Currently, everything I need to do for work, home, or anywhere else runs on windows just fine.
Here is a relevant quote, with a sting:
A lot of people, including me, have seen SaaS as the savior of the Linux desktop. SaaS neatly allows Linux to skirt around the elephant in the room: Linux on the desktop hasn't been successful because of a pretty interface; it hasn't been successful because there is a perceived lack of applications. A perception, I should add, which is basically right, at least as far as the average user is concerned.
I used to only use my Windows box to play games. Now the humble bundles have removed that need.
If your gaming needs are served by a dozen or so Indie games of wildly varying quality --- and the bundles, quite frankly, are beginning to look quite predictable.
There will be a rather pretty physics-based side-scrolling platformer, a casual puzzle game or two, and a mediocre tower shooter, now and again you will be blessed with a gem like "Machinarium" or "Trauma."
Windows remains the tail that wags the dog.
Linux contributions to the Humble Bundles average about twice that from Windows gamers but still ring up to a bare quarter of the total or less.
Not a particularly compelling performance for the would-be Linux developer when you remember that almost all of these games have long been available for the Windows platform --- and are frequently on sale.
I thought DRM was already a thing of the past. Who is still doing that?
Netflix, for one.
Move over, Web surfing. Netflix movies now take up more of the Internet pipes going into North American homes.
A study published Tuesday by Sandvine Inc. shows that Netflix movies and TV shows account for nearly 30 percent of traffic into homes during peak evening hours, compared with less than 17 percent for Web browsing.
Only about a quarter of homes with broadband subscribe to Netflix, but watching movies and TV shows online takes up a lot of bandwidth compared with Web surfing, email and practically every other Internet activity except file sharing and videoconferencing.
As late as last year, both Web surfing and peer-to-peer file sharing â" mainly the illegal trading of copyrighted movies â" were each larger than Netflix's traffic.
Barnes & Noble made a big deal out of its brand-new Nook Tablet's compatibility with Netflix and Pandora at its recent unveiling, apparently giving Amazon a bit of a complex.
Amazon did its best to one-up the Nook in today's release, rolling out the laundry list of Fire-friendly apps that will be available on day one, including "Netflix, Rhapsody, Pandora, Twitter, Comics by comiXology, Facebook, The Weather Channel and popular games from Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap and Rovio."
Amazon now says "several thousand" Android apps will be available through the Amazon Appstore for Kindle Fire, considerably less than the hundreds of thousands of apps currently populating the Android Market. Of course, this could be a good thing, as much of what's offered there is pure garbage.
So much time and effort is spent on failing to try to stop the potential loss of hypothetical profit. Even if you're pro-copyright, I still don't understand it.
The production budget for "How To Train Your Dragon" $165 million. Theatrical gross, domestic $218 million. Global, $495 million.
Clean industry. High tech. Skilled labor. Favorable balance of trade. This is not a tough sell for the politician come November.
When we stop trying to acquire their product, we will win. Boycotts do work.
The boycott merely shifts production to other --- less volitile --- markets.
Blue Sky, Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks are in no danger whatever. They produce a timeless family-oriented product to the highest of technical and creative standards.
Now and again one of their products may falter in its initial theatrical release, but find its audience a generation or two later. MGM's "Wizard of Oz" didn't have a solid anchorage until the introduction of color television in the fifties.
But the geek may be more trouble than he is worth.
He'll get a slice of the franchise comic book flick --- more Star Trek, another version of The Batman, a new James Bond, somewhere down the road.
But original production without an established fan base?
Hopefully someone will circumvent the retarded US auto laws and sell it as a "kit" so it does not have to meet ANY US safety or other laws and can be a home made car that fits under the "experimental" rules like they do iwth aircraft.
It doesn't work that way:
Homebuilt land vehicles (cars, motorcycles, ATVs), whether built from a kit or entirely from scratch, are regulated on a state level and must therefore comply with the regulations of the particular state in which they are licensed. Homebuilt vehicles are not regulated on a federal level - at least not formally. Normally, the state-level regulations that apply to such vehicles are less stringent than the federal regulations that apply to manufactured products, but much depends on the state in which you live. For example, the motor vehicle code of many states contains language requiring that all motor vehicles are equipped according to the federal regulations in effect when the vehicle was manufactured. Homebuilt aircraft and watercraft must comply with federal regulations.
Liability insurance should be relatively easy to obtain, and priced about on par with existing coverage. Collision and comprehensive insurance may be more costly and difficult to obtain. The difficulty with comprehensive and collision insurance comes mainly from the inherent difficulty of establishing a value for your car. Consequently, you may be asked to have it professionally appraised, in which case the total coverage will then be limited to the appraised value.
If you do not already have insurance on an existing car, it will be very difficult to find a company that will write a new policy on your homebuilt car.
I live in a lake effect snow belt in upstate New York. The motor vehicle safety laws don't look half so retarded where the weather can turn lethal in a heartbeat.
Seriously, with 14 bazillion bloggers fighting to get clicks to their webpages, all you need is one guy with a copy of the datasheet and a twitter account.
If this were true why is Linux clinging by its fingertips to a bare 1% market share?
You need people who can negotiate OEM system installs, retail placement and sales promotions. Your bazillion bloggers aren't as useful as the one man or woman who knows how to cut the right deal with Walmart.
Projects like this need a *lot* of work. This current idea is positively idiotic and shows just how little feedback there is in the organisation.
The Prime is an interesting take on the familiar Baylis-type windup radio, sacrificing some portability in favor of beefed up sound, output for external speakers, DC input and a rather muscular detachable solar powered battery pack that can recharge most cell phones.
This all helps make radio listening a more social experience --- the value of which is something we may have forgotten in the developed world.
The laptop or e-book reader is not so easily shared.
OLPC always seemed to me more ideology than product.
You don't begin by asking how other cultures teach their young. What they teach their young. How quickly their children will be entering the work force. What skills are in demand.
Developers do not have to use the app store to distribute their apps.
But will anyone be shopping outside the secure and comfortable environment of the app store?
How many Linux users would be comfortable installing apps outside their distro's repository? I am betting not many even if the business was made as dead easy as launching a Windows executable.
Peru 870,000 Uruguay 470,000 India 250,000 Rwanda 120,000 Columbia 65,000 (?) Argentina 60,000 Mexico 50,000
Total Latin America: 1.51 million Total Asian: 24,000
It strains coincidence when your global "one size fits all" program for the education of young children succeeds only among those who share a common (essentially Western) language and culture.
Teacher training and ongoing support
The organisation's strategy of simply giving underprivileged children laptops and "walking away" has been criticised because "laptops are getting opened and turned on, but then kids and teachers are getting frustrated by hardware and software bugs, don't understand what to do, and promptly box them up to put back in the corner." This "drive-by" implementation model is the official strategy of the OLPC project, and the mantra "You Can Give Kids XO Laptops and Just Walk Away" are Negroponte's own words.
Nigeria
Other discussions question whether OLPC laptops should be designed to promote anonymity or to facilitate government tracking of stolen laptops. A recent New Scientist article critiqued Bitfrost's P_THEFT security option, which allows each laptop to be configured to transmit an individualized, non-repudiable digital signature to a central server at most once each day to remain functioning.
In 2007, XO laptops in Nigeria were reported to contain pornographic material belonging to children participating in the OLPC Program. In response, OLPC made plans for adding content filters. The OLPC foundation maintained the position that such issues were societal, not laptop related. Similar responses have led some to suggest the OLPC takes an indifferent stance concerning this issue. According to Wayan Vota Senior Director at Inveneo and founder of the independent OLPC News, "The use of computers to look at porn is [a] social problem, not a hardware one... Children have to be taught what's good and what's bad, based on the cultural context."
The problem with the airdrop is that OLPC's root premise is that kids don't need a teacher or guardian.
It has never been quite so simple as that:
When we first started distributing wind-up radios to orphaned children in Rwanda in 1999, a common response was that our radios helped to combat ignorance and ease isolation. In May, when we launched our Prime radio, the response was the same.
Children who head households, as well as at-risk widow headed-families are hungry for information they can trust that will help them learn and grow. They want to listen to the news and practical programmes that will support their personal development, impact behavior change (in relation to sexual and reproductive health), inform on health issues like family planning and HIV/AIDS and peace and reconciliation.
Beneficiaries, who are identified by our local partner organisations, are trained in the use and care of the Prime as well as how to become listening group leaders. They are the responsible "guardians" of the radios on behalf of their family and of their neighbours. Over the years in Rwanda we've seen that roughly 20 listeners share our radios, although many more might gather to hear an important announcement or programme.
The Prime's bright LED light will decrease the use of hazardous candles and kerosene, enabling people to see at night. To the very poorest, even a candle or a tablespoon of kerosene is beyond their daily reach. Children were particularly excited about being able to see well to study.
AM radio and Shortwave broadcasting are 90 years old.
But the geek --- in his own version of magical thinking --- will assume that using his generation's bleeding-edge tech effectively will be easy for even the youngest of children.
Making a successful application is about ability.
Make a good and fun game, and you will profit from it.
There is always of element of chance in any production.
You time the release of your solidly crafted action flick to avoid the blockbuster sequel --- only to be blindsided by the success of a competitor that seemed to come out of nowhere like Die Hard or The Pirates of the Caribbean.
Gog.com is stuffed with games that became classics in their genre --- but barely saw a dime in sales when launched. Even when you look back with 20-20 hindsight, it isn't always easy to see what went wrong.
I imagine that one of their complaints about the Xbox was that it couldn't be tied into Windows or Office either, but it ended up being a big money-maker. And even that has stagnated since Allard left the project.
Kinect does not look like stagnation.
The Xbox 360 is likely getting a Fall update that contains significant graphical updates and a few new features, Kinect motion and voice navigation, Bing integration, and, ultimately, live television streaming.
If Microsoft's dashboard update looks familiar, it's because the design fits in the same family as the user interface for both the company's Windows Phone 7 OS and Windows 8 developer preview. In other words, Xbox Live will fit rather seamlessly into Microsoft's upcoming system OS, a future integration promised by none other than Xbox Live's own Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb.
Do I have to start paying $1 for every 100 searches I do over 1000 a month?
Not to mention with that horribly awful instant search BS they keep pushing, I can only imagine how much crap like that would hit people's wallets.
You get three choices with online services:
1 Funding through taxes, private grants or donations.
2 Supported by advertising.
This works only when adds are visible and clearly reaching their target audience.
3 Rental, subscriptions, or sales.
There are only so many people that want another tee shirt or coffee mug, Merchandising is not always the answer,
Because if we were happy to have someone else dictate to us how we should use our systems, we'd have stuck with Windows or OSX. The UNIX world hasn't even managed to settle on a single window manager, much less a desktop environment that no one but the guy who created it seems to like.
Unity may fail the geek.
But it stands a very good chance of success with everyone else.
The mind and market share of the "community oriented" Linux distribution is a bare 1% or less - with a trend line that is no picture of health.
The "power user" isn't going to take Ubuntu to where Canonical needs and wants it to go. .
It is galling that despite free software having become the industry standard on the web, being demonstrably more reliable and secure than Microsoft products and more flexible and configurable than Apple products, people consider it chiefly as the low-cost option.
You are talking about large-scale systems and services managed by IT pros:
Maintaining infrastructure.
Whether they are stand-alone, hosted locally or on the Internet, end user oriented applications are very different world from Apache.
It is not about the functionality. Most people use MS because it is all they know. They do not know and are not familiar with the alternatives. If all the schools in one country switch to Linux, in few years all the universities will be full of people that are used to Linux and then, soon all the companies will be full of people that prefer Linux. It will be the OS that they are familiar with.
There was a time when every grade school classroom in the states had an Apple II ---
or, at least, that is how the geek will remember the story.
What he will forget is how long those Apples remained on the desks and how badly they had aged when compared Apple's mass market competitors.
The core of it, if you can forgive the pun, is that, for all of his talk about the cathedral and the bazaar, the geek really thinks top-down. His instincts are to go with the mandate from on high.
The first mistake is to assume that users want to replicate their locked-down office cubicle at home and on the road.
The second is to forget that class still matters.
Microsoft sells solid middle class value. Apple an up-scale urban lifestyle.
Given the geek's abysmal talent for marketing, it is easy to picture Linux as the State Prison Green of operating systems. The apps generic and forgettable --- chipped beef on toast.
As long as they can keep themselves physically secure, its game on for the cyber war. Keep in mind that Mexican Anon doesn't necessarily have to be located in Mexico. Its going to be tough for the Zetas to reach out and touch someone posting from Boise, Idaho.
Do you really believe that the Zeta Cartel doesn't have contacts in the states?
That the kid in Boise is safe from the hired killer?
Large are to patrol. Small number of deputies. Counties are BIG in Texas.
In 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated Montgomery County's population to be 455,746, a 55.14% growth rate in the ten years from the last U.S. Census ---making the county the 24th fastest-growing county in the United States.
The county seat is Conroe. The Sheriff has 1,000 square miles to patrol.
As it stands now slapping the MSFT logo on something adds perceived value and credibility.
I find that hard to believe.
I don't.
Walmart.com stocks 400 Windows PCs.
108 printers. 98 webcams. 900 flavors of the Windows keyboad, mouse, and joystick controller.
It won't be difficult to find a printer that supports the Google Cloud or AirPrint. But you have to be realistic. Product that doesn't support Windows doesn't get shelf space.
Won't happen. SIP and IAX are out there, all free and decentralized, but all the proprietary junk continues to be adopted by the technologically-challenged masses.
This tells me one of two things:
1 That the geek builds systems and software too arcane and unusable for ordinary mortals.
2 That the geek can't "sell" his own product worth sh*t.
Slashdot Mirror
Currently, everything I need to do for work, home, or anywhere else runs on windows just fine.
Here is a relevant quote, with a sting:
A lot of people, including me, have seen SaaS as the savior of the Linux desktop. SaaS neatly allows Linux to skirt around the elephant in the room: Linux on the desktop hasn't been successful because of a pretty interface; it hasn't been successful because there is a perceived lack of applications. A perception, I should add, which is basically right, at least as far as the average user is concerned.
Where native Linux app development stands --- Has Linux given up on desktop app development?
I used to only use my Windows box to play games. Now the humble bundles have removed that need.
If your gaming needs are served by a dozen or so Indie games of wildly varying quality --- and the bundles, quite frankly, are beginning to look quite predictable.
There will be a rather pretty physics-based side-scrolling platformer, a casual puzzle game or two, and a mediocre tower shooter, now and again you will be blessed with a gem like "Machinarium" or "Trauma."
Windows remains the tail that wags the dog.
Linux contributions to the Humble Bundles average about twice that from Windows gamers but still ring up to a bare quarter of the total or less.
Not a particularly compelling performance for the would-be Linux developer when you remember that almost all of these games have long been available for the Windows platform --- and are frequently on sale.
fingerprint recognition (easily defeated with a boxcutter and a Kleenex)
Not so easily defeated if the sensor can also read temperature, pressure, blood oxygen levels, and so on.
Fiction is not prior art.
The severed finger makes good theater.
In real life it adds layer upon layer of complexity and danger.
I thought DRM was already a thing of the past. Who is still doing that?
Netflix, for one.
Move over, Web surfing. Netflix movies now take up more of the Internet pipes going into North American homes.
A study published Tuesday by Sandvine Inc. shows that Netflix movies and TV shows account for nearly 30 percent of traffic into homes during peak evening hours, compared with less than 17 percent for Web browsing.
Only about a quarter of homes with broadband subscribe to Netflix, but watching movies and TV shows online takes up a lot of bandwidth compared with Web surfing, email and practically every other Internet activity except file sharing and videoconferencing.
As late as last year, both Web surfing and peer-to-peer file sharing â" mainly the illegal trading of copyrighted movies â" were each larger than Netflix's traffic.
Netflix's Internet traffic overtakes Web surfing [May 17]
Barnes & Noble made a big deal out of its brand-new Nook Tablet's compatibility with Netflix and Pandora at its recent unveiling, apparently giving Amazon a bit of a complex. Amazon did its best to one-up the Nook in today's release, rolling out the laundry list of Fire-friendly apps that will be available on day one, including "Netflix, Rhapsody, Pandora, Twitter, Comics by comiXology, Facebook, The Weather Channel and popular games from Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap and Rovio."
Amazon now says "several thousand" Android apps will be available through the Amazon Appstore for Kindle Fire, considerably less than the hundreds of thousands of apps currently populating the Android Market. Of course, this could be a good thing, as much of what's offered there is pure garbage.
Kindle Fire: Yep, it'll have Netflix, Pandora, and more
At least we'll finally see what patents Microsoft has been using to strong arm manufacturers of Android based phones into patent licensing.
Tell me how you strong arm a company the size of Samsung or General Dynamics.
So much time and effort is spent on failing to try to stop the potential loss of hypothetical profit. Even if you're pro-copyright, I still don't understand it.
The production budget for "How To Train Your Dragon" $165 million.
Theatrical gross, domestic $218 million.
Global, $495 million.
Clean industry. High tech. Skilled labor. Favorable balance of trade. This is not a tough sell for the politician come November.
Why not take down paedophile rings, drug cartels that dumb down society, dictators who impose moronic taxes?
The major players in the sex slave trade aren't in it for the laughs.
When we stop trying to acquire their product, we will win. Boycotts do work.
The boycott merely shifts production to other --- less volitile --- markets.
Blue Sky, Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks are in no danger whatever. They produce a timeless family-oriented product to the highest of technical and creative standards.
Now and again one of their products may falter in its initial theatrical release, but find its audience a generation or two later. MGM's "Wizard of Oz" didn't have a solid anchorage until the introduction of color television in the fifties.
But the geek may be more trouble than he is worth.
He'll get a slice of the franchise comic book flick --- more Star Trek, another version of The Batman, a new James Bond, somewhere down the road.
But original production without an established fan base?
There are easier ways to make a living.
Hopefully someone will circumvent the retarded US auto laws and sell it as a "kit" so it does not have to meet ANY US safety or other laws and can be a home made car that fits under the "experimental" rules like they do iwth aircraft.
It doesn't work that way:
Homebuilt land vehicles (cars, motorcycles, ATVs), whether built from a kit or entirely from scratch, are regulated on a state level and must therefore comply with the regulations of the particular state in which they are licensed. Homebuilt vehicles are not regulated on a federal level - at least not formally. Normally, the state-level regulations that apply to such vehicles are less stringent than the federal regulations that apply to manufactured products, but much depends on the state in which you live. For example, the motor vehicle code of many states contains language requiring that all motor vehicles are equipped according to the federal regulations in effect when the vehicle was manufactured. Homebuilt aircraft and watercraft must comply with federal regulations.
Liability insurance should be relatively easy to obtain, and priced about on par with existing coverage. Collision and comprehensive insurance may be more costly and difficult to obtain. The difficulty with comprehensive and collision insurance comes mainly from the inherent difficulty of establishing a value for your car. Consequently, you may be asked to have it professionally appraised, in which case the total coverage will then be limited to the appraised value.
If you do not already have insurance on an existing car, it will be very difficult to find a company that will write a new policy on your homebuilt car.
Licensing And Insuring Homebuilt Vehicles [Rev. May 31st]
I live in a lake effect snow belt in upstate New York. The motor vehicle safety laws don't look half so retarded where the weather can turn lethal in a heartbeat.
Seriously, with 14 bazillion bloggers fighting to get clicks to their webpages, all you need is one guy with a copy of the datasheet and a twitter account.
If this were true why is Linux clinging by its fingertips to a bare 1% market share?
You need people who can negotiate OEM system installs, retail placement and sales promotions. Your bazillion bloggers aren't as useful as the one man or woman who knows how to cut the right deal with Walmart.
Projects like this need a *lot* of work. This current idea is positively idiotic and shows just how little feedback there is in the organisation.
The Prime is an interesting take on the familiar Baylis-type windup radio, sacrificing some portability in favor of beefed up sound, output for external speakers, DC input and a rather muscular detachable solar powered battery pack that can recharge most cell phones.
This all helps make radio listening a more social experience --- the value of which is something we may have forgotten in the developed world.
The laptop or e-book reader is not so easily shared.
OLPC always seemed to me more ideology than product.
You don't begin by asking how other cultures teach their young. What they teach their young. How quickly their children will be entering the work force. What skills are in demand.
Which is why Microsoft is so hung up about vendor lock-in and crushing Linux
With a market share of less than 1%, and a trend line as flat as the Kansas prairies, what is there left to crush?
Developers do not have to use the app store to distribute their apps.
But will anyone be shopping outside the secure and comfortable environment of the app store?
How many Linux users would be comfortable installing apps outside their distro's repository? I am betting not many even if the business was made as dead easy as launching a Windows executable.
Total distribution of XO laptops: 2 million.
Peru 870,000
Uruguay 470,000
India 250,000
Rwanda 120,000
Columbia 65,000 (?)
Argentina 60,000
Mexico 50,000
Total Latin America: 1.51 million
Total Asian: 24,000
It strains coincidence when your global "one size fits all" program for the education of young children succeeds only among those who share a common (essentially Western) language and culture.
Teacher training and ongoing support
The organisation's strategy of simply giving underprivileged children laptops and "walking away" has been criticised because "laptops are getting opened and turned on, but then kids and teachers are getting frustrated by hardware and software bugs, don't understand what to do, and promptly box them up to put back in the corner." This "drive-by" implementation model is the official strategy of the OLPC project, and the mantra "You Can Give Kids XO Laptops and Just Walk Away" are Negroponte's own words.
Nigeria
Other discussions question whether OLPC laptops should be designed to promote anonymity or to facilitate government tracking of stolen laptops. A recent New Scientist article critiqued Bitfrost's P_THEFT security option, which allows each laptop to be configured to transmit an individualized, non-repudiable digital signature to a central server at most once each day to remain functioning.
In 2007, XO laptops in Nigeria were reported to contain pornographic material belonging to children participating in the OLPC Program. In response, OLPC made plans for adding content filters. The OLPC foundation maintained the position that such issues were societal, not laptop related. Similar responses have led some to suggest the OLPC takes an indifferent stance concerning this issue. According to Wayan Vota Senior Director at Inveneo and founder of the independent OLPC News, "The use of computers to look at porn is [a] social problem, not a hardware one... Children have to be taught what's good and what's bad, based on the cultural context."
One Laptop per Child
The problem with the airdrop is that OLPC's root premise is that kids don't need a teacher or guardian.
It has never been quite so simple as that:
When we first started distributing wind-up radios to orphaned children in Rwanda in 1999, a common response was that our radios helped to combat ignorance and ease isolation. In May, when we launched our Prime radio, the response was the same.
Children who head households, as well as at-risk widow headed-families are hungry for information they can trust that will help them learn and grow. They want to listen to the news and practical programmes that will support their personal development, impact behavior change (in relation to sexual and reproductive health), inform on health issues like family planning and HIV/AIDS and peace and reconciliation.
Beneficiaries, who are identified by our local partner organisations, are trained in the use and care of the Prime as well as how to become listening group leaders. They are the responsible "guardians" of the radios on behalf of their family and of their neighbours. Over the years in Rwanda we've seen that roughly 20 listeners share our radios, although many more might gather to hear an important announcement or programme.
The Prime's bright LED light will decrease the use of hazardous candles and kerosene, enabling people to see at night. To the very poorest, even a candle or a tablespoon of kerosene is beyond their daily reach. Children were particularly excited about being able to see well to study.
Prime in Rwanda
AM radio and Shortwave broadcasting are 90 years old.
But the geek --- in his own version of magical thinking --- will assume that using his generation's bleeding-edge tech effectively will be easy for even the youngest of children.
Making a successful application is about ability.
Make a good and fun game, and you will profit from it.
There is always of element of chance in any production.
You time the release of your solidly crafted action flick to avoid the blockbuster sequel --- only to be blindsided by the success of a competitor that seemed to come out of nowhere like Die Hard or The Pirates of the Caribbean.
Gog.com is stuffed with games that became classics in their genre --- but barely saw a dime in sales when launched. Even when you look back with 20-20 hindsight, it isn't always easy to see what went wrong.
I imagine that one of their complaints about the Xbox was that it couldn't be tied into Windows or Office either, but it ended up being a big money-maker. And even that has stagnated since Allard left the project.
Kinect does not look like stagnation.
The Xbox 360 is likely getting a Fall update that contains significant graphical updates and a few new features, Kinect motion and voice navigation, Bing integration, and, ultimately, live television streaming.
If Microsoft's dashboard update looks familiar, it's because the design fits in the same family as the user interface for both the company's Windows Phone 7 OS and Windows 8 developer preview. In other words, Xbox Live will fit rather seamlessly into Microsoft's upcoming system OS, a future integration promised by none other than Xbox Live's own Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb.
Video Leaked: Xbox 360 Fall Dashboard Update
Do I have to start paying $1 for every 100 searches I do over 1000 a month? Not to mention with that horribly awful instant search BS they keep pushing, I can only imagine how much crap like that would hit people's wallets.
You get three choices with online services:
1 Funding through taxes, private grants or donations.
2 Supported by advertising.
This works only when adds are visible and clearly reaching their target audience.
3 Rental, subscriptions, or sales.
There are only so many people that want another tee shirt or coffee mug, Merchandising is not always the answer,
Because if we were happy to have someone else dictate to us how we should use our systems, we'd have stuck with Windows or OSX. The UNIX world hasn't even managed to settle on a single window manager, much less a desktop environment that no one but the guy who created it seems to like.
Unity may fail the geek.
But it stands a very good chance of success with everyone else.
The mind and market share of the "community oriented" Linux distribution is a bare 1% or less - with a trend line that is no picture of health.
The "power user" isn't going to take Ubuntu to where Canonical needs and wants it to go. .
There is absolutely no need to look at brazil for linux support.
Thank god.
Top 5 Operating Systems in Brazil from October 2010 to September 2011
Not that the numbers for Portugal look any better.
Top 5 Operating Systems in Portugal from October 2010 to September 2011
It is galling that despite free software having become the industry standard on the web, being demonstrably more reliable and secure than Microsoft products and more flexible and configurable than Apple products, people consider it chiefly as the low-cost option.
You are talking about large-scale systems and services managed by IT pros:
Maintaining infrastructure.
Whether they are stand-alone, hosted locally or on the Internet, end user oriented applications are very different world from Apache.
It is not about the functionality. Most people use MS because it is all they know. They do not know and are not familiar with the alternatives.
If all the schools in one country switch to Linux, in few years all the universities will be full of people that are used to Linux and then, soon all the companies will be full of people that prefer Linux.
It will be the OS that they are familiar with.
There was a time when every grade school classroom in the states had an Apple II ---
or, at least, that is how the geek will remember the story.
What he will forget is how long those Apples remained on the desks and how badly they had aged when compared Apple's mass market competitors.
The core of it, if you can forgive the pun, is that, for all of his talk about the cathedral and the bazaar, the geek really thinks top-down. His instincts are to go with the mandate from on high.
The first mistake is to assume that users want to replicate their locked-down office cubicle at home and on the road.
The second is to forget that class still matters.
Microsoft sells solid middle class value. Apple an up-scale urban lifestyle.
Given the geek's abysmal talent for marketing, it is easy to picture Linux as the State Prison Green of operating systems. The apps generic and forgettable --- chipped beef on toast.
As long as they can keep themselves physically secure, its game on for the cyber war. Keep in mind that Mexican Anon doesn't necessarily have to be located in Mexico. Its going to be tough for the Zetas to reach out and touch someone posting from Boise, Idaho.
Do you really believe that the Zeta Cartel doesn't have contacts in the states?
That the kid in Boise is safe from the hired killer?
Large are to patrol. Small number of deputies. Counties are BIG in Texas.
In 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated Montgomery County's population to be 455,746, a 55.14% growth rate in the ten years from the last U.S. Census ---making the county the 24th fastest-growing county in the United States.
The county seat is Conroe. The Sheriff has 1,000 square miles to patrol.
Montgomery County, Texas
As it stands now slapping the MSFT logo on something adds perceived value and credibility.
I find that hard to believe.
I don't.
Walmart.com stocks 400 Windows PCs.
108 printers. 98 webcams.
900 flavors of the Windows keyboad, mouse, and joystick controller.
It won't be difficult to find a printer that supports the Google Cloud or AirPrint. But you have to be realistic. Product that doesn't support Windows doesn't get shelf space.
It will have a sticker.
Won't happen. SIP and IAX are out there, all free and decentralized, but all the proprietary junk continues to be adopted by the technologically-challenged masses.
This tells me one of two things:
1 That the geek builds systems and software too arcane and unusable for ordinary mortals.
2 That the geek can't "sell" his own product worth sh*t.