What Will Happen in IT in 2007? 318
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Paul Murphy has set out his IT predictions for 2007. Featured among the completely predictable, OpenSolaris overtaking Linux is apparently inevitable within one year. From the article: 'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop? Other 'inevitables' include Microsoft's success with Vista, the continuing phase-out of Itanium, and the Cell processor powering most of the world's super-computers."
I don't get it (Score:4, Funny)
Does that mean that he wants Linus to get hit by a bus? Cause that's what I'm reading!
IT will be sold on EBAY! (Score:3, Funny)
3. Profit!
This guy is smoking something good (Score:5, Insightful)
He then goes on to reiterate much of what's been said every year but never come true, that is the parts that actually made sense. I'm surprised that he didn't say "2007 is the year for the Open Solaris desktop".
What a waste of time.
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Those countries found your alternative already, but I am afraid it is not exactly what you had in mind :-)
S.O.S (Same ol' shit) (Score:5, Insightful)
I could replace the word OpenSolaris with Linux. Or Mac OS X. Or BeOS. Or Amiga.
Face it, Windows is the defacto standard and will be for many, many years. Until businesses change (from running Windows) every other operating system ever created will be second fiddle to the Microsoft monopoly. You know what? Who cares? Do you think Porsche executives stay up late at night thinking "Jesus Christ, Ford has really got us by the balls. How the fuck are we going to compete againt the new Escort?"
I don't care about Microsoft and what they're doing. If it wasn't for their stranglehold on the computing industry, they'd be 10 years behind the technological curve. Natch. They ARE 10 years behind the curve. They just (currently) have the money right NOW to stay relevant.
It'll change. Maybe not now, but soon.
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Re:S.O.S (Same ol' shit) (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft gets away with being mediocre because they target the hordes of similarly mediocre individuals who make up the human population. If an above-average competitor comes along at this point and targets those same masses, upsetting Microsoft will be easy; but right now I see no evidence that such an event is likely. Google is too nerdy to do it, IBM doesn't care about desktops anymore, it could only happen at Apple with Jobs gone and with Jobs gone Apple would crumble, and Sun is just too much of a mess.
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"'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop?"
I could replace the word OpenSolaris with Linux.
You mean "By the end of the year the Linux community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community."? ;-)
Re:S.O.S (Same ol' shit) (Score:5, Insightful)
This statement from TFA completely misses the point, but not only in the way you explain. Thing is, OpenSolaris is a kernel, just like Linux; it isn't an entire OS. The 'Linux community' is only in a small part the 'Linux kernel community'; most projects in the FOSS world are kernel-agnostic. You can run GNOME on a Linux, BSD or OpenSolaris kernel, for example. So even if OpenSolaris does become a more popular kernel than Linux, very little will change in the FOSS world. Microsoft would have a hell of a time replacing their kernel; a 'Linux distro' can fairly easily do so (for example, Nexenta is Ubuntu running on OpenSolaris).
However, even after focusing only on the kernel, I seriously doubt OpenSolaris will overtake Linux anytime soon. There is quite a lot of (code) investment in Linux, e.g. drivers, which would need to be ported (and licensing issues sorted out, but perhaps Sun will GPL OpenSolaris as rumors claim). Equally importantly, distros are used to using Linux. While OpenSolaris has some advantages, I can't see how any of them is reason enough to switch over. Still, choice is always good, perhaps both kernels have a place.
Re:S.O.S (Same ol' shit) (Score:4, Insightful)
The desktop tools are fully as useable as Microsoft's. More so, I'd say. Even GNOME is, with their habit of entirely removing everything that's unnecessary for more than 80% of the users.
The major remaining issues for Linux superiority are hardware support and games. I've got TuxRacer and Globulation 2, though, and set up my wireless card in three easy step (the other fifteen were fiendishly difficult).
After that, the remaining issues are Internet access and speed (Linux isn't good for slow connections), specific applications (if you have ten years' data for ARCview, you're staying with the platforms they support), and unfamiliarity with Linux.
Take a similar example: Apple produces a product that's more polished and better in many ways than Linux, better in most ways than Microsoft, and still has less than 10% market share. Why? Nothing technical, just economic and psychological.
Prediction #11 (Score:2)
#11: The PS3 will remain in very short supply, and not come down in price anytime soon.
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Complete Drivle (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:Complete Drivle (Score:5, Funny)
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dream on (Score:2)
Yeah, because Sun's "organizational structures" for open source projects have been such huge successes, right?
the core provisions in the community development license
Oh, Sun loves software licenses that lets big companies like them take advantage of open
Re:dream on (Score:5, Insightful)
Get real - Linux tracing capabilities are like primitive caveman tools compared to DTrace. Just because something wasn't developed by the "Linux community" (whatever the hell that means) doesn't mean it is worthless. ZFS is a major evolutionary step forward for file systems. Again, just because it wasn't born and raised as a sourceforge project doesn't mean it must be crap. Take off the blinders, zealot. Great technology knows no religion, it can come from anywhere. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, et al, are not staffed by idiots (well, at least not in the engineering ranks). Just because they work for "the man" doesn't make their contributions to the field of software any less relevant or useful. Judge the tools by their merits, ignore the religion.
Whether or not OpenSolaris "takes over" in 2007 remains to be seen, but to dismiss the contributions of Sun's engineers (or Microsoft's for that matter) is to ignore history and to ignore some truly innovative contributions to the field.
Put the crack pipe down. (Score:3, Insightful)
And linux has nothing that in any way comes anywhere even close to dtrace. I know its pretty standard for gnubies to not know anything besides linux, and speak of linux's greatness out of ignorance, but go read up on d
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"Yeah, because Sun's "organizational structures" for open source projects have been such huge successes, right?"
Yep. Ever hear of NFS? NIS?
More to the point, take a look at the OpenSolaris community and tell me what's wrong with the organisational structure. It's very similar to the standard open-source structure, except that it addresses some of the problems that have cropped up in that model (fragmentation, dead projects).
I'm not even going to addres
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In what way were Sun NFS and NIS big open source successes? I mean, apart from the fact that NFS and NIS absolutely suck as technologies, Sun released their source long after other people had created their own, independent implementations.
Complete system probes are something completely new in the world of computing,
Yes, and that statement in itself makes them suspect. The UNIX philosophy has always been to provide minimal "good enough" solutions for clearly defined needs, not co
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What Linux already has is mindshare. It is a "good enough" Microsoft alternative that works now. Sure, DTrace is good. Great, even. But most people wouldn't know how to take advantage of it. Most people putting together a mail server or web server simply don't need it. A
What to say? (Score:5, Insightful)
Somebody find this guy a cluestick and beat him with it.
How many trite phrases can you fit in one blog post? "structural convergence" "Web 2" "SOA" "Googlemania" "YouTube"
OK, Here's my set of predictions.
Don't like my list? You do better.
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There are pretty good lists here [javadevelo...ournal.com], too...including Bill Dudney's:
Congratulations! (Score:2)
I can't believe I clicked it.
AJAX rocks. It won't cure cancer, though.
Java probably will take off some in noughtseven.
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You're both wrong. Or more precisely, you're both wrong in the wider scope of "HPC." HPC is much more than machoflops. Cell may indeed dominate the Top 500 in 2007, but that's a useless list for people doing serious supercomputing work. It's one datapoint on a very complex computational surface.
Cell and GPGPU will remain niche technologies for one very simple reason: they're insanely difficult to program. HPC users are less and less willing
Intel is starting to understand... (Score:2)
We'll know when Intel has got it when they realize the infinite possible permutations of special purpose cores on one chip means a great deal of marketing advantage.
Of course that solution includes a great deal more compiler complexity than even massively parallel GPGPUs. It is unfortunate that HPC is going to have this shakeout in programmers who know what they're doing, vs template geeks. Unfortunate for the template geeks, that is. Real programmers code with the tools at hand an
Hey, (Score:3, Informative)
You know stuff about HPC. That's cool.
I've been reading some of your older posts. You seem like a smart guy. Even about non-tech stuff like http://www.mosesmi.org/ [mosesmi.org] (who could use a new webmaster, btw).
I still disagree with you about GPGPU and HPC. For HPC interconnect is king and you can't get any better than being on the same die. Yes, compiler complexity bites, and it will get worse before it gets better. Naturally the idea
Re:What to say? (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Itanic is still dead. Wow. What a revelation.
3. Cell takes over HPC. Not gonna happen. See GPGPU for why.
4. Slowaris wins out over linux. Literally when pigs fly.
- Microsoft will hit financial/stock trouble as Vista flops, with businesses not buying it and the public not keen on the upgrades/lack of wow.
- Itanic get killed, zeroed and deleted from the Intel history books
- Cell is on life support by the end of the year, off the back of poor PS3 sales, poor yields, and nobody wanting to fight to program the damn thing.
- Linux comes of age as the disto crowd final package a version sensibly. Sun is on life support off the back of poor business decisions.
Slightly more bravely:Re: (Score:2)
GPGPU vs Cell: Right now you can buy off the shelf a pair of GPGPU cards that slot into one motherboard. That gives you 1024 math units, at least six GPU units, and the whole thing drives off of one single, dual or quad-core cpu, that fits in 4u. Sure they don't do dual precision yet, but that requirement is not universal. IBM may have some good stuff with the Cell, but it won't be 2007 when they begin to compete with that, and who knows what's in the graphics card manufacturers pipeline? They're a typi
Slowaris fan (Score:2)
Sure, some services need bulletproof servers that are never updated and never crash. That's what BSD is for. And with it you don't have to deal with a user interface from the 70's.
BTW, internal mail is ok with anything stable, but for edge mail you'll need something fast for your Bayes and RBLs.
By a "small bit of performance" I'm sure you meant "some reasonabl
Anybody else have the feeling? (Score:4, Insightful)
ZDNet's Paul Murphy
Anybody else have the feeling that the submitter is actually Paul Murphy?
Seems like Zonk has broken into the New Years champagne a bit early, and the standard for front-page stories went from infinitesimal to nil.
Tried OpenSolaris... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, from my working with it, I know the OpenSolaris is certainly full of themselves, and some denial, but I don't think they can live up to their own expectations. For example, any complaint or bug frequently got met with 'at least you aren't running linux!'. They trashed on lack of documentation in linux while I struggled to find some documentation on their stuff that seemed unwritten. They'd pick up a decade-old howto and say 'this is how linux requires you do it, versus our not-yet released way, see how crappy linux is'. When people talked about how woefully (understandably) incomplete their ACPI and suspend support was, they pointed at linux and said 'linux acpi support hardly works at all, so don't expect too much' despite the reality of 3 out of 3 generic motherboards I've tried worked splendidly with linux acpi. My laptop despite being one of their officially tested still doesn't have clock modulation and their acpi parser barfs on the DSDT that nothing else (not even intel's compiler) even warns on. People discussing panics/hangs are met with 'at least it doesn't crash as much as linux', despite evidence to the contrary. They are used to a closed, proprietary world of a select set of hardware and the open world if they make any headway in is going to give them quite the wake up call. They talk about how much better their driver support is, despite the glaring lack of drivers. Largely their efforts in expanding that involve porting drivers from the BSD projects.
Anyway, their current implementation does admittedly seem adequate for most server type activities if the hardware is supported. I could see a lot of hardware vendors happy about a system with a stable binary interface for drivers that doesn't require rebuilds for every uname -r, but hardware vendors face the market realities and put up with the pain if they want to play in the server space. I understand the hassle, but linux making a PITA for hardware vendors have given us a lot more driver source than we could have hoped for. For the market, probably the single best card they have is ZFS. They have done a good job of consolidating volume management, software raid, filesystem, stuff like snapshots, and paranoia of checksumming everywhere into a single implementation. In doing so they have done things more efficiently (such as RAID format on disk leveraging filesystem layer knowledge for better performance), and trustworthy (a controller failing to report data corruption is detected at a higher level). ZFS is impressive, and that was/is the one thing that makes me really want the rest of the platform to be usable for me day to day.
DTrace is much hyped, and very useful in the hands of good developers and good administrators, but I don't see administrators at large making use of it enough to deliver on the hopes Sun sets up for it.
Zoning is a nice logical extension from simple chrooting which is more comprehensive, and more efficient than the other extreme of virtualization, theoretically. However, with virtualization being ubiquitous and most of the market accepting the ever-reducing overhead for the flexibility, I don't know if Zones are going to excite anyone that much. The BrandZ extension of the metaphor gives it some flexibility, but again their Linux profile still doesn't run linux things just right, and a linux vm with the linux kernel already will do so today.
So you have a platform that probably won't need to be as successful as linux had to be in order for hardware ve
Re:Tried OpenSolaris... (Score:5, Interesting)
Be that as it may, let me make a few comments.
1) Nevada is development code, not release. If there aren't bugs in your dev. code, then you're either the finest programmer since about 1960, or you're not doing anything.
2) OpenSolaris in general is not the place to go for release code; It's the community work, warts and all. If you want a production OS, you use Solaris10.
3) Having said that, let me also add that Solaris10 is documented. Heavily. Coherently. Completely. HPUX and AIX are close, Linux isn't even an also-ran in the documentation realm.
So let me talk about some of the good and bad we're seeing with Solaris10 in the real world.
Let me start by stating that dtrace rocks. Most admins don't write scripts in it, as you suspect--however, they do download them from programmers who give back to the community. Similarly, zones rock too--companies are using them to compartmentalise their environments (for example: one database instance per zone), which makes migration between machines a trivial process. BrandZ is an interesting offshoot, but is likely to be less important for users than for developers.
Hardware support (specifically non-Sun, x86/x64) hardware support is amazing. Really, Solaris will work on anything!!!
And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
OK, let's come clean. Hardware support is rapidly um... sucking less. It's still nowhere close to the Linux ballpark, and probably won't be for at least three years. That's not surprising from a company that continually tried to kill off their X86 offering for several years, before rather suddenly committing to it. Let me come back to this in a moment.
I'll readily admit that the anti-Linux sentiment is very strong in the (Open)Solaris world, but you should understand where some of the frustration comes from. Daily (hourly!), the various newsgroups and discussion forums receive posts that come across as, "I can do THIS in Linux, but I can't in Solaris. Why does Solaris suck so badly?!" The answer is usually that Linux has some nonstandard (and more than occasionally undocumented) extensions to standard Unix tools. In other words, this 'thing' will not work in Irix, AIX, HP-UX, *BSD, OSF/1, OS X, or any other Unix variant--only in Linux. Furthermore, if that behaviour is really necessary (it rarely is), then the tool is probably available as a source or binary download to anyone interested.
I can't comment on ACPI, other than to state that I have never used a computer for any length of time, running any OS, that did power management properly. That includes Linux (RHEL3 and older), Windows (XP and earlier), or Solaris (10, etc.)
Don't get me wrong here--Solaris on commodity hardware still has a ways to go. However, Solaris on Sun hardware (either SPARC or X64) is the best thing going in computing right now. For those two reasons, OpenSolaris really does have the potential to take the world by storm next year. The community has been presented with both a challenge (make this a true commodity-hardware OS), and a clear goal (behaving like Solaris10 on Sun gear). Furthermore, since Sun is feeding contributions back from OpenSolaris into Solaris, the 'official' OS will continue to get better.
In other words, the OpenSolaris community will thrive because there's an intriguing challenge facing them, and a clear reward as a result.
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The only contributor until now who might have actually *seen* OpenSolaris. Compared to all those fanboys of whatever, who might be right, but don't know what the're talking about w.r.t OpenSolaris.
OpenSolaris can be open Solaris, but it could as well be Linux with a different kernel: SunOS.
Sorry, RMS, GNU/Linux without Linux; that would be GNU/SunOS. No, not yet GNU/Hurd; not in 2007. That's my prognosis, by the way
No need to sneeze at that kernel, running your favourite Gnome/KDE/wm/XF
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That vision of Solaris kernel coupled with GNU userland, Xorg, traditional stuff found in a linux desktop is largely achieved by Nexenta. If you want a taste, I'd try Nexenta's offering, it really is interesting and left me with a much better taste in my mout
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Fun facts: "Nexenta alpha" is an anagram of:
A Teen Phalanx
Elephant Xaan
Ummmm yeah.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Solaris is great, but if you want a FREE unix BSD is your ticket. Hell I even run it on some older Sparc 5 boxes in the basement... Faster and easier than solaris because of it being 100% open.
As for everything else.... nope... IT in 2007 will look 100% like IT in 2006. XP on the desktop in every competent Corperation, not much changes anywhere else.
Change = expense.
Thanks Captain Obvious (Score:2)
As for OpenSolaris and Linux? Uh... OK.
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My BOLD Predictions! (Score:5, Funny)
2. A Windows security hole will be discovered.
3. Internet use will increase.
4. Zune will not overtake the iPod.
5. The prices of hard drives and DRAM will continue to fall.
6. The circulation of print newspapers will continue to decline.
7. Interest groups will raise a stink over violence in video games.
8. A major technology company will introduce a new form of DRM...which will fail miserably.
9. The next version of Mac OS X will be visually and technically superior to Windows Vista.
10. Duke Nukem Forever will not be released.
I know I'm going out on a limb here, but trust me. I'm a science fiction writer. I can see the future!
Re:My BOLD Predictions! (Score:4, Interesting)
But then - that was always the case that DRAM prices are unpredictable.
Predictions repository (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting site for viewing predictions from folks.
Yea, and I'll win my ex back... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Billions off vista? Yeah, right. Public beta is expected to start at the end of January, turnaround to the market isn't THAT fast (remember NT4 SP3? Remember W2000 SP4? Remember Windows XP SP1?)
2) Itanium?
3) Except for the fact that SUPERcomputers are not specced, ordered and build overnight, more like 18-24 month timeframe for rollout and then some for full capacity if we are talking about serious ones. Also CELL is not the answer, ask Cray.
4) Assuming that ___OPEN!!! IT'S OPEN NOW___ Solaris actually manages to get any exposure at all this is absolutely unlikely to happen in an envorement that is supercharged with egos and religious evangelists/fanatics that spend their lives defending their indentation style or plan source control system migration for 18 months ahead.
Of course we could be had - last three paragraphs hives off a hint that this could be a very ultrasubtle attempt at humor. In a failed way of sense.
In short - most stupid article seen on
Another list... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Entertainment writers will spend the last week of 2007 wracking their brains for meaningless, top-ten-list, fluff pieces in order to receive their next paychecks.
2. The apparent MS astroturfing campaign will continue on
3. Apologists for the upcoming Vista horrorshow will continue to denounce MS critics as zealots.
4. A new branch of mathematics (VERIZONMATH) will dominate industry calculations, leading to much hijinx, and ultimately, total economic collapse.
5. Richard Stallman will learn to levitate, leading to much hijinx, and ultimately, total economic collapse.
Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
To quote Lewis Black: "where can one find a drug that would make one so delusional." The Linux community, I'm sorry to inform him, is much larger and more active than he apparently understands. That's because it encompasses tens of thousands of products and technologies well beyond the server and desktop markets, which aren't even the biggest market so far as Linux usage is concerned.
Sun? (Score:3, Informative)
Sun is going to have an impact on anything? Huh? Sun is imploding. Anybody want to buy their Fremont campus? It's empty.
What else is he expecting, a comeback of SGI?
Move along (Score:5, Insightful)
This ZDNet guy is an idiot in search of an audience. Move along, there's nothing to see here other than some pathetic dude trying to keep his ad-clicks up.
I didn't have to read more than OpenSolaris. Overtaking Linux? Yeah right. Even if it does happen it sure has heck won't be in 12 months time.
Paul Murphy (Score:3, Interesting)
Paul Murphy has no idea what is is talking about.
Pleeease! (Score:2, Insightful)
Predictions for last year (Score:2)
All of these next year IT prevision lists make me wonder, if we magically went back to one year ago and tried making a list of IT predictions for 2006, what would be in this list? Because I've been thinking about it and although I must have went through 80% at least of all Slashdot summaries in 2006 I can't think of anything but the Gootube merge and the Reiser story (but that one can't be put in a prediction list since it was obviously unpredictable)
Anyone?
Solaris vs Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
The simple reason is: Worse is better [wikipedia.org].
Why do you think absolutely everyone on Linux was using Mozilla? It was the main Gecko program, and your other options kind of sucked. Mozilla got the job done, and everyone was developing for it -- you were guaranteed to have new and interesting stuff (Flash, Java, RSS, tabbed browsing, etc) on Mozilla, either before it was anywhere else, or within a month of it being implemented elsewhere.
Of course, some things never made it into Mozilla -- for instance, Amaya is both a web browser and a WYSIWYG editor, and you can jump into any webpage and edit, and save the new version somewhere -- there may even be a mechanism for re-uploading it. But there must not be that much demand for such features -- after all, most of us either use Notepad (or vim), or we use some nicely-done AJAX WYSIWYG.
You could point to Firefox, but remember: Firefox was originally named "Pheonix", because it rose from the ashes of Mozilla. Had Firefox been written from scratch, it would never have gotten where it is today -- old Mozilla bugs and all.
That is what will happen with Linux and OpenSolaris.
Linux is already much, much more popular than BSD or OpenSolaris -- or, for that matter, Plan 9. So, we take the best ideas from other OSes, so long as we can reasonably implement them, and we also toy with new things of our own. If I remember right,
The only way this picture changes is if Solaris is so ridiculously better than Linux that the few people hacking on it now are enough for it to surpass Linux -- keep in mind, there will be plenty more people hacking on Linux at the same time. This has happened in the past, on a smaller scale, but I just don't think Solaris is better enough -- remember, evangelizing won't work. You won't get me to hack on Solaris till it runs on my Powerbook, at least -- and you need people like me to make it run on that Powerbook. You need it to already be almost as good as Linux, if not significantly better -- and not just in a few areas I don't care about -- in order to get me to hack on it.
If you really want to replace Linux, come up with something that's both better enough that it takes half the time to write it in FooOS than in Linux, and can run a Linux kernel alongside it (do something tricky with UML, or something like what Apple did with Mach/Darwin), so that I can load up my nVidia driver and play Quake 4, and still hack around with something cool like, say, a new cluster filesystem. You have to do it right, though -- I should be able to load my Linux kernel, nVidia driver, and Quake4 binary (and maps) from my own FooOS cluster filesystem.
If you can do that, and provide compelling enough development tools to sway the Linux kernel devs, then we might actually lose the Linux kernel -- slowly -- and replace it with something better. Unless you can do that, Linux will remain the best we've got, now and forever.
Re:There will be competition for Exchange Server? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:There will be competition for Exchange Server? (Score:4, Funny)
Outlook not so good.
Re:There will be competition for Exchange Server? (Score:5, Insightful)
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-matthew
Re:There will be competition for Exchange Server? (Score:4, Informative)
There are still plenty of businesses that use alternative servers like Lotus Notes. (Though only God knows why.) That should tell the market that an alternative communications stack should be viable in the corporate market. All you need is an email server and client with features that are competitive with Outlook/Exchange, and an operating system that doesn't automatically sell the customer on using a "unified software provider" for all their OS, Email, and Office needs.
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Methinks you completely miss the idea of why Exchange is so popular. If all it did was email then it would never have become a dominant player. It is precisely because it offers a unified provider that it has become popular. The server integrates tightly with voice communications as well as forms of instant messaging. In addition to this there is the identity management integration, teleconferencing, remote assistance, the list really goes on and on.
The desktop OS created Microsoft but all the services pr
Re:There will be competition for Exchange Server? (Score:2)
Try using email instead of the strangeness that is MS Exchange. I'm possibly biased becuase my experiences with MS Exchange were unpleasant and ridiculously time consuming and it was entirely unsuited to 24 hour operation in a small site with only one mail server (you have to shut it down to back up the mail!). A bare metal restore drill showed just how flakey and fragile the whole thing used to be and possibly still is. The sendmail config fil
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No one familiar with Exchange needs a registry hack. Nobody.
But, your comments m
If you are a newbie look it up first please (Score:2)
Nasty and showing ignorance of earlier releases to pretend it didn't happen! I should add that it was Exchange 5.0 and 5.5 - you did have to do such things, especially to get it to work with the required third party packages to make it functional like antivirus and other useful stuff like fa
Above is about MS Exchange a few years back (Score:2)
Perhaps it's good now - but is it really a shining example of something to emulate as hinted at above. I doubted it and wrote as such.
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Re:God, I hope so... (Score:5, Informative)
At this time my work machine, home machine, my kids' desktop and school notebooks are all Linux (pclinuxos 0.92)
I assume you don't use Linux as your desktop, have not even tried one in the last couple years, hence the total crap comment.
The reality is, Linux desktop is as functional and user friendly as the Windows desktop for most mainstream applications.
As an added bonus, you're virtually immune to virus, adware, data corruption, system hangs, etc.
You also have realtime access to many high quality applications.
And should you need to run the occasional Windows apps - wine works for many of them.
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Not to refer to your grandmother in particular, but this has already been done - and it worked fine for quite a few older people.
Thank you for playing.
Score: 0
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:5, Informative)
My grandmother is ~80 years old and uses Debian stable. It fits her needs - or better - she fits the computer's needs.
She needs her PC for
In a way my granny is a lot more platform-independent than I am. She doesn't care if it's called C: or
About a year with Windows XP led to a bigger amount of "family support cases", now it's the second year with Debian and it just runs - but ok, she doesn't have to dist-upgrade on her own, just the updates. But she wouldn't install a new version of Windows on her own either.
But you'll never know if your granny likes it until she tries it for herself.
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:5, Insightful)
--Okay, I'm a little grumpy this morning (it's early), so sorry folks...
How is using Wine simpler than just using windows?
--Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to spend a few minute setting up wine than buying and installing windows onto another partition to run a couple old windows programs that somebody wants me to use.
Why bother emulating it when it comes standard on most pre-built systems that the majority of computer illiterate will be purchasing?
--Because my system isn't pre-built, and I'm not computer illiterate.
Its pointless for those kinds of people. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see ANY OS properly compete with Windows, but I don't see it happening. What will the computer illiterates do with their computer?
--The same as they're doing today. Not much. The "choice" of OS and GUI have no bearing on someone who doesn't care. They managed (when they were forced to) with DOS, they'll be in the same boat with any future OS.
I'm willing to bet its gaming, word processing (possibly some other apps that come in Office), surfing and chatting, and playing media.
--I'm willing to bet it's probably not even that. True computer phobics will go to familiar programs, have other people set up things and show them how to activate them. As long as someone is there to help and show them how to do the handful of things they need, they'll use any OS. I'd hazard a guess that Linux's myriad of configuration options might offer such people a better experience. Instead of trying to force people into MS's view of user interaction, Linux will work as configured, and won't scare them with "your subscription is about to expire!", "your anti-virus is out of date!", etc.
Yeah its wonderful that Linux is a very secure OS, but its too bad it doesnt play any games.
--You mean games, as in the popular ones that lots of people buy that are typically ported to Linux? Or do you mean the kind of games MS plays with their users?
Games for Windows, no matter how much I despise it, will bring make it even more simple for those who want to game on a PC but have trouble setting up in the current PC gaming world. Windows is on top and it is folly to think its up top without a reason.
--It's folly to base your opinion on one aspect of anything. You're obviously a gamer, and some of your choice games aren't made for Linux. Personally, I'm not into running on the gaming treadmill. I'd like to know a game is good before I spend my cash on it. A key to this decision is to see that gamers like it enough to request a Linux version.
--As you can see, this is all subjective. MS Windows works for you, Linux works for me. Blanket statements either way are useless. However, my choice is a lot cheaper to implement...leaving me with more money for games.
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You hear a lot of people saying this and I just don't think it's true. I've recently acquired a laptop for my mother (that's a good swap - stop it!) and she has never used a computer of any sort. Well, Windows is the obvious choice as it's so intuitive and user friendly says I. This is a myth that is cleverly enforced by the whole Windows GUI "Style Guide" meaning that most Windows apps have a similar
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Re:God, I hope so... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:God, I hope so... (Score:4, Insightful)
In any case, comparison with a utility company is not exactly right here, it would imply renting the software - this rarely happens. A better comparison would be with a paper book that contains a chip that monitors how often you read the book, where, and how, and won't tell you what else it monitors and sends back home. And this chip can incinerate the book if it receives a radio signal from the publisher, or if it itself thinks that you are trying to copy the book. In reality you may be just reading under the sunlight. The book costs $500 (or $5,000, or more) and is essential in your business. Would you buy it? Or maybe you'd prefer a book without the chip, the one that is yours for as long as you want (since that's what was promised when you paid the money for it.) Software is very much like a book - you get use rights only, but those use rights ought to be irrevocable, unless you breach the terms of the contract and the judge (if you so choose) agrees that you are the guilty party. You can't allow a dumb machine to be your judge, jury and the executioner; you can't allow your rights to be terminated on mere suspicion of wrongdoing - and that's what the DRM is about, to deny you your rights automatically, based on arbitrary set of rules that you aren't even allowed to know.
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It will always be possible to watch Lord.Of.The.Rings.DVDRIP.xvid.avi on a Windows machine, Vista or XP since there are open source applications that let you watch it which Windows can't refuse to run.
The difference between XP and Vista is that BlueRay and HDDVD disks will (initially) only play on Vista, since XP is not regarded as secure enough to have software players run on it. But sooner or later, one of the open source media players will learn to pla
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:God, I hope so... (Score:4, Interesting)
The only hiccup I've run into running Linux or OS X (on non-mac hardware no less) is getting wifi working. A few internet searches later (other computer obviously) and voilà, they work.
In OS X you can run parallels but 99% of the Windows apps I use are available for OS X (for example, Office, Photoshop, Flash Studio, Quickbooks, Firefox, etc). Linux is a different story. That being said I have great luck running wine with photoshop and quickbooks. I've never tried flash but it's not needed. Open Office is a more than adequate replacement for MS Office. I don't use the extra 95% of tools available in those products anyway.
I like windows actually. I however love OS X. Linux is great as well. I cut my teeth using Linux in '95 while in college trying to get on doing Oracle DB development on HP-UX. I needed to be able to get around the shell and learn csh. Programming dot clocks to get your "new" video card to start X windows was an interesting learning experience. I'm forever amazed at the new distributions. Ubuntu (sp?), Fedora, etc. Ah the good old days of Slackware disk packages downloaded over ftp at the local Uni!
Tru64, Solaris (SunOS), hell even DR/MS-DOS in the days. Oh yeah Integer Basic on Apple ][ was great! Mac OS was pretty nice too, I was a bit sad to see OS 9 die. My first Mac with OS 9 & X dual boot made me see why so many people were into pre-OS X. 10.0 & 10.1 sucked IMO. However, 10.2 made my system exponentially faster, 10.3 sped it up even more, 10.4 was not such a drastic improvement, leading me to believe the OS is more mature now. I'd like to see that from an OS from Redmond. Windows gets massively larger per OS update. Granted Linux has as well. It however, includes almost 100% of what you need for an operational system. Windows just includes notepad
Ciao
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Yah, because you can't download a driver for an ethernet adaptor without its drivers. Otherwise, we're resorted to floppies, CDs, USB fobs, or some combinations of each!
Re:God, I hope so... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:same old.. (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, since Google is involved... that woudl be giPeople.
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Drafting GI's? Nothing ever changes does it.
At least we'll be able to do a spotlight search on Google Earth for WMD's.
Re:XML (Score:4, Insightful)
XML was designed for one thing, blind data interchange. That's it. Not config files, not GUI descriptions, not anything to do with databases. Get over it. Everything else is hype created by idiots that make money selling ads in magazines and on web sites.
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"OpenSolaris hasn't been big enough to experience fragmentation yet, so you can't judge how well OpenSolaris will hold up at scale of development community..."
This is entirely accurate. However, I'm inclined to believe that fragmentation will be less of a factor for OpenSolaris, due to the fact that it ultimately feeds back into a single definitive snapshot. Solaris will always be the watermark for OpenSolaris, so as new projects g
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Re:What's with all this "2006 this" and "2007 that (Score:2, Funny)
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Most of which is on a par with George Bush pulling out of Iraq...as in, no way, Jose.
I agree, OpenSolaris exceeding Linux in the marketplace is a non-starter from Day One. Never happen. I have no serious complaints about Sun OS's, never having used one, but the idea that an OS released in the last year or so (as OSS, regardless of its past history) is going to overtake the hundreds of thousands of people working on and with Linux in the Linux community is just a stupid concept.
Sun should be prepared to be l
You got to be kidding... (Score:3, Interesting)
Say *what*?
I had a NeXT, I use Mac OS X daily, and even I didn't bother installing OpenDarwin. FreeBSD is far superior to Darwin in every respect but the ability to run OSX on top of it.
I don't recall anyone predicting that OpenDarwin would replace Linux. Where was this happening?