The State Legislature should not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated."
It's the right answer but the wrong reason. There should be no law mandating a format per se, not because formats become 'outdated' but because people will find one format better than another in different circumstances.
The principle is what is important. People shouldn't be using closed source formats because they can find the data unreadable one day, but an open format can always be interpreted retrospectively because the specification is openly available and can be implemented by programmers at any later time (if, for example, a reader didn't exist for an old open format on a given platform some time in the future).
I.e., they can call on lawmakers, police and if need be, the military, and you can't. Oops, I forgot about that. Their farts mean more than my farts, basically.
Even if opening of private property on the moon is allowed, and it creates a rush to buy property, all that would happen is that the property speculators will buy it up cheap and sit on it until it is worth something. Well if they can just fart and suddenly they're moon-property-owners, then I can fart and suddenly I'm gonna go around collecting property taxes to help fund any potential need for infrastructure development, should anyone decide to put a house up there at any stage.
27% of people reporting using the product are infected. Is this a result of self-selection bias? What does it say about the actual population? What? You're trying to apply scientific principles to a slashvertisement dressed up as negative press for Vista? Shame on you;)
Next time you buy a computer order it without a hard drive, and then order whatever hard drive you want separately... this has worked for me several times in the past. A good idea, but it does not protect the millions of other people who don't know how to install a hard drive but wouldn't want Windows XP / Vista if they had the choice.
Well you might think that, but I was thinking more along the lines of "I can have the thing open next to the stove to read off the recipe and not worry about flour and oil splatters getting onto it"
Part of a botnet.
Ok, maybe I'll settle for an unemployed subnotebook then!
But, I think more people play Solitaire than play(ed) Tetris, so collectively its more hours. That's ONLY because Windows doesn't come default with Tetris.
If 28.3% of the population aren't internet users, why is it a surprise that 20% haven't sent an email? And if almost the same proportion of the population is illiterate, surely they have better things to do than write emails (such as learning how to read/write in the first place).
Point im making is a nice webpage doesn't fix everything for desktop users.
Yes, that is true, except she doesn't play games (except the default ones that come with gnome) but browses the internet, chats, plays music, does emails and writes her thesis. Yes, she hates the chat facility and so we go to the macbook and use iChat, which totally rules over the competition.
And I do agree, Linux generally has holes when it comes to things that matter for end users.
The WifeTest(TM) does show that Ubuntu is a royal pain for some things (but all the others are too, as it happens), mainly related to lack of support from commercial vendors such as Yahoo, as you say.
Remember though, that Windows got itself onto computers via SneakerNet, before the Internet. People used Windows at work because they used it at home. Everybody I knew who had a computer got their stuff from work. Amiga's weren't designed for businesses (sigh), and Apple II's didn't have decent wordprocessing and were already overpriced, so people got XT's.. then 286's with Windows 3.11, and so on. Everybody had a pirate copy of Word and Lotus 123 and whatever. And so it went on.
Where was Linux in all of that? Non-existent for most of it.
So the Windows monopoly was well on its way before the Internet (largely thanks to software piracy).
Linux is at least a decade, if not more, behind. But because it's free, because SneakerNets still exist, it is spreading.
Back to the point, though. You're right. Ubuntu is the new kid on the block and will face the same challenges as every other distro.
Just last week I was at a (non-computer-related) dinner and one of the guests started the conversation topic of "has anyone tried Linux yet?" - it's becoming more and more common. That's enouraging to me.
Fedora's a geeky test bed, Ubuntu's for Windows refugees. Gentoo, of course, is for gamers.
Yep. I used to use Fedora when I had more time and loved it a lot - for all the pain it gave me then.
But to enter the enterprise (not just IT departments) average non-geeks have to get used to the product before it becomes attractive to average non-geeky workplaces.
Is there something I'm missing completely here, or are the comments above complete non-sequiturs?
Neither distro you mention, IMHO, is targeting home users in the way that Ubuntu is. You don't see friendly smiling people holding hands, one or two clicks to download, plain english on the front page and so on, to the degree that Ubuntu's homepage has it. You don't get offered free discs (I got 5 once, left them on the coffee-room table and after two months half the department was using Ubuntu).
Opensuse.org: Nice front page, three options - I clicked download - then I look at a complex table and it fails the WifeTest(TM) dismally.
Fedoraproject.org: When I did my WifeTest(TM), she went to fedora.com, then fedora.org (nice pictures of Mario but no distro). Then we found the site and again, she doesn't know what a freakin i386 is. "I have a laptop, does it say laptop?", she says.
Ubuntu.com: she guessed the right domain, clicked download after looking at the screen for a few minutes, then figured "I must have a standard computer" and started downloading. WifeTest(TM) said she would have bought or requested free CD's except she knew I could burn an ISO for her.
They are good, I agree with you - no worse than Ubuntu, probably. But marketing is everything when like is against like.
Unless you get heart disease or have a stroke before you hit sexual maturity, this is irrelevant. Not quite. People who are still alive to help look after grandchildren tend to have more grandchildren.
Finally, BMI is a shoddy system that I'm sick of seeing. BMI was developed at a time when leeching was an accepted medical practice, and hasn't changed significantly since then. BMI can not differentiate between lean mass and lard. This means that a society of body builders would have the same average BMI as a society of, well, lazy Americans. When we start seeing the number of body builders outweigh the flabbers, then we'll review BMI. Until then it remains a useful tool because everybody understands it and it has been validated.
Although it was quite funny, it's a straw man and the study itself has some serious flaws. The writers might be thin as straw, but the subjects definitely weren't.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually... yeah.
Yep. Works for me.
That's what Bill Gates was thinking when he came out with Windows Me.
It's the right answer but the wrong reason. There should be no law mandating a format per se, not because formats become 'outdated' but because people will find one format better than another in different circumstances.
The principle is what is important. People shouldn't be using closed source formats because they can find the data unreadable one day, but an open format can always be interpreted retrospectively because the specification is openly available and can be implemented by programmers at any later time (if, for example, a reader didn't exist for an old open format on a given platform some time in the future).
Well you might think that, but I was thinking more along the lines of "I can have the thing open next to the stove to read off the recipe and not worry about flour and oil splatters getting onto it"
Part of a botnet.Ok, maybe I'll settle for an unemployed subnotebook then!
Yes, that is true, except she doesn't play games (except the default ones that come with gnome) but browses the internet, chats, plays music, does emails and writes her thesis. Yes, she hates the chat facility and so we go to the macbook and use iChat, which totally rules over the competition.
And I do agree, Linux generally has holes when it comes to things that matter for end users.
The WifeTest(TM) does show that Ubuntu is a royal pain for some things (but all the others are too, as it happens), mainly related to lack of support from commercial vendors such as Yahoo, as you say.
Remember though, that Windows got itself onto computers via SneakerNet, before the Internet. People used Windows at work because they used it at home. Everybody I knew who had a computer got their stuff from work. Amiga's weren't designed for businesses (sigh), and Apple II's didn't have decent wordprocessing and were already overpriced, so people got XT's .. then 286's with Windows 3.11, and so on. Everybody had a pirate copy of Word and Lotus 123 and whatever. And so it went on.
Where was Linux in all of that? Non-existent for most of it.
So the Windows monopoly was well on its way before the Internet (largely thanks to software piracy).
Linux is at least a decade, if not more, behind. But because it's free, because SneakerNets still exist, it is spreading.
Back to the point, though. You're right. Ubuntu is the new kid on the block and will face the same challenges as every other distro.
Just last week I was at a (non-computer-related) dinner and one of the guests started the conversation topic of "has anyone tried Linux yet?" - it's becoming more and more common. That's enouraging to me.
Yep. I used to use Fedora when I had more time and loved it a lot - for all the pain it gave me then.
But to enter the enterprise (not just IT departments) average non-geeks have to get used to the product before it becomes attractive to average non-geeky workplaces.
Neither distro you mention, IMHO, is targeting home users in the way that Ubuntu is. You don't see friendly smiling people holding hands, one or two clicks to download, plain english on the front page and so on, to the degree that Ubuntu's homepage has it. You don't get offered free discs (I got 5 once, left them on the coffee-room table and after two months half the department was using Ubuntu).
Opensuse.org: Nice front page, three options - I clicked download - then I look at a complex table and it fails the WifeTest(TM) dismally.
Fedoraproject.org: When I did my WifeTest(TM), she went to fedora.com, then fedora.org (nice pictures of Mario but no distro). Then we found the site and again, she doesn't know what a freakin i386 is. "I have a laptop, does it say laptop?", she says.
Ubuntu.com: she guessed the right domain, clicked download after looking at the screen for a few minutes, then figured "I must have a standard computer" and started downloading. WifeTest(TM) said she would have bought or requested free CD's except she knew I could burn an ISO for her.
They are good, I agree with you - no worse than Ubuntu, probably. But marketing is everything when like is against like.
You got me there... I guess they might as well put me in a &-jacket and take me away.
On my office in Germany "Kein Unruh!"
.. to put a sign up on my office door "No Hawking"