The reason Ron Paul will not win the Republican nomination is that he doesn't hold political views that agree with most people in the Republican party. Nor does he hold views that agree with the Democrat party. So he is basically out of the mainstream. I hate to break it to you Slashdotters, but you also are out of the mainstream. Most people will not agree with you or enact policies you espouse in many different situations. Deal with it. I know I've come to terms with it.
As to other people whining because the candidates didn't answer your questions, look at the questions. Will average people on the street be really concerned with a)India and China having a space program b)If people on Slashdot think other people believe slashdotters want people in office who are deliberately trying to deceive them (by the way that was the weirdest question ever) c)Marijuana for the masses d)Fair Use and Technology (actually this may be a topic that interests many people) e)Patent law ?
I would suspect other things would be of more concern to them.
Wow. So according to some weird twist of philosophy if you set up shop in a state you OWE YOUR EXISTENCE to it? If Washington state chose to dissolve Microsoft (never mind that would never happen and is impossible), they would only have to re-incorporate somewhere else. Also investors are more than gamblers who expect to get paid without working. Investors are your pension, 401K plan, retirement account, mutual funds, and one of the ways our economy is so strong.
A corporation has the obligation to limit their expenses and maximize their income potential. Frankly if a corporation decided to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and they didn't have to, they need new management. Corporations do not exist to pay taxes. They exist to generate profits. People don't exist to generate taxes. They exist to live their lives and pursue happiness as best they can. A government that starts existing to collect money instead of providing an environment where businesses and people can do what they exist to do will lose both businesses and people to more efficient places.
Seeing as a huge core Apple user base is video editors who use After Effects, saying that it was so "extremely complex to develop" Quicktime in such a way that it wouldn't break After Effects is just plain silly. QuickTime breaking a common application that drives Apple's bottom line on their high-end equipment is not an edge case. Yes, I know not to update software mid-project, but Apple should know better than this as well.
Oh, and virtualizing you computer so that you can test software interactions on your apple computer in a video production environment is just silly. Thats more work than a simple install and if it doesn't work, roll your computer back to an earlier date. I'd love you to try to virtualize video editing. In a production environment, video editors don't have that kind of time.
I am an IT person who constantly updates the operating system and software at work. I know another IT person who almost never updates the operating system at his work. He has less stability problems than I have to deal with. So go figure. Perhaps some places have the thought process of if it aint broke they won't fix it.
At home I never update my computer or my software. I have adobe photoshop cs3 and Windows XP service pack 2. I never go to any websites except ones I trust, I only run programs I have purchased, and I only open email attachments that I trust. I've never had an issue. If I ever do, I'll just restore the info I don't want to lose from back up. Although I can't take this approach at work, I guarantee I have saved labor hours at home by taking this approach.
I would think that if you ignore the concept of God, you are going to have a really hard time explaining history, current events, and a rather large part of culture and society at large. Not mentioning that would do a huge disservice to the education of any student. It is possible to talk about the idea of God without proselytizing and treating the various viewpoints with respect and intelligence, despite that not happening often on the internet.
I read the article, and I actually agree with his assessment of tech failures in 2007. As much as Dvorak is annoying, this article is pretty accurate. Slashdotters moaning and groaning about Dvorak would be better served not posting or addressing the article. Isn't this the whole point about slashdot? We are one of the few places that actually deals with information instead of groaning and moaning and acting like grade-schoolers? I have a little secret for those of you that don't want Dvorak posted here:
Don't post in the Dvorak threads. When you do, whether you complain or not, you show there is an interest in Dvorak here. Its not the negativity or positivity of reaction that determines the stories around here, its the reaction.
After years of dealing with people who deal with kernel code, I know how to spot a hardware problem when I see one. This kind of problem has a very high probability of being a hardware issue, mixed with an end user screw up. Probably because they didn't take all the precautions they should have, or possibly because it was unrealistic and too expensive to take all the precautions they would have liked to. If you think this was a kernel problem, you need to take a breath and realize other things besides kernel cause problems.
When you have a hammer, you start treating everything like it is a nail. Programmers treat everything like it is a programming issue. You don't know how many times I've replaced hardware on a server and repaired it after some hapless coder was trying to code around a hardware issue.
Unless you know what the file was stored on, what interactions with the computer caused the halting of the program and on what basis they decided to continue manually, you are jumping to conclusions. One guy even claimed there was BSOD mentioned in the article (nowhere was it mentioned I can see). After years of supporting computers and servers, I can confidently tell you there is no way of knowing what caused the glitches from the article. A corrupted file on which several pieces of hardware are going to coordinate something as complicated as a fireworks display is probably not caused by the operating system, as the operating system has no reason to modify the file at all, and will only be reading it. More likely is a malfunctioning hard drive, possibly bad media that was used to transfer the file from one location to another, Or possibly a bad connection between the file storing device and the computer running the program.
If you look up corrupted file you will see that every operating system known to man has to deal with that. There is no operating system that can magically correct the corrupted file and cause a fireworks display to run correctly. That is just silly talk.
I don't see how someone trying to protect their image is being a "dick". Chuck Norris has been relatively easy-going with the Chuck Norris phenomenon. In this case he found something that in his opinion crossed the line. So he is taking legal action. You site several precedents where he took no such action, so clearly he isn't doing this to be a jerk.
Anti-Nukes at this point do not have the capability of countering a massive Soviet-style attack. They only can take a handful of missiles down. So Anti-Nuke technology does not negate MAD doctrine in any way. It prevents smaller nations from being able to upgrade to super-power MAD status. Which is actually in our nations best interest, unless you are think it best for North Korea and Iran to have that kind of influence over us.
The reason you would see your RAM useage jump (this is presuming the program is indeed already cached in RAM with Vista) is that Firefox itself uses RAM to cache your program useage and make itself operate faster. So the program itself is (possibly) cached so that it starts up nearly instantly, but when you DO start it, it allocates itself an additional amount of RAM to actually do tasks.
The caching is only to prevent hitting the hard drive and slowing your experience down, not to cover all the future potential use of Ram of any individual program. That would require a HUGE amount of Ram. I have programs I use every day that use almost 2 Gigabytes of RAM. The actual programs only take up a couple hundred Megabytes though, so that's all that needs to be cached until I actually use the program.
"Actually, they seem to base their conclusion on the fact that Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 don't seem to have entered the termination shock at the same distance from the earth."
Distance from earth is irrelevant and would vary based on what part of the orbit of the sun we were in at this point. Voyager 1 and 2 are no longer significantly affected by the earth, neither is the environment they are in. You would want to say they dont seem to be the same distance from the SUN.
Some may think I'm being overly picky here, but we have to constantly remind ourselves the universe and solar system does not revolve around us. Actually it is not surprising that the termination shock varies, because the radiation from the sun varies as well. Regions of space that correspond with areas of the sun that had more activity would expect to have a more flared out termination shock area. It is interesting that they appear to be detecting interference from inter-stellar space now. I am curious how conditions differ in this area.
Is there anyone who honestly thinks Fark has "lost respect" by making this move? Did Fark ever really have "respect" in the first place? That's like saying you've lost all respect for Maxim as a magazine because it ran a fluffy political article. What respect is there to lose? Places like Maxim, Fark and the like exist to entertain. I'm pretty certain they don't care if they have respect.
/I lost all respect for Mad magazine when they let the good spy win in Spy vs. Spy.
I checked a lot of forums, and even PC users are having a lot of issues with the drive, not just Windows-based ones. I wouldn't even bother with a work-around with this drive. It has reliability and driver issues even in the realm where it was designed to function. Seagate appears to have designed a dud here. Western Digital has way more reliable drives. (Just don't install their software and you'll be fine).
I don't want to be a party-pooper, but I wasn't that impressed with the collection. The latest chemistry books and engineering books were from 1920. A LOT has happened in chemistry and engineering since then. Are they starting with older books and slowly moving to newer ones? The Chinese collection is impressive, but hard to read (unless you know Chinese). Also the plugin only works on windows-based computers. That is sad for me.
Could we change your login name to Neville Chamberlain?
You must confront militants on a military level, or you lose. I can only think of one or two historical examples where this was not strictly true, and thousands where it is true. India with Gandhi and South Africa with Nelson Mandela. But I see no analogies between militant islam and Britain or South Africa.
That was a great article. I loved how they had the response of at least three different perspectives (a current telecom exec from Bell, the Allstream exec looking to go in the market, and a liberal critic) in the article without slanting the information towards a particular point of view. I wish newspapers and reporting agencies would do that kind of reporting more often. I know absolutely nothing about the wireless telecom situation in Canada, so I can't really contribute anything that insightful, but I enjoyed reading that article. It somehow makes me want to find out and learn more about the subject.
I'm not sure why this post was rated +5 insightful. It seemed about as ill-informed as the one it complains about. First of all, there is no indication that the US is less prepared for a natural disaster because of the war. These claims were made in regards to California wild-fires but were immediately refuted by the California National Guard, and by Democrats as well.
Second, its not cute to mangle words like administration with maladministration. It makes the poster sound like a 14 year old trying to sound smart. Throwing in a lot of swear words makes the poster seem closer to an internet tough guy than someone who I would take seriously. Its really easy to claim everything is a conspiracy. But could it be possible that the Bush administration recognized an actual threat to global and US security? Militant Islam (or terrorism) seems like a threat to our way of life to me. Now how the Bush administration proceeded in dealing with that threat is a place where people can disagree, but I would be interested to know if the poster feels Militant Islam (or terrorism) is an actual threat or a tool for this conspiracy theory I see so many people going on about.
Also I feel the poster shortchanges the intelligence of the average person in the military. Most of them I have talked with agree the Bush administration has made errors in the execution of the war. When it comes to that, the US has always made errors in its execution of war throughout history. If the servicemen and women will vote for Republicans, could it be that they feel Democrat policies would be even worse? Is the only conclusion really that they are all being tricked and used and taken advantage of?
In the end it just seems to me like the poster is treating everything he or she doesn't agree with with contempt instead of with respect and consideration. I have no idea why people find that insightful. I've heard WAY more insightful critiques of this war from other sources.
I really don't have anti-apple sentiments. I use apple products almost exclusively and love a LOT about them. But as an apple aficionado, there are things about Apple that annoy the hell out of me. particularly when they get overly cute about their design and harm the utility of their products as a result. The hockey puck made any kind of media editing hard to do, and everyone I know threw them out and bought a real mouse.
I am aware of that, but I find it hard to use anyway. the right click is not reliable for me, even when it is enabled, possibly because of how I place my hand on the mouse. In any way, the solution is so easy: Just put buttons on the left and right of the mouse like everybody else. Sometimes in their desire for simplicity, Apple unnecessarily complicates things. This is my problem with their design philosophy . For instance on their Macbook pros: They are designed to be multimedia mobile editing laptops. Why don't they have a built in media reader like every other good mobile laptop? At least as an option. Instead I have to lug around a media reader and its cable to do my work. Yes, the apple laptop looks pretty, simple and elegant by itself, but when I have it in use, it sure looks like a mutant octopus radiating wires everywhere. In other words their quest for simplicity complicates my life.
At least the rootkit did what it was designed to do. It wasn't a complete failure for EVERYBODY. That apple mouse design was an absolute miserable failure that seems to have evaded all testing or use by anyone in Apple. I love apple products in general, but that hockey puck was absolutely stupid. Even today apple's mice are not anywhere as near as nice as the cheapest logitech mouse you can buy. Although the little BB ball that scrolls left and right is nice. I still can't figure out why apple is scared of putting left and right buttons on a mouse. Everyone else has figured out how to do it.
I see them reviewed a lot, but I would be interested to know if people really buy them. Or if they prefer to have windows installed and pay another 100 dollars. Or if they prefer a more expensive and polished system. My gut is telling me the 200 dollar computer will be a flop and we will see another slashdot thread moaning about how Walmart is evil and didn't support the computer enough even though seemingly every person willing to buy this computer seemingly refuses to go to Walmart for one reason or another. A hint: if the only people willing to buy the PC can't be bothered to go to Walmart and buy this computer, its not going to succeed. In any case, if you are a geek, and want a linux computer, you can get someone's old computer and put linux on it almost for free. My box cost me $50, and it is happily running squid and dansquardian and doing basic browsing and office tasks just fine.
Oh, by the way, you can get a dell with a gig of Ram for $349, and with a 17 inch monitor for $500 right now. I bet Dell outsells this $200 computer by a huge margin. Why would that be? Could it be no one really wants a $200 Linux computer?
There are a number of reasons why this could be a huge development. The biggest thing on my mind is that this solves the whole question of were to get all the stem cells you need for what you want to do. Now the source can be the very patient you are working on. I'm going to watch this with great interest.
Perhaps in your specific instance it might make sense to let some of the staff switch over to Linux. But wholesale firing of half the company so that you can avoid emulating Linux seems a little unrealistic. I look forward to you presenting your well thought out plan to management and seeing how far they go with it.
I also think your description of your support staff as a group of people that have let their skill set "elapse" because they focus on Windows technologies as odd. Your company has to hire its support staff from the same pool of labor that every other company in the US does. There aren't a whole lot of people running around with Linux certifications and with years of experience supporting it in a company. Things like that take years to happen at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason Ron Paul will not win the Republican nomination is that he doesn't hold political views that agree with most people in the Republican party. Nor does he hold views that agree with the Democrat party. So he is basically out of the mainstream. I hate to break it to you Slashdotters, but you also are out of the mainstream. Most people will not agree with you or enact policies you espouse in many different situations. Deal with it. I know I've come to terms with it.
As to other people whining because the candidates didn't answer your questions, look at the questions. Will average people on the street be really concerned with a)India and China having a space program b)If people on Slashdot think other people believe slashdotters want people in office who are deliberately trying to deceive them (by the way that was the weirdest question ever) c)Marijuana for the masses d)Fair Use and Technology (actually this may be a topic that interests many people) e)Patent law ?
I would suspect other things would be of more concern to them.
Wow. So according to some weird twist of philosophy if you set up shop in a state you OWE YOUR EXISTENCE to it? If Washington state chose to dissolve Microsoft (never mind that would never happen and is impossible), they would only have to re-incorporate somewhere else. Also investors are more than gamblers who expect to get paid without working. Investors are your pension, 401K plan, retirement account, mutual funds, and one of the ways our economy is so strong.
A corporation has the obligation to limit their expenses and maximize their income potential. Frankly if a corporation decided to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and they didn't have to, they need new management. Corporations do not exist to pay taxes. They exist to generate profits. People don't exist to generate taxes. They exist to live their lives and pursue happiness as best they can. A government that starts existing to collect money instead of providing an environment where businesses and people can do what they exist to do will lose both businesses and people to more efficient places.
Seeing as a huge core Apple user base is video editors who use After Effects, saying that it was so "extremely complex to develop" Quicktime in such a way that it wouldn't break After Effects is just plain silly. QuickTime breaking a common application that drives Apple's bottom line on their high-end equipment is not an edge case. Yes, I know not to update software mid-project, but Apple should know better than this as well. Oh, and virtualizing you computer so that you can test software interactions on your apple computer in a video production environment is just silly. Thats more work than a simple install and if it doesn't work, roll your computer back to an earlier date. I'd love you to try to virtualize video editing. In a production environment, video editors don't have that kind of time.
I am an IT person who constantly updates the operating system and software at work. I know another IT person who almost never updates the operating system at his work. He has less stability problems than I have to deal with. So go figure. Perhaps some places have the thought process of if it aint broke they won't fix it.
At home I never update my computer or my software. I have adobe photoshop cs3 and Windows XP service pack 2. I never go to any websites except ones I trust, I only run programs I have purchased, and I only open email attachments that I trust. I've never had an issue. If I ever do, I'll just restore the info I don't want to lose from back up. Although I can't take this approach at work, I guarantee I have saved labor hours at home by taking this approach.
I would think that if you ignore the concept of God, you are going to have a really hard time explaining history, current events, and a rather large part of culture and society at large. Not mentioning that would do a huge disservice to the education of any student. It is possible to talk about the idea of God without proselytizing and treating the various viewpoints with respect and intelligence, despite that not happening often on the internet.
I read the article, and I actually agree with his assessment of tech failures in 2007. As much as Dvorak is annoying, this article is pretty accurate. Slashdotters moaning and groaning about Dvorak would be better served not posting or addressing the article. Isn't this the whole point about slashdot? We are one of the few places that actually deals with information instead of groaning and moaning and acting like grade-schoolers? I have a little secret for those of you that don't want Dvorak posted here:
Don't post in the Dvorak threads. When you do, whether you complain or not, you show there is an interest in Dvorak here. Its not the negativity or positivity of reaction that determines the stories around here, its the reaction.
After years of dealing with people who deal with kernel code, I know how to spot a hardware problem when I see one. This kind of problem has a very high probability of being a hardware issue, mixed with an end user screw up. Probably because they didn't take all the precautions they should have, or possibly because it was unrealistic and too expensive to take all the precautions they would have liked to. If you think this was a kernel problem, you need to take a breath and realize other things besides kernel cause problems.
When you have a hammer, you start treating everything like it is a nail. Programmers treat everything like it is a programming issue. You don't know how many times I've replaced hardware on a server and repaired it after some hapless coder was trying to code around a hardware issue.
Unless you know what the file was stored on, what interactions with the computer caused the halting of the program and on what basis they decided to continue manually, you are jumping to conclusions. One guy even claimed there was BSOD mentioned in the article (nowhere was it mentioned I can see). After years of supporting computers and servers, I can confidently tell you there is no way of knowing what caused the glitches from the article. A corrupted file on which several pieces of hardware are going to coordinate something as complicated as a fireworks display is probably not caused by the operating system, as the operating system has no reason to modify the file at all, and will only be reading it. More likely is a malfunctioning hard drive, possibly bad media that was used to transfer the file from one location to another, Or possibly a bad connection between the file storing device and the computer running the program. If you look up corrupted file you will see that every operating system known to man has to deal with that. There is no operating system that can magically correct the corrupted file and cause a fireworks display to run correctly. That is just silly talk.
I don't see how someone trying to protect their image is being a "dick". Chuck Norris has been relatively easy-going with the Chuck Norris phenomenon. In this case he found something that in his opinion crossed the line. So he is taking legal action. You site several precedents where he took no such action, so clearly he isn't doing this to be a jerk.
Anti-Nukes at this point do not have the capability of countering a massive Soviet-style attack. They only can take a handful of missiles down. So Anti-Nuke technology does not negate MAD doctrine in any way. It prevents smaller nations from being able to upgrade to super-power MAD status. Which is actually in our nations best interest, unless you are think it best for North Korea and Iran to have that kind of influence over us.
The reason you would see your RAM useage jump (this is presuming the program is indeed already cached in RAM with Vista) is that Firefox itself uses RAM to cache your program useage and make itself operate faster. So the program itself is (possibly) cached so that it starts up nearly instantly, but when you DO start it, it allocates itself an additional amount of RAM to actually do tasks.
The caching is only to prevent hitting the hard drive and slowing your experience down, not to cover all the future potential use of Ram of any individual program. That would require a HUGE amount of Ram. I have programs I use every day that use almost 2 Gigabytes of RAM. The actual programs only take up a couple hundred Megabytes though, so that's all that needs to be cached until I actually use the program.
"Actually, they seem to base their conclusion on the fact that Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 don't seem to have entered the termination shock at the same distance from the earth." Distance from earth is irrelevant and would vary based on what part of the orbit of the sun we were in at this point. Voyager 1 and 2 are no longer significantly affected by the earth, neither is the environment they are in. You would want to say they dont seem to be the same distance from the SUN.
Some may think I'm being overly picky here, but we have to constantly remind ourselves the universe and solar system does not revolve around us. Actually it is not surprising that the termination shock varies, because the radiation from the sun varies as well. Regions of space that correspond with areas of the sun that had more activity would expect to have a more flared out termination shock area. It is interesting that they appear to be detecting interference from inter-stellar space now. I am curious how conditions differ in this area.
Is there anyone who honestly thinks Fark has "lost respect" by making this move? Did Fark ever really have "respect" in the first place? That's like saying you've lost all respect for Maxim as a magazine because it ran a fluffy political article. What respect is there to lose? Places like Maxim, Fark and the like exist to entertain. I'm pretty certain they don't care if they have respect.
/I lost all respect for Mad magazine when they let the good spy win in Spy vs. Spy.
I checked a lot of forums, and even PC users are having a lot of issues with the drive, not just Windows-based ones. I wouldn't even bother with a work-around with this drive. It has reliability and driver issues even in the realm where it was designed to function. Seagate appears to have designed a dud here. Western Digital has way more reliable drives. (Just don't install their software and you'll be fine).
I don't want to be a party-pooper, but I wasn't that impressed with the collection. The latest chemistry books and engineering books were from 1920. A LOT has happened in chemistry and engineering since then. Are they starting with older books and slowly moving to newer ones? The Chinese collection is impressive, but hard to read (unless you know Chinese). Also the plugin only works on windows-based computers. That is sad for me.
I'm definitely bookmarking their site and checking it out every now and then.
Could we change your login name to Neville Chamberlain?
You must confront militants on a military level, or you lose. I can only think of one or two historical examples where this was not strictly true, and thousands where it is true. India with Gandhi and South Africa with Nelson Mandela. But I see no analogies between militant islam and Britain or South Africa.
That was a great article. I loved how they had the response of at least three different perspectives (a current telecom exec from Bell, the Allstream exec looking to go in the market, and a liberal critic) in the article without slanting the information towards a particular point of view. I wish newspapers and reporting agencies would do that kind of reporting more often. I know absolutely nothing about the wireless telecom situation in Canada, so I can't really contribute anything that insightful, but I enjoyed reading that article. It somehow makes me want to find out and learn more about the subject.
I'm not sure why this post was rated +5 insightful. It seemed about as ill-informed as the one it complains about. First of all, there is no indication that the US is less prepared for a natural disaster because of the war. These claims were made in regards to California wild-fires but were immediately refuted by the California National Guard, and by Democrats as well.
Second, its not cute to mangle words like administration with maladministration. It makes the poster sound like a 14 year old trying to sound smart. Throwing in a lot of swear words makes the poster seem closer to an internet tough guy than someone who I would take seriously. Its really easy to claim everything is a conspiracy. But could it be possible that the Bush administration recognized an actual threat to global and US security? Militant Islam (or terrorism) seems like a threat to our way of life to me. Now how the Bush administration proceeded in dealing with that threat is a place where people can disagree, but I would be interested to know if the poster feels Militant Islam (or terrorism) is an actual threat or a tool for this conspiracy theory I see so many people going on about.
Also I feel the poster shortchanges the intelligence of the average person in the military. Most of them I have talked with agree the Bush administration has made errors in the execution of the war. When it comes to that, the US has always made errors in its execution of war throughout history. If the servicemen and women will vote for Republicans, could it be that they feel Democrat policies would be even worse? Is the only conclusion really that they are all being tricked and used and taken advantage of?
In the end it just seems to me like the poster is treating everything he or she doesn't agree with with contempt instead of with respect and consideration. I have no idea why people find that insightful. I've heard WAY more insightful critiques of this war from other sources.
I really don't have anti-apple sentiments. I use apple products almost exclusively and love a LOT about them. But as an apple aficionado, there are things about Apple that annoy the hell out of me. particularly when they get overly cute about their design and harm the utility of their products as a result. The hockey puck made any kind of media editing hard to do, and everyone I know threw them out and bought a real mouse.
I am aware of that, but I find it hard to use anyway. the right click is not reliable for me, even when it is enabled, possibly because of how I place my hand on the mouse. In any way, the solution is so easy: Just put buttons on the left and right of the mouse like everybody else. Sometimes in their desire for simplicity, Apple unnecessarily complicates things. This is my problem with their design philosophy . For instance on their Macbook pros: They are designed to be multimedia mobile editing laptops. Why don't they have a built in media reader like every other good mobile laptop? At least as an option. Instead I have to lug around a media reader and its cable to do my work. Yes, the apple laptop looks pretty, simple and elegant by itself, but when I have it in use, it sure looks like a mutant octopus radiating wires everywhere. In other words their quest for simplicity complicates my life.
At least the rootkit did what it was designed to do. It wasn't a complete failure for EVERYBODY. That apple mouse design was an absolute miserable failure that seems to have evaded all testing or use by anyone in Apple. I love apple products in general, but that hockey puck was absolutely stupid. Even today apple's mice are not anywhere as near as nice as the cheapest logitech mouse you can buy. Although the little BB ball that scrolls left and right is nice. I still can't figure out why apple is scared of putting left and right buttons on a mouse. Everyone else has figured out how to do it.
I see them reviewed a lot, but I would be interested to know if people really buy them. Or if they prefer to have windows installed and pay another 100 dollars. Or if they prefer a more expensive and polished system. My gut is telling me the 200 dollar computer will be a flop and we will see another slashdot thread moaning about how Walmart is evil and didn't support the computer enough even though seemingly every person willing to buy this computer seemingly refuses to go to Walmart for one reason or another. A hint: if the only people willing to buy the PC can't be bothered to go to Walmart and buy this computer, its not going to succeed. In any case, if you are a geek, and want a linux computer, you can get someone's old computer and put linux on it almost for free. My box cost me $50, and it is happily running squid and dansquardian and doing basic browsing and office tasks just fine.
Oh, by the way, you can get a dell with a gig of Ram for $349, and with a 17 inch monitor for $500 right now. I bet Dell outsells this $200 computer by a huge margin. Why would that be? Could it be no one really wants a $200 Linux computer?
There are a number of reasons why this could be a huge development. The biggest thing on my mind is that this solves the whole question of were to get all the stem cells you need for what you want to do. Now the source can be the very patient you are working on. I'm going to watch this with great interest.
Perhaps in your specific instance it might make sense to let some of the staff switch over to Linux. But wholesale firing of half the company so that you can avoid emulating Linux seems a little unrealistic. I look forward to you presenting your well thought out plan to management and seeing how far they go with it. I also think your description of your support staff as a group of people that have let their skill set "elapse" because they focus on Windows technologies as odd. Your company has to hire its support staff from the same pool of labor that every other company in the US does. There aren't a whole lot of people running around with Linux certifications and with years of experience supporting it in a company. Things like that take years to happen at this point.