The Indifferentiable Realm

Over the past 2-3 years, Linux has outstandingly escaped its geeky, technically challenging cocoon to become a fully-fledged and user-friendly operating system. No longer valid is the argument that users can’t get their work done on Linux without being familiar with Linux’s technical side. Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, OpenSUSE,the list goes on and on of desktop Linux distros that meet daily needs of common users. Vista or Mac OS X might have certain advantages, but when Michael Dell runs Ubuntu Linux on one of his own home systems, it can’t be said that Linux isn’t a real choice for anyone’s desktop.

For the last two decades, we’ve been buying expensive desktop operating systems on business PCs running from $1,000 to $2,000. On those systems, we’ve been putting pricey desktop-centric office suites like Microsoft Office. That is about to change.

Four seemingly minor trends together are causing a profound revolution in the computing world: user-friendly Linux desktops, useful under-$500 laptops and desktops, near-universal broadband, and business-ready Internet office applications (most commonly is Google Apps Premier Edition).

A 100-PC business utilizing products from the above trends can function well for about $57,000 (including a server, Internet and miscellaneous services).

The same type of business but Microsoft-powered (Vista Business equipped PCs, Exchange email server, Office 2007, Windows Server 2003) costs at least $114,923.

On the consumer front, notebooks overtook desktops to become the bigger revenue generator for PC makers in 2007. For Hewlett-Packard, laptops have become the single most important revenue source. PC vendors can make more profit on an under-$1,000 laptop than it would on a PC at the same price. Together with Wi-Fi being available essentially everywhere, more and more customers are turning to laptops.

Sub-$200 laptops equipped with Linux such as One-Laptop-Per-Child or ClassmatePC 2007 from Intel are renown examples of cheap and fully-function PCs.

If you could build a no-frills PCs that ran Linux, why not make sub-$500 computers with a bit more power and sell them to consumers? That’s exactly what Asus did with its Xandros Linux-powered ASUS Eee UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC), which lists for about $400. At about the same time, Everex introduced its gOS TC2502 gPC.

With sub-$500 laptops with 512MB of RAM and embedded Intel graphics, even the already mediocre Home Basic is still going to suck big time. Stick any Linux distribution on it, say Fedora 8, gOS 1.02 or OpenSUSE 10.3, and you’ve got a really useful laptop.

There’s only one little problem with this if your company name is Microsoft. Those under-$1,000 laptops can’t run Vista worth a darn. In addition, Vista has become a bigger and bigger part of a laptop’s cost. So, if you’re a PC vendor, you could either upgrade your hardware—and there goes your sweet price point; put Vista Home Basic on the system—which even Vista lovers admit is trash; or continue to sell Windows XP and give adventurous customers a Linux option.

Microsoft will fight this trend. It will cut prices to the point where it’ll be bleeding ink on some of its product lines. And Windows XP is going to stick around much longer than Microsoft ever wanted it to. Still, it won’t be enough. By attacking from the bottom, where Microsoft can no longer successfully compete, Linux will finally cut itself a large slice of the desktop market pie.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2222308,00.asp

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2414535067.html

The group project has driven me so crazy that I didn’t have time to look for something cool to post as usual. I have never had so much trouble with programming as I did this time in the group project. It’s certainly much harder to program in corporation – which is an essential requirement in the real world. Tune in for our presentation for further details.

I’m not a programmer yet, not until I learn to work with group

You know those crappy programmers who don’t know they are crappy? You know, they think they’re pretty good, they spout off the same catch phrase rhetoric they’ve heard some guru say and they know lots of rules about the “correct” way to do things? Yet their own work seems seriously lacking given all the expertise they supposedly have? You don’t know any programmers like that? Come one, you know, the guys who are big on dogma but short on understanding. No, doesn’t sound familiar?Then here are some signs you’re a crappy programmer and don’t know it:

• Java is all you’ll ever need.

You don’t see the need for other languages, why can’t everything be in Java? It doesn’t bother you at all to see Python or Ruby code that accomplishes in 10 lines what takes several pages in Java. Besides, you’re convinced new language features in the next release will fix all that anyway.(BTW, this can be almost any language, but right now the Java community seems most afflicted with this thinking)

• “Enterprisey” isn’t a punchline to you.

This is serious stuff dammit. “Enterprise” is not just a word, it’s a philosophy, a way of life, a path to enlightenment. Anything that can be written, deployed or upgraded with minimal fuss is dismissed as a toy that won’t “scale” for future needs. Meanwhile most of the real work in your office is getting done by people sending around Excel spreadsheets as they wait for your grand enterprise visions to be built.

• You are adamantly opposed to function/methods over 20 lines of code.

(or 30 or 10 or whatever number of lines) Sorry, sometimes a really long function is just what’s needed for the problem at hand. Usually shorter functions are easier to understand, but sometimes things are most simply expressed in one long function. Code should not be made more complex to meet some arbitrary standard.

• “OMG! PATTERNS!”

Developers who actively seek to apply patterns to every coding problem are adding unnecessary complexity. Far from being something you look to add to your code, you should feel bad every time you are forced to code up another design pattern, it means you are doing busy work that makes things more complex and is of dubious benefit. But hey, your code has design patterns, and no one can take that from you.

• CPU cycles are a precious commodity and your programming style and language reflects that belief.

There are plenty of problem domains where you have to worry a lot about CPU cycles (modeling/simulation, signal processing, OS kernels, etc), but you don’t work in them. Like nearly every software developer, your biggest performance problems are all database and I/O related. The only effect of optimizing your code for CPU is to shave 2 milliseconds off the time to get to the next multi-second database query. Meanwhile your development has slowed to a crawl, you can’t keep up with the rapidly evolving requirements and there are serious quality issues. But at least you’ll be saving lots of CPU cycles… eventually.

• You think no function/method should have multiple return points.

I’ve hear this from time to time, and usually the reason given is because the code is easier analyze. According to whom? I find simple code easy to analyze, and it often simplifies the code to have multiple returns.

• Your users are stupid. Really stupid.

You can’t believe how stupid they are, they constantly forget how to do simplest things and often make dumb mistakes with your applications. You never consider maybe it’s your application that’s stupid because you’re incapable of writing decent software.

• You take great pride in the high volume of code you write.

Being productive is good, unfortunately producing lots of lines of code isn’t quite the same as being productive. Users never remark “Wow, this software may be buggy and hard to use, but at least there is a lot of code underneath.” Far from being productive, spewing out tons of crap code slows down other devs and creates a huge maintenance burden for the future.

• Copy and paste is great, it helps you write decoupled code!

You defend your use of copy and paste coding with odd arguments about decoupling and removing dependencies, while ignoring the maintenance drag and bugs code duplication causes. This is called “rationalizing your actions”.

• You think error handling means catching every exception, logging it and continuing on.

That’s not error handling, that’s error ignoring and is the semantically equivalent to “on error next” in VB. Just because it got logged away somewhere doesn’t mean you’ve handled anything. Error handling is hard. If you don’t know exactly what to do in the face of a particular error, then let the exception bubble up to a higher level exception handler.

• You model all your code in UML before you write it.

Enthusiastic UML modeling is typically done by those who aren’t strong coders, but consider themselves software architects anyway. Modeling tools appeal most to those who think coding can be done in conference room by manipulating little charts. The charts aren’t the design, and will never be the design, that’s what the code is for.

• Your code wipes out important data.

You wrote some code that’s supposed to overwrite application files with new files, but it goes haywire and deletes a bunch of the user’s important data files.

Those were the days, my friends, when computers were big, slow and unappealing… And these computers were considered State of the Art in their time. Isn’t that how our grandchildren would think when they look at the laptop we’re using? With the dramatic rate of change of technology, sometimes it’s nice to just look back and realize how far we’ve gone.

It’s Thanksgiving! Let’s be thankful for whatever piece of technology you’re possessing, because a countless number of people had put a lot of effort in creating it. And remember, a computer is just as smart as the person who is using it. It’s a gift from God…use it well!

The new Zunes are Microsoft’s latest attempt to challenge Apple’s dynasty of digital music player. Current Zune family consists of: 4Gb and 8Gb flash-based Zune -”mini,” obviously attacking iPod Nano; and the 80Gb harddrive-based full-sized Zune – which will give the iPod Classic a run for its money. At least 6 others tech sites (CNET, Wired, Dean Takahashi, PCWorld and YahooTech) agree with me. it’s still hard to tell toward which way the scale will lean , but Microsoft is making very solid improvements on the brand.

PCMag
We’ll just come out and say it: The 80GB Zune trumps the iPod Classic…For the same $250 price as the 80GB iPod classic, the new Zune 80GB offers a much larger screen, FM radio, wireless player-to-player sharing, Wi-Fi syncing with your PC, and a rear panel that can be customized with some cool artwork–for free. Simply put, Apple is no longer the leader in the realm of hard drive-based players. While the Zune 80GB and the iPod classic are both outstanding devices, the Zune has more features–and it’s more fun.

CNET
The 80GB Zune cuts a much slimmer figure than its bricklike older brother. Measuring 4.3 inches high by 2.4 inches wide by 0.5 inch deep, Microsoft shaved some considerable bulk off the Zune’s thickness, while nearly tripling its capacity…we believe the latest crop of Zunes should finally take hold as a true iPod alternative. (83/100)

PCWorld
All of the new Zunes are built around a rounded touch-sensitive control that also doubles as a clickable d-pad-style controler, much like the Click Wheel on Apple’s iPods. Flick your thumb up or down the pad repeatedly, and you begin to build up momentum while scrolling through long lists. At any time, you can tap to stop the scrolling, though it will eventually come to stop naturally. In my experience, it’s a very fun way to navigate through a music collection, even in a long view of artists on the 80GB player…All in all, the 80GB Zune is a decent choice as an 80GB MP3 player. (no score at this time)

Wired
Video performance is very good, with the screen size really helping…Battery life didn’t meet the published specs of 20 hours for music and 4 hours for video with the Wi-Fi turned off. My rundown test on music was 18 hours, and video was 3.5 hours, which is, you know, fine…. Would I recommend the Zune? Yeah, I think I would. If you’re not invested in the iPod/iTunes ecosystem, it’s the most polished competitor I’ve used to date. Especially if you’re looking for a subscription service, the integration of player and service just crushes everyone else. (6/10)

YahooTech
…the most innovative new feature on the Zune: wireless syncing. Setup was a piece of cake: you just connect the Zune to your PC via USB, fire up the Zune software, and enable wireless syncing under the Settings menu. If your system is already connected to a wireless network, those settings are transferred to the Zune automatically—no need to key in the access point name or password…automatic syncing only works when the Zune is plugged into its charging dock. Overall, I thought wireless syncing worked pretty seamlessly, and I loved being able to sync new songs and playlists over the air (why can’t the iPhone or the iPod Touch do this?)

Dean Takahashi
The Zune Marketplace website looks better than iTunes because it feels less like a spreadsheet. It still uses the MTV Urge back-end but is completely redesigned…. All of these things represent improvements that allow Microsoft to claim that it is going its own way. Clearly, they aren’t copying Apple…At this rate of improvement, Microsoft will be a contender. But it has a long way to go before it keeps Steve Jobs up at night.

- Zune fans should be happy with the improvements, but even more, that the big new features are software based and free for everyone.

The Harddisk You’ve Been Waiting for!!!

1Gb of Storage: Now & 20 Years ago!

These two pictures really give us an idea of how drastically technology in general and the computer industry in particular have evolved…

The fastest Windows Vista notebook PCWorld Magazine tested this year is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. What an irony!!!

The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t pay less attention to the support of Windows on Mac. Boot Camp is about the only thing Apple ever does for this matter. In spite of being included with Leopard, seldom is Boot Camp mentioned during Apple’s promotion for Leopard.

Read full review of the Macbook Pro here.

For the first time in the history of computer (which is not that long), a release of a Linux distro causes major disturbances in the ocean of online news and media. Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon comes preloaded with tons of new features:  desktop search, fast user switching, Firefox plug-in support, much improved monitor support and configuration (at last), and a whole bunch of other minor tweaks and major improvements. Most noticable of which is the default integration of desktop eye candy Compiz Fusion. Joining Vista and Mac OS X, Ubuntu now supports 3D GUI with flashy effects, some of which I dare say even more impressive than Aqua’s or Aero’s. Moreover, there was no bloatware or anykind of annoying trialware.

I installed Gutsy right on the day it was releashed, and the hands-on experience truly exceeded my expectations. Everything worked like a charm out-of-the-box, included but not limited to the 3D GUI, wireless internet, sounds and even my bluetooth wireless mouse. Even though I had to install several codecs to play different music and movie format (for various legal reasons), the overall experience was too fantastic to even mention it. I really missed the snappiness of Ubuntu when I have to switch back to Vista to do programming.

When I was showing off my new flashy desktop to friends, one of them asked me: “Are you sure this stuff is free? I paid $300 bucks and my Windows laptop runs works slow like a slug. Shouldn’t I get what I paid for?” That was a question I as well as many other computer geeks can’t answer (Micro$oft, anyone?).

1. Linux is Behind the Times

One comment heard often is “Linux was five years behind XP, and it’s 10 years behind Vista!” Well, here are some facts:

• Windows began separating the basic user from the administrator account by default in Vista, over 15 years behind Linux.
• Windows added a firewall in 2001, over seven years behind Linux’s 1994 addition of ipchains.
• Linux was the first operating system with x86_64 support, beating Windows XP Pro x64 by two years.
• Windows added an attractive 3D accelerated graphical interface in Vista, a full year behind Linux’s XGL.
• Linux’s package management system can install, uninstall, and update software from one interface. Everything installed from Apache to OpenOffice and Quake 4 may be updated with one press. Windows has nothing like this on the road map.
  

2. Linux is Hard to Use

Many have never realized they were using Linux, and haven’t used it on a desktop. More troubling is the fact that lots of technically inclined persons tried Linux during the hype of the dot-com bubble, wrote it off and never revisited it. These along with other factors have left many thinking Linux is hard to use.

Well, enter the modern Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu. Ubuntu has an easy to use graphical interface that’ll remind Macintosh fans of OS X. Optionally many other interfaces are available ranging from Windows XP duplicates to interfaces focused on certain areas, such as low system requirements or high-end graphical effects. Beyond this many common tasks and features, ranging from system updating to system wide indexing, are all handled automatically by default.

This all extends to every level of Linux use. Novell’s Yast for example provides an easy to use GUI for everything from installing and updating software to managing DNS, email, and web servers, and basically anything else an administrator could think of. No command line or configuration files, unless desired.

To top it all off the installation is world class. The Ubuntu installation is done from within a fully functioning environment allowing web browsing, game playing, or or even the writing of a report all as the installation wizard ensures the install goes off not just without a hitch, but in a manor where the user doesn’t need to know anything beyond how to click next, unless they want to.

3. Linux isn’t Compatible with Anything

Everything from Maya and Oracle to Firefox run on Linux natively. Games ranging from the Doom, Quake, and Unreal Tournament series to smaller gems like Darwinia all run native on Linux as well.

Beyond native applications free (non)emulation software called WINE, as well as commercially supported options like CrossOver and VMWare, allow users to run everything from iTunes to MS Office and Photoshop, and the $5 a month Cedega lets gamers play hundreds of Windows only titles, from Battlefield 2042 to World of Warcraft.

Finally alternatives to Windows only software can replace current systems with little to no extra work. Apache can run ASP code, OpenOffice can read and save Microsoft formats, and every major distribution can join a domain, or just browse Windows file and printer shares, with ease.

Hardware support is equally incredible, in fact Linux supports more hardware than any other operating system. From hand-helds to mainframes and everything in between, including equipment considered legacy and no longer supported by Windows, the chances are if connected to a Linux box it’ll just work. Despite popular belief this does include a vast majority of consumer equipment as well, from digital cameras to iPods and 3D accelerators to wireless cards.

4. Linux isn’t Enterprise Ready / No One Uses Linux

Amazon and Google, would disagree as they’ve built their technology off Linux. PSA Peugeot Citroen, the second largest car manufacturer in Europe, also announced earlier this year they’ll be moving not only their 2,500 servers over to Linux, but also their 20,000 desktops. Other companies like IBM and Novell have reinvented themselves using Linux as the base, and government deployments from Brazil and India to China and others promise to add tens of millions of new users to the Linux community.

This isn’t even including the countless smaller government deployments like the city of Munich, the Indiana school system, or the U.S. Army’s Land Warrior program. Paired with millions of users via the One Laptop per Child initiative and massive academic deployments, this means that outside of the United States the world is positioning Linux to be the foundation of computing for their children.

Of course Linux works fine outside of the enterprise. Whether it’s browsing a website, chatting on a cellphone, checking email, getting cash from an ATM, or even just kicking some anti-lock brakes into action, there’s a fair chance Linux is in control.

Then again Linux also accounts for an estimated 70% of the super computing market. That means Linux has huge footholds in the embedded, server, and high-end market, leaving the desktop arena clearly in its sights.

5. Linux isn’t Professionally Developed or Supported

It’s true Linux started at the hands of a single college student, but that’s not true today. Linux is now a multi-billion dollar global technology. The vast majority of code is now contributed by professional programmers. Over the last year major code modifications have been submitted by IBM, Intel, Novell, VMware, and countless other big tech players. Beyond actively developing code others, such as Dell, have begun pushing vendors to develop higher quality Linux software. And this isn’t even going into the academic or government development, such as the security patch set developed and deployed by the U.S. National Security Agency for internal use, but available to anyone who wishes to use it, SELinux.

Support has taken on the same level of professionalism. Countless forums, IRC channels, and wikis are of course still available. But beyond that help can be sought from one of many books, certifications, or by contacting any one of the major players from IBM and Oracle to Novell and Red Hat. If 24/7 global support in a dozen different languages is needed, it’s just as available as free community support.

(http://www.mi80.com/node/1760)