Nope, sorry, Linux still has major issues with driver, upgrades breaking shit, and with the DE wars and pulseaudio being flaky. Instead it'll be Vista all over again where even SJVN said Vista's failure hurt Linux as people just bought XP instead. In case you didn't hear MSFT quietly boosted the EOL for ALL version of Win 7 from 2014 for the non business versions to 2020 so anybody who doesn't want Win 8 will be able to buy Win 7 no problem and it'll last longer than most keep their systems for. I know my customers have been buying up quads with plenty of upgrade-ability so they can just bypass Win 8 completely.

So sorry, it won't be enough for MSFT to put out a bad product, not with their long support cycles. Linux would have to make a major breakthrough but instead according to one of the big cheese at Red hat Linux desktop is instead in its death cries due to design mistakes made 20 years ago. and hey, guess what? He also said it needs a fricking driver ABI! Nice to see even the guys at RH know a bad design when they see one.

You wanna see how REAL people deal with Win 8? Well here you go and as a retailer that set up a Win 8 CP for customers to try I can say that is pretty typical...the only difference I saw was more frustration and cursing.

I'm sure Win 8 is GREAT for cell phones and tablets, along with touch screen PCs...the problem is that is less than 5% of MSFT's market. in fact if you take out POS and Kiosks last numbers I saw had touch enabled X86 units at less than 2% of the market.

So you take a giant shit on 95% of the market.,...for 5% of the market and around 2% of the touch screen X86 units because POS and Kiosks run their own custom software. yep, no chance of a flop at all here. BTW Win 8 DID help my business, i had a lot of folks that were sitting on the fence buy Win 7! Thanks MSFT! Oh and thanks again for the year and a half of extra money as I get paid to wipe it off like i did Vista, that was a GREAT time for me, Thanks MSFT!

And if netflix spent that 10 million again you'd have a TiVo and NOT a general purpose OS. And the OS simply can't not touch the decrypted stream because its the kernel that has to deal with caches, timings, and schedulers. If you have access to the kernel then by the very fact that for an OS to function (and for your video to not be a slideshow) the kernel HAS to have access to determine when the buffer, when to lower the priority of other tasks, and when additional resources is needed the DRM simply wouldn't hold.

Its like how many games and videos will use the Readyboost on my Win 7 system. there is NO worry about using that, even though it can be simply unplugged at any time, because the entire cache is encrypted and the user doesn't have the key...but the kernel does. if one could reprogram the kernel one could lie and simply tell it to buffer onto this SSD that is "encrypted" but in reality would be encrypted with say all zeroes for the key. Again there is no way for the DRM to know this without layers of checks that would slow the whole system to a crawl and even then it would only work on a tiny subset on Linux distros and even then in only certain releases because the amount of testing would be insane.

With Windows and OSX they only have one release every 3 or so years, only one version (all the higher versions of Windows are just supersets with the same core) and most importantly it restricts the user from the core files so that one can't simply substitute core files or the kernel after installation so those extra checks simply aren't needed.

If you look at the way kernel are built and behave what you are asking for simply can't be done on an open monolithic kernel, it just won't work. it MIGHT work on a microkernel, where nearly everything is done as a module on a higher level than the core but Linux isn't a microkernel and to design the system around that idea would basically mean starting over from scratch. I mean do you honestly think in the entire 20 years of Linux development that someone hasn't wanted to add a DRM module? The reason it hasn't been done isn't a question of money, its a question of design. Its like saying you could build an economy car that could pull the same load as a full size dualie pickup. Sure you could eventually bolt in a big enough motor, transmission, suspension, etc but by the time you are done its really not gonna have anything in common with an economy car is it? I bet if you wrote Linus himself he'd tell you the same thing, there just isn't a way to put protected path into Linux, it just can't be done.

Then you were one of the lucky ones friend, in most of the places I worked any new MBA that wanted to "make his mark" usually targeted IT because "it isn't making us a profit" while ignoring that if their workers are sitting on ass because the network is down or email fucked they are LOSING money by the minute.

Hell the reason i quit is my kids staged an actual intervention on me. I had raised them practically since birth because right after the second one was born my sis was diagnosed with a terminal illness and her husband couldn't deal and became a junkie so it was up to me. I was determined they'd never do without anything but one day I came in and they sat down in front of me and said "We already lost our mom this year, dad is long gone and grandma is sick...we can't lose you too. you look like death and you NEVER smile anymore, we don't care if we have to live on hot dogs and kool aid...just stop"

And that is what I did and while I maybe make half what I did before at least I'm happy and have color back in my skin, the constant stress of trying to keep a pile of PCs running with practically no budget and no help was just too much. The reason so many can't fill that job is they want someone who will work 24/7/365 for 30k and whose budget they will slash anytime an MBA wants a bonus and fuck over at the first opportunity, no thanks.

Except now you have the problem that many of the ISPs are overselling like mad and are not rolling out the lines to compensate. so unless you are one of the ones lucky enough to have your business in a FIOS area you could find your shit slowing to a crawl at random times.

I've dealt with plenty of businesses with business connections and frankly many of the ISP are so damned overloaded that no matter what you pay unless you have the $$$ to have private lines run to the backbone you WILL be looking at random slowdowns, which considering doing everything in the cloud will boost your line usage by 1000% any slowdowns are gonna seriously hurt.

This might work in EU and Asia, where 100Mbps full duplex is becoming common, but here in the USA the backbones like everything else is falling apart and just can't take the strain. personally I blame Wall street, which rewards short term thinking and punishes long term, but no matter what the cause if you are gonna be in the cloud you better have a shitload of bandwidth and in many areas of the USA that bandwidth simply isn't there 24/7/365.

But WHICH version of HTML? I've seen 5 different browsers load a page 5 different ways. sure it wasn't a BIG difference, but when you are using it for applications i imagine that difference WILL matter. that is how we ended up stuck with IE 6 for so many years ya know.

But considering I've had to do rollbacks on certain browsers because a customer couldn't get a certain FB app to work in the new version i have a feeling we'll be in for the same old headaches unless someone designs their apps for browsers from half a decade ago, because nobody truly supports the "standards" but just variants that can change with each release, which as I'm sure you know in browsers has been breakneck for everyone but IE.

I wonder why they can't ship it? I don't see why they couldn't just package the pieces in boxes and take a price hit, which I bet is what it REALLY comes down to, artificially keeping the prices high. But I'm sure people that like that cheese (can't stand the smell myself, it turns my stomach) would be happy to buy it, busted up or not.

And as I replied o another poster AMD has decided to go with Coreboot and has been using it since brazos so there is NO slippery slop here. if you don't like the Wintel UEFI you can buy AMD and use Coreboot which supports the 4 freedoms so if it doesn't do what you want you can simply download the source and reflash the chip.

I SERIOUSLY doubt MSFT is gonna risk another antitrust by blocking AMD systems from running Win 9, don't you? So this is simply a case of voting with your wallet, don't like UEFI and Secureboot? Buy AMD and go Coreboot. Its REALLY that simple. I've been building AMD exclusively for a couple of years now and I can tell you X86 is so overpowered that there isn't hardly any job a normal user can come up with that is gonna stress even a low end AMD dual and since they've opened their specs Linux users would be wise to support them anyway.

So no slope friend, just good old fashioned FUD, just not being cranked out by MSFT for once.

Uhhh...where have you been friend? All AMD machines are coming with Coreboot now, which is a open EFI style BIOS that you can download and modify to your heart's content.

So if UEFI truly bothers you simply buy AMD, which lets be honest the average user won't notice the difference between a Liano and a Sandy bridge anyway, they simply don't stress either one. I've been building AMD exclusively for the past two years and not a single complaint, not one.

If you are running Linux you'd be better off with AMD anyway, as they have opened the specs on all their hardware and even paid for devs to help the open driver guys get up to parity so if you truly want to support FOSS and care about UEFI you can just support AMD and Coreboot. It seems like a simple and easy way to vote with your wallet to me.

I ran the CP in my shop for nearly a month and that is what my customers said as well. in fact I've NEVER seen such a negative reaction, not even with Vista. with Vista they were curious about it but after 5 minutes with Win 8 the ONLY question I got asked is "But YOU will still be able to get me Win 7 if I need it, right?"

I have a feeling this is gonna make WinME look like XP, hell I wouldn't be surprised if this is the release that FINALLY gets the board to punt the sweaty monkey, its just a giant fail. Why oh why didn't they just improve Win 7 for the desktop and keep Metro for mobile devices? because it seriously sucks ass on the desktop and laptop. Even Gabe from valve said "Not just the worst Windows MSFT has ever come up with but the worst software PERIOD". When a guy that is making a fortune off your OS not only slams it but is seriously looking at going to all the trouble and expense of making a "Steambox" Linux to avoid it? you KNOW you're in trouble!