2011 November 22 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for November 22nd, 2011

50% Off Desktops

Published by pogson November 22nd, 2011 in technology. 3 Comments

IBM and Canonical are working together to provide better desktops at lower costs:
“If a company is a ‘Windows shop,’ at some point it will need to evaluate the significant costs of migrating its base to Microsoft’s next desktop,” said Bob Picciano, general manager, IBM Lotus. “American businesses have asked for a compelling alternative that can help them free up PC expenses to use for more strategic collaboration and business transformation projects.”

Maybe this explains the reluctance to go with “7″. It just costs too much for what it delivers. The compelling alternative are cloudy collaboration packages on Ubuntu GNU/Linux thin clients, often on recycled machines or new. That seems a lot like what I have been providing schools for the last 7 years. Eventually business catches up to new/old ideas. Organizations that intend to make money more efficiently using IT should examine the price/performance. If they don’t their competitors will.

I recommend Debian GNU/Linux. It offers performance and flexibility at a very low price.

- Robert Pogson

M$, Finally Admitting Installation Is Second-Rate, Promises Improvement

Published by pogson November 22nd, 2011 in technology. 24 Comments

The kind of installations that GNU/Linux has had for many years may finally be available to users of that other OS. M$’s data shows “clean install” times like 32 minutes becoming 21 minutes. That’s still not close to what I normally expect from GNU/Linux but, what the heck, they are newbies. Further, to install on systems with data and applications, they have finally realized doing nothing is the best way to make the process scale. M$ is finally getting rid of some of the complexity it has built into IT over the decades. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for M$ to get its act together. You can use Debian GNU/Linux today and you don’t have to pay a cent to experience proper system maintenance and upgrading.

- Robert Pogson

It Doesn’t Get Much Smaller Than This, But It Could Be Cheaper

Published by pogson November 22nd, 2011 in technology. 25 Comments

I really believe there is a large place in the market for small cheap computers, much larger than a niche. There’s just no need for wasted material in personal computing.

We are getting close to “perfection” with thin clients and all-in-one computers but this gadget must be “it”. Using only USB power, the thing can run a modern distro like Ubuntu/Linux or Android/Linux and can be used with any PC that can boot a USB drive. It’s still pricey for the material in it. I expect eventually such gadgets will sell for a bit more than a USB drive costs. The HDMI port, card reader, electronics and ARM CPU do cost something but the price should be ~$100 to really hit the market hard. Still, this thing will sell and widely.

- Robert Pogson

Smoking Gun/e-mail in Novell v M$

Published by pogson November 22nd, 2011 in technology. 2 Comments

The judge yesterday refused to dismiss the case against M$ so it will continue. I cannot see the jury deciding for M$ given this “smoking gun” in Bill Gates’ hand:
“From: Bill Gates
To: Bill Bass; Bob Muglia; Brad Silverberg; Brad Struss; Brian MacDonald; Chris Guzak; Chris Peters; Darryl Rubin; Doug Henrich; Erik Gavriluk; Jim Allchin; Joe Belfiore; Kurt Eckhardt; Leif Pederson; Mike Koss; Paul Maritz; Russell Siegelman; Satoshi Nakajima; Steve Madigan; Tom Evslin
Cc: Brian Fleming
Subject: Shell plans – iShellBrowser
Date: Monday, October 3, 1994 5:18PM

Its time for a decision on iShellBrowser.

This is a tough decision. The Chicago team has done some great work in developing a user interface that will be a big step forward for millions of people. The explorer is an important part of this because it provides a neat paradigm for finding interesting information. The shell group did a good job defining extensibility interfaces. It is also very late in the day to making changes to Chicago and Capone.

It is hard to know how much actual market benefit iShellBrowser integration would bring. I believe Chicago will be very successful either way. Unfortunately I don’t think the integration will have a marked effect in terms of Capone competing with cc:Mail, so that battle will have to be won on other grounds. This is not to say that there was anything wrong with the extensions – on the contrary they are a very nice piece of work.

On the other hand, we are in a real struggle vs. Notes and the Office/REN team needs to move as quickly as they can to deliver really rich, unified views of information and to provide and exploit storage unification as systems makes that possible, and we need as clear as path as possible to allow them to do that. The Ren team has a lot of challenges and compatibility would be an extra effort for them of at least 5 men years. If we felt we could expand this team easily to help Office, beat Notes, be a source of future shell technology and be compatible then I would say the extensions are ok. However the Ren team will find it tough to deliver on all of these even without compatibility.

I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for the likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage. This means that Capone and Marvel can still live in the top level of the Explorer namespace, but will run separately. We can continue to use the iShellBrowser APIs for MS provided views such as control panel, and can use them for other MS-provided views that don’t create a large compatibility or ISV issue.

I would also like to add a few words about the recent Shell re-organization. We have done from three centers of UI innovation to two. There is a lot of pain in doing this. All 3 groups were doing excellent work and I hope the Cairo shell and Ren can come together to provide the best of both. I think there will be real benefits to be reaped. Having the Office team really think through the information intensive scenarios, and be a demanding client of systems is absolutely critical to our future success. We can’t compete with Lotus and Wordperfect/Novell without this. Our goal is to have Office ’96 sell better because of the shell integration work, and to have the Ren/Office effort yield technology that can be an integral part of the shell in Windows ’97. I look forward to the Office team getting excited about using Component Forms, OLE automation, OFS, etc. in the future – and pushing systems much harder than before.”

That’s the case in a nutshell. The icing on the cake are documented presentations where M$ boasted to ISVs about the advantages of using the new APIs for that other OS. By keeping them private, M$ sabotaged WordPerfect which relied on them. Having to replace tons of code required the release of WordPerfect for Lose ’95 to be delayed for months during which time, many sales of M$’s product occurred.

see the e-mail at Groklaw

see the blow by blow description of what happened in court at Groklaw

Of course, Gates denied history and M$ was caught lying again. The judge was on the verge of dismissing the case based on M$’s lies but Novell persuaded him to do his duty. I can see this e-mail being front and centre in Novell’s summation to the jury. I cannot see any reasonable jury finding for M$ after re-re-reading it.

See also this account of Gates’ current testimony, “The name space extensions are pretty irrelevant when it comes to word processing and spreadsheets…”

Yeah, right, that’s what you meant when you wrote, “We can’t compete with Lotus and Wordperfect/Novell without this.”

- Robert Pogson