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IDC said in a press release on Thursday that the Linux Server market accounts for $1.2 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2005. The lions share of that belongs to HP and IBM, the top two linux server vendors.
Continue reading ‘Linux Servers made $1.2 Billion in 1st Quarter’
I’ve been married to my wife, Amy, for nearly four years. Like most married couples, it’s been awhile since I took her out on a “date.” So, last night, I took her out on a date.
Someone once said that, at a restaurant, it’s easy to tell the married couples from the dating couples; the couples who are dating are the ones who are talking to each other.
I’m not nearly that cynical, but I also know that the reason things like that are funny is that there’s a certain amount of sad reality to them. So avoiding such a fate is as good an argument as any for continuing to date your wife.
Now, by date, I don’t mean stopping at Wendy’s on the way home from work; you can turn little things like that into a nice moment (nobody has to cook, do dishes, etc), but if that’s all the dating you do, a “date” will quickly grow to be a term of less meaning, less romance, and little interest.
Gentoo is a fairly well-known Linux distribution, but it is not universally adored. There’s a lot of people who seem to love it a little too much (the oft-maligned “Gentoo zealot”, who can be found in Linux forums all over the internet), and a lot of people who hate it… usually partly because of the afore-mentioned zealots as much as anything else.
So, it was kind of nice to read this in the latest Gentoo Weekly Newsletter:
The GWN-team received a story from Leann Ogasawara and other members of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), of how Gentoo is used at the laboratory. We would like to present you the full story in this week’s GWN:
“OSDL is utilizing Gentoo for various projects here at the lab. One such project is the BRT (Binary Regression Testing) project. The purpose of the BRT project is to execute suites of regression tests focused towards specific application binaries on a specific set of software packages. The goal is to make it easier for application developers to run regression tests on the latest open source software stack and to capture the results. The need to build a customizable set of software packages from the bottom up is what initially drew our interest towards Gentoo, and more specifically, the Portage package management tool. We needed a tool that would not only automate a package’s build and installation process, but also be in sync with the latest package release as well as older versions. The tool also needed to be able to track build dependencies for a package and handle their installations smoothly. The only additional functionality we would maybe like to see in Portage is the ability to automatically remove a package’s build dependencies but keep the run time dependencies installed (an ebuild DEPENDS vs RDEPENDS thing). That way our test system would only have the absolute necessary set of packages that we want installed and the extraneous packages wouldn’t have a chance to possibly interfere with our tests we want to run. Other than that, we’ve been very pleased with the Portage tool and Gentoo in general. Since we first started playing with Gentoo and researching what it could provide for us, we’ve been using it on a daily basis and it has played an integral role in the development of our project. Other developers at OSDL have also started using Gentoo in their day to day tasks and often prefer to use it as their test platform of choice.”
I’ve been doing a little changing and experimenting with this site, recently, though probably not a lot is readily apparent. For one, if you like quotations, specifically the ones that randomly appear below the header, there’s now a link in the main navigation bar to all of those.
Also, I’m going to experiment with moving the Google Ads to a different spot. I still want them to be unobstrusive, but if you’re like me, you probably read right past them unless there is something that specifically catches your eye, so I think they will remain so. I’m going to try putting them in the posts and articles, off to one side so the text flows around them. The motivation for this is not solely avarice, but also curiousity. Does the placement of an ad make a difference? Thinking about presenation concepts would lead us to think that it does.
Besides, I think by this time most people who find Google Ads obnoxious have downloaded Firefox and downloaded the Adblock extension.
I think I’ve finally figured out what the problem is. The Democrats lost the election, but they want to run the country anyways.
I would almost believe they’d try a coup if they thought they could get away with it. That would probably be romantically “revolutionary” for them.
I could be speaking in general terms, but this is specifically sparked by this NY Times article, Democrats Force Senate to Delay a Vote on Bolton.
To me this is getting almost pathetic, and if it were a novel rather than real life, I would probably find it comedic. They are so convinced that they are right, they truly seem to think that they should run the country regardless of whether they won the election or not.
Writing style, I mean.
Brand Autopsy ran a short interview with Seth Godin recently, in which they asked him about his writing style rather than about marketing. This is a great (short) read, and important; you can know a lot, but if you can communicate it (in writing or presentation), then everything you know can’t benefit anyone else–because you can’t share it effectively.
The idea of influences in writing is, I think, a valuable one as well. It’s taken for granted to ask this question in some circles; it is almost inevitable that any interview with a rock band of any stripe will include the question “Who/what are your influences?” Musical groups are frequently defined by their influences. Someone might play straight-ahead seventies-style rock, but you’ll think of them slightly different if they say that their main influence was Led Zeppelin than if they said it was Cream… and so on.
Seth said his influences were Guy (Kawasaki), Zig (Ziglar), Tom (Peters), and Malcolm (Gladwell). He points out that these gentlemen are all recognizable by their first names, although they may or may not be to most people. Seth is now pretty recognizable by his first name alone, for that matter.
I like his choices in writers. Going back to the music analogy, a good writer can change the way you think about writing the same way that hearing Fugazi for the first time can change the way you think about music.
I’d have to echo Seth’s choices in writing influences, but I would add Paul Arden, Douglas Hofstadter, and Paul Graham to that list as well.
Though really, if I go way back, I’d guess that the real influences on my writing style have been Strunk and White. Best. Writing. Book. Ever.
I’ve found, lately, that I pay altogether too much attention to that little module on the sidebar–you see it–that says how many visitors are currently on the site. It’s silly, unrelated to anything… and marginally addictive. I can post something new, and watch the visitors slowly grow. When the count of visitors climbs to the 40s or 50s, or (like late last night) to over a hundred, I wonder what it was that got the people here, and how to do it again.
Why?
It certainly isn’t money; despite the everpresent (though I cut a few out) Google Ads, the income flowing in from that is so negligible as to be non-existent (I suppose a site with a lot more traffic would experience different trends; I wouldn’t know, at the moment).
I don’t know if it’s just the idea of someone reading what you’ve written that makes it appealing; though for all we know, the visitors to the blogs take a brief look around and immediately dismiss it, or may even hate it.
But all the little “Who’s Online” module shows is the number of visitors.
Who cares? Then again, I keep the module there… because for some reason, I want to know.
Tom Peters blogged today about how important excellence in presentation is to success in, well, almost any endeavor (okay, clearly the context is in the corporate world, but presentation is always important).
He went so far as to compile a PowerPoint presentation with 56 tips for Presentation Excellence.
You know, I don’t do a whole lot of PowerPoint presentations (even if I did, they’d probably OpenOffice Impress presentations), but I have this crazy idea that principles of communication and design translate well to other media as well.
I have to join the Blue State Conservatives in applauding Peggy Noonan’s recent column in Opinion Journal (Link).
I would have to think that no matter what side you’re on… and especially if you lean toward the conservative side… you’d want to spend a few moments reflecting on why exactly people are upset about the compromise over the filibuster. They’re upset because it was wrong. Plain and simple. Hugh Hewitt used more eloquence to say this, Peggy used more irony, but what it comes down to is that it was wrong.
Oh wait; are we still allowed to think that some things are wrong?
