Tech Blog (18)
I've been harping on how I predicted that traditional desktop (Windows dominance) would shrink while mobile marketshare (Linux dominance) would go up and that this is important for us to know so we can focus our education better.
So far this has been me watching the industry and doing a little hocus pocus foretelling of the future based on a lot of data in a lot of areas. Now other analysts are putting the real numbers down. Businessinsider wrote an article about Apple being impacted by Android but there's an interesting graphic in the middle. As you see over the years the Windows/Intel monopoly has had the mass majority marketshare for quite some time but look what it's done in the last couple of years - halved. Also look at the amount Android has made in the exact same time.
At this rate Android may be the majority OS in a couple of years. I don't know if I like that or not since I'm not really an Android fan but it shows that Linux is making massive progress in marketshare because the MARKET is changing. This year will be an interesting one as more mobile Operating Systems enter the fray. With Samsung (who makes 25% of all smartphones) is investing heavily in Tizen, Firefox releases Firefox Mobile, Ubuntu releases Ubuntu Mobile and Jolla brings out SailfishOS (outgrowth of Nokia's Meego) it will be an interesting year. All of these operating systems are Linux. If Android loses marketshare it will be to other versions of Linux.
You might say I have a long distro history so I'll add my 1.7 cents (it was 2 cents before the recession).
- Both had very easy to use but powerful administration tools.
- Wonderful menu structure
- Looked good
- Excellent hardware discovery. It could load the drivers for your blender if you could plug it in.
- Package management from the Gods when mortal man was painting on cave walls.
- unstable repositories. Software was constantly broken.
- Tons of software packages
- Gnome2 became usable for bipedal primates with large frontal lobes.
- Install process so easy a baby stuck in a mineshaft could do it.
- Everything just works and when it stops shaking a rubber chicken seems to help. If it doesn't work on Ubuntu it probably doesn't work on anything that runs Linux including orbiting brain lasers and fembots with a penchant for evil.
- Software packages broken.... sounds familiar.
- Got tired of looking at desktop color themes best reserved for a 1970s kitchen with accompanying man cave with wall to wall shag carpet.
- Moved to the Unity desktop which is targeted at a branch of hominids possessing much smaller brain functionality that have been extinct for roughly 4 million years. Possibly as a result of a poor market study with limited subject availability to question and those who they could dig up didn't have much to say.
- Including the word Ubuntu in my online dating profile has not improved love matches. In addition translating the original Swahili meaning to English only leaves me looking a bit creepy.
- Ubuntu sounds like something my kids used to say when they were a year old and needed changed. Looks like it too.
- Based on Debian so the software packages may actually work
- Uses the XFCE desktop so any sane human should feel comfortable with it.
- A bit rough
- A bit ugly
- Linux Mint DE with a port scanner vs. Clint Eastwood with a Bowie knife would be a good fight.
- Having the same name as another distribution that has broken packages gives me the shivers.
- So far every single package in the repository works. Ex Mandrake developers who must have learned their lesson.
- Doesn't talk to me like I'm a baby
- Only two packages in the repository.
- Just when I learned to pronounce Ubuntu this comes along.
n case you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks you'll know that Google released it's Google+ service. Normally I wouldn't take Google too seriously when dealing with social networking because they've been completely unsuccessful in the past (Orkut, Waves, Buzz) and in the latter case the results were disasterous. However, Google+ is a force to be reckoned with. I've been using Google+ along with Facebook for the last week or two to get an idea of how good/bad it is. Here's a few thoughts first.
- Looks kind of like Facebook mixed with a 1984 Apple Mac
- The people who are on it currently are techies mostly so there's very little of this -
- It's very easy to find and add friends
- It's got it's tenticles in everything (something FB has just started by allowing you to like things on third party sites)
- You can search your posts
- I don't see any Notes functionality
- There's no game apps (but there's hints of that coming in code)You can add posts from igoogle or gmail
- You can drag and drop media on your post box
- You can import entire on disk photo albums in one shot
- The handling of photos is on a completely different level
- There's group video chats
- There's outside feeds for your wall
- You have complete control over who sees what
I think if you know google products you'll see a lot of integrated code here. Google reader, picassa, google chat, gmail, google search etc...- What's missing in google+
- games and apps
- notes
- wall posts
- direct messages (uses email)
Apps
Facebook largely unseated MySpace because of it's numerous apps and games. We'll see how fast Google adds this ability.
Notes
The notes will be really easy if they integrate blogger but for me they'd still need to have the same level of access control.
Wall
Wall posts, would be easy but I'm not sure they'll do it because it would be difficult to integrate it into their access control system. Currently when you post you get to see which circles (or all) can view the post. If someone else posts on your wall how do you decide this? They'd have to give up some of the access control functionality if they allowed wlal posts unless all wall posts were moderated by the wall owner. For instance someone wants to post on my wall, I'd look at the post and decide which circles get to view it before any could. That would be possible.
Messages
Direct messages should probably be handled in chat/mail. It's all starting to blur anyway. In Facebook a message has persistance whereas chat messages disapear as soon as you close the window. Facebook has already started to merge these two things into one although very clumsily. I think I'd rather Google use chat to handle user messages than email since it saves it in your email anyway and has direct delivery if both parties are online.
Design
Design wise I think FB is a bit tighter and more space effecient. I also think that having contrast between sidebars, comments etc.. is a nice thing which Facebook does. Google+ was designed by the same guy who did the Macintosh interface from the 80s and although reviewers have raved about it I think the designer isn't aware that at some point computers started coming with colored monitors standard. Maybe he designed it on an 80s Mac. Here's hoping that Google tightens it up a bit in the future.
If you were the single largest commercial entity in the world don't you think you could afford to hire someone that could work on your website without taking it offline?
Or even freeze the content on the website, copy it, do the updates, then flip IP addresses so now the new one will show up? Maybe Walmart pays their IT people like they pay their other employees.
Oh and I'd be curious how fast the response from This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. would be. LOL
Sometimes you are in the trenches and you can't see anything but dirt. On occasion you're allowed to stand on a step ladder to get an idea of where you are. I just got that opportunity yesterday. In the mid 90s I started using Windows as my primary OS, then soon after ran Windows and Linux simultaneously. By 2002 I'd deleted all of my Windows clients and servers and having owned a version of Windows since. However, this is not my entire history in the computing world. Throughout the mid 80s and early 90s I used Amigas (yes, I'm one of those). If you're unaware of what the Amiga is you might want to look it up on wikipedia as they have a decent article on the history and collapse of the Amiga. In short it was created by a small group of geniuses who didn't posses enough capital to go anywhere with it. It was then sold to an incredibly ignorant company - Commodore. Commodore went from being the 10th largest PC company in the world to bankrupt in about 2 years in the early 90s. Then Amiga was sold to a European PC company called Escom who also went bankrupt a couple of years later. Then it was sold again to Gateway 2000 who did next to nothing with it for a few years and in 2000 it was sold again to some investors who created Amiga Inc. No new computers have been released in 15 years and yet people keep paying for this thing and you may be confused as to why. That's understandable so I'll try to explain.