N the last 8 days of February, I may have set a new personal record. I composed nearly 400 posts, which had been sent to various newsgroups, especially technical ones. I am admittedly somewhat addicted at this stage. I merely try to catch up and keep up appearances as a regular reader and participant.

Below is my personal take on newsgroups and in particular UseNet:

• Newsgroups are suitable for like-minded people to support each other and contribute on-topic ideas
• Newsgroups are a place for pressing, on-topic news to be raised and openly discussed. The newsgroup has a chance of having impact on the parties (e.g. companies) involved and/or being discussed.
• In UseNet, content is made eternally public owing to (or put negatively — due to) newsgroup mirrors
• Key advice: always watch newsgroup post headers. Especially when reading high-traffic newsgroups, keep all headers in sight. Headers in newsgroups can help a great deal in discerning and predicting the poster’s behaviour and his/her chance of returning to the discussion. Such habits are less important for E-mail where most typically the sender is known, assuming good spam filters operate.

Related item: Newsgroups Statistics

Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM

have just had a rare chance to become part of an exciting experiment. It took place at the The Manchester Visualisation Centre, which is near my office. This involved a new method for interaction with visual data.

A pen is being moved in 3-D space and its route gets traced in real time. Atop that, vibrations are as subtle feedback that indicates contact with items on the screen. It was only a week ago that I discussed the issue of 3-D desktops, i.e. ones with depth, where one can interact with items and be able to feel them. That notion of depth could become a good surrogate for virtual desktops. Another issue is the sensitivity of touch, realisation of depth without special displays and stereo-imagery glasses, and also the motion arms that move up and down, thereby leading to tiredness.

I must admit that got quite excited about the device and asked the lady how much it would cost to purchase one for my workstation. When I was told that the cost is 10,000 pounds per unit, I immediately gave up on the idea. Needless to mention!

Related items:

• Spherical Desktop
• The Desktop Sphere
• Spherical Display
• The User Interfaces of Tomorrow

F your business awaits in the crossroad, having to make a choice between Linux and Windows, look no further. There has been a great deal of fuss over biased figures, which falsely showed Linux servers to be weaker than Windows counterparts. Help yourself to the true facts and do not be misled by heavily-funded propaganda.

Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and member company Levanta have announced the free availability of an Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) study titled “Get the Truth on Linux Management.”The study re-examines previously reported, anti-Linux management claims — deriving updated analysis from in-depth research with more than 200 end users. The “Get the Truth on Linux Management” report is available in its entirety, for free download, at the Levanta website.

Related item: Microsoft-funded Benchmarks

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

Novell are reporting that Linux is soon to be perceived as a discipline. Judge the article for yourself.

Masters in Linux down under

Novell has teamed up with Charles Sturt University in Australia to offer what we believe is the first Masters Degree focused on Linux. The university decided to debut the degree because of rapid growth in demand for Linux training and expertise. The degree program includes obtaining Novell’s Certified Linux Engineer certification, including passing of the Novell Practicum exam. This is good evidence of growing interest in Linux by new entrants into the IT workforce, and the University’s choice to go with Novell in the curriculum is a nice vote of confidence.

Related item: Open Source in Schools

My Web-based mail access (primarily Horde)
click image to view in full size

HIS is going to be the type of post that potentially leads to friction, but I simply cannot hold off. I even created a new category due to this item and aptly named it “Rants”. I will stick to anonymity in order to prevent sensitive criticism from having context.

15 minutes we spent in the weekly meeting. 15 minutes discussing the mail problems that have plagued this department for the past week. You’ve guessed it. The Department has got an Exchange mail server. People are unable to send mail at times, Web access is flaky, and popups keep coming up to inform the user about error in the local mail client, which to most is Outlook. Fortunately, I metaphorically took my toys and left this mail system 2 years ago. It seemed unreliable when I first joined the Division.

In the interim, people still suffer from mail issue. I do not take pleasure in the misery of others, but I could not feel better about my foresight. I did the right thing by ditching this mail system very early on. This is only the pinnacle of something that has culminated after months of recurring issues. More interesting is the following observation: At no point throughout the meeting was the mail system criticised. Not Exchange, not Outlook, not even the support staff. The IT department suggests that there is a single Outlook user which is the catalyst for this issue, probably without any awareness. They can’t identify who it is (not me of course, just for clarification!).

The staff would defend the only thing that they know and consider to be trustworthy: pricy Microsoft products. This loveaffair is by all means expensive. Linux to them would seem as though it serves only be a step back. It may be the effect of age and earsay. Regardless, the most amazing thing is that the entire meeting revolved around blaming an anonymous user who had the system crippled due to its deficient nature. Exchange cannot cope with something as simple as manageing 100 mail accounts. A single user can have it grind to a halt for very long periods of time, burning the valuable time of both support staff and research staff. There is no solution on the horizon either, other than speak to each individual user which is bound to the mail system. The staff might also need to verify that the system is properly configured on each individual workstation.

I find entire the scenario rather pathetic. This is probably why I was never fond of the Microsoft-friendly attitude among academic IT departments. Due to issues of liability and large available budgets, brand names are often picked at the expense of quality.

Needless to mention, these mail issues are irrelevant to me. I could not be happlier with my mail system. I had my mail hosted in my Linux-based domain for over year without any downtime or quirks. It never ceased to work, just like the positive Linux myth. Need it be mentioned that my server is responsible for mail accounts of just a single individual and not an entire Department? This is not the first time that I mention Exchange server disasters.

Y habit of playing computer games has slowly faded over the years. There was a ‘hiccup’, however, last year: A particular game that I played very heavily, almost for entire days at a time. The game to blame: Enemy Territory (photographics evidence). Then emerged the effect of obsessive compulsive addiction (see a collection of previous write-ups on the topic). The fact that I installed and re-installed the game twice or thrice meant something. It penetrated the mind and its negative effects are best realised in retrospect.

I use the computer as a tool that simplifies life, whether it is a PDA that rids me from the need to remember or an application that helps me communicate with friends, family, and a variety of new and interesting people.

Computer games have not seen any dramatic change for many years; nothing on par with the exciting revolutions in the 80′s and 90′s at least. CPU capabilities, as well as memory capacity, frequently doubled as Moore’s law suggested and games are of course built to exploit the resources available to the extreme. Apart from graphics cards, hardware has not had the opportunity to extend much. A certain barrier has been reached. Having said that, only a couple of days ago, a graphics card with 4 CPU’s was announced. Issues regarding heat dispertion have been omitted. Will such hardware lead to yet another breathtaking leap in terms of gaming? I hope not. [cynical /]

I have played enough for one lifetime. I feel as though any genre of games and any type of actions or strategic games was played many times already. Rendering more polygons or having a few extra inches on the screen do not help. They do not excite as much as growing up to see groundbreaking resemblances to reality approached year by year.

Final advice, which is motivated by personal opinion: Use the computer primarily for work. If you wish to play, better stand up and enjoy our real world rather than escape by entering the fantasy world of your choice. Nothing can be as stimulating as reality, yet. In circumstances when the reality is harsh, however, I can see justification for gaming. Addiction to games can be harmful nonetheless and is inevitable. Let us be careful.

Entering the virtual world (screenshot of
Manchester snatched in June 2005, Google Earth, click to enlarge)

The Internet is bound to make most sectors of traditional industry obsolete. Below are several examples, which have begun to prove more realistic than ever before.

• Telephone companies- suffer from VoIP for local and international calls
• Internet Service Providers (ISP’s)- giants like Google can gnaw at their revenue by appealing to a large userbase
• Newspapers – readers opt for the Internet, get access to blogs of many ‘flavours’
• Television – user opts for interactive content, not one-way communication with a finite number of channels
• Reviews move on-line – similar impact to that of digital TV (on-demand menus) on the TV guide — a river that have dried up
• Book publishers – the impact of Wikipedia and free books in PDF format; easy printing and sharing
• Film industry – media ‘ripping’, DRM
• Music industry – same as before with but increased levels of piracy, also due to P2P networking
• Classified services, real-estate (among other middlemen-type services) – superseded by eBay, classifieds service from Google, Microsoft, Craigslist, etc.
• Banking – online banks with neither concrete branches nor assets
• Groceries – as previously predicted (along with other wild guesses), warehouses may replace supermarkets and be managed and accessible via the Internet

What will be the outcome of this revolution? Nothing far-fetched, but nonetheless a noticeable transition. More free content, low-cost services and fierce competition among service providers, primarily left in the hands of giants.