Yeah, me too. But I don't worry much about what my employer has chosen or the annoyances of windows at work; if it gets completely broken, I can call my IT department and let them deal with it. (Plus, most employers are using the Enterprise version anyway which doesn't have many of the problems the home versions do.) It's just like how I had an employer in the past that had some crappy fleet cars by GM and Ford; it wasn't my problem that those cars were shit. I wasn't on the hook for repair costs. For work, all I care about is that they pay me for my time. If I find the situation too unbearable, I'll look for another job.
For my own personal use, I'm not going to choose something that's total crap and then complain about it. Instead, I'm going to choose something that's good so I don't feel like complaining.
Unless you're building your Linux kernel from source, you're exposed to at least some of this.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with this bit. Almost no one builds their own kernel any more, and there's plenty of Linux distros where you're not "monetized" much at all (and building your own kernel isn't going to change it). The main thing I can see on Linux Mint, for instance, is that their version of Firefox by default has Yahoo set up as the default search engine because Yahoo pays them to. That's pretty easily changed. You're right about having to choose the best compromise; every system is like that. But having to do a one-time "sudo apt-get purge amazon-lens" or change the default browser search engine is, to me at least, much easier than messing around with all the hacks you need to do, and 3rd-party software you need to install, to make Windows 10 bearable to use, or deal with Apple's walled garden.
Hillary's unfavorability ratings are just as high as Trump's, and she does *not* inspire young people to turn out to vote. Bernie does, but Hillary's campaign and the DNC have done everything they can to sabotage him and push him aside, leaving Bernie voters angry and disillusioned, and extremely unlikely to vote for Hillary, and some of them likely to vote for Trump out of disgust (others will probably vote Green, yielding the highest votes that party ever got in a Presidential election). Meanwhile, Republican voters are famous for being reliable voters, and also for despising Hillary.
Sorry, but there's a very good chance Trump will win the Presidential election, and it'll be the Democrats' fault for pushing such a horrible candidate. You'd think they would have learned from experience over the last few decades, but apparently not: pushing a generally disliked candidate with no charisma is a losing proposition. Bill Clinton was highly charismatic, and won. Gore was not: he lost. Kerry was not: he lost. Obama was, and was hugely popular with the youth: he won. Hillary is not. Are Democrats still angry and envious about Nixon winning or something? (Nixon wasn't too charismatic either, but managed to win.)
Exactly. A lot of people just aren't getting this. Trump isn't really conservative, and he's proving that many Republican voters aren't either. They don't care for the religious BS that idiots like Santorum push (like trying to ban contraceptives), and they're not for the hardline economic conservatism that "let's eliminate taxes on the billionaires" candidates like Marco advocate. They apparently don't even care much about which bathroom trans people use. They don't see the Democrats as working for them instead of the Wall Street bankers and Hollywood, and they're usually not college educated and are having a hard time with employment, so Trump is the first candidate in a long time who seems to speak for them, so that's why they're rallying around him no matter how much he flip-flops.
That's a pile of crap. It's a simple fact that college tuitions and fees have gone up far greater than the rate of inflation over the last 20 years. You can try to spin it as some kind of "investment" all you want, but the inflation rate is a simple known quantity, and the cost of tuition over time is easily looked up too. Those are the only data points you need.
You can't do proper computing on a tablet, no matter how much you'd like to do it. Yes, maybe on an Android tablet, but it's still a diluted experience compared to a proper computer.
For my own purposes, I agree. Most home users, however, don't do "proper computing". They just watch Netflix, check their email (maybe; a lot of young people don't even use email), look at Facebook, buy stuff on Amazon, and that's about it. Tablets work fine for that stuff.
Tablet-like devices are simply consumers' devices. You can't create properly on them.
People reposting dumb photos on Facebook are not "creating properly".
For people who grew up with computers in their exposive evolution days starting with the first x86 processors I think it's quite sad to look upon the current times where kids are exhilarated to tap tap tap on a tablet instead of trying to look behind the shinies directly at the source.
There's plenty of kids playing with RPis these days. They're just not the majority, just like kids doing programming on C=64s back in the 80s were not a majority, and kids playing around with electronics and soldering irons were not a majority in the 60s. We'll probably never have a time when the majority of kids are techies.
Like the other responder, I have no idea what you're talking about. I, too, bought a bag of sugar recently. I'm not going to run down and look at the label, but I think it was probably at least 1 or 2 pounds. And I got it at Walmart of all places. And this was some kind of fancy organic sugar. They also have 1-pound bags of brown sugar, which I get too (it's quite cheap).
If you can't find 1+ pound bags of sugar, you're not looking very hard.
They also have "family size" boxes of cereal these days that are much larger than the cereal boxes I used to get as a kid in the 80s.
That analogy is really bad. To run with it, you'd have to add that the "scammer" is the guy who sold you the house, and when you bought it, you signed a contract that the seller could come by any time and force you to change your house, or move out of it into a "better" house (the seller gets to decide what's "better"). So when you call the police to complain, they laugh at you and point out that you explicitly agreed to all of this when you bought the house.
As an MS-hater, I'd also like to add that Vista was the most attractive of all Windows versions. Win7 was a step down with the dumb "awesome bar".
Mainly Vista got screwed because it needed too many resources and MS specified minimum hardware incorrectly, so a bunch of under-specced machines were sold with it.
The managers of Microsoft (like Monkey Boy, for example) have such limited social ability that they are not able to avoid being self-destructive. They don't see that taking control of everyone's computer will eventually have a very bad result.
How are they being self-destructive? Their stock price is way up in the last few years. Screwing over their customers is a sound strategy, because their customers will not abandon them no matter how much abuse they dish out. They were actually stupid to not take more advantage of this earlier under Ballmer.
Apparently Microsoft is trying to imitate Facebook and Google because of the sharp drop in sales of PC computers.
Yes, and it's a great strategy. They're not going to sell as many units, so they need to get more recurring revenue from existing customers. Ads are a good way to do that.
But Windows 10 is the Bing or Zune of operating systems.
Totally wrong. Bing and Zune were both me-too competitors to existing, market-dominating products (Google and iPod, respectively), so it's little wonder that Bing hasn't done that well and Zune failed entirely: trying to unseat a huge, successful, and popular competitor that dominates its market is rarely successful. Windows isn't a me-too, it *is* the huge, successful competitor that dominates its market, and Win10 is just the latest update to that. Moreover, because of various factors (like software lock-in), its customers refuse to explore alternatives, so it makes perfect sense for MS to exploit this position for greater profit. It's not going to hurt them, because as we can already tell (even from comments here), its customers will not abandon them, no matter how badly they're treated.
We need independent control over Windows operating system updates. How can we achieve that?
You can't. It's a closed-source, proprietary OS. You have no control over how it works internally, unless you resort to reverse engineering (which is very difficult, and basically pointless because anything you find is liable to be changed in the next update, and not using official updates is exposing yourself to security weaknesses so few customers will choose this--if you're going to do this, you might as well just stick with Win7).
If you want an OS that gives you independent control over its inner workings, you have to us an open-source OS.
No one's forcing you to play video games. If you insist on "the best acceleration", then you'll have to put up with ads and other BS. If you want freedom from that crap, you'll put up with less-than-optimal drivers. Freedom isn't free.
No, not really. I'm stuck using it at work too, and pretty much always have been (most of my jobs have been Linux-oriented but companies still use Windows for email and Office). But it's not my call, I'm just here because I get paid. I don't contribute my personal funds to MS; what my employers do is their business, as long as they pay me what they agreed and I meet my side of the bargain. Getting stuck with using Windows is part of the bargain, just like having an office, cubicle, or open-plan; there's no perfect job.
On top of that, Windows 10 Enterprise does not have advertising according to everything I've read. Big employers do not use cheaper versions since they don't support enterprise features like AD.
And finally, tons of companies are not using Win10 anyway, at least not yet. Big companies are pretty famous for holding off on OS "upgrades". Most places still seem to use Win7, and many have only recently gotten away from XP.
Smart companies and governments will be looking for ways to abandon MS-ware. The rest will be making MS richer and richer. I don't really see the problem. Maybe eventually people will wise up and do something; if not, oh well.
No, you're committing a logical fallacy by thinking argumentum ergo decedo applies here. Microsoft is a private company that sells software, and "users of MS software" is a voluntary group which willingly gives money to MS in exchange for software and services. That group has zero power over MS's actions, other than through their voluntary monetary transactions with it.
Here's an analogy for you: you're renting an extended-stay room. You rent it on a weekly or monthly basis, it's fully furnished, and some services are included for that price.
You decide you don't like the way the management is running the extended stay hotel, and you want to get involved and get them to make a bunch of changes, such as putting in nicer mattresses, WiFi that doesn't carry a hefty per-day charge, and selling different foods in the mini-mart downstairs. You go to management with a letter demanding all these changes. The manager says, "if you don't like it, you can leave". Guess what? He's right. You have no power, other than to take your business elsewhere. There's no logical fallacy here: the hotel owns the building, and their agent (the manager) can run it as he pleases. (If you like, you can assume that you contact the corporate CEO to complain about the manager and he tells you to fuck off.) Being a customer of this hotel is not like being part of some group of peers, or some democratic nation where you have some power to change things. You're paying a fee for a service, and that's it. If you don't like the terms, you can go elsewhere, or STFU. The hotel doesn't care about your feelings, and has told you this in no uncertain terms. So are you going to keep rewarding them with your service and pleading with them to change, or are you going to go to their competitor across the street?
It's no different with Microsoft. If you don't like their product/service and the way they do business, you have precisely two choices: put up with it, or leave. It's their business, and they can run it any way they please.
Yeah, I'm probably being a little harsh on Fedora; I haven't used it in a long time. All the mainstream Linux distros these days are really easy to install and administer.
No, I don't believe so. For a distro like Mint, where you're using a stock kernel, they don't need you to recompile the shim; they can just give you one that matches your kernel. Distros like this don't even come with compilers by default, yet the Nvidia drivers are just a couple mouse-clicks away, and don't result in downloading gcc and a bunch of development libraries.
Now, if you're making your own custom kernel, then yes, you'll have to compile your own shim. No one compiles their own kernel these days.
I'm not comparing the 50s to now, I'm comparing the 1990s to now. We still have most of the same houses, the expectations (bedrooms-per-person) are the same, and healthcare hasn't changed that much in that time. We had MRIs and CATs in the 90s too. But all these things are much more expensive now.
The CPI isn't BS at all. I'm certainly old enough to have seen how prices have varied over the years, and they've barely changed in a couple of decades, in fact many things are quite a bit cheaper. Cars aren't really any more expensive than they were 20 years ago (you get a lot more car now for $20k than you did back then), gasoline is only a bit more expensive, food is a little more, computers are far, far less, music is cheaper, video games are about the same. Most various knick-knacks are cheaper since they're all made in China now. And it's possible to get a lot of stuff much cheaper than before because of the internet, Ebay, Amazon, etc.
What's really changed is housing costs. They've gone through the roof. So that changes the budget for everything else. The other thing that's changed a lot is healthcare costs (and associated insurance premiums, which are related; ACA helped hold them down a bit, but it did nothing to control the actual cost of care so it keeps rocketing up). These (AFAIK) are not tracked by the CPI because they're not "consumer items", even though most everyone has to pay for them.
I think a better analogy would be AQ calling for killing HW to cripple the US government, even though he's not part of the government any more and hasn't been for many, many years and is quite elderly and liable to pass away from natural causes at any time. Basically, AQ seems to be stuck in a time vortex and not realize that the year is 2016, not 1996.
But this takes the cake. How ridiculous can you get? They must have seen the writing on the wall and decided to go out with a big hurrah.
They're not going out, they've woken up (finally) to the fact that there's almost no limit to how badly they can screw their customers without those customers taking their business elsewhere, so they're milking it more and more.
And it's working out for them. Their stock price is way up.
after 197 mergers or takeovers in its history its taken Microsoft just 15 years to pedal themselves to an early grave
WTF are you talking about? Have you looked at MS's stock price lately? They're doing very well, after years of languishing. This strategy is working out great for them. Getting rid of Ballmer and replacing him with Nadelli was the right move for their shareholders. You may not think it's good for the customers, but who cares? Customers aren't important, only profits are. If they customers are going to continue throwing their money at them no matter how unhappy they are with their products, then it's only smart for MS to take advantage of this.
I guess the question is, what company can I go work for that does not have active directory, sharepoint, MSSql, and a bunch of windows clients? that's an honest question.
That's really an irrelevant question.
For one thing, this adware crap isn't on the Enterprise edition, which you'll find at any company of decent size. This is something mainly affecting home users. You don't need Windows to surf the web.
But even if they change the Enterprise edition to have ads, that's not really your problem as an employee, that's your employer's problem. You're paid to sit there and do what they tell you, that's it.
But to answer yours, in the mid 80s there was no means to learn linux unless you knew someone doing it. Sure, there were some BBS and NewsGroups, go head and step in the way back machine and see how those kind fellows treated people trying to break into unix and linux, it's a fun read.
Linux did not exist until 1991. The WWW didn't exist until 1994.
No desktop computers showed up at your house with linux installed, or even as an option.
In the mid-80s, people at home had Apple ][s and Commodore 64s. They didn't have an OS at all really.
I can walk into ANY company, ANY company, a gas bar, a mom and pop bakery... and guess what? Their using windows.
Good luck making a living supporting mom and pop shops. Well-paid IT professionals work for large companies supporting their IT infrastructure, not cheap-ass small business owners.
I'll let the 20 year old me answer your question too, for reference. "I don't want to run an os that requires me to compile my own fucking device drivers" Case closed.
-1 Stupid. Linux hasn't required this for ages. Again you have your timelines off by decades.
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Yeah, me too. But I don't worry much about what my employer has chosen or the annoyances of windows at work; if it gets completely broken, I can call my IT department and let them deal with it. (Plus, most employers are using the Enterprise version anyway which doesn't have many of the problems the home versions do.) It's just like how I had an employer in the past that had some crappy fleet cars by GM and Ford; it wasn't my problem that those cars were shit. I wasn't on the hook for repair costs. For work, all I care about is that they pay me for my time. If I find the situation too unbearable, I'll look for another job.
For my own personal use, I'm not going to choose something that's total crap and then complain about it. Instead, I'm going to choose something that's good so I don't feel like complaining.
Unless you're building your Linux kernel from source, you're exposed to at least some of this.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with this bit. Almost no one builds their own kernel any more, and there's plenty of Linux distros where you're not "monetized" much at all (and building your own kernel isn't going to change it). The main thing I can see on Linux Mint, for instance, is that their version of Firefox by default has Yahoo set up as the default search engine because Yahoo pays them to. That's pretty easily changed. You're right about having to choose the best compromise; every system is like that. But having to do a one-time "sudo apt-get purge amazon-lens" or change the default browser search engine is, to me at least, much easier than messing around with all the hacks you need to do, and 3rd-party software you need to install, to make Windows 10 bearable to use, or deal with Apple's walled garden.
Hillary's unfavorability ratings are just as high as Trump's, and she does *not* inspire young people to turn out to vote. Bernie does, but Hillary's campaign and the DNC have done everything they can to sabotage him and push him aside, leaving Bernie voters angry and disillusioned, and extremely unlikely to vote for Hillary, and some of them likely to vote for Trump out of disgust (others will probably vote Green, yielding the highest votes that party ever got in a Presidential election). Meanwhile, Republican voters are famous for being reliable voters, and also for despising Hillary.
Sorry, but there's a very good chance Trump will win the Presidential election, and it'll be the Democrats' fault for pushing such a horrible candidate. You'd think they would have learned from experience over the last few decades, but apparently not: pushing a generally disliked candidate with no charisma is a losing proposition. Bill Clinton was highly charismatic, and won. Gore was not: he lost. Kerry was not: he lost. Obama was, and was hugely popular with the youth: he won. Hillary is not. Are Democrats still angry and envious about Nixon winning or something? (Nixon wasn't too charismatic either, but managed to win.)
Exactly. A lot of people just aren't getting this. Trump isn't really conservative, and he's proving that many Republican voters aren't either. They don't care for the religious BS that idiots like Santorum push (like trying to ban contraceptives), and they're not for the hardline economic conservatism that "let's eliminate taxes on the billionaires" candidates like Marco advocate. They apparently don't even care much about which bathroom trans people use. They don't see the Democrats as working for them instead of the Wall Street bankers and Hollywood, and they're usually not college educated and are having a hard time with employment, so Trump is the first candidate in a long time who seems to speak for them, so that's why they're rallying around him no matter how much he flip-flops.
It wasn't that long ago that Christians were burning each other at the stake for being the wrong kind of Christian.
It doesn't take much for religionists to regress to this kind of mentality.
That's a pile of crap. It's a simple fact that college tuitions and fees have gone up far greater than the rate of inflation over the last 20 years. You can try to spin it as some kind of "investment" all you want, but the inflation rate is a simple known quantity, and the cost of tuition over time is easily looked up too. Those are the only data points you need.
You can't do proper computing on a tablet, no matter how much you'd like to do it. Yes, maybe on an Android tablet, but it's still a diluted experience compared to a proper computer.
For my own purposes, I agree. Most home users, however, don't do "proper computing". They just watch Netflix, check their email (maybe; a lot of young people don't even use email), look at Facebook, buy stuff on Amazon, and that's about it. Tablets work fine for that stuff.
Tablet-like devices are simply consumers' devices. You can't create properly on them.
People reposting dumb photos on Facebook are not "creating properly".
For people who grew up with computers in their exposive evolution days starting with the first x86 processors I think it's quite sad to look upon the current times where kids are exhilarated to tap tap tap on a tablet instead of trying to look behind the shinies directly at the source.
There's plenty of kids playing with RPis these days. They're just not the majority, just like kids doing programming on C=64s back in the 80s were not a majority, and kids playing around with electronics and soldering irons were not a majority in the 60s. We'll probably never have a time when the majority of kids are techies.
You must not have read my comment; I specifically called out "healthcare costs".
Good point about education though. That one's through the roof too.
Like the other responder, I have no idea what you're talking about. I, too, bought a bag of sugar recently. I'm not going to run down and look at the label, but I think it was probably at least 1 or 2 pounds. And I got it at Walmart of all places. And this was some kind of fancy organic sugar. They also have 1-pound bags of brown sugar, which I get too (it's quite cheap).
If you can't find 1+ pound bags of sugar, you're not looking very hard.
They also have "family size" boxes of cereal these days that are much larger than the cereal boxes I used to get as a kid in the 80s.
That analogy is really bad. To run with it, you'd have to add that the "scammer" is the guy who sold you the house, and when you bought it, you signed a contract that the seller could come by any time and force you to change your house, or move out of it into a "better" house (the seller gets to decide what's "better"). So when you call the police to complain, they laugh at you and point out that you explicitly agreed to all of this when you bought the house.
Actually it reminds me more of Minority Report.
As an MS-hater, I'd also like to add that Vista was the most attractive of all Windows versions. Win7 was a step down with the dumb "awesome bar".
Mainly Vista got screwed because it needed too many resources and MS specified minimum hardware incorrectly, so a bunch of under-specced machines were sold with it.
The managers of Microsoft (like Monkey Boy, for example) have such limited social ability that they are not able to avoid being self-destructive. They don't see that taking control of everyone's computer will eventually have a very bad result.
How are they being self-destructive? Their stock price is way up in the last few years. Screwing over their customers is a sound strategy, because their customers will not abandon them no matter how much abuse they dish out. They were actually stupid to not take more advantage of this earlier under Ballmer.
Apparently Microsoft is trying to imitate Facebook and Google because of the sharp drop in sales of PC computers.
Yes, and it's a great strategy. They're not going to sell as many units, so they need to get more recurring revenue from existing customers. Ads are a good way to do that.
But Windows 10 is the Bing or Zune of operating systems.
Totally wrong. Bing and Zune were both me-too competitors to existing, market-dominating products (Google and iPod, respectively), so it's little wonder that Bing hasn't done that well and Zune failed entirely: trying to unseat a huge, successful, and popular competitor that dominates its market is rarely successful. Windows isn't a me-too, it *is* the huge, successful competitor that dominates its market, and Win10 is just the latest update to that. Moreover, because of various factors (like software lock-in), its customers refuse to explore alternatives, so it makes perfect sense for MS to exploit this position for greater profit. It's not going to hurt them, because as we can already tell (even from comments here), its customers will not abandon them, no matter how badly they're treated.
We need independent control over Windows operating system updates. How can we achieve that?
You can't. It's a closed-source, proprietary OS. You have no control over how it works internally, unless you resort to reverse engineering (which is very difficult, and basically pointless because anything you find is liable to be changed in the next update, and not using official updates is exposing yourself to security weaknesses so few customers will choose this--if you're going to do this, you might as well just stick with Win7).
If you want an OS that gives you independent control over its inner workings, you have to us an open-source OS.
No one's forcing you to play video games. If you insist on "the best acceleration", then you'll have to put up with ads and other BS. If you want freedom from that crap, you'll put up with less-than-optimal drivers. Freedom isn't free.
No, not really. I'm stuck using it at work too, and pretty much always have been (most of my jobs have been Linux-oriented but companies still use Windows for email and Office). But it's not my call, I'm just here because I get paid. I don't contribute my personal funds to MS; what my employers do is their business, as long as they pay me what they agreed and I meet my side of the bargain. Getting stuck with using Windows is part of the bargain, just like having an office, cubicle, or open-plan; there's no perfect job.
On top of that, Windows 10 Enterprise does not have advertising according to everything I've read. Big employers do not use cheaper versions since they don't support enterprise features like AD.
And finally, tons of companies are not using Win10 anyway, at least not yet. Big companies are pretty famous for holding off on OS "upgrades". Most places still seem to use Win7, and many have only recently gotten away from XP.
Smart companies and governments will be looking for ways to abandon MS-ware. The rest will be making MS richer and richer. I don't really see the problem. Maybe eventually people will wise up and do something; if not, oh well.
You can complain all you want, but you're wasting your breath. The company doesn't give a shit what you think.
No, you're committing a logical fallacy by thinking argumentum ergo decedo applies here. Microsoft is a private company that sells software, and "users of MS software" is a voluntary group which willingly gives money to MS in exchange for software and services. That group has zero power over MS's actions, other than through their voluntary monetary transactions with it.
Here's an analogy for you: you're renting an extended-stay room. You rent it on a weekly or monthly basis, it's fully furnished, and some services are included for that price.
You decide you don't like the way the management is running the extended stay hotel, and you want to get involved and get them to make a bunch of changes, such as putting in nicer mattresses, WiFi that doesn't carry a hefty per-day charge, and selling different foods in the mini-mart downstairs. You go to management with a letter demanding all these changes. The manager says, "if you don't like it, you can leave". Guess what? He's right. You have no power, other than to take your business elsewhere. There's no logical fallacy here: the hotel owns the building, and their agent (the manager) can run it as he pleases. (If you like, you can assume that you contact the corporate CEO to complain about the manager and he tells you to fuck off.) Being a customer of this hotel is not like being part of some group of peers, or some democratic nation where you have some power to change things. You're paying a fee for a service, and that's it. If you don't like the terms, you can go elsewhere, or STFU. The hotel doesn't care about your feelings, and has told you this in no uncertain terms. So are you going to keep rewarding them with your service and pleading with them to change, or are you going to go to their competitor across the street?
It's no different with Microsoft. If you don't like their product/service and the way they do business, you have precisely two choices: put up with it, or leave. It's their business, and they can run it any way they please.
Yeah, I'm probably being a little harsh on Fedora; I haven't used it in a long time. All the mainstream Linux distros these days are really easy to install and administer.
No, I don't believe so. For a distro like Mint, where you're using a stock kernel, they don't need you to recompile the shim; they can just give you one that matches your kernel. Distros like this don't even come with compilers by default, yet the Nvidia drivers are just a couple mouse-clicks away, and don't result in downloading gcc and a bunch of development libraries.
Now, if you're making your own custom kernel, then yes, you'll have to compile your own shim. No one compiles their own kernel these days.
I'm not comparing the 50s to now, I'm comparing the 1990s to now. We still have most of the same houses, the expectations (bedrooms-per-person) are the same, and healthcare hasn't changed that much in that time. We had MRIs and CATs in the 90s too. But all these things are much more expensive now.
The CPI isn't BS at all. I'm certainly old enough to have seen how prices have varied over the years, and they've barely changed in a couple of decades, in fact many things are quite a bit cheaper. Cars aren't really any more expensive than they were 20 years ago (you get a lot more car now for $20k than you did back then), gasoline is only a bit more expensive, food is a little more, computers are far, far less, music is cheaper, video games are about the same. Most various knick-knacks are cheaper since they're all made in China now. And it's possible to get a lot of stuff much cheaper than before because of the internet, Ebay, Amazon, etc.
What's really changed is housing costs. They've gone through the roof. So that changes the budget for everything else. The other thing that's changed a lot is healthcare costs (and associated insurance premiums, which are related; ACA helped hold them down a bit, but it did nothing to control the actual cost of care so it keeps rocketing up). These (AFAIK) are not tracked by the CPI because they're not "consumer items", even though most everyone has to pay for them.
I think a better analogy would be AQ calling for killing HW to cripple the US government, even though he's not part of the government any more and hasn't been for many, many years and is quite elderly and liable to pass away from natural causes at any time. Basically, AQ seems to be stuck in a time vortex and not realize that the year is 2016, not 1996.
But this takes the cake. How ridiculous can you get? They must have seen the writing on the wall and decided to go out with a big hurrah.
They're not going out, they've woken up (finally) to the fact that there's almost no limit to how badly they can screw their customers without those customers taking their business elsewhere, so they're milking it more and more.
And it's working out for them. Their stock price is way up.
after 197 mergers or takeovers in its history its taken Microsoft just 15 years to pedal themselves to an early grave
WTF are you talking about? Have you looked at MS's stock price lately? They're doing very well, after years of languishing. This strategy is working out great for them. Getting rid of Ballmer and replacing him with Nadelli was the right move for their shareholders. You may not think it's good for the customers, but who cares? Customers aren't important, only profits are. If they customers are going to continue throwing their money at them no matter how unhappy they are with their products, then it's only smart for MS to take advantage of this.
I guess the question is, what company can I go work for that does not have active directory, sharepoint, MSSql, and a bunch of windows clients? that's an honest question.
That's really an irrelevant question.
For one thing, this adware crap isn't on the Enterprise edition, which you'll find at any company of decent size. This is something mainly affecting home users. You don't need Windows to surf the web.
But even if they change the Enterprise edition to have ads, that's not really your problem as an employee, that's your employer's problem. You're paid to sit there and do what they tell you, that's it.
But to answer yours, in the mid 80s there was no means to learn linux unless you knew someone doing it. Sure, there were some BBS and NewsGroups, go head and step in the way back machine and see how those kind fellows treated people trying to break into unix and linux, it's a fun read.
Linux did not exist until 1991. The WWW didn't exist until 1994.
No desktop computers showed up at your house with linux installed, or even as an option.
In the mid-80s, people at home had Apple ][s and Commodore 64s. They didn't have an OS at all really.
I can walk into ANY company, ANY company, a gas bar, a mom and pop bakery... and guess what? Their using windows.
Good luck making a living supporting mom and pop shops. Well-paid IT professionals work for large companies supporting their IT infrastructure, not cheap-ass small business owners.
I'll let the 20 year old me answer your question too, for reference. "I don't want to run an os that requires me to compile my own fucking device drivers" Case closed.
-1 Stupid. Linux hasn't required this for ages. Again you have your timelines off by decades.