If one of the other OSes could persuade practically every PC manufacturer to install it as default then Windows would be dead within months
Remember BootCamp?
There is a twenty-five year backlist of MSDOS and Windows titles that do not exist for the OSX or Linux platforms.
In the real world, users migrate to an alternative OS at a pace that can best be described as somewhat less than glacial. If they move at all. Apple has never captured more than 2% of the world market.
This is likely a dying gasp from Linspire, who lost their unique selling proposition (graphical software package installation) when Ubuntu rose in popularity, and stuck it under novice user's noses for free.
Linspire's "unique selling proposition" is the OEM system install and placement in big box retail. The plug and play home appliance users expect when thry go shopping for a Windows PC or the Mac.
Why do folks still buy copies of Shakespeare's plays or Beethoven's symphonies? They aren't even protected by copyright let alone by DRM.
Allow me to suggest an experiment:
Download ten classical works in the public domain translations available from Project Guttenberg. Read the same texts in the current Penquin Classics editions. Tell me which you want on your shelves.
Isn't it better for these weirdos to have safe outlet for these destructive fetishes? These simulated images do not create the fetish, they only provide an outlet for it. As a parent, I would rather these guys wanking in front of a PC in their parents' basements than strangling my daughter in some alley.
What makes you think that violent pornography IS a safe outlet for the potential child molester or sexual killer?
You might call it violent porn, but I call it HOT!!
When the porn being suppressed is the strangulation of a child for the sexual entertainment of an adult, I think I will take my stand with the censors.
I am curious how many people use this as their main distro, and how they got there. I have yet to run into a single person who has settled on this. Hell, I've barely even run into anyone interested in trying it.
The home and SOHO user is not a system builder. He is not a free or open source ideologue. Proprietary software, binary drivers, DRM. Zero marks for political correctness.
Linux is simply a plausible alternative to Windows. Nothing more.
OEM Linspire has at least a minimal presence in big box retail. Now and again pre-loaded on systems with with specs above the bottom-feeders. Your licensed DVD player is one click and $20 away.
but once the user becomes experienced enough with using Linux they are usually going to learn to bypass the pretty tools anyway and get themselves into the guts of the system
the one certainty is that end users are never going to take more than a passing interest in the internals of an operating system.
You don't.. you sell something other than the tracks
--- or you move on to another market.
older, perhaps, but certainly with different tastes in music and media. and without the time or patience to extract what it wants from the P2P nets.
what do we lose when a talented young musician decides he doesn't want or need to meet the terms and conditions of the file sharing demographic? no grinding concert tours. no hustling tee-shirts at every gig.
Once upon a time, corporate giants and goverment entities could ignore the little guys with impunity. Now, anyone with a sufficiently good story can post it and attract a large public audience.
Define large. 1512 YouTube Videos You can make this cover with 100,000 views --- or 300.
This can only be a good thing for Linux, as the more expensive the cost of Vista, the more people who will consider another option.
Home users are not system builders. OEM Linux is dead and buried at Walmart.com.
OEM Vista will add little or nothing to the price of a mass-market Vista rated system. For big-box retail there is the added incentive of significant after-market sales to keep prices down.
Your Vista customer will likely be taking an interest in HDTV, in the xBOX 360 and so on.
They won't get Vista until they buy a new computer with it preinstalled.
XP was released in 2001. The specs on a mid-line OEM Vista system are going to look pretty damn good to anyone who has been out of the market for four to five years.
Does anybody outside of Microsoft actually care about Vista?
Vista will become the default consumer OEM install on Day 1 of it's release.
Mac users upgrade within the Mac family, Windows users within the Windows family. It is rather late in the day to believe in a mass migration from one to the other.
Linux isn't even in the picture.
No mainstream OEM support. No significant presence in big box retail. OEM Linux at Walmart.com is dead and buried.
WinXP does not have perverted-control-freak class DRM embedded into it, like Vista does/will
Translated, this means Vista will support your next-generation internet radio services and legit rental and sale high-definition commercial videos.
To the 20% of American households who have already migrated to HDTV, this is generally considered a plus.
If* the consumer does so, and you catch the consumer, and you try the consumer in a court of law, and the consumer is found to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, then you punish the consumer.
The courts are hard-hearted enough to believe that a copyright holder is entitled to pursue a civil remedy, where proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not required.
Write me a ticket if you catch me speeding, but don't put a governor on my car that won't allow me to speed. Lock me up if I bash someone with a club, but don't handcuff me at birth. That's the way it has to work.
That is not the way it has to work. You gain privileges in society through a show of maturity and competence. Until then the training wheels do not come off. Sometimes they never come off:
[John] Mueller, at Ohio State University, estimates that the number of people who die from terrorist attacks is smaller than the number of people who die in their bathtubs.
The fundamental flaw in this argument is that such accidents are distributed among a population of three hundred million people: no one city has ever had to bear the full weight of these deaths and they are never compressed into a single incident.
The impact rarely extends beyond the immeadiate family. The physical, political and economic infrastructure of society remains intact.
Social institutions like the Roman Catholic Church continue to function normally, with over 2000 years experience in providing emotional support and financial assistance to the bereaved.
People, let's start using that grey matter for once
Statistics presented without any social context are meaningless.
There are a handful of cities that can absorb 3000 deaths and massive loss of infrastructure in a single incident. New Orleans is patently not one of them. The WTC at noontime held 50,000 people. Minimized Fatalities
That is the problem.
It has become possible to imagine a terrorist attack with deaths on the scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As for myself, I'll not waste any sympathy on the passenger who can't live without his laptop, his hair gel, or his iPod for four to six hours.
The real problem here is that while the police and FAA officials are retrieving iPods toilets; they could have been diverted from a real plot, where the iPod case was a ploy to divert attention or even just a coincidence.
At any given moment, there are about 5,000 planes in the air over the United States. The diversion of one does not mean much in the larger scheme of things.
The way to win them over to Linux is not to play catch-up, or even to offer a free alternative to something that already exists. Linux will have to offer some killer app that can't be had on Windows or OS X.
Developers do not exist in a vacuum.
iTunes became a killer app because of the iPod, Apple's ability to negotiate the rights to distribute content from the major labels, and because it was written natively for both the Mac and Windows platforms, with a 100% share of the home PC market.
Damn right. The computer sits on the desk. I use it and I enjoy it. But that is the limit of my interest and commitment. I have no need for perfection and I don't invest an OS or a development model with any philosophical significance.
Why can't some group build a project to get a particular distribution to the masses with proprietary whatever (codecs, flash, etc.) ?
The masses aren't system builders. If your distro isn't available as an OEM install the masses will never see it.
But as Walmart discovered you can't compete with OEM Windows on price. There are enormous economies of scale when you produce for 97% of the home market.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember BootCamp?
There is a twenty-five year backlist of MSDOS and Windows titles that do not exist for the OSX or Linux platforms.
In the real world, users migrate to an alternative OS at a pace that can best be described as somewhat less than glacial. If they move at all. Apple has never captured more than 2% of the world market.
Linspire's "unique selling proposition" is the OEM system install and placement in big box retail. The plug and play home appliance users expect when thry go shopping for a Windows PC or the Mac.
Allow me to suggest an experiment:
Download ten classical works in the public domain translations available from Project Guttenberg. Read the same texts in the current Penquin Classics editions. Tell me which you want on your shelves.
What makes you think that violent pornography IS a safe outlet for the potential child molester or sexual killer?
When the porn being suppressed is the strangulation of a child for the sexual entertainment of an adult, I think I will take my stand with the censors.
You have a right to your opinion. But the decision is for Parliment to make.
The home and SOHO user is not a system builder. He is not a free or open source ideologue. Proprietary software, binary drivers, DRM. Zero marks for political correctness.
Linux is simply a plausible alternative to Windows. Nothing more.
OEM Linspire has at least a minimal presence in big box retail. Now and again pre-loaded on systems with with specs above the bottom-feeders. Your licensed DVD player is one click and $20 away.
the one certainty is that end users are never going to take more than a passing interest in the internals of an operating system.
--- or you move on to another market.
older, perhaps, but certainly with different tastes in music and media. and without the time or patience to extract what it wants from the P2P nets.
what do we lose when a talented young musician decides he doesn't want or need to meet the terms and conditions of the file sharing demographic? no grinding concert tours. no hustling tee-shirts at every gig.
Talk to a classical musician: ask her the price of a fine solo instrument, a piano, a violin. The basic tools of her profession.
Define large. 1512 YouTube Videos You can make this cover with 100,000 views --- or 300.
Home users are not system builders. OEM Linux is dead and buried at Walmart.com.
OEM Vista will add little or nothing to the price of a mass-market Vista rated system. For big-box retail there is the added incentive of significant after-market sales to keep prices down.
Your Vista customer will likely be taking an interest in HDTV, in the xBOX 360 and so on.
XP was released in 2001. The specs on a mid-line OEM Vista system are going to look pretty damn good to anyone who has been out of the market for four to five years.
W2K had negligible sales and significance in the home market.
Vista will become the default consumer OEM install on Day 1 of it's release.
Mac users upgrade within the Mac family, Windows users within the Windows family. It is rather late in the day to believe in a mass migration from one to the other.
Linux isn't even in the picture.
No mainstream OEM support. No significant presence in big box retail. OEM Linux at Walmart.com is dead and buried.
WinXP does not have perverted-control-freak class DRM embedded into it, like Vista does/will
Translated, this means Vista will support your next-generation internet radio services and legit rental and sale high-definition commercial videos.
To the 20% of American households who have already migrated to HDTV, this is generally considered a plus.
The courts are hard-hearted enough to believe that a copyright holder is entitled to pursue a civil remedy, where proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not required.
Write me a ticket if you catch me speeding, but don't put a governor on my car that won't allow me to speed. Lock me up if I bash someone with a club, but don't handcuff me at birth. That's the way it has to work.
That is not the way it has to work. You gain privileges in society through a show of maturity and competence. Until then the training wheels do not come off. Sometimes they never come off:
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
There have been steamboats on the Great Lakes since 1832. The Badger is a working steamboat, that is part of its charm and historical significance.
The fundamental flaw in this argument is that such accidents are distributed among a population of three hundred million people: no one city has ever had to bear the full weight of these deaths and they are never compressed into a single incident.
The impact rarely extends beyond the immeadiate family. The physical, political and economic infrastructure of society remains intact.
Social institutions like the Roman Catholic Church continue to function normally, with over 2000 years experience in providing emotional support and financial assistance to the bereaved.
Statistics presented without any social context are meaningless.
There are a handful of cities that can absorb 3000 deaths and massive loss of infrastructure in a single incident. New Orleans is patently not one of them. The WTC at noontime held 50,000 people. Minimized Fatalities
That is the problem.
It has become possible to imagine a terrorist attack with deaths on the scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As for myself, I'll not waste any sympathy on the passenger who can't live without his laptop, his hair gel, or his iPod for four to six hours.
At any given moment, there are about 5,000 planes in the air over the United States. The diversion of one does not mean much in the larger scheme of things.
FlightAware > Live Flight Tracker
Multimedia is a language in itself.
Complex and challenging both to teach and to lean. Those who can use it effectively are rare. Sesame Street
Engish or Special English is at least a more plausible solution to this sort of problem than Esperanto
Developers do not exist in a vacuum.
iTunes became a killer app because of the iPod, Apple's ability to negotiate the rights to distribute content from the major labels, and because it was written natively for both the Mac and Windows platforms, with a 100% share of the home PC market.
Damn right. The computer sits on the desk. I use it and I enjoy it. But that is the limit of my interest and commitment. I have no need for perfection and I don't invest an OS or a development model with any philosophical significance.
The masses aren't system builders. If your distro isn't available as an OEM install the masses will never see it.
But as Walmart discovered you can't compete with OEM Windows on price. There are enormous economies of scale when you produce for 97% of the home market.