Linux and Windows battle for netbooks

There is some serious misinformation in this article. Did you know there is "no infrastructure of support" for Linux yet Windows has this down cold? Yeah, you could've fooled me.

Last year less than 10% of netbooks were preloaded with Windows according to the author (no source quoted) while IDC claims that 24% of netbooks last year did have Linux preloaded. Creative math? Imaginary numbers? The 96% market share this year she's quoting was a Microsoft commissioned survery of brick and mortar retailers in the United States and nowhere else. Online sales don't count, I guess. The world outside of the U.S. is insignificant too if you use that number.

The Microsoft anti-Linux disinformation campaign is in high gear. Here is a very well written example that has the veneer of a well researched and reported article when, in fact, it's anything but.

Also..."hotting up"? When did grammar become an elective class for journalists?...

I'm not sure if this is shill, or just typical lazy "journalism." A bunch of random quotes strung together by a writer with no industry knowledge, no curiosity, no attempt to verify anything she was told. It's "balanced" because she has pro and con quotes. It's grossly mislabeled as an analysis piece. It's cut-and-paste clickcrap.

It's better than a lot of stories. For a lot of stories, it's obvious to the experienced reader that the author got a bunch of quotes and sources from someone at Microsoft, and then spent a few minutes making it read as if he/she did research.

Note to tech publishers...

I could write a perl script that does the job most of your tech 'journalists' do. Cut and paste from Big Company press releases into 'article' for publication.

In these lean times, you have to think about the bottom line! I'll charge you 1/10 of the salary of the 'journalists' you let go.

I'll even throw in a bash script that will spell check the text for free!

Keep the real journalists that add value to your product, let the shills go.

Real journalists cost money. Real research takes time. Having a shill make up some "facts" and cobble together some quotes is easy.

I put this in the shill category because she came up with some interesting misinformation numbers, some not attributed, some we know came from false and debunked sources. She had to have an agenda to pick those.

number6x, you could certainly sell a script like that. Real humans are so pesky!

Quoting:you could certainly sell a script like that. Real humans are so pesky!

How do you think LXer is run? You didn't think that Scott and I were... people, did you? Think of us more like a beefed up version of number6x's script with an ELIZA bot built in to keep the comments going.

I am script, hear me roar...lol!

That just proves that Scott is not a drummer at all ... just a frustrated user beating on the side of his box trying to get it to do what its supposed to do.

Big meanie..lol