Microsoft says Vista sales at nearly 40 million

Microsoft says Vista sales at nearly 40 million | Technology, Media & Telecom | Reuters

This is really nothing more than a marketing ploy on Microsoft’s part. Most of these were in the form of upgrade certificates, open corporate, and OEM licenses. I’m willing to bet a majority of those haven’t actually been installed. For example- they could sell a company (like Dell or HP) 1-million OEM licenses and include those in that figure, but that company may have only sold 10k units. Of the ones that were actually installed- I’m willing to bet as many as 30% were uninstalled within weeks and replaced with XP or Linux. I’d be more interested in knowing the number of actual activations have occurred, and how many of those are actually still pinging Microsoft’s servers. I doubt they would ever release that sort of information.

Console Portraits: A 40-Year Pictorial History of Gaming

Console Portraits: A 40-Year Pictorial History of Gaming

This is a great time-travel article about console video gaming. I got a kick out of it because I remember when my father bought a Magnavox Odyssey, which was the first commercial video game console. I still remember the colored screen overlays you stuck to your TV to make the black-and-white line graphics slightly more interesting… It was actually amazingly cool at the time, even though it looks quite laughable today.

EFF: DeepLinks

EFF: DeepLinks

Since I know there are more than a few pack-rat geeks out there (are you reading this- Steve)…

The EFF’s patent-busting attorneys are looking for “prior art” examples in fighting a patent case against a company called Acacia that claims a patent for CDs that contain hyperlinks to online content. I remember a lot of Shareware distributions that had embeded hyperlinks, but I’ve either thrown them away or given them away over the years. Of course, now such embedded hyperlinks are commonplace- and Acacia wants to cash-in on that.

Read the whole store at the EFF’s Web site.

Linus Torvalds Responds To Microsoft Patent Claims

Linus Torvalds Responds To Microsoft Patent Claims — Linus Torvalds — InformationWeek

He has some very good points!