A few weeks ago I updated to the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. This is the 7.10 (meaning October 2007) release, called “Gutsy Gibbon”. I encountered a couple of serious issues early on, but now that these are resolved things are running well. I’ll describe the issues and solutions so that anyone else encountering them can easily overcome them.
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Author: Jamie Flournoy
Leopard Upgrade Report: Mo’ Features, Mo’ Problems
(Apologies to The Notorious B.I.G. for the title.)
I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” recently. In short, it’s not ready for mainstream use. There are a few nice improvements, but these are balanced by numerous problems that make me wish I had waited until, say, June 2008 or so. If you haven’t upgraded and aren’t sure that you need to, I suggest that you wait a few months, until some of the bugs have been worked out.
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Another E-Book Flop, This Time From Amazon
It doesn’t take a lot of courage to predict that Amazon’s new Kindle electronic book reader will be a flop. This device looks like something that Sony or Apple circa 1994 would cook up. It’s getting a lot of press attention (such as the cover of the current Newsweek), but this is only because it’s Amazon promoting it, and because the tech press is obsessed with gadgets.
A closer examination, though, reveals that Kindle doesn’t solve the problems that caused prior e-book efforts to fail. It’s not better than a book in any way, and yet it costs more than a laptop PC and is nearly as complicated.
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Journalists, Developers Puzzled by Android SDK’s License
The Android mobile phone software platform from Google has some journalists and developers confused due to its license terms. The terms are open source, but not as free as the GNU General Public License. That decision has people wondering what Google’s up to. I have a theory about why they did this.
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Capacity vs. Scalability
In I still don’t get the fascination with Ruby on Rails, Andy Davidson writes:
Scaling does not mean “Allows you to throw money at the problemâ€, it means “Can deal with workloadâ€. He goes on to recommend mod_perl instead of Rails.
I’m not interested whether he likes Rails or not. Lots of people hate Rails, and I don’t care. I’m not going to make a big deal about the fact that he’s comparing a runtime architecture (Apache + mod_perl) with a framework (Ruby on Rails).
Those are insignificant compared to his claim that scalability means “Can deal with workload”. Actually, that’s a description of capacity.
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