Every year people predict things, it's almost the journalists version of New Year Resolutions. Predict something and see if you are right. If you are then as you say you get to say "I was right" but if you are wrong you conveniently forget you ever wrote said article and rely on Google cache cleaning itself up.
The world will be a different place after this recession - and so will the web. I don't think however we should all update our microblogs saying "The end of Web 2.0 is nigh" just yet.
This new fangled Linux craze with all of the UI tools is feeding it. Redhat is training admins that are dependent on a given release of their enterprise software (which I am a huge fan of) but not teaching them how it works under the hood.
When I did my RHCE (Admittedly back in 2006 so it was RHEL 4, not 5) we were taught a little about what was under the hood, we were certianly shown hw to do everything in the shell as well as through a GUI - but to really learn what is under the hood, as a Red Hat course anyway - you need to look at doing the RHCA - which is about 5 separate courses, and costs a small fortune!
Give me man, info, google (through links or lynx if you only wish to use the shell) over a week in a (very nice) RH lab in Guildford, UK learning Red Hat specific kernel tweaks and Red Had Directory Service any day.:-) Oh and please do not think that I am against Red Hat - I have an RHCE and use CentOS every day through work and for personal server use. I just like the abilty to transfer my skills to Debian based distros too.
You illustrate a good point here. Someone like IBM need to put their weight behind some of the big open source "needs". PDF editting, SWF playing/a decent Adobe Flash CS3 clone would do Linux the world of good - I might even be able to consider only using my Windows box for accurately testing in IE!
Sun do this already with some success. Look at Open Office, they have put their weight behind the suite and it has helped on occasion. Not all OOO's growth is due to Sun but I would say that even if all the current developers of it still developed and Sun had never joined I reckon it would (Or more rather wouldn't) be seen as an also ran in the battle for the office.
There's an old saying "No one got fired for buying IBM" Now I am sure that is no longer 100% true, but if one of the worlds biggest companies backs something - it has a much larger chance of success.
Kubuntu may be a slightly more interesting test - especially as it uses a windows like "K" button in the "correct" (IE bottom left") position for windows users. The Girlf would also have been right selecting the bottom right for the "task bar" (KDesklets) based off the default Kubuntu theme.
KDE may have on this occasion been more successful than Gnome (That's not me saying KDE or Gnome are better than each other - its just me saying with a more Windows like layout KDE could have been mreo successful)
also if any one is wondering what a girlf is - don't bother looking it up I tried:
$ man girlf
No manual entry for girlf:(
Well, I am a sad case, so I like jokes in base 13.
So did one of my maths lecturers at Uni - we had "What do you get if you multiply six by nine" on one of our hand outs - I was the only one who had read HHGTG in my class and got it right. Shame it didn't get me an A in the assignment though...
RIP Douglas (Or continue RIPing, where ever you are. Probably on the Starship Heart of Gold - (At an improbability rating of... )
I deal with both sides of this everyday. Joe and Jan sixpack are admittedly are amoung the few with something as advanced as a mailserver but we do get the odd "How do I send mail from Outlook" etc. I personally would never dream of getting those sorts of users to say force a coredump if their Mac based server hung for an unknown reason and restarting the service didn't work. Any person can use a computer to the best of their own ability.
If they are happy knowning what they know (Send email, print from a word processor, get the spreadsheet to do a little bit of maths for them etc) then thats grand, they can use the computer. The worst sort of user in my opinion is in fact the ones who think they know everything; know a few buzz words like "terminal" or "command prompt", "sudo" etc and think they are gods gift to geekdom. I've only once been able to agree with someone being comfortable in the terminal when they said "mac user, and I love the terminal" and this was coz he clarified he cut his teeth in Unix years ago on Solaris. (Its nice to not have to receit the keystrokes force kill a process with coredump!)
To Joe and Jane, it doesn't matter if they use Windows or OS X. As long as they can do all they need for their day to day work, either is satisfactory. Just accept they will come crying to the techies over what we see as the littlest of things, as we know what we're doing, and they don't! (Joe and Jane pay our wages most of the time! Be grateful:) )
A lecturer at uni once said "Computers are like the workings of the car. Everyone can use the basic product, a few can tinker and be comfortable with fixing, but b***er me only a few can truely understand the inner workings of them" and he was right:)
I work for a compant which produces a mailserver which runs on all 3 platforms. As such I spend most of the day playing hop the OS. Prior to working where I am now, I had never touched a mac other than to joke about what I saw as the "horrible" one button mouse.
Now (nearly 2 years on) I love Macs. I've used both Leopard and Vista and I have to say although Vista has finally brought in proper user security (Unix stylee:) ) Mac has had this since OS X came out (Possibly prior) and much the same with the aero eye candy. OS X has had it to.
In my mind this is Microsoft playing catchup with the Mac and Linux worlds (Don't forget Beryl/Compiz etc have meant Linux has had the "spinning cube" etc for a while as well. And well Unix gave Linux and Mac the basis for its security structure off memory.)
That said Windows does have more software, and more games as others have said. The success of both is guarenteed, Vista with Microsoft's larger market share is almost certainly going to be bigger; but their forcing upgrades on people will begin to hurt them this time around. When Vista +1 comes out (2012 anyone?;-) ), Mac will have pulled in a larger market share, as will Linux. MS will still have the largest share, but the simple useabilty of a Mac (Once you get used to typing in your password to do any admin things, or the one button mouse) will increase its acceptance in the day to day office environment. Lets just hope Office 2007 for Mac (Read somewhere something about this being due out Q4 this year/Q1 2008 ) is stable enough for those users that have to use office! Another example (In my opinion) of businesses being reliant on a global leader for its own survival.
And for those who want to flame me on the fact Open Office is useable on Mac, Linux and Windows, I know - I use it myself and find it perfectly usable. However not everyone does, the more draconian pointy haired folk amoungst non/. readers don't always like anything that doesn't have "MS" on it, or indeed is free! (Get what you pay for, etc etc)
So does Ubuntu. Both include "easy" options via Fedora Extra Repo/Universal or EasyUbuntu packages. I favour the methods show by Fedora, (mostly due to RHCE certification) but both can have easy Desktop use:)
Fedora will not die - look at Slackware - RH will always have faithful users. It will just possibly become less and less popular over time (rightly or wrongly)
Eclipse is brilliant, I use it when coding. Netbeans is faster for Swing apps in my opinion, but MyEclipse solves that.
I even use Eclipse plugins for my perl and PHP development, an "all in one" IDE me thinks. Certainly as far as I am concerned.
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Every year people predict things, it's almost the journalists version of New Year Resolutions. Predict something and see if you are right. If you are then as you say you get to say "I was right" but if you are wrong you conveniently forget you ever wrote said article and rely on Google cache cleaning itself up.
The world will be a different place after this recession - and so will the web. I don't think however we should all update our microblogs saying "The end of Web 2.0 is nigh" just yet.
This new fangled Linux craze with all of the UI tools is feeding it. Redhat is training admins that are dependent on a given release of their enterprise software (which I am a huge fan of) but not teaching them how it works under the hood.
When I did my RHCE (Admittedly back in 2006 so it was RHEL 4, not 5) we were taught a little about what was under the hood, we were certianly shown hw to do everything in the shell as well as through a GUI - but to really learn what is under the hood, as a Red Hat course anyway - you need to look at doing the RHCA - which is about 5 separate courses, and costs a small fortune!
Give me man, info, google (through links or lynx if you only wish to use the shell) over a week in a (very nice) RH lab in Guildford, UK learning Red Hat specific kernel tweaks and Red Had Directory Service any day. :-) Oh and please do not think that I am against Red Hat - I have an RHCE and use CentOS every day through work and for personal server use. I just like the abilty to transfer my skills to Debian based distros too.
You illustrate a good point here. Someone like IBM need to put their weight behind some of the big open source "needs". PDF editting, SWF playing/a decent Adobe Flash CS3 clone would do Linux the world of good - I might even be able to consider only using my Windows box for accurately testing in IE!
Sun do this already with some success. Look at Open Office, they have put their weight behind the suite and it has helped on occasion. Not all OOO's growth is due to Sun but I would say that even if all the current developers of it still developed and Sun had never joined I reckon it would (Or more rather wouldn't) be seen as an also ran in the battle for the office.
There's an old saying "No one got fired for buying IBM" Now I am sure that is no longer 100% true, but if one of the worlds biggest companies backs something - it has a much larger chance of success.
Kubuntu may be a slightly more interesting test - especially as it uses a windows like "K" button in the "correct" (IE bottom left") position for windows users. The Girlf would also have been right selecting the bottom right for the "task bar" (KDesklets) based off the default Kubuntu theme. KDE may have on this occasion been more successful than Gnome (That's not me saying KDE or Gnome are better than each other - its just me saying with a more Windows like layout KDE could have been mreo successful) also if any one is wondering what a girlf is - don't bother looking it up I tried: $ man girlf No manual entry for girlf :(
So did one of my maths lecturers at Uni - we had "What do you get if you multiply six by nine" on one of our hand outs - I was the only one who had read HHGTG in my class and got it right. Shame it didn't get me an A in the assignment though... RIP Douglas (Or continue RIPing, where ever you are. Probably on the Starship Heart of Gold - (At an improbability rating of... )
I deal with both sides of this everyday. Joe and Jan sixpack are admittedly are amoung the few with something as advanced as a mailserver but we do get the odd "How do I send mail from Outlook" etc. I personally would never dream of getting those sorts of users to say force a coredump if their Mac based server hung for an unknown reason and restarting the service didn't work. Any person can use a computer to the best of their own ability.
:) )
A lecturer at uni once said "Computers are like the workings of the car. Everyone can use the basic product, a few can tinker and be comfortable with fixing, but b***er me only a few can truely understand the inner workings of them" and he was right :)
If they are happy knowning what they know (Send email, print from a word processor, get the spreadsheet to do a little bit of maths for them etc) then thats grand, they can use the computer. The worst sort of user in my opinion is in fact the ones who think they know everything; know a few buzz words like "terminal" or "command prompt", "sudo" etc and think they are gods gift to geekdom. I've only once been able to agree with someone being comfortable in the terminal when they said "mac user, and I love the terminal" and this was coz he clarified he cut his teeth in Unix years ago on Solaris. (Its nice to not have to receit the keystrokes force kill a process with coredump!)
To Joe and Jane, it doesn't matter if they use Windows or OS X. As long as they can do all they need for their day to day work, either is satisfactory. Just accept they will come crying to the techies over what we see as the littlest of things, as we know what we're doing, and they don't! (Joe and Jane pay our wages most of the time! Be grateful
I work for a compant which produces a mailserver which runs on all 3 platforms. As such I spend most of the day playing hop the OS. Prior to working where I am now, I had never touched a mac other than to joke about what I saw as the "horrible" one button mouse.
:) ) Mac has had this since OS X came out (Possibly prior) and much the same with the aero eye candy. OS X has had it to.
;-) ), Mac will have pulled in a larger market share, as will Linux. MS will still have the largest share, but the simple useabilty of a Mac (Once you get used to typing in your password to do any admin things, or the one button mouse) will increase its acceptance in the day to day office environment. Lets just hope Office 2007 for Mac (Read somewhere something about this being due out Q4 this year/Q1 2008 ) is stable enough for those users that have to use office! Another example (In my opinion) of businesses being reliant on a global leader for its own survival.
/. readers don't always like anything that doesn't have "MS" on it, or indeed is free! (Get what you pay for, etc etc)
Now (nearly 2 years on) I love Macs. I've used both Leopard and Vista and I have to say although Vista has finally brought in proper user security (Unix stylee
In my mind this is Microsoft playing catchup with the Mac and Linux worlds (Don't forget Beryl/Compiz etc have meant Linux has had the "spinning cube" etc for a while as well. And well Unix gave Linux and Mac the basis for its security structure off memory.)
That said Windows does have more software, and more games as others have said. The success of both is guarenteed, Vista with Microsoft's larger market share is almost certainly going to be bigger; but their forcing upgrades on people will begin to hurt them this time around. When Vista +1 comes out (2012 anyone?
And for those who want to flame me on the fact Open Office is useable on Mac, Linux and Windows, I know - I use it myself and find it perfectly usable. However not everyone does, the more draconian pointy haired folk amoungst non
So does Ubuntu. Both include "easy" options via Fedora Extra Repo/Universal or EasyUbuntu packages. I favour the methods show by Fedora, (mostly due to RHCE certification) but both can have easy Desktop use :)
Fedora will not die - look at Slackware - RH will always have faithful users. It will just possibly become less and less popular over time (rightly or wrongly)
Surely the number of hits on the Fedora site is an indication - its too high to be a refresh script ;-)
Eclipse is brilliant, I use it when coding. Netbeans is faster for Swing apps in my opinion, but MyEclipse solves that. I even use Eclipse plugins for my perl and PHP development, an "all in one" IDE me thinks. Certainly as far as I am concerned.