In three days, m-day hits. ‘M’ as in moving. We’re moving back to Glendive (scroll down the page to see more) and I’m super duper excited.
Today was also an m-day of sorts. This time, ‘M’ as in mobile. Canonical, (the backers of Ubuntu, arguably the most popular linux distro) announced Ubuntu Mobile today. Now some people are saying, “who cares?” But seriously, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve got to realize where mobile technology is heading. Apple is supposed to be opening (or may have already) their iPhone SDK, so you’ve got a semi-open platform there. Nokia has been working on their Hildon platform for several years, and it keeps getting better and better. Google just launched Android recently, and has several companies with semi-functional prototypes. And now Canonical releases a Mobile version of a Ubuntu. In case you didn’t know, Ubuntu is Debian-based, which means it inherits a massively large package repository, second to none.
But now that I’ve gone crazy on you here, let’s get down to the real business, and that’s our poor ignorant friend Russell whom I alluded to previously. Does this release really matter? I’d like to take this moment in time to debunk all the junk that Russell would have known if he wasn’t a severe pessimist. I’m convinced Ziff Davis only hires cynics, and that an optimist wouldn’t last three days over there. Have you read any recent columns by John Dvorak lately? That guy is always good for a laugh. But I digress, again. I truly am sorry for that, so I’ll get on with it.
In his article, Russ says, “Unless the device manufacturers and the carriers come on board and truly open up their networks and UIs to these applications, we’re looking at nothing but niche, hacked applications from coder fanboys.”
Hmm, that’s interesting, because Ubuntu already has a test platform. Even better than Android, which has semi-functional prototypes, Samsung already makes a device that supports Ubuntu Mobile. And last I checked, AT&T already has an open network. Apparently, Russell still believes that the only folks who work on OSS (open source software) projects are ‘hackers’ and ‘fanboys’. Well, I suppose most of them probably are ‘fanboys’, but he puts it in such a negative light, it’s disgusting. One would almost be led to believe that there are no high–quality OSS projects anywhere. Never mind that 2 of the projects I just linked to have NO KNOWN BUGS. Even though the author has offered cash to anyone that could find one. But he’s just a ‘hacker’ that doesn’t know what he’s doing. The Apache folks are apparently incompetent as well, even though they own the web server market.
And then he has his example. His one, lousy, lame example that isn’t even an OSS project, it just happens to be a very popular app that runs on linux. His thoughts: “wouldn’t it be easier to just download and install Skype from the Skype site?”
Well, no, actually it isn’t. If you had used Ubuntu for any period of time, you’d know that installing apps is easier than going to a web site. I can open one program from my menu, type ‘apt-get install skype’, press ‘y’ to confirm, and it gets installed. And for those who can’t navigate the command line, you open a different application (synaptic), search for skype, check the box, and press Apply. And it’s that simple for over 23,000 different packages. Try that on Windows, and have fun with it too. Then when you want to get rid of it, you never know if it actually is gone. “Whoops, we missed a couple files, and some registry entries, but you’ll never notice, until after the twentieth application has come and gone, and your computer runs at half its original speed.” No such uncertainty on linux. Remove the program, and it’s gone. Worried about some dependencies it had to install? Alt-F2 and ‘apt-get autoremove’. There, it’s done. But again, I digress too much.
His last stab at a pathetic argument is this, “please understand that enthusiasm for your apps ain’t gonna bubble up from the mobile device user base.”
Oh, that’s right, all the publicity that companies put out to generate user buzz is not actually for the users. But of course, these are the ‘mobile users’. No one ever tries to get enthusiasm out of them, cause all they want is txting, and the ‘basic features’. All this time, companies have been making them web-accessible, and adding cameras, and music players, but the ‘mobile users’ don’t want any of that, so stop it. Just give them a keypad, a 2 line display so they can see what they are typing, and the numbers they are dialing, and they’ll be happy.
My bad.