Nyre may simply have desired to support the Feds on a particular issue.

Or maybe the feds trained someone from the MPAA to use twitter, and then thought "I know a cool way to turn to major anti-establishment groups against one another."

Of course, this is assuming that no-one from the MPAA is smart enough to learn how to use twitter for themselves. Which is doing them a massive disservice, I'm sure...

I didn't mean it as a knock on Linux. The device I was mentioning explicitly presented a watered down OS that could only check mail and internet. Anything else you had to but into a "real" OS whether windows or a *nix variant.

Ah, fair enough then. I didn't pick up on that context at all.

Regardless in my mind if the majority of people end up single or dual booting these boxes Linux hasn't one. It is shipping the box and people not feeling the need to install a different OS that will make it a win for Linux.

A very interesting opinion and one to which you are, of course, entitled.

Personally, I think we'd get a more useful metric if the criteria for "winning" wasn't skewed quite so asymmetrically towards what you think of as the "real" OS. But I suppose the question then becomes "useful toward what end?"

Not that it really matters; the absence of data makes the question moot. All we can do is compare opinions, and since we've already done that with adequate clarity, all that's really left is to agree to disagree.

Really how many? Going from the 90%+ OS is always going to be more.

Of course it is. That's exactly my point.

It does happen but I know of very few people other than *nix admins at an office that completely blast away their Win OS. They dual boot and often Win is the primary OS whenever it is time to "get something done"

Or they're like me and use Linux for the serious work and windows for the odd game that's too much trouble to keep working under wine. I doubt either of us has enough data to draw conclusions about how that percentage breaks down,

It doesn't alter my point though: You can't discount linux machines supposedly turned into windows boxes without looking at the converse case of windows boxes that have come to run Linux. And by your own admission, the percentages work in Linux' favour in that calculation.

Incidentally, conceding for the moment at a number of those linux boxes are destined to run windows, why assume that none of them will be dual boot? Anyone techie enough to do the reinstall is surely just as likely to want both OSes as your anecdotal friends

Speaking of "no Microsoft tax" I'm curious how many of those 5% of computers will be running windows in less than a year? People will go with the cheap option then get a pirated copy of windows.

Of course, if you're going to make that calculation, you should also consider the number of windows PCs that get wiped and replaced with legitimate copies of Linux.

I bet I know which number is bigger :)

I was in university (and poor) when Napster became popular and I stopped paying for music. I have money now but the habit kind of stuck and I haven't paid for music since; I know many people who are the same way. I'm pretty sure that P2P has cost the music industry hundreds of dollars from me personally over the last 14 years.

I know how you feel. I remember when I decided that records were basically overpriced crap and that I didn't feel like spending any more money on them. And I haven't. Except for the odd requested present, anyway.

Interesting point here is that this happened in the late 80s for me. Long before the advent of filesharing. I didn't need P2P to persuade me to stop buying, and the habit of not buying stuck so much that I don't d/l music either.

So in my case, it's the music industry that cost the music industry hundreds of dollars from me personally. Maybe P2P wasn't the pivotal factor in your own disenchantment either?

Here today, I think I'd consider myself to be still alive at any point in the future where someone exists who claims to be sitting on the top of my entire history of moments of conciousness, and this current moment of conciousness that I'm experiencing.

We can test that!

I hereby claim to be sitting on top of RichardJenkins' entire history of moments of consciousness, including the one referenced in the quoted paragraph above!

Still alive, Richard? I guess the definition works then :)

In my opinion, those are not "flops". Microsoft apparently deliberately releases bad versions to make more money.

That would explain why TFA reads so much like it's preparing the ground for a massive damage limitations exercise.

How is it wrong to raise the price?

Well, I suppose that depends on how you go about increasing the prices.

I mean, if all Shilling wanted was to raise the price he could have simply, you know, charged more money for the product and then we'd not be having this silly conversation.

It'd be a real shame if someone were to report you to Homeland Security for supporting what they now consider to be a terrorist group.

Yeah, it'd be a great shame if that whole right to free speech thing was so undervalued that you were unable to put forth the viewpoint of a protest group without being reported as a possible terrorist.

And yes, I know you were trolling. But I thought the point was worth making anyway.

I do support FOSS and I do support copyright. I'm not sure I agree that you *have* to be both though.

I know exactly what you mean. To my way of thinking, arguing to keep copyright becuase it drives the GPL is like refusing to eradicate malaria because it saves so many lives.

I'm pro-vaccine and anti-malaria, and I'm pro-GPL and anti-copyright. I don't think there's any contradiction in either.

"As any online discussion grows longer, the probability of someone mentioning Microsoft in a derogatory manner approaches 1."

I think we can generalise it a bit better than that.

"As any online discussion grows longer, the probability of someone mentioning anyone or anything in a derogatory manner approaches 1."

It might also make sense to add a "Slashdot Corollary" under which Microsoft and Apple are interchangeable.

And just those two and no others, because no-one ever says mean things about (let's say) Google or the FSF on this forum. Or maybe a better corollary might be "The better known the person or organization, the faster the probability approaches unity".

I find the same hilarity in people bitching and moaning about Unity. Again, nearly ALL of my time is spent in an application. I only interface with Unity to start the damn thing...

Personally, I derive vast amusement from those all too common cases where people whinge and whine about other people expressing their opinions in a public forum.

Sometimes they even try and disguise their bitching and moaning as amusement. I find that even more hillarious!

The question is: How is publishing code as open source of advantage to you?

The question is: What are you selling? Hardware or software?

If the software is the product, then close it obviously. There's money to be had from support contracts, but that's more of a pathway for monetising an existing free software project than for setting up a new business.

If the hardware is the product, then open the software. In doing so you effectively recruit every university doing research in the field, since they will all have tweaks and improvements. They publish their research, along with the software used (copyleft is good for that) and you either modify your own default software, or add the code to a repository for special purpose software. Your code is continuously improved and supports an increasingly wide range of applications.

Your competitor can adapt the results to their product as well, of course, but first of all they've got to port it. Meanwhile the number of applications for your sensor with custom software from third parties is going to grow and grow...

... probably. I don't want to sound too dogmatic when I only have a sketchy outline of the situation. But that's the way I'd look at it.