Lillesvin Networks

Back in March the web version of the Danish news paper Politiken ran an article on boosting computer performance [danish], where they list several steps for tuning Windows, with the last two steps suggesting that maybe re-installing Windows or installing Linux is the answer.

They list the steps for a Windows performance boost as follows:

• Update drivers
• Update firmware
• Give Windows less to think about (involving messing with the registry, disabling unnecessary graphic effects, removing unused fonts etc.)
• Overwhelmed by icons? (Involving messing around with msconfig.)
• Malware removal
• Defrag the hard drive

Now consider that updating drivers — and especially firmware — requires very specific knowledge of your hardware, while rummaging around in the registry and msconfig requires a good deal of knowledge about how software works and in some cases knowledge about — or ability to guess — how software vendors may choose to name their executables and the paths at which they might put the executables. Malware removal may have become easier over the years, but to a lot of users the terminology and processes involved seem intimidating, which ultimately stops them from doing it properly; or at all. And finally, defragmentation? Are you fucking kidding me?

Now Linux (let’s just take any Debian based distro for these examples.)

• Updating drivers is handled like all other updates, i.e. unless you’ve specifically disabled the automatic check for updates, you’ll be prompted to install fresh drivers pretty much as soon as they’re available. No manual searching required (unless you have some poorly supported hardware that doesn’t have drivers in any of the available repositories).
• Updating firmware can be a bitch, since most firmware updaters are Win only. On the other hand, I’ve never had to update my firmware from Linux on neither my MacBook nor my ThinkPad, so personally I regard this as a non-issue, but your mileage may vary.
• Cleaning up the registry… What registry?
• Managing applications that auto-start? System > Preferences > Startup Applications — easy and not as potentially dangerous as msconfig!
• Disabling unnecessary visual effects? System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects.
• Malware removal. Not really necessary (for the time being), but under all circumstances no harder than on Windows.
• Defragmentation. No!

So to sum up, all you actively need to do to keep a Debian based Linux box speedy is basically to decide which applications and services you want to start up as you log in. That’s it! (If you’re really picky about getting the most out of your battery, you may want to turn off visual effects while running on battery power; or all together.)

Now I’m left wondering why so many people think that running Linux is for geeks only. To me it seems like running a Windows machine (and keeping it running) requires a good deal of knowledge about your computer’s hardware, it is insanely time-consuming and in general a pain in the ass. (I wouldn’t know for sure since I haven’t done it for several years, but I still help plenty of people with their Windows related problems.) No matter what OS people run, they always tend to have a backup geek they can turn to when things get too complicated — that goes for OS X, Windows and Linux, so why not start relying a little more on your personal Linux geek?

Politiken runs an article titled “EU action may cost you your internet connection” (article in Danish, Google Translation) about how European Windows 7 users may not be able to access the internet because of the EU’s intervention against MS’s browser monopoly, forcing them to ship Windows 7 without Internet Explorer pre-installed.

Now, talk about jumping to conclusions — not to mention the wildy exagerated title! I’m willing to bet that MS won’t ship Windows 7 without any means of installing IE8 (e.g. via something like curl or wget — or simly via FTP). I’m pretty sure there’ll be big fat icon in some prominent location saying “Install Internet Explorer”. Besides, it’s not really that hard (for anyone) to open Explorer and type in: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org and navigate to the Firefox EXE and double-click — especially if Mozilla would make a shortcut. (Hint hint!) Alternatively, if MS wants to be really cool, they could offer installation of either of the major browsers when installing Windows 7. I.e. something like: “Thanks for installing Windows 7, which browser(s) would you like to install? IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Google Chrome?” Or they could even go as far as saying “Would you prefer MS defaults or non-MS defaults?” Where MS defaults would be IE, Outlook, Windows Media Player etc., and non-MS would be e.g. Firefox + Thunderbird + VLC, Opera + VLC or something completely different. MS already had something like this in XP SP2, where you could select standard setups (either MS or non-MS), which would then affect settings such as the default browser, mail client, media player and IM client. Pretty un-MS-ish and ironically my all-time favorite feature in Windows.

This is typical of Politiken’s  IT section. They always pretend to be seeing stuff from the end-user’s, while apparently being even more clueless than the average (l)user. Or maybe they have ulterior motives. Maybe they don’t like the EU putting up a fight against the MS monopoly and messing with their precious Windows. Either way it’s “journalism” like this, that makes the least technically inclined users stick to Windows XP, 98 or whatever untill someone or something forces them to upgrade.

Politiken has an article about how the EU wants to develop an emulator — KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable — in order to preserve video game history. (Original article in danish; Google translation.) According to the project description it should be able to handle pretty much any data from any platform and while I’m all for preserving video game history, I think €4.02 million ($5.05 million; £3.55 million) is a bit of a hefty price to pay, considering that there’s plenty of Open Source software out there that does exactly that.

So will KEEP actually be written from scratch? Or will they simply bundle whatever Open Source software they find into one neat package? The project description doesn’t say anything about it. The first is stupid, because a lot of the Open Source emulators available are of high quality, are quite portable, have been developed for many years now and are still maintained. Some shiny new software is likely to be less stable and compatible, and the project description doesn’t give any promise of the software being maintained in the future. The latter is simply too expensive. €4.02 million for bundling some Open Source software?

Also, while preserving the games is all well and good, there’s more to preserving video game history than just preserving the software. Playing Super Mario Bros. on the Wii with the Wiimote is NOT the same as playing it with the good old, unhandy NES controller (even though the Wiimote is quite unhandy for that purpose).

While the Medison Celebrity $150 laptop was obviously a good idea, it was — as some have noticed — very, very poorly executed. While debates on whether or not it’s actually at all possible to produce a laptop that cheap are still heated, I don’t think anyone disagrees that a $150 laptop would be nothing but great.

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In a recent article on Slashdot is given yet another reason — actually two reasons — to not use MSN (not even just the Microsoft client, but the entire protocol). Apparently Microsoft is aware that malicious URLs can be sent through MSN, so they figured they’d better block some of them. Actually, they’re blocking the sub-strings, which means that .scr will catch not only http://example.com/file.scr but also http://example.com/my.screenshot.png and everything else containing the string .scr. The blocking is done server-side, so it doesn’t matter if you use the official Microsoft MSN client or Pidgin (The IM Client Formerly Known as Gaim), Adium or whatever’s available out there.

Now, what’s really retarded is that each and every TinyURL still gets through just fine (but probably not for long now) and now Microsoft has to play catch-up to maintain that list of blocked sub-strings. This is really, really stupid, because the poor end-user will never know why their link to http://cutesie.example.com/pics.php isn’t sent — just that it’s not. And most people will probably never see the list and know which words they can’t use, hence confusion. Besides, the fact that Microsoft choose to “solve” problems in this way instead of fixing the vulnerabilities in their software, just makes me wonder how common this practice is to them and how many other problems they’ve “fixed” in a similar manner.