Archive for the ‘Tech Trends’ Category

Ubuntu: So Easy a 10 Year-Old Can Do It

Okay, this “Linux is hard” FUD is driving me insane. I can’t take seeing articles like this anymore. The author claims to want to give Linux a try but clearly wants the experiment to fail. The author tries to pick a distro for the experiment by searching for “linux os that doesn’t suck” suggesting that there would only be a handful to choose from. Other comments such as “So that’s one point for Ubuntu; good job on making use of basic http protocol” after downloading and “I hurriedly look for a copy of the OS and blissfully ignore anything that looks like a guide or set of instructions” indicate that the author doesn’t really want to succeed. Using that logic, I’m going to stop checking the fluid levels in my car since I bought what was supposed to be a “good” car. See how far that gets you with a mechanic..

All right, rant aside, I’ve some embarrassing news for those who argue that Linux is much harder to use: I installed it for my sisters (at the time one was 10 and the other was 16, both with very little “tech” experience) and had to answer very few questions for them to use it.

A couple of years ago around Christmas I acquired an old Dell Inspiron for free, so I wrapped it up. It was a slower Pentium III with 256MB of RAM with a broken USB port and a battery that barely held a charge. I picked it up to give to my sisters so that when one of them was using my parents’ XP desktop for school, the other could do some browsing on another machine. It fit the bill perfectly. I installed Ubuntu 6.10 (the newest at the time) and let them play with it. They actually used it much more than I ever anticipated. They both did a lot of browsing as well as some arcade games and chatting. The older of the two surprised me one day and called me wanting to install Real Player. I was very impressed. She had gotten the .deb files that she needed, she just needed the command to install it (sudo dpkg –install <package>, btw). They both used the machine for using Firefox (they even used it to play Flash games), OpenOffice.org, Pidgin, and the arcade games. One of them even got into using GIMP just a little bit for cropping pictures. They had even been keeping up with updates and had installed a few extra pieces of software. Given that story, all the people claiming that simple tasks are difficult absolutely amaze me. What makes me laugh even more is that now the older one has a MacBook and I seem to field more phone calls with questions about OS X than Ubuntu (Please, any Apple fans, don’t flame me. I’m an Apple fan as well, it’s just an observation I’ve made).

Just to preempt any Microsoft fanboys from commenting on this.. I would like to point out one key difference between the article linked to earlier and my story: the author of the linked article was trying to install Linux from the perspective of an “Average Joe” whereas my story did not involve the installation of any OS or drivers (actually I just popped in the CD and took all the defaults). Unfortunately, thinking that the installation is part of the “average user”’s experience is very flawed logic. I’ve done my time in the IT support world. There’s not a single “average user” who will even think of reinstalling his or her OS (Windows, Linux, or Mac). In fact, a lot of users have a hard time connecting to file shares on their Windows server from their Windows desktop. They simply call the IT support department to have them just do it for them. Heck, most users don’t even read error messages, let alone try to install an OS.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 4th, 2009

RIAA Wants Us to Pay Twice for Our Music

In the past I’ve not really had an opinion on the RIAA. Their tactics of going after individuals is pretty ridiculous, but pirating software, music, and movies, etc. is still morally and ethically wrong. If someone creates a piece of work, whether software, music, movies, or any other digital art and they want to be compensated for it monetarily, then that’s their deal. If someone wants to release their work under the GPL, BSD, Creative Commons, or any other “free” license, then great. Go ahead and use it. Unfortunately, the RIAA has taken enforcing those rules a bit too far. By definition, the people haven’t even stolen anything causing the RIAA to inevitably fail in the courts. They’ve also gone after individuals in the courts who clearly can’t afford to pay legal fees and lawsuits even if they were successful. Apparently, now the RIAA has realized this failure and is now going after ISPs to try to solve the “problem”.

The RIAA is in the midst of deals with ISPs to filter traffic of individuals. When a consumer is suspected of participating in piracy, they will receive warnings and if the actions are repeated, the ISP will shut off that customer. The software and technology behind detecting these kinds of things has been proven somewhat unreliable but even that is beside the point. If ISPs are forced into adding that kind of technology they won’t be the ones covering the costs. The consumers will be the ones paying for adding additional capacity needed to perform that kind of scanning. ISPs would have to add servers, networking equipment, software, and staff to manage the scanning. It would appear that not only does the RIAA want us to pay for our music as we should, but pay extra so that they can be sure we have actually bought our digital media. All this while P2P and other file sharing services simply move to SSL so that their traffic can’t be scanned.

If paying twice for our media wasn’t enough, the RIAA wants to put the responsibility on the ISPs for stopping piracy. According to the report from torrentfreak referenced earlier:

“…in the absence of proof to the contrary, an Internet service provider shall be considered as knowing that the content it stores is infringing or illegal, and thus subject to liability for copyright infringement…”

Apparently now the ISPs have to be the “piracy police” now. We already have to pay enough for connection to the Internet, and now we have to pay for the ISPs to have lawyers on retainer as well. If I have to pay my ISP to spy on my traffic, I’m not sure how much I’m going to be willing to spend on music anymore. I’m sure there’s a lot of others in the same boat. What was the goal of the RIAA anyway? Oh yeah, ensure there’s a market for musicians to sell their music.. Something that most consider a luxury, especially during hard economic times.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Dec 21st, 2008

openSUSE 11.1 On VMware

Yesterday I decided to install the new 11.1 release of openSUSE. Since I didn’t have any spare machines laying around, I threw it on my desktop using VMware Server. The installer was much smoother and a lot more slick than past releases, but probably what impressed me the most was that once the installation was done and I was booted up into KDE, the mouse left the VMware console screen. At first I didn’t realize what was happening. I was going in and out playing with the new OS while getting a little work done. Eventually I got the system fully patched and was ready to install the VMware tools. Then all of a sudden, I realized that the tools had already been installed and my mouse had been going in and out of the console window the whole time. The openSUSE installer had detected that it was running on top of VMware and installed the tools for me. Not too shabby.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Dec 20th, 2008

Apple’s OS/Hardware Bundle Pays Off

A study performed by VocaLabs has shown that overall satisfaction with Apple’s support is rated higher than rivals Dell, Gateway, HP, and Toshiba. The survey is conducted at the end of a conversation between an end user and tech support at each company. Company, call, and agent satisfaction were highest for Apple over other PC manufacturers except for company satisfaction which was a tie with Toshiba. Should this really surprise us? Courtesy shouldn’t really affect this, but the Apple model of hardware and software is much simpler. The hardware and OS were built by Apple which makes it much easier to predict what kind of hardware and software configurations the user is in, thus creating less confusion between support technicians and end users. One of the advantages with going the PC route is that you can use a lot more hardware within your PC which can make for awkward situations with tech support people. Variables like wireless managers and anti-viruses really make it difficult for tech support staff to predict what the end user sees on his or her computer so of course it will lower satisfaction when it’s harder to communicate.

I’ve had the same experience with Apple support vs PC support staff. I’ve only had to call the actual Apple support line once but have worked with local Apple repair shops who interface with Apple for me on other occasions. When I went to get my hard drive replaced in my MacBook about a month ago they even replaced the top cover on my case for me because it was cracking. I didn’t even ask! They just offered to do it. I can counter that with a really bad experience with a PC manufacturer. One time I was working on trying to get a Lenovo desktop to use a second video card alongside the built-in one. I finally got desperate and called the Lenovo support line. After spending 20 minutes waiting on the line they told me that it wasn’t a supported configuration. I knew the video card worked because I had tested it in another system but they said it wasn’t supported and basically hung up the phone. Wow, what service. Okay, I’ll stop my ranting now :)

What’s very interesting about the results is that customer loyalty to both Apple and Dell are the same: 70%. While I’m not sure exactly how these terms are defined, I think there’s an interesting statistic here. The survey suggests that 52% of customers are satisfied with Apple as a company, yet they have a 70% customer loyalty rating. The same goes for Dell. They are showing as a 45% overall company satisfaction yet their loyalty is 70%. I’m not quite sure what this could suggest. It could mean one of two things: that people were trying to make cool designs in the bubbles when filling out the survey (Yes, it’s a phone survey. Yes, I’m kidding) or consumers are not satisfied but keep coming back for more. An interesting human trait, indeed. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that humans are never satisfied but I thought it was worth noting. At any rate, Microsoft’s separation of hardware and software policy seems to be catching up with them. Of course, you are sacrificing some level of freedom when using a platform such as OS X since it can’t be run on anything besides Apple hardware (according to the EULA at least). However, end users seem to lean towards solutions that “just work” rather than caring about the ability to pick exactly what chipset and processor they are using. Of course there will always be those few (I count myself among them) but the consumer market seems to be swinging in the opposite direction. Like everything, it will most likely swing back in a few years but that seems to be the trend for the moment.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Nov 20th, 2008

Adobe Bringing Flash to More Platforms

It seems that Adobe is seeing the threat of Microsoft Silverlight to its Flash platform and is taking Flash to more platforms. The two most noticeable platforms that Adobe is missing in its lineup are 64-bit Linux and iPhone support. Yesterday, news reached the blogosphere that support for both platforms was coming. An alpha for the 64-bit Linux platform has been announced and Adobe will finally support both 32 and 64 bit versions of the “big three” desktop operating systems: Windows, OS X, and Linux. Adobe support for the iPhone rumors have been flying for some time, but yesterday Adobe announced it would be focusing on a build for the ARM platform. Of course, the iPhone isn’t the only phone that runs on ARM processors, but it’s evidence that Adobe is focusing its efforts on mobile phones, possibly the iPhone. Steve Jobs has said a few times that Flash was too heavy for the phone to handle and that Flash Lite was too stripped down to be useful. The lack of Flash and Java support were the two biggest complaints that Apple received in its lawsuit in the U.K. over its ads claiming you can get to “all the Internet”. Microsoft’s Silverlight platform is still missing on the iPhone and is sounds as though that won’t happen for the time. Flash support on more devices and platforms will help Flash remain the dominant platform in multimedia web content, no matter what technology comes out as being the easiest and most efficient.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Nov 19th, 2008

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