(Submitted as a story on 12/31/2006)

If you've gone to a big-box store and purchased a wireless card recently, you might have had some trouble getting it to work under Linux, or any non-Windows OS for that matter. One reason for this is that more and more manufacturers are producing hardware that are useless without proprietary firmware. While these new designs allow for lower parts counts and thus lower cost, it presents a serious problem for F/OSS software because it can sometimes guarantee no out-of-the-box compatibility. Jem Matzan has produced a detailed article, "The battle for wireless network drivers," on the subject, including interviews with manufacturers' representatives and OS developers, including Theo de Raadt. The bottom line? In general, Asian hardware manufacturers were far more responsive and liberal about firmware than U.S. manufacturers (Intel included). Look for more firmware issues in the future, as not only wireless hardware, but regular wired Ethernet cards, take the driver-loaded firmware approach.

ArsTechnica recently posted an interesting article discussing the experiences of several Chicago suburbs experiencing the first waves of telco-delivered next-gen broadband (FTTN) deployments.

On one hand, traditional telecommunications carriers like AT&T want to use their existing right-of-way agreements and "last mile" copper wiring to offer 20Mb data service, which would include the magic trifecta of voice, data, and video, to residential customers' homes. But facing them is a range of challenges, including the homeowners themselves, with local municipal governments in tow; that's in addition to the resistance you'd expect from existing cable TV franchises. Customers dislike the large fiber/copper interface boxes that must be deposited around neighborhoods in order to provide the service, and are worried that telcos will use their status as "data services" to avoid traditional franchise agreements that require whole-town build-outs, similar to what cable companies had to do in the 1980s.

The result is what you'd expect: lawsuits. The municipal governments are stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place: if they allow the telcos to go ahead with their (generally undisclosed, trade-secret) plans, they'll be sued by the cablecos for not keeping the playing field level; if they block the telcos, they'll be sued for not allowing "network upgrades." Since there are currently no court rulings or Federal laws to act as guides, it's anyone's guess as to which way it will turn out.

As someone who just wants a fast, cheap data pipe, it's a difficult issue to take sides on. It's obvious that the U.S. regulatory and competitive climate is poisonous, as evidenced by the lack of broadband options here, compared to other countries with similar population densities. What's not obvious is whether letting the telcos deploy according to their own schedules is best, or whether municipal governments should be allowed to force them to build-out, deploying service to areas that may not be as immediately profitable. The telcos are quick to threaten that the latter will cause the deployment of the services to be aborted entirely, while others have speculated that including low-income areas in next-generation deployments might help to keep prices down later, benefiting everyone.

According to this Engadget article a Chinese company, the Jiangsu Menglong Science and Technology Company, has produced a 1600 yuan ($203 USD) Internet PC. The system runs on a "750MHz 64-bit homegrown Godson IIE chip" rather than an Intel or AMD part, and includes 256MB RAM and a 40GB hard drive. Based on promotional photos, it seems to run some form of Linux as an OS. Prices are exclusive of a keyboard and monitor; you'll have to bring your own for now. Also reported by Agence France Presse, via PhysOrg: the Godson chip "was produced by the Institute of Computer Technology under the state-run China Academy of Sciences as part of a project to lower computer costs in China."

(Submitted as a story on 11/21/2006.)

The U.S.-based anti-drunk-driving group Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) has announced its new campaign this week, which prominently features technological measures against drunk driving. In particular, MADD is planning a nationwide call for wider use of "ignition interlocks," devices which require a driver to blow into a Breathalyzer in order to start their car, for all convicted drunk drivers and not just repeat offenders. However, the group sees this as only the first stage in a wider plan, which would eventually make Breathalyzer-like devices standard equipment in all U.S. automobiles. According to the N.Y. Times article: "Ms. Ferguson said the most promising technologies would work automatically, like air bags." Automatic, mandatory alcohol sensing has received support from the Governors Highway Safety Association, whose chairman was quoted as saying "When 40 percent of all our crashes are alcohol-involved, I don't think it's going to be that difficult of a sell."

According to several news sources, Verizon has dropped its controversial new fee that it had planned to add onto DSL accounts, in place of the recently-removed FCC fee. The move is an apparent win for many irate customers, who saw a potential cost savings disappear into what was almost universally felt to be a cost increase. The move comes as Verizon was taking critcism not only from disgrundled customers and the press, but from the FCC itself.

Now, if they could only get rid of those "Regulatory Compliance Fees" that the telcos and cellular providers are somehow exempt from including in their advertised prices...why is any 'fee' not assessed by the government considered anything but part of the price of the service?

As reported by Ars Technica and the Washington Post, two hackers have found an exploitable vulnerability in the wireless drivers used by Apple's MacBook. Machines are vulnerable if they have wireless enabled and are set to connect to any available wireless network, fairly close to their default state, and the exploit allows an attacker to gain "total access" -- apparently a remote root. Although the demo, performed via video at the BlackHat conference, takes aim at what one of the hackers calls the "Mac userbase aura of smugness on security," Windows users shouldn't get too smug themselves: according to the Post article, "the two have found at least two similar flaws in device drivers for wireless cards either designed for or embedded in machines running the Windows OS." Ultimately, it may be the attacks against embedded devices which are the most threatening, since those devices are the hardest to upgrade. Currently there have not been any reports of this vulnerability 'in the wild.'

As reported by Bloomberg and others, DaimlerChrylser's SmartCar may soon be coming to the U.S.. The iconic vehicle weighs 1,609 pounds, has a 50-HP gasoline engine, and gets approximately 52 MPG. Its small size have made it popular in some urban European areas, and Chrysler is betting that the inreasing price of gas will make U.S. consumers receptive to the idea of a small, efficient urban ride. No word on safety, although the idea of being struck by an H2 at highway speeds while riding in one of these is unsettling, to say the least.

A British eBay user known only as "spikytom," frustrated when a laptop he bought didn't work or match the advertised specs, took revenge on the seller when he created a website and posted information allegedly taken off of the computer's improperly wiped hard drive. Included were a number of embarrassing pictures, plus scans of the seller's passport, and excerpts from his resume. The website received national attention in the U.K., and the seller was quoted as describing his life as "a living hell." Opinions on the site seem to be mixed: while most of us who have used eBay for any length of time have ended up on the wrong end of a shady deal, this seems distressingly close to extortion, since the buyer is asking for his money back in exchange for removing the page.

Creative Labs, maker of the Zen line of digital audio players, has filed suit against Apple Computer, and is seeking an injunction to block sales of iPods, saying that the machines' user interface violates a 2005 patent held by Creative: "Automatic Hierarchical Categorization of Music by Metadata," (U.S. Patent No. 6,928,433). The patent was filed in 2001 and covers "A method, performed by software...of a portable music playback device, that automatically files tracks according to hierarchical structure of categories to organize tracks in a logical order."

As Ars Technica and others have reported, Microsoft is rolling out, via Windows Update, a new version of its Windows Genuine Advantage system to combat piracy.

The software, which is an optional install (it can be declined by not accepting the EULA) checks the validity of a user's copy of Windows and pops up an on-screen message warning that the copy may be "counterfeit" if the number doesn't check out. The message is displayed both via a system-tray alert icon, and a dialog box which pops up while the computer is in use. After 14 days of inaction, the message will pop up hourly. One article reported that according to Microsoft, once installed, the notification system is not removeable.

The new version has been rolled out to Windows users in Australia, New Zealand, and a limited number of users in the U.S., with a wider rollout expected in time.

Sources:
TechCentral
Geek.com
and of course, Ars Technica.

Voice of America news, among other sources, is reporting that Research In Motion, makers of the BlackBerry mobile email device, has settled its ongoing 2001 patent dispute lawsuit with US-based NTP, Inc., to the tune of $612.5 million USD. The settlement "settles all claims" between the two companies, and prevents either a shutdown of the BlackBerry service, or the need for RIM to roll out a potentially problematic workaround for the disputed features. The settlement comes after all of NTP's patents had been rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office, although this did officially did not impact the case. The settlement may come as a disappointment to those who have lauded RIM for standing up to what has been called an abusive use of junk patents.

While many problems with Linux, especially ones encountered by non-technical people, may be solvable with a quick Google search, many people are uncomfortable with the fact that there doesn't seem to be a "phone number of last resort" that they can call, if they run into a problem that they can't find an answer to.

Most commercial desktop OSs, including MacOS, Windows, and SunOS/Solaris, have either pay-per-use technical support numbers, or service contracts that an individual user can purchase to get support. However, on Linux most "professional" support comes from consultants and is targeted at organizations and enterprise environments, not individuals and homes or small businesses. This can be confirmed by reading most of the companies that are on the Ubuntu site's list; very few of them (none, that I've seen so far) focus on individual users.

Now that LinuxCare is dead, what suggestions does the Slashdot community have as to sources of professional, individual end-user support for Linux?

So it's been (almost) two months, and I thought I'd record some of my musings, after having lived with my $293 HP xw5000 Intel-based "workstation" for a while.

You can read part I if you want the backstory. Suffice it to say I finally decided to give Linux a fair shot, after being rather dissatisfied with all my previous experiments with it, which all involved trying to run it on sorely outdated hardware.

I have the xw5000 hooked up via a 2-port USB KVM switch, so I can use the same set of input devices to control the Linux machine and my Mac, an aging 400MHz Sawtooth. For a Linux distro, I decided to go with Ubuntu, although not for any particularly scientific reason. I noticed it was at the top of the Distrowatch charts, and had an active user forum and a good release cycle. Sounded good enough for me.

Installation was fine, I can't complain there. Although I really never have had many complaints with installing Linux. I figure there are a lot more important things with an OS than whether or not it uses a text-mode installer or a true GUI. But Ubuntu was fine, it recognized all of the internal hardware without problems. (Which it ought to have, since this machine was desiged to run Linux -- albeit RedHat Enterprise Linux -- from the beginning.)

About the only thing that the installer didn't do a good job on, was detecting my monitor's maximum resolution. My monitor isn't anything special (a MAG 19" CRT), and I had thought it would have done a better autodetect job. But it didn't blow it up, so after some Googling I found out that I could specify the maximum H and V refresh rates in the X.org config file, and it would figure things out from there. Not too bad.

After that, it was wireless card time. As I've written in several Slashdot posts, the wireless situation on Linux is deplorable. Although I'm not sure that it's really the fault of anyone in the Linux community -- more the card manufacturers themselves -- it's a shitty situation. I won't rehash the entire saga here, but I got what I thought was a compatible Linux card, only to bring it home and find out that they'd changed the chipset (made by Marvell, curse them) to one that there aren't any native drivers for. So I ended up using ndiswrappers, and being stuck with an odd side-effect: every time I want to change the SSID of the network I connect to, I have to completely reboot the machine. Not a huge problem on a workstation, but it's something I have to keep in mind whenever I'm re-jiggering my wireless settings.

(It's worth noting that the reason I'm using wireless is because the Mac, which sits 6" away from the Linux machine, acts as the internet gateway to the house and only has one Ethernet port. Perhaps at some point I'll get a router-gateway and do away with the Linux box's wireless card entirely.)

Next stop, NVidia drivers. Can't say I had any problems here; props to NVidia for making the procedure fairly trouble-free. I never played with the system enough to determine whether there's a noticable performance boost as a result of having the drivers installed. The video card that came in the machine is a NVidia Quadro4 200NVS, 64MB -- not particularly perky by today's standards. It's designed to drive dual displays, although I'm only using one through the KVM.

My first comment regarding Ubuntu is that I quickly decided that I'm not a big fan of Gnome. Sorry guys, but I just don't like it. I really did try to like it, because I'd heard all these unflattering things said about KDE (e.g., "it's Windows-ish," "it's a resource hog," "it's poorly designed,"), and perhaps if I had spent time customizing Gnome I would have liked it, but I've got better things to do. I grabbed the Kubuntu packages and never looked back. (Except to use the system-management utilites like the Networking control panel, which don't seem to work for me in KDE.)

The only downside to Kubuntu is that there isn't as much of a user community for it as plain-old (Gnome-based) Ubuntu. If you look at the number of people in each forum at any given time, the numbers usually run 2:1 or 3:1 in favor of Gnome. Also, there's no free CD available of Kubuntu, so you have to either burn it yourself, or install Ubuntu and then grab the Kubuntu-desktop packages.

The other thing I like about KDE is that it offers a MacOS-style screen-top menubar, that changes options depending on the application currently in focus / on top. Also, I think Konqueror is a good web browser, and renders more nicely than Firefox. Both of these things are attributable to my previous experience with Macs and resultant bias -- I use Safari on my Mac, which is based on the same rendering engine as Konqueror -- but they stand just the same. I also like the "fish" feature of Konqueror: you can type a URL in the form "fish://user@remotemachine/~" and it will let you access that machine just as if it was a local volume, through an SSH session. You can view text files, copy things back and forth, etc. -- all without having to set up file sharing on the remote machine (aside from SSH). Personally I think that's worth the price of admission (installing KDE) by itself.

[This was originally posted here, but I wanted to retain it after it falls off my Recent Posts page.]

I think you summed up my feelings on the issue quite well.

I'm pretty cynical when it comes to companies and their mealymouthed "corporate values" statements. Publicly held companies exist to make money and generate value for their shareholders, and they'll basically do it in any way that's legal. In fact, they'll do everything that's legal and then some, according to a formula that takes into account the risk of getting caught times the possible reward. (I doubt any major corporation would admit to doing this, and I'm not suggesting that they sit down and actually run through some algorithm to figure out whether to buy a judge, but if you look at the outcome they might as well have.) I accept this. As an investor, I'd expect this. I wouldn't want some ex-hippie executive's personal hangups getting in the way of his job, which is making me money. If having their product line manufactured by indentured 14-year-olds in Thailand will increase the share price, and it's legal to do so, I expect a CEO to either do it, or step down (or be voted out) in favor of someone who will. I would have greater personal respect for the person who refused to do it, but my opinion of the organization wouldn't change -- companies are amoral; or are moral only to the extent that their investors require them to be, which isn't much.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, IBM -- they don't go around touting themselves as the corporate equivalents of Mother Teresa. So when I see them contributing to government oppression somewhere in return for the proverbial fat wad of cash, I accept it.

But when Google sold itself to the public as a new kind of company, one that was going to be run by people who hadn't exchanged the concept of "evil" with "bad for shareholder value," I have a lot less tolerance. Especially because they sold many of their services to the public, which people might have otherwise been uncomfortable with (GMail's advertising, search history, etc.), on the strength of this reputation.

Although Google's technological innovations were obviously the key to their success, I don't think that their reputation should be easily discounted. They sold themselves to the public as a new kind of company, under a new kind of management, and that means we held them to newer, higher standards.

How popular would GMail have been -- software which unabashedly scans your emails in order to target ads -- if it had been run by IBM? I'm willing to bet not as much. Would you have signed up for a service that retains everything you've ever searched for, if Microsoft was going to have the keys to the data? I wouldn't.

They made a decision earlier this week to burn that reputation. Someone decided that, in the end, marketing to China is going to be worth a lot more to the bottom line than whether they're well-liked by a bunch of Americans or not. This doesn't surprise me; obviously a lot of other companies have decided the same thing. I find their decision distasteful, but from an analytical position they're almost undeniably right.

I forgive -- if forgive is the right word; as Google isn't actually a person or anything else, it's not as though there's anything there to forgive -- Google for working with China. What I don't forgive, and see now as the height of arrogance, was the lengths to which they went to convince everyone that they were saints, come to show I.T. the path to rightness.

It was a nice show, boys. P.T. Barnum would have been proud. But then again, I -- like many others, I think -- were easy marks. We wanted to believe that a company could both be insanely profitable and remain morally righteous. You fooled us good; just don't expect to do it again.

A few days ago, I posted a comment in response to someone else claiming that they had just bought a dual-Xeon HP rackmount server for about $300. In the comment I was rather skeptical of the pricing -- the phrase "one for each foot" was used, right after the words "I'd buy," and preceding "if they cost that much." I thought it was a pretty safe bet.

But oh, the tech world moves quickly. Apparently the dot-bombers had a lot of old gear to move quickly when their investors decided to move their retirement money into safer avenues, and it went for cheap. One of the many companies which arose to deal with this glut of liquidation, as well as the continuous flow of corporate surplus, was RetroBox.

I can't say I know very much about the company. I had never heard of them until they were mentioned in a response to my post, and I did a little Googling and apparently they're growing quickly, and seemed to be loved by all. Almost all, anyway. They do have a small but significant caveat on their website: "Final pricing will be at the full and total discretion of RetroBox.com." Essentially they're reserving the right to change the price of what you're buying, after you place the order. Now I'll grant that I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't fly in court. Something about me buying a particular good at a particular price and all that. I'll say for the record though, despite this disclaimer, I didn't have any problems working with them, and in fact found their employees to be universally helpful.

Moving on. So I was definitely eating some crow for my disbelieving comment about server prices -- they really are dirt cheap these days. You want a 1GHz Xeon in a 1U rackmount? Sure -- 150 bucks. 800MHz Dell Poweredge? $104. Not bad; and this is from a fairly legitimate establishment, not some random-ass person on eBay.

I couldn't resist. (Have you ever seen the "Go broke saving money" tagline on Dealtime? That's me.) I toyed for a while about buying a 1RU pizzabox for a while, and although there's nothing cooler in my mind than neatly rackmounted gear, the downside to them is that they require a rack. Which I don't have. Which I'd have to build. Equipment racks aren't the most challenging carpentry project in the world -- any idiot with a table saw and a power drill/driver can build one in an afternoon out of MDF and some predrilled rails from Sweetwater -- but the resulting box is HEAVY. Even commercial steel units are pretty hard to move around if any lifting is involved, at least for one person. And knockdown aluminum units are very pricey.

And did I mention I don't really have any legitimate use for a rackmount server? Sure, it'd be cool, and who knows what sort of cool stuff I might be able to come up with if I had the hardware sitting around, begging to be used. But in the end, practicality won out. Also, a rackmount box takes a lot of floorspace; they're optimized for density and not area, and in my house it's area that counts. (Yes I know I could have mounted it vertically.)

So what'd I do? I bought a desktop instead.

It's been something that I've been meaning to do for a while. I like the concept of Linux, but I've never really given it a fair shot versus my Mac. While my Mac cost $1600 when it was new and is still worth a few hundred bucks now (if the people at everymac.com are to be trusted), the most expensive PC I've ever bought was a $90 P133 clunker from the Pratt & Whitney industrial surplus store (check it out if you're ever in East Hartford, CT). Linux had always been a bit of a letdown in the experience department.

Now that's going to change. I can't afford a new Mac, much as I'd like to, but I could afford what would have been a smokin' sweet Intel workstation from not too many years ago. An HP xw5000, 3.2GHz P4, 512MB, 60GB; total cost with shipping: $293.

Although the xw5000 isn't really what I'd call a "workstation" in the traditional sense -- it's not RISC, for one -- it is a very nice PC. Or rather, it's what any self-respecting desktop computer ought to be. Big case, good power supply, lots of bays and empty slots, well-supported chipset and components, easily upgradable, excellent technical documentation. It was, except for the choice of processor, basically the sort of computer that I would build from components for myself, already prebuilt. And did I mention it was under $300?