Oh I've been saying that since i wrote that article for Linux Insider back in 09 right before the EOL of Win2K, there is a HELL of a big market both in allowing the user to keep their old hardware (because lets face it what XP ran on was actually quite powerful for web surfing and basic office work, here in the shop I'm seeing late model P4s and Pentium Ds along with Athlon X2s, more than powerful enough for most office and home tasks) and in allowing an easy migration path to Linux while letting legacy apps still be used.
The real bitch is the parts are all there but there is too much "We're leet! Do it OUR way!" elitist bullshit and chasing saturated markets like you pointed out for anyone to see the forest for the trees! hell you wouldn't even have to have Win32 support, instead shoot for something like a hardware accelerated "XP Mode" that would let them take their old license, or even better the install that is on the drive, and make it a VM that has icons on the desktop that allow them to launch the VM and have it behave like a native app. That way there wouldn't be the pain of trying to find apps to do the tasks their now EOL software was used for as they could just use what they have and have Linux for new applications.
But I agree that Canonical doesn't seem to have any clue where they are going, its just one pie in the sky idea after another, and of course by getting most of the hype it makes the whole community look directionless and flailing. There is gonna be MULTIPLE gifts given to the community but nobody will capitalize. you have Win 8 which i'm predicting will be another Vista, you have all these frankly more than powerful enough desktops and laptops losing support, you have an economy in the crapper so folks and businesses are wanting to save money and delay hardware purchases, and you have all these people doing more than ever online. Hell many of my customers don't even use their PCs for anything offline anymore.
This sadly though is ignoring what i truly believe to be the heart of the matter, and that is this: Just as the political parties have been taken over by the fringe too much of the Linux community has been taken over by the "We're leet, go back to windblowz!" crowd. As I've said repeatedly ask for a simple solution to a problem on any forum and ask for it to NOT be CLI, and watch what happens. You will see the seething hatred just come boiling forth, with you being called every filthy name in the book.
Sadly somewhere along the way the community forgot what the personal computer and FOSS was all about, forgot how its supposed to make the users life EASIER and allow them to get their work done with a minimum of fuss. Instead they have taken being obtuse and fiddly as badges of honor, as trials to "Weed out the noobs!" like turning people away is a good thing and something to community should be striving for. When i point out the hellish time I'm having with a driver that worked before and just get "Yeah well, Linux does that, what you need to do is" followed by a good page and a half of esoteric workarounds? something is SERIOUSLY wrong. Hell "use esoteric workarounds" has become a meme and if you click on some of the links below that page some of the examples are truly Rube Goldbergesque in their complexity.
Ultimately I think FOSS is a wonderful idea, its the execution of that idea that has gone all askew. instead of asking "What are we doing wrong that our competitors are doing right?" and making things easier its one step forward and two steps back. And as you pointed out by the time shuttleworth gets his latest scheme off the ground he is gonna be dealing with competition vastly more advanced and ahead of the game. Maybe we should call Canonical the Duke Nukem Forever of OS companies?
Its not sexist if its true. I've known women that even when pissed off at you had a very pretty lilting quality to their voice, and then other women (like my ex) that while having a quite lovely voice when she was pleased had a voice that would cut you like a chainsaw when she was PO'd. you know the kind where it gets higher the more they get pissed? yeah that kind. of course there are guys that also irritate the fuck out of you with just their voice, or even worse like my last boss where they'd get that spit thing going like they were foaming at the mouth.So it isn't really sexist if its true and for all we know his wife's voice could make a man's balls climb into his chest and make your ovaries shrivel in fear.
As for TFA I've always wondered if it isn't a frequency thing that causes cats not to give a fuck what humans say. Dogs always seem to respond to human speech better so I have to wonder if we aren't using frequencies that sound pleasing to the dog but just bounce right off the cat. Or it could just be that cats don't give a shit, who knows.
all I know is I loaded up on horror games off the Steam sale (still good until Nov 1st if there are any scary games you'd like cheap) so I'm gonna enjoy this holiday by painting the walls with bad guys and trying not to let that creepy little Alma grab me. Happy Halloween y'all!
Actually I'm having quite good luck with my customers and the new AMD APUs, they all just love it. I think the problem with the netbook market is in the race to the bottom too many chose Atom and as a CPU Atom is just a really bad joke. without Nvidia (which intel slit their own throats and killed their Atom market by cutting off Nvidia from further chipsets) boosting the Atom with ION frankly even 720p on those is just painful and anything more than web surfing is a skippy mess. With the Brazos chips, which i was impressed enough I sold my Athlon X2 MSI wind and got one, the CPU is powerful enough the machine feels snappy and the GPU lets you even run HDMI into a TV and do full 1080p without dropping frames.
But what killed Linux on netbooks is something that too many in the community brag about which is frankly insane instability and constant changes in the entire OS from the kernel on up which causes Dell to have to run their own repos and pay their own distro team, which i'm sure is a not inconsiderable cost, just to keep the OS running. Run the default repo? the drivers shit themselves and die hard. You can't have a product that you can't even update without it killing itself, it makes you look like a Mickey Mouse operation, it pisses the customers off when they find their laptop is broken, and you end up with egg on your face and a shitload of returns.
That is why one of two things need to happen if Linux is gonna gain REAL share. 1.-The crazy kernel and release schedule will have to be abandoned for an OEM friendly 5 year release cycle with ALL the OS and software sticking to that schedule and for business use 10 years would be more like it, or 2.-Torvalds has to go and a kernel ABI (which is currently used by Apple, MSFT, BSD, Solaris, even OS/2) is deployed so frankly it doesn't matter what happens in the kernel or userland, the underlying drivers "just work" so the user frankly doesn't notice and some kernel which fixes a race condition or security issue doesn't take a big wet dump on their wireless.
Because lets be brutally honest folks: The users out there couldn't give a crap about 'free as in freedom' and sure as hell aren't gonna jump through any hoops or deal with any grievances just to have it, for proof one just has to look at the Apple bottom line and the lines around the block when a new iShiny is released. Folks want simple, they want easy, they want hand holding, they want ALL GUI, NO CLI, and they want it to "just work".
And while strides have been made in that area frankly there is a long way to go and those further strides will have to be made while actively fighting the "STFU Noobs and go back to windblowz LOL!" trolls that seem to have infested too much of the community who consider it their sacred duty to run off those that don't do things "the Linux way". But as Tom pointed out while the Linux way has been successful in server and embedded markets that success simply hasn't carried over to the consumer market, and that is because that is a whole different ball game with different rules and needs. trying to force the Linux way of doing things on that market simply ends in failure, which is why so far the ONLY success of Linux in that arena has been by Google who are killing themselves (last i heard development was nearly a billion a year) to make Linux as UN-Linux-like as possible.
Not until they fix some of the fundamental flaws they won't. For example who in the hell thought making the bar go up and down on the left side with no easy peasy way to change it was a good idea? Even tablets are widescreen ratio, yes? There for you will have the LEAST room vertically and the MOST room horizontally. or do they think that nobody will want to have more than 3 or 4 apps ready to go? As someone that has been using docks since 2002 I find that it doesn't take long before you get hooked on them and they start growing, I'm currently up to 15 apps and folders i have in my dock.
And why isn't there a "fix drivers" button? Or a roll back drivers button? something that will help an average user if an upgrade bones a critical driver so they can fix it WITHOUT doing the Google dance, because if that critical driver is wireless or Ethernet how will they Google? this is one area where taking a page from the MSFT playbook would be a GOOD idea. Hell with everything coming from a single source it shouldn't be THAT hard to do right?
And finally why is there no "help me!" button? something that would connect a noob to a volunteer something like what was suggested here by me two years ago? With Windows 7 you can take control of a PC via an invitation in under 3 minutes if someone is in trouble as long as they have functional net access, and something similar should be implemented so LUGs and other volunteers can have a "help me!" button on the desktop for new users to help them get up and running.
Linux has some good goals and ideas but their idea of helping new users is throwing them off a bridge into rapids and calling it a swimming lesson! Despite the "we're user friendly" facade there is a LOT of geekiness under the hood that unless one is familiar with the Unix way of doing things they can easily get frustrated and give up. If you want to gain share you are gonna have to do a LOT more hand holding and help the new users get up to speed, which I believe with a little thought and a few changes COULD be done, the only question is if you can run off the "Go back to windblowz LOL Noobs!" trolls that seem to infect forums today like the clap.
Actually its a "dirty little secret" in the repair biz but you hear of this thing called Windows 7? yeah well guess what? After Vista turned out to be a turkey with ZERO adoption, even by the pirates, they made Windows 7 butt simple to crack via a REALLY lame OEM hack that from what i've been told has been running for over 2 years now. You can even look it up on BT, they have a "Windows 7 all versions pre activated" that has EVERY version, both X86 and X64, from Starter through Ultimate, and it passes WGA and updates just fine. I don't mess with pirated crap but you'd be surprised how many shops sell hacked windows machines.
So I guess MSFT learned that lesson friend, as Windows 7 doesn't even need a fricking key like XP did, its literally "stick in pirate disc, choose version, install" and that's it. The truly sad part is Ballmer could have completely wiped out piracy by keeping the "Win 7 HP Upgrade" at $50, as I saw guys that had NEVER had a legit Windows go legit with that, it really was the sweet spot price wise, but I guess he'd rather everyone run "Win 7 Ultimate Razr1911 Edition" instead. BTW that is how you can ALWAYS spot the pirate versions as they always get the highest SKU even when it makes NO sense at all! Look up how many machines on Craigslist that frankly aren't worth $100 have Win 7 Ultimate and office 2K7 or 2K10 (both of which are also easy to pirate).
I thought they were "Tell Ballmer he was right, we need to fucking kill Google"
As for TFA, do we REALLY need to have an article posted every time someone farts near an iPhone, really? Hell there was a story on Yahoo the other day that nearly all smartphones are covered in E Coli from fecal matter (because its a warm smooth surface and people are nasty and don't wash their phones OR their hands) so are we gonna get a "This just in, Yahoo says iPhones are shitty!" article next?
I mean seriously how many folks EVER jailbreak their phones? 5%? 8% max? I'm willing to bet the majority just does like my cousin who is an iPhone fan and when the new shiny comes out they put the old shiny in a drawer and promptly forget about it. I don't want to even know how many cell phones are in the corner drawers of my family, probably a lot. Somebody gets a new shiny, the old shiny goes in a drawer. no hacking, cracking, jailbreaking, hell nobody keeps their phone long enough to care.
Oh and before someone points out (as they did last time) that battered women's takes old cell phones? its a nice cause and all but until they are able to offer secure wiping nobody is gonna be willing to risk it with their smartphones. These things carry ever larger amounts of flash memory and with the way folks live on their phones who the hell knows whats it got in flash memory? hell is there even a way to secure wipe flash memory? the last i looked at it with wear leveling nobody was really sure, but that's been awhile. but until someone can give a 100% guarantee or even better just pop the phone into a device that wipes it clean folks just aren't gonna risk it, good cause or no.
I love how everyone after you is arguing over whether pot is addictive and kinda missing the big point which it is We, The People not We, Your too stupid children which is how the government is treating us. Here you have We, The People, saying "We don't think we should be blowing billions and sending kids to jail for pot" and instead of doing WHAT THE ELECTORS TELL THEM TO they say "Fuck you, our buddies in the private prison biz are making out like bandits! Now pay them taxes bitches!"
I remember hearing something about "taxation without representation" and it ended up VERY nasty for the bosses of this country at that time. Mark my words OWS is just the beginning, and its gonna get a hell of a lot nastier. Notice how the head cracking has already begun. I wonder how long it will take the OWS guys to notice when the tea parties showed up armed there was NO head cracking or beat downs?
Mark my words, you think its bad now? Wait until 2013, I'm betting that is when the student loan AND the retirement bubbles AND the stock bubbles ARE ALL gonna burst at the same time. Then they will be joined by tons of student grads with NO jobs and NO future (kinda like what happened in Egypt) and add to that all those retired folks that wake up one day and find some money manager has blown all their retirement on Ponzi schemes. the poo is gonna hit the bladed cooling device and I'm predicting another 20+ year depression. Remember folks that we didn't officially get about the numbers set before the last great depression until 1953. Food for thought.
But everyone seems to be missing the REALLY NASTY little problem nobody is talking about...the for profit 'colleges' like De Vry and Remington and ITT. I went to ITT, basically got it free through rehab grants and only went to give HR a piece of paper (since I already had the contacts) but I got to see first hand what they were doing to the poor kids and it wasn't even funny. Basically everything out of the recruiters mouth was a bold faced lie and these kids didn't have a clue they were being scammed until they were left with a piece of paper that was only good for making a airplane out of. I actually talked to a couple of the kids after graduation (tried to help the smart ones where I could, but there was only so much I could do) and the "job placement" basically just picked a couple of ads out of the paper to send them to as their "prospects" and one was even a pyramid scam!
So if you want to know what is gonna cause the bubble to burst its all these scam colleges that are feeding on the poor like check cashing services and all the other scum that prey on the weak and leech off the government. I'd love to see the placement rates of these places, i bet not a single one gets above 3% and I don't even want to know what they are charging the government for their "services".
Ya know, I've never really understood that either. I had a former boss that like me got fed up with corp work and walked away and by the end he would just tell them flat out "Does your desktop come on in the morning? Can you get your email? does the web work without you being spammed by Viagra ads? Well do you think that magic elves come in and do that work?"
One of the last straws for me was this law firm I set up, which I thought I did a beautiful job even though they were cheap bastards. Everyone had a standard Dell Optiplex PC, a nice sonicwall in the closet, it all ran like a Swiss watch. I told them i didn't have time to be their admin but I knew a couple of guys, both damned good AND affordable, and gave them their numbers, so what do they do? One of the PHBs says 'Oh that's too high, I know a guy that's a WIZ and computers, he'll do a great job!" and I bet half the admins here are ALREADY cringing, but you ain't heard nothing yet.
So I get called back out about a year or so later because the "Wiz" got caught surfing porn and running a Quake III server on company time and "things are acting funny" so they paid me time and a half to come right out....acting funny....damn. I get there and the wiz has thrown out EVERY SINGLE BOX that I bought because they were "too slow" and instead put together a bunch of gamer rigs from Tigerdirect barebones. NOTHING matched, ALL of it was this nasty unstable OCed mess. I thought that was bad and then...I went into the closet...Jesus Tapdancing Christ! The braintrust had tossed the sonicwall for a pile of d-link routers you know, the shitty blue bastards? yeah those. and instead of the ISP I had set up he had set up a DIFFERENT ISP for damned near EVERY router! Apparently his idea of adding bandwidth was to chain on another D-Link and get another connection!
That episode and a couple of similar ones broke me of working corporate. if you work corp, you have my sympathy. They are constantly fucking you on the budget, constantly giving you too much to do with too little to do it with, and what is your reward? To get offshored or even have to train the H1-B they are gonna fire you for.
I don't know, maybe IT guys need a union or something. All I know is having family in construction and working IT frankly the plumber gets more respect than the guy who has to keep millions of dollars of hardware and software running, and that just ain't right. Maybe IT needs to have a case of the "blue flu" and everyone take off for 3 days, just to let them know how much you really do? something has to change because at the local college IT has become a ghost town. Nobody is learning IT anymore because they've seen how shitty the rest of us have been treated. Everyone is in either medical or legal.
Uhhh...didn't read TFA did you? it's okay, most don't. You see in TFA they made it clear that this is because they don't want to upgrade hardware or spend money which is why its doomed to fail.
That is not to blame it on Linux, no Linux can and is used in quite a few systems but if you ONLY look at it as a choice of dollars and cents then you will lose as anyone who has had to do a major OS rollout, even from one kernel to the other like from Win9X to WinXP, much less to switch from one OS to one completely different and incompatible with the previous software can tell you major switches are expensive and by looking at ONLY the bottom line frankly you would be better off simply buying some cheap ass Win 7 machines with a volume discount.
After all as another poster pointed out we are NOT ONLY talking about some seriously old hardware, which many distros don't support older than 5 years, even ignoring that there is gonna be some hardware that isn't supported, that is just a fact. So that hardware is gotta be trashed and replaced. Then there is likely some mission critical apps, either on the education side or even more likely on the admin side where there are NO Linux equivalents, which means you are gonna have to hire some custom coders to write you a couple of apps. that isn't cheap, THEN you have ALL that data, don't forget we are talking about a school system, we are talking records on top of records, many will most likely be in some proprietary format so somebody is gonna have to get all that data out and reformat it to a format the new software will read, cost again THEN if that isn't enough they are gonna have to replace ALL their admins or pay to have them re-educated to doing thing the Unix way, most likely you'll have to have both since a school can't just stop while they go get some Linux certs.
So you see, when you figure in all of the above the electric bill is frankly a joke, and we are talking Portugal not some African hellhole, I'm sure their power is pretty dependable. Again IF they were doing this for freedom to modify, so they can customize the software to their needs, because they believe in FOSS and its ideals? Then and ONLY then would this work, because they wouldn't have a heart attack when the costs of such a massive conversion start mounting. Remember XP is a decade old now, which means a hell of a lot of data that needs converting and applications that need replacing. if the TFA is true and they are strictly doing this to cut costs? they are gonna be in for a VERY rude awakening when they find out the OS and hardware is frankly not even on the list when looking at what sucks money in a rollout like this
How about for one thing its a perfect example of the "free rider problem" and why FOSS companies like Novell and Mandriva slowly bleed to death and simply can't compete with the R&D that Apple and MSFT spend?
I mean how many here even KNOW where CentOS came from? Because its not a nice story folks, and its a perfect example of why the leeches will bleed FOSS to death. Once upon a time there was a company that sold hardware that ran...you guess it...RHEL on it, but someone at that company said "Hey, if we strip all the copyrighted stuff out we can just take what we want and not have to pay RH shit! We'll save a bundle!" and so CentOS was born. And before anyone says "Well herp derp RH doesn't complain" what do you expect them to save? "Hey community please stop butt fucking us please?"
It is also a classic example of short sighted thinking shooting yourselves right in the face. Who gives more than any other company when it comes to giving back to the community? Why that would be RH. Now how do they pay for that? Ooops, didn't think of that, did you? Its the same reason I doubt you'll be seeing any companies opening their hardware anytime soon, as AMD bent over backward, even hiring coders to help the FOSS driver guys and opened their specs as wide as they could, and what did they get? every forum filled with guys saying "Herp derp, buy Nvidia".
Pretty much everyone with a brain is saying the economy will get much worse before it gets better as not only have we hit bottom yet on the two previous bubbles, but we have two MORE bubbles that could burst any time, the student loan bubble and the retirement bubble. Now what do you think is gonna happen to RH if the economy continues to tank and more and more potential and former customers take the same route? I'll tell you, first they'll have to scale back, which will make quality suffer. patches will take longer, new features won't be implemented, things will get worse, this will then cause more to leave as there are OTHER OSes they can have for free, right? Then you end up in a death spiral and if you aren't careful Red hat is another Novell. don't forget once upon a time both Novell and Sun were powerhouses in the industry too.
This is why I have been saying for ages "free as in beer" needs to die and be replaced by "free as in freedom" only. Hell even RMS says there is nothing wrong with making money from your code as long as others have the freedom to modify. But sadly what we'll see instead is short sighted thinking like in TFA, where they'll expect this poor schmuck to "just Google it" to solve even the most complex problems with ZERO support, hell they might even reward him by cutting his staff! Meanwhile MSFT and Apple get paid year after year after year, they have NO problem spending money on R&D and advertising, they just keep on coming. How are companies like Red Hat that are busting their balls for the community gonna survive if everyone says "Just use CentOS"?
Actually I just like pointing out that retards like you have taken over the Linux community and are frankly doing a better job of making sure Linux goes nowhere than MSFT could ever DREAM of doing, I mean I can give plenty of proof of the uberfails, such as Dell having to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? yet do you have enough sense to LEARN from your mistakes? To ask "What are we doing wrong that the competition is doing right"? Of course not, hell you can't even copypasta correctly! Instead you'll scream "They are noobs, we're leet!" while whacking off to the latest bash handbook.
Yet here you are, being given gift after gift by the competition and what do you do? scream "I'm leet!" and shoot yourselves in the face while whacking off to a bash script, I mean you aren't even smart enough to copypasta a single sentence correctly yet to expect the masses to sit around and copypasta pages of CLI mess? And you wonder why you are dead fucking last? Hell you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses. Have you seen that site? It is a WHOLE SITE dedicated to NOTHING but laughing at you and your kind and you know what? Its pretty damned funny!
So please go ahead, i consider it a wonderful chance to educate people on what pathetic failure losers like you have caused the community as a whole. Once upon a time they were making progress, but now there is nothing left of the community but pathetic fat losers like yourself that somehow thinks being able to copypasta into a term somehow makes you "better" than everyone else and that it is your duty to run off the "noobs" but you know what? You are just shooting yourselves in the face,making sure Linux NEVER gains any share, the hardware OEMs won't support you, and that mainstream users treat your OS like toxic waste, and i find that quite hilarious.
MILLIONS of manhours dedicated to linux, TWENTY YEARS of hard work, what do you have to show? you are less than the margin for error, and in large part it is due to douchebags like you that make Linux look like the home of fat losers and trolls. Bravo sir, MSFT couldn't ask for a better useful idiot than yourself. You really should ask them to pay you, after all the village idiot used to get coins thrown at him, didn't he?
But you see if you are correct they are already doomed to fail as TFA makes it clear that this is STRICTLY about money and ALL those things you mentioned? having guys well trained in FOSS, paying developers to write new apps, not to mention training, converting data, and the whole changeover mess? All of that costs REAL money, in the end most likely MORE than simply buying some cheap windows 7 capable desktops with a volume discount.
To use the famous Slashdot car analogy switching a huge corp like this to Linux is a lot like being given a 57 Chevy that has been rusting in someone's field and having them say "here is a free car!". Now if they are ONLY doing it because of the price? they are gonna spend a year or two dealing with it, watching the price go up and up, until they get frustrated and end up abandoning it just to pick up something off the lot.
But if it is a labor of love? if they believe they will ultimately be better off with something they have built themselves with their own two hands, something that will be shaped to their desires? THEN and ONLY THEN will they succeed.
You see too many go into it for completely the wrong reasons, just as I predict TFA will fail. I bet my last dollar someone read some "keep your old hardware with Linux!" article and decided they could SAVE MONEY by doing this whereas i'm sure any admin here that has dealt with a major OS switch like this will tell you while you might save a little money in the long run in the short run it will LOSE MONEY because the bean counters never seem to figure in the cost of all the time and manpower.
They are NOT doing this to give the kids the ability to tinker, or because they want to customize to their specs, no this is STRICTLY about money, which is why its doomed to fail. The fail will have nothing whatsoever to do with Linux, although i'm sure some will try to claim it, no its strictly going about a major shift for all the wrong reasons and failing to figure in the cost of the conversion. I'm sure there are a million horror stories that could be told here about all different kinds of software where the bean counters looked at the bottom line instead of figuring costs and manpower included. that is not to say Linux can't save money, but that savings will be in the long term and NOT in the short.
Uhhh...you DO know there is actually a Linux distro that comes by default with an updated version of KDE 3.5, now called "KDE Classic"? of course not, you're too fucking stupid to even get a quote correct.
The correct quote fucknuts is As FAR AS THE USERS ARE CONCERNED there is NO CLI in Windows" and I stand by that statement. Ask the local checkout girl, the person you are standing behind in the bank, you know NORMAL PEOPLE how to launch command line from windows and guess what? They will say "What's command line?" because THEY DO NOT NEED IT.
So don't get all butthurt because your OS won't run without Bash, that it doesn't work without "Open up bash and type" because hey, its FOSS right? You CAN fix it.....but of course you won't, because you think it makes you in some way superior to the "noobs" which is funny as hell. First with Vista and now with windows 8 MSFT is giving you a 40 meter head start in the 100 meter dash, what do you do? Scream "I'm leet!" and shoot yourself in the foot while jacking off to a bash script. You're gonna lose, and you have NOBODY to blame but yourself.
Actually that isn't very hard for MSFT to do, as they have an embedded version of Windows 7 that is quite miserly when it comes to system requirements. Personally I've said for years MSFT needs to hire the hacker that makes the "Tiny (insert version)" Windows as his builds frankly spank BOTH the embedded and FLP versions of Windows by quite a lot, but the embedded version would most likely run on their hardware quite well.
As someone that runs a little retail shop I can tell you the problem with Linux is NOT the price, nor is it the basic look and feel, which frankly has been getting quite nice of late. No the problem is twofold, one you have the apps. The amount of specialty software on windows is just insane, education, medical, billing, literally hundreds of thousands of highly specialized apps for which there is NO Linux equivalent. having a dozen text editors and support for a bazillion programming languages really don't help when what you need is a drop in replacement for Quicken/Quickbooks does it? And please don't say GNUCash, because GNUCash is more like MSFT Money than a competitor to QB. In the case of a school I can imagine there is a ton of both educational and administrative software that is gonna be a royal bitch to change out, if there is even a Linux equivalent. Linux has been so focused on programmers and servers that the little apps just aren't there.
The other problem is bad attitude, which in a way reminds me of the way online shooters have become. go to ANY forum and ask for a non CLI way to solve a simple problem and what do you get? Most likely a wave of pure hatred, with every filthy name in the book, ending with "RTFM or go back to Winblowz noob LOL!".
Somewhere along the way too much of the Linux community was hijacked by those that think making things easier for the users is a BAD thing, and that the more fiddly and PITA it is the more "leet" it is. They remind me of the lamers in FPS that sit around trying to make things miserable for anyone new to a game just to show how much "better" they are than you. Frankly this kind of "We're leet!" attitude isn't healthy either for the community or Linux as a whole, and is more than a little crazy if you think about it. I mean wwhat are computers FOR anyway? why to do work and make your day EASIER and it has been that way since Visicalc! But sadly many in the community (and even some of the programmers) think that making things as obtuse and CLI heavy as possible is some kind of badge of honor that weeds out the "noobs" like turning people off of FOSS is a good thing. the community as a whole really needs to come down hard on those types and push that the ultimate goal is to make Linux as easy as possible so as many people as possible can use it freely.
I wish them luck, I really do, but my guess is if MSFT doesn't just offer them embedded they'll struggle for a year or two before coming back to Windows for the reasons I named above, just as we saw when other countries have tried to switch. this conversion will NOT be cheap, it will require a LOT of dedication, training, and having to learn new programs or even give up ways they are used to as no program can be found to do the job, and if they are ONLY doing this to count pennies? Then they are in for a shock. If you want to use Linux because it is FOSS, because you can customize it to your workload, because you are free to modify it to your needs? Then your conversion has a shot at succeeding. But to do it ONLY because of the bottom line is just asking to fail because ANY major software conversion IS gonna be costly, and there simply is no way around that.
Now you watch how quickly I get buried for daring to point out the problems logically and rationally with their plan. The same trolls that say "We're leet!" and teabag anybody that dares to ask for an easy solution get all butthurt if you dare to say anything other than "Gee isn't Linux perfect? Why it sure is Skip, and RMS' farts smells like roses and cure AGW!" which is exactly the kind of delusional mindset that often dooms attempts to switch.
Exactly, its the unsung heroes who really make us and shape our world. For me it would be the 7th grade tutor after my bike accident that saw that teaching me more than the basics when it came to English comp was pointless and that I did math better in my head than trying to force me to do it their way, the guy who invented the VIC chip that gave me my love of all things computing, my late uncle who was always getting me new tech that "fell off the back of a truck", the friend who had such a hard on for Hexen he sold me his less than a year old Pentium 100Mhz for $100 so he could blow a major wad on the latest and greatest, and of course my parents, my dad who didn't try to force me to be anything or anyone but the best person I could be, and my mom who instead of reading me Horton hears a Who was reading me greatest Sci Fi writers of the 70s.
In the end there are a bazillion people who shape each and every one of us, a few that are famous but the majority never will be, they are just people that came into our lives, sometimes for a short while, that shaped the way we are. Maybe instead we should have an "Unsung Heroes of our lives" day instead?
Wow...nice. Instead of pointing out ways the guy could actually get enjoyment out of the game you and several others act like douches, real nice. Most likely that means the game is broken and is only usable if you dedicate 4-8 hours a day living in the thing, thanks for the tip.
And folks wonder why many of us old timers don't play online much anymore. When I was running with a clan on the Mechwarrior series we actually LIKED when new blood came in, and not as target practice either. they would ALWAYS want to go for an ultra heavy which of course would get them killed, so we would tell them to start with the lights and work as a scout/harasser with a team until they got their skill level up. This would let them feel they were actually accomplishing something as it taught them the needed skills they could use later on a missileboat or heavy assault.
But now games with any real difficulty or challenge seem to be about who can be the biggest teabagging douchebag asshole. No help for the noobs, NO trying to build the base, just an excuse to be the biggest cockhead you can possibly be, nice. But don't be surprised if the fanbase drops like a fucking stone before the game even makes it to bargain bin because "Call of Warfare Major Douchebag Edition" has been released and you find it isn't as fun being a giant prick with nobody to see you act like an asshole.
It is guys like YOU sir that make it quite easy for the game companies to kill dedicated servers and flip the switch on games the second a new one is released so they can maximize profits because guys like YOU make sure nobody but the most hard of hardcore ever play the thing and they have moved on long before the game gets any real legs. bravo, good job, I'm sure the corps love you (and your money) for it.
What should convince everyone that critics are useless shills is that with the exception of a couple of games that were soooooooo horrible that nobody had the guts to shill for them (Kane and lynch series being the last example) they nearly always give an 80%+ score, no matter how shitty. I saw several 80 and 85% scores for TP: Fall of Liberty when it came out and that game was unplayable. I'm sure if you looked hard I bet you could find even one or two reviewers that took the cash and said Kane and Lynch was good.
Me I suggest waiting a week or two and then looking at the Amazon reviews done by ordinary folks, not the ones that have reviewer a bazillion things. the ordinary folks are usually brutal when it comes to game reviews and will point out the shitty REAL quick. They also point out all the nasty little DRM shittiness that some of us may not have heard of, like I didn't know Bioshock II had limited activations until I went there which convinced me to wait until it was in a $5 sale on Steam. Oh and if their new service means I can't buy it on Amazon? Then I wouldn't buy it PERIOD. I have seen too many of these game companies whitewash their forums and keep anything bad said about the game buried, no thanks. I want honest reviews from honest folks, not game shills or astroturfers
Hey now, we don't cotton hurting the fat girls, hell somebody has to do the cooking, right? Its always the chubby girl that can take just about any meat and make a kick ass stew or meat pie, so don't worry ladies, we'll make room for ya!
Seriously though, reading about city boys thinking they can come on down into the hills and actually kick ass is pretty dang funny, we country boys have grown up with rifles and most of our families are armed to the teeth, then you add in we know the lay of the land and many are Vietnam vets that learned a thing or two from Charlie? yeah we'd have us a great time picking any valuables from their corpses.
And claiming it would be a dustbowl just shows they don't know their history, the dust bowls were created by large farms doing strip farming whereas the hillbilly small crop farms did just fine, not to mention the delta has been tropical for centuries and I doubt seriously that'll change anytime soon, if anything global warming would just bring MORE rain from the Gulf and make it even more of a steamy jungle. Majorly sweaty but plants love it.
Don't know about the midwest but I'd say the southern folks would do just fine, plenty of good land, timber, national guard to get extra ammo from (most of which is run by relatives so it ain't like you'd even have to steal anything, just ask Uncle Fred for a canister or two) and the huge tropical storms would be quite easy to capture drinking water from. Yeah the city boys would make great sport for the hunters and give us plenty of extra women, that's be it.
Forget the whole computer, just a nice fat light pipe between the CPU and RAM, maybe a second between the PCIe and CPU but but great, thanks loads. Nowadays it seems like no matter how much RAM you stuff keeping the CPU and GPU fed ends up being the problem. SSDs for the OS can kill a lot of the HDD problem but in the end it all comes down to feeding the chips and a nice light pipe between the chips and RAM would probably make today's PCs feel like a 386 trying to run Win98.
Exactly. What this will be good for is third world applications like information kiosks and schools, basically allowing anyone anywhere to be able to do basics like web browsing, document creation etc and I'm sure being Linux based it won't be long before plenty of educational apps are ported to it.
While most of us in the west probably wouldn't care for surfing on this thing (hell the hand me downs i gave to my nephews were dual core Pentiums with 2Gb of RAM) we have to remember that our own computer revolution started with computers like the VIC 20, which this thing is a supercomputer by comparison. I bet its incredibly miserly when it comes to power consumption as well, which will be a boon in places where power isn't guaranteed 24/7.
That is what has always worried me about science since the birth of the bomb. it seems that always science seems to be doing something because they CAN but nobody stops for even a second and asks if they SHOULD or what the ramifications of the technology will be.
Everyone seems to forget with every great invention has come terrible cost, and not just the bomb with the study of the atom. as we saw with oil you have not only the ability to tend great farms and improve food to market but you have pollution and horrible wars, hell it could be argued that for all Hitler's talk of living space both Germany and Japan were fighting for oil. The microchip gave us the ability to come up with new areas of science and to do work that would have taken mathematics by hand centuries to be calculated in moments, but also gave us the ability to kill someone from halfway around the world just by pressing a button.
Not a Luddite, and not saying we shouldn't progress, but it would be nice if scientists and thinkers seemed to be looking at the big picture more than they are now and thinking about whether the tradeoffs will make life better or worse. As you have pointed out so many are lining up just to laugh at the guy at least some are really asking "What if it works, what are the implications?" because eventually someone WILL come up with a new power source, be it fusion or solar storage or something we haven't even thought up yet and it does bother me that these scientists seem to have Utopian dreams while completely ignoring the ugly reality.
And of course this doesn't even look at what would happen with game changing tech like this if it gets into the hands of the evil and sick. Imagine if this allows any nutball with a cause an easy way to make an EMP bomb or to overload the grid at will and fry large sections of infrastructure. I'm sure when the first research on the atom was conducted in the 30s nobody thought about a multi-stage fusion device that could spew toxins over hundreds of miles and kill millions, but that is what we ended up with. While this Rossi guy may be a pacifist sadly the world is not and it is truly scary to think about what the more evil and vicious members of our world would do with this much cheap power on demand.
Missing a little piece in your equation bud. When it comes to guns unless you are talking army on army it all comes down not to who has the biggest barrel, but who is the best shot and who is colder. We country folks have been shooting a hell of a lot longer than you city folks have, and we got plenty of cold as hell hillbillies up in them hills. Maybe if you'd have started that plan 20 or 30 years ago you'd be up to speed, but if poo hits the blade in 5 years? you'd be prey, sorry bud, that's just the way it goes. if it is my family or yours, i choose mine.
I bet you are running an Intel multicore. try it on an AMD single or low end dual core and watch how quickly you change your tune. Frankly i wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that Moz is using the Intel crippler compiler which completely cripples anything compiled on it with regards to AMD products. I have noticed that after the 3.6 branch FF performance has gone REALLY downhill with regards to AMD chips. When it runs better on a P4 than a brand new AMD multicore? yeah smells like the Intel compiler to me.
I have to support ALL makes and models of both Intel and AMD so having FF run like shit on half the CPUs really doesn't cut it. I have found browsers based on Chromium (currently using Dragon, but I've found this to be true with Chrome and Chromium as well) simply don't have this problem with AMD CPUs so again I bet Moz is using the crippler compiler.
That is why on first install I take my builds and refurbs over to Ninite and along with the usual (Klite, LibreOffice, irfanview) I install Sumatra PDF Reader. its fast, its lightweight, no extra BS, it just loads PDF VERY fast. And if you are in FF or Chromium based it'll just pop it up in a new tab, don't know about IE as I haven't used it for years.
But reading the comments it seems like those for having an internal PDF reader have basically been burnt by Adobe Reader but I'd say it'd be better to just ditch adobe for something that doesn't suck than to build in a reader and increase the risk. which BTW if it is still running with Firefox's higher permissions IS a risk. Does FF even support low rights mode yet? Its been nearly 5 years now and soon we'll be on the third version of Windows with low rights mode.
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Oh I've been saying that since i wrote that article for Linux Insider back in 09 right before the EOL of Win2K, there is a HELL of a big market both in allowing the user to keep their old hardware (because lets face it what XP ran on was actually quite powerful for web surfing and basic office work, here in the shop I'm seeing late model P4s and Pentium Ds along with Athlon X2s, more than powerful enough for most office and home tasks) and in allowing an easy migration path to Linux while letting legacy apps still be used.
The real bitch is the parts are all there but there is too much "We're leet! Do it OUR way!" elitist bullshit and chasing saturated markets like you pointed out for anyone to see the forest for the trees! hell you wouldn't even have to have Win32 support, instead shoot for something like a hardware accelerated "XP Mode" that would let them take their old license, or even better the install that is on the drive, and make it a VM that has icons on the desktop that allow them to launch the VM and have it behave like a native app. That way there wouldn't be the pain of trying to find apps to do the tasks their now EOL software was used for as they could just use what they have and have Linux for new applications.
But I agree that Canonical doesn't seem to have any clue where they are going, its just one pie in the sky idea after another, and of course by getting most of the hype it makes the whole community look directionless and flailing. There is gonna be MULTIPLE gifts given to the community but nobody will capitalize. you have Win 8 which i'm predicting will be another Vista, you have all these frankly more than powerful enough desktops and laptops losing support, you have an economy in the crapper so folks and businesses are wanting to save money and delay hardware purchases, and you have all these people doing more than ever online. Hell many of my customers don't even use their PCs for anything offline anymore.
This sadly though is ignoring what i truly believe to be the heart of the matter, and that is this: Just as the political parties have been taken over by the fringe too much of the Linux community has been taken over by the "We're leet, go back to windblowz!" crowd. As I've said repeatedly ask for a simple solution to a problem on any forum and ask for it to NOT be CLI, and watch what happens. You will see the seething hatred just come boiling forth, with you being called every filthy name in the book.
Sadly somewhere along the way the community forgot what the personal computer and FOSS was all about, forgot how its supposed to make the users life EASIER and allow them to get their work done with a minimum of fuss. Instead they have taken being obtuse and fiddly as badges of honor, as trials to "Weed out the noobs!" like turning people away is a good thing and something to community should be striving for. When i point out the hellish time I'm having with a driver that worked before and just get "Yeah well, Linux does that, what you need to do is" followed by a good page and a half of esoteric workarounds? something is SERIOUSLY wrong. Hell "use esoteric workarounds" has become a meme and if you click on some of the links below that page some of the examples are truly Rube Goldbergesque in their complexity.
Ultimately I think FOSS is a wonderful idea, its the execution of that idea that has gone all askew. instead of asking "What are we doing wrong that our competitors are doing right?" and making things easier its one step forward and two steps back. And as you pointed out by the time shuttleworth gets his latest scheme off the ground he is gonna be dealing with competition vastly more advanced and ahead of the game. Maybe we should call Canonical the Duke Nukem Forever of OS companies?
Its not sexist if its true. I've known women that even when pissed off at you had a very pretty lilting quality to their voice, and then other women (like my ex) that while having a quite lovely voice when she was pleased had a voice that would cut you like a chainsaw when she was PO'd. you know the kind where it gets higher the more they get pissed? yeah that kind. of course there are guys that also irritate the fuck out of you with just their voice, or even worse like my last boss where they'd get that spit thing going like they were foaming at the mouth.So it isn't really sexist if its true and for all we know his wife's voice could make a man's balls climb into his chest and make your ovaries shrivel in fear.
As for TFA I've always wondered if it isn't a frequency thing that causes cats not to give a fuck what humans say. Dogs always seem to respond to human speech better so I have to wonder if we aren't using frequencies that sound pleasing to the dog but just bounce right off the cat. Or it could just be that cats don't give a shit, who knows.
all I know is I loaded up on horror games off the Steam sale (still good until Nov 1st if there are any scary games you'd like cheap) so I'm gonna enjoy this holiday by painting the walls with bad guys and trying not to let that creepy little Alma grab me. Happy Halloween y'all!
Actually I'm having quite good luck with my customers and the new AMD APUs, they all just love it. I think the problem with the netbook market is in the race to the bottom too many chose Atom and as a CPU Atom is just a really bad joke. without Nvidia (which intel slit their own throats and killed their Atom market by cutting off Nvidia from further chipsets) boosting the Atom with ION frankly even 720p on those is just painful and anything more than web surfing is a skippy mess. With the Brazos chips, which i was impressed enough I sold my Athlon X2 MSI wind and got one, the CPU is powerful enough the machine feels snappy and the GPU lets you even run HDMI into a TV and do full 1080p without dropping frames.
But what killed Linux on netbooks is something that too many in the community brag about which is frankly insane instability and constant changes in the entire OS from the kernel on up which causes Dell to have to run their own repos and pay their own distro team, which i'm sure is a not inconsiderable cost, just to keep the OS running. Run the default repo? the drivers shit themselves and die hard. You can't have a product that you can't even update without it killing itself, it makes you look like a Mickey Mouse operation, it pisses the customers off when they find their laptop is broken, and you end up with egg on your face and a shitload of returns.
That is why one of two things need to happen if Linux is gonna gain REAL share. 1.-The crazy kernel and release schedule will have to be abandoned for an OEM friendly 5 year release cycle with ALL the OS and software sticking to that schedule and for business use 10 years would be more like it, or 2.-Torvalds has to go and a kernel ABI (which is currently used by Apple, MSFT, BSD, Solaris, even OS/2) is deployed so frankly it doesn't matter what happens in the kernel or userland, the underlying drivers "just work" so the user frankly doesn't notice and some kernel which fixes a race condition or security issue doesn't take a big wet dump on their wireless.
Because lets be brutally honest folks: The users out there couldn't give a crap about 'free as in freedom' and sure as hell aren't gonna jump through any hoops or deal with any grievances just to have it, for proof one just has to look at the Apple bottom line and the lines around the block when a new iShiny is released. Folks want simple, they want easy, they want hand holding, they want ALL GUI, NO CLI, and they want it to "just work".
And while strides have been made in that area frankly there is a long way to go and those further strides will have to be made while actively fighting the "STFU Noobs and go back to windblowz LOL!" trolls that seem to have infested too much of the community who consider it their sacred duty to run off those that don't do things "the Linux way". But as Tom pointed out while the Linux way has been successful in server and embedded markets that success simply hasn't carried over to the consumer market, and that is because that is a whole different ball game with different rules and needs. trying to force the Linux way of doing things on that market simply ends in failure, which is why so far the ONLY success of Linux in that arena has been by Google who are killing themselves (last i heard development was nearly a billion a year) to make Linux as UN-Linux-like as possible.
Not until they fix some of the fundamental flaws they won't. For example who in the hell thought making the bar go up and down on the left side with no easy peasy way to change it was a good idea? Even tablets are widescreen ratio, yes? There for you will have the LEAST room vertically and the MOST room horizontally. or do they think that nobody will want to have more than 3 or 4 apps ready to go? As someone that has been using docks since 2002 I find that it doesn't take long before you get hooked on them and they start growing, I'm currently up to 15 apps and folders i have in my dock.
And why isn't there a "fix drivers" button? Or a roll back drivers button? something that will help an average user if an upgrade bones a critical driver so they can fix it WITHOUT doing the Google dance, because if that critical driver is wireless or Ethernet how will they Google? this is one area where taking a page from the MSFT playbook would be a GOOD idea. Hell with everything coming from a single source it shouldn't be THAT hard to do right?
And finally why is there no "help me!" button? something that would connect a noob to a volunteer something like what was suggested here by me two years ago? With Windows 7 you can take control of a PC via an invitation in under 3 minutes if someone is in trouble as long as they have functional net access, and something similar should be implemented so LUGs and other volunteers can have a "help me!" button on the desktop for new users to help them get up and running.
Linux has some good goals and ideas but their idea of helping new users is throwing them off a bridge into rapids and calling it a swimming lesson! Despite the "we're user friendly" facade there is a LOT of geekiness under the hood that unless one is familiar with the Unix way of doing things they can easily get frustrated and give up. If you want to gain share you are gonna have to do a LOT more hand holding and help the new users get up to speed, which I believe with a little thought and a few changes COULD be done, the only question is if you can run off the "Go back to windblowz LOL Noobs!" trolls that seem to infect forums today like the clap.
Actually its a "dirty little secret" in the repair biz but you hear of this thing called Windows 7? yeah well guess what? After Vista turned out to be a turkey with ZERO adoption, even by the pirates, they made Windows 7 butt simple to crack via a REALLY lame OEM hack that from what i've been told has been running for over 2 years now. You can even look it up on BT, they have a "Windows 7 all versions pre activated" that has EVERY version, both X86 and X64, from Starter through Ultimate, and it passes WGA and updates just fine. I don't mess with pirated crap but you'd be surprised how many shops sell hacked windows machines.
So I guess MSFT learned that lesson friend, as Windows 7 doesn't even need a fricking key like XP did, its literally "stick in pirate disc, choose version, install" and that's it. The truly sad part is Ballmer could have completely wiped out piracy by keeping the "Win 7 HP Upgrade" at $50, as I saw guys that had NEVER had a legit Windows go legit with that, it really was the sweet spot price wise, but I guess he'd rather everyone run "Win 7 Ultimate Razr1911 Edition" instead. BTW that is how you can ALWAYS spot the pirate versions as they always get the highest SKU even when it makes NO sense at all! Look up how many machines on Craigslist that frankly aren't worth $100 have Win 7 Ultimate and office 2K7 or 2K10 (both of which are also easy to pirate).
I thought they were "Tell Ballmer he was right, we need to fucking kill Google"
As for TFA, do we REALLY need to have an article posted every time someone farts near an iPhone, really? Hell there was a story on Yahoo the other day that nearly all smartphones are covered in E Coli from fecal matter (because its a warm smooth surface and people are nasty and don't wash their phones OR their hands) so are we gonna get a "This just in, Yahoo says iPhones are shitty!" article next?
I mean seriously how many folks EVER jailbreak their phones? 5%? 8% max? I'm willing to bet the majority just does like my cousin who is an iPhone fan and when the new shiny comes out they put the old shiny in a drawer and promptly forget about it. I don't want to even know how many cell phones are in the corner drawers of my family, probably a lot. Somebody gets a new shiny, the old shiny goes in a drawer. no hacking, cracking, jailbreaking, hell nobody keeps their phone long enough to care.
Oh and before someone points out (as they did last time) that battered women's takes old cell phones? its a nice cause and all but until they are able to offer secure wiping nobody is gonna be willing to risk it with their smartphones. These things carry ever larger amounts of flash memory and with the way folks live on their phones who the hell knows whats it got in flash memory? hell is there even a way to secure wipe flash memory? the last i looked at it with wear leveling nobody was really sure, but that's been awhile. but until someone can give a 100% guarantee or even better just pop the phone into a device that wipes it clean folks just aren't gonna risk it, good cause or no.
I love how everyone after you is arguing over whether pot is addictive and kinda missing the big point which it is We, The People not We, Your too stupid children which is how the government is treating us. Here you have We, The People, saying "We don't think we should be blowing billions and sending kids to jail for pot" and instead of doing WHAT THE ELECTORS TELL THEM TO they say "Fuck you, our buddies in the private prison biz are making out like bandits! Now pay them taxes bitches!"
I remember hearing something about "taxation without representation" and it ended up VERY nasty for the bosses of this country at that time. Mark my words OWS is just the beginning, and its gonna get a hell of a lot nastier. Notice how the head cracking has already begun. I wonder how long it will take the OWS guys to notice when the tea parties showed up armed there was NO head cracking or beat downs?
Mark my words, you think its bad now? Wait until 2013, I'm betting that is when the student loan AND the retirement bubbles AND the stock bubbles ARE ALL gonna burst at the same time. Then they will be joined by tons of student grads with NO jobs and NO future (kinda like what happened in Egypt) and add to that all those retired folks that wake up one day and find some money manager has blown all their retirement on Ponzi schemes. the poo is gonna hit the bladed cooling device and I'm predicting another 20+ year depression. Remember folks that we didn't officially get about the numbers set before the last great depression until 1953. Food for thought.
But everyone seems to be missing the REALLY NASTY little problem nobody is talking about...the for profit 'colleges' like De Vry and Remington and ITT. I went to ITT, basically got it free through rehab grants and only went to give HR a piece of paper (since I already had the contacts) but I got to see first hand what they were doing to the poor kids and it wasn't even funny. Basically everything out of the recruiters mouth was a bold faced lie and these kids didn't have a clue they were being scammed until they were left with a piece of paper that was only good for making a airplane out of. I actually talked to a couple of the kids after graduation (tried to help the smart ones where I could, but there was only so much I could do) and the "job placement" basically just picked a couple of ads out of the paper to send them to as their "prospects" and one was even a pyramid scam!
So if you want to know what is gonna cause the bubble to burst its all these scam colleges that are feeding on the poor like check cashing services and all the other scum that prey on the weak and leech off the government. I'd love to see the placement rates of these places, i bet not a single one gets above 3% and I don't even want to know what they are charging the government for their "services".
Ya know, I've never really understood that either. I had a former boss that like me got fed up with corp work and walked away and by the end he would just tell them flat out "Does your desktop come on in the morning? Can you get your email? does the web work without you being spammed by Viagra ads? Well do you think that magic elves come in and do that work?"
One of the last straws for me was this law firm I set up, which I thought I did a beautiful job even though they were cheap bastards. Everyone had a standard Dell Optiplex PC, a nice sonicwall in the closet, it all ran like a Swiss watch. I told them i didn't have time to be their admin but I knew a couple of guys, both damned good AND affordable, and gave them their numbers, so what do they do? One of the PHBs says 'Oh that's too high, I know a guy that's a WIZ and computers, he'll do a great job!" and I bet half the admins here are ALREADY cringing, but you ain't heard nothing yet.
So I get called back out about a year or so later because the "Wiz" got caught surfing porn and running a Quake III server on company time and "things are acting funny" so they paid me time and a half to come right out....acting funny....damn. I get there and the wiz has thrown out EVERY SINGLE BOX that I bought because they were "too slow" and instead put together a bunch of gamer rigs from Tigerdirect barebones. NOTHING matched, ALL of it was this nasty unstable OCed mess. I thought that was bad and then...I went into the closet...Jesus Tapdancing Christ! The braintrust had tossed the sonicwall for a pile of d-link routers you know, the shitty blue bastards? yeah those. and instead of the ISP I had set up he had set up a DIFFERENT ISP for damned near EVERY router! Apparently his idea of adding bandwidth was to chain on another D-Link and get another connection!
That episode and a couple of similar ones broke me of working corporate. if you work corp, you have my sympathy. They are constantly fucking you on the budget, constantly giving you too much to do with too little to do it with, and what is your reward? To get offshored or even have to train the H1-B they are gonna fire you for.
I don't know, maybe IT guys need a union or something. All I know is having family in construction and working IT frankly the plumber gets more respect than the guy who has to keep millions of dollars of hardware and software running, and that just ain't right. Maybe IT needs to have a case of the "blue flu" and everyone take off for 3 days, just to let them know how much you really do? something has to change because at the local college IT has become a ghost town. Nobody is learning IT anymore because they've seen how shitty the rest of us have been treated. Everyone is in either medical or legal.
Uhhh...didn't read TFA did you? it's okay, most don't. You see in TFA they made it clear that this is because they don't want to upgrade hardware or spend money which is why its doomed to fail.
That is not to blame it on Linux, no Linux can and is used in quite a few systems but if you ONLY look at it as a choice of dollars and cents then you will lose as anyone who has had to do a major OS rollout, even from one kernel to the other like from Win9X to WinXP, much less to switch from one OS to one completely different and incompatible with the previous software can tell you major switches are expensive and by looking at ONLY the bottom line frankly you would be better off simply buying some cheap ass Win 7 machines with a volume discount.
After all as another poster pointed out we are NOT ONLY talking about some seriously old hardware, which many distros don't support older than 5 years, even ignoring that there is gonna be some hardware that isn't supported, that is just a fact. So that hardware is gotta be trashed and replaced. Then there is likely some mission critical apps, either on the education side or even more likely on the admin side where there are NO Linux equivalents, which means you are gonna have to hire some custom coders to write you a couple of apps. that isn't cheap, THEN you have ALL that data, don't forget we are talking about a school system, we are talking records on top of records, many will most likely be in some proprietary format so somebody is gonna have to get all that data out and reformat it to a format the new software will read, cost again THEN if that isn't enough they are gonna have to replace ALL their admins or pay to have them re-educated to doing thing the Unix way, most likely you'll have to have both since a school can't just stop while they go get some Linux certs.
So you see, when you figure in all of the above the electric bill is frankly a joke, and we are talking Portugal not some African hellhole, I'm sure their power is pretty dependable. Again IF they were doing this for freedom to modify, so they can customize the software to their needs, because they believe in FOSS and its ideals? Then and ONLY then would this work, because they wouldn't have a heart attack when the costs of such a massive conversion start mounting. Remember XP is a decade old now, which means a hell of a lot of data that needs converting and applications that need replacing. if the TFA is true and they are strictly doing this to cut costs? they are gonna be in for a VERY rude awakening when they find out the OS and hardware is frankly not even on the list when looking at what sucks money in a rollout like this
How about for one thing its a perfect example of the "free rider problem" and why FOSS companies like Novell and Mandriva slowly bleed to death and simply can't compete with the R&D that Apple and MSFT spend?
I mean how many here even KNOW where CentOS came from? Because its not a nice story folks, and its a perfect example of why the leeches will bleed FOSS to death. Once upon a time there was a company that sold hardware that ran...you guess it...RHEL on it, but someone at that company said "Hey, if we strip all the copyrighted stuff out we can just take what we want and not have to pay RH shit! We'll save a bundle!" and so CentOS was born. And before anyone says "Well herp derp RH doesn't complain" what do you expect them to save? "Hey community please stop butt fucking us please?"
It is also a classic example of short sighted thinking shooting yourselves right in the face. Who gives more than any other company when it comes to giving back to the community? Why that would be RH. Now how do they pay for that? Ooops, didn't think of that, did you? Its the same reason I doubt you'll be seeing any companies opening their hardware anytime soon, as AMD bent over backward, even hiring coders to help the FOSS driver guys and opened their specs as wide as they could, and what did they get? every forum filled with guys saying "Herp derp, buy Nvidia".
Pretty much everyone with a brain is saying the economy will get much worse before it gets better as not only have we hit bottom yet on the two previous bubbles, but we have two MORE bubbles that could burst any time, the student loan bubble and the retirement bubble. Now what do you think is gonna happen to RH if the economy continues to tank and more and more potential and former customers take the same route? I'll tell you, first they'll have to scale back, which will make quality suffer. patches will take longer, new features won't be implemented, things will get worse, this will then cause more to leave as there are OTHER OSes they can have for free, right? Then you end up in a death spiral and if you aren't careful Red hat is another Novell. don't forget once upon a time both Novell and Sun were powerhouses in the industry too.
This is why I have been saying for ages "free as in beer" needs to die and be replaced by "free as in freedom" only. Hell even RMS says there is nothing wrong with making money from your code as long as others have the freedom to modify. But sadly what we'll see instead is short sighted thinking like in TFA, where they'll expect this poor schmuck to "just Google it" to solve even the most complex problems with ZERO support, hell they might even reward him by cutting his staff! Meanwhile MSFT and Apple get paid year after year after year, they have NO problem spending money on R&D and advertising, they just keep on coming. How are companies like Red Hat that are busting their balls for the community gonna survive if everyone says "Just use CentOS"?
Actually I just like pointing out that retards like you have taken over the Linux community and are frankly doing a better job of making sure Linux goes nowhere than MSFT could ever DREAM of doing, I mean I can give plenty of proof of the uberfails, such as Dell having to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? yet do you have enough sense to LEARN from your mistakes? To ask "What are we doing wrong that the competition is doing right"? Of course not, hell you can't even copypasta correctly! Instead you'll scream "They are noobs, we're leet!" while whacking off to the latest bash handbook.
Yet here you are, being given gift after gift by the competition and what do you do? scream "I'm leet!" and shoot yourselves in the face while whacking off to a bash script, I mean you aren't even smart enough to copypasta a single sentence correctly yet to expect the masses to sit around and copypasta pages of CLI mess? And you wonder why you are dead fucking last? Hell you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses. Have you seen that site? It is a WHOLE SITE dedicated to NOTHING but laughing at you and your kind and you know what? Its pretty damned funny!
So please go ahead, i consider it a wonderful chance to educate people on what pathetic failure losers like you have caused the community as a whole. Once upon a time they were making progress, but now there is nothing left of the community but pathetic fat losers like yourself that somehow thinks being able to copypasta into a term somehow makes you "better" than everyone else and that it is your duty to run off the "noobs" but you know what? You are just shooting yourselves in the face,making sure Linux NEVER gains any share, the hardware OEMs won't support you, and that mainstream users treat your OS like toxic waste, and i find that quite hilarious.
MILLIONS of manhours dedicated to linux, TWENTY YEARS of hard work, what do you have to show? you are less than the margin for error, and in large part it is due to douchebags like you that make Linux look like the home of fat losers and trolls. Bravo sir, MSFT couldn't ask for a better useful idiot than yourself. You really should ask them to pay you, after all the village idiot used to get coins thrown at him, didn't he?
But you see if you are correct they are already doomed to fail as TFA makes it clear that this is STRICTLY about money and ALL those things you mentioned? having guys well trained in FOSS, paying developers to write new apps, not to mention training, converting data, and the whole changeover mess? All of that costs REAL money, in the end most likely MORE than simply buying some cheap windows 7 capable desktops with a volume discount.
To use the famous Slashdot car analogy switching a huge corp like this to Linux is a lot like being given a 57 Chevy that has been rusting in someone's field and having them say "here is a free car!". Now if they are ONLY doing it because of the price? they are gonna spend a year or two dealing with it, watching the price go up and up, until they get frustrated and end up abandoning it just to pick up something off the lot.
But if it is a labor of love? if they believe they will ultimately be better off with something they have built themselves with their own two hands, something that will be shaped to their desires? THEN and ONLY THEN will they succeed.
You see too many go into it for completely the wrong reasons, just as I predict TFA will fail. I bet my last dollar someone read some "keep your old hardware with Linux!" article and decided they could SAVE MONEY by doing this whereas i'm sure any admin here that has dealt with a major OS switch like this will tell you while you might save a little money in the long run in the short run it will LOSE MONEY because the bean counters never seem to figure in the cost of all the time and manpower.
They are NOT doing this to give the kids the ability to tinker, or because they want to customize to their specs, no this is STRICTLY about money, which is why its doomed to fail. The fail will have nothing whatsoever to do with Linux, although i'm sure some will try to claim it, no its strictly going about a major shift for all the wrong reasons and failing to figure in the cost of the conversion. I'm sure there are a million horror stories that could be told here about all different kinds of software where the bean counters looked at the bottom line instead of figuring costs and manpower included. that is not to say Linux can't save money, but that savings will be in the long term and NOT in the short.
Uhhh...you DO know there is actually a Linux distro that comes by default with an updated version of KDE 3.5, now called "KDE Classic"? of course not, you're too fucking stupid to even get a quote correct.
The correct quote fucknuts is As FAR AS THE USERS ARE CONCERNED there is NO CLI in Windows" and I stand by that statement. Ask the local checkout girl, the person you are standing behind in the bank, you know NORMAL PEOPLE how to launch command line from windows and guess what? They will say "What's command line?" because THEY DO NOT NEED IT.
So don't get all butthurt because your OS won't run without Bash, that it doesn't work without "Open up bash and type" because hey, its FOSS right? You CAN fix it.....but of course you won't, because you think it makes you in some way superior to the "noobs" which is funny as hell. First with Vista and now with windows 8 MSFT is giving you a 40 meter head start in the 100 meter dash, what do you do? Scream "I'm leet!" and shoot yourself in the foot while jacking off to a bash script. You're gonna lose, and you have NOBODY to blame but yourself.
Actually that isn't very hard for MSFT to do, as they have an embedded version of Windows 7 that is quite miserly when it comes to system requirements. Personally I've said for years MSFT needs to hire the hacker that makes the "Tiny (insert version)" Windows as his builds frankly spank BOTH the embedded and FLP versions of Windows by quite a lot, but the embedded version would most likely run on their hardware quite well.
As someone that runs a little retail shop I can tell you the problem with Linux is NOT the price, nor is it the basic look and feel, which frankly has been getting quite nice of late. No the problem is twofold, one you have the apps. The amount of specialty software on windows is just insane, education, medical, billing, literally hundreds of thousands of highly specialized apps for which there is NO Linux equivalent. having a dozen text editors and support for a bazillion programming languages really don't help when what you need is a drop in replacement for Quicken/Quickbooks does it? And please don't say GNUCash, because GNUCash is more like MSFT Money than a competitor to QB. In the case of a school I can imagine there is a ton of both educational and administrative software that is gonna be a royal bitch to change out, if there is even a Linux equivalent. Linux has been so focused on programmers and servers that the little apps just aren't there.
The other problem is bad attitude, which in a way reminds me of the way online shooters have become. go to ANY forum and ask for a non CLI way to solve a simple problem and what do you get? Most likely a wave of pure hatred, with every filthy name in the book, ending with "RTFM or go back to Winblowz noob LOL!".
Somewhere along the way too much of the Linux community was hijacked by those that think making things easier for the users is a BAD thing, and that the more fiddly and PITA it is the more "leet" it is. They remind me of the lamers in FPS that sit around trying to make things miserable for anyone new to a game just to show how much "better" they are than you. Frankly this kind of "We're leet!" attitude isn't healthy either for the community or Linux as a whole, and is more than a little crazy if you think about it. I mean wwhat are computers FOR anyway? why to do work and make your day EASIER and it has been that way since Visicalc! But sadly many in the community (and even some of the programmers) think that making things as obtuse and CLI heavy as possible is some kind of badge of honor that weeds out the "noobs" like turning people off of FOSS is a good thing. the community as a whole really needs to come down hard on those types and push that the ultimate goal is to make Linux as easy as possible so as many people as possible can use it freely.
I wish them luck, I really do, but my guess is if MSFT doesn't just offer them embedded they'll struggle for a year or two before coming back to Windows for the reasons I named above, just as we saw when other countries have tried to switch. this conversion will NOT be cheap, it will require a LOT of dedication, training, and having to learn new programs or even give up ways they are used to as no program can be found to do the job, and if they are ONLY doing this to count pennies? Then they are in for a shock. If you want to use Linux because it is FOSS, because you can customize it to your workload, because you are free to modify it to your needs? Then your conversion has a shot at succeeding. But to do it ONLY because of the bottom line is just asking to fail because ANY major software conversion IS gonna be costly, and there simply is no way around that.
Now you watch how quickly I get buried for daring to point out the problems logically and rationally with their plan. The same trolls that say "We're leet!" and teabag anybody that dares to ask for an easy solution get all butthurt if you dare to say anything other than "Gee isn't Linux perfect? Why it sure is Skip, and RMS' farts smells like roses and cure AGW!" which is exactly the kind of delusional mindset that often dooms attempts to switch.
Exactly, its the unsung heroes who really make us and shape our world. For me it would be the 7th grade tutor after my bike accident that saw that teaching me more than the basics when it came to English comp was pointless and that I did math better in my head than trying to force me to do it their way, the guy who invented the VIC chip that gave me my love of all things computing, my late uncle who was always getting me new tech that "fell off the back of a truck", the friend who had such a hard on for Hexen he sold me his less than a year old Pentium 100Mhz for $100 so he could blow a major wad on the latest and greatest, and of course my parents, my dad who didn't try to force me to be anything or anyone but the best person I could be, and my mom who instead of reading me Horton hears a Who was reading me greatest Sci Fi writers of the 70s.
In the end there are a bazillion people who shape each and every one of us, a few that are famous but the majority never will be, they are just people that came into our lives, sometimes for a short while, that shaped the way we are. Maybe instead we should have an "Unsung Heroes of our lives" day instead?
Wow...nice. Instead of pointing out ways the guy could actually get enjoyment out of the game you and several others act like douches, real nice. Most likely that means the game is broken and is only usable if you dedicate 4-8 hours a day living in the thing, thanks for the tip.
And folks wonder why many of us old timers don't play online much anymore. When I was running with a clan on the Mechwarrior series we actually LIKED when new blood came in, and not as target practice either. they would ALWAYS want to go for an ultra heavy which of course would get them killed, so we would tell them to start with the lights and work as a scout/harasser with a team until they got their skill level up. This would let them feel they were actually accomplishing something as it taught them the needed skills they could use later on a missileboat or heavy assault.
But now games with any real difficulty or challenge seem to be about who can be the biggest teabagging douchebag asshole. No help for the noobs, NO trying to build the base, just an excuse to be the biggest cockhead you can possibly be, nice. But don't be surprised if the fanbase drops like a fucking stone before the game even makes it to bargain bin because "Call of Warfare Major Douchebag Edition" has been released and you find it isn't as fun being a giant prick with nobody to see you act like an asshole.
It is guys like YOU sir that make it quite easy for the game companies to kill dedicated servers and flip the switch on games the second a new one is released so they can maximize profits because guys like YOU make sure nobody but the most hard of hardcore ever play the thing and they have moved on long before the game gets any real legs. bravo, good job, I'm sure the corps love you (and your money) for it.
What should convince everyone that critics are useless shills is that with the exception of a couple of games that were soooooooo horrible that nobody had the guts to shill for them (Kane and lynch series being the last example) they nearly always give an 80%+ score, no matter how shitty. I saw several 80 and 85% scores for TP: Fall of Liberty when it came out and that game was unplayable. I'm sure if you looked hard I bet you could find even one or two reviewers that took the cash and said Kane and Lynch was good.
Me I suggest waiting a week or two and then looking at the Amazon reviews done by ordinary folks, not the ones that have reviewer a bazillion things. the ordinary folks are usually brutal when it comes to game reviews and will point out the shitty REAL quick. They also point out all the nasty little DRM shittiness that some of us may not have heard of, like I didn't know Bioshock II had limited activations until I went there which convinced me to wait until it was in a $5 sale on Steam. Oh and if their new service means I can't buy it on Amazon? Then I wouldn't buy it PERIOD. I have seen too many of these game companies whitewash their forums and keep anything bad said about the game buried, no thanks. I want honest reviews from honest folks, not game shills or astroturfers
Hey now, we don't cotton hurting the fat girls, hell somebody has to do the cooking, right? Its always the chubby girl that can take just about any meat and make a kick ass stew or meat pie, so don't worry ladies, we'll make room for ya!
Seriously though, reading about city boys thinking they can come on down into the hills and actually kick ass is pretty dang funny, we country boys have grown up with rifles and most of our families are armed to the teeth, then you add in we know the lay of the land and many are Vietnam vets that learned a thing or two from Charlie? yeah we'd have us a great time picking any valuables from their corpses.
And claiming it would be a dustbowl just shows they don't know their history, the dust bowls were created by large farms doing strip farming whereas the hillbilly small crop farms did just fine, not to mention the delta has been tropical for centuries and I doubt seriously that'll change anytime soon, if anything global warming would just bring MORE rain from the Gulf and make it even more of a steamy jungle. Majorly sweaty but plants love it.
Don't know about the midwest but I'd say the southern folks would do just fine, plenty of good land, timber, national guard to get extra ammo from (most of which is run by relatives so it ain't like you'd even have to steal anything, just ask Uncle Fred for a canister or two) and the huge tropical storms would be quite easy to capture drinking water from. Yeah the city boys would make great sport for the hunters and give us plenty of extra women, that's be it.
Forget the whole computer, just a nice fat light pipe between the CPU and RAM, maybe a second between the PCIe and CPU but but great, thanks loads. Nowadays it seems like no matter how much RAM you stuff keeping the CPU and GPU fed ends up being the problem. SSDs for the OS can kill a lot of the HDD problem but in the end it all comes down to feeding the chips and a nice light pipe between the chips and RAM would probably make today's PCs feel like a 386 trying to run Win98.
Exactly. What this will be good for is third world applications like information kiosks and schools, basically allowing anyone anywhere to be able to do basics like web browsing, document creation etc and I'm sure being Linux based it won't be long before plenty of educational apps are ported to it.
While most of us in the west probably wouldn't care for surfing on this thing (hell the hand me downs i gave to my nephews were dual core Pentiums with 2Gb of RAM) we have to remember that our own computer revolution started with computers like the VIC 20, which this thing is a supercomputer by comparison. I bet its incredibly miserly when it comes to power consumption as well, which will be a boon in places where power isn't guaranteed 24/7.
That is what has always worried me about science since the birth of the bomb. it seems that always science seems to be doing something because they CAN but nobody stops for even a second and asks if they SHOULD or what the ramifications of the technology will be.
Everyone seems to forget with every great invention has come terrible cost, and not just the bomb with the study of the atom. as we saw with oil you have not only the ability to tend great farms and improve food to market but you have pollution and horrible wars, hell it could be argued that for all Hitler's talk of living space both Germany and Japan were fighting for oil. The microchip gave us the ability to come up with new areas of science and to do work that would have taken mathematics by hand centuries to be calculated in moments, but also gave us the ability to kill someone from halfway around the world just by pressing a button.
Not a Luddite, and not saying we shouldn't progress, but it would be nice if scientists and thinkers seemed to be looking at the big picture more than they are now and thinking about whether the tradeoffs will make life better or worse. As you have pointed out so many are lining up just to laugh at the guy at least some are really asking "What if it works, what are the implications?" because eventually someone WILL come up with a new power source, be it fusion or solar storage or something we haven't even thought up yet and it does bother me that these scientists seem to have Utopian dreams while completely ignoring the ugly reality.
And of course this doesn't even look at what would happen with game changing tech like this if it gets into the hands of the evil and sick. Imagine if this allows any nutball with a cause an easy way to make an EMP bomb or to overload the grid at will and fry large sections of infrastructure. I'm sure when the first research on the atom was conducted in the 30s nobody thought about a multi-stage fusion device that could spew toxins over hundreds of miles and kill millions, but that is what we ended up with. While this Rossi guy may be a pacifist sadly the world is not and it is truly scary to think about what the more evil and vicious members of our world would do with this much cheap power on demand.
Missing a little piece in your equation bud. When it comes to guns unless you are talking army on army it all comes down not to who has the biggest barrel, but who is the best shot and who is colder. We country folks have been shooting a hell of a lot longer than you city folks have, and we got plenty of cold as hell hillbillies up in them hills. Maybe if you'd have started that plan 20 or 30 years ago you'd be up to speed, but if poo hits the blade in 5 years? you'd be prey, sorry bud, that's just the way it goes. if it is my family or yours, i choose mine.
I bet you are running an Intel multicore. try it on an AMD single or low end dual core and watch how quickly you change your tune. Frankly i wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that Moz is using the Intel crippler compiler which completely cripples anything compiled on it with regards to AMD products. I have noticed that after the 3.6 branch FF performance has gone REALLY downhill with regards to AMD chips. When it runs better on a P4 than a brand new AMD multicore? yeah smells like the Intel compiler to me.
I have to support ALL makes and models of both Intel and AMD so having FF run like shit on half the CPUs really doesn't cut it. I have found browsers based on Chromium (currently using Dragon, but I've found this to be true with Chrome and Chromium as well) simply don't have this problem with AMD CPUs so again I bet Moz is using the crippler compiler.
That is why on first install I take my builds and refurbs over to Ninite and along with the usual (Klite, LibreOffice, irfanview) I install Sumatra PDF Reader. its fast, its lightweight, no extra BS, it just loads PDF VERY fast. And if you are in FF or Chromium based it'll just pop it up in a new tab, don't know about IE as I haven't used it for years.
But reading the comments it seems like those for having an internal PDF reader have basically been burnt by Adobe Reader but I'd say it'd be better to just ditch adobe for something that doesn't suck than to build in a reader and increase the risk. which BTW if it is still running with Firefox's higher permissions IS a risk. Does FF even support low rights mode yet? Its been nearly 5 years now and soon we'll be on the third version of Windows with low rights mode.