Again that is the weakness of FOSS. There are FOSS POS software. I suggest that you try some of them out and see if any of them fit your needs. If not you may find that the developer will add features for $$$.
"I certainly wouldn't hand that software to all of my competitors who didn't have to sell their firstborn children to pay for it like I did." That is the problem with FOSS. The idea is that you will get back more than you put into it. Or you could go into business selling it yourself with support. But that is the problem with FOSS. But there are some projects that might fit what you need. But none of them seem both mature and active to be honest.
Hire some developers and put them to work then release the software under the GPL. Free doesn't always mean free as in beer. The idea is that once you make the investment you will get others improving your software. But for somethings like CAD I just don't think you will ever find a FOSS solution as good as what you pay for. But I think ProE run on Linux:)
Besides Slashdot how much FOSS does Slashdot use? Do they use Asterisk for it's phone system? Or does it's parent company do all the "business" stuff for them and just let write perl and post articles?
At least one Foxtrot slipped it's tail and it was armed with nuclear weapons. It could have taken out Jacksonville or Miami. The Hotel, November, and Echos where very loud but the Golfs, and Juliets where not. One off of New York, Boston, or DC and it would have been very bad. While I am far from a tree hugging liberal I just can not bring myself to see the destruction of any US city as a win. No matter how much damage we do in return. And let's not forget the lives that would have been lost in Europe. Again I just can not be okay with the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of our allies as being a win for the US. So yes in my book if one gets through it just can not be called a win.
Okay I admit that I don't like zealot distros but they are harmless. The number of Distros is actually a good thing. I needed to set up a linux box for somebody. All I had was an old 64Mb 400 Mhz Celeron to work with. None of the big boys would work. Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuse are all to big. So I started to look around. DSL, Puppy, and ZenWalk all worked. I ended up using ZenWalk and handed it over to a church librarian. Guess what? It works just fine for her. Yes there are many distros and a lot of them of are marginal use. But the fact that you can find them that will run on just about anything can be really useful. For most people they can limit there choices to just a few to be honest. For Desktops. Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuse. For Servers. CentOS and Ubuntu Sever. If you want paid support Red Hat. But the cool thing is none of those work for you then start looking around. You will probably find something that will.
Yes Audio is mess. To many choices and to many issues. GStreamer and safe ALSA are your best bets but they are limited. What is this issue with the ABI??? That isn't a real issue what is needed and this always starts a war with the faithful is a stable binary driver interface. Nobody should ever have to recompile a driver. I know the arguments for not having it. I find the performance argument to be just silly. It wouldn't be that big of a performance hit folks. The idea that it discourages binary drivers is also silly. Nvidia? ATI? It just makes them a pain to use. I am also for the option of moving some drivers into kernel space. If they are low speed drivers then I think the gain in system stability is worth it. Multiable desktops? Not a problem. I can move from XP to Gnome to KDE to XFCE with very little effort.
For me the big problem is the lack of binary driver support, printing, and audio issues. The funny thing is tat given the mess that audio is that it works as well as it does. For the most part Audio does work but from the programmers point of view it is ugly.
The other issue really is the difficulty with commercial software. It is really hard to make inexpensive closed source software for Linux. Linux could really use Quickbooks, TurboTax, and even Bejeweled. If there was an easy way to sell and market programs for Linux I think you would see a lot of programmers flock to it. Money talks and your not going to make any selling support for a casual game! A standard install system and or something like iTunes, Steam, or the Android store would really help. The key would be for it to be done buy a major Linux distro like Ubuntu.
Windows 2000 is still supported until 2010. At least for corporate people. Microsoft really is between a rock and a hard place with XP support. Corporations see no real benefit to Vista. Pretty doesn't really help. Office also is facing a real lack of motivation as far as upgrading goes as well. I think that Microsoft knows that it can no longer brow beat it's customers. Will more people move to Linux? Maybe if more and more stuff keeps moving to a browser interface and away from VB. I think Microsoft will end up supporting XP for a lot longer than it ever wanted too. And will be selling it a lot longer as well. I can still buy it at BestCityUSADepoMax.
You better read up more before being so sure. For one thing the USSR had the Golf and Hotel Class subs in service. Let's talk about that "hand full" of costal targets that could be reached by the SSGN btw the USSR had SSGNs Echo calls, SSGs the Juliett class, Hotel call SSBNs, and Golf Class SSBs. Then lets throw the Foxtrot class and the November class subs with nuclear armed torpedoes. So that hand full of targets let's see... New York, Boston, Philadelphia. Charleston, Washington DC, Savanna, Jacksonville, and Miami... Some freaking handful. If the managed to get a few into the Gulf of Mexico then you can add Tamp, New Orleans, Mobile, and Houston. But those are just maybes. That is without a single missile from Cuba or any IL-28s getting through. So I would say your assumptions about a win is just nuts. Now as to Kennedy being the only president to prevent a nuclear exchange that is also not very accurate. Truman during the Berlin crisis and the Korean war faced that option and frankly he really could have won those exchanges. Nixon came very close to that during the Six Day War as well.
"Because he was an idiot for having tried to station missiles in Cuba in the first place, lied to Kennedy about putting them there, and took the only real option left to him when his back was put to the wall? A nuclear war was Kennedy's to choose to fight (and almost certainly win) or not, and he chose not to."
The Russians had active nuclear weapons in Cuba at that time. I don't think that would have been a "win". Well at least not if you lived in South Florida. Also The USSR really did have as much right to put those missiles in as the US had to put them in Turkey and the UK. Kennedy was a Hawk and frankly made more mistakes in his short time as president than any I can think of. The bay of pigs was the WORST possible choice that could have been made. It is a real shame because Khrushchev was one of the more progressive leaders of the USSR. We really could have worked with him if he had stayed in power.
You might but I would then suggest that you read some good history books. Kennedy. 1. Set more and more troops to Vietnam. 2. Went forward with the Bay of Pigs. 3. Didn't support the Bay of Pigs. 4. Ran on the platform that the US was lagging behind the USSR in missiles and nukes. 5. Supported the deployment of Thor, Jupiter, Atlas, Titan I, Titan II, and Polaris missile systems. 6. And almost brought the US into a full on nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis.
The one that kept things from really getting out of had wasn't JFK it was Khrushchev and it cost him just about everything.
JFK's memory has a reality distortion field that makes Jobb's look tiny.
Okay is Fedora more stable than Ubuntu or does it have more up to date? This is an honest question. I tried Fedora 2 for a test web server on old hardware. It worked but frankly I never have had any problems with Linux working. What I didn't like was Fedora kept moving and dumping the old version and I was left without an easy way to update it. So I wrote it off for servers for me anyway. I know people do use it for servers but I have no idea why when CentOS is available. OpenSuse is a real mixed bag as far as I am concerned. I love SAX but I really don't like YAST. I really like YUM and apt-get a lot better. So what do you think makes Fedora better than Ubuntu or OpenSuse for a desktop?
Staying with a Distro because you know is the same as staying with WIndows because you know that. What you don't seem to understand is that I am not being critical I am asking WHY FEDORA? As I pointed out I did use it once. I stopped using it as a server because of the short life cycle. Production servers go into production and you run them until you have to stop. The longer that your install has support the better. Yes choice is good but the question has more to do with why choose Fedora. What does it do better than Ubuntu? Both are targeted at the desktop so ease of use should be high on the list of features.
Okay flexibility. Having a these repositories already set doesn't really hurt flexibility. You can add any repository you want and remove them if you want.
Using another distro. Well I use a number of them. I really like CentOS for servers and Ubuntu for Desktop. They key is that things should be as easy as possible if you want more people to use them. My statment has more to do with why should I use Fedora? Ubuntu is more friendly, CentOS is better for servers, and Debian is more "free", DSL, Zenwalk, and Puppy are lighter. So why Fedora? What advantages does it have over other distros. I know this is likley to be flamebait for people but I have used Fedora, Ubunut, and OpenSuse for years. I haven't messed with Fedora for a while so a simple what does Fedora do better than others?
For me? Not at all. I admit that I have a fondness of not doing more work than I really have too. I have been using Linux for a long time and you have hit on one of the big problems with the mindset of many Linux users. Why should I have to configure a third party repo? What do I gain over the way Ubuntu does it. Why should I have to go through a lot of fiddling to get my video driver working? Working well with a lack of effort is a good thing.
Does it come with easy access to the "restricted" repositories? That is the thing that makes Ubuntu so easy. You just take a check mark off the evil restricted repositories and you can download all those evil codecs that let you play video on your Linux box. Oh and those evil closed source video drivers as well.
Not really. The problem with most netbooks has been the UI. The Linux distros they used just where not that good. XP works but with the smaller screens it really isn't great. Using the software you are used too? Only if your a techie. Most netbooks don't come with a optical drive and external optical drives are not yet super common.
What an Android or iPhone based netbook offers is trouble free computing. If you want software you get it from Itunes or the Android store. Learning curve? More myth than anything. I set up a Linux box for a church library. The PC was super old so I had to use Zenwalk on it. I put Gnumeric on it to keep track of their media. The woman that runs it didn't even know what a flash drive was. Did she have any problem? Not at all. She is using it just fine and wishes her XP system at home looked as pretty. People have made the jump to Mac, iPhones, and Cell phones with no real problem. So I do think this is a great idea.
We had that problem with travel notebooks. We use Linux firewalls and never had any problems with worms... Until a programmer brought back a notebook that he took on a trip and plugged it into the network. Well live and learn. It isn't just thumb drives you have to worry about when it comes to data growing legs. I have a 6 gig memory card in my cellphone and my PC has bluetooth. The amount of data you can move easily today is just scary.
"Do you remember how fast Microsoft's JVM was compared to Netscapes?" Nope because Netscape never made a JVM. Actually java is a lot faster now than it used to be. It really doesn't take long to run Eclipse.org. I think most of Java's problems are memory.
We do have a lot about what is "underneath". We have seen the 45nm server parts and they are very fast per clock tick. The new Desktop CPU is based on the same design so we can work from that and the clock speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Which was the best and what features does it lack if I might ask?
Also I know that SQL Ledger has POS and you may want to look at LedgerSMB as well.
Again that is the weakness of FOSS.
There are FOSS POS software. I suggest that you try some of them out and see if any of them fit your needs. If not you may find that the developer will add features for $$$.
"I certainly wouldn't hand that software to all of my competitors who didn't have to sell their firstborn children to pay for it like I did."
That is the problem with FOSS.
The idea is that you will get back more than you put into it. Or you could go into business selling it yourself with support.
But that is the problem with FOSS.
But there are some projects that might fit what you need.
But none of them seem both mature and active to be honest.
Hire some developers and put them to work then release the software under the GPL. :)
Free doesn't always mean free as in beer.
The idea is that once you make the investment you will get others improving your software.
But for somethings like CAD I just don't think you will ever find a FOSS solution as good as what you pay for. But I think ProE run on Linux
Besides Slashdot how much FOSS does Slashdot use?
Do they use Asterisk for it's phone system? Or does it's parent company do all the "business" stuff for them and just let write perl and post articles?
At least one Foxtrot slipped it's tail and it was armed with nuclear weapons. It could have taken out Jacksonville or Miami.
The Hotel, November, and Echos where very loud but the Golfs, and Juliets where not. One off of New York, Boston, or DC and it would have been very bad.
While I am far from a tree hugging liberal I just can not bring myself to see the destruction of any US city as a win. No matter how much damage we do in return.
And let's not forget the lives that would have been lost in Europe. Again I just can not be okay with the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of our allies as being a win for the US.
So yes in my book if one gets through it just can not be called a win.
Okay I admit that I don't like zealot distros but they are harmless.
The number of Distros is actually a good thing.
I needed to set up a linux box for somebody. All I had was an old 64Mb 400 Mhz Celeron to work with.
None of the big boys would work. Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuse are all to big.
So I started to look around.
DSL, Puppy, and ZenWalk all worked.
I ended up using ZenWalk and handed it over to a church librarian. Guess what? It works just fine for her. Yes there are many distros and a lot of them of are marginal use. But the fact that you can find them that will run on just about anything can be really useful.
For most people they can limit there choices to just a few to be honest.
For Desktops.
Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuse.
For Servers.
CentOS and Ubuntu Sever. If you want paid support Red Hat.
But the cool thing is none of those work for you then start looking around. You will probably find something that will.
Yes Audio is mess. To many choices and to many issues. GStreamer and safe ALSA are your best bets but they are limited.
What is this issue with the ABI??? That isn't a real issue what is needed and this always starts a war with the faithful is a stable binary driver interface.
Nobody should ever have to recompile a driver. I know the arguments for not having it. I find the performance argument to be just silly. It wouldn't be that big of a performance hit folks. The idea that it discourages binary drivers is also silly. Nvidia? ATI? It just makes them a pain to use.
I am also for the option of moving some drivers into kernel space. If they are low speed drivers then I think the gain in system stability is worth it.
Multiable desktops? Not a problem. I can move from XP to Gnome to KDE to XFCE with very little effort.
For me the big problem is the lack of binary driver support, printing, and audio issues.
The funny thing is tat given the mess that audio is that it works as well as it does. For the most part Audio does work but from the programmers point of view it is ugly.
The other issue really is the difficulty with commercial software. It is really hard to make inexpensive closed source software for Linux. Linux could really use Quickbooks, TurboTax, and even Bejeweled. If there was an easy way to sell and market programs for Linux I think you would see a lot of programmers flock to it.
Money talks and your not going to make any selling support for a casual game! A standard install system and or something like iTunes, Steam, or the Android store would really help. The key would be for it to be done buy a major Linux distro like Ubuntu.
Windows 2000 is still supported until 2010. At least for corporate people. Microsoft really is between a rock and a hard place with XP support. Corporations see no real benefit to Vista. Pretty doesn't really help.
Office also is facing a real lack of motivation as far as upgrading goes as well.
I think that Microsoft knows that it can no longer brow beat it's customers.
Will more people move to Linux? Maybe if more and more stuff keeps moving to a browser interface and away from VB.
I think Microsoft will end up supporting XP for a lot longer than it ever wanted too. And will be selling it a lot longer as well. I can still buy it at BestCityUSADepoMax.
You better read up more before being so sure. For one thing the USSR had the Golf and Hotel Class subs in service. Let's talk about that "hand full" of costal targets that could be reached by the SSGN btw the USSR had SSGNs Echo calls, SSGs the Juliett class, Hotel call SSBNs, and Golf Class SSBs. Then lets throw the Foxtrot class and the November class subs with nuclear armed torpedoes. So that hand full of targets let's see... New York, Boston, Philadelphia. Charleston, Washington DC, Savanna, Jacksonville, and Miami... Some freaking handful.
If the managed to get a few into the Gulf of Mexico then you can add Tamp, New Orleans, Mobile, and Houston. But those are just maybes. That is without a single missile from Cuba or any IL-28s getting through.
So I would say your assumptions about a win is just nuts.
Now as to Kennedy being the only president to prevent a nuclear exchange that is also not very accurate. Truman during the Berlin crisis and the Korean war faced that option and frankly he really could have won those exchanges. Nixon came very close to that during the Six Day War as well.
"Because he was an idiot for having tried to station missiles in Cuba in the first place, lied to Kennedy about putting them there, and took the only real option left to him when his back was put to the wall? A nuclear war was Kennedy's to choose to fight (and almost certainly win) or not, and he chose not to."
The Russians had active nuclear weapons in Cuba at that time. I don't think that would have been a "win".
Well at least not if you lived in South Florida.
Also The USSR really did have as much right to put those missiles in as the US had to put them in Turkey and the UK.
Kennedy was a Hawk and frankly made more mistakes in his short time as president than any I can think of.
The bay of pigs was the WORST possible choice that could have been made.
It is a real shame because Khrushchev was one of the more progressive leaders of the USSR. We really could have worked with him if he had stayed in power.
JFS?
You might but I would then suggest that you read some good history books.
Kennedy.
1. Set more and more troops to Vietnam.
2. Went forward with the Bay of Pigs.
3. Didn't support the Bay of Pigs.
4. Ran on the platform that the US was lagging behind the USSR in missiles and nukes.
5. Supported the deployment of Thor, Jupiter, Atlas, Titan I, Titan II, and Polaris missile systems.
6. And almost brought the US into a full on nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis.
The one that kept things from really getting out of had wasn't JFK it was Khrushchev and it cost him just about everything.
JFK's memory has a reality distortion field that makes Jobb's look tiny.
Now we just need to get android running on it.
Okay is Fedora more stable than Ubuntu or does it have more up to date? This is an honest question. I tried Fedora 2 for a test web server on old hardware. It worked but frankly I never have had any problems with Linux working. What I didn't like was Fedora kept moving and dumping the old version and I was left without an easy way to update it. So I wrote it off for servers for me anyway. I know people do use it for servers but I have no idea why when CentOS is available.
OpenSuse is a real mixed bag as far as I am concerned. I love SAX but I really don't like YAST. I really like YUM and apt-get a lot better.
So what do you think makes Fedora better than Ubuntu or OpenSuse for a desktop?
Staying with a Distro because you know is the same as staying with WIndows because you know that.
What you don't seem to understand is that I am not being critical I am asking WHY FEDORA?
As I pointed out I did use it once. I stopped using it as a server because of the short life cycle. Production servers go into production and you run them until you have to stop. The longer that your install has support the better.
Yes choice is good but the question has more to do with why choose Fedora. What does it do better than Ubuntu? Both are targeted at the desktop so ease of use should be high on the list of features.
Okay flexibility. Having a these repositories already set doesn't really hurt flexibility. You can add any repository you want and remove them if you want.
Using another distro. Well I use a number of them. I really like CentOS for servers and Ubuntu for Desktop.
They key is that things should be as easy as possible if you want more people to use them.
My statment has more to do with why should I use Fedora?
Ubuntu is more friendly, CentOS is better for servers, and Debian is more "free", DSL, Zenwalk, and Puppy are lighter.
So why Fedora? What advantages does it have over other distros. I know this is likley to be flamebait for people but I have used Fedora, Ubunut, and OpenSuse for years. I haven't messed with Fedora for a while so a simple what does Fedora do better than others?
For me? Not at all. I admit that I have a fondness of not doing more work than I really have too.
I have been using Linux for a long time and you have hit on one of the big problems with the mindset of many Linux users.
Why should I have to configure a third party repo? What do I gain over the way Ubuntu does it.
Why should I have to go through a lot of fiddling to get my video driver working?
Working well with a lack of effort is a good thing.
I was thinking more of oil and or other industrial uses.
Does it come with easy access to the "restricted" repositories?
That is the thing that makes Ubuntu so easy. You just take a check mark off the evil restricted repositories and you can download all those evil codecs that let you play video on your Linux box.
Oh and those evil closed source video drivers as well.
I was wondering if it could be used for Ships to lower their drag, or to line the inside of pipes.
Not the fabric mind you but the coating.
Not really.
The problem with most netbooks has been the UI.
The Linux distros they used just where not that good. XP works but with the smaller screens it really isn't great.
Using the software you are used too? Only if your a techie. Most netbooks don't come with a optical drive and external optical drives are not yet super common.
What an Android or iPhone based netbook offers is trouble free computing.
If you want software you get it from Itunes or the Android store.
Learning curve? More myth than anything. I set up a Linux box for a church library. The PC was super old so I had to use Zenwalk on it. I put Gnumeric on it to keep track of their media.
The woman that runs it didn't even know what a flash drive was. Did she have any problem?
Not at all. She is using it just fine and wishes her XP system at home looked as pretty.
People have made the jump to Mac, iPhones, and Cell phones with no real problem.
So I do think this is a great idea.
We had that problem with travel notebooks. We use Linux firewalls and never had any problems with worms... Until a programmer brought back a notebook that he took on a trip and plugged it into the network.
Well live and learn. It isn't just thumb drives you have to worry about when it comes to data growing legs.
I have a 6 gig memory card in my cellphone and my PC has bluetooth.
The amount of data you can move easily today is just scary.
"Do you remember how fast Microsoft's JVM was compared to Netscapes?"
Nope because Netscape never made a JVM.
Actually java is a lot faster now than it used to be.
It really doesn't take long to run Eclipse.org. I think most of Java's problems are memory.
We do have a lot about what is "underneath". We have seen the 45nm server parts and they are very fast per clock tick. The new Desktop CPU is based on the same design so we can work from that and the clock speed.