We have a more efficient system in the USA: any violation of political correctness will get you fired, pilloried, and defamed mercilessly. In certain careers, your career is often destroyed. And of course whether what was said is true or not is irrelevant.
You're exaggerating, but you do bring up a valid complaint. However, we Canadians are WAY ahead of you, since we face the same perils in the workplace, AND we have "Human Rights Commissions" (Orwellian speak for "thought-crimes inquisitions"). We're way more progressive!
Not all Canadians who have lived on both sides of the border would agree with you.
if people want Windows XP because Vista sucks, then shit.. Microsoft should just RECALL Vista completely (they've basically admitted that its bad... very bad), chuck it in the trash and start over... not tell people they can have it but only on sucky-slow laptops with itty-bitty screens. the ONLY reason XP is being obsoleted is because Microsoft says it is so they can sell Windows, again, to 100's of millions of users.
WeSaySo Corporation isn't listening. This is just like New-Coke and Coke-Classic all over. The only way OEM Vista users can get XP is if they re-purchase a 2nd XP OS for their systems. A double dip. Brilliant to pump up sales numbers, but people are getting tired of Microsoft games. So much so, Microsoft drives people to Linux. But this will backfire on Microsoft in the end.
OEMs are not talking, but I bet systems with Vista have a higher return rate chipping away at profits in a competitive market.
For example, I am waiting for an economical commodity laptop PC that runs XP or Linux. No, I am not going to order a extra expensive business model so I can get over priced XP. I will not buy one with Vista as long as my old one holds out. And if they think they are going to get $200 for XP Pro and $400 for Office....they are smoking crack.
Microsoft better get used to the idea that the PC including Microsoft software is a commodity. And that means their market elasticity in pricing is shot.
He's gonna have a hell of a time finding where to put the CD in on one of these low-cost laptops. I have yet to see one with an optical drive.
First, CDs are dinosaurs. Just download it.
If you need to, just ship the software on a USB which can also double up as storage. Seriously, in bulk they are cheap. And can be reused for backups. In my case, these can get it off of my Linux media server. With 1TB of disk on the end I could watch 200 movies.
The last laptop I bought, I took the CD-DVD player out and put a second battery in it and never used the CD-DVD device. And if kids use it, one less thing to break and consume power uselessly.
Guess what the REAL reason MS is going into the low cost PC market? CONSUMER DEMAND.
No, the real reason is to try to stem the numbers of people getting exposure to Linux and finding out that it is quite capable of doing the job for a fraction of the Micro$oft cost.
And to add to it, since Vista is too fat to fit they are going to be using the soon to be discontinued XP base to do it. Go figure.
The article didn't claim it was censorship. It made the (purely factual) claim that links to youtube were being blocked by msn messenger. Which they are.
No problems with gtalk. Users being blocked ought to switch.
Wonder what Google will do to retaliate. MSN is Microsoft, YouTube is Google. Court or MS-WAR? (MS-Windows Annihilation and Replace). But this could get real interesting fast.
Meals containing no animal fats just don't sate me and I'm willing to bet I'm not alone. Considering that I can go one day on one good steak with a filling side dish, while I get hungry in mere hours from the side dish alone... I am a carnivore. I know that. My body has made that completely clear.
Ditto. I too need meat. Tried doing a vegetarian thing one week and it was hell. Always hungry and missing something. a 2 pound rib eye medium rare fixed me up.
But lets look at the bright side, if so many go vegetarian, and meat gets short, we can put a vegetarian on the menu. Soylent Green. That was a movie far ahead of its time.
uhhh.... news flash, there is an OS X and Linux runtime.
Forgive me, I will wait until the FOSS community gets a chance to vet the code first. In the mean time, as the title says, Silverlight is insignificant and irrelevant.
The title implies that american law should prevail everywhere! No! France is not a US colony.
Actually, I find this humorous. French law being applied to an American satellite, in orbit in space, to an American company with pictures of France being sent to servers on American soil.
Does France even have jurisdiction? I don't think so. All Google has to do is not put them on servers in France. The rest is French chest puffing.
I submit that France has no jurisdiction here at all.
Microsoft is in the process of buying back stock with their oh so massive capital. They just got to spend months doing this with a defalted stock price because of the buyout offer. Now that the offer is off the table, the stock price should start to go back up.
If you could prove that Yahoo offers were related to buyback, I am sure the SEC would be interested. I think the term is market manipulation. Would not put it past Ballmer, but proving it would be another mater.
My guess though with PC sales falling, a growth in Apple, although small sends a chill of change to investors. And a 5 year chart does not really show much improvement. Or in at least does not look like a growth company. 1.43% dividend yield helps, but isn't stellar.
MSFT is fast heading to a Win7 make or break. If it breaks, they will slide like Novell. If they make, they may hold market share with little growth. I would watch 2008-Q3 and Q4 real close on this one. Not high on my stock picks at the moment.
... Microsoft is trying to earn the best possible return for their shareholders and that means competing for a share of the market in which Google is earning strong profits going forward.
Just like any company should do. However is Microsoft so bankrupt on innovation and technology leadership they must buy into markets? It is a whole lot more profitable to intrinsically grow a business that to buy it. From an investor point of view most such investments like Yahoo buyouts fail in shareholder value, MSNBC anyone? Similar stories can be seen in tech with the likes of NorTel and Sun.
Does not anyone see that if Microsoft applied that kind of money to pure R&D as in technical development and intrinsic growth could do? No, I don't mean give it to 25-30 year caffeine junkies to control, find a bunch of 50 year olds that can read a balance sheet _AND_ compile code _AND_ are innovative. Get the entrepreneurial juices going. Maybe even a super secret project like MS-Linux with advertising built in and distribution capabilities like bittorrent and SETI. Out of the box, MSFT-Skunk Workz.
But the cynical side of me hoped Microsoft would have gone through with it. Once the cash is dried up, a little market downturn would humble the Microsoft giant.
Of course, in a greener world, we're printing less, but let's face it: quality printing (booklets and stuff) is not exactly a strong suit of Free Software. Which is kind of ironic, as text handling was one of the strong suits of the early Unix.
You were doing real good until you got to above. I for one would put open source software ahead of Microsoft in being green. First off, Open Office can export PDFs. And all the web pages not needing paper running on Apache can't be that bad. The efficiency of the servers requires less servers to do the same task.
FOSS is as green as any alternative, it certainly leaves more green in the pocket.
At the late 19th century steam engines were well established technology for shipping, trains and factories but they were very inefficient. Somewhere in the range of 15%. By the early 20th century steam power was at least twice as efficient (maybe more). Today most servers in data centers run around 15% utilization, doubling the utilization will slow the increased need for power. Virtualization, efficient parallel programming, thin client and network centric computing all have potential to double the efficiency of data centers. What would really be a breakthrough is a hybrid plane. Maybe with wireless power from space.
Virtualization, while it is good it is over sold. What usually happiness is he service level goes down as the server is over allocated. A real time response system can't be loaded to 100% or the service levels would be real poor.
Think about the many millions of idle desktops with many millions of tera-flops totally wasted? Think about the 500GB drives all over the place that will never see more than 300GB of data. And if that isn't enough, 2-3 years the 2TB drives. Imagine if you could tap that processing going to waste and the associated storage! To me, I see this as the future. A company with 5000 desktops has a whopping waste of resources going on.
The single huge monolithic data center run by a non-computing company is really, already a dinosaur. Even many outsourcing companies are going midrange and distributed. Take Google, fully distributed. You could outsource services to me, I would run 3-4 servers in my home using the heat. Have a replication agreement with others doing the same. Futuristic I know, but this scenario is evolving.
The original article does NOT claim that Brazil pays 20.1% of its income to Microsoft, it only states that the âoeCost of Business Licenses as % of GNI per capitaâoe is 20.1%. Only a complete moron would read that as 20.1% of Brazilâ(TM)s income going to Microsoft.
Furthermore, the OP claims that the linked article is a study; it is NOT a study, it is a blog post. It has not been fact-checked or reviewed by editors or peers, and could be a complete load of BS.
First off, north of the border (Canada) we experience the same thing and I can assure you with NAFTA it isn't taxes. Check say amazon.ca and then amazon.com and check the prices. We see it on cars also. Be it Honda, GM, Toyota, Ford or others, the dual pricing happens all the time. Usually one price for the USA and a higher price elsewhere.
The term is called price fixing to local markets. Or, what is the term where I will sell to US customers at one price, and sell outside the US for more (or less)?
In some cases, Microsoft even charges less in foreign countries, often to prevent Linux from making too much headway.
That is the way it works. And running open source is a great way to save money.
The real issue is that our government fears free speech. Cubans can actually get health care...
Someone gave you insightful, they should have given you troll.
First, Cubans are not educated about democracy, and I bet by American standards you would not want their health care. If they have a MRI, it is probably booked up for the elite. Do you think some farmer is getting top of the line treatment?
Second issue, wages. Do you want Cuban wages? It is part of the package. Government excise taxes on exports prohibit paying you more.
Lets look at Canada, higher taxes across the board. Only one service provider and if you don't like the waiting lines and the local health boards decisions, too bad. Waiting line in Milwaukee, 1 hour. Same process in Canada might be 12 hours or if it isn't immediately life threatening, 15 months. add $1.50 per US gallon to fuel, triple sin taxes, add a 5 to 18% tax on everything. Add less competition for labor and lower paying jobs with higher income taxes.
Yes, I have lived under both systems. The American system only has two flaws and many benefits. It isn't universal and the paperwork. But for the level of care, it is a bargain. Our rich American relatives make twice as much, pay less taxes and complain because they have to kick $700 a month in health care! Do the math, and they are better off. Hell, their tax savings more than doubly cover their health care.
Lets just hope if the USA does this, they do it better than Cuba or Canada.
The main problem I see is that they are using mostly unlicensed copy of windows, since Windows licenses can't be acquired in Cuba.
Hey, how come Cubans can order PCs and not have to pay for Windows? Heck, they are already once step ahead of us.
If the US was smart, strike and agreement with Cuba, given them decent pipe access via Florida so long as they put 1 million uncensored PCs on it in say 2-3 years. That will reach 1 in 11 Cubans. Free flow of information is a true friend of democracy.
So how soon can we expect it to turn up in pet food and children's toys?
Might be already. Thorium where it is found is a good and efficient nuclear fuel source. Relatively untapped as there are already stock piles of the stuff. Wiki has a little info on it as thorium and in a reactor. It actually amazes me we don't use Thorium more. But research would indicate the government chose Uranium because it is better to make bombs with.
I don't doubt that Windows 3.1 runs fine under VirtualBox running in Linux... Of course that might have been mentioned in the article, but who reads that anyway?
I tossed my CDs years ago. Got a copy of a CD-ISO, be glade to try it.
How is hell is MS's bloatware supposed to fix that?
Sure wasn't Vista. Fatware extreme. I can say, I have not seen my Vista crash on a Q6600, but strange behavior and slow like molasses on a -35C day, you bet. And if it is XP, I wonder how many features it lost. Probably more than we can count. I can't believe they would put MS-Windows on a $400 PC without bribes and price slashes. What is going on here? Linux should kick some serious butt here. Lean, mean and ready to go.
On the other hand, maybe Microsoft is realizing they have a $19 product and XP is what people want. Suck the big boys with lots of bucks into Vista Ultimate and MS-Office retail... sure would blow the OLPC budget if not your own.
Now for the MS-fanboy mod burn. Ubuntu in 1 day!!!!
Now please explain the hefty price tag for your unfinished product.
More expensive than you think. The PC shipped with a paid copy of Vista, and if it doesn't work you get to spend some more money for XP. Brilliant marketing move to double dip customers. Probably make the last 3 quarters of sales for MSFT.
Me, I refuse to buy anything Microsoft until they either really fix Vista, or refund me free copy of say XP Pro x64. With with the developers now focusing on Win7, Vista is probably in maintenance. So I will not be betting any miracles for Vista. It is as dead as WinMe.
So when is the class-action lawsuit for releasing early pre-release software as released boxed/shrinkwrapped software?
I am sure it will happen and be posted on slashdot.
I certainly will join. The judgment should be if you bought any version of Vista, you get your choice of 1 free copy of any version of MS-Windows you want. Microsoft must let you download it and let Vista keys work with it.
Unless you're talking about a casual theft by somebody who intends to sell the laptop on the street, or for their own use, this won't work. If the laptop is fenced, the first thing the fence will do is wipe the hard drive. They do this to remove any trace of the original owner, though it also prevents any phone-home scenario.
If the OS registration sends out a MAC addresses or CPU serial number could this not also be tracked? Question is, does the Microsoft registration process do this? If so, as soon as a new MS OS was put on it...got you. So the question is does MS do this?
Yeah, the lower end 8 series cards are real dogs. I wouldn't bother with any 8 series card under an 8800 GS/GT/GTS/GTX, as you pointed out, the 7 series cards are faster.
Depends which OS you are using. I find my GeForce 8500 GT works real nice under Ubuntu. Even ran Vista decently before changed the OS.
And that has precisely what to do with the kernel? X is in user space. If you want to replace X with any other windowing system you like, just port it or write it. And when you've written something as powerful and stable as the X Window System, come back and tell us about it.
I know you were ranked funny because of how it is worded. But there is truth to it.
Lets go back to before PCs. I/T and business didn't bring them in, the real McCoy "hackers" and engineers did. Then the users got on board, often with their own dime or in at least the department business unit bought them. There was no direction from I/T or senior management. The PC crept in through the back doors. I/T even used to say use the mainframe, we don't support the PCs.
At some point the business and I/T woke up and found these PCs took over the workplace, and finally invested in it. The business was driven by the users.
The Linux desktop is no different, get the home users and it will be dragged into business. The other way around isn't going to work.
If anything, Red Hat aught to produce a home user version that is so easy to install a 5 year old could do it. And leverage the Vista mess and hand me down computers. Sell it for $20 a download. Get it out there as a choice for new laptops.
PCs, DOS and MS-Windows came in the back door, and if X-Windows Linux wants it, that is the way in.
I wonder where this leaves Fedora in the long term? I can't say I fault them, but honestly I would hope Red Hat would rise to the challenge rather than shrink away from it.
Lets hope Fedora continues, it is my favorite desktop distro. I like how the menus pull down from the top and are clean and organized. And have always had good stable use from it. In fact, I am counting the days to Fedora 9's release. (Fedora's site.
I really don't think RedHat can afford to let Fedora die. It is after all related to their desktop. And business does not drive the desktop, people do. Maybe the marketing misses this point, but business will buy what the users walk in the door knowing. Business are so adverse to training and change, they will follow user skills not lead in them. So unless RedHat wants to be a server only distribution in the future, they need Fedora.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all Canadians who have lived on both sides of the border would agree with you.
WeSaySo Corporation isn't listening. This is just like New-Coke and Coke-Classic all over. The only way OEM Vista users can get XP is if they re-purchase a 2nd XP OS for their systems. A double dip. Brilliant to pump up sales numbers, but people are getting tired of Microsoft games. So much so, Microsoft drives people to Linux. But this will backfire on Microsoft in the end.
OEMs are not talking, but I bet systems with Vista have a higher return rate chipping away at profits in a competitive market.
For example, I am waiting for an economical commodity laptop PC that runs XP or Linux. No, I am not going to order a extra expensive business model so I can get over priced XP. I will not buy one with Vista as long as my old one holds out. And if they think they are going to get $200 for XP Pro and $400 for Office....they are smoking crack.
Microsoft better get used to the idea that the PC including Microsoft software is a commodity. And that means their market elasticity in pricing is shot.
First, CDs are dinosaurs. Just download it.
If you need to, just ship the software on a USB which can also double up as storage. Seriously, in bulk they are cheap. And can be reused for backups. In my case, these can get it off of my Linux media server. With 1TB of disk on the end I could watch 200 movies.
The last laptop I bought, I took the CD-DVD player out and put a second battery in it and never used the CD-DVD device. And if kids use it, one less thing to break and consume power uselessly.
No, the real reason is to try to stem the numbers of people getting exposure to Linux and finding out that it is quite capable of doing the job for a fraction of the Micro$oft cost.
And to add to it, since Vista is too fat to fit they are going to be using the soon to be discontinued XP base to do it. Go figure.
No problems with gtalk. Users being blocked ought to switch.
Wonder what Google will do to retaliate. MSN is Microsoft, YouTube is Google. Court or MS-WAR? (MS-Windows Annihilation and Replace). But this could get real interesting fast.
Ditto. I too need meat. Tried doing a vegetarian thing one week and it was hell. Always hungry and missing something. a 2 pound rib eye medium rare fixed me up.
But lets look at the bright side, if so many go vegetarian, and meat gets short, we can put a vegetarian on the menu. Soylent Green. That was a movie far ahead of its time.
Forgive me, I will wait until the FOSS community gets a chance to vet the code first. In the mean time, as the title says, Silverlight is insignificant and irrelevant.
Actually, I find this humorous. French law being applied to an American satellite, in orbit in space, to an American company with pictures of France being sent to servers on American soil.
Does France even have jurisdiction? I don't think so. All Google has to do is not put them on servers in France. The rest is French chest puffing.
I submit that France has no jurisdiction here at all.
If you could prove that Yahoo offers were related to buyback, I am sure the SEC would be interested. I think the term is market manipulation. Would not put it past Ballmer, but proving it would be another mater.
My guess though with PC sales falling, a growth in Apple, although small sends a chill of change to investors. And a 5 year chart does not really show much improvement. Or in at least does not look like a growth company. 1.43% dividend yield helps, but isn't stellar.
MSFT is fast heading to a Win7 make or break. If it breaks, they will slide like Novell. If they make, they may hold market share with little growth. I would watch 2008-Q3 and Q4 real close on this one. Not high on my stock picks at the moment.
... Microsoft is trying to earn the best possible return for their shareholders and that means competing for a share of the market in which Google is earning strong profits going forward.Just like any company should do. However is Microsoft so bankrupt on innovation and technology leadership they must buy into markets? It is a whole lot more profitable to intrinsically grow a business that to buy it. From an investor point of view most such investments like Yahoo buyouts fail in shareholder value, MSNBC anyone? Similar stories can be seen in tech with the likes of NorTel and Sun.
Does not anyone see that if Microsoft applied that kind of money to pure R&D as in technical development and intrinsic growth could do? No, I don't mean give it to 25-30 year caffeine junkies to control, find a bunch of 50 year olds that can read a balance sheet _AND_ compile code _AND_ are innovative. Get the entrepreneurial juices going. Maybe even a super secret project like MS-Linux with advertising built in and distribution capabilities like bittorrent and SETI. Out of the box, MSFT-Skunk Workz.
But the cynical side of me hoped Microsoft would have gone through with it. Once the cash is dried up, a little market downturn would humble the Microsoft giant.
You were doing real good until you got to above. I for one would put open source software ahead of Microsoft in being green. First off, Open Office can export PDFs. And all the web pages not needing paper running on Apache can't be that bad. The efficiency of the servers requires less servers to do the same task.
FOSS is as green as any alternative, it certainly leaves more green in the pocket.
Virtualization, while it is good it is over sold. What usually happiness is he service level goes down as the server is over allocated. A real time response system can't be loaded to 100% or the service levels would be real poor.
Think about the many millions of idle desktops with many millions of tera-flops totally wasted? Think about the 500GB drives all over the place that will never see more than 300GB of data. And if that isn't enough, 2-3 years the 2TB drives. Imagine if you could tap that processing going to waste and the associated storage! To me, I see this as the future. A company with 5000 desktops has a whopping waste of resources going on.
The single huge monolithic data center run by a non-computing company is really, already a dinosaur. Even many outsourcing companies are going midrange and distributed. Take Google, fully distributed. You could outsource services to me, I would run 3-4 servers in my home using the heat. Have a replication agreement with others doing the same. Futuristic I know, but this scenario is evolving.
Furthermore, the OP claims that the linked article is a study; it is NOT a study, it is a blog post. It has not been fact-checked or reviewed by editors or peers, and could be a complete load of BS.
First off, north of the border (Canada) we experience the same thing and I can assure you with NAFTA it isn't taxes. Check say amazon.ca and then amazon.com and check the prices. We see it on cars also. Be it Honda, GM, Toyota, Ford or others, the dual pricing happens all the time. Usually one price for the USA and a higher price elsewhere.
The term is called price fixing to local markets. Or, what is the term where I will sell to US customers at one price, and sell outside the US for more (or less)?
In some cases, Microsoft even charges less in foreign countries, often to prevent Linux from making too much headway.
That is the way it works. And running open source is a great way to save money.
The real issue is that our government fears free speech. Cubans can actually get health care...
Someone gave you insightful, they should have given you troll.
First, Cubans are not educated about democracy, and I bet by American standards you would not want their health care. If they have a MRI, it is probably booked up for the elite. Do you think some farmer is getting top of the line treatment?
Second issue, wages. Do you want Cuban wages? It is part of the package. Government excise taxes on exports prohibit paying you more.
Lets look at Canada, higher taxes across the board. Only one service provider and if you don't like the waiting lines and the local health boards decisions, too bad. Waiting line in Milwaukee, 1 hour. Same process in Canada might be 12 hours or if it isn't immediately life threatening, 15 months. add $1.50 per US gallon to fuel, triple sin taxes, add a 5 to 18% tax on everything. Add less competition for labor and lower paying jobs with higher income taxes.
Yes, I have lived under both systems. The American system only has two flaws and many benefits. It isn't universal and the paperwork. But for the level of care, it is a bargain. Our rich American relatives make twice as much, pay less taxes and complain because they have to kick $700 a month in health care! Do the math, and they are better off. Hell, their tax savings more than doubly cover their health care.
Lets just hope if the USA does this, they do it better than Cuba or Canada.
All governments hate free speech.
The main problem I see is that they are using mostly unlicensed copy of windows, since Windows licenses can't be acquired in Cuba.
Hey, how come Cubans can order PCs and not have to pay for Windows? Heck, they are already once step ahead of us.
If the US was smart, strike and agreement with Cuba, given them decent pipe access via Florida so long as they put 1 million uncensored PCs on it in say 2-3 years. That will reach 1 in 11 Cubans. Free flow of information is a true friend of democracy.
So how soon can we expect it to turn up in pet food and children's toys?
Might be already. Thorium where it is found is a good and efficient nuclear fuel source. Relatively untapped as there are already stock piles of the stuff. Wiki has a little info on it as thorium and in a reactor. It actually amazes me we don't use Thorium more. But research would indicate the government chose Uranium because it is better to make bombs with.
I don't doubt that Windows 3.1 runs fine under VirtualBox running in Linux... Of course that might have been mentioned in the article, but who reads that anyway?
I tossed my CDs years ago. Got a copy of a CD-ISO, be glade to try it.
How is hell is MS's bloatware supposed to fix that?
Sure wasn't Vista. Fatware extreme. I can say, I have not seen my Vista crash on a Q6600, but strange behavior and slow like molasses on a -35C day, you bet. And if it is XP, I wonder how many features it lost. Probably more than we can count. I can't believe they would put MS-Windows on a $400 PC without bribes and price slashes. What is going on here? Linux should kick some serious butt here. Lean, mean and ready to go.
On the other hand, maybe Microsoft is realizing they have a $19 product and XP is what people want. Suck the big boys with lots of bucks into Vista Ultimate and MS-Office retail... sure would blow the OLPC budget if not your own.
Now for the MS-fanboy mod burn. Ubuntu in 1 day!!!!
Now please explain the hefty price tag for your unfinished product.
More expensive than you think. The PC shipped with a paid copy of Vista, and if it doesn't work you get to spend some more money for XP. Brilliant marketing move to double dip customers. Probably make the last 3 quarters of sales for MSFT.
Me, I refuse to buy anything Microsoft until they either really fix Vista, or refund me free copy of say XP Pro x64. With with the developers now focusing on Win7, Vista is probably in maintenance. So I will not be betting any miracles for Vista. It is as dead as WinMe.
I am sure it will happen and be posted on slashdot.
I certainly will join. The judgment should be if you bought any version of Vista, you get your choice of 1 free copy of any version of MS-Windows you want. Microsoft must let you download it and let Vista keys work with it.
Unless you're talking about a casual theft by somebody who intends to sell the laptop on the street, or for their own use, this won't work. If the laptop is fenced, the first thing the fence will do is wipe the hard drive. They do this to remove any trace of the original owner, though it also prevents any phone-home scenario.
If the OS registration sends out a MAC addresses or CPU serial number could this not also be tracked? Question is, does the Microsoft registration process do this? If so, as soon as a new MS OS was put on it...got you. So the question is does MS do this?
Yeah, the lower end 8 series cards are real dogs. I wouldn't bother with any 8 series card under an 8800 GS/GT/GTS/GTX, as you pointed out, the 7 series cards are faster.
Depends which OS you are using. I find my GeForce 8500 GT works real nice under Ubuntu. Even ran Vista decently before changed the OS.
Extremely well put.
I know you were ranked funny because of how it is worded. But there is truth to it.
Lets go back to before PCs. I/T and business didn't bring them in, the real McCoy "hackers" and engineers did. Then the users got on board, often with their own dime or in at least the department business unit bought them. There was no direction from I/T or senior management. The PC crept in through the back doors. I/T even used to say use the mainframe, we don't support the PCs.
At some point the business and I/T woke up and found these PCs took over the workplace, and finally invested in it. The business was driven by the users.
The Linux desktop is no different, get the home users and it will be dragged into business. The other way around isn't going to work.
If anything, Red Hat aught to produce a home user version that is so easy to install a 5 year old could do it. And leverage the Vista mess and hand me down computers. Sell it for $20 a download. Get it out there as a choice for new laptops.
PCs, DOS and MS-Windows came in the back door, and if X-Windows Linux wants it, that is the way in.
I wonder where this leaves Fedora in the long term? I can't say I fault them, but honestly I would hope Red Hat would rise to the challenge rather than shrink away from it.
Lets hope Fedora continues, it is my favorite desktop distro. I like how the menus pull down from the top and are clean and organized. And have always had good stable use from it. In fact, I am counting the days to Fedora 9's release. (Fedora's site.
I really don't think RedHat can afford to let Fedora die. It is after all related to their desktop. And business does not drive the desktop, people do. Maybe the marketing misses this point, but business will buy what the users walk in the door knowing. Business are so adverse to training and change, they will follow user skills not lead in them. So unless RedHat wants to be a server only distribution in the future, they need Fedora.