Tools --> Options screen isn't quite set up the same way
True, although I prefer OOo's version (just a personal preference, most likely). And I particularly like Format -> Page instead of File -> Page Setup (in 2003) or Round Orby Thing -> Prepare (if you're getting rid of menus in favor of ribbons, why keep one unlabeled menu?!?).
Doing cell borders is a pain in OOo but very easy in Excel.
Really? I use both (Office 2007 and OOo 3.2) on a daily basis, and I've not noticed any difference in border management ease of use. What I actually notice more is cell shading - 2007 keeps my color selection when I click on another cell, making shading disjointed cells easier than in OOo. 2007 also has better style management IMHO, although bizarrely they don't use the same palate as 2003, which makes switching between them an exercise in frustration (some of the conference rooms at work are still at 2003).
The big purple lightbulb box
Die, die, die! (I turned it off, of course.)
Asking me every single time
You must be right-clicking to Delete Contents..., or pressing the Delete key? The purpose of that is to ask you every single time what to delete (it's a feature). Try hitting the key on your keyboard marked "Backspace". It just deletes the contents, no dialogs. I hadn't really noticed this before - I've always used Backspace to clear a cell (on 2003, 2007 and OOo), and I've always used a right-click menu to bring up a dialog. Interesting.
Really, unless you're a math power user who needs obscure functions or Excel plugins, the differences between the two seem to come down to preferences. I like the customization of OOo more than 2007 (which has little - 2003's was better than either). I LOVE the consistency across the suite in OOo, which is lacking in 2007 and 2003. Overall, I feel comparably productive in 2003 or OOo, and a bit stymied in 2007 because of the ribbon - but I've only been using the ribbon 18 months. Fans keep telling me I'll get used to it...
I cut my teeth on Mandrake, and have used Mandriva as recently as 5 months ago. Mandriva is better at KDE, but Ubuntu is better at Gnome IMHO. Since I have a mild preference for Gnome, I have a mild preference for Ubuntu. (I also tried Linux Mint for 6 months about a year ago, and thought is was nice but not compelling enough for a permanent switch. Frankly, I missed the Applications / Places / System menus. I haven't tried Mepis for a significant period of time, so no comment there.)
I have no idea why you think that big repos don't matter much to the average user. Aren't the ones who can't build apps from source also the ones who will most value the Ubuntu Software Center? Or am I mis-reading your point?
Yes, Symbian owns the lion's share of the world smartphone market, and will for several years yet. Nokia's grand strategy to move the Symbian development world to QT 4 is good for Symbian, but even better for MeeGo - QT-based Symbian apps can also be delivered to MeeGo with a simple recompile, and MeeGo's 30+ corporate partners will help mature the next generation platform while Symbian continues to bring in the cash for Nokia.
Good strategy.
Not to discount iOS and Android, both with very visible and strong market momentum, but Nokia's approach has a pretty good shot at maintaining the volume sales crown for years while providing a very long and smooth transition to a mainstream and source-compatible successor to Symbian. Profitability from the low end over the long run is the bigger challenge, IMHO.
But also far, far short of the Android tsunami. Granted.
Nokia has clearly stated since 2007 that they were on a 5 step plan to develop a revolutionary new phone. N770, N800, N810 and N900... that's 4. The next phone is the first in the Maemo / MeeGo line actually intended by Nokia for the masses. We'll see.
Of course, iPhans would say Apple jumped straight to step 5 in 2007... and I really can't argue that point, either. I'm just not a walled garden kind of guy.
(Full disclosure: I own an N900, my wife an Android-based Cliq, and several close friends own iPhones. They're all nice phones; pick what works best for you. I won't ridicule you. Promise.;-)
Having used Mandrake 7.2 as my very first Linux distro back in 2000, I recently tried out a modern version of Mandriva. The KDE4 desktop ran rings around Kunbuntu (IMHO), and would be my first choice if I used that desktop, but I'm still a bit partial to Ubuntu's Gnome implementation.
I think what Mandriva lacks more than anything else is a rich space-faring billionaire benefactor who owes his success to Linux and just wants to give back to the community. Where do we find more of those?:-D
Re:cost of acquisition is everything, huh?
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
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Having to find and download "free" software to do stuff MS users get with their machines, and then finding out it isn't quite the same, is a cost.
Things included with Windows generally come installed in Ubuntu.
The opposite is not true, however:
Ubuntu comes with a browser, email client, multi-protocol instant messenger, office suite, graphics suite, screenshot program, scanner software, torrent software, and optical media burning software.
Windows 7 comes with... a web browser. And a third of all Windows users actually replace that with Firefox et. al.
Not only is Ubuntu significantly easier to install than Windows, it's also ready to go for the most common use cases. Windows 7 requires a *lot* of extra configuration and installation to be useful for even basic functions.
"Since CP has their own Debian distro, people won't have to wonder if their are Linux drivers for the hardware found in the system."
What a bizarre thing to say. Do you really think that if you buy an Ubuntu netbook from Dell, System76, or Zareason, that they won't include drivers for the hardware? Seriously??
I've used Linux for about 10 years now, starting with Mandrake (the original Mandriva) back in the "RPM Hell" dark ages. For the past several years I've used Ubuntu (since 6.06, I think) with Gnome, but have watch KDE 4 mature with some interest. Having recently started playing with Virtual Box, this story gave me the motivation to compare Kubuntu 9.10 to Mandriva 2010 from my own personal Gnome-tainted perspective, since KDE 4 enthusiasts keep posting that Kunbuntu doesn't do KDE 4 justice next to a "real" KDE distribution like Mandriva. This was a highly biased, what-I-care-about perspective. Your mileage will most *definitely* vary.
I installed Kubuntu first, and was underwhelmed (to be polite). Just finished playing with Mandriva 2010, and... wow. *Huge* difference.
Kubuntu was *much* easier to install, very similar to the trademark ease of Ubuntu. Mandriva was what I remembered from many years ago - scores of screens asking me the most trivial details ("How should we display time?" Well, pick something and if I really hate it I'll change it! Geesh! "Do you have any other repositories?" I have no earthly idea. "Which desktop would you like - KDE, Gnome, or other?" Other? Really? And didn't this used to have a "Both" entry?).
Once installed, however, Kubuntu left me cold. No Firefox (I launched the Konquerer thing, and it crashed on my second tab and took me to Bugzilla, which listed more "similar" Konquerer bug reports than I had heart to even skim). Few tools pre-installed. No games at all. And a weird sliding K-Menu thingy that took four clicks just to launch an application. I was left with a sinking "*now* what do I do?" kind of feeling, which is unusual in my experience in the rich world of free software.
Mandriva looked great on first boot (though it really wanted me to complete a detailed questionnaire, which I started and then abandoned). I didn't like having to log in (if someone I don't trust is accessing my console, I have a much bigger problem than computer security - like, how did this person get in my *house*!), but once in, the menu was pre-populated with all the comforting old favorites - FireFox, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Aramok, Okular, Scribus (hadn't looked that one in a few years!), and on and on - and so many games they had to have sub-categories to fit them all on the comfortingly normal menu. And a "starter quick launch bar" in the lower left, next to the Mandriva Star that acted like a K-Menu. I have no idea what a "Diff Check" is (a notice keeps popping up in the lower right to assure me that nobody has tampered with my computer - is this a common problem???), but thus far it all seems... comfortable.
Not sure I'll be switching to KDE 4 any time soon, but certainly Mandriva presents a very convincing case that it's ready to this Gnome-oriented user. Kubuntu doesn't seem to quite be there yet, but since Ubuntu is so nicely polished, I'm sure given some time they'll produce something I like. But now I see what KDE enthusiasts mean when they complain that Kubuntu unfairly tarnishes their reputation.
Just my $0.02, and a "Well done, Mandriva!" to the nice folks on the continent. I fondly miss you guys.:-)
closeminded traditionalists without understanding of relevant issues keep their mouths shut when those issues are being discussed.
So you're willing to discuss how you want to change the constitution, as long as those who disagree with you aren't allowed to talk? I don't think it's the constitution that's the problem here...
Seriously? So how did Rush and Hannity and such keep their jobs? They were merciless in criticizing Bush over a long list of lunacy, including the Medicare expansion, the attempt to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants (*again*), and the idiotic 700 *billion* dollar TARP spending bill (inadvertently labeled a "stimulus plan", as if any country can spend its way into prosperity).
Or do you only listen to people with whom you agree?
Y'know, this got me thinking. I'm a digital pack rat, so I looked for the oldest file on my computer. It's COSMIC.WP from 1989, the rules for a game my friends and I created in college, in WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS format.
Just to watch the meltdown, I double-clicked the file. OpenOffice.org opened it without a problem. Even the ASCII-formatted tables look right.
I'm of your generation, apparently, as I related to almost everything you wrote (and well-written it was, too).
But "Slide rules were frequently used by engineers and scientists to perform addition, subtraction,..."?? Since when did slide rules do addition and subtraction? And I say that while looking at my old slide rule...;-)
I was a UM Freshman in 1992... We learned binary by drawing 8x8 grids, writing "256 | 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" over them
I was a Mississippi State freshman in 1979, and we still could only fit "128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" above an 8x8 grid. I hope to God that your UM was Ole Miss!
Precisely. I'm at a class reunion (never mind which one...), and the obituary board showed that a friend of mine from high school had died. Nobody knew what happened.
So I went to his hometown newspaper's website to search for the obituary. The chumps wanted to charge me $2/article for "archived" stories. The obvious problem is that I needed to sort through dozens of obituaries to find the right one (he had a fairly common name, and the date was "sometime in the past 5 years").
To heck with them - I just called his old phone number to ask his wife. He answered.
Glad I didn't pay all that money for nothing...
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug
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F-22 Raptor Cancelled
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Actually, that was when many Americans volunteered to fight with the British against Nazi Germany. The American government, however, "didn't want to invade anybody", so they simply provided a variety of "lend / lease" supplies to the Allies and hoped everybody else would like us. You know, the policy recommended by the Anon Coward to whom I was responding.
Didn't work then. Won't work now.
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug
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F-22 Raptor Cancelled
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Not sure I understand about the flash drive. I'm typing this on Ubuntu NBR (Starling), and I've plugged in three file-oriented devices thus far (2 GB thumbdrive, 500 GB hard disk, and 1 GB SD card). In all 3 cases, they auto-mounted, and Ubuntu launched a file browser ("Nautilus") opened to the root of that device, with the device listed on the left-hand quick-access list as (for example) "500 GB disk". This was remarkably consistent and helpful IMHO. Did this not happen in your experience? Or if it did, what were you expecting / would you have preferred, exactly? Again, just curious.
You have to remember, this thing is more underpowered than the cheap netbooks that will barely surf the web on anything that has Flash.
Really? I received a System76 Starling netbook ($360 complete) for Father's Day this year. I normally have 10-15 tabs open in Firefox, while running Pidgin IM, a couple of OpenOffice.org documents (our spreadsheet budget and whatever I'm writing at the moment), and a couple of other programs. With all that, running a video on YouTube (for example) is acceptably smooth and quite watch-able. Not anti-aliased and scaled in real-time, of course, but perfectly fine for relaxing in my recliner.
Have you ever tried anything other than Windows XP on a netbook? Not trying to slam Microsoft, just curious.
Much of the OLPC software was written in Python to make it accessible, not to make it fast - that was the whole point of the "Show Source" button and the versioning file system with roll-back. Well, it was a nice dream...
The OLPC I played with at PyCon was acceptably fast. If only I knew more math, I'd own one.:-/
Didn't Stallman and friends reimplement the commercial Unix libraries as free (GPL) software?
Gnu's Not Unix. I read that somewhere...
Wasn't he potentially violating patents?
All software implementations potentially violate patents. Mono just happens to likely violate those of a convicted monopolist who has called the GPL a "cancer" and claimed Linux violates hundreds of unspecified patents in order to FUD the credulous into paying Microsoft for inferior software.
Do the commercial Unix vendors holding those patents behave any differently than Microsoft (ahem SCO)?
Mono is... a very nice easy path for the majority of all developers in the world (WINDOWS Developers) to make the transition to Linux and GNU
Don't be silly. Mono is a very nice path to ensure that free software is dependent on real Microsoft patents, as opposed to the imaginary ones that Ballmer is always ranting about between chair tosses. It's the equivalent of George Bailey taking a job with Mr. Potter because "you won, George... you've beaten me". But Microsoft "sits around here and spins your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn't, Mr. Ballmer. In the whole vast configuration of things, I'd say you were nothing but a scurvy little spider. And... [turning to his aide, Miguel de Icaza] And that goes for you, too!"
If you're a Windows developer looking to make the transition to Linux and GNU, try something that's actually innovative. QT4 comes to mind at random. Or Python for quick IT apps (it works for Google). Or Android for phones. Now, welcome to freedom.
Oddly, I've had the opposite experience. It's the BSD zealots that keep insisting that their software is "more free" than GPL, because you can even make it non-free (and they believe that is a good thing, because it means more people may use their software). Most of the GPL zealots tend more toward "we don't care who uses our software, because it's freedom that's important, not popularity". This comes across (to me, at least) as much less strident, not to mention more convincing.
Like all anecdotal evidence, of course, this proves nothing - but it is my experience nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
Tools --> Options screen isn't quite set up the same way
True, although I prefer OOo's version (just a personal preference, most likely). And I particularly like Format -> Page instead of File -> Page Setup (in 2003) or Round Orby Thing -> Prepare (if you're getting rid of menus in favor of ribbons, why keep one unlabeled menu?!?).
Doing cell borders is a pain in OOo but very easy in Excel.
Really? I use both (Office 2007 and OOo 3.2) on a daily basis, and I've not noticed any difference in border management ease of use. What I actually notice more is cell shading - 2007 keeps my color selection when I click on another cell, making shading disjointed cells easier than in OOo. 2007 also has better style management IMHO, although bizarrely they don't use the same palate as 2003, which makes switching between them an exercise in frustration (some of the conference rooms at work are still at 2003).
The big purple lightbulb box
Die, die, die! (I turned it off, of course.)
Asking me every single time
You must be right-clicking to Delete Contents..., or pressing the Delete key? The purpose of that is to ask you every single time what to delete (it's a feature). Try hitting the key on your keyboard marked "Backspace". It just deletes the contents, no dialogs. I hadn't really noticed this before - I've always used Backspace to clear a cell (on 2003, 2007 and OOo), and I've always used a right-click menu to bring up a dialog. Interesting.
Really, unless you're a math power user who needs obscure functions or Excel plugins, the differences between the two seem to come down to preferences. I like the customization of OOo more than 2007 (which has little - 2003's was better than either). I LOVE the consistency across the suite in OOo, which is lacking in 2007 and 2003. Overall, I feel comparably productive in 2003 or OOo, and a bit stymied in 2007 because of the ribbon - but I've only been using the ribbon 18 months. Fans keep telling me I'll get used to it...
I cut my teeth on Mandrake, and have used Mandriva as recently as 5 months ago. Mandriva is better at KDE, but Ubuntu is better at Gnome IMHO. Since I have a mild preference for Gnome, I have a mild preference for Ubuntu. (I also tried Linux Mint for 6 months about a year ago, and thought is was nice but not compelling enough for a permanent switch. Frankly, I missed the Applications / Places / System menus. I haven't tried Mepis for a significant period of time, so no comment there.)
I have no idea why you think that big repos don't matter much to the average user. Aren't the ones who can't build apps from source also the ones who will most value the Ubuntu Software Center? Or am I mis-reading your point?
Yes, Symbian owns the lion's share of the world smartphone market, and will for several years yet. Nokia's grand strategy to move the Symbian development world to QT 4 is good for Symbian, but even better for MeeGo - QT-based Symbian apps can also be delivered to MeeGo with a simple recompile, and MeeGo's 30+ corporate partners will help mature the next generation platform while Symbian continues to bring in the cash for Nokia.
Good strategy.
Not to discount iOS and Android, both with very visible and strong market momentum, but Nokia's approach has a pretty good shot at maintaining the volume sales crown for years while providing a very long and smooth transition to a mainstream and source-compatible successor to Symbian. Profitability from the low end over the long run is the bigger challenge, IMHO.
Time will tell.
First, N900 has 256 MB RAM and 768 MB swap - not 128 MB RAM as the grandposter (melikamp) stated.
To your (alvinrod's) point, Nokia's response to the Reuters article was laughter - see http://www.slashgear.com/nokia-n900-has-sold-well-in-excess-of-100000-handsets-gartner-figures-seriously-wrong-claims-source-2887458/. Nokia doesn't disclose sales figures, but the N900 has sold "well in excess" of 100,000.
But also far, far short of the Android tsunami. Granted.
Nokia has clearly stated since 2007 that they were on a 5 step plan to develop a revolutionary new phone. N770, N800, N810 and N900... that's 4. The next phone is the first in the Maemo / MeeGo line actually intended by Nokia for the masses. We'll see.
Of course, iPhans would say Apple jumped straight to step 5 in 2007... and I really can't argue that point, either. I'm just not a walled garden kind of guy.
(Full disclosure: I own an N900, my wife an Android-based Cliq, and several close friends own iPhones. They're all nice phones; pick what works best for you. I won't ridicule you. Promise. ;-)
Having used Mandrake 7.2 as my very first Linux distro back in 2000, I recently tried out a modern version of Mandriva. The KDE4 desktop ran rings around Kunbuntu (IMHO), and would be my first choice if I used that desktop, but I'm still a bit partial to Ubuntu's Gnome implementation.
I think what Mandriva lacks more than anything else is a rich space-faring billionaire benefactor who owes his success to Linux and just wants to give back to the community. Where do we find more of those? :-D
Having to find and download "free" software to do stuff MS users get with their machines, and then finding out it isn't quite the same, is a cost.
Things included with Windows generally come installed in Ubuntu.
The opposite is not true, however:
Not only is Ubuntu significantly easier to install than Windows, it's also ready to go for the most common use cases. Windows 7 requires a *lot* of extra configuration and installation to be useful for even basic functions.
Here's a summary, and here are the gory details.
"Since CP has their own Debian distro, people won't have to wonder if their are Linux drivers for the hardware found in the system."
What a bizarre thing to say. Do you really think that if you buy an Ubuntu netbook from Dell, System76, or Zareason, that they won't include drivers for the hardware? Seriously??
I've used Linux for about 10 years now, starting with Mandrake (the original Mandriva) back in the "RPM Hell" dark ages. For the past several years I've used Ubuntu (since 6.06, I think) with Gnome, but have watch KDE 4 mature with some interest. Having recently started playing with Virtual Box, this story gave me the motivation to compare Kubuntu 9.10 to Mandriva 2010 from my own personal Gnome-tainted perspective, since KDE 4 enthusiasts keep posting that Kunbuntu doesn't do KDE 4 justice next to a "real" KDE distribution like Mandriva. This was a highly biased, what-I-care-about perspective. Your mileage will most *definitely* vary.
I installed Kubuntu first, and was underwhelmed (to be polite). Just finished playing with Mandriva 2010, and ... wow. *Huge* difference.
Kubuntu was *much* easier to install, very similar to the trademark ease of Ubuntu. Mandriva was what I remembered from many years ago - scores of screens asking me the most trivial details ("How should we display time?" Well, pick something and if I really hate it I'll change it! Geesh! "Do you have any other repositories?" I have no earthly idea. "Which desktop would you like - KDE, Gnome, or other?" Other? Really? And didn't this used to have a "Both" entry?).
Once installed, however, Kubuntu left me cold. No Firefox (I launched the Konquerer thing, and it crashed on my second tab and took me to Bugzilla, which listed more "similar" Konquerer bug reports than I had heart to even skim). Few tools pre-installed. No games at all. And a weird sliding K-Menu thingy that took four clicks just to launch an application. I was left with a sinking "*now* what do I do?" kind of feeling, which is unusual in my experience in the rich world of free software.
Mandriva looked great on first boot (though it really wanted me to complete a detailed questionnaire, which I started and then abandoned). I didn't like having to log in (if someone I don't trust is accessing my console, I have a much bigger problem than computer security - like, how did this person get in my *house*!), but once in, the menu was pre-populated with all the comforting old favorites - FireFox, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Aramok, Okular, Scribus (hadn't looked that one in a few years!), and on and on - and so many games they had to have sub-categories to fit them all on the comfortingly normal menu. And a "starter quick launch bar" in the lower left, next to the Mandriva Star that acted like a K-Menu. I have no idea what a "Diff Check" is (a notice keeps popping up in the lower right to assure me that nobody has tampered with my computer - is this a common problem???), but thus far it all seems... comfortable.
Not sure I'll be switching to KDE 4 any time soon, but certainly Mandriva presents a very convincing case that it's ready to this Gnome-oriented user. Kubuntu doesn't seem to quite be there yet, but since Ubuntu is so nicely polished, I'm sure given some time they'll produce something I like. But now I see what KDE enthusiasts mean when they complain that Kubuntu unfairly tarnishes their reputation.
Just my $0.02, and a "Well done, Mandriva!" to the nice folks on the continent. I fondly miss you guys. :-)
Posted from my Mandriva VM...
So you're willing to discuss how you want to change the constitution, as long as those who disagree with you aren't allowed to talk? I don't think it's the constitution that's the problem here...
Seriously? So how did Rush and Hannity and such keep their jobs? They were merciless in criticizing Bush over a long list of lunacy, including the Medicare expansion, the attempt to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants (*again*), and the idiotic 700 *billion* dollar TARP spending bill (inadvertently labeled a "stimulus plan", as if any country can spend its way into prosperity).
Or do you only listen to people with whom you agree?
Y'know, this got me thinking. I'm a digital pack rat, so I looked for the oldest file on my computer. It's COSMIC.WP from 1989, the rules for a game my friends and I created in college, in WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS format.
Just to watch the meltdown, I double-clicked the file. OpenOffice.org opened it without a problem. Even the ASCII-formatted tables look right.
Wow.
They both run xterm. That's all that matters.
I'm of your generation, apparently, as I related to almost everything you wrote (and well-written it was, too).
But "Slide rules were frequently used by engineers and scientists to perform addition, subtraction,..."?? Since when did slide rules do addition and subtraction? And I say that while looking at my old slide rule... ;-)
It's not installed by default in Windows? Otherwise, it's most always my first choice...
I was a UM Freshman in 1992... We learned binary by drawing 8x8 grids, writing "256 | 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" over them
I was a Mississippi State freshman in 1979, and we still could only fit "128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" above an 8x8 grid. I hope to God that your UM was Ole Miss!
Precisely. I'm at a class reunion (never mind which one...), and the obituary board showed that a friend of mine from high school had died. Nobody knew what happened.
So I went to his hometown newspaper's website to search for the obituary. The chumps wanted to charge me $2/article for "archived" stories. The obvious problem is that I needed to sort through dozens of obituaries to find the right one (he had a fairly common name, and the date was "sometime in the past 5 years").
To heck with them - I just called his old phone number to ask his wife. He answered.
Glad I didn't pay all that money for nothing...
Actually, that was when many Americans volunteered to fight with the British against Nazi Germany. The American government, however, "didn't want to invade anybody", so they simply provided a variety of "lend / lease" supplies to the Allies and hoped everybody else would like us. You know, the policy recommended by the Anon Coward to whom I was responding.
Didn't work then. Won't work now.
Yep. Worked really well in 1940.
Not sure I understand about the flash drive. I'm typing this on Ubuntu NBR (Starling), and I've plugged in three file-oriented devices thus far (2 GB thumbdrive, 500 GB hard disk, and 1 GB SD card). In all 3 cases, they auto-mounted, and Ubuntu launched a file browser ("Nautilus") opened to the root of that device, with the device listed on the left-hand quick-access list as (for example) "500 GB disk". This was remarkably consistent and helpful IMHO. Did this not happen in your experience? Or if it did, what were you expecting / would you have preferred, exactly? Again, just curious.
Really? I received a System76 Starling netbook ($360 complete) for Father's Day this year. I normally have 10-15 tabs open in Firefox, while running Pidgin IM, a couple of OpenOffice.org documents (our spreadsheet budget and whatever I'm writing at the moment), and a couple of other programs. With all that, running a video on YouTube (for example) is acceptably smooth and quite watch-able. Not anti-aliased and scaled in real-time, of course, but perfectly fine for relaxing in my recliner.
Have you ever tried anything other than Windows XP on a netbook? Not trying to slam Microsoft, just curious.
Much of the OLPC software was written in Python to make it accessible, not to make it fast - that was the whole point of the "Show Source" button and the versioning file system with roll-back. Well, it was a nice dream...
The OLPC I played with at PyCon was acceptably fast. If only I knew more math, I'd own one. :-/
Well, certainly not the iPhone. Maybe Android or the Pre, or if you really want a head start (e.g., a long time with no paycheck), Chrome.
But custom corporate software is where much of the professional money is made nowadays.
Gnu's Not Unix. I read that somewhere...
All software implementations potentially violate patents. Mono just happens to likely violate those of a convicted monopolist who has called the GPL a "cancer" and claimed Linux violates hundreds of unspecified patents in order to FUD the credulous into paying Microsoft for inferior software.
Welcome to the 21st century. SCO does not own Unix; Novell does.
Don't be silly. Mono is a very nice path to ensure that free software is dependent on real Microsoft patents, as opposed to the imaginary ones that Ballmer is always ranting about between chair tosses. It's the equivalent of George Bailey taking a job with Mr. Potter because "you won, George... you've beaten me". But Microsoft "sits around here and spins your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn't, Mr. Ballmer. In the whole vast configuration of things, I'd say you were nothing but a scurvy little spider. And... [turning to his aide, Miguel de Icaza] And that goes for you, too!"
If you're a Windows developer looking to make the transition to Linux and GNU, try something that's actually innovative. QT4 comes to mind at random. Or Python for quick IT apps (it works for Google). Or Android for phones. Now, welcome to freedom.
Oddly, I've had the opposite experience. It's the BSD zealots that keep insisting that their software is "more free" than GPL, because you can even make it non-free (and they believe that is a good thing, because it means more people may use their software). Most of the GPL zealots tend more toward "we don't care who uses our software, because it's freedom that's important, not popularity". This comes across (to me, at least) as much less strident, not to mention more convincing.
Like all anecdotal evidence, of course, this proves nothing - but it is my experience nonetheless.
Focusing on ethics is likely to work if your goal is to promote ethical software. It's kind of hard to imagine anything else working, actually.