LOL... Just who put you in charge of saying what is of utility or not in a society?
In the Capitalist system utility is determined by the consumer -- merit and utility are determined in a distributed fashion. If the decision is centralized, then society is made inefficient... and those people that are of genuine merit will find a place in a another society where their work (or their hard-earned capital) is valued -- and where they can be justly compensated...
You mention advertising as something "creating artificial needs" -- but... I think you have it upside down... Advertising is important to any society in the process of efficient dissemination and assimilation of new ideas. Advertisers serve to communicate the utility of an idea to the society, serve to differentiate an idea from competing ideas, and make the society more efficient both at determining the merit of an idea, and at assimilating the new idea. The person that can communicate, position an idea well against it's competitors and convince is highly valued and sought after. The reward for a successful new idea both to society and to the author of the idea can be substantial -- so too, the advertiser's worth.
You mention creating weapons as harmful -- but the production of weapons is a vital benefit to society. A society must have the means of protecting its interests against challengers from outside and of checking those attempting to subvert it from within. If there are no arms in the possession of the society (or will to use them in conflict), the same is at the mercy of its neighbor and from the strongest deviant from within.
So, I am definitely glad that the author of the previous post is not making my decisions for me about what is valuable to me. I am glad I live in a society where, for the most part, we are free to determine what is of utility to and for ourselves. I am equally glad that this society is equitable enough to pay me in accordance with my effort and value -- and that I can, for the most part, keep (and pass on to whom I chose) what I have earned. I'm also glad that I am free to participate in protecting both my family and my society by responsibly bearing arms.
Does the SW that you use need to be extended for your work environment? Do you need a key improvement in terms of speed or utility? If so, then write up a req. for consultant work to extend the SW for your purpose. Make certain that the original developer is contacted about the contract opportunity.
If the contract goes to another bidder, the work will still be a derivative of open source SW and the contractor must needs give you the source... Send the new extension's source to the author (if he's interested).
... Well, can't say that I agree with you about the union part -- it's pretty easy here to form a union & _very_ difficult to get it disbanded. From my experience, any company that is unionized deserves to be so. The better companies to work for are non-union & they are afraid of unionized labor... they will do great things to keep their employees happy & non-union.
But it is true, the US has looser labor laws than Europe... An advantage to this is that these make US companies generally more flexible than than their European counterparts. Companies can enforce rules that others don't that may or may not make them more efficient... and these companies are more or less successful for their policies. Look around you for the unionized companies versus non-union right now... which are the more profitable and nimble now?
However, the US is also an incredibly litigious culture now... and a devious employee could easily take advantage of the system for his own ends & extract an easy settlement for the right issue. US companies have come to be very defensive about their labor practices & especially large corporations don't want to do anything that will get them sued.
First, be the best programmer in your group. This will give you confidence, power & security you need to either take the boss aside and say, "With all due respect sir, shove it," or get a job elsewhere. Really, if you are efficient, and your quality is exceptional, there's nothing for him to worry about... unless he really is worried about something...
The boss aught to be someone who is either a stellar programmer, or the most politically astute in your group. If he is not the former, then chances are, he knows it. Either be his technical guy, or go talk with "the guy" in your group about this that he does trust.
So, If you know your boss is not an ass & you have some kind of rapport with him, try to find out what this is really all about... Ask him, for instance, if instead you can help him with code quality metrics & see what you guys are like WRT the rest of the industry. Maybe you guys really do suck! Maybe you guys have the appearance of sucking to the rest of the company? Maybe your manager is really desperate because his boss told him that his group's going to outsourced because the company can get a better deal in India or China? Find out what's really on his mind... If it's something like outsourcing... maybe you can come up with a better outsourcing plan that "evolves" your group and makes your top programmers the primary architects & the primary communicators with the SW and testing teams?
Lastly, There's always the possibility that your boss really is an ass. So, if your boss is an ass about this, he's probably being an ass about other things... Talk with your co-workers (especially the ones of the opposite sex), and then you're going to have to start getting political. (Be the friendly guy in the elevator that enjoys meeting new people when there's only one other person going up with you. Be that guy that whips up a quick sed or python script for someone outside his group.) DO NOT TALK WITH HR, but with a couple of senior staff friends outside your group. (Maybe they will share valuable things with you as well?) Both your rep. and the rep. of your boss _will_ filter to the right level & will get dealt with one way or another. In my career, I've had two directors (at two different companies) demoted this way; whereas, I was elevated in one way or another.
The first example that the author sites as an example of poor programming is "idiomatic" C for traversing a linked list. Also, if the author can't deal with pointers, he should not only avoid C, but also C++ and stick to Java or his beloved PHP and JavaScript. Siting that he found a standards document so flugly as GNU "helpful," doesn't help his argument.
First, learn C as C. Don't be scared, it's just like this "whole nother language" that's different from JavaScript. It can be used quite safely. If it couldn't, your beloved operating system of choice, that is likely written in C, just wouldn't work at all.
Second, draw your learning of the language not from standards documents, but by immersion in books like "The Practice of Programming." You will then find out that code like "for(ss = s->ss; ss; ss = ss->ss);" can be used without fear of misunderstanding because it is "idiomatic." People that know C will fully understand what it is doing. Writing a comment here is pointless and will degrade the readability of the code.
Third, add one further standards document to the list:
Whatever you're smoking, can I have some?
Really, with Gnome on Karmic, I have no problems with multiple windows. For switching between single (laptop) and multi-monitor, xrandr works great.
On one of the levels ("On Thin Ice" -- I think) you descend in a drop-ship. The aliens are in an enclosed valley, and I found a way of climbing my tank to the tip of the mountains over the valley, baited tanks about the alien factory, sniped them, and then destroyed the factory with grenade pack... then proceeded to clear the level, as much as possible with sniping. Ended up being more fun than the level itself.
Battlezone II was a game with so much potential -- but so poorly scripted. Still like to go back to it every so once in a while.
Ever hear of Fry's? They seem to be doing just fine with RadioShack's previous business model. The difference with the former is Quality, and big-box-like selection.
I thought of posting this separately, but I really wanted to echo sopssa. What you have is a "GOOD THING" at this school.
You are getting a well rounded education in concepts, like object orientation, functional programming, scripting, and sand-boxed virtual machines. You're also getting closer to the metal with C and Assembly (Preferably Intel Protected mode?) -- and that's very cool.
My avenue was the hobby route, but I never really spent my time on the net. I'm an engineer by trade, but I found myself gradually learning coding within my organization more and more. I chiefly program now in sed, python, C++, and VBA; but the mix changes on a periodic basis. I write standard libraries, and a lot of filters and scripts to automate much tedious work within my organization... I try to program so that whatever application I write can be run on any OS -- though some of my stuff lately works best on Linux. (Linux is OK, because people can log into the workstations from their Windows PC's). Cross-platform and Open is the way to go, because you never want to force your customer to disrupt his work-flow to use your tool, and you want your customer to be able to figure out what you're doing and take over support as much as possible.
So, with my scripts, a lot of people internally at my company have become my customers. This work has taken over much more of my job as my rep built... And now we do about an order of magnitude more work than we used to with a single engineer. The tedium of filling out spreadsheets or copying by hand is largely a thing of the past. So much work is being done so quickly that the vendors that we work with are getting very nervous that they will be able to keep up with what we are doing -- and with us us targeting multiple vendors in our work-flow they are very worried about competition.
One other thing I learned -- we can learn much from the "Old Ways." What a horrible, nasty, terse, poorly documented -- and absolutely wonderful gem -- sed is! How nicely does it fit in with the UNIX toolkit: regular expressions with VIM, grep, and find; and roughly stapling things together with xargs and bash! You learn one thing by doing another, and you become so much more productive. Recently, I had to do a remote debugging session over a slow link. There were 50 engineers in the room, and a tag-team of 3 driving the remote system. How nice it was to have VIM there -- hacking stuff with only a few keystrokes to select and change lines on the fly, rather than having to wait a minute to click and select via some GUI. We were extremely successful and productive. I got promoted because of this -- because I drove the creation of tools, and because I learned to become proficient in the "Old Ways."
Because you are not established within a company, you'll have to find another avenue to get yourself noticed, and you'll have to find another way to find your niche. I think that the best way for you to get noticed is to find some Open Source project on the net to dig your fingers into. You build your rep., and you find your niche -- find out what you like, and keep doing it. Let your direction change as you find out what your interests are. Keep learning new ways of doing things, and don't be afraid to experiment with crazy ideas. Make a positive contribution to how things are done -- make something better from the inside out.
I like this quote from Daniel Phillips (Tux3): "A weak coder becomes a strong coder by reading code and writing code every day for fun."
I think the article is more of the same from people that haven't actually spent the time to learn about Linux, and haven't seen what it can do for them. They're minds are trapped in a windows world, devoid of imagination. The comments of this article also seem to be obviously culled in the author's favor.
All I know is that when people come by my office, or watch me present, and have a chance at my Ubuntu install on my laptop -- every single person says "THAT'S COOL". From wobbly windows, transparency, 3D cube... to simple things like my theme, and the invariable query, "How did you get your wallpaper to span two monitors?" -- people wish that they had it.
Then the tech-savvy come by and see that I'm doing stuff with sed and text processing applications -- and running some windows binary-to/from-text filters with wine in the mix... that updates are just taken care of... that it's virus free... that new applications are available with the click of a radio button... and that I can _natively_ display X business critical applications on my desktop running on a remote server... That all the drivers for any hardware that I would want to install on my computer is likely already there and in place... They _all_ would rather scrap their current setup for something like what I have.
The chief problem though is fear. There's fear of messing something up royally, and fear of having to learn something new, and having to rely on something as nebulous as the WWW for their support (cause Darned if IT is going to support them doing this). There's also the fear of not being able to use a key application, interoperability, or of of finding something critical can't be done (like watching Netflix "Watch Instantly" movies).
The other problem is _3d_games_ -- and Windows has all but sewn up this market. Open Source Linux Video Graphics drivers are still not up to snuff, and neither are the proprietary drivers really good. If people can't get good frame rates in Linux, or they're going to have to jump through hoops to get their game of choice up and running on their (work) laptop, they're not going to want to use it. So Linux kernel infrastructure is improving here, and some HW vendors are gradually opening to the idea of Open Source drivers, but it will be a while before the gaming industry warms to the idea of supporting Linux as a platform.
Anyway, I've got one guy at work so far that has started to learn about his computer & has installed Ubuntu on his new laptop. My laptop is still dual-boot, but I haven't gone back to Windows for ~2 months at the very least... I can get everything I need to do done on my Linux workstation and more, and am/almost/ ready to dump windows completely.
So, from a guy that is actually using it, I am more than happy. I think that if the tech was packaged with PC's and there was a little bit more education out, or perhaps a better "safe mode" packaged with every install, that it should really be a no-brainer for grandma and the tech-savvy to be able to use.
A masters is almost necessary in any field today. In your "free time," do some open source work & distinguish yourself as a hacker. You spend your two years doing those two things, and you will be able to write your own ticket.
In any case, the economy is down; so, just do it -- it's a perfect opportunity, before you're married with kids and working 60 hour weeks...
My first expedition into Linux was in my quest to install it on my Chinese wife's PC... Hers was running a Chinese version of Windows 98... and I couldn't administer it. At the same time, at work I was using Solaris and Windows... and I wanted my own Unix Box. My hope was that one day I would be able to boot into Linux and administer the system in my language, and let her have her own language in her login. But in the process I wanted to/learn/ -- and I did.
In the end, I got her a Mac Mini -- still Unix and safer & easier to manage for me than Windows... And I got my Linux install on my work Laptop, that I use almost exclusively. And as a result of learning, I was able to do some really creative work at my job, & the work I did with that knowledge got me a promo.
My worst experience... a 36-hour debugging stint... On a production test floor in Taiwan.
0) I was the vendor, and the second source -- I had no respect.
1) It was a "clean room" -- so I had to dress in an (unwashed) bunny suit... it was rank.
2) This was in the center of a test floor -- the noise pressure level was constant and about the that of a buzz saw... it was noisy.
3) I had to communicate remotely with a colleague -- and audio was almost impossible even with headphones I had to shout sometimes to be heard and so did she... relationships were strained.
4) The remote connection was horribly slow & slowed down my local interface too... It was agonizingly slow.
5) The air vent was right under my feet. At least I was successful in moving the workstation a little ways away from the vent so that I could stay somewhat warm... It was cold.
6) After ~12 hours my colleague just gave up and went to bed. After she came back & started debugging remotely, I went and crashed in a vacant meeting room. I had to stack the chairs up to get a couple of hours... I had little sleep.
7) No coffee allowed on the test floor... It was inhumane.
So for all that we still couldn't get one of the key things we wanted to get done done... we left the job half done & I had to fly home.
We found out a couple days later that the real problem was that our software was not the issue, but it was a hardware design issue that was causing our device to not get good contact. After that was fixed everything worked.
For all our "Heroic" effort, we didn't get the contract, but I later got a management gig with my company... And later I got a really decent job with my (then) customer. So, everything worked out OK in the end, but it sure was horrific going through all of that...
I got a new T400 a few weeks ago... so I decided to take the plunge and load Jaunty as its primary OS.
I thought, "Since I'm going to be on the bleeding edge anyway, might as well try KUBUNTU." And I tried it...
KDE 4 looked/slick/, but notifications were annoying, and I couldn't get dual-monitors on my docked laptop working (a very key feature for me).
I got fed up and went back to standard Ubuntu on Jaunty with Gnome.
So, for me -- if obvious things are broken on my system, I'm not going to care so much about the eye candy... I'm going to get the slickest interface that I can on my primary machine, but I'm more interested that it is functional.
So, I guess that I prefer an incremental philosophy to radicalism. If KDE now shifts to incremental improvement on it's current (very, very slick) base, then it will probably win... but any more "radical" improvements in the short term will force even more people away -- just to get their systems running the way they need them to. With every person that switches, some percentage will decide that it's just not worth the hassle to go back, and some will just see KDE as a pile of code churn.
"These were packaged as either.doc or.pdf files that installed rootkits on the machines of monks who clicked on them."
Yes... doubtless it was at least Microsoft software that was to blame, if not the OS itself. The attachments were DOC and PDF, and installing rootkits would have probably required "root" or "admin" access -- the default config. of most private Windows users.
So, I'm on Ubuntu already for my laptop... And here I was thinking that I should try installing Fedora & try it out... (chuckles).
In any case, I think instead of the nebulous "cloud vision," we are more likely going to continue see a convergence of the server into the PC, and the PC into the cell phone... We will continue to see more and more cores in the PC and continued drop of storage pricing. This will lead to more and more pricing pressure and eventual commoditization of the OS.
(BTW -- maybe captive markets like the Cell phone market make more sense as cloud platforms, hmm?)
Even then, with the cloud vision, you still need a client (embedded) OS... Either way, Linux wins.
... administer your home router over the Internet? Who does that? If you don't have an open port, even on these boxen, how could you be attacked?
But, it seems to me that this is more likely an attack on stock Linksys boxen that re-flashes with a special DD-WRT designed to "phone home." Yes, DD-WRT/OpenWRT are also vulnerable if they have weak passwords, but the bulk is more likely the former.
(Disclaimer: My home router runs HyperWRT & is not listed in DroneBL.)
Slashdot Mirror
LOL... Just who put you in charge of saying what is of utility or not in a society?
In the Capitalist system utility is determined by the consumer -- merit and utility are determined in a distributed fashion. If the decision is centralized, then society is made inefficient... and those people that are of genuine merit will find a place in a another society where their work (or their hard-earned capital) is valued -- and where they can be justly compensated...
You mention advertising as something "creating artificial needs" -- but... I think you have it upside down... Advertising is important to any society in the process of efficient dissemination and assimilation of new ideas. Advertisers serve to communicate the utility of an idea to the society, serve to differentiate an idea from competing ideas, and make the society more efficient both at determining the merit of an idea, and at assimilating the new idea. The person that can communicate, position an idea well against it's competitors and convince is highly valued and sought after. The reward for a successful new idea both to society and to the author of the idea can be substantial -- so too, the advertiser's worth.
You mention creating weapons as harmful -- but the production of weapons is a vital benefit to society. A society must have the means of protecting its interests against challengers from outside and of checking those attempting to subvert it from within. If there are no arms in the possession of the society (or will to use them in conflict), the same is at the mercy of its neighbor and from the strongest deviant from within.
So, I am definitely glad that the author of the previous post is not making my decisions for me about what is valuable to me. I am glad I live in a society where, for the most part, we are free to determine what is of utility to and for ourselves. I am equally glad that this society is equitable enough to pay me in accordance with my effort and value -- and that I can, for the most part, keep (and pass on to whom I chose) what I have earned. I'm also glad that I am free to participate in protecting both my family and my society by responsibly bearing arms.
Does the SW that you use need to be extended for your work environment? Do you need a key improvement in terms of speed or utility? If so, then write up a req. for consultant work to extend the SW for your purpose. Make certain that the original developer is contacted about the contract opportunity.
If the contract goes to another bidder, the work will still be a derivative of open source SW and the contractor must needs give you the source... Send the new extension's source to the author (if he's interested).
... Well, can't say that I agree with you about the union part -- it's pretty easy here to form a union & _very_ difficult to get it disbanded. From my experience, any company that is unionized deserves to be so. The better companies to work for are non-union & they are afraid of unionized labor... they will do great things to keep their employees happy & non-union.
But it is true, the US has looser labor laws than Europe... An advantage to this is that these make US companies generally more flexible than than their European counterparts. Companies can enforce rules that others don't that may or may not make them more efficient... and these companies are more or less successful for their policies. Look around you for the unionized companies versus non-union right now... which are the more profitable and nimble now?
However, the US is also an incredibly litigious culture now... and a devious employee could easily take advantage of the system for his own ends & extract an easy settlement for the right issue. US companies have come to be very defensive about their labor practices & especially large corporations don't want to do anything that will get them sued.
The good ones (active cancellation) are great against machine noise & shot, but don't muffle voices very well.
First, be the best programmer in your group. This will give you confidence, power & security you need to either take the boss aside and say, "With all due respect sir, shove it," or get a job elsewhere. Really, if you are efficient, and your quality is exceptional, there's nothing for him to worry about... unless he really is worried about something...
The boss aught to be someone who is either a stellar programmer, or the most politically astute in your group. If he is not the former, then chances are, he knows it. Either be his technical guy, or go talk with "the guy" in your group about this that he does trust.
So, If you know your boss is not an ass & you have some kind of rapport with him, try to find out what this is really all about... Ask him, for instance, if instead you can help him with code quality metrics & see what you guys are like WRT the rest of the industry. Maybe you guys really do suck! Maybe you guys have the appearance of sucking to the rest of the company? Maybe your manager is really desperate because his boss told him that his group's going to outsourced because the company can get a better deal in India or China? Find out what's really on his mind... If it's something like outsourcing... maybe you can come up with a better outsourcing plan that "evolves" your group and makes your top programmers the primary architects & the primary communicators with the SW and testing teams?
Lastly, There's always the possibility that your boss really is an ass. So, if your boss is an ass about this, he's probably being an ass about other things... Talk with your co-workers (especially the ones of the opposite sex), and then you're going to have to start getting political. (Be the friendly guy in the elevator that enjoys meeting new people when there's only one other person going up with you. Be that guy that whips up a quick sed or python script for someone outside his group.) DO NOT TALK WITH HR, but with a couple of senior staff friends outside your group. (Maybe they will share valuable things with you as well?) Both your rep. and the rep. of your boss _will_ filter to the right level & will get dealt with one way or another. In my career, I've had two directors (at two different companies) demoted this way; whereas, I was elevated in one way or another.
The first example that the author sites as an example of poor programming is "idiomatic" C for traversing a linked list. Also, if the author can't deal with pointers, he should not only avoid C, but also C++ and stick to Java or his beloved PHP and JavaScript. Siting that he found a standards document so flugly as GNU "helpful," doesn't help his argument.
First, learn C as C. Don't be scared, it's just like this "whole nother language" that's different from JavaScript. It can be used quite safely. If it couldn't, your beloved operating system of choice, that is likely written in C, just wouldn't work at all.
Second, draw your learning of the language not from standards documents, but by immersion in books like "The Practice of Programming." You will then find out that code like "for(ss = s->ss; ss; ss = ss->ss);" can be used without fear of misunderstanding because it is "idiomatic." People that know C will fully understand what it is doing. Writing a comment here is pointless and will degrade the readability of the code.
Third, add one further standards document to the list:
http://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v2.6.32/Documentation/CodingStyle
And learn that Coding standards are only as effective as those that use them.
Whatever you're smoking, can I have some? Really, with Gnome on Karmic, I have no problems with multiple windows. For switching between single (laptop) and multi-monitor, xrandr works great.
Here's distributions that boot from floppy: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=links#floppy http://bootdisk.com/linux.htm Then, you can install whatever you want via PPPoE.\: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apds05.html.en http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html Here's some recommendations from a 486'er: http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~knutb/linux486/linux486.html
... but every time I ask her, she says she'd rather make me a sandwich.
On one of the levels ("On Thin Ice" -- I think) you descend in a drop-ship. The aliens are in an enclosed valley, and I found a way of climbing my tank to the tip of the mountains over the valley, baited tanks about the alien factory, sniped them, and then destroyed the factory with grenade pack... then proceeded to clear the level, as much as possible with sniping. Ended up being more fun than the level itself.
Battlezone II was a game with so much potential -- but so poorly scripted. Still like to go back to it every so once in a while.
Ever hear of Fry's? They seem to be doing just fine with RadioShack's previous business model. The difference with the former is Quality, and big-box-like selection.
As a potential employee, I'd like to know the name of your company; so that, in the future, I can avoid it like the plague.
As a Perl lover it really pains me to say it...
The $%&#-based syntax never really turned me on -- but to each his own.
I thought of posting this separately, but I really wanted to echo sopssa. What you have is a "GOOD THING" at this school.
You are getting a well rounded education in concepts, like object orientation, functional programming, scripting, and sand-boxed virtual machines. You're also getting closer to the metal with C and Assembly (Preferably Intel Protected mode?) -- and that's very cool.
My avenue was the hobby route, but I never really spent my time on the net. I'm an engineer by trade, but I found myself gradually learning coding within my organization more and more. I chiefly program now in sed, python, C++, and VBA; but the mix changes on a periodic basis. I write standard libraries, and a lot of filters and scripts to automate much tedious work within my organization... I try to program so that whatever application I write can be run on any OS -- though some of my stuff lately works best on Linux. (Linux is OK, because people can log into the workstations from their Windows PC's). Cross-platform and Open is the way to go, because you never want to force your customer to disrupt his work-flow to use your tool, and you want your customer to be able to figure out what you're doing and take over support as much as possible.
So, with my scripts, a lot of people internally at my company have become my customers. This work has taken over much more of my job as my rep built... And now we do about an order of magnitude more work than we used to with a single engineer. The tedium of filling out spreadsheets or copying by hand is largely a thing of the past. So much work is being done so quickly that the vendors that we work with are getting very nervous that they will be able to keep up with what we are doing -- and with us us targeting multiple vendors in our work-flow they are very worried about competition.
One other thing I learned -- we can learn much from the "Old Ways." What a horrible, nasty, terse, poorly documented -- and absolutely wonderful gem -- sed is! How nicely does it fit in with the UNIX toolkit: regular expressions with VIM, grep, and find; and roughly stapling things together with xargs and bash! You learn one thing by doing another, and you become so much more productive. Recently, I had to do a remote debugging session over a slow link. There were 50 engineers in the room, and a tag-team of 3 driving the remote system. How nice it was to have VIM there -- hacking stuff with only a few keystrokes to select and change lines on the fly, rather than having to wait a minute to click and select via some GUI. We were extremely successful and productive. I got promoted because of this -- because I drove the creation of tools, and because I learned to become proficient in the "Old Ways."
Because you are not established within a company, you'll have to find another avenue to get yourself noticed, and you'll have to find another way to find your niche. I think that the best way for you to get noticed is to find some Open Source project on the net to dig your fingers into. You build your rep., and you find your niche -- find out what you like, and keep doing it. Let your direction change as you find out what your interests are. Keep learning new ways of doing things, and don't be afraid to experiment with crazy ideas. Make a positive contribution to how things are done -- make something better from the inside out.
I like this quote from Daniel Phillips (Tux3): "A weak coder becomes a strong coder by reading code and writing code every day for fun."
All I know is that when people come by my office, or watch me present, and have a chance at my Ubuntu install on my laptop -- every single person says "THAT'S COOL". From wobbly windows, transparency, 3D cube... to simple things like my theme, and the invariable query, "How did you get your wallpaper to span two monitors?" -- people wish that they had it.
Then the tech-savvy come by and see that I'm doing stuff with sed and text processing applications -- and running some windows binary-to/from-text filters with wine in the mix... that updates are just taken care of... that it's virus free... that new applications are available with the click of a radio button... and that I can _natively_ display X business critical applications on my desktop running on a remote server... That all the drivers for any hardware that I would want to install on my computer is likely already there and in place... They _all_ would rather scrap their current setup for something like what I have.
The chief problem though is fear. There's fear of messing something up royally, and fear of having to learn something new, and having to rely on something as nebulous as the WWW for their support (cause Darned if IT is going to support them doing this). There's also the fear of not being able to use a key application, interoperability, or of of finding something critical can't be done (like watching Netflix "Watch Instantly" movies).
The other problem is _3d_games_ -- and Windows has all but sewn up this market. Open Source Linux Video Graphics drivers are still not up to snuff, and neither are the proprietary drivers really good. If people can't get good frame rates in Linux, or they're going to have to jump through hoops to get their game of choice up and running on their (work) laptop, they're not going to want to use it. So Linux kernel infrastructure is improving here, and some HW vendors are gradually opening to the idea of Open Source drivers, but it will be a while before the gaming industry warms to the idea of supporting Linux as a platform.
Anyway, I've got one guy at work so far that has started to learn about his computer & has installed Ubuntu on his new laptop. My laptop is still dual-boot, but I haven't gone back to Windows for ~2 months at the very least... I can get everything I need to do done on my Linux workstation and more, and am /almost/ ready to dump windows completely.
So, from a guy that is actually using it, I am more than happy. I think that if the tech was packaged with PC's and there was a little bit more education out, or perhaps a better "safe mode" packaged with every install, that it should really be a no-brainer for grandma and the tech-savvy to be able to use.
Uh... Emacs?
A masters is almost necessary in any field today. In your "free time," do some open source work & distinguish yourself as a hacker. You spend your two years doing those two things, and you will be able to write your own ticket. In any case, the economy is down; so, just do it -- it's a perfect opportunity, before you're married with kids and working 60 hour weeks...
In the end, I got her a Mac Mini -- still Unix and safer & easier to manage for me than Windows... And I got my Linux install on my work Laptop, that I use almost exclusively. And as a result of learning, I was able to do some really creative work at my job, & the work I did with that knowledge got me a promo.
Sounds to me like your glass was half-empty. :-(
My worst experience... a 36-hour debugging stint ... On a production test floor in Taiwan.
0) I was the vendor, and the second source -- I had no respect.
1) It was a "clean room" -- so I had to dress in an (unwashed) bunny suit... it was rank.
2) This was in the center of a test floor -- the noise pressure level was constant and about the that of a buzz saw... it was noisy.
3) I had to communicate remotely with a colleague -- and audio was almost impossible even with headphones I had to shout sometimes to be heard and so did she... relationships were strained.
4) The remote connection was horribly slow & slowed down my local interface too... It was agonizingly slow.
5) The air vent was right under my feet. At least I was successful in moving the workstation a little ways away from the vent so that I could stay somewhat warm... It was cold.
6) After ~12 hours my colleague just gave up and went to bed. After she came back & started debugging remotely, I went and crashed in a vacant meeting room. I had to stack the chairs up to get a couple of hours... I had little sleep.
7) No coffee allowed on the test floor... It was inhumane.
So for all that we still couldn't get one of the key things we wanted to get done done... we left the job half done & I had to fly home.
We found out a couple days later that the real problem was that our software was not the issue, but it was a hardware design issue that was causing our device to not get good contact. After that was fixed everything worked.
For all our "Heroic" effort, we didn't get the contract, but I later got a management gig with my company... And later I got a really decent job with my (then) customer. So, everything worked out OK in the end, but it sure was horrific going through all of that...
Any latest news about what is happening would be appreciated.
I got a new T400 a few weeks ago... so I decided to take the plunge and load Jaunty as its primary OS.
I thought, "Since I'm going to be on the bleeding edge anyway, might as well try KUBUNTU." And I tried it...
KDE 4 looked /slick/, but notifications were annoying, and I couldn't get dual-monitors on my docked laptop working (a very key feature for me).
I got fed up and went back to standard Ubuntu on Jaunty with Gnome.
So, for me -- if obvious things are broken on my system, I'm not going to care so much about the eye candy... I'm going to get the slickest interface that I can on my primary machine, but I'm more interested that it is functional.
So, I guess that I prefer an incremental philosophy to radicalism. If KDE now shifts to incremental improvement on it's current (very, very slick) base, then it will probably win... but any more "radical" improvements in the short term will force even more people away -- just to get their systems running the way they need them to. With every person that switches, some percentage will decide that it's just not worth the hassle to go back, and some will just see KDE as a pile of code churn.
"These were packaged as either .doc or .pdf files that installed rootkits on the machines of monks who clicked on them."
Yes... doubtless it was at least Microsoft software that was to blame, if not the OS itself. The attachments were DOC and PDF, and installing rootkits would have probably required "root" or "admin" access -- the default config. of most private Windows users.
So, I'm on Ubuntu already for my laptop... And here I was thinking that I should try installing Fedora & try it out... (chuckles).
In any case, I think instead of the nebulous "cloud vision," we are more likely going to continue see a convergence of the server into the PC, and the PC into the cell phone... We will continue to see more and more cores in the PC and continued drop of storage pricing. This will lead to more and more pricing pressure and eventual commoditization of the OS.
(BTW -- maybe captive markets like the Cell phone market make more sense as cloud platforms, hmm?)
Even then, with the cloud vision, you still need a client (embedded) OS... Either way, Linux wins.
... administer your home router over the Internet? Who does that? If you don't have an open port, even on these boxen, how could you be attacked?
But, it seems to me that this is more likely an attack on stock Linksys boxen that re-flashes with a special DD-WRT designed to "phone home." Yes, DD-WRT/OpenWRT are also vulnerable if they have weak passwords, but the bulk is more likely the former.
(Disclaimer: My home router runs HyperWRT & is not listed in DroneBL.)