Honestly, I think some people in the Linux community are just too obssessed with Microsoft to produce anything useful.
Reading this sentence using links with the -g switch (extremely fast cruft-free graphic browser based on the svga lib), in a terminal-inspired desktop session (Ion), on a computer for which every piece of running software was compiled to my specifications (Gentoo distro). Thanks for the morning chuckle.
For those interested, Gentoo has xpde masked in the Portage tree. Use "emerge/usr/portage/x11-wm/xpde/xpde-0.1.1.ebuild" to automatically download, build and install. (Just like XP... cough...cough.) You'll need KDE as well. Though I have a polar opposite taste in desktops, this looks amazing. It apppears to be in very early development and locked crtl-shift-backspace hard when closing a Rox window started from the 'Run' prompt, possibly due to not having KDE installed.
From what I can see, once stable this could be a corporate desktop killer in an environment where IT controls the OS/hardware side. It would nearly eliminate the user retraining barrier.
It's also worth clearing up the mistaken impression that Microsoft gets nothing back from the government. Laws which prevent selling pirated copies of XP are enacted and enforced by the government. The DCMA was enacted by the government at the behest of the software industry. Microsoft couldn't be Microsoft if it and other closed source businesses didn't have a wall of federal and civil law protecting them. That all this is taken for granted doesn't mean it isn't there.
Now it's Microsoft's turn to obey the law. Saying it's none of the government's business is atruly one-sided perspective.
Close. When a DOJ-confirmed abusive monopoly bundles an intentionally crippled version of a competitor's add-on into its OS, that's bad: but if, forced by the courts to adhere to a prior contract in good faith, Microsoft bundles the correct add-on, then yes, that's good. Well, for everyone but the monopolist.
The students are learning math, history, language, science, the arts and not computational skills. The very best interface would more probably be similar to an ATM or airport info terminal than a typical desktop. Window's popularity is irrelevant here except to all but vocational students training for office support. My guess is that, Denmark being a prosperous and educated country, most kids learn Windows proficiency at home.
I doubt it's possible or necessary. If a group of Linux developers released a desktop environment which exactly cloned the XP desktop, they better start by retaining good legal representation. The MS legal team would come knocking at the first hint of market penetration.
The opinion is often expressed here that the average user can't cope with any variation from the MS desktop, yet they transitioned from 3.1 to 95/8 to 2k/xp easily enough. Most could handle a Mac. People aren't that stupid, give them a desktop close enough and they'll accept it. The major stumbling blocks as I see it are configuration utilities, lack of applications and, to a lesser extent, the insane dependancies of some programs.
Finally, I have to question the whole concept that the route to sucess is mimicry. Has it ever proven successful? In my chosen field of radio I've lost count of the number of program directors who've tried to clone a competing station and failed. At first glance the FVWM95 windowmanager could fool most into believing it was Windows, yet who uses it?
Slashdot posters have provided many examples of corporate acceptance of Gnome and KDE, ranging from governments to universities to Canadian national banks. Walmart is shipping systems pre-loaded. Sun adopted a Linux desktop as its standard. Is 'no sign, no inkling' a personal judgement?
I'm sure we're both going to be moderated as trolls or flamebaits or whatever for this, but it's true.
Not to worry, from what I've seen you've never posted a single positive comment on Linux and it hasn't hurt your Karma yet.
Meaningless, all your saying is that today the technology doesn't exist. Can you guarantee the same in ten years? Five? Once the precedent is set and your government begins surveillance of all communications - and it will be all, the Internet is the future of all information distribution - it's a matter of when, not if, it's effective. Is this the legacy you want to leave the next generation?
Counted perhaps. Of singular importance? No. The upbringing, education, cultural framework and intellectual bent weren't American. Fermi was almost 40 and had won a Nobel Prize before he emigrated. Von Braun was over forty and a very distinguished physicist. Americans recognized the talent and foot the bill but American culture didn't create these innovators. To equate investment with innovation is really stretching the definition of "technical edge".
There are a number of companies that offer Linux support simply as a goodwill gesture...
Or as a wise investment in the future? Nvidia must realize that being the only viable performance solution for a group of hardcore and influential computer users has more than feel-good benefits.
Don't apologize, there's nothing Mulder about it. In the vinyl age who would have believed playing music could be a threat to your privacy? Who'll venture to guess what we'll accept in another fifteen years?
If your government went totalitarian, it would be an occupation, not a normal war. The US military is already on US soil. No beach landings, tank battles or airstrikes, rendering a lot of technology irrelevant. Cruise missles and stealth bombers might be impressive on the evening news but against individuals they're useless and prohibitively expensive. Carpet bomb Atlanta? In the Iraqi case the US military faces a clearly defined opponent so the comparison isn't valid. A very large and well-armed Vietnam is a better analogy.
Part of the reason the Khmer Rouge and movements like them succeeded is that the population was completely helpless. Rounding up civilians for the killing fields was easy because the victims were unarmed. Government officials and politicians wouldn't be so inclined to take part if they knew the next walk to the car could be their last. Police forces wouldn't be so eager if they and their families were perpetually at risk. Imagine an occupying force facing a nation of Washington snipers. Take away the guns and the only risk to those joining a despotic government is to their conscience, and that hasn't proven an effective deterrent at any time.
Something I never understood about this line of reasoning, if guns are ineffective against a modernized army, how is complete civilian disarmament better? Wouldn't the logic conclusion be closer to that of the Swiss, military training and home storage of military weaponry? I'd prefer that to the option, for example, given the Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge.
There is only one answer: SOMEONE needs to convince me that I can be just as happy and productive in a Linux environment.
Would you be as productive on a Mac? It's safe to assume that you're not the most productive person alive so logically many Mac users are more productive than you. Completely different desktop, higher productivity, maybe the limitaion is yours.
Does the comment author believe that the BILLIONS of dollars Microsoft puts into marketing is wasted??
Apparently not on you, they were on me. What possible relation could there be between the efficiency of a GUI and how much money a company spends trumpeting it? Many, many insolvent companies spent huge sums in marketing. Your point?
Just be careful not to show him the process. Our IT dept showed me how he generates network presentations and documentation with an SNMP based program that polls all the devices on the network and automatically spits the results to a Visio doc. A complete network inventory across four cities to a CAD diagram in less than five minutes. The real IT crisis might be the terrific software tools being developed to make your job easier.
No, wasn't it Senator William Proxmire with his hugely influential Golden Fleece Awards? Proxmire made a name for himself exposing the government's waste of taxpayer's dollars. The sixties and early seventies were a time of major societal upheaval and strong anti-technological sentiments, sending men to the moon rather than feeding the poor appeared to many as frivolous. Instead they did neither. Some of the decisions weren't too bright. NASA should have claimed the moon really was made of cheese.
1. To Start: Mandrake, Redhat or Suse. On the assumption that anyone interested in trying Linux has some computer experience (otherwise they wouldn't have heard of Linux), start with a 'does-everything' distro. Gnome and KDE are windowish enough to be manageable by anyone who knows that retractable tray thing isn't a cup holder and supermount will prevent the pain I went through trying to mount make my CDROM work in Redhat 5.2. 2. Neatest Thing: NFS. Show them how remote servers appear as as completely transparent subdirectories of Home and not as drive letters or mappings outside of the C: drive. Simple, but amazingly natural compared to the default Win method. (Yes, XP and 2K do mounts but not as default.) 3. Best Book: None. Google Groups all the way. Anything a newbie could ask has been answered ad nauseum and there's no chance of alienation from RTFM if you don't ask in the first place. Distro forums are also a valuable source of information.
Good idea, submit one. Better yet, since this a considered a OSS-centric forum, and the success of, say, XP, in the office space is of little to no relevance, why not find a site that covers what interests you?
It would be much better for the advance of linux if the Indian governent chose is solely on the basis of lower TCO. Corporate boardrooms aren't known as fervent breeding grounds of free speech. The language spoken is pure TCO.
Can't happen. If the article is accurate Microsoft's stock value rests on the profits made from Office and Windows. Throwing that away would instantly make MS the new Nortel.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading this sentence using links with the -g switch (extremely fast cruft-free graphic browser based on the svga lib), in a terminal-inspired desktop session (Ion), on a computer for which every piece of running software was compiled to my specifications (Gentoo distro). Thanks for the morning chuckle. /usr/portage/x11-wm/xpde/xpde-0.1.1.ebuild" to automatically download, build and install. (Just like XP ... cough...cough.) You'll need KDE as well. Though I have a polar opposite taste in desktops, this looks amazing. It apppears to be in very early development and locked crtl-shift-backspace hard when closing a Rox window started from the 'Run' prompt, possibly due to not having KDE installed.
For those interested, Gentoo has xpde masked in the Portage tree. Use "emerge
From what I can see, once stable this could be a corporate desktop killer in an environment where IT controls the OS/hardware side. It would nearly eliminate the user retraining barrier.
Now it's Microsoft's turn to obey the law. Saying it's none of the government's business is atruly one-sided perspective.
Close. When a DOJ-confirmed abusive monopoly bundles an intentionally crippled version of a competitor's add-on into its OS, that's bad: but if, forced by the courts to adhere to a prior contract in good faith, Microsoft bundles the correct add-on, then yes, that's good. Well, for everyone but the monopolist.
The students are learning math, history, language, science, the arts and not computational skills. The very best interface would more probably be similar to an ATM or airport info terminal than a typical desktop. Window's popularity is irrelevant here except to all but vocational students training for office support. My guess is that, Denmark being a prosperous and educated country, most kids learn Windows proficiency at home.
I doubt it's possible or necessary. If a group of Linux developers released a desktop environment which exactly cloned the XP desktop, they better start by retaining good legal representation. The MS legal team would come knocking at the first hint of market penetration.
The opinion is often expressed here that the average user can't cope with any variation from the MS desktop, yet they transitioned from 3.1 to 95/8 to 2k/xp easily enough. Most could handle a Mac. People aren't that stupid, give them a desktop close enough and they'll accept it. The major stumbling blocks as I see it are configuration utilities, lack of applications and, to a lesser extent, the insane dependancies of some programs.
Finally, I have to question the whole concept that the route to sucess is mimicry. Has it ever proven successful? In my chosen field of radio I've lost count of the number of program directors who've tried to clone a competing station and failed. At first glance the FVWM95 windowmanager could fool most into believing it was Windows, yet who uses it?
I'm sure we're both going to be moderated as trolls or flamebaits or whatever for this, but it's true.
Not to worry, from what I've seen you've never posted a single positive comment on Linux and it hasn't hurt your Karma yet.
The first .NET post modded redundant? The MS marketing brigade at work again?
Not as big an oxymoron as Garbage and punk.
Meaningless, all your saying is that today the technology doesn't exist. Can you guarantee the same in ten years? Five? Once the precedent is set and your government begins surveillance of all communications - and it will be all, the Internet is the future of all information distribution - it's a matter of when, not if, it's effective. Is this the legacy you want to leave the next generation?
You're giving her too much credit.
Counted perhaps. Of singular importance? No. The upbringing, education, cultural framework and intellectual bent weren't American. Fermi was almost 40 and had won a Nobel Prize before he emigrated. Von Braun was over forty and a very distinguished physicist. Americans recognized the talent and foot the bill but American culture didn't create these innovators. To equate investment with innovation is really stretching the definition of "technical edge".
Or as a wise investment in the future? Nvidia must realize that being the only viable performance solution for a group of hardcore and influential computer users has more than feel-good benefits.
Don't apologize, there's nothing Mulder about it. In the vinyl age who would have believed playing music could be a threat to your privacy? Who'll venture to guess what we'll accept in another fifteen years?
Part of the reason the Khmer Rouge and movements like them succeeded is that the population was completely helpless. Rounding up civilians for the killing fields was easy because the victims were unarmed. Government officials and politicians wouldn't be so inclined to take part if they knew the next walk to the car could be their last. Police forces wouldn't be so eager if they and their families were perpetually at risk. Imagine an occupying force facing a nation of Washington snipers. Take away the guns and the only risk to those joining a despotic government is to their conscience, and that hasn't proven an effective deterrent at any time.
Would you be as productive on a Mac? It's safe to assume that you're not the most productive person alive so logically many Mac users are more productive than you. Completely different desktop, higher productivity, maybe the limitaion is yours.
Does the comment author believe that the BILLIONS of dollars Microsoft puts into marketing is wasted??
Apparently not on you, they were on me. What possible relation could there be between the efficiency of a GUI and how much money a company spends trumpeting it? Many, many insolvent companies spent huge sums in marketing. Your point?
Just be careful not to show him the process. Our IT dept showed me how he generates network presentations and documentation with an SNMP based program that polls all the devices on the network and automatically spits the results to a Visio doc. A complete network inventory across four cities to a CAD diagram in less than five minutes. The real IT crisis might be the terrific software tools being developed to make your job easier.
No, wasn't it Senator William Proxmire with his hugely influential Golden Fleece Awards? Proxmire made a name for himself exposing the government's waste of taxpayer's dollars. The sixties and early seventies were a time of major societal upheaval and strong anti-technological sentiments, sending men to the moon rather than feeding the poor appeared to many as frivolous. Instead they did neither. Some of the decisions weren't too bright. NASA should have claimed the moon really was made of cheese.
1. To Start: Mandrake, Redhat or Suse. On the assumption that anyone interested in trying Linux has some computer experience (otherwise they wouldn't have heard of Linux), start with a 'does-everything' distro. Gnome and KDE are windowish enough to be manageable by anyone who knows that retractable tray thing isn't a cup holder and supermount will prevent the pain I went through trying to mount make my CDROM work in Redhat 5.2.
2. Neatest Thing: NFS. Show them how remote servers appear as as completely transparent subdirectories of Home and not as drive letters or mappings outside of the C: drive. Simple, but amazingly natural compared to the default Win method. (Yes, XP and 2K do mounts but not as default.)
3. Best Book: None. Google Groups all the way. Anything a newbie could ask has been answered ad nauseum and there's no chance of alienation from RTFM if you don't ask in the first place. Distro forums are also a valuable source of information.
Because it costs more, is available, and does what buyers want?
I'm more curious why a post proven factually wrong one level down, by someone who is in a position to know, is still sitting at +5 Insightful.
Good idea, submit one. Better yet, since this a considered a OSS-centric forum, and the success of, say, XP, in the office space is of little to no relevance, why not find a site that covers what interests you?
It would be much better for the advance of linux if the Indian governent chose is solely on the basis of lower TCO. Corporate boardrooms aren't known as fervent breeding grounds of free speech. The language spoken is pure TCO.
That has to be the oddest use of the word 'extort' I've seen, like saying that cooking my own meals is extorting from McDonalds.
Can't happen. If the article is accurate Microsoft's stock value rests on the profits made from Office and Windows. Throwing that away would instantly make MS the new Nortel.