Internet-Standard

Why I Love Asus

The Eee PC is an awesome little laptop, very capable and very portable. On top of that, it's got enough fans to generate its own version of Ubuntu.

That's fine for being mobile, but not so great for home. I've been wishing for years for a nice (sufficient resources to do real desktop computing) small (book-size) low-power (= less noisy) and inexpensive ($300) desktop computer.

It seems that Asus has been working on it: the rumor mills are reporing about Asus' newest non-mobile computer (for example, ASUS Eee Box B202 Details Emerge).

The details are appealing: the base system (1Gb RAM, 80Gb disk) for $270 with Linux;
for another $30 you get XP--or Linux, but with 2Gb RAM, 160Gb disk.

If anything will herald the Year of Desktop Linux, this is it. Because for the past decade, we've been reading articles about how to re-purpose your old, obsolete hardware with Linux, or like this one: Build a $150 Linux PC, from Wired. The problem with old and cheap hardware is that it's old, and cheap. You can have Linux, but you won't have wireless, you will have iffy power supplies, noisy (and old and small) hard drives, and big big big boxes.

These new PCs should do very well. I wonder whether they'll be successful enough to prompt Apple to roll out a Linux version of iTunes, finally.

New Internet radio show

Be sure to check out BeyePERSPECTIVE, an Internet radio show hosted by the great people at the Business Intelligence Network.

This newly launched radio program brings together business intelligence and data warehousing experts to discuss news, mergers and acquisitions, technology announcements and other relevant industry topics.

We've had a lot of fun chatting about the business intelligence sector, and we touch on a surprising number of open source issues as well.

OSes for old (really old) PCs

It's amazing what can bubble up from forums; consider this: Operating systems for really, really old computers from the Ubuntu forums.

What a great list! The poster (darrelljon)  lists a few dozen little operating systems, mostly but not all Linux, that are small and light enough to run on older computers. Sorted by size, and in subcategories depending on what media they'll fit on. With links! Awesome!

Dell and HP on Linux

Both Dell and HP officially support Linux. Compare Dell and Linux and Open Source and Linux from HP. But Dell also has Dell Linux Engineering Web and Dell Home & Home Office Ubuntu pages.

So, it might appear Dell is a better source if you want to buy hardware with Linux installed. And maybe that's the case, going by the rest of the web. First off, there's this: The LXer Interview: John Hull of Dell a conversation with John Hull, manager of the Dell Linux Engineering team, who talked about things like getting hardware driver support in Linux.

Dell is getting the Linux desktop job done, apparently. For example, one of the big issues with Ubuntu is getting it to play DVDs, right out of the box. Not possible with vanilla Ubuntu, but Dell has gone ahead and fixed that (in other words, adding value for their customers). Linux Update: Ubuntu 7.10 and Built-In DVD playback. Read the article, because it points out other added value Dell provides with their Ubuntu installs, as well as pointing out how customers made the suggestions--and Dell listed to them.

If I were in the market for a new PC, dude, I'd be getting a Dell.

Not an HP. Because there's this from Matt Parnell: Gee, Thanks HP...Your Support Stinks! Now, HP hardware is probably just as good as Dell's, but it turns out that they're still relying on the old "unsupported software voids our responsibility for fixing bugs" excuse. Matt quoted a response he got from HP Total Care when he reported a BIOS bug, and it's just too good not to repeat here:

HP does not recommend installing of Linux Operating System, it could not guarantee a high level of compatibility for all basic hardware and software components of the PCs.

Now, I realize that this is just a semi-automated response from the outsourced tech support team, and it probably doesn't accurately reflect the corporate message that HP wants to send--but it sends a strong message to anyone who might ever want to consider using Linux.

Norway goes open!

Here's some more good news on the open standards front: Norway mandates open formats. The article is by Arve Bersvendsen, a developer for Opera Software, and points to the original report (in Norwegian).

The bottom line is that in Norway all public information must be in open standard formats. From the article, the mandate requires:

• HTML for all public information on the Web.
• PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved.
• ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit

This is great news, and a great model for other governments. Per the new rules, you can publish in whatever format you like--in addition to the required formats. And content that's already been put up in proprietary formats has to be converted/translated by 2014.

Way to go, Norway!

Learning about Linux, Online and Free

Not much for me to add here, just a pointer for anyone interested in learning more about Linux but not interested in spending lots of money: 10 Sites Offering Free Linux Courses Online. And in case you wondered, this is just one article from the Education Portal, where you can find pointers to all kinds of educational material free, online.

Expanding the Open Source Paradigm: Docstoc

As open source software grows in popularity, so too does the open source paradigm: a new way of sharing thoughts, ideas, and their expression.

For example, the Creative Commons licenses give people a way to share their work--writing, music, photos, art--in a way that gives them wide exposure, that lets others use and adapt their work, and at the same time retain the right to profit from their work.

I like to see this kind of development, as it represents the grassroots support for a system of intellectual property that does not smother content or those who would use it, but rather encourages a sensible way of producing and distributing it.

For example, Docstoc is a (currently beta) website where you can share professional documents, from legal boilerplate to business plan templates to business expense worksheets and many more legal, financial, marketing, and business-0riented documents.

Cool new open source-based businesses

Some new and interesting businesses built around open source software popped up on my radar screen today:

• Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion (version control system software) system, "making it easy for anyone to setup, browse, track, and manage Subversion repositories." Subversion is open source, but you may not want/need to set up your own server to run it; Beanstalk runs the infrastructure and you use it for whatever projects you need, with whoever you need to work with, when you need it.
• Genuitec is more specialized, but they're doing something similar with their MyEclipse service: annual subscriptions for as little as $30/year to an integrated toolbox for doing enterprise development with Eclipse, an open source community for  "building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle." Eclipse is big and free, but not always easy to get started with; MyEclipse is big and cheap, and helps people get started with Eclipse, fast.
• OK, so Chumby isn't exactly news, but it's getting closer to becoming a real product. And it is a cool little gadget, scheduled to be sold for under $200. Per the "story", Chumby "is a compact device that displays useful and entertaining information from the web: news, photos, music, celebrity gossip, weather, box scores, blogs — using your wireless internet connection. Always on, it shows — nonstop — what's online that matters to you." It's worth checking out the website for a look at this neat little--Linux-based--device. And if you're thinking about buying me a gift, this would be cool.

I'll keep posting about open source-based businesses with interesting new business models as they pop up--let me know if you hear of any news ones!

Yet another example of why DRM is Bad

DRM, or digital rights management, is the software that content vendors use to punish their loyal customers and (attempt to) control piracy. It adds to the cost of the products "protected" by it, it makes those products less useful to the people who buy them, and ultimately DRM doesn't do too much to protect the vendors.

Now, here's yet another voice: AbleGamers, "The Site for Disabled Gamers", points out that DRM is Killing the PC Gaming Market. Standard operating procedures for DRM software is to disable as many peripherals as possible, so you can't copy or scan or printout or do anything that might theoretically unprotect any of the "protected content". Too bad for disabled gamers, because they often depend on assistive peripherals that the DRM sees as "dangerous".

Mark Barlet, who wrote the article, points out that if you want a better gaming experience (e.g., fewer system crashes due to buggy DRM software), you can wait a day or so until the crackers release the non-DRM pirated version--but he would prefer to pay for a playable version in the first place. It's obvious that piracy can ruin software publishers, but the solution is to provide value to the legitimate user, not to punish your paying customers.

Microsoft "Open" Formats vs the World

You can't underestimate the importance of having open standards: imagine the chaos if, 100 years ago, telephone companies dug in their heels over maintaining their own protocols for telecommunications signals, electric companies mandated that their customers could only use electricity delivered through proprietary plugs and outlets, and radio/television broadcasters required listeners/viewers to use proprietary receivers.

You would have needed three different television sets to watch shows on the three big networks; changing electric companies would require purchasing brand new appliances; you would only be able to use your phone to communicate with other customers of your phone company.

Sort of like in the old days, when corporate computer users routinely had a PC sitting next to a DEC VT terminal, next to an IBM 3270 terminal.

Now we have the Internet, and the open TCP/IP Internet protocols, and life is good. But Microsoft just won't let the world have a set of open standards for digital documents. They want us to use Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML). Despite what Microsoft is saying about it (Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process), there is a lot of resistance to Microsoft's "alternative" to the more fully and truly open standard, ODF. And in fact, the ISO standards body has also rejected the "standard".

Here are some of the headlines (hard news/opiniated bloggers mix):

• NZ rejects Microsoft OOXML, Sweden confused
• India throws MS open format out of the window 
• Microsoft FUD Watch: OOXML Edition
• ISO Says No To Microsoft's OOXML Standard
• The Latest News on the Microsoft OOXML Fiasco (Updated)
• Can Other Vendors Implement Microsoft's Office Open XML? This is the key question for an open standard, and the answer, apparently, is NOT!
• and so on, for many many results (check it out yourself: Google Microsoft+OOXML for the latest news).

The most telling, and most important bit of information here is that, basically, the Microsoft "standard" is, if not impossible, at least difficult for anyone but Microsoft to implement. The whole point of having open standards is to enable interoperability. It's good for everyone, because the result is a much bigger "network" of interoperable nodes (c.f., Internet). But it's not good for companies that have huge investments in proprietary networks (c.f., Microsoft) because it lowers the entry barriers to the smaller companies that are more likely to innovate with better solutions that work for everyone.