"Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It's Too Much Like TV" ?
Don't think so. Faceboook, Twitter and Google murdered discourse by silencing opinion that disagreed with their agenda, which was to get Hillary elected as POTUS. http://harvardlawreview.org/20...
"Censorship How "terms of service" abridge free speech... Professor Ammori tells us that Facebook lawyers have created “a set of rules that hundreds of employees can apply consistently without having to make judgment calls.”9 The details of these rules, however, we do not know. Unlike censorship decisions by government agencies, the process in the private world of social media is secret."
So, when Facebook, Twitter and Google collaborate to demonetize videos, while stealing their ad revenues, shadow ban posts, or outright delete accounts to censor non-Marxist views, Joe NoOne claims they became too much like TV? Like when MASH denigrated conservative views by having Frank Burns behave like an idiot, or Archie Bunker is portrayed as the typical representative of Conservatives, and Hollywood blacklists Conservative actors while claiming to be the victim of a blacklist? No, it's not like TV at all. Conservatives rarely had a voice in the Leftist Hollywood productions which flooded TV in the late 60's and onward. Facebook, Twitter and Google, while supposedly representing the public commons, puts a fence around it instead. That's why I canceled my accounts. I may not agree with someone's POV but everyone has the right to express them.
When the Framers designed the House based on popular vote they knew they had a problem. The states with the most population, i.e., the biggest cities, would control the results of each election. The states with few people wouldn't be fairly represented. So, they created a second body, the Senate, which has two members from each state, regardless of their population. By requiring a bill to be passed by both houses balance was brought to the process.
The same problem existed with regards to the presidential election based on the popular vote. The big cities would control who sets in the WhiteHouse. The EC is to the presidential election what the Senate is to legislation. It give a balance of power that would be absent if there was no EC. With no EC why would a candidate want to spend anytime in a state with a low population, like Kansas, Nebraska, North or South Dakota, etc...? The candidates would spend their time in the top metropolitan areas with a million or more residents. Each of the top five cities have more people than the entire state of Nebraska. Thirty nine percent of the total population voted this year, 125,000,000 people. The top 10 hold almost 30 million residents, which would be 24% of the total votes cast for in the presidential election this year if all of them voted. Forty eight percent, almost 112 million eligible voters didn't vote. What to doto improve the election process? Force people to vote. Have voters supply their Social Security number at the polls, which then submit the voter's name, address and SSN to the IRS on a signed form. People of voting age who don't vote get a citizenship "fee" (ACA is the precursor) added to their income tax. Make it equal to two days of their average wage. Annual income divided by 2080, the number of working hours in a year. If more than one voting form with the same SSN is submitted the a fraud investigation can ensue. Or, the same name and address on more than one form with different SSN numbers. Unassigned SSN's would trigger a fraud investigation.
What candidates do now is focus on the "swing" states. States where political power is somewhat equally divided and there is a sufficient number of EC votes at stake to swing an election: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. In the current situation Michigan has already recounted and Hillary gained a little over 500 votes, but Trump still had a 10,000 vote majority, so he keeps the 16 EC votes. Wisconsin has 10 and Pennsylvania has 20 EC votes. Even if the recount flipped both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that would leave Hillary nine votes shy of 270. Hillary even made an campaign video ad pointing out Trump's response to Mike Wallace's question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
She has lost. And, by refusing to accept the results of the election, she is guilty of what she accused Trump of doing: "Denigrating our democracy and downplaying how we've elected presidents for 240 years... it's horrible".
By Federal law the recounts have to be completed by Dec 13th. The ONLY purpose for the recount demanded by Progressives now is as a blatant attempt to throw the election into the House, as was done in the 1824 election. The Progressives will deliberately drag their feet in the count process to ensure that. Trump will still win because the House is controlled by people he swept into power, but Progressives will use the Constitutional solution to the problem they caused to claim that Trump "stole" the election. THAT is denigrating and abusing our Constitution.
Because of Trump this election cycle revealed several previously denied or hidden things. First, the media is entirely controlled by Progressives, as is the entertainment and ed
would be denigrating and talking down our democracy. That's what she said about Trump when he said he would accept the results of the election only if he won. He said several times that he thought that the process was rigged, and in most major cities it probably is. But, now that she has lost, apparently not accepting the results of the election isn't such a bad idea after all. Flip-flop?
Abandon the Electoral College and most states will NEVER see a presidential candidate again. The candidates will spend all their time campaigning in the largest metropolitans areas. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Huston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas and San Jose. They each have one million or more people and combined they have about 26 million. All of them are Democrat strongholds and have been for decades. They'd never stop at any "fly over" states.
Lessig should know better. The House was created to allow each member to represent approximately the same number of people. This gives the edge to states with large populations. They could control all the legislation coming out of Washington.. The Framers solved that problem by creating the Senate, where each state has an equal vote. Legislation must pass both houses before it can be given to the President to sign or reject. The election of the President, if by popular vote, would present the same problem. The most populous states would always be electing the President. The Electoral College moves the contest away from states where one party controls most of the votes and toward states where could "swing" either way, i.e., neither party has a clear voter majority in those states. All this is moot, however, because the reason why Hillary lost is that the Democrat voters believed what the media was proclaiming, that Hillary was a shoo-in, she had a 98% change of winning, Hell would freeze over before Trump could win, etc..... Hillary's voters believed that message and stayed home. They figured she had it "in the bag" because that is what the media, a sock puppet for Hillary for the last 18 months, kept telling them. When one looks at the map of the US showing counties, with each county marked in red or blue, one can get an image of how large Trump's victory was: http://www.redflagnews.com/hea...
"Democrats paying people to protest at Trump rallies" He may have thought that he was writing fake news but one of the DNC's thugs confessed on hidden camera that he did exactly that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My first presidential election was in 1964. I was told that if I voted for Goldwater there would be war. I voted for Goldwater. There was war. Johnson started it by lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
There seems little doubt that Britain is planning on being protected by American military might, just as Canada is. Dropping their defensive capability leaves them with only two options when push comes to shove: surrender or go nuclear. I suspect that they would opt for surrender.
And this attitude is exactly why Desktop Linux hovers at around 2% or wherever it is today.
Ah, I can see from your comment that you've been in a coma for the last ten years. You're probably parroting the Windows centric site, NetApplications, that remarkets EXE's under new names and it tracked the OS of people looking for Windows software. No surprise that only 1 or 2% were running Linux.
Here is the detail of another site that tracks the OS of its visitors: http://distrowatch.com/awstats... You can see that 41% of the visitors were using Windows and 47.3% were using Linux. Now, shall I claim that Linux has a greater market share than Windows? Using your logic and proof I could. Of course, you could use the Microsoft retail chain bean counters to tally how many installs there are of Windows, but Linux doesn't have such a retail chain and no one bean counts it. Someone can download a Linux install ISO and use it to install Linux on one, two, dozens or hundreds of PCs. And, most likely, those PCs were running Windows before Linux replaced it, but the count on WinX installs doesn't drop and the count on Linux installs doesn't rise.
Goldman Sachs recently published a chart which shows the shift from Microsoft's 95 percents hare of the computing platform market in 2004, when PCs dominated the computing landscape, to just 20 percent in 2012. The forecast suggests that Microsoft will be able to grow its share back to 26 percent by 2016 and Android will shrink to 39 percent, while Apple's iOS and MacOS X will expand from 24 percent today to 29 percent in 2016
Goldman Sachs was wrong. Microsoft's Windows phone is dead, at less than 1%, and Android (based on Linux) is now at 75.6% of the market share.
The PC market is in decline, and it is affecting Windows sales the most. Windows XP, 7 and 8 users are forced by Microsoft to pay for an upgrade to the latest version, that's how bad Win10 sales have been.
"Having worked in plenty of state/local government offices... most of their work is done in proprietary software systems tailored to their specific job function (processing taxes, business registration, managing licenses, etc). There simply isn't enough of this software written for other platforms besides Windows."
I spent the last 11 years of my programming career (I retired in 2008) writing in-house solutions for a state dept of Revenue. The last eight was spent writing those applications using the Qt API on Linux, with Kate as the editor, gcc as the compiler and Kdbg as the debugger. I used the Linux environment because it was at least 2-3X faster than using the Qt API on Windows with the Visual Studio 6.0 C++ RAD. On Linux (SuSE 6.3) I used compiler defines to test the compile environment in order to switch between PostgreSQL and Oracle database code. I didn't need to buy an Oracle license to write and test code on LInux for the backend because PostgreSQL was 95% compatible with Oracle. I dropped the VSC++ and replaced it with the free Express C++ 6.0 compiler on XP. Oracle attempted to counter by buying the OneWorld RAD HTML system, renaming it APEX, and giving it to Oracle database owners for "free". They made that up in Aces when they switched from single computer licensing to core licensing. That raised the costs of an Oracle seat by 2X to 8X per server/blade.
The truth is people can't leave many proprietary systems because they were not far sighted enough to realize the data lock-in that would occur buying proprietary systems. I attempted to get the suits to use PostgreSQL instead of Oracle but they claimed that 1) "anything that is free can't be that good" and 2) it doesn't have support. They didn't consider the free user supported websites supporting PostgreSQL as "real" support. After Oracle was purchased and problems arose, the Oracle admin found he could get faster and better results on the free website than from a ticket posted on Oracle's support site. In the last 10-12 years Oracle license fees have cost state taxpayers millions of dollars.
""Accenture was chosen to co-author a report assessing the use of Microsoft software..."
Accenture worked with Microsoft to create the.NET "solution" to the London Stock Exchange attempt to get to 2 ms transaction times. They failed miserably and the second crash of the system kept the LSE off line for an entire day, costing them over $1 BILLION dollars in lost business.
Before the crash Microsoft had an ad featuring the "Highly Reliable TImes", a make-believe news paper which headlined a make-believe "fact" that WIndows and.NET "won out over Linux in head to head tests". It was later revealed that the LSE hired a Windows centric CTO who immediately contracted with Accenture/Microsoft to write the trading software. There was no "run off" between Linux and Windows. After the crash the LSE looked around for another solution and found a company which wrote a trading system called, IIRC, Xchi. It had been running at a small stock exchange for five years without a single failure and it already achieved 0.2 ms transaction times, the target.NET was trying to reach. The LSE didn't buy the software, they bought the software and the company that made it.
To its credit, Accenture wasn't responsible for the crash of the.NET/SIlverLight application which threw a BSOD onto the ceiling of the BirdNest at the Chinese Olympics.
I, on the other hand, love systemd on my Kubuntu 16.04 with Neon running on top. In System Settings, at the bottom, is the Systemd Icon. Open it and you have the GUI to start and stop all services with a mouse click, if you don't want to us the CLI.
Linux and KDE. They keep on giving you choices because one size does not fit all.
I love KDE4's look and feel, and am not partial to the default Plasma5 L&F. So, I changed themes, splash screens, wallpaper and icons and now I have my Kubuntu 16.04 with Neon on top looking pretty much like my old Kubuntu 14.04 DE, except that Plasma5 is at least TWICE as fast on my laptop as Plasma4 was.
Trolling like that it is no wonder you post anonymously. I've been using KDE since 1.l0 beta in SuSE, in September of 1998. I tried Gnome but didn't like it and I have never had to install Gnome to get a KDE app to run. For a long time Gnome and KDE dev teams worked together to create a compatibility layer so that each could run the other's apps without having to install the entire DE. It's still that way. I don't have Gnome installed on my Kubuntu Neon 16.04 with 5.73 Plasma5, but I can install Synaptic and run it without installing Gnome, but I run Muon instead.
Your second claim is entirely bogus. Unless you are running Gentoo or Arch or LFS you rarely have to compile anything. VERY FEW apps installed from the repositories have to be compiled, but when they do it is done automatically without the aid of the user. Examples: VirtualBox requires dkms, which requires kernel headers and some compiling, but its all done on the fly during the install. All the user has to do is reboot to activate the change. Installing GoogleEarth causes an automatic recompile of the source but it, too, is automatic. So, requiring the user to be a developer and compile source is NOT part of any of top 100 or so distros, save for the rare exceptions I mentioned. Of course, if you insist on going outside the repository and downloading tar file sources of apps not in the repository then you will have to know how to do a)./configure b) make c) make install. But NO distro developers I know require that for elements of their distro, save Arch, Gentoo and LFS, and those are not distros that everyday mom and pop users would run.
You stated "When there is a day, that someone can be handed a USB stick with a flavor of Linux that they can run from it,have all their hardware supported, without having to install, compile, or download anything, we will have finally a Linux OS that is at least comparable to Windows 95." How about comparable or even better than Win8 or Win10, and more open and free as well? I have such a USB stick in my pocket as I type. It is a persistent Kubuntu 16.04 LiveUSB. It is easy to make with the mksub app, which is also in Kubuntu's repository. The fact is, the top 100 or so distros in DistroWatch's page hit list are just the kind of distro you claim doesn't exist. There are always the corner or edge cases of hardware for which is difficult or impossible to find Linux drivers for, but if you've spent any time on Windows help forums you see the exact same problem, and that is with vendor configured copies of Windows.
So, better luck next time trying to conflate an experience you might have had with a Linux distro 15 years ago into what you think are problems today.
I began using KDE when SuSE shipped the 1.0 beta with its September 1998 release. It was so much better than Win95 that it became my DE of choice every since. I have been running Kubuntu since their 9.04 release and am now running 16.04 with the Neon repository added, making my distro Neon. The jump between KDE4 and kDE5 has been traumatic for some, like the jump from 1 to 2 or the jump from 3 to 4, but in that jump most of the negative complaints were from MS fans trolling in an attempt to get Linux distros to adopt Mono. De Icaza has left the Linux scene and Mono has been delegated to a minor dev tool for some developers.
I was astounded by the significant increase in speed of Plasma5 over Plasma4. With Kubuntu 14.04 on this Acer 7739-6830 the Steam program "Universe Sandbox^2" was so slow I had to disable most of the particles so that the planets would revolve smoothly in their orbits around the Sun without stuttering or lagging. Running on Kubuntu 16.04 (even with Neon) US2 is so fast I can run all of the simulations without any lag or stuttering. Stellarium gave me frame rates of 25-40 fps on Plasma4 but on Plasma5 I get vsync at 60 fps for the mediocre GPU in this laptop.
I've never used Konqueror and don't consider it a watermark for any event. I've been a fan of KMail in the past. When Google, Twitter and Facebook announced that they were going to censor posts I decided to close my Google account. KMail accepted all 5,000+ emails I imported my 200MB mbox files without a hiccup. The only problem I've found with KMail is that when I delete a mail a ghost of its header stays in the msg list until I clock on another folder, then it disappears.
To nibble and quibble one might as well say that Gnome is dying, or Unity as well. The reality is that smart phones are killing the PC market. I have an Apple iPhone 6+. I can do things with it that I only dreamed about doing on my laptop, with either Linux or Windows, and its easy to use. But they are not killing the PC game market, or the corporate desktop/laptop market and never will because the smart phone form factor is too small and klutzy. My current laptop is six years old. Will I replace it once it dies? That's the question.
I've been using KDE since the 1.0 beta was released with the SuSE 5.3 distro in September of 1998. I've been using KMail since I left Thunderbird about 10 years ago. I am currently running the latest version on Kubuntu 14.04 fully updated, with filters, encryption, etc... It has been and is running fine.
The developers opened it up to any and all suggestions and because of the power and rapid ease of development using the Qt API they went through a whole series of experiments interfaces and appliations. One volunteer, who was in grad school at the time, offered a web page to explain the new apps and features. He was crucified by those who abhorred change. Their attacks got personal. Some of the attacks were drive-by shootings by people masquerading as KDE users. He quit in disgust and devoted that time he used to his wife and graduate studies.
I suspect that the same thing will happen with this venture. My recommendation is to continue to polish the KDE UI and remove conflicting dialogs, fix the things that don't work properly, or don't work. Like this problems mentioned in this YouTube video: http://youtu.be/N7-fZJaJUv8
Above all DO NOT hide the current power and flexibility of KDE, i.e., "dumb it down", under a plethora of "useful" or "helpful" buttons, menus or dialogs. Windows does that. So does Unity. If I wanted that kind of interface I can use one of them. We saw what happened to GNOME2 when it was dumbed down to make it "easier to use". Is it possible to make a GUI "idiot proof"? Idiots are extremely ingenious, but simple interfaces are, well, simple. As in not powerful.
KDE dev team: IF you insist on shooting yourself in the foot with this scheme would you make it so that the user, during the installation process, could select the type of interface the users wants, say a mutually exclusive check box offering either the "Experienced User GUI" or "Novice Use Interfacer"? Either that, or make it easy for distro developers to select the kind of user GUI that want to default to and make the alternate option a Muon choice.
Aside from party affiliation from registration records, which says nothing about whom the voter actually voted for in the Nov election, just HOW did the DNC get a hold of individual voting records?
The question is, where is the best state to live in the US when the break up occurs.
It's obvious. The state with the greatest amount of natural resources: oil, metals, wood, rich soil, wildlife, and a low population. Southern Alaska, close to the Pacific Ocean. That it has a large supply of military weapons, including nukes, is a side benefit. It's big enough to be a nation on its own, and enough power to ward off potential invaders.
ALL the branches of the US government have become corrupt outlaws who have no clue as to what the Bill of Rights means. It's behavior for the last 8 years is a dictionary example of "power corrupts", made worse by the insufferable arrogance they display.
Slashdot Mirror
"Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It's Too Much Like TV" ?
Don't think so. Faceboook, Twitter and Google murdered discourse by silencing opinion that disagreed with their agenda, which was to get Hillary elected as POTUS.
http://harvardlawreview.org/20...
"Censorship ...
How "terms of service" abridge free speech
Professor Ammori tells us that Facebook lawyers have created “a set of rules that hundreds of employees can apply consistently without having to make judgment calls.”9 The details of these rules, however, we do not know. Unlike censorship decisions by government agencies, the process in the private world of social media is secret."
So, when Facebook, Twitter and Google collaborate to demonetize videos, while stealing their ad revenues, shadow ban posts, or outright delete accounts to censor non-Marxist views, Joe NoOne claims they became too much like TV? Like when MASH denigrated conservative views by having Frank Burns behave like an idiot, or Archie Bunker is portrayed as the typical representative of Conservatives, and Hollywood blacklists Conservative actors while claiming to be the victim of a blacklist? No, it's not like TV at all. Conservatives rarely had a voice in the Leftist Hollywood productions which flooded TV in the late 60's and onward. Facebook, Twitter and Google, while supposedly representing the public commons, puts a fence around it instead. That's why I canceled my accounts. I may not agree with someone's POV but everyone has the right to express them.
True. The vast majority of counties voted red this election:
http://www.redflagnews.com/hea...
Even Illinois.
When the Framers designed the House based on popular vote they knew they had a problem. The states with the most population, i.e., the biggest cities, would control the results of each election. The states with few people wouldn't be fairly represented. So, they created a second body, the Senate, which has two members from each state, regardless of their population. By requiring a bill to be passed by both houses balance was brought to the process.
The same problem existed with regards to the presidential election based on the popular vote. The big cities would control who sets in the WhiteHouse. The EC is to the presidential election what the Senate is to legislation. It give a balance of power that would be absent if there was no EC. With no EC why would a candidate want to spend anytime in a state with a low population, like Kansas, Nebraska, North or South Dakota, etc...? The candidates would spend their time in the top metropolitan areas with a million or more residents. Each of the top five cities have more people than the entire state of Nebraska. Thirty nine percent of the total population voted this year, 125,000,000 people. The top 10 hold almost 30 million residents, which would be 24% of the total votes cast for in the presidential election this year if all of them voted. Forty eight percent, almost 112 million eligible voters didn't vote. What to doto improve the election process? Force people to vote. Have voters supply their Social Security number at the polls, which then submit the voter's name, address and SSN to the IRS on a signed form. People of voting age who don't vote get a citizenship "fee" (ACA is the precursor) added to their income tax. Make it equal to two days of their average wage. Annual income divided by 2080, the number of working hours in a year. If more than one voting form with the same SSN is submitted the a fraud investigation can ensue. Or, the same name and address on more than one form with different SSN numbers. Unassigned SSN's would trigger a fraud investigation.
What candidates do now is focus on the "swing" states. States where political power is somewhat equally divided and there is a sufficient number of EC votes at stake to swing an election: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. In the current situation Michigan has already recounted and Hillary gained a little over 500 votes, but Trump still had a 10,000 vote majority, so he keeps the 16 EC votes. Wisconsin has 10 and Pennsylvania has 20 EC votes. Even if the recount flipped both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that would leave Hillary nine votes shy of 270. Hillary even made an campaign video ad pointing out Trump's response to Mike Wallace's question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
She has lost. ... it's horrible".
And, by refusing to accept the results of the election, she is guilty of what she accused Trump of doing: "Denigrating our democracy and downplaying how we've elected presidents for 240 years
By Federal law the recounts have to be completed by Dec 13th. The ONLY purpose for the recount demanded by Progressives now is as a blatant attempt to throw the election into the House, as was done in the 1824 election. The Progressives will deliberately drag their feet in the count process to ensure that. Trump will still win because the House is controlled by people he swept into power, but Progressives will use the Constitutional solution to the problem they caused to claim that Trump "stole" the election. THAT is denigrating and abusing our Constitution.
Because of Trump this election cycle revealed several previously denied or hidden things. First, the media is entirely controlled by Progressives, as is the entertainment and ed
https://wallethub.com/edu/stat...
https://wallethub.com/edu/stat...
would be denigrating and talking down our democracy. That's what she said about Trump when he said he would accept the results of the election only if he won. He said several times that he thought that the process was rigged, and in most major cities it probably is. But, now that she has lost, apparently not accepting the results of the election isn't such a bad idea after all. Flip-flop?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Abandon the Electoral College and most states will NEVER see a presidential candidate again. The candidates will spend all their time campaigning in the largest metropolitans areas. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Huston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas and San Jose. They each have one million or more people and combined they have about 26 million. All of them are Democrat strongholds and have been for decades. They'd never stop at any "fly over" states.
Lessig should know better. The House was created to allow each member to represent approximately the same number of people. This gives the edge to states with large populations. They could control all the legislation coming out of Washington.. The Framers solved that problem by creating the Senate, where each state has an equal vote. Legislation must pass both houses before it can be given to the President to sign or reject. The election of the President, if by popular vote, would present the same problem. The most populous states would always be electing the President. The Electoral College moves the contest away from states where one party controls most of the votes and toward states where could "swing" either way, i.e., neither party has a clear voter majority in those states. All this is moot, however, because the reason why Hillary lost is that the Democrat voters believed what the media was proclaiming, that Hillary was a shoo-in, she had a 98% change of winning, Hell would freeze over before Trump could win, etc..... Hillary's voters believed that message and stayed home. They figured she had it "in the bag" because that is what the media, a sock puppet for Hillary for the last 18 months, kept telling them.
When one looks at the map of the US showing counties, with each county marked in red or blue, one can get an image of how large Trump's victory was:
http://www.redflagnews.com/hea...
"Democrats paying people to protest at Trump rallies"
He may have thought that he was writing fake news but one of the DNC's thugs confessed on hidden camera that he did exactly that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
my browser showed nothing and reacted to nothing, just as I configured it to behave.
My first presidential election was in 1964.
I was told that if I voted for Goldwater there would be war.
I voted for Goldwater.
There was war. Johnson started it by lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
It takes a lot of the national budget to pay people not to work.
There seems little doubt that Britain is planning on being protected by American military might, just as Canada is.
Dropping their defensive capability leaves them with only two options when push comes to shove: surrender or go nuclear. I suspect that they would opt for surrender.
And this attitude is exactly why Desktop Linux hovers at around 2% or wherever it is today.
Ah, I can see from your comment that you've been in a coma for the last ten years. You're probably parroting the Windows centric site, NetApplications, that remarkets EXE's under new names and it tracked the OS of people looking for Windows software. No surprise that only 1 or 2% were running Linux.
Here is the detail of another site that tracks the OS of its visitors:
http://distrowatch.com/awstats...
You can see that 41% of the visitors were using Windows and 47.3% were using Linux. Now, shall I claim that Linux has a greater market share than Windows? Using your logic and proof I could. Of course, you could use the Microsoft retail chain bean counters to tally how many installs there are of Windows, but Linux doesn't have such a retail chain and no one bean counts it. Someone can download a Linux install ISO and use it to install Linux on one, two, dozens or hundreds of PCs. And, most likely, those PCs were running Windows before Linux replaced it, but the count on WinX installs doesn't drop and the count on Linux installs doesn't rise.
The fact is that Linux had double the market share of Window back in 2013!
http://www.tomshardware.com/ne...
Goldman Sachs recently published a chart which shows the shift from Microsoft's 95 percents hare of the computing platform market in 2004, when PCs dominated the computing landscape, to just 20 percent in 2012. The forecast suggests that Microsoft will be able to grow its share back to 26 percent by 2016 and Android will shrink to 39 percent, while Apple's iOS and MacOS X will expand from 24 percent today to 29 percent in 2016
Goldman Sachs was wrong. Microsoft's Windows phone is dead, at less than 1%, and Android (based on Linux) is now at 75.6% of the market share.
The PC market is in decline, and it is affecting Windows sales the most. Windows XP, 7 and 8 users are forced by Microsoft to pay for an upgrade to the latest version, that's how bad Win10 sales have been.
"Having worked in plenty of state/local government offices ... most of their work is done in proprietary software systems tailored to their specific job function (processing taxes, business registration, managing licenses, etc). There simply isn't enough of this software written for other platforms besides Windows."
I spent the last 11 years of my programming career (I retired in 2008) writing in-house solutions for a state dept of Revenue. The last eight was spent writing those applications using the Qt API on Linux, with Kate as the editor, gcc as the compiler and Kdbg as the debugger. I used the Linux environment because it was at least 2-3X faster than using the Qt API on Windows with the Visual Studio 6.0 C++ RAD. On Linux (SuSE 6.3) I used compiler defines to test the compile environment in order to switch between PostgreSQL and Oracle database code. I didn't need to buy an Oracle license to write and test code on LInux for the backend because PostgreSQL was 95% compatible with Oracle. I dropped the VSC++ and replaced it with the free Express C++ 6.0 compiler on XP. Oracle attempted to counter by buying the OneWorld RAD HTML system, renaming it APEX, and giving it to Oracle database owners for "free". They made that up in Aces when they switched from single computer licensing to core licensing. That raised the costs of an Oracle seat by 2X to 8X per server/blade.
The truth is people can't leave many proprietary systems because they were not far sighted enough to realize the data lock-in that would occur buying proprietary systems. I attempted to get the suits to use PostgreSQL instead of Oracle but they claimed that 1) "anything that is free can't be that good" and 2) it doesn't have support. They didn't consider the free user supported websites supporting PostgreSQL as "real" support. After Oracle was purchased and problems arose, the Oracle admin found he could get faster and better results on the free website than from a ticket posted on Oracle's support site. In the last 10-12 years Oracle license fees have cost state taxpayers millions of dollars.
""Accenture was chosen to co-author a report assessing the use of Microsoft software..."
Accenture worked with Microsoft to create the .NET "solution" to the London Stock Exchange attempt to get to 2 ms transaction times. They failed miserably and the second crash of the system kept the LSE off line for an entire day, costing them over $1 BILLION dollars in lost business.
Before the crash Microsoft had an ad featuring the "Highly Reliable TImes", a make-believe news paper which headlined a make-believe "fact" that WIndows and .NET "won out over Linux in head to head tests". It was later revealed that the LSE hired a Windows centric CTO who immediately contracted with Accenture/Microsoft to write the trading software. There was no "run off" between Linux and Windows. After the crash the LSE looked around for another solution and found a company which wrote a trading system called, IIRC, Xchi. It had been running at a small stock exchange for five years without a single failure and it already achieved 0.2 ms transaction times, the target .NET was trying to reach. The LSE didn't buy the software, they bought the software and the company that made it.
To its credit, Accenture wasn't responsible for the crash of the .NET/SIlverLight application which threw a BSOD onto the ceiling of the BirdNest at the Chinese Olympics.
Especially if the base class has a back door in it. All subclasses become owned.
I, on the other hand, love systemd on my Kubuntu 16.04 with Neon running on top. In System Settings, at the bottom, is the Systemd Icon. Open it and you have the GUI to start and stop all services with a mouse click, if you don't want to us the CLI.
Linux and KDE. They keep on giving you choices because one size does not fit all.
I love KDE4's look and feel, and am not partial to the default Plasma5 L&F. So, I changed themes, splash screens, wallpaper and icons and now I have my Kubuntu 16.04 with Neon on top looking pretty much like my old Kubuntu 14.04 DE, except that Plasma5 is at least TWICE as fast on my laptop as Plasma4 was.
Trolling like that it is no wonder you post anonymously.
I've been using KDE since 1.l0 beta in SuSE, in September of 1998. I tried Gnome but didn't like it and I have never had to install Gnome to get a KDE app to run. For a long time Gnome and KDE dev teams worked together to create a compatibility layer so that each could run the other's apps without having to install the entire DE. It's still that way. I don't have Gnome installed on my Kubuntu Neon 16.04 with 5.73 Plasma5, but I can install Synaptic and run it without installing Gnome, but I run Muon instead.
Your second claim is entirely bogus. Unless you are running Gentoo or Arch or LFS you rarely have to compile anything. VERY FEW apps installed from the repositories have to be compiled, but when they do it is done automatically without the aid of the user. Examples: VirtualBox requires dkms, which requires kernel headers and some compiling, but its all done on the fly during the install. All the user has to do is reboot to activate the change. Installing GoogleEarth causes an automatic recompile of the source but it, too, is automatic. So, requiring the user to be a developer and compile source is NOT part of any of top 100 or so distros, save for the rare exceptions I mentioned. Of course, if you insist on going outside the repository and downloading tar file sources of apps not in the repository then you will have to know how to do a) ./configure b) make c) make install. But NO distro developers I know require that for elements of their distro, save Arch, Gentoo and LFS, and those are not distros that everyday mom and pop users would run.
You stated "When there is a day, that someone can be handed a USB stick with a flavor of Linux that they can run from it,have all their hardware supported, without having to install, compile, or download anything, we will have finally a Linux OS that is at least comparable to Windows 95." How about comparable or even better than Win8 or Win10, and more open and free as well? I have such a USB stick in my pocket as I type. It is a persistent Kubuntu 16.04 LiveUSB. It is easy to make with the mksub app, which is also in Kubuntu's repository. The fact is, the top 100 or so distros in DistroWatch's page hit list are just the kind of distro you claim doesn't exist. There are always the corner or edge cases of hardware for which is difficult or impossible to find Linux drivers for, but if you've spent any time on Windows help forums you see the exact same problem, and that is with vendor configured copies of Windows.
So, better luck next time trying to conflate an experience you might have had with a Linux distro 15 years ago into what you think are problems today.
I began using KDE when SuSE shipped the 1.0 beta with its September 1998 release. It was so much better than Win95 that it became my DE of choice every since. I have been running Kubuntu since their 9.04 release and am now running 16.04 with the Neon repository added, making my distro Neon. The jump between KDE4 and kDE5 has been traumatic for some, like the jump from 1 to 2 or the jump from 3 to 4, but in that jump most of the negative complaints were from MS fans trolling in an attempt to get Linux distros to adopt Mono. De Icaza has left the Linux scene and Mono has been delegated to a minor dev tool for some developers.
I was astounded by the significant increase in speed of Plasma5 over Plasma4. With Kubuntu 14.04 on this Acer 7739-6830 the Steam program "Universe Sandbox^2" was so slow I had to disable most of the particles so that the planets would revolve smoothly in their orbits around the Sun without stuttering or lagging. Running on Kubuntu 16.04 (even with Neon) US2 is so fast I can run all of the simulations without any lag or stuttering. Stellarium gave me frame rates of 25-40 fps on Plasma4 but on Plasma5 I get vsync at 60 fps for the mediocre GPU in this laptop.
I've never used Konqueror and don't consider it a watermark for any event. I've been a fan of KMail in the past. When Google, Twitter and Facebook announced that they were going to censor posts I decided to close my Google account. KMail accepted all 5,000+ emails I imported my 200MB mbox files without a hiccup. The only problem I've found with KMail is that when I delete a mail a ghost of its header stays in the msg list until I clock on another folder, then it disappears.
To nibble and quibble one might as well say that Gnome is dying, or Unity as well. The reality is that smart phones are killing the PC market. I have an Apple iPhone 6+. I can do things with it that I only dreamed about doing on my laptop, with either Linux or Windows, and its easy to use. But they are not killing the PC game market, or the corporate desktop/laptop market and never will because the smart phone form factor is too small and klutzy. My current laptop is six years old. Will I replace it once it dies? That's the question.
I've been using KDE since the 1.0 beta was released with the SuSE 5.3 distro in September of 1998.
I've been using KMail since I left Thunderbird about 10 years ago.
I am currently running the latest version on Kubuntu 14.04 fully updated, with filters, encryption, etc...
It has been and is running fine.
Remember when KDE4 was released?
The developers opened it up to any and all suggestions and because of the power and rapid ease of development using the Qt API they went through a whole series of experiments interfaces and appliations. One volunteer, who was in grad school at the time, offered a web page to explain the new apps and features. He was crucified by those who abhorred change. Their attacks got personal. Some of the attacks were drive-by shootings by people masquerading as KDE users. He quit in disgust and devoted that time he used to his wife and graduate studies.
I suspect that the same thing will happen with this venture. My recommendation is to continue to polish the KDE UI and remove conflicting dialogs, fix the things that don't work properly, or don't work. Like this problems mentioned in this YouTube video: http://youtu.be/N7-fZJaJUv8
Above all DO NOT hide the current power and flexibility of KDE, i.e., "dumb it down", under a plethora of "useful" or "helpful" buttons, menus or dialogs. Windows does that. So does Unity. If I wanted that kind of interface I can use one of them. We saw what happened to GNOME2 when it was dumbed down to make it "easier to use". Is it possible to make a GUI "idiot proof"? Idiots are extremely ingenious, but simple interfaces are, well, simple. As in not powerful.
KDE dev team: IF you insist on shooting yourself in the foot with this scheme would you make it so that the user, during the installation process, could select the type of interface the users wants, say a mutually exclusive check box offering either the "Experienced User GUI" or "Novice Use Interfacer"? Either that, or make it easy for distro developers to select the kind of user GUI that want to default to and make the alternate option a Muon choice.
When a theory cannot be falsified because ad hoc adjustments explain every discrepency, it has become a belief.
"and voting records"???
Aside from party affiliation from registration records, which says nothing about whom the voter actually voted for in the Nov election, just HOW did the DNC get a hold of individual voting records?
Is the secret ballot a myth?
The question is, where is the best state to live in the US when the break up occurs.
It's obvious. The state with the greatest amount of natural resources: oil, metals, wood, rich soil, wildlife, and a low population.
Southern Alaska, close to the Pacific Ocean.
That it has a large supply of military weapons, including nukes, is a side benefit. It's big enough to be a nation on its own, and enough power to ward off potential invaders.
ALL the branches of the US government have become corrupt outlaws who have no clue as to what the Bill of Rights means. It's behavior for the last 8 years is a dictionary example of "power corrupts", made worse by the insufferable arrogance they display.