You've just hit on the real reason people don't switch... it's because they always find some geek they can sucker into cleaning up the mess each time, for free!
You couldn't snare a Geek here if you set out free beer and a wet T-shirted Hooters gal as bait, not that anyone is trying. I'll let you in on a secret: Most Windows users live a Geek-free life. They have no contact with the Geek community and share almost nothing of its values.
When I sit in front of a Linux install I am bombarded with information. My senses are overload and its a real rush.
The forecast is for eight inches of snow overnight, temperatures in the low teens and gale-force winds by morning. I find the real world sufficiently stimulating that I don't need a nightly encounter session with an O/S.
I do expect Microsoft to provide patches for other software of theirs, regardless of whether I'm running it on Windows or emulated (I know, Wine Is Not an Emulator...).
You see anyone else (like Apple) offering updates for applications running under emulators or operating systems for which they were not designed?
Soon, someone will show research that a lot of prisoners commit crime after they are done being tracked by the GPS technology and a law will be passed that you wear one for the rest of your life if you commit a crime. They will argue that it's more humane than prison and enforces you to stay out of crime.
More likely, you will be considered a habitual criminal, unable or unwilling to change your behavior, and they will simply put you back in jail and throw away the key.
You cannot...legally bind somebody to a contract when you are deliberately relying on that person's not understanding the contract's terms; I believe the term is "meeting of minds".
A failed "meeting of minds" simply gives you an argument to be released from a contract whose terms you reasonably misunderstood. But expect a certain skepticism from the judge.
I am contracted with the ISP. My having an account with them obligates them to deliver my traffic under reasonable and customary assumptions about their service.
Reasonable and customary assumptions would seem to apply only to services and fees that are not explicitly defined in your contact and terms of service.
Residential telephone service began in 1877 and was sold under terms and conditions that held for 100 years. Universal broadband service to the home is less than five years old, if it can be said to exist even now. The casual assumption that you are entitled to the equivelent of leased line digital services over a shared residential connection is ridiculous.
When Windows crashes what do you do? Most people reinstall.
Most people simply reboot. Some may actually read XP's recovery dialogs and go to MS's Crash Analysis site for advice, in plain English, on how to fix the ptoblem.
The 'normal user' will use at home what he/she learned to use at school or uses regularly at work.
The home is a distinct market segment with its own history, interests and values, and a market segment Microsoft has dominated for close on to twenty years now. It is driven by more than games and more than SOHO office apps. It is digital photography, home video and entertainment. Windows MCE sold well over the holidays. iTunes on Windows has proven quite successful for Apple.
Re:Parent is flamebait and trollish. Mod down.
on
LokiTorrent Shut Down
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The popularity of sites like Lokitorrent are an expression of the will of the people.
In a country of 300 million, "the will of the people" isn't defined by the relatively small number of those who downloaded from Loki.
Under the american system, the will of the people is expressed and moderated through their elected representatives and the courts, which are expected to take the longer view and balance conflicting interests. But not every interest is given the same weight and value.
Free movies for the college kid with broadband service and a $1000 PC is not high on the list of anyone's priorities right now.
In Iowa, there are a few population centers, a few "larger towns", and many towns with low enough populations that they can run the entire municipal government with two or three employees. These are the kinds of places that don't have the built-in MS infrastructure and could migrate to OpenOffice fairly easily.
The small towns will stay with Microsoft.
They will see no reliable technical support, no significant training programs, no active, organized, open-source advocacy group within seventy-five miles.
Their full-time employees and senior volunteers will have been there since the dawn of time, with decades of experience in MSDOS and Windows. (Our village clerk retired after fifty-five years on the job.) The apps and customizations they need will be place, functioning pretty well, and, by general agreement, probably best left alone.
Songs make less of an impression on your long term memory than visual media like film or theatre. So this is why renting movies is popular whereas music is not.
I can remember songs and concert pieces I heard when I was five years old. It can be trivially easy to recognize a musical theme from the first few bars, even if you haven't heard it played in decades.
So... what "advantages" are Napster touting, again
Suppose Napster had access to every significant backlist title...essentially one-click access to a world catalog of recorded music dating back to Edison's wax cylinders.
Suppose the service was genuinely all-you-can-eat, with the potential to build a library of hundreds or thousands of alblums within a few short weeks or months.
Suppose you could opt for lossless WMA downloads for home audio or high end portables.
I could live with a rental or subscription model offered on those terms.
The fact is that the Roman Empire is now almost completely irrelevant.
only if you are blind to the foundations of western civilization.
the empire survives in recognizable form in the organization and institutions of the Catholic church. you will hear echoes of it in any courtroom in the western world.
Windows succeeded for a very simple reason. Cheap PC clones. You had "PC-compatible" computers (remember that phrase?) that were getting cheaper because they were clones, and they were appearing everywhere.
These were sold as MSDOS compatible systems as well, remember. It was the combination of IBM PC compatible hardware and software that made the clones so appealing.
The MS and PC platforms evolved together and they were not everywhere in the beginning.
They got to where they are by really good marketing covering up their business ethics, and, eventually, most people become desensitized to the marketing.
There was never much evidence for a backlash against Microsoft even at the height of the antitrust suits:
The plain truth is that Americans are more likely to side with the entrepreneur who drives the market forward by playing a ruthless game of hardball than the competitor who whines from the sidelines that he has been driven off the field.
Let the average union worker know what is going on at EA and it will make a difference.
There is nothing a union worker enjoys more than seeing a self-proclaimed "professional" who has been shouting "I don't need no fsucking union!" since the day he was born being treated like roadkill by his boss.
That's ridiculous. Ads on the side != biased search results.
Confidence in a search engine is fragile. Users distrust returns which suggest manipulation, product placement. I can't believe MSN Search would have been given a pass here.
his/articles assertion that DOWNLOADING can get you these penalties is not correct.
In the United States, it is convenient and cost-effective to target the uploader, who will typically be operating on a scale and with the knowledge that he has no legal defense. But the rights holders can pursue the downloader if they chose, and the feds as well, once the offense reaches the statutory criminal threshold. Don't expect much sympathy if you are the leech who gets squashed as an example to others.
If the purpose of copyright is to control the copying and we are to presume that any individual downloading is the one doing the actual copying, then it is clear that the person hosting the file is not at fault. If the person hosting the file is the one doing the copying then the person receiving the file is not at fault.
The person hosting the file needs a license to distribute and a master copy licensed for distribution, neither of which are sold to consumers through retail outlets.
The person receiving the file knows or should know that he is not acquiring a copy through legitimate channels.
There's no reason why Google should have to take this kind of abuse.
Giving the French-speaking market to Microsoft. Suppose Adwords exposes Google to other lawsuits in the EU. Do you want Google to pull out of Europe entirely?
Anything which undermines trust in Google is a threat to Google. Prominently placed adds for products which are not the object of your search do not inspire confidence in the results of your search.
While I have no real problem with the BSD daemon, to me it doesn't *feel* like a professional branding, and lets face it..no matter what the underlying technology there is something to the image of a product when decisions are made.
The Geek's sophomoric, inbred, sense of humor doesn't resonate well with others. Think of all the silly-ass names that hobble otherwise promising open source projects.
The joke that needs explaining, the program whose name you can't pronounce without it sounding vaguely salacious or something like a sneeze, is not what you want to take into a presentation.
Man, Bill Gates is to Slashdotters what Satan is to the evangelicals- this all powerful, ubiquitous incarnation of darkness, whom all evil acts in the world can be blamed on
Does anyone here have the foggiest notion of how big Matsushita is? $22 billion U.S. in third-quarter sales. Matsushita Reports Gains in Third Quarter The cartel doesn't need Bill Gates to decide where its interests lie.
Slashdot Mirror
You couldn't snare a Geek here if you set out free beer and a wet T-shirted Hooters gal as bait, not that anyone is trying. I'll let you in on a secret: Most Windows users live a Geek-free life. They have no contact with the Geek community and share almost nothing of its values.
The forecast is for eight inches of snow overnight, temperatures in the low teens and gale-force winds by morning. I find the real world sufficiently stimulating that I don't need a nightly encounter session with an O/S.
You see anyone else (like Apple) offering updates for applications running under emulators or operating systems for which they were not designed?
More likely, you will be considered a habitual criminal, unable or unwilling to change your behavior, and they will simply put you back in jail and throw away the key.
and the nationalist, centralizing, forces won.
A failed "meeting of minds" simply gives you an argument to be released from a contract whose terms you reasonably misunderstood. But expect a certain skepticism from the judge.
I am contracted with the ISP. My having an account with them obligates them to deliver my traffic under reasonable and customary assumptions about their service.
Reasonable and customary assumptions would seem to apply only to services and fees that are not explicitly defined in your contact and terms of service.
Residential telephone service began in 1877 and was sold under terms and conditions that held for 100 years. Universal broadband service to the home is less than five years old, if it can be said to exist even now. The casual assumption that you are entitled to the equivelent of leased line digital services over a shared residential connection is ridiculous.
Most people simply reboot.
Some may actually read XP's recovery dialogs and go to MS's Crash Analysis site for advice, in plain English, on how to fix the ptoblem.
The home is a distinct market segment with its own history, interests and values, and a market segment Microsoft has dominated for close on to twenty years now. It is driven by more than games and more than SOHO office apps. It is digital photography, home video and entertainment. Windows MCE sold well over the holidays. iTunes on Windows has proven quite successful for Apple.
In a country of 300 million, "the will of the people" isn't defined by the relatively small number of those who downloaded from Loki.
Under the american system, the will of the people is expressed and moderated through their elected representatives and the courts, which are expected to take the longer view and balance conflicting interests. But not every interest is given the same weight and value.
Free movies for the college kid with broadband service and a $1000 PC is not high on the list of anyone's priorities right now.
The small towns will stay with Microsoft.
They will see no reliable technical support, no significant training programs, no active, organized, open-source advocacy group within seventy-five miles.
Their full-time employees and senior volunteers will have been there since the dawn of time, with decades of experience in MSDOS and Windows. (Our village clerk retired after fifty-five years on the job.) The apps and customizations they need will be place, functioning pretty well, and, by general agreement, probably best left alone.
I can remember songs and concert pieces I heard when I was five years old. It can be trivially easy to recognize a musical theme from the first few bars, even if you haven't heard it played in decades.
Suppose Napster had access to every significant backlist title...essentially one-click access to a world catalog of recorded music dating back to Edison's wax cylinders.
Suppose the service was genuinely all-you-can-eat, with the potential to build a library of hundreds or thousands of alblums within a few short weeks or months.
Suppose you could opt for lossless WMA downloads for home audio or high end portables.
I could live with a rental or subscription model offered on those terms.
only if you are blind to the foundations of western civilization.
the empire survives in recognizable form in the organization and institutions of the Catholic church. you will hear echoes of it in any courtroom in the western world.
These were sold as MSDOS compatible systems as well, remember.
It was the combination of IBM PC compatible hardware and software that made the clones so appealing.
The MS and PC platforms evolved together and they were not everywhere in the beginning.
There was never much evidence for a backlash against Microsoft even at the height of the antitrust suits:
Despite court loss, Microsoft moving ahead in public opinion, ABC Poll Fails to Capture Public Opinion on Microsoft Case
The plain truth is that Americans are more likely to side with the entrepreneur who drives the market forward by playing a ruthless game of hardball than the competitor who whines from the sidelines that he has been driven off the field.
The western empire collapsed around 440 AD.
The eastern empire, governed from Constantinople, survived another 1000 years.
You have a problem with the sentencing guidelines or rules for rape, talk to your state government. The feds rarely have jurisdiction in such cases.
There is nothing a union worker enjoys more than seeing a self-proclaimed "professional" who has been shouting "I don't need no fsucking union!" since the day he was born being treated like roadkill by his boss.
Confidence in a search engine is fragile. Users distrust returns which suggest manipulation, product placement. I can't believe MSN Search would have been given a pass here.
In the United States, it is convenient and cost-effective to target the uploader, who will typically be operating on a scale and with the knowledge that he has no legal defense. But the rights holders can pursue the downloader if they chose, and the feds as well, once the offense reaches the statutory criminal threshold. Don't expect much sympathy if you are the leech who gets squashed as an example to others.
The person hosting the file needs a license to distribute and a master copy licensed for distribution, neither of which are sold to consumers through retail outlets.
The person receiving the file knows or should know that he is not acquiring a copy through legitimate channels.
Giving the French-speaking market to Microsoft. Suppose Adwords exposes Google to other lawsuits in the EU. Do you want Google to pull out of Europe entirely?
Anything which undermines trust in Google is a threat to Google. Prominently placed adds for products which are not the object of your search do not inspire confidence in the results of your search.
The Geek's sophomoric, inbred, sense of humor doesn't resonate well with others. Think of all the silly-ass names that hobble otherwise promising open source projects.
The joke that needs explaining, the program whose name you can't pronounce without it sounding vaguely salacious or something like a sneeze, is not what you want to take into a presentation.
Does anyone here have the foggiest notion of how big Matsushita is? $22 billion U.S. in third-quarter sales. Matsushita Reports Gains in Third Quarter The cartel doesn't need Bill Gates to decide where its interests lie.