I'm as much an MS hater as anyone else, but still, "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence", or something like that, anyways.
The same thing that the lack of interest in Vista means for the average Joe; Average Joe will continue to run whatever OS is shipped on the PC they use.
Period.
Average Joe shops at BestBuy, Walmart, or Circuit City. Average Joe will, 90% of the time, purchase a Windows Vista computer, unless he happens to live near an Apple Store or choose to shop online. And most likely (85+% of the time) Average Joe will purchase a Windows Vista computer online.
Now, having said that, I find that if you evaluate "power users" or "IT Professionals", you have a different situation. There is a *great* deal of interest in Linux solutions. Now, does that mean people always choose Linux? No. But Linux has a substantial server/workstation market share, and is the majority in some market spaces.
Linux has no chance, ever, in the "Average Joe" market until Linux can be competitive in the retail space. By this, I mean either having "Linux Stores", or a significant number of Linux offerings at electronics stores, especially on the software side (games too).
One of the reasons Microsoft is stagnating is that it can. Microsoft, through years and years of delays with Vista, has determined that it really doesn't have to do *anything* to own the market. Should Apple or a Linux begin to see significant sales in the Average Joe space, MS Vista+1 will see serious improvement.
It's always arrogant to believe we have reached a pinnacle of technology; and when you "found" a market that isn't seeing much improvement year to year, you're seeing technological stagnation.
I'm working a business plan for a decent sized company, and our plan is to go all Apple, because iMac as "office" style workstations are not substantially more expensive than a similar setup from Dell.
Beyond that, why would we want to use Windows when we can use OS X; not to mention that the Apple business reps will help you out a little bit on price of you go to decent volumes.
As an employee at a chemical firm who likes to research this sort of "cutting edge" stuff, I took this over to our engineers, just for kicks.
Their primary complaint wasn't that you couldn't make a flexible robot (albeit perhaps a much slower one that described in the RFP). Their complaint was that the robot wouldn't have a CPU, or a brain, because we weren't yet at the capability of doing that kind of thing.
I responded that (excluding the exotic stuff like using a mouse brain) my cursory review of the RFP seemed to suggest there wouldn't be a problem with a couple microchips and/or electrodes floating around in the mess, just that it couldn't be over a certain size.
I would like to agree with you, but opening up those damn mini's is difficult. I've got 3, upgraded one, and gave up on the second after messing around with those plaster spatulas for about an hour.
I don't think it would, hypothetically, void your warranty, but I couldn't get the damn thing open.
Intel would *love* to see an end to the Microsoft monopoly. MS has had Intel by the short and curlies for some time; MS is the reason that Intel cannot work with non-x86 CPUs, and what killed the (somewhat) competitive Itanium 2.
Apple has demonstrated time and time again that they are willing to change architectures, buy the latest and greatest, and do not shirk at launching big expensive products at premium prices.
You can bet that Apple pays more than Dell does on a per-cpu basis, and guess what; they can afford to, because Apple has a significantly greater margin than Dell.
Why do you think that Intel has such excellent linux drivers cross the board? You can bet that Intel, although a MS ally, is tired of living under the Wintel shadow.
I've read about a Mini Cooper design that used a hybrid motor. It was an excellent design, with a gasoline generator powering 4 electrical motors which were located in each wheel hub.
Much of this restructuring has to happen in the poorer countries, and they are unwilling to restructure.
Take a look at North Korea, where the government makes the (mis)allocation of resources to military expenditures rather than food supplies. Take a look at Sudan, where the government has no interest in the health of its citizens, or Somalia, where there is no functioning national government.
By and large, the countries which have opened themselves to Western-style Keynesian socialist markets are developing themselves out of food security issues (China, India, and other developing 3rd world states). The other places, where nationwide starvation remains a chronic issue are either the result of natural catastrophe (Bangladesh), or broken governments (North Korea).
That's really very expensive, at least by U.S. standards. Frankly, your $270 stipend seems quite paltry given that you spend almost 1/4 of it on an internet connection.
Here, I get an 8/mbit/768kbit connection for $40 USD/month, and it bursts up to 24 mbit for 10 seconds per connection.
What kind of raid array are you using to record 2-3 HD channels at the same time, or, alternatively, what kind of capture cards are you using that do realtime hardware h264 or better encoding?
It doesn't make sense to compare Q1 to Q4, necessarily, especially when a manufacturer just experienced major growth. See this comment attached to that story: Apple's FY 1Q07 notebook sales dipped 2% from their FY 4Q06 sales because they had a huge 4Q due to education sales. FY4Q is usually Apple's strongest quarter for computer sales, not FY1Q. This whole issue is like being surprised there's a downturn in retail sales after the holiday season. What is surprising is that the dip was only 2%. Why is this 2 month old data being brought back to life?
Apple's 1Q07 computer sales were up 65% YOY! That's huge growth, not a downturn. Since 2001, their FY1Q sales have almost tripled (243%!). They went from selling approx 650,000 computers in the quarter to over 1,600,000.
As far as I can tell, Apple is doing something right, not wrong. Not to mention that their overall marketshare breached the 5% march for the first time, well, ever; their solidly at 6.5%, as of Feb 2007.
Feature wise, the ATI driver is improving, also in terms of stability (at least repeatable crashes).
My issue is performance. Performance-wise, a top of the ATI card performs more like an entry level Nvidia card, both using proprietary drivers.
This sucks. I've waited through several generations of ATI cards (bought a 9800 Pro, replaced it with a Geforce FX 5900, now using an X1600 on my MacBook Pro), and Linux performance still is an order of magnitude worse than on Windows.
Nvidia cards are, by and large, performance competitive on Windows or Linux. I cannot really play World of Warcraft on Linux with an ATI, but everything works beautifully in Windows and/or OS X. This is unfortunate.
I suspect you might have to tweak your settings. I get an incredible amount of mileage out of these things:-)
We've got 4 running at my office, one as a main router/DHCP server/QoS firewall, one as a primary access point, two as bridges. The main one does QoS, and we've got ~8 employees online at any given time, with a non-trivial amount of network traffic, especially when I'm here.
We also run all of our phone over vonage (6 lines!), all through this little DD-WRT box, and it runs like a champ. Load averages about 1, which is a little high, but it keeps on running just fine. I find that it helps to keep the "router" box running without wireless enabled, with a secondary box to handle wireless functionality.
Why do I prefer DD-WRT to a separate computer, like I used to have? Simple; reboots are faster, the hardware is drop-dead easy to replace if there's a failure, and power consumption is substantially less.
Everything is tweakable, the system is very stable, even in high traffic areas, and you will be able to get it to work reliably (mine does, with 15-20 other access points visible). In fact, I have two, and one serves as a wireless bridge, in a very high traffic area. I've had 40 days or so of up-time.
Even better, you get things like forced QoS, a lot of flexibility in terms of services (DyDNS? Check. Local DyDNS? Check. Excellent Port Triggering? Check. An iptables based firewall? Check. 802.11 briding? Check), and a future-proof, at least in terms of encryption, router (WEP WPA WPA2).
Consider: 1. The FCC controls airwave licenses. 2. A significant number of people out there do not have the means, or rightfully refuse to upgrade to a television capable of decoding over the air digital signals. 3. A significant number of people out there do not have the mans, or rightfully refuse to purchase cable and/or satellite service, yet they continue to watch TV via over the air signals. 4. Eliminating analog over the air signals will open up gobs of frequencies for other uses; including 2-way communications, IP communications, and more digital channels, both TV and radio. 5. Finally, $990 million is _nothing_ compared to how much auctioning off the new spectrum will generate in revenue for the FCC. The last auction generated something like $40 billion; $990 million in order to generate good will among the populace, and ensure that the working class (working poor) does not get cut off from their TV, is a win-win.
If the government didn't have a plan like this, most likely the analog over-the-air signals would end up continuing. This is a *bad* thing, as that spectrum is very valuable, and being used inefficiently.
Is this government intervention? Yes, of course it is. Unfortunately, this is a situation that libertarian's like myself have to learn to handle delicately, because it involves an actual *public* good, that being frequency spectrum.
Perhaps it is a PPD file issue, because both pxlmono and hplip will use the same PPD, no?
Still, I'd suggest going to the HP mailing list, just because this is the sort of semi-related issue that they will want worked out:)
If there is a distro-wide issue with Ubuntu's PCL6 support, it would make sense to make the Ubuntu HP maintainers aware, and I bet that they are reading the HPLIP lists.
Wish I could help you further, but without access to a printer that exhibits this problem, I' m stuck;-) Best of luck, and I know that this is, unfortunately, not the right kind of support to promote Linux on the desktop:(
If so, I suggest filing a bug report with HP; they have semi-official Linux support, and the issue is most likely in HPLIP, the HP Printing stack for Linux.
Assuming this is a software problem, it would be nice if you could report it, so that someone from HP can fix it. This will probably take less effort for you than upgrading your distro, or, perhaps, they'll tell you, "Fixed in version XX, avaliable on YY distro."
If you choose not to subscribe to the mailing list I might suggest a) being very polite;-) and b) requesting replies to e-mail you in addition to the list.
Depends on how buggy your laptop's bios is. MS has access to all the manufacturer's work arounds, and the Linux community does not. Reference implementations, or close to reference implementations work well, as do models with a lot of marketshare (ThinkPads, Dells).
My MacBook Pro suspends/resumes just fine using suspend to ram.
Slashdot Mirror
*shrug*
I'm as much an MS hater as anyone else, but still, "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence", or something like that, anyways.
The same thing that the lack of interest in Vista means for the average Joe; Average Joe will continue to run whatever OS is shipped on the PC they use.
Period.
Average Joe shops at BestBuy, Walmart, or Circuit City. Average Joe will, 90% of the time, purchase a Windows Vista computer, unless he happens to live near an Apple Store or choose to shop online. And most likely (85+% of the time) Average Joe will purchase a Windows Vista computer online.
Now, having said that, I find that if you evaluate "power users" or "IT Professionals", you have a different situation. There is a *great* deal of interest in Linux solutions. Now, does that mean people always choose Linux? No. But Linux has a substantial server/workstation market share, and is the majority in some market spaces.
Linux has no chance, ever, in the "Average Joe" market until Linux can be competitive in the retail space. By this, I mean either having "Linux Stores", or a significant number of Linux offerings at electronics stores, especially on the software side (games too).
One of the reasons Microsoft is stagnating is that it can. Microsoft, through years and years of delays with Vista, has determined that it really doesn't have to do *anything* to own the market. Should Apple or a Linux begin to see significant sales in the Average Joe space, MS Vista+1 will see serious improvement.
It's always arrogant to believe we have reached a pinnacle of technology; and when you "found" a market that isn't seeing much improvement year to year, you're seeing technological stagnation.
So, you have a clue? Remember, GP is talking about a small business (20-40) employees.
If, for a moment, I was willing to deal with Vista, how much would it cost me for 20 Dells similarly equipped to 20 iMacs?
Or do you not have a clue?
*shrug*
I'm working a business plan for a decent sized company, and our plan is to go all Apple, because iMac as "office" style workstations are not substantially more expensive than a similar setup from Dell.
Beyond that, why would we want to use Windows when we can use OS X; not to mention that the Apple business reps will help you out a little bit on price of you go to decent volumes.
As an employee at a chemical firm who likes to research this sort of "cutting edge" stuff, I took this over to our engineers, just for kicks.
Their primary complaint wasn't that you couldn't make a flexible robot (albeit perhaps a much slower one that described in the RFP). Their complaint was that the robot wouldn't have a CPU, or a brain, because we weren't yet at the capability of doing that kind of thing.
I responded that (excluding the exotic stuff like using a mouse brain) my cursory review of the RFP seemed to suggest there wouldn't be a problem with a couple microchips and/or electrodes floating around in the mess, just that it couldn't be over a certain size.
Dude,
I would like to agree with you, but opening up those damn mini's is difficult. I've got 3, upgraded one, and gave up on the second after messing around with those plaster spatulas for about an hour.
I don't think it would, hypothetically, void your warranty, but I couldn't get the damn thing open.
You have it backwards.
Intel would *love* to see an end to the Microsoft monopoly. MS has had Intel by the short and curlies for some time; MS is the reason that Intel cannot work with non-x86 CPUs, and what killed the (somewhat) competitive Itanium 2.
Apple has demonstrated time and time again that they are willing to change architectures, buy the latest and greatest, and do not shirk at launching big expensive products at premium prices.
You can bet that Apple pays more than Dell does on a per-cpu basis, and guess what; they can afford to, because Apple has a significantly greater margin than Dell.
Why do you think that Intel has such excellent linux drivers cross the board? You can bet that Intel, although a MS ally, is tired of living under the Wintel shadow.
It doesn't come with OS X, but Fink is easily installed, and is quite an excellent .DEB based package manager. Tons of packages in Fink. :)
I've read about a Mini Cooper design that used a hybrid motor. It was an excellent design, with a gasoline generator powering 4 electrical motors which were located in each wheel hub.
0 -hp-0-60-in-45-seconds.html
Here's the link: http://www.leftlanenews.com/hybrid-mini-offers-64
640 hp, 0-60 in 4.5 seconds, 160 hp per wheel-motor, and a 3 prong plug-in-the-wall adapter for charging the batteries up.
Cool, huh?
Much of this restructuring has to happen in the poorer countries, and they are unwilling to restructure.
Take a look at North Korea, where the government makes the (mis)allocation of resources to military expenditures rather than food supplies. Take a look at Sudan, where the government has no interest in the health of its citizens, or Somalia, where there is no functioning national government.
By and large, the countries which have opened themselves to Western-style Keynesian socialist markets are developing themselves out of food security issues (China, India, and other developing 3rd world states). The other places, where nationwide starvation remains a chronic issue are either the result of natural catastrophe (Bangladesh), or broken governments (North Korea).
I love it!
This kind of nonsense is truly the best one can find.
Grade A LSBS. You should join a propaganda team.
Bravo.
8mbit/512kbit connect at 70$ USD/month
That's really very expensive, at least by U.S. standards. Frankly, your $270 stipend seems quite paltry given that you spend almost 1/4 of it on an internet connection.
Here, I get an 8/mbit/768kbit connection for $40 USD/month, and it bursts up to 24 mbit for 10 seconds per connection.
What kind of raid array are you using to record 2-3 HD channels at the same time, or, alternatively, what kind of capture cards are you using that do realtime hardware h264 or better encoding?
That article uses goofy statistics.
It doesn't make sense to compare Q1 to Q4, necessarily, especially when a manufacturer just experienced major growth. See this comment attached to that story:
Apple's FY 1Q07 notebook sales dipped 2% from their FY 4Q06 sales because they had a huge 4Q due to education sales. FY4Q is usually Apple's strongest quarter for computer sales, not FY1Q. This whole issue is like being surprised there's a downturn in retail sales after the holiday season. What is surprising is that the dip was only 2%. Why is this 2 month old data being brought back to life?
Apple's 1Q07 computer sales were up 65% YOY! That's huge growth, not a downturn. Since 2001, their FY1Q sales have almost tripled (243%!). They went from selling approx 650,000 computers in the quarter to over 1,600,000.
As far as I can tell, Apple is doing something right, not wrong. Not to mention that their overall marketshare breached the 5% march for the first time, well, ever; their solidly at 6.5%, as of Feb 2007.
Feature wise, the ATI driver is improving, also in terms of stability (at least repeatable crashes).
My issue is performance. Performance-wise, a top of the ATI card performs more like an entry level Nvidia card, both using proprietary drivers.
This sucks. I've waited through several generations of ATI cards (bought a 9800 Pro, replaced it with a Geforce FX 5900, now using an X1600 on my MacBook Pro), and Linux performance still is an order of magnitude worse than on Windows.
Nvidia cards are, by and large, performance competitive on Windows or Linux. I cannot really play World of Warcraft on Linux with an ATI, but everything works beautifully in Windows and/or OS X. This is unfortunate.
Hmm?
What do they run Gmail on, then?
Hmmm...
:-)
I suspect you might have to tweak your settings. I get an incredible amount of mileage out of these things
We've got 4 running at my office, one as a main router/DHCP server/QoS firewall, one as a primary access point, two as bridges. The main one does QoS, and we've got ~8 employees online at any given time, with a non-trivial amount of network traffic, especially when I'm here.
We also run all of our phone over vonage (6 lines!), all through this little DD-WRT box, and it runs like a champ. Load averages about 1, which is a little high, but it keeps on running just fine. I find that it helps to keep the "router" box running without wireless enabled, with a secondary box to handle wireless functionality.
Why do I prefer DD-WRT to a separate computer, like I used to have? Simple; reboots are faster, the hardware is drop-dead easy to replace if there's a failure, and power consumption is substantially less.
*shrug* Works for me, but I get that YMMV.
Simple. Get any router than you can install DD-WRT from http://www.dd-wrt.com/ on.
Everything is tweakable, the system is very stable, even in high traffic areas, and you will be able to get it to work reliably (mine does, with 15-20 other access points visible). In fact, I have two, and one serves as a wireless bridge, in a very high traffic area. I've had 40 days or so of up-time.
Even better, you get things like forced QoS, a lot of flexibility in terms of services (DyDNS? Check. Local DyDNS? Check. Excellent Port Triggering? Check. An iptables based firewall? Check. 802.11 briding? Check), and a future-proof, at least in terms of encryption, router (WEP WPA WPA2).
Goofy.
The answer is simple. End-to-end encryption of _everything_.
One wonders how the Chinese government would respond to that.
It does, sort of.
Who's paying for this? The FCC.
Who's going to bring in billions of dollars auctioning off the newly allocated digital spectrum? The FCC.
Consider:
1. The FCC controls airwave licenses.
2. A significant number of people out there do not have the means, or rightfully refuse to upgrade to a television capable of decoding over the air digital signals.
3. A significant number of people out there do not have the mans, or rightfully refuse to purchase cable and/or satellite service, yet they continue to watch TV via over the air signals.
4. Eliminating analog over the air signals will open up gobs of frequencies for other uses; including 2-way communications, IP communications, and more digital channels, both TV and radio.
5. Finally, $990 million is _nothing_ compared to how much auctioning off the new spectrum will generate in revenue for the FCC. The last auction generated something like $40 billion; $990 million in order to generate good will among the populace, and ensure that the working class (working poor) does not get cut off from their TV, is a win-win.
If the government didn't have a plan like this, most likely the analog over-the-air signals would end up continuing. This is a *bad* thing, as that spectrum is very valuable, and being used inefficiently.
Is this government intervention? Yes, of course it is. Unfortunately, this is a situation that libertarian's like myself have to learn to handle delicately, because it involves an actual *public* good, that being frequency spectrum.
I made a mistake, and another poster corrected me :)
I meant CLEC. It was a brain fart. Sorry.
Hmm... Odd.
:)
;-) Best of luck, and I know that this is, unfortunately, not the right kind of support to promote Linux on the desktop :(
Perhaps it is a PPD file issue, because both pxlmono and hplip will use the same PPD, no?
Still, I'd suggest going to the HP mailing list, just because this is the sort of semi-related issue that they will want worked out
If there is a distro-wide issue with Ubuntu's PCL6 support, it would make sense to make the Ubuntu HP maintainers aware, and I bet that they are reading the HPLIP lists.
Wish I could help you further, but without access to a printer that exhibits this problem, I' m stuck
Does it print correctly on Windows?
;-) and b) requesting replies to e-mail you in addition to the list.
If so, I suggest filing a bug report with HP; they have semi-official Linux support, and the issue is most likely in HPLIP, the HP Printing stack for Linux.
It's not the easiest way to get support for someone who is unfamiliar with mailing lists, but they do have HP personnel here: http://hplip.sourceforge.net/mailing_lists.html
Assuming this is a software problem, it would be nice if you could report it, so that someone from HP can fix it. This will probably take less effort for you than upgrading your distro, or, perhaps, they'll tell you, "Fixed in version XX, avaliable on YY distro."
If you choose not to subscribe to the mailing list I might suggest a) being very polite
Depends on how buggy your laptop's bios is. MS has access to all the manufacturer's work arounds, and the Linux community does not. Reference implementations, or close to reference implementations work well, as do models with a lot of marketshare (ThinkPads, Dells).
My MacBook Pro suspends/resumes just fine using suspend to ram.