Please read the original summary (because we all know that you haven't really read it properly) - you don't have to provide 100% proof it impossible - just convincing the person offering the money that it is probably not practical for most real-world situations, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
Hence my whole "just point a gun at him and ask if he's convinced" argument - it works on 2 levels:
1. At the quantum level, both he and the gunholder could be considered in a quantum state - any outside observer cannot state definitively whether he is dead or alive until he either pays the $100,000, or gets shot.
2. The whole "there are no atheists in foxholes" argument.
Also, it is definitely possible to prove a negative. I can prove that there are no lions in my refrigerator, no elephants hiding behind my couch, and no dead zombie typing this comment, to most people's satisfaction, for starters.
IT is evolving rapidly, making experience worth less than in more traditional fields.
Should have been "IT is evolving rapidly, making experience worth more than in more traditional fields."
In traditional fields, a lot of the problems have generally accepted answers. In IT, because it is evolving so fast, the new entries make the same mistakes that the old ones did. You need to be involved in at least 3 huge failures to really know your stuff, because a lot of it isn't technical - it's office politics, general stupidity, nepotism, rampant sexism, etc...
Think of it - the last time I looked up the numbers, projects only failed for technical reasons 7% of the time. It was mostly people problems, bad communications, mis-management, same as any other field.
Those who have been in the field for a few decades have the perspective, and the experience, to deal with at least some of this, and to pass that knowledge on to the next generation (because if you've been in the field for a couple of decades, you don't worry about the stupid p***ing contests that people get into) - but that's not happening because of two things:
1. "crap" is "good 'nuff"
2. clueless individuals, from HR to management, all focused on keeping employee expenses down to justify their wages.
Did you see the lame replacement for CEO at RIM? As inspiring as 2-week-old lettuce. This is not a leader - not when you know the world, your employees, and your partners are watching. Even Monkeyboy knows that you've got to look like you have enough of a pulse to fog a mirror.
As for barring jurors from using facebook and twitter, jurors should be barred from EVER discussing deliberations (like they are in Kanuckistan) or having the media reveal their identity. A jury isn't really independent if they can either be compelled to give the reasons for their decision, or motivated to do so by money or because they are afraid of what the neighbors might think.
None of the games I have runs properly under Wine - what you see on Steam are the A list. It's one of those YMMV things...
Admittedly, there's less of an opportunity now than in the past, but I wasn't really targeting games with my comment - there's plenty of commercial software - including tons of custom in-house stuff that will need to be fixed when xp goes bye-bye - that could provide grist for the revenue mill. Just no distro is attacking it. If it's good enough for IBM to milk, it should be good enough for some distro somewhere... especially since at least some of the techniques and skills gained could be used over and over.
The real question is, what is any distro offering that nobody else is offering? RedHat is offering a complete set of services and support that nobody else can match, so they're going to have to find their vocation elsewhere? Cloud? Don't block ads and you'll see so many different cloud services offering free trials, free service tiers, free or cheap come-ons, all sorts of other stuff. So that's out. Music stores? Nickel and dime at best (especially since they couldn't make their own - they had to buy their service from a 3rd party). Trying to intermediate themselves into becoming a content broker via UbuntuTV? Completely broken because they lack Android support, have no manufacturers who are in the least interested, and no tie-ins with smart phones or tablets to leverage off.
This is a problem all distros are facing - how do you stay relevant? How do you grow? How do you find a niche and exploit the heck out of it quick enough to become the dominant player before everyone and their cousin sets up shop on the same street corner? You can't do it by selling the same thing as everyone else.
Or maybe what we're seeing is that RedHat is the natural monopoly, and everyone else is there for the crumbs. I don't know, and I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, but I do know that you don't abandon loyal users to the wolves while you chase other markets, and that the constant vapor-ware announcements just wear people down.
Did they do the right thing with Banshee? It made them look cheap and desperate. Perception counts. It makes people wonder if they're really generating any profits from support or manufacturers or anything else.
It's a really complicated question as to what, if anything, any distro can do that won't immediately attract dozens of imitators like, well, like flies on turds. We see that every day, even with ideas that can't possibly work - people see it, figure "I'll do it to, after all, if they're doing it, it must be profitable", and the next thing you know, you have 500 different websites all offering the same thing, the media sees it, thinks "gee, this must be the next big thing, there are so many people in that space now", they hype the crap out of it, and a year later, it's "what ever happened to..."
Maybe the originator could have made a go of it - but 500 all at once, nobody survives. But then you also have dumb ideas like color.com spending $350k for a domain name that doesn't tell you what they do, and $41 million seems to be a lot to make an app that basically lets stalkers track you in real time.
Same thing with linux - a great idea (and certainly provides a LOT more value than 100 color.coms ever will), but how is the average distro going to make any $$$ when anyone can just fork and make their own?
Two of your assumptions are way off base in todays world.
1. "Not everybody has a computer" - while still somewhat true, it's becoming pretty much a non-issue, when countries like India are putting linux-based tablets into every students hands by subsidizing them so that they only cost $30. (No, not XO-based devices - the XO is overpriced in comparison).
1.a - if you don't have access to a computer outside of school hours, you won't be able to do the rapid code/test/modify loop that is most conductive to learning anyway. The days of painstakingly figuring out what you want to do with flow-charts, writing it all down on 3x5 index cards, going through your card deck to make sure you had no bugs, then committing it to punch tape so you can run it and take the ensuing green-bar print-out to the cafeteria and pore over it to find your errors are long gone.
2. People learn by example, so cut-n-paste solutions definitely have their place. You can take a page to describe the difference between a function declaration and a function definition, and still leave someone scratching their head, or just SHOW them by example.
int foo(int a);// declaration - does nothing except declare that somewhere, we will sit down and define a function called foo();
int foo(int a) {// definition - it defines what foo actually does.
return a*42;
}
3. As for future "real-world" practicality, whatever you teach them today is probably going to be obsolete in 20 years anyway, unless you're teaching them c/c++ (which you don't want to do as a first language if they're kids).
Computer courses don't fix these basic problems in reading, writing, and arithmetic. No wonder that in one study 26% of all accountants who graduated failed the simple task of writing a 2-page memo... and why it's become an increasingly ingrained problem over the years.
One thing any long-time follower of Shuttleworth et al has learned is to take anything they say and not believe it until it ships. Shuttleworth is the linux worlds #1 vapro-ware producer.
We were promised shipping Ubuntu tablets and smartphones over a year ago. They never delivered. We were promised "Ubuntu TV" this time, to be shipped by the end of the year (without android) - already obsoleted by Lenovo's Ice Cream Sandwich Android TV. And unlike Canonical, Lenovo isn't looking around for an OEM to ship... they *are* the OEM.
They can promise all they want, plan all they want, discuss all they want - history says they can't ship (except for miserable failures like the Ubuntu Wallyworld PC), so what's your point? Shuttleworth has "cried wolf" too many times.
All your ideas are great, spot-on, 100% insightful - which is why they'll never happen:-(
As for the "getting some revenue streams", look at the damage that was done to their reputation with replacing the Amazon id in Banshee with their own. Was it really worth it?
Please keep in mind that the majority of that revenue is NOT from Canonical - several other major distros don't replace the Banshee projects' id with their own, unlike Canonical. opensuse, for example, is 100% to Banshee/Gnome. Mint gives 50% - and Canonical, since their take-it-or-leave-it offer was rejected, has since disabled it completely.
Something can generate revenue and still not, in the bigger scheme of things, be worth doing. Hummers were a good example - at one point they made money, then not so much, then they became a drain on resources, attention, and cash.
Canonical doesn't have the development resources to be a serious innovator, having decided to concentrate on marketing and "blingy" stuff instead.
What would I do differently? Get Android working properly. Hire real software developers, with cross-platform experience, and open up a porting lab. Then approach companies, the same as Loki did, and offer a percentage deal for doing ports from Windows to both the linux and mac platforms (a 2'fer). Not just consumer-facing software either. Grow the market instead of looking for change behind the cushions.
And if they want to do that, we have this wonderful thing called the Internet. Everything you need to know, including oodles of cut-n-paste sample code.
Teaching kids to "program" is as useless as teaching kids to "use a computer". Those who want to will figure it out by themselves and decide if they want to take it further, or will do so as needed. Those who don't, won't, and you're just burning them (same as trying to get someone to switch from windows to linux - the first upgrade that craps out their box, or the first time they can't run a needed program, all your "but it's better" doesn't count for a hill of beans).
Want to bet that they won't try to do that too? We're not talking usability geniuses here. We're talking people who go out of their way to be different for the sake of being different, who have a history of mis-steps and outright lies (oh, right, it's not a lie, it's just vapourware marketspeak like Microsoft), and who change their plans as often as RMS changes his underwear.
If they don't remove the menus, then there is no point, is there? Maybe they should actually try to do something, you know, useful? Like fix all the regressions that every upgrade brings?
It's stupid because anyone who wants to learn is going to be able to learn at their own pace, outside of school. The tools are there, freely available. Teaching programming to kids will be seen as being as redundant as all those quaint "teaching computers" programs decade ago ended up being.
1. To the extent that it's application-specific, it's less discoverable by users than menus are. -1 point.
2. It has the disadvantage that users can't learn the keyboard shortcuts just by browsing the menus. - 1 point.
3. It also doesn't let users quickly figure out what exactly the main features of a program are. - 1 point.
In other words, it makes things harder for the beginning user, while adding nothing for anyone who wants to get beyond n00b status.
The stated goal is also absurd - "to help users move from Windows?" How - by making things harder for them to get any work done?
He should be more concerned with stemming the flow of users away from Ubuntu. Windows users are not going to switch because of this or any other UI "feature" - they will switch because of applications, and there, Ubuntu doesn't offer anything special.
As for why Shuttleworth hasn't left Canonical, it's his business. Leaving your business pretty much means either finding someone else to buy you out (the initial goal of any venture capitalist, but not gonna happen), finding someone to run it for you (he doesn't know anyone who can make a go of it, or he would have done this already), or shutting it down.
Right now, it's a combination of the sunk costs fallacy, the whole "this time is different - this time we have a winner!" (or what I call the "hope springs eternal fallacy"), and his ego.
Canonical is not going anywhere interesting. If he had more brains than ego, he'd hire his 10 biggest critics to tear into everything and see if there's anything worth salvaging. Then again, we just saw that the boys at RIM also suffer from the "more money than brains" syndrome - RIM is similarly doomed.
First thing to go would be all the stupid UI tweaking. Let the various UI projects to their thing. Next would be scrapping all the silly me-too projects that are not competitive (Ubuntu 1, Cloud, Music Store, TV, whatever - not even bothering to review them. Just kill them off as distractions). Third would be to kill off LTS - even 5 years is not "long term". REAL long-term is a minimum of 10 years.
Fourth - hire some real software people and get android to run out of the box. Make that the ONLY goal for now. Not a hack, but a full out-of-the-box, no hassles, no special tools required, batteries included experience.
It's the only way to even hope to differentiate. Everything else is just candy floss.
It's called throwing good money after bad. His (well-known large ego) won't let him admit that the goofed, repeatedly.
It's the same reason that he keeps focusing on marketing props instead of adding real value, and why Canonical doesn't really even have much in the way of software expertise (they couldn't get Android to run properly in 3 years, while a small company does it in a couple of months?
It also explains why they concentrate on the UI - its the easiest thing to change. Same as Ubuntu TV was just taking someone else's code and slapping it on a rooted Samsung TV because more than a year after promising to ship tablets, they have NOTHING!. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Rien.
Same as Ubuntu Cloud was just re-selling Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Music Store was just re-selling someone else's music store, and... oh, what the heck, you get the picture. Remember when he appointed Matt Asay as COO, big showy announcement, and Asay making a fool of himself by saying how he's actually now using linux for the first time, and he's soooo excited (you appoint someone with no real knowledge of your product to help sell your product???)... and how Asay didn't even last the year, walked away with his tail between his legs, oh so quietly?
Same with the Android Execution Environment - announced with lots of hype, a ship date, then quietly abandoned. This last is now a crucial mistake, since nobody wants a linux tablet w/o android, and Lenovo is shipping Android TVs.
Ubuntu is like the Costa Concordia, and Shuttleworth is its' captain.
Replacing the 30 year old GUI with the 40 year old CLI*.
(*plus autocomplete, yay)
Alt+F2 already does auto-complete. In LXDE, it even gives you a nice dropdown after the first few letters, so if you're not sure and want to browse things that are "like" a command, you can.
Remember - Canonical was one of Shuttleworths' venture capital schemes. He thought that he could launch a new linux distro, market the heck out of it, and get his 30x payday.
Too bad that none of his hoped-for buyers are interested. The nails in the coffin were (in reverse order) Canonical abandoning its attempt to create an Android Execution Environment, Amazon coming out with their own line of tablets, and Canonical alienating its user base by chasing tablets (while still not having Android support), and other companies shipping working Android tablets for well under $100. The final last nail in the coffin was Lenovo coming out with Android TVs (running the latest ICS) the same week Canonical announces UbuntuTV.
What's the point? This is just another attempt to generate hype, without anything really newsworthy. More UI fiddling, when the real problem is that, without out-of-the-box Android support, Unity is worthless to both tablet and tv manufacturers.
That ship has sailed. And like the captain of the Costa Concordia, it looks like Shuttleworth has no clue where he's going.
You missed the point - programmers are a commodity.
Exposing children to programming at school gives them a chance to specialise in a subject other than CS, and still have a chance at employment as a programmer in the future....
Looking back, I'm glad my kids didn't bother. The working conditions are mostly crap, the job satisfaction is among the lowest of any industry, sexual harassment is the #1 factor for women dropping out (68%), and you're going to be hit by the 3 Os - Outsourced, Off-shored or Obsolete - well before you're ready to retire.
Staying current doesn't help - perception is what counts, which is why you see people worried that they may never find another job at 35 because they're seen as "too old."
The simulations I did 25 years ago predicted Quebec's economy would under-perform due to the anglo exodus, and peek in 2011 before going into permanent decline. I was off by one year - the peak was actually 2010. This prediction was confirmed by HydroQuebec in a leaked study in the early 90s that was quickly pulled, for obvious reasons. If you knew where to look, 2 years ago you could find another study that predicted the future economic decline as being inevitable as well. Again, pulled for obvious reasons.
Quebec is sick. Traditionally the most corrupt of Canadian provinces, by most accounts it has only gotten worse over the last 30 years. Do you like defending corruption?
Quebec politicians no longer have a presence on the national scene. Quebec's days of setting the agenda are over - permanently. Both the demographics and the economics are against Quebec. This is what happens when you spend 50 years chasing out both investment and people.
I've come to the conclusion (as have many observers) that the situation is way past the tipping point - that there is nothing that can be done to salvage the economic mess that Quebec has put itself in. I was seriously considering another run for office later this year, but the numbers say that Quebec will default by 2030 no matter what is done, so why bother? Instead, I'll leave.
That's one thing that people need to realize - sometimes you kick the can too far down the road, and you can't recover.
The next referendum, I will encourage everyone who has left the province to take advantage of a loophole in Quebec's referendum laws to register to vote, and force Quebec out. A million extra votes might make the difference this time.
As someone who's been here a LOT longer than you, your "extremely grateful to the Quebec voters during the last election" is offensive, ill-informed, and smacks of thanking someone for helping keep the place warm by setting fire to the furniture after they smashed all the windows.
You seem to have overlooked that if it weren't for the jerks in Quebec always threatening separation if they didn't get more and more preferential treatment, the Conservatives wouldn't be so right-leaning.
Don't like Harper and his policies? Blame Quebec - they created him.
You might want to do some research into western separation, which started as a reaction to Quebec "special treatment" sucking off the west economically. Remember, it's only Quebec that damaged its own economy and turned itself into a "have-not" province, due to 50 years of racist language policies.
The western separatist movement spawned the Reform Party, which basically ate the Conservative Party after the most suck-up-to-Quebec federal Conservative government of all history - Brian Mulroney.
It's no coincidence that another former federal Conservative Party member and Mulroney protege is now leading the most corrupt provincial government in at least a generation - Jean Charest - in Quebec (as head of the provincial liberal party, of all things).
in 1968, referring to widespread government corruption, historian Samuel Huntington singled out the province as âoeperhaps the most corrupt area [in] Australia, Great Britain, United States and Canada.â
It got worse.
If the choice is between Harper and any politician who sucks up to a Quebec that has corruption in its blood, I'll either spoil my ballot or sit at home.
I never said I voted for him - just that he's the first politician to remove the whole "suck up to the separatists" crap from things like the last warship bidding program - remember? The one that Quebec didn't get any contracts from, and that This Hour Has 22 Minutes ran a spoof newspaper headline:
F _ _ _
QUEBEC!
Quebec has only harmed itself - until the '60s, it's economy grew at the same rate as neighboring Ontario. Then came a series of language laws that chased away not only business, but ultimately almost a million people. Ethnocentrism based on language and heritage is still racism.
Continuing to cozy up to it for votes would ultimately destroy the RoC (Rest of Canada for everyone following along). Any party that now tries to suck up to Quebec will never get back in power. Ever. The myth that you need to win Quebec to be elected is dead.
Speaking of things that are dying, so is the basis for separation - the french language in Quebec, and it's due to the Internet and time. Parizeau thought he was funny about how "victory was inevitable as the older federalists die off", but the joke's on him. The current generation doesn't care.
Quebec no longer has a "distinct culture." The Internet already blew that away. Not that it was all that distinct beforehand. Back when the PQ first proposed regulating television to french-only broadcasts, they quickly shelved that because too many french-quebecers were huge fans of The Price is Right and Another World. Today it would be American Idol.
Quebec cannot join the US - the US doesn't want it. Quebec is financially finished. Where else in the world do you have someone earning $20,000 a year paying over $5,000 in taxes?
And this despite getting $100 a month for each person from the feds in "equalization payments" for self-inflicted harm done by chasing away jobs for more than 40 years.
1% of the population lost their jobs in the last 6 months of last year - and half of that job loss was in one month - December - the only place in Canada where that happened (everywhere else either stayed the same or increased employment).
The provincial budget has a huge hole blown in it and no way to fix it. Not when you already have the highest tax rates in the world, the 4th-lowest income of all the states and provinces (ahead only of Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia), and a debt to gdp over twice as high as any state. Why would the U.S. want to be stuck with that?
Slashdot Mirror
Hence my whole "just point a gun at him and ask if he's convinced" argument - it works on 2 levels:
1. At the quantum level, both he and the gunholder could be considered in a quantum state - any outside observer cannot state definitively whether he is dead or alive until he either pays the $100,000, or gets shot.
2. The whole "there are no atheists in foxholes" argument.
Also, it is definitely possible to prove a negative. I can prove that there are no lions in my refrigerator, no elephants hiding behind my couch, and no dead zombie typing this comment, to most people's satisfaction, for starters.
Should have been "IT is evolving rapidly, making experience worth more than in more traditional fields."
In traditional fields, a lot of the problems have generally accepted answers. In IT, because it is evolving so fast, the new entries make the same mistakes that the old ones did. You need to be involved in at least 3 huge failures to really know your stuff, because a lot of it isn't technical - it's office politics, general stupidity, nepotism, rampant sexism, etc ...
Think of it - the last time I looked up the numbers, projects only failed for technical reasons 7% of the time. It was mostly people problems, bad communications, mis-management, same as any other field.
Those who have been in the field for a few decades have the perspective, and the experience, to deal with at least some of this, and to pass that knowledge on to the next generation (because if you've been in the field for a couple of decades, you don't worry about the stupid p***ing contests that people get into) - but that's not happening because of two things:
1. "crap" is "good 'nuff"
2. clueless individuals, from HR to management, all focused on keeping employee expenses down to justify their wages.
Just point a gun at his head and ask him "Convinced?"
Did you see the lame replacement for CEO at RIM? As inspiring as 2-week-old lettuce. This is not a leader - not when you know the world, your employees, and your partners are watching. Even Monkeyboy knows that you've got to look like you have enough of a pulse to fog a mirror.
This is HP we're talking about. The US version of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot RIM.
From devs? None - HP is open-sourcing it because it's DEAD.
From everyone else? We need a good laugh (or cry) now and then ...
If HP could make a nickel out of it, or find a buyer for it, they would.
All so-called "social media" is at its core anti-social.
As for barring jurors from using facebook and twitter, jurors should be barred from EVER discussing deliberations (like they are in Kanuckistan) or having the media reveal their identity. A jury isn't really independent if they can either be compelled to give the reasons for their decision, or motivated to do so by money or because they are afraid of what the neighbors might think.
Besides ... who are these #1, 2 and 3 you speak of? ;-p
None of the games I have runs properly under Wine - what you see on Steam are the A list. It's one of those YMMV things ...
Admittedly, there's less of an opportunity now than in the past, but I wasn't really targeting games with my comment - there's plenty of commercial software - including tons of custom in-house stuff that will need to be fixed when xp goes bye-bye - that could provide grist for the revenue mill. Just no distro is attacking it. If it's good enough for IBM to milk, it should be good enough for some distro somewhere ... especially since at least some of the techniques and skills gained could be used over and over.
The real question is, what is any distro offering that nobody else is offering? RedHat is offering a complete set of services and support that nobody else can match, so they're going to have to find their vocation elsewhere? Cloud? Don't block ads and you'll see so many different cloud services offering free trials, free service tiers, free or cheap come-ons, all sorts of other stuff. So that's out. Music stores? Nickel and dime at best (especially since they couldn't make their own - they had to buy their service from a 3rd party). Trying to intermediate themselves into becoming a content broker via UbuntuTV? Completely broken because they lack Android support, have no manufacturers who are in the least interested, and no tie-ins with smart phones or tablets to leverage off.
This is a problem all distros are facing - how do you stay relevant? How do you grow? How do you find a niche and exploit the heck out of it quick enough to become the dominant player before everyone and their cousin sets up shop on the same street corner? You can't do it by selling the same thing as everyone else.
Or maybe what we're seeing is that RedHat is the natural monopoly, and everyone else is there for the crumbs. I don't know, and I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, but I do know that you don't abandon loyal users to the wolves while you chase other markets, and that the constant vapor-ware announcements just wear people down.
Did they do the right thing with Banshee? It made them look cheap and desperate. Perception counts. It makes people wonder if they're really generating any profits from support or manufacturers or anything else.
It's a really complicated question as to what, if anything, any distro can do that won't immediately attract dozens of imitators like, well, like flies on turds. We see that every day, even with ideas that can't possibly work - people see it, figure "I'll do it to, after all, if they're doing it, it must be profitable", and the next thing you know, you have 500 different websites all offering the same thing, the media sees it, thinks "gee, this must be the next big thing, there are so many people in that space now", they hype the crap out of it, and a year later, it's "what ever happened to ..."
Maybe the originator could have made a go of it - but 500 all at once, nobody survives. But then you also have dumb ideas like color.com spending $350k for a domain name that doesn't tell you what they do, and $41 million seems to be a lot to make an app that basically lets stalkers track you in real time.
Same thing with linux - a great idea (and certainly provides a LOT more value than 100 color.coms ever will), but how is the average distro going to make any $$$ when anyone can just fork and make their own?
1. "Not everybody has a computer" - while still somewhat true, it's becoming pretty much a non-issue, when countries like India are putting linux-based tablets into every students hands by subsidizing them so that they only cost $30. (No, not XO-based devices - the XO is overpriced in comparison).
1.a - if you don't have access to a computer outside of school hours, you won't be able to do the rapid code/test/modify loop that is most conductive to learning anyway. The days of painstakingly figuring out what you want to do with flow-charts, writing it all down on 3x5 index cards, going through your card deck to make sure you had no bugs, then committing it to punch tape so you can run it and take the ensuing green-bar print-out to the cafeteria and pore over it to find your errors are long gone.
2. People learn by example, so cut-n-paste solutions definitely have their place. You can take a page to describe the difference between a function declaration and a function definition, and still leave someone scratching their head, or just SHOW them by example.
int foo(int a); // declaration - does nothing except declare that somewhere, we will sit down and define a function called foo();
int foo(int a) { // definition - it defines what foo actually does.
return a*42;
}
3. As for future "real-world" practicality, whatever you teach them today is probably going to be obsolete in 20 years anyway, unless you're teaching them c/c++ (which you don't want to do as a first language if they're kids).
Let them get the basics of reading, writing, math, biology, chemistry, and physics first. The schools are already failing at this, as evidenced by how half of all universities having to give remedial english and math courses. Lest you thing the US is better, 2/3 of students entering college are not ready for it, and only 1/3 actually take remedial classes to help fix the problem and only 3.4% of those tested were suited for taking college-level courses without a remedial course first, of which a large percentage rejected help (which helps explain the drop-out rate)..
Computer courses don't fix these basic problems in reading, writing, and arithmetic. No wonder that in one study 26% of all accountants who graduated failed the simple task of writing a 2-page memo ... and why it's become an increasingly ingrained problem over the years.
One thing any long-time follower of Shuttleworth et al has learned is to take anything they say and not believe it until it ships. Shuttleworth is the linux worlds #1 vapro-ware producer.
Those same blogs talked so much about the Android Execution Environment, but it was abandoned. Why? Because they don't have access to programmers with the ability to do it, despite putting a year into it (unlike these guys who did it from scratch, along with designing and building the tablet it runs on, in just a few months).
We were promised shipping Ubuntu tablets and smartphones over a year ago. They never delivered. We were promised "Ubuntu TV" this time, to be shipped by the end of the year (without android) - already obsoleted by Lenovo's Ice Cream Sandwich Android TV. And unlike Canonical, Lenovo isn't looking around for an OEM to ship ... they *are* the OEM.
They can promise all they want, plan all they want, discuss all they want - history says they can't ship (except for miserable failures like the Ubuntu Wallyworld PC), so what's your point? Shuttleworth has "cried wolf" too many times.
All your ideas are great, spot-on, 100% insightful - which is why they'll never happen :-(
As for the "getting some revenue streams", look at the damage that was done to their reputation with replacing the Amazon id in Banshee with their own. Was it really worth it?
Please keep in mind that the majority of that revenue is NOT from Canonical - several other major distros don't replace the Banshee projects' id with their own, unlike Canonical. opensuse, for example, is 100% to Banshee/Gnome. Mint gives 50% - and Canonical, since their take-it-or-leave-it offer was rejected, has since disabled it completely.
Something can generate revenue and still not, in the bigger scheme of things, be worth doing. Hummers were a good example - at one point they made money, then not so much, then they became a drain on resources, attention, and cash.
Canonical doesn't have the development resources to be a serious innovator, having decided to concentrate on marketing and "blingy" stuff instead.
What would I do differently? Get Android working properly. Hire real software developers, with cross-platform experience, and open up a porting lab. Then approach companies, the same as Loki did, and offer a percentage deal for doing ports from Windows to both the linux and mac platforms (a 2'fer). Not just consumer-facing software either. Grow the market instead of looking for change behind the cushions.
Teaching kids to "program" is as useless as teaching kids to "use a computer". Those who want to will figure it out by themselves and decide if they want to take it further, or will do so as needed. Those who don't, won't, and you're just burning them (same as trying to get someone to switch from windows to linux - the first upgrade that craps out their box, or the first time they can't run a needed program, all your "but it's better" doesn't count for a hill of beans).
If they don't remove the menus, then there is no point, is there? Maybe they should actually try to do something, you know, useful? Like fix all the regressions that every upgrade brings?
It's stupid because anyone who wants to learn is going to be able to learn at their own pace, outside of school. The tools are there, freely available. Teaching programming to kids will be seen as being as redundant as all those quaint "teaching computers" programs decade ago ended up being.
Hi squiggy! :-)
1. To the extent that it's application-specific, it's less discoverable by users than menus are. -1 point.
2. It has the disadvantage that users can't learn the keyboard shortcuts just by browsing the menus. - 1 point.
3. It also doesn't let users quickly figure out what exactly the main features of a program are. - 1 point.
In other words, it makes things harder for the beginning user, while adding nothing for anyone who wants to get beyond n00b status.
The stated goal is also absurd - "to help users move from Windows?" How - by making things harder for them to get any work done?
He should be more concerned with stemming the flow of users away from Ubuntu. Windows users are not going to switch because of this or any other UI "feature" - they will switch because of applications, and there, Ubuntu doesn't offer anything special.
As for why Shuttleworth hasn't left Canonical, it's his business. Leaving your business pretty much means either finding someone else to buy you out (the initial goal of any venture capitalist, but not gonna happen), finding someone to run it for you (he doesn't know anyone who can make a go of it, or he would have done this already), or shutting it down.
Right now, it's a combination of the sunk costs fallacy, the whole "this time is different - this time we have a winner!" (or what I call the "hope springs eternal fallacy"), and his ego.
Canonical is not going anywhere interesting. If he had more brains than ego, he'd hire his 10 biggest critics to tear into everything and see if there's anything worth salvaging. Then again, we just saw that the boys at RIM also suffer from the "more money than brains" syndrome - RIM is similarly doomed.
First thing to go would be all the stupid UI tweaking. Let the various UI projects to their thing. Next would be scrapping all the silly me-too projects that are not competitive (Ubuntu 1, Cloud, Music Store, TV, whatever - not even bothering to review them. Just kill them off as distractions). Third would be to kill off LTS - even 5 years is not "long term". REAL long-term is a minimum of 10 years.
Fourth - hire some real software people and get android to run out of the box. Make that the ONLY goal for now. Not a hack, but a full out-of-the-box, no hassles, no special tools required, batteries included experience.
It's the only way to even hope to differentiate. Everything else is just candy floss.
It's called throwing good money after bad. His (well-known large ego) won't let him admit that the goofed, repeatedly.
It's the same reason that he keeps focusing on marketing props instead of adding real value, and why Canonical doesn't really even have much in the way of software expertise (they couldn't get Android to run properly in 3 years, while a small company does it in a couple of months?
It also explains why they concentrate on the UI - its the easiest thing to change. Same as Ubuntu TV was just taking someone else's code and slapping it on a rooted Samsung TV because more than a year after promising to ship tablets, they have NOTHING!. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Rien.
Same as Ubuntu Cloud was just re-selling Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Music Store was just re-selling someone else's music store, and ... oh, what the heck, you get the picture. Remember when he appointed Matt Asay as COO, big showy announcement, and Asay making a fool of himself by saying how he's actually now using linux for the first time, and he's soooo excited (you appoint someone with no real knowledge of your product to help sell your product???) ... and how Asay didn't even last the year, walked away with his tail between his legs, oh so quietly?
Same with the Android Execution Environment - announced with lots of hype, a ship date, then quietly abandoned. This last is now a crucial mistake, since nobody wants a linux tablet w/o android, and Lenovo is shipping Android TVs.
Ubuntu is like the Costa Concordia, and Shuttleworth is its' captain.
Sure you can. All you need is a "cow pie" or "buffalo chips" and a can of shellack.
Pictures, since someone is going to say "Pics or it didn't happen".
Not that I'd want one myself, especially on humid days ...
Alt+F2 already does auto-complete. In LXDE, it even gives you a nice dropdown after the first few letters, so if you're not sure and want to browse things that are "like" a command, you can.
Remember - Canonical was one of Shuttleworths' venture capital schemes. He thought that he could launch a new linux distro, market the heck out of it, and get his 30x payday.
Too bad that none of his hoped-for buyers are interested. The nails in the coffin were (in reverse order) Canonical abandoning its attempt to create an Android Execution Environment, Amazon coming out with their own line of tablets, and Canonical alienating its user base by chasing tablets (while still not having Android support), and other companies shipping working Android tablets for well under $100. The final last nail in the coffin was Lenovo coming out with Android TVs (running the latest ICS) the same week Canonical announces UbuntuTV.
What's the point? This is just another attempt to generate hype, without anything really newsworthy. More UI fiddling, when the real problem is that, without out-of-the-box Android support, Unity is worthless to both tablet and tv manufacturers.
That ship has sailed. And like the captain of the Costa Concordia, it looks like Shuttleworth has no clue where he's going.
Looking back, I'm glad my kids didn't bother. The working conditions are mostly crap, the job satisfaction is among the lowest of any industry, sexual harassment is the #1 factor for women dropping out (68%), and you're going to be hit by the 3 Os - Outsourced, Off-shored or Obsolete - well before you're ready to retire.
Staying current doesn't help - perception is what counts, which is why you see people worried that they may never find another job at 35 because they're seen as "too old."
The simulations I did 25 years ago predicted Quebec's economy would under-perform due to the anglo exodus, and peek in 2011 before going into permanent decline. I was off by one year - the peak was actually 2010. This prediction was confirmed by HydroQuebec in a leaked study in the early 90s that was quickly pulled, for obvious reasons. If you knew where to look, 2 years ago you could find another study that predicted the future economic decline as being inevitable as well. Again, pulled for obvious reasons.
Quebec is sick. Traditionally the most corrupt of Canadian provinces, by most accounts it has only gotten worse over the last 30 years. Do you like defending corruption?
Quebec politicians no longer have a presence on the national scene. Quebec's days of setting the agenda are over - permanently. Both the demographics and the economics are against Quebec. This is what happens when you spend 50 years chasing out both investment and people.
I've come to the conclusion (as have many observers) that the situation is way past the tipping point - that there is nothing that can be done to salvage the economic mess that Quebec has put itself in. I was seriously considering another run for office later this year, but the numbers say that Quebec will default by 2030 no matter what is done, so why bother? Instead, I'll leave.
That's one thing that people need to realize - sometimes you kick the can too far down the road, and you can't recover.
The next referendum, I will encourage everyone who has left the province to take advantage of a loophole in Quebec's referendum laws to register to vote, and force Quebec out. A million extra votes might make the difference this time.
As someone who's been here a LOT longer than you, your "extremely grateful to the Quebec voters during the last election" is offensive, ill-informed, and smacks of thanking someone for helping keep the place warm by setting fire to the furniture after they smashed all the windows.
You seem to have overlooked that if it weren't for the jerks in Quebec always threatening separation if they didn't get more and more preferential treatment, the Conservatives wouldn't be so right-leaning.
Don't like Harper and his policies? Blame Quebec - they created him.
You might want to do some research into western separation, which started as a reaction to Quebec "special treatment" sucking off the west economically. Remember, it's only Quebec that damaged its own economy and turned itself into a "have-not" province, due to 50 years of racist language policies.
The western separatist movement spawned the Reform Party, which basically ate the Conservative Party after the most suck-up-to-Quebec federal Conservative government of all history - Brian Mulroney.
It's no coincidence that another former federal Conservative Party member and Mulroney protege is now leading the most corrupt provincial government in at least a generation - Jean Charest - in Quebec (as head of the provincial liberal party, of all things).
Here's the reality - Quebec is and has always been corrupt and crooked - and the rest of Canada has paid a huge price for it.
If the choice is between Harper and any politician who sucks up to a Quebec that has corruption in its blood, I'll either spoil my ballot or sit at home.
And it just goes to show how pointless their points system is :-)
Quebec has only harmed itself - until the '60s, it's economy grew at the same rate as neighboring Ontario. Then came a series of language laws that chased away not only business, but ultimately almost a million people. Ethnocentrism based on language and heritage is still racism.
Continuing to cozy up to it for votes would ultimately destroy the RoC (Rest of Canada for everyone following along). Any party that now tries to suck up to Quebec will never get back in power. Ever. The myth that you need to win Quebec to be elected is dead.
Speaking of things that are dying, so is the basis for separation - the french language in Quebec, and it's due to the Internet and time. Parizeau thought he was funny about how "victory was inevitable as the older federalists die off", but the joke's on him. The current generation doesn't care.
Quebec no longer has a "distinct culture." The Internet already blew that away. Not that it was all that distinct beforehand. Back when the PQ first proposed regulating television to french-only broadcasts, they quickly shelved that because too many french-quebecers were huge fans of The Price is Right and Another World. Today it would be American Idol.
Quebec cannot join the US - the US doesn't want it. Quebec is financially finished. Where else in the world do you have someone earning $20,000 a year paying over $5,000 in taxes?
And this despite getting $100 a month for each person from the feds in "equalization payments" for self-inflicted harm done by chasing away jobs for more than 40 years.
1% of the population lost their jobs in the last 6 months of last year - and half of that job loss was in one month - December - the only place in Canada where that happened (everywhere else either stayed the same or increased employment).
The provincial budget has a huge hole blown in it and no way to fix it. Not when you already have the highest tax rates in the world, the 4th-lowest income of all the states and provinces (ahead only of Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia), and a debt to gdp over twice as high as any state. Why would the U.S. want to be stuck with that?