Chris Stone, Vice Chairman of Novell, is interviewed here on the SuSE acquisition by Novell.
Archive | 2003
Hardware headaches
Swapped around a hub and a switch in the home office today, and one of the W2K servers refused to connect to the network. Flickering lights on the switch, solid link lights on the NIC, both LinkSys. Cold shutdown and examination revealed the card was older than the version of the driver; reverting to the older, proper driver brought on the Full Microsoft Experience: machine locked up, lost it’s entire driver database, refused to load, refused to recognize hardware, melted down. Okay, not the full eXPerience: I didn’t blue screen. But near enough. A few hours later and the original, incorrect driver is in place, and I’m backing up the few items on the machine not duplicated elsewhere prior to meling it down for slag. Or Mandrake, SuSE, something. Grrrr. I hate hardware.
Confusion reigns in the marketplace
CNET News.com – Front Door leads off with a story that Novell to acquire SuSE Linux. “The longtime Microsoft foe signs an agreement to acquire SuSE Linux for $210 million in cash, while IBM will take a $50 million investment in Novell.” I’m sceptical that this will be a good move for any of them. Novell does not have a history of successes. SuSE was popular in Europe, with a reputation as a top distribution, but also a positive attribute of *NOT* being an “American distribution,” despite the fact that contributions come from all over the world.
Yesterday, RedHat sent out notices that ‘free’ RedHat would be no more, with a renamed (and possibly incompatible?) Fedora taking over the “enthusiast” market and a “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” raising the price point for a supported, business-grade Linux.
To me, it sounds like the #1 and #2 leading distributions have shot themselves in their respective feet. This is the kind of behavior that a marketing company like Microsoft can take advantage of. Let’s hope in the coming weeks that spin and damage control minimize the FUD sure to develop from these moves.
ZDNet special report on the PDC
“In a Nutshell: All About Longhorn” John Carroll submits a special report summarizing Microsoft’s recent Professional Developer Conference, which seemed to focus on “Longhorn,” Microsoft’s next major client operating system, supposedly due in 2003. It sounds like a completely rewritten OS, with legacy Win32 APIs as well as all new .NET interfaces. On the bright side, Microsoft is finally replacing all the groady old interfaces that drove us crazy. On the downside, what will the compatibility issue be like? Shades of the Win32s mess revisited. Let’s hope they’ve learned from that. Linked from OSNews
FoxForum Wiki is back!
After an extended downtime due to misbehaving hardware and software, the FoxForum Wiki is back up and running. The FoxForum wiki is the place I go first when looking for an in-depth answer to a technical question on FoxPro.
Jon Udel and Joe Hewitt: Longhorn’s UI a replacement for… everything?
“Replace and defend. Reading the Longhorn SDK docs is a disorienting experience. Everything’s familiar but different. Consider these three examples: …” From Jon’s Radio
Jon cites Joe Hewitt’s blog where Joe says:
“This means that Microsoft may be attempting to simultaneously obsolete HTML, CSS, DOM, XUL, SVG, SMIL, Flash, PDF.”
Why is Microsoft confusing innovation with obliteration? Read my blog subtitle: Interoperable, competition, working well with others. This is a time for evolution and not revolution. Microsoft’s arrogance is astounding.
Doc Searl’s blogging on aurorae
From The Doc Searls Weblog: “Storm of Light.
NASA’s October 2003 Aurora Gallery has some amazing photographs of the aurora show that the current series of solar storms has been putting on. Here’s a shot from the USAF Defense Meteorological Satellite Program that shows auroras that are not only brighter than the city lights below them, but blurring the city images as well. If you look at the yellow outlines of state, provincial and Great Lake boundaries, you’ll see that the brightest auroras ran in a line from Southern Quebec and Ontario through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota ÷ right over the cities of Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Milwaukee and Sioux Falls.
That was at 0214 UTC on 30 October, or 9:14pm, EST in the U.S. and Canada on 29 October. In other words, the night before last. Since auroras run up to 800 miles high, they are visible up to 1000 miles away or more. Which is why we have sightings as far south as Florida and Texas.
Though subsiding, the latest storm is still going on (as of dawn here in Santa Barbara). According to the NOAA POES Auroral Activity Map, there is still intense activity where it’s still dark: over the Northern and Yukon Territories of Canada, nearly all of Alaska, the entire northern border of Russia, and the southern reaches of New Zealand and Australia.
NASA has a terrific page on Space Weather that includes photos of auroras from space and 9MB movie titled Animiation of CME impact on Earth’s magnetosphere. A great watch if you have the bandwidth.”
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
External hard drive solutions
I’m looking for external hard drive solutions for making disk images and backups of a couple of our office laptops. Any opinions on 4200/5400/7200 rpm and bus-powered vs. transformer-powered would be welcomed. Tom’s hardware had a good review in “Mobile Data Storage: Up To 160 GB via USB and FireWire,” “External, But How? Mobile Storage Solutions Compared,” and “Smart and Simple: Portable 2.5″ Hard Drives from Fujitsu and Valueplus.”
My conclusion so far is that Firewire (built into one of the laptops and available in PC Card for the other) is the best way to go, and a 3.5″ drive the best choice. A fan is wise, and I think 7200 rpm is attractive, but worry about the noise and heat.
Any experiences would be welcomed. Epinions has some relevant reviews. A package deal like this at USB-Ware.com – 160 Gb, 7200 rpm, 2 Mb cache in an ADS Firewire/USB2 case for $270 – looks like a pretty good deal.
W3C backs Microsoft USPTO dispute with Eolas
Web Group Backs Microsoft in Patent Suit. “A leading Internet standards-setting organization took the unusual step of urging the director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate a software patent.” By Steve Lohr. [New York Times: Business]
I’m concerned that Microsoft’s decision not to pursue appeals potentially very damaging to the industry and Microsoft’s customers.
User-Hostile Interfaces
A friend let me know that my page was throwing a scripting error in Internet Explorer. I hadn’t thought of trying that – it works okay in Mozilla and Opera. Here’s the dialog box. Notice the editbox on the bottom half? You can’t copy the text from the dialog. Why would you? Perhaps you want to log the error. Or post it to a newsgroup seeking help. Or search online for the error. Or send an email to Craig letting him know he, too, has a scripting error. If you don’t want to let people edit it, why would you put it in an editbox? Stupid user interface design.