Thursday, May 24, 2012

Why does the Billlion Dollar OpenSource Company does not matter or should not matter

Once in a while I bump into posts praising Red Hat for the fact that its Financial Worth in the Stock Market has crossed the 1 Billion Dollar. Every time I read these posts I shiver. And let me explain why.
It's not that I have something against the technical merits of Red Hat. In my daily work, I support mostly CentOS and Red Hat servers, and I enjoy using them. However, at home I use Debian almost exclusively. But my point is not that Debian is better or worse. I just want to use Debian as an example of how Open Source drives new economic models, while counting the stock market worth of Red Hat is old style economy. So let's see what I mean.
First, I shiver when I think "oh god, how short is people's memory". Just two years ago, the stock market collapsed and literally vaporized many many people's savings, but the same people who were "managing" this stock market industry went home without losing a cent, and today? The stock market is alive, and people keep buying stocks - and if the worthy of Red Hat is increasing, it's because people are willing to pay more for a tiny piece of Red Hat. But what is a Stock worth if the company has no real holdings - besides it's office buildings ?  Not much, unless you are promised that the company will pay you dividends, or that the stock price will go up. Unfortunately, the current stock market does not promise any of them. Red Hat directorate can decide to give you dividends, but you are not promised, and if you are living in California or Paris, I am not sure it's worth traveling to Virginia to stock holders public meeting and vote on giving dividends to yourself and other share holders.
Now, I am asking myself, what is the interest of all these technology writers promoting Red Had by yelling "Look, Red Hat is worth a billion dollar" besides making other people buy a Red Had stock, and making sure the price goes up. They, Technology writers, just promote what I call the Red Hat Bubble.

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Ubuntu 12.04 Intrusive OS

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on two laptops by now. and I must rant. Ubuntu developers are assuming two many things about me. First, there is this bug, which the 'migration-assitant' mounts existing partitions in READ-WRITE mode. I find it dangerous and not necessary for migration.
Then, today I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on IBM x121e and found out that my Bluetooth chip is disabled. After about 20 min of looking I discovered, it is because of a bug in the installer which messes around with the BIOS. So if you have IBM x120e with Intel Chipset, you need to reboot, restore the BIOS defaults and then Bluetooth works. 
That's all the ranting for now ...

Monday, May 07, 2012

GCC 4.7 Breaks 169 Packages in Debian ... my weired hobby ...

I have a weired hobby, checking very frequently the Release-Critical Bugs in Debian.
It's kind of a magic window to all this wonderful packages found in Debian. Sometimes I'm horrified to see so many bugs opened at once. Like now ... 169 FTBS introduced by GCC-4.7...



It's no reason to panic, but it's been a while since I've seen such a huge bump up...


Thursday, May 03, 2012

Ubuntu Rant! You need Ubuntu to install Ubuntu

Ubuntu "engineers" are probably dumber than that Enterprise Linux OS. I got a laptop from a friend who asked me to install the latest Ubuntu on it. My usual technique of make a live bootable usb faild.
So, I googled and found this evidence that Ubuntu engineers are retarded.
You need Ubuntu to install Ubuntu.
This reminds me a bit that Redmond company. What if I have another OS ? NOT Mac or Windows ? For example, Debian? can't you just write how to obtain that package ???

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

New Entry in the Linux laptop list !

I am looking for a new laptop. 14" is a bit hard to fit in the bag sometimes.
While search for a new 12" laptop, I found garlac.eu. Their 14" laptop is exactly the Clevo I have, the 13.3" version I bought to my girlfriend under the brand name Belina in Germany. It's a good laptop. But the one in Garlac comes either with equiped with old AMD version or newer with Intel but equipped with NVIDIA.

Sorry, I DON'T buy AMD. Until someone here or in AMD convinces me that they do a better job with Linux. The second option, NVIDIA is an  utter crap. NVIDIA drivers is the biggest piece of s$#% I ever saw, and in my work place, I curse a lot when I need to mess with NVIDIA card on a CAE workstation or some cluster.

But... if you are looking for a good 14.1" laptop and you are in Europe... The Rush 14.1 seems like a good choice.