For all the Linux and open source community says about embracing freedom there are always a few "evangelists" who completely miss the point. While people such as yourself continue to "promote" Linux by rubbishing the opposition (both product and people) millions of Windows users will continue to think of Linux as a geek toy used by nerds and children. Anyone and everyone should be free to use whichever OS they fancy.
That's all well and good, but 99% of the time, when I'm asked to fix a computer - it's a fucked up Windows install. So even though I want NOTHING to do with windows in my personal life, I have to clean up Microsoft's messes. People can use whatever OS they like, but they shouldn't come running to me to fix their self-inflicted OS.
If I had to help people with computers, I'd rather it be something more productive than just fixing the OS these days.
If someone asks why Linux is great then explain, but please don't refer to Windows users as 'fanbois'.
You might notice I didn't refer to windows users as fanbois, I refered to fanbois as fanbois. Or do you deny the existence of fanbois?
are celebrating their Vista SP 2-3, er, Mohave, um, I mean Windows 7 as the greatest thing since sliced bread, and lining up to pay for it; I will still be getting my Ubuntu for free and with an (often) significant upgrade every 6 months.
Magazines in general are hurting. Mad magazine also cut down from being a monthly magazine to being a quarterly. It's rival, Cracked, has been doing well because they adapted to the internet (cracked.com vs mad's crappy website).
Sorry guys, it's a brave new world, it's not 1984 anymore. Get with the program.
BTW, I don't read a lot anymore, but besides the odd fanfiction (fanfiction.net), I find fictionpress for original stuff a decent place to read. Perhaps there are others. The problem is (and what magazines with editors used to do) was picking out the gems from the crap. There are various ways to do this on those type of sites, but many still still don't make any effort and dump the whole lot of listings on you.
You obviously don't understand the nuance of the story's analogy. Well-intentioned liberals often want to release bicycles in the wild so that the bike population breeds and grows over time; it's a well-known fact that bicycles don't breed in captitivity. However, bikes will start breeding too fast, and before you know it they'll start having more and more encounters with humans to catastrophic effect - in the denser areas of bicycle territory, you'll even see people get so desperate as to try to ride them, in a manner similiar to a horse, in order to tame them. This is obviously the law of unintended consequences.
Compare this to Linux. Right now, it's slow to wake up. Well-intentioned liberals see this lethargy as another sign of Linux captivity. They also want to see the population of linux grow. So, they come up with the bright idea to make linux less lethargic: if they wake up faster it means they'll have more energy. If they have more energy, linuxes will breed more often. Thus, it seems to the liberal, that fast boot up is desirable as to achieve this similiar end goal.
But the law of unintended consequences strike again! Many linuxes are in family homes, and their owners don't want to them to breed more. There'd be all types of trouble: imagine if the linux was at home and all it could breed with in its harmonal state was a Windows? Remember the Lindows travesty of years past?
The goal is laudable but strategically speaking: do we really want to focus more OSS efforts to replicate MS protocols and methods?
Something like Wine will be really helpful to the linux movement when some boxed software has in it's requirements list: XP, Vista, 7, and Wine 1.x compatible. If linux gain more, it may come! And it doesn't have to gain as much as if the software makers were forced to do a total rewrite. Once that happens, Linux has its foot in the door. And microsoft cannot change the API too much without breaking backwards compatibility and pissing off a ton of customers.
The end goal isn't to run Windows compatible apps but to make the transition to Linux easier. If Openexchange achieves the same thing, more power to them.
In an ideal world, Microsoft would conform to Open standards. But since this isn't an ideal world, and Microsoft has majority market share, open standards can, from time to time, conform to it.
They're about 150w equivalents. Lowes even sells an 85w that's fits in a regular base and isn't completely humongous but still big>.> (No, it's not Lights of America either).
The one on the front porch won't light if the temperature gets below 0F, the back porch light has lit every time. It's also dimmer and bluer.
It sounds like a brand. Mine started up immediately at -5F (as cold as it gets here) without problems, but they are enclosed. I'd say the Feit Electrics at Costco are god, GE at walmart, and sylvania. But not every model under every brand is great. I particularly like Sylvania Mini-Twists at lowes, although they are expensive, they are usually smaller and instantly bright - even their 45w is the about the size of a regular 23-27w CFL.
I switched about half-way to CFLs largely to save $$ on electricity, but they're neither as efficient nor as 'green' as LED lights.
How so? Recently, in my local walmart, GE started selling Par20 LED bulbs that were supposed to be 40-50 watt equivalent but for 7 watts produced 200 lumens. That's 28.5 lumens per watt.
My Feit Electric (Costco) 13w CFLs (60 watt equivalent) produce about 800 lumens. That's 61 lumens per watt.
A 60w incandescent makes around 700-850, depending on brand. Using the 800 as a comparison, thats 13.3 watts per lumen.
LEDs may have the potential to be more efficient than CFLs, but it doesnt look like they automatically are. Or am I missing something?
Just click on the reviewer and see if they have reviewed anything else and if they have, if it's a diverse range of stuff. I remember seeing a set of self-help books get either really poor reviews or really great ones. I clicked on the 5 star reviews and many of the reviewers were either one time reviewers, or they had a history of favorably reviewing a small circle of self-help books from a specific publisher or author. Often within a tight timeframe rather than anything spaced out between reviews.
I'm sure the reverse is true in circumstances, competing manufacturers giving their competitors' products a poor review. With the same tell-tale signs.
Amazon is very attractive to scam in this fashion although I'm sure sites like epinions and others are becoming targets as well. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if there are much more sophisticated systems in place than the ones uncovered lately with Belkin and all. What we have been seeing seems all very amateurish - and considering that, after price, having a good star rating at one of these sites may bring in or cost thousands of sales - I would think some manufacturers have to have departments hired to fill the internet with favorable reviews on amazon and other sites, as well as writing blogs or recommendations on blogs with some amount of finesse. Where their employees actually become believeable characters with a bit of history and diversity - perhaps reviewing the other odd item here and there, just enough to be convincing. In fact, they could make put these characters on file and have them become year long projects that become bit reoccuring players in the marketing process.
Ninety percent of desktop PCs run Windows, and for interchange among the public, file systems that most PCs running Windows cannot read aren't worth testing. If you format your USB drive as ext2 and carry it to someone else's PC, you'll need to 1. carry a CD or a second USB drive with the ext2 driver [fs-driver.org] and 2. get admin rights in order to install it on someone else's PC. It'd be like the Windows 9x days, when you needed to carry a floppy disk with the USB mass storage class driver whenever you used someone else's computer.
I like to run my Ubuntu off a usb stick, since Ubuntu Live CD makes it so simple to install to one that someone like me can do it - and since I can have all my firefox settings, passwords, programs, and preferences as I want them without carrying my computer or leaving traces of my info on other people's computers. So yes, it'd be nice to know how fast ext2/3 runs off a flash drive. It probably has more of an impact as well, as the one-time-per-session transfering of files most USB users use their sticks for is relatively much simpler and less demanding.
Thankfully Ubuntu comes in only Ultimate Premium Super Starter edition. Oh, and Server. 32/64 bit variations of both.
But for the price difference, I can't complain.
When people ask me what the difference between Home and Business/Ultimate edition is, I tell them: "Whatever features you should have gotten in Home, but Microsoft figured was esoteric enough to charge for it, so that if you run into a deficiency at all, it will only be later when it's too late to return. Then they hope to rape you as you pay full retail upgrade price."
Some people have learned this with the ridiculous lack of UAC in XP Home (only in pro, absense of which causes much headaches security wise up to this day), and the now coming 32/64 bit debacle as people want to upgrade RAM but won't be able to. Microsoft allows some OEM copies to be upgraded to 64bit, but custom-builders and full retail customers are screwed if they started with 32 and want to move on up. So the customer who paid more initially gets treated worse. Unless it's Vista Ultimate. Then you get both copies, as it should be. Which Ubuntu (32/64bit) provides for free.
Since Windows 7 is Vista SP2, this situation is hardly surprising. I can only hope that Microsoft's greed lasts long enough for Ubutu/Linux and Apple to make a lasting dent in marketshare. I'd hate to go back to a nothing-but-windows world.
But I can't see how waving my cellphone over a reader is an improvement over waving my credit card. The credit card is thinner, lighter and more waterproof than a cellphone.
How many cards do you carry? Not just credit cards, membership cards to stores and the like, because this tech can handle it as well.
Now, how many cell phones do you carry?
What would really make me want it is if it has digital receipts. Paper reciepts now pad my wallet, need to be scanned (or inputted in) to some stupid software, and many often fade away before I have the chance (they should really illegalize the one week fading receipt).
When I go out, I always carry a wallet. It has my driver's license, credit card and cash in it. My cell phone may or may not be with me, depending on what I'm doing. Maybe it's in the car, or my backpack. If I were going to wave anything over a reader, it would most likely be my wallet.
That's great, no one is making you use this tech or making you give up the way you do things now.
Perhaps it's because I'm over 50, but when I hear people talking about combining media player, cell phone, digital camera, [whatever] into one single unit, all I see is one item that does everything "not quite as well" as the original separate items. The cellphone/camera is only 3 megapixel...OK for some uses; but not as good as my Canon point-and-shoot.
My Sony is old and only 3 megapixel. Cameraphones still aren't as good as it (specifically for macro shots) but then I don't tend to take pictures at the prescribed times (birthdays and the like) but rather spontaneously. I never carry my Sony around, I do carry my cell phone.
My phone can hold a few gigabytes of music, nothing like the 80 G in my iPod. If the performance of the composite were equal or better, you might have me as a customer, but for now, I'll pick and choose.
I'm sure iPhones will have close to that capacity in the next year or two.
Amazing how some internet "services" become popular (ebay, youtube, etc) and then get progressively destroyed by the ones that own them and how they destroy what made them once great. Let's hope it doesn't happen to gmail and google.
Although the architecture of internet itself sought to decentralize delivery, it's funny that humans always gravitate toward provided services that are so centralized. I wish there was a way to provide these services in a more decentralized fashion while not being completely chaotic, but that likely won't happen.
Except for #1, I don't think many of those issues really hit the average consumer except when it was too late - when they already bought it.
In my life, I probably used an iPod for less than 20 minutes and a Zune for less than 15. I like looking at the newer models my friends carry from time to time, and recently had a friend's newer Zune in my hands. It's okay, much better than the sloppy buttons of the 1st gen. What strikes me about the interface - the pad where you can scroll up or down with your thumb - is that it still isn't as easy as the clickwheel on an iPod. It may sound irrelevant, but since this is the one and only way to communicate with the device it does become a big deal.
Otherwise, it's just another Me too! device and with the prices pretty much in the same range as an iPod, there is little incentive to go out and buy one. With an iPod, you at least have iTunes and the like.
But even should your EEPROM remain intact, the other problem is getting that hard drive spindle which has remained stationary for 50 years spinning again.
Buy a cheap SSD with 10GB storage. I would also caution against CD/DVD-RWs - they don't have a rated life. Perhaps a USB stick to boot off with Ubuntu on it.
And will the Fluorescent lights in a monitor last? Not sure about that tech, would think LED backed LCDs are safer, but a bit too expensive.
If you go to a flea market, you should have no problem locating 50-100 year old tech. Not sure what the purpose of a time capsule such as this is, as it will likely get lost, punctured somehow and permanently damaged, etc.
Perhaps the submitter just doesn't want to go through the trouble of properly disposing of the computers, and is showing the kids the way to get rid of things cheaply is to bury it;)
The goal would be to have instructions on how to unpack the system, plug it into the wall (we'll assume everyone is still using 110v US outlets), and get the system to boot.
I've rented houses (that I moved out ASAP) that had the wiring from the 1890s/1900s still there, as well old fuse boxes (with those old twist fuses) that were hopelessly intertangled with new fuse boxes (for some reason they didn't rip everything out) and copper wiring intermeshed with aluminum wiring, and wires shielded with tar paper (falling apart). So I don't think you have to worry about moving from 110 anytime soon.
Notebooks and Desktops can run 110 or european 220 anyway. In some ways, it's a shame we didn't go the 220/240 route but such is the sticking power of standards such that they stick with us and in many cases bog us down for a long time.
Thus proving beyond the shadow of a doubt the weakness of arguments from authority.
An argument from an authority is something to keep it mind. It shouldn't dictate your thinking.
Linus's needs at any one time will be different from yours or mine. And vice versa.
Anyway, I always liked Gnome. KDE used to feel really cluttered and buggy (many kde-based distros back in the day where the basic compiler stuff didn't work out of the box without throwing out errors, just trying to compile your basic helloworld.c for instance) although I haven't tried it since the 2.x day tbh.
the majority of time I saw Vista running dog slow on a computer out of the box was either the Aero setting cranked up on a integrated graphics chip or the bloatware included by the OEM (Acer, I'm looking at you). Both of these cases are OEM's fault - I stated in the past that this is probably one of the reasons MS will lose marketshare - lack of quality control over OEM distributors.
Apple, otoh, usually gives you a nice, clean box to run with. Linux doesn't have bloatware yet, although if it gets more popular, the free nature of it will allow manufacturers to include useless junk as well.
Just as with spam, the telemarketer gangs don't make money off of sales. Rather, they make money off of selling their "service" to the "companies" whose "products" are being advertised. So even if there are no sales at all, they still profit.
However, companies don't keep using tactics that aren't profitable, so if there were no sales, there would be no reason for those companies to buy telemarketing service - at least from that provider. In most businesses, repeat customers are the key to long term success and I suspect telemarketer service providers are not immune to that.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntadhar_al-Zaidi#Trial
Turbotax, quicken, photoshop, quickbooks claim it on their boxes?
Chair manufacturers wouldn't be able to keep up with demand!
That's all well and good, but 99% of the time, when I'm asked to fix a computer - it's a fucked up Windows install. So even though I want NOTHING to do with windows in my personal life, I have to clean up Microsoft's messes. People can use whatever OS they like, but they shouldn't come running to me to fix their self-inflicted OS.
If I had to help people with computers, I'd rather it be something more productive than just fixing the OS these days.
You might notice I didn't refer to windows users as fanbois, I refered to fanbois as fanbois. Or do you deny the existence of fanbois?
are celebrating their Vista SP 2-3, er, Mohave, um, I mean Windows 7 as the greatest thing since sliced bread, and lining up to pay for it; I will still be getting my Ubuntu for free and with an (often) significant upgrade every 6 months.
Magazines in general are hurting. Mad magazine also cut down from being a monthly magazine to being a quarterly. It's rival, Cracked, has been doing well because they adapted to the internet (cracked.com vs mad's crappy website).
Sorry guys, it's a brave new world, it's not 1984 anymore. Get with the program.
BTW, I don't read a lot anymore, but besides the odd fanfiction (fanfiction.net), I find fictionpress for original stuff a decent place to read. Perhaps there are others. The problem is (and what magazines with editors used to do) was picking out the gems from the crap. There are various ways to do this on those type of sites, but many still still don't make any effort and dump the whole lot of listings on you.
You obviously don't understand the nuance of the story's analogy. Well-intentioned liberals often want to release bicycles in the wild so that the bike population breeds and grows over time; it's a well-known fact that bicycles don't breed in captitivity. However, bikes will start breeding too fast, and before you know it they'll start having more and more encounters with humans to catastrophic effect - in the denser areas of bicycle territory, you'll even see people get so desperate as to try to ride them, in a manner similiar to a horse, in order to tame them. This is obviously the law of unintended consequences.
Compare this to Linux. Right now, it's slow to wake up. Well-intentioned liberals see this lethargy as another sign of Linux captivity. They also want to see the population of linux grow. So, they come up with the bright idea to make linux less lethargic: if they wake up faster it means they'll have more energy. If they have more energy, linuxes will breed more often. Thus, it seems to the liberal, that fast boot up is desirable as to achieve this similiar end goal.
But the law of unintended consequences strike again! Many linuxes are in family homes, and their owners don't want to them to breed more. There'd be all types of trouble: imagine if the linux was at home and all it could breed with in its harmonal state was a Windows? Remember the Lindows travesty of years past?
Something like Wine will be really helpful to the linux movement when some boxed software has in it's requirements list: XP, Vista, 7, and Wine 1.x compatible. If linux gain more, it may come! And it doesn't have to gain as much as if the software makers were forced to do a total rewrite. Once that happens, Linux has its foot in the door. And microsoft cannot change the API too much without breaking backwards compatibility and pissing off a ton of customers.
The end goal isn't to run Windows compatible apps but to make the transition to Linux easier. If Openexchange achieves the same thing, more power to them.
In an ideal world, Microsoft would conform to Open standards. But since this isn't an ideal world, and Microsoft has majority market share, open standards can, from time to time, conform to it.
They're about 150w equivalents. Lowes even sells an 85w that's fits in a regular base and isn't completely humongous but still big>.> (No, it's not Lights of America either).
It sounds like a brand. Mine started up immediately at -5F (as cold as it gets here) without problems, but they are enclosed. I'd say the Feit Electrics at Costco are god, GE at walmart, and sylvania. But not every model under every brand is great. I particularly like Sylvania Mini-Twists at lowes, although they are expensive, they are usually smaller and instantly bright - even their 45w is the about the size of a regular 23-27w CFL.
Any home depot accepts any and all CFLs. In fact, it's easier and cheaper to dispose of CFLs properly than it is of Fluorescents.
Oh, and if your electricity is generated from coal, you are helping put mercury in the air as well.
How so? Recently, in my local walmart, GE started selling Par20 LED bulbs that were supposed to be 40-50 watt equivalent but for 7 watts produced 200 lumens. That's 28.5 lumens per watt.
My Feit Electric (Costco) 13w CFLs (60 watt equivalent) produce about 800 lumens. That's 61 lumens per watt.
A 60w incandescent makes around 700-850, depending on brand. Using the 800 as a comparison, thats 13.3 watts per lumen.
LEDs may have the potential to be more efficient than CFLs, but it doesnt look like they automatically are. Or am I missing something?
/. invited me to drink from the firehose>.> I hope there isn't some type of vampiric code running here.
Just click on the reviewer and see if they have reviewed anything else and if they have, if it's a diverse range of stuff. I remember seeing a set of self-help books get either really poor reviews or really great ones. I clicked on the 5 star reviews and many of the reviewers were either one time reviewers, or they had a history of favorably reviewing a small circle of self-help books from a specific publisher or author. Often within a tight timeframe rather than anything spaced out between reviews.
I'm sure the reverse is true in circumstances, competing manufacturers giving their competitors' products a poor review. With the same tell-tale signs.
Amazon is very attractive to scam in this fashion although I'm sure sites like epinions and others are becoming targets as well. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if there are much more sophisticated systems in place than the ones uncovered lately with Belkin and all. What we have been seeing seems all very amateurish - and considering that, after price, having a good star rating at one of these sites may bring in or cost thousands of sales - I would think some manufacturers have to have departments hired to fill the internet with favorable reviews on amazon and other sites, as well as writing blogs or recommendations on blogs with some amount of finesse. Where their employees actually become believeable characters with a bit of history and diversity - perhaps reviewing the other odd item here and there, just enough to be convincing. In fact, they could make put these characters on file and have them become year long projects that become bit reoccuring players in the marketing process.
I like to run my Ubuntu off a usb stick, since Ubuntu Live CD makes it so simple to install to one that someone like me can do it - and since I can have all my firefox settings, passwords, programs, and preferences as I want them without carrying my computer or leaving traces of my info on other people's computers. So yes, it'd be nice to know how fast ext2/3 runs off a flash drive. It probably has more of an impact as well, as the one-time-per-session transfering of files most USB users use their sticks for is relatively much simpler and less demanding.
I mean acess control then, stop being so retentive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions#Home_and_Professional
Thankfully Ubuntu comes in only Ultimate Premium Super Starter edition. Oh, and Server. 32/64 bit variations of both.
But for the price difference, I can't complain.
When people ask me what the difference between Home and Business/Ultimate edition is, I tell them: "Whatever features you should have gotten in Home, but Microsoft figured was esoteric enough to charge for it, so that if you run into a deficiency at all, it will only be later when it's too late to return. Then they hope to rape you as you pay full retail upgrade price."
Some people have learned this with the ridiculous lack of UAC in XP Home (only in pro, absense of which causes much headaches security wise up to this day), and the now coming 32/64 bit debacle as people want to upgrade RAM but won't be able to. Microsoft allows some OEM copies to be upgraded to 64bit, but custom-builders and full retail customers are screwed if they started with 32 and want to move on up. So the customer who paid more initially gets treated worse. Unless it's Vista Ultimate. Then you get both copies, as it should be. Which Ubuntu (32/64bit) provides for free.
Since Windows 7 is Vista SP2, this situation is hardly surprising. I can only hope that Microsoft's greed lasts long enough for Ubutu/Linux and Apple to make a lasting dent in marketshare. I'd hate to go back to a nothing-but-windows world.
No, 1TB drives hit the market about 2 years ago. In early 2007:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/128400/hitachi_introduces_1terabyte_hard_drive.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives#1980s_to_present_day
How many cards do you carry? Not just credit cards, membership cards to stores and the like, because this tech can handle it as well.
Now, how many cell phones do you carry?
What would really make me want it is if it has digital receipts. Paper reciepts now pad my wallet, need to be scanned (or inputted in) to some stupid software, and many often fade away before I have the chance (they should really illegalize the one week fading receipt).
That's great, no one is making you use this tech or making you give up the way you do things now.
My Sony is old and only 3 megapixel. Cameraphones still aren't as good as it (specifically for macro shots) but then I don't tend to take pictures at the prescribed times (birthdays and the like) but rather spontaneously. I never carry my Sony around, I do carry my cell phone.
I'm sure iPhones will have close to that capacity in the next year or two.
Amazing how some internet "services" become popular (ebay, youtube, etc) and then get progressively destroyed by the ones that own them and how they destroy what made them once great. Let's hope it doesn't happen to gmail and google.
Although the architecture of internet itself sought to decentralize delivery, it's funny that humans always gravitate toward provided services that are so centralized. I wish there was a way to provide these services in a more decentralized fashion while not being completely chaotic, but that likely won't happen.
Except for #1, I don't think many of those issues really hit the average consumer except when it was too late - when they already bought it.
In my life, I probably used an iPod for less than 20 minutes and a Zune for less than 15. I like looking at the newer models my friends carry from time to time, and recently had a friend's newer Zune in my hands. It's okay, much better than the sloppy buttons of the 1st gen. What strikes me about the interface - the pad where you can scroll up or down with your thumb - is that it still isn't as easy as the clickwheel on an iPod. It may sound irrelevant, but since this is the one and only way to communicate with the device it does become a big deal.
Otherwise, it's just another Me too! device and with the prices pretty much in the same range as an iPod, there is little incentive to go out and buy one. With an iPod, you at least have iTunes and the like.
Buy a cheap SSD with 10GB storage. I would also caution against CD/DVD-RWs - they don't have a rated life. Perhaps a USB stick to boot off with Ubuntu on it.
And will the Fluorescent lights in a monitor last? Not sure about that tech, would think LED backed LCDs are safer, but a bit too expensive.
If you go to a flea market, you should have no problem locating 50-100 year old tech. Not sure what the purpose of a time capsule such as this is, as it will likely get lost, punctured somehow and permanently damaged, etc.
Perhaps the submitter just doesn't want to go through the trouble of properly disposing of the computers, and is showing the kids the way to get rid of things cheaply is to bury it;)
Router, don't let the computer go on the internet naked.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop? Srsly.
I've rented houses (that I moved out ASAP) that had the wiring from the 1890s/1900s still there, as well old fuse boxes (with those old twist fuses) that were hopelessly intertangled with new fuse boxes (for some reason they didn't rip everything out) and copper wiring intermeshed with aluminum wiring, and wires shielded with tar paper (falling apart). So I don't think you have to worry about moving from 110 anytime soon.
Notebooks and Desktops can run 110 or european 220 anyway. In some ways, it's a shame we didn't go the 220/240 route but such is the sticking power of standards such that they stick with us and in many cases bog us down for a long time.
An argument from an authority is something to keep it mind. It shouldn't dictate your thinking.
Linus's needs at any one time will be different from yours or mine. And vice versa.
Anyway, I always liked Gnome. KDE used to feel really cluttered and buggy (many kde-based distros back in the day where the basic compiler stuff didn't work out of the box without throwing out errors, just trying to compile your basic helloworld.c for instance) although I haven't tried it since the 2.x day tbh.
the majority of time I saw Vista running dog slow on a computer out of the box was either the Aero setting cranked up on a integrated graphics chip or the bloatware included by the OEM (Acer, I'm looking at you). Both of these cases are OEM's fault - I stated in the past that this is probably one of the reasons MS will lose marketshare - lack of quality control over OEM distributors.
Apple, otoh, usually gives you a nice, clean box to run with. Linux doesn't have bloatware yet, although if it gets more popular, the free nature of it will allow manufacturers to include useless junk as well.
However, companies don't keep using tactics that aren't profitable, so if there were no sales, there would be no reason for those companies to buy telemarketing service - at least from that provider. In most businesses, repeat customers are the key to long term success and I suspect telemarketer service providers are not immune to that.