IGPs - that many people used to have on their desktops - were equally horrible for gaming. In fact it's my impression with Aero and other non-gaming 3D effects the capabilities have gone up a little. Sure, they're not going to run Crysis but I don't think game developers are worse off than before. I think those who should be unhappy are AMD and nVidia, with so many games now targeting 5 year old consoles their cards don't really get any exercise anymore. I have a single HD5850 and figure it'll do just fine until xbox720 and ps4 comes, it'll run any console port more than well enough.
You haven't a clue. Assuming I add a little noise so your dictionary attack fails (like internaXtionalL33TspeakerZ) then lower + upper + 0-9 = ~6 bits/character. At 30 characters that's 180 bits strength, good luck with that.
I know not reading TFA is par for the course on slashdot, but if you managed to read the summary - all two lines of it - you might have discovered the following hint that these are not laptops: (one in the 21.5-inch and two in the 27-inch)
Apple comes in, says "We're going to want X millon of these A5s, and BTW I'm sure AMD would be more than glad to supply us with these chips AND the chips for our next laptops & desktops, your call."
Intel says "lol go ahead". AMD need Bulldozer to come out soon, Intel stumbled in the Sandy Bridge release but they've been shipping again a while now and AMDs lineup is now the weakest in years. Right now the aging Phenom II doesn't even compete well against Intel's 200$ processors, the X6 is really the only high-end chip worth buying today. That is AMD's high end, Intel's high end is way out of AMDs range, but then your wallet will bleed to because Intel right now essentially has a monopoly on that segment.
Way, way offtopic but the word is "deadbeat". I don't know what a dead beat is, maybe the opposite of a funky beat in a song? It doesn't sound right at all.
That's the way it has always been. People choose the newspaper or TV channel that selects / presents / distorts / invents the news in the way most fitting to their own world view. All that has changed is that the number of available publications has increased.
That's what people have always wanted to do, but it hasn't really been that easy to do in the past. Yes, there were massively biased newspapers but never like the crazy conspiracy theory websites. And if you had to deal with your local community, you'd be exposed to lots of other opinions.
With the internet all the loons find each other and you can completely lose yourself in webs and forums and blogs without ever hitting any real critical thought. I don't think it's a situation the human mind is used to dealing with, before like if your entire neighborhood - or going back further - the entire tribe - told that is how things are, it was probably true. Now you take the 1% opinion and drown yourself in supporting opinion.
Does it matter when the OSS solutions aren't ready to jump when Microsoft has bad years? I mean seriously after XP it was all silence for years and then came Vista that was a lackluster release in all sorts of ways - particularly before the service packs. If Linux wasn't grabbing market share then, why should it now when Microsoft has good years? Win7 is a killer, but it's an XP killer - not a Linux killer, because it never even got to being a real threat.
On the one side there's the evangelists "Linux is so ready for the desktop, almost any hardware is supported, it has replacements for all your software, it's so easy your grandma could do it, there's lot of people in the forums that'll help you." Then it turns out reality isn't so great, a lot of the things you expect on the desktop is broken or missing. And when you ask for help, and it's all "fix it yourself", "its free, you got what you paid for" and "go back to windows if you're so unhappy".
It's like if at the front door there's welcome signs and people welcoming you in for coffee and cookies and inside there's this grumpy old man who'll serve you cold coffee, hard biscuits and if you don't like it sod off. It's no wonder people go like "So why the hell did you invite me in then, when I'm clearly not welcome???" I stuck with it for about three and a half years (late 2007 to early 2011) before I finally said fuck it, I'm tired of being abused, ridiculed and spoken down to and switched to Windows 7.
There's some very nice open source software I still use, but I don't think I'll ever go back to a Linux distro. They've drunk waaaaaay too much of the koolaid. It's like coming to the Amish, they have everything they want for their society but people from the outside like me want more and other things. It's like "This is enough for us, then it should be enough for you. If you're so unhappy with it and want fancy things like electricity, go back to the big city." Funny that, most choose to not live the Amish way...
Some minor bugfixes get their own news article here, but two major releases of BSD based OSes are bundled together in the same news article?! WTF, dude, what's next, the/. BSD news digest posted once a year?
Okay, look, I know we all believe that we know what's best for the market and what's in demand - but I am so sick of hearing this line pulled out. "What Linux really needs is ***** if it's to become acceptable in the mainstream". (...) We are long past a position where a single application will suddenly make Linux mainstream.
Not one application, but one application suite - the problem is that one is a steep mountain to climb. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook = Microsoft Office Pro (plus a bit more junk, but they're not that relevant). Taking down one won't be enough because they sell as a package, if you try buying them individually forget all deals. The only deal you get is if you take the whole Office package.
If you could topple that then many, many office PCs would switch to Linux, together with web based apps most would not need Windows. I of course assume it is also available on Windows so all that depend on it can work with the rest of the company. Many people would start using at home what they use at work, if you've already sunk the cost of learning it that's great.
Good luck on that one though, Word is THE document creator, Excel THE spreadsheet, Powerpoint THE presentation tool and Outlook(/Exchange) THE collaboration tool. Each of them is a Photoshop-class giant in their own right and honestly OpenOffice and iWork has done little to change that. The rest is really chasing the home desktop, but that's so many different things to so many people it does take 100s of apps to cover.
Paper folder with dividers, hole puncher, file and forget. I have sections for the things I might need again like work contract & related, apartment & related, insurance & related, tax reporting and related and so on then a big section of general bills/receipts. I don't bother with the date on it, I simply file them in the order I put them in - it's close enough that I don't bother. The electronic ones I hope either who I got them from or my webmail provider will keep - at least one of them. Those I generally just pay and if all else goes nuclear I'll just have the bank statement but I accept that risk.
Most of my bills I don't really even see, they get paid automatically with a transfer limit. If they're higher than expected then they'll be stopped and I'll get mail that the payment was not completed, either because they raised prices or they did a mistake in billing. It's as simple as that.
And designing something specifically different from how you like it best takes a lot of motivation, because you go against yourself, in a way. That's why good UIs are not designed by coders, but by UI experts - people who may not have a personal interest in this particular product, but who enjoy the general topic of UI design enough to have made it a job. That (plus the money) gives them the motivation required.
No, the primary reason UI design shouldn't be done by the coder is that to the coder it's clear box testing, he knows the architecture, the design and exactly what strings he's pulling in the code so to him it makes perfect sense. To the user this is a big black box, he doesn't know anything about the inner workings of it and has to rely on only what the UI tells him. You can't shed that extra information and pretend to know no more than a user, no matter how hard you try.
Sure UI experts would be great, but I think most UI designs would be a lot better if they were designed by someone who didn't know the code, who deliberately didn't take too many lectures from the coders on the inner workings, who wouldn't know much written in mailing lists and forums except basic tutorials. Here's the application, here's the documentation, does the UI make sense on its own? Coders could be decent UI designers, just not on their own projects because you know too much. There should be an exchange program of some kind, you try making sense of my UI and I'll try making sense of yours. Then you'll see how much harder it gets without the invisible dotted lines you have in your head.
* Kdenlive is as good a name as Vegas when it comes to making sense for video editing.
Sony Vegas is the version aimed at professionals though, the version aimed at customers is called "Sony Vegas Movie Studio". Apple calls theirs "Final Cut Express", Microsoft has "Windows Live Movie Maker".
Granted, Kdenlive might not be too bad in a menu if it says Kdenlive (Video Editor) but by itself it's quite non-descript. Even knowing what it is hard to work out the abbreviation as KDE Non-LInear Video Editor. It's not a particularly bad name, but no more than a passing grade.
My experience with it was that it'd open my HDV clips but crash within 30 seconds of navigating the file, so I'm taking this announcement with a big pinch of salt. It was very much so not ready last time I tried it.
We let millions starve to death in Africa every year
Most estimates put the number of people starving to death - not just undernourished - at about 10 million/year or 0.1% of the world's population. The problem is not that we don't have food, it's because they live in war zones - mostly civil war - where foreign aid has had to pull out. If you just got all the warlords to stop shooting at each other, nobody had to die from hunger.
It's not ONLY a stick of ram. It's an indicator to your employer that you don't understand boundaries, roles, and responsibilities.
Here's my theory on processes in big corporations. If a process is just horrible to the point of being almost broken - not just lack of process but a strictly enforced insanity, that probably means there's a territorial control freak and sociopath running that process who has enough leverage to stop anyone trying to change it. Most likely he controls a business critical process that they can't afford a disruption in, so all his other shenanigans go unopposed. You assume that you're dealing with rational people, if so the process is usually rational too. This person is likely to go nuclear on you in a "either we have total control or we have NO control" kind of way. Most likely you will be sacrificed to please him, even if your boss didn't think you were that out of line. Fortunately as I've mostly been a consultant working time and material, I don't care. I've told the client what hardware and software will make me more efficient, if they don't supply it then well... my billing rate is constant so hours spent is money spent. I'd do calculations on an abacus if someone paid me for it, and that Windows NT machine I got put on around 2007 was pretty damn close.
I never got the allure of open hardware. Pretty much all the benefits from open source is that you can change it easily, but you'll never be able to make individual ASICs. If you want any change you'll have submit it to some committee that'll gather up changes for a production run, potentially rejecting yours and/or accepting others you don't want. You will never be in any real control of the hardware you run.
Many chips are extremely well documented how they function, sure they have bugs in errata lists but that's exactly because silicon bugs are expensive to fix. Also hardware is far less binary, like for example the Intel SATA bug they had - it passed all tests with the reviewers but the controller would stop working over time. What if you get a bug like that in your chip? There's no "patch and recompile" it's "throw away and buy another".
I'm sure RMS will buy one, but I can almost guarantee that I will not. But if there are enough people like RMS out there, feel free.
Whoa, see? All the complainers now switched their energy to frothing at the mouth about the free market, small government etc etc and they stopped complaining about the ass raping they are getting. Always works.
Don't worry, the libertarians will simply claim all the problems with monopolistic ISPs exist because the market is not free enough. To me it sounds like stabbing yourself with a knife, the harder you push the more pain you're in, but if you only push hard enough the pain will go away. On second thoughts, maybe they are onto something...
Norway here, ~85 USD for 25/5 and it delivers. I downloaded a 500GB torrent at ~2.9 MB/s one month, still no complaints. Too bad I'm not on fiber though, they have 25/25 for same and 60/60 for ~105 USD/mo.
Huh? How is this different from say a CPU and a GPU, where the CPU feeds the GPU command stream instructions. Ooh, computer slavery. Not.
That you have generic robots that interact with more specialized robots or non-robot machinery seems like a natural way of organizing stuff. Just like humans and their appliances.
Left to himself, a typical 5 page job application takes a couple of hours and many phone calls to complete.
Not so many phone calls, but job applications can take me a while. The "spray and pray" variety may be useful if you're unemployed, but if you already have a job and it's one of those rare opportunities I could easily spend 2 hours on it. Not because of language problems but for making the best possible application for the position. It's usually well spent time.
Something tells me the recoil from the first bullet would throw all the others way, way off. I don't think very high precision and firing bullets in rapid enough succession for that to work is possible.
People never liked dealing with drivers, compatibility, registry editors, getting apps from reliable sources, or system configuration. They want a device that just does what they need, and they don't care if it's highly configurable, so long as it turns on and works every time they go to use it.
There's a huge difference between configuring it to work the way I want and having to configure it in order to work at all. "My [network / sound / wireless / suspend / bluetooth] is broken" is never a good form of configurability. "I upgraded my OS and now apps x, y and z are broken" is not good configurability. If you go on YouTube and can't make the video play smooth, that's not good configurability. Many people hated "Plug & P(l/r)ay" because if it was broken, it was much harder to fix. But eventually that became the standard and you didn't have to configure IRQs and memory addresses and shit. There's still too much configurability in Linux of the not very good kind, because there's so many hacks and tweaks and workarounds the skilled get by without needing to scratch their itch by really fixing it and the rest are hopelessly lost.
And as for the App Store, well at least in that respect it's exactly equal to the repositories Linux fans have been raving about for ages, you only get trusted software. Or well getting a malicious app into the app store is possible, but so is getting a malicious package into the repository. The app store is essentially what open source never got going with microfunding, paying a buck is nothing. But a ten thousand people paying a buck each, that's a fair bit of money. I think there should have been a lot easier way to give a package developer a buck in Linux, even in the open source world money is a powerful motivator. Not the big donations, because people won't give. Just the small droplet that'll still add up to a river.
We can only hope. Unity is GPL, as is the vast majority of the Linux ecosphere. If Ubuntu becomes as big as (i)OSX and Win7 everybody in the linux community will gain a tremendous amount. Drivers, support, money - it will all get exponentially better for us.
Microsoft has the luxury of owning 90% of the market. OS X has the luxury of some very high margin niches, limited selection of hardware and the halo effect of their iDevices. I don't know how much one desktop adds to Canonical's bottom line, but it can't be much. Obviously the software itself is free, but I mean in total including all opportunities to make stores, cloud services, support services and whatnot. At least in terms of money I think Canonical would need the market share of Microsoft to go toe to toe with Apple.
Linux the kernel is not going anywhere, with Android it's now conquering the mobile market at record pace - regardless of the duel with iPhone non-Linux dumbphones are being replaced with Linux smartphones. Red Hat is doing very well on servers and on supercomputers there's almost no contest. But Linux the desktop? I don't think Canonical got what it takes. Linux and Windows almost touched with Gnome 2/KDE 3 and Vista SP0. Since then I have the feeling both OS X and Windows have leaped several miles while Linux is running in circles.
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IGPs - that many people used to have on their desktops - were equally horrible for gaming. In fact it's my impression with Aero and other non-gaming 3D effects the capabilities have gone up a little. Sure, they're not going to run Crysis but I don't think game developers are worse off than before. I think those who should be unhappy are AMD and nVidia, with so many games now targeting 5 year old consoles their cards don't really get any exercise anymore. I have a single HD5850 and figure it'll do just fine until xbox720 and ps4 comes, it'll run any console port more than well enough.
You haven't a clue. Assuming I add a little noise so your dictionary attack fails (like internaXtionalL33TspeakerZ) then lower + upper + 0-9 = ~6 bits/character. At 30 characters that's 180 bits strength, good luck with that.
I know not reading TFA is par for the course on slashdot, but if you managed to read the summary - all two lines of it - you might have discovered the following hint that these are not laptops: (one in the 21.5-inch and two in the 27-inch)
Apple comes in, says "We're going to want X millon of these A5s, and BTW I'm sure AMD would be more than glad to supply us with these chips AND the chips for our next laptops & desktops, your call."
Intel says "lol go ahead". AMD need Bulldozer to come out soon, Intel stumbled in the Sandy Bridge release but they've been shipping again a while now and AMDs lineup is now the weakest in years. Right now the aging Phenom II doesn't even compete well against Intel's 200$ processors, the X6 is really the only high-end chip worth buying today. That is AMD's high end, Intel's high end is way out of AMDs range, but then your wallet will bleed to because Intel right now essentially has a monopoly on that segment.
Way, way offtopic but the word is "deadbeat". I don't know what a dead beat is, maybe the opposite of a funky beat in a song? It doesn't sound right at all.
That's the way it has always been. People choose the newspaper or TV channel that selects / presents / distorts / invents the news in the way most fitting to their own world view. All that has changed is that the number of available publications has increased.
That's what people have always wanted to do, but it hasn't really been that easy to do in the past. Yes, there were massively biased newspapers but never like the crazy conspiracy theory websites. And if you had to deal with your local community, you'd be exposed to lots of other opinions.
With the internet all the loons find each other and you can completely lose yourself in webs and forums and blogs without ever hitting any real critical thought. I don't think it's a situation the human mind is used to dealing with, before like if your entire neighborhood - or going back further - the entire tribe - told that is how things are, it was probably true. Now you take the 1% opinion and drown yourself in supporting opinion.
You're not old enough.
World War 2 ended when a prisoner escaping from some castle gunned down Cyborg-Hitler, after all.
Why not? If it doesn't matter if you teach fact or fiction in science class, I guess you can do the same in history too.
Does it matter when the OSS solutions aren't ready to jump when Microsoft has bad years? I mean seriously after XP it was all silence for years and then came Vista that was a lackluster release in all sorts of ways - particularly before the service packs. If Linux wasn't grabbing market share then, why should it now when Microsoft has good years? Win7 is a killer, but it's an XP killer - not a Linux killer, because it never even got to being a real threat.
On the one side there's the evangelists "Linux is so ready for the desktop, almost any hardware is supported, it has replacements for all your software, it's so easy your grandma could do it, there's lot of people in the forums that'll help you." Then it turns out reality isn't so great, a lot of the things you expect on the desktop is broken or missing. And when you ask for help, and it's all "fix it yourself", "its free, you got what you paid for" and "go back to windows if you're so unhappy".
It's like if at the front door there's welcome signs and people welcoming you in for coffee and cookies and inside there's this grumpy old man who'll serve you cold coffee, hard biscuits and if you don't like it sod off. It's no wonder people go like "So why the hell did you invite me in then, when I'm clearly not welcome???" I stuck with it for about three and a half years (late 2007 to early 2011) before I finally said fuck it, I'm tired of being abused, ridiculed and spoken down to and switched to Windows 7.
There's some very nice open source software I still use, but I don't think I'll ever go back to a Linux distro. They've drunk waaaaaay too much of the koolaid. It's like coming to the Amish, they have everything they want for their society but people from the outside like me want more and other things. It's like "This is enough for us, then it should be enough for you. If you're so unhappy with it and want fancy things like electricity, go back to the big city." Funny that, most choose to not live the Amish way...
Some minor bugfixes get their own news article here, but two major releases of BSD based OSes are bundled together in the same news article?! WTF, dude, what's next, the /. BSD news digest posted once a year?
Because that never happens on Linux.
Okay, look, I know we all believe that we know what's best for the market and what's in demand - but I am so sick of hearing this line pulled out. "What Linux really needs is ***** if it's to become acceptable in the mainstream". (...) We are long past a position where a single application will suddenly make Linux mainstream.
Not one application, but one application suite - the problem is that one is a steep mountain to climb. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook = Microsoft Office Pro (plus a bit more junk, but they're not that relevant). Taking down one won't be enough because they sell as a package, if you try buying them individually forget all deals. The only deal you get is if you take the whole Office package.
If you could topple that then many, many office PCs would switch to Linux, together with web based apps most would not need Windows. I of course assume it is also available on Windows so all that depend on it can work with the rest of the company. Many people would start using at home what they use at work, if you've already sunk the cost of learning it that's great.
Good luck on that one though, Word is THE document creator, Excel THE spreadsheet, Powerpoint THE presentation tool and Outlook(/Exchange) THE collaboration tool. Each of them is a Photoshop-class giant in their own right and honestly OpenOffice and iWork has done little to change that. The rest is really chasing the home desktop, but that's so many different things to so many people it does take 100s of apps to cover.
Paper folder with dividers, hole puncher, file and forget. I have sections for the things I might need again like work contract & related, apartment & related, insurance & related, tax reporting and related and so on then a big section of general bills/receipts. I don't bother with the date on it, I simply file them in the order I put them in - it's close enough that I don't bother. The electronic ones I hope either who I got them from or my webmail provider will keep - at least one of them. Those I generally just pay and if all else goes nuclear I'll just have the bank statement but I accept that risk.
Most of my bills I don't really even see, they get paid automatically with a transfer limit. If they're higher than expected then they'll be stopped and I'll get mail that the payment was not completed, either because they raised prices or they did a mistake in billing. It's as simple as that.
And designing something specifically different from how you like it best takes a lot of motivation, because you go against yourself, in a way. That's why good UIs are not designed by coders, but by UI experts - people who may not have a personal interest in this particular product, but who enjoy the general topic of UI design enough to have made it a job. That (plus the money) gives them the motivation required.
No, the primary reason UI design shouldn't be done by the coder is that to the coder it's clear box testing, he knows the architecture, the design and exactly what strings he's pulling in the code so to him it makes perfect sense. To the user this is a big black box, he doesn't know anything about the inner workings of it and has to rely on only what the UI tells him. You can't shed that extra information and pretend to know no more than a user, no matter how hard you try.
Sure UI experts would be great, but I think most UI designs would be a lot better if they were designed by someone who didn't know the code, who deliberately didn't take too many lectures from the coders on the inner workings, who wouldn't know much written in mailing lists and forums except basic tutorials. Here's the application, here's the documentation, does the UI make sense on its own? Coders could be decent UI designers, just not on their own projects because you know too much. There should be an exchange program of some kind, you try making sense of my UI and I'll try making sense of yours. Then you'll see how much harder it gets without the invisible dotted lines you have in your head.
* Kdenlive is as good a name as Vegas when it comes to making sense for video editing.
Sony Vegas is the version aimed at professionals though, the version aimed at customers is called "Sony Vegas Movie Studio". Apple calls theirs "Final Cut Express", Microsoft has "Windows Live Movie Maker".
Granted, Kdenlive might not be too bad in a menu if it says Kdenlive (Video Editor) but by itself it's quite non-descript. Even knowing what it is hard to work out the abbreviation as KDE Non-LInear Video Editor. It's not a particularly bad name, but no more than a passing grade.
My experience with it was that it'd open my HDV clips but crash within 30 seconds of navigating the file, so I'm taking this announcement with a big pinch of salt. It was very much so not ready last time I tried it.
We let millions starve to death in Africa every year
Most estimates put the number of people starving to death - not just undernourished - at about 10 million/year or 0.1% of the world's population. The problem is not that we don't have food, it's because they live in war zones - mostly civil war - where foreign aid has had to pull out. If you just got all the warlords to stop shooting at each other, nobody had to die from hunger.
It's not ONLY a stick of ram. It's an indicator to your employer that you don't understand boundaries, roles, and responsibilities.
Here's my theory on processes in big corporations. If a process is just horrible to the point of being almost broken - not just lack of process but a strictly enforced insanity, that probably means there's a territorial control freak and sociopath running that process who has enough leverage to stop anyone trying to change it. Most likely he controls a business critical process that they can't afford a disruption in, so all his other shenanigans go unopposed. You assume that you're dealing with rational people, if so the process is usually rational too. This person is likely to go nuclear on you in a "either we have total control or we have NO control" kind of way. Most likely you will be sacrificed to please him, even if your boss didn't think you were that out of line. Fortunately as I've mostly been a consultant working time and material, I don't care. I've told the client what hardware and software will make me more efficient, if they don't supply it then well... my billing rate is constant so hours spent is money spent. I'd do calculations on an abacus if someone paid me for it, and that Windows NT machine I got put on around 2007 was pretty damn close.
I never got the allure of open hardware. Pretty much all the benefits from open source is that you can change it easily, but you'll never be able to make individual ASICs. If you want any change you'll have submit it to some committee that'll gather up changes for a production run, potentially rejecting yours and/or accepting others you don't want. You will never be in any real control of the hardware you run.
Many chips are extremely well documented how they function, sure they have bugs in errata lists but that's exactly because silicon bugs are expensive to fix. Also hardware is far less binary, like for example the Intel SATA bug they had - it passed all tests with the reviewers but the controller would stop working over time. What if you get a bug like that in your chip? There's no "patch and recompile" it's "throw away and buy another".
I'm sure RMS will buy one, but I can almost guarantee that I will not. But if there are enough people like RMS out there, feel free.
The way to fix this, is government regulation.
Whoa, see? All the complainers now switched their energy to frothing at the mouth about the free market, small government etc etc and they stopped complaining about the ass raping they are getting. Always works.
Don't worry, the libertarians will simply claim all the problems with monopolistic ISPs exist because the market is not free enough. To me it sounds like stabbing yourself with a knife, the harder you push the more pain you're in, but if you only push hard enough the pain will go away. On second thoughts, maybe they are onto something...
Norway here, ~85 USD for 25/5 and it delivers. I downloaded a 500GB torrent at ~2.9 MB/s one month, still no complaints. Too bad I'm not on fiber though, they have 25/25 for same and 60/60 for ~105 USD/mo.
Huh? How is this different from say a CPU and a GPU, where the CPU feeds the GPU command stream instructions. Ooh, computer slavery. Not.
That you have generic robots that interact with more specialized robots or non-robot machinery seems like a natural way of organizing stuff. Just like humans and their appliances.
Left to himself, a typical 5 page job application takes a couple of hours and many phone calls to complete.
Not so many phone calls, but job applications can take me a while. The "spray and pray" variety may be useful if you're unemployed, but if you already have a job and it's one of those rare opportunities I could easily spend 2 hours on it. Not because of language problems but for making the best possible application for the position. It's usually well spent time.
Fire a stream of bullets.
Something tells me the recoil from the first bullet would throw all the others way, way off. I don't think very high precision and firing bullets in rapid enough succession for that to work is possible.
People never liked dealing with drivers, compatibility, registry editors, getting apps from reliable sources, or system configuration. They want a device that just does what they need, and they don't care if it's highly configurable, so long as it turns on and works every time they go to use it.
There's a huge difference between configuring it to work the way I want and having to configure it in order to work at all. "My [network / sound / wireless / suspend / bluetooth] is broken" is never a good form of configurability. "I upgraded my OS and now apps x, y and z are broken" is not good configurability. If you go on YouTube and can't make the video play smooth, that's not good configurability. Many people hated "Plug & P(l/r)ay" because if it was broken, it was much harder to fix. But eventually that became the standard and you didn't have to configure IRQs and memory addresses and shit. There's still too much configurability in Linux of the not very good kind, because there's so many hacks and tweaks and workarounds the skilled get by without needing to scratch their itch by really fixing it and the rest are hopelessly lost.
And as for the App Store, well at least in that respect it's exactly equal to the repositories Linux fans have been raving about for ages, you only get trusted software. Or well getting a malicious app into the app store is possible, but so is getting a malicious package into the repository. The app store is essentially what open source never got going with microfunding, paying a buck is nothing. But a ten thousand people paying a buck each, that's a fair bit of money. I think there should have been a lot easier way to give a package developer a buck in Linux, even in the open source world money is a powerful motivator. Not the big donations, because people won't give. Just the small droplet that'll still add up to a river.
We can only hope. Unity is GPL, as is the vast majority of the Linux ecosphere. If Ubuntu becomes as big as (i)OSX and Win7 everybody in the linux community will gain a tremendous amount. Drivers, support, money - it will all get exponentially better for us.
Microsoft has the luxury of owning 90% of the market. OS X has the luxury of some very high margin niches, limited selection of hardware and the halo effect of their iDevices. I don't know how much one desktop adds to Canonical's bottom line, but it can't be much. Obviously the software itself is free, but I mean in total including all opportunities to make stores, cloud services, support services and whatnot. At least in terms of money I think Canonical would need the market share of Microsoft to go toe to toe with Apple.
Linux the kernel is not going anywhere, with Android it's now conquering the mobile market at record pace - regardless of the duel with iPhone non-Linux dumbphones are being replaced with Linux smartphones. Red Hat is doing very well on servers and on supercomputers there's almost no contest. But Linux the desktop? I don't think Canonical got what it takes. Linux and Windows almost touched with Gnome 2/KDE 3 and Vista SP0. Since then I have the feeling both OS X and Windows have leaped several miles while Linux is running in circles.