We can run round the market share game for the next couple of years, but you would missed the news. Vista, if you believe optimistic web stats, clocks in at 8%. There are plenty of sites that will also show you 8% or better GNU/Linux. Slight heaves in the landscape sometimes demand a broader perspective to understand. Because M$ is all marketing and perception, the slightest change can be their downfall. The hype wave about "strong Vista demand" is all about you missing Vista's market failure. M$ will follow, because their development and business model is wrong.
What's important is that M$ has lost it's ability to push, and the M$ game is over. Vista was pushed like the company's life depended on it. They advertised like crazy, got bogus reviews written up, demanded every vendor sell nothing but Vista it blew up in their faces. Everywhere you go, you hear the same thing about Vista performance. Sales fell through the floor, equipment makers and vendors lost real money and pushed back. Fanboy purchases and channel stuffing are over. If M$ could not sell to the back to school crowd, they can't sell to anyone so sales are going to go nowhere but down. Vista is not the future and M$ might go down with it. M$ can't threaten to whack anyone when they are not making money for anyone but themselves. This was all so easy to predict, now here we are.
Vendors are looking for something to fill the massive gap left by Vista, and free software fits perfectly. It's got eye candy, stability, security and it's free and have competitive service. What more can vendors ask for?
The sad fact that most of our culture is owned is reason to fight, not to capitulate.
But more importantly, she has a child!... So this copyrighted song is being used for a commercial application.
I know you did not mean it that way, but you are right. The child is the point of the video. Absolutely none of the mom's target audience is going to watch her video to hear Prince one more time, they are watching her baby and the moment could have been captured with any music. It is too bad that free music is not played over the radio and that the mom did not have a library of that instead of Prince.
Others have pointed out that the RIAA is happy to squash "non-commercial" websites. Google is about the only site that's brave enough and rich enough to fight the MAFIAA in cases like this.
that there's a huge population of people for whom Linux is not mutually exclusive from Windows. People who can love linux without hating Microsoft. People who can objectively use the best tool for the job.
At this point, believing there is a best tool for any job left on Windows is little more than ignorance. The only thing that's lacking is video board support, but that can be had for less trouble than setting up a Windoze gaming rig, and all of the major makers are now on board. With that last piece in place, the superiority of free software is more than obvious.
Being able to use both GNU/Linux and Windows at the same time is a short lived state. Sooner or later, people who get to know free software learn all of the dirty tricks that the control freaks in Redmond have gotten. After they go through a migration or two between stable GNU/Linux versions, they fully realize the extent of intentional waste M$ has put them through. At that point, their hatred for M$ is maximized and they are fully inoculated against non free software, not just M$. Thinking about the pain and suffering Windoze inflicts makes them angry. Like real inoculations, the reaction fades with time.
Forced updates will prod migration, but the intention and language have been in the EULA all along. The ultimate goal of non free software is power. To get there, owners keep secrets and make rules that render users helpless and divided.
There are sure to be "pirated" versions of Vista, but you can't trust them. The usual scammers will be uploading trojaned versions that will log your keystrokes for credit card accounts and do other evil things. Ultimately, this is a problem with all non free software, you have no way to verify correct operation and must trust the owner.
A better course of action is to get away from non free software altogether. Now is a good time to do that. Vista is more of the same from M$ and you can't be sure it will work with your hardware. M$'s greedy attempt to grab more power and money than ever has left them an empty Vista which can be compared to the Aral Sea. It's a dissaster so big you can see it from space but what you find on the ground is worse than anyone can imagine while their minds are polluted with official propaganda. Gamers and other media people are better off holding onto a copy of XP, but serious work should all be migrating to platforms that don't have the kinds of problems Vista does. The sooner you escape M$, the easier it is and the more you save.
And then, we will see the rise of pirate websites, just like how there are pirate radio stations now
We should never, ever get there. Unlike radio, there's no public interest that should keep you from running servers. Any laws forbidding publication are an obvious violation of the First Amendment. You should be able to use the bits you purchase in any way you chose.
If I were to make a virus that would modify your genes to include some "property" of mine without your consent, would I be able to keep you from breeding? The whole notion of owning organisms because you have made a tiny change to them is almost as absurd as the "Intellectual Property" confusion that supports such notions.
Patents on tools and methods of modifying living organisms might be considered inventions. Modified organisms are no more inventions than breeds of sheep are today. They don't deserve patents.
HTML isn't some magical closed source EXE, as much as they would like it to be.
This is not about magic, function or utility. It's about ownership and making you do as they say.
They would love to make the internet into something like cable TV. The greedheads who run broadcast companies do so with government monopoly grants, secrets and expensive equipment which is all geared toward control of media and public opinion. You are not allowed to play there. Your choices are to consume or do without. The internet is fundamentally different by design. You are supposed to be able to contribute and create and no machine is better than any other. These lawyers know what they are saying and they mean it. They can and will take action if they see something that looks like their crappy publication. They are philosophically opposed to free networks and they want to take control. They don't care what their page does for you. All they really care about is keeping you from helping your neighbor, so that they can make whatever money there is to extract from whatever you would like to do. They don't care if you have unmet needs, so long as they are the sole provider. It is an outrageous and immoral stand that must be taken seriously and fought.
Think I'm silly? Look at what software patent and bad laws have done for entertainment. Look at all the blocked ports on your cable box. Look at the dominant home and business OS. Digital restrictions surround you. Their main purpose is to own your culture and use it to control you and separate you from your money.
Claims made by Microsoft that Linux violates its software patent have not affected sales of Linux-based hardware, according to Dell's CEO Michael Dell.... for those customers who might be concerned about whether Microsoft's claims of patent violation could result in legal action, Dell added that there were "certainly mechanisms if customers are concerned about patents."
They don't really know if the FUD worked or not, they just know that trends are unbroken. Given the disparity in features, performance and trust there's no reason for most users to want anything but GNU/Linux as a server or desktop.
The whole thing is as groundless as it is ineffective. It is too bad Dell they did not look at the source of M$'s patent FUD, because he repudiated M$'s use of his work as making the exact opposite case he had observed. M$ is more likely to violate patents for technical and cultural reasons.
If you spend all of your time doing bad things to the people you don't like, you won't have any time to do nice things for the people you do like. That makes you a total asshole. Everyone who knows you has to waste time dealing with you.
you can drive by car between any 2 points in the continental US in 72 hours: 60mph * 72h = 4320 miles. If you've got an emergency, you're better off driving, no matter how far.
The bus is slower because it makes stops, but you can still get across the US in three days. NY to LA is 2d, 18h, 30m by Greyhound.
RMS wins yet again. He advocates bus travel for privacy and ecological reasons. Now he has speed too.
By whatever metric you have, gnu/linux is the winner. Reliability? Nothing else with decent consumer device support comes close. Safety? That comes along with reliability and sane practices. Flash? You can have that too. E17 has unbeatable eye candy. You can run it as an emulation on the face of a beryl cube, where the other faces an be KDE, Gnome and E16, all of which also have gadgets and other eyecandy. Yes, she can also have her lame old XP as another face of that cube. Free software is beautiful inside and out.
Why bother with car analogies when you can be direct?
But many people (and they are very vocal) do not want Freedom. They want "free" (as in beer) versions of proprietary apps to play proprietary content for "free" (again, as in beer) in proprietary formats.
You should not have to chose between software freedom and participation in your culture. You should want them both.
The original sin here is committed by people who would exert control of your culture through non free software. They try to convince people that they should be so grateful for software that they do as they are told. Do not be fooled, there is nothing special special about media players or formats. The techniques are obvious and do not merit the patents that protect them. They sometimes pretend to represent "the artist" but have as little respect for artists as they do for users. They imagine themselves masters of all.
People who yearn for specific programs want their software freedom but don't understand it yet. They want their computer to do things but have been convinced that these things can only be done with certain tools. Other tools, they fear, will not work and can not be used to cooperate with others. It does not take long to convince these kinds of people that they have been lied to.
They used the law as a weapon to destroy a person who offended them personally. They succeeded only in proving that feeble people, when given power, tend to abuse it, and that Duluth has plenty of feeble people.
Yes, that's the way right thinking people will see the penalty. The man's ignorance is matched only by his self contempt and insecurity. It's instructive to reread the quote:
I think she thought a jury from Duluth would be naive. We're not that stupid up here. I don't know what the fuck she was thinking, to tell you the truth.
The argument advanced is more plausible than someone who's never used the internet would imagine, but it's funny that he could be worked up into such a rage that he would destroy a neighbor for the petty benefit of one of the world's richest companies. Duluth is now an international laughing stock and my faith in humanity has been lowered a notch.
The Jury was naive and completely manipulated. What a wretched bunch of idiots.
What does M$ have left? M$ never has made a first rate piece of software. Ever. They have never had anything other than empty promises and intimidation. Now no one believes any of their promisses.
Fuck you, Steve Ballmer. Your company sucks life and has been rejected in the market place. Take your ill gotten money and pray you can stay out of jail.
M$ wanted to remove XP from sale in January 2008. They did everything in their power to keep it from being sold with new PCs ever since the introduction of the Vista Failure. People have complained that this service pack is long overdue, so what's the point of releasing it now? They could try to make the corporate migration path W2K to XP instead of GNU/Linux, but it looks like they want to get rid of XP. The other answer is that they don't know what they are doing.
I've got a feeling Windows XP/Vista/etc are so apt to get pwnd by the sheer amount of IE6 and under exploits, MS would rather focus resources moving forward than placing those resources on EOL programs
Anyone really concerned with security has already moved to Firefox and will soon be moving GNU/Linux or Mac. IE7 and Vista have not fixed anything important. M$ could not care less about your security.
The only thing strange is that M$ ever did anything to inhibit IE7 in the first place. It's a crucial piece of their attack on web standards, which in turn is ever more important in maintaining their desktop monopoly.
A person has been stripped of everything they own because they shared some songs. There is no better evidence that copyright law is not serving the interests of the people than that. White House advocacy of such obvious tyranny shows that the White House does not believe in justice, democracy or serving the best interests of the American people.
It is time for regime change. If no reasonable alternative is offered, I will vote for unreasonable alternatives. The Republican party has abandoned it's core principles of fiscal responsibility, international isolationism and limited government. They have become an abusive advocate of government power for the benefit of select, multinational corporations. They must be removed from power, even if the alternative is another group of corporate whores. A disrupted and ineffective government would be better than the one we have now.
Try to fight the Electronic Health Record is like trying to fight the use of computers in any other field -- it's inevitable.
Sure, but we don't have to roll over while M$ brings their culture of greed into medicine. There's no good reason to give control of medical records to a third party like them. Free software already has the answers and is already used by GE, Phillips and other medical equipment makers with a clue.
"... borrows from the company's successful formula in personal computer software." I'll bet this sentence is not going to go over too well with the slashdot crowd.
I don't have a problem with that statement at all. It's nice of them to admit they are and be described as a one trick pony. The only "formula" they have is monopoly abuse. Everything else they do is a failure, especially security, but they don't care about any of it.
Will they continue to be a success by their own standards? No, they have already failed. In fact, the article looks like hype and might actually piss the hospitals off. Are they all really jumping in with both feet when most of them don't even want to go to Vista? I doubt it.
Slashdot Mirror
We can run round the market share game for the next couple of years, but you would missed the news. Vista, if you believe optimistic web stats, clocks in at 8%. There are plenty of sites that will also show you 8% or better GNU/Linux. Slight heaves in the landscape sometimes demand a broader perspective to understand. Because M$ is all marketing and perception, the slightest change can be their downfall. The hype wave about "strong Vista demand" is all about you missing Vista's market failure. M$ will follow, because their development and business model is wrong.
What's important is that M$ has lost it's ability to push, and the M$ game is over. Vista was pushed like the company's life depended on it. They advertised like crazy, got bogus reviews written up, demanded every vendor sell nothing but Vista it blew up in their faces. Everywhere you go, you hear the same thing about Vista performance. Sales fell through the floor, equipment makers and vendors lost real money and pushed back. Fanboy purchases and channel stuffing are over. If M$ could not sell to the back to school crowd, they can't sell to anyone so sales are going to go nowhere but down. Vista is not the future and M$ might go down with it. M$ can't threaten to whack anyone when they are not making money for anyone but themselves. This was all so easy to predict, now here we are.
Vendors are looking for something to fill the massive gap left by Vista, and free software fits perfectly. It's got eye candy, stability, security and it's free and have competitive service. What more can vendors ask for?
I've got one final image for you. I GNU you would have Vista. See you later M$.
The sad fact that most of our culture is owned is reason to fight, not to capitulate.
But more importantly, she has a child! ... So this copyrighted song is being used for a commercial application.
I know you did not mean it that way, but you are right. The child is the point of the video. Absolutely none of the mom's target audience is going to watch her video to hear Prince one more time, they are watching her baby and the moment could have been captured with any music. It is too bad that free music is not played over the radio and that the mom did not have a library of that instead of Prince.
Others have pointed out that the RIAA is happy to squash "non-commercial" websites. Google is about the only site that's brave enough and rich enough to fight the MAFIAA in cases like this.
that there's a huge population of people for whom Linux is not mutually exclusive from Windows. People who can love linux without hating Microsoft. People who can objectively use the best tool for the job.
At this point, believing there is a best tool for any job left on Windows is little more than ignorance. The only thing that's lacking is video board support, but that can be had for less trouble than setting up a Windoze gaming rig, and all of the major makers are now on board. With that last piece in place, the superiority of free software is more than obvious.
Being able to use both GNU/Linux and Windows at the same time is a short lived state. Sooner or later, people who get to know free software learn all of the dirty tricks that the control freaks in Redmond have gotten. After they go through a migration or two between stable GNU/Linux versions, they fully realize the extent of intentional waste M$ has put them through. At that point, their hatred for M$ is maximized and they are fully inoculated against non free software, not just M$. Thinking about the pain and suffering Windoze inflicts makes them angry. Like real inoculations, the reaction fades with time.
Forced updates will prod migration, but the intention and language have been in the EULA all along. The ultimate goal of non free software is power. To get there, owners keep secrets and make rules that render users helpless and divided.
There are sure to be "pirated" versions of Vista, but you can't trust them. The usual scammers will be uploading trojaned versions that will log your keystrokes for credit card accounts and do other evil things. Ultimately, this is a problem with all non free software, you have no way to verify correct operation and must trust the owner.
A better course of action is to get away from non free software altogether. Now is a good time to do that. Vista is more of the same from M$ and you can't be sure it will work with your hardware. M$'s greedy attempt to grab more power and money than ever has left them an empty Vista which can be compared to the Aral Sea. It's a dissaster so big you can see it from space but what you find on the ground is worse than anyone can imagine while their minds are polluted with official propaganda. Gamers and other media people are better off holding onto a copy of XP, but serious work should all be migrating to platforms that don't have the kinds of problems Vista does. The sooner you escape M$, the easier it is and the more you save.
And then, we will see the rise of pirate websites, just like how there are pirate radio stations now
We should never, ever get there. Unlike radio, there's no public interest that should keep you from running servers. Any laws forbidding publication are an obvious violation of the First Amendment. You should be able to use the bits you purchase in any way you chose.
Define "completely horrific."
The M$ treadmill is horrific. Having to buy all new stuff, reformat all your work, learn all new shortcuts, but not getting anything better. The horror is realizing that this is repeated every three years and each new release takes away choices you took for granted the last time. Vista is redefining horror in computing.
REAL Intellectual Property issues
If I were to make a virus that would modify your genes to include some "property" of mine without your consent, would I be able to keep you from breeding? The whole notion of owning organisms because you have made a tiny change to them is almost as absurd as the "Intellectual Property" confusion that supports such notions.
Patents on tools and methods of modifying living organisms might be considered inventions. Modified organisms are no more inventions than breeds of sheep are today. They don't deserve patents.
Designed to minimize YOU!
HTML isn't some magical closed source EXE, as much as they would like it to be.
This is not about magic, function or utility. It's about ownership and making you do as they say.
They would love to make the internet into something like cable TV. The greedheads who run broadcast companies do so with government monopoly grants, secrets and expensive equipment which is all geared toward control of media and public opinion. You are not allowed to play there. Your choices are to consume or do without. The internet is fundamentally different by design. You are supposed to be able to contribute and create and no machine is better than any other. These lawyers know what they are saying and they mean it. They can and will take action if they see something that looks like their crappy publication. They are philosophically opposed to free networks and they want to take control. They don't care what their page does for you. All they really care about is keeping you from helping your neighbor, so that they can make whatever money there is to extract from whatever you would like to do. They don't care if you have unmet needs, so long as they are the sole provider. It is an outrageous and immoral stand that must be taken seriously and fought.
Think I'm silly? Look at what software patent and bad laws have done for entertainment. Look at all the blocked ports on your cable box. Look at the dominant home and business OS. Digital restrictions surround you. Their main purpose is to own your culture and use it to control you and separate you from your money.
My biggest fan asks "Twitter, is that you?"
No, it is not but I wish it had been me. You can find my AC comments for this story here and here, thank you. Enjoy.
From the Fine Article:
They don't really know if the FUD worked or not, they just know that trends are unbroken. Given the disparity in features, performance and trust there's no reason for most users to want anything but GNU/Linux as a server or desktop.
The whole thing is as groundless as it is ineffective. It is too bad Dell they did not look at the source of M$'s patent FUD, because he repudiated M$'s use of his work as making the exact opposite case he had observed. M$ is more likely to violate patents for technical and cultural reasons.
If you spend all of your time doing bad things to the people you don't like, you won't have any time to do nice things for the people you do like. That makes you a total asshole. Everyone who knows you has to waste time dealing with you.
The bus is slower because it makes stops, but you can still get across the US in three days. NY to LA is 2d, 18h, 30m by Greyhound.
RMS wins yet again. He advocates bus travel for privacy and ecological reasons. Now he has speed too.
Unfuckingbelievable! The man is right again.
By whatever metric you have, gnu/linux is the winner. Reliability? Nothing else with decent consumer device support comes close. Safety? That comes along with reliability and sane practices. Flash? You can have that too. E17 has unbeatable eye candy. You can run it as an emulation on the face of a beryl cube, where the other faces an be KDE, Gnome and E16, all of which also have gadgets and other eyecandy. Yes, she can also have her lame old XP as another face of that cube. Free software is beautiful inside and out.
Why bother with car analogies when you can be direct?
But many people (and they are very vocal) do not want Freedom. They want "free" (as in beer) versions of proprietary apps to play proprietary content for "free" (again, as in beer) in proprietary formats.
You should not have to chose between software freedom and participation in your culture. You should want them both.
The original sin here is committed by people who would exert control of your culture through non free software. They try to convince people that they should be so grateful for software that they do as they are told. Do not be fooled, there is nothing special special about media players or formats. The techniques are obvious and do not merit the patents that protect them. They sometimes pretend to represent "the artist" but have as little respect for artists as they do for users. They imagine themselves masters of all.
People who yearn for specific programs want their software freedom but don't understand it yet. They want their computer to do things but have been convinced that these things can only be done with certain tools. Other tools, they fear, will not work and can not be used to cooperate with others. It does not take long to convince these kinds of people that they have been lied to.
They used the law as a weapon to destroy a person who offended them personally. They succeeded only in proving that feeble people, when given power, tend to abuse it, and that Duluth has plenty of feeble people.
Yes, that's the way right thinking people will see the penalty. The man's ignorance is matched only by his self contempt and insecurity. It's instructive to reread the quote:
The argument advanced is more plausible than someone who's never used the internet would imagine, but it's funny that he could be worked up into such a rage that he would destroy a neighbor for the petty benefit of one of the world's richest companies. Duluth is now an international laughing stock and my faith in humanity has been lowered a notch.
The Jury was naive and completely manipulated. What a wretched bunch of idiots.
What does M$ have left? M$ never has made a first rate piece of software. Ever. They have never had anything other than empty promises and intimidation. Now no one believes any of their promisses.
Fuck you, Steve Ballmer. Your company sucks life and has been rejected in the market place. Take your ill gotten money and pray you can stay out of jail.
M$ wanted to remove XP from sale in January 2008. They did everything in their power to keep it from being sold with new PCs ever since the introduction of the Vista Failure. People have complained that this service pack is long overdue, so what's the point of releasing it now? They could try to make the corporate migration path W2K to XP instead of GNU/Linux, but it looks like they want to get rid of XP. The other answer is that they don't know what they are doing.
I've got a feeling Windows XP/Vista/etc are so apt to get pwnd by the sheer amount of IE6 and under exploits, MS would rather focus resources moving forward than placing those resources on EOL programs
Anyone really concerned with security has already moved to Firefox and will soon be moving GNU/Linux or Mac. IE7 and Vista have not fixed anything important. M$ could not care less about your security.
The only thing strange is that M$ ever did anything to inhibit IE7 in the first place. It's a crucial piece of their attack on web standards, which in turn is ever more important in maintaining their desktop monopoly.
A person has been stripped of everything they own because they shared some songs. There is no better evidence that copyright law is not serving the interests of the people than that. White House advocacy of such obvious tyranny shows that the White House does not believe in justice, democracy or serving the best interests of the American people.
It is time for regime change. If no reasonable alternative is offered, I will vote for unreasonable alternatives. The Republican party has abandoned it's core principles of fiscal responsibility, international isolationism and limited government. They have become an abusive advocate of government power for the benefit of select, multinational corporations. They must be removed from power, even if the alternative is another group of corporate whores. A disrupted and ineffective government would be better than the one we have now.
Try to fight the Electronic Health Record is like trying to fight the use of computers in any other field -- it's inevitable.
Sure, but we don't have to roll over while M$ brings their culture of greed into medicine. There's no good reason to give control of medical records to a third party like them. Free software already has the answers and is already used by GE, Phillips and other medical equipment makers with a clue.
I don't have a problem with that statement at all. It's nice of them to admit they are and be described as a one trick pony. The only "formula" they have is monopoly abuse. Everything else they do is a failure, especially security, but they don't care about any of it.
Will they continue to be a success by their own standards? No, they have already failed. In fact, the article looks like hype and might actually piss the hospitals off. Are they all really jumping in with both feet when most of them don't even want to go to Vista? I doubt it.
His boss seems to have been a M$ rep. If firing someone for a technically valid opinion is less than trustworthy, you have your man.
This hardware failure has joined my M$ ACPI Poision" list. It shows that ACPI is a weapon against Apple as well as free software.