<rant>I just read this article iPhone Coders Miffed Muzzled By Apple s NDA - Webmonkey. Steve Jobs. You can kiss my ass. There is nothing insanely great about Apple, who uses BSD under the hood of their OS for God's sake, and then has draconian and stupid NDA's like the iPhone app developer one. I hope Linux phones bury your iPhone. You can believe me when I say that will never ever use an iPhone. In fact... I'm thinking of selling my iPod classic (not that it has ever been sullied by any DRM iTunes) now too.

What an assualt on our freedoms to have something so potentially cool also be so horribly corrupted by control and fear. If you think your product is best then put your access to it where your mouth is. Open everything up so that it can be freely enjoyed.  Apple frustrates me so much, because the potential is so great. But the constant over-control and fear that is clearly there behind almost every product is just maddening to me. 

As the article "Should We Fear the (Microsoft) Geeks, Bearing Gifts?" states, we should be wary of Microsoft's intentions here. Microsoft's worst market and the one that has the most growth is in the web server space. But should we really be all that worried?

There is no end to the stupidity of decision making in IT, but when it comes to dollars and cents, especially these days, it is hard to justify an expensive Microsoft Windows operating system. On top of the Microsoft cost, it will also require lots of other expensive security programs and management tools just to keep it running and secure. Thousands of dollars worth of software just to run the worlds best free web server, Apache? 

That sounds monumentally stupid and costly. Perhaps we shouldn't be worried until Microsoft starts giving away their operating system to everyone and just charges for support.  Free as in beer will only get you so far, but I think that is the only way that Microsoft will ever be able come close to competing. Open Source will swallow them whole in few more years. They already know it.

It will be even worse for them with the economy in the state it is in. Everyone is looking to save a buck. I think it will cause a lot of true blue Microsofties to rethink their purchases like I finally did over 10 years ago. There is no room for loyalty when the company you are being loyal to is pretty much ripping you off. 

Microsoft director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow is quite frankly a jerk. He thinks that a person, organization, city, state, nation, or continent, can't take advantage of open source unless they can code it. I've added a few extra items in the list, but I'm just extrapolating his idea, which is ridiculous. The reason is simple. Microsoft doesn't allow you to code their operating system or applications, yet he is asking you to use them. How silly is that? One system allows you do jump in and code away, if you have the skills to do it, while the other system keeps their crap bloated code to themselves whether you have the ability or not. I can't help but find it funny that Matusow can't see the irony in his complaint.

I think that they should put their code with their mouth is and open everything up to South Africa. Make all of their software truly free and open source just to apologize for Matusow's ignorance. I know that won't happen. But hey, it would be a fun experiment. Oh but that won't work because no one in Africa can code right? 

Someone better tell that to South African Mark Shuttleworth who started Thawte and then created the Ubuntu Linux Distro. I wonder where he learned to do all that?

Yet another sucker Linux vendor caves to Microsoft.

So I guess there are a lot more supposed open source OS vendors that don't give a crap about what open source stands for than I thought there were. How could so many Linux distributions make deals with Microsoft?

I'm so mad at SuSE, TurboLinux, Linspire and Xandros. For shame! All of you. Have you no backbones? Morals? Brains?

Thankfully, no one can steal Linux away from me. We have Canonical (Ubuntu), Redhat, and Debian still standing their ground.

I hope that Microsoft and these other bozos realize that every time they make another deal like this they anger and dissolution even more people. SuSE was, up until they completely lost their minds with Microsoft, one of my favorite distros. In some strange way I'm glad they made themselves irrelevant to me and pushed me into the waiting arms of Ubuntu.

I just read this article over on Linux-watch.com. Its about Storm, which is an Object-relational Mapper (ORM) tool that is used as an integral part of Launchpad. While its not the full open sourcing of Launchpad as many critics of Canonical may want, I think its a step in the right direction. Its an intriguing direction at that. Launchpad is made up a a bunch of components.

Who is to say that all of the underlying technology for Launchpad can't be released as FLOSS, but not the way that each piece interacts and is used to create Launchpad as a whole? While this is technically speaking a perfectly fine thing to do, I think that Launchpad as a whole could still benefit from a more community based approach as a product. 

The topic of imaging Linux partitions came up at the COD LUG today. I thought I would drop some links to some FLOSS software that can replace much of the functionality of Ghost. In the past I've used Knoppix to run gparted and partimage to backup Windows and Linux partitions. 

Now there is a new bootable Live CD called Gparted-Clonezilla. Its a very small distro that can fit on the business card sized CDs. They also have a script that can convert the iso to a bootable usb key.

I'm going to have to check out the bootable usb key this week. That would be great to have on an old 128mb key for imaging and backing up PC's.

I had a great time at Flourish. My Dad has been learning about Drupal for a while and since a Drupal person (Hey Angela!) was presenting, I thought he might be interested in spending some good Father/Son time together. He really seemed to enjoy himself. On Saturday it was really all about meeting up with the rest of the Ubuntu Chicago Loco. What a great group of people! I really enjoy our enthusiasm for open source and Ubuntu.

I enjoyed the Chris DiBona during his key note. It was interesting to hear more about Google's Summer of Code project. Especially after hearing Angela Byron's talk on Friday. She was, by far, the best speaker of the weekend. I wish everyone had the chance to listen to her talk. You might think to yourself... Women in Open Source? Why would I want to go to that? I'm not a women. Well duh! That is exactly the point. It turns out that women make only about 1.5% of the participants in open source projects. That is so much lower than I would have guessed. Her talk on tolerance and openness in a community really hit home. This is exactly why I think that Ubuntu is so successful. The Ubuntu community, much more so than other Linux distro's that I've dealt with, is so much more open to all kinds of people. The attitude from Ubuntu is everything. Linux is Linux. We are all using the same code more or less. What makes a distro for me is the community backing it. I think Ubuntu has a lock on community right now, and I want to make sure that it stays that way and even gets better.

I found this cool article over on http://livingwithoutmicrosoft.org. It points to this interview of two Harvard economists. Its interesting to me that the discussion turned to piracy and how it actually helps Microsoft. One commenter saying "..if they stopped Chinese people using pirated copies of Windows, Linux would become the number 1 OS overnight."

I quite agree there. If people decided to be ethical about their computing Linux would become number 1 almost overnight. That's what happened to me. In my college days, when I was terribly cash strapped but hungry to learn about computers, I took 30 3.5" disks to Kinkos and I zipped the entire hard drive. I then took it all home and figured out how to manually reinstall all of the applications back onto my Windows 3.1 system at home. Thus I had MS Office, Word Pefect, Corel Draw, PageMaker, Lotus 123 etc... everything useful you could want or need.  

I've been working on my MythTV quite a bit lately. With the new baby, my hobbies have taken a turn towards things I can work on in short hour long chunks :).

I've been having this weird problem with changing channels. When the channel changes, the auto-detect feature for Progressive or Interlaced video would incorrectly choose Progressive. I am using the PVR-250 card. It has RCA, COAX, and S-Video inputs. For some dumb reason I was messing around with using the RCA input. It turns out that anytime the cable box menu would appear on screen during the channel change, that the auto-detect would detect progressive and not interlace. All I had to do was use the COAX connection and it stopped having that issue.

I have to say that it went fairly easily. So far I have no major issues. I'm in the middle of recompiling VMWare. However, now that I have 7.04 I think I need to look at the KVM capabilities and see how well that runs Windows XP for me.