Home users are far less conservative than enterprise users, and most of them will just go with whatever is loaded on their machines.
Taking the stats from StatCounter, Vista peaked 2 years and 3 quarters after release with a 23.09% market share. The same time after Win7's release it was at 48.89% market share. I don't know exactly the forces at work or the distribution between home and enterprise users, but if consumers don't like Metro you can bet Microsoft will feel it. And this time around with so many people having non-Windows smartphones and tablet, they might be a lot more open to a non-Windows laptop too. The good news for Microsoft is that Apple seem determined to only milk the high-end market. If they offered a $499 laptop instead of a $999 macbook air as the cheapest, there'd be more red lights blinking in Redmond than during Christmas. The only other alternative is Linux but I'm not holding my breath for YotLD.
Probably the most important, and the least understood is refactoring. Refactoring is defined, in agile methods, as changing the design of the system without changing its function. There are different types of refactoring: UI refactoring (e.g. radio buttons to drop-down selection list), code refactoring (e.g. pulling a method from a subclass into its parent class) and database refactoring (e.g. splitting a table into two or more tables along columns). Refactoring can be done on its own, but it is much better to do it with the other practices, particularly TDD and Pair Programming. Refactoring is essential for maintaining internal quality of a system in the face of constant change (which normally results in ever-increasing amounts of cruft and technical debt).
Oh it's perfectly understood, but there's two issues: 1) It's never executed perfectly. There's always going to be some code that rely on some crazy behavior or some corner case that isn't documented by any test case and functionality will cease to work. The fact that you can go back and blame someone else for writing the shitty code and/or not making a test case doesn't change the fact that the code failed now, during your refactoring. That's what everybody who isn't reading the code will see, the customers, your project manager, your boss. And the universal reaction is not "How great that you found this bad code, the code base is much cleaner and better now" it's "Aaaaaaaaaaaargh stop breaking our product". It doesn't matter who wrote the shitty code, it's whoever flings it at the fan who gets the blame. 2) Because it doesn't provide any tangible functionality, it's entirely opaque to anyone else whether you're actually doing anything useful or even working at all. There are a lot of coders that just like to redo code perfectly usable code because they don't like the style or structure, like if the code was an art project in itself. Without a trust between the managers and the developers that when they say a refactoring is necessary it really is, it won't work because you won't be able to show it. You can show them the code, but they will never grok it. And the manager has to have the spine to say they need a break and not deliver things in order to keep delivering things, which isn't easy if he's got deadlines looming. Save your bacon today, hope for a miracle tomorrow is how all managers work.
For that much data you want a RAID since drives tend to fail if left sitting on the shelf, and they also tend (for different reasons) if they are spinning. Basically: buy a RAID enclosure, insert drives so it looks like one giant drive, then copy files. For 24TB you can use eight 4TB drives for a 6+2 RAID-6 setup. Then if any two of the drives fail you can still recover the data.
Yeah... though I suspect with the price premium for 4TB drives - they're huge - and the cost of an 8-port RAID6 capable RAID card you're considerably above the budget he was going for. If this is like "projects" or something I'd probably suggest the human archiving method - split your live disk into three areas, "work in progress" and "to archive" and "archive". Your WIP you back up completely every time, your "to archive" you add to the latest archive disk (plain, no RAID), and make an index of it so you can easily find on which archive disk it is then move it to "archive" on the live disk. Very low tech incremental backup but this seems like a hobby project. I certainly hope it's not a company's backup / disaster recovery plan...
Yeah, if this was a failure then every time you write code that fails one of the unit tests during development that must be a failure too. That'll be a lot of fail.
Well, streaming BluRay would be 54 Mbit/s, if we go to 4K then probably ~200 Mbit/s. So if mum, dad, son, daughter all watch on different TVs + overhead you're probably close but that's not the point. I do have a 60/60 Mbit line, it's not saturated or even close to it, the main difference is that things now finish faster. Download that Linux ISO?...............done. I'm still going to transfer the same bits, so what does mean for my ISP? Averaged across everyone that probably costs them the same, only the cost of the last mile link matters. They doubled the speeds for no change in cost about a year and a half ago, but I doubt their traffic doubled. I'd like 1 Gbps because things would finish near instantly, if most people only use it in bursts then maybe they can, without it costing an arm and a leg.
Odd that they don't have a "grandma" subscription, my choices here are something like 1/1 (or maybe 0.5/0.5, can't find it right now), 25/25 and 60/60 (and up to 400/400 if you're BillG), basically they want you using their system. It's not much but fine if you're only using it to browse, read mail and pay your bills online.
But seriously, at the practical level, who can answer:
What was the first name of your third grade teacher? What was the nearest cross street to the home you lived in as a child? Who was your sports or other hero at eight years old? What was the name of your boss on your first job?
1) Well I can't. But you know schools tend to have yearbooks and with some minor effort I could probably find out. 2) Oh I don't know, look up where your parents live for example? That works for many 20-somethings at least. And if you moved a lot as a child, it doesn't really have an unique answer. 3) You're assuming there's one hero that stands out above all others, most likely a year later I won't know which of the almost-equally-great people I put down as my hero. 4) Granted, this is probably the best one. Not exactly bullet proof though, but would certainly take some work.
Anyway, I could probably come up with some good ones. But the problem is that I'd probably have to share them, it's the same problem as using the same password everywhere. It's not very smart.
Same here in Norway, average speed is 12.8 Mbps and median speed is 7.2 Mbps. In fact, looking at the full table there's actually many <2 Mbps, few between 2 and 4 Mbps and then many between 4 and 8 Mbps again so there's actually a large fraction that's significantly slower than the median again. On the high side it's as expected a gradual decline.
And you may add one more to that list: 4) The world market for cheap phones - Nokia's bread and butter - is saturating. We have 6 billion cell phone subscriptions now, pretty soon you run out of new people to sell phones to. Nokia will get much less business selling replacements, not to mention the rich buy smartphones saturating the second hand market with cheap but usable dumb/feature phones. Nokia could not afford to stand still.
That might be true from Digia's point of view, hopefully they got value for their money but from Nokia's point of view they certainly bought something very expensive, produced very little with it and sold the rest for breadcrumbs. Laying off people certainly doesn't provide any revenue. Trolltech had about 250 employees when Nokia bought them, they've laid off a lot, transferred 19 employees in the last agreement and 125 employees now so I don't think there's many unaccounted for. Does Nokia really retain anything of value from their Trolltech acquisition? If not then the money Digia gave them is all they'll get, the rest is a dead loss.
Their market cap is only about 50 million euro - significantly less than the 104 million euro Nokia paid for Trolltech back in 2008 and you get the rest of Digia for free. I'd wager that Digia paid less than 10 million for this, with Nokia taking a loss of over 90%, maybe even 99%. The thing is, I don't see who'd buy it today. Apple and Android have their own toolkits on mobile, Microsoft and Apple have their own toolkit on desktop so nobody needs it to sell hardware except maybe RIM. Going back to the dual GPL/commercial licensing model is nearly hopeless now that it's gone LGPL, people will fork off the last release and split the community. It's a nice product but I don't see how you'd make money on it.
Now that the oligarchs are offering convenience as an alternative to liberty, most people are lining up. The hardware manufacturers are falling right in line with UEFI, the network providers are pushing to cripple the nasty peer-to-peer design of the Internet, and everyone with an IQ below 120 (and a surprising percentage of those above) can easily be convinced they are happier this way. It's called progress.
Most people are totally indifferent because it doesn't make one lick of difference to them, they've never installed another OS on their phone/table/laptop and never will. It's a walled garden so big they just don't see the border, just like most Americans don't even have a passport. Even with UEFI it won't be that hard to make a laptop run Linux and you can easily find unlocked or unlockable Android phones and tablets, but I guess you have something new to blame when market share stays at 1% where it's been for many years now. As for the network providers they've tried and been failing for at least 20 years now since AOL, any particular reason you feel they're succeeding? Because last I checked all my P2P software worked just fine and the content mafia's attempts at lock down are not having any effect at all.
People bought products they thought were better, plain and simple. I got an iPhone, I got an iPad and if Apple hadn't managed to drag the rest of the phone industry's head out of their ass we'd still be stuck with Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Sure it's not open source progress but it is progress, honestly I don't want it to stop just so GNU/free alternatives can catch up. Right now the OS with by far the most shipping devices is Android, it might not be a community project but source code is source code - as long as they actually release source for every release. It's something you could fork off, if you so wanted. Honestly I think Google and an Android Desktop will bring open source to the desktop before Gnome or KDE ever manage to become popular.
Personally I find this whole deal with desktop interfaces to be a pretty big waste of resources, like rearranging toolbars and menus and trays and docks and plasmoids is what'll win people over. Maybe I'm just getting to be an old fart but my Win7 desktop in 2012 is looking pretty much like my Win95 desktop from 17 years ago. A launch icon, a taskbar of running apps and a tray of background services, most apps running in full screen. Maybe it's not new or fancy but it works pretty much like the steering wheel, gas and brake pedal of a car. They're instantly familiar and they do the job well enough.
Of course the back-ends have been rewritten many times over, to make sure whatever is behind the control panel and system provided tray icons is working but it looks mostly the same. And the apps have certainly improved, but really.... why is Gnome vs Unity vs KDE really still a big fighting issue? I mean seriously the OS is a means to an end to run applications, if you're spending so much time with it then you're doing it wrong. It's a bit like the people that spend more time tuning, styling and cleaning their car than they do driving it - you're kinda missing the point of it being a car. It's supposed to get you places.
My anecdotal evidence is just as valid as the OP's anecdotal evidence based on a data set of one alleged machine. Take that for what it's worth, or is his post "valid data" because it criticises Apple?
Finding one black sheep in the herd says more about their presence than finding a white sheep does about their absence. Imagine he'd said "Flying the space shuttle is dangerous, I went to see a launch once and it blew up" then you replying "Well I went to a launch too and it didn't blow up, so it must be safe", that wouldn't make much sense. Unless the failure rate is close to 100% one anecdotal working machine doesn't really say anything.
But that's where the problem was: MS and all OEMs saw Tablet PCs as niche systems meant for business, and they marketed and priced them that way. Since they lacked the audience, they lacked the apps. Apple saw tablets as consumption devices for the consumer, and they won that side of the bet, for pretty obvious reasons (size, price, usability).
I think it might have been the other way around, to get the necessary touchscreen and horsepower it ended up in a business class price. Remember back in 2002 when Microsoft launched their first tablet desktops were still outselling laptops 3:1 and both were pricey while your phone was dumb as fuck. That your average consumer would buy a tablet as a second computer was unthinkable. Today it's a whole different ballgame when you can get the trifecta of a smartphone, tablet and laptop for under a grand. An android/windows one anyway, for the full Apple stack you're probably looking at two.
Back in 200 when Apple showed that *nix could be used as the basis for a Desktop OS, I thought some of the major MS partners might go this route and develop a consortium to create a desktop OS for PC users, using emulation such as we see with WINE. Of course they were happy sucking the teats of MS and making the easy money. It would have been too much work for them to develop and innovative product.
Aren't you forgetting the small fact that any OEM that tried that would quickly be Microsoft's least favorite OEM? Now on the other hand, if there's going to be war they have little to lose by returning a few punches.
SCO filed for chapter 11 back in April of 2011 and now they're filing for chapter 7. Can someone explain what the two together might mean for SCO Group?
Chapter 11 means you're trying to reorganize the company to come out of bankruptcy protection again, typically by making a deal with your creditors and/or selling off assets, IP rights or parts of the business. Chapter 7 is liquidation, it means all their assets will be sold and the company will cease to exist.
That's the point, the government cannot be sued directly by a citizen, since the government has sovereign immunity. The court is merely saying that unless the government explicitly decides to waive sovereign immunity, they cannot be sued. The courts do not decide when sovereign immunity has been waived, that is left up to the legislative or executive. This has always been the case in the USA.
That part is fair enough, but shouldn't the constitution be considered explicitly waiving immunity? Because otherwise the government can tap dance over the 4th amendment's grave and nobody can sue them. In fact, the whole Bill of Rights would be useless.
If he was saying they were going to take down Linux or something, then I'd say they were bat shit crazy but really all they're saying is that they want to try doing their own thing. I think every developer has that "If I could just rewrite this from scratch without having to deal with all the old cruft, it would be soooooooo much better" itch. Maybe the goal isn't competing, it could be sheer accomplishment as in I wrote this and it works great. It could be recognition, that others see the quality of your craft. It could be inspiration, that by showing it as a proof of concept in a small and nimble OS it might be picked up by others. Of course you could end up reinventing the wheel or worse, but then that's a learning experience - but it's still easier to try and fail in a simpler environment. You get to think more on concepts, less on dealing with old code.
I think that's really one of the strengths of open source, you don't have to get anyone's permission, you don't have to convince any naysayers, you don't have to build a business case. You just have to say "yes I could" and code yourself a better mouse trap. Of course you could do that with Linux too but the whole mainlining process is working against you because it goes into millions of production servers that have to be rock stable. It's probably better for you to be part of a project that's open to such radical changes, to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. Perhaps you don't even have any interest in being in the big pond at all.
But ordering online has a mighty drawback: It takes 2-3 days to arrive. What if I need it NOW? Like that router that just failed, the headphones the cord of which my bumbling friend tripped over and broke, or the extra controller for the new console daddy forgot to order and has now two fighting kids at his hands? It can cost 50% more than it does online and people would still buy it, worse, they would buy WHATEVER item you have in stock simply because they don't have the luxury to shop around for the best one available, they need one NOW.
Well that's your problem, but it doesn't mean there's money in solving it. Desperation items are normally small and far between, if I'm only occasionally buying a forgotten $10 SATA cable for a $1000 machine then your market is really really small. And you must really be desperate, would you really need those headphones right now or will a pair of 0.99$ earplugs get you by until your new ones arrive? Tell the kids to share or nobody gets to play until the controller arrives. And for all that you need inventory, staff and retail space. The last one should really not be underestimated, if you want your store to be central where people can get to it easily then that costs loads of money.
Besides, there's something about selling yourself as a place of last resort that tends to infect the whole brand. Customers who'd never want to go to there unless they had to tend to show it, and that negativity can easily affect everyone else. Compared to desperation items there's still a lot more money in people that want to talk face to face and see the physical products, their real problem are people that browse at the store, talk to their salesmen but say they'll have to "think about it" then go home and order it online for less. Of course it's perfectly legal but intentionally freeloading I feel is a bit dishonest.
I know they're just trying to offload inventory at the lowest price point; which for 90% of people is all they care about.
No, they're trying to offload what will sound most impressive with the cheapest possible components. Which is why for example most OEM models were consistently RAM starved, people looked at the CPU and GPU so slashing that saved some bucks. That is also why AMD and nVidia do rebrands of their graphics card so it sounds like they're from the most recent series. That said, they do have some good deals so the tech-savvy people don't shun them. They know for everyone who follows your brand, they're likely to get a high-margin sale from people who can't tell the good deals from the poor ones.
It's actually pretty standard reasoning in fields you don't know very much about. You want a product that you're confident will be good enough, at a price that you feel isn't outrageous. You could read reviews and whatnot and find out exactly if that $50 cheaper model would actually suffice but it'd take time to understand and they'd much rather be playing WoW or hobby time or family time so you just get the slightly more expensive one and call it a day. I mean I can read a 20 page review of a new CPU on Anandtech but I know that's not for everyone - and they wouldn't understand all even if they did - and I do the same in many other fields.
In any case, things are integrating whether you like it or not so even if you know what you need and not the choices are narrowing. Laptops are of course very integrated, but even on a desktop I hardly use the expansion slots anymore. For most practical matters the CPU and chipset are almost one, like Ivy Bridge and Z77 which makes the motherboards practically identical. There's not really that much differentiation going on anymore, what the OEMs make is not that different from what I'd do myself - even if I started from scratch. The only real advantage you have is the ability to replace one and one component.
I really don't think the NSA is of much concern. They listen to everything, and they tell no one (not even other governemnt agencies like the DEA, FBI, CIA or DHS) and never do anything. They're a bunch of math geeks. I don't understand their mandate.
Primarily their mission is to be the intelligence branch of the military and they're not in the habit of sharing much either. But if they do, you can be sure the NSA is going to do their best to not look involved and not compromise their SIGINT assets. When they compromised Engima during WWII, do you think they sent out a press release? No. They just used that information selectively, acting like they were just lucky to hit the German forces so hard. NSA is the same way, even if they gave a tip then the DEA, FBI or whatever would have to build their own case. You'd never get any inkling the NSA was ever involved, but just because you don't see them doesn't mean they're not doing anything.
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Home users are far less conservative than enterprise users, and most of them will just go with whatever is loaded on their machines.
Taking the stats from StatCounter, Vista peaked 2 years and 3 quarters after release with a 23.09% market share. The same time after Win7's release it was at 48.89% market share. I don't know exactly the forces at work or the distribution between home and enterprise users, but if consumers don't like Metro you can bet Microsoft will feel it. And this time around with so many people having non-Windows smartphones and tablet, they might be a lot more open to a non-Windows laptop too. The good news for Microsoft is that Apple seem determined to only milk the high-end market. If they offered a $499 laptop instead of a $999 macbook air as the cheapest, there'd be more red lights blinking in Redmond than during Christmas. The only other alternative is Linux but I'm not holding my breath for YotLD.
Probably the most important, and the least understood is refactoring. Refactoring is defined, in agile methods, as changing the design of the system without changing its function. There are different types of refactoring: UI refactoring (e.g. radio buttons to drop-down selection list), code refactoring (e.g. pulling a method from a subclass into its parent class) and database refactoring (e.g. splitting a table into two or more tables along columns). Refactoring can be done on its own, but it is much better to do it with the other practices, particularly TDD and Pair Programming. Refactoring is essential for maintaining internal quality of a system in the face of constant change (which normally results in ever-increasing amounts of cruft and technical debt).
Oh it's perfectly understood, but there's two issues:
1) It's never executed perfectly. There's always going to be some code that rely on some crazy behavior or some corner case that isn't documented by any test case and functionality will cease to work. The fact that you can go back and blame someone else for writing the shitty code and/or not making a test case doesn't change the fact that the code failed now, during your refactoring. That's what everybody who isn't reading the code will see, the customers, your project manager, your boss. And the universal reaction is not "How great that you found this bad code, the code base is much cleaner and better now" it's "Aaaaaaaaaaaargh stop breaking our product". It doesn't matter who wrote the shitty code, it's whoever flings it at the fan who gets the blame.
2) Because it doesn't provide any tangible functionality, it's entirely opaque to anyone else whether you're actually doing anything useful or even working at all. There are a lot of coders that just like to redo code perfectly usable code because they don't like the style or structure, like if the code was an art project in itself. Without a trust between the managers and the developers that when they say a refactoring is necessary it really is, it won't work because you won't be able to show it. You can show them the code, but they will never grok it. And the manager has to have the spine to say they need a break and not deliver things in order to keep delivering things, which isn't easy if he's got deadlines looming. Save your bacon today, hope for a miracle tomorrow is how all managers work.
For that much data you want a RAID since drives tend to fail if left sitting on the shelf, and they also tend (for different reasons) if they are spinning. Basically: buy a RAID enclosure, insert drives so it looks like one giant drive, then copy files. For 24TB you can use eight 4TB drives for a 6+2 RAID-6 setup. Then if any two of the drives fail you can still recover the data.
Yeah... though I suspect with the price premium for 4TB drives - they're huge - and the cost of an 8-port RAID6 capable RAID card you're considerably above the budget he was going for. If this is like "projects" or something I'd probably suggest the human archiving method - split your live disk into three areas, "work in progress" and "to archive" and "archive". Your WIP you back up completely every time, your "to archive" you add to the latest archive disk (plain, no RAID), and make an index of it so you can easily find on which archive disk it is then move it to "archive" on the live disk. Very low tech incremental backup but this seems like a hobby project. I certainly hope it's not a company's backup / disaster recovery plan...
Yeah, if this was a failure then every time you write code that fails one of the unit tests during development that must be a failure too. That'll be a lot of fail.
Well, streaming BluRay would be 54 Mbit/s, if we go to 4K then probably ~200 Mbit/s. So if mum, dad, son, daughter all watch on different TVs + overhead you're probably close but that's not the point. I do have a 60/60 Mbit line, it's not saturated or even close to it, the main difference is that things now finish faster. Download that Linux ISO? ...............done. I'm still going to transfer the same bits, so what does mean for my ISP? Averaged across everyone that probably costs them the same, only the cost of the last mile link matters. They doubled the speeds for no change in cost about a year and a half ago, but I doubt their traffic doubled. I'd like 1 Gbps because things would finish near instantly, if most people only use it in bursts then maybe they can, without it costing an arm and a leg.
Odd that they don't have a "grandma" subscription, my choices here are something like 1/1 (or maybe 0.5/0.5, can't find it right now), 25/25 and 60/60 (and up to 400/400 if you're BillG), basically they want you using their system. It's not much but fine if you're only using it to browse, read mail and pay your bills online.
But seriously, at the practical level, who can answer:
What was the first name of your third grade teacher?
What was the nearest cross street to the home you lived in as a child?
Who was your sports or other hero at eight years old?
What was the name of your boss on your first job?
1) Well I can't. But you know schools tend to have yearbooks and with some minor effort I could probably find out.
2) Oh I don't know, look up where your parents live for example? That works for many 20-somethings at least. And if you moved a lot as a child, it doesn't really have an unique answer.
3) You're assuming there's one hero that stands out above all others, most likely a year later I won't know which of the almost-equally-great people I put down as my hero.
4) Granted, this is probably the best one. Not exactly bullet proof though, but would certainly take some work.
Anyway, I could probably come up with some good ones. But the problem is that I'd probably have to share them, it's the same problem as using the same password everywhere. It's not very smart.
Same here in Norway, average speed is 12.8 Mbps and median speed is 7.2 Mbps. In fact, looking at the full table there's actually many <2 Mbps, few between 2 and 4 Mbps and then many between 4 and 8 Mbps again so there's actually a large fraction that's significantly slower than the median again. On the high side it's as expected a gradual decline.
And you may add one more to that list:
4) The world market for cheap phones - Nokia's bread and butter - is saturating. We have 6 billion cell phone subscriptions now, pretty soon you run out of new people to sell phones to. Nokia will get much less business selling replacements, not to mention the rich buy smartphones saturating the second hand market with cheap but usable dumb/feature phones. Nokia could not afford to stand still.
That might be true from Digia's point of view, hopefully they got value for their money but from Nokia's point of view they certainly bought something very expensive, produced very little with it and sold the rest for breadcrumbs. Laying off people certainly doesn't provide any revenue. Trolltech had about 250 employees when Nokia bought them, they've laid off a lot, transferred 19 employees in the last agreement and 125 employees now so I don't think there's many unaccounted for. Does Nokia really retain anything of value from their Trolltech acquisition? If not then the money Digia gave them is all they'll get, the rest is a dead loss.
Their market cap is only about 50 million euro - significantly less than the 104 million euro Nokia paid for Trolltech back in 2008 and you get the rest of Digia for free. I'd wager that Digia paid less than 10 million for this, with Nokia taking a loss of over 90%, maybe even 99%. The thing is, I don't see who'd buy it today. Apple and Android have their own toolkits on mobile, Microsoft and Apple have their own toolkit on desktop so nobody needs it to sell hardware except maybe RIM. Going back to the dual GPL/commercial licensing model is nearly hopeless now that it's gone LGPL, people will fork off the last release and split the community. It's a nice product but I don't see how you'd make money on it.
Now that the oligarchs are offering convenience as an alternative to liberty, most people are lining up. The hardware manufacturers are falling right in line with UEFI, the network providers are pushing to cripple the nasty peer-to-peer design of the Internet, and everyone with an IQ below 120 (and a surprising percentage of those above) can easily be convinced they are happier this way. It's called progress.
Most people are totally indifferent because it doesn't make one lick of difference to them, they've never installed another OS on their phone/table/laptop and never will. It's a walled garden so big they just don't see the border, just like most Americans don't even have a passport. Even with UEFI it won't be that hard to make a laptop run Linux and you can easily find unlocked or unlockable Android phones and tablets, but I guess you have something new to blame when market share stays at 1% where it's been for many years now. As for the network providers they've tried and been failing for at least 20 years now since AOL, any particular reason you feel they're succeeding? Because last I checked all my P2P software worked just fine and the content mafia's attempts at lock down are not having any effect at all.
People bought products they thought were better, plain and simple. I got an iPhone, I got an iPad and if Apple hadn't managed to drag the rest of the phone industry's head out of their ass we'd still be stuck with Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Sure it's not open source progress but it is progress, honestly I don't want it to stop just so GNU/free alternatives can catch up. Right now the OS with by far the most shipping devices is Android, it might not be a community project but source code is source code - as long as they actually release source for every release. It's something you could fork off, if you so wanted. Honestly I think Google and an Android Desktop will bring open source to the desktop before Gnome or KDE ever manage to become popular.
Personally I find this whole deal with desktop interfaces to be a pretty big waste of resources, like rearranging toolbars and menus and trays and docks and plasmoids is what'll win people over. Maybe I'm just getting to be an old fart but my Win7 desktop in 2012 is looking pretty much like my Win95 desktop from 17 years ago. A launch icon, a taskbar of running apps and a tray of background services, most apps running in full screen. Maybe it's not new or fancy but it works pretty much like the steering wheel, gas and brake pedal of a car. They're instantly familiar and they do the job well enough.
Of course the back-ends have been rewritten many times over, to make sure whatever is behind the control panel and system provided tray icons is working but it looks mostly the same. And the apps have certainly improved, but really.... why is Gnome vs Unity vs KDE really still a big fighting issue? I mean seriously the OS is a means to an end to run applications, if you're spending so much time with it then you're doing it wrong. It's a bit like the people that spend more time tuning, styling and cleaning their car than they do driving it - you're kinda missing the point of it being a car. It's supposed to get you places.
Can we even nominate those two? At this point they're practically Sci-Non-Fi.
<shawshank redemption>I guess someone filed that under 'educational' too</shawshank redemption>
My anecdotal evidence is just as valid as the OP's anecdotal evidence based on a data set of one alleged machine. Take that for what it's worth, or is his post "valid data" because it criticises Apple?
Finding one black sheep in the herd says more about their presence than finding a white sheep does about their absence. Imagine he'd said "Flying the space shuttle is dangerous, I went to see a launch once and it blew up" then you replying "Well I went to a launch too and it didn't blow up, so it must be safe", that wouldn't make much sense. Unless the failure rate is close to 100% one anecdotal working machine doesn't really say anything.
I'm paying 20 Euros a month for 50 Gbit with unlimited traffic
I guess I live in the wrong part of Europe... would be fun to fully saturate a dual 10G NIC and then some though.
But that's where the problem was: MS and all OEMs saw Tablet PCs as niche systems meant for business, and they marketed and priced them that way. Since they lacked the audience, they lacked the apps. Apple saw tablets as consumption devices for the consumer, and they won that side of the bet, for pretty obvious reasons (size, price, usability).
I think it might have been the other way around, to get the necessary touchscreen and horsepower it ended up in a business class price. Remember back in 2002 when Microsoft launched their first tablet desktops were still outselling laptops 3:1 and both were pricey while your phone was dumb as fuck. That your average consumer would buy a tablet as a second computer was unthinkable. Today it's a whole different ballgame when you can get the trifecta of a smartphone, tablet and laptop for under a grand. An android/windows one anyway, for the full Apple stack you're probably looking at two.
Back in 200 when Apple showed that *nix could be used as the basis for a Desktop OS, I thought some of the major MS partners might go this route and develop a consortium to create a desktop OS for PC users, using emulation such as we see with WINE. Of course they were happy sucking the teats of MS and making the easy money. It would have been too much work for them to develop and innovative product.
Aren't you forgetting the small fact that any OEM that tried that would quickly be Microsoft's least favorite OEM? Now on the other hand, if there's going to be war they have little to lose by returning a few punches.
SCO filed for chapter 11 back in April of 2011 and now they're filing for chapter 7. Can someone explain what the two together might mean for SCO Group?
Chapter 11 means you're trying to reorganize the company to come out of bankruptcy protection again, typically by making a deal with your creditors and/or selling off assets, IP rights or parts of the business. Chapter 7 is liquidation, it means all their assets will be sold and the company will cease to exist.
That's the point, the government cannot be sued directly by a citizen, since the government has sovereign immunity. The court is merely saying that unless the government explicitly decides to waive sovereign immunity, they cannot be sued. The courts do not decide when sovereign immunity has been waived, that is left up to the legislative or executive. This has always been the case in the USA.
That part is fair enough, but shouldn't the constitution be considered explicitly waiving immunity? Because otherwise the government can tap dance over the 4th amendment's grave and nobody can sue them. In fact, the whole Bill of Rights would be useless.
If he was saying they were going to take down Linux or something, then I'd say they were bat shit crazy but really all they're saying is that they want to try doing their own thing. I think every developer has that "If I could just rewrite this from scratch without having to deal with all the old cruft, it would be soooooooo much better" itch. Maybe the goal isn't competing, it could be sheer accomplishment as in I wrote this and it works great. It could be recognition, that others see the quality of your craft. It could be inspiration, that by showing it as a proof of concept in a small and nimble OS it might be picked up by others. Of course you could end up reinventing the wheel or worse, but then that's a learning experience - but it's still easier to try and fail in a simpler environment. You get to think more on concepts, less on dealing with old code.
I think that's really one of the strengths of open source, you don't have to get anyone's permission, you don't have to convince any naysayers, you don't have to build a business case. You just have to say "yes I could" and code yourself a better mouse trap. Of course you could do that with Linux too but the whole mainlining process is working against you because it goes into millions of production servers that have to be rock stable. It's probably better for you to be part of a project that's open to such radical changes, to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. Perhaps you don't even have any interest in being in the big pond at all.
But ordering online has a mighty drawback: It takes 2-3 days to arrive. What if I need it NOW? Like that router that just failed, the headphones the cord of which my bumbling friend tripped over and broke, or the extra controller for the new console daddy forgot to order and has now two fighting kids at his hands? It can cost 50% more than it does online and people would still buy it, worse, they would buy WHATEVER item you have in stock simply because they don't have the luxury to shop around for the best one available, they need one NOW.
Well that's your problem, but it doesn't mean there's money in solving it. Desperation items are normally small and far between, if I'm only occasionally buying a forgotten $10 SATA cable for a $1000 machine then your market is really really small. And you must really be desperate, would you really need those headphones right now or will a pair of 0.99$ earplugs get you by until your new ones arrive? Tell the kids to share or nobody gets to play until the controller arrives. And for all that you need inventory, staff and retail space. The last one should really not be underestimated, if you want your store to be central where people can get to it easily then that costs loads of money.
Besides, there's something about selling yourself as a place of last resort that tends to infect the whole brand. Customers who'd never want to go to there unless they had to tend to show it, and that negativity can easily affect everyone else. Compared to desperation items there's still a lot more money in people that want to talk face to face and see the physical products, their real problem are people that browse at the store, talk to their salesmen but say they'll have to "think about it" then go home and order it online for less. Of course it's perfectly legal but intentionally freeloading I feel is a bit dishonest.
I know they're just trying to offload inventory at the lowest price point; which for 90% of people is all they care about.
No, they're trying to offload what will sound most impressive with the cheapest possible components. Which is why for example most OEM models were consistently RAM starved, people looked at the CPU and GPU so slashing that saved some bucks. That is also why AMD and nVidia do rebrands of their graphics card so it sounds like they're from the most recent series. That said, they do have some good deals so the tech-savvy people don't shun them. They know for everyone who follows your brand, they're likely to get a high-margin sale from people who can't tell the good deals from the poor ones.
It's actually pretty standard reasoning in fields you don't know very much about. You want a product that you're confident will be good enough, at a price that you feel isn't outrageous. You could read reviews and whatnot and find out exactly if that $50 cheaper model would actually suffice but it'd take time to understand and they'd much rather be playing WoW or hobby time or family time so you just get the slightly more expensive one and call it a day. I mean I can read a 20 page review of a new CPU on Anandtech but I know that's not for everyone - and they wouldn't understand all even if they did - and I do the same in many other fields.
In any case, things are integrating whether you like it or not so even if you know what you need and not the choices are narrowing. Laptops are of course very integrated, but even on a desktop I hardly use the expansion slots anymore. For most practical matters the CPU and chipset are almost one, like Ivy Bridge and Z77 which makes the motherboards practically identical. There's not really that much differentiation going on anymore, what the OEMs make is not that different from what I'd do myself - even if I started from scratch. The only real advantage you have is the ability to replace one and one component.
I really don't think the NSA is of much concern. They listen to everything, and they tell no one (not even other governemnt agencies like the DEA, FBI, CIA or DHS) and never do anything. They're a bunch of math geeks. I don't understand their mandate.
Primarily their mission is to be the intelligence branch of the military and they're not in the habit of sharing much either. But if they do, you can be sure the NSA is going to do their best to not look involved and not compromise their SIGINT assets. When they compromised Engima during WWII, do you think they sent out a press release? No. They just used that information selectively, acting like they were just lucky to hit the German forces so hard. NSA is the same way, even if they gave a tip then the DEA, FBI or whatever would have to build their own case. You'd never get any inkling the NSA was ever involved, but just because you don't see them doesn't mean they're not doing anything.
Looks like Hollywood has got prior art.