Yes. It would be so much better if we were keeping the manufacturing over here and getting paid the same as the chinese.
Great choices capitalism has left us huh? Either get paid like a chinese or lose your job to a chinese. Whoo Hoo!.
Lets get rid of the unions and take a five hundred percent pay cut. Let's also get rid of all environmental regulations, labor laws, laws against prison labor, and of course those stupid worker safety regulations. That will show those chinese!
Countries don't compete for the best citizens. Most countries worth living in have very strict immigration laws. IT's the other way around. COuntries have to put barriers to keep the unwashed masses out.
That's odd. Flash and PDFs work out of box for me. I never had to do anything to get them working.
Later on I installed the "press to play" mozilla plug in and now I don't see the annoying flash ad unless I want to. That feature alone is worth every penny I didn't pay.
I am curious though. What console did you open up and what jargon you typed to get mozilla going?
Everybody here is oohing and aahing but let me go on the record as saying that this is actually a BadIdea (TM). Why?
Let's say there is a vulnaribility in libxml. What do you do? You have to upgrade all your applications! Can you get a list of applications that use libxml? Can you just upgrade libxml and automatically fix all your applications? You know it's going to happen sooner or later.
Where is you data kept? Is it also in the application folder? If so that really sucks. I want to back up my data every day and my applications only when I install something new.
I also hate the fact that all configurations are kept with the application. I have gotten in the habit of checking my etc directory into CVS and I can't tell you how often it has saved my butt. Being able to roll back to a previous known good state is immeasurable and I won't use any system which does not give me that ability. Too many things can go wrong.
"I still would like to know how they plan on fixing library dependencies, but... assuming they get over that, I'll be very happy once this is released."
It seems like they simply going to avoid the problem by shipping every library the application depends on with the app itself. Look forward to gigabyte sized apps in the not too distant future. I don't even want to think about how much memory it will take to load applications that load their own libraries as opposed to using shared ones.
Just a bad idea taken to it's expreme. They should really look at something like encap before they roll this out into production.
Linux already has great compatibility with 90% of the hardware on market (more then windows probably), you can already call somebody when things go wrong. Moneydance is an excellent and easy to use program for balancing your check book, zip files are handled automatically by all the file managers, mozilla is better then IE in every respect including speed and ease of use. I don't edit pictures much but I imagine there are a few applications for that well.
It sounds to me like all we have to do is to get a handful games to attract the 16 year olds and we are there!.
BTW. There is not a comp-usa in my neigborhood but there is a best buy. I went in there to ask about some mac games and software and they told me that they don't carry anything for the mac but that I could check out their web site and maybe they would have some there. Apparently in this regard both the Mac and Linux platforms are suffering.
Maybe we can start some sort of a boycott of stores that don't carry Linux distributions. I mean if the republicans can call for a boycott ot heinz ketchup because the wife of the democratic candidate owns a part of the company we can call for a boycott of best but don't you think?
" That depends on the industry does it not? I consult for several lawyers and they ALL have it on every computer. Best Buy must sell enough of it to make a buck else why waste the shelf space?"
Sure. For some slivers of the user base acrobat is very useful. But the vast majority of users have no need to create PDF files. In the US it often seems like there is a lawyer under every rock but actually they probably make up for less then 5% of the population don't you think?
BTW If you consult for those people do them a favor and install open office so they can make PDFs for free.
"How about the people who are called out openly admitting they have issues they're not going to address because there is no "geek factor" in it?"
There will always be those people. Just like there will always be people calling open source users terrorists and communists. Deal with it.
" but the fault rather lies in the general Linux community making claims that Linux is ready for the desktop. It's not. Stop saying it is."
But it is for most people. Sure if you have some weird printer you can't get a driver for it but for the most common printers there are drivers. When people say it's ready they don't mean for 100% of the people just the vast majority of them.
"Until that happens in the Linux market at the same level, everyone needs to stop saying Linux will crush the Mac on the desktop this year or next year or within 5 years."
Linux will crush the Mac within five years. I already outlined the scenario. Corporations will adopt linux (not mac). Foreign countries will standardise on linux (not mac). As adoption grows vendors will write drivers because they can no longer afford to alianate corporations and the chinese market. It will happen.
"A frank evaluation of the platform strengths and weaknesses is what is needed for people to actually see a Linux desktop market in the future."
What makes you think this is not being done? You are overly pessimistic and other people are overly optimistic but vast majority of the people are pragmatic. Take an honest look at how far linux desktop has gotten in the last two years and project two years from now. What do you see?
"People can surely sit on their asses and their problems will take care of themselves!"
nobody is sitting on their hands!. Stop making shit up. Thousands of people all over the world are coding their assess off every day. IBM, SUN, HP, redHat, Novell are vigorously marketing to corporations and countries. Thousands of startups are selling services, and appliances. Exactly how blind are you to be completely ignorant of all that. Linux is moving and growing because millions of people push to make it happen every day. Because giant corporations are spending billions of dollars to improve the product and market it.
Just because you are spectator (and a detractor) doesn't mean everybody else is. Wake up and look around you.
"Rome fell. Is that the sort of inevitable conclusion you want for Linux?"
It's inevitable. All things die. you will die, America will die, linux will die, microsoft will die. Nothing last forever. No empire, no individual, no company no matter how big and powerful lasts forever. Linux will grow, it will dominate, it will die. No way of getting around that.
"Name one take-your-work-home Linux app that hasn't been ported to Windows."
Not the point. The guy who is used to working with linux at work will want the same environment at home.
"Name one corporate support tech or PHB who wants to deal with panic calls from home users who can't get their mandated office apps to install and work properly under some randomly chosen Linux distro."
Just like you don't call your work when your windows crashes neither will you call your work when you install gentoo and can't get your application to work. Aside from that our tech support routinely troubleshoots various problems with routers, wireless hubs, personal firewalls etc when employees can't get their VPN connected for some reason or another.
"Boxed software with a thick, printed, manual has a certain usefulness and credibility downloads often lack, especially if you are in the market for a $500 professional office suite."
To you maybe but not to most people. The 99% of the people in the world who use MS office never got a manual, they also never got a manual for windows. If your theory was right they would have all abondened office by now. For vast moajority of people the software comes built into the PC they bought. They don't get a box, they don't get a manual. They usually get a "recovery CD" and that's about it. Where have you been for the last decade?
"Thousands of commercial grade software packages equivalent to Word Perfect in it's prime?"
Depends on what you mean commercial grade. Postgres, mysql, apache, openoffice, mozilla, evolution, openoffice etc are certainly commercial grade. just because you don't like something that does not mean it's not "commercial grade". Remember windows 3.1 was "commercial grade".
It is a bad thing because it means that all markets eventually end up with a monopoly. The only think that prevents a worldwide monoply of all markets by one company is legislation.
Again you are talking about 1% of the computer users. How many people you know have full acrobat installed? In my workplace I think one PC has it out of hundreds.
"As long as Linux keeps this underdog mentality and spends all it's time playing catchup instead of working on some of its more difficult issues, Linux isn't going to go anywhere. "
How many people in this world think that linux isn't going anywhere? You and 10 other people?
Anybody who claims that linux "isn't going anywhere" can't ever be taken seriously on anything. You clearly show a reckless disregard for facts.
"Unless we're all open about these real issues so that they can be fixed, the platform won't actually be ready for the desktop any time soon."
What an odd thing to say.
First of all how much more open can "we" be then to have ESR publicly humiliate CUPS developers? Is there some other definition of open you are thinking about?
Secondly do you or anybody else in the world think that if we were somehow more "open" the vendors would write linux drivers? How does being more open put any pressure on vendors to write drivers?
I would like you to explain to me how yelling and screaming at open source developers and calling them names will cause hardware manufacturers to write drivers? That's the part I don't get. You apparently have some insight into this matter so please explain it to me.
From my perspective the only way hardware manufacturers will write linux drivers is if linux market share grows. The only way it can grow is if there is more hardware support. It's a chicken and egg problem.
Personally I think the problem will take care itself pretty soon. Corporate adoption of linux will grow, non us countries will continue to migrate to linux, hardware manufacturers will take notice, more drivers will get written, home adoption will follow.
It's inevitable. People are just impatient that's all. Rome wasn't built in a day.
"Does it? The shelf space reserved for Linux hardware and software at Computer City doesn't seem to be growing any. Are you saying you know a lot of people who are going to drop $500 on Corel's office suite? Are you going to spend it?"
I don't know where you get the impression that the linux desktop is growing in the home market. It's not. It's growing in the corporate desktop. It will grow into the home market later when people install it at home so they can take their work home.
Aside from that most linux users (corporate or otherwise) don't buy boxed software. They download what they need. There are thousands of pieces of linux software but I don't think you'll see any of them boxed up and displayed at your local best buy anytime soon. Of course my local best buy does not have any Mac software or hardware either so that's a bit moot.
I don't know what you mean exactly by "linux hardware" either BTW. My linux hardware is a dell. For most people linux hardware is an off the self PC.
The problem is that PHP nuubees tend to concentrate on the whizbang experts and not on the more important details. Jedit is an all in one productivity machine. It not only does syntax highlighting but with the right plug ins it allows you to check code in and out of cvs, does xml/xsl transformations, xml indenting, xml validation, tag completion, spell checking and a hundred other things.
I call bullshit. There is open source all over macosX. Kerberos, samba, cups, openldap, safari and of course freebsd core. On the server side there is apache, php, jboss, mysql, tomcat, postfix, wu-imap. every significant bit of plumbing in the mac is open source including the damned kernel.
The fact is that apple took a collection of open source software, integrated it, added carbon on top and charged people for it. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with that. But don't kid yourself either, Apple is making money off of open source.
" Okay. Let's put aside the silly "Microsoft is Evil" stuff for a minute,"
Why? I don't think you should ever put that away. Would you say the same about Jeffrey Dahmer? Would you say "let's put aside the fact that he is evil and actually listen to what he is trying to tell us"?
I would not.
In practice it's just not that good though.
I would have prefered to have the specialty searches (bsd, mac, govt etc) on the front page. There is no reason why those searches have to be two clicks away.
Yes I know I can make my own page but that's not the point. Google should give me an option to put them on the front page.
Only if the law was that simple.
They have money, they have lawyers. They can sue and win without much trouble.
sometimes I wish we were back in the days when witches were weighed to see if they weighed the same as a duck. Even that seems fairer.
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Yes. It would be so much better if we were keeping the manufacturing over here and getting paid the same as the chinese.
Great choices capitalism has left us huh? Either get paid like a chinese or lose your job to a chinese. Whoo Hoo!.
Lets get rid of the unions and take a five hundred percent pay cut. Let's also get rid of all environmental regulations, labor laws, laws against prison labor, and of course those stupid worker safety regulations. That will show those chinese!
Countries don't compete for the best citizens. Most countries worth living in have very strict immigration laws. IT's the other way around. COuntries have to put barriers to keep the unwashed masses out.
"With capitalism, greed keeps everyone in check. "
What evidence do you have for this? Clearly it hasn't kept anybody in check so far.
Maybe you could point out an example or five where greed kept somebody in check.
Wow I'll try that.
That has got the be the weirdest use of drag and drop I have ever heard.
That's odd. Flash and PDFs work out of box for me. I never had to do anything to get them working.
Later on I installed the "press to play" mozilla plug in and now I don't see the annoying flash ad unless I want to. That feature alone is worth every penny I didn't pay.
I am curious though. What console did you open up and what jargon you typed to get mozilla going?
Everybody here is oohing and aahing but let me go on the record as saying that this is actually a BadIdea (TM). Why?
... assuming they get over that, I'll be very happy once this is released."
Let's say there is a vulnaribility in libxml. What do you do? You have to upgrade all your applications! Can you get a list of applications that use libxml? Can you just upgrade libxml and automatically fix all your applications? You know it's going to happen sooner or later.
Where is you data kept? Is it also in the application folder? If so that really sucks. I want to back up my data every day and my applications only when I install something new.
I also hate the fact that all configurations are kept with the application. I have gotten in the habit of checking my etc directory into CVS and I can't tell you how often it has saved my butt. Being able to roll back to a previous known good state is immeasurable and I won't use any system which does not give me that ability. Too many things can go wrong.
"I still would like to know how they plan on fixing library dependencies, but
It seems like they simply going to avoid the problem by shipping every library the application depends on with the app itself. Look forward to gigabyte sized apps in the not too distant future. I don't even want to think about how much memory it will take to load applications that load their own libraries as opposed to using shared ones.
Just a bad idea taken to it's expreme. They should really look at something like encap before they roll this out into production.
According to your criterea liux is coming along.
Linux already has great compatibility with 90% of the hardware on market (more then windows probably), you can already call somebody when things go wrong. Moneydance is an excellent and easy to use program for balancing your check book, zip files are handled automatically by all the file managers, mozilla is better then IE in every respect including speed and ease of use. I don't edit pictures much but I imagine there are a few applications for that well.
It sounds to me like all we have to do is to get a handful games to attract the 16 year olds and we are there!.
BTW. There is not a comp-usa in my neigborhood but there is a best buy. I went in there to ask about some mac games and software and they told me that they don't carry anything for the mac but that I could check out their web site and maybe they would have some there. Apparently in this regard both the Mac and Linux platforms are suffering.
Maybe we can start some sort of a boycott of stores that don't carry Linux distributions. I mean if the republicans can call for a boycott ot heinz ketchup because the wife of the democratic candidate owns a part of the company we can call for a boycott of best but don't you think?
Why doesn't the finder give you the full path to the item you have selected so you can copy it and paste it elsewhere.?
Why does the finder refuse to open up in column view even though I tell it to?
Why doesn't the finder give me the option of keeping the directory hierarchy together like windows explorer does?
" That depends on the industry does it not? I consult for several lawyers and they ALL have it on every computer. Best Buy must sell enough of it to make a buck else why waste the shelf space?"
Sure. For some slivers of the user base acrobat is very useful. But the vast majority of users have no need to create PDF files. In the US it often seems like there is a lawyer under every rock but actually they probably make up for less then 5% of the population don't you think?
BTW If you consult for those people do them a favor and install open office so they can make PDFs for free.
"How about the people who are called out openly admitting they have issues they're not going to address because there is no "geek factor" in it?"
There will always be those people. Just like there will always be people calling open source users terrorists and communists. Deal with it.
" but the fault rather lies in the general Linux community making claims that Linux is ready for the desktop. It's not. Stop saying it is."
But it is for most people. Sure if you have some weird printer you can't get a driver for it but for the most common printers there are drivers. When people say it's ready they don't mean for 100% of the people just the vast majority of them.
"Until that happens in the Linux market at the same level, everyone needs to stop saying Linux will crush the Mac on the desktop this year or next year or within 5 years."
Linux will crush the Mac within five years. I already outlined the scenario. Corporations will adopt linux (not mac). Foreign countries will standardise on linux (not mac). As adoption grows vendors will write drivers because they can no longer afford to alianate corporations and the chinese market. It will happen.
"A frank evaluation of the platform strengths and weaknesses is what is needed for people to actually see a Linux desktop market in the future."
What makes you think this is not being done? You are overly pessimistic and other people are overly optimistic but vast majority of the people are pragmatic. Take an honest look at how far linux desktop has gotten in the last two years and project two years from now. What do you see?
"People can surely sit on their asses and their problems will take care of themselves!"
nobody is sitting on their hands!. Stop making shit up. Thousands of people all over the world are coding their assess off every day. IBM, SUN, HP, redHat, Novell are vigorously marketing to corporations and countries. Thousands of startups are selling services, and appliances. Exactly how blind are you to be completely ignorant of all that. Linux is moving and growing because millions of people push to make it happen every day. Because giant corporations are spending billions of dollars to improve the product and market it.
Just because you are spectator (and a detractor) doesn't mean everybody else is. Wake up and look around you.
"Rome fell. Is that the sort of inevitable conclusion you want for Linux?"
It's inevitable. All things die. you will die, America will die, linux will die, microsoft will die. Nothing last forever. No empire, no individual, no company no matter how big and powerful lasts forever. Linux will grow, it will dominate, it will die. No way of getting around that.
"Name one take-your-work-home Linux app that hasn't been ported to Windows."
Not the point. The guy who is used to working with linux at work will want the same environment at home.
"Name one corporate support tech or PHB who wants to deal with panic calls from home users who can't get their mandated office apps to install and work properly under some randomly chosen Linux distro."
Just like you don't call your work when your windows crashes neither will you call your work when you install gentoo and can't get your application to work. Aside from that our tech support routinely troubleshoots various problems with routers, wireless hubs, personal firewalls etc when employees can't get their VPN connected for some reason or another.
"Boxed software with a thick, printed, manual has a certain usefulness and credibility downloads often lack, especially if you are in the market for a $500 professional office suite."
To you maybe but not to most people. The 99% of the people in the world who use MS office never got a manual, they also never got a manual for windows. If your theory was right they would have all abondened office by now. For vast moajority of people the software comes built into the PC they bought. They don't get a box, they don't get a manual. They usually get a "recovery CD" and that's about it. Where have you been for the last decade?
"Thousands of commercial grade software packages equivalent to Word Perfect in it's prime?"
Depends on what you mean commercial grade. Postgres, mysql, apache, openoffice, mozilla, evolution, openoffice etc are certainly commercial grade. just because you don't like something that does not mean it's not "commercial grade". Remember windows 3.1 was "commercial grade".
The problem is that capitalism encourages greed and amorality and rewards the greed and the amoral with riches.
It is a bad thing because it means that all markets eventually end up with a monopoly. The only think that prevents a worldwide monoply of all markets by one company is legislation.
Again you are talking about 1% of the computer users. How many people you know have full acrobat installed? In my workplace I think one PC has it out of hundreds.
"As long as Linux keeps this underdog mentality and spends all it's time playing catchup instead of working on some of its more difficult issues, Linux isn't going to go anywhere. "
How many people in this world think that linux isn't going anywhere? You and 10 other people?
Anybody who claims that linux "isn't going anywhere" can't ever be taken seriously on anything. You clearly show a reckless disregard for facts.
"Unless we're all open about these real issues so that they can be fixed, the platform won't actually be ready for the desktop any time soon."
What an odd thing to say.
First of all how much more open can "we" be then to have ESR publicly humiliate CUPS developers? Is there some other definition of open you are thinking about?
Secondly do you or anybody else in the world think that if we were somehow more "open" the vendors would write linux drivers? How does being more open put any pressure on vendors to write drivers?
I would like you to explain to me how yelling and screaming at open source developers and calling them names will cause hardware manufacturers to write drivers? That's the part I don't get. You apparently have some insight into this matter so please explain it to me.
From my perspective the only way hardware manufacturers will write linux drivers is if linux market share grows. The only way it can grow is if there is more hardware support. It's a chicken and egg problem.
Personally I think the problem will take care itself pretty soon. Corporate adoption of linux will grow, non us countries will continue to migrate to linux, hardware manufacturers will take notice, more drivers will get written, home adoption will follow.
It's inevitable. People are just impatient that's all. Rome wasn't built in a day.
"Does it? The shelf space reserved for Linux hardware and software at Computer City doesn't seem to be growing any. Are you saying you know a lot of people who are going to drop $500 on Corel's office suite? Are you going to spend it?" I don't know where you get the impression that the linux desktop is growing in the home market. It's not. It's growing in the corporate desktop. It will grow into the home market later when people install it at home so they can take their work home. Aside from that most linux users (corporate or otherwise) don't buy boxed software. They download what they need. There are thousands of pieces of linux software but I don't think you'll see any of them boxed up and displayed at your local best buy anytime soon. Of course my local best buy does not have any Mac software or hardware either so that's a bit moot. I don't know what you mean exactly by "linux hardware" either BTW. My linux hardware is a dell. For most people linux hardware is an off the self PC.
The problem is that PHP nuubees tend to concentrate on the whizbang experts and not on the more important details. Jedit is an all in one productivity machine. It not only does syntax highlighting but with the right plug ins it allows you to check code in and out of cvs, does xml/xsl transformations, xml indenting, xml validation, tag completion, spell checking and a hundred other things.
I call bullshit. There is open source all over macosX. Kerberos, samba, cups, openldap, safari and of course freebsd core. On the server side there is apache, php, jboss, mysql, tomcat, postfix, wu-imap. every significant bit of plumbing in the mac is open source including the damned kernel. The fact is that apple took a collection of open source software, integrated it, added carbon on top and charged people for it. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with that. But don't kid yourself either, Apple is making money off of open source.
Get Jedit or eclipse and learn to use them. You will be happier I guarantee you.
" Okay. Let's put aside the silly "Microsoft is Evil" stuff for a minute," Why? I don't think you should ever put that away. Would you say the same about Jeffrey Dahmer? Would you say "let's put aside the fact that he is evil and actually listen to what he is trying to tell us"? I would not.
In practice it's just not that good though. I would have prefered to have the specialty searches (bsd, mac, govt etc) on the front page. There is no reason why those searches have to be two clicks away. Yes I know I can make my own page but that's not the point. Google should give me an option to put them on the front page.
And yet you are still here. You are still reading the site and adding up the advertising dollars. I guess it works.
Only if the law was that simple. They have money, they have lawyers. They can sue and win without much trouble. sometimes I wish we were back in the days when witches were weighed to see if they weighed the same as a duck. Even that seems fairer.