If you think it's just Microsoft, you're sadly mistaken. Most big corporations participate in this sort of shenanigans, and it plays into every law that gets passed and every candidate that gets elected.
Every M$ victory is ammunition for the next fight. The methods and results are so obvious that people are indeed rebelling and avoiding M$ "upgrades". Now that leadership in Mass has failed the fight must be continued at lower levels and in other states.
I wonder whether the so called Linux sellouts (read Novell, Linspire, Xandros) will be next. After all, fonts on these Linux systems and Linux in general are still very very wanting.
It would be nice for those users who actually want such things to have them, even though I think those fonts suck (parent post has images to compare). You can already get the M$ core fonts from M$ themselves by following crossover office instructions. M$ has the fonts in a series of files on some hideous and obfuscated support website, but Windoze applications work better with them installed so it's worth the time. If you go through all of that trouble you can have the web as M$ intended.
They look like shit to me, but you are free to pay for them. Until recently, the rest of us didn't have a choice when we buy a computer from most major vendors.
My wife did not like them either. She almost picked the Apple Safari fonts once but then consistently chose konqueror/debian. This may be due to aliasing from the screen shot, but he's used png so that's probably not an issue.
Oh my god. Hey, I know - why don't you go through this list [wikipedia.org] and tell us which of those sophomoric money pits were "crushed" by "M$". That should be really entertaining.
Remember Netscape, the anti-trust trial and all that? Part of the reason there was a melt down in the late 90's was because people realized they were not going to make any money in personal computing as long as M$ was allowed to operate the way they do. The other parts of the meltdown were caused by telco and publishers systematically destroying their competition. Surely you remember having a choice of DSL companies and online music vendors like mp3.com? The "money pits" are easy to point at, but the meltdown was more about legitimate business than it was about bad ideas.
This is as big a deal as pictures. M$ is sure to make this one of those awefull non-standards like ACPI, MTP and a host of other. Want to bet their idea of a no charge "implementation" is a NDA protected SDK? They will then force it onto any camera makers who care to have their devices work with Windoze in the future. Then they will sabotage the alternatives so that their "captive" audience will have trouble sharing pictures with everyone else and themselves. In the worst of cases, there will be dozens of incompatible implementations, all guarded by a M$ patent, that leave people's photo albums locked down.
What he's saying, in his own opinion, is that he thinks musicians are communicating less because the recent technology has been making it so much easier for people to produce things on their own.
Amazing new communications media keeps people from communicating!
The idea that an increased ability to share knowledge and culture should somehow make us "colder" and less rich is absurd. People are going to take advantage of things and make better music for it.
Sir Elton may be right, but fundamentally, the Internet is far more valuable than the transient phenomenon of pop music.
The choice is false because better communications are providing more and better music than the MAFIAA could ever hope to own. Sir Elton simply has no way to parse the stream and remains ignorant of great work going on. It's not his job anyway, his masters are supposed to do that and have failed.
He's also dead wrong about the internet keeping people apart. It should be pretty obvious to anyone that communications networks bring people together, as we sit here and chat. It's not so obvious that this better communications will not keep people from getting together physically in music clubs, but that's going to keep happening as long as people have spare time. When they do get together, what they will see are acts that are far better informed of wold music trends than ever before. People are co-operating as never before, sharing lyics, melodies, tabs and other things the RIAA would like to shut down.
Sir Elton's stand against the future is not surprising. The past has been good to him and he's surrounded by people who will fill his head with bullshit. Garbage in, garbage out.
Why are you trying to turn this discussion into another Microsoft hate party?
Statements of fact are only a "hate party" when you hate reality.
Why do you feel the need to come in here and post some stupid FSF-sponsored blabber about "M$ Windoze" when the whole thing is about Web 2.0 companies?
I'm not FSF sponsored or stupid, thank you, but I am sick of hearing propaganda about the "bubble" of the late 90's. Many if not most of those companies were crushed by the incumbent powers of the time, which include M$. Blather about the "bubble" blames the victims and masks wrongdoing.
No, the real madness was M$ thinking they could really force the world to use and pay for something as easy to copy and replace as software. The amazing thing is how long they pulled it off, but it's over. Get used to it, companies and users are claiming their freedom.
Ummm. O.K. Except for the fact I was explaining why a company wouldn't sell a product with little demmand...
But the best excuse you can come up with for selling Vista is that Vista will be "uniform" with itself if everyone used it. That's circular, don't you think?
You then go on to completely ignore the flexibility of free interfaces to talk about progman.exe as if it does anything of importance outside of Win3.1. KDE, for example, has been made to look exactly like the current versions of XP. No doubt, usability studies will show that people used to working with XP will be more productive on KDE than Vista, just as they did back when M$ switched from 98 to XP. Distributions like Xandros provide a smoother transition to modern software than Vista but give you hardware that works, data security and system stability.
If you look at his list of potential failures, the only thing they really have in common is M$ interference. Dorvak pours scorn onto a bunch of network uses but misses the obvious failure. User generated content, mobile internet (iPhone a "bad sign"!), online advertising, video mania, and social networking are all laughed at, but are far more solid business ideas than an OS and file format monopoly. When M$ hits the skids, we will see fewer broken toolbars, better video on demand and more reliable online advertising.
There are plenty of "bubble" companies that would have survived if there were not the action of incumbent companies. Significant last mile problems created by telco and M$ doomed many good ideas that are now flourishing. Sure, using FedEx 40lbs of dog food may never be a good idea but we will eventually see next generation grocery stores that take much less effort and give much greater choice and information. The public execution of companies like mp3.com are blatant examples of anti-competitive behavior. I'd consider Dorvak a lot more cluefull if he were able to connect the dots of the last crash.
I'd rank him IQ 100 if he were able to see the disaster that's yawning before M$. M$ never fully recovered from the last bubble and their stock price reflects that. They made his list for a few quirky ideas but there were many more, like a "squirting" music player with it's own special digital restrictions. Every idea M$ has is designed to further entrench their OS monopoly and almost all of them outside OS and Office have lost money. Now even their core products are in trouble, and make no difference to their bottom line. M$'s monopoly position depends on public and vendor perception that's quickly changing. It won't be long until we look back and see M$ and Pet.com in the same incredulous light.
Vista is selling via pre-loads and it'll keep selling this way until the public+dog are beat into submission and accept it.
You can't beat people down with something they don't have. It's not really selling and that's really hurting PC sales because people already own a system that runs XP. Vista has not been a big enough improvement, and many are calling it a downgrade due to bugs, outrageous hardware requirements and digital restrictions. Even M$'s bottom line is unchanged, despite Vista and Office releases. At this point, only gnu/linux and OSX have real improvements and they are both selling at an increasing rate. Vista is a long way from breaking even, say nothing of market dominance.
If you think that's bad for the Soft, just wait until the market is flooded with $200 gnu/linux laptops. Big changes that have been a long time coming are finally here.
Why is this a surprise to "the [PC] industry"? Vista's a new piece of software; at the begining it's bound to be less mature and less stable than it will be in the future.
Big vendors like Dell were forced to carry nothing but Vista but very quickly were forced by low sales to offer both XP and GNU/Linux. Just about everyone knows about Vista but less than 12% actually wants it. More people might actually be interested in free software than that! M$ has pushed hard against people's will, but Vista is looking more like a failure every day.
This move is also surprising, given the CEO's gripes about Vista not making his company any money and not being ready. M$ must have whacked him or something.
It's amazing how people can be so blind to the TCO of Windoze:
There are a lot of extra costs and little have to do with Linux but selling a product in an area where there is little demmand.
Now you understand the man's frustration with Vista. Really. Every few years M$ changes their UI without substantial changes to anything else. Vista is the most radical change since 3.1 to 95, yet people like you just take that cost for granted.
With GNU/Linux, on the other hand, you have a choice of UIs and they remain the same over decades. Have you ever seen the first web browser, made in 1990? Compare that interface to Window Maker or AfterStep, which have been stable for almost as long and is still available to those who want it. Those are only the beginning of your choices and they all work well together.
The whole point of TFA is about switching AWAY from Vista.
Actually, the point of the article is never going to Vista in the first place:
If you're a Vista-wary Windows user who would rather switch than fight, should you move to a Linux distro or Apple's OS X?... If you're one of those Windows users who are less than enchanted by what you've seen of Vista and you're thinking about switching, you face some tough choices that can make you feel like a pioneer.
The problem is that M$ has already forced radical change on their users. Had M$ allowed competition or freedom on their platform, there would be a choice of UIs and this would be a non issue. Instead, M$ has kept their old school, forklift upgrade treadmill running. M$ fanboys who don't mind throwing away all of their hardware and software as still faced with the fact that M$ has not provided a stable and modern OS as a reward. Information week seems to have picked up on the fact that less than 12% of home and business users want Vista and Vista is not selling.
Lets see... $250M / 4000 = $62,500 per server being consolidated? I mean, I know floor space, buildings, racks, power, AC etc cost money... but that's still a *lot*. Anyone care to chime in on how close to normal that is?
Running 2003 server, each needs an "admin", licensing fees for software, you know it gets expensive.
Really, I think the cost was in 130 football fields of mostly unused server warehouse.
The article says that the data centers required for the 4000 "small computer servers" aggregate to about 8 million square feet. It takes IBM 2000 square feet to house a small computer?
It's less amazing when you think of it as six 300x400 yard warehouses run by clients. Those are big buildings but "data centers" are usually large. There are not enough details from the article to figure it all out but four thousand computers to 30 boxes is an impressive feat that will save lots of electricity.
Dedicated attack bot, dedazo spews forth with malice again:
are you actually claiming that no one complains or even seeks help on the internet to get Ubuntu running or solving a problem with app packages on OS X? And hell, since there are about 98 Windows users for every Linux one I expect that the volume of problems will be significantly higher for Windows... and why am I even saying this? It's frakin' logic, for god's sakes.
Things would be that way if gnu/linux was anything like Winblows, but it's not. The web is full of cursing at Windows because windows vendors promise to take care of you but don't tell you what you need to know. The gnu/linux people have plenty of sites to make up for that and they form a resource for all users that everyone appreciates. It's hard to hate and complain about free software because it's written by people who tell you everything they know and expect nothing in return. More importantly, gnu/linux works and keeps working.
No amount of creative generalizations, lies and insightful-sounding "M$ is dying" rants will change that. Linux still has less market share than Windows 98. Those are the facts.
The only fact you left out was that Vista does not work. The rest of your invincible M$ talk falls apart from there. Enjoy the list of Vista failrues and rejections, it's getting longer every day.
An auction that's only half rigged is still rigged. I can't believe the FCC was so in love with the incumbents they would down 4.6 billion dollars in bids.
People care about being able to read public documents five years after they were created, ODF has only begun to fix that problem and it's adoption is far better than anything previous, except ASCII. There have been a few legal setbacks, but the momentum is really on ODF's side.
It would help if the supporters of Free Software and Open Software would stop fighting the internecine battles and start uniformly supporting Open Standards.
Oh, you mean like ODF, which has been adopted by every one except M$? How often do you see IBM, Sun, FSF, Gnome, KDE, etc, etc, agree on a document format?
You might not agree that replacing MSFT monopoly with some kind of duopoly
You are right. I don't see anything but free software as competitive in the future. There won't be a monopoly, duopoly or anything similar. There will simply be a competitive market.
XP did not do well - No, it only managed to capture 97% of the desktop market.
By M$ standards and needs, even your inflated share is not good enough. It took two or three years for XP to gain majority share, which is one of the reasons M$ has delayed Vista for so long. Their absolute growth has not been anything good and Wall Street was not convinced - M$'s stock price has remained flat since the tech crash of the late 90's:
Microsofts dominance is being challenged as never before by Google in particular, and Wall Street refuses to believe the company will regain its edge. The companys stock has largely remained flat since the end of the dot-com era.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think it's just Microsoft, you're sadly mistaken. Most big corporations participate in this sort of shenanigans, and it plays into every law that gets passed and every candidate that gets elected.
M$, as the US Government noticed is a coercive monopoly. They have enjoyed a 36% ROI over the last ten years, an outrageous rate that dwarfs others big dumb companies like Exxon.
Every M$ victory is ammunition for the next fight. The methods and results are so obvious that people are indeed rebelling and avoiding M$ "upgrades". Now that leadership in Mass has failed the fight must be continued at lower levels and in other states.
It should be obvious, but Bill Gate's victory lap was premature and I told you so.
Or right here on the Sourceforge network in source RPM form, but don't let that stop your bitching.
A link to cab extraction utilities and a pile of .exe "form" fonts? How friendly. Must be that cross platform obfuscation M$ likes to talk up.^M
I wonder whether the so called Linux sellouts (read Novell, Linspire, Xandros) will be next. After all, fonts on these Linux systems and Linux in general are still very very wanting.
It would be nice for those users who actually want such things to have them, even though I think those fonts suck (parent post has images to compare). You can already get the M$ core fonts from M$ themselves by following crossover office instructions. M$ has the fonts in a series of files on some hideous and obfuscated support website, but Windoze applications work better with them installed so it's worth the time. If you go through all of that trouble you can have the web as M$ intended.
The windows ones look the best to me.
They look like shit to me, but you are free to pay for them. Until recently, the rest of us didn't have a choice when we buy a computer from most major vendors.
My wife did not like them either. She almost picked the Apple Safari fonts once but then consistently chose konqueror/debian. This may be due to aliasing from the screen shot, but he's used png so that's probably not an issue.
Kudos to QuantumG for putting the page up.
Oh my god. Hey, I know - why don't you go through this list [wikipedia.org] and tell us which of those sophomoric money pits were "crushed" by "M$". That should be really entertaining.
Remember Netscape, the anti-trust trial and all that? Part of the reason there was a melt down in the late 90's was because people realized they were not going to make any money in personal computing as long as M$ was allowed to operate the way they do. The other parts of the meltdown were caused by telco and publishers systematically destroying their competition. Surely you remember having a choice of DSL companies and online music vendors like mp3.com? The "money pits" are easy to point at, but the meltdown was more about legitimate business than it was about bad ideas.
If Vista takes off, we will have another 10 years of computer stagnation, so it's a good thing that's not happening.
This is as big a deal as pictures. M$ is sure to make this one of those awefull non-standards like ACPI, MTP and a host of other. Want to bet their idea of a no charge "implementation" is a NDA protected SDK? They will then force it onto any camera makers who care to have their devices work with Windoze in the future. Then they will sabotage the alternatives so that their "captive" audience will have trouble sharing pictures with everyone else and themselves. In the worst of cases, there will be dozens of incompatible implementations, all guarded by a M$ patent, that leave people's photo albums locked down.
What, me cynical? Hell yes, and the evidence is in your face. If jpeg 2000 is not good enough, there's PNG. If M$ cared to improve imaging, they would simply surrender their patents and let others improve existing standards. But no, they don't like free formats and will do everything in their power to crush them.
Let's just hope this bad idea dies with Vista.
What he's saying, in his own opinion, is that he thinks musicians are communicating less because the recent technology has been making it so much easier for people to produce things on their own.
Amazing new communications media keeps people from communicating!
The idea that an increased ability to share knowledge and culture should somehow make us "colder" and less rich is absurd. People are going to take advantage of things and make better music for it.
Sir Elton may be right, but fundamentally, the Internet is far more valuable than the transient phenomenon of pop music.
The choice is false because better communications are providing more and better music than the MAFIAA could ever hope to own. Sir Elton simply has no way to parse the stream and remains ignorant of great work going on. It's not his job anyway, his masters are supposed to do that and have failed.
He's also dead wrong about the internet keeping people apart. It should be pretty obvious to anyone that communications networks bring people together, as we sit here and chat. It's not so obvious that this better communications will not keep people from getting together physically in music clubs, but that's going to keep happening as long as people have spare time. When they do get together, what they will see are acts that are far better informed of wold music trends than ever before. People are co-operating as never before, sharing lyics, melodies, tabs and other things the RIAA would like to shut down.
Sir Elton's stand against the future is not surprising. The past has been good to him and he's surrounded by people who will fill his head with bullshit. Garbage in, garbage out.
Why are you trying to turn this discussion into another Microsoft hate party?
Statements of fact are only a "hate party" when you hate reality.
Why do you feel the need to come in here and post some stupid FSF-sponsored blabber about "M$ Windoze" when the whole thing is about Web 2.0 companies?
I'm not FSF sponsored or stupid, thank you, but I am sick of hearing propaganda about the "bubble" of the late 90's. Many if not most of those companies were crushed by the incumbent powers of the time, which include M$. Blather about the "bubble" blames the victims and masks wrongdoing.
No, the real madness was M$ thinking they could really force the world to use and pay for something as easy to copy and replace as software. The amazing thing is how long they pulled it off, but it's over. Get used to it, companies and users are claiming their freedom.
This just goes round and round:
Ummm. O.K. Except for the fact I was explaining why a company wouldn't sell a product with little demmand...
But the best excuse you can come up with for selling Vista is that Vista will be "uniform" with itself if everyone used it. That's circular, don't you think?
You then go on to completely ignore the flexibility of free interfaces to talk about progman.exe as if it does anything of importance outside of Win3.1. KDE, for example, has been made to look exactly like the current versions of XP. No doubt, usability studies will show that people used to working with XP will be more productive on KDE than Vista, just as they did back when M$ switched from 98 to XP. Distributions like Xandros provide a smoother transition to modern software than Vista but give you hardware that works, data security and system stability.
If you look at his list of potential failures, the only thing they really have in common is M$ interference. Dorvak pours scorn onto a bunch of network uses but misses the obvious failure. User generated content, mobile internet (iPhone a "bad sign"!), online advertising, video mania, and social networking are all laughed at, but are far more solid business ideas than an OS and file format monopoly. When M$ hits the skids, we will see fewer broken toolbars, better video on demand and more reliable online advertising.
There are plenty of "bubble" companies that would have survived if there were not the action of incumbent companies. Significant last mile problems created by telco and M$ doomed many good ideas that are now flourishing. Sure, using FedEx 40lbs of dog food may never be a good idea but we will eventually see next generation grocery stores that take much less effort and give much greater choice and information. The public execution of companies like mp3.com are blatant examples of anti-competitive behavior. I'd consider Dorvak a lot more cluefull if he were able to connect the dots of the last crash.
I'd rank him IQ 100 if he were able to see the disaster that's yawning before M$. M$ never fully recovered from the last bubble and their stock price reflects that. They made his list for a few quirky ideas but there were many more, like a "squirting" music player with it's own special digital restrictions. Every idea M$ has is designed to further entrench their OS monopoly and almost all of them outside OS and Office have lost money. Now even their core products are in trouble, and make no difference to their bottom line. M$'s monopoly position depends on public and vendor perception that's quickly changing. It won't be long until we look back and see M$ and Pet.com in the same incredulous light.
Vista is selling via pre-loads and it'll keep selling this way until the public+dog are beat into submission and accept it.
You can't beat people down with something they don't have. It's not really selling and that's really hurting PC sales because people already own a system that runs XP. Vista has not been a big enough improvement, and many are calling it a downgrade due to bugs, outrageous hardware requirements and digital restrictions. Even M$'s bottom line is unchanged, despite Vista and Office releases. At this point, only gnu/linux and OSX have real improvements and they are both selling at an increasing rate. Vista is a long way from breaking even, say nothing of market dominance.
If you think that's bad for the Soft, just wait until the market is flooded with $200 gnu/linux laptops. Big changes that have been a long time coming are finally here.
Why is this a surprise to "the [PC] industry"? Vista's a new piece of software; at the begining it's bound to be less mature and less stable than it will be in the future.
Big vendors like Dell were forced to carry nothing but Vista but very quickly were forced by low sales to offer both XP and GNU/Linux. Just about everyone knows about Vista but less than 12% actually wants it. More people might actually be interested in free software than that! M$ has pushed hard against people's will, but Vista is looking more like a failure every day.
This move is also surprising, given the CEO's gripes about Vista not making his company any money and not being ready. M$ must have whacked him or something.
It's amazing how people can be so blind to the TCO of Windoze:
There are a lot of extra costs and little have to do with Linux but selling a product in an area where there is little demmand.
Now you understand the man's frustration with Vista. Really. Every few years M$ changes their UI without substantial changes to anything else. Vista is the most radical change since 3.1 to 95, yet people like you just take that cost for granted.
With GNU/Linux, on the other hand, you have a choice of UIs and they remain the same over decades. Have you ever seen the first web browser, made in 1990? Compare that interface to Window Maker or AfterStep, which have been stable for almost as long and is still available to those who want it. Those are only the beginning of your choices and they all work well together.
The whole point of TFA is about switching AWAY from Vista.
Actually, the point of the article is never going to Vista in the first place:
The problem is that M$ has already forced radical change on their users. Had M$ allowed competition or freedom on their platform, there would be a choice of UIs and this would be a non issue. Instead, M$ has kept their old school, forklift upgrade treadmill running. M$ fanboys who don't mind throwing away all of their hardware and software as still faced with the fact that M$ has not provided a stable and modern OS as a reward. Information week seems to have picked up on the fact that less than 12% of home and business users want Vista and Vista is not selling.
Lets see... $250M / 4000 = $62,500 per server being consolidated? I mean, I know floor space, buildings, racks, power, AC etc cost money... but that's still a *lot*. Anyone care to chime in on how close to normal that is?
Running 2003 server, each needs an "admin", licensing fees for software, you know it gets expensive.
Really, I think the cost was in 130 football fields of mostly unused server warehouse.
The article says that the data centers required for the 4000 "small computer servers" aggregate to about 8 million square feet. It takes IBM 2000 square feet to house a small computer?
It's less amazing when you think of it as six 300x400 yard warehouses run by clients. Those are big buildings but "data centers" are usually large. There are not enough details from the article to figure it all out but four thousand computers to 30 boxes is an impressive feat that will save lots of electricity.
Dedicated attack bot, dedazo spews forth with malice again:
are you actually claiming that no one complains or even seeks help on the internet to get Ubuntu running or solving a problem with app packages on OS X? And hell, since there are about 98 Windows users for every Linux one I expect that the volume of problems will be significantly higher for Windows... and why am I even saying this? It's frakin' logic, for god's sakes.
Things would be that way if gnu/linux was anything like Winblows, but it's not. The web is full of cursing at Windows because windows vendors promise to take care of you but don't tell you what you need to know. The gnu/linux people have plenty of sites to make up for that and they form a resource for all users that everyone appreciates. It's hard to hate and complain about free software because it's written by people who tell you everything they know and expect nothing in return. More importantly, gnu/linux works and keeps working.
No amount of creative generalizations, lies and insightful-sounding "M$ is dying" rants will change that. Linux still has less market share than Windows 98. Those are the facts.
The only fact you left out was that Vista does not work. The rest of your invincible M$ talk falls apart from there. Enjoy the list of Vista failrues and rejections, it's getting longer every day.
An auction that's only half rigged is still rigged. I can't believe the FCC was so in love with the incumbents they would down 4.6 billion dollars in bids.
Gosh, you mean they'll have to be happy being fucking enormous for a little while before they figure out how to grow again?
Kind of like Digital Research, but M$ has been ten times more fuck than the rest of the industry combined. Think big fat dinosaur.
... but it's a lie. Office 2007 and Vista have very low adoption rates and Vista is looking more like a failure every day.
People care about being able to read public documents five years after they were created, ODF has only begun to fix that problem and it's adoption is far better than anything previous, except ASCII. There have been a few legal setbacks, but the momentum is really on ODF's side.
It would help if the supporters of Free Software and Open Software would stop fighting the internecine battles and start uniformly supporting Open Standards.
Oh, you mean like ODF, which has been adopted by every one except M$? How often do you see IBM, Sun, FSF, Gnome, KDE, etc, etc, agree on a document format?
You might not agree that replacing MSFT monopoly with some kind of duopoly
You are right. I don't see anything but free software as competitive in the future. There won't be a monopoly, duopoly or anything similar. There will simply be a competitive market.
A silly AC taunts:
XP did not do well - No, it only managed to capture 97% of the desktop market.
By M$ standards and needs, even your inflated share is not good enough. It took two or three years for XP to gain majority share, which is one of the reasons M$ has delayed Vista for so long. Their absolute growth has not been anything good and Wall Street was not convinced - M$'s stock price has remained flat since the tech crash of the late 90's:
Ouch, that's got to hurt. Wait till they see how well Vista is really doing. It's all over for them.
TheSHAD0W attempts self amusement:
Students are going to have to learn how to use Vista, so might as well dump 'em in at the deep end...
I don't think so. I think it's more like this:
M$ is going to have to learn how to use free software, so might as well dump 'em in at the deep end...
Only unconditional GPL of all of their code will remove them from further suspicion.