In fact, if one were a bit fanboyish about it one could say that it's proof Windows is a more complete OS than OSX, as the owners of the latter still need a Windows machine by their side, whereas Windows users have their needs satisfied by it alone. Though of course that's ignoring the myriad of other factors affecting it, such as household income as noted by TFA, but it should serve to illustrate why is it Slashdot-worthy news.
I can think of another pretty good reason which is equally fanboyish though more Apple oriented.
See Apple's marketshare. More accurately, see how it has changed over the last 3 years or so. 12%? That's probably two or three times what it was a few years ago.
See Apple's growth, particularly for laptops. Compare this to every other PC vendor in a market which is generally considered fairly saturated.
I'd suggest that a hefty number of those Apple-owning households are recent converts who never threw out the PC.
If that's true then most PCs must be of the "low end" type, Celeron rather than Core 2 Duo - right? Is that true?
Actually, that wouldn't surprise me. Last time I checked, when you do a comparison down to a component level of a Mac versus a Dell with equivalent specs, you have to go quite high up in Dell's range before you even find the same CPUs available as an option, never mind standard.
The alternative is that Dell have this huge mid to low range (and continue to have something in the mid to low range year on year) that very few people are buying.
The mobile market belongs to *nix and Apple. It's just that simple. Chrome may or may not become relevant, but again, time is working against them, just as it is working against Microsoft.
The mobile market is also (or rather, has historically been) substantially more fickle than the PC OS market. It's fairly easy to move between devices when all the information you need on it can be re-downloaded from Exchange or other groupware of choice.
(especially the PIM apps, which were so backwards I don't know how it even got mildly popular as a mobile OS).
I'll tell you how. Certain managers (who I shan't name) decided they liked Outlook, saw the Microsoft name attached to a mobile phone and thought "Great! Outlook while out of the office!".
In extreme cases, they are so locked in this mindset that they point-blank refuse to try anything else.
You see, s1lverl0rd, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with secrets. Whoâ(TM)s gonna do it? You, s1lverl0rd? They have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the truth and you curse the government.
You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what they know: that secrets, while tragic, probably save lives. And their existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives...
You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want them on that wall. You need them there.
While I'd love to believe the bank has actually run the figures to work out exactly how much fraud they think they're suffering, what areas it's happening in and how much it will cost to eliminate, I don't.
Largely because any given fraudulent act by definition only works if nobody else knows about it.
It follows that if the bank has run the figures, those figures are based on estimates (at best) or wild guesses (at worst).
Add on the fact that banks are famously resistant to change and would much rather go begging for money than admit they cocked up on an astronomical scale.
Are you telling me that these companies have actually sat down and said "Right. We know we are losing $X to fraud, but in order to eliminate even a small percentage of it we're going to have to spend $X * 2" when they can't even sit down and say "Hmmm.... this policy of giving mortgages of 120% of a houses' value to people whose salary is about a tenth of the mortgage when we know that historically house prices have fluctuated.... there's no way this could backfire, is there?"?
The reason microsoft and windows have been so successful has been because their software has been so friendly to use.
The presence of numerous more friendly alternatives over the years, all of which failed for one reason or another kind of throws that argument out wouldn't you think?
The reason Microsoft and Windows have been so successful has got more to do with Microsoft doing everything in their power to gain marketshare, including but not limited to bullying OEMs with agreements which state "every PC you ship ships with Windows and may not multi-boot", seeding "partners" with outright lies over their direction (IBM, OS/2) and purposely crippling third-party products on their OS (Lotus, GEM).
Usability? What would you want a feature like that for? This is slashdot, as soon as anything becomes even remotely usable it'll be disowned for some alternative.
I'm surprised this hasn't happened with Ubuntu yet.
Actually, it's the driver support that's a real bitch. App support... A 32-bit app can only address, what, 2 gigs of RAM? Still, that means I only need to be running three memory-hungry apps for it to start to make sense.
4 gigs. But it's not as simple as that - most hardware is presented to the OS by mapping some memory addresses to the registers and buffers within the hardware which means you can program it in C by setting up an appropriate data structure and memcpy() to the address where the hardware lives.
A side effect of this is that a 32-bit machine without PAE enabled will only be able to access around 3.5GB (exact amount depends on the hardware).
Or, if you want to think the worst - perhaps those drafting the laws (frequently not those voting for them) don't want it to be easy to tell what changes a given law will introduce.
So instead what winds up happening is the men and women voting for the law don't understand the law themselves.
It gets voted in and suddenly there's a bunch of consequences which they never envisioned because the law gets implemented more-or-less as written and if that's radically different to what was intended - tough.
This has already happened a few times in the UK with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - local councils were given a bunch of snooping powers (which, we assume, were originally intended to help them weed out those who cheat council-administered benefits) are using them to track down the person who insists on putting paper in their glass recycling box.
It's a processor architecture which was originally developed by a UK company called Acorn to power a range of computers back when a personal desktop computer didn't mean "PC or Mac".
Acorn, along with most computer companies that were building non-PC compatible computers at the time, failed. Long before they failed, they had spun off the processor division into a separate company which flourished.
The processor architecture has enjoyed quite a bit of success and is now found in a lot of embedded systems.
However, while the market might be there, I suspect that, once tapped, he couldn't hold out for long. 1 guy, using more or less standard home modding methods(albeit applied with competence substantially above average), doing bespoke pieces would have a hard time competing with a smallish pro outfit doing larger runs at somewhat lower prices, with the benefit of actual machine tools, and parts you can only (cheaply) buy in lots of 100, and possibly rework kit above the level of a soldering iron and strong nerves.
Which is why, for it to work, that one guy has to set up his own small pro outfit, improve his skills and equipment to the point where he can churn them out fast and sell them relatively cheaply. Or glue diamonds all over the thing and flog it to people with more money than sense.
Suddenly setting up as a business with a view to making a good income looks rather expensive.
Even then, I can think of two big risks which would basically put him out of business more or less immediately:
1. Sony decide they don't like this because they're afraid that anything he does that impacts the console's life expectancy will reflect badly on the quality of their products. While they can't stop him doing what he's doing, they may well be able to stop him using the playstation trade mark. Which means that he'd have to sell it as a "portable games console that is compatible with a well-known brand".
2. Sony think it's such a good idea they build their own. They've got the resources to be able to produce this at a much lower price.
Most of the stuff out there now is cheap plastic crap for "personal size" printers. You get 18-24 months of moderate use out of them before they die, and ALL of them are proprietary drivers.
Not strictly true. Kyocera's printers are Postscript throughout the range, and they have got a cheapie model, the FS-1100.
I don't think it's as sturdy as the HP Laserjet 4L I bought it to replace, but it's not as bad as some.
Well, you either abolish free speech nationwide or you make arrangements to get him residence in a country which is quite happy to silence people on the whim of someone powerful.
I believe Zimbabwe should fit the bill quite nicely.
I'm not sure the US operates on a "loser (almost) always pays" system.
The theory is that by not having such a system, it's harder for the big guy to steamroller the little guy by saying "You do realise if you carry on we will apply for costs, and our costs so far have been $X hundred thousand?".
So instead what happens is they've got a fantastically complicated system whereby the big guy can keep going back to court until the little guy can no longer afford representation in court.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm shamelessly ripping off A Few Good Men.
My own opinion is that the world is simply too big and complicated to say that nothing ever needs to be kept secret.
Though I find it hilarious that a movie - a work of fiction - is considered sufficiently important as to be modded 4 - interesting.
Could always upgrade the 10 year old Mac to Leopard.
And let's be honest, XP would be just as dead and buried as OS X 10.1 if Vista hadn't been such a heavily-delayed disaster.
In fact, if one were a bit fanboyish about it one could say that it's proof Windows is a more complete OS than OSX, as the owners of the latter still need a Windows machine by their side, whereas Windows users have their needs satisfied by it alone. Though of course that's ignoring the myriad of other factors affecting it, such as household income as noted by TFA, but it should serve to illustrate why is it Slashdot-worthy news.
I can think of another pretty good reason which is equally fanboyish though more Apple oriented.
See Apple's marketshare. More accurately, see how it has changed over the last 3 years or so. 12%? That's probably two or three times what it was a few years ago.
See Apple's growth, particularly for laptops. Compare this to every other PC vendor in a market which is generally considered fairly saturated.
I'd suggest that a hefty number of those Apple-owning households are recent converts who never threw out the PC.
If that's true then most PCs must be of the "low end" type, Celeron rather than Core 2 Duo - right? Is that true?
Actually, that wouldn't surprise me. Last time I checked, when you do a comparison down to a component level of a Mac versus a Dell with equivalent specs, you have to go quite high up in Dell's range before you even find the same CPUs available as an option, never mind standard.
The alternative is that Dell have this huge mid to low range (and continue to have something in the mid to low range year on year) that very few people are buying.
The mobile market belongs to *nix and Apple. It's just that simple. Chrome may or may not become relevant, but again, time is working against them, just as it is working against Microsoft.
The mobile market is also (or rather, has historically been) substantially more fickle than the PC OS market. It's fairly easy to move between devices when all the information you need on it can be re-downloaded from Exchange or other groupware of choice.
This has made cornering it a whole lot harder.
Even scarier is the replies I'm getting.
(especially the PIM apps, which were so backwards I don't know how it even got mildly popular as a mobile OS).
I'll tell you how. Certain managers (who I shan't name) decided they liked Outlook, saw the Microsoft name attached to a mobile phone and thought "Great! Outlook while out of the office!".
In extreme cases, they are so locked in this mindset that they point-blank refuse to try anything else.
But there's a problem with that.
You see, s1lverl0rd, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with secrets. Whoâ(TM)s gonna do it? You, s1lverl0rd? They have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the truth and you curse the government.
You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what they know: that secrets, while tragic, probably save lives. And their existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives...
You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want them on that wall. You need them there.
You ever tried covering up a rolex with a sofa and two chairs?
Sure, it's easy to do but it's damn hard to do discreetly.
While I'd love to believe the bank has actually run the figures to work out exactly how much fraud they think they're suffering, what areas it's happening in and how much it will cost to eliminate, I don't.
Largely because any given fraudulent act by definition only works if nobody else knows about it.
It follows that if the bank has run the figures, those figures are based on estimates (at best) or wild guesses (at worst).
Add on the fact that banks are famously resistant to change and would much rather go begging for money than admit they cocked up on an astronomical scale.
Are you telling me that these companies have actually sat down and said "Right. We know we are losing $X to fraud, but in order to eliminate even a small percentage of it we're going to have to spend $X * 2" when they can't even sit down and say "Hmmm.... this policy of giving mortgages of 120% of a houses' value to people whose salary is about a tenth of the mortgage when we know that historically house prices have fluctuated.... there's no way this could backfire, is there?"?
You know what? I seriously doubt it.
I think it's infinitely more likely that 28% of banks questioned said "No comment".
You'd better tell British Telecom this. They don't seem to see a problem in RFC-1918 addresses appearing in the middle of traceroutes.
I'd like to think this is simply a router which is misconfigured and is replying with the IP address of a management port. But I have my doubts.
Why is it necessary for the nvidia driver to even know what other graphics cards are available?
The reason microsoft and windows have been so successful has been because their software has been so friendly to use.
The presence of numerous more friendly alternatives over the years, all of which failed for one reason or another kind of throws that argument out wouldn't you think?
The reason Microsoft and Windows have been so successful has got more to do with Microsoft doing everything in their power to gain marketshare, including but not limited to bullying OEMs with agreements which state "every PC you ship ships with Windows and may not multi-boot", seeding "partners" with outright lies over their direction (IBM, OS/2) and purposely crippling third-party products on their OS (Lotus, GEM).
Usability? What would you want a feature like that for? This is slashdot, as soon as anything becomes even remotely usable it'll be disowned for some alternative.
I'm surprised this hasn't happened with Ubuntu yet.
What's the point in buying an iPod if the first thing you're going to do is install Rockbox on it?
Actually, it's the driver support that's a real bitch. App support... A 32-bit app can only address, what, 2 gigs of RAM? Still, that means I only need to be running three memory-hungry apps for it to start to make sense.
4 gigs. But it's not as simple as that - most hardware is presented to the OS by mapping some memory addresses to the registers and buffers within the hardware which means you can program it in C by setting up an appropriate data structure and memcpy() to the address where the hardware lives.
A side effect of this is that a 32-bit machine without PAE enabled will only be able to access around 3.5GB (exact amount depends on the hardware).
Or, if you want to think the worst - perhaps those drafting the laws (frequently not those voting for them) don't want it to be easy to tell what changes a given law will introduce.
So instead what winds up happening is the men and women voting for the law don't understand the law themselves.
It gets voted in and suddenly there's a bunch of consequences which they never envisioned because the law gets implemented more-or-less as written and if that's radically different to what was intended - tough.
This has already happened a few times in the UK with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - local councils were given a bunch of snooping powers (which, we assume, were originally intended to help them weed out those who cheat council-administered benefits) are using them to track down the person who insists on putting paper in their glass recycling box.
Also what's "Arm"?
It's a processor architecture which was originally developed by a UK company called Acorn to power a range of computers back when a personal desktop computer didn't mean "PC or Mac".
Acorn, along with most computer companies that were building non-PC compatible computers at the time, failed. Long before they failed, they had spun off the processor division into a separate company which flourished.
The processor architecture has enjoyed quite a bit of success and is now found in a lot of embedded systems.
Hang on a minute, you sound like you know what you're talking about! What are you doing on /.?
However, while the market might be there, I suspect that, once tapped, he couldn't hold out for long. 1 guy, using more or less standard home modding methods(albeit applied with competence substantially above average), doing bespoke pieces would have a hard time competing with a smallish pro outfit doing larger runs at somewhat lower prices, with the benefit of actual machine tools, and parts you can only (cheaply) buy in lots of 100, and possibly rework kit above the level of a soldering iron and strong nerves.
Which is why, for it to work, that one guy has to set up his own small pro outfit, improve his skills and equipment to the point where he can churn them out fast and sell them relatively cheaply. Or glue diamonds all over the thing and flog it to people with more money than sense.
Suddenly setting up as a business with a view to making a good income looks rather expensive.
Even then, I can think of two big risks which would basically put him out of business more or less immediately:
1. Sony decide they don't like this because they're afraid that anything he does that impacts the console's life expectancy will reflect badly on the quality of their products. While they can't stop him doing what he's doing, they may well be able to stop him using the playstation trade mark. Which means that he'd have to sell it as a "portable games console that is compatible with a well-known brand".
2. Sony think it's such a good idea they build their own. They've got the resources to be able to produce this at a much lower price.
Most of the stuff out there now is cheap plastic crap for "personal size" printers.
You get 18-24 months of moderate use out of them before they die, and ALL of them are proprietary drivers.
Not strictly true. Kyocera's printers are Postscript throughout the range, and they have got a cheapie model, the FS-1100.
I don't think it's as sturdy as the HP Laserjet 4L I bought it to replace, but it's not as bad as some.
Well, you either abolish free speech nationwide or you make arrangements to get him residence in a country which is quite happy to silence people on the whim of someone powerful.
I believe Zimbabwe should fit the bill quite nicely.
I'm not sure the US operates on a "loser (almost) always pays" system.
The theory is that by not having such a system, it's harder for the big guy to steamroller the little guy by saying "You do realise if you carry on we will apply for costs, and our costs so far have been $X hundred thousand?".
So instead what happens is they've got a fantastically complicated system whereby the big guy can keep going back to court until the little guy can no longer afford representation in court.
Note: IANAL, nor am I a merkin.