Earlier this month, Psystar suspended all sales of its hardware products, honouring the court's decision which favoured Apple. This week, Psystar has also temporarily halted sales of Rebel EFI while the former clone maker confirms the tool's legality with the court. Psystar also announced it will continue hardware sales in the coming days - with Linux rather than Mac OS X.
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Member since:2009-06-10
but I said that Linux committed suicide. At the time of Mandrake 9.xx, SUSE 8.xx and Libranet I believed that Linux had a glorious future on the desktop.
Here we are, almost 8 years later and the Linux community has done all sort of mistakes, especially bad when they missed the opportunity to gain a much larger market share thanks to the huge Vista fiasco.
How about giving some examples? What have they done that has been such a big mistake. Seems to be getting more and more usable as the years go by to me.
It is now much more fashionable than in the past to try Linux (or should I say Ubuntu?), but at least 90% of people who try go back to Windows or OS X in no time.
90% is a big claim. Care to back that up? What specifically is causing them to go back.
Actually I would say that Ubuntu today is a much better choice than Mandrake was in the early 2000's. I used to hate the fact that you couldn't just edit the config files. They had a warning on the top that they would be overwritten if you tried to do that.
I would never use a distribution that forced me to use their custom gui tools. I wanted to know how to use Linux, not Mandrake specifically.
Member since:2007-01-18
What I believe hurts Linux the most is lack of applications people want to use. While the pool grows it's still fairly small. It's also nice to see some of the open source alternatives becoming more mainstream.
One of the things I've always thought would be important to Linux's growth on the desktop is getting those good applications to work across platforms. In that area I'm seeing progress.
I think what's happened with Linux is people had far to many expectations of it overtaking Microsoft. The truth is that what Linux has accomplished is waking up the 800-pound gorilla. Now the fight is on. I'm not gonna say Linux is winning or in the end it will dominate. I think as time goes on though we will see Linux on more and more desktops.
As for Vista. Linux didn't fail to take advantage of Microsoft's gaff. Linux distro's failed to take advantage of the gaff. So that we are in agreement with.
And my final thought. I've installed Linux on several computers for people who just wanted to surf the web and check e-mail. These were older people and for some this was the first time they ever used a computer. Other than one person they are all still happily using Linux (Ubuntu). One of them has even starting playing around with Linux on another computer and learning about it.
While it's only my opinion I think the Linux user base is growing, but it hasn't reached the tipping point. I don't see that happening for awhile though.
Member since:2005-07-06
While it's only my opinion I think the Linux user base is growing, but it hasn't reached the tipping point. I don't see that happening for awhile though.
Probably it is growing in absolute numbers but not in percentage (of desktop users).
As to the future, who can tell? But we have seen this trend (Linux not gaining more market share) for a long time now.
Edited 2009-12-31 16:18 UTC
Member since:2006-11-12
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I am not against OpenOffice or Firefox. In fact I wrote that they are a concern to Microsoft.
Let's make the following clear: I am not a Microsoft shill (as my nick should suggest) and I do not believe that Linux and OS X can be compared in any way. What keeps OS X from gaining a much larger market share is that you can't (normally) buy it and install on any PC (even if countless thousands of people in fact do).
I didn't say that Windows 7 is a Linux killer, but I said that Linux committed suicide. At the time of Mandrake 9.xx, SUSE 8.xx and Libranet I believed that Linux had a glorious future on the desktop.
Here we are, almost 8 years later and the Linux community has done all sort of mistakes, especially bad when they missed the opportunity to gain a much larger market share thanks to the huge Vista fiasco.
It is now much more fashionable than in the past to try Linux (or should I say Ubuntu?), but at least 90% of people who try go back to Windows or OS X in no time.
In the past people who tried Linux were much more motivated, and the percentage of those going back to Windows was much smaller.