The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is sitting on billions, but only spends 3% of their endowment in a given year. If you looked at actual dollars handed out in a given year, I wouldn't be shocked if Google (and Google.org) hands out more cash than the Gates Foundation.
Here is the real kicker. Google is giving away their own money. The Gates Foundation has been asking others to give to them to hand out. The largest contributer to the Gates Foundation is Warren Buffet. The Gates are a very rich couple who want to steward other people's money, because their own isn't good enough.
There have been many well-researched in-depth pieces that suggest The Gates Foundation is doing more harm than good right now. When The Gates Foundation was pressed about it, they said they can't be bothered to research the firms they invest it.
Wait. They want to serve as stewards for BILLIONS of dollars, but can't be bothered to research where the money goes. Do they understand what it means to steward over money?
I don't say this as a conspiracy theorist, or someone who just wants to hate Bill Gates. But there are people who've linked Gates Foundation investments to Microsoft contracts and strong-armed deals. They're investing in firms that exploit poor workers in Africa, and pollute with heavy carcinogens in Africa.
Is it good that The Gates Foundation wants to send drugs and vaccinations to Africa? Yes. But note that they're doing so as they invest in those drug companies, and the same drug companies reciprocate with Microsoft-exclusive contracts. And many of those drug companies are being hit with ethics charges.
The LA Times ran piece after piece on this. Until it is clear that The Gates Foundation is doing more good than harm, I'm not sure we should be so quick to praise them, let alone donate money to them.
The velcro on my phone case came open. My phone dropped from hip-height (maybe 3 feet?). It landed on the back, and then flipped over. On the back I have a deep gouge, and on the front I have a bad scratch.
People keep insisting Apple cases are the best in the world and that you can't damage them. I just don't see it.
The day I bought my phone (3G S) the sales person in Best Buy was trying to sell me an extended warranty. They were telling me how they covered everything under the sun and I should just buy it.
Right next to me, someone was bringing in a broken 3G and trying to get a 3G S warranty replacement and they told him to go screw himself, and that the warranty didn't really cover much of anything at all.
I turned to the sales person, pointed to the conversation right next to me, and said "that's why I'm not buying the warranty. I know you're full of shit."
Do people lie to abuse the system? Sure. Do they lie when selling the warranties? Yes.
Experience is key. The issue is that new applicants coming out school have more experience with.NET, Java and they key technologies that many industries are looking for today. The fact that you have 30 years of COBOL experience doesn't help you if you don't learn new technologies.
They aren't Gnome-centric, but KMyMoney and Skrooge and both very promising programs suitable for personal finance, or business finance.
They both import Quickbooks data.
You can also use Quickbooks via the web these days.
I think the issue for many people in the business world is integration with existing Window systems, and/or importing data from those systems.
Can you interact well with an Exchange server? Can you import a.PST file?
Novell seems to be pushing the innovation in Mono development (being able to move over your.NET apps, which are huge in the enterprise world), OpenXchange support, OOXML support in OpenOffice, etc. Novell also seems to be spearheading the Samba4 work. Why can't we replace a Windows DC with a Linux DC and integrate nicely into the existing Windows domain structure? Why can't a Linux DC work as a backup to a Windows DC? Why can't you manage AD from a Linux client?
We berate Microsoft for a lack of interoperability. It is hard convincing a shop to switch from 100% Microsoft to 100% non-Microsoft. You need to be able to sell a smooth transition and migration, which often means interoperability.
This is perhaps the largest block to wider Linux adoption. Shouldn't this be a core focus? I'd like to see better migration tools.
I think the only non-Debian friendly aspect of the LSB is rpm support. Yet any Debian based distros can support.rpm packages and.deb packages side-by-side.
If we're updating LSB, why not add in provisions that consider source-based distros?
WebGL and fast internet connections may be the future.
Game publishers hate piracy and second-hand game sales. What if the only way to play a game is to subscribe to it, and have a connection to the internet?
If we all have 1000 Mbs internet and browser with WebGL support, why ship a physical disc for a game, or even allow offline play?9
The nice thing is that WebGL might make the future of gaming platform agnostic.
Twice they got slapped for something like half a billion dollars each time.
No corporation on the planet, including Microsoft, is comfortable just handing over a billion dollars in fines.
The EU can do worse than levy fines. They can demand that Microsoft stop selling their products in the EU and completely block Microsoft.
The EU is making Microsoft play nice. And in case you missed it, Microsoft is content to jump through those hoops. Microsoft has released tons of technical documentation on their protocols and standards to outside developers. They've worked hand-in-hand with the Mono and Moonlight teams. They're opening up the PST file format.
Microsoft is aimed at making a profit. That will never change. And they want to dominate every market they are in. But they are far more open than they have ever been in their history, because the EU demands it.
If Microsoft tried to sue anyone who used Mono, the EU would drop the hammer on Microsoft again.
Mozilla also requires that remove trademarks with any non-official build.
Does that mean Mozilla isn't trying to make the world a better place?
CentOS exists as a Red Hat fork, and Red Hat has never fought it.
I don't think you understand trademarks. A trademark is only valid if you fight to protect it. If you allow others to reuse your trademark however, then you can't enforce it when you want to. Novell and Red Hat are pretty much required to try and defend their trademark, just as Mozilla defends their trademarks.
I wouldn't be shocked if Ubuntu started doing the same thing. For instance, the Ubuntu forks (like Mint) don't include Ubuntu trademarks.
Porting from one framework to another means a hefty rewrite regardless. It isn't one Gnome can entirely ignore moving forward. They're trying to mitigate it, but not really addressing the shortcomings in GTK currently. The initial switch to GTK 3 will be mainly deprecating some features of GTK 2, but many people are calling for a much more radical rewrite of GTK at some point.
There is a lot of development in Gnome land that is moving to Mono and C# anyway. So it isn't like they are firmly determined to remain with C forever.
I've gotten the KDE kwin compiz-like effects running on pretty old hardware with only 32MB of video ram. It all depends on the video driver.
The issue with some people is that Qt 4.x exposed some areas (especially with Nvidia video drivers) where they had really poor performance. Oddly enough, most of these issues were 2D painting issues exposed with a compiz-like framework.
I don't think I've ever had kwin crash on me once in the KDE 4.x series, which I've used for over two years. But again, going back to my original point, Ubuntu seems to be out some really terrible KDE packages. If you experienced heavy instability, I wonder if you were using a Ubuntu package.
Part of what I like about KDE is how fast it is, even on old hardware. The Qt painting issues with certain video drivers is unfortunate, but one that needs to be largely fixed at the driver level.
These are all US prices. Europe often has vastly cheaper plans.
I worked at a Radio Shack right out of high school. Selling cell phones was a big focus there. We sold Sprint and Altel primarily. There were $19.99 a month plans with something ridiculous like 60 minutes a month. We sold them to older customers primarily who just wanted a cell phone for emergencies, but didn't plan to use it.
Then we had plans starting at $29.99 a month for 200 minutes.
I've never been in a bottom-tier plan myself. It seems like most networks start people at $34.99 these days for basic plans. If you have a smart phone or a family plan, then pricing is a going to be a bit different.
Given that I can readily find $35 plans right now on the web, I stand by my statement that people are moving from the $30-$40 range to the $100 unlimited range.
I think Ubuntu is actively hurting the KDE community by giving it a bad name.
When Canonical works on new features for each Ubuntu release, they work indepdently of the Kubuntu team. Kubuntu is constantly trying to play catch-up on base issues.
Even worse, they put out unstable, buggy, and sometimes flat-out broken KDE packages. Almost every I've talked to that has had really bad experiences with KDE complain about bugs and constant crashes they had when testing KDE packages from Ubuntu.
Read KDE forums, mailing lists, etc. You'll see some serious hate and vitrol from users who blame KDE devs, not realizing that the same packages on other distros work just fine. They don't realize it is their distro that is causing their problems.
I've seen several KDE devs walk away and stop contributing because of all the hate their getting. If Ubuntu wasn't putting out broken packages, it would remove a lot of this backlash.
That is not to say that 100% of KDE backlast is Ubuntu-created. Some people just don't like KDE 4.x. I didn't like the 4.0 release, and was pretty worried about the future direction of KDE at the time. But Ubuntu certainly hasn't done KDE any favors the past two years with the packages they've put out.
I do think that Qt is a better framework to build upon, but I think there is room for the Gnome desktop.
They have different goals and philosophies. I think KDE 4.4 right now is a far more advanced desktop than Gnome 2.x, but the work on Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell shows that they do have an eye towards the future.
However, given that even many diehard GTK developers seem to have serious issues with GTK, and there is some dissent over how to proceed with GTK 3 in the future, why not at least consider a future Gnome built upon Qt?
It would make it far easier to apps to fit in naturally with both Gnome and KDE desktops. Qt ships with a Clearlooks engine out of the box. You could build a Gnome desktop on top of Qt that has the design and appearance Gnome developers strive for, with better portability and better performance.
If such a huge migration were ever going to happen or work, Ubuntu would have to spearhead it.
More and more people are purchasing data plans. And it sure seems like every major network is pushing to move as many users to an unlimited plan as possible. Where many people used to have service in the $30-$40 range, more and more people seem to be paying closer to $100 (pre-tax) for cell service.
Why complain about people using data when data plans are so profitable? And does it matter if they're not using minutes if they pay for an unlimited plan anyway?
Mono is integrating into more and more Gnome apps. Given that Ubuntu is based upon Gnome, either they must start forking these Gnome apps, or embrace Mono themselves.
I understand the initial concern with Mono, but I'm not paranoid about patent lawsuits.
I don't know that Microsoft can really sue over Mono given that Microsoft has worked with the Mono team and largely given their blessing to the project. The EU has also demanded they work on interoperability. If Microsoft tried to sue over Mono patent-infringement, the EU can just drop the hammer on Microsoft again. Does MS really want that?
The last few Ubuntu releases have been plagued with bugs on release. Do you support steady releases every six months, and what can Ubuntu to do improve from a quality perspective?
Even as Ubuntu soars in popularity, we see forks of Ubuntu (such as Mint) pop up. Do you feel that distro fragmentation detracts from acceptance and adoption?
You often praise proprietary, closed-source products on your blog (especially products from Apple and IBM). What is your stance on mixing proprietary and open products?
In the 21st century, why is it that we still don't have a simple, user-friendly tool to help both home and enterprise users to migrate their existing documents and settings while performing a Linux install?
Shuttleworth is still funding Canonical. At some point however, this needs to turn into a protibable vendure to endure. How does Canonical create lasting revenue streams, and will those decisions come at the cost of usability and freedom in the distro, such as the recent decision to use Yahoo search (powered by Bing) as the default)?
Will Ubuntu continue to treat KDE as a second-class citizen?
I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrude people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is sitting on billions, but only spends 3% of their endowment in a given year. If you looked at actual dollars handed out in a given year, I wouldn't be shocked if Google (and Google.org) hands out more cash than the Gates Foundation.
Here is the real kicker. Google is giving away their own money. The Gates Foundation has been asking others to give to them to hand out. The largest contributer to the Gates Foundation is Warren Buffet. The Gates are a very rich couple who want to steward other people's money, because their own isn't good enough.
There have been many well-researched in-depth pieces that suggest The Gates Foundation is doing more harm than good right now. When The Gates Foundation was pressed about it, they said they can't be bothered to research the firms they invest it.
Wait. They want to serve as stewards for BILLIONS of dollars, but can't be bothered to research where the money goes. Do they understand what it means to steward over money?
I don't say this as a conspiracy theorist, or someone who just wants to hate Bill Gates. But there are people who've linked Gates Foundation investments to Microsoft contracts and strong-armed deals. They're investing in firms that exploit poor workers in Africa, and pollute with heavy carcinogens in Africa.
Is it good that The Gates Foundation wants to send drugs and vaccinations to Africa? Yes. But note that they're doing so as they invest in those drug companies, and the same drug companies reciprocate with Microsoft-exclusive contracts. And many of those drug companies are being hit with ethics charges.
The LA Times ran piece after piece on this. Until it is clear that The Gates Foundation is doing more good than harm, I'm not sure we should be so quick to praise them, let alone donate money to them.
The velcro on my phone case came open. My phone dropped from hip-height (maybe 3 feet?). It landed on the back, and then flipped over. On the back I have a deep gouge, and on the front I have a bad scratch.
People keep insisting Apple cases are the best in the world and that you can't damage them. I just don't see it.
The day I bought my phone (3G S) the sales person in Best Buy was trying to sell me an extended warranty. They were telling me how they covered everything under the sun and I should just buy it.
Right next to me, someone was bringing in a broken 3G and trying to get a 3G S warranty replacement and they told him to go screw himself, and that the warranty didn't really cover much of anything at all.
I turned to the sales person, pointed to the conversation right next to me, and said "that's why I'm not buying the warranty. I know you're full of shit."
Do people lie to abuse the system? Sure. Do they lie when selling the warranties? Yes.
Experience is key. The issue is that new applicants coming out school have more experience with .NET, Java and they key technologies that many industries are looking for today. The fact that you have 30 years of COBOL experience doesn't help you if you don't learn new technologies.
They aren't Gnome-centric, but KMyMoney and Skrooge and both very promising programs suitable for personal finance, or business finance.
They both import Quickbooks data.
You can also use Quickbooks via the web these days.
I think the issue for many people in the business world is integration with existing Window systems, and/or importing data from those systems.
Can you interact well with an Exchange server? Can you import a .PST file?
Novell seems to be pushing the innovation in Mono development (being able to move over your .NET apps, which are huge in the enterprise world), OpenXchange support, OOXML support in OpenOffice, etc. Novell also seems to be spearheading the Samba4 work. Why can't we replace a Windows DC with a Linux DC and integrate nicely into the existing Windows domain structure? Why can't a Linux DC work as a backup to a Windows DC? Why can't you manage AD from a Linux client?
We berate Microsoft for a lack of interoperability. It is hard convincing a shop to switch from 100% Microsoft to 100% non-Microsoft. You need to be able to sell a smooth transition and migration, which often means interoperability.
This is perhaps the largest block to wider Linux adoption. Shouldn't this be a core focus?
I'd like to see better migration tools.
I think the only non-Debian friendly aspect of the LSB is rpm support. Yet any Debian based distros can support .rpm packages and .deb packages side-by-side.
If we're updating LSB, why not add in provisions that consider source-based distros?
Use a cross-platform audio framework like Phonon. You write two lines of code to play audio, and it works on every platform.
WebGL and fast internet connections may be the future.
Game publishers hate piracy and second-hand game sales. What if the only way to play a game is to subscribe to it, and have a connection to the internet?
If we all have 1000 Mbs internet and browser with WebGL support, why ship a physical disc for a game, or even allow offline play?9
The nice thing is that WebGL might make the future of gaming platform agnostic.
Twice they got slapped for something like half a billion dollars each time.
No corporation on the planet, including Microsoft, is comfortable just handing over a billion dollars in fines.
The EU can do worse than levy fines. They can demand that Microsoft stop selling their products in the EU and completely block Microsoft.
The EU is making Microsoft play nice. And in case you missed it, Microsoft is content to jump through those hoops. Microsoft has released tons of technical documentation on their protocols and standards to outside developers. They've worked hand-in-hand with the Mono and Moonlight teams. They're opening up the PST file format.
Microsoft is aimed at making a profit. That will never change. And they want to dominate every market they are in. But they are far more open than they have ever been in their history, because the EU demands it.
If Microsoft tried to sue anyone who used Mono, the EU would drop the hammer on Microsoft again.
Mozilla also requires that remove trademarks with any non-official build.
Does that mean Mozilla isn't trying to make the world a better place?
CentOS exists as a Red Hat fork, and Red Hat has never fought it.
I don't think you understand trademarks. A trademark is only valid if you fight to protect it. If you allow others to reuse your trademark however, then you can't enforce it when you want to. Novell and Red Hat are pretty much required to try and defend their trademark, just as Mozilla defends their trademarks.
I wouldn't be shocked if Ubuntu started doing the same thing. For instance, the Ubuntu forks (like Mint) don't include Ubuntu trademarks.
Porting from one framework to another means a hefty rewrite regardless. It isn't one Gnome can entirely ignore moving forward. They're trying to mitigate it, but not really addressing the shortcomings in GTK currently. The initial switch to GTK 3 will be mainly deprecating some features of GTK 2, but many people are calling for a much more radical rewrite of GTK at some point.
There is a lot of development in Gnome land that is moving to Mono and C# anyway. So it isn't like they are firmly determined to remain with C forever.
I've gotten the KDE kwin compiz-like effects running on pretty old hardware with only 32MB of video ram. It all depends on the video driver.
The issue with some people is that Qt 4.x exposed some areas (especially with Nvidia video drivers) where they had really poor performance. Oddly enough, most of these issues were 2D painting issues exposed with a compiz-like framework.
I don't think I've ever had kwin crash on me once in the KDE 4.x series, which I've used for over two years. But again, going back to my original point, Ubuntu seems to be out some really terrible KDE packages. If you experienced heavy instability, I wonder if you were using a Ubuntu package.
Part of what I like about KDE is how fast it is, even on old hardware. The Qt painting issues with certain video drivers is unfortunate, but one that needs to be largely fixed at the driver level.
These are all US prices. Europe often has vastly cheaper plans.
I worked at a Radio Shack right out of high school. Selling cell phones was a big focus there. We sold Sprint and Altel primarily. There were $19.99 a month plans with something ridiculous like 60 minutes a month. We sold them to older customers primarily who just wanted a cell phone for emergencies, but didn't plan to use it.
Then we had plans starting at $29.99 a month for 200 minutes.
I've never been in a bottom-tier plan myself. It seems like most networks start people at $34.99 these days for basic plans. If you have a smart phone or a family plan, then pricing is a going to be a bit different.
Given that I can readily find $35 plans right now on the web, I stand by my statement that people are moving from the $30-$40 range to the $100 unlimited range.
I believe Qt supports flipping them as you wish now.
I think Ubuntu is actively hurting the KDE community by giving it a bad name.
When Canonical works on new features for each Ubuntu release, they work indepdently of the Kubuntu team. Kubuntu is constantly trying to play catch-up on base issues.
Even worse, they put out unstable, buggy, and sometimes flat-out broken KDE packages. Almost every I've talked to that has had really bad experiences with KDE complain about bugs and constant crashes they had when testing KDE packages from Ubuntu.
Read KDE forums, mailing lists, etc. You'll see some serious hate and vitrol from users who blame KDE devs, not realizing that the same packages on other distros work just fine. They don't realize it is their distro that is causing their problems.
I've seen several KDE devs walk away and stop contributing because of all the hate their getting. If Ubuntu wasn't putting out broken packages, it would remove a lot of this backlash.
That is not to say that 100% of KDE backlast is Ubuntu-created. Some people just don't like KDE 4.x. I didn't like the 4.0 release, and was pretty worried about the future direction of KDE at the time. But Ubuntu certainly hasn't done KDE any favors the past two years with the packages they've put out.
I do think that Qt is a better framework to build upon, but I think there is room for the Gnome desktop.
They have different goals and philosophies. I think KDE 4.4 right now is a far more advanced desktop than Gnome 2.x, but the work on Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell shows that they do have an eye towards the future.
However, given that even many diehard GTK developers seem to have serious issues with GTK, and there is some dissent over how to proceed with GTK 3 in the future, why not at least consider a future Gnome built upon Qt?
It would make it far easier to apps to fit in naturally with both Gnome and KDE desktops. Qt ships with a Clearlooks engine out of the box. You could build a Gnome desktop on top of Qt that has the design and appearance Gnome developers strive for, with better portability and better performance.
If such a huge migration were ever going to happen or work, Ubuntu would have to spearhead it.
I have always said part of the appeal of Ubuntu is that they have so many packages.
I also think that is a mark against Ubuntu because I don't think they have the staff to properly test all those packages, hence the buggy releases.
If you have projects like Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and the new Lubuntu, you need to either properly support them, or drop them.
More and more people are purchasing data plans. And it sure seems like every major network is pushing to move as many users to an unlimited plan as possible. Where many people used to have service in the $30-$40 range, more and more people seem to be paying closer to $100 (pre-tax) for cell service.
Why complain about people using data when data plans are so profitable? And does it matter if they're not using minutes if they pay for an unlimited plan anyway?
Mono is integrating into more and more Gnome apps. Given that Ubuntu is based upon Gnome, either they must start forking these Gnome apps, or embrace Mono themselves.
I understand the initial concern with Mono, but I'm not paranoid about patent lawsuits.
I don't know that Microsoft can really sue over Mono given that Microsoft has worked with the Mono team and largely given their blessing to the project. The EU has also demanded they work on interoperability. If Microsoft tried to sue over Mono patent-infringement, the EU can just drop the hammer on Microsoft again. Does MS really want that?
The last few Ubuntu releases have been plagued with bugs on release. Do you support steady releases every six months, and what can Ubuntu to do improve from a quality perspective?
Even as Ubuntu soars in popularity, we see forks of Ubuntu (such as Mint) pop up. Do you feel that distro fragmentation detracts from acceptance and adoption?
You often praise proprietary, closed-source products on your blog (especially products from Apple and IBM). What is your stance on mixing proprietary and open products?
In the 21st century, why is it that we still don't have a simple, user-friendly tool to help both home and enterprise users to migrate their existing documents and settings while performing a Linux install?
Shuttleworth is still funding Canonical. At some point however, this needs to turn into a protibable vendure to endure. How does Canonical create lasting revenue streams, and will those decisions come at the cost of usability and freedom in the distro, such as the recent decision to use Yahoo search (powered by Bing) as the default)?
Will Ubuntu continue to treat KDE as a second-class citizen?
I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrude people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?