http://www.worldbackupday.net/
As good a day as any to start backing up your data or check that your backups are working.
Category: Computing
Alarmingly out of touch
“Today you can see tablets and pads and other things that are starting to live in the space in between (a PC and a smartphone),” Mundie said. “Personally, I don’t know whether that space will be a persistent one or not.”
Sorry Mr. Mundie, but I think you have your head in the sand on this one and I suppose I can understand why. The tablet isn’t situated between the PC and the smartphone, it is replacing the PC. This surely scares the hell of you.
“Last year, Jobs compared the PC market to the U.S. automobile industry, noting that most vehicles in America at first were trucks, because they were driven by farmers. But as cars became more popular with the growth of cities, and features like power steering and automatic transmission were added, the truck came to represent a smaller number of vehicles on the road. “PCs are going to be like trucks,” he said.
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer later fired back with a different spin on Jobs’ analogy: “There may be a reason they call them Mack Trucks,” Ballmer said, referring to Apple’s Mac line of computers. “But Windows machines are not going to be trucks.””
Apparently Ballmer took offense to Jobs stating that “PCs are going to be like trucks” and completely miss that what Jobs meant was that PCs would become much more of a utility device. A lot of people buy trucks because they have a heavy job to do.
Of course, Ballmer’s response is to attempt to put Windows everywhere even if it means allowing the market to pass them by.
Rushed to market
“Rubin says that Google cut corners during Honeycomb’s development in an effort to rush it to market.”
The iPad is more open
I’ve argued before about what “open” means to the end user and I think this guy really nails why the iPad is more “open” than other devices. A lot of in-the-know technical people will state that the iPad is a closed box because it can do certain things. For example, one might argue that the iPad doesn’t play OGG files. On the flip side an android device can’t play protected files from the iTunes store. As a regular end user, which is going to be more important? I argue that if the android device can’t play protected music from the iTunes store then the android device is going to be less useful to them and therefore less “open.”
On Apple replacing samba with their own
A lot of people think Apple is replacing samba with their own version because of the GPLv3 and patents. I’m not so sure that is the case and I think this comment is more on the mark
The reason is that binaries in /System are signed with Apple’s keys, which the haven’t made public. As far as I know this is also disallowed by GPLv3.
Of course it might also be that Apple isn’t satisfied with the progress of samba.
Apple has released the 10.6.7 update
The combo updater is located at http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1361 if you have multiple Macs. Other wise install the update using Software Update from the Apple menu
Using Puppet to manage your infrastructure
Great post on how to use puppet to manage your infrastructure. This is something I need to get back to looking at and implementing.
Engineering vs Designing
A fantastic description of what is wrong with some companies in how they create things. I’ve been really disappointed with a number of products I’ve tried or even purchased recently because so much of it had a half-assed feel.
It’s not that the NFC-based, phone-to-object interaction didn’t work. Of course it did: it had been engineered perfectly. But what it hadn’t been was designed. Those responsible for imagining the interaction apparently wanted to protect users against the (edge case!) contingency of someone making off with their phones and running up a huge vending-machine tab. They failed to understand that, for low-value transactions like this, at least, the touch gesture is a useful proxy for consent — and that if someone’s got physical possession of my phone, I’m likely to have bigger problems than whether or not they order a few cans of Coke with it. A designer committed to the user and the quality of that user’s experience gets this in a way only the rarest engineer seems to. Designers are also, by training and predilection, inclined to design for the usual, where engineers are taught a kind of rigor that compels them to account for, and overweight, low-probability events.
This example really sums up the issue with a lot of companies.
Read more at http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/nokia-culture-will-out/
Dencoder 0.3.0 released
I’ve been putting a lot of time into this little project. Nobody uses it (yet?) and truth be told I barely use it in the house but it’s been such a great way to learn a number of different things including python, mDNS (bonjour), creating installer files for debian and OS X systems and even git that I can’t stop working on it.
I’m now releasing version 0.3.0. This version brings a few changes but most notably the Linux client is now ready. The next release will be coming shortly and will focus on making the client the more robust about how it deals with network disconnects.
You can read more about the 0.3.0 release at https://github.com/dustinrue/Dencoder/wiki
Dencoder updated to version 0.2
I’ve updated Dencoder to use Bonjour to find the Dencoder server. Visit https://dustinrue.com/projects/distributed-handbrake-queue-dencoder to access the latest version. If you’ve previously installed all three packages, you only need to grab the new RabbitMQ Installer and Dencoder Client.
This update means one less config step is required when setting up your distributed encode environment. The clients will now find the master server using bonjour rather than a hard coded value. This should be useful for DHCP environments where the master server’s IP address could change.