Intel-Optimized Firefox 3.6 Final
It’s finally here! You can also find other builds of Firefox and Camino and occasionally other stuff on my downloads page.
Let me know how you like it!
Hey Ballmer, FUD Doesn’t Work Anymore
I think we all know about this Microsoft business tactic, but if not, read up on FUD. In this little exercise, I’m going to go through a couple examples:
The Slatabletbook
Once the Apple rumor engine shifted into high gear around September, Microsoft announced the Courier. This is actually a cool concept so they do deserve some credit. Not surprisingly, the project was led by J. Allard, the only person doing anything worthwhile over there. This is just a reference design, who knows when it will ship and by whom.[1]
When CES rolled around and a Courier prototype wasn’t ready, Ballmer showed off the “HP Slate” which is to be available “sometime this year”. Hmm, wonder where they got the name “Slate“.
Capacitive Multi Touch
The iPhone’s had it for almost three years. Oh yeah, Windows Mobile 7 will have it in the second half of 2010, or was that February, or will WM 6.6 have it, or 6.5.3, or something else, yeah.
Media Streaming
Apple just bought Lala and is building a massive data center in North Carolina. Seems like media streams are just around the corner, gotta announce something. Yeah, the next Zune HD firmware update, expected sometime in spring, will have music streaming from “the cloud”.
Game Consoles
Wow, in 2009 Nintendo almost sold more Wiis than Microsoft and Sony, combined. Maybe that newfangled controller has potential. We’ve got one too, Project Natal, to be released “Holiday 2010″.
Search Engines (err, Decision Engines)
This doesn’t really fall under the FUD department, more into the “staged demo” depo. Bing is good, rivals and even beats Google in some categories. There is just one fatal flaw that was never announced: The Bing Indexer Sucks. Basically, it boils down to:
- The MSNBot is slow as it does a long process of semantic analysis
- Bing pretties up areas like Auto & Travel to hide their small indeces
- “Real-Time” results come from structured data provided by partners
This choice quote sums it up pretty well:
While Bing has a lot of great features, it continues to struggle with the same issue previous incarnations of the service have. The actual index size, and the corresponding relevant results that come with those searches for the less popular queries, pales in comparison to what Google and Yahoo offer.
As Steve Jobs says, Real Artists Ship. Microsoft seems to have its hands in almost every pie there is, sometimes this FUD is to thwart a project as in the case of the slate, but more often than not, it’s probably to determine if a particular market exists before investing heavily into it. Either way, announcing so much vaporware is turning MS into something of a laughing stock.
Announcing something a year out is just ludichrist. Technological change is accelerating at a rate close to Moore’s Law so indeed the Singularity Is Near.
Disclaimer: I’m an Apple fanboy, so am quite tainted.
[1] Apple never pre-announces anything unless their hand is forced. This is what we saw with the iPhone and this is why the rumored Apple device (RAD) will be announced in the same way. The RAD will include wireless technology that must be approved by the FCC.
TrueTwit Is The Devil
Update: Seems that TrueTwit has brought out their “premium” paid model where you aren’t forced to TT your potential followers. Sounds more like blackmail than a service.
Update 2: How are you supposed to validate if the fraking site is down? Screenshot at very bottom. FAIL.
There are many great services popping up in the Twitter ecosphere, but there is one that I fail to understand. This wouldn’t be a big deal if I could just ignore it, but it is forced upon me. There is also a viral mechanism in play that is causing this dreadful service to propagate and I can barely stand it anymore. I left a comment on their blog and sent a message to their Twitter account about this negative viral impact. The blog comment was deleted within 24 hours. The service I speak of is TrueTwit (no link for you!).
This is what the service does:
Stop wasting time with spammers on twitter. We will validate your followers so you don’t have to.
Use Case
A bit of head scratching later, I realized this service is catered to those that auto-follow. If you didn’t, you could weed out the spammers/bots yourself.
Flaws In This Model
- Auto-Followers are most likely to be spammers/bots themselves.
- Putting up barriers for followers is only going to turn people off.
- If you don’t auto-follow, what difference does it make that a spammer is following you?
Negative Virality
This is where things really start to suck. According to the site, you can bypass all this CAPTCHA nonsense if you sign up with the service. What isn’t apparent is that when you sign up, you become one of them, now making your potential followers jump through hoops. And on it goes.
Much anecdotal evidence points to these facts:
- Using the service will greatly decrease your followers
- People aren’t always aware that they have been assimilated
I’ve attempted to discuss these problems with the service, but they are unwilling. I could be wrong about all this and this service could be the best thing since sliced bread, but I don’t see the light.
Please post a comment on your thoughts of this service. I’m very interested in what you have to say.
Tethered, Net-Install of Xubuntu
I don’t think I can write about anything more esoteric and useless, but maybe this will help one person somewhere.
Xubuntu? What the hell is that? I knew of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, etc. but never heard of Xubuntu. I found it when trying to get an Ubuntu distro on my old G3 iBook. According to DistroWatch, Xubuntu is
a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. Unlike its parent, however, Xubuntu uses the light-weight XFce desktop environment and is optimised for lower-end machines. The distribution includes only GTK+ applications where possible.
Perfect.
I go and grab the PPC iso image and try to burn to disc, but the image is too large to fit on a CD. I realize I’m not the only one with this problem and there is no solution other than installing from an iPod, USB drive, etc. which I don’t have. I then stumbled upon the Minimal CD Installation for Ubuntu and this what I did:
1) Get a host machine connected online as a proxy
The iBook only comes AirPort ready and I have a wireless network and am too lazy to walk downstairs to plug straight into the router. With My MacBook Pro, I set up Internet sharing. Next is an important step that I see many people get wrong. In System Preferences, go to Sharing, click on Internet Sharing and set your machine to share From AirPort To Ethernet. You don’t have to touch anything in the Network pane. Last step is to obviously connect the computers via Ethernet cable (crossover not required).
2) Boot client machine from the Minimal CD
Startup the iBook with the CD in the tray and hold down ‘c’. This will initiate the install sequence. Don’t worry about seeing Ubuntu everywhere, we will get into Xubuntu. There are a few steps to go through here - keyboard layout, timezone, etc - just follow along until you get to the main distro installation page. Select Xubuntu and proceed with the installation. If everything went correctly with the tethering in Step 1, you’re pretty much done.
3) Possible problems
USB errors - “unable to enumerate USB device on port X” errors. These popped up during the initial installation, but after getting Xubuntu running, they went away.
Tethering fails - try changing the host machine network settings to DHCP.
There really isn’t much more to it than that. This was actually an easy project, but required a bunch of wasted time on the original PPC ISO. Hope this helps someone.
Ballmer Is The Root Of All Evil
Update: I know that Google pays its way into Firefox, Safari, etc. but the relationship here is very different than that of MS and OEM.
I hate Steve Ballmer. When I met him, he was a total dick. I went to the CES keynote in 2000 (Bill Gates) and was in the reserved area seated close to him. I got up and went to talk to Masayoshi Son and Ballmer kept sneering and making odd comments. I wonder why he was so interested in our conversation that I was obviously trying to exclude him from.
Anyway, none of that matters. It’s just my personal perception of the man. What does matter is an announcement made during HIS keynote this year:
Bing will be the default search engine on
ALL HP computers shipping from now on.
Does this sound familiar? Is Microsoft not capable of innovating to the top? Do they have to strong arm everyone? There’s also Verizon forcing Bing on their users, crazy.
And the sad thing is, the other 800 lb. gorilla is making the same plays. Google is promoting the Nexus One on the single most trafficked piece of real estate on the web, Google’s front page. Is this right? I wonder how all Motorola and others feel about this. For some reason, this doesn’t feel dirty though. Probably because it doesn’t feel like anyone is being strong armed.
How do you feel about Microsoft’s strategy here? Let me know in the comments.
