Canonical is doing what Nokia did, and will pay the same penalty.

I wrote some years ago about how Nokia was missing the point, having developed a pocket computer before knowing what they had done. Their blinkers said "phone" on them, so they never saw the giant road sign that said "computer". As one veteran of a firm then free-falling out of the Fortune 500 put it in The Cluetrain Manifesto, "The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery."

Now Canonical have developed another Maemo/Meego: a life-size OS that runs on a pocket device. And Mark Shuttleworth seems to have inherited Nokia's set of blinkers that say "phone", and Lo! and behold! he too cannot see the sign that says "computer". As I said in that article, 'the current pox of "partnerships" is a particularly Good Clue, because it means management is spending more time schmoozing on the golf course than down on the shop floor making or selling.'

I truly hope this doesn't apply (mutatis mutandis) to Mark Shuttleworth, but if you have invested your money, time, or life in Canonical, you need to consider if your forecast of the future concides with theirs.

One that sets many apart: learn to communicate in another language.

Twilight certainly. In 1983 I was working for United Information Services, a data-processing bureau service in London, subsidiary of United Telecom of Kansas. We did have a few machines that still ran punched cards, but my dev work was interactive database front-ends for engineering and finance applications, coded in Fortran on an A-J VDU attached to a DEC-10. We also had private network access to a couple of Crays and some IBMs in Kansas, and a basement full of DEC-10s somewhere in PA. We would occasionally get customers come in with a deck of cards, but the last time I had had to deal with them (the cards) in anger was when I dropped a box of them in college years earlier. However, I can well see that government computing would then have been a considerable way behind the curve.

It is still missing LDAP support for list *owners*. AFAICS if you use LDAP for authentication, that means all list *members* must validate through LDAP, which is exactly the wrong way round. What I need is to enforce list *owners* to be members of my university (ie they appear in AD and can only login with their campus credentials), whereas list *members* (subscribers) can be from anywhere. Or have I missed something?

BS. 50k isn't even peanuts.

I don't know what the fuck your teachers do during the "vacations" but in my country they do stuff like accompanying educational visits with their pupils, marking exams, preparing the next year's syllabus, getting up to date on their subject, doing all the paperwork they didn't have time to do in term-time, and — if they can afford it — actually having a vacation of their own.

Maybe I'm wrong; maybe US teachers just sit on the porch and drink beer all vacation long. I doubt it. The violent jealousy you show toward their "3 months of no work" perhaps shows how little you know about the educational system. If you want to fix it, get your politicians to change the school system so that classes go on all year, just like regular work does.

NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T <scream/>

All that has happened is that FLOSS has been shown to react faster to security revelations than closed or proprietary softwarre.

That's fine with me.

This was all tried in the UK in the late 50s and early 60s and rapidly gotten rid of. Sadly, I am not surprised that the educationalists seem not to know their asses from their elbows and have resurrected a completely discredited theory yet again. All it does is cripple another generation of kids.

This is the biggest problem. Not just the Window-only applications (that's an organisational problem) but the UI behaviour.

To be a candidate for Windows replacement, Linux interfaces need to do things the way Windows people expect them, like opening the right application when you click on an email attachment or a web link. I've seen Chrome open Mutt instead of Thunderbird in order to follow a mailto: link, and Thunderbird open Libre Office in order to handle a .eml attachment, instead of opening it itself. I won't even get into what happens when you click on a https link in a PDF when using Okular...

If you're prepared to fix all this kind of stuff and preconfigure every application to work sensibly, you might just make it.

Not necessarily. Run up a couple of demo machines, half with Win8 and half with Linux. Let the users try them out, and go with whichever one they feel most comfortable with.

A dime gets a dollar that's Win8. It's management's problem if the employees' productivity falters because they are using an incompetently-designed UI that management imposed on them; it's IT's job to recommend the best course of action for the business — if management choose to pick a loser, don't blame IT (unless they also recommended the loser, which they sometimes do :-)

Finally. Only been banging the drum for a couple of decades.

Its. The. File. Format.

What's a "driver issue", Mom?

I have the same slight sense of unease because they're a charity doing important work, but the people responsible (the individual[s] and their management) have to be taught a lesson they won't forget. Perhaps naming and shaming them is more appropriate.