The bottleneck on a dynamic webserver is either network or SQL access times. It does not matter if you have the fastest web server software in assembly when it takes 1,000 ms to access a SQL query to display for a client's browser.
Static it is a different story, but who besides a small mom pop page uses simply static pages anymore? So this is why Java took off a decade ago while slashdotters scratched their head wondering why could something so slow and slugish could ever scale. It is about SQL
AT&T is capped at 2GB for $90 a month. I am being raped here but the unlimited plans are only for non smart phones. Andriods and Iphones are tired and limited to 2GB per month. So you can buy a crap phone that can't do X,Y, or Z or you can join the rest of the world, but yo are being capped while your friends who got them earlier are not.
"Microsoft paid over market value because most of that big pile of cash they are sitting on was made out side of the US and they can't bring it into the US without paying taxes on it. That is why the calls for bigger dividends are being ignored.
So the game plan is to buy some thing out side of the US that may boost the value of some thing with in the US. That way they can avoid paying taxes. There aren't that many large companies that fit the bill. Skype based in Switzerland fits the bill nicely. "
Disgusting. I thought these loonies who want a flat sales tax were nutcases and part of the tea party movement. My opinion is rapidly changing on this as millions remain unemployed and are scrapping by while these companies sit on heaps of cash thanks to our tax system. If there were no taxes for corporations you can bet the great recession would end within months and millions of jobs would flood the market like the great Mississippi River. While I feel businesses need to pay their fair share of taxes I feel it is killing our economy and generations of people begging for work flipping burgers instead.
Does anyone know how long Redhat/Fedora will keep supporting Fedora 14 with updates and security fixes?
I tried Fedora 15 with the Gnome_shell and KDE and both are not for me. I intend to stay with Fedora 14 as long as there is support before I quit Linux. I may switch to Fedora 15 and use it as a server only. I played with Scientific Linux based on RHES 6.0 but it is Fedora 11 and it does not come with the same kind of software like Joomla, books on Java and Python development, and other things that Fedora has.
The title is misleading. People are not switching because they love Oracle. I bet you the majority of customers are those who cut back on I.T. from 2007 and just tried to squeeze the existing equipments' life until 2011. This is just pent up demand as Oracle and Sun customers had 2002 era machines that need to be upgraded that are dying. So they purchase newer Oracle servers and maybe update their Java 1.3 software with a java 6 while they are at it too while the companies have cash to burn. IBM, Intel, and even Microsoft are seeing growth too mostly from existing customers updating their very old servers and desktops as well.
"I remember when I moved from PC to Mac I did the typical installation of antivirus/firewall/antispyware programs. The fact that many of these were shitty ports from PC versions should have tipped me off but I soon realized these served no purpose on my machine unlike my old XP machine "
Well prepare to be infected again. After the success of the simplistic MacDefender exploit you can bet it caught the attention of the malware writters who are already developing hundreds of trojans, virii, and worms.
Once the cat is out of the bag with a few exploits the hackers follow. I remember when Windows 2000 was herald as the most secure OS ever made. After one or two exploits it quickly raised a new breed of the current hackers. Hopefully better antivirus software will become available. Norton, McAffee, and Systemantic are very horrible regardless of OS. Maybe Apple can make a good one?
"Does Linux do anything (or at least anything more than MacOS) to protect against this type of attack?"
It doesn't as far as I am aware of which is one of the few things I do not like about Linux. There is ClamAntivus but it is just a scanner and does not offer a shield or active protection.
To be fair, as much as Cannical wants to make Ubuntu a friendly consumer OS, Linux remains a server OS where it mostly sits on servers in a computer room in a rack somewhere or run from a VM on a developers machine. MacOSX is a consumer OS run by average Joe's and artists who are not I.T. professionals mostly.
Also, most MacOSX users became users because they were lied too as MacOSX is sooo secure and will never get viruses etc. So these same people click thinking they were safe. That is more harm than good as MacOSX has no active protection unlike Windows. Windows was terrible but they at least addressing it and the tools are far ahead. All users need protection these days.
How many of you have went 80 mph once without realizing it and quickly slowed down when you found out?
Well that can now be used agaisnt you. Even if your a good driver and those few moments have absolutely nothing to do with a particular accident, you will have a lawyer making you look guilty as hell and slandering your reputation. Only can be used in court? The lawyers will have access. Bad
Not a screen. Why do you think netbooks took off so well during the recession? They are cheap... not shiny. Matte might have a preference but both the consumers and acccountants dont want to pay for it.
Today in business trends it is all about aggressive cost cutting and everything is a commodity.
It is our business if it is a corporate jet paid for by the public used for non business use. If it is his who cares.
Personally the grandposter is right to be skeptical in this age of greed,waste,and over compensation. I am very much agaisnt corporate use of jets for public companies
"A lot of the advice relates to the cost of scaling if the application takes off, with warnings about the costs then of Windows. That is a factor I had not considered. I am, because of my free Windows infrastructure, immune to the costs for development, but I will have to look at the costs for scaling. I had thought that, if I'm getting many hits, then I would also being generating sufficient revenue to pay for servers, or that I would have sufficiently proven my concept to get investor funding, and possibly switch to Mono then. IOW, that would be a problem I would like to have. The comments here have suggested that I reconsider this optimism"
I would like to say (coming from a geek turned Business Major) is that the worst possible thing that can happen to you is a double or huge increase in sales! At first that doesn't make any sense. It is agaisn't everything you know. But if you think about it, consider looking at the costs of having to pay for more resources while you go bankrupt waiting for the revenue? One question I got wrong on my finance exam was a businessman who even had the extra cash ready to document a doubling of sales and I still got it wrong because of other crazy unforseen costs and interest. An increase in sales is never linear to the costs or revenues. Profit margins get thinner and thinner. This mostly applies to Mom & Pop shops like a dry cleaners where you need to buy so much new chemicals and coat hangers that you go out of business before your customers can pay you. This would be your bandwidth and client access licenses. But this is a common mistake almost every new business owner makes without a good financial manager or accountant.
My advice is to start very frugal and tiny and make sure you have a great bank with a good negotiable line of credit so you can be prepared for such a scenario regardless as you can take money as you need it and just repay it at the end of the month. Consider hosting as well as you will not have customers at first and you can focus on marketing, selling, and developing your product rather than admining your servers. When you grow gradually start owning your own servers. I am not technical enough to answer your questions on the cloud but I do have a niche for finance and other boring things.:-)
What about unlimited seat licensing? Do they offer that? Sure they have free downloads but what use is Windows 2008 server if only 10 users can log in at a time?
I would not be surprised if Microsoft can pull the EULA and charge full amount and bankrupt you. It makes me very uncomfortable to trust them, Oracle, or any name player just starting out.
Bolony WIndows Update is much improved and better.
The reason to choose Linux as stated above is financial as Microsoft makes its money with client access licenses and you would need to go unlimited eventually if he is using copies from Technet.
Windows Server is great if you know.NET. It looks supperior to Java in many ways with less code. Windows can be easy to manage if you have an MCSE in 2008 with several years of Windows LAN experience. Just as it is with Linux.
If you are an already established company then perhaps looking into Windows vs Linux can be more objective in which is cheaper to build and maintain on the same hardware? In college I made sure I took Java even though the school turned into a Microsoft Alliance Partner just because I would not want to be in the submitters situation and locked into a particular platform ecosystem.
If I were him I would learn Php and hire someone to help him with the Java on Linux if he needs more scalability. It's still cheaper than Windows, IIS, and SQL Server with unlimted licences.
I knew someone who got laid off of a startup that used that same argument. Unlimited seat license for Windows 2k3 server, IIS, and SQL Server was over $100,000! That is a significant cost.
Startup fees are nill unless you buy a building outright and hire 4 or 5 people immediately before you obtain revenue. Then you are looking at $500,000 or more. But that $100,000 would be another 25%!
These are in American dollars mind you as I see you are british. An online company can be started for next to nothing if you use an ISP webhosting company instead and program the code yourself. $100,000 maybe peanuts yes, but not starting out. It is better to start with Linux and then migrate to Windows when you have the dough and can justify the switch.
"Reality is in the big picture, there is no difference between MS OSs and anyone else"
Try paying $100,000 plus for Windows Server, SQL Server, and IIS client access licenses. For this reason alone I am choosing Linux on my site idea. I will use a shared host at first until I gain more customers and then buy a dedicated server then 2 and then maybe my own servers in an office in a computer room etc.
You need to run your business and not admin your machines. Pay someone else. I mean $25 a month for a shared Linux host is cheap. $699 a years for people to admin and support a dedicated machine is great too!
One rule of finance in small business is to cut costs anyway possible! Second, is to project the amount of money it takes to start a business and double it and then tripple it. Watch your costs and figure out how are you going to get these customers? What about budgeting travel expenses to market and selling your product? Conventions and flying are not cheap. What about bandwidth costs? That is a big problem thanks to net neutrality.
Watch your costs and be frugally cheap. Picking Linux and Apache is very smart and makes financial sense.
"No teen/twenties or anyone else will pick OSX instead of Windows if he/she plays games. Which is exactly the target audience with bundling PC and Xbox360." I disagree
With all these win-video chipsets, non video cards(aka integratred graphics), I would say the PC gaming experience sucks now. Even World of Warcraft with its pre 2003 graphics engine needs to have all of its settings on min to run at 25 fps on a modern laptop.:-0! That is not execusable.
As a result generation Y prefers consoles now thanks to these greedy OEM's trying to save $50 on each unit. I own an Asus 6 way CPU system with a Radeon 5750 with 8 gigs of ram, but the amount of pcs games is low for it vs a console. I play World of Warcraft occasionally and use the rest of the power to run Linux via a VM inside Windows to develop internet apps for kicks.
I prefer the PC personally as I like the keyboard and mouse and raw power of a dedicated GPU mixed with the internet, but all the game makers want to focus on is the console. Can you blame them? 75% of the GPU market 2 years ago was the horrible intel G950 and to make a game that sucks on these makes angry parents and users.
These kids are not used to playing games outside of World of Warcraft on a mac/pc. Not to mention the majority of users on college are notebook users with crappy dedicated integrated graphics. Those are the ones you can take notes on in class. The higher end Macbook Pro has dedicated graphics for World of Warcraft and Half Life anyway.
For $699 you can't get a Windows notebook to play decent games anyway besides wow with blury and low distance settings all choppy.
Have any moderators been to college in the last 5 years?
I was in a minority as a pc user. All the cool students own macs as I would guess the margin is over 75% mac users. Those with pcs such as myself bought them before school and were older/middle aged students with real jobs. The 18-24 crowd is very Mac oriented.
Microsoft is in trouble as these generation Y users will eventually go into the workplace and want Macs at work and home. Corporations already are being more lenient in letting some of them use Macs instead of PCs.
If you want to try Linux, I had much better luck with Fedora on my laptop due to strange Atheros drivers that do not like the Ubuntu kernel. Fedora includes proprietary drivers as well upon request. Another strange bug I find is that flash for Ubuntu 64 will stop suddenly on sites like youtube.com, where it runs fine with Fedora. Also I get random disconnects with Ubuntu.
I have a feeling it might be due to some kernel patches that lower latency but end up hosing the connection by being too aggresive. Anyway Ubuntu is very cutting edge and would recommend SuSE or Fedora. Personally I am using Window 7 more as I used those other OSes when I hated Vista with a passion.
I like Windows 7 as a desktop over gnomeShell and Unity anyday. Windows 7 is butt ugly in virtualbox under linux. For notebooksWindows has better power managment
A few years ago Xp antivirus was also called Antivirus 2009 which clones Norton Antivirs 2009 exactly in order to confuse the users. Many users with trail anti virus software thought they were protected so no warning or prevention happened at all.
Those that knew they had unactivated copies of Norton Antivirus 2009 googled Antivirus 2009 and found what looked just like it and installed it that way. Very sleezyl. XP Antivirus did not work as popularly but was the same program under a different name.
I wonder if trailware anti virus software even stops users from running these programs today?... for removing it, the best instructions I know are simply to use a restore CD and wipe it. You can't get rid of it. Even if you use your hidden partition to restore your machine it will hide itself in a hidden part of the disk partition table and reinstall itself. Using the actual CD if you are lucky enough the OEM did is the only way to wipe this nasty program. Very sleezy indeed.
IE 9 has the most security out of box than any browser to date with full XSS protection and memory exploit protections. It is sweet. Sure Firefox has no script but it is not installed by default. Does Chrome have XSS cross site protection?
IE 9 is the first IE that doesn't suck. I am using it right now and it scrolls smoother and offers better acceleration than both Firefox or Chrome. I highly recommend Windows users upgrade even if they use other browsers as many apps use HTML embedded as IE helper objects for their guis and it is nice to have acceleration and more protection.
I still use forefpx mostly by the way and I am not a MS fanboi.
If you have a contract with Microsoft Support they are obligated to help. Individuals do not have these contracts.
Now AppleCare covers this so yes they need to provide support or turn into another IE. My parents would still use IE if it were not in the daily news for constant infections and security hazards. They chose to switch without my help.
If I were a malware writer I would take notice and then port there malware, simply because geeks on slashdot and other techno wizards said Macs never get infected. How many times have you heard that you never need anti virus products for the mac. Apple has 15% of the market now! Sure it is not 85% but the vast majority of that 85% have malware and anti virus protection. Macs have nill! Wow, I do not have to even worry if my methods will be detected because their users simply do not run any protection at all. Just release and WAM! Much easier and I could probably have a much higher rate of infection than trying to dodge security software installed with Windows.
Apple is going to be scorned like IE is now if they do address this fast
Gnome-shell is not that much better if you want to leave Ubuntu for another Linux OS. At least Unity has a minimize and maximize buttons. The developers at Gnome smirk and are proud that they took this ability away and used that argument on why its better not to have that option at all??
Both desktops seem to be built on a premise that people only run one app at a time in a multi user and multi tasking OS so lets do this because WebOS and Android all do it with the 3 inch screens. Lets pretend people will use their thumbs to move. ok... done gripping.
All the usability is done. MacOSX and Windows maximize it. Sun donated large amounts of R&D to Gnome which is why it has a mac like interface with easily accessible components.
I have seen Unity at my sons school which uses Dell 9 mini netbooks running Ubuntu and I feel Unity is perfect running 4 or 5 apps that kids can find. But not for normal users with a bigger screen. Dragging windows instead of clicking is hard if you have a trackpad laptop with big hands. I do not like it. My hope is gnome shell 3.1 will have ways to stack and access running programs in 3d or a simple bottom bar like Windows/MacOSX.
Slashdot Mirror
The bottleneck on a dynamic webserver is either network or SQL access times. It does not matter if you have the fastest web server software in assembly when it takes 1,000 ms to access a SQL query to display for a client's browser.
Static it is a different story, but who besides a small mom pop page uses simply static pages anymore? So this is why Java took off a decade ago while slashdotters scratched their head wondering why could something so slow and slugish could ever scale. It is about SQL
AT&T is capped at 2GB for $90 a month. I am being raped here but the unlimited plans are only for non smart phones. Andriods and Iphones are tired and limited to 2GB per month. So you can buy a crap phone that can't do X,Y, or Z or you can join the rest of the world, but yo are being capped while your friends who got them earlier are not.
"Microsoft paid over market value because most of that big pile of cash they are sitting on was made out side of the US and they can't bring it into the US without paying taxes on it. That is why the calls for bigger dividends are being ignored.
So the game plan is to buy some thing out side of the US that may boost the value of some thing with in the US. That way they can avoid paying taxes. There aren't that many large companies that fit the bill. Skype based in Switzerland fits the bill nicely.
"
Disgusting. I thought these loonies who want a flat sales tax were nutcases and part of the tea party movement. My opinion is rapidly changing on this as millions remain unemployed and are scrapping by while these companies sit on heaps of cash thanks to our tax system. If there were no taxes for corporations you can bet the great recession would end within months and millions of jobs would flood the market like the great Mississippi River. While I feel businesses need to pay their fair share of taxes I feel it is killing our economy and generations of people begging for work flipping burgers instead.
Does anyone know how long Redhat/Fedora will keep supporting Fedora 14 with updates and security fixes?
I tried Fedora 15 with the Gnome_shell and KDE and both are not for me. I intend to stay with Fedora 14 as long as there is support before I quit Linux. I may switch to Fedora 15 and use it as a server only. I played with Scientific Linux based on RHES 6.0 but it is Fedora 11 and it does not come with the same kind of software like Joomla, books on Java and Python development, and other things that Fedora has.
The title is misleading. People are not switching because they love Oracle. I bet you the majority of customers are those who cut back on I.T. from 2007 and just tried to squeeze the existing equipments' life until 2011. This is just pent up demand as Oracle and Sun customers had 2002 era machines that need to be upgraded that are dying. So they purchase newer Oracle servers and maybe update their Java 1.3 software with a java 6 while they are at it too while the companies have cash to burn. IBM, Intel, and even Microsoft are seeing growth too mostly from existing customers updating their very old servers and desktops as well.
Nothing else to see folks move along.
"I remember when I moved from PC to Mac I did the typical installation of antivirus/firewall/antispyware programs. The fact that many of these were shitty ports from PC versions should have tipped me off but I soon realized these served no purpose on my machine unlike my old XP machine "
Well prepare to be infected again. After the success of the simplistic MacDefender exploit you can bet it caught the attention of the malware writters who are already developing hundreds of trojans, virii, and worms.
Once the cat is out of the bag with a few exploits the hackers follow. I remember when Windows 2000 was herald as the most secure OS ever made. After one or two exploits it quickly raised a new breed of the current hackers. Hopefully better antivirus software will become available. Norton, McAffee, and Systemantic are very horrible regardless of OS. Maybe Apple can make a good one?
"Does Linux do anything (or at least anything more than MacOS) to protect against this type of attack?"
It doesn't as far as I am aware of which is one of the few things I do not like about Linux. There is ClamAntivus but it is just a scanner and does not offer a shield or active protection.
To be fair, as much as Cannical wants to make Ubuntu a friendly consumer OS, Linux remains a server OS where it mostly sits on servers in a computer room in a rack somewhere or run from a VM on a developers machine. MacOSX is a consumer OS run by average Joe's and artists who are not I.T. professionals mostly.
Also, most MacOSX users became users because they were lied too as MacOSX is sooo secure and will never get viruses etc. So these same people click thinking they were safe. That is more harm than good as MacOSX has no active protection unlike Windows. Windows was terrible but they at least addressing it and the tools are far ahead. All users need protection these days.
How many of you have went 80 mph once without realizing it and quickly slowed down when you found out?
Well that can now be used agaisnt you. Even if your a good driver and those few moments have absolutely nothing to do with a particular accident, you will have a lawyer making you look guilty as hell and slandering your reputation. Only can be used in court? The lawyers will have access. Bad
Not a screen. Why do you think netbooks took off so well during the recession? They are cheap. .. not shiny. Matte might have a preference but both the consumers and acccountants dont want to pay for it.
Today in business trends it is all about aggressive cost cutting and everything is a commodity.
It is our business if it is a corporate jet paid for by the public used for non business use. If it is his who cares.
Personally the grandposter is right to be skeptical in this age of greed,waste,and over compensation. I am very much agaisnt corporate use of jets for public companies
A very well put and mature response.
"A lot of the advice relates to the cost of scaling if the application takes off, with warnings about the costs then of Windows. That is a factor I had not considered. I am, because of my free Windows infrastructure, immune to the costs for development, but I will have to look at the costs for scaling. I had thought that, if I'm getting many hits, then I would also being generating sufficient revenue to pay for servers, or that I would have sufficiently proven my concept to get investor funding, and possibly switch to Mono then. IOW, that would be a problem I would like to have. The comments here have suggested that I reconsider this optimism"
I would like to say (coming from a geek turned Business Major) is that the worst possible thing that can happen to you is a double or huge increase in sales! At first that doesn't make any sense. It is agaisn't everything you know. But if you think about it, consider looking at the costs of having to pay for more resources while you go bankrupt waiting for the revenue? One question I got wrong on my finance exam was a businessman who even had the extra cash ready to document a doubling of sales and I still got it wrong because of other crazy unforseen costs and interest. An increase in sales is never linear to the costs or revenues. Profit margins get thinner and thinner. This mostly applies to Mom & Pop shops like a dry cleaners where you need to buy so much new chemicals and coat hangers that you go out of business before your customers can pay you. This would be your bandwidth and client access licenses. But this is a common mistake almost every new business owner makes without a good financial manager or accountant.
My advice is to start very frugal and tiny and make sure you have a great bank with a good negotiable line of credit so you can be prepared for such a scenario regardless as you can take money as you need it and just repay it at the end of the month. Consider hosting as well as you will not have customers at first and you can focus on marketing, selling, and developing your product rather than admining your servers. When you grow gradually start owning your own servers. I am not technical enough to answer your questions on the cloud but I do have a niche for finance and other boring things. :-)
What about unlimited seat licensing? Do they offer that? Sure they have free downloads but what use is Windows 2008 server if only 10 users can log in at a time?
I would not be surprised if Microsoft can pull the EULA and charge full amount and bankrupt you. It makes me very uncomfortable to trust them, Oracle, or any name player just starting out.
Bolony WIndows Update is much improved and better.
The reason to choose Linux as stated above is financial as Microsoft makes its money with client access licenses and you would need to go unlimited eventually if he is using copies from Technet.
Windows Server is great if you know .NET. It looks supperior to Java in many ways with less code. Windows can be easy to manage if you have an MCSE in 2008 with several years of Windows LAN experience. Just as it is with Linux.
If you are an already established company then perhaps looking into Windows vs Linux can be more objective in which is cheaper to build and maintain on the same hardware? In college I made sure I took Java even though the school turned into a Microsoft Alliance Partner just because I would not want to be in the submitters situation and locked into a particular platform ecosystem.
If I were him I would learn Php and hire someone to help him with the Java on Linux if he needs more scalability. It's still cheaper than Windows, IIS, and SQL Server with unlimted licences.
I knew someone who got laid off of a startup that used that same argument. Unlimited seat license for Windows 2k3 server, IIS, and SQL Server was over $100,000! That is a significant cost.
Startup fees are nill unless you buy a building outright and hire 4 or 5 people immediately before you obtain revenue. Then you are looking at $500,000 or more. But that $100,000 would be another 25%!
These are in American dollars mind you as I see you are british. An online company can be started for next to nothing if you use an ISP webhosting company instead and program the code yourself. $100,000 maybe peanuts yes, but not starting out. It is better to start with Linux and then migrate to Windows when you have the dough and can justify the switch.
"Reality is in the big picture, there is no difference between MS OSs and anyone else"
Try paying $100,000 plus for Windows Server, SQL Server, and IIS client access licenses. For this reason alone I am choosing Linux on my site idea. I will use a shared host at first until I gain more customers and then buy a dedicated server then 2 and then maybe my own servers in an office in a computer room etc.
You need to run your business and not admin your machines. Pay someone else. I mean $25 a month for a shared Linux host is cheap. $699 a years for people to admin and support a dedicated machine is great too!
One rule of finance in small business is to cut costs anyway possible! Second, is to project the amount of money it takes to start a business and double it and then tripple it. Watch your costs and figure out how are you going to get these customers? What about budgeting travel expenses to market and selling your product? Conventions and flying are not cheap. What about bandwidth costs? That is a big problem thanks to net neutrality.
Watch your costs and be frugally cheap. Picking Linux and Apache is very smart and makes financial sense.
"No teen/twenties or anyone else will pick OSX instead of Windows if he/she plays games. Which is exactly the target audience with bundling PC and Xbox360." I disagree
With all these win-video chipsets, non video cards(aka integratred graphics), I would say the PC gaming experience sucks now. Even World of Warcraft with its pre 2003 graphics engine needs to have all of its settings on min to run at 25 fps on a modern laptop. :-0! That is not execusable.
As a result generation Y prefers consoles now thanks to these greedy OEM's trying to save $50 on each unit. I own an Asus 6 way CPU system with a Radeon 5750 with 8 gigs of ram, but the amount of pcs games is low for it vs a console. I play World of Warcraft occasionally and use the rest of the power to run Linux via a VM inside Windows to develop internet apps for kicks.
I prefer the PC personally as I like the keyboard and mouse and raw power of a dedicated GPU mixed with the internet, but all the game makers want to focus on is the console. Can you blame them? 75% of the GPU market 2 years ago was the horrible intel G950 and to make a game that sucks on these makes angry parents and users.
These kids are not used to playing games outside of World of Warcraft on a mac/pc. Not to mention the majority of users on college are notebook users with crappy dedicated integrated graphics. Those are the ones you can take notes on in class. The higher end Macbook Pro has dedicated graphics for World of Warcraft and Half Life anyway.
For $699 you can't get a Windows notebook to play decent games anyway besides wow with blury and low distance settings all choppy.
Have any moderators been to college in the last 5 years?
I was in a minority as a pc user. All the cool students own macs as I would guess the margin is over 75% mac users. Those with pcs such as myself bought them before school and were older/middle aged students with real jobs. The 18-24 crowd is very Mac oriented.
Microsoft is in trouble as these generation Y users will eventually go into the workplace and want Macs at work and home. Corporations already are being more lenient in letting some of them use Macs instead of PCs.
If you want to try Linux, I had much better luck with Fedora on my laptop due to strange Atheros drivers that do not like the Ubuntu kernel. Fedora includes proprietary drivers as well upon request. Another strange bug I find is that flash for Ubuntu 64 will stop suddenly on sites like youtube.com, where it runs fine with Fedora. Also I get random disconnects with Ubuntu.
I have a feeling it might be due to some kernel patches that lower latency but end up hosing the connection by being too aggresive. Anyway Ubuntu is very cutting edge and would recommend SuSE or Fedora. Personally I am using Window 7 more as I used those other OSes when I hated Vista with a passion.
I like Windows 7 as a desktop over gnomeShell and Unity anyday. Windows 7 is butt ugly in virtualbox under linux. For notebooksWindows has better power managment
An xbox makes a nice dvr plus people swear by consoles. Pcs have crappy integrated graphics for under 1000
Most do if they have active protection.
A few years ago Xp antivirus was also called Antivirus 2009 which clones Norton Antivirs 2009 exactly in order to confuse the users. Many users with trail anti virus software thought they were protected so no warning or prevention happened at all.
Those that knew they had unactivated copies of Norton Antivirus 2009 googled Antivirus 2009 and found what looked just like it and installed it that way. Very sleezyl. XP Antivirus did not work as popularly but was the same program under a different name.
I wonder if trailware anti virus software even stops users from running these programs today? ... for removing it, the best instructions I know are simply to use a restore CD and wipe it. You can't get rid of it. Even if you use your hidden partition to restore your machine it will hide itself in a hidden part of the disk partition table and reinstall itself. Using the actual CD if you are lucky enough the OEM did is the only way to wipe this nasty program. Very sleezy indeed.
"Remove users files in standard Gnome/KDE places and futz with the .bashrc or .profile file to make the login wonky."
Yeah, I already tried Gnome-shell thanks
IE 9 has the most security out of box than any browser to date with full XSS protection and memory exploit protections. It is sweet. Sure Firefox has no script but it is not installed by default. Does Chrome have XSS cross site protection?
IE 9 is the first IE that doesn't suck. I am using it right now and it scrolls smoother and offers better acceleration than both Firefox or Chrome. I highly recommend Windows users upgrade even if they use other browsers as many apps use HTML embedded as IE helper objects for their guis and it is nice to have acceleration and more protection.
I still use forefpx mostly by the way and I am not a MS fanboi.
If you have a contract with Microsoft Support they are obligated to help. Individuals do not have these contracts.
Now AppleCare covers this so yes they need to provide support or turn into another IE. My parents would still use IE if it were not in the daily news for constant infections and security hazards. They chose to switch without my help.
If I were a malware writer I would take notice and then port there malware, simply because geeks on slashdot and other techno wizards said Macs never get infected. How many times have you heard that you never need anti virus products for the mac. Apple has 15% of the market now! Sure it is not 85% but the vast majority of that 85% have malware and anti virus protection. Macs have nill! Wow, I do not have to even worry if my methods will be detected because their users simply do not run any protection at all. Just release and WAM! Much easier and I could probably have a much higher rate of infection than trying to dodge security software installed with Windows.
Apple is going to be scorned like IE is now if they do address this fast
Gnome-shell is not that much better if you want to leave Ubuntu for another Linux OS. At least Unity has a minimize and maximize buttons. The developers at Gnome smirk and are proud that they took this ability away and used that argument on why its better not to have that option at all??
Both desktops seem to be built on a premise that people only run one app at a time in a multi user and multi tasking OS so lets do this because WebOS and Android all do it with the 3 inch screens. Lets pretend people will use their thumbs to move. ok ... done gripping.
All the usability is done. MacOSX and Windows maximize it. Sun donated large amounts of R&D to Gnome which is why it has a mac like interface with easily accessible components.
I have seen Unity at my sons school which uses Dell 9 mini netbooks running Ubuntu and I feel Unity is perfect running 4 or 5 apps that kids can find. But not for normal users with a bigger screen. Dragging windows instead of clicking is hard if you have a trackpad laptop with big hands. I do not like it. My hope is gnome shell 3.1 will have ways to stack and access running programs in 3d or a simple bottom bar like Windows/MacOSX.