People just do not understand how vulnerable electronic voting machines are to tampering. Maybe the author's dubious guide will help more to understand...but I doubt it. Bright, technically-minded, republican or democrat, people give you the same kind of glassy-eyed look when you say something about voting machine fraud as they do if you talk about a shooter on the grassy knoll. They just will not believe it, whatever the facts are. The electronic voting machines look so high-tech and cool, they must be okay. Everything else is done electronically, why not voting, might go their thinking. My county hadn't moved away from its optical scanning system...until the election in September when the poll-worker invited me to try the new, shiny, electronic voting machine (ostensibly provided for handicapped voters) rather than take my optical-scan ballot to one of the flimsy voting booths to mark with an old-fashioned pen. The electronic voting machines and their associated fraud potential just seem inevitable, now.
There is no such right, even though journalists love to pretend it is etched in the First Ammendment or something. And even if there were such a right, any responsible journalist wouldn't rely on anonymous sources anyways. They are notoriously unreliable (at least with a named source you can go back and verify what they said, and investigate how they know what they said they know).
Well, actually, 31 states and the District of Columbia have enacted statutes that enable journalists to keep their sources confidential and most of the rest have provided common law equivalents. The ability of journalists to keep their sources confidential is absolutely essential to a 'free' press since journalists rely for their information on people telling them 'secret' things and a lot of people (for their own protection) will not tell the 'secret' thing they know to a journalist if the journalist is going to tell everyone who it was that told them. You seem to be confused about the difference between an 'anonymous source' (which journalists do not use) and a 'confidential source' which journalists use frequently.
The famous 'deep throat' source who revealed a lot of information to journalists about illegal activities going on in the Nixon administration during the watergate scandal was not an 'anonymous source' but was a 'confidential source' who years later was revealed to be a high official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If journalists did not protect the confidentiality of their sources, there would have been no 'deep throat' source and Nixon would have served as president until 1976.
Most of the national and international news comes from a huge number of people that is growing larger all the time. You even mention "the newspaper that is printed in their city (probably there's only one)". There are many more newspapers now than there were 25 years ago.
No, there are not a huge number of people giving us news and information. If only it were so. Don't you ever wonder why every tv channel has the same story? Why your local newspaper prints the same 'AP' story that every other one does? Why the 'media' will give lots of time and space to a 'news conference' in which nothing is ever even actually said? And no, there's not more newspapers now than there were 25 years ago. In 1980, there were 1,750 newspapers in the United States. In 2002, there were 1,457.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with this rating that puts the US below Tonga in freedom of the press. They will point to the unfettered access to the internet, the newspaper that is printed in their city (probably there's only one) the TV news channel that they occasionally watch, and the web pages that they skim for news. 'How could there be any restrictions on the press?' they might think. News is the access to information about things that are happening and that access is much more controlled and restricted than it used to be. In fact, 100 years ago there wasn't even any such thing as 'access' which was just expected and assumed. (No one would have even dared to tell a newspaper guy in World War I that he couldn't go somewhere.) As a result, most of the national and international news originates from a very small handful of people working for a few large media companies who are 'given' access to people and places where things are happening. We know less than we used to about what is really going on in Iraq or Haiti or Venezuela or China and instead we just get the 'official' line mixed with a lot of spin and opinion. Bloggers can write about anything they want but, unless someone gives them a tip (which the government would want to later know the identity of), they have no better access to information than you do.
All of the energy used by life ultimately derives from nuclear reactions.
Make the world a better place
on
School Bans 'Tag'
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
The same people who stress about the cost of litigation arising from kids playing tag at school probably have no problem with military recruiters at the high school and they wave their little flags and cheer when 18 y/o kids go into the military. Then they avert their eyes when a kid with missing legs rolls across their field of view. Let the kids play tag and send the worry-about-litigation-cost republicans to Iraq and the world will be a better place.
The biggest software publishers back in the 80s used to copy-protect their disks and you actually had to have the copy-protected disk in the drive to even load the software. Needless to say, everyone got REALLY tired of that crap and was encouraged to try software from companies that did NOT do that stuff and made it easy to use THEIR software...like Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft got to where they are today, at least in part, by providing easy-to-install, non-protected disks of DOS, Windows 3.1, Excel, Word, etc. Yes, copying was rampant...but so was useage...which made Microsoft a ton of money that built Bill Gates big house. The formerly-leading companies with that really good copy protection evenutally dropped it, but it was too late for them. Of course, Microsoft began copy-protecting their own stuff and now has the really super-duper product activation so that NO ONE will be able to illegally install their software. When was the last time you bumped into anyone who was actually using Office 2003? Microsoft's share of the 'new office' market is shrinking faster than an iceberg in July.
Now, we have some companies offering DVDs with the really, really good copy protection that is so good that the disk will not even play on a pc. Their survival time can be measured in months, not years.
Microsoft has made great strides in a lot of places.
I'll go this far with you. Microsoft software has never had more features than it has right now. However, adding features does not qualify as making great strides towards making the software better unless the new features provide essential functionality that was previously absent and/or increase user access to functionality by making it easier to use or something like that. Unfortunately, a lot of Microsoft's focus in the last few years is on DRM/anti-piracy/IP/proprietary format/user lock-in/break-the-competing-approach stuff that doesn't make the Microsoft software easier to use, more robust, or enable the user by giving him access to more power. Much more importantly, the Microsoft approach prevents the formation and development of a healthy ecosystem around its platform that would allow innovation that could lead to synergistic products that make the whole more than the sum of its parts. Yes, Microsoft has a large share of the desktop market with windows and MS Office but it's also obvious by now, even to Microsoft I expect, that the future will be something different than the one that Microsoft is offering with Vista and Office 200X.
Software doesn't suck. It's great and has never been better than it is right now...well except for Microsoft software, anyway. Business, finance, transportation, communications, data management, entertainment, etc. are all incredibly enriched over what they were only 10 years ago because of...yes, software. The author is uninformed, misinformed or unexperienced or something.
If someone comes out with a way to make IE 7 beta 4 load pages 3% faster, someone is going to be running tests all night long. It's news for nerds, stuff that matters.
I'd agree with you if this was actually new news but it's not and I don't. It was news a few months ago when Intel came out with the Conroe and enlarged the hardware performance envelope a little bit but it's not news now and so it doesn't matter. Software is waaaaay behind the silicon. It's the software news that matters right now and there's not much of it.
Processors have become a commodity. You buy as much processor performance as you need or can afford. The Intel and AMD processors are all great right now...well all except the old Intel P4 and Celeron stuff but that will be mostly gone in a few months anyway. Move along...there's no story here.
I bought a $50 DVD player at Costco that does a great job. A "Media Center PC" means a Windows PC to play the DVD (for most people). Those graphics would have to be damned good to make anyone want to screw around with any PC running any version of Windows just to play a DVD. Never mind the hardware cost, or even the M$ software cost. No, the real cost of the system would be the time with updates, disk management, hardware updates, software updates, activation crap, spyware, viruses, scripting agents, etc. etc. I can imagine someone hooking up the MPC as a novelty for a short amount of time but then leaving it turned off in the corner after a while when the MPC needed whatever, and just using the DVD player. There's no way Microsoft could ever make Windows into powerful software that any normal person would want to use every day for something like playing DVDs, watching TV or keeping the beer cold. Using your PC to watch TV might work and it's cute, but TV sales are not suffering any.
It's inevitable that digital equipment will integrate more entertainment and household functions but it will never happen with anything called 'Windows' produced by any company named 'Microsoft.' They've been milking the Windows/Office cash cow for so long that they're unable to do anything else. For those kinds of devices to take off, they'll have to support open standards and protocols, be offered by several different large companies, and be simple and inexpensive to use. Maybe Sony, Nintendo, Toshiba, Panasonic, or HP could be players. Microsoft...no way.
The flaming Dell battery story was first published by theinquirer.net. People believed it because the Inquirer hasn't been an ad whore like most of the other online tech news sites have.
64-bit cpus have been sold since 2003. Anyone planning on running vista on hardware more than 3 years old is not making very sound plans. Newer systems should already be 64-bit and the newest ones should be dual-core as well. Buying obsolete hardware to save money is never a very good idea.
"See, that's the big negative point in
the entire setup. The bootup time
is a pain in the neck, but people can live with that easily. They'll
fetch their cups of coffee, have the morning conversation with
coworkers and will return about 10 minutes after their machines have
booted up. The real issue is the server getting hammered every morning,
slowing these boottimes as more machines get added to the network."
People don't boot every morning. In most of the places I see, the
machines are left on 24/7. I know it's not good for power consumption
but that's what people actually do. They only reboot when something
stops working.
It's hard to put a finger on it but something seems broken about the way this kind of project is done now vs. how it was done in the past. The young engineers are as smart as the engineers in the past were. The materials, tools and resources are an order of magnitude better than they were then. The people are likely working as hard or harder or harder than their counterparts did then. But the end result of the project seems likely to be way over budget, way behind schedule, and unlikely to work very well, if indeed, it even works at all. The problem, I think, is with the experience level of the people involved. The engineers and technicians obtained for the project are probably mostly very inexperienced at doing a *design* of something complex that actually works as intended. Engineering design is a creative process that takes years of experience to develop the skills for. There are relatively few opportunities for the new NASA people to have acquired the necessary experience simply because there is a lot less of that kind of work done in the United States now, compared with then. One of the reasons they are scouring the museums may be because they are desperate to acquire past engineering designs after discovering how difficult it is to do new ones.
These same kinds of negative articles also came out about XP at the beginning of its hype cycle. The 'Windows-beta-has-problems' articles all seem to be organized by the M$ hype machine to get people talking about the next Windows version. That's all. Next come the 'we-fixed-all-the-problems-and-now-its-ready' articles. Finally, come the 'Windows Vista is G-R-E-A-T!' articles on or just prior to the release day. Since M$ is cranking up the hype, we can be sure that Vista is now on track to be released.
This paper seems to
be a better example of Mitra's recent work on MECOs than your
reference. It's easy to annonymously call someone a 'loon'
in a public forum, as you have done. I, like all of us, have no
idea if Mitra's ideas about MECOs are correct or not but they certainly
deserve to be considered seriously, especially in light of the
supporting observations that are the subject of this forum. Many
important discoveries are made by people who were originally called
'loons' because they dared to think outside of the conventional
thinking of their time. Copernicus comes to
mind, with his 'loony' idea that the earth revolves around the sun when
anyone could see with their own eyes that the sun traveled through the
sky and therefore revolved around the earth.
In defense of Mitra, the peer-reviewed paper published
by Schild, Leiter, and Robertson references Mitra's work
repeatedly. You sound like a black hole
guy. These new observations by Schild et. al. appear to be
a huge boost for the Mitra theory of MECOs. If other work
confirms this, we will be talking about MECOs in the future rather than
black holes.
So, after 5 years, Microsoft is finally updating Internet Explorer from v6 to v7 in response to the overwhelming current advantages of using Firefox/Sea Monkey/Mozilla rather than IE. Here are eight reasons that no one should even bother to consider using Internet Explorer 7:
1) Microsoft is only updating IE so that it will be good enough to keep people from going to the effort and trouble of downloading, installing, and learning Firefox. Microsoft will let IE wither on the vine again as soon as Firefox stops gaining market share.
2) Using IE means you are supporting Microsoft's vision of DRM in the future.
3) Microsoft does not support open standards for IE unless they have to.
4) Firefox will be continuously updated and improved with new ideas and features into the future while IE new releases will be infrequent by comparison.
5) Security. Firefox will always be much more secure than anything IE from Microsoft due to all the extra duties Microsoft wants their browser to do for them in addition to browsing the web for you.
6) Microsoft is a convicted anti-competition monopoly. No one should ever let themselves be locked into anything from such an outfit.
7) Firefox runs on most OS platforms. IE 7 only runs on Windows and only on the newest version of that. Do you want to upgrade your OS so that you can upgrade your browser?
8) Features. Firefox has more of everything...and probably always will.
There doesn't seem to be any AMD counterstrike yet other than hot air. It would be a shock if AMD spokespeople said anything other than that they were 'supremely confident.' What else can they say...that they are facing several quarters of deep price cuts, low margins, and they're scared to death about their stock options? The original P4 delivered a pretty big smackdown on AMD that took them two years to come back from and the Conroe Core 2 Duo looks like it's going to do the same thing. AMD still has the better fundamental architecture, though, just like they did against the P4 with its 26 pipeline stages and power-sucking 'netburst' architecture, so in the long run the AMd direct connect stuff should win out but that's not going to put food on the table for the next year or so.
So, sales are weak and costs need to be cut. This Friday, though, Intel is going to announce their new 'Conroe' desktop chip when the NDAs expire. We've already seen from the hype and benchmarks of the pre-shipping chips that Conroe is going to be a very good chip that will put Intel back in the driver's seat so why do the 1,000 have to go only two days before Conroe appears? Couldn't Intel just hang on for a few more weeks until the Conroe sales take off? Maybe then they wouldn't even need to dump the 1,000 managers.
Those '50 to 70 million' users of Windows 98 or Windows ME are probably running on older hardware and are unlikely to upgrade to Windows XP due to its increased hardware requirements and slower system response. A normal competitive business with that many users of one of its product would find some way to sell them something such as security fixes, patches, or whatever. Microsoft just kisses them off.
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People just do not understand how vulnerable electronic voting machines are to tampering. Maybe the author's dubious guide will help more to understand...but I doubt it. Bright, technically-minded, republican or democrat, people give you the same kind of glassy-eyed look when you say something about voting machine fraud as they do if you talk about a shooter on the grassy knoll. They just will not believe it, whatever the facts are. The electronic voting machines look so high-tech and cool, they must be okay. Everything else is done electronically, why not voting, might go their thinking. My county hadn't moved away from its optical scanning system...until the election in September when the poll-worker invited me to try the new, shiny, electronic voting machine (ostensibly provided for handicapped voters) rather than take my optical-scan ballot to one of the flimsy voting booths to mark with an old-fashioned pen. The electronic voting machines and their associated fraud potential just seem inevitable, now.
There is no such right, even though journalists love to pretend it is etched in the First Ammendment or something. And even if there were such a right, any responsible journalist wouldn't rely on anonymous sources anyways. They are notoriously unreliable (at least with a named source you can go back and verify what they said, and investigate how they know what they said they know).
Well, actually, 31 states and the District of Columbia have enacted statutes that enable journalists to keep their sources confidential and most of the rest have provided common law equivalents. The ability of journalists to keep their sources confidential is absolutely essential to a 'free' press since journalists rely for their information on people telling them 'secret' things and a lot of people (for their own protection) will not tell the 'secret' thing they know to a journalist if the journalist is going to tell everyone who it was that told them. You seem to be confused about the difference between an 'anonymous source' (which journalists do not use) and a 'confidential source' which journalists use frequently.
The famous 'deep throat' source who revealed a lot of information to journalists about illegal activities going on in the Nixon administration during the watergate scandal was not an 'anonymous source' but was a 'confidential source' who years later was revealed to be a high official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If journalists did not protect the confidentiality of their sources, there would have been no 'deep throat' source and Nixon would have served as president until 1976.
Most of the national and international news comes from a huge number of people that is growing larger all the time. You even mention "the newspaper that is printed in their city (probably there's only one)". There are many more newspapers now than there were 25 years ago.
No, there are not a huge number of people giving us news and information. If only it were so. Don't you ever wonder why every tv channel has the same story? Why your local newspaper prints the same 'AP' story that every other one does? Why the 'media' will give lots of time and space to a 'news conference' in which nothing is ever even actually said? And no, there's not more newspapers now than there were 25 years ago. In 1980, there were 1,750 newspapers in the United States. In 2002, there were 1,457.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with this rating that puts the US below Tonga in freedom of the press. They will point to the unfettered access to the internet, the newspaper that is printed in their city (probably there's only one) the TV news channel that they occasionally watch, and the web pages that they skim for news. 'How could there be any restrictions on the press?' they might think. News is the access to information about things that are happening and that access is much more controlled and restricted than it used to be. In fact, 100 years ago there wasn't even any such thing as 'access' which was just expected and assumed. (No one would have even dared to tell a newspaper guy in World War I that he couldn't go somewhere.) As a result, most of the national and international news originates from a very small handful of people working for a few large media companies who are 'given' access to people and places where things are happening. We know less than we used to about what is really going on in Iraq or Haiti or Venezuela or China and instead we just get the 'official' line mixed with a lot of spin and opinion. Bloggers can write about anything they want but, unless someone gives them a tip (which the government would want to later know the identity of), they have no better access to information than you do.
All of the energy used by life ultimately derives from nuclear reactions.
The same people who stress about the cost of litigation arising from kids playing tag at school probably have no problem with military recruiters at the high school and they wave their little flags and cheer when 18 y/o kids go into the military. Then they avert their eyes when a kid with missing legs rolls across their field of view. Let the kids play tag and send the worry-about-litigation-cost republicans to Iraq and the world will be a better place.
The biggest software publishers back in the 80s used to copy-protect their disks and you actually had to have the copy-protected disk in the drive to even load the software. Needless to say, everyone got REALLY tired of that crap and was encouraged to try software from companies that did NOT do that stuff and made it easy to use THEIR software...like Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft got to where they are today, at least in part, by providing easy-to-install, non-protected disks of DOS, Windows 3.1, Excel, Word, etc. Yes, copying was rampant...but so was useage...which made Microsoft a ton of money that built Bill Gates big house. The formerly-leading companies with that really good copy protection evenutally dropped it, but it was too late for them. Of course, Microsoft began copy-protecting their own stuff and now has the really super-duper product activation so that NO ONE will be able to illegally install their software. When was the last time you bumped into anyone who was actually using Office 2003? Microsoft's share of the 'new office' market is shrinking faster than an iceberg in July.
Now, we have some companies offering DVDs with the really, really good copy protection that is so good that the disk will not even play on a pc. Their survival time can be measured in months, not years.
Microsoft has made great strides in a lot of places.
I'll go this far with you. Microsoft software has never had more features than it has right now. However, adding features does not qualify as making great strides towards making the software better unless the new features provide essential functionality that was previously absent and/or increase user access to functionality by making it easier to use or something like that. Unfortunately, a lot of Microsoft's focus in the last few years is on DRM/anti-piracy/IP/proprietary format/user lock-in/break-the-competing-approach stuff that doesn't make the Microsoft software easier to use, more robust, or enable the user by giving him access to more power. Much more importantly, the Microsoft approach prevents the formation and development of a healthy ecosystem around its platform that would allow innovation that could lead to synergistic products that make the whole more than the sum of its parts. Yes, Microsoft has a large share of the desktop market with windows and MS Office but it's also obvious by now, even to Microsoft I expect, that the future will be something different than the one that Microsoft is offering with Vista and Office 200X.
Software doesn't suck. It's great and has never been better than it is right now...well except for Microsoft software, anyway. Business, finance, transportation, communications, data management, entertainment, etc. are all incredibly enriched over what they were only 10 years ago because of...yes, software. The author is uninformed, misinformed or unexperienced or something.
After three and a half years of case proceedings...
If Microsoft funded SCO for any or all of the SCO v. IBM case, they got their money's worth.
If someone comes out with a way to make IE 7 beta 4 load pages 3% faster, someone is going to be running tests all night long. It's news for nerds, stuff that matters.
I'd agree with you if this was actually new news but it's not and I don't. It was news a few months ago when Intel came out with the Conroe and enlarged the hardware performance envelope a little bit but it's not news now and so it doesn't matter. Software is waaaaay behind the silicon. It's the software news that matters right now and there's not much of it.
Processors have become a commodity. You buy as much processor performance as you need or can afford. The Intel and AMD processors are all great right now...well all except the old Intel P4 and Celeron stuff but that will be mostly gone in a few months anyway. Move along...there's no story here.
I bought a $50 DVD player at Costco that does a great job. A "Media Center PC" means a Windows PC to play the DVD (for most people). Those graphics would have to be damned good to make anyone want to screw around with any PC running any version of Windows just to play a DVD. Never mind the hardware cost, or even the M$ software cost. No, the real cost of the system would be the time with updates, disk management, hardware updates, software updates, activation crap, spyware, viruses, scripting agents, etc. etc. I can imagine someone hooking up the MPC as a novelty for a short amount of time but then leaving it turned off in the corner after a while when the MPC needed whatever, and just using the DVD player. There's no way Microsoft could ever make Windows into powerful software that any normal person would want to use every day for something like playing DVDs, watching TV or keeping the beer cold. Using your PC to watch TV might work and it's cute, but TV sales are not suffering any.
It's inevitable that digital equipment will integrate more entertainment and household functions but it will never happen with anything called 'Windows' produced by any company named 'Microsoft.' They've been milking the Windows/Office cash cow for so long that they're unable to do anything else. For those kinds of devices to take off, they'll have to support open standards and protocols, be offered by several different large companies, and be simple and inexpensive to use. Maybe Sony, Nintendo, Toshiba, Panasonic, or HP could be players. Microsoft...no way.
The flaming Dell battery story was first published by theinquirer.net. People believed it because the Inquirer hasn't been an ad whore like most of the other online tech news sites have.
64-bit cpus have been sold since 2003. Anyone planning on running vista on hardware more than 3 years old is not making very sound plans. Newer systems should already be 64-bit and the newest ones should be dual-core as well. Buying obsolete hardware to save money is never a very good idea.
"See, that's the big negative point in the entire setup. The bootup time is a pain in the neck, but people can live with that easily. They'll fetch their cups of coffee, have the morning conversation with coworkers and will return about 10 minutes after their machines have booted up. The real issue is the server getting hammered every morning, slowing these boottimes as more machines get added to the network."
People don't boot every morning. In most of the places I see, the machines are left on 24/7. I know it's not good for power consumption but that's what people actually do. They only reboot when something stops working.
It's hard to put a finger on it but something seems broken about the way this kind of project is done now vs. how it was done in the past. The young engineers are as smart as the engineers in the past were. The materials, tools and resources are an order of magnitude better than they were then. The people are likely working as hard or harder or harder than their counterparts did then. But the end result of the project seems likely to be way over budget, way behind schedule, and unlikely to work very well, if indeed, it even works at all. The problem, I think, is with the experience level of the people involved. The engineers and technicians obtained for the project are probably mostly very inexperienced at doing a *design* of something complex that actually works as intended. Engineering design is a creative process that takes years of experience to develop the skills for. There are relatively few opportunities for the new NASA people to have acquired the necessary experience simply because there is a lot less of that kind of work done in the United States now, compared with then. One of the reasons they are scouring the museums may be because they are desperate to acquire past engineering designs after discovering how difficult it is to do new ones.
These same kinds of negative articles also came out about XP at the beginning of its hype cycle. The 'Windows-beta-has-problems' articles all seem to be organized by the M$ hype machine to get people talking about the next Windows version. That's all. Next come the 'we-fixed-all-the-problems-and-now-its-ready' articles. Finally, come the 'Windows Vista is G-R-E-A-T!' articles on or just prior to the release day. Since M$ is cranking up the hype, we can be sure that Vista is now on track to be released.
This paper seems to be a better example of Mitra's recent work on MECOs than your reference. It's easy to annonymously call someone a 'loon' in a public forum, as you have done. I, like all of us, have no idea if Mitra's ideas about MECOs are correct or not but they certainly deserve to be considered seriously, especially in light of the supporting observations that are the subject of this forum. Many important discoveries are made by people who were originally called 'loons' because they dared to think outside of the conventional thinking of their time. Copernicus comes to mind, with his 'loony' idea that the earth revolves around the sun when anyone could see with their own eyes that the sun traveled through the sky and therefore revolved around the earth.
In defense of Mitra, the peer-reviewed paper published by Schild, Leiter, and Robertson references Mitra's work repeatedly. You sound like a black hole guy. These new observations by Schild et. al. appear to be a huge boost for the Mitra theory of MECOs. If other work confirms this, we will be talking about MECOs in the future rather than black holes.
This article has a better description of MECOs and also properly attributes the concept of MECOs to Indian astrophysicist Abhas Mitra.
So, after 5 years, Microsoft is finally updating Internet Explorer from v6 to v7 in response to the overwhelming current advantages of using Firefox/Sea Monkey/Mozilla rather than IE. Here are eight reasons that no one should even bother to consider using Internet Explorer 7:
1) Microsoft is only updating IE so that it will be good enough to keep people from going to the effort and trouble of downloading, installing, and learning Firefox. Microsoft will let IE wither on the vine again as soon as Firefox stops gaining market share.
2) Using IE means you are supporting Microsoft's vision of DRM in the future.
3) Microsoft does not support open standards for IE unless they have to.
4) Firefox will be continuously updated and improved with new ideas and features into the future while IE new releases will be infrequent by comparison.
5) Security. Firefox will always be much more secure than anything IE from Microsoft due to all the extra duties Microsoft wants their browser to do for them in addition to browsing the web for you.
6) Microsoft is a convicted anti-competition monopoly. No one should ever let themselves be locked into anything from such an outfit.
7) Firefox runs on most OS platforms. IE 7 only runs on Windows and only on the newest version of that. Do you want to upgrade your OS so that you can upgrade your browser?
8) Features. Firefox has more of everything...and probably always will.
There doesn't seem to be any AMD counterstrike yet other than hot air. It would be a shock if AMD spokespeople said anything other than that they were 'supremely confident.' What else can they say...that they are facing several quarters of deep price cuts, low margins, and they're scared to death about their stock options? The original P4 delivered a pretty big smackdown on AMD that took them two years to come back from and the Conroe Core 2 Duo looks like it's going to do the same thing. AMD still has the better fundamental architecture, though, just like they did against the P4 with its 26 pipeline stages and power-sucking 'netburst' architecture, so in the long run the AMd direct connect stuff should win out but that's not going to put food on the table for the next year or so.
So, sales are weak and costs need to be cut. This Friday, though, Intel is going to announce their new 'Conroe' desktop chip when the NDAs expire. We've already seen from the hype and benchmarks of the pre-shipping chips that Conroe is going to be a very good chip that will put Intel back in the driver's seat so why do the 1,000 have to go only two days before Conroe appears? Couldn't Intel just hang on for a few more weeks until the Conroe sales take off? Maybe then they wouldn't even need to dump the 1,000 managers.
Those '50 to 70 million' users of Windows 98 or Windows ME are probably running on older hardware and are unlikely to upgrade to Windows XP due to its increased hardware requirements and slower system response. A normal competitive business with that many users of one of its product would find some way to sell them something such as security fixes, patches, or whatever. Microsoft just kisses them off.