And honestly, Linux would "cost" the average person more than $300 to start using in terms of time and effort. It's cost me way more than that, and I have some idea of what I'm doing.
Oh yes, because we know Windows costs less. Lets take first the OS, ranging from $50-$300, even if you buy it OEM you will still pay the approximately $50 it costs for the OEM Windows, not to mention all the time taking off all the crapware they install on new PCs. Now, because we don't want your Windows box to become part of a botnet, you install an antivirus/anti-spyware that costs around $40. Of course while your at it you need to install MS Office, around $150. So thats just $240 in software alone. Now assuming you need a dual-core PC with 2 gigs of RAM to run Vista properly, that costs around $450 without monitor and such. A far cry from the $200 gPC, so with your $300 of time and effort spent learning Linux you have spent $500 compared to the $690 with the MS solution.
And honestly, how much money do you think it would cost to learn Office 2007/Vista? I would expect a lot more and it comes without the assurance that it won't get discontinued and you have to learn Office 2009/Windows 7 within 3 years and of course pay more. Learning Linux is an investment, and not a hard one at that. And honestly, Linux would "cost" the average person more than $300 to start using in terms of time and effort. It's cost me way more than that, and I have some idea of what I'm doing.
Dell though seems to be hiding Linux, even though they offer it they never mention it in any ads, or on the main page. If you search for Linux you will find it with the heading "Not sure Open Source is for you?" under the computers. Honestly, even though Dell does offer Linux which can't be said about other vendors, they sure seem to hide it well.
Exactly, when things such as the gPC start appearing more often people will naturally switch to Linux. Why? Because A) The hardware price-performance ration is good, B) The OS is free cutting down the cost of the computer and C) Nearly all software is free. Joe Sixpack really doesn't need much more software then is installed by default in Ubuntu. About the only things would be Flash and MP3 support which is trivial to add. All in all, when cheap Linux-based desktops/laptops start appearing more often expect the dominant OS to change.
Lack of security in wireless isn't that huge of a deal. If you meet a skilled hacker, no matter what you throw at him/her they will be able to beat it. However most security holes aren't a huge deal because as long as there isn't a.exe that Joe Script-Kiddy can execute its not going to be exploited. Fact is, a skilled hacker/cracker can defeat any encryption or any security you set up, no matter how advanced. You just need enough security (normally, now for governments or high-profile businesses it is different...) so a script kiddy can't break in.
A patent troll is a company that just comes up with patents and whenever another company "infringes" on their many patents they sue them. Usually these patent trolls have no other business other then suing companies to make a profit. Think of SCO, only with patents.
Over time though certain parts of the world will become less habitable due to climate change (some places will become more habitable but that's not much comfort for the people whose children die due to an increase in tropical disease).
Over time though, many things happened that made things less habitable, the Sahara turned from a grassland to a desert and that was before we had cars. If someone can prove, without a doubt that by people driving cars and such, we are causing a great climate change that wouldn't be beneficial I might believe you, but I for one am not willing to pay money for something we aren't even sure we are causing it.
This is something agreed upon by a very large majority of scientists across the globe.
No, all that has been agreed upon is the planet is getting/slightly/ warmer. Thats it. No cause. Sure, California wants you to cease all use of technology that/could/ be/perhaps/ contributing to this slight effect however other scientists think that it could be cows that caused this. The fact is, we don't know and I for one am not happy with paying extra for something minor that/could/ be happening.
what exactly is it that elevates this particular environmental catastrophe to the point of being required curriculum in primary education?
Because this way all the students will think they have "facts" to go vote for tax increases and more government standards to make gas even more expensive and cars too! Really California has gone far enough to make sure our country is protected from any "threat" that we can get from being a productive country and eating foods that may not be the healthiest and guess what! We need warning labels now to tell us that its not good to eat lead because it may cause birth defects! Honestly, if California used "terrorist" instead of "global warming" or "climate change" we would have the patriot act.
wouldn't you at least be in favor of technological advancement?
Yes I would be in favor of technological advancement, if it comes at a decent price. Seriously, we don't have anything to replace oil with and most people who believe that all this is caused by us driving cars and such, if its between me driving my car with gas at a reasonable price or me spending an extra $70K on a new car to run on *insert "clean" fuel here* to help make the ocean not rise an extra inch because it is going to flood New York City if I drive a gas-powered car. Honestly, it would make it believable if they didn't go with wild claims of how the world is going to end if Earth's temperature goes up 3 degrees.
Sure, to the average joe it is hard to see the win, but if Yahoo loses revenues MS will begin to take them (what Google doesn't get anyway). In the business of becoming the largest in your field of endeavor having better products/services than your competition is only marginally more important (if at all) than your competitor being worse than you at the game of business.
I know a lot of people who use Google as their primary search engine, I know lots of people who use Yahoo for searching and mail, I even know people who prefer to use Ask. Even still there are some who use some hijacked browser page to search. However I have not met one person who really uses Live/MSN to search. I don't think for most people Yahoo is going away soon, most have mail accounts there and of course will use it to check their mail, and unless MS's search engine has new and different features then Yahoo and Google I doubt they will gain marketshare. For most people, they choose search engines from convience not features and Google and Yahoo are rooted in their minds and browser's homepage more then MSN/Live.
Microsoft's year over year growth for the fourth quarter of 2007 was 26%. Their quarterly revenues were nearly equal to Google's entire financial year. Such growth can hardly be termed as "treading water", despite their lack of innovation.
How many of that "growth" is in OEM versions if Windows? I'd guess alot, MS could easily have them buy in bulk (such as licenses by the thousands) and give a slight discount and make it seem like MS is alive while that may be the only OEM money they get for the first half of Vista's life. No, MS is going down and even though they can make the numbers say whatever they want the fact is, people perception of MS is different, no longer does OS need to equil Windows with Mac and Linux being just as if not more usable then Vista and unless MS can come out with Windows 7 by 2010, I would say that MS is sinking like the Titanic.
Once upon a time, Microsoft made cool stuff and people bought it... a lot of it. Then, for some reason, marketers took control of the company instead of the creative people and now people are wondering why Microsoft is failing.
No, once MS, Bought cool stuff from other companies, rebranded it and made deals with OEMs so people would use it. Just about EVERY thing MS has done has been bought by other companies. If it wasn't for getting lucky with DOS (which they bought from someone else) and IBM they would not be existing right now. All MS survived on is luck and buying companies that do innovate. Now that they managed to monopolize all the OS industry, they have just left the community projects like Linux that can't be bought and Apple which would be highly unwilling to be bought. Everything MS has done was by money, even though they have good coders, all MS has done is buy and buy and now they have scared all the competition from even trying, they have nothing left to buy and are now stagnant. Yahoo innovated slightly but I still think it represents the early '90s on the Web whereas Google represents the present age.
I really don't think that now the iPhone is the phone to beat. Most people I know have a RAZR or similar, while they would like an iPhone as most people would, the $600 price tag plus dealing with AT&T makes them not buy one.
How about, "if you have nothing to hide, hide it anyways"?
How about, if you have nothing to hide, someone either the government, your boss, Etc. will twist it to either sell your info or make you look like a criminal, so hide it.
Well, its not an "end-all" solution however it solves the immediate problem. However chances are in 10-15 years we won't even be using Torrents we will have moved on to another form of P2P.
think if ms wants to survive as far as vista goes, they better pull an AOL: give it away on DVDs, but in cereal boxes, shoe boxes, and even with his/her Viagra SUBscriptions, PROscriptions, INscriptions and CONscriptions. This cannot be good at ALL for msoft.
They already have, its called P2P networks, truthfully, thats how MS is surviving, via OEM editions and getting marketshare via "pirated" Windows, when they collapse due to MS's lawsuits its going to be funny to watch MS's marketshare drop like a rock.
Why do you think you need anti-trust laws but because growing monopolies is a known ill-effect of capitalism in action?
But do you think that the US is capitalist? I tend to disagree because of the numerous laws that prevent competition such as the DMCA, Software Patents, seemingly forever copyrights and judges that rule unfairly on the side of the *AA. Honestly, the US is a bad mixture of Capitalism, Socialism with a dash of Communism and it all blends together for a really really bad economy. If the US was fully capitalist we wouldn't have or at least limited A) Software Patents B) Overly-Protected copyrights C) Minimum Wage D) Federally regulated interest E) EPA F) Less FCC regulations unless those go away the US by definition is not fully capitalist, I don't even think there is a country that is but to say that the US is capitalist and therefore Capitalism == the USA's economy is wrong.
That, is the sad truth. When MS released ME, they at least had the NT Windows getting ready for XP, with Vista, there doesn't seem to be any new technology to save MS. With all the delays that it took getting Vista out, I doubt that we will see NT 7 betas until 2010 at the earliest. About all MS can do is clean up the bloat with a few service packs and take out the DRM and speed up the OS or release a version of Vista: Light that will work on normal hardware and not require a $600+ computer to work well on.
I don't mind using the command line to configure my wireless but when the distro doesn't detect it, it kind of makes it hard to download the madwifi packages. Yes I know I can compile them, however some distros don't contain compilers. I don't mind doing things via the shell, in fact sometimes I prefer to do things via it, however when it comes to including drivers for wireless cards, the "user friendly" distros usually contain them while the "power user" ones do not.
Yes, we just have to make sure there are always enough developers for the Slackware's, Debian's and Gentoo's to make sure the power side of the OS is kept as powerful as we need it to be.
I honestly haven't seen a loss of power from Debian to Ubuntu. Really the power side is stable, and good, its the user-friendly part that could use a bit of help. Linux has a stable kernel, stable shells, stable package managers, stable GUIs, a few stable browsers and many stable programs, however to say that from Joe Windows-User's standpoint they aren't really easy to use and until Linux can shed the "free copy of Windows" syndrome that happens when people don't understand there are OSes besides Windows and OS X, I don't see that changing.
Exactly, I really don't want to bother with getting something as simple as wireless networking is a pain in some distros, I can use a "power user's" distributions like Gentoo or Debian and spend a few hours getting my wireless up or I can get Ubuntu and connect within a few seconds. I honestly don't see how everyone thinks that easy to use == loss of power and I think that Ubuntu shows this. Even though Ubuntu is easy to use, it still retains almost all of the features of Debian. We should never have to choose between freedom and functionality but until we can get fully free drivers for everything I don't see how including them is a bad thing, and if that equals a loss of power, im fine with that and so would most people.
Exactly, not to mention the price point. Even though back when the mac was coming out, most people went with the (more primitive) DOS computers because they cost quite a bit less. Linux will be the same way, even though people think that Linux is worse then Windows (those who know nothing about Unix and use Linux like a free copy of Windows) it will achieve popularity via the low price. With an OEM edition of Windows costing $50 thats 25% of the Everex $200 PC and when people realize that, exect Linux to take off quickly.
I really don't think that any distro has watered down Linux. Sure Ubuntu may be user-friendly but its still Debian and you can do just about anything with it that you can with Debian with more software. Personally, I prefer the user-friendly distros because its not an absolute pain to get wireless networking to work right. I have to work with a wireless card, if Gentoo doesn't detect it, I really don't want to spend the hours compiling everything when Ubuntu works just fine. It also helps with a user-friendly distro is if you break it, its not too hard to install it compared to say Gentoo. Really, don't think that making a distro user friendly has to alienate the power users, it just makes it much easier to do simple tasks. Please, show me one distro that has achieved wide popularity that takes Linux and makes it watered down and its not easy to do all the power user stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes, because we know Windows costs less. Lets take first the OS, ranging from $50-$300, even if you buy it OEM you will still pay the approximately $50 it costs for the OEM Windows, not to mention all the time taking off all the crapware they install on new PCs. Now, because we don't want your Windows box to become part of a botnet, you install an antivirus/anti-spyware that costs around $40. Of course while your at it you need to install MS Office, around $150. So thats just $240 in software alone. Now assuming you need a dual-core PC with 2 gigs of RAM to run Vista properly, that costs around $450 without monitor and such. A far cry from the $200 gPC, so with your $300 of time and effort spent learning Linux you have spent $500 compared to the $690 with the MS solution.
And honestly, how much money do you think it would cost to learn Office 2007/Vista? I would expect a lot more and it comes without the assurance that it won't get discontinued and you have to learn Office 2009/Windows 7 within 3 years and of course pay more. Learning Linux is an investment, and not a hard one at that. And honestly, Linux would "cost" the average person more than $300 to start using in terms of time and effort. It's cost me way more than that, and I have some idea of what I'm doing.
Dell though seems to be hiding Linux, even though they offer it they never mention it in any ads, or on the main page. If you search for Linux you will find it with the heading "Not sure Open Source is for you?" under the computers. Honestly, even though Dell does offer Linux which can't be said about other vendors, they sure seem to hide it well.
Exactly, when things such as the gPC start appearing more often people will naturally switch to Linux. Why? Because A) The hardware price-performance ration is good, B) The OS is free cutting down the cost of the computer and C) Nearly all software is free. Joe Sixpack really doesn't need much more software then is installed by default in Ubuntu. About the only things would be Flash and MP3 support which is trivial to add. All in all, when cheap Linux-based desktops/laptops start appearing more often expect the dominant OS to change.
Lack of security in wireless isn't that huge of a deal. If you meet a skilled hacker, no matter what you throw at him/her they will be able to beat it. However most security holes aren't a huge deal because as long as there isn't a .exe that Joe Script-Kiddy can execute its not going to be exploited. Fact is, a skilled hacker/cracker can defeat any encryption or any security you set up, no matter how advanced. You just need enough security (normally, now for governments or high-profile businesses it is different...) so a script kiddy can't break in.
A patent troll is a company that just comes up with patents and whenever another company "infringes" on their many patents they sue them. Usually these patent trolls have no other business other then suing companies to make a profit. Think of SCO, only with patents.
China can't just come in take athletes way to political prisons so what does the athletes have to lose?
No but they can sure disqualify them in a heartbeat, then how does that work?
Over time though, many things happened that made things less habitable, the Sahara turned from a grassland to a desert and that was before we had cars. If someone can prove, without a doubt that by people driving cars and such, we are causing a great climate change that wouldn't be beneficial I might believe you, but I for one am not willing to pay money for something we aren't even sure we are causing it.
No, all that has been agreed upon is the planet is getting
Because this way all the students will think they have "facts" to go vote for tax increases and more government standards to make gas even more expensive and cars too! Really California has gone far enough to make sure our country is protected from any "threat" that we can get from being a productive country and eating foods that may not be the healthiest and guess what! We need warning labels now to tell us that its not good to eat lead because it may cause birth defects! Honestly, if California used "terrorist" instead of "global warming" or "climate change" we would have the patriot act.
Yes I would be in favor of technological advancement, if it comes at a decent price. Seriously, we don't have anything to replace oil with and most people who believe that all this is caused by us driving cars and such, if its between me driving my car with gas at a reasonable price or me spending an extra $70K on a new car to run on *insert "clean" fuel here* to help make the ocean not rise an extra inch because it is going to flood New York City if I drive a gas-powered car. Honestly, it would make it believable if they didn't go with wild claims of how the world is going to end if Earth's temperature goes up 3 degrees.
I know a lot of people who use Google as their primary search engine, I know lots of people who use Yahoo for searching and mail, I even know people who prefer to use Ask. Even still there are some who use some hijacked browser page to search. However I have not met one person who really uses Live/MSN to search. I don't think for most people Yahoo is going away soon, most have mail accounts there and of course will use it to check their mail, and unless MS's search engine has new and different features then Yahoo and Google I doubt they will gain marketshare. For most people, they choose search engines from convience not features and Google and Yahoo are rooted in their minds and browser's homepage more then MSN/Live.
How many of that "growth" is in OEM versions if Windows? I'd guess alot, MS could easily have them buy in bulk (such as licenses by the thousands) and give a slight discount and make it seem like MS is alive while that may be the only OEM money they get for the first half of Vista's life. No, MS is going down and even though they can make the numbers say whatever they want the fact is, people perception of MS is different, no longer does OS need to equil Windows with Mac and Linux being just as if not more usable then Vista and unless MS can come out with Windows 7 by 2010, I would say that MS is sinking like the Titanic.
No, once MS, Bought cool stuff from other companies, rebranded it and made deals with OEMs so people would use it. Just about EVERY thing MS has done has been bought by other companies. If it wasn't for getting lucky with DOS (which they bought from someone else) and IBM they would not be existing right now. All MS survived on is luck and buying companies that do innovate. Now that they managed to monopolize all the OS industry, they have just left the community projects like Linux that can't be bought and Apple which would be highly unwilling to be bought. Everything MS has done was by money, even though they have good coders, all MS has done is buy and buy and now they have scared all the competition from even trying, they have nothing left to buy and are now stagnant. Yahoo innovated slightly but I still think it represents the early '90s on the Web whereas Google represents the present age.
I really don't think that now the iPhone is the phone to beat. Most people I know have a RAZR or similar, while they would like an iPhone as most people would, the $600 price tag plus dealing with AT&T makes them not buy one.
How about, if you have nothing to hide, someone either the government, your boss, Etc. will twist it to either sell your info or make you look like a criminal, so hide it.
Well, its not an "end-all" solution however it solves the immediate problem. However chances are in 10-15 years we won't even be using Torrents we will have moved on to another form of P2P.
Doubt it will do more then increase already sky-high costs because of the carrier monopoly.
They already have, its called P2P networks, truthfully, thats how MS is surviving, via OEM editions and getting marketshare via "pirated" Windows, when they collapse due to MS's lawsuits its going to be funny to watch MS's marketshare drop like a rock.
But do you think that the US is capitalist? I tend to disagree because of the numerous laws that prevent competition such as the DMCA, Software Patents, seemingly forever copyrights and judges that rule unfairly on the side of the *AA. Honestly, the US is a bad mixture of Capitalism, Socialism with a dash of Communism and it all blends together for a really really bad economy. If the US was fully capitalist we wouldn't have or at least limited A) Software Patents B) Overly-Protected copyrights C) Minimum Wage D) Federally regulated interest E) EPA F) Less FCC regulations unless those go away the US by definition is not fully capitalist, I don't even think there is a country that is but to say that the US is capitalist and therefore Capitalism == the USA's economy is wrong.
That, is the sad truth. When MS released ME, they at least had the NT Windows getting ready for XP, with Vista, there doesn't seem to be any new technology to save MS. With all the delays that it took getting Vista out, I doubt that we will see NT 7 betas until 2010 at the earliest. About all MS can do is clean up the bloat with a few service packs and take out the DRM and speed up the OS or release a version of Vista: Light that will work on normal hardware and not require a $600+ computer to work well on.
I don't mind using the command line to configure my wireless but when the distro doesn't detect it, it kind of makes it hard to download the madwifi packages. Yes I know I can compile them, however some distros don't contain compilers. I don't mind doing things via the shell, in fact sometimes I prefer to do things via it, however when it comes to including drivers for wireless cards, the "user friendly" distros usually contain them while the "power user" ones do not.
I honestly haven't seen a loss of power from Debian to Ubuntu. Really the power side is stable, and good, its the user-friendly part that could use a bit of help. Linux has a stable kernel, stable shells, stable package managers, stable GUIs, a few stable browsers and many stable programs, however to say that from Joe Windows-User's standpoint they aren't really easy to use and until Linux can shed the "free copy of Windows" syndrome that happens when people don't understand there are OSes besides Windows and OS X, I don't see that changing.
Exactly, I really don't want to bother with getting something as simple as wireless networking is a pain in some distros, I can use a "power user's" distributions like Gentoo or Debian and spend a few hours getting my wireless up or I can get Ubuntu and connect within a few seconds. I honestly don't see how everyone thinks that easy to use == loss of power and I think that Ubuntu shows this. Even though Ubuntu is easy to use, it still retains almost all of the features of Debian. We should never have to choose between freedom and functionality but until we can get fully free drivers for everything I don't see how including them is a bad thing, and if that equals a loss of power, im fine with that and so would most people.
Exactly, not to mention the price point. Even though back when the mac was coming out, most people went with the (more primitive) DOS computers because they cost quite a bit less. Linux will be the same way, even though people think that Linux is worse then Windows (those who know nothing about Unix and use Linux like a free copy of Windows) it will achieve popularity via the low price. With an OEM edition of Windows costing $50 thats 25% of the Everex $200 PC and when people realize that, exect Linux to take off quickly.
I really don't think that any distro has watered down Linux. Sure Ubuntu may be user-friendly but its still Debian and you can do just about anything with it that you can with Debian with more software. Personally, I prefer the user-friendly distros because its not an absolute pain to get wireless networking to work right. I have to work with a wireless card, if Gentoo doesn't detect it, I really don't want to spend the hours compiling everything when Ubuntu works just fine. It also helps with a user-friendly distro is if you break it, its not too hard to install it compared to say Gentoo. Really, don't think that making a distro user friendly has to alienate the power users, it just makes it much easier to do simple tasks. Please, show me one distro that has achieved wide popularity that takes Linux and makes it watered down and its not easy to do all the power user stuff.