As I’m writing this, I just got off the phone with a customer service representative at a high-tech company. To anyone with experience in the matter, that sentence probably provokes a sympathetic wince, at the very least. But this was a very different experience. Let me ‘splain… no, there is too much, let me sum [...]
Archive of posts filed under the The Great OS Wars category.
The Joys (?) of a New Computer
I have a love/hate relationship with upgrades. On the one hand, it’s exciting to have something new, especially since that something is almost always a major improvement over its predecessor. But on the other, it’s always a major pain to transfer all your data, reinstall all your software, and get used to the new quirks [...]
“Google ChromeOS: Have people taken leave of their senses?”
Someone recently asked me what I thought about the Google ChromeOS announcement. I think a lot of things about it, but this article sums them up extremely well, and adds several more that I hadn’t considered too. The bottom line: like the Chrome browser, I don’t see it as necessary. Neither will put much added [...]
“Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04″
If they can do it, it’ll be very significant — for one thing, there’s little need to hibernate or suspend a system that boots up essentially instantly.
BTRFS
As you might remember, I wrote an entry on using the ZFS file system for my older network backup drive a while back, and how nice it was to have the protection of block checksums, ensuring that files can’t get silently corrupted. But for various reasons, I was forced to abandon ZFS on my new [...]
Taming the Wild Rodent: Unintended Double-Clicks
You’d think that with three cats in the house, we’d have no problem with mice, but for some reason they completely ignore the kind that plug into the computer. I should fire the lot of them. I have a really nice wireless Logitech mouse. Just a simple one, but it gets the job done, and [...]
Ubuntu 9.04 Even Better
I was all braced for a Herculean effort to get Ubuntu 9.04 working on my system, earlier this week, but as mentioned, I was disappointed: the upgrade worked almost flawlessly. But I did have one remaining problem with it (other than the encrypted home directory problem), and I was concerned by all the “cruft” that [...]
Ubuntu 9.04: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
On Sunday evening, after a hard day’s work on Project X, I decided to poke around the Ubuntu web site a bit. The new version wasn’t scheduled for release for another half-week, and I knew from experience that I wouldn’t be able to download it for several days after that, due to web site congestion. [...]
“Microsoft dumped after India PM’s emails go AWOL”
“Ushers in open-source era“. Um, “oops.”
Microsoft helping startups?!
It’s a curious move, coming from one of the largest software companies in the world, but a welcome one. Yes, it’s a transparent attempt to fight open-source software by getting companies hooked on their product before they’ve grown into the next Google. But it can also help such companies when they need it the most. [...]