I know that I will be moderated into the ground for this post, but here it comes anyway.
Where I can donate so that the children get a decent properly educated teacher and some new high quality schoolbooks instead of this?
Stroll around the S&M and business development department in 99% of the companies out there, multibillion PLCs notwithstanding. Find a relational database being used for any "business modelling" and "forecasting" (quotes intentional). You will not find any. It is all excel and some of the excel abuse in these circles will scare the shit out of any IT professional.
On top of that none of these MBA tagged excel jokeys has the faintest clue regarding software quality assurance and testing of their creations. This does not prevent them from forcing business decisions worth millions and often billons based on a "business model" which is nothing but a buggy excel spreadsheet.
This is a segment of the market which Microsoft has managed to capture and is keeping captive to ensure that any other parts of the business will not drag anything non-Microsofty.
It is not surprising that it is trying to keep it and roll back any of the wins achieved by Cristal and Oracle in this area. Not surprising at all.
You may need admin rights to test and to package, but you should not need admin rightsfor 95%+ of the development cycle.
With the current crop of vmware and CPU based virtualization the necessity of having admin rights to your machine for 99% of the development cycle is no longer there.
The Reichstag fire is just one case which Hitler used for a short period and abandoned. A few months in 1933-1934 and from there on he switched to banging the "Jews" and "Third Reich" drum.
As a comparison Stalin used the fictionary "Trust" organisation which was supposed to be the primary weapon of the enemies of the piecefull folks of the soviet union all the way through the thirties. IIRC from 1931 to 1938. Possibly even earlier, but after 1928.
Hitler did not have to invent a terrorist organisation called the Trust (or "the Base", or whatever) and did not blame it to be responsible for any act of violence against Nazi Germany.
Hitler did not use of the phrase "Who is not with us, is against us" on a daily basis. He did not speak it with thick southern accent either.
Hitler did not blame every country he disliked to be planning an outrage against the "Peacefull folks of the Third Reich". He simply stated what is a "historical part" of the Third Reich (half of the world in fact) and tried it by any means necessary without inventing excuses. Any opposition was declared to be racially inferior without any extra added excuses.
Hitler did not play a simpleton to appease the crowds. In fact the Nazi propaganda machine tried to paint him smarter and more talented than he really was.
So on so fourth.
The right comparison is the other genocidal dickhead. The Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvilli one. Just ask any Russian speaker for a comparison of Bushisms with koba's pearls of wisdom. There is a clear one-to-one match there as well as a one-to-one match with Koba's vindictiveness, paranoia and simulated stupidity.
This is also the scarier comparison. 'cause for all of his efforts Hitler never reached a fraction of Stalin's body count.
What about Solaris? What about AIX? Irix? UNICOS (especially this one)?
What about the specialized sh*t loaded on Rockwell vector processors used in radars by everyone but the russians?
What about...
Let's be real here.
What goes around comes around and it is very nice to see the US govt being repayed in its own currency. It is only a matter of time until it gets more of it with everyone and his dog moving manufacturing to China and R&D to India and Russia.
The good news is that simple physical precautions such as sleeping on the back and pacifiers seem to cut down on SIDS dramatically.
Add to that keeping a window in a baby's room always opened. SIDS is nearly unheard of in countries which sleep with open windows all year round regardless of the weather. Compared to a kid's life the few pennies on the heating bill saved by "fart heating" are simply not worth it.
The method of action of *limus is well known. Calcineurin modifying something or other....in short they modify IL-2 response. This is consistent with suppressing immune response. If there was a causative agent causing the symptom, you would never* put a patient on immunosupprents.
This is the method when used as an antirejection drug and I am fully aware of it. Hate to tell you, but the method when used as a topical preparation in eczema treatment is unclear. It is one of those "just works" things. Calcineurin is part of Tk responce which should not be happening in this case because *limus has 0 detectable absorption rate through skin. It should not be getting that far through the skin and has not been detected to get that far through the skin to start inhibiting immune responce the way it does when used for immunosuppression. How it works is still in the area of "god knows". As a matter of fact this is even written black on white in the physicians' level info for it.
The person's. Observation is not just mine. I had a chat with the consultant which prescribed it to the kid initially and she had been seeing it as well in some patients. It is extremely effective at first, but the efficiency drops over time and it is more evident compared to steroids.
As far as the reason - it is my guess that the organism adjusts. I may be wrong. After all the actual mechanism by which (Ta/Pime)crolimus acts on eczema is not completely clear.
According to every continental and US dermatologist I know best topical steroid treatement currently is Advantan which is surprise, surprise - methylprednisolone aceponate. I am not going to comment on the availability of specific forms and chances of prescription by UK GP as it will make me quickly descend into Green Wing mode. In fact your ideas that Prednisolone is an oral steroid are descriptive of the state of eczema treatement in the UK and provide a good explanation of why do I sometimes dream of having a gun when visiting a dermatologist with the kid.
trixera is available here. I said it is not prescribable which is different. It is available (in Boots in fact), but not on prescription and is not in the UK dermatologists recommendation lists despite being one of the first 3 usual suspects on the continent along with the others I mentioned. If I did not visit a village dermatologist in a continental fifth world country I would have never known about it. As far as diprobase, it is an el cheapo P.O.S. which quite often tends to make real eczema (not nappy rashes and such) worse, not better.
Eczema can be treated very effectively with a combination of lifestyle change (avoiding irritants such as dust, pets, chemicals etc.),
Been there, Done all that. All wonderfull british carpets are out of the house, no pets, no allergenic plants, household chemicals are vetted for use and taken off the list of allowed stuff at the slightest suspicion, the house is vaccum cleaned at a frequency which makes all my friends think I am mad. On top of that, the horsepiss supplied by UK water companies under the name of "water" is filtered and treated for the entire house. All of this made the situation better, but did not solve it completely.
emollients (moisturisers)
Interesting to hear this from an almost ready British MD. None of the really effective ones are available on NHS in Britain and the best ones are not even on the allowed import list so I have to ask friends who go to Germany, France or the third and fifth world to buy them. More specifically Trixera is not prescribable and Linolafet, Atoderm and Topyalise series are not on the import list at all. You cannot buy them even by mail order (so much for the common EU market).
and topical steroids.
The effective ones (Prednisolone and Co) cause obesity, behavioral changes and learning difficulties in prolonged use. The ineffective ones - well they are ineffective.
There are also newer treatments such as tacrolimus which can be applied to the skin to modify the immune response.
This one does work for a short period. After that the organism adjusts its immune responce and there is no more effect. To add insult to injury, I had to go to a fifth world country and the "village" dermatologist in a small city in the middle of nowhere knew about it. None of the clowns I had to deal with in the UK even considered it. One consluttant in BUPA knew about it, but it took me mentioning the third world village dermatologist to get this to be even considered.
The vast majority of people with eczema if treated appropriately can be absolutely symptom-free.
As they say this in the UK - utter bollocks
Lee (soon to be MBBS, UK equivalent of MD).
Aaaa... That explains it... NHS doctor in the making...
As my wife nowdays says about Green Wing: not funny, this is not a sitcom, it is a documentary.
P.S. By the way, it is my kid who got eczema, not me.
The success will be similar to what dermatology proper can achieve anyway.
Modern dermatology cannot cure eczema. Most varieties of psoriasis are uncurable as well. Add in neurodermatitis and a few other skin conditions and you get a fairly long list of conditions which the doctors cannot deal with. They poke at it from different angles like tribal shamans and the success rate is about the same.
The reality is that we know so little about the human skin, it is not even funny. Just take Pimecrolimus and eczema. Nobody has even the faintest idea why it works. Staph and eczema? What is the cause and what is the effect? So on so fourth.
I read the RTFA and I can understand some of the patients described in it who are taking a gun to a dermatologist appointment. I have wanted to do that on couple of occasions myself.
Though frankly, the parallel between the story of Rev. Martin Niemoller and the direction where El Presidente de partida Laborista Antonio Bliar leads the country scares the daylight s**t out of me. And not just me.
It has reached the point when I take the books written by another Blair (Eric Arthtur) in another time and put them back on the shelf. As one of my friends said recently: "Not funny mate, this is not a comedy, it is a documentary".
Why not. That is cheerfull compared to the reality.
An example of a recent Nobel laureate comes to mind. The poor chap had to be pumped with antibiotics, have an arm chopped all the way up to a bit of a shoulder and put in a coma until his organism produced at least some antibodies http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/newsfromnist_Co rnell_mediaevent.htm.
The necrosis toxins produced by cocci are as scary as anything can get. Thanks god noone has managed to make a biological weapon from them just yet.
Staph is gramm-positive. So plasmids as an exchange vector are less prominent compared to gramm-negatives like good ole E. Coli.
IIRC, at least some varieties the necrosis toxin show statistically significant correlation with M12 phage infected populations and M12 has been shown to transfer it.
I may be wrong of course as I am remembering this more or less off the top of my head at the mo.
Most Staph strains with antibiotic immunity gain it from a phague infection. While bacteriophagues are very large and complex there is not that much spare room for carry an extra resistance gene on top of what they drag around at the moment. It will most likely have to lose either the penicillin resistance gene or the tissue necrosis toxin gene to accommodate an extra antibiotic group resistance.
In the first case it can be smacked on the head using conventional penicillin derivatives.
In the second case the normal immunity mechanisms will take care of it. By the way, it is the necrosis toxins produced by MRSA which make it so dangerous, not the antibiotic resistance as such. They kill tissue around the infected zone before it actually gets infected creating the environment in which staph can trhive. In addition to that none of the immune system cells can traverse this dead zone and get to the staph either.
This is all IIRC of course, as it has been very long time since I have done something with mol biol and microbiol.
While you are correct that 70% of the Microsoft shops are not microsoft centric in their primary business function and workflow and can convert, very few businesses will even consider.
The reason for this is that 95% of the businesses which are Microsoft shops have a sales, marketing and middle management that is MS Exchange addicted and is living under the false impression that it is good process and business practice to drag any person from any other part of the business into a meeting on a whim based on his schedule in Exchange. They are the primary and usually unsurmounatble obstacle to conversion. Just try going into a Microsoft shop and saying to the sales team "You will no longer drag Engineering into meetings. You will submit requests via an issue tracking (or CRM) system instead so they can have a correct resource allocation". The screams will reach CEO level with a speed which will make you wander if Einstein is right about C being the absolute speed limit. In order to convert even a part of a Microsoft addicted business you have to create suitable processes and most importanly kill the S&M idea that the world is flat and they are the only pinnacle sticking out of it. This is a long and painfull process. Once it is complete parts of the business can use the right tool for their jobs (linux, BSD, Solaris, MacOS, even Windows which is configured to a specific business task). But not before that. And Microsoft knows this and does their best to provide "solutions" which allow you not to compartamentalise your business.
You may be right as far as graphics, web development and a few other similar items.
As far as text processing is concerned it depends what you have to do. In many scientific disciplines you have to submit articles in TeX or even worse SGML. Mac facilities in the field are nothing to shout about. In addition to that some people who write scientific articles or have to review scientific articles have been burned by Word leaving its fingerprints all over the place in the past. I know quite a few people who switched to Linux and Openoffice for this particular reason.
As far as some areas of software development, network modelling, math modelling using matlab, signal processing, linux wins hands down. No contest really. There are other areas where BSD or Solaris are the correct tool, but they are quite narrow now so no point going into that.
These are just a few examples. There are plenty of others but all I can think of are in the "tools of the trade" area. I can think of very few adult people who will use Linux unless it does a job for them better than Winhoze or Mac. In fact if Winhoze or Mac did the job better (or cheaper over a full depreciation period) I would have used them. For the stuff I do - they do not.
Yeah, I know, at least a few jerks will scream "elitism". Nope, nothing elitistic here. After all, if a person makes a living of stuff that runs predominantly on Winhoze it is not elitistic for them to use Winhoze. If a person makes a living of stuff that runs predominantly on Mac it is not elitistic for them to use Mac. I make a living of things that run predominantly on Unixes. Frankly, do not see the reason why it is elitistic for me to use solely Unixes.
When you argue that anyone who is serious about their work will convert, I think you are correct - you just did not mention what we will convert to.
We are "in violent agreement". I understand your motives for going with MacOS. For me it is useless. My trade is network stuff and more specifically design, VOIP and QoS. I am not going to get anywhere close to getting any work done on neither Winhoze nor MacOS. Both suck to that effect. So I do not use them.
Every tool for its job. Some are better than the others, some are worse, but as a general rule a specialized tool will beat a general purpose one.
Each does a list of jobs and does them well and every one either saves me money or makes me money.
The Asterisk PBX saves me 30£+ per month just on cost based phone call routing.
The thin clients save me money by allowing computers in the living room with zero noise, zero footprint and under 7W power consumption. Each costs less than I would have had to spend on a low noise case and cooling for a Winhoze box. That is before electricity savings are taken into account.
So on so fourth. Every PC I have is a tool in its own right and every one does its job perfectly well. I possibly can replace them with a single Winhoze box. It may do everything they do, but it will do every single thing worse than they do it now. In addition to that it will cost me more over its lifetime in essential expenses, maintenance and power consumption.
Such is life. Winhoze and MacOS X are multipurpose. Linux is multirole. While Linux cannot be made to do all of the tasks Winhoze does simultaneously, it can be optimised for a specific role to do it much better than Winhoze. Personally, I would rather stick with several tools each of which does its job well instead of a single that does all job at a mediocre level. Other people may make a different choice
And this is exactly what distinguishes between a possible OSS and non-OSS user. It is not price, it is not ease of use, it is not "what my computer plays".
I have a couple of friends who are nowhere near technical computerwise (biologists, humanties, etc). They run Linux for this exact and sole reason (and some of them are pretty happy with good old Debian woody as a matter of fact). They use the computer as a tool that does what they need to do for their daily bread. They do not give a flying f*** about dancing paperclips singing MP3. What they care about is that their daily bread is not being jeopardised by some binary blob taking over the computer.
Similarly, I have friends that extremely technical in the computer sense, high level software developers in fact. They are addicted to bells, whistles, singing paper clips, visual effects and the like. They would not use linux because they cannot get that "special one MP3" to sing on it. That is despite the fact that they get 20-30% less work done as result because of dealing with all the binary blobs taking over the machine.
The singing MP3 is an irrelevant factor in the "To Convert or not Convert" dillema.
People who view the computer as a "tool of the trade" will convert.
People who view it as a "toy" will not until it becomes a "toy". In order for it to become a "toy" it will have to provide facilities to all the direct marketing and MBA graduate low life out there to shag the user. The moment it does it will no longer be OSS and here the circle closes. Frankly, I do not see a point in trying to break this circle as it is kept in motion by economic powers which are selfsustaining in todays world.
In addition to that the Citrix client can run it on Linux based thin clients like the one I am typing this in http://www.sigsegv.cx/hp-thin-client.html (I am a big fan of "eat your own dogfood"). Personally, I have replaced the OS, but in an enterprise environment you are obviously better off keeping the original and using bundled Altiris for management.
Based on the stuff shipped by HP, my overall impression is that while Thin Client Winhoze starts lower than Linux (at 64MB RAM/64MB Flash), it becomes viable at 256/128+ which starts to defeat the purpose. Linux in such an environment is really "thin" because there is no choice but to push via Citrix to it and the temptation to run things locally goes away. As a result you are perfectly OK with 128/128. As far as CPUs are concerned both the HP old ones (Transmeta) and new ones (Via C3) are complete overkill for the job. I am tracking the CPU usage on mine (Transmeta 800) and it never goes above 15%.
Current HS guidelines in the UK are that you should take at least one 5 minute break every 45 minutes. This is not enshrined in law so a company may push a bit more than that but not by much. If a local arsehole suffering from a resurgence of ancestral slave trading genes is overstepping the line all it takes is for someone to write a letter to the local HS executive and watch the show unfold.
This is one part of UK law on which the companies nearly universally lose in court. To make things even more entertaining, the law allows the court to fine personally and jail the managers in question. While I would not expect any of the pathological slavers to go to jail (unless they have a DVT case in their department) they can be shaken more than enough to be very carefull from there on.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that I will be moderated into the ground for this post, but here it comes anyway. Where I can donate so that the children get a decent properly educated teacher and some new high quality schoolbooks instead of this?
Unless I am mistaken Awakenings was based on real series of medical cases. In fact there was a documentary preceding the movie.
Stroll around the S&M and business development department in 99% of the companies out there, multibillion PLCs notwithstanding. Find a relational database being used for any "business modelling" and "forecasting" (quotes intentional). You will not find any. It is all excel and some of the excel abuse in these circles will scare the shit out of any IT professional.
On top of that none of these MBA tagged excel jokeys has the faintest clue regarding software quality assurance and testing of their creations. This does not prevent them from forcing business decisions worth millions and often billons based on a "business model" which is nothing but a buggy excel spreadsheet.
This is a segment of the market which Microsoft has managed to capture and is keeping captive to ensure that any other parts of the business will not drag anything non-Microsofty.
It is not surprising that it is trying to keep it and roll back any of the wins achieved by Cristal and Oracle in this area. Not surprising at all.
Not necessarily.
You may need admin rights to test and to package, but you should not need admin rightsfor 95%+ of the development cycle.
With the current crop of vmware and CPU based virtualization the necessity of having admin rights to your machine for 99% of the development cycle is no longer there.
The Reichstag fire is just one case which Hitler used for a short period and abandoned. A few months in 1933-1934 and from there on he switched to banging the "Jews" and "Third Reich" drum.
As a comparison Stalin used the fictionary "Trust" organisation which was supposed to be the primary weapon of the enemies of the piecefull folks of the soviet union all the way through the thirties. IIRC from 1931 to 1938. Possibly even earlier, but after 1928.
The right comparison is the other genocidal dickhead. The Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvilli one. Just ask any Russian speaker for a comparison of Bushisms with koba's pearls of wisdom. There is a clear one-to-one match there as well as a one-to-one match with Koba's vindictiveness, paranoia and simulated stupidity.
This is also the scarier comparison. 'cause for all of his efforts Hitler never reached a fraction of Stalin's body count.
Just Windows?
What about Solaris? What about AIX? Irix? UNICOS (especially this one)?
What about the specialized sh*t loaded on Rockwell vector processors used in radars by everyone but the russians?
What about...
Let's be real here.
What goes around comes around and it is very nice to see the US govt being repayed in its own currency. It is only a matter of time until it gets more of it with everyone and his dog moving manufacturing to China and R&D to India and Russia.
Plausible, but least likely.
He had lost 2 lawsuits already and has been ordered to pay costs on at least one.
The average lawsuit costs in the US this will bankrupt a maker of WallaceOS right away so he has to have some bigger sponsorship to be still alive.
Who is paying this guy's costs?
Add to that keeping a window in a baby's room always opened. SIDS is nearly unheard of in countries which sleep with open windows all year round regardless of the weather. Compared to a kid's life the few pennies on the heating bill saved by "fart heating" are simply not worth it.
This is the method when used as an antirejection drug and I am fully aware of it. Hate to tell you, but the method when used as a topical preparation in eczema treatment is unclear. It is one of those "just works" things. Calcineurin is part of Tk responce which should not be happening in this case because *limus has 0 detectable absorption rate through skin. It should not be getting that far through the skin and has not been detected to get that far through the skin to start inhibiting immune responce the way it does when used for immunosuppression. How it works is still in the area of "god knows". As a matter of fact this is even written black on white in the physicians' level info for it.
The person's. Observation is not just mine. I had a chat with the consultant which prescribed it to the kid initially and she had been seeing it as well in some patients. It is extremely effective at first, but the efficiency drops over time and it is more evident compared to steroids.
As far as the reason - it is my guess that the organism adjusts. I may be wrong. After all the actual mechanism by which (Ta/Pime)crolimus acts on eczema is not completely clear.
According to every continental and US dermatologist I know best topical steroid treatement currently is Advantan which is surprise, surprise - methylprednisolone aceponate. I am not going to comment on the availability of specific forms and chances of prescription by UK GP as it will make me quickly descend into Green Wing mode. In fact your ideas that Prednisolone is an oral steroid are descriptive of the state of eczema treatement in the UK and provide a good explanation of why do I sometimes dream of having a gun when visiting a dermatologist with the kid.
trixera is available here. I said it is not prescribable which is different. It is available (in Boots in fact), but not on prescription and is not in the UK dermatologists recommendation lists despite being one of the first 3 usual suspects on the continent along with the others I mentioned. If I did not visit a village dermatologist in a continental fifth world country I would have never known about it. As far as diprobase, it is an el cheapo P.O.S. which quite often tends to make real eczema (not nappy rashes and such) worse, not better.
Been there, Done all that. All wonderfull british carpets are out of the house, no pets, no allergenic plants, household chemicals are vetted for use and taken off the list of allowed stuff at the slightest suspicion, the house is vaccum cleaned at a frequency which makes all my friends think I am mad. On top of that, the horsepiss supplied by UK water companies under the name of "water" is filtered and treated for the entire house. All of this made the situation better, but did not solve it completely.
Interesting to hear this from an almost ready British MD. None of the really effective ones are available on NHS in Britain and the best ones are not even on the allowed import list so I have to ask friends who go to Germany, France or the third and fifth world to buy them. More specifically Trixera is not prescribable and Linolafet, Atoderm and Topyalise series are not on the import list at all. You cannot buy them even by mail order (so much for the common EU market).
The effective ones (Prednisolone and Co) cause obesity, behavioral changes and learning difficulties in prolonged use. The ineffective ones - well they are ineffective.
This one does work for a short period. After that the organism adjusts its immune responce and there is no more effect. To add insult to injury, I had to go to a fifth world country and the "village" dermatologist in a small city in the middle of nowhere knew about it. None of the clowns I had to deal with in the UK even considered it. One consluttant in BUPA knew about it, but it took me mentioning the third world village dermatologist to get this to be even considered.
As they say this in the UK - utter bollocks
Aaaa... That explains it... NHS doctor in the making... As my wife nowdays says about Green Wing: not funny, this is not a sitcom, it is a documentary.
P.S. By the way, it is my kid who got eczema, not me.
The success will be similar to what dermatology proper can achieve anyway. Modern dermatology cannot cure eczema. Most varieties of psoriasis are uncurable as well. Add in neurodermatitis and a few other skin conditions and you get a fairly long list of conditions which the doctors cannot deal with. They poke at it from different angles like tribal shamans and the success rate is about the same. The reality is that we know so little about the human skin, it is not even funny. Just take Pimecrolimus and eczema. Nobody has even the faintest idea why it works. Staph and eczema? What is the cause and what is the effect? So on so fourth. I read the RTFA and I can understand some of the patients described in it who are taking a gun to a dermatologist appointment. I have wanted to do that on couple of occasions myself.
Applause.
Though frankly, the parallel between the story of Rev. Martin Niemoller and the direction where El Presidente de partida Laborista Antonio Bliar leads the country scares the daylight s**t out of me. And not just me.
It has reached the point when I take the books written by another Blair (Eric Arthtur) in another time and put them back on the shelf. As one of my friends said recently: "Not funny mate, this is not a comedy, it is a documentary".
Why not. That is cheerfull compared to the reality.
o rnell_mediaevent.htm.
An example of a recent Nobel laureate comes to mind. The poor chap had to be pumped with antibiotics, have an arm chopped all the way up to a bit of a shoulder and put in a coma until his organism produced at least some antibodies http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/newsfromnist_C
The necrosis toxins produced by cocci are as scary as anything can get. Thanks god noone has managed to make a biological weapon from them just yet.
Staph is gramm-positive. So plasmids as an exchange vector are less prominent compared to gramm-negatives like good ole E. Coli.
IIRC, at least some varieties the necrosis toxin show statistically significant correlation with M12 phage infected populations and M12 has been shown to transfer it.
I may be wrong of course as I am remembering this more or less off the top of my head at the mo.
I would not bet on that.
Most Staph strains with antibiotic immunity gain it from a phague infection. While bacteriophagues are very large and complex there is not that much spare room for carry an extra resistance gene on top of what they drag around at the moment. It will most likely have to lose either the penicillin resistance gene or the tissue necrosis toxin gene to accommodate an extra antibiotic group resistance.
In the first case it can be smacked on the head using conventional penicillin derivatives.
In the second case the normal immunity mechanisms will take care of it. By the way, it is the necrosis toxins produced by MRSA which make it so dangerous, not the antibiotic resistance as such. They kill tissue around the infected zone before it actually gets infected creating the environment in which staph can trhive. In addition to that none of the immune system cells can traverse this dead zone and get to the staph either.
This is all IIRC of course, as it has been very long time since I have done something with mol biol and microbiol.
While you are correct that 70% of the Microsoft shops are not microsoft centric in their primary business function and workflow and can convert, very few businesses will even consider.
The reason for this is that 95% of the businesses which are Microsoft shops have a sales, marketing and middle management that is MS Exchange addicted and is living under the false impression that it is good process and business practice to drag any person from any other part of the business into a meeting on a whim based on his schedule in Exchange. They are the primary and usually unsurmounatble obstacle to conversion.
Just try going into a Microsoft shop and saying to the sales team "You will no longer drag Engineering into meetings. You will submit requests via an issue tracking (or CRM) system instead so they can have a correct resource allocation". The screams will reach CEO level with a speed which will make you wander if Einstein is right about C being the absolute speed limit.
In order to convert even a part of a Microsoft addicted business you have to create suitable processes and most importanly kill the S&M idea that the world is flat and they are the only pinnacle sticking out of it. This is a long and painfull process. Once it is complete parts of the business can use the right tool for their jobs (linux, BSD, Solaris, MacOS, even Windows which is configured to a specific business task). But not before that. And Microsoft knows this and does their best to provide "solutions" which allow you not to compartamentalise your business.
You may be right as far as graphics, web development and a few other similar items.
As far as text processing is concerned it depends what you have to do. In many scientific disciplines you have to submit articles in TeX or even worse SGML. Mac facilities in the field are nothing to shout about. In addition to that some people who write scientific articles or have to review scientific articles have been burned by Word leaving its fingerprints all over the place in the past. I know quite a few people who switched to Linux and Openoffice for this particular reason.
As far as some areas of software development, network modelling, math modelling using matlab, signal processing, linux wins hands down. No contest really. There are other areas where BSD or Solaris are the correct tool, but they are quite narrow now so no point going into that.
These are just a few examples. There are plenty of others but all I can think of are in the "tools of the trade" area. I can think of very few adult people who will use Linux unless it does a job for them better than Winhoze or Mac. In fact if Winhoze or Mac did the job better (or cheaper over a full depreciation period) I would have used them. For the stuff I do - they do not.
Yeah, I know, at least a few jerks will scream "elitism". Nope, nothing elitistic here. After all, if a person makes a living of stuff that runs predominantly on Winhoze it is not elitistic for them to use Winhoze. If a person makes a living of stuff that runs predominantly on Mac it is not elitistic for them to use Mac. I make a living of things that run predominantly on Unixes. Frankly, do not see the reason why it is elitistic for me to use solely Unixes.
We are "in violent agreement". I understand your motives for going with MacOS. For me it is useless. My trade is network stuff and more specifically design, VOIP and QoS. I am not going to get anywhere close to getting any work done on neither Winhoze nor MacOS. Both suck to that effect. So I do not use them.
Every tool for its job. Some are better than the others, some are worse, but as a general rule a specialized tool will beat a general purpose one.
Your PC is a multipurpose tool.
Mine are not. Every one is specialized.
Each does a list of jobs and does them well and every one either saves me money or makes me money.
So on so fourth. Every PC I have is a tool in its own right and every one does its job perfectly well. I possibly can replace them with a single Winhoze box. It may do everything they do, but it will do every single thing worse than they do it now. In addition to that it will cost me more over its lifetime in essential expenses, maintenance and power consumption.
Such is life. Winhoze and MacOS X are multipurpose. Linux is multirole. While Linux cannot be made to do all of the tasks Winhoze does simultaneously, it can be optimised for a specific role to do it much better than Winhoze. Personally, I would rather stick with several tools each of which does its job well instead of a single that does all job at a mediocre level. Other people may make a different choice
A large portion of users are happy with this.
And this is exactly what distinguishes between a possible OSS and non-OSS user. It is not price, it is not ease of use, it is not "what my computer plays".
I have a couple of friends who are nowhere near technical computerwise (biologists, humanties, etc). They run Linux for this exact and sole reason (and some of them are pretty happy with good old Debian woody as a matter of fact). They use the computer as a tool that does what they need to do for their daily bread. They do not give a flying f*** about dancing paperclips singing MP3. What they care about is that their daily bread is not being jeopardised by some binary blob taking over the computer.
Similarly, I have friends that extremely technical in the computer sense, high level software developers in fact. They are addicted to bells, whistles, singing paper clips, visual effects and the like. They would not use linux because they cannot get that "special one MP3" to sing on it. That is despite the fact that they get 20-30% less work done as result because of dealing with all the binary blobs taking over the machine.
The singing MP3 is an irrelevant factor in the "To Convert or not Convert" dillema.
People who view the computer as a "tool of the trade" will convert.
People who view it as a "toy" will not until it becomes a "toy". In order for it to become a "toy" it will have to provide facilities to all the direct marketing and MBA graduate low life out there to shag the user. The moment it does it will no longer be OSS and here the circle closes. Frankly, I do not see a point in trying to break this circle as it is kept in motion by economic powers which are selfsustaining in todays world.
No point to bother.
In addition to that the Citrix client can run it on Linux based thin clients like the one I am typing this in http://www.sigsegv.cx/hp-thin-client.html (I am a big fan of "eat your own dogfood"). Personally, I have replaced the OS, but in an enterprise environment you are obviously better off keeping the original and using bundled Altiris for management.
Based on the stuff shipped by HP, my overall impression is that while Thin Client Winhoze starts lower than Linux (at 64MB RAM/64MB Flash), it becomes viable at 256/128+ which starts to defeat the purpose. Linux in such an environment is really "thin" because there is no choice but to push via Citrix to it and the temptation to run things locally goes away. As a result you are perfectly OK with 128/128. As far as CPUs are concerned both the HP old ones (Transmeta) and new ones (Via C3) are complete overkill for the job. I am tracking the CPU usage on mine (Transmeta 800) and it never goes above 15%.
Read my previous post.
Current HS guidelines in the UK are that you should take at least one 5 minute break every 45 minutes. This is not enshrined in law so a company may push a bit more than that but not by much. If a local arsehole suffering from a resurgence of ancestral slave trading genes is overstepping the line all it takes is for someone to write a letter to the local HS executive and watch the show unfold.
This is one part of UK law on which the companies nearly universally lose in court. To make things even more entertaining, the law allows the court to fine personally and jail the managers in question. While I would not expect any of the pathological slavers to go to jail (unless they have a DVT case in their department) they can be shaken more than enough to be very carefull from there on.