$100 million should be enough to buy a chair for every man, woman and child in the USA. Afer the chairs have been ritually tossed around at, say, precisely 11 a.m., the shards could be gathered together into a great bonfire atop of which St Linus of Mount Kernel can be burned in effigy. This might be a lot more fun than reading about Vista every time you open a paper over the next year.
Ah, glad to see/. is keeping up with traditions as this one has been well covered on osnews.com for a day now.
I guess a few ghastly, greedy "investors" fronted by teenage analysts are now circling Novell, scenting blood and booty. My understanding is that Novell is nowhere near profitability and the gap between declining Netware revenue and new Linux revenue is alarming. But Novell does have quite a lot of cash in hand and is entangled with IBM via the SuSE acquisition. I'd guess some of the Wall Street greed merchants are hoping for a takeover or a dismemberment, with IBM being greenmailed into picking up a very large tab on the Linux side because losing SuSE would be too painful for them.
Of course, the little shits don't pitch it like that, just calling for better management.
I warm to the notion of Ballmer throwing chairs around because it makes him sound human (well, almost) and a lot less deadly boring than Bill. So unlike the strangulated, unnatural jargon employed by Gates in both these interviews. The amount of hard information imparted in either interview is miniscule. I wonder what he is trying to hide.
Sigh. Microsoft are a stodgy, rather dull, middle-aged company these days with stodgy middle-aged ways and a nice line in quaint diction. If nothing else does for them, this will.
Does anyone really expect one of the big hitters of the Linux world to say anything different. I mean, he's not very likely to say "The introduction of Vista means the death of Linux. My fellow Tuxers, we are about to go to hell in a handcart. I advise anyone who still has one to go home and prepare for death."
Novell is in terrible financial shape. Perhaps a more interesting bet is whether Vista will come out before or after the hyenas of Wall Street have descended on Novell and started to reconstruct or dismember it. Awful cackling howls are already coming from analysts' reports bewailing Novell's continued losses and scarily high share price relative to its assets.
Great points, but Micosoft's strategy sounds too self-serving to be really convincing. First off, they'll be offering choice in one hand while taking it away with the other in terms of open file formats, the ease with which competing software can be used (Open Office, Firefox et al.), and as for DRM generally, well there'll be no choice at all.
Second, this all helps to plant the idea in the user's mind that an operating system is something worth paying for whereas, increasingly, it is not worth paying for. In this context, it is very hard to believe that Microsoft won't go to great lengths to muck around with the feature sets so that users will have to trade up one more level than they really need. After all, why pass up such easy revenue? In addition, users will still be paying a hefty extra tax each year in the form of firewalling and AV software, not to mention a score of other upgrades occasioned by Vista's demands. Suddenly, the whole thing starts to look extremely expensive. So in a sense, Microosoft do have a vested interest in confusing people by glossing over the true cost of the platform.
So, according to this, if you want to get the full benefit of all those overpriced games and get "custom themes" you will have to shell out major bucks for the Vista Ultimate Edition which will also come with loads of business-oriented tweaks the average gamer has no use for?
MS1: How can we screw gamers? They haven't suffered nearly enough. Besides, Bill's having trouble putting bread on the table. MS2: Break open their piggy bank, take their candy allowance, then check under the mattress. Bound to be a buck or two from the paper round there. MS3: Hey, I have a great idea. Let's force them to pay for hundreds of megs of business software they'll never need 'cos, you know, we always offer real value for money! MS1: Even better, we can thrown in say four custom themes! A bargain when the Ultimate Edition will be only a coupla hundred bucks over base
Relentlessly increasing energy prices, anyone? You can install this huge, monolithic, oh so nineties power trip of a product, multiply that by 5,000 or 10,000 corporate desktops, then hock yourself up the wazoo to your electricity company. Heck, even Intel seems to have gotten the message now - do more, for less. Small, light, nimble and frugal with the juice is the future, for all of us. This ain't it. I guess MS will just have to stick to frightening us with patents, court cases and drm madness.
Sigh. Another day, another dollar and, surprise surprise, yet another Gartner report. Funny how Gartner's conclusions always side with the big boys. I'm sure it can't be anthing to do with where their fees come from.
Linux is as ready for the desktop as you want it to be. Many organizations run thousands of near-identical desktops that are used for little more than writing letters and email. Linux is very ready for those. It's much, much harder for Joe User at home because of the sheer variety involved - zillions of hardware combinations, some proprietory gizmos plugged in by usb, the kids need Windows for this and that, etc.
So there's more than one type of mainstream here. And even if it isn't Gartner's mainstream the other, corporate mainstream is still a huge market.
This means that Gnome 2.12 may hit Debian Sid as early as 2008. In the meantime, I'd be really really pleased if they could
a) get together a decent CD/DVD burning app
b) add some amarokish bells and whistles to rhythmbox
c) do something drastic to improve the features and performance of nautilus
d) make over evolution, which is generally crash-prone and sucky.
Writing this on xfce 4.2 - all the goodness of gtk without the gnomish tendencies.
Wow, fantastic news. Anyone who's followed this story knows that after their amazing showing at the Moscow Exhibition President Putin has ordered six examples of the special "InterCosmos" gold-plated edition of the laptop for himself. These puppies come with an ingenious three-way hinge over the electro-capacitors of the optico-laser micron-designator array, offering storage for as many as 25 Balkan Sobranie cigarettes and a gram of Medicinal Powder.
Unique to InterCosmos is the two-way hyperbung next to the Bluetooth docking gate. Made from pure 8UFT5OMD-2.6AO military-grade polystrene and featuring a solild boron screwhead encrusted with industrial-style diamonds, the hyperbung's removal allows as much as 440ml of 120-proof vodka to be stowed as fuel in the event of battery failure. Independent benchmarks using the well-known Symonovksy-Heffer algorithm prove beyond doubt that the InterCoshmosh [stop drinking that battery fluid or you're fired - Ed] can carry enough liquid fuel to maintain the average Russian IT consultant at 100% usage for up to two hours, followed by automatic, clock-chipped sudden-decline sleep mode for nearly a day and a half afterwards.
Ah, but you left off the third line:
Before: Fame
Now: Fortune
Then: A very, very sore behind.
Doing time in Morocco or Turkey doesn't sound much of a laugh. Hope they remember to take a small blow-up cushion in with them. Imagine they'll be needing it. Sounds like they were hoping to use the virusfor a tie-in with some "advertisers", but alas "A pop-up a day does not keep a rogering at bay."
Where I live, "security experts" are always wheeled out at these moments to explain that the new viral assualt is the creation of organized criminal gangs headed by a supremely intelligent and resourceful Mr Big (who probably lives in a suite at the Ritz and never goes anywhere without a Yorkshire Terrier). Yet here we are again, with the alleged perps being a couple of no-name losers from nowhere. It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, they link to.
Actually I can't think of a single use of Windows inadvertently or otherwise that makes the slightest difference in my day-to-day life. The vast majority of those on the planet have never used Windows (or any computer for that matter). A working lavatory would be a leg up in most cases. Somehow I doubt a PC is top of their to-do list.
One thing that could make a great differnce to a person's daily life, though, is posting an article about their attempts to use Linux. Forget about how much you really know, or don't know. A thumbs up to Linux has propaganda sites crawling all over you. A thumbs down and ten thousand geeks will be queuing up to excoriate you. Perhaps Hollywood and a pay rise beckons.
I mean, is this guy for real? If you want to use Linux, then use it properly and fully. Amazing, really, that one guy anxiously dipping a toe in the water and then hastily running back to the apron strings should merit a slashdot write-up. On second thoughts perhaps he's going for an award for outstanding bravery.
Well I hope this works for SuSE but there are two other questions behind it all. First, Novell's financial situation doesn't look any too rosy and I wonder whether the existence of an OpenSuSE is really going to make much difference to customers looking for solid long-term support.
Second, the lines are becoming more distinct now, between what one might call community-based open source (planet Debian et al) and commercial-based open source (SuSE, Fedora, Mandriva, etc). It's far from certain that the commercial model will prevail over the community one even though the commercial outfits monopolize the headlines.
In many ways, the best help Linux users can give would be to move over to planet Debian, and start using distros the Wall Street mob can never get their mitts on. For a poorly funded school, hospital, local government outfit or similar, Red Hat or SuSE dangling corporate support contracts probably doesn't look very different from Microsoft to a harassed manager on a shoestring budget.
As it happens I use Debian Sid and typed my comments on it (then and now). Try hitting apt-get install gnome-desktop-enviroment. Your post suggests exactly why Debian is struggling to adapt to the twenty-first century: patronising incomprehension of the aspirations and needs of orginary computer users, for which read human beings: "Ubuntu has put tons of work into making an easy-to-use Debian with a pretty face, and to provide the world's kiddies with the latest and greatest software." So other distros are toys for kids, only real men use Debian, etc. Some of us can see where this is leading and we aren't keen to go there, imho.
Debian unstable is not fine, in fact it's a bit of a joke. Neither Gnome 2.10 desktop environment nor KDE 3.4.1 are currently available - the first is borked and the second isn't around at all. Funny that, since plenty of other distros have been running both quite happily for a few months now. We won't even go into wifi or xorg. As other distros, even Debian-based ones, show more and more that it doesn't have to be like this, a lot of folks must be wondering what on earth Debian is actually for. No amount of gay write-ups about Debconf can conceal the feeling that the Debian folks still haven't noticed that the world's moved on a bit since the 1970s.
Great reply, spot on the money. However, getting a Mac or for that matter saddling up as an uber-geek and going Linux are likely to be only short-term solutions. Even though both OSes are intrinsically more secure than Windows, malware would soon become a problem if enough bad boys turned their attention to OSX and Linux. In the longer term the only answers are political and legal on the one hand, and technical on the other (a more robust replacement for email protocols, for example).
The IT industry's answer - charge people for clean-up programs that shouldn't be needed in the first place - is certainly no way to go. My own hope is that someone, somewhere will bring enough investment to Linux to grab it and its precious devs by the scruff of the neck and shake out a genuinely user-friendly distribution. Arguably, that's exactly what Apple have done already, of course.
Well the article was written to be controversial and it's clearly succeeded judging by the number and tenor of replies.
The underlying point is a pretty good one. Linux is still developer driven and this is a classic example of what happens when developers get into the driver's seat and eject all others from the vehicle. It doesn't matter whether there are alternative ways of turning a feature off or on (in this case, turning on a tree menu and turning off multiple windows). The crucial question is whether the untutored user will realize that there are workarounds, and be able to use those alternatives because they are very clear and simple to operate. In this case, the answer appears to be a clear "no" on both counts.
So long as developers come first and the poor user comes a long way last Linux will continue to have a problem. And a very small share of the desktop PC market.
Slashdot Mirror
$100 million should be enough to buy a chair for every man, woman and child in the USA. Afer the chairs have been ritually tossed around at, say, precisely 11 a.m., the shards could be gathered together into a great bonfire atop of which St Linus of Mount Kernel can be burned in effigy. This might be a lot more fun than reading about Vista every time you open a paper over the next year.
Isn't the fact that it's Canada detail enough? It just means that Canadians will now be able to hunt beaver without the hassle of going outside.
A doctor writes:
... aaarrgh" ... thud
"A Messman a day
keeps profits at bay"
"A Credit Suisse First Boston a day
keeps
Ah, glad to see /. is keeping up with traditions as this one has been well covered on osnews.com for a day now.
I guess a few ghastly, greedy "investors" fronted by teenage analysts are now circling Novell, scenting blood and booty. My understanding is that Novell is nowhere near profitability and the gap between declining Netware revenue and new Linux revenue is alarming. But Novell does have quite a lot of cash in hand and is entangled with IBM via the SuSE acquisition. I'd guess some of the Wall Street greed merchants are hoping for a takeover or a dismemberment, with IBM being greenmailed into picking up a very large tab on the Linux side because losing SuSE would be too painful for them.
Of course, the little shits don't pitch it like that, just calling for better management.
I warm to the notion of Ballmer throwing chairs around because it makes him sound human (well, almost) and a lot less deadly boring than Bill. So unlike the strangulated, unnatural jargon employed by Gates in both these interviews. The amount of hard information imparted in either interview is miniscule. I wonder what he is trying to hide.
Sigh. Microsoft are a stodgy, rather dull, middle-aged company these days with stodgy middle-aged ways and a nice line in quaint diction. If nothing else does for them, this will.
Does anyone really expect one of the big hitters of the Linux world to say anything different. I mean, he's not very likely to say "The introduction of Vista means the death of Linux. My fellow Tuxers, we are about to go to hell in a handcart. I advise anyone who still has one to go home and prepare for death."
Novell is in terrible financial shape. Perhaps a more interesting bet is whether Vista will come out before or after the hyenas of Wall Street have descended on Novell and started to reconstruct or dismember it. Awful cackling howls are already coming from analysts' reports bewailing Novell's continued losses and scarily high share price relative to its assets.
Great points, but Micosoft's strategy sounds too self-serving to be really convincing. First off, they'll be offering choice in one hand while taking it away with the other in terms of open file formats, the ease with which competing software can be used (Open Office, Firefox et al.), and as for DRM generally, well there'll be no choice at all.
Second, this all helps to plant the idea in the user's mind that an operating system is something worth paying for whereas, increasingly, it is not worth paying for. In this context, it is very hard to believe that Microsoft won't go to great lengths to muck around with the feature sets so that users will have to trade up one more level than they really need. After all, why pass up such easy revenue? In addition, users will still be paying a hefty extra tax each year in the form of firewalling and AV software, not to mention a score of other upgrades occasioned by Vista's demands. Suddenly, the whole thing starts to look extremely expensive. So in a sense, Microosoft do have a vested interest in confusing people by glossing over the true cost of the platform.
So, according to this, if you want to get the full benefit of all those overpriced games and get "custom themes" you will have to shell out major bucks for the Vista Ultimate Edition which will also come with loads of business-oriented tweaks the average gamer has no use for?
MS1: How can we screw gamers? They haven't suffered nearly enough. Besides, Bill's having trouble putting bread on the table.
MS2: Break open their piggy bank, take their candy allowance, then check under the mattress. Bound to be a buck or two from the paper round there.
MS3: Hey, I have a great idea. Let's force them to pay for hundreds of megs of business software they'll never need 'cos, you know, we always offer real value for money!
MS1: Even better, we can thrown in say four custom themes! A bargain when the Ultimate Edition will be only a coupla hundred bucks over base
Relentlessly increasing energy prices, anyone? You can install this huge, monolithic, oh so nineties power trip of a product, multiply that by 5,000 or 10,000 corporate desktops, then hock yourself up the wazoo to your electricity company. Heck, even Intel seems to have gotten the message now - do more, for less. Small, light, nimble and frugal with the juice is the future, for all of us. This ain't it. I guess MS will just have to stick to frightening us with patents, court cases and drm madness.
Sigh. Another day, another dollar and, surprise surprise, yet another Gartner report. Funny how Gartner's conclusions always side with the big boys. I'm sure it can't be anthing to do with where their fees come from.
Linux is as ready for the desktop as you want it to be. Many organizations run thousands of near-identical desktops that are used for little more than writing letters and email. Linux is very ready for those. It's much, much harder for Joe User at home because of the sheer variety involved - zillions of hardware combinations, some proprietory gizmos plugged in by usb, the kids need Windows for this and that, etc.
So there's more than one type of mainstream here. And even if it isn't Gartner's mainstream the other, corporate mainstream is still a huge market.
This means that Gnome 2.12 may hit Debian Sid as early as 2008. In the meantime, I'd be really really pleased if they could
a) get together a decent CD/DVD burning app
b) add some amarokish bells and whistles to rhythmbox
c) do something drastic to improve the features and performance of nautilus
d) make over evolution, which is generally crash-prone and sucky.
Writing this on xfce 4.2 - all the goodness of gtk without the gnomish tendencies.
Wow, fantastic news. Anyone who's followed this story knows that after their amazing showing at the Moscow Exhibition President Putin has ordered six examples of the special "InterCosmos" gold-plated edition of the laptop for himself. These puppies come with an ingenious three-way hinge over the electro-capacitors of the optico-laser micron-designator array, offering storage for as many as 25 Balkan Sobranie cigarettes and a gram of Medicinal Powder.
Unique to InterCosmos is the two-way hyperbung next to the Bluetooth docking gate. Made from pure 8UFT5OMD-2.6AO military-grade polystrene and featuring a solild boron screwhead encrusted with industrial-style diamonds, the hyperbung's removal allows as much as 440ml of 120-proof vodka to be stowed as fuel in the event of battery failure. Independent benchmarks using the well-known Symonovksy-Heffer algorithm prove beyond doubt that the InterCoshmosh [stop drinking that battery fluid or you're fired - Ed] can carry enough liquid fuel to maintain the average Russian IT consultant at 100% usage for up to two hours, followed by automatic, clock-chipped sudden-decline sleep mode for nearly a day and a half afterwards.
Ah, but you left off the third line: Before: Fame Now: Fortune Then: A very, very sore behind. Doing time in Morocco or Turkey doesn't sound much of a laugh. Hope they remember to take a small blow-up cushion in with them. Imagine they'll be needing it. Sounds like they were hoping to use the virusfor a tie-in with some "advertisers", but alas "A pop-up a day does not keep a rogering at bay."
Where I live, "security experts" are always wheeled out at these moments to explain that the new viral assualt is the creation of organized criminal gangs headed by a supremely intelligent and resourceful Mr Big (who probably lives in a suite at the Ritz and never goes anywhere without a Yorkshire Terrier). Yet here we are again, with the alleged perps being a couple of no-name losers from nowhere. It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, they link to.
Actually I can't think of a single use of Windows inadvertently or otherwise that makes the slightest difference in my day-to-day life. The vast majority of those on the planet have never used Windows (or any computer for that matter). A working lavatory would be a leg up in most cases. Somehow I doubt a PC is top of their to-do list.
One thing that could make a great differnce to a person's daily life, though, is posting an article about their attempts to use Linux. Forget about how much you really know, or don't know. A thumbs up to Linux has propaganda sites crawling all over you. A thumbs down and ten thousand geeks will be queuing up to excoriate you. Perhaps Hollywood and a pay rise beckons.
I mean, is this guy for real? If you want to use Linux, then use it properly and fully. Amazing, really, that one guy anxiously dipping a toe in the water and then hastily running back to the apron strings should merit a slashdot write-up. On second thoughts perhaps he's going for an award for outstanding bravery.
Well I hope this works for SuSE but there are two other questions behind it all. First, Novell's financial situation doesn't look any too rosy and I wonder whether the existence of an OpenSuSE is really going to make much difference to customers looking for solid long-term support.
Second, the lines are becoming more distinct now, between what one might call community-based open source (planet Debian et al) and commercial-based open source (SuSE, Fedora, Mandriva, etc). It's far from certain that the commercial model will prevail over the community one even though the commercial outfits monopolize the headlines.
In many ways, the best help Linux users can give would be to move over to planet Debian, and start using distros the Wall Street mob can never get their mitts on. For a poorly funded school, hospital, local government outfit or similar, Red Hat or SuSE dangling corporate support contracts probably doesn't look very different from Microsoft to a harassed manager on a shoestring budget.
As it happens I use Debian Sid and typed my comments on it (then and now). Try hitting apt-get install gnome-desktop-enviroment. Your post suggests exactly why Debian is struggling to adapt to the twenty-first century: patronising incomprehension of the aspirations and needs of orginary computer users, for which read human beings: "Ubuntu has put tons of work into making an easy-to-use Debian with a pretty face, and to provide the world's kiddies with the latest and greatest software." So other distros are toys for kids, only real men use Debian, etc. Some of us can see where this is leading and we aren't keen to go there, imho.
Debian unstable is not fine, in fact it's a bit of a joke. Neither Gnome 2.10 desktop environment nor KDE 3.4.1 are currently available - the first is borked and the second isn't around at all. Funny that, since plenty of other distros have been running both quite happily for a few months now. We won't even go into wifi or xorg. As other distros, even Debian-based ones, show more and more that it doesn't have to be like this, a lot of folks must be wondering what on earth Debian is actually for. No amount of gay write-ups about Debconf can conceal the feeling that the Debian folks still haven't noticed that the world's moved on a bit since the 1970s.
Great reply, spot on the money. However, getting a Mac or for that matter saddling up as an uber-geek and going Linux are likely to be only short-term solutions. Even though both OSes are intrinsically more secure than Windows, malware would soon become a problem if enough bad boys turned their attention to OSX and Linux. In the longer term the only answers are political and legal on the one hand, and technical on the other (a more robust replacement for email protocols, for example). The IT industry's answer - charge people for clean-up programs that shouldn't be needed in the first place - is certainly no way to go. My own hope is that someone, somewhere will bring enough investment to Linux to grab it and its precious devs by the scruff of the neck and shake out a genuinely user-friendly distribution. Arguably, that's exactly what Apple have done already, of course.
Well the article was written to be controversial and it's clearly succeeded judging by the number and tenor of replies. The underlying point is a pretty good one. Linux is still developer driven and this is a classic example of what happens when developers get into the driver's seat and eject all others from the vehicle. It doesn't matter whether there are alternative ways of turning a feature off or on (in this case, turning on a tree menu and turning off multiple windows). The crucial question is whether the untutored user will realize that there are workarounds, and be able to use those alternatives because they are very clear and simple to operate. In this case, the answer appears to be a clear "no" on both counts. So long as developers come first and the poor user comes a long way last Linux will continue to have a problem. And a very small share of the desktop PC market.