In less than one year, Windows 7 has surpassed Vista in global usage, however both still pale in comparison to the aged Windows XP.
Vista was released in 2007 to extremely harsh critical reviews. The operating system left many concerns of application compatibility, stringent hardware requirements, and who could forget about the UAC?.
Windows 7 was released in September 2009 to high critical review.
New NetApplications analytics show that Windows has 90.67 percent of the OS market, with XP the dominant leader at 61.87 percent. Windows 7 has now moved to 14.46 percent, just ahead of Vista at 14.34 percent.
In the United States, XP has 44.26 percent, ahead of Vista at 23.31 percent and Windows 7 catching up at 16.09 percent.
Overall Windows share fell from just over 92 percent last July, thanks to a small increase in Apple Mac sales and a large jump in mobile operating systems. Linux share fell to under 1 percent.
Result for: Mac
Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal seems to think that Apple and Amazon may be enjoying an unfair advantage in the e-book market and has accused the two companies of price fixing.
Blumenthal has requested meetings with the tech giants in an effort to discuss the deals they have with massive e-book publishers Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Penguin.
The AG says both companies have deals with the publishers that promise them the best e-book prices over any competition.
Such “most favored nation” clauses blocks the publishers from offering discounts deeper than what Apple or Amazon receives. While the deals are not illegal under current antitrust laws, they certainly fall into a gray area.
“The concerns are compounded, and hence potentially more troublesome, since this arrangement appears to be something that will be agreed to by the largest e-book publishers in the United States and two competitors who combined will likely command the greatest retail e-book share,” Blumenthal added, via CNNMoney.
Result for: Mac
Record label representatives have been caught issuing DMCA takedown notices for Radiohead’s In Rainbows album despite apparently not having any legal standing to do so.
Radiohead released In Rainbows online in 2007 after severing their relationship with EMI. It was initially offered online, with downloaders allowed to choose their own price - even if they chose to pay nothing.
The DMCA’s takedown provision allows rights holders or their agents to have infringing content taken down by service providers. But the rights in question would have to be for digital distribution.
A few months after it’s initial online release, the band made a distribution deal with a RIAA member, ATO Records, which doesn’t seem to include any digital distribution (ie download) rights.
In fact it appears that Warner/Chappell Music, a publishing company owned by Warner Music Group, is contracted to be Radiohead’s representative in digital licensing. Although public details of the arrangement are somewhat vague, Last.fm lists the company as the label for In Rainbows.
A guick search of the Chilling Effects database shows that the RIAA has included the album in at least one DMCA takedown request.
Another takedown notice which includes the album comes from the RIAA’s international equivalent, IFPI, which ATO Records isn’t even affiliated with. Even stranger is the frequent listing of In Rainbows in takedown notices by a Brazilian anti piracy organization called Anti-Pirataria Cinema E Música (APCM).
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