Summary: Over a year after its official release Vista 7 is still used by just a small proportion of computer users worldwide

DUE to a great deal of activity defending Wikileaks we have not posted many articles recently, but we did not skip any new important news, either. In the daily links one can find several new examples where people are complaining about Vista 7 and then moving to GNU/Linux. In other words, Vista 7 has done almost nothing to suppress Free software on the desktop. Despite rampant copyright infringement in China, even the Chinese are not adopting Vista 7:

How about leaks of a different kind? “45.2% of China’s Internet users still rely on IE6….China’s XP share, however, was a staggering 81.8%…Windows 7′s share in China was 10.3%“. That looks like a huge share in China for that other OS but notice most of it is XP. The Chinese are not buying “7″. Those statistics also come from external sites mostly in English. Internal use may favour GNU/Linux more. The Chinese are not locked into the Wintel treadmill. They can easily go to GNU/Linux because “7″ does not run on their machines.

Do not be confused by US-biased 'market share' surveys that use improper metrics. Some of them would have you believe that China, the world's largest Internet population, only amounts to 2% of the Internet's usage. What a load of bunk claims.

A couple of days ago we went through China-related cables (thanks, Wikileaks and Bradley) and showed that Microsoft puts Windows source code in the hands of TOPSEC, which trains and employs Chinese cyberspies, according to US intelligence. Here is the latest small example of Vista 7 being broken, technically. This is a security problem and Vista 7 fails where GNU/Linux does not. "The sad case of the ISP and the supersecret password" says the headline of this blog post: [via]

The key on the CPE worked fine for my Linux netbook and an iPhone, but not a Windows 7 laptop.

Vista 7 is hardly in the news anymore. It's not at all as successful and revolutionary as Microsoft wanted people to believe, so it's not surprising that Microsoft cheats in its reports and arguably shows fake numbers about Windows sales (the real numbers decline over the years). ⬆

"One strategy that Microsoft has employed in the past is paying for the silence of people and companies. Charles Pancerzewski, formerly Microsoft’s chief auditor, became aware of Microsoft’s practice of carrying earnings from one accounting period into another, known as “managing earnings”. This practice smoothes reported revenue streams, increases share value, and misleads employees and shareholders. In addition to being unethical, it’s also illegal under U.S. Securities Law and violates Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (Fink).

--2002 story about Charles Pancerzewski, Microsoft