Maybe you have a different definition of "Prosumer" than I do, but I don't consider Photoshop CS3 a requirement for those users. Krita or Pixel would work for most non-professional photographers, or Gimp if they can learn the interface. F-Spot is great at photo-tagging and cataloging, store tags in the filesystem and FUSE+beaglefs will give you virtual-directories of all photos with a given tag. I'm not sure if even Adobe products offer that.
Wine doesn't usually cause a performance hit, it's not an emulator of VM. Wine is an implementation of the Win32 API on top of the Linux kernel (BSD and Solaris too), just like the original Win32 API is an implementation on top of the NT kernel. So there aren't any additional steps running a Windows application on Wine, you just have to contend with missing parts of the API causing errors, and differences in implementation (which can sometimes give better performance over Windows).
as is my experience with previous Linus distros -- ubuntu, red hat (2 years ago). You might try Ubuntu again, if indeed you last tried it 2 years ago, that was 4 releases ago, it has come a long was since 5.10. Go download the stable 7.04 or beta 7.10 CD's, they are both live cds, and see if they work better for you.
As a user of both Ubuntu 7.10 and Windows XP, Ubuntu is easier to use and easier to install native software on. I don't have a DVD burner on my Linux box, so I can't comment on how well that works, but Windows XP didn't come with any tools for creating DVD's, I have crappy third-party applications to do that. WoW is listed as "gold" on wine so that should be doable (I'm not a gamer, so I never tried it).
I don't know about your parents, but I would install it on my parent's machine if they ever wanted it. They use their computer for email, web surfing, and office, all of which can be done on Ubuntu. Support would be easy: as long as it was running and connected to the internet I could use VNC or SSH to have as much control over their system as I would sitting right in front of it. I also wouldn't have to run virus scanners or malware tools, no registry hacking, nothing.
Supporting Linux is easier for people who know Linux, than supporting Windows is for people who know Windows.
So, it is worth $20.00 more to ensure that you don't have to pay Microsoft hundreds more in the future when that motherboard goes out. I can actually ensure that I don't have to pay Microsoft anything more in the future for any reason, and it costs less than $20.
Everybody I know who uses Windows complains about it, regularly. I hear phrases like "I hate Windows", or "Stupid Windows is screwing up again" or "There's something with with my Windows", or "Windows is being a pain" all the time. This if from office-workers and home-users, who by all accounts don't give a damn about what OS they are using.
I don't think I've ever heard phrases like "I love windows" (other than with sarcasm), or "This new Windows is great!", or "I've never had a problem with Windows" before in my life. I've certainly never heard someone talk about upgrading to a new version of Windows with anything but disappointment and frustration.
The problem I had with Kerry's "flip-flops" is, his changes of mind were little more than sticking his finger in the air to see which way public opinion was blowing. I'd rather have a President that has his own values and sticks with it. Isn't that a exactly like saying you want a President who disregards the will of the people? The President's job is to execute the will of the people, not his own.
Guns in the hands of the victims lets them not be as victimy. Maybe, but it also lets them be more victimizing. It's a fallacy to believe that criminals can never be victims, and victims can never be criminals. Assume everyone can potentially be either, and doll out rights and protections accordingly.
I might do some research before touching the stove in the first place thus be able to stick to my guns on an issue and not flip-flop... over and over and over. It sure would have been nice to have a candidate who fit that description. Instead we were stuck with the choice between the idiot who learned, and the idiot who didn't.
Personally I was more thrown by the fact that you have a spouse AND a roommate.
If you ever end up in bed with me, I'll happily answer relevant questions at that time. But I guess that may explain it to some extent.
The concept of a "super-position" is that the ball is both blue and red at the time it enters the process. If the process will allow only blue ball to pass through, and the ball is indeed blue (and also red), then it will pass through, but only as blue, not the blue-red superposition. In this way the process can dictate which of the two positions the ball will settle on when the superposition is collapsed. Such a process doesn't force the blue ball to appear, the process forces the ball to become blue. Or, more precisely, it forces the ball to no longer be also red.
Now, if that ball has it's color-state entangled with another ball, then forcing one ball to be blue will simultaneously force the opposite ball to be red. Or, to state it in a more accurate and more confusing way, the process will have retro-actively forced the first ball to have been blue from the beginning.
The folks who use Linux are almost never the folks who choose and maintain Lotus. Usually you get some CEx who had a very informative meeting with IBM's sales reps at the most expensive restaurant(read:stripclub) in town, who decides that Lotus Notes will be the new company standard, and leaves it to some Windows admin with 2 years experience to actually implement it.
Who will sit down to write an open source word processor now that we have OO.org which is not only Open Source, but also well funded and backed up in the news media and bloggers? Abiword?
The way Sun does it: the JDK is dual licensed, and most customers continue to use Java under a non-GPL license. Sun also maintains control through the TCK and their ownership of many of the documents defining Java. Many projects are dual-licensed, what of it? Most customers continue to use the non-GPL J2SE because the GPL'd version isn't ready yet. Many people are currently using Sun's open source J2ME and J2EE implementations. Sun controls the TCK because that is the standard by which you can qualify to use the Java trademark, and Sun controls the Java trademark to ensure compatibility between Java implementations. However, there is nothing stopping Redhat from forking OpenJDK, making whatever changes they want, then distributing it as "IcedTea".
Sun has not open sourced their TCK. Quite to the contrary, they have been trying to use the TCK to maintain control of Java and exclude alternative implementations. This has been a major dispute between Sun and Apache: Sorry, I was unclear (and a bit confused myself it seems). Sun is making their TCK freely available to any implementation or derivation of the GPL'd OpenJDK code. They have released their TCK test harness under GPLv2, but not the TCK tests themselves. I believe that a TCK license has been given to the Apache group as well, either for free or paid for through a sponsor or scholarship.
And there is no reasonable explanation for why Sun picked the CDDL over other licenses other than that they wanted OpenSolaris code as a whole (including ZFS) to be incompatible with Linux. I can think of many reasons why Sun would want to use CDDL over GPL, other than wanting to be incompatible with Linux. Mostly it has to do with remaining business friendly, allowing other distributors, like IBM or HP, to incorporate proprietary code (drivers) into their distribution of Solaris (both ship Solaris on top of their own hardware). Also, it lets the BSD's use Solaris code (they have already ported dtrace and ZFS), which they couldn't do if Sun licensed them under the GPL. If they chose GPL, then they would only benefit Linux. So it's not that they didn't want to be compatible with Linux, it's that they wanted to be compatible with everyone else.
The changes to make the CDDL into a GPLv2 compatible license would be trivial and of no consequence to Sun, but Sun chose to have those clauses in there. Trivial and of no consequence? Oh do tell, what changes are needed?
Correct, and that is not mathematically impossible to do. What seems to be impossible is making a "process" that can cause a particle to collapse from it's super-position into a pre-determined state, instead of a random state. You also have the problem of clock-syncing, because if you try to pull a blue ball and succeed, that can mean that either your friend pulled a red ball already, or hasn't pulled anything yet.
The problem is that when either photon is measured, the spin of both photons' electrons(?) will be instantaneously changed to "wild"(??). So that when you measure the one on your ship, it will always be "wild", but you won't know if it was that way before you measured it, or only became that way as a result of your measurement, so you will not know if the earth-side photon was changed by earth-side folks or not.
You have 2 billiard balls, each can be either red or blue. Without looking at them you randomly place them in 2 separate boxes and ship them to opposite ends sides of the globe (east and west). First you take the east-side box, put it through a process where only a blue ball will come through, and a blue ball will always come through. Next you take the west-side box, put it through the same process where only a blue ball will come through, and no ball will ever come through, because measuring the east-side ball as blue has made the west-side ball red. If you did them in opposite order, the west-side ball would be blue, and the east-side ball would be red.
This means that the colors of the balls you put into the boxes is determined by the order in which you measured their color coming out of the boxes some time later. And that, my friend, is "spooky".
I hope somebody mods your post "funny", because I don't think you'll get "insightful".
The FSF defines what free software is because they came up with the term. With very few exceptions, software that isn't GPL compatible also isn't free software, although it may be open source software. The FSF maintains a list of GPL incompatible licenses that it considers "free software", CDDL is on that list.
Sun chose the ZFS license deliberately to be incompatible with the Linux kernel and to hurt Linux. Sun has always preferred the CDDL, it has nothing to do with trying to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. OpenSolaris is CDDL, so it would only make sense for it's flag-ship file system to be CDDL as well.
Sun has also released Java under a GPL license but is cleverly retaining control of the development process, mostly because they didn't like all the other free and open source Java implementations that were emerging and were hoping to put a stop to them that way and retain control. How do you maintain control of the development of a GPL'd work? If Sun is in such control, why is RedHat doing the most OpenJDK development at the moment? Why would Sun open-source their TCK if they wanted to stop the development of open source implementations not under their control? Do you have any idea what is going on in the open source Java community, or are you just talking out your ass?
I'm sure Microsoft will have ECMA recommend adoption of MSOOSI, the Microsoft Only OSI Stacking Initiative. I hear there are many new committee members and banana republics who want to add their completely unbiased vote on this completely fair and open standard.
However, Firefox is currently at the level where it's computational burden is increasing almost as fast as Moore's Law. The amount of memory Firefox allocates for cache is a direct function of the total amount of system memory you have, so that is by design (good or bad), not poor programming. This can be changed (in about:config), by the way, just not in a user-friendly manner.
Personally, I have noticed that while consuming the same amount of system memory, Firefox on Linux does not slow the rest of the system, while Firefox on Windows does.
By the way when was Java fully Open Sourced? Both the Java compiler and virtual machine have been open sourced. All of Sun's J2ME implementation is open sourced, all of Sun's J2EE implementation is open sourced, and most of Sun's J2SE implementation (all that they have ownership of) has been open sourced.
ZFS is licensed under Sun's CDDL license, which is derived from the Mozilla Public License and is OSI approved, but is not GPL-compatible. A lot of "free software" isn't GPL-compatible, but that doesn't make it any less free. A user-space port has been done using FUSE, and ZFS is available on the BSD's.
From what I have read (and to some extent, experienced), most of the.NET "platform" is AOT-compiled after you install it anyway, so there is even less need for a VM. Maybe it's just legacy design from VisualJ++ that wasn't removed.
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It's about time for Microsoft to properly implement IMAP, LDAP and CalDAV in Exchance. I can't wait.
Maybe you have a different definition of "Prosumer" than I do, but I don't consider Photoshop CS3 a requirement for those users. Krita or Pixel would work for most non-professional photographers, or Gimp if they can learn the interface. F-Spot is great at photo-tagging and cataloging, store tags in the filesystem and FUSE+beaglefs will give you virtual-directories of all photos with a given tag. I'm not sure if even Adobe products offer that.
Wine doesn't usually cause a performance hit, it's not an emulator of VM. Wine is an implementation of the Win32 API on top of the Linux kernel (BSD and Solaris too), just like the original Win32 API is an implementation on top of the NT kernel. So there aren't any additional steps running a Windows application on Wine, you just have to contend with missing parts of the API causing errors, and differences in implementation (which can sometimes give better performance over Windows).
As a user of both Ubuntu 7.10 and Windows XP, Ubuntu is easier to use and easier to install native software on. I don't have a DVD burner on my Linux box, so I can't comment on how well that works, but Windows XP didn't come with any tools for creating DVD's, I have crappy third-party applications to do that. WoW is listed as "gold" on wine so that should be doable (I'm not a gamer, so I never tried it).
I don't know about your parents, but I would install it on my parent's machine if they ever wanted it. They use their computer for email, web surfing, and office, all of which can be done on Ubuntu. Support would be easy: as long as it was running and connected to the internet I could use VNC or SSH to have as much control over their system as I would sitting right in front of it. I also wouldn't have to run virus scanners or malware tools, no registry hacking, nothing.
Supporting Linux is easier for people who know Linux, than supporting Windows is for people who know Windows.
Ubuntu 7.04: $0
Fedora 7: $0
OpenSuse 10.2: $0
Need I go on?
Everybody I know who uses Windows complains about it, regularly. I hear phrases like "I hate Windows", or "Stupid Windows is screwing up again" or "There's something with with my Windows", or "Windows is being a pain" all the time. This if from office-workers and home-users, who by all accounts don't give a damn about what OS they are using.
I don't think I've ever heard phrases like "I love windows" (other than with sarcasm), or "This new Windows is great!", or "I've never had a problem with Windows" before in my life. I've certainly never heard someone talk about upgrading to a new version of Windows with anything but disappointment and frustration.
"This is further evidence that Microsoft products are harmful to all consumers."
Fixed that for you.
The concept of a "super-position" is that the ball is both blue and red at the time it enters the process. If the process will allow only blue ball to pass through, and the ball is indeed blue (and also red), then it will pass through, but only as blue, not the blue-red superposition. In this way the process can dictate which of the two positions the ball will settle on when the superposition is collapsed. Such a process doesn't force the blue ball to appear, the process forces the ball to become blue. Or, more precisely, it forces the ball to no longer be also red.
Now, if that ball has it's color-state entangled with another ball, then forcing one ball to be blue will simultaneously force the opposite ball to be red. Or, to state it in a more accurate and more confusing way, the process will have retro-actively forced the first ball to have been blue from the beginning.
The folks who use Linux are almost never the folks who choose and maintain Lotus. Usually you get some CEx who had a very informative meeting with IBM's sales reps at the most expensive restaurant(read:stripclub) in town, who decides that Lotus Notes will be the new company standard, and leaves it to some Windows admin with 2 years experience to actually implement it.
KWord?
TextEdit?
Correct, and that is not mathematically impossible to do. What seems to be impossible is making a "process" that can cause a particle to collapse from it's super-position into a pre-determined state, instead of a random state. You also have the problem of clock-syncing, because if you try to pull a blue ball and succeed, that can mean that either your friend pulled a red ball already, or hasn't pulled anything yet.
The problem is that when either photon is measured, the spin of both photons' electrons(?) will be instantaneously changed to "wild"(??). So that when you measure the one on your ship, it will always be "wild", but you won't know if it was that way before you measured it, or only became that way as a result of your measurement, so you will not know if the earth-side photon was changed by earth-side folks or not.
Try this:
You have 2 billiard balls, each can be either red or blue. Without looking at them you randomly place them in 2 separate boxes and ship them to opposite ends sides of the globe (east and west). First you take the east-side box, put it through a process where only a blue ball will come through, and a blue ball will always come through. Next you take the west-side box, put it through the same process where only a blue ball will come through, and no ball will ever come through, because measuring the east-side ball as blue has made the west-side ball red. If you did them in opposite order, the west-side ball would be blue, and the east-side ball would be red.
This means that the colors of the balls you put into the boxes is determined by the order in which you measured their color coming out of the boxes some time later. And that, my friend, is "spooky".
I'm sure Microsoft will have ECMA recommend adoption of MSOOSI, the Microsoft Only OSI Stacking Initiative. I hear there are many new committee members and banana republics who want to add their completely unbiased vote on this completely fair and open standard.
Personally, I have noticed that while consuming the same amount of system memory, Firefox on Linux does not slow the rest of the system, while Firefox on Windows does.
ZFS is licensed under Sun's CDDL license, which is derived from the Mozilla Public License and is OSI approved, but is not GPL-compatible. A lot of "free software" isn't GPL-compatible, but that doesn't make it any less free. A user-space port has been done using FUSE, and ZFS is available on the BSD's.
From what I have read (and to some extent, experienced), most of the .NET "platform" is AOT-compiled after you install it anyway, so there is even less need for a VM. Maybe it's just legacy design from VisualJ++ that wasn't removed.