If you take the sales figures from the US, assume that all non-Apple units are shipped with Windows, you get:

Apple: +28.5%

Windows: 15380497 down to 13627274 = -12.9%

Obviously it is NOT just the competition from tablets and smartphones. (if it were, Apple would see similar declines)

It is two things:

- Windows 8
- Microsofts reluctance to allow Windows 7 on new PCs

When Microsoft inflicted Vista, almost all PC-makers just ignored it and continued with XP, but now things are different, it is pretty hard to get a Windows-PC without Windows 8 today. You seem to need some special deal with Microsoft.

It looks like we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Windows-hegemony. While Windows will hold the largest marketshare on the desktop for some time, the alternatives will grow into "too large to ignore" territory.

The whole point of affirmative action is to *NOT* hire the best candidate.

a "complete 180"? What are you talking about?

Obama was secretive right from the start in his campaign. He closed down all documentation from his supposed studies in university. (Which proves that he has pretty powerful forces behind him - not every candidate can get such kind of secrecy.) What does the public know about Obama? Not much. All his supposed friends he describes in his book turned out to be fictitious, nobody has ever seen him in the universities he supposedly went, nobody knows why he used two different social security numbers, etc.

His presidency is just a continuation of all that secrecy.

The only thing I know about him is that he turned up and the media told the American people to vote for him which they duly did.

I'm sure you can find a hundred non-controversial examples.

Yeah... We all know that evolution only applies to non-controversial things, i.e. everything except the brain.

The US government already directly controls more than 50 cents on every dollar. And this does not include several bookshelves of regulations and laws that gives the government indirect control over the rest.

How can anybody be so brainwashed to call this system "free-market hands-off ideology"?

Hmmm, maybe you should search on youtube for "knockout game" and/or "flash mob robbery".

Don't worry, as soon as the European and American aid dries up (currently about half of all sub-saharan Africans are dependent on food aid) Africa will revert back to the pre-colonial times. As the economic crisis will harden in the next years, this is just a matter of time.

And as we have all learned in school, colonialism was a really bad thing, therefore the coming decolonialization (not what we saw in the 1960's, but the real thing that will destroy any remnant of evil western civilization in these lands) will be a Good Thing.

The great irony is that all the phony starvation (Ethiopia doubled it's population during the "famine" in the 1980s - compare that to a real famine for example the Irish potato famine in the 19th century where the population was cut in half) was televized all over the world, but the real thing probably won't - because it's no longer profitable to collect cash for a famine in an economic depression.

5 years was ancient in the 1990s, but in the 2010s it's rather "good enough" for anything that is commonly done with MS Office.

But not because "XP needs to be wiped out", but because that will be the great chance for LibreOffice and the odt Format.

Mod parent up, this is great.

And what a coincidence, in only a few decades after that statement was made, Athens lost their independence for over 2000 years. (Athens history crashcourse: First Macedonians subdued Athens, then the Romans, then the Turks. Under the Turks Athens turned into a small village with less than 10.000 inhabitants. What is now Athens has been created before and after Turkish rule.)

In the USA there are enough "disadvantaged" lumpen proletariat to start deadly riots in every city of or above medium size.

Abolish the welfare-checks and they will starve in the next winter.

Or cut off the water, no city can survive for longer than a week without a water-supply from somewhere else.

Huh? I guess you meant "and yet it made many people rich exactly as planned."

The whole reason we have a government is to give taxpayer money to well-connected friends of politicians.

Nonsense, the Soviet Union was dependent on Western handouts pretty much from the start. First the bankers financed the revolution, then investors were lured in by Lenin's NEP (New Economic Policy), then Stalin got huge military aid during the war and after the war, they constantly needed grain imports to keep their population from starving. (And that in a country that was the traditional food-exporter in the 19th century.)

In the 1980s, Poland and East Germany were only kept afloat by massive Western loans. Also despite their glorious education system, they constantly needed Westernn engineers to get anything done (my father was several times in Bukarest and Moscow during the "cold war" like thousands of engineers from Western Europe).

There were two factors that kept the system going for 70 years: Western help and huge natural ressources (which of course were also traded with the West).

To call that a "cold war" is just nonsense, btw. You don't trade with your enemy during a war. You don't give loans to an enemy during a war.

Nonsense, the same (even worse) fracturing of the x86/AMD64-hardware platform hasn't prevented it from dominating the desktop.

The article actually makes good points: Too short support periods, missing applications and drivers. These are in my opinion the only major problems that Linux has.