You're comparing IMPACT with RISK. There's a risk that a dam will fail and cause an enormous flood killing everyone and destroying anything in it's path.
As for waste - your dam destroys the local ecology and renders several square miles uninhabitable forever.
No free lunch, but 30 tons of radioactive waste per year isn't all that much. Politicians are just too stupid to allow us to reprocess or dispose of it...so it sits.
Re: precious little real estate - Little is relative. Put them on a same-scaled map with a solar farm of comperable capacity (oh wait, how many GWe solar farms are there?) and the nuclear plant will appear miniscule. Same with wind farms or hydro (how many square miles is that lake?). Nuclear plants DO NOT consume arable land. They can exist pretty much anywhere though the preference is near water for cooling.
re: radiation compared to coal - This is no trick card. A 1 GWe coal plant spews almost 20 tons of uranium and thorium OUT THE STACK per year compared with 25-30 tons of nuclear waste tightly controlled in a cooling pool. That doesn't include all the other fun emmissions CO2, SOx, halides, soot...need I go on?
Comparing Chernobyl to modern reactors is like comparing the pre-model-t cars to your late model Lexus. But hey, it's the one real incident you have to troll on. 3MI - erm, there was no radiation release. The containment functioned exactly as designed. If memory serves one of the other reactor vessels is actually still functioning in low power mode at 3MI.
Re: Older nuclear plants venting 100 cubic feet of noble gas per 2 weeks - Read that again. Older plants. We're talking about building NEW ones. Furthermore, a substance does not become radioactive just by being in contact with something else radioactive. Helium and Neon are stable in all isotopes. The few non-stable isotopes of argon, krypton, etc. are mostly beta decay and low energy. You can blow "radioactive" helium around all day and it means jack squat. How about providing some useful information instead of FUD?
Re: the rest of that inane statement - Yes, radioactive particules accumulate in the food chain assuming you put more in than decay. Yes - they decay too. Which means some LEAVES the food chain as well. Buy hey, coal contributes FAR more radioactive elements than nuclear.
re: breeder reactors - So your bar for ecconomical use is 1GWe for 1000 years? Name me one FUNCTIONAL man-made item that's still in use after 1000 years. I guarantee your concrete dam will not last 1000 years. Your geothermal pump station? Nope. Heck, solar cells degrade and are generally disposed of after 25 years.
re: 600 years to store fissile ash - Big deal. You want to design a power station that will last 1000 years. I'm sure storing some 'trash' for 600 won't be a problem. In actuality, 600 year storage is easy to do with current technology. Ecological stability over that short a scale is simple.
re: cheap power - Just because it can be made abundant does not mean it will be too cheap to meter. Even if generation was free, distribution costs and maintenance is substantial. That applies to any power source and is entirely irrelevant. Troll...
Re: Wind is here - Wrong. Wind, solar, geo, tidal power exists as a fringe method of generation - some more so than others. Your argument is invensting billions in research of these instead of billions actually BUILDING nuclear plants. Which has a greater and more immediate return? I thought so. Never mind the additional billions that would be needed to actually BUILD a substantial "renewable" energy base.
re: downsides - Sorry, troll. People like you scream from the rooftops about the 'dangers of nuk-lear power' while not even understanding the facts that you're so badly twisting.
re: Long term solution - Nuclear power is the only CURRENTLY VIABLE solution to fixing the mess we're in with burning coal and other fossil fuels. Maybe one day someone will invent a 90% efficient solar cell that can be made for $100/KW. When that happens i'm sure there will be a big rush to build them. Today we're at 40% on a good day and $5000-10K/KW compared to ~$1300/KW for a nuclear plant.
So please, continue to cry about the dangers of everything you don't understand while proposing solutions that have no current practical or feasible implementation.
Uhm...creating a few billion cubic meters of lake for your hydro is EXTREMELY damaging to the local enviornment. If effectively and totally destroys several square miles and makes it entirely uninhabitable to people.
And uhm, that lake lasts as long as your generating power there. Indefinitely...while radioactive waste can have a long half life it eventually decays. That lake? Not so much.
To add to that, nuclear power effectively releases ZERO waste with the exception of heat (which ever plant does unless it's 100% efficient). ALL nuclear waste is self-contained during operation and approx 25-30 tons of spent fuel needs to be processed a/o disposed of per plant per year.
Coal, by comparison releases a bit under 20 tons of uranium and thorium INTO THE ATMOSPHERE per plant per year. Plus other wastes, CO2, etc.
My point is that nuclear is probably as benign as you can get. Fairly small footprint (especially compared with comperable power generation from solar or hydro), no emmissive waste, minimal total waste, high generation density, plenty of available fuel (effectively unlimited in breeder reactors). Show me any power generation techology that can compare and i'll gladly move my support.
Erm, that doesn't mean the power feeding your house comes directly from a wind turbine. It means the allocate xyz MWh at the elevated price to you and dump it into the grid. Right along with the coal and other power. Electrons are electrons beyond that. The fact that your power hasn't gone out is anecdotal and entirely unrelated unfortunately.
- sunlight is everwhere therefore people can obviously live anywhere
- if you limit people to living where energy sources exist you will quickly over-utilize the energy and have problems anyway. Wind and solar require large areas...which is opposite from what you get with high density population
I'm sorry but...WHAT? You're about 40 years behind reality if you think nuclear is so dirty it's a close runner with coal. Yes, depending on the plant type there is waste. Waste in the range of 25-30 tons of 'spend fuel' per year that needs to be sequestered and saved or reprocessed and re-used (yes, recycling! nuclear can do it too).
Do you know how many tons of carbon (aka soot) gets past the scrubbers at a coal plant in a given DAY? How many tons of CO2 is released? How about the fact that the minute amount of unranium and thorium found in coal adds up to 5.2 and 12.8 tons annually for a 1GW plant. That's almost 20 tons RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE yearly as opposed to 30 tons sequestered in a cooling pool. Daily CO2 and soot emmissions from coal dwarf those numbers.
Solar insolation is what, 1Kw/sq meter at ground level? Even that is a retardedly huge amount and a lot closer to home but i digress...
The problem with grabbing a few TW of energy from space that would normally 'fly by' is you're now dumping that excess energy into our global heat budget. Need to be careful with that one too. Overall though, I think it's a great idea and it's within our technology base to do so in the next 10 or so years. Politically, it will be an expensive, overpriced nightmare that probably will never get off the ground (pun intended, as it's actually accurate).
You're right. Let's take a wrecking ball to NYC...and every other major city. Let's scatter the population around like hermits. Suggesting we relocate a few billion people globally so they're near renewable energy sources is insane, not to mention entirely impractical.
I love how people talk about the methods to make use of renewable this or cleaner that without taking into account the reprocussions. Oh, and did you figure in the energy needed to move all those people and construct that new housing? That has to come from somewhere too.
Destroying how many square miles to create your hydro (aka lake formation in front of your dam)
Geo i don't know much about pro/con. If it was that amazing why isn't everyone using it?
Tidal is still beyond our infrastrucure to provide at scale and it's (supposedly) very likely to ruin marine ecology in the process
Wind is great in theory. The theory being you have lots of wind and lots of land. That's generally not where lots of people live. I can't put a 100' turbine on my roof in lower NY
Solar has high cost and very dirty manufacturing
In addition, only geo (maybe) and hydro are capable of providing "base load" power.
They're great ideas but not a single one is practical for large scale generation throughout the country.
Oh, and nuclear doesn't have to be as "dirty" as it is, but paranoid people are afraid of breeder type reactors that produce more fuel than they consume so instead you have to keep providing more fuel and disposing of the depleted fuel. Besides that, coal in the cleanest plants is still FAR dirtier than nuclear. Guess what provides something like 50% of our base generation in the US?
How much time is wasted on training or re-learning going from OO to MSO? At home, that's probably not worth $600 to Joe User. In the office with 100's or 1000's (or more) users using known software saves a lot in 'soft costs'.
As for intelligent decisions between OO and MSO - where are most of the MSO sales? Corporate customers. Where are most of the higher-price editions sold? Corporate customers. The same people with the productivity justification above. Joe user will more often than not buy (assuming he doesn't pirate) the student version or OEM CD-and-Key that's far less than $600.
I noticed. I submitted my address once well before the cut-off time (didn't know it was coming) and the email never came through to activate. I tried again later and it came through exactly 3 minutes after they killed the freebies.
GAH. I was actually going to have a legal copy of Vista (or office 2007). Oh well. MS loses out on the deal, not me. I simply won't run a *legal* copy of Vista of O2K7.
Maybe someone at M$ realized that their software is so "popular" (read: ubiquitous) because it was so easy to pirate back in the day. 'Oh, Bill, here's the new version of windows. Install and try it out and give me back the disks tomorrow' does very well for spreading the popularity of an OS. It's a HELL of a lot better than lame commercials on TV that no one really wants to see. 'Oh, Bill, there's another version of windows that doesn't do anything too special. It's $400 for the version that anyone would actually want. Why not go buy a copy and see if it's any good.' - The difference is utterly apparant.
Now, you'll say that M$ doesn't make money off number one. You're wrong. If the majority of people are familiar with 'operating system XYZ' a company is going to look to that first when it comes time to choose because really, it's easier to have a small department secure a crummy OS that everyone can work in than educate and train (and hire!) people on something more obscure even if it is superior.
p.s. Intentionally avoiding discussion of 'better but more obscure'. I may or may not agree...but it's not relevant to the point. This theme doesn't have to apply only to windows. There are very few examples of sucessful software with 0% piracy rates. A very few number of games (i.e. WoW) are the only examples that come to mind...and they're 1) low up-front cost compared to windows or office and 2) pure entertainment 3) offen have free trials
Ahem. That assumes the system allows such a vote to be exercised in an useful manner.
I'll skip the rant, there's enough holes in our voting system that i'd be here all night. Besides which, our lovely sheeple simply decide which candidate had the best commercial (unless they vote by party in which case...meh) and vote that way.
If you get caught possessing illegal drugs you can end up sitting in jail for a year or two. I'm sure a judge won't take too kindly to having other restricted substances on-hand but that's circumstantial and in addition to the already mentioned crime.
Your second half though has no overt illegality. If you got raided and they found no illegally copied DVDs then... no crime even if you had DVD burner(s). Besides, unless you're a DVD factory it's a civil matter.
If I wanted to use long words to prove I'm smart I would have chosen better ones. Since you insist on putting words in my mouth and try to insult me please at least try to do a better job.
You're exactly the person who they aim for. Their laptops hit some high points but fail on durability. The little gimmicky toys they all have cause more problems than they solve and the laptops just generally go to hell in short order.
Personally I reccomend Dell for 'home' users and IBM T or X series for power users. Yes IBM costs more but I have a T43 that was rock solid no matter what I did to it and despite MUCH abuse (including physcial) nothing ever broke or stopped working.
The swiss army knife here has lots of blades you could use. But is the knife edge best for cutting off a tree branch? Would the toothpick be best for self defense.
For a regular user, the default build (aka plain knife) is just fine. Once you get beyond that...you need some further refinement.
How about the mid-range (or even low side of high-end) computers so totally crippled by spyware, viruses, loggers, trojans, pre-installed garbage, etc. they they run like crap?
I've seen dual-core and even C2D machines with 2+GB of ram that crawl. People tell me: "Oh, my 1-2 year old PC is slow. Maybe i should get a new one" or "Oh, my PC is only 3 months old and it's so slow, it must be defective"
Oh, and yes: Vaio = crap. Some of them are reasonable powerful but they're mainly just sleek looking metal colored plastic with a billion proprietary gizmos and gadgets. It does show that people will buy something based on perceived image.
"Yeah, but they probably aren't the low end, now, are they?" I can buy a $400 laptop that comes with windows. I can buy a $250 desktop...windows. Unless you're talking OLPC how much lower are we going?
"I think a lot of people are fed up with virus software updates and other fine Windows features" Ok, who likes getting a virus? Guess what though, the people who create them target the widest audience. If linux or Mac had a 90% market share would you like to take odds that there would be virus and trojans for them? As for software updates, they exist on linux and mac too.
"The high end of the market is moving to Mac" Show me some vaugely accurate statistics on this? If you mean 'the over-priced and under-featured' market then sure. I can buy a very pretty Mac for twice what a comperable PC (that actually runs my software) would cost.
"and the low end -- at least the more knowledgeable among them -- are moving to Linux" Again - justify this. The one-off OLPC and wally world PC don't count as they're statistically insignificant compared to the number of PCs sold in the budget segment. Just because i buy a $200 linux PC doesn't mean it's staying linus either. I like the jab about implying that low end users not running linux aren't knowledgable but...unfortunately they actually know better than most. See, they understand that the marketplace and most jobs that require computer skills want windows and MS orifice skills. If you're talking recreations...well that $9.99 "1000 games" CD at target isn't going to be for Linux.
And finally. Your free internet access. I'm glad you have such a great library system. I'm glad there's free internet for anyone to use. That's a great tool for young and/or poor. The fact that it's on Linux is anecdotal. Unless you're the admin that runs the computer system there I don't think you're an appropriate person to say that no one complains about it not being windows. Not having windows available does mean there's one less learning opportunity that is important for the workforce.
I disagree. Piracy is one of the founding reasons why Microsoft is in it's current (giant, hugely profitable, monolithical) position. It is a KEY reason and without it they likely would have had far less success.
Why? Well when I "learned windows" I didn't exactly pay full price for each upgrade copy. If I had to spend gobs of money (especially to a teenager) to try out a new OS I simply would not have done it. I would have passed on the knowledge unless there was a specific return or entertainment value. Hell, I think that's one reason why Vista adoption is so slow. No one wants to lay down $2-400 for an OS upgrade when they can buy an entirely new computer for $500. So they just wait.
By doing such a good job at PREVENTING casual piracy MS has ensured that many people will pass on vista until/unless it's given to them for free as part of an upgrade.
I'm not saying we should go back to the days of 111-1111111 or 425-1234567 but MS isn't serving it's best long-term needs by it's current actions.
That's like saying you found 5 thousand people who abbhor alcohol so it must be bad. That's a lot of people and if you put them all together it would be an impressive crowd.
Then when you compare them to the billion or three that either enjoy or are indifferent about alcohol suddenly they disappear into insignifigance.
I'm sorry, but games are what sells 90% of high end PC hardware. Please tell me how many people need a video card (or two of them!) with 786MB of ram, highly-paralleled GPU, faster ram than the main system ram, etc. for productivity?
Yes, there's the.01% that do CAD (that haven't bought a professional card) or other professional uses but they're few and far between. Vista is a hog, true - but how many generations old is a pentium4-2GHz? Because that will handily run XP Pro.
As for your first point - a linux distro that does that exists. Unfortunately the entire user interface is different and 90%+ of people are unfamiliar with it to the point that productivity would suffer if they switched. No one wants to bother and no company wants to take the productivity hit for all their existing employees and then every new one they hire going forward.
Keep in mind that to do this, you entirely re-complie the kernel (and probably half the OS, i'm not much of a linux user). So yes, it's a swiss army knife but you have to put an edge on each blade when you pull it out.
I'll still agree that MS is much more limited in it's ability to do this.
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You're comparing IMPACT with RISK. There's a risk that a dam will fail and cause an enormous flood killing everyone and destroying anything in it's path.
As for waste - your dam destroys the local ecology and renders several square miles uninhabitable forever.
No free lunch, but 30 tons of radioactive waste per year isn't all that much. Politicians are just too stupid to allow us to reprocess or dispose of it...so it sits.
Wow. Just...wow.
Re: Geothermal - don't know much, not going there
Re: precious little real estate - Little is relative. Put them on a same-scaled map with a solar farm of comperable capacity (oh wait, how many GWe solar farms are there?) and the nuclear plant will appear miniscule. Same with wind farms or hydro (how many square miles is that lake?). Nuclear plants DO NOT consume arable land. They can exist pretty much anywhere though the preference is near water for cooling.
re: radiation compared to coal - This is no trick card. A 1 GWe coal plant spews almost 20 tons of uranium and thorium OUT THE STACK per year compared with 25-30 tons of nuclear waste tightly controlled in a cooling pool. That doesn't include all the other fun emmissions CO2, SOx, halides, soot...need I go on?
Comparing Chernobyl to modern reactors is like comparing the pre-model-t cars to your late model Lexus. But hey, it's the one real incident you have to troll on. 3MI - erm, there was no radiation release. The containment functioned exactly as designed. If memory serves one of the other reactor vessels is actually still functioning in low power mode at 3MI.
Re: Older nuclear plants venting 100 cubic feet of noble gas per 2 weeks - Read that again. Older plants. We're talking about building NEW ones. Furthermore, a substance does not become radioactive just by being in contact with something else radioactive. Helium and Neon are stable in all isotopes. The few non-stable isotopes of argon, krypton, etc. are mostly beta decay and low energy. You can blow "radioactive" helium around all day and it means jack squat. How about providing some useful information instead of FUD?
Re: the rest of that inane statement - Yes, radioactive particules accumulate in the food chain assuming you put more in than decay. Yes - they decay too. Which means some LEAVES the food chain as well. Buy hey, coal contributes FAR more radioactive elements than nuclear.
re: breeder reactors - So your bar for ecconomical use is 1GWe for 1000 years? Name me one FUNCTIONAL man-made item that's still in use after 1000 years. I guarantee your concrete dam will not last 1000 years. Your geothermal pump station? Nope. Heck, solar cells degrade and are generally disposed of after 25 years.
re: 600 years to store fissile ash - Big deal. You want to design a power station that will last 1000 years. I'm sure storing some 'trash' for 600 won't be a problem. In actuality, 600 year storage is easy to do with current technology. Ecological stability over that short a scale is simple.
re: cheap power - Just because it can be made abundant does not mean it will be too cheap to meter. Even if generation was free, distribution costs and maintenance is substantial. That applies to any power source and is entirely irrelevant. Troll...
Re: Wind is here - Wrong. Wind, solar, geo, tidal power exists as a fringe method of generation - some more so than others. Your argument is invensting billions in research of these instead of billions actually BUILDING nuclear plants. Which has a greater and more immediate return? I thought so. Never mind the additional billions that would be needed to actually BUILD a substantial "renewable" energy base.
re: downsides - Sorry, troll. People like you scream from the rooftops about the 'dangers of nuk-lear power' while not even understanding the facts that you're so badly twisting.
re: Long term solution - Nuclear power is the only CURRENTLY VIABLE solution to fixing the mess we're in with burning coal and other fossil fuels. Maybe one day someone will invent a 90% efficient solar cell that can be made for $100/KW. When that happens i'm sure there will be a big rush to build them. Today we're at 40% on a good day and $5000-10K/KW compared to ~$1300/KW for a nuclear plant.
So please, continue to cry about the dangers of everything you don't understand while proposing solutions that have no current practical or feasible implementation.
Uhm...creating a few billion cubic meters of lake for your hydro is EXTREMELY damaging to the local enviornment. If effectively and totally destroys several square miles and makes it entirely uninhabitable to people.
And uhm, that lake lasts as long as your generating power there. Indefinitely...while radioactive waste can have a long half life it eventually decays. That lake? Not so much.
Agree.
To add to that, nuclear power effectively releases ZERO waste with the exception of heat (which ever plant does unless it's 100% efficient). ALL nuclear waste is self-contained during operation and approx 25-30 tons of spent fuel needs to be processed a/o disposed of per plant per year.
Coal, by comparison releases a bit under 20 tons of uranium and thorium INTO THE ATMOSPHERE per plant per year. Plus other wastes, CO2, etc.
My point is that nuclear is probably as benign as you can get. Fairly small footprint (especially compared with comperable power generation from solar or hydro), no emmissive waste, minimal total waste, high generation density, plenty of available fuel (effectively unlimited in breeder reactors). Show me any power generation techology that can compare and i'll gladly move my support.
Erm, that doesn't mean the power feeding your house comes directly from a wind turbine. It means the allocate xyz MWh at the elevated price to you and dump it into the grid. Right along with the coal and other power. Electrons are electrons beyond that. The fact that your power hasn't gone out is anecdotal and entirely unrelated unfortunately.
Two retorts - choose one
- sunlight is everwhere therefore people can obviously live anywhere
- if you limit people to living where energy sources exist you will quickly over-utilize the energy and have problems anyway. Wind and solar require large areas...which is opposite from what you get with high density population
I'm sorry but...WHAT? You're about 40 years behind reality if you think nuclear is so dirty it's a close runner with coal. Yes, depending on the plant type there is waste. Waste in the range of 25-30 tons of 'spend fuel' per year that needs to be sequestered and saved or reprocessed and re-used (yes, recycling! nuclear can do it too).
Do you know how many tons of carbon (aka soot) gets past the scrubbers at a coal plant in a given DAY? How many tons of CO2 is released? How about the fact that the minute amount of unranium and thorium found in coal adds up to 5.2 and 12.8 tons annually for a 1GW plant. That's almost 20 tons RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE yearly as opposed to 30 tons sequestered in a cooling pool. Daily CO2 and soot emmissions from coal dwarf those numbers.
Tell me again how nuclear is dirty?
Retardedly huge amount of energy... yep.
Solar insolation is what, 1Kw/sq meter at ground level? Even that is a retardedly huge amount and a lot closer to home but i digress...
The problem with grabbing a few TW of energy from space that would normally 'fly by' is you're now dumping that excess energy into our global heat budget. Need to be careful with that one too. Overall though, I think it's a great idea and it's within our technology base to do so in the next 10 or so years. Politically, it will be an expensive, overpriced nightmare that probably will never get off the ground (pun intended, as it's actually accurate).
You're right. Let's take a wrecking ball to NYC...and every other major city. Let's scatter the population around like hermits. Suggesting we relocate a few billion people globally so they're near renewable energy sources is insane, not to mention entirely impractical.
I love how people talk about the methods to make use of renewable this or cleaner that without taking into account the reprocussions. Oh, and did you figure in the energy needed to move all those people and construct that new housing? That has to come from somewhere too.
Define "cleaner"
Destroying how many square miles to create your hydro (aka lake formation in front of your dam)
Geo i don't know much about pro/con. If it was that amazing why isn't everyone using it?
Tidal is still beyond our infrastrucure to provide at scale and it's (supposedly) very likely to ruin marine ecology in the process
Wind is great in theory. The theory being you have lots of wind and lots of land. That's generally not where lots of people live. I can't put a 100' turbine on my roof in lower NY
Solar has high cost and very dirty manufacturing
In addition, only geo (maybe) and hydro are capable of providing "base load" power.
They're great ideas but not a single one is practical for large scale generation throughout the country.
Oh, and nuclear doesn't have to be as "dirty" as it is, but paranoid people are afraid of breeder type reactors that produce more fuel than they consume so instead you have to keep providing more fuel and disposing of the depleted fuel. Besides that, coal in the cleanest plants is still FAR dirtier than nuclear. Guess what provides something like 50% of our base generation in the US?
'132 salute'
Another wonderful techie thing to further confuse people and convince them that we're not exactly human after all.
I love the dumb stares when i mention pebcak or id-10-t
Been running one of the redhat rip-offs for a while now. CentOS I believe?
Buy hey, glad to know the 'old boys' are finally catching up.
To answer your question in one word: Familiarity.
How much time is wasted on training or re-learning going from OO to MSO? At home, that's probably not worth $600 to Joe User. In the office with 100's or 1000's (or more) users using known software saves a lot in 'soft costs'.
As for intelligent decisions between OO and MSO - where are most of the MSO sales? Corporate customers. Where are most of the higher-price editions sold? Corporate customers. The same people with the productivity justification above. Joe user will more often than not buy (assuming he doesn't pirate) the student version or OEM CD-and-Key that's far less than $600.
I noticed. I submitted my address once well before the cut-off time (didn't know it was coming) and the email never came through to activate. I tried again later and it came through exactly 3 minutes after they killed the freebies.
GAH. I was actually going to have a legal copy of Vista (or office 2007). Oh well. MS loses out on the deal, not me. I simply won't run a *legal* copy of Vista of O2K7.
Maybe someone at M$ realized that their software is so "popular" (read: ubiquitous) because it was so easy to pirate back in the day. 'Oh, Bill, here's the new version of windows. Install and try it out and give me back the disks tomorrow' does very well for spreading the popularity of an OS. It's a HELL of a lot better than lame commercials on TV that no one really wants to see. 'Oh, Bill, there's another version of windows that doesn't do anything too special. It's $400 for the version that anyone would actually want. Why not go buy a copy and see if it's any good.' - The difference is utterly apparant.
Now, you'll say that M$ doesn't make money off number one. You're wrong. If the majority of people are familiar with 'operating system XYZ' a company is going to look to that first when it comes time to choose because really, it's easier to have a small department secure a crummy OS that everyone can work in than educate and train (and hire!) people on something more obscure even if it is superior.
p.s. Intentionally avoiding discussion of 'better but more obscure'. I may or may not agree...but it's not relevant to the point. This theme doesn't have to apply only to windows. There are very few examples of sucessful software with 0% piracy rates. A very few number of games (i.e. WoW) are the only examples that come to mind...and they're 1) low up-front cost compared to windows or office and 2) pure entertainment 3) offen have free trials
Ahem. That assumes the system allows such a vote to be exercised in an useful manner.
I'll skip the rant, there's enough holes in our voting system that i'd be here all night. Besides which, our lovely sheeple simply decide which candidate had the best commercial (unless they vote by party in which case...meh) and vote that way.
Sorry, but what?!
... no crime even if you had DVD burner(s). Besides, unless you're a DVD factory it's a civil matter.
If you get caught possessing illegal drugs you can end up sitting in jail for a year or two. I'm sure a judge won't take too kindly to having other restricted substances on-hand but that's circumstantial and in addition to the already mentioned crime.
Your second half though has no overt illegality. If you got raided and they found no illegally copied DVDs then
"workforce" "important" "opportunity"
If I wanted to use long words to prove I'm smart I would have chosen better ones. Since you insist on putting words in my mouth and try to insult me please at least try to do a better job.
You're exactly the person who they aim for. Their laptops hit some high points but fail on durability. The little gimmicky toys they all have cause more problems than they solve and the laptops just generally go to hell in short order.
Personally I reccomend Dell for 'home' users and IBM T or X series for power users. Yes IBM costs more but I have a T43 that was rock solid no matter what I did to it and despite MUCH abuse (including physcial) nothing ever broke or stopped working.
The swiss army knife here has lots of blades you could use. But is the knife edge best for cutting off a tree branch? Would the toothpick be best for self defense.
For a regular user, the default build (aka plain knife) is just fine. Once you get beyond that...you need some further refinement.
How about the mid-range (or even low side of high-end) computers so totally crippled by spyware, viruses, loggers, trojans, pre-installed garbage, etc. they they run like crap?
I've seen dual-core and even C2D machines with 2+GB of ram that crawl. People tell me: "Oh, my 1-2 year old PC is slow. Maybe i should get a new one" or "Oh, my PC is only 3 months old and it's so slow, it must be defective"
Oh, and yes: Vaio = crap. Some of them are reasonable powerful but they're mainly just sleek looking metal colored plastic with a billion proprietary gizmos and gadgets. It does show that people will buy something based on perceived image.
Wow. Sorry but your comment = fail.
"Yeah, but they probably aren't the low end, now, are they?"
I can buy a $400 laptop that comes with windows. I can buy a $250 desktop...windows. Unless you're talking OLPC how much lower are we going?
"I think a lot of people are fed up with virus software updates and other fine Windows features"
Ok, who likes getting a virus? Guess what though, the people who create them target the widest audience. If linux or Mac had a 90% market share would you like to take odds that there would be virus and trojans for them? As for software updates, they exist on linux and mac too.
"The high end of the market is moving to Mac"
Show me some vaugely accurate statistics on this? If you mean 'the over-priced and under-featured' market then sure. I can buy a very pretty Mac for twice what a comperable PC (that actually runs my software) would cost.
"and the low end -- at least the more knowledgeable among them -- are moving to Linux"
Again - justify this. The one-off OLPC and wally world PC don't count as they're statistically insignificant compared to the number of PCs sold in the budget segment. Just because i buy a $200 linux PC doesn't mean it's staying linus either. I like the jab about implying that low end users not running linux aren't knowledgable but...unfortunately they actually know better than most. See, they understand that the marketplace and most jobs that require computer skills want windows and MS orifice skills. If you're talking recreations...well that $9.99 "1000 games" CD at target isn't going to be for Linux.
And finally. Your free internet access. I'm glad you have such a great library system. I'm glad there's free internet for anyone to use. That's a great tool for young and/or poor. The fact that it's on Linux is anecdotal. Unless you're the admin that runs the computer system there I don't think you're an appropriate person to say that no one complains about it not being windows. Not having windows available does mean there's one less learning opportunity that is important for the workforce.
"To a certain extent"
I disagree. Piracy is one of the founding reasons why Microsoft is in it's current (giant, hugely profitable, monolithical) position. It is a KEY reason and without it they likely would have had far less success.
Why? Well when I "learned windows" I didn't exactly pay full price for each upgrade copy. If I had to spend gobs of money (especially to a teenager) to try out a new OS I simply would not have done it. I would have passed on the knowledge unless there was a specific return or entertainment value. Hell, I think that's one reason why Vista adoption is so slow. No one wants to lay down $2-400 for an OS upgrade when they can buy an entirely new computer for $500. So they just wait.
By doing such a good job at PREVENTING casual piracy MS has ensured that many people will pass on vista until/unless it's given to them for free as part of an upgrade.
I'm not saying we should go back to the days of 111-1111111 or 425-1234567 but MS isn't serving it's best long-term needs by it's current actions.
That's like saying you found 5 thousand people who abbhor alcohol so it must be bad. That's a lot of people and if you put them all together it would be an impressive crowd.
Then when you compare them to the billion or three that either enjoy or are indifferent about alcohol suddenly they disappear into insignifigance.
I'm sorry, but games are what sells 90% of high end PC hardware. Please tell me how many people need a video card (or two of them!) with 786MB of ram, highly-paralleled GPU, faster ram than the main system ram, etc. for productivity?
.01% that do CAD (that haven't bought a professional card) or other professional uses but they're few and far between. Vista is a hog, true - but how many generations old is a pentium4-2GHz? Because that will handily run XP Pro.
Yes, there's the
As for your first point - a linux distro that does that exists. Unfortunately the entire user interface is different and 90%+ of people are unfamiliar with it to the point that productivity would suffer if they switched. No one wants to bother and no company wants to take the productivity hit for all their existing employees and then every new one they hire going forward.
Keep in mind that to do this, you entirely re-complie the kernel (and probably half the OS, i'm not much of a linux user). So yes, it's a swiss army knife but you have to put an edge on each blade when you pull it out.
I'll still agree that MS is much more limited in it's ability to do this.