The Economist ~ understates ~ the advantages of being able to run your Windows apps on your netbook - and there is really nothing in F/OSS of interest to the general consumer market that isn't available for Windows.
First Who says you can't run your windows apps on a netbook running linux, quite simply not true, google virtualbox which also has seamless mode enabling you to run windows apps as part of your linux desktop. Even USB devices can be used even when there is no Linux driver.
You also have the advantage of being able to move or replace the windows install by copying the diskimage. even if windows gets infected you can just replace the disk image.
secondly for most uses Linux can be used for safe web browsing for example. www. networksecuritytech . com is a malware site and I wouldn't recommend visiting running windows unless your looking to get infected under linux it's harmless.
So really for the best of both worlds Linux is the answer. (with a VM when you can't do without windows).
With the prices your quoting it probably would pay to buy the windows version install Linux and then reinstall windows but under a VM.
well theres a network infra structure to implement, fairly obviously theres a need to seperate student accounts from teachers accounts. Servers which with the "cloud" appear as if they would be maintained by microsoft, necessary texts, which probably will need to have licensed access and drm to protect the publishers and a whole host of other things which are of no interest to us as individuals but will matter to companies looking to make a buck out of educational software. Then there are syllabus requirements...
Microsoft probably has the resources to make it as easy as logging on to Slashdot for the teachers and students and minimal technical skills required within the schools themselves. Who's going to do this for a Linux solution?
To be honest theres a good chance Microsoft would only support School requirements at a basic level but you can see the requirements of an educational program are different to having a number of educational applications.
Netbooks are pretty good for individuals but for educational use does Linux provide whats needed?
It's no good just to say Linux is cheaper than Windows, whats there available in terms of infrastructure, and applications for educational use?
Who's going to put a package together to meet the requirements of the Australian Educational System?
It looks like Microsoft is putting together a simple package for educational use, boot up, sign on and use the system. What has Linux got to offer other than a lower unit price? Is there an organization working to meet the educational requirements?
Is Windows a requirement for "cloud based" computing? Perhaps a Linux system could take advantage of the infrastructure provided by microsoft?
It seems all I have is questions, I'm not trying to flame all my systems run Ubuntu but I am not convinced that Linux has the infrastructure and applications to be easily integrated into the australian education system. I'd love to be proven wrong but Microsoft seems more than willing to invest in bringing a windows solution to the desktop.
btw which netbook did you go for bruce, and was there much work needed to make debian run well on it?
Everybody seems to be focused on the Scorpions Album Cover and its not the cover thats important, it's the now proven fact that the internet for the UK is filtered monitored and blocked!
This event was a slip up, we were not supposed to know about the censorship and filtering going on. The big question in the UK is what else is being blocked and why? People outside the UK should know that the UK is being monitored and filtered (People in the UK should know too but probably the majority still don't). What is being blocked in your locale? It is highly unlikely that any of us are getting an unfiltered service.
How much of what we read is honest reporting and how much propaganda? what don't we get to read whats missing ?
seriously the iphone isn't going to be that easy to program. however a simple bluetooth gps is pretty easy to set up and a lot cheaper. or even easier a serial port gps such as an etrex.
probably anything running windows mobile would be easier to program than an iphone. At least you could transfer your software on to an sd-card. to get it on to the device. Even then knowing where you are doesn't automatically give you a trigger to detonate anything.
I'd have thought taking without giving anything back is shitty, stupid would be to allow yourself to be exploited in this way.
The deal seems fine to me, give and take or if you insist pay and get paid.
If your any good then anything you do that you GPL is something you can show on a CV or as samples for potentially clients. Having a track record is good for anyones career.
An experienced developer has done his apprenticeship and can earn a living, seems reasonable to pay for the tools you use to earn that living.
Is that to much to ask for? you said and to be honest the answer is yes.
What your doing in the car analogy world is picking a random car and selecting a random pump to fill up at. sooner or later your going to get diesel in a petrol tank or v versa. or a tyre analogy getting a random tyre off the shelf and expecting it to fit your wheels.
There is no right to automatic linux support for any hardware so your asking for a bit too much.
However if you said you wanted to buy any pc running linux and change to a different distribution and expect it all to work, thats not too much to ask, perfectly reasonable.
It's not the case though, and that is a reasonable complaint.
Perhaps there should be a certified linux compatible logo which can be offered to vendors when everything in a package is supported by the major distro's and perhaps distro's need to be able to show a common level of compatibility with drivers for example. (that needs more thinking about)
I've no idea how complete Linux support is on Macs does everything just work or is it a case of choosing a suitable Mac for Linux use much like with PC's
I'm more ryanair than BA to be honest, i guess its what you can afford, and I can't afford much these days it seems. I've flown over to ireland twice this year and it wouldn't have happened if the fares hadn't been so cheap.
Your description of apple is very positive and I could see me getting an apple at some point. Right now thou I already pretty much have what i need with an aspire one it travels everywhere with me it's only let down is the small battery and very slow ssd. It could be better in places as an ebook reader it would be better if the screen was reversible and had a touch screen, the trackpad is a bit awkward having buttons left and right instead of below but for the money its excellent.
How many of us really need to buy a new laptop every 3 years?
Well personally, my HP laptop has major problems with usb over current detect (3 year old) My mates dual core acer lasted maybe 2 years before blowing all its ports.
3 years of working life seems realistic to me. Battery life would be practically non-existent after 3 years.
apparently they made a batch of it 60 years ago and its still not gone.
it is getting rare these day, but probably because public toilets are rare in the uk these days. They have mostly been replaced with Macdonalds. Around the world. MacDonalds toilets are usually clean and safe.
If every meat eater has to kill his own animals there would be a whole lot more vegetarians.
There probably would be more vegetarians initially, however most people would rapidly adjust. Killing cleanly is a skill that used to be fairly common and could be again, its hypocritical to eat meat if you couldn't bring yourself to kill it in the first place.
It's only wealth which saves us the chore of killing and preparing our own meat, to be frank there is a lot of prepared meat products we eat regularly which we wouldn't eat if we knew what we were eating.
you don't need to do 200 mph near a school to kill kids. Doing 40 mph changes the odds from an 80% chance of living at 30mph to an 80% chance of killing at 40 mph.
There isn't much of a problem with sanity on the roads just massive over confidence and self righteousness, realistically by all drivers some of the time.
Children and animals are unpredictable they don't follow the rules so your just as likely to have a child run in to the road in front of you at 20 mph as 40mph the only difference being your less likely to kill them the slower your driving at the time.
To be fair railway track replacement takes place over weekends to minimise the disruption to commuters and contractors face massive fines if the track isn't ready to be returned to service at the end of a blockade. Worn out track is dangerous and has to be operated at reduced speed at best.
Roads wear out too, although to be fair the biggest disruptions are caused by accidents. The last couple of days has seen a couple of fatalities on the A1 and massive tailbacks near Doncaster for example.
To be frank if people allowed enough time for their journeys and didn't take stupid risks trying to save a few seconds from their journeys we would all get to our destinations with less stress and less lives lost.
I used to work for a company that made control panels, for the new york subway one of the requirements was they had to be bullet proof - literally.
Ther e wasn't many places that we wouldn't work but the new york subway and sierra leone were two that we decided to give a miss.
so yes it could be escalator repairmen could be in short supply.
The Netbooks are being installed with extremely limited distro's.
I've got a EEE (which needs to go for repair hence) which I reimaged with Xandros and I've installed everything in the EEE's repository and still have 500MB free and a restore partition all on a 4gb ssd! not only that but the packages are old.
Now ok thats good enough for some people, for a few weeks, but it's really limiting for the rest of us, and now I get to the thing which really bugs me. Linux is open isn't it? So why is it so difficult to get another distro running perfectly on these netbooks surely there should be some communication going on between the xandros, linpus teams and the rest? I mean if Ubuntu runs fine on hardware X you would naturally expect fedora, knopix debian suse ect to run just as well.
Surely asus, acer should be more than happy to have say ubuntu running flawlessly on their netbooks, right?
Theres a good number of people into Linux who really would like their choice of distro running on a netbook, Wouldn't sales of netbooks go up with a popular Linux distro installed or easily installable (thats is working out of the box) on them.
Sure these Netbooks are great little machines but why do we have to have largely disliked Linux distro's on them?
Why would I pay a premium for intentionallylimited hardware only to end up running an OS I could use on any other machine in the world?
simple really you wish to develop applications for Windows, Linux and OSX and android and iphone and windows mobile.
Buy a Mac and you cover most bases.
While OSX isn't the biggest platform, it's easier to build a customer base with less competition. (you become a big fish in a small pond) Being fully cross platform your application will be able to be a company wide standard.
Even if your just designing web sites you can pretty much test all browsers.
If you can develop and release in parallel all your customers will be happy.
Apple hardware has a good reputation so other than the initial cost being a little higher it isn't a bad choice really.
(I don't own an apple either but I can see why I might)
I couldn't justify a kindle either, however netbooks are quite good for ebooks more so than pda's or psps.
I've been doing quite a bit of reading lately using an aspire one usually turned on its side with the screen on the right. With the arrows and page up and down keys being on what is now the bottom left outside edge its fairly comfortable to use.
Only annoyance really is you have to use the mouse for the 'next' icon on the page. other that its pretty good. I have used pda's for ebooks but the screen is too small.
running on battery gets about 2 hours, yes I am tempted to get a bigger battery but its not a must have item right now.
Sadly the OSS website template is frequently stolen repackaged for commercial use with no mention of its open source roots;)
Sadly few people step up to address some of the documentation issues.
Figuring things out is generally fairly difficult and time consuming, writing things down is a small additional step, easily done in a wiki and its always useful to be able to refer to your notes on a wiki, even better for someone else to have edited your notes when you go back to the wiki. Ideally someone else has already made notes so you don't have to start from scratch.
Thats a major plus point for OSS and is the easiest way to give back to a project.
Actually Libraries, probably have less effect on book sales than you might initially think.
Library buys a copy then Library user gets the book signed out for 4 weeks (along with a number of others usually). The copy is no longer available for 4 weeks. If someone reserves it. usually there is about a week where it's back in but can't be loaned, before again going out for 4 weeks. So really a popular title would tend to be only available to 12 or 13 people a year per copy and most libraries will not buy more than one copy due to budget restrictions.
so for a new release you might need to wait quite a while before you can get it from a library. Obviously if you don't want to wait you can buy it.
University libraries tend to have short term loans for a week or sometimes for a few hours, or even do not loan the book outside the library at all, but even this will not be effecting book sales that much as demand is high enough to force students to buy if they need that book for an assignment that week.
Libraries probably have more of an effect on the long tail side of sales.
Slashdot Mirror
The Economist ~ understates ~ the advantages of being able to run your Windows apps on your netbook - and there is really nothing in F/OSS of interest to the general consumer market that isn't available for Windows.
First Who says you can't run your windows apps on a netbook running linux, quite simply not true, google virtualbox which also has seamless mode enabling you to run windows apps as part of your linux desktop.
Even USB devices can be used even when there is no Linux driver.
You also have the advantage of being able to move or replace the windows install by copying the diskimage.
even if windows gets infected you can just replace the disk image.
secondly for most uses Linux can be used for safe web browsing for example. www. networksecuritytech . com is a malware site and I wouldn't recommend visiting running windows unless your looking to get infected under linux it's harmless.
So really for the best of both worlds Linux is the answer. (with a VM when you can't do without windows).
With the prices your quoting it probably would pay to buy the windows version install Linux and then reinstall windows but under a VM.
well theres a network infra structure to implement, fairly obviously theres a need to seperate student accounts from teachers accounts. Servers which with the "cloud" appear as if they would be maintained by microsoft, necessary texts, which probably will need to have licensed access and drm to protect the publishers and a whole host of other things which are of no interest to us as individuals but will matter to companies looking to make a buck out of educational software. Then there are syllabus requirements ...
Microsoft probably has the resources to make it as easy as logging on to Slashdot for the teachers and students and minimal technical skills required within the schools themselves. Who's going to do this for a Linux solution?
To be honest theres a good chance Microsoft would only support School requirements at a basic level but you can see the requirements of an educational program are different to having a number of educational applications.
shouldnt that be untill that day SSD's will only sell in small capacities.
A rugged power efficient SSD beats a large HDD in mobile situations.
Netbooks are pretty good for individuals but for educational use does Linux provide whats needed?
It's no good just to say Linux is cheaper than Windows, whats there available in terms of infrastructure, and applications for educational use?
Who's going to put a package together to meet the requirements of the Australian Educational System?
It looks like Microsoft is putting together a simple package for educational use, boot up, sign on and use the system. What has Linux got to offer other than a lower unit price? Is there an organization working to meet the educational requirements?
Is Windows a requirement for "cloud based" computing? Perhaps a Linux system could take advantage of the infrastructure provided by microsoft?
It seems all I have is questions, I'm not trying to flame all my systems run Ubuntu but I am not convinced that Linux has the infrastructure and applications to be easily integrated into the australian education system. I'd love to be proven wrong but Microsoft seems more than willing to invest in bringing a windows solution to the desktop.
btw which netbook did you go for bruce, and was there much work needed to make debian run well on it?
Everybody seems to be focused on the Scorpions Album Cover and its not the cover thats important, it's the now proven fact that the internet for the UK is filtered monitored and blocked!
This event was a slip up, we were not supposed to know about the censorship and filtering going on. The big question in the UK is what else is being blocked and why? People outside the UK should know that the UK is being monitored and filtered (People in the UK should know too but probably the majority still don't). What is being blocked in your locale? It is highly unlikely that any of us are getting an unfiltered service.
How much of what we read is honest reporting and how much propaganda? what don't we get to read whats missing ?
http://www.apple.com/iphone/appstore/ no not seen it listed yet...
seriously the iphone isn't going to be that easy to program. however a simple bluetooth gps is pretty easy to set up and a lot cheaper. or even easier a serial port gps such as an etrex.
probably anything running windows mobile would be easier to program than an iphone. At least you could transfer your software on to an sd-card. to get it on to the device. Even then knowing where you are doesn't automatically give you a trigger to detonate anything.
I'd have thought taking without giving anything back is shitty, stupid would be to allow yourself to be exploited in this way.
The deal seems fine to me, give and take or if you insist pay and get paid.
If your any good then anything you do that you GPL is something you can show on a CV or as samples for potentially clients. Having a track record is good for anyones career.
An experienced developer has done his apprenticeship and can earn a living, seems reasonable to pay for the tools you use to earn that living.
what else do you suggest as an alternative?
Agreed
I want mine back as it was. This is a pretty pointless post in itself
but really the only way to get noticed is if enough of us bitch about it.
Is that to much to ask for? you said and to be honest the answer is yes.
What your doing in the car analogy world is picking a random car and selecting a random pump to fill up at. sooner or later your going to get diesel in a petrol tank or v versa. or a tyre analogy getting a random tyre off the shelf and expecting it to fit your wheels.
There is no right to automatic linux support for any hardware so your asking for a bit too much.
However if you said you wanted to buy any pc running linux and change to a different distribution and expect it all to work, thats not too much to ask, perfectly reasonable.
It's not the case though, and that is a reasonable complaint.
Perhaps there should be a certified linux compatible logo which can be offered to vendors when everything in a package is supported by the major distro's and perhaps distro's need to be able to show a common level of compatibility with drivers for example. (that needs more thinking about)
I've no idea how complete Linux support is on Macs does everything just work or is it a case of choosing a suitable Mac for Linux use much like with PC's
I'm more ryanair than BA to be honest, i guess its what you can afford, and I can't afford much these days it seems. I've flown over to ireland twice this year and it wouldn't have happened if the fares hadn't been so cheap.
Your description of apple is very positive and I could see me getting an apple at some point. Right now thou I already pretty much have what i need with an aspire one it travels everywhere with me it's only let down is the small battery and very slow ssd. It could be better in places as an ebook reader it would be better if the screen was reversible and had a touch screen, the trackpad is a bit awkward having buttons left and right instead of below but for the money its excellent.
How many of us really need to buy a new laptop every 3 years?
Well personally, my HP laptop has major problems with usb over current detect (3 year old) My mates dual core acer lasted maybe 2 years before blowing all its ports.
3 years of working life seems realistic to me. Battery life would be practically non-existent after 3 years.
Are Apples really that much better?
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
its easy and simple to use.
Virtualbox is a possibility for trying distro's although it will not help you decide if your hardware is supported well enough to run native.
izal
horrible stuff but it can be left unattended in a public toilet without getting stolen. maybe it's better than nothing. maybe not.
http://www.ciao.co.uk/Izal_Toilet_Paper__Review_5481965
apparently they made a batch of it 60 years ago and its still not gone.
it is getting rare these day, but probably because public toilets are rare in the uk these days. They have mostly been replaced with Macdonalds. Around the world. MacDonalds toilets are usually clean and safe.
You wouldn't eat a lot of processed vegetables either...
Do your own preparation and you get a huge increase in quality, besides do you really want your carrots dipped in bleach (extends shelf life).
If every meat eater has to kill his own animals there would be a whole lot more vegetarians.
There probably would be more vegetarians initially, however most people would rapidly adjust. Killing cleanly is a skill that used to be fairly common and could be again, its hypocritical to eat meat if you couldn't bring yourself to kill it in the first place.
It's only wealth which saves us the chore of killing and preparing our own meat, to be frank there is a lot of prepared meat products we eat regularly which we wouldn't eat if we knew what we were eating.
you don't need to do 200 mph near a school to kill kids. Doing 40 mph changes the odds from an 80% chance of living at 30mph to an 80% chance of killing at 40 mph.
There isn't much of a problem with sanity on the roads just massive over confidence and self righteousness, realistically by all drivers some of the time.
Children and animals are unpredictable they don't follow the rules so your just as likely to have a child run in to the road in front of you at 20 mph as 40mph the only difference being your less likely to kill them the slower your driving at the time.
yes
I mean what can I say. Thats how it is, if you need osx then realistically your going to have to buy Apple hardware because Steve Jobs says so.
To be fair railway track replacement takes place over weekends to minimise the disruption to commuters and contractors face massive fines if the track isn't ready to be returned to service at the end of a blockade. Worn out track is dangerous and has to be operated at reduced speed at best.
Roads wear out too, although to be fair the biggest disruptions are caused by accidents. The last couple of days has seen a couple of fatalities on the A1 and massive tailbacks near Doncaster for example.
To be frank if people allowed enough time for their journeys and didn't take stupid risks trying to save a few seconds from their journeys we would all get to our destinations with less stress and less lives lost.
I used to work for a company that made control panels, for the new york subway one of the requirements was they had to be bullet proof - literally.
Ther e wasn't many places that we wouldn't work but the new york subway and sierra leone were two that we decided to give a miss.
so yes it could be escalator repairmen could be in short supply.
The Netbooks are being installed with extremely limited distro's.
I've got a EEE (which needs to go for repair hence) which I reimaged with Xandros and I've installed everything in the EEE's repository and still have 500MB free and a restore partition all on a 4gb ssd! not only that but the packages are old.
Now ok thats good enough for some people, for a few weeks, but it's really limiting for the rest of us, and now I get to the thing which really bugs me. Linux is open isn't it? So why is it so difficult to get another distro running perfectly on these netbooks surely there should be some communication
going on between the xandros, linpus teams and the rest? I mean if Ubuntu runs fine on hardware X you would naturally expect fedora, knopix debian suse ect to run just as well.
Surely asus, acer should be more than happy to have say ubuntu running flawlessly on their netbooks, right?
Theres a good number of people into Linux who really would like their choice of distro running on a netbook, Wouldn't sales of netbooks go up with a popular Linux distro installed or easily installable (thats is working out of the box) on them.
Sure these Netbooks are great little machines but why do we have to have largely disliked Linux distro's on them?
I quite agree you have no motivation to buy a Mac, it doesn't play your games.
But the title of this story is "Why Developers Are Switching To Macs" and the difference is their development machine(s) pay the bills.
Cross platform software development should yield greater sales justifying the cost of a Mac.
No I don't own a Mac, I don't need one.
Why would I pay a premium for intentionallylimited hardware only to end up running an OS I could use on any other machine in the world?
simple really you wish to develop applications for Windows, Linux and OSX and android and iphone and windows mobile.
Buy a Mac and you cover most bases.
While OSX isn't the biggest platform, it's easier to build a customer base with less competition. (you become a big fish in a small pond)
Being fully cross platform your application will be able to be a company wide standard.
Even if your just designing web sites you can pretty much test all browsers.
If you can develop and release in parallel all your customers will be happy.
Apple hardware has a good reputation so other than the initial cost being a little higher it isn't a bad choice really.
(I don't own an apple either but I can see why I might)
I couldn't justify a kindle either, however netbooks are quite good for ebooks more so than pda's or psps.
I've been doing quite a bit of reading lately using an aspire one usually turned on its side with the screen on the right. With the arrows and page up and down keys being on what is now the bottom left outside edge its fairly comfortable to use.
Only annoyance really is you have to use the mouse for the 'next' icon on the page. other that its pretty good. I have used pda's for ebooks but the screen is too small.
running on battery gets about 2 hours, yes I am tempted to get a bigger battery but its not a must have item right now.
Sadly the OSS website template is frequently stolen repackaged for commercial use with no mention of its open source roots;)
Sadly few people step up to address some of the documentation issues.
Figuring things out is generally fairly difficult and time consuming, writing things down is a small additional step, easily done in a wiki and its always useful to be able to refer to your notes on a wiki, even better for someone else to have edited your notes when you go back to the wiki. Ideally someone else has already made notes so you don't have to start from scratch.
Thats a major plus point for OSS and is the easiest way to give back to a project.
Actually Libraries, probably have less effect on book sales than you might initially think.
Library buys a copy then Library user gets the book signed out for 4 weeks (along with a number of others usually). The copy is no longer available for 4 weeks. If someone reserves it. usually there is about a week where it's back in but can't be loaned, before again going out for 4 weeks. So really a popular title would tend to be only available to 12 or 13 people a year per copy and most libraries will not buy more than one copy due to budget restrictions.
so for a new release you might need to wait quite a while before you can get it from a library. Obviously if you don't want to wait you can buy it.
University libraries tend to have short term loans for a week or sometimes for a few hours, or even do not loan the book outside the library at all, but even this will not be effecting book sales that much as demand is high enough to force students to buy if they need that book for an assignment that week.
Libraries probably have more of an effect on the long tail side of sales.