I am often somewhat stupefied at the fiercely stubborn refusal to at least look at factual evidence, such as glaciers melting (and yes, they truly are, worldwide, where I live here in Switzerland, but also in Alaska for example). I understand that there should be healthy scepticism at any scientific claim, but the climate is almost certainly changing, enough so that I can personally see it. When I came to Switzerland 20 years ago, the summers were not as hot or humid as they now are and winters were longer and colder. There used to be snow on the ground for around two months in January and February, and often into April, but if you have snow on the ground for more than two weeks in a row these days, it's a lot.
I originally come from South Africa and the part I come from over there, which is 1500 meters above sea level, used to have warm, pleasant summers. These days, the summers are often about 5 degrees hotter and much dryer.
All of this is just my anecdotal evidence, but I think you have to be pretty stubborn to ignore what's happening around you.
We're still getting used to Office 2007 and now they bring along Office 2010???? I wonder, with no attempt at flaming Microsoft, just who the fuck is going to buy this given the current state of the economy? What exactly will Office 2010 do that we couldn't live without? This actually applies to almost all Office versions, since a good 90% of what we use it for could just as easily be done with Office 2000 or OOo or even Google Apps for that matter.
I appreciate Microsoft's burning need to try and come up with new features in order to justify the high costs of its products, but this is just ridiculous. This is like the PC magazines making wild claims about new exclusive content on some or other product only for it to be the same rubbish as before, with a new type face and different images.
I don't have a degree and yet I've been working in IT for 20 years (everything from sysadmin to, yes, Java and Oracle coding) and it really shocks me that people would not even know where to start on questions as simple as those, and your later post where you qualify that you don't post degree requirements makes me honestly wonder what the hell they teach in American unis these days.
It honestly blows my mind, or at least it would, until I realise that here in Europe, I've got external people doing enterprise networking support who don't know what QoS is. And they're employed and they charge us for their lack of knowledge.
I think it might generally just be a human problem, in that people will try to get away with as much as they possibly can while doing as little as possible.
All the talk of desktop, distro, follow-Windows-gui, don't-follow-windows-gui is NOT the reason that Linux has such a small marketshare. The real reason is the software. There may be Linux apps for just about everything, but Linux doesn't have many of the professional commercial apps (The Adobe stuff, CAD) or niche technical apps (specialised interface apps to industry tools) Linux doesn't have MS Office (bare with me for a sec before you get to OOo) and above all, Linux doesn't have games (yes, I know about transgaming). All the non-technical people don't want to know all that much about their computers. They just want to be able to use what they use at school or work (MS Office) and what their friends use (games) and not have to get into technical details about how to get this or that to run.
And then there's the tools. KDE at least has Kdevelop, but what exactly does Gnome have? Vim? Eclipse? Glade? Gnome needs a unified set of tools at the very least.
Also, Linux is going to, as a collective, have to compromise with the commercial world if they want commercial apps to have any base there. That means, yes, paying for licenses of commercial apps in sufficient numbers to make it worthwhile for the developers to develop for Linux. While I love my Ubuntu machine, I also realise that there are real people with real jobs at all the software houses and they depend, more often than not, on license payments so that they can live. It's a fact of life obviously, and we should accept it if we want Linux to grow. It's also a rocky road, given all the legal and political issues, but it's the way to go.
I am a native English speaker living and working in Switzerland. Usually, when I search with Google, I set the search options to English and Google will happily then return English results based on page rank. Google also has a local Swiss option for whatever language I search in, i.e. to search in pages form Switzerland only. Bing allows you to search in English but still returns English pages from Germany. I haven't found a way to get it to return pages from Switzerland or international English pages yet.
On top of the some of the search results are just poor. To trip the engine up, I entered "pussy" into the search box (with an English search) and Bing only returned a warning that this might lead to sexual content, obviously not recognising that the word also has non sexual connotations, i.e. cats.
This is just poor, and the article in the NYP is almost certainly a Microsoft influenced one (I won't make direct accusations here), or the author is looking for page hits by making controversial remarks.
We use Mac OSX Server for our infrastructure. It's a royal PITA and I now wish we hadn't done it, but there have been a number of media companies in recent years that have moved to Mac OSX Server because all their clients are OSX.
My view is that Apple is just jealous of Microsoft and said to itself that if Microsoft can drop promised new features in Vista like the DB based file system, then why can't Apple drop ZFS?;-)
While I take a lot of what Microsoft says with a pinch of salt, this technology, if it works well, would be a massive breakthrough in computing, not only in gaming. For one, it would remove the need for a mouse, and possibly a keyboard and an intelligent UI could understand gestures in productivity apps. It would be very interesting, although Logitech might be pissed.
If it wasn't for Mao, those fantastic technologies wouldn't have reached the major part of the population. Say what you like about socialism/communism/whatever, but a poor country like Cuba has a far smaller percentage people without medical care than the USA and a higher literacy rate as well. And this in spite of their poor record on so-called western freedoms. It is the reason why most of South America has socialist or left-wing governments these days. People who originally believed the big industry driven lobbying in the USA preaching about capitalism, discovered that so-called freedom of speech means fuck-all if you have nothing to eat and no roof over your head and no doctor to see.
Having an open mind means being able to see BOTH sides of the picture, not just yours.
I cannot believe how many comments I've read here on how ethanol works fine in Brazil's sugar cane based ethanol production and in engines designed for it but not in the USA's corn based ethanol production and not in engines not designed for it.
With that kind of mentality, you Americans will still be paying for Arabian oil in 50 years, when there's almost none left. I don't want to appear anti-American but really, that's the same mentality that left you Americans in shit street with your SUVs (and the same, lazy ass defeatist arguments) when the oil prices skyrocketed and the recession hit.
Come on, folks, there are other crops besides corn, and you have huge areas of hot desert that would be fine for some other crops (like sugar cane) with irrigation (and before you moan about the energy needed to pump water, remember that solar and wind power could do it if need be).
If Brazil, with less resources (but obviously more will and less car indutry/corn growers/dumbass lobbying) can do it, so can the US.
You know where the real problem is in the USA? It's all the vested interests, such as the auto industry, corn farmers industry, pharmaceuticals industry, banking industry etc all trying their level best to make sure they don't actually have to adapt to changing circumstances. The not-invented-here syndrome in the US, whereby anything that wasn't an American invention is somehow suspect is not exactly helping you either.
Keep that shit up and in 40 years China will be giving the USA development aid.
The Lenovo rep is discussing the fact that Windows XP now has about 94% marketshare on the Netbook market, up from about 90% a year ago.
Why is this? Is it because people are suspicious of things they don't know (most people don't know what an operating system is, but they've heard of windows)? Or is it because manufacturers are actively supported by Microsoft in putting WinXP in place of Linux and that most manufacturers are under heavy pressure from Microsoft to get Windows on Netbooks?
Or is it because people ask for certain software and then are disappointed when they discover it won't run on Linux?
Or is it the fabled "printer driver" issue?
I seriously doubt the last two points have much to with WinXP on Netbooks (with one exception). People very rarely run any special software on Netwbooks (it's almost always email, browsing, chatting, some typing), and people use external hardware even more rarely on netbooks.
But, the one piece of missing software is Apple's iTunes. I am willing to bet, given the ubiquity of the iPod, that an awful amount of people run iTunes on their Netbooks to listen to music while they browse, mail, chat, type etc.
iTunes doesn't run flawlessly or easily under Linux. (I personally hate iTunes on Windows, but that's just me)
So, in my opinion, it's the software.
The interview guy from Lenovo is just trying to push laptops as the future of netbooks so that Windows 7 won't be a total loss on those systems, (since it's not much, if at all, faster than Vista)
Really wish I could mod you up. The US isn't alone in this kind of crap. Experts in any field that is slightly complex or has a grey area will lie outright or just guess if in doubt on occasion in order to stay in business.
Good post. I was really getting tired of everyone on here posting crap about how people without jobs are lazy bums who don't want to work and how poor people don't deserve anything. The whole "socialist obama" crap story.
I've been unemployed before and it isn't pleasant having to worry about whether I'll have something to eat tomorrow or not.
Installed Vista today on a new Mac Mini. It had no network or video until I popped in Apple's driver DVD. The chipset was a pretty standard nForce and an Nvidia 9400M non-discrete graphics card.
I've actually been installing Vista all week on a few machine now and the automatic driver search is pretty much hit and miss in my opinion. Sometimes it works but more often it doesn't.
However, I don't blame Microsoft for this. Apple's a bit better but not perfect by a long shot.
I don't know what the relevant stats are to be honest, but I'm pretty sure that some 80% to 90% of software development these days is for web based apps, i.e. backend and browser. People got burnt so often by developing for propietry platforms in the past, and I don't only mean Microsoft by that, that I think that client OS development is truly becoming somewhat irrelevant.
Microsoft knows this and tried so many times to lock people into its own web platform technologies, be that ActiveX, IE, Silverlight, XAML etc. But it never worked. The web is no longer Microsoft's backyard and people are tired of being forced to either cow to Microsoft, Apple or Adobe.
All those points in my original post are not only my own observations. I've had to replace no less than 38 of the 50 Mac Mice we've had in our company. Most of the users simply find them poor and uncomfortable.
As for the 1 battery, my Logitech LX7 works fine on one battery.
I've never had kernal panics in OSX or BSODs in Windows pulling the USB dongel out, but I don't install Logitech's software, ever. If there is one thing about Logitech that it really bad, it is their software. Use the generic Apple and Microsoft Mouse drivers and you'll be fine unless you have a mouse with lots of buttons.
I am Mac sysadmin. I admin about 50 Macs in a design agency. The Apple Mac Mighty Mouse is usually the first thing that the designers throw out (bad form factor, cramps in the hands, poor right click functionality, the scroll ball gums up far too often and is difficult to clean, the cord is far too short etc) and the wireless mouse compounds all of that with terribly poor battery life and bad response times. The only way it'll be useful is if you use rechargeable batteries.
Do yourself a favour: get a Logitech RF wireless, whichever one suites your tastes. They have fantastic battery life (8 months on my Logitech LX7 ) and Logitech almost certainly has one that will fit in your hands. Personally, I love the hard rubber grip on the sides of their mice.
The downside is that you need a USB receiver for them.
In German you can say "Fuck you" (Fick Dich) and even Motherfucker (Mutterficker), and it is a pretty bad insult, but the usual nasty German ones revolve around crap and piss: "Bekacktes Arschloch" - "shit covered arsehole" will makeyou friends all over the place, and "Pisser" (no proper translation) will save you teeth extraction fees at the dentist.
I think it's more likely that Microsoft realised that very many companies currently running XP are simply not going to upgrade any time soon, be it due to financial or technical issues. Including XP in a VM is simply a lifeline for Microsoft to get companies to upgrade and keep XP compatibility.
What is strange is that Microsoft didn't do this before, with Vista, from the get go. They would have saved themselves an awful amount of ridicule in the press. I think the reason is that Microsoft is so full of marketing types arguing with one another over the best way to sell the latest OS to customers that the faction that was arguing about not including a VM for XP compatibility was the best way to get people to upgrade (i.e. by denying that there is anything wrong with Vista) won the last time around, and this time around they're part of the "restructuring effort" after MS sales declined for the first time ever.
Microsoft is truly desperate. They would sell you Mac OSX if they could, and the postive side of this is that Microsoft will actually have to compete in the real world, also for the first time in some 20 years.
I think mysql's popularity can be attributed to php, when I come to think about it. Togther with apache they made the lamp thing work and moved web development for better or for worse to the masses. Mysql has always been good for straightforward simple queries and even scales well there, but Mysql, the company, screwed up when they started messing with the licences, causing the nerds at Zend to remove it from the default compile and install.
These days you can do most of what you used to do with mysql with sqlite on the light end and postgresql on the big end.
if i had mod points today, you'd get some
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 1
I don't have anything against Mysql, and it does what it's meant to do just fine, but it isn't a fully featured db, and attempts to use it for that usually end up with people doing half the query in their code instead of in the db, where queries are meant to be run.
Slashdot Mirror
I am often somewhat stupefied at the fiercely stubborn refusal to at least look at factual evidence, such as glaciers melting (and yes, they truly are, worldwide, where I live here in Switzerland, but also in Alaska for example). I understand that there should be healthy scepticism at any scientific claim, but the climate is almost certainly changing, enough so that I can personally see it. When I came to Switzerland 20 years ago, the summers were not as hot or humid as they now are and winters were longer and colder. There used to be snow on the ground for around two months in January and February, and often into April, but if you have snow on the ground for more than two weeks in a row these days, it's a lot.
I originally come from South Africa and the part I come from over there, which is 1500 meters above sea level, used to have warm, pleasant summers. These days, the summers are often about 5 degrees hotter and much dryer.
All of this is just my anecdotal evidence, but I think you have to be pretty stubborn to ignore what's happening around you.
We're still getting used to Office 2007 and now they bring along Office 2010???? I wonder, with no attempt at flaming Microsoft, just who the fuck is going to buy this given the current state of the economy? What exactly will Office 2010 do that we couldn't live without? This actually applies to almost all Office versions, since a good 90% of what we use it for could just as easily be done with Office 2000 or OOo or even Google Apps for that matter.
I appreciate Microsoft's burning need to try and come up with new features in order to justify the high costs of its products, but this is just ridiculous. This is like the PC magazines making wild claims about new exclusive content on some or other product only for it to be the same rubbish as before, with a new type face and different images.
I don't have a degree and yet I've been working in IT for 20 years (everything from sysadmin to, yes, Java and Oracle coding) and it really shocks me that people would not even know where to start on questions as simple as those, and your later post where you qualify that you don't post degree requirements makes me honestly wonder what the hell they teach in American unis these days.
It honestly blows my mind, or at least it would, until I realise that here in Europe, I've got external people doing enterprise networking support who don't know what QoS is. And they're employed and they charge us for their lack of knowledge.
I think it might generally just be a human problem, in that people will try to get away with as much as they possibly can while doing as little as possible.
All the talk of desktop, distro, follow-Windows-gui, don't-follow-windows-gui is NOT the reason that Linux has such a small marketshare. The real reason is the software. There may be Linux apps for just about everything, but Linux doesn't have many of the professional commercial apps (The Adobe stuff, CAD) or niche technical apps (specialised interface apps to industry tools) Linux doesn't have MS Office (bare with me for a sec before you get to OOo) and above all, Linux doesn't have games (yes, I know about transgaming). All the non-technical people don't want to know all that much about their computers. They just want to be able to use what they use at school or work (MS Office) and what their friends use (games) and not have to get into technical details about how to get this or that to run.
And then there's the tools. KDE at least has Kdevelop, but what exactly does Gnome have? Vim? Eclipse? Glade? Gnome needs a unified set of tools at the very least.
Also, Linux is going to, as a collective, have to compromise with the commercial world if they want commercial apps to have any base there. That means, yes, paying for licenses of commercial apps in sufficient numbers to make it worthwhile for the developers to develop for Linux. While I love my Ubuntu machine, I also realise that there are real people with real jobs at all the software houses and they depend, more often than not, on license payments so that they can live. It's a fact of life obviously, and we should accept it if we want Linux to grow. It's also a rocky road, given all the legal and political issues, but it's the way to go.
I am a native English speaker living and working in Switzerland. Usually, when I search with Google, I set the search options to English and Google will happily then return English results based on page rank. Google also has a local Swiss option for whatever language I search in, i.e. to search in pages form Switzerland only. Bing allows you to search in English but still returns English pages from Germany. I haven't found a way to get it to return pages from Switzerland or international English pages yet.
On top of the some of the search results are just poor. To trip the engine up, I entered "pussy" into the search box (with an English search) and Bing only returned a warning that this might lead to sexual content, obviously not recognising that the word also has non sexual connotations, i.e. cats.
This is just poor, and the article in the NYP is almost certainly a Microsoft influenced one (I won't make direct accusations here), or the author is looking for page hits by making controversial remarks.
You should get modded up. Bad behaviour generally doesn't get rewarded.
We use Mac OSX Server for our infrastructure. It's a royal PITA and I now wish we hadn't done it, but there have been a number of media companies in recent years that have moved to Mac OSX Server because all their clients are OSX.
My view is that Apple is just jealous of Microsoft and said to itself that if Microsoft can drop promised new features in Vista like the DB based file system, then why can't Apple drop ZFS? ;-)
While I take a lot of what Microsoft says with a pinch of salt, this technology, if it works well, would be a massive breakthrough in computing, not only in gaming. For one, it would remove the need for a mouse, and possibly a keyboard and an intelligent UI could understand gestures in productivity apps. It would be very interesting, although Logitech might be pissed.
Man, I know you, don't I? You're the tech junky from the lifeboat. Try to stop calling people idiots, dumbass. ;-)
If it wasn't for Mao, those fantastic technologies wouldn't have reached the major part of the population. Say what you like about socialism/communism/whatever, but a poor country like Cuba has a far smaller percentage people without medical care than the USA and a higher literacy rate as well. And this in spite of their poor record on so-called western freedoms. It is the reason why most of South America has socialist or left-wing governments these days. People who originally believed the big industry driven lobbying in the USA preaching about capitalism, discovered that so-called freedom of speech means fuck-all if you have nothing to eat and no roof over your head and no doctor to see.
Having an open mind means being able to see BOTH sides of the picture, not just yours.
I cannot believe how many comments I've read here on how ethanol works fine in Brazil's sugar cane based ethanol production and in engines designed for it but not in the USA's corn based ethanol production and not in engines not designed for it.
With that kind of mentality, you Americans will still be paying for Arabian oil in 50 years, when there's almost none left. I don't want to appear anti-American but really, that's the same mentality that left you Americans in shit street with your SUVs (and the same, lazy ass defeatist arguments) when the oil prices skyrocketed and the recession hit.
Come on, folks, there are other crops besides corn, and you have huge areas of hot desert that would be fine for some other crops (like sugar cane) with irrigation (and before you moan about the energy needed to pump water, remember that solar and wind power could do it if need be).
If Brazil, with less resources (but obviously more will and less car indutry/corn growers/dumbass lobbying) can do it, so can the US.
You know where the real problem is in the USA? It's all the vested interests, such as the auto industry, corn farmers industry, pharmaceuticals industry, banking industry etc all trying their level best to make sure they don't actually have to adapt to changing circumstances. The not-invented-here syndrome in the US, whereby anything that wasn't an American invention is somehow suspect is not exactly helping you either.
Keep that shit up and in 40 years China will be giving the USA development aid.
The Lenovo rep is discussing the fact that Windows XP now has about 94% marketshare on the Netbook market, up from about 90% a year ago.
Why is this? Is it because people are suspicious of things they don't know (most people don't know what an operating system is, but they've heard of windows)? Or is it because manufacturers are actively supported by Microsoft in putting WinXP in place of Linux and that most manufacturers are under heavy pressure from Microsoft to get Windows on Netbooks?
Or is it because people ask for certain software and then are disappointed when they discover it won't run on Linux?
Or is it the fabled "printer driver" issue?
I seriously doubt the last two points have much to with WinXP on Netbooks (with one exception). People very rarely run any special software on Netwbooks (it's almost always email, browsing, chatting, some typing), and people use external hardware even more rarely on netbooks.
But, the one piece of missing software is Apple's iTunes. I am willing to bet, given the ubiquity of the iPod, that an awful amount of people run iTunes on their Netbooks to listen to music while they browse, mail, chat, type etc.
iTunes doesn't run flawlessly or easily under Linux. (I personally hate iTunes on Windows, but that's just me)
So, in my opinion, it's the software.
The interview guy from Lenovo is just trying to push laptops as the future of netbooks so that Windows 7 won't be a total loss on those systems, (since it's not much, if at all, faster than Vista)
Pay about $29 a month. Rip Off, but that's the way it is.
If PJ is a sponge, what does that make you? And if she was on a gravy train, does that mean you were in a racket?
Really wish I could mod you up. The US isn't alone in this kind of crap. Experts in any field that is slightly complex or has a grey area will lie outright or just guess if in doubt on occasion in order to stay in business.
Good post. I was really getting tired of everyone on here posting crap about how people without jobs are lazy bums who don't want to work and how poor people don't deserve anything. The whole "socialist obama" crap story.
I've been unemployed before and it isn't pleasant having to worry about whether I'll have something to eat tomorrow or not.
Installed Vista today on a new Mac Mini. It had no network or video until I popped in Apple's driver DVD. The chipset was a pretty standard nForce and an Nvidia 9400M non-discrete graphics card.
I've actually been installing Vista all week on a few machine now and the automatic driver search is pretty much hit and miss in my opinion. Sometimes it works but more often it doesn't.
However, I don't blame Microsoft for this. Apple's a bit better but not perfect by a long shot.
I don't know what the relevant stats are to be honest, but I'm pretty sure that some 80% to 90% of software development these days is for web based apps, i.e. backend and browser. People got burnt so often by developing for propietry platforms in the past, and I don't only mean Microsoft by that, that I think that client OS development is truly becoming somewhat irrelevant.
Microsoft knows this and tried so many times to lock people into its own web platform technologies, be that ActiveX, IE, Silverlight, XAML etc. But it never worked. The web is no longer Microsoft's backyard and people are tired of being forced to either cow to Microsoft, Apple or Adobe.
Personally, I'm glad and it's abaout time.
All those points in my original post are not only my own observations. I've had to replace no less than 38 of the 50 Mac Mice we've had in our company. Most of the users simply find them poor and uncomfortable.
As for the 1 battery, my Logitech LX7 works fine on one battery.
I've never had kernal panics in OSX or BSODs in Windows pulling the USB dongel out, but I don't install Logitech's software, ever. If there is one thing about Logitech that it really bad, it is their software. Use the generic Apple and Microsoft Mouse drivers and you'll be fine unless you have a mouse with lots of buttons.
I am Mac sysadmin. I admin about 50 Macs in a design agency. The Apple Mac Mighty Mouse is usually the first thing that the designers throw out (bad form factor, cramps in the hands, poor right click functionality, the scroll ball gums up far too often and is difficult to clean, the cord is far too short etc) and the wireless mouse compounds all of that with terribly poor battery life and bad response times. The only way it'll be useful is if you use rechargeable batteries.
Do yourself a favour: get a Logitech RF wireless, whichever one suites your tastes. They have fantastic battery life (8 months on my Logitech LX7 ) and Logitech almost certainly has one that will fit in your hands. Personally, I love the hard rubber grip on the sides of their mice.
The downside is that you need a USB receiver for them.
In German you can say "Fuck you" (Fick Dich) and even Motherfucker (Mutterficker), and it is a pretty bad insult, but the usual nasty German ones revolve around crap and piss: "Bekacktes Arschloch" - "shit covered arsehole" will makeyou friends all over the place, and "Pisser" (no proper translation) will save you teeth extraction fees at the dentist.
That war was over 100 years ago. That kind of complaining about lost territory is the root cause of much of the world's wars and conflicts. Grow up.
I think it's more likely that Microsoft realised that very many companies currently running XP are simply not going to upgrade any time soon, be it due to financial or technical issues. Including XP in a VM is simply a lifeline for Microsoft to get companies to upgrade and keep XP compatibility.
What is strange is that Microsoft didn't do this before, with Vista, from the get go. They would have saved themselves an awful amount of ridicule in the press. I think the reason is that Microsoft is so full of marketing types arguing with one another over the best way to sell the latest OS to customers that the faction that was arguing about not including a VM for XP compatibility was the best way to get people to upgrade (i.e. by denying that there is anything wrong with Vista) won the last time around, and this time around they're part of the "restructuring effort" after MS sales declined for the first time ever.
Microsoft is truly desperate. They would sell you Mac OSX if they could, and the postive side of this is that Microsoft will actually have to compete in the real world, also for the first time in some 20 years.
I think mysql's popularity can be attributed to php, when I come to think about it. Togther with apache they made the lamp thing work and moved web development for better or for worse to the masses. Mysql has always been good for straightforward simple queries and even scales well there, but Mysql, the company, screwed up when they started messing with the licences, causing the nerds at Zend to remove it from the default compile and install.
These days you can do most of what you used to do with mysql with sqlite on the light end and postgresql on the big end.
I don't have anything against Mysql, and it does what it's meant to do just fine, but it isn't a fully featured db, and attempts to use it for that usually end up with people doing half the query in their code instead of in the db, where queries are meant to be run.