I'm in that situation, want a newer larger drive, but am still on pata/ide. I found they have an adapter for under ten bucks you can get for that purpose, so you can run newer hard drives or optical drives. Just run this in the search box at amazon "pata to sata adapter".
heh, I pretty much stay on the raw bleeding edge of five year old tech, or even older. Much cheaper that way, still usable with a few minor things. The biggest "must have" aspect I have found is having enough RAM when running modern software, processor speed, etc doesn't seem to be as critical. I don't do gaming or like run supercomputer exogalactic climate modeling programs (nor do I care for wiggly windows 3-d desktop effects), so for most "normal" purposes older computers are still useful.
You are correct, it isn't pure socialism, and it isn't a free or open market approach, it takes the stupidest parts from both approaches and tries to make a hybrid. Man, it's dumb.
That's all it does, mandate you or your employer get coverage (in a rapidly borking and falling apart economy). It doesn't do a thing to reduce healthcare costs, just adds more middlemen to the stew with their hands out to get paid for electron rearranging, with big fines and threats of jail if you don't fund these new middlemen.
I'll try and follow your car insurance analogy, past the point of it being mandatory.
It requires you to buy mercedes-ownership-level car insurance no matter if you drive a skateboard, a moped, a used old ford, or a pair of sneakers, because that's the transportation you can afford.
Too bad there wasn't "healthcare reform" in the bill, stuff like opening up the medical schools to be cheaper, creating a new class of a lower level type doctor for first look-sees so it is cheaper, open sourcing medical knowledge, restricting medical patents, allowing for a more fast track approach to generic drugs and medical equipment, stuff like that. It makes healthcare costs higher, then requires by law that everyone pay those new inflated costs "or else".
They'll be a slew of court challenges filed one second after it is signed into law, so we'll see how it shakes out. I do know the money just ain't there without addressing healthcare costs, as opposed to health care insurance. Of course, the money ain't there either to cover most anything related to the US government at this point, and private sector debt is ridiculous as well.
There are just too many people who don't understand the differences between money, currency, produced wealth, and credit, they equate those as all being the same thing, hence they fervently believe in the "free lunch" theory of existence and think that real stuff can be poofed into existence by "passing a law".
That these large ISPs are in the business of selling connectivity to their hundreds (whatever) of downstream ISPs and then on to millions of customers. Even if youtube is mostly one way, if they start really demanding more money, and it impacts their customers access to youtube in any way negatively, they would be seriously annoying a huge part of their customer base. Those customers *would* find out eventually, word would get around that "their" ISP was making it harder/more expensive/impossible to get to youtube. I mean, that's the whole point of being an ISP, sell that connection for a little more than it costs you. They can only push so hard before they start getting nailed with blowback. Peering with youtube might cost them a little, but it saves them a lot in the long run..by maintaining their customer base.
The only thing that might work for them, to try and squeeze more money out, is an across the board cartel push against google/youtube, and then you'd get the feds and fleets of lawyers involved, again, costing serious scratch and a lot of bad PR. And google has deep enough pockets no telling what they might do then, start their own wireless nationwide ISP. Who knows, anything along those lines combined with what fiber they have now or what more they could lay themselves, but they could do it, that's the point, they *could* do it, push come to shove.
Google makes more loot than a lot of nations. They have some juice, and so far at least, the schwartz has been with them.
disclaimer, for amusement purposes and academic research only. Always check with your hair dresser or bartender or other qualified trained licensed professional on technical and legal subjects:
materials
one small piece of pvc tubing, adequate diameter (and I forget right now what it is, get a ruler measure it yourself, it depends on what you get for the screw in adapter, has to fit snug over that) about 3 to 4 inches long
one edison socket female plug adapter
one cheap (and short) string of off season on sale white LED Christmas tree lights
some double sided sticky tape
optional rubber band
steps
Remove from your table lamp the evile incandescent politically incorrect light bulb, or lame fluorescent you got faked out into buying previously
screw in plug adapter
put double sided tape around your pvc pipe section
Wrap Christmas lights around the pipe, with the male plug end loose. Try to get a nice even spread with the way the lights are pointing. The male plug end comes out at the top of the wrap, so start with the farthest away lights on the string for your wrapping.
Stuff male plug down the tube until it comes out the bottom, just enough to give you enough slack to work the next step
Insert plug into adapter.
Squish pvc pipe-light down over the adapter in the lamp, retrieving excess cord, which remains inside the tubing. You may or may not be able to fit it all in there, if some sticks out, just use a rubber band to fix it in place
turn on lamp
profit
cost should be ~around ten bucks~ total, not $89.99 or some ridiculous price like that
Ideas=dime a dozen. Implementing those ideas is worth a lot more. That means manufacturing, real wealth creation. The fatcat politicians and wall street labor arbitragers destroyed manufacturing in the US for short term megaprofits, and created ever so much more complicated "financial instruments" and other sorts of gambling games and debt to replace it, along with running the printing presses with the currency. Those cons are about run out now. So..check the economic headlines over the past two years. Now, they are hosed, they hosed the economy. They have no back up plan that can work now. This is a last ditch effort to try and save it. This will be futile, or as they say, "good luck with that".
He is saying that this was already paid for long ago, and that telcos failed to live up to their side of the deal. They got huge amounts of cash incentives to provide broadband all over, and stopped way short. They hit the low hanging fruit and that's it, just stopped. They used the cash for like bonuses and money to buy up smaller telcos, etc. They need to be called on it and go ahead and fulfill what they promised to do years ago. And that means they get *ordered* to do so by the government. If that means they slash all the execs pay by 90% to pay for the upgrades, too bad. If that means some of those same millionaire execs get to testify in shackles going to and from congressional hearings from a jail cell, because of this massive fraud and ripoff that occurred, too bad. And so on.
I already outlined that, because software patents have an endgame which is no win for anyone concerned except IP lawyers and patent trolls. Just extrapolate it out in your mind for another decade. Keep in mind what sort of software stuff is being patented today, look at the tech headlines.
This is easy to predict. Look back ten years, see what was going on..look at today..now extrapolate some probable outcomes.
The old saying is painting yourself into a corner.
OK, I understand now. Ya, that was what I was doing, overnight updates, but frequently it resulted in just tieing up the line and being connected for excessive hours that annoyed the ISP. Plus, running diskless with just a live CD is just way more secure. Fast, too, blazing fast even on modest hardware if you have enough RAM. I am seriously considering that for my next upgrade for my desktop, looking for a used server board that can hold a ton of RAM and going completely diskless. I am not a big media packrat or anything, stuff I really need to keep I can burn to a cheap CD disk. Mostly I just want a fast internet appliance. I don't even have a big hard drive, it is only 8 gigs and frequently is mostly empty now as it is.
Guess I learned to get by with less being on dialup all those years.
How is that relevant to just someone sharing/giving away what they create? If you personally don't like it, so what? People have different tastes and interests, and that's about it. So why the need to put someone down like that?
That isn't necessarily the only phone call some tech CEO can make to another one in the software world. Nothing stopping him from calling another one up and try to work out a plan to joint lobby the government to just get rid of stupid software patents, as in nullify all the existing ones and make it so no new ones can be ever granted, before the entire industry grinds to a halt, and the only innovation is in mutually suicidal and expensive lawyer's arguments in court. Because that's the end game, it's coming, you won't be able to write a single new line of code without violating some pre existing patent. It's probably pretty close now as it is.
The whole premise is bullshit. patents OR copyright, pick one, but not both. And if patents, where is the product warranty, like any other product, as in suitable for purpose, etc? We as consumers are getting royally hosed with that deal.
Time to get this snakeoil out of the industry before it destroys it. Get rid of software patents entirely, then there's no need for these "well, we will just nuke you harder back if you threatent to nuke us!" crap that is going on.
And that's how you explain it to shareholders when they start whining, you go "want us to be in the software business, or in the expensive lawsuit forever and a day business"?
I never seen you to any of da meetins! Not lately anyway and last time you needed to worsh your hood and robes cleaner. Git some bleach on dem things, get them bluhdstains out! Just tain't respeckable...
We don't want those jetpacks, we want all them snooty rich skinny furriners to have jetpacks, then come over here and start zipping around, laughing at us in their superiority. See, then we have some *outstanding* skeet practice. and after they fall out of the sky all sorts of shot fulla holes and stuff, we get to lift their wallets, take the cash and credit cards, snag the jewelry and head to the pawn shop,etc., and get stuff like new lift kits for our pickups.
How is that malware secretly updating itself going to happen to a live linux CD? If the machine is turned off it is turned off, it is not going to be dialing out, plus, you can't burn anything to a CDR once it is fixed. Plus it is linux. It may be security by obscurity, but whatever works....works.
Really, today, on dialup, the best you can do is run an up to date live cd that has a range of apps on it, suitable for most purposes, and drop the few bucks every few months to get an updated version snail mailed to you from one of the disk burner companies. Knoppix, ubuntu, whatever, one of those live versions.
Get a few different ones to start, see which works the best, then stick with that one if you can. I was on dialup until last year and actually had two different isps give me grief over being online excessively, and dang if it wasn't just trying to keep up to date with patches overnight in a lot of cases. Trying to patch plus surf at the same time made both near unusable, dialup really can't handle that well, so I did the "do it over night" deal, which lead to excessive hours online. Note, the cheaper "bargain" dialup providers gave me the grief, then I went with the large nationwide one sorta sounds like planet chains, which is full price, and never no grief from them. FWIW. Still took a long time though, and was a PITA for patches and updates. And forget full distro upgrades, that was just nuts to try and do that.
Modern web pages are designed for broadband for the most part. No way around it anymore, so for those stuck on dialup with no broadband on the horizon for another few decades, like still huge areas of the US, it's live CDs if they want to go online. Keep an old rat box with windows on it that isn't connected to the net *ever* never, ever, ever to play games if you must. Modern OSes and apps need frequent patching, and it takes a long time to do this on dialup, so just run the best live CD you can and be done with it. Not worry so much about malwarez then, just reboot for a clean new install every time, and make sure to keep images turned off for the most part, and run noscript and adblocker to also help with the security and to give you a fighting chance of viewing a web page under two minutes load time. That's the best I could come up with as a workable compromise being stuck on dialup from 95 until 09.
A hill isn't a building. He was talking about water proofing a building. Under normal conditions, sure, buildings are pretty good to keep you from the weather, but in big floods, most will suffer leakage or outright destruction. That's why you always see people trying to save their homes or businesses with sand bags. It just isn't that common for buildings to be built bad flood tough. Some probably exist, but not too many. And yep, a good building on top of the biggest hill around would be the safest. I was just going for the cheap laugh mentioning a submarine, they are our tightest and strongest man made structures built to deal with keeping humans away from too much water. So, if you built a building like a submarine, it might make it through a big flood.
Did you ever actually see a big flood? Freaking awesome power, like a fleet of bulldozers. Smashes stuff, rips houses off foundations, knocks huge trees over, will tumble multiple ton boulders ahead of it, etc. Just depends on how big the flood is. We had one late last year here, six inches of rain in a couple of hours, just tore stuff up all over. The "building" that can withstand a flood of significant size exists, it is called a submarine. Most buildings of the normal kind just aren't designed to deal with anything that destructive. Some can resist minor floods, but not too many.
I don't want an alternative to payapl to buy stuff, because plastic cards work for that or postal money orders, that's the existing alternative, but an online "donations only" service, so it could be used for micro or "minimal" payments would be interesting. Something with a much smaller transaction fee, and geared to only non profit orgs to receive funding. The service itself could/should be a non profit org as well.
I disagree, totally. It already IS in the mainstream in three of the five major uses for computers. Linux IS the "mainstream" there, windows and mac are also-rans, but not first.. Supercomputers, regular servers, and embedded, Linux rules there, and Linux is making serious inroads in what is left, mobiles and desktops, and doing perfectly fine at it despite the work of MS and Apple to kill it off.
In short, I'd run away from any windows or mac "zealots" if I was running a linux company, they just slap don't have the mindset. I like shuttleworth OK, but I disagree with some of his stances and moves, and this is one of them.
I don't like six month release cycles being pushed on regular non-nerd desktop users as another, I think that should be for extreme hobbyists only and they should settle down and really push the long term release cycle version with much more vigor, and make it "just work", and maybe actually charge a reasonable sum for it. The six month beta level quality stuff, freebie, the long term release, costs loot.
Perpetual alpha/betaware is one of the top reasons Linux on the desktop is struggling. Just take a gander at Ubuntu forums, see how many problems they have with six month release cycles and normal folks trying to deal with it.
You may call it zealotry, but perhaps you don't grok what the real advantage and business model of open source is, and I am guessing this because of the nature of your reply, and guaranteed this dude they hired doesn't, so he is NOT a good person for this position.
And you are also saying that there are no linux first guys who have good management skills. Again, disagree *strongly*, and that's actually quite insulting to thousands of people out there who are now managing Linux oriented/using companies and shops quite well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in that situation, want a newer larger drive, but am still on pata/ide. I found they have an adapter for under ten bucks you can get for that purpose, so you can run newer hard drives or optical drives. Just run this in the search box at amazon "pata to sata adapter".
heh, I pretty much stay on the raw bleeding edge of five year old tech, or even older. Much cheaper that way, still usable with a few minor things. The biggest "must have" aspect I have found is having enough RAM when running modern software, processor speed, etc doesn't seem to be as critical. I don't do gaming or like run supercomputer exogalactic climate modeling programs (nor do I care for wiggly windows 3-d desktop effects), so for most "normal" purposes older computers are still useful.
You are correct, it isn't pure socialism, and it isn't a free or open market approach, it takes the stupidest parts from both approaches and tries to make a hybrid. Man, it's dumb.
That's all it does, mandate you or your employer get coverage (in a rapidly borking and falling apart economy). It doesn't do a thing to reduce healthcare costs, just adds more middlemen to the stew with their hands out to get paid for electron rearranging, with big fines and threats of jail if you don't fund these new middlemen.
I'll try and follow your car insurance analogy, past the point of it being mandatory.
It requires you to buy mercedes-ownership-level car insurance no matter if you drive a skateboard, a moped, a used old ford, or a pair of sneakers, because that's the transportation you can afford.
Too bad there wasn't "healthcare reform" in the bill, stuff like opening up the medical schools to be cheaper, creating a new class of a lower level type doctor for first look-sees so it is cheaper, open sourcing medical knowledge, restricting medical patents, allowing for a more fast track approach to generic drugs and medical equipment, stuff like that. It makes healthcare costs higher, then requires by law that everyone pay those new inflated costs "or else".
They'll be a slew of court challenges filed one second after it is signed into law, so we'll see how it shakes out. I do know the money just ain't there without addressing healthcare costs, as opposed to health care insurance. Of course, the money ain't there either to cover most anything related to the US government at this point, and private sector debt is ridiculous as well.
There are just too many people who don't understand the differences between money, currency, produced wealth, and credit, they equate those as all being the same thing, hence they fervently believe in the "free lunch" theory of existence and think that real stuff can be poofed into existence by "passing a law".
Ya know, they'd get way more accuracy measuring these fine wines age if they used oxygen depleted gold plated monster cables on their equipment...
That these large ISPs are in the business of selling connectivity to their hundreds (whatever) of downstream ISPs and then on to millions of customers. Even if youtube is mostly one way, if they start really demanding more money, and it impacts their customers access to youtube in any way negatively, they would be seriously annoying a huge part of their customer base. Those customers *would* find out eventually, word would get around that "their" ISP was making it harder/more expensive/impossible to get to youtube. I mean, that's the whole point of being an ISP, sell that connection for a little more than it costs you. They can only push so hard before they start getting nailed with blowback. Peering with youtube might cost them a little, but it saves them a lot in the long run..by maintaining their customer base.
The only thing that might work for them, to try and squeeze more money out, is an across the board cartel push against google/youtube, and then you'd get the feds and fleets of lawyers involved, again, costing serious scratch and a lot of bad PR. And google has deep enough pockets no telling what they might do then, start their own wireless nationwide ISP. Who knows, anything along those lines combined with what fiber they have now or what more they could lay themselves, but they could do it, that's the point, they *could* do it, push come to shove.
Google makes more loot than a lot of nations. They have some juice, and so far at least, the schwartz has been with them.
my apologies, lost track of my tabs. This is supposed to go in the toshiba incandescent light bulb thread. Oh well, once in awhile you just miss...
disclaimer, for amusement purposes and academic research only. Always check with your hair dresser or bartender or other qualified trained licensed professional on technical and legal subjects:
materials
one small piece of pvc tubing, adequate diameter (and I forget right now what it is, get a ruler measure it yourself, it depends on what you get for the screw in adapter, has to fit snug over that) about 3 to 4 inches long
one edison socket female plug adapter
one cheap (and short) string of off season on sale white LED Christmas tree lights
some double sided sticky tape
optional rubber band
steps
Remove from your table lamp the evile incandescent politically incorrect light bulb, or lame fluorescent you got faked out into buying previously
screw in plug adapter
put double sided tape around your pvc pipe section
Wrap Christmas lights around the pipe, with the male plug end loose. Try to get a nice even spread with the way the lights are pointing. The male plug end comes out at the top of the wrap, so start with the farthest away lights on the string for your wrapping.
Stuff male plug down the tube until it comes out the bottom, just enough to give you enough slack to work the next step
Insert plug into adapter.
Squish pvc pipe-light down over the adapter in the lamp, retrieving excess cord, which remains inside the tubing. You may or may not be able to fit it all in there, if some sticks out, just use a rubber band to fix it in place
turn on lamp
profit
cost should be ~around ten bucks~ total, not $89.99 or some ridiculous price like that
An Addam's cartoon with the mad inventor in the patent attorney office, the attorney leaning out the window with the death ray blaster.
Quick, grasp it!
Ideas=dime a dozen. Implementing those ideas is worth a lot more. That means manufacturing, real wealth creation. The fatcat politicians and wall street labor arbitragers destroyed manufacturing in the US for short term megaprofits, and created ever so much more complicated "financial instruments" and other sorts of gambling games and debt to replace it, along with running the printing presses with the currency. Those cons are about run out now. So..check the economic headlines over the past two years. Now, they are hosed, they hosed the economy. They have no back up plan that can work now. This is a last ditch effort to try and save it. This will be futile, or as they say, "good luck with that".
they had a bad case of humorrhoids
He is saying that this was already paid for long ago, and that telcos failed to live up to their side of the deal. They got huge amounts of cash incentives to provide broadband all over, and stopped way short. They hit the low hanging fruit and that's it, just stopped. They used the cash for like bonuses and money to buy up smaller telcos, etc. They need to be called on it and go ahead and fulfill what they promised to do years ago. And that means they get *ordered* to do so by the government. If that means they slash all the execs pay by 90% to pay for the upgrades, too bad. If that means some of those same millionaire execs get to testify in shackles going to and from congressional hearings from a jail cell, because of this massive fraud and ripoff that occurred, too bad. And so on.
I already outlined that, because software patents have an endgame which is no win for anyone concerned except IP lawyers and patent trolls. Just extrapolate it out in your mind for another decade. Keep in mind what sort of software stuff is being patented today, look at the tech headlines.
This is easy to predict. Look back ten years, see what was going on..look at today..now extrapolate some probable outcomes.
The old saying is painting yourself into a corner.
OK, I understand now. Ya, that was what I was doing, overnight updates, but frequently it resulted in just tieing up the line and being connected for excessive hours that annoyed the ISP. Plus, running diskless with just a live CD is just way more secure. Fast, too, blazing fast even on modest hardware if you have enough RAM. I am seriously considering that for my next upgrade for my desktop, looking for a used server board that can hold a ton of RAM and going completely diskless. I am not a big media packrat or anything, stuff I really need to keep I can burn to a cheap CD disk. Mostly I just want a fast internet appliance. I don't even have a big hard drive, it is only 8 gigs and frequently is mostly empty now as it is.
Guess I learned to get by with less being on dialup all those years.
How is that relevant to just someone sharing/giving away what they create? If you personally don't like it, so what? People have different tastes and interests, and that's about it. So why the need to put someone down like that?
That isn't necessarily the only phone call some tech CEO can make to another one in the software world. Nothing stopping him from calling another one up and try to work out a plan to joint lobby the government to just get rid of stupid software patents, as in nullify all the existing ones and make it so no new ones can be ever granted, before the entire industry grinds to a halt, and the only innovation is in mutually suicidal and expensive lawyer's arguments in court. Because that's the end game, it's coming, you won't be able to write a single new line of code without violating some pre existing patent. It's probably pretty close now as it is.
The whole premise is bullshit. patents OR copyright, pick one, but not both. And if patents, where is the product warranty, like any other product, as in suitable for purpose, etc? We as consumers are getting royally hosed with that deal.
Time to get this snakeoil out of the industry before it destroys it. Get rid of software patents entirely, then there's no need for these "well, we will just nuke you harder back if you threatent to nuke us!" crap that is going on.
And that's how you explain it to shareholders when they start whining, you go "want us to be in the software business, or in the expensive lawsuit forever and a day business"?
I never seen you to any of da meetins! Not lately anyway and last time you needed to worsh your hood and robes cleaner. Git some bleach on dem things, get them bluhdstains out! Just tain't respeckable...
well, we figger they done perverted their cash over ta the border, and we find real muriken money. If not, still great sport, good targit shootin!
Not sure on the harvested meat, though, we don't want our hogs gittin sick nor chokin on any of them skinny bones...
We don't want those jetpacks, we want all them snooty rich skinny furriners to have jetpacks, then come over here and start zipping around, laughing at us in their superiority. See, then we have some *outstanding* skeet practice. and after they fall out of the sky all sorts of shot fulla holes and stuff, we get to lift their wallets, take the cash and credit cards, snag the jewelry and head to the pawn shop,etc., and get stuff like new lift kits for our pickups.
You really need to get with the program better...
How is that malware secretly updating itself going to happen to a live linux CD? If the machine is turned off it is turned off, it is not going to be dialing out, plus, you can't burn anything to a CDR once it is fixed. Plus it is linux. It may be security by obscurity, but whatever works....works.
Really, today, on dialup, the best you can do is run an up to date live cd that has a range of apps on it, suitable for most purposes, and drop the few bucks every few months to get an updated version snail mailed to you from one of the disk burner companies. Knoppix, ubuntu, whatever, one of those live versions.
Get a few different ones to start, see which works the best, then stick with that one if you can. I was on dialup until last year and actually had two different isps give me grief over being online excessively, and dang if it wasn't just trying to keep up to date with patches overnight in a lot of cases. Trying to patch plus surf at the same time made both near unusable, dialup really can't handle that well, so I did the "do it over night" deal, which lead to excessive hours online. Note, the cheaper "bargain" dialup providers gave me the grief, then I went with the large nationwide one sorta sounds like planet chains, which is full price, and never no grief from them. FWIW. Still took a long time though, and was a PITA for patches and updates. And forget full distro upgrades, that was just nuts to try and do that.
Modern web pages are designed for broadband for the most part. No way around it anymore, so for those stuck on dialup with no broadband on the horizon for another few decades, like still huge areas of the US, it's live CDs if they want to go online. Keep an old rat box with windows on it that isn't connected to the net *ever* never, ever, ever to play games if you must. Modern OSes and apps need frequent patching, and it takes a long time to do this on dialup, so just run the best live CD you can and be done with it. Not worry so much about malwarez then, just reboot for a clean new install every time, and make sure to keep images turned off for the most part, and run noscript and adblocker to also help with the security and to give you a fighting chance of viewing a web page under two minutes load time. That's the best I could come up with as a workable compromise being stuck on dialup from 95 until 09.
I wonder how long it will take to start seeing some $900 Sisqqo knock offs?
A hill isn't a building. He was talking about water proofing a building. Under normal conditions, sure, buildings are pretty good to keep you from the weather, but in big floods, most will suffer leakage or outright destruction. That's why you always see people trying to save their homes or businesses with sand bags. It just isn't that common for buildings to be built bad flood tough. Some probably exist, but not too many. And yep, a good building on top of the biggest hill around would be the safest. I was just going for the cheap laugh mentioning a submarine, they are our tightest and strongest man made structures built to deal with keeping humans away from too much water. So, if you built a building like a submarine, it might make it through a big flood.
Did you ever actually see a big flood? Freaking awesome power, like a fleet of bulldozers. Smashes stuff, rips houses off foundations, knocks huge trees over, will tumble multiple ton boulders ahead of it, etc. Just depends on how big the flood is. We had one late last year here, six inches of rain in a couple of hours, just tore stuff up all over. The "building" that can withstand a flood of significant size exists, it is called a submarine. Most buildings of the normal kind just aren't designed to deal with anything that destructive. Some can resist minor floods, but not too many.
Yes, something like that is what I meant. I'd like one that is just for non profits though, nothing commercial.
I don't want an alternative to payapl to buy stuff, because plastic cards work for that or postal money orders, that's the existing alternative, but an online "donations only" service, so it could be used for micro or "minimal" payments would be interesting. Something with a much smaller transaction fee, and geared to only non profit orgs to receive funding. The service itself could/should be a non profit org as well.
I disagree, totally. It already IS in the mainstream in three of the five major uses for computers. Linux IS the "mainstream" there, windows and mac are also-rans, but not first.. Supercomputers, regular servers, and embedded, Linux rules there, and Linux is making serious inroads in what is left, mobiles and desktops, and doing perfectly fine at it despite the work of MS and Apple to kill it off.
In short, I'd run away from any windows or mac "zealots" if I was running a linux company, they just slap don't have the mindset. I like shuttleworth OK, but I disagree with some of his stances and moves, and this is one of them.
I don't like six month release cycles being pushed on regular non-nerd desktop users as another, I think that should be for extreme hobbyists only and they should settle down and really push the long term release cycle version with much more vigor, and make it "just work", and maybe actually charge a reasonable sum for it. The six month beta level quality stuff, freebie, the long term release, costs loot.
Perpetual alpha/betaware is one of the top reasons Linux on the desktop is struggling. Just take a gander at Ubuntu forums, see how many problems they have with six month release cycles and normal folks trying to deal with it.
You may call it zealotry, but perhaps you don't grok what the real advantage and business model of open source is, and I am guessing this because of the nature of your reply, and guaranteed this dude they hired doesn't, so he is NOT a good person for this position.
And you are also saying that there are no linux first guys who have good management skills. Again, disagree *strongly*, and that's actually quite insulting to thousands of people out there who are now managing Linux oriented/using companies and shops quite well.