confessions of a ex-linux junkie

The future of Windows should be open source.... yeah right

2007-07-18T12:52:00.001-05:00

The amount of open source drivel on digg is getting nauseating. This recent article off a cnet blog, the author is clearly reading of the open source fan boy cheat sheet. Filled with assumptions about the "inferiority" of windows and the obvious "superiority" of linux (which btw 98.5% of average desktop users seem to miss).

Now i am certainly not a Microsoft apologist by any means, but these stories are just getting ridiculous. Here are my comments on the story..

"And while I know the next few iterations will cost us a cool $200 just to play around on a new GUI,"
nice assumption that vista & future windows is/are only a "new GUI" way to invalidate windows by glossing that over...

"And this talk about people buying Windows machines because they use them in the office is starting to get on my nerves too. If that's true, why is Apple gaining market share .... Windows is slowly but surely becoming a dying breed."
Well people use what they are familiar with.. apple gain in market share which is rather meager in the grand scheme is likely attributed to brand recognition via the iPod, (funny) commercials, & a very user friendly OS, all of which linux DOES NOT have...

"Right now we're entrusting an outdated bible of code to get us through the next five years without any serious security issues. I don't know about you, but that doesn't instill too much confidence in me. But if we opened the code to the public, not only would experts strengthen it, but maybe they would do away with one of the main issues with Windows: its inexorable connection to the past."

outdated bible of code, not to mention the same Linux kernel you run to day was started in 1991.. and these magical experts you speak of?? and why hasn't Microsoft hired them?? do they hate money?? Microsoft has put forward quite the effort on security and is criticized at every turn regardless of it... and you act like Microsoft supporting legacy apps is sacrilege, what about all the companies that have invested into a legacy app and need support for it?

read more | digg story

Alex Albrecht owns Kevin Rose for being a apple fanboy

2007-07-06T15:40:00.000-05:00

a quick clip from the 100th diggnation episode, alex albrecht owns kevin rose in a discussion about Microsoft's new table computer called "Surface". Kevin clearly hates the idea because microsoft is behind it, and alex calls him on it. a good watch

2008: Year of the Linux Desktop

2007-07-06T15:25:00.001-05:00

Is it just me or is every year the "year of the linux desktop". I'll give these linux fanboys credit. They certainly maintain a perpentual optimistic view of linux's future. they just dont seem to understand why the linux desktop will never become a popular on the desktop, and even its future on the server is not as guranteed they would like to think.

read more | digg story

Google's interest in Solaris

2006-09-28T11:21:00.000-05:00

Reported in a story on Digg last week, Google is looking into a OpenSolaris as a alternative to their customized Red Hat version of linux. On Digg, this story surprisingly drew quite a few cheers, but as always the hardcore linux community was their to prolaim the story FUD, hersay, & dissinformation.

Sun's and Google's public relationship was amped up last year as Google started to distribute the Java Runtime with the google toolbar. The deal was solidified with a press conference meeting of Scott McNealy, Jon Schwartz and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The deal mainly focused on Java and Google's commitment to it. There was no real discussion of
of Google using OpenSolaris as its back bone.

Google is one of the linux communities darling examples of how a company can take off with open source technology. Inexpensive boxes, clustered together, added as google's need for capacity increased. It is no doubt google is facing a a tough decision. Solaris' has made leaps and bonds over linux as of Solaris 10.

Several features featured in Solaris 10 could save google a ton in TCO. Linux now, is more less focused in a futile attempt to take over the desktop world, allowing Sun's attempts to grab IT Admin's and developers attentions with technologies such as Dtrace, Zones, and ZFS.

Sun more or less confirmed the rumor that google is testing opensolaris but did not say if it was to replace their linux systems. Only time will tell if Google takes that major step in converting to Solaris.

1 Person != 1 Digg

2006-09-07T15:13:00.000-05:00

Yesterday i posted about the tirade of articles posted to digg about the top 30 users links being featured on the front page. There was 3 articles posted to digg in one day concerning this issue. All 3 were marked as inaccurate or spam before the days end. Which just furthered the outcry of diggers thinking that it was unfair.

Digg is a large online democratic community with over a half of a million users. The vast majority of the community members just log in and digg the articles they like. They don't get in to the "slashdoty" flame bait posted in the comments. They don't spend hours scouring the web for stories to post to digg. They log in on their lunch break or after work/school and quite simply just digg. So with the majority of users only digging that leaves a few to post all the interesting stories we read.

Yesterday i posted that the Digg developers should just leave digg alone and the community would balance itself out. Rose and the crew decided to appease the minority of ill-informed and mess with the algorithm. You cannot perfect democracy!1 Vote for 1 Person right??? Not in the new system. Certain people's diggs are devalued if the article happens to be posted by a friend that they have dugg a few times before. Now all of a sudden your digg isnt quite worth what a digg was before. For using the friend system within Digg? in just doesn't make any sense.

And i say the ill informed minority because they are the few screaming about it on the boards. The top 30 are the top 30 because the post alot and are the first to do so. hundreds of normal diggers digg their stories to get them on the front page. hundreds of diggers marked the 3 stories yesterday as inaccurate because they were just that. Some guy claiming a conspiracy on digg because he doesn't have the ability to get a story posted on the front page.

It's a frustrating and confusing change for people who think for themselves. prompting a few of the top diggers to leave digg. 1 person should equal 1 digg. any other mechanism used and digg is no longer a democracy.

Is Digg Broken??? NOOO!!!

2006-09-06T15:21:00.000-05:00

There has been a recent flurry of stories on digg about how the so-called “top 30” basically control what is being dugg to the front page. Some going even as far as to claim that the Digg developers are in “cahoots” with the top 30 to suppress the average joe user.

More or less the scenario is that the top 30 are very active on digg, they are not just casual users. They devote a ton of time doing something they enjoy submitting links and stories from the various corners of the web. The top 30 diggers digg a lot of what the rest of the top 30 submit. Why? Because they submit useful & informative stories? Not because they are trying to keep the “man” down.

It’s seems that a lot of diggers are upset over what they perceive as digg tilting towards a elitist editorial system that has plagued us techies for the previous decade. Many diggers are shouting “let’s bury the fuckers!”, “ban them!”, “the circle-jerk club strikes again”. Suggesting a backlash against the top 30 via auto-burying their stories. In all honesty is auto-burying top diggers any better than people auto-digging their friends? Honestly i think alot of people are basing this on their own inablility to get stories on the front page. The reality is that they probably dont deserve to be.

This reactionary backlash being shown on digg is just that. Over reacting. The top 30 diggers themselves right now do not have the power to keep their stories afloat alone. Who’s doing it then??? It’s Me and you! Normal digg users keep these guys in the top 30 because they constantly submit quality stories and are usually the first to do so. The friend feature is a useful tool on digg it helps sort through the controlled-chaos of FUD, spam, and lame stories. You know those you mark as your friends are like minded and submit quality stuff. A lot of people have befriended the top 30, simple math says they are more likely to be on the front page.

Kevin Rose and the digg crew should (and I believe they do) know that no democratic system is perfect there will always be flaws and people looking to game the system. They should stick to fixing bugs and stay out of the people accusing digg of being unfair, and shouldn’t consider any action against the top 30. Don't play god and let the community/system straighten itself out.

What it comes down to is this is a community problem that the community needs to deal with, if the community deems that the top 30 need to go, and start consistently burying their stories, than such is a democracy, but if people continue to digg the top 30’s stories then don’t cry foul.

Living with PHP

2006-07-14T12:00:00.000-05:00

PHP is everywhere, the most popular web boards use it, many shopping carts use it, a ton of dynamic websites use it to render their content. Almost every System admin is going to to have to deal with PHP. The optimal setup for PHP is linux running apache. PERIOD. It is the most widely used combo.However in the real world running linux is not always an option, sometimes you need to run windows or a more reliable unix for one reason or another.

The windows server market is roughly 30% (I should say the IIS market). That is a large chunk of servers and a fair amount of them will probably be running PHP.

The point being PHP is open sourced, maintained by a community. A group of users who mainly follow the idea of open sourced code. (Otherwise why would they donate all this time) These community members who create, maintain, and upgrade PHP are almost all running some GPL'ed OS and have that "more holy than you" attitude towards windows admins and users.

So its not a surprise that serious windows bugs like this one stay active for months at a time. A bug that can cripple a whole system running PHP; basically ignored. Now i'm sure your yelling "It's open source why dont YOU fix it" We'll the thing is im not a hardcore programmer neither are most system admins. We are paid to run servers, preform maintaince on them, and provide as little downtime as possible. Not re-write PHP. We honestly have little choice in running it and are tied to a community that shuns %30 of its user base.

The problem basically stems from open source communites. The community has no insentives other than its own dogma to fix problems. If your not on their side of the fence they dont give a shit. Noticed i said open souce communities not companies. Companies (even companies like Sun that open source some of their stuff or give it away) have a financial insentive to have stable reliable software. No CEO in his right mind would risk %30 of his user base. He would be risking his job.

I Love .... LAMP

2006-07-11T09:48:00.000-05:00

LAMP for those of you who aren't in the l33t Web 2.0 crowd stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Basically a stack for you to develop web sites and web applications on top of. Hey and the great new is it's open source top to bottom. Obviously this gives the all GPL cheerleaders a woody.

We'll not to disagree with Brick, but I think LAMP is a quite inferior to most app stacks available today. It isn't even the best among open source or free app stack out there. LAMP however is praised and fawned over like its the second coming. Don't get me wrong, LAMP works on some level, but is it necessarily the best choice??

LINUX

Ahhh.. Linux the great open source idea, thousands of developers donating time and effort for our benefit. Adding so many features that the kernel is getting no debug time. Linux works and is quite popular on the server front. It however suffers from bloatware on many distro's. (redhat fedora *cough *cough) It isn't even the best modern day UNIX. If your going the Linux route at least try something that is scaled back ala Debian or Ubuntu. Unless you like running a server with so many programs you dont recognize half of them. Studies have shown your better off with a true Unix, such as Solaris. Which is also now open sourced. It's years ahead of Linux with ZFS filesystem and offers a clean coherent package. Otherwise Windows 2003 Server is just as reliable as Linux on the server front.

Apache

this is a hard one to argue with... Apache works and it is great webserver. Modular and stable, runs on almost any OS. In all honestly, IIS gets the job done just as well on windows. It's a toss up, If you want the open source, apache is hands down the right choice.

MySQL

mysql brought database management to classrooms around the world. SQL is THE querying language for Databases, however using MySQL is like using SQL on training wheels. MySQL is limited compared to MSSQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, even the free Oracle DB runs laps around it. The Great thing about MySQL is it works, but so does everything else, and they are better at it!!! If you are still hung up on the Open source deal Postgre is the way to go.

PHP

don't get me started on PHP. (if your running PHP4 register_globals=off would be a good start) PHP itself is not a bad language. PHP within itself is not any less secure than other scripting languages. The problem lies within the people that use PHP. "I can write a program in PHP in 5 lines what would take me 15 lines in JSPs" is a common pro PHP argument. Yeah you can make it code short, but your sacrificing security in the process. PHP is so easy for beginners and allowing people to cut corners from conventional programmer that it invites people to write insecure scripts. (Look ma! no "GET_REQUEST"s!!!) I know they have made steps in PHP5, but PHP still lacks on the performance front, in production you definently need Turk MM_Cache to get PHP to bearable speeds. JSPs are more or less the professional industry's' standard. ASP.NET has a strong following and is still maturing (sadly, should have matured by now), though it is still better than PHP performance wise. A lot of the Web 2.0'ers are using Ruby, which does suffer from the same performance ailments as PHP but is a great intro to web apps.

So now before all you Linux fan boys throw a shit fit, here are some words of advice, Don't be like Brick simply look at things saying you love them, actually think for yourselves, and try out some of the other open source alternatives. or even (gasp) commercial offerings, you may be surprised

Sources:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1983364,00.asp
http://www.itjungle.com/two/two062106-story01.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=702

The Unix-Haters Handbook.

2006-07-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

a book written in '94 about unix user's frustration with the philosophy of "worse is better" that seems to prevail in unix software design. Attention GNU/GPL hippies, before you bust a nut over the title, this book is meant to be funny and has a sarcastic tone.

Download here.

A odd feeling...

2006-06-30T10:00:00.000-05:00

A odd feeling started creeping up on me a few months ago... A feeling that I was wrong. Wrong for 10+ years. Wrong in the fact that I thought was on the right side of the operating system wars. Wrong in preaching in forums that "righteous path" of open source. Well maybe not wrong in promoting open source, but maybe not all "high and mighty" in doing so.

This "high and mighty" feeling is what brought the "wrongness" to my attention. Most Linux users know the feeling. Looking at a fellow classmates laptop running windows then looking back at your laptop running debian then thinking to your self. "I am clearly smarter than him!" Whether smarter is the technical ability required to set up Linux or the fact that you think your system is safer or promotes the egalitarian ideal of free software. All of us Linux users have been there.

But are we really all that great for using it? Proclaiming Linux's absolute power over windows? That everyone should run linux. From your grandmother down to your sister?

It all sorta hit me.

As I was obsessed with ubuntu, I had downloaded the latest beta. It was perfect! Everything was clearly laid out, no program clutter that plagues my other favorite linux (redhat/fedora), it was stable, quick, and worked with all my hardware. Except for downloading a few codecs and changing the default crap-colored brown theme, I was set.

But then... I thought, this is as good as it is going to get. This is the most feature full ready to use Linux yet, and it was running on me desktop. This OS clearly wasn't going to take the world, certainly isn't going to take down windows. There is no support for windows applications, no REAL games, no really easy tools for photos, music, or video. At least compared to Mac/PC side of things. As great and user friendly as ubuntu is, can it really get any better and address those problems??

No!!! It's certainly not ubuntu's fault or any other linuxes (linuxi?) fault. Linux as a desktop os is just not meant to be. On the Business side... Imagine if a large data processing company decided to switch to linux, thousands of employee would need to be retrained. OO.org Is similar to MS Office, but not exact so it would require retraining... Sometimes we forget that everyday people (non-techies) cannot pick up things as quickly as we can. The simplest change will require retraining with these people. Add on hiring new linux staff (the three guys that run the servers wont cut it) to the cost of training and companies are looking at the not so "free" side of linux. Imagine the millions of companies across the world taking that risk.... yeah right

On the home front.... brand PC makers are not going to sell linux PCs in stores, because EVERYTHING runs on windows. Companies are not going to put themselves in the situation where "you bought this machine here and none of the software we sell here will run on it."
Its like selling a CD player that doesn't play cds to lay people.

Overall I have a new perspective on the whole windows vs. linux thing. All the windows bashing and chest pumping we do is just screaming in the dark. For all the processors processing and the hard drives crunching, linux is a drop in the bucket.

The community has too lofty of goals, but that isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Its when the community begins to not be able to smell its own shit that it turns rotten. I look at the comments on digg, slashdot and other sites in a new light now. Most linux promoters just sound stupid. Clearly not thinking for themselves "WINDOWS BAD LINUX GOOD". Applies to every situation for them.

I think these types of people began to creep into the community when linux became easier to use. They were not back there in '96 compiling the kernel over and over again to get the sound or whatever hardware wasn't running at the moment to work.

The linux community has become like the Mac community, a sort of technical elitism that distorts the real truth and REAL possibilities of open source. Too many cheerleaders and not enough informed individuals thinking for themselves.