The Linux Extremist

In case you haven’t heard, Prime Minister Tony Blair has set a timetable for his leaving office. Well, OK, it’s highly unofficial and the Sun newspaper reported it; the full story is likely to be of lesser importance in that publication than the “Phew! Wot A Scorcher!” feature with a buxom model showing her assets in full along with an utterly false “come hither” stare.

All right, perhaps it’s not a certainty. However even if it is just informed conjecture, it is entirely possible that Blair will leave in not too long a timescale. It also appears likely that he is leaving (mostly) of his own accord.

This is proper, just and right. Things pass; fads, fancies, people, empires, all have their heyday and then fade out. In 1997, Blair was “da bomb” in so far as a man who speaks in a series of painful pauses could be. It seems laughable now, but people actually believed him when he said “things can only get better”. Even people like me, who never believed him, temporarily found his presence refreshing because the Tories’ time had come and gone; admittedly, for me, that sensation lasted all of five minutes. Still, all of Europe aspired to imitate him; during his first European Union summit in Holland, he managed to make the other Prime Ministers look like utter twonks by being the only leader that didn’t look thoroughly daft while riding a bicycle.

That golden period of his reign is long gone. There came a point where having a media-savvy Prime Minister turning out soundbytes became staid and dull; the falsehood at the heart of such an approach no longer sold. Blair at least has the dignity and self-awareness to realise that his hour has come and gone, and it is time to find a new role beyond the sunset of his career.

At a certain level, apparently Bill Gates understands the “way of all flesh” too. According to the Economist, he is obsessed with the fate of Digital Equipment Corporation, a giant that was reduced to nothing, and is very concerned that Microsoft doesn’t suffer a similar fate; that apparently was a reason why he appointed Ray Ozzie. A good choice, but probably too late.

Item: consider how Microsoft has been trying to diversify into everything from MP3 players into video games consoles. This is indicative of a company which is trying to find an additional revenue stream on top of a core business which could become dangerously vulnerable.

Item: consider how that core business, operating systems, has reached a point of absurdity. I find new evidence of this every single day. Yesterday, for example, I found out Internet Information Server 6 comes with a feature that limits the size of a download. Some fiddling can make it right, but for those who say, have to import a huge list of addresses for a mass mailing campaign, it is absolutely absurd. Microsoft apparently never thought of this. They also never realised that the cycle of making their operating system ever larger and building in more functionality was going to make it ever more difficult to debug and deploy.

Item: consider how Windows users are being bombarded with viruses and trojans, to the point that “zombie” PCs are a genuine internet menace. Yet we have little visibility on how Vista is going to be less vulnerable to this problem, on the contrary, it may be even worse.

All these factors in isolation would not be fatal; they only become so because Microsoft does not realise that they are problems at the heart of their business model, and they are not willing to face up to the truth. They lack the introspection to realise their hour of total dominance has passed. They want to keep hold of the days when they set the pace of the IT market, and the idea Mac OS challenging them was laughable and Linux on the desktop was the preserve of a few enthusiasts.

If they can embrace the idea that decline is inevitable, they may be able to salvage something. They need to understand that at some point, their stranglehold on the market will dissolve and to plan for it. Digital Equipment Corporation never did such planning; by the time they woke up, it was too late.

Is Ray Ozzie the man to plan for decline? It’s difficult to say as of yet; Microsoft is still far too much Bill Gates’ company to be anything other than full of arrogance and swagger. I have heard he is a thoughtful man; hopefully he has read his history. Speaking as someone who is something of an amateur historian, he seems to be inheriting a decayed throne, rather like the last Emperors of Byzantium, with its greatest days in the past, and the memories of previous glories only preserved in artifacts and rhetoric. The empire in this case could be rejuvenated through modesty and specialisation. If not, it will roll over the horizon of history and eventually, out of relevance.

If this seems a fatalistic point of view, I’d have to say, yes it is. To err is human, and anything built by man if it lasts long enough is bound to screw up to the point of no return. We can rail against it, be like Dylan Thomas and “rage against the dying of the light”, or accept it like Tony Blair; but no matter what, that hour will strike. It will be interesting to see what happens as that time approaches for Microsoft.

For a Linux / BSD devotee like myself, visiting Distrowatch is like being the proverbial kid in a candy store. There are so many variants of Linux to discover and each has its own particular emphasis and individual strengths. One of the more unusual ones I’ve seen is the “Christian” edition of Ubuntu, the latest version of which was released on September 4.

My curiosity got the better of me and I took a look; I had no idea what could make an operating system particularly “Christian”. I found out that it has a top notch Bible study program called “GnomeSword”, a daily Bible verse feature, and extensive parental controls for web content. If I had a child, I would definitely want to install this on their PC; in so far as an operating system can promote good, wholesome family values, or at least drive one’s offspring crazy by limiting their access to Pamela Anderson pictures and thus heartily amusing the parent who installed it, this does it, and apparently does it well.

This is yet another development which indicates the flexibility of Linux; not only can it be adapted for a variety of devices, including mobile phones and games machines, it also can be tailored to suit a variety of interests and causes. Other distributions like Geexbox appeal to those who want to have full multimedia compatibility. Some distributions focus on compatibility with different languages; the Japanese distributions like Vine and Berry Linux are evidence of this. Linux is evolving outward, becoming ever more personalised, and greater choice is becoming increasingly available. Its flexibility is allowing it to be an operating system that is simultaneously for everyone and for a niche.

Strangely, this is something that Linux has in common with the British aerospace industry, circa 1940. There were many wonderful aircraft houses like Supermarine, de Havilland, Hawkers, with so many interesting and specialised designs, like the Spitfire, the Mosquito and the Hurricane, and yet many of these airplanes were powered by Rolls Royce Merlin engines. One “engine” (”kernel” if you will) was adapted to various roles and it worked surprisingly well.

In contrast, Microsoft is rather like Ford Motor Cars circa 1920. They would say of the Model T car, their first big hit, “You can have it any colour you like, so long as it’s black”; this worked fine up until General Motors offered customers a variety of colours. Microsoft has problems with diversity: Vista appears to come in flavours ranging from vanilla to vanilla. Their “distributions” would never have anything as exotic as, for example, a Christian edition. Rather, the basis of choice seems to how much one is lulled by marketing: if you’re skeptical, you can pay $199 for Vista Home Basic, or if you buy the sales message completely, you can pay $399 for the Ultimate edition. Truly, Vista’s six editions seem paltry compared to variety afforded by Distrowatch’s top 100 distributions of Linux and BSD.

Microsoft has only reinforced this “confined” impression with minor, silly mistakes. One of the more ridiculous items making its way around the web recently states that one cannot alter the Vista opening theme music; it can neither be changed nor muted. The explanation for this, according to Microsoft’s Steve Ball, is that this one opening theme is “a short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react.”

Somehow I think even inexperienced users don’t need an audio cue to know that their computer is conscious. Here’s a hint for those who dont: if you can’t do anything, it’s not. If the screen is black, press the Power button. If you are unable absorb these instructions, don’t bother to use a computer in the first place.

I digress. It is clear that the lack of choice on Vista sound and the development of Christian Ubuntu show the two ways in which the future of computing could evolve; one emphasises being confined within the straightjacket of a particular proprietor, the other emphasises the glory of choice. Yes, choice can be confusing, even maddening; however, at least it allows one to march to the beat of their own drummer, or indeed, dance to their own tune.

My recent work with Microsoft based solutions has been both painful and unpleasant; trying to get e-commerce software that wasn’t stable working with Windows 2000 and Internet Information Server 5.0 to work with Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6, was a process fraught with worry.

Fortunately, however, the transition went off without a hitch. The performance of the system did improve with the addition of new hardware. While throwing iron at a problem is generally not the best nor recommended answer, it is a more coherent answer than Microsoft often provides.

Debugging Microsoft errors has led me to a number of items which indicate that their software contains a soup of patches for symptoms of problems rather than actually dealing with the problems themselves. It’s rather like taking a cough syrup while one has the flu; the germs remain, but the cough becomes more manageable. The server is ill, but its sputtering is subdued.

While I was dealing with IIS 5, I was concerned that system resources were being used efficiently; I was particularly troubled by IIS 5’s memory allocation to dll files, which could be a cause of crashes. Rather than have a patch solving this particular problem, Microsoft created a tool to deal with the symptons, the IIS 5.0 Process Recycling Tool. The tool, according to Microsoft:

“…runs as a service on a computer running Windows 2000 and Internet Information Server 5.0. The purpose of IIS5Recycle is to recycle processes, minimizing the effects of resource-consumption problems before performance and reliability are affected. This tool automatically recycles IIS processes based on configurations stored in the Windows registry. “

Let’s examine this statement in more detail; IIS 5.0 apparently is lacking in an important aspect: it cannot prevent resource consumption problems. This tool is provided to mask this issue, standing in place of an actual fix.

One might expect an upgrade would solve this particular problem. However, in this instance, the developers have continued with this masking in IIS 6, albeit in a more effective guise. This is evident in Microsoft’s explanation on how “Worker Process Recycling” functions:

“In an overlapped recycle scenario, the process that is targeted for a recycle continues to process requests while the WWW service simultaneously creates a replacement worker process. The new worker process is started before the old worker process stops, and requests are then directed to the new process. This design prevents service interruptions, because the old process remains in communication with HTTP.sys to handle requests until it shuts down. Because the shutdown timeout value of an overlapped shutdown or startup is configurable, the worker process can be terminated while it is still serving requests, if it does not finish draining requests within the time limit.”

Did you get that? This “feature” is to hide the fact that a crash has occured. Rather than again, deal with the problem of resource allocation at source, Microsoft has opted to hide the symptoms of the crash.

Using Microsoft makes me feel like I’m a stage illusionist; I am expected to provide the image of stability, using slight of hand and more powerful hardware. Yes, there remains a debugging process whereby we can attempt to find if any of our code is creating the resource problems. However, it may very well be that the problems lie within the framework itself, outside of our reach and impervious to a genuine resolution.

All this reminds me of a former boss who used to rant on about getting “quick wins”. The philosophy of emphasising “quick wins” led to results which dealt with symptoms rather than providing an actual cure; the eventual result of so much patching was an unstable solution that needed to be rebuilt from top to bottom. “Quick wins” have a very bad habit of coming back to haunt the person who requested them; I’ve always had a preference for genuine solutions. With Microsoft, I’m just not getting them.

This past week, Windows Vista was made available for pre-order on Amazon.com. While Microsoft has been saying that they’re producing a “high quality” product, the lessons provided by Internet Information Server should make one pause: how much of what Vista contains is more of this masking rather than actually dealing with problems in the software? How often is the phrase “quick wins” being thrown at the Vista development team? Without visibility on this, it is impossible to feel comfortable with the arrival of this new Windows, which is good, because this can only help Linux.

The War on Terror has been brought home to me on several occasions. My mother was in the New York area on September 11, 2001; trying to get through to her on the phone without success for 2 hours was a genuine “heart in the mouth” episode. Fortunately, e-mail still worked and she wrote back to me.

Additionally, I had a long walk home thanks to the terrorism on 7/7; trains as far out as West Sussex were out of commission. I remember standing on the train platform and using my mobile phone to do a text message roll call of people I knew in the city, to see if they were all right. They were, thankfully.

My most recent brush with terrorism was far less traumatic and annoying than these previous incidents. As I was waiting to board the plane to go to Frankfurt last Saturday, I glanced up and saw two security officers dragging a man dressed in dark clothing off of the ramp leading to the airplane. The officers were swift and ruthless. The suspect was dragged off forcefully, and then made to do a “perp walk” in handcuffs, which proceeded past the window of the waiting area.

I have no idea if he was Al Qaeda or just some loony, but it was clear that the fellow, who appeared to be of Asian / Middle Eastern origin, was somewhere he didn’t belong. If he was a terrorist, he failed. If he was a loony, then he was completely bonkers to go skulking about without a proper security pass. Given that we haven’t heard anything on the news about this incident, I suggest it’s the latter rather than the former. Still, it had the feel of a close shave.

The War on Terror is very real. I tried not to laugh too hard when I saw Michael Moore say on television that “There is no terrorist threat”. It’s very clear you don’t live on the same planet I do, Mike. I wonder how he would have felt if he saw the same incident I did last Saturday. I also wonder how he would have felt if he had overheard a security guard say, as I did, “Yes, the government has just broadened the ban; we’re not allowing people to carry any cosmetics or powders on the plane as well as gels and liquids.” But as Mike probably flies solely on private jets (how very environmentally unfriendly of you!) I doubt such incidents even register on his radar.

The temperature of the conflict went up a bit this week; President Ahmadinejad of Iran made it very clear that he’s not going to stop his country’s nuclear programme. The United States is angry, the United Nations is reeling, but it looks like the world is going to be paralysed by indecision about what to do.

However, something must be done. Let’s put it bluntly, President Ahmadinejad is a complete and utter loon. I’m not saying this lightly. He provided ample evidence of how barmy he is in a video distributed by an Iranian website last November. The video quotes him saying that when he made his maiden speech at the United Nations, one of his colleagues said that he saw a “glow of light” around the President.

Rather than suggest that his colleague needed to have his eyes checked, he said:

“I felt it myself too…I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink…It’s not an exaggeration, because I was looking.

“They were astonished, as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.”

This is not his sole brush with insanity; worse, he has stated his desire to “wipe Israel off the map”. Such a person should not be allowed anywhere near nuclear technology (unless he suddenly decides he wants to irradiate himself), let alone be allowed to possess a bomb. Forget reasoning with him either; it’s akin to trying to talk to a lunatic with a gun. Rather, he should be treated like a lunatic with a gun; the priority should be to disarm him.

I am sure that the leaders of the world know all this and more; I can imagine the jokes about him having a Napoleon complex doing the rounds at all the fancy diplomatic dinners. However, there is a complete lack of willingness to deal with this problem. The Russians and Chinese like cheap oil and probably secretly snicker at how Iran pokes America in the eye. The French are no-shows in this struggle; let’s not forget how they set a new record for the world’s quickest surrender by first pledging to lead the new UN mission in Lebanon, and then saying they would commit a paltry 200 troops. It was only the shame of seeming weak compared to Italy that made them change this position.

Britain and America are thoroughly occupied with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are due to leave office within a relatively short timescale, and thus their political capital is spent. There really is no one who is in a position to do anything particularly tough.

Fortunately, there is one soft option and it is provided by technology. I suggest that we consider hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities with an Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb.

EMP technology, according to Globalsecurity.org, has been tested and can be effective. It’s non-lethal except within several meters of the epicentre. It will completely fry the computers and electronic equipment that Iran is using in their programme. As such, if Iran doesn’t comply with the will of the international community, detonating such a device should be acceptable to everyone. If Iran decides to build these facilities again, they will have to start from scratch. In which case, we can launch another one.

This is just an idea; I am sure a military expert could poke holes in it. However, there is very little of this kind of discussion happening at present. There is a flurry of paperwork and nonsense at the United Nations, accompanied by the hand wringing and posturing that have become typical among modern politicians. I suggest that they need to start doing something, rather than engaging in this flimflammery. The consequences of doing nothing are going to be dire. Given this, it is time to be as forceful and purposeful as any Heathrow security guard would be with any loony or saboteur. I have to say to the world’s leaders, do something, please.

Some of the people reading this article may be using a brand new laptop. I have some news for those individuals: your ceaseless hunger for ever more powerful machines is responsible for everything from the recent Dell and Apple battery fires to the next dot com bust. In other words, you’re naughty, evil and bad.

It’s not me who said this, rather it was stated in an article entitled “Crunch Time For Power Hungry Silicon”, written by Richard Waters, which appeared in Monday’s Financial Times Europe. According to him, our need for ever more powerful lightweight machines is creating a problem as battery technology is not keeping up with the demands of new processors. In his opinion, it’s doing things like “streaming racy videos from YouTube” or “cruising your friends photographs” which is causing a “fever in your laptop’s silicon brain”. The law of diminishing returns is coming into effect in our attempts to extend present battery technology. The mobile internet is about to be frozen in stasis. We’re all going to die or be poor, whichever is worse. Film at 11.

All this drama strikes me as rather funny. Personally, I can use all the multimedia features of the internet without any trouble using a relatively old laptop, one which isn’t likely to burn down my house. The difference is, I’m using Linux.

It appears that Mr. Waters has difficulty getting to the root of the problem; the real issue is the operating system. What if I were to tell you that it is possible to have a fully functional, modern desktop PC running off the same processor that is used in handhelds and other small portable (i.e., low power) devices? It’s true; a company in Britain called Iyonix PC (www.iyonix.com) offers PCs using the Intel Xscale processor. It’s intended for use with RISC OS, but also can be used with a variant of Debian Linux, a solid choice of modern operating system. With Debian and either KDE or GNOME, all the features that a modern user could want for office tasks, web browsing and potentially even streaming video are available, with a fraction of the normal power requirements. This fact simply is not well known.

The dirty little secret of the PC industry is that most users don’t need as much of the processing power and energy usage as they are presently consuming; the Windows / Intel cycle of creating an ever larger operating system which requires ever more processing power to use it is creating this situation. Users just are not aware of alternatives, and alternatives are not presented to them; there’s big business in keeping them in the hamster wheel of hardware and software replacement. There’s not enough of a sales story for people like Microsoft in saying their latest product will be more efficient in its use of resources, as opposed to having more novelty.

To be fair, those who do present an alternative are not helping matters either. It’s disappointing, but Iyonix are not offering a laptop. Acorn PC, a defunct British manufacturer of RISC OS PCs, just had its trademark bought by another company; this firm has decided to offer standard Windows laptops rather than doing something really interesting and offering the low power, high performance PCs that consumer can and should get.

In fact, the only low power device that is presently a working model of this concept is the $100 laptop that is being produced for children in the third world. This laptop proves that one can have a machine running Linux with wireless internet capabilites, with a processor that only requires a human turning a crank to make it work.

For the moment, however, we are going to live with the threat of exploding laptops; Dell and Apple are likely to be the butt of jokes for some time. I am sure any employee presented with a new laptop from either of these manufacturers is going to have a slight worry that their boss may be trying to kill them. The battery manufacturer, Sony, just slashed its profit projections thanks to these recent incidents. Perhaps there will be a slowdown in the development of mobile technology. This actually might be a cathartic experience for consumers and businesses, and refocus their minds on what is really important: efficiency, quality and durability, and frankly what would be really magnificent, an Xscale laptop running Debian, accessing the wireless at high speed while remaining cool and collected. For the moment, though, that’s just a dream.

The industry in which I work is not the most technically minded. In fact, many people in my business regard the internet as strange and frightening. For the worst cases, finding the “On” button on the PC is a real achievement. This relative lack of computer savvy has led to some acute symptoms of technical backwardness; a leading example has to do with open standards for information transfers. In short, there are none. It’s not for lack of trying, my firm attempted to lead the way, however the initiative was de-railed by one company who held fast to the belief that if they control a proprietary standard, that they would make it easier to lock in clients. They think by owning the standard, they own the customer.

When I first heard about this, I experienced that rare and transcendent state one has when a conniption occurs. No one has yet been brave enough to tell me if I actually had steam coming out of my ears; apparently I did turn bright red, however. The source of my outrage is simple; I know that open standards are not only a good idea, but they are going to be critical to business in the future.

Firms who adhere to proprietary standards are parasites. They don’t compete on quality of service, rather, they are banking on inconvenience in translating between various formats. Contrary to what one might believe, it’s anti-capitalist; a truly free market calls for a level playing field. For that to exist, open standards should be ubiquitous.

Microsoft, as ever, is leading the struggle against progress. Their reluctance to comply with the Open Document Format is very well known. Similarly, Microsoft has always made it a much simpler matter to integrate like with like rather than allow technologists to mix and match; i.e., it’s far simpler to build an ASP.NET solution for MS SQL than it is to use PHP or Java. In a previous firm of mine, there was an attempt to integrate Perl with .Net technologies; after a great deal of time and money spent on the solution, it was abandoned due to performance issues. In my present firm, communications between PHP and ASP on our present e-commerce solution are so fragile that a schedule to move to make it completely Open Source was recently accelerated.

On the other hand, I can report examples of PHP working with Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL. I can report similarly good results with Java. These solutions have run off of Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. There are some combinations more appropriate for some solutions, for example, for a high traffic e-commerce solution, I’d recommend a Java / Oracle combination, and for mid-size traffic site, I’d recommend PHP / MySQL; however, these technologies can interoperate without much difficulty.

Fortunately, more and more firms are waking up to the necessity of interoperable standards, not just for internal purposes, but also for common communications to the rest of the world. A good example is the travel industry, one of my previous stomping grounds. Opentravel.org has been publishing common XML schemas since 2001. This should be very surprising; speaking from personal experience, I can say a lot of travel firms absolutely despise each other. However, even they managed to see the benefits; travel providers win because they only have to expose their information in one format. Agencies win because their development costs are reduced because of having this easily accessible method. Furthermore, adopting these guidelines has made it easier for “agglomerators” to arise such as travelsupermarket.com, whereby consumers can compare fares; they win by getting cheaper travel.

When this progress is achieved through the length and breadth of technology, the same set of winners will be repeated. So why are so many industries still stuck in the past? In my opinion, it’s simply because the idea of top to bottom ownership is so seductive; everyone wants to be Microsoft. However, even Microsoft cannot be Microsoft any longer; their acceptance of ODF, albeit hesitant and reluctant, is a symptom of this. That said, arriving at the promised land of open standards will not be easy; it will require a lot of firms with a great deal of history of bitterness and rivalry to do something which does not come naturally, namely co-operate. However, if an industry as catty and divisive as travel can do it, so can all the rest, and so they will.

Domain squatting is one of the more unpleasant facts of online life. It’s rare that one gets a glimpse into the attitudes of people who do it, but just such an insight was provided by a ZDNet article regarding the stockpiling of 3 letter .eu domains.

According to the article, a gentleman named Andrew Hooper wanted to buy a domain for his newborn son, named Christopher James, presumably so the lad could have a space reserved for a future website. However, the domain with his initials had been purchased by a squatter company called “Really Useful Domains”.

This is kind of surprising as the people who manage the .eu domain, EUrid, have been cracking down on spurious registrations recently. They just dragged 400 American registrars to court for having done so. However this particular company is in the clear because they did it through a Canadian third party. If Mr. Hooper wants the domain, he’s going to have to fork over €1500. Somehow, I doubt he will.

Domain registry is a questionable business to begin with. The biggest registrar, Go Daddy, just postponed an IPO largely because they’re not making any money and fortunately stockbrokers have rediscovered the connection between making money and what the share price should be. OK, most of the time.

But this kind of petty squatting can only be described as dire. What makes it even more unpalatable is what the owner of Really Useful Domains had to say about it - when queried by ZDNet about the ethics of stockpiling domains, and asked if it wouldn’t be better if it was not allowed, he replied -

“I think it’s a very idealistic approach and, if you could guarantee every human on the planet would adhere to that, it would be fine, but it’s not…I’m afraid if they didn’t put enough rules into enforce it, you only need one person in the globe to not adhere to that and we’d all wring our hands.”

In other words, he’s saying that because one online entrepreneur would take advantage of this, he’s perfectly entitled to do so himself.

Just because something is not expressly forbidden does not make it moral. Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. Just because there is no authority to say something is wrong does not automatically make it right. These notions are not just an argument, they are the foundation of ethics. We should act towards the highest ideals, not guage ourselves against the lowest common denominator.

Let’s be clear, this kind of stockpiling is a form of extortion. It’s trying to get a business or individual backed into a corner, whereby their trade is inhibited by lacking a particular domain, and they have to pay exhorbitant fees in order to get out of the bind. Fortunately, it’s very, very rare that such a situation does not have an alternative. It’s simply not a good business to be in. It’s not a good nor moral way to make money.

To their credit, EUrid seem to agree. As quoted by ZDNet, the EUrid representative said “We’re not particularly fond of this.” Quite. One hopes that they will tighten their rules in the near future. Until then, I hope that Mr. Hooper found a suitable alternative for his newborn son. There is likely a world of choice awaiting him, provided he uses a little creativity. And perhaps that’s the best way to foil the plans of those who are relying on people in his situation to be otherwise.

Presumably, we’re moving into an era where Microsoft is going to play nicely; I believe this about as much as I would believe Madonna saying she was going to stop producing crap albums, but that’s what they say they’re going to do. Unlike Madonna, however, they’ve not only made this commitment, they did so in writing: in their recently announced “12 Principles”, they stated they were not going to penalise hardware manufacturers who install non-Microsoft software.

Terrific. The likes of Dell and HP should be able to poke their heads out and offer laptops with Linux on them. Or at the very least, they should be able to offer laptops without any operating system on it at all, which would be a very easy starting point. However, a month after Microsoft’s announcement, these laptops are proving difficult to come by. In fact, in some countries, one can’t find suitable hardware at all.

I may be a curmudgeon, but it goes against my principles to pay for an operating system I’m never going to use. I simply refuse to pay for a machine that has a Microsoft tax on it, no matter how hidden. Still, if one does a straw poll of major manufacturers, there’s little sign of freedom breaking out, particularly in the United Kingdom.

It really should not be that problematic; in addition to being devoid of an operating system, the hardware needs of a Linux / BSD user are fairly simple:

1. A PC should have an Nvidia graphics card, as ATI’s Linux and FreeBSD support is so dire, and…

2. In the case of laptops, wireless networking should be provided by an open source compatible chipset; Intel’s Centrino chipset is the most commonly used.

As near as I can tell from searching on Google, the number of UK hardware vendors accommodating this need is approximately zero. None. Bugger all. The closest is Novatech, who laudably have machines that come without any installed operating system, however their laptops either have the dire Intel Extreme Graphics (the only thing extreme about it in my experience is how awful it is) or again, the dreaded ATI.

One can get these machines from the United States; however, there is the rather prickly matter of customs duties, and of course, the United States and UK are two countries divided by different keyboards and power plugs. I’d really rather keep my £ key, thanks very much and not fry myself on your funny electricity.

What is frustrating about this situation is that it is a perfect market opportunity; surely some vendor can be clever enough to offer blank laptops that are ideally suited to those using Open Source operating systems. If not Dell or HP or Fujitsu Siemens, there should be at least one bright spark who realises that the rise of Open Source has presented a unique opportunity to satisfy a relatively well paid yet fussy market.

For the moment, the wait goes on. Perhaps it will take some time for the 12 principles to sink in. Perhaps the 12 principles are utter rubbish. Perhaps some entrepreneur is gearing up right now to accommodate this market space. But until this development occurs, it appears that too many of us are going to left be crying out, “Wherefore art thou blank laptop?”

One of my favourite jokes goes like this: a new recruit to the French Foreign Legion is being shown by his commanding officer around his first post, which is a fortress in the middle in the desert.

The officer shows the private where the men eat, sleep, and of course, where the latrines are. At the end of the tour, he asks, “Do you have any questions?”

“Oui, mon capitain.” the recruit replies, “what do you do when you have urges?”

“Urges?” the officer asks.

Making some suggestive movements, the recruit says with a nervous wink, “You know, urges.”

“Ah.” the officer says, pointing to a camel tied up in the courtyard, “well most of us use Daisy over there.”

Not fancying the idea of making love to a four legged animal, the recruit decides it’s best to stay away from Daisy. One month passes, two months, then three. Finally, frustrated beyond all endurance, the recruit runs screaming into the courtyard and leaps onto the camel, making love to it with all his might, and then collapses into a heap on the ground. The officer then speaks to the young man:

“Well, I hope you’re happy…but most of us use Daisy to ride to the brothel in the next town.”

Speaking of people who could probably only get a date of the four legged variety, the terrorists who have blighted air transport in and out of Britain probably don’t realise the consequences of what they’re doing. It was already inconvenient to fly. Flying is right down there on my list of experiences along with dentistry: one stands in line to check in, one stands in line to get through security, one stands in line at Duty Free, one stands in line to get on the plane, one stands in line to get through passport control on the other end, one stands in line to wait for baggage that never comes, and one has to look at a line of drivers to either find your dear ones hidden behind a Hells Angel who is moonlighting as a limo driver, or a driver who has so badly misspelled your name that he’s turned it from English into Martian. Of course the trip itself involved being crammed into a space designed for circus midgets while stewardesses who in their spare time probably work as “Katrina of the Whip” fling sandwiches at you which are hard enough to take out an eye. The terrorists, in their continuingly futile efforts to make themselves seem anywhere near macho rather than hung like a baby earthworm, have just made this entire experience even more unbearable.

This is where technology steps in. I don’t have to go on a business trip, and neither do you. In fact one doesn’t even have to leave home. Good men and women have tirelessly worked to bring broadband to the point of overcapacity to ensure that video conferencing, e-mail and document sharing are almost instantaneous. Terrorism will likely encourage this transition from jet age business to information age business.

Some might say, OK, if technology is wonderful, what about the use that these worst sort of “animal lovers” make of the internet? It’s true that Al Qaeda uses the ‘Net to communicate, but so does the FBI, CIA and MI6. In fact, maybe Al Qaeda’s operatives should try to read something other than the Koran, because, thanks a lot fellas, but communicating in the open like this helps our boys find out who you are.

Truly, we technologists have a vital role to play in the War on Terror. We need to continue to press on with developing alternatives to face to face business to sustain our economies, and to assist the authorities in tracking down terrorists who use technology for their own malign ends. We are footsoldiers in this war on terror. So, infidel geeks of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but some bandwidth.

After I completed a trial of PC BSD on one of my desktop machines, I was looking forward to moving it over to Fedora Core 5. Then I discovered something which stayed my hand; apparently wireless support for Fedora Core 5 is quite weak. Unlike Ubuntu and PC BSD, it does not come with the Madwifi drivers for Atheros cards as standard. There are plenty of how-tos, but the problem is that if wireless is the only connection one has for a particular machine, you’re fairly stuck - most require downloading drivers, through a connection that is more deus ex machina than anything practical.

Frustrated, I thought about moving to OpenSuse instead. After all, I’d used Suse before and never had this problem. However since version 10.1, Suse is moving backwards in this regard, there is no in-built support for Atheros cards.

This is disappointing, particularly since Ubuntu’s support for Atheros cards is perfect.  It also exposes the one Achilles heel of many Linux distributions; while it is outstanding in most ways, support for wireless still remains a problem.

With the rise of wireless internet and the increasing use of laptops, one would think that development teams would be pushing onward towards greater compatibility with a variety of wireless chipsets, not removing support for cards which have long had that support.  However, some distributions seem to disregard wireless almost entirely: for example, Fedora Core’s support is extremely poor. So far as I can tell, they solely support the Intel Centrino chipset “out of the box”.  This is maddening as Fedora’s support for everything else from sound cards and graphics cards is outstanding.

Fortunately, the team at Ubuntu is much more clued up about such things; their wireless support, which was always good, appears to be improving over time.  This may partially explain why Ubuntu is now the most popular distribution; it involves no ripping of hair out in order to enjoy the full benefits of wireless networking.  The developers of PC BSD also appear to understand this; while BSD’s support for wireless chipsets is still fairly narrow (they support Intel Centrino wireless and Atheros) at least this is more than what Fedora Core has on offer.

I suggest that developers working on Fedora and OpenSuse need to realise that the Linux Revolution could be hindered by a refusal to tackle this issue.  Not everyone wants to hack around with their machine merely to get onto the internet.  It will deter the nervous.  Or it may just mean that the future will belong to Ubuntu.