Your answer to my complaint that the product does not fit my needs was that it's not the product that is wrong, it's my needs that are wrong?
First off I can't imagine any need set but very obscure ones where having modern hardware is a hinderance. But if you want to use old hardware, no my answer is the product is wrong. You shouldn't be using Windows 8 with that sort of device but rather Windows 7. Run appropriate operating systems on old hardware.
No I'm one of the people who looks at the economics. Since about 2008 the PC market has been contracting. The smartphone and tablet market has exploded since then and is still growing rapidly. The current interfaces work well for traditional usage there is no reason to invest a great deal in trying to find slightly better ways to use a keyboard and mouse. For a product that still hasn't found much marketshare, go where the growth is made sense.
That's the kind of thinking that's got me soaking in the schadenfreude from this story.
Except the story was poorly written. They aren't having a donation problem they are having a cash flow problem because their women's programming initiatives are too successful.
Well looking at Gnome's website. The problem seems to be mainly cash flow not so much a huge drop in funding. What they are saying is that OPW (outreach for women has been popular beyond expectations, they are spending more than expected and not everyone is paying their invoices).
So what you see is:
Invoicing our Advisory Board members for their annual subscription fees Invoicing our conference sponsors Following up on unpaid invoices more actively Taking on the Executive Director's administrative and fundraising duties Invoicing the OPW sponsoring organizations for the upcoming round immediately Increasing our general fundraising efforts for the Foundation and its events Some of the OPW administrative workload is being shifted from Foundation employees to the OPW organizing team
Which is basically a cash flow problem. If there were domestic this would be an easy problem to solve by borrowing against receivables. For an international charity I'm not sure what the rules are.
Let's see what that does to the present near-impossibility to buy a computer without an OS.
The near-impossibility mainly came from OEMs getting discounts for Windows if they shipped windows with every system. IMHO one of the worst aspects of the Microsoft settlement was not banning this practice as it was unquestionably monopolistic. But... you can get a computer without an OS rather easily you just go to an OEM that doesn't have a strong relationship with Microsoft. And of course with Android systems at this point you can get a Linux which is configurable fairly easily as well on many low end systems.
In any case Europe has rules about years of support. It is something like 2-4 depending on country. Microsoft easily makes it.
Well looking at Gnome's website. The problem seems to be mainly cash flow not so much a huge drop in funding. What they are saying is that OPW (outreach for women has been popular beyond expectations, they are spending more than expected and not everyone is paying their invoices).
So what you see is:
Invoicing our Advisory Board members for their annual subscription fees Invoicing our conference sponsors Following up on unpaid invoices more actively Taking on the Executive Director's administrative and fundraising duties Invoicing the OPW sponsoring organizations for the upcoming round immediately Increasing our general fundraising efforts for the Foundation and its events Some of the OPW administrative workload is being shifted from Foundation employees to the OPW organizing team
Which is basically a cash flow problem. If there were domestic this would be an easy problem to solve by borrowing against receivables. For an international charity I'm not sure what the rules are.
I agree I think Gnome did the right thing. Ultimately we need a good quality touch enabled desktop / tablet OS for Unix far more than we needed a slightly improved keyboard and mouse experience. Gnome 3 is a huge upgrade but in many ways like Windows 8 it was arguably an entirely new product with an entirely new set of tradeoffs.
Sun and RedHat were the big funders. Sun was the one with a quasi desktop vision (JavaDesktop) RedHat has been moving Gnome towards a server OS. There was a period when Nokia was rather big with Maemo. Losing Nokia and Sun is what sort of pushed Gnome towards Gnome 3. Gnome 2 didn't do and couldn't do what Nokia needed.
Take a look at Occupy Wall Street. That was a real movement with real impact. It was also systematically (and very effectively) shut down before it accomplished anything:(.
It moved the national conversation i.e. the president, congress... from budget cuts to inequality. Since then we've had a tax policy change which shifted income a bit, are talking about an increase i the minimum wage and didn't get nearly the level of food stamp cuts the Republicans were aiming for. Yeah they accomplished quite a bit.
The question is, should Microsoft, a company with a virtual monopoly, be allowed to create anti-customer profit-making arrangements?
Yes. Anti-monopoly rules don't prevent profits they prevent things like spreading to other industries. So for example it would be unreasonable to prevent them from using an OS monopoly to try and lock people into their office suite. It is perfectly reasonable for them to make excess profit from their OS (though I'd disagree that's what's going on) because that is likely to encourage more marketplace diversity.
That's all besides with the rise of Android, OSX now having more market share, Linux being viable (though rarely used), and a 1/2 dozen minor systems becoming much cheaper I'm not even sure it is reasonable to classify Microsoft as having a monopoly anymore.
Microsoft is being PAID for continued fixes to Windows XP. Should governments allow Microsoft to prevent those fixes being given to taxpayers?
Of course. What you are talking about is nationalization not anti-monopoly provisions. The government if it considers Microsoft be a critical utility could pay Microsoft share and bond holders off and nationalize it if they want Microsoft run completely in the public interest.
If having their system compromised wouldn't be that harmful then there isn't really a big problem. They will stick with XP for a few more years less and less will work and they'll migrate. They probably will get hacked and lose almost nothing.
The client OS isn't what controls data standards for applications. You want to complain about proprietary data standards then the solution is to push for things like Libre office.
Most corporation and agency made the date. Most aren't paying the punitive fine. And absolutely this is likely profitable this year for Microsoft. I think it is a good thing that the Windows XP customers who didn't upgrade when they were supposed to fund things like Windows Mobile that run at a loss.
Windows 8 isn't out of date. Most of the people unhappy haven't used it on the right hardware i.e. capacitive touchscreen laptops or desktops with a drawing tablet.
Because those people aren't willing to buy a subscription mainly. They are cheap customers mostly who don't spend much on the IT. There aren't a huge collection of people willing to spend top dollar to stay on XP.
They have already picked the number for extended support $200 / yr. And mainframes are still being sold: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/... IBM released a new Z-Series chip 2 months back.
I'm not sure why you would ever upgrade the same hardware from XP to 7. That's just being cheap. But besides that, Win 7 has a full Win XP subsystem applications which have problems with the minor changes of 7 can run in the subsystem.
As far as upgrading applications... well yes that is the norm. You upgrade: hardware, OS, applications on a regular basis and their are improvements across the board. If you don't like the direction an application is going in you migrate to a competitor.
When didn't they have new releases coming out every few years? During the time of XP, Vista came out. What happened was that netbooks created a need for lower hardware demand systems and so Microsoft extended XP's life to be competitive on lower end hardware. Otherwise XP would have been retired.
When XP came out the expectation was a 3 year life expectancy for computer and OS. That was the expectation at time of purchase. As far as only option Vista was released: January 2007.
Which is total nonsense. Under Balmer Microsofts earnings and sales exploded. http://venturebeat.files.wordp... The entire enterprise class software explosion (SQL Server, Dynamics, SharePoint...) happened under Balmer.
OpenBSD might very well have more defects. Moreover
a) the core OpenBSD code (i.e. what Theo actually fixes) is a tiny codebase compared to Microsoft something like 3 orders of magnitude smaller b) the core OpenBSD codebase changes more slowly. While both Microsoft and OpenBSD are conservative over the last quarter century Microsoft has ripped out far more of their subsystems and added newer features to them.
Theo does a terrific job. But Theo also does a much smaller job.
Microsoft sells a limited lifetime product. They have never claimed that their products are defect free forever. They have always supported the idea that a customer should move from OS version to OS version. It is not a defect of Microsoft's that you don't want to use their product in the way intended.
Slashdot Mirror
First off I can't imagine any need set but very obscure ones where having modern hardware is a hinderance. But if you want to use old hardware, no my answer is the product is wrong. You shouldn't be using Windows 8 with that sort of device but rather Windows 7. Run appropriate operating systems on old hardware.
OPW might want to fork off eventually. OTOH OPW might become a key component of creating corporate and individual interest in Gnome.
Well looking at Gnome's website. The problem seems to be mainly cash flow not so much a huge drop in funding. What they are saying is that OPW (outreach for women has been popular beyond expectations, they are spending more than expected and not everyone is paying their invoices).
So what you see is:
Invoicing our Advisory Board members for their annual subscription fees
Invoicing our conference sponsors
Following up on unpaid invoices more actively
Taking on the Executive Director's administrative and fundraising duties
Invoicing the OPW sponsoring organizations for the upcoming round immediately
Increasing our general fundraising efforts for the Foundation and its events
Some of the OPW administrative workload is being shifted from Foundation employees to the OPW organizing team
Which is basically a cash flow problem. If there were domestic this would be an easy problem to solve by borrowing against receivables. For an international charity I'm not sure what the rules are.
Sorry this was supposed to be on Gnome thread. Don't know how it ended up here.
The near-impossibility mainly came from OEMs getting discounts for Windows if they shipped windows with every system. IMHO one of the worst aspects of the Microsoft settlement was not banning this practice as it was unquestionably monopolistic. But... you can get a computer without an OS rather easily you just go to an OEM that doesn't have a strong relationship with Microsoft. And of course with Android systems at this point you can get a Linux which is configurable fairly easily as well on many low end systems.
In any case Europe has rules about years of support. It is something like 2-4 depending on country. Microsoft easily makes it.
Well looking at Gnome's website. The problem seems to be mainly cash flow not so much a huge drop in funding. What they are saying is that OPW (outreach for women has been popular beyond expectations, they are spending more than expected and not everyone is paying their invoices).
So what you see is:
Invoicing our Advisory Board members for their annual subscription fees
Invoicing our conference sponsors
Following up on unpaid invoices more actively
Taking on the Executive Director's administrative and fundraising duties
Invoicing the OPW sponsoring organizations for the upcoming round immediately
Increasing our general fundraising efforts for the Foundation and its events
Some of the OPW administrative workload is being shifted from Foundation employees to the OPW organizing team
Which is basically a cash flow problem. If there were domestic this would be an easy problem to solve by borrowing against receivables. For an international charity I'm not sure what the rules are.
You don't have to guess. Many of the big ones: http://www.macosforge.org/
@Fnord
I agree I think Gnome did the right thing. Ultimately we need a good quality touch enabled desktop / tablet OS for Unix far more than we needed a slightly improved keyboard and mouse experience. Gnome 3 is a huge upgrade but in many ways like Windows 8 it was arguably an entirely new product with an entirely new set of tradeoffs.
Sun and RedHat were the big funders. Sun was the one with a quasi desktop vision (JavaDesktop) RedHat has been moving Gnome towards a server OS. There was a period when Nokia was rather big with Maemo. Losing Nokia and Sun is what sort of pushed Gnome towards Gnome 3. Gnome 2 didn't do and couldn't do what Nokia needed.
Which is a clearly dysfunctional setup.
Upgrading to what?
It moved the national conversation i.e. the president, congress... from budget cuts to inequality. Since then we've had a tax policy change which shifted income a bit, are talking about an increase i the minimum wage and didn't get nearly the level of food stamp cuts the Republicans were aiming for. Yeah they accomplished quite a bit.
Yes. Anti-monopoly rules don't prevent profits they prevent things like spreading to other industries. So for example it would be unreasonable to prevent them from using an OS monopoly to try and lock people into their office suite. It is perfectly reasonable for them to make excess profit from their OS (though I'd disagree that's what's going on) because that is likely to encourage more marketplace diversity.
That's all besides with the rise of Android, OSX now having more market share, Linux being viable (though rarely used), and a 1/2 dozen minor systems becoming much cheaper I'm not even sure it is reasonable to classify Microsoft as having a monopoly anymore.
Of course. What you are talking about is nationalization not anti-monopoly provisions. The government if it considers Microsoft be a critical utility could pay Microsoft share and bond holders off and nationalize it if they want Microsoft run completely in the public interest.
Wow offensive and ignorant in one sentence.
If having their system compromised wouldn't be that harmful then there isn't really a big problem. They will stick with XP for a few more years less and less will work and they'll migrate. They probably will get hacked and lose almost nothing.
The client OS isn't what controls data standards for applications. You want to complain about proprietary data standards then the solution is to push for things like Libre office.
Most corporation and agency made the date. Most aren't paying the punitive fine. And absolutely this is likely profitable this year for Microsoft. I think it is a good thing that the Windows XP customers who didn't upgrade when they were supposed to fund things like Windows Mobile that run at a loss.
Windows 8 isn't out of date. Most of the people unhappy haven't used it on the right hardware i.e. capacitive touchscreen laptops or desktops with a drawing tablet.
Because those people aren't willing to buy a subscription mainly. They are cheap customers mostly who don't spend much on the IT. There aren't a huge collection of people willing to spend top dollar to stay on XP.
Bill
They have already picked the number for extended support $200 / yr. And mainframes are still being sold: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/... IBM released a new Z-Series chip 2 months back.
I'm not sure why you would ever upgrade the same hardware from XP to 7. That's just being cheap. But besides that, Win 7 has a full Win XP subsystem applications which have problems with the minor changes of 7 can run in the subsystem.
As far as upgrading applications ... well yes that is the norm. You upgrade: hardware, OS, applications on a regular basis and their are improvements across the board. If you don't like the direction an application is going in you migrate to a competitor.
When didn't they have new releases coming out every few years? During the time of XP, Vista came out. What happened was that netbooks created a need for lower hardware demand systems and so Microsoft extended XP's life to be competitive on lower end hardware. Otherwise XP would have been retired.
When XP came out the expectation was a 3 year life expectancy for computer and OS. That was the expectation at time of purchase. As far as only option Vista was released: January 2007.
Which is total nonsense. Under Balmer Microsofts earnings and sales exploded. http://venturebeat.files.wordp... The entire enterprise class software explosion (SQL Server, Dynamics, SharePoint...) happened under Balmer.
OpenBSD might very well have more defects. Moreover
a) the core OpenBSD code (i.e. what Theo actually fixes) is a tiny codebase compared to Microsoft something like 3 orders of magnitude smaller
b) the core OpenBSD codebase changes more slowly. While both Microsoft and OpenBSD are conservative over the last quarter century Microsoft has ripped out far more of their subsystems and added newer features to them.
Theo does a terrific job. But Theo also does a much smaller job.
Microsoft sells a limited lifetime product. They have never claimed that their products are defect free forever. They have always supported the idea that a customer should move from OS version to OS version. It is not a defect of Microsoft's that you don't want to use their product in the way intended.