Shamanmuni

It's a definite possibility. However, with Android and iOS many people are learning that the world doesn't end after Windows and Ubuntu is very user friendly.

The typical PC user uses a web browser, an office suite and videogames. With Chrome you have an excellent web browser regardless of OS; LibreOffice is fine for many users and it's interface is similar to that of Office pre-Ribbon, which many appreciate. Games have been a painful issue, but with browser-based games and Valve porting to Linux it's getting really better.

I believe it's a matter of time until users begin questioning the Microsoft tax when they can get a useful OS sans viruses and malware for free.

I think there's nothing to fear. The announcement states that in most cases you should be able to port your applications from Qt4 into Qt5 with little or no modifications. On the other hand, I was an skeptic in regards to QML at first, but after using it I fell in love with it. It's logical and very easy to learn, and having similarities with web development means expanding the availabilty of programmers and designers who can work immediately in your project. Great stuff.

When something doesn't work or works badly on Linux, the critics always say it's Linux fault (just read the comments here). Hold Windows and OS X to the same standard and you'll see they aren't so wonderful in comparison.

Windows on the desktop is a known and reliable brand, nobody can deny that. However, Windows on the tablet is an unkown today, and people seem comfortable and used to using a non-Windows OS in their tablets and phones, it's a radically different situation.

I think it's a mistake to believe that people will choose Windows 8 in their tablets and phones just because it's Windows. Otherwise it would have worked wonders with Windows CE and Windows Phone, and it didn't. There are other factors in play, and as I said in another answer, the world is not waiting for Microsoft to catch up.

The future will tell, but I don't think tablets are very enterprisey. All the people I know use tablets casually, for work a larger screen and a good keyboard are golden.

I believe if there was a strong use case for tablets in the office, businesses would have bought iPads by now and many enterprise apps would have appeared, the compatibility in iWork is really good and it has all the hardware you could need. It's not like all managers are waiting for Windows 8 tablets as their savior, I think it's a fantasy that the world is waiting for Microsoft to enter the tablet market.

And it's not just a matter of solving OS problems, the geeks I know are usually in the position in which people go to ask if something is good before they buy it. If people come to ask me about a tablet with Windows 8 today I'll answer "I have no idea idea if it's good, but I have an iPad and it's great. Here, try it.". What do you think they'll do next?

Are you sure? iOS has 5 years in the market and plenty of apps, Android 4 years and also plenty of apps. Both have matured and you probably know a geek or two who use them and can answer your questions. Windows 8 will be a newcomer with less apps at your disposal and probably no geek nearby to ask questions. Lots of unkowns for me.

Face it, they are really late in the game this time.

Maybe it's not about succeeding or failing, and he is talking about how you spend your time; your life. I read the article as "you are a startup founder, forget about having a life and get to work!"; I would be surprised if the writer turned out to be older than 25, it's a mindset typical of that age.

Perhaps in the future, even succeeding, you'll look back to those younger days in which you put aside everything for your pet project and realise you lost the opportunity to have great experiences with your friends, boy/girlfriends, spouse, kids and/or family.

Remember, working passionately in what you love is great, but forgeting that you are not a working machine, and that you work to live, not the reverse, are perhaps more valuable advice for your future self than all the books on productivity in the world combined.

Kudos to that. The funny thing is that in the past Microsoft wanted phones and tablets to look like desktops, and it didn't work. Now they want desktops to look like phones and tablets. I predict it won't work.

Windows hasn't changed it's layout from 1995 for a reason, people know it and they don't want it to change. Many people still hate the Ribbon on Office just because it's different from what they were used to. Now they built Metro, which is radically different, and expect people to love it because it has Windows on the name. They just don't get it, the 90's are over and you can't do whatever you want without alienating your customers.

Microsoft shouldn't just look at the iPad, it's short-sighted. The reality is that Android has become the most common OS on smart-phones and both Google and Amazon are subsidizing tablets so that lots of people are able to buy their first ones with Android cheaply.

When it's time for these people to buy their second tablet, which one do you think they will choose: a Surface, an iPad or one of the many available ones with the OS they know? A classical Microsoft strategy turned against them.

It's not enough to compete with the iPad on price. If Surface is cheaper than the iPad, but the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 are cheaper than both of them, people will buy the Android ones, and probably no feature will change that.

Apple is comfortable with their first-mover advantage and respected brand, they can continue selling devices with high margin profits to people with disposable income as long as they don't damage their brand with a poor product.

Companies using Android are comfortable selling in bulk and making tiny profits with each device.

Microsoft cannot be Apple, they are entering the market almost three years late. They should compete with Android subsidizing heavily their tablets or risk becoming a niche product on this segment, as Windows Phone.

That is so true. I'm a KDE user and we had a very similar situation with KDE4. OK, 4.0 wasn't usable, we all know that; but 4.1 was really better and by 4.2 it was pretty decent. Nowadays most KDE users agree moving on was a good decision and we have a great desktop.

The people complaining usually are those who were happy with Gnome2 and just want it the way it was. Guess what, nobody erased Gnome2 from existence, and as far as I know it was in maintenance mode anyway, so nothing has changed for them. Use Mate if you prefer it.

And many (like Linus) probably just want a lightweight WM to use CLI, a browser and maybe another application. Guess what, you already have that, and there are several of them to choose.

But many of us want a complete and integrated desktop environment with lots of eye candy, multiple applications with similar look, complex file search, GUI installation and the whole shebang. We don't mind if it takes extra RAM and CPU because we have it. KDE4, Gnome3 and Unity try to give that, and many people do enjoy it, as I assume the developers of those DE's.

We get it, you don't like it. That's fine! You have choice! Just don't assume your opinion is universal, and don't be a dick about it.

In the first paragraph you just repeated what I said. Yeah, Alan is an idiot, but you can only conclude that comparing him with Charles. Otherwise he just behave as any corporate developer is expected to.

In the second paragraph, we have a problem of semantics. If you need to do some work in order to have a more stable, maintable and bug-free solution, it's not extra at all, just the necessary amount to avoid doing even more work in the future.

By planning carefully you are actually avoiding rewrites, bug hunting, failures and maintenance problems. In other words: future work. And I think that identifying the problem and its best solution from the start will always reduce the total amount of work in the long run. Always.

As both of us are saying, a poor solution means more work. So, someone who truly wants to do the absolute minimum amount of work required should never build a poor solution intentionally. It's not the truly lazy thing to do. They are not as lazy as us, lazy people for real, they just want to avoid work in the present ;P

If you want to work less, then get the problem right and build a wonderful solution that should not present complications in the future. I know it's not a foolproof method, it's a bit ideallistic, has many grey (and black) areas, but for me it's a great principle to follow at work.

But Charles wasn't just wasting his time, he was thinking about the problem while playing games! At least that's my interpretation.

I've learnt that I concentrate wonderfully and solve problems while walking. I know other people see just a guy walking in an absent-minded way, but I'm working!

For me Charles and CharlesPrime are exactly the same example, they just do the same thing in different ways. If it isn't Space Invaders then it will be another thing, they both need time to think. Otherwise you are hiring code monkeys.

It's a little more complex than you present it. You only get to think of Alan as inefficient because you know what Charles did in a similar situation. However, if you only knew what Alan did you'd say he was smart and efficient.

He did everything he was expected to do and some more, a very industrious guy. He didn't seem bothered about doing a complicated design, writing lots of code, coordinating the other developers and the testers, revising the code several times and maintaining it. He wasn't lazy at all.

On the other hand, probably Charles didn't want to do all that stuff. He just wanted to write as little code as possible with as few bugs as possible and be done with it, no maintenance at all. And that required thinking very carefully and deeply about the problem he had to solve in order to get it right and write the necessary code.

In trying to do as little work as possible and return to Space Invaders, he had to be smart and efficient. That's the lesson here, great hackers use their brains and write great code to solve their problems with the absolute minimum amount of work required. It's really about laziness.

OK, but you have to acknowledge that businessmen and engineers are not the only people who could be interested in FOSS.

I work regularly with social scientists; they are really interested in Free Software and don't care much about Open Source. You can talk about efficiency and reduction of cost endlessly and to them it's just another "marketing speech" but if you talk about ethics and the well-being of society at large they are instantly hooked.

RMS is just a man, he can't be all things to all people. There are situations in which his rhetoric is really effective, and others in which it isn't; as simple as that. It's great to have Open Source to make an argument that businessmen will pay attention to. However, criticising the "Free Software guy" because he's not an "Open Source guy" is kind of pointless.

I think the diversity in points of view is a testament to the cultural importance of FOSS, and we should celebrate that.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude, but it's not really much of a point to say "He doesn't refuse when there aren't viable alternatives". It's the same situation he was in the 80's with OS's, there wasn't a free OS for his computer, so he used a non-free one to code, a temporal compromise. When there's an alternative, even a very impractical one, he goes with that even though he could choose the other. So, "Refuses to compromise" is accurate, he refuses whenever he can.

Your distinctions in reality are pretty meaningless, you can be an open source guy using the GPL (look at Linus) or a free software guy using BSD. Both movements overlap enourmously, and the differences between them are very small compared to the rest of the software ecosystem. I wish we could stop all the silly infighting and see that we are all heading in the same direction.

The same argument could be said about slavery. You are told you have freedom, but you don't have the freedom to enslave other people. A society which admits slavery is more free in the sense you say. But, really, would you feel OK with it? I believe that society's well being is more important than absolute personal freedom. The GPL reflects that, so I support it, and we really shouldn't care about petty arguments about which one is "more free".

So, what's your point? That he shouldn't fight for free software because it's difficult? Imagine the world in the 80's, when there wasn't a free as in freedom OS; rms knows about compromise when there are no alternatives, he just doesn't want a non-free OS in a non-free computer when there are free alternatives. We usually call it coherence.

Wrong, the whole reason why NoSQL databases exist is that SQL databases aren't always the best solution for any given problem. CouchDB in particular tries to solve different problems than MySQL does, or the same problems in a different way. You should learn about it rather than citing misinformed memes.