Friday 10th November, 2006
According to this ZDNet Blog entry, an IBM-sponsored study claims that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux next year, against 23% for Windows.
It cites the recent moves by Oracle and Microsoft with regard to Linux as evidence of this trend.
I would never rule Microsoft out any race it wishes to take part in, until the race is truly over. One particular comment to this blog entry raises the interesting assertion:
Microsoft has obtained the expertise and assistance of SuSE in creating the migration tools that will ease the Linux to Windows transition. The path was already marked out.
Linux to Windows will soon be far easier than Unix to Windows has ever been. And companies can't wait for their chance to leap into the future.
I must admit, I find it hard to trust Novell's recent actions. I'm not the only one.
Thursday 9th November, 2006
It seems that shoppers will abandon a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load, according to a survey reported on by the BBC news website.
I thought it was only children which were impatient. My sons wait far longer than that for Playstation games to load!
The four-second threshold is half the time previous research, conducted during the early days of the web-shopping boom, suggested that shoppers would wait for a site to finish loading.
This general impatience is getting worse. What if your connection is poor?
Thursday 9th November, 2006
A Linux-using Dell customer has managed to get a refund for the unused copy of Microsoft Windows XP Home SP2 bundled with his new laptop.
Mitchell was careful to document that he did not run the Microsoft product or accept the EULA. "I booted the laptop, then photographed every step of the boot process up to and including clicking on the XP 'no I don't accept' button. I also scrolled through each page of the EULA, taking a photo of each page," he wrote in an e-mail interview.
Saturday 4th November, 2006
Microsoft have backed down over the proposed limit of one re-installation for Vista license holders. The previous limit allowed users to transfer their copy of MS Vista to one other PC, after which the license would have been rendered invalid, requiring the purchase of another (full) license.
Tuesday 31st October, 2006
The Register has an interesting analysis of the Microsoft Vista End-User License Agreement.
Among the gems in this agreement, which virtually everyone agrees to without reading it, are:
- If you use Vista, you may run performance benchmarks on the operating system, but you may not disclose the results of the benchmarks without permission. Censorship - that's one way to prevent bad news getting out!
- You may not run the software on a virtual system (such as the Windows XP honeypot PC I mentioned in an earlier post) unless you have purchased the more expensive Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate "editions". The differences between the "editions" is going to be interesting. Aside from the cost that is. One wonders what has been disabled, and how soon "fixes" to enable the disabled funtionality appears.
- You may not use the license on more than two PCs. So, build one PC, install Vista. Build another, transfer Vista to the new PC. And that's your lot. If you want to legitimately transfer the license to a third PC, you can't; you must shell out for another full license. I imagine that corporate customers will have a special dispensation to get around this one, but Joe Public can forget it.
It won't affect me. :)
There's a lively comments section about this very subject on OSNews.com.