Silverlight? I've only seen one site use that, and since it's a radio station, rather than install silverlight I just listen to one of the thousands of other radio stations that aren't so stupid that they use a platform that nobody has installed or uses.
You also get corruption when government gets to big
I hope you're not a native speaker, but considering your views I sadly think you're just not a native reader.
solution is SMALL TIERED government.
We have a nation 4000 miles wide and 3000 miles tall. Neither pollution, commerce, water, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, radio waves, the list goes on, stay within state boundaries. With a huge country to govern, a small government simply will not work.
Imagine how expensive your natural gas would be if you were taxed for every state it passed through.
Copy protection doesn't work. How about reasonable time limits for copyrights? How is Jimi Hendrix or John Lee Hooker going to be persuaded to record any more music? They're dead, Jim.
Also, I can buy a DVD at WalMart for five bucks. Why in the hell would I bother pirating it? And if you couldn't afford five bucks, how is your piracy costing anyone anything?
No, because then I could park my sedan between two other vehicles in a parking lot and actually be able to get the goddamned door open. Also because the lower your gas mileage, the higher the pollution, and when every other car on the road is an SUV, breathing isn't as pleasant.
But first, they will shrink government, so the corruption matters less and is on a smaller scale.
Yep, disband the EPA so Monsanto can make the air in Sauget, IL unbreathable again and have rivers catch fire again. Deregulate the power companies so California's brownouts and blackouts ten years ago are daily and nationwide. Deregulate the banks again so we have another economic catastrophe. Deregulate the monopoly utilities so they can gouge us for whatever CORRUPT price they wish to charge us.
What could possibly go wrong?
That is why the ONLY successful way to fight corruption is to reduce the scale of temptation.
Yep, if we legalize armed robbery the armed robbers won't have to pay off the corrupt cops.
Give away the content, sell the container as has been done for centuries. You didn't use to buy novels, you bought books. You didn't buy music, you bought records. You didn't buy movies, you bought tapes.
People like decorating their houses with stuff that shows visitors how erudite or rich or sophisticated or hip or intellectual they are. College kids don't count; they have neither the room nor money for "stuff". The college kid that eschews books in favors of iBooks now will have dead tree books on shelves when he or she graduates and joins the real world -- unless the media manages to convince us that material goods are unerudite or tacky or unsophisticated or uncool or antiintellectual (which they've been trying to do since they discovered that they could "sell" 3 MB of data for less than a penny and get a buck for it).
Bug From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search
Look up bug in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Contents [hide] 1 Biology 2 Geography 3 Technology 4 Art and media 4.1 In characters 4.2 In films and television 4.3 In gaming 4.4 In literature and publications 4.5 In music 4.6 Other uses 5 In acronyms 6 Other 7 See also
Bug may refer to:
[edit] BiologyInformally, an insect, spider or other small pest other than a rodent; including most arthropods, except marine crustaceans, including individuals or species of
Because art is like science and technology, in that what exists now is built on what came before. Imagine how technology would stagnate if patents lasted as long as copyrights? Well, that's how art has stagnated since the Bono Act. It needs to be repealed.
As the other responder to your comment noted, things were pretty primitive back in the iron age. Skill is a matter of practice; I took a blacksmithing class back in 1976 or 7 and it really wasn't that hard (the hardest is thin steel, too easy to set the steel on fire when it's thin). Neither is tempering the steel. We also did casting in another class, and casting is even easier than smithing. For casting you need a kiln rather than a forge, but they work on similar principles and there are a lot of ways to do it. And again, tempering is a matter of how much temper you need, whether to use oil or water, and some other simple things.
You don't need a PhD in metalurgy to cast metals or forge them.
Also, for a car you would need lots of steel, especially for the frame and engine, but anything but a car is pretty much made of 100% plastics these days. Downloading a car would be a nice exercise, but would not be worth the effort otherwise. However, for something like a replacement dash or other part to repair your car, this would be great.
I used to use my real name on my gmail account, but they yanked the account without telling me why. BTW, mcgrew is my real name. Been using it for six decades now, why should I change? Cowardly kids! Sheesh...
4 months is a little short-term to say "no bad health effects".
Er, if you're going blind anyway I'd think it was worth the risk, or I'd not have gotten my CrystaLens implant.
I agree about the biological vs mechanical, provided the biological is from your own tissues (like this research) and not from a cadaver. I have a friend with donated corneas (and a donated liver) who has to take anti-rejection drugs the rest of his life. All other things being equal, I'd rather not have to take pills every day. I'm very happy with my implant; my 20/400 vision is now better than 20/20. I hope they come up with a cure for your condition.
Only where the retina is concerned, and they've come a long, long way with that, too. I was extremely nearsighted all my life, 20/400, until I got a CrystaLens, (an artificial lens capable of focusing)implaned in my left eye in 2006. That eye is now 20/16, far better than normal vision. I used to wear contacts, and used reading glasses as well, now I need no corrective lenses at all! It also curres farsightedness (even age-related; I turn 60 this year), astigmatism, and cataracts. I have a friend who has two donated corneas (no artificial corneas as of yet).
Before 1949 a cataract meant incurable blindness. Today a cataract means you'll be able to throw your glasses away. Behind? I think not.
I suffered a detached retina in 2008, and surgery corrected it without any loss of vision at all. Had I suffered that thirty years ago that eye would most probably be completely blind.
You're wasting your time linking to the BBC for someone who obviously gets 100% of his "news" from Fox. It's preatty damned obvious he didn't listen to Obama's speech last night (Obama was bragging about GM, and it was a damned good speech), but I'll bet a donut to a dollar (yeah, dollars to donuts have reversed, since donuts aren't ten cents apiece any more) he listened to the Republican "rebuttal".
The only cure for stupid is the roof of a tall building to step off of, a bus to step in front of, or a bullet.
people distributing their works for money aren't typically going to also distribute them for free. That would undermine sales.
Sorry, but you're 100% incorrect. Very often what seems to be obvious is shown by scientific research to be completely false*. One book publisher thought the same thing as you a couple of years ago, so he commissioned a study to see how much revenue he was losing to piracy. With a book, it takes a few weeks for it to hit the net because it has to be scanned and OCRed, so they looked at how much sales dropped when the pirate edition was availabe. Both the researchers and publisher were amazed when it was shown that rather than a sales dip, there was actually a sales SPIKE. People read the book, liked it, and bought it.
I'll bet you think libraries cost publishers money, but you're wrong there, too. I have a dozen or more Asimov books on my shelf. Were I unable to read library books for free (I've read a few hundred of Asimov's) I would have never bought a single one. Only the rich or foolish would buy a book from an authout he hadn't read before unless it was highly praised by people he admired. BTW, you can get music CDs and movie DVDs at the library as well -- completely free. No charge. Walk in broke, walk out with an armload of books, CDs, and DVDs.
Most musicians give their music away. Of course, most musicians aren't RIAA's musicians. Professional musicians I know wouldn't touch an RIAA contract with a ten foot pole; they know the RIAA is made up of nothing but thieving parasites that suck the lifeblood from artists.
Want some free sci-fi ebooks? Go to boing boing, Doctorow credits his status as a New York Times best seller to the fact that he gives his books away for free on there. As he says, nobody ever lost a dime from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity.
They're not going to read your book if they've never heard of you. BTW, my old Paxil Diaries on K5 half a deceade ago will be in print soon, at the request of readers. Had I not put them on the net, there's no way I could turn them into a book and have anyone read it.
* another example, although not on topic, is marijuana research. Since all smoke contains carcinogens, it was thought that marijuana cased cancer, so they did a statistical study to back up the hypothesis. They had 4 groups of geezers: nonsmokers, long term cigarette smokers, long term pot smokers, and long term smokers of both substances. They were amazed to find that there was no statistically signifigant differences between long term pot smokers and nonsmokers, and the potsmokers actually had fewer cancers (again, statistically insignifigant). What blew them away was the finding that those who smoked both pot and tobacco had half the cancer rates of those who only smoked tobacco! Rather than causing cancer, it appears to prevent it.
That's what science is for -- to test whether your perceptions are real. As often as not, they aren't.
So now we can spend money on stupid stuff (like segway clones) that were already proven failures by other companies (Segway).
Segway was a failure because it's too goddamned expensive. Six grand? I only spent ten on my car. When the patents run out and they're a hundred bucks each, everybody will have one.
The volt isn't selling better for the same reason. A teeny little car that costs more than my full sized sedan did new, has limited range, etc? No thanks. When an electric car costs no more than a gasoline car, they too will sell well.
The 1% do not understand the 99%. Most of us don't have much money we can afford to waste on expensive toys like segways and electric cars, and those who can buy any damned thing they please can't get their heads around that.
That was what I was hoping for. Why a video at all? All it is is a talking head (which I didn't hear because I keep the sound shut off on this computer) and some STILL pics of the vehicle.
It looks pretty cool, I wonder what they cost? Probably more than I paid for my car (I never buy cars new).
I haven't really much exposure to Linux on the desktop but... There certainly is a big change going from Windows XP or even Vista to Win 7. In my opinion it would be naive to think that a more to a completely different OS doesn't mean a complete re-training exercise from top to bottom.
I'm not sure about the enterprise grade admin tools, but as far as users are concerned, believe it or not a move from XP (can't say about Vista, I never used it) to KDE is less of a change than from XP to Win 7; I'm using all three OSes, XP at work, Win 7 on my notebook (haven't gotten around to installing Linux on it yet) and kubuntu on the main home computer.
It's easy to see why you would doubt that, if I hadn't been exposed to Linux in a while I'd be pretty doubtful, too. DL a copy of kubuntu, you can run it from a CD and try it out without actually installing. The kubuntu CD is also good for getting data from a drive that Windows won't boot because you've changed too much on the computer.
Your experience of people bringing in broken PC's to fix is a world away from an enterprise environment.
That's very true.
You've also completely ignored the application compatibility angle.
Yes, if you're running custom apps that will only run on Windows, you're stuck with Windows. But MS isn't as backward compatible as they would like you to think. When I went from 98 to XP, half my software no longer worked. The shop I work in recently upgraded from the worst browser ever made (IE6), and the reason it took them so long was because of an application that used Java and IE6 and wouldn't run on any other browser. I assume they rewrote the app.
But compatibility is a reason to change, not a reason not to. Microsoft isn't compatible with anything, not even itself. If you have an older version of Word, you're not going to be able to read documants made in a newer version; we have these problems all the time. It seems MS is the about only one that does this, although I've seen it with Adobe products, too, especially PDFs, they're even worse than MS.
Please don't tell me you are going to get 15,000 apps working on WINE and maintain support agreements with the app vendors or move everything to open source and migrate the data across to the correct format at the same time.
The Ernie Ball corporation, perhaps the world's biggest manufacturer of guitar strings, managed to after the BSA raided them (google "ernie ball linux").
I woudn't mess with WINE, if there's something like Photoshop you need, moving to Linux really wouldn't be an option. It certainly isn't for everyone, but nothing ever is.
I don't automatically see that becasue Linux *may* work on older h/w better than Windows you necessarily *can* make this happen but I don't necessarily discount this either.
If you have something as ancient as a 486 running Windows 98, modern Linux distro won't work; I've tried it. But the computer is capable of running XP it will run Linux faster. The reasons are Windows' ever-growing registry and the need for antivirus. As to the hardware, often newer hardware either won't work or won't have as much functionality because the FOSS guys haven't written drivers and so forth yet.
I'd also note that in most cases, reliability is probably more important than speed within the Enterprise.
Reliability is probably Linux' strongest point. It simply doesn't crash. Apps sometimes do, but they never bring the OS down with it. Linux is far more fault-tolerant as well. A few years ago I was running a PC dual-boot, and thought I had a registry problem or something because Linux was working well while Windows was flaky, but it turned out that the power supply was on its way out. I had an Acer that had a bad hardware bug (they've since fixed it) where if you had it set to hibernate on battery with the lid closed but do nothing if plugged in, then closed the lid and plugged it in before the lights stopped flashing it would go crazy on either OS -- but after a few times, Windows woudn't even boot in safe mode, Linux always recovered.
Btw, my org is on a 4 year h/w replacement cycle.
Since the PCs always come with Windows already installed, that's a good reason to stick with Windows.
What I want is an OS that doesn't crash once a week, or require 8 gigabytes of RAM to run, even if that means it looks like an old Commodore 64 with GEOS. Just make the damn thing work.
Well, depending on what you need... I have an old computer I built form junk parts with 750 meg of RAM and a 1.7 gHz CPU running kubunti 11, and have had no crashes whatever, and I'm mostly using it to listen to the radio (damned near every station in the worls) and watch TV (I have it plugged into my TV set and get more TV than if I had cable, whichg I don't).
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever modded that flamebait, TAKE YOUR MEDS!
Now mod this one down, too, to save someone's karma whose karma needs saving.
Silverlight? I've only seen one site use that, and since it's a radio station, rather than install silverlight I just listen to one of the thousands of other radio stations that aren't so stupid that they use a platform that nobody has installed or uses.
I emailed them about it. I wasn't nice, either.
As opposed to bicycles?
Anecdote == illustration of a point
If you have to few people in government
Can I few people if I don't have to?
You also get corruption when government gets to big
I hope you're not a native speaker, but considering your views I sadly think you're just not a native reader.
solution is SMALL TIERED government.
We have a nation 4000 miles wide and 3000 miles tall. Neither pollution, commerce, water, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, radio waves, the list goes on, stay within state boundaries. With a huge country to govern, a small government simply will not work.
Imagine how expensive your natural gas would be if you were taxed for every state it passed through.
Copy protection doesn't work. How about reasonable time limits for copyrights? How is Jimi Hendrix or John Lee Hooker going to be persuaded to record any more music? They're dead, Jim.
Also, I can buy a DVD at WalMart for five bucks. Why in the hell would I bother pirating it? And if you couldn't afford five bucks, how is your piracy costing anyone anything?
No, because then I could park my sedan between two other vehicles in a parking lot and actually be able to get the goddamned door open. Also because the lower your gas mileage, the higher the pollution, and when every other car on the road is an SUV, breathing isn't as pleasant.
But first, they will shrink government, so the corruption matters less and is on a smaller scale.
Yep, disband the EPA so Monsanto can make the air in Sauget, IL unbreathable again and have rivers catch fire again. Deregulate the power companies so California's brownouts and blackouts ten years ago are daily and nationwide. Deregulate the banks again so we have another economic catastrophe. Deregulate the monopoly utilities so they can gouge us for whatever CORRUPT price they wish to charge us.
What could possibly go wrong?
That is why the ONLY successful way to fight corruption is to reduce the scale of temptation.
Yep, if we legalize armed robbery the armed robbers won't have to pay off the corrupt cops.
You, sir, are a fool.
No. Trademarks are forever. Corporate copyrights are 95 years. Patents are 20 years. Of the three, the only one that is property is trademark.
Give away the content, sell the container as has been done for centuries. You didn't use to buy novels, you bought books. You didn't buy music, you bought records. You didn't buy movies, you bought tapes.
People like decorating their houses with stuff that shows visitors how erudite or rich or sophisticated or hip or intellectual they are. College kids don't count; they have neither the room nor money for "stuff". The college kid that eschews books in favors of iBooks now will have dead tree books on shelves when he or she graduates and joins the real world -- unless the media manages to convince us that material goods are unerudite or tacky or unsophisticated or uncool or antiintellectual (which they've been trying to do since they discovered that they could "sell" 3 MB of data for less than a penny and get a buck for it).
Bug
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Look up bug in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Contents [hide]
1 Biology
2 Geography
3 Technology
4 Art and media
4.1 In characters
4.2 In films and television
4.3 In gaming
4.4 In literature and publications
4.5 In music
4.6 Other uses
5 In acronyms
6 Other
7 See also
Bug may refer to:
[edit] BiologyInformally, an insect, spider or other small pest other than a rodent; including most arthropods, except marine crustaceans, including individuals or species of
centipede
millipede
mite
scorpion[citation needed]
tick
woodlouse
Specifically, an insect of the order Hemiptera, known as the "true bugs".
Bacterium or any microorganism that causes illness and has a superficial resemblance to an insect, or bug, when viewed through a microscope
Bug, a hybrid dog that is a cross between a pug and a Boston terrier
One of several species of slipper lobster, such as
Balmain bug
Moreton Bay bug
Sickness will surely take the mind where minds can't usually go. -- The Who, Tommy
Normal people don't work on Grand Unified Theories, either. Ability to do extreme math is as abnormal as the ability to write great novels.
As to "normal", I've never met anyone who was actually "normal". I don't think "normal" exists.
Because art is like science and technology, in that what exists now is built on what came before. Imagine how technology would stagnate if patents lasted as long as copyrights? Well, that's how art has stagnated since the Bono Act. It needs to be repealed.
As the other responder to your comment noted, things were pretty primitive back in the iron age. Skill is a matter of practice; I took a blacksmithing class back in 1976 or 7 and it really wasn't that hard (the hardest is thin steel, too easy to set the steel on fire when it's thin). Neither is tempering the steel. We also did casting in another class, and casting is even easier than smithing. For casting you need a kiln rather than a forge, but they work on similar principles and there are a lot of ways to do it. And again, tempering is a matter of how much temper you need, whether to use oil or water, and some other simple things.
You don't need a PhD in metalurgy to cast metals or forge them.
Also, for a car you would need lots of steel, especially for the frame and engine, but anything but a car is pretty much made of 100% plastics these days. Downloading a car would be a nice exercise, but would not be worth the effort otherwise. However, for something like a replacement dash or other part to repair your car, this would be great.
Funny is in the ear of the beholder.
I used to use my real name on my gmail account, but they yanked the account without telling me why. BTW, mcgrew is my real name. Been using it for six decades now, why should I change? Cowardly kids! Sheesh...
4 months is a little short-term to say "no bad health effects".
Er, if you're going blind anyway I'd think it was worth the risk, or I'd not have gotten my CrystaLens implant.
I agree about the biological vs mechanical, provided the biological is from your own tissues (like this research) and not from a cadaver. I have a friend with donated corneas (and a donated liver) who has to take anti-rejection drugs the rest of his life. All other things being equal, I'd rather not have to take pills every day. I'm very happy with my implant; my 20/400 vision is now better than 20/20. I hope they come up with a cure for your condition.
Kids... sheesh... ever heard of Abbie Hoffman? Steal This Book!
"It's embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List."
What was old is new again!
We're still way behind in visual prosthesis
Only where the retina is concerned, and they've come a long, long way with that, too. I was extremely nearsighted all my life, 20/400, until I got a CrystaLens, (an artificial lens capable of focusing)implaned in my left eye in 2006. That eye is now 20/16, far better than normal vision. I used to wear contacts, and used reading glasses as well, now I need no corrective lenses at all! It also curres farsightedness (even age-related; I turn 60 this year), astigmatism, and cataracts. I have a friend who has two donated corneas (no artificial corneas as of yet).
Before 1949 a cataract meant incurable blindness. Today a cataract means you'll be able to throw your glasses away. Behind? I think not.
I suffered a detached retina in 2008, and surgery corrected it without any loss of vision at all. Had I suffered that thirty years ago that eye would most probably be completely blind.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You're wasting your time linking to the BBC for someone who obviously gets 100% of his "news" from Fox. It's preatty damned obvious he didn't listen to Obama's speech last night (Obama was bragging about GM, and it was a damned good speech), but I'll bet a donut to a dollar (yeah, dollars to donuts have reversed, since donuts aren't ten cents apiece any more) he listened to the Republican "rebuttal".
The only cure for stupid is the roof of a tall building to step off of, a bus to step in front of, or a bullet.
people distributing their works for money aren't typically going to also distribute them for free. That would undermine sales.
Sorry, but you're 100% incorrect. Very often what seems to be obvious is shown by scientific research to be completely false*. One book publisher thought the same thing as you a couple of years ago, so he commissioned a study to see how much revenue he was losing to piracy. With a book, it takes a few weeks for it to hit the net because it has to be scanned and OCRed, so they looked at how much sales dropped when the pirate edition was availabe. Both the researchers and publisher were amazed when it was shown that rather than a sales dip, there was actually a sales SPIKE. People read the book, liked it, and bought it.
I'll bet you think libraries cost publishers money, but you're wrong there, too. I have a dozen or more Asimov books on my shelf. Were I unable to read library books for free (I've read a few hundred of Asimov's) I would have never bought a single one. Only the rich or foolish would buy a book from an authout he hadn't read before unless it was highly praised by people he admired. BTW, you can get music CDs and movie DVDs at the library as well -- completely free. No charge. Walk in broke, walk out with an armload of books, CDs, and DVDs.
Most musicians give their music away. Of course, most musicians aren't RIAA's musicians. Professional musicians I know wouldn't touch an RIAA contract with a ten foot pole; they know the RIAA is made up of nothing but thieving parasites that suck the lifeblood from artists.
Want some free sci-fi ebooks? Go to boing boing, Doctorow credits his status as a New York Times best seller to the fact that he gives his books away for free on there. As he says, nobody ever lost a dime from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity.
They're not going to read your book if they've never heard of you. BTW, my old Paxil Diaries on K5 half a deceade ago will be in print soon, at the request of readers. Had I not put them on the net, there's no way I could turn them into a book and have anyone read it.
* another example, although not on topic, is marijuana research. Since all smoke contains carcinogens, it was thought that marijuana cased cancer, so they did a statistical study to back up the hypothesis. They had 4 groups of geezers: nonsmokers, long term cigarette smokers, long term pot smokers, and long term smokers of both substances. They were amazed to find that there was no statistically signifigant differences between long term pot smokers and nonsmokers, and the potsmokers actually had fewer cancers (again, statistically insignifigant). What blew them away was the finding that those who smoked both pot and tobacco had half the cancer rates of those who only smoked tobacco! Rather than causing cancer, it appears to prevent it.
That's what science is for -- to test whether your perceptions are real. As often as not, they aren't.
So now we can spend money on stupid stuff (like segway clones) that were already proven failures by other companies (Segway).
Segway was a failure because it's too goddamned expensive. Six grand? I only spent ten on my car. When the patents run out and they're a hundred bucks each, everybody will have one.
The volt isn't selling better for the same reason. A teeny little car that costs more than my full sized sedan did new, has limited range, etc? No thanks. When an electric car costs no more than a gasoline car, they too will sell well.
The 1% do not understand the 99%. Most of us don't have much money we can afford to waste on expensive toys like segways and electric cars, and those who can buy any damned thing they please can't get their heads around that.
That was what I was hoping for. Why a video at all? All it is is a talking head (which I didn't hear because I keep the sound shut off on this computer) and some STILL pics of the vehicle.
It looks pretty cool, I wonder what they cost? Probably more than I paid for my car (I never buy cars new).
I haven't really much exposure to Linux on the desktop but... There certainly is a big change going from Windows XP or even Vista to Win 7. In my opinion it would be naive to think that a more to a completely different OS doesn't mean a complete re-training exercise from top to bottom.
I'm not sure about the enterprise grade admin tools, but as far as users are concerned, believe it or not a move from XP (can't say about Vista, I never used it) to KDE is less of a change than from XP to Win 7; I'm using all three OSes, XP at work, Win 7 on my notebook (haven't gotten around to installing Linux on it yet) and kubuntu on the main home computer.
It's easy to see why you would doubt that, if I hadn't been exposed to Linux in a while I'd be pretty doubtful, too. DL a copy of kubuntu, you can run it from a CD and try it out without actually installing. The kubuntu CD is also good for getting data from a drive that Windows won't boot because you've changed too much on the computer.
Your experience of people bringing in broken PC's to fix is a world away from an enterprise environment.
That's very true.
You've also completely ignored the application compatibility angle.
Yes, if you're running custom apps that will only run on Windows, you're stuck with Windows. But MS isn't as backward compatible as they would like you to think. When I went from 98 to XP, half my software no longer worked. The shop I work in recently upgraded from the worst browser ever made (IE6), and the reason it took them so long was because of an application that used Java and IE6 and wouldn't run on any other browser. I assume they rewrote the app.
But compatibility is a reason to change, not a reason not to. Microsoft isn't compatible with anything, not even itself. If you have an older version of Word, you're not going to be able to read documants made in a newer version; we have these problems all the time. It seems MS is the about only one that does this, although I've seen it with Adobe products, too, especially PDFs, they're even worse than MS.
Please don't tell me you are going to get 15,000 apps working on WINE and maintain support agreements with the app vendors or move everything to open source and migrate the data across to the correct format at the same time.
The Ernie Ball corporation, perhaps the world's biggest manufacturer of guitar strings, managed to after the BSA raided them (google "ernie ball linux").
I woudn't mess with WINE, if there's something like Photoshop you need, moving to Linux really wouldn't be an option. It certainly isn't for everyone, but nothing ever is.
I don't automatically see that becasue Linux *may* work on older h/w better than Windows you necessarily *can* make this happen but I don't necessarily discount this either.
If you have something as ancient as a 486 running Windows 98, modern Linux distro won't work; I've tried it. But the computer is capable of running XP it will run Linux faster. The reasons are Windows' ever-growing registry and the need for antivirus. As to the hardware, often newer hardware either won't work or won't have as much functionality because the FOSS guys haven't written drivers and so forth yet.
I'd also note that in most cases, reliability is probably more important than speed within the Enterprise.
Reliability is probably Linux' strongest point. It simply doesn't crash. Apps sometimes do, but they never bring the OS down with it. Linux is far more fault-tolerant as well. A few years ago I was running a PC dual-boot, and thought I had a registry problem or something because Linux was working well while Windows was flaky, but it turned out that the power supply was on its way out. I had an Acer that had a bad hardware bug (they've since fixed it) where if you had it set to hibernate on battery with the lid closed but do nothing if plugged in, then closed the lid and plugged it in before the lights stopped flashing it would go crazy on either OS -- but after a few times, Windows woudn't even boot in safe mode, Linux always recovered.
Btw, my org is on a 4 year h/w replacement cycle.
Since the PCs always come with Windows already installed, that's a good reason to stick with Windows.
What I want is an OS that doesn't crash once a week, or require 8 gigabytes of RAM to run, even if that means it looks like an old Commodore 64 with GEOS. Just make the damn thing work.
Well, depending on what you need... I have an old computer I built form junk parts with 750 meg of RAM and a 1.7 gHz CPU running kubunti 11, and have had no crashes whatever, and I'm mostly using it to listen to the radio (damned near every station in the worls) and watch TV (I have it plugged into my TV set and get more TV than if I had cable, whichg I don't).