iEye #15: A little bit of everything

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Week in review: 2/8/08 to 2/15/08

I’m trying out a new blog segment. Basically, it’s my take on all the news for the week. Let’s hope this one works, I need stuff to blog about…

The Microsoft/Yahoo merger craziness

This week was filled with some crazy, hard to follow negotiations between Yahoo and Microsoft. So first, taking a page from facebooks’ book, Yahoo was all like “Pfft, 40 something billion, we are so worth more than that”. Microsoft then responded with the equivalent of rolling their eyes and telling Yahoo to just shut up and be happy that they’re getting any money at all. So then Yahoo was desperately looking for somebody who could outbid Microsoft for Yahoo, ’cause, let’s face it, the second they get bought by Microsoft, all of the kinda-sorta-cool-ish innovations they’ve been doing will instantly end, replaced by blatant copying of everything google does. So then Yahoo seemed to be on a mission to destroy themselves before Microsoft could get them, first threatening to buy AOL, then laying off a whole bunch of people. Wow, this is dramatic, somebody should really make a movie about this, they could call it “Transferers” and have Michael Bay direct it and put it on Blu-ray (Or however it’s spelled today), which leads me nicely into my next topic

HD-DVD died even more

From Wall-Mart and Best Buy to Michael Bay to Netflix, nobody wants to be on the HDDVD bandwagon anymore. Just one ‘nail in the coffin’ for HDDVD after another. Frankly I dunno how many more nails you can fit in it before the whole thing will just go away. I was on the Blu-ray side all along, not only does apple support it, but it has more storage space and, umm, let’s see, oh, it has a cooler name, although impossible to spell…

Microsoft buys Danger

Y’know, the guys that make the sidekick? Yeah, I didn’t either. Anyway, the story goes that one day Microsoft realized that Apple had done something that they hadn’t copied yet, they’d made a phone, and been successful with it. Knowing they didn’t have time to TOTALLY copy the iPhone, Steve Balmer monkey walked over to the phone and called danger and was all like “Umm, hey, you guys make like, phones, right?” and the danger guy was all like “Yeah…” and Balmer was all like “I. LOVE. YOUR. COMPANY! And then dug a billion dollar bill out of his pocket and somehow faxed it to them or something, and hence the deal was done. Well, one less iPhone competitor now, the sidekick is officially out, not cool, lame, crappy. Thanks Microsoft!

AT&T expanding their 3G network

Well, we know a 3G iPhone is coming this year, for awhile I was really disappointed by that for the simple reason that we don’t QUITE get 3G in my area. At least EDGE works pretty much everywhere, albeit not very well, but it’s way better than nothing. Anyway, if anybody from AT&T is reading this, I can haz 3G? kthanxbie

What linux needs

I love linux. The concept, the implementation, the whole ‘geek in a candy store’ feeling you get when choosing which distribution to install next, it’s great. Linux has matured enough that some distros (mainly Ubuntu) are becoming very easy to use and elegant. Unfortunately, it still has some major problems that could keep it from being a viable alternative to Windows for some people. Here’s my list of the final touches linux needs to be perfect.

1. Improved hardware support: In my mind, the most frustrating thing about linux is its poor hardware support. Sure, it’ll boot on almost any machine, heck, it’ll boot on way more machines than Vista, or even XP, will. Displays, drives, processors, memory, keyboards, mice; these are all well supported in Linux. Unfortunately, network cards, (some) graphics cards, webcams, iPods; not so much. The biggest problem is WiFi network cards. Only cards based on some chipsets (Mainly atheros .. I think) work out of the box. Chips such at the Airport chip inside every mac, and about 90% of other chips, require this special thing called Ndiswrapper, which, at least in my experience, sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. After hours of trying I was not able to get my Ubuntu-running iMac to see the network. Please guys, get right on that, that’s been a problem since I first ran Linux 4 years ago, and really hasn’t gotten any better. I know you’re dealing with proprietary drivers and all here, but that didn’t stop Wine (which, by the way, works great).

2. Unified API/App file format: Another thing that really annoyed me about linux is that there is no .exe or .app . There’s RPM, but they only work on some distros, and some RPM’s are distro specific (like some only work on SuSe and others only work on Red Hat), which is totally confusing and anoying. Then there’s .deb , which is better, but, again, only works on some distros (Ubuntu for example). As if all that weren’t enough, there are a jillion and seven different window managers (KDE and GNOME being the most popular) and, who’d a thunk it, KDE programs don’t work on GNOME, GNOME programs don’t work on KDE. If linux is to beat windows, there needs to be 1 format that will work on any distro with any window manager.

3. Wine built in, seamless: As I mentioned earlier, Wine (Windows emulator … oh, I mean Wine Is Not an Emulator, Confusing, is it not? The point is, it’ll run certain Windows apps on linux, not all, but a lot) is great. It runs a bunch of apps and it runs them at pretty much the same speed as they’d run if they were native linux apps. The problem is I haven’t yet run into any distro which has it built in There are a few distros with wine built in, but no major ones (yet). The non-techy crowd isn’t gonna look for a way to run Windows apps on Linux, they’re either going to assume that it does run windows apps and be confused when it doesn’t, or assume that it doesn’t and never find out that it can. If Wine is built in, but hidden from the user (so they don’t have to think about it), then new users could totally simulate the experience of using windows, without the, umm, blue screens of proprietary death.

4. Money: Just sayin’, it wouldn’t hurt their cause if they could advertise, and pay people to work on it and all.

Linux is SOO close to being a perfect alternative to windows even for non-geeks. Once these things are fixed up a bit I will tell everybody I know to install it and cure themselves of Windows.

Geek liveblogging Super Bowl 42

Ok, so i’m here watching the superbowl with my laptop, and yeah, these are my opinions. (Maybe don’t use this if you want an accurate live-blog :p

UPDATE: Coverage after break, to clean up the front page. Read more…