I upgraded (yes, upgraded) my RedHat distro to Mandrake 9 on my Thinkpad this morning in the car on the way to work. Yes, it really was that easy, and sitting in traffic has never been so enjoyable.
It picked up the Thinkpad's cs46xx soundcard, allowed xfree to run in 11x8, and although it skipped past installing the bootloader without giving me any say in the matter (installing lilo straight to my MBR instead of putting grub on the Linux boot partition, like I would have preferred), it didn't completely destroy my MBR and refuse to boot my XP NTFS partition like RedHat did.
The whole install was incredibly quick, even on a P2 366 - all in all about 30 minutes, finishing just as I pulled into the office. On the down side, the installation procedures are a little more inflexible than that of RedHat or SuSE, and KDE 3.1 seems to be broken(?).
On the whole, after a couple of hours of tooling about, it seems to be an excellent release.
In my line of work I've had a lot of contact with universities, and I must say I've barely seen a whisper of open source usage. Perhaps there are small departments here and there who are getting into it, but if so I'm yet to see it. Good on them if they are, however.
a number of banks (with the proud exception of PestWhack) here in Australia are linux-friendly
I'll put my hand up to being a Westpac customer, and I must say that I've never had any problems using their online banking, either on Linux or Windows (using both Opera and Mozilla Firebird on both operating systems). I have heard of people having lots of problems trying to do online banking on Linux, but I can't say I've ever heard Westpac's name mentioned in conjunction with that. FWIW, I think that Westpac's online banking is quite good compared to that of its competitors.
the biggest sticks in the corporate mud for insisting on Microsoft are the Federal and State governments
This is a landscape that is changing quite rapidly in Australia. The South Australian government is actively trying to pass a bill mandating that all government departments use open source software in preference to Microsoft, et al, where practical. A number of other state governments, including Queensland and (I think) Victoria are watching the case with interest, and if it is a successful program, will more than likely move down the same path. I'm sure it won't be long before this sort of publicity reaches critical mass and other government and corporate entities start to take notice and make the shift.
Having said that, it wouldn't come as a surprise to me if I learned that MS, or other software companies with vested interests in government/big business, started offering financial incentives for these organisations not to switch over to open source...
Probably about as much as the average home user spends on OSS...;)
To be quite honest, I'm surprised that more organisations haven't jumped on board the open source bandwagon; especially those who have a skilled IT department (Universities, Telcos, etc). I can understand small business owners wanting to toe the Microsoft line for the sake of being able to get advice from their buddies over red wine and dinner parties (or maybe it's the lack of OSS exposure?), but for those who know what they're doing and can afford to support it, there's savings to be had in open source.
Does anybody know how well Telstra pay? It could be time to dust off the ol' resume...
Y'know... when you've been up until 4am debugging somebody else's badly written code, you finally get to sleep, and the garbage truck / noisy neighbour / dog next door wakes you up a few hours later. You get up, open the curtains, and this strange, transluscent, yellow stuff filters into your room.
A campus bookseller offering 10% to students. How novel. What a deal. If you just happen to be a student strolling by the campus bookseller, you'll get a break.
I don't know what the situation is for you guys in the States, however in Australia there is a prevalence in campus bookstores for the student co-operative system. Most are either run by, or on behalf of the university themselves, or run as not-for-profit organisations, wherein for an outlay of, say, $10, a student can purchase a co-operative membership, thereby ensuring immediate operating capital for the shop, and a long term benefit for the students. This essentially drops profit margins on textbooks down to 20% - the heady realms of computer software and hardware retailers. Factor in your overheads, and there's not a great deal of money to be made.
So tell me - how are the bookshops ripping off the students, exactly?
Just as an aside, a good friend of mine used to manage a medical bookstore, and if you've ever studied medicine, you'll know that the prices on medical textbooks are astronomical. Prices around $1000 (AUD) are not uncommon for, say, a two volume hardcover journal. I commented to him that the prices of these books were ludicrously high, and that students really were getting ripped off, in comparison to those studying other, less esoteric subjects. He replied with the following points, that swayed my views on the matter: quite often the author(s) of the book is the expert in the field - nobody else has the knowledge or experience to write the book they've written, so they can pretty much name their price to the publisher. Given the depth of the material presented, they often have to take years off their work (with no income whatsoever) to prepare and write the text, and have to be recompensated accordingly. As a lot of these texts are for fairly narrow fields of learning, the print runs are low - not only does this mean that the prices are higher because of this, but smaller printing runs also mean higher printing costs. Often these books are retained by students throughout their career, and as such are manufactured to a distinctly higher quality than your average textbook - also incurring higher costs.
While it's no complete excuse for the margins that publishers (yes, publishers, not the bookstores) set, similar kinds of arguments can be levelled at the difference between the prices of textbooks and, as someone else has mentioned, your average Stephen King novel.
Actually, the dude has something of a point (if somewhat enshrouded in rhetoric). Coming from the campus bookseller trade, I know that it's not the bookshops that are doing the overpricing, it's the publishers and distributors that are jacking up the costs for the average student.
The average campus bookstore has very minimal margins, especially when it comes to student textbooks - a lot lower margins than many other retail areas. Let's not forget to mention that on top of this, most campus booksellers offer 10% (or more) student discounts.
It's easy enough to direct your anger at the visible front of the bookselling industry, however peel back the layers and you'll find that it's not the retail stores who are ripping the students off...
If this was a "pro-linux" motivated attack, then surely this troublemaker's attentions would've been best directed at sco.com rather than windowsupdate.com, no?
Slashdot Mirror
I upgraded (yes, upgraded) my RedHat distro to Mandrake 9 on my Thinkpad this morning in the car on the way to work. Yes, it really was that easy, and sitting in traffic has never been so enjoyable.
It picked up the Thinkpad's cs46xx soundcard, allowed xfree to run in 11x8, and although it skipped past installing the bootloader without giving me any say in the matter (installing lilo straight to my MBR instead of putting grub on the Linux boot partition, like I would have preferred), it didn't completely destroy my MBR and refuse to boot my XP NTFS partition like RedHat did.
The whole install was incredibly quick, even on a P2 366 - all in all about 30 minutes, finishing just as I pulled into the office. On the down side, the installation procedures are a little more inflexible than that of RedHat or SuSE, and KDE 3.1 seems to be broken(?).
On the whole, after a couple of hours of tooling about, it seems to be an excellent release.
lots of universities use OSS heavily
In my line of work I've had a lot of contact with universities, and I must say I've barely seen a whisper of open source usage. Perhaps there are small departments here and there who are getting into it, but if so I'm yet to see it. Good on them if they are, however.
a number of banks (with the proud exception of PestWhack) here in Australia are linux-friendly
I'll put my hand up to being a Westpac customer, and I must say that I've never had any problems using their online banking, either on Linux or Windows (using both Opera and Mozilla Firebird on both operating systems). I have heard of people having lots of problems trying to do online banking on Linux, but I can't say I've ever heard Westpac's name mentioned in conjunction with that. FWIW, I think that Westpac's online banking is quite good compared to that of its competitors.
the biggest sticks in the corporate mud for insisting on Microsoft are the Federal and State governments
This is a landscape that is changing quite rapidly in Australia. The South Australian government is actively trying to pass a bill mandating that all government departments use open source software in preference to Microsoft, et al, where practical. A number of other state governments, including Queensland and (I think) Victoria are watching the case with interest, and if it is a successful program, will more than likely move down the same path. I'm sure it won't be long before this sort of publicity reaches critical mass and other government and corporate entities start to take notice and make the shift.
Having said that, it wouldn't come as a surprise to me if I learned that MS, or other software companies with vested interests in government/big business, started offering financial incentives for these organisations not to switch over to open source...
Probably about as much as the average home user spends on OSS...
To be quite honest, I'm surprised that more organisations haven't jumped on board the open source bandwagon; especially those who have a skilled IT department (Universities, Telcos, etc). I can understand small business owners wanting to toe the Microsoft line for the sake of being able to get advice from their buddies over red wine and dinner parties (or maybe it's the lack of OSS exposure?), but for those who know what they're doing and can afford to support it, there's savings to be had in open source.
Does anybody know how well Telstra pay? It could be time to dust off the ol' resume...
Y'know... when you've been up until 4am debugging somebody else's badly written code, you finally get to sleep, and the garbage truck / noisy neighbour / dog next door wakes you up a few hours later. You get up, open the curtains, and this strange, transluscent, yellow stuff filters into your room.
That's daylight.
Do you blame them?
5 years, and still no 'Barney' affiliations?
Shame, Mozilla, shame!
It took them five years to do it, but they've come up with the best web browser known to man: with daylight second, and Opera third.
Here's hoping that the next five years sees the same committed focus to Firebird as has been poured into Mozilla.
A campus bookseller offering 10% to students. How novel. What a deal. If you just happen to be a student strolling by the campus bookseller, you'll get a break.
I don't know what the situation is for you guys in the States, however in Australia there is a prevalence in campus bookstores for the student co-operative system. Most are either run by, or on behalf of the university themselves, or run as not-for-profit organisations, wherein for an outlay of, say, $10, a student can purchase a co-operative membership, thereby ensuring immediate operating capital for the shop, and a long term benefit for the students. This essentially drops profit margins on textbooks down to 20% - the heady realms of computer software and hardware retailers. Factor in your overheads, and there's not a great deal of money to be made.
So tell me - how are the bookshops ripping off the students, exactly?
Just as an aside, a good friend of mine used to manage a medical bookstore, and if you've ever studied medicine, you'll know that the prices on medical textbooks are astronomical. Prices around $1000 (AUD) are not uncommon for, say, a two volume hardcover journal. I commented to him that the prices of these books were ludicrously high, and that students really were getting ripped off, in comparison to those studying other, less esoteric subjects. He replied with the following points, that swayed my views on the matter: quite often the author(s) of the book is the expert in the field - nobody else has the knowledge or experience to write the book they've written, so they can pretty much name their price to the publisher. Given the depth of the material presented, they often have to take years off their work (with no income whatsoever) to prepare and write the text, and have to be recompensated accordingly. As a lot of these texts are for fairly narrow fields of learning, the print runs are low - not only does this mean that the prices are higher because of this, but smaller printing runs also mean higher printing costs. Often these books are retained by students throughout their career, and as such are manufactured to a distinctly higher quality than your average textbook - also incurring higher costs.
While it's no complete excuse for the margins that publishers (yes, publishers, not the bookstores) set, similar kinds of arguments can be levelled at the difference between the prices of textbooks and, as someone else has mentioned, your average Stephen King novel.
Actually, the dude has something of a point (if somewhat enshrouded in rhetoric). Coming from the campus bookseller trade, I know that it's not the bookshops that are doing the overpricing, it's the publishers and distributors that are jacking up the costs for the average student.
The average campus bookstore has very minimal margins, especially when it comes to student textbooks - a lot lower margins than many other retail areas. Let's not forget to mention that on top of this, most campus booksellers offer 10% (or more) student discounts.
It's easy enough to direct your anger at the visible front of the bookselling industry, however peel back the layers and you'll find that it's not the retail stores who are ripping the students off...
The same kind that Darl McBride is smoking, obviously...
If only they'd implemented this before Uranus was named...
off topic, but... ssh can be proxied:
PuTTY SSH
If this was a "pro-linux" motivated attack, then surely this troublemaker's attentions would've been best directed at sco.com rather than windowsupdate.com, no?
http://trilobite.electrolux.com/ now -that- looks like something you could install linux on!