This may not be what she wants to hear, but the solution that has worked for us has been a slow process of education, not technical restrictions. Different kids have different issues that need to be addressed. Our son (now on his own at college) mainly had issues with too much non-productive web surfing and to some degree, too much gaming, but not porn. Basically, he wasn't getting his homework done. I could have blocked internet access to his machine, but we decided not to do that. Over time, with constant support from us, he began to realize that doing his homework and getting good grades in school was his ticket to bigger and better things. He eventually learned to balance his time better and had no problem getting into UC Berkeley.
Our daughter (in 8'th grade) is similar but different. Her issue is also spending too much time surfing sites like myspace and deviantart, and IM'ing with friends. Educating her has been a little harder, but instead of blocking her machine, we moved it out of her room where it is easier for us to keep an eye on how she's spending her time. Since doing that, she is gradually learning to balance her time better.
Ultimately, your kids are going to be out on there own, and it is better if they can learn to balance their time (with your help) before they're gone than just block everything and have them leave with no time management skills.
Blocking ads isn't stealing anymore than not viewing them would be stealing, but if there is a loss of revenue to the website operator, by not letting the ads show, you are risking putting your favorite websites out of business.
Websites need to find a middle ground where ads are not so annoying that people block them. Personally, I can tolerate an ad that's inline in a web page, because it's easy to ignore, but I won't tolerate an ad that pops up a window on top of everything else.
This is basically good news. Adobe software is certainly cross platform if cross platform is defined as Windows and Mac. But Adobe has been no great track record on supporting Linux. Even Flash player and Acroread, which have had Linux support, have had big holes and delays compared to Windows and Mac.
As others have pointed out, while MS has a monopoly on PC OS and Office software, Adobe has a near monopoly on the graphics content creation market, their products are expensive, and they could certainly use some competition.
In the long term, this could also be good news for MS and MS shareholders. MS still holds a firm monopoly in OS and Office software, but these monopolies are under attack, particularly in the Office software market, where eventual adoption of open (or more open) formats will reduce the lock-in factor and make adoption of free/cheap Office suites much more feasible for many. Microsoft should be expanding into other software markets. There are very few companies the size of MS who have survived and grown so long on just two products and MS would be wise to be in other markets when those two monopolies eventually begin to weaken.
The surface of Mars looks just fine in every movie I've seen, so it shouldn't be a big problem. Obviously these engineers haven't been paying attention.
The end result is that ODF becomes a standard. MS maybe gets a few brownie points in the public eye for supporting it, so good for them, but is this really an issue?
Read the article - This deal affects Suse Linux Enterprise Server. This is no surprise; Microsoft has acknowleged that Linux has market strength on servers, and knows it must coesist with Linux in that space. MS, however, would not support adoption of Linux on desktops, which this deal doesn't address. No one can know for sure, but if Dell still has any intention of addressing the desktop Linux market demand, they may still use Ubuntu to do this independent of this MS/Novell deal.
I've started turning off XGL on my laptop when running on battery since it noticably eats into the battery life. This is really just FUD, it's not just a Vista issue.
Windows is getting to the point where most of the changes don't mean too much for the average user, and some things have even gotten worse. This happened to Office sometime ago. I don't use Office, but I know many people who do, and many of them had stopped upgrading years ago once it got to the point that it had all the features they needed and the upgrades just cost money with little benefit.
In terms of this causing trouble for Microsoft, however, I don't think the effect will be huge. Despite the Dell thing, this will affect only upgraders. The upgrade market may be soft for Vista, but ultimately the new PC market is bigger, and most new PC's will still come with some version of Windows installed, and MS gets paid for those whether they are XP or Vista.
Just teach the kids that things they read on Wikipedia (or just about anywhere else on the web) may not be 100% accurate and that they should check multiple sources. Teach them common sense and make them think instead of just shielding them from everything.
First off, despite the popularity of bashing SuSE these days, most or all "purist" linux distros do the same thing, this is not just a Novell/SuSE issue. By "purist", I am referring to distros which try to stay as close to 100% open source and patent-infringment-free as possible. Fedora is the prime example of such a distro, even more so than SuSE. On whole, fedora is even more conservative than SuSE, and also has Freetype compiled in its non-patent-infringing way, yet, hypocritically, none of the SuSE bashers are bashing Fedora over this.
Second, the deal between Novell and Microsoft regarding patents was an agreement not to sue Novell's customers over patent infringement. While this might be viewed as a "patent license", it is not an explicit license and thus very limited. The implication is that it would only cover inadvertent patent violations, for example by redistributing someone elses software. Novell probably still has an obligation not to infringe any patents that it has not been granted an explicit license to use.
I believe this hits the real point. I travel a fair amount on business and spend enough time in airports to know that there are a significant number of people who would probably talk on their phones as continuously in flight as they do on the ground if given the chance, and these aren't just businesspeople. Either way you handle this in flight will be a problem. If cells can be used anywhere on the plane, there will be a big backlash of annoyed passengers; if they are confined to a few rows, they will annoy and interfere with each other which will encourage many of them to ignore the row designations and still cause problems for others; plus even if they don't, it will still be a problem for several "normal" rows adjacent to the cell phone section.
Wifi on planes will be MUCH less of a problem in terms of annoyance to other passengers.
Unfortunately, the best solution is the one that is already in place on some planes - a public pay phone in the seat. It costs money to use, so people won't use it idly, but important business and personal calls that justify the cost can still be made.
fortunately for Microsoft, the OEMs provide good business.
While this is true, it isn't really the point. It probably doesn't make too much of a difference to MS anyway, since the OEM price that a computer vendor like Dell pays for is probably not much higher for Vista than for XP.
The real point is that unlike the change from 98/ME to XP, the change from XP to Vista offers much less to end users, and in fact offers some negatives to balance out the small positives. Windows is finally becoming like Office - a mature product that already does what 99% of its users need, and where updates offer only increasingly trivial features and/or specialized features for niche markets.
There are some things about this Novell/Microsoft deal that I don't quite understand. I'm sure many people here know more about the GPL than I do:
1. The way it seems to be portrayed by Novell, the agreement is an agreement by MS not to sue Novell's customers for patent infringement, it is not, per se, a patent license. Is agreeing not to sue someone legally the same thing as specifically granting a license?
2. People have claimed that this will make it impossible for Novell to distribute GPL v3 licensed code, for example upcoming versions of glibc. Let assume for the sake of argument that glibc contains no code covered by an MS patent. If glibc does not contain any code covered by an MS patent, then how can Novell be constrained from redistributing it, since nothing is being granted, license or otherwise, as it contains no patented code? There may be some other piece of code that Novell distributes that contains patented code, but that would have nothing to do with glibc, which containes no such code.
The parent post is common sense, which seems infrequent. I have found the range to be quite wide: When rednering animations from Blender, I have found that hyperthreading results in nearly 70% faster throughput when turned on. For rendering MPEG2 using Tmpgenc (under Wine), I see around 40% improvement with HT on. Clearly, these two applications benefit quite a bit from HT due to small computational footprint and/or low cache contention, etc. On the other hand, on my system, on-screen 3D acceleration in the NVIDIA driver (under Linux at least) appears to suffer with HT, with frame rates that are around 10-20% slower than with HT disabled.
So, I see improvements ranging from -20% to +70% depending on the application, with many applications seeing only small differences one way or the other. Like many things, this tends to turn into a religious debate when the fact is that it varies case-by-case.
I use Fedora 3, and recently installed the recommended update to kernel 2.6.12. I also use VMWare because I need to run several Windows applications that don't run in Wine. After upgrading the kernel, I could not configure VMWare, and worse, the improperly built VMWare kernel modules were causing the whole system to crash. Finally, after a fair bit of internet searching, I found a third-party patch for VMWare that, when applied, fixed the problem.
The real problem, is the Linux (both the kernel and other packages) changes very fast and in ways that software authors often can't keep up with, it's more of an issue of rapid changes in the OS making it hard to keep software up to date, expecially if they need rapidly changing API's, like the kernel.
I'm not saying this never happens on Windows - it does - but it seems more prevalent in Linux because of the high rate of change.
If Linux were "normal" commercial software, it probably would never have survived competing against the Microsoft Monopoly (many superior products have failed to compete) - it has only succeeded and grown because it is open source, which has made it too diffuse of a target for Microsoft (and others) to fight effectively with their normal corporate tactics.
On the other hand, being open source and free-as-in-freedom means that it has attracted a large number of the idealogical extremists in the computer industry. This idealogical extremism can indeed be irritating to "normal" users.
To continue to grow and gain wider usership, especially among average users and companies (which many of the extremists don't actually want, or at least don't care about), Linux distributions will need to take on some aspects of "normal" software while retaining its free-as-in-freedom underpinnings. It will be a challenging balance to acheive.
Java *used* to be slow, in the days before optimized JIT JVMs. IMHO, another reason the myth persists is because Swing *is* slower than most UI toolkits in many cases, and it's easy to associate GUI slowness with overall slowness.
In my own case, for ease of cross-platform operation, I've ported several computationally intensive image processing programs from C to Java and have experienced a speed degradation of perhaps 10-15%. The Swing GUI, of course, feels more than 10-15% slower.
"Most KDE apps have Gnome analogues, and vice versa"
This is part of the problem. First of all, it's a waste of developer resources. True, most open source projects begin because the lead developer want's to "scratch an itch", but in many cases, with the KDE people insisting that there be a "K" version of everything and the GNOME people insisting that there be a "G" version of everything, the only "itch" was that the existing project wasn't using Qt or GTK, which ever the case may be.
The second problem is that although there are both "K" and "G" versions of most types of programs, it is often the case that one or the other is much more mature. You yourself use GIMP even though you are otherwise a KDE fan. In my case, I have found that even more of a mix is right for me. For example, I use GIMP, Evolution, and InkScape (GTK+), and Scribus, Quanta, and a few other smaller KDE applications (Qt), as well as Mozilla and Firefox, which use their own interface. If you tell a windows or Mac user that if they want interoperability, then they can only choose from half of the available apps (the ones that match their main DE), they will think you are crazy, and in a way they are correct. I would like to choose the *best* applications (according to my own preferences) *and* have full interoperability (see below).
The problem is not so much the different toolkits, rather it's the different standards for things like drag and drop, clipboard formats, and compound documents. Many times, you can't even do things as simple as drag a file from your file manager window to the applications if one is GNOME based and the other is KDE based.
In Windows, even though different applications use different toolkits and have different user interfaces (someone mentioned Adobe), certain interactions are always guaranteed. I can always drag a file from the explorer to an application, regardless of which development environment was used to build the application. If the developer chose to support drag-and-drop, it will work with any other Windows app that supports drag-and-drop.
This kind of consistency is important to many end users, and Linux currently lacks it. Hopefully, freedesktop.org will eventually have some success in standardizing some of these interoperability functions between the various DE's. This would be the best of both worlds - pick a DE that you like because of it's features, and still have basic interoperability between the DE and all the available applications, regardless of whigh DE it was "written to".
From the web page regarding "Why another paint program":
"This program will integrate with KDE better than GIMP does."
Great. Half of my applications integrate with KDE, and half integrate GNOME. (Actually, a few integrate with nothing).
I've had to explain this to my Windows-using friends who I am trying to convince to use Linux, and not surprisingly they answer "Well, why not just use Windows, where everything integrates with everything else?". They don't buy the idealistic "more choice" argument when more choice means less functionality.
Can't anyone on/. read? RedHat has simply said that they are not chasing the CONSUMER desktop for the time being. If you read the articles and if you go to RedHat's site, you will see that they are still quite interested in *corporate and business* desktops, where the application base is more controlled and limited, and there generally is not the need to support every consumer USB widget under the sun. Their "Enterprise Linux" offerings have versions tailored for both servers *and* (corporate) desktops.
Additionally, for individuals and small companies who want to do their own support, there is still Fedora, but it will have a shorter support lifetime.
While it's true that we're a long way from voice input becoming the normal mode of input for typical computing tasks, there are certain situations where it can be used to good effect. One example is cell phones. My most recent cell phone has voice dialing, and it has turned out to be a very convenient feature. The commands are simple enough that the phone gets it right virtually 100% of the time, and it eliminates me having to take my eyes off the road and push buttons to scroll through the phone list (which is a big safety improvement in a car).
Perhaps on a PDA the advantages are more marginal, especially since most common apps can be bound to PDA buttons, but there may be circumstances where it is convenient, say if you have to pull out your PDA in the car to get the address of a business contact you are on your way to see.
I do agree, though, that there are cases where we seem to be developing technology for technology's sake. A lot of today's new technologies seem to represent only minor improvements in standard of living compared to the landmark ones that came earlier like the automobile or the refrigerator.
Certainly not if you're even the least bit careful.
I've been developing a data collection and database system in Java that must run both on Linux and Windows. It does database access, low-level serial port access, answers phones, sends faxes and emails, and generates spreadsheet files and graphs. It also has a significant GUI component (written in Swing).
So far, the system is close to 30,000 lines of code developed on Linux, and so far zero lines of code need to be changed to run on Windows. So far, things have been highly write-once-run-anywyere.
Now, one could do things to make a Java program platform specific, as will be true in Mono/.NET/whatever, but if one plans ahead, write once run anywhere can often be achieved.
Slashdot Mirror
That's his job.
This may not be what she wants to hear, but the solution that has worked for us has been a slow process of education, not technical restrictions. Different kids have different issues that need to be addressed. Our son (now on his own at college) mainly had issues with too much non-productive web surfing and to some degree, too much gaming, but not porn. Basically, he wasn't getting his homework done. I could have blocked internet access to his machine, but we decided not to do that. Over time, with constant support from us, he began to realize that doing his homework and getting good grades in school was his ticket to bigger and better things. He eventually learned to balance his time better and had no problem getting into UC Berkeley.
Our daughter (in 8'th grade) is similar but different. Her issue is also spending too much time surfing sites like myspace and deviantart, and IM'ing with friends. Educating her has been a little harder, but instead of blocking her machine, we moved it out of her room where it is easier for us to keep an eye on how she's spending her time. Since doing that, she is gradually learning to balance her time better.
Ultimately, your kids are going to be out on there own, and it is better if they can learn to balance their time (with your help) before they're gone than just block everything and have them leave with no time management skills.
Blocking ads isn't stealing anymore than not viewing them would be stealing, but if there is a loss of revenue to the website operator, by not letting the ads show, you are risking putting your favorite websites out of business.
Websites need to find a middle ground where ads are not so annoying that people block them. Personally, I can tolerate an ad that's inline in a web page, because it's easy to ignore, but I won't tolerate an ad that pops up a window on top of everything else.
This is basically good news. Adobe software is certainly cross platform if cross platform is defined as Windows and Mac. But Adobe has been no great track record on supporting Linux. Even Flash player and Acroread, which have had Linux support, have had big holes and delays compared to Windows and Mac.
As others have pointed out, while MS has a monopoly on PC OS and Office software, Adobe has a near monopoly on the graphics content creation market, their products are expensive, and they could certainly use some competition.
In the long term, this could also be good news for MS and MS shareholders. MS still holds a firm monopoly in OS and Office software, but these monopolies are under attack, particularly in the Office software market, where eventual adoption of open (or more open) formats will reduce the lock-in factor and make adoption of free/cheap Office suites much more feasible for many. Microsoft should be expanding into other software markets. There are very few companies the size of MS who have survived and grown so long on just two products and MS would be wise to be in other markets when those two monopolies eventually begin to weaken.
The surface of Mars looks just fine in every movie I've seen, so it shouldn't be a big problem. Obviously these engineers haven't been paying attention.
"Buy it later"
The end result is that ODF becomes a standard. MS maybe gets a few brownie points in the public eye for supporting it, so good for them, but is this really an issue?
Read the article - This deal affects Suse Linux Enterprise Server. This is no surprise; Microsoft has acknowleged that Linux has market strength on servers, and knows it must coesist with Linux in that space. MS, however, would not support adoption of Linux on desktops, which this deal doesn't address. No one can know for sure, but if Dell still has any intention of addressing the desktop Linux market demand, they may still use Ubuntu to do this independent of this MS/Novell deal.
I've started turning off XGL on my laptop when running on battery since it noticably eats into the battery life. This is really just FUD, it's not just a Vista issue.
Windows is getting to the point where most of the changes don't mean too much for the average user, and some things have even gotten worse. This happened to Office sometime ago. I don't use Office, but I know many people who do, and many of them had stopped upgrading years ago once it got to the point that it had all the features they needed and the upgrades just cost money with little benefit.
In terms of this causing trouble for Microsoft, however, I don't think the effect will be huge. Despite the Dell thing, this will affect only upgraders. The upgrade market may be soft for Vista, but ultimately the new PC market is bigger, and most new PC's will still come with some version of Windows installed, and MS gets paid for those whether they are XP or Vista.
Just teach the kids that things they read on Wikipedia (or just about anywhere else on the web) may not be 100% accurate and that they should check multiple sources. Teach them common sense and make them think instead of just shielding them from everything.
First off, despite the popularity of bashing SuSE these days, most or all "purist" linux distros do the same thing, this is not just a Novell/SuSE issue. By "purist", I am referring to distros which try to stay as close to 100% open source and patent-infringment-free as possible. Fedora is the prime example of such a distro, even more so than SuSE. On whole, fedora is even more conservative than SuSE, and also has Freetype compiled in its non-patent-infringing way, yet, hypocritically, none of the SuSE bashers are bashing Fedora over this.
Second, the deal between Novell and Microsoft regarding patents was an agreement not to sue Novell's customers over patent infringement. While this might be viewed as a "patent license", it is not an explicit license and thus very limited. The implication is that it would only cover inadvertent patent violations, for example by redistributing someone elses software. Novell probably still has an obligation not to infringe any patents that it has not been granted an explicit license to use.
I believe this hits the real point. I travel a fair amount on business and spend enough time in airports to know that there are a significant number of people who would probably talk on their phones as continuously in flight as they do on the ground if given the chance, and these aren't just businesspeople. Either way you handle this in flight will be a problem. If cells can be used anywhere on the plane, there will be a big backlash of annoyed passengers; if they are confined to a few rows, they will annoy and interfere with each other which will encourage many of them to ignore the row designations and still cause problems for others; plus even if they don't, it will still be a problem for several "normal" rows adjacent to the cell phone section.
Wifi on planes will be MUCH less of a problem in terms of annoyance to other passengers.
Unfortunately, the best solution is the one that is already in place on some planes - a public pay phone in the seat. It costs money to use, so people won't use it idly, but important business and personal calls that justify the cost can still be made.
fortunately for Microsoft, the OEMs provide good business.
While this is true, it isn't really the point. It probably doesn't make too much of a difference to MS anyway, since the OEM price that a computer vendor like Dell pays for is probably not much higher for Vista than for XP.
The real point is that unlike the change from 98/ME to XP, the change from XP to Vista offers much less to end users, and in fact offers some negatives to balance out the small positives. Windows is finally becoming like Office - a mature product that already does what 99% of its users need, and where updates offer only increasingly trivial features and/or specialized features for niche markets.
There are some things about this Novell/Microsoft deal that I don't quite understand. I'm sure many people here know more about the GPL than I do:
1. The way it seems to be portrayed by Novell, the agreement is an agreement by MS not to sue Novell's customers for patent infringement, it is not, per se, a patent license. Is agreeing not to sue someone legally the same thing as specifically granting a license?
2. People have claimed that this will make it impossible for Novell to distribute GPL v3 licensed code, for example upcoming versions of glibc. Let assume for the sake of argument that glibc contains no code covered by an MS patent. If glibc does not contain any code covered by an MS patent, then how can Novell be constrained from redistributing it, since nothing is being granted, license or otherwise, as it contains no patented code? There may be some other piece of code that Novell distributes that contains patented code, but that would have nothing to do with glibc, which containes no such code.
The parent post is common sense, which seems infrequent. I have found the range to be quite wide: When rednering animations from Blender, I have found that hyperthreading results in nearly 70% faster throughput when turned on. For rendering MPEG2 using Tmpgenc (under Wine), I see around 40% improvement with HT on. Clearly, these two applications benefit quite a bit from HT due to small computational footprint and/or low cache contention, etc. On the other hand, on my system, on-screen 3D acceleration in the NVIDIA driver (under Linux at least) appears to suffer with HT, with frame rates that are around 10-20% slower than with HT disabled.
So, I see improvements ranging from -20% to +70% depending on the application, with many applications seeing only small differences one way or the other. Like many things, this tends to turn into a religious debate when the fact is that it varies case-by-case.
I use Fedora 3, and recently installed the recommended update to kernel 2.6.12. I also use VMWare because I need to run several Windows applications that don't run in Wine. After upgrading the kernel, I could not configure VMWare, and worse, the improperly built VMWare kernel modules were causing the whole system to crash. Finally, after a fair bit of internet searching, I found a third-party patch for VMWare that, when applied, fixed the problem.
The real problem, is the Linux (both the kernel and other packages) changes very fast and in ways that software authors often can't keep up with, it's more of an issue of rapid changes in the OS making it hard to keep software up to date, expecially if they need rapidly changing API's, like the kernel.
I'm not saying this never happens on Windows - it does - but it seems more prevalent in Linux because of the high rate of change.
If Linux were "normal" commercial software, it probably would never have survived competing against the Microsoft Monopoly (many superior products have failed to compete) - it has only succeeded and grown because it is open source, which has made it too diffuse of a target for Microsoft (and others) to fight effectively with their normal corporate tactics.
On the other hand, being open source and free-as-in-freedom means that it has attracted a large number of the idealogical extremists in the computer industry. This idealogical extremism can indeed be irritating to "normal" users.
To continue to grow and gain wider usership, especially among average users and companies (which many of the extremists don't actually want, or at least don't care about), Linux distributions will need to take on some aspects of "normal" software while retaining its free-as-in-freedom underpinnings. It will be a challenging balance to acheive.
"Despite (or because of) being written in the Java programming language, Sphinx-4 performs as well as similar systems written in C"
It's amazing that the myth of Java being slow is so persistant. In fact, for computational tasks, many benchmarks have shown that a modern optimized JVM with JIT compilation is roughly equivalent with most implementations of C++, with some benchmarks being better for Java and some being better for C++.
Java *used* to be slow, in the days before optimized JIT JVMs. IMHO, another reason the myth persists is because Swing *is* slower than most UI toolkits in many cases, and it's easy to associate GUI slowness with overall slowness.
In my own case, for ease of cross-platform operation, I've ported several computationally intensive image processing programs from C to Java and have experienced a speed degradation of perhaps 10-15%. The Swing GUI, of course, feels more than 10-15% slower.
"Most KDE apps have Gnome analogues, and vice versa"
This is part of the problem. First of all, it's a waste of developer resources. True, most open source projects begin because the lead developer want's to "scratch an itch", but in many cases, with the KDE people insisting that there be a "K" version of everything and the GNOME people insisting that there be a "G" version of everything, the only "itch" was that the existing project wasn't using Qt or GTK, which ever the case may be.
The second problem is that although there are both "K" and "G" versions of most types of programs, it is often the case that one or the other is much more mature. You yourself use GIMP even though you are otherwise a KDE fan. In my case, I have found that even more of a mix is right for me. For example, I use GIMP, Evolution, and InkScape (GTK+), and Scribus, Quanta, and a few other smaller KDE applications (Qt), as well as Mozilla and Firefox, which use their own interface. If you tell a windows or Mac user that if they want interoperability, then they can only choose from half of the available apps (the ones that match their main DE), they will think you are crazy, and in a way they are correct. I would like to choose the *best* applications (according to my own preferences) *and* have full interoperability (see below).
The problem is not so much the different toolkits, rather it's the different standards for things like drag and drop, clipboard formats, and compound documents. Many times, you can't even do things as simple as drag a file from your file manager window to the applications if one is GNOME based and the other is KDE based.
In Windows, even though different applications use different toolkits and have different user interfaces (someone mentioned Adobe), certain interactions are always guaranteed. I can always drag a file from the explorer to an application, regardless of which development environment was used to build the application. If the developer chose to support drag-and-drop, it will work with any other Windows app that supports drag-and-drop.
This kind of consistency is important to many end users, and Linux currently lacks it. Hopefully, freedesktop.org will eventually have some success in standardizing some of these interoperability functions between the various DE's. This would be the best of both worlds - pick a DE that you like because of it's features, and still have basic interoperability between the DE and all the available applications, regardless of whigh DE it was "written to".
From the web page regarding "Why another paint program":
"This program will integrate with KDE better than GIMP does."
Great. Half of my applications integrate with KDE, and half integrate GNOME. (Actually, a few integrate with nothing).
I've had to explain this to my Windows-using friends who I am trying to convince to use Linux, and not surprisingly they answer "Well, why not just use Windows, where everything integrates with everything else?". They don't buy the idealistic "more choice" argument when more choice means less functionality.
Does China need Microsoft?
Can't anyone on /. read? RedHat has simply said that they are not chasing the CONSUMER desktop for the time being. If you read the articles and if you go to RedHat's site, you will see that they are still quite interested in *corporate and business* desktops, where the application base is more controlled and limited, and there generally is not the need to support every consumer USB widget under the sun. Their "Enterprise Linux" offerings have versions tailored for both servers *and* (corporate) desktops.
Additionally, for individuals and small companies who want to do their own support, there is still Fedora, but it will have a shorter support lifetime.
While it's true that we're a long way from voice input becoming the normal mode of input for typical computing tasks, there are certain situations where it can be used to good effect. One example is cell phones. My most recent cell phone has voice dialing, and it has turned out to be a very convenient feature. The commands are simple enough that the phone gets it right virtually 100% of the time, and it eliminates me having to take my eyes off the road and push buttons to scroll through the phone list (which is a big safety improvement in a car).
Perhaps on a PDA the advantages are more marginal, especially since most common apps can be bound to PDA buttons, but there may be circumstances where it is convenient, say if you have to pull out your PDA in the car to get the address of a business contact you are on your way to see.
I do agree, though, that there are cases where we seem to be developing technology for technology's sake. A lot of today's new technologies seem to represent only minor improvements in standard of living compared to the landmark ones that came earlier like the automobile or the refrigerator.
Certainly not if you're even the least bit careful.
I've been developing a data collection and database system in Java that must run both on Linux and Windows. It does database access, low-level serial port access, answers phones, sends faxes and emails, and generates spreadsheet files and graphs. It also has a significant GUI component (written in Swing).
So far, the system is close to 30,000 lines of code developed on Linux, and so far zero lines of code need to be changed to run on Windows. So far, things have been highly write-once-run-anywyere.
Now, one could do things to make a Java program platform specific, as will be true in Mono/.NET/whatever, but if one plans ahead, write once run anywhere can often be achieved.