USA which has the most Internet trolls defending M$ also has the most infected PCs which are going to have their backup DNS servers disconnected Monday, knocking them off the web. Hundreds of thousands of PCs will seem to disappear.
USA has about 10% of the world’s infected machines. China which has about the same number of on-line users has 1/7 as many infected PCs as USA. India which has four times the population of USA has 1/3 as many infected PCs. To keep the problem at home in USA, the world should just stop using that other OS. It’s not needed and not worth the trouble it causes. I recommend the world use Debian GNU/Linux. It works for you and not M$, its “partners” and malware-writers.
“Terry Zink, a Microsoft ‘researcher’ who earlier claimed that Android devices were used to send spam, has now admitted that he ‘guessed’ the source of the spam. Guessed!”
It used to be that M$ would get others to lie for them but it must be getting more difficult every day… Perhaps they have run out of shame.
People love small cheap computers even when they are thin clients and used in businesses, offices and schools. In my opinion, thin clients should be the default solution, preferably with GNU/Linux. It’s the right way to do IT.
“The past few years have seen businesses in India showing a great deal of interest in understanding the pros and cons of desktop virtualization, evaluating the benefits and taking major steps to adopt this technology. A report by Gartner also substantiates this upward trend in desktop virtualization adoption, estimating that by 2013, 40 percent of all corporate desktops will be virtual desktops. Gartner also says that the desktop virtualization market is estimated to be worth at least USD 1.8 billion by 2012.
…
Another group that is betting big on desktop virtualization is the Essar Group, which plans to move its 90 -95 percent workforce to Citrix XenDesktop platform and aims to complete implementation of virtual desktops for 40,000 users in the next one year. This is expected to save the company more than 40 percent in desktop computing costs by enabling easy, centralized management of desktops and applications and reducing the need to refresh expensive hardware.”
There is a connection between the two items. FLOSS costs much less than Wintel’s stuff. Look at some of those prices…
Intel Core i5-2410M Boot-Up Linux 4GB DDR3 640GB SATA $690
Intel Core i5-460M P6100, 2.00Ghz, 3MB L3 Cache Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit 2GB DDR3 SDRAM $823
There’s no nonsense about recommending that other OS. They offer variety of OS, features and price. It’s no wonder there are far more job ads for GNU/Linux (49,500) than that other OS (2,850)…
Blender has been quoted as an example of failed commercial software in the comments here. It is a remarkable story and worth a post.
Blender was created as a rewrite by a Belgian company and spun off in its own company Not a Number Technologies. They expanded too fast and went bankrupt. Blender lives on under the umbrella of a non-profit organization The Blender Foundation. A failure it is not. About every two years, the organization produces a new animated movie and continues to thrive on donations and other revenue.
“The Blender Foundation is an independent organisation (a Dutch "stichting"), acting as a non-profit public benefit corporation, with the following goals:
To establish services for active users and developers of Blender
To maintain and improve the current Blender product via a public accessible source code system under the GNU GPL license
To establish funding or revenue mechanisms that serve the foundation’s goals and cover the foundation’s expenses
To provide individual artists and small teams with a complete, free and open source 3D creation pipeline.
“
As an application, Blender is quite challenging to use. I certainly have not mastered it but several of my students have. There are enough tutorials on the web to allow anyone to make nice 3D images. Animation is also possible but adds another level of complexity. I have used Blender to make a few logos and other images worth the effort to add 3D effects. The concepts are all simple and necessary: light, shadow, reflections and surfaces. Oh, colour is in there too, as part of light.
A typical tutorial on using Blender is http://vimeo.com/31973698. It’s way too fast but quickly shows the features of the programme. Hot keys and mouse clicks abound… A text tutorial is far easier for a newbie to follow… Unfortunately the change in UI for version 2.6 has left the bulk of tutorials behind…
Blender.org is visited by most countries in the world with 14 million visits in 2011. 10.55% of those visits were from GNU/Linux, so even folks using that other OS and MacOS appreciate Blender. There are more than 3 million downloads of the binary per annum. It is a cooperative project of the world, which can and does make its own software.
My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.
My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.
I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.
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