Can you believe it? Vista just came out a couple years ago and it's already gotten to the point that the original amount of RAM is completely used up by the OS.
If we look at the youth crime rates in the US, they dropped of precipitously when the PS1 came out and have stayed low compared to previous decades ever since.
The Playstation was released on December 3, 1994.
The US price was $300.
$580, adjusted for inflation. CPI Inflation Calculator That makes the market middle class and, stereotypically, suburban.
Windows 95 was released in August 1995. In 1996 AOL went to flat-rate monthly billing. IE4 arrives in 1997. The [middle class] kid in the mid-nineties was getting his first real taste of the interactive, on-line, world.
Exactly why hackers choose Adobe as their prime target is tougher to divine, however.
Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash have as close to a 100% share of the desktop as makes no difference. The geek's dislike of these programs has had no more effect on their use than the phases of the moon or the rising and setting of the sun.
The Complete National Geographic on DVD was a runaway software best-seller during the Christmas shopping season. Adobe AIR powered, of course
The Flash 10 Beta Player [for Windows] delivers hardware accelerated H.264 HD video today - and not in some nebulous HTML5 future.
Your post boils down to the usual complaint that application XYZ isn't available on Linux. It's true, many aren't. For many of them, there are alternatives that are at least good enough for most people. For many others, particularly custom and specialised software there are no alternatives apart from running them in Wine.
The problem is that "good enough" FOSS app for Linux will be routinely ported to Windows or begin as a native Windows app. There is no compelling reason to migrate.
It's that modularity leads to very difficult game development. Reducing the ecosystem of tools and configurations to a canonical (ha ha) set might make game development viable on Linux, but would be the antithesis of the Linux philosophy.
That implies the development of any mass market consumer application will be extraordinarily difficult under Linux. You will be struggling with problems that were solved in OSX and Windows no later than the mid-nineties.
So, let me get this straight. A media company wages an 18-month lawsuit against private companies, trying to force them to disclose private data. The media company is doing this purely out of malice, as there is no good that can come from release of this data. On what planet is this sort of thing acceptable?
"Those damn reporters are trying to hurt us. No good can come from such a disclosure."
There isn't a black man, a woman or Jew above a certain age who hasn't heard that refrain a thousand times before.
The geek celebrates the anonymous wikimedia leak - when it is damaging to those he hates.
When the open and legal pursuit of inside information cuts too close to home - he bleeds for the innocent.
_____
Women at Microsoft is the women's employee affinity group at Microsoft. More than 10,000 women employees worldwide are currently members of WAM. [2010] More than 3,000 of Microsoft's women employees turned out to network and listen to more than 30 speakers at the Microsoft Women's Leadership and Development Conference [Oct 26-28 09]
There are around forty of these Microsoft affinity groups. The Chinese, with 1,500 members, is the largest ethnic group. Diversity Advisory Councils
The US, with an extremely keen interest on controlling food prices and availability has heavily subsidized farmers across the US. So much so, that it has distorted the global market and significantly limited the introduction of new agricultural markets. By reducing the amount of corn that the US exports, we would actually create a financial advantage for investment in agriculture in 3rd world countries
The US and China are the major producers - third world production is small - almost negligible - and most of the world's production is still in the western hemisphere. 2005maize.PNG
Tell me how you get the US, Canada, Brazil and Argentina to agree to limit exports?
Every so often I see an adoption story about so and so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think "Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time." And then I wait. And wait.
The "window of opportunity" for the alternative OS was closing no later than Win 3.1.
If you want a consumer oriented OS with solid *NIX roots, you have OSX.
If you want unlimited access to both FOSS and commercial/proprietary/closed-source apps, you have Windows.
Apple sells an upscale urban life-style. Microsoft, solid, middle-class values.
While the geek trumpets Linux's ideological purity and political correctness. But at what cost?
Canonical has licensed H.264. MPEG-4 Visual Licensees It is free to do what Mozilla claims it can't. In some corners of Slashdot space, such a concession to reality would be considered treasonous.
Absolutely right. The author seems to be making the argument a lack of pay implies a lack of skill.
But lack of pay can imply lack of time - and resources.
If you are working a full time job - and paying attention to your wife and kids - you are not going to have endless hours free to study and debug someone else's code.
You are not are going to have endless hours free to write and debug your own code.
There will be very real limits to the size and complexity of your projects.
You say it's everywhere, and that's why it has already won. It's not nearly as widespread as you seem to think. Many of us do not use Blu-Ray. Much video on the Internet is still H.263.
Reading the list is, as I have said before, like watching a freight train built up speed and momentum. The geek is not going to be able to stop this thing.
Right. Because the income dealings of a non-profit corporation are really just so shrouded in secrecy, loopholes and backroom deals.
It happens.
New York has its own brand of mischief that's more lethal than other states," says Ken Boehm of the National Legal and Policy Center. "When millions of dollars are being sent to non-existent organizations, clearly there's a problem."
Unlike every other state, New York allows legislators to set up their own non-profits and then steer taxpayer money to those same organizations. So, as will happen, many state and city lawmakers have done just that. "Like DC," Boehm says, "New York allows earmarks cloaked in secrecy."
As of 2008 -- the last year for which records are available -- each City Council member has been allocated about $340,000 per year to spend at their own discretion. Quite often, a lot of that money winds up at non-profit organizations run by people very close to the legislator who is dispensing those funds. And the dispersal is very hard to track; non-profit organizations file tax forms called 990s, which are self-reported.What New York's political scandals have in common [Feb 14]
After all, these businesses bring in major direct (income taxes) and indrect revenue (local employees' property taxes, sales taxes etc) to the state. Nine years ago, Boeing ditched Seattle and moved to Chicago partly because of tax breaks offered by Chicago.
40,000 employees.
15 million square feet of office space - 133 sites - owned or leased in the Puget Sound area. Fun Facts About Microsoft
The median family income in Redmond itself? $97,000.
There isn't a city in the world that wouldn't like to land a prize like this.
Microsoft spends an enormous amount of time and money on studies of office work and the office worker. That is why it can take a chance on something like the ribbon and win - and why competitors like OpenOffice.org are left playing catch-up.
After all these years... it's still Windows and Office.
It's the Windows, Office and Server divisions.
Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.
Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields.
Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.
Crucially, Microsoft has found a way to create ties between SharePoint and its more traditional products like Office and Exchange. Companies can tweak Office documents through SharePoint and receive information like whether a worker is online or not through tools in Exchange. These links have Microsoft carrying along its old-line software as it builds a more Internet-focused software line.
"SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in," said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. "It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping."
Gaming is a huge industry and the Xbox is fairly popular.
The console and PC game industry as a whole was worth $20 billion in 2007. Electronic Arts: Lost in an Alien Landscape Microsoft raked in $19 billion in revenues in its last quarter.
What surprises me is the massive boost in OS profits in Dec 09. Could that really be Windows 7, and if so, how? It costs about the same as XP/Vista, and it's not as if people are buying Windows 7 off store shelves to upgrade older computers (are they?)
235 days in the top 100. As always this time of year, tax preparation software takes center stage.
There were of course many - many - new and used refurbished PCs sold around the holidays that came with a free upgrade to Windows 7. For HP's Win 7 customer service workers, every day was Black Thursday.
I don't know, what can you do with Win7 and Office 2010 that you couldn't do with WinXP and Office 2000? What new improvements in productivity do you gain from them? How did they lower your other costs (e.g. hardware)?
There has been a dramatic shift to the 64 bit OS in Win 7:
If you shop Walmart.com - every desktop $300 and over is 64 bit Windows Home Premium, every laptop over $350. That's about 150 systems, only ten of which are priced over $1000.
The geek's ten year old office suite probably isn't going to integrate well with SharePoint.
It won't be off-loading tasks to the GPU.
Incremental improvements in productivity do matter when you have 1500 full and part time clerical workers on staff.
Great, so long as you never pin the paper up, fold, wrinkle or spindle it. Never get oil on from your fingers on it, coffee stains, pen marks, or tape residue.
How well these print-outs stand up to light and heat?
Can you leave them on the seat of your car on a hot summer's day?
If document retention is an issue, will an ordinary fire safe or cabinet do the job?
Slashdot Mirror
Can you believe it? Vista just came out a couple years ago and it's already gotten to the point that the original amount of RAM is completely used up by the OS.
Which is as it should be.
86% of Windows 7 PCs Maxing Out Memory
It's shorthand for "for mature audiences". But you knew that.
That is not how those outside the gaming community sees the "mature" video game.
But the geek knows that too.
He also knows when the flit hits the shan which developers which will be at the center of the storm.
If we look at the youth crime rates in the US, they dropped of precipitously when the PS1 came out and have stayed low compared to previous decades ever since.
The Playstation was released on December 3, 1994.
The US price was $300.
$580, adjusted for inflation. CPI Inflation Calculator That makes the market middle class and, stereotypically, suburban.
Windows 95 was released in August 1995. In 1996 AOL went to flat-rate monthly billing. IE4 arrives in 1997. The [middle class] kid in the mid-nineties was getting his first real taste of the interactive, on-line, world.
Now I can ignore both at the same time!
Because ignoring Microsoft has served the geek so well in the past.
Yahoo draws about 130 million visitors a month, who spend about 5% of the their time online there.
So is Microsoft rushing out an update to their Malicious Software Removal Tool to clean up this rootkit?
Virus:Win32/Alureon.A Definition: 1.69.77.0 Released: Oct 23, 2009
Exactly why hackers choose Adobe as their prime target is tougher to divine, however.
Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash have as close to a 100% share of the desktop as makes no difference. The geek's dislike of these programs has had no more effect on their use than the phases of the moon or the rising and setting of the sun.
The Complete National Geographic on DVD was a runaway software best-seller during the Christmas shopping season. Adobe AIR powered, of course
The Flash 10 Beta Player [for Windows] delivers hardware accelerated H.264 HD video today - and not in some nebulous HTML5 future.
Your post boils down to the usual complaint that application XYZ isn't available on Linux. It's true, many aren't. For many of them, there are alternatives that are at least good enough for most people. For many others, particularly custom and specialised software there are no alternatives apart from running them in Wine.
The problem is that "good enough" FOSS app for Linux will be routinely ported to Windows or begin as a native Windows app. There is no compelling reason to migrate.
It's that modularity leads to very difficult game development. Reducing the ecosystem of tools and configurations to a canonical (ha ha) set might make game development viable on Linux, but would be the antithesis of the Linux philosophy.
That implies the development of any mass market consumer application will be extraordinarily difficult under Linux. You will be struggling with problems that were solved in OSX and Windows no later than the mid-nineties.
So, let me get this straight. A media company wages an 18-month lawsuit against private companies, trying to force them to disclose private data. The media company is doing this purely out of malice, as there is no good that can come from release of this data. On what planet is this sort of thing acceptable?
"Those damn reporters are trying to hurt us.
No good can come from such a disclosure."
There isn't a black man, a woman or Jew above a certain age who hasn't heard that refrain a thousand times before.
The geek celebrates the anonymous wikimedia leak - when it is damaging to those he hates.
When the open and legal pursuit of inside information cuts too close to home - he bleeds for the innocent.
_____
Women at Microsoft is the women's employee affinity group at Microsoft.
More than 10,000 women employees worldwide are currently members of WAM. [2010] More than 3,000 of Microsoft's women employees turned out to network and listen to more than 30 speakers at the Microsoft Women's Leadership and Development Conference [Oct 26-28 09]
There are around forty of these Microsoft affinity groups. The Chinese, with 1,500 members, is the largest ethnic group. Diversity Advisory Councils
The US, with an extremely keen interest on controlling food prices and availability has heavily subsidized farmers across the US. So much so, that it has distorted the global market and significantly limited the introduction of new agricultural markets. By reducing the amount of corn that the US exports, we would actually create a financial advantage for investment in agriculture in 3rd world countries
19% of the land in the US can be farmed.
In most of Africa the number is less than 5%. Arable land percent world.png
The US and China are the major producers - third world production is small - almost negligible - and most of the world's production is still in the western hemisphere. 2005maize.PNG
Tell me how you get the US, Canada, Brazil and Argentina to agree to limit exports?
Sorry Adobe, but it's time for HTML5.
Whn will there be a final HTML 5 standard to support?
Every so often I see an adoption story about so and so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think "Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time." And then I wait. And wait.
Linux arrived late to the party.
The IBM Personal Computer hit the market 29 years ago.
Commander Keen and Word For Windows 20 years ago.
The "window of opportunity" for the alternative OS was closing no later than Win 3.1.
If you want a consumer oriented OS with solid *NIX roots, you have OSX.
If you want unlimited access to both FOSS and commercial/proprietary/closed-source apps, you have Windows.
Apple sells an upscale urban life-style. Microsoft, solid, middle-class values.
While the geek trumpets Linux's ideological purity and political correctness. But at what cost?
Canonical has licensed H.264. MPEG-4 Visual Licensees It is free to do what Mozilla claims it can't. In some corners of Slashdot space, such a concession to reality would be considered treasonous.
Absolutely right. The author seems to be making the argument a lack of pay implies a lack of skill.
But lack of pay can imply lack of time - and resources.
If you are working a full time job - and paying attention to your wife and kids - you are not going to have endless hours free to study and debug someone else's code.
You are not are going to have endless hours free to write and debug your own code.
There will be very real limits to the size and complexity of your projects.
Microsoft and Apple are already licensing it for Windows and OS X
Canonical is on the list of licensees I posted above.
Google and Adobe, Netflix and Nullsoft. The list goes on and on and on.
Hardware acclerated H.264 video is in the Flash 10 Beta 2 for Windows. Silverlight has it now.
You say it's everywhere, and that's why it has already won. It's not nearly as widespread as you seem to think. Many of us do not use Blu-Ray. Much video on the Internet is still H.263.
AVC/H.264 Licensees currently number 760.
Reading the list is, as I have said before, like watching a freight train built up speed and momentum. The geek is not going to be able to stop this thing.
Right. Because the income dealings of a non-profit corporation are really just so shrouded in secrecy, loopholes and backroom deals.
It happens.
New York has its own brand of mischief that's more lethal than other states," says Ken Boehm of the National Legal and Policy Center. "When millions of dollars are being sent to non-existent organizations, clearly there's a problem."
Unlike every other state, New York allows legislators to set up their own non-profits and then steer taxpayer money to those same organizations. So, as will happen, many state and city lawmakers have done just that. "Like DC," Boehm says, "New York allows earmarks cloaked in secrecy."
As of 2008 -- the last year for which records are available -- each City Council member has been allocated about $340,000 per year to spend at their own discretion. Quite often, a lot of that money winds up at non-profit organizations run by people very close to the legislator who is dispensing those funds. And the dispersal is very hard to track; non-profit organizations file tax forms called 990s, which are self-reported. What New York's political scandals have in common [Feb 14]
After all, these businesses bring in major direct (income taxes) and indrect revenue (local employees' property taxes, sales taxes etc) to the state. Nine years ago, Boeing ditched Seattle and moved to Chicago partly because of tax breaks offered by Chicago.
40,000 employees.
15 million square feet of office space - 133 sites - owned or leased in the Puget Sound area. Fun Facts About Microsoft
The median family income in Redmond itself? $97,000.
There isn't a city in the world that wouldn't like to land a prize like this.
But a system or an office suite are very simple applications. You need some know-how, but it's not rocket science.
There is nothing simple about an OS or an office suite.
In 2003-2004 OpenOffice.org had reached 9 to 12 million lines of code. Build FAQ for OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org statcvs (Lines of code)
Microsoft spends an enormous amount of time and money on studies of office work and the office worker. That is why it can take a chance on something like the ribbon and win - and why competitors like OpenOffice.org are left playing catch-up.
Isn't 2007 the one with the ribbon that no one can use? Doesn't that make it a new product, the fact that no one knows how to use it anymore?
Someone seems to know how to use it: Bestsellers in Software
#5 Office Home & Student 2007. 1147 days in the top 100.
After all these years... it's still Windows and Office.
It's the Windows, Office and Server divisions.
Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.
Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields.
Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.
Crucially, Microsoft has found a way to create ties between SharePoint and its more traditional products like Office and Exchange. Companies can tweak Office documents through SharePoint and receive information like whether a worker is online or not through tools in Exchange. These links have Microsoft carrying along its old-line software as it builds a more Internet-focused software line.
"SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in," said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. "It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping."
Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession [August 7, 2009]
Gaming is a huge industry and the Xbox is fairly popular.
The console and PC game industry as a whole was worth $20 billion in 2007. Electronic Arts: Lost in an Alien Landscape Microsoft raked in $19 billion in revenues in its last quarter.
Then we look at the other graph and sees that Windows and Office has a 2Billion a year profit, EACH
That other chart shows profit for each quarter.
What surprises me is the massive boost in OS profits in Dec 09. Could that really be Windows 7, and if so, how? It costs about the same as XP/Vista, and it's not as if people are buying Windows 7 off store shelves to upgrade older computers (are they?)
They are:
Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade
235 days in the top 100. As always this time of year, tax preparation software takes center stage.
There were of course many - many - new and used refurbished PCs sold around the holidays that came with a free upgrade to Windows 7. For HP's Win 7 customer service workers, every day was Black Thursday.
I don't know, what can you do with Win7 and Office 2010 that you couldn't do with WinXP and Office 2000? What new improvements in productivity do you gain from them? How did they lower your other costs (e.g. hardware)?
There has been a dramatic shift to the 64 bit OS in Win 7:
Windows 7 eclipses Vista on Steam, 64-bit dominating 32-bit
If you shop Walmart.com - every desktop $300 and over is 64 bit Windows Home Premium, every laptop over $350. That's about 150 systems, only ten of which are priced over $1000.
The geek's ten year old office suite probably isn't going to integrate well with SharePoint.
It won't be off-loading tasks to the GPU.
Incremental improvements in productivity do matter when you have 1500 full and part time clerical workers on staff.
That is why it is worthwhile for Microsoft to invest time and money in improving something as basic as cut & paste: How does usage data improve the Office User Experience?
Great, so long as you never pin the paper up, fold, wrinkle or spindle it. Never get oil on from your fingers on it, coffee stains, pen marks, or tape residue.
How well these print-outs stand up to light and heat?
Can you leave them on the seat of your car on a hot summer's day?
If document retention is an issue, will an ordinary fire safe or cabinet do the job?