...completely unworkable. There are definite "must haves" in terms of software that a solution like this will never be able to account for. You have web applications that rely on IE in order to work. This solution will NEVER solve that problem. You have local executable applications that people need to get their work done on a day-to-day basis. If these applications rely on a specific platform, (Windows, Mac or Linux) you will not be able to solve that. Those are two really big issues that IBM will never solve with this solution.
Personally, I've been able to avoid running Windows at home and at work, but I've also made an investment in time and effort to get things running on Linux the way I like. Some of it was just by moving to the FOSS alternative. Some of it was accomplished with Wine (for some Windows apps). And some of it can only be pulled off in a virtual machine. However, there are still some things even someone like me can't do unless I would actually run Windows. Fortunately I don't have those needs.:) The time invested and the knowledge gained far outweighs the convenience of sticking with a "standard platform". But that's only for me. For others who have needs that can't be met by alternative platforms or don't wish to invest time and energy into adapting, my route doesn't work. IBM's solution likely doesn't apply here either.
By irrelevance, I mean public visibility. And that means "household name". If they don't have that, they don't mean a thing to the average person. They used to have that, so they've never really recovered. The fact that they do backend stuff that no one sees, doesn't mean they are relevant to the consumer. That's my point exactly.
If Apple decided to ditch their OS in flavor of the favor of the month: Adobe Flash, there would be a customer backlash you wouldn't believe. I didn't read the article, nor did I read the blurb up top. The subject said it all: IDIOTIC. Not to mention I don't think Apple would want to be at Adobe's mercy. So there!!;P
I agree. But the average person doesn't make these distinctions. As far as they're concerned Microsoft Office or even Microsoft Word is the operating system. In terms of technical discussions, it would be nice if people would stick 100% to the technical viewpoint. But, even technical folks get distracted and slip into using "OS" to mean a complete kernel + subsystem + desktop environment + applications. Sadly I don't think most people will ever get the distinctions.
I have yet to read the article so my comments should be taken in that light. One of the things I disagree with when I hear about people saying that desktop apps will be replaced with web based apps is that this doesn't apply across the board. Who, in their right mind would do video editing, audio production, 3D modeling and rendering via a web app? Those are legitimate uses for a computer that will never find a home on the web unless we all have guaranteed 1 terabit per second links to the server on which the application is hosted as well as dedicated resources on that server. In short, it ain't gonna happen. Some may argue that these aren't mainstream uses for computers, but you'd be wrong. With Microsoft and Apple packing video and audio editing tools into their OSes, you'd be VERY wrong to say that.
The other thing that people who make such claims seem to assume is that everyone uses the computer just like they do. They assume that all people want is word processing, e-mail and the web. Maybe a little streaming media and music downloads and that's it. Again, they're totally wrong. The computer is such a flexible tool, it would be a shame to put the albatross of the perception of what an average user does with a machine on it from the factory. OSes are here to stay. They might eventually get a different designation, but they will still be OSes at the core from today's mainstream definition (OS kernel + apps to make the kernel useful to a user).
Another reason I would assume the writer is all wet, is that I've seen the future of OSes. In fact I'm living with the future of OSes at home and work. What people think of as an OS, will in the future be completely disassociated from hardware. It will be ephemeral. It will be able to jump from one set of resources to another without the user even perceiving the switch, with all processes in tact. This is what I'm currently doing with the Xen virtualization system. Your VM is only associated with it's storage and subnet. The CPU and RAM that it's being executed on are irrelevant. The VM can be made to jump from one physical host to another without missing a beat and more importantly without your users ever knowing.
Combine that feature with a system where CPU and RAM resources can be partitioned and allocated to or away from these system hopping VMs as well as a robust thin client approach and you see the beauty of this approach. No longer are you forced to give a user a ton of wasted RAM and CPU just to do typical desktop stuff. Now you give them only what they need and allow the system to increase or decrease the resources within parameters and on demand. So the typical user may get 128 Megs for basic use, but if they suddenly need more RAM, the system is configured to allocate their VM up to a max of 512 Megs. Meanwhile another resource intensive user might be off that day. The typical 512 Megs they are allocated is not being used. The lower limit for their VM is 64 Megs at idle. That gives you enough RAM to reallocate to the first user. The system takes care of this for you. The same with CPU time. All on the fly.
That's where OSes are going. Users will still interact with a desktop of a sort, but what happens in the background is going to be hugely different. Look up the info for Intel's HVM and AMD's SVM support (hardware assisted virtualization). They didn't bet the farm on that for nothing. And Longhorn from Microsoft is slated to have a hypervisor to take advantage of HVM and SVM, so Microsoft can't be ignoring this either. In fact they've shown a lot of interest in Xen. So I think the article is likely completely wrong. But, I'll be able to say for sure after I read it. Off to read it now...
I don't think that would hold up in court. Microsoft has more money than you or I do, so any challenge of a EULA is likely to come out in their favor. I'm not willing to risk it.
While I agree in sentiment, and I despise Microsoft, I also believe in playing by the rules. If they say that the cheaper "Home" versions are not allowed to run on VMs, then they have every right to make the user follow suit. It's Microsoft's product and the user does not own it. The user only has permission to use Windows as Microsoft sees fit. The fact that people have, for years, been using Microsoft software and operating systems in ways the Microsoft might not like does not mean that people have the right to use the software the way they do. It simply means that Microsoft has not had enough control over what users do with their products and that is starting to change. I applaud Microsoft for finding ways to regain control over their property and wrest it back from users who think they have more rights than they actually do.
That's also why I refuse to run any Microsoft operating system on my own personal machines with the exception of a VM. That also means, if I want Vista, I will buy the Business or Ultimate edition simply to keep up with the alternative platform. (My main platform is GNU/Linux. The Gentoo distribution) And thanks to the power of virtual machines, even if I have to pay through the nose for one copy of Windows, it is NOT locked to one box. Thanks to the rdesktop client, I can use one copy of Windows on any machine in the house. I recently did this with Xen and Windows XP Pro. The Windows install doesn't exist anywhere other than within a VM. I can use this VM on my widescreen HDTV monitor in the living room. I can use it on my laptop. I can use it on any of my desktops at home. I can even use it at work over my personal VPN thanks to bandwidth compression. I suspect this is what Microsoft doesn't want people doing. The max number of copies I'd ever need to spend money on would be three. One for myself, one for my wife and one for my daughter once she's in school and needs access to Microsoft applications as deemed by the school. But those VMs would be usable on ANY machine in the house or via VPN. So they are not locked to a desktop.
...the difference between geeks, artists and art lovers is clearly illustrated. Those images do not look beatiful to anyone outside of the geek/scientific community. And I'm sure that even within that community there are those who had the same reaction I did. "Hmmm... just looks like the noise filter from Photoshop or the GIMP". Which brings up an interesting question. If we took one of the noise filter outputs and translated it back the other direction, would we wind up with any genomes?;P
If I were Emo I'd just whine about hurt feelings and you not understanding. If this were real life, instead of Slashdot, maybe I'd care enough to beat your ass.;)
...a modification of REFLECTION PORN!!! If there's a way of knowing when they will be photographing your house, you could stick an LCD monitor in your front window displaying a goatse.
This is typical of the shortsighted idiotic human being. Most people just seem incapable of thinking multiple steps ahead. It's a pretty obvious problem that clear thinking would have revealed from the get go. But, as is the human way, it was far easier to just forget about the problem until it interferes. Of course as soon as someone would have suggested that we find a way to clean up the space junk early on, they would have been derided for getting in the way and worrying about petty concerns. Humanity disgusts me.
There are long term benefits to building instead of buying that appear to be lost on today's people:
1. You can live within your means. I make a little over $60,000 a year. My mortgage payments for a $140,000 house with a $50,000 down payment are about $850 a month. I opted for a somewhat conventional loan. However, just yesterday I read about a neighboring county in my state where everyone is fleeing to from my county (too many black people here for some). That county, while experiencing tremendous growth, is also experiencing a huge balooning in poverty. Why? Because, according to the paper, there are dorks who make about what I do, but who thought they could afford a $500,000 house. More than likely they made that assumption because they thought they could play the market, or maybe they got an interest only loan. Who knows? The point is that they're going bankrupt because they couldn't make themselves live within their means. $60,000 is definitely a decent salary. But it doesn't allow you to live carelessly. Spending the money on a Media Center PC is definitely too much of a risk for me. Especially back when they were $4000 (about two years ago). Again, I had a perfectly good, working computer, why should I spend money on another one?
2. The skills you learn when you make yourself live within your means will enhance your life. Take working on your house for example. I did all of the electrical rewiring at my house from top to bottom. The only exception being the service mast and meter socket outside. I left that to a pro. In all, I spent about three weeks tearing out the old wiring, putting in new wiring as well as adding tons of additional outlets in my house built circa 1914. The only remaining original wiring is the first floor lights. Everything else in the house is new. The total cost of materials to do it was under $1000. And this isn't the first time I've done this. I did it in my first home as well for even less because it was smaller. Maybe around $400 max for the old house. With my salary, I COULD have paid to have an electrician do it. I suspect adding 40 new outlets, adding three ceiling fan/lights, switching out a fuse box for a breaker panel, and moving a good number of lights in the bathroom and basement would have put me at around $25,000 or so. Tell me it's not worth it to do it yourself if you have the ability? I know that not everyone can do it, but more people COULD do it than they give themselves credit for. This applies to many things that people waste money on.
3. Once you've spent the time doing some of these things yourself, besides saving money you've made an investment in an additional skill. With that skill comes a decrease in the time spent doing the work. As an example, I point to my wife and the homemade breakfast bundt cake she makes. Back in the 90s, both she and I developed the bad habit of eating either bagels or nutrigrain bars for breakfast. We THOUGHT we were eating "smart". Bagels were supposed to be pretty good for you and nitrigrain bars make that claim too. So we were puzzled as we noticed that we'd still managed to gain a little weight and develop some health problems as we left our 20s and entered our 30s. After some research, it became apparent to me that there were multiple culprits to blame, but the main ones were refined white sugar, white flour, corn syrup and honey. So I experimented and developed a breakfast cake based off of a recipe I found in the Enchanted Broccoli Forest cook book (The Oatmeal Yogurt Cake in that book). My experimentation resulted in a chocolate cake that we eat daily. The cake originally took about an hour and a half to make. But now that it's become a routine, my wife whips the cake out in about fifteen minutes minus the cooking time. The convenience of our old breakfast foods was that you only spent a few minutes or even seconds getting the food ready or out of it's wrapper. However, spending those few minutes maybe once or twice a week to produce a very healthy and tastier optio
That's OK. I'm not trolling either no matter what the idiot mods might think.
I'll give you an example. I have a media center of my own design. I have a laptop that uses WiFi which has a DVD drive in it that doesn't get much use. In order to not clutter up my living room with a PC, I put the media center down in the basement and ran the DVI cable through the wall using a custom faceplate through which the widescreen monitor connects. Of course this means that the DVD drive is also in the basement. I COULD have bought an external DVD drive that uses USB and run that through the wall which was my initial plan. But that would have added extra expense.
I also could have bought a dedicated DVD player and connected it to my monitor's component ins, but I want to have an integrated media center experience without external devices. So after some research, I found that I could use the network block device functionality of the Linux kernel to export the DVD device (not a file share but an eactual network device export) to the media center. In doing that the media center could then play DVDs using the laptop that happens to live on the end table in the same room with the monitor.
With a little work (some kernel recompiles on both the laptop and the media center, installation of a userspace program to do the export and import, and some custom scripting to make it automatic) I now have a system where you just pop a DVD into the laptop, wait for a few seconds and then the DVD starts playing on the HD monitor via WiFi. No file sharing to slow things down. No horrible kludges like playing the DVD on the laptop and then sending the image over. The performance is no different than watching on an internal DVD drive. But most importantly for me, NO EXTRA MONETARY EXPENSE.
I COULD have just bought a Windows Media Center extender or an Xbox (I'm not a gamer) and a new PC with Windows Media Center (or today Vista Ultimate), but that would have cost me money that I can't afford. I already had a perfectly good DVD drive in the laptop that was mostly unused. I already had a PC (A P3 that's probably not capable of running Windows XP all that well for media applications) that I was using for media center functions. I didn't want to buy new hardware and software if I already had perfectly good hardware and could find a software based solution.
If I were running with Windows XP (which was current when I put this stuff together), I wouldn't have been able to pull this off as well or make it so seamless. Sure, maybe I could share out the DVD drive from the latop and map it on a Windows XP box and hope that my player would play it. Or I could have tried to work with the Windows port of the VLC client to stream the DVD via the network. But, frankly those sound like kludges to me. I think it's much better and more stylish to take the block device itself and make it appear to be a local block device which any application can use.
What I've found in dealing with both OSes over the years is that, hands down, Linux allows me (a non-coder) to build custom solutions that would require a LOT more work on Windows to accomplish. Or, if I took the Joe Windows User route, I'd just have to spend a lot more money on hardware and software and be on the constant upgrade path if I wanted new and better. So that's one example to start with.
...as soon as profit becomes the motivation in ANY area of life, the quality of that area decreases tremendously. In the case of Microsoft and the internet, this is quite obvious. Sure, they are financially successful, but they have as yet to prove themselves on the technical front. There are many things that I cannot do in Windows, that I can do on alternate platforms. To me, it's all about technical prowess and not popularity or financial gain. From that viewpoint, Microsoft is mediocre at best.
Just to give you a few analogies. Back before the web was what it is today, there was a time when Usenet was where you went for "community" and information. Back then, you could be somewhat more trusting that the person on the other side of the wire was what they said they were and the information was valid. You were interacting with the "best of the best" in the various scientific fields. At that time, the internet was not what one would consider a financial success. But it was much more successful as a tool for self education and research. (Hell, I got a response from Stephen J. Hawking that I was allowed to use in a college paper at a state school in the U.S. How cool is that?)
So why were things so much better back then? There was a natural filter in place. A barrier to entry. You HAD to be more intelligent back then to get on the net. You had to be able to deal with your computer at a deeper level than just pointing and clicking. Or, you had to be a member of an organization that was either military, research or academic. There was a silent selection process going on that ensured that people would be of a certain level of intelligence to be able to join in. As soon as Netscape was released to the Masses and companies like AOL switched from their private proprietary networks to the internet, that filter started to dissolve.
Today, ANY idiot with enough cash or access to a computer at work can jump online and post anything he or she wants to. They can be as "authoritative" as they want. Why did this happen? Because the true point of the internet (free exchange of information, ideas, collaboration on culturally and globally beneficial non-profit projects) was lost.
Instead it became a business tool to be used by one tech company to try and beat another one to death with. It became a pitched battle to be fought to the financial death of your competitor. So, Joe Dumbass was allowed onto the internet to cultivate and share his collection of porn as well as try and "hook up" with "hot chix". Jane Dumbass was allowed to get online and post her mixed photo album of baby photos, various lovers and erotic photos to say, "This is me and I rule. I take your man. I love my baby's daddy". The businesses don't care as long as they get their monthly fee paid. Yea profit motive. Way to go there. Taking what could have been a great way to augment collevtive intellience and once again (as with radio and television) and slowly turning it into another brain sucking avenue for profits and consumerism.
There was even an early time on the web where a search in Altavista would give you decent results on various topics without providing many links to companies that sell related products. But today, no matter which search engine you use, various searches inevitably turn up a lot of dreck that is meant to convince you to BUY a solution to a problem instead of BUILD one. It's no wonder that I've resorted to using Wikipedia when I have questions about things as well as AUGMENTING the information with the subscription databases that my public library provides to it's members for free. At least following those routes, one can avoid the McNet for the most part.
What is it with people today who act like working in an office in corporate America is filled with intrigue and tales of espionage? Read this now: CORPORATE AMERICAN OFFICES ARE DULL AS HELL. There are no real secrets because the monkeys who work in these glorified cages have no real power of any kind. They have no knowledge of any value. They are basically button pushers who want to feel important after watching fantasies like Fox television's 24 series. Trust me, I've seen it all from a pretty priveledged position and I can tell you that there's nothing to see. Nothing to worry about when you look at the cubicle farms. The people who really need to be watched carefully are the people doing the watching.
Yet another reason why I am right in running my own mail server. I've done this since I got screwed over by my old ISP in 2000. I will NEVER let anyone host my mail ever again. It's too precious to trust to idiot like the folks at Lycos. And to add to that, I finally have a reason to not bother using Lycos for anything ever again. (I used to use their People Find) Goodbye Lycos. Hope you and that asshole manager rot in hell with maggots infesting your anus and genitalia. No one screws with Frank Lazarro! NO ONE!
I didn't blame the IEEE. I blame the manufacturers who screw with the standard laboring under the illusion that obscuring their technology with artificial restrictions will cause them to dominate over their competitors. In reality, if they actually took a leap of faith and made something based on an open standard that "just worked" and made sure that certain proprietary OS vendors didn't interfere with them, I think you'd have someone who would dominate the market in a good way.
It's those terrorist MySQL developing jobless hippies. Look at what Paul Reiser did. I'm telling you open sores rots the mind and produces corrupted fruit with corrupted intentions.
OK smartass... try and get a Broadcom WiFi device working in Linux WITHOUT NDIS Wrapper. What's that you say? You can't!? Score one for me and zero for the kid in the dunce cap. Trust me, I've been doing this for a while and am a hardcore Linux user with only one Windows system in a virtual machine at home. I know what I am talking about. The IEEE standard has nothing to do with the actual implementation as Broadcom and others continue to prove by not releasing the specs on their hardware.
I'm an IT guy. I assume that most readers of Slashdot are either IT folks or just like technology. Business people who would read here who have no interest in technology are not qualified to comment on Linux. And I don't mean that as an insult. They aren't even qualified to talk about Windows or MS Office because they don't implement it. And that's what this article is really talking about: implementation. If you get the implementation right for the environment no matter what platform you're using, ALL OSes are "ready for the desktop".
If you're in an environment where a character based application will let you get your work done and you're working on the business side of things, the OS or apps don't matter. You could easily set up offices on any *nix platform today as long as you're a competent IT person. The target of my previous post is IT people who claim that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. It isn't if you aren't willing to set it up. Windows takes just as much effort, but if you're an Windows admin in an IT department, it's likely that you've developed a core set of procedures that make your life easy when deploying desktops. The same can be applied to any Linux distribution today.
I have a VERY strong background in Windows, so I'm uniquely qualified to comment on this. The time to build a workable Windows desktop rollout may be shorter than a comparable Linux desktop rollout, but the ease of deployment after the fact puts Linux in the lead. If you've got money to burn, go with Windows. If you don't mind the intial time investment and you can use all the apps that Linux provides to get your work done, go with Linux. Hell, there are even some "must have" Windows apps where I work that I've simply set up to run in Wine. Not too much effort to expend to be free of the lackluster performance and environment the Windows provides... But if you have no choice, there's no reason to run Windows and be happy with it either. Just don't tell me I should do the same.
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...completely unworkable. There are definite "must haves" in terms of software that a solution like this will never be able to account for. You have web applications that rely on IE in order to work. This solution will NEVER solve that problem. You have local executable applications that people need to get their work done on a day-to-day basis. If these applications rely on a specific platform, (Windows, Mac or Linux) you will not be able to solve that. Those are two really big issues that IBM will never solve with this solution.
:) The time invested and the knowledge gained far outweighs the convenience of sticking with a "standard platform". But that's only for me. For others who have needs that can't be met by alternative platforms or don't wish to invest time and energy into adapting, my route doesn't work. IBM's solution likely doesn't apply here either.
Personally, I've been able to avoid running Windows at home and at work, but I've also made an investment in time and effort to get things running on Linux the way I like. Some of it was just by moving to the FOSS alternative. Some of it was accomplished with Wine (for some Windows apps). And some of it can only be pulled off in a virtual machine. However, there are still some things even someone like me can't do unless I would actually run Windows. Fortunately I don't have those needs.
Like I said, nice idea, but...
And you fell for it too. And had to post AC to make sure you didn't smear your "good name". Priceless.
By irrelevance, I mean public visibility. And that means "household name". If they don't have that, they don't mean a thing to the average person. They used to have that, so they've never really recovered. The fact that they do backend stuff that no one sees, doesn't mean they are relevant to the consumer. That's my point exactly.
They might recover and not make the same mistakes again, but they also become largely irrelevant. IBM and Nontendo are perfect examples.
If Apple decided to ditch their OS in flavor of the favor of the month: Adobe Flash, there would be a customer backlash you wouldn't believe. I didn't read the article, nor did I read the blurb up top. The subject said it all: IDIOTIC. Not to mention I don't think Apple would want to be at Adobe's mercy. So there!! ;P
I agree. But the average person doesn't make these distinctions. As far as they're concerned Microsoft Office or even Microsoft Word is the operating system. In terms of technical discussions, it would be nice if people would stick 100% to the technical viewpoint. But, even technical folks get distracted and slip into using "OS" to mean a complete kernel + subsystem + desktop environment + applications. Sadly I don't think most people will ever get the distinctions.
I have yet to read the article so my comments should be taken in that light. One of the things I disagree with when I hear about people saying that desktop apps will be replaced with web based apps is that this doesn't apply across the board. Who, in their right mind would do video editing, audio production, 3D modeling and rendering via a web app? Those are legitimate uses for a computer that will never find a home on the web unless we all have guaranteed 1 terabit per second links to the server on which the application is hosted as well as dedicated resources on that server. In short, it ain't gonna happen. Some may argue that these aren't mainstream uses for computers, but you'd be wrong. With Microsoft and Apple packing video and audio editing tools into their OSes, you'd be VERY wrong to say that.
The other thing that people who make such claims seem to assume is that everyone uses the computer just like they do. They assume that all people want is word processing, e-mail and the web. Maybe a little streaming media and music downloads and that's it. Again, they're totally wrong. The computer is such a flexible tool, it would be a shame to put the albatross of the perception of what an average user does with a machine on it from the factory. OSes are here to stay. They might eventually get a different designation, but they will still be OSes at the core from today's mainstream definition (OS kernel + apps to make the kernel useful to a user).
Another reason I would assume the writer is all wet, is that I've seen the future of OSes. In fact I'm living with the future of OSes at home and work. What people think of as an OS, will in the future be completely disassociated from hardware. It will be ephemeral. It will be able to jump from one set of resources to another without the user even perceiving the switch, with all processes in tact. This is what I'm currently doing with the Xen virtualization system. Your VM is only associated with it's storage and subnet. The CPU and RAM that it's being executed on are irrelevant. The VM can be made to jump from one physical host to another without missing a beat and more importantly without your users ever knowing.
Combine that feature with a system where CPU and RAM resources can be partitioned and allocated to or away from these system hopping VMs as well as a robust thin client approach and you see the beauty of this approach. No longer are you forced to give a user a ton of wasted RAM and CPU just to do typical desktop stuff. Now you give them only what they need and allow the system to increase or decrease the resources within parameters and on demand. So the typical user may get 128 Megs for basic use, but if they suddenly need more RAM, the system is configured to allocate their VM up to a max of 512 Megs. Meanwhile another resource intensive user might be off that day. The typical 512 Megs they are allocated is not being used. The lower limit for their VM is 64 Megs at idle. That gives you enough RAM to reallocate to the first user. The system takes care of this for you. The same with CPU time. All on the fly.
That's where OSes are going. Users will still interact with a desktop of a sort, but what happens in the background is going to be hugely different. Look up the info for Intel's HVM and AMD's SVM support (hardware assisted virtualization). They didn't bet the farm on that for nothing. And Longhorn from Microsoft is slated to have a hypervisor to take advantage of HVM and SVM, so Microsoft can't be ignoring this either. In fact they've shown a lot of interest in Xen. So I think the article is likely completely wrong. But, I'll be able to say for sure after I read it. Off to read it now...
I don't think that would hold up in court. Microsoft has more money than you or I do, so any challenge of a EULA is likely to come out in their favor. I'm not willing to risk it.
While I agree in sentiment, and I despise Microsoft, I also believe in playing by the rules. If they say that the cheaper "Home" versions are not allowed to run on VMs, then they have every right to make the user follow suit. It's Microsoft's product and the user does not own it. The user only has permission to use Windows as Microsoft sees fit. The fact that people have, for years, been using Microsoft software and operating systems in ways the Microsoft might not like does not mean that people have the right to use the software the way they do. It simply means that Microsoft has not had enough control over what users do with their products and that is starting to change. I applaud Microsoft for finding ways to regain control over their property and wrest it back from users who think they have more rights than they actually do.
That's also why I refuse to run any Microsoft operating system on my own personal machines with the exception of a VM. That also means, if I want Vista, I will buy the Business or Ultimate edition simply to keep up with the alternative platform. (My main platform is GNU/Linux. The Gentoo distribution) And thanks to the power of virtual machines, even if I have to pay through the nose for one copy of Windows, it is NOT locked to one box. Thanks to the rdesktop client, I can use one copy of Windows on any machine in the house. I recently did this with Xen and Windows XP Pro. The Windows install doesn't exist anywhere other than within a VM. I can use this VM on my widescreen HDTV monitor in the living room. I can use it on my laptop. I can use it on any of my desktops at home. I can even use it at work over my personal VPN thanks to bandwidth compression. I suspect this is what Microsoft doesn't want people doing. The max number of copies I'd ever need to spend money on would be three. One for myself, one for my wife and one for my daughter once she's in school and needs access to Microsoft applications as deemed by the school. But those VMs would be usable on ANY machine in the house or via VPN. So they are not locked to a desktop.
...the difference between geeks, artists and art lovers is clearly illustrated. Those images do not look beatiful to anyone outside of the geek/scientific community. And I'm sure that even within that community there are those who had the same reaction I did. "Hmmm... just looks like the noise filter from Photoshop or the GIMP". Which brings up an interesting question. If we took one of the noise filter outputs and translated it back the other direction, would we wind up with any genomes? ;P
If I were Emo I'd just whine about hurt feelings and you not understanding. If this were real life, instead of Slashdot, maybe I'd care enough to beat your ass. ;)
...a modification of REFLECTION PORN!!! If there's a way of knowing when they will be photographing your house, you could stick an LCD monitor in your front window displaying a goatse.
You've made the mistake of assuming I am human. I am but a simple shell script. HAND.
This is typical of the shortsighted idiotic human being. Most people just seem incapable of thinking multiple steps ahead. It's a pretty obvious problem that clear thinking would have revealed from the get go. But, as is the human way, it was far easier to just forget about the problem until it interferes. Of course as soon as someone would have suggested that we find a way to clean up the space junk early on, they would have been derided for getting in the way and worrying about petty concerns. Humanity disgusts me.
There are long term benefits to building instead of buying that appear to be lost on today's people:
1. You can live within your means. I make a little over $60,000 a year. My mortgage payments for a $140,000 house with a $50,000 down payment are about $850 a month. I opted for a somewhat conventional loan. However, just yesterday I read about a neighboring county in my state where everyone is fleeing to from my county (too many black people here for some). That county, while experiencing tremendous growth, is also experiencing a huge balooning in poverty. Why? Because, according to the paper, there are dorks who make about what I do, but who thought they could afford a $500,000 house. More than likely they made that assumption because they thought they could play the market, or maybe they got an interest only loan. Who knows? The point is that they're going bankrupt because they couldn't make themselves live within their means. $60,000 is definitely a decent salary. But it doesn't allow you to live carelessly. Spending the money on a Media Center PC is definitely too much of a risk for me. Especially back when they were $4000 (about two years ago). Again, I had a perfectly good, working computer, why should I spend money on another one?
2. The skills you learn when you make yourself live within your means will enhance your life. Take working on your house for example. I did all of the electrical rewiring at my house from top to bottom. The only exception being the service mast and meter socket outside. I left that to a pro. In all, I spent about three weeks tearing out the old wiring, putting in new wiring as well as adding tons of additional outlets in my house built circa 1914. The only remaining original wiring is the first floor lights. Everything else in the house is new. The total cost of materials to do it was under $1000. And this isn't the first time I've done this. I did it in my first home as well for even less because it was smaller. Maybe around $400 max for the old house. With my salary, I COULD have paid to have an electrician do it. I suspect adding 40 new outlets, adding three ceiling fan/lights, switching out a fuse box for a breaker panel, and moving a good number of lights in the bathroom and basement would have put me at around $25,000 or so. Tell me it's not worth it to do it yourself if you have the ability? I know that not everyone can do it, but more people COULD do it than they give themselves credit for. This applies to many things that people waste money on.
3. Once you've spent the time doing some of these things yourself, besides saving money you've made an investment in an additional skill. With that skill comes a decrease in the time spent doing the work. As an example, I point to my wife and the homemade breakfast bundt cake she makes. Back in the 90s, both she and I developed the bad habit of eating either bagels or nutrigrain bars for breakfast. We THOUGHT we were eating "smart". Bagels were supposed to be pretty good for you and nitrigrain bars make that claim too. So we were puzzled as we noticed that we'd still managed to gain a little weight and develop some health problems as we left our 20s and entered our 30s. After some research, it became apparent to me that there were multiple culprits to blame, but the main ones were refined white sugar, white flour, corn syrup and honey. So I experimented and developed a breakfast cake based off of a recipe I found in the Enchanted Broccoli Forest cook book (The Oatmeal Yogurt Cake in that book). My experimentation resulted in a chocolate cake that we eat daily. The cake originally took about an hour and a half to make. But now that it's become a routine, my wife whips the cake out in about fifteen minutes minus the cooking time. The convenience of our old breakfast foods was that you only spent a few minutes or even seconds getting the food ready or out of it's wrapper. However, spending those few minutes maybe once or twice a week to produce a very healthy and tastier optio
That's OK. I'm not trolling either no matter what the idiot mods might think.
I'll give you an example. I have a media center of my own design. I have a laptop that uses WiFi which has a DVD drive in it that doesn't get much use. In order to not clutter up my living room with a PC, I put the media center down in the basement and ran the DVI cable through the wall using a custom faceplate through which the widescreen monitor connects. Of course this means that the DVD drive is also in the basement. I COULD have bought an external DVD drive that uses USB and run that through the wall which was my initial plan. But that would have added extra expense.
I also could have bought a dedicated DVD player and connected it to my monitor's component ins, but I want to have an integrated media center experience without external devices. So after some research, I found that I could use the network block device functionality of the Linux kernel to export the DVD device (not a file share but an eactual network device export) to the media center. In doing that the media center could then play DVDs using the laptop that happens to live on the end table in the same room with the monitor.
With a little work (some kernel recompiles on both the laptop and the media center, installation of a userspace program to do the export and import, and some custom scripting to make it automatic) I now have a system where you just pop a DVD into the laptop, wait for a few seconds and then the DVD starts playing on the HD monitor via WiFi. No file sharing to slow things down. No horrible kludges like playing the DVD on the laptop and then sending the image over. The performance is no different than watching on an internal DVD drive. But most importantly for me, NO EXTRA MONETARY EXPENSE.
I COULD have just bought a Windows Media Center extender or an Xbox (I'm not a gamer) and a new PC with Windows Media Center (or today Vista Ultimate), but that would have cost me money that I can't afford. I already had a perfectly good DVD drive in the laptop that was mostly unused. I already had a PC (A P3 that's probably not capable of running Windows XP all that well for media applications) that I was using for media center functions. I didn't want to buy new hardware and software if I already had perfectly good hardware and could find a software based solution.
If I were running with Windows XP (which was current when I put this stuff together), I wouldn't have been able to pull this off as well or make it so seamless. Sure, maybe I could share out the DVD drive from the latop and map it on a Windows XP box and hope that my player would play it. Or I could have tried to work with the Windows port of the VLC client to stream the DVD via the network. But, frankly those sound like kludges to me. I think it's much better and more stylish to take the block device itself and make it appear to be a local block device which any application can use.
What I've found in dealing with both OSes over the years is that, hands down, Linux allows me (a non-coder) to build custom solutions that would require a LOT more work on Windows to accomplish. Or, if I took the Joe Windows User route, I'd just have to spend a lot more money on hardware and software and be on the constant upgrade path if I wanted new and better. So that's one example to start with.
...as soon as profit becomes the motivation in ANY area of life, the quality of that area decreases tremendously. In the case of Microsoft and the internet, this is quite obvious. Sure, they are financially successful, but they have as yet to prove themselves on the technical front. There are many things that I cannot do in Windows, that I can do on alternate platforms. To me, it's all about technical prowess and not popularity or financial gain. From that viewpoint, Microsoft is mediocre at best.
Just to give you a few analogies. Back before the web was what it is today, there was a time when Usenet was where you went for "community" and information. Back then, you could be somewhat more trusting that the person on the other side of the wire was what they said they were and the information was valid. You were interacting with the "best of the best" in the various scientific fields. At that time, the internet was not what one would consider a financial success. But it was much more successful as a tool for self education and research. (Hell, I got a response from Stephen J. Hawking that I was allowed to use in a college paper at a state school in the U.S. How cool is that?)
So why were things so much better back then? There was a natural filter in place. A barrier to entry. You HAD to be more intelligent back then to get on the net. You had to be able to deal with your computer at a deeper level than just pointing and clicking. Or, you had to be a member of an organization that was either military, research or academic. There was a silent selection process going on that ensured that people would be of a certain level of intelligence to be able to join in. As soon as Netscape was released to the Masses and companies like AOL switched from their private proprietary networks to the internet, that filter started to dissolve.
Today, ANY idiot with enough cash or access to a computer at work can jump online and post anything he or she wants to. They can be as "authoritative" as they want. Why did this happen? Because the true point of the internet (free exchange of information, ideas, collaboration on culturally and globally beneficial non-profit projects) was lost.
Instead it became a business tool to be used by one tech company to try and beat another one to death with. It became a pitched battle to be fought to the financial death of your competitor. So, Joe Dumbass was allowed onto the internet to cultivate and share his collection of porn as well as try and "hook up" with "hot chix". Jane Dumbass was allowed to get online and post her mixed photo album of baby photos, various lovers and erotic photos to say, "This is me and I rule. I take your man. I love my baby's daddy". The businesses don't care as long as they get their monthly fee paid. Yea profit motive. Way to go there. Taking what could have been a great way to augment collevtive intellience and once again (as with radio and television) and slowly turning it into another brain sucking avenue for profits and consumerism.
There was even an early time on the web where a search in Altavista would give you decent results on various topics without providing many links to companies that sell related products. But today, no matter which search engine you use, various searches inevitably turn up a lot of dreck that is meant to convince you to BUY a solution to a problem instead of BUILD one. It's no wonder that I've resorted to using Wikipedia when I have questions about things as well as AUGMENTING the information with the subscription databases that my public library provides to it's members for free. At least following those routes, one can avoid the McNet for the most part.
(Arms flailing in the air wildly)
What is it with people today who act like working in an office in corporate America is filled with intrigue and tales of espionage? Read this now: CORPORATE AMERICAN OFFICES ARE DULL AS HELL. There are no real secrets because the monkeys who work in these glorified cages have no real power of any kind. They have no knowledge of any value. They are basically button pushers who want to feel important after watching fantasies like Fox television's 24 series. Trust me, I've seen it all from a pretty priveledged position and I can tell you that there's nothing to see. Nothing to worry about when you look at the cubicle farms. The people who really need to be watched carefully are the people doing the watching.
Come on!!! Troll? Hasn't ANYONE seen Slaughterhouse 5? What are are you? Barbarians?
Yet another reason why I am right in running my own mail server. I've done this since I got screwed over by my old ISP in 2000. I will NEVER let anyone host my mail ever again. It's too precious to trust to idiot like the folks at Lycos. And to add to that, I finally have a reason to not bother using Lycos for anything ever again. (I used to use their People Find) Goodbye Lycos. Hope you and that asshole manager rot in hell with maggots infesting your anus and genitalia. No one screws with Frank Lazarro! NO ONE!
I didn't blame the IEEE. I blame the manufacturers who screw with the standard laboring under the illusion that obscuring their technology with artificial restrictions will cause them to dominate over their competitors. In reality, if they actually took a leap of faith and made something based on an open standard that "just worked" and made sure that certain proprietary OS vendors didn't interfere with them, I think you'd have someone who would dominate the market in a good way.
Put on your PC flak jackets Vista users...
It's those terrorist MySQL developing jobless hippies. Look at what Paul Reiser did. I'm telling you open sores rots the mind and produces corrupted fruit with corrupted intentions.
OK smartass... try and get a Broadcom WiFi device working in Linux WITHOUT NDIS Wrapper. What's that you say? You can't!? Score one for me and zero for the kid in the dunce cap. Trust me, I've been doing this for a while and am a hardcore Linux user with only one Windows system in a virtual machine at home. I know what I am talking about. The IEEE standard has nothing to do with the actual implementation as Broadcom and others continue to prove by not releasing the specs on their hardware.
...it'll be Windows based only. The non-MS crowd will have to reverse engineer it in a country that doesn't make that illegal.
I'm an IT guy. I assume that most readers of Slashdot are either IT folks or just like technology. Business people who would read here who have no interest in technology are not qualified to comment on Linux. And I don't mean that as an insult. They aren't even qualified to talk about Windows or MS Office because they don't implement it. And that's what this article is really talking about: implementation. If you get the implementation right for the environment no matter what platform you're using, ALL OSes are "ready for the desktop".
If you're in an environment where a character based application will let you get your work done and you're working on the business side of things, the OS or apps don't matter. You could easily set up offices on any *nix platform today as long as you're a competent IT person. The target of my previous post is IT people who claim that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. It isn't if you aren't willing to set it up. Windows takes just as much effort, but if you're an Windows admin in an IT department, it's likely that you've developed a core set of procedures that make your life easy when deploying desktops. The same can be applied to any Linux distribution today.
I have a VERY strong background in Windows, so I'm uniquely qualified to comment on this. The time to build a workable Windows desktop rollout may be shorter than a comparable Linux desktop rollout, but the ease of deployment after the fact puts Linux in the lead. If you've got money to burn, go with Windows. If you don't mind the intial time investment and you can use all the apps that Linux provides to get your work done, go with Linux. Hell, there are even some "must have" Windows apps where I work that I've simply set up to run in Wine. Not too much effort to expend to be free of the lackluster performance and environment the Windows provides... But if you have no choice, there's no reason to run Windows and be happy with it either. Just don't tell me I should do the same.