I'll make sure to let our Linux support lead know. He's been bashing his head against a wall trying to get SimpleScalar to compile on our systems for a class to use.
If your Linux support lead has basic Linux/Unix skills then I would recommend the following site . A quick Google will give you 28,000+ results.
The only shortcomings I have come across is my dependence upon Photoshop (yes, I now run PS in wine)
I actually hear this allot however I would normally reply "Use the GIMP" which IMHO is just as good as Photoshop. Unfortunately you mentioned you are dependent on Photoshop and run it under WINE so my reply to you would be to stick with what you are familiar with since trying to move to the GIMP has a fairly steep learning curve although the basics are very easy to learn, sort of like Photoshop:)
For someone who has never used Photoshop or the GIMP the learning curve is about the same to get the appropriate job done. Of course the biggest advantage of the GIMP over Photoshop is the GIMP is free while Photoshop is not unless you join the "Green/Red parrot brigade" and pretty much everything else is IMHO nitpicking.
Of course! This makes perfect sense, especially when many new computers are shipping without optical drives!
You know that you can boot into an OS from a USB key and install or run appropriate software. I have not used CD's, DVD's or BD's for that matter to install software for over 4 years now. Of course if you have a locked down device that has no input peripherals then you are definitely at the mercy of the vendor.
I still do not understand why HP keeps Linux support hidden from us savvy shoppers
I could not agree more, it's almost if the company is embarrassed by this and I used to work for HP at one stage, however I never had any issues with printing from a Linux machine via CUPS and that includes low and high end printers, colour and black and white, so I always recommend HP printers although I would think that most brands would work as well.
Normally when adding a new printer to CUPS under Linux I let the software download the correct drivers and from personal experience all the important printing features just work. I have found that HP printers have a very good web interface that allow you scan or fax (if supported by the printer) and since Linux has support for many web browsers the controlling and extracting info from or even too a printer is intuitive and simple to do.
The right question is are commercial printer drivers going to make it to linux?
Normally when I see this the first thing I think if is "Troll" or "The 1990's has called and want their FUD back", so I won't reply to the AC on this.
I consult with a variety of different IT firms and have never yet seen a printer I cannot connect and print to from my pure Linux (Fedora 17 now) machine. In fact I have actually found that most printers are easier to setup from Linux than from MS Windows (I can hear the screams form the Microsoft appolgists now). I think that the Trolls like to point out that not all the features of a particular printer may be available when using Linux however the so called extra features are normally never used and for admin purposes you need passwords to access them which most IT departments refuse to give. In fact most specialised access to printers can be done via a web browsers which Linux has in abundance.
I totally agree with your statement that HP, Oki and Brother are well supported however I have also used Lexmark and Cannon Laser printers that work as well. IMHO "Ink Spitters" are horrendously expensive from a perspective of consumables but if you only print on average 10 to 30 pages a month on a home printer then it makes sense however I have found that generic compatible inks are the cheapest way to go. For companies laser printers are the best way and in some cases band or drum printers may be appropriate. All I have found work with CUP's on Linux/Unix.
With Linux, you get maybe 6 months of grace, before the new version comes. Will your dev continue to support your version? Will he support the next one? Did he even decide to support RedHat/Fedora, or did they just go with Ubuntu?
Wrong!
I will agree with you on Fedora however Redhat supports a Redhat distribution over 7 years (has done this for quite a few years now) and 9 if you require and are willing to pay extra for the additional 2 years.
Its a fair bet that if they say "supports linux" that youll get some kind of script that will probably work, but on occasion it just doesnt, leading to more fun chases figuring out what library is missing or what dependency is unfilled....
Saying that does not mean anything. If you download something from a site then you are taking a chance even if you are using MS Windows or OSX or Linux. For Linux the best way to download and install a package is to use a package manager be it yum, apt-get or a GUI implementation of them. Of course if the relevant repositories don't have what you want then you are welcome to download from a different site but don't expect it to work properly.
In fact if you download say an rpm or deb package you can tell your package manager to install that package and the package manager will actually go out on the internet and install the appropriate libraries for you. Of course if that does not work then you need to get your repository list updated and if that does not work don't install that package.
I am sorry, but if you want people to try your stuff, you need to provide the assurance of a way back to what they had before installing your stuff.
Red Hat doesn't provide a backup/restore utility?
Of course backup/restore was available. But that assumes that nothing else changed in the meantime. Using a system level backup/restore is the classic sledgehammer/nut issue.
Providing no way back using the package management tools is epic FAIL.
You were going to put a different Graphical Desktop on a Redhat OS and you did not do a simple backup or even a snapshot (takes approx 15 minutes for the system disk and recovery is just as fast) you have to be kidding:)
My wife loves the solitare game under KDE. It's called "kpat" for those who want to use the command line or just select it from the GUI menu under Games:)
Have you ever done a System Restore under MS Windows? It takes forever and that is assuming you actually created a system restore disk. Of course the same can be said for Linux if you don't backup how can you restore your system? BTW saying MS Windows has a basic system restore feature is wrong since if you have a faulty system disk how do you think you can restore without a backup of some sort to another device? I won't deny you can do a snapshot of your MS Windows disk and recovery of that is easy however you can also snapshot a Linux distribution as well and recovery is just as easy.
While I personally don't like Ubuntu I have no issue with those that do, however I am quite amazed that an update to Ubuntu caused a problem. I have been running Fedora for well over 5 years with Centos and Redhat 6 years prior to that and never had any major issues with updates. I have seen problems were a new Fedora kernel had some issues however that was quickly resolved by selecting an earlier kernel on boot-up.
Oh there is a standard desktop for Linux;) Its called Ubuntu.
Ububtu is a distribution and not necessarily a Desktop. I prefer Fedora with KDE although I can use Gnome (Ugg!) or Xfce if I desire.
I think I need to ask the following "WTF is a standard desktop" for any OS? Having asked this I will now sit back and munch on popcorn since every person will have a different answer, although I think the simplest answer is "The desktop that does everything I require" and that leads into other questions. Oh the humanity:)
You can add VirtualBox to that list. You need to rebuild its kernel modules after an update. Supposedly it uses DKMS, but it seems like every time I upgrade my kernel I need to manually rebuild the Virtualbox drivers before it will work again.
Are you sure you have Dynamic Kernel Module Support "dkms" installed? When I get a kernel update and reboot "dkms" makes all the appropriate changes for "VirtualBox" to run. Of course you can manually run "dkms" if you wish and I do this when I get a new version of "VirtualBox" but no new kernel.
As for the person ranting on how he has issues with VMWare I sort of agree with him, however that is not a fault with the kernel it is a fault with VMWare and that is why I run "VirtualBox" for testing Linux distributions and Solaris on Intel.
So you just turned supporting "Linux" into supporting Ubuntu, RedHat, SuSE, etc.
Unfortunately, that happened a long time ago, and that is a major reason why Linux never really took off as a replacement for windows.
No the so called "Microsoft Tax" is the reason why Linux has difficulty replacing MS Windows because most PC's come with MS Windows pre-installed. Considering that most people would have no idea how to install a distribution of Linux or even a Microsoft OS anyway so they stick to the one that is already installed which, particularly in first world countries that is a Microsoft OS.
My experience was that 5.25" floppies were really reliable
From personal experience I would have to mostly agree (I have seen embarrassing failures) however there is nothing worse than some clueless git using them as a coaster or worse spilling their coffee on them. I have even seen people fold them and don't ask what a hot summers day can do to one. The 3.5" floppies mainly stopped the coaster issue but it still did not stop abuse.
To this day I don't fully understand why tape is so much more reliable than floppies.
Are there still people today that use floppies?:)
Basically for any professional backup service tapes are always the best and this is still the case today. Even back in the early 1980's any decent system admin would never consider using floppies for system and data backups since they had limited capacity and weren't that reliable. Of course floppies were relatively cheap in comparison to tapes however when you consider a 1.2MB 3.5" floppy (I have seen 10" floppies) verses a 100MB plus reel to reel tape and later cartridges (current LTO tapes have capacities of over 1.5TB) it makes much more sense to use magnetic tape since it is easier to store them on or off site than something like a floppy, CD, DVD, BD or even a hard disk.
Today it must be noted that if you have a PC and want to back that up the cheapest way is to use one or more external hard disks since you can get these relatively cheaply with capacities up to 3TB.
For many businesses DLT and LTO tape cartridges are still the best backup media, however a total solution must be put in place and this may not be cheap. Two of the first questions I always ask companies that are contemplating a backup solution for their business are "What price do you put on your data" and "How long can an outage for recovery purposes take before it impacts the business". There are plenty of other questions to ask but those two are a good start.
Have you ever read a patent? If you haven't and want to please make sure you have plenty of headache tablets available. The problem with many patents and not just software patents is they are written for the legal profession and don't really make allot of sense to a person who normally would have the capacity to understand how to duplicate what the patent is describing. From some patents I have read they appear to be basically a rewording on patents that should have expired years ago or written in such a vague way that they are open to interpretation by the legal profession of course.
From the Wiki on patents. "In modern usage, the term patent usually refers to the right granted to anyone who invents any new, useful, and non-obvious process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter". I can imagine the field day lawyers would have on the wording of this..
Remind me, how do these patents benefit the public again?
Well they do give the legal profession associated with patents a lucrative income. I suppose "pig's at a trough" (apologies to the pig) come to mind, but as for benefiting the the public, err no!:)
Give the product away to home users, because if they use it at home, they'll want it at work.
The problem you have here is most people have no idea how to install an OS be it Linux or MS Windows. What happens now and I suppose in the future you will still have to pay for a Microsoft License (the article states this) however there is no pricing yet. Haven't we hear this one before?
Most people when they purchase a PC normally have the OS (ie MS Windows) installed and I cannot see that changing fairly soon. For the do it yourself group not that many care about purchasing a Licensed copy of MS Widows so it would be business as usual. What scares Microsoft is the fact that their core software is now under threat from alternative sources since it is starting to become a requirement to have all saved information in a format that is fully documented and open. This makes it easy to port a particular format between products that have similar functionality but different vendors. as an example LibreOffice verses Microsoft Office.
Personally I have been running native Linux PC's at home and at work for over four year now and have never had issues with compatibility.
The problem with a dual boot between OSF and Ubuntu is exactly the same as between MS Windows and a Linux distribution, the owner will eventually go back to the OS they find more convient for them to use and the second OS is normally forgotton or booted up for braging rights. I normally find it is best to chose the OS you are comfortable with as the only OS you boot on the hardware and any other OS's that you may need for testing or required purposes run under a virtual machine. Once you do this you would never go back to dual booting especially since you only have to backup one OS.
Why in the world would you even try to do it? What is the goal of this endeavour?
I think the short answer is "because I want to".
Basically a MAC is more expensive than a standard PC however that won't stop people buying them especially since the OS "just works" and the Apple hardware is IMHO very much more professional looking and of course you can't forget the bragging rights. But putting Linux on the Apple hardware "why bother" unless you either get someone to do it or you have enough smarts to do it yourself.
I can understand someone requiring a high res monitor and Apple monitors are very good however before commiting myself to purchasing one I would do some home-work first, in fact I would do some research before buying a personal comuter. From my perspective a reasonable PC (Intel/AMD) is fine for me and does everything I require especially since I use my laptop (native Linux OS - no dual boot) in a profesional capacity as well as for home use.
Apple like many software/hardware companies has patents and those patents are there for the world to see. If a so called patent is secret then it is not a patent and should not be defensible unless you can prove industrial espionage. All patents should be able to be understood by peers who normally are people who are equal in such respects as age, education or social class... etc who with the right tools are able to implement that patent. In the case of software patents the right tools are the human mind and a computer with the appropriate development software, which begs me to wonder how software can be patentable - oh wait! see my "pig" comment below.
The problem with many patents today IMHO is that they are written in "legalese" to such an extent that it takes a lawyer to interpret it though not understand it and a "peer" to implement it after reading the lawyer's so called correct interpretation of it. Many patents are also so broad and vague that most "peers" would start to get a migraine after reading a few lines, so it's no wonder that lawyers are having a field day (think "pigs in a trough" - my apology to pigs) when patents are litigated. Of course it also helps the person/group who are defending the patent(s) if the judge and jury consists of people who are not what I would call "peers".
Want to see patent stupidity, then go to your nearest hardware store and count the number of "Patent Pending" on tools that many would view as obvious.
The corporate desktop is still dominated by Windows XP Professional. So it's often a case of Windows by day, Linux at home.
Maybe in the places you have worked but for me and I have worked for some very large companies MS Windows 7 is standard. I have even seen the dreaded "Blue Screen of Death" on MS Widows 7 OS's on quite a few occasions. I have been using Fedora for well over four years in a professional capacity and at home and have never really had any issues working with colleagues who are using MS Windows and MS Office. Actually most of the time I use KDE although when KDE 4.0 came out I had to jump ship to Gnome for about 3 months until KDE became more stable.
Eclipse/Netbeans, Firefox, Gimp (simple image editing), Geany (no vi/emacs wars please). Thunderbird and Libreoffice not so much because most businesses depend on MS Office.
Eclipse/Netbeans - I don't do Java programming so I cannot comment. Firefox is Firefox no-matter if you are running Linux or MS Windows. As for the Gimp you could use it for simple image editing however I have found that the Gimp is just as professional for image processing as Photoshop (OK to be fair Photoshop may just have the edge) and you can even install it on MS Windows, the only differences are the Gimp is free and Photoshop is not. Thunderbird is fine if you want a reasonably good mail front end although I prefer Kmail and both will work with MS Exchange contrary to what some misinformed admins say. Libreoffice which I use keeps getting better and integrates well with MS Office.
When the CEO makes 200 million and the employees make minimum wage, then something is wrong.
You are ideally right. However the CEO of a company is more interested in having the company he/she represents make money since most companies are responsible to their shareholders and shareholders like to see a return on their investment otherwise they will invest elsewhere. Yes this may not be nice for the employees particularly those on a minimum wage when the CEO is making a huge amount of money in salary, shares and other benefits but that is how capitalism works.
You could go the other way and have a collective/communist system but you still have people at the top earning massive benefits while those at the bottom earn (if they are lucky) a minimum wage. At least with capitalism a worker has a better chance to leave his employment and take up employment elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with their pay. Of course that may be easier said than done.
This is why when you download a major distribution of Linux you will not find "libdvdcss" installed since the distributors of the distribution particularly any company such as Redhat or Novel which are based in the USA would be sued by the appropriate agencies.
What surprised me from the article was the following:
Among other things this law makes illegal all the Linux distributions which come pre-installed with libdvdcss like BackTrack, CrunchBang Linux, LinuxMCE, Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS, Puppy Linux 4.2.1, Recovery Is Possible, Slax, Super OS, Pardus, and XBMC Live.
The above distributions appear that they like to live dangerously by pre-installing "libdvdcss" when a little bit of web searching will tell the installer of the particular distribution how to install the appropriate DRM defeating libraries and software ether by "apt-get" or "yum". Of course if you are a MS Windows user you can also install the appropriate libraries and capture/ripping software from an appropriate web site.
You do realize that I can't tell you what to put in your web search string to find the appropriate read-me/how-to information pertaining to the above since that could be considered aiding people to pirate DVD's or other audio/video media.:)
How come when I tried to install Ubuntu 12 on my laptop, it went khaka? I know my laptop only has 384 megabytes, but ubuntu.com says I only need 256. Maybe the CPU is too slow (P3 at ~700 MHz).
It ran better than Vista but not by much. It also failed to let me install Flash Player or Google Chome. Kept saying something about "missing installation file".
Amazing a laptop with 384 MB of RAM and what is even more amazing is you could run Vista on it:)
One of my laptops (dual core, 2GB memory and originally had MS Vista) is over four years old and it runs Fedora 17 with KDE as my display manager and I didn't have any issue installing Flash player, Google Chrome and even VLC 2 which plays 10bit codecs. Ok it does run a bit slow if I try to do video editing/translation.
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I'll make sure to let our Linux support lead know. He's been bashing his head against a wall trying to get SimpleScalar to compile on our systems for a class to use.
If your Linux support lead has basic Linux/Unix skills then I would recommend the following site . A quick Google will give you 28,000+ results.
The only shortcomings I have come across is my dependence upon Photoshop (yes, I now run PS in wine)
I actually hear this allot however I would normally reply "Use the GIMP" which IMHO is just as good as Photoshop. Unfortunately you mentioned you are dependent on Photoshop and run it under WINE so my reply to you would be to stick with what you are familiar with since trying to move to the GIMP has a fairly steep learning curve although the basics are very easy to learn, sort of like Photoshop :)
For someone who has never used Photoshop or the GIMP the learning curve is about the same to get the appropriate job done. Of course the biggest advantage of the GIMP over Photoshop is the GIMP is free while Photoshop is not unless you join the "Green/Red parrot brigade" and pretty much everything else is IMHO nitpicking.
Of course! This makes perfect sense, especially when many new computers are shipping without optical drives!
You know that you can boot into an OS from a USB key and install or run appropriate software. I have not used CD's, DVD's or BD's for that matter to install software for over 4 years now. Of course if you have a locked down device that has no input peripherals then you are definitely at the mercy of the vendor.
I still do not understand why HP keeps Linux support hidden from us savvy shoppers
I could not agree more, it's almost if the company is embarrassed by this and I used to work for HP at one stage, however I never had any issues with printing from a Linux machine via CUPS and that includes low and high end printers, colour and black and white, so I always recommend HP printers although I would think that most brands would work as well.
Normally when adding a new printer to CUPS under Linux I let the software download the correct drivers and from personal experience all the important printing features just work. I have found that HP printers have a very good web interface that allow you scan or fax (if supported by the printer) and since Linux has support for many web browsers the controlling and extracting info from or even too a printer is intuitive and simple to do.
The right question is are commercial printer drivers going to make it to linux?
Normally when I see this the first thing I think if is "Troll" or "The 1990's has called and want their FUD back", so I won't reply to the AC on this.
I consult with a variety of different IT firms and have never yet seen a printer I cannot connect and print to from my pure Linux (Fedora 17 now) machine. In fact I have actually found that most printers are easier to setup from Linux than from MS Windows (I can hear the screams form the Microsoft appolgists now). I think that the Trolls like to point out that not all the features of a particular printer may be available when using Linux however the so called extra features are normally never used and for admin purposes you need passwords to access them which most IT departments refuse to give. In fact most specialised access to printers can be done via a web browsers which Linux has in abundance.
I totally agree with your statement that HP, Oki and Brother are well supported however I have also used Lexmark and Cannon Laser printers that work as well. IMHO "Ink Spitters" are horrendously expensive from a perspective of consumables but if you only print on average 10 to 30 pages a month on a home printer then it makes sense however I have found that generic compatible inks are the cheapest way to go. For companies laser printers are the best way and in some cases band or drum printers may be appropriate. All I have found work with CUP's on Linux/Unix.
Can me an Xbox fanboy if you like
Ok show me an Xbox fanboy and I think with allot of pressure we can squeeze him into a can, however it may be a bit painful :)
With Linux, you get maybe 6 months of grace, before the new version comes. Will your dev continue to support your version? Will he support the next one? Did he even decide to support RedHat/Fedora, or did they just go with Ubuntu?
Wrong! I will agree with you on Fedora however Redhat supports a Redhat distribution over 7 years (has done this for quite a few years now) and 9 if you require and are willing to pay extra for the additional 2 years.
Its a fair bet that if they say "supports linux" that youll get some kind of script that will probably work, but on occasion it just doesnt, leading to more fun chases figuring out what library is missing or what dependency is unfilled....
Saying that does not mean anything. If you download something from a site then you are taking a chance even if you are using MS Windows or OSX or Linux. For Linux the best way to download and install a package is to use a package manager be it yum, apt-get or a GUI implementation of them. Of course if the relevant repositories don't have what you want then you are welcome to download from a different site but don't expect it to work properly.
In fact if you download say an rpm or deb package you can tell your package manager to install that package and the package manager will actually go out on the internet and install the appropriate libraries for you. Of course if that does not work then you need to get your repository list updated and if that does not work don't install that package.
Of course backup/restore was available. But that assumes that nothing else changed in the meantime. Using a system level backup/restore is the classic sledgehammer/nut issue. Providing no way back using the package management tools is epic FAIL.
You were going to put a different Graphical Desktop on a Redhat OS and you did not do a simple backup or even a snapshot (takes approx 15 minutes for the system disk and recovery is just as fast) you have to be kidding :)
My wife loves the solitare game under KDE. It's called "kpat" for those who want to use the command line or just select it from the GUI menu under Games :)
Have you ever done a System Restore under MS Windows? It takes forever and that is assuming you actually created a system restore disk. Of course the same can be said for Linux if you don't backup how can you restore your system? BTW saying MS Windows has a basic system restore feature is wrong since if you have a faulty system disk how do you think you can restore without a backup of some sort to another device? I won't deny you can do a snapshot of your MS Windows disk and recovery of that is easy however you can also snapshot a Linux distribution as well and recovery is just as easy.
While I personally don't like Ubuntu I have no issue with those that do, however I am quite amazed that an update to Ubuntu caused a problem. I have been running Fedora for well over 5 years with Centos and Redhat 6 years prior to that and never had any major issues with updates. I have seen problems were a new Fedora kernel had some issues however that was quickly resolved by selecting an earlier kernel on boot-up.
Oh there is a standard desktop for Linux ;) Its called Ubuntu.
Ububtu is a distribution and not necessarily a Desktop. I prefer Fedora with KDE although I can use Gnome (Ugg!) or Xfce if I desire.
:)
I think I need to ask the following "WTF is a standard desktop" for any OS? Having asked this I will now sit back and munch on popcorn since every person will have a different answer, although I think the simplest answer is "The desktop that does everything I require" and that leads into other questions. Oh the humanity
You can add VirtualBox to that list. You need to rebuild its kernel modules after an update. Supposedly it uses DKMS, but it seems like every time I upgrade my kernel I need to manually rebuild the Virtualbox drivers before it will work again.
Are you sure you have Dynamic Kernel Module Support "dkms" installed? When I get a kernel update and reboot "dkms" makes all the appropriate changes for "VirtualBox" to run. Of course you can manually run "dkms" if you wish and I do this when I get a new version of "VirtualBox" but no new kernel.
As for the person ranting on how he has issues with VMWare I sort of agree with him, however that is not a fault with the kernel it is a fault with VMWare and that is why I run "VirtualBox" for testing Linux distributions and Solaris on Intel.
So you just turned supporting "Linux" into supporting Ubuntu, RedHat, SuSE, etc.
Unfortunately, that happened a long time ago, and that is a major reason why Linux never really took off as a replacement for windows.
No the so called "Microsoft Tax" is the reason why Linux has difficulty replacing MS Windows because most PC's come with MS Windows pre-installed. Considering that most people would have no idea how to install a distribution of Linux or even a Microsoft OS anyway so they stick to the one that is already installed which, particularly in first world countries that is a Microsoft OS.
My experience was that 5.25" floppies were really reliable
From personal experience I would have to mostly agree (I have seen embarrassing failures) however there is nothing worse than some clueless git using them as a coaster or worse spilling their coffee on them. I have even seen people fold them and don't ask what a hot summers day can do to one. The 3.5" floppies mainly stopped the coaster issue but it still did not stop abuse.
To this day I don't fully understand why tape is so much more reliable than floppies.
Are there still people today that use floppies? :)
Basically for any professional backup service tapes are always the best and this is still the case today. Even back in the early 1980's any decent system admin would never consider using floppies for system and data backups since they had limited capacity and weren't that reliable. Of course floppies were relatively cheap in comparison to tapes however when you consider a 1.2MB 3.5" floppy (I have seen 10" floppies) verses a 100MB plus reel to reel tape and later cartridges (current LTO tapes have capacities of over 1.5TB) it makes much more sense to use magnetic tape since it is easier to store them on or off site than something like a floppy, CD, DVD, BD or even a hard disk.
Today it must be noted that if you have a PC and want to back that up the cheapest way is to use one or more external hard disks since you can get these relatively cheaply with capacities up to 3TB.
For many businesses DLT and LTO tape cartridges are still the best backup media, however a total solution must be put in place and this may not be cheap. Two of the first questions I always ask companies that are contemplating a backup solution for their business are "What price do you put on your data" and "How long can an outage for recovery purposes take before it impacts the business". There are plenty of other questions to ask but those two are a good start.
Have you ever read a patent? If you haven't and want to please make sure you have plenty of headache tablets available. The problem with many patents and not just software patents is they are written for the legal profession and don't really make allot of sense to a person who normally would have the capacity to understand how to duplicate what the patent is describing. From some patents I have read they appear to be basically a rewording on patents that should have expired years ago or written in such a vague way that they are open to interpretation by the legal profession of course.
From the Wiki on patents. "In modern usage, the term patent usually refers to the right granted to anyone who invents any new, useful, and non-obvious process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter". I can imagine the field day lawyers would have on the wording of this..
Remind me, how do these patents benefit the public again?
Well they do give the legal profession associated with patents a lucrative income. I suppose "pig's at a trough" (apologies to the pig) come to mind, but as for benefiting the the public, err no! :)
Give the product away to home users, because if they use it at home, they'll want it at work.
The problem you have here is most people have no idea how to install an OS be it Linux or MS Windows. What happens now and I suppose in the future you will still have to pay for a Microsoft License (the article states this) however there is no pricing yet. Haven't we hear this one before?
Most people when they purchase a PC normally have the OS (ie MS Windows) installed and I cannot see that changing fairly soon. For the do it yourself group not that many care about purchasing a Licensed copy of MS Widows so it would be business as usual. What scares Microsoft is the fact that their core software is now under threat from alternative sources since it is starting to become a requirement to have all saved information in a format that is fully documented and open. This makes it easy to port a particular format between products that have similar functionality but different vendors. as an example LibreOffice verses Microsoft Office.
Personally I have been running native Linux PC's at home and at work for over four year now and have never had issues with compatibility.
The problem with a dual boot between OSF and Ubuntu is exactly the same as between MS Windows and a Linux distribution, the owner will eventually go back to the OS they find more convient for them to use and the second OS is normally forgotton or booted up for braging rights. I normally find it is best to chose the OS you are comfortable with as the only OS you boot on the hardware and any other OS's that you may need for testing or required purposes run under a virtual machine. Once you do this you would never go back to dual booting especially since you only have to backup one OS.
Why in the world would you even try to do it? What is the goal of this endeavour?
I think the short answer is "because I want to".
Basically a MAC is more expensive than a standard PC however that won't stop people buying them especially since the OS "just works" and the Apple hardware is IMHO very much more professional looking and of course you can't forget the bragging rights. But putting Linux on the Apple hardware "why bother" unless you either get someone to do it or you have enough smarts to do it yourself.
I can understand someone requiring a high res monitor and Apple monitors are very good however before commiting myself to purchasing one I would do some home-work first, in fact I would do some research before buying a personal comuter. From my perspective a reasonable PC (Intel/AMD) is fine for me and does everything I require especially since I use my laptop (native Linux OS - no dual boot) in a profesional capacity as well as for home use.
Apple like many software/hardware companies has patents and those patents are there for the world to see. If a so called patent is secret then it is not a patent and should not be defensible unless you can prove industrial espionage. All patents should be able to be understood by peers who normally are people who are equal in such respects as age, education or social class ... etc who with the right tools are able to implement that patent. In the case of software patents the right tools are the human mind and a computer with the appropriate development software, which begs me to wonder how software can be patentable - oh wait! see my "pig" comment below.
The problem with many patents today IMHO is that they are written in "legalese" to such an extent that it takes a lawyer to interpret it though not understand it and a "peer" to implement it after reading the lawyer's so called correct interpretation of it. Many patents are also so broad and vague that most "peers" would start to get a migraine after reading a few lines, so it's no wonder that lawyers are having a field day (think "pigs in a trough" - my apology to pigs) when patents are litigated. Of course it also helps the person/group who are defending the patent(s) if the judge and jury consists of people who are not what I would call "peers".
Want to see patent stupidity, then go to your nearest hardware store and count the number of "Patent Pending" on tools that many would view as obvious.
The corporate desktop is still dominated by Windows XP Professional. So it's often a case of Windows by day, Linux at home.
Maybe in the places you have worked but for me and I have worked for some very large companies MS Windows 7 is standard. I have even seen the dreaded "Blue Screen of Death" on MS Widows 7 OS's on quite a few occasions. I have been using Fedora for well over four years in a professional capacity and at home and have never really had any issues working with colleagues who are using MS Windows and MS Office. Actually most of the time I use KDE although when KDE 4.0 came out I had to jump ship to Gnome for about 3 months until KDE became more stable.
Eclipse/Netbeans, Firefox, Gimp (simple image editing), Geany (no vi/emacs wars please). Thunderbird and Libreoffice not so much because most businesses depend on MS Office.
Eclipse/Netbeans - I don't do Java programming so I cannot comment. Firefox is Firefox no-matter if you are running Linux or MS Windows. As for the Gimp you could use it for simple image editing however I have found that the Gimp is just as professional for image processing as Photoshop (OK to be fair Photoshop may just have the edge) and you can even install it on MS Windows, the only differences are the Gimp is free and Photoshop is not. Thunderbird is fine if you want a reasonably good mail front end although I prefer Kmail and both will work with MS Exchange contrary to what some misinformed admins say. Libreoffice which I use keeps getting better and integrates well with MS Office.
When the CEO makes 200 million and the employees make minimum wage, then something is wrong.
You are ideally right. However the CEO of a company is more interested in having the company he/she represents make money since most companies are responsible to their shareholders and shareholders like to see a return on their investment otherwise they will invest elsewhere. Yes this may not be nice for the employees particularly those on a minimum wage when the CEO is making a huge amount of money in salary, shares and other benefits but that is how capitalism works.
You could go the other way and have a collective/communist system but you still have people at the top earning massive benefits while those at the bottom earn (if they are lucky) a minimum wage. At least with capitalism a worker has a better chance to leave his employment and take up employment elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with their pay. Of course that may be easier said than done.
What surprised me from the article was the following:
Among other things this law makes illegal all the Linux distributions which come pre-installed with libdvdcss like BackTrack, CrunchBang Linux, LinuxMCE, Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS, Puppy Linux 4.2.1, Recovery Is Possible, Slax, Super OS, Pardus, and XBMC Live.
The above distributions appear that they like to live dangerously by pre-installing "libdvdcss" when a little bit of web searching will tell the installer of the particular distribution how to install the appropriate DRM defeating libraries and software ether by "apt-get" or "yum". Of course if you are a MS Windows user you can also install the appropriate libraries and capture/ripping software from an appropriate web site.
:)
You do realize that I can't tell you what to put in your web search string to find the appropriate read-me/how-to information pertaining to the above since that could be considered aiding people to pirate DVD's or other audio/video media.
How come when I tried to install Ubuntu 12 on my laptop, it went khaka? I know my laptop only has 384 megabytes, but ubuntu.com says I only need 256. Maybe the CPU is too slow (P3 at ~700 MHz).
It ran better than Vista but not by much. It also failed to let me install Flash Player or Google Chome. Kept saying something about "missing installation file".
Amazing a laptop with 384 MB of RAM and what is even more amazing is you could run Vista on it :)
One of my laptops (dual core, 2GB memory and originally had MS Vista) is over four years old and it runs Fedora 17 with KDE as my display manager and I didn't have any issue installing Flash player, Google Chrome and even VLC 2 which plays 10bit codecs. Ok it does run a bit slow if I try to do video editing/translation.