Freedom to do what exactly? Have actually written anything for linux let alone Android? When I say "write", I'm not talking about downloading the source from some project SVN repo and doing a compile but rather writing something yourself.
Just because you conveniently choose to exclude a perfectly valid reason for having an open OS environment does not make it invalid.
You can download the Android SDK and simulator free, take a piece of existing source code and have a go at trying to compile it on Android - me, I use that as a hands on teaching aid to learning a bit more about C and Android, but there's a host of "ipks" out there where better programmers than me have successfully compiled applications for Android that are not on the Android Market.
Oh, and for your information, anyone can download Android SDKs and programming tools FREE OF CHARGE if they want to. Apple charges for its SDKs and doesn't even make them available for Windows, you have to buy one of those Mac computer thingies that less than 8% of the world's computing population uses.
Incidentally, that's a confusingly stupid strategy on Apple's part - one way to guarantee students and poor kids in the Third World don't flock to learn programming on your device is to lock them out from a financial perspective... even Microsoft give a huge amount of free software and support to Windows developers because it's actually good business sense to do so.
Yep, I can understand the concept of HD and having huge resolutions on large displays to avoid pixellation of an image.
But what benefit does this bring to a tiny 7" or 10" screen. I own two Android Phones, an Asus Transformer tablet and the missus owns an iPhone and a HP Tablet. I can't personally say that the displays are anything but excellent on any of those devices... yep, the screens on smartphones may be a bit "small" for reading ebooks and other such stuff but unless I plan on wearing super-magnifying glasses with 2" thick lenses made from the bottoms of glass bottles, how does a higher resolution on a smaller display benefit? Or carry a microscope round with me, of course!
I think this is one of those "marketing features" designed to allow Apple fanbois to elevate themselves one step higher than the rest of us so that can peer down their long pointy noses at the rest of we great unwashed from even loftier heights.
Social networking is fine provided that you fully understand the concept that nothing is for free. Somebody has to pay vast amounts of money for the servers and data centres that provide all of this stuff, and ultimately that's paid for from advertising revenue and selling your data.
Well, whilst most of us don't like advertising, it came about long before Facebook ever appeared and we accept it as a "necessary evil" and all like to think that it doesn't influence us. And if you filled in and sent off a competition form on the back of a cereal packet 20 years ago then you were probably not giving away any less information then than you do on Facebook now.
It just comes down to having a concept of how to "behave in public" and applying exactly the same principles that you would (hopefully) apply in a room full of strangers on social networking sites - the fact that walking into a roomful of strangers and shouting "I LIKE VODKA!" will automatically make them think you're an alcoholic is no different when applied on Facebook. In other words, if you wouldn't do the former then don't do the latter either.
I've used Facebook for a couple of years, I personally don't think it's anything more than a pleasant waste of time and my friends on Facebook are pretty much confined to actual friends, family and colleagues - so they know what I am like as a human being face-to-face anyway.
As for Twitter, I didn't start using it until a couple of weeks ago and I am the least celebrity-obsessed person that there is - for example, as a big music fan I admire the skills of a lot of musicians but, quite frankly, my life is far too busy and important to me that I could care less what they are doing outside of making nice albums of music for me to listen to. But because I'm a Spanish-learning geek, I follow technical news on there and a few Spanish speakers and find it quite useful.
And what's worse is that you (rightfully) feeling that you have to remind people of that fact probably says a lot about the state of our society today.
There used to be a time when parents and teachers educated young people about how to behave in public and that's why old gits like me don't swear in front of other people unless you know them really well, always look over their shoulder when going through a door just to make sure that nobody right behind gets the door slapped in their face, lowers the volume of their voice when speaking on a mobile phone in public, etc.
Yes, it's old fashioned but if I see someone demonstrating those types of behaviours then I know that person understands the concept of what it is to be in a society with other people living in it and, even if I haven't got a clue who they are, they automatically get some respect from me just because they clearly understand that.
The problem these days is that standing out from the crowd and celebrity status seems to be actively encouraged and has given birth to a lot of people who have no concept of anything outside of themselves - and, no, I don't mean self-obsession or arrogance, necessarily, but people who just can't visualise themselves as being part of a crowd where everyone else in that crowd has probably the same motivations and needs that they themselves do.
To describe such people as "rude" doesn't actually work because in order to be classified as rude, you need to be shown as deviating from what is normally acceptable behaviour - and many of these people don't have a clue what acceptable behaviour is because they have never been taught it.
I'm sure I read somewhere that the Microsoft's first TCP/IP stack that they included as an upgrade for Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was essentially the Open Source BSD TCP/IP stack - not an issue because that's what it's there for, as long as licensing restrictions are adhered to.
You may laugh but I suspect there's a lot more in your one-liner than you realise...
I think the PC desktops and laptops do have a while to go yet but they're certainly on the decline as Joe Sixpack's main computing device in the house and Microsoft currently have very little to offer in the portable device arena, which are mostly ARM-based CPUs. Therefore Windows 8 is targeted primarily at ARM devices and Microsoft will be hoping that people will want to use similar environments on both PCs and portables, and therefore also upgrade to Windows 8 PCs as well.
Windows 7 has been a success story but over a much longer period than XP was a success story and it's a clear demonstration that a lot of Windows users aren't going to "just" upgrade to Windows 8 like they have done with previous upgrades.
Another thing to bear in mind is that with Windows Vista and 7, Microsoft was able to play the "unavailable for Windows XP" hand with DirectX and Internet Explorer versions - but these days PC games manufacture has slowed considerably (unless you look at indie titles which probably aren't too bothered about state-of-the-art DirectX and graphics in most cases) and IE is slowly dying away anyway.
Yes, as long as PC desktops and laptops survive, Microsoft will find some way of making Windows 8 successful (unless they shoot themselves in the foot with it like they did with Vista) but they definitely have an uphill struggle to get it there.
Not that I have a problem with anyone being a Windows, Linux or whatever user, but calling someone an "Open Source advocate" doesn't actually mean very much since there's probably as much Open Source software available for Windows as there is for Linux (and those overpriced computers named after Autumn-ripening fruit products).
It does ISO image mounting/dismounting in Daemon Tools kind of way, I use it on Gnome and it works well - though only the basic stuff, don't expect the same feature-set as in DT.
I started working on UNIX systems before I touched Windows (yes, I'm THAT old!) and the first GUI I used was Workbench on the Commodore Amiga.
When the Amiga became "dead in the water" and I reluctantly went to PCs, I did struggle adjusting to the Windows 95 GUI, but then went through Windows 98 to Windows 2000 where I've stuck that "Windows Classic" look and feel ever since. I've found no reason to move my Windows computing beyond XP yet but I absolutely loathe the default XP desktop and didn't move from Windows 2000 until I discovered you could use Windows Classic in XP.
And despite being a mainly Linux guy, I do like Windows Classic on XP and emulate it as closely as possible in Gnome - I don't care about eye candy and 3D desktops, CPU cycles are too important to waste.
I could argue that Microsoft copied the Amiga Workbench look and feel to a degree when the whole look of Windows changed with Windows 95 - and one thing I've never understood is why a decent two-pane view in any file manager isn't the default - one of the best file managers I've ever worked with was Directory Opus on the Amiga which had the two-pane functionality from the word go and you didn't need to frig about positioning windows side by side like you do in Windows. At least in Nautilus on Gnome you can just press F3 and have that two-pane view.
Oh, I see... so, in other words, you emerged from your mother's womb with a gene-given instinct to be able to sit in front of a Windows PC and start using it, did you?
Why do you "GUI is the only way" people seem to forget that your ability to use a computer well has a) been learnt over a period of time and, b) entirely down to what you are familiar with?
I am sat here at home currently and I have two PCs running Linux and one running Windows. On the Linux PCs I have scripts and tools running that do batch jobs, backup jobs, mass file renames, automated Usenet searches and downloads. etc. etc. that if I *CAN* do them on Windows would take 10 times the amount of time to set up with a mouse and GUI.
On my Windows PC, I have tools that I love like Tag&Rename, Media Monkey, IrfanView and a few others that let me do stuff with media and graphics files that would take me a while to work out how to do on Linux.
Fortunately, I have stuff like SAMBA running so I can access files in either environment and work on them using the best tool in either OS that, for me, does the job I want to do best.
Not all of us are command line zealots... if you don't like the command line then, please, go do it a way that's better for you - but don't diss what you clearly don't understand because find a repetitive task in a GUI and I can usually work out a command-line way of automating it, and with the time I save drink beer and be a lot happier than you clearly are.
I think your over-reacting a little and exposing a degree of Microsoft fanboi-ism in the process.
Actively avoiding working on Microsoft stuff has done me no harm in my 30-year long "techie" career, I don't hate Microsoft at all and have the utmost admiration for some great MS sysadmins who I call up for support fairly regularly if I'm doing integration stuff with Windows desktops or servers. But I've always got a kick out of working at the command line ever since I started on RSX on Dec PDP-11s during the mid to late 1980s. Since then I've worked on SCO (!), Solaris, HP-UX and now mainly Linux, picked up shell-scripting, Perl, a little Python and PHP, self-taught myself Apache and MySQL, and now do UNIX security for a telecoms server manufacturer.
I can certainly (re)build a Windows machine if I need to (or friends and relatives need me to) and like tweaking and optimising it - I actually quite like XP and 2003 Server, but never moved my Windows knowledge beyond them because there's always something new UNIX-related to go learn and that's more rewarding for me.
So please don't accuse someone for being a "douche" if they go looking for a job that they actually might quite like doing - just like I do and as do the Windows guys I occasionally phone.
I'm not saying that anywhere is particularly booming in IT (or related industries) at the moment but Open Source adoption is fairly big amongst telecoms equipment providers, where there's been a big push away from commercial UNIX distributions like Solaris and HP-UX to Linux.
The company I work for first moved into Red Hat Linux servers when the world started to go Voice Over IP about a decade ago, now I think someone is looking a lot more at margins on our appliance servers as we move into virtualisation - Red Hat seems to be slowly disappearing in favour of CentOS, presumably as we move into more self-supported Linux distros rather than paying Red Hat for support (not that I have a particular problem with either methodology).
You also might want to keep an eye on the Raspberry Pi. It may never be "the Year Of Desktop Linux" (not that I care anyway) but many people here in the UK are predicting a big uptake in schools over here for it - so presumably that will need experts to support them also in educational departments. Even I'm getting to the age now where big wage packets are becoming slightly less important as the mortgage on the house gets a lot smaller and I feel like giving back some of my accrued knowledge over 30-odd years of telecoms, IT and security experience back to the youngsters. If the Raspberry Pi kicks off a new-found interest in youngsters taking up programming, there may be something an old git like me can bring to them...
It might be worth seeing how it takes off where you are... and have a look around some of the telecoms manufacturers like Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, etc., not to mention those companies that do third-party applications that interface to their kit for voice recording, predictive dialing and call-centre reporting.
You've merely repeated what I stated above - but you haven't answered the question as to why Apple didn't simply submit those extensions as updates to the epub format if they weren't just looking to create a new file format that they themselves could control.
I still find it absolutely mind-boggling that Apple fanbois see this as something any less serious to them claiming rights to the content.
Microsoft were pulled up before the EU monopolies commission and fined heavily for locking Windows users into Internet Explorer by using proprietary extensions to the existing Open Standard HTML format.
The iBook format uses proprietary Apple extension to the existing Open Standard epub format. Therefore Apple is using monopolistic practices to lock in users.
The iBook format uses proprietary extensions which is no different to what Microsoft did with HTML support in Internet Explorer in order to lock in users to their web browser.
It's monopolistic behaviour - the epub format (which is at the core of iBook) is an already Open Standard and if Apple was interested in maintaining open standards then they'd submit the changes included in the.ibook standard as extensions to the epub format.
But they haven't done it that way because it's their usual control-freakery.
From a users' perspective, I'm not aware of any strategies that Google uses that locks their userbase into using specific services by using proprietary lock-in or proprietary file formats like.ibook.
Even with smartphones, it's a case of ticking a configuration box in Android that then allows you to go install apps from anywhere you like without having to root or jailbreak the device.
Google aren't perfect, but there are varying degrees of control-freakery, and Apple sits there at the top of the list, above even Microsoft.
The thing that always amuses me is that the very reasons Apple users often quote on here for not using Microsoft Windows or Linux are things they seem to be perfectly willing to accept under Apple's regime.
For example, we often here them espouse how wonderful OS X is because it's based on a BSD UNIX core - yet anyone who uses a UNIX system properly will tell you that you cannot embrace it properly unless you use some of the power user automation and scripting at the command line. But OS X users will say they found Linux too difficult for that very reason.
Likewise, they will often complain that Windows is far too locked down, with too many proprietary file formats - yet seem perfectly willing to accept the countless proprietary file formats that Apple imposes on them.
I actually believe that for the majority of Apple users, it is simply about making a fashion statement about joining an elitist little club, hence display of the Apple logo being so important to them, and then trying to make rational arguments for their OS/hardware of choice that don't stand up to close scrutiny.
...you'd think they'd want to help with getting some Open Source drivers developed for Kinect.
I personally cannot see a use for Kinect but I recognise the algorithms that make it work are pretty cool and Microsoft is rightfully quite proud of it. Hardware hackers are definitely going to be interested in it but if the majority of those are Open Source freaks, I doubt many of them will end up paying for a Windows 7 license just to use it on a desktop PC.
Common sense would have been for Microsoft to show off something good they've done, help develop Open Source drivers, and benefit from some additional Kinect sales when hardware hackers play with it on their Linux PCs.
Because they know a certain percentage of the population will just go and buy the game anyway, and will never complain about having to jump through multiple hoops to get the thing working correctly because of DRM protection. That is my point.
DRM and protected content happens because marketing types have worked out that the producers will get more revenue by implementing it - period.
They do not care about the effect on honest customers because they already have their money in the bank, and if you go off and pirate stuff then you create the justification they need to implement even worse DRM.
I enjoy gaming like everyone else, I have done for years, but NO game will ever have me queuing like a mindless zombie to buy it and, if it's too expensive on release day then I'm happy to wait for 6 months when I can pick it up cheaper. If it's too difficult for me to use or play because of DRM then, tough, I won't buy it.
Mindless drones that treat a computer game like it is the most important thing in their life that they will curl up and die without are the people that make it BAD for you and everyone else - who was it said "a fool and his money are easily parted".
People need to get lives, stop being so materialistic and realise there are more important things in life. Computer gaming is great fun, I've done it for more than a quarter of a century and don't plan on stopping any time soon - but I'm also a consumer that expects to be a valued customer who is treated fairly, that's why these days I tend to play (and always pay for) indie games, where DRM usually isn't an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
PS. One final question - how many emulators can you ACTUALLY run on a non-jailbroken iP*d?
Freedom to do what exactly? Have actually written anything for linux let alone Android? When I say "write", I'm not talking about downloading the source from some project SVN repo and doing a compile but rather writing something yourself.
Just because you conveniently choose to exclude a perfectly valid reason for having an open OS environment does not make it invalid.
You can download the Android SDK and simulator free, take a piece of existing source code and have a go at trying to compile it on Android - me, I use that as a hands on teaching aid to learning a bit more about C and Android, but there's a host of "ipks" out there where better programmers than me have successfully compiled applications for Android that are not on the Android Market.
Oh, and for your information, anyone can download Android SDKs and programming tools FREE OF CHARGE if they want to. Apple charges for its SDKs and doesn't even make them available for Windows, you have to buy one of those Mac computer thingies that less than 8% of the world's computing population uses.
Incidentally, that's a confusingly stupid strategy on Apple's part - one way to guarantee students and poor kids in the Third World don't flock to learn programming on your device is to lock them out from a financial perspective... even Microsoft give a huge amount of free software and support to Windows developers because it's actually good business sense to do so.
Why?
Yep, I can understand the concept of HD and having huge resolutions on large displays to avoid pixellation of an image.
But what benefit does this bring to a tiny 7" or 10" screen. I own two Android Phones, an Asus Transformer tablet and the missus owns an iPhone and a HP Tablet. I can't personally say that the displays are anything but excellent on any of those devices... yep, the screens on smartphones may be a bit "small" for reading ebooks and other such stuff but unless I plan on wearing super-magnifying glasses with 2" thick lenses made from the bottoms of glass bottles, how does a higher resolution on a smaller display benefit? Or carry a microscope round with me, of course!
I think this is one of those "marketing features" designed to allow Apple fanbois to elevate themselves one step higher than the rest of us so that can peer down their long pointy noses at the rest of we great unwashed from even loftier heights.
Get a sense of humour.
...to tell the difference between oregano and weed!
Thieving dealers...
Social networking is fine provided that you fully understand the concept that nothing is for free. Somebody has to pay vast amounts of money for the servers and data centres that provide all of this stuff, and ultimately that's paid for from advertising revenue and selling your data.
Well, whilst most of us don't like advertising, it came about long before Facebook ever appeared and we accept it as a "necessary evil" and all like to think that it doesn't influence us. And if you filled in and sent off a competition form on the back of a cereal packet 20 years ago then you were probably not giving away any less information then than you do on Facebook now.
It just comes down to having a concept of how to "behave in public" and applying exactly the same principles that you would (hopefully) apply in a room full of strangers on social networking sites - the fact that walking into a roomful of strangers and shouting "I LIKE VODKA!" will automatically make them think you're an alcoholic is no different when applied on Facebook. In other words, if you wouldn't do the former then don't do the latter either.
I've used Facebook for a couple of years, I personally don't think it's anything more than a pleasant waste of time and my friends on Facebook are pretty much confined to actual friends, family and colleagues - so they know what I am like as a human being face-to-face anyway.
As for Twitter, I didn't start using it until a couple of weeks ago and I am the least celebrity-obsessed person that there is - for example, as a big music fan I admire the skills of a lot of musicians but, quite frankly, my life is far too busy and important to me that I could care less what they are doing outside of making nice albums of music for me to listen to. But because I'm a Spanish-learning geek, I follow technical news on there and a few Spanish speakers and find it quite useful.
And what's worse is that you (rightfully) feeling that you have to remind people of that fact probably says a lot about the state of our society today.
There used to be a time when parents and teachers educated young people about how to behave in public and that's why old gits like me don't swear in front of other people unless you know them really well, always look over their shoulder when going through a door just to make sure that nobody right behind gets the door slapped in their face, lowers the volume of their voice when speaking on a mobile phone in public, etc.
Yes, it's old fashioned but if I see someone demonstrating those types of behaviours then I know that person understands the concept of what it is to be in a society with other people living in it and, even if I haven't got a clue who they are, they automatically get some respect from me just because they clearly understand that.
The problem these days is that standing out from the crowd and celebrity status seems to be actively encouraged and has given birth to a lot of people who have no concept of anything outside of themselves - and, no, I don't mean self-obsession or arrogance, necessarily, but people who just can't visualise themselves as being part of a crowd where everyone else in that crowd has probably the same motivations and needs that they themselves do.
To describe such people as "rude" doesn't actually work because in order to be classified as rude, you need to be shown as deviating from what is normally acceptable behaviour - and many of these people don't have a clue what acceptable behaviour is because they have never been taught it.
I'm sure I read somewhere that the Microsoft's first TCP/IP stack that they included as an upgrade for Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was essentially the Open Source BSD TCP/IP stack - not an issue because that's what it's there for, as long as licensing restrictions are adhered to.
You may laugh but I suspect there's a lot more in your one-liner than you realise...
I think the PC desktops and laptops do have a while to go yet but they're certainly on the decline as Joe Sixpack's main computing device in the house and Microsoft currently have very little to offer in the portable device arena, which are mostly ARM-based CPUs. Therefore Windows 8 is targeted primarily at ARM devices and Microsoft will be hoping that people will want to use similar environments on both PCs and portables, and therefore also upgrade to Windows 8 PCs as well.
Windows 7 has been a success story but over a much longer period than XP was a success story and it's a clear demonstration that a lot of Windows users aren't going to "just" upgrade to Windows 8 like they have done with previous upgrades.
Another thing to bear in mind is that with Windows Vista and 7, Microsoft was able to play the "unavailable for Windows XP" hand with DirectX and Internet Explorer versions - but these days PC games manufacture has slowed considerably (unless you look at indie titles which probably aren't too bothered about state-of-the-art DirectX and graphics in most cases) and IE is slowly dying away anyway.
Yes, as long as PC desktops and laptops survive, Microsoft will find some way of making Windows 8 successful (unless they shoot themselves in the foot with it like they did with Vista) but they definitely have an uphill struggle to get it there.
Not that I have a problem with anyone being a Windows, Linux or whatever user, but calling someone an "Open Source advocate" doesn't actually mean very much since there's probably as much Open Source software available for Windows as there is for Linux (and those overpriced computers named after Autumn-ripening fruit products).
Just saying...
Might be of interest to you:
cdemu
It does ISO image mounting/dismounting in Daemon Tools kind of way, I use it on Gnome and it works well - though only the basic stuff, don't expect the same feature-set as in DT.
Isn't this just a duplicate discussion to "Windows 8 Features With Linux Antecedents" above?
After all, Linux got to ARM before Windows did... :-)
I started working on UNIX systems before I touched Windows (yes, I'm THAT old!) and the first GUI I used was Workbench on the Commodore Amiga.
When the Amiga became "dead in the water" and I reluctantly went to PCs, I did struggle adjusting to the Windows 95 GUI, but then went through Windows 98 to Windows 2000 where I've stuck that "Windows Classic" look and feel ever since. I've found no reason to move my Windows computing beyond XP yet but I absolutely loathe the default XP desktop and didn't move from Windows 2000 until I discovered you could use Windows Classic in XP.
And despite being a mainly Linux guy, I do like Windows Classic on XP and emulate it as closely as possible in Gnome - I don't care about eye candy and 3D desktops, CPU cycles are too important to waste.
I could argue that Microsoft copied the Amiga Workbench look and feel to a degree when the whole look of Windows changed with Windows 95 - and one thing I've never understood is why a decent two-pane view in any file manager isn't the default - one of the best file managers I've ever worked with was Directory Opus on the Amiga which had the two-pane functionality from the word go and you didn't need to frig about positioning windows side by side like you do in Windows. At least in Nautilus on Gnome you can just press F3 and have that two-pane view.
Oh, I see... so, in other words, you emerged from your mother's womb with a gene-given instinct to be able to sit in front of a Windows PC and start using it, did you?
Why do you "GUI is the only way" people seem to forget that your ability to use a computer well has a) been learnt over a period of time and, b) entirely down to what you are familiar with?
I am sat here at home currently and I have two PCs running Linux and one running Windows. On the Linux PCs I have scripts and tools running that do batch jobs, backup jobs, mass file renames, automated Usenet searches and downloads. etc. etc. that if I *CAN* do them on Windows would take 10 times the amount of time to set up with a mouse and GUI.
On my Windows PC, I have tools that I love like Tag&Rename, Media Monkey, IrfanView and a few others that let me do stuff with media and graphics files that would take me a while to work out how to do on Linux.
Fortunately, I have stuff like SAMBA running so I can access files in either environment and work on them using the best tool in either OS that, for me, does the job I want to do best.
Not all of us are command line zealots... if you don't like the command line then, please, go do it a way that's better for you - but don't diss what you clearly don't understand because find a repetitive task in a GUI and I can usually work out a command-line way of automating it, and with the time I save drink beer and be a lot happier than you clearly are.
I think your over-reacting a little and exposing a degree of Microsoft fanboi-ism in the process.
Actively avoiding working on Microsoft stuff has done me no harm in my 30-year long "techie" career, I don't hate Microsoft at all and have the utmost admiration for some great MS sysadmins who I call up for support fairly regularly if I'm doing integration stuff with Windows desktops or servers. But I've always got a kick out of working at the command line ever since I started on RSX on Dec PDP-11s during the mid to late 1980s. Since then I've worked on SCO (!), Solaris, HP-UX and now mainly Linux, picked up shell-scripting, Perl, a little Python and PHP, self-taught myself Apache and MySQL, and now do UNIX security for a telecoms server manufacturer.
I can certainly (re)build a Windows machine if I need to (or friends and relatives need me to) and like tweaking and optimising it - I actually quite like XP and 2003 Server, but never moved my Windows knowledge beyond them because there's always something new UNIX-related to go learn and that's more rewarding for me.
So please don't accuse someone for being a "douche" if they go looking for a job that they actually might quite like doing - just like I do and as do the Windows guys I occasionally phone.
I'm not saying that anywhere is particularly booming in IT (or related industries) at the moment but Open Source adoption is fairly big amongst telecoms equipment providers, where there's been a big push away from commercial UNIX distributions like Solaris and HP-UX to Linux.
The company I work for first moved into Red Hat Linux servers when the world started to go Voice Over IP about a decade ago, now I think someone is looking a lot more at margins on our appliance servers as we move into virtualisation - Red Hat seems to be slowly disappearing in favour of CentOS, presumably as we move into more self-supported Linux distros rather than paying Red Hat for support (not that I have a particular problem with either methodology).
You also might want to keep an eye on the Raspberry Pi. It may never be "the Year Of Desktop Linux" (not that I care anyway) but many people here in the UK are predicting a big uptake in schools over here for it - so presumably that will need experts to support them also in educational departments. Even I'm getting to the age now where big wage packets are becoming slightly less important as the mortgage on the house gets a lot smaller and I feel like giving back some of my accrued knowledge over 30-odd years of telecoms, IT and security experience back to the youngsters. If the Raspberry Pi kicks off a new-found interest in youngsters taking up programming, there may be something an old git like me can bring to them...
It might be worth seeing how it takes off where you are... and have a look around some of the telecoms manufacturers like Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, etc., not to mention those companies that do third-party applications that interface to their kit for voice recording, predictive dialing and call-centre reporting.
You've merely repeated what I stated above - but you haven't answered the question as to why Apple didn't simply submit those extensions as updates to the epub format if they weren't just looking to create a new file format that they themselves could control.
I still find it absolutely mind-boggling that Apple fanbois see this as something any less serious to them claiming rights to the content.
Microsoft were pulled up before the EU monopolies commission and fined heavily for locking Windows users into Internet Explorer by using proprietary extensions to the existing Open Standard HTML format.
The iBook format uses proprietary Apple extension to the existing Open Standard epub format. Therefore Apple is using monopolistic practices to lock in users.
The iBook format uses proprietary extensions which is no different to what Microsoft did with HTML support in Internet Explorer in order to lock in users to their web browser.
It's monopolistic behaviour - the epub format (which is at the core of iBook) is an already Open Standard and if Apple was interested in maintaining open standards then they'd submit the changes included in the .ibook standard as extensions to the epub format.
But they haven't done it that way because it's their usual control-freakery.
From a users' perspective, I'm not aware of any strategies that Google uses that locks their userbase into using specific services by using proprietary lock-in or proprietary file formats like .ibook.
Even with smartphones, it's a case of ticking a configuration box in Android that then allows you to go install apps from anywhere you like without having to root or jailbreak the device.
Google aren't perfect, but there are varying degrees of control-freakery, and Apple sits there at the top of the list, above even Microsoft.
The thing that always amuses me is that the very reasons Apple users often quote on here for not using Microsoft Windows or Linux are things they seem to be perfectly willing to accept under Apple's regime.
For example, we often here them espouse how wonderful OS X is because it's based on a BSD UNIX core - yet anyone who uses a UNIX system properly will tell you that you cannot embrace it properly unless you use some of the power user automation and scripting at the command line. But OS X users will say they found Linux too difficult for that very reason.
Likewise, they will often complain that Windows is far too locked down, with too many proprietary file formats - yet seem perfectly willing to accept the countless proprietary file formats that Apple imposes on them.
I actually believe that for the majority of Apple users, it is simply about making a fashion statement about joining an elitist little club, hence display of the Apple logo being so important to them, and then trying to make rational arguments for their OS/hardware of choice that don't stand up to close scrutiny.
...you'd think they'd want to help with getting some Open Source drivers developed for Kinect.
I personally cannot see a use for Kinect but I recognise the algorithms that make it work are pretty cool and Microsoft is rightfully quite proud of it. Hardware hackers are definitely going to be interested in it but if the majority of those are Open Source freaks, I doubt many of them will end up paying for a Windows 7 license just to use it on a desktop PC.
Common sense would have been for Microsoft to show off something good they've done, help develop Open Source drivers, and benefit from some additional Kinect sales when hardware hackers play with it on their Linux PCs.
Because they know a certain percentage of the population will just go and buy the game anyway, and will never complain about having to jump through multiple hoops to get the thing working correctly because of DRM protection. That is my point.
So don't buy the game then.
DRM and protected content happens because marketing types have worked out that the producers will get more revenue by implementing it - period.
They do not care about the effect on honest customers because they already have their money in the bank, and if you go off and pirate stuff then you create the justification they need to implement even worse DRM.
I enjoy gaming like everyone else, I have done for years, but NO game will ever have me queuing like a mindless zombie to buy it and, if it's too expensive on release day then I'm happy to wait for 6 months when I can pick it up cheaper. If it's too difficult for me to use or play because of DRM then, tough, I won't buy it.
Mindless drones that treat a computer game like it is the most important thing in their life that they will curl up and die without are the people that make it BAD for you and everyone else - who was it said "a fool and his money are easily parted".
People need to get lives, stop being so materialistic and realise there are more important things in life. Computer gaming is great fun, I've done it for more than a quarter of a century and don't plan on stopping any time soon - but I'm also a consumer that expects to be a valued customer who is treated fairly, that's why these days I tend to play (and always pay for) indie games, where DRM usually isn't an issue.
People are unhappy with the status quo.
Not so sure about the above statement as many people are saying their latest album has very much gone back to their old sound.