Willis recent post “Modern Piracy” is the inspiration for the title, along with math challenged pirate marketing team. This in-your-face sales pitch to renew my Avast Antivirus popped up today on my desktop, but the piracy is in the math:
Gosh, should I really renew with a company that can’t offer sales incentives rooted in simple math? That 3 year plan is a real winner (for them) compared to annual renewal.
I think I’ll revert to the free version or use Microsoft’s free AV solution. Arrrrrr!
Poptech, wouldn’t that be more accurately phrased as “other companies are able to make their own forks and get them working more easily with Linux than if they tried to do it with proprietary OSes, with Android being the most obvious example”, Google uses Ubuntu in house (Goobuntu) and Android itself wouldn’t exist without the open source community.
As for a linux system getting zombied and infecting a network instantly… did you get a pop up asking “will you please give me full root privileges”, and then ignore the “oh dear, are you aware you’re trying to access root folders, this can damage your system, you shouldn’t do this” pop up?
Myself I think the file manager window turning bright red when you are in full superuser mode is annoying, but it sends a clear enough message that “you don’t need to poke around in here, and if you do you are giving up the safety you gain simply by not screwing things up in here”, doesn’t it?
Sure, if you have a bit of malware that loads onto linux systems and pops up a terminal asking “hey, can you type sudo su and enter your password then just kinda ignore everything else for me, pretty please?”, more power to ya if you can hook some of those exceptionally stupid fish.
As for noscript, you can put a button next to your address bar to “temporarily allow all” and get back however much utility you need, without the whole “cheeks in the wind” effect.
Even better: use Fedora or Ubuntu Linux and you have no problems. Plus you have an enormous repository of free software, built by the best in the business, just for the taking.
Now that would be a good intention at the start of the new year.
Happy New Year everyone.
***
Poptech says:
December 31, 2012 at 5:15 pm
beng says: I also use other layers like a downloadable, free, protective HOST file (it denies thousands of junk-sites) and Firefox plug-ins like tracker-blocking Ghostery and script-denying NO-Script.
Large Hosts Files cause Internet related slowdowns due to DNS Client Server Caching. This negatively effects your browsing speed.
***
Poptech, thanks for the info. I’ve no need for the Microsoft network — file/printer sharing is disabled. The site where the HOST file comes from gives a Windows registry hack to supposedly eliminate the slowdown (DNS cache set to 1, I think). I can’t detect any slowdown while browsing — sites are “contacted” immediately.
Sorry, poptech, the registry hack is to set the DNS parameters to: MaxCacheTtl=1 and MaxNegativeCacheTtl=0. The DNS server/cache is not disabled.
Lots of good advice & insides here. I am not a computer geek Anthony but I am combining Windows and Linux for years now. Windows for the programs “I can’t do without”, as much as possible off-line. Usually from an older PC with XP, I simply disconnect the LAN cable from my router. The bulk of my internet-traffick goes by Linux with no problem. Data is always available to all my systems by external storage formatted with the Fat32 file system.
DesertYote said @ur momisugly December 30, 2012 at 7:41 pm
The Oxford English Dictionary, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Civilization V, Adobe InDesign, CorelDRAW!, my transparency scanner… Personally, I prefer multitasking on multiple computers, so I have Mac OSX, Windows 7 and Ubuntu running on different machines.
FWIW it’s decades since I was infected by a virus and that was from a floppy disk my son brought home from school. Only two out of the six machines I run have AV software running on them and that’s only because I am a belt & braces man. There’s no substitute for safe computing.
For them with a sense of humour:
http://sturmsoft.com/Writing/lunixshop.htm
Written when I couldn’t get any Linux distro to work on my then current hardware.
Setting MaxCacheTtl=1 means it will cache DNS queries for 1 second. So unless you are queering the exact same domain name every second, it is effectively disabled.
If you have a broadband connection you may not think you are noticing any slowdowns but what you are doing is unnecessarily increasing the load on your ISP’s DNS server for something that could have been done on your system (say resolving google.com). You are potentially slowing down DNS queries for yourself and others who use your ISP, the more people who do this, the worse it gets.
These custom Hosts file are effectively trying to catalog every “bad” site on the Internet you may visit which is absolutely impossible as these sites are very short lived and change faster then anyone can hope to keep up. These custom Hosts files can also block known good sites and are frequently hijacked by malware. You are just wasting your time.
Even with Apple’s limited desktop OS market share they are still being targeted, http://www.pcworld.com/article/253270/600_000_infected_macs_found_in_botnet.html
And plenty of security vulnerabilities (3,896) have been discovered in Linux, http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=linux
@max, companies cannot fork proprietary OSes because of licensing restrictions and no access to the source code (I am sure you know that). My point was that the Linux “community” has failed to make Linux a success on the desktop and the only successes have been when a large corporation takes over, such as Google with Android.
As for Linux and “root privileges” this is another problem I have with the Linux community. Limited user accounts for home users have been available in Windows since XP (2001) and for businesses since NT. The problem has always been that there is no administrator for the average home user who wants something to just “work”. Microsoft understands this, the Linux community does not (see Linux desktop market share). Microsoft introduced UAC in Vista to bridge the gap between running as a limited user but still being able to install applications like an administrator. Unfortunately nothing can stop the average user from clicking past any warnings and typing in any password that are needed to get something to “work”. So you can only do so much, at the end of the day, you cannot protect people from themselves. This is another reason for the proliferation of phishing and other social engineering techniques to get people to install malware as Windows keeps becoming more and more secure. It is so bad with end users that if the AV is not set to auto-clean an infection you run the chance of people ignoring the warning when something is found.
Besides the extension crippling websites, I also don’t trust the author of NoScript, http://www.informationweek.com/security/application-security/noscript-developer-apologizes-for-meddli/217201461
I wish people stopped referring to the “market share” of linux. It is an oxymoronic expression. Linux is not part of the market and does not share it with anybody. Even if it were, pointing out its share would still be a fallacious argument because it relies on the idea that the market is somehow smart enough to figure out the best solutions. We know that is not so. The examples of successful choices made by free markets are less numerous than those of their failures, of which I can’t help but mention just one — the querty layout of the computer keyboard in English-speaking countries.
You see a billion people engage in a strenuous handicap race every day simply because more than a century ago one of the players on the market figured it would make his product look better if people could be prevented from using it the way they wanted. Never mind that the product that started it no longer exists; the race continues globally with no signs of ever coming to an end.
What never fails to boggle my mind is that its participants continue accept the rules despite the zero cost of rejection. The handicap they bear today has transcended from a real physical constraint (however insignificant) to a purely notional one more a quarter-century ago. Today, you no longer need to be handy with a brazing torch and acid flux to change your keyboard layout. You don’t need anything. I mean, not a single thing. Only a thought. Why don’t you?
Free market can be very dumb. Remember querty when you hear about the market share of linux. Instead of looking at meaningless numbers, look at what you can and cannot do with it.
@ur momisugly Gene Selkov
You appear to be averting to the Dvorak keyboard layout. While you say it’s a simple thing to alter, that ignores the fact that the majority of keyboards in the English-speaking world are QWERTY. It’s all very well to alter one’s own personal keyboard layout to Dvorak (and I did it many years ago), but you come a cropper as soon as you need to use someone else’s PC. This has nothing to do with free markets and everything to do with inertia. The only notable study conducted to determine the effect of changing to Dvorak concluded that the costs of retraining would never be recouped. So it goes…
Linux is part of the operating system “market” which is simply, “a group of potential customers for one’s product.” Just because Linux is free does not mean it is not still part of the same market that Microsoft and Apple compete in for profit. You do not have to be for profit to be included in a certain market share. Use “usage share” if it makes you feel better, the argument is the same.
Markets actually do determine the best solutions for what people actually want. If people did not want Microsoft Windows, it would not exist. No one is forced to buy Microsoft Windows, everyone chooses to do so of their own free will. No one is stopping people from buying an Apple product or using Linux for “free”, but the question is why are they not? The reason is PC based products are more cost effective than Apple’s products even with the “expense” of Windows added in and Microsoft Windows is more user friendly to more people and more software and hardware compatible than Linux. These are the inescapable realities of the operating system market.
This is a meaningless statement because free market successes rival all other form of economic systems. Your personal preference for a keyboard layout is just that – your opinion and you should not confuse it with facts. Nothing is stopping you or anyone else from using a Dvorak Keyboard, http://www.rehabmart.com/product/dvorak-style-keyboard-24518.html. You can even use it in Windows, http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Change-your-keyboard-layout
The question is why is no one else using it? If it could truly be proven to be more efficient and it was not simply just an opinion then it would have been demonstrated in the keyboard market. Instead these arguments have been debunked for a long time now,
http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors
> Linux is part of the operating system “market” which is simply, “a group of potential customers for one’s product.”
If such is your definition of the market, then count us out. Our potential for being any product’s customers is precisely zero. Not because we don’t want to pay, or can’t afford to pay, but for the simple reason that nobody in the world of commercial software can offer us the stuff we need. We make it.
> No one is forced to buy Microsoft Windows, everyone chooses to do so of their own free will.
This is grossly untrue. Most American public schools have adopted a windows-only policy in exchange for donations from Microsoft. I was around when it started in early 1990s; I saw, for example the New York School of Medicine accept a donation on the condition that they dispose of all non-Microsoft computer systems. I know people who left for better jobs because of that.
> Your personal preference for a keyboard layout is just that – your opinion and you should not confuse it with facts.
I don’t see any facts that could be confused with my opinion. The first fact comes from Sholes, who devised the qwerty layout with the stated aim of impairing the user. You don’t need to know more, but consider this: how many meaningful words can you type on the home row in qwerty? Five? Six? OK, maybe ten, for an extremely generous estimate.
And I’ll give you my opinion of the Dvorak layout: I opine that I can write more than 600 English words on a Dvorak keyboard without lifting a finger. Some people don’t have as many words in their entire vocabulary.
> I don’t know of any sysadmins that would allow their users to change their keyboard mapping. YMMV.
MMDV. I can’t recall the last time I had to deal with the notion of a “sysadmin”, thank you very much.
@Gene:
I would audit that school. I was working for Schools in the 90s as well when the SECOND school district in the nation (ours) was totally connected to the Internet through the local Cable infrastructure (for those curious, Modesto California was the first). We had a competitive bid, and Apple won it. 5 years later, Dell won it. Both times, Microsoft got a lot of business since the standards were Works in the elementary and Office in the secondary (which ran on both platforms). Regardless of the handouts, any type of exclusionary deal would have been rejected by the legal departments.
Phil, the practice I mentioned was not regular vendor bidding. You can stifle competition with donations only, even without any strings attached. Airlines do that, for example, when they sell tickets at a loss to chase competitors out of their favourite airports. Microsoft does that, too. They are wealthy enough to avoid competition by giving stuff away.
I have never paid enough attention to all that stuff to speak about it competently, but from whatever little I know, I don’t believe you can discuss Microsoft and free choice in the same context. I can just tell you about the last attempt on their part to promote their monopoly.
A bunch of the top management figures from Microsoft visited the University of Chicago in 2007 to discuss donations and “collaboration”. UofC is a private school, all right, but the tactic they use is the same everywhere, public or private: influence the policy-makers. On that occasion, the Microsoft emissaries were generally well-received, in part because some of them happened to be UofC alumni and had friends there. They approached my boss for a demo of the real-time virtual reality system that he used to teach anatomy and to develop new visualisation and interaction technologies in surgery. It was an Access Grid-based system, and its 3d renderer was running on a linux cluster that we bolted together. Having seen the demo, the visitors said, “That’s great”, and — I quote, literally — “What incentives can we offer you to start thinking about replacing all that with Microsoft software?”
That was the last thing I heard them say because my boss’s response was to politely show them the door. I wish they got the same treatment everywhere they go, because their philanthropy is getting out of hand. But it’s not my game. I know I can’t change it. I just want to point out that those few percentage points that Poptech and others refer to as market share or “potential customers” represent no potential at all. The hardware exists, no doubt, and you can sum the numbers and calculate “usage”, but the fact remains that the owners of that hardware are not in the game. It is not a share, it is a complement.
Usage numbers are meaningless as a proof of anything. When you sum up the numbers of people who “use” the global warming idea, versus those who oppose it, what does it tell you about the validity of the idea?
@Gene
I never use MS and free choice in the same context. And your statement about “influencing the decision makers” is a game they all play. I do not delude myself about that. I know Apple “bought” the technology director at the school system where I worked (think the head decision maker, I was the head engineer – I had to make it work). And it was not even subtle! (Stipends for consulting work that never got done).
Still, with all that, Apple still had to win the bid. And later Dell. So Microsoft is not winning the school battle. While they have a 90% share in the business world, 10 years ago, they only had a 50% share of the non-post graduate education market (I have not seen figures lately).
The reason Microsoft won is actually a lot simpler. They targeted the Business community. Figuring people would rather have the same machine at home as they did at the office. And they were right. And how did they win the business community? If you say IBM, you win again. They rode the IBM business contacts into the business world before dumping IBM in the mid 90s.
Poptech said @ur momisugly January 1, 2013 at 8:45 pm
I don’t know of any sysadmins that would allow their users to change their keyboard mapping. YMMV.
In addition to the excellent comments you have made, it’s worth noting that Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing. I’d love to have a dollar for every hour I spent years ago trying to get Linux to see my Adaptec SCSI adapter, or Samba to share my Postscript printer. I contacted the dudes who wrote Samba and they suggested I use WinNT to share the printer as that’s what they were doing. Ya gotta laugh 🙂 I also wasted a lot of time beta testing Adobe FrameMaker for Linux.
So true.
You don’t understand, so long as Linux is an operating system it is by default in the “market”, you cannot just “opt out”. I am well aware of the OSS mentality but saying that there is not commercial software that does what OSS does it one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever read. If anything the open source community spends an excessive amount of time convincing people of open source alternatives to commercial products. Why are so many Linux proponents constantly recommending using it if they don’t want them to?
What are you talking about? Microsoft is not forcing any school to use Windows, they choose to. Students in the United States do not have to attend a public school, they can attend a private school or be home schooled. If someone did not want to attend a school because they used Windows they do not have to. Granted I am a proponent of school choice and want to remove the public school monopoly but that is a different argument. So tell me who is forced to use/buy Windows?
That is a myth, the QWERTY layout was designed to maximize speed by reducing typewriter jamming and since then the DVORAK keyboard has not been shown to be more efficient than QWERTY. I provided extensive debunking of these myths here,
Typing Errors (Reason, June 1, 1996)
The Fable of the Keys (PDF)
(Journal of Law and Economics, Volume 33, Number 1, pp. 1-25, April 1990)
– S. J. Liebowitz, Stephen E. Margolis
@Poptech: an impressive pile (and I read it with interest), but I remain unconvinced. That is all second-hand information, while I have first-hand experience and I understand the logic of the Dvorak layout, which is based on just three criteria: within-word travel distance, matching letter frequency to finger strength, and hand alternation. The qwerty layout uses the same criteria, but it applies them with an opposite sign: it maximises travel distance and stretch, it allocates the most frequent letters to the least able fingers, and it minimises alternation.
I was unable to learn proper typing with qwerty despite many years of use and countless hours of training. After months of daily exercises with Mavis Beacon, all I could achieve was about 35 words per minute and an abysmal 95% error rate (at any speed, no matter how slow). That was quite limiting because I worked as a proofreader for a database project, so needed to type a lot. I still type so much I have to go through a couple keyboards on any laptop I own.
Dvorak changed that. What convinced me to try it was just the explanation of its principles. I can report this result: it took me 4 hours of simple exercises to remember the layout and go back to productive work; in about 5 days, it became comfortable, and in 2 weeks I regained my original speed (the study you cite claimed 10 days: close enough, but I did not gun it; it was just work as usual). From then on, it was getting better by the day. Now, more than 15 years later, typing is so easy that I will often edit a line of text by killing it and typing it over instead of trying to salvage bits of it with the mouse or arrow keys. I hardly ever use my mouse for anything (clicking into google maps is a notable exception).
By the way, I am now two layouts away from qwerty. For the last 5 years or so, I have been using Programmer Dvorak — a layout optimised for coders, for whom easy punctuation and code structuring are more important than numbers.
My ears are shut to all news about how it is impossible to recoup the cost of retraining and how the evidence in favour of Dvorak is tainted. My own experience trumps that. You are welcome to call it an opinion; I don’t mind. In order to overturn it, you will need to explain to me for example, how it can be better for anybody to make awkward motions with the fingers of one hand to type a whole word while the other hand is idle.
We went far enough off-topic that I am not going to respond to other important stuff, such as OSS mentality you mentioned. Just remember that there are many able people out there who are not motivated by money or are negatively motivated by it. Most real scientists are like that. You can’t talk business to them and hope they will understand; their notion of success is vastly different.
These are pure economic fallacies. How is Microsoft avoiding competition from Linux by giving stuff away? Linux is free! Using your “logic” Microsoft would have to bankrupt itself to avoid competition from Linux, how does that make any sense? I don’t see anyone on the receiving end of lower prices due to competition complaining. The complaints always come from the company that cannot compete and if they are successful with legal or political action they simply force higher prices on consumers. How are consumers better off?
Predatory pricing is a long debunked economic fallacy,
Predatory Pricing (Video) (7min) (Thomas E. Woods, Ph.D. History)
The Myth of Predatory Pricing (Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Ph.D. Professor of Economics)
How is it not free choice? Microsoft cannot force you to buy their products they have to convince you to. Microsoft does not hold a 100% market or usage share of anything, therefore they do not have any sort of “Monopoly”.
This makes absolutely no sense. So you are saying the Linux community has no interest in having more users use the Linux operating system?
Of course you can use usage numbers to demonstrate the popularity of something. Linux is not popular as a desktop OS and the reasons are obvious to apparently everyone but the Linux community.
@Poptech: sorry for being a pest, but I noticed something you said that I first overlooked and can’t really let go without a retort:
> … the QWERTY layout was designed to maximize speed by reducing typewriter jamming …
That is a shameless spin. This statement is not technically incorrect, but the way it is worded conceals the truth about the motivation behind QWERTY. Let me rephrase it properly:
“The QWERTY layout was designed to salvage a faulty typewriter design by slowing down the typist and thus improving his overall speed by making jamming less likely.”
Note that the original design with the alphabetic arrangement of the keys existed for a while and the jamming problem only arose when many enough users got up to speed. Initially, nobody jammed the keys and the realisation that people can actually be faster than the machine came as a shock.
Another aspect of the story that the English-speaking people (or, rather, Latin-typing people) may not be aware of is that when Remington and Underwood finally improved the design and made it much less likely to jam under any layout (barring simultaneous key press events, for which there had never been any remedy), that improvement coincided with the spill-over of the typewriter business into other countries, where new national layouts were designed from scratch based on principles similar to Dvorak’s, but independently from him and predating his designs by a couple decades. For example the Cyrillic layout does not suffer from any of the shortcomings of QWERTY (awkward stretch, adverse finger allocation and lack of alternation). That simply tells me that QWERTY was already viewed as an abomination by the late adopters and they chose to do better.
@Poptech: I am now making sincere efforts to wind this discussion down, but I feel I haven’t related the full story when I mention Microsoft bribing schools to eliminate competition within them.
You say:
> These are pure economic fallacies. How is Microsoft avoiding competition from Linux by giving stuff away? Linux is free! Using your “logic” Microsoft would have to bankrupt itself to avoid competition from Linux, how does that make any sense?
Linux did not exist back then. We’re talking 1991-1992 here. In one instance I observed, the deal was that the school gets new IBM PCs with Windows 3.0 (if that’s what it was, can’t recall) on the condition that they dump their Sun and SGI workstations (I was one of the happy recipients of the refuse, even though the deal appeared criminal to me at the time). The economic incentive for Microsoft to do that, I reckon, was that the students of that school would be compelled to use Microsoft products, and the hope was that by the time they graduate, they would not even be aware of alternatives.
That said, they behave the same way today, in all situations where they regard Linux as a competition (who ever hears about Sun or SGI anymore?) When Microsoft gets intel on any massive (or otherwise spectacular) deployment of linux systems (UofC, Extremadura, Kerala, Munich, &c.), they go in and attempt to bribe the officials in charge of it (and sometimes succeed).
It is not predatory pricing; it is buying one person to dominate thousands.
That is another meaningless statement as review papers always include second-hand information, this does not make it incorrect. Both the article and peer-reviewed paper extensively refute all the claims made by Dvorak. Where is the scientific controlled study supporting Dvorak’s claims? Your “experience” is not a scientifically controlled study
How very unscientific of you. Of course it is an opinion! So with millions of businesses out there and after all these years no one could demonstrate the cost savings of using a Dvorak keyboard layout? Surely you jest?
This is all subjective. What word? There are a quarter of a million words in the English language alone. And in what language? Who decides that something is “awkward”?
This is a myth, no where can it be found that Sholes designed the layout to “slow down” typing speeds to prevent jamming. You keep repeating this with no evidence to support the accusation.
Another completely unsupported statement. QWERTY and it’s derivatives are the standard keyboard layout used worldwide,
http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/the-ultimate-guide-to-computer-keyboards-around-the-world/
This argument is made in the article and paper I provided that you claimed to have just read.
“There is further evidence of QWERTY’s viability in its survival throughout the world. As typing moved to countries outside the United States, any QWERTY momentum could have been only a minor influence, yet the basic configuration has been adopted with only minor variations in virtually all countries with similar alphabets.”
The only country that I could find that uses anything close to Dvorak is the Bulgarian Cyrillic layout. One country that is only using some “ideas” from the Dvorak layout is hardly evidence to support your argument.
Folks, I am completely withdrawing myself from the Microsoft vs. Linux argument because it is impossible to win and I have no stake in it, and it goes on and on elsewhere, for those who are interested. I joined a couple other commenters near the top of this thread who popped in “linux” simply because it’s a pain to see people struggle with stuff like viruses while they have an option that simply works without the need for extensive housekeeping. You’re saying, it’s not an option; all right; I don’t want to distract you from your struggles.
About the the Dvorak/QWERTY thing — I understand that making an experiment is unscientific, while putting endless spin on peer-reviewed literature is, so I won’t bother telling you about my own experiment anymore. But please kindly peer-review this visualisation of the differences between Dvorak and QWERTY (be sure to click on the icon at the bottom to see the second page):
http://agilecomplexificationinverter.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/to-dvorak-or-not-to-dvorak.html
The stuff in black indicates what I referred to as awkward earlier. Please tell me how these amounts of awkward contribute to QWERTY’s market fitness. You certainly must have an opinion on that backed by sound science.
This is a ridiculous conspiracy theory. Using this logic, I should only have been aware of Apple and Macs because that is all the schools I attended had. How is it criminal to offer someone a deal with conditions? The incentive for Microsoft was definitely in marketing but their products still have to work. Do you think that if students use Microsoft products and they don’t work right that will make them want to go out and buy them? Microsoft can only convince people to use their products, they cannot force anyone to.
But they are not “dominating” anyone by making these deals, at best they are expanding their marketing. Anyone else can make the same deals. At the end of the day the consumer still chooses to buy a Microsoft product or not. I know companies that leverage considering to switch to Linux just to beat Microsoft down on pricing. Very few really are really considering it.
My last post went into the filter.
Gene Selkov said @ur momisugly January 2, 2013 at 6:55 pm
Say what? Sun SPARCStations run Solaris and IIRC SGI high performance graphics workstations ran SGI’s proprietary Unix. Both companies appear to still operate in serverspace and I believe that SGI lost the initiative with high end graphics workstations to companies like ATI and Nvidia. I have fond memories of playing with a SGI Indigo machine these many years past. To the best of my knowledge, MS have never manufactured graphics workstations, or high performance graphics adapters. If anyone’s to blame for the demise of SPARC and MIPS based machines, it’s Intel!
Poptech said @ur momisugly January 2, 2013 at 10:39 pm
And my son should only have been aware of Acorn RISC machines because that’s what all the schools here in Tasmania had. Are we having fun here, or what? 🙂
I’ll tell you what is fun: turning up to deliver a training called Desktop Publishing with Microsoft Word to twelve Education Dept employees in a lab containing 12 PCs. Two expected me to teach them how to DTP on their Acorns and one expected me to teach her QuarkXpress, an application not available in the Ed Dept computer lab. Three of the “happy sheets” handed in at the end of the training claimed I was a useless trainer. Hey, ya gotta laugh…
It was not completely clear if Gene was referring to Linux or Microsoft putting Sun and SGI out of business with that statement. Ironically Linux had more to do with putting both out of business by offering cheaper server solutions.
Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 – http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000019-264.html
Rackable Systems acquired SGI in 2009 then just changed their name to SGI – http://www.infoworld.com/t/mergers-and-acquisitions/rackable-systems-becomes-sgi-closes-deal-076
You are not listening, absolutely nothing on Windows is “expensive”. There is no “expensive” housekeeping. Everything you need to clean (if necessary) and keep your system secure is completely free. MSE is free for home users, the Windows firewall is free and Windows security updates are free. The only software I have bought in 20 years has been my tax software. Literally everything else I have and use is all 100% free or open source. I can provide free software solutions using Windows for just about any home user.
Just claiming your personal experience is an “experiment” does not make it so, let alone a scientifically controlled one. I am not spinning the peer-reviewed literature but actually supporting my argument with it, you have failed to even present any.
It is your opinion that it is “awkward”. Why can you not identify when you are presenting a subjective argument?
Poptech, I cede this argument to you. I admit that stretching one’s fingers, making them travel the longest distance, making them curl under one’s palm, giving the palms as little rest as possible and arranging for the longest possible sequences to be typed without switching hands (while heavily favouring the left hand and the shortest, least able fingers) is not “awkward”. The preponderance of evidence shows it to be efficient and comfortable. Peer-reviewed science can’t be wrong.
I admit that my opinion (carelessly acquired from the con artist Dvorak without a controlled verification) that typing should involve the least motion and the least effort, while favouring the most natural positions of both hands was in error, and in the future I will spare you from hearing it.
Case closed.