compaq

What on earth is going on?

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

AOL-Time Warner in talks to buy Red Hat? I found this this morning. It’s intriguing, but I can’t decide if a buyout would be a good thing or a bad thing. After all, Netscape was in decline when AOL bought it. It nosedived afterward. Obviously, the problem was twofold. When AOL acquired Netscape, they didn’t acquire all of its mindshare. Some of the most talented people got fed up and left. You can take Jim Barksdale or you can leave him. The loss of Marc Andreesen and Jamie Zawinski, though, was substantial.
The second problem was that AOL wasn’t serious about competing. They bought a browser technology and basically sat on it. Netscape 4.x was fundamentally flawed, as even Zawinski acknowledges, although I would argue it was no more fundamentally flawed than IE 4.x. The Gecko engine, on which Netscape 6.x is based, is solid technology, even though it took longer to get to market than anyone had hoped. Although Netscape 6.x won’t bowl anyone over, other browsers based on the technology, such as Galeon, are absolutely fantastic. But AOL chose to release a half-hearted browser with the Netscape name on it and continued to use the IE engine in its flagship product even after the favorable agreement with Microsoft that prompted AOL to do so in the first place expired.

That begs the question of what AOL would do with Red Hat if it owned it. Red Hat is still the big-name player in the Linux field, but Red Hat is concentrating on the server market. You can still buy Red Hat at retail, but on the desktop, Red Hat is arguably #3 in popularity now behind France’s Mandrake and Germany’s SuSE. Red Hat is the only Linux company that’s making money, but that’s largely by selling consulting. That’s not AOL’s core business. At this point, AOL is more of a media company than a technology company. Software just gives AOL more outlets to sell its media content. Consulting doesn’t do that.

The best possible scenario for a Red Hat buyout would be for AOL to, as Microsoft puts it, “eat its own dog food,” that is, rip out the infrastructure it bought from other companies and replace it with the technology it just developed or acquired. Since AOL is largely powered by Sun servers, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to migrate the infrastructure to Red Hat running on Intel. Then AOL could give a big boost to its newly-acquired services division by saying, “We did it and we can help you do it too.” They can also cite Amazon’s recent successes in moving its infrastructure to Red Hat Linux. There is precedence for that; after AOL bought Time Warner, the entire company started using AOL for e-mail, a move widely questioned by anyone who’s used anything other than AOL for mail.

Of course, it would be expected that AOL would port its online service to Linux, which would create the truly odd couple of the computing field. AOL, meet sed and awk. Red Hat would certainly lose its purity and much of its credibility among the Linux die-hards. AOL would bank on making up the loss by gaining users closer to the mainstream. AOL could potentially put some Linux on its corporate desktops, but being a media company, an all-out migration to Linux everywhere within is very far-fetched.

To really make this work, AOL would either have to enter the hardware business and sell PCs at retail using its newly acquired Red Hat distribution and newly ported AOL for Linux and possibly an AOL-branded office suite based on OpenOffice, or it would have to partner with a hardware company. Partnering with a big name seems unlikely–a Compaq or an HP or an IBM wouldn’t do it for fear of retaliation from Microsoft. Sun has never expressed any interest in entering the retail computer business, and even though Sun loves to take opportunities to harm Microsoft, Sun probably wouldn’t cooperate with AOL if AOL replaced its Sun infrastructure with Red Hat Linux. Struggling eMachines might be the best bet, since it’s strictly a consumer brand, has a large presence, but hasn’t consistently turned a profit. But AOL could just as easily follow eMachines’ example, buying and re-branding low-end Far East clones and selling them at retail as loss-leaders, taking advantage of its lack of need for Windows (which accounts for roughly $75 of the cost of a retail PC) and making its profit off new subscribers to its dialup and broadband customers. A $349 PC sold at retail with a flashy GUI, decent productivity software and AOL is all the computer many consumers need.

The advantage to this scenario for everyone else is that AOL would probably dump more development into either the KDE or GNOME projects in order to give itself more and higher-quality software to offer. The official trees can either take these changes or leave them. Undoubtedly, some of the changes would be awful, and the official trees would opt to leave them. But with its 18 years’ worth of experience developing GUIs, some of the changes would likely be a good thing as well.

The more likely scenario: AOL will buy out Red Hat, not have a clue what to do with it, and Red Hat Linux will languish just like Netscape.

The even more likely scenario: AOL will come to its senses, realize that Red Hat Linux has nothing to do with its core business, and the two companies will go their separate ways.

A nice Sunday surprise

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I had a big surprise Sunday night. A couple of months ago, I was up at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in north St. Louis, and they asked me if I’d come to their Christmas banquet this year. I said I’d love to come to their Christmas banquet. They said they’d send me tickets. “Some” ended up meaning five. They’re generous people. I ended up using one–I didn’t feel like looking too hard for a date, and I felt weird asking a bunch of my friends who’ve never been up there to go with me on a rainy Sunday night.
My relationship with Bethlehem goes back several years. I moved to St. Louis in Nov. 1998, and immediately started going to a church in Oakville, a semi-ritzy, very white-middle class suburb in south St. Louis County. I was driving 30 minutes to go to church every Sunday because I had connections there, and I’d never seen a church that was so on fire. I liked it there. It was a church that made me better, and, as I would quickly learn, it was more than willing to let me make it better too. Mark my words: When you find a church like that, keep it. They’re harder to find than you might think.

In Faith Lutheran in Oakville and Bethlehem Lutheran in St. Louis, I’ve found two. And I’m much the better for it.

The north St. Louis neighborhood around Bethlehem is about as opposite of Oakville as you can get. It’s not ghetto, but the buildings are well past their prime. A number of them are condemned. Many others are boarded up. It’s lower-middle class at best. But there are people there who are trying to make a difference.

I’d been going to Faith Lutheran in Oakville for a couple of weeks when I started receiving its newsletter. And in that first newsletter was a blurb from The Rev. John Schmidtke, the pastor at Bethlehem. Faith is one of five suburban churches that has partnered with Bethlehem to reach out to its community. Pastor Schmidtke’s letter was a wish list of sorts, but he wasn’t wanting money or objects. He wanted people. “Who can help us build a computer lab so we can teach elementary computer skills to the people of our community?” he asked. “Who can help us give our children a safe, welcome place where they can sit down at a computer and do their homework?” At the end of the letter, he gave his phone number.

The next day, I called him.

He said he already had some beat-up PCs that had been donated to him. I asked when I could come look at them. I don’t really remember many specifics anymore, other than driving into north St. Louis in a snowstorm one night to come look at a pair of beat-up Compaq Proliant servers. They were DX2-66s, decked out with external SCSI CD-ROM towers. One of them had three SCSI drives. The other had five. They were pretty snazzy servers… in 1993.

It was a humble beginning. Pastor solicited some obsolete computers from other businesses, and since this was the midst of the Y2K crunch, he was able to find plenty of people willing to give up some 386s and 486s they’d just retired. The best catch was a pair of non-compliant Pentium-75s. One of them even had a hard drive–a 40-megger. No, not a 40-gig drive. A 40-meg drive, like most of us had in our first AT clone.

Basically, we had a whole lot of nothing, and I did a whole lot of nothing with it. Sure, I was able to impress a few people by taking hard drives out of 486s and putting them in those Pentiums and booting up DOS, but as far as doing anything useful, we didn’t have much. So the project pretty much sat there, a pile of beat-up PCs in the corner of a storage room.

Then one day in the summer of 2000, I got a voice mail message. It was Pastor Schmidtke. He sounded excited, but there was a certain plea in his voice. He had a grant for several thousand dollars, and it was pretty much there for the asking, assuming he knew what to ask for. He didn’t know what to ask for. So he asked me if he could have five minutes of my time to tell him the wisest way to spend a few thousand dollars to build a computer lab.

I hopped on the ‘Net and checked it out, then faxed him a shopping list. For the budget he gave me, I figured I’d be able to get several name-brand PCs and a laser printer. The grant needed three competitive bids, so I priced systems from IBM, Compaq, and Dell to give him ballpark figures, plus phone numbers to call to get hard quotes if that was what he needed.

A few months later he had the money. A couple more months after that, we’d turned that money into eight new Compaq Deskpro PCs. I wasn’t going to leave him high and dry at that point–what good is a room full of computers when no one there knew how to make them go? A couple more months after that, some volunteers had turned that storage room into a nicely laid-out computer room. So then I set about taking those PCs, installing network cards, cabling and hubs, configuring them identically, and connecting a printer. We had a usable network. An Internet connection was the tough part. I took one of those Pentium-75s, installed a 56K modem and an Intel 10/100 NIC, and configured Freesco. We were live. While 56K dialup split among 9 PCs isn’t fabulous, it’s better than it sounds–while people are reading pages, after all, their computers aren’t loading stuff. I tried setting up a Squid server to help ease congestion a little, but Squid seemed to hurt as much as it helped, so I scrapped that idea.

So now, three years after we initially met, they have a working, useful computer lab. Neighborhood kids come in and research and type. Pastor’s family comes in, and with that many computers at their disposal, the kids can play around all they want for hours and his wife can get work done. It’s not the best, but it’s worlds beyond a pair of Pentium-75s. And in a neighborhood where a Pentium-200 is considered a luxury item, it’s doing a lot of good.

So I got to the banquet Sunday night and sat down at a table. There was a program sitting there at every place. I looked at it. “That’s nice,” I was thinking. “Star of Bethlehem Awards.” There were two people listed. Then I saw people were picking up the program and flipping pages. So I picked up mine, turned to the inside, and saw there were more than two people listed. Two more on page two, and then I turned to page 3 and saw my name. With a really kind write-up to go with it.

They read the write-up, along with everyone else’s writeup, after dinner. They gave each of us plaques and asked us to say a few words. I don’t remember exactly what I said–I’m not very comfortable giving impromptu speeches. It was Pastor Schmidtke who had the vision and who got the money. And it was Cathy, a member of the congregation, who made all the phone calls and made all the runs to Office Depot to get things like power strips and network cables when I ran out of power outlets or didn’t have quite enough reach. Maybe I could have done it all without them. But chances are I wouldn’t have. No one would have. One person can’t take on a project of that magnitude alone. It’ll kill you.

The speaker who read the write-up on me was interrupted by applause a couple of times. I got a round of applause as I walked up and another one as I sat down. Helping people like them is easy, because they appreciate it so much.

I hung the plaque up right after I got home. I guess that says something about priorities–I have an expensive Jesse Barnes print I bought more than a week ago that isn’t hung yet. But the sentiment behind that plaque is worth more than a room full of Jesse Barnes prints. It’s a nice plaque. It reads:

New Birth at Bethlehem

We Thank God For You

David Farquhar

For your ongoing support, encouragement, and Christian love to the ministry of Jesus Christ through Bethlehem Lutheran Church. You are God’s Star for the ministry of Bethlehem.
…Daniel 12:3

December 16, 2001
Bethlehem Lutheran Church, St. Louis, MO

Daniel 12:3 reads as follows:

“Those who have insight will shine brightly like the brightness of the expanse of heaven, and those who lead the many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.”

There’s just one more thing I wish I’d said Sunday night. They’re a group of people trying to make a difference in north St. Louis. A lot of them are there by choice. They didn’t have to give me an opportunity, but they did. I’m glad they did.

A different Monday, but not much better…

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Moves at work continue, but unfortunately the electrical contractors we have are as incompetent as ever, and of course IT takes the brunt of the attack when computers don’t work. They don’t care if it’s an electrical problem or not; all they know is their computer doesn’t work, and of course it’s always IT’s fault if the computer doesn’t work. And with one person to keep 300 desktop PCs in tip-top shape, I usually can’t be up there and have the problem solved within five minutes.
In the last three weeks, we’ve lost three power supplies, two printers, an expensive proprietary modem, and a network card. In two instances, there was an honest-to-goodness fire, with flames and everything.

I think it’s time we sent an electrical contractor or two packing.

Meanwhile I’ve got incompetent department directors who plan moves without giving more than a half hour’s notice, and of course they throw a fit when the move falls to pieces and I’m off solving another problem. I also find myself not caring. Go ahead and yell. Davey’s not listening, la la la, and his boss isn’t listening, and his boss’ boss isn’t listening, and if his boss’ boss’ boss listens and says anything, he’ll have two, maybe three raving lunatics at his door in a heartbeat and I think he knows it.

Deep breath. OK. I feel better now. Kind of.

Let’s see what kind of hints The Big Guy may have been dropping with the day’s other events, shall we?

I had a meeting at church at 7 p.m. So I headed out to my car at 10 ’til 6, put my key in the ignition, and the engine coughed, and then nothing. No electrical system. Hmm. Time to find out how good Chrysler Roadside Assistance is, eh? Well, I called, waited an hour and a half, and they never showed up. So I paced in the beautiful October twilight, waiting for a driver who’d never arrive, thinking there are a number of things I’d love do at twilight outdoors in St. Louis in October (and waiting for a tow truck is very near the top of that list, let me tell you!) but it sure beats sitting in a meeting after dealing with irate, high-maintenance people at work for 9+ hours.

And I noticed something. I wasn’t at the meeting, and yet the world failed to fall apart.

Finally I gave up on the tow truck driver and asked one of my coworkers for a jump. Maybe the problem was a dead battery, even though I didn’t leave my lights on or anything. Indeed it was. I drove home, and about halfway there my battery light came on. I guided the car home, called Chrysler again, and asked them what to do.

On my answering machine, there was a pair of messages waiting for me. It was actually one message, but my answering machine is extremely rude and cuts you off after about 10.5 seconds. OK, maybe 30. But it seems like 10.5 seconds to everyone else but me. So most people leave a message, get cut off, then call me back. Sometimes they call me back a third or even a fourth time. Usually by then they’re pretty steamed. But I digress, as always. The message messages basically boiled down to, “Hey Dave, I understand you’re planning to teach Friday, but I hear things are really hectic so there’s no need for us to stay on the regular schedule. I’ll teach for you if you want.”

I had no idea when I’d get a chance to put a lesson together, to be completely honest. So I called her back and said if she wanted to teach, she could go right ahead. And I thanked her.

Hints taken. So much time doing stuff for God there’s no time to spend with God. So I skipped out on the meeting and now I’m not teaching Friday. I might even show up a little late, for good measure.

And now something completely different. This is starting to sound like the Stress Underground, not the Silicon Underground. So let’s talk about silicon.

Dan Bowman sent me a link to a suggestion that businesses buy old Mac clones, then dump $600 worth of upgrades into them so they can run Mac OS X and avoid paying $199 for a copy of Windows.

Yes, I know I’m teetering on the brink of mental illness here. So I’m assuming that if I were completely sane, this would make even less sense.

The best-selling software package for the Macintosh is (drum roll please)… Microsoft Office. So all you’ve accomplished so far is paying a little less money to Microsoft.

I’ve seen Mac OS X. I’ve tried to install Mac OS X. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. And this was a copy of Mac OS X that came with a brand-new G4. Mac OS X is not production-quality software yet. Not that that’s much of a problem. There’s precious little native software to run on it. For native software, you pretty much have to download and compile your own. If you’re going to do that, you might as well just run Linux, since it’s free for the asking and runs on much less-expensive hardware.

Most businesses are a bit hesitant to put Linux on the desktop yet. Some are starting to see the light. But a business that’s reluctant to put Linux on brand-new desktop PCs even when they can pay for good support they’ll probably never need isn’t too likely to be interested in buying a four-year-old Mac or Mac clone, plus 128 megs of obsolete and therefore overpriced memory plus a hard drive plus a disk controller plus a USB card, from five different vendors who will all point fingers at one another the instant something goes wrong. (And we’re talking Apple here. Things will go wrong.)

And yes, I know there are thousands of people who’ve successfully put CPU upgrades in Macintoshes, but it’s very hit-and-miss. I spent two of the most frustrating days of my life trying to get a Sonnet G3 accelerator to work in a Power Mac 7500. It either worked, failed to boot, or performed just like the stock 100 MHz CPU. Any time you turned it on, you didn’t know which of the three you would get. The local Mac dealer was clueless. I called Sonnet. They were clueless. I struggled some more. I called Sonnet back. I got a different tech. He asked what revision of motherboard I had. I looked. It said VAL4, I think. He told me he was surprised it worked 1/3 of the time. That accelerator never works right with that revision of motherboard. He suggested I return the card, or do a motherboard swap. Of course a compatible motherboard costs more than the accelerator card.

And of course there was absolutely no mention of any of this on Sonnet’s web site. At least you can go to a manufacturer of PC upgrades and read their knowledge base before you buy. Sometimes you can even punch in what model system you have and they’ll tell you if they work. Not that those types of upgrades make any sense when you can a replacement motherboard and CPU starts at around $150.

Suffice it to say I won’t be repeating that advice at work. I just got a flyer in the mail, offering me 700 MHz Compaq PCs preloaded with Win98, with a 15-inch flat-panel monitor, for $799. With a warranty. With support. Yeah, I’d rather have Windows 2000 or Windows XP on it. The only reason Compaq makes offers like that is to move PCs, so I’m sure they’d work with my purchasing guy and me.

Think about it. I can have a cobbled-together did-it-myself 400 MHz Mac refurb without a monitor for $700-$750. Or I can have that Compaq. That’s like getting a flat-panel monitor for 50 bucks. As far as usability and stability go, I’d rate Win98 and Mac OS X about equal. But for the time and money I’d save, I could afford to step up to a better version of Windows. Or I could bank the bucks and run Linux on it.

If you’re already a Mac zealot, I guess that idea might make sense. I’ve spent several years deploying, operating, and maintaning both Macs and PCs side-by-side in corporate environments. I have no great love for Microsoft. Most people would call my relationship with Microsoft something more like seething hatred.

But the biggest problems with PC hardware, in order, are commodity memory, cheap power supplies, proliferation of viruses, and then, maybe, Microsoft software. You can avoid the first two problems by buying decent hardware from a reputable company. (No, Gateway, that doesn’t include you and your Packard Bell-style 145-watt power supplies.) You can avoid the third problem with user education. (It’s amazing how quickly users learn when you poke ’em with a cattle prod after they open an unexpected attachment from a stranger. The biggest problem is getting that cattle prod past building security.) Microsoft software doesn’t exactly bowl everyone over with its reliability, but when Adobe recommends that Mac users reboot their machines every day before they leave for lunch, you know something’s up. Even Windows 95’s uptime was better than that.

A nice Labor Day.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday was nice. I got up late, then bummed around all day. I did a couple of loads of laundry, and I put a different hard drive in my Duron-750. Then I ignored my e-mail, ignored the site for the most part, and installed Wintendo (er, Windows Me) and Baseball Mogul. Around 6 I went out and bought a CD changer. My old 25-disc Pioneer died around Christmas time and I never got around to replacing it until now.
I knew I didn’t want another Pioneer. I’ve taken that Pioneer apart to fix it before, and I wasn’t impressed with the workmanship at all. And current Pioneer models are made in China. So much for those. I looked at a Technics and a couple of Sonys. Finally, swallowing hard, I dropped $250 on a 300-disc Sony model (made in Malaysia). I still suspect it’ll be dead within five years, but maybe it’ll surprise me.

I am impressed with the sound quality. It sounds much better than my Pioneer ever did. It’s really sad when you can tell a difference in sound quality between two CD players, but I guess that just goes to show how many corners Pioneer cut on that model. Next time I go CD player shopping, I’m going to bring a disc or two along to listen to in the store so I can hear the difference.

Anyhoo, I played two seasons of Baseball Mogul and guided Boston to two world championships and a boatload of money. But something happened that made me mad. I noticed over in the AL Central, Tony Muser’s Losers, a.k.a. the Kansas City Royals, were above .500, with essentially the same team that’s looking to lose 100 games this season. Well, there was no Donnie Sadler, Muser’s secret weapon, currently batting about .137 (which also seems to be about Tony Muser’s IQ, seeing as he keeps playing the guy). So the Royals minus Muser and Sadler were a .500 club. That’s nice to know.

Then, for 2002, Kansas City went and got the biggest free-agent bat they could afford. They also didn’t trade superstar right fielder Jermaine Dye, and they re-signed shortstop Rey Sanchez. And what happened? Well, the first round of the playoffs was a Boston-Kansas City affair, that’s what. I’d used the previous year’s windfall to buy myself an All-Star team, so I rolled over Kansas City in four games. I felt kind of bad about that, but it was partly because of my record against KC’s rivals that year that they made it that far, so not too bad.

It’s all I can do to keep from e-mailing Royals GM Allaird Baird and asking him why, if Tony Muser insists on playing Donnie Sadler every day, he doesn’t consider letting the pitcher bat and have the DH hit for Sadler instead.

And shocking news. HP is buying Compaq. I didn’t believe it either. Compaq’s recent problems, after all, were partly due to its purchase of Digital Equipment Corp. and its inability to digest the huge company. The only benefit I see to this is HP getting Compaq’s service division and eliminating a competitor–Compaq’s acquisition of DEC made more sense than this does.

Monday, 2 July 2001

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Some lucky people get a five-day weekend this week. Not me. I’m off Wednesday for Independence Day. About 30 years ago, my dad and his med school buddies used to go to the Missouri River and shoot bottle rockets at barges to celebrate. I’m not sure what I’ll get to do yet. Last year I had to work the 4th. That was a very nice paycheck, since I worked 60 hours that week anyway, on top of 8 hours’ holiday pay.
I found a use for absurdly high-speed CPUs this weekend. My Duron-750 can simulate a 30-team, 162-game baseball season in its entirety in roughly 3 minutes. Of course a faster CPU will do it even faster. Baseball simulation is very CPU-intensive and very disk-intensive. This 750 has a SCSI disk subsystem in it too. It’s old, but I suspect SCSI’s ability to re-order disk requests for speed helps. I haven’t swapped in an IDE drive to see if it makes a difference. So if you’re a statistical baseball junkie, you can actually justify an insanely fast CPU. It feels strange to call the cheapest CPU on the market today insanely fast, but for most things, the Duron-750 really is.

The other use I’ve found for these CPUs is emulating a 50 MHz 68060-based Amiga at full speed. A Duron-750 isn’t quite up to that task.

I talked about PartImage last week. I used it over the weekend to clone 7 PCs. My church’s sister congregation bought 8 Compaq Deskpro EXs earlier this year and just finished the room they’re going in. So I went in, set one of them up (and tweaked it out, of course–the first reaction of one of the members: “Wow, that sure boots fast!”).

Sadly, many companies seem to use non-profit organizations as a way to just get rid of their junk. Here are some of the jewels this church has been “blessed” with: two 386sx laptops with dead batteries and no power adapters, two XTs, two 286s, a pile of 386sxs, and three 486s. Two of the 486s are old Compaq ProSignia servers with big SCSI hard drives, so I can slap in an ISA NIC and install Linux on one of them and make it a file server. The only thing remotely useful that anyone’s ever given them is a pair of Pentium-75s. But one of the 75s had a 40-meg hard drive in it. That’s the better of the two, though. The other had no hard drive, no memory, and no CMOS battery.

Oh, and I shouldn’t forget the large quantities of busted monitors. They’ve got a room full of monitors. About three of them work. What’s anyone going to do with a bunch of monitors that don’t work? Legally, the church can’t throw any of this stuff away (and shouldn’t) because of all the lead content, which makes them hazardous waste. But the church can hardly afford to pay someone to take it away and dispose of it properly either. We’re talking an inner-city church here. Can you say, “blaxploitation?” I knew you could.

The Pentiums did at least come in standard AT cases though, and nice ones at that. They look like Enlights, but they had Sparkle power supplies in them, Whatever the make, they’re nice and thick so they don’t slice you, there’s lots of wide open space inside, and they have 7 drive bays. So I grabbed the diskless Pentium to make into a router/Squid server/content filter. I ripped out the P75 board and dropped in an AT Soyo Socket 370 board with a Celeron-366 on it. It’ll be fabulous.

The best I can do with most of these systems is to try to make X terminals out of them, assuming I can find a machine beefy enough to host StarOffice for a half-dozen systems. It may not be worth the bother.

One of the 386s had a 420-meg hard drive in it for some reason, so I pulled that drive, hooked it up to the first of the Compaqs, and used PartImage to dump it. I used 480 megs on the drive, so with Gzip compression, the image left just 12 megs free on the drive. Tight fit, but we were OK. Then I just ran around to each of the others, hooked up the drive, and pulled the image. I took the drive home with me so I could burn a CD from it.

That’s good use of free software.

Fare thee well, Alpha…

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Fare thee well, Alpha, if Intel will allow it… I’m not holding my breath. The greatest CPU of all time, by a long shot, looks to be no more. Compaq pulled the plug on Alpha, essentially selling it out to Intel. Another case of far superior technology dying because its owner had no idea what to do with it.
But Intel, with its terminal case of NIH syndrome, isn’t about to let some other company’s technology thrive if history is any indicator.

One story in The Register likened replacing Alpha with Intel’s Itanium as replacing a Ferrari with a Yugo.

In my ill-fated Integrating Linux Servers with Windows Networks, I stated that we’ll miss NT on Alpha, and I presented Linux as a way to preserve a shop’s investment in Alpha-based servers. Indeed, an Alpha running Linux ought to be useful for many, many years, with or without Compaq’s blessing.

I guess I should be happy to see that IBM isn’t the only company that comes up with great ideas and great technology and then has no idea what to do with it. But I’m not. I hate seeing good engineering go to waste, especially when the beneficiaries of that waste are perpetual underachievers like Microsoft and Intel.

Minesweeper is murder.

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Minesweeper is murder.

Minesweeper is murder. An activist group is asserting that the Windows game Minesweeper is disrespectful of victims of land mines and should be removed and replaced with a game about flowers. I have no idea if these guys are serious or not. I never liked the game anyway and just always wanted an excuse to say “Minesweeper is murder.” So now I’ve said it three times. I’m happy.

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Craig Mundie’s infamous speech

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I haven’t said anything about Microsoft Executive Craig Mundie’s speech yet. Everyone’s heard of it, of course, and the typical response has been something along the lines of “Now we know Microsoft’s stance on Open Source.”

No, we’ve always known Microsoft’s stance on that. They’re scared of it. Remember the stereotype of open-source programmers: college students and college dropouts writing software in their basements that a lot of people are using, with the goal of toppling an industry giant. Seem far-fetched? Friends, that’s the story of Microsoft itself. Microsoft became an underground sensation in the late 1970s with Microsoft Basic, a programming language for the Altair and other kit computers and later for CP/M. And while we’ll probably never know the entire story of how and why this happened, when IBM decided to outsource the operating system for the IBM PC, they went to Microsoft and got both an OS and the must-have Microsoft Basic. Ten years later, IBM was just another hardware maker–really big, but getting squeezed. Today, 20 years later, IBM’s still a huge force in the computing industry, but in the PC industry, aside from selling ThinkPads, IBM’s a nobody. There may be hardware enthusiasts out there who’d be surprised to hear IBM makes and sells more than just hard drives.

Ironically, Microsoft’s response to this new threat is to act more and more like the giant it toppled. Shared Source isn’t a new idea. IBM was doing that in the 1960s. If you were big enough, you could see the source code. DEC did it too. At work, we have the source code to most of the big VMS applications we depend on day-to-day. Most big operations insist on having that kind of access, so their programmers can add features and fix bugs quickly. If Windows 2000 is ever going to get beyond the small server space, they really have no choice. But they do it with strings attached and without going far enough. An operation the size of the one I work for can’t get the source and fix bugs or optimize the code for a particular application. You’re only permitted to use the source code to help you develop drivers or applications. Meet the new Microsoft: same as the old Microsoft.

Some people have read this speech and concluded that Microsoft believes open-source software killed the dot-com boom. That’s ludicrous, and I don’t see that in the text. OSS was very good for the dot-com boom. OSS lowered the cost of entry: Operating systems such as FreeBSD and Linux ran on cheap PCs, rather than proprietary hardware. The OSs themselves were free, and there was lots of great free software available, such as the Apache Web server, and scripting languages like Python and Perl. You could do all this cool stuff, the same cool stuff you could do with a Sun or SGI server, for the price of a PC. And not only was it cheaper than everybody else, it was also really reliable.

The way I read it, Microsoft didn’t blame OSS for the dot-com bust. Microsoft blamed the advertising model, valuing market share over revenue, and giving stuff away now and then trying to get people to pay later.

I agree. The dot-com boom died because companies couldn’t find ways to make money. But I’m not convinced the dot-com boom was a big mistake. It put the Internet on the map. Before 1995, when the first banner ad ran, there wasn’t much to the Internet. I remember those early days. As a college student in 1993, the Internet was a bonanza to me, even though I wasn’t using it to the extent a lot of my peers were. For me, the Internet was FTP and Gopher and e-mail. I mostly ignored Usenet and IRC. That was pretty much the extent of the Internet. You had to be really determined or really bored or really geeky to get much of anything out of it. The World Wide Web existed, but that was a great mystery to most of us. The SGI workstations on campus had Web browsers. We knew that Mosaic had been ported to Windows, but no one in the crowd I ran in knew how to get it working. When we finally got it running on some of our PCs in 1994, what we found was mostly personal homepages. “Hi, my name is Darren and this is my homepage. Here are some pictures of my cat. Here’s a listing of all the CDs I own. Here are links to all my friends who have homepages.” The running joke then was that there were only 12 pages on the Web, and the main attraction of the 12 was links to the other 11.

By 1995, we had the first signs of business. Banner ads appeared, and graduating students (or dropouts) started trying to build companies around their ideas. The big attraction of the Web was that there was all this information out there, and it was mostly free. Online newspapers and magazines sprung up. Then vendors sprung up, offering huge selections and low prices. You could go to Amazon.com and find any book in print, and you’d pay less for it than you would at Barnes & Noble. CDNow.com did the same thing for music. And their ads supported places that were giving information away. So people started buying computers so they could be part of the show. People flocked from closed services like CompuServe and Prodigy to plain-old Internet, which offered so much more and was cheaper.

Now the party’s ending as dot-coms close up shop, often with their content gone forever. To me, that’s a loss only slightly greater than the loss of the Great Library. There’s some comfort for me: Five years from now, most of that information would be obsolete anyway. But its historical value would remain. But setting sentiment aside, that bonanza of freebies was absolutely necessary. When I was selling computers in 1994, people frequently asked me what a computer was good for. In 1995, it was an easier sell. Some still asked that question, but a lot of people came in wanting “whatever I need to get to be able to get on the Internet.” Our best-selling software package, besides Myst, was Internet In A Box, which bundled dialup software, a Web browser, and access to some nationwide provider. I imagine sales were easier still in 1996 and beyond, but I was out of retail by then. Suddenly, you could buy this $2,000 computer and get all this stuff for free. A lot of companies made a lot of money off that business model. Microsoft made a killing. Dell and Gateway became behemoths. Compaq made enough to buy DEC. AOL made enough to buy Time Warner. Companies like Oracle and Cisco, who sold infrastructure, had licenses to print money. Now the party’s mostly over and these companies have massive hangovers, but what’s the answer to the Ronald Reagan question? Hangover or no hangover, yes, they’re a whole heck of a lot better off than they were four years ago.

I’m shocked that Microsoft thinks the dot-com phenomenon was a bad thing.

If, in 1995, the Web came into its own but every site had been subscription-based, this stuff wouldn’t have happened. It was hard enough to swallow $2,000 for a new PC, plus 20 bucks a month for Internet. Now I have to pay $9.95 a month to read a magazine? I could just subscribe to the paper edition and save $2,500!

The new Internet would have been the same as the old Internet, only you’d have to be more than just bored, determined, and geeky to make it happen. You’d also have to have a pretty big pile of cash.

The dot-com boom put the Internet on the map, made it the hot ticket. The dot-com bust hurt. Now that sites are dropping out of the sky or at least scaling operations way back, more than half of the Web sites I read regularly are Weblogs–today’s new and improved personal home page. People just like me. The biggest difference between 1994 and 2001? The personal home pages are better. Yeah, the pictures of the cat are still there sometimes, but at least there’s wit and wisdom and insight added. When I click on those links to the left, I usually learn something.

But there is another difference. Now we know why it would make sense to pay for a magazine on the Internet instead of paper. Information that takes a month to make it into print goes online in minutes. It’s much easier and faster to type a word into a search engine than to leaf through a magazine. We can hear any baseball game we want, whether a local radio station carries our favorite team or not. The world’s a lot smaller and faster now, and we’ve found we like it.

The pump is primed. Now we have to figure out how to make this profitable. The free ride is pretty much over. But now that we’ve seen what’s possible, we’re willing to start thinking about whipping out the credit cards again and signing up, provided the cost isn’t outrageous.

The only thing in Mundie’s speech that I can see that Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox and Dan Gillmor should take offense to is Microsoft’s suspicion of anyone giving something away for free. Sure, Microsoft gives lots of stuff away, but always with ulterior motives. Internet Explorer is free because Microsoft was afraid of Netscape. Outlook 98 was free for a while to hurt Lotus Notes. Microsoft Money was free for a while so Microsoft could get some share from Quicken. It stopped being free when Microsoft signed a deal with Intuit to bundle Internet Explorer with Quicken instead of Netscape. And there are other examples.

Microsoft knows that you can give stuff away with strings attached and make money off the residuals. What Microsoft hasn’t learned is that you can give stuff away without the strings attached and still make money off the residuals. The dot-com bust only proves that you can’t necessarily make as much as you may have thought, and that you’d better spend what you do make very wisely.

The Internet needs to be remade, yes, and it needs to find some sustainable business models (one size doesn’t fit all). But if Mundie thinks the world is chomping at the bit to have Microsoft remake the Internet their way, he’s in for a rude awakening.

More Like This: Microsoft Linux Weblogs Internet Commentary

04/22/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

The times they are a-changin’. I made the pilgrimage to north St. Louis, to visit my church’s sister congregation, to see their new PCs. I spotted some Compaq Deskpro EXs at Insight for an insanely low price, and I wanted a respectable name brand, so that was what I had them order. I set one up and let it run, and was surprised to see it came up with a standard AMI BIOS. No more Compaq disk partition-based BIOS? Nope. Not even a Compaq logo. Just an AMI logo, like a clone. The case was a standard microATX case with a Compaq case badge on it. I popped open the case. I couldn’t tell for certain if it was an Intel-made board or not (the AMI BIOS suggests yes) but it’s a standard microATX board. No weird Compaq drive rails either. Seagate hard drive. The CD-ROM firmware says Compaq. But it’s a standard ATAPI CD-ROM. It looks like a Hitachi, but I could be mistaken.

This is good. While the quality may or may not be up to the standards of an oldschool Compaq, in the event of a failure after the warranty period, off-the-shelf parts will work to keep these things running. I can get microATX power supplies and motherboards.

Oh, how do they run? Well, after I cleaned up the root and Windows directories, put in my usual msdos.sys parameters, and replaced emm386.exe with umbpci.sys–they paid for that shadow RAM, so they might as well use it as RAM–the system boots in 20 seconds. That’ll slow down after adding the network card and installing more software, of course, but at least we’re starting out really strong.

I thought I read in the system specs that they’d have built-in Ethernet, but I may be mistaken. That’s fairly easy to remedy. I can pick up a 5-pack of Netgear FA-311s at Mwave for about $70. Two of those will put us in business. I’m disappointed that the FA-310TX, an old favorite of mine, seems to be discontinued; hopefully the 311 uses the same or a similar chipset. In a lab situation I’d prefer Intel or 3Com cards, but the Netgears sell for much less, and I have lots of experience with Netgears in Linux. I’ve occasionally had problems with Intels and 3Coms in Linux, and since there’ll be one or possibly two Linux servers in the lab, and I’d rather start out with standardized parts all around, I’ll give Netgear the nod.

Bloatbusters. I believe I mentioned this site before on my old site, but maybe not. These guys look at utilities, tell you what’s wrong with them, and sometimes provide a tightly-coded alternative. For instance, here’s a Windows CD player. It’s 3K in size. Personally, I prefer the play button on the front of my CD-ROM drives, but not every CD-ROM drive has one.

I can’t stand their site navigation and layout, but their essays are often entertaining to read.

Along the same lines, there’s Radsoft , who plays host to Bloatbusters. Radsoft’s product is Extreme Power Tools, a $47 collection of over 100 tightly written utilities, including a 25K file manager that claims to pack in more features than any of Microsoft’s file managers. Evidently they used to provide a demo download, but the only demo I can find now contains just their task management tools, which are interesting but certainly not the most generally useful.

04/06/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

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Three days down… The server was down while administrators removed dead sites, in hopes of increasing performance. Performance does seem better, but time will tell… Let’s get on to some serious business.

More memory alphabet soup. JHR wrote in with a good question that I realized I haven’t answered: Can you use your existing plain, cheap old SDRAM on a new DDR-capable motherboard?

The answer, unfortunately, is usually no. DDR comes on 184-pin modules. SDRAM usually comes on 168-pin modules. A few companies, like Fujitsu and Apacer, have talked about putting SDRAM on 184-pin modules. It’s been mostly talk. The price difference between DDR and SDRAM isn’t enough to justify it.

There are a few boards, like the Asus A7A266 (reviewed at http://www.dansdata.com/a7a266.htm ), with both types of sockets for both types of memory. But the A7A266 isn’t the best performer out there, so you pay the price of convenience by buying speed instead. It’s a mediocre DDR performer and a terrible SDRAM performer.

It’s a shame to throw away memory, but this isn’t the first time. As recently as 1997, 72-pin EDO memory cost less than SDRAM. The 72-pin SIMM replaced the 30-pin SIMM as the type of memory to have in 1994, though 30-pin-capable boards remained available for upgraders through 1996. Before 30-pin SIMMs, there were all sorts of weird memory technologies, like 30-pin SIPPs, and different types of individual chips, which generally were a huge pain.

Usually when memory was replaced, adapters came out. There were SIMMs with sockets to plug old chips into. There were adapters to plug a SIPP into a SIMM socket. There were riser cards to allow you to plug 30-pin SIMMs into 72-pin slots. The problem was, they tended to hurt speed and stability, and in many cases they were nearly as expensive as new memory.

History’s repeating itself. There are adapters to let you plug DIMMs into RIMM sockets, and 168-to-184 sockets, though they’re expensive and hurt speed and stability, especially in the case of those RIMM adapters. There’s no point in using them.

I really should have been shouting louder that PC133’s time in the sun is over. The problem is, nobody knows for sure what will replace it. There’s DDR and Rambus, both of which perform really well in certain benchmarks, neither of which seem to make much difference in the real world yet. DDR’s pricing is very close to PC133, assuming you’re buying Crucial. Rambus is still priced way too high. I suspect DDR will win, but there’s no way to know.

It’s a shame to throw out memory, but there usually isn’t much we can do about it. If it makes you feel any better, PCs using SDRAM should be useful for a number of years. I’ve still got two systems with 72-pin SIMMs in them doing useful work for me. One’s a Compaq 486 I bought back in 1994 that just finished a tour of duty as a DSL router; its next incarnation will be as a file/print server if I can find an ISA SCSI card to put in it. I’ll probably also have it automate some parts of my network, courtesy of cron. The other one is a Pentium-120, which has done time as a file server and also as a testbed.

Anything new enough to have SDRAM is new enough to make a very useful Linux box, and it can also make a good Windows box, particularly if you scale it back to just do a handful of things very well. If I ever get around to retiring my K6-2/350, my sister would love to have it because it’d make a great word processing/web browsing/e-mail box–better than the Cyrix 233 she’s using right now, though she doesn’t complain much about that computer. That computer was built out of a bunch of stuff Tom Gatermann and I pulled out of our spare parts bins. And if I did make that switch for her, I know who’d get that Cyrix 233, and that person won’t be complaining either.

The key to responsible upgrading, I think, is to buy stuff that you’ll be able to recycle whenever possible. A good SCSI card and hard drive, though expensive, will be good enough to be worth recycling when you make your next motherboard upgrade. The same goes for a good monitor, and unless you’re a 3D gaming freak, the same goes for a good video card as well. My STB Velocity 128 video card, even though it has an ancient nVidia Riva128 chipset in it, is still fast for the games I play and frankly, it’s overkill for business use. I’ve had that card for three and a half years. I expect I’ll still be using it in three years. Heck, my Diamond Stealth 3D card is still useful. It won’t do justice for my 19-inch display, but it’s fast enough for routine work and it’ll drive a 17-inch monitor at 1024×768 at refresh rates and color depths that won’t embarrass you. And that card’s five years old. It cost me $119 at a time when low-end cards cost $59, and it’s still better for most things than the $40 cards of today. The $25 cards of today will give you higher color depth and sometimes better refresh rates, but they’re not as fast. So that card saved me money. My STB Velocity 128 and my Diamond Viper 770 haven’t been recycled yet, but I’ll get at least three more years’ use out of both of those, even if I turn into a flight simulator fiend. The 770 would be decent for flight sims, and both of them are outstanding for what I do now.

Everyone I know recycles good keyboards and mice, when they think to buy them.

You’ll generally replace motherboards and CPUs on every upgrade cycle. Depending on how often you upgrade, you can expect to replace memory every other cycle.

A lot of people are recommending you buy a motherboard capable of either type of memory, then buy cheap PC133 and upgrade later. But the performance difference isn’t great enough to justify that. If you think you’re going to want DDR, I recommend you just bite the bullet and get DDR. Crucial’s now selling 128 MB PC2100 DDR modules for under $65, so 256 MB of PC2100 costs slightly more than a mid-range video card.

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