For a while, they were talking about letting the public drive lunar or Mars rovers under some conditions. I was all, "SIGN ME UP!" but I think that got crunched with the rest of the budget and the economy. I also remember seeing some visionary say that NASA could pay for the space program by having a little fleet of rovers / spacecraft(?) that the public could pay for time slots to steer, take observations, do whatever. I've bought exactly one computer game in my life (Planetfall...), but I'd pay serious bucks for time in space.
precisely so I won't have to listen to breathless drivel about astronaut hair styles, or some damn thing. Just the facts, ma'am. (Why, yes, I am a scientist. Why do you ask?)
I don't give a heck about what you're advertising for, nor what style, images, words, whatever you use. I don't want to see your crap. If I need "product information", I will find it - ironically - on Google. The difference is that I'll be looking for it, instead of getting it shoved down my throat, willingly or otherwise.
Yes. Exactly. Seconded, thirded, fourthed, fifthed. Except I started using bing because they hang on to clickstreams for 48 hours instead of forever. And as soon as I started, M$ expanded it to a month. We need a non-commercial, open source, people's search engine. Get to work, Wikipedia.
Sheesh. Honestly. They capitalized "People." Call in the Firemen. I'm a university prof (biology), and we're pretty famous for being fussy, but even I wouldn't have thought that somebody objecting to facts in Wikipedia could mean something so picayune.
And by the way, I fix errors in biology articles when I see them. In two years, that's been some four edits, only two of them rising above the level of typo. I use Wikipedia all the time. It's quite good for science.
Wow, in the hospital where I work, the doctors frequently turn up to the IT department saying how they've just bought in a new system and they need it supported. If they get told 'no', they complain...
The point the article made was that system works even a little bit only when doctors,-- doctors, not management, not IT, not enterprise architecture, not business silos, doctors -- can say what they need and get told "yes."
Having the *right* to your own work is different from somebody letting you have it--for now. Google's TOS says loud and clear that they're in control, not you.
It's funny that commenters with low membership numbers -- which I assume means folks who've been around the computer scene since the Stone Age -- make that point, while the ones with the What-Me-Worry attitude sound less experienced.
Cloud computing is just thin clients all over again, thin clients with graphics. Now all that remains to be seen is what we're willing to hand over in exchange for those nice shiny beads.
Honestly. F-spot is awful. Gthumb actually works -- you can do complicated stuff like decide which directory you want photos to be in. First thing I do with a new ubuntu install is dump f-spot, install gthumb, go through the effing rigamorole to make it the default app for that, and curse a whole bunch. For any actual image processing, it's gimp. Duh.
The gnome devs have so many stupid defaults sometimes I wonder what planet they live on. Just one example: you can't rename the desktop icons for media. It's "8GB-drive" or whatever. I have about three separate USB thumbdrives, all 8GB, and no way to name them something useful because I'm such a dumb user that would confuse me.
The only one with enough clout to kick those guys is probably Shuttleworth. So why in hell isn't he doing it?
64-bit Karmic is just plain unhealthy on my Fujitsu Lifebook laptop, nvidia graphics. Suspend doesn't work, hibernate doesn't work, system freezes to the point where nothing works but a hard reset. Luckily, I was testing the move on a sandbox machine, so I'm not terribly stung, but it's still a disappointment.
Funny thing is, I've been running 32-bit Karmic since early alphas in virtualization, and had no unexpected problems. I have the RC on there now, it's rock steady, looks gorgeous, and everything runs fine.
Maybe the ubuntu devs were doing all their testing on virtual machines??
I used OS/2 at the time, and it was an absolutely phenomenal operating system. From an enduser's perspective, I can tell you why it didn't catch on: IBM charged for it ($50?) and it wasn't preloaded. Windows was "free" and you didn't have to do a thing.
I'm glad to see that it looks like IBM learned something. I've been wondering, ever since Gutsy Gibbon came out, why none of the Big Shots had the smarts to preload Ubuntu and tell M$ to go to hell. Maybe something finally got through one of their concrete skulls.
I was calling bull$hit while it was happening. (The joys of tenure.) But for some reason, Admin doesn't listen to me. They paid $650,000. You read that right. $650,000. Why, when even a biologist knows there are better deals out there? Search me.
Maybe if I knew more about IT, I'd understand the benefits. As it is, the only benefit I can see is that IT has a number to call. Hence the angry original comment.
#1 complaint is the lack of clear, easy-to-follow documentation
Absolutely. And the really frustrating thing is that, like in the X-files, the truth is out there. It's just impossible to find. If Google was still one of the good guys, I'd be hoping that they might throw a few hundred million at pulling together all the best info out there. (Nobody, no matter how altruistic, is going to do something as stone-boring as write consistent and complete documentation without being paid.) But they're just ad peddlers now, so I guess Shuttleworth is our only hope. (?)
Same where I work. It's a college with about 6000 people, and an IT department that isn't merely useless. They make our jobs *more* difficult. They just recently talked the higher-ups into switching over to M$ server software (from Apache, etc, which was great) at a cost of hundreds of thousands per year to a cash-strapped district, because then they could outsource support. They talked the higher ups into going with proprietary course management software, more hundreds of thousands per year, again, because then somebody in Pennsylvania would be so-called "supporting" it.
There are several people on campus who use Linux. None of us has ever considered switching back to either Windows or Macs. Sure, there's a learning curve. As someone who had to learn DOS in the Good Old Days, it's no worse than that. Easier actually, because these days there are forums. I can't remember when I heard a useful answer from tech support for a commercial product.
The other massive advantage is software repositories. When something comes up and I need some new program to solve that problem, I google to find out what can do the job, download, install, and some five minutes to half hour later, I'm ready to go. No credit cards, no registration codes. When I have to use Windows to help out a colleague, I can never understand why anyone puts up with the inconvenience of it now that Linux has distros like Ubuntu.
So, anyway, this is a longwinded way of saying that, yes, support is the big issue in getting people back to proprietary software. But that's not support as a non-IT person understands it. That's "support" in the sense that there's someone else to blame when things go wrong.
I run Firefox 3.5.2 and 3.6 in Ubuntu. No memory problems. And with Adblock and Noscript, its speed beats the pants off any of the other browsers. The so-called "speed" tests are done without those critical add-ons. That makes them meaningless. As other commenters have said, what matters is the user experience, not how fast some arcane benchmark runs.
As for Chrome, who cares how fast it is? It makes zero sense to rely on an advertising giant. Once they've got market share, kiss all that speed goodbye because it'll be used up tracking clicks and serving ads.
/begin language police/ Glycemic = glyc = glucose + heme (blood), i.e. the amount of glucose in the blood. Glycine = an amino acid that is not glucose. You were thinking of the, uh, glycinic index? /end language police/
I'm a biologist at a university with about 25,000 students and administrators who need IT to come out and show them where the off switch is on their computers. (Really. That happened.) IT convinced them that they should go off Apache and onto the whole MS.NET server schmier. They're also absolutely set against any open source VLS, so we're paying additional $$$hundreds of thousands for WebCT (Blackboard) even though there's a whole Moodle consortium among the big regional universities. (Right now they're shopping for a replacement.) For one quarter the amount they're paying, they could hire their own in-house support staff if they needed to.
Why is this happening? My personal theory is that IT wants to be sure there's a big corporate entity to whom they can hand off support issues, so that they don't miss any golf games. The people we have in Admin don't know enough not to be relying on IT for this. They're also not relying on the faculty. Not a single faculty member, not even the ones in Computer Sci have had a chance to give any input that I've ever heard about.
So, in these economic times, with courses being cut, enrollments being cut because the classes aren't there for the students, we're spending close to a million dollars on proprietary "solutions" that
a) do NOT work with the diversity of software you have in a university. That diversity is not optional. Very often there's only one program written by one professor that runs on one platform that's essential to getting your class taught or your research done.
and b) do not work with any platform except Windows / Vista, not even Macs. This doesn't work in a university. See point a).
So the take home message is to collate all the total cost of ownership stats you can find (not sourced from Microsoft), and to remember that IT wants to avoid dealing with support no matter what it costs (for someone else). I can't say I blame them entirely, but it does need to stay in perspective. Also, send around a well-crafted questionnaire / query to all faculty about what their needs are and what *they* think would be a good solution. Follow up with the ones who seem to know what they're talking about. There might be a few things there IT hasn't thought of. Do what you can to keep your university from wasting millions on software that is way more frustrating and less usable than open source alternatives.
algal blooms. One of the prime symptoms of anthropogenic warming is disproportionate warming at night and at the North and South Poles. We're a smart bunch here at Slashdot, right? (Right?) We can figure out what that means.
Like a previous commenter said, yes, when they die they'll take some of their incorporated carbon down to the sea floor. Along the way, microbes are going to be decomposing it. They use oxygen to do that. If there's enough algae (and this sounds like there is) what that means is that all the fish and everything else that needs oxygen dies in that whole zone. It's like the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
Do you really want an advertising agency to have complete access to your OS?
That can't be said loud enough or often enough. What boggles my mind is that a common attitude seems to be "Privacy? Who cares? I wasn't using it anyway. Give me one-click dancing hamsters."
Although I don't think M$FT would be better. Merely different. What's better is user-controlled software. We have that somewhere, don't we? Out in the garage maybe?
Google is using open source to try to close the internet
Exactly.
Google is in the business of selling ads. Tracking clicks to sell ads, storing data to mine so they can sell ads, and on and on and on.
If you think that's harmless and don't care. Fine. It should be your choice to be owned by Google. But what I don't like is that I can see a future where it is not my choice not to be owned by them.
Slashdot Mirror
For a while, they were talking about letting the public drive lunar or Mars rovers under some conditions. I was all, "SIGN ME UP!" but I think that got crunched with the rest of the budget and the economy. I also remember seeing some visionary say that NASA could pay for the space program by having a little fleet of rovers / spacecraft(?) that the public could pay for time slots to steer, take observations, do whatever. I've bought exactly one computer game in my life (Planetfall...), but I'd pay serious bucks for time in space.
Indeed. Show me trajectories. Show me telescope or satellite shots of the target. Even NASA has too many pictures of people talking.
precisely so I won't have to listen to breathless drivel about astronaut hair styles, or some damn thing. Just the facts, ma'am. (Why, yes, I am a scientist. Why do you ask?)
I don't give a heck about what you're advertising for, nor what style, images, words, whatever you use. I don't want to see your crap. If I need "product information", I will find it - ironically - on Google. The difference is that I'll be looking for it, instead of getting it shoved down my throat, willingly or otherwise. Yes. Exactly. Seconded, thirded, fourthed, fifthed. Except I started using bing because they hang on to clickstreams for 48 hours instead of forever. And as soon as I started, M$ expanded it to a month. We need a non-commercial, open source, people's search engine. Get to work, Wikipedia.
Sheesh. Honestly. They capitalized "People." Call in the Firemen. I'm a university prof (biology), and we're pretty famous for being fussy, but even I wouldn't have thought that somebody objecting to facts in Wikipedia could mean something so picayune.
And by the way, I fix errors in biology articles when I see them. In two years, that's been some four edits, only two of them rising above the level of typo. I use Wikipedia all the time. It's quite good for science.
Wow, in the hospital where I work, the doctors frequently turn up to the IT department saying how they've just bought in a new system and they need it supported. If they get told 'no', they complain...
The point the article made was that system works even a little bit only when doctors,-- doctors, not management, not IT, not enterprise architecture, not business silos, doctors -- can say what they need and get told "yes."
Having the *right* to your own work is different from somebody letting you have it--for now. Google's TOS says loud and clear that they're in control, not you.
It's funny that commenters with low membership numbers -- which I assume means folks who've been around the computer scene since the Stone Age -- make that point, while the ones with the What-Me-Worry attitude sound less experienced.
Cloud computing is just thin clients all over again, thin clients with graphics. Now all that remains to be seen is what we're willing to hand over in exchange for those nice shiny beads.
Honestly. F-spot is awful. Gthumb actually works -- you can do complicated stuff like decide which directory you want photos to be in. First thing I do with a new ubuntu install is dump f-spot, install gthumb, go through the effing rigamorole to make it the default app for that, and curse a whole bunch. For any actual image processing, it's gimp. Duh.
The gnome devs have so many stupid defaults sometimes I wonder what planet they live on. Just one example: you can't rename the desktop icons for media. It's "8GB-drive" or whatever. I have about three separate USB thumbdrives, all 8GB, and no way to name them something useful because I'm such a dumb user that would confuse me.
The only one with enough clout to kick those guys is probably Shuttleworth. So why in hell isn't he doing it?
they've been paid handsomely to make the complaint. I'm half Russian. And, boy, does this have the ring of truth.
64-bit Karmic is just plain unhealthy on my Fujitsu Lifebook laptop, nvidia graphics. Suspend doesn't work, hibernate doesn't work, system freezes to the point where nothing works but a hard reset. Luckily, I was testing the move on a sandbox machine, so I'm not terribly stung, but it's still a disappointment.
Funny thing is, I've been running 32-bit Karmic since early alphas in virtualization, and had no unexpected problems. I have the RC on there now, it's rock steady, looks gorgeous, and everything runs fine.
Maybe the ubuntu devs were doing all their testing on virtual machines??
Yeah. And the number of gamers who are that fanatical and use Linux is, oh, about 0.5% of the Windows users.
I used OS/2 at the time, and it was an absolutely phenomenal operating system. From an enduser's perspective, I can tell you why it didn't catch on: IBM charged for it ($50?) and it wasn't preloaded. Windows was "free" and you didn't have to do a thing.
I'm glad to see that it looks like IBM learned something. I've been wondering, ever since Gutsy Gibbon came out, why none of the Big Shots had the smarts to preload Ubuntu and tell M$ to go to hell. Maybe something finally got through one of their concrete skulls.
Try it. It's a strategy game, and FOSS. Unusual combination. http://glest.org/
I was calling bull$hit while it was happening. (The joys of tenure.) But for some reason, Admin doesn't listen to me. They paid $650,000. You read that right. $650,000. Why, when even a biologist knows there are better deals out there? Search me.
Maybe if I knew more about IT, I'd understand the benefits. As it is, the only benefit I can see is that IT has a number to call. Hence the angry original comment.
Good point.
#1 complaint is the lack of clear, easy-to-follow documentation
Absolutely. And the really frustrating thing is that, like in the X-files, the truth is out there. It's just impossible to find. If Google was still one of the good guys, I'd be hoping that they might throw a few hundred million at pulling together all the best info out there. (Nobody, no matter how altruistic, is going to do something as stone-boring as write consistent and complete documentation without being paid.) But they're just ad peddlers now, so I guess Shuttleworth is our only hope. (?)
Same where I work. It's a college with about 6000 people, and an IT department that isn't merely useless. They make our jobs *more* difficult. They just recently talked the higher-ups into switching over to M$ server software (from Apache, etc, which was great) at a cost of hundreds of thousands per year to a cash-strapped district, because then they could outsource support. They talked the higher ups into going with proprietary course management software, more hundreds of thousands per year, again, because then somebody in Pennsylvania would be so-called "supporting" it.
There are several people on campus who use Linux. None of us has ever considered switching back to either Windows or Macs. Sure, there's a learning curve. As someone who had to learn DOS in the Good Old Days, it's no worse than that. Easier actually, because these days there are forums. I can't remember when I heard a useful answer from tech support for a commercial product.
The other massive advantage is software repositories. When something comes up and I need some new program to solve that problem, I google to find out what can do the job, download, install, and some five minutes to half hour later, I'm ready to go. No credit cards, no registration codes. When I have to use Windows to help out a colleague, I can never understand why anyone puts up with the inconvenience of it now that Linux has distros like Ubuntu.
So, anyway, this is a longwinded way of saying that, yes, support is the big issue in getting people back to proprietary software. But that's not support as a non-IT person understands it. That's "support" in the sense that there's someone else to blame when things go wrong.
I run Firefox 3.5.2 and 3.6 in Ubuntu. No memory problems. And with Adblock and Noscript, its speed beats the pants off any of the other browsers. The so-called "speed" tests are done without those critical add-ons. That makes them meaningless. As other commenters have said, what matters is the user experience, not how fast some arcane benchmark runs.
As for Chrome, who cares how fast it is? It makes zero sense to rely on an advertising giant. Once they've got market share, kiss all that speed goodbye because it'll be used up tracking clicks and serving ads.
/begin language police/ Glycemic = glyc = glucose + heme (blood), i.e. the amount of glucose in the blood. Glycine = an amino acid that is not glucose. You were thinking of the, uh, glycinic index?
/end language police/
I'm a biologist at a university with about 25,000 students and administrators who need IT to come out and show them where the off switch is on their computers. (Really. That happened.) IT convinced them that they should go off Apache and onto the whole MS .NET server schmier. They're also absolutely set against any open source VLS, so we're paying additional $$$hundreds of thousands for WebCT (Blackboard) even though there's a whole Moodle consortium among the big regional universities. (Right now they're shopping for a replacement.) For one quarter the amount they're paying, they could hire their own in-house support staff if they needed to.
Why is this happening? My personal theory is that IT wants to be sure there's a big corporate entity to whom they can hand off support issues, so that they don't miss any golf games. The people we have in Admin don't know enough not to be relying on IT for this. They're also not relying on the faculty. Not a single faculty member, not even the ones in Computer Sci have had a chance to give any input that I've ever heard about.
So, in these economic times, with courses being cut, enrollments being cut because the classes aren't there for the students, we're spending close to a million dollars on proprietary "solutions" that
a) do NOT work with the diversity of software you have in a university. That diversity is not optional. Very often there's only one program written by one professor that runs on one platform that's essential to getting your class taught or your research done.
and b) do not work with any platform except Windows / Vista, not even Macs. This doesn't work in a university. See point a).
So the take home message is to collate all the total cost of ownership stats you can find (not sourced from Microsoft), and to remember that IT wants to avoid dealing with support no matter what it costs (for someone else). I can't say I blame them entirely, but it does need to stay in perspective. Also, send around a well-crafted questionnaire / query to all faculty about what their needs are and what *they* think would be a good solution. Follow up with the ones who seem to know what they're talking about. There might be a few things there IT hasn't thought of. Do what you can to keep your university from wasting millions on software that is way more frustrating and less usable than open source alternatives.
I'm a grey-haired quasi-respectable academic, and I get asked to boot up my laptop almost every time. Oh, and I'm white.
algal blooms. One of the prime symptoms of anthropogenic warming is disproportionate warming at night and at the North and South Poles. We're a smart bunch here at Slashdot, right? (Right?) We can figure out what that means.
Like a previous commenter said, yes, when they die they'll take some of their incorporated carbon down to the sea floor. Along the way, microbes are going to be decomposing it. They use oxygen to do that. If there's enough algae (and this sounds like there is) what that means is that all the fish and everything else that needs oxygen dies in that whole zone. It's like the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
This is major Not Good.
Do you really want an advertising agency to have complete access to your OS?
That can't be said loud enough or often enough. What boggles my mind is that a common attitude seems to be "Privacy? Who cares? I wasn't using it anyway. Give me one-click dancing hamsters."
Although I don't think M$FT would be better. Merely different. What's better is user-controlled software. We have that somewhere, don't we? Out in the garage maybe?
Google is using open source to try to close the internet
Exactly.
Google is in the business of selling ads. Tracking clicks to sell ads, storing data to mine so they can sell ads, and on and on and on.
If you think that's harmless and don't care. Fine. It should be your choice to be owned by Google. But what I don't like is that I can see a future where it is not my choice not to be owned by them.
(Spelling police. Hands up. "Tenets. Tenets of reporting. Who are these tenants whereof you speak?")