I remember those games - what really caught my attention was how the instruction manual was thicker than many of the technical manuals I have lying around these days. On the one hand, that attention to detail was conceptually fantastic; I mean, it's great that somebody sat down and made a game that tries to capture everything about flying an F-15. On the other hand, if I'm going to basically go through the effort of getting a pilot's license before I get my simulated plane off the ground, I'd like to actually have a pilot's license in my pocket to show for it.
Well, whitehouse.gov switched to Drupal not too long ago. That would sort of imply that somebody, somewhere did some testing against it. Heck, they even contributed code.
It's because a five-year-old laptop could just as easily run most newer versions of Linux. It's not because "OS progress has stagnated", it's because there's no more "low-hanging fruit" for OS designers to reach anymore. Hardware has been advancing well ahead of software requirements for years. Just as importantly, we're no longer at the point where "basic household tasks" are being constrained by the hardware; back in the '80s, I used to fill the 128k of RAM on my Apple//e by writing a decently long report. In the early '90s, a high resolution picture would max out the RAM on most PCs of the time. Nowadays? We have so much RAM, hard drive space, and processor throughput where household video editing (something which didn't really exist until fairly recently, might I add) is easily performed on most PCs; the only differentiating factor now is "how long will it take", instead of "can I do it".
That's big - bigger than any monopolistic practices that Microsoft might be embracing at any given moment.
... and no one is going to take the time to learn everything to make a modern game.
More importantly, no one could. Games are interdisciplinary these days - your "one" would have to excel at graphical design, programming, game theory, possibly physics (depending on the kind of game), and on and on and on. Outside of little Flash games, you're just not going to achieve the depth of knowledge required to make a full scale game.
A lot of the newer stuff is also available for LTS in Backports. Not all of it, of course, but enough of it where you can, for example, install the latest version of OpenOffice.org or something similar.
It's not so wildly divergent anymore, nor is it particularly "devolved". After a variety of court cases through the 20th Century, there's not much that one state can get away with that another state can't. Thanks to some rather creative interpretations of the "commerce clause" (the Federal government has the constitutional responsibility to regulate commerce between the states; this has been interpreted, for better or worse, to allow withholding of federal highway funds if states don't meet certain criteria, like establishing a particular minimum drinking age), among other things, states are no longer allowed, for better or worse, to legislate on the availability of...
Abortion
Slavery
Gun ownership (D.C. vs. Heller pretty well nukes most local and state gun restrictions)
Voting access and rights (no more poll taxes, literacy requirements, and so on)
Certain environmental standards (you can legislate above the federal minimum, which California does routinely, but you can't legislate below it)
Sodomy or miscegenation (they're allowed, regardless of what the TX State Government thinks, thank goodness!)
State National Guards (sort of controlled by local governors, but nothing like the state-controlled militias that existed prior to their nationalization under Eisenhower)
And so on. In fact, these days, when a state can legislate something fairly major on its own, it's big news. Speed limits, for example, were federalized during the Carter administration; state control of highway speed limits didn't return until the Clinton administration. The so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" is exceptional not only because it allows states to decide amongst themselves whether or not they wish to permit gay people to marry, it also allows them to creatively interpret the "full faith and credit" clause (a contract in one state has to be honored in all other states) to exclude marriages between two people of the same gender.
Realistically, states have very little power these days, especially compared to what some of the Founding Fathers initially had in mind (though not all of them - the Constitution was an attempt to bring greater power to the federal government, not less). They get to decide, at least to a certain point, what level of taxation is present, how comprehensively certain social services will be provided, whether the state is a "right-to-work" state or not, and how easy it will be to buy liquor within the state. That's pretty much it. Is that good? Well... it depends on your perspective. On the one hand, it proved to be the most reliable way to overturn some truly heinous state-level policies, especially in the South. On the other hand, it's not like the federal government is a perfectly innocent or saintly presence itself; at the very least, greater centralization leads to a "single point of failure" with potentially catastrophic consequences. At the most mundane, federal policies can be rather "average"; for example, a 55 MPH speed limit might make sense in Massachusetts, but is less impractical in, say, Montana. Similarly, concealed carry laws might make sense in Wyoming, where a single bullet might hit an antelope and a stray tumbleweed, but might make much less sense in a highly urbanized environment where a single bullet can hit a couple of people, go through a wall, and break a window. Unfortunately, figuring out which issues are best handled locally seems to be more of an art than a science.
Nah - think of the states as more like Law Distributions. They take the mainline legal "kernel", which is represented by the Constitution, US Codes, common law judgments, and so forth, then bolt on "community-oriented" laws on top of that base to create a "usable system". Just like Linux, US states have a fair amount of freedom in what they can bolt on, though certain actions are prohibited for policy or security reasons (slavery, fully independent National Guards; thanks, George Wallace, for screwing that up) and interstate (inter-"process") communication is regulated by the "kernel". Then, each municipality would be a sub-distribution, sort of like Medibuntu or something similar.
Agreed. Installing encryption software on the personal machine isn't even sufficient - the IT department should maintain a known good "white list" image with all of the required software needed to work in the hospital and nothing else extra. Furthermore, it should be on known good "white list" hardware that's been audited for hardware-related security breaches and can be remotely killed in the event of compromise.
Allowing personal equipment on a hospital network is extremely irresponsible. Personally, I'd love to find out which hospital is allowing this so we could collectively nail them on HIPAA violations.
I'm going to ask my boss for a purchase order. The only item on that purchase order will be for a sufficient quantity of whatever this guy's smoking to get the rest of the office to stop asking me why Verizon blew up our office phone service again.
Seriously, though, what "nerds" want and what "users" want aren't entirely parallel; heck, half the time, they're completely orthogonal. Granted, the users aren't terribly happy with the nomadic button placement either, but I'm at least willing to let Mark see this thing through and do what he wants to do before I start casting judgment. I mean, if it really bothers me, it's not like there aren't ways to either move the button or try different distributions.
Oh, no doubt - I do think it's a little strange that Mark won't tell anyone what he plans on putting there, only that he's planning on putting something there and needs to clear the buttons away to make room for it. Personally, I would've just moved the buttons over and placed stuff there when it was ready in the same release cycle. That said, in the grand scheme of things, as long as the buttons are consistently somewhere, I think people will be just fine.
Honestly, the button move and all the brouhaha surrounding it felt a lot like a color of the bike shed issue. Granted, it would've been nice if Mark and Canonical listened to the community about button placement, but it sounds like they have plans for the right corner of the window that they're being coy with. In the grand scheme of things, where the buttons go is infinitely less important to the usability of the system than things like Pulseaudio, GNOME 3 (coming later), and so on.
I don't know... removing programs with Synaptic or Ubuntu's Software Center always seemed fairly straightforward to me. Heck, I'm running OO.org 3.2 on my laptop and it has Ubuntu 8.10 installed on it, which originally came with (if I remember correctly) OO.org 2.
The Crusades were over 700 years ago. I think it's time to let the statute of limitations expire on them, especially since there are farmorerecentacts of Christianity-inspired terrorism.
Ah - thanks for adding to the list of incorrect assumptions for me by appending one of your own; namely, the assumption that I am either illiterate or failed to take note of the weasel-word "often" in the commenter's statement and, upon perceiving it, would immediately share the commenter's ambiguous interpretation of the word. Bravo, sir!
The No True Scotsman would like a word with you and your "real, proper IT geek". I'll warn you in advance - it involves kilts, commando-style, and bagpipes.
Well, sort of - for various reasons, he refused to give up the passwords to his bosses because he decided (correctly or not, of course, is for the jury to decide) that the only person authorized to receive the passwords was Mayor Newsom. Now, I'll note that, if his interpretation was that the "city" owned the passwords, you could make the argument that, if that's the case, he could also interpret that as broadly as humanly possible and give everyone in San Francisco the passwords; after all, if the network is owned by the city, that means its *public* property, not just the private property of Mayor Newsom or select city employees. Realistically, he adopted a particularly narrow and self-serving interpretation of city policies to suit his own agenda, a point which the city is trying to make in court.
Ultimately, Childs is, at best, technically correct. It doesn't change the fact that he rules lawyered himself a rather convenient bit of job security, even if it proved to be temporary. This case won't put "all IT admins in danger" unless "all IT admins" work in places where there are no sane, documented policies regarding password handling and sharing and where ownership of IT equipment is rhetorically ambiguous.
It's true! Hence why flat earth theory, a geocentric universe, phlogiston theory, and about 90% of the stuff Aristotle wrote about medicine have all retained their relevancy and veracity after all of these years.
Right - because, as we all know, OS/2 is fully compatible with Windows NT-based systems, especially ones as recent as Windows 7. We also know that Novell's commercial support for SUSE and Canonical's support for Ubuntu don't count as "commercial support". We also know that MS' current "Would you like Aero with that?" choice between XP and 7 is not a choice of multiple, wildly divergent interfaces at all, just as we also know that resurrecting a nearly 20 year old desktop paradigm that nobody liked in the early '90s will go over swimmingly today. Also, just for kicks, choosing between GNOME and KDE is so incredibly difficult for most people, especially since most desktop-oriented Linux distributions use GNOME these days as their default (SUSE being a notable exception).
Snarkiness aside, there are many reasons why desktop Linux is floundering and why Apple's market share is gaining, but it has little to do with anything IBM can fix. First off, you don't need Windows compatibility - you need native compatibility with Windows programs. In Apple's case, they have a version of MS Office. It's probably less compatible with MS' own file formats than OpenOffice, but it has the name "Microsoft" as part of its brand and that counts for a lot with many. Apple also enjoys native versions of several other popular Windows programs that people have to use for work or play, including Adobe's Creative Suite, as well as several other programs out there. Yes, there are a dizzying array of open source projects that mimic (if not outright exceed at times) the functionality of these closed source programs, but you have to know which ones map up to which and trust that the open source version of the program won't subtly break your work when you least expect it. IBM, I'm sorry to say, doesn't make any of the programs that we're talking about, so there's not much they can do about it. As proof, I submit the current level of "popularity" enjoyed by Lotus Symphony.
Now, let's talk about commercial support. Yes, IBM can certainly provide that, as can (and are) a ton of other support providers out there. Realistically, though, most people don't use commercial support; I mean, when's the last time you heard of someone calling Microsoft because their computer got a virus? The only company that provides real post-purchase support that home users consider using is Apple; on the flip side, Apple's commercial support is abysmal, while HP's and Dell's is comparatively fantastic. IBM would undoubtedly be able to keep up with Dell/HP/etc. as far as business support goes, but would have a heck of a time building up the sort of infrastructure that Apple has on the ground for generic consumer support, especially since IBM isn't currently "hip" or "trendy". Honestly, Apple is the only consumer electronics brand that can actually support its own store - Gateway, Sony, and Microsoft have all failed. I'd be rather pleasantly surprised if IBM didn't fall in the latter category.
Okay, now, let's talk about the standard interface. Though there are, of course, a ton of UIs out there for the more technically savvy to look at, the only two that will matter to most people are KDE and GNOME, with most major distributors focusing on GNOME these days (thanks, KDE 4!). Consequently, if you're a programmer and you target GNOME, you're going to hit well over half of the Linux desktop market (the vast majority of Ubuntu users and a good chunk of Fedora). Now, things could change once GNOME 3 comes out, but that's rapidly starting to look like a standard to me. Not that it really matters, though - MS and Apple have both changed their interfaces significantly over the past few years and people have generally lived with the changes.
Personally, I think that, if Linux is going to grow on the desktop (and I'm not entirely sure that it should, at least not right now), the best thing it can do is stop treating commercial software li
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I remember those games - what really caught my attention was how the instruction manual was thicker than many of the technical manuals I have lying around these days. On the one hand, that attention to detail was conceptually fantastic; I mean, it's great that somebody sat down and made a game that tries to capture everything about flying an F-15. On the other hand, if I'm going to basically go through the effort of getting a pilot's license before I get my simulated plane off the ground, I'd like to actually have a pilot's license in my pocket to show for it.
Maybe he's thinking about the Korn Shell. That said, I think Ubuntu is set up to use bash by default...
The first rule of outrunning a bear is that you don't need to outrun the bear. You just need to run faster than the person behind you.
I use guacamole at home all the time. It tastes great and has less filling!
If I had mod points, I would give you all of them.
Well, whitehouse.gov switched to Drupal not too long ago. That would sort of imply that somebody, somewhere did some testing against it. Heck, they even contributed code.
It's because a five-year-old laptop could just as easily run most newer versions of Linux. It's not because "OS progress has stagnated", it's because there's no more "low-hanging fruit" for OS designers to reach anymore. Hardware has been advancing well ahead of software requirements for years. Just as importantly, we're no longer at the point where "basic household tasks" are being constrained by the hardware; back in the '80s, I used to fill the 128k of RAM on my Apple //e by writing a decently long report. In the early '90s, a high resolution picture would max out the RAM on most PCs of the time. Nowadays? We have so much RAM, hard drive space, and processor throughput where household video editing (something which didn't really exist until fairly recently, might I add) is easily performed on most PCs; the only differentiating factor now is "how long will it take", instead of "can I do it".
That's big - bigger than any monopolistic practices that Microsoft might be embracing at any given moment.
More importantly, no one could. Games are interdisciplinary these days - your "one" would have to excel at graphical design, programming, game theory, possibly physics (depending on the kind of game), and on and on and on. Outside of little Flash games, you're just not going to achieve the depth of knowledge required to make a full scale game.
A lot of the newer stuff is also available for LTS in Backports. Not all of it, of course, but enough of it where you can, for example, install the latest version of OpenOffice.org or something similar.
And so on. In fact, these days, when a state can legislate something fairly major on its own, it's big news. Speed limits, for example, were federalized during the Carter administration; state control of highway speed limits didn't return until the Clinton administration. The so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" is exceptional not only because it allows states to decide amongst themselves whether or not they wish to permit gay people to marry, it also allows them to creatively interpret the "full faith and credit" clause (a contract in one state has to be honored in all other states) to exclude marriages between two people of the same gender.
Realistically, states have very little power these days, especially compared to what some of the Founding Fathers initially had in mind (though not all of them - the Constitution was an attempt to bring greater power to the federal government, not less). They get to decide, at least to a certain point, what level of taxation is present, how comprehensively certain social services will be provided, whether the state is a "right-to-work" state or not, and how easy it will be to buy liquor within the state. That's pretty much it. Is that good? Well... it depends on your perspective. On the one hand, it proved to be the most reliable way to overturn some truly heinous state-level policies, especially in the South. On the other hand, it's not like the federal government is a perfectly innocent or saintly presence itself; at the very least, greater centralization leads to a "single point of failure" with potentially catastrophic consequences. At the most mundane, federal policies can be rather "average"; for example, a 55 MPH speed limit might make sense in Massachusetts, but is less impractical in, say, Montana. Similarly, concealed carry laws might make sense in Wyoming, where a single bullet might hit an antelope and a stray tumbleweed, but might make much less sense in a highly urbanized environment where a single bullet can hit a couple of people, go through a wall, and break a window. Unfortunately, figuring out which issues are best handled locally seems to be more of an art than a science.
Nah - think of the states as more like Law Distributions. They take the mainline legal "kernel", which is represented by the Constitution, US Codes, common law judgments, and so forth, then bolt on "community-oriented" laws on top of that base to create a "usable system". Just like Linux, US states have a fair amount of freedom in what they can bolt on, though certain actions are prohibited for policy or security reasons (slavery, fully independent National Guards; thanks, George Wallace, for screwing that up) and interstate (inter-"process") communication is regulated by the "kernel". Then, each municipality would be a sub-distribution, sort of like Medibuntu or something similar.
Agreed. Installing encryption software on the personal machine isn't even sufficient - the IT department should maintain a known good "white list" image with all of the required software needed to work in the hospital and nothing else extra. Furthermore, it should be on known good "white list" hardware that's been audited for hardware-related security breaches and can be remotely killed in the event of compromise.
Allowing personal equipment on a hospital network is extremely irresponsible. Personally, I'd love to find out which hospital is allowing this so we could collectively nail them on HIPAA violations.
I'm going to ask my boss for a purchase order. The only item on that purchase order will be for a sufficient quantity of whatever this guy's smoking to get the rest of the office to stop asking me why Verizon blew up our office phone service again.
That is all.
Dude, it's not for you. (Yes, I know you're being satirical.)
Seriously, though, what "nerds" want and what "users" want aren't entirely parallel; heck, half the time, they're completely orthogonal. Granted, the users aren't terribly happy with the nomadic button placement either, but I'm at least willing to let Mark see this thing through and do what he wants to do before I start casting judgment. I mean, if it really bothers me, it's not like there aren't ways to either move the button or try different distributions.
Oh, no doubt - I do think it's a little strange that Mark won't tell anyone what he plans on putting there, only that he's planning on putting something there and needs to clear the buttons away to make room for it. Personally, I would've just moved the buttons over and placed stuff there when it was ready in the same release cycle. That said, in the grand scheme of things, as long as the buttons are consistently somewhere, I think people will be just fine.
Honestly, the button move and all the brouhaha surrounding it felt a lot like a color of the bike shed issue. Granted, it would've been nice if Mark and Canonical listened to the community about button placement, but it sounds like they have plans for the right corner of the window that they're being coy with. In the grand scheme of things, where the buttons go is infinitely less important to the usability of the system than things like Pulseaudio, GNOME 3 (coming later), and so on.
Y'know... this is going to sound a little scary... but I think they do!
Exactly. Planning a distro is like astrology - you hope and pray the planets align and, if they don't, you make the most of things.
I don't know... removing programs with Synaptic or Ubuntu's Software Center always seemed fairly straightforward to me. Heck, I'm running OO.org 3.2 on my laptop and it has Ubuntu 8.10 installed on it, which originally came with (if I remember correctly) OO.org 2.
The Crusades were over 700 years ago. I think it's time to let the statute of limitations expire on them, especially since there are far more recent acts of Christianity-inspired terrorism.
Ah - thanks for adding to the list of incorrect assumptions for me by appending one of your own; namely, the assumption that I am either illiterate or failed to take note of the weasel-word "often" in the commenter's statement and, upon perceiving it, would immediately share the commenter's ambiguous interpretation of the word. Bravo, sir!
The No True Scotsman would like a word with you and your "real, proper IT geek". I'll warn you in advance - it involves kilts, commando-style, and bagpipes.
Well, sort of - for various reasons, he refused to give up the passwords to his bosses because he decided (correctly or not, of course, is for the jury to decide) that the only person authorized to receive the passwords was Mayor Newsom. Now, I'll note that, if his interpretation was that the "city" owned the passwords, you could make the argument that, if that's the case, he could also interpret that as broadly as humanly possible and give everyone in San Francisco the passwords; after all, if the network is owned by the city, that means its *public* property, not just the private property of Mayor Newsom or select city employees. Realistically, he adopted a particularly narrow and self-serving interpretation of city policies to suit his own agenda, a point which the city is trying to make in court.
Ultimately, Childs is, at best, technically correct. It doesn't change the fact that he rules lawyered himself a rather convenient bit of job security, even if it proved to be temporary. This case won't put "all IT admins in danger" unless "all IT admins" work in places where there are no sane, documented policies regarding password handling and sharing and where ownership of IT equipment is rhetorically ambiguous.
It's true! Hence why flat earth theory, a geocentric universe, phlogiston theory, and about 90% of the stuff Aristotle wrote about medicine have all retained their relevancy and veracity after all of these years.
Right - because, as we all know, OS/2 is fully compatible with Windows NT-based systems, especially ones as recent as Windows 7. We also know that Novell's commercial support for SUSE and Canonical's support for Ubuntu don't count as "commercial support". We also know that MS' current "Would you like Aero with that?" choice between XP and 7 is not a choice of multiple, wildly divergent interfaces at all, just as we also know that resurrecting a nearly 20 year old desktop paradigm that nobody liked in the early '90s will go over swimmingly today. Also, just for kicks, choosing between GNOME and KDE is so incredibly difficult for most people, especially since most desktop-oriented Linux distributions use GNOME these days as their default (SUSE being a notable exception).
Snarkiness aside, there are many reasons why desktop Linux is floundering and why Apple's market share is gaining, but it has little to do with anything IBM can fix. First off, you don't need Windows compatibility - you need native compatibility with Windows programs. In Apple's case, they have a version of MS Office. It's probably less compatible with MS' own file formats than OpenOffice, but it has the name "Microsoft" as part of its brand and that counts for a lot with many. Apple also enjoys native versions of several other popular Windows programs that people have to use for work or play, including Adobe's Creative Suite, as well as several other programs out there. Yes, there are a dizzying array of open source projects that mimic (if not outright exceed at times) the functionality of these closed source programs, but you have to know which ones map up to which and trust that the open source version of the program won't subtly break your work when you least expect it. IBM, I'm sorry to say, doesn't make any of the programs that we're talking about, so there's not much they can do about it. As proof, I submit the current level of "popularity" enjoyed by Lotus Symphony.
Now, let's talk about commercial support. Yes, IBM can certainly provide that, as can (and are) a ton of other support providers out there. Realistically, though, most people don't use commercial support; I mean, when's the last time you heard of someone calling Microsoft because their computer got a virus? The only company that provides real post-purchase support that home users consider using is Apple; on the flip side, Apple's commercial support is abysmal, while HP's and Dell's is comparatively fantastic. IBM would undoubtedly be able to keep up with Dell/HP/etc. as far as business support goes, but would have a heck of a time building up the sort of infrastructure that Apple has on the ground for generic consumer support, especially since IBM isn't currently "hip" or "trendy". Honestly, Apple is the only consumer electronics brand that can actually support its own store - Gateway, Sony, and Microsoft have all failed. I'd be rather pleasantly surprised if IBM didn't fall in the latter category.
Okay, now, let's talk about the standard interface. Though there are, of course, a ton of UIs out there for the more technically savvy to look at, the only two that will matter to most people are KDE and GNOME, with most major distributors focusing on GNOME these days (thanks, KDE 4!). Consequently, if you're a programmer and you target GNOME, you're going to hit well over half of the Linux desktop market (the vast majority of Ubuntu users and a good chunk of Fedora). Now, things could change once GNOME 3 comes out, but that's rapidly starting to look like a standard to me. Not that it really matters, though - MS and Apple have both changed their interfaces significantly over the past few years and people have generally lived with the changes.
Personally, I think that, if Linux is going to grow on the desktop (and I'm not entirely sure that it should, at least not right now), the best thing it can do is stop treating commercial software li