VER the years, my love-hate relationship with Alexa has transformed into a hate-hate relationship. As many people exploit an already-fragile and susceptible-to-abuse system, Alexa traffic ranks usually lie.

I still remember the time when I discovered Alexa ranks. I soon discovered mistakes in their approach. Then, when Microsoft made its predatory deal with A9, Firefox got excluded from Alexa’s figures.

Months afterwards, as Alexa gained attraction and people treated it as though it really gauged traffic reliably, more Webmasters abused it. Vanity led to greed. Alexa began to lie more than ever before. Even Netcraft’s figures, which are not quite as famous as Alexa, have bcome more reasonable over time. Here is a new blog item that says much more on the topic.

If you have a site which is mostly for an audience of Mac users or maybe a site which attracts Linux users or even one which has something to do with open source software, you could have a very low percentage of your audience using Internet Explorer. Mac users really don’t have an IE option at this point and many people just don’t use it because of security risks.

Of course, Alexa only collects data from Internet Explorer. I think this sums it all up rather nicely.

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

ET me make a seemingly spurious statement: Capitalism is about rival vendors competing with one another for the betterment of society (e.g. advancement in science and technology). It is not about monopolies that eliminate any attempt to compete, or simply absorb every threat to hinder advancement. Which leads me to discussing Windows Vista and monoculture…

There’s a certain arrogance in Vista. Yes, there’s a certain vain statement therein: what we implement will become the rule, or the ‘standard’ (de facto or otherwise). If case you have not heard, Hollywood and Microsoft have decided the control the users. This endangers our most basic rights. Never mind the backlash that conflicts with the “if you build it, they will come” field of dreams, which relies on a monopoly.

This whole scenario making of the rules reminds me of people who say “PowerPoint presentation” instead of “presentation” and limit format choice in conferences to just one proprietary (could be patented also) format that’s pricey to use, prone to breakage, insecure, etc. That gives me a compelling-enough reason to never say “use Google” but to suggest “Web search engines” instead. By limiting our choices at will we restrict improvement and punish ourselves in the long term. We naively hand over power to monopolies. And all evil empires begin small and rely on innocence and undeserved trust.

N this age when convenience is perpetually sought, will mankind care about other living species? Are they a priority? Are petty acts which demonstrate care, such as Dell’s latest initiative to plant a tree for every computer sold and encourage/assist disposal, truly helpful? And can this change the big picture? To me, it seems highly doubtful.

People seek the friendly mugs when the limelight turns to them. It’s about perception of those who surround us. Little gestures and niceties do not reverse something that progresses at a much larger scale. Meanwhile, our planet is being destroyed and lives are claimed in the process. Sometimes, this life which required hundreds of thousands years of evolution is never to be restored. It is sad really. Below is a short snippet from the article which stirred and led to this unannounced rant.

Experts estimate there are 15,589 species threatened with extinction. But a species is only accepted to have become extinct if exhaustive surveys in its known habitat range have failed to find any record of the individual.

Let us suppose that Red Hat was right all along. RHEL is Unfakeable, not Unbreakable. Despite the predatory betrayal and the decreased support costs, Oracle can only attract 300 downloads per day.

In the first 30 days, we had 9,000 downloads of Unbreakable Linux from our website and hundreds of customers connecting their servers to our network.

This brings us to Novell’s GPL ripoff/sellout. Novell may suffer from the same PR backlash. It can never use organic surveys to attract informed customers, let alone a few optimistic minds, whose mind is disconnected from that of the beyrayed developers and peers.

Related articles:

Unbreakable Linux still unproven, analyst warns

IT managers running Red Hat Linux should think carefully before making the switch to Unbreakable Linux, the new Linux distribution that Oracle Corp. announced last month.

Our View: Don’t Fear Oracle’s Linux

Opinion: Oracle’s move will actually help Red Hat by boosting Linux’s already-growing presence in the enterprise.

Red Hat Dismisses Threat Posed by Oracle and Microsoft

Red Hat Inc’s executive vice president of worldwide sales, Alex Pinchev, has dismissed the impact that Oracle Corp’s entry into the Linux support business could have on Red Hat, insisting Oracle does not really know what it is doing.

Oracle up to bat: Red Hat bashing possible

The wild-card in all this is Oracle’s take on its Linux support initiative and what that means for Red Hat. Now it is possible Oracle won’t mention Linux, but typically Larry Ellison slaps some rival around and talking trash against SAP has got to be getting old.

Addendum: for the sake of comparison, Novell sees roughly 5,600 downloads a day; RHEL (not Fedora) is donwloaded about 12,500 per day. The moral of the story is that those who play fair certainly appeal to the customer. In fact, based on the latest from MarketWatch, “Red Hat is expected to report earnings per share of 12 cents for the third quarter, according to analysts polled by Thomson First Call.“

The company of marketeer has begun its next round of deception. It is no coincidence that this comes as soon as clients prepare for the next generation of servers and desktops (software-wise).

Lately there has been a HUGE push by Certified Microsoft Professionals and their companies to call clients and warn them of the dangers of open source. This week I received calls from 4 different customers that they were warned that they are dangerously insecure because they run Open Source Operating systems or Software because ‘anyone can read the code and hack you with ease’ they are being told. Other colleagues in the area also have noticed this about 3 Microsoft Partners or so they claim have been going out of their way to strike fear of OSS in companies that respond with ‘yes we use Open source or Linux’ when the sales call comes in.

The beast from Redmond is gearing up towards delivery of more disinformation than ever encountered before. It’s bracing itself for destruction of perceptions which accompany the term “Open Source”. According to Mary Jo-Foley, Microsoft has been preparing yet another
self-commissioned anti-Linux study. On top of that, Frost & Sullivan were recently used to conduct outrageous TCO studies. And yet, the press fails to mention who is behind the studies whose ‘conclusions’ it helps propagate.

Microsoft’s grip on public information and the media is nothing to sneeze at. Just have a look at the leaked Holloween Documents to get a quick reminder. That of course is the company which Novell, a so-called Linux advocate, chooses to do business with. Whilst Novell removes its anti-Windows Web site components, Microsoft fuels its anti-Linux fire and added aggression to its sales pitch. Clearly, “know your enemy” is a little tidbit which Novell absolutely must begin to digest and act upon.

In other news, LWN speaks of the division that’s formed in the Linux community, as well as the possible defection of developers who were invited to depart from Novell. Google and Canonical are named as examples.

To complete this quick roundup, I would also briefly mention Susan Heystee, the newly-appointed babysitter for this controversial deal. Shane has read the article more carefully and concluded that “they are going to customers jointly, in here she says that IP issues aren’t that important to customers that she has talked to. Plus, they admittedly have no plan – after ‘months’ of working out a deal and now they go to customers and are pitching them what exactly? Vague concepts like ‘interoperability’, ‘virtualization’ and ‘patent protection’“. This aligns perfectly well with the confusing ‘virtues’ that Novell waves in the eyes of European businesses, to whom patents are not even valid. All in all, this creates a great deal of noise and confusion. Wake up, Novell. You help destroy your source while returning to your proprietary roots.

PPLE’S moves seem slightly worrisome. They have just incorporated encryption into their kernel.

Apple’s so-called ‘DRM‘ of the kernel does not only mean an adoption of dodgy technology for the benefit of the company rather than the customer. Binaries (without accompanying source code and compilation details) are bad enough as they are. They hide the intention of a program. DRM‘ing them makes them not even runnable, regardless of what they are set to do.

Apple is being hypocritical here. It boasts virtualisation of Linux and Windows (even full installation of Linux), but it doesn’t permit OS X to run on anything other than Apple’s pricey hardware. It’s a one-way relationship.

Here is an an Arabic perspective that I found amidst some of very recent moves to Linux (at policy level) in Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines, China, and Kerala.

Another unfortunate event is that school age children and teenagers are so being accustomed to use Microsoft products that for most of them nothing else exists. In schools they are being thought that Internet Explorer 6 is the only web browser that they should use, or that outlook express is the only email client that could display Arabic characters correctly and if they were to use other email clients then the emails they write recipients would not be able to read…etc.