M$ has already begged for and been helped by bailouts as documented here. Still, a direct cash infusion would be a nice parting gift from an administration that started by neutering the anti-trust judgment.

Today the same author quotes Goldman Sachs and Oppenheimer & Co, both of which think 10% layoffs are a great idea. If you work for M$ and read Slashdot, you are so fired.

Sweaty B has been trying to kill XP for the last two years. The Black Screen of Death has been ported back, just to make it more miserable. The problem is that Vista self destructs without any malicious help.

Minority Report featured billboards that uniquely identified people and "personalized" their contents and occasionally calling the police. A billboard in Japan that monitors people's faces for feedback is a crude prototype of this concept. The people with ESP powers who predicted crime were a plot device used to explore the real issues of experimental ethics, privacy and criminal justice.

Thanks for another example of dumping. You can point to them as often as you like, that won't change the real cost difference between Windows and free software nor will it make Windows itself competitive. We've seen how this practice is hurting M$'s bottom line, they can't keep it up forever but free software won't go away.

Walmart also has cheap drugs, but healthcare in the US ruins more people than outlawed drugs do now.

A computer science class that teaches kids to use Windows is like a guitar class that teaches kids to listen to Prince CDs. Schools should aim higher than that.

Don't worry, by the time they finish "upgrading" XP, Vista 7 will be teh fastest. Do you really think upgrades are going to be kind to the OS they have tried to kill for the last two years? Move to free software before your systems all crap out and you will be happier.

This has been going on forever, but Vista's failure ends it. You're talking to a guy who fell for the Win98 trick but not the XP trick. Every OS upgrade from M$ since 95 has been a bigger joke than the last. They beat better stuff from IBM and Apple with OEM and retail strong arming, but Vista is putting them all out of business.

Can you imagine a botnet of those?

I can.

if anyone's taking a bite out of Windows gaming, it's the Mac -- much as I don't want to admit it, Linux isn't going to make much of a dent.

You seem blisfully unaware that the number one selling game console of all time and it's healthy decendent both ran GNU/Linux. Ever heard of Play Station? There's going to be plenty more where that came from because GNU/Linux is about as close a ubiquitous platform as you can get. A freaking ARM based Beagle board has accelerated graphics good enough for gaming these days. From cell phone to supercomputer, GNU/Linux runs it all. Windows has got .... Zune .... Xbox .... Windows all of it is the same broken suck because Ballmer's got his greedy palms on it.

This is not a tech industry lawsuit, it's a customer lawsuit. It's true that Intel, HP and Dell were pissed off, but they did not launch this thing. See the fine PDF for more. Industry lawsuits will come later as shareholders for CompUSA, Circuit City, Best Buy and many others sue M$ for the Vista Failure channel stuffing that put them out of business.

"Accumulated garbage data" spoils them both.

Who reads articles? Looks. Oh yeah, these are independent studdies by different people who reach the same conclusions by different means. That's a good indicator of truth. If there was a fix for Visat, it would have come out in it's six years of development. If you want to be charitable and blame hardware vendors, it should work by now but it does not. Vista still requires extraordiary hardware for ordinary tasks. This is not going to be fixed because the idiots at M$ believe in DRM and owning your computer for data rape.

but only on slashdot. It's like goats.ex or something but funnier because of what it says about M$.

It's funny to see the current M$ party line as, "incompetent IT people are going to install Vista so get used to it." Is that the best lie they can come up with? Wow! Shovel another $300 million into the PR pit.