I visit porn sites regularly to build up my collection of hot babe pictures (cheap hobby), and I have rarely gotten any spyware or trojans or viruses from them.
They don't need to do that. They know what you want to see. Spyware comes from commercial sites that want to sell you to somebody else - and most porn sites only want you to keep coming to them, not somebody else.
Uuh. the old guy wouldn't be visiting porn sites, would he?
(Actually that's a joke - I visit porn sites regularly and you know what? Very few of them dump spyware on your system. They don't have to. They know what you want to see.)
"(Did I mention the shop only charged me for the parts since they didn't fix the real problem the first time - THAT is service!)"
That's really excellent service.
I have a business client who likes me because I spent four hours trying to determine why his SCSI scanner wasn't working before concluding that either the SCSI board or the internal electronics were dead. I didn't charge him for those four hours because my policy is "no fix - no charge" - and I couldn't PROVE the machine was dead. If I'd had some utility which could tell me the SCSI board was dead or the scanner was dead, I could have charged him. My problem, though, not his.
So far in my own low-end tech support business, I've seen some of what you have experienced.
Nobody has stiffed me on a bill yet, but that's because I take cash and checks right there. Once I get a contracted business, I expect the month's money up front. Only way to go. Nobody can be trusted.
You're right about the glut of techs, too. Craigslist in San Francisco has about 100 or more ads in their "Computer Services" area every day. However, most of the ads are really poorly done - which doesn't necessarily mean the tech is incompetent, but DOES mean they don't know how to market.
I don't think joining the Chamber is really going to help your business (depending on the size of your town, I suppose - it would be a complete waste of time to do that in San Francisco for a low-end tech support business like mine.)
And of course you need a signed agreement - for business AND home users. I copied the one that one of those national PC support franchise outfits use. I figure if it was good enough for their attornies, it's good enough for me. So far no one has refused to sign, and if they ever do, they get no service. Period. I always make it a joke - I tell them this agreement gives me the right to destroy their home in order to fix their PC, as well as establishing what my rate is. So far most people have taken it well.
It's true that the problem with home users is that they expect miracles in one hour - because they can't afford more than that. I have cut my bill down or done an extra hour or so for free - but only for co-workers or other people I know. Everybody else pays full rate. You have to be hard-nosed, even though it's a pain to have to tell people that it's going to take four hours to clear their machine of 1500 pieces of spyware - not one hour. And I hate leaving somebody with a spyware-cleaning job only half done. You just have to be upfront about how difficult it is to get rid of some of this crap. (And no, Ad-Aware and SpyBot AND MS's new cleaner are NOT enough to get rid of everything.)
You're right, it's a marginal business - especially at the rates I charge. I'm just hoping to get by financially until I get something better going.
Yes, computers ARE complex - both individually and in the aggregate as an industry. With hundreds of different components, hundreds of different manufacturers who just LOVE to "differentiate" themselves by "making the computer easier to use" by making custom motherboards and tweaking the BIOS, and scores of thousands of software written by people all over the map in competence, there is no fucking way you can say computers are not complex. Especially for the non-tech end user. That's just stupid.
Second, how does the naive end user Google for a PC problem when they don't have a clue what words to use?
Manuals? HAH! Since when has any recent manufacturer included a manual - especially a manual that ACTUALLY tells you how to troubleshoot a problem - when half the techs in the industry - either on their OWN HELP DESK or outside - can't fix the problem in less than four hours of head-scratching?
Another stupid remark.
Take it back to the manufacturer? I can tell you own a locally purchased clone. Dell and the rest have help desks widely recognized as a joke. And software? Right - ask Microsoft to fix something. Fork over $275 first, please. When the average user has a monthly disposable income of $100? Are you nuts?
And finally, you suggest that adding a firewall and an AV and Ad-aware will solve all their problems. Yes, it will help with THOSE SPECIFIC problems (spyware, viruses, etc.) which are the bulk of tech support calls these days - thanks to Microsoft's fucking incompetence.
But it does NOTHING for the million other problems that regularly crop up in PCs.
You're an elitist idiot. You have no clue how fucked up the IT industry is. Get a clue, please.
about his "overqualified amateur" rant, since it was off the cuff.
And his point was that appliance repair people get training in fixing a specific item, whereas computers have such varied configurations that it is nearly impossible to be an expert in fixing EVERYTHING.
Or at least, I hope he understands that.
I happen to be one of those "unqualified amateurs" doing home and small business tech support for low rates. I have twenty years in the IT field, so I know the basic facts about IT: nothing works and nobody cares. I have only been messing with current PC systems for the last three years, but I learn fast and usually have some idea where to look to solve a problem. But there's no doubt that the bewildering variety of screwups in both hardware and software make it very hard to do a quick, efficient fix.
As an example from my own machine, a couple weeks ago I moved some partitions on the 160GB hard drive to make more room for my Windows 2000 and Windows XP root partitions (thankfully my Linux is on the other drive). Once I started accessing the partition that ended up on the other side of the 137GB barrier, both Windows crashed totally.
I reinstalled and reconfigured, making sure I had SP4 on 2000 and SP2 on XP (which I had before the crash). After accessing that partition again, I discovered that neither OS could see files put in that partition by the other OS.
To make a long story short, after nearly a week of wrestling with this, and being amazed at some of the bizarre behavior (all of which clearly indicated that at least one of the OS's simply was not seeing that partition in the "right" place on the drive), I discovered an MS Knowledgebase article that helpfully stated that Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 cannot read the partition table correctly for "some" hard drives! (God forbid that MS tell us WHICH drives, WHEN, and WHY! Now I know! Big drives!) And I had installed 2000 with SP3 and THEN applied SP4 - too late, homes!
Now, I spent a HELL of a lot of time on Google looking for ANYONE who had similar symptoms or a similar problem. Nothing - on the Web or in Google groups. I should have checked MS first, but even there it was not easy to find this particular KB article.
Apparently, only under the specific conditions I had - a particular drive, installing 2000 SP3 first, then applying SP4, and possibly dual-booting with XP - did this problem arise.
Multiply this by the tons of proprietary motherboards, manufacturer-tweaked BIOSes, "custom" hardware, scores of thousands of software apps, and add in a pinch of spyware - and how the hell can ANY tech ever hope to figure out what is wrong in less than two to four hours?
Which, at the rate techs charge, is a hell of a lot of money for some home user who has, on a national average, maybe $100 disposable income for the month. It's no less of a problem for a business user if a critical server is out of action for that time.
Another tech told me about trying to get a wireless LAN working for a small business down in Palo Alto. The frequency saturation in the 2.4GHz band was so bad there that the users kept getting kicked off or re-associating with the wrong access points. He tried everything - other brands of wireless, bigger, more directional antennas - nothing worked. Finally he had them buy a Cisco access point that was seven times more expensive than the ones they had been trying, which put out 100mw instead of 20. That worked - so far.
For the last week, my AV has been turning off its email scanner for no apparent reason. No indication why, no good explanations on the company's forum. Since turning off the outbound SMTP scanner, it seems to have stopped doing it - so far.
"Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead."
As I've said before, until we have some adequate simulation of conceptual processing, this sort of thing is not very feasible.
That sounds good, but I'm confused. How does Zero-Install know which parts you actually use - especially if you've never downloaded the program before? Or for that matter, later? Does it look at the file access dates or something? That would be nice.
OTOH, there might be occasions where I DO want to download the whole thing, so that should be an option.
I'll have to look into more thoroughly once I get my ancient RH 7.3 upgraded to current. If this method can be made to work well, without the potential problems of Web apps, I think it would be very cool.
Definitely getting rid of the notion of "installing" software would be a huge leap forward in ease of use.
Autopackage is no more a tool for dangerous practices than configure/make/make install.
You CANNOT override root with this system any more than you can now.
And you "want" vrs. "need" is utter bullshit. Anybody who says everything is in a distro - or even in a distro repository - is a complete idiot. New stuff of value comes out every day and I for one don't intend to sit around waiting for somebody in a distro that can't even field-test parted on a dual-boot machine (which caused the problems with Fedora and Mandrake last year) to get around to "certifying" some piece of software.
Also, moron, I was entirely serious about NEVER having got any malware from ANY source (except one program (a Windows program, natch) I got from a P2P network, which my AV detected instantly).
You're full of it. You imagine yourself Dictator of the OSS world. You're nothing but a troll who comes up with stupid arguments about a new system you know nothing about. Fuck off.
"then how do I update those without going out and manually downloading a few dozen AutoPackage updates?"
You still miss the point. Those packages could just as easily be placed in a repository and could be downloaded all at once by an automated facility supplied by the distro.
If Mozilla and Debian are fighting over a package, that implies stupidity on the part of at least one of them. Unfortunate, but it has nothing to do with the methodology of package management.
And there is nothing preventing complete automated management of packages. The Autopackage FAQ says they intend to integrate with automated package managers.
So again I ask, where is the problem?
You haven't provided any evidence that any of this is necessarily going to be a problem.
Try it. If it becomes a problem - as dependency hell supposedly is for current methods - then come up with a new way - like Autopackage has.
Natural language translation has to rely on conceptual processing. Without conceptual processing, good natural language translation is simply not possible.
More important, conceptual processing - if done well enough - would have enormous implications in all other areas besides natural language.
It would obsolete all current forms of software development, at the very least. Conventional computer "languages" would go the way of the dodo.
And very few people are working on that area of AI any more. It's not easy. But without it, we can never have the sort of computer interaction we want.
I don't think anybody in the Transhuman field assumes there are no further barriers.
We just assume we can't even conceive of them with less than superhuman intelligence, so why bother?
We CAN conceive - however imperfectly - of replacing human intelligence with something better.
Or we assume that such barriers will be overcome with the intelligence then at hand just as the current barriers will be overcome.
Your second scenario - an intelligence not based on (conventional) machinery or biology - is of interest. Some UFO theorists base their theories on that concept. Unfortunately there's no way to test such a theory at the moment.
Technology marches on - and will inevitably lead to developments (regardless of source) that will lead to a Singularity - or at least the sort of developments we Transhumans intend.
The Taoists were into immortality, too, so your Asian analogy doesn't hold there, either.
There are plenty of Japanese futurists, if you haven't looked.
Where this guy probably goes wrong (I haven't read everything yet) is he probably describes certain future circumstances which in reality other advances will make obsolete. Drexler warned against this in "Engines of Creation" while deliberately doing it himself.
I doubt it - because then everybody would be trying to kill him.
And unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.
Unless you count the guy who threw the pie in his face. I read a story somewhere where an assassin threw a pie filled with some sort of fast-setting putty or something so when it hit the guy, he proceeded to asphixiate...:-)
The codebase is ALREADY so unstable that Microsoft is unable to produce Longhorn in less than a decade...and that even without removing most of the feature set it was intended to have...
I'm currently studying Windows 2003 Server - a nightmare of menus, configuration management tools, wizards, command line tools, etc. Anybody who thinks Windows is somehow magically easier to use than Linux should look at this piece of shit.
It's a nightmare even trying to configure user permissions.
They put Group Policy in its own Management Console, an admission that no Windows 2000 Server administrators could ever figure it out.
And Longhorn promises to be worse than this.
It's over - Microsoft has bought the farm with their own incompetence and feature-obsession.
Much as I hate Windows, I don't see it going extinct in a mere two years.
Maybe when people see what a dog Longhorn is, they will START to go extinct then, but there's no way you can convert hundreds of millions of people from Windows to Linux in two years. Totally impossible.
What is likely to happen is more of the same - Linux will make continual slow - and increasing - inroads on the server and desktop markets until it has approximately 25% of the market (first in servers, then on the desktop) - at which point the "tipping point" will occur and Windows will start to lose market share big time. I estimate this will take another ten years.
However, I did predict the demise of IBM many years ago - and then they surprised me by actually supporting open source and changing enough to keep their relevance to the industry.
However, since Microsoft is totally run by Bill Gates, unless he gets hit by a truck or Osama drops a plane on him, I don't see Microsoft being able to change its tune the way a corporation like IBM - run by changing CEOS - can.
Of course, I suppose it's possible that once Bill sees his income dropping (since that is absolutely all that matters to him), he may panic and actually change.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see you cram WINDOWS into that space!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Mod this troll, mod this flamebait! Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
Another idiot that hasn't installed Linux in the last five years...
Most Linux distros blow on the machine in less time than Windows and FAR fewer questions asked.
AND you end up with a limited user account, NOT running as Administrator by default.
Moron.
You're absolutely correct.
I visit porn sites regularly to build up my collection of hot babe pictures (cheap hobby), and I have rarely gotten any spyware or trojans or viruses from them.
They don't need to do that. They know what you want to see. Spyware comes from commercial sites that want to sell you to somebody else - and most porn sites only want you to keep coming to them, not somebody else.
Uuh. the old guy wouldn't be visiting porn sites, would he?
(Actually that's a joke - I visit porn sites regularly and you know what? Very few of them dump spyware on your system. They don't have to. They know what you want to see.)
Now here's an example of brain-dead stupidity - on the part of MS, not you.
IE's margins affected Outlook?
Jesus Baron Von Christ!
THIS is why nobody can get anything to work on PCs!
Fucking STUPID designers!
"(Did I mention the shop only charged me for the parts since they didn't fix the real problem the first time - THAT is service!)"
That's really excellent service.
I have a business client who likes me because I spent four hours trying to determine why his SCSI scanner wasn't working before concluding that either the SCSI board or the internal electronics were dead. I didn't charge him for those four hours because my policy is "no fix - no charge" - and I couldn't PROVE the machine was dead. If I'd had some utility which could tell me the SCSI board was dead or the scanner was dead, I could have charged him. My problem, though, not his.
Now THAT'S what you REALLY need to fix PCs! Humor!
And I'm real bad at that - I get pissed instantly when dealing with stupid technology (which is just about everything in computers.)
What's that George Bush line?
"Fool me once...shame on me...Fool me twice...won't get fooled again?"
Or whatever...
So far in my own low-end tech support business, I've seen some of what you have experienced.
Nobody has stiffed me on a bill yet, but that's because I take cash and checks right there. Once I get a contracted business, I expect the month's money up front. Only way to go. Nobody can be trusted.
You're right about the glut of techs, too. Craigslist in San Francisco has about 100 or more ads in their "Computer Services" area every day. However, most of the ads are really poorly done - which doesn't necessarily mean the tech is incompetent, but DOES mean they don't know how to market.
I don't think joining the Chamber is really going to help your business (depending on the size of your town, I suppose - it would be a complete waste of time to do that in San Francisco for a low-end tech support business like mine.)
And of course you need a signed agreement - for business AND home users. I copied the one that one of those national PC support franchise outfits use. I figure if it was good enough for their attornies, it's good enough for me. So far no one has refused to sign, and if they ever do, they get no service. Period. I always make it a joke - I tell them this agreement gives me the right to destroy their home in order to fix their PC, as well as establishing what my rate is. So far most people have taken it well.
It's true that the problem with home users is that they expect miracles in one hour - because they can't afford more than that. I have cut my bill down or done an extra hour or so for free - but only for co-workers or other people I know. Everybody else pays full rate. You have to be hard-nosed, even though it's a pain to have to tell people that it's going to take four hours to clear their machine of 1500 pieces of spyware - not one hour. And I hate leaving somebody with a spyware-cleaning job only half done. You just have to be upfront about how difficult it is to get rid of some of this crap. (And no, Ad-Aware and SpyBot AND MS's new cleaner are NOT enough to get rid of everything.)
You're right, it's a marginal business - especially at the rates I charge. I'm just hoping to get by financially until I get something better going.
I don't know where to start...
Yes, computers ARE complex - both individually and in the aggregate as an industry. With hundreds of different components, hundreds of different manufacturers who just LOVE to "differentiate" themselves by "making the computer easier to use" by making custom motherboards and tweaking the BIOS, and scores of thousands of software written by people all over the map in competence, there is no fucking way you can say computers are not complex. Especially for the non-tech end user. That's just stupid.
Second, how does the naive end user Google for a PC problem when they don't have a clue what words to use?
Manuals? HAH! Since when has any recent manufacturer included a manual - especially a manual that ACTUALLY tells you how to troubleshoot a problem - when half the techs in the industry - either on their OWN HELP DESK or outside - can't fix the problem in less than four hours of head-scratching?
Another stupid remark.
Take it back to the manufacturer? I can tell you own a locally purchased clone. Dell and the rest have help desks widely recognized as a joke. And software? Right - ask Microsoft to fix something. Fork over $275 first, please. When the average user has a monthly disposable income of $100? Are you nuts?
And finally, you suggest that adding a firewall and an AV and Ad-aware will solve all their problems. Yes, it will help with THOSE SPECIFIC problems (spyware, viruses, etc.) which are the bulk of tech support calls these days - thanks to Microsoft's fucking incompetence.
But it does NOTHING for the million other problems that regularly crop up in PCs.
You're an elitist idiot. You have no clue how fucked up the IT industry is. Get a clue, please.
about his "overqualified amateur" rant, since it was off the cuff.
And his point was that appliance repair people get training in fixing a specific item, whereas computers have such varied configurations that it is nearly impossible to be an expert in fixing EVERYTHING.
Or at least, I hope he understands that.
I happen to be one of those "unqualified amateurs" doing home and small business tech support for low rates. I have twenty years in the IT field, so I know the basic facts about IT: nothing works and nobody cares. I have only been messing with current PC systems for the last three years, but I learn fast and usually have some idea where to look to solve a problem. But there's no doubt that the bewildering variety of screwups in both hardware and software make it very hard to do a quick, efficient fix.
As an example from my own machine, a couple weeks ago I moved some partitions on the 160GB hard drive to make more room for my Windows 2000 and Windows XP root partitions (thankfully my Linux is on the other drive). Once I started accessing the partition that ended up on the other side of the 137GB barrier, both Windows crashed totally.
I reinstalled and reconfigured, making sure I had SP4 on 2000 and SP2 on XP (which I had before the crash). After accessing that partition again, I discovered that neither OS could see files put in that partition by the other OS.
To make a long story short, after nearly a week of wrestling with this, and being amazed at some of the bizarre behavior (all of which clearly indicated that at least one of the OS's simply was not seeing that partition in the "right" place on the drive), I discovered an MS Knowledgebase article that helpfully stated that Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 cannot read the partition table correctly for "some" hard drives! (God forbid that MS tell us WHICH drives, WHEN, and WHY! Now I know! Big drives!) And I had installed 2000 with SP3 and THEN applied SP4 - too late, homes!
Now, I spent a HELL of a lot of time on Google looking for ANYONE who had similar symptoms or a similar problem. Nothing - on the Web or in Google groups. I should have checked MS first, but even there it was not easy to find this particular KB article.
Apparently, only under the specific conditions I had - a particular drive, installing 2000 SP3 first, then applying SP4, and possibly dual-booting with XP - did this problem arise.
Multiply this by the tons of proprietary motherboards, manufacturer-tweaked BIOSes, "custom" hardware, scores of thousands of software apps, and add in a pinch of spyware - and how the hell can ANY tech ever hope to figure out what is wrong in less than two to four hours?
Which, at the rate techs charge, is a hell of a lot of money for some home user who has, on a national average, maybe $100 disposable income for the month. It's no less of a problem for a business user if a critical server is out of action for that time.
Another tech told me about trying to get a wireless LAN working for a small business down in Palo Alto. The frequency saturation in the 2.4GHz band was so bad there that the users kept getting kicked off or re-associating with the wrong access points. He tried everything - other brands of wireless, bigger, more directional antennas - nothing worked. Finally he had them buy a Cisco access point that was seven times more expensive than the ones they had been trying, which put out 100mw instead of 20. That worked - so far.
For the last week, my AV has been turning off its email scanner for no apparent reason. No indication why, no good explanations on the company's forum. Since turning off the outbound SMTP scanner, it seems to have stopped doing it - so far.
PCs are a nightmare today, no question about it.
"Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead."
As I've said before, until we have some adequate simulation of conceptual processing, this sort of thing is not very feasible.
That sounds good, but I'm confused. How does Zero-Install know which parts you actually use - especially if you've never downloaded the program before? Or for that matter, later? Does it look at the file access dates or something? That would be nice.
OTOH, there might be occasions where I DO want to download the whole thing, so that should be an option.
I'll have to look into more thoroughly once I get my ancient RH 7.3 upgraded to current. If this method can be made to work well, without the potential problems of Web apps, I think it would be very cool.
Definitely getting rid of the notion of "installing" software would be a huge leap forward in ease of use.
Yes, and your point was other than what I said?
Look, moron, here are the facts.
Autopackage is no more a tool for dangerous practices than configure/make/make install.
You CANNOT override root with this system any more than you can now.
And you "want" vrs. "need" is utter bullshit. Anybody who says everything is in a distro - or even in a distro repository - is a complete idiot. New stuff of value comes out every day and I for one don't intend to sit around waiting for somebody in a distro that can't even field-test parted on a dual-boot machine (which caused the problems with Fedora and Mandrake last year) to get around to "certifying" some piece of software.
Also, moron, I was entirely serious about NEVER having got any malware from ANY source (except one program (a Windows program, natch) I got from a P2P network, which my AV detected instantly).
You're full of it. You imagine yourself Dictator of the OSS world. You're nothing but a troll who comes up with stupid arguments about a new system you know nothing about. Fuck off.
"then how do I update those without going out and manually downloading a few dozen AutoPackage updates?"
You still miss the point. Those packages could just as easily be placed in a repository and could be downloaded all at once by an automated facility supplied by the distro.
If Mozilla and Debian are fighting over a package, that implies stupidity on the part of at least one of them. Unfortunate, but it has nothing to do with the methodology of package management.
And there is nothing preventing complete automated management of packages. The Autopackage FAQ says they intend to integrate with automated package managers.
So again I ask, where is the problem?
You haven't provided any evidence that any of this is necessarily going to be a problem.
Try it. If it becomes a problem - as dependency hell supposedly is for current methods - then come up with a new way - like Autopackage has.
And given the state of the current design, we know there's no such thing...:-)
Of course, the Gnostics said this two thousand years ago...a "blind idiot god" created this world.
Looking at George Bush, how can anyone doubt it?
Natural language translation has to rely on conceptual processing. Without conceptual processing, good natural language translation is simply not possible.
More important, conceptual processing - if done well enough - would have enormous implications in all other areas besides natural language.
It would obsolete all current forms of software development, at the very least. Conventional computer "languages" would go the way of the dodo.
Conceptual processing - that is the key.
And very few people are working on that area of AI any more. It's not easy. But without it, we can never have the sort of computer interaction we want.
I don't think anybody in the Transhuman field assumes there are no further barriers.
We just assume we can't even conceive of them with less than superhuman intelligence, so why bother?
We CAN conceive - however imperfectly - of replacing human intelligence with something better.
Or we assume that such barriers will be overcome with the intelligence then at hand just as the current barriers will be overcome.
Your second scenario - an intelligence not based on (conventional) machinery or biology - is of interest. Some UFO theorists base their theories on that concept. Unfortunately there's no way to test such a theory at the moment.
Irrelevant.
Technology marches on - and will inevitably lead to developments (regardless of source) that will lead to a Singularity - or at least the sort of developments we Transhumans intend.
The Taoists were into immortality, too, so your Asian analogy doesn't hold there, either.
There are plenty of Japanese futurists, if you haven't looked.
Where this guy probably goes wrong (I haven't read everything yet) is he probably describes certain future circumstances which in reality other advances will make obsolete. Drexler warned against this in "Engines of Creation" while deliberately doing it himself.
I doubt it - because then everybody would be trying to kill him.
And unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.
Unless you count the guy who threw the pie in his face. I read a story somewhere where an assassin threw a pie filled with some sort of fast-setting putty or something so when it hit the guy, he proceeded to asphixiate...:-)
By 2015?
The codebase is ALREADY so unstable that Microsoft is unable to produce Longhorn in less than a decade...and that even without removing most of the feature set it was intended to have...
I'm currently studying Windows 2003 Server - a nightmare of menus, configuration management tools, wizards, command line tools, etc. Anybody who thinks Windows is somehow magically easier to use than Linux should look at this piece of shit.
It's a nightmare even trying to configure user permissions.
They put Group Policy in its own Management Console, an admission that no Windows 2000 Server administrators could ever figure it out.
And Longhorn promises to be worse than this.
It's over - Microsoft has bought the farm with their own incompetence and feature-obsession.
Thanks for the link - I've added it to my Transhumanism bookmarks.
Much as I hate Windows, I don't see it going extinct in a mere two years.
Maybe when people see what a dog Longhorn is, they will START to go extinct then, but there's no way you can convert hundreds of millions of people from Windows to Linux in two years. Totally impossible.
What is likely to happen is more of the same - Linux will make continual slow - and increasing - inroads on the server and desktop markets until it has approximately 25% of the market (first in servers, then on the desktop) - at which point the "tipping point" will occur and Windows will start to lose market share big time. I estimate this will take another ten years.
However, I did predict the demise of IBM many years ago - and then they surprised me by actually supporting open source and changing enough to keep their relevance to the industry.
However, since Microsoft is totally run by Bill Gates, unless he gets hit by a truck or Osama drops a plane on him, I don't see Microsoft being able to change its tune the way a corporation like IBM - run by changing CEOS - can.
Of course, I suppose it's possible that once Bill sees his income dropping (since that is absolutely all that matters to him), he may panic and actually change.
Naah...No way. He's too big an asshole.