Software

apt-get download speed

May 9, 2008 on 10:24 pm | In Computer | Comments Off This post has a good tip for speeding up apt-get downloads.  Ubuntu will check all of the mirrors to find the one that has the smallest latency.

Wimpy

May 9, 2008 on 6:51 pm | In | Comments Off

Every few years I actually make a television show for PBS and one of those rare occurrences is coming this month with "The Transformation Age: Surviving a Technology Revolution with Robert X. Cringely." Because of PBS scheduling anarchy you'll have to check your local listings to see when the show is on. It is about the obvious realization that as Moore's Law changes technology, technology in turn changes society in ways that are not always predictable. We look into the past and then into the future and put things in a perspective that a general audience can understand. AND it's probably the only place you'll see a Carly Fiorina interview. If you catch the show, please let me know what you think of it.

This week readers have been asking for my perspective on a number of news events, so I think I'll take this space to cover a number of topics, though not in my usual depth.

Several readers are concerned about Microsoft's decision to stop selling Windows XP and -- most importantly -- end security updates for the venerable operating system. This has everything to do with business and nothing at all to do with technology. Wearing my business reporter's fedora, then, I'll point you back a week or so to Microsoft's most recent earnings announcement, which disappointed Wall Street. This is significant because it is hard to find a Wall Street analyst who remembers the last time Microsoft's earnings were disappointing. It simply doesn't happen. That's because Microsoft has a myriad of tools for adjusting the numbers to look just right.

Because Microsoft has so many tools for fine-tuning its financials (primarily the management of expenses, by the way -- Microsoft makes so much money that it tunes the numbers by throwing cash away), the fact that this last set of numbers disappointed suggests to me that they, too, could have been avoided. Microsoft probably decided to deliberately take an earnings hit precisely so they could play the "we have to get the earnings up" card to justify the final death of XP.

Microsoft has been under huge pressure from its hardware OEMs to dump XP, thus forcing millions of customers who have been avoiding Vista and Vista's inevitable hardware upgrade to finally buy new computers. Dumping XP will help Dell and HP AND Microsoft, big-time. It won't do anything for you or me, though, since Vista still sucks, but we obviously don't matter.

Those customers who think they'll keep XP going on their own will probably be out of luck, too. With Microsoft abandoning security upgrades, hackers will eat holes in the old OS practically overnight. And if one or more of the security companies like Symantec or McAfee think they can make a business out of defending XP, I simply doubt that customers will pay.

Another reader asked about this week's big WiMax announcement in which Sprint and Clearwire will merge their WiMax assets with $3.2 billion in support from Intel, Google, and others. The reader figured that this would provide a viable third broadband competitor for DSL and cable and this one would also support mobile operations, which is why Comcast and Time-Warner Cable have money in it. Is this a death knell for telcos or what?

My vote is for what because it certainly isn't a death knell for DSL by any means.

We've gone over these numbers before in previous columns, but the fact is that WiMax is not as good as it is supposed to be. Those 30-mile-diameter WiMax cells we read about are a joke. While a typical WiFi hotspot covers about an acre, a good WiMax hotspot or cell will cover about a square mile. That's 640 times bigger, but far from the 10 to 30 miles promised in the marketing materials.

The ideal size for a WiMax cell is a compromise between user demand and backhaul economics. You want to serve as many users as possible but not so many that you can't economically provision adequate Internet bandwidth per user. If WiMax really could support those 30-mile cells it would be great, because then all that would be required was to drop a cell at every backbone point-of-presence, directly tapping a gigabit fiber. But since real WiMax cells are smaller this means installing backhaul circuits -- mainly DS3's (45 megabits per second) -- which in today's world takes us back to that one square mile.

Rather than a masterstroke, this merger of Sprint and Clearwire assets is more an act of desperation. Neither company was going to make it on their own. Sprint very nearly sold out to Comcast (not just the WiMax bits but everything) but the Comcast offer was realistic, not generous. Adding in the Intel and Google money made it marginally smarter to try for the combined WiMax network, instead. Intel wants to sell WiMax chipsets and offer WiMax integration that AMD cannot while Google just wants to keep the big broadband ISPs reeling. The two cable companies that are investing want to leverage the much larger investment of their partners to gain a viable mobile network, mainly for Voice-over-IP phone service.

This doesn't mean WiMax will be a failure, by the way, but just one of several mainly mobile data options in the market.

For a final data point in this WiMax story, look at this week's announcement from Cablevision about their planned WiFi build-out in the footprint of their existing cable TV network in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Cablevision has no licensing problems, no backhaul issues (they'll use their cable network), no site problems (they'll use their cables or utility poles -- space they've already paid for), and no sticky business model (the WiFi network will be free for Cablevision TV subscribers). This is SO much simpler than most WiFi or WiMax build-outs. Yet if you dig through the story you'll see the wireless network will take two years to build at a cost of $350 million just for the New York City metro area. So that $3.2 billion Sprint and Clearwire are getting isn't very much money after all.

The other big story this week that readers have been asking about is, of course, Yahoo and Microsoft. Taking my usual lateral view of things I find myself wondering why the people of Yahoo -- not just CEO Jerry Yang, but pretty much EVERY Yahooligan I have spoken to -- is so afraid of working for Microsoft? For Jerry, who -- oddly for a computer scientist -- has always seemed to be guided more by his gut than his intellect, it is mainly a matter of ego. He'll be a billionaire either way. But the people I know who work at Yahoo are simply afraid of working for Microsoft, as though Ballmer and Gates eat their young.

This isn't so much a Yahoo versus Microsoft perception, by the way, as a Yahoo versus MSN. Compared to Yahoo, where life has been cushy for a LONG time, MSN IS a pretty Spartan place. More importantly, at MSN there is a culture of confrontation. Where at Yahoo people with bad ideas or bad attitudes are generally isolated, sometimes at great expense to the company, at MSN those people are fired and thrown out of the building. Maybe in Yahoo's general feeling of inadequacy compared to Google, the geeks figure they couldn't survive at Microsoft, hence the whole Jonestown ambiance we sense around these recent events.

What's ironic is that Microsoft actually WANTS some Yahoo DNA, but the Yahooniks have been brainwashed not to believe it. As I have written before, Microsoft knows it has to change its ways to succeed in a new world without Bill and Steve, so becoming somewhat un-Microsoft-like is a good idea, but that can't be led from within.

Microsoft still needs Internet market share, however, so they may come back for another try at Yahoo, but it is more likely they'll try the same hostile approach to Facebook. Hostile because Zuckerberg won't want to be acquired any more than Yang did. But in the case of Facebook Microsoft will probably succeed. And Yahoo will ultimately let Google handle both search and ads because Google will richly reward Yahoo for doing so and because it will allow Yang and Filo to return to the content business they so enjoyed in their heady days of early success in the 1990s.

Yahoo will never dominate the way Microsoft or Google have, but as a going business, the best days of Yahoo probably still lie ahead.

Don't forget to watch my show.

Sound, XPS m1330 and Ubuntu 8.04

May 9, 2008 on 5:40 am | In Computer | Comments Off

In this previous post, I mentioned that everything was working correctly after upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04.  Unfortunately, after I wrote that post my audio stopped working. 

I went through several steps to get audio back, including building and installing the latest version of alsa.

I found that if I put the following line in my /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file, everthing works

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-3stack

Iron Man

May 2, 2008 on 5:33 pm | In | Comments Off

There was a game we used to play in the office, years ago, casting a movie of our own lives. What well-known actor or actress would play you? Who would play your friends? The game eventually faded, as games always do, but at the time it was great fun. So let's try it again: who would you cast to play Steve Jobs of Apple? Certainly not Noah Wyle, the only actor to actually play the Apple CEO. I've always thought there were elements of Jack Nicholson in Jobs, but Nicholson is too old for the role. But now it is clear the role should go to Robert Downey Jr. based on his turn this week as the sardonic reformed arms merchant turned Iron Man. Maybe Downey is a little too nice to play Jobs but otherwise it fits, especially in the elaborate planning and preparations that we see coming clear at Apple. Like Iron Man, Jobs is up to something, something big.

There are very few CEOs in high tech who have been at their jobs longer than Steve Jobs. While Jobs founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula back in 1977, remember he was cast out by John Sculley in 1985 and didn't return until Apple bought NeXT in 1997. Still 11 years is a long time in the top job. Bill Gates didn't last that long as CEO of Microsoft, taking over from Jon Shirley in 1990 and handing the reins to Steve Ballmer in 2000. Among the big companies only Michael Dell has been at it longer than Jobs altogether and Dell is back in his hot seat only reluctantly, returning in an attempt to bring his company back to its number one market position. Once things are fixed at Dell, if they can be, Michael will be gone again, while Jobs seems in his element and determined to stay for as long as possible.

And why not? He has taken the company from also-ran to market leadership based on quality design, not just the best price. Jobs made Porsche his archetype and has built Apple in that car company's image, selling entertainment, which always sells for more than sheer calculating ability. Apple is a lean and mean profit machine that is, more than any of its traditional rivals, poised to dominate the emerging markets for Internet-distributed entertainment and mobile devices. Industry pundits are always watching for the next new thing Jobs and Apple will come up with.

But we rarely watch what Apple is getting rid of, mainly because that doesn't happen very often. Sure, old hardware platforms are dropped, sometimes for lack of sales, but it is hard to even remember when Apple dropped or sold off any of its software businesses. Even FileMaker was dragged back inside the company by Jobs after Sculley's abortive attempt to spin off the database company.

So why, then, was Apple quietly shopping around its entire professional application business to prospective buyers at the recently completed National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas? These include Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Shake -- applications that are hardly also-rans in their segments and none of which are antiquated in the least. Final Cut, of course, absolutely dominates the video editing business. Why would Apple want to give that up?

Why indeed?

Apple's professional applications have never directly made a lot of money for the company. Rather, they were always intended to drive hardware sales in the areas of image editing, layout, and audio and video editing where PowerMacs were the dominant machines ever since the demise of Amiga. While Final Cut Pro probably makes a lot of money for Apple, the other professional apps probably just break even. Still, is that reason enough to sell them off?

Maybe, but I don't think so.

Taking a look at Apple's recent success selling Macs (up 51 percent since last year in a PC market that is otherwise fairly flat), your traditional Wall Street analyst would see that Apple is, for the first time in decades, building a broad market position, not just one based primarily on the graphics and video markets. Apple's recent hardware successes have come at the expense of Dell and HP. If that's the case, then the typical Wall Street drone would say, "Why not kill the professional apps, since they seem to no longer even be necessary for Apple's success?"

In Wall Street's quarter-to-quarter perspective, selling off Apple's professional applications makes perfect sense. Except that Steve Jobs tends not to think quarter-to-quarter so much as decade-to-decade. This is a guy with a LONG horizon, which is why he appears, frankly, to be the only one of his peers with either a plan or a clue. As Jobs did with the iPod and iTunes and now with the iPhone, he is setting the standard and most Apple competitors are mainly waiting and reacting, which is hardly a way to lead anything.

Apple has plenty of cash on hand (more than $19 billion) so they wouldn't be offering the professional apps to raise money. Nor, given the recent improvements in Aperture, for example, does it appear that Apple has at all allowed the space to languish. Only in Apple's refusal to date to embrace Blu-ray media is it holding up the pace of development in this category. More on this later.

There are plenty of potential buyers for Apple's professional apps. As the former leader in video editing Avid would love to own Final Cut, for example, if only to kill it. Sony's Vegas editing package is hardly competitive, so that company might well want all the apps to shore up its own hardware sales, not just in computers but also broadcast equipment. So too Panasonic or any of a number of other Japanese companies that might want to add software expertise to their media hardware businesses. That's why Apple was shopping the programs at NAB.

So what's really happening here? Well clues have been accumulating for months and I have already written about some of them. Apple's decision to not yet ship systems with Blu-ray drives or even support third-party or external Blu-ray drives in its professional applications has caused consternation in the $4 billion event video industry where most copies of Final Cut Pro are actually used (Hollywood is the niche market here, while weddings dominate). This has hurt Mac sales and Final Cut sales, and since Steve Jobs isn't stupid it is probably deliberate. Apple wants to slow the success of Blu-ray, probably in hopes that downloads -- especially downloads via iTunes -- become the de facto method for delivering HD content. Still, we haven't yet seen iTunes offer wedding videos, have we? There must be another shoe to fall.

To my knowledge we haven't yet seen Apple include that H.264 video encoder/decoder chip that I have written Apple is committed to using across its entire Mac/iPod/iPhone line. Could they be inside the new iMacs that were just quietly launched? That would be interesting.

It seems obvious to me, however, that there is only one real reason why Apple would sell off its professional applications and that's to avoid antitrust problems when/if Apple buys Adobe Systems as I predicted at the beginning of the year. Final Cut Pro competes directly with Adobe Premiere. While in my opinion the Apple video software is clearly better, Jobs couldn't be at NAB trying to sell Premiere -- software he doesn't yet own. Maybe there's a planned bait-and-switch, seeing who is interested in Final Cut then trying to shift them to Premiere.

The major point here is that Adobe is in play, or at least Apple thinks so. The company has plenty of cash and stock to do the deal and plenty of incentive, too. Apple's goal in acquiring Adobe would be to control first Flash and second Adobe's emerging Air application platform. Adobe announced this week a broad industry initiative to extend Flash to mobile devices, but Apple wasn't a participant. Why bother if you intend to shortly own Flash outright?

Owning Flash and merging it with QuickTime would give Apple near-total dominance of Internet video, furthering the advantages of iTunes and shoring up in the process the iPod franchise. They'd be giving up a sports car in Final Cut Pro, but end up effectively owning the road instead.