The Iron Yuppie

What Linux needs to succeed

Good night. This is one of my pet peeves about larger organizations trying to get enjoy the blogging movement. Putting up some random and attaching your name is no good... you'll just end up bringing down your creditability. ZDNet covered a story about a subject I was working on where the reporter did nothing but copy the quotes from a blog which actually covered the story. It seems that a news organization should actually do the work to identify the facts on its own rather than repeating what the active few people who actually decided to post about a story thought.

The complaint of the week comes from ZDNets blogs, courtesy of Paul Murphy.

At the moment my belief is that nothing, not even the best of the BSDs, gets close to Solaris for scalability, performance (at least on SPARC), and reliability. Similarly I don't see anyone close to catching MacOS X for desktop usability. In other words, I think that Unix is already there, and has been at least since Microsoft dropped Xenix in favor of MS-DOS.
Linux isn't the best at anything, but it's pretty good on a lot of things and far ahead of Microsoft's offerings on justabout everything. In fact my image of this is of three world class skiers who mostly finish in the same order: Solaris, BSD, Linux but almost always do so within fractional seconds of each other, with Microsoft skidding in an irrelevant fourth a minute or two later.

Sweet. Why? What about MSs offerings are so far behind Linux? What about Solaris and BSD are so good that deserve our attention? Disclaimer, I have used all of the OSs he mentions above and now work for MS.

I dont see it. And to make claims like that without backing seems arbitrary. He then goes on to say (and Ill paraphrase here) that the problem with Windows is that everyone knows how to use it and no one knows how to use Linux, which means that everyone who uses Windows should be demoted/fired and they should only hire people who use Linux. Because thats very sane.

Anyhow, I know that its just an opinion piece, but all it does is serve to annoy people and make me think less of ZDNet for letting Mr. Murphy post under their banner. One more pet peeve:

Last week's "insight Friday" piece, on the artificiality of the server - desktop distinction for Unix drew a long and well reasoned responsefrom a user signing himself (or herself) as "xtep." At the end xstep says:
I would like to hear more Linux users talking about what *nix's need to meet the needs of everyone?

Yeah, me to [sic].

Ack. How about even a MODICUM of editorial oversight? You know, enough to eliminate major grammar issues? Thanks.

Vint Cerf Leaves MCI for Google

I know I'm just cynical, but this really feels like a "publicity" hire. What is Mr. Cerf going to do... explain to the folks at Google how there is this wonderful thing called the Internets? Not that Mr. Cerf isn't ridiculously well qualified, but it's not like Google doesn't have some visionaries on staff already. I suppose you can never have too many smart people.

It is one thing that Google can offer that almost no other large software company can... the ability to work on something that will be very big and totally new. MS was able to offer this to Anders Hejlsberg back when they hired him to work on the DotNet framework and C#. If you were a visionary, why would you join MS now? To finish off bugs and ship a product that you basically had nothing to do with? Not very appealing.

D

I've been looking for something to help me train. Everytime I go out running, I always feel like I'm just thrashing about. I had a heart rate monitor which I used on the treadmill but, alas, that has failed me because 1) it's out of batteries and 2) it only measures heart rate, not how fast you should be running.

I'm currently debating between one of the following:

Garmin 301 (GPS, no footpod needed) - $325

Suunto t6 (footpod extra) - $449

Polar M61 (footpod extra, but very cool fabric heart electrodes) - $169

Nike Triax Elite (footpod included) - $360

I'm not particularly partial to anyone based on brand name, but I am leaning towards the REALLY expensive Suunto, only because it has the nice feature to really focus my workouts... to be as hard as is useful but no harder. Anyone tried any of these for coaching?

I heard Ann Coulter promoting her book on some yelling show quite a while ago and noticed the flimsiest argument I've ever heard. She said something to the effect of (and I don't have the exact quote I'm afraid) "What is different about a Liberal dissenting than someone who is helping the enemy." The concept is accurate; someone who dissents against the government and an actual traitor may both speak with a very similar message on a given issue. But they do a lot of other things the same as well! They both breathe oxygen, they both have nipples, they very likely like their ice cream cold and their coffee hot... is having a fondness for Macaroni and Cheese traitorous? It fails the most basic logic and statistics... correlation does not equal causality.

Not very recently (I'm slow to catch up on my blog reading, what can I say) some individuals in the media have called Cindy Sheehan a traitor for protesting against the war. My levels of disagreement with this assessment are many fold. First, treason = "Violation of allegiance toward one's country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one's country bywaging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies." Remind me again how sitting outside the President's ranch is "acting to aid [America's] enemies"? Second, if ANYONE could be considered supporting our country it would be one who had "the solemn pride that must be [hers] to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom." Cindy Sheehan simply has more creditability to opine on what is worth sacrificing or not considering shes already paid a hefty fee. Third, the last time I checked, petitioning the government for a redress of our grievances was something this country was founded on... where did I see that? OH RIGHT, THE FIRST AMENDMENT:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

You know, I like to consider myself open to both sides of a given controversial issue, but some people's desire to tear down Mrs. Sheehan is just wrong. She's a person who has gotten a bit of a following. Does that make her wrong, evil or traitorous? Hardly. Disagreement is fine, but the slander is just uncalled for.

30 cheat sheets for geeky stuff

I always loved this stuff, even though this list seems pretty short. Cheat sheets are the tool of the programmer... at least until you have intellisense.

The blogsphere appears to be pretty active about Ballmer's desire to kill Google. Though he denies it, it certainly sounds like him. You'd think he'd control himself a bit better in front of someone who has already said that he's going to a competitor. Strong language but I'm not sure what the big deal is... as long as he OBEYS THE LAW.

But the real nastiness that appears to come out of the recent disclosure is this one seen in these two articles:

One:

It said Lee removed "Microsoft confidential" labels from a strategy document on China and sent it to Google while pursuing his new job. It also said Lee continued to attend China strategy meetings after he began talking with Google.

and

Two

Microsoft also cites an e-mail response Lee got from Google Vice President Omid Kordestani, in which the Google executive writes that "it was nice talking to you and learning about your insights into a successful approach to Google's operations in China."

Damn. If this is true, this is fucking bad. The guy sent confidential information to Google when he was employed at MS and begun effectively working for them. Again, if true, Dr. Lee should be drummed out of the business for a long time. Those at Google who knowingly accepted these documents should be fired... Why would Google even want to hire a guy this loose with business ethics? This is some straight-forward sleazy shit.

[Updated: Bad grammar]

This reminds me of LodeRunner, for some reason... really addictive and hard flash game. (Thanks MetaFilter)

[Updated: Sadly, I misspelled one of my favorite childhood games]

Via MetaFilter. Wow, this ISP is in downtown New Orleans. Suffice it to say if they can handle a category 4 storm, looting, lack of power and massive flooding, they can probably handle your data.

Kirk Report showed off a game called Guess-the-Google. The author presents a bunch of pictures and the user is encouraged to guess the keyword which spawned them. I remember seeing something like this at MS research, but I can't find it for the life of me.

A machine seems "smart" if you tell it to do something and it does it. The more arcane or odd that request is, the smarter you will think the machine is. But the nice thing about structured data and the Internet is that search engines receive billions of odd or arcane requests every day. All you have to do is figure out which the user thought were successful and you can just mine those results into the machine. That's exactly what a game like this provides. It's fun to play, but what you're really doing is typing the keywords that should return those pictures. Unless you're lying, which is possible for one person but practically impossible for thousands of people, when you see a bunch of orange pictures and you type orange first, the machine now knows that's what it should present when someone types orange. It's a nice way to take a lot of distributed knowledge and perceptions (namely in our heads) and record it in such a way that it's useful for a lot of other people.

People have started to voice opinions that the next generation of the web will be something big. Could be, but I doubt it. With all the mash-up apps that are out there, I think this cool site is the next generation of the web:

Last Minute Auctions via Marcus Zillman

Great site and all it does is take information which is already there and present it in a totally new and useful way. Really nice!