2009 February archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for February, 2009

A Call to Arms

Published by Robert Pogson February 28th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

M$ has been doing the SCO thing for years now, claiming that GNU/Linux violates their rights in intellectual property. Now they are suing TomTom over methods used in the Linux kernel (FAT file-system) and other trivial and obvious combinations of ideas that are none of M$’s property. They can sue TomTom into oblivion, servitude, or recantation, or we can help them fight back exposiing the perfidy of software patents and M$’s bullying.

One can speculate that M$ has seen the writing on the wall about software patents and decided to attack now while there was any threat left in them. Perhaps they wanted to exploit their patents before they expired since the idea has been implemented since the early 1990s. Perhaps it is the fact that GNU/Linux has finally dented the bottom line. Perhaps they believed their own lies and felt the world would believe that this is not about attacking FLOSS or GNU/Linux and that we should not be alarmed.

I have been a deer hunter for many years. Deer are beautiful, graceful animals but they are powerful and dangerous. Just when you think they have been overcome and in hand, they will still struggle for life and do you harm if you approach too soon. M$ is ugly but still powerful. We should not be deceived into believing they will behave civilly while the world adopts FLOSS. They will strike out wildly at any nearby target to do damage even if there is no chance of success. This is a desperate move by a desperate corporation. We need to put to rest any ideas it still holds of world domination. The only way to do that is to administer a prompt sound defeat.

We have seen in the case of SCO that defeat may take years and that M$ will likely use the demonstrated threat of suit to rake in money from the weak. How foolish EV1 and others were to prefer to pay extortion rather than fight the bully. Several third parties got involved and fought a good fight. It costs many millions but the precedent is worth much more. Losing every software patent in its armory would show the world that M$ is impotent. They have to start competing on the value of their software and hardware, not the fiction that they are irreplaceable. I replace them daily in my work. How sad it will be if M$ reverts to being a software-patent troll in its end-days. The battle will show the world that patents on software do not promote creativity.

We should all encourage TomTom to fight this to the end. We will support them. If they even think being acquired by M$ is in their best interest, they will get higher value for having fought them all the way. There is little chance of losing this battle because M$ cannot allow it to go to trial without settling. The pre-trial discovery will show the emperor is naked. Prior-art will show the old beast is toothless. Obviousness will show the weakness of its intellect. Is there anyone on the planet who believes the length of a filename in a widely used file-system is intellectual property? Imagine, trying to patent a patch to fix a flaw in their file-system…

We can also abandon compatibility with that other OS entirely and stick to open standards.

Never, in the course of human history, have so many been able to stand up to a single bully and kick him in his tender parts.
It does not matter his bank balance, cash flow, patent portfolio, or ubiquity of his OS, a bully is easily out-numbered and over-powered if we stick together. We are many millions. They are a few thousands and becoming fewer.

Useful links on this topic:

End Software Patents (announced a few days before the suit…)
about TomTom
Financial trouble at TomTom
Zemlin at Linux-foundation.org
ZDnet quotes from all over
Bruce Perens opines

- Robert Pogson

GNU/Linux is Hot in Brazil, Again

Published by Robert Pogson February 19th, 2009 in Linux in Education. 0 Comments

There is news of a 356000 seat installation in Brazil in the works. This is for schools and uses Userful’s shared-PC technology. There is a similar FLOSS technology from Groovix. I used Groovix in the school at Easterville. Groovix uses Multi-seat X. Good, old, X…

“Canada-based Userful and ThinNetworks of Brazil have been selected to supply 356,800 virtual desktops to schools across Brazil.

”

see Linux virtual desktops sweeping Brazilian schools

There it is folks, the world’s largest virtual desktop deployment and the world’s largest rollout of GNU/Linux in the year of the GNU/Linux Desktop, 2009.

Way to go, world, double the number of computer seats in schools and

- Robert Pogson

Vista-Incapable Suit Fizzles

Published by Robert Pogson February 19th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

The judge has ruled that the case cannot procede as a class-action suit. That pretty well guts it as the value of the licences/computers is a lot less than the litigation for a few individuals.

The judge’s reasoning was that the plaintiffs had not proven their price inflation theory. That would be difficult as there are many factors:

M$’s Vista Incapable campaign
the tendency for the price of hardware to decrease with time and Moore’s Law, etc.
shifts in the economy

Of course, the judge put the onus on the plaintiff to prove that a megacorp spending big bucks on an advertising campaign could/did affect the market. I would think it would be unquestionable that M$ can sell and that they did sell whatever they wanted. Otherwise it makes little sense to have a law that does not apply to M$. If an individual cannot reasonably sue for redress for a few hundred dollars, how will the law ever be applied?

I think the judge is wrong because she put an impossible barrier to the plaintiff.

Besides justice, class-action should be about judicial efficiency, putting a bunch of cases together. Will a million or so individuals have to sue to get the judge’s attention?

- Robert Pogson

Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman

Published by Robert Pogson February 16th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

Several sites have mentioned the suit against M$ by Emma Alvarado for illegal use of monopoly power. Here is one with a pictureat The Inquirer. She sure looks determined. Good for her! If I were M$, I would apologise immediately and see that everyone gets a refund for Vista who paid anything for it in the last two years. Nothing less will begin to repair the damage they have done to themselves with Vista.

Seriously. I have been married 25 years to a determined woman and I know you should not mess with one. In the 200 million or so copies of Vista sold there are probably enough to whip up a real class-action suit. M$ has no good legs to stand on. Everything it does is designed to leverage monopoly power and to maintain it. No proper business sells a new model and charges extra for the old model and insists one buy the new model to get the old model. That would take a jury about 5s to decide was abuse of the market. What were they thinking? That the US DOJ was tamed? Impatient for the governments to reign in this bully, ordinary folks are fighting back. Millions are using GNU/Linux. Others are suing the bastards. It is all good.

Links:

- Robert Pogson

Feel the Love

Published by Robert Pogson February 14th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Debian 5.0 Lenny will be pushed to mirrors tonight, unless wheels fall off…

see this blog . That is not the official announcement, just news of the preparation. This is a wonderful Valentine’s Day present to the world.

The last release of Debian, Etch, has served us well and I will continue to use it in production until I have tested Lenny. Last I heard, there were still strange things about the installer and hard disk device names, but that will sort itself out.

Congratulations to the Debian team for their years of hard work on 11 architectures and many thousands of packages. Take a bow. M$, eat your heart out.

Compared to that other OS, Debian is a model of efficiency. Debian releases much more software on many more architectures and, in a similar period of time, M$ can only do a point-release. )

UPDATE:

Here is the Official Announcement.

- Robert Pogson

Stupidity – The State of Blissful Ignorance

Published by Robert Pogson February 13th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Over at LinuxToday.com, Carla Schroder hits the nail on the head with her blog entry, ”
I Give Up. Windows Is Proof That People Are Too Stupid To Use Computers.

And too stupid or dishonest to report Microsoft Windows as the defective disaster that it is. If it were any other type of product it would have banned from every country in the world long ago. ”

She goes on to recount situations where people are in denial that the OS they use is garbage.

I have witnesses these things many times:

acceptance of virus scanning as normal even when it sucks the life out of the machine
thinking that other OS is “free”
thinking re-re-rebooting is normal
accepting phoning home, DRM, BSODs, network glitches
accepting that PCs slow down with use
accepting that the user has done something wrong to cause a crash
mistaking pretty graphics for a pretty OS
accepting the EULA

It all reminds me of an interesting day about 15 years ago. A backyard mechanic had overhauled his differential and took the car out for a spin. He turned a couple of corners and a wheel and axle fell off! He had forgotten or not installed properly the retaining clip. Oops. I don’t think he ever made that mistake again, but M$ and its customers keep making the same mistake over again. That is stupid.

If one bought a new car and the wheels kept falling off, you would immediately realize it was poorly built or designed to fail. Why cannot stupid people realize that other OS is badly designed??? Why do stupid people keep paying whatever M$ asks even as the price of hardware falls and the price of the licence for that other OS as a proportion of the price of a PC keeps rising.

M$ thought they had a problem when PCs were selling around $1000. Many OEMs helped them out by throwing stuff into PCs to keep the price about there for years. Now you can buy a quad-core, multi-gigabyte, terabyte machine for a few hundred dollars and people by the hundreds of millions keep paying for that other OS, with all its flaws.

Stupidity does not end with the end-users. The developers, analysts, bloggers, apologists, and trolls who keep writing for that other OS, and the OEMs who push it, and the retailers are all part of the circle of stupidity.

Fortunately, FLOSS is a breath of fresh air, a beam of light, real enlightenment in the world of IT. I have not bought a PC with that other OS for many years because I make my own but no one needs to now that a number of OEMs are starting to see the light. M$ is not their friend. It is not smart to rely on M$. Do not accept candy from that stranger.

- Robert Pogson

The Government of Canada Finally Listens

Published by Robert Pogson February 8th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments

The Government of Canada has been lukewarm to FLOSS. A recent RFI could be a change. Parts of the RFI are very awkward, like lumping FLOSS in with NO CHARGE LICENSED SOFTWARE. How awkward is that? I suggested, in my submission, that they split their universe into Free and non-Free because that makes sense. No-charge licences for non-free software like IE can be loaded with security and anti-competitive burdens that FLOSS does not impose. I proposed that the Government of Canada prefer FLOSS rather than look upon it as something to be very cautious about. Why fear openness? Here is my submission:
rfi_floss_gc

- Robert Pogson

Upgrading the old Beast

Published by Robert Pogson February 1st, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I finally obtained the CPU for my upgrade, a quad-core Phenom 2.5gHz. The Opteron I wanted was not available from my usual supplier. That is a lot more CPU than I need because instead of having one core idling, I now will have four but it sure is snappy when I am alone on it.

The interesting thing about this upgrade is that the floppy drive, power supply and case were the only components held over. Everything else was new. I copied from the old RAID with 200 gB drives to one element of the new RAID, a 500 gB drive. Thus, the initrd (Initial Ram Drive) would likely be missing some drivers. It was. This thing could not boot, “waiting for root filesystem” forever. After trying RescueCD, I chrooted into the new RAID and re-installed the kernel, making up a new initrd. It worked. Isn’t GNU/Linux great? How would that other OS behave with “new hardware” blues? I have no clue but I expect a lot of drivers would need installing. I re-installed my kernel from my local mirror which was on the new RAID. Sweet.

The only driver issues were the RAID, the old system booting non-RAID, and the sound. I ran alsaconf and things were good. I had to fix my /tmp permissions because I had created /tmp manually and had not been careful. X and logins had a problem with not being able to write to /tmp .

The old mobo was MSI K8T Neo 2 and the new one was ASUS M3A78 PRO with six SATA sockets. I memtested the new RAM overnight with no problems ECC on or off. Being a power user is fun in 4gB RAM:

free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3702 3651 51 0 468 1915
-/+ buffers/cache: 1267 2435
Swap: 0 0 0

PHP pages load much faster now and the search engine seems instantaneous. This should be a pleasant experiences for other teachers at the conference in a few weeks.

I find it amazing that this machine was installed in 2004 and has never been re-installed. I did an apt-get dist-upgrade to Etch and changed everything with only a little tweaking for configuration. How many times would it have been re-installed with that other OS? HEHEHEHE Could the beast live forever? I was thinking to change the name to Behemoth but it is not that much bigger now and looks the same.

Double the disk transfer rate, 50% increase in clock-speed,, double the RAM, now with ECC, 4X the cores, switch to all SATA, and 4X the cache should be good for a while for an old guy nearing retirement but still a bit flashy like a red convertible…

- 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.