One man. Closing, all the windows.
According to Net Applications, GNU/Linux is rapidly gaining share in the “designated market area” of San Francisco:
| Week of | Share GNU/Linux |
|---|---|
| July 8 |
29% |
| July 15 |
31% |
| July 22 |
33% |
Combined with that other OS being down to 42% the future is clear, M$’s OS is just another player in a free market with choices available. A year ago, they were showing 23% for GNU/Linux. For all of California, they report 7.6% GNU/Linux. This likely means more than Google are using GNU/Linux for desktops.
“The latest version of MySQL Workbench has a new migration wizard designed to provide an easy way to migrate databases from third party products to MySQL.
This first version of the wizard lets you migrate from Microsoft SQL Server and from databases supporting ODBC such as PostgreSQL.”
see Oracle offers route from SQL Server to MySQL.
The new migration feature is available in MySQL Workbench 5.2:
“The MySQL Workbench Migration Wizard is designed to save DBA and developer time by providing visual, point and click ease of use around all phases of configuring and managing a complex migration process:
“
It’s already part of Debian GNU/Linux, Wheezy version.
“dpkg -s mysql-workbench
Package: mysql-workbench
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: database
Installed-Size: 43021
Maintainer: Dmitry Smirnov
Architecture: amd64
Source: mysql-workbench (5.2.40+dfsg-1)
Version: 5.2.40+dfsg-1+b1…”
One more bit of lock-in bites the dust. I like it…
He who lives by the sword dies by it… M$ locked big business into using IE6 long ago and now finds the lock-in is so powerful it prevents big business from using “7″… Chuckle.
“web browser specialist Browsium, which said 80 per cent of big companies – those with 10,000 or more PCs – are still clinging to Windows XP even though support for it is due to end in two years. But IT department bosses fear the cost, difficulty and disruption of moving business-critical apps from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 and 7, which are off-limits on Windows 7.”
see Big biz 'struggling' to dump Windows XP • The Register.
There are lessons to be learned from this. Why not rewrite those web applications in FLOSS and use FLOSS clients to prevent a repetition? I recommend Debian GNU/Linux on clients and servers because it works for you, not M$.
I mostly watch national and international news on TV besides stuff I see on WWW. Today, I was put off by the endless coverage of the Olympic trade show…
I switched to watching Global TV’s coverage of local news, weather and sports. It’s clear my nearest large city is having growing pains:
I guess a lot of that will be “normal” for city-dwellers, but I can tell you that if a tree were down in my neighbourhood, I would not wait hours for the municipal workers to clear it. I have a swede-saw and know how to use it… That’s one of the differences between rural and urban dwellers. We in the countryside know to take care of ourselves.
I think cities and IT systems are analogous. Data capacity and throughput keeps growing and people become dependent on providers rather than taking care of themselves. That’s partly what allowed M$ to grab IT by the throat for decades. People are in the business of creating, finding, modifying and displaying data rather than in building IT structures. So they plug in another unit, pay another licensing fee and carry on.
With FLOSS, Free/Libre Open-Source Software, one is able to and should do more to manage IT. There’s more to IT than plodding on the Wintel treadmill. Since there is no EULA to restrict what you can do with the software, you can do more with it like running databases, servers and clients all on the same system with a single licence costing $0. That’s just so much more efficient than paying M$ per seat, per server and per service and dancing though hoops designed to maximize M$’s revenue.
I recommend Debian GNU/Linux, an OS and system of infrastructure which works for you because it has many tools and components all designed to interoperate and be simple to set up. There’s no EULA restricting how many machines you can connect and what you can do with the software. The licence, mostly GPL, allows you to run, examine, modify and distribute the code to best suit your system and to allow it to grow rationally in the way that’s most efficient for you.
The city also has growing pains because change becomes more difficult as the city grows. For instance, I know a tree that towers above nearby houses, which could have fallen in the storm. Each year it grows larger creating a more difficult and expensive problem to solve. IT systems are like that. Mistakes made a decade ago (Whether planting a giant tree near homes or agreeing to M$’s EULA…) have now grown into serious lock-in as intended by M$ and “partners”. One thing is sure. There’s no time like the present to fix problems because they will only grow larger otherwise. Organizations like the city of Munich which recognized the problem nearly a decade ago are just now finishing disentangling from M$ but they have already recovered the cost of doing so in lower operating costs.
In my experience small IT systems like schools can break even on day one or within a few months. Larger organizations with deeper lock-in are reported to take many months or a few years to break even but paying M$ forever is much more costly. The key is making the decision to start breaking free. It has been reported that a large fraction of businesses have started by selecting the low-hanging fruit first and doing most “green field” roll-outs using FLOSS. That takes longer but it gives the most benefits sooner. Whatever works for you and your organization is the right thing to do. I can’t think of any organization that is better off using M$’s stuff. It’s more than the revenue that M$ filters off. It’s more than the complexity of having to struggle with restrictions on software in addition to capabilities of hardware. It’s about freedom to use your hardware any way you want for the best IT you can buy.
Financial Times reports the uneven success of Apple in flooding the world with iThingies. They still have few stores in China and it shows. As well, the hot emerging markets are price-sensitive and Apple’s prices make their products second or third choices.
The world, apparently, does not love small expensive computers although USA does. Coincidentally, USA also loves M$’s OS even though it costs twice as much to use it and has all kinds of drawbacks. Apple’s made in USA business plan seems to work there but not elsewhere when price/performance matters. The cult of Apple thins out as distance increases from USA.
For example, in USA, Android/Linux smart phones have 50% higher share than iOS but in China, Android/Linux has 450% higher share than iOS and more units are being sold in China than USA.
Perhaps GNOME has lost its way trying to be everything to everyone. Perhaps it’s just having a mid-life crisis. TheVarGuy pegs it right. GNOME should stick to what it does best if it is to remain relevant, provide a great GUI for desktop/notebook PCs. There’s no need to derail the users who have come to know and love a simple windowed user-interface. There’s nothing wrong with providing a GUI for other devices but why scuttle something that works? Fork or start a new GUI, GNOME. Don’t kill what works.
“GNOME Shell wants to be an interface for smartphones, tablets and other fancy devices on which Linux currently rarely runs, and that endeavor — despite the best efforts of GNOME designers — makes it less useful as an interface for the PCs on which most people are actually running Linux today. You can’t be everything at once, no matter how much you might like to be — or how much proprietary competitors, like Windows, think they can be as well.”
see GNOME's Future: Open Source Desktop Interface In Doubt? | The VAR Guy.
A small city in Hungary is shifting most of its clients and servers to GNU/Linux and saving a bundle. They still need a few copies of that other OS because people keep sending them old file formats.
“The main problem we have is with the documents we receive from the national government, companies and other institutions. They send us Microsoft Word and Excel files containing special macros, causing compatibility problems with our open source office software. So in one to two per cent of cases we have to open the documents using a Microsoft Office program.”
see Hungarian city of Miskolc: "Saving €3,000 per user per year on licenses" | Joinup.
Clearly, FLOSS and GNU/Linux are working for them. I recommend you try it as well. see http://www.debian.org/
Really, there is nothing unusual about rounded rectangles:
and they probably rounded the corners to keep them from breaking.“A recent court filing by Samsung reveals that in 2006 Apple industrial designer Shin Nishibori was directed to design an iPhone prototype inspired by Sony’s aesthetics after Tony Fadell internally circulated an interview with a designer from the company. An assortment of renders reveal his design, complete with a Sony logo — save for one where the logo has been modified to read "Jony," presumably in honor of Apple’s Jony Ive.”
see Apple Stole iPhone Design From Sony, Patented It And Sued Everyone Else – Muktware.
More at Apple v. Samsung: 5 Surprising Reveals in Latest Court Documents
This is one of several reasons why I hold Apple in low esteem. My contempt is compounded by their hypocrisy and the courts’ deference to them.
However you think of statistics, these are some from this site, displayed at the lower right corner of the starting page:
 2012-07-29 |
Facts from these data that please me are
Of course it would please me more if thousands of visitors would light on the site, see the light and find Debian GNU/Linux was a better way to do IT, but it’s a start. In any event, every few months we get a new high in page-views. This month should be the first or second highest number of page-views ever. It helps that it’s a month with 31 days in spite of so much summer-fun happening. |
Another incident involving a person attempting to recycle a used barrel results in death… How many times do we have to read such things before everyone knows to leave that to experts or at least combine some facts into reasonable actions?
Still, it keeps happening. People think of the resource a discarded barrel provides but neglect obvious dangers resulting from former contents and welding and cutting operations. Sometimes even accumulation of welding gasses in a barrel can be fatal if a cutting torch sneezes.
The solution is simple. Fill the damned thing with inert gasses, water, sand, etc. before cutting into it. What’s a life worth compared to the few minutes of time it takes to do any of these things?
see BBC News – Man dies after Horspath barbecue explosion.
I wrote about a similar event in a school a while back…
Just returned from a fishing expedition with my son less than a mile from home. In an hour he caught two catfish, one 34 inches long, good enough for a “Master Angler” award. It took ages to haul it in. We knew it was big when it ran away at full speed with the drag set. It took ~100 yards of line before it tired. When reeling it in another line in the water was snagged so some reaching from shore with a long net was required. The net needed straightening afterward. Here is the result:
Cat Fish Caught in the Red River, Manitoba, 2012-07-28 by my Son
Close-up of the Head
Catfish Fresh From the River
Well, I didn’t teach him how to do that. He must have learned from his own mistakes… After the photo, the fish was gently returned to the water and resuscitated. It swam away under its own power.
The Times of India, the world’s largest English newspaper in circulation (3 million) has an article promoting GNU/Linux on the desktop. India is one of the countries with a government promoting GNU/Linux. This article is an indication that GNU/Linux on desktops is gaining traction with the general population in India, a good thing, IMHO. When government, schools, businesses and individuals know they have a choice and exercise that choice good things happen: stimulation of local business, opportunities for young people in start-ups, interoperability between IT systems, less lock-in and greater competition in software of all kinds.
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