MS is on the death march toward Vista, the death march toward Office 2007, the death march towards a.Net strategy.
Wars on the IE front, Wars on the server front, Wars on the standards fronts.
Legal battles with various corporations, the patent office, and various governments.
Let them come against Linux. Who are they going to pick a fight with, IBM? Redhat? Novell? Maybe this lawsuit will break the (MS) camel's back. I do know that discovery in any MS versus (Linux Corp.) case will be very, very interesting. Linux's dirty laundry is avaliable for everyone to see, but won't it be nice for (Linux Corp's) our lawyers to take a look at MS source, MS confidential e-mails, MS's internal documents?
I think so. Not to mention that IBM'll be able to contribute a bunch of that stuff from their current discovery involving MS's contacts with SCO. And if IBM gets drawn into (Linux Corp) versus MS, I think very interesting things will happen.
Not to mention that MS will never have any success versus Linux; even if they smear one linux company, the "community" will rewrite those portions, and move on.
Actually this is a general feature of most software. Just not Microsoft's software.
Most software gets _faster_ in between versions. New features may run slower, but other aspects of the software should speed up, not slow down. Optimization takes time.
People are just used to Microsoft, where (version ++1) = (hardware ++1)
SMART package manager, Checkinstall, and Kommander.
Everything goes on my system via RPM. Sometimes I get the RPMS from APT, sometimes from YAST, sometimes from YUM, somtimes from a directory of RPMs.
Sometimes my RPMs are build from source tarballs (checkinstall). But this way, every piece of software on my system is managed via RPM, and this makes a huge difference from allowing./configure make make install to drop random files all over the place.
MS Office and OpenOffice.org aren't really competitors. OOorg only competes with MS Office in one segment of the market; individuals and small business.
OOorg, however, has a big brother for the mid-size and enterprises sectors: IBM's Workplace. And this delay in Office 2007 WILL be a significant boost to Workplace deployments.
And that's gravy for OOrg, because Workplace uses OpenDocument.
This is bullshit. I've tested this myself, multiple times.
Take a computer luddite who's semi-used to Windows XP. I don't mean this in a cruel way, but my father (a brilliant post-doc organic chemist), my gf's mom (also smart), my grandma, and our secretary have all been switched to OS X.
They became proficient within a month or so, at a higher level than their ability to use Windows after _years_ of usage.
Windows is a UI nightmare. Windows is not intuitive or easy to use.
This stuff does NOT sound like stuff Microsoft wants him to say:
Worst of all, I can't believe Microsoft actually held this big nonevent "event" only a few days before announcing another screw-up in Vista. If Ballmer knew he was about to announce a delay and still had this event, he's crazy. If he didn't know Vista was about to slip again, then Microsoft is in worse shape than anyone realizes.
Microsoft can't afford to screw up like this. There are free alternatives to everything Microsoft sells, like the Linux operating system and the Open Office application suite. Rivals like Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ), Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) and, yes, IBM are pushing those programs big time.
Given Microsoft's delays I can't believe open-source stuff still hasn't caught on for desktop computers. It's amazing, but people will wait months and months for products that are so complicated that no ordinary person can figure out how to use them.
Why not at least switch to an Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) Mac? Apple's new operating system is stable, reliable and easy to use. The applications are simple, gorgeous and work well together. And they're here. Today. Steve Jobs must be waking up a happy man this morning.
Add in YaST repositories, APT, YUM, RedCarpet, or just dumps of RPMs, DEBs, whatever. Add in all the mirrors you can think of (it automatically prioritizes them by download speed). I find it convenient to also have a local "RPM" directory, where I drop random packages that I want to install. This is my local "repository".
It's slick, it handles conditional dependancies nicely, and it doesn't choke on "broken" systems the way apt does (sometimes you WANT to leave your system partially broken, the SuSE pygtk2 nonsense comes to mind). It's not _yet_ production quality, but its pretty damn good. I expect a lot out of version 1.0.
Oh, and if you want to install from source.... get checkinstall, and possible Kommander (latter is buggy). Checkinstall does./configure, make, and make install for you, but does it in a chroot, and then builds an RPM. You can then manage this RPM like any other.
Pretty slick, huh? Kommander is a GUI front end, which relies upon checkinstall.
Is SuSE FOSS or not? 'cause on SuSE the only thing you have to do to install an Nvidia driver is run "system update", and click on "Install Nvidia driver" in the list of available updates.
One X-server restart later, and you've got working OpenGL. What's so tricky about that?
However, our per minute costs are generally lower, as are the per SMS costs.
I pay $0.05 per SMS or MMS message, text, video, audio, whatever. It costs me both incoming and outgoing.
I pay $45.99 for 1500 minute a month, incoming and outgoing. Calls after 9pm(through 7 am) on weekdays are free. Weekends are free, as are calls to other T-mobile subscribers.
I average ~2250 minutes usage a month. I also pay an additional $19.99 for unlimited data. Sadly, its only at EDGE rates. Still, I use an average of 50-80 megs per month, which would cost quite a bit in some parts of the world.
I used to be a firm KDE kamp member, but lately I've started to swing towards gnome.
Why?
1. Looks;-) Take a look at Novell's Linux Desktop 10.1 Preview. You can search for OpenSuSE 10.1 beta screenshots. Gnome is the default, the default "look" is very, very clear and usable. It's not terribly sexy, but the icons are goregous, and the clean lines are a welcome change from KDE's proliferation of settings and dialogues.
2. Now, Gnome's loosing in the raw "theme" eye candy category, but they have KDE crushed in eye candy. How? Some neat new features. For one, SVG themeing on GNOME is a lot further along than KDE. For two, Cairo-GTK. This means that your SVG themes become DPI indepedant, as well as antialiased. This is a vast visibility improvement. Three, XGL integration. XGL is beautiful. XGL makes your linux desktop feel greater. A double buffered openGL desktop really makes everything feel more tactile.
3. Search. Beagle works, Kat doesn't. Kat, in its current iterations, exhibits horrifying memory leaks. My 2 GB desktop system slows to a crawl after 8 hours of indexing. Beagle works perfectly. Maybe it's cause I'm used to spotlight, but good, real-time fulltext search of your system is an incredible thing. It really makes it far less necessary to organize your files, you can spend less time on maintenance and more time working, and that's a good thing.
4. Fit and Finish. Some of this is in themeing (Gnome's interface exhibits less 'mis-alignment' of icons/images in interfaces, and other little uglies), and some of this is in userspace utilities. Gnome's networking is more reliable than KDEs. For whatever reason, all kinds of browsing on my KDE setup are semi-broken. SMB doesn't always work, nor does a variety of other kio:// interfaces.
Of course, I'm happy about this stuff, and I can't say that I've switched to Gnome for good. The last time I experimented with Gnome, the printing interface, the file browser, the (lack of) a menu editor, and nautilus were all vastly inferior to their KDE counterparts. Now, Gnome's various dialogues and interfaces are pretty functionally similar to KDE and more reliable. Gnome's also got the eye candy factor going for it.
I will say, however, that if KDE 4.0 is 1/2 as good as it currently is specc'd for I'll be moving back. As it is, KDE 3.5 is looking awful long in the tooth compared to Gnome.
Really, though, its not a huge deal. Install both (you'll want the libraries anyways), and they interoperate just fine. Switch back and forth as needed, and as long as your distro implements the freedesktop specifications you'll get the same entries everywhere.
Gnome has come a long way, and I think it can finally satisfy it's goals: A simple, defaults-are-correct, easy to use Linux environment. It's not necessarily a powerusers environment, but come on, how many average users are going to be using KIO and the like. Gnome aims for the Mac OS X goals (which are _very_ good goals when you are going after Joe Blow) and does it WITHOUT ripping off OS X part and parcel. Sure, there's some duplication, but that's to be expected: Sometimes the other guys just "get it right". But Gnome definitely has it's own identity, and is now feature complete for "the average user".
3. Select Auto, Auto, Easy. Next, Next, Next. Type in Name. Press Finished.
4. Done
It's as easy as an operating system install can get, and certainly noob friendly. It'll non-destructively resize NTFS and FAT, too; this is infact the default option.
Don't look for Purevideo on Linux. Look for Xvmc support.
Xvmc is an interface for hardware accelerated video decoding. Deinterlacing, yadda yadda. Via currently supports Mpeg-1,2,4, H.264, and some other goodies. Nvidia only supports Mpeg-1 and 2 right now. But expect more in the future.
Rather, they support Xvmc, which enables hardware video decoding. Currently, their support is not up to date with Via's, but they are working on it. Mpeg-1 and 2 are supported in hardware. Expect Mpeg-4 soon.
Nvidia's linux drivers lag behind windows, but only slightly.
ATI's linux drivers will never be up to date with Windows drivers. Hell, your lucky if you'll be able to use your ATI graphics card before it becomes outdated (X1x00 series, ahem.)
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IBM has vastly more patents than MS. IBM has been in the #1 spot in terms of patent granted each year for over a decade.
MS is on the death march toward Vista, the death march toward Office 2007, the death march towards a .Net strategy.
Wars on the IE front, Wars on the server front, Wars on the standards fronts.
Legal battles with various corporations, the patent office, and various governments.
Let them come against Linux. Who are they going to pick a fight with, IBM? Redhat? Novell? Maybe this lawsuit will break the (MS) camel's back. I do know that discovery in any MS versus (Linux Corp.) case will be very, very interesting. Linux's dirty laundry is avaliable for everyone to see, but won't it be nice for (Linux Corp's) our lawyers to take a look at MS source, MS confidential e-mails, MS's internal documents?
I think so. Not to mention that IBM'll be able to contribute a bunch of that stuff from their current discovery involving MS's contacts with SCO. And if IBM gets drawn into (Linux Corp) versus MS, I think very interesting things will happen.
Not to mention that MS will never have any success versus Linux; even if they smear one linux company, the "community" will rewrite those portions, and move on.
1. How do you know this stuff?
2. Is this related to ATI's continous botching of the Linux driver?
KDE, too.
Actually this is a general feature of most software. Just not Microsoft's software.
Most software gets _faster_ in between versions. New features may run slower, but other aspects of the software should speed up, not slow down. Optimization takes time.
People are just used to Microsoft, where (version ++1) = (hardware ++1)
I recently mirrored the SuSE factory install tree, not thinking about how big it was.
~50 GBs.
First, binaries for i386, x86_64, ppc, and something else, iirc.
Also sources for everything, and packages of most everything you could possibly imagine. Thank god I have lots of disk space.
SMART package manager, Checkinstall, and Kommander.
./configure make make install to drop random files all over the place.
Everything goes on my system via RPM. Sometimes I get the RPMS from APT, sometimes from YAST, sometimes from YUM, somtimes from a directory of RPMs.
Sometimes my RPMs are build from source tarballs (checkinstall). But this way, every piece of software on my system is managed via RPM, and this makes a huge difference from allowing
Everyone is saying OOorg this, OOorg that.
MS Office and OpenOffice.org aren't really competitors. OOorg only competes with MS Office in one segment of the market; individuals and small business.
OOorg, however, has a big brother for the mid-size and enterprises sectors: IBM's Workplace. And this delay in Office 2007 WILL be a significant boost to Workplace deployments.
And that's gravy for OOrg, because Workplace uses OpenDocument.
XP is my last MS OS.
I've transitioned 100% to SuSE and OS X. OS X on laptops, SuSE on desktop.
Windows is dead in my house/company.
Not only that, SBC is gonna get blown away by the cable companies.
1 HD stream, max? 25 Mbps, before HD/SD streams, and before Voip?
You must be kidding me. Comcast is getting to 16 Mbps this year, with unlimited HD/SD streams.
OOorg OS X is not competive with Office OS X.
It's the only F/OSS solution for OS X, but it sucks, frankly.
Still, OOorg on Linux/XP is great.
This is bullshit. I've tested this myself, multiple times.
Take a computer luddite who's semi-used to Windows XP. I don't mean this in a cruel way, but my father (a brilliant post-doc organic chemist), my gf's mom (also smart), my grandma, and our secretary have all been switched to OS X.
They became proficient within a month or so, at a higher level than their ability to use Windows after _years_ of usage.
Windows is a UI nightmare. Windows is not intuitive or easy to use.
This stuff does NOT sound like stuff Microsoft wants him to say:
Worst of all, I can't believe Microsoft actually held this big nonevent "event" only a few days before announcing another screw-up in Vista. If Ballmer knew he was about to announce a delay and still had this event, he's crazy. If he didn't know Vista was about to slip again, then Microsoft is in worse shape than anyone realizes.
Microsoft can't afford to screw up like this. There are free alternatives to everything Microsoft sells, like the Linux operating system and the Open Office application suite. Rivals like Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ), Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) and, yes, IBM are pushing those programs big time.
Given Microsoft's delays I can't believe open-source stuff still hasn't caught on for desktop computers. It's amazing, but people will wait months and months for products that are so complicated that no ordinary person can figure out how to use them.
Why not at least switch to an Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) Mac? Apple's new operating system is stable, reliable and easy to use. The applications are simple, gorgeous and work well together. And they're here. Today. Steve Jobs must be waking up a happy man this morning.
Huh?
;-) I honestly had no idea that you couldn't mix them. Take a look:
Smart supports 64-bit architectures, and mixing of 64-bit and 32-bit applications/packages. Smart also supports apt-rpm repositories.
I use it all the time
http://labix.org/smart
SMART Package (meta)-manager is kind of nice.
.... get checkinstall, and possible Kommander (latter is buggy). Checkinstall does ./configure, make, and make install for you, but does it in a chroot, and then builds an RPM. You can then manage this RPM like any other.
4
:)
Add in YaST repositories, APT, YUM, RedCarpet, or just dumps of RPMs, DEBs, whatever. Add in all the mirrors you can think of (it automatically prioritizes them by download speed). I find it convenient to also have a local "RPM" directory, where I drop random packages that I want to install. This is my local "repository".
It's slick, it handles conditional dependancies nicely, and it doesn't choke on "broken" systems the way apt does (sometimes you WANT to leave your system partially broken, the SuSE pygtk2 nonsense comes to mind). It's not _yet_ production quality, but its pretty damn good. I expect a lot out of version 1.0.
Oh, and if you want to install from source
Pretty slick, huh? Kommander is a GUI front end, which relies upon checkinstall.
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=1313
http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/
The other nice thing about smart: with basic options, its just like synaptic or kynaptic, but "slicker".
I digg it
Huh?
Is SuSE FOSS or not? 'cause on SuSE the only thing you have to do to install an Nvidia driver is run "system update", and click on "Install Nvidia driver" in the list of available updates.
One X-server restart later, and you've got working OpenGL. What's so tricky about that?
And Super SuSE includes Nvidia and FGLRX RPMs.
Yes, these are both true.
However, our per minute costs are generally lower, as are the per SMS costs.
I pay $0.05 per SMS or MMS message, text, video, audio, whatever. It costs me both incoming and outgoing.
I pay $45.99 for 1500 minute a month, incoming and outgoing. Calls after 9pm(through 7 am) on weekdays are free. Weekends are free, as are calls to other T-mobile subscribers.
I average ~2250 minutes usage a month. I also pay an additional $19.99 for unlimited data. Sadly, its only at EDGE rates. Still, I use an average of 50-80 megs per month, which would cost quite a bit in some parts of the world.
I used to be a firm KDE kamp member, but lately I've started to swing towards gnome.
;-) Take a look at Novell's Linux Desktop 10.1 Preview. You can search for OpenSuSE 10.1 beta screenshots. Gnome is the default, the default "look" is very, very clear and usable. It's not terribly sexy, but the icons are goregous, and the clean lines are a welcome change from KDE's proliferation of settings and dialogues.
Why?
1. Looks
2. Now, Gnome's loosing in the raw "theme" eye candy category, but they have KDE crushed in eye candy. How? Some neat new features. For one, SVG themeing on GNOME is a lot further along than KDE. For two, Cairo-GTK. This means that your SVG themes become DPI indepedant, as well as antialiased. This is a vast visibility improvement. Three, XGL integration. XGL is beautiful. XGL makes your linux desktop feel greater. A double buffered openGL desktop really makes everything feel more tactile.
3. Search. Beagle works, Kat doesn't. Kat, in its current iterations, exhibits horrifying memory leaks. My 2 GB desktop system slows to a crawl after 8 hours of indexing. Beagle works perfectly. Maybe it's cause I'm used to spotlight, but good, real-time fulltext search of your system is an incredible thing. It really makes it far less necessary to organize your files, you can spend less time on maintenance and more time working, and that's a good thing.
4. Fit and Finish. Some of this is in themeing (Gnome's interface exhibits less 'mis-alignment' of icons/images in interfaces, and other little uglies), and some of this is in userspace utilities. Gnome's networking is more reliable than KDEs. For whatever reason, all kinds of browsing on my KDE setup are semi-broken. SMB doesn't always work, nor does a variety of other kio:// interfaces.
Of course, I'm happy about this stuff, and I can't say that I've switched to Gnome for good. The last time I experimented with Gnome, the printing interface, the file browser, the (lack of) a menu editor, and nautilus were all vastly inferior to their KDE counterparts. Now, Gnome's various dialogues and interfaces are pretty functionally similar to KDE and more reliable. Gnome's also got the eye candy factor going for it.
I will say, however, that if KDE 4.0 is 1/2 as good as it currently is specc'd for I'll be moving back. As it is, KDE 3.5 is looking awful long in the tooth compared to Gnome.
Really, though, its not a huge deal. Install both (you'll want the libraries anyways), and they interoperate just fine. Switch back and forth as needed, and as long as your distro implements the freedesktop specifications you'll get the same entries everywhere.
Gnome has come a long way, and I think it can finally satisfy it's goals: A simple, defaults-are-correct, easy to use Linux environment. It's not necessarily a powerusers environment, but come on, how many average users are going to be using KIO and the like. Gnome aims for the Mac OS X goals (which are _very_ good goals when you are going after Joe Blow) and does it WITHOUT ripping off OS X part and parcel. Sure, there's some duplication, but that's to be expected: Sometimes the other guys just "get it right". But Gnome definitely has it's own identity, and is now feature complete for "the average user".
Gmail permits both SMTP and POP access.
While its unfortunate that you can't read your encrypted messages in Google's brilliant webmail client, there's no reason to stop using their service.
Use PGP (or GPG) for important stuff. Access it from your desktop e-mail client. The rest of the crapmail you get can remain in plaintext.
Note that this is something you CANNOT do on Hotmail and yahoo's free service.
IIRC, its the other way around that they are getting at.
iTunes ->
And not just iTunes, but:
->
It's an admirable goal, actually, and probably a good thing in terms of preserving a fluid market.
I misunderstood.
;-)
I thought there were taking it out of the standard, not their first set of titles.
My bad. Not buying either
Suse has been there for some time.
1. Insert DVD.
2. Follow GUI Prompts.
3. Select Auto, Auto, Easy. Next, Next, Next. Type in Name. Press Finished.
4. Done
It's as easy as an operating system install can get, and certainly noob friendly. It'll non-destructively resize NTFS and FAT, too; this is infact the default option.
If HD-DVD implements this, and BluRay does not, I will purchase a BluRay player, no questions asked.
I have several analog HD sets. I won't replace them; they are nice units.
You mean, why don't Linux distributions litter userspace with Mono apps?
.NET
Like this: http://www.mono-project.com/Software ?
Oh, they do, that's right.
I would not be surprised to see OSS and Linux distro makers embrace Mono, C#, GTK#, and the like moreso than Microsoft pushes
No, not yet.
Don't look for Purevideo on Linux. Look for Xvmc support.
Xvmc is an interface for hardware accelerated video decoding. Deinterlacing, yadda yadda. Via currently supports Mpeg-1,2,4, H.264, and some other goodies. Nvidia only supports Mpeg-1 and 2 right now. But expect more in the future.
No, nvidia won't support Purevideo on linux.
Rather, they support Xvmc, which enables hardware video decoding. Currently, their support is not up to date with Via's, but they are working on it. Mpeg-1 and 2 are supported in hardware. Expect Mpeg-4 soon.
Nvidia's linux drivers lag behind windows, but only slightly.
ATI's linux drivers will never be up to date with Windows drivers. Hell, your lucky if you'll be able to use your ATI graphics card before it becomes outdated (X1x00 series, ahem.)