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You know your product's reputation is in trouble when a government advises the public to dump it.

Dude, that was the case back ten years ago, too. Facts and technical data don't play a role in situations where Microsoft products get deployed.

You know you have a cult-like following when governments, research universities and a handful of computer magazines advise the public to dump your product and it still retains market share. Having EULAs that prohibit benchmarking doesn't hurt either. Nor does it hurt to have insiders paid for by the victim's own budget.

How long must this go on? Put a dollar value on the damage and then put out warrants for Microsoft executives and interns, past and present.

Linux On The Desktop has been an unachieved goal for about a decade now and it seems it's stuck with unreliable drivers. Especially graphics- and wireless drivers are notoriously in this regard, where every version offers some new surprises regarding errors and lack of stability.

However, having a stable ABI won't be the magic solution to this. A lot (if not most) of the problems encountered on one platform with a stable ABI (Windows) seem to be related to buggy drivers. A more recent example: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/vista-capable-lawsuit-paints-picture-of-buggy-nvidia-drivers.ars

And even an open source driver doesn't guarantee quality. For at least a year now, drivers for Intel's graphics cards have been the source of a lot of problems on the desktop (see http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2009081702335OSHWKN). And I'm not even mentioning the various buggy ALSA drivers that have been a plague for linux desktop users in the past.

Taking these two observations, one can state that we cannot trust hardware companies nor kernel developers to produce quality and stable drivers. Both parties cannot and/or will not test against many possible hardware and software combinations. Kernel developers do not have the resources and I don't believe companies will invest a lot of effort as well (especially not for such a small market-share)

Microsoft seems to know about this problem and offers the WHQL driver-certification to ensure a certain driver quality. I don't know what qualifies for such a certification but I won't be surprised they have a huge amount of resources available for testing various (popular?) hardware and software combinations. But again, even Microsoft cannot cover nearly all the bases.

So what does that leave Desktop Linux? In my opinion, if it really wants to be better than Windows in terms of delivered quality and offer a smooth and stable environment, it needs to control the hardware offer as well. It's Apple's little public secret: the reason why their software is perceived to be so stable and seamless, is because you don't have to fiddle around with drivers. Plus, the OS guys can actually test the delivered system pretty thoroughly because of the limited variations in hardware.

The way I see it Canonical should have released a Ubuntu laptop bundled with hardware that is well-tested to work with the current available drivers. But also release their OS for use on other hardware, but without the guarantee that everything will work as good as on the offered hardware. They had a good shot at this with their Dell deal roughly one or two years ago but it seems they dropped the ball on that. Even the Dell guys made the remark that it was getting pretty difficult to find quality drivers for some components (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NTkxOA). From the outside it seems that Canonical only was interested in delivering the OS part and didn't really pay any attention to the complete product. The end result was a 'nice try', but riddled with problems regarding hibernation, wireless and dual-monitor support, not exactly trivial pieces of functionality on a laptop. I don't know if their current offerings are any better, but a bad first impression is pretty hard to make up for.

That was my first thought..No accelerated anything, crappy performance on anything more than rendering a basic webpage, totally lame. I also wonder if they could have picked WORSE timing with the FTC investigating and EU already fining them.

I mean first the have to cut a 1.25 billion dollar check to AMD for rigging the game with OEMs through bribes and threats, they shut out Nvidia from the newer chipsets leaving them to rot on LGA775 and making themselves the only game in town for the new sockets, and now integrating their shitty GPU, which of course will make it even easier to cut Nvidia's ION out of that market as well. WTF Intel? Do you really want a MSFT antitrust bust added to your company?

This seems to me to be the absolute WORST timing they could have come up with for this release. They should have waited until AMD came out with Bulldozer (which doesn't compete in the same market as Atom) and then popped out the new chips, so they could say "see? We are just doing what the other guys are doing!" but instead this looks more like trying to drive another nail into the independent chipset market, at least to me, and I wouldn't doubt the FTC and EU takes a close look as well. Stupid move Intel, stupid move.

Well, according to the same site, Firefox is almost 23%.

But in truth, all it reveals is a sadly biased study, one which doesn't reveal its sources -- does it count unpaid deployments? I doubt it. And if you're trying to measure the marketshare of a free operating system by counting the number of people paying for it...

I mean, yes, he was modded troll, but chances are, someone is taking him seriously. So, here's some facts.

Sigh. Every time this comes up:

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-17-014-20-NW-BZ-LF&tbovrmode=3

i say why because my app only runs on linux (for now). i don't know anything about multiplatform stuff and wouldn't even try to (I'm a VB developer..)

Apparently you know a LOT about cross-platform development already, because you're evidently developing in a WINDOWS-ONLY language (VB) but SOMEHOW getting your app to run in LINUX.

Perhaps you were developing in THIS, or THIS?

Idiot.

RMS originally tried to brand Mono as GNU Mono:

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-07-09-004-20-PR-MS-SW

It's a victory for great free software applications that just so happen to use Mono. Mono often gets treated as a second class citizen because of its Microsoft roots, with zealots not wanting Microsoft's "unholy embrace" on Linux, whatever that's supposed to mean. Thankfully, there are sane people to defend it and because of this developers don't have to worry about their software not being included in a default install because they just so happened to pick Mono.

Also, how was my original post Flamebait?

I realize that exact figures don't really change your argument much but market share figures are something that have long been slippery. The more appropriate figures, in my opinion, put Windows at about 88%, Mac at 9.7 and Linux around 1%.

"Appropriate"? Only if you enjoyed the Kool-Aid. The marketshare.hitLink site is owned by NetApplications, whose business model was selling rebranded Windows executables to track Windows visits to Windows websites. No bias there, eh?

http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/2009/05/1-linux-market.html
"Matt Assay said it was at 2.02%

ZDNet reported on Feb 24th, 2004 http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=5334 that the 2003 Linux desktop market share hit 3.2% and expected it to hit 6% by 2007.

In 2005 they reported that the 2004 saw the Linux desktop at 4%.

I believe that the all the ZDNet figures were spot on. If anything, the Linux desktop market share has continued to increase and is probably currently at 8-10% and rising. Dell and the other PC OEMs wouldn't have invested in selling Linux pre-installed if it appealed only to less than 1% of the desktop market.

It is quite obvious that NetApplications latest "report" is merely Microsoft's continuing attempt to control the news about Linux's success in replacing Windows on the desktop...."

The best evidence that the NetApplications "report" is fake is from Ballmer himself. In a Feb, 2009 presentation he displayed a graph showing the percentages of desktop marketshare for Windows, Linux and Apple. HE puts the Linux pie slice at around 10%, and slightly larger than Apple's.
http://www.osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Competitor_than_Apple

Ballmer can't listen to his own PR pulp. He has to plan using real data. Fortunately, he let it leak.

You bring up a very important argument : trust. Who do you trust in the cases of you being the Dalai Lama and you're using linux or windows.

Windows : you're trusting Microsoft, the State of Massachusetts and the Federal Government of America. All of these organizations vet their people, every step up the ladder means more thorough checks. This means that Microsoft has the option of ratting out just about everything you know to the chinese

Linux : you're trusting everyone, everywhere with the basic smarts of getting code accepted in an open source project.

This is the story of a "slightly better than average" attempt at backdooring the linux kernel was thwarted :

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7388
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-01-22-005-10-SC
http://www.opennet.ru/base/sec/p52-18.txt.html

How can this be prevented ? Simple : vet your contributors BEFORE accepting code from them.

"the Carla Schroeder article read like it was done by someone with the maturity of a ten year old"

Did MS misquote Canonical that there is a 4x return rate for Linux notebooks, did those articles debunk that statement. Is MS engaged in a propaganda war to keep Linux off the desktop. If none of this is true, then produce some citations instead of trashing the style of a report.

"However here is an interesting fact--when customers are offered choice on equally well-engineered computers around a third will select Ubuntu over XP"

"Continually repeating that we 'confirmed' a 4x return over XP when we did nothing of the sort is really not worthy of a great company like Microsoft"

The very clear-headed Carla Schroeder has a write-up at Linux Today. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols also noticed the figures were bogus.

Pretty exciting stuff. Another notable open source victory was that of the release of Django 1.0 in November.

Sadly, Django is not written in Python 3, and python 3 breaks backwards compatibility.

Since both the Django and python communities are very active, I suspect this will be remedied soon. I cannot wait.

With lobbyists making sure the US military use Microsoft products "securing their networks" is not the description I'd give to it. The false sense of security you mention won't apply to China.

The Chinese have their own official Red Flag Linux which despite the suspicions of monitoring / back door access for Chinese officials to make sure it's users stick to the party line......it's still Linux. I know who I'd bet on in a security war.

Is this an example of "winning the war" using the corporate strength of Redmond? http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/2008/12/trumpet-windows.html

...after reading Ballmer's latest prognostications.

Tell me, tubby, how do you expect to own the market when your product is late and lousy, your competitors never sleep, and abuse-of-monopoly type shenanigans aren't an option?

Someone needs to get him one of those "I reject your reality and substitute my own" t-shirts.

What happened to Congressman Villanueva and Peruvian Bill Number 1609 (Free Software in Public Administration)?
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-05-20-006-26-IN-LF-PB

http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/2008/08/httpbryceharrin.html

Do you consider your CPU good enough? Or if not, which of the zero high performance CPUs with open source microcode do you run?

My CPU conforms to a documented and published interface, which is all that is necessary for it to support free software.

And that's also exactly what's necessary for any system to "work completely" - can't check that something works if its behavior isn't precisely specified.

The conditions necessary to be able to state that a bit of hardware "works completely" are the same as those necessary to support free software - conformance to a published interface specification.

Is it good if, in addition, the hardware is free (as in freedom)? Sure. But that's not necessary for it to support free software.

Eric S. Raymond discusses the recent Microsoft security debacle in which an engineer inserted a back door in a library that allowed access with the phrase 'Netscape engineers are weenies!' The article notes that 'Apache will *never* have a back door like this one.

http://linuxtoday.com/stories/20234.html

versioning, lots of options depending on what you mean:

-- straight linux OS level snapshots...
      http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshots_backup.html

-- source code management systems ... can be applied to entire file systems: git, subversion, tla, bzr, etc...

-- maintaining parallel copies: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2008063000526OSHL

surely lots of others too...

• one
• two

• should i continue? or is there already abundant proof out there that darl is a lying sack of shit?

Just the other day, I helped an enterprise client do some work in MSSQL - they had to import LITERALLY DOZENS of customer records from an SQL database into a spreadsheet. We managed to do this quite easily by clicking the mouse for a few hours together, setting the ODBC drivers up using heaps of helpful GUI tools. We then managed to get the spreadsheet to AUTOMATICALLY TOTAL all of the postcodes for the customer records, and even calculate the AVERAGE of the postcodes.
Try doing THAT with your little shareware database !! Hmmph !

And it wasn't, until one of the programmers who made GNU/Linux viable in the first place by reverse engineering the SMB protocols, Tridge, tried to reverse engineer BitKeeper to try to create a free software version, something he had every right to do given he wasn't bound by the license.

While this may be irrelevant to your insight, 1998 seems a bit early for 2.4. The relevant part might just be that it was some current version of the linux kernel.

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-01-05-001-04-NW-LF-KN

Anyway, sorry if it's irrelevant.

Way back when the MS is a Monopoly ruling first came out in late '99 I put together a site called MS-Monopoly.com. It was covered by /. but damned if I can find the story on /. now but here's a Linux Today blurb.

I'd used the well known Monopoly game board as the basis for our site, with a different company that MS had bought for each square. The Community Chest and Chance cards were contributed by users. Satire is meant to be protected by copyright law, at least here in Canada. Anyway, we got slashdotted not once but twice, Yahoo site of the day, we were in Mac Addict, a whole bunch of portals, etc. Basically we were getting tonnes of traffic... then came the letters from Hasbro.

Long story short, I didn't own the domain name and the guy who did got cold feet after we received the fourth letter. I was holding out for a registered letter, but it wasn't my neck. We'd checked with lawyers and while we had a case fighting a case, even one your most likely going to win, gets expensive in a hurry. We reluctantly closed up shop.

Interestingly enough before we got shut down we heard from a fellow who produced his own version of Monopoly. According to him the game itself is in the public domain because it was a popular game long before it became a Hasbro product. He shipped us one of his board games and gave us permission to copy it for our site, but by that time we had moved on to other things.

To the folks making Facebook apps, I wish you luck. Fighting a Hasbro will require deep pockets and in court nothing is 100%. Yes, if you win you can sue for costs... but you can't be sure you'll win.

ms-monopoly.com lives on... as a advert site. Google it though and you'll still find copies of the site (minus a working backend) and references around, I guess people like a good joke.. In the end it had to end, but I guess that's life.

- The Jester, Department of Jest

Someone hasn't been paying attention

But it's not a first time scan. Amada was checked long ago, and FreeBSD has been running a Coverity server since Jan 2006.

http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2006031800826OSCYDV

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/coverity.html

Worst of all, these articles haven't disclosed the classes of software issues detected. I'm sure huge classes of deadlocks and other system-wide issues go undetected. Even if the point of Coverity is to conduct system-wide analysis, I'd still say large classes escape.

I'm sure it can't detect that a Linux device driver sends the wrong byte to the wrong register of the hardware it supervises.

I think from the DHS perspective, they want to close as many bugs as possible that their adversaries could find by mechanical means. Finding deep bugs is real work, and wouldn't support a multi-vector concerted attack without massive preparation of the kind that HUMINT can usually detect.

Yes, I click all the MS Ad links here. MS is paying my Linux News.
And by the way "Linux Reference Center by Microsoft" is a improper use of a Registered Mark, isn't it?.

That back in the day... Gnome was championed for it's openness over the "evil" KDE for choosing to using encumbered libraries? (Anyone remember FreeQT? Or RMS Making noise about the whole thing?) My how things change over time.

Aside from Microsoft's perennial reluctance to get into the PC hardware business, it's surprising that they are not designing such a thing. Microsoft reportedly has over 40 engineers working full-time on the XP port to the XO. OLPC, on the other hand, has about 20 full-time employees (and admittedly numerous volunteers) working on hardware, software, marketing, and administration. Microsoft could easily crush this effort if they wanted to -- at least, in terms of money and man-hours. Why they do not is not clear... Perhaps they are not sure yet if there is a profit to be had, so they are content to let the OLPC expend resources to find a market, then take it at their leisure if one is found. Perhaps also they realize that much of the appeal of the project lies in the charity of shared knowledge, and that a similar attempt by a multi-billion dollar monopoly will be tainted with cynicism and irony.

now would you beleive it!

6 years ago...

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-01-05-001-04-NW-LF-KN

Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 16:01:22 -0800 (PST)
From: Linus Torvalds torvalds@transmeta.com
To: Kernel Mailing List linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: And oh, btw..

In a move unanimously hailed by the trade press and industry analysts as
being a sure sign of incipient braindamage, Linus Torvalds (also known as
the "father of Linux" or, more commonly, as "mush-for-brains") decided
that enough is enough, and that things don't get better from having the
same people test it over and over again. In short, 2.4.0 is out there.

today ...

http://kernel.org/

The latest 2.4 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.4.35.4 2007-11-17 17:44 UTC F V C Changelog

Not quite prospecting for or exploiting underground resources quite yet, but many a career has started at the pump...

But seriously, for a company with a truly global customer base (not forgetting that infamous motto either) celebrating militaries must have been a difficult decision to make, although geotargetting obviously alleviates some of the obvious issues here. I mean, most of the world doesn't probably see the US military with admiring eyes at the moment, or even in recent decades. Despite being a pacifist a heart and considering war as the final, brutal alternative when a nation or people and their lives and freedoms are under the threat of extinction, I do have respect for the veterans and volunteers who've put their lives on the line to protect their people (or even other peoples!) or their rights and values against outside aggression.

Sometimes it is easy to know, given access to realistic historical and contemporary information, who were the aggressors (and invaders and colonizers) and who merely defended their rights, freedoms and lives. Unfortunately wars and their reasons are often obfuscated in political fog and extremely selective scripting of history. Even after the WWII most wars and invasions have been wars of choice and of political and/or territorial expansionism. The five UN veto-wielding former and current colonial powers have all used their position, power and military in the WWII-era to impose their will or rule upon other smaller nations. How many of those wars has been purely to help free a people from foreign (or even unpopular domestic) occupation or dictatorship?

I'm not keen on honouring veterans anywhere who've helped invade a foreign country for their own regime's political or material gain, without either absolute necessity or clearly altruistic and humanitarian reasons. Therefore it is all but impossible for a non-jingoistic person to celebrate a veterans' day in a large and powerful country with a "militarily active foreign policy". Meanwhile smaller countries tend have their own clearly defined independence or uprising remembrances (even if in places such remembrances are strictly and brutally suppressed, such as the March 10th (1959) in Chinese-occupied Tibet) which are based on defensive struggles.

Perhaps instead of celebrating the power of war and its tools, we should all start remembering that there are still too many unrepresented nations and peoples in our modern world. With some peoples under genuine genocidal occupation, who's going to support their rights and freedoms? While the West or the democratic world in general still has some financial and political edge over the rising authoritarianism we could even try using non-military means in support of freedom and liberty. Besides, I'd even feel some guilt celebrating my own people's day of freedom while my nation actively collaborates and trades with regimes engaged in violent expansionism and/or domestic dictatorship, thereby denying such freedoms from others suffering under ongoing oppression.

There has been a similar case against SCO's German office and website, they were forced to take their claims off their site, as they couldn't provide proof. Along with that court order came a warning that they will be heavily fined if they ever try it again. See, for example: http://www.computerwoche.de/nachrichten/538897/ (German) or here http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2003053001926NWLLDV (English).

SCO sometimes reminds me of a certain song... many of you may already know it. For those that don't...
(shamelessly ripped off from The Dead Milkmen's "Stuart", from the album "Beelzebubba".)

You know what, Laura DiDio? I LIKE YOU! You're not like the other people, here, in the Lindon trailer park! Oh, nonono, don't go get me wrong. They're fine people, they're good Americans. But they're content to sit back, fire up their Windows XP boxes and surf a little Internet on AOL, maybe chat a little on MSN. They're good, fine people, Stuart. But they don't know ... what the penguins are doing to our code! [...]

You know that Johnny Werzner kid - the kid who ports apps in the neighborhood? He's a fine kid. Some of the neighbors say he smokes crack, but I don't believe it. Anyway, for his 10th birthday, all he wanted was a Sourceforge page. "Dad, get me a Sourceforge account. I'll never ask for anything else as long as I live". So the guy breaks down and set him up with a Sourceforge page.

Anyway, 10:30, the other night, I go over next door, and there's the Werzner kid, looking up something on the 'net. I say, "What are you looking for?" He says "I'm looking for the source code to add to this new app."

I said, "Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick! Everybody knows the source code is proprietary! Under NDA! In a vault! Why the hell do you think they call it 'source code' anyway!?"

Now Laura, do you think a kid like that is going to know what the penguins are doing to the code!? I first became aware of this about ten years ago, the summer my oldest boy, Darl Jr. died. You know that trade show comes into town every year? Well this year IBM came through with a Demo called The Parser. The man said, "Keep your links, and dependencies, inside The Parser at all times!" But not Darl Jr - he was a DAAAREDEVIL, just like his old man! He was banging out code, saying "Hey everybody, Look at me! Look at me!" POW! He was decapitated! They found his head over by the Microsoft .NET concession! A few days after that, I open up the mail - and there's a pamphlet in there - from Pueblo, Colorado ! And it's addressed to Darl Jr. And it's entitled: "Do you know what the penguins are doing to our code!?"

Now, Laura! If you look at the soil around any large US city where there's a large underground kernel hacker population. Portland, Oregon - perfect example. Look at the soil around Portland, Stuart... You can't build on it; you can't grow anything in it. The government says it's due to poor farming. But I know what's really going on, Laura. I know it's the penguins! They're in it with the aliens! They're building landing strips for code-stealing Martians! I swear to God!

You know what, Laura DiDio? I like you! You're not like the other people, here in the Lindon trailer park...

That and no-one in their right mind uses emacs willingly.

It's not about repeating the "party line" (to be honest, I don't think there is one), I'm not really a Wine developer either (although I've had 2 small patches committed), I'm just presenting the situation the way I see it.

Currently I can't say: function x, it gets executed by Acrobat Reader 2.1, Firefox, fuzzycalc and Darly's Printshop. So the person who implements it can test it with these applications that make use of it.

Strictly speaking, you're right, but that data is fairly easily accessable. For example, here's a tiny script that'll give you said information (just feed it a +relay trace), I just wrote it in the span of a few minutes. It could be useful to integrate such data with the AppDB.

I understand that a function does not need to be 100% implemented. But think about a sponsor who says: I want to sponsor dll x. Or: My program WAccounting uses these 5 API calls, I want this program to run perfect under Wine, what does it cost me?

In general, people don't seem to care about how much of a DLL is implemented, they care about if their programs foo, baz and bar work. Most of the major investments into Wine have been to make a particular program (or set of programs) work, such as Google with Picasa (list of patches), or Corel with Wordperfect and CorelDRAW (until Microsoft threw a large chunk of money at them).

In a similar vein, Codeweavers offers porting services for Wine, ie, they'll make a particular application work, and they can give you an estimate of how much it'll cost, on a case by case basis.

What also motivates people is to see a kind of progress bar. I mean a automated script that indicates how much stubs and so on are in there.

I agree that people like progress bars (so do I), but they can be deceptive. For example, the Wine status pages have an automated script that guesses the completion status of all DLLs based on the contents of the .spec file for each DLL, but this isn't always accurate. For example, the .spec files don't seem to contain all functions for a given DLL, (I'd guess any COM functions aren't in there, as they're special, AFAIK), and while the automated tool thinks that d3d8 and d3d9 are 40% and 20% completed, respectively, the actual case is closer to 95% in both cases, based upon developer inspection.

I also would like to get informed how to debug an application with Wine. The documentation is heavily outdated and imcomplete here. WINEDEBUG=+relay is intresting, I tried it out. But the documentation is not very informative here.

Here's the complete list of WINEDEBUG channels, as well as some useful registry keys, and a debugging tutorial. Generally when you're debugging something, WINEDEBUG can be very useful with the right channels selected.

My perception is that we will get
- almost perfect DirectX games support
- very good installer and crypto support.
because here it really does scale but wine development did not scale that much over the past years.

Actually, as I menti

• The Year of the Linux Desktop! (2007)
• 2006: The year of desktop Linux?
• 2005 will be the year of the Linux Desktop
• Linux breaks desktop barrier in 2004: Torvalds
• I am convinced that 2003 is going to be the breakout year for Desktop Linux.

Funny. I thought that was 2004.

Or was it 2006?

Or was it actually 2002 and then it burst in 2006?

Umm... 2003?

Oh! Stupid me! It was 1999! Yeah. definately 1999. I mean. It's not like Linus would the exact same thing five years later.
It had to be 1999, because it was Almost Ready(tm) for the desktop back in 1994 when I first used it!

Now, tell me again. Why do I have a mac? Oh that's right. It's Unix, but I don't have to sysadmin it like Linux.

Yes yes. "Some people like to learn about their machine." [emphasis original] Ahh yes. I was once like you, some 13 years ago this fall. Then I got a bit older, and perhaps a bit wiser, and learned that there was much more important things than screwing around with sendmail, or 3d acceleration, or hotplug vs devfs, or ipchains vs ipfwadm, or oss vs alsa, or cups vs lpr, or ... It's a tool. Nothing more. If the tool is working you, instead of you working the tool, it's time to get a new tool.

It was a while back now but Sys-con allowed Maureen O'Gara to publicly attack PJ of Groklaw fame. I wish I had realized what I was clicking through to before viewing the article. Being bombarded with the ads from their site just helped enforce my dislike of their services. To Sys-con's credit, they did drop O'gara, I guess.

"It's always funny to see someone who never designed professionally in their life suggest GIMP."

What's even funnier is the poster who declares that others have never designed professionally, while never posting a link to their own portfolio. For all we know, your sum total of graphics design experience involves crayons and construction paper.

Meanwhile open source tools continue to dominate web design, and the movie design industry:
http://www.linuxtoday.com/high_performance/2003100 201126OSBZHE
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5472
http://www.linuxmovies.org/studios.html
http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT7096363910. html

including this guy here:
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/57300.html
who says:

"Linux is the default operating [system] on desktops and servers at major animation and visual effects studios, with maybe 98 percent [or more] penetration," CinePaint Project Manager Robin Rowe told LinuxInsider. "With the big dogs, there's nobody left to convert to Linux. Every studio is already on board."

That's Cinepaint... a fork of Gimp.

Yes, some of these people design professionally just a tiny bit. And some of them might answer this question on Slashdot with just that response. Yeah, the rest of your points have some merit, but not this one.

- sincerely, a professional designer who uses all FOSS tools, and kicks your butt at it.

Excuse me, but the only reason it went unnoticed was because you didn't accept my submission on this exact same story last week. I wrote it up at http://www.bytesfree.org/ in the entry All Your Rights Are Belong to Us. LinuxToday was on the ball enough to report it.

The correct thing for anyone to do when encountered with a sudden massive increase in wealth is to write a ridiculous article about it. That way, with any luck, the article can go from merely silly to pants-wettingly hilarious when the money goes up in smoke later.

Loki Software proved the lack of market for Linux games 5 years ago when they shut down in 2002.

"If a lot of you, previously unexposed to the CLR gain access to it, you will discover that it is not the crap that so many of you have read it to be.

From denial, to grudging acceptance, to surprised admiration, is how the process works, and whether you hate Microsoft or not, a few months playing with C# usually results in the comment "Damm, why didnt they do this with Java?"" - by LibertineR (591918) on Tuesday May 01, @04:34PM (#18946709)

I'm inclined to agree, and it comes from nearly the exact same experience you outline: I am mainly an MIS/IT/IS database-information systems coder, who worked with Borland & Microsoft tools since the mid 90's professionally!

(Ms-Access 2.0 - current, VB3-6, MSVC++/Borland C++ Builder, & Borland Delphi) & tried like hell to avoid doing work programming browsers (never 'caught-on' with me, other than basic HTML, until 2-3 years ago, as there is no avoiding it).

I was, at first, reluctant to use ANYTHING run out of a runtime!

I.E.-> Anything that could not compile a file (or set of files in a 'project') to a statically linked 'stand-alone' executable type for smaller programs!

(& I tried to steer clear of using ActiveX/OLEServers in my work, doing more using std. 'old-school' libs (DLLs) when I could get away with it, & the extra time to create them (ActiveX OCX's /OLEServer DLL's aren't bad when used LOCALLY (not online via browsers like IE can do))).

Then, I got (like it or not) "thrown into the pond & told 'SWIM BOY'" with Visual Studio 2003, & later with Visual Studio 2005, & love the IDE environs, it is loaded and SLICK!

It is good for locally built .exe apps in VB.NET, & even runs decently fast, imo, about as fast as VB5-6 apps do really, and with a safe runtime (or rather, safer one), which surprised me.

See, as I am sure you probably remember? When VB3 came around, its apps were a bit slow compared to ones done in say, MSVC++ or Delphi (fastest of them all, on this latter one, per VB Programmer's Journal 1997 issue "Inside the VB5 Compiler" issue in fact, of all places, proven so there).

Where I like it best? ASP.NET actually!

ASP.NET, to me, is a faster, better, more capable version of ASP imo.

Server-side generated, and IF you steer clear of ActiveX usage? Basically, it's "multi-platform" because it's server-side generated, and imo? It's truly a better "ISAPI" than ISAPI ever was (due to garbage cleanup).

"The Borg isnt dead, they have only been regenerating. Prepare to modulate shield frequencies, because they are coming......." - by LibertineR (591918) on Tuesday May 01, @04:34PM (#18946709)

They never will be. I got into a discussion YEARS AGO, circa 1999, regarding talk just like that even back then (at this site, "Linux Today") posting as apk:

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=199 9-05-14-016-05-NW-SM

And recently posted there (just for posterities' sake) about a "Linux will kill Microsoft" type of discussion held there.

That was years ago, & it STILL hasn't happened, & never will.

Don't get ME wrong - I like & use Linux @ times over time, since Slackware 1.02 around 1993-1994 or so, & then again when the Linux Penguin crew (a 'socio-technological marvel' they are, not sarcasm, but proof people CAN & DO CREATE NICE THINGS THAT WORK, & FOR FREE NO LESS) do a really technology loaded stable kernel & when the KDE folks put out new versions of their excellent desktop.

Still, I have been hearing how "Linux/BSD/UNIX will kill Microsoft" for coming up on 14 years now, & it STILL hasn't happened, & never will. Each OS has merits, especially in various 'niches', imo, but Microsoft is a force, that is still kicking butt, when imo? It should NEVER have gone as far and did as well as it did.

I thought, for su

http://linuxgazette.net/124/smith.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=multiseat+x
http://cs.senecac.on.ca/~ctyler/ruby/
http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives/ 14-Multiseat-X-Under-X11R6.97.0.html
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/200512070 0126OSDTHL

What's an Ipod Nano today? The cheapest on amazon is $142.00. Getting those at 10% off is still $127.80.

So we can give the kids laptops for only $52.20 more each? Isn't that more worth it?

Well you see.... *points to elephant in corner* ====> who me?

Tom

I'm sure we all remember how well things went for the U.S.S. Yorktown; an Aegis Class missile destroyer that ended up dead in the water after a crew member entered a zero into a database. Obviously, this was caused by the fact that the Yorktown's control software was of a really bad design. Critical systems should have never been so tightly linked that a failure in one area would cause a cascading failure across the ship. Still, it raised a lot of questions about the wisdom of using consumer software for life and death situations.

Two years after that, the Navy had still not learned their lesson. The flagship of the seventh fleet, the USS Blue Ridge, was deployed in 1999 with Windows-based Command and Control systems. The result? The ship was infected with the Melissa Macro Virus. (Source - Section 12.4)

I'm sorry, but when you're taking men into combat, you want equipment that has been designed to do what needs to be done, not pretty features that let the GIs open their email attachments. There's a reason why the current military setup in the US is for the crew to have their own laptops for personal use. Using a consumer OS in a battle-critical system is nothing but a recipe for disaster. It's too bad that Her Majesty's Navy has failed to learn from the mistakes of others.