Microsoft Killed the Netbook – not the Tablet
What we have here is a case of the victors writing the history book. We learned recently that Dell decided to discontinue selling Netbooks. Netbooks? You remember them – the small, inexpensive notebook-like computers with a lightweight operating system. They came in a few different flavors of Windows and Linux. They were the rage a [...]
Small, Powerful, Elegant, Sexy, and Hard Core
Ok, it’s that time of the year and I’m at the phase of the cycle when it is computer purchasing time. What do I want, what do I need, who has the best options available? In order of priority here’s my wish list for the ideal machine.
It must be able to run Windows & Linux. Even better would be the ability to run OS-X, Windows, and Linux. Preferably with Linux or OS-X as the core operating system and Windows either virtualized or dual booted.
Another high priority is I want elegant, sexy, and strong design. But not just in appearance but in functionality too. I want the device to be strong. I want the material to be fabricated well, I want the quality and durability to be built into the device. This comes down to the device being a single mold, probably of a high quality material like aluminum.
I want as much oomph as I can get out of the hardware. Demanding elegant and sexy usually dictates it won’t be powerful. Demanding tough is usually another strike against that.
Another thing which is super important, but I may be flexible on, is the resolution. I simply want as much resolution as possible.
The last thing, which isn’t as important, is I don’t really want to pay more than about $1500. I’d be all the happier if I can find something for even less.
Narrowing Down the Machines… (click through to read the entire article)
OS-X, Top 2 Gripes
I’ve been developing in my spare time on Mac OS-X using Rubymine, Webstorm, TextMate, XCode, and several other apps. I’ve also been using Kindle (the native app and the HTML5 Version), Tweetdeck, and a host of other applications. A bulk of things I’ve also been using, however they’re almost entirely in Chrome/HTML5 or some web [...]
Mac Battles, The Personal Day to Day of Software Development and Morale
I’ve been using a Mac for a couple of months now. My employer purchased a few for us coders to try out, and I’ve become spoiled. I rarely want to use my other machines now, as they seem cumbersome and inefficient. Mainly from a hardware perspective, as the OS itself seems to have plusses and [...]
OS Bridge Conference Day #2
First a quick catch up on the afternoon and evening activities from day #1. Linuxcon in Vancouver, British Columbia! I discovered that Linuxcon will be in Vancouver this year. Linus will be coming to keynote with another 10 keynote sessions following that. To top all that off, it will be the 20th anniversary for Linux! [...]
Observations on Linux (Ubuntu Specifically)
It has been a long while since I’ve used a Linux + GUI. Ubuntu, I understand probably isn’t the most bleeding edge, but just out of the box it has all the candy of Windows 7 plus lots of 3rd party enhancements and drivers or OS-X with the same. I’m honestly amazed that the OS [...]
The Non-Microsoft Realm, Collecting Rubies Part I
Years ago I worked with Linux (Redhat 3.2, SUSE, Gentoo, and Slackware among others) and also played around with PHP. I’ve never really gotten too keen in PHP, mainly because it just seemed sort of a mess. But when I needed something to get the job done and didn’t want to wait on the bureaucratic [...]
WordPress on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Linux EC2 Micro Instance, For Free
I’ve been wanting to get a write up done for WordPress on AWS, the fact that it is free for a year, since they’ve released the free-tier many months ago. Well I finally got around to it, however it isn’t a write up. I went ahead and put the work in to produce a video [...]
Cloud.com Supports RHEL 6
Cloud.com (see previous CloudAve coverage), the open source cloud provider for enterprise and service providers, last week announced that they are supporting RedHat Enterprise Linux 6. This will allow enterprises and service providers to immediately take advantage of the new features available in the newly released RHEL 6 and extend it into cloud using their [...]
Internal Email on Why a Software Company Migrates Away from MySQL
Twitter is abuzz this morning with MySQL news: What these messages refer to is that Oracle dropped InnoDB from the free Classic Edition, it is now only available starting with the $2,000 Standard Edition. A few days ago we heard support prices were increased – none of this should come as a surprise, the writing [...]
Yawn, Joyent Announces Windows And Linux Virtual Machines On Cloud
Joyent (See previous CloudAve coverage), the San Francisco based infrastructure cloud service provider, today announced the availability of Windows and Linux virtual machines in their cloud. They are targeting the enterprise customers who want to move their existing apps to VMs on the cloud. The new Windows and Linux solutions are available at all of [...]
Open Source And Cloud Computing: The Amazon Linux AMI Is Now Available
Yesterday, Amazon Web Services announced that they are offering their own Amazon Linux AMI for EC2 customers. This will be available along with the large collection of other AMIs in EC2. The idea behind this AMI is to offer EC2 customers a lean AMI which is highly optimized for EC2 environment. The AMI is available [...]
Ubuntu Is Ready For A Multi-Touch Future
As more and more touch based devices flood the market, open source community is looking for support to such devices in the Linux distros. Ubuntu is almost ready to take on the proliferation of such devices in their upcoming Ubuntu 10.10.10 (Maverick Meercat Release) in October of this year. In a mail sent to Multi-Touch [...]
US Air Force Forced to Play – by Sony
My new HTC Incredible phone has a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor in it. That’s faster than laptop computers were just a few years ago. That, and reading the US Air Force story (you have to wait for that a little longer…) reminded me of an interesting conversation with Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu two years ago: Given [...]
Red Hat Takes Another Step Towards Cloud Computing
Redhat, the poster child of open source and maker of most popular Linux distribution in the enterprise market, took another step into the cloudy future. Redhat recently released version 5.5 of their popular Enterprise Linux distribution. They followed it up with an announcement focused mainly on the hybrid nature of the enterprise cloud adoption in [...]
