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The death knell sounds again for Internet Exploder 6
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The death knell sounds again for Internet Exploder 6
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Posted by gewg_ (4444 messages posted)

When IE6 users go to YouTube these days,
they get a message warning them that support for that ancient PoS
will soon be dropped and advising them to get a modern browser.
http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/2015/youtubeie6.png
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/

Web developers are tired of having to jump thru hoops
to support that browser and its poor compliance with web standards.
IE usage (all versions) is steadily dropping
as browsers with better standards compliance ascend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#StatCounter
Many tech-heavy sites show cumulative numbers below 50% for IE
(even though Windows usage is put at ~88% these days).

Even M$'s best/latest try is just pitiful--and, of course, IE6 stinks on ice:
cache 
of  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Acid3#Trident_-_Internet_Explorer
Notice how Opera, Chrome, and Safari score 100 percent.
Firefox (scoring 95%) is on a feature freeze for its current version
and the guys promise improvements with the release after that (3.6).

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

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re: The death knell sounds again for Internet Exploder 6
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Posted by Steve (23810 messages posted)

youtube seems to work fine with IE6 on XP, is it a Windows 98 related problem. I do Agree all versions of IE suck though.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: The death knell sounds again for Internet Exploder 6
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Posted by gewg_ (4444 messages posted)

Steve wrote:
|youtube seems to work fine with IE6 on XP,
|
They haven't crippled anything yet.
Despite my hyperbolic Subject line, for now it's just a notice of their plans.

|is it a Windows 98 related problem.
|
All that has changed for now is the added graphic.
http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/2015/youtubeie6.png
Aren't you seeing it?  (I've had IE firewalled off since 2002, so I can't say.)

|I do Agree all versions of IE suck though.
|
The Wikimedia page putting numbers on everything
makes it quite clear who's trying and who is dead meat.
When the Acid3 test was devised, everybody did pretty lousy.
Only IE8's position has barely budged.  (IE6 & IE7: no change at all.)

With perfect scores having been achieved by
the browsers that are based on WebKit and Presto,
it's time for an Acid4 to get even more progress in compliance with the standards.

...and it's sad that Apple, M$, and Mozilla shot the HTML5 {video} tag in the head
by not agreeing on which codec(s) to support in that evolving standard.
My contempt for corporations (especially USAian corps) grows daily.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: The death knell sounds again for Internet Exploder 6
Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 5:41 am
Posted by Steve (23810 messages posted)

OK I see the added graphic now. "We will be phasing out support for your browser soon."

I started seeing a few Web surfing Browser problems with Windows 9X in general a year ago, and finally unplugged the 9X Box.

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M$'s attempts to dominate the Web via incompatibility torques off old M$ users and others
Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Posted by gewg_ (4444 messages posted)

Steve wrote:
|[...]I started seeing a few Web surfing Browser problems
|with Windows 9X in general a year ago, and finally unplugged the 9X Box.

Video-related?  Sounds like Silver-Lie
(a M$ proprietary technology that M$ won't port to earlier platforms).
http://www.google.com/search?q=silverlight+moonlight+mono+"c-sharp"

There's a big stink about this in the Free Software community as well.
cache 
of  http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/24/1939214#22539402

Miguel de Icaza (an influential guy who now works for Novell
--the very M$-friendly vendor of SuSE Linux)
is reverse-engineering the M$ crap so it will work under Linux/BSD
and is building ostensibly gratis and libre versions of those:
C# --> Mono
Silverlight --> Moonlight

Most of the Software Libre guys realize that whatever M$ touches, they corrupt
and that M$ screws every "partner" they've ever had
so those guys are just watching and waiting for the other shoe to drop
expecting at some point that M$ will sue the folks who "used M$ technology"
whereupon the greybeards can say "See. We told you so".

The fact that M$ can extend the protocol at any time
and instantly make anyone else's implementation obsolete
is another tactic we've seen used before (Embrace, extend, extinguish).
{Sigh}  We learn from history that we don't learn from history.

Ubuntu's recent release actually had an app that not only used Mono/C#,
the app was a startup item.
It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
The fact that "Tomboy" was a simple note-taking app
--a function that most folks don't care about--was one thing;
having to install extra libraries to get that single app working was yet another.

There was a mad scramble to get the apt-get command to uninstall all the crap
and another in parallel to create the Gnote app that does the same task
--without using Mono/C#.

...so, there are MANY big ripples
coming from M$'s latest effort at Web domination via lock-in.


Heh.  I loved it the other day when Google took a page out of the M$ playbook
causing Google stock to rise while M$ stock sank
--all because of an announcement of vaporware
which has a tentative release date of mid-2010.

.On the other hand, it DOES show the power of just saying "Linux".
http://google.com/search?q="Google.Chrome.OS"+"Linux.kernel"
If the "new windowing system" they said it would have replaces X Window,
I don't see Chrome OS having much lasting effect.
It won't have support for old hardware--being mostly a cheap vendor pre-install
(so there won't be any benefit to the Linux community at large
due to expanded device driver support)--
and you can get more than a start-up-to-a-browser thing with a current distro
that WILL support old hardware
and I expect most folks who get Chrome OS pre-installed
*will* end up installing a different Linux spin.

...and the One Laptop Per Child attempt at reinventing the wheel
shows how that questionable notion can bog down your project to crawl.
http://google.com/search?q=Sugar+"OLPC.XO"

The in-the-cloud apps Google's new thing will use will have to be build as well.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: M$'s attempts to dominate the Web via incompatibility torques off old M$ users and others
Friday, July 17, 2009 at 6:06 am
Posted by Arminius (334 messages posted)

I have never understood why Microsoft should care what browser people use. Since 
Internet Explorer is included with Windows anyway how does it benefit Microsoft for 
people to use IE as opposed to some other browser? It isn't as though IE has to bought 
and paid for, what is the payoff for them? Or is it just a prestige thing?

I still use Win98SE with IE5.5sp2 on two boxes I use offline only. My impression 
was that IE6 sucked on both Win98FE and Win98SE. When IE6 was installed it seemed 
to make Windows Explorer less stable than it was with IE5.5sp2. I get the feeling 
as with WMP9, IE6 was supposed to work under Win98 but was not as compatible with 
Win98 as it ought to have been.

And did you know MS still provides updates for IE5.01sp4 under Win2000?


[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: M$'s attempts to dominate the Web via incompatibility torques off old M$ users and others
Friday, July 17, 2009 at 11:24 am
Posted by gewg_ (4444 messages posted)

Arminius wrote:
|I have never understood why Microsoft should care what browser people use.
|Since Internet Explorer is included with Windows anyway...
|
You need to remove your blinders/blinkers (aka Step away from the Kool-Aid cup).
Your argument pre-supposes that *everyone* buys Windoze.
See "tying" (below).  See also "a la carte".

|...how does it benefit Microsoft for people to use IE
|as opposed to some other browser?
|It isn't as though IE has to bought and paid for, what is the payoff for them?
|
Internet Exploder, however, isn't a stand-alone product.
You need an ecosystem that supports IE (e.g. M$ stopped supporting IE on Mac).
This means that in order to use IE, you must purchase Windoze[1]
and in order to use *the latest* IE, you must purchase *the latest* Windoze.

As M$ continued to "raise the bar" by "extending what IE can do"
(doing things that broke the Worldwide Web Consortium's Web standards)[2],
then, in order to "get those extras" (purposely-broken backwards-compatibility),
some folks felt compelled to continue to "update" to the latest version of Windoze
...and they certainly made sure any new hardware they bought included Windoze
(as though M$'s illegal practices as a monopoly gave folks in most places a choice).

Requiring someone to buy one product in order to get another product
is called "tying" and it is illegal in most countries.
The You-must-buy-Windows-to-get-our-PC thing is the most blatent example.
The European Union / European Commission is currently holding the line on M$.[3]
The USA (under Republican administrations)
has a history of rolling over and playing dead on this matter.
It will be enlightening to see what tack Obama takes WRT M$.

|And did you know MS still provides updates for IE5.01sp4 under Win2000?
|
I started hearing about this thing called Linux about 1996.
By 1999, you'd even see the occasional story in the rags whose bread & butter
was selling ads to M$.  At that point, I figured by the time I needed a new OS,
Linux would be mature enough to be useful
and I resolved to never again send any money to Redmond.

The Linux distros have lived up to my expectations WRT schedule and features.
For folks who haven't yet tried Linux,
there's a low-resources Linux desktop that has caught my eye recently: 
from the Usenet Archive -- LXDE (The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment)

2 distros built around that and released in this calendar year
would work nicely on most folks' old Win98 boxes:
(Ubuntu-based moonOS LXDE Edition)
cache 
of  http://news.softpedia.com/news/Available-Now-moonOS-LXDE-Edition-2-0-105511.shtml

(Fedora 11 LXDE Remix)
cache 
of  http://news.softpedia.com/news/Available-Now-Fedora-11-LXDE-Remix-114272.shtml


For those folks whose hardware is a bit $tronger, there are even more choices e.g.
from the Usenet Archive -- Reviews of Linux Mint 7
I am quite smitten with Mint; it comes with all the proprietary stuff
that the USA's stupid "intellectual property" laws make difficult for non-payware.

The Mint folks already have multiple spins of their flavor of Linux
built around the KDE, Xfce, and Fluxbox desktops
and *their* lightweight-but-friendly spin built around LXDE is being assembled.
I can hardly wait till that is available so I can start recommending it.

With the hundreds of flavors of Linux available
(at least one for everyone's needs/taste/hardware)
added to the fact that most flavors of Linux are zero-cost[4]
as well as the fact that you can try most of them without installing them,
it should be obvious that M$ isn't the only game in town.

Miguel's Linux-compatible implementations of the M$ technologies
show that those misguided/dumb/evil attempts by M$ to impose boundaries
are also quite arbitrary and not really rigid/effective.
(For this and other reasons, the tech press is quite angry with M$ recently.)


[1] You no longer need Micros~1 to run Internet Exploder.
The WINE project has made it a prority to make sure that IE works under WINE
(which, in turn, runs under Linux/BSD/OpenSolaris/...).
cache 
of  http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Internet/HTTP-WWW-/IEs-for-Linux-11281.shtml

This is done so that Web developers who use Linux can check their work
and see how it looks in M$'s broken browser(s).

[2] Ironically, M$ is a member of W3C and is involved in drafting those standards
--which they then turn around and crap on.

[3] What I would like to see with hardware purchases
is an a la carte menu of software choices available.
I have a strong feeling when the true cost of Windoze is listed separately,
many folks will make the $0 Linux choice.

[4] The fact is that the **payware** versions of Linux aren't worth having;
they have HORRIBLE security by default.
Those payware distros were constructed to be easy for Windoze users
--and in the process, what is best about Linux was thrown out
(it's high resistance to infection).

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: M$'s attempts to dominate the Web via incompatibility torques off old M$ users and others
Friday, July 17, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Posted by Arminius (334 messages posted)

gewg wrote:
|You need to remove your blinders/blinkers (aka Step away from the Kool-Aid cup).
|Your argument pre-supposes that *everyone* buys Windoze.
|See "tying" (below).  See also "a la carte".
Hey! Who's arguing? I simply asked a question. I thought the topic was IE6. Relax 
and have a drink gewg, and I mean something stronger than Kool-Aid.

|Internet Exploder, however, isn't a stand-alone product.
|You need an ecosystem that supports IE (e.g. M$ stopped supporting IE on Mac).
|This means that in order to use IE, you must purchase Windoze[1]
|and in order to use *the latest* IE, you must purchase *the latest* Windoze.
I doubt there would be very many people out there who bought the latest version of 
Windows for the expressed purpose of being able to use the latest version of IE. 
A decline in IE usage doesn't necessarily correlate with a decline in Windows usage.

|Requiring someone to buy one product in order to get another product
|is called "tying" and it is illegal in most countries.
|The You-must-buy-Windows-to-get-our-PC thing is the most blatent example.
|The European Union / European Commission is currently holding the line on M$.
Microsoft isn't the only guilty party here. The PC manufacturers (assemblers really) 
deserve a good share of the blame. I don't believe they are innocent victims of MS's 
bullying. By limiting their products to a single OS they can keep their costs down 
(maximize their profits), a symbiotic relationship as I see it.

I never thought including a browser or media player with the OS was a problem. In 
fact I would be disappointed if it didn't include one. New users eventually figure 
out there are better third party options than the one that shipped with the OS. So 
why all the lawsuits? PC suppliers have the ability to preload any browser they want 
at the factory, some of the responsiblity lies with them. You don't hear the people 
who put out text editors complaining about Notepad do you? Or developers of graphics 
programs complaining about MS Paint?

The things that bother me most about MS:
1). The ever increasing hardware requirements to run their OS (and the increased 
amount of energy required to run it).
2). Product activation.
3). The ever increasing lack of backwards compatiblity.
4). Planned obselescence.
5). DRM. Digital Rights Management.
6). Cost, yeah it ain't cheap.


[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: M$'s attempts to dominate the Web via incompatibility torques off old M$ users and others
Friday, July 17, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Posted by gewg_ (4444 messages posted)

gewg wrote:
||Your argument pre-supposes that *everyone* buys Windoze.
||
Arminius wrote:
|Hey! Who's arguing? I simply asked a question. I thought the topic was IE6.
|
Well, I kinda veered off to include the tying aspects.

|Relax and have a drink[...]
|
Yeah.  8-)
I still don't think, however, that you fully appreciate the *leveraging* aspect
--using dominance in one market to affect another market.
It's classic anti-trust stuff.

|I doubt there would be very many people out there
|who bought the latest version of Windows
|for the expressed purpose of being able to use the latest version of IE.
|
True.
Actually, there are some MSI tricks to get some "forbidden" stuff running on W2k.
In a similar vein, the KernelEx extension exists for crippled aspects of some apps
and the 9x kernel compatibility.
Few ordinary users know about these, however.

|A decline in IE usage doesn't necessarily correlate with a decline in Windows usage.
|
Not a direct correlation, but both numbers are declining--IE's rate is precipitous.
I don't want to see any (more) dirty tricks used to change that trend/choice.

The real problem all along has been M$'s dealings with hardware vendors
which forbad those businesses from installing ANY non-M$ software
without seeing an accompanying massively punitive change in per-unit pricing.
Tiered pricing is not illegal, but the way a corp with >88% of a market does it
can quickly run afoul of the anti-trust laws--and that's where we are.

It was a self-fulling prophecy that by using this kind of thuggery,
M$ would continue to dominate multiple markets.

||[...]"tying"[...]
||The You-must-buy-Windows-to-get-our-PC thing is the most blatent example.
||The European Union / European Commission is currently holding the line on M$.
||
|Microsoft isn't the only guilty party here.
|
Again, with >88% of the market, M$ can beat down the smaller system vendors
and the DoJ's pitiful enforcement here doesn't help the situation.

|The PC manufacturers (assemblers really) deserve a good share of the blame.
|I don't believe they are innocent victims of MS's bullying.
|
If the big vendors had pulled together and started a class action suit against M$
way back when, I believe things would have gone quite differently.
So, yeah, there's culpability there as well.

|By limiting their products to a single OS they can keep their costs down 
|(maximize their profits), a symbiotic relationship as I see it.
|
The "symbiosis" can quickly get skewed
when one of the entities has >88% of its market share.
I see it more as riding a tiger--or as conjoined twins
where the health of one is dependent on the health of the other.
I also like to bring up the example of the Irish Potato Famine
to show that monoculture is a bad notion.
The existence of Windoze botnets illustrates this.

|I never thought including a browser or media player with the OS was a problem.
|
The EXCLUSIVITY provision / limited choice placed on assemblers is the issue.
...and lock-in via the use of non-standard/proprietary stuff in apps
was one of the original underpinnings of this thread.
IE has used those to hold back the Web for its entire lifetime
(think: least common denominator).

|In fact I would be disappointed if it didn't include one.
|
You should investigate the wget utility (or cURL).
It would be no sweat for a vendor to script a menu
so a user could get ANY browser from a list.

You should also check out the Add/Remove utility in a Ubuntu-based distro
to appreciate the difference between the M$ ecosystem and that of Free Software.
The multitude of 1-click choices is what Micros~1 users SHOULD have had.
(To show the power, the corresponding command line is
apt-get install | update {app}
That can identify/select, download, install, and update any Free Software app.

The EU is mulling over these ideas and others WRT Vista-7.

|New users eventually figure out there are better third party options
|than the one that shipped with the OS.
|
Lots of people still use the brand of soap their Moms used.
Getting that initial "sale" is powerful stuff.
While folks may add apps, many folks never *change out* a working app.

|So why all the lawsuits?
|PC suppliers have the ability to preload any browser they want at the factory[...]
|
It wasn't that way until *after* USA vs Microsoft (Clinton's DoJ)
--and the GWB administration immediately relaxed enforcement of that verdict.
The EU appears to have more cajones in this area than the USA gov't.

I'm glad to hear you've never been "leaned on" by a thug as to have insight in that.
I'm afraid what goes on behind closed doors between M$ and vendors
includes a lot more intimidation that you imagine.

|The things that bother me most about MS:
|1). The ever increasing hardware requirements to run their OS
|(and the increased amount of energy required to run it).
|
Actually, the poor configurability of M$'s GUI-driven environment is the real issue.
Linux, OTOH, can run as just a command line, or with just a window manager,
or with an entire desktop environment.
Linux distros/spins are like a Stone Soup menu, all starting with the Linux kernel.
The contrast with M$ is enormous.

|2). Product activation.
|5). DRM. Digital Rights Management.
|
Amen and Amen.
I hope you're including Windows Genuine DISAdvantage in there.
A vendor holding over your head the threat of remotely crippling your OS is evil.
...and let's not forget "critical updates" THAT AREN'T.

|3). The ever increasing lack of backwards compatiblity.
|
Actually, Apple's periodic complete ecosystem turnover has done them good.
Having emulators for old apps seems to work fine for them.
M$, OTOH, can't seem to get emulators to work well.
(It's worth noting here that WINE under Linux/BSD/...
has superior Windows binary compatibility
--especially when compared to Vista/Vista-7--aka Vista SP3.)

|4). Planned obs[o]lescence.
|
That's at the *core* of M$'s business model.
Take that away and the empire crumbles.
This is also tied to Embrace, extend, extinguish.

|6). Cost, yeah it ain't cheap.
|
Outside of VERY vertical markets,
selling ones and zeroes is an obsolete business model.
As more and more Free Software application programs are written,
the need to have Windoze and Windoze-compatible apps dwindles.
See also "WINE" (above).

The future of the software business is providing SUPPORT.
RedHat, Canonical, and Novell are in the vangard of the new wave.
Think: (gratis) Fedora/CentOS, (gratis) Ubuntu, and (gratis) openSuSE
i.e. you can get all the executables at zero cost (and the source code is available);
you only pay if you want SUPPORT.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: M$'s attempts to dominate the Web via incompatibility torques off old M$ users and others
Saturday, July 18, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Posted by Steve (23810 messages posted)

Microsoft likes people to use IE, so MSN is default Home page, more viewers means more Advertising revenue earned.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: The death knell sounds again for Internet Exploder 6
Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 6:04 am
Posted by Keith Stanier (1655 messages posted)

Steve wrote:
|youtube seems to work fine with IE6 on XP, is it a Windows 98 related problem. I 
|do Agree all versions of IE suck though.

Yes Steve YouTube might work ok on WinXP thats because you can update the Adobe Flash 
Player. On Win9x/ME you can only update to 9.0.124.0 (IE) which doesn't allow you 
to view YouTube video's so its Adobe Flash Player that sucks.

Your right IE6.0 does have a lot of errors that it wants to report to M$. I would 
hate to go back to IE5.5 after all these years and I don't want to use Firefox 2.0.0.18 
or Opera 9.61. I've tried them and didn't like them.

And WMP9.0 works perfectly for me on Win9x/ME even though gewg would disagree as 
I'm the only Win9x use that can get it to install and work perfectly. We have discussed 
this before on here.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: The death knell sounds again for Internet Exploder 6
Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 7:22 am
Posted by Steve (23810 messages posted)

I never really had much problem with IE, but knowing it is a Magnet for Malware makes not using IE is just a easy preventative measure in PC Bit decay.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: The death knell sounds again for Internet Exploder 6
Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Posted by gewg_ (4444 messages posted)

Steve wrote:
|I never really had much problem with IE,
|
...but have seen the cavalcade of folks in forums
that are infected to the core because of IE...

|but knowing it is a Magnet for Malware
|
...having observed ample evidence from a safe distance...

|makes not using IE is just a easy preventative measure in PC Bit decay.
|
The only "advantage" to Internet Exploder is having ActiveX.[1]
I don't go anywhere that uses ActiveX, so I don't need IE.

If I *did* encounter a site that used ActiveX, (having shown how clueless they are)
I would look for *another* site/corp that provided a similar service
--and who knows WTF they are doing.

If, after that, I still couldn't get along without the idiots[2]
(especially if I was forced to use Windoze)[3],
I'd install a _very_ old version of a Mozilla-compatible browser
(hey, even that beats what M$ offers WRT browser security)
and I'd make a profile for that site/setup.

I'd then install the ancient no-longer-supported ActiveX plug-in for Mozilla:
cache 
of    http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm#introduction
(Scroll down to see what I mean about a _very_ old version.)

After dealing with the idiots' site, I'd shut down that browser
and go back to my modern, muscular, dumps-the-crap browser
(a browser that, BTW, knows how to do *.SVG and *.PNG).

Of course, a much better way to avoid the nasties is not to use any M$ code at all.


[1] IE also has Browser Helper Objects, but that is purely a DISadvantage
--only useful to infect your box.
There are a multitude of ways to do all that stuff *without* easily-exploited crap.

[2] Let's have a silent moment for the people of South Korea
whose entire IT infrastructure is built on ActiveCrap.
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win98/1247427038

[3] A safer way to run Internet Exploder / ActiveX is under WINE
(in turn under Linux/BDS/OpenSolaris/...).
All the M$ crapware becomes totally benign.

The **safest** way to run Internet Exploder / ActiveX is in a virtual machine.
(Even with a Windoze host)
the (guest) copy of Windoze becomes bulletproof.
Why anyone would run a M$ system they depend on outside a VM
is totally beyond me this far into the 21st Century.
It's even easier than mechanically re-imaging a Windoze drive after it's infected.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: The death knell sounds again for Internet Exploder 6
Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Posted by Steve (23810 messages posted)

I think XP is the best value for a Operating System right now. Need 2002 or later Hardware, some safe Surfing Habits, and a little Common Sense, though that may rule out many.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

re: The death knell sounds again for Internet Exploder 6
Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Posted by gewg_ (4444 messages posted)

Steve wrote:
|I think XP is the best value for a Operating System right now.

The City of Munich has committed itself to an all-Free Software ecosystem.
cache 
of  http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/09/5284.ars

They are on budget and on schedule
(~10% of 14,000 desktops for the OS; even better for OpenOffice deployment).
cache 
of  http://www.go-portal.org/index.php/component/awiki/?view=mediawiki%26article=LiMux

In the short run, they don't disagree with you.
They don't appear to be in a huge rush to git 'er done
(I figure in large part due to reticence on the part of users)
and the city has until their XP licenses EoL (in what? 2010?).

...and a 100% deployment of an image *could* be made overnight, if desired.


As a counter to your position, MANY are finding that it's hard to oppose FREE.
Burlington Coat Factory has been M$-free since 1999.
http://google.com/search?q=Linux+1999+1250+"Burlington.Coat.Factory"

Ernie Ball, Inc. had to learn the hard way about the REAL costs of payware.
Apparently, they didn't have a full-time guy keeping track of software licences
and the Business Software Alliance raided the joint.
cache 
of  http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-6488047_ITM

After pissing away $100,000 to get past that,
Ernie Ball, Inc. hasn't used proprietary software since the Summer of 2000.
cache 
of  http://www.getopenoffice.org/ernieball.html
Sterling Ball has even remarked that he didn't buy a support contract from RedHat.

The City of Largo, Florida has been payware-free all of this century as well
and while Munich says it will initially cost them MORE to use Linux[1],
Largo says they cut their costs to half of what it had been.
cache 
of  http://linux.com/archive/feature/119109?theme=print

For an individual, payware may still make sense
but more and more corps are realizing just how poorly it scales
--and it can be demonstrated that it's been true for all of this century.


[1] My first link in this post talks about how Ballmer crapped his pants
and told Munich he'd give them fire-sale prices on everything.
The way to get better prices on M$ is to show M$ you don't need them.
Several places have used this as a bargaining chip;
it works REALLY well when you already have a demo Linux network deployed.

In Munich's case, it helps that there are lots of watchdogs
making sure the city fathers don't indulge in graft as has happened many places.

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