Archive for the 'technology' Category

Ziff Davis Enterprise Sold

Ziff Davis Enterprise runs a bunch of relevant websites: eweek.com, desktoplinux.com, linuxdevices.com, and more.

Heads have rolled, apparently, and future directions are not public. ZD had problems adjusting from print to publishing on the web. This sale follows a reorganization from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection back in 2008.

Time will tell us what’s next. It may well be that consolidation is long overdue.

- Robert Pogson

More FUD Gone

One of the key elements spread by FUDsters is the doubt about being able to do real stuff using */Linux. The naysayers trot out some pet application that they may never have used as an example of an application not available on FLOSS systems. The reality is that FLOSS on a general-purpose computer can do just about anything. Take Android/Linux, for instance. It’s on hundreds of millions of personal computers now and things like AutoCAD are available to run on it. The ISVs cannot pass up platforms that popular. And, yes, Android/Linux is a Linux distro…

It has over 1 million installations already and it’s a FREE APP! People who are mobile do indeed have to do stuff they used to do only at their desktop PCs.

- Robert Pogson

Linux 3.3/3.4 Will Be Androidian

“The 3.3 kernel release will let you boot an Android userspace with no modifications, but not very good power management. The 3.4 kernel release will hopefully have the power management hooks that Android needs in it, along with a few other minor missing infrastructure pieces that didn’t make it into the 3.3 kernel release.”

Linux 3.3-rc2 is on Kernel.org so it should be just a few weeks before Android/Linux is back to the standard kernel or rather the standard kernel is back to Android/Linux. This will make it much easier for GNU/Linux and Android/Linux to coexist and much easier to bring Android/Linux to a huge mass of ARM/x86/amd64 hardware. It’s all good.

M$, FLOSS is way ahead of you. Is there a shortage of apps in GNU/Linux? The pool just grew by hundreds of thousands. If “it’s all about the apps” then FLOSS is winning. There may still be a few “legacy” apps outside the fold but they will soon hop on the bus.

see Muktware – Soon You Will Be Running Android On Your PCs

- Robert Pogson

British Telecom Recognizes the Value of Linux

“BT plans an ambitious over-the-internet upgrade to over half a million customers, with Windows CE being replaced by a Linux variant, and a browser and middleware stack being provided by UK software house Oregan Networks – plus and a new cataloguing system and user-interface from Australian TV software biz, Massive Interactive, who provided much the same for Telstra’s Big Pond service.”

see The Register – BT Vision throws Microsoft Mediaroom under a bus for Linux/Set-top box software to be torn out and replaced over the net

Rather than deal with the inflexibility and cost of M$’s software and licensing, British Telecom plans to replace it with a system based on Linux in hundreds of thousands of set-top boxes of subscribers. Now, if only businesses avoided the lock-in in the first place… they could do it right and avoid the cost of migration.

- Robert Pogson

The Rise of GNU/Linux on the Desktop

According to NetApplications, GNU/Linux continues its rise on the desktop. The trendline shows 8% per month increase in share, 150% per annum.

I don’t know what has changed in NetApplications’ world but in the real world, a rate of growth like that would make GNU/Linux the dominant desktop OS in 3.5 years. Android/Linux is on a more modest pace and will take over the world in 4 years.

- Robert Pogson

UK Looking at GNU/Linux for Web Portal

Glyn Moody has more details on the new web portal being tested by gov.uk. It runs on GNU/Linux on Amazon EC2. They should save a ton of money by running that way combined with centralizing web services.

Like many organizations, UK has grown sites/servers like dust bunnies and rationalizing them should provide a lot of economy in hardware and software. The neat feature of the new site is that searching will replace menus largely. Done right, that can be very helpful. Continue reading ‘UK Looking at GNU/Linux for Web Portal’

- Robert Pogson

The Chinese Are Back

Now that New Year celebrations are over, we have some interesting new facts coming to light. The latest is that 531 million Chinese use the Internet. There are a lot that still do not but Of the Internet surfers, 391.77 million used broadband fixed-line access modes (xDSL, cable modem, fiber-optic and dedicated line) at home and 355.58 million used handsets for mobile access.

The high proportion of mobile access cannot be a good sign for M$ which is barely in that market. We know people are creatures of habit. Try changing the habits of 355 million of them.

Given the option of choosing multiple devices, respondents of the survey reported

Desktop

73.4%

Handset

69.3%

Notebook

46.8%

Unfortunately, multiple users use a device so we cannot calculate proportions of devices but this is a strong indication that some are using smartphones to access the web and not desktops/notebook. That’s not surprising since many love small cheap computers.

- Robert Pogson

Internet Enabled Mobile Devices Steal Share

Further evidence of the impact of IEMDs on IT. IDC reports that the printing market has flattened and may remain flat with little growth for years to come because people are using smartphones and tablets to read documents rather than shuffling hard copies.

Oh boy! Printing is one of the top uses of PCs in the desktop/notebook market, especially in business. Less of that usage is one more reason not to buy a PC. Of course the people producing the documents may still want a keyboard and large screen but the consumers may not… Producers may be quite happy to ship PDFs.

This is a further weakening of the monopoly. Folks can use GNU/Linux just fine to create PDFs and folks can read them on their smart thingies. Woe is M$. The sales of smart thingies is still ramping up so this effect will only grow. It might be optimistic to see printing and desktop/notebook PCs flat. They could decline. This trend may also indicate there will be demand for smart thingies with larger screens.

- Robert Pogson

XP/IE6 in the Enterprise

According to The Register web stats showing IE6 down in USA:, “gathered by Net Applications, counts browsers running on Joe Netizen’s PC. It doesn’t count enterprise users.

IE6 is dug in like a First World War sniper with 80 per cent of that market, according to Browsium”

Wow! If that’s true then XP may also be larger than the stats show, by a large margin. It’s a bit of work to get IE6 to run on “7″ on some older hardware.

Because of vendor lock-in migration of enterprise applications is taking far longer than many expected. This is a sign that a re-write is in order, not just tweaking. At the same time migration to open standards is advisable to prevent such pain in the future.

This could explain the “missing” licences for “7″. The enterprise is not buying licences for “7″ but installing XP on their new machines bought naked. The world is shipping 90 million x86/amd64 PCs per quarter but M$ is only selling 50 million licences per quarter. That suggests share something like this:

  • 50 million “7″ – 55%
  • 4.5 million MacOS – 5%
  • 9 million GNU/Linux – 10%
  • 27 million XP – 30%

I still think some of those XP machines will eventually run GNU/Linux when the enterprise market escapes lock-in. Refusing to take the next step on the Wintel treadmill is the first step to Freedom. One could argue that realizing there is lock-in is the first step to Freedom but the enterprise definitely knows about lock-in given that they are clinging to IE6 in an IE9ish world.

- Robert Pogson

Open Works for Bloomberg

Bloomberg has opened its API, providing a Software Development Kit (SDK) so developers can import Bloomberg’s financial market data into any application. This is cool. It shows the idea of openness in IT is mainstream. The short-sighted thinking that one must charge money for everything is giving way to providing a lot for free in order to generate/support a larger core business. M$ has been doing that for 20 years to lock-in users. FLOSS has been doing that even longer. It works.

It was only a few years ago one could not visit many web sites with client computers having certain browsers or certain operating systems. Now anything goes. There is a lot less room/tolerance for arbitrary restrictions/monopoly these days. It’s all good. Anyone appreciating openness will use FLOSS for their IT. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux because it gives me maximum control of my systems with a minimum of effort using open standards.

- Robert Pogson

Shortage of Hard Drives is Huge

The flooding in Thailand in 2011 knocked out many factories and caused a huge shortage of drives which peaked in December 2011. Seagate said, “Shortage of drives by the end of this year is likely to be about 150 million units”.

In fact, Seagate will be auctioning some drives to find out what the market will bear and big players in IT are signing up for long term contracts. This could mean that the standard PC with a single hard drive and lowest margins will take a hit, along with M$ and its client division. SSDs are still a bit small and expensive to take up the slack.

This could be a strong stimulus for server-centric computing to minimize the number of hard drives needed in a system. In the small project I did at Easterville, only 13 client machines had hard drives out of 153 seats while servers were choked with drives. Total was about 40 hard drives for 153 seats. Not only did we save the price of 100+ hard drives, using GNU/Linux terminal servers and thin clients we saved 153 CALs (Client Access Licences), 153 client OS licensing fees and 6 server OS licences. That was the deciding factor for the project. A shortage of hard drives could push many new installations and upgrades to this solution or to the smart thingies which tend to perform like thin clients with some local processing. 2012 will be a great year for FLOSS and ARM. The shortage of hard drives could be the straw that broke the monopoly/camel’s back.

- Robert Pogson

Petition the Governement of the USA to Use FLOSS

There is a petition asking the government of the USA to increase usage of FLOSS. While I agree with that general goal the wording of the petition is a bit strange:
Lower the national debt by expanding the government’s use of Free Software such as GNU/Linux and LibreOffice.
The U.S. federal government is being taken advantage of by many unscrupulous software vendors who charge the government far more for proprietary software, and technical support for that software, than is warranted. There is a very large community of volunteer software coders and Free Software/Open Source based U.S. companies such as Red Hat Inc. and Google Inc. that provide far more cost effective solutions. These solutions are most often provided with the software’s source code, so the federal government will never be locked in to a single vendor or software provider. We recommend that the government appoint people of great moral character and ethics who are also familiar with Free Software to advise the government on this shift (e.g. Dr. Richard M. Stallman of Boston, MA).

It’s just too complex while not mentioning many important factors beyond cost. Keep it simple. I would have proposed something like:
The Government of the United States of America Should Use Free/Libre Open Source Software

Whereas

  • the government is running a large budgetary deficit,
  • the government spends billions of dollars annually on information technology,
  • FLOSS is a cooperative project of the world to provide and to share software that can be used, examined, modified and distributed at low cost for many kinds of computer hardware,
  • besides price, FLOSS has many advantages over closed source software for reliability, security and performance,
  • the United States is a world leader in development and usage of FLOSS, and
  • many organizations have increased performance while reducing licensing and operational costs using FLOSS.

We, the people demand the Government give preference to FLOSS in all planning, purchasing and hiring for IT from now on.

Go ahead and support the petition any way. The message should be clear enough and the effect should be the same. There are indications that the administration of President Obama is leaning that way but a little push would not hurt.

- Robert Pogson

Good News From All Over

Some days there does not seem to be a big story but I thought to make a list of good things found all over the web.

  • Found in a RedHat (India) employee’s resume:“Roll out of customized Thin Client operating system for 7000 desktops. This helped the customer to improve the employee efficiency and reduce CAPEX by 60% “. Like it was routine, eh? Chuckle. Thin clients are happening. They are fun and profitable.
  • Here’s a story from last year about replacing desktop systems with GNU/Linux using RedHat virtual machines on servers: “for the Enterprise setting, all those Fat Client Desktops are now moving away from the physical ‘Desktop’ and being pushed back into the Data Center as Virtual Machines where they can be ‘tamed’ and centrally managed with RHEV-m.

    The Enterprise craves stability. Things move carefully, applications get certified for each O/S iteration.

    That process keeps Microsoft Windows around for a long time, like it or not. But the essential difference is that now Enterprise is ready for Windows 7, it gets to keep its stable MS Windows infrastructure but the Desktop is no longer Windows.”

  • Userful, a Canadian company, is busy competing with that other OS on price/performance in schools and libraries.
  • OpenSense Solutions is a US company doing similar work as Userful. All their stuff is FLOSS but they have not updated their repositories in a while…
  • The folks who think Google has no plan for Android/Linux should read Infographic: Six Stats on In-aisle Mobile Engagement. Using smart phones while shopping is huge. Mobile apps, retail websites, price comparison, reviews, social sites are all important yet sales staff often do not promote such usage. Shoppers do care about price/performance and a bunch of other characteristics and whoever facilitates the flow of information will be beloved.
- Robert Pogson

M$, It’s Just Not Happening

M$ has recently advised users of XP that “It takes 18-24 months to plan for and deploy a new operating system” in order to hurry people up to migrate to “7″ and reminding them that end-of-support is in about 800 days.

It’s not going to happen, M$. About 30% of PCs are running XP and many of them are a bit old. To buy 450 million new PCs to replace them, in 800 days would need 500K machines per day, about 45 million per quarter. The world is only shipping 90 million PCs per quarter and many are getting GNU/Linux or MacOS. Don’t hold your breath expecting a 50% pop in revenues the next few quarters. M$ has been selling 50 million licences for “7″ per quarter but that includes consumer, business, replacements and new purchases. The replacement part is not the whole ball of wax.

The world has a huge inventory of used but solid and reliable PCs running XP and other OS and they are not going to be suddenly installed of “7″ or “8″ or replaced with a new machine. They will run until they die, in four or five more years, and may well be replaced by tablets or netbooks or any other kind of PC other than Wintel. People will re-install XP and use anti-malware products from other suppliers to keep it alive. Get used to it, M$. The free ride is ending.

According to W3Schools, in the last year, “7″ share grew from 29.1% to 46.1% (+17%) while XP lost only 12.7% and Vista lost 3.9%. A lot of XP machines are going elsewhere. Perhaps as many as 4-5% of PCs are going to GNU/Linux annually. Vista, you see, is much closer to “7″ than is XP.

I like to check the numbers. Suppose you have a five year old PC running XP and you want something faster. Are you going to spend $hundreds on a new PC with “7″ or are you going to install Debian GNU/Linux for a few dollars’ worth of your time and laugh at M$? It’s good to have choice and enough will accept this choice to keep M$’s wet dreams from becoming reality.

- Robert Pogson

Oracle Shoots Foot, Repeatedly, in Oracle v Google

It’s absolutely amazing that Oracle, having some of the most expensive lawyers on the planet, cannot even follow the rules of evidence and procedure. Oracle cannot even provide expert witness to many of its patent claims. The simple thing required by the judge, they have not done:
” On January 6, 2012, Oracle will provide an identification, for each of the 26 asserted claims, of each Oracle product, Oracle-licensed product, Sun product, or Sun-licensed product (“Oracle Products”) that practice or have practiced the claim. Oracle will also identify the fact witnesses who possess information supporting Oracle’s contentions that the Oracle Products practice or have practiced the asserted claims, as well as provide a summary of testimony Oracle intends to elicit at trial from those witnesses regarding those Oracle Products’ practice of the claims. Oracle will also provide source code citations and/or other documentation supporting Oracle’s contentions that the Oracle Products practice the asserted claims.”

Instead Oracle tried another snowjob having prevented its witnesses from informing Google of many things in depositions and so disqualified them from testifying on some matters at trial as simple as how Oracle’s products practise the claimed patents. This all goes to damages that are surely not capable of reaching $1billion let alone the $billions Oracle demanded. Oracle was ordered to produce citations of source code and did not. The judge is likely to stomp all over Oracle for defying his order.

Typical of Oracle’s response is this:
“1. The ’104 Patent

Google’s first objection to Oracle’s identification of products that practice the ’104 patent is that it cannot respond because Oracle supposedly failed “to actually cite any source code or documentation” reflecting how the patent is practiced. (Google Response at 3.) Google repeats this same rote objection for each of the six patents-in-suit. (See id. at 6, 9, 11, 12, 13.) The objection is baseless as to the ’104 patent and as to the other five patents as well. Oracle identified specific source code files for each of the products it claims practices the six patents. (See, e.g., Oracle Response at 2-12.) These are not “a laundry list of names of various source code files” as Google claims. (Google Response at 1.) To the contrary, Oracle has identified specific source code files relevant to each product or product version — typically less than five files — that illustrate where and how the patent is practiced. (See, e.g., Oracle Response at 2, 12.) If Google felt these responses were somehow deficient, it could have raised that with Oracle before its response was due. But it never did. In fact, although it had a full two weeks to respond, Google’s counsel waited until three days before Google’s response was due to ask for copies of only some of the referenced source code files (which had all been produced last year as part of the parties’ procedure for producing confidential source code). Google did not make a good faith effort to prepare its response or to meet and confer during this two-week period, and if it did not have enough time to review the files to verify Oracle’s position, it has only itself to blame.”

A non-expert naming a file as practising a claim of a patent won’t cut it IMHO. I doubt the judge will be impressed by Oracle’s argument when there’s nothing in the experts’ reports to support the idea that Oracle practised the patents. Google argues that Oracle’s experts are not expert as they had no intimate knowledge during deposition.

see Oracle v. Google – Patent Marking – Closing the Gap

- Robert Pogson

Good Years for MrPogson.com

I started this blog back in 2007, more or less for fun. Later, I got more serious as I found many popular forums on the web quite biased against FLOSS. Hard work pays off. Thanks to all who contributed.

The data points are statistics for the site and the smooth curve is an exponential growth curve for 261% per annum. This month is the best month ever and there is still a day left. This is beginning to look like full-time occupation. I hope I have some time left for gardening, hunting and fishing in 2012.

- Robert Pogson

US Government is a Website Vandal

The US government in its haste to support big businesses seized a bunch of uploading sites. They claim big business loses money due to uploading copyright material to servers. Tons of data is at risk of being deleted. Certainly some of that data is an illegal copy but much is not and folks who have used uploading sites in good faith are now threatened with losing their data with no due process. The sticking points are that MegaUpload’s funds have been seized as well and they cannot pay the bills for storage and users cannot access their own data to move it.

I can see a lot of lawsuits in the future and liability for taxpayers who may have to pay the bills. I can see people all over the world refusing to store any data on any server in US jurisdiction. This is yet another sign that the USA is going down the technological drain. The world does not need the bureaucracy of the US messing up IT.

see Feds: Megaupload User Data Could Be Gone Thursday

and

Megaupload users face data deletion US prosecutors warn

- Robert Pogson

Oh Boy! Tilera Servers Out in March

“the ramp for the Tilera chips has been pretty steep, with over 80 engagements with system and network equipment vendors of all colors and stripes, and 20 design wins where the company has committed to use a Tile processor”

Wow! A Tile processor uses a bunch of RISC CPUs on a chip in a mesh. They have 64bit processing and 40bit addressing. The idea is to get close to one processor per thread so that fewer context switches and massive parallelism will get a lot of throughput at lower cost than x86 with SMP. For servers this makes a lot of sense and because they are optimized for Linux and have tools, porting is trivial. Lots of software that runs on GNU/Linux will be able to move quickly to servers running these things. Sampling is happening and production will happen in March. 2012 will be even more interesting than Android/Linux v world.

Of course, there will be particular applications where Tilera offers no advantage but there are lots that will. Anything on a busy website should be helped. Super-computing is a natural. Big data too… I would bet that as this matures, Google and other big players will slurp them up. That could really dent the bottom line of Intel/AMD which means price/performance could improve a lot for us ordinary mortals who do one thing at a time.

I would not be surprised if this technology eventually gets to the desktop. Most desktops don’t need this but terminal servers may be natural. Many of us have ~100 processes running. A hundred users might benefit greatly having one processor per process.

- Robert Pogson

Weather in UK

The weather office in UK has quit providing widgets for GNU/Linux desktops thanks to Adobe dropping support for AIR in GNU/Linux. There is a workaround. On my PC, running Debian GNU/Linux, there is an app called “metar”:
metar -d eggp
EGGP 301220Z 11008KT 8000 FEW020 04/M00 Q1027
Station : EGGP
Day : 30
Time : 12:20 UTC
Wind direction: 110 (ESE)
Wind speed : 8 KT
Wind gust : 8 KT
Visibility : 8000 M
Temperature : 4 C
Dewpoint : 0 C
Pressure : 1027 hPa
Clouds : FEW at 2000 ft
Phenomena :

It’s trivial to extract from that whatever you want:
metar -d eggp|grep ^Temp
Temperature : 4 C

That’s for Liverpool, but many other airports publish METAR data.

It’s trivial to periodically refresh that information in a window or title bar in GNU/Linux, making your own widget. I have mine on the menubar which I access with a single click but I could also make it update automatically in a virtual desktop, say, using crontab. Either way, I don’t need to rely on Adobe for weather info. Isn’t FLOSS grand? Independence from unreliable software suppliers is priceless.

- Robert Pogson

Strategy Analytics: Consumers are increasingly buying tablets in preference to netbooks and even entry-level notebooks or desktops

In Q4 2011, Strategy Analytics found that 26.8 million tablet PCs shipped with these distributions:

iOS 57.6%
Android 39.1%
M$

1.5%

Others

1.9%

26.8 million is 150% more than the same quarter last year so stay tuned for more growth and more slippage by M$ in the PC market. “Others” includes BlackBerry, WebOS and MeeGO, I suppose. M$ is thick with that bunch… Android/Linux is gradually overtaking iOS. I predict they will be even within a few months.

Share stolen from Wintel? 26.8 million is about 30% of x86 desktop/notebook shipments so about one in five tablets is taking the place of a desktop/notebook. Expect continuing no/low/negative growth, M$. Some people prefer small cheap computers.

- Robert Pogson

Ubuntu’s HUD: Why It’s A Terrible Idea

I just read another article proclaiming why HUD (Head Up Display) is a great idea. The gist of it is that

  • HUD learns on the job improving its performance with use.
  • HUD allows you to search for menu items by hitting Alt + search terms
  • HUD is faster and easier to use/learn.

In fighter aircraft the idea of HUD was to allow a pilot to see important stuff while looking through the windscreen for important stuff allowing intricate operations without taking the eye off either. That‘s a good thing. Ubuntu’s HUD is not. Continue reading ‘Ubuntu’s HUD: Why It’s A Terrible Idea’

- Robert Pogson

It’s True. More People Use Smartphones Than Desktop/Notebook PCs

A survey of 2000 people 18 and over in several developed countries/markets found that 68-86% used desktop/notebook PCs but 76-96% used smartphones. USA was on the low end while UK, France, Germany and Japan were successively higher in both categories.

Besides the bare facts, I conclude

  • 8-10% use smartphones but not desktop/notebook PCs
  • USA, which is on the low end of desktop/notebook usage is on the high end of tablet usage (11%) so tablets are definitely cutting into desktop/notebook usage

This is entirely consistent with M$’s drop in client division revenue. M$ is barely present in smartphone/tablet markets. 10% can have a huge effect on consumer demand. Decimation gets noticed. I expect this will grow and M$ will continue to drop in market share for the next few quarters and “8″ will have little traction. People prefer chocolate bars in their hands rather than vapourware. The acceptability of */Linux on ARM and consumers’ influence on business IT could well open the door to more widespread use of */Linux on desktop/notebook PCs.

- Robert Pogson

OLPC in Australia

Thanks to reader oiaohm for providing a link to the following video presentation on the One Laptop Per Child implementation in Australia. Key points:

  • remote locations require a programme like OLPC to bring in IT to education
  • focus is on younger students and using IT to teach, not teaching IT
  • just dumping in the technology does not work
  • teachers, schools and communities need to be prepared/gotten on board to bring success
  • students are a huge asset
  • educational results are dramatic
  • it’s GNU/Linux and they provide both Sugar and GNOME

This documentary is about a programme to bring the XO notebooks to hundreds of thousands of students over the next five years. TCO is about $380 with the local school paying only $80 for training/support. $300 is paid by corporate sponsors such as banks/ISPs in Australia. see http://dev.laptop.org.au/

Note on the presenter’s T-shirt:“No, I will not fix your computer.”

- Robert Pogson

Geography of GNU/Linux

NetApplications used to restrict geographic reports of web stats to subscribers. Today they will let anyone have the information:

GNU/Linux share for the past month (counting only GNU/Linux, MacOS and that other OS)

Some of those numbers are pretty strange but there are a lot of populous countries with more than 1% share of hits going to GNU/Linux. It’s interesting that USA embargoes Cuba on lots of things but in the above list they are the highest users of GNU/Linux. Maybe they have more in common than they know.

UPDATE I guess they had a misconfiguration. Now they ask for authentication…

- Robert Pogson

Opportunities Lost

One of the things I read about M$ is that M$ facilitated wide use of PCs and so has been a blessing over the years. While it is true that other OS was cheaper than UNIX licences back in the day (~$1000), the licences still cost too much to bridge the Digital Divide.

We can see this clearly now that Android/Linux on ARM is allowing other technologies into the market. Costs per unit can be under $100, several times less than Wintel. The number of people using IT could thus double within a few years, far greater growth in numbers than is typical using only that other OS in IT.

M$ of course mostly cares about its total revenue, and not about units shipped, but imagine M$ had adopted GNU/Linux a decade or more ago and encouraged ARM. They could have cut their licensing/support fees in half, reduced expenses and had a decade with treble rate of growth, giving them even larger revenue than they have now. They locked themselves in to lower profits at the same time that they locked in users to M$’s way of doing things. They now have to raise licensing fees to maintain profits on a decreasing share of the market which will hasten their demise.

At the same time, a billion people, more or less, were denied IT by M$’s short-sighted behaviour.

The score: In a decade of error,

  • 10 billion person-years of computing was lost,
  • $100 billion in profits was lost by M$ alone,
  • billions were kept in poverty years longer than they should have,
  • Earth was polluted/raped by the material wasted/used in PCs replaced every few years, and
  • the world spent $billions more fighting the malware and bloat and re-re-reboots of that other OS.

So, rather than congratulating Bill G and Co. for their success, we should pity them for their failures and regret having given them any business at all. This is essentially what will happen in 2012 as M$ loses more market share, comes late to market with that other OS on ARM, and */Linux and ARM bring IT to the next billion people.

In 2012, the installed base of that other OS on x86 PCs could well fall to 70% or less and units shipped with that other OS could fall to less than 50% at the same time that Android/Linux smartphones ship 300 million units and tablets ship 200 million units and GNU/Linux ends up on 100 million more desktops/notebooks.

- Robert Pogson

Solution Finds A Problem

The Chromebook, essentially a browser built into a thin-ish client, has not been wildly successful in the marketplace because many people find it limiting compared to thick clients but there are exceptions. Education has some unique requirements:

  • Young people are young and inexperienced so a limited environment is a perfect way to protect them from themselves as well as a lot of other dangers in an anything-goes environment.
  • Schools and educators are not IT experts but need to serve in the place of parents when children are at school.
  • Students don’t need the latest version of every feature-bloated app. In fact, it’s much easier to teach the important principles of IT using stripped-down minimal software. The important uses of IT in education are efficiently finding, creating, modifying, storing and presenting information. A thin client can do those things better than a thick client because servers can be beefier than thick clients and still fit the budget (and just about everything is in RAM except users’ data).
  • Oh, yes. Thin clients like Chromebooks cost less to acquire and cost less to maintain simply because they have fewer parts.
  • Students have wide ranges of ability and a client system that is simpler will be usable by just about every one.
  • Schools can set up their own servers or web portals as start-pages and make every web application and database in the school system easy to find.
  • Using thin clients means schools have fewer machines to configure/maintain/upgrade. That costs much less, performs more reliably and is much more secure.

Google has expressed surprise that Chromebooks are popular with schools. I’m not surprised. I’ve been there and done that. Thin clients work in education. A bonus for everyone is that the software is based on Linux so it works for the users/owners and not M$ which provides software to schools to lock-in students and keep revenue flowing, something that is not part of an educational system’s mandate.

- Robert Pogson

More Market Forces Squeezing the Monopoly

The desktop monopoly of M$ is looking very old today. Emerging markets are consuming an ever larger piece of the PC pie (Asia/Pacific exluding Japan shipped about 1/3 of PCs with per annum growth of 11%) and they are not loyal servants of M$. Consumerization of IT means stuff consumers drag in to work will have to be accommodated. No more “M$ shops”.

The numbers are spectacular. Last year folks were expecting the world to ship 45 million tablets and revised estimates to 60 million. It turns out Apple, on its own, shipped that many. The global shipments of tablets were close to 100 million. And then there are the smartphones which shipped in greater numbers than desktop/notebook PCs.

All this means M$’s share of personal computing is plunging like a stone and more importantly, the share of people who look to M$ for the source of software is declining rapidly. Only a tiny percentage of smart phones and tablets use M$’s stuff. Soon the desktops and notebooks will not be using M$’s stuff. The change in 2012 could be dramatic as more businesses use thin clients and/or web applications and have less dependence on M$’s software. In the last quarter M$’s client division decreased its revenue 6% on the basis of December’s shopping mostly. There’s no sign of a decrease in consumer spending on non-M$ software. Shortages of hard drives will impact desktop and notebook PCs seriously in 2012 on top of everything else.

Still, there are many who are seriously locked in but they may have taken their last step on the Wintel treadmill.

- Robert Pogson

*/Linux PCs for Consumers

I am tired of people claiming that M$ won the war and GNU/Linux need not apply here or there in IT. It’s crap, unadulterated crap. GNU/Linux is more popular than ever and finding its way to lots of retail spaces where ordinary (non-geek) consumers are buying them. That other OS, on the other hand is declining in popularity steadily and M$’s client division had a 6% per annum drop in revenue. That’s not winning a war but resting on laurels. Ordinary folks who are never going to install an OS but want some IT that works on their desks are buying GNU/Linux systems retail all over the world.

Some examples:

Large enterprises which value efficiency are using GNU/Linux desktops and servers. The Kerala State Electricity board with 10 million customers saved 80 million rupees using FLOSS. They had a few specialized applications and paid 15 people to write for GNU/Linux. Individual consumers who don’t have anywhere near that complexity of IT, can and do use GNU/Linux desktops and notebooks with satisfaction from a host of applications. see also Debian’s repository

It’s a tired tale, that GNU/Linux is not/cannot make it on the desktop. GNU/Linux on the desktop happened long ago and continues with fresh growth today. There still are some retailers who don’t stock GNU/Linux but those are decreasing in number steadily. All the advantages that people see on servers are available on desktops/notebooks/thin clients/netbooks/smart thingies. There’s just no reason not to use GNU/Linux and plenty of reasons to use it (low cost, simplicity, easy maintenance, less malware, fewer re-re-reboots, speed, it’s Free Software, the licence costs $0 and you can make as many copies as you like, …). I recommend Debian GNU/Linux because it has great tools for system management, can be used on servers or clients and has a huge repository of software packages and APT (Advanced Packaging Tool).

- Robert Pogson

HTC Catches the Train

HTC and Samsung are huge players in smart thingies. It’s a battle to ship more faster. HTC has hired IBM to its sales team. The idea is that IBM will grease the skids for sliding HTC devices into large businesses who buy stuff by the thousands of units. HTC has shipped nearly 100 million units so far.

HTC is also fighting the battle from one individual to the next by opening the boot-loader to run GNU/Linux or other stuff for geeks.

And they are in the mainstream shipping smart thingies to consumers and ISPs.

2012 will see huge take-up in Android/Linux smart phones and tablets and HTC wants its share and is willing to compete on price/performance. M$ is nowhere to be seen.

- Robert Pogson

Battle of the Bots

Today this site had an hour-long denial of service. The logs were normal until 6 bots came to visit simultaneously… on a busy day. We’ve doubled the RAM again. Hope this works.

- 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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February 2012
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