The fact is, its almost pointless to subscribe if you have a broadband internet connection. Most of the info each month is outdated by the time it hits your mailbox or the store. It doesn't help that in an effort to decrease cost, most of the time theres no demo games or "free gifts" to gain by subscribing. The internet has replaced the gaming mag, because of its near instant news source, source for cheats and hints and reviews.
The problem with records are that they arn't very portible, its not like your going to put batteries in a record player and listen to it on long road trips. And very very very few companies have done anything productive with digital music, either they trample over your rights but have a good selection or they are very respective of your rights and have a poor selection. With a CD* I can play it in my; Car, Stereo, Portable CD player, Windows Computer, Linux Computer, Mac computer, MP3 player (after its ripped of course), and my friend's Car, Stereo, etc. And I can burn multiple copies in case it breaks, I can share songs with my friend, I can have 1000000 backups of my songs if I feel like it and can play it whenever. With most digital audio I can play it in my: iPod OR Mp3 player and Windows and Mac computers, unless I install "illegal" codecs to play them. Until I can buy digital audio and play it in more things without DRM and make as many backups and share them as I can with CDs digital audio will never fully catch on. And although records are nice, they lack the ability to be "burnt" how CDs are and rip music from them.
So now are they going to patent "Making a violent video game" now? If so then I think that the quality of games is going to drop.... But clearly, its not hurting Rockstar, everyone knows that GTA is violent, so is it right for Nintendo to threaten other platforming games that have a character that can jump? Because everyone knows that Mario does that and so Nintendo is loosing money left and right because of that....
I was at my local Best Buy (Only big tech store around) and decided to buy Guild Wars and so I took it home opened it up, I already had the client downloaded so I made a new account although it said that my serial number had already been used! So I contacted Guild Wars support and they told me to take it back to Best Buy, thankfully after reading the e-mail Best Buy gave me a new game without the serial number being used, however I suspect that the box would just be re-shrinkwrapped and given to someone else who would have the same problem.
Its the Microsoft effect working, people don't like change even if Hulu managed to be 100X better then YouTube people for the next 5 years would still be on YouTube, why hasn't the Mac and Linux gotten more appeal even though most people agree that its a better operating system? Its the unknown and the average web browser/computer user won't remember about Hulu. And also, about the "pirated" things, its not the things that are on NBC, ABC, FOX and CBS that people want, its the things that they can't get off-air such as Comedy Central, Disney and things that aren't out in America/Europe/Japan such as most Anime, T.V. shows and movies. People would have no problem paying if they could get the content they wanted, for a reasonable price with No DRM that works on Every format (Linux, Windows, iPod, MP3 player, DVD player, PS3, etc.) with infinite free downloads if your hard drive/flash drive fails. No one is going to change from going to YouTube in any large crowd anytime soon, and not to NBC who seems to be a foe of open content.
The problem with how memory is that it gives developers no incentive to optimize code to run it faster/better/smaller other then small speed boosts. 1 TB of storage would be nice, but if it means that I have to download 300 GB for a program or a Linux distribution with the same speed of 1 MB/second it would take forever or say a 7 MB web site. We need to see an increase in Internet speeds at affordable prices first before we go overboard with physical storage.
Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? Linux teaches students about computers Windows teaches students how to use Windows If someone learned UNIX 10 years ago, they could pick up a modern Linux distro and have little trouble with it, if you take someone who learned Windows 98 and put them on a Vista system, they would be confused and have no clue how to do the most basic things. Same thing with Office, if a UNIX student learned on vi, they could edit text files with ease on a Linux system, take someone who learned on Word 97 and put them on a Word 2007 machine and they would be confused. Not to mention practically anyone knows how to check e-mail, surf the web and get around an operating system, that doesn't get you ahead, now if someone knows PHP, Perl and Server Administration, they could be an entry-level sysadmin for a small company, while the other student would be more or less a data entry clerk, Windows leads to more dependence on MS products, Linux leads to more solutions and more opportunities.
Well this explains why they went haywire on the iPhone unlocking, even though they still made enough money on the hardware that they shouldn't break compatibility with an "update"
MS will always make Vista look "better" then OS-X, Linux, BSD, GNU, *insert non MS product here* and can do so with WGA. For example, if I buy a computer from a physical location (Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.) chances are it will have either Vista or OS-X, even if I want to put Linux, BSD or another operating system on it, it registers as a "sale" for Windows and not to mention how ridiculously complicated it is to refuse the EULA and get your money back, some companies even prevent you from doing that!!! So unless you buy a Dell with Ubuntu or another vendor with Linux pre-installed it comes out as a "point" for MS, and even more if you get Vista, buy a licence for XP and run XP, it counts as 2 sales for MS. It is this that is creating a monopoly for MS, a computer sale is a Windows sale, and if someone wants to tell me how easy it is to get Linux pre-installed, tell me of a physical location that is a nationwide chain that sells Linux pre-installed, the sad fact is you can't, and when you ask for advice to their store "computer experts" if *insert hardware here* is compatible with Linux/BSD *insert distro name and kernel version here* you get a blank stare or a "Sorry I don't know much about Linux" it is this why MS has such a great market share, the stupidity of the typical customer to anything not MS and to know not much about "computers" as "Microsoft products" it is that why technology is moving at such a slow pace lately.
When people boot up the laptop they aren't going to see "Linux" they are going to see the GUI which happens to look very childish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_(GUI) (as the target audience is children) but the typical computer user only sees the GUI and thinks how simple it is rather then using a "true operating system" such as XP, not to mention how people generally have no clue what Linux is or thinking of it solely as a server OS (I had one guy after I said that I used Linux ask me why I needed a server at home) and because Linux always seems to be "intigrated" into the hardware, most people don't know that its there, just as if you would ask someone who has a cell phone what operating system it was running they would shrug (Unless it was a Palm, Blackberry or iPhone) because people think of it as "just a phone" just like a TiVo is "just a video recorder" it is this that is hurting Linux adoption as people don't know what runs Linux, and when you show a typical American parent if you want a laptop running Linux (But all they see is a very simple GUI) or Windows which they know as an Operating system. And I bet that for the third world countries, they would just have Linux running and just download a copy of Windows to put on there.
Exactly, it seems like the GPLV3 was made in effort to stop Tivo and MS and Novell. That is it, add in a few things about patents and that is the GPLV3, it seems to be a "temporary" licence, one that only is any good in 2007-2008 when it will need rewritten again. While the GPL2 was a solid licence meant to defend code freedom rather then stop a few companies from exploiting flaws in the previous GPL.
For the "PC is dead" comment, it should be that the Microsoft PC is dead. Because vendors are so hesitant either realising source code or spending money for a very niche market there aren't that many major games for Linux. And Microsoft with Vista has scared hard-core gamers away with lacklustre performance, bad or non-existent drivers and the fact DirectX10 is being made to work on both Linux and XP. Not to mention how M$ core developers are developing only for the 360 rather then making releases for the PC at the same time. As for the Wii, it has tons of potential but most of the games don't have much substance yet, it will take some major games such as Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl to get development moving for the Wii. If you take a look at the Nintendo DS the first year or two very, very few "substantial" games came out, only tech-demo like experiments until major games came out for it that were traditional games that used the 2 screens well. For the Wii though, the one thing that is saving it is the Virtual Console and exclusive titles. You can almost guarantee most Nintendo first or second party titles will never show up on the PS3 or 360 such as Mario, Super Smash Bros., Fire Emblem, Zelda, and the list goes on and on. The only reasons that people have told me that they bought a 360 was for Halo 3, most people I talked to about getting a Wii wanted either the innovative controls, first-party titles or the Virtual Console.
I have a flash cart and guess where I bought it... Wal-Mart here in the US. It was a Datel branded "Max Media Player" and it had a NoPass-like device to put in Slot-1 and a Compact Flash card reader on the bottom, its not the greatest for homebrew as it doesn't contain any extra RAM, but I have a NES and SNES emulator working fine on it, along with a few homebrew games, I don't believe commercial games will run on it though, but recently I saw a Datel product "Games and Movies" that was another flash cart-like device. So they aren't as hard to come by as Nintendo makes you think they are.
Isn't this ironic that this happens right after Ubuntu 7.10 launch that one of its biggest features was the search tool (And became it's most hated) but now M$ has come up with yet another reason not to use Windows and worse, its not uninstallable unlike the search tool in 7.10. I can see this being a Big Problem on the ancient computers that are somehow running XP like the 800 MHZ Celerons with 256 MB of RAM making their (normally already slowed experience due to spyware/adware/viruses) crawl to a halt. If MS wants to stay ahead, they need to stop installing major "updates" and start coming out with a new operating system that looks like XP, feels like XP, drops the DRM of Vista, lets you use the same hardware as XP but has all the security of Vista (not that Vista is that secure) because Vista is dead. Vista has been the number 1 thing that has pushed users to OS-X or Linux lately. So how does MS intend to get market share from this move?
Generally, its not because people want to watch a commercial free broadcast of *insert show here* but rather they don't have time to watch it live, they missed an episode, its not available where they live, or they don't get the channel it is on. Viacom is not losing any money because of this because obviously people can't watch the show when they want to on TV so they are watching it online. An industry wide copyright filter will just encourage people to crack and hack it.
Another reason to download music illegitimately, its bad enough with DRM, Incompatible formats, high prices and slow getting it to the music store, so now you have to put up with the same amount of DRM, Incompatible formats, slower service and now higher prices, and how is a "Tax" going to help compensate artists? Same way that all the other taxes are going to help the "Roads and schools" when they don't. Just another reason to "pirate" songs
Their advertisements are working, they don't target XP though, everyone knows that Vista is a OS no one wants to use, but that still isn't' going to push them to get a Mac rather then staying with XP or switching to Linux.
I'm imagining that not only will this be used to sue MS, and Patent Trolls but once IBM has sued them hopefully the "mainstream" media catches on, and congress will reform patents to only include physical inventions (For example you can patent the Blu-Ray disk itself, but not the encryption key for it) Sure MS can claim prior art, but the goal of this I don't think is to sue patent trolls/MS but rather to bring attention to the patent system and how flawed it is. But Im glad IBM is getting this rather then some other company (MS, SCO, Apple) because IBM seems to know that Open-Source is the future and is moving towards it and I doubt will sue them with a large patent portfolio.
Thats why I enjoy using Linux, several easy to use languages(Python, Perl), documentation, compilers and a 100% customizable system, thats just about the best you can get now with Windows and to a lesser extent OSX hides data from the end user, remember back when the C64 you could program all your games just on that, its no wonder that so many people don't have a clue about technology, its totally hidden.
Its about getting $. Its much harder to gain access to a server then to get cracked serial numbers for the actual versions of Adobe products. Seriously, Flash and Photoshop serial numbers are floating around the web waiting for anyone to get them, I'm sure that this is just Adobe's way of getting their money for those products by either a subscription based service, a one time fee or through ads. Or it could be a way to make easy cross-platform products without open-sourcing them.
Which is why if your that paranoid, you look at the source yourself and compile it from that source, its not that hard and there is no way that you somehow got code you didn't want. If you overlooked somthing that is your fault, you compiled it, you looked over the source, thats something you can't do in the Windows world with stealth updates and the like
But Linux and most Linux programs are already more "trusted" then Windows can ever be. From being open source, how can you not trust it? There are no surprises and if you feel so inclined, you can build everything from source to make sure that there isn't any malformed code in the binaries. So how is this news?
At least here in the US, it is a challenge to find a Wii, most places are sold out of them I have only seen one when I was looking around in tech stores and the discount stores (Wal-Mart etc.) are sold out of them too, 360s are found in almost all of the stores same with Halo 3, lots of boxes, sure the Wii hasn't had a "Killer Hit" yet like the 360 has with Halo 3 but the games that are released are fun to play and with Brawl and Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn coming this winter, I would imagine that Wii sales will be way up this Christmas season, also, Nintendo is making a killing with the Virtual Console, something that still makes sales go up because there still will be games available for purchase that you won't be able to get for the 360 and PS3. Nintendo has exclusive first party titles that are strong, the PS3 and 360 really don't have as much, and I for one welcome our new Wii masters.
Yes, I think Linspire might be bought before Novell, but hardly anyone that I know uses Linspire (or Freespire) But for most of the codecs, MS doesn't have a right to them anyways (MP3, AAC) sure WMF and such they do, but if its legal or not, most people simply don't care including MS (Who after being convicted as an abusive monopoly in both the US and EU, had nothing done, except for the non-inclusion of WMP in Windows) but wouldn't all the WMVs and WMFs be legal to those who had a copy of Windows that was properly licensed? And if MS thinks people even care about "legality" then why are they trying so hard to stop people from getting non-licensed versions of Windows? MS is dying, Open Source is the only thing that is going to save them, I would place almost any amount of money of them going down soon, and Linux is the next thing that will take root in the OS market, if Windows 7 is anything like Vista, people will see a forced upgrade and ditch Windows altogether, a new era is dawning, MS isn't part of it.
I can assure you that Canonical (Makers of Ubuntu) And Red Hat won't be bought out, and Debian is a community distro, and when SUSE is practically sold to MS already, there doesn't leave a lot of major distros left, I don't think that PCLinuxOS will be sold to MS or Mandriva will because they seem to be much like a community distro even though they are sponsored by companies, so with Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Debian, Mandirva, and PCLinuxOS staying MS free, that doesn't give MS much room with the other distro makers, as for Novell, sure they have contributed to the Open Source community a lot, but that software is GPL'd so whenever MS makes a change to the code it becomes GPL'd too (assuming they actually follow the law this time...) But it seems that whenever MS buys a company, us/.ers won't use it (and when its open source stuff, face it were the main users of it) and so you hit a major user base that refuses to use it, but it might be nice to have a "free" Windows-Like distro like Windows thats Open Source (with a few proprietary components) to recommend to Windows users, but Im not going to switch from Ubuntu anytime soon.
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The fact is, its almost pointless to subscribe if you have a broadband internet connection. Most of the info each month is outdated by the time it hits your mailbox or the store. It doesn't help that in an effort to decrease cost, most of the time theres no demo games or "free gifts" to gain by subscribing. The internet has replaced the gaming mag, because of its near instant news source, source for cheats and hints and reviews.
The problem with records are that they arn't very portible, its not like your going to put batteries in a record player and listen to it on long road trips. And very very very few companies have done anything productive with digital music, either they trample over your rights but have a good selection or they are very respective of your rights and have a poor selection. With a CD* I can play it in my; Car, Stereo, Portable CD player, Windows Computer, Linux Computer, Mac computer, MP3 player (after its ripped of course), and my friend's Car, Stereo, etc. And I can burn multiple copies in case it breaks, I can share songs with my friend, I can have 1000000 backups of my songs if I feel like it and can play it whenever. With most digital audio I can play it in my: iPod OR Mp3 player and Windows and Mac computers, unless I install "illegal" codecs to play them. Until I can buy digital audio and play it in more things without DRM and make as many backups and share them as I can with CDs digital audio will never fully catch on. And although records are nice, they lack the ability to be "burnt" how CDs are and rip music from them.
*that is excluding the rootkitted ones
So now are they going to patent "Making a violent video game" now? If so then I think that the quality of games is going to drop.... But clearly, its not hurting Rockstar, everyone knows that GTA is violent, so is it right for Nintendo to threaten other platforming games that have a character that can jump? Because everyone knows that Mario does that and so Nintendo is loosing money left and right because of that....
I was at my local Best Buy (Only big tech store around) and decided to buy Guild Wars and so I took it home opened it up, I already had the client downloaded so I made a new account although it said that my serial number had already been used! So I contacted Guild Wars support and they told me to take it back to Best Buy, thankfully after reading the e-mail Best Buy gave me a new game without the serial number being used, however I suspect that the box would just be re-shrinkwrapped and given to someone else who would have the same problem.
Its the Microsoft effect working, people don't like change even if Hulu managed to be 100X better then YouTube people for the next 5 years would still be on YouTube, why hasn't the Mac and Linux gotten more appeal even though most people agree that its a better operating system? Its the unknown and the average web browser/computer user won't remember about Hulu. And also, about the "pirated" things, its not the things that are on NBC, ABC, FOX and CBS that people want, its the things that they can't get off-air such as Comedy Central, Disney and things that aren't out in America/Europe/Japan such as most Anime, T.V. shows and movies. People would have no problem paying if they could get the content they wanted, for a reasonable price with No DRM that works on Every format (Linux, Windows, iPod, MP3 player, DVD player, PS3, etc.) with infinite free downloads if your hard drive/flash drive fails. No one is going to change from going to YouTube in any large crowd anytime soon, and not to NBC who seems to be a foe of open content.
The problem with how memory is that it gives developers no incentive to optimize code to run it faster/better/smaller other then small speed boosts. 1 TB of storage would be nice, but if it means that I have to download 300 GB for a program or a Linux distribution with the same speed of 1 MB/second it would take forever or say a 7 MB web site. We need to see an increase in Internet speeds at affordable prices first before we go overboard with physical storage.
Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? Linux teaches students about computers Windows teaches students how to use Windows If someone learned UNIX 10 years ago, they could pick up a modern Linux distro and have little trouble with it, if you take someone who learned Windows 98 and put them on a Vista system, they would be confused and have no clue how to do the most basic things. Same thing with Office, if a UNIX student learned on vi, they could edit text files with ease on a Linux system, take someone who learned on Word 97 and put them on a Word 2007 machine and they would be confused. Not to mention practically anyone knows how to check e-mail, surf the web and get around an operating system, that doesn't get you ahead, now if someone knows PHP, Perl and Server Administration, they could be an entry-level sysadmin for a small company, while the other student would be more or less a data entry clerk, Windows leads to more dependence on MS products, Linux leads to more solutions and more opportunities.
Well this explains why they went haywire on the iPhone unlocking, even though they still made enough money on the hardware that they shouldn't break compatibility with an "update"
MS will always make Vista look "better" then OS-X, Linux, BSD, GNU, *insert non MS product here* and can do so with WGA. For example, if I buy a computer from a physical location (Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.) chances are it will have either Vista or OS-X, even if I want to put Linux, BSD or another operating system on it, it registers as a "sale" for Windows and not to mention how ridiculously complicated it is to refuse the EULA and get your money back, some companies even prevent you from doing that!!! So unless you buy a Dell with Ubuntu or another vendor with Linux pre-installed it comes out as a "point" for MS, and even more if you get Vista, buy a licence for XP and run XP, it counts as 2 sales for MS. It is this that is creating a monopoly for MS, a computer sale is a Windows sale, and if someone wants to tell me how easy it is to get Linux pre-installed, tell me of a physical location that is a nationwide chain that sells Linux pre-installed, the sad fact is you can't, and when you ask for advice to their store "computer experts" if *insert hardware here* is compatible with Linux/BSD *insert distro name and kernel version here* you get a blank stare or a "Sorry I don't know much about Linux" it is this why MS has such a great market share, the stupidity of the typical customer to anything not MS and to know not much about "computers" as "Microsoft products" it is that why technology is moving at such a slow pace lately.
When people boot up the laptop they aren't going to see "Linux" they are going to see the GUI which happens to look very childish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_(GUI) (as the target audience is children) but the typical computer user only sees the GUI and thinks how simple it is rather then using a "true operating system" such as XP, not to mention how people generally have no clue what Linux is or thinking of it solely as a server OS (I had one guy after I said that I used Linux ask me why I needed a server at home) and because Linux always seems to be "intigrated" into the hardware, most people don't know that its there, just as if you would ask someone who has a cell phone what operating system it was running they would shrug (Unless it was a Palm, Blackberry or iPhone) because people think of it as "just a phone" just like a TiVo is "just a video recorder" it is this that is hurting Linux adoption as people don't know what runs Linux, and when you show a typical American parent if you want a laptop running Linux (But all they see is a very simple GUI) or Windows which they know as an Operating system. And I bet that for the third world countries, they would just have Linux running and just download a copy of Windows to put on there.
Exactly, it seems like the GPLV3 was made in effort to stop Tivo and MS and Novell. That is it, add in a few things about patents and that is the GPLV3, it seems to be a "temporary" licence, one that only is any good in 2007-2008 when it will need rewritten again. While the GPL2 was a solid licence meant to defend code freedom rather then stop a few companies from exploiting flaws in the previous GPL.
For the "PC is dead" comment, it should be that the Microsoft PC is dead. Because vendors are so hesitant either realising source code or spending money for a very niche market there aren't that many major games for Linux. And Microsoft with Vista has scared hard-core gamers away with lacklustre performance, bad or non-existent drivers and the fact DirectX10 is being made to work on both Linux and XP. Not to mention how M$ core developers are developing only for the 360 rather then making releases for the PC at the same time. As for the Wii, it has tons of potential but most of the games don't have much substance yet, it will take some major games such as Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl to get development moving for the Wii. If you take a look at the Nintendo DS the first year or two very, very few "substantial" games came out, only tech-demo like experiments until major games came out for it that were traditional games that used the 2 screens well. For the Wii though, the one thing that is saving it is the Virtual Console and exclusive titles. You can almost guarantee most Nintendo first or second party titles will never show up on the PS3 or 360 such as Mario, Super Smash Bros., Fire Emblem, Zelda, and the list goes on and on. The only reasons that people have told me that they bought a 360 was for Halo 3, most people I talked to about getting a Wii wanted either the innovative controls, first-party titles or the Virtual Console.
I have a flash cart and guess where I bought it... Wal-Mart here in the US. It was a Datel branded "Max Media Player" and it had a NoPass-like device to put in Slot-1 and a Compact Flash card reader on the bottom, its not the greatest for homebrew as it doesn't contain any extra RAM, but I have a NES and SNES emulator working fine on it, along with a few homebrew games, I don't believe commercial games will run on it though, but recently I saw a Datel product "Games and Movies" that was another flash cart-like device. So they aren't as hard to come by as Nintendo makes you think they are.
Isn't this ironic that this happens right after Ubuntu 7.10 launch that one of its biggest features was the search tool (And became it's most hated) but now M$ has come up with yet another reason not to use Windows and worse, its not uninstallable unlike the search tool in 7.10. I can see this being a Big Problem on the ancient computers that are somehow running XP like the 800 MHZ Celerons with 256 MB of RAM making their (normally already slowed experience due to spyware/adware/viruses) crawl to a halt. If MS wants to stay ahead, they need to stop installing major "updates" and start coming out with a new operating system that looks like XP, feels like XP, drops the DRM of Vista, lets you use the same hardware as XP but has all the security of Vista (not that Vista is that secure) because Vista is dead. Vista has been the number 1 thing that has pushed users to OS-X or Linux lately. So how does MS intend to get market share from this move?
Generally, its not because people want to watch a commercial free broadcast of *insert show here* but rather they don't have time to watch it live, they missed an episode, its not available where they live, or they don't get the channel it is on. Viacom is not losing any money because of this because obviously people can't watch the show when they want to on TV so they are watching it online. An industry wide copyright filter will just encourage people to crack and hack it.
Another reason to download music illegitimately, its bad enough with DRM, Incompatible formats, high prices and slow getting it to the music store, so now you have to put up with the same amount of DRM, Incompatible formats, slower service and now higher prices, and how is a "Tax" going to help compensate artists? Same way that all the other taxes are going to help the "Roads and schools" when they don't. Just another reason to "pirate" songs
Their advertisements are working, they don't target XP though, everyone knows that Vista is a OS no one wants to use, but that still isn't' going to push them to get a Mac rather then staying with XP or switching to Linux.
I'm imagining that not only will this be used to sue MS, and Patent Trolls but once IBM has sued them hopefully the "mainstream" media catches on, and congress will reform patents to only include physical inventions (For example you can patent the Blu-Ray disk itself, but not the encryption key for it) Sure MS can claim prior art, but the goal of this I don't think is to sue patent trolls/MS but rather to bring attention to the patent system and how flawed it is. But Im glad IBM is getting this rather then some other company (MS, SCO, Apple) because IBM seems to know that Open-Source is the future and is moving towards it and I doubt will sue them with a large patent portfolio.
Thats why I enjoy using Linux, several easy to use languages(Python, Perl), documentation, compilers and a 100% customizable system, thats just about the best you can get now with Windows and to a lesser extent OSX hides data from the end user, remember back when the C64 you could program all your games just on that, its no wonder that so many people don't have a clue about technology, its totally hidden.
Its about getting $. Its much harder to gain access to a server then to get cracked serial numbers for the actual versions of Adobe products. Seriously, Flash and Photoshop serial numbers are floating around the web waiting for anyone to get them, I'm sure that this is just Adobe's way of getting their money for those products by either a subscription based service, a one time fee or through ads. Or it could be a way to make easy cross-platform products without open-sourcing them.
Which is why if your that paranoid, you look at the source yourself and compile it from that source, its not that hard and there is no way that you somehow got code you didn't want. If you overlooked somthing that is your fault, you compiled it, you looked over the source, thats something you can't do in the Windows world with stealth updates and the like
But Linux and most Linux programs are already more "trusted" then Windows can ever be. From being open source, how can you not trust it? There are no surprises and if you feel so inclined, you can build everything from source to make sure that there isn't any malformed code in the binaries. So how is this news?
At least here in the US, it is a challenge to find a Wii, most places are sold out of them I have only seen one when I was looking around in tech stores and the discount stores (Wal-Mart etc.) are sold out of them too, 360s are found in almost all of the stores same with Halo 3, lots of boxes, sure the Wii hasn't had a "Killer Hit" yet like the 360 has with Halo 3 but the games that are released are fun to play and with Brawl and Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn coming this winter, I would imagine that Wii sales will be way up this Christmas season, also, Nintendo is making a killing with the Virtual Console, something that still makes sales go up because there still will be games available for purchase that you won't be able to get for the 360 and PS3. Nintendo has exclusive first party titles that are strong, the PS3 and 360 really don't have as much, and I for one welcome our new Wii masters.
Yes, I think Linspire might be bought before Novell, but hardly anyone that I know uses Linspire (or Freespire) But for most of the codecs, MS doesn't have a right to them anyways (MP3, AAC) sure WMF and such they do, but if its legal or not, most people simply don't care including MS (Who after being convicted as an abusive monopoly in both the US and EU, had nothing done, except for the non-inclusion of WMP in Windows) but wouldn't all the WMVs and WMFs be legal to those who had a copy of Windows that was properly licensed? And if MS thinks people even care about "legality" then why are they trying so hard to stop people from getting non-licensed versions of Windows? MS is dying, Open Source is the only thing that is going to save them, I would place almost any amount of money of them going down soon, and Linux is the next thing that will take root in the OS market, if Windows 7 is anything like Vista, people will see a forced upgrade and ditch Windows altogether, a new era is dawning, MS isn't part of it.
I can assure you that Canonical (Makers of Ubuntu) And Red Hat won't be bought out, and Debian is a community distro, and when SUSE is practically sold to MS already, there doesn't leave a lot of major distros left, I don't think that PCLinuxOS will be sold to MS or Mandriva will because they seem to be much like a community distro even though they are sponsored by companies, so with Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Debian, Mandirva, and PCLinuxOS staying MS free, that doesn't give MS much room with the other distro makers, as for Novell, sure they have contributed to the Open Source community a lot, but that software is GPL'd so whenever MS makes a change to the code it becomes GPL'd too (assuming they actually follow the law this time...) But it seems that whenever MS buys a company, us /.ers won't use it (and when its open source stuff, face it were the main users of it) and so you hit a major user base that refuses to use it, but it might be nice to have a "free" Windows-Like distro like Windows thats Open Source (with a few proprietary components) to recommend to Windows users, but Im not going to switch from Ubuntu anytime soon.