Every time there's a new, expensive version of Windows released, I get more people asking about Linux.
I'm sure you do... but your circle of friends and contacts is not representative of the general public.
How do I know that? Because the desktop usage of Linux hasn't budged in a decade.
And for what it is worth, Windows is just as free, from the point of view of the average consumer. Most people get Windows with their computer and few upgrade, which is one of the reasons MS went ahead and started giving Windows away. They want to be paid when the computer is sold, but for most people, it will now be a free upgrade. You just pay again when you buy your next computer.
Linux lacks a single release, it is confusing, there are many versions, there is no one company for support, some things work better on one release or another, etc.
To the average consumer, it is just a big mess. Windows 7 is Windows 7 is Windows 7. Linux doesn't offer that.
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Look, I don't want to get into a fanboy argument, rest assured MS has done some really dumb things over the years, I'll be the first to point out that Vista was a mess at launch, they overreached and backed off to that. 8 had its own problems, partly fixed with 8.1, completely (more or less) fixed with 10.
Balmer is gone, real change is happening, these are good things. Did Linux cause them? Meh, I suspect Apple is a bigger concern for MS, but they aren't fools, they don't want anything getting in the way of Windows being on the vast majority of computers.
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To put this another way... Linux can't win by "not being Windows". It has to offer something compelling that Windows does not. To most consumers, it does not offer anything compelling and it in fact has tons of draw backs. You don't mind, you can work past them, but most people don't WANT to do that.
Also, consider that asking people to change their OS then brings up another question... "Why?"
Oh sure, YOU understand the benefits, but they don't see any. It is like saying "change the engine in your car for this other engine, it doesn't have DRM or auto-updates".
Um... so? Does the average driver care?
The vast majority of consumer electronic users just don't care, they want something that works, and the reality is that Windows works better than it really ever has.
It isn't perfect, but perfection is the enemy of "good enough", and Windows long ago passed "good enough".
Linux doesn't offer a compelling reason to change, it didn't 20 years ago, it didn't 10 years ago, and it doesn't today. Not to more than about 1.5% of desktop users anyway.
Meh, "for the most part" isn't good enough, and no, they don't really...
TurboTax doesn't run on Wine, not without some effort...
Look, I get the benefits of Linux, I really do... but they don't matter to most people, which is why "The year of the Linux desktop" remains a 20 year old joke at this point, and it is likely to remain so for a very long time.
Something might replace Windows at some point, but I doubt it will be Linux. Frankly OS X has more of a chance of that happening than Linux does.
Sorry friend but you've been bamboozled as it would take SEVENTEEN YEARS to save enough power to make up the price difference between an AMD and an Intel and that is with picking the 125w on the AMD side. Now are you seriously gonna argue you are keeping your chip for nearly 20 years?
That is a cute video, but it doesn't show anything but a guy talking.
Frankly, my own testing shows otherwise, the AMD chip uses twice the power as the Intel chip at load and 50% more at idle.
For a computer that is on 24/7, that has stuff often running for hours (I often set it to run overnight tasks, so it spends many hours at 100% load), the difference adds up.
He also doesn't take into account the needed cooling for the extra heat. I'm in Texas, I pay to AC my home. The extra power is nearly doubled due to the need to cool the room the computers are in.
Finally, there is performance to consider. He only looked at the two computers running for 4 hours at 100%. Fine, but what happens when the Intel chip gets the same job done in 3 hours and can go idle, while the AMD chip runs 100% for an extra hour.
The video is terrible, it doesn't take into account multiple factors.
Payback is about 3 years, give or take. I've done the math, AMD makes no sense for high end computers. It can make sense for the low end stuff, but if you have data crunching to do, there is nothing but Intel to consider.
The point of my comment was to suggest that things like that will drive more and more people away from Windows so that eventually, only those users who can't or won't think for themselves will be left with it.
I get that, and it is a reasonable point to make. However that assumes that the majority care.
I don't think they do.
The number of people using iPads and iPhones would indicate such, and while Android has a large market share, a lot of that is on locked down phones such as the Galaxy S series that you can't do much with without hacking anyway.
How many people who own Android phones actually do anything more than basic stuff with them? I'd be shocked if the number was above 10%.
However, one thing that you should keep in mind is that 18W is a whole lot more than 1W.
What does that mean? Intel has learned in recent years that rather than slow down the CPU and let it run tasks over time, it actually saves more power most of the time to run at full speed, get done quickly, then go to sleep mode.
Even if this happens every second or two, it saves more power most of the time.
Consider that a 35W Haswell chip might actually pull less total power than that 18W AMD chip, because it can get done so much faster and go to sleep.
Note: I get that your application might seem busy all the time, but Intel's newest chips look at it in very small slices. So it may be working really hard for half a second, then going to sleep for half a second, then back awake, etc.
That really cuts down on power use.
I recently replaced a Sandy Bridge machine with Haswell for just that reason. It isn't really faster, but it does use less power, enough to be noticed. For a 24/7 machine, the chip becomes free after about 3 years, and that doesn't take into account less AC requirements from lower power.
This is why I have no problems staying an AMD shop despite AMD staying at 28nm, because even at 28nm they are still vastly overpowered compared to what the average user does (especially when you look at non rigged [youtube.com] benchmarks [phoronix.com]) because once we went multicore chips went from "good enough" to so insanely powerful it isn't even funny.
While much of what you said is true, AMD's single biggest problem is power consumption.
No, not for laptops, desktops...
What? Why does that matter?
Because power costs money, some places more than others, but generally consuming lots of power is bad for the planet. Even if your power is hydro, wind, or solar, that power could have been sent somewhere else and been used to replace coal or natural gas, so it is still wasted.
The modern Haswell chips are so much more power efficient than AMD it is sad. Compare equal CPU powered chips and some of the "modern" AMD chips consume three times the power of Intel.
greatest achievements of humankind ? are you kidding me ? We have been (40 years ago) sending a few men of the moon, but haven't fixed any of mankind's problem here on earth. The moon landing was a political race to show the Russians that Americans had the biggest.
What is so sad is that many people think like you do.
You're entitled to your opinion, but it is a sad one IMHO... There is no future to the human race in your worldview...
Look, if you're going to use Windows 10, just get on with it and make a Microsoft account already, sooner or later you'll need one, wanted or otherwise...
It usually happens in Kindergarten. If some group of children who all look alike and are led by an incalcitrant bully "don't like Billy" and continue to taunt and isolate him, then the skilled Kindergarten teacher will find a way of isolating the bully.
That is, to an extent, effective in Kindergarden... Kids at that age are still mostly willing to do what they are told to do.
By 4th grade, that changes and it is no longer so effective.
There is a LONG history of this, some situations have been more for or against it...
While you are right that a Judge can hold you in comtempt, and you'd be foolish to openly flout the judge, the reality is this:
"However, jury verdicts of acquittal are unassailable even where the verdict is inconsistent with the weight of the evidence and instruction of the law."
Once acquitted, you're done, never to be tried again. The lack of double jeopardy is a key part of the US justice system. Otherwise you get the nonsense in Italy when they kept trying to get the verdict they wanted against Amanda Knox.
Uber can break whatever laws it wants, and it must take the legal responsibility whatever that turns out to be as determined by a court.
This is true, and if they end up in a court of law and in front of a jury of 12 people, those 12 people can decide whatever they want, such as "not guilty".
That is the 4th pillar of our legal system. No matter what the government says, at the end of the day, we're judged by a jury of our peers, not the government.
Mistakes have been made, the past isn't perfect... but using your logic, since we polluted once, we should never do so again, so we might as well just shut it all down, turn off the lights, and go back to caves.
Yea, that is stupid, as is turning off the nuclear power because of mistakes make before the EPA even existed!
Why not learn from those mistakes and control the waste better in the future? The anti-nuclear people are just insane, no intelligence whatsoever...
You said it was impossible to enforce. The facts are that is is not impossible, because people do succeed in claiming compensation for such discrimination.
Don't be obtuse... 500 people being caught out of 500,000 committing the crime is effectively impossible to enforce.
Wrong again. There's a couple of obvious ways of finding evidence of this. One is that you make the same application under different names, only varying the one characteristic that you think is being discriminated against. That's strong evidence if the applications are treated differently.
Nope, not wrong, you don't know what you're talking about.
Why? Because you don't know how statistics work. Doing that once or twice doesn't show anything, you have to do it enough to have a pattern without a large margin of error.
The second, where the is a larger company that has a significant number of people in similar roles, is simply to loon at the demographics of who is employed, and compare with applications.
Lord you are an idiot... People offered jobs does not and SHOULD not match the demographics of the applications... Just because 25% of the people who apply are old, or black, or anything else doesn't mean that 25% should be hired. They might not be qualified.
Again, this established law (depending on jurisdiction) and has been successfully actioned on.
Yes, because people are idiots, juries are idiots, and idiots work at such companies.
Lots of other people get away with it just fine, because the whole concept is stupid and unenforceable against people who know how to cover their tracks.
You however, are a complete idiot, so carry about your day.
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Every time there's a new, expensive version of Windows released, I get more people asking about Linux.
I'm sure you do... but your circle of friends and contacts is not representative of the general public.
How do I know that? Because the desktop usage of Linux hasn't budged in a decade.
And for what it is worth, Windows is just as free, from the point of view of the average consumer. Most people get Windows with their computer and few upgrade, which is one of the reasons MS went ahead and started giving Windows away. They want to be paid when the computer is sold, but for most people, it will now be a free upgrade. You just pay again when you buy your next computer.
Linux lacks a single release, it is confusing, there are many versions, there is no one company for support, some things work better on one release or another, etc.
To the average consumer, it is just a big mess. Windows 7 is Windows 7 is Windows 7. Linux doesn't offer that.
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Look, I don't want to get into a fanboy argument, rest assured MS has done some really dumb things over the years, I'll be the first to point out that Vista was a mess at launch, they overreached and backed off to that. 8 had its own problems, partly fixed with 8.1, completely (more or less) fixed with 10.
Balmer is gone, real change is happening, these are good things. Did Linux cause them? Meh, I suspect Apple is a bigger concern for MS, but they aren't fools, they don't want anything getting in the way of Windows being on the vast majority of computers.
---
To put this another way... Linux can't win by "not being Windows". It has to offer something compelling that Windows does not. To most consumers, it does not offer anything compelling and it in fact has tons of draw backs. You don't mind, you can work past them, but most people don't WANT to do that.
Also, consider that asking people to change their OS then brings up another question... "Why?"
Oh sure, YOU understand the benefits, but they don't see any. It is like saying "change the engine in your car for this other engine, it doesn't have DRM or auto-updates".
Um... so? Does the average driver care?
The vast majority of consumer electronic users just don't care, they want something that works, and the reality is that Windows works better than it really ever has.
It isn't perfect, but perfection is the enemy of "good enough", and Windows long ago passed "good enough".
Linux doesn't offer a compelling reason to change, it didn't 20 years ago, it didn't 10 years ago, and it doesn't today. Not to more than about 1.5% of desktop users anyway.
Meh, "for the most part" isn't good enough, and no, they don't really...
TurboTax doesn't run on Wine, not without some effort...
Look, I get the benefits of Linux, I really do... but they don't matter to most people, which is why "The year of the Linux desktop" remains a 20 year old joke at this point, and it is likely to remain so for a very long time.
Something might replace Windows at some point, but I doubt it will be Linux. Frankly OS X has more of a chance of that happening than Linux does.
That is sad... why do you bother to wake up in the morning then? Why not just kill yourself and leave more room for the rest of us?
The problem with Linux is not that people don't know it doesn't exist.
Even my Mother has heard of it, it isn't a secret. The real problem is people don't see a need for it. Windows works "well enough".
Then you have the issue of "do my programs run on it". If your answer is, "no, but similar programs do", then you've lost, you might as well give up.
Sorry friend but you've been bamboozled as it would take SEVENTEEN YEARS to save enough power to make up the price difference between an AMD and an Intel and that is with picking the 125w on the AMD side. Now are you seriously gonna argue you are keeping your chip for nearly 20 years?
That is a cute video, but it doesn't show anything but a guy talking.
Frankly, my own testing shows otherwise, the AMD chip uses twice the power as the Intel chip at load and 50% more at idle.
For a computer that is on 24/7, that has stuff often running for hours (I often set it to run overnight tasks, so it spends many hours at 100% load), the difference adds up.
He also doesn't take into account the needed cooling for the extra heat. I'm in Texas, I pay to AC my home. The extra power is nearly doubled due to the need to cool the room the computers are in.
Finally, there is performance to consider. He only looked at the two computers running for 4 hours at 100%. Fine, but what happens when the Intel chip gets the same job done in 3 hours and can go idle, while the AMD chip runs 100% for an extra hour.
The video is terrible, it doesn't take into account multiple factors.
Payback is about 3 years, give or take. I've done the math, AMD makes no sense for high end computers. It can make sense for the low end stuff, but if you have data crunching to do, there is nothing but Intel to consider.
The point of my comment was to suggest that things like that will drive more and more people away from Windows so that eventually, only those users who can't or won't think for themselves will be left with it.
I get that, and it is a reasonable point to make. However that assumes that the majority care.
I don't think they do.
The number of people using iPads and iPhones would indicate such, and while Android has a large market share, a lot of that is on locked down phones such as the Galaxy S series that you can't do much with without hacking anyway.
How many people who own Android phones actually do anything more than basic stuff with them? I'd be shocked if the number was above 10%.
Fair enough, that might be an edge case...
However, one thing that you should keep in mind is that 18W is a whole lot more than 1W.
What does that mean? Intel has learned in recent years that rather than slow down the CPU and let it run tasks over time, it actually saves more power most of the time to run at full speed, get done quickly, then go to sleep mode.
Even if this happens every second or two, it saves more power most of the time.
Consider that a 35W Haswell chip might actually pull less total power than that 18W AMD chip, because it can get done so much faster and go to sleep.
Note: I get that your application might seem busy all the time, but Intel's newest chips look at it in very small slices. So it may be working really hard for half a second, then going to sleep for half a second, then back awake, etc.
That really cuts down on power use.
I recently replaced a Sandy Bridge machine with Haswell for just that reason. It isn't really faster, but it does use less power, enough to be noticed. For a 24/7 machine, the chip becomes free after about 3 years, and that doesn't take into account less AC requirements from lower power.
This is why I have no problems staying an AMD shop despite AMD staying at 28nm, because even at 28nm they are still vastly overpowered compared to what the average user does (especially when you look at non rigged [youtube.com] benchmarks [phoronix.com]) because once we went multicore chips went from "good enough" to so insanely powerful it isn't even funny.
While much of what you said is true, AMD's single biggest problem is power consumption.
No, not for laptops, desktops...
What? Why does that matter?
Because power costs money, some places more than others, but generally consuming lots of power is bad for the planet. Even if your power is hydro, wind, or solar, that power could have been sent somewhere else and been used to replace coal or natural gas, so it is still wasted.
The modern Haswell chips are so much more power efficient than AMD it is sad. Compare equal CPU powered chips and some of the "modern" AMD chips consume three times the power of Intel.
Which will only be a problem for those of you who still insist on using Windows. The rest of us will go on about our business with no problems at all.
While you might be right, "the rest of us" is not a very large number...
Until Windows is less than about 95% of the desktop OS market, then "the rest of us" is pretty meaningless.
Ok, so $105 Million sounds like a lot... and of course it isn't chump change...
But they just issued a recall of 1.4 million vehicles. So $105 Million works out to $75 per vehicle.
I suspect the cost of doing the recall on each vehicle is more than $75.
Frankly, that is less per vehicle than you pay in documentation fees when you buy it (at least here, we pay about $150 for that).
This is a trivial amount of money if the point is to punish a company that has over $22 billion in cash on hand and a profit of $4.1 billion in 2014.
http://www.autonews.com/articl....
They'll pay it and move on, nothing will change. Fine them a billion dollars and then it would actually be real money.
greatest achievements of humankind ? are you kidding me ? We have been (40 years ago) sending a few men of the moon, but haven't fixed any of mankind's problem here on earth. The moon landing was a political race to show the Russians that Americans had the biggest.
What is so sad is that many people think like you do.
You're entitled to your opinion, but it is a sad one IMHO... There is no future to the human race in your worldview...
An operating system might have a shelf life of 1 or 2 years.
I expect 10 years of reasonable use out of an OS, 1 or 2 years is not NEARLY enough...
A TV might be expected to work properly for 5 years.
5 years? Lord, you have low expectations...
I expect a TV I buy to work for decades...
It's a trap to make you create an account*.
Perhaps, but it is a pretty gentle one...
Look, if you're going to use Windows 10, just get on with it and make a Microsoft account already, sooner or later you'll need one, wanted or otherwise...
It usually happens in Kindergarten. If some group of children who all look alike and are led by an incalcitrant bully "don't like Billy" and continue to taunt and isolate him, then the skilled Kindergarten teacher will find a way of isolating the bully.
That is, to an extent, effective in Kindergarden... Kids at that age are still mostly willing to do what they are told to do.
By 4th grade, that changes and it is no longer so effective.
Source: I have a children in both grades.
Perhaps nuclear power should be a state function, rather than a private function.
The US Navy has a decent record of running nuclear power, perhaps we should simply ask them to do it.
Not everything translates into private companies. After all, my local water utility works very well and is government run.
A more civilized solution, of course, would be for worker's rights to be respected in all countries such that it were a level playing field.
That isn't going to happen in our lifetime. Work with the system you have, not the one you wish you had.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/we...
There is a LONG history of this, some situations have been more for or against it...
While you are right that a Judge can hold you in comtempt, and you'd be foolish to openly flout the judge, the reality is this:
"However, jury verdicts of acquittal are unassailable even where the verdict is inconsistent with the weight of the evidence and instruction of the law."
Once acquitted, you're done, never to be tried again. The lack of double jeopardy is a key part of the US justice system. Otherwise you get the nonsense in Italy when they kept trying to get the verdict they wanted against Amanda Knox.
Yes, but in the US, if you're being charged with a criminal offense, you have the right to ask for a jury trial.
The jury has the right to make any decision it wants, regardless of what the law says.
That is the ultimate safeguard of an overpowered government, a jury that rules the way they believe in, regardless of the law.
Uber can break whatever laws it wants, and it must take the legal responsibility whatever that turns out to be as determined by a court.
This is true, and if they end up in a court of law and in front of a jury of 12 people, those 12 people can decide whatever they want, such as "not guilty".
That is the 4th pillar of our legal system. No matter what the government says, at the end of the day, we're judged by a jury of our peers, not the government.
If you actually believe that, then you must also believe we might as well just kill ourselves and end humanity...
In which case, the pollution doesn't matter, now does it?
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Back to a serious reply, of course we can handle it safely, all it requires is a desire to do so and the commitment to spend what that costs.
Mistakes have been made, the past isn't perfect... but using your logic, since we polluted once, we should never do so again, so we might as well just shut it all down, turn off the lights, and go back to caves.
Yea, that is stupid, as is turning off the nuclear power because of mistakes make before the EPA even existed!
Why not learn from those mistakes and control the waste better in the future? The anti-nuclear people are just insane, no intelligence whatsoever...
You said it was impossible to enforce. The facts are that is is not impossible, because people do succeed in claiming compensation for such discrimination.
Don't be obtuse... 500 people being caught out of 500,000 committing the crime is effectively impossible to enforce.
Wrong again. There's a couple of obvious ways of finding evidence of this. One is that you make the same application under different names, only varying the one characteristic that you think is being discriminated against. That's strong evidence if the applications are treated differently.
Nope, not wrong, you don't know what you're talking about.
Why? Because you don't know how statistics work. Doing that once or twice doesn't show anything, you have to do it enough to have a pattern without a large margin of error.
The second, where the is a larger company that has a significant number of people in similar roles, is simply to loon at the demographics of who is employed, and compare with applications.
Lord you are an idiot... People offered jobs does not and SHOULD not match the demographics of the applications... Just because 25% of the people who apply are old, or black, or anything else doesn't mean that 25% should be hired. They might not be qualified.
Again, this established law (depending on jurisdiction) and has been successfully actioned on.
Yes, because people are idiots, juries are idiots, and idiots work at such companies.
Lots of other people get away with it just fine, because the whole concept is stupid and unenforceable against people who know how to cover their tracks.
You however, are a complete idiot, so carry about your day.
Make jokes all you like... there is a slice of truth to it or you wouldn't be upset about it...