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Comment Either it is valuable to MS or not... (Score 1) 650

The should not be allowed to have it both ways: protect the source code because it's "valuable" but not support is any more because it has become worthless crap - and hell yes - why not make it a more general law: If you drop support for old software; your company should be enforced to open the source. This has several advantages:
1) Old hardware can still be supported, so there is less e-waste
2) Customers are not forced into anything
3) Even more world domination for Open Source software!

Whatever license, as long as it's OSI approved.

And I can't resist to post a link to our press release done today.

Submission + - Capitalising on the end of Windows XP (linuxbe.com)

internet-redstar writes: Belgian Linux companies try to capitalise on the end of life of Windows XP. They offer alternatives like remote desktop, Raspberry Pies and Xubuntu to transform the outdated infrastructure. Also they blame Microsoft for a massive amount of e-waste on their website.

Comment Re:The difference (Score 1) 293

Correctly assessed!
And the numbers of failure for Tesla are even much worse than Ford: "There have been 12 reported fires but no injuries in the bigger recall of 139,917 Ford Escape vehicles." - so one in 11659 cars.
Tesla has sold an estimated 18,200 units through September 2013 (according to wikipedia) with 3 fires - so one in 6066 cars.
Neglecting or minimising this problem is a bad thing for everybody.

Comment Re:Only time will tell... (Score 1) 631

It is sad that they didn't go for the Ubuntu phone - I was one of the (many) people who contributed to the kickstarter.
Having raised more than 10M usd and then not releasing it... WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT.

Maybe Marc is burning through his cash too quickly. Who knows.

But I still think he helped OpenSource and Free Software a lot, whatever direction it turns out to go into.
It looks like there will not be an Ubuntu phone ready for the Xmas shopping season this year, and that's sad, very sad!
Even Apple launched a new phone without having any real new features...

Comment Re:Only time will tell... (Score 1) 631

I'm sure you didn't upgrade Fedora 12 to 19 on the command line.
It isn't supported and it doesn't work.

It's a shame.
Ah and did you try this: rpm -qa | grep -i v fc19
how many old version shit is still hanging around?

We prefer Ubuntu over Fedora out of stability and software choices. Of course Ubuntu has its issues too. But you don't get that much of a 'leaking ship' feeling...

Comment Re:Only time will tell... (Score 2) 631

I understand your point.
I believe - just like Linus Torvalds - that there is something terrible wrong with the UI designers in Linux.
The kernel has learned from the very beginning that it needs to be stable to userspace, yet the UI designers try to make users change their behaviour with every major release of their crap.
Yesterday I heared that GNOME wants to drop the middle-mouse paste.
Who the fuck they think they are for messing with our user experience. It's just rude.

And that's also one of the major points of critique.
An operating system experience designer should not have to choose between 'dumb' and 'power user'.
Both need to be possible at the same time. But uninformed UI designers try to copy MacOS where they don't even know about the power user options within the Finder. They themselves think it's dumb. But in reality they are the only dumb ones.

In the FOSS context, we can however stick with Enlightenment or with any other window manager, and in the current situation small and light window managers indeed remain wildly competitive with dumb but bloated Unity or Gnome or KDE desktops which lack uniformity and power user options.

But I'm getting off topic; it's more of a general UI experience topic than a pure Ubuntu disaster.
I like the fact that Ubuntu tries with unity to do something new.
BUT it is not that more than a good-effort try. It doesn't work that great. It improved a bit with 13.10, I believe.

As I said, only time will tell if Ubuntu scared away too much power users.

Comment Re:Only time will tell... (Score 1) 631

Yes, but it is slow.
And if you ever tried upgrading Fedora from the command line, you know what for a mess it is.
I'm certain it isn't used successfully by YOU on more than a few servers if you say that...
We support thousands of systems, and know what the difference is :)

It's workable for most situations, but it's crappy technology compared to .deb/apt-get

Comment Re:Only time will tell... (Score 5, Insightful) 631

Being popular as a distribution does not mean they are evil. And the comparison with Windows is just plain _stupid_
Microsoft promotes software patenting.
Microsoft embraces and extends open standards to break them - allows importing of data but only crappy exporting.

Now, I do agree that Ubuntu made some less popular decisions to make money.
While I don't like it either, they are easily apt-get removed.

Ubuntu also does their software development in OpenSource fashion.

I think some of the ubuntu-bashing is unjustified and unconstructive.

Ubuntu has a certain amount of critical mass which is very interesting and which leads to a better quality experience than for example with Fedora.
While I don't agree with all the 'dumbing down', it still allows power user to dive as deep as they want into the system and into the code. And I like the fact that it's not required for novice users.

Comment Only time will tell... (Score 4, Insightful) 631

It's hard to predict. But Mint, which builds on ubuntu, has some major flaws with Mint 15. We see Ubuntu still as the distribution of choice for developer workstations. Especially in the embedded linux space. Ubuntu in the server still has the advantage of having a recent kernel and being build on .deb packages instead of the horrible slow and unstable, unupgradeable yum/RPM combination.

If Ubuntu declines, then the question is to what?
We see a lot of ubuntu users going to arch linux for example, but these are the people who started out ubuntu just a few years ago.
Distribution diversity is a good thing.
But we still wouldn't recommend newcomers anything else.

Grtz,
Jasper Internet

Comment Better update their course material and method (Score 1) 372

Instead of wasting time with 'converting' to new tech, I would prefer that they updated their course material and changed their method so it's more applicable in real life.
Real life in which everybody has internet access, almost always.
Sure, it's important that certain things are learned by heart, very sure.
But certain things simply are not.

Insight questions, those are the important ones.

But hey, who am I kidding, the school system will probably never change. Until our robot overlords do ;)

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