Apple

Hello Again, Linux

Richard Mavis — Fri, 31 May 2019 13:26:34 +0000

My first MacBook was the first computer I really loved, but I wasn't happy about the idea of buying a new one. I decided it's important to live your values and to support groups that value the things you do.

After ten years of faithful service, last year the time finally came to retire my MacBook. Not many laptops last ten years—not many companies produce a machine as durable and beautiful as Apple does—but, if one was available, I was willing to invest in a machine that might last me through the next ten years. A lot has changed in ten years—for Apple, for Linux and for myself—so I started looking around.

The Situation

Prior to 2006, I had used only Windows. Around that time, there was a lot of anxiety about its upcoming successor to Windows XP, which at the time was code-named Project Longhorn. My colleagues and I all were dreading it. So, rather than go through all that trouble, I switched to Linux.

However, my first experience with Linux was not great. Although 2006 was The Year of the Linux Desktop (I saw headlines on Digg proclaiming it almost every day), I quickly learned, right after wiping my brand-new laptop's hard drive to make way for Fedora, that maybe it wasn't quite The Year of the Linux Laptop. After a desperate and miserable weekend, I finally got my wireless card working, but that initial trauma left me leery. So, about a year later, when I decided to quit my job and try the digital nomad freelance thing, I bought a MacBook. A day spent hunting down driver files or recompiling my kernel was a day not making money. I needed the assurance and convenience Apple was selling. And it proved a great investment.

During the next decade, I dabbled with Linux. Every year seemed to be The Year of the Linux Desktop—the real one, at last—so on my desktop at work (freelancing wasn't fun for long), I installed Ubuntu, then Debian, then FreeBSD. An article in this journal introduced me to tiling window managers in general and DWM in particular. The first time I felt something like disappointment with my MacBook was after using DWM on Debian for the first time.

Through the years, as my MacBook's hardware failures became increasingly inconvenient, and as my personal preference in software shifted from big beautiful graphical applications to small command-line programs, Linux started to look much more appealing. And, Linux's hardware compatibility had expanded—companies had even started selling laptops with Linux already installed—so I felt reasonably sure I wouldn't need to waste another weekend struggling with a broken wireless connection or risk frying my monitor with a misconfigured Xorg.conf.

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Now Is the Time to Start Planning for the Post-Android World

Glyn Moody — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Glyn Moody

We need a free software mobile operating system. Is it eelo?

Remember Windows? It was an operating system that was quite popular in the old days of computing. However, its global market share has been in decline for some time, and last year, the Age of Windows ended, and the Age of Android began.

Android—and thus Linux—is now everywhere. We take it for granted that Android is used on more than two billion devices, which come in just about every form factor—smartphones, tablets, wearables, Internet of Things, in-car systems and so on. Now, in the Open Source world, we just assume that Android always will hold around 90% of the smartphone sector, whatever the brand name on the device, and that we always will live in an Android world.

Except—we won't. Just as Windows took over from DOS, and Android took over from Windows, something will take over from Android. Some might say "yes, but not yet". While Android goes from strength to strength, and Apple is content to make huge profits from its smaller, tightly controlled market, there's no reason for Android to lose its dominance. After all, there are no obvious challengers and no obvious need for something new.

However, what if the key event in the decline and fall of Android has already taken place, but was something quite different from what we were expecting? Perhaps it won't be a frontal attack by another platform, but more of a subtle fracture deep within the Android ecosystem, caused by some external shock. Something like this, perhaps:

Today, the Commission has decided to fine Google 4.34 billion euros for breaching EU antitrust rules. Google has engaged in illegal practices to cement its dominant market position in internet search. It must put an effective end to this conduct within 90 days or face penalty payments.

What's striking is not so much the monetary aspect, impressive though that is, but the following: "our decision stops Google from controlling which search and browser apps manufacturers can pre-install on Android devices, or which Android operating system they can adopt."

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Book Review: Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

I don't know where to begin—and I mean that in a very positive way. I can best describe Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) as a "literary documentary". The book provides a sort of oral history of the Valley from the legends who built it.

The author, Adam Fisher, grew up in Silicon Valley. He continues to live in the Bay Area, so he's been exposed to many of the early technologies created in the region. He eventually became a computer programmer and writer, writing for Wired magazine and other publications. Valley of Genius is his first book, but he wrote very little of it—and he didn't need to do much more than piece together the many interviews he conducted to form a wonderful and continuous narrative that begins as early as the 1950s.

The story starts off with the very first computer that was more than just a super calculator created by Doug Engelbart. With a small team, he built a prototype: the oN-Line System, or NLS. It even was equipped with a "mouse"! The story continues on to the first video games manufactured by Nolan Bushnell and company in their pre-Atari days.

The book also details how, in parallel, Engelbart's prototype inspired the computers of the future developed at Xerox PARC, while the Spacewar video game would motivate a young Steve Wozniak not only to help Steve Jobs create video games for the later Atari, but also eventually to build the original Apple computer.

The narrative progresses with the birth of Apple, the company, was born and took the world of personal computing by storm—at least initially. What followed was an emotional roller coaster. The Apple II was a success, and up until Jobs looked to Alan Kay's visions preserved in the Xerox Alto, Apple continued to fail, but then later turned it all around with the Macintosh, as the story goes.

The book covers the evolving hardware (and software), and how the culture it nurtured evolved along with it. It explores how the early versions of the internet connected the youngest and brightest, and how ideas were shared—all of them centered around the concept of openness.

It looks at how passionate people started flame wars, and how publications, such as Wired, captured those times and emotions best. The book explores how Wired also rode the internet wave by shifting some of that focus toward its HotWired website. It considers the early days of the internet, at a time when it was all research and bulletin-board systems (or BBSes), and the problem of how to navigate this new World Wide Web. It describes how early web browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic killer or Mozilla), solved this need—and with it, helping to open the internet to more users.

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Leaving the Land of the Giants

Doc Searls — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 18:44:57 +0000

by Doc Searls

The next revolution will be personal. Just like the last three were.

The cover of the December 1st–7th 2012 issue of The Economist shows four giant squid battling each other (http://www.economist.com/printedition/2012-12-01). The headline reads, "Survival of the biggest: The internet's warring giants". The squid are Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Inside, the story is filed under "Briefing: Technology giants at war". The headline below the title graphic reads, "Another game of thrones" (http://www.economist.com/news/21567361-google-apple-facebook-and-amazon-are-each-others-throats-all-sorts-ways-another-game). The opening slug line reads "Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are at each other's throats in all sorts of ways." (Raising the metaphor count to three.)

Now here's the question: Is that all that's going on? Is it not possible that, in five, ten or twenty years we'll realize that the action that mattered in the early twenty-teens was happening in the rest of the ocean, and not just among the mollusks with the biggest tentacles?

War stories are always interesting, and very easy to tell because the format is formulaic. Remember Linux vs. Microsoft, personalized as Linus vs. Bill? Never mind that Linux as a server OS worked from the start with countless millions (or even billions) of Windows clients. Or that both Linus and Bill had other fish to fry from the start. But personalization is cheap and easy, and there was enough antipathy on both sides to stoke the story-telling fires, so that's what we got. Thus, today we might regard Linux as a winner and Microsoft as a loser (or at least trending in that direction). The facts behind (or ignored by) the stories mostly say that both entities have succeeded or failed largely on their own merits.

Here's a story that illustrates how stories can both lead and mislead.

The time frame was the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the "war" was between CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_instruction_set_computing) and RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_computing). The popular CPUs at the time were CISC, and the big two CISC competitors were Intel's x86 and Motorola's 68000. Intel was winning that one, so Motorola and other chip makers pushed RISC as the Next Big Thing. Motorola had an early RISC lead with the 88000 (before later pivoting to the PowerPC).

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