When making ambitious trilogies, shoot the whole set in one go. Do not try to make a Version 2 years after the first one made it big, or you will end up looking like a fool. And yes, I'm still regretting having seen the second Matrix movie.
For many reasons this is not true in large parts of Africa. Heavy rain washes away entire roads, not to mention cables. Theft is an issue. Loose local authority means your cables are likely to be cut by arbitrary digging. Unclear land rights mean it's sometimes impossible to know who to contact for access rights. Crony competition (i.e. your competitors having friends in government) mean that it can take months or years for permits. Geography means there are constant physical impediments - rivers, forests, mountain ranges - that have no roads or bridges that can carry cable. You really do not want to try laying cable along a dirt path that could be entirely lost after the next rainy season.
These are the reasons Africa is not already cabled, because the demand is there, from business and from the private sector ISPs that run the 'internet and phone shops' that are for many Africans their international point of contact.
Wireless gets around all these issues and actually has more potential than in Europe/USA because there is less regulation of the airwaves. So the power of amplifiers can be increased: that 50km can be turned into 100 or 200km.
About the only places where cables are practical are in population centers.
And indeed, the notion of using fixed lines for the 'last mile' is already heavily used in Africa: a standard model is to use a VSAT link (with perhaps 128kbps capacity, which gives you an idea of the current market) that sends out an outshoot of cables to a neighbourhood of telephone / internet shops. Few homes have or even need IP access, the cybercafe model is successful and currently the only bottleneck is that huge investment for the VSAT.
A network with 100km point-to-point access could cover a country like Nigeria with only a few thousand nodes. This sounds a lot but if the equipment is cheap, I suspect it would be significantly cheaper than any other solution, including laying fibre-optic cables.
There is no real demand for this kind of technology in countries that are already well-cabled with more fibre-optic cable than they can ever use.
We did a project once in Nigeria that depended on semi-reliable Internet connections across the country. The only option for our client was to install VSAT stations, at a cost of $50,000 each not counting operating costs.
With 50km point-to-point range it becomes very possible for operators to build a national IP network with local distribution via WiFi or cable.
This could do for Internet what the GSM has done for telephony in large parts of Africa (i.e. brought modern communications to millions of people who have never been able to get it before).
We need something that did what the old mp3.com did, create a direct link between the artists and the public. The record industry as it is today is so totally redundant.
Give me quality music that is digitally available, rated through a balanced criticism system like Slashdot, that I can copy onto my systems and play as I like, and I will subscribe tomorrow.
Knighthoods and other decorations have very often been sold to the highest bidder one way or another. It's not even particularly offensive, but a good way of paying for the monarchy. I'd rather that Bill gets a knighthood by paying for it in cash than for making large contributions to the political party in charge, which is the other way it happens.
- home entertainment systems - small office use (with data saved on network disk) - education and training (data on USB drives) - standardized corporate desktops (data on network) - cybercafe workstations - point-of-sale terminals - industrial kiosks - voting systems - automated tellers - DJ workstations - application demos (both standalone and interactive) - games
The speed of live CDs is becoming less of an issue as RAM sizes get larger. On my 512Mb notebook, Knoppix runs just fine.
What I find more interesting than "standard Linux on a CD" is the concept of packaging a specific application along with a live CD. For example, the systemrescueCD boots up and gives a good set of tools for doing backups/restores of your disks.
What works for backup/restore also works for games, demos, even large-scale applications that do not require intensive local data storage. The advantage of a live CD based on something like Knoppix is that it will run on practically any PC out there, booting in less time than it would normally take to install and configure.
There is little reason why a lot of software should be hard-installed onto PCs, and many reasons why it's a pain in lots of cases.
The counter argument is that "yes, but I want to be able to switch back from my game to my other applications." But this ignores the huge market for single-purpose kiosk-style systems, in home, in shops, and in business.
I would estimate that 30% or more of all PCs run only a few specific applications, and that most of the future expansion is into kiosk-style areas where live CDs are a perfect answer.
Why is this interesting? Because Linux has a significant lead in this technology mainly thanks to Knoppix. Thus a large part of Linux's future growth may well come from a native technology, which is much nicer than trying to win market share by imitating Windows.
The GPL is a license that is commercially netural insofar as you can charge for work, but it is definitely not a commercial license. It is a constitution that clearly separates the interests of commercial software producers (who sell software and therefore rely on closed source) and the wide range of people who produce software for other reasons (hobby, indirect need, whatever).
I'm also surprised you say it has nothing to do with the open source movement. Open source is about promoting the values of software as a medium of expression of common (shared) ideas. The GPL is also exactly about this. The GPL defines one particular open source model.
By coincidence, my first open source work (a code generation tool) was distributed on the Internet in 1991, the same year that version 2 of the GPL was published. After 13 years of this, I think I do have the right combination of licenses for my work.
No, we were doing our very best to keep it alive. Part of that means getting it used by people even if that does not mean sales. This has actually worked - none of the packages we made open source has died, we still develop and use them all. Many of the packages we did not manage to open (mainly because the quality of the work was too poor) have since been abandoned.
Do you have people donate the copyright to code they contribute to the GPL version?
Not to the GPL version, but to us. This is one of the conditions of contributing code and patches into our codebase. People are also free to make GPL derivations without giving us the copyright. We don't get many complaints about this, and for the kinds of contributions we get - mainly small patches - it's not a big issue.
But not because you think it will get you a job, it won't. The days when people were hired in IT because they carried the right bits of paper are gone and dead. These days you get hired because you're the only person available who can solve a critical issue, solve an impossible problem, or otherwise convince your potential employer that hiring you will save him money and tears.
Certification is a commodity and commodity jobs have been shipped overseas.
So, it would be better to do some research in a few prospective companies to see what kinds of essential IT skills they are short of, then go and get some practice in that area. Arm yourself with a skill an employer is actively seeking and you might get the job. One more certificate (or even a CS degree!) won't mean squat.
My company writes software that we like to distribute as free software. I started doing this in 1995, and the tools and packages I make are quite widely ported and used. When I started my company our policy was that anything we could not rapidly turn into a product we would release as open source. Software that is not used dies, we figured.
Our license was a BSD-style license that basically allowed people to do what they liked with the software.
In 2001 I noticed that some commercial products incorporating our code were being sold. Very good, I thought, it's nice to see our work being used. But when I asked them to provide us with some of the extensions and patches they'd made, the answer was "no, this is not possible". Now, seeing people use the results of years of work then refusing to contribute anything back rather annoyed me. My company was selling support licenses for our products, and these were in fact our competitors.
The solution came in the form of an article by Richard Stallman which explained why using the LGPL was in fact giving help to closed-source developers who directly or indirectly compete with open source developers.
We decided to switch to the GPL, and in 2002 we moved all our OSS products to this license. At the same time, we had a number of commercial licensees. To give these groups a non-viral package, we developed a dual licensing model.
Since the code is ours, it's our right to license it to specific users under specific terms. The GPL is not incompatible with commercial licenses, so long as it's the copyright holder who decides what license to apply in each case.
To summarize: for OSS developers we use the GPL, for commercial developers we use a commercial license.
It works well. We've had no GPL violations, and enough commercial licensees to make it worth developing our core packages further.
After something of the same journey with licenses for my own open source work, I finally came to the conclusion that Richard Stallman had seen the inevitable truth clearly when he designed the GPL, namely that free software thrives best when there is a definite barrier between it and commercial software.
Our software now uses a dual license model in which it's either licensed for free under the GPL, or licensed for a fee under a standard commercial license.
Without exageration, nor wanting to start a religious war, I believe the GPL is an astonishingly robust answer to the question of how to share creative works without subsidising commercial interests that inevitably seek to quash the independent creative spirit.
Media capacity follows the standard technological growth curve (aka Moore's Law) so that it is both convenient and practical to move your entire library every few years.
Thus my MP3 collection has migrated over time from Jaz cassettes to CDR to large hard disk to DVD.
Apart from the practical aspects of finding a reader for old media, the sheer space taken by old media (e.g. my twenty-odd Jaz cartridges) makes it useful to move regularly.
My MP3 collection, freshly re-created from my original CD collection, fits onto ten data DVDs while it would require about 70 CDRs.
Doing this, while also keeping multiple archives on hard disk (CVS mainly) means I have no problem accessing projects that I worked on 15-20 years ago. No way would I have confidence in diskettes or backup tapes from the same period.
Though I do have a 50cm-wide 150Mb removable Wang disk that has some interesting stuff on it if anyone has an old Wang VS lying around.
Which assumes that OOorg is a marginal product. This may be true in some places, for some time, but after a while the failure to interoperate will become a strong argument to switch away from MSOffice.
Typical scene that is not unheard of today:
"I've sent you a Word document"
"Why not install OOorg and use that instead?"
"What's that?"
"It's like Office but free and doesn't crash."
1 hour later...
"Hey, here's your document, and thanks for the tip!"
Point is that it's much easier to switch someone from paying to free software, and almost impossible to do the reverse. I (as a long-time OOorg user) will spend considerably more effort convincing someone to use the application than any MSOffice user will spend to get me to change back.
Forgive what may sound like a troll, it's not. Just a serious reaction to a lengthy article.
This lengthy point-by-point breakdown of every feature is probably fascinating to someone who has just installed the OS. But I can't feel enthusiastic about this data dump.
Some points of comparison with what we know would be useful. What are the alternatives, and how does it compare? Is there a compelling reason for existing Windows and Linux users to migrate? If not, is this intended only for Mac users?
When your product is available on a global basis through illicit channels at near-zero cost, and innovative retailers try to bring their prices down in order to attempt to win back legitimate customers, force them to raise prices artificially and drive customers away.
Ah, brave words, but remember that every barrel burnt is a dollar earnt.
Pollution is highly profitable for those who hold the levers of power. I've not yet seen a single example of people voluntarily stopping a profitable activity.
So in this case the best solution is not going to happen. If the tanks don't burn the oil, the SUVs will. When the oil has almost gone, we will be left scrabbling for the few remaining drops. Until then it will be burnt at maximum possible speed.
Incidentally, did anyone else notice that BP has restated its oil reserves with a massive reduction on what it previously said it had. We're possibly closer to the end of oil than we thought.
This happens so often with me it's almost a standard procedure. If I'm working late trying to fix a problem, debug a difficult issue, or find that really elegant solution to a tricky problem, I leave it until the next morning. Almost every time, the solution is then obvious, clear, and works immediately.
Most likely it's because the unconcious mind needs space to work, and concentrating on the issue is counter-productive. Someone once wrote a nice article about why it helps to be stupid when you want to play football, because _thinking_ is not what you want to do when you're standing in front of the goal with an open shot.
Similarly in more intellectual challenges, the subconcious mind does a large part of the work but needs to be left alone to do its thing.
There are other ways to get the same effect:
- playing music while working
- going for a brisk walk (not heavy sport, because that tires you out)
- smoking a joint (depends on the person but for many people this does the trick)
- playing a game (solitaire?)
But sleeping is definitely the best way, probably because the brain is designed to do exactly this.
Incidentally, it works for social problems too. Having trouble with a colleague? Sleep on it, they say.
Remember the battles between network protocols, and how TCP/IP inexorably took over the whole domain until "network = TCP/IP" became a self-evident truth.
The same is IMO inevitable with Linux because it has solved the main issue of how to provide the necessary services on any platform in a non-partisan manner. The people who "get it", like IBM, are swiftly moving to a "Linux everywhere" strategy on which they can build a solid business of services and products. The people who still don't get it, like Microsoft, insist that Linux is an illegitimate upstart with no credentials.
The operating system as a product has become almost completely commoditized. There is simply no compelling reason for someone with free choice to pay for OS software today.
However, don't say "last", this would be wrong. Linus is most likely the "last OS" in the same sense as TCP/IP is the "last internetworking protocol". But new models of computing that provoke new concepts of organization and software are inevitable. Linux is not infinitely plastic and there is an infinite space beyond its reach that will be filled with the upstart OS platforms of the future.
C'mon, anyone can tell that the picture was faked in a studio, it's obvious from the shadows cast by the so-called "aerogel". Just one more NASA conspiracy to convince us that they spend our tax dollars on worth subjects. Hrghmh.
Actually it's trivial to remove the Launch button. One of the fun things about KDE is that you can configure it to look like almost any system. The important thing is the principle of least surprise. If you're used to clicking the lower-left corner to start an application, that's where there should be a button. If you're used to a menu along the top, there should be one there.
It's not about copying or being unoriginal. Originality is not such a great thing - imagine if every car you drove had an "original" layout for the dashboard and gearstick.
How can an honest report of what we experienced 20 years ago be called "FUD"?
The Macs our company bought were not expandible and the price of PCs went down very rapidly from the $6000 the first one cost. This is my point: Apple had a window of opportunity which they lost.
We used the Macs for serious work, yes, mainly documentation since it was the only box that could run software like PageMaker. But a box that does one thing does not succeed. The PCs could run terminal emulators, we could attach modems, install compilers, build software, and so on.
The Mac Plus - which you had - was already late in the game, which started in 1984 IIRC. By the time the Mac Plus came around, the bulk of potential customers had chosen IBM compatible PCs as their "personal computer of choice", and it was hard to change that.
And there was no conspiracy against Apple, despite the somewhat defensive attitude you take. Apple made a great product but it took them too long to understand what the market wanted, which was more power for less money. When you sell something - even wonderful - that people do not want, you cannot succeed. That is why the Mac failed.
Started with Xandros/1.0 a while back. Nice simple package, installs all by itself, but a little dusty around the edges. But hey, it brought a number of old PCs back to life as simple browser/email/Office boxes, no hassle.
Chucked Xandros/2.0 deluxe onto a box (from which I'm typing this). My main machine, now. The switch from a W2K notebook was remarkably easy. I did use CrossoverOffice to install MSIE because we need this to test some applications. But most everything else has gone the native Linux way.
Xandros' good points: Debian, the file manager, seamless integration with Windows networks, good selection of packages, clean and dry user interface (compared to the 'how much more can we add' horrors of Lindows 4.5). Everything a 'normal' user needs within easy reach, and very little poking under the hood to make it all work. The file manager is especially lovely, though I suspect a large part of that comes from Konqueror. Double-click on _anything_ and something useful happens. Archives magically uncompress, ISO images magically get burnt to CD, Windows executables run immediately (assuming CrossoverOffice is there), RPMs get launched in the Xandros installer. It "just works", and that's the greatest compliment I can give any software.
Xandros' weak point is the lack of some useful packages in the standard sources. To burn DVDs for instance I needed to install K3b and a number of auxilliary tools myself, some from source, some from RPMs and other packages. But then exploring and installing one's own packages from source is part of the fun of getting the system you want.
Linux is an operating system with depth (as are most Unix systems). Xandros wraps this up so nicely that you almost get that Windows experience. But when you open the wrapping, there is solid metal underneath, and it feels good.
I forgot how limiting Windows was, how many comprimises there are in the platform, and to tell the truth after a decade of using mainly Windows, I was a little scared to jump to a Linux distro. Xandros made this move easy, so easy that I did not once think 'Oh, forget it'.
Slashdot Mirror
When making ambitious trilogies, shoot the whole set in one go. Do not try to make a Version 2 years after the first one made it big, or you will end up looking like a fool. And yes, I'm still regretting having seen the second Matrix movie.
The backbone is better built by using fiber.
For many reasons this is not true in large parts of Africa. Heavy rain washes away entire roads, not to mention cables. Theft is an issue. Loose local authority means your cables are likely to be cut by arbitrary digging. Unclear land rights mean it's sometimes impossible to know who to contact for access rights. Crony competition (i.e. your competitors having friends in government) mean that it can take months or years for permits. Geography means there are constant physical impediments - rivers, forests, mountain ranges - that have no roads or bridges that can carry cable. You really do not want to try laying cable along a dirt path that could be entirely lost after the next rainy season.
These are the reasons Africa is not already cabled, because the demand is there, from business and from the private sector ISPs that run the 'internet and phone shops' that are for many Africans their international point of contact.
Wireless gets around all these issues and actually has more potential than in Europe/USA because there is less regulation of the airwaves. So the power of amplifiers can be increased: that 50km can be turned into 100 or 200km.
About the only places where cables are practical are in population centers.
And indeed, the notion of using fixed lines for the 'last mile' is already heavily used in Africa: a standard model is to use a VSAT link (with perhaps 128kbps capacity, which gives you an idea of the current market) that sends out an outshoot of cables to a neighbourhood of telephone / internet shops. Few homes have or even need IP access, the cybercafe model is successful and currently the only bottleneck is that huge investment for the VSAT.
A network with 100km point-to-point access could cover a country like Nigeria with only a few thousand nodes. This sounds a lot but if the equipment is cheap, I suspect it would be significantly cheaper than any other solution, including laying fibre-optic cables.
There is no real demand for this kind of technology in countries that are already well-cabled with more fibre-optic cable than they can ever use.
We did a project once in Nigeria that depended on semi-reliable Internet connections across the country. The only option for our client was to install VSAT stations, at a cost of $50,000 each not counting operating costs.
With 50km point-to-point range it becomes very possible for operators to build a national IP network with local distribution via WiFi or cable.
This could do for Internet what the GSM has done for telephony in large parts of Africa (i.e. brought modern communications to millions of people who have never been able to get it before).
We need something that did what the old mp3.com did, create a direct link between the artists and the public. The record industry as it is today is so totally redundant.
Give me quality music that is digitally available, rated through a balanced criticism system like Slashdot, that I can copy onto my systems and play as I like, and I will subscribe tomorrow.
Anyhow, I always liked Gabriel and Eno. Go, guys!
Knighthoods and other decorations have very often been sold to the highest bidder one way or another. It's not even particularly offensive, but a good way of paying for the monarchy. I'd rather that Bill gets a knighthood by paying for it in cash than for making large contributions to the political party in charge, which is the other way it happens.
"All hail to Sir Borg^h^h^h^hBill!"
Here are some instances I can think of:
- home entertainment systems
- small office use (with data saved on network disk)
- education and training (data on USB drives)
- standardized corporate desktops (data on network)
- cybercafe workstations
- point-of-sale terminals
- industrial kiosks
- voting systems
- automated tellers
- DJ workstations
- application demos (both standalone and interactive)
- games
The speed of live CDs is becoming less of an issue as RAM sizes get larger. On my 512Mb notebook, Knoppix runs just fine.
What I find more interesting than "standard Linux on a CD" is the concept of packaging a specific application along with a live CD. For example, the systemrescueCD boots up and gives a good set of tools for doing backups/restores of your disks.
What works for backup/restore also works for games, demos, even large-scale applications that do not require intensive local data storage. The advantage of a live CD based on something like Knoppix is that it will run on practically any PC out there, booting in less time than it would normally take to install and configure.
There is little reason why a lot of software should be hard-installed onto PCs, and many reasons why it's a pain in lots of cases.
The counter argument is that "yes, but I want to be able to switch back from my game to my other applications." But this ignores the huge market for single-purpose kiosk-style systems, in home, in shops, and in business.
I would estimate that 30% or more of all PCs run only a few specific applications, and that most of the future expansion is into kiosk-style areas where live CDs are a perfect answer.
Why is this interesting? Because Linux has a significant lead in this technology mainly thanks to Knoppix. Thus a large part of Linux's future growth may well come from a native technology, which is much nicer than trying to win market share by imitating Windows.
The GPL is a license that is commercially netural insofar as you can charge for work, but it is definitely not a commercial license. It is a constitution that clearly separates the interests of commercial software producers (who sell software and therefore rely on closed source) and the wide range of people who produce software for other reasons (hobby, indirect need, whatever).
I'm also surprised you say it has nothing to do with the open source movement. Open source is about promoting the values of software as a medium of expression of common (shared) ideas. The GPL is also exactly about this. The GPL defines one particular open source model.
By coincidence, my first open source work (a code generation tool) was distributed on the Internet in 1991, the same year that version 2 of the GPL was published. After 13 years of this, I think I do have the right combination of licenses for my work.
You had already assumed it would die.
No, we were doing our very best to keep it alive. Part of that means getting it used by people even if that does not mean sales. This has actually worked - none of the packages we made open source has died, we still develop and use them all. Many of the packages we did not manage to open (mainly because the quality of the work was too poor) have since been abandoned.
Do you have people donate the copyright to code they contribute to the GPL version?
Not to the GPL version, but to us. This is one of the conditions of contributing code and patches into our codebase. People are also free to make GPL derivations without giving us the copyright. We don't get many complaints about this, and for the kinds of contributions we get - mainly small patches - it's not a big issue.
Maybe replacing a broken NIC isn't a commodity job.
But a lot of sysadmin is. ssh and rdesktop mean it can be done from anywhere.
Most businesses I know that laid off network and system admins in 2001-2002 are outsourcing the whole business now rather than reemploying people.
But not because you think it will get you a job, it won't. The days when people were hired in IT because they carried the right bits of paper are gone and dead. These days you get hired because you're the only person available who can solve a critical issue, solve an impossible problem, or otherwise convince your potential employer that hiring you will save him money and tears.
Certification is a commodity and commodity jobs have been shipped overseas.
So, it would be better to do some research in a few prospective companies to see what kinds of essential IT skills they are short of, then go and get some practice in that area. Arm yourself with a skill an employer is actively seeking and you might get the job. One more certificate (or even a CS degree!) won't mean squat.
What is the name and web address of your company?
Sorry, I like the anonymity of my Slashdot user account, given that these conversations are fully a matter of public record.
I'm sure there are many examples of businesses using the same dual-licensing scheme as us - it's not a very radical idea.
I thought it was clear but I'll explain again.
My company writes software that we like to distribute as free software. I started doing this in 1995, and the tools and packages I make are quite widely ported and used. When I started my company our policy was that anything we could not rapidly turn into a product we would release as open source. Software that is not used dies, we figured.
Our license was a BSD-style license that basically allowed people to do what they liked with the software.
In 2001 I noticed that some commercial products incorporating our code were being sold. Very good, I thought, it's nice to see our work being used. But when I asked them to provide us with some of the extensions and patches they'd made, the answer was "no, this is not possible". Now, seeing people use the results of years of work then refusing to contribute anything back rather annoyed me. My company was selling support licenses for our products, and these were in fact our competitors.
The solution came in the form of an article by Richard Stallman which explained why using the LGPL was in fact giving help to closed-source developers who directly or indirectly compete with open source developers.
We decided to switch to the GPL, and in 2002 we moved all our OSS products to this license. At the same time, we had a number of commercial licensees. To give these groups a non-viral package, we developed a dual licensing model.
Since the code is ours, it's our right to license it to specific users under specific terms. The GPL is not incompatible with commercial licenses, so long as it's the copyright holder who decides what license to apply in each case.
To summarize: for OSS developers we use the GPL, for commercial developers we use a commercial license.
It works well. We've had no GPL violations, and enough commercial licensees to make it worth developing our core packages further.
After something of the same journey with licenses for my own open source work, I finally came to the conclusion that Richard Stallman had seen the inevitable truth clearly when he designed the GPL, namely that free software thrives best when there is a definite barrier between it and commercial software.
Our software now uses a dual license model in which it's either licensed for free under the GPL, or licensed for a fee under a standard commercial license.
Without exageration, nor wanting to start a religious war, I believe the GPL is an astonishingly robust answer to the question of how to share creative works without subsidising commercial interests that inevitably seek to quash the independent creative spirit.
Media capacity follows the standard technological growth curve (aka Moore's Law) so that it is both convenient and practical to move your entire library every few years.
Thus my MP3 collection has migrated over time from Jaz cassettes to CDR to large hard disk to DVD.
Apart from the practical aspects of finding a reader for old media, the sheer space taken by old media (e.g. my twenty-odd Jaz cartridges) makes it useful to move regularly.
My MP3 collection, freshly re-created from my original CD collection, fits onto ten data DVDs while it would require about 70 CDRs.
Doing this, while also keeping multiple archives on hard disk (CVS mainly) means I have no problem accessing projects that I worked on 15-20 years ago. No way would I have confidence in diskettes or backup tapes from the same period.
Though I do have a 50cm-wide 150Mb removable Wang disk that has some interesting stuff on it if anyone has an old Wang VS lying around.
Which assumes that OOorg is a marginal product. This may be true in some places, for some time, but after a while the failure to interoperate will become a strong argument to switch away from MSOffice.
Typical scene that is not unheard of today:
"I've sent you a Word document"
"Why not install OOorg and use that instead?"
"What's that?"
"It's like Office but free and doesn't crash."
1 hour later...
"Hey, here's your document, and thanks for the tip!"
Point is that it's much easier to switch someone from paying to free software, and almost impossible to do the reverse. I (as a long-time OOorg user) will spend considerably more effort convincing someone to use the application than any MSOffice user will spend to get me to change back.
Forgive what may sound like a troll, it's not. Just a serious reaction to a lengthy article.
This lengthy point-by-point breakdown of every feature is probably fascinating to someone who has just installed the OS. But I can't feel enthusiastic about this data dump.
Some points of comparison with what we know would be useful. What are the alternatives, and how does it compare? Is there a compelling reason for existing Windows and Linux users to migrate? If not, is this intended only for Mac users?
When your product is available on a global basis through illicit channels at near-zero cost, and innovative retailers try to bring their prices down in order to attempt to win back legitimate customers, force them to raise prices artificially and drive customers away.
Way to go, BPI!
Ah, brave words, but remember that every barrel burnt is a dollar earnt.
Pollution is highly profitable for those who hold the levers of power. I've not yet seen a single example of people voluntarily stopping a profitable activity.
So in this case the best solution is not going to happen. If the tanks don't burn the oil, the SUVs will. When the oil has almost gone, we will be left scrabbling for the few remaining drops. Until then it will be burnt at maximum possible speed.
Incidentally, did anyone else notice that BP has restated its oil reserves with a massive reduction on what it previously said it had. We're possibly closer to the end of oil than we thought.
This happens so often with me it's almost a standard procedure. If I'm working late trying to fix a problem, debug a difficult issue, or find that really elegant solution to a tricky problem, I leave it until the next morning. Almost every time, the solution is then obvious, clear, and works immediately.
Most likely it's because the unconcious mind needs space to work, and concentrating on the issue is counter-productive. Someone once wrote a nice article about why it helps to be stupid when you want to play football, because _thinking_ is not what you want to do when you're standing in front of the goal with an open shot.
Similarly in more intellectual challenges, the subconcious mind does a large part of the work but needs to be left alone to do its thing.
There are other ways to get the same effect:
- playing music while working
- going for a brisk walk (not heavy sport, because that tires you out)
- smoking a joint (depends on the person but for many people this does the trick)
- playing a game (solitaire?)
But sleeping is definitely the best way, probably because the brain is designed to do exactly this.
Incidentally, it works for social problems too. Having trouble with a colleague? Sleep on it, they say.
Remember the battles between network protocols, and how TCP/IP inexorably took over the whole domain until "network = TCP/IP" became a self-evident truth.
The same is IMO inevitable with Linux because it has solved the main issue of how to provide the necessary services on any platform in a non-partisan manner. The people who "get it", like IBM, are swiftly moving to a "Linux everywhere" strategy on which they can build a solid business of services and products. The people who still don't get it, like Microsoft, insist that Linux is an illegitimate upstart with no credentials.
The operating system as a product has become almost completely commoditized. There is simply no compelling reason for someone with free choice to pay for OS software today.
However, don't say "last", this would be wrong. Linus is most likely the "last OS" in the same sense as TCP/IP is the "last internetworking protocol". But new models of computing that provoke new concepts of organization and software are inevitable. Linux is not infinitely plastic and there is an infinite space beyond its reach that will be filled with the upstart OS platforms of the future.
C'mon, anyone can tell that the picture was faked in a studio, it's obvious from the shadows cast by the so-called "aerogel". Just one more NASA conspiracy to convince us that they spend our tax dollars on worth subjects. Hrghmh.
Actually it's trivial to remove the Launch button. One of the fun things about KDE is that you can configure it to look like almost any system. The important thing is the principle of least surprise. If you're used to clicking the lower-left corner to start an application, that's where there should be a button. If you're used to a menu along the top, there should be one there.
It's not about copying or being unoriginal. Originality is not such a great thing - imagine if every car you drove had an "original" layout for the dashboard and gearstick.
How can an honest report of what we experienced 20 years ago be called "FUD"?
The Macs our company bought were not expandible and the price of PCs went down very rapidly from the $6000 the first one cost. This is my point: Apple had a window of opportunity which they lost.
We used the Macs for serious work, yes, mainly documentation since it was the only box that could run software like PageMaker. But a box that does one thing does not succeed. The PCs could run terminal emulators, we could attach modems, install compilers, build software, and so on.
The Mac Plus - which you had - was already late in the game, which started in 1984 IIRC. By the time the Mac Plus came around, the bulk of potential customers had chosen IBM compatible PCs as their "personal computer of choice", and it was hard to change that.
And there was no conspiracy against Apple, despite the somewhat defensive attitude you take. Apple made a great product but it took them too long to understand what the market wanted, which was more power for less money. When you sell something - even wonderful - that people do not want, you cannot succeed. That is why the Mac failed.
Started with Xandros/1.0 a while back. Nice simple package, installs all by itself, but a little dusty around the edges. But hey, it brought a number of old PCs back to life as simple browser/email/Office boxes, no hassle.
Chucked Xandros/2.0 deluxe onto a box (from which I'm typing this). My main machine, now. The switch from a W2K notebook was remarkably easy. I did use CrossoverOffice to install MSIE because we need this to test some applications. But most everything else has gone the native Linux way.
Xandros' good points: Debian, the file manager, seamless integration with Windows networks, good selection of packages, clean and dry user interface (compared to the 'how much more can we add' horrors of Lindows 4.5). Everything a 'normal' user needs within easy reach, and very little poking under the hood to make it all work. The file manager is especially lovely, though I suspect a large part of that comes from Konqueror. Double-click on _anything_ and something useful happens. Archives magically uncompress, ISO images magically get burnt to CD, Windows executables run immediately (assuming CrossoverOffice is there), RPMs get launched in the Xandros installer. It "just works", and that's the greatest compliment I can give any software.
Xandros' weak point is the lack of some useful packages in the standard sources. To burn DVDs for instance I needed to install K3b and a number of auxilliary tools myself, some from source, some from RPMs and other packages. But then exploring and installing one's own packages from source is part of the fun of getting the system you want.
Linux is an operating system with depth (as are most Unix systems). Xandros wraps this up so nicely that you almost get that Windows experience. But when you open the wrapping, there is solid metal underneath, and it feels good.
I forgot how limiting Windows was, how many comprimises there are in the platform, and to tell the truth after a decade of using mainly Windows, I was a little scared to jump to a Linux distro. Xandros made this move easy, so easy that I did not once think 'Oh, forget it'.