"The path to hell is paved with good intensions" and this applies to Engineers almost more than other people as they are in a position to actually create hell.
1. Creating an parameter map for the engine management system is a good thing. It allows the performance of the engine to be tuned, where all of the possible values are stored in one place where they can easily be changed and also tweeked during production. 2. Allowing several parameter maps which are linked to environmental conditions also makes sense. Vehicle speed, temperature, pressure are all possible inputs, and it wouldn't make much sense to limit this list. The more environmental inputs the better, right? 3. There would also be some testing to see how green the engine could be made to run, and a suitable parameter map produced. Why wouldn't you? It might be great and give you a great competative advantage. 4. You want to sell in different markets that have different environmental requirements. Best leave all of the maps in the software so that it doesnt need to be changed. 5. We need to have the car tested by the USA EPA for emissions before we can sell it there, but there is still some more work on the software that needs to be done.. thats ok. Load the car up with the software so that when it is tested it gets the 'right' map and passes. We don't want to delay the launch of our new model with new diesal engine. 6. Work done.. software complete. Lets not remove the EPA code, its too risky and we might break something else... and by the way, the guy that new that bit of the code has moved onto another project.
I'm not saying that this is what happened, but may be how some small steps led to this situation.
Without buying the Forrester report, it's hard to know what exactly the article is commenting on. On the other hand there are some real reasons why Linux is going to continue to find it difficult to obtain more acceptance in Australasia.. although I guess the problems will be more Australian then New Zealand.
- Bundling of Microsoft Operating System with new PC Hardware.
It is not possible for the public to by a PC (including laptops) from any of the mainline retail outlets without Microsoft Windows on it. Individuals can buy parts and assemble their own PC without paying the 'Microsoft Tax' but don't expect any system support. I have used Intel Celeron systems that have been sold as 'working systems' which appear to operate fine under Microsoft XP, but systematically lock up under Linux when stress tested. (This makes Linux look bad.)
- Microsoft Licensing in Education Sector (Schools etc.)
In some places in Australia, it is rumoured that the Windows licensing arrangements for an educational institutions is done on a per PC bases, whether that PC is running Windows, Mac OSX, BSD or Linux. (I'm happy to be proved wrong...) This means that there is no monetory advantage to Schools installing anything else other than Microsoft Networks. These licensing arrangements are negotiated state-by-state, rather than school-by-school.
- System Administrators in Schools
These are typically teachers who have (off their own back) taken on this role. They do what they know. The installation and configuration of computers is given to the lowest bidding service provider, and the typical installation today is Microsoft XP and Ghost.
There are exceptions though, but it needs support from the Education adminstrators to remove barriers (see previous point).
- Business Solution Providers
These people are generally not interested in providing anything that would company specific. Australian providers (business services, telecommunications) are generally lazy and will generally on-sell a foriegn solution then invest in a local product. There are, as always, exceptions, but these companies have to work particular hard to prosper.
- Lack of local promotion of OSS and Linux Solutions
There are no brand name companies in Australia who have gotten behind Linux in any meaningful way to Mr and Ms Jo Bloggs on the street. At no time are they given a choise, or presented with an alternative to the status quo, and the media is happy to promote the next round of anti-viral and anti-spyware products, when one option is to use a system that doesn't require these 'fixes'.
(There are possibly a lot more reasons..)
All this means that there is a huge gap between those that use, develop and understand FLOSS software in the community, and the business, education and public decision makers. Hopefully the Gardiner report had something to say about this as well.
In the same way that subscribers see articles before thay are released, allow 'friends' or 'friends of friends' to see a users submitted articles, and allow them to 'second' the article (or rank it) while it is in the submission queue.
In the Sydney 2000 Olympics I worked as a volunteer in the Sports Results section in Adelaide, South Australia. We had 6 of the football (soccer) matches and one final.
Our small team had to: - Print the start lists of players when they came through
at beginning of the matches - (Watch the game.. a perk) - Print the results of all the matches played around
Austalia at the end.
The printouts (100's) were then run out to the various people who needed them around the venue. eg. Game Results, Media, Olympic Family (VIP's)
It was a low tech result, but it relied on IBM software for the print jobs, and was centrally managed/controlled on their network. Everything went through Sydney.
I don't know what would have happened if the network had failed, other than we also had been given a Fax machine as a backup.
It was a good experience, and FLOSS should be able to bring somethign to the table...
W
Adsense- I'm afraid, and fear Google is broken.
on
Who's Afraid of Google?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Earlier in the year I had my Google AdSense account suspended because of illegal clicks. It was against their policy and I acknowledge that.. BUT (the long story)
- The ads. that Adsense was serving to my community website
were irrelvent to the audience of my site. I had informed Google
of this and were told changes were in the pipeline.. for over a year.
- I tried several methods to get more relevent ads. displayed, including
removing words from the site that triggered particular ads (like
'maillist' and 'email') and adding particular advertisers to the
blacklist (which was limited to 200). [Why should I have to modify
my website to get Google ads. to work for me, other than to enable them
in the first place? ]
If I could make the ads. relevent to my audience, then this would help
bring more visitors, and I could also approach advertisers and promote
AdWords to relevent businesses.. a win,win,win situation (The customer,
The company, and myself.)
This didn't happen!
- In despiraton (and nothing else to do) I clicked on the ads. myself. At least
then it would make some money, make someone pay, and hopefully get some
different ads. displayed.
After 6 months, Google contacted me to say that my Adsense account had been disabled, ironically the day after I had been informed about the site target advertising (the feature that I had been waiting for).
A request to re-activate my AdSense account was refused. The revenue prevously received from Google had been small, and only one payment had ever been made (the minimal amount). An offer to payback even this amount, in order to get the account reactivated was also refused.
(I could have very easily opened another Adsense account under a different name/address, but this would not have helped Google and was not the point.)
So.. my point?
- Adsense seems to be run out of the UK (was it purchased?), and seems to have a different ethos to the 'do no evil' US operation, as much as they try to be the same comapny.
- While Adsense has taken a strong stance on illigal clicks, there is no appeal process to the decisions that they are making. They have made up their mind, and they didn't care why.
As Google gets larger, and buys/develops more customer facing businesses, rather than technology, this situation will only get worse, and more scary.
The Google Summer of Code fitted in with northern hemisphere student timetables.. what about Southern Hemisphere students?
- South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Brazil, New Zealand, and Brazil (no particular order, and by no means exclusive) are some of the countries that would have students that could participate.
Maybe Canonical/Ubuntu could run a Southern Hemisphere Summer of Code? or, in the spirit of open source and open markets, southern hemisphere students can hook into Ubuntu's bounty program.
Introduce them to the GNU Toolchain, and compiling for different architectures. Show them examples where the code can run on Intel, and PowerPC (for example).
Have an assessment where they are required to contribute something (it could be anything) and get them to decide what Licence they would like to use (and explain why)... get others in the class to 'peer review' the work and comment/make changes. (It could be anything... from code, to documentation, graphics or audio.)
You asked for suggestions on what to take... and I would suggest that the most important thing is that everyone starts with the correct attitude. I applaud your efforts. You've also given yourself enough time to set yourselves up properly, and enjoy the adventure, as well as help people.
My tips:
- Think about the skills of people currently in your team. Make sure everything is covered by atleast one person. One of the good things about these sorts of trips is the ability to learn new skills from each other. Pair people up for the various tasks.
- Don't allow untrained people to come in at the last moment. If people are going to be committed to the task, they will commit now. This is not the say that people can't join you team later, but they should be there to fill a specific need.
- Look after the team. Designate a 2IC who can keep an eye open for probelem that you may miss.
Some other suggestions:
- Information: Do a recon. Get to know the people, the area and the work that you will be doing. Take two others and visit, if you can. (eg. Work out if you'll need that chainsaw or not, or that extra can of fuel). This will make the trip itself start a whole lot better.
- Be prepared to have to leave early, or take someone out. (eg. Take 2 vehicles, rather than a minibus).
Depending on what your manager is most concerned about, this is a good opportunity to use the GPL licence to waylay any business continuity related fears.
IANAL but create a contract which says that:
- Any code that you create or modify is your original property as the author as laid out in copyright law.
- Any code or patches that you create for use by the company, are licenced to the company under a GPL, LGPL or BSD type licence. (This will probably depend on the software you are modifying.) This ensures that the business will always have access to the code thay they use, and can employ someone else to continue your work, should you get 'hit by a bus'.
This does not address any 'strategic' business concerns though, which big businesses seem to be most worried about. Business issues of a strategic nature (competitors getting access to the code, you running off to start your own competing) have not been adequately addressed in the the Open Source vs. Free Software debate, as old as it is. IBM seems to be one comapany willing to look at this seriously.
Having worked for a (failed) IT start-up that was anal about IP protection, my personally opinion is that a business needs to get their fundamental (and money making) operations right first. This leads to companies which are sustainable and actually care about their customers, which is a good thing. This is what you seem to be doing.
In just the same way that there were various 3rd party dock appliances for the dockable iPods (external speakers etc.) I'm going to suggested that keeping the iPod nano simple, and small, will enable other dockable hardware to be produced to add the functionality that people seem to be asking for.
eg. Video - Create a module which has a larger colour screen, but when combined with the IPod nano has a similar size of the original IPod.
Bluetooth expansion - can be used as a 'store' for photos captured by a camera or phone.
The article cites older examples of where Linux is currently being used in the business world. It's originally information probably came from IBM or other commertial Linux vendors (this is the feel of the article, and presumably the report).
Linux is going to make the 'mainstream' in a whole lot of other areas that are going to become very important to big business, just at data processing, email and web has become. It that it is already starting to happen, and the desktop and server are part of it.
The beauty of linux is that all of previous work, but vendors and businesses isn't lost in the process. What's on the Mainframe today can be used on the desktop of the future.
Areas to look out for: - Telephony - VoIP and associated call handling and voicemail messaging. - Distributed data handling and processing - enhancing the bittorrent model to enable easy persistant distributed network storage (google does this).
3) Using up FLOSS resources. OSDL may have some resources, but I suspect that Microsoft would love to have them used up in a 'collaboration' that ends up going nowhere, rather than being used to significantly improve Linux.
If the device is able to automaticaly detect and mount disks (until it get designed with a harddrive) and work with other USB peripherals (sound card) then it would be very attractive as a 'quick office'.
This may even kick-start a 'PC market' where the PC itself is quite a low powered unit, and processing power and IO is added via these types of removable peripherals.
I can see a suite of Low-end PC's which do the barest minimum, but which can be temporarily 'upgraded' to the users needs.
This may even extend to 'handheld displays' (eg. Nokia Internet Table if it had a USB host port) also providing the user interface.
Will a PC of the future just be a 'smart USB hub'?
There are also many other significant open source projects, such as Debian and Ubuntu, that serve active user and development communities. Generally speaking, these open source projects focus on engineering-centric issues that serve their technical community of Linux developers and users.
The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux.... (snip)...
Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience.
As a rebuttle.. I am an incredibly happy user of Ubuntu, and I have seen non-technical users also enjoy using it, whether this is via TheOpenCD (now a Ubuntu LiveCD), or on a Ubuntu desktop.
Ubuntu's user community is also actively refining the distribution for the Education market (edubuntu) and additional usability through KDE (keduntu), and well as on different hardware architectures (eg. the Mac Mini).
While there is always room of another specifically customised and targeted distribution, broad sweeping statements like the above just don't hold.
Novell's SUSE and openSUSE are aimed at providing an easy to use and maintain, site-wide contant installation base. These goals are good for corporate environments (business and non-business alike), but there are other ways. It will be interesting to see how Novell seeks to control the outcomes of openSUSE, as it attempts to let go of control at the same time.
I can see a use for such a 'watchdog' process running on my systems.
It could be trained to react in certain ways, like shutting ports, killing processes or rate-limiting, should it see some sort of pattern of activity (eg. port scan, slashdotting).
Having it participate in a dialog would be cool as well though, just don't give it the keys to the nuclear silos.
I agree with this (and I don't necessarity agree with the parent being a troll).
In the long term, the Mac hardware aught to get Linux (or another FLOSS OS) installed on it anyway for several good reasons:
- Apple will charge to upgrade it with more
shiny mac software; - Mac hardware is well engineered,
reliable and will last a reasonable
amount of time (forever?); - Dual booting is really annoying on server
class (always on) hardware. - When Apple moves to Intel based hardware it
will cost them more continue to support older
hardware. - Ubuntu installs very easily - Linux is Free (both reasons).
So if the hardware works, why delay the inevitable?
Paul - A happy owner of an iMac Mini running Ubuntu.
I've just installed Ubuntu on a Mac Mini... Reason? - Excellent (reliable) hardware, with a vast software base that's rapidly getting better, with 6 monthly stable releases.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a look at the Serval Project. http://www.servalproject.org
Requires rooted Android Phone
"The path to hell is paved with good intensions" and this applies to Engineers almost more than other people as they are in a position to actually create hell.
1. Creating an parameter map for the engine management system is a good thing. It allows the performance of the engine to be tuned, where all of the possible values are stored in one place where they can easily be changed and also tweeked during production.
2. Allowing several parameter maps which are linked to environmental conditions also makes sense. Vehicle speed, temperature, pressure are all possible inputs, and it wouldn't make much sense to limit this list. The more environmental inputs the better, right?
3. There would also be some testing to see how green the engine could be made to run, and a suitable parameter map produced. Why wouldn't you? It might be great and give you a great competative advantage.
4. You want to sell in different markets that have different environmental requirements. Best leave all of the maps in the software so that it doesnt need to be changed.
5. We need to have the car tested by the USA EPA for emissions before we can sell it there, but there is still some more work on the software that needs to be done.. thats ok. Load the car up with the software so that when it is tested it gets the 'right' map and passes. We don't want to delay the launch of our new model with new diesal engine.
6. Work done.. software complete. Lets not remove the EPA code, its too risky and we might break something else... and by the way, the guy that new that bit of the code has moved onto another project.
I'm not saying that this is what happened, but may be how some small steps led to this situation.
... then find out who wrote the code and audit all of their other project contributions. Just saying.
Read this a long time ago and just recently figured out what the title was.. not sure where you would find it though. Full of Unix puns.
Find an industry that would otherwise need a gas fired boiler and on-sell the heat.
Other options:
- Heated public swimming pool
- Source of community/public heating
Git and the git-web web based tool are very useful for maintaining a tree of archived data, and browsing it.
Just received a Resume for a C Developer position, in docx format. Pity we can't open it.
The advertisement also specifically said that job applicants will only be contacted if they make the short list
Without buying the Forrester report, it's hard to know what exactly the article is commenting on. On the other hand there are some real reasons why Linux is going to continue to find it difficult to obtain more acceptance in Australasia.. although I guess the problems will be more Australian then New Zealand.
- Bundling of Microsoft Operating System with new PC Hardware.
It is not possible for the public to by a PC (including laptops) from any of the mainline retail outlets without Microsoft Windows on it. Individuals can buy parts and assemble their own PC without paying the 'Microsoft Tax' but don't expect any system support. I have used Intel Celeron systems that have been sold as 'working systems' which appear to operate fine under Microsoft XP, but systematically lock up under Linux when stress tested. (This makes Linux look bad.)
- Microsoft Licensing in Education Sector (Schools etc.)
In some places in Australia, it is rumoured that the Windows licensing arrangements for an educational institutions is done on a per PC bases, whether that PC is running Windows, Mac OSX, BSD or Linux. (I'm happy to be proved wrong...) This means that there is no monetory advantage to Schools installing anything else other than Microsoft Networks. These licensing arrangements are negotiated state-by-state, rather than school-by-school.
- System Administrators in Schools
These are typically teachers who have (off their own back) taken on this role. They do what they know. The installation and configuration of computers is given to the lowest bidding service provider, and the typical installation today is Microsoft XP and Ghost.
There are exceptions though, but it needs support from the Education adminstrators to remove barriers (see previous point).
- Business Solution Providers
These people are generally not interested in providing anything that would company specific. Australian providers (business services, telecommunications) are generally lazy and will generally on-sell a foriegn solution then invest in a local product. There are, as always, exceptions, but these companies have to work particular hard to prosper.
- Lack of local promotion of OSS and Linux Solutions
There are no brand name companies in Australia who have gotten behind Linux in any meaningful way to Mr and Ms Jo Bloggs on the street. At no time are they given a choise, or presented with an alternative to the status quo, and the media is happy to promote the next round of anti-viral and anti-spyware products, when one option is to use a system that doesn't require these 'fixes'.
(There are possibly a lot more reasons..)
All this means that there is a huge gap between those that use, develop and understand FLOSS software in the community, and the business, education and public decision makers. Hopefully the Gardiner report had something to say about this as well.
Just my $0.02 worth.
Distribute the solution.
In the same way that subscribers see articles before thay are released, allow
'friends' or 'friends of friends' to see a users submitted articles, and allow them to 'second' the article (or rank it) while it is in the submission queue.
In the Sydney 2000 Olympics I worked as a volunteer in
the Sports Results section in Adelaide, South Australia.
We had 6 of the football (soccer) matches and one final.
Our small team had to:
- Print the start lists of players when they came through
at beginning of the matches
- (Watch the game.. a perk)
- Print the results of all the matches played around
Austalia at the end.
The printouts (100's) were then run out to the various
people who needed them around the venue. eg. Game Results,
Media, Olympic Family (VIP's)
It was a low tech result, but it relied on IBM software
for the print jobs, and was centrally managed/controlled
on their network. Everything went through Sydney.
I don't know what would have happened if the network
had failed, other than we also had been given a Fax machine
as a backup.
It was a good experience, and FLOSS should be able to bring
somethign to the table...
W
Earlier in the year I had my Google AdSense account suspended because of
illegal clicks. It was against their policy and I acknowledge that..
BUT (the long story)
- The ads. that Adsense was serving to my community website
were irrelvent to the audience of my site. I had informed Google
of this and were told changes were in the pipeline.. for over a year.
- I tried several methods to get more relevent ads. displayed, including
removing words from the site that triggered particular ads (like
'maillist' and 'email') and adding particular advertisers to the
blacklist (which was limited to 200). [Why should I have to modify
my website to get Google ads. to work for me, other than to enable them
in the first place? ]
If I could make the ads. relevent to my audience, then this would help
bring more visitors, and I could also approach advertisers and promote
AdWords to relevent businesses.. a win,win,win situation (The customer,
The company, and myself.)
This didn't happen!
- In despiraton (and nothing else to do) I clicked on the ads. myself. At least
then it would make some money, make someone pay, and hopefully get some
different ads. displayed.
After 6 months, Google contacted me to say that my Adsense account had
been disabled, ironically the day after I had been informed
about the site target advertising (the feature that I had been waiting for).
A request to re-activate my AdSense account was refused. The revenue
prevously received from Google had been small, and only one payment
had ever been made (the minimal amount). An offer to payback even this amount, in order to get the account reactivated was also refused.
(I could have very easily opened another Adsense account under a different
name/address, but this would not have helped Google and was not the point.)
So.. my point?
- Adsense seems to be run out of the UK (was it purchased?), and seems to have
a different ethos to the 'do no evil' US operation, as much as they try to
be the same comapny.
- While Adsense has taken a strong stance on illigal clicks, there is no appeal process to the decisions that they are making. They have made up their mind,
and they didn't care why.
As Google gets larger, and buys/develops more customer facing businesses,
rather than technology, this situation will only get worse, and more scary.
The Google Summer of Code fitted in with northern hemisphere student
r chterm=bounty
timetables.. what about Southern Hemisphere students?
- South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Brazil, New Zealand,
and Brazil (no particular order, and by no means exclusive) are some of the
countries that would have students that could participate.
Maybe Canonical/Ubuntu could run a Southern Hemisphere Summer of Code?
or, in the spirit of open source and open markets, southern hemisphere students
can hook into Ubuntu's bounty program.
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/bounties/view?sea
A 'do it yourself' summer of code... anyone want to sponsor the T-shirts?
(As mentioned) Give lots of real world examples.
- Sourceforge projects
- Ubuntu
Introduce them to the GNU Toolchain, and compiling for different architectures. Show them examples where the code can run on Intel, and PowerPC (for example).
Have an assessment where they are required to contribute something (it could be anything) and get them to decide what Licence they would like to use (and explain why)... get others in the class to 'peer review' the work and comment/make changes. (It could be anything... from code, to documentation, graphics or audio.)
You asked for suggestions on what to take... and I would suggest that the most important thing is that everyone starts with the correct attitude. I applaud your efforts. You've also given yourself enough time to set yourselves up properly, and enjoy the adventure, as well as help people.
My tips:
- Think about the skills of people currently in your team. Make sure everything is covered by atleast one person. One of the good things about these sorts of trips is the ability to learn new skills from each other. Pair people up for the various tasks.
- Don't allow untrained people to come in at the last moment. If people are going to be committed to the task, they will commit now. This is not the say that people can't join you team later, but they should be there to fill a specific need.
- Look after the team. Designate a 2IC who can keep an eye open for probelem that you may miss.
Some other suggestions:
- Information: Do a recon. Get to know the people, the area and the work that you will be doing. Take two others and visit, if you can. (eg. Work out if you'll need that chainsaw or not, or that extra can of fuel). This will make the trip itself start a whole lot better.
- Be prepared to have to leave early, or take someone out. (eg. Take 2 vehicles, rather than a minibus).
Depending on what your manager is most concerned about, this is a good opportunity to use the GPL licence to waylay any business continuity related fears.
IANAL but create a contract which says that:
- Any code that you create or modify is your original property as the author as laid out in copyright law.
- Any code or patches that you create for use by the company, are licenced to the company under a GPL, LGPL or BSD type licence. (This will probably depend on the software you are modifying.) This ensures that the business will always have access to the code thay they use, and can employ someone else to continue your work, should you get 'hit by a bus'.
This does not address any 'strategic' business concerns though, which big businesses seem to be most worried about. Business issues of a strategic nature (competitors getting access to the code, you running off to start your own competing) have not been adequately addressed in the the Open Source vs. Free Software debate, as old as it is. IBM seems to be one comapany willing to look at this seriously.
Having worked for a (failed) IT start-up that was anal about IP protection, my personally opinion is that a business needs to get their fundamental (and money making) operations right first. This leads to companies which are sustainable and actually care about their customers, which is a good thing. This is what you seem to be doing.
In just the same way that there were various 3rd party dock appliances for the dockable iPods (external speakers etc.) I'm going to suggested that keeping the iPod nano simple, and small, will enable other dockable hardware to be produced to add the functionality that people seem to be asking for.
eg. Video - Create a module which has a larger colour screen, but when combined with the IPod nano has a similar size of the original IPod.
Bluetooth expansion - can be used as a 'store' for photos captured by a camera or phone.
The article cites older examples of where Linux is currently being used in the business world. It's originally information probably came from IBM or other commertial Linux vendors (this is the feel of the article, and presumably the report).
Linux is going to make the 'mainstream' in a whole lot of other areas that are going to become very important to big business, just at data processing, email and web has become. It that it is already starting to happen, and the desktop and server are part of it.
The beauty of linux is that all of previous work, but vendors and businesses isn't lost in the process. What's on the Mainframe today can be used on the desktop of the future.
Areas to look out for:
- Telephony - VoIP and associated call handling and voicemail messaging.
- Distributed data handling and processing - enhancing the bittorrent model to enable easy persistant distributed network storage (google does this).
Others?
Another two..
3) Using up FLOSS resources. OSDL may have some resources, but I suspect that Microsoft would love to have them used up in a 'collaboration' that ends up going nowhere, rather than being used to significantly improve Linux.
4) Poach talent (mentioned elsewhere).
If the device is able to automaticaly detect and mount disks (until it get designed with a harddrive) and work with other USB peripherals
(sound card) then it would be very attractive
as a 'quick office'.
This may even kick-start a 'PC market' where
the PC itself is quite a low powered unit,
and processing power and IO is added via
these types of removable peripherals.
I can see a suite of Low-end PC's which do the barest minimum, but which can be temporarily
'upgraded' to the users needs.
This may even extend to 'handheld displays'
(eg. Nokia Internet Table if it had a USB
host port) also providing the user interface.
Will a PC of the future just be a 'smart USB hub'?
The FAQ in question says:
... (snip) ...
There are also many other significant open source projects, such as Debian and Ubuntu, that serve active user and development communities. Generally speaking, these open source projects focus on engineering-centric issues that serve their technical community of Linux developers and users.
The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux.
Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience.
As a rebuttle.. I am an incredibly happy user of Ubuntu, and I have seen non-technical users also enjoy using it, whether this is via TheOpenCD (now a Ubuntu LiveCD), or on a Ubuntu desktop.
Ubuntu's user community is also actively refining the distribution for the Education market (edubuntu) and additional usability through KDE (keduntu), and well as on different hardware architectures (eg. the Mac Mini).
While there is always room of another specifically customised and targeted distribution, broad sweeping statements like the above just don't hold.
Novell's SUSE and openSUSE are aimed at providing an easy to use and maintain, site-wide contant installation base. These goals are good for corporate environments (business and non-business alike), but there are other ways. It will be interesting to see how Novell seeks to control the outcomes of openSUSE, as it attempts to let go of control at the same time.
What about 'xfig'?
And going back a little further, 'macdraw'.
I can see a use for such a 'watchdog' process
running on my systems.
It could be trained to react in certain ways,
like shutting ports, killing processes or rate-limiting, should it see
some sort of pattern of activity
(eg. port scan, slashdotting).
Having it participate in a dialog would be
cool as well though, just don't give it the
keys to the nuclear silos.
I agree with this (and I don't necessarity agree
with the parent being a troll).
In the long term, the Mac hardware aught to
get Linux (or another FLOSS OS) installed
on it anyway for several good reasons:
- Apple will charge to upgrade it with more
shiny mac software;
- Mac hardware is well engineered,
reliable and will last a reasonable
amount of time (forever?);
- Dual booting is really annoying on server
class (always on) hardware.
- When Apple moves to Intel based hardware it
will cost them more continue to support older
hardware.
- Ubuntu installs very easily
- Linux is Free (both reasons).
So if the hardware works, why delay the
inevitable?
Paul - A happy owner of an iMac Mini running Ubuntu.
... on Mac hardware!
I've just installed Ubuntu on a Mac Mini...
Reason? - Excellent (reliable) hardware, with a
vast software base that's rapidly getting better,
with 6 monthly stable releases.
Set it up in a USBkey formfactor which
can be used to boot.
It would cost even less to send out Ubuntu CD's!