Year 2009

Forget me not!

Canonical announces its support for Moblin, just a year after Intel dropped Ubuntu as the basis for the project in favour of Fedora. A great move by Canonical, as Moblin seems to provide the best overall optimisations for netbooks --- and some really great æsthetics/usability --- for that class of devices.

Google Wave First Impressions

Google Wave, a new API/protocol and platform was presented on Google I It’s a hosted, embeddable communications and collaboration platform that introduces quite a few interesting features that are currently either not available or require multiple service vendors It was written in Java Google has made it clear that the protocol is going to be […]

Moblin: Proof that Corporate Support Needed.

If anything the sudden appearance of Moblin 2.0 Beta and its excellent User Interface has proven, beyond any doubt, that corporate support is essential if linux — and the open source community — is going to survive beyond a very very small niche. Linux on the server has been doing well despite Microsoft’s pretty good […]

Why Desktop Linux Sucks

“…And what can we do about it”. Linux usability (and the sorry state of desktop linux) has become a staple of this blog, but bear with me for a bit. Here’s a video by Bryan Lunduke from the Linux Action Show with reasons why the linux desktop still sucks for many (most) users. This comes […]

Moblin 2 Intro Video

Moblin 2.0 is a netbook-optimized linux distribution/environment originally created by Intel and largely based on the work by OpenedHand, a startup bought by Intel in 2007. This is the introduction video to Moblin. And, as far as linux goes this is by far the most advanced, well-thought, usable environment I’ve ever seen. Sure, it may […]

Lopssi 2

Lopsided if anything. Yet another gross error in judgment from Mini Napoleon Wannabe. Yet another nail in the coffin of French Legislation. Much can be said of Sarkozy's predecessors; both Chirac and Mitterrand were accused of corruption, sleaze, excess etc. None were as classless, blatantly ignorant or downright corrupt as Sarkozy has proved to be in less than two years in office.

Straight from Microsoft's Rulebook.

Apple's rumoured upcoming software crippling 'segmentation' for the iPhone stinks of Microsoft's 'Windows Vista SKU' nastiness. But then again Apple is no stranger to controversy or bad decisions.

Benchmarks

When OS X first made its appearance in 2001 and for many years afterwards, the performance of xnu, its kernel, and many of its subsystems was ridiculed as it was way slower than its competitors. Elitism, slower development cycle, closed source etc. aside, Apple has managed to make Mac OS X much faster than the leading linux distributions in the span of a couple of years, while at the same time the desktop linux projects and companies struggle with reinventing the wheel and fixing regressions. The situation on the desktop today for linux users is --- comparatively --- worse than it was a decade: traditional strongholds are gone [e.g. performance] while usability, stability and features are more or less unchanged for many years. Sad for Open Source, sad for competition.

Star Trek (2008)

Reboot. Labelling any fictional universe, any story, any work as a ‘franchise’ couldn’t be considered anything, but demeaning to those that love it. Yet I am lost for words when I try to determine how the Star Trek series of movies and TV episodes could be called. After 2002’s ‘Nemesis‘, it was all but clear […]

One Big Problem.

If there is any one big problem with kernel development and Linux it is the complete disconnection of the development process from normal users. You know, the ones who constitute 99.9% of the Linux user base.

Con Kolivas, 2007

An interesting interview and some views on the priorities of the linux development community and the history of the personal computer that I generally agree with. Con's quoted statement sadly rings true for Open Source development in general. After years of development, the Linux Desktop, the applications, the libraries, the documentation seem incomplete, archaic, chaotic and riddled with critical, esoteric issues that the 'fix it yourself' mentality of the stereotypical linux hacker is not going to remedy; that --- if anything --- is what keeps the wonderful idea of FLOSS from attaining the position it deserves.