PCs are, as many of us agree, not dying, but they are changing and becoming a niche product -- again.
The term "personal computer" was in a way a misnomer, because personal computers existed before: we called them "workstations", and at the time they were quite a revolution, because we could do whatever we wanted with them instead of sharing computing time on Unix boxen, VAX, or mainframes. They were also super expensive, enough that they were not worth the money except for specific tasks where computing independence was absolutely required,
The "personal computer" revolution should really have been called the "small office computer" or "home computer" revolution: these were new kinds of "workstations" that were cheap enough that we could buy them for... small offices and homes.
I predict that we're moving back in time, in a way. Most consumers would prefer tablets and similar devices. For those of us that need serious computing power, we will still have our computers to buy. But they will likely be targeted and priced accordingly for the "prosumer" market. It would be easy to buy a cheap tablet, but forget about cheap laptops: manufacturers won't make them because they won't sell well. Instead, they'll focus on premium desktop computers for premium users.
So let's call them "workstations" again. Meanwhile the term "personal computer" may finally make perfect sense for phones and tablets: truly "on-person" computers.
The clock is turning back: we used to call these things "workstations," a name that stood for a powerful but small computer sitting on a desk somewhere, definitely not something that everyone had or needed. We should call them that again: most of us won't need "workstations," but some us do.
The word "PC" has run its course. Tablets and phones are far more "personal" than a big clunky desktop would ever be. So, yeah, I would say that conceptually the PC has died, or rather has become a workstation again.
By the way, I'm one of those people who will always need a workstation...:) But it doesn't mean I begrudge or don't understand the changes in the industry. My mom sure as heck doesn't need a workstation for her email and web browsing.
Some people got that setup to work, but it hasn't been very stable for me (crashes), so I prefer xfwin. Compiz is nice and all, but I prefer stability above all.
Just want to point out that "fallback" does not exist anymore as a separate mode. Clutter (the window manager) will simply use the 2D LLVM pipe if 3D graphics are not available.
"GNOME Classic" is a "mode," meaning a pre-configured template for a desktop session. You can also create your own modes according to your tastes.
Same here. Xfce is mature, and everything just works. I don't have time to beta-test in my everyday work.
It's still impossible to do very essential things in GNOME Classic, such as moving the panels around or fully configuring them. So, in many ways GNOME 3 hasn't reached feature parity with GNOME 2 or Xfce.
That said, it's really nice to see GNOME listening to users. An especially important part of GNOME 3.8, in my view, is that more options were added to the settings rather than removing them. This shows that the team really is trying to stabilize the core before adding more features, which is really the right way to go about things. I think in a few years GNOME 3 will be a great desktop, suitable for various work styles.
Canonical used to pay a salary to a sole employee who did work on KDE/Kubuntu integration, but decided they could not afford it anymore and need to focus their energies on Unity. Blue Systems stepped in to offer the funding instead.
In any case, it didn't mean "ownership," it was merely offering some direct finanical support in addition to the resource support. Canonical will continue to offer resource support to all the ?ubuntus, but I don't blame them for not funneling money into areas that are not their core priorities.
Canonical doesn't "own" the ?ubuntu flavors. Instead, it provides resources: build machines with integrated QA, bandwidth and recognition.
This means that it's up to the volunteer teams who make these flavors (or the upstream desktop environments) to do the integration.
It's actually not clear that Wayland/Mir support will happen for them. It will surely happen in GTK+3 and Qt, but both Xfce and LXDE currently use GTK+2. There are talks about migrating Xfce to GTK+3, and perhaps the addition of modern graphical backends will be the tipping point for the decision.
Of course, once/if it does happen, these flavors will enjoy the same bugfixes and updates to Wayland/Mir that the basic Ubuntu distribution will have.
Same here! I do my audio recording with Ardour and an Edirol UA-25. It's immediately recognized in Ubuntu, out of the box.
Ardour may not be as good as Logic (though Ardour 3.0 just came out a few days ago, I'm eager to try it), but the JACK system on Ubuntu is astoundingly flexible. Digital plumbing!
My problem with these "just work" descriptions is that people have very different needs.
I use both Ubuntu and Mac OS regularly. The things that I need to "just work" are a lot of programming tools (gcc, python), databases, and servery stuff like databases, web servers, etc. Getting those to work on Mac OS is unpleasant. MacPorts and Homebrew are both terrible in comparison to the APT world. "apt-get install apache2" is very much "just works" in my book. On the Mac, I'm fine as long as I use Xcode and other Apple-specific tools, but anything else ends up being frustrating.
People complain a lot about desktop choices for Linux, but I never found any of them any worse than Mac, and some are better tailored for certain workstyles than others. All the major ones (GNOME with Shell or Unity, KDE, XFCE) are mature enough now for everyday work, even if they weren't so a few years ago. I really find all of them easier to work with than Mac's desktop. I don't like Mac's bubblegum dock, and I find the Finder to be perhaps the worst file manager ever made.
Another aspect of "just work" is installation. Installing a free OS can be painful on some hardware (and trivial on others). Since you can't (easily) install Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, this problem doesn't exist there, so it indeed "just works" in this respect. If you want a "just works" experience with a free OS, just buy a machine from System 76, a truly wonderful company that has yet to disappoint me. Comes with Ubuntu and everything working, great hardware and great support. And for me, all the things that I want to "just work" indeed do.
I use Windows 7, too, and it's fine, but I really need the Unix stuff to do my work.
Can we retire the "just works" phrase, or at least find better ways to qualify it?
Mark calls anybody who disagrees with his vision (which was never entirely presented to the public, but is instead rolled out in "surprises" like Ubuntu phone and then tablet) a "whiner." Anyone who criticizes a decision is being "selfish" and "childish." (These are all words he uses in interviews, blogs and bug comments on Launchpad.) But you are very right that he is setting up a straw man. Sure, there are a few childish whiners, but a large group of people criticizing the directions of Ubuntu are people heavily invested in free software, and they have an interest in seeing Ubuntu succeed. These critiques are not "selfish," they are all about trying to make Ubuntu succeed.
But Mark avoids any kind of discussion by pretending that he's dealing with "dumb" people.
I'm surprised that the biggest deal about Ubuntu phone isn't mentioned!
You'll be able to plug this phone into a dock (or otherwise connect it to a big monitor, keyboard and mouse) and use it essentially like Ubuntu desktop. There, you'll be able to run all your usual desktop applications as well as your phone applications, on a big screen with full resolution. (The do need to be built for ARM, but already most of the software in the Ubuntu Software Center has ARM versions.)
Nobody does this yet. There are dockable Android phones, but Android is not a desktop OS, and the experience on a desktop is quite miserable, both in terms of UX (mouse support is awkward) and in terms of available applications.
Phones are powerful computers! It's silly that we carry all that power around with us and yet can't apply it towards the usual desktop experience. I see the Ubuntu phone as finally being able to bridge this gap.
Even more: I can imagine desktop applications that make use phone features. GPS is not something we usually have in laptops, but phones have it, and there can be cool desktop apps that make use of it. And there's tilt-control: I can imagine big desktop games making use of tilt: the phone will become something like a game "controller" (even though the entire computer is inside, too). And, of course, you have cellular internet built in. In a way, phones, as hardware, offer more features than desktops, and app developers will surely take advantage of it!
I'm very excited about this feature, and hope to see it fronted more as one of the big advantages of Ubuntu phone!
I think the naming scheme is clear and brilliant: a number according to size, not "version" or "bandwidth speed" or any of that crap that most non-techie consumers could care less about. No more of that "S" or "Galaxy" stuff. No more internal numbering. "Nexus" is the brand family, and that's it.
Consumers are starting to think of this new network-computer world of "phones," "tablets" and "mini-tablets" exactly in terms of comfort vs. portability. How big is it? That's the only major quesiton they care about in terms of usability. Sure, there are other factors important to some users, but that should be the starting point.
I hope for their sake they keep the Nexus family numbering scheme consistent from now on. The can release new versions of these (like Apple does) with a simple numbering scheme (say, Nexus 7 version 2), but the name itself being tied to the size is perfect.
A desktop shell is a very small part of the experience. Try sending an email using Thunderbird via a tablet, and you'll quickly see the problems... What Ubuntu needs in order to be a good tablet OS is an application ecosystem, at the very least the basic stuff.
Thing is, having a relatively cheap reference platform (mature distro on an ARM tablet) will allow a lot of devs an opportunity to make touch-friendly version of their apps. And, a few years from now, we might have a smoother experience between desktops/tablets/phones.
The advantages of having a single platform for all are mostly for the devs; but when devs are happy, the benefits trickle down to users, too, who have a much more vibrant ecosystem. This is exactly what MS is doing with Win 8/RT.
Would also be great to see Ubuntu support running Android apps! Lets have the best of both worlds!
Wayland does not entirely replace X11. You can definitely continue running an X11 server that renders to your local Wayland (it is a client of Wayland). The challenge is that this server is not ready yet. it needs to be programmed essentially from scratch, and include all the weird parts of X. But, the xwayland project is already running pretty nicely for the main parts of X11 that most toolkits require. Check out the demos!
Toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt already support pluggable rendering backends (GTK+ even has a cool web backend!), so they would just need to create a new one to support Wayland. (It would be MUCH simpler than their X11 backend.) But, even if they don't support Wayland, they would be able to continue working through their X11 backend and the xwayland client.
Bottom line is that Wayland (once xwayland is finished) will have only advantages. The toolkits already support X11, so all apps written for GTK+ and Qt will continue to support network transparency. But, when running locally, they will have the option of using a Wayland backend for much improved throughput.
Thing is, what if people write applications without GTK+ or Qt, that use Wayland directly? These, of course, will not be able to enjoy network transparency. But, writing applications like that is highly specific and likely the coders will be doing it for a good reason.
I've initiated and maintain several large free software projects, and I agree wholeheartedly with the basic premise here: I think that software without documentation is close to useless, and I put huge amounts of effort into it.
But, let's be realistic here: it's a LOT of work. I can easily spend more time maintaining the documentation than the code. I consider it time well spent, but realize (as others have pointed out here) that it's a different kind of skill-set, which programmers don't always have.
The bottom line is that I would rather people release software than not release it a all. (close to useless != useless). Still, I wish more projects would take this issue more seriously.
The first reaction of the article and many commentators here seems to be that the main target is the consumer market, where the tablet would compete with Android and iOS devices.
But remember that a significant part of Microsoft's revenue is from the vertical market, where there's a lot of need for a tablet that could connect to an Microsoft-oriented enterprise backend. This tablet could then be customized by Microsoft and other contractors for very specific enterprise needs. Other vendors will be releasing Win RT tablets, but it's important for Microsoft that they 1) have one reference platform device, and 2) that they can create a complete solution for clients that involves both the backend and the tablets.
LaTeX is the technology, but LyX is the document processor (not word processor) that you want.
I've made the switch from OpenOffice/LibreOffice to LyX and haven't looked back!
For what it's worth, I work in academia and often have to create documents with complex bibliographies. I use JabRef to manage my bibliographic database, and it integrates so smoothly with LyX. My colleagues who are stuck with MS Word+Endnote are green with envy when they see my professional quality printouts.
But the real benefit is pleasure of the WYSIWYM (what you see if what you mean) paradigm. When you're actually doing work, you want to think in terms of content, not in terms of how the printout will appear. LyX is just so perfect in this respect: I get to define the screen fonts that are comfortable for me as I work, while relying on LaTeX's power to make things render nicely in the end.
Wikipedia NOR Britannica are citable sources. EVER. Nor any other encyclopedia.
This is not entirely true: entries in some encyclopedias are credited with specific authors, and in some cases do represent a citable opinion, or even citable, factual results of research. These "entries" are essentially "articles." This is not true for Britannica or Wikipedia, but is true for many, many encyclopedias in many fields.
The problem of citation in encyclopedias, wikipedia, and even the web at large, is that of authority. If you can't trace the author, then you have no way of evaluating the authority and validity of the cited text.
The funding amounted to paying one single Canonical employee to work specifically on Kubuntu.
Kubuntu is remaining an official Ubuntu variant and will continue to be updated by the community. Moreover, bugs to the KDE package (which is part of the main repository) will continue to be fixed by anyone at Canonical, and patches will continue to be sent upstream.
The "drop funding" issue has been blown out of proportion.
Pixel Qi does both "eInk" and color, but unfortunately does both very poorly.
If you ever get your hands on one, you'll see the problems immediately. The B&W mode is faded and hard to read. The color mode is washed-out and has a ridiculously bad viewing angle. Seriously, it's barely usable. I'm sure all tablet manufacturers have reviewed Pixel Qi, and their reasons for not using it are simply that it doesn't deliver an acceptbile user experience.
I wanted this to work very, very badly, because both eInk and color tablets are an exercise in painful compromise for me. Pixel Qi sounds great on paper, but it demands too many compromises to be truly useful.
1) Older Apple devices do get abandoned by Apple. My early iPod touch is locked at iOS 3.3 and Apple has made it clear that it will not receive updates.
2) The exciting "Siri" feature available on the iPhone 4S does not work on earlier phones, even though they do get an iOS 5 update. The official reasoning is that earlier phones are not powerful enough, but this seems to be dubious (even David Pogue, the super Apple fanboy seems to doubt this).
Bottom line: Apple plays the "obsolete" game pretty well, too.
On the other side, while Android has had painful fragmentation in the past, Google is claiming, at least, that Android from version 4.0 onwards will be able to run on older devices, though obviously not all features will be supported there. And Google is trying to muscle vendors into a consortium which *requires* them to provide updates for older phones. We'll see how well this happens! And this is all for future phones and Android versions, of course: current "early adopters" of Android will be stuck with the existing mess.
Steve Jobs was a very good salesman and micromanager, who revolutionized the field of packaging gadgets, made some wise investments in 3D cinema, and did not believe in sharing his incredible wealth. He will be sorely missed by greedy Apple stockholders and his family, and apparently by a billion people who really like their iPhone and think Steve Jobs "invented" it and was a "genius" inventor like Thomas Edison because they have no idea what anything means.
I remember that when Linux started to become popular, it seemed crazy to many people that Linus chose the GPL, because there free operating systems out there with much more lenient licenses. Why would a vendor (Red Hat, IBM, etc.) subject themselves to the restrictions of the GPL when there are other choices?
Well, they chose Linux because of its quality. They went with the best product, and adapted themselves to the license. (Some vendors eventually learned that the GPL was good for them, because it ensured that they could get the advantages developed in-house by other vendors.)
I think a GPLv3 Android would have been just as popular as a GPLv2 Android. Vendors would have picked it because it was good, free (and encouragingly backed by Google). So, they wouldn't have locked boot loaders. Big deal! They would have adapter to the situation, and in the end the GPLv3 would have made Android a better product then it is now.
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PCs are, as many of us agree, not dying, but they are changing and becoming a niche product -- again.
The term "personal computer" was in a way a misnomer, because personal computers existed before: we called them "workstations", and at the time they were quite a revolution, because we could do whatever we wanted with them instead of sharing computing time on Unix boxen, VAX, or mainframes. They were also super expensive, enough that they were not worth the money except for specific tasks where computing independence was absolutely required,
The "personal computer" revolution should really have been called the "small office computer" or "home computer" revolution: these were new kinds of "workstations" that were cheap enough that we could buy them for ... small offices and homes.
I predict that we're moving back in time, in a way. Most consumers would prefer tablets and similar devices. For those of us that need serious computing power, we will still have our computers to buy. But they will likely be targeted and priced accordingly for the "prosumer" market. It would be easy to buy a cheap tablet, but forget about cheap laptops: manufacturers won't make them because they won't sell well. Instead, they'll focus on premium desktop computers for premium users.
So let's call them "workstations" again. Meanwhile the term "personal computer" may finally make perfect sense for phones and tablets: truly "on-person" computers.
The clock is turning back: we used to call these things "workstations," a name that stood for a powerful but small computer sitting on a desk somewhere, definitely not something that everyone had or needed. We should call them that again: most of us won't need "workstations," but some us do.
The word "PC" has run its course. Tablets and phones are far more "personal" than a big clunky desktop would ever be. So, yeah, I would say that conceptually the PC has died, or rather has become a workstation again.
By the way, I'm one of those people who will always need a workstation... :) But it doesn't mean I begrudge or don't understand the changes in the industry. My mom sure as heck doesn't need a workstation for her email and web browsing.
Some people got that setup to work, but it hasn't been very stable for me (crashes), so I prefer xfwin. Compiz is nice and all, but I prefer stability above all.
Just want to point out that "fallback" does not exist anymore as a separate mode. Clutter (the window manager) will simply use the 2D LLVM pipe if 3D graphics are not available.
"GNOME Classic" is a "mode," meaning a pre-configured template for a desktop session. You can also create your own modes according to your tastes.
Same here. Xfce is mature, and everything just works. I don't have time to beta-test in my everyday work.
It's still impossible to do very essential things in GNOME Classic, such as moving the panels around or fully configuring them. So, in many ways GNOME 3 hasn't reached feature parity with GNOME 2 or Xfce.
That said, it's really nice to see GNOME listening to users. An especially important part of GNOME 3.8, in my view, is that more options were added to the settings rather than removing them. This shows that the team really is trying to stabilize the core before adding more features, which is really the right way to go about things. I think in a few years GNOME 3 will be a great desktop, suitable for various work styles.
Canonical used to pay a salary to a sole employee who did work on KDE/Kubuntu integration, but decided they could not afford it anymore and need to focus their energies on Unity. Blue Systems stepped in to offer the funding instead.
In any case, it didn't mean "ownership," it was merely offering some direct finanical support in addition to the resource support. Canonical will continue to offer resource support to all the ?ubuntus, but I don't blame them for not funneling money into areas that are not their core priorities.
Canonical doesn't "own" the ?ubuntu flavors. Instead, it provides resources: build machines with integrated QA, bandwidth and recognition.
This means that it's up to the volunteer teams who make these flavors (or the upstream desktop environments) to do the integration.
It's actually not clear that Wayland/Mir support will happen for them. It will surely happen in GTK+3 and Qt, but both Xfce and LXDE currently use GTK+2. There are talks about migrating Xfce to GTK+3, and perhaps the addition of modern graphical backends will be the tipping point for the decision.
Of course, once/if it does happen, these flavors will enjoy the same bugfixes and updates to Wayland/Mir that the basic Ubuntu distribution will have.
I love that Jurassic Park verbed.
Same here! I do my audio recording with Ardour and an Edirol UA-25. It's immediately recognized in Ubuntu, out of the box.
Ardour may not be as good as Logic (though Ardour 3.0 just came out a few days ago, I'm eager to try it), but the JACK system on Ubuntu is astoundingly flexible. Digital plumbing!
My problem with these "just work" descriptions is that people have very different needs.
I use both Ubuntu and Mac OS regularly. The things that I need to "just work" are a lot of programming tools (gcc, python), databases, and servery stuff like databases, web servers, etc. Getting those to work on Mac OS is unpleasant. MacPorts and Homebrew are both terrible in comparison to the APT world. "apt-get install apache2" is very much "just works" in my book. On the Mac, I'm fine as long as I use Xcode and other Apple-specific tools, but anything else ends up being frustrating.
People complain a lot about desktop choices for Linux, but I never found any of them any worse than Mac, and some are better tailored for certain workstyles than others. All the major ones (GNOME with Shell or Unity, KDE, XFCE) are mature enough now for everyday work, even if they weren't so a few years ago. I really find all of them easier to work with than Mac's desktop. I don't like Mac's bubblegum dock, and I find the Finder to be perhaps the worst file manager ever made.
Another aspect of "just work" is installation. Installing a free OS can be painful on some hardware (and trivial on others). Since you can't (easily) install Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, this problem doesn't exist there, so it indeed "just works" in this respect. If you want a "just works" experience with a free OS, just buy a machine from System 76, a truly wonderful company that has yet to disappoint me. Comes with Ubuntu and everything working, great hardware and great support. And for me, all the things that I want to "just work" indeed do.
I use Windows 7, too, and it's fine, but I really need the Unix stuff to do my work.
Can we retire the "just works" phrase, or at least find better ways to qualify it?
I'm sad to agree with you.
Mark calls anybody who disagrees with his vision (which was never entirely presented to the public, but is instead rolled out in "surprises" like Ubuntu phone and then tablet) a "whiner." Anyone who criticizes a decision is being "selfish" and "childish." (These are all words he uses in interviews, blogs and bug comments on Launchpad.) But you are very right that he is setting up a straw man. Sure, there are a few childish whiners, but a large group of people criticizing the directions of Ubuntu are people heavily invested in free software, and they have an interest in seeing Ubuntu succeed. These critiques are not "selfish," they are all about trying to make Ubuntu succeed.
But Mark avoids any kind of discussion by pretending that he's dealing with "dumb" people.
Mark, it's not a black-and-white world.
I'm surprised that the biggest deal about Ubuntu phone isn't mentioned!
You'll be able to plug this phone into a dock (or otherwise connect it to a big monitor, keyboard and mouse) and use it essentially like Ubuntu desktop. There, you'll be able to run all your usual desktop applications as well as your phone applications, on a big screen with full resolution. (The do need to be built for ARM, but already most of the software in the Ubuntu Software Center has ARM versions.)
Nobody does this yet. There are dockable Android phones, but Android is not a desktop OS, and the experience on a desktop is quite miserable, both in terms of UX (mouse support is awkward) and in terms of available applications.
Phones are powerful computers! It's silly that we carry all that power around with us and yet can't apply it towards the usual desktop experience. I see the Ubuntu phone as finally being able to bridge this gap.
Even more: I can imagine desktop applications that make use phone features. GPS is not something we usually have in laptops, but phones have it, and there can be cool desktop apps that make use of it. And there's tilt-control: I can imagine big desktop games making use of tilt: the phone will become something like a game "controller" (even though the entire computer is inside, too). And, of course, you have cellular internet built in. In a way, phones, as hardware, offer more features than desktops, and app developers will surely take advantage of it!
I'm very excited about this feature, and hope to see it fronted more as one of the big advantages of Ubuntu phone!
You just compared the two, and did it well, too. ;)
I think the naming scheme is clear and brilliant: a number according to size, not "version" or "bandwidth speed" or any of that crap that most non-techie consumers could care less about. No more of that "S" or "Galaxy" stuff. No more internal numbering. "Nexus" is the brand family, and that's it.
Consumers are starting to think of this new network-computer world of "phones," "tablets" and "mini-tablets" exactly in terms of comfort vs. portability. How big is it? That's the only major quesiton they care about in terms of usability. Sure, there are other factors important to some users, but that should be the starting point.
I hope for their sake they keep the Nexus family numbering scheme consistent from now on. The can release new versions of these (like Apple does) with a simple numbering scheme (say, Nexus 7 version 2), but the name itself being tied to the size is perfect.
A desktop shell is a very small part of the experience. Try sending an email using Thunderbird via a tablet, and you'll quickly see the problems... What Ubuntu needs in order to be a good tablet OS is an application ecosystem, at the very least the basic stuff.
Thing is, having a relatively cheap reference platform (mature distro on an ARM tablet) will allow a lot of devs an opportunity to make touch-friendly version of their apps. And, a few years from now, we might have a smoother experience between desktops/tablets/phones.
The advantages of having a single platform for all are mostly for the devs; but when devs are happy, the benefits trickle down to users, too, who have a much more vibrant ecosystem. This is exactly what MS is doing with Win 8/RT.
Would also be great to see Ubuntu support running Android apps! Lets have the best of both worlds!
Let me attempt clarify this further:
Wayland does not entirely replace X11. You can definitely continue running an X11 server that renders to your local Wayland (it is a client of Wayland). The challenge is that this server is not ready yet. it needs to be programmed essentially from scratch, and include all the weird parts of X. But, the xwayland project is already running pretty nicely for the main parts of X11 that most toolkits require. Check out the demos!
Toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt already support pluggable rendering backends (GTK+ even has a cool web backend!), so they would just need to create a new one to support Wayland. (It would be MUCH simpler than their X11 backend.) But, even if they don't support Wayland, they would be able to continue working through their X11 backend and the xwayland client.
Bottom line is that Wayland (once xwayland is finished) will have only advantages. The toolkits already support X11, so all apps written for GTK+ and Qt will continue to support network transparency. But, when running locally, they will have the option of using a Wayland backend for much improved throughput.
Thing is, what if people write applications without GTK+ or Qt, that use Wayland directly? These, of course, will not be able to enjoy network transparency. But, writing applications like that is highly specific and likely the coders will be doing it for a good reason.
I've initiated and maintain several large free software projects, and I agree wholeheartedly with the basic premise here: I think that software without documentation is close to useless, and I put huge amounts of effort into it.
But, let's be realistic here: it's a LOT of work. I can easily spend more time maintaining the documentation than the code. I consider it time well spent, but realize (as others have pointed out here) that it's a different kind of skill-set, which programmers don't always have.
The bottom line is that I would rather people release software than not release it a all. (close to useless != useless). Still, I wish more projects would take this issue more seriously.
The first reaction of the article and many commentators here seems to be that the main target is the consumer market, where the tablet would compete with Android and iOS devices.
But remember that a significant part of Microsoft's revenue is from the vertical market, where there's a lot of need for a tablet that could connect to an Microsoft-oriented enterprise backend. This tablet could then be customized by Microsoft and other contractors for very specific enterprise needs. Other vendors will be releasing Win RT tablets, but it's important for Microsoft that they 1) have one reference platform device, and 2) that they can create a complete solution for clients that involves both the backend and the tablets.
The article totally misses this point.
LaTeX is the technology, but LyX is the document processor (not word processor) that you want.
I've made the switch from OpenOffice/LibreOffice to LyX and haven't looked back!
For what it's worth, I work in academia and often have to create documents with complex bibliographies. I use JabRef to manage my bibliographic database, and it integrates so smoothly with LyX. My colleagues who are stuck with MS Word+Endnote are green with envy when they see my professional quality printouts.
But the real benefit is pleasure of the WYSIWYM (what you see if what you mean) paradigm. When you're actually doing work, you want to think in terms of content, not in terms of how the printout will appear. LyX is just so perfect in this respect: I get to define the screen fonts that are comfortable for me as I work, while relying on LaTeX's power to make things render nicely in the end.
Wikipedia NOR Britannica are citable sources. EVER. Nor any other encyclopedia.
This is not entirely true: entries in some encyclopedias are credited with specific authors, and in some cases do represent a citable opinion, or even citable, factual results of research. These "entries" are essentially "articles." This is not true for Britannica or Wikipedia, but is true for many, many encyclopedias in many fields.
The problem of citation in encyclopedias, wikipedia, and even the web at large, is that of authority. If you can't trace the author, then you have no way of evaluating the authority and validity of the cited text.
The funding amounted to paying one single Canonical employee to work specifically on Kubuntu.
Kubuntu is remaining an official Ubuntu variant and will continue to be updated by the community. Moreover, bugs to the KDE package (which is part of the main repository) will continue to be fixed by anyone at Canonical, and patches will continue to be sent upstream.
The "drop funding" issue has been blown out of proportion.
Pixel Qi does both "eInk" and color, but unfortunately does both very poorly.
If you ever get your hands on one, you'll see the problems immediately. The B&W mode is faded and hard to read. The color mode is washed-out and has a ridiculously bad viewing angle. Seriously, it's barely usable. I'm sure all tablet manufacturers have reviewed Pixel Qi, and their reasons for not using it are simply that it doesn't deliver an acceptbile user experience.
I wanted this to work very, very badly, because both eInk and color tablets are an exercise in painful compromise for me. Pixel Qi sounds great on paper, but it demands too many compromises to be truly useful.
I'll just note two points:
1) Older Apple devices do get abandoned by Apple. My early iPod touch is locked at iOS 3.3 and Apple has made it clear that it will not receive updates.
2) The exciting "Siri" feature available on the iPhone 4S does not work on earlier phones, even though they do get an iOS 5 update. The official reasoning is that earlier phones are not powerful enough, but this seems to be dubious (even David Pogue, the super Apple fanboy seems to doubt this).
Bottom line: Apple plays the "obsolete" game pretty well, too.
On the other side, while Android has had painful fragmentation in the past, Google is claiming, at least, that Android from version 4.0 onwards will be able to run on older devices, though obviously not all features will be supported there. And Google is trying to muscle vendors into a consortium which *requires* them to provide updates for older phones. We'll see how well this happens! And this is all for future phones and Android versions, of course: current "early adopters" of Android will be stuck with the existing mess.
Steve Jobs was a very good salesman and micromanager, who revolutionized the field of packaging gadgets, made some wise investments in 3D cinema, and did not believe in sharing his incredible wealth. He will be sorely missed by greedy Apple stockholders and his family, and apparently by a billion people who really like their iPhone and think Steve Jobs "invented" it and was a "genius" inventor like Thomas Edison because they have no idea what anything means.
I have to object to this line of thinking.
I remember that when Linux started to become popular, it seemed crazy to many people that Linus chose the GPL, because there free operating systems out there with much more lenient licenses. Why would a vendor (Red Hat, IBM, etc.) subject themselves to the restrictions of the GPL when there are other choices?
Well, they chose Linux because of its quality. They went with the best product, and adapted themselves to the license. (Some vendors eventually learned that the GPL was good for them, because it ensured that they could get the advantages developed in-house by other vendors.)
I think a GPLv3 Android would have been just as popular as a GPLv2 Android. Vendors would have picked it because it was good, free (and encouragingly backed by Google). So, they wouldn't have locked boot loaders. Big deal! They would have adapter to the situation, and in the end the GPLv3 would have made Android a better product then it is now.