Every economist? You can take your social metaphysics and control by fear and shove it wherever you like, but lets just be clear you are talking about ideal high school Keynesian Economics and not real world, grown up Austrian Economics. I am glad you had the capacity to drool over colorful supply and demand graphs, but if you have any additional brain power, try a real book like "The Theory of Money and Credit" or "Keynes the Man" which is contemporary to "The General Theory". And as much as I might like to simply agree with Mesis and Rothbard, I think if Keynes were alive today he would say we were taking all this WAY to far. Keynes advocated for community level collaborative interventionalism, not the head of the Federal government appointing himself CEO and engineer of the next generation of high speed coffins that fart strawberries. Holy Shit!
Strong language is for effect. So long as everyone with the slightest critique is getting modded to hell, I might as well go down all the way.
Oh yeah, and fuck using taxes as moral regulatory tool. What, you run out of Bibles to choke people to death with?
*shooosh* Remember, truth is what the majority or whatever book Oprah is promoting this week says it is. This is neither the time or the place for your "facts". This is a DEMOCRACY!
More specifically, I meant if I was invested in ProTools and Avid audio hardware, or if I had commercial, high volume printers from Lexmark, the investment in Windows 7 Ultimate is a drop in the bucket compared to the hassle of trying to force that all upon Linux. Linux runs on anything, but vendor lockins to bleeding edge technology worries me less. But that is an entirely different matter. IF I wanted to start a private recording studio / label, if I felt ProTools was going to serve me the very best, Linux compatibility would not be my biggest worry. I would investigate fully though. (Not to mention such circumstances would be very unlikely).
I am a true Linux fan boy. This was the best I could come up with, but I do try to watch for that attitude in people and save my breath explaining to them why I think they might be happier with Ubuntu than Windows if ALL thy do is game and homework, and really couldn't care less about what computers can do with respect to anything that would require them to learn somehing.:)
HA HA HA!!! I will watch out for that, and you have my deepest sympathy. That is so sad. You should call them and complain. My motherboard is great for now, and likely for a few more years, but I will really keep that in mind the next time I build a machine for somebody. Ouch. Really, my heart bleeds.
The irony? In the last few years when I still used Windows, it was a lot easier to setup many things with the assistance of a Linux Live CD. Check [your usual sources] for a Live XP CD. They do exist, and maybe that would be enough to make it work.
On the Desktop, everything that Linux distros have, Windows also has.
If by desktop you mean the things you can click on in the applications menu... hmm... Unless you are talking about things like ProTools vs Jack/PulseAudio I can not imagine what you are talking about, especially when one claims to be a UNIX Systems Administrator.
Needless to say, they will be annoyed and frustrated when their Linux distro pulls out one of its patented "only half-works" issues on something that should be taken for granted like sound or graphics.
A) cheap hardware sucks B) your normal home user doesn't set that stuff up, so why do people keep trying to compare preinstalled Windows to a one size fits most crammed onto a Live CD designed for use by someone that had to read the manual to turn it on. It is a ridiculous argument. You are not going to find a build to order Linux machine with ANY of the problems you stated, but you do have those problems (and far worse) frequently trying to use retail windows on a Dell/HP.
And as usual, gotta say that I continue to love year after year the number of qualification used to try and make Linux seem insignificant is hilarious.
I can see it now, HEADLINE 2010: 99.9% of Normal Home Desktop x86 based OEM prebuilts from 2003 with XP SP2 purchased by senile grandmothers and "had to take out a loan to go to community college" students buy commercial Linux support. Once again, Microsoft has had great success with latest Operating System, Windows 7. Will 2011 be the year of Linux?
I think someone told Bill Gates that you couldn't herd cats, and took it figuratively as a challenge. Little did he know he ended up with sheep, but he was pleased (and rich) just the same.
arth1 covered it pretty completely, but I would add that in the US when Internet was new, there was a lot of bitching over who was going to get it first, and rather than allowing companies to figure it out through competition, many states and counties that didn't want initial builds to be fragmented paid subsidies and gave out 10 - 25 year no competition contracts. So all these cities got complete coverage, but there is now no incentive for these companies to build upon their networks with new technology like fiber but in a few places contracts have run out. The only fast Internet is being built between universities, and because there is already the consumer grade Internet, there is no law saying that the new Internet has to be shared with anyone. I don't see the US catching up to the technology seen throughout Europe or Asia for a long time if ever.
I have 20/2 at home of just recently for $120 with no television programming or telephone. I hear throughout some places in Europe you can get 100/100 Internet, Cable television, and a phone line for equivalent of <$15. *sigh*
I'll totally agree most people don't think about their computer in any useful way, like what it COULD be used for, and that it is within their reach to create in any way they believe. It is the general attitude today and I think a lot has to do with this image that there is some great wall between culture creators and consumers that involves selling out to hollywood, et al. I think if people understood the degree to which computers are more than an all in one collection of a glorified typewritter / newspaper / television and what a computer can really DO FOR a user rather than just deliver, we would see greater Linux adoption. The microprocessor has no equal, no matter how well integrated the software of the real world tools it mimics so well. If you are or want to be discovering the secrets to be unlocked, the raw power of the human mind that can ONLY be expressed through computers in ways never done by any machine, then Linux/OSS has no substitute.
I gotta say I HATE the very low end Sony and Dell computers. From the first time you start it up, it will never work that well again. Once you break it, you can never get it back. Yeah, its more complicated than that, but my number one reason for switching to Linux completely and never using Windows again for any reason was the pain of installing Windows, at least all that was necessary to get it all working just the way I wanted. You just can't be aggressive with Windows and hope to maintain it.
Gotta be a little fair, these are people working from the mind frame that progress in Linux is as slow as Windows. I still laugh how much all the anti-Linux statistics have to be qualified soooo heavily, then of course the Linux people see them and know that they have to be qualified further. Hmm... lets look back at some history for a moment. Windows server... ooh; Windows Embedded... oooh; Windows port to ARM... ooh; Windows shell... ooh; and lets of course never touch anything that Windows wasn't even ever meant to do. The worst is about security when almost everybody uses a Linux based embedded firewall / switch. Windows Vista has the lowest level of certification reasonable enough to be allowed for use by the government. The most secure OS (or as they put it, the only secure OS) is "Green Hills Inc., INTEGRITY 178-b separation RTOS" with a level of certification achieved by no other operating system. Red Hat comes in at the same level as Oracle with their proprietary Unix, just under IBM's. *shrug* but whatever.
When I first started debian many years ago, I started off with unstable because I wanted to learn, and was still dual booting, but I was really amazed how often I would run into a bug, but then see it fixed 12 hours later. I'll assume these were quickly identified regression bugs, but I remember one of the first really shocking things I encountered.
I love Linux gaming. Sure, there is a different colored zomie and a new way to kill them for $50 every 2 weeks I will never see on Linux, but the range of play style from puzzle to arcade to rpg is the best on Linux. For older games, Linux rocks at emulation, but they haven't been my thing as much. Many Linux games are HARD and really challenge the brain. Too many of the Windows games out there want to be Halo/Counterstrike or World of Warcraft. Nobody has made enduring alternatives. There are a lot of Windows games that are a little different, but not in good ways, and for game play and strategy, Linux has TONS of enduring games that are very different. Just my feeling.
consoles have made quite a comeback, especially with blaming piracy as the fashionable thing to do these days. Game makers are not trusting the PC platform as a safe model to support. At least in the United States, non-MMO games have not made good money in several years. The Japanese "free" model only a few years old seems to be the big money maker; free to play, pay for special extras.
Hmm... so many fun issues brought up.
One in particular, "industry-standard software" is written for Red Hat / AIX / HP-UX / Solaris. The only companies that makes anything that would be considered industry standard, and even then only de facto standard, is Adobe, Avid, and Quicken. The market dictates which platforms they will develop for, and software they have produced for any platform has been rock solid. I really can't call that a virtue of Windows, but it does tempt me slightly to buy a Mac... slightly.
You leave a lot to be desired with your Debian reference. If it was a matter of downloading, installing, and running questionable Windows software versus questionable Linux code, I would be most fearful of the Linux code, but only because there are so many safeguards against such things. There is more than enough software in the repositories and beyond that to the bottom, code is typically signed. I'd say just about anything off the web that isn't signed runs a risk. In Windows, this is the normal way of going about things. For a Debian user that should NEVER happen and I would expect would have to be really really bad most of the time.
a) non-geeks don't do OS installs. And I would impressed to find anyone not from Microsoft that has ever gotten windows to run on anything that wasn't designed FOR windows, or came with windows pre-installed. Linux runs flawlessly on AT LEAST everything Windows does with the exception of things mention next. There is always this measure of how much Linux isn't EXACTLY like Windows, and the answer is that it wasn't ever meant to. It was trying to make a free alternative to the very expensive UNIX platform... but so did Microsoft. Windows is DIRT CHEAP compared to proprietary UNIX kernels / systems. But that's another issue. I would bet that you have not attempted an install in many years, and I'll just be fair and ASSUME you were ONLY talking about installation to x86 compatible systems. You may say "non-x86? that isn't what normal people use!", but neither is an OS install. The argument is relevant to Home Desktop x86 compatible machines. There is a lot more out there than that.
b) imho, Linux has far and beyond better driver support. Even if you only include crappy commodity hardware that nobody would buy if they understood how they work, Linux has Windows beat. Some of the best Wacom features for their newest boards are not supported as completely, but work fairly well as of fairly recently. Windows provides no tools to test drivers before doing an installation. While there is some hardware that is no longer supported by the 2.6 kernel, because it would only make sense to use the 2.4 kernel anyway, I'd bet you couldn't find a SATA or ethernet (wired) interface with a production volume over 100 that isn't supported. It is way easier to get a device to work on Linux what wasn't designed with Linux in mind than to take a device that wasn't meant to run on Windows and get it to run on Windows.
c) When? Which versions? If you want to say that MS Office 2003 is superior to OpenOffice 1.x I'll give you that. There are certain specific, known incompatibilities between 2.4 and 2003 that would affect very few people, and in general, OpenOffice 3.x has received better reviews than MS Office 2007.
d) (Nearly?) all video games released for Windows in 2008 do not run as well on Linux under Wine as they do under Windows natively. I would bet that would even go as far as games that were released for Windows XP and Vista. The two major reasons for this is DirectX9/10 support is incomplete, and many of the features of the Windows API that were very buggy and rather than fixing Microsoft simply told people not to use has not and will not get support in Wine. Sadly, there are a few "great" applications that have gone against the advice of Microsoft, and so will never work properly in Wine. While those are real issues for people, and maybe that was what you meant to say, but your STATEMENT is absolutely false.
I'd agree in so far that if you are going to advocate for open source alternatives, you had best understand your audience because anyone who takes you seriously will want to ask you questions about these "open-source alternatives". Thinking people understand cost of change applies to everything in life, so why talk people up unless you are ready to explain or point to literature that can explain what they are getting themselves into. If you are giving a tutorial, be sure you can be at least as ready as any Microsoft zombie sales guy to show people what they want to see. "Open source" is political more than anything else to the small guy. I get caught up cheering the GPL, but once someone is actually interested, stop posturing yourself and show people what they want to know, like "All your basic programs are in the applications menu, and sorted by genera". That covers a lot! You don't need to explain that there is no start menu, because why would they look for one if they know where their programs are. Next, show them how to change their wallpaper, then maybe their home folder. Don't ask someone what they want to run, and try to show them something else; ask the person what they want to DO, and show them how to do it. Don't show them just how customizable everything is, because how can they be interested in changing what they may not even understand yet.
I will say that in my advocacy for Linux, STAY AWAY FROM WINE!!! Wine is great for the nerd that finds themselves switching between windows and Linux for games and would otherwise prefer to drop Windows. BUT, if you are "selling" Linux, unless there is a specific application you have tested and you know works well and you can setup for them, you must let Linux stand on its own merit. Wine is great for many applications more than a year old. Many old applications that don't work on XP / Vista have more of a chance of working on Linux, but these are fairly advanced tasks to undertake. A feature I wouldn't want to live without is regex web searches, but I am not going to use that as a selling point. I show Ubuntu to people who are frustrated with Windows and refuse to use mac. They are the easy sell. Once they have totally switched and are in love and grateful, I let them know, or remind them that the true power of expression is on the command line and that IF they are inclined to be a Linux guru, you should start with the Bash man page, and from there, when feeling so inclined, check out/bin and read through man pages of anything you find in there that sparks your interest... but of course, this is ONLY for those that have decided they are no longer content with being a "normal user".
You are implying that the purpose of VM's are to get Windows to run Linux. If this was the business of VM development, I don't think we would see such a robust and competitive market. There are various reasons to use a VM, and various reasons it would be preferable to keep Windows in a VM, and among the third-party specialized de facto standard applications written for the Windows API with features not implemented into WINE, or whatever, are frequently served well in a Windows VM.
Mom and Pop? Who was even suggesting that? People take a few of the problems of Linux, and somehow assume that it is easier / better on windows as well as take challenges of taking a person familiar with one system for something as dynamic as a computer and call it a short-coming. Something can't be better and the same all at once. The truth is that normal people don't do OS installs. Beyond that, Windows is high maintenance. Just because many people don't maintain their systems AT ALL, doesn't somehow give it a virtue.
If "Mom and Pop" are not computer people, but want to learn to do the things their other senior friends are doing, Ubuntu has a great learning curve. If the system is built to order (ie nerdy grandson), the thing is going to be rock solid and hassle free. If they are less inclined to "figuring things out" or "trying something new", or if you (or they) are unwilling to give (receive) a quick tutorial, and want to drop something off on their porch and say "good luck" with no further assistance, you get them a Mac.
I consider Windows to be a really awesome console, and in that respect, Windows has the best in latest PC gaming. It is not as "easy" as an Xbox360 or Playstation 3, and not as portable as many of the handhelds, but if you want one machine for gaming, Windows is a great way to go, especially if it is already going to be setup for you to work perfectly. It is also cool that you can write letters and such, print them or email them, and surf the Internet with ease and grace. If that is what you want out of your computer, and/or you have the money to support it as a hobby / habit, Windows is the better way to go. I'd further agree that a FEW bleeding edge applications that have become 'industry standard', all being third-party have POOR substitutes in certain circumstances, all of which far exceed the cost of Windows Vista Ultimate.
As much as I advocate for Ubuntu / Linux, If the above situation applies, I would encourage a person to stay with Windows, but I think such circumstances are uncommon among "normal users" and does not justify having Windows pre-installed, let alone required, on so many machines (The Microsoft Tax).
If you look at the parallel struggles of Mac and Linux, their downfalls I think can be much more greatly related to the stranglehold of Microsoft and that the perception of superiority of Windows is a perception thereof. I will concede that between Windows and Mac (and by proxy Microsoft or Apple) I would pick Windows Vista or 7 Ultimate Edition.
Is it really too much to ask for a RAM disk and Internet access, even a cli, to download drivers or *gosh*, a self updating installer? XP SP2 won't even let you get drivers off of USB let alone arbitrary removable media. From what I can tell, Windows 7 ONLY added USB support, and even then only to pick the (already decompressed) driver... and it must be in the root directory. I only tested out the first public beta to see how the installer had improved, and from what I saw improvements were arbritrary (no new "features"), minimal (like usb support; would it have been possible for them to make a SMALLER step?), and aesthetic (woohoo, high resolution installer! oh joy!).
No SATA drive was the most confounding situation I have ever been stuck in, attempting to help someone upgrade from Vista to XP. No floppy drive, and wouldn't let me swap out the CD, and installer didn't support USB for drivers. Ended up making a slip streamed disc which was eventually done right... but I wouldn't consider that something a "normal" user would do.
Thankfully I added NIC driver at same time which otherwise wasn't there.
Maybe this is a harsh bias, but I don't consider any problem that can occur between installation and fully working setup to be normal for any user. I was a big windows fan and I found Linux to be "hard". Every turn there was more documentation I needed to read. I thought the documentation was really good... when it existed (I have noticed a lot more "incomplete" documentation than ever any "bad" documentation. Bad documentation gets fixed really quick, because bad documentation is either bad because of content or structure, and in either case many small contributions can improve documentation quickly.)
When I last used Windows regularly (up until shortly after SP2 was released), I found it took roughly 2 days for an ideal setup with every little thing done properly. One time I managed to cut this down with a slip stream and having all the software on the DVD, but the next time I needed it, most of the software was out of date. The part I liked the least was that breaking one little thing, and your best / only option is to start over. In my personal experience, things rarely work one day and then not work the next in Linux without a clear or easily discoverable reason due to a known issue. If something is broken, it is easy to track down 1) whether or not the issue is fixable / has a work around, and 2) the level of skill / experience necessary to fix such issue. This QUICKLY tells you whether or not fussing with it is going to yield adequate results. Any 'consistent' installation issue (I tweak a new Ubuntu install quite a bit) I just throw into a script I keep online, and each "tweak" being its own function, the script is very portable, like comment out "setup fkey macros".
In practice, for me, I prefer cli over gui; nobody ever implements all cli / api functions into a gui, least of all Windows, and even when they do, tasks can not easily be automated, if at all. I guess I have had more of the feeling that anything I learn about Linux teaches me how to learn better and faster about Linux. When you learn a gui all you have learned is the gui. No matter how easy it is to use, it doesn't teach you about how the system works.
Ok, too high an expectation for regular users. Most the problems I see / hear are switching to Linux from Windows problems, not Linux problems. Certain "advantages" of Windows are directly related to Microsoft's monopolistic control over the environment (ANY other hardware, getting the right parts that will work with the system is normal and expected). With due diligence, educating yourself about Linux lets to do more. Maintenance and auditing is fast and easy at any level, once you learn it ("normal users" don't maintain their machines AT ALL even though they know they should, and I would bet most would ask "what's an audit?"). If you break it, just undo it; you don't necessarily need to "time-machine" backwards or restore from backup, or reload a saved state; just change it back. Worst case scenario, like killed grub or hosed your kernel to an unbootable state, just lock and load with a liveCD and fix it. Tinkering in good faith is never going to require you to reinstall from scratch. If you tinker recklessly and aggressively, there is a good chance you can be unaware of what you changed and how, and the amount of time to reinstall than track down the issue will be shorter.
I know I am a fan boy, but it is only after 1) Taking the time to educate myself about Linux, and 2) Decades of "WTF, ARE YOU KIDDING?!?" with issues with Windows that only seemed to INCREASE over time. Am I expecting too much? Evidently. MY problems, and headaches for that matter, were fixed switching to Linux. Ubuntu has given me enough not to need anything else, installed as host anyway (Gentoo VM is just too much fun).
Those are valid arguments, completely outside of the scope of what is being addressed. At present, and work that is licensed 'CC-NC-AT' typically only includes a note of "contact author for alternate licensing options". This is an attempt to expand on that. You referenced that the typical royalty rate is "27% of gross income". That is the system NOW under an All Rights Reserved model and while it obviously doesn't in your examples, it is a valid criticism of gross income royalty models. Whether you are using All Rights Reserved or CC is irrelevant. Obviously if you with to make a collage or remix, some other deal will need to be struck.
If you believe the law is a social contract, and that current copyright law violates that, then the current model is broken... no matter how fancy the suit of the person who would tell you otherwise. CC addresses many immoralities criticized by people, including artists. Now that the issue has been reasonably settled, the argument that keeps coming up is being addressed directly, "how do we make money?". A place to start is to incorporate parts of the old model that DID work. If you want to take a product and put in the time and effort to make money distributing a work AS A WHOLE, a percentage of the gross makes a lot of sense. Compared to a flat rate, the scalable model allows flexibility between free and commercial attempting to alleviate the barrier to market that could encourage people to pirate.
Further, don't confuse gross income with profit. Technically, 'Star Wars: A New Hope' has never turned a profit, leaving many of the actors who were paid on a 'net proceeds' model having never been paid. Investors in the principle of a business, such as the music on a CD being distributed by a music distributor, should be entitled to a portion of the gross. By contrast, a person assisting a distribution company voluntarily that believes they can sell the product well would justly be entitled to a portion of the net proceeds.
Anyway, hope that helps in understanding what's going on. It may not be a complete model for every situation: non-commercial remix licensing is still a mess and will be difficult to work out, likely even on an individual basis, but compare that to 'fair use' which is utterly useless when it becomes a legal matter.
I think such service will be great because I don't see these RIAA idiots ever understanding that a packet is a packet is a packet. Stream but not download? HA HA HA!!! If they believe their own rhetoric at all, I am sure they will buy that too. Thanks for the laugh.
currency is meant to play a certain role in the economy, but it has gotten completely out of hand. Only in a monetary system would people be making decisions based on a broken window fallacy.
I hate the word "volunteer". You are either part of a team or you are not. When you are paying for something, you get a type of professional relationship with that person, a level of expectation on the part of the payer and the payee. In a way, you become someones bitch. Also, on a team, or in a barter system, each person needs something the other can provide. Money is a debt. I think there is also a level of dehumanization.
If you can provide a service, and someone recognizes that you are hungry or thirsty while they work, it isn't that "time and energy to get pizza and beer" is so laborious, it is that you are not only doing something USEFUL, but you are acknowledging that person as a human being.
I pride myself in being a community person. I have good friends that take care of me and I do my best to look out for them and do whatever I can when possible. But I am nobody's bitch... for less than $60/hr.
Bash + Lynx makes a much more fun Internet experience:)
Individual applications do what individual applications do under Windows. Linux, imo, as a general principle of development is designed around interoperability, not in that the applications run well on other platforms easily, but applications work well with each other. Sorting, manipulating, and customizing applications, depending on the degree are fairly easily to learn (with some desire) and once learned are every easy use. I got very tired of the Windows experience of "Feature A, click here. Feature B, click here". Sure, "everything" is right there and easy to use in a way that fits most most people. With Linux, you get the basic tools first that allow you to do whatever you want. Windows has a few, really great programs that are hard to do without, but none of it is Microsoft software, and there isn't anything about "Windows" specifically that MAKES those programs great, it is just that those programs happen to be developed for the Windows platform. I miss Cakewalk, Adobe Premiere, and Quicken. Playing the "game of the day" that plays just like the last piece of crap hasn't been missed much. So is having a functional OS verses a dull, does nothing out of the box OS that requires me to go to the store and buy software for any time I want to try something (assuming I want to go a legal route) a reasonable trade off? Absolutely. Every once in awhile something might spark my interest that has only been developed for the Windows platform, Just not working well in Wine is enough to turn me off. Hypothetically I could keep a VM, but I haven't seen anything that has been THAT interesting in a long time.
I'd completely agree. Upheaving our entire digital life to a completely different platform, no matter how good, is a nightmare for even the most patient. Linux has its own great software, and as much as people think "you need to be a programmer to use Linux", that is just false. IMHO, if there is something you need to do and the software isn't available, the range of possibilities or chances of hunting down some project is much more likely in Linux. The variety of shells and easy to learn scripting languages let you get started very quickly. There isn't so much of a line between programming and typical user experience in Linux, where as in Windows the line is quite firm. Sure, there are casual Windows programmers, but I don't get the impression that windows power users are writing short disposable code to make boring tasks easier in the way it is very common to pull up Bash or Ruby shell to get something done faster than point and click.
Anyway, I think the better approach is to find all the best foss/Linux software and get the Windows port. Firefox, OOo, Gimp, Blender, Scribus, Inkscape, Audacity, vlc, hydrogen, and such. After some time, and browsing forums and finding that most of the help and often most up to date features and strong desktop integration are in Linux. Once you make the move, only having to learn things like apt-get are a lot easier and feel much more like conveniences than a burden. And as you get into things like desktop customization, Bash programming, or webmin, whatever, you start to wonder how you ever lived without.
Next thing you know, you start carrying CDs and handing them out every time you hear someone mention 'computer'.
If your first introduction to Linux is trying to get all your Windows apps to work under Wine, you are going to be very disappointed when you just end up with something a little more than a confusing buggy Windows experience.
I think it would make more sense do do it the other way around; make Ubuntu / foss applications work better on Windows which eventually results in "Why am I paying so much (monetary, time, etc...) with proprietary software when most all what I use is foss? From there, what is the benefit of staying with Windows as Microsoft stops supporting it? It will become a battle of loosing support for my favorite foss as XP fades in support, acquire Vista or 7 paying for it or dealing with cracking it, or legally and inexpensively stay up to date easily with all your favorite software by moving to Ubuntu.
I think Ubuntu should take a lesson from Microsoft and bring some of the power of Linux poorly over to Windows, get everyone addicted, keep support realy pathetic, but not enough to get people to not want it, and as people complain, let them know that "while you are doing your best to bring the newest and and greatest stuff over to Windows, it is really hard to support such an old, outdated model, and until then, for the best support, you should really stick with Ubuntu.
One of several reasons I don't use mac is that OpenOffice just doesn't perform as well / smoothly. Same with Windows. I don't like the old way of keeping software up to date. In Ubuntu, the latest version for the distribution us usually good enough, but if I want more, I can just add the OOo repository. Easy!
I would love to see the look on Balmers face if asked the same question: "Hey Steve, do you think that the development and support for Cygwin is going to really help fuel the future Windows and future releases?" I predict at least three stammers before pulling something out of his ass. As cool as the whole Windows XP mode in 7 is interesting, I thought it was pretty cool for a moment until I realized I wouldn't do anything with it in reality, I think it could hurt Windows long run. As Ubuntu looks to the future in many ways, Microsoft having to battle with people that want to stay in the past isn't going to compel industry leaders to look to a future with Microsoft.
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Every economist? You can take your social metaphysics and control by fear and shove it wherever you like, but lets just be clear you are talking about ideal high school Keynesian Economics and not real world, grown up Austrian Economics. I am glad you had the capacity to drool over colorful supply and demand graphs, but if you have any additional brain power, try a real book like "The Theory of Money and Credit" or "Keynes the Man" which is contemporary to "The General Theory". And as much as I might like to simply agree with Mesis and Rothbard, I think if Keynes were alive today he would say we were taking all this WAY to far. Keynes advocated for community level collaborative interventionalism, not the head of the Federal government appointing himself CEO and engineer of the next generation of high speed coffins that fart strawberries. Holy Shit!
Strong language is for effect. So long as everyone with the slightest critique is getting modded to hell, I might as well go down all the way.
Oh yeah, and fuck using taxes as moral regulatory tool. What, you run out of Bibles to choke people to death with?
*shooosh* Remember, truth is what the majority or whatever book Oprah is promoting this week says it is. This is neither the time or the place for your "facts". This is a DEMOCRACY!
More specifically, I meant if I was invested in ProTools and Avid audio hardware, or if I had commercial, high volume printers from Lexmark, the investment in Windows 7 Ultimate is a drop in the bucket compared to the hassle of trying to force that all upon Linux. Linux runs on anything, but vendor lockins to bleeding edge technology worries me less. But that is an entirely different matter. IF I wanted to start a private recording studio / label, if I felt ProTools was going to serve me the very best, Linux compatibility would not be my biggest worry. I would investigate fully though. (Not to mention such circumstances would be very unlikely).
I am a true Linux fan boy. This was the best I could come up with, but I do try to watch for that attitude in people and save my breath explaining to them why I think they might be happier with Ubuntu than Windows if ALL thy do is game and homework, and really couldn't care less about what computers can do with respect to anything that would require them to learn somehing. :)
HA HA HA!!! I will watch out for that, and you have my deepest sympathy. That is so sad. You should call them and complain. My motherboard is great for now, and likely for a few more years, but I will really keep that in mind the next time I build a machine for somebody. Ouch. Really, my heart bleeds.
The irony? In the last few years when I still used Windows, it was a lot easier to setup many things with the assistance of a Linux Live CD. Check [your usual sources] for a Live XP CD. They do exist, and maybe that would be enough to make it work.
On the Desktop, everything that Linux distros have, Windows also has.
If by desktop you mean the things you can click on in the applications menu... hmm... Unless you are talking about things like ProTools vs Jack/PulseAudio I can not imagine what you are talking about, especially when one claims to be a UNIX Systems Administrator.
Needless to say, they will be annoyed and frustrated when their Linux distro pulls out one of its patented "only half-works" issues on something that should be taken for granted like sound or graphics.
A) cheap hardware sucks B) your normal home user doesn't set that stuff up, so why do people keep trying to compare preinstalled Windows to a one size fits most crammed onto a Live CD designed for use by someone that had to read the manual to turn it on. It is a ridiculous argument. You are not going to find a build to order Linux machine with ANY of the problems you stated, but you do have those problems (and far worse) frequently trying to use retail windows on a Dell/HP.
And as usual, gotta say that I continue to love year after year the number of qualification used to try and make Linux seem insignificant is hilarious.
I can see it now, HEADLINE 2010: 99.9% of Normal Home Desktop x86 based OEM prebuilts from 2003 with XP SP2 purchased by senile grandmothers and "had to take out a loan to go to community college" students buy commercial Linux support. Once again, Microsoft has had great success with latest Operating System, Windows 7. Will 2011 be the year of Linux?
I think someone told Bill Gates that you couldn't herd cats, and took it figuratively as a challenge. Little did he know he ended up with sheep, but he was pleased (and rich) just the same.
arth1 covered it pretty completely, but I would add that in the US when Internet was new, there was a lot of bitching over who was going to get it first, and rather than allowing companies to figure it out through competition, many states and counties that didn't want initial builds to be fragmented paid subsidies and gave out 10 - 25 year no competition contracts. So all these cities got complete coverage, but there is now no incentive for these companies to build upon their networks with new technology like fiber but in a few places contracts have run out. The only fast Internet is being built between universities, and because there is already the consumer grade Internet, there is no law saying that the new Internet has to be shared with anyone. I don't see the US catching up to the technology seen throughout Europe or Asia for a long time if ever.
I have 20/2 at home of just recently for $120 with no television programming or telephone. I hear throughout some places in Europe you can get 100/100 Internet, Cable television, and a phone line for equivalent of <$15. *sigh*
I'll totally agree most people don't think about their computer in any useful way, like what it COULD be used for, and that it is within their reach to create in any way they believe. It is the general attitude today and I think a lot has to do with this image that there is some great wall between culture creators and consumers that involves selling out to hollywood, et al. I think if people understood the degree to which computers are more than an all in one collection of a glorified typewritter / newspaper / television and what a computer can really DO FOR a user rather than just deliver, we would see greater Linux adoption. The microprocessor has no equal, no matter how well integrated the software of the real world tools it mimics so well. If you are or want to be discovering the secrets to be unlocked, the raw power of the human mind that can ONLY be expressed through computers in ways never done by any machine, then Linux/OSS has no substitute.
I gotta say I HATE the very low end Sony and Dell computers. From the first time you start it up, it will never work that well again. Once you break it, you can never get it back. Yeah, its more complicated than that, but my number one reason for switching to Linux completely and never using Windows again for any reason was the pain of installing Windows, at least all that was necessary to get it all working just the way I wanted. You just can't be aggressive with Windows and hope to maintain it.
Gotta be a little fair, these are people working from the mind frame that progress in Linux is as slow as Windows. I still laugh how much all the anti-Linux statistics have to be qualified soooo heavily, then of course the Linux people see them and know that they have to be qualified further. Hmm... lets look back at some history for a moment. Windows server... ooh; Windows Embedded... oooh; Windows port to ARM... ooh; Windows shell... ooh; and lets of course never touch anything that Windows wasn't even ever meant to do. The worst is about security when almost everybody uses a Linux based embedded firewall / switch. Windows Vista has the lowest level of certification reasonable enough to be allowed for use by the government. The most secure OS (or as they put it, the only secure OS) is "Green Hills Inc., INTEGRITY 178-b separation RTOS" with a level of certification achieved by no other operating system. Red Hat comes in at the same level as Oracle with their proprietary Unix, just under IBM's. *shrug* but whatever.
When I first started debian many years ago, I started off with unstable because I wanted to learn, and was still dual booting, but I was really amazed how often I would run into a bug, but then see it fixed 12 hours later. I'll assume these were quickly identified regression bugs, but I remember one of the first really shocking things I encountered.
I love Linux gaming. Sure, there is a different colored zomie and a new way to kill them for $50 every 2 weeks I will never see on Linux, but the range of play style from puzzle to arcade to rpg is the best on Linux. For older games, Linux rocks at emulation, but they haven't been my thing as much. Many Linux games are HARD and really challenge the brain. Too many of the Windows games out there want to be Halo/Counterstrike or World of Warcraft. Nobody has made enduring alternatives. There are a lot of Windows games that are a little different, but not in good ways, and for game play and strategy, Linux has TONS of enduring games that are very different. Just my feeling.
consoles have made quite a comeback, especially with blaming piracy as the fashionable thing to do these days. Game makers are not trusting the PC platform as a safe model to support. At least in the United States, non-MMO games have not made good money in several years. The Japanese "free" model only a few years old seems to be the big money maker; free to play, pay for special extras.
Hmm... so many fun issues brought up. One in particular, "industry-standard software" is written for Red Hat / AIX / HP-UX / Solaris. The only companies that makes anything that would be considered industry standard, and even then only de facto standard, is Adobe, Avid, and Quicken. The market dictates which platforms they will develop for, and software they have produced for any platform has been rock solid. I really can't call that a virtue of Windows, but it does tempt me slightly to buy a Mac... slightly.
You leave a lot to be desired with your Debian reference. If it was a matter of downloading, installing, and running questionable Windows software versus questionable Linux code, I would be most fearful of the Linux code, but only because there are so many safeguards against such things. There is more than enough software in the repositories and beyond that to the bottom, code is typically signed. I'd say just about anything off the web that isn't signed runs a risk. In Windows, this is the normal way of going about things. For a Debian user that should NEVER happen and I would expect would have to be really really bad most of the time. a) non-geeks don't do OS installs. And I would impressed to find anyone not from Microsoft that has ever gotten windows to run on anything that wasn't designed FOR windows, or came with windows pre-installed. Linux runs flawlessly on AT LEAST everything Windows does with the exception of things mention next. There is always this measure of how much Linux isn't EXACTLY like Windows, and the answer is that it wasn't ever meant to. It was trying to make a free alternative to the very expensive UNIX platform... but so did Microsoft. Windows is DIRT CHEAP compared to proprietary UNIX kernels / systems. But that's another issue. I would bet that you have not attempted an install in many years, and I'll just be fair and ASSUME you were ONLY talking about installation to x86 compatible systems. You may say "non-x86? that isn't what normal people use!", but neither is an OS install. The argument is relevant to Home Desktop x86 compatible machines. There is a lot more out there than that.
b) imho, Linux has far and beyond better driver support. Even if you only include crappy commodity hardware that nobody would buy if they understood how they work, Linux has Windows beat. Some of the best Wacom features for their newest boards are not supported as completely, but work fairly well as of fairly recently. Windows provides no tools to test drivers before doing an installation. While there is some hardware that is no longer supported by the 2.6 kernel, because it would only make sense to use the 2.4 kernel anyway, I'd bet you couldn't find a SATA or ethernet (wired) interface with a production volume over 100 that isn't supported. It is way easier to get a device to work on Linux what wasn't designed with Linux in mind than to take a device that wasn't meant to run on Windows and get it to run on Windows.
c) When? Which versions? If you want to say that MS Office 2003 is superior to OpenOffice 1.x I'll give you that. There are certain specific, known incompatibilities between 2.4 and 2003 that would affect very few people, and in general, OpenOffice 3.x has received better reviews than MS Office 2007.
d) (Nearly?) all video games released for Windows in 2008 do not run as well on Linux under Wine as they do under Windows natively. I would bet that would even go as far as games that were released for Windows XP and Vista. The two major reasons for this is DirectX9/10 support is incomplete, and many of the features of the Windows API that were very buggy and rather than fixing Microsoft simply told people not to use has not and will not get support in Wine. Sadly, there are a few "great" applications that have gone against the advice of Microsoft, and so will never work properly in Wine. While those are real issues for people, and maybe that was what you meant to say, but your STATEMENT is absolutely false.
I disliked pirating software, but a major r
I'd agree in so far that if you are going to advocate for open source alternatives, you had best understand your audience because anyone who takes you seriously will want to ask you questions about these "open-source alternatives". Thinking people understand cost of change applies to everything in life, so why talk people up unless you are ready to explain or point to literature that can explain what they are getting themselves into. If you are giving a tutorial, be sure you can be at least as ready as any Microsoft zombie sales guy to show people what they want to see. "Open source" is political more than anything else to the small guy. I get caught up cheering the GPL, but once someone is actually interested, stop posturing yourself and show people what they want to know, like "All your basic programs are in the applications menu, and sorted by genera". That covers a lot! You don't need to explain that there is no start menu, because why would they look for one if they know where their programs are. Next, show them how to change their wallpaper, then maybe their home folder. Don't ask someone what they want to run, and try to show them something else; ask the person what they want to DO, and show them how to do it. Don't show them just how customizable everything is, because how can they be interested in changing what they may not even understand yet.
/bin and read through man pages of anything you find in there that sparks your interest... but of course, this is ONLY for those that have decided they are no longer content with being a "normal user".
I will say that in my advocacy for Linux, STAY AWAY FROM WINE!!! Wine is great for the nerd that finds themselves switching between windows and Linux for games and would otherwise prefer to drop Windows. BUT, if you are "selling" Linux, unless there is a specific application you have tested and you know works well and you can setup for them, you must let Linux stand on its own merit. Wine is great for many applications more than a year old. Many old applications that don't work on XP / Vista have more of a chance of working on Linux, but these are fairly advanced tasks to undertake. A feature I wouldn't want to live without is regex web searches, but I am not going to use that as a selling point. I show Ubuntu to people who are frustrated with Windows and refuse to use mac. They are the easy sell. Once they have totally switched and are in love and grateful, I let them know, or remind them that the true power of expression is on the command line and that IF they are inclined to be a Linux guru, you should start with the Bash man page, and from there, when feeling so inclined, check out
You are implying that the purpose of VM's are to get Windows to run Linux. If this was the business of VM development, I don't think we would see such a robust and competitive market. There are various reasons to use a VM, and various reasons it would be preferable to keep Windows in a VM, and among the third-party specialized de facto standard applications written for the Windows API with features not implemented into WINE, or whatever, are frequently served well in a Windows VM.
Mom and Pop? Who was even suggesting that? People take a few of the problems of Linux, and somehow assume that it is easier / better on windows as well as take challenges of taking a person familiar with one system for something as dynamic as a computer and call it a short-coming. Something can't be better and the same all at once. The truth is that normal people don't do OS installs. Beyond that, Windows is high maintenance. Just because many people don't maintain their systems AT ALL, doesn't somehow give it a virtue.
If "Mom and Pop" are not computer people, but want to learn to do the things their other senior friends are doing, Ubuntu has a great learning curve. If the system is built to order (ie nerdy grandson), the thing is going to be rock solid and hassle free. If they are less inclined to "figuring things out" or "trying something new", or if you (or they) are unwilling to give (receive) a quick tutorial, and want to drop something off on their porch and say "good luck" with no further assistance, you get them a Mac.
I consider Windows to be a really awesome console, and in that respect, Windows has the best in latest PC gaming. It is not as "easy" as an Xbox360 or Playstation 3, and not as portable as many of the handhelds, but if you want one machine for gaming, Windows is a great way to go, especially if it is already going to be setup for you to work perfectly. It is also cool that you can write letters and such, print them or email them, and surf the Internet with ease and grace. If that is what you want out of your computer, and/or you have the money to support it as a hobby / habit, Windows is the better way to go. I'd further agree that a FEW bleeding edge applications that have become 'industry standard', all being third-party have POOR substitutes in certain circumstances, all of which far exceed the cost of Windows Vista Ultimate.
As much as I advocate for Ubuntu / Linux, If the above situation applies, I would encourage a person to stay with Windows, but I think such circumstances are uncommon among "normal users" and does not justify having Windows pre-installed, let alone required, on so many machines (The Microsoft Tax).
If you look at the parallel struggles of Mac and Linux, their downfalls I think can be much more greatly related to the stranglehold of Microsoft and that the perception of superiority of Windows is a perception thereof. I will concede that between Windows and Mac (and by proxy Microsoft or Apple) I would pick Windows Vista or 7 Ultimate Edition.
Is it really too much to ask for a RAM disk and Internet access, even a cli, to download drivers or *gosh*, a self updating installer? XP SP2 won't even let you get drivers off of USB let alone arbitrary removable media. From what I can tell, Windows 7 ONLY added USB support, and even then only to pick the (already decompressed) driver... and it must be in the root directory. I only tested out the first public beta to see how the installer had improved, and from what I saw improvements were arbritrary (no new "features"), minimal (like usb support; would it have been possible for them to make a SMALLER step?), and aesthetic (woohoo, high resolution installer! oh joy!).
No SATA drive was the most confounding situation I have ever been stuck in, attempting to help someone upgrade from Vista to XP. No floppy drive, and wouldn't let me swap out the CD, and installer didn't support USB for drivers. Ended up making a slip streamed disc which was eventually done right... but I wouldn't consider that something a "normal" user would do.
Thankfully I added NIC driver at same time which otherwise wasn't there.
Maybe this is a harsh bias, but I don't consider any problem that can occur between installation and fully working setup to be normal for any user. I was a big windows fan and I found Linux to be "hard". Every turn there was more documentation I needed to read. I thought the documentation was really good... when it existed (I have noticed a lot more "incomplete" documentation than ever any "bad" documentation. Bad documentation gets fixed really quick, because bad documentation is either bad because of content or structure, and in either case many small contributions can improve documentation quickly.)
When I last used Windows regularly (up until shortly after SP2 was released), I found it took roughly 2 days for an ideal setup with every little thing done properly. One time I managed to cut this down with a slip stream and having all the software on the DVD, but the next time I needed it, most of the software was out of date. The part I liked the least was that breaking one little thing, and your best / only option is to start over. In my personal experience, things rarely work one day and then not work the next in Linux without a clear or easily discoverable reason due to a known issue. If something is broken, it is easy to track down 1) whether or not the issue is fixable / has a work around, and 2) the level of skill / experience necessary to fix such issue. This QUICKLY tells you whether or not fussing with it is going to yield adequate results. Any 'consistent' installation issue (I tweak a new Ubuntu install quite a bit) I just throw into a script I keep online, and each "tweak" being its own function, the script is very portable, like comment out "setup fkey macros".
In practice, for me, I prefer cli over gui; nobody ever implements all cli / api functions into a gui, least of all Windows, and even when they do, tasks can not easily be automated, if at all. I guess I have had more of the feeling that anything I learn about Linux teaches me how to learn better and faster about Linux. When you learn a gui all you have learned is the gui. No matter how easy it is to use, it doesn't teach you about how the system works.
Ok, too high an expectation for regular users. Most the problems I see / hear are switching to Linux from Windows problems, not Linux problems. Certain "advantages" of Windows are directly related to Microsoft's monopolistic control over the environment (ANY other hardware, getting the right parts that will work with the system is normal and expected). With due diligence, educating yourself about Linux lets to do more. Maintenance and auditing is fast and easy at any level, once you learn it ("normal users" don't maintain their machines AT ALL even though they know they should, and I would bet most would ask "what's an audit?"). If you break it, just undo it; you don't necessarily need to "time-machine" backwards or restore from backup, or reload a saved state; just change it back. Worst case scenario, like killed grub or hosed your kernel to an unbootable state, just lock and load with a liveCD and fix it. Tinkering in good faith is never going to require you to reinstall from scratch. If you tinker recklessly and aggressively, there is a good chance you can be unaware of what you changed and how, and the amount of time to reinstall than track down the issue will be shorter.
I know I am a fan boy, but it is only after 1) Taking the time to educate myself about Linux, and 2) Decades of "WTF, ARE YOU KIDDING?!?" with issues with Windows that only seemed to INCREASE over time. Am I expecting too much? Evidently. MY problems, and headaches for that matter, were fixed switching to Linux. Ubuntu has given me enough not to need anything else, installed as host anyway (Gentoo VM is just too much fun).
Those are valid arguments, completely outside of the scope of what is being addressed. At present, and work that is licensed 'CC-NC-AT' typically only includes a note of "contact author for alternate licensing options". This is an attempt to expand on that. You referenced that the typical royalty rate is "27% of gross income". That is the system NOW under an All Rights Reserved model and while it obviously doesn't in your examples, it is a valid criticism of gross income royalty models. Whether you are using All Rights Reserved or CC is irrelevant. Obviously if you with to make a collage or remix, some other deal will need to be struck.
If you believe the law is a social contract, and that current copyright law violates that, then the current model is broken... no matter how fancy the suit of the person who would tell you otherwise. CC addresses many immoralities criticized by people, including artists. Now that the issue has been reasonably settled, the argument that keeps coming up is being addressed directly, "how do we make money?". A place to start is to incorporate parts of the old model that DID work. If you want to take a product and put in the time and effort to make money distributing a work AS A WHOLE, a percentage of the gross makes a lot of sense. Compared to a flat rate, the scalable model allows flexibility between free and commercial attempting to alleviate the barrier to market that could encourage people to pirate.
Further, don't confuse gross income with profit. Technically, 'Star Wars: A New Hope' has never turned a profit, leaving many of the actors who were paid on a 'net proceeds' model having never been paid. Investors in the principle of a business, such as the music on a CD being distributed by a music distributor, should be entitled to a portion of the gross. By contrast, a person assisting a distribution company voluntarily that believes they can sell the product well would justly be entitled to a portion of the net proceeds.
Anyway, hope that helps in understanding what's going on. It may not be a complete model for every situation: non-commercial remix licensing is still a mess and will be difficult to work out, likely even on an individual basis, but compare that to 'fair use' which is utterly useless when it becomes a legal matter.
I think such service will be great because I don't see these RIAA idiots ever understanding that a packet is a packet is a packet. Stream but not download? HA HA HA!!! If they believe their own rhetoric at all, I am sure they will buy that too. Thanks for the laugh.
All of the sudden they may find that a certain 1% was a little more significant than they anticipated.
currency is meant to play a certain role in the economy, but it has gotten completely out of hand. Only in a monetary system would people be making decisions based on a broken window fallacy.
I hate the word "volunteer". You are either part of a team or you are not. When you are paying for something, you get a type of professional relationship with that person, a level of expectation on the part of the payer and the payee. In a way, you become someones bitch. Also, on a team, or in a barter system, each person needs something the other can provide. Money is a debt. I think there is also a level of dehumanization.
If you can provide a service, and someone recognizes that you are hungry or thirsty while they work, it isn't that "time and energy to get pizza and beer" is so laborious, it is that you are not only doing something USEFUL, but you are acknowledging that person as a human being.
I pride myself in being a community person. I have good friends that take care of me and I do my best to look out for them and do whatever I can when possible. But I am nobody's bitch... for less than $60/hr.
Bash + Lynx makes a much more fun Internet experience :)
Individual applications do what individual applications do under Windows. Linux, imo, as a general principle of development is designed around interoperability, not in that the applications run well on other platforms easily, but applications work well with each other. Sorting, manipulating, and customizing applications, depending on the degree are fairly easily to learn (with some desire) and once learned are every easy use. I got very tired of the Windows experience of "Feature A, click here. Feature B, click here". Sure, "everything" is right there and easy to use in a way that fits most most people. With Linux, you get the basic tools first that allow you to do whatever you want. Windows has a few, really great programs that are hard to do without, but none of it is Microsoft software, and there isn't anything about "Windows" specifically that MAKES those programs great, it is just that those programs happen to be developed for the Windows platform. I miss Cakewalk, Adobe Premiere, and Quicken. Playing the "game of the day" that plays just like the last piece of crap hasn't been missed much. So is having a functional OS verses a dull, does nothing out of the box OS that requires me to go to the store and buy software for any time I want to try something (assuming I want to go a legal route) a reasonable trade off? Absolutely. Every once in awhile something might spark my interest that has only been developed for the Windows platform, Just not working well in Wine is enough to turn me off. Hypothetically I could keep a VM, but I haven't seen anything that has been THAT interesting in a long time.
I'd completely agree. Upheaving our entire digital life to a completely different platform, no matter how good, is a nightmare for even the most patient. Linux has its own great software, and as much as people think "you need to be a programmer to use Linux", that is just false. IMHO, if there is something you need to do and the software isn't available, the range of possibilities or chances of hunting down some project is much more likely in Linux. The variety of shells and easy to learn scripting languages let you get started very quickly. There isn't so much of a line between programming and typical user experience in Linux, where as in Windows the line is quite firm. Sure, there are casual Windows programmers, but I don't get the impression that windows power users are writing short disposable code to make boring tasks easier in the way it is very common to pull up Bash or Ruby shell to get something done faster than point and click.
Anyway, I think the better approach is to find all the best foss/Linux software and get the Windows port. Firefox, OOo, Gimp, Blender, Scribus, Inkscape, Audacity, vlc, hydrogen, and such. After some time, and browsing forums and finding that most of the help and often most up to date features and strong desktop integration are in Linux. Once you make the move, only having to learn things like apt-get are a lot easier and feel much more like conveniences than a burden. And as you get into things like desktop customization, Bash programming, or webmin, whatever, you start to wonder how you ever lived without.
Next thing you know, you start carrying CDs and handing them out every time you hear someone mention 'computer'.
If your first introduction to Linux is trying to get all your Windows apps to work under Wine, you are going to be very disappointed when you just end up with something a little more than a confusing buggy Windows experience.
I think it would make more sense do do it the other way around; make Ubuntu / foss applications work better on Windows which eventually results in "Why am I paying so much (monetary, time, etc...) with proprietary software when most all what I use is foss? From there, what is the benefit of staying with Windows as Microsoft stops supporting it? It will become a battle of loosing support for my favorite foss as XP fades in support, acquire Vista or 7 paying for it or dealing with cracking it, or legally and inexpensively stay up to date easily with all your favorite software by moving to Ubuntu.
I think Ubuntu should take a lesson from Microsoft and bring some of the power of Linux poorly over to Windows, get everyone addicted, keep support realy pathetic, but not enough to get people to not want it, and as people complain, let them know that "while you are doing your best to bring the newest and and greatest stuff over to Windows, it is really hard to support such an old, outdated model, and until then, for the best support, you should really stick with Ubuntu.
One of several reasons I don't use mac is that OpenOffice just doesn't perform as well / smoothly. Same with Windows. I don't like the old way of keeping software up to date. In Ubuntu, the latest version for the distribution us usually good enough, but if I want more, I can just add the OOo repository. Easy!
I would love to see the look on Balmers face if asked the same question: "Hey Steve, do you think that the development and support for Cygwin is going to really help fuel the future Windows and future releases?" I predict at least three stammers before pulling something out of his ass. As cool as the whole Windows XP mode in 7 is interesting, I thought it was pretty cool for a moment until I realized I wouldn't do anything with it in reality, I think it could hurt Windows long run. As Ubuntu looks to the future in many ways, Microsoft having to battle with people that want to stay in the past isn't going to compel industry leaders to look to a future with Microsoft.