Double-click on the video to reach the YouTube page. To the right of the summary (left of the number of views) is a down-chevron icon. Click on that for the full description.
Or, just copy and paste that description here:
View of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones.
The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.
Earth Crossers are Red
Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow
All Others are Green
Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.
As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.
At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.
Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates snow no sign that we're running out of undiscovered objects.
Its a great machine and all, but I can't imagine trying to use it on a plane for any real length of time.
That's why I bought a folio-style case with adjustable stand for mine so you can leave it propped up at a reasonable angle, making it a nice hands-free device while watching a movie or reading a book. The popular response to that is "Why not just get a netbook, since that stands up on its own already?!" Well, the iPad just does a lot of things very well that I want it to do, and with a 10+ hour battery life (generally much longer if just reading an ebook), I haven't found a better device yet. Plus, it comfortably fits on the fold-out tray on planes when the person in front of you leans back, unlike my 15" laptop.
I run Boxee on a 3 year old Mac Mini, though it's Intel-based, and it works just fine. If you feel like hiring someone to update the code that's necessary for decoding everything on PPC, then feel free. I'm sure they'd be happy to help you out once you provide the resources to get someone "off of his/her non-collective butt". But, once you start wanting to view HD content that's heavily compressed, good luck using that old PPC system without massive stuttering.
My point is, this is a FEDERAL crime they're speaking of. This is definitely something that can be handled and prosecuted at the state level. This has zero effect on national security or interstate commerce...
I'll have to disagree here. This does affect interstate commerce. Let's say that I live in Maryland, and I log into myspace.com, which is a server that's hosted by a commercial entity in Los Angeles. If I then proceed to use their commercial service to harass a person who lives in Texas, that certainly qualifies as "interstate commerce".
Not that I agree with the premise of this bill, but I would have to say that this is within the scope of the federal government's designated powers.
I'm in a somewhat similar situation. For me (a techie), the PS3 was a great option. However, I really don't expect my wife to have the patience to learn the interface to watch movies on her own with the PS3. We have a programmable remote which has a nice "Watch Movie" button, but it has no way of turning on the PS3 or controlling it once the movie has started. Having to control the menus with a video game controller is just plain annoying (including having to push the little PS3 button in the middle of the wireless controller just to turn it on).
They could probably use a tip or two from Apple's human interface design team...
As an employee of TransGaming, I take offense to that generalization. I've spent the better part of a year reporting and working around platform limitations for the various drivers that we have to work with. Many of the stability issues that we've had reported to us are present on the PC version of the games as well, and others are due to crashes inside the drivers over which we have no control. The biggest issue, however, is the speed at which OpenGL evolves as compared to DirectX.
With DirectX, Microsoft can go to ATI and NVIDIA and say, "Hey, what do you guys want to do, and we'll make a spec for it." With OpenGL, it's designed by committee which usually leads to a much more well thought out specification, but it takes quite a bit longer to get equivalent hardware features exposed to developers. Plus, individual vendors can pick and choose what they want to support. Since OpenGL is less used by developers, its driver teams are smaller, and there are typically more driver bugs to work out than on Windows.
So, game X comes along and decides that it's going to use this newish method to render shadows. It picks a texture format that is well supported by most hardware on DirectX, then bases much of the engine on that assumption. As an example, many games use 32-bit floating point single channel render targets (D3DFMT_R32F). This is not new anymore for DirectX, and most hardware can handle it just fine. However, that same hardware under OpenGL cannot do so (with the exception of drivers that support the GL_FLOAT_R32_NV format, which is only certain NVIDIA cards, and not at all on Mac OS). So, in order to port the game, if we want to use the same concept of rendering to 32-bit float buffers, we end up having to use GL_RGB32F_ARB and ignoring the 2 extra channels. This now triples the amount of video card RAM that we need to use in order to pull off the exact same technique. If OpenGL simply exposed this functionality from the get-go, we wouldn't be forced to take over so much more RAM. This extra VRAM usage starts adding up, and eventually, we've blown past what the card can handle, and we have to start trimming graphics features from the game in order to get it to run at all.
That was just a single example, but there are many cases like this in the world of OpenGL. Things are starting to converge, but until it becomes the leading graphics interface, there will always be discrepancies like this. Game developers want to use the latest and greatest technologies to write new and pretty games. In order to do this currently, they are forced to use DirectX to get the most benefits from the hardware they want to target.
So, the alternative, as you mentioned, is for game developers to write their own rendering engine based on OpenGL. This is all fine and dandy, but you are quite often left writing multiple different paths for accomplishing the exact same thing. While this is true of DirectX to some extent, the disparity is much greater on OpenGL. One vendor will implement support for a whole range of features, while another will only implement the basics. But that same vendor will have the whole featureset working just fine in their DirectX drivers. Not to mention the great libraries that Microsoft throws in with DirectX to handle everything a game might want (think, texture loading from just about any format, all the math functions you could ever think of, scriptable Effects architecture, Mesh routines, audio, video playing, input, etc.). DirectX (and XNA by extension) has a very large array of features that game developers make wide use of.
So, while in a perfect world, all games could be written using a standard library of features that are cross-platform from the beginning, we are still pretty far from that dream. SDL, ClanLib, and other libraries have all tried and succeeded to some degree, but none of them have the breadth of documentation, sample code, and support that DirectX has. Until that day comes, Cider and Cedega a pretty good fit for filling the void of Mac and Linux gaming. Each game released provides a better engine that the one previously, so as a technology, it will only get better with time. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but then again, what is?
They just released their 8.28.8 drivers a couple of days ago, and they had just released the previous version about 3 weeks before that. So, there are some changes being made at least. Also, with the AMD merge, they are considering opening up the source code to at least portions of the driver, so I personally expect ATI to become a serious player in Linux space in the not-too-distant future.
Normally, I would agree with you. But, seeing as how the Google Toolbar is now included with the latest Sun JVM (even when simply doing their "security updates", you have to manually uncheck the option to download that tool), I'm getting a little leary of the Google monster. It's one thing to offer a service to someone as an option, but quite another to bundle your service with unrelated options as part of "security updates".
Who's to say that Google some day won't decide to enable this feature by default in the future as part of their own security upgrade? We've finally taken the stance of not allowing employees to install ANYTHING on their PCs anymore as a result of such bundling in addition to more and more spyware crap recently. A little more work for us in some aspects, but I think it will save us down the road.
Wow, someone's a bit hostile....
The main problem people have with Cedega is that it forked the original WINE code and has made a decision to never give back to the original WINE community. While this was perfectly legal under the old license, it's still kinda sleazy and rubs people the wrong way. TransGaming has done a lot for getting games to run under Linux, but WINE has done much more over the years. People still have a problem with leechers in any market, and they kinda fit the bill on that.
If you really want to support Open Source, give money to Codeweavers instead of TG. Or, donate your time and help make vanilla WINE better. Or, only play open source games.
He found that paying geeks to code without assigning them managers lead to "shiny geek toys", rather than the product he was actually paying for.
Do ya think? How long did it take him to reach that conclusion?
Well, according to the date on the article, he had reached this conclusion and spoke out about it in 2003... Ubuntu has sure come a long way since 2003. Do you think he might have learned the lesson?:-)
Do you have any idea how Wine works? It loads PE files and calls into Winelib. Linking to winelib and running through wine are functionally identical. The most stark difference between Cygwin and Wine is that Cygwin is functionally-complete, while Wine is not.
But this is only a "Good Thing". This will encourage Google to implement any functions that happen to be missing in Wine. I've been working with and learning the codebase of Wine for the last few months, and it's quite solid. The functions are all laid out into separate DLL subfolders and the debugging support is very thorough. It allows you to figure out why your app isn't working fairly easily by usually telling you which function failed.
The goal of the Wine project is to fully implement the Win32 API on Linux or other Open Source platforms. This has been endlessly debated, but it's generally considered a "Good Thing" as well. This will eventually allow you to run any application that was designed for Windows 95 through XYZ3000 on Linux and eliminate my need for dual-booting to play games. People complain that it will always be playing catch up, but it has really come a long way. The latest version ran Quickbook 99 Professional (the only non-game I had to dual boot for) right out of the box, and I was amazed. When I looked at this project a couple of years ago, it couldn't run anything I threw at it. Most applications you buy today can still be run on Windows 98, and if Wine finishes only Win98 functionality, it will have accomplished tons.
IMHO, getting Google behind the Wine project is spectacular and will only bring about positive things for the Open Source crowd.
The Game. I really liked that movie and thought it would be really cool (if not crazy and scary at times) to be involved in something like that. Might have to give some of these links a try...
Re:Application Programming
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
I use Quickbooks 99, which is the last version that came out before it really started going downhill and integrating IE into every aspect of its being. There are plenty of things that could be done better, but for a very small business operation, it works great. It generates every report I need and is flexible enough to not demand that I enter everything in through an Invoice module (I lease out & buy/sell real estate). Very good double-entry accounting system that focuses on the Accounting piece, and not a fancy user interface.
However, now that I boot into Linux for everything else, I've been looking at alternatives. There's not much out there with a full report selection that I really need (without writing my own Custom Reports). So, I continue to dual boot.
Transparent PNGs still don't work correctly in IE. I haven't tested IE7 Beta yet, but they sure don't with IE6 SP1. See the logo here in the top-right for an example. Works in Firefox & Mozilla, but the "transparent" background shows up as white in IE. What's funny is that Microsoft's own "Photo Editor" (copyright 1998, from the Office suite, I believe) correctly displays and can save the transparency on a PNG image.
This is actually a distribution that I think will find many fans. I have so much hardware I'd like to donate to my church or local teen center but I know wouldn't run WinXP.
You might find that your local church group will be upset by software named Damn Small Linux... Just a little heads up.:-)
To be honest, if you know what you're doing with computers, there's no reason to stick with Windows on your desktop in a Windows environment
Once again, I call BS. I hate Windows problems as much as the next guy, but there are certain applications that only run in Windows environments. In fact, there are MANY applications that only run in certain environments. WINE, as good as it may be, still falls WAY short of making every Windows-based app work successfully on Linux (let alone trying to get it working on a 64-bit machine at all - see Ubuntu 5.10's repository for AMD64).
In my industry, there are no applications designed for any OS but Windows that handle all of the government regulations that we need to comply with. There are a couple of web-based products, but either their quality is very poor, or you are required to store your data on their servers. Unacceptable. At the moment, unless you have a ton of free time to devote to writing all of your software in-house, and you also have the skills to make that software cross-platform, easy to use, etc., some people/companies are forced to remain on Windows.
You also mention rdesktop, which is fine, but you still have to have a Windows terminal server configured to make that happen. Some software doesn't run nicely in a Terminal Server environment, plus, if your users need to access that software, you still have to pay for a Windows File/Print CAL in addition to the Terminal Server CAL, so there's no cost savings that way, either.
I love Linux's philosophy and general framework as much as the next geek, but to make a blanket statement like "There is NO reason to run Windows" is a bit far-fetched. There are plenty of reasons to run Windows, just as there are plenty of reasons to run Linux. It's still a choice, and Windows will remain until every vendor starts designing apps to be cross-platform or specifically targeting Linux/MacOSX, etc. But, for now, Windows is where 90% of their clients are, and they need to pay bills, too. Hopefully, that will continue to change.
I've spent a good portion of the last couple of months working on an open source game, and the people who wrote the underlying library (ClanLib) have been extremely helpful in IRC. It's just a matter of finding the right channel.
First, how could the monitor issue be a "hardware problem", when it works "flawlessly" in Windows? I can duplicate the problem over and over. I've tried the Ubuntu forums to no avail. My problem is that I have both an nVidia on-board video port and an ATI Radeon 7000 PCI card. Apparently with Ubuntu, you can't apt-get install both the nVidia and ATI binary drivers. They are mutually exclusive. Try googling for that problem, and see if you maintain your sanity.
However, Windows XP has yet to complain about this configuration. If I were buying everything over again, I wouldn't have mixed chipsets, but I didn't know that it would be a problem until after I'd already purchased everything and decided to toss on another Linux installation. I REALLY want to use Linux as my primary desktop OS, but every time I try to make the switch for good, some little issue comes up that prevents it from happening. I do use FC3 as a web/email/dns server, and it rarely has problems. So, for server-side things, I strongly encourage Linux adoption (but stay away from bleeding edge stuff).
However, on the desktop front, there are just some issues that still create a high barrier to entry. Most standard configurations are supported out of the box, but once you start tinkering to get x or y component installed, expect the occassional problem.
I'm not saying that Linux exclusively has these issues. I'm just saying that for desktop purposes, I've had more issues with Linux recently than I'm willing to deal with. I know how to deal with them in Windows when they pop up, but the frequency for me has been lower than with Linux. About every 6 months, I give it another shot. There always seems to be *something* that prevents a full overthrow of MS for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Double-click on the video to reach the YouTube page. To the right of the summary (left of the number of views) is a down-chevron icon. Click on that for the full description.
Or, just copy and paste that description here:
View of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones. The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.
Earth Crossers are Red
Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow
All Others are Green
Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.
As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.
At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.
Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates snow no sign that we're running out of undiscovered objects.
Its a great machine and all, but I can't imagine trying to use it on a plane for any real length of time.
That's why I bought a folio-style case with adjustable stand for mine so you can leave it propped up at a reasonable angle, making it a nice hands-free device while watching a movie or reading a book. The popular response to that is "Why not just get a netbook, since that stands up on its own already?!" Well, the iPad just does a lot of things very well that I want it to do, and with a 10+ hour battery life (generally much longer if just reading an ebook), I haven't found a better device yet. Plus, it comfortably fits on the fold-out tray on planes when the person in front of you leans back, unlike my 15" laptop.
Wow, that was the first thing that's actually made me laugh out loud in quite a while. Nicely done!
I run Boxee on a 3 year old Mac Mini, though it's Intel-based, and it works just fine. If you feel like hiring someone to update the code that's necessary for decoding everything on PPC, then feel free. I'm sure they'd be happy to help you out once you provide the resources to get someone "off of his/her non-collective butt". But, once you start wanting to view HD content that's heavily compressed, good luck using that old PPC system without massive stuttering.
My point is, this is a FEDERAL crime they're speaking of. This is definitely something that can be handled and prosecuted at the state level. This has zero effect on national security or interstate commerce...
I'll have to disagree here. This does affect interstate commerce. Let's say that I live in Maryland, and I log into myspace.com, which is a server that's hosted by a commercial entity in Los Angeles. If I then proceed to use their commercial service to harass a person who lives in Texas, that certainly qualifies as "interstate commerce".
Not that I agree with the premise of this bill, but I would have to say that this is within the scope of the federal government's designated powers.
Email has become a victim of its (or is it it's) own success.
It's its. :-)
Yeah, but that remote can't control every other device that I have... I really dislike having more than one remote. What's the point?
I'm in a somewhat similar situation. For me (a techie), the PS3 was a great option. However, I really don't expect my wife to have the patience to learn the interface to watch movies on her own with the PS3. We have a programmable remote which has a nice "Watch Movie" button, but it has no way of turning on the PS3 or controlling it once the movie has started. Having to control the menus with a video game controller is just plain annoying (including having to push the little PS3 button in the middle of the wireless controller just to turn it on).
They could probably use a tip or two from Apple's human interface design team...
As an employee of TransGaming, I take offense to that generalization. I've spent the better part of a year reporting and working around platform limitations for the various drivers that we have to work with. Many of the stability issues that we've had reported to us are present on the PC version of the games as well, and others are due to crashes inside the drivers over which we have no control. The biggest issue, however, is the speed at which OpenGL evolves as compared to DirectX.
With DirectX, Microsoft can go to ATI and NVIDIA and say, "Hey, what do you guys want to do, and we'll make a spec for it." With OpenGL, it's designed by committee which usually leads to a much more well thought out specification, but it takes quite a bit longer to get equivalent hardware features exposed to developers. Plus, individual vendors can pick and choose what they want to support. Since OpenGL is less used by developers, its driver teams are smaller, and there are typically more driver bugs to work out than on Windows.
So, game X comes along and decides that it's going to use this newish method to render shadows. It picks a texture format that is well supported by most hardware on DirectX, then bases much of the engine on that assumption. As an example, many games use 32-bit floating point single channel render targets (D3DFMT_R32F). This is not new anymore for DirectX, and most hardware can handle it just fine. However, that same hardware under OpenGL cannot do so (with the exception of drivers that support the GL_FLOAT_R32_NV format, which is only certain NVIDIA cards, and not at all on Mac OS). So, in order to port the game, if we want to use the same concept of rendering to 32-bit float buffers, we end up having to use GL_RGB32F_ARB and ignoring the 2 extra channels. This now triples the amount of video card RAM that we need to use in order to pull off the exact same technique. If OpenGL simply exposed this functionality from the get-go, we wouldn't be forced to take over so much more RAM. This extra VRAM usage starts adding up, and eventually, we've blown past what the card can handle, and we have to start trimming graphics features from the game in order to get it to run at all.
That was just a single example, but there are many cases like this in the world of OpenGL. Things are starting to converge, but until it becomes the leading graphics interface, there will always be discrepancies like this. Game developers want to use the latest and greatest technologies to write new and pretty games. In order to do this currently, they are forced to use DirectX to get the most benefits from the hardware they want to target.
So, the alternative, as you mentioned, is for game developers to write their own rendering engine based on OpenGL. This is all fine and dandy, but you are quite often left writing multiple different paths for accomplishing the exact same thing. While this is true of DirectX to some extent, the disparity is much greater on OpenGL. One vendor will implement support for a whole range of features, while another will only implement the basics. But that same vendor will have the whole featureset working just fine in their DirectX drivers. Not to mention the great libraries that Microsoft throws in with DirectX to handle everything a game might want (think, texture loading from just about any format, all the math functions you could ever think of, scriptable Effects architecture, Mesh routines, audio, video playing, input, etc.). DirectX (and XNA by extension) has a very large array of features that game developers make wide use of.
So, while in a perfect world, all games could be written using a standard library of features that are cross-platform from the beginning, we are still pretty far from that dream. SDL, ClanLib, and other libraries have all tried and succeeded to some degree, but none of them have the breadth of documentation, sample code, and support that DirectX has. Until that day comes, Cider and Cedega a pretty good fit for filling the void of Mac and Linux gaming. Each game released provides a better engine that the one previously, so as a technology, it will only get better with time. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but then again, what is?
And she said size mattered. Ha! I was just holding back the rest of it in reserve...
ATI's Linux Driver Page.
They just released their 8.28.8 drivers a couple of days ago, and they had just released the previous version about 3 weeks before that. So, there are some changes being made at least. Also, with the AMD merge, they are considering opening up the source code to at least portions of the driver, so I personally expect ATI to become a serious player in Linux space in the not-too-distant future.
Who's to say that Google some day won't decide to enable this feature by default in the future as part of their own security upgrade? We've finally taken the stance of not allowing employees to install ANYTHING on their PCs anymore as a result of such bundling in addition to more and more spyware crap recently. A little more work for us in some aspects, but I think it will save us down the road.
As of the most recent release (yesterday), WINE 0.9.8 has reportedly fixed PS7 to run in Linux (obviously x86 only).
Wow, someone's a bit hostile.... The main problem people have with Cedega is that it forked the original WINE code and has made a decision to never give back to the original WINE community. While this was perfectly legal under the old license, it's still kinda sleazy and rubs people the wrong way. TransGaming has done a lot for getting games to run under Linux, but WINE has done much more over the years. People still have a problem with leechers in any market, and they kinda fit the bill on that. If you really want to support Open Source, give money to Codeweavers instead of TG. Or, donate your time and help make vanilla WINE better. Or, only play open source games.
Do ya think? How long did it take him to reach that conclusion?
Well, according to the date on the article, he had reached this conclusion and spoke out about it in 2003... Ubuntu has sure come a long way since 2003. Do you think he might have learned the lesson? :-)
But this is only a "Good Thing". This will encourage Google to implement any functions that happen to be missing in Wine. I've been working with and learning the codebase of Wine for the last few months, and it's quite solid. The functions are all laid out into separate DLL subfolders and the debugging support is very thorough. It allows you to figure out why your app isn't working fairly easily by usually telling you which function failed.
The goal of the Wine project is to fully implement the Win32 API on Linux or other Open Source platforms. This has been endlessly debated, but it's generally considered a "Good Thing" as well. This will eventually allow you to run any application that was designed for Windows 95 through XYZ3000 on Linux and eliminate my need for dual-booting to play games. People complain that it will always be playing catch up, but it has really come a long way. The latest version ran Quickbook 99 Professional (the only non-game I had to dual boot for) right out of the box, and I was amazed. When I looked at this project a couple of years ago, it couldn't run anything I threw at it. Most applications you buy today can still be run on Windows 98, and if Wine finishes only Win98 functionality, it will have accomplished tons.
IMHO, getting Google behind the Wine project is spectacular and will only bring about positive things for the Open Source crowd.
The Game. I really liked that movie and thought it would be really cool (if not crazy and scary at times) to be involved in something like that. Might have to give some of these links a try...
For C++, there's always ClanLib. :-)
I use Quickbooks 99, which is the last version that came out before it really started going downhill and integrating IE into every aspect of its being. There are plenty of things that could be done better, but for a very small business operation, it works great. It generates every report I need and is flexible enough to not demand that I enter everything in through an Invoice module (I lease out & buy/sell real estate). Very good double-entry accounting system that focuses on the Accounting piece, and not a fancy user interface.
However, now that I boot into Linux for everything else, I've been looking at alternatives. There's not much out there with a full report selection that I really need (without writing my own Custom Reports). So, I continue to dual boot.
Transparent PNGs still don't work correctly in IE. I haven't tested IE7 Beta yet, but they sure don't with IE6 SP1. See the logo here in the top-right for an example. Works in Firefox & Mozilla, but the "transparent" background shows up as white in IE. What's funny is that Microsoft's own "Photo Editor" (copyright 1998, from the Office suite, I believe) correctly displays and can save the transparency on a PNG image.
You might find that your local church group will be upset by software named Damn Small Linux... Just a little heads up. :-)
Once again, I call BS. I hate Windows problems as much as the next guy, but there are certain applications that only run in Windows environments. In fact, there are MANY applications that only run in certain environments. WINE, as good as it may be, still falls WAY short of making every Windows-based app work successfully on Linux (let alone trying to get it working on a 64-bit machine at all - see Ubuntu 5.10's repository for AMD64).
In my industry, there are no applications designed for any OS but Windows that handle all of the government regulations that we need to comply with. There are a couple of web-based products, but either their quality is very poor, or you are required to store your data on their servers. Unacceptable. At the moment, unless you have a ton of free time to devote to writing all of your software in-house, and you also have the skills to make that software cross-platform, easy to use, etc., some people/companies are forced to remain on Windows.
You also mention rdesktop, which is fine, but you still have to have a Windows terminal server configured to make that happen. Some software doesn't run nicely in a Terminal Server environment, plus, if your users need to access that software, you still have to pay for a Windows File/Print CAL in addition to the Terminal Server CAL, so there's no cost savings that way, either.
I love Linux's philosophy and general framework as much as the next geek, but to make a blanket statement like "There is NO reason to run Windows" is a bit far-fetched. There are plenty of reasons to run Windows, just as there are plenty of reasons to run Linux. It's still a choice, and Windows will remain until every vendor starts designing apps to be cross-platform or specifically targeting Linux/MacOSX, etc. But, for now, Windows is where 90% of their clients are, and they need to pay bills, too. Hopefully, that will continue to change.
I've spent a good portion of the last couple of months working on an open source game, and the people who wrote the underlying library (ClanLib) have been extremely helpful in IRC. It's just a matter of finding the right channel.
Didn't you guys JUST HAVE this debate??? Some people aparently don't read weekend articles. :)
First, how could the monitor issue be a "hardware problem", when it works "flawlessly" in Windows? I can duplicate the problem over and over. I've tried the Ubuntu forums to no avail. My problem is that I have both an nVidia on-board video port and an ATI Radeon 7000 PCI card. Apparently with Ubuntu, you can't apt-get install both the nVidia and ATI binary drivers. They are mutually exclusive. Try googling for that problem, and see if you maintain your sanity.
However, Windows XP has yet to complain about this configuration. If I were buying everything over again, I wouldn't have mixed chipsets, but I didn't know that it would be a problem until after I'd already purchased everything and decided to toss on another Linux installation. I REALLY want to use Linux as my primary desktop OS, but every time I try to make the switch for good, some little issue comes up that prevents it from happening. I do use FC3 as a web/email/dns server, and it rarely has problems. So, for server-side things, I strongly encourage Linux adoption (but stay away from bleeding edge stuff).
However, on the desktop front, there are just some issues that still create a high barrier to entry. Most standard configurations are supported out of the box, but once you start tinkering to get x or y component installed, expect the occassional problem.
I'm not saying that Linux exclusively has these issues. I'm just saying that for desktop purposes, I've had more issues with Linux recently than I'm willing to deal with. I know how to deal with them in Windows when they pop up, but the frequency for me has been lower than with Linux. About every 6 months, I give it another shot. There always seems to be *something* that prevents a full overthrow of MS for me.