We're Moving

After a couple years on Blogger, the TechnoTrike is moving... home.

I've resisted the urge to completely revamp my old website and I'm done resisting... I heard somewhere it's futile, anyway.

The Technological Tricycle now lives at http://www.ursuspacificus.net/blog/?cat=3.

All new posts will appear there.

Thanks,

Paul

"Uh... What?" He said, squinting, and looking sideways.

This has me completely befuttled.

There's an investment firm that sees SCO as a good investment. Worth $100M, no less.

Really, I think this says all that needs to be said.

A company whose principle product for the last five years has been what amounts to poorly-thought-out extortive slip-and-fall litigation, in which it has been found, not only to not be right, but to be not even be wrong... This is a good place to put one hundred million Dollars?! A quick note for Stephen Norris Capital Partners: Y'know the snow removal at my apartment complex is usually pretty shabby... Perhaps we could come to an understanding....?

I mean I've made some stupid purchases in my time, but... I don't feel so bad about them now.

Oh, Dear... Time to stop using Yahoo!, I guess.

This is horrifying news. Microsoft, in a move which is, actually, completely in-character, has decided to try to buy its way into a (or another) market where it has failed to dominate on its own.

Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 BILLION. On the one hand, I'm thinking, "Anti-trust? Yeah. I think so. I REALLY think so. Anti-competitive? Absolutely." If the government doesn't stop this one, it's all over. You'll be eating MS-TacoBell and getting new MS-Goodyear tires at MS-PepBoys within a decade.

On the other hand, Microsoft, with its $303 BILLION market capitalization, and dwindling (20-something Billion, down from a high of 50-ish billion) cash reserves, may be over-reaching. Microsoft's online services have been a consistent money-loser, from what I hear, and most of those ventures have been parnered (MSNBC) or acquisitions (HotMail). This means, that, if MS lives up to their reputation, they'll buy Yahoo, re-brand it and drive it into a hill like everything else. It's sad for Yahoo!, its employess and fans, but may turn out to be the deathknell for Microsoft. ...which would be good for the rest of us.

See, Vista's a pig and just about everybody knows it. Office2007 is a pig, and just about everybody knows it. Dell, ASUS and Lenovo have either stepped in, or are planning to step into the Linux waters for consumer PCs. MS's lobbying power seems to be waning (their OOXML "Standard" was resisted by the ISO)

Maybe, just maybe, Yahoo! has to die for the greater good.

I'll tell you one thing, tho... if this deal does go through, I'll immediately abandon my Yahoo! email address, which I've had for 10 years. Yahoo!, if you take this offer, you're dead to me.

Linux Marketshare

This article is little more than Linux-bashing tripe from an Apple apologist. It does state that part of what gives Mac a leg up over Linux is that MS Office and Adobe tools are available for Mac OSX, but not for Linux, which is true.

The article uses statistics that are from a source which ... well... I don't quite get. For example, How are they figuring market share? I work in an office with 10 desktop PCs, all running Linux. There are a couple MS Windows VMs in there too. We all connect to the Internet through a NAT. Are they figuring market share based on the requesting IP address? If so, they're seeing one machine which flip-flops between Linux and (occasionally) MS Windows. I have 6 Linux PCs at home, from which I access the Web. I access the Internet through a NAT. Are they seeing my 6 machines as one?

And here's another thing. Not every machine used as a desktop computer is used to browse the web. I have a couple machines at home, which are "desktop machines" in that they have GUIs installed, with the full spread of standard desktoppy apps, but I rarely browse the web from them. My studio machine is mostly used for audio, video and image editing. My current HTPC is used for viewing movies.

Linux desktop adoption statistics will likely always be a little shady, and widely varied. Anybody can pull a rabbit out of their ass from such a pool of statistics and present a statistic that supports their own position. Statistics, in general are suspect by the very nature of how they're compiled. Linux desktop adoption stats are almost useless.

From my personal experience, Linux has about a 99% desktop market share. There are no Macs in my home or office, and 1 machine running MS Windows on hardware.

This, of course, is to say nothing of servers. We have 10 servers in our office, and 25 at our IDC running Linux, and about half of them are running 2 or more Linux virtual machines. I administer around 100 running Linux images... 1 MS Windows, 0 Mac.

So... Like I said to my girlfriend's mother about presidential candidates, figure out what works for you, and then pick the one that fits your needs. The advertising and the statistics and all the rest of it means nothing. Try it out. Give it a fair shake. If you like it, use it. If you don't like it, don't use it.

I run Linux all over the place because it works for me. Your mileage may vary.

PS I'm writing this on one of my eeePCs.

REVIEW: The ASUS eeePC

I'm writing this on my brand new ASUS eeePC. This thing is pretty spiffy. They keyboard is, admittedly tiny, but certainly serviceable. With built-in wireless, OpeOffice.org and an easily available terminal (with SSH built in) this little baby rocks. It's got a solid state hard drive, which is great for battery life, as well as lightning-quick boot-ups. The downside of the solid state drive, tho, is the limited write lifetime of flash memory. This should be mitigated through judicious use of off-board flash drives.

I have to admit that I was a little uncertain, when I heard that ASUS has skipped over the normal “desktop” metaphor, but as someone who's worked ona variety of GUIs, going back to Tandy DeskMate and MS Windows 3.1, the tabbed “Program Manager” UI is a bit out-of-fashion, but perfetly apt for the screen resolution of the eeePC.

Once one gets past the seeming awkwardness of the tabbed app picker thing, the eeePC is a delight. The 900MHz Celeron, while not exactly super-computer-class hardware, is definitely adequate for mobile word-processing, web-browsing, emailing and so on. One should be prepared for a little reduction in desktoppiness in a tiny $350 potable computer, but this machine definitely delivers a good level of laptop capability in a super-portable very-well-built package at an outstanding price.

Oh, and the really great news is that this is one among an increasing class of OEM computers being marketed to consumers with Linux pre-installed. I bought two, and plan to use them in my DJ business, when I start it. I may get a couple more just to keep in my car and truck... 'cause you never know when you'll need to compute ;)

I was considering the iPod Touch and the Nokia N800 for quick and dirty internet access and SSH connectivity, but with the iPod in the $300-or-better neighborhood and the Nokia about the same, both with no keyboard, and the eeePC at $349, with basically everything I need in a laptop and not much bigger of a package than the Nokia... um... it was kind of a no-brainer. OK, the eeePC is bigger than either of the other two, but I don't need to carry a separate Bluetooth keyboard, and don't have to wait for Apple to open up their SDK, or risk bricking the stupid thing to put Linux on it. The eeePC has linux on it already (albeit Xandros), and if I want to put another distro on it, there's really nothing standing in my way. Having said that, i think I'll stick with the pre-installed software (at least for now), as it seems to have all the hardware stuff already worked out... like the Wi-Fi drivers, the function keys and power management... so...

The only gripes I have with it so far are:

• I can't seem to connect to NFS shares on my home network. Prolly something I'm doing wrong.
  
• I ran updates, which made Firefox segfault. I easily found a workaround on a forum (forum.eeeuser.com).
  

All-in-all, after a mere 4 hours of use, I give the eeePC a four and three-quarters stars out of five.

I'll see about udating this a little later, after I've have more time to put this little honey through its paces.

... A quick post script: laptop bags for a machine this tiny are a little tough to come by, but portable DVD player bags work great. The CompUSA near me is going out of business, and I managed to pick up 2 such bags for $.98 each!!!!!

Leaked Internal MS Wishlist: BWA-HA-HA-HA

This, pointed to by this, which I got to from this Slashdot article basically demonstrates that the people within Microsoft who work on MS Windows want it to be more like Linux and Mac OS X.

Pardon my Les Nessman-like restrained snicker.

... and yet... somehow, they also seek to add more bloat.

I don't know... The Phenomenal Cosmic Power of UNIX-Like Operating Systems has grown on me. There is nothing compelling on the MS Windows side to make me want to switch.

I was talking about this with a friend... she's taking some UNIX and other engineering classes... and she had to do a paper for Technical Writing... a newsletter article. So she was doing it as Linux promo piece.. an interview with an enthusiastic Linux System Administrator (me). She asked what was the one thing that made Linux a better choice of Operating System. I paraphrased Aladdin, by saying, "Phenomenal Cosmic Power!!! Itty-bitty living space." She then asked what Microsoft would have to do to win me back... I told her that the "free-ness" of Linux is certainly liberating... but that's not the only thing that makes Linux the right choice for me. If Windows was free (as in beer) and Linux was as it is (F/OSS), I would still choose Linux. Because it's BETTER. Better shells, better modularity, better choices, better catalog of software that matters to me, better security, better performance, better efficiency, better usability... as in better.


So... in the end... Microsoft and it's minions seem to be trying to cosmetically placate the Windows users who know Linux or Mac users who brag about usability features they've had for years (perhaps a decade or more). I think, tho, that as time goes on, it's going to get harder and harder to build Band-Aid upon Band-Aid onto the decidedly non-UNIX-ey foundation of MS Windows and still justify charging $400 for "the good stuff".

Heh... Vista's STILL poop.

I can't say this surprises me

The gist of it is that users of Microsoft's "next generation" operating system Windows Vista... Oh, and this image from the Vista home page is pretty funny... standard marketing ploy...


Screen shot of funny Vista ad.

Why is this funny? Heh... Ever seen Tron? At the end the Master Control Program (MCP) was revealed to have been nothing more than a chess program gone mad... Heh... This might be a little esoteric for you... who am I kidding?! If you're reading this blog, you love esoteric! Looks for just a second at the computer and monitor behind the kid. Now I don't know when Compaq STOPPED selling that case style, but I remember buying them when I worked at Sony IN THE LAST CENTURY... and the Sony shop I worked at did warranty service on Sony computer monitors (both Sony-branded and OEM units)... the last of that model of monitor were dropping out of their THREE YEAR warranty in 1997... something tells me the computer and monitor pictured have no capacity to run Windows Vista... Can anyone remember the little "Simulated reception" disclaimer on print advertisements for TVs?

OK... so the problem is that Audio Playback on Vista is pre-empting the ability to receive data of the network. So... Does that mean that if you're streaming multimedia content, um... your inbound network performance goes out the window? Yes it does. Ah, sweet irony. Eight years ago, I had a Linux machine that couldn't even run a GUI with respectable performance (486DX2-100 w/ 16MB RAM), but could stream oggs and MP3s. With Vista, You really need 1GB of RAM just to boot the stupid thing... they recommend a dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM... and there's not enough spare clock ticks and memory bandwidth to run the network card and the sound card at the same time.

That's flat-out pathetic.

So... I still am not going to get MS Windows Vista. Just for the record. I just got a chuckle out the whole thing.