In India about 5-10% (probably closer to the latter figure by now) PCs are sold with linux pre-installed. Obviously, not all stick with linux. My guess is 2-3%.
Its the same situation in most of Asia. Linux PCs are reportedly selling like hotcakes in Malaysia. In China, it is even more extreme than in India because the number of people actually using linux is negligibly small.
The reason for this is that most home PC users in these countries use pirated software whereas OEMs still have to pay for Windows if they want to install it. The amount of wipe-out-linux-and-install-windows going on in Asia totally dwarfs the number of geeks in the world installing linux on their machines after paying the windows tax.
Slashdotters are living in the 1990s. The new reality is vastly different from what it used to be. The vast majority of linux users are non-geeks. There is no problem at all in getting linux PCs. The number of Linux PCs sold significantly overestimates atual usage.
The reason that linux usage continues to hover around 2% is no longer due to Microsofy bullying, but because Linux is still quite hard for non-geeks to use.
I hereby nominate this to be the next standard in-joke of slashdot. The previous candidate, evil overlords, never really took off in popularity, leaving us in the pathetic situation that every single bad joke available is soooo 2002! I particularly like "but can it run Longhorn?" because it will be funny until Longhorn is out, which is (hopefully) a long long time from now;-)
Not only that, he explicitly suggested setting up an autoreply. Grandparent is the most retarded comment I've seen all day. Irony is that its modded insightful.
Check out dispute resolution and the three revert rule. Its not a silver bullet, but there are guidelines to make it possible to make progress even on highly controversial issues.
Until now, word of mouth. For instance, I have talked about 10 people into participating. Jimbo has been saying advertising is one of the things that needs to be worked on. You can help. Put a link to it on your website for starters. Limited print editions of wikipedia (called "wikireaders") are being tried out; if it takes off perhaps the revenue could be used for advertising. Currently, though, the priority is to buy more hardware and keep the site going.
If it were a random glitch, it should have happened before. But, according to the article, it hasn't. Plus, it comes precisely at a time when attacks against MSIE have peaked. Which makes it highly likely that there is a causation.
IE marketshare going below 60% is never going to happen. But if it goes below 90% that's still a huge win, since no one will be able to make IE-only web pages and get away with it.
I bet a significant reason for the change is the grassroots marketing campaign started by some of the mozilla people a few weeks back. Here's your chance to help out. And don't forget to put the firefox promotional buttons on your site.
Sun's vacillation about open source reminds me of the philosophers in the Hitchhiker's guide.
``But who the devil are you?'' exclaimed an outraged Fook.
``We,'' said Majikthise, ``are Philosophers.''
``Though we may not be,'' said Vroomfondel waving a warning finger at the programmers.
``Yes we are,'' insisted Majikthise. ``We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!''
``What's the problem?'' said Lunkwill.
``I'll tell you what the problem is mate,'' said Majikthise, ``demarcation, that's the problem!''
``We demand,'' yelled Vroomfondel, ``that demarcation may or may not be the problem!''
``You just let the machines get on with the adding up,'' warned Majikthise, ``and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?''
``That's right!'' shouted Vroomfondel, ``we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!''
I think the link you meant to give was the comparison graph between slashdot and wikipedia. Wikipedia passed slashdot in traffic early this year, and the difference has widened since then. By now wikipedia gets twice to three times as much traffic.
Just so that its clear, they haven't broken MD5 in the cryptographic sense; they're merely using the fact that the 8 character password space is small enough if you are restricted to lowercase alphabets and numbers (about 3*10^12) to run the whole thing through a brute force search. The nice thing is that they precompute all the plaintext-ciphertext pairs, which means that the actual cracking step is simply a lookup. Lookup can be greatly speeded up if you're looking up lots of things at once, so the/. effect is a very good thing for them, throughput-wise:-)
The best part is that since IE isn't going to get any significant updates, Mozilla/firefox have a lot of time to catch up in terms of marketshare before Longhorn is widely deployed. It looks more and more likely that the browser wars are coming back!
Pre-empting all the knee jerk posters who will claim that rural Indians need food and water first, let me inform you that India already overproduces food; the problem is that the rural folk don't have purchasing power. And the reason they don't is that they don't have tech, and are therefore totally dependent on the urban/industrial sector. So if they are to get food they need more technology, which is what the Indian gov't is trying to do.
As an Indian, I find the level of cynicism in comments in any article related to India quite surprising (although there are exceptions, like the interview about "onshore insourcing" which was full of positive comments). What's the problem? Is it simply that you're all pissed off about outsourcing and find/. articles about India to be a convenient place to let off some steam? Or are you fundamentally opposed to third world countries doing anything to get out of the muck?
This is absolutely not a troll, its a perfectly serious question.
I cheer your voice of sanity in crowd of ideology and narrowmindedness.
When the windows desktop market was the size of the current linux desktop market (not in terms of percentage, of course, but numbers) there was a huge market for shareware. Why doesn't that market exist for linux today?
One reason could be the technology, which you've addressed, but IMHO the main reason is the economics. A while back, in a newsforge article I analyzed the situation and suggested how to create such a market. I was quite taken aback by the feedback, which consisted mainly of semi-coherent rants saying "shareware is teh evil!!!" and "kill anyone who dares to suggest proprietary software for linux!!" and so on, despite the fact that what I proposed would have the side effect more open source software getting written.
The linux landscape is changing, its going mainstream, and there are a lot linux users who don't like that. I must humbly suggest to such people that you cannot do anything about it, and you should therefore either accept the reality or start moving to another system where you can feel more "l33t".
Help more people switch to mozilla/firefox. Mozilla hacker Blake Ross has started a weekly brainstorming effort for firefox marketing ideas on his weblog. Go thither and chime in. I just did.
I think you missed the point. The submitter feels that if MRAM becomes widespread, you could recover from system crashes more easily because the memory is non volatile. This might lead to programmers becoming lazier and not bothering to fix bugs.
Not that I agree with that viewpoint; just pointing out what I think was meant.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Something like 95% of SCO news hits are from tech sites.
In India about 5-10% (probably closer to the latter figure by now) PCs are sold with linux pre-installed. Obviously, not all stick with linux. My guess is 2-3%.
Its the same situation in most of Asia. Linux PCs are reportedly selling like hotcakes in Malaysia. In China, it is even more extreme than in India because the number of people actually using linux is negligibly small.
The reason for this is that most home PC users in these countries use pirated software whereas OEMs still have to pay for Windows if they want to install it. The amount of wipe-out-linux-and-install-windows going on in Asia totally dwarfs the number of geeks in the world installing linux on their machines after paying the windows tax.
Slashdotters are living in the 1990s. The new reality is vastly different from what it used to be. The vast majority of linux users are non-geeks. There is no problem at all in getting linux PCs. The number of Linux PCs sold significantly overestimates atual usage.
The reason that linux usage continues to hover around 2% is no longer due to Microsofy bullying, but because Linux is still quite hard for non-geeks to use.
I hereby nominate this to be the next standard in-joke of slashdot. The previous candidate, evil overlords, never really took off in popularity, leaving us in the pathetic situation that every single bad joke available is soooo 2002! I particularly like "but can it run Longhorn?" because it will be funny until Longhorn is out, which is (hopefully) a long long time from now ;-)
Not only that, he explicitly suggested setting up an autoreply. Grandparent is the most retarded comment I've seen all day. Irony is that its modded insightful.
I'm not at all surprised by that, considering that Microsoft can't even remember to register their own domain names ;-)
That's OK. After all, cars and vans are more than twice the size of Linux computers.
Check out dispute resolution and the three revert rule. Its not a silver bullet, but there are guidelines to make it possible to make progress even on highly controversial issues.
Until now, word of mouth. For instance, I have talked about 10 people into participating. Jimbo has been saying advertising is one of the things that needs to be worked on. You can help. Put a link to it on your website for starters. Limited print editions of wikipedia (called "wikireaders") are being tried out; if it takes off perhaps the revenue could be used for advertising. Currently, though, the priority is to buy more hardware and keep the site going.
user@domain.com - 17,100.
IE marketshare going below 60% is never going to happen. But if it goes below 90% that's still a huge win, since no one will be able to make IE-only web pages and get away with it.
I bet a significant reason for the change is the grassroots marketing campaign started by some of the mozilla people a few weeks back. Here's your chance to help out. And don't forget to put the firefox promotional buttons on your site.
Sun's vacillation about open source reminds me of the philosophers in the Hitchhiker's guide.
``But who the devil are you?'' exclaimed an outraged Fook.
``We,'' said Majikthise, ``are Philosophers.''
``Though we may not be,'' said Vroomfondel waving a warning finger at the programmers.
``Yes we are,'' insisted Majikthise. ``We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!''
``What's the problem?'' said Lunkwill.
``I'll tell you what the problem is mate,'' said Majikthise, ``demarcation, that's the problem!''
``We demand,'' yelled Vroomfondel, ``that demarcation may or may not be the problem!''
``You just let the machines get on with the adding up,'' warned Majikthise, ``and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?''
``That's right!'' shouted Vroomfondel, ``we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!''
I think the link you meant to give was the comparison graph between slashdot and wikipedia. Wikipedia passed slashdot in traffic early this year, and the difference has widened since then. By now wikipedia gets twice to three times as much traffic.
Just so that its clear, they haven't broken MD5 in the cryptographic sense; they're merely using the fact that the 8 character password space is small enough if you are restricted to lowercase alphabets and numbers (about 3*10^12) to run the whole thing through a brute force search. The nice thing is that they precompute all the plaintext-ciphertext pairs, which means that the actual cracking step is simply a lookup. Lookup can be greatly speeded up if you're looking up lots of things at once, so the /. effect is a very good thing for them, throughput-wise :-)
This is probably obvious, but you can verify it using:
$ echo -n goatse | md5sum
f3789b3c1be47758203f9e8a4d8c6a2a -
So parent is right.
Start up a JVM process and you'll find that it makes incredibly heavy use of resources. That's what he means, incredibly heavily used ;-)
Politics of India.
The best part is that since IE isn't going to get any significant updates, Mozilla/firefox have a lot of time to catch up in terms of marketshare before Longhorn is widely deployed. It looks more and more likely that the browser wars are coming back!
Pre-empting all the knee jerk posters who will claim that rural Indians need food and water first, let me inform you that India already overproduces food; the problem is that the rural folk don't have purchasing power. And the reason they don't is that they don't have tech, and are therefore totally dependent on the urban/industrial sector. So if they are to get food they need more technology, which is what the Indian gov't is trying to do.
This is absolutely not a troll, its a perfectly serious question.
Playboy :) I find the articles informative and accurate. Entertainment value? No, I don't think so.
When the windows desktop market was the size of the current linux desktop market (not in terms of percentage, of course, but numbers) there was a huge market for shareware. Why doesn't that market exist for linux today?
One reason could be the technology, which you've addressed, but IMHO the main reason is the economics. A while back, in a newsforge article I analyzed the situation and suggested how to create such a market. I was quite taken aback by the feedback, which consisted mainly of semi-coherent rants saying "shareware is teh evil!!!" and "kill anyone who dares to suggest proprietary software for linux!!" and so on, despite the fact that what I proposed would have the side effect more open source software getting written.
The linux landscape is changing, its going mainstream, and there are a lot linux users who don't like that. I must humbly suggest to such people that you cannot do anything about it, and you should therefore either accept the reality or start moving to another system where you can feel more "l33t".
*Google shows a slight upswing in Gecko marketshare in the last couple of months
*Firefox 0.9 is an awesome release, and 1.0 promises to be a killer
*Mozilla foundation hires former Netscape marketing guy and also starts major grassroots marketing effort
*MSIE is hit with more security vuln's than ever before
*More and more mainstream tech news outlets start recommending firefox
*Microsoft is sufficiently scared to reconstitute MSIE dev team
Could this be the beginning of another round of browser wars??!!
Help more people switch to mozilla/firefox. Mozilla hacker Blake Ross has started a weekly brainstorming effort for firefox marketing ideas on his weblog. Go thither and chime in. I just did.
Not that I agree with that viewpoint; just pointing out what I think was meant.