I've been using Chromium on Gentoo for about a week. It's generally stable and definitely feels faster and more responsive than Firefox. The proof-of-concept toys over at Chrome Experiments are worth checking out. A lot of them work in Firefox too, but Chrome's speed advantage is more obvious. It's a shame Chrome can't do for Flash what it does for javascript. I do miss extensions like NoScript, NukeAnything, and VideoDownloader. Chrome is extendable though and I expect to see their equivalents in Chrome pretty soon.

I don't care too much about my own browsing stats being reported to Google, but I am glad that SRWare's Iron browser is available. In fact, as long as the browsers are standards-compliant, the more the better. I'm generally supportive of Google's agenda to make the browser the primary interface for the PC. Of course there are some applications that really should run on a desktop... but the other 99% of what people do with their PCs would be much better served by a standards-compliant web framework.

I upgraded to Xubuntu 9.10 the day after it was released and I haven't had any problems with it. Admittedly, this machine isn't doing all that much. It's for my kids and they mainly use it to browse the web or play Battle for Wesnoth. The wireless and Flash and everything works fine though. If there were any problems, they'd have told me about it. I don't know if running Xfce instead of Gnome should make this machine more or less likely to have problems, but it's been a smooth upgrade for me.

As far as comparing the release of Karmic Koala to Windows 7, there are some pretty huge factors that need to be taken into perspective. First of all, Ubuntu is developing at a significantly faster pace, which pretty much means that you should expect more problems. If you want an Ubuntu machine to "just work" you should be sticking to the LTS version which comes out every two years. Vista came out three years ago, so the Windows release cycle is slower than even Ubuntu's LTS cycle.

And look, I really have different expectations from a company with nearly $60 billion in revenue and 93 thousand employees and universal unconditional support from all PC hardware vendors than I do from a company with $30 million and 200 employees. And considering the role that proprietary protocols and vendor lock-in plays in MS's near monopoly, I also have different sympathies. So is this making excuses for Canonical? Yeah, could be, but IMHO it's a pretty reasonable excuse.

I worked for America Online when Jonathan Miller came on as CEO. It was pretty encouraging to have someone who seemed clueful about the internet making decisions for a change. There was a big push to get the company thinking in terms of Web 2.0. During one of the company all-hands in 2006 or 2007 or so he even brought in Tim O'Reilly for an interview. For a company whose culture was just getting around to realizing that the AOL dial-up client was a dead-end product, this was a big change. Eventually Jonathan Miller was pushed out from AOL and a former NBC executive was brought in, and the company went back to trying to understand the internet in terms of television.

As it was with AOL, I suspect MySpace's reawakening is too late. There isn't any likelihood MySpace is going to challenge Facebook or Twitter, but there may still be some value left. MySpace was popular among kids at one point, maybe they can make something of that. Based on what I saw at AOL, Miller has good a chance of salvaging MySpace as anyone. The biggest danger that I can see is that the company is ultimately owned by Rupert Murdoch who isn't exactly a friend to progress.

I pretty much agree with everything you said, up till the "Crazy Frog" and Star Wars part. The Crazy Frog themes I've heard are Axel-F and Popcorn. I can understand not wanting the phone to ring when you sit down with a client, but in the technology world having 80's pop hits or science fiction themes as ring tones are about as innocuous as it gets.

But yeah, the overall point still stands as long as we're talking about company avatars, not private avatars. If you're being paid to represent a company, it makes sense for them to set the terms. Of course companies that set overly restrictive policies may hurt their own image if their image is perceived as too staid. It depends what kind of industry they're in. If I were to find that my bank had a presence in Second Life I'd count it against them no matter what the avatar looked like.

but MS let it fall apart to crap and die once they killed the only competitor in the market

Yeah, makes one wonder what corporate desktop computing would be like today if there were serious competition in the market. There have been great strides made in hardware, cell phones and consumer electronics and the past decade. The typical corporate desktop computer doesn't crash as much as it used to, but there's hardly been the revolution you see in other fields.

VirtualBox is very easy to use and it's GPL. If you use the free-as-in-beer desktop integration tools, then it's quite slick as well. I run a 64-bit Gentoo desktop with 32-bit Windows XP as a guest OS. This gives me all the power of Unix with MS compatibility when I need it. In full screen mode, I might as well be running XP for all you can tell.

I haven't tried 3D accelerated graphics. I understand that VirtualBox has been making strides in bringing OpenGL to the guest host, but they don't have any expectation of getting DirectX working any time soon if ever.

I hope Oracle decides to keep VirtualBox alive. As it is, VirtualBox is great for desktops, but the server side tools aren't in the same league as VMware. With Oracle backing, VirtualBox could become a serious contender.

The cost of malware is beside the point. MS has improved security in their product tremendously over the past several years. It's now possible for a competent admin to run a secure Windows server. But the social cost of a monopoly software vendor is larger and the price is more deeply hidden. For a typical small business that wants to run an office suite that's interoperable with their customers and vendors and perhaps some piece of third party software that's relevant to their line of business, there just isn't much choice. Their options are:

  * Macs (since MS supports their office suite on Mac), but they have a single hardware vendor and few options for commercial third party software.
  * Open source, which is great for those of us who understand the technology, but not everyone wants to do that for a living. And commercial third party software options are even fewer.
  * Microsoft.

So for a small business, the choice to go with the dominant software is pretty obvious. The thing is, the overall benefits of using MS software have little to do with technical merit. MS is better at some things and worse at others. By far and large, their main advantage is they control so much of the ecosystem.

The cost here is born by society. MS software may be far better than it was a decade ago, but to think that the market is better served by a single vendor than by competitive free enterprise is to ignore centuries of economic history. So an individual business may save money by going with the flow, but the economy overall suffers from the lack of choice.

So using these numbers we can establish that China's numbers should be reflected in Asia's numbers at 1.33/4 or 33%.
 

I would expect the internet access rate to be lower in China than it is for Asia as a whole. China has an enormous emerging middle class, but it has an even more enormous rural farmer and migrant worker population which doesn't have access to a computer. The middle class (that is, people who can afford to use a compuer) is relatively larger in Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, etc, and much larger in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

Some nice pictures of the device on the manufacturer's web site:
http://www.skytone.net.cn/en/products.php?bigclass=4&smallclass=15&show_type=1

The SkyTone corporate picture at the top of the page has a road leading to a city... apparently straight toward the Manhattan's erstwhile World Trade Center.

I got a 16 GB Transcend SD memory card as expansion storage for my Aspire One netbook. I reformatted it for ext4 and put about 4 GB worth of music onto it. It worked fine for a couple of months, then just recently, especially today, I've been getting read errors and it's hiccuping on songs that used to play just fine. The weirdest one is that one track will actually jump to a completely different song from a different artist about a minute in. I'm playing stuff in mplayer which is extremely forgiving of read errors, but I shouldn't expect any errors.

Aside from reformatting to ext4, this card has had very little rewriting. I haven't filled it yet, and very little has ever been erased or rewritten. I don't know whether the weirdness should be attributed to the the cutting-edge ext4 file system or to the cheapo Transcend SD card. I'm leaning toward the latter, but I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this sort of thing.

Hear, hear!

This is exactly the attitude we need. I run Gentoo Linux on my Acer netbook, but I'd be insane to say that Gentoo is for everybody. What's frustrating about Windows isn't the OS itself, it's the proprietary APIs and protocols that have become de facto standards. It isn't just open source that's locked out. There simply isn't any competition from commercial software vendors in the generic hardware market. (OS X isn't supposed to run on generic hardware, and Microsoft allows interoperability by selling the office suite for macs.)

Firefox made a huge impression on the web, even when it had less than 10% market share. Safari, Chrome, Opera, Konkeror, all of these can be pretty much expected to just work thanks to open standards that were largely forced on the web by Firefox adoption.

The promise of Linux isn't that everyone will run Linux, it's that regular users will have a real choice who they buy their system. Bring on the BSDs, Haiku OS, and more commercial derivates, and life will be much easier for us Linux users as well.

I could start to like Microsoft if I weren't compelled to run their software because I had no other choice. In the office where I work, the Exchange server will only work with Outlook, critical internal web-based applications don't work outside of IE, Visio diagrams are routinely distributed internally, and there are loads of legacy desktop applications that will never be ported to another platform. My workplace is hardly unusual in any of this. Short of quitting my job, how do I get away from this shit?

When I can recommend software based on its own merits rather than how compatible it is with a proprietary infrastructure, then I might start to like Microsoft. In the meantime, if you don't see a problem with a single company having a virtual monopoly on small to medium business IT infrastructure, I don't know what to tell you.

Flash.

Dead on. Flash is a huge part of the web nowadays. Nearly all of the big video sites deliver their content using Flash. There's also Flash-based games, and when the devs have no idea what they're doing, even navigation.

Flash is the only piece of proprietary hardware on my Aspire One netbook. Without it, that thing wouldn't need x86 either. Hopefully gnash will soon become good enough to replace Flash entirely. In the meantime, better Flash than Silverlight.