Do you think Microsoft will make Linux illegal?

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Orwell
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09 Jul 2010, 12:14 am

mcg wrote:
My point was that other factors the same, UNIX is not inherently more suited to scientific computing.

Quite possibly true. At the moment, UNIX is certainly more suited to the type of high-throughput data analysis that scientists need, but I'm sure the Windows NT platform is also capable of doing those things if it were designed to do so. Similarly, Windows is not inherently more suited to gaming.


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mcg
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09 Jul 2010, 12:38 am

Indeed. One thing about UNIX is that the vast amount of different implementations pretty much force programmers to follow the spec if they want their code to be able to run on any UNIX implementation. Additionally, UNIX programmers tend to not make stupid assumptions like that all their users will be able to run their code as root (which you shouldn't do even if you can). A lot of (bad) Microsoft programmers have bad habits that make it impossible to run their code in a securely-configured environment.



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09 Jul 2010, 1:16 am

Standards are a very important thing. There is no technical reason why Windows could not adhere to open, published standards (even while remaining proprietary) but it seems unlikely that Microsoft will move in that direction. Poor security practice is quite often a user-level problem, but UNIX is set up in a way where such poor practices are made more difficult.


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09 Jul 2010, 2:56 am

mcg wrote:
Yeah, it wouldn't really be a smart business decision for Microsoft to try to make windows available for the vast amount of platforms out there.


Ichinin says hes done. I guess thats conceding defeat, but I am positive hes still reading.

What you said, mcg, is the coming problem for windows.

The desktop market is shrinking in the face of the laptop market. Meanwhile, the netbooks ate into the laptops from the other side, but only for a while. Now the phones are edging into the netbooks. You might also recall that basically vanished technology the PDA. It crunched between laptops and phones, and has just about completely disappeared by the time of the netbooks.

The trend of course is that the machines are all getting smaller and moving away from the intel style hardware and windows hasnt matured on anything but x86 technology. It doesnt make sense for MS to develop for a dozen different hardware sets, and the growth just isnt there(as I will show).

For example, the only places MS plays a noticeable part is in the phones and xbox. The MS phones are a distant third runner to iphone and android, with little chance that will change. The phones(baring also-ran windows) of course use opengl.

On the console market xbox does ok, but its certainly not first. Things like wii eat it for lunch, market wise. Yeah, wii supports... opengl. PS3? A form of opengl. So as computing, pervasive computing, moves away from x86 machines, expect to see more opengl based games. More portability. Opengl is all over the console market, so as OSX grows, you'll start seeing many more games.

What Microsoft counts on is that people will iterate to the next version of windows. So whatever windows 8 is, its going to have to be a radically different package which means MS would then be in the position of chasing everyone else. New research, new development, and many many bugs.

But the looming problem(from the MS viewpoint) with the intel style architecture is that maximum memory has grown much faster than the ability of operating systems(read windows) to use it. It used to be that they could bump the requirements for ram to force people to trade up in machines. But now they cant bloat fast enough. They also use a new directx as a carrot to get the gamers moving. Hence, directx9 only on xp, dx10 only on vista, and now seven introduces dx11.

But as is apparent, the hardware is making a shift. But windows and direct x were never designed for anything but x86/64 technology. What little headway has been made into the phone market has failed to match the competition.

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

You can see by this chart(follow the link) that xp still commands almost half the market. Vista never reached 20%, and seven, after a year, is only just catching vista. It only has 1/3 the installs that xp has. On the other hand, OSX has half as many users as seven. Even geeky linux is closing in on 3%.

On the browser side, you can see that explorer is doing a slow decline to firefox. Firefox users tend to adopt new versions faster, and even though explorer 6 is officially dead, some people just wont give it up. A nice colorful graphic in the link above shows it well. If average people just wanted their explorer, it would match relatively closely to the totals of the windows versions... about 82%. But its half that, speaking loudly of the untruth of average people not being willing to adopt new things.

The view trends button in the upper right on that page http://www.w3counter.com/trends will show the trend over 3 years. Explorer is dropping at about the same rate as firefox rises. Its fairly simple reasoning that those explorer folks are crossing over to the other browsers.

Whats shocking though, is if you add the windows numbers up. From a lifetime high of around 97%, windows has fallen to 82% or so, a plummet of 15% or so. Neither vista nor seven seem to have prevented this. New versions of windows explorer steal market from the old windows browser and lose it to the open source ones in turn.

What then, is the magic at work here? Why, despite Ichinin's fervent desire that windows reign supreme, is he wrong?

Note that this site doesnt accurately track the use of the smart phones. They tend to be used to access social media, while w3 is tracking web site browsing. Blogs and the like, and not twitter, email or facebook.


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Orwell
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09 Jul 2010, 7:41 am

Fuzzy wrote:
On the console market xbox does ok, but its certainly not first. Things like wii eat it for lunch, market wise. Yeah, wii supports... opengl. PS3? A form of opengl. So as computing, pervasive computing, moves away from x86 machines, expect to see more opengl based games. More portability. Opengl is all over the console market, so as OSX grows, you'll start seeing many more games.

Plus Steam's decision to start supporting OS X and Linux (and their commitment to simultaneous release on all platforms for all future games) ensures that Opengl is going to become much more prevalent in the desktop gaming market. If you want to write for all platforms, why not just use the cross-platform OpenGL instead of bothering with the restricted DirectX system? This will break the dependency on Windows for games.


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JakeGrover
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09 Jul 2010, 2:25 pm

Not entirely, but, I think they'll still keep trying. Microsoft is falling. Go APPLE!



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10 Jul 2010, 1:02 am

IMHO, Apple is worse than Microsoft. They lock you in to their products and restrict what you can do with your computer. The iPhone is proof that you're not allowed to see how it works or put something else on it. They also censors applications from it and books.



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10 Jul 2010, 7:48 am

I find it funny how nintendo can also censor content that gets released on their platform, and yet everyone still only remembers what Apple did.



Fuzzy
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10 Jul 2010, 11:12 am

MDM wrote:
I find it funny how nintendo can also censor content that gets released on their platform, and yet everyone still only remembers what Apple did.


There is a consensus that Nintendo is available for children. That adults might enjoy it as well is secondary. A computer on the other hand, is an adult tool, and the fun and games are supplementary.


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10 Jul 2010, 3:10 pm

Apple doesn't censor their computers - just their mobile devices. Which although people like to think as having the functionality of an actual computer, I would argue it is much closer to a console than a desktop.



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11 Jul 2010, 10:47 am

BigK wrote:
Orwell wrote:
But Linux is most certainly superior to Windows in every way (except perhaps gaming...


Now, you see this is why people think you are crazy. :D

If it is better for you then I am happy for you. When it is better for the other 99.9% of users maybe they'll install it.


Actually, Linux has a 1% market share, not a .1% market share.


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11 Jul 2010, 10:51 am

Jookia wrote:
IMHO, Apple is worse than Microsoft. They lock you in to their products and restrict what you can do with your computer. The iPhone is proof that you're not allowed to see how it works or put something else on it. They also censors applications from it and books.


Um, ever heard of .NET being incompatible with everything but Windows? Ever heard of Microsoft deliberately making Internet Exploder not CSS-compliant to try to lock people into using it? And OS's restrict what you can do with your computer. For instance, you can't run Cocoa applications in Windows.

All of these "Apple is worse than Microsoft" arguments are unbelievably stupid. There is nothing Apple has done that MS hasn't also done in some way, and most of the things people list as reasons are pretty trivial compared to what Microsoft does (eliminating competition, making competing software illegal, suing anyone who competes with them, copying everyone else's ideas, deliberately making their software incompatible to reinforce their monopoly, etc., etc., etc.).


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eagletalon86
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11 Jul 2010, 11:22 am

I don't think Microsoft would pursue it unless Linux posed a threat to their market share, and from the looks of things they don't. More people recognize the Windows brand over Linux, more people expect it to be installed on their brand new $1000 piece of crap machine they bought from some big name retailer. It's going to take more than a flashy user friendly interface to turn Linux into a consumer standard.



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11 Jul 2010, 1:20 pm

LordoftheMonkeys wrote:
Um, ever heard of .NET being incompatible with everything but Windows? Ever heard of Microsoft deliberately making Internet Exploder not CSS-compliant to try to lock people into using it? And OS's restrict what you can do with your computer. For instance, you can't run Cocoa applications in Windows.


1) .Net isn't incompatible with everything but Windows. The manufacturer of Windows has built .Net for its operating system. Other vendors have not built the same features into their OS or have built them using their own proprietary standards. C# is a standardized language (ECMA and ISO according to Wikipedia). So why aren't the other vendors followig this standard? I suspect it's because all vendors play stupid games of creating some standards so their fanboys can argue that the other vendors aren't standards compliant.

2) I'd like to see a source for your CSS comment. IE "won the browser wars" back in the 90s, and now has the burden of backwards compatibility vs CSS standardization. I believe IE8 is much better in this regard - they try to be CSS compliant but if they detect certain markup - it offers to show the page in compatibility view. What more do you want? I develop web pages for IE and Firefox and I find them both to be just about as horrible as one another when it comes to CSS standardization, speed, frustration, etc.


Quote:
All of these "Apple is worse than Microsoft" arguments are unbelievably stupid. There is nothing Apple has done that MS hasn't also done in some way, and most of the things people list as reasons are pretty trivial compared to what Microsoft does (eliminating competition, making competing software illegal, suing anyone who competes with them, copying everyone else's ideas, deliberately making their software incompatible to reinforce their monopoly, etc., etc., etc.).


I would agree with the first sentence - but I would expand it to the majority of the arguments made in this thread. It seems to me that other companies have done the things you're referencing. It seems to me that your real argument is with the power the goverment gives to corporations and the things the goverment allows them to do. You do realize that the government regulates Microsoft to a much higher degree than the other companies mentioned in this thread, don't you? Apple, Google, and other companies are free to add whatever features to their competing operating systems whereas Microsoft is not.

It's been 8 years since the antitrust settlement was approved. If you don't like how the goverment is handling its regulatory duty, go whine to your local representative. Or get over it already.



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11 Jul 2010, 2:24 pm

BigK wrote:
Orwell wrote:
But Linux is most certainly superior to Windows in every way (except perhaps gaming...


Now, you see this is why people think you are crazy. :D

If it is better for you then I am happy for you. When it is better for the other 99.9% of users maybe they'll install it.


Your numbers are a bit off. OSX alone has about 8% of the computer market. Its the real risk to windows. Linux follows that with between 1-3% (10-30% more credit than you give). And both are growing. As OSX is a close cousin to linux, its ascendancy helps promote linux, and vice versa.

Currently windows is losing on the server side, the embedded side, mobile devices and consoles. It purports to lead on traditional personal computing, but even that is slipping. Even were it not, its growth market has vanished, a critical aspect of business that funds development and rising labour costs.


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11 Jul 2010, 5:00 pm

Fuzzy, do you think that computer game companies will start porting more game to Linux? I'm sort of hoping they will if games that make use of Opengl become more common.