The real innovation comes from small businesses and projects trying to meet a need and make a name for themselves.

They are unencumbered by massive PR and marketing departments trying to throw in everything but the stuff that is needed in order to appease some marketing survey.

Microsoft has been using the technique for decades now. See a hot technology, buy it up and take it over. IBM, RedHat, Oracle, Sun and Novell have been playing the game too.

They don’t create anything anymore. They refine it and mass produce it. Then they let the PR and marketing people in and ruin a good thing. (Except for Novell, they can’t seem to hire marketing people at all, because thankfully, they can put out a solid product, they just never actually sell the darn thing.)

I don’t want to overstate the obvious but since when has that not happened? Ever since the rise of the Corporate form, the idea of see, like, buy, run with it till it dies has been a staple in most of the world for a couple of centuries now. Nothing earth shattering there.

What would be innovative if somebody came up with a way to NOT have that happen!

Linky.

David Heath, over at IT Wire lead off with Ten Reasons why Linux is really a Religion. Being the kind that likes to poke a stick at the lion in the cage I just had to respond in kind. Hence my response below as to why Windows is a cult. –

10/ There are untold millions who not know why they picked Windows other than it is was provided by their Parents Bosses. Unrepentent like stone cutters to the cathedral they toil yet know not better than to march to the Path Ordained.

9/ Running like mice at the Plague they mouse across the screen incessantly unawares that ‘Command’ exists and that C: unzip *.txt is their salvation…

8/ Like a cult, the sheltered from reality, the Windows community bumbles from one version to another. From DOS, beget Windows 1.1. They split into subsects for Windows 3.1 beget Windows NT 3.5 and Windows 95a. Unbowed they march forward ever like Diagonsises looking for THE OS which beget ME and Windows NT4. The Windows priests ordained that subsects were blasphemous hence Windows NT 4 beget Windows XP. But lo not all is righteous for from the darkness Vista was beget and the land of cubicles was smitten with ire.

7/ In the Land of Windows once upon a time two sects doth coexist yet not at the same. The sect of Consumer doth not speak the dialect of the sect Business. Hence ipconfig not knost to those of Consumer. And confusion reigned in the land. Nor shall Consumer knowth of AD, or Kerberos.

6/ The lowliest of user, less anointed they readeth from the scripture of the Blue Screen of Death. Scibble they must and report to the Knowledge Base on high holy days, for they know not of The Word X0000AF66AAD. Their everlasting hope be The Word from the Church of Redmond.

5/ Cultists of Windows shall partake of Bart PE, modify thy Registry, and divine the arcane of the entrails of .ini and Autoexec.bat.

4/ In the beginning there was Darkness. On to this land stepped the ‘One’ called Gates. Gates dealeth with the Beast called IBM for 5 days and nights. On the sixth day Gates usurped CPM and smite the Beast with DOS. On the 7th day Gates rested everlasting to code nevermore.

3/ The ‘One’ having smitten the Beast ordained the Shrink Wrapped License and called it Good. To the cash register the serfs of Redmond trod. 7 times they have tithed for forgiveness of their sins in the search for ‘Ease of Use’. To each tithe they are forsworn to yet again relearn the GUI in recognition of their trespasses.

2/ In the land of users the cubicles are swabbed with CDs in the hope that yet their cubicle shall be passed over by the TAM. Their leaders cower in their offices fearful of the coming of the lean years as their spreadsheets have foretold. For Upgrade is upon the land and their coffers are bare. Yet the Microsoft Rep stride the land seeking alms.

1/ Castigated as their lot, the Windows drones bow before Ballmer for fear grips the land. For in this land Vista bears drought, the masses cling to beloved XP ever mindful that what Ballmer giveth he may taketh away — “So let it be coded, so let it be EOLed”; he hath proclaimed twice before.

Enjoy it as much as I had fun writing it. This is released as Creative Commons license and is free to copy and distribute.

 
An interesting blog were I able to read it. Actually I was but only by going into Firefox and altering the View. I’ Been to Ubuntu has a very interesting missive today any Linux user should read. But that’s not the point of this post.

The Wachowski brothers should be hung by their thumbs. I mean that seriously. That damn movie The Matrix has been an abomination on the web. Specifically what I refer to is this penchant for #000000 backgrounds and #cccccc text. Made all the worse by .js and .aspx scripts that provide a #eeeeee text alternative. Pretty soon you are mousing all over the web page looking for links to highlight. In layman’s terms using dark backgrounds with a mid grey text. Like the web page in the image above. Made even more puzzling by the fact that the signature item of the Matrix flick was that it was a bright green text on black background.

Regardless it stuck. Every webmaster for years after has deemed it ‘chic’ that a black background should be used. Now in film/digital motion production ill lit scenes are favored by both the director and the producer. The director shortens his focal plane to the active scene. Even if he screws up his depth of field its not a loss as the back drop being black is of no consequence to the human eye. Producers love it to as it drastically reduces prop costs in a scene. You can fake the feeling of instruments, or walls or whatever with only a few items.

I would refer you to two comparisons. Consider the starkly lit space station scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey vs many of the scenes in Alien 3. I picked those 2 to keep in genre. In 2001 the scene was overlit. The entire set had to be placed to a detail that was believable at 5′ or 50′. The filming had to be perfect as errors in camera work would be glaring. Alien had few such problems. The corridor and final battle sequence was low lit that other than the 4-5′ depth of the camera everything else is a blur. Add some smoke and the scene detail in the battle scene was a huge blur. I hear a bunch of you — so what? Hey you paid $10-15 for a ticket. You are being cheated and the prop master is lazier for it.

Back to the web. I’ll concede it looks cool. But like the complaint above on low lit film you the reader are being cheated. Dark backgrounds are hard on the eyes regardless of color combinations. Gutenberg got a black ink, white background (paper) because that was the limit of his technology. But by serendipity that combination was right from the very beginning. 6 centuries of cultural conditioning has prepped us for the use of a light background with a high contrast text.

Is #ffffff the ONLY color for a background? For readable content as in a book yes it is. But on the web no. But take this challenge. Go here and play with the color wheel. Play the edges and note what makes for a pleasing color combination. Most will have a component of #xxxxff or #xxffff in them. Practically any of the colors can be used with black text that tend toward the pale visually. That tendency is useful in web work as you can work a large palette with only a few changes in the color code. Especially if you use javascript to manage it.

But friends don’t let friends blog like this.

We here at Tightwad are always looking at ways to be computer cheap. So we go for free stuff if it will do the job. Well as an exercise I went and looked at the pricing for MS Office Professional 2007. I went out to eBay for some comparative pricing. It looks like the price is ~$110-130 with $125 being the midrange.

Even more curious I went to other eBay sites worldwide and here’s the results –

Currency conversion was via XE an online currency broker.

Note the price for India. That was typical for them not a low price outlier. The rest of the world was paying considerably higher prices. US price being about middle of the road. I would provide the China and Japanese figures but I lack the linguistic skill. If there is a reader out there that does and can provide the information I will update the worksheet.

Personally I will stick with Open Office. The price is right.

Life is short, so they say. But your life can be made even shorter if you don’t keep your machines critial data off loaded from time to time. Case in point –

And we don’t know today the exact size of the measurement unit Eratosthenes was using when he came up with the final figure of 252,000 stades. (We know he knew it was just a rough estimate, because he adjusted his initial number of 250,000 upward by 2,000 — or 0.8 percent — to make it divisible by 60 or 360 for easy computation.)

So how big is 252,000 stades? Depending on which classical source you trust, it’s somewhere between 24,663 and 27,967 miles. The accepted figure for equatorial circumference today is 24,902 miles. Pretty darn good for a guy without modern measurement tools.

Eratosthenes went further and computed the tilt of the Earth’s axis to within a degree. He also deduced the length of the year as 365¼ days. He suggested that calendars should have a leap day every fourth year, an idea taken up two centuries later by Julius Caesar.

Grade-school tales aside, it was thus known long before Columbus that the Earth was round and even how big it is, approximately. But it was just not widely known among the masses in 15th-century Europe. One reason is that Eratosthenes’ very own library of Alexandria had been destroyed, and there was no complete backup of its data.

“…One reason is that Eratosthenes’ very own library of Alexandria had been destroyed, and there was no complete backup of its data.” As a consequence the human race had to wait 16 centuries to recreate what was already known. All for a lack of a backup! Enuf said?

Read the full Wired article here.

Or at least it seems that way today. Seems every 5th tech article that has crossed my desk has been about some aspect of Open Source. Must be the water. Case in point — “Why Linux Frightens Both the Software and Hardware Industry”, Datamation. Now the article has some good points and some weaknesses.

The most glaring is this –

Desktop Linux presents a problem for many hardware vendors. To provide their own driver support to the half dozen popular Linux distributions, it means providing consistent support from distribution to distribution.

Now as I mentioned previously, most of the problem stopping this from taking place is the unwillingness of vendors to support that third platform option – Linux – in the first place. Yet at the same time, I have been told that these same vendors feel like they might end up supporting much more than just one more platform, as Linux has many popular distribution releases these days.

Then there is the method of the driver module installation itself. Because there is no uniform means of software installation for Linux, one must generally lean toward something like a .run file, as it can successfully bridge Debian, Red Hat, and other unrelated distributions.

To a point the case is made that yes it could be a problem IF you follow the old formula. I need only point to the NVIDIA fiasco with Developer_K to ram that point home. Distribution is not the problem Source data is. There are many interested Linux teams that would be more than willing to develop Open Source Linux drivers for cards if the hardware manufacturers would just open up some on the guts of the cards. Once a tested source code set has been validated inclusion in the multitude of Linux variants tends to take care of itself. But as we reported here, this problem on the video side is going to take care of itself much to the legacy mfrs dismay.
More on If Its Tuesday, It Must Be Open Source

This post will be a little off the path we usually cover, but for those 20Something readers that are going into the tech field a bit of advise. Think about striking out on your own as soon as you can. There are advantages that I will get into in a moment. But first a word from that Delphi of Capitalism the WSJ –

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today’s high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

An upcoming wave of new workers in our society will never work for an established company if they can help it. To them, having a traditional job is one of the biggest career failures they can imagine.

Much of childhood today is spent, not in organized sports or organizations, but in ad hoc teams playing online games such as Half Life, or competing in robotics tournaments, or in constructing and decorating MySpace pages. Without knowing it, we have been training a whole generation of young entrepreneurs.

80% believe that self-employment is a more secure employment situation. 30 years ago that was not the case. The old game in town get in with a Fortune 1000 company, bust your chops, rise thru the ladder and dump as much money as you could in the 401(k) before they gave you the gold watch and your lump sum pension. But no longer. Few companies today provide defined benefit pension plans. Gold watches are $5 at Kmart. And sadly many pension plans are nothing but a funding vehicle for the corportion for cheap capital. So when the company fortunes go South you end up like an Enron Pauper.

So what is the new game?

• Graduate HS. You don’t start a race without a beginning. In this country that is the starting block. Then go to school. That could be college or tech school. Your choice. But I won’t suggest to you to go into debt for the 4 year experience. Do it online or at night and pay as much of it out of your own pocket or through your employer if they have such offerings. Yes it will take longer But you will have two legs up on the guy/gal who got the sheepskin 2 years ago — work experience and no debt load.
• Avoid the corporate monster if you can. Now if you are going to be a microprocessor design engineer then you pretty much can’t escape it; there are only 6 companies on the planet that do this work all corporations. But short of that opportunities abound. Do contract work at first. Build a portfolio. Build that net
• Do contract work at first. Build a portfolio. Build that network. After a couple of years if you get steady repeat business from a couple of good clients approach them under your own banner. You won’t get all of them but you will get enough. Build up that clientèle list.
• The next part is probably the hardest. Hire talented people that are self motivated and smarter than you. If you want to have your business last any length of time you need to think in these terms.. You could bet hit by a truck tomorrow. As a sole practitioner if you aren’t able to produce you are out of business. Talented staff also permit the owner to work ‘on’ their business rather than ‘in’ their business.
• Get that SEP or other retirement vehicle set up as soon as you can. Leverage the time value of money to your advantage. By all means get a good accountant on your side as soon as it seems practical to do. Your first ‘hire’ should be a retainer for a CPA you trust.

Oh, and why is working for yourself more secure than working in a Corporation? Set your mind to the idea of income streams first. Working for someone else means you have a boss. Your income (paycheck) is 100% dependent on the trepidations of your relationship to your superior. Even if they are a jerk and an empty suit. On the other hand if you have 20 consistent clients with equal steams of income and lose one, you only lost a minor component of your income. Finally which do you think is easier — finding a new client to fill in that small income loss or finding a new employer to replace 100% of that income? Self employment is a tough racket. But the tech business has always been somewhat of a wild west show. If you have the nerve you can make it.

Linky.

Andy Patrizio, wrote an article Big Money and Open Source May Not Compute asking the question that if ‘Open Source is so good, why isn’t there a Billionaire in the bunch?’. I’ll provide the answer at the end. But to be quite honest Mr. Patrizio has much of his observations all wrong.–

Until it does, the open source community is living off mom and dad. In this case, that would be Google, IBM, Sun, HP and other vendors that keep most open source programmers employed. Even Red Hat (NASDAQ:RHAT), the largest of the open source vendors, is dependent on Tier One hardware vendors, particularly IBM (NYSE:IBM). Of course, so was Microsoft in its early days.

Linux living off the skirts of IBM? Ha! Lets hark back to 1997-99 for IBM. Those were dark days for IBM even in the midst of the biggest run up in corporate IT spending on the planet. Why? NONE of IBM’s product lines could be conveniently integrated. The mainframes, midrange and PC platform applications were not scalable. Any company that needed to move beyond PC’s to midrange backends prior to that time faced the task of application ports. If you were going to do that then you might as well look at some competitors wares as well. IBM was losing customers by the fist full as a consequence.
More on Open Source Billionaire? Wrong Question.

This piece was triggered by no less than 2 blogs ruminating that it is time for Linux gerneally and Ubuntu specifically to conquer the desktop. One went so far as to say that Ubuntu has already done so. I am going out on a limb here and state — Not So Fast, Fred! But first some front matter. We live a linux computing lifestyle. We run Kubuntu on all our systems. Those instances where we need Windows it is a virtual instance of the OS for a specific application need. Were not Windows users bashing Ubuntu.

Is Ubuntu #1?

If you believe one blog, they think so and trot out the graphs to prove it.

So whats the problem? Heh. At best the imagery is a representation of mindshare. The Trends beta is a mapping of Google News instances on a trend line. It has no relation to installs done or servers rolled out the door. Again it is mindshare.
More on Ubuntu Uber Alles!?

Adam Kane, over at the blog Foogazi asks the question above. One could dismiss this as just exuberance. But from a business perspective it does merit an answer. Put simply wouldn’t there be more adoption of Linux if a broad market campaign was applied?

The Linux Product

The question that begs here is which one? Ubuntu via Canonical? Fedora via Red Hat? Suse via well of course Suse? Or any one of a hundred others. The problem is Linux itself is not a brand. Closest we have of course are the leading 3-4 distros that have mind share. But lets say that the top 4 pulled together and started a advertising cooperative. They went out and spent $10m on TV time. Where does the offsetting revenue come from?

Keep in mind that any user can pull down a copy and run it on their devices. So the risk is the expenditure may not garner the increased revenues as is expected for proprietary products. It should also be noted that Red Hat, Canonical, Suse spend their dollars on targeted advertising and on sales force to get their products in Corporations where the $$ are made.

The Grassroots Phenom

Linux possesses an arm that is almost unique in the IT landscape — User Groups. For Linux it was a out growth of the need to overcome the chicken and egg problem of a world dominated by Microsoft. In the early days how would you get that first kernel when you did not have a kernel to start with? LUG’s solved that problem by providing a ’seed machine’ and [at that point] floppies to start the boot process.

but it has grown far beyond that now to full fledged support, Q&A, new products and new ideas kind of meetings. Nowhere else can you bring a PC to a meeting, ask for an assist on an install and most likely walk out with not only linux but nearly every tool you need to be useful with the device. LUG’s are the LInux secret weapon. With this kind of one on one support user to user who needs to buy advertising? And it sure beats ‘Bob’ from Bangalore who is reading off a script.

Strategic Advantage

One of the precepts in most any MBA training is optimal corporate size. That is for any industry segment there is a certain optimal size for the comapny in which to have the resources to develop new product, defend market share, diss rivals and prevent new entrants in the industry. Tied to that is the idea of having an advertising budget as a component of the positioning of the firm.

But there is a down side. To support any mind share advertising one must adapt a earnings projection mindset. You have to make the quarterly numbers. Crank, crank, crank. That’s part of the problem with Microsoft. Excellence be damned, we got to have 10m units sales this quarter. as a consequence you get Vista. Linux has dead lines too. The Kernel Development team make projections on kernel changes and generally stick to them. But if something like a security patch needs to take presdence they will delay a change. That is added flexibility in not having to meet $$ projections.

What of Red Hat? Don’t they have to meet projections? Sure they do. Otherwise the commercial side would not stay in business. But if you look at all of the top distros with commercial product their primary revenue stream is on support not sales as compared to a Microsoft. Red Hat wants more customers. But they want corporate customers who need the support services.

Point is, not being saddled with a large need for revenue keeps one nimble. It also means you waste less money in the change out to a new paradigm when it is required.

Conclusion

By the diverse nature of Linux, the OS, the applications, the environment; I don’t know what Linux as a brand would do with an advertising budget. Probably the best advertising of all is the fact that the key players in the FOSS movement are all now actively supported by Corporations. Von Roussmen found er of Python at Google for example. Or note the fact that IBM would not be where they are today were it not for Linux. Linux literally saved IBM in the early 80’s from the Mainframe-Mini-Desktop malaise they were having. Few of their applications were transportable across OS’s [OS360, AIX, Dos] Linux solved that for them. But I don’t think IBM would be such stalwart Linux supporter today if a Linux brand was competing against the IBM brand.

Linux is winning, thank you very much, by NOT being ‘corporate’. Linux dominates the embedded controller market. It nearly in full control of the printer engine market. It has got its foot in the door in the low end of the PC market and is very solidly established in the server market.

Let us let the Penguin fish for its prey as it sees fit.