2011 June 01 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for June 1st, 2011

M$ Can’t Handle Diversity

Published by Robert Pogson June 1st, 2011 in technology. 0 Comments

Chuckle. M$’s plan to absorb the ARMed ecosystem is getting push-back. M$ wanted to talk with only a few “special” players and the gang said “no”. The ARMed ecosystem is very diverse with many chip makers, designers, system makers, system designers and many devices. M$ wanted to divide and conquer just as they did with the desktop PC but it isn’t happening in the mobile world.
“The issues started after Microsoft reportedly planned to implement an Integrated Development Program (IDP) for Windows 8, inviting only five major chip players – Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Nvidia, to participate in testing of the operating system, while Microsoft would also allow the five chip players to each choose two of their downstream system partners to join.”

see Digitimes – Microsoft postpones IDP for 2 weeks to re-consult with chip players

This looks like an act of desperation for M$. It wants to jump into the game as quickly as possible but they have not done their homework. All the players in the ARMed ecosystem need their whole channel involved, nearly 100 parties, if products are to be delivered. The ecosystem is thriving with Android and they don’t need to be divided over “8″. M$ cannot win. If they get everyone on the same page, it will take time they don’t have. If they treat a few players specially, they won’t have enough volume to matter. The CPU makers don’t make the motherboard, memory, OS for the gadgets, or the gadgets. The people to whom M$ needs to be sweet are not they. M$ finds itself being a small fish in a big pond now. They will have to create an OS that will run on anything if they want to survive.

- Robert Pogson

Oracle Frees OpenOffice.org, Again

Published by Robert Pogson June 1st, 2011 in technology. 9 Comments

Sun Micrososystems freed OpenOffice.org a decade ago but kept tight controls that stifled the project. Oracle bought Sun but now has seen the light and has transferred the assets to the Apache Foundation. Continue reading ‘Oracle Frees OpenOffice.org, Again’

- Robert Pogson

Wikimedia as an Educational Tool

Published by Robert Pogson June 1st, 2011 in Linux in Education and technology. 0 Comments

For years, I have travelled the northern parts of Canada dragging a server with a snapshot of Wikipedia taken in 2005. It’s a great tool for schools. Students and teachers can add material relevant to them and edit articles to reflect the northern viewpoint. The body of knowledge in the wiki grows with time and becomes part of the history or the community and the school. It is a great resource for documenting special people, places and events.

I am not alone doing this. A professor reports that students do better work when their research gets posted on Wikipedia where the world can see, read and criticize it. Nothing teaches reading, writing and thinking better than doing those things in bulk.

Wikimedia is a package in Debian GNU/Linux:
Package: mediawiki
Priority: optional
Section: web
Installed-Size: 45752
Maintainer: Mediawiki Maintenance Team Architecture: all
Version: 1:1.15.5-2squeeze1
Depends: apache2 | httpd, php5, php5-mysql | php5-pgsql | php5-sqlite, mime-support, debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0
Recommends: mysql-server | postgresql-contrib, php5-cli
Suggests: imagemagick | php5-gd, mediawiki-math, memcached, clamav
Filename: pool/main/m/mediawiki/mediawiki_1.15.5-2squeeze1_all.deb
Size: 11715418
MD5sum: befce32fefe84c2bc3efdefa9c6ce111
SHA1: e5981355e3f6d3ee8a40144a4d87d12af507d96a
SHA256: a91572165802425727f0aeea94395a1c750433deb9ea0a055d7dcc89ee0dc84e
Description: website engine for collaborative work
MediaWiki is a wiki engine (a program for creating a collaboratively edited website). It is designed to handle heavy websites containing library-like document collections, and supports user uploads of images/sounds, multilingual content, TOC autogeneration, ISBN links,
etc.
.
Moreover, it keeps track of changes, so users can receive notifications, view diffs and revert edits. This system has many other features and can easily be extended.
Homepage: http://www.mediawiki.org/
Tag: implemented-in::php, interface::web, made-of::html, network::service, role::dummy, role::program, web::wiki, works-with::db, works-with::text, works-with-format::html

Wikipedia dumps are available.
A recent dump (enwiki-20110405-pages-articles.xml.bz2) is 6.7gB… That’s far more text than some libraries in schools where I have worked. Of course, one can start from scratch and make a wiki entirely in-house or take only selected articles for import.

- Robert Pogson

ARM v Intel – More Than A Battle of Words So Far

Published by Robert Pogson June 1st, 2011 in technology. 4 Comments

“According to Nvidia CEO Huang Jen-Hsun, Android is the fastest growing operating system in computing history and that speaks to the fact that every single company in the world is desperate for a mobile computing strategy… Huang added that in the tablet market consumers do not care whether their products use x86- or ARM-based processor and this will serve as a great opportunity for Nvidia to step up in the market.”

see Digitimes – Computex buzz: ARM vs Intel keeps people talking

Nvidia should know. They make the Tegra line of ARMed processors that are one of the leaders of the ARMed revolution. While Intel and M$ shift their forces, ARMed processors and systems running Android/Linux are out there clogging supply channels. By the time Wintel is ready to compete, the battle for the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of users will be won.

see ASUS’ eeePad Transformer page
This is the video on it …

- Robert Pogson