Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Business Week has a great write up on Macs in the office. Apparently more and more companies are becoming receptive of a dual platform environment, and more and more employees are requesting better computers (yea, I said “better”).

I’ve found consistently over the years that they are just more reliable requiring much less effort to keep running smoothly for years on end. I can’t recall a similar experience even with Windows XP, which is clearly the winner of the Windows family. Less time fighting the OS is more time being productive. Not to mention the improved usability just allows for more efficiency (Exposé is still amazing).

I don’t think the reason for the rise in corporate popularity is so much about the usage of an Intel processor, but because of OS X. Most companies I’d venture won’t want to pay for dual OS (and emulation) since that bloats the cost of the workstation. Some obviously will, but not too many. The rise I’d say is mainly attributed to applications becoming more web based, meaning less proprietary software installs. All you need these days is an office suite (Office X, Google Docs) web browser (Safari or Firefox) and email (Entourage, Thunderbird, Apple Mail). Apple’s also made giant leaps in ensuring compatibility with other platforms such as NFS, SMB even Active Directory.

Linux is totally usable in the workplace, but lacks the usability and the sparkle to compete with Apple in this new open market thus far. Ubuntu’s made great strides, but it still doesn’t hold a candle to Leopard’s polish.

Apple does however sorely need a mid-range line to compete further, and to enhance it’s business and consumer sales. Essentially an iMac but trading the built-in display for some expansion at the same cost as the iMac line. The result would be a pretty impressive line up. It likely wouldn’t kill Mac Pro sales since anyone currently spending $2,500+ is likely still going to be willing to drop that cash for the top models. It would likely impact Mac mini and iMac sales slightly, though it’s a reasonable trade-off. Apple would still have a hard time pushing it’s display’s to accompany those computers, due to Apple’s rather high price as opposed to a more generic Samsung or Dell, but they could easily introduce a lower end for general office use, and make the current models a higher class.

It will be interesting to see how Apple decides to go after this market share.

Mark Pilgrim has a great picture of the top laptops on Amazon.com right now. What I found interesting is that the first Windows laptop is #6 (and no it’s not running an Intel), The #1 and #2 goes to Mac OS X and Linux.

1. Apple Macbook 13″ (2.4GHz)
2. Asus Eee 4G 7″ (900MHz)
3. Asus Eee 4G Surf 7″ (800MHz)
4. Apple Macbook 13″ (2.4GHz)
5. Apple Macbook 13″ (2GHz)
6. HP Pavilion DV2740SE 14.1″ (2Ghz AMD Turion 64 X 2)

Taking a look at the competition it’s pretty clear why. The Times They Are A-Changin’.

That new 9″ Asus Eee looks pretty nice. What would be ideal is if they made the 7″ with a higher resolution and kept the price the same. 9″ is a little large for this class of mobile computing.

According to Mitch Meyran at Free Software Magazine Hotmail is crippled in Firefox 2.0 for Linux. The fix? Spoof the user agent to be Firefox 2.0 for Windows. Another fix is to use Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Anyone else experience this problem? There does seem to be a few reports of this.

Paul Stamatiou has a great blog post on the DIY $200 PC. Premise is that for $200 (or possibly less depend on your requirements) you could put together a little PC for some purpose. The core of this being affordable is the new-ish Intel D201GLY2 Motherboard/Processor combo.

The only problem I see with it is the board surprisingly uses an SiS964 Southbridge, which for the moment doesn’t seem to be well supported under Linux from what I can tell. That could make use a little more complicated, though I can see that changing relatively quick. I wouldn’t run a modern version of Windows on something like that, not to mention Windows would cost about as much as the hardware. It is a Celeron, but it’s 64bit.

This means for approximately $200 you can put together a very low power, quiet (could even be fanless) computer/device/server/appliance for whatever purpose you wish. A little work and it would make a great file server. Add a better NIC and you’d have a great firewall. Hook it up with some WiFi and it can easily get on a network from anywhere. There’s a ton of possibilities here. It could be a lot of fun to build something out of it. I’m not sure using something like MythTV will work to well, at least now.

Very cool stuff. I’m interested what people will do with it.

If you search for Firefox using Google you’ll see this ad towards the top:

Look over to the right side and you’ll see this:

Here’s a larger complete screenshot for anyone interested.

Interesting eh? They aren’t threatened though. Here’s another tidbit. A search for “Safari” brings up a Microsoft ad as well. A search for “Opera” or “Opera Browser” does not. A search for “Browser” will. A search for “linux” will bring up a few Microsoft ads as well as a Firefox ad.

Looking at this map, it’s clear November 9, 2004 was D-Day for the open source movement. We can’t stop until Steve Balmer is in a hiding in a bunker under Redmond Washington.

Map by Steven Hilton copied per license in image to ensure availability.

On Monday, I decided to see if Ubuntu’s Live CD was good enough to work for the week. I put the CD in, rebooted, and said “no Windows until Friday”. Surprisingly, it recognized all the hardware in my Thinkpad T43 (at least all that I cared enough about to notice), and actually did a good job. With 1.5GB of RAM in this monster, it was rather smooth once it loaded. My only gripe is that it didn’t have an easy way to save the session to a USB flash device on shutdown, and allow it to re-init based on that session next restart. If the Live CD was smart enough to do that, it would have been truly perfect.

OpenOffice did the trick, as did Firefox. Really had no issues at all. Printing worked, so did networking.

Live CD’s are definitely useful. Find a computer that doesn’t work in a lab? Just put in the CD, and you can use it without problems.

Really says a lot for Linux. Ubuntu is definitely a great distro, the best I’ve seen so far. Now if I had a bigger hard drive, I’d have a partition for it. Eventually I will… I hope.

BrassRing Enterprise 8, which is used by many companies to allow applicants to apply for a job online is going to be adding Firefox support in version 8 (due out December) to address incompatibility with Mac users (I presume Linux users are also affected). This is great news of course, and may mean that they are close enough to standards compliance that you can use your browser of choice (although it sounds like Firefox will be the only non-IE browser supported).

American Express also uses BrassRing Enterprise according to the article. This is a separate issue from the #1 reported issue I discussed the other day.

That’s another win for alternative browsers. I’m hoping American Express and others follow.

[Hat tip CNET News]

Macworld notes that the W3C objects to the Copyright Office Browser Compatibility plan (I mentioned this a few weeks ago). There are two particular quotes I wanted to share:

While stressing that the W3C is not criticizing Internet Explorer, the W3C officials said the office would be placing limitations on users of the Mac OS, Linux and Unix, who may have incompatible browsers. Cell phone and PDA users, and persons with disabilities also may be affected, Berners-Lee said.

So well said of Berners-Lee. What about Linux users? Where do they download the latest Internet Explorer? The Mac version is the same as the PC version in name only.

The W3C also stressed that the Web “was born and achieved widespread use only because of a commitment to open, vendor-neutral standards.”

I think that sums things up rather well. Not just about the problem with this proposal, but the problem facing the Internet in general. It applies to some patents, and to some monopolies.

You can find the complete W3C letter here.

Well, I finally did it. I burnt Fedora Core 2 Install CD’s, and put it on my 2nd HD of my Thinkpad. Had trouble booting at first, but found a hidden option in my BIOS to select the drive as my boot drive. It’s zippy! Very, very, very fast. My big problem so far is I’ve been unable to get my wireless card going, and downloading anything, means booting into windows, and copying to a floppy disk…. a real drag.

But it is fast. Looks like I got a new toy to play with!

Also on th agenda is a boot loader. I tried just using the Windows one, but that wasn’t working for me, so perhaps I’ll just use grub on the alternate drive, to boot windows. If anyone has some good directions, or reading material on this topic, please shoot me an email, or leave a comment, I’d really appreciate it.

Other than that, all is good. It’s been a very busy week, so some geeky fun was in order.