Net Radio Exec Says "Don't Mention Linux" 442
Barence writes "It might be reliable enough to power their device, but it seems some companies are still a bit reluctant to use the 'L word' when talking about their products. Speaking at the launch of the touchscreen Pure Sensia digital radio, director of marketing Colin Crawford was pressed for specifics of the new device's software. But after his CEO reminded him that the new radio was based on a Linux OS, Crawford remarked: 'I don't like the using the word "Linux" on a radio.'" Of course the presence of (possibly embedded) Linux may not have any relevance to consumers in some products; but does the word itself carry a commercial stigma?
Stigma to Linux (Score:4, Informative)
overall, I think that people still relate Linux to "Command Line" and "Nerdy basement hacker geeks who are fat and have too much facial hair"
People are really surprised when I show them my netbook running Ubuntu and all they have to do is click the firefox icon on the dock. They are always shocked when I explain that it's based on Linux.
Re:Competitive advantage (Score:4, Informative)
Re:gnu? gpl? probably a license issue (Score:2, Informative)
If, and only if, they made any changes to the GPLed code. And, even then, only the bits integrated into the GPLed code.
If you distribute any GPL code, such as the Linux kernel or the GNU userland, you have to offer the sources to the recipient.
Re:Linux. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Most of us are unqualified to comment (Score:2, Informative)
... Linux is weird. Linux is not normal. Linux is what "different" people use.
I resemble that remark!!
GNU/Linux (Score:3, Informative)
That's okay. Stallman says it's GNU/Linux, but I'm sure he'd be happy if you dropped the Linux part ;-) So just tell people you're building a GNU radio. Brand GNU.
Re:Stigma to Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe you tried this before you installed Windows out of frustration, but did you know that you can (most often than not) move a window around by holding down Alt while clicking & dragging? [ I've also been frustrated by screen-size dialogues not ensuring they fit on the current screen... ]
Re:Stigma to Linux (Score:1, Informative)
- Connect to my ISP (the software connects and then crashes before I type my password)
- Run my ISP's web accelerator software (simply doesn't run)
- Allow me to select 1000 songs, right-click on "open", and play those songs sequentially in VLC Player. Instead the stupid OS tries to open all 1000 songs at the same time. I had to yank the power cord to regain control. I haven't seen that level of poor design since AmigaOS 1.2 (1987).
- Won't properly emulate Atari games via StellaX (which works 100% on Windows but only 70% on Linux)
Windows does not do those things either.
Re:For low values of "it will" (Score:3, Informative)
Oh yeah, the game will page fault quite often
You (or the Wine user who originally wrote that) obviously do not know what a page fault [wikipedia.org] is. Hint: As the Wikipedia article says, page faults are not errors, they do not crash applications. They are signals from the hardware to the operating system that a requested memory page does not exist in RAM, and must be paged in from the backing store (swap, memory mapped file, binary image, etc). Page faults are not seen by applications.
You are likely thinking of the various kinds of protection faults instead.
Re:GNU/Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Stigma to Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Points 1, 2, 3 and 5 are all about wine. Your ISP software is probably trying to change some windows network/dialup settings that don't exist in Linux, use the native broadband configuration. Your "web accelerator" is probably a http proxy setting so again it's trying to modify things that don't exist, use the native proxy configuration. Wine is a system to run Windows applications under Linux. If you think you can do Linux system administration and change system settings through wine, then that is your problem. It's certainly not been my problem with any ISP since 2000, though I've only used it on the desktop for 1-2 years.
There are much better native browsers and as far as I can tell also native Amiga emulators, though I don't know the quality of them. So you come from Windows and expect Linux to run all your windows applications. Not unusual, but not really helpful either because then the only Linux project you're interested in is wine. Software not designed for Linux or cross-platform would normally not run at all, sometimes I wish newbies were forbidden from using wine until they've at least tried to use a Linux application. Yes, I know there's some irreplaceable windows software, but still.
Now the two things that are problems with Linux software: About the files, yeah that is stupid. I discovered the same using ark, if you try to unzip ten archives it'll start ten processes at the same time and go crazy trashing the disk instead of queuing them up. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Don't know why it's this way. To be fair the music players typically have a normal add to playlist dialog, but from a file browser the behavior is terrible.
As for 640x480, I don't know when I was last in that mode, I'd call it an obscure problem getting stuck in it, but you can get out of it holding down the ALT button though I admit that's not obvious for someone coming from Windows. I'm guessing StellaX switched resolution to 640x480, then it crashed and left you in a 640x480 desktop? I know the problem from other games, it's again that wine isn't working like a native application so the original resolution won't be restored in case of the application crashing and taking wine with it. So really this problem also traces back to wine.
Sure, it's not perfect. But you're constantly finding fault running Windows applications under Linux, not Linux applications under Linux. Personally I've found that the answer is more Linux, but I guess you never reached that tipping point. Windows applications are the square peg with Linux being a round hole, and wine is the hammer. Sometimes it works but it never fits well. It's a learning curve but except gaming I've found that there's usually an equivalent Linux application that's good enough for my purposes.
Re: Stigma (Score:1, Informative)
Ahem...
for(;yourStupidHeadGotTheIdea == 0;){
printf("Use of any GPLed product carries no obligations, whether attribution, source release, or otherwise, UNLESS YOU REDISTRIBUTE THE BINARY TO THIRD PARTIES"); }
Re:Competitive advantage (Score:3, Informative)
"Linux" a trademark of Linus Torvaldes and that's it. As long as you don't use it as a trademark of *your* product it will be fine.
Unless your product is a Linux dist. Initially he had no interest in trademarking it but because William R. Della Croce, Jr. (AKA whore face) tried to steal it, thus forcing him to play along the flawed American market rules. You can find the brand Linux printed anywhere, and Linus hasn't bothered to do anything about it (he doesn't want to). I'd bet that he wouldn't even care if someone made a Linux sex toy. He has a sense of humor that way.
Re:Don't let those annoying facts get in the way (Score:3, Informative)
The entire point of ActiveX is to put software on your computer you didn't ask for.
Have you actually used Windows in the last, oh, 9 years or so? Did you ever see an ActiveX control on a web page in a browser install itself quietly, with no confirmation from the user, with default security settings?
(Hint: in XP and above, it actually requires 3 clicks to install a new ActiveX control - one to click on the sliding bar above the page which says "Page is trying to install ActiveX", one more in the opened dialog to answer "yes" to the question "Should this site be allowed to even ask you to install ActiveX", and then one more in another dialog to confirm that, yes, you do want this particular ActiveX control to be installed. That's for a digitally signed control - one without a signature will be rejected outright.)
Re:Don't let those annoying facts get in the way (Score:3, Informative)
systems with .NET will still have Java installed
Not really. I've seen plenty systems with .NET (especially now that NVidia and ATI control panels require it) and without Java. In fact, any fresh install of Vista and above is such a system (Vista has .NET 3.0 out of the box, Win7 has 3.5 SP1).
Microsoft should have worked with Sun, keeping with the original Sun JVM instead of trying to trick them for commercial gain.
There are plenty of reasons why MS went for its own VM, not the least of it is that it is not restricted to a sandbox - e.g. it has raw data and function pointers and arithmetic, unions, and other nifty things. It's possible to efficiently implement the entire ISO C++ on top of CLR (and MSVC does just that), but not so for JVM. There are other things that JVM is lacking - generics would be a fairly major point, and first-class functions ("delegates" in .NET parlance) is another. And Sun is very conservative about changing JVM, and as you recall it was MS adding delegates to their own JVM implementation that triggered Sun lawsuit against MS over it... and Sun made it perfectly clear that they do not want delegates in JVM because they're "not object oriented" (huh...) - well, many years later first-class functions are still not even in Java-the-language, much less JVM, so I guess MS was right in making their own platform so that they don't have to move with the glacial pace of Java VM evolution...
.Net will be more tightly integrated to the OS
Do you mean implementation details, or APIs exposed to .NET developers here?