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.

Some photos I took in Oxford last year

ATER this month I will present my work at Oxford University. I still have many photos from my last visit (sample above) and I also wrote some notes. The absurd thing is that, for the first time, the college where we’ll be staying does not permit jeans and T-shirts. It doesn’t sound so liberal to me.

As was the case before, another concern for me would be whether the projection facilities can handle OpenDocument format. Even if I choose to present in HTML with JavaScript, there’s no guarantee that a proper Web browser (one that supports Web standards) will be installed. In that case, I need to bring a laptop and, oddly enough, people are assumed to have the same ‘flavour’ of software. Therefore, it has become common to share the same computer in a session, passing files using USB sticks. Use of laptops is frowned upon, so ignorance in computing and standards evidently leads to inconveniences. That aside, I have little desire to travel anymore, but I am left without much choice. I’ll probably write more on this topic, nearer to the actual date of the event.

TFM stands for “Read The Fine Manual”. But the letter “F” does not necessarily stand for “Fine”. This phrase, which is a popular support forums acronym, is often used in scenarios where a basic question is asked despite the fact that it can be easily answered given some minimal research effort.

Inevitably, this reminds me of times when my mother asks me computer-related questions over the telephone. I have read about similar experiences from others, so I will share. The bottom line is that I steer away from any such conversations and sometimes refuse to answer questions. Why? Because, at the end, these conversations tend to frustrate both sides. What was supposed to take just seconds to achieve can ultimately consume long and miserable minutes that involve impatience, anger and blame games.

The root of such problems is reluctance to read manuals. To friends or family members, the demands are often higher. To a non-tech-savvy person, everything needs to be done in the form of a UI or command-line ‘recipe’ by somebody else. Rather than exploring a program and learning how it works, some people want to exclusively know the path to the few things which need doing. It’s the natural and rational approach, so there is little room for blame. However, any program which is to be used in the long term can be learned from literature and tutorials, rather than endless one-on-one crash courses.

Lazy users, in my opinion, are often those who rebel against the intrusion of technology into our lives. When it’s something new that they face, they just immediately ask others and expect to be served. Why? Because it’s easier to ask. But beyond a certain point it’s unacceptable. Exploration and trial-and-error routines are still a fundamental and important skill to anyone that is inquisitive.

As for my mother, I reached the point where I insist that she spends several hours looking at application menus, without ‘tinkering’ too much. For one who isn’t familiar with the application at hand, it’s unfair to seek help to grasp the very basics. The exception is, of course, dedicated/paid support/teaching. Otherwise it’s just wasteful; Especially if the manuals are out there. Giving a solution will not help without context, as well as user orientation. Without letting others acquire the skills of exploring computer programs and their user interfaces, a request is implicitly made for more of the same.