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de Icaza: Rest of World Will Force US Into Linux
Eugenia writes "OSNews had an interesting discussion with Miguel de Icaza about all things Linux and Novell. Miguel talked about the general patent problem and how this will become the one single stumbling block of widespread adoption of Linux in USA, while he asserts that Longhorn uses some 'new' technologies already found on Gnome and elsewhere. Miguel believes that poor countries will be the first that will adopt widely Linux, and as long the EU won't adopt a similar system to US for patents, Europe will follow soon after, leaving no option to USA but to eventually adopt Linux as well in the long run (despite potential patent problems). Another strategy Miguel discussed was about moving as many F/OSS applications as possible to Windows in order to familiarize the casual users with open source. Among many other interesting tidbits he also mentions that Quark is now using Mono on Mac OS X." Of course, the EU not adopting software patents seems to be less and less likely.
Well, that's a nice idea and all, and the initial logic seems to follow, but... will the US actually follow suit? The US isn't exactly known for following the rest of the world. Think of the metric system, for one...
Umm, yeah... because that worked so well with the metric system.
to move F/OSS to Windows. It helps the migration to Linux a lot better.
Linux needs to improve to become a better desktop OS.
Many organizations do not use Linux and F/OSS becuase they have not been certified for use with their profession, like accounting etc. So there needs to be certification of Linux and F/OSS products. If the organization doing the certification is in the pocket of MS, fat chance of that happening.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Note: The European elections are due in a month or so, so contact your MEPs to ask why they exist if the parliament can be bypassed like this.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Pirate the software! Oh wait they already do....
Is the 3rd world. While these countries are poor now, their economies will be openning up. If they have adopted a standard of open source, they will have no reason to change. Certainly not at Microsoft's prices. The point will come where, if the US wants to do business, we will be forced to adopt their standards. Good thing we already have Linux here.
...largely uses either legitimate copies of Windows (most of Western Europe and Japan) or pirated copies of Windows (poorer regions like most of Africa, South America, Asia).
I really don't see this changing.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I'm genuinely looking forward to the release of the Ximian Evolution Windows port as it'll finally give a decent free mail client, which I can distribute to the several dozen friends' PCs I unofficially support.
I've been trying to get them off Outlook/OExpress for ages (for safety purposes) but most refused to go to Thunderbird as it was "too different"
They can hardly say that about Evolution.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Miguel realizes that while, for example, OOo doesn't have all the MS Office features, "it's good enough" and that's a great start for the majority of users.
But the problem is that it is NOT "good enough". Just because OSS zealots think it is does not mean that it is.
When I can open every single one of my Word and Excel files without a single error then it will be "good enough". The missing features, etc, are one thing but not having the exact replica of what I saved in Office is a hassle.
I agree with him that if OSS software gets rooted on the Windows side then the transition to the Linux side would be easier... Only if Linux becomes a large percentage better than Windows at somepoint. That point comes when the rest of the world decides it not when "we" do.
> So since he has already made his fortune, why should he care if there are strong IP laws to insure that others get paid for their work?
> Actually, the same criticism applies to all these big name open-source advocates.
Right, RMS is in it for the $$$:-)
Of course someone deeply involved in the Open Source software movement is going to say that Linux will become the dominant system. It's in his best interest to say that.
Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, Craig Mundie, etc. all feel that Windows and Microsoft software will be the dominant platform. Steve Jobs thinks that Apple and OS X will be the dominant platform. Is this really news?
The more interesting question is if de Icaza *really* believes that Gnome and Mono are going to be the dominant desktop. I know as the founder of the project, again it is in his interest to say yes. I just wonder if he's tried to use a KDE 3.2.x system and what his impressions are of it?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
It always bugged me that Evolution was not available for Windows. I'd be more than happy to ditch Outlook, but a good alternative does not exist. The Mozilla family is not a good alternative.
I hope that this means we'll see Evolution and others ported to Windows in the near future.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Albrecht Einstein once thought that the amount of input that Jews contributed to scientific thought in Germany and Austria would make Jews accepted in mainstream Germanic society.
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
ESR certainly is. As soon as he became a millionaire he posted his 'Surprised by wealth' shitstain to let us know how well off he now was.
Easy knowing these morons don't actually have to earn a wage programming.
Yes, but unlike the Metric system, Linux offers actual benefits.
Linux benefits: Free, open, stable, secure, easily modifiable. Saves billions of dollars and reduces dependence on single vendor.
Metric benefits: Measures everything relative to a single lump of iridium kept in Paris and on the incorrect original French calculation of the size of the earth. Good if you really like the number 10... except for time... and angles.
See, the metric system's benefits, while of course they are great, aren't really as compelling, commercially.
(Let the metric system advocacy commence!)
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
What does "US" mean in this case? It's not like there aren't already American people and companies using Linux. Does he mean the US government?
I mean, when is the last time you heard of a successful business person taking advice from a skid row bum?
And, yes, I know it sounds harsh, elitist, and rude, but it is the truth and we all know it.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Two countries that simply refuse to be bullied by anybody. Watch out for Linux development heading eastwards - patents or no patents. China, as we have seen went out of their way to develop an alternative DVD standard just to get around patent crap. And they almost went their own way on WiFi too. I wonder what the terms of settlement between Intel and China amounts too. Japan too, for their consumer electronics industry adopting Linux in a big way. NTT DoCoMo's reference platform for the next generation phones is based on Linux.
When all of the obvious, trivial methods of computation are patented, how will I, the "after working hours, pursuing my dream" programmer be able to produce the next new whiz bang program? Doesn't the US like the small startups anymore?
Is for the big important games to start coming out for Linux instead of Windows.
Of course, while the U.S. sucks for console games, it rules the PC game market. So I don't know how likely it is for games to be a way for the world to force the U.S. into OS compliance...
Also if De Icaza gets his way this won't happen.. since Icaza's glorified-Wine mono project is more likely to lead to crossplatform games than linux-only ones...
-- Super Ugly Ultraman
Windows had its chance. It has certainly proven itself as a liability in the server world, but it just doesn't have what it takes to be a true desktop alternative. There are a number of reasons that it isn't ready, but the biggest problem of all is that when you tell a Windows zealot that Windows isn't ready for the desktop because of X reason, they flip out and tell you that you are wrong. The general Microsoft astroturfers need to learn to accept helpful and honest criticism, and use it to better the OS. Windows is good, but it has shortcomings, and it is certainly not ready for mass adoption on the desktop. Until the Windows astroturfers are ready to accept that and start addressing the problems that people have, Windows will never have a chance to become a true alternative.
Wakey, wakey!
Don't forget: this guy also thinks Mono is a great idea.
Sometimes I wonder if he's actually working for MS with the ideas or "strategies" he comes up with.
No it didn't work, but the rest of the world cares not for the backwards, stone-age measurement systems used by the US. Instead of persisting, we just point and laugh when the US talks of feet and inches.
The US won't be the world's super power forever, once they're second or third for a half century, I'm sure they'll make efforts to fall into line.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
From the article:
Poor countries don't have the money to buy and maintain Windows; this is where open source software is becoming a real and powerful alternative," he said.
OK, but if they are too poor to maintain Windows, doesn't that also mean that they are that much more open to pressures and special "deals" (to ensure lock-in) from Microsoft?
----
"Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so."-Lawrence Lessig
This is an (un)official Slashdot repetition marker. Any further posts on the Lame Ass Metric System Analogy (LAMSA) are now Redundant, and their posters may be spanked with a metric ruler.
Posts utilizing the LAMSA _above_ this marker may also be moderated Redundant, but you may not beat the poster for more than forty five minutes at one sitting. Thank you. Have a nice day.
There is at least a bit of a fundimental difference.
:) ).
Joe Six-Pack in the U.S. doesn't usually need to use the metric system in his life, so he has no incentive to change over to it. He DOES however use the internet regularly, and his company may do deal with some overseas companies. If Linux is adopted overseas, all it means it that interoperability will probably have to be maintained between Linux and Windows. Once that happens though, managers in the US may start to see the cost savings, and switch.
On the other hand, as long as the interoperability is maintained, there is no incentive to switch.
For instance, if the U.S. was REALLY serious about moving to the metric system, they should offer incentives to Juice/Bottle makers too only put out things in metric containers (instead of a Half gallon of milk/Juice, go get a 2 liter contianer). They should also mandate that all gas pumps should be switched to the Liter instead of the Gallon. Those two things alone would bring the Metric system into the average persons, life in such a dramatic way that it might foster adoption (one they get past the resentment that things have changed
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I think its good to see a leading F/OSS developer saying there needs to be F/OSS software made available on Windows. I am a developer that releases software under the GPL and try to make all of my software cross-platform. I believe that F/OSS developers needs to get out of the Linux bubble and realize that there are other platforms which are hungry for the software. I think that cross-platform is the next logical step for developers. I want to be able to use the same software at work (SolarisOS), home (WindowsXP), and develop environment (Linux).
A little learning never hurt anyone.
Here's to another 7-10 years of the Linux community ignoring people telling them how to improve the end user experience!
1. Write a news article using wild assumptions and speculation explaining how Linux will become the predominant OS soon. 2. Get story published on slashdot 3. ????? 4. Profit!
Non-US: More people = more power
US: More money = more power
In practical reality, the US approach always seems to pan out.
Either this, or it will be like "soccer" and metric: two world standards that the U.S. will continue to buck no matter what.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I've been following Linux for several years, but it's only this year I been able to stay exclusively on linux for a week or so while doing uni work. It's like everything has clicked for me, and I'm finding that I'm prefering to work under linux for coding. Maybe it's because i've been fiddling around long enough that I've grown to love the OS and desktop managers like KDE, or maybe it's because projects in the open source community have risen to such high levels of quality.
Thats not to say though that I haven't had my share of problems- cant get tv out working nicely, or 5.1 sound, or my OpenGL working right...
But for sitting down and doing research, coding and web activites, I'm finding Linux (i'm using Mandrake 9.2 btw) is more productive for me than Windows.
And when it comes to business, productivity is a significant drawcard. Due to my new found fondness of linux and OSS this week, im thinking that OSS will win users over due to it's increasing quality moreso than patent issues.
Live in your skin. Keep changing the scenery.
First, I will admit that I didn't RTFA yet, so let's get that out of the way. Mod me down if you don't like it.
That said, I would say that the US is unlikely to adapt a standard just because the rest of the world has. Witness:
www.wavefront-av.com
What are you talking about? The United States Congress officially adopted the metric system in 1866. :-)
They just didn't force people to stop using the units and measures with which they were familiar.
Coming from a science/engineering background, I *hate* working in traditional/avoirdupois/empire units.
On the other hand, it feels unnatural to talk about the weather in anything but degrees Fahrenheit. I've tried. I have plenty of European relatives. But centigrade's units feel too "big" and awkward.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
And at the same time, avoid pissing off the rest of the metric world by spelling litre properly. I know "liter" is an accepted way of spelling litre, but it just looks wrong IMHO.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
One interesting question this raises is which MS would prefer the poor countries to do: Pirate MS Products or use Linux. My guess is MS would prefer them to use pirated Windows than Linux because MS at least then has the vendor lockin. MS change of heart concerning WinXP SP2 installation on pirated machines would certainly argue for this.
Can any US scientist help me out here - do _you_ use the metric system? What I'm getting at is: I seem to recall that US scientists _do_ use metric; it's just not a mandated standard for society at large. Am I way off-base here?
Incidentally, before knocking the non-metric US, remember that there are other guilty parties: the UK still proudly uses miles, pints and it's a real concession when weather forecasters deign to tell us the temperature in "Centigrade" as well as degrees Fahrenheight. ("Centigrade"? WTF? How difficult is it to say "degrees Celcius"?)
This is where the serious fun begins.
The EU is becoming more and more unified every year, and the economy of Europe is quickly becoming simmilar to the economy of the US, where you can compare a European country to a US state.
United States:
Total GDP (2002) - 10.4 Trillion $
GDP/head - $37,600
Ranked 1st (countries)
European Union:
Total GDP (2002) - 9.61 Trillion
GDP/head - 21,125
Ranked 1st if counted as a single country
Europe is coming up fast... not to mention China and India. The days of the US as the economic superpoer of the wolrd are numbered by just abount any metric you use.
Metric vs. SAE
... and a lot of other things
But then this weekend something happened that changed my mind on the future of Linux. I downloaded Knoppix 3.4 and stuck the CD in a friend's WinXP box with a failing HD. WinXP wouldn't boot. Knoppix "just worked". It auto-configured all the hardware (a Dell 4550 series P4) and allowed me to back up most of this person's data to a CDR.240V 50Hx vs. 120V 60Hz
Drive on left vs. drive on right side of the road
EBCDIC vs. ASCII (IBM vs. everyone else)
This is the kind of thing that will make people take notice of Linux. They want a car that they can turn the key and drive away. People don't want a car that needs to have the engine tuned before they can drive it off the lot. Or one that they actually have to read the owner's manual.
They want an computer that auto-configures and is intuitively obvious to use. Knoppix 3.4 is a step in that direction.You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
and if people are using F/OSS applications on any operating system, this is a win-win situation for the F/OSS future.
..the above worries me. Allot of the time users
who download and run OSS programs don't even
know that they are Open source or in any way related to Linux. We cannot rely on peoples views being tainted by apps especially when they have a
"Windows look and feel" as most of them do. In fact almost every app. I've seen running on Win has the Win. theme.
One of the few examples of softwarethat buck this trend I can think of is Valves's Steam which to my knowledge is not in any way OSS.
The Os community need to help open the minds of the average joe bloggs end user, by giving apps targeted at Windows an alternative theme- anything: Cocoa, Aqua, KDE - all of these are perfectly nice and not "assimilated" into windows.
It is possible not to scare off users just becase an app doesn't hav Win L&F.
Anyone agree?..
Going metric means changing every set of scales, every printed label on every product sold by weight and educating the entire populace
Going to FLOSS means using the same hardware, the same user interfaces, but just not paying for the privilege.
Cost is a barrier to adoption of the metric syste, the conveniences it brings are only really useful to the scientific community, hence NASA's partial adoption.
Saving money is a different matter entirely...
There is a big difference between the Metric system and this. The difference is times have changed. The US is no longer as dominant as it used to be. It is ahead but by not as much. And we are now on a world economy where the US is getting knocked out of the drivers seat. You don't keep you spot there by dictating the rest of the world do something. It's competition. You get there by doing it better than anyone else. And the US (I live there) at it's current rate will not stay as the world leader.
Evolution or ID?
In the US it is all too possible for something to be well established prior art, but an inventor claims to have made the invention prior to the first date of open publication. Having been involved with both US and European patents until about 1995, I considered the US system to be deeply screwed - the opportunity for fraud is immense. (though yes, that didn't stop me from filing US patent applications...)The EU system should not be so bad.
If this still applies, the important thing is for all ideas and concepts being brought to the OSS table to be published as soon as possible after they arise, thus creating prior art even if it is only in a very buggy bit of code.
Of course, if the US gets the entire IP world to rely on "date of invention", we're all screwed, and I'm going to buy a farm and retire.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The "European Union" is not yet "Europe": about half of the European countries, and more than half of European territory are not even part of the EU.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I was thinking the same exact thing actually. The drive seems to be towards another monoculture. I have to question how one or another can possibly be any better. Though I am sure companies who are seeking to sell IT as a service, such as IBM, would love to see an OSS future. With developers being a less than autonomous group and direct support being hit or miss for their product it would generate an enormous marketplace for service/support providers, implementers, etc.
And does anyone actually want a monopoly operating system? I know I don't.
There are two or three agendas in the FOSS movements which can be summarized thusly:
- "Why? What are we going to do tomorrow Brain?" "Same thing we do every night Pinky... try to take over the world!" Microsoft, goes the argument, is eeeeeeevil. We must topple it at all costs. While it may or may not be true, there's an element of 1918 here, toppling a cruel and dictatorial czar and not caring what the regime is that replaces it.
- "Freedom!" - Proprietary software is eeeevil, we must topple it at all costs, toppling dictators whereever we might find them even at immense cost to ourselves.
- "Choice" - The problem isn't Microsoft, it's Windows. If Windows was what we wanted, we wouldn't be so hostile to it.
My problem is I see too many people who see GNU/Linux as a chance to create an alternative Windows. And I don't see how anyone really benefits from that. We replace one monopoly with another, that monopoly might be less "evil", but we don't even know that. What we do know is that an inappropriate clone of someone else's work isn't likely to be as good as the original. And many, many, of us do not like the original.Above all, the regime being proposed is frequently the worst of all worlds. People who hold this view tend to argue that Windows needs to be replaced with a version of GNU/Linux that looks like Windows. But a version of GNU/Linux designed to be as similar to Windows as possible to an end user is going to be dysfunctional by definition. GNU/Linux isn't Windows, it shares few of the same concepts, the solutions Microsoft came up with for interfacing the underlying OS with the user are unlikely to be relevent to GNU/Linux and rarely are in practice. And Windows is simply not a good example of a user friendly operating system, unless you're talking about the original version of Windows 95, which at the time was "pure", it hadn't been hacked to try to push certain competing middleware out of the market. And do you really want to switch to Windows 95 today? GEM and Mac OS System 6 were user friendly too, would you like to clone either?
There's some legitimacy to this view, but again it has a tendency to be undermined by its own supporters who frequently assert that, as a starting point, you need to clone whatever's already there. Again, the Pinky and the Brain scenario springs to mind here, with the more vocal supporters being in favour of a dysfunctional system "because it's what users know." In fairness, most also argue that free software, by its very nature, improves choice because if you don't like the way something works, you can modify it. However, it's not "free software" that's taken hold so much as "open source", where programmers across the world collaborate. This is both a strength and an Achile's Heel, because just as Microsoft and other proprietary vendors cannot keep up with such a freight train, neither can most ordinary users who'd like their software to work with a better paradigm.
This is the only one of the three scenarios that has immediate and obvious benefits to end users. A view based on choice works best when people create Free Software, when programmers try to do original things, and when people try new things.
Personally, I love free software. Given the choice, however, between One (Supported) Free Operating System (the "Supported" is important), an Operating System whose design choices have made me dislike it intensely, and a miriad of supported proprietary systems, at least one of which works in the way I prefer, I have to go with the Devil and chose the latter. It's not Microsoft I dislike, it's their operating system and the dull grey rock of monoculture. Changing who owns that rock doesn't make things much better.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yes, US scientists use metric. High school students use it in science class, too, and I've noticed (in my years in school) a trend towards math class using it as well - although non-decimal systems are useful for some things (modulus, anybody?).
/.?), so this may not mean anything, but I estimate better in meters and liters than in feet and gallons. Mass/weight I suck at estimating anyway, so that doesn't matter.
Part of the reason metric is used is because it makes solving equations easier (what's 1/12 of a foot in angstroms again?), but also because no one has ever come in contact with a slug (which is apparently the US answer to the kilo; the pound is technically force, like Newtons, not mass).
I'm a geek (gasp! a geek on
Preview is my fiend
I can't tell if that's supposed to be perverted or not.
More to the point, IP laws in the US are generally becoming more restrictive, as corporate interests codify their wish-list into our legal system.
This will backfire, as it forces innovation out of the US.
Honestly, I expect Europe to follow the US lead. The same corporations that are doing this to the US are also well entrenched in Europe. So in effect, we're pushing innovation to India and China, the new growing world economies.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Center, theater, liter, saber, color, armor, flavor, labor, humor, aluminum, defense, fiber, somber, savior, spoiled, medieval, fetus, maneuver... :-)
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
There are several statements made by Miguel that frighten me since he's an influental person in the oss community.
:)
:)
The first statement is that as many applications as possible should be ported to win32 so that people can get familiar with them. This is utterly wrong for several reasons:
1.) you will never reach the same comfort as it's the case with native win32 apps, this concerns installation(a typical windows user will not really understand why he should install an additional separate gtk package in order to run apps such as gimp, gnumeric, gaim etc), UI design (different HIGs - consider open/save dialogs for example, non-native look - gtk-wimp doesn't help that much)
2.) by providing ports you're making users more lazy, if no linux application was available, users would be forced/encouraged to install linux *itself* as a desktop platform, which is the goal. Makes the platform more attractive by actually not porting at all IMHO.
Another statement concerns mono and its adoption.
AFAIK the go-mono.com site perfectly describes what mono is, but it doesn't explain the reasons why it's here and who will benefit. Discussions about its adoption in gnome arise, with scary ideas to write desktop apps or even parts of gnome core in mono. I think that mono is a completely separate platform from gnome and should be kept that way. The main benefits of mono are
1. rapid application development and
2. crossplatform
Which makes it a perfect platform for custom enterprise applications rather than general purpose applications(desktop apps fall into the second category).
The two features are very attractive for governments and companies since what you really want is a complete office and groupware solution + rapid application development for custom applications, what you really don't want to see is viruses, games. Not true for home desktop usage(except for the viruses
Personally i don't see any need for JIT in a home linux desktop environment since you have the platform itself free as beer shipped with development tools suited for native application development which makes it substantially different from win32 platform.
The US economy is very dependant on foreign trade. Over time many other countries are becoming richer and influential. For example, today China's choice to use Linux doesn't matter much to the US. But if it's the next big market as many people believe then what standards they use will most certainly matter to the US. As trade with China grows and companies become more entagled overseas their choices will influence US companies.
Developers: We can use your help.
The czar was toppled in 1917, and he wasn't particularly cruel or dictatorial... it's more that the aristocrats resisted his reforms and that his army was too corrupt and disorganized to resist Germany.
Thank you... I'm available for public and private nitpicking... just call my agent...
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Just to make a point:
Pronounce the following:
er
re
Explain to me how you can pronounce "re" as "reee" and "metre" as "meee-tur".
I suppose if the spelling were
metr
then it might make a degree of sense.
www.eFax.com are spammers
There is just NO point in trying to teach USians to spell!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
If the US wants to keep its Imperial measures then let it.
The day will come when there are only two nations (three if you count Melchizebek) which don't use metric measures. They will be Burma and America. It's not a problem though (I'm not joking now). I grew up with Imperial and then had to change to metric. They are both comfortable to me but metric is infinitely easier to use. Especially with percentages. What is 12.5% of two miles five yards and seven and half inches? Metric wins every time but change hurts and the US is grown soft.
I went to the US once, Anchorage, it is the most beautiful place I ever saw. Cold though.
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
"Liter" sure looks a lot better than "litre". Unless it really is the intent that the word be pronounced similar to "lit tree".
Boy is there some confusion here about the adoption of Linux in Europe! If anything, the US is still the above-and-beyond leader in terms of small- and large-scale Linux implementation. A few well-publicized adoptions by town councils overseas changes that in no way. Hey, I live in Europe!
"US talks of feet and inches."
The UK doesn't mind when we talk about miles.
No, they were protesting out of hatred for the Iraqi people and out of a desire to keep Saddam Hussein in power. They cared nothing for Iraqi lives: Saddam was executing between 10,000 and 20,000 a year.
"No, they cared about the eleven thousand people who are now dead who woulnd't be dead right now but for the war."
Given Saddam's previous track record, there likely would have been 20,000 dead if the protests had their way and their hero Saddam was still around to fill the body pits.
I get the impression de Icaza really does believe Gnome and Mono can become dominant on the desktop. He seems to have a decent grasp of the political and economic situation surrounding the debate. Plus he gives credit to Microsoft when appropriate (and sometimes when inappropriate in my opinion), so he's not overly zealous. You're correct in that he does have a vested interest. But I think he's a true believer.
Developers: We can use your help.
Thing is for some things imperial is a better scale - carpentry for one - because is easier to half fractions than metric measures, and who can deny that a pint is a perfect unit of measure of beer? The oddest thing about the uk is that the petrol pumps are in litres, but everyone I know discusses the fuel economy of their car in mpg, and all distances are printed in miles on signs. That is truly f**kwitted!
Lumber - 5x10's instead of 2x4's (a 2x4 is not even 2 inches by 4 inches) and metric lengths.
Carpeting/flooring etc - sell by sq meter instead of sq yrd.
All scales sold must use metric as Primary unit (they could also give the archaic english units)
There is a lot more use of the metric system in the US society than you might think at first glance. Those people working in anything to do with chemistry are likely using the metric system in their work.
I don't think the US will ever adopt the kilometre in place of the mile, however, because in a lot of the US, the land is plotted into 1 mile square sections and this provides a more usable unit with which to measure distances. Using km would just be more confusion.
Does anyone know if there is a metric unit that would correspond to the english bushel? (a unit of volume)
If you haven't used Linux yet, now its time. Grab the new Knoppix 3.4. This version includes KDE 3.2, which has surpassed Windows AND Mac OSX in usabillity and user friendlyness. I'm not just saying this, KDE developers have worked in conjuction with usabillity experts.
So go on have a go, and since its a live CD, you have nothing to lose!
This is a nice thought, but, as always, the US will do whatever it wants. Metric system, cell phones, wars, etc.
And that's not because Americans are stupid/lazy/whatever; it is because it is the largest consumer market in the world. Corporations will bend over backwards to cater to the needs (real or perceived) of the American buyer.
Not saying that it is good or right, but that's just how it is.
it's just not a mandated standard for society at large. Am I way off-base here
You're right, it's not a mandated standard. That's because we don't like to "mandate" things for our citizenry, and let them decide for themselves what to use.
I'm not sure that "Stealing" can apply to electricity. However, it is certain that it does not apply to illegal copies of software. It only counts if you actually stole the software (shoplifting at Babbage's). It is impossible to steal something by copying it or using p2p.
I think a lot of people may be missing a few key points. I'm sure these will draw some criticism, but here goes:
First, F/OSS is only as good as it's user input. If you use such software and gripe about it's this-or-that, but never submit even these quirks to the dev team, DON'T expect the issues to get resolved any time soon. The dev team, unlike major corporations, doesn't have the ability or capital to test and develop on a wide scale.
Second, on a lower level, I doubt Microsoft would be up for offering deals to poorer economies, lock-in or not. If they offer WinXP Pro to Uraguay for $50 a license, the American businesses that got the "Special Business License" for $75 would start whining. That's just something they don't need to deal with. In such case, I think MS will continue to treat the market as a whole in the manner they always have.
Third, in relation to the productivity of an application or OS, I would haard a guess that one is more productive when one goes into something (e.g. a new OS, a new F/OSS app) expecting to BE more productive. I tried the Firefox browser a few months ago, and hated it. Coincidentally, I expected to hate it because it wasn't IE. A month or two later, I tried it again, with a more open mind, and lo and behold, it's my current favorite browser. Same idea for C++/C# IDEs - from VC++ 6 to some no-name F/OSS IDE with ero problems. It's all relative.
So as far as a mass migration to Linux, it's anyone's guess - but I think it's a bit too early to be calling it Linux's game. Too many branches, and a whole new system to learn, seem to be a bit daunting for the average user. Wait ten years until Linux certification really gets a firm footing in the industry, and until the weaker Linux flavors drop off or conglomerate, and we may have some good competition.
[SQL Error ID 10-T: This sig. is above your current threshold.]
Doesn't anybody else find it interesting that Quark will use mono on OSX? I mean, apart from Novell, I haven't really heard of too many companies using mono for their products.
And bear in mind that mono on OSX is not that well supported (yet). Yes, the compiler and JIT run, but no GTK# or Windows Forms stuff yet. Miguel seems to indicate that Quark is working on bindings to Cocoa (will they name it Cocoa#?).
I, for one, welcome this development. I've tried Objective-C, and while it is quite powerful, the fact that it is almost exclusive to OSX (yeah yeah, I know about GNUstep) doesn't really help in making me want to learn it.
I just finished developing the first release of kSpaces, a distributed knowledge management platform that uses C#. While it was initially written for Windows, it took me 10 minutes (!!!) to get it to run on mono. All I really had to do was take out the Windows Forms stuff (not a problem with good separation between logic and presentation). I'm impressed.
Some really great stuff is going on here! Congrats, Miguel and Co.
Martin May
Although I believe that in Europe there will be a short term leap in Linux usage, due mainly to it's adoption in Public Education facilities and by the Public Administration, a process which is now taking it's first steps in Portugal (where I live), I believe the main pressure will come from South-East Asia countries, which have strong commercial ties to the US but are countries just way to large and poor, as far as most of the population is concerned, to allow for paying licences for Windows.
And although these coutries are well known for licence violations, as MS becomes more and more successfull in preventing Windows unlincenced use, they will fall victim of their own success. And remember: China alone has more inhabitants than US and EU TOGETHER!!
Are you being sarcastic? What can be intuitive about a number like 299792458 that has nothing to do with anything? One of the problems with metric acceptance is that some of the standards were "let's create something different just to be perverse". Imagine if they had based everything on the yard, instead of arbitrarily making up something that is "almost a yard". It would have worked out better.
"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it." - Abe Simpson
the metric system. ... It's just like fuel efficient cars! ... negotiations without the threat of violence!
No, wait
No, wait
No, oh I give up!
MDI maybe a great programmer, but his opinions about the software industry are no better than /. rants. Third world countries will continue to adopt linux, but by no means does it mean the US has to adopt Linux. Large corporations are adopting linux for backend servers already. I know first hand the top 10 financial companies are investing aggressively in linux. MS has very little chance of getting in those data centers. As much as MS hopes this trend stops, most of them consider windows64bit a joke for critical datacenter work. Whether the average user will adopt linux all depends on how much MS charges for windows. Moving forward, people are not going to accept half the cost of their system is the OS.
This advert was certainly a mistake. The newspaper's name is "USA Today". The "us today" pronunciation example does not apply.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"moving as many F/OSS applications as possible to Windows in order to familiarize the casual users with open source." i can't imagine that he means moving, but instead porting/building, it wouldn't benefit anyone making the software available only in win32.
this foot in the door approach is certainly one that i've seen to be effective, and TheOpenCD project attempts to make it easier for windows users to get the good stuff, while also giving them some FOSS literature to read.
Is Usia a nice country to visit? I'm from America, and I keep hearing European jackasses say what horrible people these Usians are, so I figure it can't be all bad.
If they were to be brothers, although I prefer to think of them as grandfather and child, then Albrecht is the elder and better. Albert lost his way with his morals. They are of course the same man with the same name, only in different languages.
Perhaps you are right. Perhaps Albert is the bizarro Albrecht. How curious to become your own bizarro self.
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
You must be pretty young. In the '80s it seemed that the metric system was going to become the official measurement system in the US. All US schools taught the metric system, gas stations were selling gasoline by the liter, and Coke converted its 64oz bottles to 2L bottles (never changed them back though). People hated gasoline being sold by the liter, because they thought they were being ripped off (in many cases they were because gas stations tried to take advantage of the situation). Once it was obvious that the metric conversion was not going to pass (it would be too expensive to convert all of the US industry from one system to another), schools stopped emphasizing the metric system and gas stations went back to using gallons. As globalization continues, more and more companies use the metric system to reduce the number of SKUs in their inventory.
As a side note, I used to work in package development at Coca-Cola and all bottles world-wide are designed using the metric system. For example, in the U.S. and other non-metric countries, we design a 591ml bottle and place a 20oz label on it.
Unless of course MS makes a "donation" of Windows and x86 hardware to a few of these countries. Say, maybe, in the schools where the future generations are being trained. And they'll learn on Windows and get used to Office. And then they grow up and get jobs in government or public sector. And guess what OS they'll want to buy? (Hint: not Linux)
And we'll be powerless to stop them. Any objections will result in headlines of the form "Open Source Community against free computers for third-world schoolchildren". Which will really endear people to our cause. (Yes, yes, we all know what MS would be trying to do in this situation, but good luck getting the media to not twist any statements)
Of course, if IBM were clever (ha ha ha ha ha), they'd beat MS to the punch and donate a shitload of low-end (low-end being 1.3Ghz Celerons - not exactly crappy) ThinkCentres (as low as $399 with an educational discount, and I'm sure it actually costs them much less to make) pre-loaded with Linux and OpenOffice to schools in 3rd world countries. They could donate LCDs instead of CRTs for low power consumption. IBM has a good edge here, because they control the hardware, and they have a zero-cost OS available to them. Sure, MS can offer a "zero-cost" OS - they could even offer free upgrades for life (ha!), they even have enough cash to purchase the hardware for free. But probably not support contracts. Again, IBM can provide those for free if it wishes.
This would be an incredibly smart move. Microsoft will likely cry foul about not providing Windows, but IBM can come right back and say "These people can't afford to upgrade to the next version of Windows when it comes out. They can afford a free upgrade for Linux. And we're providing hardware and support free of charge. Explain how this is bad?"
and as long the EU won't adopt a similar system to US for patents, Europe will follow soon after,
Not the way the winds are blowing. Media interests are lobbying for the same laws the US has, with the usual "think of the children" and "piracy!" arguments. And no third world country is going to want to adopt a system that two large markets (US and Europe) don't like.
leaving no option to USA but to eventually adopt Linux as well in the long run (despite potential patent problems).
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Right after they adopt the metric system, the DD/MM/YYYY date format, and the PAL video format. Because the U.S. has a great history of following Europe's lead.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
...shouldn't it be liteur? They like all the extras... makes it fancy or something.....
I think IM chat speak will become dominant, spelling-wise.
Isn't this the same argument that used for the metric system?
I mean, really, the parallels are there. The rest of the world uses a superior system that is standardized across national boundaries, and the US continues using an older, less useful system due to a combination of stubborness and inertia...
Why do you call it "20oz"? Twenty fluid ounces are more usually called a pint.
So in 10 years we will be the technology have-nots still running IPV4 and Windows. While coutntries that barely have net access and other developed countries will use our patent system against us by flooding it with more patents than we do while they are less encumbered by them? They will capitalize on the off-shoring trend in technology to build their own innovation ecosystems and become less reliant on the US.
Sounds pretty bleak. While I am reluctant to say that it wont happen I have heard these groupings of fears before (electronics and cars with the Japanese, etc.). I still remain, personally, alarmed by all of these trends but I suspect that a few other areas may become the US's next "gorilla" markets..
"it just doesn't have what it takes to be a true desktop alternative"
Your absolutely right. Since it can't be a desktop alternative, it can only continue to be the primary desktop system.
Hmmm...interesting post...I think.
Please, fill in a few blanks for someone who uses a system that "sucks". What commonly used amounts/distances is it that your system uses? Isn't an inch supposed to be the length of the the last section of some old, long dead kings thumb??? How many dead king thumbs are there in a mile? And how do volumes get counted? 6 2/3cups, is how many pints/gallons (quick, no calculators!)? You do realize that a half a mile, IS some goofy number, right? I have no idea what the actual numbers are, but am I not correct that a mile, is some silly number like 3207 feet. I am not sure what the number is, but I know it isn't something natural, like say 1000 even units. BTW, metric is great for chemistry, physics, and engineering, and its ease of use, and logical units are not deminished by the US's lack of adoption (PS your military sure uses the system, ever wonder what the soldiers are talking about when they say they have to walk a few "clicks". Hint, its got nothing to do with the sound of jackboots, or miles). And why does it stink around the house? Would you find yourself unable to function, if that bottle of water in your fridge said it was 750ml instead of 26oz? Would you forget to drink enough water? Would you find yourself over hydrated, because you weren't exactly SURE what a ml was?
Now, I live in Canada, and we have used the system since I can remember, but I have to admit, I am not sure exactly how tall I am in cm's, but I do know in feet/inches. Same with most weights, pounds are still commonly used (outside of commerce). Shit, our dragstrips are still so bold as to use the quarter mile. All that aside, if you cannot see the benefit of using measurement systems that are all base 10 (I know that is important somehow), and in fact all based on some very common natural occurances, I guess you should take a 137 5\16' walk off of a 30 yard pier.
People made the same argument for it back in the 70s.
The rest of the world using it would force the US into using the metric system also.
Still waiting?
Steve
luv from
the rest of the world
I fix Windows computers onsite for clients. One of my advertising hooks is "Free CD" with every visit. How can I do this? Easy. I give them a CD full of free software, which I use every day so I can vouch for its worth and use. I show them that the only paid for software they need on their computer is Windows itself.
Most are convinced that free software is the way to go after only a few programs, notably Mozilla Firefox (no popups, browser hijack etc), Mozilla Thunderbird (no more junk mail after training the filters; no more virii) and OpenOffice.org (I simply tell them this works the same as MS Office, and set file saves to those formats if they need interoperability; if they think it's the same system, they amazingly seem to find the differences ok to work with, almost expected like in normal Office upgrades, whereas if you tell them it's a whole new system they seem to get stuck in the differences mindset).
After clearing off their virii with free alternatives, using Spybot S&D and Ad-aware to remove spyware (all free), they are more than willing to try the rest.
Note that this is only a first step. Start them with free (but not necessarily open) software. Users don't generally care about the difference. If they ask, show them how you can customise the css files in Firefox for example, explaining that open means you can create your own version to behave as YOU want it to.
Once you have successfully set up a Windows user with free software, they have embarked on the road to eventual dismissal of Windows altogether (except if they game, as I do!!).
If you want to go a step further, grab a Linux LiveCD (Slax is great because it fits on the mini-CD size discs which impresses folk no end!!) and boot them into it (GUI mode of course) to show them that an entire operating system which looks like Windows can run off the CD on their computer. If the LiveCD has an install option, leave it with them, and maybe, just maybe, you will have stirred the first inkling that there's a larger world out there.
Visceral Psyche Films
You sure?
You're thinking of Kelvin. Celcius is a scale measured into degrees, hence the archaic use of centigrade (there are 100 degrees between water freezing and boiling).
Wikipedia has the answers:
This is where the serious fun begins.
Television: Corporate America in your mind.
A little paranoid, aren't you? Clothing: corporate America in your closet. Carpeting: corporate America under your bed.
-Steve Ballmer
CPO (Chief of Psychological Operations)
Microsoft Corporation
Redmond, WA
On the 1st May the EU surpassed America.
There will be a couple of years of turbulence as the economies are integrated but unless the US swallows Canada and Mexico it's going to be playing second fiddle in the mid future.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Fact: *BSD is dying.
If Linux is adopted overseas, all it means it that interoperability will probably have to be maintained between Linux and Windows. Once that happens though, managers in the US may start to see the cost savings, and switch.
This cannot be understated!
And the next step after that, is where US corporations are almost forced to adopt Linux and other OSS just to keep their costs in line with their overseas competitors.
Not to mention, any company that wants to do business globally won't be able to deploy future lockers-in like XAML or DRM'ed Office fileformats for fear of cutting off interoperability with customers, suppliers, and partners overseas. And that benefits American Linux users as well.
Never forget that Microsoft must maintain a monopoly to win -- well over 90 percent market share. Linux wins simply by breaking Microsoft's monopoly -- which requires less than 10 percent market share.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I would hate you forever if you got rid of a gallon of milk. 2 liter soda bottles are very annoying in the refigator. I wouldn't want to have to have 4 2 liter bottles of milk that would too be evil.
I agree with your theory. I would still hate you forever though if it got implemented.
It is so much more convenient to build the tunnel between England and France with the left-hand lane from France that can double as the right-hand lane from England, aka traffic compression :-)
Microsoft has been donating to poor countries such as England recently - often subverting the regional adoption to Linux.
Bribery is always an added option of course.
They can argue, and they did. What else were the protests other than arguments in favor of keeping "Hussein and his psychotic children" in power?
The US is already a major user of Linux. Pick any major distribution, what language is it in? What country does it originate from?
I think there is just a few faulty assumptions here, as well as some mis-applied logic. For example, "MS is evil" is a subjective opinion, and not really fact. If it wasn't for MS and windows, I don't think computers would be quite as widespread as they are now. "The US will follow the rest of the world", while at times they should be doing what the rest of the world is doing, the US will do what it wants, for better or worse (proof: metric system, Iraq)
If you own a "furrin" car (my preference is German), you know how SIMPLE it is to use metric tools. Example: list the sizes of your wrenches, in order, from smallest to largest. Doing it by 8ths/16ths/halves etc is tough. Millimeters is braindead. I know my socket set goes from 5mm to 19mm. What is the next largest size after 3/8? Uhhhh. How about after 7mm?
I am sure that carpenters and mechanics would have a tough time adjusting, because you do get to know the system you use. But once you use metric tools, they are a breeze. You'll realize how much smarter and efficient the system is.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
On one hand competition is good and it may happen that it helps further adoption of free software, improvements in both Evolution and Glow and all that. And we hope both remain standards-based and interoperable.
But at this point, we aren't strong enough to compete much, we already have too much duplication of efforts like in the whole KDE vs Gnome mess, and the BSDs vs GNU/Linux vs Hurd one.
Worse yet, he is happy that Sun users get less goodies! This is simply Not Good. Whatever Sun motives may be, this is not a good thing in itself. It would be much better to work with Sun to address its concerns, but then de Icaza already proved he would rather follow his own path, like he already dissociated himself from copyleft and the FSF because he didn't like the focus on ideas over pragmatism.
And perhaps that's nice about Sun doing their own stuff: it's copylefted and they have copyright assignment. Not only Glow may prove a safer choice (legally speaking) than Evolution both to users and developers (if Sun ever frees Java, or makes it run good on free JVM implementations), but Sun is getting used to free software and copyleft. Free Solaris and Java anyone?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
No, it isn't.
It's "degrees Fahrenheit" (F), "degrees Celsius" (C) (also known as "Centigrades"), "degrees Réamur" (R) (=old French unit, hardly ever uses anymore. Confusingly, "degrees Rankine", the US answer to Kelvin, uses R as symbol too.
The official SI unit *is* "Kelvin" (K) though, without "degrees". It's only used in science.
0 K = -273.15 C = -459.7 F = 218,5 R (Réamur) = 0 R (Rankine) is the coldest temperature possible.
We're a bit worse off in the Great White North, because of exactly this. While we're technically supposed to be metric, because of heavy trade with the US we have to do both. FYI I live near Toronto.
When you're buying a house, the property size is measured in metres. However, the interior measurements are all given in square feet.
I know my height in feet and inches, but my driver's license lists it in centimetres. Funny, because I measure my skis in centimetres.
I buy meat in the store by the gram or kilogram, but my microwave asks me how many pounds is it when I want to defrost it. Of course I know my weight in pounds.
Construction materials are measured in feet, while I drive in km/h. I pump litres of gas into my tank, while I purchase hard booze in ounces. But beer, water and soft drinks are sold in millilitres.
I read the outside temperature in celsius, and I set my thermostat in C, yet my oven is set in farenheit. At least, all the recipes I have do (some ovens have both C and F listed).
We're pretty damned confused up here.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Metric benefits: Measures everything relative to a single lump of iridium kept in Paris and on the incorrect original French calculation of the size of the earth. Good if you really like the number 10... except for time... and angles.
The Iridium rod is no longer what defines the metre. A metre is defined by how far light goes in specific amount of time (about 1/300,000,000th of a second).
There are metric units for angles and time. Gradients are used for angles (400 gradients to a circle, 100 gradients to a right angle), but they don't seem to have caught on. There is also a metric system for time, with 10 days in a week, 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds in a minute (might be mistaken, but the ratios are powers of 10), but it was only in use for a short time during the French Revolution.
... widespread diversity. Linux could become dominant, easily, but it won't be one single distro or way of doing things. It's rather a unique concept in the business world, but there are other examples that are close enough. An example analogy might be the early railroad days with each company having their own track gauge sizes. Eventually it was agreed to have a single gauge, but there were still multiple railroads and brands of engines and cars. They also agreed to play nice with each other and use each others tracks, and the government in a lot of cases stepped in and adjusted laws in the favor of retaining (or seizing via eminent domain) right of ways for the tracks.
I think FOSS will be universally adopted, because it has the momentum and mindshare now within the developer community of the younger people,not the users yet but the developers, who are becoming the techs/admins and eventually the managers all across the professional IT board, the dreaded PHBes. They will use what they are comfortable with, and attrition will negate the dominance of closed source and propietary and (more) expensive.
But I also think that change in hardware will dictate what gets used as well, I can foresee when all devices use embedded, and that will extend to the desktop, both home and business, which will go to a merge between a full thin client model, distributed computing, and stand alone single use machines. Hmm, for example, the "business desktop" that comes prebuilt to work only with a secure company server system, and is even more modular than wehat we have today, extremely easy plug and play modularity, with "aware" components that don't have to work in conjunction with extremely specific hardware, following the USB and Firewire progression modality, and that also contain their own processors, ram, OS and so forth. Plug it in, it can talk to all the other devices, not being dependent on a single OS, just having a common way to communicate in other words.
It's interesting to watch it really. Cellphones that are becoming PDAs with audio video capabilities, PDAs that evolve into cell phones, desktops that resemble laptops (smaller, adoption of LCDish screens, etc), laptops that can mimic powerful desktops justfrom advanced features, etc. Hardrives becoming more RAM like, while RAM being used more and more like a hardrive used to be used for.
It's quite amazing really, because we've crossed the point where any sort of single monolithic standard can be dominant, there just isn't time to market something extensively before it's entirely obsolete, this will gradually force just the interoperability standards of communicating between devices to determine general computing trends more than anything else, and even there that's a moving target right now.
Quite true. I like to look outside from time to time through the clear glass panes.
1 Litre = 1.2009 Liter. Just like before..
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
The former government of Afghanistan (Taliban and Al Queda_ which launched the 9-11 attacks. Also, the Saddamite government in Iraq, and its remnants, which engaged in more than 2,000 attacks against U.S. and British peacekeepers in the "no-fly zones".
Me, me, me. It's all about me. What's wrong with this generation???
You are wrong. The parent post wasn't talking about just you. It was talking about the vast majority of users. It was you who changed the subject to be about yourself, not me.
Therefore, you are wrong. OpenOffice.org is fine for most users.
just like the rest of the world forced the US to adopt the metric system right?
If that logic made any sense, the US would be using the metric system by now. Whether it be a quality or a flaw, we're damn stubborn, and we don't like chaning the way we do things, especially if it's seen as bowing to international pressure.
Not that this should be a surprise to anyone.
That is true. The US would have had a lot more profit and a lot more oil had it made a sweetheart deal with Saddam Hussein instead of moving forward with helping the Iraqis.
"and has been involved in no scandals."
There has been one scandal so far (the prison abuse), and it is getting resolved, and the guilty are being sacked even as we speak.
As more money flows...patents will come to EVERY country. It may be screwed up .....but the guys with the money and the guys that want to make the money will push patents into every economy.
*nixes will only prevail if there is a way to use them to make money.
Dont FlameBait him you IDIOTS.
...
He is right you sex-less Morons.
And why the Clipboard is still not working across Gnome Apps and KDE's is still a mystery.
All my fault I guess, let me try that xcutsel app again
Miguel believes that poor countries will be the first that will adopt widely Linux, and as long the EU won't adopt a similar system to US for patents, Europe will follow soon after, leaving no option to USA but to eventually adopt Linux as well in the long run (despite potential patent problems).
It's unlikely that the US will move to linux just because the EU and some third world countries do. It's more likely at this point that some mega-worm that causes some type of damage will cause US companies off of windows. Migration for small companies can costs thousands of dollars, they aren't going to migrate unless there is some type of huge risk in not migrating. Not to mention, if a company has a bunch of MCSE's they aren't going to be chomping at the bit to migrate. Right now, the only 'killer app/feature' linux can offer companies is security. Total cost of ownership is debatable.
Actually, here in Belgium, we also say "Liter". The same for very much other contries. ....
My uneducated guess is:
*Litre: Roman languages: French, Spanish,Italian,...
*Liter: German languages:Dutch, German,
List the European countries in the EU, and the ones not in the EU (A hint: a lot of the non-EU nations are too small to appear on many maps: San Marino, Vatican, Leichtenstein, Andorra, etc. Others are forgotten: Moldova and Turkey). The Washington Post story does not change this. Then, look at the land mass. Russia is a huge percentage of the land mass of Europe. It is not in the EU. Nor is Belarus, Ukraine, Norway, Switzerland. The former Yugoslavian nations and Albania, which together have a land mass similar to that of the United Kingdom, are also not in the EU.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
first of all, linux is probably more adopted in the US than anywhere else. secondly, linux is not the most adopted in the rest of the world, windows is.
did you forget to take your meds?
what defines a second then?
I hate to say this, but Linux has to support some form of digital rights management.
....
Why? Is this something that consumers want?
I would have thought not being locked into some form of DRM would actually be a point in linux favor.
nick
The decay of a meta-stable atom. Mercury isotope? Something like that.
Quote : " Economic growth in the dozen euro nations probably barely accelerated in the first quarter, as the euro's gain against the dollar hurt exports and unemployment deterred consumer spending, an economist survey showed.
0 0& sid=a3cWucTUtQvk&refer=germany
Gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services, may have expanded 0.4 percent, little changed from the 0.3 percent rate of the fourth quarter, the median forecast of 39 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News showed. A first estimate of growth will be released by the European Union's statistics office on Friday after reports from individual countries earlier in the week. "
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=100001
By contrast, the US economy in the first quarter grew by a whoping 4.2%!!
So much for the "don't underestimate the EU" nonsense.
The truth hurts doesn't it? :)
Linux replace Windows? Not on your life.
Reasons for JIT:
1 - avoid lock-in to one particular processor. I have a PPRO dual processor rig, Pentium II, Thinkpad and Pentium 1. Does the same optimization work on all of these? [Answer: NO]. I have also had a quad Sparc, and MIPS based machines (all with Linux).
2 - profiling and JIT can result in better code than static compilation and optimization. The optimization *should* be directed toward the applictions use. Something that can be done by running the app, and then rebuilding the app. Or, use a JIT (ref. HP work - binding an emulator and JIT optimizer to PA-RISC *unoptimized* binaries gives results comparable to fully optimized binaries. At a fraction of the compile time.)
3 - Why would an app delivery platform need all those compilers anyway?
Next, use of mono. You think its bad that mono is actually *used*?
We are talking about Gnome using mono, not mono using Gnome. Very easy, anyway. Nothing prevents you from coding pieces of Gnome in *any* language (as long as you've got CORBA).
Anyway, mono may be an application delivery mechanism for the web, which would imply the possibility of "viruses". Which needs to be taken care of. Sandboxing is probably the only viable mechanism. Games? If its a RAD system, most programmers will write a utility or game just to "get their feet wet". Nothing wrong with that.
And now, on to your objection about Win32 ports.
The source is open. If someone wants it, they can do it. F/OSS is *not* a monolithic thing. You want to restrict the use of software based on.. what.. your perception that Windows is in some way a lesser platform, and you want to force it, by not making some software available, even though the platform is capable? Shame on you.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
The Revolutionaries here defeated the British for two major reasons: they had home field advantange and the patronage of the French Crown.
AFAIK a centigrade is 1/100 of a grade, used in geographic calculations. It has nothing to do with temperature.
I think France had more to do with us losing our American colony than the Americans did, that and the problems with the rest of the Empire.
You might make a case that this makes a dent in standard US policy of using foreign aid as a blunt instrument to get favors, bases, whatnot from these poor countries, but I'll argue that a happy, well-economied nation will find itself with less of the issues (famine, danger of Communist or Islamist extremists, or extreme trade barriers) which the US foreign-aid regime is bent toward combatting anyway.
But then again, I've missed the last few sessions in the smoke-filled room and may be behind the times.
Reminds me of the canadian brothers from "Strange Brew" in a short skit in which they speak aboot converting to/from American and Canadian beer.
and their posters may be spanked with a metric ruler.... to within an inch of their lives. ;)
well DD/MM/YYYY date format sucks worse than MM/DD/YYYY. Eventually I hope to see a switch to ISO standard dates YYYY/MM/DD which can be text sorted properly and are not ambiguous (is 01/02/2004 January second or february first, who wrote the date, do they use American or european style, who was their intended audience, while 2004/02/01 is clearly february first)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I guess you haven't noticed that "Mono" apps are being written to Gtk#, not System.Windows.Forms or modern equivalent.
Most Mono apps run on Windows, but only due to the windows port of Gtk#.
DNA just wants to be free...
Gentoo had (has?) a Gentoo Games division w/ the same idea. Seems defunct now. I personally thought it was interesting, but wasn't sure if I really liked the idea of requiring a reboot into the game OS to play a game.
I posed the possibility in some rather discerning forums (Arstechnica.com gaming for one) and the idea was roundly tossed out. NO ONE was willing to think about rebooting to play a game. Sometimes, you're multitasking, and feel like playing a round of your latest game for a bit. Rebooting is just too big a hassle, and windows gamers won't make any moves that don't enhance convenience and enjoyment. Rebooting would be a big negative. If you want a system such as you propose, then a console is the answer, and most PC gamers don't like consoles.
I'd love to see a big title go Linux only or even linux exclusive for a month before general release. I also wish game devs could be coaxed into designing their games from the ground up using cross-platform API's. UT2004, all iD software title, Bioware's neverwinter nights, and S2Games' Savage all show it can be done, but most devs go the MS only route. Its a shame. I also think that big time linux gaming support could be the key to massive linux home PC adoption.
In my own little experiment I have tested the adoption of F/OSS apps in my family.
While no one in my family is AGAINST using OSS, they hesitate to learn a new way to do something when it comes to software.
So, I have passed out numerous copies of Mozilla, OOo for their windows boxes, andmost are quite happy with the apps. (especially Mozilla)
More should be done to port Linux apps to windows, despite the fact that is seems counterproductive (not to mention a complete pain in the ass...)
You're overlooking the major issue. Cost. Everything mentioned would cost money for conversion and what the US has is 'good enough'. Rather than comparing this to metric, I would liken it more to beta/vhs.
I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings here, but right now free software isn't there yet. In many instances, it would actually cost more to use free software than it does to use closed source solutions. That produces no driving force to change in the US. If you want evidence of this assertion, look at this slashdot article.
Nations like China are interested in Linux from a national security standpoint. Being held hostage by a closed source American OS is simply unacceptable to them. Cost is secondary.
Right now, the Linux user base is tiny compared to Windows, so the developer base is as well. Converting China to Linux will cause global ripple effects. Capitalists don't care what China uses, or why, they just want money. So development efforts will intensify in the US as well as the foreign nations using Linux.
Given significant increases in development efforts, free software will become more cost effective than closed source solutions. The US will be forced to convert or loose its competitive edge. The 'forced' part of that statement is where patent issues arise. Those who stand to loose the most by a US conversion to free software (and we all know who they are) will use patent issues to resist it.
Also, as far as porting Linux applications to Windows goes, in my experience as a project leader of Inkscape, it's been worth it.
Not only has the Windows version attracted a lot of users and developers, it's also helped migrate a number of them to Linux.
The best way to migrate most people to Linux is not to throw them in the deep end of the pool and hope they learn to swim. A gradual transition works better.
Once all the apps they use on a regular basis are ones which are available on Linux, most people are pretty happy to switch.
That might sound a little naive, but from experience that's the way it works.
It does, however, require that the free applications be better than their proprietary equivalents (for the user's specific needs, at least). We can do that, right?
DNA just wants to be free...
It's an iridium weight that defines the kilogram. Do people actually use gradians?
*checks*
Hmm, windows calc.exe supports them.
In any case, the advantages of changing to these particular totally arbitrary units still escapes me
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Condemn the packaging (or the mfgr of the refrigerator), not the unit of measure. There is no reason the dairys could not distribute milk in 3.5 or 4.0 liter containers, similar to the current gallon jugs.
O.k. Why are those 2L soda bottles designed like they are? If 2L bottles were better designed, then those of us in the US would start to like metric more. Come on 2L soda bottles are the only thing we come into contact with. If the only time you came into contact with a unit of measure was with a badly designed piece of packaging, wouldn't you mentally blame the unit of measure? Heck, there is nothing really sacred about a gallon of milk. It is just alot more convient bottle than the 2L. There are annoyances about the gallon jug being too big for kids to successfully pour by themselves. God, I know by experience on that one.
Actually, the 1L soda bottles are kinda of nice. They are a great single serving size.
I guess that's the problem though. Everything in the US likes to be a whole number, which doesn't convert very well usually. Getting people to accept something is difficult.
Linux needs to improve to become a better desktop OS.
So does Windows.
I think the Mac OS is the only OS to become a better desktop OS by staying the same, but don't quote me on that.
Free yourself. Everything else will follow.
Actually, it does. Centigrade is the denominator for a scale that has 100 grades between the freezing point of water and the boiling point. Celsius is one of those scales, Kelvin is another. :)
Props to the other poster who said this earlier. I apologize for being too lazy to find a citation/link
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Neat idea, but they said the same thing about the Metric system, and that still hasn't happened yet.
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardwa re/server/story/0,10801,93035,00.html
Open Source Java DAO Generator
I think I'd rather say "The rebels kicked us out" then "The FRENCH beat us down." :p
Enough said.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Ranking countries by GDP without looking at National Debt is like ranking people by house value without asking how much of the house is actually paid for. Read this article (some math required) for a discussion of the EU's policy on public debt. Nearly all EU countries maintain a national debt 60% or less of GDP. The US national debt is more than 70%. That difference puts the EU ahead of the US in terms of true wealth/productivity.
No proof? Is the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds something that did not happen, something made up by the US and UK?
" It's now obvious that there never were any such weapons."
See above. You won't find any informed person who thinks that "Saddam using chemical weapons against Kurds" is a made-up story. Since it is not a made-up story, it is well known that he had the WMDs.
"Saddam has never instigated any terrorist attacks against the UK or the US"
You are off by a factor of more than 2,000. Saddam's terrorist forces launched more than 2,000 attacks against US and UK peacekeepers in the no-fly zones. He also engaged in terrorism/aggression against Kuwait, Israel, and other countries.
They said the same thing about the metric system...
Why do you believe that the United States would hate a unified and prosperous Europe?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Yes. Of these US "Below the poverty line", a large % are landowners, some even owning large lots country land that only the very rich would own in Europe. Most of them have at least one car, while the poor in Europe more often have none.
The "poverty line" is a shifting and subjective thing that has nothing to do with real poverty. It divides the have-mores from the haves.
Miguel's got a great point, one that evangelical F/OSS developers tend to miss: If you want the lay person to celebrate F/OSS software, make it available to them, meaning make it build and run on Windows. I've had great success migrating almost all of my Windows-using friends and family to Firefox and GAIM. Both of these packages are obviously superior to their proprietary, Windows-only counterparts, and my users understand this within the first five minutes of working with them.
But fundamentalist F/OSS developers often tell me that they don't want their software running on the Evil Empire's OS and that if users want to run them they need to use a supported OS. They seem to be angry at the user for running Windows in the first place. I think this is a counter-productive attitude: We want people to use F/OSS software, but we refuse to make it available on the OS that the majority of them run?
I don't mean to imply that all or even most developers feel this way, but it remains an attitude that must be dealt with if we are ever to 'dominate the world.'
-Nick
I don't even know what the sport is. I read the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, so I do have a vague idea about balls, 'hammers'(?) and poles and such, but...
And I don't think I know people here in the Netherlands, Germany or Belgium that play or view cricket.
Don't be preposterous. RMS isn't in it for the money. RMS is in it for the women.
I am officially gone from
That is a third measure, the one I forgot.
"But asserting less than half of Europe due to "nations too small to appear on many maps"??? That's the sort of stupidity you have to work to achieve."
Perhaps you are not aware of the existence of Andorra, San Marino, Vatican City, Leichtenstein and Monaco. Such stupidity is remedied if you have a good enough atlas. Just because you don't know of these places does not mean that they do not exist. A good dose of maturity on your part to realize that some maps do leave off tiny countries would help too.
I said earlier, before counting, that about half of the European nations are not in the EU. After the enlargement of a few days ago, the EU now contains 25 nations. This is still 57% of the total countries in Europe. (Not less than half, but more than half)
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Alright AC, this is a topic that never dies. It's like trying to determine which religion is best, MS or Linux. I'm not using anymore disk space on an argument without end.
OK, I agree with much of your post. However, it's my experience that people are not such simple programmable devices as you make them out to be. When you take your general Joe User who is my age, it's very likely that they had Commodore 64s and Apple ][s in their grade schools, used DOS in high school, used Macs in college, and Windows at their jobs out of college.
For those who make decisions about what technoogy their enterprises are going to use, I'm quite certain that (though it may produce some nostalgia) they're not likely to suggest a vendor simply because that's what they grew up with. This is software, not Coke.
I think in the short term, yes, users like to stick with what they have. But outside of the space of a year or so, people basically adopt what works better at that time.
1) New idea
2) Show idea to VCs for funding
3) VCs steal idea
4) VCs establish a business model that
actually works
5) Steal back idea and working business model
6) Profit
Well, ok there's no advantage to actually coming up with new ideas yourself. And establishing a new business model could be dicey unless you think there is an advantage in being the first mover. Just jumping in at step 5 makes sense if you buy into the non zero sum game theory.
Actually, I have been doing a lot of step 1's. It's that step 6 that seems to remain elusive.
It depends on what kind of Europe. If it is the Europe of ""Liberte, Egalite, Fraternity" and the Magna Carta, it would be a good thing of the world. If it is the Europe of Karl Marx and Adolph Hitler, then the world would have a reason to hate it.
What if Longhorn were released as an OSS product? How would we react to that? Sun's SDK source code is available under some conditions. Even Windows source code is readily available to contract partners (and parts of it was leaked recently), so it is not secret anymore. It could very well happen, that Microsoft decides to OSS Longhorn even before hell freezes over, rather than shortly after. What would happen in this case?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Listen, opinion polls in Spain (and all of europe, with the exception of the UK) showed overwhelming resistance against the war.
About 70% in Spain, I believe, and that was before the bombings.
This "Oh, they're all corrupt friends of Saddam" stuff is just pure propaganda the US administration put out there to discredit the opposition and draw attention away the fact that a vast majority of Europeans (in poll after poll) were against the war.
What I find most frightening is that this tactic works: The current administration and supporters thereof appear to be prepared to believe anything which supports their views, even when it flies in the face of easily made observations of reality.
This will be the idiot country that will starve itself converting agriculture land to fuel production, rather than get the stuff "free" from under the ground. This is kind of insane, really. I would bet you North Korea is going to be the first country to try it: they are the most insane.
"Bear in mind also that, about 30 years ago, they figured there would be enough oil left for about 30 years."
And, in 2080, they will be figuring that the oil will run out in 2110.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that software should be cross-platform. The problem is that, where the majority of systems in use (speaking in number of platforms, not installations) are UNIX-like, but the most widely deployed (number of installations) are Windows systems.
It's quite easy to write a program that compiles and runs on any modern *NIX system, but Windows APIs are so utterly incompatible that there is not a snowball's chance in hell it will compile there (unless Cygwin or some kind of emulation is used - but that sort of kills the point). Standard io works, but try to do anything that involves graphics, or sound, or networking. And, let's face it, who writes an application without any of these?
Of course, there are several projects that make things easier. Allegro does a good job at abstracting away the differences between systems for 2D graphics, sound and input handling, as does SDL. Network code can also be written in a way that ports to Windows. So, by carefully choosing the libraries you use, you can come a long way.
It gets ugly when it comes to GUIs. To my knowledge, there is only one GUI library that attempts to gen native looks on all platforms (wxWidgets). However, it doesn't always achieve a truly native experience, and I find it's API ugly (I heard it's modeled after MFC, which Windows types seem to like a lot). Other than that, well, GTK+ works on Windows, but feels buggy and slow, Qt works, but you have to pay for a license. All of them require that users install a new library, besides whatever native system is already in place.
The long and the short of it is that developing cross-platform is easy if you don't support Windows, and becomes a lot more hairy if you do. Losing out on some great F/OSS is the price one pays for using a system that I can only assume is willfully incompatible.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
At the end of the Middle Ages, an increase in the power and sophistication of the merchant class (and their desire for accurate measurements) produced an unprecedented desire for king-arms. As a result, the harvest of Europe's royalty grew beyond sustainable levels, until there were no kings left anymore.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Doesn't Hockey=ice hockey? Whenever someone talks about a hockey game they are talking about ice hockey. At least in Alabama anyway.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
And there my friends is the reason America is getting so fat. 1L a single serving??? Wasn't the old soda can size 295 mL (10 ounce) and then it was increased to 355 mL (12 ounce) and now there are the 600 mL bottles (20 ounce). And now you speak of 1L being a serving size. Yee gods man, that's more than 3x the old serving size.
I've seen this claim before. Typically, the person will go on and whine about how the US media is controlled by the Jews and has a pro-Jewish bias. They then go on about how "honest" the non-USian press is, and how it lets people know how craven and despicable the Jew is, and how the Jew is the root of all problems, especially in the Middle-East. These "honest" accounts include reports about how Hamas is a heroic group fighting for human rights.
OSS is a fad that will, for all purposes, die in the next 5 years. It's already started. Why would people want free software when they can buy the same thing? People love to buy things...it gives it value. When they get it for free they hardly want it. The only thing free and OSS is good for is improving real software. So, while you may be using and promoting inferior OSS, a wonderful corperation will be selling the same thing, but better and making lots of money on it, while the greasy, pimply, no girl friend OSS developer and user bitch and moan about no one using their software. OSS is cool to you, but incredabily lame to ~98% of other people. Artists love avant guard art, but the general public, namely you in this case, enjoy Star Wars, comic book art and all the other crap "art" derivitives out there. The articts will never use Linux. They want OS X or Windows. Why? Because although we the nerds don't see it, those operating systems are 100 times better in terms of use, features, software and support. They're "real". Linux is great, I will always use it, but OSS will never be heavily adopted by people. The day it's as good as commercial software is the day commercial software is that much better. You have no chance to win!
Yet these protests are nothing but that, as they argued for leaving Saddam in power.
"What I find most frightening is that this tactic works:"
There is nothing frightening at all that telling the truth here has worked.
"current administration and supporters thereof appear to be prepared to believe anything which supports their views"
No, they have a standard: believe what is true, only.
By the way, if you want an example of what I think is a cross-platform GUI app done right, look at AbiWord. The core engine is the same on all platforms, but the GUI part is implemented on each of them seperately.
Now, you might say that this is obviously the right approach, but AbiWord is one of the few applications I know uses it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
...software patents or not.
We may see the time when it becomes de-facto illegal to write software, but then most coders either will stop coding or will move into the underground. Sort of like the alchemists a few hundred years ago.
I even think software patents could even push OSS, as freelance coders officially won't sell software anymore but more obscure 'services'. Licences will become less important since they require an officil legal holder - a big no-no for the small programmer in future thought-crime societies. There will be lots of semi-legal quasi public-domain stuff and in the end software-only vendors will fold. Be they US american or not. As I've said before: Bonjour Cyberpunk.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The US government doesn't have the authority to mandate the units that gas is sold in.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
This is a myth. Here in Canada everyone, government included, was against the war, and we are not involved in Oil for Food.
You're the one who's propogating a myth. According to a CBC poll 65% of Canadians supported the war if it had gotten UN approval while 25% would still have supported the war if the US went in just with major allies. Even thought most Canadians didn't support the war, nearly 50% of Canadians had wanted Canada to support the US in the war. In Alberta, 56% wanted Canada to join the Coalition even without UN approval. As for the Canadian-Iraqi oil connection: Chretien's son-in-law, Andre Desmarais, is the biggest shareholder in Total Fina Elf, the French oil company that would have profited the most if there had been no war.
No, they cared about the eleven thousand people who are now dead who woulnd't be dead right now but for the war.
But they were perfectly OK with Saddam killing an average of 20,000 per year since he's been in power. (1 million Iraqis in the Iraq-Iran war. 30,000 Iraqis in the Kuwait invasion. 1 million Iraqis in Iraq killed off to maintain power his 20+ year grip on power). That figure doesn't even include the millions he's tortured. Over 6 million Iraqis fled their country and now live outside of Iraq. I didn't see any protests over those dead, tortured and displaced so "the _people_ of the world" should spare me the sanctamonious 'what about the children' type claptrap. Those protests were because people think America is too powerful. They could give a rat's ass about some dead Iraqis. I haven't seen any protests over the hundreds of thousands killed by Russia in Chechnya. Now, I'll grant you that Bush and company could give a rat's ass about the Iraqis either but in acting for the security of the US, they're doing what they mistakenly think is best for their country.
Those "pseudo-elected politicrats" were bribed and Saddam got what he paid for. Newspapers in foreign countries are totally devoid of any sort of factual reporting (if they ever had it in the first place). Take France as an example. The papers in that country are in bed with the politicians and each covers for the other. There were no reports about Saddam's atrocities and all the worst possible outcomes of the war and casualty figures were highly exaggerated. The French papers were also reporting that the US was indiscriminately killing massive numbers of civilians.
According to Gallup's poll of Iraqis, 71% think they will be better off now with Saddam gone. The people that think they will be worse off were probably the ones who benefited the most under Saddam. I'll trust the Iraqi's opinions about what's best for them over the rest of the world's.
I was born in Iran and now live in Vancouver.
One important field where linux fails miserably: JOBS, I still see today 6 SQL server/access/vba jobs for each mysql/php/you name it job in the market, Bill Gates is winnig the war so far and with longhorn the tux will get the horns hard and square, geeks are not business men and the greed blind them from the real targets, living under the tirany of a geek is worse than the democracy of a capitalist.
Sorry but linux won't make it to the massses because the linux geeks are too miserable to call themselves human beings.
Having been adopted by the rest of the world the USA was forced to implement it here... Oh wait I guess that didn't happen...
Why will the US follow the world again? Oh it won't Microsoft, as icky as it sounds, will still rule the game. Actually, the US may see it as it's exclusive advantage...
Originally from The Onion:
Department of Education: Metric System Thriving in Nation's Inner Cities
bwahahahaahah! Yea right. Is it April fools? Sorry, I just don't buy into the thought process that third world nations are going to dictate to the worlds last remaining super power what software to use...Bill Gates himself has more money then some of these countries put together!
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
We could all be "helpful" and let the pirating authorities know where people were that were using pirated software? :) http://www.fast.org.uk/. Choose Make a Report, then Use of illegal software.
Yes, scientists in the U.S. use metric almost exclusively. The vast majority of Americans however, do not understand metric units with the possible exception of liters because our soda cans are measured in liters. People who drive a lot MAY know that 100km/h is approximately 60m/h, but I wouldn't count on it.
Hope you look forward to your -1 for your anti-intellectual bellow of rage. You can't even refer to the President without using a pet juvenile insult instead.
"If anything, it's because of their abuses worldwide that the USA is a target, not only of terrorism, but of hatred and disdain from all over the world."
You are entirely incorrect. The terrorists are actually fueled by an extreme vision of Islam; and their major hatred is because the US is not islamic. The "abuses" by the US is an old chestnut; a largely-fictional list made up by Noam Chomsky that has nothing to do with terrorists. (if Chomsky and the far left were correct about so-called US abuses causing terrorism, then there would be numerous terrorist attacks by Nicaraguans and Chileans against Americans).
"the Spaniards NEVER SUPPORTED Mr. Aznar's move to [join with the large coalition to help Iraq], this is why our former government was voted out of office and this is why our troops are coming home."
This is not true either. Before the Madrid attack, the voters were set to overwhelmingly re-elect Aznar, along with his foreign policy. The terrorists won the election, and the Spaniards lost (now Spain is governed by a much more oppressive [socialist] government).
"What lesson do you think the whole freakin' world is learning from the USA ?"
You obviously have not learned anything.
I can imagine the world-wide movement towards Linux will push lots of folks into running Linux _alongside Windows_(say using VMware or the free alternative Xen). However, there is an alternative to movement to Linux:
serious innovation
Linux is cheaper than Windows-no doubt about it. However, is Linux really as good an os as there could be? Neither Windows nor Linux are really what folks need in areas like embedded systems or robotics. Linux and Windows both have their roots in rather ancient operating systems(i.e. VMS and Unix), as Chuck Moore, inventor of forth points out, occaisionally it is time for a fresh start.
It was a "rest of world" comment - "football" isn't the only word whose meaning is different in the U.S. to the rest of the world. To the rest of the world (except Canada), hockey is what Americans know as field hockey. Hence the International Hockey Federation and the International Ice Hockey Federation.
Distances on highways south of Tucson, AZ, all the way to the border with Mexico are posted in kilometers!
Most scientists and engineers use the metric system. In fact most areas that need precision or calculation use the metric system. For things like a gallon of milk or the speed limit on a road the traditional metod is used. For those area there is really no difference in what is used but everyone is used to dealing with Miles per hour and it is very expensive to replace all those road signs with no real gain.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
I'll bet that there are already more Linux-based computers running in the US than anywhere else. Heck, maybe even more than everywhere else combined. What I see happening all the time is that as corporations leverage Linux on the server with positive results, there is more of an interest in pursuing Linux on the desktop. I suspect over the next two years you will see major corporations adopt Linux on the desktop. I know mine has already started, yet no one on Slashdot knows anything about it. As for Miguel, he knows not of what he speaks.
And I'm sure you're prepared to back up this assertion with a citation, such as an AP or Reuters article?
Maybe it's not AP, but how about this?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I was born in this non-standards country (Perhaps the U.S goverment officials use a non-standard system of measurement (Non-metric) in order that other countries cannot interpret the measurements of their missles ;)), however, I have never purchased/installed/used on my own computer a copy of Windows, my first x86 operating system was Mandrake Linux 7.0. The rason I went with Linux is because it was free. The reason I stay with Linux is because OSS doesn't take away my rights.I have become very pleased with OSS. I run FreeBSD and Slackware Linux on all my boxes. I also have begun to get "friends" (MS lovers) to begin using OSS in the form of Mozilla Firefox aka Firebird. They are happy because tehy get a free popup blocker, I'm happy because I am turning them on to OSS. Eventually, I am hoping to get them to go completely to desktop Linux. The only thing holding back a few is Windows games. Solution for now, is dualboot. I am doing everything in my power to get everyone I know in this country to use Linux. One of the biggest problems has been that they believe that Windows, MSIE, Office, etc is a standard. I hope desktop Linux and WINE (Or retail games for Linux) will make it easier for Joe Sixpack to migrate to Linux. For now, at least I am getting people started in the Linux "world" instead of Windows.
The fact that Germans recognize that a man from Austria is an Austrian doesn't sound like "intolerance" to me, either. I've lived in the United States most of my life, but I was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. You know what that makes me? A Canadian. That's not a statement of judgment, it's just a fact (backed up by the evidence of my passport). Do I consider the United States my home? Sure, and I've got one of those passports now, too -- but it doesn't change a thing about my nation of origin.
Breakfast served all day!
The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
Speaking of cross-platform, it was interesting to read that Quark will be using Mono for its upcoming release on Mac OS X. For those unfamiliar with the company, QuarkXPress is the industry-leading page layout program for the publishing industry. If you read a magazine this week, it's a safe bet that it was laid out in Quark.
But Quark's decision to use Mono seems pretty strange, considering that:
1. The Mono project is not claiming support for Mono on any platform other than Linux. At this stage, it seems the chances are pretty good that it will run, but there's no guarantees.
2. The Mono project has no bindings for Cocoa, the native Mac OS X windowing/widget set. The only way to build a GUI app in Mono at this time would be to build it with GTK#, in which case you'd need to run it under Apple's X Windows server on Mac OS X.
3. I would warrant that the majority of Quark users still do most of their work on Macs. I could be wrong, but even so, the proportion is huge -- a much greater percentage of publishing professionals are Mac-based than other industries.
Does anyone have any other information, besides Miguel's mention, explaining just what Quark might be using Mono for? (Bear in mind, Quark has never had a track record for strong, timely, bug-free, robust software releases -- but based on the above, writing the next version of QuarkXPress in C# under Mono seems more hairbrained than usual, even for Quark.)
Breakfast served all day!
As everyone knows, and as Lawnmower Deth sang, a good old-fashioned English cricket bat, measured in proper English feet and inches is the de facto standard and benchmark instrument for dealing out a good spanking. Just ask any public schoolboy and Tory MP.
Stick Men
Quote:
9 87 65&partnersite=espn
"OSLO, Norway -- An American soccer player in Norway was subjected to racial taunts and spit on by fans during a game.
Robbie Russel, who is black and was born in Amherst, Mass., plays for the Norwegian club Sogndal.
"I've experienced racism, but never anything like this," the 24-year-old player told the state radio network NRK.
He said four or five Brann fans on Sunday grabbed his jersey through the fence about 27 minutes into the game.
"A woman spit in my face," he said. "The entire time a group of supporters were yelling racist things at me."
Russel was not injured and declined to file a police complaint, choosing to let soccer organizations deal with the matter."
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=17
And these Europeans are lecturing us on morality?
Puleeze!!
The thing is, I've seen all this before, as a member of the Amiga community. We knew we had the better technology - more stable, easier to use, more flexible - better in every respect. How could the world fail to see it? (Mac users have always been the same of course.) We'd jump on every piece of pro Amiga/anti MS propaganda, no matter how biased the source, and loudly trumpet it as the final proof we were winning. Didn't happen then, won't happen now.
I know Linux is different in that it isn't owned by one (clueless) company, and it's impossible to see it going west in the way the Amiga did. But it's equally impossible to see it usurping Windows.
I've been through all this once, and I'm not doing it again. I've got better things to do with my time than being just another fanboy.
MS has too much inertia. You know how clueless your boss is? Well, he's the one who decides what the company has on it's desktop. You won't change his mind, because if he switches to linux and it isn't a smooth switch, he gets fired. He's not stupid enough to chance that. Don't waste your time being angry about it. Like I said, deal with it.
Don't worry, I'm english, we use metric for temprature here (except the oldies!)... but dunnow about in aerospace, I'd think it's probably metric too... some things are better in imperial measurements - Pints (english, not american!) for Beer... and miles for distance will probably stay for quite a while + mph...
Hey,
I was just wondering if you met anyone in Japan named Tom Kodiak or Sarah Rasher. They're friends of mine from way back, both were in Japan. Yeah, I know it's a big place and all, but they tend to stand out and you seemed like the type of person who might strike up a conversation with them.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The metric system is taught in schools whilst the SAE / avoirdupois system isn't. Ask any kid in the US how many fluid ounces there are to a pint or feet in a mile and 9 times out 10 they'll tell you that they don't know -- and they've never thought about it. We don't measure things in stones, or furlongs, or rods anymore. Ask them how big a liter or a meter are, and most can tell you.
I don't know where you live, but in much of Massachusetts they certainly teach kids English measurements as well as metric.
Unless you are referring to the Americas (North and South America), which I am pretty sure you are not, "The US" and "America" mean exactly the same thing.
Thankfully, democracy worked. Democracy follows a standard procedure. It does not mean "Oh! A minority of the people marched and yelled REAL LOUD in support of terrorism and Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq. Therefore, we must let these braying morons set foreign policy!"
Things worked out. The elected British government decided to do the right thing, even if Saddam's idiot legions in the streets yelled at them. I'm sure in the 1940s, you could have found a million people to march for Hitler, just like the moderns marched for Saddam.
But it would be more accurate to say that the rebels and the French ganged up to kick the English out.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Saddam agreed to these flyovers as part of the cease-fire at the end of his Gulf War. His firing at the planes a total of more than 2,000 times certainly counts as a "first strike", and there was nothing "pre-emptive" about the coalition's invasion a year ago. After all, we tried peaceful means, even asking Saddam many times to stop attacking the peacekeepers/flyovers.
The US likes to be the BIG Kid on the block and lean on anyone they choose. While we in the US seem to be apathetic about our government messing in the 3rd world :( I think that there are enough related people that should the American Brainchild GWBush start messing with European powers militarily, things would go south quickly. That leaves only economic 'influence' to wielded like a big club. If the EU survives, grows and becomes a cohesive ecomonic force, there goes the one remaining weapon the small minded politco's in Washington don't have to use/abuse...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
America has more linux users than any other country, almost double the next best country. Regardless of that fact, the idea that the 'rest of the world' is going to push the US into using linux is just pure provincial snobbery bordering on anti-Americanism. It's also a tremendous discredit to the pan-nationalist activism of Linux users, who don't play these petty turf wars.
they said that about the metric system too.
But it has significantly less of those problems than the US.
Not to mention that politically, Europe swings more to the left, which is much in line with Canada - as opposed to the US, which swings quite far toward the right.
but how is heading the desktop project which is and will probably always remain the 2nd choice on SuSE Linux "heading and steering the desktop happenings at Novell"? I wish these guys knew how delusional they sound when they talk like this. Hey Ximian: you're hired help. Get over it.
The internal co-operation with SuSE and Novell is going great, we were told, with Nat Friedman (co-founder of Ximian) heading and steering the desktop happenings at Novell.
They're doing whatever business lobbies want. They're also trying to ban dietary supplements like vitamins and minerals. No more Vitamin C when you've got a cold. This is seriously sick; depriving people of de facto medication. Do you think the very same people are doing to listen to some geeks over something as esteric as patents when they are willing to take life-saving dietary supplements off the market so the drug companies can sell more cough mixture? Never underestimate how corrupted people in positions of power are.
No they weren't. It was widely predicted a week before the election that the Aznar goverment was going to be kicked out but that it would be a close thing. Then the Goverment tried to pin the bombing on ETA even though it was pretty obvious that it wasn't an ETA style attack and that was the final straw.
The funniest part of all of this is that in 10 years when people try to figure out why Linux failed, they're going to find that the blame rests on the immature Linux community, and not Microsoft.
To the victor go the spoils, huh?
Depends on what the 1L is.
... although if its a good single malt I might be inclined to think of it as a single serving for me ... jsut spread out over a couple of months while I enjoy it :)
I think of 1L of Seltzer (Soda Water) as a single serving if its for a meal. Its only about 4 glasses of water, which can be nice at the end of a day after coming home from work and a good workout.
A 1L of scotch WOULD be a bit much for a single serving
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Why does OSNews has to FORCE me to install Gator adware to view their article, even when clicking 'NO', then rundll32, crash my Internet Explorer browser then crash my computer. Just to read their article...
More accurately, the encumbent government lying about, and trying to benefit from, the terrorists "changed it".
I actually agree with your comment. :-) Mind you, Apple hardware is a bit on the expensive side, though. :-(
But Linux has to be easy to use when you attach multimedia hardware. That's why my original suggestion makes a lot of sense.
1) The EU, as you stated it, has about 2/3 of the USA per head GDP. So off the wheel the EU is 33% less productive than the USA, despite all of its social services.
2) The EU has a serious demographic problem. While the USA is expected to increase its population to 460 million by 2050, the EU's population is actually expected to decline, and rather significantly. There's some talk that Germany actually may not exist 100 years from now solely due to lack of a population.
3) Chinese economic growth will be constrained by the availability of fossil fuels controlled by the United States and Europe.
4) Indian economic growth will be constrained by Indian economic policies.
For the next 50 to 100 years, the United States will be the pre-eminent economic power on the planet.
This is my sig.
The USA has and will always advocate a United Europe because European defense is ultimately best undertaken by Europeans.
This is my sig.
Because Europeans are not having enough children. Check the birth rate out and keep passing out that RU-486. It's good for your women to have that choice, but you aren't going to have a continent anymore for it.
This is my sig.
How is this different from the argument that "the whole world is going to force US to go metric"
I hate to explain a joke but I was referring to the following:
"Windows had its chance. It has certainly proven itself as a liability in the server world, but it just doesn't have what it takes to be a true desktop alternative."
Not the post about Linux. I was poking fun of that because the poster was trying to turn a negative comment about Linux into a negative comment about Windows. He screwed up because the phrase "desktop alternative" didn't make any sense when applied to Windows. Thus my smart-ass response.
Clear?
The vast majority of those who get to keep their own money under the Bush tax cuts are middle-class. Calling it "tax cuts for the rich" is misleading. Besides, the rulers taking less from the rich does still go against "maximizing the power of the rulers".
Thought that was a cute subject line.. Reminiscent of the trade among italians and americans for the
last half century.. I made up the patents part..
Anyhow, the problem in America is the faith in tech, its so much so that the government is bending the rules to allow companies to patent algorithms. To patent an algorithm though, you have to prove that the algorithm is unique, that nobody else's algorithms do what yours do, and you have to prove that it is part of a physical mechanism. Like if you have some software that controlled a tractor, the software would be patentable.. But if no mechanism relies on it as a kind of virtual gear, then it can't be patented..
Now tell me how this is going to effect the open source movement or linux for that matter?
Just say no to license servers!!
Its no where near a dominant client-side OS.. So people wil continue to use Linux to run servers, but not to interact with servers.. That's been the hope of the geeks, and they completely ignore their needs and thsoe of people who don't know Linux and of the needs of people ont he outside. I know someone licing in Uzbekistan, and there they use Internet Cafes with Windows 98, 2000 and XP.. If they use linux, its subliminal..
And as for open source, I think one has to make a significant effort to use open source packages.. Its easier for programmers.. But without technical support, most users would not bother with it.. They prefer a tech support line and a common social experience among others who use the tools.. Its just that open source packages are so much better in some things and not everything.. I think of open source as a way to standardize processes, a way for everyone to be able to afford to communicate in a common way, and a way for there to be a common platform on which to do things.. But commercial sofwtare development and commercial competition relies of unique proprietary technologies, so that one can develop something the other doesn't, in order to compete..
ITs pretty obvious the reason why businesses base their processes on commercial technologies, one is the consistency of the product (though OSS tends to be more so, if you have programmers to maintain the OSS in-house), another is reliability (but how reliable is it to have to upgrade every year to a compiled proprietary package that may have lost features in the interest of leveraging a different product line?), and some competitors might not be able to afford the package or get the kind of relationship you have with the vendor (however many proprietary connections are facades, mainly the vendor sells a level of access to the hardware or to the proprietary process on a more flexible level, in OSS you can fine tune the capability of the software in proportion to yoru ability).
So the wheels have shifted from the political agendas to the wheels of mental ability. If you can't think in a more structured and efficient way, you won't survive in this world. But that is what we would like to believe, however its not working out this way.. In fact more and more people in support of OSS are unable to find jobs, could this just be an effect of our preference for truth?
Just say no to license servers!!
to save the password and use DialD to automate the ISP dial-up dialing in Linux for them.
Also I think there is an option to log on to Linux as a default account without entering the password. Just don't make it root. Install all the software they need, and don't let them have root access or else they will foul things up.
BTW XP has that Remote Access feature and VNC works great on any 32 bit version of Windows. So you don't always need Linux to remote fix someone else's computer.
J-Dog is that you?
Wow, first time I've had a post moderated down. :) A mile is 5280 feet. 6 cups = 3 pints = 1.5 quarts = .375 gallons. 3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon. 16 tablespoons = 1 cup. Ok, it's goofy, but I like it. Really, my objection to the Metric system is that it's base 10. I really do believe the world should switch to a system predicated either on a base 2 or 6 system. Note that for base 2 system you more likely use base 4 or 8 as binary tends to be awkward to read. I'm partial to base 6 myself. Once you get used to operating in a different base, it's amazing how much faster and easier basic math is.
But back to the science, where the Imperail system has its failings. Metric is brilliant for chemistry, but this has nothing to do with being base 10. It has to do with the fact that volume (and hence distance) is related to mass by the density of water. Most chemistry is all about water so being able to tie mass and volume together is invaluable. This is not as much the case for physics. In any case, the other advantage of metric is only when one needs to change units. Particularly useful when dealing with basic constants - gravity, gas constant, whatever.
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