Fedora is a bleeding-edge distro with a rapid release cycle and relatively short support period. If Linux makes sense for you at all, you should probably be looking at Ubuntu LTS or Debian on the desktop, and RHEL/CENTOS/Debian for servers. Fedora would not be my first (or even second...) choice for deployment in an enterprise environment, unless most of your users are *NIX software developers (and they're developing for RHEL/CENTOS as the target environment).
Not practical for most businesses. An organization that has invested a lot in IE6-specific web apps is likely to be tethered to Microsoft in other ways as well (MS Access databases, existing MS Office documents that don't import cleanly into OpenOffice, etc., etc., etc.)
Unless the PCs are only being used as dumb web terminals, the cost of retraining users and IT staff to use Linux is also going to be substantial.
Furthermore... IANAL but running IE on Linux is probably a technical EULA violation as well. Even if it is a non-issue from a practical standpoint (would MS ever go after users for doing this? probably not...) if it ain't legal, this is going to prevent a lot of corporate IT managers from even considering it.
At least they're not IE 6 specific; they work OK with IE7/8. In fact, about a year ago we we instructed to do a "search and destroy" on any remaining copies of IE6, as they didn't want to have to deal with IE6 security vulnerabilities any more.
I'd much rather use Chrome though. The IE-specific intraweb apps are among the last few remaining things that are forcing me to maintain a Windows VM on my desktop system -- my primary desktop OS is Linux these days. (Another thing still tethering me to Windows is Outlook; last time I tried using Evolution to talk to the corporate Exchange server things did not go well. I should probably give Evolution another chance; my last attempt was nearly 2 years ago. Hopefully Evolution's Exchange integration sucks less now.)
Quite frankly, I would've been surprised if they had not tried something like this; it is certainly in character (and in the interests of their shareholders). And if they happen to get some protection *ahem* I mean "royalty" payments as a side effect, that's just more money to the bottom line.
Clearly they've got good lawyers on staff. Too bad their development teams aren't quite up to the same standard.
Does this mean that if I build PCs with Linux (Ubuntu/ChromeOS/Fedora) and sell them I am at risk of getting sued by Microsoft?
No, it does not. Unless you're high profile enough to represent a true threat in terms of mindshare, or moving enough systems to represent a significant revenue stream from royalties, they don't give a crap about you -- you're insignificant. (And whether you choose to interpret that as a good thing or a bad thing is entirely up to you...:D)
Yup, I agree completely. Rome is burning, and we're fiddling, oblivious to the slow-motion collapse occurring around us.
It's bad enough for me; I'm probably older than the average/. reader by nearly a factor of 2, and can't imagine how I'll ever be able to retire. I pretty much expect to retire via body bag. But it's going to be even worse for my kids (who are just now entering the work force); the younger generation will still be dealing with the repercussions of this mess long after I'm gone.
There's only so many times you can throw money out and expect Corporations to develop good busniess state-side(see automakers, see banks)
I don't think you should be lumping banks in with the automakers (and other manufacturing); they don't fundamentally create anything tangible, as they're purely a service industry. The idea that the financial sector can drive our economy is a pipe dream. Several years ago (before the financial meltdown) I read an article that said "You can't base an entire economy on people flipping houses to each other." And that's basically what we did, with predictable results. When you get down to it, it was all facilitated -- and encouraged! -- by the Wall Street investment banks.
We need to refocus, and get back to innovating and actually producing stuff. (And by "innovating" I don't mean things like ever-more sophisticated high frequency stock trading algorithms which allow a privileged few to skim humongous paper money profits from minute market fluctuations, while hurting the individual investor and doing nothing to increase our real GDP.)
Ahh, but China isn't embargoing finished products, just the raw materials. And they also seem to be committed to keeping their currency artificially undervalued, thereby holding the exchange rate down.
We're already being held hostage by the Middle East oil sheiks. Now the Chinese too.
But we really did it to ourselves... and since most of the everyday products that use rare earth minerals are also made in China, Joe Average is probably never going to notice, at least not over the near term. I'm sure the big screen TVs, computers, and iPhones will keep flowing regardless of any rare metals embargo.
It's just one more symptom of our waning influence. 25 or 50 years from now, who will be the dominant economic force in the world? If current trends hold, my bet is not on the US; we're way too preoccupied with political navel-gazing and petty ideological infighting to give a crap about global competitiveness. IMO the leader will be China... or India... or someone else entirely if China and India also somehow manage to fuck themselves over (which is a possibility).
...keeps the only copy of their past 10 years' work on their laptop? While the incident may have helped restore the poor prof's faith in humanity, it has knocked mine down a few notches knowing that people like this are teaching in our universities.
The article itself even admits as much: "Since the organizations surveyed were picked by the Linux Foundation End User Council, there's naturally going to be some happy Linux users in the bunch."
While we're throwing meaningless statistics around, we might as well also toss in a mostly meaningless anecdote. I work in a small satellite R&D office of a medium sized company. Corporate HQ runs big iron (IBM) and Windows servers. The primary server and most of the desktops in our office run Windows, and always have (this office was opened in 2005, the primary server is still the original one). However, the last two servers we've added have been Linux-based, and two of the software developers have switched to using Linux as their primary desktop OS (I am one of the two who have switched).
for a mediocre computer, your idea of what qualifies as "mediocre" is different from mine. For typical office tasks you should be able to get the job done for about half that. Sure, your power users (CAD, software developers who need to run multiple VMs, etc.) may need a much more expensive workstation ($2000 or more), but your average office PC user does not need a $1000 system.
I also question whether building your own is going to save you anything over the long run once you factor in the costs of building and supporting those systems yourself, and the fact that you're unlikely to get the parts as cheaply as the big OEMs do.
...they'd be viewing it as an opportunity for additional revenue. Set up multi-tiered data plans and charge the bandwidth hogs accordingly.
On the other hand, it seems fairly likely the issue is that their network can't handle the bandwidth they've already sold. In which case they just need to upgrade their network and quit whining.
Yeah, zealotry will only get you so far. At some point you've got to deliver solutions that real-world users can use without spending days surfing web forums to figure out how to configure things, or learning how to compile a custom kernel. In fact, I've said that Linux evangelists are often Linux's own worst enemy. Canonical's approach seems to be a sensible one, in that they're really trying to address the issues which have prevented non-computer-geek types from adopting Linux on a wider basis.
Good point. A statistic I've seen is that productivity among software developers varies by roughly an order of magnitude. Based on my own experiences in the industry, I would have to agree; in fact, some developers even have negative productivity!
On the other hand, how much does it cost to get a competent attorney (as opposed to just an average one)? Is the ratio of competent to incompetent attorneys any better than that of software developers?
I wish them success in their attempt to topple (or at least put a serious dent in) Microsoft based purely on technical merit. Unfortunately the landscape is littered with other companies who have tried to do so; it's an uphill battle which typically runs off a cliff at some point. I do think that Canonical is in the best position to do so since IBM with OS/2 back in the day; in fact, IMO Canonical is significantly better positioned than IBM was back then. I've been using Ubuntu as my primary OS (both at home and work!) for a while now, and in spite of the occasional glitches, it has been like a breath of fresh air. The mere thought of going back to Windows gives me nightmares.
The shuttle is obsolete technology; it is time to move on.
I feel bad for those who are losing their jobs, but the only true job security is in keeping your skills current, and not becoming too specialized. If you don't have the opportunity to pick up new skills on the job, then you need to do it on your own time. If you just assume that your employer will provide you with a job for life, you're probably gonna get a rude awakening at some point...
but once he steps out of his area of expertise, he goes off the deep end pretty quick. I've been calling BS ever since he started spouting his "singularity" nonsense.
We've had multiple incidents nearly identical to one of the stupid tricks described in the article. One of our (former) techs had a habit of running two cables between the same pair of switches... or even plugging both ends of a single cable into the same switch! Needless to say, neither of these scenarios ends well.
Provided that they clearly state up front what information gets sent, and provide an easy way to opt-out during the installation process (or during first boot for pre-installed copies) I have no problem with this.
Well, OK... maybe on second thought I have a small problem with it: It is just one more example of the sort of "feature creep" which has caused most of the major Linux distros to bloat to a ridiculous degree. Sure, the scripts to implement this are probably tiny, and the network bandwidth consumed minuscule. But multiply this by a couple of orders of magnitude (to account for the hundreds of little "bells and whistles" features that have crept in over the years), and things get out of control. At least you still have the option of using one of the alternative distros that are optimized for size, or starting from a bare-bones Debian install and building your system up piecemeal with a light-weight desktop environment and only the applications you need.
Ahh, another fan of Chieftec tower cases -- I agree, they're great! Built like a tank, removable drive cages, good ventilation, plenty of space to work inside. I picked up several of them at a clearance sale a few years back, and still use them. Both of my main desktops (home and work) as well as my home file server live in Chieftec full towers.
The one thing they definitely don't have going for them is portability. When I built my son's system a few years ago, I used one of my Chieftec tower cases. Unfortunately, about a year ago he started getting into LAN parties; that Chieftec is a PITA to lug around! So we swapped his full tower for a smaller, lighter mid tower.
It has been possible to build a system at that price point for a while. In fact you could've probably done it even cheaper a year or two ago when RAM prices were ridiculously low.
My main concern with this build is the PSU that came bundled with the budget case. If the case + PSU was only $30, the PSU is almost certainly a total piece of crap; it'll probably be dead within a year. Hopefully it doesn't take the motherboard with it when it goes.
If we're not supposed to code in Java/C++, and interpreted languages are a no-no, what's left? C, FORTRAN, and assembler? (I actually *love* C, but I don't have any illusions that it is the be-all and end-all of programming languages... IMO Python is capable of filling most of the niches that C does not.)
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Fedora is a bleeding-edge distro with a rapid release cycle and relatively short support period. If Linux makes sense for you at all, you should probably be looking at Ubuntu LTS or Debian on the desktop, and RHEL/CENTOS/Debian for servers. Fedora would not be my first (or even second...) choice for deployment in an enterprise environment, unless most of your users are *NIX software developers (and they're developing for RHEL/CENTOS as the target environment).
Not practical for most businesses. An organization that has invested a lot in IE6-specific web apps is likely to be tethered to Microsoft in other ways as well (MS Access databases, existing MS Office documents that don't import cleanly into OpenOffice, etc., etc., etc.)
Unless the PCs are only being used as dumb web terminals, the cost of retraining users and IT staff to use Linux is also going to be substantial.
Furthermore... IANAL but running IE on Linux is probably a technical EULA violation as well. Even if it is a non-issue from a practical standpoint (would MS ever go after users for doing this? probably not...) if it ain't legal, this is going to prevent a lot of corporate IT managers from even considering it.
At least they're not IE 6 specific; they work OK with IE7/8. In fact, about a year ago we we instructed to do a "search and destroy" on any remaining copies of IE6, as they didn't want to have to deal with IE6 security vulnerabilities any more.
I'd much rather use Chrome though. The IE-specific intraweb apps are among the last few remaining things that are forcing me to maintain a Windows VM on my desktop system -- my primary desktop OS is Linux these days. (Another thing still tethering me to Windows is Outlook; last time I tried using Evolution to talk to the corporate Exchange server things did not go well. I should probably give Evolution another chance; my last attempt was nearly 2 years ago. Hopefully Evolution's Exchange integration sucks less now.)
Quite frankly, I would've been surprised if they had not tried something like this; it is certainly in character (and in the interests of their shareholders). And if they happen to get some protection *ahem* I mean "royalty" payments as a side effect, that's just more money to the bottom line.
Clearly they've got good lawyers on staff. Too bad their development teams aren't quite up to the same standard.
Does this mean that if I build PCs with Linux (Ubuntu/ChromeOS/Fedora) and sell them I am at risk of getting sued by Microsoft?
No, it does not. Unless you're high profile enough to represent a true threat in terms of mindshare, or moving enough systems to represent a significant revenue stream from royalties, they don't give a crap about you -- you're insignificant. (And whether you choose to interpret that as a good thing or a bad thing is entirely up to you... :D)
Yup, I agree completely. Rome is burning, and we're fiddling, oblivious to the slow-motion collapse occurring around us.
It's bad enough for me; I'm probably older than the average /. reader by nearly a factor of 2, and can't imagine how I'll ever be able to retire. I pretty much expect to retire via body bag. But it's going to be even worse for my kids (who are just now entering the work force); the younger generation will still be dealing with the repercussions of this mess long after I'm gone.
There's only so many times you can throw money out and expect Corporations to develop good busniess state-side(see automakers, see banks)
I don't think you should be lumping banks in with the automakers (and other manufacturing); they don't fundamentally create anything tangible, as they're purely a service industry. The idea that the financial sector can drive our economy is a pipe dream. Several years ago (before the financial meltdown) I read an article that said "You can't base an entire economy on people flipping houses to each other." And that's basically what we did, with predictable results. When you get down to it, it was all facilitated -- and encouraged! -- by the Wall Street investment banks.
We need to refocus, and get back to innovating and actually producing stuff. (And by "innovating" I don't mean things like ever-more sophisticated high frequency stock trading algorithms which allow a privileged few to skim humongous paper money profits from minute market fluctuations, while hurting the individual investor and doing nothing to increase our real GDP.)
Ahh, but China isn't embargoing finished products, just the raw materials. And they also seem to be committed to keeping their currency artificially undervalued, thereby holding the exchange rate down.
We're already being held hostage by the Middle East oil sheiks. Now the Chinese too.
But we really did it to ourselves... and since most of the everyday products that use rare earth minerals are also made in China, Joe Average is probably never going to notice, at least not over the near term. I'm sure the big screen TVs, computers, and iPhones will keep flowing regardless of any rare metals embargo.
It's just one more symptom of our waning influence. 25 or 50 years from now, who will be the dominant economic force in the world? If current trends hold, my bet is not on the US; we're way too preoccupied with political navel-gazing and petty ideological infighting to give a crap about global competitiveness. IMO the leader will be China... or India... or someone else entirely if China and India also somehow manage to fuck themselves over (which is a possibility).
...keeps the only copy of their past 10 years' work on their laptop? While the incident may have helped restore the poor prof's faith in humanity, it has knocked mine down a few notches knowing that people like this are teaching in our universities.
The article itself even admits as much: "Since the organizations surveyed were picked by the Linux Foundation End User Council, there's naturally going to be some happy Linux users in the bunch."
While we're throwing meaningless statistics around, we might as well also toss in a mostly meaningless anecdote. I work in a small satellite R&D office of a medium sized company. Corporate HQ runs big iron (IBM) and Windows servers. The primary server and most of the desktops in our office run Windows, and always have (this office was opened in 2005, the primary server is still the original one). However, the last two servers we've added have been Linux-based, and two of the software developers have switched to using Linux as their primary desktop OS (I am one of the two who have switched).
for a mediocre computer, your idea of what qualifies as "mediocre" is different from mine. For typical office tasks you should be able to get the job done for about half that. Sure, your power users (CAD, software developers who need to run multiple VMs, etc.) may need a much more expensive workstation ($2000 or more), but your average office PC user does not need a $1000 system.
I also question whether building your own is going to save you anything over the long run once you factor in the costs of building and supporting those systems yourself, and the fact that you're unlikely to get the parts as cheaply as the big OEMs do.
...they'd be viewing it as an opportunity for additional revenue. Set up multi-tiered data plans and charge the bandwidth hogs accordingly.
On the other hand, it seems fairly likely the issue is that their network can't handle the bandwidth they've already sold. In which case they just need to upgrade their network and quit whining.
Yeah, zealotry will only get you so far. At some point you've got to deliver solutions that real-world users can use without spending days surfing web forums to figure out how to configure things, or learning how to compile a custom kernel. In fact, I've said that Linux evangelists are often Linux's own worst enemy. Canonical's approach seems to be a sensible one, in that they're really trying to address the issues which have prevented non-computer-geek types from adopting Linux on a wider basis.
Good point. A statistic I've seen is that productivity among software developers varies by roughly an order of magnitude. Based on my own experiences in the industry, I would have to agree; in fact, some developers even have negative productivity!
On the other hand, how much does it cost to get a competent attorney (as opposed to just an average one)? Is the ratio of competent to incompetent attorneys any better than that of software developers?
If anything, you're probably underestimating the cost of an attorney.
I wish them success in their attempt to topple (or at least put a serious dent in) Microsoft based purely on technical merit. Unfortunately the landscape is littered with other companies who have tried to do so; it's an uphill battle which typically runs off a cliff at some point. I do think that Canonical is in the best position to do so since IBM with OS/2 back in the day; in fact, IMO Canonical is significantly better positioned than IBM was back then. I've been using Ubuntu as my primary OS (both at home and work!) for a while now, and in spite of the occasional glitches, it has been like a breath of fresh air. The mere thought of going back to Windows gives me nightmares.
The shuttle is obsolete technology; it is time to move on.
I feel bad for those who are losing their jobs, but the only true job security is in keeping your skills current, and not becoming too specialized. If you don't have the opportunity to pick up new skills on the job, then you need to do it on your own time. If you just assume that your employer will provide you with a job for life, you're probably gonna get a rude awakening at some point...
Umm... last time I checked, none of those "redundant systems" are designed to prevent the user from driving it off a cliff. RTFA.
but once he steps out of his area of expertise, he goes off the deep end pretty quick. I've been calling BS ever since he started spouting his "singularity" nonsense.
We've had multiple incidents nearly identical to one of the stupid tricks described in the article. One of our (former) techs had a habit of running two cables between the same pair of switches... or even plugging both ends of a single cable into the same switch! Needless to say, neither of these scenarios ends well.
Provided that they clearly state up front what information gets sent, and provide an easy way to opt-out during the installation process (or during first boot for pre-installed copies) I have no problem with this.
Well, OK... maybe on second thought I have a small problem with it: It is just one more example of the sort of "feature creep" which has caused most of the major Linux distros to bloat to a ridiculous degree. Sure, the scripts to implement this are probably tiny, and the network bandwidth consumed minuscule. But multiply this by a couple of orders of magnitude (to account for the hundreds of little "bells and whistles" features that have crept in over the years), and things get out of control. At least you still have the option of using one of the alternative distros that are optimized for size, or starting from a bare-bones Debian install and building your system up piecemeal with a light-weight desktop environment and only the applications you need.
Ahh, another fan of Chieftec tower cases -- I agree, they're great! Built like a tank, removable drive cages, good ventilation, plenty of space to work inside. I picked up several of them at a clearance sale a few years back, and still use them. Both of my main desktops (home and work) as well as my home file server live in Chieftec full towers.
The one thing they definitely don't have going for them is portability. When I built my son's system a few years ago, I used one of my Chieftec tower cases. Unfortunately, about a year ago he started getting into LAN parties; that Chieftec is a PITA to lug around! So we swapped his full tower for a smaller, lighter mid tower.
It has been possible to build a system at that price point for a while. In fact you could've probably done it even cheaper a year or two ago when RAM prices were ridiculously low.
My main concern with this build is the PSU that came bundled with the budget case. If the case + PSU was only $30, the PSU is almost certainly a total piece of crap; it'll probably be dead within a year. Hopefully it doesn't take the motherboard with it when it goes.
If we're not supposed to code in Java/C++, and interpreted languages are a no-no, what's left? C, FORTRAN, and assembler? (I actually *love* C, but I don't have any illusions that it is the be-all and end-all of programming languages... IMO Python is capable of filling most of the niches that C does not.)