It beat all others but Wow. It did fairly well and attracted almost 2 million subscribers. GW and Warhammer did not even get close. They are fixing it now and my guess is the next expansion will greatly improve this. They already added 2 heroics in the past few months and with higher pop realms and a flashpoint finder it will approach wow.
SWTOR is fixing many issues and has locked most of its low pop realms and added a flashpoint funder aka dungeon finder. In higher pop realms it is much better. I do not want to go back to Wow at all and think SWTOR has great potential. It is just new and half the people left because it was not as mature as WOW on opening day is silly.
You should try it again? You can get a free account where you can play up to level 15 and you will e thrown only in a high pop realm by default now. They are adding more heroics too gradually. I love it and the storyline and the companion parts so much more than Wow and pray it doesn't die.
If I have to look up a cheat sheet to do such a basic task it is a failure. You can't expect an average Joe to figure this out and learn a new way one the other one works just fine. Same reason they usually prefer XP over win 7 still just because it is familiar more than the fact it is 10 years old.
Living close the border I have seen the evils of illagal immigration when I lived in Riverside California. My exwife is from there and it is turning 3rd world. Not because I am a racist evil person who is a member of the KKK, but rather my ex worked in a school district that went 70% American to 70% hispanic in 15 short years, doubled the student population, cut fundinging by 1/3, cut all our family friends salaries, except increased one business owners' salary tremendousnly from the cheaper labor.
You can't drive past a Home Depot with 30 hispanics ready to jump in a truck for work. My ex's friend did construction and made good monay back in the 1990s and he can't compete with these people. As a result people are getting poorer and poorer each year while taxes keep going up driving employers away.
If ICE did its job and went into these home depots and busted them up, stopped trucks with 10 people on them, deported all the parents of these children you can be economic recovery would take place.
H1b1 and greencards are welcome and an important step but Arizona is the only state that had the balls to do it without fear of the hispanic vote. All the other states lost control.
I am not racist and the jobs being taken away are not ones I do normally. However, I can't go to India to look for work or some place cheaper. The employers can and do because every country but the US enforces its immigration laws and is not being pocketed by corporations who hire illegally.
Schools are flooded where 70% of the kids are not US born, have limited english, get free health care, and their parents do not pay for taxes. My ex kept getting laid off each year because of budget underruns caused by this. Her friends included former middle class workers who can't get hired as they do not speak spanish and are willing to work for less than minimium in construction. They are being shafted.
Sorry but if I spoke iwth my great American accent in London the police there have a right too to ask if I am there legally right?
I heard that sadly as I loved Austin in the 1990s. Dallas is a nice place but it sure as hell beats North Dakata! Hot there too in the summer and freaking arctic winters as it is flight from there all the way to the north pole. It is warmer in Alaska than in Bismark or Fargo believe it or not!
Still it can't be as expensive as Mountain View or San Jose?
That is especially true if you have a family. That is why many up there like to hire fresh cs grads with no experience willing to share a room in a studio.... what they do not see is they have no experience outside their b-tree algorithm assignments unlike the 35 year old with 8 years of experience. Obviously the 35 year old probably has 2 kids, a wife, and a mortgage to pay off and can't get that 4 bedroom the wife wants in Mountain View unless he makes as much as Mark Zuckerburg.
Even that office space itself is not cheap and you burn money very fast and California is one the least business friendly places in the US with lots of regulation, taxes, and attorney fees (also taxed) to keep it running. Arizona and North Dakata you can work more than 40 hours no sales tax (important if you are an amazon.com), low corporate taxes etc. Remember the investors get a cut first before yourself so your own cut covers the taxes too.
Sorry but there is no magic specialization that makes a coder better there and I do not see the point.
Gnome 3 caused me to move to Windows 7 and it was a paradise in comparison. At least I can do the very advanced task of unmaximizing a freaking Window.
ICE is under executive branch and the president gets campaign contributions from lobbiests to make sure they do not hire Americans. Mostly farming corporations who take over farms and then hire illegals to run them.
If ICE cracked down the hispanic vote would be up in arms rioting and the corporations would no longer have cheap labor.
FYI I am not racist at all but just stating the obvious as someone who used to live in Southern California and seen what happened to the state. In the old days Americans use to do construction believe it or not and got paid a middle class salary. Today you can't find any work in that field even for minimium wage. The rest of the US is not that bad but even in places like Minnosota wages 15 years ago for working in the meat processing plant averaged $30,000 a year. Today they only hire Mexicans and pay $17,000 a year for the same job while the former workers were mysteriously laid off.
ICE is not doing its job. I have no problems with h1b1 workers such as yourself as you pay taxes and provide a service no one else can do, but the economic cost is bankrupting states and hurting people trying to not starve.
Airzona is doing what other countries do. ENFORCING immigration polices. If you have an h1b1 visa or are a greencard worker you are welcome.
Now if I want to your country (probably Australia, UK, or India) and came illegally you bet my ass I would be arrested and the employer fined and deported. Why is that you can come take jobs away but I can't take yours away. Employers can use the whole globe for the best talent and yet I can't do the same with the best employer.
It is hot button issue but in a recession with millions out of work many in Arizona can't find work anymore and yet Mexicans from across the border come in and the employers get a BIG tax write off to boot! How is that fair?
Austin Texas is a hot one and so is Bismark, ND. Indianapolis is a major call center hub too for english speaking call centers.
It does not make economical sense to move to such an outrageously expensive place like northern California where you need to make $90,000 a year for a studio apartment when you are a struggling.com with limited funds who can not afford even the insurance premiums let alone employee costs.
In the old days it made sense to specialize in one area as your suppliers, inventory, and material were all nearbye which is why Michigan is home to the auto industry and nearbye Ohio made the parts and tires. Steel was one state away in Pennsylvania etc.
But with IT you do not have that issue so why bother paying $120,000 a month for a tiny floor with just 3 offices and 1200 square feet when you can tripple that in Austin or Bismark and pay your employees half or hire twice as much with the saved capital?
It is special. It means it is supported and compiled with the same settings as the rest of the distro. This means less problems and integration as all the other apps use the same flags like --gtk.
I left Linux because of gnome3. No sense sticking with gnome2 if it is not supported and will not even compile anymore as the apis and libraries move on. Mate on the other hand means it is still being updated and I am relieved. Now if it starts using gtk 3 and other things that would be welcome too and may give me the urge to at least try it again.
Hotmail's spam filtering is without a doubt the worst on the web. Obvious spam ends up in my Inbox, and legitimate mail ends up in the spam.
What's worse though is when it gets fooled into thinking that the email is part of a mailing list I've subscribed to and displays all the images automatically, making the spammer aware that my email address is valid.
No doubt you still do not have a Yahoo Email account then? I pitty the users. You will get spam by the hour and hotmail is sooo tame in comparison.
According to www.zdnet.com (Win fanboys I know) if you even go there it will automatically cancel your hotmail and give you an outlook.com address without your consent and import everything. Once in you can't go back etc.
I use gmail now and have only 1 hotmail account active (from before it was acquired by Microsoft) for certain job postings. I will be sure not to check it out with me logged in with hotmail.
She had leopard which received no security updates anymore forcing her to buy lion which then bricked her photoshop installation and suite. Again planned obscolence.
This used to be true, but changed right after Jobs returned. Apple became more about consumer devices, commodity parts, and planned obsolescence.
After Mac OS X came out (and the new non-flavored iMacs), you basically couldn't count on an Apple computer lasting more than 5 years anymore.
Well then. My move to Windows 7 a year and a half ago after I turned down the iMac was the right one. I was going to spend just $200 more, but the fact I couldn't upgrade the video card in 2.5 years (my 5 year timeline plan) and this planned obsolescence was too much. I could only get a warranty for 3 years for that reason and I am not spending $1699 for a machine that I throw away in 3 years. 5 years min!
Sorry Apple, you almost had a customer but XP/7 are supported for 10 years and it would be great if I can get this system to last that long with a decent video card for some MMOs.
I find this difficult to believe. Flashback was successful because so many users like my aunt in the previous post had older non supported versions of MacOSX. Many Mac users who came from Windows are terrified to touch their systems as they had bad experiences messing up their PCs and bought Macs so they would not have to deal with this. Just plug it in and out of sight out of mind.
Because Macs are so much more expensive than PCs their users historically did not upgrade as often. I remember Mac users in the Mac Classic days boasting how their 10 year old computers can still run Netscape and they did not have to upgrade as often.
My opinion is Apple is providing a great value upgrading their operating systems with more features, but are being greedy at the same time. They need to support Carbon and older releases more often as the high price should cover that.
You think that is bad My aunt's 2009 imac stopped running her very expensive Adobe software suite after upgrading to LION. She was fuming.
Apple did a F-U to their core market by ditching carbon. She ended up rebuying like $2300 for CS 6 and throwing out her perfecting working 2009 mac for a new one she didn't need.
She was very close to considering a PC instead after hearing XP is still supported and how Win 7 will last until 2020 if she opts for a Windows workstation instead. If Apple pulls similar things again this will be her last mac.
I am learning some web development for a site I am creating. OSX is better than Linux if you use programs like Photoshop and Dreamweaver and other graphical design software. Its screens, color calibration, and other stuff which make it a choice for creative professionals that Windows is lacking. Windows Vista finally caught up with enhanced color if you have a high end monitor for example.
You can run Word and Excel so you can communicate to Windows users with documents that are not malformed due to bugs only available to office users that LibraOffice can't often duplicate exactly.
I wish I could afford afford a mac but the ones I have used are superior to anything out there. Of course if you make server software like your post suggests you do not need these things.
I really hate that registry. It is why you can't upgrade Windows as cleanly. Infact, as an IT profession I would never recommend an upgrade. You have no idea what in hell would happen with some no name app or setting the user did 3 years earlier on his pc that would mess up Windows 7 in some way.
I always use the Easy Transfer Wizard and use thumb drives to move settings and user files and do a fresh format and installation. Apple has Windows smoked in this regard, not to mention one of XPs weaknesses is that its registry can be damaged and fragmented leading to Windows rot. A problem Mac users never have to worry about.
Remember that Windows 7 was Microsoft's most successful OS ever, in terms of adoption speed. Part of it had to do with the new features that 7 introduced, but part of it also had to do with how incredibly craptacular Vista was. Not saying that's neccesarily the case here; just saying you have to think a bit past the marketing hype.
Not really. Adoption is very lagging with Windows 7. While Windows 7 is a fine desktop OS if you are stuck in the Windows ecosystem, the sales of Windows 7 counted include XP users who downgraded. MS used this as a marketing stunt just like Vista saying it was the most sccessful OS EVER!! So it is false as you couldn't buy anything but a Windows Vista/7 license even to run XP after 2007/2008.
The real marketshare numbers show Windows 7 as a mediocre player in the hearts and minds of consumers who still prefer and use XP and wont upgrade. In non tech forums and even on slashdot you will find people clining to XP to life feeling Windows 7 is just a fancy gui and XP is the end all of all that is holy etc. Windows 7 just hit the 50% marketshare a few months ago almost 3 years after it came out! That is terrible historically. By this time in 2004 3 years after Xp/Windows 2000 came out, 80% of Windows users already migrated with 20% still using ME and 98.
MS needs to do more in its Windows product line to convince people to upgrade. I am not a Mac user but www.arstechnica.com has a great review of Mountain Lion and Apple is updating its core OS much more to entice its users to upgrade. In many ways Windows 7 is behind desktop wise. Windows 7 is just a bug fix to Vista which was a poorly implemented clone of MacOSX tiger in which Apple Spotlight was everything winfs was supposed to be. MS is still playing catchup from that and XP users noticed that and find little reason to upgrade besides a fancier gui and instant search.
For anything else you can't do statistics in any college level major which is a requirement (unless you do humanities). You also can't do chemistry or any science course because you can't interpret a graph. Infact, you can't even do a simple presentation in the workforce as a graph wont make any sense without knowing what an x,y, independent variable and so on.
But since the middle class is going down the crap shoot then say know as counting change for the cash register for minimum wage is the wave of the future.
Hmm I do remember Windows 3.1 starting to become very popular, but I used DOS for games back then. Yes I was just in 8th grade in those days but my father was installing the first Oracle ODBC systems which provided some ERP functionality. Crystal reports just came out and powerbuilder was in. There was some advancement since 10 years before that in 1982 when the XT came out and Apple IIs were just being introduced. Albeit many pcs then were 5 to 6 years old too with 386s everywhere.
There were many Windows haters too for good reason just like today who hate anything besides XP so you are right it did not grow as fast as between 1992 - 2002. But no one had DOS 1.0 systems on 8086s still in 1992. which were so prevalent that app makers had to target just that which gave employers no reason to leave their 8086 greenscreens behind. That is what is happening today. If you make any business app it must support XP and IE 6 if it is an intranet app. That is rediculous and why MS is selling copies of Win 7 as numbers in markethsare show.
Even Dos 5 was improved over IBM DOS 1.0. You could at least use more than 640k of ram with various tricks and hacks.
Slashdot Mirror
It's Billy Gates on a tricycle.
... butt naked peeing with piss droppings flying everwhere where I then scream TODA!! ... and the talent agent just sits there for the longest time.
Talent Agent: Hmmm billly gates that is an interesting act you got there? What do you guys call yourself? The aristocrats?!
Me: No. Windows 8!
Disclaimer. A reference to this very non-worksafe aristrocrats joke. Personally I find METRO much more revolting.
It beat all others but Wow. It did fairly well and attracted almost 2 million subscribers. GW and Warhammer did not even get close. They are fixing it now and my guess is the next expansion will greatly improve this. They already added 2 heroics in the past few months and with higher pop realms and a flashpoint finder it will approach wow.
I am.
SWTOR is fixing many issues and has locked most of its low pop realms and added a flashpoint funder aka dungeon finder. In higher pop realms it is much better. I do not want to go back to Wow at all and think SWTOR has great potential. It is just new and half the people left because it was not as mature as WOW on opening day is silly.
You should try it again? You can get a free account where you can play up to level 15 and you will e thrown only in a high pop realm by default now. They are adding more heroics too gradually. I love it and the storyline and the companion parts so much more than Wow and pray it doesn't die.
Wow
If I have to look up a cheat sheet to do such a basic task it is a failure. You can't expect an average Joe to figure this out and learn a new way one the other one works just fine. Same reason they usually prefer XP over win 7 still just because it is familiar more than the fact it is 10 years old.
I do not hide under an AC.
Living close the border I have seen the evils of illagal immigration when I lived in Riverside California. My exwife is from there and it is turning 3rd world. Not because I am a racist evil person who is a member of the KKK, but rather my ex worked in a school district that went 70% American to 70% hispanic in 15 short years, doubled the student population, cut fundinging by 1/3, cut all our family friends salaries, except increased one business owners' salary tremendousnly from the cheaper labor.
You can't drive past a Home Depot with 30 hispanics ready to jump in a truck for work. My ex's friend did construction and made good monay back in the 1990s and he can't compete with these people. As a result people are getting poorer and poorer each year while taxes keep going up driving employers away.
If ICE did its job and went into these home depots and busted them up, stopped trucks with 10 people on them, deported all the parents of these children you can be economic recovery would take place.
H1b1 and greencards are welcome and an important step but Arizona is the only state that had the balls to do it without fear of the hispanic vote. All the other states lost control.
I am not racist and the jobs being taken away are not ones I do normally. However, I can't go to India to look for work or some place cheaper. The employers can and do because every country but the US enforces its immigration laws and is not being pocketed by corporations who hire illegally.
Schools are flooded where 70% of the kids are not US born, have limited english, get free health care, and their parents do not pay for taxes. My ex kept getting laid off each year because of budget underruns caused by this. Her friends included former middle class workers who can't get hired as they do not speak spanish and are willing to work for less than minimium in construction. They are being shafted.
Sorry but if I spoke iwth my great American accent in London the police there have a right too to ask if I am there legally right?
I heard that sadly as I loved Austin in the 1990s. Dallas is a nice place but it sure as hell beats North Dakata! Hot there too in the summer and freaking arctic winters as it is flight from there all the way to the north pole. It is warmer in Alaska than in Bismark or Fargo believe it or not!
Still it can't be as expensive as Mountain View or San Jose?
That is especially true if you have a family. That is why many up there like to hire fresh cs grads with no experience willing to share a room in a studio. ... what they do not see is they have no experience outside their b-tree algorithm assignments unlike the 35 year old with 8 years of experience. Obviously the 35 year old probably has 2 kids, a wife, and a mortgage to pay off and can't get that 4 bedroom the wife wants in Mountain View unless he makes as much as Mark Zuckerburg.
Even that office space itself is not cheap and you burn money very fast and California is one the least business friendly places in the US with lots of regulation, taxes, and attorney fees (also taxed) to keep it running. Arizona and North Dakata you can work more than 40 hours no sales tax (important if you are an amazon.com), low corporate taxes etc. Remember the investors get a cut first before yourself so your own cut covers the taxes too.
Sorry but there is no magic specialization that makes a coder better there and I do not see the point.
Funny
Gnome 3 caused me to move to Windows 7 and it was a paradise in comparison. At least I can do the very advanced task of unmaximizing a freaking Window.
ICE is under executive branch and the president gets campaign contributions from lobbiests to make sure they do not hire Americans. Mostly farming corporations who take over farms and then hire illegals to run them.
If ICE cracked down the hispanic vote would be up in arms rioting and the corporations would no longer have cheap labor.
FYI I am not racist at all but just stating the obvious as someone who used to live in Southern California and seen what happened to the state. In the old days Americans use to do construction believe it or not and got paid a middle class salary. Today you can't find any work in that field even for minimium wage. The rest of the US is not that bad but even in places like Minnosota wages 15 years ago for working in the meat processing plant averaged $30,000 a year. Today they only hire Mexicans and pay $17,000 a year for the same job while the former workers were mysteriously laid off.
ICE is not doing its job. I have no problems with h1b1 workers such as yourself as you pay taxes and provide a service no one else can do, but the economic cost is bankrupting states and hurting people trying to not starve.
Airzona is doing what other countries do. ENFORCING immigration polices. If you have an h1b1 visa or are a greencard worker you are welcome.
Now if I want to your country (probably Australia, UK, or India) and came illegally you bet my ass I would be arrested and the employer fined and deported. Why is that you can come take jobs away but I can't take yours away. Employers can use the whole globe for the best talent and yet I can't do the same with the best employer.
It is hot button issue but in a recession with millions out of work many in Arizona can't find work anymore and yet Mexicans from across the border come in and the employers get a BIG tax write off to boot! How is that fair?
Austin Texas is a hot one and so is Bismark, ND. Indianapolis is a major call center hub too for english speaking call centers.
It does not make economical sense to move to such an outrageously expensive place like northern California where you need to make $90,000 a year for a studio apartment when you are a struggling .com with limited funds who can not afford even the insurance premiums let alone employee costs.
In the old days it made sense to specialize in one area as your suppliers, inventory, and material were all nearbye which is why Michigan is home to the auto industry and nearbye Ohio made the parts and tires. Steel was one state away in Pennsylvania etc.
But with IT you do not have that issue so why bother paying $120,000 a month for a tiny floor with just 3 offices and 1200 square feet when you can tripple that in Austin or Bismark and pay your employees half or hire twice as much with the saved capital?
It is special. It means it is supported and compiled with the same settings as the rest of the distro. This means less problems and integration as all the other apps use the same flags like --gtk.
I left Linux because of gnome3. No sense sticking with gnome2 if it is not supported and will not even compile anymore as the apis and libraries move on. Mate on the other hand means it is still being updated and I am relieved. Now if it starts using gtk 3 and other things that would be welcome too and may give me the urge to at least try it again.
Hotmail's spam filtering is without a doubt the worst on the web. Obvious spam ends up in my Inbox, and legitimate mail ends up in the spam.
What's worse though is when it gets fooled into thinking that the email is part of a mailing list I've subscribed to and displays all the images automatically, making the spammer aware that my email address is valid.
No doubt you still do not have a Yahoo Email account then? I pitty the users. You will get spam by the hour and hotmail is sooo tame in comparison.
According to www.zdnet.com (Win fanboys I know) if you even go there it will automatically cancel your hotmail and give you an outlook.com address without your consent and import everything. Once in you can't go back etc.
I use gmail now and have only 1 hotmail account active (from before it was acquired by Microsoft) for certain job postings. I will be sure not to check it out with me logged in with hotmail.
Just be forewarned!
She had leopard which received no security updates anymore forcing her to buy lion which then bricked her photoshop installation and suite. Again planned obscolence.
So it is her fault Apple decided to make her spend several thousand dollars?
She doesn't care about technicalities. The fact is Apple planned to make her expensive software not run for no reason and she is pissed.
This used to be true, but changed right after Jobs returned. Apple became more about consumer devices, commodity parts, and planned obsolescence.
After Mac OS X came out (and the new non-flavored iMacs), you basically couldn't count on an Apple computer lasting more than 5 years anymore.
Well then. My move to Windows 7 a year and a half ago after I turned down the iMac was the right one. I was going to spend just $200 more, but the fact I couldn't upgrade the video card in 2.5 years (my 5 year timeline plan) and this planned obsolescence was too much. I could only get a warranty for 3 years for that reason and I am not spending $1699 for a machine that I throw away in 3 years. 5 years min!
Sorry Apple, you almost had a customer but XP/7 are supported for 10 years and it would be great if I can get this system to last that long with a decent video card for some MMOs.
I need to see statistics on this?
I find this difficult to believe. Flashback was successful because so many users like my aunt in the previous post had older non supported versions of MacOSX. Many Mac users who came from Windows are terrified to touch their systems as they had bad experiences messing up their PCs and bought Macs so they would not have to deal with this. Just plug it in and out of sight out of mind.
Because Macs are so much more expensive than PCs their users historically did not upgrade as often. I remember Mac users in the Mac Classic days boasting how their 10 year old computers can still run Netscape and they did not have to upgrade as often.
My opinion is Apple is providing a great value upgrading their operating systems with more features, but are being greedy at the same time. They need to support Carbon and older releases more often as the high price should cover that.
You think that is bad My aunt's 2009 imac stopped running her very expensive Adobe software suite after upgrading to LION. She was fuming.
Apple did a F-U to their core market by ditching carbon. She ended up rebuying like $2300 for CS 6 and throwing out her perfecting working 2009 mac for a new one she didn't need.
She was very close to considering a PC instead after hearing XP is still supported and how Win 7 will last until 2020 if she opts for a Windows workstation instead. If Apple pulls similar things again this will be her last mac.
Apple has to be more careful and less greedy.
I am learning some web development for a site I am creating. OSX is better than Linux if you use programs like Photoshop and Dreamweaver and other graphical design software. Its screens, color calibration, and other stuff which make it a choice for creative professionals that Windows is lacking. Windows Vista finally caught up with enhanced color if you have a high end monitor for example.
You can run Word and Excel so you can communicate to Windows users with documents that are not malformed due to bugs only available to office users that LibraOffice can't often duplicate exactly.
I wish I could afford afford a mac but the ones I have used are superior to anything out there. Of course if you make server software like your post suggests you do not need these things.
I really hate that registry. It is why you can't upgrade Windows as cleanly. Infact, as an IT profession I would never recommend an upgrade. You have no idea what in hell would happen with some no name app or setting the user did 3 years earlier on his pc that would mess up Windows 7 in some way.
I always use the Easy Transfer Wizard and use thumb drives to move settings and user files and do a fresh format and installation. Apple has Windows smoked in this regard, not to mention one of XPs weaknesses is that its registry can be damaged and fragmented leading to Windows rot. A problem Mac users never have to worry about.
Remember that Windows 7 was Microsoft's most successful OS ever, in terms of adoption speed. Part of it had to do with the new features that 7 introduced, but part of it also had to do with how incredibly craptacular Vista was. Not saying that's neccesarily the case here; just saying you have to think a bit past the marketing hype.
Not really. Adoption is very lagging with Windows 7. While Windows 7 is a fine desktop OS if you are stuck in the Windows ecosystem, the sales of Windows 7 counted include XP users who downgraded. MS used this as a marketing stunt just like Vista saying it was the most sccessful OS EVER!! So it is false as you couldn't buy anything but a Windows Vista/7 license even to run XP after 2007/2008.
The real marketshare numbers show Windows 7 as a mediocre player in the hearts and minds of consumers who still prefer and use XP and wont upgrade. In non tech forums and even on slashdot you will find people clining to XP to life feeling Windows 7 is just a fancy gui and XP is the end all of all that is holy etc. Windows 7 just hit the 50% marketshare a few months ago almost 3 years after it came out! That is terrible historically. By this time in 2004 3 years after Xp/Windows 2000 came out, 80% of Windows users already migrated with 20% still using ME and 98.
MS needs to do more in its Windows product line to convince people to upgrade. I am not a Mac user but www.arstechnica.com has a great review of Mountain Lion and Apple is updating its core OS much more to entice its users to upgrade. In many ways Windows 7 is behind desktop wise. Windows 7 is just a bug fix to Vista which was a poorly implemented clone of MacOSX tiger in which Apple Spotlight was everything winfs was supposed to be. MS is still playing catchup from that and XP users noticed that and find little reason to upgrade besides a fancier gui and instant search.
For anything else you can't do statistics in any college level major which is a requirement (unless you do humanities). You also can't do chemistry or any science course because you can't interpret a graph. Infact, you can't even do a simple presentation in the workforce as a graph wont make any sense without knowing what an x,y, independent variable and so on.
But since the middle class is going down the crap shoot then say know as counting change for the cash register for minimum wage is the wave of the future.
What a stupid topic ...
Hmm I do remember Windows 3.1 starting to become very popular, but I used DOS for games back then. Yes I was just in 8th grade in those days but my father was installing the first Oracle ODBC systems which provided some ERP functionality. Crystal reports just came out and powerbuilder was in. There was some advancement since 10 years before that in 1982 when the XT came out and Apple IIs were just being introduced. Albeit many pcs then were 5 to 6 years old too with 386s everywhere.
There were many Windows haters too for good reason just like today who hate anything besides XP so you are right it did not grow as fast as between 1992 - 2002. But no one had DOS 1.0 systems on 8086s still in 1992. which were so prevalent that app makers had to target just that which gave employers no reason to leave their 8086 greenscreens behind. That is what is happening today. If you make any business app it must support XP and IE 6 if it is an intranet app. That is rediculous and why MS is selling copies of Win 7 as numbers in markethsare show.
Even Dos 5 was improved over IBM DOS 1.0. You could at least use more than 640k of ram with various tricks and hacks.