Explore by tag: computers

Is the Linux community watching a setting Sun?

The title of this post was a headline that was probably written by an overly sensationalistic editor at http://www.searchenterpriselinux.com.  The actual article, though, was written by Pam Derringer, was a pretty balanced piece (although it obviously could have been more in-depth; given length and time constraints, she talked to as many people as I think could have been expected, including a Sun spokeswoman, two analysts from different analyst companies, the chair of Apache Software Foundation, a Sun customer, and so on).

I’m not sure I’d agree with Jim Jagielski when he claims that Sun has the “best and brightest business people in the world,” though.  As I said in the article, and as I’ve said before, I have nothing but the highest respect for many of Sun’s engineers, especially those who work on Solaris.   But their business people?   I’m not so sure ...

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New toy: iPod Touch (2nd Generation)

With the price drop, I finally decided to get a 32GB iPod Touch, and I have to admit, Apple has done a really nice job. Its decisions about which applications it decides to arbitrarily blacklist from its AppStore (either now or without warning in the future) is evil, of course, but I don’t plan to develop on a locked-in platform such iPod/iPhone, so that’s not a problem. And of course, given AT&T’s evil customer service, I won’t be getting an iPhone any time soon (life’s too short to play cat and mouse with Apple’s cell phone locking games), this was probably my only opportunity in the short time to play with the iPhone/iPod touch’s e-mail application.

My reaction? Apple’s programmers and UI designers are very, very, good. As Jim Zemlin has pointed out, if Apple’s locked-down platform is ...

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Donald Knuth: “I trust my family jewels only to Linux”

Andrew Binstock interviewed Donald Knuth recently, and one of the more amusing tidbits was this:

I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop—it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.

More seriously, I found his comments about about multi-core computers to be very interesting:

I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won’t be surprised at all if the whole ...

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Links — 2008-04-25

The Open Source Commands
Really good ideas that companies should take to heart.
Open Source Commandments II: Passover Penguins
More really good ideas, especially for companies like Sun…
Did Canonical Just Get Punked by Red Hat and Novell?
Interesting thoughts about Linux desktop strategies
rPath to OEM SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell for Appliances
I know a bunch of the folks at rPath, and I very much respect their technology; I think this is a very good thing for them.
Does Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer need an intervention?
Does anyone think a Microsoft/Yahoo merger makes sense besides Mr. Ballmer?

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Why I purchased the Sony PRS-505 Reader

Although I lot of people have been lauding the Kindle, I recently decided to go with the Sony PRS-505 instead. Yes, the Kindle has built-in EVDO access, and the ability to buy books without a computer, or even browse the web; and yes, the Sony has once again demonstrated it can’t create a compelling 21st century computer application to save its life. However, it had a few things that at least for me, made a better choice for me than the Kindle:

  1. The Sony is thinner — I want to be able to slip it into my laptop case and have it take the absolute minimum amount of space.
  2. The Sony simply looks much more elegant than the Kindle; steel with a leather cover simply looks a lot better than white, cheasy plastic.
  3. I’m not interested in buying a lot of DRM’ed ebooks; ergo, I won’t be ...

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