Seriously, most self declared "Windows Experts" have no idea what you are talking about. You are talking about the very few who actually know what they are talking about.
"In fact often those Linux admins are far better at administrating windows systems then your typical windoze admin."
That's actually something I refused to believe. The most "modern" Version of Windows I've used was Windows XP, and I even barely did anything with it. Yet recently I was working with someone who earned his money fixing Windows. We ran into a fairly trivial problem, the owner of some files was set wrong so you couldn't access it via the network. The Windows person didn't know how to fix it. I had to look it up and found the way to do it. (believe me it's absolutely counter intuitive, you need to enable something in the dialog where you set how file listings look like)
I always find it hard to believe that there are people working in IT on Windows systems out there knowing even _less_ about Windows than I do.
No, in the instances companies and organisations switched from Windows to Linux the support cost went _down_ not up. There's plenty of good reasons for that, like the ability to not only remotely log into such machines, but also the ability to script that. Or the idea of a package manager where you can do updates of _all_ your software automatically. Or the idea that all configuration is stored in text files which are trivial to edit and fix if something goes wrong.
One if the more extreme examples is currently seen. Microsoft dropped support for Windows XP... without providing a successor. Now many companies are faced with switching to Windows 7 only to be faced with the same problem in a few years. If Windows XP would have been free (as in speech) software, they could have just gradually replaced parts of it with newer versions, making the change gradual instead of abrupt, maybe even keeping some parts for compatibility.
Free Software isn't dependent on single organisations or persons. Just look at Ubuntu. If you don't like Unity, switch to Xubuntu or Kubuntu. If you don't like Shuttleworth switch to Debian. You'll have (more or less) the same software on all of those, but you have a choice.
Well simple, because we as a society have decided that such a TV would be quite anti-competitive.
The point is this, the society is there to limit what companies can do so they will serve the greater good. If you don't do that you'll end up with "Objectivism" where everybody acts selfish causing messes like the the one the US is in right now.
Actually there are limits to what Google can sell already. Their products must conform to FCC regulations, they must not give you electrical shocks, they must not contain certain harmful materials, etc. There is lots of sensible regulation out there. It would be trivial to enforce a certain level of freedom of the user. And it would be vital for the future, particularly with technology getting more and more into our daily lives.
Think about this: I can buy a TV set and own it 100% I can do everything I want with it. That doesn't mean I own the TV station. The TV station has no right to enforce me to make sure my TV set will only be able to receive their channel.
If you sell a product which requires a service, you have to make the interface to that service open to everyone so that everyone can provide a similar service which is accessible by the product. That would be a sensible regulation.
Yes, that's my point, it's my right to own it therefore I should demand it. Payment without transfer of ownership should be illegal. It's a fault in the laws that this is even possible.
Yes, but I'm paying for the device, I have paid for it's development and production. It is only natural that I demand to own it so I can run any software on it I wish to and that I have no artificial hurdles in the process.
Yes, but why doesn't Google free that protocol so you can run your own servers? I mean just being able to choose my own backend would make that thing much less problematic.
Sure not everybody will run their own servers, but I could choose to not trust Google but trust perhaps the local computer club running such a system.
The problem is that it's not running Free Software (as in speech). Such glasses deal with the private data of not only it's wearer, but also other people. Therefore it's of utmost importance that society, in form of at least the people having bought it, can decide what it does.
This clashes with the idea of it running Android which is just Open Source, but not Free Software. You cannot quickly modify your Android, every change is a fairly lengthy process involving the creation of an image and often even finding binary blobs for non-standard hardware and the circumvention of a "secure" boot loader.
So where does that lead us to? A device which watches us all, which sends much of that data to central services provided by Google, where that data will most likely be stored and can most likely be accessed by law enforcement agencies.
Google Glass is the best example why we need Free Software on those device, otherwise it will become a privacy nightmare. If we don't draw the line here, just think how future prostetics will be. Do you really want some company to decide what your brain implant will be able to do?
Yes, but it's not like there is any demand for good engineers. Companies have learned that it's good enough to just re-package old technology. Certain US companies have shown that innovation is not necessary for success.
Particularly in Germany there's now also a problem of horribly bad management. This leads into anybody who can leave leaving, the rest that stays behind is sub standard and makes even worse decisions increasing the problem.
Here they admit they don't understand the Internet, by limiting incomming "connections" and acting if there was a difference between a server and a client. It's a testament that freedom and education are now less important than stupidity and the fear of imaginary dangers.
Actually Steve Jobs probably turned Apple into one of those companies just looking for cheap labor. Apparently he managed his company preety much top down. His decisions were right, others were wrong. I would assume that this was quite demotivating for the engineers, and that this was the reason for the demise of engineering quality Apple had during the Jobs era.
Currently many people see computers as magical boxes they don't believe they can understand. (or believe they already do, which is worse)
If you teach children how to code they will understand what computers are, how they work. They will understand that Facebook privacy settings don't mean a thing to Facebook as they will always be able to access the data, that copy protection is not possible in principle, and that democratic elections using computers (and machines) are impossible.
In a democracy everyone needs to have some fair understanding on how the world works. What the "Tech Leaders" don't understand is that their success was based on people being stupid.
The problem here is that reviewers don't understand it, just like they didn't understand Maemo/Meego.
If we are lucky, you have a full-blown Ubuntu/Debian below the surface, meaning you can do everything with it you can also do with a Debian box. Now _that_ would be a big advantage over the rest. You'd just make it boot into some sane user interface and do everything you want to do.
Spreadsheets were just a solution for people who couldn't program. If you want to have a grid of input fields and program around it, look for Lazarus. It's a rapid development environment primarily aimed at GUI applications. It's platform independent so you can compile (and I mean compile to native machine code!) to the usual platforms like Linux, MacOSX and even Windows. Apparently it even works for Android and Windows CE, but I haven't tried that yet.
True, well "ARM" could take that position, or maybe Google.
One should also say that the software companies also kept the hardware coherent. If you, for example, wanted to bring out a PC without backwards compatible graphics hardware, you'd simply have no software for it.
Actually IBM set the perfect example. In response to the clones they developed their PS/2 line. They were designed to be deliberately incompatible with normal PC parts, as well as having a new bus, the MCA. It did still run MS-Dos or Windows or OS/2, so it was software compatible, even games ran on it. Needless to say it failed. Nobody wanted to have a proprietary system for which a network card costs multiple times as much as for the competitors. Needless to say it failed miserably, even though there were considerably better.
A common hardware platform means that you have actual competition. Compaq, for example built an IBM compatible into a portable case for the same price as IBM. Plus you could use all your normal peripherals.
Well it actually would have changed things. Instead of having to port Android to every little device, which is extremely time consuming, you'd just need to compile it once. And you wouldn't even have needed drivers for all your hardware. Android at least allows you to do that, but in reality you'll still be faced with closed source SoC vendor proprietary drivers. It's just a lot of wasted resources.
So far I don't see much competition between different SoCs, you select one and have to stay with it since going to another one is to much effort for most projects. Please name positive aspects of the competition you see there, don't just state they somehow exist.
Disclaimer: I'm going to use "PC" in a very sloppy sense, meaning any 386-derivative system which can, in theory, run DOS-games or a standard Linux distribution from scratch.
I wouldn't say so. It's been upgraded from, essentially a "home computer" with 64k RAM to something which now spans everything from larger embedded systems to huge server farms. Just keep in mind that only in the 1990s it would have been impossible to run a high performance webserver on a PC. Today special "PC"-architecture servers are the norm.
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Since DRM costs me money I would pay more for the DRM-free version.
It's designed to do so, and has proven itself in wireless community mesh networks.
Seriously, most self declared "Windows Experts" have no idea what you are talking about. You are talking about the very few who actually know what they are talking about.
You're funny :)
"In fact often those Linux admins are far better at administrating windows systems then your typical windoze admin."
That's actually something I refused to believe. The most "modern" Version of Windows I've used was Windows XP, and I even barely did anything with it. Yet recently I was working with someone who earned his money fixing Windows. We ran into a fairly trivial problem, the owner of some files was set wrong so you couldn't access it via the network. The Windows person didn't know how to fix it. I had to look it up and found the way to do it. (believe me it's absolutely counter intuitive, you need to enable something in the dialog where you set how file listings look like)
I always find it hard to believe that there are people working in IT on Windows systems out there knowing even _less_ about Windows than I do.
No, in the instances companies and organisations switched from Windows to Linux the support cost went _down_ not up. There's plenty of good reasons for that, like the ability to not only remotely log into such machines, but also the ability to script that. Or the idea of a package manager where you can do updates of _all_ your software automatically. Or the idea that all configuration is stored in text files which are trivial to edit and fix if something goes wrong.
One if the more extreme examples is currently seen. Microsoft dropped support for Windows XP... without providing a successor. Now many companies are faced with switching to Windows 7 only to be faced with the same problem in a few years. If Windows XP would have been free (as in speech) software, they could have just gradually replaced parts of it with newer versions, making the change gradual instead of abrupt, maybe even keeping some parts for compatibility.
Free Software isn't dependent on single organisations or persons. Just look at Ubuntu. If you don't like Unity, switch to Xubuntu or Kubuntu. If you don't like Shuttleworth switch to Debian. You'll have (more or less) the same software on all of those, but you have a choice.
Well simple, because we as a society have decided that such a TV would be quite anti-competitive.
The point is this, the society is there to limit what companies can do so they will serve the greater good. If you don't do that you'll end up with "Objectivism" where everybody acts selfish causing messes like the the one the US is in right now.
Actually there are limits to what Google can sell already. Their products must conform to FCC regulations, they must not give you electrical shocks, they must not contain certain harmful materials, etc. There is lots of sensible regulation out there. It would be trivial to enforce a certain level of freedom of the user. And it would be vital for the future, particularly with technology getting more and more into our daily lives.
Think about this: I can buy a TV set and own it 100% I can do everything I want with it. That doesn't mean I own the TV station. The TV station has no right to enforce me to make sure my TV set will only be able to receive their channel.
If you sell a product which requires a service, you have to make the interface to that service open to everyone so that everyone can provide a similar service which is accessible by the product. That would be a sensible regulation.
Yes, and changing that should be a high legislative priority.
Yes, that's my point, it's my right to own it therefore I should demand it. Payment without transfer of ownership should be illegal. It's a fault in the laws that this is even possible.
Yes, but I'm paying for the device, I have paid for it's development and production. It is only natural that I demand to own it so I can run any software on it I wish to and that I have no artificial hurdles in the process.
Yes, but why doesn't Google free that protocol so you can run your own servers? I mean just being able to choose my own backend would make that thing much less problematic.
Sure not everybody will run their own servers, but I could choose to not trust Google but trust perhaps the local computer club running such a system.
The problem is that it's not running Free Software (as in speech). Such glasses deal with the private data of not only it's wearer, but also other people. Therefore it's of utmost importance that society, in form of at least the people having bought it, can decide what it does.
This clashes with the idea of it running Android which is just Open Source, but not Free Software. You cannot quickly modify your Android, every change is a fairly lengthy process involving the creation of an image and often even finding binary blobs for non-standard hardware and the circumvention of a "secure" boot loader.
So where does that lead us to? A device which watches us all, which sends much of that data to central services provided by Google, where that data will most likely be stored and can most likely be accessed by law enforcement agencies.
Google Glass is the best example why we need Free Software on those device, otherwise it will become a privacy nightmare. If we don't draw the line here, just think how future prostetics will be. Do you really want some company to decide what your brain implant will be able to do?
Yes, but it's not like there is any demand for good engineers. Companies have learned that it's good enough to just re-package old technology.
Certain US companies have shown that innovation is not necessary for success.
Particularly in Germany there's now also a problem of horribly bad management. This leads into anybody who can leave leaving, the rest that stays behind is sub standard and makes even worse decisions increasing the problem.
Here they admit they don't understand the Internet, by limiting incomming "connections" and acting if there was a difference between a server and a client. It's a testament that freedom and education are now less important than stupidity and the fear of imaginary dangers.
Actually Steve Jobs probably turned Apple into one of those companies just looking for cheap labor. Apparently he managed his company preety much top down. His decisions were right, others were wrong. I would assume that this was quite demotivating for the engineers, and that this was the reason for the demise of engineering quality Apple had during the Jobs era.
A few weeks back I applied at a company doing exactly that as a demo many years ago.
Currently many people see computers as magical boxes they don't believe they can understand. (or believe they already do, which is worse)
If you teach children how to code they will understand what computers are, how they work. They will understand that Facebook privacy settings don't mean a thing to Facebook as they will always be able to access the data, that copy protection is not possible in principle, and that democratic elections using computers (and machines) are impossible.
In a democracy everyone needs to have some fair understanding on how the world works. What the "Tech Leaders" don't understand is that their success was based on people being stupid.
The problem here is that reviewers don't understand it, just like they didn't understand Maemo/Meego.
If we are lucky, you have a full-blown Ubuntu/Debian below the surface, meaning you can do everything with it you can also do with a Debian box. Now _that_ would be a big advantage over the rest. You'd just make it boot into some sane user interface and do everything you want to do.
It would be a real Linux then.
Spreadsheets were just a solution for people who couldn't program. If you want to have a grid of input fields and program around it, look for Lazarus. It's a rapid development environment primarily aimed at GUI applications. It's platform independent so you can compile (and I mean compile to native machine code!) to the usual platforms like Linux, MacOSX and even Windows. Apparently it even works for Android and Windows CE, but I haven't tried that yet.
True, well "ARM" could take that position, or maybe Google.
One should also say that the software companies also kept the hardware coherent. If you, for example, wanted to bring out a PC without backwards compatible graphics hardware, you'd simply have no software for it.
Actually IBM set the perfect example. In response to the clones they developed their PS/2 line. They were designed to be deliberately incompatible with normal PC parts, as well as having a new bus, the MCA. It did still run MS-Dos or Windows or OS/2, so it was software compatible, even games ran on it.
Needless to say it failed. Nobody wanted to have a proprietary system for which a network card costs multiple times as much as for the competitors. Needless to say it failed miserably, even though there were considerably better.
A common hardware platform means that you have actual competition. Compaq, for example built an IBM compatible into a portable case for the same price as IBM. Plus you could use all your normal peripherals.
Why remember? Those still exist. How else would you get a 4 socket mainboard? (that's 4 CPU sockets, each one with its own RAM)
Well it actually would have changed things. Instead of having to port Android to every little device, which is extremely time consuming, you'd just need to compile it once. And you wouldn't even have needed drivers for all your hardware.
Android at least allows you to do that, but in reality you'll still be faced with closed source SoC vendor proprietary drivers. It's just a lot of wasted resources.
So far I don't see much competition between different SoCs, you select one and have to stay with it since going to another one is to much effort for most projects. Please name positive aspects of the competition you see there, don't just state they somehow exist.
Disclaimer: I'm going to use "PC" in a very sloppy sense, meaning any 386-derivative system which can, in theory, run DOS-games or a standard Linux distribution from scratch.
I wouldn't say so. It's been upgraded from, essentially a "home computer" with 64k RAM to something which now spans everything from larger embedded systems to huge server farms. Just keep in mind that only in the 1990s it would have been impossible to run a high performance webserver on a PC. Today special "PC"-architecture servers are the norm.