They did so because their VM environment is playing catch up, and if it didn't support linux that would be even less reason for anyone to consider using it.
If their VM platform were the market leader, it's almost certain that they would intentionally not support linux and even go out of their way to break it in an attempt to coerce people away from linux.
They only ever do anything that aid interoperability when their own product is coming from behind. If they have cornered a market already, they do the exact opposite as has been shown time and time again.
Locking the handset is simply immoral. There is already contract laws in place to protect businesses from selling subsidised handsets and the buyer subsequently breaking the contract. Implementing technical measures like handset locks in addition only hurt the paying customers, for instance:
I may want to go on holiday and use a local simcard in my handset, carrier lock prevents me. I might be perfectly happy with my existing phone, but take a new subsidised handset (since many carriers dont offer discounted plans for not taking a phone so there is no reason not to get one) so i can give it to a friend or family while maintaining the contract on my existing handset.
Locking prepaid or up front purchased phones is even worse, as is not even offering a free unlock option once the contract has expired (or been paid off).
Selling units works well in the short term, and you can make huge profits on something that costs nothing per additional unit to produce.
On the other hand, once purchased they have no further need for you, and unlike physical goods, software does not wear out or become damaged over time, you can always install a new pristine copy from your original media. You can try selling upgrades which offer new functionality, but sooner or later the users will have all the functionality they need and won't want your upgrades.
Software will gradually become commoditised, market by market until its impossible to sell anything. On the other hand, companies and end users will always want customisations and support, be willing to pay for them but unable to perform those functions themselves.
If anything, the model of off-the-shelf software is very bad for business, i have seen countless businesses which adapt their business practices to revolve around how the software they bought does thing. It should be the other way round, software should compliment the way *your* business runs, not force it to conform with what a developer half way round the world thinks a business should do.
Steam doesn't really come into it because all of their software is for entertainment, an entirely luxury service that noone depends on and which inherently does become "worn" as you complete the game and become bored of it.
They resell BT wholesale, which just provides a PPP tunnel to servers run by the ISP, what protocol(s) they choose to run over the top of that tunnel has nothing to do with BT.
Interestingly, many years ago BT had a public ipv6 tunnel broker service, but this appears to be long gone. No idea why they abandoned it, but BT were a relatively early adopter of V6 and already had experience of v6 before 21cn or fttc were being rolled out, even first generation adsl was still under testing with bt first had ipv6.
You forgot to link to the stories about the catastrophic failures and day long outages the london stock exchange suffered while they were running a windows based system...
Ramping up DRM and suing people is only happening in the west, where infringement rates are relatively low anyway and the laws are easily bought and heavily stacked against end customers...
Over in asia and eastern europe where copying is far more common, they are actually competing by making content more easily and cheaply available.
The problem from the greedy and arrogant perspective of the movie industry, is that p2p users tend to be far more discerning as they will often try before they buy... That is, while they may well buy more music overall they are far less likely to purchase the drivel that is cheaper (and thus more profitable) for the industry to produce.
If you don't make the codec part of the standard, then it is no real standard... You can technically comply with it but implement a codec that noone else supports, thus being completely and utterly useless. What you need to do is mandate codecs now, and then release a revision of the standard in the future which supports others. It worked well for SSL with encryption ciphers, there have been numerous revisions to add support for newer ciphers such as AES.
You may also find that the protocol itself needs updating when new ciphers come out, so you have a good opportunity there too. Also if designed properly, clients should be able to negotiate use of the older version if necessary.
The problem is even worse with exFAT... There are plenty of perfectly capable and open filesystems, most of which are much better than fat/exfat and some designed specifically for flash storage among other things... And yet the world is forced to use an inferior and patent encumbered filesystem because MS refuse to support anything else.
Lots of IE users are people browsing from work, who have no choice as to what browser they can use... I see a significant difference in browser stats between a porn site (which you would assume has very few people browsing from work) and other sites with various content. I see IE users at ~15% on the pornsite (which places it third after firefox and chrome) but somewhere between 30 and 40 on other sites.
AT&T already provide IPv6 to their DSL customers, and the routers they provide to their customers include support for it out of the box. If you sign up a new AT&T DSL right now and use the supplied kit then you will get a/64 of IPv6 configured and working by default - i know several people who are using it right now.
Comcast have already rolled out IPv6 to a big portion (over 50%) of their network, and if you have a DOCSIS 3 router you too can do V6 there. I would assume that the latest hardware Comcast are supplying will enable v6 by default too.
The UK is way behind the US when it comes to V6 adoption...
Most users use whatever hardware the ISP supplies to them (most of which is complete crap), so the ISP need only supply them a v6 capable router. Those few users who use their own router tend to be geeks who would actively seek out a v6 capable router themselves.
This "Strange obsession" is called backwards compatibility...
Companies have lots and lots of very poorly written software which was designed to run on XP, and doesn't work (the same) on anything else. The reasons why it doesn't work are varied, some just refuses to run when it detects a version it doesn't recognise while others depend on the weaker security model of XP or other such things, while some software mostly works but some features are broken or behave differently.
The cost of testing all this software, and replacing what doesn't work is HUGE both in terms of money and man hours.
Some of the software may not be easily replaceable, i have encountered many companies locked in to closed source software where the original vendor has gone bankrupt, leaving them with an old version, no source code, no specifications on how the data is stored etc.
Besides, if you're going to make the huge investment of moving to a different system, it would make more sense to move to Linux... At least then you will significantly decrease your long term costs.
No ASLR, limited DEP, no priveldge seperation in the code. Yeah, XP is last century security wise which is fine as other operating systems from the 20th century lacked those as well.
ASLR was first implemented in July 2001, as part of the pax patch for linux... So it's about as old as XP. The idea of DEP was partially implemented much earlier, SunOS 4.x and Digital Unix 3.x had non executable stack areas, Linux had a patch to implement such too, it wasn't until much later that AMD implemented direct hardware support for non executable pages on x86, but it was effectively emulated in software long before that.
The idea of layers of filtering slowing down XP is ridiculous, that would be such a ridiculous kludge that i don't believe even microsoft would implement things that way... On the other hand if they intentionally slow down XP with updates, then it makes subsequent versions more attractive. Users have long criticised MS for new versions being significantly slower and more bloated than old ones, so i wouldn't be surprised to see them using underhanded tactics to distort this perception.
Once you buy a product from a company, their goal is then to sell you another product... They only care about your satisfaction with the existing product to the extent that you will buy their next product.
The end customer on the other hand might want to continue using the product for many years, long after several generations of replacement product have been released and doing so with software that may not have existed when the original product was released.
A several generations out of date videocard may not be useful for playing some modern games on high detail settings, but it will be perfectly adequate for older games, modern games on lower detail settings or various less demanding operations such as regular desktop use, non demanding games, video playback etc.
Where open drivers generally lag behind, is when the hardware manufacturers refuse to release full specs, so the effort required to write drivers is significantly harder relative to employees of the manufacturer who do have full access to the specs and the original hardware designers.
These processors are intended for tablet devices with touchscreens, windows 7 is not really suited to such devices and windows =7 tablets have always sold very poorly in the past. Linux on the other hand, has sold well on tablets in the form of android so it makes more sense to support.
Also if Intel release enough of the hardware specs, they don't need to explicitly support linux, someone else will do it if they don't. Windows users typically don't write their own drivers while linux users do.
It may be more than drivers too, windows =7 expects an ibm pc compatible system, if the new processors eliminate some of the backwards compatibility cruft in order to save power then the platform will be different enough that windows cannot boot, and the only organisation capable of making the changes necessary for it to work wants to sell the latest version and has no incentive to do so for older versions. Linux on the other hand could have any necessary changes made by all manner of people. I believe this has already been the case with at least one model of atom processor, which despite being x86 was unable to boot windows but did have a modified linux kernel working on it.
Firmware runs on the device itself, and is generally OS independent. Drivers run on the OS, and therefore require you to be running a specific OS and a specific version of that OS. If a third party is maintaining the drivers, and does not provide you with sourcecode then you have no guarantee that they will continue updating it to work with new OS versions, or fix bugs.
It's a choice between having a single source who can fix bugs, or a significantly larger pool of people who are capable of fixing those bugs. Employees of a single company are beholden to the business goals of that company, goals which are highly likely to differ from your needs as a user.
In short, if the source is open you have a much bigger chance that someone will be both willing and able to fix the bug thats causing you problems, or that you could entice someone to do so if it really matters to you.
Sure you can't do everything on a tablet, but does the person in question actually want to do anything that's not possible or practical on a tablet? If not, then no reason to have anything other than a tablet.
Well you could have both the windows version (under wine or natively) and the native linux version installed, and use the native version whenever possible with wine as a fallback. The more linux users there are, the more incentive there will be to produce linux versions of games.
There are plenty of people who would prefer to play games on linux if they could, but they play games on windows out of necessity and thus show up as a windows user in the stats.
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They did so because their VM environment is playing catch up, and if it didn't support linux that would be even less reason for anyone to consider using it.
If their VM platform were the market leader, it's almost certain that they would intentionally not support linux and even go out of their way to break it in an attempt to coerce people away from linux.
They only ever do anything that aid interoperability when their own product is coming from behind. If they have cornered a market already, they do the exact opposite as has been shown time and time again.
Locking the handset is simply immoral. There is already contract laws in place to protect businesses from selling subsidised handsets and the buyer subsequently breaking the contract. Implementing technical measures like handset locks in addition only hurt the paying customers, for instance:
I may want to go on holiday and use a local simcard in my handset, carrier lock prevents me.
I might be perfectly happy with my existing phone, but take a new subsidised handset (since many carriers dont offer discounted plans for not taking a phone so there is no reason not to get one) so i can give it to a friend or family while maintaining the contract on my existing handset.
Locking prepaid or up front purchased phones is even worse, as is not even offering a free unlock option once the contract has expired (or been paid off).
Selling units works well in the short term, and you can make huge profits on something that costs nothing per additional unit to produce.
On the other hand, once purchased they have no further need for you, and unlike physical goods, software does not wear out or become damaged over time, you can always install a new pristine copy from your original media. You can try selling upgrades which offer new functionality, but sooner or later the users will have all the functionality they need and won't want your upgrades.
Software will gradually become commoditised, market by market until its impossible to sell anything. On the other hand, companies and end users will always want customisations and support, be willing to pay for them but unable to perform those functions themselves.
If anything, the model of off-the-shelf software is very bad for business, i have seen countless businesses which adapt their business practices to revolve around how the software they bought does thing. It should be the other way round, software should compliment the way *your* business runs, not force it to conform with what a developer half way round the world thinks a business should do.
Steam doesn't really come into it because all of their software is for entertainment, an entirely luxury service that noone depends on and which inherently does become "worn" as you complete the game and become bored of it.
Off the top of my head:
AAISP..
Entanet..
They resell BT wholesale, which just provides a PPP tunnel to servers run by the ISP, what protocol(s) they choose to run over the top of that tunnel has nothing to do with BT.
Interestingly, many years ago BT had a public ipv6 tunnel broker service, but this appears to be long gone. No idea why they abandoned it, but BT were a relatively early adopter of V6 and already had experience of v6 before 21cn or fttc were being rolled out, even first generation adsl was still under testing with bt first had ipv6.
You forgot to link to the stories about the catastrophic failures and day long outages the london stock exchange suffered while they were running a windows based system...
Stick to printers that actually support Postscript... There is no reason to ever buy a printer that doesn't support postscript...
Competent engineers are more expensive...
Incompetent windows engineers are ten a penny, incompetent engineers generally don't even know what linux is so won't claim to know it.
Competent windows engineers are no cheaper than competent linux engineers.
Ramping up DRM and suing people is only happening in the west, where infringement rates are relatively low anyway and the laws are easily bought and heavily stacked against end customers...
Over in asia and eastern europe where copying is far more common, they are actually competing by making content more easily and cheaply available.
The problem from the greedy and arrogant perspective of the movie industry, is that p2p users tend to be far more discerning as they will often try before they buy... That is, while they may well buy more music overall they are far less likely to purchase the drivel that is cheaper (and thus more profitable) for the industry to produce.
If you don't make the codec part of the standard, then it is no real standard... You can technically comply with it but implement a codec that noone else supports, thus being completely and utterly useless.
What you need to do is mandate codecs now, and then release a revision of the standard in the future which supports others.
It worked well for SSL with encryption ciphers, there have been numerous revisions to add support for newer ciphers such as AES.
You may also find that the protocol itself needs updating when new ciphers come out, so you have a good opportunity there too. Also if designed properly, clients should be able to negotiate use of the older version if necessary.
The problem is even worse with exFAT...
There are plenty of perfectly capable and open filesystems, most of which are much better than fat/exfat and some designed specifically for flash storage among other things...
And yet the world is forced to use an inferior and patent encumbered filesystem because MS refuse to support anything else.
Anyone using java to configure a cisco router is doing it wrong...
Lots of IE users are people browsing from work, who have no choice as to what browser they can use...
I see a significant difference in browser stats between a porn site (which you would assume has very few people browsing from work) and other sites with various content. I see IE users at ~15% on the pornsite (which places it third after firefox and chrome) but somewhere between 30 and 40 on other sites.
Only traditional IPv6 tunnels don't work from behind NAT...
AT&T already provide IPv6 to their DSL customers, and the routers they provide to their customers include support for it out of the box. If you sign up a new AT&T DSL right now and use the supplied kit then you will get a /64 of IPv6 configured and working by default - i know several people who are using it right now.
Comcast have already rolled out IPv6 to a big portion (over 50%) of their network, and if you have a DOCSIS 3 router you too can do V6 there. I would assume that the latest hardware Comcast are supplying will enable v6 by default too.
The UK is way behind the US when it comes to V6 adoption...
Most users use whatever hardware the ISP supplies to them (most of which is complete crap), so the ISP need only supply them a v6 capable router.
Those few users who use their own router tend to be geeks who would actively seek out a v6 capable router themselves.
This "Strange obsession" is called backwards compatibility...
Companies have lots and lots of very poorly written software which was designed to run on XP, and doesn't work (the same) on anything else. The reasons why it doesn't work are varied, some just refuses to run when it detects a version it doesn't recognise while others depend on the weaker security model of XP or other such things, while some software mostly works but some features are broken or behave differently.
The cost of testing all this software, and replacing what doesn't work is HUGE both in terms of money and man hours.
Some of the software may not be easily replaceable, i have encountered many companies locked in to closed source software where the original vendor has gone bankrupt, leaving them with an old version, no source code, no specifications on how the data is stored etc.
Besides, if you're going to make the huge investment of moving to a different system, it would make more sense to move to Linux... At least then you will significantly decrease your long term costs.
No ASLR, limited DEP, no priveldge seperation in the code. Yeah, XP is last century security wise which is fine as other operating systems from the 20th century lacked those as well.
ASLR was first implemented in July 2001, as part of the pax patch for linux... So it's about as old as XP.
The idea of DEP was partially implemented much earlier, SunOS 4.x and Digital Unix 3.x had non executable stack areas, Linux had a patch to implement such too, it wasn't until much later that AMD implemented direct hardware support for non executable pages on x86, but it was effectively emulated in software long before that.
The idea of layers of filtering slowing down XP is ridiculous, that would be such a ridiculous kludge that i don't believe even microsoft would implement things that way...
On the other hand if they intentionally slow down XP with updates, then it makes subsequent versions more attractive. Users have long criticised MS for new versions being significantly slower and more bloated than old ones, so i wouldn't be surprised to see them using underhanded tactics to distort this perception.
Once you buy a product from a company, their goal is then to sell you another product... They only care about your satisfaction with the existing product to the extent that you will buy their next product.
The end customer on the other hand might want to continue using the product for many years, long after several generations of replacement product have been released and doing so with software that may not have existed when the original product was released.
A several generations out of date videocard may not be useful for playing some modern games on high detail settings, but it will be perfectly adequate for older games, modern games on lower detail settings or various less demanding operations such as regular desktop use, non demanding games, video playback etc.
Where open drivers generally lag behind, is when the hardware manufacturers refuse to release full specs, so the effort required to write drivers is significantly harder relative to employees of the manufacturer who do have full access to the specs and the original hardware designers.
These processors are intended for tablet devices with touchscreens, windows 7 is not really suited to such devices and windows =7 tablets have always sold very poorly in the past.
Linux on the other hand, has sold well on tablets in the form of android so it makes more sense to support.
Also if Intel release enough of the hardware specs, they don't need to explicitly support linux, someone else will do it if they don't. Windows users typically don't write their own drivers while linux users do.
It may be more than drivers too, windows =7 expects an ibm pc compatible system, if the new processors eliminate some of the backwards compatibility cruft in order to save power then the platform will be different enough that windows cannot boot, and the only organisation capable of making the changes necessary for it to work wants to sell the latest version and has no incentive to do so for older versions.
Linux on the other hand could have any necessary changes made by all manner of people.
I believe this has already been the case with at least one model of atom processor, which despite being x86 was unable to boot windows but did have a modified linux kernel working on it.
Firmware runs on the device itself, and is generally OS independent.
Drivers run on the OS, and therefore require you to be running a specific OS and a specific version of that OS. If a third party is maintaining the drivers, and does not provide you with sourcecode then you have no guarantee that they will continue updating it to work with new OS versions, or fix bugs.
It's a choice between having a single source who can fix bugs, or a significantly larger pool of people who are capable of fixing those bugs. Employees of a single company are beholden to the business goals of that company, goals which are highly likely to differ from your needs as a user.
In short, if the source is open you have a much bigger chance that someone will be both willing and able to fix the bug thats causing you problems, or that you could entice someone to do so if it really matters to you.
Has anyone made an ebuild for Gentoo yet?
Sure you can't do everything on a tablet, but does the person in question actually want to do anything that's not possible or practical on a tablet?
If not, then no reason to have anything other than a tablet.
Well you could have both the windows version (under wine or natively) and the native linux version installed, and use the native version whenever possible with wine as a fallback. The more linux users there are, the more incentive there will be to produce linux versions of games.
There are plenty of people who would prefer to play games on linux if they could, but they play games on windows out of necessity and thus show up as a windows user in the stats.