That would be a valid argument if it wasn't for the fact that many people have no choice but to buy Windows because of its monopoly status.
If there is a program that is vital to your income that doesn't have alternatives yet (and many niche markets have those), you need a PC with Windows. That means you don't have a choice - you have to get Windows, it only comes from one place, and that place will only give you something you actually choose if you buy something you don't choose.
Many people didn't choose Windows, but their predecessors made it their only option by not bothering to shop around. Now people that actually want choices are paying for that. That's not fair.
Simple economics example: you sell organic products.
You start with food, and do very well. Everyone loves your food and only your food. They stop buying food from anyone else, and all other food producers go out of business and get other jobs.
So now you want to sell hemlock as well... but it's not selling. Hey, this is ORGANIC hemlock. Now I'm not trying to actually say Vista is to hemlock as XP is to food anymore than to say "people want one but not the other" so don't get me wrong. The analogy only applies as far as "there are LOTS of people that want to buy one and don't want to buy the other".
So you make a rule. You can't buy food unless you buy hemlock too. Now you still have the option of not buying food - just like people have the option of not buying a new computer and subsequently not being able to do their jobs (and subsequently not eating...), but you don't have the option of buying just food. You *must* buy hemlock to get food, and that's where we have a problem. That is leveraging a monopoly.
What makes it easy to get away with is the fact that the law states leveraging a monopoly is illegal if you use it to influence *other markets* and this is still the same market (both are operating systems and you're not gaining new customers), but the substance of the law is that you shouldn't limit consumer choice simply because you have a stranglehold on them, and that's what's happening here. In my food/hemlock analogy it's not a new market - you're selling consumables for sure, only people don't want to consume one and need to consume the other. There is no option other than to buy both. Now you're making more money entirely because people don't have a choice -- but it's not in a different market so it's not obviously illegal under current laws.
Then don't buy it, period. If you're so adamant about not touching Vista in any way/shape/form, and all manufacturers offer are systems with Vista pre-installed, then I guess you won't be purchasing a system then. That's the choice you have.
LOL. Just how delusional are you if you actually believe what you're saying? Did you read that through at all?
Just because she can't get XP pre-installed for no additional cost from a vendor of her choosing...
...does not mean that she can't find a different vendor or build her own machine with XP.
Right. Because everyone knows how to install an operating system. Now they can find vendors that will sell XP machines, but they're rare and often charge more or limit your options for non-vista machines. Maybe it's lack of drivers, not sure. The other option is to buy XP (after they've already bought Vista) and then pay somebody to install it for them (we can't assume they have friends that will do it for free. Plenty of people don't).
There are copies of XP out there - buy them! If Dell were her only method of getting a computer with XP, that would be one thing. But it's not - there are alternative options.
True, but every single option presented takes more time and money than it needs to and some involve buying both Vista and XP licenses, with no intent to use the Vista license. Now if people want to pony up for two versions of Windows on one machine then fine - they want to pony up. But when you make it *so* hard not to buy your product (Vista) that it's far beyond practical for the average person, you're bullying. I can't say there's a law against that, but common sense dictates there should be unless people have non-monopoly alternatives. For many cases (heavy reliance on 3rd party Windows-only apps) there are no such alternatives.
So how easy is it to install MySQL 5+ and PHP 5+? That seems like a sane enough expectation, right?
Not actually asking out of curiosity. It's actually really annoying and tedious. Yay macports! Yay dependencies! Yay command line! There really isn't a way to do it with a "click next now" installer on mac. Not yet. Just one reason I put a tick in the "Ubuntu did something better" column. I have plenty in the Windows and Mac ones, but Ubuntu (ok it really came from Debian) did this one seriously well. A few clicks and I have an Apache Mysql PHP ready test machine. The least and most predictable steps of any other OS. That means something to lots of people I know.
Sure. And the more general rule would be that people don't give a shit about their rights (or giving them up) if you can keep them comfortable in the present.
This works for nerds, but go tell your mom she needs to go get a music player that doesn't use DRM. See what reaction you get. I guarantee it will involve "would you just pick one for me?" eventually, and we all know you and I can't spend our whole days picking what mp3 player or media player app our friends and family should use.
It's pretty easy to lose our perspective on what sort of information can be expected of the average consumer, especially when it comes to computers. I think that the level of expertise your post would require of the average consumer in order to become realistic is far far too high and just not expectable.
I know tons of programmers that don't know what a DRM is. I know tons of doctors that couldn't tell you what a winamp is and why they should use it instead of an iTunes or Windows (tm!) brand Media Player!!! The list goes on.
In a fair and realistic world it wouldn't be long from now that ten billion page EULAs were ruled not good enough. When someone can't use your program without agreeing to 20,000,000 fine points outlined in your humongous essay this is an unrealistic expectation. A dialog saying "Do you agree?" with a bigass "Agree" (translated automatically in minds "ok"), or "Disagree" (translation: "cancel") buttons will get 99.999% of people to just say "whatever, Ok, next, next finish". So even if these companies spelled it out in clear and concise english just what their users could and couldn't do with their software (and they don't: they (probably for reasons of precision: not pointing fingers) use legalese to describe a bunch of techie topics, both of which are above most peoples' heads), it'd still be stupid to expect people to read and understand this "agreement". They know they're in over their heads, they just want to print their spreadsheet, and this is a new computer.
Which doesn't change the fact that the view on copyright and media sharing presented on/. is massively biased, and doesn't reflect the general consensus of the wider population, which is exactly what the OP was saying.
The general population is completely uninformed on the topic. That makes it a good thing that/. doesn't agree with their consensus, provided it doesn't, which you have yet to substantiate (in my experience it does).
Any solution that revolves around a tax on reproduction would require methods like DRM to stop reproduction that doesn't pay the tax, or are we going on the basis that people will not subvert a mandatory tax (even though they choose to ignore a mandatory cost of purchase)?
Naw. It's pretty simple. See them in concert? Pay for the concert. You're paying for a once in all eternity experience -- this is the one time that concert will happen. Pay for a shirt, or some other merch? Hey, you're motivated to pony up because you get something for it. I would honestly even pay for a CD from an artist I liked just so I know I have it around if an EMP magically destroyed all my data.
Why do you expect we would pay for more artists, when the reason for the majority of piracy at the moment is to either to avoid paying, to get a digital copy of something you already own or at best "to trial material that you may buy if you like it"? The % of piracy which is committed due to idealistic concerns is almost certainly statistically insignificant.
Huh. Well I think you hit the nail on the head there. Maybe not in the way you wanted. Why do most people not want to pay for music? Because they know it doesn't go to the artist. When you listen to a song you love, you don't mind supporting the person that brought it into the world. You want to. I know I do, and most people I discuss the topic with do too. Ok, look at churches - some guy talks for a little while and people give him 10% of their income. People don't mind paying for things that they feel feed their hearts, and music does that.
I have no problem pirating music from big label artists, because the labels aren't really giving me the music. If anything they water the inspiration down and generalize it. A small percentage goes to the artist that really generated the inspiration.
I would never steal an indie artist's stuff, but I guarantee I'll pirate it. Over and over. I will send it to all my friends, because it gets the word out about that band, and if it wasn't for me they'd have one less fan. Let me clarify: one less potential customer. Every time I interview an artist (I've interviewed a few when I worked for a magazine) they've said "on the record, don't steal my stuff. Off the record download all you want. I just want people to enjoy my music." A lot of the time artists have a philosophy that they would like to share with the world, free or not.
I WANT to support the person that makes music I love because I want them to make more, and I want to thank them for what they've made that changed my world in a good way. I've actually mailed money to a band that was on a major label because I wanted to support them but I knew their label would swallow all their share if I bought a CD. I want these bands to succeed. I want them to keep making music, and I understand they need support to do so. I'm not the only one.
But this is clear intent to murder! How blind is justice these days?! It's a well known fact that names correlate directly to real-world function every time and never have metaphoric, symbolic, or otherwise figurative contexts and thus should be court-admissible evidence.
I'm absolutely with you on the brain-dead authoring tool bit. Flash studio is a nightmare. Minor nitpick: I got Flash running well on FreeBSD back in... 2005? That was Flash 7 so maybe that's changed with 9 and 10 (the entire *nix world lost out on 8 because Macromedia was busy stagnating before being bought out).
Even if it's not "native" (and I don't know if it was back then, I really didn't know what I was doing), FreeBSD has a Linux emulation layer available that should be able to handle the Flash player with a pretty thin wrapper if any was even necessary.
Not true. I recall Flash 7 having been really usable. Flash 8 got skipped, which sucked, but Flash 9 was out long before Silverlight, and it had a great Linux port beforehand as well. Much better than the Flash 7 one, and I remember the Flash 7 one being not half bad. I wasn't even a real techie when the 7 port came out.
RFID is huge in the UK, and I've seen a lot of commercials for them in the US.
If it wasn't for the large amount of tourists London gets, you'd get the equivalent of the South's "You ain't from around here, is ya?" look if you go to a London retailer with a magstrip card.
A friend of mine went to one store and they literally had to look under the counter, dust their old mag reader off and hook it up to run his card.
Likely someone expendable in case stock holders deem it a bad thing and someone needs to be fired over it. Sure it's easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission, but it's even easier to fire a scapegoat and pay him to shut up than either.
"Huh. That's funny, this guy has a really unimpressive salary but a huge severance package."
And many of those amendments were to amdendments. So you have to spend hours per line figuring out what the law actually says now. And yes, I've seen them done this way.
This reminds me of a conversation I heard the other day in a cafe. It's a "hippie" cafe, but most young "hippies" these days are what I call "faux hippies" -- they dress like the old hippies did, they listen to the music the old ones did, despite the fact that the original hippies did all this because it was new.
So I'm sitting there working, and overhear the conversation between two faux hippies next to me.
faux hippie 1 I want to protest something.
faux hippie 2 Yeah, we should totally protest something! What should we protest?
fh1 I don't know, but my sociology professor said that if we wanted to protest something we could apply with the local college name... hidden so as not to tarnish its image board and if they approve they'll let us set up a booth in the commons and hand out flyers!!
fh2 That would be awesome!! Ok, ok... so what can we protest?
... 5 minutes of silence.
fh2 *I forget, but it was a lame attempt at a joke citing a stupid cause*
fh1 I'm serious!!
... 2 more minutes of silence
fh2 We need to smoke a bowl first. This is a lot of thinking.
fh1 Yeah. WAY too much thinking
...
I wish I was making this up. I seriously wish. This is almost verbatim, as it has been burned into my mind, leaving scars of cynicism that may never heal.
I think this mindset is an easy trap for people that work well with computers to fall into (I know I've caught myself falling for it at times). The law, much like a programming language, config file, or program is a defined set of rules and behavior for dealing with a situation.
It states in concise, as-specific-as-possible terms what to do in situation X. The problem for the technically inclined is, I think, that we can get caught up enough in the technicality of the laws that we forget the human element. There isn't really a "buffer overflow" here. You may be right by the letter of the law but there's room for the judge, prosecuting lawyer, or jury to fudge the lines when they see something they think is wrong.
My favorite streetview scene would be this picture of my friend's car
Sharky. This link brought to you by sharky, driving down the property value of its neighborhood since 2006.
As far as I can tell the problem doesn't lie in the language itself as much as the common practices and culture.
For example PHP supports prepared queries and the like, but it also supports the execution of bare strings as queries. In my experience most PHP programmers started back before prepared queries and just use the strings.
Another example: register_globals -- a short read, but a good one.
So it's not like any of these things are inherently security breaches, but they do lead to them without judicious development.
This is something that's always perplexed me. The only difference between a healthy economy and a depression is how fast money changes hands.
But the slower things are, the more stingy people get. The more stingy people get the slower things are.
It's an evil spiral. But if all (all, and that is key) people just decided to forget it all and loosen up the problem would dissolve. Journalism that sensationalizes a recession/depression is contributing to the problem. It's short term payoff (hey, it gets an audience for sure) but long term it hurts everyone including them.
Security is just relative to how much incentive someone has to break in. "More secure" is believable (if unprovable, given the closed nature of Microsoft), but to claim it's truy "secure" is a farce.
I use Ubuntu almost exclusively (I occasionally use OSX), but let's not make overhyped underfactual claims. If Ubuntu makes it big there will be worms out there for it. Less worms than Windows? I think so, but there's just no way to prove that yet.
I think you've touched on something important here - Linux offers a different philosophy to its users. Linux users don't expect to pay for software licenses except as a rare exception.
OSX may be cutting into microsoft's market share, but it hasn't changed that mindset. I run Linux and OSX and I was surprised at how many OSX programs are "try for 30 days, $20-30 bucks to buy" type programs. The fact that I was surprised just highlighted how my mindset had been changed by open source software.
I have my opinions but I won't argue which is greater or worse: but that mindset is what would be freaking me out if I was Microsoft. They probably need to do what the RIAA should have done about file sharing: embrace the changing market with a new business model, don't fight it.
Nobody gives a fuck about Linux because Linux doesn't have a unified billion dollar marketing campaign behind it and because it didn't enter the market pre-installed on all PCs.
Whether Ubuntu is lower or higher quality than Windows isn't even an issue when it comes to market share. Even if Ubuntu could cure cancer it wouldn't matter if nobody knows about it and everyone's already using Windows + software that only works on Windows. That's why market share is an unfair metric.
Hell Budweiser is (as far as I know) the most popular beer in America but I don't know anyone with a clue that would argue it's the best beer in America.
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That would be a valid argument if it wasn't for the fact that many people have no choice but to buy Windows because of its monopoly status.
If there is a program that is vital to your income that doesn't have alternatives yet (and many niche markets have those), you need a PC with Windows. That means you don't have a choice - you have to get Windows, it only comes from one place, and that place will only give you something you actually choose if you buy something you don't choose.
Many people didn't choose Windows, but their predecessors made it their only option by not bothering to shop around. Now people that actually want choices are paying for that. That's not fair.
Simple economics example: you sell organic products.
You start with food, and do very well. Everyone loves your food and only your food. They stop buying food from anyone else, and all other food producers go out of business and get other jobs.
So now you want to sell hemlock as well... but it's not selling. Hey, this is ORGANIC hemlock. Now I'm not trying to actually say Vista is to hemlock as XP is to food anymore than to say "people want one but not the other" so don't get me wrong. The analogy only applies as far as "there are LOTS of people that want to buy one and don't want to buy the other".
So you make a rule. You can't buy food unless you buy hemlock too. Now you still have the option of not buying food - just like people have the option of not buying a new computer and subsequently not being able to do their jobs (and subsequently not eating...), but you don't have the option of buying just food. You *must* buy hemlock to get food, and that's where we have a problem. That is leveraging a monopoly.
What makes it easy to get away with is the fact that the law states leveraging a monopoly is illegal if you use it to influence *other markets* and this is still the same market (both are operating systems and you're not gaining new customers), but the substance of the law is that you shouldn't limit consumer choice simply because you have a stranglehold on them, and that's what's happening here. In my food/hemlock analogy it's not a new market - you're selling consumables for sure, only people don't want to consume one and need to consume the other. There is no option other than to buy both. Now you're making more money entirely because people don't have a choice -- but it's not in a different market so it's not obviously illegal under current laws.
Then don't buy it, period. If you're so adamant about not touching Vista in any way/shape/form, and all manufacturers offer are systems with Vista pre-installed, then I guess you won't be purchasing a system then. That's the choice you have.
LOL. Just how delusional are you if you actually believe what you're saying? Did you read that through at all?
Just because she can't get XP pre-installed for no additional cost from a vendor of her choosing...
...does not mean that she can't find a different vendor or build her own machine with XP.
Right. Because everyone knows how to install an operating system. Now they can find vendors that will sell XP machines, but they're rare and often charge more or limit your options for non-vista machines. Maybe it's lack of drivers, not sure. The other option is to buy XP (after they've already bought Vista) and then pay somebody to install it for them (we can't assume they have friends that will do it for free. Plenty of people don't).
There are copies of XP out there - buy them! If Dell were her only method of getting a computer with XP, that would be one thing. But it's not - there are alternative options.
True, but every single option presented takes more time and money than it needs to and some involve buying both Vista and XP licenses, with no intent to use the Vista license. Now if people want to pony up for two versions of Windows on one machine then fine - they want to pony up. But when you make it *so* hard not to buy your product (Vista) that it's far beyond practical for the average person, you're bullying. I can't say there's a law against that, but common sense dictates there should be unless people have non-monopoly alternatives. For many cases (heavy reliance on 3rd party Windows-only apps) there are no such alternatives.
So how easy is it to install MySQL 5+ and PHP 5+? That seems like a sane enough expectation, right?
Not actually asking out of curiosity. It's actually really annoying and tedious. Yay macports! Yay dependencies! Yay command line! There really isn't a way to do it with a "click next now" installer on mac. Not yet. Just one reason I put a tick in the "Ubuntu did something better" column. I have plenty in the Windows and Mac ones, but Ubuntu (ok it really came from Debian) did this one seriously well. A few clicks and I have an Apache Mysql PHP ready test machine. The least and most predictable steps of any other OS. That means something to lots of people I know.
... an iPhone!
Sure. And the more general rule would be that people don't give a shit about their rights (or giving them up) if you can keep them comfortable in the present.
This works for nerds, but go tell your mom she needs to go get a music player that doesn't use DRM. See what reaction you get. I guarantee it will involve "would you just pick one for me?" eventually, and we all know you and I can't spend our whole days picking what mp3 player or media player app our friends and family should use.
It's pretty easy to lose our perspective on what sort of information can be expected of the average consumer, especially when it comes to computers. I think that the level of expertise your post would require of the average consumer in order to become realistic is far far too high and just not expectable.
I know tons of programmers that don't know what a DRM is. I know tons of doctors that couldn't tell you what a winamp is and why they should use it instead of an iTunes or Windows (tm!) brand Media Player!!! The list goes on.
In a fair and realistic world it wouldn't be long from now that ten billion page EULAs were ruled not good enough. When someone can't use your program without agreeing to 20,000,000 fine points outlined in your humongous essay this is an unrealistic expectation. A dialog saying "Do you agree?" with a bigass "Agree" (translated automatically in minds "ok"), or "Disagree" (translation: "cancel") buttons will get 99.999% of people to just say "whatever, Ok, next, next finish". So even if these companies spelled it out in clear and concise english just what their users could and couldn't do with their software (and they don't: they (probably for reasons of precision: not pointing fingers) use legalese to describe a bunch of techie topics, both of which are above most peoples' heads), it'd still be stupid to expect people to read and understand this "agreement". They know they're in over their heads, they just want to print their spreadsheet, and this is a new computer.
Which doesn't change the fact that the view on copyright and media sharing presented on /. is massively biased, and doesn't reflect the general consensus of the wider population, which is exactly what the OP was saying.
The general population is completely uninformed on the topic. That makes it a good thing that /. doesn't agree with their consensus, provided it doesn't, which you have yet to substantiate (in my experience it does).
Any solution that revolves around a tax on reproduction would require methods like DRM to stop reproduction that doesn't pay the tax, or are we going on the basis that people will not subvert a mandatory tax (even though they choose to ignore a mandatory cost of purchase)?
Naw. It's pretty simple. See them in concert? Pay for the concert. You're paying for a once in all eternity experience -- this is the one time that concert will happen. Pay for a shirt, or some other merch? Hey, you're motivated to pony up because you get something for it. I would honestly even pay for a CD from an artist I liked just so I know I have it around if an EMP magically destroyed all my data.
Why do you expect we would pay for more artists, when the reason for the majority of piracy at the moment is to either to avoid paying, to get a digital copy of something you already own or at best "to trial material that you may buy if you like it"? The % of piracy which is committed due to idealistic concerns is almost certainly statistically insignificant.
Huh. Well I think you hit the nail on the head there. Maybe not in the way you wanted. Why do most people not want to pay for music? Because they know it doesn't go to the artist. When you listen to a song you love, you don't mind supporting the person that brought it into the world. You want to. I know I do, and most people I discuss the topic with do too. Ok, look at churches - some guy talks for a little while and people give him 10% of their income. People don't mind paying for things that they feel feed their hearts, and music does that.
I have no problem pirating music from big label artists, because the labels aren't really giving me the music. If anything they water the inspiration down and generalize it. A small percentage goes to the artist that really generated the inspiration.
I would never steal an indie artist's stuff, but I guarantee I'll pirate it. Over and over. I will send it to all my friends, because it gets the word out about that band, and if it wasn't for me they'd have one less fan. Let me clarify: one less potential customer. Every time I interview an artist (I've interviewed a few when I worked for a magazine) they've said "on the record, don't steal my stuff. Off the record download all you want. I just want people to enjoy my music." A lot of the time artists have a philosophy that they would like to share with the world, free or not.
I WANT to support the person that makes music I love because I want them to make more, and I want to thank them for what they've made that changed my world in a good way. I've actually mailed money to a band that was on a major label because I wanted to support them but I knew their label would swallow all their share if I bought a CD. I want these bands to succeed. I want them to keep making music, and I understand they need support to do so. I'm not the only one.
But this is clear intent to murder! How blind is justice these days?! It's a well known fact that names correlate directly to real-world function every time and never have metaphoric, symbolic, or otherwise figurative contexts and thus should be court-admissible evidence.
I'm absolutely with you on the brain-dead authoring tool bit. Flash studio is a nightmare. Minor nitpick: I got Flash running well on FreeBSD back in... 2005? That was Flash 7 so maybe that's changed with 9 and 10 (the entire *nix world lost out on 8 because Macromedia was busy stagnating before being bought out).
Even if it's not "native" (and I don't know if it was back then, I really didn't know what I was doing), FreeBSD has a Linux emulation layer available that should be able to handle the Flash player with a pretty thin wrapper if any was even necessary.
Not true. I recall Flash 7 having been really usable. Flash 8 got skipped, which sucked, but Flash 9 was out long before Silverlight, and it had a great Linux port beforehand as well. Much better than the Flash 7 one, and I remember the Flash 7 one being not half bad. I wasn't even a real techie when the 7 port came out.
RFID is huge in the UK, and I've seen a lot of commercials for them in the US.
If it wasn't for the large amount of tourists London gets, you'd get the equivalent of the South's "You ain't from around here, is ya?" look if you go to a London retailer with a magstrip card.
A friend of mine went to one store and they literally had to look under the counter, dust their old mag reader off and hook it up to run his card.
Likely someone expendable in case stock holders deem it a bad thing and someone needs to be fired over it. Sure it's easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission, but it's even easier to fire a scapegoat and pay him to shut up than either.
"Huh. That's funny, this guy has a really unimpressive salary but a huge severance package."
And many of those amendments were to amdendments. So you have to spend hours per line figuring out what the law actually says now. And yes, I've seen them done this way.
Ah, so you know what it's like to debug COBOL?
So I'm sitting there working, and overhear the conversation between two faux hippies next to me.
faux hippie 1 I want to protest something.
faux hippie 2 Yeah, we should totally protest something! What should we protest?
fh1 I don't know, but my sociology professor said that if we wanted to protest something we could apply with the local college name... hidden so as not to tarnish its image board and if they approve they'll let us set up a booth in the commons and hand out flyers!!
fh2 That would be awesome!! Ok, ok... so what can we protest?
... 5 minutes of silence.
fh2 *I forget, but it was a lame attempt at a joke citing a stupid cause*
fh1 I'm serious!!
... 2 more minutes of silence
fh2 We need to smoke a bowl first. This is a lot of thinking.
fh1 Yeah. WAY too much thinking
...
I wish I was making this up. I seriously wish. This is almost verbatim, as it has been burned into my mind, leaving scars of cynicism that may never heal.
I think this mindset is an easy trap for people that work well with computers to fall into (I know I've caught myself falling for it at times). The law, much like a programming language, config file, or program is a defined set of rules and behavior for dealing with a situation.
It states in concise, as-specific-as-possible terms what to do in situation X. The problem for the technically inclined is, I think, that we can get caught up enough in the technicality of the laws that we forget the human element. There isn't really a "buffer overflow" here. You may be right by the letter of the law but there's room for the judge, prosecuting lawyer, or jury to fudge the lines when they see something they think is wrong.
Turing machines still aren't so hot at that part.
My favorite streetview scene would be this picture of my friend's car Sharky. This link brought to you by sharky, driving down the property value of its neighborhood since 2006.
As far as I can tell the problem doesn't lie in the language itself as much as the common practices and culture.
For example PHP supports prepared queries and the like, but it also supports the execution of bare strings as queries. In my experience most PHP programmers started back before prepared queries and just use the strings.
Another example: register_globals -- a short read, but a good one.
So it's not like any of these things are inherently security breaches, but they do lead to them without judicious development.
This is something that's always perplexed me. The only difference between a healthy economy and a depression is how fast money changes hands.
But the slower things are, the more stingy people get. The more stingy people get the slower things are.
It's an evil spiral. But if all (all, and that is key) people just decided to forget it all and loosen up the problem would dissolve. Journalism that sensationalizes a recession/depression is contributing to the problem. It's short term payoff (hey, it gets an audience for sure) but long term it hurts everyone including them.
Yeah, because a truly unbiased news source will never contradict itsself.
Nothing is "secure".
Security is just relative to how much incentive someone has to break in. "More secure" is believable (if unprovable, given the closed nature of Microsoft), but to claim it's truy "secure" is a farce.
I use Ubuntu almost exclusively (I occasionally use OSX), but let's not make overhyped underfactual claims. If Ubuntu makes it big there will be worms out there for it. Less worms than Windows? I think so, but there's just no way to prove that yet.
Microsoft doesn't have that with Ubuntu,
I think you've touched on something important here - Linux offers a different philosophy to its users. Linux users don't expect to pay for software licenses except as a rare exception.
OSX may be cutting into microsoft's market share, but it hasn't changed that mindset. I run Linux and OSX and I was surprised at how many OSX programs are "try for 30 days, $20-30 bucks to buy" type programs. The fact that I was surprised just highlighted how my mindset had been changed by open source software.
I have my opinions but I won't argue which is greater or worse: but that mindset is what would be freaking me out if I was Microsoft. They probably need to do what the RIAA should have done about file sharing: embrace the changing market with a new business model, don't fight it.
MMmm. You're likely to be modded troll, and you'll deserve it. I'll enjoy watching.
Nobody gives a fuck about Linux because Linux doesn't have a unified billion dollar marketing campaign behind it and because it didn't enter the market pre-installed on all PCs.
Whether Ubuntu is lower or higher quality than Windows isn't even an issue when it comes to market share. Even if Ubuntu could cure cancer it wouldn't matter if nobody knows about it and everyone's already using Windows + software that only works on Windows. That's why market share is an unfair metric.
Hell Budweiser is (as far as I know) the most popular beer in America but I don't know anyone with a clue that would argue it's the best beer in America.