Actually, I am not a violent person but my strong comments were meant to illustrate my disdain at no-hopers searching for a bit of fame by using Slashdot as an advertising platform for some boring little talk they're doing at a computer show somewhere.
People like me, who just get on and do their security work without bragging to the rest of the world about it, are the ones with skills - anyone can stand in front of a bunch of salivating muppets and perform magic tricks.
I have an education, a bit of money, my own house (with my wife) and I started my career cleaning cars to go into showrooms some 30 years ago, but nowadays I'm a well-paid security consultant on Linux-based telephony servers.
In all that time, I have only ever owned one Apple product, an iPod Touch which my wife gave to me when she upgraded to an iPhone. It's a neat little music player that's great value for money based on what I paid for it, but nothing more.
But I wouldn't hand over a single penny for an Apple product whilst it is locked-in to one vendor.
My experience of Apple fanbois (which I have been describing as "elitists" in my posts for some months now anyway) is that they sneer down their noses at everyone else & believe that subscribing to Apple products immediately makes them experts in all things.
I have no problem with people wanting easy computing with vendor lock-in and paying a premium price for it - it's their money after all.
In the same way, I really don't use Windows much these days as a now mostly-Linux user, but I still give a lot of my free time fixing the Windows PCs of friends & relatives because it's not my place to preach to anyone else unless they come to me and ask me questions.
But I get very annoyed when fanbois make sweeping statements about Linux & Windows that simply are NOT true and that's when I am compelled to respond to their posts on here - I'm sure many techie geeks on here do exactly the same thing.
So I recommend just going off and enjoying your Apple products without trying to preach to us constantly how good they are. Most of us treat computing devices as tools that have a job of work to do and have a high degree of customisation; how they look or whether they match the clothes I'm wearing are immaterial.
Not at all. Like I said, there's more than enough good CD albums for me to find out there & enjoy.
I think the record companies are doing a fantastic job at the moment remastering & rereleasing some great old music at the moment, I don't see £10 for a CD I'm going to enjoy for at least the next 20 years as being anything but great value for moment.
I just don't like sweeping statements from people who clearly have a limited musical experience or taste range, and no idea of what they are talking about.
All this means that if you decide to hack open your Wii, nobody can take litigation out on you on circumventing the DMCA. It does *NOT* mean Nintendo have to provide you with both the means and instructions on how to hack open your Wii and install your stuff on it.
Likewise, it does nothing about Nintendo, Apple, etc. putting code in their official ROMs that detect when a machine is jailbroken so they don't have to support it.
As an avid gamer, I've pretty much stopped buying modern games now, simply because gaming has become far too complicated for me.
I used to be able to go into a games shop, browse a good selection of titles, buy something, then go home, load it on my machine & play it. I didn't have to download new drivers, then a 500MB patch for the game before I even started to play it, I didn't have to register my security code on a web site, I didn't have to scratch my head reading the back of the game box trying to work out if I could play the game multiplayer on a local LAN.
I thought the Internet was supposed to make all this shit simpler, but it actually just gives games companies the ability to rush this shit out, secure in the knowledge they can just finish it later by publishing a patch everyone can download.
Gaming has become far too complicated for me now, and with the exception of new Fallout or Half-Life games, I'm simply not interested in any other big releases that are coming out in the future.
I keep a Windows XP installation around for gaming, otherwise everything else for me is Linux and that's how I look to get my gaming fun now - existing Linux game ports for things like Quake & Unreal Tournament, free games like Oolite and OpenTTD, running some Windows games favourites in WINE, and finally older games in emulators like DOSBox & UAE. Bunch all that together and there's far more gaming capability there than I will ever have the time to use fully...
Sorry, but I'm really not into hemorrhaging money for, in effect, games that I am renting rather than owning, no matter how "micro" the micro-transactions are and my model for games companies is quite simple:
"I buy your shit & play it, if it's good fun and good value for money, then I'm pretty certain I'll come back and buy more shit later. In the mean time, kindly piss off and leave me to my fun."
Your obviously youthful drug-addled brain has glossed over one important fact that destroys your argument completely...
For music to be released in the first place, curmudgeonly old people like me have to be prepared to buy it (which I am *MORE* than happy to do, BTW, at least for good quality music anyway) such that someone can make it available to pirates to obtain freely.
Incidentally, I'm in my mid-40s, have been around computers for 30+ years and probably know better than you how to rip my music & DVDs. Oh, and I don't plan on dying any time soon, BTW - for having subsidised your free music habits all these years, I shall be expecting a return favour from you when and if I need to employ some drug-addled youthful simpleton like you to empty my colostomy bag...
For years now, we've been able to get around the old injustice of having to buy a whole album just for one or two of the songs which weren't crap....
I suggest you need to do a little more investigation into your music & change artists. There are countless albums out there that are great from start to finish, so please don't make sweeping statements about all albums having only one or good tracks on them.
Maybe that's the case for most modern over-marketed plasticized modern rubbish, but it's certainly not the case for what I listen to.
Good, quite frankly. If you haven't got the attention span to be able to listen to an entire album start to finish, then you shouldn't be listening to Pink Floyd, or countless other great artists.
Turning music into "Pick 'n' Mix sweeties" cheapens it - well, maybe not for the plasticized chart dross out there, but for proper music written and produced by proper musicians it does.
I doubt it was ever illegal in the first place anyway because as I interpret the DMCA, the law stops you cracking copy protection - not that I am (or ever plan to be) an iPhone owner, but doesn't jailbreaking just mean having the ability to install non-Apple approved software?
It still doesn't mean Apple have to support it, plus I doubt the sanity of anyone who buys a locked-in device with the sole purpose of unlocking it anyway.
Now admittedly, the Linux box is acting as the server, and I did set it up on that first, but the number of patches, updates, etc. that needed to be applied was ridiculous on the Linux box.
I'd love to know what Linux distro you were using & how long ago you did this because this doesn't sound much like any modern Linux distro today - sure, there may be a need to download a new version or use the package manager to download the VPN apps in the first place, but this idea of "dependency hell" pretty much disappeared years ago. I myself use the "roll your own" Gentoo Linux distro and there's some mucking about with putting the correct USE and KEYWORDS in place, I might even have to do a kernel recompile to build VPN adapter support into the kernel - but then Gentoo's not for the faint-hearted Linux user anyway...
But I cannot argue with much else you've said and it's actually refreshing to speak to an Apple user who is able to rationally explain why he made the choice that he did and clearly knows a bit about how computers and OSes work.
Unfortunately, that isn't the case for most of the other Apple users on here...
Incidentally, I used the phrase "nosey consumers" because, quite frankly, as a consumer of books & music, it's frankly none of my business who gets what percentage cut in getting that product to me - all that matters is that it was worth the money I paid for it, that's IT!
Yes, I'll make an exception about wanting to know if kids suffered human rights abuses working in sweat shops to make the clothes I'm going to buy, or if the meat I'm about to buy isn't produced in an ethical fashion - but none of that stuff concerns books or music anyway so I really don't consider it my business to go poking my nose in there.
I'm surprised you didn't mention marketing costs in there also - presumably someone has to pay for the posters at bus or train stations, or moving the author around various towns & cities signing books. Correct me if I'm wrong but presumably the publisher pays for that & ultimately the marketing serves a purpose of getting news out about the book which a lot of people wouldn't have known about otherwise.
This is why I have a problem with nosey consumers who have this ridiculous belief that the book industry can survive with publishers & the music industry can survive without record companies - if every author and every musician sets up their own web site to sell direct to the public, the whole thing becomes equivalent to a huge Arabian market where every hawker is trying to sell his wares by shouting louder than every other hawker... and millions of bemused consumers wandering around scratching their heads wondering which stall they should try next in order to find something interesting to spend their money on.
If I buy a book for £10 (sorry, I'm in the UK) and when I've finished with it, I hand it in to a charity shop where someone buys it used for £1, then two of us got to read it for £11 total with £1 of that money going to a good cause.
You cannot pass on DRM ebooks to others, and Amazon stands to make a lot more profit selling it's own DRM ebooks than reselling paper books published by others...
If publishers are spending millions on advertising & marketing something then there is some risk to them.
And once again, this raises the same old questions - without the marketing people in the middle advertising books and music, what's going to lead you and I, the consumers, to find the music & books we want to listen to or read amongst the hundreds of thousands of musicians and artists all calling out trying to get us to buy their wares.
I dislike advertising as much as the next guy but the facts are inescapable - I buy and read classic rock music magazines that contain adverts that lead me to buy albums I would probably never have found & enjoyed otherwise, I buy computer magazines that contain adverts that lead me to buy the best type of computer hardware for the job I need it to do, and I'm sure that despite having an enlarged cynicism gland connected to an equally large anti-corporation venom sac, there's some subliminal marketing shit going on in my head somewhere that occasional causes me to buy other stuff that was advertised at me at some point.
So please stop fooling yourself - much of marketing is lies & bullshit but some of it does lead you to buy stuff that you wouldn't have found out about otherwise.
Okay, so in other words your proposing that iTunes does for music what Amazon is doing for ebooks and going to a "direct from the creator" DRM-based model......but didn't iTunes try DRM already & wasn't it vastly unpopular with you iHavenobrain owners?
My own personal experience of it is that it hasn't worked.
The Indian staff that have been added to my team as consultants are hard working, interested & well educated - but in my particular technical consultancy role, previous experience is very important but they lack that experience.
They were also put into the team without any consultation with me, yet for any interviewees in the UK, I or another of the senior consultants are asked to technically vet them in a separate short interview.
Furthermore, my role is specifically based around security on application servers built on Linux and Solaris - yet it took my having to speak to their manager to get the Indian guys put on their *FIRST* Linux course after they had been put into their roles.
The whole purpose of them being there is for me to handover some work to them and for me to be their technical lead. However, I do not have the bandwidth to mentor them because I am too busy on some major projects for large clients. Yet whoever put these guys in the roles did not think about their current technical skills or allocate any additional resource to get them trained so that they can assist me effectively.
Again, I don't blame them one bit but would dearly like to find out the name of the senior person who organised this - it was badly thought out and done purely as a cost-saving exercise without thinking about the additional time and training expense these guys need to effectively speak to my clients.
So please don't give me the "outsourcing corporate speak" - the same people who use that speak are the people who make the decisions about it in the first place and leave the front-line people like me having to try to sort their crap out.
I didn't say I liked outsourcing & I've lost some good work colleagues as a result of it - but I'm not going to blame it on Indian people who ultimately just want to earn a decent livelihood like the rest of us.
I think you need to keep yourself better informed.
Firstly, the salary for an IT job in India is somewhere around 15-20% what it is here in the UK - even so, someone on that salary in India is earning a good wage. It therefore makes sense that electronics goods would also be proportionately priced.
Secondly, there is a stronger cultural link between wealth and status in India - a man on a high salary will have have no shortage of potential wives knocking at his door - but they are also less materialistic than us. Therefore, the importance you and I might place on the functionality of a device is perhaps less important to an Indian. So please don't judge everyone else by our standards.
Thirdly, India is not known for exporting high-tech goods to the West, it is a country aimed at providing a cheaper-to-hire English-speaking service industry workforce to the West. And because I detect some sour grapes over outsourcing in the tone of your message, please target your wrath at the rich Western CEOs pocketing the cost differential between hiring staff in the USA or Europe than in India - after all, if somebody offered you a higher paid job than what you're in at the moment, you'd at least consider it even if you didn't take it. So why should anyone in India be any different?
Because if you're that delusional to believe that any personal data leakage is less important that displaying a little fruit picture on the lid of your computer, then you will need all the luck you can get.
Incidentally, my nice salary as a security consultant has ultimately lead to a happy more comfortable lifestyle in a good relationship - so yes I'm a computer geek and yes I get laid regularly - but thanks for asking.
As I said already, how many other people use Linux really doesn't bother me & I don't believe any company anywhere undertakes anything unless they think there's profit to be made from it.
But Steam for Linux is a good thing & I'll be interested to see what impact it does have on desktop Linux take-up.
Sure Windows 7 may be better than XP, I don't use it & cannot comment on it. And, yes, it's more popular than Vista, enough so that it's being hailed a success - again, cannot argue with that.
But the fact is that Windows XP is still the most popular Windows desktop OS and good enough for most people until they get a new PC with Windows 7 on it or go buy the Windows 7 boxed version as an upgrade. So any PC games that are released in the near future are certainly not going to be incompatible with Windows XP because that would be commercial suicide for any games company.
So faced with the fact that most people have no reason to upgrade from XP to 7, Microsoft's only course of action would be to some how try to force them to upgrade - but then, with Steam on Linux and more games running on Linux, are they more likely to pay for Windows 7 or give Ubuntu a try because it's free?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I am not a violent person but my strong comments were meant to illustrate my disdain at no-hopers searching for a bit of fame by using Slashdot as an advertising platform for some boring little talk they're doing at a computer show somewhere.
People like me, who just get on and do their security work without bragging to the rest of the world about it, are the ones with skills - anyone can stand in front of a bunch of salivating muppets and perform magic tricks.
Just to show the other side of the coin also...
I have an education, a bit of money, my own house (with my wife) and I started my career cleaning cars to go into showrooms some 30 years ago, but nowadays I'm a well-paid security consultant on Linux-based telephony servers.
In all that time, I have only ever owned one Apple product, an iPod Touch which my wife gave to me when she upgraded to an iPhone. It's a neat little music player that's great value for money based on what I paid for it, but nothing more.
But I wouldn't hand over a single penny for an Apple product whilst it is locked-in to one vendor.
My experience of Apple fanbois (which I have been describing as "elitists" in my posts for some months now anyway) is that they sneer down their noses at everyone else & believe that subscribing to Apple products immediately makes them experts in all things.
I have no problem with people wanting easy computing with vendor lock-in and paying a premium price for it - it's their money after all.
In the same way, I really don't use Windows much these days as a now mostly-Linux user, but I still give a lot of my free time fixing the Windows PCs of friends & relatives because it's not my place to preach to anyone else unless they come to me and ask me questions.
But I get very annoyed when fanbois make sweeping statements about Linux & Windows that simply are NOT true and that's when I am compelled to respond to their posts on here - I'm sure many techie geeks on here do exactly the same thing.
So I recommend just going off and enjoying your Apple products without trying to preach to us constantly how good they are. Most of us treat computing devices as tools that have a job of work to do and have a high degree of customisation; how they look or whether they match the clothes I'm wearing are immaterial.
How's the KoolAid addiction coming along? Did you manage to 1/2 your consumption to just 5 crates a day as you said you might?
Not at all. Like I said, there's more than enough good CD albums for me to find out there & enjoy.
I think the record companies are doing a fantastic job at the moment remastering & rereleasing some great old music at the moment, I don't see £10 for a CD I'm going to enjoy for at least the next 20 years as being anything but great value for moment.
I just don't like sweeping statements from people who clearly have a limited musical experience or taste range, and no idea of what they are talking about.
...because if I was, and you decided to eavesdrop & record one of *MY* calls, the only "interception" would be between my fist & your face.
I don't think it will have any effect.
All this means that if you decide to hack open your Wii, nobody can take litigation out on you on circumventing the DMCA. It does *NOT* mean Nintendo have to provide you with both the means and instructions on how to hack open your Wii and install your stuff on it.
Likewise, it does nothing about Nintendo, Apple, etc. putting code in their official ROMs that detect when a machine is jailbroken so they don't have to support it.
... "Keep It Simple Stupid".
As an avid gamer, I've pretty much stopped buying modern games now, simply because gaming has become far too complicated for me.
I used to be able to go into a games shop, browse a good selection of titles, buy something, then go home, load it on my machine & play it. I didn't have to download new drivers, then a 500MB patch for the game before I even started to play it, I didn't have to register my security code on a web site, I didn't have to scratch my head reading the back of the game box trying to work out if I could play the game multiplayer on a local LAN.
I thought the Internet was supposed to make all this shit simpler, but it actually just gives games companies the ability to rush this shit out, secure in the knowledge they can just finish it later by publishing a patch everyone can download.
Gaming has become far too complicated for me now, and with the exception of new Fallout or Half-Life games, I'm simply not interested in any other big releases that are coming out in the future.
I keep a Windows XP installation around for gaming, otherwise everything else for me is Linux and that's how I look to get my gaming fun now - existing Linux game ports for things like Quake & Unreal Tournament, free games like Oolite and OpenTTD, running some Windows games favourites in WINE, and finally older games in emulators like DOSBox & UAE. Bunch all that together and there's far more gaming capability there than I will ever have the time to use fully...
Sorry, but I'm really not into hemorrhaging money for, in effect, games that I am renting rather than owning, no matter how "micro" the micro-transactions are and my model for games companies is quite simple:
"I buy your shit & play it, if it's good fun and good value for money, then I'm pretty certain I'll come back and buy more shit later. In the mean time, kindly piss off and leave me to my fun."
Your obviously youthful drug-addled brain has glossed over one important fact that destroys your argument completely...
For music to be released in the first place, curmudgeonly old people like me have to be prepared to buy it (which I am *MORE* than happy to do, BTW, at least for good quality music anyway) such that someone can make it available to pirates to obtain freely.
Incidentally, I'm in my mid-40s, have been around computers for 30+ years and probably know better than you how to rip my music & DVDs. Oh, and I don't plan on dying any time soon, BTW - for having subsidised your free music habits all these years, I shall be expecting a return favour from you when and if I need to employ some drug-addled youthful simpleton like you to empty my colostomy bag...
How's this for an idea?
How about you develop some games worth buying *FIRST*, and *THEN* work out how you are going to sell them to me?
For years now, we've been able to get around the old injustice of having to buy a whole album just for one or two of the songs which weren't crap....
I suggest you need to do a little more investigation into your music & change artists. There are countless albums out there that are great from start to finish, so please don't make sweeping statements about all albums having only one or good tracks on them.
Maybe that's the case for most modern over-marketed plasticized modern rubbish, but it's certainly not the case for what I listen to.
Good, quite frankly. If you haven't got the attention span to be able to listen to an entire album start to finish, then you shouldn't be listening to Pink Floyd, or countless other great artists.
Turning music into "Pick 'n' Mix sweeties" cheapens it - well, maybe not for the plasticized chart dross out there, but for proper music written and produced by proper musicians it does.
I doubt it was ever illegal in the first place anyway because as I interpret the DMCA, the law stops you cracking copy protection - not that I am (or ever plan to be) an iPhone owner, but doesn't jailbreaking just mean having the ability to install non-Apple approved software?
It still doesn't mean Apple have to support it, plus I doubt the sanity of anyone who buys a locked-in device with the sole purpose of unlocking it anyway.
Now admittedly, the Linux box is acting as the server, and I did set it up on that first, but the number of patches, updates, etc. that needed to be applied was ridiculous on the Linux box.
I'd love to know what Linux distro you were using & how long ago you did this because this doesn't sound much like any modern Linux distro today - sure, there may be a need to download a new version or use the package manager to download the VPN apps in the first place, but this idea of "dependency hell" pretty much disappeared years ago. I myself use the "roll your own" Gentoo Linux distro and there's some mucking about with putting the correct USE and KEYWORDS in place, I might even have to do a kernel recompile to build VPN adapter support into the kernel - but then Gentoo's not for the faint-hearted Linux user anyway...
But I cannot argue with much else you've said and it's actually refreshing to speak to an Apple user who is able to rationally explain why he made the choice that he did and clearly knows a bit about how computers and OSes work.
Unfortunately, that isn't the case for most of the other Apple users on here...
Incidentally, I used the phrase "nosey consumers" because, quite frankly, as a consumer of books & music, it's frankly none of my business who gets what percentage cut in getting that product to me - all that matters is that it was worth the money I paid for it, that's IT!
Yes, I'll make an exception about wanting to know if kids suffered human rights abuses working in sweat shops to make the clothes I'm going to buy, or if the meat I'm about to buy isn't produced in an ethical fashion - but none of that stuff concerns books or music anyway so I really don't consider it my business to go poking my nose in there.
I'm surprised you didn't mention marketing costs in there also - presumably someone has to pay for the posters at bus or train stations, or moving the author around various towns & cities signing books. Correct me if I'm wrong but presumably the publisher pays for that & ultimately the marketing serves a purpose of getting news out about the book which a lot of people wouldn't have known about otherwise.
This is why I have a problem with nosey consumers who have this ridiculous belief that the book industry can survive with publishers & the music industry can survive without record companies - if every author and every musician sets up their own web site to sell direct to the public, the whole thing becomes equivalent to a huge Arabian market where every hawker is trying to sell his wares by shouting louder than every other hawker... and millions of bemused consumers wandering around scratching their heads wondering which stall they should try next in order to find something interesting to spend their money on.
The system simply wouldn't work...
Yes, but why still the DRM protection?
If I buy a book for £10 (sorry, I'm in the UK) and when I've finished with it, I hand it in to a charity shop where someone buys it used for £1, then two of us got to read it for £11 total with £1 of that money going to a good cause.
You cannot pass on DRM ebooks to others, and Amazon stands to make a lot more profit selling it's own DRM ebooks than reselling paper books published by others...
Wrong!
If publishers are spending millions on advertising & marketing something then there is some risk to them.
And once again, this raises the same old questions - without the marketing people in the middle advertising books and music, what's going to lead you and I, the consumers, to find the music & books we want to listen to or read amongst the hundreds of thousands of musicians and artists all calling out trying to get us to buy their wares.
I dislike advertising as much as the next guy but the facts are inescapable - I buy and read classic rock music magazines that contain adverts that lead me to buy albums I would probably never have found & enjoyed otherwise, I buy computer magazines that contain adverts that lead me to buy the best type of computer hardware for the job I need it to do, and I'm sure that despite having an enlarged cynicism gland connected to an equally large anti-corporation venom sac, there's some subliminal marketing shit going on in my head somewhere that occasional causes me to buy other stuff that was advertised at me at some point.
So please stop fooling yourself - much of marketing is lies & bullshit but some of it does lead you to buy stuff that you wouldn't have found out about otherwise.
Okay, so in other words your proposing that iTunes does for music what Amazon is doing for ebooks and going to a "direct from the creator" DRM-based model... ...but didn't iTunes try DRM already & wasn't it vastly unpopular with you iHavenobrain owners?
My own personal experience of it is that it hasn't worked.
The Indian staff that have been added to my team as consultants are hard working, interested & well educated - but in my particular technical consultancy role, previous experience is very important but they lack that experience.
They were also put into the team without any consultation with me, yet for any interviewees in the UK, I or another of the senior consultants are asked to technically vet them in a separate short interview.
Furthermore, my role is specifically based around security on application servers built on Linux and Solaris - yet it took my having to speak to their manager to get the Indian guys put on their *FIRST* Linux course after they had been put into their roles.
The whole purpose of them being there is for me to handover some work to them and for me to be their technical lead. However, I do not have the bandwidth to mentor them because I am too busy on some major projects for large clients. Yet whoever put these guys in the roles did not think about their current technical skills or allocate any additional resource to get them trained so that they can assist me effectively.
Again, I don't blame them one bit but would dearly like to find out the name of the senior person who organised this - it was badly thought out and done purely as a cost-saving exercise without thinking about the additional time and training expense these guys need to effectively speak to my clients.
So please don't give me the "outsourcing corporate speak" - the same people who use that speak are the people who make the decisions about it in the first place and leave the front-line people like me having to try to sort their crap out.
I didn't say I liked outsourcing & I've lost some good work colleagues as a result of it - but I'm not going to blame it on Indian people who ultimately just want to earn a decent livelihood like the rest of us.
Many a true word spoken in jest... I don't suppose you've ever seen NPRQuake have you?
Jeez, I cannot believe it's not been updated in 8 years!!!
I think you need to keep yourself better informed.
Firstly, the salary for an IT job in India is somewhere around 15-20% what it is here in the UK - even so, someone on that salary in India is earning a good wage. It therefore makes sense that electronics goods would also be proportionately priced.
Secondly, there is a stronger cultural link between wealth and status in India - a man on a high salary will have have no shortage of potential wives knocking at his door - but they are also less materialistic than us. Therefore, the importance you and I might place on the functionality of a device is perhaps less important to an Indian. So please don't judge everyone else by our standards.
Thirdly, India is not known for exporting high-tech goods to the West, it is a country aimed at providing a cheaper-to-hire English-speaking service industry workforce to the West. And because I detect some sour grapes over outsourcing in the tone of your message, please target your wrath at the rich Western CEOs pocketing the cost differential between hiring staff in the USA or Europe than in India - after all, if somebody offered you a higher paid job than what you're in at the moment, you'd at least consider it even if you didn't take it. So why should anyone in India be any different?
Well, then I wish you the best of luck.
Because if you're that delusional to believe that any personal data leakage is less important that displaying a little fruit picture on the lid of your computer, then you will need all the luck you can get.
Incidentally, my nice salary as a security consultant has ultimately lead to a happy more comfortable lifestyle in a good relationship - so yes I'm a computer geek and yes I get laid regularly - but thanks for asking.
As I said already, how many other people use Linux really doesn't bother me & I don't believe any company anywhere undertakes anything unless they think there's profit to be made from it.
But Steam for Linux is a good thing & I'll be interested to see what impact it does have on desktop Linux take-up.
Sure Windows 7 may be better than XP, I don't use it & cannot comment on it. And, yes, it's more popular than Vista, enough so that it's being hailed a success - again, cannot argue with that.
But the fact is that Windows XP is still the most popular Windows desktop OS and good enough for most people until they get a new PC with Windows 7 on it or go buy the Windows 7 boxed version as an upgrade. So any PC games that are released in the near future are certainly not going to be incompatible with Windows XP because that would be commercial suicide for any games company.
So faced with the fact that most people have no reason to upgrade from XP to 7, Microsoft's only course of action would be to some how try to force them to upgrade - but then, with Steam on Linux and more games running on Linux, are they more likely to pay for Windows 7 or give Ubuntu a try because it's free?
Definitely interesting times...