For the MS haters

They've failed most ventures over the last 12 years and are still doing well.

Interesting self-contradicting statement.

JamesNT

Lots of bonuses being a monopoly the world is unable to curtail.

 Long Live the Empire.  :)

JamesNT:

 Long Live the Empire.  :)

Resistance is futile. 

digital-doc:

>> OS based apps are dinosaurs looking up in awe at the bright light falling from heaven. >>

That may be for the housewife, but not for the real man power user

Let me know when, "Bandwith," exceeds hard drive "Seek time."

When you are working from a server on your local LAN, it is essentially there now.  I routinely edit files on other Linux computers using the GUI - I believe that I am using "KIO slaves" or something along those lines, but essentially the traffic is "ssh" encrypted through the network, so it would take a supercomputer and blunt force to break the encryption if the network was sniffable, and one should assume any wireless network is sniffable). 

Bryan

martalli:

digital-doc:

>> OS based apps are dinosaurs looking up in awe at the bright light falling from heaven. >>

That may be for the housewife, but not for the real man power user

Let me know when, "Bandwith," exceeds hard drive "Seek time."

When you are working from a server on your local LAN, it is essentially there now.  I routinely edit files on other Linux computers using the GUI - I believe that I am using "KIO slaves" or something along those lines, but essentially the traffic is "ssh" encrypted through the network, so it would take a supercomputer and blunt force to break the encryption if the network was sniffable, and one should assume any wireless network is sniffable). 

Bryan

Hi Bryan,

Did I say that? Must have been a weekend. Is there a question somewhere, not that I can answer it?

digital-doc:

Hi Bryan,

Did I say that? Must have been a weekend. Is there a question somewhere, not that I can answer it?

Sorry, I was only commenting that the speed on your LAN is functionally the same now as using a local hard drive - for "office tasks".  In fact, it may be faster to work with a large database by keeping a powerful machine with the database and nice fast RAID setup while you access the database from a thinner client.  I don't necessarily mean a "thin clinet" like a citrix workstation, but something along the lines of a web interface with a central server.  Hospital HIT systems often follow this rubrick...there is little reason a physician's office couldn't.

Accessing a web interface, like an ASP system may be a whole different ball of wax. What passes for broadband in my small town would hardly compare to the local LAN speeds.  Maybe an ASP interface would work well if I was in a large city, but I would have to see a functional demonstration over a span of weeks before I would trust the availability of our health information to our local internet provider...

ahh now I get Grahams comment, heh

Cloud computing will hopefully open up the door to os independant applications but that's a long time away.  I have high hopes that someday users will be able to choose to buy either a mac or pc, run either windows or linux and be able to run the same applications across whatever platforms they choose to use. I truly believe this day will come, eventually.

ZenTech:

Cloud computing will hopefully open up the door to os independant applications but that's a long time away.  I have high hopes that someday users will be able to choose to buy either a mac or pc, run either windows or linux and be able to run the same applications across whatever platforms they choose to use. I truly believe this day will come, eventually.

With virtualization becoming increasingly accessible (and open sourced with projects like Virtualbox, kvm, and xen), we already find ourselves able to run Linux and Windows at the same time.  I have an install of ubuntu 8.10 alpha running as a vitual machine on my wife's imac (running Leopard) and I have w2k running inside virtualbox when ncessary on my laptop (which runs ubuntu 8.04). 

Virtualization for the desktop has literally exploded on the scene in the last few years with machines regularly having multiple cores, virtualization-ready processors, and 2-4GB of memory being an affordable option.  The only thing you lose currently is the best graphics tricks of the virtualized OS (which usually contends with a virtual version of intel graphics).  Even this may improve in time.

An option for the Linux folks who want to run windows program would be to run their programs with the wine libraries - a set of windows-compatible libraries that run windows programs natively in windows - without actual virtualization.  Things run faster and even 3d graphics are available.  Google's versions of picasa and google earth for linux are essentially their windows programs running on bundled wine libraries.