My wife and I have a business plan for two public service web portals (yeah, with advertisements...): a knowledge intensive recipe/health site (which we already have an early beta for, but I leave out our URL to avoid slashdoting:-)) and a public bulletin board searched by zip code/location.
I subscribe to Business 2.0 (usually has interesting material). I was dissapointed to see our idea in slightly different form in the article - now I will have 10,000 competitors. I did grab a great domain name (http://ourevents.us/ but it will be a couple of months before we have a beta system in place.
I think that with a few exceptions the days of making a lot of money off of web portals is gone. However, by combining personal interests (e.g., both my wife and I love to cook) with low cost deployments of web portals, I think that it is a good business for motivated individuals. The important thing is finding a need and filling it.
I think that the idea behind http://del.icio.us/ is brilliant. I have heard that one guy did this: came up with the idea, implemented it, and I notice fairly frequent enhancements. Very cool.
At least half of the songs that I have purchased on the iTunes music store have been old songs - my typical use case is that something happens during the day to remind me of some old song I used to love - then later I take a minute to buy it for 99 cents; paying less than 99 cents would also work well for me:-)
Lucene is great! I use it all the time
on
Lucene in Action
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Lucene is so well documented and simple to use that I am surprised that this subject would fill an entire book:-) Just kidding.
Lucene can be used as is, or you can extend it with your own document type handlers, etc.
As a programmer, I way prefer dynamic languages like Common Lisp, Ruby, Python, Smalltalk, etc. However, one of the things that keeps me firmly in the "Java camp" is the great free infrastructure software tools (like Lucene, Tomcat, JBoss, etc.) As a programming language, Java is kind-of weak.
I did the game AI for a few games (cancelled Nintendo U64 game, hovercraft racing game) and for a VR prototype for Disney. It was probably the most fun job I ever had - I do mostly server side Java development now which is not quite as interesting:-)
I started out trying to write complex control code (a multi-agent system with modules for different behaviors/situations with a simply control agent to choose which module to give control to and for how long). The problem with this approach was that the game NPCs acted in complex and unpredictable ways - interesting behavior, but not predictable. It turns out that gamers want to learn how to react to game AIs. Anyway, I eventually got it right:-)
BTW: why did I quit such a fun job? My wife and I had bought a home in the mountains of Northern Arizona and we eventually wanted to move. The stuff that I work on now can be done remotely.
I think that Java is the gold standard for small and large web portals in terms or reliability, good performance, etc. I have done portals that simply use Tomcat with either Prevayler or Hibernate/JDBC for persistence that basically run forever, until we want to do a software upgrade.
That said, for CRUD applications, RoR is good - the scaffolding gets you up and running quickly, and views, controllers, etc. are easily customized.
I used to use Python and Common Lisp a fair amount, but not recently. The UnCommon Web Common Lisp package looks good; I would like to check it out in some detail when it is more mature. It uses continuations (like Seside for Squeak and VisualWorks Smalltalk) to manage state between web pages.
Sure, there is some overhead for using multiple langauges and frameworks, but I have always believed that it is best to be a "generalist" who can drill down when required.
Sure, being the creative commoner of the week a few years ago makes me a little positively biased in favor of CC, but who but a big media company shill would not like CC?
Really. CC makes it easy to choose a license that lets you share your works while maintaining whatever degree of control you want. Simple really.
Like open source software, there are good reasons to participate in the 'gift economy' of sharing written and media works with others.
I dislike being critical of people, but: after reading Dorvak's article, it seems like maybe he spent all of 5 minutes trying to figure out CC, then gave up.
OK, Fleury has a valid point when he looks at things from his business' point of view. I can't criticize the guy for starting and running his own business the way he wants to.
There are other valid reasons for doing open source (both Free Software or Open Source) development. I live in a remote area and need to attract consulting work. Although I enjoy sharing my open source and open content works with others, to be frank, I am also motivated to spend perhaps 300 hours a year writing "free" stuff to attract people to my web site and thus attract consulting work.
There is another side to open source software: as a consultant, it is a huge win having free platforms like Jakarta Tomcat, JBoss, Ruby on Rails, etc. for building applications for customers. Money not spent on infrastructure software is money that businesses can use for hiring consultants, hiring more internal staff, etc.
I wrote a web blog a couple of weeks ago, poking a little fun at Mark Fleury because of his comments on the open sourcing of the GlueCode J2EE stack (which is very nice, BTW).
I have been using it for a few months, and although ActiveRecord is lacks a little of the flexibility of Hibernate, it is good enough for lots of database backed web applications. I like how easy it is to replace automatically generated scaffolding code with your own code, but the scaffolding code gets you started quickly.
Also, Ruby is a fine programming language - it has just about totally replaced Python as my scripting language of choice. Using Ruby has also cut way down on my use of Common Lisp and Scheme - I miss the raw performance of compiled COmmon Lisp code, but Ruby is generally fast enough for me.
I bought the PDF version (and physical book when it is available) of Agile Web Development with Rails - nice book.
You have a valid point of view, but just one quick clarification:
Rete scales really well as you add rules but scales really poorly with the number of items in working memory.
I believe that rete would be a bad choice for the SW where you would have a very large data set in working memory.
(I used to do a lot of rete hacking: commercial expert system tools for Xerox Lisp Machines and the Mac, and hacking OPS5 to support 'multiple data worlds' for in house use.)
Both Open Source and inexpensive web services will erode this market.
On the Open Source side: systems like SugarCRM are free to implement and very high quality. On the inexpensive web services side: systems like Basecamp provide a great service at a price point that looks almost free.
Anyway, SugarCRM and 37signals (Basecamp) are two companies that I am watching as examples of a new business model that works.
I bought his book "The Emperor's New Mind" in 1990 because it was rumored to be an argument for why conventional computers could not 'do real AI' - I wanted to read something that cut across the grain of my own beliefs.
The ironic thing is that now I very much agree with what he wrote in "The Emperor's New Mind": I have attended enough "Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics" type conferences to finally start to believe in the connection between consciousness and quantum mechanics.
I definitely used to believe in the idea of 'strong AI' on convential computers, but not now.
I don't have time right now to dig up links (it has been a really long work day, and now my wife and I are going to party:-) but search for "Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics" for interesting reading material.
I agree with you. I would like to see the new GPL license be exactly like the current one with the single addition of a patent protection (I liked the "if you pee in the pool, then you have to get out" quote in the original article).
I have been following (a little) the www.fsf.org new GPL stuff - although it might be technically better to spend years getting the new GPL 'just right', as a social issue I think that people would have an easier time understanding "it is just the old license with the 'pee in the pool' addition".
And, I would like to se the new GPL released sooner than later.
I use three macs for my business: dual 1GHz G4 (coding), old 400MHz G4 (web server), and an old 600MHz G3 iBook (travel and 'deck time').
Seriously, for software design and coding, how much speed do you need? I would rather spend computer upgrade money taking my wife on an extra vacation.
My Dad does lots of video editing and 3D animation - he needs the speed and upgrades often. But for most users, older hardware with software upgrades matter more (I can't wait to get Tiger on my development Mac).
At least your kids have the advantage of your involvement in their education.
I think that this might become a new pattern: kids who do well in school will be those whose parents step in and help them by setting higher standards, etc. (Well, maybe it has always been this way.)
Well, I don't live in a shack, I am pleased to report:-)
That said, I used to live on the beach in Southern California - now I live in a small town in the mountains. Just about everything seems a lot cheaper here in Arizona and that makes it a bit easier to accept "lower than California" wages, which opens up more opportunities for telecummuting work.
There has actually been a lot of press about technical workers moving to cheaper parts of the country, "in sourcing", etc.
A bit off topic, but: I find the standard of living so much better not living in a dense population area - so cheaper living costs and a better life style.
But sure - I agree with you: I don't see how a tech worker could live in Manhatten, La Jolla, etc. and be competitive with much lower cost foreign workers.
One advantage some US workers have (at least me:) over younger foreign workers is many years of experience that makes it possible to get work done faster.
Don't get me wrong: I actually think that globalization is not such a bad thing (assuming some semblance of fair market practices - but then again, read Arundhati Roy for the dark side of the World Bank, globalization, etc.) I live in the US and because I live in a remote area I only telecommute so I both compete with foreign workers and also receive a fair amount of work from companies in India and Europe. It is all a matter of trying to stay competitive in the amount of work done per $$.
Where I think we really have problems is in our educational system. In the 1970s, most articles in ACM journals were written by Americans. Now relatively few articles are. In the US, we have the top end of the IT food chain covered - by this I mean super creativity, capital for investments, etc. Anyway, it bothers me how few young people that I talk with have any desire what so ever to pursue careers in science and engineering.
I earn most of my living writing custom web apps using (usually just part of) the J2EE stack. I love J2EE because it is rock solid - debugged web apps seem to run forever:-)
That said, I have been working through the fantastic second edition of "Programming Ruby" and I have been using Ruby on Rails. Another great technology for use in my consulting business!
While I understand that it is good for developers to share their experiences as per what works for them and what does not, I think that these J2EE vs. RoR discussions are starting to loose value based on the time spent on them.
Now, to get up to speed on J2EE probably takes several months of dedicated study and lots of experience. Ruby and specifically Ruby on Rails might take a half dozen evenings of study instead of watching TV. If you are a J2EE developer the cost of trying RoR is low. The cost of trying J2EE is much higher.
The choice of platform does not have the impact that design choices make on the success of projects. This is obvious, but: do some up front analysis and then try to use the best tool for a job.
BTW, I have a few open source projects in both Java and Ruby (shameless plug:-)
I am most looking forward to having JDK5 (or JDK1.5) support. I have put off using the new Java language extensions for production code because I do a lot of development work using OS X. JDK5 support alone is worth the upgrade price to me.
Teach those assholes a lesson. Really, Google linking to them looked to me like FAIR USE that could only improve traffic to the French news site - and the news site's profits!
I can not imagine how the Google News links could do anything but help make more profit for news sites that Google links to.
Google News could link to my sites anyday - I will not complain:-)
The hypocrisy of a few people is starting to bug me: if people want to use, for example, Apple's Music Store, fine, let them - their choice. (I enjoy the service, and being able to back up by burning audio CDRs, even at less quality, makes it OK with me - this is how I listen to my iTunes purchases under Linux).
If you don't like DRM, for example Apple's version, then don't use it.
What part of FREEDOM don't people understand?
This is similar to GPL vs. Open Source, vs. proprietary software
I release my little open offerings under the GPL because I like that - it is my stuff and I can release it under whatever license I want.
I also respect people who prefer BSD, Apache, MIT licenses - their stuff, so they choose the license.
I make my living (mostly) by having people pay me to write proprietary software that the own the rights to - they pay the bills, they get the licensing that they want.
People who make the investment and create movies, music, books, etc. own what they create - they call the shots.
The problem is that Sun's Java is not installed by default in most Linux distributions. As a Java developer (also use Ruby, Lisp, and Python a lot) the best situation for me would be to have Java installed by default on Linux and Windows - like on OS X.
For server side Java (web apps), which is mostly what I do, it does not matter too much because setting up a JDK, Tomcat, etc. is easy enough. It is a different matter however for Java client apps. Java is not that bad anymore for GUI applications and it would be great to not have end users having to install a JRE themselves.
BTW, natively compiling Java applications with GNU gcj is really getting to be a viable alternative to running under the JRE. I have been playing with Java and SWT also - looks promising.
I have been making about 80% of my revenue consulting (and writing) and about 20% selling niche market commercial products. Recently, I started releasing all of my projects as GPLed code. This is an experiment, but I *think* that increased consulting revenue will make up for the loss of product revenue. Ask me in a year how this turned out:-)
It seems right to donate Free Software because my consulting business is leveraged strongly on using lots of open source projects (e.g., Tomcat, JoramJMS, Apache, etc.). Most of my customers are very cost conscious, and money that they don't have to spend on infrastructure tools can pay consulting fees:-)
Use Google adsense ads to pay for the bandwidth. I have two small web sites (I am just a Java consultant) and Google ads generate enough monthly revenue to pay for servers, ISP charges, etc. with plenty to spare. I don't find the ads intrusive and it basically provides me with free web sites. I just open sourced my KBtextmaster project, so my bandwidth charges might increase, but I still think that I will break even.
Big deal. So he using excellent (and free for him) Mac hardware to run Linux.
What is the point?
BTW, I really like using Ubuntu on my Macs. However, there are some obvious advantages to running Linux on Intel processors: easier to get latest apps like firefox, easier to get Java support, etc. The solution is to also have an Intel Linux box on your LAN.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife and I have a business plan for two public service web portals (yeah, with advertisements...): a knowledge intensive recipe/health site (which we already have an early beta for, but I leave out our URL to avoid slashdoting :-)) and a public bulletin board searched by zip code/location.
I subscribe to Business 2.0 (usually has interesting material). I was dissapointed to see our idea in slightly different form in the article - now I will have 10,000 competitors. I did grab a great domain name (http://ourevents.us/ but it will be a couple of months before we have a beta system in place.
I think that with a few exceptions the days of making a lot of money off of web portals is gone. However, by combining personal interests (e.g., both my wife and I love to cook) with low cost deployments of web portals, I think that it is a good business for motivated individuals. The important thing is finding a need and filling it.
I think that the idea behind http://del.icio.us/ is brilliant. I have heard that one guy did this: came up with the idea, implemented it, and I notice fairly frequent enhancements. Very cool.
At least half of the songs that I have purchased on the iTunes music store have been old songs - my typical use case is that something happens during the day to remind me of some old song I used to love - then later I take a minute to buy it for 99 cents; paying less than 99 cents would also work well for me :-)
Also, I wrote a DevX article on Lucene:
:-) Just kidding.
http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/27728/0
Lucene is so well documented and simple to use that I am surprised that this subject would fill an entire book
Lucene can be used as is, or you can extend it with your own document type handlers, etc.
As a programmer, I way prefer dynamic languages like Common Lisp, Ruby, Python, Smalltalk, etc. However, one of the things that keeps me firmly in the "Java camp" is the great free infrastructure software tools (like Lucene, Tomcat, JBoss, etc.) As a programming language, Java is kind-of weak.
I did the game AI for a few games (cancelled Nintendo U64 game, hovercraft racing game) and for a VR prototype for Disney. It was probably the most fun job I ever had - I do mostly server side Java development now which is not quite as interesting :-)
:-)
I started out trying to write complex control code (a multi-agent system with modules for different behaviors/situations with a simply control agent to choose which module to give control to and for how long). The problem with this approach was that the game NPCs acted in complex and unpredictable ways - interesting behavior, but not predictable. It turns out that gamers want to learn how to react to game AIs. Anyway, I eventually got it right
BTW: why did I quit such a fun job? My wife and I had bought a home in the mountains of Northern Arizona and we eventually wanted to move. The stuff that I work on now can be done remotely.
I think that Java is the gold standard for small and large web portals in terms or reliability, good performance, etc. I have done portals that simply use Tomcat with either Prevayler or Hibernate/JDBC for persistence that basically run forever, until we want to do a software upgrade.
That said, for CRUD applications, RoR is good - the scaffolding gets you up and running quickly, and views, controllers, etc. are easily customized.
I used to use Python and Common Lisp a fair amount, but not recently. The UnCommon Web Common Lisp package looks good; I would like to check it out in some detail when it is more mature. It uses continuations (like Seside for Squeak and VisualWorks Smalltalk) to manage state between web pages.
Sure, there is some overhead for using multiple langauges and frameworks, but I have always believed that it is best to be a "generalist" who can drill down when required.
Sure, being the creative commoner of the week a few years ago makes me a little positively biased in favor of CC, but who but a big media company shill would not like CC?
Really. CC makes it easy to choose a license that lets you share your works while maintaining whatever degree of control you want. Simple really.
Like open source software, there are good reasons to participate in the 'gift economy' of sharing written and media works with others.
I dislike being critical of people, but: after reading Dorvak's article, it seems like maybe he spent all of 5 minutes trying to figure out CC, then gave up.
There are other valid reasons for doing open source (both Free Software or Open Source) development. I live in a remote area and need to attract consulting work. Although I enjoy sharing my open source and open content works with others, to be frank, I am also motivated to spend perhaps 300 hours a year writing "free" stuff to attract people to my web site and thus attract consulting work.
There is another side to open source software: as a consultant, it is a huge win having free platforms like Jakarta Tomcat, JBoss, Ruby on Rails, etc. for building applications for customers. Money not spent on infrastructure software is money that businesses can use for hiring consultants, hiring more internal staff, etc.
I wrote a web blog a couple of weeks ago, poking a little fun at Mark Fleury because of his comments on the open sourcing of the GlueCode J2EE stack (which is very nice, BTW).
-Mark
... I find Ruby on Rails to be great!
I have been using it for a few months, and although ActiveRecord is lacks a little of the flexibility of Hibernate, it is good enough for lots of database backed web applications. I like how easy it is to replace automatically generated scaffolding code with your own code, but the scaffolding code gets you started quickly.
Also, Ruby is a fine programming language - it has just about totally replaced Python as my scripting language of choice. Using Ruby has also cut way down on my use of Common Lisp and Scheme - I miss the raw performance of compiled COmmon Lisp code, but Ruby is generally fast enough for me.
I bought the PDF version (and physical book when it is available) of Agile Web Development with Rails - nice book.
-Mark
You have a valid point of view, but just one quick clarification:
Rete scales really well as you add rules but scales really poorly with the number of items in working memory.
I believe that rete would be a bad choice for the SW where you would have a very large data set in working memory.
(I used to do a lot of rete hacking: commercial expert system tools for Xerox Lisp Machines and the Mac, and hacking OPS5 to support 'multiple data worlds' for in house use.)
Both Open Source and inexpensive web services will erode this market.
On the Open Source side: systems like SugarCRM are free to implement and very high quality. On the inexpensive web services side: systems like Basecamp provide a great service at a price point that looks almost free.
Anyway, SugarCRM and 37signals (Basecamp) are two companies that I am watching as examples of a new business model that works.
I bought his book "The Emperor's New Mind" in 1990 because it was rumored to be an argument for why conventional computers could not 'do real AI' - I wanted to read something that cut across the grain of my own beliefs.
:-) but search for "Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics" for interesting reading material.
The ironic thing is that now I very much agree with what he wrote in "The Emperor's New Mind": I have attended enough "Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics" type conferences to finally start to believe in the connection between consciousness and quantum mechanics.
I definitely used to believe in the idea of 'strong AI' on convential computers, but not now.
I don't have time right now to dig up links (it has been a really long work day, and now my wife and I are going to party
-Mark
I agree with you. I would like to see the new GPL license be exactly like the current one with the single addition of a patent protection (I liked the "if you pee in the pool, then you have to get out" quote in the original article).
I have been following (a little) the www.fsf.org new GPL stuff - although it might be technically better to spend years getting the new GPL 'just right', as a social issue I think that people would have an easier time understanding "it is just the old license with the 'pee in the pool' addition".
And, I would like to se the new GPL released sooner than later.
I use three macs for my business: dual 1GHz G4 (coding), old 400MHz G4 (web server), and an old 600MHz G3 iBook (travel and 'deck time').
Seriously, for software design and coding, how much speed do you need? I would rather spend computer upgrade money taking my wife on an extra vacation.
My Dad does lots of video editing and 3D animation - he needs the speed and upgrades often. But for most users, older hardware with software upgrades matter more (I can't wait to get Tiger on my development Mac).
Cool :-)
At least your kids have the advantage of your involvement in their education.
I think that this might become a new pattern: kids who do well in school will be those whose parents step in and help them by setting higher standards, etc. (Well, maybe it has always been this way.)
-Mark
Well, I don't live in a shack, I am pleased to report :-)
:) over younger foreign workers is many years of experience that makes it possible to get work done faster.
That said, I used to live on the beach in Southern California - now I live in a small town in the mountains. Just about everything seems a lot cheaper here in Arizona and that makes it a bit easier to accept "lower than California" wages, which opens up more opportunities for telecummuting work.
There has actually been a lot of press about technical workers moving to cheaper parts of the country, "in sourcing", etc.
A bit off topic, but: I find the standard of living so much better not living in a dense population area - so cheaper living costs and a better life style.
But sure - I agree with you: I don't see how a tech worker could live in Manhatten, La Jolla, etc. and be competitive with much lower cost foreign workers.
One advantage some US workers have (at least me
-Mark
Don't get me wrong: I actually think that globalization is not such a bad thing (assuming some semblance of fair market practices - but then again, read Arundhati Roy for the dark side of the World Bank, globalization, etc.) I live in the US and because I live in a remote area I only telecommute so I both compete with foreign workers and also receive a fair amount of work from companies in India and Europe. It is all a matter of trying to stay competitive in the amount of work done per $$.
Where I think we really have problems is in our educational system. In the 1970s, most articles in ACM journals were written by Americans. Now relatively few articles are. In the US, we have the top end of the IT food chain covered - by this I mean super creativity, capital for investments, etc. Anyway, it bothers me how few young people that I talk with have any desire what so ever to pursue careers in science and engineering.
-Mark
I earn most of my living writing custom web apps using (usually just part of) the J2EE stack. I love J2EE because it is rock solid - debugged web apps seem to run forever :-)
:-)
That said, I have been working through the fantastic second edition of "Programming Ruby" and I have been using Ruby on Rails. Another great technology for use in my consulting business!
While I understand that it is good for developers to share their experiences as per what works for them and what does not, I think that these J2EE vs. RoR discussions are starting to loose value based on the time spent on them.
Now, to get up to speed on J2EE probably takes several months of dedicated study and lots of experience. Ruby and specifically Ruby on Rails might take a half dozen evenings of study instead of watching TV. If you are a J2EE developer the cost of trying RoR is low. The cost of trying J2EE is much higher.
The choice of platform does not have the impact that design choices make on the success of projects. This is obvious, but: do some up front analysis and then try to use the best tool for a job.
BTW, I have a few open source projects in both Java and Ruby (shameless plug
I am most looking forward to having JDK5 (or JDK1.5) support. I have put off using the new Java language extensions for production code because I do a lot of development work using OS X. JDK5 support alone is worth the upgrade price to me.
I am also interested in playing with Searchlight.
Teach those assholes a lesson. Really, Google linking to them looked to me like FAIR USE that could only improve traffic to the French news site - and the news site's profits!
:-)
I can not imagine how the Google News links could do anything but help make more profit for news sites that Google links to.
Google News could link to my sites anyday - I will not complain
The hypocrisy of a few people is starting to bug me: if people want to use, for example, Apple's Music Store, fine, let them - their choice. (I enjoy the service, and being able to back up by burning audio CDRs, even at less quality, makes it OK with me - this is how I listen to my iTunes purchases under Linux).
If you don't like DRM, for example Apple's version, then don't use it.
What part of FREEDOM don't people understand?
This is similar to GPL vs. Open Source, vs. proprietary software
I release my little open offerings under the GPL because I like that - it is my stuff and I can release it under whatever license I want.
I also respect people who prefer BSD, Apache, MIT licenses - their stuff, so they choose the license.
I make my living (mostly) by having people pay me to write proprietary software that the own the rights to - they pay the bills, they get the licensing that they want.
People who make the investment and create movies, music, books, etc. own what they create - they call the shots.
The problem is that Sun's Java is not installed by default in most Linux distributions. As a Java developer (also use Ruby, Lisp, and Python a lot) the best situation for me would be to have Java installed by default on Linux and Windows - like on OS X.
For server side Java (web apps), which is mostly what I do, it does not matter too much because setting up a JDK, Tomcat, etc. is easy enough. It is a different matter however for Java client apps. Java is not that bad anymore for GUI applications and it would be great to not have end users having to install a JRE themselves.
BTW, natively compiling Java applications with GNU gcj is really getting to be a viable alternative to running under the JRE. I have been playing with Java and SWT also - looks promising.
I have been making about 80% of my revenue consulting (and writing) and about 20% selling niche market commercial products. Recently, I started releasing all of my projects as GPLed code. This is an experiment, but I *think* that increased consulting revenue will make up for the loss of product revenue. Ask me in a year how this turned out :-)
:-)
It seems right to donate Free Software because my consulting business is leveraged strongly on using lots of open source projects (e.g., Tomcat, JoramJMS, Apache, etc.). Most of my customers are very cost conscious, and money that they don't have to spend on infrastructure tools can pay consulting fees
Use Google adsense ads to pay for the bandwidth. I have two small web sites (I am just a Java consultant) and Google ads generate enough monthly revenue to pay for servers, ISP charges, etc. with plenty to spare. I don't find the ads intrusive and it basically provides me with free web sites. I just open sourced my KBtextmaster project, so my bandwidth charges might increase, but I still think that I will break even.
Big deal. So he using excellent (and free for him) Mac hardware to run Linux.
What is the point?
BTW, I really like using Ubuntu on my Macs. However, there are some obvious advantages to running Linux on Intel processors: easier to get latest apps like firefox, easier to get Java support, etc. The solution is to also have an Intel Linux box on your LAN.