Broken Windows Theory

June 15, 2006 Leave a comment

An interesting post from a former members of the Windows team on why he thinks Vista slipped. It's clear at this point that Vista is complicated… almost certainly more complicated than it needs to be. An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies). Circular dependencies?? While Microsoft may not like UNIX, it's clear they need to understand the “UNIX way”. It's what allows a decentralized and largely uncoordinated team of disparate developers to come together and write something like the Linux kernel. A modular and logical separation of functionality brought together by standard interfaces. Windows on the other hand seems to be a jumbled mess that requires all developers to understand far too much of the puzzle. It's also telling to see just how out of control the management scheme seems to be at Microsoft. I'd guess we'll see it change drastically after Vista actually ships, but by then it may be too late. Microsoft is losing a lot of ground here. Linux is steadily gaining both ground and mind share while OS X continues to deliver features that were cut from Vista long ago. Meanwhile, Google is looming from the other direction. And that's just the beginning. The lack of innovation is finally catching up to Microsoft. They are having an extremely tough time replacing the talent they lost during the bubble and it's showing. They're playing catchup in almost every place they compete. With even their proprietary formats, one of the tried and true forms of lockin, under fire things are looking shaky at best. Don't be too worried though – with $50 billion in the bank and an entrenched install base, Microsoft isn't going away any time soon. I think it's clear though that the king-fu death grip they've hand on the industry has loosened and will never be regained. Where exactly the company goes from here is the interesting question to me. I still wonder if they can fully grasp the potential that still remains with the current leadership in place.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Native Port of Google Earth Comes to Linux

June 14, 2006 Leave a comment

When I saw that a native port of Google Earth would be coming soon, I didn't think it would be that soon. With the help of icculus, Google has ported Earth to Linux using Qt and OpenGL. I've had a chance to download it onto a couple machine and for the most part, things seem to work OK. For the first native port ever, things look quite smooth (I'm sure icculus helped substantially). Here's hoping that the response on this port is positive enough to warrant more native ports. It's a great first step I think and an indicator of the progress Linux is making. One thing to note: at least for me, Google Earth seemed to crash almost immediately on any machine with an nVidia driver installed. After a little poking around, it seems like it doesn't like the libGL that comes with the driver (libGL.so.1.0.8762 for me). Pointing to the system version solved the problem immediately. You can do so with LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 ./googleearth. Enjoy!
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Reliability Survey: Windows Servers Beat Linux Boxes

June 7, 2006 Leave a comment

Well, we haven't seen one of these reports in a while. From the article:
Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime.
20 percent more annual uptime?!?!? What math was used to come to that conclusion? Well, they don't say…but it seems like a hefty number to me. Also from the article:
The Yankee Group made a point of stressing that the survey was not sponsored or supported by any server OS maker.
But, guess who did the survey? Laura DiDio. That's right – the same Laura DiDio that said SCO had a good case and the same Laura DiDio that – well, insert clearly biased claim here. The ascertation that this survey was unbias because it was “not sponsored or supported by any server OS maker” goes right out the Window when you see a name with that kind of track record behind it. I can't find the entire results of the survey and the linked article is quite lacking when it comes to details, but I'd guess it's like the last one they did, where each shop had to be running both operating systems to be part of the survey. When you get a bunch of Linux boxes setup by MCSE's it's no wonder why things came out like they did. The completely hilarious thing about this is that the Yankee Group has absolutely no business even talking about uptime when they can't keep their own web server up for more than 20 days. It incidentally runs Windows 2000.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Google Follows Through Follow up

June 7, 2006 Leave a comment

I recently covered the Google release of Picasa for Linux. As I noted then, it was great to see that Google followed though on their promise and release a major app on Linux, but it was a little disappointing to see that the support came via wine as opposed to a native port. I'm not sure if this was in the FAQ before, but if it was I missed it:
Q: Will more Google applications be ported to Linux under Wine?
If Picasa for Linux is successful, then other Google applications (and future versions of Picasa) may also be ported using Wine. (Google Earth won't be one of them, though; it will be a native Linux application.)
There is is, in writing on the Google site. Google Earth will be coming to Linux via a native port. I'd guess it's because Earth is a poor wine candidate, but hopefully the response to that port will be positive enough to justify them doing more native ports. Awesome.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

Lenovo To Shun Linux

June 7, 2006 Leave a comment

In an extremely odd move, computer maker Lenovo will not install or support Linux on any of its PCs, including Thinkpads and a series of new notebooks. Why is this odd? Well, the Thinkpad had an extremely large Linux following – one that IBM worked fairly hard to build. Go to any Linux convention and you'll see rows after row of Thinkpads and Apples. While it's no surprise they won't be installing Linux, officially calling it not supported is a big step. One has to wonder what IBM will use internally if Lenovo starts to move toward laptops that simply won't run Linux. That part alone could get interesting. But that's not the odd part though. Just a day before this announcement from Lenovo, the government-run Central Trust of China mandated for the first time that all desktop computers purchased from now on must be Linux-compatible. Those two items didn't seem to jive, so I started doing some more research. It seems Lenovo may now be back tracking a little, according to this CNet article. One has to wonder what happened here. Was there something more to the recent 1.2B dollar deal between Microsoft and Lenovo? Would the company really leave Linux completely unsupported despite a Chinese mandate that all government desktops be compatible? Hard to tell at this point, but I didn't like the deal when it happened and I am liking it less and less now.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Steve Ballmer Attempts to Fix Spyware

June 7, 2006 2 Comments

It looks like Steve Ballmer recently offered to uninfest someones computer and wasn't able to fix it, nor were a team of top Microsoft engineers. So says Jim Allchin in this article. Seems more like a marketing ploy than a true story to me. The odds the Ballmer would try this hard to fix a machine, and then a team of top engineers would not be able to fix it seems far fetched. However, it does show that Microsoft is aware of what's going on in the real world.
This really opened our eyes to what goes on in the real world,” Allchin told the audience.
Makes you think they may actually fix it this time, eh? To me the real story here is Windows Live OneCare. We now have a company selling a product with so many problems, that they are going to sell another product to fix the first product. The best part for Microsoft here is that the second product is a subscription product. No more having to get people to upgrade to a new version of Windows, they can just get the $50+ a year out of them for OneCare. The scary thing is, people will buy this. Of course, Symantec and Mcafee are hurrying similar products to market now, but it's going to be hard to compete with Microsoft in the space. Here's hoping that this situation will help open the average consumers eyes to just how bad the current situation has gotten.
–jeremy
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Filed under Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

TreoQuestions.org Officially Launched

June 6, 2006 Leave a comment

I am happy to announce that TreoQuestions.org is now out of beta and officially launched. I'm looking forward to the challenge of growing a site from scratch, while also continuing to build and grow LQ (which is just about to hit 250,000 registered members). While this blog will remain mostly Linux and Open Source related, I'll likely now throw a Treo tidbit out there from time to time, especially as Linux and the Treo converge.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source, Treo

Why the light has gone out on LAMP

June 6, 2006 Leave a comment

I have no idea how things like this make news sites like slashdot (or maybe I do I guess…). It's a couple paragraph rant that contains no real facts, huge generalizations and not much more. The fact is, MySQL and PHP are just fine if you use them correctly. Ask Yahoo! if they scale. The thing is both will allow you to be lazy, but that's your fault – not theirs. The fact is, with PHP5 and MySQL 4.1/5.x both offer feature rich solutions that are highly scalable. One thing I notice about PHP and MySQL bashers, is that they are stuck in MySQL 3.23 and PHP 4 land. Things like:
For years the MySQL developers were quite vocal that things like referential integrity, transactions, subselects, etc were little more than baggage that could be done better another way. Let me clue you in: you need these things or you need to let someone else handle your database work for you.
Let me clue you in – MySQL has supported these things for a long time now. Now, don't get be wrong – PHP and MySQL historically had major problems (very real problems – like magic quotes and register_globals being on by default) and still do have some problems. If you are going to bash them, at least know what you are bashing, as opposed to comparing them to BASIC..which is really a bit silly. PostgreSQL and Python are both great, but as always the right tool for the right job (and knowing what each tool actually does is a huge part of that).
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

May 27, 2006 Leave a comment

I found it interesting that 3 of the top 10 in the 25 Worst Tech Products were of Microsoft origin. The one that really sticks out to me is Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001), coming in at number 8. The fact that the most current browser from a company that has a huge majority share of the browser market is over 5 years old is almost unintelligible. Think of how much has changed on the web since 2001. That's redefining stagnation. Ask yourself if they'd be working so hard on IE 7 if Firefox hadn't seen its meteoric rise in popularity. Monopolies are bad – and this is just a single example of why.
–jeremy
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Filed under Main Page, Microsoft, Open Source

Google Follows Through

May 26, 2006 1 Comment

Following up on a topic I've talked about before, Google has released Picasa for Linux. As speculated though, it's not a native port, but a Wine rollup. It's great to see Google follow up on the promise they made to support Linux apps, but it is a bit unfortunate they went the Wine route IMHO. There are a lot of downsides. First, it *looks* a bit out of place after you run it, ie it looks like a Windows app stuck in Linux and has absolutely no Window Manager integration. The package includes a bundled version of Wine, so is a hefty 25M. If other companies follow, will we now need to have 30 different wine installs (since this does not use a standard win install, even if you have one). I'm hoping this isn't a dangerous precedent where Linux support equals Wine. Now, unlike some, I'm not a Wine basher and think it is a useful piece of software, but if Linux support starts to equal “runs in Wine” we will forever be intrinsically tied to Windows and that's a very bad thing. I'm hoping it's only used as a sort of temporary migration platform while they gauge demand and get more comfortable with Linux as an end user platform, but that remains to be seen. All in all though, kudos to Google for staying true to what they said and also for potentially furthering the exposure Linux gets. One truly great thing here is that Google contributed over 200 patches back to Wine, so even if you never touch Picasa it's very possible you may benefit from this. More info is available here and here.
FWIW I did download and install this and it does run very nicely for a Wine app. Google makes 3 downloads available – RPM, DEB and a Loki-based installer. They even contributed some patches back to Loki. It should be interesting to see if they continue this three release paradigm as they support more of their applications on the Linux desktop. This is certainly a sticking point area for Linux and how Google handles it could set a precedent for many.
–jeremy
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Filed under Linux, Main Page, Open Source

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