I'm now running my Eee PC900 with Kubuntu Jaunty right out of the box with support for everything. The hacked kernel that was required to support my netbook is now no longer required.
OpenGL runs well enough on the netbook video chipset that I can even use the "spinning cube" desktop switcher animation. . . as long as I'm willing to charge my battery twice as often.
and the ability to use Linux apps concurrently with Windows apps.
I run Windows XP on Virtualbox to run legacy apps... except for Eudora I am running via Crossover Office until Eudora for Linux is ready for prime time.
Now that I run Eudora in Crossover Office, I run XP maybe an hour a week. Once Eudora for Linux is ready... I'll be running Windows apps for maybe an hour a week.
farm you refer to is a megafarm in Mexico owned by Smithfield Foods, a USA company, it is believed by many that the virus recombination occurred in one of their CAFO holding lagoons and departed it using houseflies as a vector.
would be equally appropriate. How can we get that name to stick?
How many popular entertainment programs have had their hosts give NASA the same kind of consistent support that Colbert has given it in the last few years?
I can't think of any, either. The MSM generally ignores NASA as it does Open Source.
In a time of economic disaster, NASA is especially vulnerable to budget cuts. IOW, NASA needs all the friends it can get. The 'stuff the ballot box to name the module' got massive hits to the NASA website. Hopefully, people saw things that make them like NASA better. The administrators at NASA who were actually offended by the public daring to have an opinion probably should have their asses canned and be replaced by people who remember who pays for NASA's programs.
Bruce, what have you ever done for NASA or advancing the cause of space exploration and industrialization that compares with the good and free publicity Colbert has given them?
I generally agree with you, but this is genuinely stupid and I certainly will not sign on to your crusade. You do NOT speak for me and you do NOT speak for the Open Source community.
Please tell us that you are doing this in the hope of getting free publicity from Colbert yourself. It might get you out of the sh*t you just stepped in... I can't be the only person here who is wondering if you've gone off the deep end.
I update my HD mirror 3x a week using a copy of Knoppix modified to add custom backup scripts and the mirror lives in a drive rack plugged in ONLY when I'm doing backup. The optical storage is for portable, durable offsite backup and/or the case where the first HD fries followed by whatever killed the first HD doing the same to the second one.
have ever heard of RMS, who addresses his remarks to a technologically competent crowd that does its own regular backups. As I do and hope you do.
The fun part about depending on external services is that they can go down for business reasons. Running a business-critical service on a cloud service that may go down without notice or warning simply because the VCs pulled the plug or the Board of Directors decided since a service isn't making money, they need no longer support it doesn't impress me as being the smartest possible business practice, either.
Terabyte-range optical storage has been pushed as coming Real Soon Now for the last few years. I don't want it Real Soon Now, I want it now... right now, it takes a dozen DVD-9 disks to back up my HD. Or one 500G GE optical disk. Hopefully, demand will be sufficient to get the price down to prosumer levels.
to make a major customer happy, they probably did NOT go back and optimize their newly fixed Vista aka Win7 to remove the issues attempts at backward compatibility built into it. Maybe that's what they're planning for Win8, should they survive long enough to build it for real.
I'm not saying built-in virtualization will damage them, but I suspect their customer upgrade scheme will. Imagine having a low-end computer, the cut-rate Win7, and an HDMI monitor the low-end Win7 won't run on. A customer buys the upgrade and discovers the increased memory and CPU and graphics requirements of the more expensive Win7... and that their computer runs the way XP does in 128M. Or not at all.
Multiply by several million and imagine what the Win7 buzz is going to be like afterwards.
As a Debian user who runs XP in Virtualbox, I can afford to be amused. I don't think M$ can survive two OSs perceived to be bogus in a row. M$ stockholders won't be amused by this any more than the customers will be.
I run XP in VirtualBox on a Debian testing host workstation. Stable, secure, and the only time it can contribute to my security risks is during the hour or two a week I run it. (my Eudora mail client runs in Crossover Office)
As for the performance hit, the way to deal with that is simply to run a faster processor. Though even in virtualization, remember that XP was designed for processors a lot slower than anything you'll see in a modern computer.
M$ being willing to put virtualization in their OS gave them the opportunity to switch their host OS to a secure, stable, and efficient *nix (even with their religious adherence to proprietary OSs, they could have bought SCO unix or licensed AIX)... they could have ported their flagship apps to a native *nix environment while using XP as a legacy compatibility layer. The result might have been unstoppable.
Happily for the rest of us (except for the unfortunates running Windows as a primary OS)... they chose otherwise.
to go on the same kind of low-end desktops Vista Basic was targeted at in the past? If so, people WILL notice the reduced functionality and M$'s demand for money to make it possible for a user to run as many apps as he could with Windows 98. The "the average user uses two apps at a time" probably refers to major applications, not low-footprint utility programs. (we can hope that this doesn't include programs continuously running in background, e.g. antivirus + malware scanner)
Entertaining would be if a user paid for the upgrade and Win7's high-end version locked up his computer.
I can afford to laugh about this, I'm running Debian and I run XP in Virtualbox when I need to. The average computer buyer next year won't find this funny at all.
I wonder how many people who know this are going to be shorting M$ stock as of when Win7 releases.
I dropped in on a Newegg customer review page of the version that succeeded my PC900... the OEM OS was dumped by users with startling unanimity. The advantage of changing out the OS my way is that if you ever have to return the netbook for warranty service, all you have to do to get it ready to ship (assuming you got your data off) is to pull the SDHC card out of the internal card reader.
It's fairly easy to prove that the problem with Linux on vendors is in fact the drastically customized version of Linux that's sold on them, not Linux itself.
Here are customer reviews of a Linux netbook, about 95% of which mention replacing the ASUS OEM Xandros OS. Of those, almost everybody replaced the OEM OS with some form of Ubuntu, a handful replaced it with XP, one user replaced with Vista and is wondering why not all peripherals work. One person said he's tried both Xandros-OEM and Ubuntu and prefers Xandros. Linus Torvalds wasn't a Newegg customer, he publicly announced that he replaced Xandros on his Eee PC with Fedora Core.
When the great majority of users replace an OS / UI with something else, one can conclude that the OS / UI has big problems, which it does. I suspect that if XP had gotten the same kind of UI that various incompetents have foisted on Linux, people would be dumping XP just as fast.
A reasonable test of Linux v XP on netbooks would involve the regular Linux desktop UI vs the XP UI. That isn't what happened.
16G local storage is not a problem given the way I use the netbook. I have nxclient set up on the netbook and nxserver on my desktop. I don't keep work-related information on my netbook, if I need to access it, I remote-control to the desktop... and if I need more horsepower than the netbook has, I run programs on the desktop.
If my netbook gets stolen, it's merely a matter of replacing the hardware, I don't have to panic about what's on it, all I actually keep on mine is multimedia content, and a few hundred e-books.
Of course, this also means I have to be within range of an AP to do any serious work, but IMO, the tradeoff is worth it.
I installed to an SDHC card plugged into the card reader to avoid hardware warranty issues, the OEM install is intact. I carry a USB card reader in case I have to read flash cards in the field, though that's really a plus, since the card reader is SD only and the card reader will read almost anything. Insisting on doing it that way was most of the pain, I went through 3 different cards on my reinstallation to an 8G card (not covered in the article, I did that months later) before finding one that worked. (A Kingston Class 4 8G SDHC card)
My netbook is 100% usable... though the minor irritations that go with Gnome are just severe enough that I may actually install KDE 4.2 on the netbook one of these days. But that's just a matter of adding new repositories, i.e. doing it the same way I would install it to a desktop Ubuntu Intrepid.
Open Office runs just fine on an Linux Eee PC even in the OEM default configuration and equally well after replacing the toy OS with a real one. While one has to find the right UI desktop tab to make this possible, the difficulty is on the order of finding one's ass with both hands and a map.
Odd that your argument went from "it won't run high-end graphics software" to "Linux doesn't run MS Office" once you got called. Note that with Crossover Office installed, you don't even need XP to run MS Office should Open Office not fit your needs. However, OO should work fine for at least 95% of average MS Office users. Particularly since doing serious document editing on a netbook given the keyboard and monitor size is a Really Bad Idea regardless of OS, if I absolutely have to do it, I plug in an external "multimedia" PC USB keyboard. And would be doing this with any M$ OS as well.
You can still get Linux EEE PCs at http://www.newegg.com/ . They're the ones with the SSD drives. Matter of preference, but I consider the idea of a netbook with a HD a trifle silly. I expect a netbook not only to be lighter than a laptop, but more rugged. I'd like a netbook that at least has the chance of normal operation after it gets dropped.
Agreed about the desirability of an OS-free option.
As for a netbook on which wireless does not work in the OEM configuration . . . a vendor selling it deserves anything bad that happens as a result, up to 100% returns and/or including a class-action lawsuit. That isn't the fault of Linux, that's the fault of an idiot vendor.
actually, I have indeed been to the Asus Eee PC forums.
"The Feb 4, 2009... Enable Advanced Desktop Mode - The Easy Way. Now everyone with an Asus EEE PC ( 2GB, 4GB or 8GB) can easily enable the advanced desktop using..."
Oddly enough, my PC 900 is a 16G machine with NO "Advanced Desktop Mode" available.
The challenging part was installing Ubuntu in a way that wouldn't give me warranty problems if I had to send the unit back for warranty repair... i.e. installing it onto an SDHC card that actually works with the internal card reader. (I use the internal SSD with the OEM OS intact as a data drive)
If all you want from the Eee PC is net appliance functionality, it doesn't matter what the OS is, it's just fine.
First, who the hell is going to do serious graphics design on a 9" netbook screen, on a computer with a CPU in the 900 Mhz range with 1G DRAM? That's the Eee PC 900 and similar models. You're going to run a high-end webserver or a gigantic DB on a netbook? Doesn't matter whether it's XP, Win7, or Linux, it's A Bad Idea regardless.
Second, the Linux UI on the Eee PC is a dumbed down, locked down older version of Xandros modified to provide a tabbed interface designed as a Net appliance whose program selection for ordinary installation is limited to a handful of programs), and a response to another post of mine downthread says that Acer's Linux UI is similar. If you install anything that is not in the Asus repository (presumably via binaries) it will not show up in any of the UI tabs. To run that installed program, one will have to open a terminal and invoke it via CLI.
So your whines about the differences between Linux software and XP are completely irrelevant to any recognizable netbook reality. The current and last generations of netbooks are too underpowered to run large-scale Linux apps with large datasets, and the screen size is really too small to make that class of work comfortable. I deal with the CPU power problem when need be by running a remote control connection to my far more powerful desktop from anywhere around a wireless AP.
The real problems with Linux sales on netbooks are:
that you won't find them at ordinary computer stores
the people who know that Linux netbooks exist and order one on purpose are going to be seriously disappointed that we bought netbook appliances
it takes some research to find out how to replace the OS with something that's actually functional for a power user. Unless you follow this link and read how I installed Ubuntu with a slightly modified standard desktop UI (turnes out I hate tabbed UIs on netbooks even if they're Open Source, too) on my Eee PC.
Any problem with Linux on netbooks comes down to the manufacturers using Linux to deliver a net appliance experience. Remember the companies that used to sell net appliances? The ones that still exist don't sell them anymore. Not to say that for the few people left who are still unfamiliar with computers, a net appliance is necessarily a bad idea, I think I could hand a Linux netbook to the proverbial computer-illiterate grandmother and get her websurfing in a few minutes. But these people are increasingly rare, everyone else expects a computer to have a recognizable desktop with icons that do things and a bottom panel with a start menu and some apps that can be selected from it.
Manufacturers can do different things with a smartphone UI because we don't have fixed expectations of what a phone UI is going to look like other than we expect some way to enter phone numbers and a button to push to accept a call when the phone rings.
the Linux desktop on the Asus Eee PC 900 out of the box is an abomination for anyone who qualifies as a power user on ANY OS. It's a dumbed down older version of Xandros modified for a tab-based UI.
Basically, it's a locked down net appliance UI... the only programs you can install without drastically modifying or replacing the OS that will show up on any desktop tab are the handful of programs available on the Asus repository site. Running nxclient required me opening a terminal window and using the CLI to manually enter/path-to/nxclient . Note that nxclient has a perfectly good desktop icon and is happy to install itself to a menu if given the chance, i.e. on any normal Linux OS.
I turned myself from a pissed off Eee PC Linux user to a happy one by replacing the OEM desktop with a standard Ubuntu desktop plus hardware drivers from the Ubuntu-eee project, you can find out how I did it here.
However, I also have some serious doubts about the accuracy of the original "analyst" report. If Linux sucks so badly on netbooks, why are any netbook vendors still selling it to anybody? Note that by and large, computer retail stores have not exactly put any great effort into selling Linux netbooks, the only place it's easy to get them is via online ordering, so it can be assumed that people who buy the Linux netbooks thought they knew what they were getting in advance.
being thrown out represents "restoral of the rule of law" or just another way of protecting connected fat cats is for AG Holder to answer. Note that Holder is the one who moved to stop the prosecution before the judge acted.
If the prosecutors are fired on a basis of this misconduct and/or are subject to criminal investigation if this conduct can be reasonably held to be a deliberate attempt to make criminal prosecution impossible, Holder is restoring the rule of law.
If the prosecutors are left in place, we can assume that Holder got what he actually wanted, a GOP ex-senator walking free, and what we've got is "the law applies only to the little people", not change any sane person would believe in.
I had a $200+ bank error in my account in the late 1980s... I waited a month before spending the money. I then spent it without problems. Your suggestion that the bank missed some account debits is probably why this happened.
in what universe does the author live in?
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 1
I'll simply cite what happened when KDE4 was prematurely released into the wild, as in packaged as the default with the KDE versions of most major Linux distros.
Lots of critics, both in user forums and in professional publications (I wrote some of the harsher criticisms myself.)
Every once in a while, some group in the OpenSource community will pull off an EPIC FAIL. And when that happens, I've never noticed anybody being shy about ripping that group a new asshole or collection of new assholes.
Of couse, there will also be idiot fanboys who will scream "how dare anyone say evil of [fill in the blank]", but the proper response is to stomp them as obstacles to progress who are just as dangerous to the future of Linux as MS's legal staff is and move on.
before there was anything in it for him. How many regular MSM news shows have you ever seen with interviews from the ISS? Or with any NASA astronaut? Why would he stop just because NASA gives him public recognition?
He's given NASA a couple of segments on his show which were essentially humorous promotional pieces, one of which was an interview with the ISS astronauts. That's more than you will ever do for either NASA or the space program.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm now running my Eee PC900 with Kubuntu Jaunty right out of the box with support for everything. The hacked kernel that was required to support my netbook is now no longer required.
OpenGL runs well enough on the netbook video chipset that I can even use the "spinning cube" desktop switcher animation. . . as long as I'm willing to charge my battery twice as often.
and the ability to use Linux apps concurrently with Windows apps.
I run Windows XP on Virtualbox to run legacy apps... except for Eudora I am running via Crossover Office until Eudora for Linux is ready for prime time.
Now that I run Eudora in Crossover Office, I run XP maybe an hour a week. Once Eudora for Linux is ready... I'll be running Windows apps for maybe an hour a week.
farm you refer to is a megafarm in Mexico owned by Smithfield Foods, a USA company, it is believed by many that the virus recombination occurred in one of their CAFO holding lagoons and departed it using houseflies as a vector.
would be equally appropriate. How can we get that name to stick?
How many popular entertainment programs have had their hosts give NASA the same kind of consistent support that Colbert has given it in the last few years?
I can't think of any, either. The MSM generally ignores NASA as it does Open Source.
In a time of economic disaster, NASA is especially vulnerable to budget cuts. IOW, NASA needs all the friends it can get. The 'stuff the ballot box to name the module' got massive hits to the NASA website. Hopefully, people saw things that make them like NASA better. The administrators at NASA who were actually offended by the public daring to have an opinion probably should have their asses canned and be replaced by people who remember who pays for NASA's programs.
Bruce, what have you ever done for NASA or advancing the cause of space exploration and industrialization that compares with the good and free publicity Colbert has given them?
I generally agree with you, but this is genuinely stupid and I certainly will not sign on to your crusade. You do NOT speak for me and you do NOT speak for the Open Source community.
Please tell us that you are doing this in the hope of getting free publicity from Colbert yourself. It might get you out of the sh*t you just stepped in... I can't be the only person here who is wondering if you've gone off the deep end.
I update my HD mirror 3x a week using a copy of Knoppix modified to add custom backup scripts and the mirror lives in a drive rack plugged in ONLY when I'm doing backup. The optical storage is for portable, durable offsite backup and/or the case where the first HD fries followed by whatever killed the first HD doing the same to the second one.
have ever heard of RMS, who addresses his remarks to a technologically competent crowd that does its own regular backups. As I do and hope you do.
The fun part about depending on external services is that they can go down for business reasons. Running a business-critical service on a cloud service that may go down without notice or warning simply because the VCs pulled the plug or the Board of Directors decided since a service isn't making money, they need no longer support it doesn't impress me as being the smartest possible business practice, either.
the computing marketplace.
... right now, it takes a dozen DVD-9 disks to back up my HD. Or one 500G GE optical disk. Hopefully, demand will be sufficient to get the price down to prosumer levels.
Terabyte-range optical storage has been pushed as coming Real Soon Now for the last few years. I don't want it Real Soon Now, I want it now
to make a major customer happy, they probably did NOT go back and optimize their newly fixed Vista aka Win7 to remove the issues attempts at backward compatibility built into it. Maybe that's what they're planning for Win8, should they survive long enough to build it for real.
I'm not saying built-in virtualization will damage them, but I suspect their customer upgrade scheme will. Imagine having a low-end computer, the cut-rate Win7, and an HDMI monitor the low-end Win7 won't run on. A customer buys the upgrade and discovers the increased memory and CPU and graphics requirements of the more expensive Win7... and that their computer runs the way XP does in 128M. Or not at all.
Multiply by several million and imagine what the Win7 buzz is going to be like afterwards.
As a Debian user who runs XP in Virtualbox, I can afford to be amused. I don't think M$ can survive two OSs perceived to be bogus in a row. M$ stockholders won't be amused by this any more than the customers will be.
I run XP in VirtualBox on a Debian testing host workstation. Stable, secure, and the only time it can contribute to my security risks is during the hour or two a week I run it. (my Eudora mail client runs in Crossover Office)
As for the performance hit, the way to deal with that is simply to run a faster processor. Though even in virtualization, remember that XP was designed for processors a lot slower than anything you'll see in a modern computer.
M$ being willing to put virtualization in their OS gave them the opportunity to switch their host OS to a secure, stable, and efficient *nix (even with their religious adherence to proprietary OSs, they could have bought SCO unix or licensed AIX)... they could have ported their flagship apps to a native *nix environment while using XP as a legacy compatibility layer. The result might have been unstoppable.
Happily for the rest of us (except for the unfortunates running Windows as a primary OS)... they chose otherwise.
to go on the same kind of low-end desktops Vista Basic was targeted at in the past? If so, people WILL notice the reduced functionality and M$'s demand for money to make it possible for a user to run as many apps as he could with Windows 98. The "the average user uses two apps at a time" probably refers to major applications, not low-footprint utility programs. (we can hope that this doesn't include programs continuously running in background, e.g. antivirus + malware scanner)
Entertaining would be if a user paid for the upgrade and Win7's high-end version locked up his computer.
I can afford to laugh about this, I'm running Debian and I run XP in Virtualbox when I need to. The average computer buyer next year won't find this funny at all.
I wonder how many people who know this are going to be shorting M$ stock as of when Win7 releases.
Win7 could have saved M$.
M$ fanbois.
I dropped in on a Newegg customer review page of the version that succeeded my PC900... the OEM OS was dumped by users with startling unanimity. The advantage of changing out the OS my way is that if you ever have to return the netbook for warranty service, all you have to do to get it ready to ship (assuming you got your data off) is to pull the SDHC card out of the internal card reader.
It's fairly easy to prove that the problem with Linux on vendors is in fact the drastically customized version of Linux that's sold on them, not Linux itself.
Here are customer reviews of a Linux netbook, about 95% of which mention replacing the ASUS OEM Xandros OS. Of those, almost everybody replaced the OEM OS with some form of Ubuntu, a handful replaced it with XP, one user replaced with Vista and is wondering why not all peripherals work. One person said he's tried both Xandros-OEM and Ubuntu and prefers Xandros. Linus Torvalds wasn't a Newegg customer, he publicly announced that he replaced Xandros on his Eee PC with Fedora Core.
When the great majority of users replace an OS / UI with something else, one can conclude that the OS / UI has big problems, which it does. I suspect that if XP had gotten the same kind of UI that various incompetents have foisted on Linux, people would be dumping XP just as fast.
A reasonable test of Linux v XP on netbooks would involve the regular Linux desktop UI vs the XP UI. That isn't what happened.
16G local storage is not a problem given the way I use the netbook. I have nxclient set up on the netbook and nxserver on my desktop. I don't keep work-related information on my netbook, if I need to access it, I remote-control to the desktop... and if I need more horsepower than the netbook has, I run programs on the desktop.
If my netbook gets stolen, it's merely a matter of replacing the hardware, I don't have to panic about what's on it, all I actually keep on mine is multimedia content, and a few hundred e-books.
Of course, this also means I have to be within range of an AP to do any serious work, but IMO, the tradeoff is worth it.
I installed to an SDHC card plugged into the card reader to avoid hardware warranty issues, the OEM install is intact. I carry a USB card reader in case I have to read flash cards in the field, though that's really a plus, since the card reader is SD only and the card reader will read almost anything. Insisting on doing it that way was most of the pain, I went through 3 different cards on my reinstallation to an 8G card (not covered in the article, I did that months later) before finding one that worked. (A Kingston Class 4 8G SDHC card)
My netbook is 100% usable... though the minor irritations that go with Gnome are just severe enough that I may actually install KDE 4.2 on the netbook one of these days. But that's just a matter of adding new repositories, i.e. doing it the same way I would install it to a desktop Ubuntu Intrepid.
Open Office runs just fine on an Linux Eee PC even in the OEM default configuration and equally well after replacing the toy OS with a real one. While one has to find the right UI desktop tab to make this possible, the difficulty is on the order of finding one's ass with both hands and a map.
Odd that your argument went from "it won't run high-end graphics software" to "Linux doesn't run MS Office" once you got called. Note that with Crossover Office installed, you don't even need XP to run MS Office should Open Office not fit your needs. However, OO should work fine for at least 95% of average MS Office users. Particularly since doing serious document editing on a netbook given the keyboard and monitor size is a Really Bad Idea regardless of OS, if I absolutely have to do it, I plug in an external "multimedia" PC USB keyboard. And would be doing this with any M$ OS as well.
You can still get Linux EEE PCs at http://www.newegg.com/ . They're the ones with the SSD drives. Matter of preference, but I consider the idea of a netbook with a HD a trifle silly. I expect a netbook not only to be lighter than a laptop, but more rugged. I'd like a netbook that at least has the chance of normal operation after it gets dropped.
Agreed about the desirability of an OS-free option.
As for a netbook on which wireless does not work in the OEM configuration . . . a vendor selling it deserves anything bad that happens as a result, up to 100% returns and/or including a class-action lawsuit. That isn't the fault of Linux, that's the fault of an idiot vendor.
actually, I have indeed been to the Asus Eee PC forums.
... Enable Advanced Desktop Mode - The Easy Way. Now everyone with an Asus EEE PC ( 2GB, 4GB or 8GB) can easily enable the advanced desktop using ..."
"The Feb 4, 2009
Oddly enough, my PC 900 is a 16G machine with NO "Advanced Desktop Mode" available.
The challenging part was installing Ubuntu in a way that wouldn't give me warranty problems if I had to send the unit back for warranty repair... i.e. installing it onto an SDHC card that actually works with the internal card reader. (I use the internal SSD with the OEM OS intact as a data drive)
If all you want from the Eee PC is net appliance functionality, it doesn't matter what the OS is, it's just fine.
Second, the Linux UI on the Eee PC is a dumbed down, locked down older version of Xandros modified to provide a tabbed interface designed as a Net appliance whose program selection for ordinary installation is limited to a handful of programs), and a response to another post of mine downthread says that Acer's Linux UI is similar. If you install anything that is not in the Asus repository (presumably via binaries) it will not show up in any of the UI tabs. To run that installed program, one will have to open a terminal and invoke it via CLI.
So your whines about the differences between Linux software and XP are completely irrelevant to any recognizable netbook reality. The current and last generations of netbooks are too underpowered to run large-scale Linux apps with large datasets, and the screen size is really too small to make that class of work comfortable. I deal with the CPU power problem when need be by running a remote control connection to my far more powerful desktop from anywhere around a wireless AP.
The real problems with Linux sales on netbooks are:
Any problem with Linux on netbooks comes down to the manufacturers using Linux to deliver a net appliance experience. Remember the companies that used to sell net appliances? The ones that still exist don't sell them anymore. Not to say that for the few people left who are still unfamiliar with computers, a net appliance is necessarily a bad idea, I think I could hand a Linux netbook to the proverbial computer-illiterate grandmother and get her websurfing in a few minutes. But these people are increasingly rare, everyone else expects a computer to have a recognizable desktop with icons that do things and a bottom panel with a start menu and some apps that can be selected from it.
Manufacturers can do different things with a smartphone UI because we don't have fixed expectations of what a phone UI is going to look like other than we expect some way to enter phone numbers and a button to push to accept a call when the phone rings.
the Linux desktop on the Asus Eee PC 900 out of the box is an abomination for anyone who qualifies as a power user on ANY OS. It's a dumbed down older version of Xandros modified for a tab-based UI.
/path-to/nxclient . Note that nxclient has a perfectly good desktop icon and is happy to install itself to a menu if given the chance, i.e. on any normal Linux OS.
Basically, it's a locked down net appliance UI... the only programs you can install without drastically modifying or replacing the OS that will show up on any desktop tab are the handful of programs available on the Asus repository site. Running nxclient required me opening a terminal window and using the CLI to manually enter
I turned myself from a pissed off Eee PC Linux user to a happy one by replacing the OEM desktop with a standard Ubuntu desktop plus hardware drivers from the Ubuntu-eee project, you can find out how I did it here.
However, I also have some serious doubts about the accuracy of the original "analyst" report. If Linux sucks so badly on netbooks, why are any netbook vendors still selling it to anybody? Note that by and large, computer retail stores have not exactly put any great effort into selling Linux netbooks, the only place it's easy to get them is via online ordering, so it can be assumed that people who buy the Linux netbooks thought they knew what they were getting in advance.
being thrown out represents "restoral of the rule of law" or just another way of protecting connected fat cats is for AG Holder to answer. Note that Holder is the one who moved to stop the prosecution before the judge acted.
If the prosecutors are fired on a basis of this misconduct and/or are subject to criminal investigation if this conduct can be reasonably held to be a deliberate attempt to make criminal prosecution impossible, Holder is restoring the rule of law.
If the prosecutors are left in place, we can assume that Holder got what he actually wanted, a GOP ex-senator walking free, and what we've got is "the law applies only to the little people", not change any sane person would believe in.
I had a $200+ bank error in my account in the late 1980s... I waited a month before spending the money. I then spent it without problems. Your suggestion that the bank missed some account debits is probably why this happened.
I'll simply cite what happened when KDE4 was prematurely released into the wild, as in packaged as the default with the KDE versions of most major Linux distros.
Lots of critics, both in user forums and in professional publications (I wrote some of the harsher criticisms myself.)
Every once in a while, some group in the OpenSource community will pull off an EPIC FAIL. And when that happens, I've never noticed anybody being shy about ripping that group a new asshole or collection of new assholes.
Of couse, there will also be idiot fanboys who will scream "how dare anyone say evil of [fill in the blank]", but the proper response is to stomp them as obstacles to progress who are just as dangerous to the future of Linux as MS's legal staff is and move on.
before there was anything in it for him. How many regular MSM news shows have you ever seen with interviews from the ISS? Or with any NASA astronaut? Why would he stop just because NASA gives him public recognition?
He's given NASA a couple of segments on his show which were essentially humorous promotional pieces, one of which was an interview with the ISS astronauts. That's more than you will ever do for either NASA or the space program.