Monday, June 27, 2005

The Ownership of Sharing

I invoke my right to make fun of Scott McNealy for his latest interview.

We have a strategy that's very different from everybody else's, and it's community development. The way we say that is with the S curve in all our new literature. It's not for Scott, it's not for Sun, it's for "share." We're grabbing that word and saying, of anybody, we own the word "share." We own that space.

Ok somebody please get him a dictionary. They own the word "share". Bill Gates was quoted saying recently that he doesn't send an email without first having a lawyer reviewing it first. Maybe Scott needs to do the same with his interviews.

MS

Friday, June 24, 2005

A very happy surprise from IBM / Lotus

Ok I am so jumping for joy right now. IBM has announced that they are basicly bringing together the Lotus Notes and their new Workplace client in version of Notes that will follow the up and coming Notes 7.0. Workplace being an Eclipse/Java program it is mostly platform agnostic. This will bring about something that has been begged for by Notes Admins for years. A Linux Notes client. For those who are not in the know, I am a Lotus Notes/Domino Admin. This might give me a chance to switch my office over to Linux desktops. That would be cool. Bye bye Windows, spyware, viruses, all of it. Thank you IBM for finally listening to your customers. What took you so long? Check out Ed Brill's Blog for details.

MS

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Nerd Identity and Nerds in Love

Ok I know this is a bit old and has been linked every place in the world but it indirectly caused a bit of an identity crisis. I was concerned if I was a geek or a nerd. I saw an article from the New York Times on how Nerds are better lovers which was noted but I didn't have time to really blog it. In the process of googling the article I came across a couple articles the difference between a geek and a nerd. Once upon a time I had considered them the same but now I know there is a real difference. I guess from the outside it would be difficult distinguish the two but there is a real difference. I don't like the geek tag especially as it refers to a circus performer that does strange things. After some serious introspection and advise from my friends, I consider myself a nerd. The title of the blog stands. After some test I also found that I am "fairly smart" and a "Loser" (see below)


Ok to the second matter, nerd love. Yes folks we have main stream has recgonized what we have been saying quite some time. Nerds are really much better mates than they are given credit for. The scary thing is this might put things out of balance (for example). Society will crumble. Ok I am over exaggerating, but I hate to see my beloved group get infiltrated by the cool kids. It would be kinda sad to see the nerd fakers. Well truthfully this is already happening. It was only the nerds and a few geeks on the internet but now its mainstream. Only nerds carried mp3 players and now its the chic accessory. The same with the pda, cell phone, computers and a boat load of other things. I guess thanks to the highly technology direction of our society we are no longer outcast but really just progressive and forward thinking, or just maybe just ahead of our time. So anyway back to the subject at hand. I just thought it was humorous, we nerd don't get the respect we deserve. I'm sure its not a start of a social movement or anything. At most maybe it makes us a good backup plan. I'm sure it means nothing.

MS


The Stupid Quiz said I am "Fairly Smart!" How stupid are you? Click here to find out!
I am 82% loser. What about you? Click here to find out!

Hair Trouble

I forgot to post about this. Makes you wonder why in the world someone would do something as stupid as stealing hair of someone and sell it on Ebay. Not really a tech article but funny though. Here is the link.

MS

City WiFi

News.com has an article about the fight between Verizon and the city of Philadelphia. Like most cities anymore they want to build a city wide wireless network so that they can take advantage of technologies like VOIP and have internet access to all their city vehicles and workers. The thing is since they have the network why not let their citizens take advantage of it too. Especially the poorer ones that the cost of high speed internet is way out of their price range. This is where Verizon has issue with this. They have a new wireless network technology that they really want to sell themselves. So here is the dilemma who is in the right? Sure Philadelphia has full right to provide city employees (maintains crews, police, fire) with wireless access but should they go beyond that? If you look at the situation the city would like to provide its poorer citizen with high speed internet access. Can they do that and stick to only low income households or do they have to include their richer citizens. So where does this leave companies like Verizon. Some could make a case that it gives the city an unfair monolopy on the internet access in a city. A compromise could be made to only allow access to the poor (you must be this poor to get cheap internet), but that leaves the question what do you consider poor. There are families who by most would be considered middle class who can't afford high speed internet. If I could get high speed wireless that would free up a fair amount of cash I could save some money for other important things. What about the businesses in the city? Shouldn't they should be allowed to take advantage. If I owned a restaurant in that area I would advocate it. I'm sure there will be those who take advantage of it. Seriously I'm sure there are going to be a few companies sticking out WiFi antennas out to get free internet access. Several cities including the one I live in are considering going this route. Down deep I have to say that I am all for it. Could this hurt innovation among the wireless providers? Probably not, they will have their pity parties then try to innovate. Looking at what available for like wireless access from Verizon ($75) it would be hard to compare against something say for $10 or $15 a month. To a lot of families that would be a strain. Maybe this could create a market for something like that new Nokia device. Oh well time will tell. If Verizon and the like were offering a reasonably priced service then I probably would be in their camp but I until they do I'm on municipality side of this issue. Maybe this will spur them into doing this. That would be nice but not likely.

MS

Friday, June 17, 2005

OpenSolaris

Well Sun has thrown Solaris in the free operating system mix. For this I am willing to forgive almost all the stupid things Scott McNealy has said in the past. Although I reserve the right to make fun of him for a select few utterances in the past and all stupid quotes in the future. My congratulation to his handlers he has managed to stay out of the news recently. I hope it didn't have to involve duct tape. Anyway I have to admit Sun is slowly starting to redeem itself from its old ways. There was a time I could say that I had no interest in messing with Solaris. It only ran on one absurdly expensive platform. As much I admired their commitment to Unix, their way and no other philosophy has really rubbed me the wrong way in the past. They were trying to be IBM with a different color scheme. As big and bad as they are, they are still not IBM probably won't ever be. Regardless Sun in the last couple years has slowing seen the light that IBM saw a couple years before. It of course dabbled in open source some time before (OpenOffice) that but that was to combat MS Office the only way you could, open and free. That was an end to a means. With the job market being as it is . I'll probably eventually play with OpenSolaris, need as many OS under my belt to be competitive. If your interested then check them out here.

MS

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Mac Os X86

Apple has finally took the plunge from PPC to Intel chips. I can't say I'm surprised that they did it. It was inevitable, if they want to grow their market share they would have to use more widely available and cheaper x86 chips. I could imagine that they will use x86-64 though. I figure they will manage to make super proprietary though, so Mac fans don't worry. They will find a way to give you, your elitism fix. The down side though, I will have to buy an actual IBM E-series to get a PPC workstation and you thought Macs were expensive.

MS

Debian Sarge (3.1r0)

I saw this posted over at OSnews.com it kinda speaks for itself:

Debian GNU/Linux 3.1r0 (Sarge) has been released to the ftp mirrors. The full download is available on 14 CDs or 2 DVDs.

Its about time. I love how they refer to their "up to date" packages. I love them as a server but suck as a desktop. They need to separate their server and desktop packages. With direction the desktop market is going and speed at which it is going, they need to be more limber. I know Server Administrators (I am one myself) like a steady code base but seriously folks both KDE 3.3 and Gnome 2.8 is at least a year old. In the open source world that is an eternity.

MS