Not much to worry Bill Gates

CCORDING to Reuters, Bill Gates states [enormous ASP ‘URL‘] that IBM is the main rival to Microsoft. Google are Apple are said to be smaller factors of concern, which lies in contrary to some fairly recent memo and even a few urgent strategic moves.

IBM studies show that Linux TCO is 40% lower than that of the Windows equivalent. What happens when IBM begin to pull out the Windows equipment from their clients’ operations environment?

What I find most admirable about IBM is that, unlike Google and Microsoft, they give no compelling reason to be hated. They embrace and encourage standards. They cater for diversity where it seems suitable.

I may be an exception and perhaps even an oddity. I lost interest in PDA applications that differ from the most fundamental PIM set. Alas, I sometimes wonder if anything beyond a reliable simplicity is truly necessary. I suspect not.

I bought a Tungsten over a year ago, but I need never do anything that I could not do on the M130, which is a low-end PDA I once owned. It now sits idly and serves no-one even though it works. It has a few minor defects, but workarounds can compensate for all of them. What was its contribution to the subsequent device in the ‘upgrade cycle’? A 32 MB memory card was inherited from the M130, among a few other peripherals. A larger SD card (quarter of a gigabyte) is now available, but it rarely, if ever, gets used. Same programs are used and the capacity required is similar. So what does it all come down to?

Palm rarely ever failed me where it mattered the most: data integrity. After over 3 years of regular use of the Palm I can only vividly recall two incidents of data loss which were a nuisance. Both incidents were not at all severe and they both date back to 2003:

• Incident #1: I was editing a large memo for approximately half an hour without applying the changes. A very rare crash of Memo Pad led to the loss of all changes. A lesson was learned following this loss. As I compose this item on my Palm at the moment, I do not neglect to periodically save it.
• Incident #2: Half a day of changes were lost after restoration from desktop-side backup. Fortunately, all that was lost included a few calender entries, which I could quickly restore from fresh memory

I have had an SD Card-based backup program for over a year, but never had the chance (reason) to use it. Well done, Palm, for preserving my data and preventing me from ever pulling my hair in frustration over data disasters.

Side note: I truly hope that Palm can deliver innovation shortly. They begin to lag far behind their competitors and I am tempted to swap vendors and move to Nokia’s Linux-based tablet.

Life involves accumulation of things, not always objects, money or recognition. Happiness, however, is dependent on the momentum (increment of pace) of this accumulation, so a step up may not necessarily entail happiness. This explains why perpetual happiness is a myth.

To close with a quote which I strongly agree with (from Dr. Kent M. Keith):

“The good you do today will be forgotten
tomorrow. Do good anyway.”

OR quite some time, companies with large budgets have feared the inclusion of free software in their server rooms. Cost was not an issue. Naturally, price was never assumed to lie orthogonally to quality either. Is there a fallacy? There certainly is and it is being perpetuated by those whose interests it serves.

I store about 1.5 GB of mail only to see great reliability. I also maintain Web spaces of roughly the same size and a continuously increased level of complexity. The Linux server and its Linux Web-based applications are both reliable and free. As seems as though the issue remains that in the wealthy working place, people have budgets that they need to make use of. Often they opt for Exchange servers and IIS. The expenditure due to acquisition of ‘premium’ solutions costs people their jobs. Cost cuts are more easily approached due to this. Pure and simple.

The same issues arise in a different context — the context of liability and job protection by sticking to brands. This pattern is an impediment in its own right. FUD continues to impede adoption, as does the norms and perceptions in people’s mind.

Related essay: Operating System Monoculture

In my own mind, there is one golden rule for design with Flash:

Non-Flash browsers should miss no information. Their users should only miss out on the flash (no capital ‘F’ here), but never any content. If proprietary formats like Flash are made a requirement for information extraction, the outlook for the Web seems grim.

It has been a long time since I last designed with Flash. This goes back to 2001, in fact. At the time, little did I know about the SEO impact, which is why I no longer bother with Flash. Originally, its use was not my choice either; it was the client’s.

As a final word of advice (or caution), menus and text should remain in pure-text form, never embedded in something that requires pattern analysis or closed-source software. The same rules apply to graphics (images) where the alt attribute must be used as a surrogate, just in case images are not (or cannot) be displayed.

The pact which involves Google and Sun Microsystems arouses my curiosity, particularly due to recent speculation about the Google PC and its vocation. It is no secret that Java is having tremendous impact. Nowadays, Firefox incorporates almost everything one needs, either as a joint plug-in that resides next to core, or as Web-based software, which is accessible via Web sites. Such sites are interpretable using Gecko (the rendered) or various other plus-ins for Flash, videos and the likes of them.

It is all about extensions, it seems — merely JRE applications embedded as panes in Firefox, which makes them well-integrated like the centre of all. Thunderbird does likewise and so can OpenOffice. The main implication is gaps being bridges. No more platform dependencies and filesharing protocols. Firefox makes everything transparent, or so one might assume (albeit you never know for sure with today’s Windows-only Firefox/Thunderbird themes and plug-ins).

For those who haven not heard/read yet, Firefox will soon have P2P file sharing incorporated as a plug-in. Rumours about this add-on have been circulating around the Internet for several weeks, if not even longer. There is even a screenshot. All of this commotion could attract a huge number of users from an already troubled Internet Explorer and, as browsers are used by all, this would push copyrights infringement to very worrisome levels.

Update (05/01/2006): Google renounce low-margin PC speculations

AST night, Brad Templeton pointed out that mail servers which run autoresponders or challenge/response filters could get blacklisted by spamcop.net. This is a database-driven Web site, which various spam filters rely on as a knowledgebase-type service. It also banned our LUG‘s mailing list earlier today.

I have been aware of the problems with such anti-spam tactics for quite some time, but never thought it could lead to this. As some commenters pointed out, other services may indirectly abolish anti-spam practices such as challenge/response, as well lead to banishment from people’s inboxes. Put in Brad’s words:

I learned a couple of days ago my mail server got blacklisted by spamcop.net. They don’t reveal the reason for it, but it’s likely that I was blacklisted for running an autoresponder, in this case my own custom challenge/response spam filter which is the oldest operating one I know of.

My personal solution, as posted in reply to the article, is to use a spam filter ‘on top’ of the challenge/response component. The intent: lowering the amount of challenges. One can reduce the likelihood of banishment in this way, as well as become less of a nuisance to the Net. In other words, it is possible to rule out cases when messsages are rather obviously spam. It leads to lower volume of messages being dispatched, which in turn can avoid blacklisting.

I use SpamAssasin, which is active at a layer higher than challenge/response (in this case Apache with BoxTrapper). Whatever gets scored as spam will be put aside in a mail folder which is reserved for spam. Only messages not marked as spam (and not in the whitelist either) will have a challenge delivered. This cuts down the number challenges by about 70% in my case. It never entails any false positive because I set the thresholds rather high.