Gnash is not ready for prime time and last I checked, didn't currently work with youtube. Supposedly swfdec does, if you compile the latest build, but I haven't done so yet. (I'm running Linux on PPC)
You do know that this is intimidating and unintelligible gibberish to the video's target audience?
For every couple of M$ jobs that gets filled, more Linux jobs will open: And I'm expensive.:)
Expensive = Expendable.
M$ used three times in one paragraph = Trivial and adolescent.
Don't underestimate the opposition.
The training is for jobs in the MS Office enviroment, jobs which strengthen Windows's position as a client OS and as the server OS of choice for small business. We aren't talking about a couple of jobs. We are talking about a labor pool of 30,000 workers.
I commend Microsoft for doing an OS which no one uses
The OS that no one uses has a 25% share of the desktop in the Net Applications webstats. Net Appplications tracks users - not licenses. Think hits to CNN and Amazon.com.
The WSJ's Cassandra Sweet calls Solaren a "stealth startup:"
The company is in talks with two trusts, one in the U.S. and one in Europe, about financing for engineering, design and testing of the system, and launching a pilot system, The company needs funding "in the billions of dollars" [simply for the pilot project] after which it will likely float an initial public offering.UPDATE: PG&E Looks To Outer Space For Solar Power
The faith of the innocent.
Solaren is one guy with a pick-up team of engineers: it has no money and no track record.
Looks pleasentltly rural and small town, a nice place to go fishing.
"Trimming the fat" is on everyone's mind right now.
I don't think there is any great mystery why a campus bar would seem a little out of place in an environment in which even the strongest of companies are laying people off.
IMHO building a following behind The Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, KinoDV and other open source apps on both Windows and Linux will help the war effort generally.
It accomplishes - nothing - in the mass consumer market.
Users aren't system builders. OEM Windows is - and will remain - competitive at every price point.
ARM is not going to vanquish Windows at WalMart.
Windows is the open market buffet. You want the proprietary app or driver you can get the proprietary app or driver. No lectures. No hassles. Ever.
FOSS is on the menu. But RMS didn't make the dress code.
Your FOSS app has to compete on its merits in an environment that is wholly user oriented.
Windows has Photoshop. But just as importantly it has mature apps in every category for the non-professional.
Print Shop has been around for damn near thirty years.
Its successors will be doing custom embroidery or laser-etching your coffee mug before your kid has a Linux app that makes it trivially easy to customize a birthday card for his mom.
It's good that this provides you with entertainment, it must get very boring over there when you can't play any games;)
Many a truth is spoken in jest:
The elephant in the room is "games." If you buy a computer for fun, you probably want to play games on it, and you'll quickly learn that most halfway decent games don't run on OS X.
Apple also seems to be addressing the wrong end of the market. It's producing multi-thousand dollar machines when it's the bottom end of the market -- filled with low cost laptops and netbooks that cost a few hundred dollars -- that's on fire at the moment.
Apple's sales proposition seems to come down to this:
* Windows is for boring business people, while OS X is for everyone else. Unless they want to play games. Or they don't want to pay inflated prices. Or they notice that there are far, far more applications to choose from on a PC than there are on a Mac.
* OS X can do business too -- but not as well as a PC. But don't worry, you can buy Windows and run it on your Mac. Then it's just as good as a PC, just much more expensive.
* OS X is really secure, although actually it turns out that it's not...
So it's not really that surprising Reuters reported unit sales of computers running OS X fell 16 percent in February, according to research group NPD, while Windows PC sales leaped 22 percent. Within that overall figure, MacBook laptops dropped 7 percent, while Windows laptops rose 16 percent. Windows desktops had a hard time in February, with sales down 10 percent, but OS X suffered even more with unit sales down a staggering 36 percent.
One of the major causes of the Potato famine in Ireland was the reliance on a single product (the potato) and an inability to shift to a more varied diet.
and the reason:
The British colonized the Irish, transforming their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry market at home. The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of Ireland. Pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population dependent on the potato for survival.
Christine Kinealy, author of Irish Famine: This Great Calamity writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the famine. The food was shipped under guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland.Great Famine (Ireland)
Things like ILoveYou and Conflicker are preying on exactly the same homogeneous environment as they know that hitting one element yields massive results.
The heterogeneous environment has its own costs.
There are profitable niche markets but no true mass market. Hardware and software remains expensive and incompatible.
The Apple II ended production with about five or six million units sold.
It is only with Windows that it becomes meaningful to speak of a world in which the PC is everywhere.
Hundreds of millions of units sold, perhaps 2 or 3 billion users.
Slashdot Mirror
You do know that this is intimidating and unintelligible gibberish to the video's target audience?
Expensive = Expendable.
M$ used three times in one paragraph = Trivial and adolescent.
Don't underestimate the opposition.
The training is for jobs in the MS Office enviroment, jobs which strengthen Windows's position as a client OS and as the server OS of choice for small business. We aren't talking about a couple of jobs. We are talking about a labor pool of 30,000 workers.
I haven't in ten years heard the phrase "convicted monopolist" used outside Slashdot.
Anti-Trust sentiment in the U.S. waxes and wanes like the phases of the moon. No one ever looks back, because no one gives a damn.
Government endorsement of the program. This is just so very peculiar
Training in MS Office skills are a staple of employment programs for the disabled and those on welfare.
I'll take the odds that there are classes scheduled tonight at your local high school, senior center and community college.
Perhaps not.
You will almost certainly run into the occassional snag migrating an old app or game to 64 Bit Vista.
But where are the show stoppers for the home and SOHO user?
The Linux netbook faded from view as soon as the Atom running XP became competitive.
WalMart has tried to make a go of every OEM Linux distribution known to man.
It has been known to put the mini board into the maxi case - rather like the flea-market BoomBox.
Nothing ever comes of it.
Vista remains in stock because Vista is what sells.
No one in this economy is hanging on to inventory that ain't moving out the door.
The OS that no one uses has a 25% share of the desktop in the Net Applications webstats. Net Appplications tracks users - not licenses. Think hits to CNN and Amazon.com.
Apple sells an upscale urban life-style.
Microsoft, solid middle-class value. In the home and SOHO markets these strategies have been wildly successful for over thirty years.
These are not system builders - and the OEM Windows install is for all practical purposes free at every price point.
Familiarity breeds content.
Keep it simple, stupid.
Vista and Win 7 offer an attractive refresh of the familiar Windows GUI. Which is really all anyone was demanding.
The Atom netbook - soon to be dual-core - running XP or Win 7 is an attractive and versatile product.
The Vista desktop at WalMart is 64 bit and realistically spec'd with a quad-core CPU, humongous HDD, and 4-8 GB RAM.
Bring it on.
There is damn little in FOSS that isn't ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app.
There is the enormous backlist of Windows titles.
Where is the single - compelling - reason to migrate to Linux?
Read the classified adds.
Visit your state employment office. Talk to a temp service. Look at the number of jobs which demand competence in MS Office and Windows.
Look especially closely at entry level jobs. Re-entry jobs for retirees and others long out of the job market.
The Linux market is in the back office. Where you will be expected to deliver the sun, moon and stars at the deep-discount price.
This isn't entry level employment. It isn't even your basic up-grade.
It's for the guy with five to ten years experience managing really, really, big, mission-critical networks and systems.
What you describe are games which appeal directly to women and girls - 50% of your potential market.
[and don't think for one moment that there are no males playing "The Sims"]
The WSJ's Cassandra Sweet calls Solaren a "stealth startup:"
The company is in talks with two trusts, one in the U.S. and one in Europe, about financing for engineering, design and testing of the system, and launching a pilot system, The company needs funding "in the billions of dollars" [simply for the pilot project] after which it will likely float an initial public offering. UPDATE: PG&E Looks To Outer Space For Solar Power
The faith of the innocent.
Solaren is one guy with a pick-up team of engineers: it has no money and no track record.
The mandate from on high.
I have wondered more than once how the geek keeps a straight face when he talks about the cathedral and the bazaar.
It couldn't be made plainer that he is more comfortable dealing with the OCP exec and the party bureaucrat.
So much more tractable than the countless users who chose Windows or OSX.
The geek fancies himself as the rebel. The libertarian.
He's not. He is the establishment.
He wasn't born and bred in grandma's basement. He is a product of the *NIX back office.
The geek might usefully remember how subversive of authority the MSDOS-WINDOWS PC really was.
The antithesis of the thin client. The corporate lock-down.
The ordinary user when confronted with the Geek and Linux doesn't back away quietly.
He runs screaming from the room.
Microsoft employs around 40,000 in and around Redmond.
Mormons represent about 3% of the state's population.
The largest concentration would appear to be in Grant County, a three hour drive east on the I-90. Largest Latter-day Saint Communities
Looks pleasentltly rural and small town, a nice place to go fishing.
"Trimming the fat" is on everyone's mind right now.
I don't think there is any great mystery why a campus bar would seem a little out of place in an environment in which even the strongest of companies are laying people off.
You choose the "brand name" office suite because it is a rock-solid solution that scales.
There are no show-stoppers for the one-man office. No show-stoppers for the business with a clerical staff of 15,000.
The obscure function your temp needs is where she expects to find it.
It won't matter whether you recruited her in mid-town Manhattan or Nowhere, Nebraska.
Integration with Small Business Accounting and other software and services will be - at least ideally - butter-smooth.
Not a Windows system, does not run Microsoft anything, none of your programs will work on this
WalMart was posting big-print disclaimers like these on its website just before the Linux netbook market headed south.
You can save yourself some pain by just stocking Windows.
It accomplishes - nothing - in the mass consumer market.
Users aren't system builders. OEM Windows is - and will remain - competitive at every price point.
ARM is not going to vanquish Windows at WalMart.
Windows is the open market buffet.
You want the proprietary app or driver you can get the proprietary app or driver.
No lectures. No hassles. Ever.
FOSS is on the menu.
But RMS didn't make the dress code.
Your FOSS app has to compete on its merits in an environment that is wholly user oriented.
Windows has Photoshop. But just as importantly it has mature apps in every category for the non-professional.
Print Shop has been around for damn near thirty years.
Its successors will be doing custom embroidery or laser-etching your coffee mug before your kid has a Linux app that makes it trivially easy to customize a birthday card for his mom.
Ever heard of a NetBook?
Yeah.
It has an ATOM CPU, 1 GB RAM, a 9" screen, a 160 GB HDD and runs Win XP.
Desktop specs not so very many years back.
The ranks of COBOL programmers out there are living drone like lives without passion or joy.
Their only reward a regular paycheck and the satisfaction of building and maintaining systems that do the world's work.
I used to think that was what engineering was all about.
How many common household items will remain dangerous for 1,000 years?
10,000? 100,000?
How many present relatively simple problems of disposal or recycling?
How many of these items "expose" their danger only to an advanced scientific and technical civilization?
We didn't have the means to detect radiation or the intellectual framework needed to understand it until the mid-nineteenth century.
The great thing about an Open game is that it can be worked on for fucking ages and still come out to be positive.
You can't sit around for fucking ages waiting for everything to come together.
You have to make it happen now.
Projects need leadership. Projects need discipline. Projects need goals.
The FOSS developer can't expect an unlimited commitment from outside talent that sees significant opportunities opening up elsewhere.
Oblig comment about how those $150 dollar/month heavy users will likely still be throttled anyway
If a small number of users are putting a heavy load on a shared connection, what do you expect to happen?
The only promises which matter are those defined by your contract of service.
For the uninitiated:
In the states, the original meaning of "unlimited" was dial-up AOL at $19.95 a month - an end to billing by the hour.
That plus toll-free local access numbers and flat-rate billing from the telephone company brought folks online in the tens of millions.
Cable, DSL, or satellite introduced you to affordable "always on" broadband.
You signed on for residential grade service at a mass market price: a shared connection, no fixed address, no guaranteed quality of service.
Terms of Service subject to change.
You were not the geek with his insatiable appetite for bandwidth and a wallet clutched more tightly than Scrooge McDuck's.
You were not the geek who - off hours - forgets the first lesson of gainful employment:
Get it in writing.
I've seen BSODs in the last five years, and I don't even use Windows very often.
In the last five years, how many ATM transactions, ticket sales, etc., do you suppose have been completed without a problem?
Many a truth is spoken in jest:
The elephant in the room is "games." If you buy a computer for fun, you probably want to play games on it, and you'll quickly learn that most halfway decent games don't run on OS X.
Apple also seems to be addressing the wrong end of the market. It's producing multi-thousand dollar machines when it's the bottom end of the market -- filled with low cost laptops and netbooks that cost a few hundred dollars -- that's on fire at the moment.
Apple's sales proposition seems to come down to this:
* Windows is for boring business people, while OS X is for everyone else. Unless they want to play games. Or they don't want to pay inflated prices. Or they notice that there are far, far more applications to choose from on a PC than there are on a Mac.
* OS X can do business too -- but not as well as a PC. But don't worry, you can buy Windows and run it on your Mac. Then it's just as good as a PC, just much more expensive.
* OS X is really secure, although actually it turns out that it's not ...
So it's not really that surprising Reuters reported unit sales of computers running OS X fell 16 percent in February, according to research group NPD, while Windows PC sales leaped 22 percent. Within that overall figure, MacBook laptops dropped 7 percent, while Windows laptops rose 16 percent. Windows desktops had a hard time in February, with sales down 10 percent, but OS X suffered even more with unit sales down a staggering 36 percent.
Apple's Challenges: Gaming to Security [April 8, 2009]
This is how Microsoft explains Conficker to the home user: Protect yourself from the Conficker computer worm
Rather well done, I think.
and the reason:
The British colonized the Irish, transforming their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry market at home. The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of Ireland. Pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population dependent on the potato for survival.
Christine Kinealy, author of Irish Famine: This Great Calamity writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the famine. The food was shipped under guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland. Great Famine (Ireland)
Things like ILoveYou and Conflicker are preying on exactly the same homogeneous environment as they know that hitting one element yields massive results.
The heterogeneous environment has its own costs.
There are profitable niche markets but no true mass market. Hardware and software remains expensive and incompatible.
The Apple II ended production with about five or six million units sold.
It is only with Windows that it becomes meaningful to speak of a world in which the PC is everywhere.
Hundreds of millions of units sold, perhaps 2 or 3 billion users.