I wrote about Google PC about 2 years ago. It was speculative, but based on rumours. As you may have heard by now, Google began selling a software stack based on Linux (Enlightenment and Ubuntu, if I recall correctly).

Several thoughts come to mind. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but let’s think about this for a moment.

Google has recently introduced both gPhone and gPC. These are essentially like Google stacks. Can you see where it’s going? Google is becoming a software developer that integrates things with Web services. It’s contracting OEMs to use its stack, just like Microsoft, which does this with Windows and other applications that it bundles or sells separately.

The reason for concern here is the pushing aside of smaller businesses in the process. Along with Wal-mart, Verizon and HTC, Google will make an alliance of giants. The small players will struggle to compete.

On the very positive side, now we know that unsubstantiated patent FUD will have another willing member fighting it along with Oracle, IBM, Red Hat (not Novell). Google joined OIN a few months ago and it now sells Linux stacks for phones and PCs. Well done, Google. Just keep humble and “do not evil.”

Well, at least it runs Linux…

Correction (03/11/2007): gPC has nothing to do with Google (apart from the toolbar), do it’s not truly a Google PC.

The press is abuzz. Intel has just joined the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) board.

As someone who has followed the developments on this topic and watched these stories extremely closely for over a year, I can assure you that Intel only does this because of guilt.

There is also the bad image it has earned itself and the ability to capitalise at AMD’s expense. Do not think for a second that they wanted to help the children. It’s Nick and the volunteers from Red Hat and outside Red Hat that truly have passion. To them, it is altruism. To Intel, it’s about keeping a monopoly strong.

Intel sabotaged, FUD-ed, and ridiculed OLPC. It did this in a very, very nasty way. Microsoft is a friend of Paul O. and it shows. When they failed to intercept OLPC, they started “dumping” a different type of laptops to hurt OLPC further. Suddenly they embraced the very same type of idea that they said was insane. This, along with documents, did the trick. OLPC lost momentum.

OLPC is not a healthy shape now, so the volunteers are willing to fall into the arms of a monopoly abuser.

It’s a sad story. It’s disgusting.

NE of my hard drives died a horrible death yesterday. I am lucky to be able to even boot sporadically. It’s a physical error (it even makes funny noises). At the moment, I just use another PC of mine. Tomorrow I shall buy a new hard-drive and install a new GNU/Linux distribution. I was at first leaning towards PCLinuxOS 2007, but getting the ISO and burning it might take a little while. Ubuntu is almost a ‘default’ option nowadays. I used Ubuntu on 2 of my workstations in the past, but I prefer to go with a distribution that is KDE-oriented out of the box.

It seems like there is a busy weekend ahead. There are a lot of scripts and customisations running on my main box and they will need to be restored and tested. The experience will hopefully be a very educational one, but it will also mean not being involved in some of the forums and site which I routine participate in. Any ‘change in agenda’ (as in “unexpected event”) can be a fun one nonetheless. The next such thing will probably be my sister’s wedding in October.

My machine at an older office. It
ran Ubuntu Linux (see daily photolog)

It has been very hard to ignore pictures of flaming laptops. Problems as such have not only affected Dell, which is now recalling millions of batteries.. If you own a Dell laptop, consider this an important announcement.

Dell Inc.’s record-setting recall of 4.1 million notebook computer batteries raised safety concerns about the power source of countless electronic devices, but experts said the problem appears to stem from flaws in the production of the laptop batteries, not the underlying technology.

Apple has begun similar a initiative, wherein it collects batteries (quick replacements to be shipped). Additionally, in the United States, an agency has begun reviewing all of Sony’s laptop batteries. Dell partly blames Sony for its battery woes. Sony is responsible for one component of the batteries which Dell stocks.

O, there I am at work again. By all means it’s an ordinary day, but the unusual heat makes me want to stay inside where it’s air conditioned. Just a minute ago I saw a follow Ph.D. student slamming his mouse and keyboard. I could see an empty Windows XP desktop, so I can only imagine that it froze on him (possibly after an important overnight experiment). That’s just something, isn’t it? No access to the results and a whole night gone in vain. I’d offer him Linux (it’s already installed on his secondary partition), but I don’t want to risk alienation or become his ‘support guy’.

My computer was running from April to July (SuSE Linux 8.1) without a single reboot, but we had three outages recently. These were due to the heat wave that evidently affects London datacentres, as well as California (notably the half-day MySpace downtime). I even heard about Utah too last week… downtime reported in news:alt.www.webmaster. I then found a news release and reproted it to Walt as a possible proof that the Web host was not lying. I guess we must all have to cope with the effect of the weather on our servers. Everyone suffers the same, so balance prevails.

NE thing that keeps striking me as surprising is that people’s habits supersede all logic. I will provide an example from technology.

How can anybody argue that drive A for floppy disk and C for primary hard-drive is more rational than the rhetorical and self-explanatory /dev/floppy/ (for floppy device) and /dev/hd0/? This comes the prove that it is all just a matter of habits. People refuse to accept new things that they are not already used to, irrespective of their reasoning. In fact, the hierarchy of a computer (abstraction) in the *nix world is far more robust. It may also be easier for a new user to ‘digest’ and everything stems from the root of a single tree.

may have just helped in intercepting a key decision and plan. It was the plan of our Division to convert a Linux HPC cluster into a Windows Compute Server, deploying it across approximately 32 nodes.

Not everybody was happy with this decision which made by just one junior staff, especially after I had voiced my own opinions. That guy, a regular Windows user, was rather frustrated. He wanted to convert a perfectly-operational Linux cluster into something else. He wanted to do so because the *nix system administrator who runs the Linux supercomputer has recently left. Without much clue about the alternative route, he went ahead and made a proposition to the management, contacting Microsoft in the process.

It worries me when such decisions are pushed forward by people who are not qualified to judge. The initiator does not know anything but Windows, let alone is able to draw a comparsion between different high-performance solutions (IBM have clearly stated that Linux is superior in that arena).

The person in question was/is bound to go to a training course on using Windows supercomputing, but an afternoon IT staff meeting will review the whole plan and possibly scrape it. I feel as though I have, to some extent, prevented a huge and expensive mistake from being made. That was my Linux advocacy for today and it was done locally, where it truly matters, rather than over cyberspace.