Most non-technical people use their computer mainly for 2 things. Web Browsing and Email.
Email clients have come a long way in linux, and are very competitive with windows alternatives. The web browsing experience, however, falls far short.
Too much effort has to go into getting the browser to support everything needed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but no distribution supports flash, java, and streaming audio/video out of the box in the browser. Why is that? My mom or dad, grandparents, aunts and uncles.. none of them will ever take the time to figure out how to make these things work under a fresh linux install. Yet it's something that all of them are exposed to on the web. (If I had a dollar for every time my mom forwarded me a "funny" flash animation).
Seems to me that the biggest single thing linux could do to appeal to the masses would be to have a fully functional web browser - complete with flash, java, and mplayer or gxine - included in the distribution.
Where I used to work, they had 6 diesel locomotive engines, all in a row in a big room. When I went on the tour, they told us we could only stay in there for a minute, because of the possibility of them firing up at any time (the sound would be deafening). Each of the engines sat on an isolated "pad" which reduced vibrations. They told us that was necessary to prevent the harmonics for damaging the building. It was really a beautiful thing:)
In the summer, they would sometimes run them during peak periods. I was told that they generated enough power to run the datacenter (which is one of the largest in the midwest), plus sell enough power back onto the grid to earn a sizeable kickback.
My son is blind. He uses the web with a reader, and loves google. He searches for music, among other things. It's pretty amazing how effecient he is with it, given he can't see. Some sites work better than others. It is possible to optimize a site for the blind. You're ignorant.
I've been a Unix administrator for 9 years, 7 of which on Solaris. We use linux as work, as well. And I have a lot of linux stuff at home.
Solaris has its advantages in a big environment. Advantages you would never grasp by having it installed on your machine for an hour. One example is binary compatibility. If it worked on Solaris 2.6, 99% of the time it will work on versions 2.7, 2.8, 2.9 and 2.10. You may not care about that, but we're in a constant cycle of upgrading old systems.. and on Solaris, the applications are hardly ever affected. It's a beautiful thing. Linux on the other hand gives us all sorts of problems with 3rd party applications when we do any major OS upgrade. Solaris has usually been a pleasure to work with, has given us 99.99% uptime most months, and has been a rock solid workhorse OS.
We're also starting to use zones pretty heavily. They save money on equipment and backup licenses (only need one license per physical box). And offer us some neat options. Veritas cluster is aware of zones. So you can have a zone as a cluster resource on shared san disk. If the machine dies, the cluster imports the disk on a different node, and brings up the zone there. How cool is that?
Linux has been fairly solid as well, though we've had the occasional glitch. But all of the big mission critical stuff goes on Solaris, and that's been proven to be a wise choice for us many times over.
Back in the day you could judge the quality of a video card by how fast it displayed the "stars" screensaver on windows 3.1.. And the truly awesome rigs wouldn't skip every few seconds.
More functionality is good, right? It's obviously not going to jump out of the box and replace Windows, but it will be a good next step for damn sure. Google has a lot of power and influence now, and I, for one, am giddy that this massive corporation is so pro-linux. Google has developed some pretty radical stuff.. If you're in to linux, how can you not be excited (or at least curious) about what google + linux distro = ?
I use gentoo + fluxbox myself, but I have a lovely vmware window waiting to try it.
SWG was an awesome game at first. They killed it by changing the rules too many times. Shouldn't it be common sense that if you have something popular that a lot of people are enjoying, you can add to it, but don't drastically change it. SWG managed to survive one drastic change. The fanbase was up in arms, but gave them the benefit of the doubt. But then what do they do? Less than a year later they do another change that's twice as drastic. From a gameply perspective, the game isn't even hardly recognizeable. Removed all of the classes and skills and replaced them with something different, made huge changes to the combat system, then sat around wondering why everyone left. And people left. They left in droves, and it's now just a shell. The poster child of how not to run a mmorpg.
If WoW did something similar, it would be a disaster. Thankfully, they're probably not that stupid.
After all of the security headaches to date, and as soiled their security reputation has become (especially in the last couple of years), Including anti-virus would really be a nice gesture to customers. And it would maybe score a few points at a time which they could really use them. They're so used to being the only dog on the block, it probably never even occurred to them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to watch them continue shooting themselves in the foot.
I leveled a hunter to 60, ran a number of raids with people in my guild, and really had a blast. My character is sitting there waiting for me, and I do plan on going back once the level cap is raised. When I was playing before, my wife was getting pretty neglected. I tried getting her into it, but I'd have had better luck trying to talk the pope into subscribing and playing an undead thief. Brick wall.
But now, she changed jobs, and starts very early in the morning. And goes to bed at about 9pm. Me? I stay up until about 1am. Lots of gaming time, wife is happy, therefore I am happy and life is good. I think I just talked myself into re-subscribing again. Where's my damn credit card.
Instance - An area that once you (and your group) enter, you are alone. So if you and your group want to have the challenge of fighting their way through a dungeon, and killing the end boss, the game will generate a seperate dungeon instance just for your group. There can be 20 other groups running the same dungeon, each one in their own instance. So you don't have to worry about people being in the zone ahead of you. Once you enter, its yours to conquer.
In WoW, there's groups (limited to 5 people I think?), and then there's raiding parties. Rading parties can hold a much higher number of people. There's advantages and disadvantages to both, but raiding parties are usually organized to attack an enemy city, or to conquer an instance. A 40 man raid instance is geared towards large raiding parties. If you enter with much less, you'll simply be overwhelmed. The hardest instances require the most coordination between members of the raiding party.. as far as healing, debuffs, etc.
Only 1 raid party of 40 people can enter that particular instance. But there can be dozens of parallel instances going at the same time. Hope that makes sense:)
As someone who works with unix all day, this thing would drive me absolutely mental. Can you imagine trying to program on this thing? Regular expressions? SED?! The image of this thing will haunt me in my dreams.
There goes my karma, but it's attitudes like this that slow the progress of alternative OS's. I think it's fine to cater to the people who don't want to know the ins and outs of compiling from source. Gentoo is pretty good like that.. but it's also one of the hardest to install. Don't get me wrong, all of my linux boxes are gentoo both at home and at work. I love it personally, but my wife (who also uses gentoo), parents, or many of my friends and coworkers wouldn't want to or simply couldn't set one up by themselves.
So aside from gentoo, people are pretty much left with two options. Install from source and a binary package. I don't think it's reasonable to mock someone for asking if there's a binary disto available. Granted, there's a lot of distros out there, and it may be harder than it sounds, but don't jump on the guy for asking.
What ever happened to cyrix?:) I owned one or two of those, back in the day. Maybe they've got a new super-secret mega processor in the works that will jump out and take the CPU market by storm!
I work as a unix administrator in a mixed shop. The windows and unix guys are in the same group, so we get their email and go to the same team meeting. From everything I see, the bane of their existance is trying to keep everything patched. They have people in every weekend doing patching, and seem to be getting farther and farther behind. Every time a new "critical" windows patch is issued, you can hear the groans from over the cube wall. We run Solaris, and apply a patch cluster 4 times a year. When we need to patch to address a security vulnerability, we rarely have to reboot. Also, our uptime reports put theirs to shame. It boggles my mind that MS claims that maintaining their systems is less work.
A company I used to work for piped the heat from the datacenter to the rest of the building, and apparently saved a lot of money.
At home, my office is upstairs. I close all of the upstaris heating vents during the winter. My computers keep it warm enough. (And in Minnesota, that's saying something!)
I remember hearing something about E17, but I never actually looked into it. After looking at the screenies, it looks pretty slick. I'll give it a shot tonight. Thanks!
It still seems like nothing is there yet. At home, I run the big 3.. OSX, Windows, and Linux. It may be for a lack of looking, but I still haven't found a desktop manager for linux that really screamed "COOL". So I've settled for fluxbox which is light and functional.
Currently I have to run all three to get everything I want. I love the OSX desktop. As a unix administrator who works from home quite a bit, I rely on linux. It's the swiss army knife of my environment.. (firewall, file server, terminal desktop, etc). And windows, as much as I resent it, I need it around to play my games. And as such, I grudgingly give it the best hardware.
If there were an OS that was based on linux with a desktop like OSX Tiger that (easily) ran windows games / software, I would cash out my 401k and fill my house with boxes running it.
So, to tie it back in with the topic.. KDE just doesn't do anything for me at all.
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Most non-technical people use their computer mainly for 2 things. Web Browsing and Email.
Email clients have come a long way in linux, and are very competitive with windows alternatives. The web browsing experience, however, falls far short.
Too much effort has to go into getting the browser to support everything needed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but no distribution supports flash, java, and streaming audio/video out of the box in the browser. Why is that? My mom or dad, grandparents, aunts and uncles.. none of them will ever take the time to figure out how to make these things work under a fresh linux install. Yet it's something that all of them are exposed to on the web. (If I had a dollar for every time my mom forwarded me a "funny" flash animation).
Seems to me that the biggest single thing linux could do to appeal to the masses would be to
have a fully functional web browser - complete with flash, java, and mplayer or gxine - included in the distribution.
Just MHO.
Where I used to work, they had 6 diesel locomotive engines, all in a row in a big room. When I went on the tour, they told us we could only stay in there for a minute, because of the possibility of them firing up at any time (the sound would be deafening). Each of the engines sat on an isolated "pad" which reduced vibrations. They told us that was necessary to prevent the harmonics for damaging the building. It was really a beautiful thing :)
In the summer, they would sometimes run them during peak periods. I was told that they generated enough power to run the datacenter (which is one of the largest in the midwest), plus sell enough power back onto the grid to earn a sizeable kickback.
Technology is cool.
My son is blind. He uses the web with a reader, and loves google. He searches for music, among other things. It's pretty amazing how effecient he is with it, given he can't see. Some sites work better than others. It is possible to optimize a site for the blind. You're ignorant.
I've been a Unix administrator for 9 years, 7 of which on Solaris. We use linux as work, as well. And I have a lot of linux stuff at home.
.. and on Solaris, the applications are hardly ever affected. It's a beautiful thing. Linux on the other hand gives us all sorts of problems with 3rd party applications when we do any major OS upgrade. Solaris has usually been a pleasure to work with, has given us 99.99% uptime most months, and has been a rock solid workhorse OS.
Solaris has its advantages in a big environment. Advantages you would never grasp by having it installed on your machine for an hour. One example is binary compatibility. If it worked on Solaris 2.6, 99% of the time it will work on versions 2.7, 2.8, 2.9 and 2.10. You may not care about that, but we're in a constant cycle of upgrading old systems
We're also starting to use zones pretty heavily. They save money on equipment and backup licenses (only need one license per physical box). And offer us some neat options. Veritas cluster is aware of zones. So you can have a zone as a cluster resource on shared san disk. If the machine dies, the cluster imports the disk on a different node, and brings up the zone there. How cool is that?
Linux has been fairly solid as well, though we've had the occasional glitch. But all of the big mission critical stuff goes on Solaris, and that's been proven to be a wise choice for us many times over.
Back in the day you could judge the quality of a video card by how fast it displayed the "stars" screensaver on windows 3.1 .. And the truly awesome rigs wouldn't skip every few seconds.
Is it just me, or does Cisco + Nintendo warp your mind a bit. Nintendo... by Cisco. I just can't wrap my head around it :)
The only thing scarier than a patch that MS is forced to release is a patch that MS is -grudgingly- forced to relase.
More functionality is good, right? It's obviously not going to jump out of the box and replace Windows, but it will be a good next step for damn sure. Google has a lot of power and influence now, and I, for one, am giddy that this massive corporation is so pro-linux. Google has developed some pretty radical stuff.. If you're in to linux, how can you not be excited (or at least curious) about what google + linux distro = ?
I use gentoo + fluxbox myself, but I have a lovely vmware window waiting to try it.
SWG was an awesome game at first. They killed it by changing the rules too many times. Shouldn't it be common sense that if you have something popular that a lot of people are enjoying, you can add to it, but don't drastically change it. SWG managed to survive one drastic change. The fanbase was up in arms, but gave them the benefit of the doubt. But then what do they do? Less than a year later they do another change that's twice as drastic. From a gameply perspective, the game isn't even hardly recognizeable. Removed all of the classes and skills and replaced them with something different, made huge changes to the combat system, then sat around wondering why everyone left. And people left. They left in droves, and it's now just a shell. The poster child of how not to run a mmorpg.
If WoW did something similar, it would be a disaster. Thankfully, they're probably not that stupid.
After all of the security headaches to date, and as soiled their security reputation has become (especially in the last couple of years), Including anti-virus would really be a nice gesture to customers. And it would maybe score a few points at a time which they could really use them. They're so used to being the only dog on the block, it probably never even occurred to them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to watch them continue shooting themselves in the foot.
FatCHYOU!
I leveled a hunter to 60, ran a number of raids with people in my guild, and really had a blast. My character is sitting there waiting for me, and I do plan on going back once the level cap is raised. When I was playing before, my wife was getting pretty neglected. I tried getting her into it, but I'd have had better luck trying to talk the pope into subscribing and playing an undead thief. Brick wall.
But now, she changed jobs, and starts very early in the morning. And goes to bed at about 9pm. Me? I stay up until about 1am. Lots of gaming time, wife is happy, therefore I am happy and life is good. I think I just talked myself into re-subscribing again. Where's my damn credit card.
Instance - An area that once you (and your group) enter, you are alone. So if you and your group want to have the challenge of fighting their way through a dungeon, and killing the end boss, the game will generate a seperate dungeon instance just for your group. There can be 20 other groups running the same dungeon, each one in their own instance. So you don't have to worry about people being in the zone ahead of you. Once you enter, its yours to conquer.
:)
In WoW, there's groups (limited to 5 people I think?), and then there's raiding parties. Rading parties can hold a much higher number of people. There's advantages and disadvantages to both, but raiding parties are usually organized to attack an enemy city, or to conquer an instance. A 40 man raid instance is geared towards large raiding parties. If you enter with much less, you'll simply be overwhelmed. The hardest instances require the most coordination between members of the raiding party.. as far as healing, debuffs, etc.
Only 1 raid party of 40 people can enter that particular instance. But there can be dozens of parallel instances going at the same time. Hope that makes sense
(Have to pick firefly from the drop down box) http://cubemonkey.net/quotes
As someone who works with unix all day, this thing would drive me absolutely mental. Can you imagine trying to program on this thing? Regular expressions? SED?! The image of this thing will haunt me in my dreams.
There goes my karma, but it's attitudes like this that slow the progress of alternative OS's. I think it's fine to cater to the people who don't want to know the ins and outs of compiling from source. Gentoo is pretty good like that.. but it's also one of the hardest to install. Don't get me wrong, all of my linux boxes are gentoo both at home and at work. I love it personally, but my wife (who also uses gentoo), parents, or many of my friends and coworkers wouldn't want to or simply couldn't set one up by themselves.
So aside from gentoo, people are pretty much left with two options. Install from source and a binary package. I don't think it's reasonable to mock someone for asking if there's a binary disto available. Granted, there's a lot of distros out there, and it may be harder than it sounds, but don't jump on the guy for asking.
What ever happened to cyrix? :) I owned one or two of those, back in the day. Maybe they've got a new super-secret mega processor in the works that will jump out and take the CPU market by storm!
Or, maybe not.
I work as a unix administrator in a mixed shop. The windows and unix guys are in the same group, so we get their email and go to the same team meeting. From everything I see, the bane of their existance is trying to keep everything patched. They have people in every weekend doing patching, and seem to be getting farther and farther behind. Every time a new "critical" windows patch is issued, you can hear the groans from over the cube wall. We run Solaris, and apply a patch cluster 4 times a year. When we need to patch to address a security vulnerability, we rarely have to reboot. Also, our uptime reports put theirs to shame. It boggles my mind that MS claims that maintaining their systems is less work.
A company I used to work for piped the heat from the datacenter to the rest of the building, and apparently saved a lot of money.
At home, my office is upstairs. I close all of the upstaris heating vents during the winter. My computers keep it warm enough. (And in Minnesota, that's saying something!)
The US built it, it's working fine. Leave it alone.
SUSE is a decent distro, but it's a little wacky .. in a Goldmember from Austin Powers kinda way. I think it's the "Have a lot of fun!" bit. I dunno :)
Prizes are for children.
-- Charles Ives, upon being given, but refusing, the
Pulitzer prize
I remember hearing something about E17, but I never actually looked into it. After looking at the screenies, it looks pretty slick. I'll give it a shot tonight. Thanks!
How do you know I haven't? I've installed it, and tweaked around with it. It doesn't do it for me. Too much "cutsie and the letter K".
Thanks for the advice though.
It still seems like nothing is there yet. At home, I run the big 3.. OSX, Windows, and Linux. It may be for a lack of looking, but I still haven't found a desktop manager for linux that really screamed "COOL". So I've settled for fluxbox which is light and functional.
Currently I have to run all three to get everything I want. I love the OSX desktop. As a unix administrator who works from home quite a bit, I rely on linux. It's the swiss army knife of my environment.. (firewall, file server, terminal desktop, etc). And windows, as much as I resent it, I need it around to play my games. And as such, I grudgingly give it the best hardware.
If there were an OS that was based on linux with a desktop like OSX Tiger that (easily) ran windows games / software, I would cash out my 401k and fill my house with boxes running it.
So, to tie it back in with the topic.. KDE just doesn't do anything for me at all.