Want to know what's REALLY funny about this announcement? Look at the intended release date - April 2014.
That's right - the same month that XP is being EOL'd, instead of releasing a Linux OS that can replace it and run legacy apps, they're going after a pie-in-the-sky mobile market that will be competing with the iPhone6, iPad4, and Win9Mobile.
Here you have a 30-month window of opportunity, a business community that would do a Bernanke and drop helicopter-loads of money on you if you can even half-way deliver, and nobody is going after it.
Who does Shuttleworth think he's fooling? In 2-1/2 years, there will be a billion smart devices running Android and iOS, and even a few running Win9Mobile. Somebody should buy him a black turtleneck so he can pretend his RDF is working.
Besides, anyone who really wants to run Linux just has to buy a r00table Android device. No need to wait 30 more months for Ubuntu.
Sure, the DEA still exits. But there's nothing to compel the locals to work with them if they can say "Sorry, we don't have the budget." Especially when they DON'T have the budget. "Sorry, we don't have room in our jails for people you arrested. Guess you'll have to 'catch and release'... or take them home with you." "We're out of those forms. No, we, didn't order any more. Budget cuts." "It's your law - YOU enforce it. Our cops are here to keep the peace."
The prison population is made up disproportionately of people of color. That's pretty arbitrary. And btw, more than 95% of the overall population are guilty of *some* crime. It's most likely 100% of all adults. It's impossible to even know what all the laws are, never mind comply with them.
So the application of justice, when 100% of the population is guilty of various crimes, is definitely arbitrary.
They're also html5+javascript, unlike apps in the competing Android and Apple App stores. So stop with the "wrong" already. Microsoft has already gone on record as saying this will be the predominant / favoured method for the MetroUI.
So, Linux certainly has the opportunity to at least heavily compete with Windows mobile.
Competing for last spot? Even if you win, you're still a loser.
Anyone who wants to run linux just roots their phone. There's simply no demand - and especially none for perennial scr*w-up-something-critical-on-every-update Canonical - to be the installed-by-the-OEM OS on any device without it being hidden from the end user in layer after layer of "insulation" and customizations.
And for that, they already have Android and their own custom derivatives, so why bother?
This will die, same as their last forays into mobile devices (netbooks) and retail PCs (Wallyworld $200 Ubuntu PC) died. Or just as pointless as "Ubuntu Cloud" (rebranded Amazon EC2).
Canonical - the company that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.
Canonical will give the smartphone world the power of Linux minus the controls and restrictions imposed by Google
Safe prediction, based entirely on past performance. It. Will. Never. Happen.
Canonical can't even give linux away to "the world" after 7 years of trying. Hint - Apple sold more than 20 million iPhones and 9 million iPads in the second quarter - that's way more than the total Ubuntu userbase world-wide after 7 years.
And Samsung is now cleaning Apple's clock.
Neither of the market leaders is going to worry about Ubuntu - it has a long history of big announcements that go nowhere.
Look around - it's been mentioned elsewhere. One retailer reported 20%... and at that point, not all returns had come back... and it doesn't include people who were upgraded for a fee to XP to resolve their complaints (and if you check around, many users did the upgrade themselves rather than fight with the vendor).
This was happening at the same time as Ubuntu was falsely claiming that return rates were in line with netbooks with XP installed.
As for overall netbook returns, they ARE high. People get disappointed, realize that for $100 or so more they can get a real laptop, and bring it back within the 2 week return period. Or they figure it's not worth the hassle, and "gift" the netbook to someone in the family. It's one reason why the netbook market started its' collapse - prices of laptops dropped by more than half in just a couple of years. Now it continues to collapse because tablets and smartphones are much more capable than a crapbook.
So the end result is the same (plummeting housing prices, people unable to refi on their balloon-priced homes, backlogs of repo'd homes clogging the system so that people can live mortgage-free for several years before they get the foreclosure notice, etc., etc.) except you've added trillions of public debt in a failed attempt to try to artificially prop up over-inflated housing prices.
It would have been better to let Citi and BofA go under. The money spent baling out wall street could have bought up EVERY SINGLE underwater mortgage. Then at least the taxpayers would have some hard assets on the books in exchange, instead of toxic paper.
And of course, there's nothing to say that the perps behind it couldn't have been prosecuted, rather than continue to profit from the mess they created.
Thats where the attack ads come in. You scare the people who would sit at home because they're not pleased with any candidate, into going to the poll to vote for "not the other guy".
That might still work in the US, but not here... post attack ads, and you'll be on the national news the next day apologizing for it (and usually blaming some staffer). We're sick of it, and election results show that people will actually go out and vote for the person attacked, "just 'cuz".
That's why the bible-thumpers *hate* the Jesuits:-)
I have no objection to people believing whatever superstitions they want, provided it doesn't hurt someone else, and that they don't claim that it has any sort of basis in reality (want to really p*ss them off when they try to point to some sort of "evidence"? Ask them why they are even looking for such evidence if it's supposed to be "sola fide" - by faith only - after all, that whole exercise undermines the "by faith alone" principle, and anyone they convince by such "proof" is not "justified by faith alone", so they're really leading them into sin).
Of course, the majority of fundamentalist PASTORS have never read the whole bible, so you may have to educate them.
Yes, I actually had 64k, after a few years of using an upgrade from 4k to 16k. Those were the days - you learned to write in assembler, and to pre-calculate the address of every jmp so that you could load each chunk of code, one after another, into memory and it would "just work"... or "just hang".
I agree, we lost a lot when we no longer had to "think smart" and really understand what's going on under the hood. Case in point - years later, I wrote a program to exercise the disk drives using assembler instead of c, and achieved more than 150% of the throughput on both reads and writes that the specs gave (twin WD Caviar 85meg hds on a 286/20 with 2 megs of ram). C is great, I love it, but it's not the optimal solution for everything.
The most effective voter strategy is to go up to your "natural allies" when they're in power, and tell them that unless they start listening, you're going to work to get their worst enemy elected, and encourage as many around you to do the same, because you're sick and tired of your vote being taken for granted.
I'm not entirely sure how Ubuntu think they'll compete with Android when it's already free*, though.
The same way they "competed" with Vista on the desktop with the Walmart $200 Ubuntu PC. Too many returns.
The same way they "competed" with Windows with those Dell consumer laptops running Ubuntu... 30% return rates suck. Ended up being replaced by the aging XP.
The same way they "compete" with Amazon's cloud service (hint - they don't - they use Amazon's EC2 cloud service).
The same way they "compete" with Apple and Microsoft right now - oh wait - they can't even GIVE it away.
Ubuntu is shuttleworth-speak for "make a big announcement, then nothing much happens, then move on to the next Oh shiny!"
The TV and blu-ray manufacturers already have their own customized distros. Nobody's going to switch from Android to a distro that has a history of breaking something important on every update.
The problem is that local laws can't support the goals of drug legalization. Look at what's happening in California.
Sure they can. Just don't provide police funding for pot busts, funding for prosecuting cases, etc. Enforce the existing federal requirement to pay tax on pot (and add a state tax) - "We're just enforcing federal law wink wink nudge nudge" when the feds complain about how your "tax inspectors" aren't arresting anyone. Stop building prisons, then say "gee, we don't have the resources to house all those potential criminals - plea-bargain any pot cases to a $50 fine or community service or it comes out of YOUR salary".
Saying no to the federal prison money is the hard part. But it's cheaper in the long run than the current war on citizens. (Disclaimer: Never used it, can't even stand the stench of it, but I know some users, and they are NOT criminals despite what some stupid, selectively-enforced laws might say, and if you're not going to ban tobacco, stop being hypocrites!)
You take our fake-direct-democracy way too seriously. It has all the legal status of a suggestion box. Since the site is already plied by spammers and astroturfers, why not a sensible human being that happens to be from Canada?
Seeing as Canada is probably going to be forced to legalize it within the next decade (the Canadian Supreme Court has already ruled that the feds violated the Constitution when they ordered supervised injections sites to close), it's only a matter of time, same as it was for same-sex marriage.
After all, if it's legal in Canada, then NAFTA means that Canadian grow-ops can demand financial compensation from the US for being denied entry to the US market, same as the $$$millions that Ethyl Corp got from the Canadian government over the ban of the gasoline additive MTB because of environmental concerns.
And since the market would be ~$100 billion a year, do the math.
So yes, legalize it, the only people it would hurt are those who profit from it being outlawed
That includes the cops. And if anyone don't believe cops are users, and like being able to score their supply for free, you're incredibly naive. Talk to the 20-somethings in your neighborhood. Talk (off the record) to a cop if you know them personally.
The evolution of the grey wolf to the domestic dog was marked by 4 separate mutation events that created new branches. The grey wolves obviously continued to exist, but the new branches diverged from them with each mutation. The first mutation was between 40k and 130k years ago, the last (according to mitochondrial dna) was ~15k years ago, and gave rise to the animals that became our domesticated dogs. The intervening mutations (the "missing links") have since disappeared, having been out-competed over the long term, but their existence still show up in the dna record.
There were certainly other mutations, same as in every species, that were not competitive even in the short run. The thing is, sometimes a mutation, such as the last one, coincides with a change in the environment, such as humans transitioning from hunter-gatherer to farmer-herder, so a mutation that allowed dogs to be less timid of humans than wolves are (if you've ever owned a wolf-dog cross you'd know what I mean), given the benefits of living with humans that are herders, would rapidly propagate.
Wolves, coyotes, and dogs are very distinct. We had a coydog when I was a kid, and one of my current dogs is part wolf, and their behaviours are markedly different from "regular dogs".
1. Create web site for fictitious for-profit college
2. Print up your "degree"
3. PROFIT!
And before everyone goes "you can be fired for lying"... in most places, you can be fired for any reason, or no reason at all, so what's the big diff? Places are now asking for a degree for washing dishes. Why? Because they can.
After a few years practical experience, your experience counts for more than a piece of paper anyway.
Defaulting on student loans will make you ineligible for government employment
So the solution to someone not being able to pay back a loan guaranteed by the government is to block them from a job that might help them pay back the loan? That's just messed up!
After the first event, the "wolf" was no longer a wolf. You might want to think about that for a bit, because YOU don't understand the phrase "clade mutation event" and what it implies. A clade is a branch. A clade mutation event means the branch mutated.
Slashdot Mirror
Want to know what's REALLY funny about this announcement? Look at the intended release date - April 2014.
That's right - the same month that XP is being EOL'd, instead of releasing a Linux OS that can replace it and run legacy apps, they're going after a pie-in-the-sky mobile market that will be competing with the iPhone6, iPad4, and Win9Mobile.
Here you have a 30-month window of opportunity, a business community that would do a Bernanke and drop helicopter-loads of money on you if you can even half-way deliver, and nobody is going after it.
Who does Shuttleworth think he's fooling? In 2-1/2 years, there will be a billion smart devices running Android and iOS, and even a few running Win9Mobile. Somebody should buy him a black turtleneck so he can pretend his RDF is working.
Besides, anyone who really wants to run Linux just has to buy a r00table Android device. No need to wait 30 more months for Ubuntu.
Sure, the DEA still exits. But there's nothing to compel the locals to work with them if they can say "Sorry, we don't have the budget." Especially when they DON'T have the budget. "Sorry, we don't have room in our jails for people you arrested. Guess you'll have to 'catch and release' ... or take them home with you." "We're out of those forms. No, we, didn't order any more. Budget cuts." "It's your law - YOU enforce it. Our cops are here to keep the peace."
So the application of justice, when 100% of the population is guilty of various crimes, is definitely arbitrary.
Even the chart you point to makes that point.
Competing for last spot? Even if you win, you're still a loser.
Anyone who wants to run linux just roots their phone. There's simply no demand - and especially none for perennial scr*w-up-something-critical-on-every-update Canonical - to be the installed-by-the-OEM OS on any device without it being hidden from the end user in layer after layer of "insulation" and customizations.
And for that, they already have Android and their own custom derivatives, so why bother?
This will die, same as their last forays into mobile devices (netbooks) and retail PCs (Wallyworld $200 Ubuntu PC) died. Or just as pointless as "Ubuntu Cloud" (rebranded Amazon EC2).
Canonical - the company that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.
Safe prediction, based entirely on past performance. It. Will. Never. Happen.
Canonical can't even give linux away to "the world" after 7 years of trying. Hint - Apple sold more than 20 million iPhones and 9 million iPads in the second quarter - that's way more than the total Ubuntu userbase world-wide after 7 years.
And Samsung is now cleaning Apple's clock.
Neither of the market leaders is going to worry about Ubuntu - it has a long history of big announcements that go nowhere.
Windows8 will run on ARM. Windows Metro Apps are html5+javascript, which is CPU-agnostic.
Please go easy on them - they obviously typed that using Unity.
Look around - it's been mentioned elsewhere. One retailer reported 20% ... and at that point, not all returns had come back ... and it doesn't include people who were upgraded for a fee to XP to resolve their complaints (and if you check around, many users did the upgrade themselves rather than fight with the vendor).
This was happening at the same time as Ubuntu was falsely claiming that return rates were in line with netbooks with XP installed.
As for overall netbook returns, they ARE high. People get disappointed, realize that for $100 or so more they can get a real laptop, and bring it back within the 2 week return period. Or they figure it's not worth the hassle, and "gift" the netbook to someone in the family. It's one reason why the netbook market started its' collapse - prices of laptops dropped by more than half in just a couple of years. Now it continues to collapse because tablets and smartphones are much more capable than a crapbook.
Come on, Hitler wasn't ALL bad. After all, he DID kill Hitler. [/sick joke]
Seriously, if he hadn't committed suicide, the Nuremberg trials could have been a lot messier.
So the end result is the same (plummeting housing prices, people unable to refi on their balloon-priced homes, backlogs of repo'd homes clogging the system so that people can live mortgage-free for several years before they get the foreclosure notice, etc., etc.) except you've added trillions of public debt in a failed attempt to try to artificially prop up over-inflated housing prices.
It would have been better to let Citi and BofA go under. The money spent baling out wall street could have bought up EVERY SINGLE underwater mortgage. Then at least the taxpayers would have some hard assets on the books in exchange, instead of toxic paper.
And of course, there's nothing to say that the perps behind it couldn't have been prosecuted, rather than continue to profit from the mess they created.
That might still work in the US, but not here ... post attack ads, and you'll be on the national news the next day apologizing for it (and usually blaming some staffer). We're sick of it, and election results show that people will actually go out and vote for the person attacked, "just 'cuz".
That's why the bible-thumpers *hate* the Jesuits :-)
I have no objection to people believing whatever superstitions they want, provided it doesn't hurt someone else, and that they don't claim that it has any sort of basis in reality (want to really p*ss them off when they try to point to some sort of "evidence"? Ask them why they are even looking for such evidence if it's supposed to be "sola fide" - by faith only - after all, that whole exercise undermines the "by faith alone" principle, and anyone they convince by such "proof" is not "justified by faith alone", so they're really leading them into sin).
Of course, the majority of fundamentalist PASTORS have never read the whole bible, so you may have to educate them.
Yes, I actually had 64k, after a few years of using an upgrade from 4k to 16k. Those were the days - you learned to write in assembler, and to pre-calculate the address of every jmp so that you could load each chunk of code, one after another, into memory and it would "just work" ... or "just hang".
I agree, we lost a lot when we no longer had to "think smart" and really understand what's going on under the hood. Case in point - years later, I wrote a program to exercise the disk drives using assembler instead of c, and achieved more than 150% of the throughput on both reads and writes that the specs gave (twin WD Caviar 85meg hds on a 286/20 with 2 megs of ram). C is great, I love it, but it's not the optimal solution for everything.
The most effective voter strategy is to go up to your "natural allies" when they're in power, and tell them that unless they start listening, you're going to work to get their worst enemy elected, and encourage as many around you to do the same, because you're sick and tired of your vote being taken for granted.
Then do it.
One election cycle is all it takes.
The same way they "competed" with Vista on the desktop with the Walmart $200 Ubuntu PC. Too many returns. ... 30% return rates suck. Ended up being replaced by the aging XP.
The same way they "competed" with Windows with those Dell consumer laptops running Ubuntu
The same way they "compete" with Amazon's cloud service (hint - they don't - they use Amazon's EC2 cloud service).
The same way they "compete" with Apple and Microsoft right now - oh wait - they can't even GIVE it away.
Ubuntu is shuttleworth-speak for "make a big announcement, then nothing much happens, then move on to the next Oh shiny!"
The TV and blu-ray manufacturers already have their own customized distros. Nobody's going to switch from Android to a distro that has a history of breaking something important on every update.
Sure they can. Just don't provide police funding for pot busts, funding for prosecuting cases, etc. Enforce the existing federal requirement to pay tax on pot (and add a state tax) - "We're just enforcing federal law wink wink nudge nudge" when the feds complain about how your "tax inspectors" aren't arresting anyone. Stop building prisons, then say "gee, we don't have the resources to house all those potential criminals - plea-bargain any pot cases to a $50 fine or community service or it comes out of YOUR salary".
Saying no to the federal prison money is the hard part. But it's cheaper in the long run than the current war on citizens. (Disclaimer: Never used it, can't even stand the stench of it, but I know some users, and they are NOT criminals despite what some stupid, selectively-enforced laws might say, and if you're not going to ban tobacco, stop being hypocrites!)
Seeing as Canada is probably going to be forced to legalize it within the next decade (the Canadian Supreme Court has already ruled that the feds violated the Constitution when they ordered supervised injections sites to close), it's only a matter of time, same as it was for same-sex marriage.
After all, if it's legal in Canada, then NAFTA means that Canadian grow-ops can demand financial compensation from the US for being denied entry to the US market, same as the $$$millions that Ethyl Corp got from the Canadian government over the ban of the gasoline additive MTB because of environmental concerns.
And since the market would be ~$100 billion a year, do the math.
Bank bailouts, nobody charged, never mind convicted, in the biggest financial swindle in history, but instead rewarded.
Do you believe that most of the 99% *wanted* that? Given a choice, the majority would rather back OWS.
That includes the cops. And if anyone don't believe cops are users, and like being able to score their supply for free, you're incredibly naive. Talk to the 20-somethings in your neighborhood. Talk (off the record) to a cop if you know them personally.
That's looking more and more likely every day. You can't win if you can't get out the vote.
There were certainly other mutations, same as in every species, that were not competitive even in the short run. The thing is, sometimes a mutation, such as the last one, coincides with a change in the environment, such as humans transitioning from hunter-gatherer to farmer-herder, so a mutation that allowed dogs to be less timid of humans than wolves are (if you've ever owned a wolf-dog cross you'd know what I mean), given the benefits of living with humans that are herders, would rapidly propagate.
Wolves, coyotes, and dogs are very distinct. We had a coydog when I was a kid, and one of my current dogs is part wolf, and their behaviours are markedly different from "regular dogs".
1. Create web site for fictitious for-profit college
2. Print up your "degree"
3. PROFIT!
And before everyone goes "you can be fired for lying" ... in most places, you can be fired for any reason, or no reason at all, so what's the big diff? Places are now asking for a degree for washing dishes. Why? Because they can.
After a few years practical experience, your experience counts for more than a piece of paper anyway.
So the solution to someone not being able to pay back a loan guaranteed by the government is to block them from a job that might help them pay back the loan? That's just messed up!
HTH