Commercials
What moron puts a live alligator in the bed of his pickup truck? I hate truck commercials! I hate commercials period. Thank gods the TiVo allows me to skip most of them.
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Great Day for Football…
Interesting game between the Colts and the Patriots today. Long story short, the colts had the ball, with 4 minutes left, with a forth and a couple, down by a touchdown, and went for a fieldgoal. That’s weird decission number one. Then, after they kicked it off, the Pats came out and thew on first down. Not a bad call, on the whole, as it resulted in defensive holding, and a first down. Then, they threw three more times! The result? The Colts got the ball back with over three minutes left, at about the 50. I thought to myself that the game was over, the Colts would win. But, they didn’t. They had a first and goal on the 1, and ran twice, then threw, without play action, and ran on fourth down and didn’t make it.
Quite a few odd decisions by the coaches on that one.
Gnome, in all it’s glory
Well, I took the plunge today. I switched to the full Gnome environment. Rather than using my own window manager (fvwm) with it’s own button bar and panel, I’ve switched to using the gnome environment, complete with panel and desktop. Now, I do still run fvwm as my window manager, so I still get all my great keyboard shortcuts, and my positioning, and my lack-of-decorations, but I also get all the panel plugins that I couldn’t run before. It’s nice, and I like it. For example, I can use the applet version of Gnome Blogger (which I’m using to post this) rather than the standalone version. And, I can get into gdesklets, which should be cool. On the whole, I’m quite happy with it, dispite the loss of vertical space.
I do have two small gripes. First, the fvwm paging doesn’t interact well with the gnome paging. Fvwm puts it’s entire virutal desktop system into each gnome desktop. I’d like to be able to use my fvwm shortcuts to move around the gnome desktop. However, it’s a small thing.
The second is that I can’t use the gnome terminal app. The problem is that it only uses truetype fonts, and they only go down to a size of 8. I really need smaller than that, so that I can get at least 160 characters of width out of my screen realestate. This is not good. So, I’m still using my venerable xterm setup with it’s bitmapped fonts. Oh well.
Backwards compatibility? Or not?
Recently, Microsoft announced that they would be parternering with IBM on the chip for XBoxNext (okay, stupid name, but I didn’t name it), and licensing IBM’s chip technology. This has caused widespread speculation that XBoxNext will be PowerPC based. I find this not-at-all surprising, as AltiVec, the multimedia engine on the PowerPC, is far superior to SSE2, the one on x86.
Now, the assumption that XBoxNext will be on PowerPC has spured a huge online discussion on backwards compatibility. Will XBoxNext play XBox games? And if so, how?
The Backwards Compat camp says that it’s all about market share. If XBoxNext plays the huge library of expensive XBox games, than people, especially parents, are much more likely to buy it, rather than a PS3, which likely will be backwards compatible with PS2. Also, any new console is likely to ship with very few games, and that makes it much less attractive.
The Non Backwards Compat camp points to the little financial benifit to Microsoft in backwards compatibility (most old games bought are used, and so MS makes no money on them), and the huge R&D costs to developing a backwards compatibility solution.
Both camps have good points, but what if there was no R&D cost involved? Or, more specifically, what if that R&D was carried and amortized by a separte product? Enter VirtualPC, which Microsoft is touting as being a “Multiple Servers on One Box” solution. In fact, MS has so linked it with servers, that no-one in the above discussion to my knowledge, has even considered it. But, VirtualPC was written for the Mac origianally, and so it runs natively on the PPC, and emulates x86. This means that it is tailor made for emulation of the XBox on the XBoxNext. The world in general assumed that support for running on PPC would be dropped by MS, which otherwise has no PPC products. But, what if they bought VirtualPC so that they could leave x86 behind on the XBox, and are using sales of it to amortize the cost of buying and developing it? This gives them all the benifits of backwards compatibility, with none of the costs.
Expect XBoxNext to be backwards compatibile.
Whatever
I think I’ll take a Carnival Cruise. I need some “Hot fun in the summertime” with a hot woman in a very thin sundress. Too bad it’s not summertime…
Aqueous liquid, aqueous liquid, circumambient,
Aqueous liquid, aqueous liquid, circumambient, and nary a sib to imbibe.
The times, they be interesting
Momentus events in the Linux world today. Novell has bought Suse, and RedHat has officially dropped it’s desktop “product”.
The Novell deal is interesting for a lot of reasons. First, it gives Suse a huge enterprise customer base and a support machine. Novell has over 1200 people just doing support! Second, it shows that Novell is really committed to Linux. They bought Ximian earlier this year, which gives them arguably the best GUI, and now Suse, which gives them one of the best Linux distros. With Novell’s reputation for solid networking products, this could result in a huge jump in Linux adoption in the enterprise, especially considering the EOL of NT products recently announted by Microsoft.
Yet another interesting aspect of the Novell/Suse deal is that Suse has traditionally been a KDE distro, while Novell bought Ximian, which is Gnome. This means that Suse will likely switch from KDE as it’s primary DE to Ximian. Oh, I know they’re all saying that they will continue to use KDE, but they won’t. The KDE lovers definitely won’t like this. Still, maybe this will signal more work towards unifying the DEs on Linux. That would be great.
RedHat dropping it’s non-enterprise (read Free) Linux distro is another interesting, if not suprising, move. RedHat is finally realizing that they won’t make any money “selling” a box set that anyone with broadband can download and burn themselves, and have decided to EOL the product. The surviving offering of RedHat is something called Enterprise Linux. No free downloads of that.
What does this mean for us Linux users? Well, if you currently use RedHat as your desktop, and you like to keep current (IE, you’re running 8 or 9), then you’ll have to find an alternative. The alternative being pushed by RedHat is Fedora, the community supported RedHat based varient that is now being pseudo-run by RedHat. I suspect this will really result in people fleeing to other distros entirely. Most techies will probably go to Debian or Gentoo. Non-techies will probably hit up Mandrake or Suse. Me, I use Gentoo already, so this is not an issue for me.
For current corperate RedHat users, this means one of two things: move the Enterprise, with it’s higher cost, or leave for something else, probably Suse. This is where the Novell deal becomes interesting, because it makes Suse that much more attractive for people being EOL’d by RedHat. I suspect that Suse will be the corperate Linux desktop of the near-to-mid future.
All in all, an interesting time in Linux.
Windows Games
So I discovered this game, part of the Gnome Games package, named Same Gnome. It looks like this:
What you do is you click on sequences of two or more marbles of the same color that are adjacent horizontally or vertically, and they vanish. The remaining marbles then fall down and left. The goal is to make them all disappear. At any rate, this is a wonderfully fun game, and Janette wanted a version for Windows. It turns out it’s pretty hard to find. There are several really bad play-online java versions, and one in TCL-TK that doesn’t appear to work, and so on. She did eventually find one, but it looks horrible and doesn’t do everything mine does. Now, who would have thought that Linux would have better games than Windows?