He's not asking "How do I use Linux to solve a problem?" He's asking "If I use Linux, how do I still give Microsoft money?" If the question were the former, the question would have been "How do I deal with these.docx documents?" In that case my answer would be to use OO.o to convert them to a standard format, except for the ones that stupidly require vendor specific software. For those you still have to use MSOffice apps to convert them until you can get your contacts to use an interoperable format, and that means probably Citrix.
We don't tolerate people sending us.WP documents or VisiCalc spreadsheets any more, do we? Unless we must, and then we convert them.
For gaming the problem is the same. Game developers are developing on the Windows platform not because DirectX is such a joy to work with or because it's a nice reliably consistent platform. Neither of those things are true. They're doing it because they sell a lot of copies and because they're evangelised to do it. The sooner they're weaned from that the better, and shifting to console games for a while can ease the transition. The point of playing games after all is not to play them on your PC. It's to play them. So play them on a platform that's designed for them. Duh.
If he wants to just give Microsoft money for no reason, he can continue to overlicense unused software like most enterprises are doing right now. That's a hearty way to flush some serious cash down the Redmond toilet for no reason if that's what you want to do. As abhorrent as the idea is, it's still better than actually using that stuff.
Interesting as well that the testers didn't seem to grasp the differences in the way Vista manages applications and resources. Programs running under Vista should become more responsive the more you use them.
Not on the eee they don't. Nor under any of the 50 low cost MIDs and mini notebook pc's coming out in the next few months. For the two pound laptop with six hours of battery life Vista is dead on arrival.
Vista 14% Up From 4%
Lies, damn lies and statistics. All the way up at 14% after a year and a half with under a year to go before the next version is out? That means it's going to peak at something under 30%. Sure, they sold lots of licenses nobody is using. They made Billions doing that. I hope that's not the kind of trick you can get people to fall for over and over. I wish I knew it for sure.
You have to follow a few links in the first link
to get to this fine article where they explain that in 2007, XP's share went up in the enterprise. Since we know the end is nigh for Vista as well
there seems little motivation to feel this pain.
That's telling, isn't it? And that's actually from Forrester, whose bias is legendary in favor of Redmond.
I should think some Vista evangelists aren't getting their bonuses this year.
The error you're making is thinking anybody cares about the twitter sockpuppets. It's not honest but it's within the rules. Perhaps when you've posted as much content to slashdot as twitter has (since 1999!) you'll be a more jaded about such things.
Thanks for the list of accounts though. I'm sure what I did with the information doesn't suit your purpose, but oh well. That's life.
Most everybody moved to network printing years ago. It's working out fine.
In fact, a lot of direct attached peripherals can go away. Gigabit networks are fine for most stuff you used to attach devices directly to your PC for.
HP's linux support isn't really all that good. Most of what I've seen has been developed by third-parties.
HP supports linux. They have for a long time. Kernel.org runs on servers donated by HP and they have since 2001. Third party support for HP gear is also strong as you note. I only wish they'd wake up and start using it for their web server. Their site is hideous and slow, and for the most part their web stuff is IE only. Other than that, good on them.
As it become more apparent that the hardware needed an upgrade, Peter began to think about preparing a request to Hewlett-Packard for new hardware. Before he even made his request, HP contacted him basically saying, "hey, we noticed that you guys have been kind of struggling lately, what do you need?" Peter provided them with his wish list, and within two weeks the decision was made and new hardware was on the way. Peter noted, " HP came to us from a quite high level. They have been absolutely great."
Matt Taggart, part of the R&D lab within HP's Open Source & Linux Organization, noted that HP is a large company and that the different donations to kernel.org actually came from different divisions. "There are plenty of people in HP that recognize the value that kernel.org provides and that benefit (both directly and indirectly through HP's customers) from having it perform well," he explained. "This time the donation came for HP's Open Source and Linux Operation R&D Lab, but in the past they have come from other places such as the Industry Standard Server Division (the folks that do ProLiant)." He went on to add, "HP's IT organizations also use Linux and are big users of kernel.org, so it benefits them as well."
As for why HP has made these donations, Matt explained, "when possible, HP likes to help Free and Open Source software projects at the source. For example, if HP wants to contribute driver fixes for a piece of equipment that we ship, it is a better use of our time to work at the kernel.org level rather than duplicating effort by working individually with each distributor (or not being able to work with some at all). Providing kernel.org hardware is an easy way for us to give back to the project that has helped save us a lot of effort."
None of these lists is anywhere near complete or definitive. One of the challenges these days is picking a good distro. Usually people develop a fondness to one family of distributions and stick with it for a single purpose. The thing is that each distribution has its merits and fans. Each one has support forums and repositories and developers. It's a whole ecosystem of operating systems competing for the attention of users. I like the Debian based Ubuntu and its derivative for the desktop but PCLinuxOS spawned from Mandrake seems to have legs these days. It's hard to beat the Knoppix based bootables for recovery, diagnostics and utilities too.
I so much prefer that to an entire ecosystem of malware developers competing to hose my Windows box, and the antithetical software vendors selling cures (mostly snake-oil).
The cool thing about people being free to roll their own distro is that even a little guy can have grand ideas and if he implements them well, kaching! He's got a seller. A few months of good marketing and he can sell services for the rest of his days. If it's good but he loses interest or it doesn't rise to that level, someone will just fold his great ideas into their own distro until it gets absorbed by them all. That's called "progress", and you don't get it from a Windows Distro family like Vista.
In California they don't tear down the house and build a new one usually - they leave one wall standing and "Remodel" the rest. Something to do with taxes on new construction I think. That's more likely their intent with Vista.
Anyway, this "fresh restart" is what's wrong with Vista and by extension the entire commercial software market. If they had started with a foundation strong enough in the fundamentals like X did in 1984 or BSD did in 1977 the process would be more evolutionary and less revolutionary. The problem with revolutionary development is you have to cross so many unknown frontiers that you have to stumble across many of the same errors with each revolution. You spend so much time and effort building up a stable platform only to tear it down again.
In the mean time the builders that started with a foundation strong in the fundamentals forged in the fire of public scrutiny evolve and expand it bit by bit... A new trunk here, a fork there, forgotten annexes trimmed away. Eventually the construction rises into a fortress that looms over the hastily built McMansions of the revolutionary model builders.
Essentially that's Microsoft's problem now. They could scrap the whole thing and start fresh with a perfect design and implement an architecture that is simple and graceful and efficient -- but it would take them ten years and they would have to build it in the looming shadow of Linux. When they were done people would look at the puny structure and say "that's cute Billy. Now go play outside."
Try to remember that the road for these Atom procs has just begun. The roadmap calls for dual cores with hyperthreading, and another process shrink will bring the watts down or the clocks up (your choice).
Add some improvements to SSD density and speed; some GPU enhancements. They can already access 3.5GB of RAM. In three or four years these things might be Vista capable after all.
People don't really care too much if their tool is the ideal solution. They just want a tool good enough to do what they want to do.
There are lots of interesting ramifications here. Some poor souls at Intel will be tasked to "enable" Vista on MID despite the fact that nobody in their right mind would want such a thing.
They claim only XP Home will be supported. Yeah, that's likely to stick. No businesses I know of would be interested in a $300 laptop that weighs 2 pounds and lives for 6 hours. Except maybe all of them. Can you say remote desktop?
The MID concept calls for always-on wireless internet. We're going to redo those cellular capacity equations over again I should think. And somebody might want to consider the security ramifications of a million more public-IP'd XP Home boxes with permanent broadband connectivity. Somebody other than the lads from Lagos I mean.
The later of 6/30/2010 or one year after the release of W7 seems to hint at a 6/30/2009 release date for W7. That might be a wee bit optimistic. OTOH, short lifecycling Vista must be a big motivator, what with how it's selling so many Macs and Linux boxes these days.
Is keeping their product in front of the customer.
This is going to make a lot of people unhappy. Lots of OEMs are going to have a little chat with Microsoft about this whole death-of-XP thing I think.
If Vista runs well on a MID I will be shocked. If it ran well, the things would ship with Vista and we wouldn't be having this 8-year-old OS discussion at all since these devices weren't even announced until Vista had been out for a year.
It's already annoying enough when "windows mobile" os so crippled and incompatible with other versions of "windows", sharing little more than the name. By contrast, i can recompile apps from my desktop linux system to run on my linux based nokia n800 tablet.
Wait until you see "Vista for MID". You'll think Windows ME or Windows Mobile was the second coming of Brian Kernighan.
Actually I was hoping they could make it blink. Every blog on the internet needs fifty huge blinking "Reply to this" buttons on every page, you know, so people can figure out which button to push to reply to my comments.
Have both been selling machines with Linux for many years. HP offers Linux on, I believe, nearly every box they sell and drivers for nearly every printer.
Instead let's talk instead about the eee PC from ASUS, and the clones of it, and all those hot new cheap mini laptops and mobile internet devices based on Intel's Atom that won't run Vista.
Microsoft had better pay their taxes while they still can.
XP dies in June. Unless they extend it every last one of those boxes is going out the door with Intel's MobiLinux or a distro that supports that platform. Let's talk about BMW, where Linux comes standard with many models.
Forget Linux on the desktop. 2008 is the year of Linux in your pocket, in your dashboard, in your cable box, on your lap and bringing the third world online without contributing too much to global warming. Desktop? What do you need a desk for any more? Next year that question may read "What's a desk?"
I hear there's a new rambus memory tech in development for servers. It would be incredible except that rambus is a spinout of Intel. Read up on the Rambus history if you want to understand this.
Several companies do this. Executives from a group spin out in an entrepeneurial venture. Then they build their businesses on technologies they worked on in their parent companies.
Eventually the spinout gets bought back in for huge profits for the executives involved.
For HP this has evolved into an unofficial executive retirement plan. The benefit for the corp is deniability. They didn't submarine the patents - their newly acquired subsidiary did.
It's called a submarine patent. They call it that because it lurks there and lets you get all confident before it surfaces and torpedos your business.
Another company did this with.gif, and another with.jpg. In fact I doubt there are many accepted standards that lack these traps. The companies that participate in standards do their best to ensure their patented technologies are included in their standards.
The standards bodies have a term for this. They require not that the standards contain no patented content, but rather that licensing is available under terms that are "RAND": Reasonable and non discriminatory.
There can be no better example than the current hot topic, OOXML. MS has offered their "promise" that they won't sue people for using their specification for non commercial use under certain (unlikely) conditions. They won't even call it a license.
It's all a lie, of course. A corporation does not buy something so expensive as a submarine unless they have a plan to use it.
That's not the same thing as patent troll. A patent troll has no other business than patenting the obvious and suing people who follow the simplest path. While these patents are one clear answer to certain technical problems they are not the only obvious answer. Also, Rambus does have a legitimate business (or did).
Therefore it's not a patent troll, it's a submarine patent. I'll agree that it's despicable though.
This one's a cake walk. A gentle lob over the net. "Overwhelming international approval for new international document standard. Embraced by technical committees the world over. A revolution in standards process. Sailed through." Quote after quote from NB committee members without mentioning that they're Microsoft employees, or that they managed to get themselves inserted into the process for this one thing only.
I'm turning off my internet for a couple weeks after it starts. I think I'm going to be ill. Somebody record the SCO fiasco for me.
For the really good stuff you'll have to wait for the next process shrink ~3 years (more if competition lets up).
An open question is if more energy efficient processors just mean greater density in the datacenter. Apparently demand for performance shows no sign of letting up any time soon.
The link in the summary will take you to This page. It appears that OOXML will pass if some more Yes votes don't turn to No. Ireland and the UK both switched from No to Yes.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not asking "How do I use Linux to solve a problem?" He's asking "If I use Linux, how do I still give Microsoft money?" If the question were the former, the question would have been "How do I deal with these .docx documents?" In that case my answer would be to use OO.o to convert them to a standard format, except for the ones that stupidly require vendor specific software. For those you still have to use MSOffice apps to convert them until you can get your contacts to use an interoperable format, and that means probably Citrix.
We don't tolerate people sending us .WP documents or VisiCalc spreadsheets any more, do we? Unless we must, and then we convert them.
For gaming the problem is the same. Game developers are developing on the Windows platform not because DirectX is such a joy to work with or because it's a nice reliably consistent platform. Neither of those things are true. They're doing it because they sell a lot of copies and because they're evangelised to do it. The sooner they're weaned from that the better, and shifting to console games for a while can ease the transition. The point of playing games after all is not to play them on your PC. It's to play them. So play them on a platform that's designed for them. Duh.
If he wants to just give Microsoft money for no reason, he can continue to overlicense unused software like most enterprises are doing right now. That's a hearty way to flush some serious cash down the Redmond toilet for no reason if that's what you want to do. As abhorrent as the idea is, it's still better than actually using that stuff.
Not on the eee they don't. Nor under any of the 50 low cost MIDs and mini notebook pc's coming out in the next few months. For the two pound laptop with six hours of battery life Vista is dead on arrival.
Lies, damn lies and statistics. All the way up at 14% after a year and a half with under a year to go before the next version is out? That means it's going to peak at something under 30%. Sure, they sold lots of licenses nobody is using. They made Billions doing that. I hope that's not the kind of trick you can get people to fall for over and over. I wish I knew it for sure.
"LALALALALA I can't hear you!"
Not real persuasive. Not going to work any more.
In a VM or better yet in a Citrix session, silly. That's not a good excuse to run Windows as your base OS.
This wikipedia link should help.
No charge. If you need anything else I'll be here all day.
You have to follow a few links in the first link to get to this fine article where they explain that in 2007, XP's share went up in the enterprise. Since we know the end is nigh for Vista as well there seems little motivation to feel this pain.
That's telling, isn't it? And that's actually from Forrester, whose bias is legendary in favor of Redmond.
I should think some Vista evangelists aren't getting their bonuses this year.
Because it's an obvious troll.
This discussion of twitter is more interesting.
The error you're making is thinking anybody cares about the twitter sockpuppets. It's not honest but it's within the rules. Perhaps when you've posted as much content to slashdot as twitter has (since 1999!) you'll be a more jaded about such things.
Thanks for the list of accounts though. I'm sure what I did with the information doesn't suit your purpose, but oh well. That's life.
google news
If there's a tipping point I would say we're getting pretty close to it.
It would appear "get the facts" backfired.
Most everybody moved to network printing years ago. It's working out fine.
In fact, a lot of direct attached peripherals can go away. Gigabit networks are fine for most stuff you used to attach devices directly to your PC for.
HP supports linux. They have for a long time. Kernel.org runs on servers donated by HP and they have since 2001. Third party support for HP gear is also strong as you note. I only wish they'd wake up and start using it for their web server. Their site is hideous and slow, and for the most part their web stuff is IE only. Other than that, good on them.
Let me quote for you from a history article:
'nuff said.
Distrowatch is tracking 566 distributions now, 353 of them active.
Linux.org shows 455.
There's a rather long list on Wikipedia
None of these lists is anywhere near complete or definitive. One of the challenges these days is picking a good distro. Usually people develop a fondness to one family of distributions and stick with it for a single purpose. The thing is that each distribution has its merits and fans. Each one has support forums and repositories and developers. It's a whole ecosystem of operating systems competing for the attention of users. I like the Debian based Ubuntu and its derivative for the desktop but PCLinuxOS spawned from Mandrake seems to have legs these days. It's hard to beat the Knoppix based bootables for recovery, diagnostics and utilities too.
I so much prefer that to an entire ecosystem of malware developers competing to hose my Windows box, and the antithetical software vendors selling cures (mostly snake-oil).
The cool thing about people being free to roll their own distro is that even a little guy can have grand ideas and if he implements them well, kaching! He's got a seller. A few months of good marketing and he can sell services for the rest of his days. If it's good but he loses interest or it doesn't rise to that level, someone will just fold his great ideas into their own distro until it gets absorbed by them all. That's called "progress", and you don't get it from a Windows Distro family like Vista.
In California they don't tear down the house and build a new one usually - they leave one wall standing and "Remodel" the rest. Something to do with taxes on new construction I think. That's more likely their intent with Vista.
Anyway, this "fresh restart" is what's wrong with Vista and by extension the entire commercial software market. If they had started with a foundation strong enough in the fundamentals like X did in 1984 or BSD did in 1977 the process would be more evolutionary and less revolutionary. The problem with revolutionary development is you have to cross so many unknown frontiers that you have to stumble across many of the same errors with each revolution. You spend so much time and effort building up a stable platform only to tear it down again.
In the mean time the builders that started with a foundation strong in the fundamentals forged in the fire of public scrutiny evolve and expand it bit by bit... A new trunk here, a fork there, forgotten annexes trimmed away. Eventually the construction rises into a fortress that looms over the hastily built McMansions of the revolutionary model builders.
Essentially that's Microsoft's problem now. They could scrap the whole thing and start fresh with a perfect design and implement an architecture that is simple and graceful and efficient -- but it would take them ten years and they would have to build it in the looming shadow of Linux. When they were done people would look at the puny structure and say "that's cute Billy. Now go play outside."
It's about how Vista's not long for this world. It quotes a fairly reliable source.
TFA is about Yet Another Fine Distro. It seems like there are ten thousand of them now. Choice is good.
So yeah I hope this one's got more than a year left in it.
It seems like just yesterday we were discussung the death of Vista's predecessor XP. How time flies...
Longer than Vista I hope.
Try to remember that the road for these Atom procs has just begun. The roadmap calls for dual cores with hyperthreading, and another process shrink will bring the watts down or the clocks up (your choice).
Add some improvements to SSD density and speed; some GPU enhancements. They can already access 3.5GB of RAM. In three or four years these things might be Vista capable after all.
People don't really care too much if their tool is the ideal solution. They just want a tool good enough to do what they want to do.
There are lots of interesting ramifications here. Some poor souls at Intel will be tasked to "enable" Vista on MID despite the fact that nobody in their right mind would want such a thing.
They claim only XP Home will be supported. Yeah, that's likely to stick. No businesses I know of would be interested in a $300 laptop that weighs 2 pounds and lives for 6 hours. Except maybe all of them. Can you say remote desktop?
The MID concept calls for always-on wireless internet. We're going to redo those cellular capacity equations over again I should think. And somebody might want to consider the security ramifications of a million more public-IP'd XP Home boxes with permanent broadband connectivity. Somebody other than the lads from Lagos I mean.
The later of 6/30/2010 or one year after the release of W7 seems to hint at a 6/30/2009 release date for W7. That might be a wee bit optimistic. OTOH, short lifecycling Vista must be a big motivator, what with how it's selling so many Macs and Linux boxes these days.
Is keeping their product in front of the customer.
This is going to make a lot of people unhappy. Lots of OEMs are going to have a little chat with Microsoft about this whole death-of-XP thing I think.
If Vista runs well on a MID I will be shocked. If it ran well, the things would ship with Vista and we wouldn't be having this 8-year-old OS discussion at all since these devices weren't even announced until Vista had been out for a year.
Wait until you see "Vista for MID". You'll think Windows ME or Windows Mobile was the second coming of Brian Kernighan.
Actually I was hoping they could make it blink. Every blog on the internet needs fifty huge blinking "Reply to this" buttons on every page, you know, so people can figure out which button to push to reply to my comments.
Have both been selling machines with Linux for many years. HP offers Linux on, I believe, nearly every box they sell and drivers for nearly every printer.
Instead let's talk instead about the eee PC from ASUS, and the clones of it, and all those hot new cheap mini laptops and mobile internet devices based on Intel's Atom that won't run Vista.
Microsoft had better pay their taxes while they still can.
XP dies in June. Unless they extend it every last one of those boxes is going out the door with Intel's MobiLinux or a distro that supports that platform. Let's talk about BMW, where Linux comes standard with many models.
Forget Linux on the desktop. 2008 is the year of Linux in your pocket, in your dashboard, in your cable box, on your lap and bringing the third world online without contributing too much to global warming. Desktop? What do you need a desk for any more? Next year that question may read "What's a desk?"
I hear there's a new rambus memory tech in development for servers. It would be incredible except that rambus is a spinout of Intel. Read up on the Rambus history if you want to understand this.
Several companies do this. Executives from a group spin out in an entrepeneurial venture. Then they build their businesses on technologies they worked on in their parent companies.
Eventually the spinout gets bought back in for huge profits for the executives involved.
For HP this has evolved into an unofficial executive retirement plan. The benefit for the corp is deniability. They didn't submarine the patents - their newly acquired subsidiary did.
It's called a submarine patent. They call it that because it lurks there and lets you get all confident before it surfaces and torpedos your business.
Another company did this with .gif, and another with .jpg. In fact I doubt there are many accepted standards that lack these traps. The companies that participate in standards do their best to ensure their patented technologies are included in their standards.
The standards bodies have a term for this. They require not that the standards contain no patented content, but rather that licensing is available under terms that are "RAND": Reasonable and non discriminatory.
There can be no better example than the current hot topic, OOXML. MS has offered their "promise" that they won't sue people for using their specification for non commercial use under certain (unlikely) conditions. They won't even call it a license.
It's all a lie, of course. A corporation does not buy something so expensive as a submarine unless they have a plan to use it.
That's not the same thing as patent troll. A patent troll has no other business than patenting the obvious and suing people who follow the simplest path. While these patents are one clear answer to certain technical problems they are not the only obvious answer. Also, Rambus does have a legitimate business (or did).
Therefore it's not a patent troll, it's a submarine patent. I'll agree that it's despicable though.
This one's a cake walk. A gentle lob over the net. "Overwhelming international approval for new international document standard. Embraced by technical committees the world over. A revolution in standards process. Sailed through." Quote after quote from NB committee members without mentioning that they're Microsoft employees, or that they managed to get themselves inserted into the process for this one thing only.
I'm turning off my internet for a couple weeks after it starts. I think I'm going to be ill. Somebody record the SCO fiasco for me.
Read it and get back to us if you still have questions.
I don't see how this makes the device more useful.
The keywords you're looking for are Dunnington and Nehalem
For the really good stuff you'll have to wait for the next process shrink ~3 years (more if competition lets up).
An open question is if more energy efficient processors just mean greater density in the datacenter. Apparently demand for performance shows no sign of letting up any time soon.
The link in the summary will take you to This page. It appears that OOXML will pass if some more Yes votes don't turn to No. Ireland and the UK both switched from No to Yes.