If I'm not sure how to spell a word I usually look it up at Merriam-Webster. If I don't know how to spell it, I'm generally not exactly sure of the definition/connotation, and so it's probably a good idea to make sure that's really the word I'm looking for. It's also pretty good at making suggestions, and if I'm not sure that's really what I want, there's also a theraurus.
I've always been a bit of a spelling nazi, so for me a spell checker is just a tool to catch typos. I find it really irritating when it keeps questioning me simply because I have a large vocabulary. It doesn't seem like it should be that difficult, especially for a company like MS, to give their office suite a real dictionary. Maybe they sell one as a seperate add-on to bleed more money from their customers? I don't know.
The spell checker is just an annoyance, though. It's the grammar checker that really irks me.
That is true. I just installed 8.0, and YaST1 is quite dead. YaST2 text mode is quite painful, though, or at least it was in the 7.x releases. Navigation is horrible, being based mainly on the Tab key, with no way to go in reverse order that I've found. You can use the arrow keys anywhere that is a scroll window, but you have to tab out of that window to do anything with your selection (description/help, select/next, run, etc.). Then of course, if after looking at the description you decide that isn't what you're looking for, you have to tab through all the tab stops (as many as 12 in some windows) to get back to the selection window. It really sucks. YaST2 is just short of being unusable without a mouse. YaST1 was a much less capable tool, certainly, but at least it's text interface was designed for easy navigation with a keyboard. For basic admin stuff, like adding users over ssh say, YaST1 was much better than YaST2.
Where is this per-seat license laid out? I've read a lot of the articles, etc. surrounding this UnitedLinux thing, but nowhere have I seen a per-seat license mentioned by anyone actually involved in the project. What I have seen is a/. post mentioning a somewhat ambiguous phrasing in the UnitedLinux FAQ which could theoretically allow for the possibility that maybe they will use an End User License that is not quite typical of the Free Software Ideal. Nowhere is any specific licensing scheme, per-seat or otherwise, ever laid out, except by the Chicken Littles that have latched onto this ambiguous phrase and determined that the sky is falling. RMS heard the screaming and, without bothering to look up and see if the sky was actually coming down, joined the corus.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, quite the opposite. I know that I would go out of my way to not support a Linux vendor using per-seat licensing, and I think we've already seen that most of the Linux community feels the same. Frankly, after the beating Caldera took for bringing up the idea of a per-seat license, I'd be extremely surprised if anyone even considered such a scheme again, especially Ransom Love (he does give the impression sometimes that he just doesn't get it, though, so who knows).
This per-seat licensing thing is just a totally unsubstantiated rumor! Get over it, people!
There are plenty of other reasons to complain about the project, though. The fact that it's server only seems to me to be monumentally stupid. Linux seems to be doing just fine in the server market, and I don't see how this standardization effort will make much difference in that arena. Linux on the desktop, however, would derive incredible benefit from an innitiative like this. In fact, the lack of an innitiative like this is really the only thing standing in the way of Linux becoming viable on the desktop. If there were a serious effort to standardize for desktop distros, I bet we'd quickly see some of those missing apps being ported to that standard.
Actually, it is Capitalism. It is not a Free Market, which is, I think, what you meant to say. They are not the same thing, but are often confused, especially by Americans, due to our political leader's tendancy to mash Capitalism, Democracy, and the Free Market together into a single, nebulous ideology.
Why is it still Capitalism? because the goal of Capitalism is to amass Capital, and the best way to do that is by establishing a monopoly.
It's a small point, really. Other than that I completely agree with you.
Were these "obvious misspellings" on the order of their/there/they're? In that case it would fall under grammar, not spelling. You can hardly blame a spell checker for not catching a mistake like that. Or, perhaps you have accidentaly added these misspellings to the dictionary, or have dictionaries for other languages installed also? Spell checkers work by comparing every word against their internal dictionary, so if the misspellings weren't caught, then it means those misspellings are in your dictionary as real words for some reason. Perhaps a friend decided to help you out by adding them for you?
I haven't installed 1.0 yet, but I haven't had the crashing problem you discribe. OO has only crashed on me once, ironically when I was trying to save.
The main reason I find the OO spellchecker better than the MS one is that it is more complete. Whenever I sit down at an install of MS Office that I haven't touched before I find myself having to add an absurd number of words to the dictionary (and yes, I know that they are real words and that they are spelled correctly). Don't even get me started on MS' grammar checker. Talk about lowest common denominator! I'm sure it's great for people struggling through English 1A, but it's a serious impediment to anyone more familiar with the language than that.
When I was a full time student I regularly checked on what discounts were available to me on various software packages. In general I found them to be not enough to be relevant. They didn't make them affordable to the average student, just less than you would pay through any other legitimate source.
Now that I've discovered GIMP and OpenOffice, though, it's largely irrelevant. They do everything I would use the various Adobe or MS packages for, and the price is right.
This is still good news, though. I would love to see StarOffice take over in schools. That would make things much easier for me as an OpenOffice user.
I've been using OpenOffice exclusively at home for about 4 months, and I'd be using it at work if I weren't stuck with this damned 2GB HDD and an Admin who's a VB programmer. OpenOffices spell checker has been great so far. In fact, I consider it to be much better, and more complete, than MS Office 2000's spell checker.
SuSE is NOT trying to make it's own standards, it is actually following the standards that are already there, namely LSB and FHS. It's Red Hat that isn't following the standards by being lazy and throwing everything under the sun in a single directory rather than having some kind of logical organization, perhaps based on one of the standards that has grown out of 30 years of *nix tradition!.
And if YaST sucks so bad, and Red Hat is so great, then why do I read so many hardware reviews that say "I couldn't get X to work under Red Hat, but in SuSE it worked automagically"?
For some reason I'm thinking of a Monty Python sketch where they keep having to slap this politician upside the head because his tiny brain keeps getting dislodged...
SuSE installs lots of apps in/opt, but RedHat leaves it empty
That's exactly the problem. Red Hat piles everything in one directory, a lot of which belongs in other places, like/opt. What's the point of having the directories if you don't use them? Every one of those directories has a specific purpose, and has had that purpose since before Red Hat, or probably even the Linux kernel, existed.
It's the player that's important, not the format. If you had the choice between a DVD drive that won't play EVDs and an EVD player that will play DVDs and is $20 cheaper, which would you buy? I thought so. WMF is a straw man. Only Microsoft is trying to get DVDs to use it.
SuSE has every directory that Red Hat has and more (which is where the standards compliance comes in), so I doubt that is the problem. I'm guessing, then, that the./configure is looking for dependencies in non-standard places, which is easily fixed.
The./configure should tell you what it's looking for and where it expects to find it, though you may need to redirect or --verbose to get that info. find will tell you where the file actually is, and then it's a matter of either editing the./configure or creating a symbolic link to the file where./configure expects it to be. I usually go with the link, reasoning that other packages may look for said file in the same place.
If the file isn't on your system, then you'll have to find it and install it first, which is a problem all distros suffer from with certain packages. KDE, in prticular, has a reputation for having this problem.
Well, ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/8.0/ currently contains a README dated 5/23/02 saying that the 8.0 ftp version will be up in a few days. I'll have to try an FTP or NFS install sometime to see if I have the same problems you describe.
As far as missing packages, though, There are some that I wouldn't mind having to install by hand, like OpenOffice and Mozilla for example. That has more to do with their 1.0 releases being right after SuSE 8.0 was released, though.
To be fair, though, all the downloaded ISOs I've ever seen of either Mandrake or Red Hat have been missing packages as well. I didn't download them myself, so I don't know if it was just laziness on the part of the person that did, or if the ISO distros are squeezed down to one disk by the vendor to make it easier/save bandwidth.
Apparently, they've got a non-standard layout that many./configure scripts choke on.
Actually, it is Red Hat that has a non-standard layout, and I've read a number of complaints about their choices (or, rather, apparent lack thereof), particularly with regards to directory structure.
SuSE, being the wierd Germans that they are, actually follow the two relevant standards very closely. The main one is the LSB (Linux Standards Base), which is supposed to fix the problems you describe. The other one I can't remember the name of right now, but it has to do with directory structure.
The problem you are having, as I understand it, is that you are trying to install rpms targeted at the hideous RH directory structure, as opposed to one that makes sense (and there are a few, remember that Linux builds on Unix traditions).
Sorry if that sounds like a flame to you Red Hat fans out there, but really, for what they charged for a boxed version, you'd think they could put some thought into organizing their files better than just mashing them all into one directory.
they take a loss on every ISO download? SuSE would probably have more market share if they gave away their YaST2 enabled distribution, but it's not in their business plan.
That's why SuSE Pro is $80 and Red Hat Pro is $200. To be fair, though, SuSE does give their distro away for free, just not as ISOs. Anyone can install it over FTP, and they provide instructions for doing so on their website. IIRC, it was also an option on the boot disk install menu (my Mother-in-Law's computer mourns the demise of the boot disk in 8.0), at least from 6.3 to 7.2.
I haven't tried it, so I don't know how easy/difficult it really is, but it's an available option, and certainly a viable one for anyone who has the bandwidth to download ISOs, especially since (at least in theory) you'd only be downloading the packages you were actually installing. There's certainly nothing stopping anyone from simply burning their FTP directories to CD. Hell, they even let you mount their FTP directory as an NFS partition if that floats your boat...
I'm aware of the comics, just as I am aware of the comics which Batman, Superman, and The Crow were based on, which is specifically why I metioned them rather than any of the other numerous series that Hollywood has fumbled. Having a lot of material to draw from doesn't make good sequels.
Attack of the Clones is a completely different kind of movie than Spider-Man, and trying to make direct comparisons between the two is asinine. AotC has a wide base to draw upon, and has a responsibility to expand upon that base, which it does quite well. It's not as if everyone hasn't known exactly what it would be about for the last 15 years. The only surprise is in the details, which is exactly as it should be!
I think it's fairly obvious that there will be at least 2 Spider-Man sequels, as Hollywood tryies to milk as much as it can out of it. If the Spider-Man franchise ever makes it to 5 films, I think it's a safe prediction that you will be far more disappointed in it than you are in AotC.
Remember how great the first Batman movie was? How about The Crow? Superman?
How old were you when the A New Hope came out? I was 2 years old. Star Wars absolutely dominated my childhood, it was by far the coolest thing any of us had ever seen. Guess what? The new trilogy holds the same place among kids of similar age today. My daughter is constantly asking to watch The Phantom Menace, she would watch it 5 times a day if we let her, and most of my friend's kids are the same way.
The new Start Wars movies dominate their culture just as the first three dominated ours, and I'm sure that they will be just as disappointed in parts 7-9 as some of us are in parts 1 and 2, and for the same reason: Nothing will ever be as cool as it was when you were a kid. Get over it.
And enought with this "Post 9/11 America" crap. It had potential in the first 3 months or so to become a positive, unifying force, but now it's become nothing more than a blanket pulled over our eyes so we can't see Bush holding the door for Ashcroft, Hollings, and the rest to cart our freedoms out for auction to the highest bidder. "Post 9/11 America" is a code word for the same kind of blind patriotism bullshit that fueled the Cold War, but without the altruistic aspect of fighting for Democracy.
some of the managers are ex-roadies. Most roadies are dumb as a box of rocks.
Most musicians aren't much smarter. If they had any brains they wouldn't be put in a position where they feel like they have to sign the infamous "standard contract". Of course, you already said that.
And strangely a lot of roadies seem to be musicians who aren't able to go anywhere on their music skills. And then there's the managers and musicians who end up as scouts. It's like one big mental midget circle jerk.
Wow, that really sounds like flamebait. Oh well, being a musician myself, I feel I have a right to say that, flamebait or not. Besides, it'll be amusing trying to get my karma back up to the cap;-)
you have that computer loaded with Longhorn and a dozen or so Mirya tablets, one for each meeting attendee. They can work on materials being shared on one desktop in the same room, ala a whiteboard.
No they can't, because Mira only allows one user per machine at a time. Version 2, which will likely be released in 2004, will allow... 2 users! So no, it will be impossible to do what you discribe using Mira in the forseeable future.
I won't argue that Mira could be something cool, but it is hamstrung by Microsofts absurd user licensing policies. I expect that it will be possible to do what you describe once these devices are hacked to run Linux, but Microsoft has no plans to give you that functionality any time soon.
That said, though, it would be easy enough to create similar functionality using Linux with much cheaper hardware. Those web tablets have been mentioned, which seem to run about half the price of a Mira tablet, or a laptop would also work, and there are some laptops with touchscreens.
In short, there is nothing particularly cool or innovative about Mira. MS is taking something that's simple to do with *nix/X windows and hamstrung it to fit their licensing model.
I agree, it would be nice to get ahold of that report. I have never visited Mitre's site, I only know of them by reputation. I expect, though, that anyone who has heard of Mitre would find a pro-Linux (or anything else, for that matter) report from them convincing. That report would be a real boon to anyone trying to sell Linux in the enterprise.
Mitre has been tight with the government since just about the dawn of time. They were one of the origionators of what became the internet. At this point, I doubt Mitre has much difficulty getting contracts, especially from the DoD, since they have such a long-standing relationship. I think it is significant, however, that Mitre is pushing Linux. That, even more so than IBM's efforts, tells me that Linux has made it to the big time.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm not sure how to spell a word I usually look it up at Merriam-Webster. If I don't know how to spell it, I'm generally not exactly sure of the definition/connotation, and so it's probably a good idea to make sure that's really the word I'm looking for. It's also pretty good at making suggestions, and if I'm not sure that's really what I want, there's also a theraurus.
I've always been a bit of a spelling nazi, so for me a spell checker is just a tool to catch typos. I find it really irritating when it keeps questioning me simply because I have a large vocabulary. It doesn't seem like it should be that difficult, especially for a company like MS, to give their office suite a real dictionary. Maybe they sell one as a seperate add-on to bleed more money from their customers? I don't know.
The spell checker is just an annoyance, though. It's the grammar checker that really irks me.
That is true. I just installed 8.0, and YaST1 is quite dead. YaST2 text mode is quite painful, though, or at least it was in the 7.x releases. Navigation is horrible, being based mainly on the Tab key, with no way to go in reverse order that I've found. You can use the arrow keys anywhere that is a scroll window, but you have to tab out of that window to do anything with your selection (description/help, select/next, run, etc.). Then of course, if after looking at the description you decide that isn't what you're looking for, you have to tab through all the tab stops (as many as 12 in some windows) to get back to the selection window. It really sucks. YaST2 is just short of being unusable without a mouse. YaST1 was a much less capable tool, certainly, but at least it's text interface was designed for easy navigation with a keyboard. For basic admin stuff, like adding users over ssh say, YaST1 was much better than YaST2.
Where is this per-seat license laid out? I've read a lot of the articles, etc. surrounding this UnitedLinux thing, but nowhere have I seen a per-seat license mentioned by anyone actually involved in the project. What I have seen is a /. post mentioning a somewhat ambiguous phrasing in the UnitedLinux FAQ which could theoretically allow for the possibility that maybe they will use an End User License that is not quite typical of the Free Software Ideal. Nowhere is any specific licensing scheme, per-seat or otherwise, ever laid out, except by the Chicken Littles that have latched onto this ambiguous phrase and determined that the sky is falling. RMS heard the screaming and, without bothering to look up and see if the sky was actually coming down, joined the corus.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, quite the opposite. I know that I would go out of my way to not support a Linux vendor using per-seat licensing, and I think we've already seen that most of the Linux community feels the same. Frankly, after the beating Caldera took for bringing up the idea of a per-seat license, I'd be extremely surprised if anyone even considered such a scheme again, especially Ransom Love (he does give the impression sometimes that he just doesn't get it, though, so who knows).
This per-seat licensing thing is just a totally unsubstantiated rumor! Get over it, people!
There are plenty of other reasons to complain about the project, though. The fact that it's server only seems to me to be monumentally stupid. Linux seems to be doing just fine in the server market, and I don't see how this standardization effort will make much difference in that arena. Linux on the desktop, however, would derive incredible benefit from an innitiative like this. In fact, the lack of an innitiative like this is really the only thing standing in the way of Linux becoming viable on the desktop. If there were a serious effort to standardize for desktop distros, I bet we'd quickly see some of those missing apps being ported to that standard.
It's sure not Capitalism
Actually, it is Capitalism. It is not a Free Market, which is, I think, what you meant to say. They are not the same thing, but are often confused, especially by Americans, due to our political leader's tendancy to mash Capitalism, Democracy, and the Free Market together into a single, nebulous ideology.
Why is it still Capitalism? because the goal of Capitalism is to amass Capital, and the best way to do that is by establishing a monopoly.
It's a small point, really. Other than that I completely agree with you.
Were these "obvious misspellings" on the order of their/there/they're? In that case it would fall under grammar, not spelling. You can hardly blame a spell checker for not catching a mistake like that. Or, perhaps you have accidentaly added these misspellings to the dictionary, or have dictionaries for other languages installed also? Spell checkers work by comparing every word against their internal dictionary, so if the misspellings weren't caught, then it means those misspellings are in your dictionary as real words for some reason. Perhaps a friend decided to help you out by adding them for you?
I haven't installed 1.0 yet, but I haven't had the crashing problem you discribe. OO has only crashed on me once, ironically when I was trying to save.
The main reason I find the OO spellchecker better than the MS one is that it is more complete. Whenever I sit down at an install of MS Office that I haven't touched before I find myself having to add an absurd number of words to the dictionary (and yes, I know that they are real words and that they are spelled correctly). Don't even get me started on MS' grammar checker. Talk about lowest common denominator! I'm sure it's great for people struggling through English 1A, but it's a serious impediment to anyone more familiar with the language than that.
When I was a full time student I regularly checked on what discounts were available to me on various software packages. In general I found them to be not enough to be relevant. They didn't make them affordable to the average student, just less than you would pay through any other legitimate source.
Now that I've discovered GIMP and OpenOffice, though, it's largely irrelevant. They do everything I would use the various Adobe or MS packages for, and the price is right.
This is still good news, though. I would love to see StarOffice take over in schools. That would make things much easier for me as an OpenOffice user.
I've been using OpenOffice exclusively at home for about 4 months, and I'd be using it at work if I weren't stuck with this damned 2GB HDD and an Admin who's a VB programmer. OpenOffices spell checker has been great so far. In fact, I consider it to be much better, and more complete, than MS Office 2000's spell checker.
SuSE is NOT trying to make it's own standards, it is actually following the standards that are already there, namely LSB and FHS. It's Red Hat that isn't following the standards by being lazy and throwing everything under the sun in a single directory rather than having some kind of logical organization, perhaps based on one of the standards that has grown out of 30 years of *nix tradition!.
And if YaST sucks so bad, and Red Hat is so great, then why do I read so many hardware reviews that say "I couldn't get X to work under Red Hat, but in SuSE it worked automagically"?
You're a sick individual, and should probably seek counseling
;)
That's the one!
Thanks.
For some reason I'm thinking of a Monty Python sketch where they keep having to slap this politician upside the head because his tiny brain keeps getting dislodged...
SuSE installs lots of apps in /opt, but RedHat leaves it empty
/opt. What's the point of having the directories if you don't use them? Every one of those directories has a specific purpose, and has had that purpose since before Red Hat, or probably even the Linux kernel, existed.
That's exactly the problem. Red Hat piles everything in one directory, a lot of which belongs in other places, like
Hey, YaST1 beats YaST2 text mode any day of the week, especially if you don't have a mouse :P
It's the player that's important, not the format. If you had the choice between a DVD drive that won't play EVDs and an EVD player that will play DVDs and is $20 cheaper, which would you buy? I thought so. WMF is a straw man. Only Microsoft is trying to get DVDs to use it.
SuSE has every directory that Red Hat has and more (which is where the standards compliance comes in), so I doubt that is the problem. I'm guessing, then, that the ./configure is looking for dependencies in non-standard places, which is easily fixed.
./configure should tell you what it's looking for and where it expects to find it, though you may need to redirect or --verbose to get that info. find will tell you where the file actually is, and then it's a matter of either editing the ./configure or creating a symbolic link to the file where ./configure expects it to be. I usually go with the link, reasoning that other packages may look for said file in the same place.
The
If the file isn't on your system, then you'll have to find it and install it first, which is a problem all distros suffer from with certain packages. KDE, in prticular, has a reputation for having this problem.
Well, ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/8.0/ currently contains a README dated 5/23/02 saying that the 8.0 ftp version will be up in a few days. I'll have to try an FTP or NFS install sometime to see if I have the same problems you describe.
As far as missing packages, though, There are some that I wouldn't mind having to install by hand, like OpenOffice and Mozilla for example. That has more to do with their 1.0 releases being right after SuSE 8.0 was released, though.
To be fair, though, all the downloaded ISOs I've ever seen of either Mandrake or Red Hat have been missing packages as well. I didn't download them myself, so I don't know if it was just laziness on the part of the person that did, or if the ISO distros are squeezed down to one disk by the vendor to make it easier/save bandwidth.
Apparently, they've got a non-standard layout that many ./configure scripts choke on.
Actually, it is Red Hat that has a non-standard layout, and I've read a number of complaints about their choices (or, rather, apparent lack thereof), particularly with regards to directory structure.
SuSE, being the wierd Germans that they are, actually follow the two relevant standards very closely. The main one is the LSB (Linux Standards Base), which is supposed to fix the problems you describe. The other one I can't remember the name of right now, but it has to do with directory structure.
The problem you are having, as I understand it, is that you are trying to install rpms targeted at the hideous RH directory structure, as opposed to one that makes sense (and there are a few, remember that Linux builds on Unix traditions).
Sorry if that sounds like a flame to you Red Hat fans out there, but really, for what they charged for a boxed version, you'd think they could put some thought into organizing their files better than just mashing them all into one directory.
they take a loss on every ISO download? SuSE would probably have more market share if they gave away their YaST2 enabled distribution, but it's not in their business plan.
That's why SuSE Pro is $80 and Red Hat Pro is $200. To be fair, though, SuSE does give their distro away for free, just not as ISOs. Anyone can install it over FTP, and they provide instructions for doing so on their website. IIRC, it was also an option on the boot disk install menu (my Mother-in-Law's computer mourns the demise of the boot disk in 8.0), at least from 6.3 to 7.2.
I haven't tried it, so I don't know how easy/difficult it really is, but it's an available option, and certainly a viable one for anyone who has the bandwidth to download ISOs, especially since (at least in theory) you'd only be downloading the packages you were actually installing. There's certainly nothing stopping anyone from simply burning their FTP directories to CD. Hell, they even let you mount their FTP directory as an NFS partition if that floats your boat...
I'm aware of the comics, just as I am aware of the comics which Batman, Superman, and The Crow were based on, which is specifically why I metioned them rather than any of the other numerous series that Hollywood has fumbled. Having a lot of material to draw from doesn't make good sequels.
Attack of the Clones is a completely different kind of movie than Spider-Man, and trying to make direct comparisons between the two is asinine. AotC has a wide base to draw upon, and has a responsibility to expand upon that base, which it does quite well. It's not as if everyone hasn't known exactly what it would be about for the last 15 years. The only surprise is in the details, which is exactly as it should be!
I think it's fairly obvious that there will be at least 2 Spider-Man sequels, as Hollywood tryies to milk as much as it can out of it. If the Spider-Man franchise ever makes it to 5 films, I think it's a safe prediction that you will be far more disappointed in it than you are in AotC.
Remember how great the first Batman movie was? How about The Crow? Superman?
How old were you when the A New Hope came out? I was 2 years old. Star Wars absolutely dominated my childhood, it was by far the coolest thing any of us had ever seen. Guess what? The new trilogy holds the same place among kids of similar age today. My daughter is constantly asking to watch The Phantom Menace, she would watch it 5 times a day if we let her, and most of my friend's kids are the same way.
The new Start Wars movies dominate their culture just as the first three dominated ours, and I'm sure that they will be just as disappointed in parts 7-9 as some of us are in parts 1 and 2, and for the same reason: Nothing will ever be as cool as it was when you were a kid. Get over it.
And enought with this "Post 9/11 America" crap. It had potential in the first 3 months or so to become a positive, unifying force, but now it's become nothing more than a blanket pulled over our eyes so we can't see Bush holding the door for Ashcroft, Hollings, and the rest to cart our freedoms out for auction to the highest bidder. "Post 9/11 America" is a code word for the same kind of blind patriotism bullshit that fueled the Cold War, but without the altruistic aspect of fighting for Democracy.
some of the managers are ex-roadies. Most roadies are dumb as a box of rocks.
;-)
Most musicians aren't much smarter. If they had any brains they wouldn't be put in a position where they feel like they have to sign the infamous "standard contract". Of course, you already said that.
And strangely a lot of roadies seem to be musicians who aren't able to go anywhere on their music skills. And then there's the managers and musicians who end up as scouts. It's like one big mental midget circle jerk.
Wow, that really sounds like flamebait. Oh well, being a musician myself, I feel I have a right to say that, flamebait or not. Besides, it'll be amusing trying to get my karma back up to the cap
you have that computer loaded with Longhorn and a dozen or so Mirya tablets, one for each meeting attendee. They can work on materials being shared on one desktop in the same room, ala a whiteboard.
No they can't, because Mira only allows one user per machine at a time. Version 2, which will likely be released in 2004, will allow... 2 users! So no, it will be impossible to do what you discribe using Mira in the forseeable future.
I won't argue that Mira could be something cool, but it is hamstrung by Microsofts absurd user licensing policies. I expect that it will be possible to do what you describe once these devices are hacked to run Linux, but Microsoft has no plans to give you that functionality any time soon.
That said, though, it would be easy enough to create similar functionality using Linux with much cheaper hardware. Those web tablets have been mentioned, which seem to run about half the price of a Mira tablet, or a laptop would also work, and there are some laptops with touchscreens.
In short, there is nothing particularly cool or innovative about Mira. MS is taking something that's simple to do with *nix/X windows and hamstrung it to fit their licensing model.
I agree, it would be nice to get ahold of that report. I have never visited Mitre's site, I only know of them by reputation. I expect, though, that anyone who has heard of Mitre would find a pro-Linux (or anything else, for that matter) report from them convincing. That report would be a real boon to anyone trying to sell Linux in the enterprise.
Indeed it is
I'll have to remember that...
I think that Stenbit is a moron.
How is the NSA able to release security patches for Linux if they haven't tested it?
Mitre has been tight with the government since just about the dawn of time. They were one of the origionators of what became the internet. At this point, I doubt Mitre has much difficulty getting contracts, especially from the DoD, since they have such a long-standing relationship. I think it is significant, however, that Mitre is pushing Linux. That, even more so than IBM's efforts, tells me that Linux has made it to the big time.