Yes. You're an idiot. But I knew that anyway.
(Hint: The computing world does not consist entirely of desktops. If you assume that a "computer" is something with an MMU, Unix-related O/Ss overwhelmingly win.) The only way your count is "correct" is by asking the question "how many Linux users are there among Windows PC users".
And IME (financial services), it isn't.
Fallacious; Argument from specious authority.
Precisely. Its no use saying 'windows could' when windows patently doesn't. Its no use saying there is nothing inherently impossible about making windows use a better file system, when windows doesn't actually use a better file system.
Its no use saying 'but windows delivers a better user experience' when we are not talking about a user experience, we are talking about 'designed to sell, not designed to be stable and reliable'
Chrome and tailfins on a chassis with cart springs, basically, and its always been that way.
That mind set of sales volume and profit against quality is evinced in every single statement Microsoft makes about itself. Look at this thread, the fanbois are there saying how many units are sold, how many people use it.,, how much money it makes. AS if that was some kind of measure of its quality.
Its growing certainly - but with the move to cloud and SaaS etc the whole market is growing, so its harder to peg in temrs of overall market share.
Indeed and always have done.
Many folks will probably stay with XP for some time to come. Its worth noting that official support for it ends early next year. This is not a show stopper as yet, but it means no more patches and updates. It may become a problem if a serious security vulnerability comes to light.
MS don't actually like people staying with old versions since traditionally they only made money from people buying new stuff. Hence why they are always trying to nudge people toward upgrading - initially by using other products they control to break compatibility with older stuff, and these days with licensing terms. Now they want to move to the Software as a Service model where we rent our applications...
No point in going to Vista anyway. Windows 8 & 7 are very similar when you scrape away the surface.
I was not suggesting you do - use whatever you are comfortable with and what works for you. Just keep in mind that what works for you, may not for others.
So.....
A friend unfortunalty brought a fake copy last august, it ran for 2 months.
Not always soom enough it seems. I'm betting there's fake products on there today and there will be tomorrow. Then there's other sites that are just s cams.
Its more ingrown, than ingrained. Like toenails.
Which version? The ten year old version in XP? How well do ten year old linux and OSX systems work?
Reading between the lines here, the dell software sales are not fake products in the accepted sense as would be understood by the proverbial man on the bus, and they in all likelihood will work fine, So buyers are unlikely to complain. However the software is also highly unlikely to be legit in the eyes of Microsoft either...
MS licensing terms make it quite clear that you can't migrate an OEM OS product from one machine to another - once installed on a machine, it lives and dies with it. In exchange for this limitation the manufacturer gets a much lower price for the software compared to the same thing bought at retail.
What many of these sellers appear to be doing is flogging recovery disks for failed systems, and they normally have some words at the end pointing out you are actually buying the dead PC with the software - just arrange to come and get it! This sidesteps ebay restrictions on selling OEM software.
Now the reasons that these install and activate ok, is because big name makers like dell tend to build out batches of machines using a stock OS image with a version of windows that does not require activation (if you run key recovery software on them, the key recovered will often not match that on the CoA). So in effect each machine goes out the door with the same key as all the others and the one on the CoA has not ever been used. However the CoA stuck to the case is genuine and that has been bought and paid for by the OEM.
Should the buyer ever end up needing to reinstall the OS from the supplied DVD, the version they install is subtly different from that which it originally came with, and that will be the first time that the key provided on the CoA has ever been used to activate the software.
(the implication being that you can lift a key from a new laptop and used it to install the OS of a different system using the supplied recovery disk. So long as you don't need to ever reinstall the laptop's OS, MS's activation system won't actually notice (which is not the same as saying they would consider it acceptable for you to to do this))
So the normal logic applies, if the deal seems to good to be true, then it probably is.
Current trade prices on windows from my supplier are:
MICROSOFT WINDOWS 7 PREMIUM, 32 BIT, OEM DVD, SINGLE COPY £ 55.58 Ex.VAT MICROSOFT WINDOWS 7 PREMIUM, 64 BIT, OEM DVD, SINGLE COPY £ 56.12 Ex.VAT MICROSOFT WINDOWS 7 PRO UPGRADE FROM XP OR LATER, RETAIL DVD £ 127.29 Ex.VAT MICROSOFT WINDOWS 7 PROFESSIONAL, 32 BIT, OEM DVD, SINGLE COPY £ 85.89 Ex.VAT MICROSOFT WINDOWS 7 PROFESSIONAL, 64 BIT, OEM DVD, SINGLE COPY £ 85.89 Ex.VAT MICROSOFT WINDOWS 7 ULTIMATE, 64 BIT, OEM DVD, SINGLE COPY £ 112.11 Ex.VAT MICROSOFT WINDOWS 8 PROFESSIONAL, 32 BIT, OEM DVD, SINGLE COPY £ 85.38 Ex.VAT MICROSOFT WINDOWS 8 PROFESSIONAL, 64 BIT, OEM DVD, SINGLE COPY £ 87.15 Ex.VAT MICROSOFT WINDOWS 8, 32 BIT, OEM DVD, SINGLE COPY £ 59.05 Ex.VAT MICROSOFT WINDOWS 8, 64 BIT, OEM DVD, SINGLE COPY £ 55.52 Ex.VAT
So unless you are a PC maker buying 10s or 100s of thousands of copies of the software, those are the prices you can expect to pay give or take a few percent. If its on offer for half the price, then you can be certain that its not an official MS channel product.
(and they treat anything of that nature as a pirate copy regardless of if they made it originally)
The algorithm descibed earlier means that free space on my brand new disc is in 1000 pieces with the Linux method, and 1 with the Windows method before deleting the 500 files. Afterwards they both have 500 fragments.
But if this wasy of doing things is so wonderful how come MS don't do it that way?
Oh sure. Lots. Just not fragmentation:)
Andy
As I asked Steve upthread - if this allocation scheme is so wonderful how come Windows doesn't do it?
Most likely a dedicated embedded OS. It _could_ be Linux, but more likely to be VxWorks or such.
Andy
Unable to distinguish between and O/S and a file system, eh, dennis? It's either NTFS or it isn't.
I am struggling to comprehend how stupid that question is.
Well that is the point. Because they spent the money on designing animated paperclips?
That may well have been true. I know Netware did off-line file compression,so I wouldn't be surprised to find it did background defragmentation as well.
Andy
MUCH better than XP. EXT2 etc have been around for donkeys years. Unix had far far netter filesystems than FAT years ago. It had to. It was the OS for large multi-user machines featuring seriously heavy access, not a toy operating system, for single users. Linux simply picked the best around to do the job.
But of course no one has such a thing as ten year old LInix , since the upgrades are free, they get upgraded to the latest mostly.
Good read. So Apple's primary tools are delayed allocation and an on-the-fly defragmenter - and that seems to be enough.
Andy
So not windows then?
(hint: An MMU has been built into every [1] Intel CPU since the 386...)
Andy
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