The winning aspect of Ubuntu is: if something's too hard for a newbie, that's considered a reportable bug that should be fixed. This attitude makes all the difference.
It'll be solved as hardware manufacturers feel a need to target Linux.
Dell is already asking its suppliers for hardware that has a proper open source Linux driver rather than a binary blob. Expect this situation only to improve.
freedesktop.org is unifying what can be unified, and KDE and GNOME work with them enthusiastically. That's why apps from either systray properly in the other and why adding menu items just works, and why installing stuff under Wine puts stuff in the menu (though it frequently can't find the right place). Expect this to only get better.
This is arguably the right thing to do technically - central CPU is stupidly cheap, much cheaper than doing it in hardware.
The main problem with present sound cards is doing more than one thing at once - Audacity often can't play back one track while recording another because the sound card isn't up to the task, whereas a ten-year-old SoundBlaster would be just fine with walking and chewing gum.
The current uptake rate looks to me a lot like Firefox when it was called Firebird - gradual but accelerating uptake by word of mouth. And it took Microsoft until it was too late to get around to IE7.
OTOH, Windows Home Server will be a Windows 2003 (NT 5.2) variant - so they're still working on the old line.
It seems to vary per support area. I know that in Australia, HP's support is shit. In London, they can be pretty OK. Not as good as Sun, but quite tolerable.
Most annoying HP experience: three-way blamestorm with Red Hat over who supports bonding network connections on a DL580. Red Hat I expect to be shit at service (Red Hat licenses are things you buy to pacify PHBs and Oracle), but I woulda loved to been proven wrong. HP I was thoroughly disappointed by.
I'm a Solaris admin for a living. We stick with it because:
* Solaris is good and stable. Userland is horrible, but no-one uses that. * Solaris is UTTERLY PREDICTABLE and BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE. No sudden changes. If your old SunOS 4 binaries stop working, that's a reportable bug. * Sun hardware is pretty good. * Sun support is pretty good. This last is a big one.
Linux is fine, you know. And Solaris 10 feels like a sorta weird GNU/Solaris. If they can pull that off for Solaris 11 without losing their backward compatibility, then good.
We actually use Wine at work - we have a crappy old Windows binary blob written by a company that went bust, and we've yet to work around needing it. So we run it under Wine on CentOS. Wine is production quality for us - "works well" in such a case being "means we don't need another gratuitous unstable Windows box for a light load." It's a console app, I think the Win32 console interface is considerably better-defined than the zillions of graphical ones, so that probably helps Wine for completeness.
I believe MNG support was removed from Mozilla because it was almost unused and they didn't like the code. An extension is available, but it's pretty much a dead format.
PNG is the preferred lossless image format on Wikipedia (#9 website in the world), and in fact people go around converting GIFs to PNGs. The only use for GIFs is animations (because no-one supports MNG). This gives PNGs a large viewing audience.
A lot of people bitch about Wikipedia and express hope that Citizendium will be better. Just about 0 actually edit anything on Citizendium. Why is that? Can you think of ways of fixing this?
"I've worked with Windows all my working life and, despite what you may hear, it has been a blessing to us all: without it we would still be running Wang word processors on Wang hardware that saved documents in a Wang file format that can only be read by other Wang applications and printed on Wang Printers. Or HP, Or IBM, or Toshiba: whatever. It took a Big Bad Corporation to build a big enough operating system that everyone uses it, and every other software vendor works with it rather than against it, each other, and the user population. I fully expect the Big Bad Corporation to make a handsome profit from their systems and I am certain that Microsoft have behaved far, far better than IBM would've done if their DOS and their visual interface had established the natural monopoly that emerges from a widely-used operating system. But Vista and Microsoft's implementation of DRM is a clear indication that they have failed to balance the constant commercial compromise of profit, competition, quality, and customer service."
MUSTELASBURG, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Monday (Neues Deutschland) — Microsoft and Trabant have unveiled a complete new software system for car drivers. The "Sink" platform, introduced at the Mustelasburg auto show, will be available in over 12 Trabant vehicles this year.
The agreement is part of a constant quest by Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, for fresh vistas beyond the office supply market it dominates. Trabant, meanwhile, hopes that new technology will help it solve the problem of dwindling market share even in its home German market. "The market potential is absolutely enormous," said Markus Fields, Trabant's president for the DDR.
Microsoft is bringing its expertise to bear on all aspects of the new Trabant Langeshorn:
Improved compatibility with the original motor-tricycle version of the Trabant, while maintaining at least its level of crash safety. Not that the Trabant Langeshorn crashes.
The two cylinders of the two-stroke engine will be doubled in size, shortening the 0 to 100 km/h time to three hours and forty minutes, half what it was in previous models.
A colouring agent ("Aero") will be added to the exhaust, to accurately recreate the vapour trail of the twenty-first century flying car those people in the West are supposed to have by now.
The phenolic reinforced plastic body will be doubled in thickness for added crash protection. Not that the Trabant Langeshorn crashes.
Other "Aero" enhancements in the Trabant Langeshorn include pink alloy wheels, a musical horn playing Die Internationale and a metre-high spoiler.
"The thrust of our new model of car is to make it more attractive to Trabant owners," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. "Any Trabant driver knows Ferrari owners are just losers with penis-size issues and that their market share is insignificant. Ferrari just keeps proving over and over that it can't come out with a popularly priced Trabant-like model."
Microsoft expected its marketing muscle to go far in this new market battle. "Just imagine the joy a Ferrari mechanic will feel when they finally get to work on a market leader with industry muscle behind it like the Trabant."
You donated the hundreds of dollars to Wikimedia, which is not just Wikipedia the encyclopedia, which is of course not a newspaper.
However, Wikinews - http://en.wikinews.org/ - is a newspaper. Have you considered writing a story on the matter? Remembering of course to keep it firmly neutral.
However, Wikinews - http://en.wikinews.org/ - is a newspaper. Have you considered writing a story on the matter? Remembering of course to keep it firmly neutral.
WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A NEWSPAPER and WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A GRAFFITI WALL.
We're not here to report on the kerfuffle-du-jour. Give it a month and it will probably be notable. In the meantime, it'll be shot on sight. Because we're big m33nz0rz. Yeah.
Gossip from inside Microsoft is that the Silverlight project is a death march and people are transferring out of the doomed project team as fast as they can. The same process which led to Vista's vast successes.
That's complete bollocks. Fair use is far from well-defined and is an eternal game of brinksmanship. Courts have found it to include anything up to 100% of the work in question, depending on the circumstances.
Ah yeah. I was thinking a static HTML version and perhaps not the entire thing. Presumably more recent PDAs can take SDHC cards that would fit the current text database.
Slashdot Mirror
OOXML is a theoretically perfect standard that just happens to have no implementations whatsoever.
The winning aspect of Ubuntu is: if something's too hard for a newbie, that's considered a reportable bug that should be fixed. This attitude makes all the difference.
It'll be solved as hardware manufacturers feel a need to target Linux.
Dell is already asking its suppliers for hardware that has a proper open source Linux driver rather than a binary blob. Expect this situation only to improve.
freedesktop.org is unifying what can be unified, and KDE and GNOME work with them enthusiastically. That's why apps from either systray properly in the other and why adding menu items just works, and why installing stuff under Wine puts stuff in the menu (though it frequently can't find the right place). Expect this to only get better.
The main problem with present sound cards is doing more than one thing at once - Audacity often can't play back one track while recording another because the sound card isn't up to the task, whereas a ten-year-old SoundBlaster would be just fine with walking and chewing gum.
OTOH, Windows Home Server will be a Windows 2003 (NT 5.2) variant - so they're still working on the old line.
TFA 2006.
It seems to vary per support area. I know that in Australia, HP's support is shit. In London, they can be pretty OK. Not as good as Sun, but quite tolerable.
Most annoying HP experience: three-way blamestorm with Red Hat over who supports bonding network connections on a DL580. Red Hat I expect to be shit at service (Red Hat licenses are things you buy to pacify PHBs and Oracle), but I woulda loved to been proven wrong. HP I was thoroughly disappointed by.
I'm a Solaris admin for a living. We stick with it because:
* Solaris is good and stable. Userland is horrible, but no-one uses that.
* Solaris is UTTERLY PREDICTABLE and BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE. No sudden changes. If your old SunOS 4 binaries stop working, that's a reportable bug.
* Sun hardware is pretty good.
* Sun support is pretty good. This last is a big one.
Linux is fine, you know. And Solaris 10 feels like a sorta weird GNU/Solaris. If they can pull that off for Solaris 11 without losing their backward compatibility, then good.
Well, yeah. IBM will sell you service on anything. IBM is currently Sun's biggest reseller!
We actually use Wine at work - we have a crappy old Windows binary blob written by a company that went bust, and we've yet to work around needing it. So we run it under Wine on CentOS. Wine is production quality for us - "works well" in such a case being "means we don't need another gratuitous unstable Windows box for a light load." It's a console app, I think the Win32 console interface is considerably better-defined than the zillions of graphical ones, so that probably helps Wine for completeness.
These days, I'm more surprised when an app doesn't work well in Wine than when it does.
And Wine runs more Windows programs than Vista. "Wine: A better Windows than Vista."
I believe MNG support was removed from Mozilla because it was almost unused and they didn't like the code. An extension is available, but it's pretty much a dead format.
PNG is the preferred lossless image format on Wikipedia (#9 website in the world), and in fact people go around converting GIFs to PNGs. The only use for GIFs is animations (because no-one supports MNG). This gives PNGs a large viewing audience.
A lot of people bitch about Wikipedia and express hope that Citizendium will be better. Just about 0 actually edit anything on Citizendium. Why is that? Can you think of ways of fixing this?
"I've worked with Windows all my working life and, despite what you may hear, it has been a blessing to us all: without it we would still be running Wang word processors on Wang hardware that saved documents in a Wang file format that can only be read by other Wang applications and printed on Wang Printers. Or HP, Or IBM, or Toshiba: whatever. It took a Big Bad Corporation to build a big enough operating system that everyone uses it, and every other software vendor works with it rather than against it, each other, and the user population. I fully expect the Big Bad Corporation to make a handsome profit from their systems and I am certain that Microsoft have behaved far, far better than IBM would've done if their DOS and their visual interface had established the natural monopoly that emerges from a widely-used operating system. But Vista and Microsoft's implementation of DRM is a clear indication that they have failed to balance the constant commercial compromise of profit, competition, quality, and customer service."
MUSTELASBURG, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Monday (Neues Deutschland) — Microsoft and Trabant have unveiled a complete new software system for car drivers. The "Sink" platform, introduced at the Mustelasburg auto show, will be available in over 12 Trabant vehicles this year.
The agreement is part of a constant quest by Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, for fresh vistas beyond the office supply market it dominates. Trabant, meanwhile, hopes that new technology will help it solve the problem of dwindling market share even in its home German market. "The market potential is absolutely enormous," said Markus Fields, Trabant's president for the DDR.
Microsoft is bringing its expertise to bear on all aspects of the new Trabant Langeshorn:
"The thrust of our new model of car is to make it more attractive to Trabant owners," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. "Any Trabant driver knows Ferrari owners are just losers with penis-size issues and that their market share is insignificant. Ferrari just keeps proving over and over that it can't come out with a popularly priced Trabant-like model."
Microsoft expected its marketing muscle to go far in this new market battle. "Just imagine the joy a Ferrari mechanic will feel when they finally get to work on a market leader with industry muscle behind it like the Trabant."
However, Wikinews - http://en.wikinews.org/ - is a newspaper. Have you considered writing a story on the matter? Remembering of course to keep it firmly neutral.
However, Wikinews - http://en.wikinews.org/ - is a newspaper. Have you considered writing a story on the matter? Remembering of course to keep it firmly neutral.
We're not here to report on the kerfuffle-du-jour. Give it a month and it will probably be notable. In the meantime, it'll be shot on sight. Because we're big m33nz0rz. Yeah.
Or for GNUstep to be more filled out. Which is what GNUstep does now.
Gossip from inside Microsoft is that the Silverlight project is a death march and people are transferring out of the doomed project team as fast as they can. The same process which led to Vista's vast successes.
That's complete bollocks. Fair use is far from well-defined and is an eternal game of brinksmanship. Courts have found it to include anything up to 100% of the work in question, depending on the circumstances.
Ah yeah. I was thinking a static HTML version and perhaps not the entire thing. Presumably more recent PDAs can take SDHC cards that would fit the current text database.
That'd be a Tungsten C with a 2GB SD card.