...how dumb would MS be to help Apple make a viable alternative to Office?
I think that would actually be pretty clever. They'd generate some revenue, have some competition to prove their not a monopoloy, and get money off of the competitor.
If you're hired/paid to use Java the quality of alternatives doesn't really matter. Also, finding Java folks is probably easier than Ruby or some other languages.
The best way to avoid feeling like you have stuff on your system that doesn't work is to go with older stuff.
Just because people love to use Linux doesn't mean they're working on device drivers. Chances are they're spending their time posting to forums complaining about USB2, playing games and looking at porn. I don't think many people write drivers for free, which is pretty much what you need, unless you apply lots of pressure to manufacturers.
Amerians are so hard up about working and consuming they miss the important things in life.
Life can be a bit more complicated than just Americans or silly, or what not. In America, you have little vacation time, small pensions/retirements, and living is expensive. Student loans, mortgages, consumer debt, etc. can make taking a year or two off impossible.
Here's something that discusses the productivity differences of farmers - this might be the origin of what I had heard, not sure.
I agree, there's sustainable, and there's sutainable... I'd bet you could grow a lot without damaging the environment if you were willing to put the money into it, and be inventive, could focus on long term goals, and cared deeply about the big picture. I think we both know what that means.
I don't have great expectations for our ability to contribute very much to our future extinguishing resources from space. I hope I'm wrong.
I can't believe you lecturing me on how a city needs food and fuel and all that. Wow. You must have though I fell off the turnip truck onto my head! At the very least, as a/. reader, you should assume I read the Asimov Foundation series, which goes on and on about how whole planets supply the central administrative planet. Anyhow...
Land is being used 'somehow', but not all of it, and not nearly to capacity. I remember hearing years back how Dutch farmers were 100 times more efficient than Russian farmers - her Russian farmers could barely more than feed their families. I bet a lot of farming done in the world is using 19th century technology, at best. Keep in mind that there's plenty of food in the world right now to feed everyone, it's a question of greed and to some extent transportation and storage.
Just think about this - according to this document, in India, which probably doesn't have super modern agriculture, approximately 26.8 million metric tons of food a year are eaten or spoiled by rats, who are protected and encouraged to thrive. This waste was from 134 million metric tons.
Now, according to this page, "...in the U.S., 157 million metric tons of cereal, legumes, and vegetable protein suitable for human use is fed to livestock every year to produce only 28 million metric tons of animal protein consumed by humans."
So if you could just double the efficiency of the India farmers, and cut out the waste, you'd be able to feed another approximately 295 million people on an American style, super sized, extra meaty diet, just from some changes to India.
According to Bread for the World Institute 842 million people in the world are hungry. We just talked about how to overfeed a third of them. I'm sure we could feed clothe and house everyone on Earth quite comfortably, if we really wanted to.
Life is a little bit more complicated than "Let's not use oil anymore." Does Bush keep good relations with oil producers? Is that in the best interest of our country and the world economy? What would happen if he told the oil industry to go choke on their oil? Without altneratives up and running your grandmother and lots of other people might not get food (yummy, petroleum), heat, electricity and transportation.
Sure, I'd love to get us off of one power source having such dominance. I'd even consider the risks and problems with coal, nuclear, burning garbage and whatever else you've got. But we need to get those things going to be able tell oil to get in line and make a good offer.
How soon do you possibly think we could ship an appreciable number of people off our planet? Who would want to go? Are you thinking of shipping the poor off the planet? I'm sure people will LOVE that! My gosh, people will fight to the death for generations for land that is barren and excessively cold or hot, you want people to be herded onto flying coffins off their land?
Also, I must question the idea that our planet is as over crowded as you're saying. I don't know where you live, but get in a car and drive long enough and you'll go through miles/kilometers of uninhabited land that could sustain people. By the way, I live in New York City, so I'm fairly sure this situation is similar elsewhere.
You misread what I wrote. I wasn't referring to missionaries being killed, I was talking about Christians. And I said nothing about them wanting a theocracy.
Christian missionaries certainly do not tell people their culture is primitive compared to theirs and that Jesus, Coca-cola and Hollywood are the answers to feeding their children and stopping wars or something.
I think you have a very biased view against Christians and missionaries, and are not focusing on the subject - N. Korea's ill treatment of people they don't like.
And choose to not believe in whatever you like, but don't forget that your faith is somewhere, so just be aware of where it is and make it a conscious decision.
By PCs do you mean Windows? B/C I'm certain you could get some killer price/performance by using only open source software and commodity hardware.
Very user friendly - I post so much on this issue I might have to start writing on it. Is it user friendly? It's different from Windows, so if you're productive with that, it might not be so friendly. It's also a little tricky to get the hang of seeing your open windows. Things dock differently, and tabbing between applications/windows is condsiderably different.
Also, consider how the machines are being used. Windows machines have broader corporate deployment, they like everything the same, and they like certain upgrade cycles. Macs are heavily used in environments that don't like to upgrade - schools (cost), print (if Quark works, don't change it!), etc.
In case you're wondering, I use OS X, W2K, Linux and OpenBSD daily.
Good points, but perhaps things are already being done. Sactions, supplying them with food and talks all seem largely useless. But putting the plans on CNN for the world to see and approve wouldn't be wise, either.
One of the major expenses the N. Korean gov. has is supporting it's military - 3rd largest standing army in the world, and they're actively building/developing weapons, such as nuclear missiles. It's not that the whole country is poor and so people are starving. The country is starving b/c huge amounts of money are poured into the military.
And don't think that N. Korean agents just hang out there. They spread out. N. Korea has been known to kidnap foreign nationals (Japanese, for instance) to train their agents to mix in in other countries, and they periodically get caught, at least in S. Korea.
And just in case you think N. Korea is an ok place that just has a different philosophy, read up a little on the extermination and enslavement. Did you know N. Korea was at one time one of the most fertile grounds for Christian missionaries? Know how many Christians there are in N. Korea now? And they didn't move away when it was made clear they weren't wanted.
When DVD players cost $50 as opposed to $500, and DVDs are easier to find than VHS, then there's substantially less kicking involved. Also, many people, such as grandmothers, are more interested in tried and true, stable and guaranteed to work, than cutting edge.
Next, there is a certain dance involved in watching movies. Just as people still go to theaters, people like to go to video stores. They like to see what's out there, what people are getting, read the boxes. And it's simple and guaranteed. Jumping into the car to go the video store is fun. Setting up a download and monitoring it's progress - not fun.
Our pediatrician told us to give our infant daughter tap water, rather than bottled or filtered water. Enough chlorine and flouride, not as much bacteria as can be present in water pitchers sitting around.
Comcast charges 40 bucks a month markup because people keep digging through the cables, can't get their cablemodem working, etc.. (Comcast sucks and is a ripoff)
Big cable and telephone companies also do business very differently from this guy. He doesn't seem to try to get people in the neighborhood as customers - doesn't even seem like he charges them! So no marketing, no accounts receivable, no office so no security or cleaning crew. Big companies always love to have 50 layers of people who do nothing but yell at each other. And no one just sells "TV service" or "cable modem service." It has to be branded, marketed, advertised, etc. Why I honestly don't know....
Sure, this little operation won't necessarily scale all that well, but there's no way on earth cable/Internet/telephone service should cost you as much as it does.
Some program for fun, or for the greater good. Some add or debug because it's no big deal and they just want it to work. Some solicit donations, some use it as a hook for work. Then of course, there's the fame, the free as in beer, and groupies.
Usability is very subjective, and often times addresses how fast you can get productive with something familiar, not how productive you can be with some experience.
Features is slightly more relevant. But what these things both point to is there isn't something exactly like Photoshop that runs natively in Linux.
For some people it's a trade up. For you it may not be.
If you are productive and familiar with a piece of software and can live with the drawbacks that it or the OS it's running on might bring along (security, stability, price, control, etc), then stay with what works.
"...it is likely to prevent most developers from coding in it (what is the point in coding in Java if it won't work on the #2 desktop OS?)."
Don't forget Java isn't just desktop. Also, presumably it will be available at some point on Mac. And speak for yourself. People write software for their own reasons, and it's not always to reach the widest possible audience.
Mucking around with your distro and editting config files isn't all its cracked up to be...
Awesome. That should show up when you boot up using Knoppix or something.
I tend to agree. Yes, you may learn a lot getting Gentoo to do anything, but that may not necessarily be what you need to do.
Sometimes you need something rock solid that you can depend on nearly 100% of the time. Making your living with that computer? You can't have it die. You need to be able to use it.
I also like being able to run a system on ancient hardware. I happen to like minimal eye candy and using the commandline. I want an install that's easy to forget about, not something I'll learn from. I want it to be easy to get things working, expect a regular cycle of development, and not have to worry about my OS suddenly disappearing or becoming commercial.
I know this sounds like an ad, building up to where I tell you what the distro you'll use if you're cool like me. Don't know what to tell you. I have to use Mac OS X, W2K and Linux servers daily. I've used Linux quite a bit (red hat, debian, gentoo) and now play around with OpenBSD, which I'll be using for a network appliance project. As a 'desktop' it seems to meet most of my needs (getting latest version of Java to run is the one thorn).
...it shouldn't be appropriate to name the building after Bill Gates simply because he provided a large chunk of the financing
Getting millions to build a building is something people should be thankful for, not snotty about how better educated they are. If they think they're so much better than Bill Gates, and naming the building is so dear to them, they should have told him no thank you and done without.
It's frankly stupid. That mathematician should study up on his logic a bit. What's the difference whose name is on the building? If you want to build me a house you can name it after yourself, if you like.
...when 50% of the turbines aren't turning because the wind aint blowing where they are, you still have 100% requirements coming from the rest of the wind turbine 'pool'.
How close must the customers for your power be? Doesn't electricity bleed off at a certain rate? I don't think you could supply this electricity accross the US or something like that.
I don't know... it's an interesting idea to use that energy for something. Distilling water, powering a completely automated factory that makes more turbines, powering an insanely bright light that will shoot into space to be redirected somewhere on earth that could use the light for energy... something.
Or even at a simpler level, greater use of batteries. Let's say the power company's rate changed as the supply of electricity coming from the wind came in. If you had a device that would open the flow of electricity from the outlet when the price went below a certain point (data transmitted by wifi/bluetooth) you could charge up batteries at the cheapest rate.
Have an UPS type set up for your house and use the electricity from those batteries.
I'm not suggesting this would be uber cheap, convenient or even necessarily ecologically friendly - since you'd have a lot of batteries. But it could be all of those things, with work.
There's a vast difference between x86 servers and what they promise with their Sparc processors. They've done various things over the years to encourage people to use Solaris on the low end -for development, for single processor machines, etc. so when they need something bigger they'll buy a mulitple processor Sparc machine. They don't want to base revenue on the low end.
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...how dumb would MS be to help Apple make a viable alternative to Office?
I think that would actually be pretty clever. They'd generate some revenue, have some competition to prove their not a monopoloy, and get money off of the competitor.
If you're hired/paid to use Java the quality of alternatives doesn't really matter. Also, finding Java folks is probably easier than Ruby or some other languages.
The best way to avoid feeling like you have stuff on your system that doesn't work is to go with older stuff.
Just because people love to use Linux doesn't mean they're working on device drivers. Chances are they're spending their time posting to forums complaining about USB2, playing games and looking at porn. I don't think many people write drivers for free, which is pretty much what you need, unless you apply lots of pressure to manufacturers.
Amerians are so hard up about working and consuming they miss the important things in life.
Life can be a bit more complicated than just Americans or silly, or what not. In America, you have little vacation time, small pensions/retirements, and living is expensive. Student loans, mortgages, consumer debt, etc. can make taking a year or two off impossible.
Here's something that discusses the productivity differences of farmers - this might be the origin of what I had heard, not sure.
I agree, there's sustainable, and there's sutainable... I'd bet you could grow a lot without damaging the environment if you were willing to put the money into it, and be inventive, could focus on long term goals, and cared deeply about the big picture. I think we both know what that means.
I don't have great expectations for our ability to contribute very much to our future extinguishing resources from space. I hope I'm wrong.
I can't believe you lecturing me on how a city needs food and fuel and all that. Wow. You must have though I fell off the turnip truck onto my head! At the very least, as a /. reader, you should assume I read the Asimov Foundation series, which goes on and on about how whole planets supply the central administrative planet. Anyhow...
Land is being used 'somehow', but not all of it, and not nearly to capacity. I remember hearing years back how Dutch farmers were 100 times more efficient than Russian farmers - her Russian farmers could barely more than feed their families. I bet a lot of farming done in the world is using 19th century technology, at best. Keep in mind that there's plenty of food in the world right now to feed everyone, it's a question of greed and to some extent transportation and storage.
Just think about this - according to this document, in India, which probably doesn't have super modern agriculture, approximately 26.8 million metric tons of food a year are eaten or spoiled by rats, who are protected and encouraged to thrive. This waste was from 134 million metric tons.
Now, according to this page, "...in the U.S., 157 million metric tons of cereal, legumes, and vegetable protein suitable for human use is fed to livestock every year to produce only 28 million metric tons of animal protein consumed by humans."
So if you could just double the efficiency of the India farmers, and cut out the waste, you'd be able to feed another approximately 295 million people on an American style, super sized, extra meaty diet, just from some changes to India.
According to Bread for the World Institute 842 million people in the world are hungry. We just talked about how to overfeed a third of them. I'm sure we could feed clothe and house everyone on Earth quite comfortably, if we really wanted to.
Good point on the hydrogen technology.
Life is a little bit more complicated than "Let's not use oil anymore." Does Bush keep good relations with oil producers? Is that in the best interest of our country and the world economy? What would happen if he told the oil industry to go choke on their oil? Without altneratives up and running your grandmother and lots of other people might not get food (yummy, petroleum), heat, electricity and transportation.
Sure, I'd love to get us off of one power source having such dominance. I'd even consider the risks and problems with coal, nuclear, burning garbage and whatever else you've got. But we need to get those things going to be able tell oil to get in line and make a good offer.
How soon do you possibly think we could ship an appreciable number of people off our planet? Who would want to go? Are you thinking of shipping the poor off the planet? I'm sure people will LOVE that! My gosh, people will fight to the death for generations for land that is barren and excessively cold or hot, you want people to be herded onto flying coffins off their land?
Also, I must question the idea that our planet is as over crowded as you're saying. I don't know where you live, but get in a car and drive long enough and you'll go through miles/kilometers of uninhabited land that could sustain people. By the way, I live in New York City, so I'm fairly sure this situation is similar elsewhere.
You misread what I wrote. I wasn't referring to missionaries being killed, I was talking about Christians. And I said nothing about them wanting a theocracy.
Christian missionaries certainly do not tell people their culture is primitive compared to theirs and that Jesus, Coca-cola and Hollywood are the answers to feeding their children and stopping wars or something.
I think you have a very biased view against Christians and missionaries, and are not focusing on the subject - N. Korea's ill treatment of people they don't like.
And choose to not believe in whatever you like, but don't forget that your faith is somewhere, so just be aware of where it is and make it a conscious decision.
By PCs do you mean Windows? B/C I'm certain you could get some killer price/performance by using only open source software and commodity hardware.
Very user friendly - I post so much on this issue I might have to start writing on it. Is it user friendly? It's different from Windows, so if you're productive with that, it might not be so friendly. It's also a little tricky to get the hang of seeing your open windows. Things dock differently, and tabbing between applications/windows is condsiderably different.
Also, consider how the machines are being used. Windows machines have broader corporate deployment, they like everything the same, and they like certain upgrade cycles. Macs are heavily used in environments that don't like to upgrade - schools (cost), print (if Quark works, don't change it!), etc.
In case you're wondering, I use OS X, W2K, Linux and OpenBSD daily.
Good points, but perhaps things are already being done. Sactions, supplying them with food and talks all seem largely useless. But putting the plans on CNN for the world to see and approve wouldn't be wise, either.
3 5351.html and consider what other posters have said about Seoul falling, think about how S. Korean troops would be regarded differently in N. & S. Korea and globally. And consider the US missile defense system http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A966 1-2004Aug17.html Bush is building and Kerry opposes.
The US presence in S. Korea seems to be tightening up a bit, doesn't it? Read this: http://usinfo.state.gov/eap/Archive/2004/Jun/29-5
One of the major expenses the N. Korean gov. has is supporting it's military - 3rd largest standing army in the world, and they're actively building/developing weapons, such as nuclear missiles. It's not that the whole country is poor and so people are starving. The country is starving b/c huge amounts of money are poured into the military.
And don't think that N. Korean agents just hang out there. They spread out. N. Korea has been known to kidnap foreign nationals (Japanese, for instance) to train their agents to mix in in other countries, and they periodically get caught, at least in S. Korea.
And just in case you think N. Korea is an ok place that just has a different philosophy, read up a little on the extermination and enslavement. Did you know N. Korea was at one time one of the most fertile grounds for Christian missionaries? Know how many Christians there are in N. Korea now? And they didn't move away when it was made clear they weren't wanted.
When DVD players cost $50 as opposed to $500, and DVDs are easier to find than VHS, then there's substantially less kicking involved. Also, many people, such as grandmothers, are more interested in tried and true, stable and guaranteed to work, than cutting edge.
Next, there is a certain dance involved in watching movies. Just as people still go to theaters, people like to go to video stores. They like to see what's out there, what people are getting, read the boxes. And it's simple and guaranteed. Jumping into the car to go the video store is fun. Setting up a download and monitoring it's progress - not fun.
Our pediatrician told us to give our infant daughter tap water, rather than bottled or filtered water. Enough chlorine and flouride, not as much bacteria as can be present in water pitchers sitting around.
Comcast charges 40 bucks a month markup because people keep digging through the cables, can't get their cablemodem working, etc.. (Comcast sucks and is a ripoff)
Big cable and telephone companies also do business very differently from this guy. He doesn't seem to try to get people in the neighborhood as customers - doesn't even seem like he charges them! So no marketing, no accounts receivable, no office so no security or cleaning crew. Big companies always love to have 50 layers of people who do nothing but yell at each other. And no one just sells "TV service" or "cable modem service." It has to be branded, marketed, advertised, etc. Why I honestly don't know....
Sure, this little operation won't necessarily scale all that well, but there's no way on earth cable/Internet/telephone service should cost you as much as it does.
Some program for fun, or for the greater good. Some add or debug because it's no big deal and they just want it to work. Some solicit donations, some use it as a hook for work. Then of course, there's the fame, the free as in beer, and groupies.
Usability is very subjective, and often times addresses how fast you can get productive with something familiar, not how productive you can be with some experience.
Features is slightly more relevant. But what these things both point to is there isn't something exactly like Photoshop that runs natively in Linux.
For some people it's a trade up. For you it may not be.
If you are productive and familiar with a piece of software and can live with the drawbacks that it or the OS it's running on might bring along (security, stability, price, control, etc), then stay with what works.
"...it is likely to prevent most developers from coding in it (what is the point in coding in Java if it won't work on the #2 desktop OS?)."
Don't forget Java isn't just desktop.
Also, presumably it will be available at some point on Mac.
And speak for yourself. People write software for their own reasons, and it's not always to reach the widest possible audience.
Mucking around with your distro and editting config files isn't all its cracked up to be...
Awesome. That should show up when you boot up using Knoppix or something.
I tend to agree. Yes, you may learn a lot getting Gentoo to do anything, but that may not necessarily be what you need to do.
Sometimes you need something rock solid that you can depend on nearly 100% of the time. Making your living with that computer? You can't have it die. You need to be able to use it.
I also like being able to run a system on ancient hardware. I happen to like minimal eye candy and using the commandline. I want an install that's easy to forget about, not something I'll learn from. I want it to be easy to get things working, expect a regular cycle of development, and not have to worry about my OS suddenly disappearing or becoming commercial.
I know this sounds like an ad, building up to where I tell you what the distro you'll use if you're cool like me. Don't know what to tell you. I have to use Mac OS X, W2K and Linux servers daily. I've used Linux quite a bit (red hat, debian, gentoo) and now play around with OpenBSD, which I'll be using for a network appliance project. As a 'desktop' it seems to meet most of my needs (getting latest version of Java to run is the one thorn).
...it shouldn't be appropriate to name the building after Bill Gates simply because he provided a large chunk of the financing
Getting millions to build a building is something people should be thankful for, not snotty about how better educated they are. If they think they're so much better than Bill Gates, and naming the building is so dear to them, they should have told him no thank you and done without.
It's frankly stupid. That mathematician should study up on his logic a bit. What's the difference whose name is on the building? If you want to build me a house you can name it after yourself, if you like.
...when 50% of the turbines aren't turning because the wind aint blowing where they are, you still have 100% requirements coming from the rest of the wind turbine 'pool'.
How close must the customers for your power be? Doesn't electricity bleed off at a certain rate? I don't think you could supply this electricity accross the US or something like that.
I don't know... it's an interesting idea to use that energy for something. Distilling water, powering a completely automated factory that makes more turbines, powering an insanely bright light that will shoot into space to be redirected somewhere on earth that could use the light for energy... something.
Or even at a simpler level, greater use of batteries. Let's say the power company's rate changed as the supply of electricity coming from the wind came in. If you had a device that would open the flow of electricity from the outlet when the price went below a certain point (data transmitted by wifi/bluetooth) you could charge up batteries at the cheapest rate.
Have an UPS type set up for your house and use the electricity from those batteries.
I'm not suggesting this would be uber cheap, convenient or even necessarily ecologically friendly - since you'd have a lot of batteries. But it could be all of those things, with work.
There's a vast difference between x86 servers and what they promise with their Sparc processors. They've done various things over the years to encourage people to use Solaris on the low end -for development, for single processor machines, etc. so when they need something bigger they'll buy a mulitple processor Sparc machine. They don't want to base revenue on the low end.
Porting is not as fast and easy as it might seem. See the hard work involved in making Java work on all platforms, despite the source being available.