Published by Robert Pogson September 27th, 2010
in Linux in Education and technology.
A decent review of anti-trust actions against M$ and M$’s fight against competition around the world is on Ars Technica. For those too young to remember or too busy to be engaged, there is a good outline of events from the legal side. If you have time, please read the documents on US DOJ v M$. They will change the way you think of M$. They did so many things to mess with competition instead of making a good product. There is just no other way to view merging the browser with the OS. It wasn’t an application. They made it a necessary component of the OS and they claimed it could not be removed. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Read how they threatened major OEMs with higher prices or no right to distribute the software.
This was all too little and too late. M$ got a solid monopoly that it wanted and a decade or more of obscene profits rolled in. The “final agreement” can be seen as a rubber-stamp of acceptability on the monopoly even though it was illegally gained. M$ was not punished in any way, just told not to do it again. That might work for an innocent child but M$ is a brutal tyranny, ruled from the top down by evil men anxious to enslave the world. If you consider that M$ rakes in tens of $billions annually and the product is basically copies of documents/CDs/permissions the world really has been working for M$ and not the other way around. They have created something worth a few $billion and have arranged to be paid repeatedly for every PC sold. They even force people who use thin clients to pay multiple times for a licence just for connecting to the PC or server running their software. They do nothing to earn that money. The world has been working for M$.
It is past time to free the world of this evil. Use Free Software. Use GNU/Linux, or FreeBSD, or OpenSolaris, anything but that other OS that does not even have a legitimate name. If the courts refuse to see the light, what is your excuse? Be free. Don’t buy any of M$’s products. Find out what you have been missing. I saw the light 10 years ago. PCs that refused to work reliably danced. Students had good use of IT in the classroom. I became a magician in the classroom. Today I had standing room only in my lab as students thrilled at the performance of all their applications running on one PC that would have laboured to please one user with that other OS (and restricts the number who may even try by the EULA). Be free.
UPDATE At the end of an article linked from the one mentioned above, ARS Technica reported in July 2010 that only 63% of their visitors used that other OS and 6% used GNU/Linux. Clearly, they have different visitors than NetApplications counts. ARS shows 26% use MacOS although Apple says they produce only about 3% of PCs.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson September 27th, 2010
in technology.
I am not into graphics. I appreciate pretty pictures and video and the like but I could care less how fast they flow or whether they are 2D or 3D. My monitor is 2D and I can live with it. M$ is heavily into graphics, catching the eye of the consumer/end-user who may be persuaded that a good appearance means what lies beneath is first-rate. We know that appearances can be deceiving but M$’s best graphics, DX11 is not available on XP but is coming to GNU/Linux. With half the world’s PCs supposedly on XP with nowhere to go when support is cut off, would it not be cute if the lack of graphics software on XP drove users to try better graphics on GNU/Linux? M$ will try to force folks off XP one way or another. Some will fall by the wayside and go to GNU/Linux especially if games can now be ported to GNU/Linux more easily...
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson September 27th, 2010
in technology.
For those who don’t know, Tux is the mascot of the Linux kernel. The kernel ties everything together in an efficient reliable bundle of hardware, performance and reliablity. The mascot likes to eat fish but cannot fly in air. It flies in water. Now there is a monument to Tux with air-foil wings. Linux overcomes little problems like water-wings.
This could be the first monument to Tux. Perhaps the GNU/Linux operating system should have a few more monuments to the efforts of the world to produce its own software rather than relying on single sources. Where I live there are monuments to just about everything: traitors now seen as heroes, mosquitoes, snakes, geese, etc. Free Software has its icons. Why not monuments? GNU has a mascot. Apache has a feather. MySQL has a porpoise. This could catch on.
It’s about time this blog had a logo. Robert Pogson is just my name and I am a fat old guy, nothing inspiring. I will have to think and consult more artistic types. I am a linear problem solver not into creating visions but able to recognize them.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson September 27th, 2010
in technology.
That other OS is a mess of design issues. Anything that big and complicated has design issues. It’s inevitable. Still people rely on the unreliable.
Recently, M$’s BPOS which has a 99.9% guarantee was down to 99.7%. They fixed multiple bugs in an upgrade with multiple un-planned outages. M$ is learning openness and coming clean about the problems but the basis of their monopoly is still a black hole of problems they created and by the nature of the beast they are the only ones capable of fixing the problems. The world is better off using FLOSS so the world can fix its own problems and have fewer problems.
I was looking at the bug list of Debian GNU/Linux today. They are down to 370 release-critical bugs before Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze is released officially and fully-tested software. 370 bugs in 25000 packages and how many millions of lines of code… If you look at the bugs, many are pretty trivial like the creator used the name of an old package now replaced by another. Stuff that can be fixed in an instant. At this rate a group of a thousand individuals will bring forth a product produced by many thousands of developers in a new release two years after the last one. M$ had a terrible time releasing the buggy Vista after six years and $billions spent.
There is a better way to do IT. Use GNU/Linux. Do not trust M$ to run your IT. They cannot run their own reliably.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson September 27th, 2010
in technology.
Ballmer said M$ would be all-in for the cloud. Apparently, he doesn’t realize blogging is one of the clouds… Is it cloud 2 or 3 after e-mail and search? M$ is shutting down Live Spaces. Users will have a smooth transition to WordPress, the software running this blog. I hope this isn’t embrace, extend and extinguish in the blogosphere. Maybe bloggers are too intelligent and don’t drink the Koolaid.
I don’t know what to make of it but will back up my files to move elsewhere if need be. My blog isn’t actually on WordPress. I just run WordPress PHP code. I have my own server running that.
I suspect that M$ really has no traction with people serious about what they do. Their OS is smoke and mirrors. Their web-presence may be that as well. Maybe this is the next nail in the wall of recognizing they are not a growth company.
UPDATE! AHHHHH! The backup was more than 8MB of XML, nearly twice as large as the one I did in June. I’ve created a monster…
UPDATE TheRegister has spotted a trend in projectcide at M$. M$ keeps trying to do what it did to NetScape and failing badly because the monopoly fails on the web. So sad… 
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson September 27th, 2010
in Linux in Education and technology.
Wikileaks has leaked a draft of a report by an OSS working group representing industry. It appears to be a very divisive document, perhaps intended to fragment the global FLOSS community:
- The draft points out that EU has done a lot in FLOSS but US corporations are making the profits
- The draft points out that FLOSS cannot be zero cost. What has this to do with EU strategy?
- “There is no clear distinction between closed source and open source.”
- “Commoditization if the opposite of innovation.”
- “Open Source will never be THE solution which will modify the whole economy and the IT world.”
- “Why all the benefit from OpenSource is mainly for non-European countries?”
- “tenders preferring or mandating OpenSource software or narrowly defined open standards, according to the view of leading software trade associations, can be in violation of the same neutrality principles.”
It’s a long document, 37 pages, and while showing a discussion is happening contains such bizarre viewpoints (not unlike one of our commenters) that I do not see it contributing much towards establishing an EU policy on FLOSS. GNU/Linux is doing very well in EU and the divisive issues raised are typical strawmen in that they are essentially irrelevant to the adoption of FLOSS. That is, the cost of making GNU/Linux available to everyone divided by the potential number of installations (billions) is trivial in comparison to the cost of non-free software and the deadly weight of support it needs (anti-malware, licensing, lawyers, salesmen and techs). In my school, for instance, we were dead in the water with that other OS. Half the machines were not working. By adopting FLOSS, we can triple the number of existing machines, and increase the number of working machines five-fold with no increase in costs. GNU/Linux is also sustainable because the whole world shares in the cost of production and we are many.
I hope the final version of this report is reasonable but I am not optimistic. Fortunately, the EU is advancing in adoption of FLOSS faster than the writers of the report can revise.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson September 27th, 2010
in technology.
M$ appears to have accepted that it is not a “growth stock”. A recent move reduces the number of “product keys” subscribers can get from TechNet to do trial installations. Reducing the number of keys from 10 to 2 should slow down the rate of adoption of M$’s products. {joke}They offer 938 products {/joke} but offer trials only two at a time. You should use GNU/Linux. You can try as many installations as you want for the same low price, $0.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson September 27th, 2010
in technology.
Digitimes is one of my favourite publications. I am an early riser and those guys rise earlier than I to publish what’s happening in the far east. Today there is a story that Ubuntu is having a conference and in preparation some information on how Ubuntu is doing is set free:
- Dell and Lenovo both launched Ubuntu notebooks in 2010. Two more OEMs plan such releases in 1H2011.
- Ubuntu 10.10 will have multi-touch capability, on-line app-store, personal cloud services, and sync with Android and iphone phones.
- Global production of Ubuntu PCs in 2010 will be ten times that of 2009 and further growth is expected for 2011.
- Lenovo is expected to ship one million Ubuntus in 2010.
- Talks are planned with a bunch of OEMs in Taiwan.
So, while it appears GNU/Linux is nowhwere on retail shelves in USA and such developed markets. Somewhere on the planet, people are buying millions of them. Perhaps martians are exporting them.
The information about Lenovo is interesting for me personally. My school is mainly populated by IBM PCs. The 12 new ones we received last spring are Lenovos. You can hardly tell them apart except the case is a little slimmer, the power-supply is ATX and they are blazing fast. Lenovo is a huge player in China where they are the home boy. If they are cranking out GNU/Linux boxes by the million, GNU/Linux is mainstream on the desktop. There is no question about that. What other OEM will be content to let Lenovo have too much fun? Retail shelves in USA may be different in 2011, perhaps even by Christmas. Retailers will have choice. Let us see if they make a choice for freedom.
Lenovo does promote GNU/Linux:
- Robert Pogson
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