Actually, saying that UBUNTU is the only player in the field is like Henry Ford saying that the only car you could buy was a black Model T.
The later kids on the block outdid the Ford Company production volumes and profitability.
Competition will make both distributions try harder.
I happen to have linux installed on one PC and XP moth-balled. There is a restriction on distribution by vendors, but as far as I know, there is no restriction on use.
Moving the codecs to the linux platform is not illegal for me. And in Canada, it is not illegal to download from livna or freshrpms.org websites, the codecs to make linux fly.
As an avid linux user, and also an XP user, I would say that I have very mixed feelings. From a business perspective, XP is a better choice for the following reason: Microsoft Office.
Microsoft Office is a substantially better product then Open Office, and has features that OO does not have, such as easier use, a fantastic multi-lingual grammer checker (I use English and French), a great spelling checker, and finally, it saves smaller files then the same document saved with Open Office. I have noted file size reductions of 50 percent in favour of MS-Office.
From the desktop, Evolution, and Firefox are comparable to the XP versions, and that adds points in favor of linux. Other points are the plethora of free compilers, development tools, games and whatever utilities for network management.
But as a frustration, suppose you are job-hunting, and the web site has a 100k restriction on the attached resume file (my experience was OO size was 168k), but on moving the file to XP, doing the open and save, reduced the file to 93k, allowing it to be attached to the application.
OO does not handle multiple concurrent languages easily. In fact, it is a real dog.
Powerpoint sound accompanyment does not work in Linux, and using webcams is almost non-existant (no support from the major webcam vendors).
Back to non-office stuff.
The development tools, stability, resistance to virus attacks, and to Selinux (Google Selinux), for extra security is very hard or as yet impossible to defeat.
Finally, linux lacks a roll-back facility, which, MS copied from OS/2. That means that with XP, one can go backwords and de-install a latest patch. This is virtually impossible with today's linux. If the patch is buggy, you have killed your working system.
So, is Linux ready for business. Not in 2008. But I believe that it is more ready than is Vista.
You are missing the point. Today there is so much commerce on the net that to block the web by concentrated attacks in many ways would be very serious. We would be back to 1980s.
Actually, it is American foreign policy that has caused the terrorisme. Just look who the USA went to bed with in Saudi Arabia, then in the other oil producing countries. It was in USA interest to not have a govenment that would nationalise the oil industry, and distribute the wealth to the citizens in the form of universities, healthcare and local industries.
We can look outside of OIL to the fruit and produce industries.
That raping of the wealth of a nation, siphoning off the cream, and leaving the rest to one or two families in each foreign country is the cause of terrorisme.
A good example is Chavez and soon Chili, Columbia, Mexico and Canada will join him. USA has to stop being a "All for me and my Hummer", I need to drive the guzzler 60 miles to work daily.
A Canadian who sees the USA wealthy in power and lieing to their citizens.
The people are the ones the state must protect, not the corporations. Wake up Americans. If Microsoft gets away with their stuff, then you can all kiss your freedom goodbye. The new government will be the corporation by the corporation for the corporation.
As MS would say, we dont want to show how much we pirated from open source or other software packages, and we dont want to show code that we cut and pasted from other sources.
I have no faith in MS Sr Management, though they do have good to excellent developers.
I appreciated your posting to which I am replying with questions. If there was no healthcare, it meant that there was no money being transfered from the rape of the countries resources by the oil monopoly. The rich take care of the rich and forget the rest, the oil money never tricked into the government coffers. It does now.
Chavez, from what I read in our local press, is using the revenue money to create industries and work/jobs for his people. He may do it in a socialistic way, but at least he is doing it.
Americans are a wonderful people. But American leaders have an agenda which is not what the founding fathers envisaged. The FF envisaged a democracy. But when one party remains in power too long, that parties objective is to stop serving the people, but to find ways to continue to remain in power. Ergo Power corrupts. And that is why Americans need a new broom. To sweep away the current jerk in power and to restore power to the people. Imagine, you, an american citizen, suspected (without real proof) could be shipped offshore for interrogation by cruel means. Don't say it cannot and does not happen.
In closing, the American appetite for money before humanity (remember "In God We Trust, All others Cash" is what will destroy your great country.
Chavez is raising the standard of knowledge of South Americans. He will be remembered as a hero. What about your presidents? How will they be remembered?
Is the use of terminator genes the reason for the major decline in bee population. -- no regrowth the following year.... no sap/pollen for bees. Sap for food, pollin for fertilisation of other plants.
We Canadians see it as the dumbing down of America. Americans have stuck pacifiers in their mouths and have been overwhelmed by bullshit and lies to the point where they have forgotten to question what they are fed.
And that includes NPR radio as well, whose funding would be cut if they reported the truth about the war in Iraq that has killed more Americans then the 911 disaster.
I guess I am talking to the wind.
Similar story here in Canada, where I purchased a USB drive with 250 gig disk. Internet price 120, store price $140.
Fortunately the salesmen do not work on commission and I asked the salesman to take me to the one and only pc in the store that had outside internet connection. Thats how I got my best deal.
Leslie
PS. In Quebec, we have a consumer law that says that if the item price in the register system is higher than the shelf posted price, and the item is less than $10.00, you get it free. Over $10.00, you get it at the lower price and you also get $10.00 plus a percentage of the overprice. Nice eh.
I believe like Ross Perault, that no manager should earn more than 20 to 25 times the average salary of his organisation. If he needs more, let him purchase shares. I will allow that rule to be important, starting at the top VP level.
I, as a manager have discovered that each manager of mine that has distinct reponsibilities from his peer, takes up 15 percent of my time. Thus, I find my week is full, managing seven distinct departments via their managers. And yes, I do work overtime too.
However, it is much easier (to manage seven managers in seven companies or regions) when each has the same responsibility. Then I have 15% of time allocated for the first individual, and about 5% of time for each of the others.
Should I earn the sum of salaries paid to the 7 subordinates?
Linux will remain on 32 bit systems (as well as 64bitters) as it does now, for a long long time. Reason:== There are many many developers in less affluent countries who only have 32 bit machines.
Vista is for the rich, thats all I have to say. It offers so little more than XP that I will continue with the latter. By the way, there is a clone of XP that is being tested. Wow.
Will we have a clone of Vista, minus some look and feel?
Christ did exist, and so did Rabbi Akiva. They were in the same "group" or school. And it was differences that caused the split and the birth of a new religion.
Until Linux has the power that Microsoft holds to specify compliant hardware designs, linux is going the root of the poor man's system, or the rich man's toy, and more or less, always with something broken.
Aix was designed to run on specific IBM hardware with up to 8 processors, and superior disk I/0. Linux is geared to the ubiquitus PC. Here again there are many implementation problems, so much so that I am considering giving linux up for a year or two. I have rebuilt my system about every 3 months. (Fedora Fc6 and now Fc7). But in fairness to FC7, this system is known as a beta, so it does not count. But for some reason, this beta system performs better then the version it is replacing.
Still, linux is the tail trying to wag the dog in the sense that it has to run on ever so many platforms.
I guess you have never tried to live on a pension, when the choice is food or medicine. And when your outside world contact is, as you say, email and internet, and you are already spending some of that pension to be connected, then linux makes excellent sense.
Furthermore, not having to buy anti-virus programs, anti-spam programs, and expensive operating systems makes a big big difference to many many low income budgets (including libraries, social assistance organisations, schools, and the like).
And I guess the other argument would be something like reliability. I am told that between xp and linux, or linux and vista (for now), linux is more reliable.
I live in Canada, where we have cold winters. In winter, my home is heated by electricity, with plenums in each room. If I turn on an incandescent, the heat from the bulb displaces the heat required from the plenum. That is in winter, when the sun sets early. Net benefit from energy savinsg is zero.
In summer, the sun sets late, so we hardly use the lights before bedtime, and then, for very little time. Net savings around zero.
Repeat. In winter florescent bulbs really dont save energy for us. In summer, they do, but their hours of use are short.
Give me a more efficient home air conditioner, and I will be happy. Couple that with a well insulated home. Then we can really make gains in energy consumption.
There is legal and moral. Amazon had a bug in their software for price calculation. People took advantage of that error, and did so knowingly. So these people stole merchandise. Yes, stole. Their moral obligation was to advise Amazon of the error.
Now in Canada, where I live, we have some consumer protection laws. It prevents a company for billing after the sale is closed. Actually, the law is there to protect consumers from store errors or misleading advertisements. (For goods under $10.00, if the cash register price is above the shelf price, the consumer gets the item for free). If the sale is above $10.00, they get $10.00 off the individual prices. That way, the onus is in the retailer to ensure that there is no error in their own favor.
From a moral standpoint, those customers who stole the extra merchandise either advise Amazon to bill them for the correction, return the merchandise, or the other option, the consumer become and remain branded as a thief.
Lets see,
First they got a tax on each cd and dvd blank. Instead of being 10-20 cents per virgin cd or dvd blank, we have a 10cent tax on each copy.
Now they want to tax the ipod. But then that legislation will be applied to any device that can play music. So my computer with a terabyte of hard disk memory and 4 gigs of memory will cost about $20,000 (if they can get away with it).
The government should tell them to get into another line of business. If you cannot succeed with the one you are in, change. I as an employee have done that several times in my life.
Having felt the impinging of my freedom of access due to DRM, I switched to linux this April past. Never have I felt so relieved at worring about licensing (home use), about viruses, about not having software to do what I need to do (web, email, sql, and learn).
Patents of ideas, without recognized products should be discarded, or the USA should take the same stance as the rest of the WORLD.
If a patent is infringed upon, the penalty would be the actual, not estimated losses, due to products which compete with the existing product for which the patent is filed. There would have to be proof of marketing attempts, and of manufacturing, not just to prototyping of the product being patented. No penalty if the patent was being held as a ransome or blackmail license.
Henry Ford, at the turn of the century, did what Microsoft did, produce one model car and kill the competition. But eventually GM and the Dodge Brothers came along with better vehicles. So what transpired for the car industry will come to Microsoft. the Mac, some Linux flavors will gain market share. It is possible that another new interface can come along to be the product for the future.
Linux, because volume is perhaps 40 million installations versus 20 times that for windows, has a hard time to compete on volume, but not on quality. It will compete based on stability. But instability forces innovation, so all the products, such as Microsoft's, the Mac or Linux, will have to innovate as new dual core/4 cores processors and the like drive innovation. Does that mean linux is for the geeks?
So the bubble is there! As for geeks, Open linux means that developers/geeks live around the world, not just in the USA west coast, hidden from view. Today Linux is used in the schools, and taught in the Universities. Linux is open and affordable. In summary the MS geeks are invisible, and the latter linux ones, are known around the world.
My view, if there are patent infringements, we are more likely to find it on the Microsoft side, then on the Linux side.
If Microsoft opens the case against Linux, then the world will have to do likewise against Microsoft. And then it will not be limited to Linux, but to every other software vendor, and would MS want to open their source to scrutiny?
Do you think that only Microsoft employees have exclusivity on honesty; every one of them honestly developed propriatory logic to solve problems, without having completed research and possibly copying an already existing bit of logic from prior publications. Not one of the 30,000+ developers would do that! Right!
I think that it overreaction. If we follow through to the letter, all the signs in a MacDonald or Burger King or whatever public store should have a braile version. Even the packages sitting on the shelves of the supermarket should have braile on them. Braile must be everywhere.
Going further, my newspaper must have a talking version produced daily, or at least a braile version.
I would dismiss that lawsuite. The ADA is being overextended in it's application.
Lets see. Suddenly his wife and child disappear, and he is suspected of murdering the wife. What about the child? When both disappear, I would say that the problem was one of "Lets see what interests you more? "Your PC and programming" or "your wife and kid".
Only close associates for Hans would know if he is prone to violence. A man can scream, a man can yell and wave his hands, and say wrong things, but if he never lifts a finger, then it is frustration speaking.
I think Hans is innocent. The wife and child have gone into hiding, or even back home, whereever that is.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, saying that UBUNTU is the only player in the field is like Henry Ford saying that the only car you could buy was a black Model T. The later kids on the block outdid the Ford Company production volumes and profitability. Competition will make both distributions try harder.
I happen to have linux installed on one PC and XP moth-balled. There is a restriction on distribution by vendors, but as far as I know, there is no restriction on use. Moving the codecs to the linux platform is not illegal for me. And in Canada, it is not illegal to download from livna or freshrpms.org websites, the codecs to make linux fly.
Microsoft Office is a substantially better product then Open Office, and has features that OO does not have, such as easier use, a fantastic multi-lingual grammer checker (I use English and French), a great spelling checker, and finally, it saves smaller files then the same document saved with Open Office. I have noted file size reductions of 50 percent in favour of MS-Office.
From the desktop, Evolution, and Firefox are comparable to the XP versions, and that adds points in favor of linux. Other points are the plethora of free compilers, development tools, games and whatever utilities for network management.
But as a frustration, suppose you are job-hunting, and the web site has a 100k restriction on the attached resume file (my experience was OO size was 168k), but on moving the file to XP, doing the open and save, reduced the file to 93k, allowing it to be attached to the application.
OO does not handle multiple concurrent languages easily. In fact, it is a real dog.
Powerpoint sound accompanyment does not work in Linux, and using webcams is almost non-existant (no support from the major webcam vendors).
Back to non-office stuff.
The development tools, stability, resistance to virus attacks, and to Selinux (Google Selinux), for extra security is very hard or as yet impossible to defeat.
Finally, linux lacks a roll-back facility, which, MS copied from OS/2. That means that with XP, one can go backwords and de-install a latest patch. This is virtually impossible with today's linux. If the patch is buggy, you have killed your working system.
So, is Linux ready for business. Not in 2008. But I believe that it is more ready than is Vista.
Leslie
You are missing the point. Today there is so much commerce on the net that to block the web by concentrated attacks in many ways would be very serious. We would be back to 1980s.
Actually, it is American foreign policy that has caused the terrorisme. Just look who the USA went to bed with in Saudi Arabia, then in the other oil producing countries. It was in USA interest to not have a govenment that would nationalise the oil industry, and distribute the wealth to the citizens in the form of universities, healthcare and local industries. We can look outside of OIL to the fruit and produce industries. That raping of the wealth of a nation, siphoning off the cream, and leaving the rest to one or two families in each foreign country is the cause of terrorisme. A good example is Chavez and soon Chili, Columbia, Mexico and Canada will join him. USA has to stop being a "All for me and my Hummer", I need to drive the guzzler 60 miles to work daily. A Canadian who sees the USA wealthy in power and lieing to their citizens.
It is too bad that AMD cannot compete. If AMD goes, look for a 50% increase in cpu prices. Competition keeps the prices in line.
The people are the ones the state must protect, not the corporations. Wake up Americans. If Microsoft gets away with their stuff, then you can all kiss your freedom goodbye. The new government will be the corporation by the corporation for the corporation. As MS would say, we dont want to show how much we pirated from open source or other software packages, and we dont want to show code that we cut and pasted from other sources. I have no faith in MS Sr Management, though they do have good to excellent developers.
I appreciated your posting to which I am replying with questions. If there was no healthcare, it meant that there was no money being transfered from the rape of the countries resources by the oil monopoly. The rich take care of the rich and forget the rest, the oil money never tricked into the government coffers. It does now. Chavez, from what I read in our local press, is using the revenue money to create industries and work/jobs for his people. He may do it in a socialistic way, but at least he is doing it. Americans are a wonderful people. But American leaders have an agenda which is not what the founding fathers envisaged. The FF envisaged a democracy. But when one party remains in power too long, that parties objective is to stop serving the people, but to find ways to continue to remain in power. Ergo Power corrupts. And that is why Americans need a new broom. To sweep away the current jerk in power and to restore power to the people. Imagine, you, an american citizen, suspected (without real proof) could be shipped offshore for interrogation by cruel means. Don't say it cannot and does not happen. In closing, the American appetite for money before humanity (remember "In God We Trust, All others Cash" is what will destroy your great country. Chavez is raising the standard of knowledge of South Americans. He will be remembered as a hero. What about your presidents? How will they be remembered?
Is the use of terminator genes the reason for the major decline in bee population. -- no regrowth the following year.... no sap/pollen for bees. Sap for food, pollin for fertilisation of other plants.
We Canadians see it as the dumbing down of America. Americans have stuck pacifiers in their mouths and have been overwhelmed by bullshit and lies to the point where they have forgotten to question what they are fed. And that includes NPR radio as well, whose funding would be cut if they reported the truth about the war in Iraq that has killed more Americans then the 911 disaster. I guess I am talking to the wind.
Similar story here in Canada, where I purchased a USB drive with 250 gig disk. Internet price 120, store price $140. Fortunately the salesmen do not work on commission and I asked the salesman to take me to the one and only pc in the store that had outside internet connection. Thats how I got my best deal. Leslie PS. In Quebec, we have a consumer law that says that if the item price in the register system is higher than the shelf posted price, and the item is less than $10.00, you get it free. Over $10.00, you get it at the lower price and you also get $10.00 plus a percentage of the overprice. Nice eh.
I believe like Ross Perault, that no manager should earn more than 20 to 25 times the average salary of his organisation. If he needs more, let him purchase shares. I will allow that rule to be important, starting at the top VP level.
I, as a manager have discovered that each manager of mine that has distinct reponsibilities from his peer, takes up 15 percent of my time. Thus, I find my week is full, managing seven distinct departments via their managers. And yes, I do work overtime too.
However, it is much easier (to manage seven managers in seven companies or regions) when each has the same responsibility. Then I have 15% of time allocated for the first individual, and about 5% of time for each of the others.
Should I earn the sum of salaries paid to the 7 subordinates?
Linux will remain on 32 bit systems (as well as 64bitters) as it does now, for a long long time. Reason:== There are many many developers in less affluent countries who only have 32 bit machines. Vista is for the rich, thats all I have to say. It offers so little more than XP that I will continue with the latter. By the way, there is a clone of XP that is being tested. Wow. Will we have a clone of Vista, minus some look and feel?
Christ did exist, and so did Rabbi Akiva. They were in the same "group" or school. And it was differences that caused the split and the birth of a new religion.
Until Linux has the power that Microsoft holds to specify compliant hardware designs, linux is going the root of the poor man's system, or the rich man's toy, and more or less, always with something broken.
Aix was designed to run on specific IBM hardware with up to 8 processors, and superior disk I/0. Linux is geared to the ubiquitus PC. Here again there are many implementation problems, so much so that I am considering giving linux up for a year or two. I have rebuilt my system about every 3 months. (Fedora Fc6 and now Fc7). But in fairness to FC7, this system is known as a beta, so it does not count. But for some reason, this beta system performs better then the version it is replacing.
Still, linux is the tail trying to wag the dog in the sense that it has to run on ever so many platforms.
Furthermore, not having to buy anti-virus programs, anti-spam programs, and expensive operating systems makes a big big difference to many many low income budgets (including libraries, social assistance organisations, schools, and the like).
And I guess the other argument would be something like reliability. I am told that between xp and linux, or linux and vista (for now), linux is more reliable.
I live in Canada, where we have cold winters. In winter, my home is heated by electricity, with plenums in each room. If I turn on an incandescent, the heat from the bulb displaces the heat required from the plenum. That is in winter, when the sun sets early. Net benefit from energy savinsg is zero.
In summer, the sun sets late, so we hardly use the lights before bedtime, and then, for very little time. Net savings around zero.
Repeat. In winter florescent bulbs really dont save energy for us. In summer, they do, but their hours of use are short.
Give me a more efficient home air conditioner, and I will be happy. Couple that with a well insulated home. Then we can really make gains in energy consumption.
There is legal and moral. Amazon had a bug in their software for price calculation. People took advantage of that error, and did so knowingly. So these people stole merchandise. Yes, stole. Their moral obligation was to advise Amazon of the error.
Now in Canada, where I live, we have some consumer protection laws. It prevents a company for billing after the sale is closed. Actually, the law is there to protect consumers from store errors or misleading advertisements. (For goods under $10.00, if the cash register price is above the shelf price, the consumer gets the item for free). If the sale is above $10.00, they get $10.00 off the individual prices. That way, the onus is in the retailer to ensure that there is no error in their own favor.
From a moral standpoint, those customers who stole the extra merchandise either advise Amazon to bill them for the correction, return the merchandise, or the other option, the consumer become and remain branded as a thief.
Lets see, First they got a tax on each cd and dvd blank. Instead of being 10-20 cents per virgin cd or dvd blank, we have a 10cent tax on each copy. Now they want to tax the ipod. But then that legislation will be applied to any device that can play music. So my computer with a terabyte of hard disk memory and 4 gigs of memory will cost about $20,000 (if they can get away with it). The government should tell them to get into another line of business. If you cannot succeed with the one you are in, change. I as an employee have done that several times in my life.
Having felt the impinging of my freedom of access due to DRM, I switched to linux this April past. Never have I felt so relieved at worring about licensing (home use), about viruses, about not having software to do what I need to do (web, email, sql, and learn).
So, Vista is a non issue to me.
Patents of ideas, without recognized products should be discarded, or the USA should take the same stance as the rest of the WORLD.
If a patent is infringed upon, the penalty would be the actual, not estimated losses, due to products which compete with the existing product for which the patent is filed. There would have to be proof of marketing attempts, and of manufacturing, not just to prototyping of the product being patented. No penalty if the patent was being held as a ransome or blackmail license.
Ideas would bear 0$ penalty.
Linux, because volume is perhaps 40 million installations versus 20 times that for windows, has a hard time to compete on volume, but not on quality. It will compete based on stability. But instability forces innovation, so all the products, such as Microsoft's, the Mac or Linux, will have to innovate as new dual core /4 cores processors and the like drive innovation. Does that mean linux is for the geeks?
So the bubble is there! As for geeks, Open linux means that developers/geeks live around the world, not just in the USA west coast, hidden from view. Today Linux is used in the schools, and taught in the Universities. Linux is open and affordable. In summary the MS geeks are invisible, and the latter linux ones, are known around the world.
If Microsoft opens the case against Linux, then the world will have to do likewise against Microsoft. And then it will not be limited to Linux, but to every other software vendor, and would MS want to open their source to scrutiny?
Do you think that only Microsoft employees have exclusivity on honesty; every one of them honestly developed propriatory logic to solve problems, without having completed research and possibly copying an already existing bit of logic from prior publications. Not one of the 30,000+ developers would do that! Right!
Leslie Montreal
I think that it overreaction. If we follow through to the letter, all the signs in a MacDonald or Burger King or whatever public store should have a braile version. Even the packages sitting on the shelves of the supermarket should have braile on them. Braile must be everywhere. Going further, my newspaper must have a talking version produced daily, or at least a braile version. I would dismiss that lawsuite. The ADA is being overextended in it's application.
Lets see. Suddenly his wife and child disappear, and he is suspected of murdering the wife. What about the child? When both disappear, I would say that the problem was one of "Lets see what interests you more? "Your PC and programming" or "your wife and kid".
Only close associates for Hans would know if he is prone to violence. A man can scream, a man can yell and wave his hands, and say wrong things, but if he never lifts a finger, then it is frustration speaking.
I think Hans is innocent. The wife and child have gone into hiding, or even back home, whereever that is.