Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Now that it's official that Ubuntu 7.04 will be the first popular Linux distribution to hit the mainstream PC market thanks to Dell, the time for excuses are over. With a pre-installed version of Ubuntu soon to be available on select desktop and notebook Dell PCs, users will finally be able to compare apples with apples - or in this case Ubuntu Linux with Windows Vista or XP.
No doubt Dell will be doing its darndest in
conjunction with the Ubuntu development team to get the
hardware-software configuration spot on. This represents a huge
opportunity for both Dell and the Linux community, so neither Dell nor
Canonical can afford to mess up.
Everything will pretty much have to be plug and play out of the box -
or at least as plug and play as pre-installed Windows - including
wireless networking and setting up a compatible printer, scanner and
other peripherals, such as webcams, microphones, headsets et al.
Pricing should be interesting because users will finally be able to
compare the real cost of a pre-installed Linux distribution and an OEM
Windows version. They will also be able to compare what they get for
their money with Linux, with a multitude of free open source
applications already installed on the desktop, such as Open Office,
Evolution and The Gimp, and what they get with Windows, which is
basically nothing.
If Dell gets this right, however, it will mean much more than a
turnaround in the fortunes of one hardware company. No doubt HP, Acer,
Lenovo, Toshiba and others are watching to see what happens.
If things go well for Dell, there is little doubt that other tier one
hardware vendors will come charging in. Once that happens, the year of
the desktop will have finally arrived.
Conversely, if the whole exercise turns out to be a flop, desktop Linux
may remain a system for geeks, with a market share of one to two
percent, for years to come.
There is also not the slightest doubt that a certain proprietary
software is looking on with a great deal of interest and possibly more
than a little trepidation. We intend to put in order to Dell for a loan
of a review machine as soon as possible.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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