lack of imagination

internet misc

The ‘municator’ is a very small PC that costs 146 US$. With its 40 GB Harddrive and a CPU that is as fast as a Pentium III it offers what we had couple of years ago as a desktop computer. Imagine the following: If you sign up with an ISP you get this box and a DSL modem. Maybe put them in one box.

The system comes pre configured with firefox and open office. Maintenance could be done by the service provider remotely. The user would use it for web browsing and text processing. The service could include automated backups of your own data and bookmarks. All this would be pretty inexpensive to run once set up.

For 25 US$ a month you could get:
1. Internet
2. Text processing
3. digital photography

No update costs, no virus hassles, no worries. The box is broken? You’ll get a new on in the mail. Your data has been backed up to the service provider anyway. In the future you just push more features out: IpTV, Voip, you name it.

The user experience can be made seamless. How many people actually do like to mess with software installs, security settings and driver nightmares?

AOL should offer this now. Or Google or even Sony or Microsoft could do this. Or At&t or Verizon. If they would not be stuck in their own perception of what their business is, then each of those companies could easy make billions with this.

This machine is really fast enough for 80% of all people being connected to the internet right now. OpenSoftware is available, and ‘just’ needs to be made available automatically. The bandwidth needed to implement this is available too. There is a market and a need. It just needs a little bit of imagination to see this work.

If you should have fifty million dollars lying around then let me know, it could be up and running in 18 months. But I am not holding my breath: Imagination is not in ample supply these days.

what people do

BlogsNow internet

what some people do to get a number 1 spot in BlogsNow

go

internet

go! Gruber, go!

interesting patent

marketing media

Philps patents a technology that would not allow a TV to switch a channel during a commercial break.

Interesting how consumer electronic companies have a very skewed perspective how to serve the people that actually buy their products.

switchn’ distros

linux

Somehow I ended up being a ‘redhat boy’. Just happened, in my former job, that lastest almost as long as linux was on the rise, it was nothing that I needed to do: Install and configure linux. I ‘just’ wrote software for it. Being freelance I know get to pick what I want to do and learn. Which is very nice. For the next two machine that will to clients I have decided to switch to debian. It’s all different, but ‘the head is round so that the thoughts can change direction’. At least that’s what Picabia said.

Debian appeared on my horizon once I had to move a site of a client to a hosting solution of their choosing, which happened to be Debian. They had to drag me there kicking and screaming. Everything was different. /etc/httpd became /etc/apache and so forth. It’s too early to tell if I really like debian. But things that are different seem to be better. Of course I missed


chkconfig

But a quick


apt-get install sysv-rc-conf

took care of that.

I actually have been bouncing around debian quiet a bit, and did horrible things to it (like compiling kernels that ought not to run, messing with raid, initrd and so forth, and so far it has been remarkably robust.
With redhat I would have not gotten that far so quick, and would have cursed allot more.

to be continued …

since we wont need AFBs anymore soon

free of any reason politics

we could convert them to disco’s

The cold war was over. Just that too bad that certain people then got us into ‘perma-war’.
Good money for them, bad for ours

watching a marble roll for twelve minutes

misc

[software] raid 1 with debian

confessions of a pixel pusher

‘1000 marketing people at the bottom of the ocean’ -> a good start.

So, I needed a couple of servers. Had my trusted hardware vendor slap them together. They felt that I could use the ‘Intel server boards’. Since the price was ok, why not. And in the end they are not bad: 4x Sata, dual gigE, overall standard stuff. I had been told (by its builder and by the boot screen) that the motherboard would have a ‘Raid controller’.
“Cool” me thinks: Hardware raid, one thing less to worry about. Turns out it’s a ‘marketing raid’ that intel present here. There are drivers (no source …) that play together with the bios a software raid. Which is maybe ok for Windows, but certainly stupid for Linux: mdadm & Co work really well and are equally well documented.

Next time sink was the fact that I ended up being conservative in picking the debian ‘sub distro’.
Only after picking the future ‘etch’ that is currently the ‘testing/unstable’ stream things worked fine. With this iso
I could make the software raid right in the install menu. Before I wasted pretty much two days compiling kernels, installing lilo, compiling more kernels etc. Google shows you years worth of hacks and workarounds. Just that they are obsolete by now.

glad

BlogsNow internet

glad that BlogsNow is running again:
where else would I have found
tape failure ?

project origami and how it folds

M$ marketing technology

this sounds like a personal Steve Jobs nightmare before Macworld, but it is rather the harsh reality of tech-CEOs trying to use their own products.

Amazing how these companies get to waste Billions of dollars just by ignoring s simple fact:

Features don’t exist if they are not accessible.

The amount of high tech they cramped into those device is certainly impressive. But those don’t do anybody any good if they can not be used.

Windows is not an interface, it’s a hack. People use it since they have to, not because they like to. The biggest miracle is how a crappy system like this could get so far. Trying to resize it into Origami dimensions is not helping.

But let’s focus on something less complex than a OS interface to show that Origami is a dead concept: Battery life.
So it went black during the presentation. That will happen to allot of people. Imagine that the alpha geek you know shelled out seven hundret dollars for this lump of plastic. Eagerly does want to show it to somebody. The chances are rather high that it will run out of juice just inmidst or before this private demonstration. Let that happen a couple of times and your product evangelist moves on to the next gadget. Something that does not let him down when he needs to show off with it.

Origami’s are a debacle. They might get sold to a couple of vertical integrators. But ‘selling’ to big companies and the government does not really count. Those processess share an eiry ressemblance with inner working of the market-economy of the failed soviet empire.

Intel, Microsoft and Samsung might be able to churn out some industrial products in vast numbers. But together they can not innovate. 800 pounds gorillas can not enact a decent ballet.