I’ve been using the Catalyst framework for developing an enterprisey database-backed web application over the past two weeks, and I have yet to be disappointed. Catalyst is the lovechild of the MVC design pattern and Perl, and it’s poetically beautiful. Programming with Catalyst is filet mignon - PHP is chewing glass shards.
“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.” — Voltaire
Small life lesson: don’t ever tell a scientist that something is “good enough”. Put alternately, try telling someone you believe might be a scientist that something is “good enough” - a true, died-in-the-wool scientist would never let you get away with such a grievous offense.
In the interest of staying current, I decided to upgrade my desktop to Windows Vista. After 2-3 weeks of battling Vista’s poor driver support, insatiable hunger for RAM (2GB isn’t enough), inconsistent privilege escalation, and more than anything, general UI sluggishness, I decided it was time to throw in the towel. Going back to Windows XP lacked long-term viability, so I decided to try Gentoo.
I’m an old hat when it comes to Linux. After dozens of installs over 6-7 years on a half-dozen distributions, it’s far to say I’ve been doing this for a while. However, it was mostly for servers; using a Linux desktop is a different proposition altogether.
I installed Gentoo on my home machine. I really like it, but in fairness, it’s not a distribution for the weak of heart. Since laptops tend to be more fiddly, I decided to install Ubuntu on my hp tc1100 - I simply couldn’t justify the hassle of another Gentoo machine.
Ubuntu is incredible. Its installation is easier than any operating system I have ever used (including Windows) and the out-of-box experience is stellar. Without any action on my part, my video was fully configured, my wireless card found an active list of access points, and my sound worked. I changed two lines in my xorg.conf to make the tablet function. The overall responsiveness blows my Vista desktop out of the water, even on only 512 MB of RAM. It’s no stretch to say that this might be Linux for the masses - or, as Ubuntu’s distributor Canonical puts it, “Linux for human beings”. It’s no surprise that Dell is offering Ubuntu with their computers, but having a first-tier OEM offer Linux from the factory is a huge win for the OSS community.
Perhaps not in such blunt terms, but renowned business scholars such as Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, the innovation guru, are taking a hard look at the prospects of open source taking serious market share from Microsoft.
In his recent book, Seeing What’s Next, which he coauthored with Erik Roth and Scott Anthony, Christensen provides a sober, theoretical framework for circumstances under which companies offering modular open source solutions have a competitive advantage over companies offering the integrated architectural solutions such as Microsoft’s Windows franchise.
In a nutshell, Christensen and his co-authors argue that when modular commodity products such as the Linux kernel are “good enough” for the jobs of price-sensitive market tiers, those commodity products are positioned to take market share from integrated solutions that “overshoot” the performance demands of customers in any given market tier, particularly the more price-sensitive lower market tiers.
The Christensen team writes that as companies race to meet the performance expectations of the more functionality-sensitive upper-tier customers, who are willing to pay a premium for the latest and greatest, those companies will inevitably innovate ahead of the performance demands of the more price-sensitive market tiers. For customers in the more price-sensitive market tiers, performance of the modular commodity is often “good enough” to win the job bid or close the sale.
Most industry observers are now coming to see that for the average desktop functions, the operating system and the office productivity suite are basically “done.” In other words, the market leader has overshot the demands of customers such as schools, governments, and businesses who only need to provide their office workers with basic office productivity functions and Internet accessibility.
http://linux.sys-con.com/read/46891.htm (emphasis mine)
Is it possible that the three major desktop operating systems: Linux, Windows, MacOS - are all fundamentally good enough? I’m not sure, but I asked Nikita to get me a Mac for my research work. Today, I am Windows-free.
Why are my friends going to work for the Windows kernel team?