I read Slashdot every day, and until this moment I had never even heard of PCLinuxOS. I had to look it up.
Ubuntu, however... Ubuntu, my parents have heard of.
Don't know what metric Distrowatch uses, but it seems to be flawed.
Granted, I don't use Linux as a day-to-day OS, but I have some Linux apps I like which I run via Ubuntu in VMware Fusion. As a casual user, of the distros I've tried, Ubuntu wins hands-down. It's still too hard to set up for my parents, say, but not so hard that I don't just say "fsck it" and delete the partition, as I have done with all the others.
What numbers say on the clock really don't have anything to do with it.
Yeah, people keep saying that in this discussion, but... Well, it's patently insane. By that logic, why do we have clocks at all? We should just get up with the sun, like we did for aeons before clocks were invented. Or maybe we should just use sundials, which work great as long as you never have to communicate or do business with someone far away.
Why have a calendar, which has to be adjusted every 4 years because it doesn't quite work?
A lot of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution and then the Communication Revolution (there may be a better term for that--I just made it up) arose because everyone was on very regular, predictable time systems irrespective of the sun. Business hours. You don't have to know what the sky looks like in Helsinki to know when to call there to get someone at work.
It is far, far easier to turn the clock forward a few hours than it is to reinvent the entire timekeeping system!!!
Yeah, I spent a month in Spain on a homestay in high school. I remember being amazed at how late the sun was up. We were coming home and I felt like it was maybe 11PM, based on the sun, but I'd look at the clock and it was 3.
That being said, people out with their families late, enjoying the evening together at restaurants and pubs? Definitely a positive thing, I think, and something you don't get when the first four hours of daylight are useless.
I actually think that the whole Japanese time zone is wrong. The sun is up for 4 hours before anyone leaves the house, and you're still going home in the dark. It's a total waste of daylight, but it isn't a DST problem so much as it is one of the timezone being totally screwed up.
Yeah, see... Most people don't use computers to learn more about them any more than they (sorry in advance) drive cars to learn about them. They do both to solve problems in their lives. Linux solves basically none of my problems and meets none of my requirements of a computer.
I respect playing with things to learn. I play with Linux, too. But I work with OSX and Windows.
You're not better than people who don't care to learn about computers; you just have different interests. I know a lot about tuning 50cc scooters to go way faster than they should (and have, unfortunately, the 30-day suspension on my license to prove it). But I don't denigrate people who just want to hop on one and go to the store and back. They're not dumb or lazy; they just don't care.
So, while I'm glad you enjoy editing.conf files, I encourage you to explore the possibility that people who don't just... don't.
Good lord you should hear the bitch sessions at my departmental meetings. Teachers hate it, but despite the university having tons of money, because of some budget stupidity, the budget that pays for this kind of thing is too small to get a commercial piece of software. Now that BB has bought WebCT, which was my favorite, maybe we will forever have to make due with it.
What the hell is the deal with the "weeks/topics" organization? Why is there nothing else available?
Why does the page reload every time I make a change? Why can't I make a bunch of changes and then hit "Save" or something? Every time I update my class, I have to block off an hour.
Why do I have to push an "Edit" button? Why don't I see the edit functions when I log in? I'm the teacher!
Why doesn't the "course reset" actually reset the course? Why can't it basically just purge any data that I didn't put in? I always have to go back through all of the glossaries and quizzes and hand-remove tons of stuff.
Related, but if I want to run a quiz again (like the following semester), I almost always have to re-make it because even if I only want to change one question, it says "people have already taken this quiz; you can't change it." Actually, why the hell would that matter? It's my quiz! I'm the teacher! If I want to change the rules of the game before everyone has had a chance, I'm an ass, but ultimately, it's my class and I can do whatever I want. I don't need the software telling me what's ethical and what's not. I just want it to display things on browsers.
No WebDAV support.
Ugly ugly ugly and no way around it.
My department once hired a student to go through and make a bunch of forums for discussing various books (like 50+ possible) because it was so time consuming that we'd rather fork over the money for some kid to sit there and be bored for a couple hours than do it ourselves. That's how awful it is. You would rather spend your research budget on someone else doing it than do it yourself for free.
And feature requests. To whom do you send them? It's open source, so if you want it to do something, you will have to learn to program and make it do it yourself. You know, on top of teaching classes and doing research and applying for PhD programs and going to pointless meetings and trying to have a life outside of that as well. Yeah, I'm going to add "learn a new trade" onto that so I can get this damned thing to do what I want. Ugh.
Moodle sucks and everyone knows it. OSS works well for things that a lot of people like, use, and are interested in. No one seems too keen on LMSes, and that means that Moodle is kind of neglected.
OSX is the watered down Unix experience for those who want all their decisions made for them. Most Free software is developed on Linux and works best there anyway. When a program like vmware fusion exists for Linux, the last reasons to use OSX will be gone.
Isn't that Workstation?
And I'd say your complaints about OSX are really just complaints about proprietary/consumer software. They're fair points, all, but, I think, inherent to the business model and the demographic. If they irritate you that much, yeah, Linux is where you should be. Me? Meh. Doesn't bother me that much. YMMV.
Also, until I can get my laptop running Ubuntu to use the wireless card (not have to find one to shove in the PCMCIA slot like some kind of savage) and go to sleep/wake up properly, I'm just plain not interested. Don't get me wrong, it has come a LONG, LONG, LONG way in the years I've been playing with it. It actually almost works now, and if you have really standard, common hardware, and nothing fancy, you can go from zero to fully-functioning system WITH your basic software already installed in 23 minutes, judging from my last install of Ubuntu (see sig). That, my friend, is frickin' sweet. But it still isn't there yet, and I don't think it will be until there's better hardware and software dev support.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Linux succeed, but I just don't think it will. Maybe if it gets a really strong foothold in China and/or India, they'll take it with them to the economic top and we'll all just follow. But the West runs Windows, and we're on top right now, so I don't see it changing anytime soon.
Yeah, but watch what the people who do have mod points do to me! I should chart my mod points, because I think I'm noticing a direct correlation between having them and saying good things about Linux. Most of the time I'm trying to temper people's enthusiasm about it with observations of the non-IT world, which is most of it, and that means major mod backlash. But whatever.
I, too, see no compelling reason to go to Vista. I actually am moving away from XP and to OSX. My new Mac Pro should be here this morning, in fact. The fact I can still run Windows under Fusion or boot into it with Boot Camp means I don't actually have to choose anymore. And OSX runs really nicely. I've been delighted with my little MacBook.
But if I were staying on Windows, yeah, XP is still the OS to stay with. It works pretty damned well.
Yeah, I don't know what happened with X11 in Leopard. I actually rely pretty heavily on Inkscape for some of the stuff I do, and I can't seem to get it to run since I went to Leopard. I have been running it under Windows in Fusion.
It's true what you say about free software, though. I have bought a lot of shareware. It's great stuff, but it's not free.
Yeah, the sleep/wake thing sold it almost immediately for me. Close the lid, walk away. Come back, open it, battery is only very slightly less, and it starts up as soon as it's open. It has made me so much more productive. The computer is ready when I am.
People actually write a thesis that long with all those features in anything but TeX (or LyX if they want a nice GUI)? Odd. That's a development I hadn't heard of yet.
That's interesting (and I'm not even being facetious!) because until someone around here mentioned it awhile back, I had never heard of it. Ever. I still haven't, aside from around here. And I'm still not sure how it's any different from using styles in Word.
And, um, I'm an academic and a researcher. Not in engineering or hard science, mind you, so that might be the difference. And I don't know any post-grad engineering or science types. Probably because they can actually put bread on the table with their bachelors', whereas people like me have to get a master's before that happens (applied linguistics)!
It is, however, downloaded and on my list of things to figure out; don't worry.
But seriously... I can't find anyone who has ever heard of it, and some of the people I've showed it to have PhDs in things like cognitive psychology... If it's as great as people say, I'm inclined to think that our colleagues in the buildings next door have just plain been holding out on us!
Actually, Slashdot has been great of late for this kind of interdisciplinary cross-pollination. I've switched to Keynote on a Mac for technical (testing) presentations on the recommendation of a couple materials science researchers who turned me onto it here, and they were absolutely right about that.
I don't really think so. I'm seeing a lot of people moving to the Mac (full disclosure: I did, and I can't believe I'm saying that).
You're still pretty heavily in the IT industry there, though. The point I make endlessly at Slashdot is that most people aren't in IT.
For me, ALL of the software I need to do my research is Windows-only. But that hasn't stopped me from just running it under virtualization with VMware Fusion on the Mac. I picked up a Mac laptop last summer just kind of out of curiosity, and have been stunned at how good it is at getting things done, now that they are on Intel and I can run Windows (or Linux!) apps in virtualization with, to me, no noticeable performance hit.
Lets take first the OS, ranging from $50-$300, even if you buy it OEM you will still pay the approximately $50 it costs for the OEM Windows, not to mention all the time taking off all the crapware they install on new PCs.
Windows comes free with your eMachine or whatever, and then, yeah, you or I would take all that crap off, but most people don't. If you're building, the price is something like $134 with your floppy drive or something for the OEM disc. And that's only if you're going legit, which I'll admit I didn't do for many, many years. It's free if you use a cracked copy you get from a friend, or a volume license you get from work, etc. Who pays $300?
Now, because we don't want your Windows box to become part of a botnet, you install an antivirus/anti-spyware that costs around $40.
--Or you use Norton for a year for free, because it comes with your terrible eMachine. Or, if you have a clue, you use AVG or Avast for free. Oh, and you don't even really have to do this; just don't be an idiot. I have never gotten a virus, ever. The only people I've ever known to have gotten one are people who click on executables in gibberish mail.
Of course while your at it you need to install MS Office, around $150.
Um, no, you could use OO.o if you have nothing important to do, and it'll serve you well. Or you could get a cracked copy, or a copy from work, or a student copy or a million other kinds of copy. If you need/want MS Office, then you might actually buy it, but the only reason you don't have to do this on Linux is that it's not even available. Way to spin a major drawback of Linux as a money saver: "No one makes anything you want or need for it, so think of all the money you'll save!"
Now assuming you need a dual-core PC with 2 gigs of RAM to run Vista properly, that costs around $450 without monitor and such.
So this person previously didn't even have a computer? I thought we were comparing software prices! You can't bundle the hardware platform into the software cost, and you don't actually need that much horsepower to run Vista... Hell, you don't even need Vista! The only people running Vista are those who just bought a new computer anyway!
A far cry from the $200 gPC, so with your $300 of time and effort spent learning Linux you have spent $500 compared to the $690 with the MS solution.
Okay, first off, comparing a decent computer (the one you have running Vista) to a piece of garbage like the gPC is just plain not fair. Let's keep them on the same hardware.
Now let's check that MS total, with my corrected figures: $450 - $734, versus $450 for Linux.
Oh, but the former high end also includes the world industry standard office suite and the latter would if it could, but it can't, so let's put OO.o on both of them: $450 - $584 vs. $450.
Now let's add the (let's admit, totally arbitrary, but you seemed to run with it, so I guess I will too) cost of learning Linux. Now our Linux machine, running on the same hardware, is $750! Yikes! That's more than the Vista machine with the only office suite that matters!
And honestly, how much money do you think it would cost to learn Office 2007/Vista? I would expect a lot more and it comes without the assurance that it won't get discontinued and you have to learn Office 2009/Windows 7 within 3 years and of course pay more.
Well, here's where MS Office and Windows kind have Linux beat (fair or not): Everyone already knows how to use them. OO.o and Linux have a learning curve; Office and Windows don't. Not for most people, anyway.
Learning Linux is an investment, and not a hard one at that.
An investment in what, pray tell? How do I leverage my ability to make Ubuntu work almost as well as Windows 98, minus all the industry-standard software even avai
She is converted, and introduced 4 of her friends, all students, to openoffice.
...Until they have to write their master's thesis with tons of tables, a dynamic table of contents, and more formatting sections than you can shake 116 pages of stick at...
At least, that's what un-converted me. OO.o is damn nice for the money, and you can bang out a basic paper on it, but it really falls down when you try to do anything terribly complex with it (for example, tables--which are a hassle in OO.o--rarely format right in.doc, which is what your adviser/supervisor uses).
Ubuntu's a LOT, LOT, LOT, LOT, LOT better, but it's eventually just more of the same. Your software still won't work; you'll still have to try a bunch of bizarre crap, and your wireless will never work.
Linux (on the desktop, anyway) is a toy for geeks who like futzing with conf files. And that's all it will ever, ever, ever be.
If you want out of the Windows nonsense, but want a computer that still works, just do what I've done in the last year: Get a new Intel-based Mac and run OSX with VMware Fusion for everyday stuff you still need out of Windows, and boot into Windows with Boot Camp for games. It's been painless, and hopping out to a real UNIX terminal is damned nice sometimes.
I'm sorry to point this out to you, when everyone else is doing the same thing, but his point is simply that the software people need to do their jobs does not exist on Linux. It doesn't for web developers, it doesn't for me, it doesn't for anyone I know except for the woman who writes server code on and for Linux.
Best post ever. Lately, I've just been kind of basking in the joys provided me by cheap oil: my computers, my video games, bananas in Japan. I don't expect any of these things to last. I wish I could muster the optimism some people seem to have about our ability to change things, but I don't think it's possible. I think we're at the apex before another Dark Age. It's gonna be a scary ride down, but for now, I'm all for listening to the fiddles while nature, human and otherwise, lays the kindling beneath our new Rome...
Um. I use a Mac primarily, but I really prefer Firefox to look like Firefox, regardless of the platform. I wish MS Office would look like MS Office as well; it's very frustrating.
Over here in the UK, where 3G coverage is really very good, a 3G plan can *replace* wired network connections. Speeds of 180kB/s are pretty common, and the bandwidth limits are pretty high too. (Enough for me, and I'm connected for about 14 hours a day.)
Over here in Japan, 3G is exorbitantly priced and you pay by the packet for network connectivity. I don't touch the browser button on my phone anymore because the last time I did I payed 2300 yen (about USD 20) to read an MSNBC article. Ability to hook up to a PC, if possible, is completely unadvertised. And I pay about USD 70/mo.
The only benefit I can find to having a 3G phone in Japan is that it's the only way to get a GSM phone that works in any country (Japan is mostly CDMA). That's exorbitantly priced as well, of course, but nice to have if someone needs to talk to you when you're at a conference or something.
That being said, my building FINALLY got "wired" for fiber-optic (been waiting 3 years), and for less than 4000 yen/mo I have 83Mbit down and 8Mbit up!
I am a HUGE NIN fan. Huge. Like most NIN fans, I'm getting older, but even so, I still try to hit at least one show per tour (usually more), and have basically everything Trent has done.
But here's the thing. NIN is a well-known, well-loved band with a rabid fanbase. Would I pay $5 for a new NIN album? Yes yes yes. Probably more as a "tip" for all the years of what I consider great and powerful and beautiful music. I'm excited to see what he does with his new unsigned status.
This does not extend to his buddy Saul's project. I bought it because I want to support the model, but come on. No one who is fond of Trent Reznor has any idea who this Saul Williams character is, probably doesn't like rap (or whatever it is Saul does... it's a mess), and probably thinks that The Inevitable Rise of Niggy Tardust is the stupidest and most derivative album name ever (because it is). Furthermore, despite the fact that I paid the $5 for it, I have probably cost him many sales because I've told everyone how awful and retarded the album is. And I'm not alone. Look around online; there are very few good things written about it, because it is unlistenable.
So it's not about the failure of the model or how people are bad. It's about how the album is bad. The first NIN album Trent releases is going to make the guy a mint. But if I did it, I'd go in the red. No one knows who I am.
And that, my friends, is why we shouldn't be so quick to ditch the label model.
Indeed. There's nothing worse to an al-Qaeda type than a sane and prosperous Arab Muslim state. Countries like the UAE show that Islam is not the culprit; idiots and assholes are. As usual.
That ANYONE above the age of 12, in a CIVILIZED FIRST WORLD COUNTRY, would LACK THESE SKILLS, tells me all I need to know about how "educated" and "enlightened" westerners truly are as compared to how much they THINK they are.
Um. I teach university in Japan. The other day I found myself explaining how an internal-combustion engine works in class, because they had no idea. None. They were fascinated at the arcane knowledge I had acquired in 6th grade in the US.
I can't even begin to imagine that they know anything about first aid.
After many years here in Japan, I've come to realize that my "Western education" --whatever that means-- is pretty damned good. If you're going to elicit some sort of "Western vs. something-else" comparison, at least provide a counter-example. Oh, and you'll probably have to leave out the 2nd most-developed nation in the world...
Slashdot Mirror
I read Slashdot every day, and until this moment I had never even heard of PCLinuxOS. I had to look it up.
Ubuntu, however... Ubuntu, my parents have heard of.
Don't know what metric Distrowatch uses, but it seems to be flawed.
Granted, I don't use Linux as a day-to-day OS, but I have some Linux apps I like which I run via Ubuntu in VMware Fusion. As a casual user, of the distros I've tried, Ubuntu wins hands-down. It's still too hard to set up for my parents, say, but not so hard that I don't just say "fsck it" and delete the partition, as I have done with all the others.
Yeah, people keep saying that in this discussion, but... Well, it's patently insane. By that logic, why do we have clocks at all? We should just get up with the sun, like we did for aeons before clocks were invented. Or maybe we should just use sundials, which work great as long as you never have to communicate or do business with someone far away.
Why have a calendar, which has to be adjusted every 4 years because it doesn't quite work?
A lot of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution and then the Communication Revolution (there may be a better term for that--I just made it up) arose because everyone was on very regular, predictable time systems irrespective of the sun. Business hours. You don't have to know what the sky looks like in Helsinki to know when to call there to get someone at work.
It is far, far easier to turn the clock forward a few hours than it is to reinvent the entire timekeeping system!!!
Yeah, I spent a month in Spain on a homestay in high school. I remember being amazed at how late the sun was up. We were coming home and I felt like it was maybe 11PM, based on the sun, but I'd look at the clock and it was 3.
That being said, people out with their families late, enjoying the evening together at restaurants and pubs? Definitely a positive thing, I think, and something you don't get when the first four hours of daylight are useless.
I actually think that the whole Japanese time zone is wrong. The sun is up for 4 hours before anyone leaves the house, and you're still going home in the dark. It's a total waste of daylight, but it isn't a DST problem so much as it is one of the timezone being totally screwed up.
Yeah, see... Most people don't use computers to learn more about them any more than they (sorry in advance) drive cars to learn about them. They do both to solve problems in their lives. Linux solves basically none of my problems and meets none of my requirements of a computer.
I respect playing with things to learn. I play with Linux, too. But I work with OSX and Windows.
You're not better than people who don't care to learn about computers; you just have different interests. I know a lot about tuning 50cc scooters to go way faster than they should (and have, unfortunately, the 30-day suspension on my license to prove it). But I don't denigrate people who just want to hop on one and go to the store and back. They're not dumb or lazy; they just don't care.
So, while I'm glad you enjoy editing .conf files, I encourage you to explore the possibility that people who don't just... don't.
Good lord you should hear the bitch sessions at my departmental meetings. Teachers hate it, but despite the university having tons of money, because of some budget stupidity, the budget that pays for this kind of thing is too small to get a commercial piece of software. Now that BB has bought WebCT, which was my favorite, maybe we will forever have to make due with it.
What the hell is the deal with the "weeks/topics" organization? Why is there nothing else available?
Why does the page reload every time I make a change? Why can't I make a bunch of changes and then hit "Save" or something? Every time I update my class, I have to block off an hour.
Why do I have to push an "Edit" button? Why don't I see the edit functions when I log in? I'm the teacher!
Why doesn't the "course reset" actually reset the course? Why can't it basically just purge any data that I didn't put in? I always have to go back through all of the glossaries and quizzes and hand-remove tons of stuff.
Related, but if I want to run a quiz again (like the following semester), I almost always have to re-make it because even if I only want to change one question, it says "people have already taken this quiz; you can't change it." Actually, why the hell would that matter? It's my quiz! I'm the teacher! If I want to change the rules of the game before everyone has had a chance, I'm an ass, but ultimately, it's my class and I can do whatever I want. I don't need the software telling me what's ethical and what's not. I just want it to display things on browsers.
No WebDAV support.
Ugly ugly ugly and no way around it.
My department once hired a student to go through and make a bunch of forums for discussing various books (like 50+ possible) because it was so time consuming that we'd rather fork over the money for some kid to sit there and be bored for a couple hours than do it ourselves. That's how awful it is. You would rather spend your research budget on someone else doing it than do it yourself for free.
And feature requests. To whom do you send them? It's open source, so if you want it to do something, you will have to learn to program and make it do it yourself. You know, on top of teaching classes and doing research and applying for PhD programs and going to pointless meetings and trying to have a life outside of that as well. Yeah, I'm going to add "learn a new trade" onto that so I can get this damned thing to do what I want. Ugh.
Moodle sucks and everyone knows it. OSS works well for things that a lot of people like, use, and are interested in. No one seems too keen on LMSes, and that means that Moodle is kind of neglected.
I have used WebCT and Moodle, the former as both a teacher and a student, and the latter as a teacher.
WebCT rocked, but was expensive. Moodle sucks, but is OSS. But Blackboard? I have never heard a kind word uttered about it.
Being patent trolls doesn't help my image of it, either.
Someone's read his 7 Habits...
But it's absolutely true. Win-win is the way to keep winning.
Isn't that Workstation?
And I'd say your complaints about OSX are really just complaints about proprietary/consumer software. They're fair points, all, but, I think, inherent to the business model and the demographic. If they irritate you that much, yeah, Linux is where you should be. Me? Meh. Doesn't bother me that much. YMMV.
Also, until I can get my laptop running Ubuntu to use the wireless card (not have to find one to shove in the PCMCIA slot like some kind of savage) and go to sleep/wake up properly, I'm just plain not interested. Don't get me wrong, it has come a LONG, LONG, LONG way in the years I've been playing with it. It actually almost works now, and if you have really standard, common hardware, and nothing fancy, you can go from zero to fully-functioning system WITH your basic software already installed in 23 minutes, judging from my last install of Ubuntu (see sig). That, my friend, is frickin' sweet. But it still isn't there yet, and I don't think it will be until there's better hardware and software dev support.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Linux succeed, but I just don't think it will. Maybe if it gets a really strong foothold in China and/or India, they'll take it with them to the economic top and we'll all just follow. But the West runs Windows, and we're on top right now, so I don't see it changing anytime soon.
Yeah, but watch what the people who do have mod points do to me! I should chart my mod points, because I think I'm noticing a direct correlation between having them and saying good things about Linux. Most of the time I'm trying to temper people's enthusiasm about it with observations of the non-IT world, which is most of it, and that means major mod backlash. But whatever.
I, too, see no compelling reason to go to Vista. I actually am moving away from XP and to OSX. My new Mac Pro should be here this morning, in fact. The fact I can still run Windows under Fusion or boot into it with Boot Camp means I don't actually have to choose anymore. And OSX runs really nicely. I've been delighted with my little MacBook.
But if I were staying on Windows, yeah, XP is still the OS to stay with. It works pretty damned well.
Yeah, I don't know what happened with X11 in Leopard. I actually rely pretty heavily on Inkscape for some of the stuff I do, and I can't seem to get it to run since I went to Leopard. I have been running it under Windows in Fusion.
It's true what you say about free software, though. I have bought a lot of shareware. It's great stuff, but it's not free.
Yeah, the sleep/wake thing sold it almost immediately for me. Close the lid, walk away. Come back, open it, battery is only very slightly less, and it starts up as soon as it's open. It has made me so much more productive. The computer is ready when I am.
Thanks! I am hoping to give it a whirl with my next article.
That's interesting (and I'm not even being facetious!) because until someone around here mentioned it awhile back, I had never heard of it. Ever. I still haven't, aside from around here. And I'm still not sure how it's any different from using styles in Word.
And, um, I'm an academic and a researcher. Not in engineering or hard science, mind you, so that might be the difference. And I don't know any post-grad engineering or science types. Probably because they can actually put bread on the table with their bachelors', whereas people like me have to get a master's before that happens (applied linguistics)!
It is, however, downloaded and on my list of things to figure out; don't worry.
But seriously... I can't find anyone who has ever heard of it, and some of the people I've showed it to have PhDs in things like cognitive psychology... If it's as great as people say, I'm inclined to think that our colleagues in the buildings next door have just plain been holding out on us!
Actually, Slashdot has been great of late for this kind of interdisciplinary cross-pollination. I've switched to Keynote on a Mac for technical (testing) presentations on the recommendation of a couple materials science researchers who turned me onto it here, and they were absolutely right about that.
I don't really think so. I'm seeing a lot of people moving to the Mac (full disclosure: I did, and I can't believe I'm saying that).
You're still pretty heavily in the IT industry there, though. The point I make endlessly at Slashdot is that most people aren't in IT.
For me, ALL of the software I need to do my research is Windows-only. But that hasn't stopped me from just running it under virtualization with VMware Fusion on the Mac. I picked up a Mac laptop last summer just kind of out of curiosity, and have been stunned at how good it is at getting things done, now that they are on Intel and I can run Windows (or Linux!) apps in virtualization with, to me, no noticeable performance hit.
Oh, puh-leeze. Here we go:
Lets take first the OS, ranging from $50-$300, even if you buy it OEM you will still pay the approximately $50 it costs for the OEM Windows, not to mention all the time taking off all the crapware they install on new PCs.
Windows comes free with your eMachine or whatever, and then, yeah, you or I would take all that crap off, but most people don't. If you're building, the price is something like $134 with your floppy drive or something for the OEM disc. And that's only if you're going legit, which I'll admit I didn't do for many, many years. It's free if you use a cracked copy you get from a friend, or a volume license you get from work, etc. Who pays $300?
Now, because we don't want your Windows box to become part of a botnet, you install an antivirus/anti-spyware that costs around $40.
--Or you use Norton for a year for free, because it comes with your terrible eMachine. Or, if you have a clue, you use AVG or Avast for free. Oh, and you don't even really have to do this; just don't be an idiot. I have never gotten a virus, ever. The only people I've ever known to have gotten one are people who click on executables in gibberish mail.
Of course while your at it you need to install MS Office, around $150.
Um, no, you could use OO.o if you have nothing important to do, and it'll serve you well. Or you could get a cracked copy, or a copy from work, or a student copy or a million other kinds of copy. If you need/want MS Office, then you might actually buy it, but the only reason you don't have to do this on Linux is that it's not even available. Way to spin a major drawback of Linux as a money saver: "No one makes anything you want or need for it, so think of all the money you'll save!"
Now assuming you need a dual-core PC with 2 gigs of RAM to run Vista properly, that costs around $450 without monitor and such.
So this person previously didn't even have a computer? I thought we were comparing software prices! You can't bundle the hardware platform into the software cost, and you don't actually need that much horsepower to run Vista... Hell, you don't even need Vista! The only people running Vista are those who just bought a new computer anyway!
A far cry from the $200 gPC, so with your $300 of time and effort spent learning Linux you have spent $500 compared to the $690 with the MS solution.
Okay, first off, comparing a decent computer (the one you have running Vista) to a piece of garbage like the gPC is just plain not fair. Let's keep them on the same hardware.
Now let's check that MS total, with my corrected figures: $450 - $734, versus $450 for Linux.
Oh, but the former high end also includes the world industry standard office suite and the latter would if it could, but it can't, so let's put OO.o on both of them: $450 - $584 vs. $450.
Now let's add the (let's admit, totally arbitrary, but you seemed to run with it, so I guess I will too) cost of learning Linux. Now our Linux machine, running on the same hardware, is $750! Yikes! That's more than the Vista machine with the only office suite that matters!
And honestly, how much money do you think it would cost to learn Office 2007/Vista? I would expect a lot more and it comes without the assurance that it won't get discontinued and you have to learn Office 2009/Windows 7 within 3 years and of course pay more.
Well, here's where MS Office and Windows kind have Linux beat (fair or not): Everyone already knows how to use them. OO.o and Linux have a learning curve; Office and Windows don't. Not for most people, anyway.
Learning Linux is an investment, and not a hard one at that.
An investment in what, pray tell? How do I leverage my ability to make Ubuntu work almost as well as Windows 98, minus all the industry-standard software even avai
...Until they have to write their master's thesis with tons of tables, a dynamic table of contents, and more formatting sections than you can shake 116 pages of stick at...
At least, that's what un-converted me. OO.o is damn nice for the money, and you can bang out a basic paper on it, but it really falls down when you try to do anything terribly complex with it (for example, tables--which are a hassle in OO.o--rarely format right in .doc, which is what your adviser/supervisor uses).
Ubuntu's a LOT, LOT, LOT, LOT, LOT better, but it's eventually just more of the same. Your software still won't work; you'll still have to try a bunch of bizarre crap, and your wireless will never work.
Linux (on the desktop, anyway) is a toy for geeks who like futzing with conf files. And that's all it will ever, ever, ever be.
If you want out of the Windows nonsense, but want a computer that still works, just do what I've done in the last year: Get a new Intel-based Mac and run OSX with VMware Fusion for everyday stuff you still need out of Windows, and boot into Windows with Boot Camp for games. It's been painless, and hopping out to a real UNIX terminal is damned nice sometimes.
I'm sorry to point this out to you, when everyone else is doing the same thing, but his point is simply that the software people need to do their jobs does not exist on Linux. It doesn't for web developers, it doesn't for me, it doesn't for anyone I know except for the woman who writes server code on and for Linux.
Best post ever. Lately, I've just been kind of basking in the joys provided me by cheap oil: my computers, my video games, bananas in Japan. I don't expect any of these things to last. I wish I could muster the optimism some people seem to have about our ability to change things, but I don't think it's possible. I think we're at the apex before another Dark Age. It's gonna be a scary ride down, but for now, I'm all for listening to the fiddles while nature, human and otherwise, lays the kindling beneath our new Rome...
Um. I use a Mac primarily, but I really prefer Firefox to look like Firefox, regardless of the platform. I wish MS Office would look like MS Office as well; it's very frustrating.
Over here in Japan, 3G is exorbitantly priced and you pay by the packet for network connectivity. I don't touch the browser button on my phone anymore because the last time I did I payed 2300 yen (about USD 20) to read an MSNBC article. Ability to hook up to a PC, if possible, is completely unadvertised. And I pay about USD 70/mo.
The only benefit I can find to having a 3G phone in Japan is that it's the only way to get a GSM phone that works in any country (Japan is mostly CDMA). That's exorbitantly priced as well, of course, but nice to have if someone needs to talk to you when you're at a conference or something.
That being said, my building FINALLY got "wired" for fiber-optic (been waiting 3 years), and for less than 4000 yen/mo I have 83Mbit down and 8Mbit up!
I am a HUGE NIN fan. Huge. Like most NIN fans, I'm getting older, but even so, I still try to hit at least one show per tour (usually more), and have basically everything Trent has done.
But here's the thing. NIN is a well-known, well-loved band with a rabid fanbase. Would I pay $5 for a new NIN album? Yes yes yes. Probably more as a "tip" for all the years of what I consider great and powerful and beautiful music. I'm excited to see what he does with his new unsigned status.
This does not extend to his buddy Saul's project. I bought it because I want to support the model, but come on. No one who is fond of Trent Reznor has any idea who this Saul Williams character is, probably doesn't like rap (or whatever it is Saul does... it's a mess), and probably thinks that The Inevitable Rise of Niggy Tardust is the stupidest and most derivative album name ever (because it is). Furthermore, despite the fact that I paid the $5 for it, I have probably cost him many sales because I've told everyone how awful and retarded the album is. And I'm not alone. Look around online; there are very few good things written about it, because it is unlistenable.
So it's not about the failure of the model or how people are bad. It's about how the album is bad. The first NIN album Trent releases is going to make the guy a mint. But if I did it, I'd go in the red. No one knows who I am.
And that, my friends, is why we shouldn't be so quick to ditch the label model.
Indeed. There's nothing worse to an al-Qaeda type than a sane and prosperous Arab Muslim state. Countries like the UAE show that Islam is not the culprit; idiots and assholes are. As usual.
Um. I teach university in Japan. The other day I found myself explaining how an internal-combustion engine works in class, because they had no idea. None. They were fascinated at the arcane knowledge I had acquired in 6th grade in the US.
I can't even begin to imagine that they know anything about first aid.
After many years here in Japan, I've come to realize that my "Western education" --whatever that means-- is pretty damned good. If you're going to elicit some sort of "Western vs. something-else" comparison, at least provide a counter-example. Oh, and you'll probably have to leave out the 2nd most-developed nation in the world...