I don't know about the impressibe part - Have you seen *some* people?

You mean, until X company decides it's no longer profitable and shuts down their DRM servers, leaving your media unplayable? It's happened several times already, with several companies.

Or what about those DVDs/Blu-rays with "DigitalCopy"... which the fine print says will only work until a certain date, usually a year or two out?

DRM might not have been designed to make things expire, but it does through unneeded obsolecence - I mean, a MP3, OGG or XVID/DIVX file will still work *many* years down the road, just as long as someone has ported the decoder to whatever new platform there is. If it's got DRM, though... not without breaking it.

Frigging Furries, always ruin everything!

No, you misunderstand. Lets say we have 300 computers in a building. If we upgrade them every 3-5 years like would have happened in pre-p4 days, that's 300 licences every 3 years.
Now, if we decide "eh, only 50 of those machines are CAD stations, so we'll upgrade those, and leave the rest for another 3 years", MS gets only 50 licenses. 3 years after that, upgrade the CAD stations again, and use the old ones to replace 50 of the others. MS gets only 50 licences, again.
Repeat this process about 3 times, and you'll see where we're at - a few new machines, mostly handmedowns, including old P4's, most of which aren't getting upgrades to W7, let alone 8, and aren't giving MS any license fees.

Note that by Kiosk, I mean "time and attendance" app-driven kiosk, not just "basic maching for random googling etc" - machines we *do* need in the building and would require a PC and MS license... But instead of buying a new machine with win8 to fulfil that, they're using a spare P4 with XP.

Multiply this scenario many many times, and you can see why MS isn't getting the license fees they did in the XP/P4 days.

Because they aren't selling new licences of Windows 8 for them, either directly or to OEMs.
When your machines barely run XP, you aren't upgrading them to even 7.

And yet, I have things that "just work" on linux which don't work at all on Windows.. Removable drives with more than one partition, for one. I can take any flash drive, partition it with two partitions(say one for work and one for play, one for LiveCDs and one for files). Any Linux will see and use all partitions. Windows 7 will only see one. It's frigging annoying.
Or, say, booting off USB. With USB3, you could easily use an external USB3 drive to boot, and haul it between three computers so you have all your files and settings. Linux? Trivial. Windows 7? Impossible.
Or how about printer support? I've run into a number of printers which wouldn't work on 7 due to lack of drivers(MFGR didn't care beyond XP)... Ubuntu? autodetect, Just Works.

Meh. With either system there's problems. At least on Linux, the solution isn't "reinstall from scratch" like it often is on Windows.

Mod *very* interesting!

I too would be interested in such details.

Windows is having a dip in sales because old machines "do the job". When a C2D does the job fine, why upgrade to the latest and greatest?

Ah, but you see, it doesn't matter - if the hardware is compatible with Ubuntu, it should be compatible with *any* modern enough Linux. Which is why having Ubuntu, even if it's not what you use, is so important.

No, the problem is that Windows saturates the market already, and 8 year old desktops are still fine. I know people still running P4s with XP!
Even my company still has some P4s around, as kiosks and such, and anything with an I3 or better processor is rare...

Apple might sell more devices, but the problem is that MS has lots of old devices around which still work.

If your harddisk controller has enough of a microprocessor in it, it *could* be turing complete, just like the 1541 floppy drive.

You mean like this 3TB Seagate drive I have next to me? It's got 4K sectors, with "fake" 512B ones exposed to the OS -- and that was inside a 3TB external drive that reports 4K sectors to the OS!
So, it's not just WD drives doing the lying.

Hell, a h.264 720p 4GB rip looks far better than DVD quality(and "good enough" in most cases), especially when the full 1080P source video wasn't made with the best cameras...

Pwnie express is selling one of those, too. And it even seems to come with a copy of my very own BackupMenu, so it's easy to restore if it breaks etc.

That's cool!
Yeah, looking at some of the new ads on Youtube(See the Ram "Farmer" ad), looks like Ram's aimong for the worker/rural market, and such people like Diesel.