Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 18, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Is the Linux desktop dream dead?

Will Linux ever become a major desktop operating system, the way that Windows XP was? My colleague over at PC World, Robert Strohmeyer, thinks that "The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead." I beg to differ.

Many of his points make sense. Strohmeyer wrote, "Ultimately, Linux is doomed on the desktop because of a critical lack of content. And that lack of content owes its existence to two key factors: the fragmentation of the Linux platform, and the fierce ideology of the open-source community at large." But I disagree with his emphasis.

Those factors haven’t helped desktop Linux, but they haven’t blocked its success. Yes, too many Linux distributions was a problem for independent software vendors (ISVs) like Adobe, but take a closer look. How many versions of the Linux desktop actually have enough market share to matter to the major ISVs? I’d argue there are only two: Ubuntu; and Novell‘s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and its community forefather, openSUSE.

Ubuntu gets the nod because of its popularity and the SUSE family because it’s the only other desktop Linux with much commercial support.

Fedora? Sure, it’s very important to cutting edge Linux users and developers. For most users or the business market though? I can’t see it. The other popular desktop Linuxes, like Mint, a particular favorite of mine, are based on Ubuntu. I’ve yet to find an application that can run on Ubuntu that won’t run on Mint or any of the rest of the Ubuntu family.

As for the "fierce ideology of the open-source community at large," I have several objections. First, it’s not the "open-source" community that has ideological problems that annoy proprietary ISVs; it’s the "Free Software" ideologues with Richard M. Stallman at their head. Second, and my real point: no one in the Linux "business" really cares what they think. We can happily argue over the benefits of pure GPL Linux distributions like gNewSense or why everyone should use Ogg Theora instead of MP4 as a video codec, but does anyone really care outside of hardcore Linux circles? No, no they don’t.

Try it yourself. Ask your friends who use Ubuntu but aren’t deep into Linux what they think about running a pure GPLv2 stack and watch their puzzled expressions. I would venture to say, based on my experience with all the many Linux users I’ve met, that most of them won’t have a clue. That’s because Linux actually has matured into a mainstream operating system and now has users, not just techies and programmers.

As my buddy Joe Brockmeier at Network World pointed out, there’s now a tempest in a teapot over whether or not Ubuntu’s parent company, Canonical, is handling copyright assignment in a way that would make the company "Open Core". Joe asks, "Does it matter?" I’d argue that for 99% of all Ubuntu users, the answer is no.

The real problem with desktop Linux acceptance was the same one it always had. Microsoft has maintained a near-monopoly on the traditional desktop market. Only Dell, of all the major PC makers, ever really supported Linux. Everyone else would sometimes toss a crumb to desktop Linux, but that was it.

So why am I not ready to give up on desktop Linux since neither Vista’s failure nor Linux on netbook‘s success brought Linux to millions of new desktops? Because, I don’t see a failure. I see a sea-change in desktop computing. Strohmeyer sees it too, but again we look at its importance in different ways.

The 21st-century desktop isn’t based on the fat-client desktop of the last 25-years. It exists on the Web in Web-based applications and software as a service (SaaS) and what I call "Content as a Service." If the content providers have their way, you’ll view content from the Web instead of downloading it. You see this in Apple TV, Hulu, Google TV, and all the other recent Internet TV news. Desktop Linux can live in such a world. Windows, however, can’t.

Think about it. Why should anyone pay real money for Windows when all you really will need is an HTML 5 compatible Web browser? Besides, Strohmeyer and I can both agree that these days tablets and phones are where things are happening. On those platforms, Windows has proven to be a non-starter while Android is kicking rump and taking names on smartphones.

There’s a reason why I opened my story by mentioning Windows XP. I believe XP was the apex of the fat client desktop movement. Neither Linux nor Windows 7 will ever be as important as XP was on that kind of desktop. In the new desktop, where applications and content are more often than not provided by Linux-based servers, Linux will do quite well whether your main interface will be on a laptop, desktop, smartphone, or a tablet. It’s Windows, not Linux, that has reason to fear this future.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

October 18, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Real Life ‘Pre-Crime’ Technology

We live in an age of wonders. We can talk and see our friends in the world over the Internet. We live in an age of horrors. Third-world dictatorships are working on atomic bombs. And, we live in age where new miracles and terrors are only a research project away.

Take, for example, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the government agency that brought us the Internet. Now, besides working on bullets that will home in on their targets, EXtreme ACcuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO), DARPA is working on algorithms that can be used to predict when someone is getting ready to commit a crime.

Who needs three mutant pre-cogs ala the movie Minority Report and Philip K. Dick’s short story The Minority Report it was based on, when you have computers? The theory is, given the right algorithms and computers, the government should be able to figure out when “a soldier in good mental health” may become an “insider threat.”

Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales (ADAMS) is still in its Request for Proposal (RFP) days may sound like science fiction, but really, is there anything that’s fictional about it?

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October 14, 2010
by sjvn01
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Five problems Linux still needs to overcome

Big business loves Linux for servers and they seem to like it more than you might expect for the desktop. That said, enterprises still have some concerns about Linux. Here’s the top five as picked by people who responded to The Linux Foundation’s recent corporate and government end-user survey: “Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users.”

Before diving into these problems, I’d like to point out something. These are the opinions of business people who, for the most part, are already Linux users. Questions like, whether KDE or GNOME is the better desktop interface or just how cool Ubuntu 10.10 is, matter a whole lot less to them then do to Linux fans or programmers. Instead, they care about how they can use Linux to advance their work. They don’t love Linux for its own sake. They love it because of what it can do for them. That said, let’s get on with their list of concerns in the order they gave them in importance.

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October 14, 2010
by sjvn01
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Five ways for IPv6 and IPv4 to peacefully co-exist

It would have been so easy if the early Internet and TCP/IP network designers had made IPv6 backward compatible with IPv4. They didn’t. In 1981, IPv4’s 32-bit 4.3 billion addresses look more than enough addresses for the ARPANet/Internet. That was the Internet then, this is the Internet now.

Oh, network professionals saw the Internet address shortage coming and knew it would be a problem. I can’t do better than to quote, Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society, who admitted at a June 2009 meeting that “IPv6’s lack of real backwards compatibility for IPv4 was [its] single critical failure.” It’s too late now to cry over spilled standards. We need to work on getting the two fundamental network standards to peacefully co-operate today.

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October 12, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Big business go big on Linux

I know Linux is continuing to play a larger and larger role in big business, but it’s always nice to see hard, cold proof that this is true. The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating Linux’s growth, published “Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users.” This report shows that Linux is continuing to grab market share from Unix and Windows and it’s doing it more mission critical applications.

Admittedly, the 1,900 people surveyed were both from The Linux Foundation’s Enterprise End User Council as well as other companies and government organizations, but I feel the results still were valid. And, unlike similar surveys, sponsored by proprietary software companies where you have to dig to find out who paid for the research and who’s actually being surveyed, the Linux Foundation comes right out and tells you ”

In particular, the Foundation, and its partner in the survey, Yeoman Technology Group, an engineering and management firm, focused on larger enterprise companies and government organizations–those with $500 million or more a year in revenues or greater than 500 employees.

These businesses are moving to Linux far faster than they are to Windows or Unix. Given that we already know that they’re interested in Linux that’s not too surprising. What was interesting was that conventional wisdom is that Unix users are the most likely to switch to Linux. While it’s true that Unix users are migrating to Linux, it turns out that, by a few percentage points, Windows users at 36.6% are more likely to be heading to Linux than Unix, 31.4%.

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October 12, 2010
by sjvn01
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Netgear gets back into Internet video with Roku

Everyone knows Netgear as, along with D-Link and Cisco’s Linksys, as one of the leading SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) and home networking companies. What’s less well known is that, like D-Link with its Boxee Box, Netgear would like to compete with Apple’s Apple TV and Google’s upcoming flood of Google TV-enabled devices.

The reason why you don’t know about this is that Netgear has, well, flopped at this business with such non-starters as the NTV550 and NeoTV 550. That may change now. Netgear has quietly started selling a Roku XD under its own name at Fry’s.

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