Community Matters

During the panel that I participated in at OSBC the panelists were asked what they thought of the “Google model” of computing. I was rather negative about this. Actually, according to Yahoo News, I said “The Google model really scares me”. Yep, that sounds about right. I talked about this before. Where’s my data and Google’s subpoena is a sign of some of the downside of their server centric approach… . So consider this part three of an ongoing series…

Here’s a new example why the cloud model is flawed – and just for kicks, it’s not picking on Google but on Adobe this time. Adobe recently released their Web version of Photoshop Express. If you ignore the cute “the lawyers make us do this” tool-tips and actually click through the terms of use you’ll find language like this:

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

So when you use their web software you grant Adobe worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and sublicensable rights to use, reproduce, modify(!), publish(!) and derive revenue(!) from your images.

Wow. One more reason why I don’t like these “cloud services”.

I think I’ll call it “Jon Williams’ Law of Open Source”. But maybe that wouldn’t be fair as others have pointed this out before (including R0ml)…

Basically the point Jon was making at the end of his keynote was that the only way customers will continue to pay for open source software if the open source project that they are paying for doesn’t mature. Or in other words, if your company has an open source based business model, keep breaking the software and people will keep paying you.

Depressing

I’m at OSBC this week; maybe the only open source conference that I attend that has on it’s invitation email the note “business attire requested”. It’s an interesting conference, one that really tries to focus on the non-techie aspects of open source. Lots of execs and manager types in the audience – and the only true geeks and developers than I ran into so far are speakers (so am I – I’m part of a panel on the future of operating systems later this morning).

Matt Asay opened the conference with a good dose of the usual (all kinds of statistics that show just how much the industry embraces open source) and a bit of the unusual (a video spoof that he did on his Mac trying to show the inevitability of open source’s success – note to Matt: video editing is really hard – that’s why people get paid a lot of money to do it… also, did you have valid license to use the music and images / video clips? After all this conference has lots of lawyers in its audience…). But don’t get me wrong, it was a good opener and it got people in the right mindset for Red Hat’s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst who gave the opening keynote.

It’s very interesting to hear a non-insider speak about the open source industry. Jim was the COO for Delta airlines before he joined Red Hat at the beginning of this year. Lots of what he says is the standard marketing fair that you are used to from Red Hat execs (his predecessor, Matthew Szulik, spoke here last year). But if you pay attention, there are a few new topics tipping up. When he talks about service he seems a lot more comfortable with the model and much more focused on the customer needs. That’s expected. What surprised me was his explanation of how customers are actually participating in the development. His logic? 75% of all software is written as in house apps. So almost all big customers have plenty of developers. And for many of them it makes business sense to have a few developers on staff who participate in the community building the software that they actually use.

Makes perfect sense, but it’s the first time that I heard an open source CEO speak openly about the power of community in this context – not the “anonymous developers” out there whose work they leverage, but their own customers as part of that community. Very interesting.

Looks like the Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) Disk Utility has even more issues than the partition resize bug that I already talked about.

Fundamentally it seems to fail when trying to add members to a mirrored RAID Volume. I tried several ways to do this but every time I try I get one of these fundamentally useless error messages: “Unrecognized Filesystem”.

Turns out you need to go back to the command line and use the underlying tools that the GUI tool is supposed to use. Here’s a description of the steps that worked for me:

• diskutil list
  Now find the Identifier of the partition or disk you want to add; it’s something like disk4 for a disk or disk4s2 for a partition. While you are at it, make sure that the disk that you want to add has the same partition scheme as the one that holds the existing RAID slide – otherwise this won’t work, anyway.
• sudo diskutil addToRAID member Identifier /Volumes/Mountpoint
  where Mountpoint is the name under which the original RAID is mounted (TAB-expansion will give you the options of what’s there under /Volumes/, so this should be rather straight forward). Note that this command should be issued as superuser, so you need the sudo
• diskutil listRAID
  will show you the progress of rebuilding the mirror. Depending on size and connection speed this can take a long time. I did a 500GB RAID of two external disks connected via USB and that’s estimated to take 16 hours…

I wish they paid more attention to the functionality of their tools. Being pretty and easy to use is nice – but it actually needs to work, too.

Interesting blog entry over at ComputerWorld. The fundamental statement is that an EeePC plus 3G modem is a rather interesting competitor to the iPhone. Arguably the iPhone is more portable and the user interface is much nicer, but from the overall internet experience, I’d say that the EeePC is ahead.

Now think about the MID (Mobile Internet Devices) category that Intel is creating. Equipped with WiMAX (or 3G wireless capability) and a full x86-based software stack, they allow you to experience the internet just like at home (which frankly the iPhone doesn’t quite do – missing Flash support is just one of the issues).

Do I think that this will seriously impact sales of the iPhone? Not a chance. But it’s an interesting angle to think about the value proposition of MIDs and even the (second generation) EeePC.

I for one don’t own an iPhone and find myself taking my EeePC with a Sprint EVDO adapter to many places…

This little write-up is targeted at parents who never thought of photography as a hobby and now want to start taking pictures to document their children.

I’ll cover a few simple topics:

• what’s the right camera?
• what other equipment do I need?
• how can I manage these pictures on my computer?
• how can I print them / post them?

And of course we will also talk a bit about actually taking pictures – but the focus is the non-photographer trying to get started.

For this first part, we’ll assume that you don’t have a camera that you use every day (or if you do, then you are considering getting something that works better for this purpose). So we’ll start with the basics.

You definitely want a digital camera. I know there are areas where film is superior – taking pictures of your children is not one of them. First we’ll have to pick the type of camera that you want. A compact digital camera (often also called point-and-shoot camera or D-PnS) or a D-SLR (digital single lens reflex). D-PnS cameras are usually small cameras that use the built-in LC-display on the back of the camera to frame the picture. In contrast, on a D-SLR camera there is an optical viewfinder that uses the same lens as the actual image sensor. D-SLRs normally allow the user to change lenses, most of them don’t allow to use the LC-display on the back to preview the picture, but this is showing up as a feature on some newer D-SLRs like the Nikon D300 or the Canon EOS 40D.

Here’s an overly simplified table that compares the two groups. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we are basing this on “decent mainstream” cameras of each group at the time of this writing:

Note that I didn’t include Megapixels in this table. Once the camera has about 6Mpix, it doesn’t really matter. That’s enough for a full page print of your pictures. What is much more important to the quality of the pictures is the quality of the lens and the image sensor used. Which brings me to the key point here. Your goal is to take good pictures of your children. Point and shoot cameras are much smaller, much cheaper, but their main shortcoming tends to be the quality of the pictures that they take. This discussion necessarily has to make many generalizations, but one thing that I have seen consistently across all brands and all price ranges of point and shoot cameras is that the image sensors tend to create much noisier pictures at the same sensitivity settings as decent D-SLRs and that in general the color range and vibrance of the pictures is significantly inferior on the point and shoot models.

I guess it all comes back to “you get what you pay for”.

So what’s the recommendation? If you absolutely must have a tiny camera or absolutely cannot afford more than a couple hundred dollars, I guess you should go with one of the higher rated point and shoot cameras. But if you want good pictures, plan to print some of them or want to stretch what you can do when taking pictures of your child even the least bit – take the plunge and look at a D-SLR. This doesn’t have to be all that expensive.

You can get the entry level cameras from Canon and Nikon (these two brands are by far the leaders in the market and I’d suggest sticking with one or the other) including a decent lens for under $500; at the time of this writing, trusted online stores like B&H Photo have both the Canon Rebel XT with an 18-55mm lens and the Nikon D40, also with an 18-55mm lens available new for $470 and $500, respectively. I’ll try to keep this information updated as prices continue to fall and newer models replace these entry D-SLRs (and as a side note, if you click on the button on this site to get to B&H Photo and end up buying from them, I get a small affiliate bonus from them which would help offset some of the cost of maintaining this blog).

I take a lot of pictures. I average somewhere around 2500 a month these days. But I still think that there’s a lot that I can learn. Especially about photography as art (instead of photography as documentation). So I have signed up for a few workshops with Peter Schütte. And was reminded again of the title of this blog. Community absolutely matters. You learn so much more when doing things with others, exchanging ideas, getting feedback and being able to ask questions. This is not something that was invented by software developers after all – it’s how we develop; in any skill.

I look forward to taking more classes and experiencing more of that great photography community.

In an interview with Laptop Magazine Jerry Sheen, Asus’ CEO, finally confirmed some of the details of the EeePC that I was most curious about.

First and foremost, the EeePC 900 won’t be based on an Intel Celeron M but instead on the Intel Atom processor – the platform codenamed Diamondville. That should be great news for the power consumption of this little system, while still providing very respectable performance. There are of course no benchmarks available yet, but I expect the new system to perform better than the existing EeePC 701 model. Interesting comments on the comparison with the competing Via chips: “Diamondville is the better choice, because it uses the 45-namometer [process]. And pricewise it is very competitive. In my planning I will continue to use Intel’s Diamondville. And for the VIA one I think from the power point of view, Diamondville is still better.”

Equally important, Mr. Sheen confirmed that there will continue to be a Linux based version of the EeePC. Interestingly enough, he explained that the low end model with an 8GB SSD will run Windows XP, while the higher end versions with 12GB or 20GB SSD will be Linux based. I couldn’t be happier with that positioning.

And he confirmed what was already announced at CeBIT – the 8.9 inch 1024×600 display.

Finally he announced that the system would be available in April or May, earlier than many people assumed it would be – that’s great news. I can’t wait to get one (and what will I do with my existing one? why, my three year old twins always wanted a computer…)

Interesting… Asus’ EeePC is basically the hottest selling computer out there, yet Walmart stops selling Linux computers in its stores, including the Everex Cloudbook, which is competing for exactly the same market.

Interestingly enough, they will continue to sell these machines online, but apparently they are not flying off the shelves in the stores so they will disappear from there. I wonder why this experiment failed. Is it a problem with the Everex machines? Is it that Walmart is not exactly attracting the right audience for these computers (I cannot remember the last time I was in a Walmart)? Or is Linux simply the wrong choice of OS for this market segment?

I look forward to seeing more sales numbers for the EeePC, the Cloudbook and some of the other new entries into this market like the Kohjinsha E8 and the yet to be officially announced Compaq 2133.

As the number of EeePC-sized machines increases we are seeing more and more comparisons. And the more of them I see, the more I am disturbed about the cluelessness of some reviewers (no offense…).

Look at this comparison of the HP 2133 vs. EeePC 900. Specifically look at the table at the bottom. Green means better. The Via C7-M runs at more than 1GHz, the Intel CPU quoted runs at 900MHz. Argl.

First – I have yet to see any public information on the CPU used in the EeePC 900. And second, as I mentioned before in the Cloudbook vs EeePC 701 comparison, a Via C7-m at twice the frequency is still slightly slower than a Celeron M.

Vista on a machine like the HP 2133 would be seriously painful.