What about long distance? Why do they still charge long distance rates in this day and age where you can access sites anywhere in the world via internet? They also these weird rules like if you're roaming in another city, and someone local calls you, you pay long distance. But, if you call them, you don't because you'd be calling the same area code. How can long distance be charged depending on who intiates the call, even though you're physically in the same location in both scenarios. In any event, cell plans in Canada suck and are expensive for nothing. I even have to pay an extra $5 dollars with Rogers to get call display, a feature I got with my first cell plan years ago for free.
Is this mp3 "problem" even a valid point? When I first tried to play an mp3 using Amarok, it went and downloaded the codec automatically, and I didn't need to futz with apt-get or anything. Also, my experience with windows is that every time I had a codec missing, the "automatic download" functionality of Windows Media Player wouldn't work. I always had to install XviD or DivX etc.
Lastly, what about playing DVDs? Will Windows Media Player play DVDs yet? Last time I tried on an XP box, I needed to use Media Player Classic or VLC. That's far from working "out of the box".
Man did you ever hit the nail on the head. I often wonder who writes these requirements. Do they want a super C++ coder or a jack-of-all-trades? You can't be a super-duper expert in 30 things... if you were, you certainly wouldn't work for $50k a year. Imagine the following add:
Job: Surgeon
Required Skills: Must have experience performing heart and liver transplants, as well as brain surgery and hip replacement. Breast augmentation experience a plus.
Salary: $50-75k
Seriously, why don't people get that just like in medicine, to be really good at something, you need to specialize.
I counter that with why not both? If I can have my data and my application available to me anywhere, why not?
Why not all 3?:) You can't work in offline mode if you run a thin-client. Furthermore, you're wasting the power of your own machine. I experienced the thin-client paradigm when I was a engineering student, and frankly, I thought it sucked. We had a powerful (for the day) Sun machine that would slow to a crawl when 30 users were running Netscape at the same time. I know you're going to say that today we have more powerful machines, but we also have more compute intensive applications. How powerful a machine would you need to run the equivalent of MS Office for an entire company?
The hybrid you suggest is probably right on. That's how it usually goes with things, anyways.
Maybe some sort of plugin architecture where functionality is downloaded/installed when you need it. Amarok has this functionality already, so a more advanced incarnation of plugins may be what we're headed for.
I would also point out that your original premise of 10 years may not be far enough away. I don't think that the web will change that drastically in that short a time. With all the time and money invested in the current web, it will be quite difficult to just erase it all and move on. Just look at how long Cobol has been around in banking. In a utopian vision of the future, maybe we'll all have tricorders like in Star Trek (the original thin client?), but in the meantime, I'll keep my rich client, thank you.
Everything you say makes sense, but if you want to think "outside the box", then why are you limiting yourself to a web browser? Why can't we have a suite of rich clients that interact through the internet via other protocols? A rich client doesn't mean you can't store preferences on a networked (Google?) drive. The important thing about the net is that it lets you share *data*. I prefer to access my *data* through a rich client because it's faster and not limited by available bandwidth; I can also use it offline.
Consider Amarok for example. Can you imagine implementing it as a web app? Why not store your music on a remote server somewhere and play it using the normal stand-alone Amarok app? Why does it have to be one or the other? I prefer to see a hybrid of the two models emerge, which makes use of the strengths of each.
So what you're saying is that the webpages will get slower and slower? What about the bandwidth that these pages will require? Since no 2 browsers are alike, you need to hack your pages to work with IE, Firefox and maybe Opera, thereby making development more expensive. If standard protocols and APIs are developed, then we shouldn't have to be tied to using a browser for interacting with a site, but could instead use whichever client is available. I think a good example is IMAP; you can access it via web interface or a rich mail client.
I really don't understand why everybody hates the "rich" client. Even though I prefer the Gmail interface to Yahoo or Hotmail, the responsiveness of my rich client (Kmail) makes using web-based clients painful. With the new dual and quad core machines, we have more processing power on our desktops than ever before. Why not use it?
We're sorry we got caught, we'll try not to get caught again.
Seriously though, I don't think that this is the first time that a corporation has tried to influence these kinds of decisions. Yeah it sucks, but this is how the business world works. "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" and all that.
I just saw on the news today the first iPhone in Canada. Some guy got a 'supersim' card that he had to stick into his phone. Using his desktop computer, he was able to unlock the phone in 30 minutes. He's now using his phone on the Rogers network. I found this supersim hack guide by doing a quick google search.
I realize that, what I meant was that in my experience, the updated gentoo packages usually appeared faster in portage when compared to Debian unstable. There are also some packages missing in Debian like KNetworkManager, which Kubuntu has. Admittedly, Gentoo is also missing that package in the official tree, but it's in one of the overlays.
as oposed to download, read the README, set up manually a bunch of stuff on the Makefile, find about several parameters|variables for the./configure script, build the stuff just to find it installed in/usr/local instead of/opt, and... you get the idea.
Are you implying that this is the case when using Gentoo? "emerge package" is all you need to do on Gentoo, similar to "apt-get install"
not to mention that some packaging systems allows you to revert any change made to the system.
Also keep in mind that while the package might exist in gentoo, you can't actually use it until you've compiled it, so you can't discount the compilation time just because you're doing it instead of the packager.
As I mentioned in another post, the overhead due to compiling is usually quite small and doesn't matter. The only time it makes a difference is for large packages like Xorg or KDE.
Debian unstable is very close to Gentoo
Well, yes and no. You can run a 90% stable Gentoo system and use only unstable packages for things like KDE and mplayer. I know you'll say you can use apt pinning to do the same thing, but it's not as easy to manage as per-package ~x86 flags.
Fair enough, but you should try running Debian unstable. You get the new software fast without the hassle of compiling. I have used it, and I found Gentoo to be more manageable. I'm not saying that Gentoo should be used in all situations, I'm merely trying to point out that a lot of negative criticism of Gentoo is unfounded. A lot of people use it because they like it; if it doesn't suit your needs, don't use it. Lastly, the help and support in the Gentoo forums and Wiki is unmatched by any distro, which is a big plus.
The speed of package maintainers updating their packages is going to be roughly the same in any distro
Not true. My experience has been that Gentoo updates their packages faster than all other distros I've used;
don't even try comparing Debian stable to Gentoo. The reason why Gentoo can release faster is because Portage basically just downloads the source from SourceForge and runs "./configure && make && make install", usually using the default install options of the package. Remember the term "RPM Hell"? This situation resulted because of people installing RPMs from all sorts of different sources. Q: Why were they doing this? A: The latest versions of packages were taking too long to appear in the RedHat repositories! This is precisely the reason I left RH and then tried Debian and Gentoo.
in other words: compiling the code yourself to get better performance is (in the best penn jillette style) BULLSHIT!!!
I'm not so sure about that. I was running a stock Debian kernel on an old Dell, and it was slow as hell. When I switched to a custom compiled kernel, I noticed a significant boost in performance. So I think making a blanket statement like yours is a little premature.
big companies loathe this kind of adventure with the code that runs their business. whith their asses on the line, they want someone to fix any mistake quickly and efficiently
I agree.
(and binary packages are waaaay quicker than compiling)
Not necessarily. What if the package that's broken hasn't been updated in the repository yet? You may wait days, weeks, or months for the fix to appear. This happend to me with ALSA on Kubuntu last month. On Gentoo, you can simply downgrade your broken packages and re-compile all the dependencies of that package. This doesn't take as long as most people who are not gentoo users claim. I'm not saying that Gentoo should be used in a corporate environment, just saying that some of the criticism source based distros get is a little exaggerated.
I've been a Gentoo and Debian user for about 5 years now, and using "emerge" or "apt-get" are both the same in terms of complexity. For me, the most useful thing about gentoo is slots, where I can have multiple versions of libraries and tools like GCC installed simultaneously on my machine without breaking anything. The whole argument about Gentoo taking days and days to compile is not really true. Most packages are quite small and compile quickly. Only KDE or Gnome really take a significant amount of time to install, but on a fast machine, you don't even notice when you're emerge processed has been niced.
Oh, and when you do a fresh Gentoo install, you can use the binary snapshot that comes on the install CD, so installing Gentoo from scratch takes no longer than any other distro.
they aren't paying the bulk of the taxes, the small guy is.
Your post reminded me of a PBS Frontline episode called Tax me if you can, which was quite interesting. As you said, corporations aren't paying their fare share of taxes, and the middle class is left paying the difference.
There's nothing wrong with open-source software that only runs on MS products. In fact, it's a step in the right direction. Consider that in the past, if you wanted some custom app on Windows or some custom VB macro for Excel, you had to buy it or pay some developer to create it. A free repository of open-source MS only apps can only benefit the Windows world the same was OSS helped *nix, and maybe drive down the cost of running a Windows only environment.
I base my opinions on the experiences I've had with the people around me. In my experience, most computer illiterate people like having icons on their desktop. Icon for the internet, email, IM etc. If you switch to Linux and put all those icons on the desktop, the switch *should* be rather painless. I've watched numerous times as family members have used my KDE desktop for the first time without skipping a beat. Although, I will concede that I haven't run into the "stupid and terrified" computer user you're referring to.
I'm not suggesting you swap out Linux and Monday morning everybody is surprised by a new KDE gui. I'm sure if you provide a tutorial or short demo, this would take care of a lot or potential problems. Also, I think that the 35 and under crowd is a lot more computer literate than the older generations. The current generation of kids has grown up with computers, so I think the switch would be a lot less painful for them.
So do I. I learned all that using MS Office. Guess what? I can do all that in Open Office too, and it didn't take me 2 years of "retraining" to figure it out. If you know your way around Word, you should be able to adapt to OpenOffice pretty quick.
And then there's training; how many job ads have you seen that say "Must know Linux and Star Office"?
I don't buy the training excuse. Anybody who is familiar with Windows should be able to sit down in front of KDE and figure things out in < 10 minutes. The GUI is what matters, the underlying OS is irrelevant. Same goes for Star/Open Office; anybody familiar with Word should be able to use them easily. The only reason to stick with Windows is if you have a need for an app that doesn't have an equivalent on Linux, or you're using all sorts of VB macros in your Office docs and can't switch.
Then again, lock-in affects home users too. People don't want to use different software at work and at home.
If the home users actually paid for all their software, I bet it wouldn't be hard to convince them to switch. Unfortunately, since Photoshop and other apps are "free", they don't care. If I owned my own business and had to pay out of my pocket for all this MS stuff, I can tell you that it would be pretty hard for you to convince me not to use Linux if the app wasn't mission critical (i.e. Windows + Word + IE != mission critical).
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What about long distance? Why do they still charge long distance rates in this day and age where you can access sites anywhere in the world via internet? They also these weird rules like if you're roaming in another city, and someone local calls you, you pay long distance. But, if you call them, you don't because you'd be calling the same area code. How can long distance be charged depending on who intiates the call, even though you're physically in the same location in both scenarios. In any event, cell plans in Canada suck and are expensive for nothing. I even have to pay an extra $5 dollars with Rogers to get call display, a feature I got with my first cell plan years ago for free.
7 Canadian dollars = 6.825273 U.S. dollars
Lastly, what about playing DVDs? Will Windows Media Player play DVDs yet? Last time I tried on an XP box, I needed to use Media Player Classic or VLC. That's far from working "out of the box".
Man did you ever hit the nail on the head. I often wonder who writes these requirements. Do they want a super C++ coder or a jack-of-all-trades? You can't be a super-duper expert in 30 things... if you were, you certainly wouldn't work for $50k a year. Imagine the following add:
Job: Surgeon
Required Skills: Must have experience performing heart and liver transplants, as well as brain surgery and hip replacement. Breast augmentation experience a plus.
Salary: $50-75k
Seriously, why don't people get that just like in medicine, to be really good at something, you need to specialize.
Why not all 3? :) You can't work in offline mode if you run a thin-client. Furthermore, you're wasting the power of your own machine. I experienced the thin-client paradigm when I was a engineering student, and frankly, I thought it sucked. We had a powerful (for the day) Sun machine that would slow to a crawl when 30 users were running Netscape at the same time. I know you're going to say that today we have more powerful machines, but we also have more compute intensive applications. How powerful a machine would you need to run the equivalent of MS Office for an entire company?
The hybrid you suggest is probably right on. That's how it usually goes with things, anyways.Maybe some sort of plugin architecture where functionality is downloaded/installed when you need it. Amarok has this functionality already, so a more advanced incarnation of plugins may be what we're headed for.
I would also point out that your original premise of 10 years may not be far enough away. I don't think that the web will change that drastically in that short a time. With all the time and money invested in the current web, it will be quite difficult to just erase it all and move on. Just look at how long Cobol has been around in banking. In a utopian vision of the future, maybe we'll all have tricorders like in Star Trek (the original thin client?), but in the meantime, I'll keep my rich client, thank you.
Everything you say makes sense, but if you want to think "outside the box", then why are you limiting yourself to a web browser? Why can't we have a suite of rich clients that interact through the internet via other protocols? A rich client doesn't mean you can't store preferences on a networked (Google?) drive. The important thing about the net is that it lets you share *data*. I prefer to access my *data* through a rich client because it's faster and not limited by available bandwidth; I can also use it offline.
Consider Amarok for example. Can you imagine implementing it as a web app? Why not store your music on a remote server somewhere and play it using the normal stand-alone Amarok app? Why does it have to be one or the other? I prefer to see a hybrid of the two models emerge, which makes use of the strengths of each.
So what you're saying is that the webpages will get slower and slower? What about the bandwidth that these pages will require? Since no 2 browsers are alike, you need to hack your pages to work with IE, Firefox and maybe Opera, thereby making development more expensive. If standard protocols and APIs are developed, then we shouldn't have to be tied to using a browser for interacting with a site, but could instead use whichever client is available. I think a good example is IMAP; you can access it via web interface or a rich mail client.
I really don't understand why everybody hates the "rich" client. Even though I prefer the Gmail interface to Yahoo or Hotmail, the responsiveness of my rich client (Kmail) makes using web-based clients painful. With the new dual and quad core machines, we have more processing power on our desktops than ever before. Why not use it?
I think you mean:
We're sorry we got caught, we'll try not to get caught again.Seriously though, I don't think that this is the first time that a corporation has tried to influence these kinds of decisions. Yeah it sucks, but this is how the business world works. "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" and all that.
I just saw on the news today the first iPhone in Canada. Some guy got a 'supersim' card that he had to stick into his phone. Using his desktop computer, he was able to unlock the phone in 30 minutes. He's now using his phone on the Rogers network. I found this supersim hack guide by doing a quick google search.
I guess I didn't find it because they used a different name... What's wrong with "knetworkmanager"?
I realize that, what I meant was that in my experience, the updated gentoo packages usually appeared faster in portage when compared to Debian unstable. There are also some packages missing in Debian like KNetworkManager, which Kubuntu has. Admittedly, Gentoo is also missing that package in the official tree, but it's in one of the overlays.
Are you implying that this is the case when using Gentoo? "emerge package" is all you need to do on Gentoo, similar to "apt-get install"
not to mention that some packaging systems allows you to revert any change made to the system.On Gentoo, "quickpkg somepackage" will do this.
As I mentioned in another post, the overhead due to compiling is usually quite small and doesn't matter. The only time it makes a difference is for large packages like Xorg or KDE.
Debian unstable is very close to GentooWell, yes and no. You can run a 90% stable Gentoo system and use only unstable packages for things like KDE and mplayer. I know you'll say you can use apt pinning to do the same thing, but it's not as easy to manage as per-package ~x86 flags.
Fair enough, but you should try running Debian unstable. You get the new software fast without the hassle of compiling. I have used it, and I found Gentoo to be more manageable. I'm not saying that Gentoo should be used in all situations, I'm merely trying to point out that a lot of negative criticism of Gentoo is unfounded. A lot of people use it because they like it; if it doesn't suit your needs, don't use it. Lastly, the help and support in the Gentoo forums and Wiki is unmatched by any distro, which is a big plus.Not true. My experience has been that Gentoo updates their packages faster than all other distros I've used; don't even try comparing Debian stable to Gentoo. The reason why Gentoo can release faster is because Portage basically just downloads the source from SourceForge and runs "./configure && make && make install", usually using the default install options of the package. Remember the term "RPM Hell"? This situation resulted because of people installing RPMs from all sorts of different sources. Q: Why were they doing this? A: The latest versions of packages were taking too long to appear in the RedHat repositories! This is precisely the reason I left RH and then tried Debian and Gentoo.
I'm not so sure about that. I was running a stock Debian kernel on an old Dell, and it was slow as hell. When I switched to a custom compiled kernel, I noticed a significant boost in performance. So I think making a blanket statement like yours is a little premature.
big companies loathe this kind of adventure with the code that runs their business. whith their asses on the line, they want someone to fix any mistake quickly and efficientlyI agree.
(and binary packages are waaaay quicker than compiling)Not necessarily. What if the package that's broken hasn't been updated in the repository yet? You may wait days, weeks, or months for the fix to appear. This happend to me with ALSA on Kubuntu last month. On Gentoo, you can simply downgrade your broken packages and re-compile all the dependencies of that package. This doesn't take as long as most people who are not gentoo users claim. I'm not saying that Gentoo should be used in a corporate environment, just saying that some of the criticism source based distros get is a little exaggerated.
I've been a Gentoo and Debian user for about 5 years now, and using "emerge" or "apt-get" are both the same in terms of complexity. For me, the most useful thing about gentoo is slots, where I can have multiple versions of libraries and tools like GCC installed simultaneously on my machine without breaking anything. The whole argument about Gentoo taking days and days to compile is not really true. Most packages are quite small and compile quickly. Only KDE or Gnome really take a significant amount of time to install, but on a fast machine, you don't even notice when you're emerge processed has been niced.
Oh, and when you do a fresh Gentoo install, you can use the binary snapshot that comes on the install CD, so installing Gentoo from scratch takes no longer than any other distro.
Your post reminded me of a PBS Frontline episode called Tax me if you can, which was quite interesting. As you said, corporations aren't paying their fare share of taxes, and the middle class is left paying the difference.
There's nothing wrong with open-source software that only runs on MS products. In fact, it's a step in the right direction. Consider that in the past, if you wanted some custom app on Windows or some custom VB macro for Excel, you had to buy it or pay some developer to create it. A free repository of open-source MS only apps can only benefit the Windows world the same was OSS helped *nix, and maybe drive down the cost of running a Windows only environment.
Not writing you off, but you have to admit that the current generation is far more computer literate than yours (or mine).
I base my opinions on the experiences I've had with the people around me. In my experience, most computer illiterate people like having icons on their desktop. Icon for the internet, email, IM etc. If you switch to Linux and put all those icons on the desktop, the switch *should* be rather painless. I've watched numerous times as family members have used my KDE desktop for the first time without skipping a beat. Although, I will concede that I haven't run into the "stupid and terrified" computer user you're referring to.
I'm not suggesting you swap out Linux and Monday morning everybody is surprised by a new KDE gui. I'm sure if you provide a tutorial or short demo, this would take care of a lot or potential problems. Also, I think that the 35 and under crowd is a lot more computer literate than the older generations. The current generation of kids has grown up with computers, so I think the switch would be a lot less painful for them.
So do I. I learned all that using MS Office. Guess what? I can do all that in Open Office too, and it didn't take me 2 years of "retraining" to figure it out. If you know your way around Word, you should be able to adapt to OpenOffice pretty quick.
You have a point, but this is getting to be less and less of a problem as time goes.
I run Linux and have Windows in a VM and dual boot as well. But I would not wish this on a regular user.It's funny you say that. I think VMWare is probably the best way to run Windows. You can use the same pristine image of Windows everytime you boot.
I don't buy the training excuse. Anybody who is familiar with Windows should be able to sit down in front of KDE and figure things out in < 10 minutes. The GUI is what matters, the underlying OS is irrelevant. Same goes for Star/Open Office; anybody familiar with Word should be able to use them easily. The only reason to stick with Windows is if you have a need for an app that doesn't have an equivalent on Linux, or you're using all sorts of VB macros in your Office docs and can't switch.
Then again, lock-in affects home users too. People don't want to use different software at work and at home.If the home users actually paid for all their software, I bet it wouldn't be hard to convince them to switch. Unfortunately, since Photoshop and other apps are "free", they don't care. If I owned my own business and had to pay out of my pocket for all this MS stuff, I can tell you that it would be pretty hard for you to convince me not to use Linux if the app wasn't mission critical (i.e. Windows + Word + IE != mission critical).