Recently in Brian Proffitt: Hoosier Penguin Category
This isn't usually through inability to do something; it's usually a matter of not seeing the need for it. So it is with Compiz--I realize that I'm very late to the party, but I finally got around to installing it this week on my Kubuntu machine.
First impression? Very pretty, but what the heck do I use it for?
Intel, with their new Atom processor, is leading the MID charge, encouraging OEMs like "Lenovo, Toshiba, Panasonic, and LG Electronics" to get their own MIDs to market using Atom and Linux.
Which Linux is always the question, of course. Today over in Taiwan, Canonical used the Computex event as the stage to announce its Ubuntu Netbook Remix, an OEM-targeted flavor of Ubuntu Mobile Edition that's pretty much ready to go for any MID that wants it.
There's some disagreement in the community on just who that target audience is. The big commercial vendors like to hit the "low-hanging fruit": the few but massive enterprise players in the world who stand to gain from Linux use and--let's face it--generate the most revenue dollars. On the other end of the spectrum, there's the call for the ubiquitous "Desktop"--the be-all, end-all interface that everyone, including our grandmothers, can use instead of the hated Windows products.
Somehow, one would think, there should be a compromise between these two extremes.
I'm having that feeling right now, and it may not bode well for Linux.
One media outlet after another propagated the story theme: "Red Hat drops plans for consumer desktop development" Of course by the second or third wave this story, like the game of Telephone, has morphed into: "Red Hat Abandons Desktop! Aieee!" Which industry pundits immediately jumped on and used as "proof" for their long-waning arguments: "See? Even Red Hat sez that Linux on the desktop is no work-y. Told ya so!"
Curiously, very little attention was paid to Ron Hovespian's comments on Novell's similar plans, made before Red Hat's. If I were Novell, I would take this as a bad sign. Not only did the mainstream media not pick up on Novell's news, but even most of the hard-line Linux blogosphere wrote them off with nary so much as a "meh" And if you can't get those folks mad, you must be doing something wrong! :)
It's a brief entry, fairly matter of fact. Too bad I could hardly understand a word of it. Neither could my friend. It was one of those things you know is significant, if only you could grasp the meaning.
A couple of e-mails later to settle on a time, and I was on the phone to Qumranet, where Kivity works, in Israel so I could find out what the heck he was talking about.
From a Linux advocacy standpoint, it's a strong sense of Schadenfreude that prevails as I watch a usually nascent Windows community struggle to awaken itself fast enough to try to get something they want from Redmond. Good luck with that, guys.
In the quest to get as much content to the mobile end user as is humanly possible, much of the content delivery to IP-enabled devices and cell phones is being handled by the large telecommunications providers themselves.
So, AT&T customers will see their content from AT&T; T-Mobile customers get their stuff from T-Mobile; and so on. This is not just in the US, as other nation's providers--such as MTN in South Africa and China Mobile in China--are the primary content deliverers to consumers using their hardware and networks.
It's not about the telcomm providers being selfish or greedy, necessarily. A big reason why it's just the big boys playing in this space is because it's hard for smaller companies to get over the entry threshold to deliver apps to umpteen million customers. It's expensive and the R&D can be enormous, since the app developer has to figure out how to deliver their app effectively to all of the various devices any given network might have.
Yes, Office Open XML is now (almost) a standard. Open source users are upset, which seems a natural course of events. Heck, I am too.
But I also wonder if the preliminary approval of OOXML as an ISO standard might not be the biggest gift to Linux and Open Software... ever.
It seems that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program's XO laptop is just popping up all over lately. Twice in as many weeks, mention of the green and white laptop has appeared in the most unusual places.