Archive for October, 2007

Last Days of Empire

Published by Robert Pogson October 28th, 2007 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

Last week, M$ announced that it had made tons of money, thanks to the high price and huge numbers of sales of Vista. They state 88 million Vista licences were sold. That is a lot, unless you also consider how many PCs are sold each year…

According to IDC and others, more than 250 million PCs will be sold in 2007. Three quarters of that would be 187.5 million. What was on the other 100 million PCs? Not Vista. Pretty shocking when you consider how many naked PCs are sold these days. Pretty shocking when you consider that many businesses buy a PC with an OS and over-write it with their favourite image of XP. XP, GNU/Linux, Solaris and MacOS are likely candidates. Could competition be knocking at the door? We have seen in the last year M$ cut prices in Asia, pay the price in Korea and EU, and now they cannot force folks to install/buy the latest and greatest OS. If they were Ford or GM and they sold only half new models and half old models from inventory, what would the world think? The last days of empire.

A further complication is that there exist close to 1000 million PCs, almost none of which will run Vista. 88 million is less than 10%, about the same number that are scrapped each year. At that rate, it will take many years for the glorious days of monopoly to return. They plan to kill XP next year. Good! They will cut off their right hand so the left can work harder. GNU/Linux and others can fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the empire. The only thing that can save Vista and M$ is a miraculous repair job on the spaghetti code so that it works and a doubling or trebling of PC output. That is not going to happen. They took six years to produce Vista. They cannot fix it. PC buyers are not going to treble. People who have a machine P3 and later probably are content with it. Only a few gamers/M$ fanbois will queue up to throw money at M$. Moore’s Law spoiled the game plan. Existing PCs can do the job but they cannot provide enough resources for Vista.

Personally, I have seen two copies of Vista running. One was demanding to phone home or it would not play. I heard the owners found the installation CDs and appeased it by typing in a code. Another was turning off features randomly requiring stuff to be constantly re-started. No sound? Re-start the programme. Files gone? Re-start. The owner of that system is going back to XP. It may not be as flashy but it is predictable, the hallmark of digitial computing. I actually touched a running Vista. It was not user-friendly. Nothing was in the same old place. I could not get there from here many times. I had to close windows and re-start things to be in a known state. I was lost when an app was in full-screen mode. I am used to pushing “F” on my Debian GNU/Linux system.

I imagine hundreds of millions of M$ lovers will seriously back up their XP systems and block phoning home one way or another and hang on for a few years. I once bought a car from a company that did not stand behind their product. They lost me as a customer forever. How many of hundreds of millions of users will cling to XP or avoid buying anything from M$, ever? It could easily be tens of millions, giving GNU/Linux and MacOS a real boost. Thanks, M$!

- Robert Pogson

Growth

Published by Robert Pogson October 27th, 2007 in Linux in Education. 0 Comments

In recent days, M$ has boasted that it has sold 88million Vistas. In ten months. When about 200 million PCs were sold. That’s less than 50% of their market. If they cannot compete against their own obsolete product, they surely are not going to compete against GNU/Linux which has had some of the new features for years. The numbers do not even count the boxes that were shipped with Vista but converted to GNU/Linux or XP. Still, they jacked the price up so high they made record profits. GNU/Linux will still keep running up the middle and score. With performance like that, M$ will have to yield a lot of market share. Too much to ignore. Good.

In the last two days, I have met people from several schools and a pair of consultants who all are looking for a solution to IT problems. Vista is not it. They have no machines that will run it. GNU/Linux is a rugged, robust, reliable option for IT on old equipment. They can minimize their costs by buying a few new machines and networking equipment. They can do everything with existing machines as thin clients and newer machines as terminal servers or powerful thick clients for multimedia generation. They can become self-supporting by training local staff how to use GNU/Linux.

These folks are not alone. Around the world, organizations large and small seek to keep IT going and growing. The world does not want to scrap everything and replace it with stuff that works no better. The world is ready for GNU/Linux. There will be a lot of growth in the next year. Be a participant in this revolution, not a bystander.

- Robert Pogson

Effective Strategies Workshop, Winnipeg, 2007-10-23 to 26

Published by Robert Pogson October 26th, 2007 in Teaching. 0 Comments

Hey! I attended a pretty cool conference. Actually I missed the first two days because weather put a low cloud ceiling over Shamattawa, but the two days I did attend were great.

On the first day, I attended a session on bullying by a wonderful lady who had lots of inspiring stories from her personal experiences and some famous and not so famous people. Her thesis is brilliant. Instead of struggling to deal with the bullies, she advises that we focus on the 80% who are not bullies and condition them to respond more positively to bullies by informing authorities or supporting each other. She said the way to get kids to confide in adults is to teach them about bullying and to promise (and keep the promise) of confidentiality. She told a story describing how a sibling of a bully spilled the beans at such a session and caused a dangerous situation to be nipped in the bud.

On the second day, I attended a session about funding from INAC and how schools need to deal with it. I was shocked to learn that INAC funds schools by a simply inadequate formula based on student population and not on all the costs of education. Then there are five year plans (shades of Stalin…) unresponsive to population increases and the like. This explains why teachers ten years ago were paid pretty well in this system but now have fallen far behind. We shared horror stories about how bands were shifting funds from education to support housing because the whole system is not well funded. While education gets a fair amount of funding, the lack of funding in other areas squeezes bands. We learned about openness and how it could help to make sure adequate planning is done to commit to spending monies properly and to follow through.

I learned other amazing things, like one school that had been built over a cave where snakes hibernated and because the building is warm in winter, it crawls with snakes! Yipes! I like snakes but most people have negative reactions and kids can be downright mean. These are harmless garter snakes but they certainly do not belong in a school. see Snakes Alive

Another school has no computer teacher so I offered to help remotely. Another wants to upgrade/expand/better utilize IT so I may help there, too. Maybe, I will have to delay my retirement or make it an active one.

To top it off, on the bus ride in on the second day, a couple of kids got on the bus and one had no bus fare. For $2, I felt good all day. Priceless. I did not want to be the bystander who did nothing when a wee kid was in trouble.

- Robert Pogson

GNU/Linux at Shamattawa

Published by Robert Pogson October 7th, 2007 in Linux in Education. 2 Comments

Shamattawa is so far off the beaten path, one might not expect Earth-shaking changes to come from there, but that would be wrong. Like many schools in many places, Shamattawa uses computers that are a few years old. There are four generations here:

  • a couple of DEC Vectras from the early 1990’s
  • a bunch of machines from the late 1990’s that started out with Lose 98
  • a bunch of good IBM machines from 2003 or so
  • a bunch of ACER machines from a similar date.

The problem is how to maintain all that software and boxes. There are over 50 machines and no full time tech. Just me, and I have a day job. When I got to the lab there was an OS but little else. There was only one browser. Yes, that one, that security experts recommend not be used. Most machines had no typing tutor and no word processor. There was ony one thing to do… I plugged in my personal machine as a terminal server and hunted down the cables to the lab machines and connected them to a couple of switches on my LAN port. A gigabit/s switch was set up to loop detection for 30s or more so I could not use that. It was just too slow. My boot loader times out. Finally, I had the lab working from my machine. As it had handled 30 seats previously, I thought 24 would be a piece of cake. Little did I know that Grade 1s are not afraid to click things multiple times! I restricted their menus and added a second terminal server, an old Xeon box that had some guts. I added 2 gB RAM and it worked.

That is a solution that many schools could use. Maintain a small number of servers and use the clients to boot PXE from the server. Instantly the maintenance chore is cut way down. A fairly ordinary box can run 30 clients so the load is reduced a factor of 30. Buying new servers could make that ratio much higher, perhaps 200 or more. Why do they not do that?

The machines not in the lab could not use that solution. Many were not networked. They had passwords unknown blocking any maintenance of software. I had to hunt for a tool to do that. I put chntpw on my thumb drive but these old machines cannot boot from it so I use RescueCD. It has NTFS-3g to mount the partitions and chntpw to reset the Administrator password. Still it takes a few minutes and there are many machines. I have to find them and visit them. A complete waste of time. I am writing a proposal to put a server in each building and make a clean sweep. Then I just have to access the BIOS. I can unplug the hard drives to save power. Better, I could wipe them and install Linux on them as a backup in case the terminal server should fail. I can always do that over the network while the clients are running. I have to get that network extended.

So there are the travails of the computer teacher in a remote outpost. I have to find parts, fix things and make things work. So far I have made about 40 machines work. I need wireless to get the remote folks networked. There is a proposal afoot to use some of the decent machines as servers in the classrooms so multi-seat X or thin clients can be used. We can put a lab machine in each classroom as multi-seaters and six in the lab, to cut the heat and noise. Can’t do that with that other OS! Thank goodness for GNU/Linux. Officially, I get 40 minutes a day to do this stuff, but with walking about, that amounts to fixing only a couple of problems. Time will tell if we get it all to work. The only way the system will double in size and keep working is with Linux and LTSP. Thick clients will not do. That would become a full-time job.

Just imagine keeping track of all the installation CDs and licences with that other OS. With GNU/Linux, I set up a local repository and install over the network and I am done. No extra paperwork except to write a manual for how to keep it going, which is easy. Sit down and watch it hum. Literally. Apart from logging off students who misbehave or killing unnecessary apps or bringing forth the password sheet yet again, there isn’t much to do with LTSP. With 24 Grade 1s afoot there is no time anyway. They need help instantly the whole class long. Usually, they have exited GCompris or want to get out of Tuxpaint… It is the workout of the day. Fortunately it is scheduled for the start of the day when I am fresh. With crontab I have the terminal server automated, switching desktops for the younger grades to the middle years and typing tutors.

- Robert Pogson

Pogson’s Desktop

Published by Robert Pogson October 2nd, 2007 in Teaching. 0 Comments

I have been told by people with clean desktops that the secret is to never finish the day with anything left on it… Here is my desktop, after I tidied it up…My Desktop

The pretty yellow flower is a wild orchid that grows in the poplar forests of Canada. It forms a symbiotic relationship with fungi to obtain nutrients from decaying forest litter. In spite of producing many thousands of spores, it reproduces slowly, perhaps taking 25 years for a generation. They pop up and flower before the poplar put out leaves so that they take advantage of the sunshine. Most orchids are tropical but these survive winter air temperatures of -40C by being in contact with earth at near 0C. Flies are the pollinators and the foul smell produced is used to attract flies. The species is Cypripedium parviflorum.

- Robert Pogson

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My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

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