Sounds much like the Kensington Runestone. Back around the turn of last century, the Scandinavian immigrants in MN were always digging up various Viking artifacts which 'proved' that they had some moral claim to the land.
The most prominent being a large stone with a runic account of a battle with the natives in the 1300s. It's generally considered to be a very good fake, but there's still a few credible people who believe that it's real.
Anyway, it's a particular interest of mine, so I'd be interested in any more information that you might have about these genealogies -- nutscrapesucks (at) yahoo. Thanks.
Try the built-in SMIME tools in Outlook, and then get back to us about how "flawless" PGP is...
PGP's Outlook Plugin sorta works, sure, but it tends to bork on HTML mail and attachments, doesn't prove UI information about encryption/signing, and requires all sorts of external windows to pop-up, produces wierd error messages, and sometimes just goes south for no reason.
Woefully, this is as good as it gets for PGP (at least on Windows), which is probably a big reason it never really caught on. And this is from someone who really wanted to use it and just got sick of all the bugs.
In my experience, when you have seemlessly integrated encryption (like SMIME in Outlook or the Lotus Notes stuff), even the lusers start to use it with glee.
Note that the bundling of IE is only *part* of the issue at hand.
The other part is the whole "cutting off the air supply" thing. Microsoft engaged in exclusionary deals with OEMs and ISPs to prevent Netscape from distrbuting their software to the channel. (Recall the story of MS threating to pull Compaq's right to ship Windows because ONE crappy Presario model came with a Netscape icon on the desktop?)
In reality, this was far more damaging than bundling IE -- Microsoft had 50% browser marketshare before Windows 98 even shipped. The problem is that you can't go back in time to fix this, but you could prevent them from doing the same to media players or whatever comes up in the future.
There's a disconnect between the what the "major components of the operating system" cause SAYS and what they MEAN.
If you read the FSF GPL FAQ, they make it very clear that they think the VC++ Compiler and distributable libraries are OK to use with GPL projects. Great, but that's not what the licence says in black-and-white - the plain fact is that VC isn't distributed with the OS.
So, does the unstated "VC Exception" extend to non vendor compilers like Borland's? How about Sun Java on Windows? Big big big gray area there.
If GNU was being intellectually honest, they would release a licence patch to solve this problem. However, a big part of GPL politics is that the licence is open to a certain amount of interpretation and Stallman/FSF wants to be in the position when there are interpeting the scrolls of wisdom for us plebs. This give them the power to create conflicts when it suits them (KDE and the Qt libs) or ignore them when convienent (MFC.DLL), or go back and forth depending on which side of the bed they woke up on (Java).
Why not provide a reward for providing content? Something like 500 'free' pageviews for each net positive moderation or story submission. (Although that could be abused, it's just ads.)
I should have pointed out that my scenario never would have happened. While Linux was climbing on the radar, Sun was too busy selling high profit boxes to doomed dotcoms to pay attention to the greater market trend.
Now they are doomed themselves. Like every other stupid midrange company, they will cling to their high profit segments while their market contracts down to nearly nothing. My point is that the big high-profit box is always surrounded by smaller low-profit boxes, and that Sun could have had the whole deal instead of ghettoizing themselves as Oracle-only hardware.
As for your armchair CEO suggestion -- I did run Solaris x86 on a HCL PC, and it was far better than Linux (RedHat 5.0) at the time. I'm sure that Sun thought similarly -- why would they support a pile of crap like Linux when they have their own solid and expensive OS? Right now their Linux Strategy just reeks of the doomed plans of SGI.
"The problem with this idea is that there is no incentive for PC makers to put in copy protection for movies."
Sure there is -- PC sales are in the toliet and the OEMs are desparate for any applicaiton which moves machines. Machine X which can connect to might have more percieved value than Machine Y which can not.
Furthermore, as you note, margins are tiny and a MPAA subsidy of $100/box could make a huge difference in the profitability. (This would be like the ISP subsidies which are common.)
But I suspect that the greater aim of the MPAA is to generate an alternative to programmable PCs and replace them with closed media terminals (such as settop boxes). Due to economies of scale, these terminals will be based on standard PC hardware, and therefore the DRM hardware standards are required if the PC companies want to play ball in that market. After all Gateway could care less if you buy a $500 PC or a $500 Media Consumption Terminal.
One of these days I'll get around to trying one of the test builds, although the current release is too painfully slow to use on my poor old PowerBook 333, so it's not a big priority.
I'm sure they can create a product that does great on the current mostly HTML3.2 WWW -- I just think that it will be difficult to match Mozilla and IE in support for next gen standards.
don't ever expect to see an X86 version of Solaris (as a server or workstation) again. It is a pity...
If Sun would have shown some interest in Solaris x86 a few years ago -- say focusing on driver support, adding Apache, Perl, and GNU tools, and adding a PPP dialer, I think they would have done quite well. Instead of all the Linux Hype we've seen, we would have had Solaris Hype.
Sun might have even stolen server market share from MS, instead of fighting a defensive battle - and still made lots of money on support and upsizing to Sparc hardware.
Of course now Linux is so established that the question always was "Why run Solaris x86 when you can run Linux?", but if Sun had played their cards right it easily could have been "Why run Linux when you can run Real UNIX?"
"If they could just finish the JS and CSS support, OmniWeb could also make a great default browser."
I'm sorry, but that ain't going to happen any time soon. OminWeb has some great end-user features, but their HTML engine is essentially roughly at the Netscape 3.0 level. The _only_ thing it has going for it in the page rendering department is the Fuzzy Text. Considering it took Netscape, a much larger company, many years to develop a renderer that meets modern specs, I don't think we will see anything mindblowing out of Omni soon.
A much more interesting project is Chimera, which is a Mozilla fork to (really) support Aqua. Personally, I would have liked to see the smart folks at Omni get involved something like this under the NPL, but instead their shareware plans will probably be obliviated.
(And while all of these browsers are great, I doubt IE is going away anytime soon, because it's defaultness was pretty much the cornerstone of the Apple-MS deal.)
Well there might not be a legal definition of software, but copyright law does define a "computer program" to be "a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result"
I would figure that any spreadsheet that uses formulas or macros would fall under this definition.
One of the things I have long wished for would be if Microsoft added MS Office-style menus/toolbars to the base Windows API. (If you haven't reall dug into Office, you have nearly complete control over all menus, toolbars, and keybindings, and it's been that way since Office 4.2.)
One thing nice about the Mac is that they app guidelines state that a program should be able to start without it's preference file (and should create new preferences with default vaules).
Most Windows apps will croak if they can't find their magic registry settings (or INI file, etc). All because the reg process is part of the installer and not part of the application itself. It would be nice if all apps worked like PuTTY!
The copyright on characters expires with the expiration of the first copyrighted work containing that character.
If that's true that means that the characters of "Popeye", "Superman", "Tom and Jerry", "Daffy Duck", "Felix the Cat" and others are now in the Public Domain.
All fo these characters starred in cartoons which didn't have their copyrights renewed and are now in the Public Domain. http://www.retrofilm.com/cartoons/. Somehow I doubt that I could make a film or a comic book of Superman battling Popeye without having a ton of lawyers come down on me.
I came from an enviromnent were if someone asked if they should use *nix, the answer was no.
I've seen that a bit too, and the main reason is usually not Unix itself, but the sort of people that you need hire to maintain Unix systems. They're generally expensive elitiest hard-to-replace assholes, and that fact has cause a certain repugnance against the entire platform.
Everyone's dancing around the core issue here, which is that a 99 conf file formats, symlinks forests, and jerryrigged scripts all basically add up to a job protection contract for the Unix Administrator, and that increases the overall cost of the system by quite a bit, and ultimately has crippled Unix's adoption in many markets.
The fact is that there's a large number of normal LAN admin tasks that don't require detailed understanding of the system. From a managerial standpoint, hiring cheap, dull people that aren't that interested in "progressing" to do that sort of work is just fine.
The Unix Guru needs to understand that rather than boobytrapping his box like the Last Mohican, that if Unix becomes signicantly cheaper to own and maintain, the installed base will explode and so will the market for his Guru services. Then instead of adding users and maintaining the print queue, he can focus on the large scale planning and architecture.
(You'll note that my rant hasn't mentioned the magic "MCSE" word yet - but look at the organization of large NT networks. One or two "gurus" that understand ActiveDirectory and other archtiectual stuff, and lots of low level guys performing the reboot duties.)
"They are doing much better under Steve but go back 3 or 4 years and they had few models that were profitable overall."
As you point out, their inventory and manufacturing control was horrible -- But the biggest reason for Apple mispredicting demand was their own confusing product lineup.
For example: In one particular period of time Apple was making the 4400, the 5300, the 6500, the 7300, the 7600, the 8600, and the 9600. Furthermore many of these models had 3 or 4 clones. Most of these machines had unique cases and motherboards. Nobody knew if a 300Mhz 603e was faster or slower than a 200Mhz 604e.
Now it's relatively easy to predict the total market for consumer Macs (iMac) and pro Macs (G4 tower), but try to segement that market a dozen ways, and then try it. It's better under Steve because he did what the previous 2 CEOs promised to do and did not (or could not) -- simplify the model line-up.
That division might have lost money, but IBM makes an enormous amount of money from Big Blue shops that use IBM as a single source provider. They keep selling PCs because they don't want that customer base picking up the phone and finding out how badly IBM has been overcharging them over the years.
To clarify -- Corporate campaign contributions are illegal under federal law. In addition, individuals can only contribute $2000 or so (an amount that hasn't changed since the 70s). That's "hard money".
However, party contributions are less regulated. So a corporation could give $1M to the GOP or Dems and tell them "run commercials to elect your guy". That's "soft money" -- it bypasses the intent of the old campaign laws.
Now, if you ban party donations, the corporations will just funnel that $1M into other advocacy groups that are less democratic than the party systems. The McCain bill trys to limit that but it's probably unconstitutional.
As to the political situation, the real GOP advantage is in "soft" money. The hard money limits are so low that either party has no problem maximizing them, and there's lots of limousine libs. The Dems probably have a broader base of support, but the funding is a lot more disparate than the GOP's corporate front group pals. In addition, the unions contribute an enormous amount of labor, not money.
So, yes, the Dems probably get a huge advantage out of campaing finance reform. But isn't that the whole point? -- to shift power from corporations back to the people?
The nature and structure of both political parties would change if this passed, but the GOP's changes would be far more radical. They would need to rely more heavily on their populist base -- primarily Christian Moral Conservatives, and less on big business. That move would drive a certain faction out of the party. Meanwhile the Dems deal with corporations mostly because they have to. They'd love to go back to classic new deal politics.
It's a good point that Microsoft has historically been a pretty pro-piracy company.
Windows and MS Office got in the door at major corporations basically because the users said "fuck this DOS stuff" and swapped floppies. Eventually DOS/Novell-loving MIS guys gave in and supported Windows and got legal.
The question is, how long should MS support this sort of activity? No doubt there's many small businesses who have been running entirely on pirated software for 10 years now (or more).
The thing is, MS isn't the old democratic "a computer on every desk" company that it used to be. They've tasted a bit of the enterprise revenue stream, and they like it. Much like IBM did with OS/2, they can tell Joe Sixpack to fuck himself while they chase the big accounts. If they can make more money that way, it doesn't matter if they are the "standard" or not.
Enterprise level system administration and other support costs will probably be not so dramatically less than either UNIX/RISC or Windows desktop deployments.
And that's by far the biggest cost in the desktop market. If a large company is paying (say) $12,000 per year per desktop in TCO, does knocking a couple hundred dollars off in licencing fees really make a difference? This is assuming that you are still paying the big per seat fees to your ERP and RDBMS (etc) vendors.
Also, migrations are traditionally very expensive and difficult to manage. If it isn't providing significant new functionality, it's probably not worth the time and effort, because the ROI is so far out. And you could argue that Linux is now significantly less functional in a desktop role.
(Apologies for going off pointy-haired here - Just trying to point out that there's big factors affecting the fate of Desktop Linux besides the piddling little MS Tax.)
Don't forget inflation! Factor that in and the game cost is about the same today as it was back in the early 80s. ($30-$50 was a significant bunch of lawnmowing for me back in the day.)
And the consoles were significantly more expensive. A new system cost about $250, which is roughly $450 in modern $s. Nowdays the price of entry is much lower, which is probably why home video gaming is a much larger market than it was even at the peak back in 1983.
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Sounds much like the Kensington Runestone. Back around the turn of last century, the Scandinavian immigrants in MN were always digging up various Viking artifacts which 'proved' that they had some moral claim to the land.
The most prominent being a large stone with a runic account of a battle with the natives in the 1300s. It's generally considered to be a very good fake, but there's still a few credible people who believe that it's real.
Anyway, it's a particular interest of mine, so I'd be interested in any more information that you might have about these genealogies -- nutscrapesucks (at) yahoo. Thanks.
Try the built-in SMIME tools in Outlook, and then get back to us about how "flawless" PGP is...
PGP's Outlook Plugin sorta works, sure, but it tends to bork on HTML mail and attachments, doesn't prove UI information about encryption/signing, and requires all sorts of external windows to pop-up, produces wierd error messages, and sometimes just goes south for no reason.
Woefully, this is as good as it gets for PGP (at least on Windows), which is probably a big reason it never really caught on. And this is from someone who really wanted to use it and just got sick of all the bugs.
In my experience, when you have seemlessly integrated encryption (like SMIME in Outlook or the Lotus Notes stuff), even the lusers start to use it with glee.
Note that the bundling of IE is only *part* of the issue at hand.
The other part is the whole "cutting off the air supply" thing. Microsoft engaged in exclusionary deals with OEMs and ISPs to prevent Netscape from distrbuting their software to the channel. (Recall the story of MS threating to pull Compaq's right to ship Windows because ONE crappy Presario model came with a Netscape icon on the desktop?)
In reality, this was far more damaging than bundling IE -- Microsoft had 50% browser marketshare before Windows 98 even shipped. The problem is that you can't go back in time to fix this, but you could prevent them from doing the same to media players or whatever comes up in the future.
There's a disconnect between the what the "major components of the operating system" cause SAYS and what they MEAN.
If you read the FSF GPL FAQ, they make it very clear that they think the VC++ Compiler and distributable libraries are OK to use with GPL projects. Great, but that's not what the licence says in black-and-white - the plain fact is that VC isn't distributed with the OS.
So, does the unstated "VC Exception" extend to non vendor compilers like Borland's? How about Sun Java on Windows? Big big big gray area there.
If GNU was being intellectually honest, they would release a licence patch to solve this problem. However, a big part of GPL politics is that the licence is open to a certain amount of interpretation and Stallman/FSF wants to be in the position when there are interpeting the scrolls of wisdom for us plebs. This give them the power to create conflicts when it suits them (KDE and the Qt libs) or ignore them when convienent (MFC.DLL), or go back and forth depending on which side of the bed they woke up on (Java).
Why not provide a reward for providing content? Something like 500 'free' pageviews for each net positive moderation or story submission. (Although that could be abused, it's just ads.)
I don't think it's absurd to think that Dell is paying $20 or $25 dollars for Windows when they buy 10,000 copies.
If anyone here recalls Obi-Wan Raymond and the Windows Refund Day hullabaloo, they might recall this story: Emachines give $26 refund for Windows Return
I should have pointed out that my scenario never would have happened. While Linux was climbing on the radar, Sun was too busy selling high profit boxes to doomed dotcoms to pay attention to the greater market trend.
Now they are doomed themselves. Like every other stupid midrange company, they will cling to their high profit segments while their market contracts down to nearly nothing. My point is that the big high-profit box is always surrounded by smaller low-profit boxes, and that Sun could have had the whole deal instead of ghettoizing themselves as Oracle-only hardware.
As for your armchair CEO suggestion -- I did run Solaris x86 on a HCL PC, and it was far better than Linux (RedHat 5.0) at the time. I'm sure that Sun thought similarly -- why would they support a pile of crap like Linux when they have their own solid and expensive OS? Right now their Linux Strategy just reeks of the doomed plans of SGI.
That should be "Machine X which can connect to Hollywood's Movie Distribution Service might have more percieved value than Machine Y which can not."
(And if they don't fix this f*ing textarea soon, I'm going to create a new account called MozillaSucks.)
"The problem with this idea is that there is no incentive for PC makers to put in copy protection for movies."
Sure there is -- PC sales are in the toliet and the OEMs are desparate for any applicaiton which moves machines. Machine X which can connect to might have more percieved value than Machine Y which can not.
Furthermore, as you note, margins are tiny and a MPAA subsidy of $100/box could make a huge difference in the profitability. (This would be like the ISP subsidies which are common.)
But I suspect that the greater aim of the MPAA is to generate an alternative to programmable PCs and replace them with closed media terminals (such as settop boxes). Due to economies of scale, these terminals will be based on standard PC hardware, and therefore the DRM hardware standards are required if the PC companies want to play ball in that market. After all Gateway could care less if you buy a $500 PC or a $500 Media Consumption Terminal.
One of these days I'll get around to trying one of the test builds, although the current release is too painfully slow to use on my poor old PowerBook 333, so it's not a big priority.
I'm sure they can create a product that does great on the current mostly HTML3.2 WWW -- I just think that it will be difficult to match Mozilla and IE in support for next gen standards.
don't ever expect to see an X86 version of Solaris (as a server or workstation) again. It is a pity...
If Sun would have shown some interest in Solaris x86 a few years ago -- say focusing on driver support, adding Apache, Perl, and GNU tools, and adding a PPP dialer, I think they would have done quite well. Instead of all the Linux Hype we've seen, we would have had Solaris Hype.
Sun might have even stolen server market share from MS, instead of fighting a defensive battle - and still made lots of money on support and upsizing to Sparc hardware.
Of course now Linux is so established that the question always was "Why run Solaris x86 when you can run Linux?", but if Sun had played their cards right it easily could have been "Why run Linux when you can run Real UNIX?"
"If they could just finish the JS and CSS support, OmniWeb could also make a great default browser."
I'm sorry, but that ain't going to happen any time soon. OminWeb has some great end-user features, but their HTML engine is essentially roughly at the Netscape 3.0 level. The _only_ thing it has going for it in the page rendering department is the Fuzzy Text. Considering it took Netscape, a much larger company, many years to develop a renderer that meets modern specs, I don't think we will see anything mindblowing out of Omni soon.
A much more interesting project is Chimera, which is a Mozilla fork to (really) support Aqua. Personally, I would have liked to see the smart folks at Omni get involved something like this under the NPL, but instead their shareware plans will probably be obliviated.
(And while all of these browsers are great, I doubt IE is going away anytime soon, because it's defaultness was pretty much the cornerstone of the Apple-MS deal.)
Well there might not be a legal definition of software, but copyright law does define a "computer program" to be "a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result"
I would figure that any spreadsheet that uses formulas or macros would fall under this definition.
One of the things I have long wished for would be if Microsoft added MS Office-style menus/toolbars to the base Windows API. (If you haven't reall dug into Office, you have nearly complete control over all menus, toolbars, and keybindings, and it's been that way since Office 4.2.)
One thing nice about the Mac is that they app guidelines state that a program should be able to start without it's preference file (and should create new preferences with default vaules).
Most Windows apps will croak if they can't find their magic registry settings (or INI file, etc). All because the reg process is part of the installer and not part of the application itself. It would be nice if all apps worked like PuTTY!
Doh -- Apologies for the mistargeted comment.
The copyright on characters expires with the expiration of the first copyrighted work containing that character.
If that's true that means that the characters of "Popeye", "Superman", "Tom and Jerry", "Daffy Duck", "Felix the Cat" and others are now in the Public Domain.
All fo these characters starred in cartoons which didn't have their copyrights renewed and are now in the Public Domain. http://www.retrofilm.com/cartoons/. Somehow I doubt that I could make a film or a comic book of Superman battling Popeye without having a ton of lawyers come down on me.
I came from an enviromnent were if someone asked if they should use *nix, the answer was no.
I've seen that a bit too, and the main reason is usually not Unix itself, but the sort of people that you need hire to maintain Unix systems. They're generally expensive elitiest hard-to-replace assholes, and that fact has cause a certain repugnance against the entire platform.
Everyone's dancing around the core issue here, which is that a 99 conf file formats, symlinks forests, and jerryrigged scripts all basically add up to a job protection contract for the Unix Administrator, and that increases the overall cost of the system by quite a bit, and ultimately has crippled Unix's adoption in many markets.
The fact is that there's a large number of normal LAN admin tasks that don't require detailed understanding of the system. From a managerial standpoint, hiring cheap, dull people that aren't that interested in "progressing" to do that sort of work is just fine.
The Unix Guru needs to understand that rather than boobytrapping his box like the Last Mohican, that if Unix becomes signicantly cheaper to own and maintain, the installed base will explode and so will the market for his Guru services. Then instead of adding users and maintaining the print queue, he can focus on the large scale planning and architecture.
(You'll note that my rant hasn't mentioned the magic "MCSE" word yet - but look at the organization of large NT networks. One or two "gurus" that understand ActiveDirectory and other archtiectual stuff, and lots of low level guys performing the reboot duties.)
"They are doing much better under Steve but go back 3 or 4 years and they had few models that were profitable overall."
As you point out, their inventory and manufacturing control was horrible -- But the biggest reason for Apple mispredicting demand was their own confusing product lineup.
For example: In one particular period of time Apple was making the 4400, the 5300, the 6500, the 7300, the 7600, the 8600, and the 9600. Furthermore many of these models had 3 or 4 clones. Most of these machines had unique cases and motherboards. Nobody knew if a 300Mhz 603e was faster or slower than a 200Mhz 604e.
Now it's relatively easy to predict the total market for consumer Macs (iMac) and pro Macs (G4 tower), but try to segement that market a dozen ways, and then try it. It's better under Steve because he did what the previous 2 CEOs promised to do and did not (or could not) -- simplify the model line-up.
That division might have lost money, but IBM makes an enormous amount of money from Big Blue shops that use IBM as a single source provider. They keep selling PCs because they don't want that customer base picking up the phone and finding out how badly IBM has been overcharging them over the years.
To clarify -- Corporate campaign contributions are illegal under federal law. In addition, individuals can only contribute $2000 or so (an amount that hasn't changed since the 70s). That's "hard money".
However, party contributions are less regulated. So a corporation could give $1M to the GOP or Dems and tell them "run commercials to elect your guy". That's "soft money" -- it bypasses the intent of the old campaign laws.
Now, if you ban party donations, the corporations will just funnel that $1M into other advocacy groups that are less democratic than the party systems. The McCain bill trys to limit that but it's probably unconstitutional.
As to the political situation, the real GOP advantage is in "soft" money. The hard money limits are so low that either party has no problem maximizing them, and there's lots of limousine libs. The Dems probably have a broader base of support, but the funding is a lot more disparate than the GOP's corporate front group pals. In addition, the unions contribute an enormous amount of labor, not money.
So, yes, the Dems probably get a huge advantage out of campaing finance reform. But isn't that the whole point? -- to shift power from corporations back to the people?
The nature and structure of both political parties would change if this passed, but the GOP's changes would be far more radical. They would need to rely more heavily on their populist base -- primarily Christian Moral Conservatives, and less on big business. That move would drive a certain faction out of the party. Meanwhile the Dems deal with corporations mostly because they have to. They'd love to go back to classic new deal politics.
It's a good point that Microsoft has historically been a pretty pro-piracy company.
Windows and MS Office got in the door at major corporations basically because the users said "fuck this DOS stuff" and swapped floppies. Eventually DOS/Novell-loving MIS guys gave in and supported Windows and got legal.
The question is, how long should MS support this sort of activity? No doubt there's many small businesses who have been running entirely on pirated software for 10 years now (or more).
The thing is, MS isn't the old democratic "a computer on every desk" company that it used to be. They've tasted a bit of the enterprise revenue stream, and they like it. Much like IBM did with OS/2, they can tell Joe Sixpack to fuck himself while they chase the big accounts. If they can make more money that way, it doesn't matter if they are the "standard" or not.
Maybe it's just my foggy memory, but I seem to recall new carts going for $30-$40, unless there was a sale going on.
The VCS was introduced at $250 and only dropped to $150 after the new 5200 system was released (for $250). Pretty expensive stuff for the day.
Of course, after the big crash in 1984, cheap games could be found very easily! By then I was more interested in girls and beer, however...
Enterprise level system administration and other support costs will probably be not so dramatically less than either UNIX/RISC or Windows desktop deployments.
And that's by far the biggest cost in the desktop market. If a large company is paying (say) $12,000 per year per desktop in TCO, does knocking a couple hundred dollars off in licencing fees really make a difference? This is assuming that you are still paying the big per seat fees to your ERP and RDBMS (etc) vendors.
Also, migrations are traditionally very expensive and difficult to manage. If it isn't providing significant new functionality, it's probably not worth the time and effort, because the ROI is so far out. And you could argue that Linux is now significantly less functional in a desktop role.
(Apologies for going off pointy-haired here - Just trying to point out that there's big factors affecting the fate of Desktop Linux besides the piddling little MS Tax.)
Don't forget inflation! Factor that in and the game cost is about the same today as it was back in the early 80s. ($30-$50 was a significant bunch of lawnmowing for me back in the day.)
And the consoles were significantly more expensive. A new system cost about $250, which is roughly $450 in modern $s. Nowdays the price of entry is much lower, which is probably why home video gaming is a much larger market than it was even at the peak back in 1983.