Digitimes has another reason for Windows 7 sales to be low.

PC replacement demand is not driven significantly by the consumer market, but rather enterprise and government purchases ... most enterprises in Europe and North America are expected to start planning annual purchasing budgets for the year in March and April of 2010, actual replacement demand is not expected to spur until the second half of the year.

Companies and government might buy computers next year, but they should already be buying orders placed in March and April of this year. There are already accounts of corporate rejection of Windows 7, so that OS is not likely to have anything to do with corporate buying and government won't be a big market because UAC still does not meet government security standards . Back in January, retailers at CES remembered being "burnt by Vista" and saw nothing to change their minds about the contracting PC market. Perhaps OEMs and retailers could deliver the gnu/linux netbooks and desktops that people actually want to buy.

Who decided that all story submissions would be tagged with user email addresses? You might as well demand and publish people's real names.

This is a breach of trust that will drive away long standing users such as myself. Email addresses were collected under the promise of never being published. Now I have the choice of submitting things as AC, publishing my email address or just giving up. I'm leaning towards giving up. Boycott Novell has been more fun anyway.

Despite all the hype, it is easy to predict that Windows 7 will go the same way Vista did. Vista was a failure in every way, so a pretty new face was made to sell the same buggy and customer hostile core and the Microsoft hype machine was turned on full blast. Now that Vista 7 is RTM, we no longer have to make predictions, we can simply watch the results. Here is a collection of Vista 7 failures found on YouTube. Enjoy what I found in a few minutes:

• Counter Strike Fail
• Power Management Fail Hibernate seems to be broken. Any power management working would be an improvement over XP or Vista but we should not expect such miracles from non free software.
• Cracking Video shows how to p0wn "activation." Soothing music welcomes you to the botnet.
• Good rundown of Windows 7 problems by seasoned IT professional who has yet to give up on Windows. He's not correct about being able to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7.

Update 1/2/2011 Real users have been forced to buy Vista 7 with their new computers for more than a year and it's Vista all over again. They tell the story better than I can.

Here are videos that have collected at YouTube over the last year. Windows 7 is no less a pig and no more secure than Vista was, everything the Microsoft boosters say is a lie. All of these videos were made after the RTM date and most after the October 22nd, 2009 shelf date. The best have bold dates.

2009

• 07/28 - an amazing Windows 7 failure video. Ten minutes long but fun the whole time.
• 09/11 - buggy dual monitor action. It's funny how my PIII can correctly do this kind of thing with composting using E16 and Debian. Multitouch on Windows 7 has had a lot of high profile failure too.
• 10/22 - Fails the day it was released to the public. Man forced to wipe Vista to install Windows 7 and ends up with two dead computers.
• 12/29 - Windows 7 speech recognition, impressive and completely worthless.
• 12/31 - What Windows 7 OEM "support" is really like, explained by a former Gateway support tech. The techical issue was product activation but the video is a profoundly sad portrait of betrayed US tech workers.

2010

• 01/03 - A gamer hates Windows 7 performance and broken Steam
• 01/05 - Another user abandons the Windows world over Vista/Windows 7.
• 01/15 - Another tech and XP fans tell his users to go from XP to Mac OSX because Windows 7 is so poor
• 01/18 - This poor user thinks Vista was better, how pathetic.
• 04/19 - Hardware does not work with Windows 7, user hates it.
• 07/10/2010 - Excellent critique by long term Windows user fed up with Vista/Window7. After fighting "updates" for two years, user runs to Mac and vows to never purchase Windows again.
• 07/29 - Windows 7 ruins a netbook and lots of other hardware, user can't use CDs and is very frustrated.
• 8/21 - Infuriating general flakeyness, poor user wants his XP back.
• 09/04 - Poor battery life of Windows 7 graphically illustrated.
• 09/30 - Windows 7 broken so that user can't log in.
• 10/04 - User complains about poor performance and incomplete Vista facelift for Window 7. Thinks it works a little faster with "classic" 1995 like menu bar.
• 10/10 - Fake AV demonstrated, shows that Windows 7 is still insecure and preyed on by all sorts. The demonstrator should have actually used virtual machine if he really needed Windows.
• 10/31 - Slow shutdown ruins someone's day.
• 12/10 - Great demonstration of CPU usage in Windows 7 vrs GNU/Linux.

2011

• 02/01 - Bugs and clown music
• 02/11 - Microsoft Anna voice tells you how annoying Windows 7 is
• 02/13 - Windows 7 ruins $1,000 computer so user is unable to play games, make videos and whatnot.
• 03/16 - Five crashes a month belies hype for this man. He wanted an improvement over Vista and 64 bit OS, but thinks Windows 7 is worse than Vista, which he also thought suckes. Wants to go Linux but has a few programs holding him back.

This ZDNet opinion piece has got to be the worst defense of unethical business practices I've see to date. Basically, the author admits M$ bribes and punishes OEMs and that's AOK with him. Let's preserve this gem:

a company gets twice as much from a PC with their brand on it as one they make for someone else. MSI needs this money to survive in a world where its Chinese partners can undercut them. The margin justifies MSIs existence.

It is also true that Linux cannot afford a presence in the channel. Its not how we roll. You cant invest in retailing if your product costs nothing. There is nothing to invest. Thats why Linux and open source depend on the Internet.

A monopolistic practice occurs when two sides are offering the same deal and one side gets all the business. But in this case both sides were not offering the same deal. Microsoft offered channel support, Linux a hearty handshake and rhetoric about freedom.

... What Linux needs to succeed is a way to offer more than was offered MSI. The question is, how would you structure a deal?

Well, that's a good question. What besides an OS that works and costs zero dollars does free software offer? OK, it can cost up to half what Windows costs if you get it customized and maintained by a company like Xandros. "Channel Support" is just a code word for exclusion of competition by bribes and threats, the very definition of anti-trust conspiracy. Lately, "Channel Support" has come at a terrible cost to companies like Asus. Retail partners like CompUSA, Circuit City and others who got themselves channel stuffed with Vista. This is what Li Chang, vice president of the Taipei Computer Association, was complaining about and it's worth a DOJ investigation. People don't want Windows, they want computers that work. Retailers and OEMs that don't deliver are going the way of other M$ partners and M$ themselves.

Ordinarily, I don't pick on language and style but the phrase, "how we roll," references to his parents' national origin bring special disgrace on ZDNet and the Wintel press. It's hard to tell if he's being cynical or if M$'s culture has really degenerated so far. This single article earns Dana a place in my Poison Pen Collection.

A government exists to protect it's citizens. Any government that doesn't, doesn't deserve to exist. Let's look at the US government.

In 2004 crime in the US cost its victims almost 16 billion dollars. [cite(pdf, table 82)]

The criminals behind the current financial crisis have cost the US *trillions* of dollars. Clearly, theft, fraud, and all other property crimes are insignificant in the face of this disaster, and our government did nothing to stop it, and is holding no one accountable. They have utterly failed in their responsibility to protect us.

The WTC attacks on 9/11/01 killed nearly 3000 Americans and caused losses reaching 1.7 trillion dollars in the stock market. [cite]
In response, Bush went to war with Iraq. This war has killed over 4500 Americans and will cost over 3.5 trillion dollars. [cite(pdf, p.1)] Not only did the US government fail to protect us, they harmed us worse than Bin Laden did.

Let's keep going. In 2007, 775,138 people were arrested for marijuana possession. In contrast, 597,447 were arrested for *all violent crimes combined. [cite]. As you can see, the US government victimizes more of its citizens than it protects.

So what's left to justify the existence of this government? Majority rule perhaps? Well, Barack Obama got 62.98 million votes in 2008. The voting age population in 2008 was 230,117,876.[cite] That's 27% of our population that voted for this president. That can in no way be interpreted as a mandate to rule.

From all these facts and figures, one conclusion is clear. The US government has no claim to legitimacy whatsoever.

Roger Grimes makes this startling admission of public perception:

Youll often read similar recommendations to dump Microsofts Internet Explorer (I work full-time for Microsoft) and use any other browser instead. To completely protect yourself, theyll advise moving off of Microsoft Windows all together.

He goes on to make some long winded excuses and insult users in a way that's completely torn apart in the comments. His readers sanely point out that Window's endless problems have been well demonstrated. What's interesting about this article is not the same old blame the user and "popularity" excuses, it's that M$ is no longer able to pretend to the general public that "computer experts" still trust Windows. They don't and neither does anyone else any more.

The venerable BBC is reporting that a survey of light emitted from white dwarfs showed that between 1% and 3% had material (such as silicon) falling into the star on a continuous basis, potential evidence of dead worlds and asteroids. On this basis, the authors of the study speculate that the same percentage of mainstream stars in the active part of their life will have rocky matter. This is not firm evidence of actual planetary formation, as asteroids would produce the same results, but it does give an upper bound and some idea of what a lower bound might be for planetary formation.

Aside from being a useful value for Drake's Equation, the rate of planetary formation would be valuable in understanding how solar systems develop and what sort of preconditions are required for an accretion disk of suitable material to form.

Because the test only looked for elements too heavy to have been formed in the star, we can rule out the observations being that of cometary debris.

On an earlier post, tqft (619476) kindly left an informative reply. That and some random articles on strong AI have had me thinking. It's Sunday, the coffee is hot, and I feel like jotting down a few thoughts.

A summarization of some other's thinking goes kind of like this: The mind is too complex to be implemented in silicon or by digital computers. Digital computers are deterministic, and thus could not be used to implement strong AI or intelligence.

That all sounds good, if you lived 500 years ago IMO, but when you consider information like that passed on by tqft (link above) you have to think more about it.

Yes, a simplistic linear program cannot imitate intelligence. Even a complex multi-threaded linear program cannot do so. This is easy enough to agree to. If it was not true we'd already have Strong AI among us.

What I see is that seemingly every day another discovery is made about the human brain, human physiology, and the body in general. Recently there was a discovery about a new enzyme in the human and rat brains. Yes, that changes how we need to study the brain with regard to genetically managed functions. We as a race have mapped various areas of the brain that are involved with specified functions. If you think of not a single computer but a group of them working in concert, each has only a small number of 'tasks' to work on. I don't mean try imitating the human mind on an IBM super computer but on a huge cluster of them.

Why so much HPC power? Simple: we are only now finding out the many ways in which neurons pass information and form data sets. Think of how we remember things, associate things, process information, process geophysical location, and many other things that most of us take for granted since it has been part of our lives since day one. Each of those processes needs to be managed, to be parsed and fed to various other processes. Nothing linear about it.

We know that memories act on each of us. The smell of burning weed will cause each of us to have a different memory brought immediately to mind. Why? It's not something we are programmed to do, so where does it come from? It comes from our total previous experiences and what we personally have marked as important among them. This puts subjectivity in our minds rather than objectivity or programmed response.

Strong AI researchers should be working on imitating parts of the brain by function, not by form. Imitating 10 billion neurons is not going to do it, imitating the function of that group of neurons one function at a time is... IMO.

Vast amounts of information must be processed in different ways at the same time. A quick example is that of a person seeing a picture of a plastic duck, one of those pull toy things with wheels on it.

Even as you read that, you had things come to mind. What were they? Some of us who surf the less wholesome parts of the Internet will think of /b/. Others will think of many other things. It is personal experience, not programming alone that create our existence as different, unique, and that of an intelligent being.

Today's computers do not have the ready ability to store and process that volume of data. Even we humans cannot store all of the experiences of humanity, thus we have different reactions to any stimulus. Social functions help us to have the same memories and reference points. This is a problem for which there is relatively no simple ready answer. Memories.

Some who argue that getting the intelligence of a dog or cat into silicon is a good start, but that still has the problem of storing and processing memories. Even that seems a distant goal. Memory that last no longer than 'power down' just won't do it. Creating software that can put together memories even for simple things, like the experience of being in the living room and moving to the kitchen, and understanding what 'outside' means will be difficult without a functioning brain.

I think we need to work on putting supercomputers in very small spaces. Maybe the size of a USB memory stick so you can plug many of them into a system to work together.

Seems a long way off

I enjoy gloating, so a pair of articles, 1 and 2, from the M$ employee known as Mini Microsoft were quite enjoyable. It sucks to work for a big dumb company that's being raped by greedy and stupid people at the top of the org chart. It must suck even more at a company like M$, which long ago became a parasitic cult, loathed when people have the inclination to care. Mini's observations come through rose colored glasses, but there's no mistaking the lack of motivation and useful leadership.

He's got mood swings the size of Steve Ballmer's ego. He swings from wishing everyone well to wanting people fired, now - damn it! Desperately, he seeks a simple solution for his broken company but realizes none is can be found. This is typical of the emotional rollercoaster employees of a failing company ride.

Do you think that the concept of shared sacrifice would work at Microsoft? If it still felt like a company driven by the employees, probably so. ... if we still felt like the drive and ambition of the front-line employees shaped the company and defined it, then helping one another would make sense. But the huge growth shattered that sense of employee ownership, abetted by the abysmal Microsoft stock performance we've had since, yes, Mr. Ballmer became CEO.

Microsoft gorged itself at the buffet bar of mediocre hires. And now we're bursting at the seams and deadlocked. We are stagnant right when we have two major product releases coming in for landing ... Zero attrition. Stagnation. Organizational constipation. Nothing good comes out of that but corporate sepsis.

He proposes a crazy plan where people can move freely in the company but crashes hard the very same day. He celebrates the fifth birthday of his blog by basically saying, "I was right, M$ is stupid and hopeless. All of my efforts have been wasted."

Soon to be five years ago, I started this blog up because I felt Microsoft was a train not only off-track but also heading straight for a cliff. We were massively expanding and incapable of dealing with the exponential complexity that a fast growing Microsoft required of us. It appeared as though we were growing for growth's sake and without a particular elegant plan in mind. [twitter note: most people think they were just buying revenue to keep their stock price from collapsing.] ...

... Early 2009, we publically reached that cliff and went flying off. ... all the publicity this blog has garnered and the awkward questions it forced to be asked, none of it helped to avoid that cliff we've been steaming towards the last five years. My reality check has been cashed.

Yes Mini, you were right. Non free software quit making sense about a decade ago. Everything M$ has done since then has been to perpetuate a lie to enrich top leadership at M$, broadcast media and other fraudulent companies. Vista is non free software's crowning achievement in treacherous and disfunctional computing. Re arranging the org chart won't make Windows 7 any better. The non free software development model will never be able to provide enough resources to code production to make it competitive. This is true even if M$ were to quit wasting billions on Zune, Xbox, advertising and executive toys like the world's larges private yacht and failed private resort towns. But they won't do that any more than they will divest NBC, CNBC or any of the rest of the news organizations bought by M$, the Gates Foundation or funded by M$'s massive budget. The lies will go on till the company falls over like Enron did. M$ has entered the same death spiral it created for so many more worthy companies over the years. M$'s demise alone won't bring the owners of those other companies justice. That will take many protracted lawsuits to strip the ill gotten wealth from those who think they have gotten away with it. A country of ruined worker bees will be more than happy to see it happen.

Four fireballs, glowing blue and orange, were visible last night over the skies of the Carolinas on the southeast coast of the United States, followed by the sound of an explosion described as being like thunder. Reports of hearing the noise were coming in from as far afield as Connecticut. There is currently no word from NASA or the USAF as to what it could be, but it seems improbable that anything non-nuclear the military could put up could be heard over that kind of distance. It therefore seems likely to be a very big meteorite.

The next question would be what type of meteorite. This is not an idle question. The one slamming into the Sudan recently was (a) extremely big at an estimated 80 tonnes, and (b) from the extremely rare F-class of asteroid. If this new meteorite is also from an F-class asteroid, then it is likely associated with the one that hit Sudan. This is important as it means we might want to be looking very closely for other fragments yet to hit.

The colours are interesting and allow us to limit what the composition could have been and therefore where it came from. We can deduce this because anything slamming through the atmosphere is basically undergoing a giant version of your basic chemistry "flame test" for substance identification. We simply need to look up what metals produce blue, and in so doing we see that cadmium does produce a blue/violet colour, with copper producing more of a blue/green.

Other metals also produce a blue glow and tables of these colours abound, but some are more likely in meteoric material than others. Cadmium exists in meteorites. Well, all elements do, if you find enough meteorites. but it exists in sufficient quantity that it could produce this sort of effect. (As noted in the chemmaster link, low concentrations can't be detected by this method, however this is going to be vastly worsened by the fact that this isn't a bunsen burner being used and the distance over which you're observing is extreme.)

Ok, what else do we know? The fireballs were also orange. Urelites, such as the Sudan impact, contain a great deal of calcium, which burns brick-red, not orange. This suggests we can rule out the same source, which in turn means we probably don't have to worry about being strafed the way Jupiter was with the Shoemaker-Levy comet (21 impacts).

What can we say about it, though? Well, provided the surviving fragments didn't fall into the ocean, it means every meteorite hunter on the planet will be scouring newspaper stories that might indicate where impacts occurred. Meteoric material is valuable and anything on a scale big enough to be heard across the entire east coast of the US is going to be worth looking for. It had split into four in the upper atmosphere, so you're probably looking at a few thousand fragments reaching ground level that would exceed a year's average pay.

Well, Mr. 4-digit UID asshat: I now know who you are. Let's just say my spies are everywhere. Oh, no, I'm not going to call you out. I want you to sweat it: does he really know or not? Because you don't want a war. You really don't want to pick a fight with me. I've been on this system at least as long as you have. Think about what that means. Or are you too stupid? Better watch your back, pal.

This is another open letter to Brad Smith, Microsoft's general legal counsel, in regards to their thinly veiled Linux patent threats and related lawsuit against TomTom.

(Disclaimer: As I am a nobody as far as Microsoft is concerned, I don't honestly expect Brad Smith or anyone at Microsoft to read this, and I don't care. Mostly I'm just blowing off steam and getting my beefs out in the open).

So it's come to this, is it? Suing over an ancient filesystem developed from the the 1970s (FAT) and the assorted ugly hackish kluges that have been necessary to keep the decrepit pile of garbage on life support? The one that only became a defacto standard because at one time its use was all but mandated by some older versions of Microsoft Windows that didn't support anything else? You know, the one originally developed for floppy disks?

Why don't you just stop your lawsuit now before you get laughed out of the courtroom? Seriously, you guys are starting to look more and more like your old sock puppet, The SCO Group? Remember them? Yeah, they're basically on life support now thanks to IBM, Novell and Red Hat practically bankrupting them. Guess they chose the wrong opponents to pick a fight with, huh?

So you thought maybe TomTom would roll over and play dead, eh? I guess they didn't. Especially now that they're backed by the Open Invention Network.

So you have $20 billion in the bank? Wanna watch that money continue to slowly dwindle whilst you fight the Linux community? You don't get it do you? A lot of people with serious cash have a vested interest interest in watching Linux succeed in dwindling your market share. You think others in the industry aren't prepared to enter the melee between you and TomTom? Wrong.

Give it up before you embarrass yourself. Seriously.

Sys-Con.tv is reporting that The Pirate Bay is currently offline due to massive DDoS attack:

I just got word that "someone" is currently DDoS'ing the thepiratebay.org. Even more interesting it may be a hijacked botnet causing the problem. More details as they come in.

Interesting. Now we'll know if the theories about the BitTorrent network experiencing difficulties if/when The Pirate Bay gets taken down are true.

In related news Wired is reporting that the prosecutor and Hollywood are demanding prison sentences for the four defendants in The Pirate Bay case.

Think SSDs are so much wickedly faster than top of the line mechanical drives like the Western Digital Velociraptor? Maybe not. Bill O'Brien has an article on his site debunking three common myths about solid state drives (SSDs):

Myth 1: A Solid State Disk will boot faster than mechanical hard drive.
This is true but it's partially smoke and mirrors as well. When SSDs first appeared, they were rather pathetic 8GB and 16GB devices. Not much fits in that size. Even at 32GB you'll still be somewhat cramped if you have hardware drivers and applications. But when you get to 64GB or 80GB or 128GB -and you have some room to feel confident about carrying the additional software you need around with you--you start to add time to the boot process.

Some of you may remember Bill O'Brien from his stint at Computer Shopper, where he co-wrote The Hard Edge with Alice Hill.

I've always wondered about things. What goes on in my head is far more strange than anything you are likely to find on the Internet most days. Things like how mammals came to have 5 digits for the most part. Yes, I know evolution explains it fairly simply but that does not explain how we almost all stuck with 5 digits and the body symmetry.

How math seems to evidence itself everywhere in nature. Perhaps it's just that math seems that way in explaining how nature is. I still wonder if there is a relationship here that has a cause elsewhere that we should be looking at.

Today I read an article about Moby Dick or rather, FTFA:

Relate this to MD5 hash collisions - which now seem inevitable, if rare, and it feels like I'm seeing a pattern. We used to think a trillion dollars was a lot, no longer. Large numbers like PI seemed huge, but perhaps they should not be thought of like that anymore.

I am not a statistician by any means, and advanced math hurts my head for the most part. Hopefully someone out there will point to a URL that explains more. As we analyze nature further we find ways to make materials that mimic nature and coincidentally include more math in their structure. Other advances are based on nature and math that could revolutionize how we as a species live on this planet.

I'm not linking to any of the stories describing things I've mentioned - sorry.

I was thinking the other night about AI. We attempt to mimic the human mind mostly and I don't think it's a perfect example of the 'I' part. Seems we have 2 brains with large connectivity between them. We have 5 senses and can do approximately 7 things at once. So 1,2,3,5, and 7 seem to be important numbers. Fibonacci excelled at the stuff that makes my brain hurt so I'm not going to analyze this much right now, but can you see any similarity to his math and these seemingly important numbers I've mentioned? It could be pure coincidence. It might be something else.

Does anyone have any URLs that explain more of this? Something that might stop me feeling a bit like Neo? I'd like to understand more and explore it more.

Thanks for any help anyone can direct my way.