Most commentators like this CNN reporter immediately position WinPhone7 in competition with the iPhone, but just maybe it's RIM who's really the initial target. Consider the enormous investment large corporations have in a Blackberry infrastructure that co-exists with their Exchange servers. Having Outlook on a cell phone with a secure connection to Exchange makes RIM rather superfluous.
There were 10 million Blackberries sold in the first quarter of 2010 according to Gartner. Devices running the iPhone and Android OS accounted for about thirteen million. If I were running Microsoft, I'd start by leveraging my existing clients and targeting those RIM devices. Switching a single large enterprise from Blackberries to WinPhones brings a lot of business Microsoft's way in a hurry.
First quarter year-on-year growth was 40% for RIM compared to -0.9% for Windows Mobile and 117% for iPhones. Sales of Android devices grew a whopping 800% but did not overtake the iPhone in total. Most of those phones were being sold to consumers, of course. Denting that market would be nice for Microsoft but not as lucrative as converting corporate Blackberry accounts.
I doubt most buyers even understand the different formats, they probably just think 3D TV is all the same. No, it's more likely higher cost plus lack of a real need just yet that's behind this - sales of HDTV were similarly low when sets first started appearing on the consumer market, due to both the high cost and the lack of content.
I don't think the two are comparable at all. HDTV provided larger screens with better resolution without any change in how viewers relate to the television. 3D offers nothing like that.
3D makes some sense in theaters where a large screen makes the experience more "immersive." 3D in my living room would mean silly things like Brett Favre standing on my carpet to throw a pass to Randy Moss somewhere in the nether reaches of my TV.
Put eicar.com on a website, then send an email with a embedded URL and a subject line having to do with nude celebrity videos. You know, the "Hey dude! Wassup! Check out this hot video of Angelina and Brad getting it on!" variety.
Make sure you craft an HTML version so the URL isn't displayed or use a TinyURL link.
EICAR is detected by all AV products including ClamAV.
I'd put it in a zip file, then attach the zip to an email message. Show how real viruses propagate by mail. How about putting a copy on a USB pendrive then running eicar.com from Autostart? Any Windows AV product with a decent autoscanner should detect both of these and pop up a warning.
If you want to get really fancy you can set up a Linux box running MailScanner with ClamAV and send an "EICAR-infected" e-mail message through it. You'll see MailScanner detect the virus, put it in a quarantine, and send notices to the admin and, optionally, the sender.
For a lay audience I think it's more important to stress the vectors than to concentrate on the payload itself.
Now if you could only find a site distributing Antivirus 2010. If you do, make sure you're using a Linux machine when you visit the site. If your class understands that there's more to the world than Windows, see how long it takes them to understand why there can't really be an AV program "scanning the C: drive."
I agree that I should have multiplied by two because the spots are thirty-seconds long. My bad.
However I have to take issue with the 22 minutes/hour of advertising. If you look at a prime-time show on Hulu, it runs about 44 minutes. Since nearly all of the content on Hulu is the program itself, with the advertising timed separately, that only leaves 16 minutes for everything else. Usually there's a station break at the half-hour which gives a couple of minutes to the local affiliate. Then there is typically a promotional spot in most every break for another program on the network. Once you take those out, it looks to me like 10-12 minutes is a plausible guess for the amount of time devoted purely to national advertising.
Let's be generous and say there are twenty-five, thirty-second availabilities each hour. That still works out to something like $0.82 per hour.
Of course, if that $2 was per episode and not per hour, thirty-minute sitcoms would be an even bigger bonanza.
What browser do Android phones use by default? It's listed as "Google Browser" at Wiki, but does it identify itself as Chrome?
Given how long it's taken Firefox to reach its current market share, it seems either remarkable or implausible that Chrome could reach 11% in about two years just on the basis of word-of-mouth. This figure only makes sense if it's a reflection of other trends in the industry like the rise of mobiles.
I looked at current advertising costs to see whether $2/episode is justified. Right now advertisers pay about 3.3 cents to put an ad in the face of a 25-54 year-old adult during a prime-time show. In an hour-long show, there are about sixteen minutes of non-program material, though some of that is promotions for other shows and local advertising. Let's say that ten minutes of every prime-time hour includes national advertising. That means advertisers are willing pay about thirty cents per show; two dollars seems like gouging in comparison.
So what do you all think are the prospects for this service? Does it hold out the potential to challenge the wireline carriers like Verizon or Comcast? How about providing specialized services for businesses? Will this be a niche business, or does it hold out the potential to become a major player?
Once again we have another poll which is somehow supposed to represent actual facts.
This is a "study" by a company that sells computer security "solutions" to small and medium-sized businesses. Haven't we all learned by now that these reports are largely designed to scare PHBs into buying the products and services these companies peddle? There's absolutely nothing in TFA that enables us to determine how the firms were chosen, who was interviewed, how they were selected, and whether they have even a clue about how sites like Facebook and YouTube might be the culprits.
Enough breathless reporting of stupid press releases, Slashdot editors. Just because SecurityWeek has no editorial scruples doesn't mean you shouldn't have them.
Rendell wasn't appalled enough to fire anyone, though.
From the Inquirer article: "Rendell said that he will not fire or discipline anyone in the Office of Homeland Security, headed by director James F. Powers Jr., for the lapse. But he said he ordered the office to terminate its contract with Philadelphia-based Institute of Terrorism and Research Response, which he said has been paid $125,000 in the last year to gather data about possible security threats."
Unless heads roll it's hard to see what pounding the podium will do to deter future antics like these.
I didn't know where to put this comment, so I'm attaching it here.
Someone earlier mentioned things like being cautious about posting photos, etc. I'd like to expand that suggestion to include some discussion of policy issues as well. I don't know how Internet services are offered in India, but a consideration of notions like "common carriage" (much better than "net neutrality") and copyright issues ought to be included as well. How should we regulate the Internet since it spans national boundaries? What types of policies might India pursue to expand Internet access? What role should the government play? Perhaps a bit on computer security and spying as well? You're not just training future geeks here, but future citizens as well.
The terrorists couldn't give a rat's ass about push email. They use it because it is there. [...] It's so easy to change ISPs that it is utterly naive to think that what you're talking about will have ANY real impact on terrorism.
Or, perhaps, just host their own mail servers? For $20/month you can get a virtual Linux machine. You could just play a shell game hosting the mail on a succession of virtuals.
There are cases about cell phone tracking working their way through the courts as well.
I know it's horribly un-Slashdot of me to have read TFA, but here's Jennifer Granick of EFF on the subject:
"The court correctly recognized the important differences between limited surveillance of public activities possible through visual surveillance or traditional 'bumper beepers,' and the sort of extended, invasive, pervasive, always-on tracking that GPS devices allow," said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. "This same logic applies in cases of cell phone tracking, and we hope that this decision will be followed by courts that are currently grappling with the question of whether the government must obtain a warrant before using your cell phone as a tracking device."
I don't think "computer classes" should deal with programming at all.
Thanks for saying what I was about to write myself.
So far the answer to the question "what should schools teach kids about computing that's not Microsoft Office" has been to teach Python. As you say, programming appeals to but a tiny fraction of the students who might be interested in a course in computing. They want to learn how to do cool things with computers, not how to type numbers into a spreadsheet and create a row of totals.
Might I add two other features to your proposed curriculum? The first would be to include a discussion about the policy issues these technologies create. Today's students will be confronted throughout their lives with questions about the proper role of information technologies in human societies. Better they start thinking about those questions now.
Second, I'd emphasize the use of FOSS products like the GIMP to teach image editing and Audacity for audio editing. (Video editing is another story.) Partly this emphasis represents an obvious practical concern when dealing with kids and educational budgets; free is always better when people have little or no money to spend. But I also have an admittedly ideological motive; I'd like to expose kids to the free software culture as soon as possible. I'd rather we show kids how to use a free-in-all-senses program like the GIMP to do photo editing instead of training them to use Photoshop because it's the industry standard. Teaching with FOSS software like the GIMP or OpenOffice forces the instructor to teach functionality rather than rote sequences. Understanding that it's the functionality that's important and not the particular software implementation is an important concept to convey to secondary school students. I want kids to look first for a free product like the GIMP before automatically pirating a commercial product like Photoshop.
Once I've gotten kids to think about free applications that run on multiple platforms, it's an easy step to talking about multiple operating systems. Getting their minds around virtualization by watching another operating system boot up in a window in their usual environment conveys an important concept about how the world doesn't need to be Windows.
If you really need to teach programming, how about developing FOSS Android apps? Isn't that going to have a lot more appeal to fifteen year-olds than Python? Remember that mobile is the future for most of these kids, not the desktop nor even perhaps the netbook.
I scanned the actual Sophos report and nowhere did I see a presentation of how the sample was drawn, how it's distributed across countries, of the level of sophistication of the respondents. At a minimum, I'd like to see the sample divided out by countries or regions. Talking about "computer users globally" requires some substantial documentation before I'll believe they've even come close to drawing a world-wide sample, much less one that is statistically representative of computer users worldwide. How many people did they interview in China, India, or Kenya? How was a "computer user" defined? Any study as bold as to claim that it represents the attitudes of "computer users globally" needs a lot more documentation than the article or the Sophos report provide.
The most telling statistic on the kinds of people who might be in the sample comes from responses to the question "Do you think you will quit Facebook over privacy concerns?" If you believe the data from Sophos, Facebook should be seeing a mass exodus. About 18% of the respondents say they've already left Facebook for this reason, and another 30% claim to be "highly likely" to quit. It's hard to take these figures seriously when Facebook just recently reporting having over half a billion accounts.
By the way, the section of the report entitled "No OS is Risk Free" talks only of Windows and OS/X. While I don't think Linux is "risk-free" either, I'm guessing Sophos writes reports for organizations on the platforms that generate its income. Sophos is hardly a distinterested party when it comes to evaluating operating systems and platforms.
I guess I'm just weird since I enjoyed the story and characters in FFX at least as much as looking at the pretty graphics, probably more. I'd say the last two installments (XII and XIII) demonstrate that having great graphics is pointless unless the story is good. XII's story might have been good if Ashe hadn't been so annoying and whiny; XIII's story was hopeless from nearly the beginning. I actually like XII for its gameplay and diversity of sidequests and the like, but XIII doesn't even have that going for it. I also think well-developed, intriguing characters might matter as much as any other feature of a game.
FF VI through X all had decent stories; XI onward have generally had poor stories. Was it only coincidence that this decline happened at the same time Sakaguchi left?
I'm someone who wants to see more single-player games again. I'm replaying Chrono Cross right now, and I can't see how a multi-player extension could improve on this already-remarkable game.
"A leaked MI5 document says that undercover intelligence officers from the People's Liberation Army and the Ministry of Public Security have also approached UK businessmen at trade fairs and exhibitions with the offer of "gifts" and "lavish hospitality".
The gifts -- cameras and memory sticks -- have been found to contain electronic Trojan bugs which provide the Chinese with remote access to users' computers. "
In Kubuntu 10.04, I can go to System Settings in the main menu, pick Startup and Shutdown and use a graphical tool to alter the list of programs that start at boot up. Yesterday I was talking to a friend who wondered how to get her Windows computer to stop running a bunch of nagware for programs she doesn't want and never used. She has no idea why these programs start or how to keep them from reappearing at each boot. The Registry? Not something she's ever heard of.
Many older people have lots of experience with using the command line under DOS. They managed to copy files to floppies with commands like "copy myfile.doc a:" and didn't die from the horror of the experience. Some of them learned about things like autoexec.bat and config.sys, too. We're not talking about advanced users or computer aficionados; we're talking about secretaries running WordPerfect and archiving documents to floppy disks.
I don't usually respond to myself, but I see I misinterpreted the parent's comment.
My comment concerned the vast number of users who do use the copy of Windows that came preloaded on their computers. I'd bet the number of ordinary folks out there using some other copy of Windows is pretty small.
but honestly how many home users actually use a legal copy of Windows that didn't come preloaded with their computer?
Nearly most of them I'd expect. You need to spend some time with people outside the computer industry, most of whom use the computer as it comes from the factory.
Back when netbooks first appeared on the market, many of them ran Linux for cost and performance reasons. At the time the only shipping version of Windows was Vista which was ill-suited for machines running early Atom processors. Microsoft actually extended the life of XP so it could be used on netbooks, but protected the notebook market by adding irrelevant licensing requirements on XP sales like limits on screen sizes and maximum memory.
Then we started hearing about a brand-new generation of ARM netbooks with much longer battery lives than Atom's can offer. Linux enthusiasts exulted that since there was no shipping version of Windows that ran on ARM processors other than the hoary CE, this gave Linux another window of opportunity in the netbook market. I don't know if MS now has a Windows 7 build that runs on ARM, or whether they needed this deal to release one, but if this means we'll be seeing netbooks with Windows 7 on ARM chips, it will block Linux from advancing in this space. For evidence, it took only a few months after the extension of the end-of-life for XP to enable Windows to dominate the netbook market in the US.
The netbook market is flourishing, by the way. Recent studies suggest that netbook revenues in 2010 will run into the $10-15 billion neighborhood and growing fast.
Ringtones are in decline, but full-track downloads for cell phone use now constitute billions of dollars in revenues.
"Juniper Research's latest report argues that a sharp fall in ringtone revenues will be more than offset by growth in full-track downloads, streamed music services and ringback tones. As a matter of fact, the research company forecasts that global revenues from mobile music services will reach nearly $14.6 billion by 2013."
Slashdot Mirror
Most commentators like this CNN reporter immediately position WinPhone7 in competition with the iPhone, but just maybe it's RIM who's really the initial target. Consider the enormous investment large corporations have in a Blackberry infrastructure that co-exists with their Exchange servers. Having Outlook on a cell phone with a secure connection to Exchange makes RIM rather superfluous.
There were 10 million Blackberries sold in the first quarter of 2010 according to Gartner. Devices running the iPhone and Android OS accounted for about thirteen million. If I were running Microsoft, I'd start by leveraging my existing clients and targeting those RIM devices. Switching a single large enterprise from Blackberries to WinPhones brings a lot of business Microsoft's way in a hurry.
First quarter year-on-year growth was 40% for RIM compared to -0.9% for Windows Mobile and 117% for iPhones. Sales of Android devices grew a whopping 800% but did not overtake the iPhone in total. Most of those phones were being sold to consumers, of course. Denting that market would be nice for Microsoft but not as lucrative as converting corporate Blackberry accounts.
I doubt most buyers even understand the different formats, they probably just think 3D TV is all the same. No, it's more likely higher cost plus lack of a real need just yet that's behind this - sales of HDTV were similarly low when sets first started appearing on the consumer market, due to both the high cost and the lack of content.
I don't think the two are comparable at all. HDTV provided larger screens with better resolution without any change in how viewers relate to the television. 3D offers nothing like that.
3D makes some sense in theaters where a large screen makes the experience more "immersive." 3D in my living room would mean silly things like Brett Favre standing on my carpet to throw a pass to Randy Moss somewhere in the nether reaches of my TV.
I have no idea what a normal Brasilian bathing suit looks like
Here you go.
Oh, how about one more example?
Put eicar.com on a website, then send an email with a embedded URL and a subject line having to do with nude celebrity videos. You know, the "Hey dude! Wassup! Check out this hot video of Angelina and Brad getting it on!" variety.
Make sure you craft an HTML version so the URL isn't displayed or use a TinyURL link.
EICAR is detected by all AV products including ClamAV.
I'd put it in a zip file, then attach the zip to an email message. Show how real viruses propagate by mail. How about putting a copy on a USB pendrive then running eicar.com from Autostart? Any Windows AV product with a decent autoscanner should detect both of these and pop up a warning.
If you want to get really fancy you can set up a Linux box running MailScanner with ClamAV and send an "EICAR-infected" e-mail message through it. You'll see MailScanner detect the virus, put it in a quarantine, and send notices to the admin and, optionally, the sender.
For a lay audience I think it's more important to stress the vectors than to concentrate on the payload itself.
Now if you could only find a site distributing Antivirus 2010. If you do, make sure you're using a Linux machine when you visit the site. If your class understands that there's more to the world than Windows, see how long it takes them to understand why there can't really be an AV program "scanning the C: drive."
I agree that I should have multiplied by two because the spots are thirty-seconds long. My bad.
However I have to take issue with the 22 minutes/hour of advertising. If you look at a prime-time show on Hulu, it runs about 44 minutes. Since nearly all of the content on Hulu is the program itself, with the advertising timed separately, that only leaves 16 minutes for everything else. Usually there's a station break at the half-hour which gives a couple of minutes to the local affiliate. Then there is typically a promotional spot in most every break for another program on the network. Once you take those out, it looks to me like 10-12 minutes is a plausible guess for the amount of time devoted purely to national advertising.
Let's be generous and say there are twenty-five, thirty-second availabilities each hour. That still works out to something like $0.82 per hour.
Of course, if that $2 was per episode and not per hour, thirty-minute sitcoms would be an even bigger bonanza.
What browser do Android phones use by default? It's listed as "Google Browser" at Wiki, but does it identify itself as Chrome?
Given how long it's taken Firefox to reach its current market share, it seems either remarkable or implausible that Chrome could reach 11% in about two years just on the basis of word-of-mouth. This figure only makes sense if it's a reflection of other trends in the industry like the rise of mobiles.
I looked at current advertising costs to see whether $2/episode is justified. Right now advertisers pay about 3.3 cents to put an ad in the face of a 25-54 year-old adult during a prime-time show. In an hour-long show, there are about sixteen minutes of non-program material, though some of that is promotions for other shows and local advertising. Let's say that ten minutes of every prime-time hour includes national advertising. That means advertisers are willing pay about thirty cents per show; two dollars seems like gouging in comparison.
Look harder. Try page 35 and page 36.
So what do you all think are the prospects for this service? Does it hold out the potential to challenge the wireline carriers like Verizon or Comcast? How about providing specialized services for businesses? Will this be a niche business, or does it hold out the potential to become a major player?
Once again we have another poll which is somehow supposed to represent actual facts.
This is a "study" by a company that sells computer security "solutions" to small and medium-sized businesses. Haven't we all learned by now that these reports are largely designed to scare PHBs into buying the products and services these companies peddle? There's absolutely nothing in TFA that enables us to determine how the firms were chosen, who was interviewed, how they were selected, and whether they have even a clue about how sites like Facebook and YouTube might be the culprits.
Enough breathless reporting of stupid press releases, Slashdot editors. Just because SecurityWeek has no editorial scruples doesn't mean you shouldn't have them.
Rendell wasn't appalled enough to fire anyone, though.
From the Inquirer article: "Rendell said that he will not fire or discipline anyone in the Office of Homeland Security, headed by director James F. Powers Jr., for the lapse. But he said he ordered the office to terminate its contract with Philadelphia-based Institute of Terrorism and Research Response, which he said has been paid $125,000 in the last year to gather data about possible security threats."
Unless heads roll it's hard to see what pounding the podium will do to deter future antics like these.
I didn't know where to put this comment, so I'm attaching it here.
Someone earlier mentioned things like being cautious about posting photos, etc. I'd like to expand that suggestion to include some discussion of policy issues as well. I don't know how Internet services are offered in India, but a consideration of notions like "common carriage" (much better than "net neutrality") and copyright issues ought to be included as well. How should we regulate the Internet since it spans national boundaries? What types of policies might India pursue to expand Internet access? What role should the government play? Perhaps a bit on computer security and spying as well? You're not just training future geeks here, but future citizens as well.
The terrorists couldn't give a rat's ass about push email. They use it because it is there. [...] It's so easy to change ISPs that it is utterly naive to think that what you're talking about will have ANY real impact on terrorism.
Or, perhaps, just host their own mail servers? For $20/month you can get a virtual Linux machine. You could just play a shell game hosting the mail on a succession of virtuals.
There are cases about cell phone tracking working their way through the courts as well.
I know it's horribly un-Slashdot of me to have read TFA, but here's Jennifer Granick of EFF on the subject:
"The court correctly recognized the important differences between limited surveillance of public activities possible through visual surveillance or traditional 'bumper beepers,' and the sort of extended, invasive, pervasive, always-on tracking that GPS devices allow," said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. "This same logic applies in cases of cell phone tracking, and we hope that this decision will be followed by courts that are currently grappling with the question of whether the government must obtain a warrant before using your cell phone as a tracking device."
I don't think "computer classes" should deal with programming at all.
Thanks for saying what I was about to write myself.
So far the answer to the question "what should schools teach kids about computing that's not Microsoft Office" has been to teach Python. As you say, programming appeals to but a tiny fraction of the students who might be interested in a course in computing. They want to learn how to do cool things with computers, not how to type numbers into a spreadsheet and create a row of totals.
Might I add two other features to your proposed curriculum? The first would be to include a discussion about the policy issues these technologies create. Today's students will be confronted throughout their lives with questions about the proper role of information technologies in human societies. Better they start thinking about those questions now.
Second, I'd emphasize the use of FOSS products like the GIMP to teach image editing and Audacity for audio editing. (Video editing is another story.) Partly this emphasis represents an obvious practical concern when dealing with kids and educational budgets; free is always better when people have little or no money to spend. But I also have an admittedly ideological motive; I'd like to expose kids to the free software culture as soon as possible. I'd rather we show kids how to use a free-in-all-senses program like the GIMP to do photo editing instead of training them to use Photoshop because it's the industry standard. Teaching with FOSS software like the GIMP or OpenOffice forces the instructor to teach functionality rather than rote sequences. Understanding that it's the functionality that's important and not the particular software implementation is an important concept to convey to secondary school students. I want kids to look first for a free product like the GIMP before automatically pirating a commercial product like Photoshop.
Once I've gotten kids to think about free applications that run on multiple platforms, it's an easy step to talking about multiple operating systems. Getting their minds around virtualization by watching another operating system boot up in a window in their usual environment conveys an important concept about how the world doesn't need to be Windows.
If you really need to teach programming, how about developing FOSS Android apps? Isn't that going to have a lot more appeal to fifteen year-olds than Python? Remember that mobile is the future for most of these kids, not the desktop nor even perhaps the netbook.
I scanned the actual Sophos report and nowhere did I see a presentation of how the sample was drawn, how it's distributed across countries, of the level of sophistication of the respondents. At a minimum, I'd like to see the sample divided out by countries or regions. Talking about "computer users globally" requires some substantial documentation before I'll believe they've even come close to drawing a world-wide sample, much less one that is statistically representative of computer users worldwide. How many people did they interview in China, India, or Kenya? How was a "computer user" defined? Any study as bold as to claim that it represents the attitudes of "computer users globally" needs a lot more documentation than the article or the Sophos report provide.
The most telling statistic on the kinds of people who might be in the sample comes from responses to the question "Do you think you will quit Facebook over privacy concerns?" If you believe the data from Sophos, Facebook should be seeing a mass exodus. About 18% of the respondents say they've already left Facebook for this reason, and another 30% claim to be "highly likely" to quit. It's hard to take these figures seriously when Facebook just recently reporting having over half a billion accounts.
By the way, the section of the report entitled "No OS is Risk Free" talks only of Windows and OS/X. While I don't think Linux is "risk-free" either, I'm guessing Sophos writes reports for organizations on the platforms that generate its income. Sophos is hardly a distinterested party when it comes to evaluating operating systems and platforms.
I guess I'm just weird since I enjoyed the story and characters in FFX at least as much as looking at the pretty graphics, probably more. I'd say the last two installments (XII and XIII) demonstrate that having great graphics is pointless unless the story is good. XII's story might have been good if Ashe hadn't been so annoying and whiny; XIII's story was hopeless from nearly the beginning. I actually like XII for its gameplay and diversity of sidequests and the like, but XIII doesn't even have that going for it. I also think well-developed, intriguing characters might matter as much as any other feature of a game.
FF VI through X all had decent stories; XI onward have generally had poor stories. Was it only coincidence that this decline happened at the same time Sakaguchi left?
I'm someone who wants to see more single-player games again. I'm replaying Chrono Cross right now, and I can't see how a multi-player extension could improve on this already-remarkable game.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article7009749.ece
"A leaked MI5 document says that undercover intelligence officers from the People's Liberation Army and the Ministry of Public Security have also approached UK businessmen at trade fairs and exhibitions with the offer of "gifts" and "lavish hospitality".
The gifts -- cameras and memory sticks -- have been found to contain electronic Trojan bugs which provide the Chinese with remote access to users' computers. "
Ah, good old autoplay!
In Kubuntu 10.04, I can go to System Settings in the main menu, pick Startup and Shutdown and use a graphical tool to alter the list of programs that start at boot up. Yesterday I was talking to a friend who wondered how to get her Windows computer to stop running a bunch of nagware for programs she doesn't want and never used. She has no idea why these programs start or how to keep them from reappearing at each boot. The Registry? Not something she's ever heard of.
Many older people have lots of experience with using the command line under DOS. They managed to copy files to floppies with commands like "copy myfile.doc a:" and didn't die from the horror of the experience. Some of them learned about things like autoexec.bat and config.sys, too. We're not talking about advanced users or computer aficionados; we're talking about secretaries running WordPerfect and archiving documents to floppy disks.
I don't usually respond to myself, but I see I misinterpreted the parent's comment.
My comment concerned the vast number of users who do use the copy of Windows that came preloaded on their computers. I'd bet the number of ordinary folks out there using some other copy of Windows is pretty small.
but honestly how many home users actually use a legal copy of Windows that didn't come preloaded with their computer?
Nearly most of them I'd expect. You need to spend some time with people outside the computer industry, most of whom use the computer as it comes from the factory.
Back when netbooks first appeared on the market, many of them ran Linux for cost and performance reasons. At the time the only shipping version of Windows was Vista which was ill-suited for machines running early Atom processors. Microsoft actually extended the life of XP so it could be used on netbooks, but protected the notebook market by adding irrelevant licensing requirements on XP sales like limits on screen sizes and maximum memory.
Then we started hearing about a brand-new generation of ARM netbooks with much longer battery lives than Atom's can offer. Linux enthusiasts exulted that since there was no shipping version of Windows that ran on ARM processors other than the hoary CE, this gave Linux another window of opportunity in the netbook market. I don't know if MS now has a Windows 7 build that runs on ARM, or whether they needed this deal to release one, but if this means we'll be seeing netbooks with Windows 7 on ARM chips, it will block Linux from advancing in this space. For evidence, it took only a few months after the extension of the end-of-life for XP to enable Windows to dominate the netbook market in the US.
The netbook market is flourishing, by the way. Recent studies suggest that netbook revenues in 2010 will run into the $10-15 billion neighborhood and growing fast.
http://www.abiresearch.com/press/1697-As+Market+Shares+Shift,+Annual+Netbook+Shipments+Will+More+than+Double+by+2013?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AbiresearchPressReleasesFeed+(ABIResearch+Press+Releases+Feed)
http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/22/netbook-shipments-2009/
Ringtones are in decline, but full-track downloads for cell phone use now constitute billions of dollars in revenues.
"Juniper Research's latest report argues that a sharp fall in ringtone revenues will be more than offset by growth in full-track downloads, streamed music services and ringback tones. As a matter of fact, the research company forecasts that global revenues from mobile music services will reach nearly $14.6 billion by 2013."
See: http://www.intomobile.com/2009/02/27/juniper-research-ringtone-sales-may-go-down-but-mobile-music-revenues-are-set-to-reach-146-billion-by-2013/