Microsoft looses money on XBox360 sold. Sony loses money on every PS3 sold. Gillette loses money on every razor handle made. They make the money up on other areas because they are smart enough to do so. ASUS should have been making money on selling Linux units because it didn't have to pay anyone for the license. However, Microsoft often tips the scales by (illegally) paying vendors for shipping Windows (as in this case). Then the consumer choice is removed. This is my point. This is what keeps the Windows monopoly going. No large company is going to invest in developing an alternative because Microsoft uses a combination of licensing threats (removal of cheap licenses) and 'bribe' payments to bundle Windows exclusively. This is my point. When Win8 comes out and it sucks and people are forced to use it because they have no realistic alternative because Microsoft ensure there is no absolutely economic incentive for alternatives to be developed then we'll still get shopkeepers like yourself blaming Linux or Mac OS X for the lack of market penetration when the real reason is the lack of a free market and level playing field (one devoid of illegal monopoly payments). This is my point. Intel does exactly the same thing, but it is not illegal because it isn't using one monopoly to create another (unlike Microsoft). Oh, and while you're busy defending Microsoft's business practices (attributing the current state of the market to their 'superior' software rather than their business practices) I hope you love getting reamed by the unit pricing on Windows.
Notice how the Windows phones are such dogs the Microsoft have to pay the point-of-sales folks a direct commission to try and move them (but they're still not moving, lol). The (Microsoft) technology is perfectly fine but in this case the network effect (Apple and Android[Linux]) are already established. What usually works for Microsoft in new spaces (payments to vendors and exclusive licensing terms) failed here. The best tech doesn't always win. There are a bunch of factors at play.
Incidentally, it sounds partially is your view is because you are bitter with regard to Linux because your well-meaning suggestions weren't immediately jumped on by a legion of willing developers. You don't need a Masters to develop useful user-space stuff on Linux. Read about how this 60-year old retired civil servant made a difference instead of just complaining: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1047633/one-writes-linux-drivers-235-usb-webcams
Hell, a great businessman would see an opportunity that perhaps Linux just needs a little polish and you could re-sell it using all the labour already put in over the years (Google did this with Android). With the Win8 opportunity coming up the time to start it is now. Not just whining about the situation like a lazy shag, but actually doing something innovative. Incidentally, I'm not in the O/S retail space. I have seen an opportunity in another space and am working towards that goal - and the software will run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Avoiding the Windows-only trap is just smart business.
There is a saying with ICBMs, "The birds have flown". It means once authorization has been given to launch and the missile is out of the silo then there is nothing to stop the ICBM anymore. They don't have a self-destruct built in (doesn't make any sense to have one). The aircraft being discussed is no different. Maybe you could call an abort over the radio - but basically once you launch them you have to assume radio is gonna be out and they are gonna plaster their targets. That is why giving the launch order is so incredibly stressful (poor Boris Yeltsin was under that pressure once, refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident). And the skywriting suggestion is just daft - it won't work because a) the Earth is curved and you wouldn't see it, and b) bombers have crap visibility and don't look backward even if there was this 'skywriting'. Nope, satellite radio is the best you can do and that can be taken out through various means.
With a crew there is no reliance on wireless. That is the point of having the option of people fly in this thing (getting rid of people and just getting straight to our robotic overlords would make a much better performing aircraft - but at least the meat sacks can be relied on when the intarwebz is down).
Oh, and replying to your return rate article. Like a typical Windows fanboi you read something that re-inforces your bias and then stop reading. How about you read this article that is *relevant to the ASUS Eee* that we were talking about, http://ostatic.com/blog/asus-ceo-says-linux-netbook-returns-on-par-with-windows
This is from the ASUS CEO himself.
Now we have all embarrassed ourselves online in debates. One good way to avoid it is to read widely, including seeking out articles made with the opposite point of view. Also try and obtain figures and where they are given try and find out what biases are in the statistics (that is, the limits of applicability of the numbers or the methodology used to collect them). A little wider reading and you would have discovered that the MSI article was sensationalist (as they often are in the tech world) and its conclusion has been debunked by later articles - pointing out things like the Europeans are for more likely to adapt and adopt new tech than the US market (this true general, the Europeans don't have as much tunnel vision as the US through necessity and wide exposure to different cultures).
Ha! I actually use Apple as my primary OS. I also have a lot of Windows machines (and host several game servers for players all around the planet), and used to use Linux a lot for development (since it is vastly better and more stable than Windows if you have some skill). nb. if you haven't noticed Windows is losing mindshare. Linux in the guise of Android is destroying Windows in the mobile space and is starting to outsell Apple. Once people are used to Android and things not looking like Windows then Microsoft are hosed. All it takes is someone like Google to make Linux palatable for the masses and the economics will be against Windows (it'll still exist but it'll be avoided, just like Windows phones are). Fortunately Microsoft saw this coming a long time ago, which is why they are desperate to bundle things to Windows via DirectX,.NET, IE etc. However, if you haven't noticed the trend is already moving away from this. The desktop is not the only computing space there is, dontcha know. Once there is enough traction in other spaces then the desktop stronghold of Windows will be broken - once OEM vendors are no longer afraid to bundle only Windows with their systems (the real reason Windows is so prevalent, there is no choice when you buy it because Windows charges extortionate amounts to OEMs who don't bundle Windows exclusively - which was part of my original point). Oh yeah, and as of last week the WinTel monopoly is starting to fade - Intel are going to ship Android (customised Java on Linux) as well as Windows. The thin end of the wedge. Anyway, enjoy your dying O/S. All the cool stuff is happening outside of it. Don't worry that history has shown time and time again that the more expensive and supposedly superior product gets beaten - it'll take time and corporates to move, but the trend is heading that way.
Telstra have been doing the exact same thing in New Zealand for years. I have a cable connection for the Net and TV but still have to pay an arm and a leg for a copper telephone line (required to get the good Interwebs from Telstra). As usual, Big Business screws us (as it does everywhere) and our Government gets Big Business to draft the telecom laws and tells us what is good for us. Balance needs to be restored in the Force.
Ah yeah, but it affected the on-screen document too. That meant it was hosed for further editing. Business as usual for Microsoft. Read some of the Joel Spolsky articles on his time there (like hard coding "12" as a function return value to pass a unit test - it was what the Microsoft devs had to do to complete things under tremendous (artificial) schedule pressure).
In my country you used to be able to by Linux pre-installed on Eee. You can no longer do this (for some time), despite Linux being just as popular as Windows for purchasers. Microsoft bribed Asus here so that Linux was no longer an option. As for citation, Google is your friend, see how many hits you get when you use the phrase "Asus and Microsoft join forces against Linux". In one example v3 confirms the report with Asus. http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/1941481/asus-microsoft-join-forces-linux
Now you may say that this is just hardball business practice. However, if you understand US law you'll know that this is illegal. It is illegal to use a monopoly in one space (desktop) to attempt to gain market dominance in another space (netbooks in this case). However, since Asus was paid and the Linux crowd lack the means to bring it to court then nothing is done (plus in 2009 the US DoC had been lax with MS for some time).
Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?
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Intel Joins LibreOffice
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually most people who used Wordperfect preferred it - because the prefessionals felt so much more productive in it compared to Word (same deal I guess with the Linux CLI fans compared to the OSI-inducing clickity click of Window admin tools). However, Word was favored because it got great reviews and was often bought based on the number of checklist items in the review - including one that one reviewer described as being only of use to reviewers.
I'm glad Word works for you. However that is not the experience of most people. Classic case I can remember from several years ago. A mate's flatmate had finished her Master's thesis in Psychology (lamers used Word instead of LaTeX like real scientists). It was due to be submitted the next day. She went to print it and *the same instance of Word* went and scrambled the format. Fcuk! She couldn't revert it. So she went with my mate to his word where they had the same version number of Word. Loaded it up. It was mangled in a different way. She spend the *whole night* sorting the formatting out (usual stuff, Word is a lame word processor rather than a true typesetting tool). Printed it out. Sigh, relief. Took the thesis back to her place and it was messed up on her machine, no surprise there. However, the original version she had now worked for no apparent reason. For bigger documents (although the thesis was relatively mid-sized, around 150 pages). Like I said, it is great Word works for you or you don't notice any glitches. For plenty of people Word is just too lame - including me. Installed (a legal copy) of Word 2011 on my Mac and Word is dog slow - I get the Mac 'beach ball' wait cursor even when I'm not actively doing anything in Word. In contrast, LibreOffice is lightning slick and doesn't get it my way - no beach ball there and most of the 8 GB RAM free (while Word is a hog and maxes out a whole CPU core when doing nothing). Also, I can use LibreOffice no matter whether I'm on my Mac, one of my Windows desktops, a Linux machine, or on a customer site. Plus, anyone wanted to edit my stuff doesn't have to pirate the tools to do it. For me, and plenty others, Word may be very common but that doesn't make it less sub-par compared to the alternatives.
Hah! I love those who claim Word is better but don't want to pay for it. At least you admit to that. In that case why not use Acrobat if legality is not a factor? it is vastly superior to either Word or LibreOffice (although personally, the value proposition of 'gratis' is a very strong plus feature of LibreOffice, IMHO). Was your missus able to successfully produce what she needed too, even after doing contortions with OpenOffice?
VMWare or the free VirtualBox may be your friend in this case. Easy to run 'proper' Windows in a Virtual Machine and then you just have to have on machine on your desk:)
Not much surprise there. Intel contribute a lot of development effort to Linux. Android is the marketing name of a customised version of Java on Linux. Should not be a surprise that Intel went down this road. You are right, this is a good thing and I also hope they are successful with it.
Just because Google is evil doesn't make Microsoft less evil. It just makes them both evil. A trivial perusal of the Web would bring up information about why Microsoft is considered evil. Here is a light selection of keywords for you to start your research with: anti-trust; illegal use of monopoly; linux is cancer; ISO document standard bribery; Open Document Format vs OpenXML; licensing of MFC to crunch Borland and promote MFC over (the vastly superior) OWL; payment of computer manufacturers to bundle Windows instead of open competition; removal of Linux from Asus Eee; deliberatly hobbling OpenGL on Windows; deliberately hobbing POSIX-compliance on Windows (Windows needs POSIX for US Government contracts); deliberately hobbling Java on Windows (which Microsoft lost a court case against Sun over - but the tactic worked long enough for Microsoft to derive the essentially Windows-only C# and the.NET platform from Java and the JVM); Microsoft's attempts in the mid-90's to stiffle the open Internet by promoting NetBUI etc instead of open protocols (something they had to do a volte face about); trying to tie the open internet to Windows through ActiveX and Internet Explorer 6 proprietary extensions (which Bill Gates also famously lied about saying IE could not be removed from the O/S); I could go on but it ought to be enough if you have been paying attention for the last two decades. No one would mind if Microsoft competed hard but fairly. The truth is they don't - they use all sorts of morally shady tactics - which makes them evil. For that matter, neither do Apple. Apple is at least as bad as Microsoft, but at least Apple stuff (mostly) works a lot better. But just because Google and Apple are also evil does not make Microsoft any less evil.
Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?
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Intel Joins LibreOffice
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· Score: 2, Informative
Nope. Microsoft Office is used because they made it the de-facto document standard with their ever-changing proproetary formats. How did it get to be so prevalent, well, for starters Microsoft was able to use undocumented functions to make Office run faster than its competitors. Plus, they had information about upcoming releases of the operating system well before any competitors had it - so that gave the Office team a good head start. The funny thing is that much of the Office functionality actually didn't come from Microsoft - the products were acquired and then integrated into the Office suite.
Re:Yes .... he installed garbage software
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Intel Joins LibreOffice
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· Score: 3, Informative
... and MS Word does a better job with retaining perfect formatting from older versions of Word? not in my experience it doesn't! LibreOffice does a pretty good job of retaining formatting for ODF documents - this is the format you should be using and converting everything to, it is the true ISO standard for documents. If you are really worried about preserving presentation then use PDF, this is what everyone else on the Web does. Also use a good tool for doing documents, Acrobat is a good tool for professional documents - word processors are designed for lightweight tasks only (which is why they blow for making professional documents larger than a few dozen pages).
Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?
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Intel Joins LibreOffice
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, among my other hats I'm a trained Technical Writer (in the superb Information Mapping methodology). I actually prefer LibreOffice to MS Word for just getting things done. LibreOffice doesn't has all the bells and whistles that MS Office does, and has the occasional glitch but MS Office is just painful to use. It's slow, it crashes a lot, I have to wrestle with it to get what I want done. I'm afraid I can't agree with your assessment. MS Office is worse than LibreOffice, at least for professional work. At the high end I wouldn't even use MS Office, Acrobat is much better, and beyond that is TeX/LaTeX (for pro-level typesetting). MS Word really is for n00bs that don't know much better and whinge if the interface doesn't look exactly like the version of MS Word they got their training on.
Oh, and complaining that a MS Word template doesn't work perfectly in LibreOffice is fairly lame. If you want to use Word templates you should pay for Word. How about you make a template for LibreOffice instead? - if you actually have the skill to do such a thing.
At least LibreOffice can display Word files, even a little junkily. Most versions of Word do an even worse job with Word files from different Word versions, and besides Word being so retarded it can barely deal with its own format it certainly can't deal with the formats of any other product (the bigger the organisation is, the more likely it is that they have critical systems that aren't Windows in addition to Windows desktops - but Microsoft want to pretend that this is not reality for the sake of their own business interests). If the person that made the company Word templates had instead made Open Document Format templates then things would have worked pretty sweetly for you, not matter whether you had used LibreOffice, OpenOffice or one of the other alternatives that use the (true) ISO standard format. It's just you are so inculcated with the Microsoft monoculture (you're certainly not alone in this) you blame LibreOffice for getting Microsoft's proprietary formats wrong (and Microsoft's ISO standardisation was a blatantly corrupt process and produced a 'standard' that is woefully underspecified). Please assign the blame where it is due, on Microsoft's proprietary doorstep.
Except for religion. The Indians are famous for tolerating just about every fruity religion that has come along. Things are changing though. They are seem to be slowly opening up to accept more than just their strict traditional values - but she's certainly a big country, I'm sure you could find intolerant nutters there if you wanted to.
Is there any possibility that the laptops could be converted to run Linux? Usually Linux can be make to work very well on older and more resourced constrained devices. If the IT department knows nothing about Linux or you must have Win7 then it might not be a good option - otherwise why not explore this option.
You could get everything you need for zero cost: an operating system, LibreOffice, browsers, decent networking (although that may depend on the wireless chipsets), LDAP etc. Plus, you won't have to lock them down so lots of games get played on them (apart from TuxRacer).
Plenty of schools run Macs - at least the ones near me, so the "they only understand Windows" argument is invalid. Linux could be made to work well for school-type tasks without you having to get anything other than the budget for one competent sysadmin.
In production I have had to change the garbage collector limits to stop it thrashing when the total size of objects was near the default heap size.
You do need to have this ability, and the O/S doesn't provide it (you can't control the garbage collector using O/S switches). Oh, and if the overhead of the VM is 72M you can easily do the math to determine what size to set for you memory limit - again, at least you have the ability to do this with Java. So, the memory limit switch can be used in two ways.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick and are projecting a worldview onto my statements. Please let me explain. By lesser programmers I mean the non-craftsmen who are just there to collect their paycheck and do the minimum thinking to get through the day. Surely you've had to work with or direct these people. There is nothing wrong with them or their attitude, it's just they are not going to spend a lot of effort worrying about the best, most robust, or most efficient way to solve something. Yet these warm bodies are required to be productive because without them there simply would not be the manpower to *deliver large working systems*. So my statement was not meant to put them down, just recognise the realities of software development on an (post-)industrial scale, and that development processes should select tools that consider them too (hence, part of my promotion of Java's simplicity as a feature).
So, if we can drop the (unintentional?) ad-hominem on me and get back to the original premise. I believe Java has advantage in its simplicity. Sure, we could solve problems in any number of languages but why not choose one that is general purpose (works well enough no matter whether you are doing embedded, desktop, web, mobile, or supercomputing), can be grasped by teams of 9am-to-5pm workers, has a huge ecosystem, has multi-vendor support (including the all-important Free Software community through GCJ and OpenJDK), has sufficient critical mass that it is not going away in the next decade or two (#1 popularity according to Tiobe - not that this is a beauty contest), will work on all platforms you develop for (except for those specifically locked-out by the manufacturer for business reasons rather than technical ones), yada yada.
Sure, Java is not always the best fit for some particular aspect of programming that excites those who collect programming languages like butterflies. For me, my ego is not tied up in making things complex, there are far more interesting problems to *actually solve and deliver* than explore the merits of one language construct over another. This is why I make the case for Java, and why I feel it is necessary to counter the strutting of the language snobs (who can give a breadth of language constructs but actually don't deliver large systems that *actually do things*). I hope that explains my motivation a little better - and enables those who are considering Java to get a balanced view on why it is currently so popular and why what some would consider weaknesses (designers deliberately eschew complex constructs) are actually strengths (able for average developers to be productive and deliver working systems).
Wow. Thanks for the very detailed reply. It's very interesting to hear how it is in the north of England (I'm in New Zealand, about as far away as you can get - this is a Microsoft country too, but not were the big outfits are concerned - including clients from England, lol). Best of luck unifying your mobile development environments, and growing your company. Based on market trends I wouldn't worry about Windows Phone too much for now:)
All good points. You don't even need do use a thread local, just have an independent pool per thread (assuming your threads are long lived and do a lot of work). Simple and is nearly as efficient as having a global pool, but without the locking overhead.
Bah. The kind of reply I get when you've never had to review the work of a dozen lesser programmers to see what simple thing they didn't get right. More complexity is not better - it's a shame if you haven't grokked that.
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Microsoft looses money on XBox360 sold. Sony loses money on every PS3 sold. Gillette loses money on every razor handle made. They make the money up on other areas because they are smart enough to do so. ASUS should have been making money on selling Linux units because it didn't have to pay anyone for the license. However, Microsoft often tips the scales by (illegally) paying vendors for shipping Windows (as in this case). Then the consumer choice is removed. This is my point. This is what keeps the Windows monopoly going. No large company is going to invest in developing an alternative because Microsoft uses a combination of licensing threats (removal of cheap licenses) and 'bribe' payments to bundle Windows exclusively. This is my point. When Win8 comes out and it sucks and people are forced to use it because they have no realistic alternative because Microsoft ensure there is no absolutely economic incentive for alternatives to be developed then we'll still get shopkeepers like yourself blaming Linux or Mac OS X for the lack of market penetration when the real reason is the lack of a free market and level playing field (one devoid of illegal monopoly payments). This is my point. Intel does exactly the same thing, but it is not illegal because it isn't using one monopoly to create another (unlike Microsoft). Oh, and while you're busy defending Microsoft's business practices (attributing the current state of the market to their 'superior' software rather than their business practices) I hope you love getting reamed by the unit pricing on Windows.
Notice how the Windows phones are such dogs the Microsoft have to pay the point-of-sales folks a direct commission to try and move them (but they're still not moving, lol). The (Microsoft) technology is perfectly fine but in this case the network effect (Apple and Android[Linux]) are already established. What usually works for Microsoft in new spaces (payments to vendors and exclusive licensing terms) failed here. The best tech doesn't always win. There are a bunch of factors at play.
Incidentally, it sounds partially is your view is because you are bitter with regard to Linux because your well-meaning suggestions weren't immediately jumped on by a legion of willing developers. You don't need a Masters to develop useful user-space stuff on Linux. Read about how this 60-year old retired civil servant made a difference instead of just complaining: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1047633/one-writes-linux-drivers-235-usb-webcams
Hell, a great businessman would see an opportunity that perhaps Linux just needs a little polish and you could re-sell it using all the labour already put in over the years (Google did this with Android). With the Win8 opportunity coming up the time to start it is now. Not just whining about the situation like a lazy shag, but actually doing something innovative. Incidentally, I'm not in the O/S retail space. I have seen an opportunity in another space and am working towards that goal - and the software will run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Avoiding the Windows-only trap is just smart business.
There is a saying with ICBMs, "The birds have flown". It means once authorization has been given to launch and the missile is out of the silo then there is nothing to stop the ICBM anymore. They don't have a self-destruct built in (doesn't make any sense to have one). The aircraft being discussed is no different. Maybe you could call an abort over the radio - but basically once you launch them you have to assume radio is gonna be out and they are gonna plaster their targets. That is why giving the launch order is so incredibly stressful (poor Boris Yeltsin was under that pressure once, refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident). And the skywriting suggestion is just daft - it won't work because a) the Earth is curved and you wouldn't see it, and b) bombers have crap visibility and don't look backward even if there was this 'skywriting'. Nope, satellite radio is the best you can do and that can be taken out through various means.
With a crew there is no reliance on wireless. That is the point of having the option of people fly in this thing (getting rid of people and just getting straight to our robotic overlords would make a much better performing aircraft - but at least the meat sacks can be relied on when the intarwebz is down).
Oh, and replying to your return rate article. Like a typical Windows fanboi you read something that re-inforces your bias and then stop reading. How about you read this article that is *relevant to the ASUS Eee* that we were talking about, http://ostatic.com/blog/asus-ceo-says-linux-netbook-returns-on-par-with-windows
This is from the ASUS CEO himself.
Now we have all embarrassed ourselves online in debates. One good way to avoid it is to read widely, including seeking out articles made with the opposite point of view. Also try and obtain figures and where they are given try and find out what biases are in the statistics (that is, the limits of applicability of the numbers or the methodology used to collect them). A little wider reading and you would have discovered that the MSI article was sensationalist (as they often are in the tech world) and its conclusion has been debunked by later articles - pointing out things like the Europeans are for more likely to adapt and adopt new tech than the US market (this true general, the Europeans don't have as much tunnel vision as the US through necessity and wide exposure to different cultures).
The switches were designed for, and are used for, more than one purpose. It is that simple.
Ha! I actually use Apple as my primary OS. I also have a lot of Windows machines (and host several game servers for players all around the planet), and used to use Linux a lot for development (since it is vastly better and more stable than Windows if you have some skill). nb. if you haven't noticed Windows is losing mindshare. Linux in the guise of Android is destroying Windows in the mobile space and is starting to outsell Apple. Once people are used to Android and things not looking like Windows then Microsoft are hosed. All it takes is someone like Google to make Linux palatable for the masses and the economics will be against Windows (it'll still exist but it'll be avoided, just like Windows phones are). Fortunately Microsoft saw this coming a long time ago, which is why they are desperate to bundle things to Windows via DirectX, .NET, IE etc. However, if you haven't noticed the trend is already moving away from this. The desktop is not the only computing space there is, dontcha know. Once there is enough traction in other spaces then the desktop stronghold of Windows will be broken - once OEM vendors are no longer afraid to bundle only Windows with their systems (the real reason Windows is so prevalent, there is no choice when you buy it because Windows charges extortionate amounts to OEMs who don't bundle Windows exclusively - which was part of my original point). Oh yeah, and as of last week the WinTel monopoly is starting to fade - Intel are going to ship Android (customised Java on Linux) as well as Windows. The thin end of the wedge. Anyway, enjoy your dying O/S. All the cool stuff is happening outside of it. Don't worry that history has shown time and time again that the more expensive and supposedly superior product gets beaten - it'll take time and corporates to move, but the trend is heading that way.
Telstra have been doing the exact same thing in New Zealand for years. I have a cable connection for the Net and TV but still have to pay an arm and a leg for a copper telephone line (required to get the good Interwebs from Telstra). As usual, Big Business screws us (as it does everywhere) and our Government gets Big Business to draft the telecom laws and tells us what is good for us. Balance needs to be restored in the Force.
Ah yeah, but it affected the on-screen document too. That meant it was hosed for further editing. Business as usual for Microsoft. Read some of the Joel Spolsky articles on his time there (like hard coding "12" as a function return value to pass a unit test - it was what the Microsoft devs had to do to complete things under tremendous (artificial) schedule pressure).
In my country you used to be able to by Linux pre-installed on Eee. You can no longer do this (for some time), despite Linux being just as popular as Windows for purchasers. Microsoft bribed Asus here so that Linux was no longer an option. As for citation, Google is your friend, see how many hits you get when you use the phrase "Asus and Microsoft join forces against Linux". In one example v3 confirms the report with Asus.
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/1941481/asus-microsoft-join-forces-linux
Now you may say that this is just hardball business practice. However, if you understand US law you'll know that this is illegal. It is illegal to use a monopoly in one space (desktop) to attempt to gain market dominance in another space (netbooks in this case). However, since Asus was paid and the Linux crowd lack the means to bring it to court then nothing is done (plus in 2009 the US DoC had been lax with MS for some time).
Actually most people who used Wordperfect preferred it - because the prefessionals felt so much more productive in it compared to Word (same deal I guess with the Linux CLI fans compared to the OSI-inducing clickity click of Window admin tools). However, Word was favored because it got great reviews and was often bought based on the number of checklist items in the review - including one that one reviewer described as being only of use to reviewers.
I'm glad Word works for you. However that is not the experience of most people. Classic case I can remember from several years ago. A mate's flatmate had finished her Master's thesis in Psychology (lamers used Word instead of LaTeX like real scientists). It was due to be submitted the next day. She went to print it and *the same instance of Word* went and scrambled the format. Fcuk! She couldn't revert it. So she went with my mate to his word where they had the same version number of Word. Loaded it up. It was mangled in a different way. She spend the *whole night* sorting the formatting out (usual stuff, Word is a lame word processor rather than a true typesetting tool). Printed it out. Sigh, relief. Took the thesis back to her place and it was messed up on her machine, no surprise there. However, the original version she had now worked for no apparent reason. For bigger documents (although the thesis was relatively mid-sized, around 150 pages). Like I said, it is great Word works for you or you don't notice any glitches. For plenty of people Word is just too lame - including me. Installed (a legal copy) of Word 2011 on my Mac and Word is dog slow - I get the Mac 'beach ball' wait cursor even when I'm not actively doing anything in Word. In contrast, LibreOffice is lightning slick and doesn't get it my way - no beach ball there and most of the 8 GB RAM free (while Word is a hog and maxes out a whole CPU core when doing nothing). Also, I can use LibreOffice no matter whether I'm on my Mac, one of my Windows desktops, a Linux machine, or on a customer site. Plus, anyone wanted to edit my stuff doesn't have to pirate the tools to do it. For me, and plenty others, Word may be very common but that doesn't make it less sub-par compared to the alternatives.
Hah! I love those who claim Word is better but don't want to pay for it. At least you admit to that. In that case why not use Acrobat if legality is not a factor? it is vastly superior to either Word or LibreOffice (although personally, the value proposition of 'gratis' is a very strong plus feature of LibreOffice, IMHO). Was your missus able to successfully produce what she needed too, even after doing contortions with OpenOffice?
VMWare or the free VirtualBox may be your friend in this case. Easy to run 'proper' Windows in a Virtual Machine and then you just have to have on machine on your desk :)
Not much surprise there. Intel contribute a lot of development effort to Linux. Android is the marketing name of a customised version of Java on Linux. Should not be a surprise that Intel went down this road. You are right, this is a good thing and I also hope they are successful with it.
Just because Google is evil doesn't make Microsoft less evil. It just makes them both evil. A trivial perusal of the Web would bring up information about why Microsoft is considered evil. Here is a light selection of keywords for you to start your research with: anti-trust; illegal use of monopoly; linux is cancer; ISO document standard bribery; Open Document Format vs OpenXML; licensing of MFC to crunch Borland and promote MFC over (the vastly superior) OWL; payment of computer manufacturers to bundle Windows instead of open competition; removal of Linux from Asus Eee; deliberatly hobbling OpenGL on Windows; deliberately hobbing POSIX-compliance on Windows (Windows needs POSIX for US Government contracts); deliberately hobbling Java on Windows (which Microsoft lost a court case against Sun over - but the tactic worked long enough for Microsoft to derive the essentially Windows-only C# and the .NET platform from Java and the JVM); Microsoft's attempts in the mid-90's to stiffle the open Internet by promoting NetBUI etc instead of open protocols (something they had to do a volte face about); trying to tie the open internet to Windows through ActiveX and Internet Explorer 6 proprietary extensions (which Bill Gates also famously lied about saying IE could not be removed from the O/S); I could go on but it ought to be enough if you have been paying attention for the last two decades. No one would mind if Microsoft competed hard but fairly. The truth is they don't - they use all sorts of morally shady tactics - which makes them evil. For that matter, neither do Apple. Apple is at least as bad as Microsoft, but at least Apple stuff (mostly) works a lot better. But just because Google and Apple are also evil does not make Microsoft any less evil.
Nope. Microsoft Office is used because they made it the de-facto document standard with their ever-changing proproetary formats. How did it get to be so prevalent, well, for starters Microsoft was able to use undocumented functions to make Office run faster than its competitors. Plus, they had information about upcoming releases of the operating system well before any competitors had it - so that gave the Office team a good head start. The funny thing is that much of the Office functionality actually didn't come from Microsoft - the products were acquired and then integrated into the Office suite.
... and MS Word does a better job with retaining perfect formatting from older versions of Word? not in my experience it doesn't! LibreOffice does a pretty good job of retaining formatting for ODF documents - this is the format you should be using and converting everything to, it is the true ISO standard for documents. If you are really worried about preserving presentation then use PDF, this is what everyone else on the Web does. Also use a good tool for doing documents, Acrobat is a good tool for professional documents - word processors are designed for lightweight tasks only (which is why they blow for making professional documents larger than a few dozen pages).
Actually, among my other hats I'm a trained Technical Writer (in the superb Information Mapping methodology). I actually prefer LibreOffice to MS Word for just getting things done. LibreOffice doesn't has all the bells and whistles that MS Office does, and has the occasional glitch but MS Office is just painful to use. It's slow, it crashes a lot, I have to wrestle with it to get what I want done. I'm afraid I can't agree with your assessment. MS Office is worse than LibreOffice, at least for professional work. At the high end I wouldn't even use MS Office, Acrobat is much better, and beyond that is TeX/LaTeX (for pro-level typesetting). MS Word really is for n00bs that don't know much better and whinge if the interface doesn't look exactly like the version of MS Word they got their training on.
Oh, and complaining that a MS Word template doesn't work perfectly in LibreOffice is fairly lame. If you want to use Word templates you should pay for Word. How about you make a template for LibreOffice instead? - if you actually have the skill to do such a thing.
At least LibreOffice can display Word files, even a little junkily. Most versions of Word do an even worse job with Word files from different Word versions, and besides Word being so retarded it can barely deal with its own format it certainly can't deal with the formats of any other product (the bigger the organisation is, the more likely it is that they have critical systems that aren't Windows in addition to Windows desktops - but Microsoft want to pretend that this is not reality for the sake of their own business interests). If the person that made the company Word templates had instead made Open Document Format templates then things would have worked pretty sweetly for you, not matter whether you had used LibreOffice, OpenOffice or one of the other alternatives that use the (true) ISO standard format. It's just you are so inculcated with the Microsoft monoculture (you're certainly not alone in this) you blame LibreOffice for getting Microsoft's proprietary formats wrong (and Microsoft's ISO standardisation was a blatantly corrupt process and produced a 'standard' that is woefully underspecified). Please assign the blame where it is due, on Microsoft's proprietary doorstep.
Except for religion. The Indians are famous for tolerating just about every fruity religion that has come along. Things are changing though. They are seem to be slowly opening up to accept more than just their strict traditional values - but she's certainly a big country, I'm sure you could find intolerant nutters there if you wanted to.
Is there any possibility that the laptops could be converted to run Linux? Usually Linux can be make to work very well on older and more resourced constrained devices. If the IT department knows nothing about Linux or you must have Win7 then it might not be a good option - otherwise why not explore this option.
You could get everything you need for zero cost: an operating system, LibreOffice, browsers, decent networking (although that may depend on the wireless chipsets), LDAP etc. Plus, you won't have to lock them down so lots of games get played on them (apart from TuxRacer).
Plenty of schools run Macs - at least the ones near me, so the "they only understand Windows" argument is invalid. Linux could be made to work well for school-type tasks without you having to get anything other than the budget for one competent sysadmin.
In production I have had to change the garbage collector limits to stop it thrashing when the total size of objects was near the default heap size.
You do need to have this ability, and the O/S doesn't provide it (you can't control the garbage collector using O/S switches). Oh, and if the overhead of the VM is 72M you can easily do the math to determine what size to set for you memory limit - again, at least you have the ability to do this with Java. So, the memory limit switch can be used in two ways.
Sysadmins don't do it for 'policy' - they do it for performance and server safety.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick and are projecting a worldview onto my statements. Please let me explain. By lesser programmers I mean the non-craftsmen who are just there to collect their paycheck and do the minimum thinking to get through the day. Surely you've had to work with or direct these people. There is nothing wrong with them or their attitude, it's just they are not going to spend a lot of effort worrying about the best, most robust, or most efficient way to solve something. Yet these warm bodies are required to be productive because without them there simply would not be the manpower to *deliver large working systems*. So my statement was not meant to put them down, just recognise the realities of software development on an (post-)industrial scale, and that development processes should select tools that consider them too (hence, part of my promotion of Java's simplicity as a feature).
So, if we can drop the (unintentional?) ad-hominem on me and get back to the original premise. I believe Java has advantage in its simplicity. Sure, we could solve problems in any number of languages but why not choose one that is general purpose (works well enough no matter whether you are doing embedded, desktop, web, mobile, or supercomputing), can be grasped by teams of 9am-to-5pm workers, has a huge ecosystem, has multi-vendor support (including the all-important Free Software community through GCJ and OpenJDK), has sufficient critical mass that it is not going away in the next decade or two (#1 popularity according to Tiobe - not that this is a beauty contest), will work on all platforms you develop for (except for those specifically locked-out by the manufacturer for business reasons rather than technical ones), yada yada.
Sure, Java is not always the best fit for some particular aspect of programming that excites those who collect programming languages like butterflies. For me, my ego is not tied up in making things complex, there are far more interesting problems to *actually solve and deliver* than explore the merits of one language construct over another. This is why I make the case for Java, and why I feel it is necessary to counter the strutting of the language snobs (who can give a breadth of language constructs but actually don't deliver large systems that *actually do things*). I hope that explains my motivation a little better - and enables those who are considering Java to get a balanced view on why it is currently so popular and why what some would consider weaknesses (designers deliberately eschew complex constructs) are actually strengths (able for average developers to be productive and deliver working systems).
Wow. Thanks for the very detailed reply. It's very interesting to hear how it is in the north of England (I'm in New Zealand, about as far away as you can get - this is a Microsoft country too, but not were the big outfits are concerned - including clients from England, lol). Best of luck unifying your mobile development environments, and growing your company. Based on market trends I wouldn't worry about Windows Phone too much for now :)
All good points. You don't even need do use a thread local, just have an independent pool per thread (assuming your threads are long lived and do a lot of work). Simple and is nearly as efficient as having a global pool, but without the locking overhead.
Bah. The kind of reply I get when you've never had to review the work of a dozen lesser programmers to see what simple thing they didn't get right. More complexity is not better - it's a shame if you haven't grokked that.