* Posts by Mayhem

380 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2009

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Intel: Just 3,000 employees run Windows 7

Mayhem
Go

Agreed, it has nothing to do with the OS

Most systems either fail in the first month, or keep going till time catches up.

Business systems are bought to a budget, with an expected hardware life of 3-5 years.

Once the cheapest nastiest part of the system starts to go, the rest of it will degrade faster and support costs increase massively.

In my experience it tends to be more PSU first, then disk due to the power fluctuations, then fans from the sheer weight of dust.

Complete desktop replacement took our calls in a small office from 15-20 per week to less than one a month. On a large scale, that kind of reduction is massively cost beneficial.

I have rackmount servers downstairs that are ~8+ years old. They still do the job, but the support contracts are coming due and the cost increase for renewal is almost double the cost per annum of simply buying a new cheap dell and transferring the app across.

While a home pc can creak along indefinitely, in a business environment, you can't afford not to have the equipment covered and lets face it, hardware is the cheapest cost in this business by far.

Bringing P2P in from the cold

Mayhem

@ the idea of classic hits

So what you are saying is that 14 years isn't long enough to make a sufficient living off of a recording? You need at least 30/40/50 years worth of income?

Surely the point of copyright is to *encourage* creativity through protection, not stifle it through locking it away. At some point you have to let your child walk free, in life as well as in art.

Copyright has been stretched and bent and manipulated to favour individual factions over its life. Is it not time to sit down and reevaluate terms back down?

Should the performer be rewarded longer than the writer. Who was more creative?

Should inventors reap benefits, or those that implement the invention?

Wreck of 1930s flying aircraft carrier dubbed 'historic'

Mayhem

Re: Great Article

>>Why we don't use them for freight transport, I wish I knew. Guess we humans are stodgy and pragmatic about that type of risk, and water ships are a proven technology with existing logistical lines of connection to and from. Then again we are flying freight in normal airplanes. And then there is the problem of who pays for development, and how to get helium...

<<

The main issue with using airships for freight is keeping the dang thing on the ground when you unload.

Essentially they need to pump the lifting gas out at the same rate that you unload the ballast (the freight containers) so the airship doesn't violently take off.

The problem is that we don't have any way of doing this fast enough for it to be useful.

There are a variety of hybrid designs involving for example pumping water ballast in at the same time to compensate for the load, but these won't work in the rough field environments the airship is best suited for as they inherently won't have the infrastructure available.

And you really don't want to know about the storage issues which is quite tricky for both hydrogen & helium as they make normally solid pipes look like chickenwire.

I imagine that modern airships will become more common for tourist purposes, say game viewing in africa, but without figuring out a good workaround for storms and the loading problems, they will be stuck in a very small niche

Sci-fi and fantasy authors wade into Amazon spat

Mayhem

Re: Shirley?

"Why is that publishers are so keen on ebooks anyway? Simply because publishers have never liked the idea of selling used books, nor do they like ideas like book sharing or passing on previously enjoyed books. They hope that ebooks and DRM will put a stop to this uncapitalist behaviour and increase their profits."

Actually this is exactly wrong. Unlike the music industry, almost every publishing house is well aware that the vast majority of fiction titles are promoted via word of mouth of readers

There is an extraordinary range of titles released each month, and only a fraction will ever get shelf space in a bookstore. The biggest challenge a publisher has is getting a book even noticed. Unlike music, you can't just blanket the airwaves, or put it in as background on TV.

Every single author who has been around a while welcomes used books as a marketing tool - it doesn't matter much if their title is being passed around so long as *someone* reads it, likes it, and will sooner or later buy more by that author. Compared with the challenge of actually getting a book into someones hands .. the marketing potential is fantastic.

Also the primary driver for DRM on ebooks is in fact coming from Amazon itself, every title it sells is DRM locked to the Kindle, coincidentally a device it sells.

All the other publisher backed e-tailers are selling a range of locked and unlocked titles. Webscriptions and Fictionwise are mostly without any kind of DRM at all.

Spirit rover clocks up six years on Mars

Mayhem

all these ideas for freeing it

From earlier reports, NASA has set up a sandpit with identical conditions back at home base so that they can test out each theory before actually trying it in space.

The problem with the whole rock em back and forth thing is the lag associated with the rover being on Mars, which means they have to send a series of commands and hope for the best, then wait for the telemetry data to see what happened. You can't do the old lean out the window and look at your wheels trick so well with a delay of up to 40 min before you know what your actions did.

They broke out of the last sand trap with the rocking the wheels idea, but that broke one of the wheels which indirectly caused them to get stuck this time. I suspect they are being more circumspect now with the whole lack of power thing.

Nokia E72 smartphone

Mayhem

Headphones

@nigel Ahh, missed the link to the product page, to be honest I usually skip the rating in reviews

I have to say though that the key apps I've found on the E71 have been the GPS & ovi maps, which have been pretty damn reliable for 9 countries so far, and picodrive, for playing all my old megadrive games on the tube.

I like the new hold-down space for a light, reminds me of my old simple 3310 which had a similar feature. Surprisingly handy.

@Wolf

Never had reception issues with E71, Vodafone has been good to me.

Well, no signal in my datacentre, but thats a plus in my book.

"holding the centre button will do nothing?" Yeah, that can be irritating

"This feature whereby turning it onto its front silences a call? Can this differentiate between you placing it face down on a table, or your phone just being in your back pocket?"

This would be good to know.

Mayhem

Headphone

Does it have a 2.5 or 3.5 mm headphone socket?

About the only complaint I have with the E71 is the headphone socket.

Well, that and I notice I'm slowly knocking chips off the navipad cause it was made of a cheaper plastic.

MIT boffins invent robot clam-grapnel

Mayhem

But how do they pull the anchor up again?

The usual tradeoff is between 'sticking power' vs being able to actually remove the damn thing from the seabed, as everyone who ever snagged an anchor in a rock outcrop knows.

I'm very curious to know exactly how they get the damn thing out again if it digs in too far.

US immigration dodge is permanent

Mayhem

@teecee

Erm, two things.

#1, name four other incidents off the top of your head where hijackers have attempted to take a plane in NA domestic travel. I can think of maybe two since the 70s when they introduced x-ray machines.

#2, did you notice the word 'wand' above? You know, the hand held metal detector used in place of physically invasive searches for identifying things the walk through gates may have pinged on. Damn site faster and less offensive than a pat search.

Key point is for a domestic flight, any traveller is within your borders, so there is no reason for photos and biometric records etc - it should be just like taking a bus or a train.

Mayhem

@The photo system for mixed departure areas

Of course, this would be why the rest of the world generally has segregated international and domestic terminals so the situation cannot arise. The good side of this is that you no longer need to be inspected detected rejected and so on and so forth just to fly internally. Makes Domestic travel much more attractive - having encountered the delights of internal security in the UK now, I'd rather drive.

I mean seriously, who the hell does pat down searches of every flyer on a puddlejump airline. Your airports spend enough money on security, surely they can buy a couple of wands for use by the staff.

eBooks: What to read on which reader

Mayhem

Webscriptions

Once the other major publishers start removing DRM same as Webscriptions, then I'll be more interested in buying from them.

I read a lot of e-books on the screen (full text looks more like work than web browsing) but I only purchase things that once I own it, it is mine to do what I want with. I don't want to be locked to a particular device, or particular shop. Especially with the way technology will outdate a device in a matter of months. I have books that are over a century old, the words are still readable, and I can lend it to a friend with no issues. I'd rather purchase ebooks that are device independant, so I know that whatever I buy to read them with will work fine.

Exoplanets dubbed 'Vulcan', 'Romulus' and 'Female Pigeon'

Mayhem

Niven had the right idea

The planets of We Made It, Jinx, and Mount Look At That

I have a very strong feeling that by the time we actually start exploring the galaxy, the pioneers will be a lot more irreverent than the people back home

Pizza-making ATM hacker avoids jail

Mayhem

re: Errr...

I'm with you here. A previous job of mine was servicing ATM machines, and they all required physical access to the internals of the machine and the setting of a physical lockout switch inside before you could make any changes to the system. You can't even access the test menu from the public facing screen, there is a separate panel inside the machine for all those functions.

Getting inside involved a key to open it held by the security service we had contracted with to provide protection, the engineers didn't carry them.

Either something was decidedly dodgy or we're not talking banking atms...

As far as "accessed the hard drive" goes, the atms have a standard pc inside, ours were prone to faulty caps on the motherboard so yanking them was surprisingly common. You can't get to the OS from the ATM, there is a separate keyboard in the machine for that, assuming the machine is big enough for a screen inside. Well, you can remotely power cycle it, but thats about it.

NZ town cans rabbit-chucking contest

Mayhem

NZ farming communities

You'd be hard pressed to find a working farm in NZ that doesn't hunt rabbits on the side to feed the dogs. The damn things are everywhere. And trust me, after you've chucked a couple of dozen carcasses in the back of the ute for the freezer, they become much less precious little Thumper and more a heavy smelly mess that you'd rather freeze asap.

I can't wait to see what el reg thinks of the Waimarino Easter Hunt events, the social pig races are hella impressive.

Rabbit stew is fairly tasty too, though with respect to David 63 above, it is pretty unlikely even in a backwater like NZ you'd find people eating an exclusively lean meat diet...

West Antarctic ice loss overestimated by NASA sats

Mayhem
Headmaster

@toughluck and Allan George Dyer

Antarctica is not one contiguous landmass, it is two adjacent masses connected by a whopping great lump of frozen water. These are named in true British tradition as West Antarctica and East Antarctica. The eastern mass is mostly solid, and very high. The western mass is mostly a collection of mountain ranges linked by ice. The major ice sheets fill the gaps between the two.

Seriously, did you even glance at a map before spouting off?

Opera chief: history will silence Unite doubters

Mayhem
Go

the point of Unite?

"But if you're technical enough to do this from Apache or anything else, one, there's no problem with that, and two, you're probably not going to understand Unite anyway"

I think what he's saying is that you probably won't understand the *point* of Unite anyway.

Which is exactly what I'm seeing in the comments. Lets face it, this is a community of reasonably technically minded people. Not all of us regularly configure apache servers in our spare time, but I expect most could with a few minutes worth of effort reading the instructions. Now imagine talking your non-technical friends/family through the same process.

The point of what he is proposing is taking the idea of a webserver and merging it into the browser experience, to abstract the complexities of setting up and securing a server away from the user.

Its the same as Apple took the idea of a CD ripper and merged it with a browser, a shop and an interface for portable media players with iTunes. Prior to itunes, most techy types ripped their own music, and had no issues with doing it but I'm sure people remember the wild state of rippers, codecs, and lame vs xing vs iis et al. It worked, but it wasn't ever *simple*.

After Apple saw the market and got involved, every man and their cat could rip and download music without actually knowing how they do it, they just click a button and its all done for them.

That, combined with good marketing and a clever piece of hardware made them the dominant option for the masses.

Its a very clever idea at heart, I'll be interested to see if it gets mass market interest.

NZ council to scrub Muff Road

Mayhem

@ac

"Fix the real road sign so securely that no one can sensibly swipe it"

You fail to understand the removal power of a beat up ford escort and a motivated student flat.

UK climate change funding cut by 25%

Mayhem

@CTG

And once again someone misses my point that we are still talking about different timescales.

'Since the 19th century temperature has been steadily increasing' Yes, we came out of the little ice age, so temperatures went up. You talk of the last 70-80 years as being a significant amount of time, but the problem is that we actually don't know what the temperature *should* be without anthropogenic influences.

We don't know what caused the little ice age. We don't know if the medieval warm period was normal or out of the ordinary.

Take a look at the graph at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/schmidt_01/

It is a record of a particular isotope of oxygen found in greenland icesheets and gives a good idea of temperature changes. Spot the trend? Over the last 250k years the variation has been getting more severe compared with earlier. The highs are higher and the lows lower than at say 500k years. We also don't know why this is. What you do see though is that our current temperature is abnormally high when compared with the historical record, but roughly equates to the 125k year high.

By referring to solar output, I'm talking about a process of centuries and more not decades - did the amount of solar input change between 1000 & 1400, or 1400 & 1800? The data is rarely published outside of university circles so I can't say.

The first thing I learned about graphs in statistics is that they are usually biased to promote or hide something. Look for changing scales, asymmetric axes, and particularly choosing beneficial points of origin. I can't find it now, but regularly reprinted are temperature graphs where the timescale is logarithmic or keeps changing timescales, so the variation in the last 1000 is shown as being more extreme than the 500k years beforehand. Transposed onto a graph with a constant timescale, and the variation becomes much more regular.

Simplistic comment is everyone lies somewhere, the issue is keeping an open mind to all possiblities until they can be definitively ruled out and I find most of the ideas on the 'denial' side of the fence are being shouted down rather than proved wrong because actual proof for or against is harder to obtain.

I'm not actually in favour of either side in this debate, I'm supporting contrary views on here because the majority of people won't consider them.

Mayhem

What about the big hot thing?

@AC Also before you bring it up, yes I am aware that ozone is itself a GHG and the ozone layer acts to increase absorbtion & raise the temperature.

But to elaborate on the point I had initially mentioned in passing with E(in) = E(out)+ E(abs)

E(in) is the total amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere

E(out) is the amount that is directly reflected back into space again due to the albedo (~30%)

E(abs) is the amount that is absorbed and later radiated back out as heat (~70%)

The fundamental thing is that the total amount entering always matches the total amount leaving. The difference for us is in what percentage the balance lies. More reflection, cooler climate. More absorbtion, warmer climate.

See http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/radiation_facts.html for more details

The big point which often seems to get overlooked is that increasing the amount coming in will naturally increase the amount that must leave, and since our albedo is fairly constant that means the temperature will rise until the albedo changes to bring things back into balance, whether through increasing from water clouds, or forest fires or whatever..

What attention is being put towards studying increases/decreases in solar activity since CO2 became the be-all and end-all of climate change?

Mayhem

@CTG

@AC 08:42 You are correct and SO2 was wrong, I was meaning NO2 and the other non-carbon emissions from aircraft which affect upper atmosphere balances. Blame it on lack of sleep :)

@CTG - I don't think the US is the be-all and end all (for the record, I don't even live there). My point with regards to surfacestations is that what has happened to stations in the US can be extrapolated to have happened around the rest of the world as well, and there is unlikely to be proper compensation applied to the data on a world wide basis. With people such as the head of the NCDC publicly praising his work as valuable, yes, I do consider it a reliable source for information on the potential microclimate effects.

With regards to sea surface temperature measurements, my complaint is that they only really date back as far as 1856 gaining increasing accuracy over the last half century, and satellite observations have only happened since the 1980s. On the other hand, I admit the older data is being steadily refined and a lot of measurement bias is being compensated for. Still, it is only over a very short timeframe, and records information following the end of the little ice age. Of course it will show a rising trend.

Incidentally, can you tell me what caused the LIA? Was it a blip? What is the trend in temperature over the last five thousand years and what should our temperature be now if the LIA isn't considered?

What I strongly object to is the insistence that 'the consensus of climate scientists' know what is happening and why. The whole point of scientific debate is that it should be exactly that - there should be people presenting arguments in favour of all possible causes, and dissenting views must be tolerated. They may be wrong, but I will defend to the death their right to try and prove it.

Insert irrelevant statement about corporate and university politics and changes in what research gets more funding here.

Mayhem

surfacestations

With regards to Aron's first point, I don't know of any pertinent references, but surfacestations is a reputable web based repository of information on the climate monitoring network in the US.

http://www.surfacestations.org/

The 9/10 figure he quotes refers to the fact that of the 807 sites physically surveyed as of january this year, 89% show a recording bias of >1degree due to artificial heating sources located adjacent to the climate monitor.

http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm shows a range of examples where the bias is obvious at a glance.

Mayhem
Boffin

@bluegreen - some references

Since you appear to want references for everything, here are a few for you.

Regarding CO2 trapping heat, here is a good summary of how it happens - http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2000-11/975357138.Es.r.html

The reason CO2 suffers from diminishing returns with regards to increasing concentration is the equilibrium formed by the temperature gradient. All 'greenhouse gasses' have different levels of absorbtion, and thus different levels of diminishing returns. Because water has much stronger bonds than CO2, it can absorb a higher amount of infrared energy. This, combined with the fact that there is much much more of it, means it is more of a contributor to the absorbtion portion of climate changes.

Other 'greenhouse gasses' like CFCs and S02 influence the climate by affecting the concentration of gasses in the upper atmosphere, especially the ozone layer.

This increases the amount of energy that enters the lower atmosphere and is able to be absorbed. Because the equilibrium needs to rebalance and the amount that can be radiated is initially the same, the temperature must rise because more energy must be absorbed.

In simple terms, energy in = energy out + energy absorbed.

This is the traditional greenhouse effect which has been known since the 1890s.

The negative feedback that is referred to above relates to the fact that low dense clouds tend to have a high albedo and this increases the amount of energy reflected back into space, causing a cooling effect. High thin clouds tend to have a low albedo, so pass more radiation through, and also absorb energy themselves, both of which have a warming effect.

As can be seen in the tropics compared with more temperate regions, the trend as temperature increases is for the formation of more clouds due to higher evapotranspiration, which means while local temperature increases from surface emissions from the clouds above the overall atmospheric temperature decreases due to increased reflection.

For more information see http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Clouds/

AC @19:43 brought up the issue of how sensitive the current models are to changes in H2O concentration. You dismissed this as H2O plus a million other variables but you need to understand that since H2O is such a dominant percentage of the greenhouse gasses - up to 70% even by wikipedia standards, it has a correspondingly higher amount of impact. This means small changes to the H2O concentration have wildly variant effects on the models, you mention a rise of 5-6 degrees being bad, but you need to understand that a fall of 5-6 degrees is equally likely by the current models with minor changes in input parameters. This is also an equally bad scenario. Realistically none of the models talk of such drastic temperature changes over the short term, everyone reporting on their results suggest timeframes of centuries.

With regards to the concept of geologic time, this is *exactly* the timeframe we need to look at to get our models right - if the models cannot replicate what has already happened and that we have a plethora of information on, how do you expect them to accurately predict the future?

We cannot definitively identify the influence of anthropogenic effects on global warming without knowing exactly what we should be seeing from natural causes. Currently there are no models that can replicate the past without extensive tweaking of the results, which strongly suggests that people are manipulating the models to get the results they want, not which the models predict, which kind of invalidates the models. Also, we don't have to get them accurate over 50 million years, an accurate model for even the last ten or twenty thousand would be a massive increase on what we have, especially since modern humans have only really been settled on all continents for a little over thirteen thousand years.

Mayhem
Black Helicopters

What else does climate modelling and the MOD have in common?

Interesting fact, modelling climate and especially storm systems uses a particular set of supercomputer models. Another environment that has been heavily modelled using very similar models is thermonuclear explosions.

Whats the bet that the MOD has simply decided that it finally has enough data about how its aging weapons go boom that it is shifting its budget elsewhere. I mean, I don't really think the average MoD person is that interested in the potential changing of the weather over a battlefield 20 years hence to the tune of spending lots of dosh on it.

Buzz Aldrin weighs into NASA

Mayhem

Earth orbit rendezvous vs Lunar orbit rendezvous

The US decided to go with Lunar orbit rendezvous for the Apollo programme against the NASA advice at the time in order to win the race to the moon. They built a staggeringly wasteful rocket, they brought back a few rocks, and they prevented themselves from accomplishing anything else truly significant for half a century.

Russia went with Earth orbit rendezvous, and focussed on putting up a space station in local orbit before going anywhere else. Funnily enough, Mir lasted twice as long as Skylab, and russian tech is a fairly fundamental part of the ISS, especially since a progress visit costs a fraction of what a shuttle visit does.

Before the US can jet off to the solar system, they need to construct some sort of stable platform in orbit around the earth that they can start from, and a reliable cheap taxi service to service it. They can then send steadily more elaborate missions off to the moon, mars, the asteriods and so on by designing a purely space vehicle and refining it according to need without having to sink massive amounts of the budget into simply getting out of our gravity well.

Digital Universe adds sextillions to hit 487 billion gigs

Mayhem

De-duplication

And five minutes after the de-duplication is completed, a hardware failure occurs and all their nicely redundant data backups are no longer there...

German police boot down doors of Wikileaks offices

Mayhem
Black Helicopters

Let them view it, and record who tried

Here's a simple idea. If you know where the child porn sites are well enough to make a black list, why not just route any requests for those sites through a filter to record the details of who tried to access them and then let them view what they like. Most countries still only have a few major portals out into the wider intranet, so it'd be easily done technically. At the end of the day, the material that is supposed to be blocked 'for the sake of the children' is almost always illegal within your borders, so I expect the carriers can pass it on to local PD for further investigation without too many qualms.

Actually, I'd be surprised if this isn't done already.

Ok, I can see deeper privacy implications with regards to political protest etc, but at the end of the day its better to try and know who wanted to do something than to try and block everything.

Provided your blacklist is regularly reviewed by an acceptable range of groups, and there are some stringent rules attached to who can do what with the collected information, I have no objections.

Hell, it'd be funny just putting groups like right wingers, amnesty and christian fundamentalists into a room and making them agree on just what is considered worth recording.

Put the record labels in there too so they can get an understanding of just how wide the difference really is between civil and criminal issues.

Airline pilots told to switch off mobile phones

Mayhem

Ryanair

Ryanair is allowing people to use their phones because they have essentially turned the passenger cabin into a cell site, which then redirects all communications skywards to a satellite which relays it back to the ground. This neatly gets around all the issues with terrestrial cell stations not handling vertical signals well. I suspect the modern planes involved also have some extra passive means of impeding signals installed around the passenger areas.

I learned from several senior people a few years back that along with FAA certification, the other major hindrance to using electronic devices is because the insurance companies will use anything as an excuse to void policies. Its the same reason security measures are tending to the absurd and we can't take cans of coke and what have you on board - because once the restriction is in place, it gets added to the policy, and the airline cannot jeopardise its insurance by relaxing their requirements even though the risks associated are next to nothing.

Pirate Bay prosecutor tosses infringement charges overboard

Mayhem
Pirate

Re: Piracy on the high comments

>>If facilitating copyright infringement is a crime*, then writing it off as a fair accompli is not an appropriate response in an enlightened society. Arguing that copyright infringment is here to stay and we need to adapt our business models around it isn't much different from arguing that fraud, robbery, assault, rape, murder and usury are something we should accept too. Crime exists, does this mean we should simply let it exist? Or should we rail against it and attempt to prevent and discourage it where-ever possible, to the appropriate standard or justice?<<

Ignoring the debate around comparing civil and criminal activities, actually, yes this is exactly what we should do. Crime exists. Therefore, we must adapt our business models around it. For example, banks have sophisticated anti-fraud measures not to prevent the fraud from happening, which is impossible, but to identify the fact that it DID happen, and if possible narrow down when where and who. Armorgard accepts that robbery of armored cars happens, so has procedures to minimise the amount of money in circulation and carries the money in boxes that will cause dye packs to explode if mishandled. This doesn't stop them being robbed, it merely tries to make the potential reward not worth the hassle.

Risk management is all about identifying what the risks are, and then either avoiding, mitigating or accepting the risk. The only way to completely avoid a risk is to not do the activity the risk is associated with. If you do that activity, the risk is there, you can only mitigate it to some extent, or accept it and wait for it to happen.

Railing against crime and attempting to prevent it isn't going to stop it existing on a macro scale, only on a micro scale. While crime continues to provide a tangible benefit over not being a criminal, it will happen. If companies start to accept that the first thing that will happen to their product is that it will be the victim of copyright infringement then they will either adjust their business practice to mitigate the effects (whether through providing additional benefits to their customers, or by some other means where the original can be proved superior) or they will go out of business and someone else will take their place.

This is not rocket science by any means.

Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'

Mayhem
Gates Halo

@Mark re: Missing the point

"Linux cannot become a dominant desktop until such time as it develops a way of allowing windows based applications to be installed and run seamlessly."

Why?

There are already installers out there that will work IF the writer of the application USES THEM.

If they don't surely that's a fault of the developer, not Linux."

No, because you can't expect a developer of an older piece of software to go back and rewrite their install mechanisms to cope with different operating systems.

Yes, a developer of a new piece of software can and should try and make it as seamless as possible to work on any platform, but my point above was that linux is not in a safe position of dominance. Therefore it needs to accommodate *more* than windows to take over that position, and as such needs to make it trivial for an end user to install any program they want, especially windows based programs.

Why? Because often they are "best of breed" programs, or programs mandated by policy, or simply legacy programs needed for compliance with other systems. Sure, someone could spend weeks writing their own open source program to do the same thing, but the simple point is they shouldn't have to.

Yes, linux is different. Yes, it works differently to windows. But until someone comes up for a way in which it can replicate the whole windows experience in addition to its own, it cannot *replace* windows.

As an earlier commercial example, see OS/2. It ran windows applications as well as its own, and arguably better than windows did. Ok, that was based off the fact that they shared a common ancestry, but IBM understood that platform compatibility was fundamental.

Another example, see the Playstation 2. Its still the biggest selling console of all time, a large part because it allowed people to seamlessly continue using their old PS1 software while also providing a new and improved experience. Ok, maybe not many people ever play their old games any more, but the point is that they *can*.

Look at the modern Apple PC. It will allow you to install and run many windows based programs *without* requiring much user intervention. And thats with OSX running on some form of *nix, so it can be done.

Linux on the desktop requires that same seamless built in compatibility with the mass market of applications, or it will be stuck as a kind of slow second cousin in the minds of the masses.

Mayhem
Thumb Down

Missing the point

I agree with Psymon above, and also think many of the responses miss the point

Linux cannot become a dominant desktop until such time as it develops a way of allowing windows based applications to be installed and run seamlessly. And by that I don't mean "install wine and then tweak this and then run that" I mean put in a cd and click the nice little flash INSTALL ME prompt. This then needs to trigger some underlying handling to translate the OS into whatever the app expects and let the program *just run*. And this needs to be done out of the box when a user first gets the machine, not as an aftermarket tweak.

Lets face it. Windows has the dominant market share for desktops, so programs are written for it. If the *nix system cannot run them by default, it has failed in its goal.

Yes, alternatives are available, but the user should not have to use them, especialy if they already own the software.

And don't just dismiss specific programs as *niche markets*. Niches can be pretty damn large. Two examples. Banking uses Excel heavily to do all sorts of things that Microsoft never dreamed of. I've seen Excel running as essentially a full trading suite, with live data being updated simultaneously by multiple users in a 24/7 environment. How that was done I have no idea, and my support consisted of crapping myself and praying a reboot fixed it, but I strongly doubt it can be done in Open Office. There are a lot of traders around the world, and I'd say all use Reuters data tied with Excel. Sure, Reuters could develop a plugin for open office, but do YOU want to pay them to do it?

A second niche, a very large school a friend teaches at has a big piece of software that handles student data - reports, exam results, attendance etc. The software is written as a desktop suite, and runs on windows 95 98 NT4 and 2000. It doesn't run properly on XP, but then none of the local pcs run XP either. This is the fourth software suite they've tried, each headmaster likes to bring the one from his old school in as an "upgrade". All essentially work the same however. Find me a linux based alternative to that, as there are a lot of educational facilities around, and they all need something similar. Niche yes, small no.

Finally, many people above were talking about embedded or rebadged operating systems, and servers. Frankly, I think most people would be hard pressed to say what OS is running their embedded device, and I've seen windows errors crop up in everything from ATMs to airport boards. I've also seen unix errors on the same devices. Which is more suited is an irrelevant argument - the original article talks about desktop PCs, not routers or atms. As for servers, they are normally specifically built to do a few things well. File servers could be *nix or windows and most users wouldn't know or care - across a network they all seem the same.

Application servers are the same, certainly most web servers these days seem to run apache.

Once again though, its arguing the wrong thing. Linux, or unix, or debian, or ubuntu, or whatever, they are not suitable to replace a desktop for the majority of users oustide of a home environment, with the exception of *niche* roles like software development.

Think of corporate environments. Admin - no time and attendance programs. Accounts - not enough compatibility with regulators. Trading - just no.

Educational environments? For CS students, sure, maybe. For staff, no.

What about military, or geosciences. Any linux based GIS programs?

You name a program that linux provides as an alternative, I can probably find another large *niche* that there isn't an alternative for. *Thats* the point. Windows allowed the creation of all these programs. If you don't support them, you'll never expand outside of the small niche market of the home tinkerer.

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