Remember I occasionally pull saved drafts and see what I wrote and didn't post? I'm doing it again this evening before going out for a drink. A few good ones here, which i'll post in full, and some... other stuff... which I guess gets summarised then deleted.
Bites
Bad vibes about the way Chrome OS was being discussed as a competitor without any evidence. Thankfully that one did die down, but it'll be back, and there will be people touting it as the savior long before it's running on John Doe's machine.
Good vibes about Win 7 E, now irrelevant. Me wondering if the rotating backdrop in Win 7 RC1 will turn out to be an Ultimate only feature. I still wonder about this one. It'd be ridiculous, but backdrop stuff certainly made up part of Vista Ultimate.
Good vibes about RSS Player on the iPhone. That remains. Looking forward to version 2 to see what gets improved. Top of my head... Surely there's a way to resume videos and enhanced podcasts? If we want, let us choose to do all our deleting manually. Fix the way the first few ms get cut off an audio podcast. Test resuming weirdness with lots of people's servers and make it consistent. It's a great app though, no question.
Empty Vessels
Me whining about the number of fan pages on Facebook that are just a slogan that when clicked on reveal just a bunch of fans and no actual discussion. That hasn't changed.
Me whining about suggestions feature now including such fan pages. Still don't like that.
I Like My iPhone
Me lamenting that immediately after I bought an iPhone people of note said it wasn't cool anymore. So what? I like it.
Natural Born Killers
Me in disbelief that I watched NBK for what I thought was the first time and realised 10 minutes from the end that in fact i've seen it before. I still can't work this weirdness out.
Is L ready for the D?
Me crying about not being able to get my freshly bought 802.11n card working with Ubuntu with WPA . It wasn't too bad but not worth posting. I reached the conclusion that the problem is driver related, not Ubuntu related. After all, when my HDD died I distinctly remember using an Ubuntu live disc to continue using my laptop with full internet access for days, and there was no ethernet cable involved.
Asexual
Me exclaiming that this word gets misused... That's literally what I wrote. Then I looked it up and found out it actually has both meanings, so I decided against going any further with the rant.
Why Blogger?
In which I began to discuss why I host this blog on Blogger, without much insight. It's fine for this purpose, I guess.
Bailouts Fail
Where I gave poorly constructed opinions about the "badness" of bailouts. They don't work, for sure, but I had nothing useful to add to the conversation that night.
Really, the better stuff in the drafts posts are the ones I decided to post in full rather than the ones in this post, which is a little lightweight now I read though it. Scroll down and look at those... 3 I think. Ok, pub.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Linux is not ready for the Desktop part 8192
I clearly worked hard on metaphors in this post but decided to leave it because I felt maybe I was letting my frustration cloud my judgement about Ubuntu. This was definitely a good call as I more recently posted somewhere, though I forget where, that I was impressed by Ubuntu's ability to fix itself when it got screwed up. This applies to failed upgrades as much as anything else. So, enjoy the post, and don't call me on the last few paragraphs - I don't really feel that way any more.
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There was a monkey, a heron and an ibex. Before those there were other animals, fawns and the like, but I never met them.
The monkey was something I had never expected. An effective, efficient companion.
When the heron showed up it offered promise. I was perfectly happy with the monkey for company, but curiosity got the better of me. Somehow the heron and monkey had words and knocked each other out. In real terms thats a win for the heron. He shouldn't really have been expected to win, size wise.
The heron came around first, and although I couldn't really see anything in him to make him a better companion, the monkey wasn't getting any younger, so I decided to hang with the heron, and in time grew to like him as I had liked the monkey. In fact, apart from their different looks, they were essentially the same.
This ibex showed up some time later. I wasn't even sure what an ibex was or what he might do for me. For quite some time I ignored him. When you have a heron tending to your needs just fine, why stray?
Then one day when the I was asleep the Ibex started making all kinds of noise. I'd tied him to a tree but he'd eaten the rope. I hadn't told him to do this, but I could have stopped him had I been thinking straighter.... Saved the heron, for now at least.
Sadly, turning to the heron, well, there was no heron. The bird was gone. I knew what had happened, but it was hard to swallow. For me at least. The Ibex is a goat like creature it turns out, and has no trouble swallowing birds whole. What happens after that is a different matter...
The Ibex vomited up the heron, dead of course, and slumped to the floor, now looking a little worse for wear. I tried to feed him a boot (a hard one I found by a stream) but he wouldn't swallow it.
What's the moral to this story of three animals? Simple. Ubuntu is really fucking bad at upgrading itself. Both times I've let it try, it's failed half way through. Last time it left a mess, whereas this time it's left me with a console and a read only file system. I can say quite categorically that not one Microsoft Windows Update or OS upgrade has ever left me with a broken OS. This would be a crime of enormous magnitude from MS. Last time I badmouthed Ubuntu I got a rare comment telling me I was wrong. Let's see if i'm wrong this time too. If the response is that I shouldn't expect the update not to kill my machine because Ubuntu is open source and free, you're dumb. If the response is that I should find the problem and fix it rather than complain, you're also dumb. The first idea is bad publicity for the entire concept, and the latter is unrealistic. Not everybody that finds problems are going to either be able to fix them, or in many cases even be able to afford the time to get involved in helping.
I'm sorely tempted not to bother to figure out what went wrong here, but no doubt I will.
---
There was a monkey, a heron and an ibex. Before those there were other animals, fawns and the like, but I never met them.
The monkey was something I had never expected. An effective, efficient companion.
When the heron showed up it offered promise. I was perfectly happy with the monkey for company, but curiosity got the better of me. Somehow the heron and monkey had words and knocked each other out. In real terms thats a win for the heron. He shouldn't really have been expected to win, size wise.
The heron came around first, and although I couldn't really see anything in him to make him a better companion, the monkey wasn't getting any younger, so I decided to hang with the heron, and in time grew to like him as I had liked the monkey. In fact, apart from their different looks, they were essentially the same.
This ibex showed up some time later. I wasn't even sure what an ibex was or what he might do for me. For quite some time I ignored him. When you have a heron tending to your needs just fine, why stray?
Then one day when the I was asleep the Ibex started making all kinds of noise. I'd tied him to a tree but he'd eaten the rope. I hadn't told him to do this, but I could have stopped him had I been thinking straighter.... Saved the heron, for now at least.
Sadly, turning to the heron, well, there was no heron. The bird was gone. I knew what had happened, but it was hard to swallow. For me at least. The Ibex is a goat like creature it turns out, and has no trouble swallowing birds whole. What happens after that is a different matter...
The Ibex vomited up the heron, dead of course, and slumped to the floor, now looking a little worse for wear. I tried to feed him a boot (a hard one I found by a stream) but he wouldn't swallow it.
What's the moral to this story of three animals? Simple. Ubuntu is really fucking bad at upgrading itself. Both times I've let it try, it's failed half way through. Last time it left a mess, whereas this time it's left me with a console and a read only file system. I can say quite categorically that not one Microsoft Windows Update or OS upgrade has ever left me with a broken OS. This would be a crime of enormous magnitude from MS. Last time I badmouthed Ubuntu I got a rare comment telling me I was wrong. Let's see if i'm wrong this time too. If the response is that I shouldn't expect the update not to kill my machine because Ubuntu is open source and free, you're dumb. If the response is that I should find the problem and fix it rather than complain, you're also dumb. The first idea is bad publicity for the entire concept, and the latter is unrealistic. Not everybody that finds problems are going to either be able to fix them, or in many cases even be able to afford the time to get involved in helping.
I'm sorely tempted not to bother to figure out what went wrong here, but no doubt I will.
QUICK: 4GB iPhone Smelling Wrong
I held back on posting this for fear of looking like an idiot. I go through phases of caring. Right now I don't, but if I was wrong who knows if i'd post this. In this case, I wasn't wrong. This was written a few days before the iPhone 3GS was announced.
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Surely you're looking at this all wrong.
Because a standards board approves 4GB iPhones and 32GB iPhones you draw the conclusion that it's a low end $100 model. There's a shitload of stuff in that little box that contributes to the overall price. 4GB of memory is not going to chop a hundred from production.
Wouldn't a sensible model to do this loss leading thing (aside, chances are in real terms it wouldn't actually be a loss leader, but that's generally the concept of a price cut of this size) offering a cheap 8GB model, a standard 16GB model and a high end 32GB model? Why for the sake of very little money talk poorer people into buying a piece of hardware that will run out of space for music and apps?
---
Surely you're looking at this all wrong.
Because a standards board approves 4GB iPhones and 32GB iPhones you draw the conclusion that it's a low end $100 model. There's a shitload of stuff in that little box that contributes to the overall price. 4GB of memory is not going to chop a hundred from production.
Wouldn't a sensible model to do this loss leading thing (aside, chances are in real terms it wouldn't actually be a loss leader, but that's generally the concept of a price cut of this size) offering a cheap 8GB model, a standard 16GB model and a high end 32GB model? Why for the sake of very little money talk poorer people into buying a piece of hardware that will run out of space for music and apps?