Brownyworld blog and a half a bag of crazy chicken

I am just now starting to learn Python and so far it has been great fun.

The main motivation to start for me has been to give back something to the community.

To help with something that Linux ails currently: to write a GUI for some tool that now works swell in the commandline. I am a lazy fellow, I don't like to work extra if I don't have to and some tasks can be performed much faster with a GUI than with the CLI.

I totally like the combination of a GUI frontend that uses a CLI command at the backend and stays totally transparent through it, while offering some automation and visual and abstraction eye candy.

So far, I am really excited about Python, for these reasons:

It is a high level language that is at the same time still pretty fast.

It is platform neutral, so code once and run everywhere.

It is vendor independent.

 

Python has all the features that made Visual Basic once so fashionable and popular. Now, Python has all advantages of VisualBasic, while having none of its drawbacks (that being: Visualbasic only runs on Windows, being proprietary).

Furthermore, it has not been endlessly extended like VB has been and this enables you to write some really elegant code.

It is object oriented, as they say, “everything is a object in python”.

What will throw you a nasty “type mismatch” error in other languages, Python handles very cool:

when printing a image object, you get

 

<Tkinter.PhotoImage instance at 0x00B4A170>

I have started a program called Frostybaby that tutors me in the snowmans dream method of Piano learning (see other blog posts) and scripting it in BASH has reached limits. I took it as a great opportunity to start learn Python and so far it is surprisingly easy.

The Tkinter GUI kit is a little nasty (it especially looks like puked on Linux ;-), but it is a place to start.

The program will surely be GPL code.

And best of all: In the Debian repositories, there must be at least half a million extensions and tie-ins for Python, where you can access everything from music players to database systems to Asterisk Phone servers. Very interesting and powerful, like having a remote control that will give you power to remote control EVERYTHING around you ;-).

 

Windows much needed weight-loss possible with Windows 7?

As you might have heard, with Vista Windows has become too fat. It does not run on anything but very fast machines. Netbooks? Forget it, the 400 pound gorilla of an OS sits on it and drops through the floor, taking astonished bystanders with it ;-)

So, this is announced with Windows 7. But is it possible at all?

I just had a very tasty read of this:

http://linux-watch.com/news/NS7955116339.html

And the author raises some good points:

I've been nonplussed the last few weeks as ordinarily sane compu-journalists opine that Windows 7 will somehow kill Linux on netbooks. This weekend, I had a chance to actually see XP running on an EEE 900, and I can tell you, Linux has nothing to fear from Redmond.

During my 13-year career as a compu-journalist, I have seen the pattern over and over. Microsoft pre-announces a product years before it will ship. Then, people who have built careers supporting Microsoft's products -- whether IT staff or journalists -- slavishly salivate, as if on cue. Purchase decisions are deferred, per recommendations of the trade press.

Harharhar! Yeah, that is EXACTLY how it is done. Amazing, I have never heard anybody put it so concise!

Next, the product is delayed. Purchase decisions are further deferred. Nothing can sway the devotion of the true Microsoft believers. And they think Linux "fanboys" are partisan!

Yeah, I guess nothing can sway real conviction. Or shall I say: habit? Habit surely applies to both Linux and Windows fanboys.

But to the defense of Linux advocates I can say this: they at least know what they are talking about. They started off knowing nothing but Windows and then switched over to Linux, now knowing both. Typical Windows fanboys will not touch any other OS with a 20 foot pole. Yeah, right, they have installed Linux one time or another and laughing about KDE or Gnome interface, comparing it to a world where everything should look and work like Windows (and decided that it does not measure up). But they don't get Linux, barely scratched the surface and know nothing about the power hidden under the hood.

Today, it turns out, XP is hardly usable on netbooks. What makes people think the next version of Windows will actually get better? Microsoft has never in its history delivered an OS upgrade that did not require SUBSTANTIALLY more resources than its predecessor. Is that really going to change? Really?

Good point there. This has never happened. And in my judgment, it won't. Microsoft just does not know how. Windows is a monolith, everything connects to everything else, everything must be compatible back to the last 8 years. All that legacy code is inside and it makes it fat and slow.

 

If it were true that “Vista was redesigned from ground up” as I hear the Microsoft marketing fanfare and its loudspeakers (people echoing it), how come Vista is SO HUGE? There is virtually nothing in it and yet it is larger than a fully configured Ubuntu install, with OpenOffice (around 600 megs), Gimp Graphic Suite, several high class editors,  Firefox (and 3 other browsers) and tons of other programs that Vista has not installed by default.

 

Nothing short of a total redesign of Windows will remedy this weight problem.

 

Now a total redesign (like Apple did wisely with OS X) takes:

1. a lot of time
   
2. causes much and/or total incompatibility (can you say "rewrtite all software"?)

 

Now MS acts like Windows 7 is ready, which surely negates 1. If they truly slimmed it down, it will cause 2, even more so because current programs are not written to accept anything than the fat GUI laced Windows experience.

We are seeing this in the Windows 2008 server edition, in which someone at MS had the glorious idea of reducing it to the command line (I want to hear Windows admins swear at that. Heck, that is the main reason they won't touch Linux: forced to use the CLI. Talk about alienating your customer base)

Fearing a virus or other problem, we took the machine in to a local shop specializing in fixing Windows OS installations.

...

Ouch, THAT is an issue that stings home: Ever realized how much power a antivirus software saps? Ever thought about how that will slow down a normal netbook into the glacial growth-speed of a tree?

 

....

XP is just not optimized for low-resource machines, it seems.

 

Heck no, it isn't. It is not even modular, so you cannot just remove components to speed it up. And Windows 7 will be? How long did they work on it that betas are already available now? My verdict: It is a cook up of Vista, not at all different (maybe some changes to the skin).

 

 

And I have written this blog some time ago, and am posting it now, like 15 days later. And look at that, somebody has already half confirmed my assumption:

 

http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_big_windows_7_lie

 

So, in the brave new world of netbooks, the software is not really baked yet, neither on the community-supported Linux side nor on the pre-installed Windows side.

 

That much is sure. Even Linux is not really 100% ready. It is just too new. But the eeePC does work and it is simple to use.

 

If you buy a netbook preinstalled with Linpus or Xandros or another distro actually tuned for use on a netbook, chances are the experience will be very good.

Linux has a long history of working better on lower-powered machines.

And there is no arguing about that, no matter how hard you try. It is a fact.

That is because at every level of the stack, from kernel and C library to productivity application layer, there are low-footprint alternatives that enable expert users and Linux system integrators to tune Linux for their needs.

Yes, and that is foremost why companies use Linux for it, since Microsoft is doing the same mistake that Apple did when they lost the OS market to Microsoft in the 80'ies and 90'ies: They sit on their technology, nobody can do anything to it without their permission.

 

And since MS has a million sausages frying in the fire, it takes too long for anything usable to crystallize. The OEMs sidestep MS and Linux gives them the power to innovate and they use it.

 

Remember that there were no clones of Macs? (except that little experiment) That Apple insisted that they build them all? Well, the PC compatible market took off much stronger because it allowed clones and competition became fierce. Microsoft should open Windows, give out the source code, open source it. Only like that they will be able compete with Linux on the mobile market.

 

Given that flexibility, and netbook-specific builds from Debian, Ubuntu, Puppy, and others, I'm guessing that community Linux will get fixed for netbooks long before Windows does.

Yes, exactly! What is Windows CE and mobile known for? For its slowness.

 

What was the comment of a first time user of Android? „It is faster than than Windows Mobile!“

 

Microsoft will not get this problem solved. They will have to change Windows so much to run on these little machines that it will not be Windows anymore. Linux on i386 (Intel Atom) is still Linux and code can be recompiled very easily. The only thing that has to be considered is the GUI that needs to be small-screen ready.

Not that Microsoft professionals are likely to take notice.

 

Well, no, they won't. For them there is just no alternative. They will stick with Windows no matter what. I guess it is like with us Linux professionals, on that we know what we are talking about (knowing both systems in deep) and that we have our destiny in our own hands and not in some megalomaniac Company that does not care the least about a user.

 

 

The best jokes are always the ones that life writes, that are partly true and make you laugh because it is just too ridiculous.

 

Microsoft is in my favorite personal joke producer. Yes, and the people that consider Windows to be secure.

I wonder what definition of secure they have. Not mine, that is for sure.

 

One of the delicious jokes about security vulnerabilities in Windows are, that every time you can exploit anything, bang, you are admin.

When comparing with Linux, the joke becomes even funnier:

Yes, there are more vulnerabilities in Linux than in Windows. And yes, they are much less severe. The often amount to nothing at all.

 

Let's take a example:

Editor xzy has a vulnerability, that if you could get a user to run some supplied code and do that and that, then THEN you can take up his privileges and maybe, maybe from there become root some day.

So translated into a visual example:

In this fortress that is the OS, if you can trick the guard to open the window while you distract him hacking the bell, which rings incessantly, you could open his door and get into the guard house, from where you just have to get through the corridors of the entry-buildings, not getting caught, not seen in the video cameras and THEN, open the door to the main building, which is barred and locked.

Well, the joke? In Windows, do the trick with the bell and bingo, the main door, the huge main entrance opens up in front of you and you are IT!

And the Windows security log will be... as always... EMPTY!

 

Hihihihihi!

 

Want to join me laugh really hard? Well, it has been like this for years and years.

Let's see the real life example, brand new and fresh:

 

http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA08-297A.html

 

Systems Affected

• Microsoft Windows 2000

• Microsoft Windows XP

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003

• Microsoft Windows Vista

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008

Hmm, ok, meaning EVERYTHING in the Windows world ;-)

Can somebody say monoculture?

 

Overview

A vulnerability in the way the Microsoft Windows server service handles RPC requests could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges.

Oh? SYSTEM privileges? How so?

II. Impact

A remote, unauthenticated attacker could execute arbitrary code or cause a vulnerable system to crash. Since the Server service runs with SYSTEM privileges, an attacker could take complete control of a vulnerable system.

Impact? Totaled! Deep impact, a OS killer!0

Hahahahaha!! So the service runs with SYSTEM privileges!! Hihihihihihi! Precious, just precious!!! Translation: The security guard that patrols the outside of Fort Knox has the master key to the vault dangling from his keyring. Get that guy and you got the whole complex !

Sorry my outburst, but I am burdened with security-training, holding the certificate as CISSP and people that know me remember my lectures about ARCHITECTURE of Operating Systems and why Windows is insecure by design by the way it was built. (a humble hut that was retrofitted with steel doors, but... still a hut with straw walls ;-)

Have you ever heard about the concept of least privilege? Well, Linux and Unix systems abide by it and especially their services that run on it. An Apache server has as little privileges as possible. Exactly because an attacker might take it over in the worst case.

Now in Windows, writing the year 2008, how the heck a service is still allowed to still run with SYSTEM privileges beats me. It is just unconceivable.

 

The cause? Compatibility. And that is standing on bad architecture.

Hahahahahaha!

Great joke people. I am just writing this down here, so next time some Wintard is uttering the line „it is just not true... All OSes are equally insecure, even Linux... blablabla... Windows has improved so much, Vista is a complete redesign... blablabla... now Windows also runs services as separate users....“

ROFL!!

I love how the above exploit has just annulled wonderfully transparent all the uninformed blabla. Please, people, if you need to say such things, do realize that you are spreading Microsoft Marketing, but not facts, nothing that you can call engineering and information technology. Just Marketing!

Accusing me of being smug? Of not being part of the solution? Well, here is my recommendation to Microsoft: A complete tear down and rebuild of Windows is the only thing that will help.

This time with proper architectural planing!

 

I just read a very cool paragraph:

Mark Shuttleworth and Matt Zimmerman of Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu Linux, hosted a telephone press conference this morning. The official occasion is the upcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex. Mark and Matt gave a lot of good release information, but the main impression I came away with was the breadth and depth of Canonical's vision for Linux. Mr. Shuttleworth seems to see Linux as a launch pad for all kinds of useful tools and activities. Not a prefab path to riches (all that free code!), nor the biggest free candy store on the planet (free as in freeloader, mine all mine!), nor even a way to lock in the suckers and then make them pay and pay and pay, but a platform for building cool productive tools for everyone.

I especially like the things in bold, that is the standard strategy of proprietary software: Make the customer PERCEIVE your software as high value, making it OK to charge a ton of money for it. If you make it free, make sure it is a bait to lure the customer in, then bind him with a classical vendor-lock in, making it impossible or hard to migrate away to competition and MILK HIM SILLY.

Let's get one thing out of the way right now-- Mr. Shuttleworth does not believe that anyone will ever make money selling desktop Linux, and that the era of selling software is winding down. He's not the first person to say this, I just mention it because desktop Linux is such a hot topic, and there is so much demand for OEM and Tier 1 Linux desktops.

I was wrong initially to assume that Linux would be a cash cow. Heck, I am a RedHat customer and yes, there is not that much money in OpenSource and Linux for an investor. But only if you see it the wrong way.

The reason why Linux as an example does not pay as an investor is because it gives all the benefit to the customer, the user of it. Not the owner. You cannot own it, at least not in the way that you own it and somebody else has to pay you to use it.

So Linux is a great benefactor only if you use it yourself. And for that I am so grateful, having servers purring away without problems, being able to set up a laptop or desktop with Ubuntu or Debian or whatever, paying NOTHING for it, yet reaping the benefit of a full super OS. No CD Keys, no registration or activation torture. No paying for every feature you use. No fancy „pay more and get a more functional OS“ (in Windows parlance: A Vista version we did not castrate on purpose)

How silly is it to do a full product, like a remote control for example, and sell it with most of the buttons deactivated and offer them activated for extra money. Or a car that does have ABS installed, but only when you pay extra money is it unlocked in a garage.

Well, that is why Microsoft is doing with Vista, as silly as it seems.

It is good business of course and I don't mind anybody doing it. A customer getting into a relationship with a seller is everyones free choice. But realize that you will never get as much benefit from such a product than a competition one in OpenSource, simply because OpenSource is built for you, 100%. It is made by people for people.

A proprietary product is made primarily for the company, not for you! For their profit, which you have to pay them. Compared to OpenSource it is a unfavorable deal.

Except, there is a catch!

And it is the following: If you are lazy, unwilling to learn anything new or are opposed to choice („...which editor should I take, there are 6 different ones. Gosh, I just am tired of always making choices...“), then you will be very unhappy with pretty much anything OpenSource and you should go on giving your hard earned cash to an ordinary (charging) company.

On a last note: Operating Systems will be free sooner or later. It will be perceived absurd to pay for it. Windows will have to be free too, it will be forced to it. Software will still be pay-ware, but nobody will dream of paying for the mere platform to run it.

 

 

No, I don't mean the OSCAR initiative

http://www.theoscarproject.org/ , where some guys decided that it is time to open source car production. In the highly proprietary environment of car manufacturers, this has a hard stand. And consumers also don't care the least how their cars work, what makes them work or how much they overpay for it.

 

They practice „ignorance is bliss“ and as absurd as it is to some people to suggest that a „welded shut hood“ is a good thing, these people do believe it. Why, even when you have a break down, the friendly man from the AAA will take you in tow.

How was it again? „The ones that don't value freedom are doomed to lose it.“

I guess in this case this will be true, because repair stations have been making a hell of a extra buck with overpriced repairs on women for the last century and looks like men won't be far behind.

 

There is an equation that states, that the less you know about a machine, the more a seller/manufacturer is going to rip you off repairing it.

 

Anyway, for the record, I will be one of the first buying an OSCAR when it becomes available. It will be a feasible cost effective car, not sporting the fanciest designs and features, but have replaceable, standardized parts that make upkeep very cheap and more reliable than normal cars.

 

I currently service my own car, just to know how the whole thing works and it pays huge dividends when a repair garage tries to rip me off. But the power of knowledge works wonders: If they can tell that you know about it, just replacing the shocks and telling you „because they had to be replaced“ is a dangerous proposal. You know that they were still fine and they can expect that I find out about it, which is going to be very embarrassing. I don't dick somebody when I fix his computer, even though I could, knowing how little people know about pretty much anything. It is work ethics, things you just don't do, even if you got away with them.

 

Anyway, BMW has announced that they will go open source with their in-vehicle platform.

 

http://www.autonews.com/article/20081023/COPY/310239911/-1/SUPPLIERS

 

Looks like it took a long time for them to realize that they sucked in a big and extensive way in producing anything that resembled an OS. And an OS you do need with the complexity that in-vehicle systems have today. Microsoft is just waiting to conquer another area and murder a former business partner, now turned victim. So they stay away from the Redmond giant, as the phone industry did (windows mobile is a marginal platform for mobile devices).

Now if BMW does what they say the do, a dream will come true: I will be able to pick and choose and install free open source programs in my car. They OS might even be standardized, so you won't have to learn everything from scratch with every different car you drive.

Exciting things like a data uplink to your servers at home, where a GPS receiver tracks the position of the car, the engine conditions, error codes etc and sends it out into the Internet to your server, where you can monitor and run statistics to see if your car is running smoothly or if it is guzzling too much gas and a tune up is in order. Or tracking your car when it is stolen, rivaling a service that now costs you dearly (Onstar for example).

 

Well, so far about the dreams, let's get down to the hard reality:

It probably won't happen.

As much as I dream, I am a realist and pragmatist and watch how the world spins, how it seems to be populated and dominated by people that have as much vision and foresight as your average paper clip ;-)

 

The BMW scheme needs 2 things to work:

 

1. Car producers have to work together, developing a open system that all others can use.

2. Accepting what open source is and lay off the proprietary “I am going to sell it for a million” temptation.

 

And as I know the car manufacturers, I doubt that they have what it takes to pull this off. I see their products all the time and I think they are not aware that they are very sub standard and highly overpriced. They will have a hard time working together for point 1, cooperating. Competition (what they usually do) is the opposite of cooperation. It takes realizing that they got a problem in common, that currently no car manufacturer has a attractive price competitive in-car entertainment system and neither will they have soon. Without working together, this is not going to change.

 

Point 2 is not easy neither, because proprietary companies often get scared at the prospect of openness and sharing code. ”Another manufacturer will profit from something I developed? Heck, no way!” Proprietary is the opposite of sharing.

You don't have to do it with the GPL, that all changes have to be shared again with everybody. You can also develop something together, when the project is finished, everybody gets the code, a minimal platform with plugins and can go on from there. Then, further development is close sourced.

 

You can use the freeBSD license if you don't want to give anything back to the community. For me I always called that license the suicide license (for the original programmers), but more on that another time.

 

There is not something for nothing: If you want to stand on the shoulders of giants (and use GPL code), you can use a gigantic library of code, but since the GPL lifted you up into the clouds, instead you having to build your own ladder or invent a plane from scratch to get you up there, what you build on that foundation will have to be accessible via the GPL too.

It just works like you cannot take a Shakespeare work and sell it like you wrote it.

 

The GPL enables companies to develop amazing stuff that they would not have been able without: TomTom does amazing navigation systems, but has no clue about operating systems and kernels and so they used Linux to stand on and did their thing.

 

http://www.autonews.com/article/20081023/COPY/310239911/-1/SUPPLIERS

 

Jim Buczkowski said that Ford, through its partnership with Microsoft Corp. that produced the Sync system, already has 280,000 vehicles on the road with an open system.

 

Yeah, if you consider Guantanamo Bay an open facility? If you consider a locked safe open? Well, I guess there are many definitions of open. Like there are many definitions of white: Some whites are even darker than black ;-) *grin*

So far nothing that Microsoft has produced can be viewed as open. People that claim that have listened too much to MS marketing, which now uses open in everything, because it is fashionable.

 

MS marketing scout: “Market polls have shown that people are migrating over to open source because it is perceived as open”

MS marketing boss: “Ok, in this case we need to name our products accordingly, including the open term. Like we did with the “secure” and “security” term to make people believe our products are secure.”

 

It is a scary prospect that some people (heck, a lot of them) believe what marketing tells them. Just because I tell you that I am a very good guy, that I do so many great things for other people does not make it so. Only actions can be verified and be fact.

Since the second world war, we live in an age of information manipulation. Just having information is not enough. Being informed is fraught with pitfalls.

 

My favorite line always is: Where is this information from?

If you know the source, you probably can establish if there is a commercial vested interest in bending and manipulating the information.

 

Anyway, I applaud BMWs efforts: As a German company they do know more what OpenSource can do. If they pull it off, they (and their allies) will have the sexiest in-car entertainment system on the market. The competition is not hard to beat, there is none!

 

Just be careful to consult your legal team on how you can use code and what, if, you have to give back to the community (make the source code accessible). Companies get sued when they freeload on the GPL and penguins have sharp teeth as some have surprisingly found. Free does not mean worthless and most authors will fight tooth and nail to prevent you from abusing their code commercially. It might then even be something that you will not understand, it won't be a matter of money (and license payments as you know it), it might that the author prohibits you to use their code all together. Pride can get in the way of good business if an author feels that you have been rude by abusing their license.

 

But it can be done, the community will be helpful, just ask questions. http://www.groklaw.net/ is a good first stop and they will be friendly in educating you how the whole thing works.

I don't know about you, but I have been wondering what Microsoft wants to accomplish with their „get friendly with OpenSource“ campaign.

 

There is no way in my opinion how Microsoft can profit from OpenSource, since OpenSource it the Anti-Microsoft, the very thing they are not.

 

OpenSource is the undoing of MS, because it is free and open software and Microsoft has a business model on selling overpriced closed source software.

 

So now, why do they cuddle up to the open source community? What is their motive?

Some deranged and not well informed individuals tell me „Hey, it is the new Microsoft, things have changed, they are good now, they want the community to benefit. They want to share!“

 

Heck, don't these people read news? I was not born yesterday, I was born a lot earlier than that and I have followed the strategies and tactics of Microsoft with great interest: they are an unique company, rude, merciless and very much.... like the Borg. It is no surprise that many IT professionals that use and love Microsoft products predict that sooner or later everything will be overrun and all software and OSes will be Microsoft products. “Heck, they are just that good! How else did Bill Gates get so rich?“

 

Yeah, it is that simple, is it? Might makes right?

Well, I will not go into the details above, people that read news and have been doing so for the last 15 years do know how Microsoft operates. And as long as at least one founding member is working in the company, policies will not change. PR will, though, to shake off some bad publicity and image in the public in general that Microsoft is evil, a power mongering giant that stamps out competition for breakfast. A super capitalist company that does not tolerate peaceful coexistence, but is bent on wiping it all out, no matter the cost or effort.

 

What is your strategy, Balmy?

Anyway, we informed people and Linux advocates have been wondering what Microsoft is up to now.

OpenSource? Heck, if they OpenSource Windows or Office, they won't make a dime off it anymore and due to their business model, forcing people with a monopoly like model to overpay for their software, it will soon be all red in the balance sheet and a steep ride down into oblivion.

 

I see two possibilities to their strategy:

 

1. They just want to create good PR, looking like the do OpenSource, but they don't Who will ever see through a crazy complex license? That it says OpenSource on the contents, but in fact just contains the same old restrictions and lock-in.

2. They are out on a new way to exterminate OpenSource: Enter the rat poison. Make sure the community gobbles up their code and then, when people are using it, when it is part of Linux, then sue everybody till their ears ring and they come back to mom and pop Microsoft, regretting their detestable defection.
    

I count on the second one, although it is so much more difficult to pull of. In case MS has not noticed, there are great many intelligent people out there that form the OpenSource community and they can read between the lines, have keen minds to look for things that might potentially bother and annoy them, like... say.... license restrictions.

That is why we use OpenSource in the first place. I know that your typical Windows user does not care at all about the freedom of choice, but we Linux advocates do very much.

I can do whatever I want with Linux. If I feel like running it on my washing machine, I will.

Your precious cellphone does not support this or that application? Well, mine will, no assurance of the provider needed and no block or bar from their neither possible.

 

The demise of SCO

 

Now I wonder if Microsoft knows what happened to SCO. They do have much deeper pockets than SCO did, but the PR damage that would result if Microsoft starts suing OpenSource companies and the ones that use it? Disastrous

 

They have no idea how people would love to make a statement of putting up stickers like „Stop Microsoft“ or „Don't support the big innovation roadblock and inhibitor“ and go out of their way to move all their stuff to Linux. I predict that there would be a huge boost for gaming on Linux. Now many people (like myself) use Windows for gaming, I think they would so some extra effort to get free of that last dependency.

 

 

http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/columnists/doubletake/furber081022.asp?S=Software&A=SFT&O=google

 

In at least two interviews with IT publications this week, Horacio Gutierrez reaffirmed that the company intends to try and force open source companies to sign patent licensing deals or face lawsuits.

"If every effort to license proves not to be fruitful, ultimately we have a responsibility to customers that have licenses and to our shareholders to ensure our intellectual property is respected," he told Cnet News.

 

Do go and sue! I would very much like Microsoft to take on one of the biggest (tech) patent holder in all the world, IBM, and... a big Linux advocate. When it comes to patent litigation, IBM wrote the book on and and sued companies out of their a** before Microsoft was even founded. ;-)

 

Daddy IBM will move, when Microsoft bullies the little penguin the schoolyard. MS will force their hand.

 

Microsoft seems to be bent on garnering bad PR.

 

For I = 1 to 10, high tech s***!!

 

The intellectual property that is trying Gutierrez's patience is not any line of copyrighted code, nor any trademark or trade secret. It's a bunch of patents that Microsoft claims it owns. In the bizarro-world that is US patent law, companies can get government-granted monopolies on procedures that are taught to programmers at high school as if they were some sort of valuable asset.

 

Yeah, there was a defacement once of the SCO website, where it stated:

We own all your code, give us all your money.

 

It stated that they held a patent on the for i = 0 to x ; next i loop, which is obviously extreme high tech stuff, brand new and millions, heck... billions (why am I understating it?) went into developing it. ;-) *grin*

 

But open source vendors are a different kind of enemy all together. If Microsoft sued a smaller Floss vendor for patent infringement, it would invite a kind of mutually assured destruction from any one of the big vendors who own patents that Microsoft itself infringes and hasn't licensed. If Microsoft wants to sue Red Hat, it should get ready for a sledgehammer in reply from IBM, which has more patents than anyone else on the planet – and happens to be a big fan of open source.

 

So, Microsoft will not sue, that is my prediction. They can't. Otherwise they would have done so already. They want to taint the OpenSource cheese, let the community take the poison into their hole and die from eating it, so to say. You could call this infiltration.

 

There are other risks to patent lawsuits: it gets things out in the open. If Microsoft were to sue a Linux vendor for, say, infringing on its super-secret patented method of checking variables, it would have to say what that method is. The community would then immediately hunt down code that predated the application and thus invalidate the patent. If no such code existed and the defendant was actually infringing, it would probably take days for its engineers to work around the method and make the lawsuit irrelevant. ...

 

Exactly, my word. Do you know how easy it is to change some „potentially infringing“ code in the Linux kernel and post an update, making all Linux servers and clients download the new kernel package, install it and be complaint tomorrow? Yes, you might not have known, we can actually do that, with one command (or even automatically) replace the system core and not feel a thing about it. That is what you call modular system design. It would make updating much more interesting: instead of dodging security exploits, we would dodge tags and hand holds that Microsoft tries to use to sink Linux.

 

 

So what's a patent-holder to do? The way Gutierrez seems to think will work is to threaten to sue – but without actually doing anything – and hope that vendors who don't want to call its bluff will be scared enough to sign a licensing deal.

Microsoft continually refuses to say what the patents are – you're just going to have to trust that they're valuable. From an InfoWorld interview this week:

 

The sad story is that there are casualties already, vendors that took the bait and now have lost all credibility in the OpenSource community. In a world where profits are irrelevant, but honor and respect is everything, I don't see much hope for companies like Novell. They will be casualties of war, sidling over to the „enemy“ and losing all support from their former brothers in arms, only to realize that their new „friends“ only wanted to use them too and then let them to die. Divide and conquer, that seems what Microsoft has done, knowing that if Novell works together with them, that the Linux community will cast them out.

I could go on and on. The article (see link above) in an interesting read. If you have followed the SCO care, even funny and hilarious. Microsoft does use the same gags and joke SCO used on the lines of:

Interviewer: „So, OpenSource does violate patents that Microsoft holds?“

MS: „Yes, it does“

Interviewer: „Ok, can you give as an example of which one(s)?“

MS: „Unfortunately, that is top secret.“

 

Hihihihi! SCO was much fun, let's get some popcorn and watch!

I use Linux for audio production. It is pretty cool to take your recording studio in your laptop, have your grand piano ready to deploy if you find some decent speakers to work with.

 

Unfortunately, Ubuntu, the new hope for the Linux desktop has deeply disappointed me in my audio making efforts. I have grappled with Kubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 (Hardy) and could not get Jack to work without sky high latency.

This is on a Thinkpad T61 with 2.4 dual core CPU, 2 Gigs of RAM.

 

But on Hardy, the latency felt like it was a 233 MHz MMX.

 

To say it bluntly, Audio is a total mess on Linux.

I am a total fan of Jack and how it neatly connects audio streams and how it logs error messages and is so transparent.

But then it gradually goes worse: Open Source Sound System is single channel only, which is to say, a little over nowadays.

Alsa, the bottom layer that directly connects to the sound card (like OSS) seems to frequently break in Ubuntu, that is at least my experience. And it does not log one bit of anything to any log, so you won't know what is going on and what is going wrong.

 

Now as the sound system landscape on Linux would not be in a sorry mess already, there are some people that had to make things worse:

 

As it turned out, they decided to define a new sound system layer, called Pulse Audio in Hardy, a LTS Ubuntu (long term support), i.e. a Ubuntu that is supposed to be more mature and stable than your normal releases. Go check out the net, there are countless posts of people having upgraded from 7.10 and found their Audio crippled and gone.

 

Nasty breakage!

The Linux hater blog is usually pretty abrasive and just needlessly angry at the (Linux) world in general, but in this little sniplet he gets it on the spot:

 

100. Fedora led the way in incorporating Pulse Audio before it was ready, breaking audio for thousands of users. Then because open source is about copying good ideas and bad ones, a ton of other distros adopted it as well. Amazing guys. In a way, you've spread bad code that breaks audio on thousands of computers faster than a virus could have. And it's immune to antivirus!

 

If you had audio break from an upgrade, you know this kind of pain and I know I have felt it. We foremost want out computers to work, if something breaks in software, we still need that functionality.

 

I was saving this one until this article became free on LWN.net. It's awesomeness is truly unparalleled.

 

Let me attempt to summarize.

 

A) PulseAudio needs to work with existing applications, so it implements an ALSA emulation layer, except, it's not complete. Only 70% of ALSA applications work. So it's like, totally ready.

 

B) So, in the true open source fashion, you should port your app to be a native PulseAudio client. Except that you can't. There's this yet-another-audio-library called libsidney, but it's not ready yet. (Hmm, this sounds familiar...)

I wonder who made that decision to include Pulse Audio in its current state. We get breakage in ALSA, we don't need MORE breakage please!

 

For me ALSA is a necessary evil, because I need it for Jack to run. But as said before, I have big trouble working with a software that does not do any logging. It is like treating a patient that is mute and having now diagnose equipment. How can you tell the patient's condition if he/she cannot talk?

 

When it works, I find that audio on Linux is better than on Windows. On Windows, the sound server (if you can call it that, because nobody knows where it is and what it is) does not do any logging neither, never had, never will and people don't even dream about that it should.

Now if you get into trouble in Windows XP for example with audio production, if a driver behaves weird, you are suddenly unable to control the volume of a sound card, you are in deep sh***, because there is no way to troubleshoot the problem. Reinstall Windows is the treatment that Dr. Browny is going to recommend, since that seems to be as professional as troubleshooting on Windows is getting.

 

Now in my case, I gave up on Kubuntu and went where I always go when I need something that just works, reliably and stable: Debian.

It is not the best distro to install on a Laptop, but audio works on it.

And nobody in Debian would dream of putting a half cooked alpha (or even beta) sound system in a production distribution. That is why we have SID (unstable)

 

Ubuntu needs an unstable branch

We have to remember that Ubuntu is not only set for open source software, there are closed source companies trying to port their software to Linux. They seem to have very little knowhow how Linux works, how it is made (and fail to find the documentation and training on it).

Now the ones that do port, find their software broken in the next release by something like Pulse audio. This is not really cool, because it puts off these companies and in the case of gaming, this is a big problem (since there is hardly none on Linux). If you knew that game xzy works on 7.04, it was barely fixable on 7.10 and then totally breaks in 8.04, your investment is futsch, kaputt and gone and you are never going to buy another game from that company and hence that company will not find paying customers on Linux.

 

In the 21^th century, there is a futuristic thing called “directly installing from the internet” with apt-get

Yes yes, companies need to be more flexible, offer repositories for Ubuntu (gheeee whiz, they probably still think a .MSI is a high tech piece of package system) and keep up to date what is changing and be more flexible with their code. Code can be written that it tolerates some changing environments. Closed source companies are a bit challenged there, they code once and assume (the windows way) that thing will not change for the next decade. This is also a big cancer on Windows, inhibiting much progress that has moved to Linux, bloating the OS and slowing it down.

 

I do what is right, not what is convenient.

But I guess the main problem is this: maintainers and the “people in power” in certain Linux areas, the decision makers (if you can call it that) just do what they want, they don't talk with anybody, they don't consider their actions. They do what is “right” in their mind and when it breaks things, it is not their problem, but the problem of the program that cannot keep up and adjust to the new situation.

 

In the case of pulse audio, this is awful, since the change is done in the production release of Ubuntu. This must never be done, since this is a public beta test, but not calling it beta. People expect that things work moderately well, when they upgrade to a new release, not these huge changes. And huge changes always create breakage, since bugs have to be first found. For this, we do betas.

 

Windows Vista was the same garbage: code that was still beta, released under a production label. I understand that people get angry if their sound card stops working or their printer or scanner. Let's not forget that there is that thing called productivity: Using a computer to be a means to an end.

 

There is fun stuff, trying out stuff, research and development in my book, trying a prototype. Checking out new features.

 

And then there is work. The more we rely on computers, the more breakage kills us, literally.

I just recently realized how devastating it was to not have my broadband internet connection for half a month. No mail, no telephone, no way to pay the bills. Horrible.

 

And as it stands currently, (K)ubuntu is not trusted in my book to still work the way I expect it to after an upgrade. Too many times, I lost vital functionality after going to a newer (supposedly better) version.

 

For stability, Debian still rules

So for this reason I keep systems at a release that I know works and then do a test before I migrate. And that is why I still use Debian for servers, since Ubuntu just can't give me the stability that Debian can. The Ubuntu developers just seem to be thinned out over too many releases to be fixing bugs for good in one release.

If you use your server as an internet gateway like I do, doing NAT and firewalling, failure and breakage is not an option, but a catastrophy. Same goes with my piano learning with the snowman's dream. I take lessons over the internet, with a web cam. I use Linuxsampler for my gigasampler piano. I have not upgraded that workstation out of fear that latency might go through the roof and my piano becoming unusable. I pay for these lessons and no (Linux e-)piano to play on, no lessons.

 

Final applause

So after all the criticism, I still say: Go, Ubuntu! There is much good in this distro, it is poised to be the greatest Linux desktop distro ever, but focus on that (so far empty) niche. No HPC version, no IBM mainframe “big-butt server” version, just focus on what Ubuntu does best (the desktop). Everybody diversifies and everybody does badly in what he does not know best. We need a proper 3D system, an configurable X-server, a bug report tool that pools bugs centrally and checks for doubles, GUI tools for most things (but not SuSE style), stuff that “J.U.S.T. W.O.R.K.S. ™ ® patented, proprietary tied down fancy expensive wow-wow sauce ancient Chinese secret ;--)“, we will get there eventually.

 

Let's not forget one thing: Ubuntu is fiercely criticized because it wants to be so much and because people do care a lot about it (me included). The year of the Linux desktop has finally arrived!

 

Henrik and I just had a killer good game last night.

I lasted more than 2 hours. The map was Fields of Isis, which is not that large and land only.

I played Cybran and Henrik did UEF. I have recently switched from AEON to Cybran, exploring the units that have stealth and probably the coolest experimentals in SupCom.

We played 2X Mass and the rules were no nukes. Nukes sucks because they let even a total noob win by just the inability of every opposition player to scout every 4 Minutes.
If you don't scout all the time, an enemy can build a nuke or two and when you do discover that he has one, building a defense, the missile he has in production will impact in the center of your base, before you got a chance to get your defense ready. A nuke is pretty much a game ender, so it is very boring and even a very good player can lose like this, if he is lax and forgets to produce 2 defenses right away.

Henrik was as always producing large amounts of T1 tanks and moving forward while I pledged to focus on air.

I have dominated the skies with AEON, since the AEON T3 AA Gunship is the most powerful air unit in the game. Build around 40 of these and nobody will be able to harm you in the sky and any attempt of them trying it will result in a total loss of their air power. I have played enemies that just did not get it and tried over and over to get down my Gunships and failed one try after another.
At around 70 gunships, no matter what the enemy throws at you, it it all obliterated in speed. These AA gunships have several SAM launchers built in, just hovering them close to an airforce will wipe the sky clean.

Now Cybran got some cool units that I wanted to try out. So far my adventures into this faction have not yielded that many wins. The Cybran units are all very weak. I used to focus on UEF and play that all the time and it is a far cry from the stone hard hitpoints of UEF.

After like 10 minutes, Henrik got attacked on the upper passage by T2 units. At this time I was building up a defense in the middle, with T2 point defenses. Immediately I spotted the artillery shell impacts and it was, yes, T3 arty, which you must not underestimate. No fixed position was in range, but I noticed immediately that he had mobile T3 units behind the hill...

 Now the game went on, he building up that defense in the middle and we both trying to break it. The yellow player, (playing left bottom) of the map was a true genius strategist putting (a total fool or arrogant SOB) for putting his SC under several shields outside his base. I killed him off with about 25 gunships pretty early in the game teaching him a lesson.

I am always amazed of what bozos put their SC on the front line. I remember my noob days, when I was confident that a fully upgraded SC would be a match for a experimental unit, but after 4,7 seconds under a monkeylord microwave laser it blew up, making me learn that the SC in all cases is no match for anything above T2.

After this, our remaining enemy adopted an interesting strategy: bunker behind the hill in the middle and pound us with T3 mobile artillery. That worked surprisingly well and he managed to build up a shield sheltered outpost

He soon terrorized us also with tactical missiles, of which he built like 10 launchers, making it impossible for us to build defenses against them.

He was also competing with us in air power, usually my domain. And after me realizing that he was winning in the skies, I made a massive effort to build 15 air factories and put tons of mass in it to crank out 180 Air superiority fighter at its peak. With this, I wiped him off the sky. He dominated on land though and we realized that we had to use our air power to strike him down.

My air superiority fighter were backed up with T3 gunships, about 40 of them I guess. The Cybran version is not as tough as the AEON or UEF version, but got a radar jammer on board, which can confuse a volley of SAMs initially and win some time.

Henrik made a landing effort with T3 bots on the left bottom base, the base formerly belonging to our enemies ally. We stopped his feable efforts of claiming the area (his attention was obviously focused elsewhere) and Henrik marched north with his bots. He met resistance by some Cybran experimental Megabots (3 of them) and even with my air power, I was not able to wipe them out before they ate all his bots.

The enemy tried to challenge me in the skies again and again, even deploying AEON gunships, the dominator in the sky, but I kept the pressure on and won every confrontation because of superior numbers (the main reason for any war to be won, forget the "the better man wins" theory that is propounded so vigorously in Hollywood movies and people that see so much romance and heroism in war)

At this point we did what makes playing against humans so interesting and makes SupCom such a great game: We realized that he had us pinned down on land, his probably 35 or more T3 mobile artillery wiping out any land unit that we tried to throw at him, his tactical missiles digging deeper and deeper into our bases, missing Henrik's SupCom by a hair and leaving him limping for safety (out of range) with only 25% of the total hitpoints remaining.
So being outgunned on land, we did what everybody should do when faced with a turtler that has an unbreakable defense: Sidestep it, just avoid it all together.

Out initial assault on his SupCom failed. We failed to coordinate our attack and although I had 150 air superiority fighters circling to draw his SAM fire in the base, my 30 or so T3 Gunships could not kill his commander, much less get through the 4 shields in a meaningful way. Henrik, moving north with his T3 gunships was immediately wiped out by his SAM fire.

His fighters were circling all the way to the south and I thought that it would have made a difference, throwing them into the mix, for drawing off the SAM fire off the Gunships that were pounding the shields and the his SupCom below, but this never was put in action.

We had to regroup, but then finally, after a new build up on bombers and fighters, we managed to wipe the last opponent out.

I have seen many many games in my time. I started probably around 1984, when I was 11 years old. With the Commodore VIC 20 and then a C 64, followed by an Amiga, I have probably seen over 1500 games in my time. Heck, my whole teenage years and much of my 20's were devoted 100% to gaming.
You could consider me what people call a gaming nut.

I love games, I love them all. Well, OK,  except sports games I guess. (I follow watch sports and the only thing I will do is do them myself.)

And by now, the best and most exciting game I have ever played is Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander Forged Alliance.

It is a special Game, out of the category of real time strategy (RTS). It is not for the casual gamer, it is not mashed-down-all-fun, jump-in-and-know-nothing,-but-still-get game. it has a steep learning curve. If you are a beginner and you meet an advanced player, he will stomp you into the ground without you being able to do a scratch on him. Just the resource management system is daunting (yet there are only 2 resources)

It is also a game where you can learn and progress and wield experience in a way that is unheard of in other games.

I have been playing it for the last 1.5 years now and it seems to get better every day. I have never ever in my life played a game for that long and still enjoyed it so tremendously.

The thing I like about Supreme Commander is that is mirrors many aspects of warfare in real life in a real way.

Of these are:

1. Scale: There are no stupid build limits that even out the chances and odds in lesser games (in essence making sure that a advanced player cannot produce tons of units while a beginner struggles to keep up)
In Supreme Commander, you have build limits simply imposed by the CPU power you got. A 3000 per game unit limit is realistically, since otherwise one of the player's CPU will get overwhelmed and make the game slow down to a crawl.3000 units is way beyond anything that other games can conjure up.
2. Maps: Maps can be from small (5 km x 5 km) to outright huge, up to 85 km x 85 km and they are real, meaning that it will really take you a long time to move units around on the larger maps. Playing on such maps can make a game take 3.5 hours. Nothing for people with a small attention span.
3. Defense: Supreme Commander enables you to build very very tough defenses, some of which are outright unbreakable, except with special tactics and knowledge. It is quite common that a beginner loses all his 230 units when trying to wipe out a enemy commander's front defense. He cannot believe it, he has played Age of Empire and there this always worked. A advanced player already smiles when he assesses the incoming threat and realizes that the aggressor is making a terrible mistake in arriving in insufficient firepower and numbers and will lose it all and be defenseless to the defenders pending offense. 
4. Strategy: Since there are so many units, strategic thinking become paramount. Distracting the enemy becomes a worthwhile endeavor. Scouting is a must! You must know what the enemy is doing and what he/she is planning. (ok, let's be realistic: I don't think there is one woman player on the planet. Much too warlike is SupCom)


My trusty brother in arms Henrik and me have been battling in Supreme Commander for so long that we can practically read each others thoughts. We have won countless times, but also lost many many times and I have learned some insightful things, especially when losing: What did I do wrong? How could the other person beat me? And how to be a good loser, to accept that the other person has beaten you fair and square. To be an honorable loser and realize that the ultimate outcome of the game, win or lose, pales in comparison to the fun you have playing it.
In many ways it is like getting your first million: the way there is much more exciting than having the money finally. Reaching things, overcoming adversity and obstacles is a life elixir and builder of character.


If you want to check out what supreme commander looks like, and what the super zoom is, check out this youtube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmYAycFZLx0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander

So, what is the super zoom? Well, you know the normal zoom in RTS, right?
Well, that is no zoom at all. Going out a little, zooming in a little, what a joke!
Think zooming in till you see one unit full screen and now zoom out, zoom zoom zoom zoom....
till you see the whole map. The whole map!
Even in a map that is real life 85 km x 85 km!

This gives you the overview you need in order to command your armies and coordinate defense and attack, on the land, in the water or in the air.

There is also the option of having a second monitor, where you see the overview map displayed all the time and I love to be able to turn my head and spot a troop movement on the enemy border and wonder what the enemy is cooking up.

And that is the most exciting thing of it all, analyzing your enemy and seeing how he/she plays the game, how much knowledge she/he has.
And often, you can find holes. Things that this person opposite you just does not seem to know.

As an example, some time ago, I have discovered the UEF Tech 2 Cruiser Ship as an excellent long distance bombardment weapon. It produces a ton of missiles (about 1 per second) and fires them far into the enemy's territory.
This is so very annoying, since you know that you won't be able to reach this nuisance, since it is so far off. It is the same feeling as when your opponent is bombarding you with artillery. Artillery, especially T3 artillery pushes you to the wall, twists your arm and tells you in no uncertain terms "get your behind in gear or this guy is going to smear your base all around the landscape with these heavy detonations".

So he gets some fighters in the air and tries to use torpedo bombers to rid me of my cruisers. But what he does not realize is that cruisers have one major role in warfare and the missiles are just a bonus: They are anti air ships. They pack more SAM launchers than any other water unit.
Soon his planes are all shot down and he is wondering what else he could throw at me.

The correct answer:
Submarines.

About the only thing that will work. Or massive air force.
But at which time I might even have double as many cruisers at the ready.


It always boils down to one thing in SupCom: initiative. Do you have an intention or are you just producing units without strategy? Do you have a plan how to combat and weaken your enemy? If you don't and your opponent does, chances are that he will find you with your pants down.
Recognizing holes and use them is as much essential as it is fun.

Testing his knowledge in units. What does that unit do best? What weaknesses does it have?

You really build up the skill in this game and I have seen many friends venture into SupCom to just as fast again throw it into a corner, since "this game takes too much time and learning". And I guess they are right about that. And it is as worthwhile to play.

You just already need a huge amount of time to get the resources thing worked out.
You got energy and mass and as Einstein proved, they can be converted into each other.

You pull mass out of the ground with Mass extractors (called Mexes in short) and they are limited to a few spots. You need mass to produce buildings, defenses and units.
Then there is energy, which you need for artillery, shield generators and upgrading units, as well as radars and stealth generators.
You can also produce mass with energy, although at a bad conversion rate.
Now do you put your mass in upgrades in your Mexes or should you build units instead? The Mex thing is a investment that will pay off by the Mexes producing much more mass indefinitely.
But if you deal with a rusher, you might have lost already with that tactic.

According to the reviewers, that Supreme Commander is not a "game that everyone can play".

And most players crash their economy at the very start by just building ridiculously, without paying attention to their resources. Well, you can do that in other games, yeah.
You end up with a production of 20 mass and a minus of 95 and nothing moving anymore, since your economy is starved for mass. A factory building then takes 5 minutes instead of 40 seconds and well, guess what happens when the enemy arrives with bombers at your doorstep.

Do you have air defenses? If not, you are screwed and dead. Have you scouted for what the enemy was doing? Your point defenses are ready for any ground assault, but your opponent has scouted you, sending a plane over your base and noticed that you got no air whatsoever. What a huge hole.
A deadly hole.


SupCom is also a tough game for people that cannot think about 15 things parallel, since there is a lot going on.
You have to upgrade your Mexes, tech up (there are 3 tech levels), build air defense, do reconnaissance to see what the enemy is doing and find holes. And cover yours. You have to protect your SupCom, since like in Chess, if he can drop a bomb on it, it will go chain react and blow up spectacular in your base and end your game. You gotta protect the SupCom, because in the game that is where you are sitting in and which gives you control over the game field.
Is it already time to build mass producers? Do you have enough energy for that? Building them to early will crash your energy economy and make your shields flicker on and off, leaving your SupCom standing naked under a shield that is off. Bomber bait!
And your radar is going to be off too and you will be blind.

You can tech up pretty much everything, from shields to radar to SAMs and PointDefenses (PDs), you can even upgrade your SupCom with shields, a resource generator (built in energy and mass generation) and special weapons. But in all goodness, your SupCom is a weak being and you want to protect him from harm. You can always tell bozos that are total noobs when they let their SupCom work on the front line and then are surprised at the health bar falling down with light speed when being grilled under a Monkey Lord's  (spiderbot) red microwave laser. It lasts, well, about 4 seconds.
"But I upgraded it" you hear the boob cry. Yeah, you did, but against T4 units (which is Experimentals, these huge units that take a gazillion mass to build, but flatten everything to the ground when they waltz through your defenses) it is as solid and resistant as a FA18 jetfighter made out of the finest butter when encountering a solar flare up close.
Wrapping it in tinfoil.. will prolong its life, but only for a few fraction of a nanosecond.

For many experimentals are the real fun in SupCom and yes, they certainly are. Just think big. Bigger than you have ever seen in a game. Without the super zoom, you probably could not see the experimental in its full size, you would see parts of it.

To illustrate: a Fatboy mobile factory is probably as large as when taking 30 T1 battle tanks wide and 40 long. It's shells shoot so far that you will not even see the thing when your defenses are crumbling from the impacts.

One fun thing is to cooperate with your buddy, in my case Henrik. You can save each others like when one is in a pickle, about to be wiped out by the incoming bombers. So you send your fighter planes that have been idling around on your ground to his rescue. Or he is rushing me with T1 units, and my factories are just about to crank out T2, so instead of dieing, he saves my butt.

Specialization and teamwork are absolutely necessary and communication is a plus too. You will not get a warning in SupCom when a unit is destroyed, because your speaker would flood you with messages nonstop. You would be swamped with warnings and not pay attention to them. You have to pay attention to the map overview, where the enemy is attacking you. It is not uncommon that you find a whole area of an outpost wiped out, just because your focus was elsewhere and you did not keep an overview of everything.

Henrik and me use Skype to chat and we are always in close contact. 4 eyes see a heck lot more than that. An air invasion force heading for his base will surely contain bombers and T3 strategic bombers can smear a SupCom all over the pavement even under heavy shielding. In a case like this, seconds count in mobilizing your air force and come to the aid of your buddy in arms.

Just recently I posted a blog about how Microsoft is hindering progress and innovation by dragging their feet and stepping on the brakes on the lines of "if we don't invent it, nobody will".
Another example of your burned out over the hill gigantic fat company.

Google on the other hand has a lot of spark in it yet, coming into its tweens (while Microsoft ist well over their 70'ies I guess). A good example is Google Chrome.

"Yeah yeah, I have seen that, nothing new, nothing groundbreaking..." I hear you say?

Well, you might not have seen their concept, of what they want to do. Check this out here:
(A really cool comic showing their concept in detail (it is long))

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/med_00.html

Basically, it puts the Google spirit in the browser the way it has always meant to be in.

The bad:
More data collecting on us, more profiling. Now not just your google search requests are logged and aquired by google, but also all surfing, every move.


The good:
More ease of use, cool features that evaluates on which sites you always hang around and a start page that shows them without bookmarking anything before.
Cool applications, this time OS independent. A real blow to Windows, since it is getting one step more obsolete (and too expensive, because soon more and more people will start asking why anybody must pay for an operating system, if you can get Ubuntu free of charge and use your Google applications there)


More bad:

I don't know what Google is thinking in first releasing the Windows client. Is this another Windows centric development? Do we need lessons how to write multi-platform, OS independent software?

Now this is the only bad news. But unfortunately, I will ignore Chrome as long as there is no native Linux client and I will not lose another word about it. And so I would recommend you should, if you are a Linux centric user like me. In my book, all software is required to be multi-platform, I am sick and tired of software that ties me down to Windows and forces me to pay a license fee for a substandard operating system just to run a piece of software.
Oracle, IBM, Mozilla and Lotus all know how the game needs to be played. They can all manage to do it and so can Google.

It is even more confusing, since it is not a tentative move (to try out the water before committing), but a solid strategy which I am sure will work AND it is supposed to be open source, so why no Linux port?
*scratching head*.... it just... does not make any sense!

I am always amazed of how little people are informed about the latest and greatest open source technologies stirring up the tech world. This even when it has been going on for years and years and can hardly be called marginal.

One nice example of this is Asterisk!
I am flabbergasted at the lack of people for:
a.) interest in finding new ways to solve problems and work more efficiently in the IT world.
b.) recognizing when something is ground shaking novel and relevant.

One of these days a company will hire me for tech scouting, since I am in touch with pretty much all the new open source technologies and these projects sometimes are hard to find. Yet I am always putting a focus on business feasability on it, bridging the gap between the idealistic creator that wants to better the world and the ice cold business manager that has not invented anything ever and just cares about the bottom line and pragmatism. These are extremes mind you, but having a foot in both worlds helps greatly.

To put it simply, Asterisk is a telephone server that works both for analog and digital phones (VoIP). It is open source, extremely customizable (beyond all the proprietary hardware telephone systems that you have ever seen) and scales up to enterprise needs.

Here an exerpt from the Asterisk book "Asterisk - the future of technology"
http://cachefly.oreilly.com/books/9780596510480.pdf

An incredible revolution is under way. It has been a long time in coming, but now that
it has started, there will be no stopping it. It is taking place in an area of technology
that has lapsed embarrassingly far behind every other industry that calls itself hightech.
The industry is telecommunications, and the revolution is being fueled by an open
source Private Branch eXchange (PBX) called Asterisk™.
Telecommunications is arguably the last major electronics industry that has remained
untouched by the open source revolution.* Major telecommunications manufacturers
still build ridiculously expensive, incompatible systems, running complicated, ancient
code on impressively engineered yet obsolete hardware.
As an example, Nortel’s Business Communications Manager kludges together a 15
year-old Key Telephone Switch and a 1.2 GHz Celeron PC.† All this can be yours for
between $5,000 and $15,000, not including telephones. If you want it to actually do
anything interesting, you’ll have to pay extra licensing fees for closed, limitedfunctionality,
shrink-wrapped applications. Customization? Forget it—it’s not in the
plan. Future technology and standards compliance? Give them a year or two—they’re
working on it.
All of the major telecommunications manufacturers offer similar-minded products.
They don’t want you to have flexibility or choice; they want you to be locked in to their
product cycles

Asterisk changes all of that. With Asterisk, no one is telling you how your phone system
should work, or what technology you are limited to. If you want it, you can have it.
Asterisk lovingly embraces the concept of standards compliance, while also enjoying
the freedom to develop its own innovations. What you choose to implement is up to
you—Asterisk imposes no limits.

The very interesting thing about this is: Yes, the telephone industry is many things, but hardly an innovator: Since the day of Bell, they have been peddling the old stuff over and over. I found it mind boggling how expensive huge seemingly functional phones with a large display still failed to be used by anybody that does not have a PhD. in telephonology.
I sometimes thought to myself: These people must be absolutely crazy and deranged to crank out such a horrendous user interface that does not make sense at all.

It is very similar for mobile phone producers, although not as bad. They have now received a big boost by the iPhone, putting high heat under their collective behinds to finally create user interfaces that can be used by normal mortals. The question remains: Why did it take so long?

Back to Asterisk: It really is a marvelous project , you can create your own voice menus (like the ones you know from support sites), play on hold music or whatever. A cool idea is that the asterisk server calls you on the cell phone if, lets say your RAID has a problem at home and text to voice reads out the error log.

LinuxMCE (another fine project, about which I will talk another time, but check out the extremely cool demo video)

http://linuxmce.com/  

actually uses Asterisk to call you when there is a intruder in the house and lets you talk with him (scary stuff, the will run out pretty crazily, having all the screens at home flash "intruder" at you and the owner talking over the intercom "get out of my house! You are being recorded!!". Yes, it also ties in IP cameras and lights, so it actually can do that. And the burglar, surely total incompetent in Linux skills won't be able to disable the system, otherwise he would not be in such a low line of profession. (you can put your server that centrally houses LinuxMCE in a room that is locked and that he cannot get access. Well, how can you tell where a central server is, when all the screens in the house are hooked up to it and each one of them seems to be the main central device?)

Now that the gloves are off, you lazy buggers in the telephony industry (phony industry, eh??) will have to work harder in the future, otherwise you might just become obsolete.
But wait, heck... No, you still got the loyal (and neverending) support from the believers in the superiority of  "proprietary systems" and as I understand it, they don't look left or right, don't register things that are not marketed big and...... if it is not proprietary, it just doesn't exist.

No, I am not talking about more and more users abandoning Windows. That is happening no doubt thanks to Vista and Ubuntu Linux being the best Linux ever to run on a desktop (and by so being the easiest way to migrate to Linux ever).

I am talking about an arrogant, fat, bloated self centered empire collapsing.

The company, once a huge benefactor to PC proliferation (Gates surely had a clear strategy: "a PC on everybodies table with my Windows on it") has now become a roadblock for innovation and progress.
You might not think so: if you are a Windows user only, you will not notice what is happening in the Linux word and that we "Linux guys" don't suffer DRM, activation, expensive and performance wasting OS upgrades.

Let's face it, Microsoft can only lose at this point: They own the market and it can hardly grow anymore. And so they play defense.
They have been ridiculing Linux for years and put things they call innovation in their OSes that other operating systems have had years before.

Now Vista has arrived and the wow that they wanted people to feel changed from the collective "WHEN?" to a "WHAT?".

"This is what we waited so long for?"

A 3d Desktop, that Linux had even before Vista got released (they started developing it later then MS too ;-), additional security (no debate there, good feature), a ready boost feature that was still born (because there is no hardware that supports or is any good in it), many more versions, much higher price tag and a mandatory activation policy, even for enterprise.

When it was released, it was half cooked and scarcely tested. A true beta and if you have people telling you "Vista? NO, that thing is not getting on my PC!" it is not only anti-MS propaganda that Apple has been making. There were really serious problems. If they still exist? I don't know, so I will not talk about that.

But the whole thing speaks of gigantic incompetence and arrogance. Incompetence, because it took 7 years to release it. The transition from Windows 98 to XP took less than 3 years and that was a much bigger one. They also released Windows 2k on the way.
And arrogance, because they think that they can just do that, that users will bear with them. Well, the typical Windows user probably will. I have many colleagues that hear me talk about Linux, but hardly register anything I say, because for them, Windows is the only thing they will consider. Alternatives are a nono, a non thing that one does not contemplate.

They don't seem to care if they can do things better. Getting upset at Windows, the endless problems that seem to have no solution?
(as I hear one of them "what problems? I never have problems.") Well, I did and my motto is: "Take it, change it or leave it"
I could not change Windows, so I left it. Linux can be changed though in any way you like, either by taking another distro or just doing the changes by myself. Customizing and tuning does not end ever if you got the blueprints for the whole penguin-machine.

Now big empires usually collapse when they
1. are so fat and big that they become lazy
2. they think they are invincible and that normal laws of physics and market do not apply to them.
3. That the sheer name they carry makes users buy anything they seem to put out.


3 definitely seems to apply to many people. They are brainwashed by marketing (which MS does excellent) and get a cosy feeling thinking about Windows. They have used it so long and are familiar with it.
This seems to matter much more in peoples minds than efficiency and freedom of licensing costs and restrictions.

There are those that like Windows still, but not Vista. For a variety of valid and invalid reasons they reject it, and stick to XP. I like Windows for gaming, since that you just can't do on Linux and on Windows works well and always has worked well.
But as it stands right now, I am sticking with XP, since I don't see the need for Vista. The balance sheet of advantages and disadvantages is heavily tipped to the disadvantage side.
Vista runs slower on the same hardware than XP, uses more RAM and is just absolutely humongous huge on the harddisk (more than the size of a fully featured Ubuntu, with Office Environment, Graphical tools, audio production tools etc..) while providing.... nothing in terms of applications. It is just the OS, nothing more.

I will eventually migrate to Vista, but not in the next 3 years and I am pretty sure, from what I have noticed in the W98 to XP migration cycle of the world at large, that XP concurrently exist with Vista for much longer than any other Windows OS has ever done. So my bet is that even in 5 years you will still get all drivers for XP. Microsoft wants to stop this and force people to migrate to Vista, but it is now out of their hands, with the awful publicity (worst ever for any MS OS, even worse than Windows ME) floating around, the majority will stick to XP.

And that will be valid also for business customers, because Vista even offers less appealing benefits for companies. Enterprise likes to keep all computers on the same OS release, which reduces support costs. They need to test every application for Vista AND Vista is so fat that it usually needs new hardware to run on.
If this would not be enough, MS forces business customers to buy the expensive support version, instead of letting them have the cheap OEM version. This practice has dissuaded at least 3 customers that I know from migrating to it, since the price tag (they can do the math) is absolutely staggering.

To explain: Vista ist only fully functional in its most expensive version (for home users) and its support backed SLA version (for enterprise). All other versions are castrated into various levels of "incompetence".
Microsoft knows exactly what functions companies crave (Bitlocker HD encryption for example) and has only enable that ones in the most expensive of versions for enterprise customer.



Now, anyway, the arrogance that the fat dying empire is showing nowadays shows that they don't think at all that they are dying or declining. They think they are in full swing. Therefore they don't much care about bad publicity and strongarm their way around. It is not a new tactic. In the "great" tradition of all monopolies, starting with Standard Oil, Microsoft is bullying and forcefully pushing their agenda.

Their failed grasp for standards and openness is not new, but they still try to push through OOXML.

I initially assumed that OOXML would become the standard and that nobody would use ODS, simply because I have learned in the many years working in and for companies that in business, nobody cares about right and wrong, about idealism or what makes sense. It is all about money and appealing to companies morals is a futile effort, since they obey none and only care about profits.

So I assumed that MS would buy their way into the standard. That nobody would care about it being substandard and rigged towards MS favour.

I mean I don't have to explain to you that it is just plain simple wrong to declare something an open standard that anybody has to be able to read and write, while still requiring people to buy MS Office to be able to do that.
What about the poor that cannot afford to buy the overpriced software? If governments adopt the standard, the democratic process and participation is taken away from the poor. They might be able to afford a second hand computer and install Ubuntu, but they will be able to afford an MS Office license (wine and Crossover Office runs MS Office).

Now what I was surprised was this: There were large protests and OOXML had a hard stand, received brutally bad publicity and the standards commission fought it tooth and nail. There were "bribes" of course, companies (in bed with MS) that suddenly became ISO members and votes pro OOXML, but this also was publicised widely.

At this time I am amazed, that MS still does not give up and does not fear more bad publicity, trying to bribe and corrupt the standards boards.

This is a very nice read:
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-93970/norwegians-leave-their-standards-body-in-protest


"Norway: 21 "No", 2 "Yes" and Microsoft still gets its way?"

13 members of the TC in Norway has left their Standards Body in protest. They say that the Standards Body has lost its credibility in the IT area.



Oslo, Monday 29 september 2008
We, the undersigned, are ending our work within Standard Norway.
It is sad when organizations that work for our common interest fail the task. Through the OOXML work Standard Norway has shown, with a clear margin, that they are not fit to represent Norway in the ISO.
"Standardization of formats for content on the Web is more important than ever. A large part of mankind's communication is done digitally, and all - ALL - must have the ability to read and write these formats," said Håkon Wium Lie.


...

Therefore, we have chosen to leave the committee.
We end our work with Standard Norway because:
* The administration of Standard Norway trust 37 identical letters from Microsoft partners more than their own technical committee.
* The process within Standard Norway has been unpredictable and the administration has changed the rules along the way.
* Standard Norway and ISO have committed a series of violations of their own rules and other irregularities in the OOXML process.
"Standard Norway has overruled hundreds of thousands of users in the public and private sectors", says Martin Bekkelund.


and a comment from a user reading the article:

They seem to have 'pulled a Denmark' (or Singapore too).
"37 letters with exactly the same words. Some of the senders didn't even care to remove the 'Type company name here' text.
Simular letters has been circulating in Denmark as an e-mail from the Danish MD Jørgen Bardenfleth to customers and business partners.
I call it fraud, cheating and disgusting. If I wasn't anti-Microsoft before, I am now. Disgusting !"
—Leif Lodahl

If it looked like bribing ever before, this tops it by a large margin.
I am curious why Microsoft does now realize that they lose so much sympathy and power by being this incredible rude bully and trying to buy people.

I know I know, that won't persuade you from quitting Windows and you will be responsible for some time to come to give power to Microsoft by using their products and buying them. This will enable them to be even more manipulative and arrogant, forcing OEMs to stop offering Ubuntu on their desktops and wipe out Google and Firefox, so that Internet Explorer can go back into the sorry feature less security hole ridden state it had before Firefox came along and lighted the fire of competition under Microsoft's butt.

You will like their software, as you do now. It will be feature less, slow, more and more expensive, but at least you will not have the burden of choice ;-)

How many have buried their life long dream to play the piano due to most piano teachers inability to teach them properly.

"She has no talent."

"He has no persistence, he does not practice enough."

"She thought Piano playing is supposed to be fun. How ridiculous! It is hard practice and way too serious to be 'fun' "

You hear the above thing uttered by you average piano teacher and you might have heard this right before you gave it up for good or before you even started.

You might belong to the 80% of people that "have no talent", "lack the musical aptitude".

The 80% number is a figure from the hip, just my impression. But let's face it, the majority of people don't stand a chance to learn to play the Piano. It is just too tough.

Well, that was true before prof. Wei Tsin Fu invented the Snowman's Dream (original German: "Schneemanns Traum").

Through a superior teaching method and his understanding how music gets processed in the brain, he invented a learning method that enables EVERYBODY to learn to play the Piano. And the best of all: make it fun too!!!

Because let's face it: It is not your fault that teachers of the classical method don't know how to teach you to read notes and play them well too.

It is theirs, or better, that they never questioned that there is no methology to it.

I know what I am talking about, I have passed through the classical system for 3 grueling years.

My teacher preferred to practice pieces endlessly, till I could play them flawlessly. I could do this not because I really learned how the piece was built, how it all worked, but because I memorized it.

The teaching was as simple as this: This note is a G. The G is on this key on the keyboard, so you press it.

This note is a C, it is this key on the keyboard.

And so on, you get the picture. The problem is, that the brain has no clue why this note should be F and which one C, because they all look the same. The musical right hemisphere of your brain also finds this unimaginative labeling of the notes with letters totally lacking and flushes the learned immediately. Only like this you can explain how students have to practice Beethoven's "Für Elise" countless times till they can finally play it full speed.

There are not learning how to read the notes with sufficient speed, but memorize the song.

The right hemisphere works with pictures and symbols, that need to be tied to concrete things and real life objects. Only like this, musical concepts can be stored with a minimum of effort.

Enter the Snowman

And that is how the snowman's dream concept works. A snowman are three notes that you play together as a chord. When you look at it on the sheet, it looks exactly like a snowman.

Instead of reading each individual note like in the classical system, you read the snowman as a whole, in one glance.

And you do this from the very start on. Even a bloody beginner starts playing 3 finger chords from the very moment and it is easy and no problem at all.

This is based on the realization of prof. Wei that the right hemisphere (where the music is located) can grasp blocks of several notes much easier than single notes.

It works from the whole to its parts, from big to small. (the left work the opposite way)

Rarely do you find perfect snowmen though, many time they are modified in some way: The head is a little higher or the foot is lower or the belly is higher or lower.

But the speed with which you recognize a snowman and can produce it on the keyboard after only a few hours is the stuff of legends.

You also learn from the very start where which keys are on the keyboard, although you are not tortured into knowing how they are named at first, because that is irrelevant.

I have had 5 lessons with my new teacher now, he sits in Tübingen, Germany, while I am in Switzerland and he instructs me with a webcam. And I am frenetic about the way he teaches and how the snowmans dream is transforming my brain. I feel new connections getting formed.

Many times I have a headache after having a lesson, a thing that never occurred ever in all the 3 years I was thought classically. I had frustration and stress, because I just could not play properly, but never a headache from learning too much and getting new and innovative connections formed in my brain.

Needless to say, my old teacher doubted the new method and insisting on her old fashioned approach. I was not surprised at all, since it is the attitude of most piano teachers here in Europe, especially in Switzerland, which is extremely traditional in all areas.

Well, it is their loss, because learning how to teach the new method, you could open up the potential market of Piano students about 5 fold, have happier students and ones with lots more enthusiasm and perseverance than it is currently the case.

It is no secret that the quitting rate is very high, especially when a kid started learning the Piano, pushed by his/her parents and then after 3 or 4 years has other priorities and/or is tired of the relentless punishing and torture that the Piano lessons inflict. Fun does not enter the equation.

Some go on learning and after they have stayed about 5 years, they then usually go on and reach various degrees of expertise. Few though reach the mastery that you can with the Snowman's Dream, because the method is just superior in every way and utilizes the brain as the dual core (left and right hemisphere) super computer that it is.

Prof. Wei claims that students that learn with this system get better grades in school, especially in math, because the Piano learning forms a intercommunication between the hemispheres that is usually only seen in geniuses and savants. He had several students with which play with a skill that would make a 35 year old master player blush, but they reach that level when they are but 12 years old.

And they practice a small fraction of that what that master had to go through.

Of course you do have to repeat something endlessly if you don't understand it in the first place and your teacher does not encourage you to recognize and utilize patterns that repeat.

They never really learn how to properly read notes. Not being able to play a piece at full speed without familiarizing themselves with it beforehand anyway.

Question: Do you need to read through a newspaper a few times before you can read it aloud without getting stuck? Of course not.

And so it is with sheet music and notes.

Now I am off on my magical journey, discovering my talent and progressing in leaps and bounds. I am looking forward to play myself through countless classics, without practicing them before.

If you have buried your Piano dream a long time, you might be interested to know that I also started very late on. I had my first lesson when I was 32 and with the Snowman's Dream, it is never too late to start.

Because with your brain running at full capacity, everybody can learn and progress to a comfortable level without breaking your patience and your bank.

Hihihihi, just got a laugh out of Linux haters blog:

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

To be fair, I laughed from the articles, not about them. The guy really knows Linux, in deep. I doubt that he knows Windows in deep, otherwise he would write an "OS hater blog", because in the things that Windows sucks, it sucks even harder and stickier than Linux. For many of your problems in Windows will stay with you indefinitely. In Linux, you can change it yourself or convince/hire somebody that does it for you. (Microsoft does not need you or care about you)

 

Anyway, funny comments like:

 

But guess what? take a look at the bug trackers out there. They're mostly full of hogwash. Most of the bug reports go something like this...

 

Johnny User writes...

Hi. I'm trying to use ellipticaljerk-0.3.2, but my speakers make a farting sound when I click the jerk button. Then it crashes. Is this a bug?

 

Sammy Developer writes...

Hi Johnny. The jerk button works for me.

 

Bug status updated: CLOSED - USER ERROR

 

Sally User writes...

I'm also seeing this problem. These farting noises suck.

 

Bug status updated: REOPENED

 

Sammy Developer writes...

Ok, fine. Could you give me some more information? A backtrace maybe?

 

Johnny User writes...

What's a backtrace?

 

are really hilarious...

 

or check this out:

 

At some point in time in the past, Flash worked on Linux. In some configuration. Otherwise Adobe wouldn't have released it. Whatever you did to deviate from that configuration is your responsibility. Not Adobe's. The fact there are a bazillion Linux configurations that Adobe couldn't possibly test: OSS sound, or Alsa sound, or alsa-oss sound, or pa-alsa emulation, or pa-alsa-oss-jack-esound-vagina emulation, or all of the above inside nspluginwrapper, or whatever the fuck... it's all your fault. Not Adobe's.

 

and that is actually funny, on the point. He knows what he is talking about, because that is really annoying, because things in Linux are changed on a whim, without consulting the writers of software first and breakage is frequent.

And the sound system mess is also a fact of Linux life. I especially loathe ALSA, since there are no logs, no way to know what the thing is doing. Jackd is complicated, but at least it will tell you if something breaks and it is universal.

But one thing I want to add: Software companies don't seem to know how to write apps for Linux. They think they can release a program once and then see it work for 4 yours on Linux. They are thinking Windows.

They expect that nothing changes and most of all, they are scared like the devil from holy water about releasing their source code. If they did that, the community would helpe them adjust their code, so it would run on the new release, with the new kernel. Ever noticed how open source software seems to effortlessly step over the obstacle of the ever changing Linux OS and act like it is a leaf on the floor?

 

Anyway, as said before, the guy knows Linux and seems to fuel his hate by constantly plunging into it, again and again.

Now in my case, I could write a bit called Windows haters blog, because I know that inside out and know all the nasty deficiencies and cases of mediocre crap quality that Microsoft left in there in their conquest for higher profits and excellence in Marketing (meaning: They don't need to produce quality, just be very good at convincing Wintards about it ;-)

 

I have chosen to go away from Windows for the reason that I don't want to get upset, not hearing a fsck file system check tool of the Windows XP recovery CD tell me that "your filesystem has one or more unrecoverable errors", when trying to save my NTFS partition and my data on it when the HDD was falling appart. This is essentially: "Your data? nah, don't worry about it, it is lost, don't even try!"

Knoppix rescued 99% of it then. And product that uses reverse engineering to read NTFS. I found that amazing and educational.

Now my data resides on EXT3. The fsck tool on that one provides about 14 options, 12 more than the one on NTFS.

 

So instead of using Windows again and again, getting upset and poisoning myself with the hate and the loathing I feel for a ill designed and unscalable OS, I use now Linux, which calms my nerves. Problems still occur, but in every case I know that there is a solution. It can be far fetched, requiring some time, but there is one.

In the worst case, I can go over to the author(s) of EXT3 Filesystem and hire them to recover my data or ask them to give me the specs and hire any other programer on the planet. Try to do that in Windows.

 

Lusers and Freetards are terms that Linux Haters Blog uses.

I hereby institute Wintards and Windozers. The first term describes a user that only considers Windows (no other alternatives exist), knows nothing else and insists on his ignorance (hell, choice makes you nervous and too much information will explode your head) He knows that Windows Vista is excellent, heck it is brand new and from Microsoft (gotta be), because he runs his heavily loaded system stable (while using a maximum of 1 program at the time, namely Internet Exploder 7) and that the "Vista is evil, fat and slow" is just bad run that it totally untrue, spread by... well, crackheads that hate Microsoft as a profession (they get payed by RedHat for it, full time).... with no foundation and just for the sake of talking evil about Microsoft and Bill Gates, which is a total benefactor to humanity and should stand as a role model to all of us, especially business wise, since he "got so rich" and uses "such sound business practices" (that will also make you stinking rich) (a "coexistence through assimilation" dogma the Borg couldn't perform better)

 

Now a Windozer is your typical Vista user that sleeps in front of his little turning wheel, while his OS does..... nobody knows... crawl through the gigabytes of bloated code. But hey, a modern OS is large, everybody knows that ;-) And it is normal that every OS is much slower than the previous one, that is why you buy faster hardware (the OEMs rub their hands and smiling satisfied towards their CFO guy that has just surprised them with the newest (higher) profits report)

Funny that, your typical Ubuntu is smaller in install size than Vista, while still including a ton of tools, including a full Office Suite (heck 3, but forget the other 2).

 

I would write a blog like this but heck, what would that any good? I am not such a helpless complainer than the author of Linux Haters Blog. He truly has no interest in improving Linux. I think he likes Linux, because it keeps him upset and complaining.

 

Ever seen one of these people that incessantly complain?

Ever asked them what they would do different? Got no answer? Well, did you relalize that they use xzy to vent their frustration and anger they have about their lifes in general and how they don't want anything to change? How they point a finger most of the time, like it is always somebody else's problem?

 

I provide solutions in my blog. When I point out that Windows is bad, I point to a solution on Linux. That is why I use Linux, because it works better.

Not in everything. Some things truly suck in Linux. But they will get better, hold you breath for that.

Don't do that on Windows, because your typical company does not listen to users. Heck, they don't have to, they already dominate the market.

If Linux never listened to users, it would be decending in to the same grave as UNIX. UNIX is being marginalized into the area where GUI does not matter, where user interface are for the uneducated wimps. Where every user is a admin at the very same time. Has to be.

 

Linux listened, it changed to become more like Windows, which surely drove the UNIX hardcore league nuts (using the sacred CTRL - C to copy, while the UNIX bible clearly states that it is terminating a program)

 

And the coolest thing is: I can help make Linux better. I have some very nifty features in mind that nobody has ever thought about. I am not a programer, but a visionary. I dream up stuff, concepts and ideas. I get ridiculed, which does not bother me. Because after some time I see the thing that I envisioned become reality and hear people complain about it (since they are from the past, dinosaurs waiting to die out so to speak).

And their ridiculing my ideas ("that will never happen") is only an expression of their inability to think future. They are stuck in the past and progress slowly drags them on, with the noise of their claws and teeth screeching as they try to resist.

 

Linux will not make me rich and neither will it do that for you. If you want that, work on (or for) Windows. There is an infinite number of business savvy people out there that capitalize on the assumption of the typical Windoze user that every good software costs money.

 

But it works, it works for you and the stuff you get for free is staggering.

 

I remember back in 2001 when I took a look at the RedHat DNS server in Linux and could not believe my eyes.

What? DNS, commercial grade, for free????

And I found more... it really is impossible how great that stuff is, what code quality it has being free. Heck, some of that stuff even beats commercial software that you buy for thousands of bucks.

 

Set up a CentOS or Debian Server for thin clients (an unlimited amount of them), cluster it, put a webserver on it, a database server, a LDAP directory, a fileserver and then let 100 users use it. Get your support at a small competent company. And now count how much you saved in License costs and CALs. How many thousands?

 

Yes, you will have to put in some skill or hire a Linux guy. But trust me, he will enjoy his work much more than your average Windows drone, that knows that the world is "point and click" and that some things just can't be done.

 

Ask the Linux guy and he will tell you that impossible does not exist in the OpenSource world. It might take a lot of effort, but it can be done.

 

 

 

Enter the physical engines battle.

The contestants:
Intel, maker of CPU, with their Havok engine

NVIDIA, buyer of Ageia (maker of the PhysX engine)

Now Intel wants to use their dual and quad or oct cores to run the physical engine, NVIDIA wants to do the same on their graphic cards.

Currently, NVIDIA is further in their efforts, you can download the Ageia physical engine PhysX and there are some very cool demos that you can fiddle around with. Now unfortunately, they are doing a big mistake with their push to run PhysX on the GPU.

To illustrate this point, let me ask you the following:

Do you have a high end Graphic card?
Ever had the problem that a new game runs with too many FPS? i.e. that it is not using all of your graphic cards capabilities?
Well, if you say yes, you surely don't know much about gaming.

I have a high end GFX card, I regularly spend around 700 $ for a puppy like this and I tell you that you can never have too much power in a GPU.
Punch up the resolution to some sweet 1600 x 1200 in a new game (I am one that can appreciate all the extra detail and crispness on my 22 inch monitor), make sure you keep the details, shadow detail, etc.. up to the maximum and see the FPS dwindle to a sad slow slideshow.

GPUs are not powerful enough to cope with the high resolutions and full details of new games. They are at a limit, you can never have too much GPU power. Well, this can happen with games that are older, say 3 years or so, but never with new titles.

So to say it short, the GPU is overworked and has no extra capacity.

Now lets take a look at a typical Gamers CPU. Many do have dual cores already, some of them running at 3 ghz and higher.
Few have Quad Core CPUs, I got one with 3.2 ghz as current. Overclocking is sweet!

Have you ever heard somebody tell you that in gaming, you should invest the most money in the GPU, but not in the CPU? Well, they are right: there are almost no games that really use a CPU much. You can buy whatever CPU you want, the FPS will not go up one bit, unless you buy a faster GFX card.

There are some exceptions: Supreme Commander uses all of the CPU and is CPU limited, meaning that even a very fast GPU is not going to save you from a crawling game. SC has a massive scale and needs lots and lots of CPU, because it is a very realistic and accurate Strategy Game that declasses all other RTS to RTT: Real Time Tactical games. To small is the scale, to little units and too little strategic thinking is required.

Now my Quad core is almost idling when I play even the newest titles.
To catch my drift: The GPU is overloaded, the CPU is underworked.

WHERE SHOULD WE PUT THE PHYSICAL ENGINE?

On the CPU of course.

Even with the performance loss of the CPU not being ideally for calculating physical reality calculations, it has so much power left to spare that you can beat any GPU based solution.

Graphic cards with PhysX built in will cost more (because the extra calculation power needs somewhere to run on) or will give you less FPS, because the GPU will have to devote time on the PhysX calculations, which will go away from the pure rendering of the scene.

On the other hand, you got your CPU idling, not knowing what to do, capacity to throw away. Soon, Quad cores will become dirt cheap and everybody will have one sitting in his computer, ready to do tons of additional work. Also in game, so just give it to them.
Also CPU calculation power is cheaper when you have it in the CPU than in the GPU. The GPU is a specialized chip (makes it more expensive, not all computer have a high power GPU built in), while the CPU is a standardized commodity chip (makes it cheaper, because every computer has one).


Let's all hope that the physical engine battle will not be anything like the Blu Ray, HD DVD battle, that was a total waste and did not give anything to consumers.
I hope NVIDIA comes to it's senses and will also release a competitive engine that runs on CPUs.
(There was a test some time ago where NVIDIA showed that running the engine on their GPU beats CPU computing like 10 fold, even on a gigantically fast Quad Core. I suspect foul play and a rigged test. Vested interest I guess.)

I just installed the Quad Core I got yesterday with Henrik (the guy that introduced me into overclocking some 2 years ago) and we both were disappointed to say the least.
You can of course use the raw calculation power for rendering, but in games, even the ones that are supposed to use it, it is a waste of money.

Example?

Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance:

On my dualcore Intel, that I had overclocked from 2.4 ghz to 3.5 ghz, the game always pushed the cpu cores to the maximum.
On the quad now, even with the tool core maximizer, it is not. It is only using each core like up to 75%.

Sad!

The same story with Warmonger: Downtown destruction, a game that uses the Physix physical engine for calculating a modifiable environment (i.e. you can destroy walls and ceilings).
The physix engine usually requires a special HW card, which I always felt that was ill advised, since nobody would spend 100 $ just to buy such a thing for a few games). Now if you don't have that card, it will use the CPU instead.

Warmonger was running on my dual core 3.5 ghz at the very limit, meaning 100% CPU usage. It went down to appalling 8 fps at times, which made it sick to look at and impossible to play. Now the kicker:
On my quad core, overclocked, now running at 3.2 ghz (each core), nothing changed.
But now it is using the cores at like 60%. I don't get what the problem is of if the game (and games in general) are just not written scalable for 4 cores.

What I am saying is that i got the CPU power, but the program does not take it.

This is not just a little stupid, but a lot.

Physix was bought by NVIDIA and what they are doing right now is pushing their GFX card rendering. It is their agenda, because they want to sell graphic cards, but it is ill advised to say the least. Read my next blog on where the physical engine needs to run and why it only makes sense on the CPU.
 

Today I delivered a 900 mhz Compaq desktop to a friend of mine that I got to know speaking esperanto. He did not have good luck with it when it was installed with XP and since I have seen that especially people that want things simple take good to Linux, I installed Kubuntu on it.
Gutsy 7.10 to be exact.

I was again amazed of how smoothly the setup went. Not once was a asked to enter a serial key, not once bothered to activate a software that was rightfully owned by him.

Once again I saw my principles aknowledged, when I found the transition of thunderbird mail from windows to Linux a piece of cake.
I remember that it payed to pay attention to which kind of modem I bought him 2 years ago, when I first set up the hardware for him. It is a PCI modem, but one that was supposedly supported by Linux. And yes, it is.
I have for some time made a point of going out of my way to buy hardware from manufacturers that favour Linux.
I was worried in the last moment, that he might not be able to print or have a reduced functionality on the printer, but then was relieved to find, that it is in fact a HP printer.
It is nothing more than justice that I recommended to buy a HP for 3 other people, including my parents, and bought one myself just recently. Companies are purposefully ignoring Linux and not releasing drivers for it. So not making sales serves them well.  I know that my area of influence is probably of no importance to Canon, but for me it is policy to buy hardware and software that works on all OSes, not just one.
HP does a wonderful job of supporting Linux with printers, they provide drivers and everything.

Now if my friend would have been using Outlook, it would have been much worse. There is no Outlook for Linux and therefore it would have been chained to Windows only.
My policy is that software needs to be multiplattform. In the future, the operating system will not matter, because nobody cares what the OS does, it is just a plattform for running applications, nothing more. No wonder Microsoft was so disappointed by the public lack of enthusiasm towards Vista. Who cares about a OS that much? Not even Linux would incite much excitement, just the OS itself. It does nothing, without programs. And Linux is just so great because so much is included already.

Now there are a marvelous lot of software available in multiplattform style, most of it probably open source. Commercial companies still poo poo Linux, especially on the desktop.
Well, too bad for them. If a program in my "software fleet" is single plattform only, it gets replaced with a open source equivalent. If it is absolutely necessary, it gets put on the black list, meaning: due for replacement ASAP that a alternative comes around. This just happened with Gigastudio: Linuxsampler, a brand new and promising project has taken it over, evicting yet another functionality from my XP bucket.
it was not the only reason, it was also behaving badly. When using the Webcam to communicate with my piano teacher and having Gigastudio on, XP went blue screen, interesting enough. I wonder how come these things go that deep into the OS. They definitely should not.
Tascam has also not released any drivers for normal soundcards for XP, so I had to initially buy a special Soundcard just that Gigastudio, a nuisance to say the least.
The always quoted that it would ensure maximum performance to have a low level proprietary soundcard driver especially for Gigastudio. Well, Linux does quite well without it. And the disadvantage of having to compile linuxsampler myself payed off in terms of performance, since it is perfectly tailored to the CPU and architecture.

Altough professional music production on Linux is still in the beginning, I very much like the Jackd soundserver, especially the patchbay, where you can connect things in a way that you wish you could in Windows. AND, it is part of the OS, not a 3rd party software that you got to pay for.

But I will talk about that some other time.

Just as usually, I am a very happy camper with Linux... Exciting times to be in the IT field. Especially in the one that still enjoys innovation and progress ;-)
 

Have you ever dreamt to learn playing the Piano? Always knew that you don't have the talent for it?

Well, now things have changed a little in that respect, now you can.

Half a year ago I discovered what I have known must exist for 3 grueling years of classical piano instruction.
Normal Piano learning is a royal pain in the butt. Finally somebody became a little inventive and challenged the way it was taught over so many years.
Take that, tradition!!!

As you will find from other posts, I am a big challenger of tradition. Tradition is basically say that you do things the way they have always been done.... because.............they have always been done like that...

No intelligent and valid reason to do something.

Anyway, the method is called Snowmann's Dream and was originally invented by the Indonesian professor Wei Tsin Fu in Tübingen Germany, in Germany it is called "der Schneemanns Traum".

The last 6 months were permeated through the frustration of not being able to find a teacher to teach me in the new way. And now I have found one, crazily enough (incredible!!!) the writer of the snowmans dream book himself. I am so flattered!!!

After 3 lessons I have to admit that I was right in assuming that learning by yourself with this method and the book, that does not explain that much is highly inefficient. Now that I am learning with him, I am on track and curious how I will play in 2 years.
In the new method, the progress is highly accelerated. You  probably overtake classical students and play better than them in half the time. Students of the snowman's dream often play devilishly difficult piano pieces that many piano players never master.

Professor Wei, himself a genius (my opinion), has examined how the brain works, what the left side does, what the right side does and how it is networked together. Only this way can one really learn to play the piano well and fast.

The classical method focuses on endless repetiton. How to read notes is never really taught. How else can you explain that even advanced piano players cannot play from sheet music with full speed when they have never played the song before?

It is like you would have to read a newspaper first 20 times, before you can read it with full speed to somebody.
It is not surprising, since the classical way does not offer any help in learning to read notes. What the teacher basically says is this:
"This is a G   it is that key on the keyboard... memorize where that G is on the sheet" (line or space) Students have a hard time memorizing notes, since the brain does not see the difference between one note and another. They all look the same.

The snowmans dream method on the other hand uses whole clusters of notes. Three notes played together form a chord and when you put three notes on top of each other it looks exactly like a snowman.

I am constantly amazed how teachers versed in the classical method fight this new method and don't want to recognize its superiority. They fail to analyze it properly and to be critic and open about the merits.

I find that amusing and a classical example of the lathargicness that most humans have towards the new, especially when they "know" better... Justifying ones believes and knowledge seems to be more important than the truth or finding a more efficient and beneficial way to do a thing.

I believe that is also why so many people that only know Microsoft Software fight Linux, without even understanding it. They "know" already and they don't care if they are overpaying for software or doing things inefficient for ever, they just stick to what they know.

I have stopped trying to convince people with facts about new ways to do things a long long time ago, since they don't seem to want to try to solve their lifes problems, live easier and more efficient, have less problems. They only care about what they have heard about, what is marketed big and prominent. If other people know about it, then they will consider it. If it is brand new, nobody knows about it, then it cannot be good.

Sadly, that is the total opposite of a highly successful person. In order to be that, you have to find unconventional ways. If you follow the masses, do what everybody else does, you are ordinary. The minority is EXTRAORDINARY.

Anyway, I will talk more about the snowman's dream in due time, how it works and why it works.
I am running an experiment now. I am far from talented in terms of piano playing. After learning 3 years, I can hardly play a tune worth listening to. I will record myself now on video and then compare how I will play in one year. The video then, the comparison will speak the truth. I am curious how it will turn out.
I am a scientist at heart and just want to find as much of the truth as possible.

But I am pretty sure how it will turn out. I am a mix between a dreamer and a pragmatic. I pride myself on staying realistic and being good in busting "fantastic business deals" and "get rich quick schemes" that other enthusiastic people (with less pragmatism) tend to fall prey too.
Many things just don't work, because they are too good to be true. Learning something effortlessly, getting rich without knowing anything or having special skills? Just does not work in my experience.
Playing the lottery? Grandiose waste of time.

And to all my checks, this new method holds water.

Just got my new T61 Thinkpad Laptop. Unwillingly I had to buy Vista on it, which bothers the heck out of me. It is a pain in the behind to try to buy a Laptop with Linux preinstalled. Pretty much all companies are bought by Microsoft to Install Windows, since they know that Linux is already a big threat to them. The advantages are endless, especially for a tech savy person or professional. No bullshit with licenses and activation, no restrictions what you can or can't do with it. You can use it as a server, if you like. Microsoft on the other hand limits the Desktop Windows, so that you cannot use it as a server (restrictions on how many incoming connections there can be) and that ist just dumb. Nowadays, one OS with different kernels (for user focused or backend services focused) is all it takes.
In Linux, there is no difference in Desktop, enterprise grade and Server , it is all the same and it also provides the same benefit, it all depends what you want to install.

Now I am so happy with this T61, since I installed Kubuntu 8.04 on it (the KDE flavour of Ubuntu, since I cannot stand the patronizing Ubuntu is doing with Gnome and the restricted configuration possibilities). Needlessly to say, it truly flies and Vista would be a real drag on it.
I would not even be able to use a full 3D Desktop on Vista. On the opposite on Linux, it runs quiet well on the NVIDIA card I got in it, with all effects (with are quite a lot more than Vista has to offer)

8.04 has been released just about a month ago or so and is still a little green. Realtime kernel is not working as it should, the jackd audio server is showing latency that punches you out.

I am considering to downgrade to 7.10, which works much better. Hell, yeah, I should know better, never use a OS that just came out of the press. That is why Microsoft should have run Vista as a public betatest, giving it for free the first year. Nobody would have complained, since it would have been free. Now that people spent money for it, they got quite upset to receive the unfinished garbage quality that Vista was when it was released.