there is a BIG difference. I have trouble believing they even believe themselves that they'll have a billion users. However, its clear that more and more people own more than one PC, and companies like MS are pushing for this as much as they can, with products like Windows Media Edition, or even the XboX.
A billion windows pc's wouldn't be too lofty of a claim. I think thats completely attainable.
96% of desktops are Windows. There are plenty of skilled Windows admins out there...numbers would suggest more so then there are for unix.
the problem isn't that there aren't skilled windows admins out there. The problem is that the sheer amount of them creates a market for even unskilled admins to find work.
If there is ever a day that unix is 98% of the desktops, you will find plenty of unskilled *nix admins out there, doing their best to screw things up for the rest of us.
Compounded by the fact that OSS's biggest strength is customizability. Take 100 KDE desktops, and they are probably all going to look very different. Take 100 WindowsXP desktops....they're going to look more or less the same.
Of course most windows users i know get jealous over my KDE desktop precisly because of this.
Amen. I'm a Computer Science student, and I've learned infinitely more about Linux, and in general how an operating system works since installing Slackware than I ever have at school using Solaris and Red Hat.
I run Debian on my server because of its nice, easy-to-use package managemnt. But if I want a workstation, its always going to be Slack.
I'm running Slackware right now, and am much happier with it than RH.
that said, Gentoo and SuSE both have 64-bit versions out right now, and you can get neccesary updates to either one free of charge. It sounds to me as if you are running Fedora, not true RH if you are supposedly being charged for updates. I can tell you that if you purcahsed RH's supported product, you would get free updates and still have spent considerably less on TCO than if you were running Windows. And while I am not been a RH user since RH9, I find it very hard to believe that Fedora has no free security updates...that would just be irresponsible. I download my RH9 for free, never gave RH a cent, and i still get free updates to this day.
Lastly, 64-bit versions are in development for both Slackware and Debian:) Unfortunately I think Debian's will most likely be ready first(slack dev. is sometimes slow). However, from what my 64-bit laptop toting friend has told me, 64-bit isn't really ready-for-primetime in anything other than servers yet anyways.
actually, i think thats great. reading stories about how Linux users all try a half dozen different versions before they get one working how they want probably puts off new users. the fact that you stuck with the first one you tried says a lot about mandrake, and how far linux has come.
I agree with you on Linux not being right for everyone.
However, it doesn't sound like you're very up-to-date with Linux. VIrtually every kind of USB device works under Linux, most very easily. I own scanners, digital cameras, USB flash drives, etc. etc. I have found only one device of mine which is unsupported, and thats a very chincy generic gooseneck webcam i bought at walmart for next to nothing. There are default webcam apps in Linux, and my old webcam (a more common logitech) is most defintely supported.
The rule of thumb now is that if a majority uses it, and its not bleeding edge, its supported. Plenty of things that fit neither of these descriptions work. How many people use Wacom tablets or a Griffin Powermate? Both are obscure USB devices, both have support...in the KERNEL.
So to answer...Aunt Millie can probably use her ipod just as easily in KDE(especially in a polished distro like SuSE 9.1) as she can on a Mac or in Windows.
Gnome is at 2.6 and KDE at 3.2. Lots of advancements have been made. I was impressed to find that many things(my Rio500, Palm m100) work as well if not BETTER under Linux as with the software they came with(for Windows).
No GUI programming involved. We were simply programming in C with the ARIA API for the Activemedia Amigobots. Very simple programs, but there were a lot of ARIA specific commands that were completely foreign to VS.
my impression was that much like windows itself, VS is very difficult to trouble-shoot when things go wrong.
You are right that i can't download whatever I want at school. I am also unsure how many systems may or may not have some of the tools you mentioned. My beef is that they aren't included by default. Obviously there are a billion aps to do these things which i can download...and in fact i've grabbed the borland C++ compiler and a few freeware text editors for my windows partition. It took considerable effort to find decent ones however, and a lot of time.
particularly for a new programmer, Linux is much easier, because everything is there. I pull my "development" and "editors" menus in KDE and there are a dozen choices right there.
out-of-the-box, windows doesn't even know wha to do with a.cpp or.pl file. I agree with you about academic editions, and I'll go one further: They really ought to market a developers edition, which has ALL of these tools packaged. As hard as they are trying for "developers, developers, developers," and as many college CS departments as they have commited to using their tools...you'd think they'd at least create a more ideal environment.
Of course i go to a smaller school. Perhaps it is different elsewhere. All I can say is that I never really learned much of anything in school until I installed Linux on my home machine. That is when the lightbulb went off and everything seemed to come together. I think Linux is a more ideal OS for a student also because of its transparency. Using Windows i had a vague concept of what a kernel was. Using Linux I have a very good grasp of what it is, how important it is, and even whats in it, thanks to the occasional need to recompile one(somethine one never does in windows).
I think Linux is a wonderful educational tool. And because its free and will run on damn near anything, you have greater freedom to just tinker, and if it breaks, oh well. You often learn the most from breaking things:)
No disrespect to Windows...i use it for graphics( i can't afford a Mac as a student). Every OS has its place. The very things that make Windows easy-to-use make it bad for learning, IMHO. The same could certainly be said vice-versa for linux!
I hope you are kidding. Every major media application that is on the Mac is on Windows, and has been for years.
This has been one of Mac's big problems, and why they are trying to distinguish themselves more and more as being some sort of luxury PC. They are no longer the exclusive graphics platform they once were...every app i've used at work as a graphic designer on a Mac, I have at home on a Windows machine. Works just as good on both(sometimes better if we're talking Os9..)
you're forgetting that:
1. 90% of Windows users do NOT know this
2. You certainly can't buy them boxed up at your local computer store.
2 certainly helps cause 1. Both of these things keep most people from ever using anything other than what they see in the store, or came on their computer.
If you want to do both your friends and OSS a favor, tell everyone you know about all the great OSS replacements they can use under Windows. It is much more likely that people will begin using the Gimp and Open Office than suddenly switch their entire operating system. And as they begin to use more and more OSS apps, one day perhaps they'll think "gee, why am I even still running Windows?"
Its like teaching someone to swim. You don't throw them in the deep end, you let them dip their toe in the shallow end and wade around a little first:)
You've clearly never done graphics work, and picking on someone else's spelling is a sure sign that you're the troll.
If i had gone out and bought every graphic and layout app that i have(and use) on my Windows machine, I know it would be several thousand $$$. 10 grand may be a little high...but you are underestimating the price of closed source software.
While they are certainly not equivalent, Linux has apps like the Gimp, Open Office, Quanta, Latex, while Windows has Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Dreamweaver, and Quark(or InDesign). Thats several thousand dollars right there. Add in apps that really don't have a Linux equivalent like Illustrator(or Freehand), Macromedia Flash(which is being ported to Linux), Adobe After Effects, ATM to manage your fonts, Adobe Acrobat Writer if you want to publish PDF's, Acrobat Distiller as well...not to mention the cost of all those font packages if you want to be able to create much of anything. That probably is 10G's, and if its not than throw in Adobe Premiere for Video and ProTools, Cakewalk and Fruity Loops for video and sound.
I don't even want to know what various CAD packages cost if thats your field.
The point is that both Windows and Mac software tends to be very, very expensive...you are generally paying for the support up front. Inexplicably, even Linux apps that you have to pay for, which have infinitely smaller user bases consistently cost a LOT less. Obviously, most of them are not the equivalent of their closed cousins...but they are catching up. And whats nice is most of them provide enough functionality for the average user. Most people don't need the 1000 features that Photoshop has...but until the Gimp came around, there really wasn't a good lower-end photo-editing ap(even low-end versions of photoshop aren't cheap). Some things like Latex are actually BETTER(my mother, a physics professor, has cursed the Word equation editor for years).
I have no idea what software the grandparent was referring to, and honestly, most people do not need half the software that I listed. I just wanted to illustrate how easy it is to spend an amount reasonably close to what he stated to get all of what "i" would want.
I didn't spellcheck this. Feel free to point all of my errors.
I don't know why this is modded "troll." The parent is making a very insightful comment: there are tools in Windows, but they are just as foreign to the *nix user as *nix tools are to even the most skilled Windows admin.
Just because the tools you prefer aren't readily visibile, doesn't mean similar things do not exist.
Personally I don't admin Windows, so i don't know what the best tools are)i do know all versions have built-in scripting capabilities). But there are lots of Windows admins out there, and they get their job done somehow...and its not my installing Cygwin. Logic implies that there are clearly tools there being used to get their job done.
It depends. At my school CS students are required to learn C, among other things. CIS students can get by with VB and some PHP/SQL skills.
I've actually been really, really wanting to learn some assembler and annoying all my profs about it. We really don't offer a course...theres one in mainframe assembler, but on the books.
I feel like everyone nowdays should get a litle bit of x86 assembler. How else am I going to write drivers for all these devices I get that don't work in Linux?:)
I said "in" not "for". There is a BIG difference there. This summer I've taken a robotics programming class using the ARIA API. I coded all of my programs in Linux, using only one.cpp file for each assignment. The other students(and the teacher) spent the whole semester pulling their hair out trying to create relatively simple programs, and cut and paste from one to another( a lot of the code is jsut repetive "glue"), trying to figure out why things didn't work when there were a half dozen files created created by Visual Studio each time they wanted to code. We learned more about troubleshooting VS than we did about robotics, i fear.
On top of that, Windows does not normally come with ANY development tools, my other primary reason it is a bad platform to code ON. You can't just walk up to any available Windows box and code. Precious few have VS on them. Very few Linux or UNIX boxes come without at least a few tools like Emacs and VI.
Right now, Windows *is* the best deal. Like all best deals, it is a compromise. It makes History majors reasonably happy, it makes the beancounters reasonably happy, and the CS folk tolerate it because they can use Cygwin or SFU.
Generally speaking, i actually agree with you. I did not say ay any point that I thought Linux was the best deal. In fact, as cheap as the typical college campus gets Windows, and as plentiful as people with Windows adnom skills are, Windows very well may be the cheapest choice for most universities.
You clearly missed my point, which was that there was no reason a campus neccesarily had to use Mac, Windows, Linux, or any one platform anymore...each of these has become so compatible, to the point that they all run the same software...it really makes financial viability the msot important factor.
I just want Windows kept out of our Computer Science departments. Make the machines dual-boot, and let us have a choice. I bought a laptop of my own because the ones in our library our setup in such a way that one can't even run Knoppix...making it very hard for me to get homework done(as mentioned above, default windows installs don't have Visual Studio.)
Windows is a nice easy-to-use system for most of the world. It defintely has its place. But if you are trying to tell me its an ideal development platform, or even as good of one as a typical UNIX or Linux systemm, you are either not a coder, highly ignorant, or flat-out lying.
And I'll remind you again, for developing "on," not "for." Completely different things.
he problem is i never really got into coding until i started using Linux. Ou classes are/were generally taught telnetting into Unix(Solaris) servers from the Windows DOS command line. Very little to get excited about there.
Ever since I started using Linux, Ive discovered how exciting coding could be, and have a host of tools at my disposal to code with...by default.
I still use Windows as well...but only for graphics. I can't afford a Mac.
From the Wikipedia entry on Microsoft(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft):
Stac Electronics, which accused Microsoft of stealing its data compression code and using it in MS-DOS 6 [4]
Sendo, which accused Microsoft of terminating their partnership so it could steal Sendo's technology to use in Windows Smartphone 2002 [5]
Apple Computer, which accused Microsoft of stealing QuickTime code and using it in Windows Media Player
This was just a quick google too. There was once a documentary on TV about MS, where they went inside developer meetings, and actually had managers telling developers "if you see another product that looks useful, incorporate it into ours. Don't worry about the legal issues...we've got lawyers whose job it is to sort that out."
I'm not trying to be a tin-foil hat wearing anti-MS zealot here. I thought it was a pretty well-known fact that they are the 8000lb. gorilla of the software world. Ask yourself: if MS sued your company, could you afford the legal battle, or would you just give-in and take the generous out-of-court settlement?
They certainly have the ower to get their way most of the time(especially 10-15 years ago). History has shown that in business anyone who has great advantage, uses it. MS is no different than any of the other large corporations that came before them.
heck, i'm even posting this from an MS box.
Re:Am I safe just running Microsoft stuff?
on
Indemnification Roundup
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The difference is that Microsoft is one of the largest corporations in the world. They do in fact use other people's code on a regular basis...they outright steal things, knowingly.
The difference here is that Microsoft has the legal muscle to get virtually anyone to back down from them...even if MS was actually in the wrong.
You can't afford to hire MS's lawyers if SCO decides to sue you next...thats what you would want indemnification for.
Frankly, I am surprised that anyone is still discussing this as if its really a viable option anyways. SCO's suits are all but over, paying indemnication fees to anyone at this point is a waste of money, no matter who you are.
As a CS student, I often wonder why are labs are all WIndows. Its a horrible OS to write software in, IMHO.
OTOH, you have to realize that 95% of students are using computers to surf the web, send e-mail, and write papers...and thats it(unless you count entertainment things like games, mp3's etc.). These are things that could be done on literally ANY platform, and are virtually the SAME on every platform. You have MS Office for both Windows and Mac, and for Linux under Crossover Office. You have Mozilla or Netscape for any of those platforms...not that using them is all that different from IE.
And nowadays, a document or picture saved on one of those platforms is going to be readable on any of the others. So a student can easily take their work home, regardless of whether they have a mac, windows, linux, whatever.
The bottom line is that generally speaking, schools should just buy whatever is the best deal. Whether it is the most widely used platform or not is completely insignificant at this point. Unless you're a CS student, you'll do your homework the same way no matter what the system is.
Actually Centrino IS supported under Linux. I believe it was announced on/. not all that long ago, and just last night I was helping a wireless newbie on IRC get his setup. Works perfectly.
I used to bitch about there not being enough drivers for things either...and the more i learn, the more I realize that there are drivers for virtually everything at this point. Hell even my Griffin Powermate and Wacom Tablet have support in the KERNEL! And my Rio500 MP3 player which has been abandoned by its manufacturer has Linux support as well...support thats better than the software that came with the thing. My Palm Pilot works...i could go on.
I briefly owned a Microsoft wireless card, and it worked flawlesssly under Linux as well:)
I own only one device which is so far unsupported under Linux, and its an obscure goose-necked USB webcam which i picked up at a clearance rack at my local Wal-mart. Of course it barely works under Windows:)
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution has supported for some Exchange-related things. You might want to read up on it, if exchange is the only thing tying you to windows :)
there is a BIG difference. I have trouble believing they even believe themselves that they'll have a billion users. However, its clear that more and more people own more than one PC, and companies like MS are pushing for this as much as they can, with products like Windows Media Edition, or even the XboX.
A billion windows pc's wouldn't be too lofty of a claim. I think thats completely attainable.
96% of desktops are Windows. There are plenty of skilled Windows admins out there...numbers would suggest more so then there are for unix.
the problem isn't that there aren't skilled windows admins out there. The problem is that the sheer amount of them creates a market for even unskilled admins to find work.
If there is ever a day that unix is 98% of the desktops, you will find plenty of unskilled *nix admins out there, doing their best to screw things up for the rest of us.
Of course most windows users i know get jealous over my KDE desktop precisly because of this.
I really like that you said they donated $6000 to Debian, even though there was nothing forcing them too.
I know that I would certainly go out of my way to do business with that kind of company.
Someone ought to put together a highly public list of OSS supporting companies(unless someone already has, and i just don't know)
I run Debian on my server because of its nice, easy-to-use package managemnt. But if I want a workstation, its always going to be Slack.
You would probably get a larger performance gain from ditching KDE then from any optimized compiling you did.
that said, Gentoo and SuSE both have 64-bit versions out right now, and you can get neccesary updates to either one free of charge. It sounds to me as if you are running Fedora, not true RH if you are supposedly being charged for updates. I can tell you that if you purcahsed RH's supported product, you would get free updates and still have spent considerably less on TCO than if you were running Windows. And while I am not been a RH user since RH9, I find it very hard to believe that Fedora has no free security updates...that would just be irresponsible. I download my RH9 for free, never gave RH a cent, and i still get free updates to this day.
Lastly, 64-bit versions are in development for both Slackware and Debian :) Unfortunately I think Debian's will most likely be ready first(slack dev. is sometimes slow). However, from what my 64-bit laptop toting friend has told me, 64-bit isn't really ready-for-primetime in anything other than servers yet anyways.
with Cedega(formerly WineX) you can play a HUGE asortment of Direct-X based games.
Honestly, there are hundreds of supported games listed on their sites, and gamers i've spoken with say they do in fact work very, very well.
actually, i think thats great. reading stories about how Linux users all try a half dozen different versions before they get one working how they want probably puts off new users. the fact that you stuck with the first one you tried says a lot about mandrake, and how far linux has come.
I agree with you on Linux not being right for everyone.
However, it doesn't sound like you're very up-to-date with Linux. VIrtually every kind of USB device works under Linux, most very easily. I own scanners, digital cameras, USB flash drives, etc. etc. I have found only one device of mine which is unsupported, and thats a very chincy generic gooseneck webcam i bought at walmart for next to nothing. There are default webcam apps in Linux, and my old webcam (a more common logitech) is most defintely supported.
The rule of thumb now is that if a majority uses it, and its not bleeding edge, its supported. Plenty of things that fit neither of these descriptions work. How many people use Wacom tablets or a Griffin Powermate? Both are obscure USB devices, both have support...in the KERNEL.
So to answer...Aunt Millie can probably use her ipod just as easily in KDE(especially in a polished distro like SuSE 9.1) as she can on a Mac or in Windows.
Gnome is at 2.6 and KDE at 3.2. Lots of advancements have been made. I was impressed to find that many things(my Rio500, Palm m100) work as well if not BETTER under Linux as with the software they came with(for Windows).
No GUI programming involved. We were simply programming in C with the ARIA API for the Activemedia Amigobots. Very simple programs, but there were a lot of ARIA specific commands that were completely foreign to VS.
.cpp or .pl file. I agree with you about academic editions, and I'll go one further: They really ought to market a developers edition, which has ALL of these tools packaged. As hard as they are trying for "developers, developers, developers," and as many college CS departments as they have commited to using their tools...you'd think they'd at least create a more ideal environment.
:)
my impression was that much like windows itself, VS is very difficult to trouble-shoot when things go wrong.
You are right that i can't download whatever I want at school. I am also unsure how many systems may or may not have some of the tools you mentioned. My beef is that they aren't included by default. Obviously there are a billion aps to do these things which i can download...and in fact i've grabbed the borland C++ compiler and a few freeware text editors for my windows partition. It took considerable effort to find decent ones however, and a lot of time.
particularly for a new programmer, Linux is much easier, because everything is there. I pull my "development" and "editors" menus in KDE and there are a dozen choices right there.
out-of-the-box, windows doesn't even know wha to do with a
Of course i go to a smaller school. Perhaps it is different elsewhere. All I can say is that I never really learned much of anything in school until I installed Linux on my home machine. That is when the lightbulb went off and everything seemed to come together. I think Linux is a more ideal OS for a student also because of its transparency. Using Windows i had a vague concept of what a kernel was. Using Linux I have a very good grasp of what it is, how important it is, and even whats in it, thanks to the occasional need to recompile one(somethine one never does in windows).
I think Linux is a wonderful educational tool. And because its free and will run on damn near anything, you have greater freedom to just tinker, and if it breaks, oh well. You often learn the most from breaking things
No disrespect to Windows...i use it for graphics( i can't afford a Mac as a student). Every OS has its place. The very things that make Windows easy-to-use make it bad for learning, IMHO. The same could certainly be said vice-versa for linux!
I hope you are kidding. Every major media application that is on the Mac is on Windows, and has been for years.
This has been one of Mac's big problems, and why they are trying to distinguish themselves more and more as being some sort of luxury PC. They are no longer the exclusive graphics platform they once were...every app i've used at work as a graphic designer on a Mac, I have at home on a Windows machine. Works just as good on both(sometimes better if we're talking Os9..)
you're forgetting that:
:)
1. 90% of Windows users do NOT know this
2. You certainly can't buy them boxed up at your local computer store.
2 certainly helps cause 1. Both of these things keep most people from ever using anything other than what they see in the store, or came on their computer.
If you want to do both your friends and OSS a favor, tell everyone you know about all the great OSS replacements they can use under Windows. It is much more likely that people will begin using the Gimp and Open Office than suddenly switch their entire operating system. And as they begin to use more and more OSS apps, one day perhaps they'll think "gee, why am I even still running Windows?"
Its like teaching someone to swim. You don't throw them in the deep end, you let them dip their toe in the shallow end and wade around a little first
You've clearly never done graphics work, and picking on someone else's spelling is a sure sign that you're the troll.
If i had gone out and bought every graphic and layout app that i have(and use) on my Windows machine, I know it would be several thousand $$$. 10 grand may be a little high...but you are underestimating the price of closed source software.
While they are certainly not equivalent, Linux has apps like the Gimp, Open Office, Quanta, Latex, while Windows has Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Dreamweaver, and Quark(or InDesign). Thats several thousand dollars right there. Add in apps that really don't have a Linux equivalent like Illustrator(or Freehand), Macromedia Flash(which is being ported to Linux), Adobe After Effects, ATM to manage your fonts, Adobe Acrobat Writer if you want to publish PDF's, Acrobat Distiller as well...not to mention the cost of all those font packages if you want to be able to create much of anything. That probably is 10G's, and if its not than throw in Adobe Premiere for Video and ProTools, Cakewalk and Fruity Loops for video and sound.
I don't even want to know what various CAD packages cost if thats your field.
The point is that both Windows and Mac software tends to be very, very expensive...you are generally paying for the support up front. Inexplicably, even Linux apps that you have to pay for, which have infinitely smaller user bases consistently cost a LOT less. Obviously, most of them are not the equivalent of their closed cousins...but they are catching up. And whats nice is most of them provide enough functionality for the average user. Most people don't need the 1000 features that Photoshop has...but until the Gimp came around, there really wasn't a good lower-end photo-editing ap(even low-end versions of photoshop aren't cheap). Some things like Latex are actually BETTER(my mother, a physics professor, has cursed the Word equation editor for years).
I have no idea what software the grandparent was referring to, and honestly, most people do not need half the software that I listed. I just wanted to illustrate how easy it is to spend an amount reasonably close to what he stated to get all of what "i" would want.
I didn't spellcheck this. Feel free to point all of my errors.
I don't know why this is modded "troll." The parent is making a very insightful comment: there are tools in Windows, but they are just as foreign to the *nix user as *nix tools are to even the most skilled Windows admin.
Just because the tools you prefer aren't readily visibile, doesn't mean similar things do not exist.
Personally I don't admin Windows, so i don't know what the best tools are)i do know all versions have built-in scripting capabilities). But there are lots of Windows admins out there, and they get their job done somehow...and its not my installing Cygwin. Logic implies that there are clearly tools there being used to get their job done.
It depends. At my school CS students are required to learn C, among other things. CIS students can get by with VB and some PHP/SQL skills.
:)
I've actually been really, really wanting to learn some assembler and annoying all my profs about it. We really don't offer a course...theres one in mainframe assembler, but on the books.
I feel like everyone nowdays should get a litle bit of x86 assembler. How else am I going to write drivers for all these devices I get that don't work in Linux?
Windows is a pretty good OS to write software for
.cpp file for each assignment. The other students(and the teacher) spent the whole semester pulling their hair out trying to create relatively simple programs, and cut and paste from one to another( a lot of the code is jsut repetive "glue"), trying to figure out why things didn't work when there were a half dozen files created created by Visual Studio each time they wanted to code. We learned more about troubleshooting VS than we did about robotics, i fear.
I said "in" not "for". There is a BIG difference there. This summer I've taken a robotics programming class using the ARIA API. I coded all of my programs in Linux, using only one
On top of that, Windows does not normally come with ANY development tools, my other primary reason it is a bad platform to code ON. You can't just walk up to any available Windows box and code. Precious few have VS on them. Very few Linux or UNIX boxes come without at least a few tools like Emacs and VI.
Right now, Windows *is* the best deal. Like all best deals, it is a compromise. It makes History majors reasonably happy, it makes the beancounters reasonably happy, and the CS folk tolerate it because they can use Cygwin or SFU.
Generally speaking, i actually agree with you. I did not say ay any point that I thought Linux was the best deal. In fact, as cheap as the typical college campus gets Windows, and as plentiful as people with Windows adnom skills are, Windows very well may be the cheapest choice for most universities.
You clearly missed my point, which was that there was no reason a campus neccesarily had to use Mac, Windows, Linux, or any one platform anymore...each of these has become so compatible, to the point that they all run the same software...it really makes financial viability the msot important factor.
I just want Windows kept out of our Computer Science departments. Make the machines dual-boot, and let us have a choice. I bought a laptop of my own because the ones in our library our setup in such a way that one can't even run Knoppix...making it very hard for me to get homework done(as mentioned above, default windows installs don't have Visual Studio.)
Windows is a nice easy-to-use system for most of the world. It defintely has its place. But if you are trying to tell me its an ideal development platform, or even as good of one as a typical UNIX or Linux systemm, you are either not a coder, highly ignorant, or flat-out lying.
And I'll remind you again, for developing "on," not "for." Completely different things.
he problem is i never really got into coding until i started using Linux. Ou classes are/were generally taught telnetting into Unix(Solaris) servers from the Windows DOS command line. Very little to get excited about there.
Ever since I started using Linux, Ive discovered how exciting coding could be, and have a host of tools at my disposal to code with...by default.
I still use Windows as well...but only for graphics. I can't afford a Mac.
From the Wikipedia entry on Microsoft(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft):
Stac Electronics, which accused Microsoft of stealing its data compression code and using it in MS-DOS 6 [4]
Sendo, which accused Microsoft of terminating their partnership so it could steal Sendo's technology to use in Windows Smartphone 2002 [5]
Apple Computer, which accused Microsoft of stealing QuickTime code and using it in Windows Media Player
This was just a quick google too. There was once a documentary on TV about MS, where they went inside developer meetings, and actually had managers telling developers "if you see another product that looks useful, incorporate it into ours. Don't worry about the legal issues...we've got lawyers whose job it is to sort that out."
I'm not trying to be a tin-foil hat wearing anti-MS zealot here. I thought it was a pretty well-known fact that they are the 8000lb. gorilla of the software world. Ask yourself: if MS sued your company, could you afford the legal battle, or would you just give-in and take the generous out-of-court settlement?
They certainly have the ower to get their way most of the time(especially 10-15 years ago). History has shown that in business anyone who has great advantage, uses it. MS is no different than any of the other large corporations that came before them.
heck, i'm even posting this from an MS box.
The difference is that Microsoft is one of the largest corporations in the world. They do in fact use other people's code on a regular basis...they outright steal things, knowingly.
The difference here is that Microsoft has the legal muscle to get virtually anyone to back down from them...even if MS was actually in the wrong.
You can't afford to hire MS's lawyers if SCO decides to sue you next...thats what you would want indemnification for.
Frankly, I am surprised that anyone is still discussing this as if its really a viable option anyways. SCO's suits are all but over, paying indemnication fees to anyone at this point is a waste of money, no matter who you are.
As a CS student, I often wonder why are labs are all WIndows. Its a horrible OS to write software in, IMHO.
OTOH, you have to realize that 95% of students are using computers to surf the web, send e-mail, and write papers...and thats it(unless you count entertainment things like games, mp3's etc.). These are things that could be done on literally ANY platform, and are virtually the SAME on every platform. You have MS Office for both Windows and Mac, and for Linux under Crossover Office. You have Mozilla or Netscape for any of those platforms...not that using them is all that different from IE.
And nowadays, a document or picture saved on one of those platforms is going to be readable on any of the others. So a student can easily take their work home, regardless of whether they have a mac, windows, linux, whatever.
The bottom line is that generally speaking, schools should just buy whatever is the best deal. Whether it is the most widely used platform or not is completely insignificant at this point. Unless you're a CS student, you'll do your homework the same way no matter what the system is.
There are several SuperKaramba themes you can use to do this under Linux. Some are even virtually identical to what you have in OSX.
Actually Centrino IS supported under Linux. I believe it was announced on /. not all that long ago, and just last night I was helping a wireless newbie on IRC get his setup. Works perfectly.
:)
:)
I used to bitch about there not being enough drivers for things either...and the more i learn, the more I realize that there are drivers for virtually everything at this point. Hell even my Griffin Powermate and Wacom Tablet have support in the KERNEL! And my Rio500 MP3 player which has been abandoned by its manufacturer has Linux support as well...support thats better than the software that came with the thing. My Palm Pilot works...i could go on.
I briefly owned a Microsoft wireless card, and it worked flawlesssly under Linux as well
I own only one device which is so far unsupported under Linux, and its an obscure goose-necked USB webcam which i picked up at a clearance rack at my local Wal-mart. Of course it barely works under Windows
I went there last year, and i did NOT know they had machine gun ranges...