Posts by westlake 159 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Apr 2010
>>Side benefit is all the security camera folks being driven insane. Rentacops running through the malls, looking for someone with a flaming hat.<<
Let's ignore for the moment the possibility that the camera has an IR filter.
Search Google Images for "shopping mall interiors." Count the number of people wearing hats. It might be a little different at Bass Pro.
Dare To Think: "Thus, can someone please let me know MS Office' unique advantage?"
The chances are quite good that every local high school. college, public library, or community center within easy driving distance from your home is offers courses in MS Office. Recruiting experienced MS Office workers is dead easy pretty much anywhere south of the Artic Circle.
Microsoft sells Office as part of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size. The geek still tends to think in terms of the stand-alone office suite.
The office manager doesn't want themes.
He wants mature tools for deployment and administration.
He wants to be able to place his full time staff, temps and senior volunteers at any available desk and be productive.
>>For what it's worth, the only way I can see Ubuntu succeeding is if they can persuade OEMs to offer Dual Windows 8/Ubuntu installations<<
The fundamental problem here --- the elephant in the room that no one ever talks about --- is the lack of compelling programs which are Linux only.
Which is perfectly evident in these official screen shots of the Ubuntu Software Center:
http://shop.canonical.com/index.php?cPath=19
Maintaining two operating systems. software libraries, and skill sets has all the appeal of root canal without general anesthesia.
You have to deliver a really big pay-off in return for all that pain and suffering.
>>Canonical have made a conscious decision to break with the main community of Linux users and go for the masses who don't really care as long as they can easily 'get stuff' - because that's where the money is.
The big flaw with this approach is that the only way most 'consumers' will see Linux is if they know someone willing to set it up for them. And those helpful people will tend to be the ones that Canonical have pissed off.<<
Ubuntu is one of the few Linux distributions with strong OEM support.
Canonical is well known for making practical concessions to the reality of big box retail like the licensing of H,264.
Google Product Search returns about 1,000 hits of interest to the Ubuntu novice. Amazon.com --- perhaps not surprisingly --- about the same. in a search of books alone.
If the FSF or a LUG has a significant off-campus presence in upstate New York, I've seen no sign of it in almost fifteen years.
I doubt I could attract a Linux geek to these premises if I baited the trap with a keg of beer and a girl from one of the border town strip clubs.
The point being that, if Linux adoption is dependent on personal contacts or the "kindness of strangers," it is doomed to failure.
FSF's lame-ass promotional stunts are comic gold.
Remember "Windows 7 Sins?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnrFHB3YSx0
Here are some screen shots of "Ubuntu's Software Center." http://shop.canonical.com/index.php?cPath=19
Looks a lot like the Windows Store doesn't it?
Now count the number of apps on display which are available for the Windows platform. Tell me what I am missing that would make the migration to Linux worthwhile.
I did the upgrade-in-place on the desktop to Windows 8 Pro Sunday.
Total cost: $16.10.
I have since been moving freely and comfortably between Metro, Media Center, the desktop and AMD's Android AppZone player.
I can't emphasize more that learning the new system has been easy and it has been fun.
I will probably gift myself with a touch mouse. If large screen multi-touch desktop hardware was within budget I would have no hesitation in going that route.
Belize has had an extradition treaty with the US for twelve years.
The Treaty provides for a broad range of cooperation in criminal matters. Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes....transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes....
GEORGE W. BUSH.
TREATY WITH BELIZE ON MUTUAL LEGAL ASSISTANCE IN CRIMINAL MATTERS
The Republican party is all but extinct in California. The Republican party in New York is more centrist then the party nationally but is in no great shape either.
No one is surprised when the Senator from Kansas votes wheat and corn.
The states where IP is of great economic significance --- production and distribution finance, balance of trade --- are the states where you can harvest the most popular and electoral votes.
These are also the states where the racial and cultural mix is most diverse and dynamic --- and that is by no means coincidental.
As much as copyright reform may excite the geek, it is not a big winner politically.
The geek tends to forget that Microsoft had an early and very successful entrant in the *NIX market for the PC.
>>In the late 1980s, Xenix was, according to The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System, "probably the most widespread version of the UNIX operating system, according to the number of machines on which it runs<<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
"You Can Afford A Ford"
The MSDOS and Windows PC entered the market as an office workhorse and home appliance.
The beige box built around a decent keyboard, an 80 column display, off-the-shelf PC hardware ---- and a price tag that wouldn't send the buyer into sticker shock.
It's a winning formula that allows hardware and software to evolve together and expand into new markets as the installed base grows and economies of scale kick in.
The Northside district of San Antonio has 112 schools and 100,000 students. The middle school and high school in the RFID badge pilot program 4,200 students.
https://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8&q=john+jay+high+school+(san+antonio)&fb=1&gl=us&hq=john+jay+high+school&hnear=0x865c58af04d00eaf:0x856e13b10a016bc,San+Antonio,+TX&cid=0,0,4692771767847319479&ei=RUi0ULfFEKTU0gHO2IGYDQ&ved=0CH4Q_BIwAA
The school is about three city blocks long.
It fronts on a four lane highway zoned mixed commercial and light industrial.
Five tennis courts, Two baseball fields. Two soccer fields. One football stadium.
John Jay is a STEM magnet school. Parents send their kids here expecting academic rigor, a favorable student-teacher ratio, a strict code of behavior, and a safe and secure environment. In a school this size that is quite a challenge,
In our state, even a parent doesn't have unrestricted access to a public school or freedom of movement within a public school during school hours.
>> I really hate the current trend in Reg comments for blaming the victims of a crime for bringing it upon themselves.<<
You see this all the time on Slashdot.
The geek at the core is technocratic not libertarian. He believes that his unique skills and training put him somehow above the law, and answerable to no one.
The numbers tell the story.
The Northside district in San Antonio has 112 schools and 100,000 students.
The middle school and high school in the RFID badge pilot program have 4,200 students.
In the adult world, where will you find a campus that size ---- whatever its purpose --- which doesn't restrict physical access and access to services through the use of keycards, badges, and so on?
John Jay is a STEM magnet school.
Parents are encouraged to enroll their kids with promises of small class sizes, a safe and secure environment, academic rigor and strong discipline.
It's been a winning formula for the Catholic School to generations.
>> Toshiba would only sell it with Windows because Microsoft had paid them and effectively stopped them from offering the machine in other formats; because they'd subsidised teh cost of the netbook.<<
Walmart spent the better part of a decade trying to explain Linux to its big box retail market.
Having no success whatever in this, the chain was reduced to running yellow-striped borders --- like a CSI crime scene tape --- around Linux info boxes warning its customers that these systems would not run software sold for the Windows OS.
Despite its enormous purchasing power, Walmart could not deliver a credible Linux PC that cost significantly less than its brand name Windows competitors.
The geek simply ignores economies of scale --- which is the real meaning of the Microsoft "Tax."
Walmart BTW sells tons of software, hardware and accessories to its Windows customers. The after-market in Windows is golden.
In 2012 Walmart.com offers over 300 flavors of the Windows laptop. While Toshiba remains in the business of delivering a product retailers are anxious to have in stock.
>> Microsoft don't make any PCs so it should be illegal for their OS to be paid for in the purchase price.
Bare Bones doesn't sell worth spit.
The PC as a "name branded" plug and play home appliance or workhorse office machine has been around for about 35 years now.
That makes it easy to sell and easy to support under warranty,
Linux is hopelessly fragmented. The geek 's next demand --- quite plausibly --- would be for an generic OS system ballot. Then a Linux distro ballot.
Then a UI ballot...
"Billy-Boi's Mommy was IBM Chairman John F. Akers executive secretary."
Grow up.
In 1975 Microsoft had revenues of $22,000.
In 1980, $7.5 million,
MBASIC was the glue that held the eight-bit world together. The first million-dollar bestseller in the new microcomputer market,
Microsoft had a full suite of programming languages ready to be ported to the 16 bit micro. MBASIC. FORTRAN. COBOL. PASCAL. In XENIX it had a plausible entrant in the *NIX OS market. It had the SoftCard for the Apple II --- which would make it the biggest distributer of CP/M.
If you were a small team in 1880 designing a workhorse PC for office use and positioning it as the natural upgrade path for business from CP/M, you had two logical places to go for system software and development tools ---- Digital Research and Microsoft.
If you were smart, you were talking to them both from Day 1.
It is not smearing Kildall to say that C/PM 86 was moving forward at a pace that could best be described as glacial.
That he had no clear notion of how the IBM PC would transform the market --- and how fast the IBM PC development team was prepared to move.
Gates promised to deliver a serviceable OS in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC. These were the words IBM needed to hear,
That pricing CP/M 86 at $240 was disastrous mistake when PC-DOS was available for $40 ---
and Gates had negotiated a non-exclusive deal with IBM that would make the MS-DOS PC a commercially viable product before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.
"Billy-Boi's Mommy was IBM Chairman John F. Akers executive secretary."
Who the hell cares?
Microsoft was selling microcomputer BASIC to the Fortune 500 in 1975.
MBASIC was the glue that held the all-but-hopelessly fragmented universe of the eight-bit micro together.
MBASIC was the first program for the micro to achieve a million dollars in sales.
Microsoft was selling a broad spectrum of programming languages for CP/M in 1980. The Z-80 Softcard for the Apple II was a huge success.
If you are designing a workhorse office machine in 1980 as the natural upgrade path for business from CP/M and want to launch with a full suite of development tools that will make ports to the new system dead easy where do you go?
If your answer isn't Microsoft, go to the back of the class.
"I do know that there was a DR copyright easter egg hidden in CP/M that be reproduced on the original IBM PC."
This sounds like an echo of the story ---- I am tempted to call it a hoax --- peddled by the sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle.
The Spectrum article makes it perfectly clear that in a 160 KB OS there is no way to conceal that Easter Egg.
"First, no one knows the secret command; Pournelle claims he wrote the command down but has never shown it to anyone. In addition, such a message would be easily seen by opening the binary files in a simple text editor unless the message was encrypted. CP/M had to fit on a floppy disk that held only 160 kilobytes; Kildall’s achievement was squeezing an entire operating system into such a small footprint. But it is difficult to imagine he could do this and also squeeze in an undetectable encryption routine."
"Take a big thing and make it smaller? I don't see that as an innovative use of something which already exists."
Carrier was building central air conditioning systems for theaters, hospitals and factories in the 1920s. But the installations were massive.
The industrial refrigerants used lethal when mishandled.
That is why you don't see residential air conditioning in common use until the 1950s.
You can't patent an idea, period.
What you can do is patent a solution to a particular problem. The transistor that replaces electro-mechanical or vacuum tube logic circuits.
"Carrying screeds of comments (i.e. human readable text within the object code) forward would only have happened if exact *copying* had taken place, and nobody ever alleged that, as far as I know."
Jerry Pournelle certainly did:
"Legend tells us Kildall himself buried a secret message in CP/M and that the message can also be found in MS-DOS.
In 2006, science fiction writer and technology reporter Jerry Pournelle said on “This Week in Tech,” an Internet radio show, that this secret command triggered the display of a copyright notice for DRI and Kildall’s full name. According to Pournelle, Kildall had demonstrated this command to him by typing it into DOS; it produced the notice and thus proved that DOS was copied from CP/M.
This story, circulated for years, has a few problems. First, no one knows the secret command; Pournelle claims he wrote the command down but has never shown it to anyone. In addition, such a message would be easily seen by opening the binary files in a simple text editor unless the message was encrypted. CP/M had to fit on a floppy disk that held only 160 kilobytes; Kildall’s achievement was squeezing an entire operating system into such a small footprint. But it is difficult to imagine he could do this and also squeeze in an undetectable encryption routine. And although we’re now in an era of hackers breaking into heavily secured computers, no one has ever cracked DOS to find this secret command.
But I set out to look for it anyway. I used a utility program developed at SAFE to extract strings of text from binary files. Not only did Kildall’s name not show up in any QDOS or MS-DOS text strings, it did not show up in CP/M either. The term “Digital Research” did appear in copyright notices in the CP/M binary files, but not in MS-DOS or QDOS binary files.
If Jerry Pournelle did indeed see a hidden message revealed by a secret command, it was not in MS-DOS"
http://m.spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/did-bill-gates-steal-the-heart-of-dos/0
>> I'm sorry, but any microsoft software is doomed for me. The better it is, the less I want to be tied into it.
That logic would doom any alternative software product or service to the category of second-rate.
Because as soon as it became competitive, to chose it would mean that you would locked in just as tight.
Microsoft sells solutions for clerical work that scale to an enterprise of any size.
Small gains in productivity in the office --- which are damn hard to come by --- can add up to real savings down the road.
>>The Romans had quite extensive vineyards around York so we've 'always' known it was a bit warmer back then.<<
It is by no means impossible to have a successful vineyard and produce quality table grapes and wines in a cool or cold climate.
Here you'll find an overview of US states, including Alaska:
<a href="http://www.vineyardsandwineries.com/ " a>Vineyards and Wineries</a>
So the question then becomes "What varieties were grown in Roman York and how they were managed?
Win RT will ship with a full version of MS Office Home & Student. The best selling software package in the OSX and PC markets.
That is not a bad place to begin.
The x86 Surface has both keyboard and stylus. That means it can function as a generously sized graphics tablet with 600 dpi resolution.
I can think of a lot of people who would like that combination in an ultralight mobile device,
>> Now, I know if it wasn't MS it would have been someone else,
Who?
The PC market of the late seventies and early eighties was fractured in a dozen different ways. Incompatible hardware. Incompatible software.
The two unifying forces were MBASIC (and other Microsoft programming languages) cross-platform --- and in the business world CP/M.
What Microsoft delivered to IBM was a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone. The Holy Grail for every hacker who wanted an entry into the 16 bit sweepstakes.
MSDOS at retail was $50. 1/5 the price of CP/M-86, It broke the tightly woven bond between OEM hardware and OEM software that is Apple's model to this day,
The MSDOS PC was a viable commercial product before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.
The modular design of the IBM PC and PC compatible meant that the tech would advance rapidly and that incremental upgrades of your system would be both attractive and affordable.
>>We have foreign flagged ships running through our waters all the time.
Not all of them actually stop in the US, but continue on their way to Canada or Mexico, etc.<<
This is the right of "innocent passage."
But the key words here are "innocent" and "passage." These are ships with a clearly defined destination. They are not permently stationed off-shore.
They are not trying to evade US labor laws.
The basics:
MARITIME ZONES AND BOUNDARIES
"Each coastal State may claim a territorial sea that extends seaward up to 12 nautical miles (nm) from its baselines. The coastal State exercises sovereignty over its territorial sea, the air space above it, and the seabed and subsoil beneath it. Foreign flag ships enjoy the right of innocent passage while transiting the territorial sea....
Each coastal State may claim a contiguous zone adjacent to and beyond its territorial sea that extends seaward up to 24 nm from its baselines. In its contiguous zone, a coastal State may exercise the control necessary to prevent the infringement of its customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations within its territory or territorial sea, and punish infringement of those laws and regulations committed within its territory or territorial sea.
In 1999, eleven years after President Reagan extended the U.S. territorial sea to 12 miles, President Clinton proclaimed contiguous zone extending from 12 to 24 nm offshore.
Each coastal State may claim an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) beyond and adjacent to its territorial sea that extends seaward up to 200 nm from its baselines... Within its EEZ, a coastal State has: (a) sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring, exploiting, conserving and managing natural resources, whether living or nonliving, of the seabed and subsoil and the superjacent waters and with regard to other activities for the economic exploitation and exploration of the zone, such as the production of energy from the water, currents and winds; (b) jurisdiction as provided for in international law with regard to the establishment and use of artificial islands, installations, and structures, marine scientific research, and the protection and preservation of the marine environment, and (c) other rights and duties provided for under international law.
The U.S. claimed a 200 nm EEZ in 1983 (Presidential Proclamation No. 5030 of March 10, 1983..."
http://www.gc.noaa.gov/gcil_maritime.html
Come hell or high water, your floating Utopia needs to remail on station or anchored at least 25 nm out and quite probably more than 200 nm out
That makes it a very risky and very expensive proposition.
>> The downside: lower, 720p resolution 3D content. The upshot: …''
PC World had this to say about passive 3D last September:
"Our own subjective comparisons echo DisplayMate's results. We tested several sets in our Active 3D vs. Passive 3D feature, and while you can certainly see the passive TVs' interlaced look staring at the screen without glasses, all the passive 3D TVs we've tested in-house (the LG 47LW5600, Vizio XVT650SV, and LG 47LW6500) produced a 3D image that looked every bit as detailed as their active-shutter counterparts."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/239599/do_passive_3d_tvs_trade_quality_for_comfort.html
http://www.displaymate.com/3D_TV_ShootOut_1.htm
"Windows only has two significant overheads, Hard disk space and RAM usage, neither of which are a deal breaker for me."
Windows 7 was released in 2009.
In 2012 the geek has yet to work his head around the notion that hardware resources like RAM are meant to be used and not hoarded.
>>1) On MS Windows there is still no central repository to conveniently and securely look for, install and update most applications.
Let's be honest here.
The Linux user needs a respository if he is not up to the challenge of compiling from source and resolving any remaining issues.
There is no such thing as a universal repository that works across all Linux distributions. That can be a beast for both the user and the developer.
There can and likely will be barriers to downloading and installing programs which aren't quite "free" enough to meet the geek's standard of purity.
The repository which offers the novice little more than a bare listing of applications and resources is pretty much useless.
_____
In his next breath, of course, the geek will whining about the "walled garden" of the app store and the platforms it serves.
>> 2) Due to the MS Windows architecture, most updates require reboots.
Not true in Windows 7.
Trust me on this one. Secunia's PSI tracks the OS and 191 programs on this machine, all up to date, and nary a reboot in sight.
_____
>> Windows is still teaming with malware dangers (see, e.g., the recent stuxnet, zeus, ramnit), so users are given the so called "anti-virus software" in lieu of proper security
The only Windows malware I see these days is the stuff which slips through Firefox's defenses and detected almost instantly by MSE.
It isn't often that malware can be traced back to a mainstream download site for Windows:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/03/malware-in-android-market-highlights-googles-vulnerability.ars
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/google-pulls-22-malicious-android-apps-to-prevent-fraudulent-charges.ars?comments=1&start=0#comments-bar
>>IIRC the US defense dept were using a server farm of PS3s running Linux for nuclear testing. Were also very popular with a few academics for the same reason.<<
The HTPC doesn't need the firmware upgrade.
What it needs is 2000 PS3 FATS + spares.
Hardware that has been out of production since 2009.
Hardware support for OtherOS was stripped from later versions of the PS2 because it added cost and complexity without a significant return in sales,
That the original PS3 was over-built and over-priced for its market was obvious from the beginning.
The PS3 Slim was predicted and inevitable.
I don't think anyone could have seriously believed that the PS3 based HTPC was going to be anything other than a short-term solution.
Something to get keep you going through the next round of budget cuts.
>>Surely if browser "usage" is the benchmark here them Firefox plus Adblock and/or NoScript will naturally have less results than Chrome and its umpteen adserver connections.<<
That depends on how many Firefox users have Adblock and NoScript installed and enabled.
The geek tends to assume that everyone else will customize their software the same way he does --- while most may never add or change a single thing.
"On the other hand, this is a BAD LAW which needs to be nullified. Too bad I wasn't on her jury pool."
The way jury nullification works in the real world is that the jury cuts some slack for the home town boy and hangs the outsider:
the nerd, the dork and the geek, among others.
Oregon doesn't requre a unaminous verdict even in a murder trial. (11/12) If you want to play the lone hold-out, get a job in dinner theater,
The judge does not want to exclude any relevant evidence.
He does not want to hear that your only defense to --- any --- charge is a witness who cannot be brought into court.
To re-imagine the printing press as a "license to libel" can do enormous damge to the innocent. That is why shield laws are construed narrowly.
Knowledge of the law has never been the geek's strength:
"The contiguous zone is a band of water extending from the outer edge of the territorial sea to up to 24 nautical miles (44 km; 28 mi) from the baseline, within which a state can exert limited control for the purpose of preventing or punishing "infringement of its customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations within its territory or territorial sea."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_waters
(Which puts your boat closer to 30 miles out than 10. With essentially all the expenses of maintaining a residential cruise ship.)
The US generally accepts these rules as a matter of custom but has never ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
That gives it the flexibility to act in its own national interest.
Which means that your permanant floating off shore crap game is going to be shut down faster than you can say "ICE."
>>When Apple pulls this kind of sh*t, half the world rears up on its hind legs, screaming for blood. What is it about droids that makes them so tolerant of fragmentation, the lack of upgrades, and this kind of DRM nonsense<<
The truth is that the iOS device attracts shoppers comfortable with Apple, the Kindle shoppers comfortable with Amazon and so on.
The overwhelming majority of buyers aren't interested in "rooting" their expensive high-tech gadgets.
Their vendor's app store is safe and convenient.
Most media purchases are ephemeral. You load the disk and movie plays. Tomorow it goes back to the Red Box.
That the media is DRM'd doesn't enter into your thinking.
>>This product clearly violates US Constitutional provisions against Self Incrimination
The root of the privilege in American constitutional law lies in the use of intimidation and torture to extract confessions and testimony on the witness stand.
You can be compelled to appear in a line-up. To surrender physical samples obtained through safe and ordinary means:
hair, blood, urine, fingerprints and so on.
>> One should always note that those stats vary a great deal.
It is true that published webstats vary.
But it is also true those most frequently quoted, Net Applications, W3Schools, and so on, have not been kind to Linux.
The trend lines within these sites for Linux are all pool table flat --- and that is more telling then the percentages. I think.
>>Exactly, if instead of one huge target we had a number of smaller ones, then these problems would all be far less serious... <<
Incompatible hardware. Incompatible software. More tightly bound together than OSX and the Mac are now.
There are no economies of scale.
Prices remain high, market penetration remains low. The introductory price of the C-64 was $1326, adjusted for inflation.
Companies enter and exit the business at a bewildering pace, leaving you high and dry. You had a computer.
Now you own a souvenir paperweight.
>> If only the various linux companies had enough money to buy some lawyers and challenge m$
In 2009 Samsung had revenues of $172 billion and 276,000 employees. It is one of the largest and most diverse industrial cartels on the planet.
Samsung accounts for 20% of South Korean exports.
"Samsung Electronics overtook Sony as one of the world's most popular consumer electronics brands in 2004 and 2005, and is now ranked #19 in the world overall. Behind Apple, Samsung is the world's second largest by volume producer of smart phones with a leading market share in the North America and Western Europe" [Wikipedia]
Samsung has money. It has engineering.
It is a tough-minded, throughly competent player in this business. So tell me why it is licensing Microsoft smartphone/tablet tech that you think has no value.
Tell me why you are putting all your chips on Google.
"The best way to get Linux on the desktop is to promote cross platform applications. Who cares what OS you're running when the apps you use are the same?"
Damn near every FOSS client application is ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app.
97% of the Moz Foundation's funding comes from the add-click. From its placement on the Windows home desktop.
Moz, it would seem, has written off the enterprise market.
Sun spent at first tens of millions - then hundreds of millions - of dollars trying to transform Star Office into a first-tier office suite.
Oracle took one look at OpenOffice.org and what it saw was a bottomless pit.
To Microsoft, MS Office is simply one component of an integrated office system [client-server-web-mobile] that scales to an enterprise of any size.
That said, the "Ribbon" has been a spectacular commercial success on both the Mac and PC platforms ---
and the geek in IT still can't fathom why.
The productivity of the clerical worker. Staffing. Training. Retention. These are the things that matter to the office manager. To senior management.
Net Applications had this to say about IE and Windows 7:
"Browser Wars"
Microsoft skipped XP support for Internet Explorer 9 in order to compete more effectively on Windows 7.
In July on Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9 hit 18.5% share worldwide and 24.8% in the United States.
There are indications that this strategy is working.
Although Internet Explorer lost usage share on XP, on Windows 7, Microsoft increased global usage share, going from 54.6% in June to 54.8% in July.
In the U.S., Internet Explorer share on Windows 7 grew 0.6% to 68.1%.
Microsoft has been pushing Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7 as the best browsing experience on Windows 7 because of IE9's use of hardware acceleration and integration with the Windows 7 user interface.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/
IE 9 and Win 7 have about the same market share in the states.
If I had to pick a loser in this round of the browser wars, it would be Firefox.
>>Computers are essentially the same things as they were when this chap cobbled together some spare parts at IBM to compete on a market they (IBM) had no interest on (That's why the original PC's were so crappy BTW)<<
The desktop systems that were built around custom hardware with limited expansion options are all dead.
Exit the Atari. The Amiga.
Exit the PPC Mac. Enter the x86 Hackintosh.
The IBM PC began as an affordable stand-alone office workhorse with a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone in PC-DOs that sold for $40.
CP/M 86 would have set you back $240. $586, adjusted for inflation. The MS-DOS PC was a commercially viable product before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.
MBASIC. MS COBOL. FORTRAN. Assembler. The programmer had a full suite of development tools available from Day 1.
Enhanced functionality is no further away than a plug-in card or chip. External 80 column display. External, built-like-a-tank, IBM keyboard.
The form factor couldn't be bettered. The upgrade path from the 8-bit PC and CP/M couldn't have been made easier or cheaper.
>>Judge Kiyo Matsumoto of the US District Court... in consultation with plaintiff's and defendants' counsel, has ordered "that all documents remain under seal with access only to counsel for the parties and the court."
How perfectly Cupertinian.<<
This is the judge taking control of the case. It cools things down. It keeps the parties focused. If you have no business here, leave.
>>It seems to me the reason why so many publications and their readers were taken in by this hoax was that it rang completely true.>>
It rang true for those who wanted - and needed - to believe it. It rings true even now, for those, like a certain El Reg editor, who want and need to believe it.
This is why the Secret Service becomes involved:
"Since 1984, the Secret Service's investigative responsibilities have expanded to include crimes that involve financial institution fraud, computer and telecommunications fraud, false identification documents, access device fraud, advance fee fraud, electronic funds transfers and money laundering as it relates to the agency's core violations."
http://www.secretservice.gov/investigations.shtml
"In 2006, the New York Electronic Crimes Task Force merged with the Newark Electronic Crimes Working Group to form the New York/New Jersey Electronic Crimes Task Force. This combined entity enhances cooperation between law enforcement and corporations in the greater New York and New Jersey areas to combat electronic crimes.
Investigations conducted by the U.S. Secret Service through the ECTFs include crimes such as:
Computer generated counterfeit currency
Bank fraud
Counterfeit checks
Credit card fraud
Virus and worm proliferation
Access device fraudTelecommunications fraud
Internet threats
Computer system intrusions and cyber-attacks
Phishing/spoofing
Assistance with internet related child pornography and exploitation
CD/DVD piracy
Terrorism/terrorist financing nexus
Identity theft "
http://www.secretservice.gov/ectf_newyork.shtml
>> Nice how MS have moved on to bullying the small fry.
General Dynamics is the fifth largest defense contractor in the world.
Guns. Tanks. Submarines.
But 34% of its revenues come from IT services and technologies. The first NSA certified smartphone, for example.
Obama's smartphone.
All this amd more you will find sketched out in the Wikipedia.
The geek can't argue that General Dynamics is a company without technical competence or financial resources.
It is not a company known for being easily pushed around.
If it sees a problem with Android --- it just might be because there - is - a problem with Android.
>>Let's hope you do not buy your iPhone THEN find out Apple license patents from Microsoft (either now or in the future).<<
Apple and Microsoft signed a peace treaty in 1997.
>>In 1997, five years after the lawsuit was decided, all lingering infringement questions against Microsoft regarding the Lisa and Macintosh GUI as well as Apple's "QuickTime piracy" lawsuit against Microsoft were settled in direct negotiations. Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer their default browser, to the detriment of Netscape. Microsoft agreed to continue developing Microsoft Office and other software for the Mac over the next five years. Microsoft also purchased $150 million of non-voting Apple stock, helping Apple in its financial struggles at the time. Both parties entered into a patent cross-licensing agreement.<<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation
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