Have you tried WINE? Seriously - have you? It doesn't work well enough for anyone to depend on. Better to just run a copy of Windows in a VM. As for Android, good luck with that. It's SLLOOOOOOWWWWWWWW. And BUGGGGGGGYYYYYYYYYYYY. I know - I tried.
WINE is a joke - it can't even run Simcity 2000 without crashing.
BTW - even Linus Torvalds says that Android isn't going to run natively under linux until ~2016 - I think I'll trust him more than you.
Until the fud ends, nobody will want to acknowledge that in the long term, OSX and windows are simply not going to last. It's absolutely guaranteed. This doesn't mean that somehow they aren't in full use - just that people like to deny reality. Same line of thought as creationists, politicians, and anyone else anti-science.
The reality is that the window of opportunity that Vista provided was lost. While everyone was going "Ubuntu! Ubuntu! Ubuntu! Nyah nyah nyah!!!" Microsoft pulled up their socks, and are now good enough for the masses. Ubuntu? Shuttleworth has become a joke - every year he makes a new announcement while abandoning another project. Not just Kubuntu - there's the smartphones that were supposed to be on shelves over a year ago, the android execution environment that was promised almost 3 years ago, etc.
The reality is we dropped the ball big time, and don't want to admit it.
How is it arbitrary? You don't obey the local laws, you are banned from doing business locally, same as in the "real world"?
And no, the EU is not trying to "extend EU law to jurisdictions outside the EU" - it is enforcing EU law within its borders, as is its right. If you don't want to obey the privacy legislation when dealing with citizens of the EU in the EU, then you simply don't get to do business. Same as the US. Or do you believe that US citizens should be free to watch kiddie porn, as long as the server is located in Thailand? Or that Nigerian scammers should be allowed to continue to scam people because Nigerian law doesn't care?
Are you that much of a Facebook fanboi? Grow up already - facebook is useless.
Want a real shock? Grab a 5-year-old version of Knoppix and boot it - it's easily just as usable. 5 years of "progress" - and in the meantime, there's yet another family of software linux can't run natively - Android - on top of not being able to run Windows or iOS apps.
It's the applications, people! Until linux can run most of them, it's going to remain mostly a server and utility OS, because most people have at least one "must have" application that won't let them switch.
Please read what I wrote. I was specific - it gets rid of the 3.2 crudiness - I didn't say it gave anything more. You want applets, then it's up to you to install gnome-applets. They don't just magically jump out of the ether:-)
Under F16 set it to use the fallback video driver - it gets rid of all the 3.2 cruddiness.
Applications -> System Tools -> System Settings - opens the dialog. Select "System Info" at the bottom, then "Graphics". Click the toggle for "Forced Fallback Mode" and Gnome 3.2.1 should revert to a much cleaned-up 2.something.
You're perfectly fine signing a contract that has clauses that are against your rights that are illegal - it makes it that much harder for them to enforce ANY of the contract in court, as it shows bad faith and sharp dealing on their part.
So of course, when they included a clause with a 5-year non-compete, I was happy to sign it. If it had been a year, the courts might have found that reasonable - but 5 years? Nope - they had already ruled that was way over the line. So, the non-compete was null and void, and I could ignore it if I so chose. Now, being a nice person, I told them after the fact that their contracts were illegal, and they did subsequently change them for new hires - but of course, they STILL tried to over-reach (3 years instead of 5), so they still ended up with the same problem when they'd lay off an employee and he'd go apply for work for a competitor.
Now, as to your "point" about only a few places having legislation wrt non-competes - we don't have any such legislation here, but that just means that we have recourse to equitable defense of our right to work irrespective of what a non-compete says. If it's not "fair" in the eyes of the court, it will be struck. As an employer, if you don't like that, tell it to the judge - or stop being a greedy pig.
If you're "always on the clock", you have to be paid for that time, whether you're physically there or not. Optimal Robotics lost that one, in an "at-will" state - they had to pay employees overtime even when they weren't called, because they were "subject to call".
So, maybe you aren't willing to fight it in court, but others did, and won.
Sure, let them be blocked. Why not? Every country is sovereign, and has a right to block web traffic from other countries. Or do you have a problem with countries exercising their sovereignty over their own borders? Canada was ready to block Facebook. The Chinese *DO* block Facebook - and that's entirely their right.
Extradition is governed by treaty, so YMMV. And the US has extradited people who have broken US law on out-of-territory web servers, so again, what's your point?
And before you throw in the recent 3-tweets guy - "Don't do the crime unless you're ready to do the time." Civil rights protesters throughout history have known that, and it was because they were ready to "do the time" that their protests had meaning. If you're not ready to "do the time", then at least don't run off to another country that has the same laws. The guy will qualify for a Darwin.
You still don't seem to get it - blocking the website is sufficient. The website doesn't follow local laws - block it. End of story. Why do you have a problem with that? It's not like the US doesn't do worse to websites it doesn't agree with ("ICE, ICE, Baby").
Try again - any contract that goes against public order is invalid. It doesn't even have to go against a particular statute, just general principles of equity and fairness. For example, one of my former employers had a 5-year term on their non-competes. Sure I signed it, knowing that jurisprudence had already held that 5-year non-competes were against public policy here and as such the whole non-compete clause was invalid. And I told them as much after. So what?
So most of those non-competes out there? Garbage, so stop with the whining already. You can safely sign a contract that has invalid provisions, and then ignore the invalid provisions. If the contract said "I give my first-born as part of the deal", you can sign it and ignore it.
No, they can't. Companies aren't going to waste money on a "what-if" that they're going to lose anyway, and have to pay damages. Get into the real world for a change, mkay?
No - EU laws should apply to companies dealing with EU citizens in the EU, and American laws should apply to companies dealing with American citizens in the US.
Otherwise, just block them - same as Canada threatened to block Facebook, and Facebook backed down.
Completely off-topic - the question was, should a country be able to enforce their business laws on businesses that do business with their citizens in their country? And the answer is yes.
The US is welcome to enforce its own laws on its own citizens within its own borders, while the rest of the world shakes its' head in disbelief.
If you don't like our FISA and PATRIOT policies, change them. You asked for them by voting for cowards, and by having a news media that refused to check sources. The rest of the world laughed at Colin Powell in the UN when he was making assertions of WMDs and aluminium tubes "used for centrifuges", because severl hours prior, we had watched the inspectors on TV telling us that those tubes could not have been used in centrifuges. But the US wasn't allowed to show those interviews, because of media self-censorship.
And now you have a decade of stupidity and debt because of your own cowardice and your catering to Faux News (who have said in court that they do not broadcast the truth, because - get this - the first amendment says they don't have to, and they won. Lying is just part of "good ole yankee horse trading", which is why you'll never elect an honest president).
The policy is illegal, the same as so many of those non-competes that they copy off the web "because everyone uses them, so they must be enforceable". If you're off the clock, you're off the clock.
And before all the ID-10-Ts start whinging about "non-exempt" - forget it - there is NOTHING an ermployer can do except fire you, and they only time they'll do that is if your idea is really really good and they're trying to get you to fork it over, in which case, aren't you in the drivers seat at that point? They cannot claim your off-the-clock work, since you were neither hired to do it, nor paid to do it. Copyright doesn't work that way, stop being morons already.
Almost ALL cameras sense outside the visual range. Remember the Sony "see-through-clothes" camera? Just a low-light camera used in the daytime with an IR filter.
You want to do business in a country, you abide by the laws, or youget hauled into court - how hard is that to figure out? It's the same deal as the US did to Canadian online pharmacies. Or are you being stupid on purpose?
The bible... weird theories of animal inheritance akin to Lamarckism, the whole "origin of the universe" debate, imaginary stuff that if it were to happen today would be explained away as "any sufficienly advanced magic looks like technology", the whole "Ark" thing to save humanity presaging all the sci-fi stories where people build space arks to leave a depleted, dying Earth, fire that doesn't burn stuff, weather control, matter converters (water into wine, etc).
The people who have been sniffing around Apple's supply chain say that the iPad3 will have a 2048x1572 screen, etc... so why not get the iPad2 cheaper, or get the iPad3 for its better display, etc.?
I think one of the things you miss is that customers *will* pay for things like wipe-and-re-install on Windows because it's worth it to them to keep being able to play their games and run their programs because those are Windows games and Windows programs.
People don't buy an operating system to run an OS - they buy it to run programs.
Linux, for most people, is *not* better. It won't run all of the programs that people use. For them, the alternatives are Windows or a Mac.
When's the last time you or anyone you know paid for linux? Or linux support? Consumer linux is never going to make money. Look at the latest feeble attempt - rebadging an obsolete $120 Zenithing C71 tablet and trying to sell it for $260 as a KDE tablet. You can tell the dev lives in Calgary - he has brain freeze. Worse, his promotional video is a fake - it was done on a 14" or 15" laptop, not a 7" tablet. And yet people "oh" and "ah" - and we wonder why we're labeled freetards???
As for updates to Windows systems, I had a series of updates trash both my opensuse systems - and I'm not alone. One of my friends (who didn't make the mistake of upgrading to 12.1) has had the same buggy updates turn his computer into a box that can only run one program at a time. If he's running Thunderbird, he has to exit it before he starts firefox, or the machine reboots. When he wants to write an email, he has to boot into Windows so he can have both a browser and libreoffice open at the same time. Why? Because open source is too often just crap.
Grab the source for the programs that make up a distro and compile it from scratch. I did that last month. The number of compiler warnings for stupid, completely avoidable problems (comparison between signed and unsigned, invalid comparisons between types, comparison always yields true, invalid type, bad pointer, conversion from blah blah blah, etc.) - it's not just eye-opening, it's shocking.
Or take programs that you think run okay, and instead of launching them by a clicky, do so from a terminal - and watch the error messages flow.
In the end it doesn't matter - there won't be a single disto left with any decent following a decade from now - everyone will just go online, pick a build service, pick the packages they want, the customizations, and download their own personal distro - or mix and match however they want. Crap like Shuttleworth betraying his user base in a desperate attempt to try to monetize his investment will be a thing of the past. Good riddance. The sooner he leaves, the better for everyone else.
Then again, this is the year Canonical officially starts dying. January was the whole UbuntuTV fiasco. The same CES show they intro a tv that they're running code they downloaded from samygo.tv on a rooted samsung, Lenovo shows up with a tv running Android 4.0, facial and voice recognition, motion detection, etc.
This week was the semi-official abandoning of both Kubuntu and Xubuntu.
What's coming for March? The answer to that one is easy - who cares? Shuttleworth will continue to make announcements like a kid with ADHD on a sugar rush, and people will continue to go "yeah, yeah, whatever..."
Irrelevant. That's like a white guy going around using the N word because blacks do it among themselves. Why don't you try it and let us know how it works out.
I guess I wasn't the only one who got burned... used opensuse from 9.0 to 11.4, then the upgrade to 12.1 ate my email. Even a wipe and re-install didn't fix the problems... so I switched to Fedora (and was happy to find that there's no xorg.conf file to mess around with when switching between single and dual monitors - it's all done with autodetection at boot time). Just make sure that you type selinux=0 on the install kernel options line or you will be sorry - "selinux broke upgrade" returns lots of results.
I don't see the problem. It makes sense to focus on one core product and make it the best and because it's open source anyone that wants KDE with Ubuntu can do that. I'm not sure you want to do it but you can.
Since when has Canonical "focused" on anything? They're the ADHD of the linux world. Big announcements, then a year later more big announcements about something else. Look what's been abandoned in the last few years - their "android execution environment" - dead. Tablets that were supposed to be on store shelves last year? Dead. Smartphones. Dead.
Their latest - UbuntuTV? It's stillborne, upstaged at CES by LenovoTV, which supports the latest android, facial and voice recognition, comes with a "normal" remote with motion sensors and multi-touch swipe pad, and a second game controller, etc. and, unlike UbuntuTV, is going into production and will be sold in China starting in April.
This is just Shuttleworth finally realizing that he made a mistake, that this is one venture capital deal that is never going to be sold to anyone for half a billion.
Actually, no, they didn't. It says they were closing in on that point - and since then, they've lost the Dell OEM netbook market.
The reason for the headcount is financial. If they were profitable, there'd really be no reason to cut one of the distro and help stem the flow of people abandoning Ubuntu. The fact is that every product they've announced since that article has been a dud - their music store (turns out it's not even theirs), their initial cloud offering (again not theirs - just a rebandged Amazon deal), the android execution environment (abandoned), tablets (abandoned), cell phones (abandoned), and the latest fiasco - UbuntuTV (code ripped from samygo.tv that anyone can use to install any linux distro on samsung tvs) - announced at the same show where Lenovo was showing off 55" Android Ice Cream Sandwich TVs with facial and speech recognition, remote with motion and multi-touch sensors, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you tried WINE? Seriously - have you? It doesn't work well enough for anyone to depend on. Better to just run a copy of Windows in a VM. As for Android, good luck with that. It's SLLOOOOOOWWWWWWWW. And BUGGGGGGGYYYYYYYYYYYY. I know - I tried.
WINE is a joke - it can't even run Simcity 2000 without crashing.
BTW - even Linus Torvalds says that Android isn't going to run natively under linux until ~2016 - I think I'll trust him more than you.
The reality is that the window of opportunity that Vista provided was lost. While everyone was going "Ubuntu! Ubuntu! Ubuntu! Nyah nyah nyah!!!" Microsoft pulled up their socks, and are now good enough for the masses. Ubuntu? Shuttleworth has become a joke - every year he makes a new announcement while abandoning another project. Not just Kubuntu - there's the smartphones that were supposed to be on shelves over a year ago, the android execution environment that was promised almost 3 years ago, etc.
The reality is we dropped the ball big time, and don't want to admit it.
That would be a real shocker, considering it was only released in 2001 ... 20 years ago, people were still running DOS and Windows 3.1 and WFW.
And no, the EU is not trying to "extend EU law to jurisdictions outside the EU" - it is enforcing EU law within its borders, as is its right. If you don't want to obey the privacy legislation when dealing with citizens of the EU in the EU, then you simply don't get to do business. Same as the US. Or do you believe that US citizens should be free to watch kiddie porn, as long as the server is located in Thailand? Or that Nigerian scammers should be allowed to continue to scam people because Nigerian law doesn't care?
Are you that much of a Facebook fanboi? Grow up already - facebook is useless.
It's the applications, people! Until linux can run most of them, it's going to remain mostly a server and utility OS, because most people have at least one "must have" application that won't let them switch.
Please read what I wrote. I was specific - it gets rid of the 3.2 crudiness - I didn't say it gave anything more. You want applets, then it's up to you to install gnome-applets. They don't just magically jump out of the ether :-)
Applications -> System Tools -> System Settings - opens the dialog. Select "System Info" at the bottom, then "Graphics". Click the toggle for "Forced Fallback Mode" and Gnome 3.2.1 should revert to a much cleaned-up 2.something.
So of course, when they included a clause with a 5-year non-compete, I was happy to sign it. If it had been a year, the courts might have found that reasonable - but 5 years? Nope - they had already ruled that was way over the line. So, the non-compete was null and void, and I could ignore it if I so chose. Now, being a nice person, I told them after the fact that their contracts were illegal, and they did subsequently change them for new hires - but of course, they STILL tried to over-reach (3 years instead of 5), so they still ended up with the same problem when they'd lay off an employee and he'd go apply for work for a competitor.
Now, as to your "point" about only a few places having legislation wrt non-competes - we don't have any such legislation here, but that just means that we have recourse to equitable defense of our right to work irrespective of what a non-compete says. If it's not "fair" in the eyes of the court, it will be struck. As an employer, if you don't like that, tell it to the judge - or stop being a greedy pig.
So, maybe you aren't willing to fight it in court, but others did, and won.
Sure, let them be blocked. Why not? Every country is sovereign, and has a right to block web traffic from other countries. Or do you have a problem with countries exercising their sovereignty over their own borders? Canada was ready to block Facebook. The Chinese *DO* block Facebook - and that's entirely their right.
Extradition is governed by treaty, so YMMV. And the US has extradited people who have broken US law on out-of-territory web servers, so again, what's your point?
And before you throw in the recent 3-tweets guy - "Don't do the crime unless you're ready to do the time." Civil rights protesters throughout history have known that, and it was because they were ready to "do the time" that their protests had meaning. If you're not ready to "do the time", then at least don't run off to another country that has the same laws. The guy will qualify for a Darwin.
You still don't seem to get it - blocking the website is sufficient. The website doesn't follow local laws - block it. End of story. Why do you have a problem with that? It's not like the US doesn't do worse to websites it doesn't agree with ("ICE, ICE, Baby").
So most of those non-competes out there? Garbage, so stop with the whining already. You can safely sign a contract that has invalid provisions, and then ignore the invalid provisions. If the contract said "I give my first-born as part of the deal", you can sign it and ignore it.
No, they can't. Companies aren't going to waste money on a "what-if" that they're going to lose anyway, and have to pay damages. Get into the real world for a change, mkay?
No - EU laws should apply to companies dealing with EU citizens in the EU, and American laws should apply to companies dealing with American citizens in the US.
Otherwise, just block them - same as Canada threatened to block Facebook, and Facebook backed down.
Completely off-topic - the question was, should a country be able to enforce their business laws on businesses that do business with their citizens in their country? And the answer is yes.
The US is welcome to enforce its own laws on its own citizens within its own borders, while the rest of the world shakes its' head in disbelief.
If you don't like our FISA and PATRIOT policies, change them. You asked for them by voting for cowards, and by having a news media that refused to check sources. The rest of the world laughed at Colin Powell in the UN when he was making assertions of WMDs and aluminium tubes "used for centrifuges", because severl hours prior, we had watched the inspectors on TV telling us that those tubes could not have been used in centrifuges. But the US wasn't allowed to show those interviews, because of media self-censorship.
And now you have a decade of stupidity and debt because of your own cowardice and your catering to Faux News (who have said in court that they do not broadcast the truth, because - get this - the first amendment says they don't have to, and they won. Lying is just part of "good ole yankee horse trading", which is why you'll never elect an honest president).
The policy is illegal, the same as so many of those non-competes that they copy off the web "because everyone uses them, so they must be enforceable". If you're off the clock, you're off the clock.
And before all the ID-10-Ts start whinging about "non-exempt" - forget it - there is NOTHING an ermployer can do except fire you, and they only time they'll do that is if your idea is really really good and they're trying to get you to fork it over, in which case, aren't you in the drivers seat at that point? They cannot claim your off-the-clock work, since you were neither hired to do it, nor paid to do it. Copyright doesn't work that way, stop being morons already.
So you've answered the question - you're being intentionally stupid.
Almost ALL cameras sense outside the visual range. Remember the Sony "see-through-clothes" camera? Just a low-light camera used in the daytime with an IR filter.
You want to do business in a country, you abide by the laws, or youget hauled into court - how hard is that to figure out? It's the same deal as the US did to Canadian online pharmacies. Or are you being stupid on purpose?
The bible ... weird theories of animal inheritance akin to Lamarckism, the whole "origin of the universe" debate, imaginary stuff that if it were to happen today would be explained away as "any sufficienly advanced magic looks like technology", the whole "Ark" thing to save humanity presaging all the sci-fi stories where people build space arks to leave a depleted, dying Earth, fire that doesn't burn stuff, weather control, matter converters (water into wine, etc).
The people who have been sniffing around Apple's supply chain say that the iPad3 will have a 2048x1572 screen, etc ... so why not get the iPad2 cheaper, or get the iPad3 for its better display, etc.?
I think one of the things you miss is that customers *will* pay for things like wipe-and-re-install on Windows because it's worth it to them to keep being able to play their games and run their programs because those are Windows games and Windows programs.
People don't buy an operating system to run an OS - they buy it to run programs.
Linux, for most people, is *not* better. It won't run all of the programs that people use. For them, the alternatives are Windows or a Mac.
When's the last time you or anyone you know paid for linux? Or linux support? Consumer linux is never going to make money. Look at the latest feeble attempt - rebadging an obsolete $120 Zenithing C71 tablet and trying to sell it for $260 as a KDE tablet. You can tell the dev lives in Calgary - he has brain freeze. Worse, his promotional video is a fake - it was done on a 14" or 15" laptop, not a 7" tablet. And yet people "oh" and "ah" - and we wonder why we're labeled freetards???
As for updates to Windows systems, I had a series of updates trash both my opensuse systems - and I'm not alone. One of my friends (who didn't make the mistake of upgrading to 12.1) has had the same buggy updates turn his computer into a box that can only run one program at a time. If he's running Thunderbird, he has to exit it before he starts firefox, or the machine reboots. When he wants to write an email, he has to boot into Windows so he can have both a browser and libreoffice open at the same time. Why? Because open source is too often just crap.
Grab the source for the programs that make up a distro and compile it from scratch. I did that last month. The number of compiler warnings for stupid, completely avoidable problems (comparison between signed and unsigned, invalid comparisons between types, comparison always yields true, invalid type, bad pointer, conversion from blah blah blah, etc.) - it's not just eye-opening, it's shocking.
Or take programs that you think run okay, and instead of launching them by a clicky, do so from a terminal - and watch the error messages flow.
In the end it doesn't matter - there won't be a single disto left with any decent following a decade from now - everyone will just go online, pick a build service, pick the packages they want, the customizations, and download their own personal distro - or mix and match however they want. Crap like Shuttleworth betraying his user base in a desperate attempt to try to monetize his investment will be a thing of the past. Good riddance. The sooner he leaves, the better for everyone else.
Then again, this is the year Canonical officially starts dying. January was the whole UbuntuTV fiasco. The same CES show they intro a tv that they're running code they downloaded from samygo.tv on a rooted samsung, Lenovo shows up with a tv running Android 4.0, facial and voice recognition, motion detection, etc.
This week was the semi-official abandoning of both Kubuntu and Xubuntu.
What's coming for March? The answer to that one is easy - who cares? Shuttleworth will continue to make announcements like a kid with ADHD on a sugar rush, and people will continue to go "yeah, yeah, whatever ..."
Irrelevant. That's like a white guy going around using the N word because blacks do it among themselves. Why don't you try it and let us know how it works out.
I guess I wasn't the only one who got burned ... used opensuse from 9.0 to 11.4, then the upgrade to 12.1 ate my email. Even a wipe and re-install didn't fix the problems ... so I switched to Fedora (and was happy to find that there's no xorg.conf file to mess around with when switching between single and dual monitors - it's all done with autodetection at boot time). Just make sure that you type selinux=0 on the install kernel options line or you will be sorry - "selinux broke upgrade" returns lots of results.
Since when has Canonical "focused" on anything? They're the ADHD of the linux world. Big announcements, then a year later more big announcements about something else. Look what's been abandoned in the last few years - their "android execution environment" - dead. Tablets that were supposed to be on store shelves last year? Dead. Smartphones. Dead.
Their latest - UbuntuTV? It's stillborne, upstaged at CES by LenovoTV, which supports the latest android, facial and voice recognition, comes with a "normal" remote with motion sensors and multi-touch swipe pad, and a second game controller, etc. and, unlike UbuntuTV, is going into production and will be sold in China starting in April.
This is just Shuttleworth finally realizing that he made a mistake, that this is one venture capital deal that is never going to be sold to anyone for half a billion.
Actually, no, they didn't. It says they were closing in on that point - and since then, they've lost the Dell OEM netbook market.
The reason for the headcount is financial. If they were profitable, there'd really be no reason to cut one of the distro and help stem the flow of people abandoning Ubuntu. The fact is that every product they've announced since that article has been a dud - their music store (turns out it's not even theirs), their initial cloud offering (again not theirs - just a rebandged Amazon deal), the android execution environment (abandoned), tablets (abandoned), cell phones (abandoned), and the latest fiasco - UbuntuTV (code ripped from samygo.tv that anyone can use to install any linux distro on samsung tvs) - announced at the same show where Lenovo was showing off 55" Android Ice Cream Sandwich TVs with facial and speech recognition, remote with motion and multi-touch sensors, etc.
Expect more cuts.