It's fiction of course, but I think Star Trek had it more or less right. You can talk to the computer, and it can understand you and comply with requests, but people generally only use this capability for quick and dirty things: ordering food, making a minor parameter change to the holodeck, opening a communications channel, etc. When you're doing something like writing a Holodeck scenario, driving the ship, analyzing data, etc you use something that looks like a combination of keyboard and touch screen. When computers get smart enough to understand natural language you'll probably see speech interfaces for some tasks (a welding machine that could understand directions would be nifty for instance), but a version of keyboard and mouse probably won't be going anywhere for more intensive computation tasks.
True, my point was that they are significantly sub-par and need to be dealt with (how is sort of immaterial, this is a contrived example and we have no idea "why" these people are under-performing). The rest of the "bottom 10%" fall pretty well within median performance, and shouldn't be considered "under-performers" simply because they happen to be in some arbitrary percentile.
Let us postulate a company with 100 employees in a given category. Let us further postulate that this company can accurately measure the performance of these employees using the "Wigetizer Scale" which rates you on a scale of 1-100 widgets. Average performance is for the department is 75 widgets, maximum performance is 85 widgets. All employees but 5 maintain at least 70 widgets, those 5 rate between 45 and 60 widgets. Obviously those bottom 5 guys are a problem and should be fired. They consistently rate significantly fewer widgets than their pears. They would be included in a "slice off the bottom 10%" cut, but so would 5 more people who obviously can perform at close the levels of their peers (there's probably a decimal point between the performance of employee 90 and employee 89). Doesn't it make more sense to fire people who dramatically under-perform than to try and figure out whether Bob or Sue is the slightly less productive?
I have a serious love/hate relationship with Mail.app. I like the way the app is organized and it's generally one of the better mail apps I've used from a usability perspective, but it's probably the least stable Apple app on the computer. It's gotten better in recent updates, but still has the occasional memory leak or freeze-up.
1) Even on highly technical websites I doubt that everyone, or even most people, block ads. I don't, I find it more of a pain that occasionally dealing with the ads. Ad blocking tech blocks more content than the ads themselves ever obscure, and getting rid of obscuring ads is usually a one click operation, unblocking is often a multi-click operation.
2)People that block ads may affect raw site numbers (if I ban 1,000 of my 10,000 users for using ad blockers, that's a 10% drop in traffic), but has no affect on revenue. By nature, none of the ad blocking people ever made the site any money. While the loss of raw numbers might be a problem when the site is small (losing 10 people out of 100 is a significant drop in voices of the "community" since probably everyone knows everyone else), it's less of one with a larger site (there's no way I could get to know all 10,000 people on a larger site, so the unless everyone I know is in the list of 1,000 bans, it's not likely to be noticed).
I'm not saying that you don't necessarily use Linux at work, maybe even exclusively (I did for quite a while when I worked for a University). I'm saying that you can't afford to be Zealot. If you lose your current job, would you refuse to accept a new one because they made you use a Windows Workstation? Would you, as Stallman has suggested, refuse to open an MS Word Doc sent to you by a client? Even though OO.org can open Word Docs fairly successfully now, he still recommends this because the Documents are "entangled" with non-Free software. Would you refuse to use Flash websites that your job required you to access or a binary video drivers for a company provided video card? Certainly many people can use Free software a lot, or even all of the time. The vast majority of us are in no position to insist on it in every instance though.
At the moment, I manage servers with Solaris, Linux, and Irix installed, but my workstation is Windows. Period. It's a Fortune 100 company doing Government contracting, I had to move small bureaucratic mountains for permission to install CYGwin.
Irrelevant to right and wrong? Sure. Irrelevant to reality? Not at all. Winners and losers in this game are decided by how many people use your stuff. Just as winner and loser in elections are determined by numbers of votes. The FSF's stated purpose is to get people to use Free Software. That ain't gonna happen while most people don't know what Free Software is. Software market share, like elections, are in fact popularity contests. Being right has little to do with it.
The GGGP's point was that Stallman needs to be a better salesman if he hopes to accomplish his goal (which we understand as "many if not most people, ideally all of them, using Free Software). He needs to retool his approach around an understanding that, unlike 25 years ago, the vast majority of computer users don't actually know much of anything about computers. You can't win a Popularity contest when the vast majority of the people voting not only don't prefer your entry, they don't even know there is a contest going on.
Dreaming is all well and good. Practically speaking however, in a world full of more than 3 people, some compromise is necessary if you hope to see any of that dream come to pass. Stallman can dream all he wants about of world of perfectly free software, but in the real world, those of us who wish to eat use the Windows box our company gives us at work. We deal with user that don't know the difference between floppies and CDs (alright, that was years ago, but not that many years), let alone the difference between free and closed OSes. There are three types of people that can afford to be zealots about open source: those who don't need to worry about money, those who never use a computer at work and are pure hobbyists, and FSF employees. As far as I can see everyone else has to make some sacrifices somewhere.
No, that's the problem for you. The GP points out the problem for the vast majority of users. Personally I lean a bit more toward the GPL ideal over the BSD ideal, but it's fairly immaterial. 99.9% of computer users will look at what I just wrote and say "oh look, letters." They don't care. They don't even know enough to know if they want to care. If the software is cost-free, and it works, they might prefer to something that costs money or doesn't work as well, but that's as far as the analysis goes.
Stallman likens software freedom to a house, even if you don't know how to modify it they can pay a professional to do so. That's a fair analogy to a point, but the problem is that most people don't know or care that their software is "like a house". For them it's more like a car, a modern car with computers and stuff. They own it, they pay some one to fix it when it's broke, they do basic preventative maintenance if they're smart and know enough (I'm likening AV and spyware software to oil changes and tire pressure here), but otherwise they use it like a tool. They might be vaguely aware that they could pay some after-market guy to come in and make major modifications, but they don't see the point. It's dangerous (the car may no work as well afterward), it's expensive (often more expensive than the modification seems worth), and the car already does what they want it to. Many of them aren't even aware that an after-market exists.
P.S. I'm aware that the car analogies are overdone, but it was the best I could come up with. Flog me is needed.
That is the real issue. If global hunger was eliminated and basic rights where there for everyone (including basic education) then fanatical cultures or religions would have a hard time finding anyone to follow their suicidal ideas.
In general I agree with your comments and the West (particularly the US) has to address the issues of hunger and education in the third world if it ever hopes to be secure. Having said that, the West can hardly be blamed for all, or even most of the hunger and lack of education in the third world. Dictators that interrupt food aid (Myanmar comes to mind most quickly), religious and cultural biases against education (girls are being threatened with death and disfigurement for the "crime" of going to school in Afganistan right now, under the very noses of US troops trying to enforce the opposite policy), religious and cultural norms that insist people have more children than they can afford for the perceived status it grants them, all of these and many other issue are to blame for hunger and lack of education in the world. There is nothing the West can do about these issues, or very little at the least (my Afghanistan shows that even direct enforcement of western style values doesn't help much).
I'm by no means trying to say that the US and other "first world" nations don't share some of the blame, but we can't "fix" the problem. Certainly the Israelis could be more reasonable to the Palestinians (though that would be easier to argue if Hamas would stop randomly lobbing rockets into Israel), but them doing so will not change the culture of Palestine to make it value peace and education over personal bravery and violent action. The US could get out of Iraq, but it can't make Sunnis and Shiites like each other. There's only so much that the "West" can do, though I will grant you that we could do more of what we can do.
They didn't say anything about security. They were having the normal "Where's the safest place to sit on the airplane" conversation that every experienced traveler has had three or four times (at least) in their lives. They were completely misinterpreted, probably because they were Muslims. The FBI not only cleared them in less than two hours they specifically requested that the airline reseat them. According to both the family and the FBI there was NO security risk and no one got "irrate" until AFTER Airtran refused to reseat them. It was complete bull shit and never would have happened if they hadn't been Muslim.
The FBI agents eventually got them US Airways tickets and they continued their trip. The FBI doesn't clear you in two hours and HELP you continue your trip unless there was ABSOLUTELY no threat and they are being apologetic. Airtran totally screwed the pooch on this one, and now that it's made the front page of CNN.com (and they realized that one of the men is an attorney) they are back pedalling furiously.
It's kinda funny... Yesterday Airtran released this completely unapologetic press release, but after CNN pick it up and interviewed the FBI agents who contradicted the press release directly, they've now issued a formal apology. After all the agents have no dog in the fight and no reason to lie.
To call Exchange a "mail server" is more that a bit disingenuous. The usual term these days is "Groupware" server. Exchange (especially when combined with Outlook) is a very powerful business tool (and I say this as a person who doesn't particularly care for Microsoft and would love to hear about viable alternatives). It's an e-mail server sure, but it integrates with Active Directory consolidating all your user management tasks. It provides powerful calendar sharing and group calendaring features, shared and group task lists, interfaces with Project to enable managers and project leaders to create and manage tasks intuitively, shared address books, basic but usable CRM functions, and probably a few other things I've never used. Plus it scales all of this relatively well to at least a thousand or so users (I've heard hard times stories about larger installs, but never managed anything that big personally).
We spent a few weeks trying to come up with something that worked as well at my last job. There are a few things that come close, but precious few things do everything that Outlook/Exchange can. We were a pretty anti-Microsoft shop too, we looked pretty hard. I left before they made a final decision on groupware... I may have to call and find out what they decided on.
It depends entirely on the definition of "sex offender". If we wanna separate out the guys who pissed in a public place, got drunk at Mardi Gras and exposed themselves, the 18 year olds who had sex with their 16 year old girlfriends, etc, then I might, might, be convinced that additional monitoring after they serve their time is needed. Even then there are Constitutional issues, but you are right that recidivism on violent sex offenses is very high. Some consideration must be given to this fact. The problem is that "sex offender" is a very broad category and often includes people who have never been violent and who's crimes are often only vaguely sexual. Incidentally the places where the most restrictions are placed on sex offenders also tend to be the places where the definition of "sex offender" tends to be the most all encompassing.
There's an optional update to XP that puts the Desktop search bar in. I haven't tested it to see if it'll do what you're talking about (the only XP box I have is my wife's laptop), but it seems likely. Sadly I'm not an administrator on my work XP box, because that seems like a useful time saver.
But in actual fact many, many geeks are capable of being mentally vacuous. This is not to say that they (we) are all the time, but like everyone else, occationally the brain needs a drain. Whether it be Britney Spears, the latest Green Lantern comic, Duke Nukem Forever, or the latest edition of the Players Handbook almost everyone has some sort of vacuous and silly interest.
I rather doubt Google signed any contracts stating that each employee is due a HUGE bonus at the end of the year. It's a "bonus".
"We made a shit-pot of money this year, and you contributed a lot. Here's part of the shit-pot, thanks."
"We didn't make a shit-pot of money this year, you contributed a lot though. Here's a nice new phone, maybe next year if you and several others write something really cool with it, we'll have a shit-pot of money to give you part of."
That's because YOU did it. If everybody, or any appreciable fraction of everyone, did it then the botnets could adapt to it trivially. Since it's not a common thing to do, it happens to work for you. It's not like it's a technically difficult hurdle to overcome, and it's not like the botnet controllers wouldn't realize it was becoming a popular technique. It's essentially a form of security by obscurity that works for you because no great number of other people are doing it.
OK, there's a good chance you'll never see this reply, but you bring up a good point. IF one could get a pre-installed Linux computer with decent specs at the local Best Buy, AND the staff was trained to the point where they wouldn't automatically ignore it and try to sell you the Windows model; that would go a long way towards making "Linux on the Desktop" work. It doesn't address my point about real Office compatibility (though the vendors could ensure that Wine was installed and Office would work with a minimal hassle, which would go a long way to solving the problem), but it does address install headaches and (to some extent) marketing/awareness problems. Even re-installs, distro changes, or upgrades (any of which a "my dad" class user might take it into his head to do) would not likely be much of a problem since the hardware has probably been chosen with Linux in mind to begin with.
The problem is that such a thing really doesn't exist. Sure Dell and Hp will send you a Linux Desktop... If you know to make the specific effort to find them on the website, and are willing to put up with the very limited model choices. The limited number of Linux based netbooks are poorly speced compared to their Windows based counterparts, and even the anti-Microsoft crowd here admits to buying the better speced windows machines and installing Linux after the fact (which brings us right back to dad having to a) know Linux is out there, and b) hope the netbook has Linux happy hardware on it). If Red Hat or SuSE could convince one of the big boys to put their Linux on a number of consumer class machines and then either the computer vendor or the distro vendor really pushed so people would recognize and want those machines, this might go somewhere. "If you build it they will come" actually rarely works in real life unless you are phenomenally lucky or build a products that people suddenly realize they can't live without (often both are required).
If (let's say) Red Hat could convince (let's say) Dell to put Linux on a consumer line that Dell then advertised somewhat obviously on their front page AND the two companies paired up to do some cute "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" style ads on national TV, Newspapers, and non-tech magazines; then you might seriously be looking at people going, "Wow! I should try that." Until that happens, I stand by my three points.
Apparently you've never seen my Golden Retriever plan a heist. He's capable of a remarkable level of fore-thought, at least as much as I would give any two or three year old child credit for. He's learned to open "child-proof" trash cans, escape from no-roofed enclosures, and figured out the door knobs we used to have in New Orleans (they were the "handle" variety rather than the "knob" variety so he didn't need hands). He's also self aware and communicative to the point of being able to "talk" to us. If you ask him what he wants he'll show you. Granted 5 times out of 10 he wants food or a treat, but he's developed a vocabulary of wants. He can show you his food bowl, his water being low, his leash, the back door (he can separately tell you the he wants to "go out" to use the bathroom, or "walk" for entertainment), his toys, or even the couch (he sleeps on the couch at night and when my wife and I are in "his bed" to late he gets annoyed). He's also adjusted this vocabulary across three different homes without ever missing a beat. Ironically, we're currently living in an apartment and have to walk them every time they go out (no fenced yard). He still communicates "out" by going to the back door (which leads to a small porch he rarely ever goes out on), and "walk" with his leash. The "walks" are now trips to the park for a longer exercise.
Now our other dog, while she has a personality, doesn't display anywhere near the retriever's level of self awareness or fore-thought. She'll take advantage of his more successful plots when the opportunity arises, but left to herself would never be able to communicated her desires or plan food grabs. She's capable of basic communications and we usually know what she wants or needs, but she doesn't display anywhere near the retriever's vocabulary or nor his apparent understanding of "conversation".
As soon as I read this article, I started to think: "ya know, Grandma going to come into this before too long." Here she is, not even ten comments in too. I've recently come to the conclusion that we need to leave her alone; when it come to Linux on the Desktop, she isn't the problem. Grandma is pretty easy to deal with you see, she doesn't ask for much. Grandma's computer comes to her, she has somebody (Maybe her son, maybe her grandson, maybe some volunteer at the Senior Center) tell her how to get to the "Internet" (Web), her e-mail, and maybe if she's an "Advanced Gandma User" (AGU) her word processor. After that she uses those things, as they were configured, until someone comes in and changes them. I'm generalizing here of course, but this is what we generally think of as the grandma user. We could convert this person to Linux quite easily. Install OS, make sure that Firefox appears where IE used to and Thunderbird (pre-configured with mail servers of course) is where Outlook Express used to be. Maybe install OO.org for her. No problem, she's likely never know the difference between that and a Windows/Office upgrade.
The people that "Linux on the Desktop!" need to be worrying about are more like my dad or my wife. Neither of them is a Grandma Class user, nor are they experts. You'd be hard pressed to even call them hobbyists. They are fairly expert users. They can install software (and are smart enough to know not to install some software), use advanced features of the OS or applications they're familiar with, and get hardware working most of the time. In a pinch with good instructions they could probably set up a small home network or install an OS. You wouldn't want them in charge of company IT (and they wouldn't want to be), but they can keep their own computers up and running and mostly virus free. In a Starbucks or hotel they can find and hook up to the free wifi network to surf the web. When they buy a new computer they can set it up without the assistance of the Geek Squad.
These are the people (my thought is that to one extent or another I've just described a bare majority or large minority of users, maybe 40-55% of the total) that "Linux on the desktop!" must work for. They're not going to get the kid down the street to re-install their OS for them, they'll try to do it themselves. Maybe they'll make a mess of it and take the computer to Best Buy afterward, but they'll try. Through work or extensive home use they really know how to use Office and probably know more than one cute trick for making it do things more efficiently or to better suit the user's own work habits; they may even have a few simple VBS scripts under the hood (probably they haven't written the scripts, but they know what one is and may have modified one to suit some need). They understand conceptually what wifi is, and may have even setup a Linksys wifi router at the house. They may own an iPhone or other smart-phone, either through work or because they think the devices are "cool" (they may even have a Blackberry for work and another smart-phone for cool). They may even run Linux on their smart-phone, though if so they likely have no idea.
These are the people you have to convince for two reasons.
1) They are probably a bare majority or large minority of total users. This is pretty obviously the biggest block you're going to find.
2) They are very influential users. They very likely make decisions about what kind of computer at least one child or teenager has. They talk to other users and compare experiences. They probably buy a computer or help set one up for at least one "grandma class" user. They likely have some level of influence at work and can talk to bosses or IT guys about how they've started using this "new" system at home. They may even be bosses at one level or another.
So how can you lure these people in? Remember, the "grandma" market share and maybe even some corporate desktop market share follows this demographic. This is probably the demographic tha
I know the first thing my wife did when she got her iPhone was bitch about what a poor SSH client it was... Oh.. no, wait... She obsessively played with the web browser for an hour, ignoring the large screen laptop right in front of her, just because it was SOOO cool that she could surf the web that well on a phone. Then she started playing around in the app store. She still hasn't mentioned SSH, now I come to think of it.
Had she done so I might have shown her the SSH app I got from the app store which works perfectly adequately. The transparent on screen keyboard and zoom and scroll function mean that that it actually has a much larger usable screen area than SSH clients I've use on other smartphones with "real keyboards". Of course I still prefer a terminal window on a real computer for most of my SSH needs, but for quick "OMFG it's broke!" SSH access in from the mall or parking lot, it works quite as well as any other phone based SSH. Better than the one I had on my Treo that had 4 point fonts and incessantly warned me that my phone was incapable of real encryption so I was probably being spied on by half a dozen men in trench coats.
I agree with you that Apple could do many things to better support the Enterprise but I don't think you have show that this support will help their bottom line. Apple is a fantastically successful company that makes consumer products. All of the things you are proposing cost money and take time and energy away from their highly successful consumer products. Ultimately it might not be the best move for Apple over all. Sure they could do much better in that particular market but we aren't talking about a company that is hurting.
But I think the GP's point still stands. Apple MAKES enterprise hardware, and they CLAIM they want a piece of that market. Given this it is a back eye for them (however small or large a black eye as it relates to their overall market penetration) that they fail to properly support the enterprise. If you don't want to take the enterprise market seriously, withdraw from it. Stop spending dollars to develop and market Xservers and Xsans that either don't work as people expect or aren't supported to the level that Enterprise customers expect.
If they drop enterprise support completely, they save money (given what I've seen of there enterprise support, I can't imagine it makes enough to be worth its support costs). If they take enterprise support seriously they stand to make more money (selling to this market in volume is keeping most of the PC companies in business right now). By kind of wishy-washingly half supporting the enterprise they're both weighing down their balance sheets and creating an unnecessary level of discontent. Sure, they're doing fine as a company either way, but it never hurts to improve.
Lance should have been dead. if Lance was literally anyone other than Lance he WOULD have been dead. The treatment plan IIRC was "we'll give you enough chemo to kill any two ordinary people and count on the fact that you're Lance Armstrong to keep you alive long enough for it work". Somewhat to everyone's surprise this turned out to be a highly effective plan. Lance's survival was mostly due to the fact that his cardio/vascular system practically qualifies him as an X-Man.
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You're right, even when programmers talk among themselves they use pseudo-code; natural language is generally insufficient to describe algorithms.
It's fiction of course, but I think Star Trek had it more or less right. You can talk to the computer, and it can understand you and comply with requests, but people generally only use this capability for quick and dirty things: ordering food, making a minor parameter change to the holodeck, opening a communications channel, etc. When you're doing something like writing a Holodeck scenario, driving the ship, analyzing data, etc you use something that looks like a combination of keyboard and touch screen. When computers get smart enough to understand natural language you'll probably see speech interfaces for some tasks (a welding machine that could understand directions would be nifty for instance), but a version of keyboard and mouse probably won't be going anywhere for more intensive computation tasks.
True, my point was that they are significantly sub-par and need to be dealt with (how is sort of immaterial, this is a contrived example and we have no idea "why" these people are under-performing). The rest of the "bottom 10%" fall pretty well within median performance, and shouldn't be considered "under-performers" simply because they happen to be in some arbitrary percentile.
Let us postulate a company with 100 employees in a given category. Let us further postulate that this company can accurately measure the performance of these employees using the "Wigetizer Scale" which rates you on a scale of 1-100 widgets. Average performance is for the department is 75 widgets, maximum performance is 85 widgets. All employees but 5 maintain at least 70 widgets, those 5 rate between 45 and 60 widgets. Obviously those bottom 5 guys are a problem and should be fired. They consistently rate significantly fewer widgets than their pears. They would be included in a "slice off the bottom 10%" cut, but so would 5 more people who obviously can perform at close the levels of their peers (there's probably a decimal point between the performance of employee 90 and employee 89). Doesn't it make more sense to fire people who dramatically under-perform than to try and figure out whether Bob or Sue is the slightly less productive?
I have a serious love/hate relationship with Mail.app. I like the way the app is organized and it's generally one of the better mail apps I've used from a usability perspective, but it's probably the least stable Apple app on the computer. It's gotten better in recent updates, but still has the occasional memory leak or freeze-up.
1) Even on highly technical websites I doubt that everyone, or even most people, block ads. I don't, I find it more of a pain that occasionally dealing with the ads. Ad blocking tech blocks more content than the ads themselves ever obscure, and getting rid of obscuring ads is usually a one click operation, unblocking is often a multi-click operation.
2)People that block ads may affect raw site numbers (if I ban 1,000 of my 10,000 users for using ad blockers, that's a 10% drop in traffic), but has no affect on revenue. By nature, none of the ad blocking people ever made the site any money. While the loss of raw numbers might be a problem when the site is small (losing 10 people out of 100 is a significant drop in voices of the "community" since probably everyone knows everyone else), it's less of one with a larger site (there's no way I could get to know all 10,000 people on a larger site, so the unless everyone I know is in the list of 1,000 bans, it's not likely to be noticed).
I'm not saying that you don't necessarily use Linux at work, maybe even exclusively (I did for quite a while when I worked for a University). I'm saying that you can't afford to be Zealot. If you lose your current job, would you refuse to accept a new one because they made you use a Windows Workstation? Would you, as Stallman has suggested, refuse to open an MS Word Doc sent to you by a client? Even though OO.org can open Word Docs fairly successfully now, he still recommends this because the Documents are "entangled" with non-Free software. Would you refuse to use Flash websites that your job required you to access or a binary video drivers for a company provided video card? Certainly many people can use Free software a lot, or even all of the time. The vast majority of us are in no position to insist on it in every instance though.
At the moment, I manage servers with Solaris, Linux, and Irix installed, but my workstation is Windows. Period. It's a Fortune 100 company doing Government contracting, I had to move small bureaucratic mountains for permission to install CYGwin.
Irrelevant to right and wrong? Sure. Irrelevant to reality? Not at all. Winners and losers in this game are decided by how many people use your stuff. Just as winner and loser in elections are determined by numbers of votes. The FSF's stated purpose is to get people to use Free Software. That ain't gonna happen while most people don't know what Free Software is. Software market share, like elections, are in fact popularity contests. Being right has little to do with it.
The GGGP's point was that Stallman needs to be a better salesman if he hopes to accomplish his goal (which we understand as "many if not most people, ideally all of them, using Free Software). He needs to retool his approach around an understanding that, unlike 25 years ago, the vast majority of computer users don't actually know much of anything about computers. You can't win a Popularity contest when the vast majority of the people voting not only don't prefer your entry, they don't even know there is a contest going on.
Dreaming is all well and good. Practically speaking however, in a world full of more than 3 people, some compromise is necessary if you hope to see any of that dream come to pass. Stallman can dream all he wants about of world of perfectly free software, but in the real world, those of us who wish to eat use the Windows box our company gives us at work. We deal with user that don't know the difference between floppies and CDs (alright, that was years ago, but not that many years), let alone the difference between free and closed OSes. There are three types of people that can afford to be zealots about open source: those who don't need to worry about money, those who never use a computer at work and are pure hobbyists, and FSF employees. As far as I can see everyone else has to make some sacrifices somewhere.
No, that's the problem for you. The GP points out the problem for the vast majority of users. Personally I lean a bit more toward the GPL ideal over the BSD ideal, but it's fairly immaterial. 99.9% of computer users will look at what I just wrote and say "oh look, letters." They don't care. They don't even know enough to know if they want to care. If the software is cost-free, and it works, they might prefer to something that costs money or doesn't work as well, but that's as far as the analysis goes.
Stallman likens software freedom to a house, even if you don't know how to modify it they can pay a professional to do so. That's a fair analogy to a point, but the problem is that most people don't know or care that their software is "like a house". For them it's more like a car, a modern car with computers and stuff. They own it, they pay some one to fix it when it's broke, they do basic preventative maintenance if they're smart and know enough (I'm likening AV and spyware software to oil changes and tire pressure here), but otherwise they use it like a tool. They might be vaguely aware that they could pay some after-market guy to come in and make major modifications, but they don't see the point. It's dangerous (the car may no work as well afterward), it's expensive (often more expensive than the modification seems worth), and the car already does what they want it to. Many of them aren't even aware that an after-market exists.
P.S. I'm aware that the car analogies are overdone, but it was the best I could come up with. Flog me is needed.
That is the real issue. If global hunger was eliminated and basic rights where there for everyone (including basic education) then fanatical cultures or religions would have a hard time finding anyone to follow their suicidal ideas.
In general I agree with your comments and the West (particularly the US) has to address the issues of hunger and education in the third world if it ever hopes to be secure. Having said that, the West can hardly be blamed for all, or even most of the hunger and lack of education in the third world. Dictators that interrupt food aid (Myanmar comes to mind most quickly), religious and cultural biases against education (girls are being threatened with death and disfigurement for the "crime" of going to school in Afganistan right now, under the very noses of US troops trying to enforce the opposite policy), religious and cultural norms that insist people have more children than they can afford for the perceived status it grants them, all of these and many other issue are to blame for hunger and lack of education in the world. There is nothing the West can do about these issues, or very little at the least (my Afghanistan shows that even direct enforcement of western style values doesn't help much).
I'm by no means trying to say that the US and other "first world" nations don't share some of the blame, but we can't "fix" the problem. Certainly the Israelis could be more reasonable to the Palestinians (though that would be easier to argue if Hamas would stop randomly lobbing rockets into Israel), but them doing so will not change the culture of Palestine to make it value peace and education over personal bravery and violent action. The US could get out of Iraq, but it can't make Sunnis and Shiites like each other. There's only so much that the "West" can do, though I will grant you that we could do more of what we can do.
They didn't say anything about security. They were having the normal "Where's the safest place to sit on the airplane" conversation that every experienced traveler has had three or four times (at least) in their lives. They were completely misinterpreted, probably because they were Muslims. The FBI not only cleared them in less than two hours they specifically requested that the airline reseat them. According to both the family and the FBI there was NO security risk and no one got "irrate" until AFTER Airtran refused to reseat them. It was complete bull shit and never would have happened if they hadn't been Muslim.
The FBI agents eventually got them US Airways tickets and they continued their trip. The FBI doesn't clear you in two hours and HELP you continue your trip unless there was ABSOLUTELY no threat and they are being apologetic. Airtran totally screwed the pooch on this one, and now that it's made the front page of CNN.com (and they realized that one of the men is an attorney) they are back pedalling furiously.
It's kinda funny... Yesterday Airtran released this completely unapologetic press release, but after CNN pick it up and interviewed the FBI agents who contradicted the press release directly, they've now issued a formal apology. After all the agents have no dog in the fight and no reason to lie.
To call Exchange a "mail server" is more that a bit disingenuous. The usual term these days is "Groupware" server. Exchange (especially when combined with Outlook) is a very powerful business tool (and I say this as a person who doesn't particularly care for Microsoft and would love to hear about viable alternatives). It's an e-mail server sure, but it integrates with Active Directory consolidating all your user management tasks. It provides powerful calendar sharing and group calendaring features, shared and group task lists, interfaces with Project to enable managers and project leaders to create and manage tasks intuitively, shared address books, basic but usable CRM functions, and probably a few other things I've never used. Plus it scales all of this relatively well to at least a thousand or so users (I've heard hard times stories about larger installs, but never managed anything that big personally).
We spent a few weeks trying to come up with something that worked as well at my last job. There are a few things that come close, but precious few things do everything that Outlook/Exchange can. We were a pretty anti-Microsoft shop too, we looked pretty hard. I left before they made a final decision on groupware... I may have to call and find out what they decided on.
It depends entirely on the definition of "sex offender". If we wanna separate out the guys who pissed in a public place, got drunk at Mardi Gras and exposed themselves, the 18 year olds who had sex with their 16 year old girlfriends, etc, then I might, might, be convinced that additional monitoring after they serve their time is needed. Even then there are Constitutional issues, but you are right that recidivism on violent sex offenses is very high. Some consideration must be given to this fact. The problem is that "sex offender" is a very broad category and often includes people who have never been violent and who's crimes are often only vaguely sexual. Incidentally the places where the most restrictions are placed on sex offenders also tend to be the places where the definition of "sex offender" tends to be the most all encompassing.
There's an optional update to XP that puts the Desktop search bar in. I haven't tested it to see if it'll do what you're talking about (the only XP box I have is my wife's laptop), but it seems likely. Sadly I'm not an administrator on my work XP box, because that seems like a useful time saver.
But in actual fact many, many geeks are capable of being mentally vacuous. This is not to say that they (we) are all the time, but like everyone else, occationally the brain needs a drain. Whether it be Britney Spears, the latest Green Lantern comic, Duke Nukem Forever, or the latest edition of the Players Handbook almost everyone has some sort of vacuous and silly interest.
I rather doubt Google signed any contracts stating that each employee is due a HUGE bonus at the end of the year. It's a "bonus".
"We made a shit-pot of money this year, and you contributed a lot. Here's part of the shit-pot, thanks."
"We didn't make a shit-pot of money this year, you contributed a lot though. Here's a nice new phone, maybe next year if you and several others write something really cool with it, we'll have a shit-pot of money to give you part of."
There's about ten times the money to be gained on the dark side.
Plus they have cookies.
That's because YOU did it. If everybody, or any appreciable fraction of everyone, did it then the botnets could adapt to it trivially. Since it's not a common thing to do, it happens to work for you. It's not like it's a technically difficult hurdle to overcome, and it's not like the botnet controllers wouldn't realize it was becoming a popular technique. It's essentially a form of security by obscurity that works for you because no great number of other people are doing it.
OK, there's a good chance you'll never see this reply, but you bring up a good point. IF one could get a pre-installed Linux computer with decent specs at the local Best Buy, AND the staff was trained to the point where they wouldn't automatically ignore it and try to sell you the Windows model; that would go a long way towards making "Linux on the Desktop" work. It doesn't address my point about real Office compatibility (though the vendors could ensure that Wine was installed and Office would work with a minimal hassle, which would go a long way to solving the problem), but it does address install headaches and (to some extent) marketing/awareness problems. Even re-installs, distro changes, or upgrades (any of which a "my dad" class user might take it into his head to do) would not likely be much of a problem since the hardware has probably been chosen with Linux in mind to begin with.
The problem is that such a thing really doesn't exist. Sure Dell and Hp will send you a Linux Desktop... If you know to make the specific effort to find them on the website, and are willing to put up with the very limited model choices. The limited number of Linux based netbooks are poorly speced compared to their Windows based counterparts, and even the anti-Microsoft crowd here admits to buying the better speced windows machines and installing Linux after the fact (which brings us right back to dad having to a) know Linux is out there, and b) hope the netbook has Linux happy hardware on it). If Red Hat or SuSE could convince one of the big boys to put their Linux on a number of consumer class machines and then either the computer vendor or the distro vendor really pushed so people would recognize and want those machines, this might go somewhere. "If you build it they will come" actually rarely works in real life unless you are phenomenally lucky or build a products that people suddenly realize they can't live without (often both are required).
If (let's say) Red Hat could convince (let's say) Dell to put Linux on a consumer line that Dell then advertised somewhat obviously on their front page AND the two companies paired up to do some cute "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" style ads on national TV, Newspapers, and non-tech magazines; then you might seriously be looking at people going, "Wow! I should try that." Until that happens, I stand by my three points.
Apparently you've never seen my Golden Retriever plan a heist. He's capable of a remarkable level of fore-thought, at least as much as I would give any two or three year old child credit for. He's learned to open "child-proof" trash cans, escape from no-roofed enclosures, and figured out the door knobs we used to have in New Orleans (they were the "handle" variety rather than the "knob" variety so he didn't need hands). He's also self aware and communicative to the point of being able to "talk" to us. If you ask him what he wants he'll show you. Granted 5 times out of 10 he wants food or a treat, but he's developed a vocabulary of wants. He can show you his food bowl, his water being low, his leash, the back door (he can separately tell you the he wants to "go out" to use the bathroom, or "walk" for entertainment), his toys, or even the couch (he sleeps on the couch at night and when my wife and I are in "his bed" to late he gets annoyed). He's also adjusted this vocabulary across three different homes without ever missing a beat. Ironically, we're currently living in an apartment and have to walk them every time they go out (no fenced yard). He still communicates "out" by going to the back door (which leads to a small porch he rarely ever goes out on), and "walk" with his leash. The "walks" are now trips to the park for a longer exercise.
Now our other dog, while she has a personality, doesn't display anywhere near the retriever's level of self awareness or fore-thought. She'll take advantage of his more successful plots when the opportunity arises, but left to herself would never be able to communicated her desires or plan food grabs. She's capable of basic communications and we usually know what she wants or needs, but she doesn't display anywhere near the retriever's vocabulary or nor his apparent understanding of "conversation".
As soon as I read this article, I started to think: "ya know, Grandma going to come into this before too long." Here she is, not even ten comments in too. I've recently come to the conclusion that we need to leave her alone; when it come to Linux on the Desktop, she isn't the problem. Grandma is pretty easy to deal with you see, she doesn't ask for much. Grandma's computer comes to her, she has somebody (Maybe her son, maybe her grandson, maybe some volunteer at the Senior Center) tell her how to get to the "Internet" (Web), her e-mail, and maybe if she's an "Advanced Gandma User" (AGU) her word processor. After that she uses those things, as they were configured, until someone comes in and changes them. I'm generalizing here of course, but this is what we generally think of as the grandma user. We could convert this person to Linux quite easily. Install OS, make sure that Firefox appears where IE used to and Thunderbird (pre-configured with mail servers of course) is where Outlook Express used to be. Maybe install OO.org for her. No problem, she's likely never know the difference between that and a Windows/Office upgrade.
The people that "Linux on the Desktop!" need to be worrying about are more like my dad or my wife. Neither of them is a Grandma Class user, nor are they experts. You'd be hard pressed to even call them hobbyists. They are fairly expert users. They can install software (and are smart enough to know not to install some software), use advanced features of the OS or applications they're familiar with, and get hardware working most of the time. In a pinch with good instructions they could probably set up a small home network or install an OS. You wouldn't want them in charge of company IT (and they wouldn't want to be), but they can keep their own computers up and running and mostly virus free. In a Starbucks or hotel they can find and hook up to the free wifi network to surf the web. When they buy a new computer they can set it up without the assistance of the Geek Squad.
These are the people (my thought is that to one extent or another I've just described a bare majority or large minority of users, maybe 40-55% of the total) that "Linux on the desktop!" must work for. They're not going to get the kid down the street to re-install their OS for them, they'll try to do it themselves. Maybe they'll make a mess of it and take the computer to Best Buy afterward, but they'll try. Through work or extensive home use they really know how to use Office and probably know more than one cute trick for making it do things more efficiently or to better suit the user's own work habits; they may even have a few simple VBS scripts under the hood (probably they haven't written the scripts, but they know what one is and may have modified one to suit some need). They understand conceptually what wifi is, and may have even setup a Linksys wifi router at the house. They may own an iPhone or other smart-phone, either through work or because they think the devices are "cool" (they may even have a Blackberry for work and another smart-phone for cool). They may even run Linux on their smart-phone, though if so they likely have no idea.
These are the people you have to convince for two reasons.
1) They are probably a bare majority or large minority of total users. This is pretty obviously the biggest block you're going to find.
2) They are very influential users. They very likely make decisions about what kind of computer at least one child or teenager has. They talk to other users and compare experiences. They probably buy a computer or help set one up for at least one "grandma class" user. They likely have some level of influence at work and can talk to bosses or IT guys about how they've started using this "new" system at home. They may even be bosses at one level or another.
So how can you lure these people in? Remember, the "grandma" market share and maybe even some corporate desktop market share follows this demographic. This is probably the demographic tha
I know the first thing my wife did when she got her iPhone was bitch about what a poor SSH client it was... Oh.. no, wait... She obsessively played with the web browser for an hour, ignoring the large screen laptop right in front of her, just because it was SOOO cool that she could surf the web that well on a phone. Then she started playing around in the app store. She still hasn't mentioned SSH, now I come to think of it.
Had she done so I might have shown her the SSH app I got from the app store which works perfectly adequately. The transparent on screen keyboard and zoom and scroll function mean that that it actually has a much larger usable screen area than SSH clients I've use on other smartphones with "real keyboards". Of course I still prefer a terminal window on a real computer for most of my SSH needs, but for quick "OMFG it's broke!" SSH access in from the mall or parking lot, it works quite as well as any other phone based SSH. Better than the one I had on my Treo that had 4 point fonts and incessantly warned me that my phone was incapable of real encryption so I was probably being spied on by half a dozen men in trench coats.
I agree with you that Apple could do many things to better support the Enterprise but I don't think you have show that this support will help their bottom line. Apple is a fantastically successful company that makes consumer products. All of the things you are proposing cost money and take time and energy away from their highly successful consumer products. Ultimately it might not be the best move for Apple over all. Sure they could do much better in that particular market but we aren't talking about a company that is hurting.
But I think the GP's point still stands. Apple MAKES enterprise hardware, and they CLAIM they want a piece of that market. Given this it is a back eye for them (however small or large a black eye as it relates to their overall market penetration) that they fail to properly support the enterprise. If you don't want to take the enterprise market seriously, withdraw from it. Stop spending dollars to develop and market Xservers and Xsans that either don't work as people expect or aren't supported to the level that Enterprise customers expect.
If they drop enterprise support completely, they save money (given what I've seen of there enterprise support, I can't imagine it makes enough to be worth its support costs). If they take enterprise support seriously they stand to make more money (selling to this market in volume is keeping most of the PC companies in business right now). By kind of wishy-washingly half supporting the enterprise they're both weighing down their balance sheets and creating an unnecessary level of discontent. Sure, they're doing fine as a company either way, but it never hurts to improve.
Lance should have been dead. if Lance was literally anyone other than Lance he WOULD have been dead. The treatment plan IIRC was "we'll give you enough chemo to kill any two ordinary people and count on the fact that you're Lance Armstrong to keep you alive long enough for it work". Somewhat to everyone's surprise this turned out to be a highly effective plan. Lance's survival was mostly due to the fact that his cardio/vascular system practically qualifies him as an X-Man.