philcrissman.com

I’m a Canadian.

There, I said it. It doesn’t come up very often, mostly because it doesn’t really seem relevant to what I’m generally writing. But today it seems relevant to what I’m wanting to mention, since I’m about to mention Paul Martin.

Paul Martin is (maybe "was", soon?) the Prime Minister of Canada. Canada, if you haven’t been paying attention, is that small feudal state north of Montana with a population of about a million less than the state of California.

As far as most Americans are concerned, Canada’s cheif natural resource and export is probably comedians. You would think that Canada must be simply lousy with comedians. Mike Myers, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Eugene Levy, Jim Carey, Tom Green, Michael J. Fox, Dan Aykroyd, all the Kids in the Hall, Steve Smith (Red Green Show), Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster (Americans probably don’t know the last two, which is too bad), the Rubber Chicken Guy  — all are Canadians. I am probably forgetting someone for whom I will kick myself (or be kicked) later, but that’s enough for now.

So other than export comedians and hockey players, what else happens in Canada? It may come as a surprise, but one answer is lots and lots of politics.

Continue reading ‘Paul who?’

Idaho’s elected officials have shown their skills, and they are considerable. I bet they keep nunchucks in the state capitol.

Wow. Apparently in Law school they teach you to ignore everything you ever learned about run-on sentences. If you couldn’t bring yourself to follow the whole thing, at least make sure to read the end.

This legislation is sweet.

EDIT: Oh, incidentally, the bill passed unanimously, 69-0-1 (the "1" is someone absent from the proceedings).

(Link)

Continue reading ‘Idaho’s legislators show their skills’

I’ve mentioned Linspire a few times in the last few weeks, and inevitably I gripe about the poor design decision of having the user running root privileges all the time. If you read Slashdot, you may have seen that in a recent interview, Michael Robertson (CEO of Linspire) responds to this precise question.

His response is given so forcefully that one is almost tempted to overlook how ludicrous it is, and to want to admit that he has a point. Resist this temptation; running as root is still a stupid idea. It’s been a stupid idea for thirty-five years with every flavor of Unix, BSD, and now Linux. It will never be a good idea. Ever.

To be fair, Robertson also says, We’re not trying to win ultra-geeks. Ultra-geeks LIKE having to type commands, they think it’s fun to learn the system, and to know the secret codes. That’s just not our customer.

Well, he has that right; having the user run as root pretty much guarantees that the ultra-geek is going to think that your product is a joke.

When the question is finally put to him, here is his first response:

If this is really what he thinks, I don’t think that he could have asked too many people. On the other hand, with that attitude, who can tell this guy anything?

Robertson is totally ignoring the fact that most compromised Windows XP boxes serve as potential zombies for the computer crackers who are able to store and run their programs (bots) from these boxes; the reason that they are able to do this (and subsequently have the power to use their armies of Windows boxes to launch DOS attacks on servers) is that usually, when the cracker gains access to the box, he already has administrator (Windows equivalent to root) access. If this were not the case, the problem would not be so severe.

To say that it is just as secure to run as root is just plain ludicrous, and is really difficult to comprehend. Robertson tries to argue that it’s an "ease of use" issue, and that Grandma shouldn’t run into permissions errors when trying to change her wallpaper.

I defy Michael Robertson to find me a Linux user at any stage, new user to veteran, who has had a permissions error when trying to change their wallpaper. (Two can play this "I defy anyone…" game.)

By making that statement, if he really means it (I hope that he does not), what Michael Robertson is really saying is: It’s easier for us to give the user root access than it is to design our desktop properly so that the user has permissions to what he or she needs, but nothing else.

Of course, then Robertson closes his defense with, I know the hardcore geeks feel differently, that’s fine. It’s hard to argue with a guy who is admitting that he knows you feel differently, but he’s just so wrong that I can’t help it.

I think Michael’s shooting himself in the foot on this one, and here’s why. Until Linux for the mainstream consumer reaches some sort of "tipping point" (thanks, Gladwell), the primary way that most users will adopt Linux is through the recommendations of these very same hardcore geeks which Robertson says are not his target market. Well, the problem there is that we aren’t going to recommend Linspire; we’ll recommend a distribution, any distribution, which isn’t so base-headed as to have the default user be root. For a brand new user I might recommend Ubuntu, or maybe Fedora or Suse; for a Windows user who is already a geek who wants to learn Linux, Gentoo, Arch, or Debian. Sorry, Michael; Linspire isn’t on the list.

Continue reading ‘Linspire’s CEO on the root issue’

I’ve been blogging about art, off and on, for a couple weeks now. The first post was just a rant on the elitism which is usually associated with "Art." The next was a summary of a few things written which contrast and compare art and computer science.

Yesterday I found an article which I had been looking for when wrote on elitism; it’s a short editorial that appeared in World Magazine just after the election. It’s a great little article, based on a quote by an Ohio State drama professor Alan Woods, who was trying to articulate why he felt that George Bush had been elected, and John Kerry had not. His quote?

Hah. I’m sorry, that line still makes me chuckle. What Mr. Woods was apparently trying to articulate seems to be that if only the ignorant masses had a better understanding of art… why then clearly, they would have voted for John Kerry.

The fact is, I can certainly admit that my usage of "anti-art" to describe my attitude was a poorly chosen phrase, since I actually like a great deal of art, music, and literature, and always have. But on the other hand, my opinion of art, and it’s place in society, is clearly quite different than that supposed by Professor Woods. Perhaps I’m wrong to throw all the other "artsy" types in with Woods; perhaps they aren’t all that insane to think that the election of George Bush can actually be attributed to poor art education. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen a whole lot of evidence in that regard.

Continue reading ‘A little more grist for the mill’

When we talk about Linux and Windows, we could just be honest. We could say that something like this has never really happened before. The computer industry, especially the desktop PC industry, is too new. We have Windows, an established, ubiquitous, near-monopoly on business and home desktops, versus Linux,  a new clone of an even older OS, but with all sorts of excitement, buzz, and development around it, being given away for free (I know that if you go Red Hat or Novell, etc, you will pay — but remember, they didn’t develop Linux from scratch; the reason they have a product at all is because Linux is free). We could shrug our shoulders and admit that this has never happened before, and we have no idea what the future will bring.

But that’s boring.

Instead, some of us constantly talk about how Linux will inevitably take over the world. Some people say this because they think it will, some because they simply hope it will, and others because they are simply journalists and somebody else told them that it will.

On the other hand, some talk about how Linux is not ready, or will never be ready, and infinite variations on this theme.

It seems that we need to say one or the other, because saying that we just don’t know is not interesting or provocative enough.

In this latter vein, Tom Yager (back page of InfoWorld) has announced to us that we may stop proclaiming the inevitable victory of Linux. It’s not inevitable, he says; it’s impossible.

Now, I like Tom; I generally just plain like InfoWorld, it’s a decent trade magazine, usually at least one or two articles or items of interest every month. I disagree with him, though. To be honest, I’m not even sure that Tom believes this. I almost feel like he’s just decided to be as dogmatic, extreme, and contrary as possible just to provoke discussion. Well, it probably worked; I’m joining the talk, for one.

Here it is; Tom’s argument is basically that Windows is a platform and Linux is not. He does not waste valuable space explaining in detail his reasons for declaring this; we are smart people, apparently it should be self evident.

Here’s one problem with Tom’s assessment; he makes the statement that Linux will never make a dent in Windows mindshare or marketshare. I’m under the impression that Linux has already done this; there are thousands of developers, and tens of thousands of corporate and home desktops, using Linux. Now, perhaps this number is simply too small to qualify as a "dent". That’s fair; maybe it is. It must be large enough to have given Red Hat over $190 million in revenue last year; $190 million that did not go to Microsoft. I don’t have Microsoft’s revenue statements on hand, but it’s possible that this number, also, does not qualify as a "dent." All the same, I doubt that it’s a number which is pleasing to Microsoft’s marketing department.

The other problem is this; at the end of the article, he posits that while Linux is not a platform, and ergo not a threat to Windows, OS X (plus Java, he thinks) is. Come again? OS X is a wonderful operating system, and its proponents often love to mention that it is based on Unix. On FreeBSD unix, in fact. So, my question would be, if it can be done with FreeBSD, why can’t it be done with Linux? If Apple can take Darwin and build OS X on it, why couldn’t Novell, (or whoever) take Linux and build… NewGroovyOS on top of it? The answer has to be, well, of course someone could.

Tom’s reply may be (I’m only guessing) that sure, someone could do that, but then it wouldn’t be Linux anymore. It would be something else.

We could say that, but I think we might be splitting hairs too fine if we did. I think Tom has a point, but if and only if you hold the same assumptions, and the same definitions of what a "platform" is, that he presupposes.
 
My own take is that if you look at the bigger picture, Tom is wrong. Microsoft could topple; nothing in the corporate world has ever been immutable. By the same token, Microsoft may very well not topple, but if so it will not be because Linux is not a "platform."

I don’t think we know what will happen yet, and therefore we can’t possibly know why or how. But in the meantime, we’ll all keep pretending that we do, because it’s more interesting that way.

Continue reading ‘Microsoft: Immortal?’