Exactly, for some games like adventures and RPGs levels take away from the game, for platformers and some shooters it is pointless not to use a level or mission like system.
Red Hat isn't losing much money on Cent OS because they target two separate demographics. While RHEL is targeting the business who needs solid tech support and a business to stand by them with pointless patent lawsuits and the like, Cent OS is for the home user or for trial at businesses to make sure their hardware is detected and that the business can function under Linux. When there is Fedora which is also a RHEL-based distro from Red Hat and Ubuntu and Mandirva has better hardware detection in my opinion and more packages, there is little need to run RHEL for anything other then support. Also, Red Hat has by allowing Cent OS has gained much more respect as a business and when monopolies (read as Microsoft, Adobe and proprietary software vendors either break up or go bankrupt, reputation will be a real meter on choosing a software vendor and Red Hat will be right up there.
Exactly, and if they are so worried about forking, make the code good in the first place. Other then ports and the like, most forks are caused by bad leadership or poor maintenance of the code. And also, a word to all potential "open source" businesses, if your code is open and not-proprietary and you let the community contribute and such you will succeed, if your just trying to make a Windows-like OS and sell it for $45 at a retailer with some proprietary things mixed in, chances are your going to fail. Only the truly open companies that are in Open Source will triumph otherwise, the hobbyists who collaborate will be better.
Why even "protect" it? First off, the most you should do is trademark your name or possibly your logo, the problem is, if you have a large enough base of people using your software, and you go out of your way to make it "protected" chances are someone is going to fork it into a more free version such as what happed with Firefox and Debian. As for forks, very, very, very few people are going to fork your code unless either there is a leadership disagreement, your work is not free enough, there is serious problems with the code or it is unmaintained, those are just about the only cases where it actually "forks" now if it is big enough of a project, there is going to be forks, however probably 80% die out within the first year and the 20% that remains are either lagging behind the main version or have very limited appeal. People will be quick to point out such things such as Cent OS and Red Hat Linux, however Cent OS is aimed for hobbyists or small businesses who don't need commercial support. Red Hat sells support, not Red Hat Linux. So moral to this post is, don't over "protect" your work, its no big deal if someone forks it, in Open Source, may the best code win.
Because it depends on what you are trying to do. If I am just web browsing and nothing else, I would want it to use full RAM no matter if I just have say 200 MB free, if I am going to do other things in addition to web browsing such as putting a music video on while I code and compile, I would want it in RAM saving mode even if I have 600 MB free at the time that I launched it, and to put a process managing RAM will just use up more RAM. Options are good, they let the user choose, that is what makes KDE popular is that you can configure most things easily, you can do the same in GNOME but it requires more hacking.
What Firefox needs to do is in about:config have an option that would be "Use RAM saving rendering" have it set as true but if you have loads of RAM just set it to be false, good for people running Firefox on slower systems and good for people with 4 gigs of RAM
Because mostly on Windows, most people's RAM is stretched to the limit, if a simple program that people use every day (Firefox) will decrease memory usage, then they can focus on speed and in the end, if Firefox can be 2X as fast as IE, Konqueror(and by extension Safari), and Opera people will switch to it. And I actually have around 512 MB on both my Laptop and Desktop with the Desktop currently running Xubuntu and my laptop running Ubuntu 7.10 happily. And when Linux can resurrect a "dead" system like a crashed Windows system that someone may give you for like $10 that happens to have 256 MB of RAM on it and a slower but usable processor like a Pentium III, Linux can run fine on it however, if FF runs slowly, most people have little need for a computer if they can't browse the web with it.
On Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 if you install the flash plugin nonfree package from apt-get flash works fine but whenever you try installing it from Adobe's site or the auto plugin installer, FF grinds to a halt on it using around 100 CPU on anything Flash related like Youtube or Slashdot's ads, disabling flash solves it, however on my other computer that is not much more powerful (slower clock speed of CPU but higher bus speed) when I installed it from the auto plugin installer it works fine getting only around 50% of CPU Max. Firefox or Adobe needs to fix this so Linux people can test the binary that requires you to install the auto-plugin and doesn't work with flash-plugin-nonfree. However, Firefox 3 is my preferred browser on my other computer and it was on Windows even more. My question is, why can't Firefox produce either a sane way to compile it (its a pain to compile it already...) or supplying.deb and.rpm for the builds to make it easier to install? Linux seems to be neglected by Firefox lately, with more strategy of stealing IE's market share then making a better browser on Linux. And Konqueror is painfully slow when on XFCE or GNOME (or just about anything thats not KDE) but perhaps KDE 4 will fix that....
Because programming is producing a "good" not a service, sure they are preforming a service in say programming a shell script but the end result is a shell script, thats my first answer. My second answer is because if the US keeps embracing anti-tech measures with the DMCA, international treaties and now this, they are going to lose jobs to people in Europe, Canada and India who will just use SSH or other means to access computers and fix them remotely.
Exactly, people don't mind paying for music "legally" however when you get so many closed source formats that are incompatible with each other, mixed with the patent mess here in the USA (So even though free-software has advanced and you can get codecs to play WMA, AAC, MP3 and others you can't legally use them because they are patented) make it nearly impossible to get good legitimate music. And bandwidth won't be an issue as long as you distribute them via a P2P network such as BitTorrent but when the *IAA realizes that they are driving potential customers away with DRM and things and stop, online music will have a future beyond the closed-source of Apple and the underground efforts of TPB
First off, the concept of DRM is absolutely anti-consumer and gives me no incentive to purchase music "legitimately" if I can download DRM free tracks for free. So when you pay for your music why should you be restricted in what format you listen to it in? There was nothing stopping me from making my own CD player or record player or even tape player to play music but yet in the patent-ridden USA where even though we have codecs to play AAC, MP3, WMA and other audio files it is "illegal" because those are patented. When you can get DRM free music that you can get in as many formats as you want to play on an unlimited amount of devices, that will all play the song. Why should I have to pay say 3 times for a song to play it on an iPod then buy it again as a ringtone for my phone then buy the exact same thing to play on a Linux machine. There is absolutely no reason to have to do that. Whenever someone can get music in their format of choice, whether that is AAC, MP3, OGG, WAV or FLAC they should be able to have their music in that format. Sure it isn't profitable to sell for 10 cents DRM free but how about 99 cents DRM free? DRM-free shouldn't be an option, it should be expected. How much sence does it make to penalize your paying customers by only offering music that can't be played on certain hardware and software devices, now I am not saying they need to support every format known to mankind but having it in some open-source formats such as OGG and FLAC would make more people download music "legitimately".
Well when the RIAA can spin it that sharing and downloading around 20 songs equals thousands of dollars to be given to them, they can spin anything. When the *IAA can mislead congress to passing the DMCA and similar acts they can spin it. What the FSF needs to do, is to have people running for congress, with some of the people who get elected they will probably have an easy time getting in and if they can stop the next DMCA from getting passed, its a win for freedom. Without some good senators and representatives in congress, we will be even more digitally shackled then we are now. When congress worries about US kids not getting high test scores and about importing things from foreign countries yet will pass laws allowing single mothers to be charged for thousands of dollars for 20 some songs. The *IAA is hurting innovation and if congress keeps on P2P networks will be illegal, no matter what you are using it for. So please FSF please send people to congress.
Good thing technology is making big leaps as you are going to need this, a solid state 1 TB hard drive and around 20 gigs of RAM to make Windows 7 to run at even a Vista level!
Five years ago, this would have worked. Now though with Vista failing more people are starting to see beyond MS, and 90% of people who use MS products (XBOX, Windows) don't switch to alternitives not for what MS has done, but third parties. Very few people when they see Office 2007 use that as their reason for keeping Windows, it is almost always a third-party app or game or second party in the case of Halo 3 (which was the reason most people I know bought a 360) but with many third parties now having applications on Linux and OS-X or via good support through WINE or similar programs, Microsoft is no longer needed, in 5-10 years I doubt that very many people will even use Windows unless NT 7 is much much much better then XP. Microsoft is losing the monopoly very fast with the relese of Vista, if the new "MS Media" doesn't work on Linux or Mac, it won't be used. The age of the MS monopoly is coming to an end finally, MS is just blind to it.
But what starts out as "unauthorized distribution" becomes "all bittorent traffic" becomes "all P2P traffic" how many colleges will start banning P2P traffic and if the lobbyists keep on misleading Congress, how much more time till "all P2P traffic" becomes illegal?
Yes, I'll admit that last generation Nintendo didn't have the greatest games and currently they seem to lack some good ones now. However, Super Smash Bros. Brawl is coming out and that has always been a hit. Sure all the Mario Party games after the third one added no more interesting ideas and most third-party games seem like tech-demos, the Virtual Console is saving the Wii. Because even if there is no good games on store shelves, every Monday (Friday in Europe) they add new classic games. This is what is making Nintendo a lot of money because while the prices are reasonable ($5 for NES, $6 for TurboGrafix, $8 for SNES/Genesis and $10 for N64) a near 0 distribution cost and the speed of which they can get out there keeps many classic gamers happy. Also, they have started to add Japan only games for $1 more and that could be in the end what saves the Wii.
Sure it might not be used like that but remember the DMCA? About the "Anti-Circumvention" part? Whenever we have senators/representatives clueless about technology (I don't think that they should be programmers but still should know a lot about computers) and are getting lobbied by the *IAA they can make it seem like somehow all this is hurting the economy and it would be the right thing to do is to discourage any time of filesharing, they will usually go along with it and ruin our economy that way much like the DMCA did.
Just about eveyrhting that can be shared through P2P is copyrighted. For example those Linux ISOs I downloaded last night, they were copyrighted, now they were under the GPL which allows me to share them, but it still is copyrighted. So are the creative commons works, so now can we not share them like the licence allows us to do due to this bill? It is so much like the *IAA to try to distroy innovation. People are wondering why America has lost business and tech domonence yet would vote for this bill. They would egarly press for more education in computers, yet favor Microsoft which got us here in the first place. Our new motto for our country should be "Don't innovate, don't share and don't learn unless you have paid your patent protection fees and copyrights to the *IAA"
I expect that the Wii will continue to win, it shows Nintendo's domination strategy. First there are exclusive games made my Nintendo that are very very popular such as Mario, Zelda, Fire Emblem and Star Fox that will only be available on the Wii or other Nintendo consoles. Sony has Square, however usually will port the games to Wii and 360 also later in the console's life. The 360 has Halo and.. not much else, most of the people that I have talked to bought a 360 for Halo and Halo only. The Wii manages to have some good games for it, Galaxy, Paper Mario and Zelda are all good and exclusive titles, but as with the DS, we only have to wait a few years and after all the "tech-demos" of new controls you get very solid games. Sure Nintendo's systems don't have an absolutely huge quantity of games for them, but those that are made for it have very high quality (sports games aside) and don't have the flaws that the other systems had. For example, Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube was much better then the Tales games on the PS1-2 because Nintendo desinged the hardware so you wouldn't get loading screen after loading screen like on the PS2. In the end, Nintendo is more popular, you only have to look at how almost every store has a PS3 and 360 but very few have the Wii in stock and sometimes even Wii point cards are sold out! The Wii will win the "console war" the way that Nintendo always has, good quality, exclusive games.
Why should AT&T even care about bittorent? Sure it uses a lot of bandwidth but so does YouTube, and downloading music "legitimately" they shouldn't care what I am using my network that I payed for, whether that is bittorent, YouTube, downloading Linux ISOs, iTunes or whatever, they are the ISP Internet Service Provider not some arm of the *IAA. Their goal should be to provide internet at a fast speed and not care at all whatever you want to do, and unless in the contract it said so, that means don't give bittorent or other P2P networks lower priority, seriously, what is with all these companies fighting innovation.
Google is simply best, its not because Mozilla and Google somehow are the same, Google just happens to be one of the few search engines that loads fast and doesn't display banner ads all over the place, also, most web users use Google as their homepage, so why not set that as the default? Its simply for practical reasons. Because Firefox on Ubuntu has the Free Software Foundation in the bookmarks does that mean that somehow the FSF is giving Ubuntu tons of money? No it is simply practical same thing with Firefox.
OS-X isn't necessarily "Huge In Japan" but, it was boxed operating system sales, almost 90% of Windows users, have not bought a box of Vista/XP, why? Because of OEM licenses, when most people use Windows and most people get it from OEM licenses, who else has boxed operating systems that people want to buy? Linux is free and although a few people buy the boxed editions its mostly to fund development and such and other then OS-X, Linux and Windows there aren't any other major boxed operating systems so where else would it go?
Yes I know that they can lock down Windows, I worked for a company for a short time that locked down Windows. The fact though was, between an over-aggressive content-blocking server that blocked non-inappropriate or time wasting sites, the fact that Firefox could never update itself because I didn't have Read, write and execute privileges to update Firefox (which by the way was already installed by the IT department) most IT departments I have found know very very little about computers, they either know how to use Windows and other MS software or a little about hardware, very few know anything about computers and many have irrational fears (like checking your E-Mail from a web based E-Mail account will suddenly infect the entire network, didn't give a reason or anything even when I asked) and so I don't think that "locking down Windows" will solve anything about it, it will just give them more ways to mess everything up.
As for the applications, very few businesses that I have seen, have any "must-need" software on most of their computers, sure there are a few that would need to have a VM running to run a few or have Windows dual-booting but for the average worker, Linux is sufficient. And I am not proposing a total abrupt change, but when the next licensing fee has to be sent in, or when it is time for an upgrade, Linux works 85% of the time for a solution and the other times, just dual-booting Windows or keeping a VM with it installed works.
As for the social aspect, Linux would allow them to download what they choose and surf the internet without IT locking down computers to being unusable. There is very very very little Linux malware, and those that do exist are either not in the wild, or as long as you use a halfway recent distro (like Fedora Core 1) you will be safe from them if you keep up on your patches. Also, most Windows Malware/Adware/Spyware/Viruses are caused by a program that looks legit but isn't, Linux reduces this threat by the package management system, when you type in sudo apt-get install firefox, you can be assured that someone has looked that over and that it matches checksums to make 100% sure its Firefox and not some malware. If you don't trust that, you can compile it completly from source, there is little way unless you are randomly installing binary files, then you won't get any malware on a Linux machine. Also, if there is a problem, a sysadmin can simply SSH into the system and fix the problem.
Free, Easy to use, (it can be customized to behave like XP/OS-X/Vista) Secure, and Functional, theres no reason not to use Linux
Well for one there are sky high system requirements for Vista at least and unless you are buying computers online, you will be stuck with Vista which needs around 1-2 Gigs of RAM for sub-XP level performance and 4 gigs for decent performance, while a more recent Ubuntu then Vista (7.10 which came out a month ago in October 2007) runs happily on my 1.8 GHZ processor with 512 MB of slow RAM while Vista is unbelievably slow on my friend's Intel Dual Core (1.6 GHZ) with 512 MB of RAM thats about 3-4 years newer then my Dell which cost me $25 at a garage sale. Not to mention how slow running
1. A third party antivirus
2. A third party firewall
3. A third party anti-spyware
4. Adobe reader that preloads itself on Windows startup
Secondly, the license is barbaric,
Internet Gaming/Update Features. If you choose to utilize the Internet gaming or update features within the
Product, it is necessary to use certain computer system, hardware, and software information to implement the
features. By using these features, you explicitly authorize Microsoft or its designated agent to access and utilize
the necessary information for Internet gaming and/or updating purposes. Microsoft may use this information
solely to improve our products or to provide customized services or technologies to you. Microsoft may disclose
this information to others, but not in a form that personally identifies you.
So in other words, MS or any one of it's partners can spy on you as long as its for "internet games" and "Windows update" but they can't use it to identify you but anyone who is a "MS partner" can do it. How nice.
Security Updates. Content providers are using the digital rights management technology ("Microsoft DRM")
contained in this Product to protect the integrity of their content ("Secure Content") so that their intellectual
property, including copyright, in such content is not misappropriated. Owners of such Secure Content ("Secure
Content Owners") may, from time to time, request Microsoft to provide security related updates to the Microsoft
DRM components of the Product ("Security Updates") that may affect your ability to copy, display and/or play
Secure Content through Microsoft software or third party applications that utilize Microsoft DRM. You therefore
agree that, if you elect to download a license from the Internet which enables your use of Secure Content,
Microsoft may, in conjunction with such license, also download onto your computer such Security Updates
that a Secure Content Owner has requested that Microsoft distribute. Microsoft will not retrieve any personally
identifiable information, or any other information, from your computer by downloading such Security Updates.
So whoever owns a DRM scheme, can force MS to download a "security update" that can make it so all your DRMed media can't play. How nice of them, you bought the content but now can't watch it.
Consent to Use of Data. You agree that Microsoft and its affiliates may collect and use technical information
gathered in any manner as part of the product support services provided to you, if any, related to the Product.
Microsoft may use this information solely to improve our products or to provide customized services or
technologies to you. Microsoft may disclose this information to others, but not in a form that personally identifies
you.
So any information about you thats deemed "technical" can be sent to other "Microsoft Partners"
So in other words, MS owns your computer. Linux doesn't have *any* of those problems, yes XP is broken and yes Linux does solve all of those problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, for some games like adventures and RPGs levels take away from the game, for platformers and some shooters it is pointless not to use a level or mission like system.
Red Hat isn't losing much money on Cent OS because they target two separate demographics. While RHEL is targeting the business who needs solid tech support and a business to stand by them with pointless patent lawsuits and the like, Cent OS is for the home user or for trial at businesses to make sure their hardware is detected and that the business can function under Linux. When there is Fedora which is also a RHEL-based distro from Red Hat and Ubuntu and Mandirva has better hardware detection in my opinion and more packages, there is little need to run RHEL for anything other then support. Also, Red Hat has by allowing Cent OS has gained much more respect as a business and when monopolies (read as Microsoft, Adobe and proprietary software vendors either break up or go bankrupt, reputation will be a real meter on choosing a software vendor and Red Hat will be right up there.
Exactly, and if they are so worried about forking, make the code good in the first place. Other then ports and the like, most forks are caused by bad leadership or poor maintenance of the code. And also, a word to all potential "open source" businesses, if your code is open and not-proprietary and you let the community contribute and such you will succeed, if your just trying to make a Windows-like OS and sell it for $45 at a retailer with some proprietary things mixed in, chances are your going to fail. Only the truly open companies that are in Open Source will triumph otherwise, the hobbyists who collaborate will be better.
Why even "protect" it? First off, the most you should do is trademark your name or possibly your logo, the problem is, if you have a large enough base of people using your software, and you go out of your way to make it "protected" chances are someone is going to fork it into a more free version such as what happed with Firefox and Debian. As for forks, very, very, very few people are going to fork your code unless either there is a leadership disagreement, your work is not free enough, there is serious problems with the code or it is unmaintained, those are just about the only cases where it actually "forks" now if it is big enough of a project, there is going to be forks, however probably 80% die out within the first year and the 20% that remains are either lagging behind the main version or have very limited appeal. People will be quick to point out such things such as Cent OS and Red Hat Linux, however Cent OS is aimed for hobbyists or small businesses who don't need commercial support. Red Hat sells support, not Red Hat Linux. So moral to this post is, don't over "protect" your work, its no big deal if someone forks it, in Open Source, may the best code win.
Because it depends on what you are trying to do. If I am just web browsing and nothing else, I would want it to use full RAM no matter if I just have say 200 MB free, if I am going to do other things in addition to web browsing such as putting a music video on while I code and compile, I would want it in RAM saving mode even if I have 600 MB free at the time that I launched it, and to put a process managing RAM will just use up more RAM. Options are good, they let the user choose, that is what makes KDE popular is that you can configure most things easily, you can do the same in GNOME but it requires more hacking.
This is good news for the PSP homebrew scene, just edit the binaries of the games to create your own, and it should work fine on almost any firmware.
What Firefox needs to do is in about:config have an option that would be "Use RAM saving rendering" have it set as true but if you have loads of RAM just set it to be false, good for people running Firefox on slower systems and good for people with 4 gigs of RAM
Because mostly on Windows, most people's RAM is stretched to the limit, if a simple program that people use every day (Firefox) will decrease memory usage, then they can focus on speed and in the end, if Firefox can be 2X as fast as IE, Konqueror(and by extension Safari), and Opera people will switch to it. And I actually have around 512 MB on both my Laptop and Desktop with the Desktop currently running Xubuntu and my laptop running Ubuntu 7.10 happily. And when Linux can resurrect a "dead" system like a crashed Windows system that someone may give you for like $10 that happens to have 256 MB of RAM on it and a slower but usable processor like a Pentium III, Linux can run fine on it however, if FF runs slowly, most people have little need for a computer if they can't browse the web with it.
On Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 if you install the flash plugin nonfree package from apt-get flash works fine but whenever you try installing it from Adobe's site or the auto plugin installer, FF grinds to a halt on it using around 100 CPU on anything Flash related like Youtube or Slashdot's ads, disabling flash solves it, however on my other computer that is not much more powerful (slower clock speed of CPU but higher bus speed) when I installed it from the auto plugin installer it works fine getting only around 50% of CPU Max. Firefox or Adobe needs to fix this so Linux people can test the binary that requires you to install the auto-plugin and doesn't work with flash-plugin-nonfree. However, Firefox 3 is my preferred browser on my other computer and it was on Windows even more. My question is, why can't Firefox produce either a sane way to compile it (its a pain to compile it already...) or supplying .deb and .rpm for the builds to make it easier to install? Linux seems to be neglected by Firefox lately, with more strategy of stealing IE's market share then making a better browser on Linux. And Konqueror is painfully slow when on XFCE or GNOME (or just about anything thats not KDE) but perhaps KDE 4 will fix that....
Because programming is producing a "good" not a service, sure they are preforming a service in say programming a shell script but the end result is a shell script, thats my first answer. My second answer is because if the US keeps embracing anti-tech measures with the DMCA, international treaties and now this, they are going to lose jobs to people in Europe, Canada and India who will just use SSH or other means to access computers and fix them remotely.
Exactly, people don't mind paying for music "legally" however when you get so many closed source formats that are incompatible with each other, mixed with the patent mess here in the USA (So even though free-software has advanced and you can get codecs to play WMA, AAC, MP3 and others you can't legally use them because they are patented) make it nearly impossible to get good legitimate music. And bandwidth won't be an issue as long as you distribute them via a P2P network such as BitTorrent but when the *IAA realizes that they are driving potential customers away with DRM and things and stop, online music will have a future beyond the closed-source of Apple and the underground efforts of TPB
First off, the concept of DRM is absolutely anti-consumer and gives me no incentive to purchase music "legitimately" if I can download DRM free tracks for free. So when you pay for your music why should you be restricted in what format you listen to it in? There was nothing stopping me from making my own CD player or record player or even tape player to play music but yet in the patent-ridden USA where even though we have codecs to play AAC, MP3, WMA and other audio files it is "illegal" because those are patented. When you can get DRM free music that you can get in as many formats as you want to play on an unlimited amount of devices, that will all play the song. Why should I have to pay say 3 times for a song to play it on an iPod then buy it again as a ringtone for my phone then buy the exact same thing to play on a Linux machine. There is absolutely no reason to have to do that. Whenever someone can get music in their format of choice, whether that is AAC, MP3, OGG, WAV or FLAC they should be able to have their music in that format. Sure it isn't profitable to sell for 10 cents DRM free but how about 99 cents DRM free? DRM-free shouldn't be an option, it should be expected. How much sence does it make to penalize your paying customers by only offering music that can't be played on certain hardware and software devices, now I am not saying they need to support every format known to mankind but having it in some open-source formats such as OGG and FLAC would make more people download music "legitimately".
Well when the RIAA can spin it that sharing and downloading around 20 songs equals thousands of dollars to be given to them, they can spin anything. When the *IAA can mislead congress to passing the DMCA and similar acts they can spin it. What the FSF needs to do, is to have people running for congress, with some of the people who get elected they will probably have an easy time getting in and if they can stop the next DMCA from getting passed, its a win for freedom. Without some good senators and representatives in congress, we will be even more digitally shackled then we are now. When congress worries about US kids not getting high test scores and about importing things from foreign countries yet will pass laws allowing single mothers to be charged for thousands of dollars for 20 some songs. The *IAA is hurting innovation and if congress keeps on P2P networks will be illegal, no matter what you are using it for. So please FSF please send people to congress.
Good thing technology is making big leaps as you are going to need this, a solid state 1 TB hard drive and around 20 gigs of RAM to make Windows 7 to run at even a Vista level!
Five years ago, this would have worked. Now though with Vista failing more people are starting to see beyond MS, and 90% of people who use MS products (XBOX, Windows) don't switch to alternitives not for what MS has done, but third parties. Very few people when they see Office 2007 use that as their reason for keeping Windows, it is almost always a third-party app or game or second party in the case of Halo 3 (which was the reason most people I know bought a 360) but with many third parties now having applications on Linux and OS-X or via good support through WINE or similar programs, Microsoft is no longer needed, in 5-10 years I doubt that very many people will even use Windows unless NT 7 is much much much better then XP. Microsoft is losing the monopoly very fast with the relese of Vista, if the new "MS Media" doesn't work on Linux or Mac, it won't be used. The age of the MS monopoly is coming to an end finally, MS is just blind to it.
But what starts out as "unauthorized distribution" becomes "all bittorent traffic" becomes "all P2P traffic" how many colleges will start banning P2P traffic and if the lobbyists keep on misleading Congress, how much more time till "all P2P traffic" becomes illegal?
Yes, I'll admit that last generation Nintendo didn't have the greatest games and currently they seem to lack some good ones now. However, Super Smash Bros. Brawl is coming out and that has always been a hit. Sure all the Mario Party games after the third one added no more interesting ideas and most third-party games seem like tech-demos, the Virtual Console is saving the Wii. Because even if there is no good games on store shelves, every Monday (Friday in Europe) they add new classic games. This is what is making Nintendo a lot of money because while the prices are reasonable ($5 for NES, $6 for TurboGrafix, $8 for SNES/Genesis and $10 for N64) a near 0 distribution cost and the speed of which they can get out there keeps many classic gamers happy. Also, they have started to add Japan only games for $1 more and that could be in the end what saves the Wii.
Sure it might not be used like that but remember the DMCA? About the "Anti-Circumvention" part? Whenever we have senators/representatives clueless about technology (I don't think that they should be programmers but still should know a lot about computers) and are getting lobbied by the *IAA they can make it seem like somehow all this is hurting the economy and it would be the right thing to do is to discourage any time of filesharing, they will usually go along with it and ruin our economy that way much like the DMCA did.
Just about eveyrhting that can be shared through P2P is copyrighted. For example those Linux ISOs I downloaded last night, they were copyrighted, now they were under the GPL which allows me to share them, but it still is copyrighted. So are the creative commons works, so now can we not share them like the licence allows us to do due to this bill? It is so much like the *IAA to try to distroy innovation. People are wondering why America has lost business and tech domonence yet would vote for this bill. They would egarly press for more education in computers, yet favor Microsoft which got us here in the first place. Our new motto for our country should be "Don't innovate, don't share and don't learn unless you have paid your patent protection fees and copyrights to the *IAA"
I expect that the Wii will continue to win, it shows Nintendo's domination strategy. First there are exclusive games made my Nintendo that are very very popular such as Mario, Zelda, Fire Emblem and Star Fox that will only be available on the Wii or other Nintendo consoles. Sony has Square, however usually will port the games to Wii and 360 also later in the console's life. The 360 has Halo and.. not much else, most of the people that I have talked to bought a 360 for Halo and Halo only. The Wii manages to have some good games for it, Galaxy, Paper Mario and Zelda are all good and exclusive titles, but as with the DS, we only have to wait a few years and after all the "tech-demos" of new controls you get very solid games. Sure Nintendo's systems don't have an absolutely huge quantity of games for them, but those that are made for it have very high quality (sports games aside) and don't have the flaws that the other systems had. For example, Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube was much better then the Tales games on the PS1-2 because Nintendo desinged the hardware so you wouldn't get loading screen after loading screen like on the PS2. In the end, Nintendo is more popular, you only have to look at how almost every store has a PS3 and 360 but very few have the Wii in stock and sometimes even Wii point cards are sold out! The Wii will win the "console war" the way that Nintendo always has, good quality, exclusive games.
Why should AT&T even care about bittorent? Sure it uses a lot of bandwidth but so does YouTube, and downloading music "legitimately" they shouldn't care what I am using my network that I payed for, whether that is bittorent, YouTube, downloading Linux ISOs, iTunes or whatever, they are the ISP Internet Service Provider not some arm of the *IAA. Their goal should be to provide internet at a fast speed and not care at all whatever you want to do, and unless in the contract it said so, that means don't give bittorent or other P2P networks lower priority, seriously, what is with all these companies fighting innovation.
Google is simply best, its not because Mozilla and Google somehow are the same, Google just happens to be one of the few search engines that loads fast and doesn't display banner ads all over the place, also, most web users use Google as their homepage, so why not set that as the default? Its simply for practical reasons. Because Firefox on Ubuntu has the Free Software Foundation in the bookmarks does that mean that somehow the FSF is giving Ubuntu tons of money? No it is simply practical same thing with Firefox.
OS-X isn't necessarily "Huge In Japan" but, it was boxed operating system sales, almost 90% of Windows users, have not bought a box of Vista/XP, why? Because of OEM licenses, when most people use Windows and most people get it from OEM licenses, who else has boxed operating systems that people want to buy? Linux is free and although a few people buy the boxed editions its mostly to fund development and such and other then OS-X, Linux and Windows there aren't any other major boxed operating systems so where else would it go?
Yes I know that they can lock down Windows, I worked for a company for a short time that locked down Windows. The fact though was, between an over-aggressive content-blocking server that blocked non-inappropriate or time wasting sites, the fact that Firefox could never update itself because I didn't have Read, write and execute privileges to update Firefox (which by the way was already installed by the IT department) most IT departments I have found know very very little about computers, they either know how to use Windows and other MS software or a little about hardware, very few know anything about computers and many have irrational fears (like checking your E-Mail from a web based E-Mail account will suddenly infect the entire network, didn't give a reason or anything even when I asked) and so I don't think that "locking down Windows" will solve anything about it, it will just give them more ways to mess everything up.
As for the applications, very few businesses that I have seen, have any "must-need" software on most of their computers, sure there are a few that would need to have a VM running to run a few or have Windows dual-booting but for the average worker, Linux is sufficient. And I am not proposing a total abrupt change, but when the next licensing fee has to be sent in, or when it is time for an upgrade, Linux works 85% of the time for a solution and the other times, just dual-booting Windows or keeping a VM with it installed works.
As for the social aspect, Linux would allow them to download what they choose and surf the internet without IT locking down computers to being unusable. There is very very very little Linux malware, and those that do exist are either not in the wild, or as long as you use a halfway recent distro (like Fedora Core 1) you will be safe from them if you keep up on your patches. Also, most Windows Malware/Adware/Spyware/Viruses are caused by a program that looks legit but isn't, Linux reduces this threat by the package management system, when you type in sudo apt-get install firefox, you can be assured that someone has looked that over and that it matches checksums to make 100% sure its Firefox and not some malware. If you don't trust that, you can compile it completly from source, there is little way unless you are randomly installing binary files, then you won't get any malware on a Linux machine. Also, if there is a problem, a sysadmin can simply SSH into the system and fix the problem.
Free, Easy to use, (it can be customized to behave like XP/OS-X/Vista) Secure, and Functional, theres no reason not to use Linux
Well for one there are sky high system requirements for Vista at least and unless you are buying computers online, you will be stuck with Vista which needs around 1-2 Gigs of RAM for sub-XP level performance and 4 gigs for decent performance, while a more recent Ubuntu then Vista (7.10 which came out a month ago in October 2007) runs happily on my 1.8 GHZ processor with 512 MB of slow RAM while Vista is unbelievably slow on my friend's Intel Dual Core (1.6 GHZ) with 512 MB of RAM thats about 3-4 years newer then my Dell which cost me $25 at a garage sale. Not to mention how slow running
1. A third party antivirus
2. A third party firewall
3. A third party anti-spyware
4. Adobe reader that preloads itself on Windows startup
Secondly, the license is barbaric,
Here are some examples from the Windows XP professional where you can pick up a PDF from http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx
Internet Gaming/Update Features. If you choose to utilize the Internet gaming or update features within the Product, it is necessary to use certain computer system, hardware, and software information to implement the features. By using these features, you explicitly authorize Microsoft or its designated agent to access and utilize the necessary information for Internet gaming and/or updating purposes. Microsoft may use this information solely to improve our products or to provide customized services or technologies to you. Microsoft may disclose this information to others, but not in a form that personally identifies you.
So in other words, MS or any one of it's partners can spy on you as long as its for "internet games" and "Windows update" but they can't use it to identify you but anyone who is a "MS partner" can do it. How nice.
Security Updates. Content providers are using the digital rights management technology ("Microsoft DRM") contained in this Product to protect the integrity of their content ("Secure Content") so that their intellectual property, including copyright, in such content is not misappropriated. Owners of such Secure Content ("Secure Content Owners") may, from time to time, request Microsoft to provide security related updates to the Microsoft DRM components of the Product ("Security Updates") that may affect your ability to copy, display and/or play Secure Content through Microsoft software or third party applications that utilize Microsoft DRM. You therefore agree that, if you elect to download a license from the Internet which enables your use of Secure Content, Microsoft may, in conjunction with such license, also download onto your computer such Security Updates that a Secure Content Owner has requested that Microsoft distribute. Microsoft will not retrieve any personally identifiable information, or any other information, from your computer by downloading such Security Updates.
So whoever owns a DRM scheme, can force MS to download a "security update" that can make it so all your DRMed media can't play. How nice of them, you bought the content but now can't watch it.
Consent to Use of Data. You agree that Microsoft and its affiliates may collect and use technical information gathered in any manner as part of the product support services provided to you, if any, related to the Product. Microsoft may use this information solely to improve our products or to provide customized services or technologies to you. Microsoft may disclose this information to others, but not in a form that personally identifies you.
So any information about you thats deemed "technical" can be sent to other "Microsoft Partners"
So in other words, MS owns your computer. Linux doesn't have *any* of those problems, yes XP is broken and yes Linux does solve all of those problems.