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IBM and Red Hat Offer College Prep
Califa writes "IBM announced Tuesday it will work with Red Hat to bring universities up to speed in teaching college students open source skills." From the article: "The company said its research of technology training at universities around the world have shown a need for more open-standards offerings. About 75 percent of a group of CEOs interviewed by IBM's Business Consulting Services said education and a lack of qualified candidates are the two issues with the greatest impact on their business."
An employee suggested to me that we load Linux on a few machines here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it for our employee's day-to-day tasks. So I decided to let him install RedHat onto 5 machines to see how the users got on. Besides, our Gentoo servers had been running fine up till now, why not try it on the client machines? Once he'd got the machines up and running we let the users try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: Openoffice was a pretty good replacement for MSOffice and the users could still do their work as normal. Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who could not find things they were used to (notepad even!??) or tasks they could not perform that they previously couuld on windows. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when Openoffice suddenly had an error reading from our database and corrupted his project. I made the employee uninstall RedHat from the machines and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
Hello people from Slashdot,
As a former GNOME Foundation member and six years contributor towards GNOME, the community, my own projects, that I can tell you that GNOME is being sold to the public as far more than it really is. The lack of knowledge and the aggressive marketing is, makes people blindly jump on GNOME.
GNOME is an architecture disaster, to say, only half of the things really work as it should, stuff not quite polished giving the user the feel of bad implementation. I wonder if you from Slashdot want to promote such a product to customers, companies or government without making yourself sound untrustable afterwards. You should really spent some time into the product GNOME itself and compare the things I mention here with a vanilla build of GNOME on your systems.
I always hear that GNOME is so polished, that GNOME is there to get work done, that it is a corporate desktop and so on. Not to mention that such sentences are scaring a lot of developers away it's also some sort of politics which went through no communication with other developers. It makes other developers look like outsiders. Since the corporate argument gives them the feeling that GNOME is lead by 'corporates' and big companies and right now it only looks like paid members of the community are doing the job because others have resigned.
Now for the facts of getting the work done. Has anyone ever tried getting serious work done with GNOME ? Ever tried to print the actual page from GPDF or EVINCE ? Or has anyone ever asked why GGV doesn't offer a print dialog ? Ever tried copying a full recursive subdirectory from FTP to the desktop using Nautilus without losing files ? Ever tried writing a circular letter with Abiword and trying to use Evolutions address book ? Ever tried drawing a computer related graph or UML graph using GNOME programms ? using DIA maybe ?
People should really spent some time looking at the whole thing, that GNOME is, each app, what it does, what it doesn't. And not just watch some movies or listen to mp3 files. That's not what business is supposed to do or want to do.
I now want to show you one visible aspect about GNOME, something that you can easily check up on your side, though it doesn't cover all the problems inside the architecture of GNOME such as broken gnome-vfs (which explains why Nautilus copies 0byte files from FTP to your computer) or other things. Well I don't want to make stuff sound more complicated for now but try throwing an eye on this this picture. Look closer to it. Now look again a bit closer to it.. No.. that's close enough..
This screenshot explains a lot to us. We don't care for the Toolbar structure nor do we care for the Menu structure. We only look at the appearance. Note that this is just one minor example of the overall problems that exists.
We see Toolbars with ICONS only, we see Toolbars with TEXT beneath the ICONS, we see Toolbars with mixed entries as ICONS and TEXT, we see Toolbars which have a drag handle, we see Menu with drag handle, we see Toolbars without drag handle we see Menu without drag handle.
Now what does us tell this ? It tells us that there is something wrong "why is this the case ?", it's because there are huge problems inside the architecture. We need to ask ourself what the aim of a desktop is ? The aim is to provide a set of bottom libraries (called a framework) for the developers, so they are able to create applications that feel coherent, look the same, work the same, behave the same as in a real environment.
Now we need to look a bit closer to it and we figure out that GNOME offers for historic reasons different ways to create Windows. Now imagine this, you are a user and you want for some reason ICONS only on your Toolbar or you want no images in the Menu. You go into the preferences section and select 'icons only' for Toolbars and 'no images' for Menus. After that you realize that 3/4 of the mostly GNOME centric applications