Whereas with a dome, the wind cannot exert as much force because it flows around the structure, not into it.
On the lee side of a dome there will still be a big vacuum. You need a teardrop shape to get rid of that vacuum, which is why every type of bird, fish (and man-made counterparts, airplanes and submarines) are basically composed of tear drop cross sections - to minimize drag. You could make a really flat dome such that it was sufficiently teardropped in all directions, but it's not really what we think of as a dome. May as well just build a bunker and be done with it, as another poster suggests.
I have a question for the neuroscientists however... what's so critically important about this work, to demand the enormous resources being sunk into this?
We still don't have a cure for it, so you are just telling the person at present 'Hey, you have Alzheimer's! Good luck with that!".
Knowing allows planning - for the person (as best they can), their relatives, friends and people at work. Consider the alternative. You have a person who is slowly but surely (although often with periods of lucidity) losing their memory, their judgment, and acting in increasingly inappropriate ways. This is a serious problem for all concerned.
If you know you have Alzheimers, you can make some appropriate decisions. It is a degenerative disease with a likely timeline. For one, you can set realistic goals - goals within your future capabilities. You can start wrapping things up because you know your time of being effective is running short. You can start figuring out who will make financial decisions, because eventually there will be con artists preying on you. And if you don't like the idea of not remembering your closest family members, potentially causing rifts with family members for no good reason other than your brain is dying, acting in a sexually inappropriate fashion, losing control of bodily functions etc... you can choose to end it while you still have the mental capacity to carry it out.
If you are a family member/friend you can realize that their brain is faulty and going to get faultier. They are literally not the people you used to know, so you can't expect them to act the same way any more. They may treat you badly and not realize it. If you liked them before, you can choose to remember them in that way rather than the demented person they become. There are a host of other things to get out of the way, powers of attorney and stuff like that. It allows you to plan, too. It won't get better, it will get steadily worse.
Another thing - as the boomers age there are going to be a lot of people with Alzheimers in positions of power - government and business especially. They will make bad decisions that affect a lot of people. Think Reagan with his finger on the nuke button, not being in his right mind any more. Jobs will be lost and shareholders will lose money as a result of demented CEOs. Mandatory Alzheimers testing in these positions (and candidates) past a certain age would certainly prevent a lot of problems.
Generally, people with Alzheimers are going to be driving cars, operating heavy machinery and inadvertently kill people. Enough of them and it's going to cause serious problems. Perhaps the problems will be obvious and pervasive enough that those in power acknowledge it, even though it conflicts with their generally narcissistic desire to live forever and not be reminded of their mortality, let alone be constrained against their will.
I'm not exactly sure when the trend started but at some point this attitude of "make a good design, then make it fast" came to prevalence.
I would credit Donald Knuth - "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."
In a lot of cases he's right. I can deal with slow but usable. I would lump the general Ubuntu (Gnome?) experience in that category, especially Openoffice. And on my machine that would have been top of the line in, oh, 2005 - it runs those things fast enough to suit me. If it's fast but unusable, I won't run it.
It all comes down to resource allocation. It's a huge tribute to the Gnome team that someone on slashdot is even comparing the speed of Gnome with the speed of XP. How many orders of magnitude did the resources thrown at XP outweigh those volunteered for gnome?
The problem isn't preserving data, it's knowing when to let it go.
That problem will only mean a lot when MB/$ stops its exponential march upwards. It is just plain easier and cheaper to continue copying the old data than spend the time to go through it personally (disk usage analyzer in Ubuntu is helpful but still time consuming) or risk deleting something that may come in handy in the future. Is keeping your 10Gb of data from 1998 really that much of a stress?
I believe the problem is more a search problem than a data expiry problem. I thought Google Desktop Search was brilliant - no need to even categorize your data, just enter some good search terms and you can find whatever you want. However, it was too creepy in that it is closed source, indexes your HDD and sends god knows what to google. But I'm content to wait until FOSS alternatives get up to speed, it should only be a matter of time.
... is if the major cities of southeast/east asia were destroyed somehow, since that's where desktops/netbooks/notebooks are produced. I don't see the point in differentiating between desktops/netbooks/notebooks because the operating system needs are not that much different and will be less different as netbooks improve in performance/watt.
1. People will still want to OWN their own computers, with their files accessible all the time. Privacy, uptime, trust, status quo, no recurring costs - all play a part. 2. Companies in countries with the world's cheapest labor forces (competent enough to produce electronics) will continue to produce computers, because it is profitable to do so. 3. They will produce computers cheaper every year, and the costs will approach the cost of materials required (squeezing out software, profit and labor costs through automation). 4. FOSS software will improve every year, for the exact same reasons as a ratchet goes only in one direction - it can't get worse.
A software CEO's wet dream about deriving an income stream from all personal computing will not change the above facts. Some people may pay for cloud computing just as some people buy bottled water, but the rest will continue drinking from the tap.
Sex is like pizza... Even when it is bad, it's still pizza.
The difference is... when you get desperate enough to eat disgustingly bad pizza, your friends won't bring it up for the next ten years at every possible occasion.
"Enterprise Class" is marketing gibberish designed to produce FUD. There are many, many databases used in a typical "Enterprise" that do not need to scale out and never will. In fact, I would bet more companies have need of this sort of database than the other. Every company has need of databases that cover internal control issues - accounting, inventory, payroll, industry specific stuff. These do not need replication. (Often they just need a better backend than MS Access.)
The primary concern of these databases is data integrity - that is, that the RDBMS does not treat your data like junk, and that you can constrain your data however you require. PostgreSQL has a well deserved reputation there. The secondary requirement is flexibility - can you get at your data and do what you want with it to learn more about your business or save you time? With flexibility in querying and a wide range of languages for stored procedures, PostgreSQL has an excellent reputation here too. Speedwise it is also no slouch.
Besides, if you really need to scale out (now or in future) there are third party solutions such as Slony, and now the PostgreSQL team is working on simple, built-in replication.
Its time for the vendors that add value to be paid for their work, and ensure that they stay in business.
I agree. I think it would be better to CentOS and not have to go hat in hand to the executive board meetings than cause money to flow to Ellison just for slapping an Oracle logo on a product Redhat has developed. Of course, getting money to flow to Redhat would be a better outcome than either.
Great product, shame about the marketing. That's why Canonical / Ubuntu is so important.
Important for... the marketing? I disagree. It's the product. I must have tried to convert to Linux at least 5 times, and most times I tried several distributions - Redhat, Debian, Mandrake, SUSE, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Ubuntu (in the early days), as well as the small distros like DSL and Puppy. I did not find any of them to be really livable at the time I tried them. Ubuntu Feisty was the first time I found a distro that did things acceptably enough for me to live with, even though because of its popularity I really did not want to like it. Canonical/Ubuntu is important because they have lowered the bar to Linux adoption through working on ease of use issues and through their newbie friendly ubuntuforums.org. The emphasis is on great product first, the marketing will take care of itself.
I think in many cases the next logical adopters of Linux know what Linux is and why they should adopt it. They have seen friends they admire use it and envy the power, or heard it talked up in online forums. Marketing is not needed for them. They know that learning Linux is an investment - more work up front that will pay back that effort and more in the long term. Chances are good that they have indeed tried it before and failed. In many of those cases, they will try it again. Why? Windows is like the abusive alcoholic boyfriend - the user is the battered wife that keeps coming back despite all the flaws because he's the devil they know, and it's less work! But every so often, Windows will push people to their limits - a malware hosed computer, having to pay the MS tax, whatever.
Even those who have tried Linux, fail and vow to never go there again will be tempted to do so again out of pride when they see someone with less technical skill embrace linux. (If that klutz can make it work, why can't I?)
On a related note, a pertinent question to ask in terms of marketing is "What sort of user isn't currently using Linux now but would find it useful? How do I reach them?", and more importantly, "What sort of user will cause many other people to use Linux? How do I reach them?". Asking that will provide most bang per buck.
I think in a lot of ways the product is there and the right people are adopting it. Hacker kids embrace Linux because it is powerful and they have unlimited time to make things work. Entrepreneurial kids (and people in general) embrace Linux because they have time and ability but lack money, which allows low-risk business experimentation. Even if they don't start companies, they appreciate the low-cost aspect of Linux. As those two groups of people move up the IT ladder, the corporate ladder or bring new corporations into being, Linux will infiltrate the corporation. As both groups of people install Linux in the homes of their families and friends, the install base will also grow as people are initially exposed or forced into using Linux, then become familiar with it and resistant to change.
Interesting post - relating it to databases. From what I have read, IQ has two main components, gC and gF, standing for Crystallized and Fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is raw problem solving ability, crystallized intelligence is the database aspect you are referring to (tables, the data in the tables and the queries you have built up over the years). I guess fluid intelligence is more the ability to create the right tables, fill them up with good data, and creating meaningful queries.
Fluid intelligence is known to peak in young adulthood and then steadily decline. Crystallized intelligence gradually rises and then stays stable through most of adulthood, declining after 65 on average. I think practically for many things, the increase or maintenance in gC offsets the decrease in gF.
I notice the drop in gF type things in myself - I certainly don't have the superior reaction times I did in my late teens. If I play an FPS, I have learned to make up for that by playing in a more patient manner and playing the percentages - picking my battles. It's harder to say about the reasoning, I haven't noticed much decline yet. But I certainly notice having the larger database of information and more queries, and more refined queries of gC, which enables me to solve some problems much quicker than previously.
Eventually though, it's downhill and I hope to anticipate that and lower my expectations accordingly.
that is, they pay foreigners the exact same amount they could pay someone born in the United States.
Increase the supply of labor and the price goes down. Additionally, that money is going towards people who aren't US citizens, who will then go back and with expertise they otherwise wouldn't have, start competing businesses in their own countries. The only Americans who benefit from this are MSFT shareholders and they aren't exclusively US citizens either.
If you take the line that the US government is by, of and for the people of the United States, the fact that this has been allowed to go on is incongruent. If you take a more realistic approach and realize that the government is fronted by and of the people but for whoever has money and influence, you understand what has happened but if you are out of a job or earning less than you did, it makes it harder to be sanguine about the whole thing.
IANAB but it seems unlikely that all of these internal things would be changing while the outside stays practically identical. Someone correct me!
Sensory and intelligence apparatus can change a great deal while a creature superficially remains the same. There may be others (e.g. efficiency), but those are the ones I immediately think of. I suspect those things are harder to get right, so they take longer for natural selection to do its thing.
Consider a mould of Isaac Newton versus early man. Newton's head was a bit bigger and his body a bit weedier, but all in all, pretty similar. Or perhaps more to the point, consider a WWII or 1950s submarine versus the latest iterations of US submarines, or an F-22A versus an F-15 or F-18. Superficially they are very similar, because an object that spends all its time in a fluid will need to be designed (or will converge on a "design" through natural selection) to move efficiently in that fluid.
However, the power plant, avionics, stealthiness of later iterations of military vehicles are going to outclass earlier vehicles by a huge degree. Pitted head to head, the former submarines and aircraft will only be capable of lucky kills. Getting back to the example of the octopus, we have no way of knowing whether the earlier version of octopus could change color at will, spurt ink, or figure out how to get food out of a bottle with a cork in the top.
There are books, and some of them are good (I really recommend this one and this one) but for the most part, the internet is "the book." Learn to use it. To start with, a good search pattern is [four or five word synopsis of problem OR pasted error message] [name of distribution]. Sometimes you'll get a bunch of old crap in the search results in which case you may want to put the version number of the distro at the end. 95% of the time that's your book.
I wrote "google is your friend" a couple times in my similar post, but kudos to you for actually spelling out how to search properly.
I'd add that the key is to knowing that IME there is a 99.5% chance that something is out there that is exactly what you want, you just have to figure out which search terms bring that page up (often words or phrases that will be in that page but not in other pages that are coming up in your search). You need dogged determination to keep searching, and sometimes the result will not be on the first page of google. I almost always right click to open new tabs (the most likely search results) for every search I do and read through each until I find one that is most applicable or easy. Often the pages will give me ideas for new search terms, maybe a concept I did not know the name of.
We, in the developed World will be cursing the existence of Linux and the rest of F/OSS one day - mark my words.
I guess it depends on whether you are part of that labor force or not. But also, I don't see the sense in a lot of the outsourcing that has gone on - you lose a lot of control for not much of a drop in cost.
Entrepreneurs gain much, much more from FOSS than CEOs do because FOSS reduces startup costs, which are a blip for most established companies in the scheme of things, but mean the difference between do or don't in a startup.
I can install $Distribution on a spare machine and tinker with basic this and that. Beyond that, what else?
Ah, therein lies your problem! Installing $Distribution on a spare machine is not going to do you any good, whether $Distribution is Debian, Slackware or Gentoo. It's like buying an exercise bike, thinking that you are going to suddenly start a regular program of exercise in your house, and stick to it, and that the exercise bike won't end up a dustgatherer like every other non-gym installed exercise bike. If you want to get fit from cycling regularly, I can think of no better way than moving close to work, selling your car, and buying a bicycle. It's considered a little extreme but if you can do those things before the buying the bike thing, it works, guaranteed.
Linux is much the same way. You will become far more proficient with Linux using Ubuntu every day as your main system than you will having installed $Uberl33t_Distro on some spare machine or dual boot only to gather dust. The latter didn't work for me, that's what I did for my first 5 or so failed attempts to switch. Using $Uberl33t_Distro only made it worse - the culture shock of seeing just the bare X screen thinking "now what do I do?" only makes it worse.
The way I switched was to first recall every program or process I used my Windows PC for. The next step was finding FOSS apps that exist in a single $Distro that did the same things and had Windows binaries. After you have worked through all of your applications and are now happily doing them in FOSS programs inside of windows, you are ready for the next step. If you can't get an app that does what you want, you will have to either wait or see if there is a linux-only app that does what you want, which you will test in a spare machine. Alternatively, if it is a game that is your app, you may need to set aside one computer as a gaming machine with ONLY that game on it, running Windows (I found it easier just to learn to like the better Linux games). Once you are sure that all the things you use your computer for will work in a linux environment, then and only then you are ready for the next step.
Buy two new HDD for your machine to install $Distro on - one to use and one to keep as a backup. Buy an external USB HDD case for your old HDD to copy your files over. Catalog your hardware and google each item and linux, to see if there might be a problem. If there is, note the alternative hardware that works. Schedule a week off work. Maybe longer. Install $Distro (I recommend Ubuntu simply because it worked for me, the repos are everywhere, extensive, and the user community is without par). If some hardware does not work, give yourself a day or two to troubleshoot it, otherwise be prepared to buy your way out of trouble.
Migrate each application's config files etc. Google is your friend here. After everything is working properly, back up your HDD using something like partimage, or maybe tar. Now, if you screw something up you can always wipe the slate clean without having to go through the monotonous process of figuring out how to get hardware to work, or hacking some obscure config files that you won't touch again. And at least you have a reference known working config file, should you decide to try and repair the config files yourself. You should also document the whole process - what you did to get each thing to work. You might need that again some day, only it might take a week (or never) to find that one helpful website or to chance upon the correct config instead of a day. You will also find it very useful if and when you do a clean install of the next distro.
Now, use Linux in your day to day life. Google will be your friend, especially google with site:ubuntuforums.org. Proficiency will come as you set yourself goals of wanting to do something and googling to figure out how to do it. Every little experience makes you that bit more proficient.
Someone may argue that you can't become proficient with
It turns out that the OUs (you don't say "orangs", as it offends some of the more hard-core keepers) are the more cunning of the two -- she likened them to engineers.
Shh. There are CEOs who read this site, and right now they are looking to cut costs.
Slashdot Mirror
On the lee side of a dome there will still be a big vacuum. You need a teardrop shape to get rid of that vacuum, which is why every type of bird, fish (and man-made counterparts, airplanes and submarines) are basically composed of tear drop cross sections - to minimize drag. You could make a really flat dome such that it was sufficiently teardropped in all directions, but it's not really what we think of as a dome. May as well just build a bunker and be done with it, as another poster suggests.
Hey, Skynet ain't gonna get built by itself.
Knowing allows planning - for the person (as best they can), their relatives, friends and people at work. Consider the alternative. You have a person who is slowly but surely (although often with periods of lucidity) losing their memory, their judgment, and acting in increasingly inappropriate ways. This is a serious problem for all concerned.
If you know you have Alzheimers, you can make some appropriate decisions. It is a degenerative disease with a likely timeline. For one, you can set realistic goals - goals within your future capabilities. You can start wrapping things up because you know your time of being effective is running short. You can start figuring out who will make financial decisions, because eventually there will be con artists preying on you. And if you don't like the idea of not remembering your closest family members, potentially causing rifts with family members for no good reason other than your brain is dying, acting in a sexually inappropriate fashion, losing control of bodily functions etc... you can choose to end it while you still have the mental capacity to carry it out.
If you are a family member/friend you can realize that their brain is faulty and going to get faultier. They are literally not the people you used to know, so you can't expect them to act the same way any more. They may treat you badly and not realize it. If you liked them before, you can choose to remember them in that way rather than the demented person they become. There are a host of other things to get out of the way, powers of attorney and stuff like that. It allows you to plan, too. It won't get better, it will get steadily worse.
Another thing - as the boomers age there are going to be a lot of people with Alzheimers in positions of power - government and business especially. They will make bad decisions that affect a lot of people. Think Reagan with his finger on the nuke button, not being in his right mind any more. Jobs will be lost and shareholders will lose money as a result of demented CEOs. Mandatory Alzheimers testing in these positions (and candidates) past a certain age would certainly prevent a lot of problems.
Generally, people with Alzheimers are going to be driving cars, operating heavy machinery and inadvertently kill people. Enough of them and it's going to cause serious problems. Perhaps the problems will be obvious and pervasive enough that those in power acknowledge it, even though it conflicts with their generally narcissistic desire to live forever and not be reminded of their mortality, let alone be constrained against their will.
I would credit Donald Knuth - "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."
In a lot of cases he's right. I can deal with slow but usable. I would lump the general Ubuntu (Gnome?) experience in that category, especially Openoffice. And on my machine that would have been top of the line in, oh, 2005 - it runs those things fast enough to suit me. If it's fast but unusable, I won't run it.
It all comes down to resource allocation. It's a huge tribute to the Gnome team that someone on slashdot is even comparing the speed of Gnome with the speed of XP. How many orders of magnitude did the resources thrown at XP outweigh those volunteered for gnome?
That problem will only mean a lot when MB/$ stops its exponential march upwards. It is just plain easier and cheaper to continue copying the old data than spend the time to go through it personally (disk usage analyzer in Ubuntu is helpful but still time consuming) or risk deleting something that may come in handy in the future. Is keeping your 10Gb of data from 1998 really that much of a stress?
I believe the problem is more a search problem than a data expiry problem. I thought Google Desktop Search was brilliant - no need to even categorize your data, just enter some good search terms and you can find whatever you want. However, it was too creepy in that it is closed source, indexes your HDD and sends god knows what to google. But I'm content to wait until FOSS alternatives get up to speed, it should only be a matter of time.
When it was already 1337 after only ten years, it's hard to believe that progress on the firearm could have been all that slow.
4. Drive so as to minimize the use of your brakes.
5. Use the highest gear that does not lug.
... is if the major cities of southeast/east asia were destroyed somehow, since that's where desktops/netbooks/notebooks are produced. I don't see the point in differentiating between desktops/netbooks/notebooks because the operating system needs are not that much different and will be less different as netbooks improve in performance/watt.
1. People will still want to OWN their own computers, with their files accessible all the time. Privacy, uptime, trust, status quo, no recurring costs - all play a part.
2. Companies in countries with the world's cheapest labor forces (competent enough to produce electronics) will continue to produce computers, because it is profitable to do so.
3. They will produce computers cheaper every year, and the costs will approach the cost of materials required (squeezing out software, profit and labor costs through automation).
4. FOSS software will improve every year, for the exact same reasons as a ratchet goes only in one direction - it can't get worse.
A software CEO's wet dream about deriving an income stream from all personal computing will not change the above facts. Some people may pay for cloud computing just as some people buy bottled water, but the rest will continue drinking from the tap.
Dvorak much?
The difference is... when you get desperate enough to eat disgustingly bad pizza, your friends won't bring it up for the next ten years at every possible occasion.
"Enterprise Class" is marketing gibberish designed to produce FUD. There are many, many databases used in a typical "Enterprise" that do not need to scale out and never will. In fact, I would bet more companies have need of this sort of database than the other. Every company has need of databases that cover internal control issues - accounting, inventory, payroll, industry specific stuff. These do not need replication. (Often they just need a better backend than MS Access.)
The primary concern of these databases is data integrity - that is, that the RDBMS does not treat your data like junk, and that you can constrain your data however you require. PostgreSQL has a well deserved reputation there. The secondary requirement is flexibility - can you get at your data and do what you want with it to learn more about your business or save you time? With flexibility in querying and a wide range of languages for stored procedures, PostgreSQL has an excellent reputation here too. Speedwise it is also no slouch.
Besides, if you really need to scale out (now or in future) there are third party solutions such as Slony, and now the PostgreSQL team is working on simple, built-in replication.
PostgreSQL, unless there is some feature PostgreSQL is missing that I would need for the given application in the foreseeable future.
I agree. I think it would be better to CentOS and not have to go hat in hand to the executive board meetings than cause money to flow to Ellison just for slapping an Oracle logo on a product Redhat has developed. Of course, getting money to flow to Redhat would be a better outcome than either.
Important for... the marketing? I disagree. It's the product. I must have tried to convert to Linux at least 5 times, and most times I tried several distributions - Redhat, Debian, Mandrake, SUSE, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Ubuntu (in the early days), as well as the small distros like DSL and Puppy. I did not find any of them to be really livable at the time I tried them. Ubuntu Feisty was the first time I found a distro that did things acceptably enough for me to live with, even though because of its popularity I really did not want to like it. Canonical/Ubuntu is important because they have lowered the bar to Linux adoption through working on ease of use issues and through their newbie friendly ubuntuforums.org. The emphasis is on great product first, the marketing will take care of itself.
I think in many cases the next logical adopters of Linux know what Linux is and why they should adopt it. They have seen friends they admire use it and envy the power, or heard it talked up in online forums. Marketing is not needed for them. They know that learning Linux is an investment - more work up front that will pay back that effort and more in the long term. Chances are good that they have indeed tried it before and failed. In many of those cases, they will try it again. Why? Windows is like the abusive alcoholic boyfriend - the user is the battered wife that keeps coming back despite all the flaws because he's the devil they know, and it's less work! But every so often, Windows will push people to their limits - a malware hosed computer, having to pay the MS tax, whatever.
Even those who have tried Linux, fail and vow to never go there again will be tempted to do so again out of pride when they see someone with less technical skill embrace linux. (If that klutz can make it work, why can't I?)
On a related note, a pertinent question to ask in terms of marketing is "What sort of user isn't currently using Linux now but would find it useful? How do I reach them?", and more importantly, "What sort of user will cause many other people to use Linux? How do I reach them?". Asking that will provide most bang per buck.
I think in a lot of ways the product is there and the right people are adopting it. Hacker kids embrace Linux because it is powerful and they have unlimited time to make things work. Entrepreneurial kids (and people in general) embrace Linux because they have time and ability but lack money, which allows low-risk business experimentation. Even if they don't start companies, they appreciate the low-cost aspect of Linux. As those two groups of people move up the IT ladder, the corporate ladder or bring new corporations into being, Linux will infiltrate the corporation. As both groups of people install Linux in the homes of their families and friends, the install base will also grow as people are initially exposed or forced into using Linux, then become familiar with it and resistant to change.
Interesting post - relating it to databases. From what I have read, IQ has two main components, gC and gF, standing for Crystallized and Fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is raw problem solving ability, crystallized intelligence is the database aspect you are referring to (tables, the data in the tables and the queries you have built up over the years). I guess fluid intelligence is more the ability to create the right tables, fill them up with good data, and creating meaningful queries.
Fluid intelligence is known to peak in young adulthood and then steadily decline. Crystallized intelligence gradually rises and then stays stable through most of adulthood, declining after 65 on average. I think practically for many things, the increase or maintenance in gC offsets the decrease in gF.
I notice the drop in gF type things in myself - I certainly don't have the superior reaction times I did in my late teens. If I play an FPS, I have learned to make up for that by playing in a more patient manner and playing the percentages - picking my battles. It's harder to say about the reasoning, I haven't noticed much decline yet. But I certainly notice having the larger database of information and more queries, and more refined queries of gC, which enables me to solve some problems much quicker than previously.
Eventually though, it's downhill and I hope to anticipate that and lower my expectations accordingly.
Increase the supply of labor and the price goes down. Additionally, that money is going towards people who aren't US citizens, who will then go back and with expertise they otherwise wouldn't have, start competing businesses in their own countries. The only Americans who benefit from this are MSFT shareholders and they aren't exclusively US citizens either.
If you take the line that the US government is by, of and for the people of the United States, the fact that this has been allowed to go on is incongruent. If you take a more realistic approach and realize that the government is fronted by and of the people but for whoever has money and influence, you understand what has happened but if you are out of a job or earning less than you did, it makes it harder to be sanguine about the whole thing.
Sensory and intelligence apparatus can change a great deal while a creature superficially remains the same. There may be others (e.g. efficiency), but those are the ones I immediately think of. I suspect those things are harder to get right, so they take longer for natural selection to do its thing.
Consider a mould of Isaac Newton versus early man. Newton's head was a bit bigger and his body a bit weedier, but all in all, pretty similar. Or perhaps more to the point, consider a WWII or 1950s submarine versus the latest iterations of US submarines, or an F-22A versus an F-15 or F-18. Superficially they are very similar, because an object that spends all its time in a fluid will need to be designed (or will converge on a "design" through natural selection) to move efficiently in that fluid.
However, the power plant, avionics, stealthiness of later iterations of military vehicles are going to outclass earlier vehicles by a huge degree. Pitted head to head, the former submarines and aircraft will only be capable of lucky kills. Getting back to the example of the octopus, we have no way of knowing whether the earlier version of octopus could change color at will, spurt ink, or figure out how to get food out of a bottle with a cork in the top.
You can always try Wine. If you can't get Wine to run that app and you need that app, then Linux is simply not for you... yet.
I wrote "google is your friend" a couple times in my similar post, but kudos to you for actually spelling out how to search properly.
I'd add that the key is to knowing that IME there is a 99.5% chance that something is out there that is exactly what you want, you just have to figure out which search terms bring that page up (often words or phrases that will be in that page but not in other pages that are coming up in your search). You need dogged determination to keep searching, and sometimes the result will not be on the first page of google. I almost always right click to open new tabs (the most likely search results) for every search I do and read through each until I find one that is most applicable or easy. Often the pages will give me ideas for new search terms, maybe a concept I did not know the name of.
I guess it depends on whether you are part of that labor force or not. But also, I don't see the sense in a lot of the outsourcing that has gone on - you lose a lot of control for not much of a drop in cost.
Entrepreneurs gain much, much more from FOSS than CEOs do because FOSS reduces startup costs, which are a blip for most established companies in the scheme of things, but mean the difference between do or don't in a startup.
Ah, therein lies your problem! Installing $Distribution on a spare machine is not going to do you any good, whether $Distribution is Debian, Slackware or Gentoo. It's like buying an exercise bike, thinking that you are going to suddenly start a regular program of exercise in your house, and stick to it, and that the exercise bike won't end up a dustgatherer like every other non-gym installed exercise bike. If you want to get fit from cycling regularly, I can think of no better way than moving close to work, selling your car, and buying a bicycle. It's considered a little extreme but if you can do those things before the buying the bike thing, it works, guaranteed.
Linux is much the same way. You will become far more proficient with Linux using Ubuntu every day as your main system than you will having installed $Uberl33t_Distro on some spare machine or dual boot only to gather dust. The latter didn't work for me, that's what I did for my first 5 or so failed attempts to switch. Using $Uberl33t_Distro only made it worse - the culture shock of seeing just the bare X screen thinking "now what do I do?" only makes it worse.
The way I switched was to first recall every program or process I used my Windows PC for. The next step was finding FOSS apps that exist in a single $Distro that did the same things and had Windows binaries. After you have worked through all of your applications and are now happily doing them in FOSS programs inside of windows, you are ready for the next step. If you can't get an app that does what you want, you will have to either wait or see if there is a linux-only app that does what you want, which you will test in a spare machine. Alternatively, if it is a game that is your app, you may need to set aside one computer as a gaming machine with ONLY that game on it, running Windows (I found it easier just to learn to like the better Linux games). Once you are sure that all the things you use your computer for will work in a linux environment, then and only then you are ready for the next step.
Buy two new HDD for your machine to install $Distro on - one to use and one to keep as a backup. Buy an external USB HDD case for your old HDD to copy your files over. Catalog your hardware and google each item and linux, to see if there might be a problem. If there is, note the alternative hardware that works. Schedule a week off work. Maybe longer. Install $Distro (I recommend Ubuntu simply because it worked for me, the repos are everywhere, extensive, and the user community is without par). If some hardware does not work, give yourself a day or two to troubleshoot it, otherwise be prepared to buy your way out of trouble.
Migrate each application's config files etc. Google is your friend here. After everything is working properly, back up your HDD using something like partimage, or maybe tar. Now, if you screw something up you can always wipe the slate clean without having to go through the monotonous process of figuring out how to get hardware to work, or hacking some obscure config files that you won't touch again. And at least you have a reference known working config file, should you decide to try and repair the config files yourself. You should also document the whole process - what you did to get each thing to work. You might need that again some day, only it might take a week (or never) to find that one helpful website or to chance upon the correct config instead of a day. You will also find it very useful if and when you do a clean install of the next distro.
Now, use Linux in your day to day life. Google will be your friend, especially google with site:ubuntuforums.org. Proficiency will come as you set yourself goals of wanting to do something and googling to figure out how to do it. Every little experience makes you that bit more proficient.
Someone may argue that you can't become proficient with
Shh. There are CEOs who read this site, and right now they are looking to cut costs.
Bankers of which era? Recent bankers haven't been very conservative.
Those dollar bills are not only a food source, a medium of exchange, but also a store of value. At the right price, they make great firewood!
Just a guess, but maybe his tastes don't lean towards guys with beards and questionable personal hygiene.