I think it's impossible to measure it objectively. I purchase one copy of SuSE at each release but I install that same copy on 9 separate boxes. 3 are mine but the other 6 are for other people who asked me to manage their PCs. So trying to use SuSEs sales figure to determine my install base would make no sense. Short of random end user polls (ie. a telephone / mail survey) or data extrapolation (I guess surveys do this too), I don't know how in the heck a true installed base could be determined. If you want to try an interesting experiment, buy a shirt with a big Tux on it from www.thinkgeek.com and go for a walk. The amount of people that will stop you to talk Linux is almost beyond belief. I assume the same thing might be true of a Mac t-shirt but it's really a strange feeling.
Yeah, they run a little hot. It's funny you bring this up because I'm considering investing in a water cooling system to cut down the fan noise in here. If only I wasn't so freaking nervous about introducing water into my computer case. One drop of condensation could cause a real mess and probably void a few warranties in the process.
That's not exactly true. You're forgetting that the entire bus architecture would be 64 bit. There wouldn't be any slowdown since there's no basis for comparison. The upside is that really big (ie. > 4G) file operations and double integer ops should be much faster. Think video and databases for apps that would benefit greatly. I agree that for mom sending email and surfing the web, there's no real incentive to invest in this kind of hardware. However, for data mining, this is a big deal. It'll be interesting to see if a peripheral market develops around the 64 bit arch. Should prove interesting!
As I have been MS free since 2000, I really couldn't care less what they do or don't do. As for Intel, here's some news for them, they DO NOT have a monopoly like their special friend. I'll gladly purchase an AMD Opteron to run my shiny new Linux 2.6 kernel sometime this fall while the WinTel boys play their reindeer games. In fact, dare I say it, I'm GLAD this is happening. Hopefully, this will finally show Intel that their future is not tied to MS as it was in the past.
Ditto, dunno who they interviewed for those stats but I really want to know what they were smoking. Raises? I think I remember those. Those were those things we got every year in the 90s right?
Dude, to me that high pitch is a sign of impending death. I've had 2 monitors die on me (CRT) and the sound was the thing I noticed both times. I won't place a bet on WHEN but I'd guess you have about 6 months after the point it gets REALLY annoying.
I love my LCD but reality is that ghosting (blurring of moving images) is very noticeable on LCDs. They are nowhere near CRTs for watching movies and such. However, for text work (99% of my time) I love it. The decision boils down to WHAT you do with your PC. If you game or do a lot of multimedia, it's not as good as a CRT. In my case, I couldn't go back to CRTs since I'd lose the "crispness" of text on an LCD.
You're way wrong buddy. History has shown that royalty free and open implementations ALMOST ALWAYS win out over proprietary and closed. Look at HTML and TCP/IP for obvious examples. Do you see the internet running on OEB and IPX/SPX? Bet you don't even know what in the heck those are. People are cheap buggers and the "good enough" mentality definately dictates the actions of the masses. The ONLY exception to this "rule" is when it's a "life-or-death" situation or when a "good enough" option is not known to exist (perhaps due to being uninformed).
You beat me to it. There was an interview with Jeremy Allison in Linux Format sometime back where he said exactly that. The same problem exists with WINE whereby they're forced to replicate MS bugs in order to be compatible.
Linux kernel patches are very rarely that bad, not to say that I like them either. So long as your kernel minor version number doesn't change and you're using loadable modules, there's no need to recompile any existing drivers. However, you DO still have to recompile the kernel, drop it into/boot, AND reboot which DOES mean you will lose any uptime bragging rights you were saving for your performance review.
Well, you might be on Windows for a while then. There are quite a few games for Windows that run under WINE and WineX but, at least as of right now, they don't have the same level of stability (can't believe I'm saying this) as running them on native Windows. There are some very good games that run natively under Linux but, like you pointed out, the selection is quite limited. If you really want to ditch Windows then you should consider buying a console for gaming. Sadly, the popularity of DirectX combined with it's proprietary non-portable nature means that the market needs to convince game engine makers to wean themselves off DirectX and (back) onto OpenGL. Even though this isn't impossible (ie. game engines that support the PS2 don't use DirectX) it would probably take quite some time to happen. One way to start is by simply not buying games that require DirectX since talking with your wallet is often the most effective way of conveying a message to companies.
On a side note, I think there were some licensing issues with developing OpenGL graphics drivers that might have helped pave the way for DirectX back in it's infancy. I'm not sure if these were ever addressed but somebody else might know full text of the issue I'm thinking of. Regardless, a lot of legacy cards that support DirectX may well not offer OpenGL drivers.
1) When is the last time you called MS support and got USEFUL information? The "support is only free if your time is worthless" argument is completely moot. You want support? Get a support contract with RedHat.
2) Things you install yourself (not from the distro) almost never work out of the box. No kidding, well not ALL non-MS Windows apps ALWAYS work right out of the box either. See where I'm going here? If you want a guarantee it will work, stick with the apps certified with the distro.
3) Inconsistent interface (emacs vs. vi)? Come on, compare apples to oranges why don't you. I could just as easily say MS-Word and Corel WordPerfect have inconsistent interfaces. They're not from the same authors and toolkits, they're bound to have differences. Besides, there's not interface guidelines for either emacs or vi. Pick a suite of applications and compare within, like the KDE suite or the GNOME suite.
Fact is, you probably didn't know about all this before you posted but now you do. I'm not saying everything works hunky-dory under Linux but don't post untruths. If you don't like Linux, fine, then don't use it, nobody's forcing you in the way MS forces it's products on the masses.
"from what I have seen" == from my personal experience. I know of only 4 Mac boxen (with 2 belonging to one person) in my circle of acquaintances (work included). In that same circle I know of over 30 Linux boxen (4 are mine). So "from what I have seen", Linux boxen outnumber Mac boxen 6-to-1. If I had seen it written somewhere, I wouldn't have added "nobody is stating it yet in the mass media".
Don't get me wrong, I think Mac hardware kicks a-- and I wish I had the resources to stock up on it. However, this doesn't change the fact that people with Mac hardware are few and far between. Are your observations so vastly different from mine?
Not to answer for him but, here's one for file and printer sharing. There are also a number of TPC benchmarks that show Linux outperforms MS W2K running Oracle on identical platforms.
That said, I'd like to second your point that broad statements like "outperforms" should always be in the context of "at what". It's like me saying "I'm faster than George"... it just doesn't mean anything when it's out of context like that.
At what level of penetration (% install base share) will Linux reach critical mass on the desktop? It's much less relevant from a server perspective since it appears that Linux already has reached critical mass on that front. Should we assume that when Linux supplants Apple as the number two platform (although this has already happened from what I have seen, nobody is stating it yet in the mass media), that we will see a proliferation of commercial Linux offerings and (more importantly) better OEM hardware support?
Yep, that's exactly what I do. All my "remote" boxes have SSH enabled and TightVNC (just in case). The root password is the same on all the boxes and only I know it (it's in my passport in case I get hit by a bus). I've locked down the BIOS using the same password to prevent "mucking" without a screw driver. They can pretty much do whatever they want without breaking the system. I highly recommend using JFS to for anything that's writable (basically/var,/tmp, and/home) to speed up power-off-without-shutdown recovery.
The one caveat is that I only support family/friends on always-on broadband since all the admin work (including notifying me of IP changes) is done by cron jobs. I flat out tell family/friends still on dialup to stick with Windows since 1) I don't have "anytime" access to the hardware, 2) downloading updates would be unbearable, and 3) I'd rather slam my hand in a car door than deal with modem issues. Other than that, it works out pretty well and I'm able to "support" 6 remote Linux boxes with almost no effort!
Actually, I don't really care about Loki going away. Their model would never have had legs long term. By the time they released a game for $50 it was already in the $5 bin at BestBuy. The last thing I want to be is canon fodder for some punk who's been polishing their sharpshooting skills for 9 months when I finally get online.
That said, I do wish more publishers would put out titles for Linux (and Mac) but I think this is more a factor of the game engine makers than the game publishers themselves. I mean if they can put out games for the PC and the PlayStation, the portability is obviously there. Reality is that most (with a few notable exceptions) game engines simply don't have Linux support and so Linux ports don't happen. Of course there's a critical mass element too but I'd think that would be secondary to the feasibility of the port itself.
I just love these arguments. Loki released Rune for Linux on July 20th, 2001. The posting you refer to is dated September 17th 2001. So that's 1000 units over what... less than 60 days assuming the sales figures are exact as of the date of the posting? More likely it was the numbers as of the end of August. I'm not saying 1000 units over 30 days is something to write home about but please put this kinda post into context. By September 17th 2001, the Windows version had already been out for just shy of a year. Also, when a game has been around for a year, there's no "rush" to by the game on it's release. This release date lag was one of the biggest factors working against Loki, the first of course being lousy management.
Small correction, the Linux kernel hackers announced their intention to support Hammer before MS did. MS followed suit in this case.
Re:Separating Content from Presentation a Good Thi
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 1
Looks like the article might be a little bit short sighted. If this post is true, then maybe it would be fairly easy to write readers/writers for the O2+K format. I find it hard to believe that MS given it's reputation would implement this in the final release though but people change.
Re:Separating Content from Presentation a Good Thi
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think the point is that if you save to their XML specification, you will loose all your document formatting. So yeah, the data is there, but it can't be reopened in Office or any other word processor and be in a structured way. Essentially, it is the same as just saving as plain text which has already been available since Office 95.
B) Capitalism is determined by competition in a free-market. The desktop PC OS market is governed by a monopoly which by it's very definition means it's no longer a free-market. Look it up.
C) Did you even read my post? Did I even *mention* forcing anybody to sell anything? No. It's about forcing somebody to *not* sell something in a bundle. There are plenty of rules like this already in place, ask your local telephone company for one example.
I agree with you that "disable" this, break out that, are not the proper way to address the monopoly issue. The truth is that these approaches do nothing to redress the playing field. I for one would much rather see the EU state that OEMs and resellers must sell hardware without any preinstalled or bundled operating system. This would break Microsoft's grip on the OEM market which is the real remedy that is required. At that point, Joe Sixpack can choose the OS of their liking (for a price) and either have the onsite tech install it or install it themselves. If Microsoft truly has the best product, they would have nothing to fear with this arrangement.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's impossible to measure it objectively. I purchase one copy of SuSE at each release but I install that same copy on 9 separate boxes. 3 are mine but the other 6 are for other people who asked me to manage their PCs. So trying to use SuSEs sales figure to determine my install base would make no sense. Short of random end user polls (ie. a telephone / mail survey) or data extrapolation (I guess surveys do this too), I don't know how in the heck a true installed base could be determined. If you want to try an interesting experiment, buy a shirt with a big Tux on it from www.thinkgeek.com and go for a walk. The amount of people that will stop you to talk Linux is almost beyond belief. I assume the same thing might be true of a Mac t-shirt but it's really a strange feeling.
Yeah, they run a little hot. It's funny you bring this up because I'm considering investing in a water cooling system to cut down the fan noise in here. If only I wasn't so freaking nervous about introducing water into my computer case. One drop of condensation could cause a real mess and probably void a few warranties in the process.
That's not exactly true. You're forgetting that the entire bus architecture would be 64 bit. There wouldn't be any slowdown since there's no basis for comparison. The upside is that really big (ie. > 4G) file operations and double integer ops should be much faster. Think video and databases for apps that would benefit greatly. I agree that for mom sending email and surfing the web, there's no real incentive to invest in this kind of hardware. However, for data mining, this is a big deal. It'll be interesting to see if a peripheral market develops around the 64 bit arch. Should prove interesting!
As I have been MS free since 2000, I really couldn't care less what they do or don't do. As for Intel, here's some news for them, they DO NOT have a monopoly like their special friend. I'll gladly purchase an AMD Opteron to run my shiny new Linux 2.6 kernel sometime this fall while the WinTel boys play their reindeer games. In fact, dare I say it, I'm GLAD this is happening. Hopefully, this will finally show Intel that their future is not tied to MS as it was in the past.
Ditto, dunno who they interviewed for those stats but I really want to know what they were smoking. Raises? I think I remember those. Those were those things we got every year in the 90s right?
Dude, to me that high pitch is a sign of impending death. I've had 2 monitors die on me (CRT) and the sound was the thing I noticed both times. I won't place a bet on WHEN but I'd guess you have about 6 months after the point it gets REALLY annoying.
I love my LCD but reality is that ghosting (blurring of moving images) is very noticeable on LCDs. They are nowhere near CRTs for watching movies and such. However, for text work (99% of my time) I love it. The decision boils down to WHAT you do with your PC. If you game or do a lot of multimedia, it's not as good as a CRT. In my case, I couldn't go back to CRTs since I'd lose the "crispness" of text on an LCD.
Come on now Mr. Ballmer! Be sport and use a real account like the rest of us. Hiding behind an anoncow account is not like you.
You're way wrong buddy. History has shown that royalty free and open implementations ALMOST ALWAYS win out over proprietary and closed. Look at HTML and TCP/IP for obvious examples. Do you see the internet running on OEB and IPX/SPX? Bet you don't even know what in the heck those are. People are cheap buggers and the "good enough" mentality definately dictates the actions of the masses. The ONLY exception to this "rule" is when it's a "life-or-death" situation or when a "good enough" option is not known to exist (perhaps due to being uninformed).
You beat me to it. There was an interview with Jeremy Allison in Linux Format sometime back where he said exactly that. The same problem exists with WINE whereby they're forced to replicate MS bugs in order to be compatible.
Linux kernel patches are very rarely that bad, not to say that I like them either. So long as your kernel minor version number doesn't change and you're using loadable modules, there's no need to recompile any existing drivers. However, you DO still have to recompile the kernel, drop it into /boot, AND reboot which DOES mean you will lose any uptime bragging rights you were saving for your performance review.
Well, you might be on Windows for a while then. There are quite a few games for Windows that run under WINE and WineX but, at least as of right now, they don't have the same level of stability (can't believe I'm saying this) as running them on native Windows. There are some very good games that run natively under Linux but, like you pointed out, the selection is quite limited. If you really want to ditch Windows then you should consider buying a console for gaming. Sadly, the popularity of DirectX combined with it's proprietary non-portable nature means that the market needs to convince game engine makers to wean themselves off DirectX and (back) onto OpenGL. Even though this isn't impossible (ie. game engines that support the PS2 don't use DirectX) it would probably take quite some time to happen. One way to start is by simply not buying games that require DirectX since talking with your wallet is often the most effective way of conveying a message to companies.
On a side note, I think there were some licensing issues with developing OpenGL graphics drivers that might have helped pave the way for DirectX back in it's infancy. I'm not sure if these were ever addressed but somebody else might know full text of the issue I'm thinking of. Regardless, a lot of legacy cards that support DirectX may well not offer OpenGL drivers.
Your posts about Linux are pretty far off-base:
1) When is the last time you called MS support and got USEFUL information? The "support is only free if your time is worthless" argument is completely moot. You want support? Get a support contract with RedHat.
2) Things you install yourself (not from the distro) almost never work out of the box. No kidding, well not ALL non-MS Windows apps ALWAYS work right out of the box either. See where I'm going here? If you want a guarantee it will work, stick with the apps certified with the distro.
3) Inconsistent interface (emacs vs. vi)? Come on, compare apples to oranges why don't you. I could just as easily say MS-Word and Corel WordPerfect have inconsistent interfaces. They're not from the same authors and toolkits, they're bound to have differences. Besides, there's not interface guidelines for either emacs or vi. Pick a suite of applications and compare within, like the KDE suite or the GNOME suite.
4) No hardware support for scientific hardware:
CCD Camera
Digital Frame Grabbers
Confocal Microscopy- got me there, guess they must stock these at your local BestBuy because mine sure doesn't
High Res Image Analysis
Fact is, you probably didn't know about all this before you posted but now you do. I'm not saying everything works hunky-dory under Linux but don't post untruths. If you don't like Linux, fine, then don't use it, nobody's forcing you in the way MS forces it's products on the masses.
"from what I have seen" == from my personal experience. I know of only 4 Mac boxen (with 2 belonging to one person) in my circle of acquaintances (work included). In that same circle I know of over 30 Linux boxen (4 are mine). So "from what I have seen", Linux boxen outnumber Mac boxen 6-to-1. If I had seen it written somewhere, I wouldn't have added "nobody is stating it yet in the mass media".
Don't get me wrong, I think Mac hardware kicks a-- and I wish I had the resources to stock up on it. However, this doesn't change the fact that people with Mac hardware are few and far between. Are your observations so vastly different from mine?
Not to answer for him but, here's one for file and printer sharing. There are also a number of TPC benchmarks that show Linux outperforms MS W2K running Oracle on identical platforms.
... it just doesn't mean anything when it's out of context like that.
That said, I'd like to second your point that broad statements like "outperforms" should always be in the context of "at what". It's like me saying "I'm faster than George"
At what level of penetration (% install base share) will Linux reach critical mass on the desktop? It's much less relevant from a server perspective since it appears that Linux already has reached critical mass on that front. Should we assume that when Linux supplants Apple as the number two platform (although this has already happened from what I have seen, nobody is stating it yet in the mass media), that we will see a proliferation of commercial Linux offerings and (more importantly) better OEM hardware support?
Yep, that's exactly what I do. All my "remote" boxes have SSH enabled and TightVNC (just in case). The root password is the same on all the boxes and only I know it (it's in my passport in case I get hit by a bus). I've locked down the BIOS using the same password to prevent "mucking" without a screw driver. They can pretty much do whatever they want without breaking the system. I highly recommend using JFS to for anything that's writable (basically /var, /tmp, and /home) to speed up power-off-without-shutdown recovery.
The one caveat is that I only support family/friends on always-on broadband since all the admin work (including notifying me of IP changes) is done by cron jobs. I flat out tell family/friends still on dialup to stick with Windows since 1) I don't have "anytime" access to the hardware, 2) downloading updates would be unbearable, and 3) I'd rather slam my hand in a car door than deal with modem issues. Other than that, it works out pretty well and I'm able to "support" 6 remote Linux boxes with almost no effort!
Actually, I don't really care about Loki going away. Their model would never have had legs long term. By the time they released a game for $50 it was already in the $5 bin at BestBuy. The last thing I want to be is canon fodder for some punk who's been polishing their sharpshooting skills for 9 months when I finally get online.
That said, I do wish more publishers would put out titles for Linux (and Mac) but I think this is more a factor of the game engine makers than the game publishers themselves. I mean if they can put out games for the PC and the PlayStation, the portability is obviously there. Reality is that most (with a few notable exceptions) game engines simply don't have Linux support and so Linux ports don't happen. Of course there's a critical mass element too but I'd think that would be secondary to the feasibility of the port itself.
I just love these arguments. Loki released Rune for Linux on July 20th, 2001. The posting you refer to is dated September 17th 2001. So that's 1000 units over what ... less than 60 days assuming the sales figures are exact as of the date of the posting? More likely it was the numbers as of the end of August. I'm not saying 1000 units over 30 days is something to write home about but please put this kinda post into context. By September 17th 2001, the Windows version had already been out for just shy of a year. Also, when a game has been around for a year, there's no "rush" to by the game on it's release. This release date lag was one of the biggest factors working against Loki, the first of course being lousy management.
Small correction, the Linux kernel hackers announced their intention to support Hammer before MS did. MS followed suit in this case.
Looks like the article might be a little bit short sighted. If this post is true, then maybe it would be fairly easy to write readers/writers for the O2+K format. I find it hard to believe that MS given it's reputation would implement this in the final release though but people change.
I think the point is that if you save to their XML specification, you will loose all your document formatting. So yeah, the data is there, but it can't be reopened in Office or any other word processor and be in a structured way. Essentially, it is the same as just saving as plain text which has already been available since Office 95.
Is that an upstream and downstream combined total? Also, the installation costs seems really fishy ... what's with this:
4 Port Router: $150.00 / Mo
... about 58 years :D Yeah, yeah, I know it wasn't meant seriously.
A) VA Linux ONLY sold rack mounts.
B) Capitalism is determined by competition in a free-market. The desktop PC OS market is governed by a monopoly which by it's very definition means it's no longer a free-market. Look it up.
C) Did you even read my post? Did I even *mention* forcing anybody to sell anything? No. It's about forcing somebody to *not* sell something in a bundle. There are plenty of rules like this already in place, ask your local telephone company for one example.
I agree with you that "disable" this, break out that, are not the proper way to address the monopoly issue. The truth is that these approaches do nothing to redress the playing field. I for one would much rather see the EU state that OEMs and resellers must sell hardware without any preinstalled or bundled operating system. This would break Microsoft's grip on the OEM market which is the real remedy that is required. At that point, Joe Sixpack can choose the OS of their liking (for a price) and either have the onsite tech install it or install it themselves. If Microsoft truly has the best product, they would have nothing to fear with this arrangement.