You are joking right? I have full Linux under the hood with root and it has all the disadvantages of console?????? REALLY??? You are WAY out of touch here.
I agree, it's just a PC but that means it comes with the disadvantages of PC gaming and the main one there is the inconsistencies of the platforms that developers need to target.
There are AMD and Intel CPUs with different clockspeeds, different bus speeds, different cache sized and different numbers of cores. There are Intel, AMD and nVidia GPUs with different clockspeeds, bus speeds, numbers of shader/compute processors, video memory and even multiple physical GPUs. Then you have all the different motherboards and chipsets and RAM type/amount/speed as well.
On the software side there the various chipset drivers, audio drivers, video drivers (that include shader compilers), different versions of OpenGL and GLSL as well as different levels of compliance with those versions and support for extensions (obviously SteamOS isn't concerned with DirectX).
On a console these specifications are a constant (or at least you have a concrete minimum) which obviously makes development and testing far easier which yields a more stable result.
Do you have a GUI alternative for OS-X? I can install KDE, but I'm not sure the average Mac user can.
I was going to say KDE, you're right that it's not a simple and straightforward process but there's nothing stopping anybody from creating an easy installer if demand for such a thing existed.
So what if we can tap into their work and use it ourselves? Could they provide us with a distro with the full power of a city distro with (hopefully!) no hidden agendas, backed by their level of tech support they use themselves? That could be a new go-stone in the OS Wars.
I doubt it, they aren't going to even want to get close to the bleeding edge. One of the complaints was the need to upgrade their systems every 3-4 years so you really think they are going to spend time and money pulling in, testing and rolling out new changes all the time? I'm guessing the focus is going to be on security over features, which will lead to it getting forked, which will lead to it ending up just like every other distro that loses its way.
If you want a no nonsense distro just use stock Debian or CentOS or something.
Simple, no one is forcing any Linux user to use a table interface shoehorned into a desktop interface, there's choice aplenty. I shouldn't have included Gnome 3.
How is that different to any other operating system? What operating system (aside from say iOS) can you not change the shell on?
One step toward an open-source world. What an exciting idea! Imagine computers out there computing, with no license fees that seem to propagate.
Yeah, one step. But with corporates, education and governments shoehorning iPads into every sector the free software movement may have taken ten years to take one step forward but Apple is swamping industries with devices to tie not only their software but also their hardware to one vendor. DOCX may be replaced as the defacto standard but the way Apple is going it's much more likely to be replaced by.PAGES files than an open document format.
Office and its DOCX format is pretty much the last big thing holding people to the Microsoft monoculture.
I still really find it hard to believe that the only reason people use Microsoft products is because of DOCX, LibreOffice can open DOCX (even if it does have some minor formatting bugs every now and then) and there are addins to Office to output to ODF if you have problems with their default ODF writer or of course you could use PDF if you aren't worrying about the users editing it. There are also a lot of legal templates for LaTeX which is another good option.
Then there's the ease of transition, non-gov/corp users can open Office documents in Skydrive and ODF documents in Google Docs where gov/corp can use subscriptions to Office365 and GoogleApps during the transition phase. If there is benefit to the change then there's really nothing holding back transition.
You write as though this point is the end of possible cost savings. In the future, there will be no more Windows licenses, no more CALs to buy. No more Office licenses.
In the future there will be maintenance costs, that's how the free software model works. It is their own distribution so either they will contract software development out to another company or employ a development team to manage themselves, either way it is a significant cost.
I agree, it's not that it isn't good - in fact I think it's very good - but the problem is the same as BB10, WebOS, Ubuntu Phone, Sailfish OS, Meego, etc... have which is that it isn't marginally better than the incumbents. You can't disrupt an established market with a product that isn't disruptive......which is why I use an iPhone I guess;)
It's not so much that since it will be available on the web but my question is what will be better about this? Linux Format is well known to be a quality publication and this new magazine is supposedly authored by many of the same people. What was so wrong with Linux Format that this new Linux Voice will rectify?
i never said i felt that way at all. I was providing an analogy that more correctly described the FSF's position, not mine. Do you disagree that the analogy represents the FSF position accurately?
My point is that if that is indeed an accurate representation of their point then they are advocating the position that you should not use anything that you don't own and control, because to do so would require you trust that the owner/maintainer has installed the locks properly and that they haven't been tampered with.
well, the only one you would have heard of would be apple.
And of course yes, upon reading the article that is exactly the case:
“The current system for Universal Credit is a conventional system being developed on a waterfall approach. When you look at digital [the enhanced system], it’s very different – it relies not on large amounts of tin, black boxes, but uses open source and mechanisms on the web to store and access data,” Shiplee told MPs.
When asked why he didn’t adopt this approach two and a half years ago at the start of the project, Shiplee said: “Technology is moving very rapidly, such things weren’t available as they are today.”
And the article and summary have misquoted and taken it out of context in order to make it seem as if he thought open source didn't exist 2 years ago. Chalk one up for incompetent flamebait journalism.
Then either they needed something highly specific, or this guy isn't qualified to evaluate technology.
The third and most probable explanation is that the quote was taken out of context. Even without reading the article this sort of flamebait is common enough for that to be the default explanation: "oh look, government incompetence...they didn't even know about open source"
I think you're confusing bugs and backdoors explicitly put in place.
Nope, the discussion is about security holes. If you think that "security holes" means explicit backdoors and that when I said Linux kernel vulnerabilities that I meant explicit backdoors then you are the one who is confused.
The corner small businessperson shouldn't. I don't see how that is unreasonable.
So you can have the same shrewd business practices so long as you keep some token competitor alive? Anti-competitive practices should be disallowed across the board, not just for the biggest player, it fosters a rotten culture.
Since very recently as you'll soon find out with a quick google..
Not sure what you're referring to, Microsoft bought the devices division of Nokia but Nokia itself - which is the part being discussed here and the part that owns all the patents - is a Finnish company.
The fact you know about those vulnerabilities in the first place exactly makes my point for me.
No it doesn't, not at all. It actually proves the point that you can review it all you want and there will still be bugs, likely some that exist right now that won't even be discovered for another decade.
The aversion to promoting people to their level of incompetence. Look at this site and look at how many people complain about managerial incompetence, most of those managers got to where they were by being promoted up from entry level positions by virtue of simply being there for a long time not because they were any good at the actual positions they were being promoted to.
If you are good at the job you do it makes sense to bump your pay from time to time and continue having you do a good job in your position than to change your position to something you are potentially not good at at all. Of course if you are proactive and engage your managers about training and your desired career path then you should be able move positions assuming you prove yourself but you would have to be a diabolically incompetent manager to move good resources out of their effective positions, unfortunately we have seen this happen plenty of times before.
Here is something that gets me. And I am no windows fanboi by any means, but I still for the life of me do not understand how MS got in trouble for bundling a web browser. I mean by that logic should we not be looking into apple for locking down everything? Apple bundles safari lets stone them! oh what? android bundles chrome on chromebooks? break out the lawsuits! I mean I followed the case I just dont get it is all
The issue is the monopoly, anti-competitive behavior isn't actually illegal. You have highlighted the issue with browsers which is exactly the same behavior and of course there is also the bundling of their curated app stores (imagine the backlash if Microsoft had done that back in the late 90s) and the usage of private APIs - which was a key element of the anti-trust trial wrt Office.
Google and Apple need eachother because if one were to drop off in their competing markets the other would be faced with the same anti-trust problems as Microsoft was, they only escape by not being a dominant market force. Microsoft's mistake was to crush their competitors (like OS/2) rather than letting them thrive and the saving payment to Apple was not enough to offset their market power.
If we cannot inspect the job you did and the lock you chose, there's no way for us to know if the house is actually secure to our satisfaction.
So do you feel the same way about say, Google? Have you inspected the locks on their infrastructure? Up until recently they weren't encrypting traffic between their datacenters at all. Actually I'd be interested to know which company's communications infrastructure you have inspected the security implementation of.
You can review it all you like, that doesn't mean you understand it. For example there have been nearly decade-old vulnerabilities found in the Linux kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
You are joking right? I have full Linux under the hood with root and it has all the disadvantages of console?????? REALLY??? You are WAY out of touch here.
I agree, it's just a PC but that means it comes with the disadvantages of PC gaming and the main one there is the inconsistencies of the platforms that developers need to target.
There are AMD and Intel CPUs with different clockspeeds, different bus speeds, different cache sized and different numbers of cores. There are Intel, AMD and nVidia GPUs with different clockspeeds, bus speeds, numbers of shader/compute processors, video memory and even multiple physical GPUs. Then you have all the different motherboards and chipsets and RAM type/amount/speed as well.
On the software side there the various chipset drivers, audio drivers, video drivers (that include shader compilers), different versions of OpenGL and GLSL as well as different levels of compliance with those versions and support for extensions (obviously SteamOS isn't concerned with DirectX).
On a console these specifications are a constant (or at least you have a concrete minimum) which obviously makes development and testing far easier which yields a more stable result.
Do you have a GUI alternative for OS-X? I can install KDE, but I'm not sure the average Mac user can.
I was going to say KDE, you're right that it's not a simple and straightforward process but there's nothing stopping anybody from creating an easy installer if demand for such a thing existed.
So what if we can tap into their work and use it ourselves? Could they provide us with a distro with the full power of a city distro with (hopefully!) no hidden agendas, backed by their level of tech support they use themselves? That could be a new go-stone in the OS Wars.
I doubt it, they aren't going to even want to get close to the bleeding edge. One of the complaints was the need to upgrade their systems every 3-4 years so you really think they are going to spend time and money pulling in, testing and rolling out new changes all the time? I'm guessing the focus is going to be on security over features, which will lead to it getting forked, which will lead to it ending up just like every other distro that loses its way.
If you want a no nonsense distro just use stock Debian or CentOS or something.
Simple, no one is forcing any Linux user to use a table interface shoehorned into a desktop interface, there's choice aplenty. I shouldn't have included Gnome 3.
How is that different to any other operating system? What operating system (aside from say iOS) can you not change the shell on?
One step toward an open-source world. What an exciting idea! Imagine computers out there computing, with no license fees that seem to propagate.
Yeah, one step. But with corporates, education and governments shoehorning iPads into every sector the free software movement may have taken ten years to take one step forward but Apple is swamping industries with devices to tie not only their software but also their hardware to one vendor. DOCX may be replaced as the defacto standard but the way Apple is going it's much more likely to be replaced by .PAGES files than an open document format.
He's talking about the expense.
Which, for free software, comes in the cost of support and maintenance instead of license fees.
The city of Munich ain't in the business of writing software.
Actually they are, they have an operating system distribution to support and maintain. Free software is libre, not gratis.
Office and its DOCX format is pretty much the last big thing holding people to the Microsoft monoculture.
I still really find it hard to believe that the only reason people use Microsoft products is because of DOCX, LibreOffice can open DOCX (even if it does have some minor formatting bugs every now and then) and there are addins to Office to output to ODF if you have problems with their default ODF writer or of course you could use PDF if you aren't worrying about the users editing it. There are also a lot of legal templates for LaTeX which is another good option.
Then there's the ease of transition, non-gov/corp users can open Office documents in Skydrive and ODF documents in Google Docs where gov/corp can use subscriptions to Office365 and GoogleApps during the transition phase. If there is benefit to the change then there's really nothing holding back transition.
We have alternatives.
There's alternatives on Windows too, litestep, classic shell, pokki, etc...
You write as though this point is the end of possible cost savings. In the future, there will be no more Windows licenses, no more CALs to buy. No more Office licenses.
In the future there will be maintenance costs, that's how the free software model works. It is their own distribution so either they will contract software development out to another company or employ a development team to manage themselves, either way it is a significant cost.
You know you can just use a 'sensible version of GNOME' on Ubuntu if you want right? It's really easy.
I agree, it's not that it isn't good - in fact I think it's very good - but the problem is the same as BB10, WebOS, Ubuntu Phone, Sailfish OS, Meego, etc... have which is that it isn't marginally better than the incumbents. You can't disrupt an established market with a product that isn't disruptive... ...which is why I use an iPhone I guess ;)
It is a big deal You name projects that can run on any distro, but Canonical is rolling a Ubuntu-only Ubuntu targeted version.
Why can't I run those Canonical applications on any other Linux distro?
It's not so much that since it will be available on the web but my question is what will be better about this? Linux Format is well known to be a quality publication and this new magazine is supposedly authored by many of the same people. What was so wrong with Linux Format that this new Linux Voice will rectify?
i never said i felt that way at all. I was providing an analogy that more correctly described the FSF's position, not mine. Do you disagree that the analogy represents the FSF position accurately?
My point is that if that is indeed an accurate representation of their point then they are advocating the position that you should not use anything that you don't own and control, because to do so would require you trust that the owner/maintainer has installed the locks properly and that they haven't been tampered with.
well, the only one you would have heard of would be apple.
And what exactly did you inspect and verify?
I was wondering myself, incompetent or corrupt?
You mean the author of the article right?
“The current system for Universal Credit is a conventional system being developed on a waterfall approach. When you look at digital [the enhanced system], it’s very different – it relies not on large amounts of tin, black boxes, but uses open source and mechanisms on the web to store and access data,” Shiplee told MPs.
When asked why he didn’t adopt this approach two and a half years ago at the start of the project, Shiplee said: “Technology is moving very rapidly, such things weren’t available as they are today.”
And the article and summary have misquoted and taken it out of context in order to make it seem as if he thought open source didn't exist 2 years ago. Chalk one up for incompetent flamebait journalism.
Then either they needed something highly specific, or this guy isn't qualified to evaluate technology.
The third and most probable explanation is that the quote was taken out of context. Even without reading the article this sort of flamebait is common enough for that to be the default explanation: "oh look, government incompetence...they didn't even know about open source"
I think you're confusing bugs and backdoors explicitly put in place.
Nope, the discussion is about security holes. If you think that "security holes" means explicit backdoors and that when I said Linux kernel vulnerabilities that I meant explicit backdoors then you are the one who is confused.
The corner small businessperson shouldn't. I don't see how that is unreasonable.
So you can have the same shrewd business practices so long as you keep some token competitor alive? Anti-competitive practices should be disallowed across the board, not just for the biggest player, it fosters a rotten culture.
Since very recently as you'll soon find out with a quick google..
Not sure what you're referring to, Microsoft bought the devices division of Nokia but Nokia itself - which is the part being discussed here and the part that owns all the patents - is a Finnish company.
The fact you know about those vulnerabilities in the first place exactly makes my point for me.
No it doesn't, not at all. It actually proves the point that you can review it all you want and there will still be bugs, likely some that exist right now that won't even be discovered for another decade.
What is going on?
The aversion to promoting people to their level of incompetence. Look at this site and look at how many people complain about managerial incompetence, most of those managers got to where they were by being promoted up from entry level positions by virtue of simply being there for a long time not because they were any good at the actual positions they were being promoted to.
If you are good at the job you do it makes sense to bump your pay from time to time and continue having you do a good job in your position than to change your position to something you are potentially not good at at all. Of course if you are proactive and engage your managers about training and your desired career path then you should be able move positions assuming you prove yourself but you would have to be a diabolically incompetent manager to move good resources out of their effective positions, unfortunately we have seen this happen plenty of times before.
Here is something that gets me. And I am no windows fanboi by any means, but I still for the life of me do not understand how MS got in trouble for bundling a web browser. I mean by that logic should we not be looking into apple for locking down everything? Apple bundles safari lets stone them! oh what? android bundles chrome on chromebooks? break out the lawsuits! I mean I followed the case I just dont get it is all
The issue is the monopoly, anti-competitive behavior isn't actually illegal. You have highlighted the issue with browsers which is exactly the same behavior and of course there is also the bundling of their curated app stores (imagine the backlash if Microsoft had done that back in the late 90s) and the usage of private APIs - which was a key element of the anti-trust trial wrt Office.
Google and Apple need eachother because if one were to drop off in their competing markets the other would be faced with the same anti-trust problems as Microsoft was, they only escape by not being a dominant market force. Microsoft's mistake was to crush their competitors (like OS/2) rather than letting them thrive and the saving payment to Apple was not enough to offset their market power.
If we cannot inspect the job you did and the lock you chose, there's no way for us to know if the house is actually secure to our satisfaction.
So do you feel the same way about say, Google? Have you inspected the locks on their infrastructure? Up until recently they weren't encrypting traffic between their datacenters at all. Actually I'd be interested to know which company's communications infrastructure you have inspected the security implementation of.
You can review it all you like, that doesn't mean you understand it. For example there have been nearly decade-old vulnerabilities found in the Linux kernel.