Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Ubuntu Linux is BIG! And, the company expects to be a profitable company doing free and Open Source Linux within two years!

Canonical seeks profit from free Ubuntu

“Canonical is the 65-employee start-up behind a popular version of Linux called ‘Ubuntu’. The company is betting that it can win a place in the market using a strategy that dominant Linux seller Red Hat has dropped. Red Hat offers two versions of Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora Core is free, but relatively untested and unsupported by Red Hat, while RHEL is supported and certified, but must be purchased. With Canonical’s Ubuntu, however, the free and supported versions are identical–the approach Red Hat abandoned in 2003. ‘We believe that Ubuntu should be free to everyone–not just a trial version, but our very best version,’ said Christopher Kenyon, Canonical’s business development manager. The South African company even ships free CDs anywhere in the world. Using that strategy, it expects profitability within 24 months, he added.

This is cool! What once was science fiction gets closer to reality every day!

Scientists teleport two different objects

“Beaming people in ‘Star Trek’ fashion is still in the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality. Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second. But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter. ‘It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium,’ Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday. The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.”

Website customers think they are cool. But there are a lot of technical reasons that splash pages are NOT a good idea (especially if you want to show up in web searches!)

How to Convince a Client They Don’t Need a Splash Page

The link above is to an article that explains the downsides of “splash pages” on a website. What do YOU think?

The new Crossover Office beta supports World of Warcraft. Now, let me say, I am not a gamer. But, from what I hear, this is huge! Mainly because this type of game is a “stream-based” game such as Half Life 2 and Counterstrike. These games are popular and hard to transfer to a Linux environment… and now Crossover will support them. Dewd.

Bigger, better CrossOver adds WoW to Linux

“CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White wants to make sure, though, that everyone understands that ‘this is still beta software, and there are many issues remaining; we still have a ways to go until we feel comfortable considering it ready for release. While we greatly appreciate feedback on this release, if you don’t like bleeding edge experimental software, we’d really rather you waited for a proper production version.'”

Try it and see what you think!

OK, I am a curmudgeon. It’s official. You would figure that that was a “moot point” since this is “Dr. Bill – The Computer Curmudgeon.” However, to seem “officially old” … “Yeah, sonny, I can remember waaay back when e-mail was cutting edge! We couldn’t get anyone to use it, and everybody thought I was crazy to promote it as a business tool! Why, back in that day I was known first as the ‘VAXman’, and then as ‘the Mailman’ because I pushed e-mail so hard. This was back in the late seventies and early eighties.” Well, now, kids are saying the e-mail is “so last century.”

Teens: E-mail is for old people

“Is e-mail only for the old? That’s the contention of a string of articles published in the last four months, the most recent appearing today in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle says that in a study last year, ‘teenagers preferred new technology, like instant messaging or text messaging, for talking to friends and use e-mail to communicate with ‘old people.’ The Mercury News says, ‘For those of you who have just figured out how to zap spam or manage your inbox, prepare for the bad news: E-mail is, like, so yesterday.’ And then there’s USA Today, which makes the claim that ‘E-mail is so last millennium.'”

Leo Laporte in his speech at the PODCAST Expo 2006 has suggested podcasters change the name of what they do from “PODCAST” to “NETCAST” in the belief this is a more accurate name than Podcasting.

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Sony batteries must really stink! Whoa!

Lenovo Recalls 560,000 Sony Batteries

“In conjunction with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, both IBM and Lenovo announced that they were calling for the voluntary recall of approximately 526,000 laptop batteries manufactured by Sony. Lenovo had announced earlier this week that it was investigating reports of issues with laptops containing batteries from the manufacturer. The two companies become the fourth and fifth computer makers behind Toshiba, Apple, and Dell to recall Sony batteries due to overheating problems. Altogether, nearly 6.8 million laptops have been affected, although in fairness Toshiba’s recall of 340,000 had to do more with a defect in the laptop manufacturing itself.”