[Original Link] The thrust of this article, despite the title, is that Linux is causing more problems for traditional Unix vendors at present than for Microsoft. Interestingly, however, the largest Unix vendor is now Apple, and is perhaps the only one winning converts from Linux.
[Original Link] Victor Keegan’s article compares music to water. Eh? Have a read… (Thanks to JenWeb for the link)
A year ago I wrote about Tom Stewart’s old Fortune article “Friends don’t let their friends use PowerPoint” (now on the Business 2.0 site). John Naughton’s recent column has brought to light several other good commentaries on the phenomenon. In particular Julia Keller’s piece from the Chicago Tribune is highly recommended.
If I had to take away one thought form LinuxWorld this time, a common theme which occurred in several talks I attended, it would be this: Open Source software gives you back control over your business decisions.
With proprietary software, it is often somebody else who tells you when you need to upgrade your hardware, when you need to switch operating systems, when you must re-train your staff. If you have a network now which runs very happily on Windows 3.1, or NT 3.51, or even NT 4, you will not be able to keep it that way for long. What about Office 95? Try buying extra new licenses for these systems. Try getting support for software that runs on them.
With Linux & Open Source, you have no need to upgrade until you want to. If you have a very old system and the original suppliers won’t support it for you, you can maintain it yourself or pay somebody else to do so. The point is that the choice is yours.
If you’re at all like me, you move regularly between mutiple different networks: home, office, dialup, wifi hotspots, hotels, and, just now, any of the 15 or so wifi links I can see on the exhibition floor at LinuxWorld. For web browsing and reading mail this is normally fine, but when it comes to sending mail you often have to switch SMTP servers for each network you connect to. (This is because most ISPs only provide SMTP to machines on their network, as a spam-reduction measure. Move to another service provider and your home SMTP server probably won’t want to talk to you.)
There are ways around this. If you’re lucky enough to have an email server that supports authentication it’ll probably let you connect from anywhere, but not many do, and not all email clients support it.
I’ve found a solution which works well for me. If you have a machine somewhere that you can connect to using SSH, you can arrange to forward a port on your local machine over that link to whatever SMTP server that remote machine uses. Then you just tell your mail client to use ‘localhost’ as the SMTP server, regardless of which network you’re on. If you’re not familiar with SSH the details are a little tricky to describe here – email me for more info – but on OS X I’ve found a neat little app called SSHTunnelManager which makes it trivial to make and break the link.
[Original Link] This is quite a good idea for a service. You register your past and present email addresses with them, and then when anybody goes to the site and types in one of your old addresses, you get notified and can choose whether or not they are given your new one. If it reaches a critical mass it will be very helpful, provided, of course, that they remain squeaky clean and are seen to be trustworthy.
[Original Link] A highly abridged version of this article appeared in the IEE Review, Jan 2003. Unfortunately, as a result of the editorial process, significant typos and non-sequiturs were introduced, to the extent that I do not really wish to be associated with the published result. The original, however, makes much more sense and can be downloaded as a PDF here.
[Original Link] Bad news, this. A triumph of legal confusion and commercial influence over common sense.
[Original Link] I’ve been thinking about getting a TiVo for some time. This might push me over the edge.
[Original Link] Let’s hope it won’t have the Windows 95/98 bug that stops your machine after 6 weeks. Or the one which causes your date to leap forward or back a couple of days. Or the one which changes your time when you didn’t mean to. Or…
Having just returned home after a month away, I’m reading all my mail. You know, the old-fashioned sort that doesn’t follow you around the globe. One letter is a cheery note from my insurance company telling me that my home and contents aren’t insured against the consequences of (a) war, or (b) terrorism. This doesn’t bother me nearly so much as the fact that they felt the need to write and tell me….
[Original Link] Just discovered I have my name on
U.S. Design Patent D463,389. After two and a half years I had forgotten it was even in progress. Not sure what good it is; it’s sort of like a regular patent without the claims… 🙂 And prettier pictures of the Broadband Phone can be found here.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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