I had an iPad and it was fine when it was just me using it. When my kid started to get old enough to play games on a tablet I found I wanted something multi-user and with parental controls. I eventually went with the Kindle because of said parental controls. I can leave wireless on and he can do streaming of things without being able to drain my bank account. Let him have the iPad with wireless on and within about 60 seconds he had purchased and downloaded a movie (from flailing about more than from doing it on purpose). While you can lock down an iPad to some extent I found it to be a lot more user friendly and flexible when using the Kindle.
So I think besides the issue(s) that people have talked about already with they bought one and it is still good enough, I think that they are also not really starting to think about families using them. They still want you to buy an iPad for everyone if you secure it which isn't very realistic. Even if the device is 'better' if it is missing something that is crucial to most people they are going to move on. It is suffering from good enough syndrome, cost comparisons, a lack of good multi-user functionality and parental controls far behind their competition.
I have read about these off and on for a few years, but a few years ago they said this standard wasn't really taking root because at these resolutions people were experiencing motion sickness when viewing the images. I wonder if they have been able to do anything to alleviate that in the newer televisions or if that is still going to be an issue.
Schools nowadays deal with a lot of cyber bullying and the like. These students/teachers know who the poster is and who the intended target is in most cases. So there is no anonymity there and people still act like jerks.
I think in reality it is not being anonymous that leads people to be jerks, it is the knowledge that they have no consequences for their actions. The internet seems to be a fine line between no consequences for being a jerk and massive overkill if you piss off someone with the appropriate technical skills (or a stalker I suppose).
Just because anonymous people are jerks does not mean that being a jerk is caused by being anonymous. So really all you are going to do is make it easier to harass people on the internet without really weeding out the people being jerks. So not only is this solution infringing on a lot of rights, real and perceived, it wouldn't even accomplish anything.
You can use PowerShell and plink to write PowerShell scripts. You can login to a router, run commands, go into enable mode and tftp off a backup for instance.
You can also do something semi-dynamic by dumping the output to a script file with PowerShell and using plink to run the commands in the script file.
Not a built-in cmdlet, but you can still accomplish what you want pretty easily.
The cost and list of phones looks very similar to the phone sets that support Microsoft's Exchange Active Sync push technology. Is the lawsuit definitely something to do with Linux or could it just be licensing fees for synchronizing email?
Are there any options that would work for internally hosted solutions (your data center not theirs) that would have support?
I have heard this question multiple times, but one of the requirements for some enterprises is to have support. Do any of these products (or similar, open source or not) that include support?
A lot of compliance audits have requirements that are not OS specific and one of them is having anti-virus (among other things). So a lot of large companies just find it easier to have something that supports all their systems so they don't have to get into an argument on every audit.
Whether it is right or wrong, or a system needs it, isn't the point. Audits can be very expensive and sometimes having those boxes checked can be an easier route to go.
I haven't tried it, but some of the Linux administrators at work just download the add-on from Sysinternals.
It doesn't come with the operating system but it is free, produced by the vendor and most people seem happy with it. Of course this only applies if you actually want to use virtual desktops over slamming Windows - but if so here is the link:
You are missing the point between what you consider quality software and software that passes a government audit. Just like the parent said, if we are looking at a product and it doesn't pass regulations - we can't even really look at it.
Now the question you should ask here is what passes regulations. With the laws being so vague and having so many contradictions, the real answer about what passes and what doesn't is what the big third party auditors say passes. So what you consider assured is much different than what the government will let us consider assured.
This isn't to say open source software doesn't get in - we have many linux server farms, apache and a host of other open source products that we use (happily).
A for instance though is that one of the requirements for compliance is that all servers need to have anti-virus. You could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that concreteBox1 sans internet attachment cannot get a virus - yet you still need to prove it has an updated AV product on it. You can try to fight it, but with 50,000+ systems it just isn't worth it.
Another example is two factor authentication being required for any remote VPN solution, requiring AV and firewall. To meet this requirement we use third party products such as F5 (Juniper has some, etc). They all have the built-in scanning engines for Windows and even Mac (e.g. OPSWAT), but not Linux. This means that Linux is pretty much not acceptable as a workstation due to compliance.
Does Linux NEED AV/Firewall? It doesn't *matter*. It matters that we as a company are required to be able to scan to prove they have it and most third party products don't support it yet. We keep pushing though (can you hear the frustration?).
I am not saying in any way that open/closed is better, cheaper or less anything. What I am saying is if you are in a company that is that regulated sometimes it really is cost prohibitive to look at any company that can't provide you with an easy pass to your audits. The companies that the parent listed - RedHat, Novell, Microsoft - and anything they support are what we tend to go with because we know our audits will fly.
The people you have to convince of your theories are the companies that do the audits for PCI, SOX and a whole host of others.
If you took away auditing a lot of companies our size might have a completely different perspective.
It looks like they have an evaluation version for download but there is a price list for the commercial version.
Any ideas on whether the download is feature compliant and if you still have to pay anything to use it (open source license, but is it 'free' to use with no legal issues)?
If you had to pay the lists on the sidebar this is much higher than what we pay for Exchange licenses, even if you take every discount on the page into account.
I would also be interested to know how large the system could scale.
Based on the RFCs for VOIP they are supposed to support UDP and TCP per the new specs. Most companies are moving to support both so you can choose, but some of the large companies are going to TCP because this is what all of the 'Unified Communications' packages go with (such as Microsoft Office/Live/Communicator, etc).
One of the reasons they are leaning this way is security. Go figure.
Besides that, I don't really see the point. What does this solve that just encrypting sensitive data wouldn't?
Yeah, I can just see telling my mom "ok, now go to the command line and....no...command line....no...click the terminal thi...no not...oh I give up".
To put it another way, some IT people, people that like to tinker and developers have valid reasons to prefer open source software. To the typical user it is still just as closed source because they have no idea what 'source' is. This is why it isn't winning people over in mass numbers.
The second point people always make is that 'the hardware requirements'. The typical user LIKES shiny and new, so they find it exciting in some cases. Another large percentage of people will get a virus and then go buy a new computer because their current one is 'broken'.
Everyone keeps trying to foolproof Linux for grandma and grandpa to use, but we just keep producing better fools. It's one thing humanity universally excels at.
If you follow the links on the other article though, where they talk about redoing the kernel to what they are calling MinWin - it ran on 40 MB of memory and only had 100 files.
So it might be interesting where they draw the line between the kernel at 40 MB and 'the system' with 480 MB of memory. It sounds like mainly applications running that you could probably parse down.
I agree with a lot of the posts that said without knowing your exact infrastructure (data, bandwidth, office size, budget, etc) it would be difficult to give accurate answers that aren't overkill.
For all of our branch offices we use Packeteer iShared/iShaper devices with a larger box at the hub. This allows for WAFS, AD/DNS/DHCP/DFS, compression and traffic management all from one box. It isn't going to be cheap and it is a server at the branch office, but we find we save enough in bandwidth and backup tapes that it pays for itself.
Your mileage may vary depending on all the factors...
The same thing happened to us but the powers that be have decided to let it fly at this point (they don't see the harm and they like the search better).
Just to add to the clamor I'll e-mail our Microsoft rep as well to see if they have any reason for this updating. I'm not sure we want to go to the extremes you did, but if they have no response I just might follow your example.
Can you provide any specific links about any 'phone home' type capability with Windows Desktop Search? I'm not seeing anything obvious on Google crying out that WDS phones home - and I don't see anything hammering the firewall or proxy server trying to get anywhere. If something is going on I would like to pass it on to our Information Security team for review.
The issue about someone being a jerk and being shamed for it is something that happens with or without the internet, it is just a matter of degree I suppose. The issues that I do see with it though are veracity and personal information.
First of all, we all watch tv and movies and we know how good special effects are getting. Now that technology is getting to the point that most people with a computer and time on their hands could generate some very believable things. So if you've ever made someone mad who is to say that they wouldn't want to 'get revenge'. I see this as probably rare and unlikely, but at the outside scope of possibility. The people that post are anonymous, so you have absolutely no way to know your 'accuser'.
The second issue though is that people are starting to go from public humiliation to being vigilantes. They are posting people's information and they are showing up at people's houses to redress what they see as issues from the bad behavior. The idea of completely short circuiting the justice system and having the average citizen (or groups of them) become judge and jury is a scary thought.
Example: Your neighbor borrows your car and runs someone off the road - possibly even injuring them. They get a snapshot with your license plate, post your information online and people come to hunt YOU down. What can you do to clear yourself? Nothing, and this information is going to be out there for life.
We've already been here in a lot of ways though, because if you get accused of a crime and it hits the news - the public sees you accused. If they find you innocent it might not be interesting enough to hit the news again.
So the scary part is not about where the trend is now, but where people are going to take it. Like any tool (or weapon) the good or bad of it depends on the user. So as long as you trust every person on the internet, or at least every person you run into in your life - it's all fine and good.
At the very least don't piss off artists that are good with Photoshop and have a YouTube account;)
How about the fact that at the end now the Cylons control everyone, but they don't just outright kill them and end the show?
Now not only the humans are stupid but either (a) the Cylons are also just as stupid or (b) their 'goal' was never to outright kill humanity (which just changes the premise of the whole show).
Also, they're now all stuck on a planet. It has gone from being a sci-fi space show to a political soap opera with occasional flashes of a spaceship here and there.
Very true. If you have anything that is cluster aware though this will work. This isn't really a function of VM of course, but what is cool about doing this on VM machines is you have multiple levels of redundancy. You can VMotion the inactive server, swap the cluster and then vmotion the active server - and doing it this way you can move machines from one piece of hardware to another with no downtime.
Again this isn't really a VM thing but if you have a whole VM farm on a SAN - you can swap out whole servers without impacting running processes. We mainly use this for file servers / DNS / AD / print servers , but if your servers are beefy I don't see why you couldn't do this with any cluster aware application.
If you have an application that is not memory or cpu intensive, but it doesn't work well with others - this works very well. Even if it does work well with others, it helps you to really put it by itself. This is partly useful for troubleshooting, but it means when you call a company for support they can't really point their fingers at anyone else because their product is the only thing installed.
It is also useful for things like clustered file servers. They don't take up much cpu/memory, but if you put two (or more) of them out there on a VM box you can roll them back and forth for patches, updates, adding drives, etc.
It also helps for disaster recovery. You can do the equivalent of a bare metal restore in a few minutes versus loading a machine from scratch, loading drivers, loading your backup software and then restoring.
So multiple answers - and I'm sure there are many more that I haven't listed.
For me I have a single monitor at home that I use for browsing/gaming/etc - and I have no real need for a second monitor.
At work though I do lots of testing of patches, scripts and other administration duties. I open up my administration or editing program in one window and the target system in the other window. With one monitor I sometimes missed any quick messages or weird update issues - with two I can catch everything. I also know a lot of people that use two monitors for the same reason. More real estate would not help, it is literally being able to see two separate things at once that helps.
It could be argued that with a 30 inch you could open up two windows side by side, but in my personal experience it is always easier to use two monitors because it is easier to just expand an application to take up one monitor rather than trying to manually resize programs every time.
So I think the whole debate about which is better depends completely upon what your goals are and how you work.
I feel the same way. A lot of browsing the internet is not doing it as fast as possible so any 'speedfeed' wouldn't make a difference. I like taking a few minutes and going to each website and finding anything interesting. If I'm not in the mood I don't go out and look. This isn't to say RSS is good or bad, just saying that not everyone browses the web by the same methods.
I also only browse about 4-5 sites a day and no blogs, so I don't have the volume of sites I check to make it useful. This might be one of the key differences in RSS being useful or not - the volume of sites you check.
The issue with podcasting is that a lot of checking websites that I do is at work. Text works fine, but if you start using audio you need to wear headphones or you start disturbing people, and if you forward a podcast that is interesting - a lot of people aren't going to 'read it' because they don't have headphones or want to disturb those around them.
Re:Throw your Microsoft boxes into Boston Harbor!
on
The Demise of IP?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
What they mean by stifling competition is that small companies, which usually spark R&D, would go belly up without IP because they wouldn't be able to recoup the investment in any new invention / IP. If everything is sold for 'free' and the company profits are based on services alone - what will happen to R&D?
I don't pretend to be smart enough to know the answer to that question. You could take the side that thousands of developers working worldwide for the greater good will lead to greater things, or that if they do eliminate any proprietary companies that software will stagnate because nobody wants to put anything into moving forward. I don't think anyone can really show which way it would go - so articles like this can speculate until the end of time based on personal opinion until real long term facts become available.
The registry as a cause of slowdown has been true in almost every version of Windows - given enough time. I know that there are also tools out there to clean up the registry if you've cleaned up everything else but it still reacts slowly.
Config files have always seemed like a smarter idea than a registry:/
IE: If you run Windows is it because that is what they run at work? If it is an Open Source OS - is it because you believe in open source? If it is OSX - why wasn't it included in the study?
Slashdot Mirror
I had an iPad and it was fine when it was just me using it. When my kid started to get old enough to play games on a tablet I found I wanted something multi-user and with parental controls. I eventually went with the Kindle because of said parental controls. I can leave wireless on and he can do streaming of things without being able to drain my bank account. Let him have the iPad with wireless on and within about 60 seconds he had purchased and downloaded a movie (from flailing about more than from doing it on purpose). While you can lock down an iPad to some extent I found it to be a lot more user friendly and flexible when using the Kindle.
So I think besides the issue(s) that people have talked about already with they bought one and it is still good enough, I think that they are also not really starting to think about families using them. They still want you to buy an iPad for everyone if you secure it which isn't very realistic. Even if the device is 'better' if it is missing something that is crucial to most people they are going to move on. It is suffering from good enough syndrome, cost comparisons, a lack of good multi-user functionality and parental controls far behind their competition.
I have read about these off and on for a few years, but a few years ago they said this standard wasn't really taking root because at these resolutions people were experiencing motion sickness when viewing the images. I wonder if they have been able to do anything to alleviate that in the newer televisions or if that is still going to be an issue.
I would sign-up for something like this. I can also see it being a win-win for readers and publishers.
Now you just need to convince Amazon or Barnes and Noble (is anyone else left?).
Schools nowadays deal with a lot of cyber bullying and the like. These students/teachers know who the poster is and who the intended target is in most cases. So there is no anonymity there and people still act like jerks.
I think in reality it is not being anonymous that leads people to be jerks, it is the knowledge that they have no consequences for their actions. The internet seems to be a fine line between no consequences for being a jerk and massive overkill if you piss off someone with the appropriate technical skills (or a stalker I suppose).
Just because anonymous people are jerks does not mean that being a jerk is caused by being anonymous. So really all you are going to do is make it easier to harass people on the internet without really weeding out the people being jerks. So not only is this solution infringing on a lot of rights, real and perceived, it wouldn't even accomplish anything.
You can use PowerShell and plink to write PowerShell scripts. You can login to a router, run commands, go into enable mode and tftp off a backup for instance.
You can also do something semi-dynamic by dumping the output to a script file with PowerShell and using plink to run the commands in the script file.
Not a built-in cmdlet, but you can still accomplish what you want pretty easily.
The cost and list of phones looks very similar to the phone sets that support Microsoft's Exchange Active Sync push technology. Is the lawsuit definitely something to do with Linux or could it just be licensing fees for synchronizing email?
Are there any options that would work for internally hosted solutions (your data center not theirs) that would have support?
I have heard this question multiple times, but one of the requirements for some enterprises is to have support. Do any of these products (or similar, open source or not) that include support?
A lot of compliance audits have requirements that are not OS specific and one of them is having anti-virus (among other things). So a lot of large companies just find it easier to have something that supports all their systems so they don't have to get into an argument on every audit.
Whether it is right or wrong, or a system needs it, isn't the point. Audits can be very expensive and sometimes having those boxes checked can be an easier route to go.
I haven't tried it, but some of the Linux administrators at work just download the add-on from Sysinternals.
It doesn't come with the operating system but it is free, produced by the vendor and most people seem happy with it. Of course this only applies if you actually want to use virtual desktops over slamming Windows - but if so here is the link:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881.aspx
You are missing the point between what you consider quality software and software that passes a government audit. Just like the parent said, if we are looking at a product and it doesn't pass regulations - we can't even really look at it.
Now the question you should ask here is what passes regulations. With the laws being so vague and having so many contradictions, the real answer about what passes and what doesn't is what the big third party auditors say passes. So what you consider assured is much different than what the government will let us consider assured.
This isn't to say open source software doesn't get in - we have many linux server farms, apache and a host of other open source products that we use (happily).
A for instance though is that one of the requirements for compliance is that all servers need to have anti-virus. You could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that concreteBox1 sans internet attachment cannot get a virus - yet you still need to prove it has an updated AV product on it. You can try to fight it, but with 50,000+ systems it just isn't worth it.
Another example is two factor authentication being required for any remote VPN solution, requiring AV and firewall. To meet this requirement we use third party products such as F5 (Juniper has some, etc). They all have the built-in scanning engines for Windows and even Mac (e.g. OPSWAT), but not Linux. This means that Linux is pretty much not acceptable as a workstation due to compliance.
Does Linux NEED AV/Firewall? It doesn't *matter*. It matters that we as a company are required to be able to scan to prove they have it and most third party products don't support it yet. We keep pushing though (can you hear the frustration?).
I am not saying in any way that open/closed is better, cheaper or less anything. What I am saying is if you are in a company that is that regulated sometimes it really is cost prohibitive to look at any company that can't provide you with an easy pass to your audits. The companies that the parent listed - RedHat, Novell, Microsoft - and anything they support are what we tend to go with because we know our audits will fly.
The people you have to convince of your theories are the companies that do the audits for PCI, SOX and a whole host of others.
If you took away auditing a lot of companies our size might have a completely different perspective.
It looks like they have an evaluation version for download but there is a price list for the commercial version.
Any ideas on whether the download is feature compliant and if you still have to pay anything to use it (open source license, but is it 'free' to use with no legal issues)?
If you had to pay the lists on the sidebar this is much higher than what we pay for Exchange licenses, even if you take every discount on the page into account.
I would also be interested to know how large the system could scale.
Based on the RFCs for VOIP they are supposed to support UDP and TCP per the new specs. Most companies are moving to support both so you can choose, but some of the large companies are going to TCP because this is what all of the 'Unified Communications' packages go with (such as Microsoft Office/Live/Communicator, etc).
One of the reasons they are leaning this way is security. Go figure.
Besides that, I don't really see the point. What does this solve that just encrypting sensitive data wouldn't?
Yeah, I can just see telling my mom "ok, now go to the command line and ....no...command line....no...click the terminal thi...no not ...oh I give up".
To put it another way, some IT people, people that like to tinker and developers have valid reasons to prefer open source software. To the typical user it is still just as closed source because they have no idea what 'source' is. This is why it isn't winning people over in mass numbers.
The second point people always make is that 'the hardware requirements'. The typical user LIKES shiny and new, so they find it exciting in some cases. Another large percentage of people will get a virus and then go buy a new computer because their current one is 'broken'.
Everyone keeps trying to foolproof Linux for grandma and grandpa to use, but we just keep producing better fools. It's one thing humanity universally excels at.
If you follow the links on the other article though, where they talk about redoing the kernel to what they are calling MinWin - it ran on 40 MB of memory and only had 100 files.
So it might be interesting where they draw the line between the kernel at 40 MB and 'the system' with 480 MB of memory. It sounds like mainly applications running that you could probably parse down.
A move in the right direction at least.
I agree with a lot of the posts that said without knowing your exact infrastructure (data, bandwidth, office size, budget, etc) it would be difficult to give accurate answers that aren't overkill.
For all of our branch offices we use Packeteer iShared/iShaper devices with a larger box at the hub. This allows for WAFS, AD/DNS/DHCP/DFS, compression and traffic management all from one box. It isn't going to be cheap and it is a server at the branch office, but we find we save enough in bandwidth and backup tapes that it pays for itself.
Your mileage may vary depending on all the factors...
The same thing happened to us but the powers that be have decided to let it fly at this point (they don't see the harm and they like the search better).
Just to add to the clamor I'll e-mail our Microsoft rep as well to see if they have any reason for this updating. I'm not sure we want to go to the extremes you did, but if they have no response I just might follow your example.
Can you provide any specific links about any 'phone home' type capability with Windows Desktop Search? I'm not seeing anything obvious on Google crying out that WDS phones home - and I don't see anything hammering the firewall or proxy server trying to get anywhere. If something is going on I would like to pass it on to our Information Security team for review.
Thanks!
The issue about someone being a jerk and being shamed for it is something that happens with or without the internet, it is just a matter of degree I suppose. The issues that I do see with it though are veracity and personal information.
;)
First of all, we all watch tv and movies and we know how good special effects are getting. Now that technology is getting to the point that most people with a computer and time on their hands could generate some very believable things. So if you've ever made someone mad who is to say that they wouldn't want to 'get revenge'. I see this as probably rare and unlikely, but at the outside scope of possibility. The people that post are anonymous, so you have absolutely no way to know your 'accuser'.
The second issue though is that people are starting to go from public humiliation to being vigilantes. They are posting people's information and they are showing up at people's houses to redress what they see as issues from the bad behavior. The idea of completely short circuiting the justice system and having the average citizen (or groups of them) become judge and jury is a scary thought.
Example: Your neighbor borrows your car and runs someone off the road - possibly even injuring them. They get a snapshot with your license plate, post your information online and people come to hunt YOU down. What can you do to clear yourself? Nothing, and this information is going to be out there for life.
We've already been here in a lot of ways though, because if you get accused of a crime and it hits the news - the public sees you accused. If they find you innocent it might not be interesting enough to hit the news again.
So the scary part is not about where the trend is now, but where people are going to take it. Like any tool (or weapon) the good or bad of it depends on the user. So as long as you trust every person on the internet, or at least every person you run into in your life - it's all fine and good.
At the very least don't piss off artists that are good with Photoshop and have a YouTube account
How about the fact that at the end now the Cylons control everyone, but they don't just outright kill them and end the show?
Now not only the humans are stupid but either (a) the Cylons are also just as stupid or (b) their 'goal' was never to outright kill humanity (which just changes the premise of the whole show).
Also, they're now all stuck on a planet. It has gone from being a sci-fi space show to a political soap opera with occasional flashes of a spaceship here and there.
I still hold out hope....just not much.
Very true. If you have anything that is cluster aware though this will work. This isn't really a function of VM of course, but what is cool about doing this on VM machines is you have multiple levels of redundancy. You can VMotion the inactive server, swap the cluster and then vmotion the active server - and doing it this way you can move machines from one piece of hardware to another with no downtime.
Again this isn't really a VM thing but if you have a whole VM farm on a SAN - you can swap out whole servers without impacting running processes. We mainly use this for file servers / DNS / AD / print servers , but if your servers are beefy I don't see why you couldn't do this with any cluster aware application.
If you have an application that is not memory or cpu intensive, but it doesn't work well with others - this works very well. Even if it does work well with others, it helps you to really put it by itself. This is partly useful for troubleshooting, but it means when you call a company for support they can't really point their fingers at anyone else because their product is the only thing installed.
It is also useful for things like clustered file servers. They don't take up much cpu/memory, but if you put two (or more) of them out there on a VM box you can roll them back and forth for patches, updates, adding drives, etc.
It also helps for disaster recovery. You can do the equivalent of a bare metal restore in a few minutes versus loading a machine from scratch, loading drivers, loading your backup software and then restoring.
So multiple answers - and I'm sure there are many more that I haven't listed.
For me I have a single monitor at home that I use for browsing/gaming/etc - and I have no real need for a second monitor.
At work though I do lots of testing of patches, scripts and other administration duties. I open up my administration or editing program in one window and the target system in the other window. With one monitor I sometimes missed any quick messages or weird update issues - with two I can catch everything. I also know a lot of people that use two monitors for the same reason. More real estate would not help, it is literally being able to see two separate things at once that helps.
It could be argued that with a 30 inch you could open up two windows side by side, but in my personal experience it is always easier to use two monitors because it is easier to just expand an application to take up one monitor rather than trying to manually resize programs every time.
So I think the whole debate about which is better depends completely upon what your goals are and how you work.
I feel the same way. A lot of browsing the internet is not doing it as fast as possible so any 'speedfeed' wouldn't make a difference. I like taking a few minutes and going to each website and finding anything interesting. If I'm not in the mood I don't go out and look. This isn't to say RSS is good or bad, just saying that not everyone browses the web by the same methods.
I also only browse about 4-5 sites a day and no blogs, so I don't have the volume of sites I check to make it useful. This might be one of the key differences in RSS being useful or not - the volume of sites you check.
The issue with podcasting is that a lot of checking websites that I do is at work. Text works fine, but if you start using audio you need to wear headphones or you start disturbing people, and if you forward a podcast that is interesting - a lot of people aren't going to 'read it' because they don't have headphones or want to disturb those around them.
What they mean by stifling competition is that small companies, which usually spark R&D, would go belly up without IP because they wouldn't be able to recoup the investment in any new invention / IP. If everything is sold for 'free' and the company profits are based on services alone - what will happen to R&D?
I don't pretend to be smart enough to know the answer to that question. You could take the side that thousands of developers working worldwide for the greater good will lead to greater things, or that if they do eliminate any proprietary companies that software will stagnate because nobody wants to put anything into moving forward. I don't think anyone can really show which way it would go - so articles like this can speculate until the end of time based on personal opinion until real long term facts become available.
The registry as a cause of slowdown has been true in almost every version of Windows - given enough time. I know that there are also tools out there to clean up the registry if you've cleaned up everything else but it still reacts slowly.
:/
Config files have always seemed like a smarter idea than a registry
What OS do you run personally - and why?
IE: If you run Windows is it because that is what they run at work? If it is an Open Source OS - is it because you believe in open source? If it is OSX - why wasn't it included in the study?