Or better yet, give them a donation and then download it via Bittorrent.

Obviously they wouldn't make this offer if it wasn't to be used, but only as a last resort.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[adona1]

Two comments on that....it only took about 2 weeks for my Ubuntu CD to arrive from wherever it came from (somewhere in Europe, I think) to Australia, which isn't bad at all. Secondly, I like to have a professional looking CD to use to liveboot family & friend's computers to show them what Ubuntu is like - they are much more likely to trust me with something that looks legitimate than if I just brought over a burnt CD scribbled on with a texta. YMMV, of course.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It'll only be a failure if they never release another version of Windows, and don't learn from their mistakes."

So you're saying they intentionally fail in order to justify new versions? That's one way to make money! Keep producing garbage for the average Jane/Joe PC user!...Oh wait.

Vista failed because Microsoft spent 5 years of "over promise, under deliver". The features (user perspective) it offers doesn't justify the upgrade from XP OR the price they're asking for.

Vista's poor reception has proven one thing to Microsoft's competitors: Microsoft may have 90%+ of the desktop market, but there's no customer loyalty there.

All one needs to do is write better open source software, and watch how desperately Microsoft will try to counter you.

Microsoft is desperately clinging on to an old business model that was made obsolete by an entity that wasn't in it to make money.

The more it resists, the more its gonna hurt them.

My touchscreen was defective!

[EETech1]

I had that same touchscreen problem, and I ended up calling HTC to see if perhaps I was doing something wrong, or stressing the touchscreen in the hip case. He informed me that there were defective touchscreens, and even called my carrier to authorize an out of warranty replacement! I was impressed! Offtopic I know, but hopefully helpful. (Posted from a windows mobile device lucky enough to have felt Linux firsthand!)

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[ignavus]

Linux from Scratch?

That must be where you develop your own Linux-compatible kernel without looking at any of the Linux kernel code.

That's hard core!

their only hits are Office and Windows

[Scudsucker]

Everything else has either failed (their attempts to take on Adobe) or lost money overall (Xbox). You could argue that IE was a success, but that's only because Microsoft leveraged their Windows monopoly, not because it succeeded on its own merits.

Linux is just ultimately amazing.

[ASMworkz]

Linux is just ultimately amazing, and now saving Windows XP? Hah!

I love my wibrain

[vuffi_raa]

I have been an early adopter on this one- I was one of the first US people to receive the wibrain b1h- it is a nice little machine and runs xp like a charm- also the via integrated video is damn cool for a unit not much bigger than a psp, but can run warcraft III smoothly

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have a geek badge (or geek status) if you only know Windblows.

Nokia bought QT, makes Linux tablets

[Werrismys]

Nokia would dump Symbian immediately if all the nifty infra existed on Linux.

Re:Nokia bought QT, makes Linux tablets

[kovari]

More specifically, in about two years. Apparently the successor to N810 will have a phone in it. Source: local newspaper. Does not seem to provide any sources, so apply a self defined amount of salt with it.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[MrResistor]

I did a similar comparison back in 2001, with Suse 7.something and Win2k.

Suse was up and running, with all the apps I wanted, in about 40 minutes, with not much more interaction from me than Ubuntu requires today.

Windows took about twice as long just to install the OS and drivers, with lots of CD swapping, mucking with dialog boxes, and rebooting. Then I had to install my apps...

I don't do that many OS installs these days, but based on the few I've done, things haven't changed that much.

private vs corporate

[krischik]

Apple dominates the high end market and GNU/Linux rules the low. Soon the ends will meet and M$ will be squeezed out. Vista is a failure and it has taken M$ down with it. Precisely what I thought as well! At least for the private sector. And in the past the corporate market tend to follow the private market some time later (first the SOHOs then small companies later large companies).

However the corporate market which might have already passed the point on no return.

Martin

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[oracle128]

With Google and Apple being so trendy and all, one would think they would prefer 'The Gap(ple)'

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[wicka]

Normally I would just disagree with you quietly and move on, but your use of "M$" has forced my hand. You're a fool. And as a side note, while I'm here, you should try to realize that Apple presents much more of a obstacle to OSS than Microsoft ever will. You know how Microsoft already has that image in the public of an evil corporation? Well take Microsoft's opposition to openness, multiply it by 10, and then give it to a company that has the most undeservedly perfect reputation and is considered "cool" by 90% of teenyboppers. That's Apple. That's your enemy.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Argon]

Really? I have a Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition mobile phone (Nokia E51). I can install open source unsigned application as long as I disable key signing check. You can self-sign your app, you don't need Symbian Signed certification (http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/getting_started/application_signing.html). The phone has WiFi and I have full access to everything. The phone's browser is a port of Webkit (http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/index.html). Putty is supported. VoIP is supported.

Series 60 SDK (C++) is a free download (http://developer.symbian.com/main/tools/sdks/s60/). You have option of Java (J2ME), Python for S60 (http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/pythonfors60/) as well as Open C (http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/open_c/index.html) which by the way includes libraries like OpenSSL, GLIB etc to make porting of open source applications easier.

From Linux to OSX

[krischik]

Well there are former Linux users which move to OSX as well.

For me: I had enough of tweaking my system all the time. I wanted my next system to which just work. And indeed it does

SAMBA - no configuration needed - it just works.
Printer - Bonjour [1] - and just works.

(I could continue)

On the other hand all my GNU / OpenSource tools are there as well [2]. Note that the Darwin kernel is OpenSource as well [3].

But enough of that. I don't want to convert you - I am on your side.

The interesting part is: Why is Apple successful? Answer: Because Hardware, OS and Software starter pack comes form the same vendor which makes sure that everything just works fine.

And back to original post: Why are those Linux based UMPCs so successful? They are cheap and Hardware, OS and Software starter pack comes form the same vendor which makes sure that everything just works fine.

Windows has none of these. It's not cheap any more and it's not single vendor either.

It think the single vendor part is the great change for both Linux and OSX.

And yes, your little "OS X------Windows------Linux" is absolutely right but let me quote Odder (1288958) from way up:

Apple dominates the high end market and GNU/Linux rules the low. Soon the ends will meet and M$ will be squeezed out. Vista is a failure and it has taken M$ down with it. Mind you I don't by the "has taken" part - "might take" is more like it.

Martin

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_(software)
[2] http://www.macports.org/
[3] http://kernel.macosforge.org/

I can see your point, but

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just delicious how you waste your time (the AC reply to this post). Deeeelicious. Face it, you have failed. Whomever is paying you for this shit is not getting their investment's worth, so they must be demanding their money back by now.

Just think about how much time you've wasted on this. How much time you haven't dedicated to that transvestite wife of yours. What a massive, terrible waste. You think you're making some sort of difference on Slashdot? Where you preach to the choir?

You are a loser and a waste of oxygen. You should be put out of your misery. Whatever amount Microsoft is paying you, it's definitely not enough.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[Benaiah]

XP takes 15 (streamlined SP3 googness included). Debian about the same (final update to todays version depends on your internet connection speed though). You say Vista takes 20, I've seen Ubuntu take 30 minutes plus. Anyone noticing a pattern here? Peak oil^Winstall!? your not arguing the point. Your taking random points out of context to support your argument, did you work on Zeitgeist by any chance?

I could say it only takes 5 mins to install Ubuntu, (when I copy over a drive image from previous install and then reboot.)

Compare stock standard installs off standard install Cd's then your metrics are worth something to the argument.

UMPC experience..

[steppin_razor_LA]

I have a Samsung Q1 Ultra UMPC that runs Vista. While the UI + tablet features are very nice, the system is unbearably slow. Vista simply doesn't run well in constricted hardware.

I've considered downgrading the OS to XP tablet edition, but I'm not sure if the performance gains would be worth the effort.

Linux has some appeal, but my gut tells me that driver support could be pretty painful...

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Skrapion]

Popularized by Dodgeball, sure. But from dodgeball? I dunno about that.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[harry666t]

LFS?... Meh, it's not teh hardcore. You get that silly guidebook and stuff, all you do is wget and untar and ./configure&&make a next set of sources.

Write your own OS! (I've tried :P)

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[hostyle]

Sorry if I didn't state as such, but all installs (except for Vista which I do not have) were from stock CDs / burned ISOs. I made my own streamlined XP CD so that SP3 could be pre-installed - unless thats your point? That SP3 should have to be downloaded after install and then run? Thats a fair point I suppose.

W7=Bigger Vista

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, it turns out Windows 7 will just be a bigger version of Windows Vista

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[bhtooefr]

Right now, but we're not to June 30 yet.

After June 30, if a manufacturer wants to provide XP Pro on a laptop, they have to sell the customer a Vista Business license, instead of an XP license.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[rtb61]

Now of course add the likely 'surprise' application to drive low cost UMPC uptake, mesh networking and lan game play. Old pc games ported to Linux that suit multi-player networked game play.

The free office suit, openoffice.org plus of course all the other readily available FOSS applications that run on top of Linux will just be an excuse to justify the business expense of a second PC for many users and being cheap will help immensely. Now add in the education market globally and you are talking hundreds of millions of units

Anyone for a really cheap CASIO UMPC, Ubuntu notebook ;).

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[DeathElk]

apt get [package] or yum install [package]. I haven't had a conflict in years. If by time, you mean seconds, then yes, it does take time. When was the last time you used linux?

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[pdusen]

Well I guess I'm ok, then. And I'm going to give you the courtesy of assuming you did, in fact, read my whole post.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[Hucko]

three times. it is slow, exasperating and possible to do it wrong. Not so with any linux install Ive had in the past 5 years.

SDTV output?

[tepples]

EEE PC already has enough horsepower to play movies and music as well as anything else. But can the Eee PC or any of its direct competitors output composite video, S-video, or component video? A lot of people still have an SDTV.

Downgrade clause in the Vista Business EULA

[tepples]

Only extending the life of XP Pro will have any meaning. If I recall correctly, licensees of Windows Vista Business can use downgrade rights to install Windows XP Professional on any machine with a Vista license.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Andy Dodd]

Yes and Yes.

Plus I can tether it via USB which is much faster. (Bluetooth 2.0+EDR is a bottleneck in HSDPA service areas.)

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Andy Dodd]

OK, yeah, there's PalmOS too but I don't count it any more since it's painful and users/developers are leaving it in droves because it and the devices it runs on are obsolete.

(I'm a former Treo 650 owner. My Tilt is such a breath of fresh air after that limited and buggy POS.)

As to Linux - Believe it or not most of the existing Linux-on-mobile-phone deployments are the MOST locked down (hence my comment about Android catering to the Lords of Lockdown). See MOTOMAGX for an example.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Andy Dodd]

From what I've heard, a lot of Symbian phones do not allow you to disable the signing check.

Whereas I have yet to see a WM device that had forced signing checks.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[Phroggy]

BS. If all your hardware works, installing Vista is a simple and pleasant experience (although upgrading is less pleasant because it takes a long time). It actually looks very Linux-like.

The XP installer is a pile of crap.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[Phroggy]

Vista's installer is worlds apart from Win2k and XP. It's one of the things they've actually fixed.

It still doesn't install all your apps, of course. And it may not be faster (if you're upgrading, it's very slow; clean installs aren't bad).

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[Phroggy]

Linux From Scratch is where you download the source code for each package you need, compile everything yourself until you have a working compiler, then use the compiler you just built to recompile everything.

It's a pain in the ass, because just about every single package has to be hacked to get it to work. The Linux From Scratch project provides patches you can apply, with specific instructions. It's not the simple "./configure && make && make install" you'd expect.

After awhile I realized that all the patches I had to apply were already done in Slackware's SlackBuild scripts, and those had lots of other nifty improvements as well. So I abandoned LFS and went back to happily running Slackware, with a new appreciation for how complicated it is to actually put a complete Linux distribution together.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot wait for the day when I saunter into a public space and see some business man spinning the compiz cube/cylinder/sphere/triangle/whatever the hell they come up with next

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[npsimons]

OK, yeah, there's PalmOS too but I don't count it any more since it's painful and users/developers are leaving it in droves because it and the devices it runs on are obsolete.

(I'm a former Treo 650 owner. My Tilt is such a breath of fresh air after that limited and buggy POS.)

Not that I'm going to switch, but I'll pose the same questions to you that I did to the iphone people: where are the apps that I use everyday on PalmOS? I have source to the vast majority of them, but that would still require I port them; will I have to use a windows desktop to do that? Or can I compile and test them on any platform I choose?

As for lockdown, I know of at least one phone that (unlike android) is not locked down, and it already exists and is available for purchase.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Anonymous Coward]

-about 50% of our entire workforce and 80-90% of our management are over 47 years old. There's going to be a great deal of bellyaching when users are suddenly confronted with the brand new user interface for both the shell (Aero will be on by default) and office suite (2007). I'll adapt fairly easily, I expect, since I'm still in my 20's, but I feel sorry for the poor folks at the Helpdesk when it hits.

Listen good you 20 something slacker. I'm over 47 and I've had to use more user interfaces to get real work done than your age in years. Take your age bias and GET OFF MY LAWN! ;).

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[MrResistor]

I haven't installed Vista, and honestly I'm not likely to, probably ever. Nothing against doing it, but I switched to Linux several years ago, and now the only windows I come in contact with is what comes pre-installed on a new laptop.

I don't doubt that they've improved the installer, but I don't think it's possible for them to fix the main thing that makes Windows installs so long and complicated: third party drivers.

More and more drivers are included in Windows Update these days, and maybe that's how they're dealing with it, but I've always felt it wise to have my Windows installs complete before I give it any kind of access to the internet.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Risen888]

I wish there was a -1 Modappeal modifier on /. like there is on Plastic.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[slashdotwannabe]

I ran WM for a while, and now I have an iPhone. They both crash/lock up relatively often (2-3 times a week).

The iPhone UI kicks WM all over the playground. WM has more features I'd like to have (like, say, 3rd party applications!).

Interestingly enough, my justification for buying a phone with WM was that I wanted to be able to write apps for it. In 3 years, I never did. So much for that justification (for me anyway)

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[Andy Dodd]

You don't exactly provide details of what apps you're using.

In most if not all cases, you will find applications that are as good as if not better than the PalmOS version.

TomTom - Exists for PalmOS and WM. In my opinion the WM version seems to work MUCH better and is far easier to set up.
TCPMP media player - Exists for both platforms, has somewhat extended codec support compared to PalmOS on a Windows Mobile device
Web browser - The PalmOS web browser Just Plain Sucks in every way possible. Even Pocket IE is better and it isn't that hot (there are other options for WM)
Java - The Java environment for PalmOS is utter and total crap and when I tried it on my Treo 650 not a single app I tried would work. GMail's Java app works great on my Tilt
Google Maps - Don't think there's a PalmOS client that can come anywhere close to Google's Windows Mobile native app
Instant Messaging - Half of the PalmOS IM app vendors seem to have gone out of business or stopped supporting the app. I've found FAR more choices for WM.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[r_jensen11]

Gentoo is not hard core. Any monkey that can use a command line can do a Stage 1 Gentoo install (I'm proof!). Linux From Scratch is hard core.

emerge "teh hardcorz" Good luck finding a stage-1 anywhere anymore, though. Gentoo's pretty much dropped Stage-1 and Stage-2. For a while, there were some people who tried fix bootstrapping for stage-1, but I think even they just concluded that after syncing and updating from the stage-3 install has the same result (albeit in less time) as a stage-1 install.

But you are correct: Gentoo is not hard-core. It's for developers and for people like me who occasionally have OCD and want to specify 1 thing too many that you can't easily specify with RedHat, SuSE or Debian.

It's been a while (probably around 5 or 6 years) since I've used Patrick's distribution, but I'd wager that Gentoo is just as hard core as Slackware....

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[ChrisA90278]

"...seems like you don't ever "own" any of your devices, your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider, your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux, the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you..."

How sad to think that "geek" is some guy who just passivily plays media, play games, listen to music, watch videos.. Has it come to this already? I hope not Hopefully there are still people who just likethe technology and like writing software and soldering.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[npsimons]

In most if not all cases, you will find applications that are as good as if not better than the PalmOS version.

Ah, but can I get the source? It's not essential, but it's a definite important feature for me.

TomTom - Exists for PalmOS and WM. In my opinion the WM version seems to work MUCH better and is far easier to set up.

I haven't tried this, but I was not aware that the GPS was usable by apps on Treo 650.

TCPMP media player - Exists for both platforms, has somewhat extended codec support compared to PalmOS on a Windows Mobile device

Yeah, I prefer TCPMP over RealPlayer, as TCPMP will play OGGs (which is what I rip to by default).

Web browser - The PalmOS web browser Just Plain Sucks in every way possible. Even Pocket IE is better and it isn't that hot (there are other options for WM)

Yes, which is why I've switched to Opera. I'm not happy that I can't get source to Opera, but I can't get source to any of the others and Opera seems to work better.

Java - The Java environment for PalmOS is utter and total crap and when I tried it on my Treo 650 not a single app I tried would work.

I managed to get ahold of the IMB java kit for PalmOS so I could run Opera. Seems to work pretty well, but then I don't use it for anything besides Opera; I'm not a big fan of Java myself.

GMail's Java app works great on my Tilt.

I run my own mail/web server, which seems to work fine with Opera and the mail client that comes with PalmOS. My only gripe there is that the PalmOS mail client doesn't support aliases.

Google Maps - Don't think there's a PalmOS client that can come anywhere close to Google's Windows Mobile native app

Don't know; haven't use the windows mobile version, but the PalmOS version of Google Maps seems to work fine for me.

Instant Messaging - Half of the PalmOS IM app vendors seem to have gone out of business or stopped supporting the app. I've found FAR more choices for WM.

IM isn't a priority for me (I hardly use it). I'm pretty sure there are open source IM clients for PalmOS however.

You don't exactly provide details of what apps you're using.

Here's a list:

• Little John - Console emulator for playing classic games.
• pFuel - Keeps track of gas mileage.
• FreeCoins - Accounting software.
• Keyring - Keeps track of passwords.
• pssh - SSH client.
• Plucker - EBook reader.
• LispMe - Scheme interpreter.
• Eat Watch - Weight tracking.

The thing is, PalmOS works very well for me, and is entirely compatible with Linux (or any other platform I choose to move to). If I were going to move to a new mobile platform, the last place I would look is to Microsoft (or Apple for that matter). Not only would I need to have the apps I use above (which I have source to, so I could port given a decent development environment that runs on my desktop of choice), but I would prefer to move to something more open, not less. Something more hackable, not something that gets in my way when I try to do something the big corps don't like.

Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over.

[linhares]

My eee pc is as large as your IBM mainframe, you insensitive clod!

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[darkonc]

Vista is not a failure. ..... It'll only be a failure if they never release another version of Windows, ....! I'd call that a rip-roaring success ,,, Oh: you mean 'for microsoft'

In any case, Microsoft has enough Money in the bank (and other semi-liquid assets) that the only way that they'd never survive to put out another operating system is if they're the victim of a massive class-action suit that they don't manage to drag out for a decade or so.

They'll put out another 'windows' -- Whether the market wants it or not .. and even a worst-case crash and burn for Vista is unlikely to be enough to stop that.

Viruses and 4GB RAM then ?

[HuguesT]

So if no one wants to upgrade to a newer, competitive version of Windows, this means computer users will be stuck with the same old viruses, users-as-administrators, drab 32-bit world for years to come?

This doesn't sound like progress much.

Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux

[BrunoUsesBBEdit]

Shipit is a demonstration of what FLOSS is all about. Shipit demonstrates that there is a community that anyone is welcome to join where you are valued as a person rather than a revenue stream.

When you join the Linux community you find passionate people who want to see you learn to use your hidden potential. You are not corralled into doing things the way the MSFT or AAPL think you should do them. You are encouraged to customize the devices you interact with daily so that they meet your needs and preferences. Nothing is demanded in return, because we find that most of the people we help soon have the skills to help others. That is how Free/Libre and Open Source Software continues to grow. It is something that no corporation can stop.

Shipit is wonderful because it extends this culture to those who otherwise may not have taken notice of it.

Thing is, Linux gives more free copies in a day

[BrunoUsesBBEdit]

Thing is, Linux gives away more free copies in a day than Vista has since its inception. Looky, we have impressive metrics too.

Found

[dallaylaen]

Just found a Linux EEE selling for 9500 RUR (a bit less than $400). Not at a big store, though.

Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over.

[telax]

I don't think Microsoft is sqweezed out quite easily. Considering the amount of money they have to invest on their development.