To put the speed in perspective, 2 knots/hours is roughly double the speed of the world record holder in the men's long course 800 meter freestyle. Even allowing for fins, and for being under water, I rather doubt you could swim that far, that fast, with your legs.
Plus, of course, if a person could swim that far, that fast, with their legs do you really think DARPA would have spent the money do develop this device?
Very, very specialized situations? Uhh, this *is* DARPA we're talking about here, so it's pretty likely those are just the situations they had in mind.
I know I'm just feeding a troll here, but software is far easier to install on Linux than on Windows. In most distros, it's strictly point and click, all dependencies handled. No having to go to some website and download the software first. No having to run an installer for each program individually and having to click through multiple screens, often including a proprietary license agreement that no one reads anyway. No adware. No spyware. Doing a full system upgrade to a new version also happens with just a few clicks on most major distros. No reinstall needed. No flaky migration wizards needed.
This same ease of use goes for installation. Most Linux distros today are easier to install than XP or Vista, and a number of them will even automatically partition your disk for you if you want to keep Windows.
There are some areas (not many, and the gap is narrowing all the time) where Windows still has an edge over Linux, but ease of installation, for either applications software or the OS, is not one of them. You've missed cleanly. In those areas where Windows still has an edge over Linux on the desktop, Windows is not the target to shoot at anyway, because the things that Windows does better than Linux, it doesn't necessarily do well; it just currently does them better than Linux. The Target to shoot at in those areas is OS X, which stands head and shoulders above GNOME, KDE, and Windows in most areas of usability.
I find OS X to be somewhat inflexible in some areas and that inflexibility is annoying enough that I still prefer KDE, even though it doesn't have the consistency and usability of OS X (yet), but overall, OS X's high usability and supreme UI consistency is the target to shoot for. As a long-time Linux user and new (from this year) Mac user, every time I have to use Windows, the overall kludginess and lack of ease of use compared to either KDE or OS X (yes, you read that right: lack of ease of use) makes me want to rip my hair out. That makes Windows a lot better qualified to be called a desktop joke, IMO.
Linux has already surpassed Windows as a desktop OS in most respects. You're confusing dominant market share stemming from past innovation in a young market, combined with expert marketing and a huge cash reserve to support that dominant position, with technical superiority. The technical superiority war is already over, and the *nix camp won. Now we're just conducting the mop-up operation. It's like the Pacific war in WW II. After Midway, Japan was finished. There remained over three years of difficult fighting before the war ended, but the momentum had shifted and the outcome was no longer in real doubt.
When we look back in a few years, 2007 is going to be seen as the year that was the tipping point, the Midway of the Linux-Windows wars. I'm not predicting absolute victory over Microsoft the way absolute victory was achieved in WW II, but there will be an OS parity in which Linux is a fully supported platform alongside Windows by the major vendors, with a large share of the desktop market held by Linux, the BSDs, and OS X. I would not be the least bit surprised to see Microsoft reduced to a 50% marketshare on the desktop 10 years from now. Rather than Midway, the battle will be called Vista. With it's high price, lack of compelling reasons to upgrade, confusing number of different versions, and steeper hardware requirements (and the announcement the other day that Vista SP 1 will obsolete DirectX 10 hardware with DirectX 10.1, whee!), Vista is proving to be the catalyst for a lot of people to try Linux or OS X.
As a troll, you may laugh at that prediction, but I've been using Linux on the desktop for 10 years, since back in the days when it was actually hard, and most Windows users had never heard of Linux, or even UNIX. Now, most Windows users have not only heard of Linux, chances are pretty good they know someone who uses it. I've watched Linux go through the "Ghandi" phases: "First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win." Linux i
My screwdrivers, are a mix of Snap-On and Craftsman, and probably better than yours. I wouldn't describe the handles on them, or any screwdriver, as huge. That's why some of them have a wrench lug for really tough work.
I don't think so, at least, there are no leasing company asset tags on any piece of equipment I've ever seen. We just take pretty good care of our staff. Lots of free food, free drinks, free beer (no, I'm not kidding). They're starting to issue 30" Apple Cinema Displays now, as budget allows. A couple months ago we got a batch of 30s and a smaller batch of 23s, which were given out by lottery. If you were a manager, you could only enter to win a 23. The 30s all went to staff. I didn't win one, but maybe next time.
Does anyone "know" how it will impact other clients? No, we don't "know" that, however, a reasonable estimate would be "not much, if at all."
utorrent may be the single most popular BT client as TFA claims (OTOH, most of the peers I see are Azureus and Ktorrent. I don't know if that's just because I'm in the odd niche of only doing legal stuff over BT (no, it exists, really Linux and *BSD ISOs), or if most people are using those, I don't know.
Either way, what I expect will happen if they go totally closed will be much like what happened with SSH. After the official SSH became closed and proprietary, the OpenSSH project picked up where they had left off, and while SSH is still in business and has a product line, OpenSSH took over the market and is now far more popular, on both the client side and the server. If BT totally closes everything off and makes the protocol incompatible with open versions, I think we can reasonably expect to see the open source version fork and take over the BT market.
OK, when I say "power screwdriver" I actually mean my 18 volt drill, so yeah, there's more torque. Even with a regular (read "wuss") power screwdriver you could expect at least a little more torque, because the handle is larger than at least most manual screwdrives. Think logically, man.
My dad always hand-tightens screws on computer cases. Of course, most people need a power screwdriver to get them *out* after he's tightened them, but...
Has anyone seen any sales figures on Ubuntu Dells? It would be very interesting to know, on a model for which Ubuntu, XP, and Vista are all available, how the sales numbers are coming out.
Another factor in the valuation is the hardware life cycle. For example, at my company you get your choice of a Mac, a Windows machine or installing the BSD or Linux distro of your choice (on pretty much a support-it-yourself basis), and you're eligible for a new machine every three years.
When I was hired in January, I chose a Mac, and they issued me a 15" MacBook Pro, 2 GB RAM/120 GB disk. I'm fairly confident this will still be a highly usable machine in three years. Lots of people have PowerBooks that are between 2 and 3 years old, and while they think a new MBP would be cool, they have no complaints with their current hardware; it's getting the job done and performing well. The people running Linux or BSD are doing OK, too.
But the ones with 3-year old notebooks running XP, they practically have their upgrade eligibility date marked in red on the calendar (some probably really do). Compared to the Mac and Linux and BSD machines of the same age, those 3 year old Windows boxes are just wheezing along. What this means for the purchaser of a Dell Ubuntu box, then, is that if they buy a decently speced-out machine now, the can reasonably expect that in three years it will still be very serviceable. Even if you pay a little more for it, you'll get that money back in the form of longer hardware upgrade cycles. This fact can't be lost on Dell, I wonder if that's a factor in any price differences?
Interestingly, a thing I hear regularly from people waiting for their hardware upgrade cycle is that they plan to get a Mac next time instead of a Windows machine. At least in engineering, Macs have already become the majority platform. I was in a meeting today and looked around the table and counted that 80% of the attendees had Macs.
Regular users still mostly opt for Windows, of course, but both here where I work and at a couple of recent conferences I went to (not Black Hat and Defcon, but security-oriented anyway), there were a lot of people with Macs or PC notebooks minus Windows. A guy a couple rows in front of me was running FreeBSD on his. Everywhere, I hear people who currently have Windows saying they are going to take a serious look at moving to Mac or Linux. Microsoft is losing, or at risk of losing, a great deal of mindshare in the community of programmers, engineers, and other technical fields. One of the things that helped make Microsoft who they are today is great mindshare in that group. If they lose it, that loss can go a long way toward breaking them. Interest in, and acceptance of, Macs and Linux machines in the corporate environment seems to be at an all-time high and going up rapidly.
I'm sure Microsoft is concerned, but I don't believe they fully appreciate the peril, fully appreciate how close the tipping point may be. The next 2 or 3 years, while they work on the successor to Vista while many of their users cling to XP or move to Mac or Linux should be very interesting.
Every non-Quebecois I know wishes Quebec would follow through on those threats to secede they make from time to time.
Why don't the other provinces just get together in a preemptive strike and kick Quebec out? If it's not consitutional, you could make it constitutional with only Quebec in opposition. Heck, if they even get wind of it, they'd get up on their high horse and just go ahead and secede and you'd be free of them:)
Vi Vs. Emacs, GNOME Vs. KDE, BSD Vs. Linux, are not examples of fracture at all. They are examples of the software equivalent of biodiversity, which builds a strong ecosystem. As steveb has been known to put it, "Developers, developers, developers!" Why is that such a big deal? Simple: lots of developers, writing lots of apps (often competing ones) produces a healthy ecosystem around your platform.
I also do not agree with Shuttleworth's assessment that the MSFT patent deals have fractured the open source community, for one basic reason: neither Novell nor Linspire, the two biggest names to sign such deals with MSFT really are, or ever were, part of the open source community. Novell is, and always has been, primarily a proprietary software company and it doesn't really get FOSS, any more than MSFT does. Linspire is also a pretty poor example of a FOSS company; if they could find a way to make Linspire proprietary, I'm sure they would. Linspire is also so small that they don't matter much anyway, even if we are charitable (read, "stupid") and call them part of the community.
As some other posters have pointed out, these patent deals have actually done a lot to solidify the actual FOSS community. Beyond that, they have clearly spotlighted those companies that are not, and never really were, part of the community.
I wish I had some mod points to give you. It has been correctly pointed out that a lot of assumptions are being made about the potential nature of ETI and that those assumptions may well all be groundless. I think the only assumption we can make is that it will in some fashion be competitive, like us. Life is a competitive business, and a non-aggressive, non-expansionist, non-colonizing life form is a roundabout way of saying "extinct."
However there has been less mention of your point, and I think it's well taken: we may well be alone, or so close to being alone that it would take a real stroke of luck to find any evidence to the contrary. This doesn't particularly horrify me; I think it's neither here nor there. If there are others out there and they are friendly (or at least non-hostile), cool. If we're the only ones, so what? Then if we ever do solve the hard problems of interstellar travel, at least we know that whatever we find is ours to fight over in peace;)
However, as some have said in the responses to TFA, another limiting factor in the spread of life in the galaxy or the universe may be that the problem of interstellar travel in a practical time frame really is unsolvable, so that intelligent life arises, colonizes perhaps other livable planets in its star system, then is later wiped out by the expansion of its star.
I used to work at Microsoft, and from reading minimsft, I'm pretty sure he really does work there, or at least did at one time. His take on what's right and wrong at Microsoft shows not just a great deal of insight, but a great deal of knowledge of what it's really like on the inside. If he doesn't work there, he's got to be talking to some pretty knowledgeable people who do, and who are willing to say these things to an outsider at the potential risk of their jobs.
So, if I were an investigate reporter trying to find out who minimsft is, I'd start by moving anyone who is not a current or former blue badge to the bottom of my suspects list. The stuff about being a manager and being male may be true or may be obfuscation, so I wouldn't put too much stock in it It's not hard for a non-manager there to make the same observations mini-msft makes. I accept that minimsft is probably male, if for no reason other than most of the people working there (at least in coding jobs) are men.
Minimsft may well be exactly what he describes himself as. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if he were actually a mid or senior-level manager. Turning an oil tanker can be hard, even for someone with a lot of clout, and revolution is sometimes easier to start from the bottom than from the top. Microsoft is certainly an oil tanker, or perhaps an aircraft carrier might be a better description. They, too, take a lot of time and space to turn, but once turned can move pretty quickly and bring a lot of power to bear on the target.
Can Microsoft be turned? Now that's an interesting question. The corporate culture there so powerful, pervasive, and seemingly immutable. Turning Microsoft may not be impossible, but it would be very, very hard.
OK, it's about a three-click process, and it will automatically partition your disk for you if you're not sure what to do. Safely? In my experience, yes. Should you do that without a backup? No, of course not. Have I done it without a backup anyway? Yes, but don't try this at home. Even though the systems in question were on a large UPS and one was also a notebook for even one more level of protection, it's not a good practice. I did it only because both were freshly installed and patched XP installs and it was my opinion that if something broke, doing it over again was probably no bigger of a deal than backing them up first.
So, a few clicks, and Kubuntu was installed and dual-booting on both of them. No problem.
I can't comment on how compatible (or not) OO.o/NeoOffice may be with MS Office macros, since in the 10 years I've been using Linux, no one has ever sent me an MS Office document that used macros. All I can say is that NeoOffice has been perfect on every Word and Excel document I've opened with it or converted from ODF, and the only way an MS Office user in my company would know I'm not using MS Office is if I said so.
Funny, I just recently switched to a trackball due to wrist pain issues (much better now, and using trackballs at home and work; I'll never go back to mice), but I tried the Marble Mouse and didn't like it at all, but like the Trackman Wheel (thumb type) very much. No sore thumb issues and few problems with accuracy and positioning once I got used to.
To anyone considering a trackball, I'd definitely say try it, but do find some place where you can try a bunch of different ones out. If possible, find someone who can lend you one, maybe see if the IT department where you work has any cast-off trackballs in their parts horde (that's where I found an old Kensington (IIRC) that I used as proff of concept. It wasn't great and I didn't really like using my fingers to spin the ball (prefer thumb) but it was way better than any mouse. Based on that, I bought a Trackman Wheel for home use, and expensed another one for work use. Several weeks in, my wrist is feeling much better. All I can say is, trackballs rock!
For the Mac users, of course there are four options: Mac Office, Windows Office via Parallels or VMWare Fusion, standard OpenOffice.Org, and NeoOffice (native Mac port of OpenOffice.Org). I use the latter and have zero problems exchanging files with MS Office users.
I work at a very large IT company whose name is a household word (not Microsoft, but I used to work there, too), and we have a heterogeneous environment: Windows machines make up the majority of the network, our mail is on Exchange, and there are a lot of Mac, Linux, and BSD machines, especially among the engineering departments. I also have Mac Office, but never use it anymore; I find I prefer OOo. I use Entourage for Email,and while it has a few quirks and is not a native Exchange client, I find that in most respects I actually prefer it to Outlook; going back to using Outlook after learning Entourage would really suck. In fact, I prefer it in all respects.
Of course, what they *could* do about MS Office is chuck it completely. Keep Windows where it makes sense, but move away from Microsoft applications. The cost savings would be huge. Or, they could not to it but start planning it, and could probably extract large price concessions from Microsoft if they scrap the plan. The cost savings would still be huge.
If this trial had taken place in at least some countries in Europe (and it *could* have taken place in most, if not all, of them), the plaintiff might well have won. For example, under UK law, truth is *not* an absolute defense against defamation. That's right: if you write something bad about someone, even though that bad thing is demonstrably true, you could still lose a libel suit. Now *that* is injustice.
You might also want to take note that while Paterson *filed* a suit (and I fully agree with you that he was a complete tool in doing so, especially that part about mental anguish; mental anguish and $3.35 will get you a venti latte at Starbucks), the judge looked at that merits of the case and threw it out of court (figuratively, anyway; a pity it wasn't literal).
There are problems in the justice system, of course (show me a place where that isn't true) and the (?:RI|MP)AA is clearly a bull in a justice china shop, but justice was very obviously served in this case. Makes me glad I'm an American, and doubly glad you're not.
But it weighs 6.6 pounds, which makes my 15" MacBook Pro look like a lightweight.
Still, if a person didn't need to move it around very much (if at all), it might be an acceptable low-cost notebook. The one caveat I'd put on this is that my cousin's son has a low-end Compaq notebook (looks similar to that one, but probably older; don't know what model it is), and it's basically a piece of crap. Fit, finish, feel of the keyboard, they're all awful. I'm not really blaming Compaq, that's what you get when you buy the bottom of the line; they have to get it that cheap somehow, and to make a "regular" notebook that can sell in that price range you have to cut a lot of corners.
These Asus laptops, OLPC, etc, cut different corners. Take out the hard drive, put in a a pretty low-spec graphics chipset, very modest CPU, etc., and you can deliver better build quality (well, we hope) while still maintaining a very low price point.
This does look very cool. My kids (ages 3 and 4) are already using Linux to play NickJr games, Gcompris stuff, etc. I have them set up with desktop machines with happy hacking-type keyboards and notebook mice to better fit the size of their hands, but these notebooks might be better still. Toddlers have a way of dragging things around to screw up their KDE environment in interesting ways, or clicking the Firefox launch button so many times that it runs the system out of memory
You obviously didn't live in the 1960s. OK, maybe you did, but were too young to remember it.
I remember watching Star Trek in the evenings during the original broadcast run when I measured my age in single digits.
Our large console TV (with built-in AM-FM stero, turntable, and speaker cabinets) did not have a round screen, but I'm sure it did cost a lot.
There were a lot more than four TV channels.
Commercial microwave ovens went on sale in the early fifties. We didn't get one until the 1970s but I remember TV commercials for the Amana Radarange in the late sixties.
Some cars have had seat belts since at least the 1950s (Ford was a pioneer of this in the US auto industry). Front seat belts were standard by the mid-sixties and by the late sixties all cars also came standard with rear seatbelts. We had a '67 Dodge that had front and rear seatbelts. People mostly didn't use them in those days, but they were there.
Those inaccuracies aside, the original Star Trek - while it may look hokey today - was, as you say, very cool at the time. It was a groundbreaking show in many ways. It had an interracial cast with non-whites portraying officers, it had women as officers, and it dealt with a lot of issues that American society itself was dealing with at the time. I would go so far as to say that while some of the successors of the original series have surpassed it in acting or writing, and all of them have surpassed it in special effects, the original series is better than any of them when considered in context. This is not to take anything away from some of the good work done in the follow-on series and movies, but I would rarely use words like "groundbreaking" or "revolutionary" to describe them. An episode here, an episode there, maybe. But not about any of the series as a whole, or any of the movies.
That doesn't mean I didn't like them. I liked them a lot. Well, most of them. When the first movie came out, my brother and I and one of my friends ditched high school to go see it on opening day. We got away with it, but it would have been worth it even if we'd been caught. It's just that, when you consider the original series in its context, it's the best of them. It truly was boldly going where no TV series had gone before. None of the others can say that.
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To put the speed in perspective, 2 knots/hours is roughly double the speed of the world record holder in the men's long course 800 meter freestyle. Even allowing for fins, and for being under water, I rather doubt you could swim that far, that fast, with your legs.
Plus, of course, if a person could swim that far, that fast, with their legs do you really think DARPA would have spent the money do develop this device?
Very, very specialized situations? Uhh, this *is* DARPA we're talking about here, so it's pretty likely those are just the situations they had in mind.
I know I'm just feeding a troll here, but software is far easier to install on Linux than on Windows. In most distros, it's strictly point and click, all dependencies handled. No having to go to some website and download the software first. No having to run an installer for each program individually and having to click through multiple screens, often including a proprietary license agreement that no one reads anyway. No adware. No spyware. Doing a full system upgrade to a new version also happens with just a few clicks on most major distros. No reinstall needed. No flaky migration wizards needed.
This same ease of use goes for installation. Most Linux distros today are easier to install than XP or Vista, and a number of them will even automatically partition your disk for you if you want to keep Windows.
There are some areas (not many, and the gap is narrowing all the time) where Windows still has an edge over Linux, but ease of installation, for either applications software or the OS, is not one of them. You've missed cleanly. In those areas where Windows still has an edge over Linux on the desktop, Windows is not the target to shoot at anyway, because the things that Windows does better than Linux, it doesn't necessarily do well; it just currently does them better than Linux. The Target to shoot at in those areas is OS X, which stands head and shoulders above GNOME, KDE, and Windows in most areas of usability.
I find OS X to be somewhat inflexible in some areas and that inflexibility is annoying enough that I still prefer KDE, even though it doesn't have the consistency and usability of OS X (yet), but overall, OS X's high usability and supreme UI consistency is the target to shoot for. As a long-time Linux user and new (from this year) Mac user, every time I have to use Windows, the overall kludginess and lack of ease of use compared to either KDE or OS X (yes, you read that right: lack of ease of use) makes me want to rip my hair out. That makes Windows a lot better qualified to be called a desktop joke, IMO.
Linux has already surpassed Windows as a desktop OS in most respects. You're confusing dominant market share stemming from past innovation in a young market, combined with expert marketing and a huge cash reserve to support that dominant position, with technical superiority. The technical superiority war is already over, and the *nix camp won. Now we're just conducting the mop-up operation. It's like the Pacific war in WW II. After Midway, Japan was finished. There remained over three years of difficult fighting before the war ended, but the momentum had shifted and the outcome was no longer in real doubt.
When we look back in a few years, 2007 is going to be seen as the year that was the tipping point, the Midway of the Linux-Windows wars. I'm not predicting absolute victory over Microsoft the way absolute victory was achieved in WW II, but there will be an OS parity in which Linux is a fully supported platform alongside Windows by the major vendors, with a large share of the desktop market held by Linux, the BSDs, and OS X. I would not be the least bit surprised to see Microsoft reduced to a 50% marketshare on the desktop 10 years from now. Rather than Midway, the battle will be called Vista. With it's high price, lack of compelling reasons to upgrade, confusing number of different versions, and steeper hardware requirements (and the announcement the other day that Vista SP 1 will obsolete DirectX 10 hardware with DirectX 10.1, whee!), Vista is proving to be the catalyst for a lot of people to try Linux or OS X.
As a troll, you may laugh at that prediction, but I've been using Linux on the desktop for 10 years, since back in the days when it was actually hard, and most Windows users had never heard of Linux, or even UNIX. Now, most Windows users have not only heard of Linux, chances are pretty good they know someone who uses it. I've watched Linux go through the "Ghandi" phases: "First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win." Linux i
My screwdrivers, are a mix of Snap-On and Craftsman, and probably better than yours. I wouldn't describe the handles on them, or any screwdriver, as huge. That's why some of them have a wrench lug for really tough work.
That's a truly heartbreaking hardware story. Maybe this will help :)
http://www.ironport.com/company/careers.html
I don't think so, at least, there are no leasing company asset tags on any piece of equipment I've ever seen. We just take pretty good care of our staff. Lots of free food, free drinks, free beer (no, I'm not kidding). They're starting to issue 30" Apple Cinema Displays now, as budget allows. A couple months ago we got a batch of 30s and a smaller batch of 23s, which were given out by lottery. If you were a manager, you could only enter to win a 23. The 30s all went to staff. I didn't win one, but maybe next time.
:-)
Yes, it's very, very nice to work here
Does anyone "know" how it will impact other clients? No, we don't "know" that, however, a reasonable estimate would be "not much, if at all."
utorrent may be the single most popular BT client as TFA claims (OTOH, most of the peers I see are Azureus and Ktorrent. I don't know if that's just because I'm in the odd niche of only doing legal stuff over BT (no, it exists, really Linux and *BSD ISOs), or if most people are using those, I don't know.
Either way, what I expect will happen if they go totally closed will be much like what happened with SSH. After the official SSH became closed and proprietary, the OpenSSH project picked up where they had left off, and while SSH is still in business and has a product line, OpenSSH took over the market and is now far more popular, on both the client side and the server. If BT totally closes everything off and makes the protocol incompatible with open versions, I think we can reasonably expect to see the open source version fork and take over the BT market.
OK, when I say "power screwdriver" I actually mean my 18 volt drill, so yeah, there's more torque. Even with a regular (read "wuss") power screwdriver you could expect at least a little more torque, because the handle is larger than at least most manual screwdrives. Think logically, man.
Dude, if you think she's hot, you really, really, really need to get out more. I know this is /., but c'mon :)
My dad always hand-tightens screws on computer cases. Of course, most people need a power screwdriver to get them *out* after he's tightened them, but...
Has anyone seen any sales figures on Ubuntu Dells? It would be very interesting to know, on a model for which Ubuntu, XP, and Vista are all available, how the sales numbers are coming out.
Another factor in the valuation is the hardware life cycle. For example, at my company you get your choice of a Mac, a Windows machine or installing the BSD or Linux distro of your choice (on pretty much a support-it-yourself basis), and you're eligible for a new machine every three years.
When I was hired in January, I chose a Mac, and they issued me a 15" MacBook Pro, 2 GB RAM/120 GB disk. I'm fairly confident this will still be a highly usable machine in three years. Lots of people have PowerBooks that are between 2 and 3 years old, and while they think a new MBP would be cool, they have no complaints with their current hardware; it's getting the job done and performing well. The people running Linux or BSD are doing OK, too.
But the ones with 3-year old notebooks running XP, they practically have their upgrade eligibility date marked in red on the calendar (some probably really do). Compared to the Mac and Linux and BSD machines of the same age, those 3 year old Windows boxes are just wheezing along. What this means for the purchaser of a Dell Ubuntu box, then, is that if they buy a decently speced-out machine now, the can reasonably expect that in three years it will still be very serviceable. Even if you pay a little more for it, you'll get that money back in the form of longer hardware upgrade cycles. This fact can't be lost on Dell, I wonder if that's a factor in any price differences?
Interestingly, a thing I hear regularly from people waiting for their hardware upgrade cycle is that they plan to get a Mac next time instead of a Windows machine. At least in engineering, Macs have already become the majority platform. I was in a meeting today and looked around the table and counted that 80% of the attendees had Macs.
Regular users still mostly opt for Windows, of course, but both here where I work and at a couple of recent conferences I went to (not Black Hat and Defcon, but security-oriented anyway), there were a lot of people with Macs or PC notebooks minus Windows. A guy a couple rows in front of me was running FreeBSD on his. Everywhere, I hear people who currently have Windows saying they are going to take a serious look at moving to Mac or Linux. Microsoft is losing, or at risk of losing, a great deal of mindshare in the community of programmers, engineers, and other technical fields. One of the things that helped make Microsoft who they are today is great mindshare in that group. If they lose it, that loss can go a long way toward breaking them. Interest in, and acceptance of, Macs and Linux machines in the corporate environment seems to be at an all-time high and going up rapidly.
I'm sure Microsoft is concerned, but I don't believe they fully appreciate the peril, fully appreciate how close the tipping point may be. The next 2 or 3 years, while they work on the successor to Vista while many of their users cling to XP or move to Mac or Linux should be very interesting.
Every non-Quebecois I know wishes Quebec would follow through on those threats to secede they make from time to time.
:)
:)
Why don't the other provinces just get together in a preemptive strike and kick Quebec out? If it's not consitutional, you could make it constitutional with only Quebec in opposition. Heck, if they even get wind of it, they'd get up on their high horse and just go ahead and secede and you'd be free of them
Then you could have Dells with Ubuntu right now
Vi Vs. Emacs, GNOME Vs. KDE, BSD Vs. Linux, are not examples of fracture at all. They are examples of the software equivalent of biodiversity, which builds a strong ecosystem. As steveb has been known to put it, "Developers, developers, developers!" Why is that such a big deal? Simple: lots of developers, writing lots of apps (often competing ones) produces a healthy ecosystem around your platform.
I also do not agree with Shuttleworth's assessment that the MSFT patent deals have fractured the open source community, for one basic reason: neither Novell nor Linspire, the two biggest names to sign such deals with MSFT really are, or ever were, part of the open source community. Novell is, and always has been, primarily a proprietary software company and it doesn't really get FOSS, any more than MSFT does. Linspire is also a pretty poor example of a FOSS company; if they could find a way to make Linspire proprietary, I'm sure they would. Linspire is also so small that they don't matter much anyway, even if we are charitable (read, "stupid") and call them part of the community.
As some other posters have pointed out, these patent deals have actually done a lot to solidify the actual FOSS community. Beyond that, they have clearly spotlighted those companies that are not, and never really were, part of the community.
I wish I had some mod points to give you. It has been correctly pointed out that a lot of assumptions are being made about the potential nature of ETI and that those assumptions may well all be groundless. I think the only assumption we can make is that it will in some fashion be competitive, like us. Life is a competitive business, and a non-aggressive, non-expansionist, non-colonizing life form is a roundabout way of saying "extinct."
;)
However there has been less mention of your point, and I think it's well taken: we may well be alone, or so close to being alone that it would take a real stroke of luck to find any evidence to the contrary. This doesn't particularly horrify me; I think it's neither here nor there. If there are others out there and they are friendly (or at least non-hostile), cool. If we're the only ones, so what? Then if we ever do solve the hard problems of interstellar travel, at least we know that whatever we find is ours to fight over in peace
However, as some have said in the responses to TFA, another limiting factor in the spread of life in the galaxy or the universe may be that the problem of interstellar travel in a practical time frame really is unsolvable, so that intelligent life arises, colonizes perhaps other livable planets in its star system, then is later wiped out by the expansion of its star.
I used to work at Microsoft, and from reading minimsft, I'm pretty sure he really does work there, or at least did at one time. His take on what's right and wrong at Microsoft shows not just a great deal of insight, but a great deal of knowledge of what it's really like on the inside. If he doesn't work there, he's got to be talking to some pretty knowledgeable people who do, and who are willing to say these things to an outsider at the potential risk of their jobs.
So, if I were an investigate reporter trying to find out who minimsft is, I'd start by moving anyone who is not a current or former blue badge to the bottom of my suspects list. The stuff about being a manager and being male may be true or may be obfuscation, so I wouldn't put too much stock in it It's not hard for a non-manager there to make the same observations mini-msft makes. I accept that minimsft is probably male, if for no reason other than most of the people working there (at least in coding jobs) are men.
Minimsft may well be exactly what he describes himself as. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if he were actually a mid or senior-level manager. Turning an oil tanker can be hard, even for someone with a lot of clout, and revolution is sometimes easier to start from the bottom than from the top. Microsoft is certainly an oil tanker, or perhaps an aircraft carrier might be a better description. They, too, take a lot of time and space to turn, but once turned can move pretty quickly and bring a lot of power to bear on the target.
Can Microsoft be turned? Now that's an interesting question. The corporate culture there so powerful, pervasive, and seemingly immutable. Turning Microsoft may not be impossible, but it would be very, very hard.
OK, it's about a three-click process, and it will automatically partition your disk for you if you're not sure what to do. Safely? In my experience, yes. Should you do that without a backup? No, of course not. Have I done it without a backup anyway? Yes, but don't try this at home. Even though the systems in question were on a large UPS and one was also a notebook for even one more level of protection, it's not a good practice. I did it only because both were freshly installed and patched XP installs and it was my opinion that if something broke, doing it over again was probably no bigger
of a deal than backing them up first.
So, a few clicks, and Kubuntu was installed and dual-booting on both of them. No problem.
I can't comment on how compatible (or not) OO.o/NeoOffice may be with MS Office macros, since in the 10 years I've been using Linux, no one has ever sent me an MS Office document that used macros. All I can say is that NeoOffice has been perfect on every Word and Excel document I've opened with it or converted from ODF, and the only way an MS Office user in my company would know I'm not using MS Office is if I said so.
YMMV, of course.
Funny, I just recently switched to a trackball due to wrist pain issues (much better now, and using trackballs at home and work; I'll never go back to mice), but I tried the Marble Mouse and didn't like it at all, but like the Trackman Wheel (thumb type) very much. No sore thumb issues and few problems with accuracy and positioning once I got used to.
To anyone considering a trackball, I'd definitely say try it, but do find some place where you can try a bunch of different ones out. If possible, find someone who can lend you one, maybe see if the IT department where you work has any cast-off trackballs in their parts horde (that's where I found an old Kensington (IIRC) that I used as proff of concept. It wasn't great and I didn't really like using my fingers to spin the ball (prefer thumb) but it was way better than any mouse. Based on that, I bought a Trackman Wheel for home use, and expensed another one for work use. Several weeks in, my wrist is feeling much better. All I can say is, trackballs rock!
I haven't had any problems opening any MS Office files so far. It's based on OpenOffice.org with a native Mac UI, so it's as compatible as OO.org.
It does not require X to be installed, that's correct. It looks and acts like any other native Mac application.
For the Mac users, of course there are four options: Mac Office, Windows Office via Parallels or VMWare Fusion, standard OpenOffice.Org, and NeoOffice (native Mac port of OpenOffice.Org). I use the latter and have zero problems exchanging files with MS Office users.
I work at a very large IT company whose name is a household word (not Microsoft, but I used to work there, too), and we have a heterogeneous environment: Windows machines make up the majority of the network, our mail is on Exchange, and there are a lot of Mac, Linux, and BSD machines, especially among the engineering departments. I also have Mac Office, but never use it anymore; I find I prefer OOo. I use Entourage for Email,and while it has a few quirks and is not a native Exchange client, I find that in most respects I actually prefer it to Outlook; going back to using Outlook after learning Entourage would really suck. In fact, I prefer it in all respects.
Of course, what they *could* do about MS Office is chuck it completely. Keep Windows where it makes sense, but move away from Microsoft applications. The cost savings would be huge. Or, they could not to it but start planning it, and could probably extract large price concessions from Microsoft if they scrap the plan. The cost savings would still be huge.
If this trial had taken place in at least some countries in Europe (and it *could* have taken place in most, if not all, of them), the plaintiff might well have won. For example, under UK law, truth is *not* an absolute defense against defamation. That's right: if you write something bad about someone, even though that bad thing is demonstrably true, you could still lose a libel suit. Now *that* is injustice.
You might also want to take note that while Paterson *filed* a suit (and I fully agree with you that he was a complete tool in doing so, especially that part about mental anguish; mental anguish and $3.35 will get you a venti latte at Starbucks), the judge looked at that merits of the case and threw it out of court (figuratively, anyway; a pity it wasn't literal).
There are problems in the justice system, of course (show me a place where that isn't true) and the (?:RI|MP)AA is clearly a bull in a justice china shop, but justice was very obviously served in this case. Makes me glad I'm an American, and doubly glad you're not.
But it weighs 6.6 pounds, which makes my 15" MacBook Pro look like a lightweight.
Still, if a person didn't need to move it around very much (if at all), it might be an acceptable low-cost notebook. The one caveat I'd put on this is that my cousin's son has a low-end Compaq notebook (looks similar to that one, but probably older; don't know what model it is), and it's basically a piece of crap. Fit, finish, feel of the keyboard, they're all awful. I'm not really blaming Compaq, that's what you get when you buy the bottom of the line; they have to get it that cheap somehow, and to make a "regular" notebook that can sell in that price range you have to cut a lot of corners.
These Asus laptops, OLPC, etc, cut different corners. Take out the hard drive, put in a a pretty low-spec graphics chipset, very modest CPU, etc., and you can deliver better build quality (well, we hope) while still maintaining a very low price point.
This does look very cool. My kids (ages 3 and 4) are already using Linux to play NickJr games, Gcompris stuff, etc. I have them set up with desktop machines with happy hacking-type keyboards and notebook mice to better fit the size of their hands, but these notebooks might be better still. Toddlers have a way of dragging things around to screw up their KDE environment in interesting ways, or clicking the Firefox launch button so many times that it runs the system out of memory
You obviously didn't live in the 1960s. OK, maybe you did, but were too young to remember it.
I remember watching Star Trek in the evenings during the original broadcast run when I measured my age in single digits.
Our large console TV (with built-in AM-FM stero, turntable, and speaker cabinets) did not have a round screen, but I'm sure it did cost a lot.
There were a lot more than four TV channels.
Commercial microwave ovens went on sale in the early fifties. We didn't get one until the 1970s but I remember TV commercials for the Amana Radarange in the late sixties.
Some cars have had seat belts since at least the 1950s (Ford was a pioneer of this in the US auto industry). Front seat belts were standard by the mid-sixties and by the late sixties all cars also came standard with rear seatbelts. We had a '67 Dodge that had front and rear seatbelts. People mostly didn't use them in those days, but they were there.
Those inaccuracies aside, the original Star Trek - while it may look hokey today - was, as you say, very cool at the time. It was a groundbreaking show in many ways. It had an interracial cast with non-whites portraying officers, it had women as officers, and it dealt with a lot of issues that American society itself was dealing with at the time. I would go so far as to say that while some of the successors of the original series have surpassed it in acting or writing, and all of them have surpassed it in special effects, the original series is better than any of them when considered in context. This is not to take anything away from some of the good work done in the follow-on series and movies, but I would rarely use words like "groundbreaking" or "revolutionary" to describe them. An episode here, an episode there, maybe. But not about any of the series as a whole, or any of the movies.
That doesn't mean I didn't like them. I liked them a lot. Well, most of them. When the first movie came out, my brother and I and one of my friends ditched high school to go see it on opening day. We got away with it, but it would have been worth it even if we'd been caught. It's just that, when you consider the original series in its context, it's the best of them. It truly was boldly going where no TV series had gone before. None of the others can say that.