Introduction About Site Map

XML
RSS 2 Feed RSS 2 Feed
Navigation

Main Page | Blog Index

Sunday, December 16th, 2007, 6:17 am

Miscellaneous Sunday Rants

Intel Against Our Children

Intel sabotaged and even strove to ‘kill’ the OLPC charity by derailing it off a mass-production route. It’s disgraceful. Then they made a deal with Nick (project head) to shut him up. If you want proof, I’ve collected articles from the press here and here. Criminal-minded companies like Intel ought to be punished already. They are already an abusive, convicted monopoly in some nations, but the Bush administration turns a blind eye.

Analysts Are Often Shills in Suits

Analysts are paid by companies to dig their dirt. Red Hat seems to be a recent victim of their wrath. One analyst, for example, has already got one damaging prediction on Red Hat totally wrong and then disappeared into a distant cave (not to admit the ‘mistake’).

See this podcast from last week. In many cases analysts are little more than shills in suits. Gartner and IDC, for example, are funded by Bill Gates. Steve Ballmer shouts at the analysts on the phone and there are records in antitrust memos about hiding disclosures (a misconduct)

Google’s ‘Innovations’ That Weren’t

Innovating Lock-in

Google acquired the company which used the ‘wrong’ (platform-dependent) tools to build Picasa, which isn’t innovative at all. They would probably need to rewrite the whole application just to make it properly run in platforms other than Windows.

It’s better to just buy companies whose software is build not for just one platform. Wine patches are a nice gift though. At least Google’s work on the Windows-centric Picasa continues to bring good patches to Wine, which benefits other applications too.

Innovating Buyouts

Let’s use a better example. Take into account another acquisition (KeyHole) and be aware that ‘Google Earth’ has always been OpenGL+QT, making a native port trivial for most platforms to enjoy. One thing to point out here is that Google takes pride in Google Earth, claiming it is its own innovation (they even suggested that in an interview with me).

Google is like Microsoft in that respect. It buys more ‘innovation’ than it creates. And these acquisitions are typically proprietary.

Environment Concerns

The British government’s study on servers revealed that Linux can be 50% greener than Windows. The study says a lot about aging, but little about utility where GNU/Linux enjoys even more advantages (fewer Linux servers are needed to handle the same loads).

Comments are closed.

Back to top

Retrieval statistics: 21 queries taking a total of 0.110 seconds • Please report low bandwidth using the feedback form
Original styles created by Ian Main (all acknowledgements) • PHP scripts and styles later modified by Roy Schestowitz • Help yourself to a GPL'd copy
|— Proudly powered by W o r d P r e s s — based on a heavily-hacked version 1.2.1 (Mingus) installation —|