Mind the game or not, it carries on

somewhat laughable request for Office on Linux has been put forward by the OSDL. Some would argue that this was part of the recent mind game, wherein Microsoft wanted to fund a joint TCO study. An impartial TCO study from IBM has already shown that Linux is 40% cheaper to set up and maintain than Windows-based equivalents. It makes Microsoft feel very threatened. Also worth a mentioning is their proprietary video format/protocol, which DVD Jon reverse-engineered for the benefit of non-Windows users. This was only reported yesterday, as a matter of fact, so hacks must be circulating around the Net already.

In other news, Microsoft ends Services for UNIX, in a move which they claim will improve inter-operability in the long-term. Whose side would you believe?

Related items:

• Microsoft-funded Benchmarks
• Reasons to Use Linux

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

ICROSOFT have recently raved about their Get the facts campaign [rel="nofollow"ed]. This vigorous campaign aims to convince the public that Windows Web servers outperform Linux equivalents. The study upon which this is based is Microsoft-funded, who often wave big bucks at the face of academic research groups, as well as employ them. Microsoft-funded researchers have been caught red-handed in the past. They published fraudulent or questionable results when surveying security among Windows, Mac and Linux. Initially, little did they bother to mention who funded the research, but eventually, all conclusions were binned in a sector-wide embargo due to these biassed reports.

Sadly, for any impartial review, there must be funds allocated, which are often provided in the form of greedy commercial backings. Likewise, when some results are available, money can be used to run a propaganda. The extent of such propaganda is related to the size of the bank account — something that Linux, for example, is adverse to.

Quite recently, Open Source bodies refused to fall for industrial benchmark temptation and be victims to Microsoft’s marketing tricks that are constantly being pulled. The latest such manipulative situation is a scenario involving an offer from Microsoft to fund 50% of a research comparing enterprise Linux performance to that of Windows.

Microsoft’s open-source point man Martin Taylor has expressed interest to
jointly develop a study on deploying Windows versus Linux with the Open
Source Development Lab (OSDL).

…

“As far as working with Microsoft on a study, Microsoft could probably find
one negative line on Linux in a 100-page research report that it would
spend $10 million marketing while ignoring the other 99 pages,” he (OSDL
CEO) said in his e-mail to ZDNet Asia.

Google Talk

s Google release an instant messaging and voice application, as well as a re-loaded desktop search application, one cannot help but wonder if they now target the desktop at full force. Google are even rumoured to have interest in Skype

To balance this discussion, let us mention those who say that Google might become the next Microsoft, honouring all operating systems, but putting a barrier at the front of competing companies all over the Internet. Instant messaging, voice, maps, conversion tools and of course — above all — the search engine seem to be drifting Google’s ways. An article just released in The New York Times agrees with such accusations:

For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.

The shift towards the desktop does not contradict a shift towards on-line operating systems. A more recent article by Kottke supports my views as well. Will ten years of being enslaved to Microsoft ¹ come to an end sooner than anyone dared to predict?

¹ Windows 95 is one milestone among several, but today we mark the 10^th anniversary of that milestone (placebo rather).

Computers to be driven purely off the iPod/Handheld device

magine yourself the following scenario: To start up your computer you connect an iPod (or any other large-storage mobile device) to your (x86-based) work computer, which then launches the operating system (currently Knoppix Linux) from the iPod. It uses the processor and memory of the local machine rather than the iPod’s, which is merely used as a hard-drive. Then, once work is finished, you take your iPod home and repeat that exact same procudure, plugging in the iPod to a different computer. Not only can you resume your work, but your hard-drive (which contains everything that is personalised) gives you an identical environment, i.e. you have all your recent files, browser cookies, desktop settings, etc.

That vision is now real as IBM exploit the iPod for this purpose. The device could, in principle, be a Palm LifeDrive, which makes the exception among modern PDA‘s since it exploits very high data capacity. The large-sized hard-drive and high bandwidth (USB/FireWire) make it possible to use your machine merely as a host (computation, display, and peripherals), while your data (operating system, files and applications) always remain in your pocket. From an article just published in CNET:

The virtual computer user environment setup is called SoulPad, and consumers install it from a x86-based home or office PC. SoulPad uses a USB (universal serial bus) or FireWire connection to access the network cards for connecting to the Internet, the computer’s display, the keyboard, the main processor and the memory, but not the hard disk.

Also worth mentioning is the prospect for running your favourite operating system and programs to access your data on any computer. You could even use a workstation at your local library cluster. Plug in your mobile device and use the computer as if it was yours. This considerable step can give a major boost to devices such as the iPod and the LifeDrive. Perhaps Jeff Hawkins, Palm co-founder and R&D chief, had substance in his vision of the “Life Manager”. Could this be what Palm had in mind when switching to Linux?

On a less enthusiastic note, the entire idea of protable high-volume storage is not brand new. For quite some time it has been possible to install hard-drive housing units in one computer and slide in different hard-drives that suit different users of the same computer. This essentially meant that computers came without a hard-drive; hard-drives were provided by the users. However, with a handhelds like the LifeDrive, several major advantages spring to mind:

• Size, which is a major pro
• The ability to view and edit data on the go, unlike just carrying a ‘black box’
• Internet connectivity
• Infra-red communication

Cited by: PalmAddict

venturous article from Softpedia makes speculations with regards to a Google homebred operating system that is based on GNU/Linux. Google’s Open Source affinity is out of the bag now, so looking 5 years ahead, will there be a tighter integration between Google’s on-line services and a Google-controlled Linux distrubution?

Google is non-conformist enough, and it has sufficient money and knowledge to be able to venture in this domain. The recipe? You take a Linux distribution (Google’s appetite for Open Source and Linux is no longer a secret), you mix it with Google’s knowledge on Internet searching, e-mail, security, programming and document indexing, you give it a name that includes Google and OS, and there you have it.

• Related items: Google and Linux, Towards On-Line Operating Systems
• Related article: A Google OS by 2010?

When a general audience observes Windows being used everywhere, it is natural to assume it is the best operating system. In reality, very few people have seen alternatives to Windows. Even fewer people had a prolonged hands-on experience with another platform. Microsoft are exploiting the placebo effect, giving unnecessary and unproductive software, which you truly think helps you, but only helps lock your data to one particular vendor. Often the vendor destroys the very same community that it pretends to cherish. One day in the future, people come to realise that better software is out there and that influence of the group has shifted its balance. But is it too late once data has been locked to a vendor and habits become less reversible?

Windows used to be a great operating system. I cannot deny it. Yet, I am thinking about 1992-1995 or thereabouts when Windows spread like fire owing to its nice tools (and piracy). It has been static in terms of productivity ever since and it is now lagging behind the competition. It has lost its edge rather quickly — something that even “the” Microsoft evangelist admitted to.

Lock-ins, proprietary and narrow-mindedness allow Windows to live longer than it truly deserves. A large number of people in newsgroups I get involved in ask about data conversions that will redeem them from Microsoft proprietary and allow them to reclaim their data. It is only then, several years later, that ex-Windows users understand that this placebo was in fact poison.

Businesses are said to always be in a state of growth or diminish. Experience shows that they can never remain static. Encouraging is that fact that Windows loses more users to other operating system than it manages to attract at the moment. Balance has shifted.

A heavily-discussed topic in this quiet August is Mac OS X piracy. Yet more sets of instructions flow in, which explain about (at least) 3 different ways of installing Mac OS X on non-Apple workstations. To give a snippet of one of them, “1 – Install Darwin 8.0.1…” and yet another: “3. Download Ubuntu Live CD…”. It becomes apparent that a Linux installation is usually, if not always, part of the installation process. It’s a pre-requisite.

OS X will supposedly require its own isolated hard-drive, which is a shame. OS X is good for many things, but not for everything so partitioning would have been a pro. Only 2 days ago I formatted one of my partitions. I would have loved to make it an OS X partition, but I ended up with 2 Linux partitions. Let us refer to it as “two birds with one stone (physical drive)” and needless to mention, penguins are the best birds.

Related items: Mac OS on Every Machine, Dual-Partition Linux