This makes no sense.

reat! So statCounter altered what it is measuring and thus, overnight, it puts Windows like 10-15% higher than days ago. Maybe it’s time to rely on Clownflare’s data more. At least it’s more consistent over time.

Or maybe… wait a few more days for statCounter to sort out the data and make things more consistent.

Windows is perishing, so…

ROWING up in the 1980s, Microsoft was mostly irrelevant, but by the 90s it was everywhere. Now it’s going away gradually. It tries to hide the mass layoffs; it’s fashionable now…

Silent layoffs are still layoffs.

his morning I wrote about “voluntary” (NOT!) layoffs at Microsoft.

I said: “They can’t catch a break, can they?”

I was using wordplay because it is summer’s break.

A friend asked, “why should shoddy, subpar, proprietary software be given any preferential treatment by groups which don’t have access to the backdoors / bugdoors built into the product(s)?”

He said that “can’t catch a break” looks too much like sympathising with Microsoft.

“It’s good news that the world is giving Microsoft,” the friend said, as well as “its products, and services the
heave ho. What remains, especially in Europe, is how to deal with the leftover microsofters which have displaced as good as all IT departments.”

“Even the idea of a team to support workers to use ICT to their advantage has become foreign due to the persistent pervasiveness of microsoftianism over the IT departments it has displaced.”

Another friend said “it will take a lot of time and effort to get rid of them and to properly train IT people on real technologies again you could talk about a lost generation or two. I’m just glad I started using GNU/Linux in 1997 and abandoned Microsoft in 2002, long before the current move towards GNU/Linux and free software…”

Crossposted from Techrights

10 hours ago:

Last week: Clownflare Sees a Lot of GNU/Linux in China, Unlike statCounter

n the US, the home of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM), GNU/Linux is said to have exceeded 10% “market share” on “the desktop” (desktops/laptops). Even Clownflare (US) sees that.

What about the world’s second-largest economy (by GDP)?

China said it would reduce its reliance on GAFAM several times over the years, but now there is a timeline and perhaps also a directive/order like in France.

It is hardly surprising that Windows is shedding off userbase all around the world and Microsoft has mass layoffs even during the summer break.

They can’t catch a break, can they?

In India, whose population is estimated to be bigger than China’s (based on the official figures at least; some authorities dispute these because of undocumented residents and distant/detached settlements, nonconfomist societies that reject any census), things are even worse for Microsoft and much better for GNU/Linux.

recently wrote about security crises associated with Windows deployments. “On the topic of Windows,” a friend told me (citing this one article): “The writers there (and elsewhere) conflate spending with results. Security is part of the design and not an aftermarket add-on. The latter is a pointless and futile waste of time and money, but one which keeps Microsoft market share from bottoming out. [...] the Microsoft way of thinking permeates their design *and* implementation *and* especially their deployment.”

I still firmly believe that removing most Windows installations out there (ultimately all of them) would considerably improve computer security worldwide. Microsoft designs things not for security but the very opposite (remote access by the state). ?

‘ve just published another post about why Microsoft needs to be eradicated as a matter of national security. If Finland still uses anything from Microsoft, as I generally argue that it sadly does, then it remains widely open to any Russian cracker all the time.

“Only the physical border is being limited,” a friend told me. “The digital border has been cracked wide open and the visit by Microsoft’s Brad Smith and the subsequent failure of authorities to detail and charge him indicate that the crack is widening.”

“Lots of Windows TCO announcements are likely during the long weekend, especially from the assholes at shit organizations and companies which have decided to sponsor more malware via payment to ransomware operators. First and foremost Microsoft is to blame. Second, however, are those who have chosen to intentionally underwrite more breaches by paying the ransom, instead of having had proper data hygiene and backup practices.”

“Dissent” at databreaches, i.e. the main author of a site that tracks major security incidents (cracks/compromise), had an interesting message for Thanksgiving and then covered many new incidents about this topic over the weekend (which has only just started). Are companies revealing severe failings while journalists are away on holiday?

Citing this new article, the friend said they’re “underwriting further attacks against inherently vulnerable Windows useds” [sic].

The world won’t be without breaches after Microsoft is gone, but there will be vastly fewer such breaches. Also, the Microsoft way of teaching “security” is part of the problem..

“Windows 98 should have been released for free on Jan. 1, 1996 and titled Windows 95.1. If this were Hollywood, then Windows 98 would be the equivalent of ‘Heaven’s Gate’, ‘Waterworld’ and ‘Godzilla’ rolled into one. A huge, overhyped, bloated, embarrassment.”

–Jesse Berst, ZDNet editor

MY GENERATION (I’m 37) grew up on DOS. Not necessarily Microsoft DOS, either. Just DOS. As a kid I used to work from the command line. We, as kids, taught one another new tricks; sometimes an adult would visit to teach us things and copy some programs for us (floppy disks with compressed archives). Various utilities like RAR were useful. Sometimes an infection (malicious program) needed to be removed. That was before the days of Windows 3.x — the days we used ncurses-type interfaces to type documents and send these to printers. Later on I did some programming with batch files and at around age 15 I started with Pascal (quite popular at the time owing to simplicity and relative elegance).

I mostly missed the BBS generation (some friends of mine used it; they’d copy for us files they got from there). When bulletin board systems were still popular many computers did not even have modems (few of my classmates had them, usually because of lack of a technical parent, and only one of them was a GNU/Linux user in the mid/late nineties). I think I got my first modem when I was 14 and IRC was probably the first thing I used “on-line”. After Windows 95, which many people used at that time, I bought my last Windows laptop. Actually, my father bought it. He used it and then passed it to me. It had only 32 MB of RAM and Windows 98. I carried it around and used it in university as an undergraduate student (at the faculty I used GNU/Linux at the time). It retired years later and I’ve not bothered with Windows since then. I wrote a great deal about it in USENET at the time. Memories from these days are mostly gone by now; I barely ever touch Windows and when I do it’s over Remote Desktop, typically to access a client’s network, e.g. to run PuTTY from a remote system. That happens about once a month (patching Debian GNU/Linux servers).

Was Windows 98 a decent operating system? No, it was unreliable, but at least it ran on modest hardware without much RAM. I ran Firefox on it, with a total system capacity of something from the mid-nineties (~400MegaHertZ CPU, 32 MB of RAM). That was before Microsoft added back doors to Windows (this was reportedly done in 1999), before the bloat of NT and before DRM (Vista).

With 3 weeks left before the end of this year (and this decade) I remember not so fondly the 90s, back when I used Windows. In 2000 I moved to GNU/Linux, helped by a Finnish friend, an exchange student at the university. In a sense, next year I become a 20-year GNU/Linux user.