What's more important is that the calendar solutions that exist on Linux often doesn't run on windows as well. To beat the outlook/exchange dominance there need to be a client and a server from the same vendor that runs on Linux, Windows or even MacOS.
Today admins will have to mix and match plugins, servers and clients to have a calendaring system that works cross platform. Being cross platform is very important as most organizations will not be able to switch to Linux on every Desktop at a resonable cost (e.g. due to some specialized software that not yet run on Linux). These desktops must still be able access the IT infrastructure of the company.
If multiple vendors are involved it is always sombody elses fault when it doesn't work, and the risk that it doesn't work is bigger as all components of the mail/calendaring/schedueling system may be updated at different times. This is one of the reasons Outlook/Exchange have been such a success.
Web/AJAX based systems like Zimbra could remedy this another alternative could be Lotus/Domino from IBM. The new Lotus 8 (currently in beta) looks very promising.
The year of Linux arrives the year Adobe ports their software to Linux.
Linux is already more usable and easy to use and install than windows. The problem is that windows is good enough for most people, and it have the advantage of having a lot of applications the people already know how to use.
To make any dent in the Windows dominance it doesn't only need to be better than Vista, it need to be significantly better.
It doesn't prevent fair use as there are no technical way to stop copying. It is just a way to check if the terms of the contract between consumer and provider are followed.
For one thing, this means that it can be copied and distributed when the copyright have expired.
There are no risk for the user that the loss of some sort of encryption key would make his video collection unviewable.
It would probably also result in less support issues and aggreviated customers of both contents and hardware.
Removing what's preinstalled is easy, if they preinstalled Ubuntu or some other free Linux and told you what was working, offered support for it, you would know that it actually worked with Linux. You would even be able to look at driver settings before you installed whatever distro you want. FreeDOS gives no such promises.
I have yet to find somebody that actually uses the FreeDOS that comes with Dell, even just bundling the latest version of Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse... name any free distro you want, would be better than FreeDOS.
Yes, testing takes time, but I'm sure they could get help from Canonical, Red Hat, Novell or even individual users. Giving away a few computers for such tests would not be all that expensive.
What the potentioal Linux box buyer would like to know is whether the box will work with Linux or not. The only way to know that is if the box comes with Linux preinstalled, and there is a list of all the devices that works, what chipset they use, and if the driver for the device is part of the standard Linux kernel.
If I was Dell I would have chosen Ubuntu, as it is known to be easy to use for desktop purposes. People, like me who doesn't like Ubuntu, would have a good starting point if they wanted to install their favorite distro. E.g. they would be able to examine driver settings and such before they tried another distro. The people who allready have a favorite distro and are brave enough to install it, are not likely to need much support from Dell, and it wouldn't take long before the internet was full of info on various quirks if any needed to get most distros running, so I don't think they would be all that disapointed when Dell said "Sorry Sir, we only support Ubuntu". The main thing is that they support some kind of Linux.
The current situation where they ship FreeDOS on their non windows boxes is quite meaningless. I doubt that there is somebody that installs it. It is only there so that they can say they ship the box with an OS as not shipping an OS would invite to software piracy. So, please Dell! Why not replace the FreeDOS disk with Ubuntu, and tell potential customers the specs of your hardware
I think common sense have more to do with companies to cutting off their relationships with SCO, than IBM pressure. Who would be stupid enough to do business with companies that are in the habit of suing their customers.
For once I'm not so sure we should blame Microsoft for all these sleep related problems. I would say hardware manufacturers is just as much to blame. They test their ACPI stuff and make sure it works in the current version of windows, and not that it follows the standard.
When Microsoft creates a new version of windows they most likely develop it to follow the ACPI standard. By doing so, the functionality may break on non compliant boxes, and Microsoft will have to go back to add quirks to make it work.
Being the dominant OS vender, Microsoft at usually manage to get full specs to the failing devices, and have a fair chance of compensate for the errors in the hardware and BIOS. Developers of other less common OSes, such as Linux may not be that lucky. So I really wish Microsoft hadn't bothered to fix this, unless of course they really are the ones that are responsible for this screw up, and left it to the hardware vendors. That way it would be easier for all OS vendors, including Microsoft, in the long run.
Perahaps Microsoft should consider renaming their OneCare product to Microsoft WhoCares, I'm sure many of the affected users would find that a more appropriate name.
MacOS-X an look like an afterthought, I think not.
The Vista versions of some MacOS features looks very cool, but in reality the coolness have no function or even worse degrades usability. A typical example of this is the Vista version of Expose. The slanted windows makes the text harder to see and you can't see the entire window. But it do look cool.
Another problem with windows Vista included, is that it tends to give me a lot of irrelevant information to the user. E.g. if I insert an USB stick I will get a pop up telling me that it connected successfully. Why do I need that? If I the disk appears in the filebrowser, or desktop I know that it worked. Besides, should I even have to doubt that it worked. The Vista UAC adds to the problem.
The sad thing from Microsoft point of view, is that they managed to outcool the MacOS at the expense of usability but still didn't manage to outcool Linux/Gnome/Beryl on coolness. To make it even worse Beryl keeps the good stuff from MacOS/Expose and then add some. Luckily for Microsoft most of their potential customers have never studied usability so they will settle for cool looks.
The more interesting question is: Will Vista feel fresh in 19 months from now? Current versions of Linux and MacOS is very close to Vista with respect to usability and look & feel. It is really only the top models of Vista that can compete in these respects.
In 19 monts from now 3 more Gnome releases will have passed, KDE will have released its version 4 and probably one or two point releases. Apple will have released their next version too.
Vista on the other hand, will most likely still look like what it looks now.
The question is, will dynamic IP result in too many or too few hits. If you count the IP during installation, you are most likely to complete that installation using the same IP. Then the next time sombody installs using that IP it will not be counted as new. So both dynamic IP and people behind NAT might actually give a lower estimate, than the actual value.
Sorry, but that site looks awful in firefox and konquerer (meaning that it probably doesn't look right in other khtml based browsers either). I really can't imagine that you meant it to look like this.
A good idea to make site work well everywhere is to run them through html validator at http://validator.w3.org./ When it passes the test, test it in whatever browsers you plan to support, if something doesn't work, remove or change the feature in a way that the page validates correctly.
This gives you the best chances that your site will work even in browsers that you haven't tested.
Currently your site generates 1024 errors when validated.
W3c have also similar test for validating CSS. Use it and then remove or make adjustments so that it works in the browsers you officially intend to support but still passes w3c tests.
BTW, IE regardless of version is a disaster, when it comes to supporting CSS. Just try http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html. Firefox will not work properly either, but it is far better than IE. Konquerer passes acid2 and probably others based on KHTML such as Safari, Opera is supposed to work as well.
I really wish browser manufacturers would start to support CSS properly, it would make it so much easier to build and maintain good web sites.
Not really, changes are always expensive, but if you go for Linux/Openoffice, at least you don't have to pay licence fees for the new software.
Besides, changing from a pre 2007 MS-Office to Openoffice.org is much less of a change than going to MS-Office 2007.
Linux is quite configurable, this means that you can train your sysadmin to create, a Linux appearnce that is very close to that of winXP, that means that you will have to train fewer people, than if you make the change to Vista where all users will need training.
By going the Linux/OOo way you may also reduce the cost for new hardware, and you get some money left that you could use for training.
1) Get better performance on multiprocessor systems
2) Get a decent storage engine that is not controlled by MySQL competitors
As far as I can tell there is nothing in it that you can't get in Postgresql. Postgresql already performs better than the standard MySQL on multiprocessor systems. It remains to be seen if Falcon will be better than Postgresql once its production ready. Well, there is one thing, Falcon compresses data while Postgresql doesn't. can't help wondering what this will do to performance.
On the other hand there seam to be a lot missing from Falcon that you find in Postgresql. If you read the Falcon limits page on the mysql site you find that it lacks e.g:
- SELECT FOR UPDATE
- No online backup
- No foreign keys
All in all, I would say Postgresql would be a better choice, if your web hosting company allows you to use it.
MySQL have a tendency to slow down on many concurrent or complex queries. Postgresql is far better at handling triggers and can be programmed in many different programming languages. Support for domains and much more. MySQL also lacks EXCEPT, this makes some types of queries (relational division) much more complex than they have to be.
Still for people that aren't free to choose their database, it is nice to see that MySQL makes some progress. Besides a little competition never hurts.
I will scream, when it happens. It's just that it hasn't so far, at least not with Linuxes from this century. While I wait for it to happen in Linux I will continue to scream when it happens in windows. You are right in that I will probably scream higher when it happens in Windows, the reason for that is that I have paid them good money for it to work, while high quality Linuxes like Fedora, OpenSuse, Centos,... can be downloaded for free.
Last time it happened, was a just before christmas. I decided to try to get a game up and running in windows. So I decided to reinstall win2k on an old laptop that was no longer in use for work. The laptop originally shipped with win2k, but it faild to install properly. There was about 15 driver diskettes that needed to be applied in the right order, then there was servicepacks with incompatible encryption levels. Another problem was that some of the sofware on the disks that shipped with the computer was installers that insisted on visit links on the Microsoft website that no longer existed. After four days I gave up.
Fedora on the other hand, installed in less than an hour, where most of that time went by with no userinteaction what so ever. Oh, I forgot to mention in that time you not only get an OS, you get a good office suite a very good database, and much more.
Now the game runs on win2k in VMWare and makes use of Linux supperior hardware support through virtualization. Unfortunately the windows end of the VMWare display driver for windows doesn't fully support the OpenGL stuff that I can run in pure Linux, so if my game had demanded more advanced graphics I would have been totally out of luck.
So, please don't tell me there is no reason to scream when it comes to Windows ease of installation and ease of use. The only reason Microsoft manages to hold its market position, is that they have managed to get hardware venders to preinstall it on almost every sold PC, and that people by now have a collection of documents that only can be opened with programs that run on windows. Without that advantage Microsoft wouldn't have a chance against easy to install and use OSes like Linux and MacOS-X.
I agree, the only killer feature they have added that make it stand out on the windows platform is the spell checker. (konqueror have had spell checking for quite some time). Even though FF the CSS support, still is much better than that of IE7, I would at the very least expected that FF 2.0 should comply with the acid2 test.
The smart thing to do for the Mozilla people would have been to make FF easy to use in corporate environments, an area where IE have been strong. That means having support for easy network installation and management, and perhaps add in XForms by default. Together with AJAX, XForms could be a very powerful in e.g. intranet applications.
This won't be marketed at home users, at least not to start with.
I'm not so sure abuout that. I think that it will start as sort of crippleware OSes, that when you pull donw
a menu and select the "fancy feature" menu item, you will get a pop up saying - Fancy Feature not installed,
you can buy it from Os vender, for $$ or you can get the Fancy Feature Enterprise Edition for $$$.
After that it will not be long before, the ads isn't just about OS enhancemets, they will try to sell all
sorts of software. I.e. the OS vender may sell advertising space to other software companies. That way you
may get a popup ad for photoshop if you open paint.
Sure, there are ads on computers in shopping malls etc, but these ads will most likely be in the running applications, and not in the OS itself, as OSes regardless of vender will be too hard and complicated for this kind of public use. This means that they will be locked down, to run certain apps where the ads will appear, regardless of OS.
According to eweek http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1991064,00.as p the install time was around 50 minutes. That is a lot longer than what it takes to install equvalent functionality on e.g. Linux, it is far more than what it takes to install MacOS-X.
In 50 minutes you can install Linux, including office suites, database software e-mail software, windows file servers, image editors, software development tools,... With Vista you just get a plain OS.
Microsoft is lucky that they most of their software preinstalled on hardware.
However, the competion is shaping up even in this area. HP is to be planning to ship some systems with Novell/Suse preinstalled, and that is a desktop that rivals MacOS-X in usability.
The OS market development of the beginning of next year will be interesting to watch.
Sure they could do all that, but that would tell the governments in the rest of the world that Microsoft really can't be trusted. Governmnets in many parts of the world are allready leaning towards Open Source to make sure that they can stay in control of their information structure. Microsoft doing something like this would be the final proof that these governments were right.
Once governments leave the windows business, large government contractors and their subcontractors will follow. This would hurt Microsoft much more than it would hurt EU. To EU it would mean one or two years with a lot of hazzle, while applications was wineified, ported to e.g. Linux, or replaced with software running on MacOS-X, To Microsoft it would mean the end of their dominance on the desktop world wide. In turn that would also mean that they would lose their grip on hardware venders, nobody is prepared to lose a big market like Europe just to ship products that only runs windows.
So, we can be quite sure that Microsoft will either pay their fines, or comply. There is really nothing to worry about.
- I would expect 99% of Linux users are already well aware of OO, and including the word "Linux" might scare a few people off.
You miss the point. Of course Linux users know about OOo, the point is to tell people that it runs on all sorts of platforms. This incrases the value of the package as a software platform. I hardly think Linux would scare anybody away. Especially not in combination with Solaris, Windows, MacOS-X, FreeBSD.
BTW, Why are there no seagulls, and why is it yellow instead of blue and white. If you do an add you should use your logo and company colors. That way you strenghten your brand. Whenever sombody sees some one else open OOo they should be able recognize the logos in splash screen from the add.
Why not mention that ODF is the new iso standard for Office documents, why not mention that you easy can share documents with other popular office suits
Besides, I think promoting it on MacOS-X is a bit premature. Most Mac users don't have X11 installed. and will not think of it as a real Mac program as things like menus and fonts will look weird to them.
When Vista gets out, the computers you buy at your local computer store will be a lot faster than what they are today, and will most likely be able to open ODF as well as Microsoft XML based documents at resonable speed. Even my current 1.4 GHz laptop opens business documents of 10 pages or so in less than a second.
The difference in speed could of course be annoying at very long documents, but then you have to ask yourself is really OpenOffice or MS-Office really the right tools for such things. FrameMaker, LaTeX, or DocBook comes to mind as better alternatives for cases like that. If the large document happens to be an overgrown spreadsheet there are plenty of free and propriatory database engines that would be much better suited to do the heavy lifting.
The ability to use the mozilla bookmark file as an ordinary html file, is a very nice feature that I would miss if they used a database engine instead.
If they should use a database engine, they should use some kind of client server solution so that bookmarks could be shared between multiple machines or users. Preferrably they should use some abstraction layer such as JDBC or ODBC, so that users could have a choise of what database engine to use.
There is also a need for standardization in bookmark storage. Free and open source browsers should agree on a common standard, regardless if it includes databases or not.
FC5 is very snappy indeed. It's the most responsive Gnome desktop I have used so far. Much better than Ubuntu 5.04. If the article is right, and the new Ubuntu really smokes FC5 with respect to speed, I will be impressed. This really looks good for Linux.
Usability is getting better and better for each new release of Gnome. It is now at a state where it leaves Windows XP in the dust, and is seriously starting to get to the same levels of usability as MacOS-X.
Vista will need to be very good to beat this, or perhaps even more pollished Linux distros, using Gnome 2.16 that probably will be available by the time Vista hits the market.
Slashdot Mirror
What's more important is that the calendar solutions that exist on Linux often doesn't run on windows as well. To beat the outlook/exchange dominance there need to be a client and a server from the same vendor that runs on Linux, Windows or even MacOS.
Today admins will have to mix and match plugins, servers and clients to have a calendaring system that works cross platform. Being cross platform is very important as most organizations will not be able to switch to Linux on every Desktop at a resonable cost (e.g. due to some specialized software that not yet run on Linux). These desktops must still be able access the IT infrastructure of the company.
If multiple vendors are involved it is always sombody elses fault when it doesn't work, and the risk that it doesn't work is bigger as all components of the mail/calendaring/schedueling system may be updated at different times. This is one of the reasons Outlook/Exchange have been such a success.
Web/AJAX based systems like Zimbra could remedy this another alternative could be Lotus/Domino from IBM. The new Lotus 8 (currently in beta) looks very promising.
The year of Linux arrives the year Adobe ports their software to Linux.
Linux is already more usable and easy to use and install than windows. The
problem is that windows is good enough for most people, and it have the advantage
of having a lot of applications the people already know how to use.
To make any dent in the Windows dominance it doesn't only need to be better than
Vista, it need to be significantly better.
It doesn't prevent fair use as there are no technical way to stop copying. It is just a way to check if the terms of the contract between consumer and provider are followed.
For one thing, this means that it can be copied and distributed when the copyright have expired.
There are no risk for the user that the loss of some sort of encryption key would make his video collection unviewable.
It would probably also result in less support issues and aggreviated customers of both contents and hardware.
Removing what's preinstalled is easy, if they preinstalled Ubuntu or some other free Linux and told you what was working, offered support for it, you would know that it actually worked with Linux. You would even be able to look at driver settings before you installed whatever distro you want. FreeDOS gives no such promises.
I have yet to find somebody that actually uses the FreeDOS that comes with Dell, even just bundling the latest version of Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse... name any free distro you want, would
be better than FreeDOS.
Yes, testing takes time, but I'm sure they could get help from Canonical, Red Hat, Novell or even individual users. Giving away a few computers for such tests would not be all that expensive.
What the potentioal Linux box buyer would like to know is whether the box will work with Linux or not. The only way to know that is if the box comes with Linux preinstalled, and there is a list of all the devices that works, what chipset they use, and if the driver for the device is part of the standard Linux kernel.
If I was Dell I would have chosen Ubuntu, as it is known to be easy to use for desktop purposes. People, like me who doesn't like Ubuntu, would have a good starting point if they
wanted to install their favorite distro. E.g. they would be able to examine driver settings and such before they tried another distro. The people who allready have a favorite distro and are brave enough to install it, are not likely to need much support from Dell, and it wouldn't take long before the internet was full of info on various quirks if any needed to get most distros running, so I don't think they would be all that disapointed when Dell said
"Sorry Sir, we only support Ubuntu". The main thing is that they support some kind of Linux.
The current situation where they ship FreeDOS on their non windows boxes is quite meaningless. I doubt that there is somebody that installs it. It is only there so that they can say they ship the box with an OS as not shipping an OS would invite to software piracy.
So, please Dell! Why not replace the FreeDOS disk with Ubuntu, and tell potential customers the specs of your hardware
I rest my case, common sense seam to be quite scarce these days
I think common sense have more to do with companies to cutting off their relationships with SCO, than IBM pressure. Who would be stupid enough to do business with companies that are in the habit of suing their customers.
For once I'm not so sure we should blame Microsoft for all these sleep related problems. I would say hardware manufacturers is just as much to blame. They test their ACPI stuff and make sure it works in the current version of windows, and not that it follows the standard.
When Microsoft creates a new version of windows they most likely develop it to follow the ACPI standard. By doing so, the functionality may break on non compliant boxes, and Microsoft will have to go back to add quirks to make it work.
Being the dominant OS vender, Microsoft at usually manage to get full specs to the failing devices, and have a fair chance of compensate for the errors in the hardware and BIOS.
Developers of other less common OSes, such as Linux may not be that lucky. So I really wish Microsoft hadn't bothered to fix this, unless of course they really are the ones that are responsible for this screw up, and left it to the hardware vendors. That way it would be easier for all OS vendors, including Microsoft, in the long run.
Perahaps Microsoft should consider renaming their OneCare product to Microsoft WhoCares, I'm sure many of the affected users would find that a more appropriate name.
MacOS-X an look like an afterthought, I think not.
The Vista versions of some MacOS features looks very cool, but in reality the coolness have no function or even worse degrades usability. A typical example of this is the Vista version of Expose. The slanted windows makes the text harder to see and you can't see the entire window. But it do look cool.
Another problem with windows Vista included, is that it tends to give me a lot of irrelevant information to the user. E.g. if I insert an USB stick I will get a pop up telling me that it connected successfully. Why do I need that? If I the disk appears in the filebrowser, or desktop I know that it worked. Besides, should I even have to doubt that it worked. The Vista UAC adds to the problem.
The sad thing from Microsoft point of view, is that they managed to outcool the MacOS at the expense of usability but still didn't manage to outcool Linux/Gnome/Beryl on coolness. To make it even worse Beryl keeps the good stuff from MacOS/Expose and then add some. Luckily for Microsoft most of their potential customers have never studied usability so they will settle for cool looks.
The more interesting question is: Will Vista feel fresh in 19 months from now?
Current versions of Linux and MacOS is very close to Vista with respect to usability and look & feel. It is really only the top models of Vista that can compete in these respects.
In 19 monts from now 3 more Gnome releases will have passed, KDE will have released its version 4 and probably one or two point releases. Apple will have released their next version too.
Vista on the other hand, will most likely still look like what it looks now.
The question is, will dynamic IP result in too many or too few hits.
If you count the IP during installation, you are most likely to complete that installation using the same IP. Then the next time sombody installs using that IP it will not be counted as new. So both dynamic IP and people behind NAT might actually give a lower estimate, than the actual value.
Sorry, but that site looks awful in firefox and konquerer (meaning that it probably doesn't
.
look right in other khtml based browsers either). I really can't imagine that you meant it to look like this.
A good idea to make site work well everywhere is to run them through html validator at http://validator.w3.org./ When it passes the test, test it in whatever browsers you plan to support, if something doesn't work, remove or change the feature in a way that the page validates correctly.
This gives you the best chances that your site will work even in browsers that you haven't tested.
Currently your site generates 1024 errors when validated.
W3c have also similar test for validating CSS. Use it and then remove or make adjustments so that it works in the browsers you officially intend to support but still passes w3c tests.
BTW, IE regardless of version is a disaster, when it comes to supporting CSS.
Just try http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html
Firefox will not work properly either, but it is far better than IE. Konquerer passes acid2
and probably others based on KHTML such as Safari, Opera is supposed to work as well.
I really wish browser manufacturers would start to support CSS properly, it would make it so much easier to build and maintain good web sites.
Not really, changes are always expensive, but if you go for Linux/Openoffice, at least you don't have to pay licence fees for the new software.
Besides, changing from a pre 2007 MS-Office to Openoffice.org is much less of a change than going to MS-Office 2007.
Linux is quite configurable, this means that you can train your sysadmin to create, a Linux
appearnce that is very close to that of winXP, that means that you will have to train
fewer people, than if you make the change to Vista where all users will need training.
By going the Linux/OOo way you may also reduce the cost for new hardware, and you get
some money left that you could use for training.
As a I see Falcon is mainly an attempt to:
1) Get better performance on multiprocessor systems
2) Get a decent storage engine that is not controlled by MySQL competitors
As far as I can tell there is nothing in it that you can't get in Postgresql.
Postgresql already performs better than the standard MySQL on multiprocessor systems.
It remains to be seen if Falcon will be better than Postgresql once its production
ready. Well, there is one thing, Falcon compresses data while Postgresql doesn't. can't help wondering what this will do to performance.
On the other hand there seam to be a lot missing from Falcon that you find in Postgresql.
If you read the Falcon limits page on the mysql site you find that it lacks e.g:
- SELECT FOR UPDATE
- No online backup
- No foreign keys
All in all, I would say Postgresql would be a better choice, if your web hosting company allows you to use it.
MySQL have a tendency to slow down on many concurrent or complex queries. Postgresql is far better at handling triggers and can be programmed in many different programming languages. Support for domains and much more. MySQL also lacks EXCEPT, this makes some types of queries (relational division) much more complex than they have to be.
Still for people that aren't free to choose their database, it is nice to see that MySQL
makes some progress. Besides a little competition never hurts.
I will scream, when it happens. It's just that it hasn't so far, at least not with Linuxes from this century. While I wait for it to happen in Linux I will continue to scream when it happens in windows. You are right in that I will probably scream higher when it happens in Windows, the reason for that is that I have paid them good money for it to work, while high quality Linuxes like Fedora, OpenSuse, Centos,... can be downloaded for free.
Last time it happened, was a just before christmas. I decided to try to get a game up and running in windows. So I decided to reinstall win2k on an old laptop that was no longer in use for work. The laptop originally shipped with win2k, but it faild to install properly. There was about 15 driver diskettes that needed to be applied in the right order, then there was servicepacks with incompatible encryption levels. Another problem was that some of the sofware on the disks that shipped with the computer was installers that insisted on visit links on the Microsoft website that no longer existed. After four days I gave up.
Fedora on the other hand, installed in less than an hour, where most of that time went by with no userinteaction what so ever. Oh, I forgot to mention in that time you not only get an OS, you get a good office suite a very good database, and much more.
Now the game runs on win2k in VMWare and makes use of Linux supperior hardware support through virtualization. Unfortunately the windows end of the VMWare display driver for windows doesn't fully support the OpenGL stuff that I can run in pure Linux, so if my game had demanded more advanced graphics I would have been totally out of luck.
So, please don't tell me there is no reason to scream when it comes to Windows ease of installation and ease of use. The only reason Microsoft manages to hold its market position, is that they have managed to get hardware venders to preinstall it on almost every sold PC, and that people by now have a collection of documents that only can be opened with programs that run on windows. Without that advantage Microsoft wouldn't have a chance against easy to install and use OSes like Linux and MacOS-X.
I agree, the only killer feature they have added that make it stand out on the windows platform is the spell checker. (konqueror have had spell checking for quite some time). Even though FF the CSS support, still is much better than that of IE7, I would at the very least expected that FF 2.0 should comply with the acid2 test.
The smart thing to do for the Mozilla people would have been to make FF easy to use in corporate environments, an area where IE have been strong. That means having support for easy network installation and management, and perhaps add in XForms by default. Together with AJAX, XForms could be a very powerful in e.g. intranet applications.
I'm not so sure abuout that. I think that it will start as sort of crippleware OSes, that when you pull donw a menu and select the "fancy feature" menu item, you will get a pop up saying - Fancy Feature not installed, you can buy it from Os vender, for $$ or you can get the Fancy Feature Enterprise Edition for $$$.
After that it will not be long before, the ads isn't just about OS enhancemets, they will try to sell all sorts of software. I.e. the OS vender may sell advertising space to other software companies. That way you may get a popup ad for photoshop if you open paint.
Sure, there are ads on computers in shopping malls etc, but these ads will most likely be in the running applications, and not in the OS itself, as OSes regardless of vender will be too hard and complicated for this kind of public use. This means that they will be locked down, to run certain apps where the ads will appear, regardless of OS.
According to eweek http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1991064,00.as p
the install time was around 50 minutes. That is a lot longer than what it takes
to install equvalent functionality on e.g. Linux, it is far more than
what it takes to install MacOS-X.
In 50 minutes you can install Linux, including office suites, database software
e-mail software, windows file servers, image editors, software development tools,...
With Vista you just get a plain OS.
Microsoft is lucky that they most of their software preinstalled on hardware.
However, the competion is shaping up even in this area. HP is to be planning to
ship some systems with Novell/Suse preinstalled, and that is a desktop that rivals
MacOS-X in usability.
The OS market development of the beginning of next year will be interesting to watch.
Sure they could do all that, but that would tell the governments in the rest of the world that Microsoft really can't be trusted. Governmnets in many parts of the world are allready leaning towards Open Source to make sure that they can stay in control of their information structure. Microsoft doing something like this would be the final proof that these governments were right.
Once governments leave the windows business, large government contractors and their subcontractors will follow. This would hurt Microsoft much more than it would hurt EU. To EU it would mean one or two years with a lot of hazzle, while applications was wineified, ported to e.g. Linux, or replaced with software running on MacOS-X, To Microsoft it would mean the end of their dominance on the desktop world wide. In turn that would also mean that they would lose their grip on hardware venders, nobody is prepared to lose a big market like Europe just to ship products that only runs windows.
So, we can be quite sure that Microsoft will either pay their fines, or comply. There is really nothing to worry about.
- I would expect 99% of Linux users are already well aware of OO, and including the word "Linux" might scare a few people off.
You miss the point. Of course Linux users know about OOo, the point is to tell people that it runs on all sorts of platforms. This incrases the value of the package as a software platform. I hardly think Linux would scare anybody away. Especially not in combination with Solaris, Windows, MacOS-X, FreeBSD.
BTW, Why are there no seagulls, and why is it yellow instead of blue and white. If you do an add you should use your logo and company colors. That way you strenghten your brand. Whenever sombody sees some one else open OOo they should be able recognize the logos in splash screen from the add.
Why not mention that ODF is the new iso standard for Office documents, why not mention that you easy can share documents with other popular office suits
Besides, I think promoting it on MacOS-X is a bit premature. Most Mac users don't have X11 installed. and will not think of it as a real Mac program as things like menus and fonts will look weird to them.
When Vista gets out, the computers you buy at your local computer store will be a lot faster than what they are today, and will most likely be able to open ODF as well as Microsoft XML based documents at resonable speed. Even my current 1.4 GHz laptop opens business documents of 10 pages or so in less than a second.
The difference in speed could of course be annoying at very long documents, but then you have to ask yourself is really OpenOffice or MS-Office really the right tools for such things. FrameMaker, LaTeX, or DocBook comes to mind as better alternatives for cases like that. If the large document happens to be an overgrown spreadsheet there are plenty of free and propriatory database engines that would be much better suited to do the heavy lifting.
The ability to use the mozilla bookmark file as an ordinary html file, is a very nice feature that I would miss if they used a database engine instead.
If they should use a database engine, they should use some kind of client server solution so that bookmarks could be shared between multiple machines or users. Preferrably they should use some abstraction layer such as JDBC or ODBC, so that users could have a choise of what database engine to use.
There is also a need for standardization in bookmark storage. Free and open source browsers should agree on a common standard, regardless if it includes databases or not.
FC5 is very snappy indeed. It's the most responsive Gnome desktop I have used so far. Much better than Ubuntu 5.04. If the article is right, and the new Ubuntu really smokes FC5 with respect to speed, I will be impressed. This really looks good for Linux.
Usability is getting better and better for each new release of Gnome.
It is now at a state where it leaves Windows XP in the dust, and is seriously starting to get to the same levels of usability as MacOS-X.
Vista will need to be very good to beat this, or perhaps even more pollished Linux distros, using Gnome 2.16 that probably will be available by the time Vista hits the market.