intellectual honesty suggests that the entire computer part of the company suffers from intellectual silliness. MacBook Pro with a huge number of dongles hanging off of it is not a design win for me the consumer. Overpriced hardware that doesn't appear to be any better than the competition. Suggesting that not having ports to connect devices and a lack of simple things like headphone jacks is "brave". IMHO this makes the buyer a ninny!
Whats amazing to me is that all of these ISP's would make customers happy and grow their business if they used the money from the boat load of lawyer fees they are going to have to pony up to expand their networks. You want me to pay more, OK give me something more! Remember when business was about making a profit for stockholders and keeping customers and employee's happy. What the hell happened! It's weird, this seems to be one of the various businesses that keep shrinking their level of service and wanting more money for it. The biggest issue is in most places there exists no choice so you have to put up with it. Sucks:-(
Oh that's easy. We are apathetic and generally disinterested in politics until it affects us. Our representatives do not represent the people who elected them in general. I think if you were to randomly go up to anyone is the US and ask who represents them in congress and the Senate most wouldn't have a clue. It cost so much money to get elected that its become common place for companies and special interest groups to pay for said elected official. In my mind I share you're opinion in that these "contributors" want something for their support.
Has anyone in here heard of bizspark. I used it and I like it. Really does give you an opportunity to use just about every dev tool MS has and addresses the issue of laying out a lot of money to try out tools and dev platforms.
amorphous-codeworks.com
Well, here is the thing. I think most people understand that a computer has become an appliance. It's a machine to gather information, publish information, and a simple communications tool. Most people have come to know windows because it's loaded on every factory made box everywhere. I think that people want to spend time doing the things they do on a computer and not to learn about the machine or software they are using. It's all about being productive. *nix is a vastly more powerful OS in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it. The vast majority of people going to Wal-Mart to buy a computer don't care about this. The only way to make this customer happy is to emulate what they do know (outlook express, IE, Menu's, Office). If you can't do this 80% of the people buying your machine are going to be some what unhappy. Will some people learn a new way to do things, yes. However, even after they learn this still might not be enough as these are the same people who will likely become frustrated and have someone load windows back on their machine. If equipment manufacturers want to move away from windows they will need to provide a distro that looks and feels like windows and I haven't seen any distro that has accomplished this.
Well, can't wait to pay for midori monthly, then office monthly, VS monthly, maybe media services monthly. MS will make 10 times the money they do now off software that you probably already have. Best part is every version that comes out we rush to get because we think it is going to be better.We haven't learned to use most of the functionality of the software version you are replacing.
Everything you said above is correct but there is a problem here. To win playing the "selling the cheap" CPU you have to have the manufacturing to carry out this plan. You have have to sell a lot of cheap CPU's to pay the bills. FABS aren't cheap and AMD doesn't have enough of them to compete with Intel to begin with. IMHO AMD's route to survival is to massively outsource manufacturing to every purplay FAB that will take their stuff. AMD already outsources or has manufacturing agreements with Fujitsu and TSMC and I am sure there are others.
I agree fully.... Also, I love linux and use it as a sever OS. Web server, mail server, FTP server... it's awesome. People, it's time to be honest... Linux is a miserable desktop OS for the would be windows switch over user. No software in a box at wal-mart, no generally accepted package management between different distributions. I talk shop with other linux admins and they keep saying " users will just have to learn a lot of new stuff", well what most users want to do is use their machines and not fuss over them. Until there is a standard way to do a lot of stuff or there is one linux distro, linux will NEVER be a good choise for the base desktop user.
New releases come out every 6 months. Basically as soon as a new release comes out fedora is through with the old one. This IMHO makes fedora totally worthless for so many reasons. I have used Fedora from core 2 to Fedora 8 and it's a good distro but this upgrade cycle is what has made me leave Fedora.
Red Hat never understood the Linux desktop market, and apparently never will.
RH9 really pissed me off. Even though I use Fedora and not for desktop use I don't want to go through switching to something else on several machines when RH decides that RH desktop doesn't taste good again and we all get spit out. Loyalty was important to me as I wanted to keep running RH, but apparently it was a one way street.
I believe what your saying is essentially the truth. However, companies claiming that they can't find employee's are lying. Perhaps just telling the truth would be a good and refreshing idea.
We have stock holder and they require we spend less money on labor and maximize profits.
Hiring help in the US is too costly and we can find qualified help elsewhere at half what we pay a US employee.
Labor laws in other countries are often cheaper to comply with than in the US.
Paying for health care for our US employee's costs us up 30% above the basic wage scale we have offered.
I don't believe for a second that you find a better employee outside the US but you can definitely find a cheaper one. The point you make about taxes I have to disagree with. I run a company and the tax issue is convoluted at best. There are many ways to make more money and make it look like your not. So, in essence we need tax reform and a health care system that doesn't put the entire burden of health care on companies. Perhaps then we could even the playing field a bit and become competitive with cheaper labor elsewhere.
I have been reading this farce for years now and I am taken a back by the idea that you can litigate an issue for so long and waste so many resources with no real evidence. If this whole doesn't show the need for real copyright and patent law changes then nothing does. Our legal system is a joke! A seriously bad joke!
In regard to upgrades: I hate upgrades, they are for the most part a huge waste of time and money. I am an IT engineer for a company in the midwest. Here's the thing, if it works and it works reasonably well there is NO reason to upgrade. I would like to contend that Vista in many ways is a down grade as there are still a lot of applications that don't work real well in Vista. The additional hardware requirements alone are enough to completely ditch any idea of moving to Vista for most people. You can make the similar case for a lot of linux distributions as well. The upgrade every 6 months hamster wheel is bad! It's disruptive and almost Invariably breaks something. All of this takes time away from what you should be doing, using your computer to do something productive.
All this article does is further this thought:
Would Mr. Ballmer continue to rant and rave, threaten and coerce if he didn't believe that Linux may eat his lunch at some point. I believe that the more you hear from Microsoft and it's leaders the worse Microsoft's wallet is being drained.
I agree and disagree with much of what you have written. discipline is a major problem and it will probably get worse as many children have bad role models for this. When I say role models I am not assuming a parent, I mean TV and media in general. When instant gratification is all you see and seek in life working hard at something falls much less glamorous. I graduated high school 25+ years ago and I have to admit college was sort of a shock in that you had to work to get through.
I have also seen people in college drone through class after class and receive a BA for staying awake. This is also someone I don't want working for me. When I interview college grad's I want to see transcripts so I can get a feeling for what they were doing.
Let's be honest; most kids would do better if they were interested and engaged in what they were doing. This means getting general studies over with in middle school and making a focus of study on something specific in 10th grade through the end of high school. Also, it would be good to get students into paid internships as early as possible. Experience often adds excitement to learning and this creates a want to learn.
Finally I hate that schools have become a social tampon for all problems. This is incredibly time and resource consuming. Teachers have to deal with so much crap and still teach! There are always going to be good and bad teachers but I think as a whole teachers would do a better job if they just had to teach!
In my opinion the entire education system needs an overhaul. I guess if I had to vote on Iraq or education for my tax dollars, well you get my point.
I have been using Fedora since version 2 (or) since support ran out on RH9. It's been getting better with each version and the number of applications there are packages for have increased dramatically. I am using version FC5 now and using it in a production environment on several servers. I continue to read that RH/Fedora doesn't support the idea of using FC for a production environment. Is this true and if so what exactly is FC's charter? I mean what exactly is the purpose of the FC project? What do you envision your users are going to do with FC? Are you thinking about end user at all? Where do you see FC in 5 years?
Thanks Robert W. Oldfield
90% of the PC's bought are sold to people who don't know the difference between Ghz and dual core. The hardware so far outstrips the software's ability to use it that it makes these comparisons kind of lame. I think both Intel and AMD need to shift to a new way to market themselves . With the exception of gamers and people that live tech no one really cares if the machine does something several milliseconds faster than something else. If they can write a letter and send email and the machine doesn't run painfully slow they are happy. Lets face it, this is where the vast majority of users of PC's are!
This is absoulutely true. Electromigration happens at normal operating current and voltages. If you raise voltages to high there are a couple of common failures. First, the electromigration problem where by the interconnect metals from different layers of the circuit migrate. This lessens the path for current to travel and will eventually create an open. Read spec's for the device and stay within it's operating limits as those voltages and currents have been tested. The second failure that is common with overvoltage is thin film (cap-nitride) failure. Because films like this are isulators and and very thin 30nm they are not strictly smooth you will see punch through in places on the film that are rough. Voltage builds in area's that have large peaks. This is not a concern with relatively thick films BPSG/PSG as these again are thick and usually reflowed to flatten them out. In any case I worked for Intel twice as a process eng in the early 80's and then again in R&D in Oregon in the 90's and these were the common items I remember. You would be surprised at how much process technology has remained the same while the process equipment has become remarkably good.
Unfortunately this idea seems to make sense with the exception of the fact that we are not a democracy or a republic. The only people offered up for election are rich people and the pawns of those rich people. When someone does manage to gain some national attention that doesn't fit in the power group they are ignored by the press and often times made to be non-competitive. An example of this is in national debates where lessor known candidates are not allowed to compete. Perhaps this national debate would be their opportunity to show they are a better leader, we will never know. Our country has become complacent and lazy. We have had to much for to long and it shows in our culture and in our leaders. We should not be surprised when another culture whips our ass because they understand what went wrong in the past and endeavor not to do those things in the future.
Basically you are making my point. There are a whole bunch of ways to do this and few of them are clear. They are different from distr to distr. This makes for a serious amount of confusion. This is but one example of what is wrong with linux on the desktop.
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intellectual honesty suggests that the entire computer part of the company suffers from intellectual silliness. MacBook Pro with a huge number of dongles hanging off of it is not a design win for me the consumer. Overpriced hardware that doesn't appear to be any better than the competition. Suggesting that not having ports to connect devices and a lack of simple things like headphone jacks is "brave". IMHO this makes the buyer a ninny!
If you use gmail and chrome there is a extension named mailvelope that is super easy to use. Just saying not all PGP email encryption is hard.
When I was in 4th grade I threw my metal batman lunchbox in pit on a field trip, I wonder if they have unearthed that yet?
Yeah we could have 50 of theses for the price of the iraq war.
the road....
Whats amazing to me is that all of these ISP's would make customers happy and grow their business if they used the money from the boat load of lawyer fees they are going to have to pony up to expand their networks. You want me to pay more, OK give me something more! Remember when business was about making a profit for stockholders and keeping customers and employee's happy. What the hell happened! It's weird, this seems to be one of the various businesses that keep shrinking their level of service and wanting more money for it. The biggest issue is in most places there exists no choice so you have to put up with it. Sucks :-(
Oh that's easy. We are apathetic and generally disinterested in politics until it affects us. Our representatives do not represent the people who elected them in general. I think if you were to randomly go up to anyone is the US and ask who represents them in congress and the Senate most wouldn't have a clue. It cost so much money to get elected that its become common place for companies and special interest groups to pay for said elected official. In my mind I share you're opinion in that these "contributors" want something for their support.
Perhaps making people buy products they already have over and over!
Has anyone in here heard of bizspark. I used it and I like it. Really does give you an opportunity to use just about every dev tool MS has and addresses the issue of laying out a lot of money to try out tools and dev platforms. amorphous-codeworks.com
Well, here is the thing. I think most people understand that a computer has become an appliance. It's a machine to gather information, publish information, and a simple communications tool. Most people have come to know windows because it's loaded on every factory made box everywhere. I think that people want to spend time doing the things they do on a computer and not to learn about the machine or software they are using. It's all about being productive. *nix is a vastly more powerful OS in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it. The vast majority of people going to Wal-Mart to buy a computer don't care about this. The only way to make this customer happy is to emulate what they do know (outlook express, IE, Menu's, Office). If you can't do this 80% of the people buying your machine are going to be some what unhappy. Will some people learn a new way to do things, yes. However, even after they learn this still might not be enough as these are the same people who will likely become frustrated and have someone load windows back on their machine. If equipment manufacturers want to move away from windows they will need to provide a distro that looks and feels like windows and I haven't seen any distro that has accomplished this.
Well, can't wait to pay for midori monthly, then office monthly, VS monthly, maybe media services monthly. MS will make 10 times the money they do now off software that you probably already have. Best part is every version that comes out we rush to get because we think it is going to be better.We haven't learned to use most of the functionality of the software version you are replacing.
Everything you said above is correct but there is a problem here. To win playing the "selling the cheap" CPU you have to have the manufacturing to carry out this plan. You have have to sell a lot of cheap CPU's to pay the bills. FABS aren't cheap and AMD doesn't have enough of them to compete with Intel to begin with. IMHO AMD's route to survival is to massively outsource manufacturing to every purplay FAB that will take their stuff. AMD already outsources or has manufacturing agreements with Fujitsu and TSMC and I am sure there are others.
I agree fully.... Also, I love linux and use it as a sever OS. Web server, mail server, FTP server... it's awesome. People, it's time to be honest... Linux is a miserable desktop OS for the would be windows switch over user. No software in a box at wal-mart, no generally accepted package management between different distributions. I talk shop with other linux admins and they keep saying " users will just have to learn a lot of new stuff", well what most users want to do is use their machines and not fuss over them. Until there is a standard way to do a lot of stuff or there is one linux distro, linux will NEVER be a good choise for the base desktop user.
New releases come out every 6 months. Basically as soon as a new release comes out fedora is through with the old one. This IMHO makes fedora totally worthless for so many reasons. I have used Fedora from core 2 to Fedora 8 and it's a good distro but this upgrade cycle is what has made me leave Fedora.
Red Hat never understood the Linux desktop market, and apparently never will. RH9 really pissed me off. Even though I use Fedora and not for desktop use I don't want to go through switching to something else on several machines when RH decides that RH desktop doesn't taste good again and we all get spit out. Loyalty was important to me as I wanted to keep running RH, but apparently it was a one way street.
I believe what your saying is essentially the truth. However, companies claiming that they can't find employee's are lying. Perhaps just telling the truth would be a good and refreshing idea. We have stock holder and they require we spend less money on labor and maximize profits. Hiring help in the US is too costly and we can find qualified help elsewhere at half what we pay a US employee. Labor laws in other countries are often cheaper to comply with than in the US. Paying for health care for our US employee's costs us up 30% above the basic wage scale we have offered. I don't believe for a second that you find a better employee outside the US but you can definitely find a cheaper one. The point you make about taxes I have to disagree with. I run a company and the tax issue is convoluted at best. There are many ways to make more money and make it look like your not. So, in essence we need tax reform and a health care system that doesn't put the entire burden of health care on companies. Perhaps then we could even the playing field a bit and become competitive with cheaper labor elsewhere.
I have been reading this farce for years now and I am taken a back by the idea that you can litigate an issue for so long and waste so many resources with no real evidence. If this whole doesn't show the need for real copyright and patent law changes then nothing does. Our legal system is a joke! A seriously bad joke!
In regard to upgrades: I hate upgrades, they are for the most part a huge waste of time and money. I am an IT engineer for a company in the midwest. Here's the thing, if it works and it works reasonably well there is NO reason to upgrade. I would like to contend that Vista in many ways is a down grade as there are still a lot of applications that don't work real well in Vista. The additional hardware requirements alone are enough to completely ditch any idea of moving to Vista for most people. You can make the similar case for a lot of linux distributions as well. The upgrade every 6 months hamster wheel is bad! It's disruptive and almost Invariably breaks something. All of this takes time away from what you should be doing, using your computer to do something productive.
All this article does is further this thought: Would Mr. Ballmer continue to rant and rave, threaten and coerce if he didn't believe that Linux may eat his lunch at some point. I believe that the more you hear from Microsoft and it's leaders the worse Microsoft's wallet is being drained.
I agree and disagree with much of what you have written. discipline is a major problem and it will probably get worse as many children have bad role models for this. When I say role models I am not assuming a parent, I mean TV and media in general. When instant gratification is all you see and seek in life working hard at something falls much less glamorous. I graduated high school 25+ years ago and I have to admit college was sort of a shock in that you had to work to get through. I have also seen people in college drone through class after class and receive a BA for staying awake. This is also someone I don't want working for me. When I interview college grad's I want to see transcripts so I can get a feeling for what they were doing. Let's be honest; most kids would do better if they were interested and engaged in what they were doing. This means getting general studies over with in middle school and making a focus of study on something specific in 10th grade through the end of high school. Also, it would be good to get students into paid internships as early as possible. Experience often adds excitement to learning and this creates a want to learn. Finally I hate that schools have become a social tampon for all problems. This is incredibly time and resource consuming. Teachers have to deal with so much crap and still teach! There are always going to be good and bad teachers but I think as a whole teachers would do a better job if they just had to teach! In my opinion the entire education system needs an overhaul. I guess if I had to vote on Iraq or education for my tax dollars, well you get my point.
I have been using Fedora since version 2 (or) since support ran out on RH9. It's been getting better with each version and the number of applications there are packages for have increased dramatically. I am using version FC5 now and using it in a production environment on several servers. I continue to read that RH/Fedora doesn't support the idea of using FC for a production environment. Is this true and if so what exactly is FC's charter? I mean what exactly is the purpose of the FC project? What do you envision your users are going to do with FC? Are you thinking about end user at all? Where do you see FC in 5 years? Thanks Robert W. Oldfield
90% of the PC's bought are sold to people who don't know the difference between Ghz and dual core. The hardware so far outstrips the software's ability to use it that it makes these comparisons kind of lame. I think both Intel and AMD need to shift to a new way to market themselves . With the exception of gamers and people that live tech no one really cares if the machine does something several milliseconds faster than something else. If they can write a letter and send email and the machine doesn't run painfully slow they are happy. Lets face it, this is where the vast majority of users of PC's are!
This is absoulutely true. Electromigration happens at normal operating current and voltages. If you raise voltages to high there are a couple of common failures. First, the electromigration problem where by the interconnect metals from different layers of the circuit migrate. This lessens the path for current to travel and will eventually create an open. Read spec's for the device and stay within it's operating limits as those voltages and currents have been tested. The second failure that is common with overvoltage is thin film (cap-nitride) failure. Because films like this are isulators and and very thin 30nm they are not strictly smooth you will see punch through in places on the film that are rough. Voltage builds in area's that have large peaks. This is not a concern with relatively thick films BPSG/PSG as these again are thick and usually reflowed to flatten them out. In any case I worked for Intel twice as a process eng in the early 80's and then again in R&D in Oregon in the 90's and these were the common items I remember. You would be surprised at how much process technology has remained the same while the process equipment has become remarkably good.
Unfortunately this idea seems to make sense with the exception of the fact that we are not a democracy or a republic. The only people offered up for election are rich people and the pawns of those rich people. When someone does manage to gain some national attention that doesn't fit in the power group they are ignored by the press and often times made to be non-competitive. An example of this is in national debates where lessor known candidates are not allowed to compete. Perhaps this national debate would be their opportunity to show they are a better leader, we will never know. Our country has become complacent and lazy. We have had to much for to long and it shows in our culture and in our leaders. We should not be surprised when another culture whips our ass because they understand what went wrong in the past and endeavor not to do those things in the future.
Basically you are making my point. There are a whole bunch of ways to do this and few of them are clear. They are different from distr to distr. This makes for a serious amount of confusion. This is but one example of what is wrong with linux on the desktop.