Windows 7 Pricing

Gizmodo has the details on Windows 7 pricing (gleaned from the Windows Blog), and it appears far far far FAR better than I expected.  If you recall, I cynically expected upgrades to cost about $50 more than they cost now.  But I was wrong.  If you act quickly, you might be able to get Windows 7 Home Premium for as little as $50 as an upgrade.  (If you don’t act quickly, it will cost you $120).  There’s no discount on an early order of Windows 7 Ultimate, though, and I don’t think there are any details on what will be crippled from Ultimate yet.

Pardus 2008.2 Part 2

As I discussed in my last post, just getting to the point where I had actually booted into a working Linux environment seemed a rather difficult task.  But, nontheless, there it was, Kaptan asking me for information.

Kaptan is Pardus’s welcome screen, and it allows you to select the way your mouse (or trackpad) will work, the desktop theme, the way menus will work, and other initial settings.  It’s slick, and seemed to work with no problem.

The other thing you’ll notice with Pardus is that it uses the KDE environment (the official release says KDE 3 is installed by default), which some people don’t like.  I am somewhat ambivalent.  It definitely looks similar to XP (and you can make it act like Vista), but it also appears to be more extensible than either.  What I like about it is that the network icon on the bottom right-hand side is right there to click on, and I was able to set up my wireless network by entering in the WEP key.  And it worked.  “Out of the box.”  Fantastic!  Now, that’s why I chose Pardus in the first place, because I had read somewhere that it may be one of the only distros that plays well with my particular card.  And true to form, it worked perfectly.

So I launched Firefox, and the next thing I knew I was able to bring up pages.  What a nice thing to be able to do.  Flash was also preinstalled, because pages with Flash objects were not presenting any problems.  Now, certain things about Firefox for Linux bother me a little.  For example, I’m used to being able to click on the address bar once and have the whole address get highlighted.  That doesn’t happen for me.  Also, double-clicking on just part of a URL doesn’t segregate just that part of the URL.  (e.g., if I double-clicked on cmchoatelaw in the URL above, I’m used to it highlighting just cmchoatelaw, so that I can replace it with www instead if I need to log in to WordPress.)  But these are minor complaints.

Other things that are nice about Pardus:

Frozen Bubble game, which is ridiculously addictive; GIMP; codecs; Karamba Themes; Amarok; TASMA; PiSi (though it is bereft of certain things); Turkish support; it’s built from the ground up (i.e., not based on another distro); OpenOffice.org; and a bunch of other stuff.

What’s not so great?  OpenOffice.org.  This is because it isn’t the most recent version (3.1) but rather is v2.4.  Not the biggest deal-breaker but it would be nice to have the most recent version of the suite.  It’s common knowledge that installing software on Linux is a lot easier when you’re using a package manager, and PiSi does a good job of doing that with the software in its repository.  The problem is that OOo3.1 isn’t in the repository, near as I can tell.  There’s a PiSi link out that apparently you can use, but from what I’ve seen it’s somewhat crippled.  And trying to install OOo3.1 without a package manager has proved to be a nightmare, with it not recognizing that I actually DO have a directory called usr/java on my system.  But whatever.  It’s an irritation, but it was free, you know?

And I apparently only need to wait a few more weeks for Pardus 2009 to come out, which apparently has these improvements:

Latest stable release of KDE family version 4.2.4 is available with enhancements for Pardus. Pardus 2009 Beta comes with many new features of base tools PiSi and COMAR, the installation program YALI, Pardus manager family and KAPTAN. The new version contains up to date packages like KDE 4.2.4, Linux kernel 2.6.30_rc8, OpenOffice.Org 3.1.0.6, Mozilla Firefox 3.5 RC1, Gimp 2.6.6, Xorg 1.6.2pre, Python 2.6.2 and many more in just one CD. (From the main Pardus site)

Pardus also has the benefit of feeling swifter than XP; I get less hiccups with it than I was having with XP, but to be fair, I have far fewer things installed at this moment.  We’ll have to see if that makes a difference as I play with it some more.  One thing I know for certain, though, is that I feel like I could use Pardus every day if I wanted, and I think that’s saying an awful lot.

Pardus 2008.2 Part 1

I’ve been playing with a great Linux distro I hadn’t heard of until this past weekend.  It’s called Pardus, and it’s really very nice.  Before I get into discussing why it’s nice, I think I’ll talk a little bit about why I’m using Pardus instead of some of the more mainstream distros, notably Ubuntu.

Due to some extenuating circumstances, I’ve been using my laptop more than I would generally like.  It’s an HP Pavilion dv5020, with a Turion 64 processor (single-core) and only a Gig of memory, which is shared with the ATI Xpress 200M video card.  It wasn’t such a bad purchase 3 years ago, but these days, even with a recent reinstall of Windows XP, it was a sludgy experience, especially compared to my desktop setup, which has a triple-core AMD chip, 4 Gigs of RAM, and a dedicated video card.  The desktop runs Vista with no problems, and I generally like that OS.  But, like I said, XP was running pretty cludgy, so why not see if I can partition my drive, slap a Linux distro on there, and see if I get some performance benefits?

Now, I’ve played with Linux distros before, and as I mentioned the last time I did this, the experience was less than adequate, mainly because dual-monitor support was disappointingly terrible on the distros I used, and because somehow I lost printer drivers on the XP side.  So I went into this new experiment with only a couple of goals:

1. I would not be trying to hook up external monitors to my laptop;
2. I would not be trying to make the laptop my main computer;
3. Wireless support would need to be present “out of the box”;
4. If possible, I didn’t want to have to burn a live CD because my disc burner is hit or miss in terms of reliability; and
5. I didn’t want to use Wubi because I wanted the distro to live in its own partition.

So, taking the last two goals first, I sought out and found a program called Unetbootin, which promises to make it easy to start a “frugal install” from within Windows.  In theory it is a great program, allowing you to select a series of predetermined distros (you can add your own .iso that you’ve downloaded already instead), click a few buttons in Windows, reboot your computer, select the installation function, and away you go.  Unetbootin also allows you to create a USB stick from which you can install the distro, but as my laptop doesn’t allow me to boot to USB, and the bios update didn’t cover that functionality, that wasn’t an option I could try.

Anyway, that was the theory.  I had downloaded Pardus for this purpose, but as it went into the installation process, it kept looking for a CD-ROM drive to install off of, and thus kept failing.  I then tried a number of other distros, almost all of which failed without even going into the live environment.  The only one that didn’t fail right off the back was Linux Mint 6 (which is not where Mint is at this point; they’ve moved on the 7 by now).  But it failed in the end, because it booted into the live environment, which has limited functionality.  The nice thing about live CDs is that they let you play around before committing, and then they give you the option of installing the distro right there on the desktop.  Couldn’t be easier, generally speaking.  Mint looked promising, and as it had been the only one I tried that had actually made it into a live environment, I tried to install it.

No dice.  It, too, ended up looking for a CD-ROM, and failed. Now, I wasn’t the only one having problems with this method of easily installing distros in this manner, but, as this thread demonstrates, getting answers on how to fix this problem, without doing a network install, doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s cards.

Fine, I thought, let’s try Wubi.  I had read somewhere that it was possible to move Wubi from the loop-back file into its own dedicated partition.  (Turns out, the thing I had read somewhere is actually provided by the developer of Unetbootin.)  Now, Wubi is pretty snazzy, and it does a very nice job of letting people play around with Ubuntu without the hassle of partitioning your hard drive.  And if you don’t like it, deleting it is as easy as going to the control panel.  Nice.  However, there are a few problems with it: it’s a squidge slower than if it was on its own dedicated install, you can’t hibernate, and it’s susceptible to power issues.  And it’s Ubuntu, which–I’m really sorry–I just don’t like.  I think it’s ugly.  I know it can be dealt with, but…

Anyway, I installed Ubuntu 9.04 through Wubi, and it couldn’t have been easier to get it up and running.  But here’s the rub: wireless support wasn’t there. I have a Broadcom 4318 card in my laptop, which is found in a huge number of laptops.  One would suspect that such ubiquity would lead to familiarity and thus driver support.  But as Broadcom appears to not be very friendly with the open source folks (though that may be changing) built-in support isn’t there in Ubuntu.  I guess the thing is that you have to tunnel into the firmware or something.  I don’t know; it’s a little over my knowledge level at this point.  Now, there have been all sorts of developments that make it pretty easy to get Broadcom to work properly if you also have a wired network to use as a backup while you do what’s necessary to make it work.  At the moment, however, a wire is a little hard to come by, but I am also of the opinion that wireless should not be a multi-step process.

So I ditched Ubuntu, dug out a blank CD, and burned the Pardus .iso to disc, hoping that the drive wouldn’t go belly up in the process.  Ten minutes later I had a shiny distro in my hands. I rebooted, installed, fuddled with some settings to make it install to the location I wanted, and crossed my fingers.  Half an hour later, the orange screen came up with the login prompt.  I entered my password, it churned away for about a minute, and up came Pardus’s setup manager, Kaptan, and the next thing you know, I’ve got a working Linux distro.

My next post will discuss my experience with Pardus 2008.2

The Freeconomy Malaise

At the beginning of this month, I mentioned some of the open-source leeching going on, along with mentioning Wired’s article, “Free.”  Well, “Free” is back in the news again, and not so much in the way that it probably wants to be.

Gawker.com is all over recent reports that Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, contains a number of straight lifts right out of Wikipedia.  Putting aside for the moment the propriety of using Wikipedia as definitive proof of anything, the problems with doing so I’ve mentioned before, it’s of course ironic that there’s a lot of hullabaloo surrounding using free content in a book about the economics of free.  It probably bears mentioning, that Wikipedia, like many organizations, such as Gawker media, publishes under the CCL which means that contributors allow their work to be freely used, so long as the use is attributed and that the derivative work is then allowed to be freely used:  “To grow the commons of free knowledge and free culture, all users contributing to Wikimedia projects are required to grant broad permissions to the general public to re-distribute and re-use their contributions freely, as long as the use is attributed and the same freedom to re-use and re-distribute applies to any derivative works.”  (Source)  For Mr. Anderson, the issue appears to be whether there was proper attribution of the material allegedly lifted, and as a logical extension, whether he would then allow the use of the material he used in a free manner.  It’s a fascinating dilemma in many ways.  To me, anyway.

Perhaps the biggest reason why I find myself so fascinated by the whole thing is that I recently read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, published in 1992 (yeah, I know Amazon is saying 2000, but that’s just for the edition to which I linked), and it was incredibly prescient in almost all respects (okay, so we don’t have rat-things …. yet, or burbclaves …. yet) except for one area.  In Snow Crash, people pay–sometimes, a lot–for information.  I also recently listened to the book-on-CD of Douglas Adams’ quasi-posthumous work, The Salmon of Doubt.  One of Mr. Adams’ suppositions as he was writing at the end of the 90s was that individuals would be willing to make micropayments for content.  That is clearly not the case today. Somebody pays for the information, but it seems rarely to be the end-user.  At least in the dead-tree media days, subscribers would defray some of the cost of publication, but these days the cost is almost exclusively placed on advertisers and content-generators willing to receive little to no compensation for their work, all in the name of trying to get noticed in some form or fashion.  Gawker, to its credit I think, has pointed out the way this can be problematic.  (This is not to say that Gawker Media, as shown by Gizmodo’s call-for-intern, is paying its interns splendiferous salaries.)

As we move along in this terrible economy, it really does make me wonder what the end game will be.

Oh, and to satisfy the FTC, links to Snow Crash and The Salmon of Doubt, are not made as part of Amazon’s affiliate program.  And if you don’t like Amazon, here are links to B&N.com’s site for the respective works:  Snow Crash; The Salmon of Doubt (MP3 download).  I am not part of an affiliate program with B&N, either.

FTC, Bloggers, and Compensation

Change must be coming soon, or else the AP wouldn’t have felt compelled to write up a story about proposed “FTC Plans to Montior Blogs for Claims, Payments.”  (I say “change must be coming soon” because the proposed guidelines (PDF) linked to by the AP are from November and the public comments period has expired, so there is ostensibly something brewing.)

Anyway, as I don’t want to diminish the AP’s timeliness and all that, let’s take a look at what some of the proposed guidelines would do to the average blogger or tweeter.

First, “the only relevant criterion in determining whether a statement is an endorsement is whether consumers believe it reflects the endorser’s views.”  In other words, “it does not matter whether the statements made by an endorser are identical to or different than those made by the sponsoring advertiser.”  (Page 12)

Second, and this is where we begin to see some teeth, is that “advertisers are subject to liability for false or unsubstantiated statements made through endorsements, or for failing to disclose material connections between themselves and their endorsers. [Furthermore] endorsers may also be subject to liability for their statements.” (Page 13)  (It should be noted that the proposed guidelines acknowledge that there are parties out there that would like to see private causes of action made out of these principles, but the FTC states that “the Guides merely provide insight into how the Commission interprets existing laws, and do not, in and of themselves, create substantive law.” (Page 10 n.12)  The statements leading to liability, the proposal goes on to say, may be express or implied.

Third, the FTC is proposing a new list of principles which are not currently found in the Guides.  These principles are:

1. “[A]n advertisement employing endorsements by one or more consumers about the performance of an advertised product or service will be interpreted as a representation that the product or service is effective for the purpose represented in the endorsement. Consumer endorsements convey not only that the advertised product or service worked for the consumers depicted in the advertisement, but also that it will work for others.” (Page 14)
2. “[A]n advertiser who uses consumer endorsements must possess and rely upon adequate substantiation to support efficacy claims made through endorsements, just as the advertiser would be required to do if it had made the representation directly.”  Furthermore, anecdotal consumer endorsements in and of themselves are not sufficient “to substantiate claims requiring scientific evidence.” (Page 15)
3. “[A]n advertisement employing an endorsement reflecting the experience of an individual or a group of consumers on a central or key attribute of the product or service will likely be interpreted as representing that the
   endorser’s experience is representative of what consumers will generally achieve with the advertised product in actual, albeit variable, conditions of use.” (Page 17)
4. “[D]isclaimers regarding the limited applicability of an endorser’s experience to what consumers may generally expect to achieve are unlikely to be  effective, and therefore that the Guides’ current safe harbor for such disclaimers should be eliminated.”  (This refers to those little blurbs seen most often in weight-loss ads that say “Results not Typical.”)  Thus, “the advertiser
   should clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected performance in the depicted circumstances.” (Pages 18 – 49)

Third, there are also proposed clarifications to use of “expert” endorsers, such as doctors, testing organizations, and hospitals.  “[A]n expert endorser must possess the level of expertise that the ad implies he or she has.”  (Page 54)  For example, a doctor endorser of a hearing aid should probably be a doctor of audiology, not exercise physiology.  Also, if an endorser claims to be a bona fide independent testing organization, but it really isn’t, “the endorsement would be deceptive.” (Page 55)  In addition, the reason a hospital might endorse a particular non-prescription drug over another may not have anything to do with the drug’s efficacy; this may be deceptive.  (Page 55)

It’s worth taking a look at the entirety of the proposed guidelines because there are a lot of examples which clarify things a little.

It also bears mentioning, as I have noted in previous posts and have recently placed in my disclaimer, that I receive no compensation from anybody when I discuss products or services.  If that ever changes, I’ll note it.

FCC, Exclusivity, and Broadband

The acting chairman of the FCC, Michael J. Copps, recently addressed a crowd at Pike & Fischer’s Broadband Policy Summit V, and what he discussed is pretty interesting.  For one thing, what PC Magazine gleaned from the talk is that the FCC is investigating whether cell phone exclusivity deals, such as the one AT&T has with the iPhone and Verizon has with the Blackberry Storm, harm consumers.

This is the extent of Mr. Copps statements on that subject:

The second “other telecom issue” I want to touch upon, and which is much in the news recently, is exclusive arrangements between wireless carriers and handset manufacturers. In the fast-changing wireless handset market, too, we must ensure that consumers are able to reap the benefits that a robust and innovative competitive marketplace can bestow. I appreciate the concerns that have been expressed on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, and I agree that we should open a proceeding to closely examine wireless handset exclusivity arrangements that have reportedly become more revalent (sic) in recent years, and I have instructed the Bureau to begin crafting such an item. The Commission as the expert agency should determine whether some of these arrangements adversely restrict consumer choice or harm the development of innovative devices, and it should take appropriate action if it finds harm.

(Source (PDF))

As that snippet accounted for only one paragraph in a seven page speech, what else did he touch on?  Well, for one, he wants to increase broadband access across the country.  “Are we really responding to national need when what passes for broadband in too many areas—I’d say most—puts our citizens and entrepreneurs at serious disadvantage compared to their competitors in London, Paris, Tokyo or Seoul who enjoy broadband speeds at multiples of what is available here and at half the cost?”  Good point, as Gizmodo recently noted that the USA is number 20 on the list of broadband penetration.  And as you can see if you go play with speedtest.net, South Korea has some seriously fast pipes, pushing data through at roughly 20 Mbps.

Okay, so we’re laggards, but we knew that already.  What else did Mr. Copps talk about?  Well, he reiterated that the deadline on the Notice of Inquiry is July 7, 2009.  The FCC has received 500 comments, totalling 8,000 pages.

He also said that citizens need to be priority numero uno with regards to all the changes that are planned, but I’ll believe that when I see it.  The words are nice, such as “consumer-oriented” and “consumer-responsive,” but unless the telecoms are really reined in, it really will just be business as usual.

So, somewhat interesting things percolating at the FCC, and we’ll just have to see what comes out of it.

Windows 7 in Five Months

Ars Technica tells me that Windows 7 will be going on sale on October 22, 2009.  There’s no news of pricing yet, though.  My thinking is that it will be $50-$100 more per version than Vista is right now.  We’ll see.

Anyway, I haven’t used Windows 7 in a couple of weeks.  I mentioned that I had been playing with the release candidate and the first evening was very successful, apart from Netflix’s problems.  Well, the second day, things started getting all crashy, at least when I used IE8.  Not wanting to have a general system meltdown, I deleted it from the partition I had created, and went back to using Vista, getting my HDMI sound back in the process.  In retrospect, however, I don’t know if it was 7 that was causing the problems, or if it was IE8.

Hiring Practices and Antitrust Concerns

It may not be as sexy as hearing that corporations have colluded with eachother to keep prices high (say in the TFT or DRAM markets), but I see in the NY Times this morning that the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice has quietly opened an antitrust investigation into tech companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Apple, and others.  According to the Times, the direction of the inquiry is unclear, but seems to be focused on “whether the companies involved agreed to not actively recruit employees from each other.”  See?  Not very sexy.  The Washington Post apparently was the first one to mention the investigation.

Open Source Malaise

InfoWorld’s Bill Snyder has a very interesting article about open source “leeching,” and the apparent beginnings of some grumbling in the bleeding-edge world.  I say it’s interesting because of what I perceive to be major fissures in our new freeconomy.  (I didn’t make up the term; it’s been applied to a lot of things…)  In February of last year, before the economy went legs-up, Wired had a cover article called “Free!  Why $0.00 is the Future of Business.”  That didn’t seem like a really cool idea to me at the time, and I still feel that way.  This is because, at some point, I think people want to be rewarded for their information or innovation.

But that doesn’t seem to be the prevailing ethos among certain tech blogs.  Take Gizmodo, for example, which called Psion, who had apparently challenged Intel on the use of mark “netbook” because Psion had registered it with the USPTO long ago, “dickish.”  (Ars Technica has a more even-handed analysis of the litigation. (Ars’ search function is broken right now, so this is the Yahoo! approximation.))  The upshot is pretty clear: free is awesome, and IP is bad.  But how long is that sustainable? (And it bears mentioning that Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo, publishes under a Creative Commons License, but it has registered the names of its sites with the USPTO, and even the CCL has restrictions on how its work can be used.)

I think the economics of free are going to be challenging our society for a while, and I can’t end this post without acknowledging the fact that I’m writing this blog on a free wi-fi connection, using a free blog service (WordPress), giving away information for free, and making use of information that I was able to access for free.

Bing!

I’m not entirely sure I like the name of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing.  Actually, I’m pretty sure I don’t.  But, whatever, it’s new and shiny, and everyone’s playing with it.

My first impression is that it’s fine, generally no worse than Yahoo!, but probably not quite as “accurate” as Google.  (For what it’s worth, I’m beginning to feel that Google’s accuracy is leaving a lot to be desired.)

However, there’s one thing that I think really needs a little tweaking.  The interface is really pretty, with lots of pictures and interactive features (which makes it all the more impressive that it loads so quickly), but the froufrou aspects do have the potential to get in the way of the stated function, which is searching.  For example, using Firefox, if you go to bing.com, and just click on Images, you get a list of things that are similar to the background image.  All well and good.  But say you don’t want your results filtered, so you click on the safe search moderate “change” link, and this is what you get:

It seems to work properly, however, in IE7:

Will Bing become my search engine of choice?  I doubt it, but not because of its functionality.  Indeed, I very strongly want there to be search competition against Google, because of what that monolith has done to the advertising market.  No, I’ll be sticking with Yahoo! for my searches because I have been feeling ill at ease about using Google so much, what with their data retention policies.  According to this Lifehacker post, it looks like Yahoo! is the clear winner, retaining data for only 90 days, while Google holds on to it for 9 months, and Microsoft holds on to it for 18 months(!!).  (I should note, that the 18 months figure comes from MS’s statements vis-a-vis Live.com, which Bing replaces.  I doubt that MS will change that policy just because they’re launching a rebranded search engine.)