Here's MS' problem, there's a strong perception that they don't exist in the phone market. I was watching the news the other day and they were covering various gadgets and they had this thing which paired over bluetooth with a phone and had an app. The reviewer actually said that it supports all smartphones, both android and iPhone. Boom, there's your problem MS. No-one even knows or cares that you exist.
As a long time Linux user, it feels good that MS is getting killed because no-one is supporting their product however good it may be.
Dave Lister: Sometimes I think it's cruel giving machines a personality. My mate Petersen once brought a pair of shoes with artificial intelligence. Smart Shoes, they were called. It was a neat idea. No matter how blind drunk you were, they would always get you home. Then he got ratted one night in Oslo, and woke up the next morning in Burma. See, the shoes got bored just going from his local to the flat. They wanted to see the world, man, y'know? He had a helluva job getting rid of them. No matter who he sold them to, they'd show up again the next day! He tried to shut them out, but they just kicked the door down, y'know?
Arnold Rimmer: Is this true?
Dave Lister: Yeah! Last thing he heard, they'd sort of, erm, robbed a car and drove it into a canal. They couldn't steer, y'see.
Arnold Rimmer: Really?!
Dave Lister: Yeah. Petersen was really, really blown away by it. He went to see a priest. The priest told him, he said, it was alright, and all that, and the shoes were happy, and they'd gone to heaven. Y'see, it turns out shoes have soles.
Here (NZ), we use a lot of hydro power. In fact the electricity company I use is 100% renewables. The benefit of hydro is you can also use it as a battery and use excess generation from houses with rooftop solar to pump water back up into the reservoir storing the energy for use at night when solar doesn't work. Here we've also been having a series of dry spells which have caused issues with the reservoirs emptying too quickly and running the risk of blackouts, and again having distributed solar on houses will help a great deal to conserve the energy stored in the hydro lakes.
I've just taken out a loan to reroof my house and put solar up and I will be selling the excess energy back to the supplier - the savings will cover my usual electricity bill and offset the cost of the extra debt but then again I had to get a new roof anyway as the current one is leaking so why not put solar up at the same time? Sure, I'll still have to pay for the connection but in the end it is a win win. More to the point, next year I plan on getting a fully electric car to replace the current petrol model (we rarely do more than 50Km a day so it will be ample) and that will also be charged off the roof so I'll save a good chunk of money there. Most of our electricity use is during the day anyway because that is when we run our AC units mostly. A bit of thought and we can be rid of fossil fuels.
When I was a school (many many years ago) computers were metal boxes with black and white (or green) screens and a flashing cursor. That's it. We were taught logic, binary and all that stuff. In school. We learned structured programming, some minor graphics but mostly it was how to do calculations, and make decisions etc. That set me up to pick up multiple programming languages over the years, and I moved from 8 bit through to 64 bit computers with ease. A decade or so after I had finished, schools were focussing on teaching computer skills which pretty much focussed on how to do 'things' in Windows or on a Mac and no-one knew jack about how the computer worked, especially the teachers. The result has been a generation of people who really know nothing about computers or computer science. If we taught other sciences like this we would still be thinking of elements like 'air' and 'fire' etc. Students need to know what is going on rather than skipping all that and focussing on making powerpoints.
I was buying CDs from 1986 and I certainly had discs which were 70 mins long even then so there certainly were discs longer than 45 mins. It was true that some discs threw the early players for six, but worse than that was the utterly terrible sound of both these early discs and early players. Without oversampling, the brick wall filters produced horrible audible artefacts, and there were real problems with the ADCs used in mastering the discs too. CDs sounded really rough throughout the 80's and it wasn't until the 90's that we started getting recordings on CD that were even close to audiophile quality, plus there were some nice players at that point which paid attention to the analogue components and PSU isolation to prevent electronic noise getting through to the speakers. I had a 16bit 16x oversampling, 8 DAC player at the time which was the first player I had heard that really did sound decent (Cambridge CD2) and compared to the usual CD players it was amazingly good. The whole digital is digital thing was wrong when it came to everything after the DAC, and even the DACs made a big difference. The first time I heard the oversampling players compared with my first gen Sony it was a revelation and the Sony got dumped shortly after with the Technics MASH unit, and then that got dumped for the Cambridge.
The main problem with the replay of vinyl in the future will be getting a working turntable because belts and other polymer components degrade over time just because. My current turntable is 25 years old and it still works fine but I worry about the drive belt and cartridge. However, the strong demand for vinyl suggests I'll still be able to source replacements for some time to come, just as I can easily replace the 6L6 valves in my amp (also 25 years old) whereas a transistor amp of that age would likely be junked if it failed. As for CDs that failed, I was a LaserDisc owner (still am, don't like to get rid of old formats) and laser rot was well known with those analogue discs and it also afflicts CDs where the aluminium oxidises and no longer reflects so the disc just stops playing. With LD it was obvious when it was happening because you got colour flecks on the screen, but with CD it should play fine until it doesn't.
Anyway, I'm preserving my old equipment and formats for the future as best I can. Sadly, it looks like my NAD cassette deck may have had it if I can't replace the capstan belt which literally fell to pieces when I tried it. Getting the transport apart and back together to put the replacement in is going to be an interesting exercise based on what I've seen having partially dismantled it. Like CDs, tapes don't have a long shelf life so vinyl may well be the best format for long term storage.
One last comment on the degradation of records - what you were hearing was the mould release agent, basically like a grease layer to allow the pressing to be removed from the mother easily and each time you play the record you move that into the grooves where it picks up dust and also smothers the fine details. Remove that stuff with a solvent and you'll find the vinyl doesn't wear out and it will sound brand new. I've run many 'worn out' records through a solvent cleaner and they come out amazing. A good turntable (mine is an Opus 3 Continuo, in fact it is the prototype for that model) will not suffer from rumble and will also minimise surface noise such that many people couldn't even tell it wasn't a digital source due to the lack of background noise, especially on a cleaned and cared for LP.
I noticed our local JB hifi has got a whole section of vinyl so had a leaf through. Most of the albums I already have on LP from when they were new and they cost a lot but it is still nice to see. The real problem LPs had back in the late 80's was the quality of the pressings because they were so mass produced and the vinyl was thin plus they were trying to squeeze a CDs worth of music onto the LP so you got shallow grooves and crushed dynamics making them sound much worse than they could. Given the choice between CD and those terrible LPs from that period the CD is hands down the better choice. If these new pressings are done right, they should sound very good assuming the source material is good and I have a few direct to disc LPs which are incredible. I don't tend to use my turntable these days but I have still got it, plus my collection and hope to have the right space to set it up because the experience of listening to a record isn't just about the quality but rather you end up listening to the whole album as a complete piece of work where with CDs or MP3s you would focus more on tracks
While early computers had very limited graphics and usually no sound, the arrival of colour and sound (er beeps) resulted in a large number of games and kids at the time clamoured to get a spectrum, C64 or whatever because it was a games machine and nothing else to them. Sure, you could program them but very few did. I started on a Commodore Pet (horrible BASIC) and went through the Sinclairs, the BBC Micro and then onto UNIX machines skipping PCs entirely (at least until Linux came along) and what I appreciated about all these was the ability to program them (same goes for Linux) but I was a minority.
The sad thing is once you got to PCs and GUIs, programming was largely a thing of the past. My son just got interested in computers and asked me to teach him to program so I pulled my actual Spectrum out and gave it to him. Sadly, age hasn't been kind to the hardware so the modulator failed and wouldn't display a picture. I bypassed that and got composite video out but in the process the keyboard membrane cracked so I had to order a new replacement (yay for retro computer fans) and it works again. He's getting on well and hasn't really shown interest in games on it. I did load up Manic Miner for a laugh but it was awful. I forgot how precise you had to be.
I just wish this was a real Spectrum with a keyboard. As it stands, meh. Emulators are also hard work without the real keyboard.
I can't be alone in not liking this film. It wasn't the science (there was obviously a lot of work done there) that bothered me, and besides which with Sci Fi you always get a 'gimme' or two (warp drive, transporters, technobabble etc) but I really didn't feel anything with the story. It didn't draw me in, it just dragged. This wasn't what I was expecting as I had been looking forward to this film since I saw the first teaser. I see so many people going on about who great this film was but I can't help but wonder what it was that I missed?
4K does not have 4x the resolution. I don't care what sounds sexier, there's truth in advertising and 4K is only twice as sharp. You want 4x sharper, you need 8K and don't worry, once you've spent a good chunk of cash on the 4K set, they'll be there telling you it is obsolete and you need to upgrade again to 8K because, because, oh whatever, give us more money you peasant!
"MS says they have 75% market share for x86 servers (I've no idea if that is a legit statistic). Macs are barely a blip in desktop/laptop market share. Win 8 and Win 8.1, which according to comments in posts like this is the worst OS since Win ME, each has greater market share than all versions of Mac OS combined."
I can believe that MS has 75% market share for x86 servers simply because you can replace a whole host of Windows servers with a single Linux box - I know, I've done it multiple times. When it takes several machines to do what a single *nix box can do then sure, you're going to get high market share but that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing a good job. This is similar to their claims for IIS when it is just hosting parked domains.
MS has a bigger problem than that though because they're failing to break out of the jail of desktop in any serious way. Xbox cost a fortune and while the 360 did OK, the One is struggling badly compared with the PS4. The Windows phones are a joke, as are their tablets. The desktop may not be going anywhere soon but people have so widely embraced other technologies like Android and iOS that the desktop has little leverage any more. They simply can't use it to control the world and stop people leaving. Windows 8 was their attempt and it is an abject failure. 9 may be a decent version of Windows but really they've got no growth left in them. MS needs to get away from the idea of owning the platform and focus on developing software because they don't have the leverage to succeed the way they did back in the 90's and 00's. The sad fact is, the software they make which isn't supported by their OS isn't really all that good. Can they write good software without the tie in to the OS? I don't know but the signs aren't good.
The funny thing is I remember reading back in '97 that the whole world would ditch UNIX and switch to NT over the following few years. Without Linux, maybe that would have happened but now the spawn of Linus has really spoiled their day, especially Android despite their bogus patent claims. I agree with the other poster, if they had been broken up back in 2000 I suspect the world would have seen a lot more innovation and maybe Apple wouldn't have had the chance to grab the lion's share of the profit and overtake MS in the value stakes.
I find it funny that MS is now the only major OS vendor that isn't running on a UNIX base. Seems like an uphill struggle as the world passes them by. They should do an Apple and virtualise the old Windows code in a classic environment and switch to a UNIX base. Or just stop trying to make operating systems altogether and focus on software.
There are a few similar services starting up down here. I had a look at Quickflix because they have a client for my smartTV and TiVo but all they have to offer are old BBC shows which I already own on DVD and their movie selection is woeful even compared with what we can get on AppleTV. Worse, the compression is too high so what they do have looks terrible. If they had the vast array of stuff that Netflix has then they might have a chance but without it they're going nowhere. I don't subscribe to Netflix as I've taken the approach of buying or renting what I want to see but if it was legitimately offered here I would be interested.
Seriously, not only are they whining about being 'hacked', even when they find out what really happened and that they got an album for free they're still not happy and are still indignant. It is pathetic. I made a point of giving the album a listen and you know what? I like it. I was pleased to get it and I've played it a few times. The media are fanning the flames for all they're worth too. Definitely time to go back to dumb phones for dumb users.
"Wow, time flies! Soon it will be the 20th anniversary of Linux on the Desktop Year."
You think you're funny but I first had Linux as my desktop in 1995 and shortly after I was one of the founding members of our university Linux User Group.
"I mean it worked for Windows Vista. (I'll always wonder if they didn't have to rename it would we have gotten what became Windows 7 as a service pack.)"
Indeed, I have Windows 7 64 bit home premium on my home PC and a spare copy of Vista 64 bit Ultimate on my MacBook Pro in VMWare so I use both relatively regularly. The main visible difference is the change to the task bar and honestly, I prefer the Vista version to what they did with Windows 7. Other than that, modern hardware zips along running Vista just fine and if it wasn't for the fact that I can see the different task bar I would be hard pressed to tell the difference in actual use.
Mind you, run 7 for any length of time and it soon starts to decay with the classic MS bit-rot and it still suffers from frequent reboots whenever it updates because it can't replace files that are being used. There's really very little different about 7 other than dropping the Vista name and little that couldn't have simply been a service pack because Vista today doesn't bog down anything like as much as it did when it first came out. Vista and 7 are still way more bloated than XP and that was a fat pig compared with 2K (my personal favourite Windows, gone too soon)
"Mac remains the desktop fashion accessory for those who care about style over function"
This is a very myopic view of the Mac. In some fields, particularly scientific fields, Macs are a better solution than Linux and have gained considerable support. It isn't because it is a fashion accessory, it is because it is a fully fledged UNIX with all the same open source tools as Linux, plus a bunch of commercial software that Linux lacks, all on hardware that is well specified, long lasting and well designed. I've had my share of PC hardware cobbled together to get Linux on my desktop but in the end a Mac is more cost effective and a better solution. Our site's Linux fanboy admin even bought a MacBook Air for his own use and now won't spec anything non-Apple for our users regardless of the OS they choose because we've had such bad experience of poorly made PCs.
I've been reading through the comments and there seems to be so much vitriol aimed at electric vehicles. Sure, this isn't a practical car, but electric vehicles in general can be very practical. We have a petrol powered car at the moment but when it eventually dies (which won't be for some time given how reliable it is, go Mazda!) I would seriously consider an all electric simply because we rarely if ever do trips in our car that are longer than the range of the Nissan Leaf for instance. One tank of fuel lasts us about three weeks so we're averaging around 100 miles a week. We have a garage so we can keep an electric topped up (from roof mounted solar panels) and for the once or twice a year where we need the range of a petrol car I have no issue with nipping over to the nearest car rental place and grabbing whatever I fancy for the trip. The cost savings of switching to an electric will be substantial and we would never have to waste five minutes filling the car up every few weeks so that's a plus.
It only makes sense to make the switch when we're shopping for a new car but electrics have become easily practical for an every day car when you live in a city and the cost is dropping down to the affordable range. If we were in the country then I would more likely look to a hybrid but for our needs, lugging around a petrol motor just for the rare times we would have to travel more than 100 miles round trip makes no sense.
If none of the above applies to you and you tow your boat everywhere just in case, and you won't even start your vehicle unless you intend to do an 800 mile round trip, well then, buy a huge 4x4 and be happy with your choice.
" I just pledged to avoid that airline in future... and later upgraded it to a blanket ban after the next time I used the airline (4 years later) a similar event happened where my connecting flight was cancelled and trapping me in the same airport."
US airlines are some of the worst I've ever had the displeasure of encountering. I just got back from some work in the US and had to fly United internally as that was what worked for the necessary connections. The flight was late by two hours but fortunately it didn't matter that time but I was still grumpy sitting in SF for five hours. The next flight was Delta which was OK and on time, and then I was on United again and the same thing happened, delayed by two hours due to weather (aka act of God) and I missed my international connecting flight which stranded me in LA for 22 hours until the next connection. United didn't offer a hotel having left me there at close to midnight. I paid for an hotel myself having confirmed my insurance would cover me but the lack of customer service skills was very apparent. The flights were also lousy with no in flight entertainment unless you put your hand in your pocket and the same goes for food or drink.
I won't fly United again. Consider this my 'tweet'.
"The problem with digital "sales" is that they aren't really a sale. They are effectively an extended rental. That rental can be revoked at any time and your entire collection can be made to go away."
This is exactly my problem. I've always bought discs but sometimes I get a free iTunes voucher so I redeem that. I've recently had a case where a movie from iTunes was showing in reverse colours and they swore blind that it was my fault. I tested it on every device I had an the thing was always the same, a file I downloaded was fine, the one they were now serving via iCloud was inverted. In the end I had to give up because they kept to the story that the issue was with my Mac, PC, iPad and iPhone rather than the file being the problem. If this file had been a purchase I would have been stuck. Fortunately, I rip all my DVDs and Blu rays since they are then fine and I can archive the discs. Discs are still the way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
They better watch what they google for.
"...you're not even allowed to talk about tooth decay."
Because they're all so old they don't have any teeth. Not that they would hear you anyway.
Here's MS' problem, there's a strong perception that they don't exist in the phone market. I was watching the news the other day and they were covering various gadgets and they had this thing which paired over bluetooth with a phone and had an app. The reviewer actually said that it supports all smartphones, both android and iPhone. Boom, there's your problem MS. No-one even knows or cares that you exist.
As a long time Linux user, it feels good that MS is getting killed because no-one is supporting their product however good it may be.
Dave Lister: Sometimes I think it's cruel giving machines a personality. My mate Petersen once brought a pair of shoes with artificial intelligence. Smart Shoes, they were called. It was a neat idea. No matter how blind drunk you were, they would always get you home. Then he got ratted one night in Oslo, and woke up the next morning in Burma. See, the shoes got bored just going from his local to the flat. They wanted to see the world, man, y'know? He had a helluva job getting rid of them. No matter who he sold them to, they'd show up again the next day! He tried to shut them out, but they just kicked the door down, y'know?
Arnold Rimmer: Is this true?
Dave Lister: Yeah! Last thing he heard, they'd sort of, erm, robbed a car and drove it into a canal. They couldn't steer, y'see.
Arnold Rimmer: Really?!
Dave Lister: Yeah. Petersen was really, really blown away by it. He went to see a priest. The priest told him, he said, it was alright, and all that, and the shoes were happy, and they'd gone to heaven. Y'see, it turns out shoes have soles.
Here (NZ), we use a lot of hydro power. In fact the electricity company I use is 100% renewables. The benefit of hydro is you can also use it as a battery and use excess generation from houses with rooftop solar to pump water back up into the reservoir storing the energy for use at night when solar doesn't work. Here we've also been having a series of dry spells which have caused issues with the reservoirs emptying too quickly and running the risk of blackouts, and again having distributed solar on houses will help a great deal to conserve the energy stored in the hydro lakes.
I've just taken out a loan to reroof my house and put solar up and I will be selling the excess energy back to the supplier - the savings will cover my usual electricity bill and offset the cost of the extra debt but then again I had to get a new roof anyway as the current one is leaking so why not put solar up at the same time? Sure, I'll still have to pay for the connection but in the end it is a win win. More to the point, next year I plan on getting a fully electric car to replace the current petrol model (we rarely do more than 50Km a day so it will be ample) and that will also be charged off the roof so I'll save a good chunk of money there. Most of our electricity use is during the day anyway because that is when we run our AC units mostly. A bit of thought and we can be rid of fossil fuels.
When I was a school (many many years ago) computers were metal boxes with black and white (or green) screens and a flashing cursor. That's it. We were taught logic, binary and all that stuff. In school. We learned structured programming, some minor graphics but mostly it was how to do calculations, and make decisions etc. That set me up to pick up multiple programming languages over the years, and I moved from 8 bit through to 64 bit computers with ease. A decade or so after I had finished, schools were focussing on teaching computer skills which pretty much focussed on how to do 'things' in Windows or on a Mac and no-one knew jack about how the computer worked, especially the teachers. The result has been a generation of people who really know nothing about computers or computer science. If we taught other sciences like this we would still be thinking of elements like 'air' and 'fire' etc. Students need to know what is going on rather than skipping all that and focussing on making powerpoints.
I was buying CDs from 1986 and I certainly had discs which were 70 mins long even then so there certainly were discs longer than 45 mins. It was true that some discs threw the early players for six, but worse than that was the utterly terrible sound of both these early discs and early players. Without oversampling, the brick wall filters produced horrible audible artefacts, and there were real problems with the ADCs used in mastering the discs too. CDs sounded really rough throughout the 80's and it wasn't until the 90's that we started getting recordings on CD that were even close to audiophile quality, plus there were some nice players at that point which paid attention to the analogue components and PSU isolation to prevent electronic noise getting through to the speakers. I had a 16bit 16x oversampling, 8 DAC player at the time which was the first player I had heard that really did sound decent (Cambridge CD2) and compared to the usual CD players it was amazingly good. The whole digital is digital thing was wrong when it came to everything after the DAC, and even the DACs made a big difference. The first time I heard the oversampling players compared with my first gen Sony it was a revelation and the Sony got dumped shortly after with the Technics MASH unit, and then that got dumped for the Cambridge.
The main problem with the replay of vinyl in the future will be getting a working turntable because belts and other polymer components degrade over time just because. My current turntable is 25 years old and it still works fine but I worry about the drive belt and cartridge. However, the strong demand for vinyl suggests I'll still be able to source replacements for some time to come, just as I can easily replace the 6L6 valves in my amp (also 25 years old) whereas a transistor amp of that age would likely be junked if it failed. As for CDs that failed, I was a LaserDisc owner (still am, don't like to get rid of old formats) and laser rot was well known with those analogue discs and it also afflicts CDs where the aluminium oxidises and no longer reflects so the disc just stops playing. With LD it was obvious when it was happening because you got colour flecks on the screen, but with CD it should play fine until it doesn't.
Anyway, I'm preserving my old equipment and formats for the future as best I can. Sadly, it looks like my NAD cassette deck may have had it if I can't replace the capstan belt which literally fell to pieces when I tried it. Getting the transport apart and back together to put the replacement in is going to be an interesting exercise based on what I've seen having partially dismantled it. Like CDs, tapes don't have a long shelf life so vinyl may well be the best format for long term storage.
One last comment on the degradation of records - what you were hearing was the mould release agent, basically like a grease layer to allow the pressing to be removed from the mother easily and each time you play the record you move that into the grooves where it picks up dust and also smothers the fine details. Remove that stuff with a solvent and you'll find the vinyl doesn't wear out and it will sound brand new. I've run many 'worn out' records through a solvent cleaner and they come out amazing. A good turntable (mine is an Opus 3 Continuo, in fact it is the prototype for that model) will not suffer from rumble and will also minimise surface noise such that many people couldn't even tell it wasn't a digital source due to the lack of background noise, especially on a cleaned and cared for LP.
I noticed our local JB hifi has got a whole section of vinyl so had a leaf through. Most of the albums I already have on LP from when they were new and they cost a lot but it is still nice to see. The real problem LPs had back in the late 80's was the quality of the pressings because they were so mass produced and the vinyl was thin plus they were trying to squeeze a CDs worth of music onto the LP so you got shallow grooves and crushed dynamics making them sound much worse than they could. Given the choice between CD and those terrible LPs from that period the CD is hands down the better choice. If these new pressings are done right, they should sound very good assuming the source material is good and I have a few direct to disc LPs which are incredible. I don't tend to use my turntable these days but I have still got it, plus my collection and hope to have the right space to set it up because the experience of listening to a record isn't just about the quality but rather you end up listening to the whole album as a complete piece of work where with CDs or MP3s you would focus more on tracks
While early computers had very limited graphics and usually no sound, the arrival of colour and sound (er beeps) resulted in a large number of games and kids at the time clamoured to get a spectrum, C64 or whatever because it was a games machine and nothing else to them. Sure, you could program them but very few did. I started on a Commodore Pet (horrible BASIC) and went through the Sinclairs, the BBC Micro and then onto UNIX machines skipping PCs entirely (at least until Linux came along) and what I appreciated about all these was the ability to program them (same goes for Linux) but I was a minority.
The sad thing is once you got to PCs and GUIs, programming was largely a thing of the past. My son just got interested in computers and asked me to teach him to program so I pulled my actual Spectrum out and gave it to him. Sadly, age hasn't been kind to the hardware so the modulator failed and wouldn't display a picture. I bypassed that and got composite video out but in the process the keyboard membrane cracked so I had to order a new replacement (yay for retro computer fans) and it works again. He's getting on well and hasn't really shown interest in games on it. I did load up Manic Miner for a laugh but it was awful. I forgot how precise you had to be.
I just wish this was a real Spectrum with a keyboard. As it stands, meh. Emulators are also hard work without the real keyboard.
I can't be alone in not liking this film. It wasn't the science (there was obviously a lot of work done there) that bothered me, and besides which with Sci Fi you always get a 'gimme' or two (warp drive, transporters, technobabble etc) but I really didn't feel anything with the story. It didn't draw me in, it just dragged. This wasn't what I was expecting as I had been looking forward to this film since I saw the first teaser. I see so many people going on about who great this film was but I can't help but wonder what it was that I missed?
"Oh look, MS is embracing open source. Isn't that wonderful?"
Maybe open source is embracing MS? That would put the cat amongst the pigeons to say the least. Just who gets extinguished in that scenario?
4K does not have 4x the resolution. I don't care what sounds sexier, there's truth in advertising and 4K is only twice as sharp. You want 4x sharper, you need 8K and don't worry, once you've spent a good chunk of cash on the 4K set, they'll be there telling you it is obsolete and you need to upgrade again to 8K because, because, oh whatever, give us more money you peasant!
You have twice as many pixels on each axis, so 4x as many pixels on screen but resolution is only 2x higher.
"MS says they have 75% market share for x86 servers (I've no idea if that is a legit statistic). Macs are barely a blip in desktop/laptop market share. Win 8 and Win 8.1, which according to comments in posts like this is the worst OS since Win ME, each has greater market share than all versions of Mac OS combined."
I can believe that MS has 75% market share for x86 servers simply because you can replace a whole host of Windows servers with a single Linux box - I know, I've done it multiple times. When it takes several machines to do what a single *nix box can do then sure, you're going to get high market share but that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing a good job. This is similar to their claims for IIS when it is just hosting parked domains.
MS has a bigger problem than that though because they're failing to break out of the jail of desktop in any serious way. Xbox cost a fortune and while the 360 did OK, the One is struggling badly compared with the PS4. The Windows phones are a joke, as are their tablets. The desktop may not be going anywhere soon but people have so widely embraced other technologies like Android and iOS that the desktop has little leverage any more. They simply can't use it to control the world and stop people leaving. Windows 8 was their attempt and it is an abject failure. 9 may be a decent version of Windows but really they've got no growth left in them. MS needs to get away from the idea of owning the platform and focus on developing software because they don't have the leverage to succeed the way they did back in the 90's and 00's. The sad fact is, the software they make which isn't supported by their OS isn't really all that good. Can they write good software without the tie in to the OS? I don't know but the signs aren't good.
The funny thing is I remember reading back in '97 that the whole world would ditch UNIX and switch to NT over the following few years. Without Linux, maybe that would have happened but now the spawn of Linus has really spoiled their day, especially Android despite their bogus patent claims. I agree with the other poster, if they had been broken up back in 2000 I suspect the world would have seen a lot more innovation and maybe Apple wouldn't have had the chance to grab the lion's share of the profit and overtake MS in the value stakes.
I find it funny that MS is now the only major OS vendor that isn't running on a UNIX base. Seems like an uphill struggle as the world passes them by. They should do an Apple and virtualise the old Windows code in a classic environment and switch to a UNIX base. Or just stop trying to make operating systems altogether and focus on software.
There are a few similar services starting up down here. I had a look at Quickflix because they have a client for my smartTV and TiVo but all they have to offer are old BBC shows which I already own on DVD and their movie selection is woeful even compared with what we can get on AppleTV. Worse, the compression is too high so what they do have looks terrible. If they had the vast array of stuff that Netflix has then they might have a chance but without it they're going nowhere. I don't subscribe to Netflix as I've taken the approach of buying or renting what I want to see but if it was legitimately offered here I would be interested.
Seriously, not only are they whining about being 'hacked', even when they find out what really happened and that they got an album for free they're still not happy and are still indignant. It is pathetic. I made a point of giving the album a listen and you know what? I like it. I was pleased to get it and I've played it a few times. The media are fanning the flames for all they're worth too. Definitely time to go back to dumb phones for dumb users.
"Wow, time flies! Soon it will be the 20th anniversary of Linux on the Desktop Year."
You think you're funny but I first had Linux as my desktop in 1995 and shortly after I was one of the founding members of our university Linux User Group.
"It's been said many times - Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
I prefer "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach, and those who can't teach, manage"
In Ballmer's case he seems to be going around in circles, rather like Microsoft who can't choose a direction and stick with it.
"I mean it worked for Windows Vista. (I'll always wonder if they didn't have to rename it would we have gotten what became Windows 7 as a service pack.)"
Indeed, I have Windows 7 64 bit home premium on my home PC and a spare copy of Vista 64 bit Ultimate on my MacBook Pro in VMWare so I use both relatively regularly. The main visible difference is the change to the task bar and honestly, I prefer the Vista version to what they did with Windows 7. Other than that, modern hardware zips along running Vista just fine and if it wasn't for the fact that I can see the different task bar I would be hard pressed to tell the difference in actual use.
Mind you, run 7 for any length of time and it soon starts to decay with the classic MS bit-rot and it still suffers from frequent reboots whenever it updates because it can't replace files that are being used. There's really very little different about 7 other than dropping the Vista name and little that couldn't have simply been a service pack because Vista today doesn't bog down anything like as much as it did when it first came out. Vista and 7 are still way more bloated than XP and that was a fat pig compared with 2K (my personal favourite Windows, gone too soon)
"Mac remains the desktop fashion accessory for those who care about style over function"
This is a very myopic view of the Mac. In some fields, particularly scientific fields, Macs are a better solution than Linux and have gained considerable support. It isn't because it is a fashion accessory, it is because it is a fully fledged UNIX with all the same open source tools as Linux, plus a bunch of commercial software that Linux lacks, all on hardware that is well specified, long lasting and well designed. I've had my share of PC hardware cobbled together to get Linux on my desktop but in the end a Mac is more cost effective and a better solution. Our site's Linux fanboy admin even bought a MacBook Air for his own use and now won't spec anything non-Apple for our users regardless of the OS they choose because we've had such bad experience of poorly made PCs.
I've been reading through the comments and there seems to be so much vitriol aimed at electric vehicles. Sure, this isn't a practical car, but electric vehicles in general can be very practical. We have a petrol powered car at the moment but when it eventually dies (which won't be for some time given how reliable it is, go Mazda!) I would seriously consider an all electric simply because we rarely if ever do trips in our car that are longer than the range of the Nissan Leaf for instance. One tank of fuel lasts us about three weeks so we're averaging around 100 miles a week. We have a garage so we can keep an electric topped up (from roof mounted solar panels) and for the once or twice a year where we need the range of a petrol car I have no issue with nipping over to the nearest car rental place and grabbing whatever I fancy for the trip. The cost savings of switching to an electric will be substantial and we would never have to waste five minutes filling the car up every few weeks so that's a plus.
It only makes sense to make the switch when we're shopping for a new car but electrics have become easily practical for an every day car when you live in a city and the cost is dropping down to the affordable range. If we were in the country then I would more likely look to a hybrid but for our needs, lugging around a petrol motor just for the rare times we would have to travel more than 100 miles round trip makes no sense.
If none of the above applies to you and you tow your boat everywhere just in case, and you won't even start your vehicle unless you intend to do an 800 mile round trip, well then, buy a huge 4x4 and be happy with your choice.
" I just pledged to avoid that airline in future... and later upgraded it to a blanket ban after the next time I used the airline (4 years later) a similar event happened where my connecting flight was cancelled and trapping me in the same airport."
US airlines are some of the worst I've ever had the displeasure of encountering. I just got back from some work in the US and had to fly United internally as that was what worked for the necessary connections. The flight was late by two hours but fortunately it didn't matter that time but I was still grumpy sitting in SF for five hours. The next flight was Delta which was OK and on time, and then I was on United again and the same thing happened, delayed by two hours due to weather (aka act of God) and I missed my international connecting flight which stranded me in LA for 22 hours until the next connection. United didn't offer a hotel having left me there at close to midnight. I paid for an hotel myself having confirmed my insurance would cover me but the lack of customer service skills was very apparent. The flights were also lousy with no in flight entertainment unless you put your hand in your pocket and the same goes for food or drink.
I won't fly United again. Consider this my 'tweet'.
"The problem with digital "sales" is that they aren't really a sale. They are effectively an extended rental. That rental can be revoked at any time and your entire collection can be made to go away."
This is exactly my problem. I've always bought discs but sometimes I get a free iTunes voucher so I redeem that. I've recently had a case where a movie from iTunes was showing in reverse colours and they swore blind that it was my fault. I tested it on every device I had an the thing was always the same, a file I downloaded was fine, the one they were now serving via iCloud was inverted. In the end I had to give up because they kept to the story that the issue was with my Mac, PC, iPad and iPhone rather than the file being the problem. If this file had been a purchase I would have been stuck. Fortunately, I rip all my DVDs and Blu rays since they are then fine and I can archive the discs. Discs are still the way to go.