the great software blog

In the category of “I’m not falling for that again,” I suggest we take 2010 off as a year of predictions. Your tech life will get smaller, smarter, and more mobile. But it will not necessarily be cheaper.

This past week I tested the installation times — including HD format — of three distros and Win7 among five machines. Those five machines included:  an i7-2.93 Quad-core desktop, a Core-2, 2.83 desktop, a Pentium-III desktop, a 2Gb netbook, and a 4Gb laptop. Here are the averaged results in minutes:

7:05 – openSUSE 11.2
7:40 – sidux [...]

mouser is producing 30 days of screencasts for his fantastic Screenshot Captor app, and he’s encouraging other developers to post their own screencasts.

I’m amazed at how many stories appear out of nowhere and land in major publications praising Microsoft’s press releases. The innumerable Bing stories alone are laughable in their content. They read very much like the typically hyped iPhone stories, and the themes read like press release talking points.
But love or hate Microsoft (I proudly hate [...]

If you’re using some of the flashier Linux distros like Mint or openSUSE and have also tested one or more Win7 builds to date, you feel sad for Microsoft users. Truly you do.
Note also that no Mac OS users are bragging about their Win7 impressions.
However, if you are a current vista or xp user, I’ll [...]

Their legal problems would have been fewer, and imagine the time they could have spent improving their OS versions compared to horking HTML standards, creating the infamous ActiveX, and stumbling through what is widely felt the worst browser ever. Just a ‘what if’ thought.

Virtually every PC magazine is a 160-page advertisement for Microsoft products. Why, when so many exciting things are going on elsewhere?
At most they will toss in one miserly, usually amateurish Linux article (Ubuntu). A good portion of each magazine is still devoted to troubleshooting Windows.
Incredible.

It’s called the QWERTY phenomenon. David Williams nails it again, this time in a column titled, Why doesn’t everyone just run Linux?
In one sense, the Redmond monopoly is self-perpetuating. The first reason Linux doesn’t have a stronger foothold in the market is because Windows is already there. For most people their first experience with a [...]

If I can make the switch from Windows to GNU/Linux, anyone can. I’m not a programmer, not an expert, nor do I have time to endlessly futz with my system. Based on my experience over the past year, these tips will smooth your transition from Win to Lin.
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(1) KEEP YOUR OLD WINDOWS MACHINE/PARTITION INTACT
You may [...]

Red Hat Linux and Microsoft servers just got a little more interoperable. Now is that so hard? Too bad the Novell deal wasn’t this clean.

Jack Wallen gives us ten good reasons why Linux in 2009 is better than Win7, and here’s #9:

Windows 7: OS X-like Doc, Multi-touch screen, mapping application similar to Google Earth, Hyper-Visor virtualization, location-aware apps, User Access Control improvements, Sidebar removal.
Fedora 11: 20-second boot time, btrfs file system, Better C++ support, Cups PolicyKit integration, DNS Security [...]

SJVN talks about the first dual Windows/Linux PCs at Dell. Just like their Ubuntu systems, they’re nearly impossible to find on the site; however, as vendors see that Linux can be put on netbooks and other systems, allowing the hardware vendor to pocket the extra profit that would normally go to Redmond for Windows’ license [...]

Those Wall Street guys must have graduated from Harvard or Yale, because they’re utter goddamn idiots, even with tech. John Paczkowski has not heard of FTP or Linux, it seems, whose various distros come with a desktop environment, such as KDE, Gnome, or Xfce, etc., and includes their own non-IE browser. Or, you could install [...]

TuxRadar compares the three and it’s glaring how much Vista sucks on comparison.
Only caveat? Win7 is beta, but the Ext4 filesystem is a screamer.