Posts by Publius Valerius Publicola 3 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009
...the "we're cleaning up; go 'way" message looks like someone rushed it together in Notepad in about two minutes... a good test of how well [i]your[/i] browser handles invalid, tag-soup HTML.
This from one of the leading corporate lights of the doing-the-Web-right movement. Giving you your recommended daily allowance of irony, but no meat.
...the interest in and momentum towards Linux that was building amongst my clients and prospects 2-3 years ago has almost completely dissipated - at least on the desktop. Virtually all of my desktop migration now is Windows to Mac, rather than Windows to Linux. People are still interested in Linux and the BSDs in the back office - but almost entirely RHEL/CentOS and SUSE, rather than any of the "movement" distros like Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware.
For myself, it's been nearly a year since I paid much attention to Linuxpolitik at all... mainly because I decided that I wanted to get interesting things done rather than have deep but ultimately meaningless intellectual discourse that might as well be debating how many angels could dance on the edge of a SO-DIMM.
The Linux communities, led ably as always by the Debian crowd, is in imminent danger of "freeing" themselves - and the larger potential shift away from proprietary systems - into complete irrelevance in the real world. The shift to 64-bit desktops; the unprecedented clusterfark that is/was Vista... these are, if not in the market's rear-view mirror, at least nearly so, and the amount of open source takeup on the desktop has been...
([i]drumroll....[/i])
...absolutely negligible. A rounding error to a rounding error. We can, we previously [i]have[/i] done better. Joe Businessman or Jane Home User doesn't [i]care[/i] about the philosophical underpinnings, about the dialectic of open source; they want to get payroll out on time, or open the wedding video their daughter and new son-in-law just sent from the other side of the planet. If we, as a larger community of people and groups interested in promoting open source solutions lose sight of that, we will be increasingly sidelined by a small number of very well-known, well-funded and (importantly) reasonably well-[i]led[/i] companies that Get It™.
Can we measure up?
Aggregate intelligence of the species is an invariant. The population has grown more than sixfold in the last 200 years. Witness (I actually typed 'Witless' twice) not merely those like Cuomo, Coulter, Lee and so on, but the too-easily-distracted masses that don't simply ignore them and their ilk.
Mine's the one with the "Intelligent design could never have led to THIS" lapel pin...
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