Editorial Archive

"Cocktail parties and relating to the opposite sex are two very human activities that preoccupy many during the holiday season. Computers are notoriously poor at both: artificial intelligence researchers have long envied the human abilities to assign gender to faces and pick voices out of a noisy babble. Now San Diego company HNC Software has taught personal computers equivalent feats of recognition, and claims that the technique is a significant advance for AI, both theoretically and for building practical applications." Get the rest of the story at ZDNews. Our Take: Last February I wrote an editorial on Artificial Intelligence and how this can change the way we are using computers or the way operating system's... actually operate.

"Many 'gurus' teaching new users about Linux make it look harder than it needs to be, and apparently fail to explain that yes, you can make PowerPoint-style presentations in Linux, you can view Web Pages that use Flash animation and other "glitz" features, and that you can manage all your files though simple "point, click, drag and drop" visual interfaces. Could the biggest problem with Linux usability be that most of the people teaching newbies to use Linux are too smart and know too much?" Robert Miller's excellent editorial found on NewsForge.

"It is becoming increasingly clear that we are heading for a world in which there are only two operating systems Windows and Linux. Within 10 years virtually all computers, from the smallest wristwatch (don't laugh) to the largest mainframe (they will never die), will run one of these two operating systems. All others are headed for extinction." Maybe true, maybe not. Get the rest of the story at It.MyCareer.

"With all of this going for it, how come Linux has not exploded even more than it has? How come it has not penetrated corporations to a larger degree? How come users have been so resistant to it on the desktop / client level? There are any number of possible reasons, and to be honest, I'm not expert enough to be able to nail them all down with absolute certainty. But I, like so many of you, am a huge supporter of the platform and a rabid enthusiast who spends countless hours tweaking and tinkering with various distributions. It is a synergy of sorts. I learn about the complexities while working to customize the system, and as an old DOS guy from way back, it is actually pretty fun." AnandTech's Paul Sullivan is analyzing the Linux situation in his latest editorial.

This commentary on ZDNews talks about the need of the Linux development community to build something new and revolutionary, something that Microsoft has not offered to its customers, instead of trying to recreate Ms Office as the main "killer application" that Linux needs in order to go mainstream. One day after the above commentary went live, there is already an answer to it made by the C|Net News.com editorial stuff here. Both editorials are a good read. Our Take: I wrote a similar editorial once, called "The Killer Application Concept", about what BeOS needs to make it through and become mainstream, and I still stand in this opinion and I believe it applies for the Linux situation as well. To summarize: The OS doors are closed, except you do create a real (r)evolution.

The editorial, over at ZDNet, explains the impact .NET will have on Linux, analyzes the Ximian's Mono initiative and how all this will also have an impact on the open source and Free software in general.