What are you looking for and what are your qualifications? I got laid-off and was able to find a new job in a month's time back in April. I think a lot of it right now has to do with where your skills are. There's still demand, but it's much more specific than it was before. Hell before the skills required were having a pulse and knowing how to turn on a computer. The pulse was even optional sometimes:).
See, by stating the doom of all of these companies it naturally leads to them suggesting you should click on over to their site to watch the crash. They'll of course report on this in great detail and rake in the ad banner clicks.
Sensationalist statements like that could be overzealous reporting, clever marketing, or both. News organizations learned long ago that people don't tune in to watch the everyday mundane. They want sensationalism, tragedy, and bigger than life stories. Just meeting market demand I guess.
WOW! What an amazing way to illustrate what low fidelity images are provided on your television than to blow them up onto the IMAX screen:)
I think IMAX is really cool, but things not designed to play on an IMAX screen don't necessarily translate well. The IMAX screen over at Navy Pier in Chicago does showings of various non-imax movies during weekends at midnight. So, some friends of mine and I went to see the Matrix there.
The problem is that it was filmed for being shown in a normal theater. So all of the quick cuts are just totally overwhelming on that screen. Furthermore, the images end up being rather grainy because the scale is so much bigger than is natual. And if you happen to see it on a dome IMAX, then you've got that as another impact on it. The sound was awesome, but man it's hard to watch.
You are sounding like one of those wacky open source advocates now. You should feel privleged that you can get such fine quality software for such a low price. Stop complaining!
So I'm writing an application that works on all open source software. I'm being paid to do this and the people involved expect (rightfully) to be making money on all of this. I'm not feeling particularly screwed....
Apple is a more likely competitor? Hardly! Apple had been and will continue to be a niche product. The reason is that the mindset that drives apple is little different than that which drives Microsoft. What Microsoft is afraid of isn't Linux per se. What they are afraid of is that as a whole, corporations will become convinced that open source is the best way to do things. If that happens, Microsoft is completely screwed. Linux just tends to most directly illustrate the threat.
Unlike many of their competitors (most notable IBM), they have little substantial revenue outside of their software production. They are particularly lacking in the services arena. Thus they are uniquely vulnerable to anything that could force down the margins for software. The operating system has been a commodity for the last 5 years or so and it's only Microsoft's domination of the market that has kept that little fact from disrupting their cash flow. Today, as an operating system, Linux is capable of everything Windows is and that means that people may start to recognizae how commodity Windows is. That will hurt their bottom line if that notion spreads far enough.
There was an article just the other day on here about how web developers are designing for Microsoft now and ignoring standards. Though Microsoft is never going to make themselves fully incompatible with other browsers, they have continued to distinguish themselves from the competition by their "innovations". The result is that while I can surf websites on linux using mozilla, I will be given a decidedly different experience doing so. Some sites will refuse to let me in all together, and others will just break horribly.
Now, you might say the reaction to this is that those companies will suffer from losing my business. Yeah, so they are losing what, 5% of the market? Ooooo, big deal. This causes people who don't have a tolerance for these glitches to go with a windows platform out of their lack of patience for that stuff.
Overall.Net is going to get used by the places that have tended towards being heavily windows environments originally. Companies that have been using Unix, Linux, and Java will probably not be moving to.Net anytime soon.
Personally I'd be very interested in using.Net on Linux provided that it works well and provided that I can have faith that, in the long term, I'll be able to do this without risking a microsoft tax or lock-in.
My big concern down the road is that Microsoft is going to start using patents and license restrictions to control the fate of.Net. Wait until enough people develop.Net solutions on alternative platforms then say, "well that's great, now you can pay us a license fee."
I just can't believe that Microsoft would develop any technology that wasn't designed from the ground up to further their control. If just about any other company had put forth.Net I'd probably see it as a good thing. Hell, I've been a java developer for a while and I don't think much better of Sun than I do of Microsoft. The only reason I trust sun to stick with some level of openess is that it's about the only ammunition they have available to leverage against Microsoft's hegemony.
Bribery is generally a situation where an individual or individuals in government are given something in echange for special consideration of some decision. In this case the government as a whole is being given something for special consideration.
The basic issue in bribery is the notion that government officials will be having their objective opinions of the benefit of something tainted by their personal gain from the decision. If somebody writes a check to the government, there's no bribery, because, as a whole, the government would benefit. If they write a check to the president, it is bribery, because it's influencing the decision in a way that's extraneous to the direct cost/benefit for the country.
I had, overall, very good parents. All parents make some mistakes, and they've long admitted to that being one of them. Which I suppose is one of the big diffrences between good and bad parents. They all screw up, but good parents will eventually admit to it.
It would seem that the cost of Linux is no longer zero. Instead it is effectively negative because in order to compete with it, it seems, Microsoft has to give organizations a bunch of incentives. It says something that in order to create a reasonable value proposition for their software they have to, not just give it away, but actually pay people to take it.
So the question for organizations now is, is it worth the upfront money Microsoft gives you to possibly be hooked into their products in the long run. Certainly you can use a possible linux move as leverage against MS prices, but in the end, is it better to use the leverage or to take Linux.
You have to presume that Microsoft has a plan of how they intend to make back this money in the long run. I can guarantee you that they aren't cutting half billion dollar checks at a whim without thorough belief that they'll make up for it. I'm sure that 5 years down the road Microsoft will be coming around to collect on those incentives. They'll collect by increasing licensing fees, further invading privacy, etc.
I grew up frequently finding the television as my babysitter. It's a very hard habit to kick. I've realized that when we have children that it will probably be best for them to seriously limit the amount of TV time. This is going to be a very difficult change for me because I've long been in the habit of mindlessly watching TV.
The problem in giving up television is that as soon as you turn the TV off you have to come up with something to do. If one had gotten in the habit of always watching television when there is nothing to do, it becomes difficult to come up with things to do even. So it become easier to just go back to watching television. Not sure what the best approach is to this. Sometimes I've had some success but I eventually seem to fall back into my bad habits.
Not to be a raging cynic, but you can tell where it's end up based on the money behind it. Where's the money? It's in favor of limiting fair use and protecting the revenue streams of big corporations. I can tell you this, it will go nowhere positive.
Well folks we are pretty much screwed if this becomes possible for the average person to do. The fact of the matter is that no matter what, this information will get out and eventually somebody will use it.
It does depend entirely on when the object is detected. I mean humanity given 50 years to figure out a way to stop an asteroid from demolishing the planet, would figure out a way. We don't have the technology because there's no eminent threat so we don't put the money there. Hell even a government bureaucracy can react in 50 years time:)
You must remember that humanity is a rather short sighted specieis. A meteor strike isn't going to happen in the next 4-8 years so as far as a politician is concerned, that's never going to happen. If a meteor strike did happen, civilization would fall apart and it wouldn't really matter whether the politicians fought to save the planet because the survivors would be too busy hunting and gathering to worry about voting them in for another term.
The problem with the future of space exploration is that there's no evidence that there's any useful return on that investment in the short term. As we can tell from the social security debates, that's what makes or breaks any political decision.
As for your view that we shouldn't care about AIDS, etc, because it doesn't matter in the long run if a big asteroid wipes us out. Using that logic, then to hell with space exploration, lets get to work on reversing entropy. Because regardless of anything we do, if entropy continues on its merry way, we're screwed. Check out Asimov's short story, I believe it's called "the question" or something like that.
Personally I think space exploration is vital to our survival, but in a way that isn't immediately obvious. It's not about avoiding the next plague, rather it is about creating hope and something to strive for. Right now, there are few frontiers left to explore on this planet. We have this growing sense of stangation of culture, etc. BUT, if we were pushing into space, then suddenly we've got new things to strive for.
I suspect though that, as with all of past exploration, money will have to be the driving factor. Corporations need to be convinced that there's money to be made by investing in space exploration. Renaissance exploration was all about trying to find resources, and wealth. If the WWF's report on the fate of the world is any indiciation, there will be plenty of motivation to do this in the near future.
Why is Snort the clear winner? Because it's the only one that doesn't cost anything. If none of them work as well as they should, at least with Snort you aren't blowing money on the software:)
You mean it leaves you with that feeling of dissapointment in that you just paid for a giant second rate advertisement for collectible toys and 3D rendering software?:)
What NVidia card do you have? I grant that I don't usually run linux on my box that has a GeForce GTS2 64MB card because that's my windows game box (it pains me but I have little choice). It does dual boot and i've run Linux with the NVidia drivers with no serious problems. So it may be my lack of experience with it, but I haven't see major problems.
Oh and as a point of contrast when my box is running Win2K and I play games on it (like Operation Flashpoint), it BSOD's at least once a day. Nothing so fun as being at the beginning of a mission, getting a BSOD, and then having to wait 25 minutes to join back in.
Something to keep in mind here is that the process you described is really pretty easy if you know what to do. Thus, if a hardware company really wanted to insure that it would be easy to run their stuff on Linux, they could probably do so without much trouble.
The fact of the matter though is that most people that run Linux are either technically inclined or their system was set up with the assistance of somebody technically inclined. So they don't bother because they know that as long as the difficulty in setting up their stuff isn't going to lose them sales. Since nobody expects anything better from the market place, nothing better exists.
Mostly reasonable and hardly insightful...
on
A Linux User Goes Back
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
While it is true that Linux has a number of niggling problems, Windows does as well. It seems that ultimately the reason he moved to XP was because of two things:
1) frustration with graphics in general (both performance and fonts)
2) frustration with hardware support
As far as #1 goes, I'll back him on that one. Fonts have continued to be an amazing pain to deal with. Both MacOS and Windows have systems that make managing fonts trivial. I susppose the source of the complication is that X provides multiple ways to provide fonts which complicates any unified easy means to add fonts.
As for performance of graphics, I find that the performance of Linux is on par with windows. And though admittedly I'm a power user, I find it rather handy every so often to be able to run remote applications so easily (thank heaven for SSH).
Now as for point #2, though his point is true, this should not be attributed to any inherent limitations in Linux itself. The problem is simply a matter of market share. Why support the few percentage points of the market who use Linux when you can just support Windows and cover 90+% of your users.
Personally I find that for 95% of what I do, Linux is as good if not better than Windows for doing it. Evolution is an excellent mail program, both mozilla and konqueror are great browsers. With crossover I'm now able to view a lot more of what's on the Internet. Honestly the only long running grip I have that hasn't been adequately addressed is the font problem.
If you've got problems with hardware support, just make sure to research your purchases before hand to suit your needs. I've only had problems when trying to install on very new hardware that wasn't built with running linux in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
MS Support: Thank you for calling Microsoft. Your call is very important to us. Your call will be answered in the order it was recieved.
F-22 Pilot: #$@@#%%(@!!
MS Support: o/~ The girl from iponimia dah dum dee dee. Duh dum dum dum da dee dee dee dee... o/~
BOOM
If it was Linux, it wouldn't crash but the pilots would constantly complain about how ugly the fonts were on the display.
What are you looking for and what are your qualifications? I got laid-off and was able to find a new job in a month's time back in April. I think a lot of it right now has to do with where your skills are. There's still demand, but it's much more specific than it was before. Hell before the skills required were having a pulse and knowing how to turn on a computer. The pulse was even optional sometimes :).
See, by stating the doom of all of these companies it naturally leads to them suggesting you should click on over to their site to watch the crash. They'll of course report on this in great detail and rake in the ad banner clicks.
Sensationalist statements like that could be overzealous reporting, clever marketing, or both. News organizations learned long ago that people don't tune in to watch the everyday mundane. They want sensationalism, tragedy, and bigger than life stories. Just meeting market demand I guess.
WOW! What an amazing way to illustrate what low fidelity images are provided on your television than to blow them up onto the IMAX screen :)
I think IMAX is really cool, but things not designed to play on an IMAX screen don't necessarily translate well. The IMAX screen over at Navy Pier in Chicago does showings of various non-imax movies during weekends at midnight. So, some friends of mine and I went to see the Matrix there.
The problem is that it was filmed for being shown in a normal theater. So all of the quick cuts are just totally overwhelming on that screen. Furthermore, the images end up being rather grainy because the scale is so much bigger than is natual. And if you happen to see it on a dome IMAX, then you've got that as another impact on it. The sound was awesome, but man it's hard to watch.
You are sounding like one of those wacky open source advocates now. You should feel privleged that you can get such fine quality software for such a low price. Stop complaining!
So I'm writing an application that works on all open source software. I'm being paid to do this and the people involved expect (rightfully) to be making money on all of this. I'm not feeling particularly screwed....
Apple is a more likely competitor? Hardly! Apple had been and will continue to be a niche product. The reason is that the mindset that drives apple is little different than that which drives Microsoft. What Microsoft is afraid of isn't Linux per se. What they are afraid of is that as a whole, corporations will become convinced that open source is the best way to do things. If that happens, Microsoft is completely screwed. Linux just tends to most directly illustrate the threat.
Unlike many of their competitors (most notable IBM), they have little substantial revenue outside of their software production. They are particularly lacking in the services arena. Thus they are uniquely vulnerable to anything that could force down the margins for software. The operating system has been a commodity for the last 5 years or so and it's only Microsoft's domination of the market that has kept that little fact from disrupting their cash flow. Today, as an operating system, Linux is capable of everything Windows is and that means that people may start to recognizae how commodity Windows is. That will hurt their bottom line if that notion spreads far enough.
I believe that what you are thinking of was the licensing they put around information they released related to SAMBA.
There was an article just the other day on here about how web developers are designing for Microsoft now and ignoring standards. Though Microsoft is never going to make themselves fully incompatible with other browsers, they have continued to distinguish themselves from the competition by their "innovations". The result is that while I can surf websites on linux using mozilla, I will be given a decidedly different experience doing so. Some sites will refuse to let me in all together, and others will just break horribly.
Now, you might say the reaction to this is that those companies will suffer from losing my business. Yeah, so they are losing what, 5% of the market? Ooooo, big deal. This causes people who don't have a tolerance for these glitches to go with a windows platform out of their lack of patience for that stuff.
Microsoft Bob... Need I say more? :)
.Net is going to get used by the places that have tended towards being heavily windows environments originally. Companies that have been using Unix, Linux, and Java will probably not be moving to .Net anytime soon.
.Net on Linux provided that it works well and provided that I can have faith that, in the long term, I'll be able to do this without risking a microsoft tax or lock-in.
.Net. Wait until enough people develop .Net solutions on alternative platforms then say, "well that's great, now you can pay us a license fee."
.Net I'd probably see it as a good thing. Hell, I've been a java developer for a while and I don't think much better of Sun than I do of Microsoft. The only reason I trust sun to stick with some level of openess is that it's about the only ammunition they have available to leverage against Microsoft's hegemony.
Overall
Personally I'd be very interested in using
My big concern down the road is that Microsoft is going to start using patents and license restrictions to control the fate of
I just can't believe that Microsoft would develop any technology that wasn't designed from the ground up to further their control. If just about any other company had put forth
Bribery is generally a situation where an individual or individuals in government are given something in echange for special consideration of some decision. In this case the government as a whole is being given something for special consideration.
The basic issue in bribery is the notion that government officials will be having their objective opinions of the benefit of something tainted by their personal gain from the decision. If somebody writes a check to the government, there's no bribery, because, as a whole, the government would benefit. If they write a check to the president, it is bribery, because it's influencing the decision in a way that's extraneous to the direct cost/benefit for the country.
I had, overall, very good parents. All parents make some mistakes, and they've long admitted to that being one of them. Which I suppose is one of the big diffrences between good and bad parents. They all screw up, but good parents will eventually admit to it.
That example is irrelevant because the broadcasters will never let us record anything :).
It would seem that the cost of Linux is no longer zero. Instead it is effectively negative because in order to compete with it, it seems, Microsoft has to give organizations a bunch of incentives. It says something that in order to create a reasonable value proposition for their software they have to, not just give it away, but actually pay people to take it.
So the question for organizations now is, is it worth the upfront money Microsoft gives you to possibly be hooked into their products in the long run. Certainly you can use a possible linux move as leverage against MS prices, but in the end, is it better to use the leverage or to take Linux.
You have to presume that Microsoft has a plan of how they intend to make back this money in the long run. I can guarantee you that they aren't cutting half billion dollar checks at a whim without thorough belief that they'll make up for it. I'm sure that 5 years down the road Microsoft will be coming around to collect on those incentives. They'll collect by increasing licensing fees, further invading privacy, etc.
I grew up frequently finding the television as my babysitter. It's a very hard habit to kick. I've realized that when we have children that it will probably be best for them to seriously limit the amount of TV time. This is going to be a very difficult change for me because I've long been in the habit of mindlessly watching TV.
The problem in giving up television is that as soon as you turn the TV off you have to come up with something to do. If one had gotten in the habit of always watching television when there is nothing to do, it becomes difficult to come up with things to do even. So it become easier to just go back to watching television. Not sure what the best approach is to this. Sometimes I've had some success but I eventually seem to fall back into my bad habits.
Not to be a raging cynic, but you can tell where it's end up based on the money behind it. Where's the money? It's in favor of limiting fair use and protecting the revenue streams of big corporations. I can tell you this, it will go nowhere positive.
Well folks we are pretty much screwed if this becomes possible for the average person to do. The fact of the matter is that no matter what, this information will get out and eventually somebody will use it.
It does depend entirely on when the object is detected. I mean humanity given 50 years to figure out a way to stop an asteroid from demolishing the planet, would figure out a way. We don't have the technology because there's no eminent threat so we don't put the money there. Hell even a government bureaucracy can react in 50 years time :)
You must remember that humanity is a rather short sighted specieis. A meteor strike isn't going to happen in the next 4-8 years so as far as a politician is concerned, that's never going to happen. If a meteor strike did happen, civilization would fall apart and it wouldn't really matter whether the politicians fought to save the planet because the survivors would be too busy hunting and gathering to worry about voting them in for another term.
The problem with the future of space exploration is that there's no evidence that there's any useful return on that investment in the short term. As we can tell from the social security debates, that's what makes or breaks any political decision.
As for your view that we shouldn't care about AIDS, etc, because it doesn't matter in the long run if a big asteroid wipes us out. Using that logic, then to hell with space exploration, lets get to work on reversing entropy. Because regardless of anything we do, if entropy continues on its merry way, we're screwed. Check out Asimov's short story, I believe it's called "the question" or something like that.
Personally I think space exploration is vital to our survival, but in a way that isn't immediately obvious. It's not about avoiding the next plague, rather it is about creating hope and something to strive for. Right now, there are few frontiers left to explore on this planet. We have this growing sense of stangation of culture, etc. BUT, if we were pushing into space, then suddenly we've got new things to strive for.
I suspect though that, as with all of past exploration, money will have to be the driving factor. Corporations need to be convinced that there's money to be made by investing in space exploration. Renaissance exploration was all about trying to find resources, and wealth. If the WWF's report on the fate of the world is any indiciation, there will be plenty of motivation to do this in the near future.
Why is Snort the clear winner? Because it's the only one that doesn't cost anything. If none of them work as well as they should, at least with Snort you aren't blowing money on the software :)
You mean it leaves you with that feeling of dissapointment in that you just paid for a giant second rate advertisement for collectible toys and 3D rendering software? :)
What NVidia card do you have? I grant that I don't usually run linux on my box that has a GeForce GTS2 64MB card because that's my windows game box (it pains me but I have little choice). It does dual boot and i've run Linux with the NVidia drivers with no serious problems. So it may be my lack of experience with it, but I haven't see major problems.
Oh and as a point of contrast when my box is running Win2K and I play games on it (like Operation Flashpoint), it BSOD's at least once a day. Nothing so fun as being at the beginning of a mission, getting a BSOD, and then having to wait 25 minutes to join back in.
That's 90% of the reason I started using KDE is because I got tired of waiting for gnome to get it's butt in gear on anti-aliased fonts.
Something to keep in mind here is that the process you described is really pretty easy if you know what to do. Thus, if a hardware company really wanted to insure that it would be easy to run their stuff on Linux, they could probably do so without much trouble.
The fact of the matter though is that most people that run Linux are either technically inclined or their system was set up with the assistance of somebody technically inclined. So they don't bother because they know that as long as the difficulty in setting up their stuff isn't going to lose them sales. Since nobody expects anything better from the market place, nothing better exists.
While it is true that Linux has a number of niggling problems, Windows does as well. It seems that ultimately the reason he moved to XP was because of two things:
1) frustration with graphics in general (both performance and fonts)
2) frustration with hardware support
As far as #1 goes, I'll back him on that one. Fonts have continued to be an amazing pain to deal with. Both MacOS and Windows have systems that make managing fonts trivial. I susppose the source of the complication is that X provides multiple ways to provide fonts which complicates any unified easy means to add fonts.
As for performance of graphics, I find that the performance of Linux is on par with windows. And though admittedly I'm a power user, I find it rather handy every so often to be able to run remote applications so easily (thank heaven for SSH).
Now as for point #2, though his point is true, this should not be attributed to any inherent limitations in Linux itself. The problem is simply a matter of market share. Why support the few percentage points of the market who use Linux when you can just support Windows and cover 90+% of your users.
Personally I find that for 95% of what I do, Linux is as good if not better than Windows for doing it. Evolution is an excellent mail program, both mozilla and konqueror are great browsers. With crossover I'm now able to view a lot more of what's on the Internet. Honestly the only long running grip I have that hasn't been adequately addressed is the font problem.
If you've got problems with hardware support, just make sure to research your purchases before hand to suit your needs. I've only had problems when trying to install on very new hardware that wasn't built with running linux in mind.