>The main criticism that I've seen for Hardy were first that we shipped Firefox 3 which was a beta. That was a very conscious decision taken in partnership with Mozilla and we were very confident that Mozilla in fact would release Firefox 3 in a reasonable amount of time. And if now - after the release of Firefox 3 - we would only have Firefox 2 on the desktop for three years, people would be equally upset. So I think it was the right decision.
Ubuntu went with FF3 because they didn't want to still be stuck with FF2 3 years from now. Similarly, Mandriva said they went with FF2 because FF3 wasn't ready, and they're not going to provide an upgrade path to FF3 unless FF2 stops getting security fixes.
Why is it so hard to provide a Firefox version upgrade on these major Linux distros? Mandriva seemed to suggest that lots of other software counted on having either Gecko or XULRunner at version 2.
In a post on a previous article I was modded Troll for suggesting that Firefox has become almost as embedded in Linux distros as IE is in Windows. I assume the majority of the 8 million FF3 upgrades on upgrade day were Windows installations, where the upgrade was trivial.
Does anybody else see this as a problem? If apps are going to have dependencies on Mozilla API's, then either distros shouldn't bundle those apps, or they should include the shared bits of Mozilla in a way that allows Firefox to be upgraded without breaking any other apps. Is that so hard?
I didn't say it was hard. I said the Mandriva repository didn't have FF3, and its RPM package for the latest FF2 reinstalled some plugins I didn't want, so I had to delete them again. So, do I have your permission to use linux now, asshole?
That said, there wasn't an easy way to disable Totem from within Firefox. I had to manually locate the plugin directory and wipe them there. In Windows FF, more things like that are under your control. I guess plugins go in a user-writeable place, and maybe that's not so secure, but it'd be nice to be prompted for the root password and have firefox take care of updates, etc.
Of course, for that, FF would have to run as root, and maybe that's not a good thing;)
I agree about IE's being integrated with windows being a disadvantage, but I wonder if that cuts both ways.
I'll bet most of the Firefox 3 users are Windows or Mac users. Not because Linux users don't love Firefox, but because the distros' repositories haven't made FF3 available. And why is that? Could it be because Firefox is 'sort of integrated' into various Linux distros due to various library dependencies? I've been told that's not true, but if not, where's my upgrade?
I recently upgraded FF2 to 2.0.0.14 on Mandriva 2008. I was looking for FF3, but it wasn't there. In the meantime, even upgrading FF2 messed me up a little bit. It reinstalled some crappy, non-working Totem plugins that I had deleted in order to get videos to simply play in kaffeine rather than embedding in FF via Totem and then refusing to play without paying for codecs from Fluendo.
In a lot of ways Firefox on Windows provides a better experience than on Linux - auto upgrade, etc. Does it have to be like that? I don't know.
I think OS/2 could probably run MS-DOS programs at least as well as Windows 3.x (or 95). But at the time, IBM tried to use OS/2 to regain its hardware monopoly from the clone market. So PS/2-OS/2 ended up being much pricier than a clone with Win3.x. That's what made it the better DOS program switcher.
And by the time OS/2 opened up to generic hardware, the windows API was well established as the de-facto standard. To late for the better system to win.
Of course, it was sheer ruthlessness that allowed Microsoft to lead IBM to believe that OS/2 could eventually become the standard. Microsoft was supposed to be involved in OS/2. Who knew they were also working to undermine it...
Kind of like Intel and the OLPC project. Or Microsoft and OASIS. Or, truth be told, IBM and Unixware.
Already did that. Also installed the xine-libfaad connector. I'm guessing that the xine as released by Mandriva isn't compiled to work with libfaad, and that I have to reinstall xine from one of the 'non-free' repositories. Only problem with that is that the package manager warns me it's gonna uninstall a ton of stuff, and I'm scared to do it.
All of which reinforces my original point. This needs to be easier for desktop linux to pass even the limited 'internet terminal' usage test. Actually, for what it's worth, with PCLinuxOS all this stuff just works right out of the box (or liveCD). And I just might wait for their next release...
I'll bet this stuff works out of the box on the EeePC too. That's why OEM integration is so vital.
I think Mandriva's trying to get you to pony up for their non-free Power Pack edition, which probably makes it all work fine. I guess that's okay, but they charge too much. If they could get an OEM deal, I'm sure it would be a great distro for that. Chicken, egg, chicken, Microsoft...
I don't mind having to mess around with stuff and try 15 distros before settling on one. But that's not a strategy for widespread acceptance - which is a shame, because modern Linux is more than 'ready' these days.
I agree, Mandriva gets a lot right. But for some reason, I haven't been able to get 2008 to play unencrypted AAC files. Loaded all the codecs, but I probably have to upgrade Xine itself. I know I got it to work on 2007, just don't know what of all the things I tried did the trick.
And that's the nasty truth. The distros that preconfigure all the multimedia beat the ones that don't. And to do that, they have to be non U.S. (patents) and non-ideological (non-free stuff). Or they have to cut pre-load deals with OEM's that allow them to install non-free stuff for a pittance without 'redistributing' it.
If this thing isn't going to run Linux, then I don't know what it is going to run. Certainly not the 'nearly free', stripped down Windows XP for cheap portables.
nVidia would be pretty silly to build this thing and not to provide a proper driver for the only OS it'll probably work under. Of course, if this thing takes off, Microsoft probably will come out with a 'mini XP for ARM-based cheap portables'. But nVidia's got to feed the Linux chicken in order to lay that particular egg...
Remember that the new extended life XP is for a very limited set of hardware. Screens = 10". That alone would probably make any desktop system (with an external monitor) ineligible for an XP license.
It'll probably run Vista, but that'd require a lot more RAM than the Linux version. How will they get away with making Linux more expensive than Vista on this thing? Who knows, but presumably MS will try to force them to.
Okay, we get it. Apple is a hardware company, and always has been. And Apple has never wanted to be in the low-end hardware business - why, if they're able to sell all the high-end stuff they can make.
They've also never wanted to license OS/X to clone makers, presumably because they fear that at least some of those clones would cut into Apple's high-margin hardware business.
Then along comes Microsoft, with their new XP for cheap hardware only program. Personally, I think that should be illegal. Either you sell XP or you don't, and the price (especially in the light of their past monopoly abuses) should be the same, regardless of who you sell it to. But, assuming they'll get away with it, what's to stop Apple from licensing OS/X to low-end clone makers only.
No competition for the high-margin stuff, except maybe some bargain hunters, who by definition would be buying it for Apple's software, which you say isn't their selling point. And surely, that could be more than made up for in software revenues. Plus the added OS/X user base should boost sales of their high-end stuff too.
Windows has tons of commercial apps, which forces a huge chicken and egg dilemma on OEM's that might want to support Linux. That, plus they actually make a teeny bit of profit on the Windows OS.
OS/X has the Macintosh hardware behind it, so no OEM problems. Beyond that, they have some great mythology and some pretty good software.
Linux has... linux. It's great software, perfectly usable in many cases, but no compelling reason for OEM's to provide it. So, it's limited to geeks willing to install (often over a paid-for copy of Windows) and some businesses that understand the potential savings.
There was a brief glimmer of hope in the EeePC and it's copycats (all prodded by the OLPC). Pre-installed linux made perfect sense on low-end hardware intended to be sold cheap and for limited uses. Microsoft's caught on to this bit of momentum, and is attempting to squelch it with XP. It remains to be seen whether they'll succeed, though press accounts suggest they might.
It remains for other Open Source stuff (most specifically OOo) to make inroads as a real cross-platform money saver. Once businesses stop using MSOffice/Outlook, they can seriously consider ditching Windows. And they might have the clout to get the OEM's to do it.
Interestingly, OOo, because it's own 'yet another cross-platform toolkit' is not shared by other software, it is nicely poised to be distro-agnostic on Linux. That could be a plus.
Would it be too paranoid to expect that the government customers that approached OLPC about wanting Windows, had themselves been approached by Microsoft to be convinced that they wanted Windows?
Didn't the same thing happen when Intel, as a member of the OLPC team sent out its sales force to sell against the OLPC? It'd be pretty naive to think that "more comfortable with Windows" was the only reason. There's comfort and comfort.
Yeah, Microsoft kinda wants to be in the advertising business, but only because of their typical 'me-too' approach to competition. And normally, they'd go slow and let the monopoly do its magic, but they're a teeny bit restrained these days.
And all of this is because of Google's success. Google's got enough mindshare to get the DOJ to look when Vista tries to lock them out.
But the ultimate reason Microsoft is so hot to compete with Google is that Google's using its profits to invest in cloud computing. Microsoft doesn't particularly want to be in cloud computing either, but they understand that it's a potentially serious competitor to their Office cash cow. It's Google Docs that must be killed. Not because Google Docs is so great, but becuase it's a new enough paradigm that it gets people thinking. And thought is the enemy of blind "use MSOfice because everyone uses MSOffice" logic.
That's because it takes 'lots of people who search for aardvark' in order to know that lots of people who search for aardvark might be searching for...
Chicken and egg. Nice to see that it works in favor of somebody other than Microsoft for once.
Actually, I did install a new distro to go from Firefox 1 to 2. I was running Mandriva, and they had so many dependencies on Firefox 1 (presumably throughout GNOME) that they were unable to provide an upgrade.
I suppose they could've provided it as a separate package (as some distros are doing now with FF3), but that's nasty too.
That's the downside of 'building the web browser into the system'. In any case, it's why Firefox on Windows can so easily self-upgrade, but not on Linux. I imagine an IE upgrade on Windows is pretty nasty too - though the Windows 'distro' handles it pretty well.
Don't know whether this argues for or against multiple incompatible distros or not, but it's certainly not an ideal situation. And it does argue for upgrading your distro instead of upgrading certain crucial packages. Or choosing a distro that handles upgrading those packages better.
Any effects that make multiple distros a 'smaller attack vector' for malware are the same exact effects that make multiple distros that much harder to target for ISV's.
Cute way of taking a liability and spinning it into an advantage. But there are other ways (address randomization, etc) to shrink the attack vector without making the good guys jump through hoops.
Build it yourself Slashdotters will always pooh-pooh calls for harmonizing distros. Folks like Shuttleworth, who'd like to eventually build a moneymaking business around Linux, know why it's a good idea (for them, at least). And they're the ones, if anybody, that are going to get Dell and HP to preload their distros. So it's eventually gonna be that the commercial distros are the only ones targeted by ISV's and the rest of us won't get workable plugins, etc. Or the rest of us will sync with the commercial distros. Or Linux will never be mainstream - I guess I can live with that, at least until any developers who want it to be mainstream start giving up...
"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."
If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".
Not quite. Intuitive doesn't simply mean "follows the conventions you're used to". It's more like "works in a way that makes sense for the function it's performing". That's not to say that each application should change the way buttons work - there's a lot to be said for conventions, especially if you want your users to be able to discover how your app works on their own (to 'intuit' how it works, if you will). But something like, say, vi, which follows no conventions to speak of, is plenty intuitive to use once you know it.
Okay. Better example. When I started using PuTty on Windows, I hated that it always copied to the clipboard whenever you blocked some text. What was so hard about right-click/copy? Now that I'm used to it, I hate having to explicitly copy in other apps. Which is more 'intuitive'?
I wonder why MS is specifically refusing touch screens on this new hardware class. Could it be they're spooked by the iPhone and are busy at work cloning its interface for a different 'new' class of hardware?
Believe me. Microsoft does not want to be in the EeePC market. They're there to thwart Linux - plain and simple.
You said it. Without Linux, the ULPC market wouldn't exist in the first place. The freedom provided by Linux is what allowed that particular innovation to happen.
Microsoft isn't interested in servicing a market where it has to reduce prices to near zero, all the while competing with their own Vista systems. The only reason is to stop Linux in its tracks. And their chosen method seems to be to use their market power to insure that no Linux box will ever be cheaper than a comparable Windows box.
More and more, it seems like the simplest DOJ remedy would've been the most effective. No preferential pricing. All OEM's pay the same price whether and however they decided to deploy Windows on their product lines.
There are a lot of windows programs out there whose developers would like them to be cross-platform, but can't afford the effort to rewrite them in a cross-platform toolkit. WINE allows them to test the waters and determine whether there's even any market for a Linux port.
One other (minor?) consideration. WIN32/WINE might just solve the problem of targeting multiple distros. Like it or not, you've got to admit that the Windows ABI hasn't changed much in years. And that's a good thing. It's been 'good enough' to base apps on for a long time, or at least app developers have worked around its defficiencies. In any case, a single.EXE should work on all X86-32 Linux distros. Can you say that for any other GUI toolkit?
And yet, they've been selling the old Linux-only one without apparent confusion for many months now...
I guess if they're positioning this thing as a traditional laptop, it makes sense to be concerned about people's expectations. But I thought the Eee was marketed as an internet appliance that you shouldn't expect to be able to run iTunes on. And the limited capacity (especially of the XP model) leaves little room for big apps like iTunes.
If you ask me, the price point has moved beyond the old, cheap, impulse buy model. It's certainly a better deal than a Mac Air, but Asus is starting to confuse the new category they helped define. And maybe that's by design. Lots of attention and hype. Now they're trying to redirect it toward their higher-margin offerings.
Still doesn't justify charging more to leave off Windows. Anti-trust enforcement is a joke.
I had IntelliSense drop dead on me, and deleting the.ncb file didn't help.
Then suddenly, after several months, it just came back. No idea why. My guess is that I must've opened another project (or an older saved version of my standard one) at some point that cleaned up whatever the problem was.
Sure, Sugar probably has lots of rough edges, but Negroponte was talking about porting Sugar to run on top of XP, so he apparently still thinks it's a good front-end to give to his target audience.
The main complaint I heard Negroponte voice was that certain Flash apps didn't work. And that was because they were using an incomplete clone of Flash. If they're talking about putting Windows on the OLPC, why on earth are they getting hard-line about using an open source Flash plugin? Why not put the latest closed-source Adobe Flash plugin on it? The OLPC is still X86, isn't it? Even if it weren't, don't you think they could lobby Adobe to recompile Flash to run there if only for the public relations value?
Whether they hate Microsoft or love Microsoft, it still makes a lot of sense that if you're providing Unix-based services, you'd also want to be using Unix-based client-machines. It would just be a better solution for a variety of technical and non-technical reasons.
Even more, if you're providing (and selling) unix-based services, you want to know and demonstrate that your services work well (better than the MS equivalent) in a mixed-client environment. Likewise, you want to make sure that all of your vendors provide software that works well in such an environment.
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>The main criticism that I've seen for Hardy were first that we shipped Firefox 3 which was a beta. That was a very conscious decision taken in partnership with Mozilla and we were very confident that Mozilla in fact would release Firefox 3 in a reasonable amount of time. And if now - after the release of Firefox 3 - we would only have Firefox 2 on the desktop for three years, people would be equally upset. So I think it was the right decision.
Ubuntu went with FF3 because they didn't want to still be stuck with FF2 3 years from now. Similarly, Mandriva said they went with FF2 because FF3 wasn't ready, and they're not going to provide an upgrade path to FF3 unless FF2 stops getting security fixes.
Why is it so hard to provide a Firefox version upgrade on these major Linux distros? Mandriva seemed to suggest that lots of other software counted on having either Gecko or XULRunner at version 2.
In a post on a previous article I was modded Troll for suggesting that Firefox has become almost as embedded in Linux distros as IE is in Windows. I assume the majority of the 8 million FF3 upgrades on upgrade day were Windows installations, where the upgrade was trivial.
Does anybody else see this as a problem? If apps are going to have dependencies on Mozilla API's, then either distros shouldn't bundle those apps, or they should include the shared bits of Mozilla in a way that allows Firefox to be upgraded without breaking any other apps. Is that so hard?
I didn't say it was hard. I said the Mandriva repository didn't have FF3, and its RPM package for the latest FF2 reinstalled some plugins I didn't want, so I had to delete them again. So, do I have your permission to use linux now, asshole?
That said, there wasn't an easy way to disable Totem from within Firefox. I had to manually locate the plugin directory and wipe them there. In Windows FF, more things like that are under your control. I guess plugins go in a user-writeable place, and maybe that's not so secure, but it'd be nice to be prompted for the root password and have firefox take care of updates, etc.
Of course, for that, FF would have to run as root, and maybe that's not a good thing ;)
I agree about IE's being integrated with windows being a disadvantage, but I wonder if that cuts both ways.
I'll bet most of the Firefox 3 users are Windows or Mac users. Not because Linux users don't love Firefox, but because the distros' repositories haven't made FF3 available. And why is that? Could it be because Firefox is 'sort of integrated' into various Linux distros due to various library dependencies? I've been told that's not true, but if not, where's my upgrade?
I recently upgraded FF2 to 2.0.0.14 on Mandriva 2008. I was looking for FF3, but it wasn't there. In the meantime, even upgrading FF2 messed me up a little bit. It reinstalled some crappy, non-working Totem plugins that I had deleted in order to get videos to simply play in kaffeine rather than embedding in FF via Totem and then refusing to play without paying for codecs from Fluendo.
In a lot of ways Firefox on Windows provides a better experience than on Linux - auto upgrade, etc. Does it have to be like that? I don't know.
For cases where you're signing on to a system that has its own account/password validation, is it always enough to just use SSL for encryption only.
At that point are cetrificates even necessary, let alone ones signed by a 3rd party?
I think OS/2 could probably run MS-DOS programs at least as well as Windows 3.x (or 95). But at the time, IBM tried to use OS/2 to regain its hardware monopoly from the clone market. So PS/2-OS/2 ended up being much pricier than a clone with Win3.x. That's what made it the better DOS program switcher.
And by the time OS/2 opened up to generic hardware, the windows API was well established as the de-facto standard. To late for the better system to win.
Of course, it was sheer ruthlessness that allowed Microsoft to lead IBM to believe that OS/2 could eventually become the standard. Microsoft was supposed to be involved in OS/2. Who knew they were also working to undermine it...
Kind of like Intel and the OLPC project. Or Microsoft and OASIS. Or, truth be told, IBM and Unixware.
Already did that. Also installed the xine-libfaad connector. I'm guessing that the xine as released by Mandriva isn't compiled to work with libfaad, and that I have to reinstall xine from one of the 'non-free' repositories. Only problem with that is that the package manager warns me it's gonna uninstall a ton of stuff, and I'm scared to do it.
All of which reinforces my original point. This needs to be easier for desktop linux to pass even the limited 'internet terminal' usage test. Actually, for what it's worth, with PCLinuxOS all this stuff just works right out of the box (or liveCD). And I just might wait for their next release...
I'll bet this stuff works out of the box on the EeePC too. That's why OEM integration is so vital.
I think Mandriva's trying to get you to pony up for their non-free Power Pack edition, which probably makes it all work fine. I guess that's okay, but they charge too much. If they could get an OEM deal, I'm sure it would be a great distro for that. Chicken, egg, chicken, Microsoft...
I don't mind having to mess around with stuff and try 15 distros before settling on one. But that's not a strategy for widespread acceptance - which is a shame, because modern Linux is more than 'ready' these days.
I agree, Mandriva gets a lot right. But for some reason, I haven't been able to get 2008 to play unencrypted AAC files. Loaded all the codecs, but I probably have to upgrade Xine itself. I know I got it to work on 2007, just don't know what of all the things I tried did the trick.
And that's the nasty truth. The distros that preconfigure all the multimedia beat the ones that don't. And to do that, they have to be non U.S. (patents) and non-ideological (non-free stuff). Or they have to cut pre-load deals with OEM's that allow them to install non-free stuff for a pittance without 'redistributing' it.
Is there a solution to this?
If this thing isn't going to run Linux, then I don't know what it is going to run. Certainly not the 'nearly free', stripped down Windows XP for cheap portables.
nVidia would be pretty silly to build this thing and not to provide a proper driver for the only OS it'll probably work under. Of course, if this thing takes off, Microsoft probably will come out with a 'mini XP for ARM-based cheap portables'. But nVidia's got to feed the Linux chicken in order to lay that particular egg...
Remember that the new extended life XP is for a very limited set of hardware. Screens = 10". That alone would probably make any desktop system (with an external monitor) ineligible for an XP license.
It'll probably run Vista, but that'd require a lot more RAM than the Linux version. How will they get away with making Linux more expensive than Vista on this thing? Who knows, but presumably MS will try to force them to.
Okay, we get it. Apple is a hardware company, and always has been. And Apple has never wanted to be in the low-end hardware business - why, if they're able to sell all the high-end stuff they can make.
They've also never wanted to license OS/X to clone makers, presumably because they fear that at least some of those clones would cut into Apple's high-margin hardware business.
Then along comes Microsoft, with their new XP for cheap hardware only program. Personally, I think that should be illegal. Either you sell XP or you don't, and the price (especially in the light of their past monopoly abuses) should be the same, regardless of who you sell it to. But, assuming they'll get away with it, what's to stop Apple from licensing OS/X to low-end clone makers only.
No competition for the high-margin stuff, except maybe some bargain hunters, who by definition would be buying it for Apple's software, which you say isn't their selling point. And surely, that could be more than made up for in software revenues. Plus the added OS/X user base should boost sales of their high-end stuff too.
A win-win-win situation, no?
Windows has tons of commercial apps, which forces a huge chicken and egg dilemma on OEM's that might want to support Linux. That, plus they actually make a teeny bit of profit on the Windows OS.
OS/X has the Macintosh hardware behind it, so no OEM problems. Beyond that, they have some great mythology and some pretty good software.
Linux has... linux. It's great software, perfectly usable in many cases, but no compelling reason for OEM's to provide it. So, it's limited to geeks willing to install (often over a paid-for copy of Windows) and some businesses that understand the potential savings.
There was a brief glimmer of hope in the EeePC and it's copycats (all prodded by the OLPC). Pre-installed linux made perfect sense on low-end hardware intended to be sold cheap and for limited uses. Microsoft's caught on to this bit of momentum, and is attempting to squelch it with XP. It remains to be seen whether they'll succeed, though press accounts suggest they might.
It remains for other Open Source stuff (most specifically OOo) to make inroads as a real cross-platform money saver. Once businesses stop using MSOffice/Outlook, they can seriously consider ditching Windows. And they might have the clout to get the OEM's to do it.
Interestingly, OOo, because it's own 'yet another cross-platform toolkit' is not shared by other software, it is nicely poised to be distro-agnostic on Linux. That could be a plus.
Would it be too paranoid to expect that the government customers that approached OLPC about wanting Windows, had themselves been approached by Microsoft to be convinced that they wanted Windows?
Didn't the same thing happen when Intel, as a member of the OLPC team sent out its sales force to sell against the OLPC? It'd be pretty naive to think that "more comfortable with Windows" was the only reason. There's comfort and comfort.
Yeah, Microsoft kinda wants to be in the advertising business, but only because of their typical 'me-too' approach to competition. And normally, they'd go slow and let the monopoly do its magic, but they're a teeny bit restrained these days.
And all of this is because of Google's success. Google's got enough mindshare to get the DOJ to look when Vista tries to lock them out.
But the ultimate reason Microsoft is so hot to compete with Google is that Google's using its profits to invest in cloud computing. Microsoft doesn't particularly want to be in cloud computing either, but they understand that it's a potentially serious competitor to their Office cash cow. It's Google Docs that must be killed. Not because Google Docs is so great, but becuase it's a new enough paradigm that it gets people thinking. And thought is the enemy of blind "use MSOfice because everyone uses MSOffice" logic.
That's because it takes 'lots of people who search for aardvark' in order to know that lots of people who search for aardvark might be searching for...
Chicken and egg. Nice to see that it works in favor of somebody other than Microsoft for once.
Actually, I did install a new distro to go from Firefox 1 to 2. I was running Mandriva, and they had so many dependencies on Firefox 1 (presumably throughout GNOME) that they were unable to provide an upgrade.
I suppose they could've provided it as a separate package (as some distros are doing now with FF3), but that's nasty too.
That's the downside of 'building the web browser into the system'. In any case, it's why Firefox on Windows can so easily self-upgrade, but not on Linux. I imagine an IE upgrade on Windows is pretty nasty too - though the Windows 'distro' handles it pretty well.
Don't know whether this argues for or against multiple incompatible distros or not, but it's certainly not an ideal situation. And it does argue for upgrading your distro instead of upgrading certain crucial packages. Or choosing a distro that handles upgrading those packages better.
Any effects that make multiple distros a 'smaller attack vector' for malware are the same exact effects that make multiple distros that much harder to target for ISV's.
Cute way of taking a liability and spinning it into an advantage. But there are other ways (address randomization, etc) to shrink the attack vector without making the good guys jump through hoops.
Build it yourself Slashdotters will always pooh-pooh calls for harmonizing distros. Folks like Shuttleworth, who'd like to eventually build a moneymaking business around Linux, know why it's a good idea (for them, at least). And they're the ones, if anybody, that are going to get Dell and HP to preload their distros. So it's eventually gonna be that the commercial distros are the only ones targeted by ISV's and the rest of us won't get workable plugins, etc. Or the rest of us will sync with the commercial distros. Or Linux will never be mainstream - I guess I can live with that, at least until any developers who want it to be mainstream start giving up...
No doubt. But seriously, this suggests that Asus may not want to be configuring their Linux EeePC's to cost more than the XP model.
At very least, the Eee pricing seems to be a chair dodging maneuver.
"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."
If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".
Not quite. Intuitive doesn't simply mean "follows the conventions you're used to". It's more like "works in a way that makes sense for the function it's performing". That's not to say that each application should change the way buttons work - there's a lot to be said for conventions, especially if you want your users to be able to discover how your app works on their own (to 'intuit' how it works, if you will). But something like, say, vi, which follows no conventions to speak of, is plenty intuitive to use once you know it.
Okay. Better example. When I started using PuTty on Windows, I hated that it always copied to the clipboard whenever you blocked some text. What was so hard about right-click/copy? Now that I'm used to it, I hate having to explicitly copy in other apps. Which is more 'intuitive'?
I wonder why MS is specifically refusing touch screens on this new hardware class. Could it be they're spooked by the iPhone and are busy at work cloning its interface for a different 'new' class of hardware?
Believe me. Microsoft does not want to be in the EeePC market. They're there to thwart Linux - plain and simple.
You said it. Without Linux, the ULPC market wouldn't exist in the first place. The freedom provided by Linux is what allowed that particular innovation to happen.
Microsoft isn't interested in servicing a market where it has to reduce prices to near zero, all the while competing with their own Vista systems. The only reason is to stop Linux in its tracks. And their chosen method seems to be to use their market power to insure that no Linux box will ever be cheaper than a comparable Windows box.
More and more, it seems like the simplest DOJ remedy would've been the most effective. No preferential pricing. All OEM's pay the same price whether and however they decided to deploy Windows on their product lines.
Ummm... because the WIN32 code's already written?
.EXE should work on all X86-32 Linux distros. Can you say that for any other GUI toolkit?
There are a lot of windows programs out there whose developers would like them to be cross-platform, but can't afford the effort to rewrite them in a cross-platform toolkit. WINE allows them to test the waters and determine whether there's even any market for a Linux port.
One other (minor?) consideration. WIN32/WINE might just solve the problem of targeting multiple distros. Like it or not, you've got to admit that the Windows ABI hasn't changed much in years. And that's a good thing. It's been 'good enough' to base apps on for a long time, or at least app developers have worked around its defficiencies. In any case, a single
And yet, they've been selling the old Linux-only one without apparent confusion for many months now...
I guess if they're positioning this thing as a traditional laptop, it makes sense to be concerned about people's expectations. But I thought the Eee was marketed as an internet appliance that you shouldn't expect to be able to run iTunes on. And the limited capacity (especially of the XP model) leaves little room for big apps like iTunes.
If you ask me, the price point has moved beyond the old, cheap, impulse buy model. It's certainly a better deal than a Mac Air, but Asus is starting to confuse the new category they helped define. And maybe that's by design. Lots of attention and hype. Now they're trying to redirect it toward their higher-margin offerings.
Still doesn't justify charging more to leave off Windows. Anti-trust enforcement is a joke.
I had IntelliSense drop dead on me, and deleting the .ncb file didn't help.
Then suddenly, after several months, it just came back. No idea why. My guess is that I must've opened another project (or an older saved version of my standard one) at some point that cleaned up whatever the problem was.
Sure, Sugar probably has lots of rough edges, but Negroponte was talking about porting Sugar to run on top of XP, so he apparently still thinks it's a good front-end to give to his target audience.
The main complaint I heard Negroponte voice was that certain Flash apps didn't work. And that was because they were using an incomplete clone of Flash. If they're talking about putting Windows on the OLPC, why on earth are they getting hard-line about using an open source Flash plugin? Why not put the latest closed-source Adobe Flash plugin on it? The OLPC is still X86, isn't it? Even if it weren't, don't you think they could lobby Adobe to recompile Flash to run there if only for the public relations value?
Whether they hate Microsoft or love Microsoft, it still makes a lot of sense that if you're providing Unix-based services, you'd also want to be using Unix-based client-machines. It would just be a better solution for a variety of technical and non-technical reasons.
Even more, if you're providing (and selling) unix-based services, you want to know and demonstrate that your services work well (better than the MS equivalent) in a mixed-client environment. Likewise, you want to make sure that all of your vendors provide software that works well in such an environment.
The more variations (within reason), the better.