Bob’s World

Ubuntu is getting a lot of good press - and it’s a terrific, easy-to-use Linux distro. With some extra software included in the default install - it could just take over the world.

Let’s face it - no one really “likes” Vista. I don’t care who says they love it - they really don’t. It’s the gas guzzler of operating systems - it takes the equivalent of a Hummer in terms of hardware to run the damn thing correctly.

The Mac OS is really great. It’s pretty, it plays nice with others, and is pretty fun to use. The problem (as demonstrated by Apple’s suit against Psystar) - is that you have to drink from the Ferrari-inspired Apple well and fork over huge bucks for their hardware (whether you want to or not).

Then there’s Linux. Fast. Stable. Free. Runs on damn near any hardware. The problem is - it’s only used by wonks.

It’s like getting one of those old Radio Shack do-it-yourself radio kits. You get a printed circuit board, some transistors, resistors, and other parts - and then you need to solder the stuff together and pray you read the directions right - or nothing works.

Granted - the novelty and pride of ownership of building an AM radio the size of a bread box from scratch is cool - but not when you can buy one the size of a USB stick for $10 - AND get a FREE FM tuner as well.

That’s basically the state of all the Linux distributions. Red Hat started to go down the “for everyone” route - and then decided it’s better (and easier) to sell “Enterprise” stuff to a bunch of wonks looking for job security rather than real people who just want to check email and surf the web.

The various distros of Linux - while good - are missing the one thing that makes it useful: applications humans use.

Guys - just bundle OpenOffice, Firefox (with bookmarks on where to find other Linux stuff), Acrobat Reader, Thunderbird with the Google Calendar extension, a media player, games, a notepad equivalent, anti-virus, screensavers, and most of all - some drivers (or a good clearning house site of where to find them) for peripherals.

Hey Ubuntu - you have Dell on your side - why is it you think people who buy Dells still don’t get Ubuntu on their machine by default? I mean, after all, the price is right. Right?

Right - but it doesn’t do any good to get something for free (or low cost) but have it be completely useless. When you get a new box (or install a new OS) - you expect to at LEAST be able to fire up email and surf the web.

And while you’re waiting for your favorite browser plug-ins to install - you want to play some games. And maybe play around with some spreadsheet stuff, read boring PowerPoint-esque presentations and the like.

Give people the power to become productive right out of the box. Help them get used to the retarded-sounding application names that no one has heard of. Make an online forum for new users to get help from other new users, etc.

I think as time goes on - and people are looking for alternatives to Windows (just wait until Windows 7!) - Linux will be able to be the great equalizer - if only people could use it.

OK, I admit I was ready to go the other way on this one. I almost wrote an entry on why Psystar should cry foul and lawyer up and fight Apple in both the press and public opinion arenas. It was a knee-jerk reaction to David vs. Goliath.

Then, I actually thought about it.

The sticky part is the End User License Agreement (EULA) that has a little phrase in it that is the basis for the Apple suit: “You agree not to install, use or run the Apple software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so,” Apple’s EULA reads (download PDF)

Hmmmmm. That’s interesting.

It’s really clear on what Apple’s intentions are - they moved to the Intel chip - and they just knew that someone like Psystar would pop up in the future - so they added some verbiage in there as a pure CYA move.

Yes, it is pretty chicken-sh*t - and it might not even be legal, but hey, it’s their intellectual property. They are the ones that did the R&D, made the pretty icons, and ported the mother over from a reliance on the PowerPC chip. They also spent a fair amount of dough doing so as well.

They make up that investment by selling Mac boxes (and iPhones!). If they didn’t challenge Psystar, then every schmo who could build a PC could start bundling their OS software (that they would also have to pay for just like Psystar) - and gosh… they might actually get some market share.

We wouldn’t want that!

People who buy a Mac buy a Mac because they love the industrial design, and the seamless way that the OS plays nice with EVERY Mac peripheral, and the nice, hermetically sealed, Apple-only experience.

PC users buy motherboards and power supplies and build their own box - and then are free to install Windows (which they must buy), Ubuntu (which they must download) or both to make a machine that meets their needs.

Who ever heard of a clause in an EULA that doesn’t allow people who buy a piece of software to install it on whatever hardware will run it? It’s like buying a car and having the manufacturer tell you what roads you can drive on.

Ridiculous.

Or is it? The EULA is a contract after all. It’s a contract between the maker of the software and the end user. Not all contracts are good ones, not all are “fair”, and not all favor the person making the purchase. Just because a contract sucks for one party - does it make it illegal?

Not necessarily. It will be interesting to see if Psystar can pull this one out of the crapper or not (I’m betting not). Apple is already in a potentially embarassing place - being exposed for the buy-only-our-stuff-or-you-can’t-use-our-stuff company it is.

Will people care? Will Psystar have the cash to lawyer up? Will the courts (if it even gets that far) buy Psystar’s argument that the clause is illegal?

Only  a whole lot of bucks to lawyers on both sides, and time will tell.

Seems the folks over at ICANN have decided that the “holy” top level domain (TLD) business is more about money than control. They’ve recently come up with the idea that along with the “blessed” TLD’s of .com, .net., .org, .biz that they would just open up the flood gates (for a price!) and let anyone with cash make up their ownTLD.

Talk about your wild west!

Basically their proposal is that rather than people just buying an existing TLD domain for the price of a latte, anyone with $100,000 (or more - final price TBD) - can just make up any TLD and basically “own” that extension.

Think about that. The obvious ones are .sex, .money, .bank, .tech, etc. - but that will have a huge impact on both the marketplace as well as the average consumer.

For example - what if Marriott scores the .hotel domain? Will they preclude Hilton and Sheraton from buying a domain name that ends in .hotel? How about all the speculators that in the early days of the bubble were buying up every single domain (and misspelled variant) that could potentially have any value. They’ll do the same for the otherTLDs as well.

What about companies with trademarks and intellectual property marks - they will now have to police dozens of TLDs for violations and go after them one by one.

Last but not least - what about the end users? Talk about confusion! Most people have a hard time trying to remember mybank.com. Now if you throw in all the other possible TLDs - it could be mybank.money, or mybank.bank, or mybank.cash, or mybank.cool, or mybank.weTreatYouRight, etc.

Now at least there’s only a few possible variations - with the default .com being the top-of-mind domain - even for organizations that are not companies. I mean, really,when’s the last time you visited a commerical company that ended in .net? How about .biz?

It says something about an organization if they don’t have a .com address. It says “We woke up too late on this whole ‘Internet Thing’ and could only get a crappy .net or .biz domain.”

However, with a proliferation of TLD’s - I think it will become even more valuable to have a .com (or .net or .biz) email - unless a few TLD’s raise to the top of customer awareness through advertising and marketing.

Even then, breaking the .com habit won’t go easily - and there is bound to be ample opportunity for good guys and bad guys alike to flourish in a free-for-all (well, a $100,000-for-all) type of unregulated (except by ability to pay) environment. The bad guys are already have a field day withphising sites and Trojans and stuff. It would be easy for them to create all kinds of domains on all kinds of TLD’s and then just keep them rotating all the time.

All-in-all, I just don’t see who wins with this type of arrangement.

Oh, wait, now I get it - ICANN.

Nah, nah, nah, nah! Told you so.

Once again, the in-store ONLY activation plan - the Steve Jobs my-way-or-the-highway method of activating the phone - has crashed and burned - exactly as I predicted yesterday.

The whole idea of in-store only activation was to prevent people from buying the phone, going home, hacking it, and then switching providers. Because, the thought went, if you did that - you would be locked in to the AT&T contract and at the minimum you would have to pay the difference between the subsidized price and the retail price as well as an early termination fee to AT&T.

Sounds great! Good idea!

If only it worked.

Almost immediately the activation servers at Apple went down due to such a huge surge in traffic from such a huge surge in demand for the new iPhone.

That, in turn, took down the other servers that were serving up the iPhone 2.0 update software for iPod Touch and iPhone 1.0 people trying to update to the new software.

THAT, in turn, took down the iTunes store.

Well, if you’re going to crash and burn - you might as well do it all the way!

Nothing like working for 6 months to hype a new product, build demand, build feverish anticipation and actually get people to stand in line to buy the thing - only to fail at the last 10 feet of service. Even in my suburbian town we have an AT&T store on the way to the office, so I thought I’d stop by (about 8:15am PST) to see what the reaction would be. I expected a handful of the faithful waiting in line.

There was about 175 people snaking a line all the way around the building. I didn’t even have the courage to go into the parking lot. Our office is right across the street from a mall that has an Apple Store in it. I didn’t even bother going to see how many people were there.

What a bummer it must be to be an IT hack over at Apple Corporate today! I can only imagine how many people are getting fired on the spot in a patented Steve Jobs tirade.

The good news is - they now get to work all weekend long (FREE pizza! FREE RedBull!)… and get the opportunity to be under the entire world’s microscope. I sure hope they brought a sleeping bag and a change of clothes…

Well, the iPhone 2.0 goes on sale tomorrow in the US - and if the response is anything as big as it was in London and Hong Kong - tomorrow is going to be a banner day for iPhone and AT&T.

Or not.

My prediction is that everything is going to go horribly wrong - and that servers will crash (like they did for the big Firefox download) - and that people will go home with a nice looking brick that they won’t be able to activate for a day or two.

But hey - I’m always Mr. Glass-Half-Full. It might work wonderfully well with happy iPhone people holding hands and singing “It’s a Small World After All” as they gleefully walk out of the stores with fully functioning and activated phones.

Regardless of whether they’re activated or not - there will be certain places where the Mac faithful will stand in line, and there will be the usual reviews and “unboxing” videos from people with nothing better to do made expressly for other people with nothing better to do.

The larger picture here is that Apple has managed to create such a huge demand for a here-to-fore commodity device - a cell phone - that people everywhere are talking about it, writing about it, standing in line for it, and have been waiting with bated breath just for the opportunity to spend money to buy one!

Brilliant!

The iPhone isn’t the best-equipped, or most feature-rich, or have the best camera, or have built-in turn-by-turn GPS, or even have copy/paste! But it does have a few things that other companies, try though they may, are not even close to:

• First move advantage
• Excellent industrial design
• Excellent GUI design
• Stuff that’s included just works
• Revenue model for sustained growth beyond just a kickback on airtime

I have to hand it to Apple - they seem to have a winner on their hands - a 2.0 sequel that about 100% better than the first revision - and they created it, marketed it, hyped it and delivered it about 370 days after the launch of the first one.

That’s remarkable for a company the size of Apple. My hat’s off to you guys.

We’ll see how the implementation goes tomorrow…

Well, the iPhone 2.0 goes on sale tomorrow in the US - and if the response is anything as big as it was in London and Hong Kong - tomorrow is going to be a banner day for iPhone and AT&T.

Or not.

My prediction is that everything is going to go horribly wrong - and that servers will crash (like they did for the big Firefox download) - and that people will go home with a nice looking brick that they won’t be able to activate for a day or two.

But hey - I’m always Mr. Glass-Half-Full. It might work wonderfully well with happy iPhone people holding hands and singing “It’s a Small World After All” as they gleefully walk out of the stores with fully functioning and activated phones.

Regardless of whether they’re activated or not - there will be certain places where the Mac faithful will stand in line, and there will be the usual reviews and “unboxing” videos from people with nothing better to do made expressly for other people with nothing better to do.

The larger picture here is that Apple has managed to create such a huge demand for a here-to-fore commodity device - a cell phone - that people everywhere are talking about it, writing about it, standing in line for it, and have been waiting with bated breath just for the opportunity to spend money to buy one!

Brilliant!

The iPhone isn’t the best-equipped, or most feature-rich, or have the best camera, or have built-in turn-by-turn GPS, or even have copy/paste! But it does have a few things that other companies, try though they may, are not even close to:

• First move advantage
• Excellent industrial design
• Excellent GUI design
• Stuff that’s included just works
• Revenue model for sustained growth beyond just a kickback on airtime

I have to hand it to Apple - they seem to have a winner on their hands - a 2.0 sequel that about 100% better than the first revision - and they created it, marketed it, hyped it and delivered it about 370 days after the launch of the first one.

That’s remarkable for a company the size of Apple. My hat’s off to you guys.

We’ll see how the implementation goes tomorrow…

Last night I watched the movie “Live Free or Die Hard” - the next sequel to the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” series. While I’m a fan of car-chase-action-all-the-way movies - this one had a couple of twists in it that got me thinking about the Mac vs. PC debate.

Twisted logic, I know - but bear with me.

Justin Long, better known as “I’m a Mac” in the Apple ads, is the co-protagonist along with Bruce Willis. Willis plays the part of - well - John McClane - the “I’m just a cop doing my job but I kick bad guy ass by accident” and Long plays the part of Matt Farrell - a twenty-something hacker.

The basic story goes like this: Farrell is wanted by the FBI because there’s been a FBI computer breach. John is assigned to bring him in. As it turns out - Farrell is one of a bunch of hackers who are wanted for questioning and who are being hunted by bad guy Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant).

Gabriel and his crew plan to shut down the US infrastructure and grab a bunch of money in the process - over the 4th of July weekend. I won’t bore you with the details - but if you get a chance to check it out for yourself - it’s a pretty good flick. But that’s not the point of this post.

As I was watching this movie - I kept seeing the Farrell hacker character as a Mac. Really. It was weird.

All his actions; his speech; what he did and didn’t do; his attitudes - I filtered through the “I’m a Mac” persona.

And as I got more and more into the movie - Farrell in many ways DID play the same role in the movie as the Mac does in the marketplace. He even LOOKS like the guy from the Mac ads - same scruffy beard, dressed the same way - everything.

Long played an underdog - who just escaped death by the skin-of-his-teeth - and confronts his own feelings of inadequacy and fear and realizes that he CAN take on big challenges even in the face of a foe who is superior in terms of manpower, resources and technical prowess.

Long also uses his brain (and some really old Palm Pilot and a Nokia E90 Communicator) to partially thwart the enemy. He’s not worth a crap in the fighting department (he even gets bitch-slapped by Mai Linh [Maggie Q]) - but what he lacks in brawn he makes up for by just sticking to his guns and continuing down the path with a single goal in mind: save the world (or at least the US).

Here’s to the little Mac that “could” - hopefully someday Apple will get a Bruce Willis to help it take a man pill and kick some marketplace ass as well.

I’ve been using Firefox since version 1.0 - and, in general, I like it a lot over by old default browser - Internet Exploder. Version 2.x was cooll - although a bit heavy on the memory usage and it could be a bit sluggish at times. All-in-all - pretty good.

Then I “upgraded” to Firefox 3. At first blush, the rendering is fine, the speed is a bit better than 2.x, the UI has some improvements that are nice - but the BEST feature is the new automated crash-and-burn feature.

This terrific new addition is really fun and was probably added to shake up the web surfer’s day and remind them that they should take daily (or twice-daily) breaks and interact with other humans.

At least Firefox saves your session information. If not for this truly great feature - I would have chucked my laptop through the wall by now. Firefox just seems to crash now - for no apparent reason. Click a tab once - OK. Click a tab twice - bye bye. Open a file once - OK. Open a different file - OK. Open a new link in a tab - BOOM.

I admit I’m a tab-aholic and have 10-20 tabs open at a time - but, hey, I did in Firefox 2.x as well. My browsing habbits haven’t changed - the only thing that has is my browser.

So, I had a BRILLIANT idea - I’ll just start using Safari. So that’s what I’ve been doing over the past week.

Or at least tried to do.

Once you get over the sort of Mac-like goofy UI renderings of buttons and the glow around the active entry field and the terrible fonts for the menus and the horrible too-dark “metal” header - it’s actually not a bad browser.

One thing I will say for sure - it’s the absolute FASTEST browser I’ve ever used. The speed is almost embarassing. Sites pop up really fast - and even with zero browsing history and zero cached graphics - this thing cooks. It does take a little longer to load a new (never visited site) - but once it loads - it seems to have cached everything in the site.

So I thought to myself - YEAH! OK, a new browser, I can do this. I started to move a few bookmarks over - and entered some passwords to some of my many username-required sites - and that’s when I started missing some of the features that I take for granted in Firefox.

Like: password protection for auto-entering user information on sites.

The next one was the deal breaker: I shut down my laptop (with the browser running) - and just expected that the next time I launched - it would just restore itself. I had maybe 10 tabs open. Nope.

I mean, it’s not the end of the world or anything - but I’ve gotten so used to be able to just restore my last session (I often keep tabs open for days until I read the story, finish my research on a topic, etc) - that not being able to do that became a real pain.

Plus, the rendering and the fonts used - while readable and well-rendered - were just not… ummm… “normal.” Sites viewed in IE, Firefox, and Opera looked, well… a little Mac-ed up. It’s nothing that I’m sure I couldn’t get used to in time - but old habits die hard.

And so do cookies. And passwords. And browsing history.

When all was said-and-done - I really wanted to use Safari as my primary browser - but I just couldn’t.

Now I’m back to Firefox 3 - and I have convinced myself that those “daily reminders” (or more) are actually a benefit. They remind me to get up and take a pee…