AnandTech ran an inter­est­ing (and VERY thor­ough) review of Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to high­light my favorite sec­tion.

Titled CPU Bench­marks, they test appli­ca­tions run­ning on both Win­dows Vista and Ubuntu. The amaz­ing thing is the appli­ca­tions run­ning on Ubuntu via Wine per­formed bet­ter than they did on Windows!

Let’s let that sink in for a moment…the open-source project writ­ten ½ by vol­un­teers and ½ by com­mer­cial inter­ests, intended to dupli­cate the Win­dows API on Linux, actu­ally out­per­forms the soft­ware it’s intended to mimic. That’s amaz­ing to me. Read the rest of this entry »

Meld is, by far, the best diff viewer & edi­tor that I have used. Ear­lier I posted about get­ting Meld up and run­ning on OSX and over­com­ing a cou­ple of issues. With the cur­rent ver­sion of Mac­Ports (1.7.1) and Meld 1.2, it’s much eas­ier :) Read the rest of this entry »

I recently came across a Yahoo Finance arti­cle about Intel’s $1.45 Bil­lion fine in Europe. In it was this:

“The fine against the world’s biggest chip maker rep­re­sents a huge vic­tory for Intel’s Sil­i­con Val­ley rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., or AMD, the No. 2 sup­plier of micro­proces­sors to PC makers.”

Let’s con­tem­plate what this “vic­tory” really means.

Intel invests its resources into some of the best and bright­est minds in the world. Intel applies itself, and as Cap­i­tal­ism Mag­a­zine rec­og­nizes “a mar­ket for com­puter chips would not exist at all if Intel did not invent, develop, and con­stantly inno­vate the chips that become the brains of com­put­ers.” Any­one in the indus­try can rec­og­nize the effect Intel has had on the land­scape. To my mind AMD should be thank­ing Intel for the amaz­ing mar­ket­place, and oppor­tu­nity, that their pio­neer­ing efforts have created.

Instead AMD sub­mits Intel to the loot­ing Euro­pean Union by suing Intel and lob­by­ing reg­u­la­tors for the past 5 years. The result: the EU is steal­ing $1.45 bil­lion from Intel. Money that Intel won by sell­ing it’s inno­va­tions to con­sumers who freely paid for them.

Why is all this hap­pen­ing? Neelie Kroes, the EU Com­pe­ti­tion Com­mis­sioner, said “Intel did not com­pete fairly, frus­trat­ing inno­va­tion and reduc­ing con­sumer wel­fare in the process.” These “unfair” tac­tics include offer­ing rebates to big cus­tomers, a com­mon prac­tice of any busi­ness wish­ing to entice more. The EU requests of Intel were so vague that they left Intel “mys­ti­fied” about what it should change.

But the real kicker in all of this is what AMD has done to itself and to all who value free­dom. Instead of fight­ing the loot­ers along­side Intel, as it should have done, it feed them to lions. AMD has helped to usher in a dystopian Atlas Shrugged style world in which the best and bright­est among us must work for free so the loot­ing masses can feast on their efforts.

I won­der, what will Dirk Meyer, AMD’s Chief Exec­u­tive who said this deci­sion was “an impor­tant step toward estab­lish­ing a truly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket,” be say­ing when the loot­ers come after him?

• Yahoo Finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Record-euro106-billion-EU-apf-15225753.html
• Cap­i­tal­ism Mag­a­zine: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5564

It seems that Ama­zon has lis­tened to their cus­tomers’ feed­back. They cre­ated a great microsite, kindle.amazon.com, for man­ag­ing your Kindle’s notes and high­lights. On this site you can:

1. View a list of all books you pur­chased from Amazon.com for your Kindle
2. Review all notes and high­lights for books pur­chased from Ama­zon. Note that you will not see notes for con­tent that you have added man­u­ally via usb :(
3. Rate all of your books
4. See user com­ments and other details

Here is the email announc­ing the microsite:

Our cus­tomers have told us that they love being able to add high­lights and notes to their Kin­dle books. We want to make it pos­si­ble for you to access your high­lights and notes directly from a Web browser too. So we’ve released http://kindle.amazon.com, an online tool that enables you to do just that.

To try it out, go to http://kindle.amazon.com, sign in with your Ama­zon account, and sim­ply select one of your books where you have added high­lights or notes.

We hope you enjoy this new fea­ture. If you have feed­back please send it to us at amazonkindle-feedback@amazon.com.

The Ama­zon Kin­dle Team

Here’s a few screen­shots of the site:

A microsite for the Ama­zon Kin­dle that shows all your notes and highlights

Detail of a book’s notes and high­lights in the Ama­zon Kin­dle microsite

Ama­zon notes that if the site is miss­ing notes or high­lights that you know you have made then do the fol­low­ing on your Kindle:

These are the high­lights or notes that you added to this book. If you added high­lights or notes and you don’t see them here, then do the following:

If you have a Kin­dle (1^st Gen­er­a­tion) then from your Home screen choose MENU and select “Check for New Items”.

If you have a Kin­dle (2^nd Gen­er­a­tion) then from your Home screen choose MENU and select “Sync & Check for Items”.

I have been read­ing on my 6″ Ama­zon Kin­dle 2 for quite some time now and really enjoy it. But, as with all inno­va­tions that try to re-invent a tried-and-true prod­uct, it has its trade-offs. It does not com­pletely replace the expe­ri­ence of read­ing a real paper book. I thought it was about time we had some side-by-side shots — the same book in print and on the Kin­dle 2, so you can see the exact dif­fer­ences. The book is Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder (link to the Kin­dle edi­tion.)

Gallery

It is imme­di­ately appar­ent that a real book has more con­trast than the Kin­dle. And images are harder to view on the Kin­dle;  the 5^th image above, of the ship dia­gram, is almost unread­able on the Kindle.

Ways that the Kin­dle bet­ters the ordi­nary book

• Built in dictionary
• Search within books
• Search within notes and bookmarks
• Dynamic resiz­ing of the text size
• A whole library of books in one device

Ways that the ordi­nary book bet­ters the Kindle

• Con­trast
• Res­o­lu­tion (espe­cially images)
• Smell
• Typog­ra­phy
• Sense of which chap­ter your cur­rently in. On the Kin­dle there is no way to know which chap­ter your read­ing other than pag­ing for­ward to the next chap­ter or back­ward to the begin­ning of the cur­rent chap­ter. Books can place this info at the top of every page.
• Sense of loca­tion within the book. The progress bar below the text on the Kin­dle works ok, but it’s not nearly as good as page num­bers and the feel of the thick­ness of the pages before and after the open page.

Drop­box is an amaz­ing ser­vice that allows you to sync your com­put­ers (Mac, Linux, and Win­dows) and backup your files to the cloud. It’s sim­ply amazing!

Drop­box: sign up here

For my day job I own and oper­ate BIG Images — a large for­mat print shop. I know this is unre­lated to Ubuntu and the main focus of this blog, but this is where I got my start writ­ing soft­ware and devel­oped an inter­est in open-source tech­nol­ogy. I just fin­ished my intro­duc­tory arti­cle for my series on the future of print­ing and imag­ing. This is the first in a series describ­ing the future of print­ing and what it means for print man­u­fac­tur­ers like BIG Images and the design­ers who cre­ate the artwork.

I just fin­ished my intro­duc­tory arti­cle for my series on the future of print­ing and imag­ing. This is the first in a seriese describ­ing the future of print­ing and what it means for print man­u­fac­tur­ers like BIG Images and the design­ers who cre­ate the art­work. Check it out here: http://www.big-images.com/blog/tradeshow/02/2009/the-future-of-imaging/

Yes­ter­day Steve Balmer made an inter­est­ing claim that Linux is a big­ger com­peti­tor than Apple. I would not have guessed that, but his pretty graph illus­trates the proof.

Steve Balmer shows us that unli­censed Win­dows and Linux are their two biggest competitors

So far the best diff viewer I have used is Meld, which up to now I could only use on my Ubuntu Linux par­ti­tion. But now, thanks to Mac­ports, I got it run­ning on OS X. Yeah!

Update

I wrote this arti­cle about a year ago. As usual, tech­nol­ogy advances, and this time it is in our favor. The hack for the .xini­trc is no longer nec­es­sary. On my machine I can install Meld straight from Mac­Ports and it runs straight away.

This took a bit of work, but I finally got Meld to run on OS X. The instal­la­tion is very easy…just tell Mac­ports to install Meld. In your ter­mi­nal type:

sudo port install meld

Get­ting Meld to run on OS X was a bit trick­ier. When launch­ing it nor­mally I kept get­ting this error: Read the rest of this entry »