From Julien Roussea's translation: === Cut=== Article 3
State administrations, local collectivities and administratives services can , with the exceptions of the dispositions of the article #4, only use software free of rights and which source code is available . === Cut===
It says "only use software free of rights and which source code is available".
Now what does that exactly mean?
If I understand it correctly, it doesn't have to be GPL'ed software -the software could be licensed under the QT-license or Sun's community license, or whatever license, as long as the source code is available and they are alloved to change the source code as the like.
Not that it matters that much...it's a giant step in the right direction *if* it becomes a law.
Well, how do you excatly know that all who says that, wants a portable?
Besides, computers can be pretty small today - I don't know what size yours are?
Those players I mention, fits nicely in with your other stereo equipment.
Furthermore, if it can be done in stationary players, then it can certainly also be made in portable players, and I bet you will be able to buy such a player soon...
The site is in danish, but there are a picture of them, and some of the text is also in english.
AFAIK, they are for you regular stereo, and plays CD's with MP3-files. I've seen a player which could have 3 CD's and shuffle between them, and a player which had room for one CD and a normal harddrive.
This one (according to the manual , which is found on the site too) plays both DVD, VCD, MP3 CD's, and has a lot more features: http://www.china-shinco.com/dvd/dvd.htm
You're absolutely right, it all depends on your hardware is supported.
But you can get just as unlucky as you've been with any Windows-installation.
What is different between Windows and Linux is what comes after the installation (configuration), and there I think Linux is behind, allthough it various GUI utilities is getting better all the time.
I think the installation of Linux has been pretty easy for some time now - that's not big news. The first distribution I installed was Redhat 5.1, and I didn't have much trouble with that (granted I know much more about computers than most "ordinary users" does, but anyway...).
The problem is getting Linux configured for your needs.
A fresh installation of Linux doesn't install my Zyxel ISDN adapter as an example, and what about my Palm III?
Another example is the lack of an easy way to printing in Linux- the fact that Corel's new distribution will come with it's own drivers for a lot of printers should give all a hint on what is needed to make Linux mainstream...
If novices are going to be using Linux, it has to be easy to configure too.
How could they (MS) believe that this wouldn't get out to the public?
This can only do more damage to the company than this case has done allready...
First posts sucks;)
Re:Move by Intel to try to kill FireWire?
on
USB2 Specs Are In
·
· Score: 3
Ican help you out there - it *is* a move from Intel.
The difference between firewire and USB is sorta like the diffence between the SCSI and IDE interfaces for harddisk etc.
Silvino Orozco from Toms hardware gives a nice explanation:
"The big drawback is that USB actually uses CPU horsepower and some people are just not happy with that. This is why people push IEEE 1394 (Firewire) so much. It has high bandwidth but doesn't eat up the processing power that USB does."
Here is the link: http://www.tomshardware.com/editorial/99q3/99091 0/idf-99-01.html
Intel is of course not happy to see more things being moved away from the CPU (NVIDIA's new GeFORCE256 GPU is another example) - Intel pushes everything that demands a lot of CPU-power, and I bet that pushing that much data over a connection as USB2 is supporting, is going to use a lot of CPU-cycles...
That's why I hope that firewire will catch on - maybe the Playstation2 (which AFAIK uses firewire) will give firewire a nice boost - I hope it does...
From the IGN article (http://pc.ign.com/news/11159.html):
"USB 2.0 will be 40 times faster than the already-blazing USB 1.1, running at 480 Megabits per second. By comparison, current FireWire (IEEE-1394) runs at up to 400 Megabits, though a faster version of the technology is expected next year."
From The press release (http://www.usb.org/press/pressroom/backgrounder.h tml):
"USB 2.0 will extend the capabilities of the interface from 12 Mbps, which is available on USB 1.1, to between 120-240 Mbps on USB 2.0, providing a connection point for next-generation peripherals which complement higher performance PCs."
Seems to me that they are stating 120-140Mbps in the press release and 480Mbps in the IGN article.
Which one is correct?
120-140Mbps is certainly not faster than firewire...
"Raytracing has a reputation for being very processing-intensive, but I am convinced that it could be done efficiently in hardware, and the quality of the graphics would be far greater than polygon rendering."
It has allready been made for professionals: http://www.art-render.com/products/rdrive.html
From the article: "He just passed through Silicon Valley last week demonstrating his homemade graphics engine, and everyone from the designers at Nintendo to programmers at Apple has been left in shock."
They sound pretty impressed to me. If this is a real breakthrough - then NVIDIA, 3dfx etc. may be in big trouble...
The question is - if this is so great - when is it going to be available/usefull - later this year or in ten years?
Now, I'm not trying to flame you, but some of you statements are pretty silly imho.
"RedHat employs Linux developers and improves it." "I haven't seen Mandrake do anything. Until then they can get no respect or cash from me."
Mandrake does too, but Mandrake is a small company when compared to Redhat, but they all the create, they are giving back to the community. Look at my previous post, or even better, look at mandrakes website, for information about what they do.
"Mandrake sucks!"
This is pretty imature - it's just as bad as all the FUD Microsoft publish, imho. Why? - you don't write one single fact that supports you claim.
It would be allright to write that "Mandrake sucks", if the Mandrake dsitribution had huge flaws, but until now I haven't heard about that being the case.
Please, lets have a serious discussion instead.
It's probably a stupid decision to reply to your post at all, but it's my hope that you'll think a bit more, before you post again.
Infojack - you *really* don't like Mandrake do you? Why is that? I honestly don't get it!?
What I'm saying (again) is that this is the way Open Source works (and is supposed to work) - you're free to take the Mandrake-distribution (or Redhat, or SUSE or Caldera or...) and put your name on it and sell it. Nobody stops you from doing that.
Even Redhat think Mandrake is great! Don't believe me? Read this: http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/linuxworldtod ay/lwt-indepth3.html
As I said, it is a win-win situation for all of us, because, as Donnie Barnes (from Redhat) states in the article, it is all GPL'ed (allright - KDE isn't, but that doesn't matter in this case).
When Redhat don't see a problem with this - why do you?
And why do anybody have a problem with Macmillan selling a lot of Mandrake boxes? I think it is a great thing - more people gets to know Linux, which I think is good. They add value to the boxes (books AFAIK), which is really needed for a newbie, if he shall have any chance of using and learning Linux.
I don't understand why people is flaming each other just because the other person is using another distribution?
"... but mandrake just takes all that work adds kde and calls it their own, kinda sickening."
Why is that sickening?
Isn't that one of the things that makes OSS so great? If you don't like something, then make something better. That's excatly what Mandrake does.
If that is sickening - then Redhat is also sickening, they are doing the same thing (all distributions does...). They just take the Linux kernel and put some "stuff" on top and sells it for about 80 bucks - is that any better?
Mandrake does not only put KDE in the box, and most of the work they do, they give back to the community. AFAIK they pay at least one of the main KDE-developers to work full time on KDE, and they (as stated in the article) has made a site for internationalization of Linux, and they also sponsor the Lothar project.
Besides Redhat is free to use all the changes Mandrake makes in their next distribution, if they like.
You're maybe right about the average desktop user, but that all depends on what the user uses the PC for! Pictures pretty quickly fills up several GB.
And data storage needs are booming in the industry!
I can't remember where I've read it, but think about it - companies is storing everything (knowledge is power/money!). They are using datamining, datawarehouses etc. more and more - it takes up lot and lots of disk space!
It is actually the other way around - the harddisks can't follow the needs!
Moreover, if you want everything in your home to be runned by you computer, you're going to need much more than 10GB! It will more be like 10TB I think...
I imagine one day where all my movies, music etc. is on a server (TV-channels is plugged in the server too).
In all the rooms of my house, where I want to listen to music, a little display is hanging on the wall together with some speakers or in the case of movies or television, a huge flatscreen (of some kind) is hanging on the wall, and the sound would of course be at least DTS surround quality.
Everything should be connected, so I for example could get a notice when the coffee is ready:-) or a bit more seriously: if the temperature gets to high in my refrigerator - gotta make sure the beers are cool:-)
I personally hope that firewire is soon catching on, because USB 2 is driven by Intel, and therefor, while it has some pretty great specifications, it is also (unlike firewire) CPU-dependant. I bet that is why Intel is pushing USB 2 instead of firewire.
Tom at Toms Hardware Guide has written a bit about it here: http://www.tomshardware.com/editorial/99q3/99091 0/idf-99-01.html
It will come...everybody is free to implement it without any cost, so NVIDIA (and others, except S3 maybe...) will probably implement it in their next generation cards.
But 3dfx has just announced it, so NVIDIA haven't had a chance to implement it in GeFORCE.
One thing is for sure - FXT1 is better than S3 texture compression, and it is *free*! Which also means that it maybe will be available on Linux.
S3's texture compression is (at the moment) only for the Windows platform.
With SGI and NVIDIA in bed with each other, and SGI is putting a lot of money on Linux, my bet is that we will soon see much better drivers from them...
Some games can take more advantage of T&L than other games - Unreal stresses fill rate while Q3 Arena will benefit more from T&L.
Voodooextreme has asked a lot of game developers, what they think of this hole issue about T&L vs fill rate - you can find the article here: http://www.voodooextreme.com/articles/fillvstl.htm l
I like the first comment from Tim Sweeney - Epic Games:-)
A lot of the benchmarks that has been published doesn't take advantage of the T&L, and therefore the benchmarks doesn't look really great, just great. But the fill rate of the GeForce isn't *that* much better than the TNT2 Ultra or the Voodoo3 3500.
What you can't se from the benchmarks either, is the picture quality - with games that uses T&L, you might not get a frame rate that is much higher than others, but you'll get a much nicer picture.
You'll need to get games that stresses the T&L chip to see the difference, and there are not many games which does that today (are there any at all?!)
Download the tree demo from NVIDIA's website and run it on you 3D-accelerators - it crawls! I tried it on my Celeron450/128MB RAM/Voodoo3 2000 - it was a slideshow!
Besides, Geforce is the only next generation card which is available in the next couple of weeks - S3 Savage2000 will be available before christmas, but that's a long time in the graphics bussiness. It is even worse with 3dfx's Voodoo4/Napalm - it will maybe not be available before february!
If NVIDIA continue to deliver a new product every 6 month, then the will have their next generation card ready a few month after Voodoo4 arrives.
Rumors about NVIDIA's next card/chip/GPU will certainly be all around the net at that time, which may hurt 3dfx's sales, if they don't deliver something quite extraordinary...
>In contrast, the 64-bit version of the G5 (which will also be available in a 32-bit version) will be able to run 32-bit applications "in full native mode," Swearingen said.
If the 64bit version runs 32bit applications just as good as (or nearly as good as) an 32bit version and it only takes a few modifications to make the 32bit application run, then why make the 32bit version?
Seems like a waste of time to me?! That time could (maybe?) be used for getting the 64bit version out a bit earlier...
Here in Denmark 3 kids (one at the age of 17, don't know about the others) has also been sued for linking to sites which contained illegal MP3 music.
2 of the three boys has got "free process" (I don't know what it is called in US, but I hope you know what I mean), because there don't excist any law on this area.
KODA (IFPI in Denmark) writes on their homepage that if you're linking to pages with illegal "stuff", then you're responsible too (maybe not directly for the files, allthough they would like that, but you have some sort of resposibility!).
IMHO it is going to be hard to get them convicted, because, when you link to a site, you can't know if/when that site change what it contains.
Fortunately, law-experts in Denmark has the same opinion...
NVIDIA has had pretty good OpenGL drivers since their Riva128 chipset - they are stable and fast - I don't think that is going to change, especially not now after the deal with SGI...
Maybe this is a little bit offtopic, but anyway, here it goes...
Fact: Softwarepiracy is a huge problem in most of the world where computers are being used. We are talking about 40% to more than 90% in a lot of countries.
If a secure copy protection was developed (AFAIK they are getting better and better), it would prevent a lot of people in getting a lot of the software they need/want, because they simply can't afford it.
What are they to do? They will go for the free, just as good, allmost as god or better alternative!
I know a lot of students who can't afford to pay for all the expensive MS software, and neither can a lot of companies.
If Linux becomes a viable alternative (it isn't quite there yet, but lets se how Corels distribution looks when it is released, or wait about a year, and a lot will have changed), they will certainly think about going the Linux way...
In the end it is a big "if", but from what I know, it's getting harder and harder to get pirated software.
Another thing is that people has been tired of MS software for a looong time (I don't have to say why, do I?), but there just hasn't been a viable alternative - Linux is getting there fast.
Slashdot Mirror
From Julien Roussea's translation:
=== Cut===
Article 3
State administrations, local collectivities and administratives services can , with the exceptions of the dispositions of the article #4, only use software free of rights and which source code is available .
=== Cut===
It says "only use software free of rights and which source code is available".
Now what does that exactly mean?
If I understand it correctly, it doesn't have to be GPL'ed software -the software could be licensed under the QT-license or Sun's community license, or whatever license, as long as the source code is available and they are alloved to change the source code as the like.
Not that it matters that much...it's a giant step in the right direction *if* it becomes a law.
Well, how do you excatly know that all who says that, wants a portable?
Besides, computers can be pretty small today - I don't know what size yours are?
Those players I mention, fits nicely in with your other stereo equipment.
Furthermore, if it can be done in stationary players, then it can certainly also be made in portable players, and I bet you will be able to buy such a player soon...
Well I would like to be able to have my hole collection of music with me wherever I go/travel...
It's not allways you can download new music to the player, but you can almost allways re-charge it...
If you are gone for a month, then only having room for one CD on you player isn't quite enough imho.
There are a few - you can buy them here in Denmark, so you should be able to buy them in the US too.
a renr=4&gruppe=mp3
n r=15&gruppe=mp3
Here are a few of those you can buy:
http://www.mmvision.dk/default.asp?action=vis&v
and
http://www.mm-vision.dk/mp3.asp?action=vis&vare
The site is in danish, but there are a picture of them, and some of the text is also in english.
AFAIK, they are for you regular stereo, and plays CD's with MP3-files.
I've seen a player which could have 3 CD's and shuffle between them, and a player which had room for one CD and a normal harddrive.
This one (according to the manual , which is found on the site too) plays both DVD, VCD, MP3 CD's, and has a lot more features:
http://www.china-shinco.com/dvd/dvd.htm
You're absolutely right, it all depends on your hardware is supported.
But you can get just as unlucky as you've been with any Windows-installation.
What is different between Windows and Linux is what comes after the installation (configuration), and there I think Linux is behind, allthough it various GUI utilities is getting better all the time.
I think the installation of Linux has been pretty easy for some time now - that's not big news. The first distribution I installed was Redhat 5.1, and I didn't have much trouble with that (granted I know much more about computers than most "ordinary users" does, but anyway...).
The problem is getting Linux configured for your needs.
A fresh installation of Linux doesn't install my Zyxel ISDN adapter as an example, and what about my Palm III?
Another example is the lack of an easy way to printing in Linux- the fact that Corel's new distribution will come with it's own drivers for a lot of printers should give all a hint on what is needed to make Linux mainstream...
If novices are going to be using Linux, it has to be easy to configure too.
I'm pretty amazed too...
;)
How could they (MS) believe that this wouldn't get out to the public?
This can only do more damage to the company than this case has done allready...
First posts sucks
Ican help you out there - it *is* a move from Intel.
1 0/idf-99-01.html
The difference between firewire and USB is sorta like the diffence between the SCSI and IDE interfaces for harddisk etc.
Silvino Orozco from Toms hardware gives a nice explanation:
"The big drawback is that USB actually uses CPU horsepower and some people are just not happy with that. This is why people push IEEE 1394 (Firewire) so much. It has high bandwidth but doesn't eat up the processing power that USB does."
Here is the link:
http://www.tomshardware.com/editorial/99q3/9909
Intel is of course not happy to see more things being moved away from the CPU (NVIDIA's new GeFORCE256 GPU is another example) - Intel pushes everything that demands a lot of CPU-power, and I bet that pushing that much data over a connection as USB2 is supporting, is going to use a lot of CPU-cycles...
That's why I hope that firewire will catch on - maybe the Playstation2 (which AFAIK uses firewire) will give firewire a nice boost - I hope it does...
From the IGN article (http://pc.ign.com/news/11159.html):
h tml):
"USB 2.0 will be 40 times faster than the already-blazing USB 1.1, running at 480 Megabits per second. By comparison, current FireWire (IEEE-1394) runs at up to 400 Megabits, though a faster version of the technology is expected next year."
From The press release (http://www.usb.org/press/pressroom/backgrounder.
"USB 2.0 will extend the capabilities of the interface from 12 Mbps, which is available on USB 1.1, to between 120-240 Mbps on USB 2.0, providing a connection point for next-generation peripherals which complement higher performance PCs."
Seems to me that they are stating 120-140Mbps in the press release and 480Mbps in the IGN article.
Which one is correct?
120-140Mbps is certainly not faster than firewire...
"Raytracing has a reputation for being very processing-intensive, but I am convinced that it could be done efficiently in hardware, and the quality of the graphics would be far greater than polygon rendering."
It has allready been made for professionals:
http://www.art-render.com/products/rdrive.html
...then I think sounds pretty cool.
From the article:
"He just passed through Silicon Valley last week demonstrating his homemade graphics engine, and everyone from the designers at Nintendo to programmers at Apple has been left in shock."
They sound pretty impressed to me. If this is a real breakthrough - then NVIDIA, 3dfx etc. may be in big trouble...
The question is - if this is so great - when is it going to be available/usefull - later this year or in ten years?
Now, I'm not trying to flame you, but some of you statements are pretty silly imho.
"RedHat employs Linux developers and improves it."
"I haven't seen Mandrake do anything. Until then they can get no respect or cash from me."
Mandrake does too, but Mandrake is a small company when compared to Redhat, but they all the create, they are giving back to the community.
Look at my previous post, or even better, look at mandrakes website, for information about what they do.
"Mandrake sucks!"
This is pretty imature - it's just as bad as all the FUD Microsoft publish, imho.
Why? - you don't write one single fact that supports you claim.
It would be allright to write that "Mandrake sucks", if the Mandrake dsitribution had huge flaws, but until now I haven't heard about that being the case.
Please, lets have a serious discussion instead.
It's probably a stupid decision to reply to your post at all, but it's my hope that you'll think a bit more, before you post again.
System Apex has made another response here:
o _ms_linux_page/
http://www.systemapex.com/technology/response_t
Infojack - you *really* don't like Mandrake do you? Why is that? I honestly don't get it!?
d ay/lwt-indepth3.html
What I'm saying (again) is that this is the way Open Source works (and is supposed to work) - you're free to take the Mandrake-distribution (or Redhat, or SUSE or Caldera or...) and put your name on it and sell it. Nobody stops you from doing that.
Even Redhat think Mandrake is great!
Don't believe me? Read this: http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/linuxworldto
As I said, it is a win-win situation for all of us, because, as Donnie Barnes (from Redhat) states in the article, it is all GPL'ed (allright - KDE isn't, but that doesn't matter in this case).
When Redhat don't see a problem with this - why do you?
And why do anybody have a problem with Macmillan selling a lot of Mandrake boxes?
I think it is a great thing - more people gets to know Linux, which I think is good. They add value to the boxes (books AFAIK), which is really needed for a newbie, if he shall have any chance of using and learning Linux.
I don't understand why people is flaming each other just because the other person is using another distribution?
Ups - this is getting offtopic, sorry...
"... but mandrake just takes all that work adds kde and calls it their own, kinda sickening."
Why is that sickening?
Isn't that one of the things that makes OSS so great? If you don't like something, then make something better. That's excatly what Mandrake does.
If that is sickening - then Redhat is also sickening, they are doing the same thing (all distributions does...). They just take the Linux kernel and put some "stuff" on top and sells it for about 80 bucks - is that any better?
Mandrake does not only put KDE in the box, and most of the work they do, they give back to the community. AFAIK they pay at least one of the main KDE-developers to work full time on KDE, and they (as stated in the article) has made a site for internationalization of Linux, and they also sponsor the Lothar project.
Besides Redhat is free to use all the changes Mandrake makes in their next distribution, if they like.
As I see it, it's a win-win situation.
You're maybe right about the average desktop user, but that all depends on what the user uses the PC for! Pictures pretty quickly fills up several GB.
:-) :-)
And data storage needs are booming in the industry!
I can't remember where I've read it, but think about it - companies is storing everything (knowledge is power/money!). They are using datamining, datawarehouses etc. more and more - it takes up lot and lots of disk space!
It is actually the other way around - the harddisks can't follow the needs!
Moreover, if you want everything in your home to be runned by you computer, you're going to need much more than 10GB! It will more be like 10TB I think...
I imagine one day where all my movies, music etc. is on a server (TV-channels is plugged in the server too).
In all the rooms of my house, where I want to listen to music, a little display is hanging on the wall together with some speakers or in the case of movies or television, a huge flatscreen (of some kind) is hanging on the wall, and the sound would of course be at least DTS surround quality.
Everything should be connected, so I for example could get a notice when the coffee is ready
or a bit more seriously: if the temperature gets to high in my refrigerator - gotta make sure the beers are cool
Maybe a bit offtopic, but here it goes...
1 0/idf-99-01.html
I personally hope that firewire is soon catching on, because USB 2 is driven by Intel, and therefor, while it has some pretty great specifications, it is also (unlike firewire) CPU-dependant. I bet that is why Intel is pushing USB 2 instead of firewire.
Tom at Toms Hardware Guide has written a bit about it here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/editorial/99q3/9909
It will come...everybody is free to implement it without any cost, so NVIDIA (and others, except S3 maybe...) will probably implement it in their next generation cards.
But 3dfx has just announced it, so NVIDIA haven't had a chance to implement it in GeFORCE.
One thing is for sure - FXT1 is better than S3 texture compression, and it is *free*!
Which also means that it maybe will be available on Linux.
S3's texture compression is (at the moment) only for the Windows platform.
With SGI and NVIDIA in bed with each other, and SGI is putting a lot of money on Linux, my bet is that we will soon see much better drivers from them...
Some games can take more advantage of T&L than other games - Unreal stresses fill rate while Q3 Arena will benefit more from T&L.
m l
:-)
Voodooextreme has asked a lot of game developers, what they think of this hole issue about T&L vs fill rate - you can find the article here: http://www.voodooextreme.com/articles/fillvstl.ht
I like the first comment from Tim Sweeney - Epic Games
A lot of the benchmarks that has been published doesn't take advantage of the T&L, and therefore the benchmarks doesn't look really great, just great. But the fill rate of the GeForce isn't *that* much better than the TNT2 Ultra or the Voodoo3 3500.
What you can't se from the benchmarks either, is the picture quality - with games that uses T&L, you might not get a frame rate that is much higher than others, but you'll get a much nicer picture.
You'll need to get games that stresses the T&L chip to see the difference, and there are not many games which does that today (are there any at all?!)
Download the tree demo from NVIDIA's website and run it on you 3D-accelerators - it crawls!
I tried it on my Celeron450/128MB RAM/Voodoo3 2000 - it was a slideshow!
Besides, Geforce is the only next generation card which is available in the next couple of weeks - S3 Savage2000 will be available before christmas, but that's a long time in the graphics bussiness. It is even worse with 3dfx's Voodoo4/Napalm - it will maybe not be available before february!
If NVIDIA continue to deliver a new product every 6 month, then the will have their next generation card ready a few month after Voodoo4 arrives.
Rumors about NVIDIA's next card/chip/GPU will certainly be all around the net at that time, which may hurt 3dfx's sales, if they don't deliver something quite extraordinary...
>In contrast, the 64-bit version of the G5 (which will also be available in a 32-bit version) will be able to run 32-bit applications "in full native mode," Swearingen said.
If the 64bit version runs 32bit applications just as good as (or nearly as good as) an 32bit version and it only takes a few modifications to make the 32bit application run, then why make the 32bit version?
Seems like a waste of time to me?!
That time could (maybe?) be used for getting the 64bit version out a bit earlier...
Here in Denmark 3 kids (one at the age of 17, don't know about the others) has also been sued for linking to sites which contained illegal MP3 music.
2 of the three boys has got "free process" (I don't know what it is called in US, but I hope you know what I mean), because there don't excist any law on this area.
KODA (IFPI in Denmark) writes on their homepage that if you're linking to pages with illegal "stuff", then you're responsible too (maybe not directly for the files, allthough they would like that, but you have some sort of resposibility!).
IMHO it is going to be hard to get them convicted, because, when you link to a site, you can't know if/when that site change what it contains.
Fortunately, law-experts in Denmark has the same opinion...
Does it run Quake?
NVIDIA has had pretty good OpenGL drivers since their Riva128 chipset - they are stable and fast - I don't think that is going to change, especially not now after the deal with SGI...
Maybe this is a little bit offtopic, but anyway, here it goes...
Fact: Softwarepiracy is a huge problem in most of the world where computers are being used. We are talking about 40% to more than 90% in a lot of countries.
If a secure copy protection was developed (AFAIK they are getting better and better), it would prevent a lot of people in getting a lot of the software they need/want, because they simply can't afford it.
What are they to do? They will go for the free, just as good, allmost as god or better alternative!
I know a lot of students who can't afford to pay for all the expensive MS software, and neither can a lot of companies.
If Linux becomes a viable alternative (it isn't quite there yet, but lets se how Corels distribution looks when it is released, or wait about a year, and a lot will have changed), they will certainly think about going the Linux way...
In the end it is a big "if", but from what I know, it's getting harder and harder to get pirated software.
Another thing is that people has been tired of MS software for a looong time (I don't have to say why, do I?), but there just hasn't been a viable alternative - Linux is getting there fast.