Archive for category tech
This Article Contains Faulty Reasoning
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Recently I was reading an article about “Linux on the Desktop being a non starter.” Most of these articles revolve around the author wanting to do something and failing OR it taking way to long to do it. I can accept that. Ubuntu isn’t perfect for everything. Its really great at some things though.
However, this article is so flagrantly poor quality it makes me wonder what quality standards Computerworld has for its bloggers. Obviously few.
Lets go over some of the gems contained in this article.
It claims Linux on the desktop is “still not happening.” Beyond the fact that is is and I know lots of people using it, its also constructed of basically two silly arguments.
* “For a while last year, things were looking up for Linux. Many of the early netbook vendors were forgoing Windows licenses and instead offering consumers machines that ran some form of Linux. That didn’t last long, though. Return rates for Linux netbooks were much higher than for their Windows counterparts, and most netbooks today are sold with some version of Windows, not Linux. What this means is that, though Linux is a great value for many server applications, it’s still a non-starter on the desktop.
Huh. So netbooks have a higher return rate than Windows netbooks? OK. Fair enough. The author notes this and jumps to the conclusion that Linux is a non-starter on the desktop. This is faulty logic. There could be a sea of reasons why someone would return a Linux netbook. How bout they thought Windows was on it? You mean customer made a mistake? I think its possible people may click before they read every sentence.
Netbooks are a nascent market in computing. Its like looking at ebooks and noting that Amazon controls the desktop. The author didn’t note how many people stuck with Linux powered netbooks. If the number of people with Linux netbooks is 20% then id say Linux on a netbook is a success.
* “Richard Stallman may not be typical, but you can read all about his setup here. It’s not something that’s going to win a lot of converts among the mass market of computer users, though. As he explains it, he uses a Lemote Yeelong, a netbook with a Loongson chip and a 9-inch display. “I spend most of my time using Emacs. I run it on a text console, so that I don’t have to worry about accidentally touching the mouse-pad and moving the pointer, which would be a nuisance. I read and send mail with Emacs (mail is what I do most of the time). I switch to the X console when I need to do something graphical, such as look at an image or a PDF file. Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection. Once or twice or maybe three times a day I connect and transfer mail in and out.”
Since most of us would go back to using paper, pens, envelopes and stamps before using the open-source text editor Emacs, it still seems likely that it’s going to be a Windows and Mac OS world for the foreseeable future.”
ARE YOU SERIOUS? <sarcasm>Obviously all Linux users have is Emacs and a console. Obviously</sarcasm>. Wait, no thats absolutely ludicrous. I use Gnome. Gnome is pretty, functional and elegant.
Anyways, felt it was worth sharing. I am not a Linux crazy but this kind of poor article makes me want to throw a Firefox at someone.
9.10 – Now With More Candy!
Posted by jdodson in free software, tech on February 23rd, 2010
After dealing with swapping out a newer Nvidia card for an older one on my Linux machine I decided the easiest course of action would be to install the latest version of Ubuntu on it. Plus it would be cool to check out how far Ubuntu has come since Hardy. Ill sum up my thoughts in one sentence.
This free software thing is really incredible.
I think we are starting to see the free software desktop evolve to a point where all the functional parts exist. At this point its not about getting a great browser, image viewer/editor, music player, video player or ability to easily install software. All that stuff exists and in spades. Now the free software desktop is polishing itself to the point of decadence. And I use that word because in the past it was unpolished to the point of frustration. The default stock Ubuntu experience in its latest release 9.10 is like candy on top of cake. Or at leasts thats how it feels to me and I spend 99% of my work life on Mac OSX desktop. Ive used the Mac for 2+ years now and I can honestly say this version of Ubuntu is in ways better than Mac OSX. Im not going to get into specifics its just little things mostly. Like a easier time of desktop switching, resource management bars, middle click paste in linux and the power of apt-get and more. Oh and it doesn’t tie you down to vendor specific hardware…. That said depending on the hardware you can be in for quite a ride. Also the default theme in Ubuntu seems more elegant to me than the gun metal grey Mac OSX theme that seemed so sexy in 2001. Can’t a brother get a theme selection tool native on the Mac? No? OK then.
In Ubuntu 9.10 after installing the closed source Nvidia driver it switched my monitor to a lower resolution than id like. So I decided to simply use the free software 2D driver and not spend time in config hell. Yeah I don’t get the full power of the card but id rather things just work. And beyond that bit of driver annoyance which Ubuntu can do nothing about the experience is quite good. Suprisingly good in fact.
Head over to the Ubuntu site and notice the tour. I am happy to see this kind of progress and thank the free software developers that made it happen.
Ahh The Memories!
Good ol days.
“WWIV, Wildcat, Celerity — these hallowed names represent the best of a golden era of communication, back when “getting online” meant tying up the family phone line, remembering arcane Hayes AT codes to maximize performance out of the 9600 baud modem your dad borrowed from work, and TradeWars was the best multiplayer game available. Yes, I’m talking about Bulletin Board Systems, originally text based and later augmented with ANSI graphics. The first public BBS celebrated its birthday yesterday, and I think it’s a fair bet that few of us would be engaging in discussion today if it weren’t for that simple little computer bulletin board in 1978. Why even our esteemed leader John Biggs ran a bulletin board system for a brief while!”
I wanted to run my own board but due to no extra phone line, I had to be content to have a setup that my friends could dial in when they called. It was called Demosis Erima, which is hebrew for public desert. Or at least I thought it was? The software I ran was JetBBS and I ran it because it was totally free and didn’t come crippled unless you paid money. I had LORD and Tradewars attached to it. Adam and I both pitched in for a license of Tradewars but LORD was the free limited version. I made the intro graphics in The Draw. I ran it on a 2600 modem which was pretty fast for the time. Later on I upgraded to a 14.4. I never owned a 56k in the BBS days. That was later when dial up internet was the rage.
Free Software Nvidia Drivers Make Me Happy
Posted by jdodson in free software, life, tech, video games on February 16th, 2010
Finally, my old hardware wont suck to use!
Last week I got a PC from my friend. I decided to make that something I play PC games on and use my other PC for home development. So I moved the Nvidia 7600 from my Linux desktop to the new PC and my old Nvidia 5400LE back to my desktop Linux development machine. This usually goes fine as the proprietary Nvidia drivers are first rate and the installer is easy enough to use. Well, turns out, its not as easy as it once was.
Nvidia seemed to deprecate my old 5400LE video card in the up-to-date proprietary driver sometime in the last year so I have to use the old legacy Nvidia drivers to get it to work with the proprietary driver. OK well that should be fine right? No it wasn’t. The old legacy driver didn’t auto configure xorg like the old one did. So basically, I installed the old video card ran the legacy driver setup and was in 800×600 land. Yippie. So it was a fun hunt to track down how to set the display resolution. Long story short the legacy driver doesn’t seem to really work well and I don’t have 3D on the card. I have the amazing 2D from the in kernel Nvidia driver but the rendering artifacts are annoying and font smoothing doesn’t work.
My choices at this point involve more pain of screwing with configs, hacking kernels and doing stuff I don’t want to do or reinstalling everything and having the setup process of Ubuntu work it out. I bet that would fix it all and I have backups, that might be less pain than the “magic config file hunt and change scenario.”
However, the long term fix in my opinion for Linux is to STOP using hardware that requires so much manual work. Which means, stop using hardware that doesn’t have relatively useful drivers in the mainline kernel. Which is why the recent inclusion of the Nouveau drivers that can do useful 3D is so sweet. Since I am not gaming on Linux anymore due to the pain involved in that(sorry, spent the last 5-8 years in Wine and thats not really fun) I don’t need super bling cutting edge 3D in Linux. Which is why the recent work in the free software Nvidia space is so cool. Its the long term fix for a problem that I hate dealing with in Linux.
Free Software I Love
Posted by jdodson in free software, tech on February 2nd, 2010
Google Chrome
I have been using Google Chrome as my primary browser for a few months. Its a low footprint UI and its blazingly fast. I won’t primarily use a non free software browser so Google Chrome fits my needs in that capacity as well. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you need to. Compared to IE or Firefox 3.0, Chrome is a rocket. Add flashblock to the mix and it crashes less than any browser ive ever used. This runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is a music player ive used for years. It just keeps getting better and better. It can awesomely manage my 24 days and 12 hours of music. I use iTunes on my Mac and Rhythmbox on Linux. iTunes is a extremely bloated player and I have less music on my mac. I have a few gripes with it but largely it works really well. Ive tried Songbird but it just isn’t as good as Rhythmbox and I am still on the version that shipped with Hardy. To my knowledge this only runs on Linux.
PiTiVi
This project I have been avidly watching and hoping could release something awesome in a stable Linux distro I use for quite sometime. It looks like the next Ubuntu stable will see something great I can use and I excited. I don’t make as many movies as I could because the only tool I have for that is on a Mac in my living room. When I sit down in the living room I want to watch a video or play a game not edit video. The above demo video shows that its come quite a long way and I hope by next Ubuntu stable release it has titles and some transitions. Thats pretty much all I need for the basics and my videos dont do more than that.
Handbrake
I buy movies. I buy movies because I love watching movies. I rip my movies into a variety of formats at times to watch them on a mobile device or laptop. Think of it like ripping a CD. I rip the music I own as well. DVD’s come with copy protection to limit your legitimate use of them in this way but it doesn’t stop enterprising people from figuring out how to get around that. Handbrake is one such program. I mostly use it to rip movies to watch on my iPhone. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
LAME
I rip my MP3’s using LAME. It creates the best quality 320k MP3’s ive heard. I use grip to ensure I don’t have to write a script to rip a CD. grip is old school but the MP3 files it creates sound great and are tagged properly. Runs on practically everything.
VirtualBox
If you want a completely free replacement for VirtualPC or VMWare I recommend VirtualBox. Its come quite a long way in the past year and it works perfectly on my Mac and Ubuntu for virtualizing Windows or any other OS id care to. Did I mention its free? Runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and more.
The iPad: Opinion Overload
iPad
Apple’s iPad was released yesterday to mixed reviews. A few quotables from the iPad site.
“Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”
“The best way to experience the web, email, photos, videos and video. Hands down.”
If I had to rewrite the first Apple quote it would go like this:
“Our most advanced technology in a hot and evolutionary device at a lowish price for Apple products.”
Is the price unbelievable? Not really. Then again, I haven’t used it yet. Put another way, im not running out in 60 days to buy one because I think its ultra cheap not having played with it. The price point doesn’t seem to far off though. If it were $200 I buy one on release day.
iPad is essentially a bigger iPhone. This is actually a big deal because the iPhone was revolutionary but it was too small for certain tasks. Like typing up emails. I don’t really use it for longer emails than “OK” or “LOLZ.” I can tweet from it, but it thinks certain words I mispell on purpose are other words and its not fun changing them 3 times to the right word. Beyond that, its a fine device. The iPad has more screen and because of that I expect it will be easier to type on it.
I received a first generation iPhone from a friend for free. It works fine in every way save it doesn’t turn on or off as the power button is broken. It just goes in and out of standby. Works fine beyond that. I use it as a web/email/twitter/facebook/music/video podcast device. I have a few games on it but i rarely play them. Games on the iPhone are not that much fun. Then again, it might just be me. I LOVE the iPhone so much when I am home I just use that for surfing, twitter and facebook at home. If I want to type up a blog post I turn on a desktop/laptop but for mostly everything else its the iPhone all the way. Though its important to note that its great for consuming, not creating stuff. The iPad might be better for creating as it has a larger screen and can come with iWork. We will see.
When I first read the stream from Engadget on release day I was EXTREMELY underwhelmed. After all the hype and buzz about iTablet/iSlate this device couldn’t have lived up to the hype. And it seems with many people it really didn’t. But the trick is we haven’t used it yet. After the day was over, I woke up and relooked at the pictures I changed my tune a bit. It looks like a really cool device. I still have reservations about it though.
No multitasking. No console. Locked down. No native SD slot. These are pretty much my major complaints about iPhone. I can understand from a UI/UX perspective why you wouldn’t enable multitasking. Having 90% of the CPU for the current application is a very nice thing. The iPhone isn’t a speed demon. Howevever when only one thing is happening what performance you do get you get consistently. So if an app pushes the limits of 3D, RAM and CPU it will consistently work accross thousands of iPad 1.0 devices. If you enable multitasking this goes down. Stuff gets slower. Stuff may crash. The UI/UX suffers. On a such a little device this is a bigger problem than a beefy desktop computer. Plus, enabling a multitask switcher on a device with one button would suck. So I get why they may want to only enable one app at a time. I also understand why they want to lock it down. Similarish reasons, but you do get to make more on an app store with no other competitive channels to install software.
So the problems I have with iPad I have with iPhone yet I love my iPhone. So much so if it broke id get a new iPod touch. Its that cool. Will the iPad be something I get because I love my iPhone? I am not sure but I imagine not the 1.0 version. I like that the iPhone is so small I can put it in my pocket and put it on a window ledge next to the bed. Can’t do that with the iPad. Then again, its not meant to do that.
People thought the iPod and iPhone were a joke but they turned out well for Apple in the end. I believe the iPad is such a device but the market will tell. Not our opinions.
The Disconnect of Digital Pricing
When I was in middle school CDs were a new thing. I remember talking in school about CDs and how they cost about a penny to press and because of this insanely low printing cost, CDs would be ultra cheap compared to tapes or records. Imagine a world where the printing cost led to ultra low prices! Imagine that world. I can, its great. It would be awesome to pop over to Best Buy and get the latest album for $1. Or $3. At that price I wouldn’t really think about it, id just buy it.
And that is the topic of this blog post. The disconnect of digital pricing.
I buy games, music and software in a box from the store. I know this makes me a dinosaur but I am actually getting a better value and in most cases its cheaper. I want to live in a world where I download everything for a lesser fee, but I don’t. The idea WAS that when we went to the point where we download all our games or software online the price dropped because the cost of producing a physical product was circumvented. Ill give an example.
Modern Warfare 2 on PC costs $51.48 on Amazon. Now, since thats a physical box and manual product the digital copy should be cheaper right? Well on Steam its $59.99. Why the hell is it more expensive to download on Steam? Why does it cost me MORE TO DOWNLOAD IT? I have no idea but the disconnect between the download/physical product is absolutely nuts.
Same with music. The Book of Eli download on Amazon/iTunes is $11.99. The physical CD costs $11.99 as well.
Simply stated, I believe digital goods should cost a significant share LESS than their physical counterparts. However it seems the physical product actually costs less. OR in the case of music, you can get a better value if you buy a album for the same price because you can rip it long after MP3 is dethroned. Adopting a pricing model like the iPhone where apps are mostly $0.99-$5 means people dont think about buying stuff. They just buy it. I am not saying AAA game titles should be $5 but how bout $25. How bout $30? $60 for a digital download? No thanks.
I always I buy the physical copy these days unless the digital price is so low it doesn’t matter. Digital pricing needs to improve or I will always buy the physical product, because most of the time its a way better deal.
Making a Few Dollars Online
I blog. I Tweet. I put ads on my site to see if I could make any money blogging. Thus far I am not sure its worth having them up. I don’t make much money on click throughs. Recently ive been experimenting with having an Amazon referral account. Basically if I talk about a product and someone buys it I get a 4% cut. Leaps and bounds its a better system than click through ads. My first day with Amazon referrals I made a reasonable amount of money. Its strange that just talking about something can lead someone to buy it, but it is cool.
I can’t tell who bought what, its pretty secure in that regard, but its nice to know people do actually buy things based off what I say. Its as if I have some influence on people in some capacity that I didn’t realize I had before. Its a cool feeling.
Thanks for reading.
.Google Does Goodle
“Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.
First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.”
This is good. This is also Google roundaboutly saying the Chinese government is behind these attacks. I hope this is one more nail in Chinas “not allowing its citizens to be free” coffin. And what I mean by that is I hope these kinds of actions lead China to adopt a much more free society.
exFAT And The Love Of A Robot
** This was in my pending queue and I just realized I hadn’t posted this yet. Belated, but relevant still **
exFAT come to patent the day!
Microsoft is announcing to the world that its exFAT file system is ready for mass consumption/distribution. Unsure if you care but it will impact the future in a slightly significant way.
For instance.
You go to the store and want something to carry in your pocket that can hold a few documents and music files. Since they don’t sell floppy discs anymore you turn to the latest and greatest USB flash drive. Since its the year 2015 you notice that a 128G flash drive is $20.00. You pick it up. You put it in your Mac and expect to copy files over to it.
Lets make this a choose your own adventure:
1) The USB key company formatted it for FAT 32.
2) The USB key company formatted it for exFAT.
If you chose 1) congratulations, your key will work on any old and modern computer! But RUH ROH the latest movie you downloaded illegally off bittorrent is 4.7G. You drive seems like it could hold it but due to FAT32 file size limits you can’t copy it. You get a strange error you don’t understand and return the drive thinking it is broken.
If you chose 2) congratulations, your key works beautifully with Windows 7. Your torrented movie loads just fine but somehow your Mom’s old Mac won’t read it much less your crazy friend that runs Linux! Too bad everyone doesn’t use Windows 7!
OK well the above was just for fun AND I actually imagine exFAT will have a in kernel driver though it might take a very long time, like the read/write NTFS driver.
In the end I want filesystems for flash media to support all filesizes and flash drive sizes. FAT32 has served its purpose well but its past time for a replacement. The issue I have is that its going to be exFAT because its what Microsoft wants to do. Not because its the best, cheapest or easiest to implement choice. Its because they are going with it. And that means 90% of all desktops will support it going forward. For instance, the Linux kernel has MANY free software and free of patents filesystem that are up to the task. They have been battle tested and are ready to roll, source included. But if a vendor decided to roll with XFS(not saying that would be the best move) for new SD cards, they wouldn’t work until Microsoft supported them OR the drive shipped with a CD with a driver on it(assuming said computer has an optical media drive).
We are living in a world where Microsoft is opening itself up some but it still makes plays like this. I know licensing royalties are better for said company but its sad that this will become a patent dispute at some point involving some vendor at some point(Tom Tom anyone?). Or its possible it may not be supported in Linux due to a Linux vendor not wanting to touch it with a 10 foot pole because they refuse to license the patent. Possible, but I don’t see the vendors accepting a scenario where they exclude 100% of all the new flash drives from working on their product. Time will tell though.
Again, I am not wanting to curb progress just progress as the expense of free implementations.