I live in a city where rental properties are hastily being converted to Airbnb rentals at an alarming rate.
Many middle class folks, myself included have been recipients of no-fault evictions as landlords rush to cash in on the short-term rental craze.
At least in my city, Airbnb drives up the price of property, making the dream of home ownership an increasingly distant fantasy for many in the middle class.
Sure when I travel, I can more easily afford a room for a night, but I'm a lot more concerned with the affordability of a the property I have to rent longterm. One day I hope to afford a mortgage, but I don't know how that will happen if every property gets converted in to an ad-hoc hotel.
Now if you happen to be one of the lucky middle-class people who already owns 1 or more properties, you might be able to make a little money with Airbnb, but for the most part Airbnb is doing nothing to help the middle class.
That's a terrible idea. It sounds like a proposal made by someone who doesn't understand how computers work.
Enforcing this would be a nightmare. If they did a cost/benefit analysis of this, I suspect the cost of implementation & maintenance would far outstrip the earnings they hope to "protect".
Well we can't know. Ultimately it's speculation, but speculation informed by what little information we does become public. Via leaks, congressional hearings, info-sec researchers, etc.
Edward Snowden and other's have made statements alluding to deficiencies in the NSA's capacity to make the most of the data that's already in front of them.
Bottom line, given the size and scope of the U.S. intelligence gathering machine, why have we not thwarted any large terror attacks?
https://theintercept.com/2015/...
It could easily be the case that U.S. intelligence agencies are too incompetent to catch these terrorist affiliated social media accounts.
U.S. intelligence agencies haven't exactly demonstrated a capacity to really make effective use of the big data they collect.
Yes, they are quite good at intercepting and collecting data, but there are many indications that the NSA in particular doesn't really have the data intelligence necessary to effectively sift through what they capture.
In the 'proud' tradition of the TSA, our intelligence agency's anti-terror data collection operations may be more security theater than actual security.
That said I'm not sure a bunch of anons are likely to do much better.
Your counter argument depends on a false analogy. Wearing a short skirt is not at all like attempting to commit adultery.
To pretend that someone caught cheating is similarly a victim is a really offensive position to take. People are entitled to wear anything they want without threat of sexual assault. People are not entitled to commit adultery without risk of being discovered.
One must go out of their way to have an affair, whereas sexual assault can happen to anyone without provocation.
Fortunately Slashdot readers are pretty savvy, I doubt too many people will be fooled by your false equivocation.
Near as I can tell you aren't providing any reasons or evidence for why legacy support is so imperative.
Also that seatbelt example is laughable, seat belts are in no way analogous to limiting legacy support.
Thing is if your look at browser market shares, much of the time it's not cost effective to spend the time writing legacy support. Unless your target demographic is enterprise, or 3rd world nations, it's a pretty safe bet to drop IE6 & IE7.
I think there is a monetary argument to be made for skipping legacy support. The amount of time that dev's must spend on supporting old IE browsers can be astounding depending on the site.
At least for some business in the long run it's not just preaching standards, it's a cost saving measure.
Notably the Australian retailer Kogan, instituted an [IE7 tax](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18440979) back in 2012. This surcharge I think was a brilliant way to offset the expense of supporting antiquated browsers.
No doubt it comes down to your customer demographics, and if you can afford to ignore that share of your potential market. These days I think IE8+ is a pretty safe bet for retail (maybe IE7 for B2B).
They won't hit 0 hits a month until we stop supporting them. Don't be an enabler. Be brave, make your CTO talk some sense into management at large. IE6 still has market share only because we let it have market share.
This is tricky. It's tempting to support legacy browsers, but if you do too good a job of supporting them, you don't incentivize your users to ever get their sh*t sorted, and upgrade their browsers. It's a vicious cycle I am eager to avoid.
In my experience if your target market is the general public legacy support isn't thaaat important, people tend to upgrade their personal browsers out of necessity, so just create that necessity and the people will follow.
It's really only when you are catering to large enterprise businesses that only upgrade their workstations once in a while that you really have to sweat that sort of thorough backwards compatibility.
I saw a very insightful & funny talk on this subject last year. The very clever Josh Broton lays out exactly why jQuery has become an excuse not to do it right the first time. Basically it comes down to this:
A few facts about latency and user behavior:
"...250 milliseconds can be the difference between a return customer and an abandoned checkout cart."
"...every 100 milliseconds of latency resulted in a 1% loss of sales."
"...lose 20% of their traffic for each additional 100 milliseconds it takes a page to load."
The average overhead jQuery adds to a website:
"... add roughly 150ms to 1 full second of load time..."
He goes into many other good reasons too, it's well worth a read.
So the bottom line for you is about the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law?
If the 30 other bugs are forfeit because of a procedural mistake that only applied to one of the bugs, the next infosec researcher won't report 30 bugs. They will report them one at a time in an effort to maximize their rewards. The vulnerabilities will stay in the wild longer, the effectiveness of whole effort behind posting bounties is reduced.
Hunting for bugs sometimes requires consulting with others in the infosec community. From what I understand it was a fairly minor and well intentioned slip. A technicality.
If good intentions are met with pedantics & technicalities, I wonder how long those intentions will remain good.
Fair enough, but what about the other 30 or so bugs he reported?
More to the point. Let's say they don't pay this time. Next time someone finds a bug that effects Groupon what incentive do they have to report it to Groupon? Why not sell it on a Blackhat forum for a big ol pile of bitcoins?
Let's just assume for a second that a polygraph actually was fairly good at detecting physiological discomfort caused by telling a lie. This is a dubious claim, but let's just take it at face value and consider the logical extension of using this policy for disqualifying candidates.
This will let two very extreme personality types through:
-Those who are so incredibly rigid and moral they cannot lie, not even a minor (and very human) fib about something as inconsequential as how you consume media on a computer.
-Those who are so incredibly indifferent to lying it's pathological for them.
Neither of these personalities make ideal FBI agents. They are two extremes of a spectrum of morality and they both suck. I'd much rather our federal law enforcement agencies were staffed with people who are imperfect, but capable of empathy. They feel uncomfortable with fibbing, they understand it's not good, but they're capable of small doses of it. The discomfort they experience will prevent them from escalating their actions to extreme self-righteous or evil behavior.
In other words this practice applied in this extreme will almost certainly disqualify the most emotionally/morally stable candidates.
I hear you. I agree that ideally a B.A. should teach critical thinking. I also don't think this is the case in most places.
I think this is the natural dilution one can expect with so many people attending school. The rise of a for profit education model has made higher education widely accessible, but at the cost of quality. A lot of these additional students end up studying humanities, because quite frankly the requirements to be admitted are less rigorous (math pre-requisites for instance).
In the world of ideals you are correct, but in the world we live in I still suspect a science student is more likely to have critical thinking skills.
In science course work you are constantly exposed the notion that there are correct and incorrect answers to a given question. Not every answer is seen as carrying some degree of validity. Some solutions work, others do not.
In humanities coursework, many different answers to the same question are often seen to carry value. In some domains that may even be the case. In my Arts coursework I very rarely saw a professor entirely shoot down a bad thesis (with the exception of one excellent religious studies teacher who busted bad citations/interpretations with glee). They might test you on memorization of facts, but beyond that it was hard to give a wrong answer. Process was emphasized, but product didn't matter as much.
If I was an employer and I had two seemingly equal candidates to choose from. I'd be more inclined to hire the one with a sciences background. If only because their coursework was more likely to be results oriented. Having the appearance of rigor is not sufficient to yield the desired outcome.
P.S. Your are right about stats, I also think formal logic should be mandatory for everyone. Ever try to predicate a brief from a supreme court ruling? It's wonderful the logical inconsistency one can uncover when forced to mathematically evaluate reasoning.
P.P.S. I attended the University of British Columbia. I don't know if that helps you evaluate how typical/atypical my impression of humanities teaching might be.
I have a B.A. in Cognitive Systems, it's a multi-disciplinary degree, about 60% of my course work was Faculty of Arts, and 40% Faculty of Sciences.
What I experienced while in University was this:
Most liberal arts courses are driven by writing essays where you defend a thesis. The actual validity of your thesis didn't matter so long as you are able to find several points to defend it. What I commonly saw was students starting with a conclusion and working backwards to find evidence which best fit the chosen thesis. Heck I did it myself after a while, it was much easier than looking at an entire body of work in a field and working forwards to a valid thesis. In a science course this would be called cherry picking the data, in liberal arts, it's called another day.
My science course work on the other hand is where critical thinking was encouraged. I was taught how to write logical proofs, I was taught how to represent both everyday situations, and also computational operations in the form of atomic sentences. I was taught the dangers of conflating correlation with causation, I was taught the dangers of Type I and Type II errors. I was taught about common logical fallacies. I was taught how to evaluate information critically, I was taught the importance of internal consistency, I was taught how critically examine evidence.
Perhaps some science students could use a little more course work in writing for the purpose of communicating to a broad audience in an uncomplicated way. But when it comes to critical thinking skills, I'll take a B.Sc. over a B.A. any day of the week.
I understand what you are saying, and I'd almost agree with you, were it not for the issue of drivers. The OS & the hardware need to function well together, and drivers built into the OS have to facilitate that. I'm afraid that makes it rather harder to consider the two separately. Someone has to make those drivers for each OS that the system will support, that costs money. I see no reason to compel Apple to make their iPhone capable of running Android.
Most electronic devices are not made by one company. The origin of individual components shouldn't bug you.
My Nintendo Wii has an ATI graphics card in it. You might be surprised to know that many apple devices have Samsung manufactured chips on their main-boards.
Just because a component is made by a 3rd party that doesn't necessarily diminish the effort the vendor of the final product took in making a product intended to function a sum of it's specifically chosen parts.
I agree MS has predatory contracts, and those certainly should be made illegal.
However by making a law that requires all computers be sold sans software is a very imprecise way of targeting the acts of MS. There are much better ways to approach this than a blanket law that applies to every manufacturer who sells a product consisting of both hardware and software. Many have good reasons for pairing specific software with specific hardware.
For instance this law inadvertently harms Apple, which has for a long time now practiced making hardware exclusively for it's software and vice versa. What about video game consoles? Should Nintendo be required to release the next Nintendo DS in a variant without an operating system?
Like I said in my initial post, the distinction between hardware and software is an arbitrary one. In the case of many (most even) devices there are integral components made out of both hardware and software. This sort of legislation is entirely blind to that.
If Xbuntu has a fighting chance, I imagine you should feel quite comfortable letting the market decide.
If it's truly a contender, it's popularity will grow. I must admit having tested several dozen flavors of tux over the years Xbuntu is my favorite, but I still prefer Mac OS X or Windows 7.
I agree Windows 8 is problematic, and perhaps that misstep is something the Linux community could take advantage of to promote open source.
Thing is there is a ton of infighting within that community. They can't agree on a window manager, they can't agree on a package manager, they can't agree on almost anything. I doubt they have the unity needed to appeal to commercial vendors.
Yes, I understand where you are coming from, and in principal think these things are good. But for the same reasons I cannot force the grocery store to carry the brand of ice cream I like, I can't force Best Buy to carry a laptop with Linux (or BSD, or sans operating system, etc).
Actually a few years back my local Best Buy did carry some Dell Laptops with Ubuntu on it. This effort failed miserably, nobody wanted to buy them even though they were a little bit cheaper than the same machine with Windows. In terms of usability Linux, BSD, etc, just fails to measure up.
Did it ever occur to the people foaming at the mouth about the injustice of being "forced" to voluntarily buy a laptop with Windows on it, that perhaps Open Source fails to be in stores because it's not user friendly?
Most folks cannot be bothered to learn a new UI just to browse the web, write documents, and send email. Let's face it even the most polished of Open Source window managers is seriously lacking next to Windows and Mac.
It's no surprise to me many vendors aren't interested in carrying an unfinished product. It's great for code enthusiasts, but it's just unreasonable to expect general consumers have a serious interest in open source operating systems (at least as they are now).
Let's just say I got my Grandma a tux laptop purely out of principal. What window manager should I set her up on? Gnome? KDE? XFCE? Fluxbox? Which Kernel? Which Distro? Ubuntu? Xbuntu? Mandravia? Linux Mint? Fedora?
It would be hell trying to teach my grandma how to apt-get, or how to escalate permissions to super user.
My point is open source operating systems are a mess of inconsistent competing branches. It's a total headache. I see no compelling reasons to legislate that vendors go out of their way to support this mishmash of half-baked projects.
I agree it is not good that Microsoft is allowed to create predatory OEM licensing agreements. I would be in favor of regulations that would prevent MS from making such contracts.
If the ice cream man only has chocolate, but I want vanilla. That does not make him a tyrant who is forcing chocolate upon me. He's just not interested in selling vanilla. As a private business he is under no obligation to sell vanilla if he doesn't want to. Similarly I as an consumer am not required to buy chocolate ice cream if it's not what I want.
A consumer can choose not to buy a computer from a vendor that chooses to sell it with Windows.
My point is simple, if you want Linux (or any open source), you are better off buying from a vendor who is interested in supporting Linux without a court order.
Am I the only one who thinks this is not a good thing?
Ultimately the distinction between hardware and software is an arbitrary one. Both mediums combine to provide the function required for a given product.
Let's pretend I am a hypothetical manufacturer of electronic devices. I am making some awesome hardware, and some equally awesome software to compliment it. They function beautifully together combining to make one truly cool product. Why should I be compelled to sell a variant of my product with have of it ripped out? That just harms the overall quality of the products my company is known for.
Would you ask a car manufacturer to sell an unpainted version of their vehicles because it's unfair to other paint manufacturers? Would you demand a watch ship without gears, so you can specifically choose what time keeping mechanism to use? Would you require lightbulbs to retail without gas inside, so you can choose to fill it with nitrogen or argon yourself?
Of course not! You choose to buy a car in the color you want. You buy a completed watch that you think keeps time the best. You purchase a lightbulb that already has the features your want.
Software made to compliment hardware and vice-versa can be awesome. I want to buy my hardware from a vendor that supports open source because they think it's worthwhile, not because they begrudgingly were obliged to make it.
Linux, BSD, other open source solutions are awesome, and if I am a hardware vendor I am going to build hardware that supports it because it's awesome. Not because I've been strong armed into it by a the courts.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in a city where rental properties are hastily being converted to Airbnb rentals at an alarming rate.
Many middle class folks, myself included have been recipients of no-fault evictions as landlords rush to cash in on the short-term rental craze.
At least in my city, Airbnb drives up the price of property, making the dream of home ownership an increasingly distant fantasy for many in the middle class.
Sure when I travel, I can more easily afford a room for a night, but I'm a lot more concerned with the affordability of a the property I have to rent longterm. One day I hope to afford a mortgage, but I don't know how that will happen if every property gets converted in to an ad-hoc hotel.
Now if you happen to be one of the lucky middle-class people who already owns 1 or more properties, you might be able to make a little money with Airbnb, but for the most part Airbnb is doing nothing to help the middle class.
That's a terrible idea. It sounds like a proposal made by someone who doesn't understand how computers work.
Enforcing this would be a nightmare. If they did a cost/benefit analysis of this, I suspect the cost of implementation & maintenance would far outstrip the earnings they hope to "protect".
Well we can't know. Ultimately it's speculation, but speculation informed by what little information we does become public. Via leaks, congressional hearings, info-sec researchers, etc.
Edward Snowden and other's have made statements alluding to deficiencies in the NSA's capacity to make the most of the data that's already in front of them.
Bottom line, given the size and scope of the U.S. intelligence gathering machine, why have we not thwarted any large terror attacks?
https://theintercept.com/2015/...
It could easily be the case that U.S. intelligence agencies are too incompetent to catch these terrorist affiliated social media accounts.
U.S. intelligence agencies haven't exactly demonstrated a capacity to really make effective use of the big data they collect.
Yes, they are quite good at intercepting and collecting data, but there are many indications that the NSA in particular doesn't really have the data intelligence necessary to effectively sift through what they capture.
In the 'proud' tradition of the TSA, our intelligence agency's anti-terror data collection operations may be more security theater than actual security.
That said I'm not sure a bunch of anons are likely to do much better.
Your counter argument depends on a false analogy. Wearing a short skirt is not at all like attempting to commit adultery.
To pretend that someone caught cheating is similarly a victim is a really offensive position to take. People are entitled to wear anything they want without threat of sexual assault. People are not entitled to commit adultery without risk of being discovered.
One must go out of their way to have an affair, whereas sexual assault can happen to anyone without provocation.
Fortunately Slashdot readers are pretty savvy, I doubt too many people will be fooled by your false equivocation.
Near as I can tell you aren't providing any reasons or evidence for why legacy support is so imperative.
Also that seatbelt example is laughable, seat belts are in no way analogous to limiting legacy support.
Thing is if your look at browser market shares, much of the time it's not cost effective to spend the time writing legacy support. Unless your target demographic is enterprise, or 3rd world nations, it's a pretty safe bet to drop IE6 & IE7.
I think there is a monetary argument to be made for skipping legacy support. The amount of time that dev's must spend on supporting old IE browsers can be astounding depending on the site.
At least for some business in the long run it's not just preaching standards, it's a cost saving measure.
Notably the Australian retailer Kogan, instituted an [IE7 tax](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18440979) back in 2012. This surcharge I think was a brilliant way to offset the expense of supporting antiquated browsers.
No doubt it comes down to your customer demographics, and if you can afford to ignore that share of your potential market. These days I think IE8+ is a pretty safe bet for retail (maybe IE7 for B2B).
They won't hit 0 hits a month until we stop supporting them. Don't be an enabler. Be brave, make your CTO talk some sense into management at large. IE6 still has market share only because we let it have market share.
This is tricky. It's tempting to support legacy browsers, but if you do too good a job of supporting them, you don't incentivize your users to ever get their sh*t sorted, and upgrade their browsers. It's a vicious cycle I am eager to avoid.
In my experience if your target market is the general public legacy support isn't thaaat important, people tend to upgrade their personal browsers out of necessity, so just create that necessity and the people will follow.
It's really only when you are catering to large enterprise businesses that only upgrade their workstations once in a while that you really have to sweat that sort of thorough backwards compatibility.
I saw a very insightful & funny talk on this subject last year. The very clever Josh Broton lays out exactly why jQuery has become an excuse not to do it right the first time. Basically it comes down to this:
A few facts about latency and user behavior: "...250 milliseconds can be the difference between a return customer and an abandoned checkout cart." "...every 100 milliseconds of latency resulted in a 1% loss of sales." "...lose 20% of their traffic for each additional 100 milliseconds it takes a page to load."
The average overhead jQuery adds to a website: "... add roughly 150ms to 1 full second of load time..."
He goes into many other good reasons too, it's well worth a read.
Slide here: https://github.com/joshbroton/...
That's a good point, at this point it's unclear how like (or unlike) the reported bugs were.
None the less I think it wiser to reward the good intent rather than punish on a technicality.
So the bottom line for you is about the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law?
If the 30 other bugs are forfeit because of a procedural mistake that only applied to one of the bugs, the next infosec researcher won't report 30 bugs. They will report them one at a time in an effort to maximize their rewards. The vulnerabilities will stay in the wild longer, the effectiveness of whole effort behind posting bounties is reduced.
Hunting for bugs sometimes requires consulting with others in the infosec community. From what I understand it was a fairly minor and well intentioned slip. A technicality.
If good intentions are met with pedantics & technicalities, I wonder how long those intentions will remain good.
Fair enough, but what about the other 30 or so bugs he reported?
More to the point. Let's say they don't pay this time. Next time someone finds a bug that effects Groupon what incentive do they have to report it to Groupon? Why not sell it on a Blackhat forum for a big ol pile of bitcoins?
Let's just assume for a second that a polygraph actually was fairly good at detecting physiological discomfort caused by telling a lie. This is a dubious claim, but let's just take it at face value and consider the logical extension of using this policy for disqualifying candidates. This will let two very extreme personality types through: -Those who are so incredibly rigid and moral they cannot lie, not even a minor (and very human) fib about something as inconsequential as how you consume media on a computer.
-Those who are so incredibly indifferent to lying it's pathological for them.
Neither of these personalities make ideal FBI agents. They are two extremes of a spectrum of morality and they both suck. I'd much rather our federal law enforcement agencies were staffed with people who are imperfect, but capable of empathy. They feel uncomfortable with fibbing, they understand it's not good, but they're capable of small doses of it. The discomfort they experience will prevent them from escalating their actions to extreme self-righteous or evil behavior.
In other words this practice applied in this extreme will almost certainly disqualify the most emotionally/morally stable candidates.
I hear you. I agree that ideally a B.A. should teach critical thinking. I also don't think this is the case in most places.
I think this is the natural dilution one can expect with so many people attending school. The rise of a for profit education model has made higher education widely accessible, but at the cost of quality. A lot of these additional students end up studying humanities, because quite frankly the requirements to be admitted are less rigorous (math pre-requisites for instance).
In the world of ideals you are correct, but in the world we live in I still suspect a science student is more likely to have critical thinking skills.
In science course work you are constantly exposed the notion that there are correct and incorrect answers to a given question. Not every answer is seen as carrying some degree of validity. Some solutions work, others do not.
In humanities coursework, many different answers to the same question are often seen to carry value. In some domains that may even be the case. In my Arts coursework I very rarely saw a professor entirely shoot down a bad thesis (with the exception of one excellent religious studies teacher who busted bad citations/interpretations with glee). They might test you on memorization of facts, but beyond that it was hard to give a wrong answer. Process was emphasized, but product didn't matter as much.
If I was an employer and I had two seemingly equal candidates to choose from. I'd be more inclined to hire the one with a sciences background. If only because their coursework was more likely to be results oriented. Having the appearance of rigor is not sufficient to yield the desired outcome.
P.S. Your are right about stats, I also think formal logic should be mandatory for everyone. Ever try to predicate a brief from a supreme court ruling? It's wonderful the logical inconsistency one can uncover when forced to mathematically evaluate reasoning.
P.P.S. I attended the University of British Columbia. I don't know if that helps you evaluate how typical/atypical my impression of humanities teaching might be.
I have a B.A. in Cognitive Systems, it's a multi-disciplinary degree, about 60% of my course work was Faculty of Arts, and 40% Faculty of Sciences.
What I experienced while in University was this:
Most liberal arts courses are driven by writing essays where you defend a thesis. The actual validity of your thesis didn't matter so long as you are able to find several points to defend it. What I commonly saw was students starting with a conclusion and working backwards to find evidence which best fit the chosen thesis. Heck I did it myself after a while, it was much easier than looking at an entire body of work in a field and working forwards to a valid thesis. In a science course this would be called cherry picking the data, in liberal arts, it's called another day.
My science course work on the other hand is where critical thinking was encouraged. I was taught how to write logical proofs, I was taught how to represent both everyday situations, and also computational operations in the form of atomic sentences. I was taught the dangers of conflating correlation with causation, I was taught the dangers of Type I and Type II errors. I was taught about common logical fallacies. I was taught how to evaluate information critically, I was taught the importance of internal consistency, I was taught how critically examine evidence.
Perhaps some science students could use a little more course work in writing for the purpose of communicating to a broad audience in an uncomplicated way. But when it comes to critical thinking skills, I'll take a B.Sc. over a B.A. any day of the week.
I understand what you are saying, and I'd almost agree with you, were it not for the issue of drivers. The OS & the hardware need to function well together, and drivers built into the OS have to facilitate that. I'm afraid that makes it rather harder to consider the two separately. Someone has to make those drivers for each OS that the system will support, that costs money. I see no reason to compel Apple to make their iPhone capable of running Android.
Most electronic devices are not made by one company. The origin of individual components shouldn't bug you.
My Nintendo Wii has an ATI graphics card in it. You might be surprised to know that many apple devices have Samsung manufactured chips on their main-boards.
Just because a component is made by a 3rd party that doesn't necessarily diminish the effort the vendor of the final product took in making a product intended to function a sum of it's specifically chosen parts.
I agree MS has predatory contracts, and those certainly should be made illegal.
However by making a law that requires all computers be sold sans software is a very imprecise way of targeting the acts of MS. There are much better ways to approach this than a blanket law that applies to every manufacturer who sells a product consisting of both hardware and software. Many have good reasons for pairing specific software with specific hardware.
For instance this law inadvertently harms Apple, which has for a long time now practiced making hardware exclusively for it's software and vice versa. What about video game consoles? Should Nintendo be required to release the next Nintendo DS in a variant without an operating system?
Like I said in my initial post, the distinction between hardware and software is an arbitrary one. In the case of many (most even) devices there are integral components made out of both hardware and software. This sort of legislation is entirely blind to that.
If Xbuntu has a fighting chance, I imagine you should feel quite comfortable letting the market decide.
If it's truly a contender, it's popularity will grow. I must admit having tested several dozen flavors of tux over the years Xbuntu is my favorite, but I still prefer Mac OS X or Windows 7.
I agree Windows 8 is problematic, and perhaps that misstep is something the Linux community could take advantage of to promote open source.
Thing is there is a ton of infighting within that community. They can't agree on a window manager, they can't agree on a package manager, they can't agree on almost anything. I doubt they have the unity needed to appeal to commercial vendors.
Yes, I understand where you are coming from, and in principal think these things are good. But for the same reasons I cannot force the grocery store to carry the brand of ice cream I like, I can't force Best Buy to carry a laptop with Linux (or BSD, or sans operating system, etc).
Actually a few years back my local Best Buy did carry some Dell Laptops with Ubuntu on it. This effort failed miserably, nobody wanted to buy them even though they were a little bit cheaper than the same machine with Windows. In terms of usability Linux, BSD, etc, just fails to measure up.
Did it ever occur to the people foaming at the mouth about the injustice of being "forced" to voluntarily buy a laptop with Windows on it, that perhaps Open Source fails to be in stores because it's not user friendly?
Most folks cannot be bothered to learn a new UI just to browse the web, write documents, and send email. Let's face it even the most polished of Open Source window managers is seriously lacking next to Windows and Mac.
It's no surprise to me many vendors aren't interested in carrying an unfinished product. It's great for code enthusiasts, but it's just unreasonable to expect general consumers have a serious interest in open source operating systems (at least as they are now).
Let's just say I got my Grandma a tux laptop purely out of principal. What window manager should I set her up on? Gnome? KDE? XFCE? Fluxbox? Which Kernel? Which Distro? Ubuntu? Xbuntu? Mandravia? Linux Mint? Fedora?
It would be hell trying to teach my grandma how to apt-get, or how to escalate permissions to super user.
My point is open source operating systems are a mess of inconsistent competing branches. It's a total headache. I see no compelling reasons to legislate that vendors go out of their way to support this mishmash of half-baked projects.
That is a different issue.
I agree it is not good that Microsoft is allowed to create predatory OEM licensing agreements. I would be in favor of regulations that would prevent MS from making such contracts.
The buyer is not "forced" to do anything.
If the ice cream man only has chocolate, but I want vanilla. That does not make him a tyrant who is forcing chocolate upon me. He's just not interested in selling vanilla. As a private business he is under no obligation to sell vanilla if he doesn't want to. Similarly I as an consumer am not required to buy chocolate ice cream if it's not what I want.
A consumer can choose not to buy a computer from a vendor that chooses to sell it with Windows.
My point is simple, if you want Linux (or any open source), you are better off buying from a vendor who is interested in supporting Linux without a court order.
Am I the only one who thinks this is not a good thing?
Ultimately the distinction between hardware and software is an arbitrary one. Both mediums combine to provide the function required for a given product.
Let's pretend I am a hypothetical manufacturer of electronic devices. I am making some awesome hardware, and some equally awesome software to compliment it. They function beautifully together combining to make one truly cool product. Why should I be compelled to sell a variant of my product with have of it ripped out? That just harms the overall quality of the products my company is known for.
Would you ask a car manufacturer to sell an unpainted version of their vehicles because it's unfair to other paint manufacturers? Would you demand a watch ship without gears, so you can specifically choose what time keeping mechanism to use? Would you require lightbulbs to retail without gas inside, so you can choose to fill it with nitrogen or argon yourself?
Of course not! You choose to buy a car in the color you want. You buy a completed watch that you think keeps time the best. You purchase a lightbulb that already has the features your want.
Software made to compliment hardware and vice-versa can be awesome. I want to buy my hardware from a vendor that supports open source because they think it's worthwhile, not because they begrudgingly were obliged to make it.
Linux, BSD, other open source solutions are awesome, and if I am a hardware vendor I am going to build hardware that supports it because it's awesome. Not because I've been strong armed into it by a the courts.