What is amazing is you read some of the other posters, who were so quick to mod me down and go "poo poo, Linux is virus free, poo poo" it ALL comes down to "Magical Thinking", the same crap that those selling security junk have used for years. Its the same old "With product X you are always safe and immune!" which anybody with two functioning brain cells ought to be able to see through, but apparently not here. Nice to see at least one person gets it.
Look magical thinkers, it is VERY simple, okay? EVERY SINGLE OS is an extremely complex pile of code. it has to support at least tens of thousands of pieces of hardware, multitasking, resource management, hell the kernel is how many million lines now? And that is before you even account for all the third party code running on top. I bet you could ask Linus Torvalds himself what happens when program Foo gets called and even HE won't know every single interaction, its just too complex.
So magical thinking simply doesn't work. What kernel is Android running while its getting malware up the butt? That would be Linux. What about Are there unpatched security holes in Linux? Why yesthereare which kinda blows a giant hole in the magical thinking. BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? takea lookand see. Maybe they just had bad configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a flukeby any means.
In the end it doesn't matter if you are running Linux, windows, OSX, BSD, or OS/2, if you are targeted by malware writers, which is EXACTLY what happened to the corp in TFA, then they can simply target the payload to the OS and you are just as screwed, no magical thinking will save you.
Because sadly users seem to forget that what works in tech A can work just as well with tech B and have to be re-educated all over?
I've had to deal with this in the shop, what with so many switching to smartphones lately and wrote about it in my journal here. basically those same "Hey you won a $1000 gift card" emails that haven't worked in regular emails in years work just fine when it comes to smartphones. Its like people just don't connect one to the other and so really OLD tricks work on them when given with new tech. This is why I think phone malware is gonna explode, the same people that wouldn't install a program on their Windows PC from just anywhere will happily do so to be given " free Angry Birds!" so all you can do is try to warn them as best you can.
Question: Is that enough to absolve them of legal liability? Because it seems kinda flimsy to me, like writing a worm and then going "oopsie, it was just for testing" when it gets out and infects thousands of PCs, it just doesn't sound like the kind of thing a simple EULA or statement can CYA. So is that really all there is to it? The right kind of EULA and you can cook up anything?
Despite you "Windoze" comment frankly it wouldn't matter what OS you are running because when you are dealing with a targeted attack such as this the enemy knows what you have and therefor can simply tune the attack to the OS, just as we saw with stuxnet.
If you think Linux has a magical immunity you might want to read how to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps which shows with just a little social engineering its really not hard to target Linux just as the malware writers target Windows and OSX now. Or did you think android runs on Windows? In the end if you know what your target is running you can simply shape the payload to target that infrastructure, its really not that hard to do.
I wonder what they have that the malware guys figured it was worth the expense of such a targeted attack? perhaps a rival corp wanting to get ahead of the game? it would be interesting to see where this all leads, as you usually don't hear of malware writers going to this much trouble for a single target, so whatever they have must be worth a lot to someone.
Well you would THINK after me handing them the bill a couple of times they would get a fucking clue and at least call or email me before doing something REALLY stupid, but instead I've found it settles quickly into one of 2 camps. 1.-The ones that listen to me, which run year after year without needing me for more than hardware upgrades. i like these customers a lot, even though I make less money off of them, because they are just so easy to support. I tell them what is bad, point them to what is good, and they listen, its nice.
The other camp simply ignores everything I say, and after clicking ignore enough times on the AV ends up with more viruses than a Bangkok whore on coupon night. The totally gobsmacking batshit part? they will simply KEEP USING THE INFECTED PC until it simply won't run anymore and THEN bring it to me. They of course make me more money but every time you get spam, have your internet slow to a crawl because of the latest worm? you can lay the blame at these bozos, because in the end nobody is gonna keep them from that free movie/music/porn/ screensaver dammit!
Just as a test I gave one of the "must have teh tittiez!" customers Mepis, just to see if the vaunted Linux security would keep Goober from shitting on the PC, did it work? Nope, he made it unbootable in less than a week, how? He decided he didn't like the package manager and just Googled "Linux programs" and got enough crap off of Freshmeat (boy is THAT name perfect) to put the entire system in dependency hell...sigh.
In the end you just can't fix stupid, you just can't. You can try to lessen the damage the average mouth breather can do but in the end you'll end up having to clean up the mess, because some will simply NEVER learn or worse think they are smarter than they are, but in either case shit will be broke and malware will spread, all you can do is clean up the messes.
Uhhh...Billy? They didn't CUT support they INCREASED it, with Win Vista getting ALL versions supported until 2017 (it was supposed to lose Home and basic in 2012) and Win 7 getting all versions supported until 2020 (was supposed to lose Home and Basic in 2014) so that is one thing you got wrong.
The other you got wrong was corp attitude, while its true that with a downturn they aren't spending like they did before a LOT of that has to do with PCs simply lasting longer and being overpowered. in the days of the MHz war you had no choice but to stay on the upgrade treadmill, because even a 2 year old PC would struggle to run the latest software but now i have plenty of small business customers that are quite happy with their Phenom Is and Core duos simply because their work isn't stressing those cores out. I mean how many average folks you know are gonna seriously stress a Phenom I quad or a Core Duo? Not many.
But what WILL cause them to go with 7 over 8 is cost to retrain which won't be cheap. Ever put a user on Win 8? i have, they are TOTALLY lost and have no damned clue how to get anything done. With Win 8 you might as well start with the idea of teaching your entire workforce to start over from scratch and that ain't cheap by a long shot. if MSFT would have had a brain they would have put in a switch that would let the GUI be set at startup and then let them choose between Classic/ Win 7/ Metro and they wouldn't be in this mess, but like it or not its Metro or Win 7 and the customers WILL choose Win 7, mark my words.
Ya know, thinking about it....could this be a "New Coke" style ploy to speed up win 7 adoption? Wouldn't be the first time a corp has done a dumb move that ended up helping sales.
Sadly it wasn't just that Drinkypoo, as I had a pretty nice machine for that time (Pentium 4 3.6Ghz Cedar Mill with HT, Geforce 7600GS, 4Gb of RAM) and I can tell you there were some serious show stoppers that kept me on WinXP X64 until I built a new machine for Win 7, specifically the "Play multimedia and the network crawls" bug and the "Vista loses network shares' bug which was irritating as hell as the only damned way i could get Vista to see those shares was to reboot, and finally what I called "senior moments" where the entire system would just hang for a few seconds.
Don't get me wrong I have several customers on Vista and they are happy with it and after SP2 it seems like a decent OS, but they did rush it out with some show stoppers that SP1 didn't even fix. I hung onto until SP1 and when i found it didn't fix the senior moments I just went back to XP X64 until Win 7 came out.
Now XP X64, now there is a fine OS! Built like a tank it was, solid and dependable, until Win 7 it and Win2K Pro were my favorite OSes, just clean and neat and stayed out of your way. I have a feeling Win 8 is gonna end up in the WinME "Oh HELL no!" pile as i don't see how any patches could make a cell phone UI nice to use on a desktop or laptop without touch, i just don't. With the cell/tablet UI you have to go big, big icons and big flips because its designed for little screens, whereas most desktops and laptops have big screens, it just doesn't work.
The bitch is it COULD have been great if they'd have done that, as they could have focused on what's under the hood and making cool "must have" features instead of making the desktop into a smartphone. for example make it easy peasy for someone like my dad to hook up into his office PC from home so he could work from home, kinda like easyconnect. Or something like what they had promised with WinFS, where there would be smart metadata on every file so i could type in "blue dress" and any video or picture that had a blue dress would pop up without me remembering the file name, now THAT would be nice.
Instead what we get is obviously MSFT's Hail Mary, where they risk taking a dive on the desktop in the hopes of getting some smartphone sales. What MSFT doesn't seem to get is nobody runs Windows for Windows, they run it for third party X86 apps that WinRT will never have so MSFT on the phone is fucking pointless! So stick to Win 7 and avoid the aborted mess that is Win 8, maybe we'll get lucky and Ballmer will retire and somebody will come in with a fucking brain. couldn't do any worse than Ballmer has.
I don't think so, what I think we'll see instead is the OEMs will thin out, probably only have a few left like Asus and Dell, and the same will happen to the parts suppliers, you'll have your Gigabyte and your Asrock and that will be about it.
There is STILL hundreds of millions of PCs being sold every year, both laptops and desktop, there just isn't enough being sold to keep 60 companies cranking them out. People's PCs die all the time, or something breaks and they go "Meh, gives me a good excuse to buy something new' so there will still be plenty of business to be had there, there just won't be as many OEMs as we have now. Instead we'll simply see consolidation, instead of fifty bazillion models you'll have "low-medium-high" from AMD and Intel and the OEMs will set themselves apart by differences in design or other specs such as RAM or having two drives.
Meh, it might be good for tablets....maybe. Having run the CP on a machine in the shop sitting out front for customers to play with, as I have just about every beta of Windows going back to Win2K, I have found this to be a typical user experience only with more frustration and cursing. See how lost she is? How she can't figure out even basic tasks? Oh and before someone says 'It would be the same on OSX" no it would not, as i had a G3 sitting in the shop for awhile with the last OSX release for the PPC and people had no trouble using it just fine.
Whether you like or hate MSFT, whether you think tablets are the future or believe the whole "post PC" thing is bullshit designed to sell more hardware the one thing i think we can ALL agree on is this...Win 8 is just a bad design folks. It is NOT intuitive, NOT easily discoverable, doesn't do jack shit to help the users, no wizards or tooltips that explain WTF they are going for, its like you took the absolute worst ideas of tablets and desktops and ran them through a blender, its just a mess.
I have run every single Windows beta in the shop as my personal OS going back over a decade, i even struggled with Vista for nearly a year before i gave up on it, but not this time. it took less than a month for Win 8 to irritate the living hell out of me so badly I wiped it with a smile on my face. Its just not worth a damn without touchscreens and desktops and laptops simply suck balls with touchscreens, the angle is all wrong and will cramp the shit out of your arm with the constant poking the screen.
Final verdict? If you want Win 8 wait and buy a WinRT tablet or phone, otherwise stick with Windows 7 and pass on Win 8 for X86, its just not good at all.
Not if you are trying for the safe harbor or common carrier protections as BOTH have provisions for cooperating with law enforcement which naturally Freenet simply can't support. Your ISP, your search engine, they will be happy to hand over anything and everything to a LE official with a warrant and Freenet simply can't do that.
So again until its really tested in a court all should know they risk decades in PMITA prison and being labeled a sex offender if they don't have the money to fight it all the way through the courts and even then one bad ruling and you are fucked. kinda a lot to risk on the hope the courts will act rationally around a hot button topic like CP huh?
Which is why I'd be seriously leery of going anywhere near freenet until its been tested in a court of law, because as we have seen many times courts and common sense? rarely go together. Look up what happened to that guy in Florida that got a bug where the malware guys were using his connection to transfer CP, he ended up spending 3 years and over $100,000 just to clear his name. In the meanwhile he lost his job, his home, most of his friends, tell me do YOU have a $100,000+ and the ability to survive 3 years with no job if that happened to YOU friend?
The simple fact is CP has become the new 'red scare" and most prosecutors just have to say the words CP and most juries WILL turn on you so it is YOUR JOB and the job of your lawyer to clear you, but how would you argue with Freenet? For all you know you DID share CP, and a common carrier defense won't work because not only has Freenet not been ruled a common carrier by the courts (as the ISPs and search engines have) but nothing in their EULA is designed to meet the common carrier requirements, such as cooperating with law enforcement which Google and the ISPs WILL DO if given a warrant.
so I don't know about you but I'd be scared shitless to risk it. the last guy busted for CP around here got 63 years for 14 pictures, which considering he is in his 40s and has the label of child molestor in general pop might as well be a death sentence. hell of a big risk to test the courts on, don't ya think?
Not without another year to a year and a half of work and polish that Nokia didn't have the money nor the time to spend friend. You are talking about building a VM to run the applications of a moving target, hell a target as slow as Windows has been tried to emulate by the ReactOS guys for years with little to no success, and Windows lasts a decade an OS.
Now try imagining doing that for an OS that comes out yearly, is designed for a platform currently undergoing a MHz war on both the CPU side AND the GPU side, and which will have to integrate into a market controlled by a rival which will naturally not want you accessing their market, and what you are suggesting is as "easy" as hitting a dartboard off a moving truck with a live bumblebee.
Sure you could do it, but by the time you came out you'd have support for Android 4 and they'd have already moved on to Android 6. IBM tried a similar situation with OS/2 back in the day with their Win16 support which came from MSFT no less but when Win32 came out they found that to add support would have been a living hell. Even though android uses a Linux kernel its still a Google product and Google has a HELL of a lot more being sunk into new versions R&D than Nokia could ever hope for. This is why I get irked at the "just use Linux" crowd because they act like its a magic word and all those problems will disappear when the opposite is true, Google didn't "just use Linux" but spent over a billion on R&D for Android to build it, a billion Nokia didn't have.
How has she been conditioned to ignore ME, sitting right exactly there, telling her "Its a fucking bug!" and pointing out the person sending her the bug wouldn't have the skills to send a real anything that way?
In the end friend it has NOTHING to do with conditioning and everything to do with the dancing bunnies problem which is as old as the hills. The user WANTS the bunnies, you try to stop them from getting the bunnies she/he WILL IGNORE YOU and do whatever it takes to get the bunnies, simple as that. You can show file names, have the AV show a picture of Goatse with an arrow pointing to it saying "This is you if you run that" and it will not matter because they WANT the bunny dammit!
Dude I offer to install P2P for them if that is what they want so that is NOT the problem, all they have to do is ask and they'll have BT, Gnuc, eMule, whatever, as long as they don't expect me to support it it is their PC and I'll give it to them and make it clear I will. The "New Limewire" bit was right after they closed the real Limewire and a bunch simply refused to accept that LW was dead and downloaded "New Limewire" which was a Gnuc package loaded with trojans.
And how do you explain the "ZOMG U got teh viruz!" installs of Security Tool and AV20xx? Every single machine that leaves the shop has either Avast or Comodo IS installed which will TRY to warn them but again they ignore it. Or the "porn codec" bug? I actually had to find a bug free porno site just to keep certain customers from constantly falling for that one. Again the AV TRIED to stop them, but they'd rather have the titties so they ignored it.
Finally its not that they they "don't understand the consequences" it is that the "prize' of free music/movies/porn/whatever is worth MORE to them that a clean PC. Its the classic dancing bunnies problem that simply can't be solved with technical means because the users wants the bunnies MORE than they want the clean PC. Believe me friend, i've seen it a million times, all they have to do is offer the right bunny and the users will happily destroy any and all roadblocks you put in to see the bunnies. Every time a new Twilight comes out at least a half a dozen females will get infected by running "Twilight (name of movie) player.exe" and in every damned case the AV practically tried to jump on the keyboard to stop them and they ignored it, not because of any P2P blocks but because they wanted to see the new Twilight for free more than they cared what the AV said.
With all the money spent each year to patch holes and deal with user stupidity, don't you think MSFT and the AV vendors would LIKE to be able to stop this? Imagine the sales of a "user proof" AV, that corp would be richer than God, but there simply isn't a way to ward off a user fighting for the malware unless you stuff them into a walled garden and refuse to let them do anything without permission from an outsider, and most simply won't put up with that.
Well as the guy that has to work on the machines just let me say that having an "extra browser" even if you never use it is a nice thing to have. I don't know how many times I've had a customer screw up their main browser somehow and was able to walk them through fixing it by uninstalling it and using IE to download the latest version to fix the problem. It of course doesn't happen as often as it did during the days of XP but it does happen so having an extra browser is nice. Of course they could have the same effect with that browser selection screen the EU mandated, just make an easy way for the customer to call that back up if things go wrong so its not like you'd HAVE to have IE, but as long as its there it does make a good backup.
That said the biggest users of IE has been and probably will be corporate. Corporate generally prefer timetables and life cycles and that's something the other browsers simply haven't been on board with. Mozilla finally gave the corps ESR release but after burning everyone with their "We're not gonna support old versions" stupidity they probably burnt that bridge and the only support they had for GPOs was third party anyway. The others have never seemed to care about business users so in the end all the businesses have is IE. So even if it dies out completely for the home users I doubt business will be giving up IE since its the only one that supports the way they like to do things.
Jesus man, are you staying in a home with no power in this heat? That reminds me to never bitch about the local cops peeling out with sirens blasting, as living a block from the station means if nobody else gets power we WILL get ours back ASAP as we are on the same grid with the cops.
Not to mention I'm in charge of bringing my elderly mother to the library so she can drop off another donation of 70s Sci/Fi and Horror and get herself some books to read, know what happens when i get there? i get practically attacked by young college girls, we are talking 19-25, who go into a feeding frenzy when mom brings a load of books. i even asked one how she always manages to be there and she laughed and said "Your mom is VERY predictable on her timing so i just make sure to be here on her days". After they are through snatching books as fast as the librarian can slap them into the DB they are hitting mom up with questions about the authors.
Now you would think if ANY would be post book it would be these women, they all own smartphones and tablets and laptops, yet just like my mom they'd rather have a "dead tree DB" as I jokingly call them than a Kindle version, which most don't exist for the cheesy Sci/Fi Horror mom collected for ages. I walk into that library and its full of young people, in fact other than me and mom I'd say most are under 30. Don't seem very "post book" to me.
And how many hundreds of millions of PCs are being sold this year? We've had smartphones and tablets for a couple of years now, why hasn't the bottom fallen out like it did with dialup?
because the numbers you are seeing in smartphones and tablets don't tell the whole story. people break smartphones and tablets so they get chunked often, people replace PCs as they die which takes longer. but just because it takes longer does NOT mean people won't buy, it just means they won't go apeshit with it like during the MHz wars where a 2 year old PC would struggle to run current software. today you can take any 6 year old Core Duo or Phenom I and do anything the user can think of with cycles to spare, that's all. nobody is replacing A with B, they are simply adding A to B and replacing B more often because the dog chewed on it, the 3 year old thought it would be nice to flush it (boy you have NO IDEA how often that happens, I swear kids and toilets are a deadly mix for portables) or they step on it, I even had one run his over with his truck. the PC and laptop on the other hand lasts until it dies, which looks to be anywhere from 5-9 years depending on the model.
Except that its NOT being pushed into PC space, as I have yet to meet anybody that has a tablet and/or smartphone but no PC, they are like the Yeti in that they supposedly exist but nobody has actually met one. Instead everyone is simply hanging onto their PCs until they die because they simply can't push enough work to stress these monsters we've had for years. i mean how many home users or office workers can stress out a Phenom I quad or even a Core Duo?
I'll use my dad as an example because frankly he is the PERFECT use case, he is as bog standard and typical for users as they come. He surfs, watches YouTube and Internet TV, does chat, burns DVDs, basic stuff. Just for shits and giggles a few years back when Tiger had one of those "Crazy quad core for $199 ZOMG!" deals I got him one. Its a Phenom I 2.1 GHz, about the lowest Phenom they made. What did I find? he has never gotten above 45% CPU EVAR, he just can't come up with enough work to slam that chip.
So WHY would he replace his PC before it dies? the only reason he replaced his GF's PCs is that the old P4s had finally started failing and frankly parts cost more for those old junkers than they are worth so he simply got a couple of those "ZOMG $199 triple!" deals at tiger which with his GF being even less hard on a PC they'll last probably a good decade barring hardware failures. in that same time he's gone through something like 3 phones because he steps on them, runs over them, etc its just easier to kill a phone than a desktop.
For that to work we would need to have actual CHOICE when it comes to candidates and we don't. The amount of corruption and greed has gotten so thick that for all intents and purposes they are the same party. Sure the dems kiss big media booty a little more and the reps kiss big business booty a little more but in the end they are BOTH for more power, they are BOTH for more money to their "friends" they are BOTH for bringing home the bacon, they are BOTH for less rights for you.
People don't vote because they don't care, they don't vote because they see the current system is pointless and a waste of time. Tell me how did we get anything different by changing the POTUS? Or the switches back and forth with congress? Occupy do anything? Nope because in the end when a 1%er walks in and writes a big fat check that is the ONLY vote that counts and since you can't write that check you don't have a vote, simple as that. think they give a crap if you kick them out? They'll just get a high paid lobbying job while enjoying their benefits, hell they won't even leave town, just move to an office down the street. Boy now THAT is a hardship!
Wow, look at the crazy from the mods here. So you are HONESTLY saying that even though MSFT couldn't crack into that market with over a BILLION DOLLARS SPENT that Nokia could magically have taken share with Maemo...because? What you think "Linux hackers" would set the world on fire? Have you forgotten OpenMoko?
Hindsight is always 20/20 and while we all agree that Win 8 hasn't got a prayer the simple fact is Maemo needed at least another year of polish and work and Droid and Apple were drinking Nokia's milkshake bud. Mark my words the new Maemo phones won't even sell 100,000 units and will go the way of OpenMoko, the mobile market is driven by developers developers developers and ironically all the developers are on Android and iOS and NOT Maemo or WinPhone. All you'll get on Maemo is a few half baked ports of FOSS software, maybe Abiword or VLC, and then it'll die. Sorry to burst your bubble but its as crazy as saying PalmOS could compete with iPhone, its just not in the same league and wouldn't be without tens of millions spent and another year or two of development, by which time the race would have been over.
You are missing the point friend in that they do not NEED to see the extension because while it is an executable the AV will be SCREAMING at them "Don't run that!" and they will DO IT ANYWAY because they want the porn/music/video/kitty screensaver.
Here let me give you an example, a real swear to God that happened in a small business I was working at setting up some systems: ME "Do NOT run that! Its a password protected zip with the password in the email! Its a Virus!" Velma "Oh you worry too much, its from my BFF Kim, see her name right there? Oh and it says its kitty pictures, i love kitties!" ME:"It is NOT from your BFF Kim because I KNOW KIM and she wouldn't have a clue about how to set up a Pword protected zip!" Oh you are just paranoid, stop drinking so many colas!"/Velma promptly ignores me, runs contents of zip, next thing here comes the pop ups/ "Velma:oops... ME..........
And NOW do you see why extensions doesn't help? if the AV is saying NO and an honest to goodness human with years of experience is saying HELL NO and they do it anyway, how in the hell are you gonna stop them with extensions? Even the dumbest moron knows there is free AV out there, but that doesn't help if they ignore it if it gets between them and the "goodies" the malware writer is offering, as they will disable or even uninstall the AV if that is what it takes. Its PEBKAC friend, tech can't fix that.
Oh and the ONLY reason I was pointing out the extensions is that IE WILL LET THEM SEE THE FULL NAME including the extension as they download and they STILL ignore it, they just don't care.
I'm sorry but he's full of shit because he is still pretending everyone has WinXP when in Vista and Win 7 there is UAC WARNINGS before you launch executables but NO warning before you just play a video.
And perhaps you both better read what I wrote again because in damned near every case the AV TRIED to stop them, did everything but yank the damned keyboard away, but they simply refused to listen (or in the case of the "New Limewire" guy) actively REMOVED THE ANTIVIRUS TO ALLOW THE MALWARE IN.. Now you tell ME friend, short of an Apple style "You may do nothing without corporate approval" style iOS can you stop that in ANY way by changing any part of a UI?
The answer is you can't, because its NOT a UI problem, despite the "ZOMG HAIRY WORKS FOR M$" troll we had in this thread, its a dancing bunnies problem where the user KNOWS what they are doing is risky, they KNOW there is a more than average chance at infection, but for free movies/music/porn/stuff they simply DO NOT CARE and will happily help the malware writer remove any and all roadblocks that get between them and the prize. so I'm sorry, but you can't fix a user problem with a tech solution, it just doesn't work unless you take away all the rights and give them thin clients.
We're not gonna lose squat because the "industry" has done this dance before and been full of shit then and is full of shit now. Anybody remember "We are all gonna use thin clients hooked to the net! No more bugs, no more upgrades!" remember that? Right before the dotbomb blew up I swear every pundit was cranking out those articles. if Cringely was writing then i wouldn't be surprised if he was doing the thin client shuffle too.
Now y'all listen to old Hairy, I've been down here in the trenches since the days of Win 3.x so I know what is what and here is the scoop: Those people with the smartphones and tablets? Yeah well guess what? They all have PCs as well and in fact many of them have multiple. Most have a desktop AND a laptop or netbook.
So why the big slowdown in sales? because there IS NO SLOWDOWN the only "slowdown" is in the minds of the OEMs and MSFT who got spoiled rotten by the "MHz Wars" and people chunking PCs every 2 years. The simple fact is those circa 2006 Phenom Is and Athlon X2 and Core duos simply have more cycles than the users need and when the price of triples and quads dropped in 2008 computers went from "good enough" to "insanely overpowered" because the users simply don't have enough useful work to stress these monsters. Hell once we got the P4 Mobiles out of the channel folks aren't even stressing the Core Duo and Turion laptops so unless they drop them they ain't dying either, because as we all know its heat that kills and what they are doing simply isn't pushing them hard enough.
So while we'll probably see an uptick as XP reaches EOL the simple fact is the PC is NOT GOING AWAY but instead has become a mature commodity item, simple as that. I have YET to meet anyone who has thrown out their PC for a smartphone, and the clueless like Cringely don't even take into account how truly shitty the networks are in most of the USA or the fact that those with smartphones and tablets already have PCs and laptops, they are simply hanging onto what they have until it breaks. We WILL see the same thing in ARM in a couple of years, there is already talk of "dark silicon" because ARM will have more transistors than battery to feed them and when it can't continue the MHz War just like X86 things will settle back down and folks won't replace until they die.
So don't listen to Bob, it's the same crap they tried selling us during the dotbomb because it makes the corps a LOT of money to be able to sell constantly replaced hardware and have control of everybody's data. Instead listen to Hairy who is down here in the trenches and I can tell you I haven't seen a single person toss their PC for a phone, not one. Folks simply see no need to act like the days of the MHz wars because even that low end Athlon triple can game and do anything your average person wants to do. Its just the market maturing folks, no need to panic.
Slashdot Mirror
What is amazing is you read some of the other posters, who were so quick to mod me down and go "poo poo, Linux is virus free, poo poo" it ALL comes down to "Magical Thinking", the same crap that those selling security junk have used for years. Its the same old "With product X you are always safe and immune!" which anybody with two functioning brain cells ought to be able to see through, but apparently not here. Nice to see at least one person gets it.
Look magical thinkers, it is VERY simple, okay? EVERY SINGLE OS is an extremely complex pile of code. it has to support at least tens of thousands of pieces of hardware, multitasking, resource management, hell the kernel is how many million lines now? And that is before you even account for all the third party code running on top. I bet you could ask Linus Torvalds himself what happens when program Foo gets called and even HE won't know every single interaction, its just too complex.
So magical thinking simply doesn't work. What kernel is Android running while its getting malware up the butt? That would be Linux. What about Are there unpatched security holes in Linux? Why yes there are which kinda blows a giant hole in the magical thinking. BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? take a look and see. Maybe they just had bad configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a fluke by any means.
In the end it doesn't matter if you are running Linux, windows, OSX, BSD, or OS/2, if you are targeted by malware writers, which is EXACTLY what happened to the corp in TFA, then they can simply target the payload to the OS and you are just as screwed, no magical thinking will save you.
Because sadly users seem to forget that what works in tech A can work just as well with tech B and have to be re-educated all over?
I've had to deal with this in the shop, what with so many switching to smartphones lately and wrote about it in my journal here. basically those same "Hey you won a $1000 gift card" emails that haven't worked in regular emails in years work just fine when it comes to smartphones. Its like people just don't connect one to the other and so really OLD tricks work on them when given with new tech. This is why I think phone malware is gonna explode, the same people that wouldn't install a program on their Windows PC from just anywhere will happily do so to be given " free Angry Birds!" so all you can do is try to warn them as best you can.
Question: Is that enough to absolve them of legal liability? Because it seems kinda flimsy to me, like writing a worm and then going "oopsie, it was just for testing" when it gets out and infects thousands of PCs, it just doesn't sound like the kind of thing a simple EULA or statement can CYA. So is that really all there is to it? The right kind of EULA and you can cook up anything?
Despite you "Windoze" comment frankly it wouldn't matter what OS you are running because when you are dealing with a targeted attack such as this the enemy knows what you have and therefor can simply tune the attack to the OS, just as we saw with stuxnet.
If you think Linux has a magical immunity you might want to read how to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps which shows with just a little social engineering its really not hard to target Linux just as the malware writers target Windows and OSX now. Or did you think android runs on Windows? In the end if you know what your target is running you can simply shape the payload to target that infrastructure, its really not that hard to do.
I wonder what they have that the malware guys figured it was worth the expense of such a targeted attack? perhaps a rival corp wanting to get ahead of the game? it would be interesting to see where this all leads, as you usually don't hear of malware writers going to this much trouble for a single target, so whatever they have must be worth a lot to someone.
Well you would THINK after me handing them the bill a couple of times they would get a fucking clue and at least call or email me before doing something REALLY stupid, but instead I've found it settles quickly into one of 2 camps. 1.-The ones that listen to me, which run year after year without needing me for more than hardware upgrades. i like these customers a lot, even though I make less money off of them, because they are just so easy to support. I tell them what is bad, point them to what is good, and they listen, its nice.
The other camp simply ignores everything I say, and after clicking ignore enough times on the AV ends up with more viruses than a Bangkok whore on coupon night. The totally gobsmacking batshit part? they will simply KEEP USING THE INFECTED PC until it simply won't run anymore and THEN bring it to me. They of course make me more money but every time you get spam, have your internet slow to a crawl because of the latest worm? you can lay the blame at these bozos, because in the end nobody is gonna keep them from that free movie/music/porn/ screensaver dammit!
Just as a test I gave one of the "must have teh tittiez!" customers Mepis, just to see if the vaunted Linux security would keep Goober from shitting on the PC, did it work? Nope, he made it unbootable in less than a week, how? He decided he didn't like the package manager and just Googled "Linux programs" and got enough crap off of Freshmeat (boy is THAT name perfect) to put the entire system in dependency hell...sigh.
In the end you just can't fix stupid, you just can't. You can try to lessen the damage the average mouth breather can do but in the end you'll end up having to clean up the mess, because some will simply NEVER learn or worse think they are smarter than they are, but in either case shit will be broke and malware will spread, all you can do is clean up the messes.
Uhhh...Billy? They didn't CUT support they INCREASED it, with Win Vista getting ALL versions supported until 2017 (it was supposed to lose Home and basic in 2012) and Win 7 getting all versions supported until 2020 (was supposed to lose Home and Basic in 2014) so that is one thing you got wrong.
The other you got wrong was corp attitude, while its true that with a downturn they aren't spending like they did before a LOT of that has to do with PCs simply lasting longer and being overpowered. in the days of the MHz war you had no choice but to stay on the upgrade treadmill, because even a 2 year old PC would struggle to run the latest software but now i have plenty of small business customers that are quite happy with their Phenom Is and Core duos simply because their work isn't stressing those cores out. I mean how many average folks you know are gonna seriously stress a Phenom I quad or a Core Duo? Not many.
But what WILL cause them to go with 7 over 8 is cost to retrain which won't be cheap. Ever put a user on Win 8? i have, they are TOTALLY lost and have no damned clue how to get anything done. With Win 8 you might as well start with the idea of teaching your entire workforce to start over from scratch and that ain't cheap by a long shot. if MSFT would have had a brain they would have put in a switch that would let the GUI be set at startup and then let them choose between Classic/ Win 7/ Metro and they wouldn't be in this mess, but like it or not its Metro or Win 7 and the customers WILL choose Win 7, mark my words.
Ya know, thinking about it....could this be a "New Coke" style ploy to speed up win 7 adoption? Wouldn't be the first time a corp has done a dumb move that ended up helping sales.
Sadly it wasn't just that Drinkypoo, as I had a pretty nice machine for that time (Pentium 4 3.6Ghz Cedar Mill with HT, Geforce 7600GS, 4Gb of RAM) and I can tell you there were some serious show stoppers that kept me on WinXP X64 until I built a new machine for Win 7, specifically the "Play multimedia and the network crawls" bug and the "Vista loses network shares' bug which was irritating as hell as the only damned way i could get Vista to see those shares was to reboot, and finally what I called "senior moments" where the entire system would just hang for a few seconds.
Don't get me wrong I have several customers on Vista and they are happy with it and after SP2 it seems like a decent OS, but they did rush it out with some show stoppers that SP1 didn't even fix. I hung onto until SP1 and when i found it didn't fix the senior moments I just went back to XP X64 until Win 7 came out.
Now XP X64, now there is a fine OS! Built like a tank it was, solid and dependable, until Win 7 it and Win2K Pro were my favorite OSes, just clean and neat and stayed out of your way. I have a feeling Win 8 is gonna end up in the WinME "Oh HELL no!" pile as i don't see how any patches could make a cell phone UI nice to use on a desktop or laptop without touch, i just don't. With the cell/tablet UI you have to go big, big icons and big flips because its designed for little screens, whereas most desktops and laptops have big screens, it just doesn't work.
The bitch is it COULD have been great if they'd have done that, as they could have focused on what's under the hood and making cool "must have" features instead of making the desktop into a smartphone. for example make it easy peasy for someone like my dad to hook up into his office PC from home so he could work from home, kinda like easyconnect. Or something like what they had promised with WinFS, where there would be smart metadata on every file so i could type in "blue dress" and any video or picture that had a blue dress would pop up without me remembering the file name, now THAT would be nice.
Instead what we get is obviously MSFT's Hail Mary, where they risk taking a dive on the desktop in the hopes of getting some smartphone sales. What MSFT doesn't seem to get is nobody runs Windows for Windows, they run it for third party X86 apps that WinRT will never have so MSFT on the phone is fucking pointless! So stick to Win 7 and avoid the aborted mess that is Win 8, maybe we'll get lucky and Ballmer will retire and somebody will come in with a fucking brain. couldn't do any worse than Ballmer has.
I don't think so, what I think we'll see instead is the OEMs will thin out, probably only have a few left like Asus and Dell, and the same will happen to the parts suppliers, you'll have your Gigabyte and your Asrock and that will be about it.
There is STILL hundreds of millions of PCs being sold every year, both laptops and desktop, there just isn't enough being sold to keep 60 companies cranking them out. People's PCs die all the time, or something breaks and they go "Meh, gives me a good excuse to buy something new' so there will still be plenty of business to be had there, there just won't be as many OEMs as we have now. Instead we'll simply see consolidation, instead of fifty bazillion models you'll have "low-medium-high" from AMD and Intel and the OEMs will set themselves apart by differences in design or other specs such as RAM or having two drives.
Meh, it might be good for tablets....maybe. Having run the CP on a machine in the shop sitting out front for customers to play with, as I have just about every beta of Windows going back to Win2K, I have found this to be a typical user experience only with more frustration and cursing. See how lost she is? How she can't figure out even basic tasks? Oh and before someone says 'It would be the same on OSX" no it would not, as i had a G3 sitting in the shop for awhile with the last OSX release for the PPC and people had no trouble using it just fine.
Whether you like or hate MSFT, whether you think tablets are the future or believe the whole "post PC" thing is bullshit designed to sell more hardware the one thing i think we can ALL agree on is this...Win 8 is just a bad design folks. It is NOT intuitive, NOT easily discoverable, doesn't do jack shit to help the users, no wizards or tooltips that explain WTF they are going for, its like you took the absolute worst ideas of tablets and desktops and ran them through a blender, its just a mess.
I have run every single Windows beta in the shop as my personal OS going back over a decade, i even struggled with Vista for nearly a year before i gave up on it, but not this time. it took less than a month for Win 8 to irritate the living hell out of me so badly I wiped it with a smile on my face. Its just not worth a damn without touchscreens and desktops and laptops simply suck balls with touchscreens, the angle is all wrong and will cramp the shit out of your arm with the constant poking the screen.
Final verdict? If you want Win 8 wait and buy a WinRT tablet or phone, otherwise stick with Windows 7 and pass on Win 8 for X86, its just not good at all.
Not if you are trying for the safe harbor or common carrier protections as BOTH have provisions for cooperating with law enforcement which naturally Freenet simply can't support. Your ISP, your search engine, they will be happy to hand over anything and everything to a LE official with a warrant and Freenet simply can't do that.
So again until its really tested in a court all should know they risk decades in PMITA prison and being labeled a sex offender if they don't have the money to fight it all the way through the courts and even then one bad ruling and you are fucked. kinda a lot to risk on the hope the courts will act rationally around a hot button topic like CP huh?
Which is why I'd be seriously leery of going anywhere near freenet until its been tested in a court of law, because as we have seen many times courts and common sense? rarely go together. Look up what happened to that guy in Florida that got a bug where the malware guys were using his connection to transfer CP, he ended up spending 3 years and over $100,000 just to clear his name. In the meanwhile he lost his job, his home, most of his friends, tell me do YOU have a $100,000+ and the ability to survive 3 years with no job if that happened to YOU friend?
The simple fact is CP has become the new 'red scare" and most prosecutors just have to say the words CP and most juries WILL turn on you so it is YOUR JOB and the job of your lawyer to clear you, but how would you argue with Freenet? For all you know you DID share CP, and a common carrier defense won't work because not only has Freenet not been ruled a common carrier by the courts (as the ISPs and search engines have) but nothing in their EULA is designed to meet the common carrier requirements, such as cooperating with law enforcement which Google and the ISPs WILL DO if given a warrant.
so I don't know about you but I'd be scared shitless to risk it. the last guy busted for CP around here got 63 years for 14 pictures, which considering he is in his 40s and has the label of child molestor in general pop might as well be a death sentence. hell of a big risk to test the courts on, don't ya think?
Not without another year to a year and a half of work and polish that Nokia didn't have the money nor the time to spend friend. You are talking about building a VM to run the applications of a moving target, hell a target as slow as Windows has been tried to emulate by the ReactOS guys for years with little to no success, and Windows lasts a decade an OS.
Now try imagining doing that for an OS that comes out yearly, is designed for a platform currently undergoing a MHz war on both the CPU side AND the GPU side, and which will have to integrate into a market controlled by a rival which will naturally not want you accessing their market, and what you are suggesting is as "easy" as hitting a dartboard off a moving truck with a live bumblebee.
Sure you could do it, but by the time you came out you'd have support for Android 4 and they'd have already moved on to Android 6. IBM tried a similar situation with OS/2 back in the day with their Win16 support which came from MSFT no less but when Win32 came out they found that to add support would have been a living hell. Even though android uses a Linux kernel its still a Google product and Google has a HELL of a lot more being sunk into new versions R&D than Nokia could ever hope for. This is why I get irked at the "just use Linux" crowd because they act like its a magic word and all those problems will disappear when the opposite is true, Google didn't "just use Linux" but spent over a billion on R&D for Android to build it, a billion Nokia didn't have.
How has she been conditioned to ignore ME, sitting right exactly there, telling her "Its a fucking bug!" and pointing out the person sending her the bug wouldn't have the skills to send a real anything that way?
In the end friend it has NOTHING to do with conditioning and everything to do with the dancing bunnies problem which is as old as the hills. The user WANTS the bunnies, you try to stop them from getting the bunnies she/he WILL IGNORE YOU and do whatever it takes to get the bunnies, simple as that. You can show file names, have the AV show a picture of Goatse with an arrow pointing to it saying "This is you if you run that" and it will not matter because they WANT the bunny dammit!
Dude I offer to install P2P for them if that is what they want so that is NOT the problem, all they have to do is ask and they'll have BT, Gnuc, eMule, whatever, as long as they don't expect me to support it it is their PC and I'll give it to them and make it clear I will. The "New Limewire" bit was right after they closed the real Limewire and a bunch simply refused to accept that LW was dead and downloaded "New Limewire" which was a Gnuc package loaded with trojans.
And how do you explain the "ZOMG U got teh viruz!" installs of Security Tool and AV20xx? Every single machine that leaves the shop has either Avast or Comodo IS installed which will TRY to warn them but again they ignore it. Or the "porn codec" bug? I actually had to find a bug free porno site just to keep certain customers from constantly falling for that one. Again the AV TRIED to stop them, but they'd rather have the titties so they ignored it.
Finally its not that they they "don't understand the consequences" it is that the "prize' of free music/movies/porn/whatever is worth MORE to them that a clean PC. Its the classic dancing bunnies problem that simply can't be solved with technical means because the users wants the bunnies MORE than they want the clean PC. Believe me friend, i've seen it a million times, all they have to do is offer the right bunny and the users will happily destroy any and all roadblocks you put in to see the bunnies. Every time a new Twilight comes out at least a half a dozen females will get infected by running "Twilight (name of movie) player.exe" and in every damned case the AV practically tried to jump on the keyboard to stop them and they ignored it, not because of any P2P blocks but because they wanted to see the new Twilight for free more than they cared what the AV said.
With all the money spent each year to patch holes and deal with user stupidity, don't you think MSFT and the AV vendors would LIKE to be able to stop this? Imagine the sales of a "user proof" AV, that corp would be richer than God, but there simply isn't a way to ward off a user fighting for the malware unless you stuff them into a walled garden and refuse to let them do anything without permission from an outsider, and most simply won't put up with that.
Well as the guy that has to work on the machines just let me say that having an "extra browser" even if you never use it is a nice thing to have. I don't know how many times I've had a customer screw up their main browser somehow and was able to walk them through fixing it by uninstalling it and using IE to download the latest version to fix the problem. It of course doesn't happen as often as it did during the days of XP but it does happen so having an extra browser is nice. Of course they could have the same effect with that browser selection screen the EU mandated, just make an easy way for the customer to call that back up if things go wrong so its not like you'd HAVE to have IE, but as long as its there it does make a good backup.
That said the biggest users of IE has been and probably will be corporate. Corporate generally prefer timetables and life cycles and that's something the other browsers simply haven't been on board with. Mozilla finally gave the corps ESR release but after burning everyone with their "We're not gonna support old versions" stupidity they probably burnt that bridge and the only support they had for GPOs was third party anyway. The others have never seemed to care about business users so in the end all the businesses have is IE. So even if it dies out completely for the home users I doubt business will be giving up IE since its the only one that supports the way they like to do things.
Jesus man, are you staying in a home with no power in this heat? That reminds me to never bitch about the local cops peeling out with sirens blasting, as living a block from the station means if nobody else gets power we WILL get ours back ASAP as we are on the same grid with the cops.
Not to mention I'm in charge of bringing my elderly mother to the library so she can drop off another donation of 70s Sci/Fi and Horror and get herself some books to read, know what happens when i get there? i get practically attacked by young college girls, we are talking 19-25, who go into a feeding frenzy when mom brings a load of books. i even asked one how she always manages to be there and she laughed and said "Your mom is VERY predictable on her timing so i just make sure to be here on her days". After they are through snatching books as fast as the librarian can slap them into the DB they are hitting mom up with questions about the authors.
Now you would think if ANY would be post book it would be these women, they all own smartphones and tablets and laptops, yet just like my mom they'd rather have a "dead tree DB" as I jokingly call them than a Kindle version, which most don't exist for the cheesy Sci/Fi Horror mom collected for ages. I walk into that library and its full of young people, in fact other than me and mom I'd say most are under 30. Don't seem very "post book" to me.
And how many hundreds of millions of PCs are being sold this year? We've had smartphones and tablets for a couple of years now, why hasn't the bottom fallen out like it did with dialup?
because the numbers you are seeing in smartphones and tablets don't tell the whole story. people break smartphones and tablets so they get chunked often, people replace PCs as they die which takes longer. but just because it takes longer does NOT mean people won't buy, it just means they won't go apeshit with it like during the MHz wars where a 2 year old PC would struggle to run current software. today you can take any 6 year old Core Duo or Phenom I and do anything the user can think of with cycles to spare, that's all. nobody is replacing A with B, they are simply adding A to B and replacing B more often because the dog chewed on it, the 3 year old thought it would be nice to flush it (boy you have NO IDEA how often that happens, I swear kids and toilets are a deadly mix for portables) or they step on it, I even had one run his over with his truck. the PC and laptop on the other hand lasts until it dies, which looks to be anywhere from 5-9 years depending on the model.
Except that its NOT being pushed into PC space, as I have yet to meet anybody that has a tablet and/or smartphone but no PC, they are like the Yeti in that they supposedly exist but nobody has actually met one. Instead everyone is simply hanging onto their PCs until they die because they simply can't push enough work to stress these monsters we've had for years. i mean how many home users or office workers can stress out a Phenom I quad or even a Core Duo?
I'll use my dad as an example because frankly he is the PERFECT use case, he is as bog standard and typical for users as they come. He surfs, watches YouTube and Internet TV, does chat, burns DVDs, basic stuff. Just for shits and giggles a few years back when Tiger had one of those "Crazy quad core for $199 ZOMG!" deals I got him one. Its a Phenom I 2.1 GHz, about the lowest Phenom they made. What did I find? he has never gotten above 45% CPU EVAR, he just can't come up with enough work to slam that chip.
So WHY would he replace his PC before it dies? the only reason he replaced his GF's PCs is that the old P4s had finally started failing and frankly parts cost more for those old junkers than they are worth so he simply got a couple of those "ZOMG $199 triple!" deals at tiger which with his GF being even less hard on a PC they'll last probably a good decade barring hardware failures. in that same time he's gone through something like 3 phones because he steps on them, runs over them, etc its just easier to kill a phone than a desktop.
For that to work we would need to have actual CHOICE when it comes to candidates and we don't. The amount of corruption and greed has gotten so thick that for all intents and purposes they are the same party. Sure the dems kiss big media booty a little more and the reps kiss big business booty a little more but in the end they are BOTH for more power, they are BOTH for more money to their "friends" they are BOTH for bringing home the bacon, they are BOTH for less rights for you.
People don't vote because they don't care, they don't vote because they see the current system is pointless and a waste of time. Tell me how did we get anything different by changing the POTUS? Or the switches back and forth with congress? Occupy do anything? Nope because in the end when a 1%er walks in and writes a big fat check that is the ONLY vote that counts and since you can't write that check you don't have a vote, simple as that. think they give a crap if you kick them out? They'll just get a high paid lobbying job while enjoying their benefits, hell they won't even leave town, just move to an office down the street. Boy now THAT is a hardship!
Wow, look at the crazy from the mods here. So you are HONESTLY saying that even though MSFT couldn't crack into that market with over a BILLION DOLLARS SPENT that Nokia could magically have taken share with Maemo...because? What you think "Linux hackers" would set the world on fire? Have you forgotten OpenMoko?
Hindsight is always 20/20 and while we all agree that Win 8 hasn't got a prayer the simple fact is Maemo needed at least another year of polish and work and Droid and Apple were drinking Nokia's milkshake bud. Mark my words the new Maemo phones won't even sell 100,000 units and will go the way of OpenMoko, the mobile market is driven by developers developers developers and ironically all the developers are on Android and iOS and NOT Maemo or WinPhone. All you'll get on Maemo is a few half baked ports of FOSS software, maybe Abiword or VLC, and then it'll die. Sorry to burst your bubble but its as crazy as saying PalmOS could compete with iPhone, its just not in the same league and wouldn't be without tens of millions spent and another year or two of development, by which time the race would have been over.
You are missing the point friend in that they do not NEED to see the extension because while it is an executable the AV will be SCREAMING at them "Don't run that!" and they will DO IT ANYWAY because they want the porn/music/video/kitty screensaver.
Here let me give you an example, a real swear to God that happened in a small business I was working at setting up some systems: ME "Do NOT run that! Its a password protected zip with the password in the email! Its a Virus!" Velma "Oh you worry too much, its from my BFF Kim, see her name right there? Oh and it says its kitty pictures, i love kitties!" ME:"It is NOT from your BFF Kim because I KNOW KIM and she wouldn't have a clue about how to set up a Pword protected zip!" Oh you are just paranoid, stop drinking so many colas!" /Velma promptly ignores me, runs contents of zip, next thing here comes the pop ups/ "Velma:oops... ME..........
And NOW do you see why extensions doesn't help? if the AV is saying NO and an honest to goodness human with years of experience is saying HELL NO and they do it anyway, how in the hell are you gonna stop them with extensions? Even the dumbest moron knows there is free AV out there, but that doesn't help if they ignore it if it gets between them and the "goodies" the malware writer is offering, as they will disable or even uninstall the AV if that is what it takes. Its PEBKAC friend, tech can't fix that.
Oh and the ONLY reason I was pointing out the extensions is that IE WILL LET THEM SEE THE FULL NAME including the extension as they download and they STILL ignore it, they just don't care.
I'm sorry but he's full of shit because he is still pretending everyone has WinXP when in Vista and Win 7 there is UAC WARNINGS before you launch executables but NO warning before you just play a video.
And perhaps you both better read what I wrote again because in damned near every case the AV TRIED to stop them, did everything but yank the damned keyboard away, but they simply refused to listen (or in the case of the "New Limewire" guy) actively REMOVED THE ANTIVIRUS TO ALLOW THE MALWARE IN.. Now you tell ME friend, short of an Apple style "You may do nothing without corporate approval" style iOS can you stop that in ANY way by changing any part of a UI?
The answer is you can't, because its NOT a UI problem, despite the "ZOMG HAIRY WORKS FOR M$" troll we had in this thread, its a dancing bunnies problem where the user KNOWS what they are doing is risky, they KNOW there is a more than average chance at infection, but for free movies/music/porn/stuff they simply DO NOT CARE and will happily help the malware writer remove any and all roadblocks that get between them and the prize. so I'm sorry, but you can't fix a user problem with a tech solution, it just doesn't work unless you take away all the rights and give them thin clients.
We're not gonna lose squat because the "industry" has done this dance before and been full of shit then and is full of shit now. Anybody remember "We are all gonna use thin clients hooked to the net! No more bugs, no more upgrades!" remember that? Right before the dotbomb blew up I swear every pundit was cranking out those articles. if Cringely was writing then i wouldn't be surprised if he was doing the thin client shuffle too.
Now y'all listen to old Hairy, I've been down here in the trenches since the days of Win 3.x so I know what is what and here is the scoop: Those people with the smartphones and tablets? Yeah well guess what? They all have PCs as well and in fact many of them have multiple. Most have a desktop AND a laptop or netbook.
So why the big slowdown in sales? because there IS NO SLOWDOWN the only "slowdown" is in the minds of the OEMs and MSFT who got spoiled rotten by the "MHz Wars" and people chunking PCs every 2 years. The simple fact is those circa 2006 Phenom Is and Athlon X2 and Core duos simply have more cycles than the users need and when the price of triples and quads dropped in 2008 computers went from "good enough" to "insanely overpowered" because the users simply don't have enough useful work to stress these monsters. Hell once we got the P4 Mobiles out of the channel folks aren't even stressing the Core Duo and Turion laptops so unless they drop them they ain't dying either, because as we all know its heat that kills and what they are doing simply isn't pushing them hard enough.
So while we'll probably see an uptick as XP reaches EOL the simple fact is the PC is NOT GOING AWAY but instead has become a mature commodity item, simple as that. I have YET to meet anyone who has thrown out their PC for a smartphone, and the clueless like Cringely don't even take into account how truly shitty the networks are in most of the USA or the fact that those with smartphones and tablets already have PCs and laptops, they are simply hanging onto what they have until it breaks. We WILL see the same thing in ARM in a couple of years, there is already talk of "dark silicon" because ARM will have more transistors than battery to feed them and when it can't continue the MHz War just like X86 things will settle back down and folks won't replace until they die.
So don't listen to Bob, it's the same crap they tried selling us during the dotbomb because it makes the corps a LOT of money to be able to sell constantly replaced hardware and have control of everybody's data. Instead listen to Hairy who is down here in the trenches and I can tell you I haven't seen a single person toss their PC for a phone, not one. Folks simply see no need to act like the days of the MHz wars because even that low end Athlon triple can game and do anything your average person wants to do. Its just the market maturing folks, no need to panic.