Those geeks that blow away the OS that comes with the machine and build their own systems from scratch are much less likely to be interested in their business news stories
Maybe, but an awful lot of them do follow business news. I wouldn't hazard a guess about the percentage vs the general population.
More likely, the 3% are the ones that mistakenly clicked a poorly identified link to a business news story and accidentally got counted.
Don't forget that a lot of them do what I do: spoof the browser and machine IDs in order to be able to use those brain-dead websites that refuse to function if you aren't using the browser/machine that the website designers think you should use.
So I get counted as Internet Explorer running Windows 7, even though neither of those things are true.
Not even close. Windows 8 was certainly hostile -- even more hostile than Windows 10.
However, the history of computers encompasses an awful lot of operating systems that were worse than anything Microsoft has produced. Without even trying to hard, I can come up a half dozen mainframe OSes from the 60s and 70s that make any Windows OS look like heaven in comparison.
I have a couple of laptops, but my primary one is a Dell Inspiron I bought a couple of years ago. I'm not home right now, so I can't tell you the exact model. But it doesn't much matter, my experience has been the same with pretty much all the laptops I've used over the years.
However, I don't use Ubuntu. I never could get that distro to work right. I just use straight Debian.
I *might* believe you've got working controls, reliable suspend/hibernate/resume and all the Laptop bells and whistles.
Well, gee, how generous of you. You know, I haven't insinuated you're a liar. It would sure be nice if you could extend the same courtesy, otherwise there's no point in having a conversation at all.
But anyway, the software compatibility issues, absence of groupware and commercial VPN issues are invariant.
Remember two important things that I said: it does everything that I need it to do, and I acknowledge that Linux isn't the right choice for everybody.
That said, software compatibility has never been an issue for me. I can exchange documents with Office users without a problem, my groupware needs are well met, I have zero problems with sharing calendars with my phone and Outlook, and I couldn't care less about commercial VPNs. I do use a VPN, but it's OpenSSH and serves my needs quite well (it even works with Windows machines).
So I find it very hard to believe that Linux is a better tool for anyone on the desktop, unless they have specific needs like the ones I describe.
Just because you don't believe it doesn't mean it isn't true. I literally don't have a single one of the problems you describe. It just works for me, without hassle.
I wasn't saying (and I don't believe) that they're scammers*. I think that they designed a product for a market that only existed in their imaginations.
* The part the could be considered scammy was the internet connectivity, which I believe only existed in order to be able to get funding from SV. Nobody would have given them big investment money if what they made was a juicer. An Internet-connected device, however, that's a different story, so they made it internet connected even though doing so added literally no value to the product.
Honestly, the machine they made was a case study in how not to design a consumer machine. It was seriously over-engineered and therefore overpriced all by itself.
Absolutely true. I have no data beyond my own experience. (And truthfully, my own experience is the only thing that matters to me on this count.) But I do know, even if I'm in the minority, that I'm not the only one who has noticed this.
It irritates me because I remember when it wasn't true and I long for a search engine that is as good as Google's used to be. But, as near as I can tell, it doesn't exist.
This has Linux rather consistently around half as popular as Mac, suggesting that for every two people you know with Macs, there's a third running Linux on the desktop.
This actually correlates reasonably well with what I observe in my area. Almost everyone is running Windows of one flavor or another (about 50/50 between Win 7 and Win 10), and of those that don't, there are about twice as many Mac users as Linux.
I'll bet there's a great deal of regional variation in these sorts of things, though.
Personally? Because it's the OS that works the best for me overall. Most reliable, and easiest to make it do the things I want it to do. I literally have no reason not to run it on bare metal.
So whatever, Windows works great for me. It was crap 20 years ago, and on the server it's been lousy, but on the desktop? Linux never cut it for me.
Fair enough. I readily concede that Linux is not the best solution for everybody. Will you concede that it is the best solution for some?
from reliable market analytics firm Net Applications
I have no reason to doubt the stats, but when someone feels the need to insert the qualifier "reliable" like this for their own source, it immediately makes me question the reliability of the source.
I guess it's a variation of the rule of thumb that you should never trust anyone who says "trust me".
That's Apple's thing, being creative hippie acid taking hackers.
Yeah, that stopped being Apple's thing back around when the first Mac was introduced. It's certainly part of their carefully crafted marketing image, though.
Yes, I agree with most of this. I have a little quibble, though...
If there's a +1 button on the bottom of the page, then you're getting a real content quality signal. Not everyone who likes the content will click, but no one who hates it will click.
If the goal is to find the highest quality content, the +1 button seems dubious. It's not measuring quality, it's measuring popularity. And it's a poor measure of popularity at that because of the heavy selection bias involved (most people aren't going to click it no matter how they feel about it.)
In other words, it's not really telling you much more than tracking who clicks on what links tells you. That this stuff figures so much in search rankings at all is probably part of why Google's search results have been getting worse.
In fairness, there was one entity complaining about stagnation: Microsoft.
Microsoft was making a lot of noise about how awful it is that people take their time about moving to new Windows versions (obviously, those people weren't worried about stagnation!). Windows 10 was Microsoft's way of fixing that problem: force everyone.
It's really not that simple at all. What you say would be more true if it were a private company, but it's not and so different rules apply. Brin and Page absolutely have more power than anyone else, but they don't have absolute power. Even taking into account their stock holdings, the board still has more authority than they do. Exerting that authority against B&Ps wishes would cause a great deal of turmoil, but things like that have happened before in public companies situated similarly.
It's a question of where the buck stops, and the buck stops at the board.
That not how it would work. You don't find pages not using the +1 button and punish them specifically. Instead, you reward the pages that do use the +1 button.
The end result is exactly the same, but the latter is easier to implement.
I never liked that phrase because of its obvious untruth -- might gets you your way, might makes victory, but being victorious and getting your way does not imply that you're right.
I prefer the redefinition of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.
Most of my friends use Window 10 (some computer literate, some not).
For the past couple of updates, when they were released, about half of them had showstopper issues.
There's a selection bias, of course -- my friends are probably not representative of the entire population, but a 50% failure rate in that group makes me suspect that the overall failure rate is rather higher than a small percentage.
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I don't understand the point you're trying to make, unless it's that eating a piece of taffy is putting your life at risk.
Those geeks that blow away the OS that comes with the machine and build their own systems from scratch are much less likely to be interested in their business news stories
Maybe, but an awful lot of them do follow business news. I wouldn't hazard a guess about the percentage vs the general population.
More likely, the 3% are the ones that mistakenly clicked a poorly identified link to a business news story and accidentally got counted.
Don't forget that a lot of them do what I do: spoof the browser and machine IDs in order to be able to use those brain-dead websites that refuse to function if you aren't using the browser/machine that the website designers think you should use.
So I get counted as Internet Explorer running Windows 7, even though neither of those things are true.
Not even close. Windows 8 was certainly hostile -- even more hostile than Windows 10.
However, the history of computers encompasses an awful lot of operating systems that were worse than anything Microsoft has produced. Without even trying to hard, I can come up a half dozen mainframe OSes from the 60s and 70s that make any Windows OS look like heaven in comparison.
Be fair. No /. commenter is a "normal person".
What make/model/revision of laptop are you using?
I have a couple of laptops, but my primary one is a Dell Inspiron I bought a couple of years ago. I'm not home right now, so I can't tell you the exact model. But it doesn't much matter, my experience has been the same with pretty much all the laptops I've used over the years.
However, I don't use Ubuntu. I never could get that distro to work right. I just use straight Debian.
I *might* believe you've got working controls, reliable suspend/hibernate/resume and all the Laptop bells and whistles.
Well, gee, how generous of you. You know, I haven't insinuated you're a liar. It would sure be nice if you could extend the same courtesy, otherwise there's no point in having a conversation at all.
But anyway, the software compatibility issues, absence of groupware and commercial VPN issues are invariant.
Remember two important things that I said: it does everything that I need it to do, and I acknowledge that Linux isn't the right choice for everybody.
That said, software compatibility has never been an issue for me. I can exchange documents with Office users without a problem, my groupware needs are well met, I have zero problems with sharing calendars with my phone and Outlook, and I couldn't care less about commercial VPNs. I do use a VPN, but it's OpenSSH and serves my needs quite well (it even works with Windows machines).
Actually, juice is highly correlated with diabetes if done to excess.
Literally everything will make you sick or kill you if done to excess. Remember the toxicologist's saying: "the dose makes the poison".
No, but I was making a distinction between "right" and "making the rules".
So I find it very hard to believe that Linux is a better tool for anyone on the desktop, unless they have specific needs like the ones I describe.
Just because you don't believe it doesn't mean it isn't true. I literally don't have a single one of the problems you describe. It just works for me, without hassle.
I wasn't saying (and I don't believe) that they're scammers*. I think that they designed a product for a market that only existed in their imaginations.
* The part the could be considered scammy was the internet connectivity, which I believe only existed in order to be able to get funding from SV. Nobody would have given them big investment money if what they made was a juicer. An Internet-connected device, however, that's a different story, so they made it internet connected even though doing so added literally no value to the product.
Honestly, the machine they made was a case study in how not to design a consumer machine. It was seriously over-engineered and therefore overpriced all by itself.
Your assessment is anecdotal and subjective.
Absolutely true. I have no data beyond my own experience. (And truthfully, my own experience is the only thing that matters to me on this count.) But I do know, even if I'm in the minority, that I'm not the only one who has noticed this.
It irritates me because I remember when it wasn't true and I long for a search engine that is as good as Google's used to be. But, as near as I can tell, it doesn't exist.
This has Linux rather consistently around half as popular as Mac, suggesting that for every two people you know with Macs, there's a third running Linux on the desktop.
This actually correlates reasonably well with what I observe in my area. Almost everyone is running Windows of one flavor or another (about 50/50 between Win 7 and Win 10), and of those that don't, there are about twice as many Mac users as Linux.
I'll bet there's a great deal of regional variation in these sorts of things, though.
why run Linux on bare metal?
Personally? Because it's the OS that works the best for me overall. Most reliable, and easiest to make it do the things I want it to do. I literally have no reason not to run it on bare metal.
So whatever, Windows works great for me. It was crap 20 years ago, and on the server it's been lousy, but on the desktop? Linux never cut it for me.
Fair enough. I readily concede that Linux is not the best solution for everybody. Will you concede that it is the best solution for some?
Sometime I am, sometimes I'm not -- and if I could tell the difference in advance, I'd always be right!
I will never say people should believe anything I say just because I say it.
from reliable market analytics firm Net Applications
I have no reason to doubt the stats, but when someone feels the need to insert the qualifier "reliable" like this for their own source, it immediately makes me question the reliability of the source.
I guess it's a variation of the rule of thumb that you should never trust anyone who says "trust me".
That's Apple's thing, being creative hippie acid taking hackers.
Yeah, that stopped being Apple's thing back around when the first Mac was introduced. It's certainly part of their carefully crafted marketing image, though.
I'm fascinated that so many people find DDG to be inferior. For me, it's night and day, with DDG putting Google to shame.
This just makes me suspect the personalization even more. Perhaps there's just something about me that makes Google's algorithms completely fail.
Yes, I agree with most of this. I have a little quibble, though...
If there's a +1 button on the bottom of the page, then you're getting a real content quality signal. Not everyone who likes the content will click, but no one who hates it will click.
If the goal is to find the highest quality content, the +1 button seems dubious. It's not measuring quality, it's measuring popularity. And it's a poor measure of popularity at that because of the heavy selection bias involved (most people aren't going to click it no matter how they feel about it.)
In other words, it's not really telling you much more than tracking who clicks on what links tells you. That this stuff figures so much in search rankings at all is probably part of why Google's search results have been getting worse.
In fairness, there was one entity complaining about stagnation: Microsoft.
Microsoft was making a lot of noise about how awful it is that people take their time about moving to new Windows versions (obviously, those people weren't worried about stagnation!). Windows 10 was Microsoft's way of fixing that problem: force everyone.
It's really not that simple at all. What you say would be more true if it were a private company, but it's not and so different rules apply. Brin and Page absolutely have more power than anyone else, but they don't have absolute power. Even taking into account their stock holdings, the board still has more authority than they do. Exerting that authority against B&Ps wishes would cause a great deal of turmoil, but things like that have happened before in public companies situated similarly.
It's a question of where the buck stops, and the buck stops at the board.
That not how it would work. You don't find pages not using the +1 button and punish them specifically. Instead, you reward the pages that do use the +1 button.
The end result is exactly the same, but the latter is easier to implement.
"Might makes right"
I never liked that phrase because of its obvious untruth -- might gets you your way, might makes victory, but being victorious and getting your way does not imply that you're right.
I prefer the redefinition of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.
It's not so much advertising as it is fair warning.
Most of my friends use Window 10 (some computer literate, some not).
For the past couple of updates, when they were released, about half of them had showstopper issues.
There's a selection bias, of course -- my friends are probably not representative of the entire population, but a 50% failure rate in that group makes me suspect that the overall failure rate is rather higher than a small percentage.
The NDA is a separate issue. I agree that in terms of the meat of the story, it doesn't matter.
Where it does matter, though, is if Google really was pulling the NDA card, that strongly implies that the gist of what the reported said is true.