Mmm, I'd not say that OpenOffice.org is MEGA fast, especially the 32-bit Linux binaries from OpenOffice.org's site. However, it is pretty snappy if you endure the multi-hour build time and compile it yourself, especially if you have a 64-bit machine. There's quite the speed difference there, especially when working with large data sets in Calc. Startup times are not an issue if you have 384 MB or more of RAM and use the Quickstarter.
The university not using something as a "profit center" is like telling a government official not to take campaign contributions. Everywhere you look there are things done just to soak students- $130 textbooks, mandatory fees for the health center, library, rec center regardless if you set foot in them, exorbitant parking fees to park about 5 miles off campus and then a huge fine if you park in a spot 1 nanosecond before it's allowed, mandatory printer quota deductions regardless if you want it or not, hundreds of dollars in student fees to support all manner of "important" things like expensive "festivals" and "celebrations" that almost nobody goes to, etc. ad nauseum.
It's a real racket and frankly, I'm surprised that they haven't been metering Internet bandwidth all along.
Thanks for the correction. I'd briefly used other kinds of UNIX machines and almost all of the commands I'd used were identical to Linux, so I though this would be to.I guess not.
There is a more open way of imaging CDs. For this, I assume that the CD-ROM drive is IDE channel 1 master. You'll either need a UNIX-type machine or "dd" from the UNIX Utilities for Windows on Sourceforge.net.
1. Insert CD to be imaged into the CD drive. 2. Type in dd if=/dev/hda of=/home/yourname/name_of_cd.iso 3. Move the.iso from your home folder to whatever subdirectory you want.
To read the image on a UNIX machine:
mkdir/mount mount -t iso9660/home/yourname/name_of_cd.iso/mount
and then the contents of the CD will be visible at/mount. If you want to rip it, point the CD ripping app at/mount.
If you have a Windows machine, I believe there is a Windows Power Toy that will allow you to mount.iso images and then you can point your CD ripper at the mount point.
It depends. I run Linux on my old laptop and my desktop. I built my own desktop as that's pretty easy to do- parts are standard, inexpensive and easily sourced. Not to mention it's less expensive to do a decent build on your own than to buy. That and I wanted an Athlon 64 X2 and most OEMs just had the Pentium Ds and charged a ton for them over the single-core Prescotts. Cheap builds are another story as the OEMs get REALLY low-end stuff in bulk for dirt cheap; you'll never beat them dollar-for-dollar. However, I'd bought my Gateway laptop in 2002. There was simply no other option than to buy from an OEM at that time- even now, barebones are still very uncommon. The old Gateway runs Linux pretty well and there's nothing in it that's not well-supported by about every 2.6 kernel distro out there and some of the later 2.4 ones too.
I do get poked fun at a little for hauling the big old Gateway around, mostly because it's 5 years old and looks it. It's chunky, a little bit worn, has parallel and serial ports, and isn't widescreen. I do have to admit that most of the people poking fun at me are either Mac or Sony fanboys and fangirls with brand-new laptops. At least MY laptop isn't at risk of blowing up...
Actually, software is generally more expensive than books, especially the less-expensive custom-published-on-campus spiral-bound stuff that my department (thankfully) likes to use. Those are roughly $20-30 while a soft-bound textbook tends to be $80-100 and a hard-bound text is $100-120. All proprietary software I've seen is >$100, with a median price of about $150. MATLAB is $104 at my school, Mathematica is $150, and AutoCAD was a whopping $250. People bitch and gripe about textbook prices, so it's no wonder that they get cracked software. It's so darned expensive- cuts into the beer money.
There are some high-dollar proprietary applications used in my classes, particularly MATLAB, Mathematica, Visual Studio, and SAS/SPSS. Usually one can get away with using any program that accomplishes the function, such as using GNU Octave and R instead of MATLAB and SAS/SPSS and a text editor + GCC in place of Visual Studio (we did basic terminal/CLI apps, not GUI ones.) The instructors would even generally point out that there were free, legal programs like Octave, R, and GCC available for people who did not want to pay for the proprietary stuff at the bookstore. They also admonished people that illegally downloaded software. So what happened in my classes? Out of 20 people, 3 or 4 would buy the proprietary program, one would use the open-source equivalent (me), 15 would download a crack, and the rest would just go to the computer labs and use the program there (that is, if the license didn't expire like our department's MATLAB license did.)
I occasionally asked the people who used the cracks why they did so. The most common responses were something like "I'm going to screw The System by using this expensive app for free and I'm not supposed to" or they were digital kleptomaniacs of sorts. They would illegally download stuff just because they could- they are the guys with 100 GB of MP3s that they never really listen to but still brag about. Open-source software provides neither of those, so it was not all that common. You can't steal something that's given away. A couple of people commented that there are occasionally small compatibility problems with other programs opening up the work that people turned in last semester so that they could change a few things and then turn it back in as theirs.
Percentage of machines with MacOS installed: 15.25%
Percentage of machines with Windows installed: 81.62%
Percentage of machines with Linux installed: 5.44%
Percentage of machines with ONLY MacOS installed: 14.99%
Percentage of machines with ONLY Linux installed: 2.05%>br>
Percentage of machines with ONLY Windows installed: 79.30%
If you look at the distribution of machines in the different labs as seen here you'll notice that there are only two sites without any Windows computers- A&S #41, which is filled with Macintosh G5s and then Neff Hall, which is in the Macintosh-heavy journalism school. Every other site has at least some Windows computers, even in the CS department where almost all classes use Linux. (The students not in the one classroom full of Linux machines SSH into the local file server which uses Linux using a terminal client.) In the labs that have the dual-boot machines, I rarely if ever see anybody boot them into Linux except for a biochemistry class that uses SYBYL, which only runs on x86 Linux or SGI IRIX.
There are a few other non-IATS labs that are not included in these tallies. My academic building happens to have two of these. One is the student lab for the building and consists of 32 Windows-only machines. The other lab is a 10-computer Linux lab that a professor of mine put together himself for use in his classes. There are a few Macintosh machines sitting around in the biology building as the entire department is Mac-only. But then there are also a boatload of departmental labs that only use Windows, like mine did, too, so I think the official stats are indicative of the population as a whole.
And as far as student computer use...there was a survey done by Residential Life of freshman dorm dwellers (can't find the link, sorry.) It stated that Mac laptops were about 20% of the total computers on the network and about 65% were Windows laptops. There were a few Windows desktops and 3 Mac desktops. No mention of Linux as it's not supported by IATS and thus not "supposed" to be used, but IATS does not seem to care much. I was the only person on my floor who'd even heard of Linux my freshman year and I'd just started to dabble in it at that point- had a dial-up line at home, you know. So we're an Apple and Windows campus, that's for sure.
Last time I checked, shooting somebody with a gun was already illegal. So is stabbing somebody with a kitchen knife, hitting them in the face with a crowbar, running them over with a truck, or locking them in a tape safe. And all of those acts are illegal too. Your argument that guns should be banned because they can be dangerous is misused* holds true for just about everything. Should we then ban electricity because somebody could electrocute you? Or how about toilets and water because somebody could drown you in a toilet bowl? Or ban iPods because somebody could strangle you with with the headphone cord? You'll say, "that's absurd!" but no, that's EXACTLY your argument.
*Guns are not dangerous to law-abiding people when used for their intended uses in a proper manner by a responsible gun owner: hunting, target shooting, and self-defense. Responsible shooters and hunters make sure of their backdrop when firing a shot to ensure that the projectile travels in a safe direction, away from people, livestock, and property. That's the law. And all responsible gun owners keep their weapons locked up and unloaded during storage. That is also a law. The only people who get hurt while around guns are using them in an illegal and unsafe manner OR are violating the safety of the gun owner by threatening them with severe injury or death and get shot by the owner in self-defense.
I will admit that this isn't really all that great of an experiment nor was the sample size very big, but in one of my classes, everybody had to use Fedora Core in a computer lab to run a program called Octave to do some mathematical work. (This was a professor's semi-official lab, NOT a university IT lab. IATS' 15 dual-boot and 5 dedicated Linux computers run RHEL 4.) Almost all of my classmates regularly use Windows but could accomplish basic tasks in Linux with either KDE or Gnome pretty quickly as long as the programs have entries in the main menus like is done in Windows. They seemed to take to KDE a little nicer than GNOME as the K Menu was at the same place as the "Start" menu, but it wasn't hard for them to see that the top bar with "Applications" was the same thing in GNOME. They all started programs by picking the icons from the programs menus rather than hitting Alt+F2 for the "Run" dialog like most Linux users do, but they got along just fine. OpenOffice.org is not very different from MS Office 97-2003, Konqueror is very similar to Windows Explorer, and Firefox is...well, Firefox. It wasn't that different from running Windows, and the prevalent comment is that Linux (they meant KDE or GNOME) was easier to try to use than OS X was.
You're going to tell IT to spend their time trying to get unauthorized and unsupported hardware to work on the corporate network? Riiiight. You'll be lucky if all they do is tell you to put it away lest you get fired for unauthorized network use. And if you get fired for that, every future employer will see that and think that you're a horrible liability as "unauthorized network use" generally means that you've been caught surfing the Net all day, downloading porn or illegal music/programs, or trying to steal company data.
Is all that worth it just to use a Mac at work? I don't think so. If I were you, I'd talk to your IT guys NICELY and perhaps find a way to do this without getting fired.
My question is why would anybody run MacOS X as a UNIX distribution when there are other UNIXes out there that are a lot cheaper to buy, such as BSD, Solaris, and Linux. Not to mention that running UNIX programs in OS X is more trouble at first as OS X doesn't natively use X11 and it will include none of the standard Qt or GTK libraries, X11, or GCC in a standard installation. The appeal of a Mac is that it's got a shiny GUI, NOT that it runs BSD underneath. If I wanted to run BSD, I'd simply go get {Free|Open|Net}BSD for nothing and run it on my inexpensive "commodity" computer rather than hacking up an expensive Macintosh. I bet that any CIO worth their Mountain Dew ration will feel the same way.
Oh, and Linux does not necessarily have its own disk format like Solaris, OS X, or Windows do. Linux will install on ext2, ext3, ReiserFS 3, XFS, and JFS. You can get patched kernels to install on the new ext4 and ReiserFS 4, but those are not enterprise-worthy options at the moment due to development. Also, unlike those other OSes, not all of its supported filesystems came from its development. The ext filesystems did come from the Linux kernel developers, but ReiserFS came from a third party, Namesys. XFS came from SGI, who used it as the IRIX filesystem. IBM uses JFS as AIX's filesystem. And with the exception of ReiserFS and ext4, all of the Linux filesystems are fully read-write in at least one other OS. For example, Windows can read-write ext2 and ext3 via the IFS driver.
Well, first thing, not all of those filesystems are "Linux-specific." XFS and JFS were used in SGI's IRIX and JFS came from AIX. Even though ext/ext2/ext3/ext4 came from Linux, everybody with a Windows NT/2000/XP (and probably Vista as well) can natively access ext2 and ext3 filesystems via the IFS driver. JFS isn't all that common, but XFS is widely supported and used a decent amount in Linux, although less than ext3 and Reiser 3.ReiserFS is about the only filesystem you that could be claimed to be Linux-specific.
My university (University of Missouri-Columbia) is thinking about doing this also, but thankfully is using it as a pilot program with about 65 students to gauge feedback before it would be done campus-wide. I happened to be one that enrolled in it to test it out. The Live Mail is rather rough around the edges and drops a lot of widely-used features of the current Exchange system, such as automatic e-mail address lookup, calendars, and e-mail client access.
Preliminary results from users like me were pretty negative, so IATS put this on hold for the time being. Will they eventually switch? Maybe- and I hope not. It is a pretty awful system, especially for those who like to use e-mail clients and not just webmail. I'm doing what I can to try and stop this, and I hope that I am successful.
The chips are a much different ISA, so there's no way that binaries that will run on G80 hardware will run on an R600. Heck, even the ATi R400 series (x700, x8x0) is not binary-compatible with the current R500 x1000 units.Maybe ATi will make a CUDA compiler, but I am guessing that since folks have already gotten going using the R500 hardware (see: http://folding.stanford.edu/ I doubt that AMD/ATi will make a big effort to use a competitor's technology. Please correct me if I am incorrect, but I am not aware of any groups or programs that use NVIDIA hardware as number-crunchers yet.
Try making a few friends in IT departments in larger companies or schools. I happened to get my Model M (dated 20-SEP-93) because one of the departmental IT guys was getting ready to give a heave-ho to about 10 of them and one of my friends (who knows the IT guys quite well) managed to requisition one for me.
Of course it is profitable for pharmaceutical companies to produce cures. Transmissible diseases are VERY hard to impossible to completely eradicate due to biological factors such as mutation and human-animal transmission. Non-transmissible diseases are either environmental or genetic in cause. The obesity problem in America shows how poorly most people can handle environmental factors and we can't do much with genetics yet. So there will always be people who will come down with diseases and that guarantees a market for the pharmaceutical companies, regardless of if their products work or not. Products that tend to work sell much better than those that don't, so it's in their best interest for the products to work. Otherwise people will buy cheaper stuff that also does not work like snake oil and other quack medicine.
What is NOT profitable for the pharmaceutical companies is to simply be happy with one good drug to treat a condition. Once that drug hits 7 years, then it loses its patent monopoly and generics pop up. Doctors for the most part will prescribe generics over brand-name drugs, so the big pharmaceutical companies try to tweak existing drugs a tiny bit so they can get a new patent. So thus there are a bunch of different drugs for common conditions like impotence instead of just a couple.
I do agree with your last point, though. I am not necessarily saying that scientists fudge their data or misconstrue it to make something look like it's not, but there *IS* an incentive for them to do so. We'd all like to think that everybody is 100% noble and honest in their actions, but we're all human and as such, we're not. Because, as you said, if there's no problem, there's no money in it for them. This is just like how other companies try to "create a need" that they fill so they get paid.
It's not another tool for a monopoly as they already have that. This is a tool for getting the Holy Grail of sales: constant revenue and the ability to present a very low "teaser" price that virtually NOBODY can call you on (as they have to spend much more to get a workable system.) It also gives them extreme control over your computer, both the hardware and software. This allows for guaranteed ability to always be in the position to sell you something, even sell you things that are free. I'll give a few examples:
1. There could be a module that is required for non-Microsoft applications to use system resources like disk drive access, RAM access, network access, display access, etc. Microsoft would of course make people pay for this and it would automatically add whatever the fee for this is to the cost of whatever non-MS software to the cost of running that software. (Of course, MS software will run for free on your system.) This could be used to price competitors out of the market and MS could hide behind some shady "quality assurance" reason for doing this if they are sued.
2. Microsoft could sell subscription-based modules for HDD access beyond merely running certain programs, and if you do not keep the subscription current, then the module (which contains the drive) gets locked and encrypted.
3. You could be forced to pay for more modules if you change your hardware. Say a $2/month module supports 1GB RAM, but if you want 2GB, than you have to buy another module or your extra RAM is dead in its tracks.
4. Microsoft would be free to change the price of their modules at will and if you don't pay, your computer would be locked up and completely unusable, the data on it inaccessible by any means, even yanking the HDD out and putting it in any other machine.
All of these scenarios are possible with this plan. Will they happen? My guess is it will be like the frog in the pot scenario, where there is a little bit of this at first and then as people accept it, it gets ratcheted up.
Suppose, for example, that you want to use the latest and greatest video card. You already pay for the drivers - there's a reason why cheap video cards crash the system more often than expensive ones
Maybe that used to be true, but today the trend is towards unified drivers that are the same on every GPU that is supported. So that 3-year-old card that cost you $30 new uses the same drivers as the $700 brand-new, top-of-the-line card for that manufacturer. Why people buy a better graphics card is mostly just to get better performance, but sometimes the better cards have extra features such as dual DVI monitor support, video-in capability, or HDMI support- things that low-end cards usually lack.
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Mmm, I'd not say that OpenOffice.org is MEGA fast, especially the 32-bit Linux binaries from OpenOffice.org's site. However, it is pretty snappy if you endure the multi-hour build time and compile it yourself, especially if you have a 64-bit machine. There's quite the speed difference there, especially when working with large data sets in Calc. Startup times are not an issue if you have 384 MB or more of RAM and use the Quickstarter.
OOo does do 3D charts as I have made 3D charts with OOo. I don't know when it was introduced, but it's certainly there now.
The university not using something as a "profit center" is like telling a government official not to take campaign contributions. Everywhere you look there are things done just to soak students- $130 textbooks, mandatory fees for the health center, library, rec center regardless if you set foot in them, exorbitant parking fees to park about 5 miles off campus and then a huge fine if you park in a spot 1 nanosecond before it's allowed, mandatory printer quota deductions regardless if you want it or not, hundreds of dollars in student fees to support all manner of "important" things like expensive "festivals" and "celebrations" that almost nobody goes to, etc. ad nauseum.
It's a real racket and frankly, I'm surprised that they haven't been metering Internet bandwidth all along.
Good luck and we all hope you'll do well over there at Sun.
D'oh...you got me. It should read:
/path/to/image.iso /mount/point"
"mount -o loop -t iso9660
Thanks for the correction. I'd briefly used other kinds of UNIX machines and almost all of the commands I'd used were identical to Linux, so I though this would be to.I guess not.
There is a more open way of imaging CDs. For this, I assume that the CD-ROM drive is IDE channel 1 master. You'll either need a UNIX-type machine or "dd" from the UNIX Utilities for Windows on Sourceforge.net.
.iso from your home folder to whatever subdirectory you want.
/mount /home/yourname/name_of_cd.iso /mount
/mount. If you want to rip it, point the CD ripping app at /mount.
.iso images and then you can point your CD ripper at the mount point.
1. Insert CD to be imaged into the CD drive.
2. Type in dd if=/dev/hda of=/home/yourname/name_of_cd.iso
3. Move the
To read the image on a UNIX machine:
mkdir
mount -t iso9660
and then the contents of the CD will be visible at
If you have a Windows machine, I believe there is a Windows Power Toy that will allow you to mount
It depends. I run Linux on my old laptop and my desktop. I built my own desktop as that's pretty easy to do- parts are standard, inexpensive and easily sourced. Not to mention it's less expensive to do a decent build on your own than to buy. That and I wanted an Athlon 64 X2 and most OEMs just had the Pentium Ds and charged a ton for them over the single-core Prescotts. Cheap builds are another story as the OEMs get REALLY low-end stuff in bulk for dirt cheap; you'll never beat them dollar-for-dollar. However, I'd bought my Gateway laptop in 2002. There was simply no other option than to buy from an OEM at that time- even now, barebones are still very uncommon. The old Gateway runs Linux pretty well and there's nothing in it that's not well-supported by about every 2.6 kernel distro out there and some of the later 2.4 ones too.
I do get poked fun at a little for hauling the big old Gateway around, mostly because it's 5 years old and looks it. It's chunky, a little bit worn, has parallel and serial ports, and isn't widescreen. I do have to admit that most of the people poking fun at me are either Mac or Sony fanboys and fangirls with brand-new laptops. At least MY laptop isn't at risk of blowing up...
Actually, software is generally more expensive than books, especially the less-expensive custom-published-on-campus spiral-bound stuff that my department (thankfully) likes to use. Those are roughly $20-30 while a soft-bound textbook tends to be $80-100 and a hard-bound text is $100-120. All proprietary software I've seen is >$100, with a median price of about $150. MATLAB is $104 at my school, Mathematica is $150, and AutoCAD was a whopping $250. People bitch and gripe about textbook prices, so it's no wonder that they get cracked software. It's so darned expensive- cuts into the beer money.
There are some high-dollar proprietary applications used in my classes, particularly MATLAB, Mathematica, Visual Studio, and SAS/SPSS. Usually one can get away with using any program that accomplishes the function, such as using GNU Octave and R instead of MATLAB and SAS/SPSS and a text editor + GCC in place of Visual Studio (we did basic terminal/CLI apps, not GUI ones.) The instructors would even generally point out that there were free, legal programs like Octave, R, and GCC available for people who did not want to pay for the proprietary stuff at the bookstore. They also admonished people that illegally downloaded software. So what happened in my classes? Out of 20 people, 3 or 4 would buy the proprietary program, one would use the open-source equivalent (me), 15 would download a crack, and the rest would just go to the computer labs and use the program there (that is, if the license didn't expire like our department's MATLAB license did.)
I occasionally asked the people who used the cracks why they did so. The most common responses were something like "I'm going to screw The System by using this expensive app for free and I'm not supposed to" or they were digital kleptomaniacs of sorts. They would illegally download stuff just because they could- they are the guys with 100 GB of MP3s that they never really listen to but still brag about. Open-source software provides neither of those, so it was not all that common. You can't steal something that's given away. A couple of people commented that there are occasionally small compatibility problems with other programs opening up the work that people turned in last semester so that they could change a few things and then turn it back in as theirs.
Here are the stats for my school's official computer labs, the University of Missouri
Total machines = 1121
1. Linux-only machines: 38
2. Linux/Windows dual-boot: 23
3. Apple-only machines: 168
4. Apple/Windows dual-boot: 3
5. Windows-only machines: 889
Percentage of machines with MacOS installed: 15.25%
Percentage of machines with Windows installed: 81.62%
Percentage of machines with Linux installed: 5.44%
Percentage of machines with ONLY MacOS installed: 14.99%
Percentage of machines with ONLY Linux installed: 2.05%>br> Percentage of machines with ONLY Windows installed: 79.30%
If you look at the distribution of machines in the different labs as seen here you'll notice that there are only two sites without any Windows computers- A&S #41, which is filled with Macintosh G5s and then Neff Hall, which is in the Macintosh-heavy journalism school. Every other site has at least some Windows computers, even in the CS department where almost all classes use Linux. (The students not in the one classroom full of Linux machines SSH into the local file server which uses Linux using a terminal client.) In the labs that have the dual-boot machines, I rarely if ever see anybody boot them into Linux except for a biochemistry class that uses SYBYL, which only runs on x86 Linux or SGI IRIX.
There are a few other non-IATS labs that are not included in these tallies. My academic building happens to have two of these. One is the student lab for the building and consists of 32 Windows-only machines. The other lab is a 10-computer Linux lab that a professor of mine put together himself for use in his classes. There are a few Macintosh machines sitting around in the biology building as the entire department is Mac-only. But then there are also a boatload of departmental labs that only use Windows, like mine did, too, so I think the official stats are indicative of the population as a whole.
And as far as student computer use...there was a survey done by Residential Life of freshman dorm dwellers (can't find the link, sorry.) It stated that Mac laptops were about 20% of the total computers on the network and about 65% were Windows laptops. There were a few Windows desktops and 3 Mac desktops. No mention of Linux as it's not supported by IATS and thus not "supposed" to be used, but IATS does not seem to care much. I was the only person on my floor who'd even heard of Linux my freshman year and I'd just started to dabble in it at that point- had a dial-up line at home, you know. So we're an Apple and Windows campus, that's for sure.
Last time I checked, shooting somebody with a gun was already illegal. So is stabbing somebody with a kitchen knife, hitting them in the face with a crowbar, running them over with a truck, or locking them in a tape safe. And all of those acts are illegal too. Your argument that guns should be banned because they can be dangerous is misused* holds true for just about everything. Should we then ban electricity because somebody could electrocute you? Or how about toilets and water because somebody could drown you in a toilet bowl? Or ban iPods because somebody could strangle you with with the headphone cord? You'll say, "that's absurd!" but no, that's EXACTLY your argument.
*Guns are not dangerous to law-abiding people when used for their intended uses in a proper manner by a responsible gun owner: hunting, target shooting, and self-defense. Responsible shooters and hunters make sure of their backdrop when firing a shot to ensure that the projectile travels in a safe direction, away from people, livestock, and property. That's the law. And all responsible gun owners keep their weapons locked up and unloaded during storage. That is also a law. The only people who get hurt while around guns are using them in an illegal and unsafe manner OR are violating the safety of the gun owner by threatening them with severe injury or death and get shot by the owner in self-defense.
The political spectrum really is a circle with the extreme right and extreme right both meeting at "anarchist."
What about USB-on-the-go? That is a USB peer-to-peer communication method.
I will admit that this isn't really all that great of an experiment nor was the sample size very big, but in one of my classes, everybody had to use Fedora Core in a computer lab to run a program called Octave to do some mathematical work. (This was a professor's semi-official lab, NOT a university IT lab. IATS' 15 dual-boot and 5 dedicated Linux computers run RHEL 4.) Almost all of my classmates regularly use Windows but could accomplish basic tasks in Linux with either KDE or Gnome pretty quickly as long as the programs have entries in the main menus like is done in Windows. They seemed to take to KDE a little nicer than GNOME as the K Menu was at the same place as the "Start" menu, but it wasn't hard for them to see that the top bar with "Applications" was the same thing in GNOME. They all started programs by picking the icons from the programs menus rather than hitting Alt+F2 for the "Run" dialog like most Linux users do, but they got along just fine. OpenOffice.org is not very different from MS Office 97-2003, Konqueror is very similar to Windows Explorer, and Firefox is...well, Firefox. It wasn't that different from running Windows, and the prevalent comment is that Linux (they meant KDE or GNOME) was easier to try to use than OS X was.
You're going to tell IT to spend their time trying to get unauthorized and unsupported hardware to work on the corporate network? Riiiight. You'll be lucky if all they do is tell you to put it away lest you get fired for unauthorized network use. And if you get fired for that, every future employer will see that and think that you're a horrible liability as "unauthorized network use" generally means that you've been caught surfing the Net all day, downloading porn or illegal music/programs, or trying to steal company data.
Is all that worth it just to use a Mac at work? I don't think so. If I were you, I'd talk to your IT guys NICELY and perhaps find a way to do this without getting fired.
My question is why would anybody run MacOS X as a UNIX distribution when there are other UNIXes out there that are a lot cheaper to buy, such as BSD, Solaris, and Linux. Not to mention that running UNIX programs in OS X is more trouble at first as OS X doesn't natively use X11 and it will include none of the standard Qt or GTK libraries, X11, or GCC in a standard installation. The appeal of a Mac is that it's got a shiny GUI, NOT that it runs BSD underneath. If I wanted to run BSD, I'd simply go get {Free|Open|Net}BSD for nothing and run it on my inexpensive "commodity" computer rather than hacking up an expensive Macintosh. I bet that any CIO worth their Mountain Dew ration will feel the same way.
Oh, and Linux does not necessarily have its own disk format like Solaris, OS X, or Windows do. Linux will install on ext2, ext3, ReiserFS 3, XFS, and JFS. You can get patched kernels to install on the new ext4 and ReiserFS 4, but those are not enterprise-worthy options at the moment due to development. Also, unlike those other OSes, not all of its supported filesystems came from its development. The ext filesystems did come from the Linux kernel developers, but ReiserFS came from a third party, Namesys. XFS came from SGI, who used it as the IRIX filesystem. IBM uses JFS as AIX's filesystem. And with the exception of ReiserFS and ext4, all of the Linux filesystems are fully read-write in at least one other OS. For example, Windows can read-write ext2 and ext3 via the IFS driver.
Well, first thing, not all of those filesystems are "Linux-specific." XFS and JFS were used in SGI's IRIX and JFS came from AIX. Even though ext/ext2/ext3/ext4 came from Linux, everybody with a Windows NT/2000/XP (and probably Vista as well) can natively access ext2 and ext3 filesystems via the IFS driver. JFS isn't all that common, but XFS is widely supported and used a decent amount in Linux, although less than ext3 and Reiser 3.ReiserFS is about the only filesystem you that could be claimed to be Linux-specific.
My university (University of Missouri-Columbia) is thinking about doing this also, but thankfully is using it as a pilot program with about 65 students to gauge feedback before it would be done campus-wide. I happened to be one that enrolled in it to test it out. The Live Mail is rather rough around the edges and drops a lot of widely-used features of the current Exchange system, such as automatic e-mail address lookup, calendars, and e-mail client access.
Preliminary results from users like me were pretty negative, so IATS put this on hold for the time being. Will they eventually switch? Maybe- and I hope not. It is a pretty awful system, especially for those who like to use e-mail clients and not just webmail. I'm doing what I can to try and stop this, and I hope that I am successful.
The chips are a much different ISA, so there's no way that binaries that will run on G80 hardware will run on an R600. Heck, even the ATi R400 series (x700, x8x0) is not binary-compatible with the current R500 x1000 units.Maybe ATi will make a CUDA compiler, but I am guessing that since folks have already gotten going using the R500 hardware (see: http://folding.stanford.edu/ I doubt that AMD/ATi will make a big effort to use a competitor's technology. Please correct me if I am incorrect, but I am not aware of any groups or programs that use NVIDIA hardware as number-crunchers yet.
Try making a few friends in IT departments in larger companies or schools. I happened to get my Model M (dated 20-SEP-93) because one of the departmental IT guys was getting ready to give a heave-ho to about 10 of them and one of my friends (who knows the IT guys quite well) managed to requisition one for me.
I think $8 sounds like a lot more reasonable price, don't you think?
Of course it is profitable for pharmaceutical companies to produce cures. Transmissible diseases are VERY hard to impossible to completely eradicate due to biological factors such as mutation and human-animal transmission. Non-transmissible diseases are either environmental or genetic in cause. The obesity problem in America shows how poorly most people can handle environmental factors and we can't do much with genetics yet. So there will always be people who will come down with diseases and that guarantees a market for the pharmaceutical companies, regardless of if their products work or not. Products that tend to work sell much better than those that don't, so it's in their best interest for the products to work. Otherwise people will buy cheaper stuff that also does not work like snake oil and other quack medicine.
What is NOT profitable for the pharmaceutical companies is to simply be happy with one good drug to treat a condition. Once that drug hits 7 years, then it loses its patent monopoly and generics pop up. Doctors for the most part will prescribe generics over brand-name drugs, so the big pharmaceutical companies try to tweak existing drugs a tiny bit so they can get a new patent. So thus there are a bunch of different drugs for common conditions like impotence instead of just a couple.
I do agree with your last point, though. I am not necessarily saying that scientists fudge their data or misconstrue it to make something look like it's not, but there *IS* an incentive for them to do so. We'd all like to think that everybody is 100% noble and honest in their actions, but we're all human and as such, we're not. Because, as you said, if there's no problem, there's no money in it for them. This is just like how other companies try to "create a need" that they fill so they get paid.
It's not another tool for a monopoly as they already have that. This is a tool for getting the Holy Grail of sales: constant revenue and the ability to present a very low "teaser" price that virtually NOBODY can call you on (as they have to spend much more to get a workable system.) It also gives them extreme control over your computer, both the hardware and software. This allows for guaranteed ability to always be in the position to sell you something, even sell you things that are free. I'll give a few examples:
1. There could be a module that is required for non-Microsoft applications to use system resources like disk drive access, RAM access, network access, display access, etc. Microsoft would of course make people pay for this and it would automatically add whatever the fee for this is to the cost of whatever non-MS software to the cost of running that software. (Of course, MS software will run for free on your system.) This could be used to price competitors out of the market and MS could hide behind some shady "quality assurance" reason for doing this if they are sued.
2. Microsoft could sell subscription-based modules for HDD access beyond merely running certain programs, and if you do not keep the subscription current, then the module (which contains the drive) gets locked and encrypted.
3. You could be forced to pay for more modules if you change your hardware. Say a $2/month module supports 1GB RAM, but if you want 2GB, than you have to buy another module or your extra RAM is dead in its tracks.
4. Microsoft would be free to change the price of their modules at will and if you don't pay, your computer would be locked up and completely unusable, the data on it inaccessible by any means, even yanking the HDD out and putting it in any other machine.
All of these scenarios are possible with this plan. Will they happen? My guess is it will be like the frog in the pot scenario, where there is a little bit of this at first and then as people accept it, it gets ratcheted up.
Gentoo's portage was modeled after BSD ports. The similarities are intentional :D