It's not so much knowing about security as it is jackass leadership who do not want to deal the the hassle. Good security is usually very inconvenient and sometimes requires them to learn or understand something. That's more than they can handle.
Yes. You can put it that way. But cable TV stole the free broadcast TV signal I once used. The power was decreased in large part due to the demands of cable TV companies. Digital TV helped and hurt because the signal power still sucks.
In any case, I won't pay for it ever and the cable company lost money because they didn't want to give it away for free as it should be.
This "shutdown" is no shutdown. The things people do not want is not to be shut down.
The most telling thing is that the stock market didn't react to this "crisis." If anything will react as an indicator, it's the market. It didn't.
I get the feeling this is an attempt to get people who are already hooked on government to freak out and demand action. As a former TSA screner, I still receive emails from a government employee organization who yesterday pushed out a message directly blaming the republicans and urging recipients to flood the house with calls demanding action. At the top of the list of "hooked on government" are these parasites who skate through life as government employed wastes of money.
To me, this is a "cable TV" moment. The cable TV moment happened to me when I moved to another state and attempted to bribe the cable internet installer to leave the TV signal unblocked. He refused and I have been without TV since that time... over 4 years now. I don't miss it. I never paid for TV and I never will. But now they aren't able to sell ads as effectively because I'm not watching them. (Some cable TV vendors are giving it away for free now because I'm not the only one cutting down on their subscribership numbers.)
Let's all hope we can cut back on government addiction and dependency and that this "shut down" illustrates how much we don't need it.
My aspergery nature prevented me from saying "I'm sorry for your loss" (mostly because I don't actually mean that) so I'll say "I'm sorry for the difficulty you and yours had to go through" (because I do actually mean that.)
Fortunately, as humanity at large goes, this is rare and certainly not common enough to be effective in "volume purchases." I know it seems insensitive, and it is, but at some point, we have to face and accept our mortality and this includes making practical choices under terminal conditions. I have only faced this type of thing once with my mother and I can say that I believe the "making them as comfortable as possible" is the best approach. My mother disagreed and went through all sorts of hell before she finally died. My reaction to the news was silence but internally I said to myself "...finally." In the end, she was praying for death....well anyway...
You're not healthy. Not by my definition. Healthy means "needs no medicine." You need it... and it is apparently expensive.
The HSA you speak of is artificially set that way to prevent it from being a viable option for many people and to (unfairly) reduce the competition it would provide to the medical industrial complex.
I realize you are being sarcastic, but you are quite correct. What's more, people can actually do that if they exercised more self-discipline and actually understood what they are doing to themselves at every turn.
And as another commenter pointed out, a MSA + high deductible insurance account is a terrific balance and you get to accumulate interest on saving accounts. Try accumulating anything for an insurance account.
You just proved that a particular method of handing a problem is too expensive to be practical.
And the question that never comes up often enough is why these medicines and treatments are so expensive? Is it because the current structure of the medical industrial complex is such that people are always spending "OPM" (other people's money) and so they don't care about the actual cost and just pay expensive monthly subscriptions to "modern healthcare" magazine?
I admit there have been advances in medical science. But I don't think the advances justify the costs. I think the costs were set increasingly higher and the profits of certain industry participants are ridiculously high. And while we can talk "capitalism" all day long, I just have to remind people that a great deal of the R&D comes from public support and funding in various forms. Also, the standard "supply and demand" model always breaks down when demand is unlimited and this is always true of medicine where it's not so much that demand is unlimited for everyone, but for a few. Supply and demand economics is inhumane where life and living are concerned though it's all good when it comes to things which aren't necessary like iphones and such.
Most people are healthy and only need to learn to stay healthy. Most are better off with a medical savings account than with medical insurance. Why give money away for someone else to make billions off of it while you get little more than weak promises that in the event something bad happens, you might get minimal care?
We live in such a debt financing society we've all completely forgotten how to save money for bad days. Does a credit card really substitute for a savings?
Let the gamblers game in every way. Gambling is a stupid thing and let them all have it. "Cheating"? Really? We have gamblers losing the world's economy and at the expense of the rest of the world, the gamblers are getting bailed out so they can do it some more.
Let actual gamblers do what they want. It doesn't harm the world. And let their continued operation go on as it is.
I was thinking something along those lines myself. To arrive at "1.0" would mean that it would be feature complete and stable according to the "1.0" set defined when "1.0" was created as a target. That already makes me wonder if Hurd is absolete before it has been completed.
So... kill the gays? And what about you? Is there anything different about you we should know and kill you over?
I recognize the "ad absurdum" I am applying here, but it's more of a "wake up." Many people, myself included, seek to understand humanity beyond primitive instincts. The thing that makes humanity what it has become is due to its ability to oppress, limit and overcome its instinctive behaviors. We've still got'm and it helps to be aware of them. (And yes, RACISM is just such an instict and it will never go away -- so please -- anti-racism is still actually racism. Just stop it. It's only a problem when you bring attention to it. When given no option to complain, people will eventually find ways to blend in and work together.)
So to be clear, are you endorsing the notion that it is fair and reasonable to simply put people away or punish them if they have issues beyond their control? We're seeing an alarming rise in such disorders and indicators all seem to point at environmental conditions as they follow localization patterns which do not follow genetics. So, just punish and stop thinking about it?
I know it's a kind of joke to say that, but that's not what an open mind. An open mind is one prepared to consider and process ideas rather than discard them based on the probability that they may clash with [one's] currently accepted ideas.
Do you not observe the dual nature of understanding we have of behavior? On one hand, we want to blame the individual for his behavior. "I wouldn't do it. I don't think it's right. He must be an asshole." I get that way too sometimes. It's a "relative" measure though. On the other hand, we recognize that chemical and other external forces on people can have extreme and wildly varied behavioral consequences. We all seem to know and accept it when a drug does something to a person. We all accept it when post traumatic stress does things to people. And we even accept it (to a lesser degree) when a person is is psychopathic or sociopathic in nature. (We even celebrate a few of them -- Steve Jobs is a great example of one of those.)
I invite you to take this into a deeper consideration to try to reconcile this double-standard of understanding into one that makes more sense and offers a more unified understanding of human behavior.
First and foremost, autism is diagnosed through behavior only. There is no medical test for it. It's observational data only.
Secondly, autism is a spectrum disorder so it could literally be a reason for being an asshole. It could also be a reason for worse or more bizarre behavior. But for some, it's not a good excuse for the behavior.
*I* am on the autistic spectrum and *I* would not do this to anyone. Then again, I'm asking my 2013 self if I would do that... I guess I would be better off asking a much younger version of myself if I would. I think the answer is the same because it is not within me to hurt anyone else in any way but I could see possibly wanting to find ways to peek through someone's webcam secretly.
In any case, I suspect he'll end up working for the NSA. Having the "mean gene" helps with the job.
This ridiculous push to offload every type of programming into GPUs including bitcoin mining and no one saw this possibility? (Sarcasm, I know people saw the possibility.)
Measures could have been taken... but then again, what better way for the NSA and other government spies to infiltrate a computer independent of an operating system than this? Seriously. It'll work on Mac, Windows and Linux with or without proprietary drivers.
You cannot and should not blame people for being stupid. The dumbing down of the people has been intentional in all of this. It has been done under the color of many, many things and among them have been racial equality. It's ridiculous. (And seriously, I am not saying some races are smarter or dumber than others. There are frikken geniuses in all races, so shut up already!) Also, you can't blame the masses for being the masses. You can blame the few for taking unfair advantage of them. After all, we don't blame the masses for pick-pockets. We blame pick-pockets for their own actions.
There is probably a very long list of possible good entries into the list and I hope people reply here to add their own.
This is a short list of "things that were okay/acceptable before but terrible now." (Mostly things I did as a child)
1. Fireworks 2. Children playing/hiking far away from home 3. Play with guns (both toys and real... yes I knew how to use a gun from a very early age and how dangerous they are. Still here, no one was harmed.) 4. Play with knives 5. "Hunted small game" (meaning killed small animals for sport) 6. War dialing finding a lot of interesting things back in the day
The top few of my list would, today, result in my removal from society and possibly institutionalized somewhere. War dialing would make me a criminal hacker and possibly even a traitor to my nation.
My complaint, just to be clear, is how, against protest and wisdom, society was quite literally handed over to bankers as indentured servants. Every time you hear deficit and all that. It's money "borrowed from the Fed" with taxpayer money as the collateral. And when people say "our grandchildren are in debt" they are exactly correct and deadly serious. It means in our lifetimes, we cannot be the collective collateral for the borrowing of the government. Our children cannot be the collective collateral. It will take our grandchildren to pay this off and the way thing are going (because they aren't stopping) it'll be worse than that. When the democrats had a budget surplus, that was a great achievement, but it was virtually meaningless in that they temporarily halted the growing principal, but they can't quite touch the interest for quite a white.
Society has been hijacked... all of it. Sold to bankers. This is not wild-eyed conspiracy theory. This is something any anyone can look into and verify. There are distinctive "before" and "after" and I liken it all to electronic appliances in the home. With every new gadget, things somehow "got easier" and yet everything still seems to take the same amount of work and time.... well, with the exception of microwave popcorn. People think they have everything better and easier but I think differently. Having some perspective on the matter, I would say slightly worse. And by worse, I mean the consumerist society we live in is just bad. Not to make a morality argument here, but it is quite literally WRONG to measure a person by what he owns. But it's what we do. And we even give a person more respect based on it... where they live, what car they drive and all that. The 80s and the ridiculous gold jewelry? Do you think it was because we just loved shiny stuff? It was "respect." (And Mr. T seemed to need a LOT of it didn't he?)
The whole thing where they started taking people's private assets to manage the financial crisis in Cypress was just the test bed to see how well people would accept this. Since the whole story died down, they are now preparing to do that asset seizure in Canada and in several European countries as well. They would do it in the US too, but we have too many guns and the government doesn't yet have enough bullets.
Let's stop calling it that. These numbers we call our identity is not our identity. The whole notion of doing things like this were an invention of mega-business interests who wanted to expand their business range without having to employ a whole bunch of people. You see, long ago, people were given credit by a process which involved references... actual people who could vouch for your reputation. But this is too much of a hassle and involves the use of people and people, of course, are very expensive. So much better to track a whole bunch of people with a computer system where they are tagged with a unique number -- say a social security number which we were promised would never ever ever be used for anything but social security account tracking. Several legal filings surrounded the controversy long ago but the serfs of the USA lost out and here we are.
Stop feeding the machine. Stop being in debt. Stop relying on credit and build a savings instead. It's harder to get started if you're already accustomed to the debt financing game, but it's the difference between LIFO and FIFO where your money is concerned. Stop spending money you don't have. Of course, this message goes out to people who aren't reading this... everyone here has "good reasons" for using credit instead of cash.
Yes, they always thought they could buy their way into a market. Someone has a great idea? "Hey, be a Microsoft 'Partner!' and get cheated out of what you created." There are way too many examples of that crap happening... and I can't believe Orange is STILL working with Microsoft after getting screwed so hard.
The world basically hates Microsoft. There are tons of reasons for it, but when it comes to new computing devices (that is to say, non-PCs) they do NOT want Microsoft running it because of their horrible experience with Microsoft stuff. It's a discussion which would last until the end of time as to what and who is to blame if the people's experiences were caused by others people and that it's not Microsoft's fault or even if it's just perception which is no longer valid. It doesn't matter. It's like the stock market -- it is what people believe it is and that's the end of the story.
So when given a choice, people choose "not Microsoft." Not so much that they choose Android or Apple of whatever. It's that they voted "not Microsoft." And I think that says more than enough in a completely clear and understandable way. However, has Microsoft paid any mind to this problem? Have they worked to reverse those problems at all? Once again, opinions will vary, but I'm saying NO. No visible effort at attempting to win the hearts and minds of the users. They already have dominance and all their effort was, in my opinion, coasting and doing just enough to maintain and take advantage of their dominance.
To this day, one example of Microsoft hubris sticks in my mind the strongest and I just can't get beyond it. Microsoft one day changed their volume licenses of Windows to "upgrade only." This enabled them to sell two copies of Windows for each computer sold. A business who wanted to save money on licensing used to buy enough seats for their users and that was it. But Microsoft just changed the license terms and said "you have to have Windows in order to qualify to use your volume licensed images." When I learned about that, I was just furious. No longer can we save money by telling Dell, "no OS... we'll take care of it." Sell it twice and use it once. Come on!!!
Not only did they lose the good will of the end users who hate Microsoft for speed, usability and stability reasons, they started taking advantage of the businesses who are their primary source of money.
So when people have a choice, choosing "not Microsoft" seems like a rational choice.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so much knowing about security as it is jackass leadership who do not want to deal the the hassle. Good security is usually very inconvenient and sometimes requires them to learn or understand something. That's more than they can handle.
Yes. You can put it that way. But cable TV stole the free broadcast TV signal I once used. The power was decreased in large part due to the demands of cable TV companies. Digital TV helped and hurt because the signal power still sucks.
In any case, I won't pay for it ever and the cable company lost money because they didn't want to give it away for free as it should be.
This "shutdown" is no shutdown. The things people do not want is not to be shut down.
The most telling thing is that the stock market didn't react to this "crisis." If anything will react as an indicator, it's the market. It didn't.
I get the feeling this is an attempt to get people who are already hooked on government to freak out and demand action. As a former TSA screner, I still receive emails from a government employee organization who yesterday pushed out a message directly blaming the republicans and urging recipients to flood the house with calls demanding action. At the top of the list of "hooked on government" are these parasites who skate through life as government employed wastes of money.
To me, this is a "cable TV" moment. The cable TV moment happened to me when I moved to another state and attempted to bribe the cable internet installer to leave the TV signal unblocked. He refused and I have been without TV since that time... over 4 years now. I don't miss it. I never paid for TV and I never will. But now they aren't able to sell ads as effectively because I'm not watching them. (Some cable TV vendors are giving it away for free now because I'm not the only one cutting down on their subscribership numbers.)
Let's all hope we can cut back on government addiction and dependency and that this "shut down" illustrates how much we don't need it.
My aspergery nature prevented me from saying "I'm sorry for your loss" (mostly because I don't actually mean that) so I'll say "I'm sorry for the difficulty you and yours had to go through" (because I do actually mean that.)
Fortunately, as humanity at large goes, this is rare and certainly not common enough to be effective in "volume purchases." I know it seems insensitive, and it is, but at some point, we have to face and accept our mortality and this includes making practical choices under terminal conditions. I have only faced this type of thing once with my mother and I can say that I believe the "making them as comfortable as possible" is the best approach. My mother disagreed and went through all sorts of hell before she finally died. My reaction to the news was silence but internally I said to myself "...finally." In the end, she was praying for death. ...well anyway...
You're not healthy. Not by my definition. Healthy means "needs no medicine." You need it... and it is apparently expensive.
The HSA you speak of is artificially set that way to prevent it from being a viable option for many people and to (unfairly) reduce the competition it would provide to the medical industrial complex.
I realize you are being sarcastic, but you are quite correct. What's more, people can actually do that if they exercised more self-discipline and actually understood what they are doing to themselves at every turn.
And as another commenter pointed out, a MSA + high deductible insurance account is a terrific balance and you get to accumulate interest on saving accounts. Try accumulating anything for an insurance account.
You just proved that a particular method of handing a problem is too expensive to be practical.
And the question that never comes up often enough is why these medicines and treatments are so expensive? Is it because the current structure of the medical industrial complex is such that people are always spending "OPM" (other people's money) and so they don't care about the actual cost and just pay expensive monthly subscriptions to "modern healthcare" magazine?
I admit there have been advances in medical science. But I don't think the advances justify the costs. I think the costs were set increasingly higher and the profits of certain industry participants are ridiculously high. And while we can talk "capitalism" all day long, I just have to remind people that a great deal of the R&D comes from public support and funding in various forms. Also, the standard "supply and demand" model always breaks down when demand is unlimited and this is always true of medicine where it's not so much that demand is unlimited for everyone, but for a few. Supply and demand economics is inhumane where life and living are concerned though it's all good when it comes to things which aren't necessary like iphones and such.
Most people are healthy and only need to learn to stay healthy. Most are better off with a medical savings account than with medical insurance. Why give money away for someone else to make billions off of it while you get little more than weak promises that in the event something bad happens, you might get minimal care?
We live in such a debt financing society we've all completely forgotten how to save money for bad days. Does a credit card really substitute for a savings?
Just saying... kay?
Let the gamblers game in every way. Gambling is a stupid thing and let them all have it. "Cheating"? Really? We have gamblers losing the world's economy and at the expense of the rest of the world, the gamblers are getting bailed out so they can do it some more.
Let actual gamblers do what they want. It doesn't harm the world. And let their continued operation go on as it is.
I was thinking something along those lines myself. To arrive at "1.0" would mean that it would be feature complete and stable according to the "1.0" set defined when "1.0" was created as a target. That already makes me wonder if Hurd is absolete before it has been completed.
So... kill the gays? And what about you? Is there anything different about you we should know and kill you over?
I recognize the "ad absurdum" I am applying here, but it's more of a "wake up." Many people, myself included, seek to understand humanity beyond primitive instincts. The thing that makes humanity what it has become is due to its ability to oppress, limit and overcome its instinctive behaviors. We've still got'm and it helps to be aware of them. (And yes, RACISM is just such an instict and it will never go away -- so please -- anti-racism is still actually racism. Just stop it. It's only a problem when you bring attention to it. When given no option to complain, people will eventually find ways to blend in and work together.)
So to be clear, are you endorsing the notion that it is fair and reasonable to simply put people away or punish them if they have issues beyond their control? We're seeing an alarming rise in such disorders and indicators all seem to point at environmental conditions as they follow localization patterns which do not follow genetics. So, just punish and stop thinking about it?
I know it's a kind of joke to say that, but that's not what an open mind. An open mind is one prepared to consider and process ideas rather than discard them based on the probability that they may clash with [one's] currently accepted ideas.
Do you not observe the dual nature of understanding we have of behavior? On one hand, we want to blame the individual for his behavior. "I wouldn't do it. I don't think it's right. He must be an asshole." I get that way too sometimes. It's a "relative" measure though. On the other hand, we recognize that chemical and other external forces on people can have extreme and wildly varied behavioral consequences. We all seem to know and accept it when a drug does something to a person. We all accept it when post traumatic stress does things to people. And we even accept it (to a lesser degree) when a person is is psychopathic or sociopathic in nature. (We even celebrate a few of them -- Steve Jobs is a great example of one of those.)
I invite you to take this into a deeper consideration to try to reconcile this double-standard of understanding into one that makes more sense and offers a more unified understanding of human behavior.
First and foremost, autism is diagnosed through behavior only. There is no medical test for it. It's observational data only.
Secondly, autism is a spectrum disorder so it could literally be a reason for being an asshole. It could also be a reason for worse or more bizarre behavior. But for some, it's not a good excuse for the behavior.
*I* am on the autistic spectrum and *I* would not do this to anyone. Then again, I'm asking my 2013 self if I would do that... I guess I would be better off asking a much younger version of myself if I would. I think the answer is the same because it is not within me to hurt anyone else in any way but I could see possibly wanting to find ways to peek through someone's webcam secretly.
In any case, I suspect he'll end up working for the NSA. Having the "mean gene" helps with the job.
This ridiculous push to offload every type of programming into GPUs including bitcoin mining and no one saw this possibility? (Sarcasm, I know people saw the possibility.)
Measures could have been taken... but then again, what better way for the NSA and other government spies to infiltrate a computer independent of an operating system than this? Seriously. It'll work on Mac, Windows and Linux with or without proprietary drivers.
You cannot and should not blame people for being stupid. The dumbing down of the people has been intentional in all of this. It has been done under the color of many, many things and among them have been racial equality. It's ridiculous. (And seriously, I am not saying some races are smarter or dumber than others. There are frikken geniuses in all races, so shut up already!) Also, you can't blame the masses for being the masses. You can blame the few for taking unfair advantage of them. After all, we don't blame the masses for pick-pockets. We blame pick-pockets for their own actions.
Yeah... that will happen. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop in Texas as the guy behind Tesla is also behind some spaceport thing right?
That insect farmers are edible, I thought, was already established. I guess that Clinton is giving money is news enough...
There is probably a very long list of possible good entries into the list and I hope people reply here to add their own.
This is a short list of "things that were okay/acceptable before but terrible now." (Mostly things I did as a child)
1. Fireworks
2. Children playing/hiking far away from home
3. Play with guns (both toys and real... yes I knew how to use a gun from a very early age and how dangerous they are. Still here, no one was harmed.)
4. Play with knives
5. "Hunted small game" (meaning killed small animals for sport)
6. War dialing finding a lot of interesting things back in the day
The top few of my list would, today, result in my removal from society and possibly institutionalized somewhere. War dialing would make me a criminal hacker and possibly even a traitor to my nation.
My complaint, just to be clear, is how, against protest and wisdom, society was quite literally handed over to bankers as indentured servants. Every time you hear deficit and all that. It's money "borrowed from the Fed" with taxpayer money as the collateral. And when people say "our grandchildren are in debt" they are exactly correct and deadly serious. It means in our lifetimes, we cannot be the collective collateral for the borrowing of the government. Our children cannot be the collective collateral. It will take our grandchildren to pay this off and the way thing are going (because they aren't stopping) it'll be worse than that. When the democrats had a budget surplus, that was a great achievement, but it was virtually meaningless in that they temporarily halted the growing principal, but they can't quite touch the interest for quite a white.
Society has been hijacked... all of it. Sold to bankers. This is not wild-eyed conspiracy theory. This is something any anyone can look into and verify. There are distinctive "before" and "after" and I liken it all to electronic appliances in the home. With every new gadget, things somehow "got easier" and yet everything still seems to take the same amount of work and time.... well, with the exception of microwave popcorn. People think they have everything better and easier but I think differently. Having some perspective on the matter, I would say slightly worse. And by worse, I mean the consumerist society we live in is just bad. Not to make a morality argument here, but it is quite literally WRONG to measure a person by what he owns. But it's what we do. And we even give a person more respect based on it... where they live, what car they drive and all that. The 80s and the ridiculous gold jewelry? Do you think it was because we just loved shiny stuff? It was "respect." (And Mr. T seemed to need a LOT of it didn't he?)
The new word is "bailed in."
The whole thing where they started taking people's private assets to manage the financial crisis in Cypress was just the test bed to see how well people would accept this. Since the whole story died down, they are now preparing to do that asset seizure in Canada and in several European countries as well. They would do it in the US too, but we have too many guns and the government doesn't yet have enough bullets.
Let's stop calling it that. These numbers we call our identity is not our identity. The whole notion of doing things like this were an invention of mega-business interests who wanted to expand their business range without having to employ a whole bunch of people. You see, long ago, people were given credit by a process which involved references... actual people who could vouch for your reputation. But this is too much of a hassle and involves the use of people and people, of course, are very expensive. So much better to track a whole bunch of people with a computer system where they are tagged with a unique number -- say a social security number which we were promised would never ever ever be used for anything but social security account tracking. Several legal filings surrounded the controversy long ago but the serfs of the USA lost out and here we are.
Stop feeding the machine. Stop being in debt. Stop relying on credit and build a savings instead. It's harder to get started if you're already accustomed to the debt financing game, but it's the difference between LIFO and FIFO where your money is concerned. Stop spending money you don't have. Of course, this message goes out to people who aren't reading this... everyone here has "good reasons" for using credit instead of cash.
Yes, they always thought they could buy their way into a market. Someone has a great idea? "Hey, be a Microsoft 'Partner!' and get cheated out of what you created." There are way too many examples of that crap happening... and I can't believe Orange is STILL working with Microsoft after getting screwed so hard.
The world basically hates Microsoft. There are tons of reasons for it, but when it comes to new computing devices (that is to say, non-PCs) they do NOT want Microsoft running it because of their horrible experience with Microsoft stuff. It's a discussion which would last until the end of time as to what and who is to blame if the people's experiences were caused by others people and that it's not Microsoft's fault or even if it's just perception which is no longer valid. It doesn't matter. It's like the stock market -- it is what people believe it is and that's the end of the story.
So when given a choice, people choose "not Microsoft." Not so much that they choose Android or Apple of whatever. It's that they voted "not Microsoft." And I think that says more than enough in a completely clear and understandable way. However, has Microsoft paid any mind to this problem? Have they worked to reverse those problems at all? Once again, opinions will vary, but I'm saying NO. No visible effort at attempting to win the hearts and minds of the users. They already have dominance and all their effort was, in my opinion, coasting and doing just enough to maintain and take advantage of their dominance.
To this day, one example of Microsoft hubris sticks in my mind the strongest and I just can't get beyond it. Microsoft one day changed their volume licenses of Windows to "upgrade only." This enabled them to sell two copies of Windows for each computer sold. A business who wanted to save money on licensing used to buy enough seats for their users and that was it. But Microsoft just changed the license terms and said "you have to have Windows in order to qualify to use your volume licensed images." When I learned about that, I was just furious. No longer can we save money by telling Dell, "no OS... we'll take care of it." Sell it twice and use it once. Come on!!!
Not only did they lose the good will of the end users who hate Microsoft for speed, usability and stability reasons, they started taking advantage of the businesses who are their primary source of money.
So when people have a choice, choosing "not Microsoft" seems like a rational choice.