As a PhD student in computer science, I would rather give up computers for the rest of my life and work on a farm rather than have my work help kill or torture more people. At least in my research community, working for DARPA is thought of as selling out to work for conservative bastards. Sure, you get lots of funding and the coolest toys, but for most people it's about hot ideas, not gear. If instead we were talking about major government programs to develop massive renewable energy resources, provide clean water or more food, I think the application process would quickly become very competitive. Oh, and it would probably increase American security, both physical and economic, an order of magnitude faster as well. Put the money into the NSF, the NIH and the part of the department of energy that actually does renewable energy research.
This discussion comes down to a matter of goals. If the goal is to get as many windows users as possible to convert to linux, than producing an exact copy of windows that is free is probably the perfect solution. I don't think that is the goal though, at least for most of the open source & linux community members that I know. I think we should let microsoft take care of the web surfing, office using weenies, and make linux the platform of the computing elite. Lets pimp it out to the extreme. Sure, we can have some clean, easy to use systems that help make mundane computing tasks easier, but other than that I don't think we should follow anyone. Lets invent, create and kick some ass!
Maybe this neverending stream of corporate BS will push people in the direction of the gimp. As time goes on it might even be cheaper for companies to pitch in and help developers improve something like this rather than deal with activation schemes etc...
I guess you missed the part about being open source. For a large installation (1500 users) they want $30,000 for the insight server. A GPL'ed exchange type server would be a huge step forward for linux in the workplace.
This brings up a good point. Is it really necessary for the kernel to include so many additional drivers and modules that most users won't use? I don't think it would be to much of a problem to make a web based kernel configurator so you could just download the extra pieces necessary to make your kernel do what you want it to do.
The make system could still be aware of the other pieces you don't have so if you ever do need to grab some other stuff then it will tell you exactly code to download.
If the kernel gets to 200G, this will be a necessity.
Sure, the solar panel isn't worth getting if you are going to be sitting next to a window, but thats not what its made for. On backpacking trips, vacations etc... sometimes a panel is all that you can use. It doesn't charge as fast as an outlet, but it has plenty of power to charge up a battery in a couple of hours. (4 or so)
Slashdot Mirror
As a PhD student in computer science, I would rather give up computers for the rest of my life and work on a farm rather than have my work help kill or torture more people. At least in my research community, working for DARPA is thought of as selling out to work for conservative bastards. Sure, you get lots of funding and the coolest toys, but for most people it's about hot ideas, not gear. If instead we were talking about major government programs to develop massive renewable energy resources, provide clean water or more food, I think the application process would quickly become very competitive. Oh, and it would probably increase American security, both physical and economic, an order of magnitude faster as well. Put the money into the NSF, the NIH and the part of the department of energy that actually does renewable energy research.
This discussion comes down to a matter of goals. If the goal is to get as many windows users as possible to convert to linux, than producing an exact copy of windows that is free is probably the perfect solution. I don't think that is the goal though, at least for most of the open source & linux community members that I know. I think we should let microsoft take care of the web surfing, office using weenies, and make linux the platform of the computing elite. Lets pimp it out to the extreme. Sure, we can have some clean, easy to use systems that help make mundane computing tasks easier, but other than that I don't think we should follow anyone. Lets invent, create and kick some ass!
Maybe this neverending stream of corporate BS will push people in the direction of the gimp. As time goes on it might even be cheaper for companies to pitch in and help developers improve something like this rather than deal with activation schemes etc...
I guess you missed the part about being open source. For a large installation (1500 users) they want $30,000 for the insight server. A GPL'ed exchange type server would be a huge step forward for linux in the workplace.
The make system could still be aware of the other pieces you don't have so if you ever do need to grab some other stuff then it will tell you exactly code to download. If the kernel gets to 200G, this will be a necessity.
Sure, the solar panel isn't worth getting if you are going to be sitting next to a window, but thats not what its made for. On backpacking trips, vacations etc... sometimes a panel is all that you can use. It doesn't charge as fast as an outlet, but it has plenty of power to charge up a battery in a couple of hours. (4 or so)