Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 19, 2008
by sjvn01
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Why good people make bad OS choices

I was looking for a mini-notebook the other day for my mom-in-law at a Best Buy when I happened to hear a senior sales guy telling a newbie the 411 on selling PCs. “You sell them either Vista, or, if you have to, point them to the Macs because those computers work. That XP stuff is old junk and Linux doesn’t work.”

Oh did I have words with him! And, as I talked with him, once more I was reminded about the difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman: the used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

As our conversation continued I discovered that while he knew many people were unhappy with their Vista PC purchases — he told me most of them complained about older software and hardware incompatibilities — Vista was still the newest operating system so, it was, somehow, the best.

And, this mind you, was from someone who’ve I seen selling PCs at this particular store for more than five years. If this is what experienced sales help is like, God help poor customers who come in and just want a good computer for their money.

It wasn’t that this guy was shilling for Microsoft. It was that he really didn’t know any better. With help like this is it any wonder why good people make bad operating system choices?

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October 17, 2008
by sjvn01
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No Linspire Love Lost

When Michael Robertson sold Linspire to Xandros, I doubt many people saw a lawsuit coming his way from former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony.

Carmony had not seen eye-to-eye with Robertson about Linspire’s future since the summer of 2007 when he resigned as CEO. Other Linspire executives followed and many people thought that Linspire, and its self-named distributions and its community distribution, Freespire would soon follow. Carmony’s feelings about his old distributions may be judged from the fact that, in October 2007, he switched to Ubuntu..

But, the split between the two Linspire executives wasn’t over yet. When, in April 2008, Robertson sold Linspire’s assets, including the key CNR (Click’N’Run) Web-based installation system, to Xandros, Carmony was ticked off.

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October 17, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Ballmer says skip Vista

Boy, I wish I’d been at Gartner’s Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. this year. That way I could heard with my own ears, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tell an audience of high-level business people that if they want to wait for Windows 7 to switch from XP, instead of going to Vista, “They certainly can.”

Mind you, this was at the same show, where earlier, Gartner analyst Yvonne Genovese had tore into Ballmer like a hurricane saying she had installed Vista for her daughter — and two days later went right back to using XP . “It’s safe, it works, all the hardware is fine, and everything is great,” Genovese said

She went on to say that “What we’re seeing and what we’re hearing from users is a very similar thing. It’s difficult to implement.” Amen sister. Vista is junk. And, yes, I speak from experience. I finally got Vista to work properly with all my hardware and software on one PC after 16-months of trying. But, hey, at least I got everything to work. A lot of people haven’t been so lucky.

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October 16, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

The five best things in Linux 2.6.27

Does anyone really know what will be better in Windows 7? I don’t and I follow Windows almost as closely as I do Linux. With Linux, on the other hand, we know exactly what we’re getting well in advance of its arrival. In this latest Linux kernel, I see several outstanding new features that have been coming down the road for some time.

After a brief hardware hiccup with Intel’s e1000e gigabyte Ethernet firmware, Linux 2.6.27 was released on October 9th. It’s a good, but not ground-breaking, kernel. Still, it has at least five significant improvements.

The first of these, in my opinion, is a new way of handling device firmware. In the best of all possible worlds, firmware should be compiled with each driver. Linux users know all too well that, despite the opening of some proprietary driver firmware by vendors like Atheros, the Wi-Fi chip OEM, too many devices still require proprietary firmware. In Linux 2.6.27, the firmware blobs (binary large object) now have a permanent home: the new directory, ‘/lib/firmware.’

This works for Linux in two ways. The first is that it will make it easier for all Linux distributors to handle proprietary drivers in a single common way. For users this translates into making it easier to use this kind of devices. For those users who don’t want a thing to do with proprietary drivers, it also makes it easy for them to make sure that their PCs don’t inadvertently use the closed software.

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October 15, 2008
by sjvn01
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Web browser dragster races: Firefox 3.1 beta vs. Chrome beta

I like Chrome, Google’s beta Web browser, a lot. It boasted the fastest Web-rendering engine I’d ever seen, until now. Starting last night, there’s a new Web speed-demon, Firefox 3.1 beta 1.

I know, I know. Some people aren’t seeing this speed boost. My colleague, John Brandon, found that “Compared to Chrome, in testing my most frequently visited sites, Firefox 3.1 now lags well behind Chrome.” Brandon’s right. For daily Web browser visits, Chrome is still faster.

The blame for that goes, from what I can see, to the fact that Firefox 3.1 beta has a lot more beta error-checking code in it than does Chrome. Before either one goes gold that code will be stripped out.

While I was looking under the new Firefox beta hood though at Firefox’s new JavaScript rendering engine, TraceMonkey, I saw killer performance that leaves Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine eating its dust.

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October 14, 2008
by sjvn01
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Linux Standard Base 4 is coming in for a landing

If you write software for the Mac, you must obey Apple’s rules. Period. End of statement. If you write software for Windows, you have more lee-way, but Microsoft pretty much calls the shots. If you write software for Linux though you can pretty much do whatever you want, except, of course, you shouldn’t. Because if you do re-invent the wheel every time you write for Linux, we end up with software that doesn’t work or play well with other Linux software. That’s where the LSB (Linux Standard Base) comes in.

The LSB is a set of guidelines on how you should program for Linux. You don’t have to obey its rules. It’s just a really good idea if you do.

This isn’t just a truism. Thanks to Unix, we know exactly what happens when everyone does things their own way on the same system: utter chaos. Even if you were on the same hardware and used the same basic Unix you ended up with a mess. For example, UHC, Consensys, Interactive, and Dell (yes, the Dell you’re thinking about), briefly all had their own versions of Unix SVR4 (System V Release 4) on i386 processors. You could no more run a program designed for UHC Unix on Dell’s Unix than you could run a Toyota Prius on diesel fuel.

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