Maybe they will throw a couple hundred millions at wine, make their own distro and then offer services around it? I doubt they will do that soon, since that would hurt their bottom line for the moment. But as soon as the other business model promises more profit they could be able to make the switch if they are prepared. As far as I understand they are getting ready.
So maybe it is not time to dump your MS stock just yet.
Like with the Xbox they would enter a competitive market. Maybe then they will make better products. At least they should be able to, considering all the brain power they are sucking up every year.
Even if you only buy Intel, because the competition finally woke up Intel and made them throw out their horrible netburst design. Companies that don't have any competition deliver mediocre products at best. Look at Microsoft. If Intel didn't have AMD on their tail we would still be stuck with the shiny new 5 Ghz Pentium 4 coming out in 2008 with a fraction of the computing power per cycle compared to the current P4 design (every desktop design since the P3 had less bang for every single cycle, but Intel made up for it by clocking them up so high that the new processor was faster overall).
The Pentium M OTOH has a very good design. Thanks to that Intel still dominates the portable market. Maybe they can revive their strength on the desktop side as well now.
One of the main problems is that in a stable environment democracies tend to abide more and more to invluential special interest groups. Germany is a very young democracy compared to the US. In terms of democracy you are the old world.
The EU is no democracy at all and is much faster in bowing to special interest groups. Example: They wanted to introduce software patents. Only the (democratic) EU parliament (which under current rules does not have much power at all compared to the EU commission) was able to stop that for some time now. Best example for EU stupidity: EU data retention
Please, let the patent cold war already erupt into a huge patent suing everyone vs. everyone. I know you wouldn't like to see the lawyers take a couple billions away on this, but that will be the necessary sacrifice to make everybody see how bad trivial/software patents really are.
As soon as Sun sues Microsoft, Microsoft sues IBM and IBM sues them all I will sit back and have some popcorn (btw. do lawyers companies have stock options?).
Skype with webcam is nice. Many people use it. But Linux does not have the video version of skype. Also I don't know which cameras work with Linux and which ones don't.
While I also think hardware support in Linux tends to be much better than in Windows (because Linux has all the drivers built in) there are still many, many devices out there that Linux does not work with at all. On Windows the device manufacturer gives you a crappy driver that will crash your system, but at least as long as the system is running the device works.
It would be very nice to have comprehensive, up to date lists of devices that work with Linux and how to make them work. Everytime I want to make a purchase I need to do extensive research on which one I can buy. And I need to be very precise. One time I bought a wlan card only to find out when I brought it home that it was the wrong revision.
I am sure that comment got already posted but what the heck: If you want to work in Windows and Linux just use Openoffice. Complaining about the lacking MS Office support is rediculous for a number of reasons. First one would be that MS intentionally makes it hard, because it helps to sustain their monopolies.
As soon as MSN search produces somewhat usefull results (and now they do) they will have at least 50% market share among systems that have MSN search on default.
Personal estimate, wait for 2 years and see for yourself.
Competition drives innovation. One of the reasons why I think KDE vs. GNOME is a great idea.
On a sidenote, what the end user sees is not Linux, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Fedora or Windows for that matter. They see Luna, KDE and Gnome. I heard KDE even runs on Windows. So when I tell someone I can install a new system on their computer I tell them it is either KDE or Gnome.
My dad said that they tried for years to make it work at the company he worked for (very large) and, after spending a lot of money, they, and their competition, came to the conclusion that it simply does not work.
It would mean a data line to every household. That is a lot of potential, so everybody has been trying to tap it for years. None has succeded. A small company in Austria is selling it on a trial bases, but they have been sued by the state, because their systems cause interference with police and firerescue radio systems.
Now I know that Linus wants to leave the stability issue up to the distributions. But I fear they neither have the infrastructure nor the manpower for a big, stable kernel.
I think the reason for this is that it always took way too long for a stable release and Linus got sick of the wait, anticipation and pressure. But instead of mergin stable and unstable developement maybe he should just overhaul unstable developement to focus on a faster release cycle into stable. Maybe a new stable version every 6 month.
And a third, rock solid kernel that only gets security issues fixed. So for each 6 month period there would be the current developement kernel, the current stable (but bugs still get fixed) kernel and all the others would still be maintained for security issues. So there would always be a third "current" kernel that went through 6 month of bug fixing in the last cycle.
For now, I certainly do take it for granted that an os comes with an internet browser. So the browser is part of the os. Microsoft has a monopoly in the desktop os market.
If they use a monopoly to push their own services they exploit that monopoly. So everyone has to look very carefully at what Microsoft is doing. Especially when they "bundle" things with their desktop os.
I expect the marketshare of MSN search to make huge gains from being set as default. Same thing as the browser. Why would download a better browser (if they even know how to) if one is installed? Why would anyone change the default search engine (if they even know how to) if the current one works? The worse product grows only in market share, because a monopoly was abused. That is the very reason why it is not allowed.
Fortunately for you I can see into the future. I see 80% marketshare for MSN search and 20% for Google in 2011. I also see a lawsuit coming up. But it will go on beyond 2050 and I can't see that far.
The main problem is the desktop os monopoly that MS exploits to gain in other markets. Simple as that. And, according to the US govt. illegal. For very good reasons IMHO.
Oceans are pretty large and cameras don't look all that far (especially when it gets very dark, like in deep sea). How many giant squid do you think are there? Are they all hungry to become celebrities?
Why are so many still so STUPID??? (Like the Safari/Google post moderated +5 Insightful. Does Apple have a monopoly? So many other crap was moderated up as well. Slashdot really had gone down.)
Microsoft has a monopoly on the OS. Which seems to be fine with the govt as long as they don't exploit it to push other products. Microsoft was nailed for exactly that in the browser war. The latest case in the European Union is that Microsoft includes a streaming media client (Media Player) in their monolopy os that only works with their streaming media server. So they leverage their desktop os monopoly to sell server system. The case even gets a lot of coverage on Slashdot. Latest story here
So now they default to MSN search in their monopoly desktop os.
Please don't think in terms of black and white. The US is dangerous. Every single death in Iraq is horrible. But put into perspective the view changes. Stalin is responsible for about 20 million dead people. That is about a hundred times more than 30000. Congo sees about 1000 people die every single day: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/congo/ 2005/0107volatile.htm
To checks and balances: Bush needed more than a year to bring about this war. Time is the key here. The US will not be able to wage more than one major war every four years I think. The thing I am a little orried about is nukes. But countries like Pakistan or North Korea are much more likely to drop one or "loose" one to terrorists for now. Pakistan is a very unstable islamic state that already exported nuke know how to North Korea.
Free as in shades of grey instead of black or white. The difference is that many Americans think their country is perfect and every other country should follow its lead. And when the US armed forces bomb another country to submit to its whims it is to the best of that country, because by that logic it can only get better. Pretty dangerous ideas, especially if you think in terms of black or white. That is the reason why many people on earth think the US is the most dangerous country.
Which is WRONG!
Checks are pretty much still in place. Free press helps a lot. Even though Iraq was a bad idea the number of people that suffer is much lower than in other places. Take for example Chechnya, or places in Africa.
Gosh, are you getting paid by the industry? Look it up yourself. And for fear mongering, I am from Germany and I am still awstruck how the f... 9/11 seems to get to almost all of America. It changed world history simply because it happened to the US. If it would have happened to ANY other country it would have been big news - for a month. Until the next story came up.
Terror has been with the rest of the world for some time. But because the US are the largest economy and the biggest military power (the US military budget is more than what the rest of the world spends on weapons) and for some reason Americans seem much more upset by it than any other population terror went from somewhere at the bottom to the top of the agenda in international relations on 9/11 and has staid there ever since. So by stating that terror attacks are on the balance sheet I just made a simple oberservation. I certainly didn't put it there.
we have open source drivers for Nvidia as well as Ati graphic adapters. Just not for 3D. Maybe someone that actually does develope for X11 should comment here. AFAIK Nvidia and Ati release the specs for their cards to work in 2D mode on a regular basis. So everything except 3D games (many of which are prorpietary themselves) works. I also heard that Ati stopped supplying their specs for 2D for their latest offerings.
Personally I can understand both sides. AFAIK Ati and Nvidia are in a patent cold war. As soon as one of them opens their drivers the other will sue big time. Unfortunately.
I purchased an Ati Radeon 9200 for which the open source 3D drivers work very well. Ati once released the specs for their DirectX 8 line of adapters and the community quickly built drivers. Those are Radeon 8500 and the likes ( http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon ). Check I get about 2250 fps on Glxgears. I can play Quake3 and UT and they look very good. I should try the Ati closed source drivers for comparison, but have been too lazy, since my setup works very well.
I chose the Radeon 9200 based on the fact that open source drivers exist. And even though I do understand the free software movement and I think they are right I still use closed source for reasons of convenience (shame on me). The real reason why I went with open source is because they integrate so well with my Debian system. It just works. Easier than jumping through the hoops of installing all the closed source stuff. If you ever administered a Debian system you know what I am talking about when I say it's so easy when I can just pull it out of the official repository (which I often can, because it is so huge).
Unfortunately nuclear energy might be the only viable short term solution. There is no way China, Europe or the US will cut their energy consumption to reasonable levels (reasonable as in all the world's population could use the same lever per capita and the world would not melt or blow to pieces like Melmac when they all turned on their hair dryers at the same time). Sustainable energy sources like wind and water energy can't cover the demand. And coal and oil just add too much CO2 to the atmosphere. So we are left with no choice (until we get fusion, cold or hot) but fission.
But please don't get all excited about it. There seem to be accidents in Japanese plants on a regular basis. Pebble reactors are fine, until you count in terrorism. Uranium is also a limited resource. We produce waste. And even if we refurbish the waste (and take care of the last two points) it still produces waste and it will still run out at some point.
There are new studies coming out every month that either radiation from power plants does or does not make a difference in cancer rates. Until we have that figured out we are still in doubt about that one. So I count that as not being very excited about the prospect of nuclear energy.
But you guys are right about one thing. People need to realize that nuclear energy IS the least worse choice out there now. I come from Germany and it is not possible to build power plants here for political reasons. Nobody will! This is rediculous.
Not a big deal you think, they should control their own servers? That's the first thing I thought would come from Slashdot. But actually that is a pretty big deal right there. If ISPs start to regulate email in their interes using content filters where do we get? How about they sell this "feature" to other companies for marketing purposes. For better damage control in cases like this one. The more we rely on that kind of communication the more sensetive should we be about sensorship. How about your ISP filters what you comment on Slashdot?
(I hope this comment gets through my ISP's filter)
I am only in my 20s and, as you realize, pretty apathetic myself. I call that apathatic without the a. Am I better off than the ignorant masses? At least they don't know they are sheep. Count yourself lucky to be among them.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they will throw a couple hundred millions at wine, make their own distro and then offer services around it? I doubt they will do that soon, since that would hurt their bottom line for the moment. But as soon as the other business model promises more profit they could be able to make the switch if they are prepared. As far as I understand they are getting ready.
So maybe it is not time to dump your MS stock just yet.
Like with the Xbox they would enter a competitive market. Maybe then they will make better products. At least they should be able to, considering all the brain power they are sucking up every year.
Even if you only buy Intel, because the competition finally woke up Intel and made them throw out their horrible netburst design. Companies that don't have any competition deliver mediocre products at best. Look at Microsoft. If Intel didn't have AMD on their tail we would still be stuck with the shiny new 5 Ghz Pentium 4 coming out in 2008 with a fraction of the computing power per cycle compared to the current P4 design (every desktop design since the P3 had less bang for every single cycle, but Intel made up for it by clocking them up so high that the new processor was faster overall).
The Pentium M OTOH has a very good design. Thanks to that Intel still dominates the portable market. Maybe they can revive their strength on the desktop side as well now.
We are not that much better, sorry!
One of the main problems is that in a stable environment democracies tend to abide more and more to invluential special interest groups. Germany is a very young democracy compared to the US. In terms of democracy you are the old world.
The EU is no democracy at all and is much faster in bowing to special interest groups. Example: They wanted to introduce software patents. Only the (democratic) EU parliament (which under current rules does not have much power at all compared to the EU commission) was able to stop that for some time now. Best example for EU stupidity: EU data retention
Windows equals lost productivity all right, but it doesn't have to be a pirated copy for it to do so.
Please, let the patent cold war already erupt into a huge patent suing everyone vs. everyone. I know you wouldn't like to see the lawyers take a couple billions away on this, but that will be the necessary sacrifice to make everybody see how bad trivial/software patents really are.
As soon as Sun sues Microsoft, Microsoft sues IBM and IBM sues them all I will sit back and have some popcorn (btw. do lawyers companies have stock options?).
Skype with webcam is nice. Many people use it. But Linux does not have the video version of skype. Also I don't know which cameras work with Linux and which ones don't.
While I also think hardware support in Linux tends to be much better than in Windows (because Linux has all the drivers built in) there are still many, many devices out there that Linux does not work with at all. On Windows the device manufacturer gives you a crappy driver that will crash your system, but at least as long as the system is running the device works.
It would be very nice to have comprehensive, up to date lists of devices that work with Linux and how to make them work. Everytime I want to make a purchase I need to do extensive research on which one I can buy. And I need to be very precise. One time I bought a wlan card only to find out when I brought it home that it was the wrong revision.
I am sure that comment got already posted but what the heck: If you want to work in Windows and Linux just use Openoffice. Complaining about the lacking MS Office support is rediculous for a number of reasons. First one would be that MS intentionally makes it hard, because it helps to sustain their monopolies.
As soon as MSN search produces somewhat usefull results (and now they do) they will have at least 50% market share among systems that have MSN search on default.
Personal estimate, wait for 2 years and see for yourself.
Competition drives innovation. One of the reasons why I think KDE vs. GNOME is a great idea.
On a sidenote, what the end user sees is not Linux, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Fedora or Windows for that matter. They see Luna, KDE and Gnome.
I heard KDE even runs on Windows. So when I tell someone I can install a new system on their computer I tell them it is either KDE or Gnome.
My dad said that they tried for years to make it work at the company he worked for (very large) and, after spending a lot of money, they, and their competition, came to the conclusion that it simply does not work.
It would mean a data line to every household. That is a lot of potential, so everybody has been trying to tap it for years. None has succeded. A small company in Austria is selling it on a trial bases, but they have been sued by the state, because their systems cause interference with police and firerescue radio systems.
Now I know that Linus wants to leave the stability issue up to the distributions. But I fear they neither have the infrastructure nor the manpower for a big, stable kernel.
I think the reason for this is that it always took way too long for a stable release and Linus got sick of the wait, anticipation and pressure. But instead of mergin stable and unstable developement maybe he should just overhaul unstable developement to focus on a faster release cycle into stable. Maybe a new stable version every 6 month.
And a third, rock solid kernel that only gets security issues fixed. So for each 6 month period there would be the current developement kernel, the current stable (but bugs still get fixed) kernel and all the others would still be maintained for security issues. So there would always be a third "current" kernel that went through 6 month of bug fixing in the last cycle.
Just a thought. Fill in better ideas please.
You cannot produce a baby in one month by impregnating nine women.
That's what they said when MS came out with their crappy IE browser. You are too young to have seen the browser wars, have you?
For now, I certainly do take it for granted that an os comes with an internet browser. So the browser is part of the os. Microsoft has a monopoly in the desktop os market.
If they use a monopoly to push their own services they exploit that monopoly. So everyone has to look very carefully at what Microsoft is doing. Especially when they "bundle" things with their desktop os.
I expect the marketshare of MSN search to make huge gains from being set as default. Same thing as the browser. Why would download a better browser (if they even know how to) if one is installed? Why would anyone change the default search engine (if they even know how to) if the current one works? The worse product grows only in market share, because a monopoly was abused. That is the very reason why it is not allowed.
Fortunately for you I can see into the future. I see 80% marketshare for MSN search and 20% for Google in 2011. I also see a lawsuit coming up. But it will go on beyond 2050 and I can't see that far.
The main problem is the desktop os monopoly that MS exploits to gain in other markets. Simple as that. And, according to the US govt. illegal. For very good reasons IMHO.
Is that so hard to understand?
Thank you for that one.
Very good laugh!
Oceans are pretty large and cameras don't look all that far (especially when it gets very dark, like in deep sea). How many giant squid do you think are there? Are they all hungry to become celebrities?
I bet they won't see jack.
Microsoft has a monopoly on the OS. Which seems to be fine with the govt as long as they don't exploit it to push other products. Microsoft was nailed for exactly that in the browser war. The latest case in the European Union is that Microsoft includes a streaming media client (Media Player) in their monolopy os that only works with their streaming media server. So they leverage their desktop os monopoly to sell server system. The case even gets a lot of coverage on Slashdot. Latest story here
So now they default to MSN search in their monopoly desktop os.
What is so difficult to understand here???
...and (put in your favourite emulator, I use Vmware) for everything else on Windows.
What has changed?
Please don't think in terms of black and white. The US is dangerous. Every single death in Iraq is horrible. But put into perspective the view changes. Stalin is responsible for about 20 million dead people. That is about a hundred times more than 30000. Congo sees about 1000 people die every single day:/ 2005/0107volatile.htm
1 28869
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/congo
To checks and balances: Bush needed more than a year to bring about this war. Time is the key here. The US will not be able to wage more than one major war every four years I think. The thing I am a little orried about is nukes. But countries like Pakistan or North Korea are much more likely to drop one or "loose" one to terrorists for now. Pakistan is a very unstable islamic state that already exported nuke know how to North Korea.
I am German and very critical of US foreign policy. I just like to put things in perspective:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183097&cid=15
Free as in shades of grey instead of black or white. The difference is that many Americans think their country is perfect and every other country should follow its lead. And when the US armed forces bomb another country to submit to its whims it is to the best of that country, because by that logic it can only get better. Pretty dangerous ideas, especially if you think in terms of black or white. That is the reason why many people on earth think the US is the most dangerous country.
Which is WRONG!
Checks are pretty much still in place. Free press helps a lot. Even though Iraq was a bad idea the number of people that suffer is much lower than in other places. Take for example Chechnya, or places in Africa.
Still, Bush's rethoric is pretty scary at times.
Gosh, are you getting paid by the industry? Look it up yourself. And for fear mongering, I am from Germany and I am still awstruck how the f... 9/11 seems to get to almost all of America. It changed world history simply because it happened to the US. If it would have happened to ANY other country it would have been big news - for a month. Until the next story came up.
Terror has been with the rest of the world for some time. But because the US are the largest economy and the biggest military power (the US military budget is more than what the rest of the world spends on weapons) and for some reason Americans seem much more upset by it than any other population terror went from somewhere at the bottom to the top of the agenda in international relations on 9/11 and has staid there ever since. So by stating that terror attacks are on the balance sheet I just made a simple oberservation. I certainly didn't put it there.
we have open source drivers for Nvidia as well as Ati graphic adapters. Just not for 3D. Maybe someone that actually does develope for X11 should comment here. AFAIK Nvidia and Ati release the specs for their cards to work in 2D mode on a regular basis. So everything except 3D games (many of which are prorpietary themselves) works. I also heard that Ati stopped supplying their specs for 2D for their latest offerings.
Personally I can understand both sides. AFAIK Ati and Nvidia are in a patent cold war. As soon as one of them opens their drivers the other will sue big time. Unfortunately.
I purchased an Ati Radeon 9200 for which the open source 3D drivers work very well. Ati once released the specs for their DirectX 8 line of adapters and the community quickly built drivers. Those are Radeon 8500 and the likes ( http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon ). Check I get about 2250 fps on Glxgears. I can play Quake3 and UT and they look very good. I should try the Ati closed source drivers for comparison, but have been too lazy, since my setup works very well.
I chose the Radeon 9200 based on the fact that open source drivers exist. And even though I do understand the free software movement and I think they are right I still use closed source for reasons of convenience (shame on me). The real reason why I went with open source is because they integrate so well with my Debian system. It just works. Easier than jumping through the hoops of installing all the closed source stuff. If you ever administered a Debian system you know what I am talking about when I say it's so easy when I can just pull it out of the official repository (which I often can, because it is so huge).
Unfortunately nuclear energy might be the only viable short term solution. There is no way China, Europe or the US will cut their energy consumption to reasonable levels (reasonable as in all the world's population could use the same lever per capita and the world would not melt or blow to pieces like Melmac when they all turned on their hair dryers at the same time). Sustainable energy sources like wind and water energy can't cover the demand. And coal and oil just add too much CO2 to the atmosphere. So we are left with no choice (until we get fusion, cold or hot) but fission.
But please don't get all excited about it. There seem to be accidents in Japanese plants on a regular basis. Pebble reactors are fine, until you count in terrorism. Uranium is also a limited resource. We produce waste. And even if we refurbish the waste (and take care of the last two points) it still produces waste and it will still run out at some point.
There are new studies coming out every month that either radiation from power plants does or does not make a difference in cancer rates. Until we have that figured out we are still in doubt about that one. So I count that as not being very excited about the prospect of nuclear energy.
But you guys are right about one thing. People need to realize that nuclear energy IS the least worse choice out there now. I come from Germany and it is not possible to build power plants here for political reasons. Nobody will! This is rediculous.
Not a big deal you think, they should control their own servers? That's the first thing I thought would come from Slashdot. But actually that is a pretty big deal right there. If ISPs start to regulate email in their interes using content filters where do we get? How about they sell this "feature" to other companies for marketing purposes. For better damage control in cases like this one. The more we rely on that kind of communication the more sensetive should we be about sensorship. How about your ISP filters what you comment on Slashdot?
(I hope this comment gets through my ISP's filter)
I am only in my 20s and, as you realize, pretty apathetic myself. I call that apathatic without the a. Am I better off than the ignorant masses? At least they don't know they are sheep. Count yourself lucky to be among them.