Archive | Technology

I had hoped to exclaim “Microsoft-Free in 2003!” but I’ve been a little busy.

Interoperable is not just the slogan of the blog, but a philosophy that all tools work better than any single one; a group of minds is greater than their sum. So, this is no abandonment of anything, rather an expansion of possibilities.

I’ve had several dual-boot machines for years, and have learned to work on them pretty interchangeably.

At the end of September 2006, I booted into the Ubuntu 6.06 distribution I had on the laptop and three days later I’m still working there. There are things I need other OSes for, but the transition is getting easier each time.

I've always wanted an excuse to build one of those lunch-box sized PCs. I haven't come up with a good excuse yet, but Ars Technica has some recommendations on the components to build the box, whether you want a Budget Box or a top-of-the-line machine.

IBM joins in the fray by recalling over half a million laptop batteries. PC Magazine covers the story.

“Customers are encouraged to call Lenovo at (800) 426-7378 anytime or log on to Lenovo's battery recall web site to determine if they have an affected battery.”

InfoWorld's Off the Record column continues to supply great tales of the software world's mis-steps, like this one:

“Ten years ago, I was the IT manager at a successful software company whose main product was aimed at large insurance companies. It was a DOS app that read records from large data files, did a little processing, and passed the results to other apps downstream. It wasn't particularly pretty, but it was accurate — and it was fast! It worked in batch mode, processing thousands of records per minute, which was a critical feature, considering how many records our clients needed to manage each day.”

“We were doing well with this app, which was pretty much the industry leader. So in a classic it-ain't-broke-so-let's-fix-it-anyway move, some of our managers and salespeople began complaining that it wasn't written for Windows.”

Betcha can't guess what comes next. Read the whole story here.

InfoWorld's Off the Record column continues to supply great tales of the software world's mis-steps, like this one:

“Ten years ago, I was the IT manager at a successful software company whose main product was aimed at large insurance companies. It was a DOS app that read records from large data files, did a little processing, and passed the results to other apps downstream. It wasn't particularly pretty, but it was accurate — and it was fast! It worked in batch mode, processing thousands of records per minute, which was a critical feature, considering how many records our clients needed to manage each day.”

“We were doing well with this app, which was pretty much the industry leader. So in a classic it-ain't-broke-so-let's-fix-it-anyway move, some of our managers and salespeople began complaining that it wasn't written for Windows.”

Betcha can't guess what comes next. Read the whole story here.

Phil Windley gave a presentation to Brigham Young University's Unix User Group on “Power Laws, Longtails, and Software.” An interesting view of the power of the Internet.

Just a bit of advice for folks trying to market to the A-List: Have something worthy. Else you might end up on Joel's bad side:

The phones they send us are so lame there is literally no area you can go into without being disappointed and shocked at just how shoddy everything is and how much it costs and what a rip off scam they're trying to run here with the music that costs too much and the movies that you don't want to watch on the screen that makes them unwatchable and you just KNOW that if you call to cancel the extra $7/month, their customer service department is going to give you the phone menu runaround and then put you on hold for an hour and then you'll get some cancellation specialist with an incomprehensible accent who will spend 15 minutes trying to talk you out of canceling the useless service until you just give up and let them have the goddamned $7 a month.

Great commentary. Read it all.