Arrington vs Chandra: An official bitchfight over whatsername?

Amidst all the JooJoo, I've taken a back seat on this story for a while. Right until now, where I felt somewhat obligated to update you on the matter in the way I see it. Well, Arrington filed a lawsuit against Fusion Garage even letting the public read the 41 page document. I got to about 7-8 pages and stopped. Not because there was some legal mumbo-jumbo that I couldn't understand. But it sounded like Arrington was being a bit of a whimp. They say first impression is usually the last impression – I was hardly impressed with what I have read thus far. And I know how law can be interpreted to one's preference in a particular side of a case, but there wasn't much of that to be seen.

A Ctrl+F sequence brought up the find box for me and I entered the word "CONTRACT" (not case-sensitive of course). No results found. So obviously unless there is some legal jargon that I've missed to substitute contract, oh.. wait, lets have a look at the title of the lawsuit for any hint of that. No contract mentioned, then. And whats this about "false advertising/lies & deceit"? Really, Mr. Arrington? Was that all you could muster as part of the subject of the lawsuit? Do you want the judge to send your lawsuit papers to the recycling plant? Do you think your lawsuit will be recycled after the guys at the factory vomit over the pages when they read that crap?

Ok enough messing around, I'll get straight to what I can draw from this so far and why Arrington is going to lose according to me. To be very concise:

1. I wouldn't expect someone of Arrington's experience and knowledge of startups in the industry to not take precautionary (or more appropriately, professional) legal measures before embarking on such a project. I simply mean, he should have signed a contract. I understand that even when you're setting up a startup and receive funding there are legalities involved at some level. Now, he put the whole story of how he was "heartbroken" when he felt that the guy who he was becoming good friends with over time, ended up "betraying him". You can be friends with whoever you want, Michael, but where is your ethic when it comes to business? Your project is on the line, there are companies supplying hardware and you are supposedly trying to develop a product for the masses. So could you step up and get the job done? Oh, wait its a bit late for that with "intellectual property" rights now solely with Fusion Garage. Hardly intellectual when we know its a tablet for web browsing, but thats the legal stuff for you. 
2. With the kind of contacts Arrington probably has in the industry, he chose to work with an inexperienced, unproven startup. He could use the whole "but I had faith in them" excuse, but it is what it is – an excuse. As you sow, so shall you reap, Michael.
3. The first thing that came out of Fusion Garage's side was that there was a clear lack of communication between Arrington/TechCrunch and Fusion Garage. That of course, supplied the base to their other statement such as lack of hardware support on Arrington's part as was promised, funding issues and what not. Basically Michael, you blew it. Again.

And to sum this whole bitchfight up: Michael, you are wasting your time in this whole issue. I neither know what you were thinking when you wrote the lawsuit, nor what you were thinking when you let everyone read it. I don't know what you're trying to achieve from all this. You had a few days of sympathy (one even from me, regrettably) but until you can provide something that's as obvious as daylight then I see only defeat in your horizon. Get your act together, you self-promoting bastard and go work on the Crunchpad again, learn from your mistakes and revive it if you really want it that bad.

Now, notice in my second point I used the word "inexperienced" to describe Fusion Garage as a startup. Clearly, either that or profound stupidity is the case from the fact that they are violating PayPal's rules while taking pre-orders. To quote Gizmodo's report:

The Joojoos are supposed to be delivered in 8 to 10 weeks, which is prohibited by PayPal:

ll.4 – Prohibited Transactions. [...] You also agree not to use your PayPal account to sell goods with delivery dates delayed more than 20 days from the date of payment, or to sell securities, business opportunities, franchises or multi-level marketing or goods with delivery delayed more than 20 days from the date of payment.

So there you have it folks, its all happening in the center of this bitchfight ring. Chandra vs Arrington. Really, you could make a video game out of this kind of ring match. Oh, I almost forgot. Walt Mosspuppet, the only technology journalist in the world shares his thoughts on the whole issue above my post. You really ought to read his blog and seek his approval before you pretty much buy anything. He's also the self-proclaimed King of Twitter.

Now, I'm off to think of something to say on the Google phone. Boy, people will buy ANYTHING that is free these days…

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JooJoo is the CrunchPad Reborn

If you missed the liveblog that took place a while ago, you probably don’t know that the CrunchPad is back. Not with Arrington though, nope. Fusion Garage set aside a press conference to provide their side of the tale and move on to announce their plans for this device. Gizmodo sums up what they’ve drawn up about the CrunchPad from the liveblog in this post. I’m going to just comment on each of the 10 points, parallel to Gizmodo as they’ve mentioned it.

1. If you ask me the name ‘JooJoo’ is just hilarious compared to CrunchPad and Chandra you are pretty much down on your knees begging us all to put your face up on a caricature.
2. You guys probably have a decent interface, but really if you’re looking for this product to hit off, if I were doing the marketing of this product I’d ensure this was approved by Google to run Chrome OS. Obviously it isn’t right now, so unless you’re going to offer something a bit more than the web application interface, I don’t see how you’re going to captivate the market. Apple will probably steamroll you with their tablet. Its just how it is.
3. I know I felt a little bad for Arrington in an earlier post of mine, but if I were to forget the legal brawl for a second and look at it from the programmer’s point of view, it might just be the case that unless Arrington had contributed majorly with input for the device (and not just marketing and funding), it might have been slightly justified that they booted him out. However, this is still wrong, because you don’t hear Intel tell Apple, “Alright, you guys are just throwing an operating system over our specially designed hardware, so give us the installation DVD and we’re moving on with selling Macs as our own”. It just doesn’t work that way. I mean you’d have to be a real dick-face if you did something like that. The fact that there was no contract between the two parties probably suggests Arrington had a bit too much faith (taking a risk) in the guys at Fusion Garage. Though if he had people close to advise him, I’m sure he’d have thought of being a little more sensible in his venture.
4. The specs seem alright but I still think they’re going to have a hard time marketing this product. Arrington would have made that a bit easier but with this whole legal brawl, I think Fusion Garage are worse off than they would’ve been had they not got Arrington in the first place and come up with this entirely on their own.
5. $500 for this thing. Atleast the Kindle costs less than that, and if you just replace features like for like, it probably works out to performing similarly, correct me if I’m wrong here.
6. Well, one thing I can conclude from their website is that this device is pretty slim. Not sure about the ergonomics without first hand experience, but as far as selling this device is concerned, I’ve already covered it. All I can say is good luck with getting Arrington of your case, Fusion Garage.
7. Heh. I’m not sure I’d be inclined to test this but of course, if someone’s willing to send me one I’m willing to have a go at this!
8. Gizmodo have a point here. The screen is strangely green when Chandra displays it to the camera. Anyway, first hand benchmarks will probably provide a better conclusion about the screen quality and viewing angles.
9. Hold on to that $500 indeed. Or if it were me, I’d just sit on it and relax till sometime next year, when the market will be buzzing with tablets (or so I think).
10. Yeah, I get the drift here. Fusion Garage and Arrington have pretty much tainted this device, so good luck trying to use it peacefully if you do happen to get it.

That should cover my thoughts on the JooJoo (sniggers) for a while.

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Online registration, now quicker through social networking APIs

Continuing my trend of testing new web startups, I came across LiveFyre, which is a sort of extension of Twitter enabling people to have real-time conversations over a specific subject. I'll save my review of this website for another post though. While registering I was offered to have my Twitter account linked to LiveFyre, which wasn't surprising to me. After all, the real global conversations take place on Twitter. Facebook is primarily used to keep it within your friend circle, though it does have the same global conversation potential. Disqus was actually the first implementation of this new style of registration. You can find it on a lot of popular blogs and it really fosters a community following.

What I realized during the registration process was that the intertwining due to Web 3.0 which I had earlier covered, seems to be more evident than it was, say a year ago. The signup process on websites has become shorter because you can just plug yourself in with Facebook Connect, OpenID or Twitter. I know there were (probably still are) people out there who secretly worry that Google will one day control all their personal information. Well, that day hasn't come and its unlikely to happen with the lack of clear monopoly in this regard. Facebook is huge, and when you read that their revenue will soar in 2010, you know they're not going to sell to anyone soon. OpenID and Twitter can be applied through their respective APIs, so I don't think you need to fear Google right now, though things change really fast in the industry.

I'm pretty sure many envisioned a monopoly in terms of information control. One Google account to rule them all, eh? Not quite, and rightly so. This isn't a topic I plan to drone on and on about. I just took a step back for a moment to see several pages of forms, password entries and captcha codes have been replaced by a few buttons. Of course, the conventional method won't die, its just that users have more options now.

I've got to say I prefer Posterous over WordPress for this 'social connection' reason. I rarely have my friends commenting on the stuff I write (not everyone follows the tech world in depth), and just the other day I was pleasantly surprised to have one do so.

Oh and for the lesser tech people, be prepared to get excited and go bonkers over Google's upcoming real-time search. Knock yourselves out.

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KDE 4.4 SC Beta 1 is ready for testing

The KDE development team has just released the first beta release of KDE Software Compilation 4.4. The final release is scheduled for February 9th, 2010, by which time we should have a very stable implementation of the features previewed in this beta release. To summarize what you can expect to see from this release:

• New automounter and smart device notifier
• New and improved interface for adding widgets to the Plasma workspace
• Support for widgets in system tray including battery monitor, system monitor (Bubblemon) and weather
• More functional KRunner now located at the top of the screen on execution
• Improved and consistent animations throughout Plasma and window applications
• New window tiling support
• Improved search within Dolphin and support for version control systems
• Improved thumbnailing and new import tool in Gwenview
• TimeLine, a virtual filesystem powered by a quicker and more powerful Nepomuk backend
• Kmail additions include email archiving feature, tag searching and less intrusive error messages
• KGet includes support for digital signature checking and downloading files from multiple sources
• Palapeli is a new puzzle game addition
• Cantor and Rocs, two scientific applications for advanced math and graph theory needs
• Blogilo is a new, easy to use application to write and post blogs

The full list of release goals can be found here. With the recent release of Qt 4.6, it seems justified that people are reporting performance improvements over the 4.3 series. I'll be giving it a test run soon. If time and conditions permit, it might be a fresh setup over my Fedora installation. With KDE 4.3 we saw the KDE 4 series finally mature into something aimed at the end user, and which could come close to satisfying KDE 3 users (opinions vary on this). However, with KDE SC 4.4 we are finally going to see important implementations of the 'pillars of KDE' like Nepomuk and Phonon throughout the release. This should be an exciting ride to February.

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The SixthSense technology will enthrall us all

via ted.com

Even if you’re not the technology-inclined kind of person, I highly recommend you view this video and let Pranav Mistry enthrall you for a little more than 10 minutes.

It seems like it was only yesterday that I rushed home from the last lecture in college, turned on the PC and tuned into the live stream of TEDIndia. And when he did start speaking about his brainchild, I was stunned. While he might not have the best pronunciation, his goal was clear – to bring the physical world and the digital world together.

The examples of applications he presented would pretty much render Web 3.0 as I tried to cover it in one of my earlier posts, null and void. This MIT grad is on to something special and what is amazing is the very base of his technology is quite economical. In addition to that, he plans to make it open source. The potential, then my dear reader, is quite scary.

However, though this is an extraordinary breakthrough, one thing worries me slightly, and its marketing. The recent CrunchPad debacle could serve as a reminder here, as to how nasty things can get in the industry. I just hope this project doesn’t meet the same fate. Mr. Mistry will have probably sat down and cleared his head before deciding who to trust his project with so hopefully we’ll see it in the industry soon, no holds barred.

What did strike me during his speech was the fact that he said “it was technically complicated but it offered an intuitive output”. Which means that it isn’t so simple on the software side, as it seems to be with the hardware. So when this goes open source, there is a lot of potential to modularize and expand the web and other service integration capabilities of a SixthSense device.

Taking a photo by merely using a gesture, dialing a phone number using your hand, looking at the weather in your newspaper only to find that you’re getting real time updates of the weather in front of you… these are just some of the applications or possibilities of SixthSense and if this doesn’t make you say WOW, then honestly I don’t know what will.

I won’t forget the tingle down my spine when he happily declared that the software was going to be open source and available to all. I salute you, Pranav Mistry and I wish you success with this amazing innovation.

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Web 3.0 – The Arthropod’s Limbs Intertwine

Web 3.0. Not too long ago we were talking about Web 2.0 being the next big thing. Unfortunately, when we’re talking about developments in the tech industry, two years is a really long time. Facebook created waves publicly back in 2006 and we haven’t seen a real explosion since Twitter in 2007. Don’t get me wrong though, it hasn’t been completely quiet on the Web 2.0 front. We’ve seen both these startups grow phenomenally in terms of features and application integration. We’re also seeing them spread to all platforms, not just on the PC but on the mobile as well. So why then, has it all gone a little quiet? The calm before the storm? Maybe.

Now analysts have their own interpretations or predictions about what Web 3.0 is going to be like. So really, if you happen to have a really good idea, then you can pretty much invent Web 3.0. Simple, really. So what is the industry saying? Well, the most widely believed proposition is that Web 3.0 will heavily involve Semantics. The Semantic Web is what they call it. Now the Web in its earliest form has already addressed the requirement of obtaining information at one’s fingertips. What we’re looking at now with Web 3.0, is personalized information at one’s fingertips.

“Personalized, you say?”

Let me give you an example. Say its a Friday night. I’m exhausted after a long week behind you and a heavy workout at the gym. Ive got no real energy to go out so why not relax at home with some food and a movie? Sounds good to me. So I’ll just whip up Google and look for a good movie to order and some food to watch.

“Why, I haven’t seen this one before, its perfect. That new food place sounds good too.”

Vague, as it may have just sounded, what did Google just do? It personalized my search. In a world with the Semantic Web, Google knows my favourite movie genres, probably even which one I’d want to watch on a weekend as well. It also knows what food I’d like to eat, probably even specific to what I’d like at the end of the week for dinner. Sounds a little creepy, doesn’t it? Bad enough we plant ourselves in front of the PC for so long, now its like the PC’s got hots for us and knows what we’re all about, eh? Well, thats not why the Semantic Web will shape up like that, so don’t fret.

We’re probably going to see Web 2.0 services transition into what we will one day call Web 3.0.  That doesn’t mean however, that Web 3.0 is limited to just improved searching. Unification of services is what’s actually happening. Steve Jobs once said in an address at Stanford University, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards”. Here, we have a plethora of web services in Facebook, MySpace, deviantART, Twitter, Last.fm and more, which are the dots. Looking forward if we crossed MySpace with Twitter or deviantART with Last.fm through their various APIs, we’d have something along the lines of Web 3.0. In fact, a lot of this mashing up has already been implemented. Facebook Connect, for example, allows developers to integrate Facebook with other applications and platforms.

So would it be right to say we’re already seeing a bit of Web 3.0 already? Yes, but only a little. So we’re somewhere in Web 2.5 you could say, if numbers matter to you. We’re also getting a preview of the Web running itself for us. Netvibes, for example, displays all my news sources aggregated on one page, in addition to my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Sometimes, I even enable the Remember the Milk box if I want to use the Web for task management. So basically, this whole process of bringing everything together has already begun.

What we know as Web 2.0 has largely been dominated by AJAX, which in simple terms, makes JavaScript as we know it, quick and real-time. Fast applications are definitely going to be a priority in the future as the Web strengthens its presence on embedded systems.

This brings to mind something I’ve encountered during my first year engineering course. A glance over into my neighbour’s screen during practicals involving programming would sometimes lead me to notice something really small. The relatively new coder, would create a variable in an instance where a direct operation could be performed. Addition of two numbers for example.

“Look, why would you want to waste 2 bytes of memory creating an additional integer for that operation?”

And then he’d reply, “Its just 2 bytes, how does it matter?”

Now obviously, we just dealt with some rudimentary code here. That as my friend will learn in time, is not the case when you go large-scale. Its also not the case when you go small-scale. We have to consider running several apps on a portable platform and even consider multiple apps running at the same time. So really, it does matter.

Back on topic though, lightening fast apps on the embedded platform will be (if not already are) the order of the day for Web 3.0 to make a big impact. In this area, having a solid development kit on the mobile platform is important. You just have to look at the number of iPhone applications and what they can do to know what I mean.

There is talk of how a lot of Web 3.0 will be based in the Cloud. Now that will hold true for the fact that user information will be stored online, but that doesn’t mean the Desktop is dead. I’ve touched on this before in an earlier post, and I’d like to state it again – no, the Desktop will not die. In fact, the Cloud is not even going to replace the Desktop. They will simply co-exist. So in my opinion, you shouldn’t really live with the fear that you’re going to lose everything to the Cloud.

Web 3.0 as a 3-D world? I’m very tempted to slam it off directly and say its not going to happen, but I won’t. I’ll just say its rather unlikely. People talk about how Second Life, World of Warcraft and XBox Live make great use of networking. That is true, however it would be a bit too optimistic to expect some new concept in that area. Yes, it would completely change the way we used the Web but it would have to be feasible first.

We can talk about replacing the classroom with online lectures but then again, thats like performing a mass operation on all of mankind and turning them into aliens. So yes, while its good that we’re getting access to educational databases from around the world and Web 3.0 will go a step closer in integrating those databases and making them easily accessible, its unlikely that we’re going to have something completely blow us away in this regard that would make us ditch our two-dimensional habits altogether.

To conclude, I’d just like to paraphrase the title of the post in case you haven’t quite got that. The Arthropod would probably refer to the Web itself. No, the Web isn’t a living spider, but if you take a step back and forget that there are humans involved in pumping code to make it expand, it does look like a spider’s web that is constantly expanding. And when the spider’s legs intertwine while its weaving, we get a sort of cross-web. Where every strand is linked. Thats what we’re going to see with Web 3.0.

Every connection, every link made, will open a door to new opportunities.

Filed under: Web , Facebook, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

How to turn a Linux distribution LiveCD into a LiveUSB

LiveCDs these days provide the simplest way to test a Linux distribution. Pop in the CD, reboot and then watch the distro’s default desktop unfold before you. With flash drives being relatively cheap these days, booting your favorite Linux distribution for a clean install from a USB seems to be an interesting option. And that is possible with one tool even if you’re distribution doesn’t already offer LiveUSB images for download – UNetbootin.

The main reason I looked for a tool like UNetbootin was because my CD drive seems jammed at the moment (fortunately there’s no disc inside). November promises releases from the top Linux distributions and I was looking for a quick, cheap way to boot distros and test them one after the other. Being in the ‘distrohopping’ mood, wasting CDs seems like a bad idea and I don’t have any rewritables with me at the moment.

So step in UNetbootin. What does it do then? With a simple user interface, it allows you to choose the Distribution and version number from a drop-down menu, specify the ISO, add any extra tweaks (optional, mainly for experienced users), choose your USB drive and bang – just burn. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It is.

Add to this, you can run it on Windows and Linux, so if you’re stuck on Windows and you need a quick LiveUSB fix then UNetbootin will do the job for you. Just download and install the executable setup, run the program and you’re good to go. Linux users will need to make the file executable, with a simple chmod +x ./unetbootin-linux from the terminal or changing the permissions via your desktop environment’s file Properties dialogue. UNetbootin is built using C++ and the Qt4 toolkit so in my opinion it should be possible to compile it on Mac OS X as well.

Visit the homepage here for detailed instructions on making a LiveUSB for the distribution of your choice. There are screenshots that should make things clear about the process. You can even convert bootable CDs like Parted Magic to the USB and deploy it.

I’ll conclude this one, with a reminder that a lot of distributions these days do provide LiveUSB images that are ready to download. One good indication would be to check the latest version of your distribution that UNetbootin supports. If its a little old, like Arch Linux for example, then it is an indication that there may already be an official LiveUSB version available. Unfortunately, it was only after I downloaded the Kubuntu 9.10 x86_64 ISO did I realize my CD drive is somewhat busted. That’s a side issue that I’ll sort out later anyway.

I’m planning to begin this month’s (possible) slew of reviews and they’ll probably be the first ones on this version of the blog.  I’ll be trying a different approach to reviewing while keeping the length minimum. First up will be Kubuntu, as I’ve missed KDE for too long now. Until then, see you soon.

Filed under: Linux , LiveCD, LiveUSB, UNetbootin

Why desktop market share shouldn’t be Linux’s priority

During the time in which I’ve followed Linux development and its various distributions, every year I come across several articles on “Why 200X will be the year of the Linux Desktop“. Every time I read those posts, I have just one reply in mind – “It’s not going to happen”. And every time someone mentions this in the comments of those posts, a flame war breaks out. I’ve never spoken on this topic before so I thought I’d give it a go right now.

Let’s forget the statistics for now. We all know Microsoft has the largest market share, followed by Apple. Let’s just leave it at that. They both have their shortcomings in different areas and so does Linux. It’s up to us, as the Linux community to work on our own. Linux has a very firm stronghold in the server market, so I’m not going to go into details about that. Red Hat and Novell are pretty dominant in that area, so kudos to the two of them .

The Linux kernel now has its latest stable version in the 2.6.31.x series at the time of writing. Some might argue it has become bloated and far from the minimalistic ideals people had in mind for it. But with technology progressing and the need for drivers and to satisfy the enthusiasm of some innovative minds, the kernel now has improved driver support and advanced features for basic end-users and enthusiasts alike. This is important for the desktop because contrary to what some think, the desktop isn’t really going to die.

The desktop is going to improve and transform over time and that situation isn’t likely to change. Microsoft have just recently come out with Windows 7 and Apple had last released Snow Leopard. Both of them will capture their respective markets and will succeed. We’ll have bigger screens, smaller screens and multiple screens, but the base of the software we run on it will be pretty much the same.

The community needs to get behind the big projects like KDE and GNOME now, more than ever before. KDE is slowly coming out of its cocoon as the KDE 4 series matures, while GNOME is in the process of bringing the upcoming GNOME 3 series into mainstream. We have to stop directing rants at MS and get to brainstorming for these free desktop environment giants. Bug reports need to keep coming and feedback should flow in.

Users need to be the priority, because users have needs and as a community we need to fulfill them. Documentation needs to be given a lot more attention and made more prominently friendly and visible so as to minimize frustration and trolling in forums. Distribution websites, I think, could also do with sprucing up. It is as the saying goes, “the first impression is the last impression”. Get the screenshots of the desktop visible on the page and then let users decide what they want to do. After all, possibly the most important philosophy behind Linux today, is freedom.

There have been long discussions on release cycles of distributions and desktop environments. Whatever is decided, the priority should be to have the user end up with something usable and within his/her niche. If he/she needs something stable for the long-term for example, then the distribution with that philosophy simply needs to continue working in that direction. If distributions feel that the lack of proprietary driver support is something they can’t fix without the help of the original proprietary developers, then pressure needs to be applied on the hardware companies to get what is required.

When it comes to legacy hardware, Linux has been a major boon for most users who rely on old machines to get things done. That shouldn’t be forgotten and is something that could be better integrated and focused on to give a finished product for legacy systems. Even with Windows 7, Microsoft hasn’t ignored legacy software and provides an emulation layer for software compatible with Windows XP and prior. While Linux doesn’t have that to worry about, we’ve just got to keep the old PCs alive while we know how to.

I understand that some purists and users alike may not appreciate something like Windows support on Linux. I have seen a minority of people even criticize a project as long in the running as WINE, and I find it a bit strange. We’ve got to try and put those notions aside and at least acknowledge that a team of developers with a goal in mind are working really hard to satisfy a niche of users. Remember, even OS X has made progress in supporting Windows, if not natively, but through means like Boot Camp.

If there’s any market that needs to draw concern, it is the markets that we’ve not tapped strongly into. Gaming for example, is something that applying pressure again, is going to go a long way in developing Linux into a suitable platform. I know a lot of work has gone into WINE integration in Ubuntu, but I’d like to see what Mark Shuttleworth can do to attract the gaming industry to tap into Linux. We may see increased collaboration and the community will buzz with purpose and excitement. I know the industry works fast these days, and deadlines are to be met, clients are required to be satisfied, but the areas of the industry that focus on research should not be ignored. Nepomuk, the Semantic Desktop for KDE started off as a research project at university level, if I recall correctly. But the KDE team worked on it and integrated it well into the desktop environment and now we’re looking at a new way to collect and store (meta) data. If we had something similar in gaming, well… who knows?

If you look at the progress on the mobile platform, Linux is pretty strong there already. The Android is being touted by some as a potentially huge breakthrough in mobile technology and I think the free software base, resulting in a reduced price is the reason it is going to become more consumer-friendly. Something I don’t see given much coverage outside Planet KDE, is the fact that the Qt framework is making a lot of ground on the Symbian platform giving developers yet another option to developing applications. At some point for example, we could harness Qt’s native libraries on a single mobile platform to have applications we’d normally write in Java to work quickly and efficiently on the phone. We could of course, still support Java, but then we don’t have to use it.

The main purpose behind the title of this post is to remind us all why we love Linux in the first place. It is because we enjoy being part of the free software and open source community, more than anything else. We’ve got to believe we’re good enough to compete no matter what the trolls and critics think. While it would be quite something if Free Software dominated the desktop market, it isn’t the end of the world if you stop and look at where this community’s spider-like legs have stretched into.

On that note, I’d just like to say I’m looking forward to his month’s plethora of distribution releases by the big guns to see them take a step in the direction of satisfying users. Signing off.

Filed under: Linux , Desktop, Free Software, Future of Linux, Linux, Market Share, Open Source, Year of the Linux Desktop

So you want to know how important KDE 4 is?

I’ve followed and written about the development of the KDE 4.0 project on the old version of this blog. Until now however, I’ve never addressed the criticism that some sections of the Linux community have heaped on it. So I’ll just start with this post in the blogosphere that caught my eye.

I wonder if KDE 4 has hurt the KDE project?

No, as has been said by others countless of times before, it hasn’t. It’s as they say – no pain, no gain. If you want your project to become a long-term success you have to take risks, and the KDE development team should be lauded even now for their early release of KDE 4.0 with a warning that it was meant for experimental and development purposes to provide a platform for developing Qt4 applications and take the KDE project in a new direction. GNOME clearly aren’t in the spotlight yet, because they’re not rewriting the desktop from the ground up (or atleast judging by the GNOME 3.0 shell reviews I’ve read, they aren’t). Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.

Just by taking a look at a list of distributions out there, the major distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian all use GNOME as their desktop environment of choice, and there are not really any major distributions with commercial backing that use KDE as their primary desktop.

openSUSE is a major distribution with commercial backing from Novell that uses KDE as their primary desktop environment. The same can be said about Mandriva. Slackware is the Godfather of Linux distributions and while they aren’t commercially backed, they use KDE by default.

The major problems with KDE 4 in its current state is its patchy development, performance, and reliabilty — something corporations do not want attached to their software.

The state of KDE development is far from what’s been mentioned here. You have monthly releases which cater to patches to the desktop. The same frequency isn’t sported by GNOME. Indirectly if you consider security, KDE is reacting faster than GNOME, but that again is subject to what vulnerabilities if any, have been found. KDE suffered with the early poor performance on NVIDIA systems, but if you look back at it now, NVIDIA responded reasonably quick to the pressure from the community considering this is a new, heavily experimental open source project we were dealing with at the time.

KDE’s development seems to be all over the place, without much order or quality controls. It is claimed as a work-in-progress. I know from experience people want software that is complete, something that is stable enough for them to rely on for their work.

Again, this work-in-progress statement is a bit overused. I thought even with the openSUSE 11 KDE 4 release, KDE 4.0.2 was reasonably stable if not perfectly usable. In fact, it was so minimal you could compare it to GNOME if you wanted. But we’re down to KDE 4.3 right now with 4.4 coming in February, 2010. Slackware considered 4.2.4 to be stable and useable enough so you can imagine how rock solid their next release could be. I’d go as far as saying KDE 4 will be as rock solid as 3.5 by then.

I believe that KDE 4 development has come too slow, and for an impation community that expects development to move at a pace that can compete with proprietary competitors with similar or better quality, KDE 4 is really not up to quota.

Isn’t this what the Linux community was crying for? “Slow down, KDE we can’t keep up with your use of ARGB and your rapidly evolving system tray?” GNOME in my opinion, does a good job of releasing few features now and then through their development cycle and I believe that suits them considering how mature the GNOME 2.x series is now. But we’re talking about KDE 4 here and at it’s point three release (KDE 4.3) more than a year on, we have an amazing development team thats created a desktop for the future that is likely at some point soon to put Free Software more prominently on the map.

KDE’s patchy development leads to little oversight on how the many features and eye-candy effect performance.

Turn the desktop effects off if eye-candy is not your thing. If you use Compiz Fusion or actually like desktop effects then you should be admiring KDE’s efforts to incorporate these features natively, which GNOME simply integrates into its environment. The jury is still out on GNOME 3.0 and its direction on this.

Many people, including many who commented on the original post, have complained that the desktop environment seems too slow, and forces them to buy new hardware. Of course, this does not go over well with a community known for using old, outdated hardware to run their Linux systems.

Honestly, I’ve seen this kind of comment on how KDE 4 is slow on hardware right now rubbished off on the Ubuntu forums so often, its not funny.  If you think questions that require reading the wiki or something are annoying to them, you can add this hardware criticism to their list of statements that are annoying. If you honestly think its slow for some reason, get another distro, go lightweight and get over yourself.

Of course, this does not go over well with a community known for using old, outdated hardware to run their Linux systems.

Just as an addon, if you manage your installation well then like me, you can run KDE 4 even on 256MB RAM. It’s not that hard if you choose your distribution’s packages wisely.

Connected to the patchy development and random inclusion of new features has led to the mass number of bugs hindering the software from reaching its full potential as a desktop contender.

Why not contribute to some of the KDE bug days instead of whining like an old granny? Random inclusion of new features? If you’re referring to something like the next-generation of Semantics in Nepomuk, improved multimedia integration through Phonon and a new way of looking at the desktop through Plasma as randomly included features, then you’re saying the KDE 4 developers are retards. Take a second to look at the number of bugs that were fixed for the KDE 4.3 release alone. I’ve seen charts on Planet KDE by developers now and then showing how the number of contributors and bug-fixers is only going up these days. KDE 4 has brought new life to the project and nothing else.

People care about the work they do on their computers, and having that at risk is certainly not in the interest of both companies or mainstream users. Perhaps this is the reason that KDE 4 has failed to make an impact on the major distributions and unseat the much-criticized GNOME desktop environment from being the most popular desktop?

Sure they care. But that didn’t stop openSUSE, commercially backed and community driven from releasing KDE 4.0.2 in the openSUSE 11 release with KDE 3 as the alternative, now did it? Patches and bugfixes were released and the only thing keeping it from being a long-term option was the lack of features. But backports were made to fix bugs, so it didn’t end up being messy before 11.1. When Debian comes out with their release of KDE 4 through Debian Squeeze a good while from now, I’d like to see you talk about KDE in the same way then.

From my observations of the software, the number of features and eye-candy is truly amazing. However, I find that in many cases that some of the features do not contribute to the usefulness of the software and are poorly implemented.

I’m not going to question what GNOME does or what they plan to do. That would just be plain fanboyism. So I’ll remind you of Nepomuk, Phonon and Plasma to name just a few of the pillars of KDE 4.  Some of the features don’t contribute to the usefulness of the software? KDE has always been highly integrated with its applications with Qt being the common link. The same can be said about KDE 4 as it matures. With every release of Qt 4.x we’re seeing enhancements being added to improve the KDE 4 experience, be it performance, bling or features. Why, with Qt 4.6 we’re going to get a glimpse of Kinetic and I’m sure KDE and Qt applications will take advantage of the potential of Kinetic in animation, soon enough.

The overall look of the system is nowhere as clean as it was in the earlier versions, and instead today it is a translucent mess. Also, much of the artwork is starting to take the look of KDE 3, a bit “cartooney,” with exceptionally large icons and images that look as if they were placed together in a matter of a few minutes, without much concern for whether or not the system would look better as a whole — that may be harsh, but I see the seeds of what could become a giant mess for the KDE project.

Wow, you must really hate KDE.  I wonder how much time you spend on GNOME-Look trying to get rid of the defaults. Exceptionally large icons? Have you ever heard of SVG being employed so extensively in a desktop environment? It’s what lets you make your icons and widgets however big you want, so really, stop crying. And please do think twice, when you call the wallpapers “cartooney”. I mean if you don’t like a couple of pretty flowers or some nice landscapes, it doesn’t mean they’re “cartooney”.  Nuno and the Oxygen team have done a fine job making KDE look fantastic and they deserve better than that.

Just by taking a look at the major KDE applications such as Konqueror, KMail, and KOffice, they are in not as mature as their mainstream counterparts, or for that matter the other competitors in the Linux arena.

I’m only going to agree with you on KOffice here. Building an office suite from scratch is as hard as building a desktop environment from scratch, and add to the fact you’re naturally going to have less personnel behind it. But Konqueror and KMail are very much part of the mainstream of KDE development and most of the bug fixes in the monthly point releases end up fixing bugs in KHTML rendering and KMail crashes. So they get a lot of attention and are far from ignored.

GNOME Office is not even close in comparison to OpenOffice or IBM’s Lotus Symphony, and the Epiphany web browser is not complete enough to compete with Firefox.

I don’t want to resort to bashing GNOME. But sounds like you’re just going against your own cause.

Surely distributions could work on implementing better software into their version of KDE 4. Applications seem to be a sticking point, and the fact that many major applications are rarely written specifically for the KDE desktop is not a good sign for the acceptance of the system by developers — a potential problem for them in the future.

Pardus is a fine example against this point. Take a look at how they’ve developed their own installer, own package management interface, own control panel and more tools of their own, all in Qt4 to complement their distribution. In my opinion, as KDE 4 matures further, they only stand to gain popularity.

So, how important is KDE 4? To the KDE project, it is absolutely crucial.

It is important, yes. But I don’t think there’s any cause for worry if you look at KDE’s work with the right mindset. Remember, Vista was criticized heavily and now with Windows 7 on the horizon, things seem rosy (or so people think) with Microsoft’s operating systems again. Naturally, the future of any project and the direction it takes is vital for a team of developers, no matter how big they may be.

I hate to say it, but it looks as if KDE 4 has become KDE’s “Vista.” The KDE reputation has been tainted with a divided community, mediocre products, and a seeming lack of solid direction.

You’ve just contradicted yourself, you know? Vista no matter, what people think of it, is the product of a commercial giant like Microsoft and obviously required a lot of manpower and investment to make it what it is. The fact that you compare KDE to Vista in that sense, is itself a compliment to KDE, considering the lack of such commercial backing and the considerably smaller size of the development crew behind it. I’ve already covered why clearly KDE 4 isn’t a mediocre product before and so to the fact that it clearly doesn’t lack solid direction.

I can only hope KDE becomes stable at some point in the near future, perhaps by choosing to make their “4.5″ release their stable release fit for refinement and development, much like with KDE 3.5. Perhaps creating that stable environment for people to improve upon could lead to the creation of a new, thriving community, one just as influential as the one when KDE 3.5 was around. Otherwise, they may lose the market they have fought so hard to gain.

KDE 4 hardly has anything left to prove, and you only have to be a part of the current KDE community to know that there is only a small section of users, who depending on the lifecycle of the distribution they use, are waiting a little longer with KDE 3.5 before plunging into the now mainstream KDE 4. They’re just playing it safe, which is fine if it suits them.

I must conclude by emphasizing that I have no disrespect intended to the author of that blog post, I just feel that some of the criticism KDE has received is unwarranted and out of line.

Filed under: Linux , KDE 4

Speed up YouTube, Facebook and more Flash Videos in your Browser

I just had my internet connection bumped from 256K to 512K with unlimited monthly bandwidth and I’ve started tinkering around to squeeze every bit of juice out of it. Now bandwidth these days isn’t cheap so you’ve got to compromise on speed significantly if you want to remain with unlimited bandwidth. That said, I only had to pay a small one-time fee to get the bump from my ISP.

One of the first things I did was to check my new download speed. With about 60 kB/s it seemed alright and I began to wonder how close I was to streaming YouTube videos. Turns out I was still some way off. Intermittent lags for buffering were still present and somehow there didn’t seem to be anything much different.

So I tried tweaking Opera 10 (my primary browser) to increase the number of connections via “about:config”. Enter “about:config” without quotes in your address bar and press enter. Once you’re there, enter connections in the quick find box. Under the Performance box that shows up there is a field titled “Max Connections Server”. Change it to 32 or 64 and you should see some difference in browsing. That’s of course, if you’re using Opera. For Firefox users, I’d recommend trying a guide like this one that is based on some old Firefox tweaks right from the early days of the browser.

Now that you’ve got your browser open to more connections its time to install a small application to take advantage of your net connection – SpeedBit Video Accelerator. SVA, as I’ll refer to it in the rest of the post, is available for Windows for free with the option of premium features via a commercial version. It’s also available on the Mac, but on a 15-day trial after which its commercial, sadly. Assuming your on Windows you’d want to go for the Free version before considering the commecial one which offers support for HD videos above 200 KBps. The free version is fine if you just want to benefit from YouTube, Metacafe, Facebook and other sites with Flash video.

SVA is very simple to use. Just download the setup (around 4 MB) from this page and install it. Once you’re done it should initialize on its own after the setup or you can click on the newly created shortcut on your desktop or Start Menu. Try loading a video on YouTube and see if the “Now Accelerating” notification pops up near your taskbar. That should indicate that SVA is trying to perform its tricks.

If you’re satisfied with the improvement and want to keep using this software, then might I suggest making a small change in the settings. Right click the system tray icon and click on Settings. Uncheck the second option under General Settings that says “Show Now Accelerating message”. That should let you run your YouTube videos without any annoying pop-up notification to come in your way. If you want to disable viewing the system tray icon as well you can do that by checking the third option under General Settings to “Hide Tray Icon”.

What SVA basically does is it allows multiple connections for buffering the video and gives it a higher priority, resulting in faster streaming. Also you might notice, that just as you might come to the point where you have to start buffering again, SVA gives you a bit of a boost and ensures continuity of the video. This was true even on my previous 256K connection but somehow there was still intermittent lag for buffering. With my 512K connection however, I can finally get streaming YouTube videos with maybe one moment of lag at the beginning of the video, at which point I pause and give the buffering process a head start.

In the background of this post, I’m also giving another old SpeedBit product, Download Accelerator Plus a try by downloading the latest version of VLC. It seems to be hitting 60 KB/s consistently which is great. I’m not sure if I’ll stick to it. It’s been more than three years since I last used it and it seems fine right now.

Anyway, I hope you benefit from SVA and enhance your video browsing experience. Just remember though, the faster connection you have, the more you’re likely to gain from it. Until my next post then, have a good weekend.

Filed under: Windows , Facebook, Firefox, Flash, Opera, YouTube