08:48
- As much as I like Xandros, it has one drawback. It's a
commercial product. For an individual, that's no problem. Xandros
licensing allows an individual to install one licensed copy on as many
systems as he personally owns. If the price of even one copy is a
problem, there's Xandros
3 Open Circulation Edition, which is free for personal use, and does about
98% of what the pay-for versions do. OCE lacks pay-for software
like Crossover Office and StarOffice, and has limited support for CD
writing and no DVD writing. That last is no real problem, because it's
easy enough to install K3b, which is what I use for writing CDs and
DVDs anyway.
But Xandros OCE is not licensed for commercial use, even by schools and
other non-profits, and that presents a problem. I'd like to have a
top-notch desktop Linux distro that I could install on systems I donate
to non-profits, but for licensing reasons Xandros OCE isn't it. The
non-profits would have to buy one copy of Xandros for each system. So I
decided to take a look at some of the other desktop Linux distros that
are free for commercial use. I spent some time this weekend looking at
several of the most popular free desktop distros. Ubuntu, Mandriva, and
MEPIS are the top three on DistroWatch, KNOPPIX is in the top ten, and
Kubuntu (the KDE version of Ubuntu) is in the top 25.
All five are excellent distros, but as it turns out none of them are
even remotely close to Xandros as a Windows desktop replacement OS. I
could use any of them as my primary desktop OS, but the people I want a
desktop Linux OS for do not have my skills. For them, any of those five
other distros would present many showstoppers, including things as
simple as connecting to a Windows network or enabling a printer.
MEPIS, for example, didn't find the embedded network adapter in an
Intel D865 motherboard, and Ubuntu failed to detect my USB scanner,
which every other distro I'd tried did without a problem. Obviously, I
could setup networking and shares and scanners for the non-profits, but
that'd mean I'd end up the de facto support person, and that's more
involvement than I really want to have.
Thinking about it, the solution is obvious enough. Xandros 3 Standard
Edition sells for only $50 per system, which even most non-profits can
afford.
The other reason I was playing around with distros yesterday is that my
UMAX 3450 USB scanner isn't working properly under Xandros 3. It scans
well enough, but the output is covered in random colored blotches. I
ran into this problem several months ago under Xandros 2.0/2.5, and
solved it by installing more recent SANE libraries. Unfortunately, I
already have the most recent libraries officially supported by Xandros,
and installing more recent software from unsupported sources sometimes
borks Xandros.
I know the scanner is okay, because I was able to do a clean scan under
MEPIS. Unfortunately, MEPIS has problems of its own, not least that it
doesn't recognize the embedded Intel Gigabit Ethernet adapter. I
suppose I could scan under MEPIS, burn the files to DVD, and transfer
them to my primary system that way, but that seems kludgey. I'd like to
get XSANE working properly under Xandros 3.
Brian Bilbrey suggested yesterday that I just install the scanner on ripper, which runs Windows XP. I
suppose I could try that, but my experiences with scanners under
Windows have been even worse than the problems I've had with Linux. At
least under Linux when I get the scanner working it keeps working.
Under Windows, I just don't have a lot of luck with scanners. They may
work, kind of, for a while, but then they stop working for no apparent
reason. And that's been true for me with half a dozen or more different
brands and models of scanners, going back to Windows 3.1 days.
I suppose I could install Xandros 2.0/2.5 on another system. I know how
to make the scanner work under Xandros 2. Or perhaps I'll just upgrade
a test-bed Xandros 3 system from an unsupported repository to the most
recent SANE/XSANE versions and see what happens.
Actually, the sad thing is that I'd be happy just to buy a new scanner,
if I had any assurance that it'd work as it was supposed to. That'd be
cheaper than wasting hours trying to make this one work. Unfortunately,
there's no scanner that I can buy with any real certainty that it'll
work any better than the UMAX 3450. Support for that scanner under SANE
is listed as "complete", and has been for a long time now.
10:57
- Someone commented to me the other day that she wasn't
concerned about malware on her Windows system at home because the
computer "wasn't doing anything strange." It struck me then that the
average user's understanding of malware is dangerously obsolete. Years
ago, malware was written mostly by teenage punks, whose only real goal
was to vandalize systems by corrupting files, formatting hard drives,
or displaying stupid banners.
Those days are long gone. Much malware nowadays is the result of an
unholy alliance between spammers and organized crime. Their goal is to
make malware pay, and the last thing in the world they want to do is
make it obvious to you that your system is infected. They want to keep
using your system, unbeknownst to you, as a spam relay or bot. They
want to log your keystrokes, record your passwords, and steal your
identity. What they don't want is for you to figure out what's going
on.
Some recent malware even defends your system against being infected
by other malware. After all, once someone owns your system, he doesn't
want someone else's malware trying to take it away from him. It's
ironic to think about the invisible Darwinian battle going on right now
on millions of PCs, with only the fittest malware surviving. It's more
than ironic; it's frightening.
And what's truly frightening is that nearly all computer owners are
more or less clueless about what's happening, and even those who have a
dim understanding are pretty much powerless to do anything effective to
stop it. Give Microsoft their due. They've belatedly realized the
problem, and thrown huge resources into the battle against malware.
Unfortunately, what they're doing is all for naught because they refuse
to acknowledge the real problem, which is that Outlook, Windows, and
Internet Explorer, what I call OWIE, are fundamentally broken from a
security standpoint. Short of completely rewriting their operating
system and applications from the ground up, there's ultimately not much
Microsoft can do to fix the problem.
Microsoft touts SP2 and autoupdate, not because they're truly
effective, but because they're all Microsoft has to offer. A Windows XP
system with SP2 applied and autoupdate enabled is more secure only in
the sense that it is protected against older exploits. But many
post-SP2 exploits exist, and locking the front door doesn't help much
if you leave the back door standing wide open. The fundamental design
flaws of Windows remain, and all the patches in the world won't change
that fact.
Here's the simple truth. Every time I look at a Windows system owned by
a regular person, regardless of how up-to-date the patches are, that
system has been infected by at least one malware program, and usually
several. Every time I look at a Linux system owned by a regular person,
even those that have never been patched, that system is free of
malware. You can argue the whys and wherefores all you want, but that
simple fact remains: Windows=Infected and Linux=Clean. A regular person
who runs Windows is playing with fire, period.
My readers are a technically-savvy lot, of course. Most of them are
capable of securing Windows adequately on their own systems, although I
wouldn't be surprised if even some of my readers have a malware app or
two lurking on their hard drives. But even technically-savvy people
can't secure Windows sufficiently well to allow it to be used safely by
non-technical users without regular supervision and intervention.
My solution to setting up a safe system for family and friends is to
install Xandros Linux. The OCE version is free for personal use, and is
more than sufficient for about 99% of what most people want to do most
of the time. For those who absolutely need Windows, for example for
running games, my solution is to setup the system to dual-boot Xandros
and Windows and to warn the user to run Windows only when absolutely,
positively necessary. Ideally, I'll disable the network adapter under
Windows, which is about the only way to make Windows truly secure. And
even then I have my doubts.
11:52
- I've been doing some more experimenting with DVD rips, or,
more accurately, with burning DVD rips to DVD+R discs. In the past, I'd
simply burned the DVD+R discs at 8X in the Plextor PX-708A burner,
using Verbatim 8X DVD+R discs. That never worked properly. On a
four-episode DVD, the first episode would generally play back properly,
the second had some video and audio artifacts, the third was
extremely jerky in video and audio, and the fourth wouldn't play at all.
Someone suggested burning the discs at a slower rate. I tried that once
on my previous main system, setting the burn rate to 2X or 4X, but K3b
0.11.15 on that system simply ignored my speed selection and burned at
8X anyway, with predictable results. I have K3b 0.11.23 installed on my
new main system, which also has a PX-708A DVD burner, so last night I
decided to try again. I set K3b for 2X and started it burning to a
Verbatim 8X disc. K3b started up, and told me it was burning at 2.5X,
which I thought was an interesting number. The disc completed burning
without errors, and I popped it into the DVD player. Barbara and I
watched the first two episodes last night, and there were no video or
audio problems in either of them. We'll try watching episodes 3 and 4,
but I expect they'll be fine as well. So apparently burning at a lower
rate does indeed solve the problem.
Here's what I don't understand: when I use the DVD drive to backup
data, either to DVD+RW or DVD+R, I write at the maximum rate supported
by the drive. (The Verbatim 8X discs also work reliably at 12X and 16X,
just as an old spindle I have of 24X Taiyo Yuden CD-R discs works fine
at 40X and 48X.) When I backup data, I tell K3b to verify after
writing, and the verify operation always returns "all files seem binary
equal". So, if data can be written flawlessly at high speed, why does
video need to be written at 2X or 4X to be reliably readable?
Barbara has a four-day holiday weekend off from work, so I'm going to
take the time off as well. I'll probably do a bit of work, but most of
the time we'll spend lying around relaxing. So there's not likely to be
much new posted here until next Tuesday.
08:40
- I'm trying to figure out if I'm an A-list blogger or a B-list
blogger, not that it really matters much. I came across an article
on slashdot yesterday that had a link to lists of the top A-, B-, and
C-list bloggers. I recognized several of their A-listers, a few of
their B-listers, and a couple of their C-listers, but that was about it.
That got me thinking, so I did a search to learn what qualified a
blogger for those categories. I came up with this article,
which categorizes blogs by daily page read counts and total reader
attention per day per blog. I was surprised to see that only about
2,000 blogs generate 1,000 or more page reads per day. According to
that article, 1,000 page reads/day defines the low end of the
B-listers, and 15,000/day the bottom of the A-listers. On that basis,
I'm solidly in the middle of the B-lister range, which I suppose means
I'm in the top 1,000 or so in page reads/day.
But according to the other metric, I must be an A-lister. The article
categorizes B-listers as receiving 30 to 100 hours of total reader
attention per day, and A-listers 100 to 400 hours. My sites receive
roughly 2,000 visits/day on average, so if one assumes that the average
visitor spends no more than three minutes/day reading my sites, that
still takes me to the bottom of the A-list at 100 hours/day total.
Figuring by page count makes the issue even more obvious. In terms of
average page reads per day, the average visitor could spend only a
minute or so on each page before I exceeded the 100 hour/day total.
Not that any of this is really meaningful. Whenever I see a list of top
blogs, I always look for Jerry
Pournelle's journal page. It's never listed, despite the fact that
Jerry generates between three and four times as much traffic as I do,
both in terms of visits and page reads. Jerry often posts very long
entries and numerous reader mail messages. With his daily visitor count
and page count, he surely exceeds the 400 hours/day which that article
lists as being the top of the A-list. Jerry's also solidly A-list in
terms of page counts. And yet his journal is never listed. Hmmm.
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Copyright
© 1998,
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by Robert Bruce Thompson. All
Rights Reserved.
