I would consider myself an agnostic that tends towards atheism.
I had a mixed faith upbringing that included going to Sunday School on a regular basis. However, I was always skeptical of religion, even from an early age.
If I had known the word, I would have described myself as an atheist from before the age of five or six - I gave up believing in the existance of a God (or Gods) around the same time that I had given up believing in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy.
The religous allegories that run through the Chronicles of Narnia didn't really colour my enjoyment of the books then, just as the religious allegory doesn't colour my enjoyment of The Green Mile now.
Somehow, I doubt that that would happen if it had been Bill Gates or the CEO of RealNetworks who was asking people to install spyware. Talk about double standards.
I guess Slashdot still hasn't grown beyond being CmdrTaco's little personality cult.
In his editorial, CmdrTaco admits that Alexa is spyware... yet he's asking you to install it.
Why? So he can prove a point to his boss, sales guys, advertisers and journalists?
Yep. CmdrTaco would prefer that you compromise your privacy and security to help him make a point to others.
If I hadn't have seen it with my own eyes then I never would have believed that "the guy in charge" of one of the largest OSS-related sites on the web would have been reduced to publicly pimping spyware just to win an argument.
As I've said, Rowling's writing is good enough to keep millions of kids and adults happy but I find that I'm not one of them. I'm completely comfortable with that.
However, I do find it strange that you should feel that I (or anybody else reading this who feels as I do) might have a "road to Damascus" conversion if only they're willing to wade through a few thousand below par pages "to get to the good stuff"... for which you've just provided what look like a few key spoilers.
Seriously, I'm happy that other people enjoy something that I don't, but why is it that there are some people who can't (or won't) appreciate that there are people out there who don't find the same enjoyment in something that they do?
There you go again, putting words into the mouths of others. Is there some reason why you might be better informed than I am about how I feel and what I think?
I don't see why something has to be read at a certain age. I don't see why you have to be at least x years old to read 1984 and I don't see why you can't read Dr Suess if you're older than y. If you can read it, and can enjoy it, then I say go for it.
I'm not sure what you're offended about here. I've said that I didn't like something but acknowledged that millions of others do: does my not liking it offend you that much? Is it that important to you that I enjoy it?
"Lowest common denominator"? Assuming that "people who read [Harry Potter novels aren't capable of reading anything better"? Where did I say any of that? Where are you getting this from? From where I'm sitting, it's not me who's making the assumptions here...
My point wasn't that kids should specifically read the books that I mentioned, it was that kids (and even adults!) should read more books. I thought it was clear but, apparently, it wasn't to everyone. Mea culpa.
I certainly don't claim to be a literary authority and I'm far from being a published author myself, hence my reluctance to be overly critical about the quality of JK Rowling's work. Having said that, plenty of critics have had their say about it and it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that she's yet to win most of them over.
One thing that I do find strange is the inability of people to take my lack of praise as an overt display of hatred. When I say "even if it was something that I thought was junk...", it seems that people can't, or won't, read that as it should be read ("something that I thought was junk...", and prefer instead to read it as something else instead ("something that is junk").
I've gone out of my way to show that I realise that my opinion doesn't matter ("Personally, I found...", "which is why I find myself appreciating...", "Rowling's writing is good enough to satisfy millions...") yet people are happy to assume my reluctance to join them in their unbridled enjoyment of a series of books as some sort of personal insult to both them and the author.
I'd love to have Rowling's talent, because I do recognise that that talent is both considerable and appreciated, but I'm not going to lie to myself and pretend that I'm one of the millions that loves it just to make myself more popular.
Well, not being American, I can't claim to know how old a 1st or even 7th grade child is, but I can tell you that saying that something isn't "supposed" to be read by someone until they hit a certain age is just silly.
I read the Chronicles of Narnia at about age five or six, I read 1984 when I was around 11, and I re-read them at later ages, too. Of course I picked up on aspects that I missed first time around when I looked at them again, but that doesn't mean that I didn't learn anything during the initial readings.
And as for the average age of a Harry Potter reader, well, JK Rowling's readers have aged in the last ten years so the kids that picked up Harry Potter during that time are now older: I remember the news coverage of the previous book's release included a lot of stories about university students holding Potter parties, etc while they waited for their fixes: if a university student can't grasp Fahrenheit 451 then Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Lastly, I think you're over-optimistic about how well read the average adult is these days. I bet you can't find more than 1 in 5 people at work who've read one or more of the books that I've listed. Heck, most people couldn't even name one of the authors of one of those books.
By the way, at least one of those books that I mentioned is younger than 50 years old. And, not that it's relevant, there are plenty of good books that I can name that are less than 20, or even 10, years old. But thanks for calling me a jerk and writing me off because I dared to offend your sensibilities by naming four of the most influential books of the last century.
A fine collection of cynical drivel (IMnshO). If they must read scifi...
Firstly, that wasn't a list of sci-fi novels. It was a short list of some critically acclaimed dystopian novels. "Cynical drivel"? Well, you're entitled to your thoughts (by the way, good luck getting kids to read either The Iliad or Odyssey; I know adults educated to doctorate level who struggle with those) but not many would agree with you there.
Personally, I like hitting kids with the idea that shit happens and that life isn't all sweetness and light through reading. Usually it makes them think, about their lives and the world around them, and I rather kids came away from any experience (even if it's "just" reading a book) having been challenged in some way, no matter how big or small, instead of just looking for their next momentary distraction.
The irony of me having an idealistic view of reading about imperfect worlds hasn't been missed.
Personally, I found the Harry Potter books to be unchallenging and unstimulating.
Perhaps that's because I wasn't a teenager (or even a pre-teen) when I first read one of them, but I doubt that: I still appreciate the Chronicles of Narnia, even though they're of the same genre and also aimed at young children. If I had to give a simple explanation, I'd say that JK Rowling isn't as good a writer as CS Lewis, which is why I find myself appreciating the latter but not the former.
Clearly though, Rowling's writing is good enough to satisfy millions of kids (and adults) around the world, so, sure, give one or two of the books a try: they can't cost that much on eBay and what do you have to lose?
Come on. If there's one thing that you can't accuse Nintendo of it's lacking originality in coming up with new games.
Look at the WarioWare series of games, for example. If WarioWare: Smooth Moves on the Wii isn't an example of "reinventing the entire story behind a game" then, please tell us, what out there is?
As for the Gamecube being a failure, well, if you go by the number of consoles sold then, sure, it wasn't as popular as the PlayStation 2, and was a "failure" but if you use that whacky profit metric that those crazy kids down at Wall Street are so fond of, the Gamecube did quite well.
I've never owned a Nintendo console in my life but it seems that they've made plenty of original games along the way, as well as making plenty of sequels (and let's not forget that sequels can be original too!), and made plenty of money doing it.
So every benchmark that I've seen shows Opera to be demonstrably faster but your PC is some kind of exception to the rule?
If indeed Firefox is notably faster than Opera on your PC, it's more likely that you're not using similar configurations (more cache allocated to one browser than another, etc) when comparing the two.
Use whatever browser that makes you happy, but one thing is certain, Firefox is not faster than Opera.
Excuse me for pointing it out, but Firefox was far from being the first browser to feature tabbed browsing.
Opera was bringing tabbed browsing to the masses, as well as a host of other features that most people mistake as being Firefox "innovations", before Firefox was even conceived. Firefox was merely playing catch-up.
In almost every way, Opera is a better browser. It's smaller, faster, more polished, etc, but purely because it's not open source that makes it somehow "unworthy" in some people's eyes.
The irony of ignoring a superior alternative to MSIE 6 or 7 just because it's not OSS seems to be lost on many. It's like complaining that the seat on your bike isn't 100 percent waterproof so you get a wet backside when you cycle in a thunderstorm.
Just about every speed benchmark for graphical browsers will have Opera at the top.
Install both, clear any disk caches if you've got one or both installed already and then browse a few pages to see for yourself. Then, close both down, open up those pages again, do some refreshes, navigate forward and backward through a site a few times and then tell us which is faster.
The answer is going to be Opera.
Sorry if this doesn't fit into your "Firefox must be faster" view of the world but the stopwatch doesn't lie.
The author seems to live in a "fanboi la-la land" world where there are only two web browsers, Firefox and MSIE, and his whole article is based upon that ignorance of alternatives.
There are, as others have pointed out, smaller, faster browsers than Firefox. Opera consistently beats all its rivals in speed tests, on older as well as newer hardware.
I appreciate that everybody has their personal preferences but the author is clearly blind if he can't see the alternatives available out there. For a technology journalist to be so ignorant about the technology that he's discussing is unforgiveable.
Yeah, the internet is one of the last things Africa needs.
I'd say that Social, Political, and Agricultural reforms are FAR more important to the average African than the good old WWW.
Africa is living proof that imposition of a foreign structure and hierarchy followed by throwing fists-full of aid money is not enough to improve the lives of a people.
Interesting viewpoint. A few points immediately sprang to mind though:
Firstly, access to better information via the internet can play its part in improving social, political and agricultural conditions in Africa.
Granted, there are other problems, such as infrastructure, to overcome but that doesn't negate the benefits that internet connectivity could provide to developing world nations.
Secondly, the "imposition of a foreign structure and hierarchy followed by throwing fists-full of aid money" can work... in the right circumstances. West Germany after the Second World War is one example. Clearly today's Iraq isn't though.
The keys would seem to be honesty and acceptance: if you genuinely care about improving the situation on the ground and can convince people of your sincerity then you can make huge changes for the better. However, if your help is poisoned by political or economic rhetoric then you're doomed to failure and/or accusations of attempting to profit from the situation.
Forcing HIV/AIDs-related programmes to teach abstinence rather than educating them about the benefits of using a condom, even though you know that the abstinence message will fail but that condoms will save lives, because of religious pressure is crazy.
Similarly, pushing African mothers to use powdered baby milk rather than encouraging them to breastfeed, which is a healthier option, just to sell more of your product is exploitative at best.
Put another way, if developed nations really wants to help less fortunate nations then perhaps thinking about themselves and what's in it for them should disappear from the equation.
Lastly, Africa is a pretty big place. It's not homogenous, and what might be a problem in one place might have already been solved somewhere else. Anything that helps disseminate knowledge can only be a good thing, especially in rural areas.
Imagine how much and how quickly you can find help online when your PC's playing up compared to how little and how slowly you can find it offline. Now imagine that information on something more essential to your everyday life, like basic healthcare advice, how to repair a vital piece of machinery, or how to save a crop.
Even something as simple as knowing what the average shopper 10,000 miles away will pay for your produce could make a huge difference: knowing that might help you secure a fairer, more beneficial price for your harvest, which in turn could dramatically improve the standard of life for you and everybody around you.
You're making an incorrect assumption here, namely that notebooks make up the majority of PC sales at the moment. In fact, the opposite is true.
The summary mentions that notebooks will become the majority of US sales later this year, but the rest of the numbers in the summary refer to worldwide numbers.
The article itself will tell you this: notebooks sales are predicted to overtake their desktop counterparts worldwide in 2010.
So, for now, your conclusion that worldwide desktop sales are falling is erroneous, as it's based upon assumptions that aren't entirely correct.
But, to be fair to you, the grandparent poster's conclusion wasn't 100 percent correct either.
If, as you say, we don't know then how can the AC to whom I replied assert that he was fired?
The facts, as agreed by Microsoft, EA and Peter Moore himself have stated are that he resigned. If nobody directly involved has anything different to say then how can someone claim with any degree of certainty that he was fired?
There are so many inaccuracies in this post that I don't know where to start.
1. The 360 is selling poorly? Look at the user base.
2. Peter Moore was fired? Uh, no, he resigned, and he received a 7-figure golden hello from EA to compensate him for lost earnings at Microsoft. Why would EA give him over $1 million if he was on the street?
3. Execs sell shares all the time. At a company the size of Microsoft, I'd be shocked if you could find a single month in the last 10 years where one exec or another wasn't selling off some of his stock.
4. HD-DVD is dead? Most people don't even know what HD-DVD or Blu-Ray are but you're ready to declare a winner already? What else can you see in your crystal ball?
And those are just the ones that jump out. Almost every statement that you've made is challengable on some level.
I'm sure that most people who know Microsoft will tell you that losing money on Xbox in generations 1 and 2 probably doesn't faze them at all. Screwing it up the first time, making a semi-decent product the second time and then getting it right on the third attempt is practically a tradition at Microsoft.
Right now, this generation of consoles looks like being a big win for Nintendo, with Sony and Microsoft slugging it out for second place. But write off Microsoft at your peril.
Allow a government to get away with as much shit as this current Bush administration has been allowed to, from Guantanamo Bay onwards, and this is what you get.
I guarantee you that if people had kicked up more of a fuss about the rights of POWs (they're POWs, denying that they're POWs and calling them detainees is just an easy way to avoid giving them basic rights) at Gitmo then you wouldn't be seeing stuff like this today.
Right now, the winners in the "War on Terror" are Al Qaeda (they have what they wanted: open conflict with the West) and oil companies. The losers are average citizens, not just in the West but in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the occupied territories, etc.
It's not too late to change things. But it probably is too late to leave it to others and just hope for the best. Get out the pen, get out the paper and write to your representatives. It's your government, so take it back.
Just a suggestion, but you might want to try Opera. It's smaller and faster than its rivals.
But, as others have pointed out, MSIE is known for not reporting memory usage correctly, so it's very hard to make like for like memory usage comparisons based solely on the numbers reported by Task Manager.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't we wait until the first Service Pack has been out for a few months before talking about how good or bad Vista adoption has been?
I don't know about you, but I'm not shy about telling people that waiting until Vista SP1 has been tried and tested is a prudent move.
I would consider myself an agnostic that tends towards atheism.
I had a mixed faith upbringing that included going to Sunday School on a regular basis. However, I was always skeptical of religion, even from an early age.
If I had known the word, I would have described myself as an atheist from before the age of five or six - I gave up believing in the existance of a God (or Gods) around the same time that I had given up believing in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy.
The religous allegories that run through the Chronicles of Narnia didn't really colour my enjoyment of the books then, just as the religious allegory doesn't colour my enjoyment of The Green Mile now.
Go ahead, label it as flamebait.
Somehow, I doubt that that would happen if it had been Bill Gates or the CEO of RealNetworks who was asking people to install spyware. Talk about double standards.
I guess Slashdot still hasn't grown beyond being CmdrTaco's little personality cult.
I think you lost the meaning. He doesn't expect anyone to install it. He asked to make a point.
I think you missed the point. He asked people to install it. Admittedly, he said that he didn't expect most readers to do it, but he did ask.
In his editorial, CmdrTaco admits that Alexa is spyware... yet he's asking you to install it.
Why? So he can prove a point to his boss, sales guys, advertisers and journalists?
Yep. CmdrTaco would prefer that you compromise your privacy and security to help him make a point to others.
If I hadn't have seen it with my own eyes then I never would have believed that "the guy in charge" of one of the largest OSS-related sites on the web would have been reduced to publicly pimping spyware just to win an argument.
Incredible.
As I've said, Rowling's writing is good enough to keep millions of kids and adults happy but I find that I'm not one of them. I'm completely comfortable with that.
However, I do find it strange that you should feel that I (or anybody else reading this who feels as I do) might have a "road to Damascus" conversion if only they're willing to wade through a few thousand below par pages "to get to the good stuff"... for which you've just provided what look like a few key spoilers.
Seriously, I'm happy that other people enjoy something that I don't, but why is it that there are some people who can't (or won't) appreciate that there are people out there who don't find the same enjoyment in something that they do?
Yeah, I saw this article and thought of that story too.
Man-eating badgers. How nuts do you have to be to think that a badger could eat a man?
Everybody knows that a small child aged four to five years old, six at the most, is their limit.
There you go again, putting words into the mouths of others. Is there some reason why you might be better informed than I am about how I feel and what I think?
I don't see why something has to be read at a certain age. I don't see why you have to be at least x years old to read 1984 and I don't see why you can't read Dr Suess if you're older than y. If you can read it, and can enjoy it, then I say go for it.
I'm not sure what you're offended about here. I've said that I didn't like something but acknowledged that millions of others do: does my not liking it offend you that much? Is it that important to you that I enjoy it?
"Lowest common denominator"? Assuming that "people who read [Harry Potter novels aren't capable of reading anything better"? Where did I say any of that? Where are you getting this from? From where I'm sitting, it's not me who's making the assumptions here...
My point wasn't that kids should specifically read the books that I mentioned, it was that kids (and even adults!) should read more books. I thought it was clear but, apparently, it wasn't to everyone. Mea culpa.
That's a valid argument, of course.
I certainly don't claim to be a literary authority and I'm far from being a published author myself, hence my reluctance to be overly critical about the quality of JK Rowling's work. Having said that, plenty of critics have had their say about it and it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that she's yet to win most of them over.
One thing that I do find strange is the inability of people to take my lack of praise as an overt display of hatred. When I say "even if it was something that I thought was junk...", it seems that people can't, or won't, read that as it should be read ("something that I thought was junk...", and prefer instead to read it as something else instead ("something that is junk").
I've gone out of my way to show that I realise that my opinion doesn't matter ("Personally, I found...", "which is why I find myself appreciating...", "Rowling's writing is good enough to satisfy millions...") yet people are happy to assume my reluctance to join them in their unbridled enjoyment of a series of books as some sort of personal insult to both them and the author.
I'd love to have Rowling's talent, because I do recognise that that talent is both considerable and appreciated, but I'm not going to lie to myself and pretend that I'm one of the millions that loves it just to make myself more popular.
Well, not being American, I can't claim to know how old a 1st or even 7th grade child is, but I can tell you that saying that something isn't "supposed" to be read by someone until they hit a certain age is just silly.
I read the Chronicles of Narnia at about age five or six, I read 1984 when I was around 11, and I re-read them at later ages, too. Of course I picked up on aspects that I missed first time around when I looked at them again, but that doesn't mean that I didn't learn anything during the initial readings.
And as for the average age of a Harry Potter reader, well, JK Rowling's readers have aged in the last ten years so the kids that picked up Harry Potter during that time are now older: I remember the news coverage of the previous book's release included a lot of stories about university students holding Potter parties, etc while they waited for their fixes: if a university student can't grasp Fahrenheit 451 then Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Lastly, I think you're over-optimistic about how well read the average adult is these days. I bet you can't find more than 1 in 5 people at work who've read one or more of the books that I've listed. Heck, most people couldn't even name one of the authors of one of those books.
By the way, at least one of those books that I mentioned is younger than 50 years old. And, not that it's relevant, there are plenty of good books that I can name that are less than 20, or even 10, years old. But thanks for calling me a jerk and writing me off because I dared to offend your sensibilities by naming four of the most influential books of the last century.
A fine collection of cynical drivel (IMnshO). If they must read scifi...
Firstly, that wasn't a list of sci-fi novels. It was a short list of some critically acclaimed dystopian novels. "Cynical drivel"? Well, you're entitled to your thoughts (by the way, good luck getting kids to read either The Iliad or Odyssey; I know adults educated to doctorate level who struggle with those) but not many would agree with you there.
Personally, I like hitting kids with the idea that shit happens and that life isn't all sweetness and light through reading. Usually it makes them think, about their lives and the world around them, and I rather kids came away from any experience (even if it's "just" reading a book) having been challenged in some way, no matter how big or small, instead of just looking for their next momentary distraction.
The irony of me having an idealistic view of reading about imperfect worlds hasn't been missed.
Personally, I found the Harry Potter books to be unchallenging and unstimulating.
Perhaps that's because I wasn't a teenager (or even a pre-teen) when I first read one of them, but I doubt that: I still appreciate the Chronicles of Narnia, even though they're of the same genre and also aimed at young children. If I had to give a simple explanation, I'd say that JK Rowling isn't as good a writer as CS Lewis, which is why I find myself appreciating the latter but not the former.
Clearly though, Rowling's writing is good enough to satisfy millions of kids (and adults) around the world, so, sure, give one or two of the books a try: they can't cost that much on eBay and what do you have to lose?
I thought it was nice that something, even if it was something that I thought was junk, could get kids reading for five minutes.
Now, if only we could find a way to make them read books like 1984, Brave New World, Catch 22 and Fahrenheit 451...
Come on. If there's one thing that you can't accuse Nintendo of it's lacking originality in coming up with new games.
Look at the WarioWare series of games, for example. If WarioWare: Smooth Moves on the Wii isn't an example of "reinventing the entire story behind a game" then, please tell us, what out there is?
As for the Gamecube being a failure, well, if you go by the number of consoles sold then, sure, it wasn't as popular as the PlayStation 2, and was a "failure" but if you use that whacky profit metric that those crazy kids down at Wall Street are so fond of, the Gamecube did quite well.
I've never owned a Nintendo console in my life but it seems that they've made plenty of original games along the way, as well as making plenty of sequels (and let's not forget that sequels can be original too!), and made plenty of money doing it.
So every benchmark that I've seen shows Opera to be demonstrably faster but your PC is some kind of exception to the rule?
If indeed Firefox is notably faster than Opera on your PC, it's more likely that you're not using similar configurations (more cache allocated to one browser than another, etc) when comparing the two.
Use whatever browser that makes you happy, but one thing is certain, Firefox is not faster than Opera.
Excuse me for pointing it out, but Firefox was far from being the first browser to feature tabbed browsing.
Opera was bringing tabbed browsing to the masses, as well as a host of other features that most people mistake as being Firefox "innovations", before Firefox was even conceived. Firefox was merely playing catch-up.
In almost every way, Opera is a better browser. It's smaller, faster, more polished, etc, but purely because it's not open source that makes it somehow "unworthy" in some people's eyes.
The irony of ignoring a superior alternative to MSIE 6 or 7 just because it's not OSS seems to be lost on many. It's like complaining that the seat on your bike isn't 100 percent waterproof so you get a wet backside when you cycle in a thunderstorm.
Opera is faster than Firefox.
Just about every speed benchmark for graphical browsers will have Opera at the top.
Install both, clear any disk caches if you've got one or both installed already and then browse a few pages to see for yourself. Then, close both down, open up those pages again, do some refreshes, navigate forward and backward through a site a few times and then tell us which is faster.
The answer is going to be Opera.
Sorry if this doesn't fit into your "Firefox must be faster" view of the world but the stopwatch doesn't lie.
Frankly, the article is useless.
The author seems to live in a "fanboi la-la land" world where there are only two web browsers, Firefox and MSIE, and his whole article is based upon that ignorance of alternatives.
There are, as others have pointed out, smaller, faster browsers than Firefox. Opera consistently beats all its rivals in speed tests, on older as well as newer hardware.
I appreciate that everybody has their personal preferences but the author is clearly blind if he can't see the alternatives available out there. For a technology journalist to be so ignorant about the technology that he's discussing is unforgiveable.
Yeah, the internet is one of the last things Africa needs.
I'd say that Social, Political, and Agricultural reforms are FAR more important to the average African than the good old WWW.
Africa is living proof that imposition of a foreign structure and hierarchy followed by throwing fists-full of aid money is not enough to improve the lives of a people.
Interesting viewpoint. A few points immediately sprang to mind though:
Firstly, access to better information via the internet can play its part in improving social, political and agricultural conditions in Africa.
Granted, there are other problems, such as infrastructure, to overcome but that doesn't negate the benefits that internet connectivity could provide to developing world nations.
Secondly, the "imposition of a foreign structure and hierarchy followed by throwing fists-full of aid money" can work... in the right circumstances. West Germany after the Second World War is one example. Clearly today's Iraq isn't though.
The keys would seem to be honesty and acceptance: if you genuinely care about improving the situation on the ground and can convince people of your sincerity then you can make huge changes for the better. However, if your help is poisoned by political or economic rhetoric then you're doomed to failure and/or accusations of attempting to profit from the situation.
Forcing HIV/AIDs-related programmes to teach abstinence rather than educating them about the benefits of using a condom, even though you know that the abstinence message will fail but that condoms will save lives, because of religious pressure is crazy.
Similarly, pushing African mothers to use powdered baby milk rather than encouraging them to breastfeed, which is a healthier option, just to sell more of your product is exploitative at best.
Put another way, if developed nations really wants to help less fortunate nations then perhaps thinking about themselves and what's in it for them should disappear from the equation.
Lastly, Africa is a pretty big place. It's not homogenous, and what might be a problem in one place might have already been solved somewhere else. Anything that helps disseminate knowledge can only be a good thing, especially in rural areas.
Imagine how much and how quickly you can find help online when your PC's playing up compared to how little and how slowly you can find it offline. Now imagine that information on something more essential to your everyday life, like basic healthcare advice, how to repair a vital piece of machinery, or how to save a crop.
Even something as simple as knowing what the average shopper 10,000 miles away will pay for your produce could make a huge difference: knowing that might help you secure a fairer, more beneficial price for your harvest, which in turn could dramatically improve the standard of life for you and everybody around you.
The possibilities are limitless.
You're making an incorrect assumption here, namely that notebooks make up the majority of PC sales at the moment. In fact, the opposite is true.
The summary mentions that notebooks will become the majority of US sales later this year, but the rest of the numbers in the summary refer to worldwide numbers.
The article itself will tell you this: notebooks sales are predicted to overtake their desktop counterparts worldwide in 2010.
So, for now, your conclusion that worldwide desktop sales are falling is erroneous, as it's based upon assumptions that aren't entirely correct.
But, to be fair to you, the grandparent poster's conclusion wasn't 100 percent correct either.
If, as you say, we don't know then how can the AC to whom I replied assert that he was fired?
The facts, as agreed by Microsoft, EA and Peter Moore himself have stated are that he resigned. If nobody directly involved has anything different to say then how can someone claim with any degree of certainty that he was fired?
There are so many inaccuracies in this post that I don't know where to start.
1. The 360 is selling poorly? Look at the user base.
2. Peter Moore was fired? Uh, no, he resigned, and he received a 7-figure golden hello from EA to compensate him for lost earnings at Microsoft. Why would EA give him over $1 million if he was on the street?
3. Execs sell shares all the time. At a company the size of Microsoft, I'd be shocked if you could find a single month in the last 10 years where one exec or another wasn't selling off some of his stock.
4. HD-DVD is dead? Most people don't even know what HD-DVD or Blu-Ray are but you're ready to declare a winner already? What else can you see in your crystal ball?
And those are just the ones that jump out. Almost every statement that you've made is challengable on some level.
I'm sure that most people who know Microsoft will tell you that losing money on Xbox in generations 1 and 2 probably doesn't faze them at all. Screwing it up the first time, making a semi-decent product the second time and then getting it right on the third attempt is practically a tradition at Microsoft.
Right now, this generation of consoles looks like being a big win for Nintendo, with Sony and Microsoft slugging it out for second place. But write off Microsoft at your peril.
Did you bother reading the next paragraph?
I hate to say it but what did you expect?
Allow a government to get away with as much shit as this current Bush administration has been allowed to, from Guantanamo Bay onwards, and this is what you get.
I guarantee you that if people had kicked up more of a fuss about the rights of POWs (they're POWs, denying that they're POWs and calling them detainees is just an easy way to avoid giving them basic rights) at Gitmo then you wouldn't be seeing stuff like this today.
Right now, the winners in the "War on Terror" are Al Qaeda (they have what they wanted: open conflict with the West) and oil companies. The losers are average citizens, not just in the West but in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the occupied territories, etc.
It's not too late to change things. But it probably is too late to leave it to others and just hope for the best. Get out the pen, get out the paper and write to your representatives. It's your government, so take it back.
Just a suggestion, but you might want to try Opera. It's smaller and faster than its rivals.
But, as others have pointed out, MSIE is known for not reporting memory usage correctly, so it's very hard to make like for like memory usage comparisons based solely on the numbers reported by Task Manager.