MS knows what sells windows - IE only Kindergarten Language applications and the like.
While GNU Linux is making great progress to get better software on their systems many people need specific software such as that language program.
On the other hand a LOT of these applications were written years ago (sometimes more then a decade) and if they were to be updated they would probably have to be re-written as the original developers have since moved on to other things. Which means XP is kept alive, and developers who do re-write may be considering more cross-platform oriented applications with the increase of the Mac/Linux use in business and schools.
I think though that those tides are turning a lot with FOSS, as a lot of talented people can build/adapt on the works of others and make better educational and other vertical market applications. MS knows its a matter of time, and they are trying to PR/license it to their advantage while they can.
Since Silverlight isn't cross platform, why bother? What part of Microsoft's "Windows Strategy" did you not hear about?
It has been quoted by Balmer, MSs entry into open source is "to bring better value to OUR customers" (emphasis is mine). If they get RoR developers to make Silverlight front ends, it benefits mainly MS customers (euphemism for MS may make more $ sales) - goal met.
Remember high school when you knew more about computers than the teacher? Your kids will cope, make sure they have access to some goo material and make sure they don't poke their eyes out, you will be good.
Here is a video of a talk of Jeri Ellsworth, a prominent hardware hacker of the Commodore/Amiga community (she designed those 30 in one Commodore 64 joystick games), she gives a little insight on her childhood:
The owner of the TinkerSchool site - http://www.tinkeringschool.com/blog/ spoke at the last Maker Faire http://www.makerfaire.com/ this year in San Mateo(something you should look into attending with your kids, theres also another one in October in Texas)
Anyway, he did a talk on "Make Your Own School" which was about his tinkering school he runs for kids, as well as "the Five Dangerous Things You Should Have Your Kids Do" Both were very informative and common sense. Write him and see if he has any publications you can read.
Regardless of the syntax or the name spaces or variable typing, if it does what you want or surprises you by doing more it will be successful. Another factor is if you have early successes, or good beginning documentation.
PHP, which I do use, does that for me, Ive had many a time times where something pretty complex turned out to be not a big deal using PHP, it just blows me away. Of course I migrated from FoxBase+/Mac so I had a huge leap in capacity, and added complexity (HTML, PHP and MySQL) but it hasn't failed me yet, and that what counts.
As far as my success comment, I tried PostgreSQL early on and it was good and all but I could not get understandable answers on ensuring setup was correct and I struggled with the syntax. Went back to MySQL as it just worked (might try later, but too busy now).
Though PHP works for me it may not work for others, it's not the nice drag and drop of Visual Studio nor is it the one size fits almost everybody of RoR, and those have their appeal as well, just not for what I do.
With the diversity of OSs nowadays I think the overall trend is in general for "cross-platform," not proprietary lock-in. With cross platform, you or people who use your stuff, can pick the platform best suited to their environment/skills/budget/security. MS dropping FoxBase then FoxPro on the Mac and Apple killing OS9 compatibility did it for me, I was on an obsoleted platform running on a dead-ended OS, never again.
I bought a Windows notebook and promptly reformatted the hard drive and put Linux on it.
I wanted a laptop that I could return easily if there were problems, so I wanted to get it from a store. I selected one with an AMD64 processor and Nvidia chip.
When I selected the model the sales guy asked do I require any Anti Virus/Anti Spyware software. I said it was going to be running Linux so it won't have any of those issues. Which was quite satisfying, and also I hope. Not just getting a laptop but educating the sales staff (with my purchase) that there is an alternative to Windows that doesn't have those problems and still works on their laptops.
Sure MS got their $30 or so but that's it, no upgrades or even activation confirmation (didn't get that far) which in the end means another less Windows installation - also, very importantly, another example in the wild that Windows can be dumped and Linux installed and work well on just about any computer.
My other private entertainment was peeling off all the stickers and pasting my own stickers, one from Ubuntu, and the others printed from the books at http://www.openstickers.com/
"I'm sorry, I cannot play music or entertain you at this time... my 'Plays for Sure' media files require re-validation with the with the authentication server. Would you like to play minesweep, or listen to me read the Microsoft EULA instead?"
Got to play with it a maker faire and bought one the same day.
She currently uses it to listen to news and music streams and get weather reports and such. I don't think she's discovered the alarm features yet.
Nice and small and is excellent for the bedside, easy to operate, comes on quick and the touchscreen size is good for its purpose. The widgets are getting better more information feeds and stuff - even slashdot articles (not reply chains though)
I too wonder what happens if the parent co goes under what would be left, though I know it is flashable, as upon first power up it downloaded and installed a system update.
First thing I can think of is you have yourself covered in the areas that the program covers but not in the areas that the program needs help (if it is an n-body motion type program as speculated and you are getting astronomer/physics people but not programmers...right?).
What you may want to do is look at your 'program needs' list and post in the related places for development of those needs. I.e. say your program uses a GUI in QT and you believe it can use improvement, post about your problems in a QT forum or a user interface related forum, you will at least have the right people who know GUIs to look at your user interface...
Also if your program module does something in that area you feel came out nifty, post a 'what do you think of my GUI for x' post, people may be interested in checking out something different and offer you some tips for improvement. Or if it is really bad, you might post a 'I'm a real GUI noob, please take a look and offer suggestions/help."
You won't attract programmers if all you talk about is n-body physics (unless they are physics programmers, which probably have their own physics projects.
On the other hand PDF can handle rendering things books can't (which makes a PDF capable e-reader something better then books) like cross stitch patterns (which my wife would like - portable and scalable) sure the page sizes are fixed but with an appropriate zoom feature it would be a great utility, not everybody reads books with just words in it.
Being able to use some more open standards would be great I get a lot of e publications in PDF this includes newsletters books as well as technical diagrams and such. Being able to read those without any conversion would be great.
This also includes some HTML content (Halcyon Days comes to mind... hmm PHP manual...).
I think the more it has features where I don't have to depend on connection/supplies from the company to use it the better, just like real books.
I wish apple would fix Safari (and Mail too) to better display the actual targets of links.
On the Mac you have Apples browser and Email which seem more compatible with a lot of sites but kinda slow and lacking some of the nice security tips. And then you have other browsers that don't seem as compatible (with IE oriented up sites) but are faster and have better security tools.
Sure Apples' stuff is slick on the surface, but there are still problems in the underpinnings. (when are we going to get group edit in iCal???)
That what it will all boils down to, when people get their computer (7 days from purchase, so should be seeing post about them next week). Or do a hand-on review (I saw a few pages called a review on the OpenPC where they were just reviewing their opinions.
Until there is something more than phone calls and photoshopped corporate website images - a lot of this is just empty speculation.
Mac doesn't have the same directory layout of Linux (it is BSD, and I am not sure how it follows on BSD ). So usually a lot of those programs have to be adapted in a library or two to compensate. A popular packaging for x-windows Mac stuff is fink, while it does OK I find XWindows mac or the programs ported to xWindows Mac are a bit more flaky (maybe xwindows is still PPC code?) But it has not always been the best experience.
If you look for updated Java libraries in the wild like on Suns site, they usually point you to Apples site, go to Apples site and they tell you the latest is available for the latest OS and there is no port for OSs that are recent but not for sale.
I've had similar experiences on other apple bug fixes or improvements which are only available on the later OS version, though the older OS was originally touted as providing support for 'feature x' (case in point, SMB support, was advertised in 10.2, but only works well after 10.3).
So OS X may be way cheaper at $140 or so it also is marketed to be a periodic 'necessary upgrade' (sometimes also forcing a hardware upgrade as well).
Many FOSS projects I am interested in (Open Office, Scribus being two big ones) are really lagging behind in the OSX ports, either more bugs or are a version behind. I understand that is partly because of Aqua or some other binding issue with OSX. It is truly not the seamless experience you get with running a Linux version on Linux.
Macs don't always follow the Linux rules:
I've had to do some on my SAMBA server to get Macs to properly use permissions. Usually when I find a problem, I do a bunch of googleing and end up with some obscure note that SMB was mis-configured in OS X and to get it to work with Linux add: xxx into your servers conf file, etc. (I plug in the lines and usually it works, but many times it doesn't 'just work')
Other times it's a case of "Oh yeah, Apple fixed that - but only in the [insert latest version of OS] just buy upgrades" - that seems to happen a lot in Apple's support of Java Libraries.
And for the past decade or two everything has been fine. There are a couple users who use some of the extras, but most are on work and maybe browse.
Nice thing about the Macs are that a lot of the "crap" on-line just isn't compatible so they ignore it.
My worst problem is iPhoto, which looks slick but is a nightmare behind the scenes making lots of archival copies of images (fills up hard drives real quick) - just waiting for Picasa for the Mac to arrive...
Though my plan is one day, in a few years) to do thin clients with LTSP, most of what we do is data, web surf, word process and some light DTP, all could work under Linux. My office DB I'm writing on LAMP and the admin department is getting an accounting system that is also web-based so many of the hurdles are going away. We don't have any investment in Exchange, etc. Compatibility is our only issue, and for our office we have one Windows Laptop setup for accessing/opening those platform specific reports/documents. (though it doubles as a Linux PC for faster Scribus than what the Macs can do).
Everybody knows they gamed the process in one way or another and didn't 'earn' the vote as others have in the past. These actions says a lot for the company's ethics if you ask me. I expect that they probably made a bunch of deals with less reputable more desperate firms, organizations and individuals that will further behold them to such dealings.
Microsoft seems to be a lot about deal making now a days from lowering the specs to Microsoft vista capable requirements and their shifty legal contracts that they conned Novell to sign without enough review.
While this may "buy" them some market share they still have a butt-load of aging technology which mainly advertises "improved security" over any other sort of innovation or compatibility. Ultimately it means they will have to continuing paying-off for their market else face real critical comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Repackage it as "Windows Classic"
MS knows what sells windows - IE only Kindergarten Language applications and the like.
While GNU Linux is making great progress to get better software on their systems many people need specific software such as that language program.
On the other hand a LOT of these applications were written years ago (sometimes more then a decade) and if they were to be updated they would probably have to be re-written as the original developers have since moved on to other things. Which means XP is kept alive, and developers who do re-write may be considering more cross-platform oriented applications with the increase of the Mac/Linux use in business and schools.
I think though that those tides are turning a lot with FOSS, as a lot of talented people can build/adapt on the works of others and make better educational and other vertical market applications. MS knows its a matter of time, and they are trying to PR/license it to their advantage while they can.
One of which the previous owner had ran over with her car. Except for the missing LCD (was cracked) the unit worked; keyboard and all.
Had a nice little BASIC and lots of cool ports. Trivia: the OS was the last major coding work by Bill Gates himself.
It has been quoted by Balmer, MSs entry into open source is "to bring better value to OUR customers" (emphasis is mine). If they get RoR developers to make Silverlight front ends, it benefits mainly MS customers (euphemism for MS may make more $ sales) - goal met.
oops, wrong video link, here is one of the complete video without a download requirement from the site:
http://video.google.it/videoplay?docid=-1053309060448851979
Remember high school when you knew more about computers than the teacher? Your kids will cope, make sure they have access to some goo material and make sure they don't poke their eyes out, you will be good.
Here is a video of a talk of Jeri Ellsworth, a prominent hardware hacker of the Commodore/Amiga community (she designed those 30 in one Commodore 64 joystick games), she gives a little insight on her childhood:
http://www.veoh.com/videos/e155710Q6md6hn3
Essentially if you have the interest and resources a lot of the other stuff will take care of itself.
The owner of the TinkerSchool site - http://www.tinkeringschool.com/blog/ spoke at the last Maker Faire http://www.makerfaire.com/ this year in San Mateo(something you should look into attending with your kids, theres also another one in October in Texas)
Anyway, he did a talk on "Make Your Own School" which was about his tinkering school he runs for kids, as well as "the Five Dangerous Things You Should Have Your Kids Do" Both were very informative and common sense. Write him and see if he has any publications you can read.
On his site he had a link to his five dangerous things talk at ted: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/202
Regardless of the syntax or the name spaces or variable typing, if it does what you want or surprises you by doing more it will be successful. Another factor is if you have early successes, or good beginning documentation.
PHP, which I do use, does that for me, Ive had many a time times where something pretty complex turned out to be not a big deal using PHP, it just blows me away. Of course I migrated from FoxBase+/Mac so I had a huge leap in capacity, and added complexity (HTML, PHP and MySQL) but it hasn't failed me yet, and that what counts.
As far as my success comment, I tried PostgreSQL early on and it was good and all but I could not get understandable answers on ensuring setup was correct and I struggled with the syntax. Went back to MySQL as it just worked (might try later, but too busy now).
Though PHP works for me it may not work for others, it's not the nice drag and drop of Visual Studio nor is it the one size fits almost everybody of RoR, and those have their appeal as well, just not for what I do.
With the diversity of OSs nowadays I think the overall trend is in general for "cross-platform," not proprietary lock-in. With cross platform, you or people who use your stuff, can pick the platform best suited to their environment/skills/budget/security. MS dropping FoxBase then FoxPro on the Mac and Apple killing OS9 compatibility did it for me, I was on an obsoleted platform running on a dead-ended OS, never again.
I bought a Windows notebook and promptly reformatted the hard drive and put Linux on it.
I wanted a laptop that I could return easily if there were problems, so I wanted to get it from a store. I selected one with an AMD64 processor and Nvidia chip.
When I selected the model the sales guy asked do I require any Anti Virus/Anti Spyware software. I said it was going to be running Linux so it won't have any of those issues. Which was quite satisfying, and also I hope. Not just getting a laptop but educating the sales staff (with my purchase) that there is an alternative to Windows that doesn't have those problems and still works on their laptops.
Sure MS got their $30 or so but that's it, no upgrades or even activation confirmation (didn't get that far) which in the end means another less Windows installation - also, very importantly, another example in the wild that Windows can be dumped and Linux installed and work well on just about any computer.
My other private entertainment was peeling off all the stickers and pasting my own stickers, one from Ubuntu, and the others printed from the books at http://www.openstickers.com/
Hah, you are both wrong, it is this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hczaiM3LH0M
It's about science!
"I'm sorry, I cannot play music or entertain you at this time... my 'Plays for Sure' media files require re-validation with the with the authentication server. Would you like to play minesweep, or listen to me read the Microsoft EULA instead?"
That's gumby, not chumby. :-)
Got to play with it a maker faire and bought one the same day.
She currently uses it to listen to news and music streams and get weather reports and such. I don't think she's discovered the alarm features yet.
Nice and small and is excellent for the bedside, easy to operate, comes on quick and the touchscreen size is good for its purpose. The widgets are getting better more information feeds and stuff - even slashdot articles (not reply chains though)
I too wonder what happens if the parent co goes under what would be left, though I know it is flashable, as upon first power up it downloaded and installed a system update.
First thing I can think of is you have yourself covered in the areas that the program covers but not in the areas that the program needs help (if it is an n-body motion type program as speculated and you are getting astronomer/physics people but not programmers...right?).
What you may want to do is look at your 'program needs' list and post in the related places for development of those needs. I.e. say your program uses a GUI in QT and you believe it can use improvement, post about your problems in a QT forum or a user interface related forum, you will at least have the right people who know GUIs to look at your user interface...
Also if your program module does something in that area you feel came out nifty, post a 'what do you think of my GUI for x' post, people may be interested in checking out something different and offer you some tips for improvement. Or if it is really bad, you might post a 'I'm a real GUI noob, please take a look and offer suggestions/help."
You won't attract programmers if all you talk about is n-body physics (unless they are physics programmers, which probably have their own physics projects.
On the other hand PDF can handle rendering things books can't (which makes a PDF capable e-reader something better then books) like cross stitch patterns (which my wife would like - portable and scalable) sure the page sizes are fixed but with an appropriate zoom feature it would be a great utility, not everybody reads books with just words in it.
Being able to use some more open standards would be great I get a lot of e publications in PDF this includes newsletters books as well as technical diagrams and such. Being able to read those without any conversion would be great.
This also includes some HTML content (Halcyon Days comes to mind... hmm PHP manual...).
I think the more it has features where I don't have to depend on connection/supplies from the company to use it the better, just like real books.
and who has the restrictions.
Though this was not the beginning, Music Match was one that happened first.
Downloaded a few MP3s last evening, no worries here.
I wish apple would fix Safari (and Mail too) to better display the actual targets of links.
On the Mac you have Apples browser and Email which seem more compatible with a lot of sites but kinda slow and lacking some of the nice security tips. And then you have other browsers that don't seem as compatible (with IE oriented up sites) but are faster and have better security tools.
Sure Apples' stuff is slick on the surface, but there are still problems in the underpinnings. (when are we going to get group edit in iCal???)
Where's the Box
That what it will all boils down to, when people get their computer (7 days from purchase, so should be seeing post about them next week). Or do a hand-on review (I saw a few pages called a review on the OpenPC where they were just reviewing their opinions.
Until there is something more than phone calls and photoshopped corporate website images - a lot of this is just empty speculation.
Mac doesn't have the same directory layout of Linux (it is BSD, and I am not sure how it follows on BSD ). So usually a lot of those programs have to be adapted in a library or two to compensate. A popular packaging for x-windows Mac stuff is fink, while it does OK I find XWindows mac or the programs ported to xWindows Mac are a bit more flaky (maybe xwindows is still PPC code?) But it has not always been the best experience.
If you look for updated Java libraries in the wild like on Suns site, they usually point you to Apples site, go to Apples site and they tell you the latest is available for the latest OS and there is no port for OSs that are recent but not for sale.
I've had similar experiences on other apple bug fixes or improvements which are only available on the later OS version, though the older OS was originally touted as providing support for 'feature x' (case in point, SMB support, was advertised in 10.2, but only works well after 10.3).
So OS X may be way cheaper at $140 or so it also is marketed to be a periodic 'necessary upgrade' (sometimes also forcing a hardware upgrade as well).
Linux more up to date FOSS:
Many FOSS projects I am interested in (Open Office, Scribus being two big ones) are really lagging behind in the OSX ports, either more bugs or are a version behind. I understand that is partly because of Aqua or some other binding issue with OSX. It is truly not the seamless experience you get with running a Linux version on Linux.
Macs don't always follow the Linux rules:
I've had to do some on my SAMBA server to get Macs to properly use permissions. Usually when I find a problem, I do a bunch of googleing and end up with some obscure note that SMB was mis-configured in OS X and to get it to work with Linux add: xxx into your servers conf file, etc. (I plug in the lines and usually it works, but many times it doesn't 'just work')
Other times it's a case of "Oh yeah, Apple fixed that - but only in the [insert latest version of OS] just buy upgrades" - that seems to happen a lot in Apple's support of Java Libraries.
Macs have a lot more commercial offerings than Linux.
Linux has a lot more up-to-date/less bug-ridden FOSS offerings than Macs.
Both have SSH and other unixy goodness that make them working together pretty nice. Then again OSX does not follow all the rules Linux does.
Both are easier to manage than Windows (system wise and license wise)
See what one (difference engine #2) looks like running, impressive!
This one is in mechano parts (Erector Set for us Americans)
http://www.meccano.us/difference_engines/rde_2/index.html
And for the past decade or two everything has been fine. There are a couple users who use some of the extras, but most are on work and maybe browse.
Nice thing about the Macs are that a lot of the "crap" on-line just isn't compatible so they ignore it.
My worst problem is iPhoto, which looks slick but is a nightmare behind the scenes making lots of archival copies of images (fills up hard drives real quick) - just waiting for Picasa for the Mac to arrive...
Though my plan is one day, in a few years) to do thin clients with LTSP, most of what we do is data, web surf, word process and some light DTP, all could work under Linux. My office DB I'm writing on LAMP and the admin department is getting an accounting system that is also web-based so many of the hurdles are going away. We don't have any investment in Exchange, etc. Compatibility is our only issue, and for our office we have one Windows Laptop setup for accessing/opening those platform specific reports/documents. (though it doubles as a Linux PC for faster Scribus than what the Macs can do).
Everybody knows they gamed the process in one way or another and didn't 'earn' the vote as others have in the past. These actions says a lot for the company's ethics if you ask me. I expect that they probably made a bunch of deals with less reputable more desperate firms, organizations and individuals that will further behold them to such dealings.
Microsoft seems to be a lot about deal making now a days from lowering the specs to Microsoft vista capable requirements and their shifty legal contracts that they conned Novell to sign without enough review.
While this may "buy" them some market share they still have a butt-load of aging technology which mainly advertises "improved security" over any other sort of innovation or compatibility. Ultimately it means they will have to continuing paying-off for their market else face real critical comparison.