A CIO's View of Ubuntu 308
onehitwonder writes "Well-known CIO John Halamka has rigorously tested six different operating systems over the course of a year in an effort to find a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows on his laptop and his company's computers. Here is CIO.com's initial writeup on Halamka's experiences; we discussed their followup article on SUSE. Now CIO is running a writeup on Halamka's take on Ubuntu and how it stacks up against Novell SUSE 10, RHEL, Fedora, XP, and Mac OS X, in a life-and-death business environment." For the impatient, here's Halamka's conclusion: "A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008."
Well known? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Well known? (Score:5, Funny)
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Nor Tom, from Myspace.
Re:Well known? (Score:5, Funny)
*rimshot*
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Re:Well known? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well known? (Score:4, Funny)
Results 1 - 10 of about 4,630,000 for Jacob Smith [google.com]
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,460,000 for Cheryl Johnson [google.com]
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,290,000 for Samuel Travolta [google.com]
Results 1 - 10 of about 519,000 for Susan Hannover [google.com]
Results 1 - 10 of about 34,400 for bathilda bagshot [google.com]
Results 1 - 10 of about 203,000 for east australian orange ringed octopus [google.com]
By your logic, "John Halamka" must be more obscure that the "East Australian orange-ringed octopus", but more well known than "Bathilda Bagshot."
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Ginux is in development and will be ready for a public beta soon.
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A genius! (Score:5, Funny)
This man is a genius! Obviously the main problem for CIOs switching from MS to linux is: What happens to the saved licensing costs? You don't want it cut from your budget because that will make you less important...
So this guy's answer: replace it with 4 different OS's! That's 4x the support staff! Might even require a budget increase! And headcount, oh more of that lovely headcount!
I suspect once this idea gets out it really will be the year of the linux desktop!
Now, I just have to figure out if I'm joking or not. I know I don't usually end every sentence with an exclamation mark...
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Realistically, many companies that employ graphics people already have both Macs and Windows users. And I wouldn't think SUSE and Ubuntu are really all that different from a support perspective. Not sure why he thinks OSX is better for researchers, though. I tried looking at the article for more information, but I'm not going to wade thr
Re:A genius! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't want all the annoying ads, click the "print" link and read it on one page. That is what I did.
Re:A genius! (Score:4, Interesting)
If you need to run specialized commercial software for data capture or analysis, you need Windows. Very few companies support anything else. Those that do (e.g. National Instruments) offer only a subset of their tools which aren't well integrated into the platforms.
If you just need a computer that is pretty and powerful and you don't have to worry about, you need OS X. Stuff just works; you can forget about the computing and focus on the research.
If you are in research that involves computation or statistics, you need Linux. The standard tools are more powerful and flexible than anything you can find under Windows, and the headache of getting these to work on a Mac more than offsets the slightly smoother interface in some areas.
And from what I've seen, researchers' preferences in these fields tend to follow the needs above. (People who are mostly interested in data collection/hardware interface generally prefer Windows, biology researchers generally like Macs, bioinformatics folks like Linux, etc..)
Re:A genius! (Score:4, Interesting)
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That may often be true, but not always.
I have a couple really nice digitizers that run Linux in the firmware that live in a rack with a controller running Linux and store the data (closing in on 1 TB) on a Linux server. The code controlling the digitizers and archiving the data is free to download (but not officially open source). All the data analysis is done in a commercial data analysis programming lan
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2008 is gonna be the year of Windows, OS X, SuSE and Ubuntu on the desktop!
Seriously, though, it seems that what he's calling the difference between SuSE and Ubuntu is actually the difference between KDE and GNOME. At a minimum, it's the difference between their default desktop configurations. I'm not sure I'd trust this guy as a Linux expert, however "well-known" he may be.
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I don't think he's claiming to be a Linux expert. Moreover, his target audience is not Linux enthusiasts who are trying to pick the best distro. His audience is other corporate-types who want to know how thes
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Sigh...
The whole point is that he is NOT a Linux expert, just like the other 99% of us out here in userland. Just like 95% of us are not Windows "experts". Allow me to clue in the 1%:
1) I don't care about KDE and Gnome either, nor do I care to know.
2) I don't want to be an "expert" at either system, but that doesn't mean I can't form opinions about how well something works for me or my organization.
It sounds like the Ubunt
Re:A genius! (Score:4, Interesting)
No, but he's a CIO publicly holding forth on the suitability of one Linux over another for certain applications based on the failure to understand that you can change the desktop environment! Maybe I'm a Linux snob but that seems like a striking lack of understanding. It's not like he was complaining about the lack of some obscure functionality and I chimed in with "its fixed in CVS so stop spredding FUD you M$ a$troturfer"!
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No, he actually understands the situation much better than you. For one thing, he
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No, I hadn't known that. Is it really "massive re-engineering" to get it to work like the Ubuntu default? I hadn't objected to his point about package management, which certainly is a major barrier between one distro and another, but had thought that customizing a GNOME or KDE desktop is easily within the capacity of any IT department that's going to be capable of subsequently maintaini
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Re:A genius! (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some important problems to recognize, although I hope you can pardon my amazement that people still want to listen to MIDIs at all. MIDI playback in Ubuntu is not as simple as it could be. While I don't know why this matters as an evaluation of 40,000 user base suitability, it might be the best example for the state of Ubuntu usability. At the moment, MIDI is recognized as a music filetype by GNOME, but gstreamer (and totem as a consequence) can't handle it. So first instinct when something doesn't work is to check the repos. There are 87 hits for "midi" in my apt-cache search. Once you exclude the libraries and random extra hits for midi maze clones and the like, you get about ten options. The first one is kmid. kmid looks like it would work out great in kubuntu, but I'm guessing it can't handle the lack of artsd running in the background or something, as I heard no sound. The last one on the list is timidity++. It works fine on the command line, but even if you install the extra interfaces, the interface isn't that great.
Gutsy (to be released in October) handles it slightly differently. If you double click to open a
As an aside, I do appreciate the implication that Debian is the mother of all Linux. And we should recognize that organizations, hired bounties, or outside firms like SuSE, can make these re-engineering feats simple via open source.
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You probably are, but that's not relevant. He wasn't saying, which version of Linux, with which desktop (and should I fork that version and change schedulers) best fits my needs, but which distro. Period. You choose bad defaults, you lose. And that is the selection critera, which, frankly, is the only way software becomes friendly enough for 99.9% of people to use. More Linux snobs should insist it work best for most users by
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I ditched the command line with Dos and Win3.1
I agree with your post, I just wanted to share a bit of wisdom that I shamelessly stole from someone's sig.
DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a Pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
For your job, the command line is not very efficient, and a GUI is better. For a sysadmin, whose job involves lots of scripting and configuration, it is essential - and MS-DOS doesn't even hold a candle to what's possible in bash.
But you're right... Linux fanatics can't expect everyone to edit xorg.conf by hand and apply
Re:A genius! (Score:5, Informative)
Then switch to Ubuntu, download VMWare Server [vmware.com] (free as in beer), install your Windows license in a VM, put Quicken on it and be done. With the snapshots in VMware you can easily test install stuff and just roll back to the state before the install if you don't like the results. Burn the VM onto a DVD and never reinstall Windows again.
"I would love to switch but I need $windows_app" is not a viable excuse anymore.
If you need assistance with installing VMWare Server under Ubuntu, feel free to ask.
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I am an accounting major who was once an MIS major and has a background in IT.
What I have seen is that those who make money or save the company money are the most valued. An example are salesmen who get paid a ton of money and programmers who get outsourced to India since they provide no value(the ones that can't sell themselves or what they do).
What I am learning in school goes to the opposite of what your post says. If I were an account working for the CFO (under several levels) I would quest
heh (Score:2)
Re:heh (Score:4, Insightful)
However, the big difference between the two distros is that Yast sucks and Synaptic, aptitude and friends are great. That also comes up in the article.
almost everything is "niche business application" (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, people have been writing Windows-specific business apps for a long time, and MS Office itself is a critical business application in corporate-land. The overwhelming majority of computer users at every company I've been at has been somewhat-to-very nontechnical folks running Office and other Windows-specific software.
So, Halamka's analysis is not encouraging.
That's what I was wondering. (Score:2)
Run it via WINE?
Run it via Citrix?
Use only the functionality common to MS Office and OpenOffice.org?
Another option?
There are lots of different ways to do it, but which of them is he taking and why?
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I don't know what Halamka's approach is... but I know exactly what the approach of the PHBs will be - continue to buy and use Windows.
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I work at a very large IT company whose name is a household word (not Microsoft, but I used to work there, too), and we have a heterogeneous environment: Windows machines make up the majority of the network, our mail is on Exchange, and there are
Re:almost everything is "niche business applicatio (Score:2)
MS Office itself is a critical business application in corporate-land
Not everywhere and not every user even in Microsoft-centric customers. OpenOffice is quite capable for the vast majority of users. And so many productivity apps are going online, just doesn't seem to be the show-stopper it once was.
I'd mod the author's distribution. I'd use Ubuntu on the desktop for most users, Mac for the advertising and graphics people, and set up Windows as kiosks for Windows only applications.
Even a three OS
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Doesn't like you've actually done this if you throw out a 3:1 figure like that given that in most businesses there are far more Windows installs than OS X installs so that 3:1 figure actually makes Linux and OS X look bad. Fortunately I know the figure isn't accurate for a lot of places. In the company I work for at least the OS makes absolutely no difference on the number of support calls since the problems are related to the in-house web-based ERP system which has specific issues with specific browsers on
Print view (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cio.com/article/print/41140 [cio.com] is much nicer to read.
Having your cake and eating it too ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sweet. And with my Macbook and a copy of Parallels, I can have them all.
That's the beauty of virtualization on the Intel Macs. You cease worrying about which OS is the best compromise; you simply use the best OS for the task at hand.
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Actually, Halamka agrees with you. But he also needs a subnotebook and Apple doesn't make one. For work that requirement outweighs his preference for OS X. All this laptop needs to do is basic business stuff like email and presentations, and Ubuntu is more than good enough at
CIO.com doesn't want us to read the article (Score:3, Informative)
Good freaquin' googly.
CIO.com sure has a hardon for online ad revenue. Seventeen pages for one article, the article itself taking up only 1/3 of the page real estate for each page. Talk about a pain in the ass to read.
It's bad enough that nobody in Slashdot reads the actual articles. The next time I see a link to a CIO.com article, I'll just skip trying to read it, and go right to throwing down a random opinion based on the Slashdot summary.
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CIO.com sure has a hardon for online ad revenue. Seventeen pages for one article, the article itself taking up only 1/3 of the page real estate for each page. Talk about a pain in the ass to read.
That's simple to solve, just click the print link. It all is on one webpage. Unfortunately my browser print preview shows it's still 11 pages without changing any settings. But there's no ads.
FalconRe: (Score:2)
Oh yea, that is original.
Are you implying that there are already Slashdot readers who don't take the time to read the actual articles? I'm shocked. Shocked!
Sorry, couldn't resist
Understandable indeed.
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Lemme see how ya beat that!
Uhhh... I'll mod down the next post you make, without even looking at it! Or without even knowing it was yours! Hah! Then I'll go make disparaging comments about you on some random Digg post.
Man, I need to get outside.
Where I stopped reading (Score:5, Funny)
I can not take this man seriously anymore.
Yeah, obviously he isn't worth his salt (Score:2)
Can anyone confirm? (Score:2)
6 minutes? 20 seconds? Is that true? I use Thunderbird (on Kubuntu), and it starts up in a second. I can't imagine waiting that long for an email client to load up. What is it doing that takes so long? Is this typical behavior for Evolution?
Since t
Re:Can anyone confirm? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, if your firefox directory is read only, it takes MINUTES to fire up. Allow write access, it loads in a handful of seconds. Doing a little digging, it seems it is trying to open all of these config files for read/write... and when it fails, it tries a few more times. Then some of them get copied to $temp$ so that they CAN be opened for read/write, even though YOU LIKELY WON'T EVEN BE WRITING TO THEM. All it would take is a "if CantOpenConfigFileWithReadWrite(...) OpenConfigFileForReadOnly(...);"
And I use firefox as an example, but just about every application seems to have the same issues. This may be where Evolution is at.
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The 10-30 secon
Re:Can anyone confirm? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Can anyone confirm? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I've experimented with Evolution off and on for some years, on various chunks of hardware, and I'd say it is typical. Whenever you tell Evolution to do something, you can go to the kitchen, make coffee, and be back with a cup before the results are on the screen. After a while, you're really wired
Maybe there's some config problem that's wrong everywhere I've tried it, but I haven't seen enough clues to diagnose the problem. If anyone knows, especially if you have some fixes, you might try contacting the Evolution folks and tell them that this is a major barrier to getting their toy widely adopted.
It's not just me, either; I've mentioned this to a number of people who've tried Evolution a few times, and they report the same molasses-like slowness.
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Formal operating systems evaluations? (Score:2)
"Halamka's month with Ubuntu concludes his formal operating system evaluations. What follows are the details of his experience running Ubuntu and his plans for his company's enterprise desktops and laptops moving forward. Will he finally replace Windows forever with OS X or Linux? You'll see..."
Funny, I didn't see any Bell-LaPadula models or ACL2 proofs, or anything other than some user's opinion clouded by the random crap that happens to every user of every OS.
This is not a job for a CIO (Score:2, Insightful)
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But supporting four platforms when you start off with that as your goal is not as much of a nightmare. We have the same
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Re:This is not a job for a CIO (Score:5, Funny)
How do you figure? I didn't see any mention of Solaris in the mix, so there is no way it rises to the level of "nightmare".
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And you know this because....... you are a "pc support guy"?
/. we are always mocking PHBs who have no knowledge of the technology under their control. Now one comes along who does something to expand his knowlendge of the technology and you post that
Let's face it, here on
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Mac's in research (Score:5, Informative)
You could run the Linux apps that did the number crunching (not high end physics stuff, but still datasets around a gig or more that took an hour or so).
You could run the visulaization software and model building softare, also Linux based.
You had shells to log into the Linux cluster if you needed access to more power.
Disk mounting and sharing was easy amongst other Macs, nfs clients, and even the PCs.
The entire Microsoft office suite ran. I realize OpenOffice provides all the same utilies, but most journals, conferences, and employers in our field require papers, abstracts, and resumes be submitted in Microsoft Word, and slides in Powerpoint. Other programs were not accepted, or, when tried, we ran into compatibility issues.
Photoshop ran really well for making figures.
So it wasn't uncommon for someone to be sitting at their computer running a job, building a model, putting the results in powerpoint, writing the figures in word, sending the results out on their integrated e-mail client, letting your advisor know all was well with a quick video conference through the integrated camera, all while listening to music on iTunes streaming off a neighbor's Mac through the library sharing feature, and all without any specific new training required.
For our group the hardware was expensive of course, but we made up for it by lab-wide shared software. If you bought your own Mac essentially all the software was free and you'd be up and running in an hour at full productiivty. This is one reason Macs do well in research environments. It's not that you couldn't rig a PC or a Linux box to do all of this, but it would take some serious effort and know how that many grad students outside a computer science/physics type have (we were a biochemistry and biophysics group), and university labs generally have little to no IT support. The Macs just work and you can get you research started with little thought to the computer on your desk that rarely crashes, and that is worth the extra cost of the hardware in a grant-driven environment anyday. (I mean, the Mac is $500-$1000 more than a comparably configured PC, but how much IT support can you buy over a period of 2-4 years for $500-$1000. . .not much, it pays for itself indirectly).
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You could have also ssh'd into a real cluster, or built a Mac cluster for a price similar to an Opteron system, and just quietly integrated it with your deskto
Stupid Autoinstall (Score:2)
Which is why I use the "not recommended" setting where it asks me before installing updates. That way I can postpone anything that requires me to reboot. (It boggles the mind that nobody at Microsoft realized that this would be an issue!) The downside is that every few days it asks my permission to install signa
Arrrgh my eyes.. my eyes (Score:2)
Thanks for the summary, as i know I will never read something with that much crap attached.
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4 different OSes (Score:2)
Close but Limited (Score:5, Informative)
Now that I gone over some of my pet-peeves I want to cover some of my opinion of what makes Linux great.
For hardware support, this area has improved over the past several years. In Ubuntu it takes a couple of clicks to have 3D hardware support whereas it took a long process before. Used to be that I would have to live without a certain piece of hardware because of incompatibility but most of those concerns have been taken care of for the majority of the distributions. I could go over some of the terminal apps but I am talking about a desktop environment so apples and oranges.
OK, buddy ... (Score:2)
I was expecting him to pick all Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
If you use win32 apps then you need Windows. Standardization is important and I used to have Ubuntu on my laptop and love it. But I have XP now as I get ready for school with MBA majors who will be sending me excel and ms access files that openoffice would have trouble with.
As many pointed out this CIO was a laughing stock 4 years ago when his whole network failed due to poor planning.
Ubuntu is great but unless your a hacker or need a webserver its not practical. Large organizations need to stick with one platform and that is Microsoft as much as I wish it were not true. Until linux takes over more government agencies and foreign companies I would not trust the platform yet as its not standard.
IF I were a CIO or an IT manager I would care only if it got the job done as thats what I am paid to do. MS exchange, active directory, and proprietary vb apps dictate my decision when lowering costs.
Frequent crashes? Updates? (Score:3, Interesting)
I cannot seriously see from the guy's description or even the CIO Mag's a real problem with the OS. I'd rather put this on account of his bias (also mentioned in TFA).
Please note that this is not in any way a bash of Ubuntu, SuSE, OS X or any other OS mentioned. I agree that they are more fit to do some jobs better than others. Hell, I even run Hoary Hedgehog on my old PC (converted to a sort of media-center). It's just the arguments are dubious.
Re:Ubuntu? Power users? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ubuntu? Power users? (Score:5, Informative)
As others have pointed out, you can do a lot of things (I would say every kind of maintenance) remotely over SSH. That basically allows you to do everything that doesn't require a graphical user interface. If you do need the graphical user interface, you're in luck, though. One of the hidden strengths of Unix [inglorion.net] is that GUI is provided by X [x.org], which can be accessed over the network. A convenient and secure way to do this is by tunenling it through SSH (try ssh -X user@host xterm, for example). Even if that isn't enough (e.g. because you're on a machine without an X server), you can even access your desktop through RFB [wikipedia.org].
Of course, you can't perform any maintenance that requires physical access to the machine remotely. However, in all my years working with *nix systems remotely, I have never needed physical access.
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I use Webmin [webmin.com], it's the best free remote administration tool for unix and linux that I know of. It makes setting up things like Apache and Samba really simple for a non-expert like myself, no need to modify config files directly.
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Re:Not a realistic scenario (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not just talking about supporting the OS, but also the business applications that would run in each of those environments. Sure more things are going web based, but 75% of what we do is still on desktop applications.
Re:Not a realistic scenario (Score:4, Insightful)
Standardization may be good for some, but technological diversity may be better for others. Afterall, your employees should use the best tool for the job. That may be Windows or it may be Linux. Also, the more enterprises start mixing OS's, the more demand there will be for them to communicate with one another. This means a higher demand for open standards. While most of the savings of standardization is from only needing an IT staff with a knowledge of one system, another big chunk of it is from not having to make many different OS's and devices play nice together. If it became expected that your IT staff have a working knowledge of all of the most popular OS's, then standardization starts saving less and less money over a diverse IT environment.
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I tend to follow to standardize on one platform unless a requirement for high availability is there for something like a database server. Unix is much cheaper to control and administer with less hardware for things like one app per server and expensive switches due to constant bsods. For servers win32 compatibility is not important either unless its to service a win32 desktop.
But for
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John is a CIO in a large teaching hospital network. The group runs enterprise apps, remote employees, clinical staff, physicians, the business side of a hospital, and the university people. It's not a surprise that one contract with Dell can't handle this.
Re:KDE vs GNOME (Score:5, Informative)
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been years since my last Japanese class...
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If the cost of recoding the apps is more than the cost of maintaining Windows, they're going to maintain running Windows. They'll cut back to however many Windows boxes they need to run those niche apps. Maybe a Citrix server, something like that.
They give Apple hardware and OS X to the graphics people
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Many companies run on cheap desktops because they have lots of people doing advanced stuff from the business' point of view, but trivial in terms of computer hardware. Apple doesn't HAVE cheap, non-multimedia basic office computers, so replacing those with Macs are expensive.
Windows is over. Its brief and lucrative (for some) flare of popularity was a result of other p
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Funnily, this never seems to be an issue when Microsoft changes the user interface.
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This is purely wishful thinking, unfortunately. I'm a Mac user by choice but at work I have to work in a mixed environment by necessity. Windows still has all the mindshare - my boss dismisses any other kind of computing as "swimming upstream" even though Windows problems cost him time and money every single day. (And as a businessman himse
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Things can change. Fast.
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I suspect Microsoft will fade with a whimper, rather than a bang, as web technologies and open standards slowly make one's choice of operating system transparent.
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But then, that's just how I see it.
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Is there African language?
No.
There are a lot. It's not even one family. Really a lot! [ethnologue.com] (Every red dot a language.)
What is probably meant: It's an African concept [wikipedia.org]. This notion is not restricted to one language/speech community and in that sense (sub-Sahara) African.
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