I've never heard of anything expressed in Pebi, Tebi or Gibi nor Mebi. A Petabyte is still 1024 x 1 Terabyte which is 1024 x 1 Gigabyte which is 1024 x 1 Megabyte which is 1024 x 1 Kilobyte which is 1024 x 1 Byte which is 8 bit. As soon as you have a 10-bit based computer, you can express your stuff in *bibytes
Only western Europeans jumped on the UMTS bandwagon, the rest of the world kinda left it where it was. Why? To deploy EDGE you only need to upgrade some hardware, it works on the same frequencies and uses the same techniques as GSM while UMTS needs first a hefty license fee and then a hefty upgrade. Although it is faster, I doubt UMTS is really the demand for now. Hardly anybody uses their mobile carrier as a primary internet connection and the capabilities of most devices (iPhone included) don't require high bandwidth at any time soon (checking e-mail and surfing some sites including 320x200 or even 640x480 videos can be done usually over 56k.
Yes, you can do it, but I guess you couldn't expect Ford to keep up the warranty or fix the recalls on the product you bought.
I know from experience that if you do not go to THEIR garage every x,000 miles to have your full service done you lose your warranty on the 'lifetime' balancing and alignments of your wheels nor will they keep the warranty on the tires (my tires went blank after 30,000 miles but they were specced for 80,000 but since I used another (cheaper) garage to change oil and do tire balancing/alignments they wouldn't give me anything anymore).
Well, ask yourself: if something went drastically wrong with Windows, would you know what to do? How about Mac OS X? I am a sysadmin and I would have to look up how to get a regedit from command line in Windows, then disable some startup services that caused the login box to not come up (I have done it, but it's a pain). How about resetting your forgotten admin password from command line (without a password reset disk because you didn't think of that).
I know however how to do it in Linux and almost any other Unix-based operating system because it's simple, go to/etc for your configuration files and each process has it's own neat little file or directory no need to go messing with no hives of rubbish.
I also noticed much games worked faster using Wine and a lot of games even work natively in Linux so more options are available.
That's right. In the MICROSOFT mindset. For everybody else of course, replacing software or even firmware shouldn't void your warranty. Most hardware is also user-replaceable. Somebody you wouldn't expect it off... Apple... has the designation "user replaceable hardware" for hard drives, ram, wireless cards and batteries in most if not all of their computer products, even iBook's and other notebooks which are (out of experience) quite difficult to take apart and if within (extended) warranty or recalls will provide the user with free new parts (even shipping is free both ways) and point to step-by-step manuals on how to take things apart.
Most likely you do not want everything destroyed or unhabitable, but your enemies dead is good enough. If you have to send troops to a certain area and want it cleared of your enemy, you throw a fuel-air bomb, you can use a lot of the structures with minor repairs but you won't have much resistance. Throw a nuclear bomb and your enemy is dead but neither can you use that area for anything for the next 10 years. A big explosive device is nice if you want to clear out a bunker or so but usually doesn't go a very large area as far as being lethal/effective.
No, the Grey Hat's would have to include something that destroys the boot sector from the hard drive, then shut down the machine. All of a sudden, we would have a massive drop in power usage (saving the environment) and a whole lot of dumbasses that in turn will provide a job to low-wage Circuit City and Best Buy employees. I guess a lot of computers would just stay off because no-one knows that they are running.
So to make it easy: 1) Create or take over Storm botnet 2a) (Optional): dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda count=2000 (I think that should do it) 2b) Send "shutdown -h now" to all machines (I don't know the Windows equivalent, I don't use Windows) 3) ??? 4) Profit!
There is always going to be a shortage in QUALIFIED applicants no matter what field. That is true for IT, Engineering, Managing, Science,... People (and business) want something for their money, most salaries are set anyway and the good applicants can get a little more so you might as well hire good people.
I know out of experience, having worked as a contractor and now full-time that there is always a new technology somewhere that somebody wants to implement and nobody has 5 years experience with the 2007 product, so they hire people that have proven their best in the past in similar situations, people that can adapt, people that know the basics and how to think their way out of a situation, those are also the ones that gets sucked up first and paid the most.
I personally think flash memory is going to take over from traditional backup tapes, not hard drives. The problem seems to be writability and that might be a physical problem. If however, we get to build 48GB cartridges they come pretty close to small business backup tapes. Flash drives are very portable like tapes while hard drives are very 'sensitive' to shocks and other external factors.
Is the government agency that is going to collect that money. The Netherlands have a similar 'non-profit' agency that collects the extra levies on CD's, DVD's, hard drives, MP3-players (and everybody knows by now that mass-importing it from Germany is cheaper), it's called Stichting Thuiskopie, and recently the government noticed that they are collecting money but hardly (better yet, not at all) distributing that money among neither artists, media producers nor 'cultural' projects.
In this world, it seems like that is the whole purpose of 'save the children' and 'columbine prevention'. Getting the kids accustomed to 24/7 monitoring will get them easier switched once we are dead or too old to do anything about it.
The surveillanced world is coming, just not under our watch because we know how the internet came about and what happened with uncontrolled surveillance by government agencies, just because we value our privacy. If you raise the kids nowadays that surveillance is normal and checking what you're doing or being punished for what you say is a day-to-day thing, they will much easier accept it from government agencies in the future.
As soon as we are dead and the rest of the world as we know it isn't, that change is going to happen.
It's the same as saying "Thieves should know that law enforcement can hang around in pawn shops or set up sting operations with goods sold in the local paper"
There is nothing new about it, only the medium changes. That law enforcements can surf sites is nothing new, it's just fluff in their news conference to say: "look, we're doing something good with your tax dollars" and maybe it might let the average Fox or CNN news viewer feel more safe about his precious possessions.
To give you an example of the difference if Microsoft were Intel:
Intel would make chips but don't release any of the specs to those chips so they could only be sold with their own motherboards and their own RAM (like that Rambus thingy). For the other interconnects (PCI-bus) they would release only limited information so you could build somewhat your own cards (like IBM did with MCA) but then you would make something good and they would just copy it and because they have 'secret' information about their products, would then use that information to make it perform better and outcompete you (Word vs. WordPerfect), then as soon as you are dead they would just leave that product without any further development until it was completely broken because of unsupported new technology (Internet Explorer) - eg. if you made an Ethernet card, they wouldn't keep up with gigabit or jumbo frames or leave support intentionally out for other technology so that it never works well unless with their own products (Java/ActiveX)
Luckily for us no hardware manufacturer could ever gain that technology leap the software manufacturer made since the development was started as an academic idea and later commercialized by several companies at the same time and they all looked to each other (IBM tried with their BIOS but failed) just like DOS (Novell, Caldera, IBM,...) had different flavors by different manufacturers and Linux now has different flavors by several companies. If nobody would've tagged on to the massive move to another API for graphical interface development (Win32) and remained with the 'good ol' stuff' (X11, DOS4GW).
I have access to a (or let's say THE) server from the US Embassy in a certain country because I used to work at the datacenter that hosted them, I do have full administrator rights (still) because the datacenter doesn't ever change all the different passwords and more than once we create administrator accounts for testing purposes, on the other hand, the machine WAS secured and certified by DHS although they missed large portions of scripts and crap that can be ran through port 80 (the website part).
I also have the access to a web server for a fairly small (regional) bank because I programmed their website. Again, poor security practices and audits (actually it's the auditors that only test for external threats, not for inside jobs) make that I still have full access to the machines to the point where I could host a small website using their very own SSL certificates. They are also certified by some government agency and have top-of-the-line firewall with deep packet inspection.
These days a $15 CD is also 3 hours work for the artist, they just sing some songs and then the rest is reworked digitally, but for pete's sakes, let's say the CD costs 3 weeks of full-time (40h/week) work to create. That is 120 hours of work, in my eyes, I can do a lot of things in 3 weeks. Say you need the artists (avg band of 3 persons), 2 sound technicians (which is a lot), 1 editor and 2 aux. people that do something: that is 8 people x 120 x $55 (my current rate as a consultant which is rather high, divided among the artist (higher) and the technicians (lower)) = $52800 + rent the studio etc, let's say that's about $1000/week + other stuff that needs to be done like marketing, printing and packaging = $100,000/cd (and that is a high budget since I HAVE been involved in creating music CD's professionally).
Let's say that there are about 1,000 CD's that are brought out each year (and I don't think that amount is excreted in music stores) for the audience (students and young adults) your quote = $100,000,000 (that is $100M or $0,1B), let's even up the ante and say it's 10x that amount ($1B) for creating more marketing and pressing more CD's (yes, that is $1M/cd, a budget almost no artist has for complete sing -> sale) and as you say the expended money for that group is $200B, I think someone is lining their pockets...
I have one of those 'Universal Recovery Disks', it helps against spyware, virusses, malware or just plain broken hardware and you can still save your data:
The only reason Microsoft brings out SP1 so 'early' is because too many people say: we'll wait till SP1. They really want you to buy Vista for which sales are way lower than expected, so they push up SP1 so they can sell more.
Having worked for MS Gold partners, MS Gold partners are just extensions of Microsoft itself basically. They push Microsoft products and are not allowed to promote alternative products.
I worked for a hosting company that was a MS Gold partner but our 'free' hosting and static domain names was on Apache/Linux for the 'free' reason and we had to proxy the requests through a bunch of IIS boxes or reroute certain ICMP traffic on the firewall so it would come up as IIS/ASP.NET/Windows 2003 with NetCraft. And then the sales junkie finally got the report that more than 50% of their machines were Windows.
The sales were not allowed to sell Linux or Mac unless specifically asked and persisted on by the customer and then we had to support Apache/PHP/MySQL on Windows (that was back in 2002), then on tradeshows we had to say 70% of our machines were running Windows, that metric we got only because we didn't include our internal Linux service machines (you know Nagios, e-mail, spamfilters, Snort, firewalls,...).
By the way: we hosted parts of MSN (Belgium) and the dumbest thing they did: buy a cheap Shared Hosting package for MSN advertisements (which were going to display nationwide) and they HARD CODED the shared package URL (msn.server.hostingcompany.com) in MSN Messenger, we had to redirect our nameservers for that URL to a separate server.
Stating the obvious, repeats and transcripts in your next InfoWorld or whatever free magazine you get in your mailbox because you're an IT professional.
I never understood the SaaS model and why anyone would want it. You might want it internally within a company in a physical location (kinda like the dumb terminal model) but internet connections and even private MAN or WAN connections are way too unstable in general (count the hours of your internet connection AND remote server AND local maintenance offline in the year, with SaaS, everybody would be non-productive during those hours)
Well, I have been using Linux since the mid-90's, even used Caldera (SCO) Linux back in the day when they were not evil and even bought Red Hat 5 when it came out.
That being said, I have used Linux since Windows 2000 (actually never installed Windows XP on my personal systems) and never had to look back. Sure I'm a power user, but I never thought it was very difficult to install or use with proper hardware (no winmodems). Windows 95 was about the same difficulty of installing since you also had to mess a lot with drivers.
For end-users, Ubuntu is indeed one of those big hit wonders, but even Fedora Core initially wasn't very difficult to use and install nor was SuSE, I've recommended those to lot's of desktop users (ok, usually with some type of geek background).
Now I have given my dad the latest Ubuntu when his computer broke down (hard drive) taking away the temptation of installing XP by saying: Look Vista is difficult to install illegally, it's expensive to buy and won't run on your computer anyway (P4 with GeForce2), XP is down the gutter and will run out of any support soon and you'll most likely get a virus before you're done installing, here is Ubuntu, install it and if you don't like it we'll install XP.
Well, he called me because he had a problem with his computer the other day (now Ubuntu)... he didn't know the username/password of his dial-up provider. He managed to get connected which would've been a run down to his house on Windows (I remember), the only thing I had to be there for the install was to reassure him that it was that simple and that he wasn't doing anything wrong because it looked too simple.
People are accustomed to difficulties and calling a techie when they do anything out of line with their computer. Hell, my dad is an extensive Office user and I haven't yet heard him complain that OpenOffice didn't do it. It's weird since I haven't received any complaints yet, he even managed to set up his Yahoo and MSN Messenger apparently (before, trying to find the installers on the net alone was a problem for him)
Well, having implemented ShitPoint 2007, nobody uses OOXML, everybody still uses the DOC or PDF formats. Even XPS is hardly used (only by documentation originating from Microsoft)
Nobody wants to switch to Office 2007 because 1) it's expensive, 2) it's more difficult to use, 3) it needs major retraining.
I am going on as a Mac Sysadmin now (quit the other job) and I don't think a lot of people are going to upgrade to Office 2008 for Mac either, I think they stay with the current implementation and switch to Open/NeoOffice later, maybe if iWork gets an ODF implemented, I would consider it.
You might not see it, but there is a big push for more open standards and usable file formats. Not only for ideological reasons, the current Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA-compliance as well as a lot of other internal legal policies require a lot of (financial and personal) documents to be stored about 10 years or longer (some 20 years, or even forever). Looking at Microsoft's track record, they keep their document formats for maximum 10 years (they just killed the format that was last updated in 2000 and is backwards compatible with a version of 1997) and then throw it out with minimal if not no backwards compatibility. Another requirement is that those documents stored are directly available in case of legal action in their original format and layout. There is not going to be any time to write plugins and converters that do their job halfwards at that moment and if you need to write something like that, it's nice to have a DOCUMENTED format that everybody can use without paying Microsoft an extortion fee.
Well, in many European countries this has been the case for a while. You choose your major/minor at age 12 (or beginning the 7th grade for the USA) but you can decide to change at 14 (start of 9th grade) and 16 (start of 11th) without any major repercussions. If you switch in between, you might fall behind on some subjects since you're missing a year, but I didn't have any problems with that. I was one of those persons that is easily bored when not challenged, so I found school pretty boring, I probably couldn't stand going to school in the US since it's too general and you come out with absolutely no skills or trades.
I had Exact Sciences for 2 years (A lot of Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry and Physics as well as 4 languages), Architectural Arts (building stuff with lots of geometry) for one year, Electro-Mechanics (General electricity and mechanical stuff, lots of physics and mathematics) and my last 2 years I majored in Electronics and Data Communication (again a lot of mathematics, physics and even chemistry)
I tutored math to a 10th grader here in the US and they were just reviewing sqrt and powers (and having problems calculating anything multiplied or divided by a negative integral) while I remember we were doing integral functions, differentials, infinity, chaos theory and calculating matrixes in the same grade.
The only thing they have to make sure off is that there is an easy way to switch because, yes, children that age switch a lot of ideas. There should be a way for both people that like to work after school and people that want to go to school (college, university) after school.
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I've never heard of anything expressed in Pebi, Tebi or Gibi nor Mebi. A Petabyte is still 1024 x 1 Terabyte which is 1024 x 1 Gigabyte which is 1024 x 1 Megabyte which is 1024 x 1 Kilobyte which is 1024 x 1 Byte which is 8 bit. As soon as you have a 10-bit based computer, you can express your stuff in *bibytes
Only western Europeans jumped on the UMTS bandwagon, the rest of the world kinda left it where it was. Why? To deploy EDGE you only need to upgrade some hardware, it works on the same frequencies and uses the same techniques as GSM while UMTS needs first a hefty license fee and then a hefty upgrade. Although it is faster, I doubt UMTS is really the demand for now. Hardly anybody uses their mobile carrier as a primary internet connection and the capabilities of most devices (iPhone included) don't require high bandwidth at any time soon (checking e-mail and surfing some sites including 320x200 or even 640x480 videos can be done usually over 56k.
Yes, you can do it, but I guess you couldn't expect Ford to keep up the warranty or fix the recalls on the product you bought.
I know from experience that if you do not go to THEIR garage every x,000 miles to have your full service done you lose your warranty on the 'lifetime' balancing and alignments of your wheels nor will they keep the warranty on the tires (my tires went blank after 30,000 miles but they were specced for 80,000 but since I used another (cheaper) garage to change oil and do tire balancing/alignments they wouldn't give me anything anymore).
Well, ask yourself: if something went drastically wrong with Windows, would you know what to do? How about Mac OS X? I am a sysadmin and I would have to look up how to get a regedit from command line in Windows, then disable some startup services that caused the login box to not come up (I have done it, but it's a pain). How about resetting your forgotten admin password from command line (without a password reset disk because you didn't think of that).
/etc for your configuration files and each process has it's own neat little file or directory no need to go messing with no hives of rubbish.
I know however how to do it in Linux and almost any other Unix-based operating system because it's simple, go to
I also noticed much games worked faster using Wine and a lot of games even work natively in Linux so more options are available.
That's right. In the MICROSOFT mindset. For everybody else of course, replacing software or even firmware shouldn't void your warranty. Most hardware is also user-replaceable. Somebody you wouldn't expect it off... Apple ... has the designation "user replaceable hardware" for hard drives, ram, wireless cards and batteries in most if not all of their computer products, even iBook's and other notebooks which are (out of experience) quite difficult to take apart and if within (extended) warranty or recalls will provide the user with free new parts (even shipping is free both ways) and point to step-by-step manuals on how to take things apart.
Most likely you do not want everything destroyed or unhabitable, but your enemies dead is good enough. If you have to send troops to a certain area and want it cleared of your enemy, you throw a fuel-air bomb, you can use a lot of the structures with minor repairs but you won't have much resistance. Throw a nuclear bomb and your enemy is dead but neither can you use that area for anything for the next 10 years. A big explosive device is nice if you want to clear out a bunker or so but usually doesn't go a very large area as far as being lethal/effective.
No, the Grey Hat's would have to include something that destroys the boot sector from the hard drive, then shut down the machine. All of a sudden, we would have a massive drop in power usage (saving the environment) and a whole lot of dumbasses that in turn will provide a job to low-wage Circuit City and Best Buy employees. I guess a lot of computers would just stay off because no-one knows that they are running.
So to make it easy:
1) Create or take over Storm botnet
2a) (Optional): dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda count=2000 (I think that should do it)
2b) Send "shutdown -h now" to all machines (I don't know the Windows equivalent, I don't use Windows)
3) ???
4) Profit!
There is always going to be a shortage in QUALIFIED applicants no matter what field. That is true for IT, Engineering, Managing, Science, ... People (and business) want something for their money, most salaries are set anyway and the good applicants can get a little more so you might as well hire good people.
I know out of experience, having worked as a contractor and now full-time that there is always a new technology somewhere that somebody wants to implement and nobody has 5 years experience with the 2007 product, so they hire people that have proven their best in the past in similar situations, people that can adapt, people that know the basics and how to think their way out of a situation, those are also the ones that gets sucked up first and paid the most.
That is because each time you measure the entanglement, it breaks down.
I personally think flash memory is going to take over from traditional backup tapes, not hard drives. The problem seems to be writability and that might be a physical problem. If however, we get to build 48GB cartridges they come pretty close to small business backup tapes. Flash drives are very portable like tapes while hard drives are very 'sensitive' to shocks and other external factors.
Is the government agency that is going to collect that money. The Netherlands have a similar 'non-profit' agency that collects the extra levies on CD's, DVD's, hard drives, MP3-players (and everybody knows by now that mass-importing it from Germany is cheaper), it's called Stichting Thuiskopie, and recently the government noticed that they are collecting money but hardly (better yet, not at all) distributing that money among neither artists, media producers nor 'cultural' projects.
In this world, it seems like that is the whole purpose of 'save the children' and 'columbine prevention'. Getting the kids accustomed to 24/7 monitoring will get them easier switched once we are dead or too old to do anything about it.
The surveillanced world is coming, just not under our watch because we know how the internet came about and what happened with uncontrolled surveillance by government agencies, just because we value our privacy. If you raise the kids nowadays that surveillance is normal and checking what you're doing or being punished for what you say is a day-to-day thing, they will much easier accept it from government agencies in the future.
As soon as we are dead and the rest of the world as we know it isn't, that change is going to happen.
It's the same as saying "Thieves should know that law enforcement can hang around in pawn shops or set up sting operations with goods sold in the local paper"
There is nothing new about it, only the medium changes. That law enforcements can surf sites is nothing new, it's just fluff in their news conference to say: "look, we're doing something good with your tax dollars" and maybe it might let the average Fox or CNN news viewer feel more safe about his precious possessions.
To give you an example of the difference if Microsoft were Intel:
...) had different flavors by different manufacturers and Linux now has different flavors by several companies. If nobody would've tagged on to the massive move to another API for graphical interface development (Win32) and remained with the 'good ol' stuff' (X11, DOS4GW).
Intel would make chips but don't release any of the specs to those chips so they could only be sold with their own motherboards and their own RAM (like that Rambus thingy). For the other interconnects (PCI-bus) they would release only limited information so you could build somewhat your own cards (like IBM did with MCA) but then you would make something good and they would just copy it and because they have 'secret' information about their products, would then use that information to make it perform better and outcompete you (Word vs. WordPerfect), then as soon as you are dead they would just leave that product without any further development until it was completely broken because of unsupported new technology (Internet Explorer) - eg. if you made an Ethernet card, they wouldn't keep up with gigabit or jumbo frames or leave support intentionally out for other technology so that it never works well unless with their own products (Java/ActiveX)
Luckily for us no hardware manufacturer could ever gain that technology leap the software manufacturer made since the development was started as an academic idea and later commercialized by several companies at the same time and they all looked to each other (IBM tried with their BIOS but failed) just like DOS (Novell, Caldera, IBM,
I have access to a (or let's say THE) server from the US Embassy in a certain country because I used to work at the datacenter that hosted them, I do have full administrator rights (still) because the datacenter doesn't ever change all the different passwords and more than once we create administrator accounts for testing purposes, on the other hand, the machine WAS secured and certified by DHS although they missed large portions of scripts and crap that can be ran through port 80 (the website part).
I also have the access to a web server for a fairly small (regional) bank because I programmed their website. Again, poor security practices and audits (actually it's the auditors that only test for external threats, not for inside jobs) make that I still have full access to the machines to the point where I could host a small website using their very own SSL certificates. They are also certified by some government agency and have top-of-the-line firewall with deep packet inspection.
These days a $15 CD is also 3 hours work for the artist, they just sing some songs and then the rest is reworked digitally, but for pete's sakes, let's say the CD costs 3 weeks of full-time (40h/week) work to create. That is 120 hours of work, in my eyes, I can do a lot of things in 3 weeks. Say you need the artists (avg band of 3 persons), 2 sound technicians (which is a lot), 1 editor and 2 aux. people that do something: that is 8 people x 120 x $55 (my current rate as a consultant which is rather high, divided among the artist (higher) and the technicians (lower)) = $52800 + rent the studio etc, let's say that's about $1000/week + other stuff that needs to be done like marketing, printing and packaging = $100,000/cd (and that is a high budget since I HAVE been involved in creating music CD's professionally).
Let's say that there are about 1,000 CD's that are brought out each year (and I don't think that amount is excreted in music stores) for the audience (students and young adults) your quote = $100,000,000 (that is $100M or $0,1B), let's even up the ante and say it's 10x that amount ($1B) for creating more marketing and pressing more CD's (yes, that is $1M/cd, a budget almost no artist has for complete sing -> sale) and as you say the expended money for that group is $200B, I think someone is lining their pockets...
I have one of those 'Universal Recovery Disks', it helps against spyware, virusses, malware or just plain broken hardware and you can still save your data:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
The only reason Microsoft brings out SP1 so 'early' is because too many people say: we'll wait till SP1. They really want you to buy Vista for which sales are way lower than expected, so they push up SP1 so they can sell more.
There is certain campaigns in Battle for Wesnoth that are really difficult to finish (or even impossible) especially when your hero HAS to die.
Having worked for MS Gold partners, MS Gold partners are just extensions of Microsoft itself basically. They push Microsoft products and are not allowed to promote alternative products.
...).
I worked for a hosting company that was a MS Gold partner but our 'free' hosting and static domain names was on Apache/Linux for the 'free' reason and we had to proxy the requests through a bunch of IIS boxes or reroute certain ICMP traffic on the firewall so it would come up as IIS/ASP.NET/Windows 2003 with NetCraft. And then the sales junkie finally got the report that more than 50% of their machines were Windows.
The sales were not allowed to sell Linux or Mac unless specifically asked and persisted on by the customer and then we had to support Apache/PHP/MySQL on Windows (that was back in 2002), then on tradeshows we had to say 70% of our machines were running Windows, that metric we got only because we didn't include our internal Linux service machines (you know Nagios, e-mail, spamfilters, Snort, firewalls,
By the way: we hosted parts of MSN (Belgium) and the dumbest thing they did: buy a cheap Shared Hosting package for MSN advertisements (which were going to display nationwide) and they HARD CODED the shared package URL (msn.server.hostingcompany.com) in MSN Messenger, we had to redirect our nameservers for that URL to a separate server.
Stating the obvious, repeats and transcripts in your next InfoWorld or whatever free magazine you get in your mailbox because you're an IT professional.
I never understood the SaaS model and why anyone would want it. You might want it internally within a company in a physical location (kinda like the dumb terminal model) but internet connections and even private MAN or WAN connections are way too unstable in general (count the hours of your internet connection AND remote server AND local maintenance offline in the year, with SaaS, everybody would be non-productive during those hours)
Well, I have been using Linux since the mid-90's, even used Caldera (SCO) Linux back in the day when they were not evil and even bought Red Hat 5 when it came out.
That being said, I have used Linux since Windows 2000 (actually never installed Windows XP on my personal systems) and never had to look back. Sure I'm a power user, but I never thought it was very difficult to install or use with proper hardware (no winmodems). Windows 95 was about the same difficulty of installing since you also had to mess a lot with drivers.
For end-users, Ubuntu is indeed one of those big hit wonders, but even Fedora Core initially wasn't very difficult to use and install nor was SuSE, I've recommended those to lot's of desktop users (ok, usually with some type of geek background).
Now I have given my dad the latest Ubuntu when his computer broke down (hard drive) taking away the temptation of installing XP by saying: Look Vista is difficult to install illegally, it's expensive to buy and won't run on your computer anyway (P4 with GeForce2), XP is down the gutter and will run out of any support soon and you'll most likely get a virus before you're done installing, here is Ubuntu, install it and if you don't like it we'll install XP.
Well, he called me because he had a problem with his computer the other day (now Ubuntu)... he didn't know the username/password of his dial-up provider. He managed to get connected which would've been a run down to his house on Windows (I remember), the only thing I had to be there for the install was to reassure him that it was that simple and that he wasn't doing anything wrong because it looked too simple.
People are accustomed to difficulties and calling a techie when they do anything out of line with their computer. Hell, my dad is an extensive Office user and I haven't yet heard him complain that OpenOffice didn't do it. It's weird since I haven't received any complaints yet, he even managed to set up his Yahoo and MSN Messenger apparently (before, trying to find the installers on the net alone was a problem for him)
rm -rf /
eat that DMCA
Oh crap,
$@)$^_)! NO_CARRIER
Well, having implemented ShitPoint 2007, nobody uses OOXML, everybody still uses the DOC or PDF formats. Even XPS is hardly used (only by documentation originating from Microsoft)
Nobody wants to switch to Office 2007 because 1) it's expensive, 2) it's more difficult to use, 3) it needs major retraining.
I am going on as a Mac Sysadmin now (quit the other job) and I don't think a lot of people are going to upgrade to Office 2008 for Mac either, I think they stay with the current implementation and switch to Open/NeoOffice later, maybe if iWork gets an ODF implemented, I would consider it.
You might not see it, but there is a big push for more open standards and usable file formats. Not only for ideological reasons, the current Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA-compliance as well as a lot of other internal legal policies require a lot of (financial and personal) documents to be stored about 10 years or longer (some 20 years, or even forever). Looking at Microsoft's track record, they keep their document formats for maximum 10 years (they just killed the format that was last updated in 2000 and is backwards compatible with a version of 1997) and then throw it out with minimal if not no backwards compatibility. Another requirement is that those documents stored are directly available in case of legal action in their original format and layout. There is not going to be any time to write plugins and converters that do their job halfwards at that moment and if you need to write something like that, it's nice to have a DOCUMENTED format that everybody can use without paying Microsoft an extortion fee.
Well, in many European countries this has been the case for a while. You choose your major/minor at age 12 (or beginning the 7th grade for the USA) but you can decide to change at 14 (start of 9th grade) and 16 (start of 11th) without any major repercussions. If you switch in between, you might fall behind on some subjects since you're missing a year, but I didn't have any problems with that. I was one of those persons that is easily bored when not challenged, so I found school pretty boring, I probably couldn't stand going to school in the US since it's too general and you come out with absolutely no skills or trades.
I had Exact Sciences for 2 years (A lot of Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry and Physics as well as 4 languages), Architectural Arts (building stuff with lots of geometry) for one year, Electro-Mechanics (General electricity and mechanical stuff, lots of physics and mathematics) and my last 2 years I majored in Electronics and Data Communication (again a lot of mathematics, physics and even chemistry)
I tutored math to a 10th grader here in the US and they were just reviewing sqrt and powers (and having problems calculating anything multiplied or divided by a negative integral) while I remember we were doing integral functions, differentials, infinity, chaos theory and calculating matrixes in the same grade.
The only thing they have to make sure off is that there is an easy way to switch because, yes, children that age switch a lot of ideas. There should be a way for both people that like to work after school and people that want to go to school (college, university) after school.