When Windows feels better than Linux

In an attempt of Linux trying to be better than windows, there are apparently a few significant features being left out that ended up making it feels inferior to the latter. They maybe not that important but it really is annoying to know that they’re missing, considering that those features help in expediting many personal computing operation.

The first thing I noticed missing in Linux is the “click-twice-to-rename”. In windows you don’t have to right-click and select rename in order to rename a file/folder. Just by clicking the icon twice will activate the renaming process, thus saving great deal of time.

Another feature that I noticed is missing is the automatic focus to the specific file when we opened a file browser such as nautilus from within an application. For example it is just natural for one to right-click on an icon of a downloaded file from within Firefox’s download list and select “open in file manager”, hoping the focus will be for the said file, but no, it is not. It is quite time-consuming to look for that one file from the swarm of them in the file manager window. Wouldn’t it be more convenient if it works just like in windows, right?

Actually there are still more I’d like to point out too but I’ll save them for future posts for now. If you also think there are also other things Linux could learn, please let me know by leaving your comments here. You may also write your own article about it and linking it back to this post as a mean for sharing.

Pumping words/text to my blog from my Androphone

Image via CrunchBase

As mentioned sometime ago, this is my new blog, a successor to my old blog at wordpress.com. thank goodness that ‘almost’ all entries from my old blog has been succesfully imported to this new place. Actually it has been my dream to have my own dotcom domain, and now that I finally have it, I’m gonna blog with more motivation than I used to be.

And you know what? This post is composed on my new Androphone, and it’s also has been my dream to have an Androphone. LG Optimus One may not sound much compared to a certain popular brand like HTC but at least it fulfilled some of my dreams.

I’m making my own slate/tablet (I’m not joking)

Image via CrunchBase

I’m tired of people talking about tablet/slate is the future of personal computing. I mean I’ve built my own PCs all this time so why don’t I start making my own slate if that is really the future?

Many people think iPad is the best tablet so far. I beg to differ. It’s probably the worst since it has no USB port, it does not use desktop OS, and it has no memory card slot. So you’re asking why does using a full-fledged desktop OS matters to me? Read on.

Before I go further, I’d like to tell you how important to have at least one USB port on a slate. Imagine this; we should already know by now that iPad in 2 versions; the 3G and non-3G. People with money would normally go for the best their money could buy. For poorly paid public servant like me, it’s just normal to opt for the cheaper one, which is in this case the non-3G one. Practically it’s cheaper to buy the non-3G and then plug my existing USB 3G modem (or even 3G-enabled phone) and I’m good to go. Besides, even if the slate does not have a memory card reader, I can always plug a USB card reader too, should there’s a need to do so. Not to mention the freedom to directly connect my other devices such as phones, digicam, mp3 player, etc. without the need of a PC as a mediator. It would also allow me to expand the built-in memory by plugging in USB flash drives. See how cool it is to have a USB port? The presence of USB ports on some Windows slates makes them the winner over iPad.

Talking about connectivity, the non-3G iPad would only benefit home users, provided that the house is equipped with wi-fi. Travelers and road warriors would be happy with the 3G version, but that’s it, they’re restricted to 3G only. Since many new ISPs have started rolling out WiMax services, even the 3G version of iPad is out of luck, as there is no way to plug in USB WiMax modem to it. That’s why I’d like to stress out that having USB port is as important as having the core of the tablet itself. Not only it allows the slate to have extra features, it may also doubles the existing features.

Now, into the OS as I promised earlier. I don’t mind if people prefer to put/use a specially developed mobile OS for tablets. However I can’t accept it if people think tablets must use mobile OS instead of desktop OS, citing issues like battery life, “overkill”, etc. I’m not really sure about the “overkill” part as I never think desktop OS is too much for a tablet, because even netbooks can accept them. However when it comes to battery life, actually it’s the goal of all desktop OS to become most power efficient and it doesn’t have to be for mobile OS only. Besides the battery life is usually determined by the CPU. That means even if the OS is power efficient, if the CPU is power-hungry then even a tablet with power-optimized mobile OS would have it’s battery juice drained in no time. For an analogy, imagine comparing a 3GHz Intel Pentium-powered PC with a 3GHz Intel Core-powered PC. Install both PCs with Windows 7 Ultimate and I’m pretty sure the latter would be the winner for consuming much lower power despite using the same OS.

For me, no matter how people want to push the usage of a mobile OS in a tablet, a tablet must be powerful enough to support at least Windows 7 in it, should there are people who want to use it in a tablet. People should not think that “a slate is a smartphone+ and it should have similar battery life to a smartphone”. It is a ridiculous idea to believe that way. Sure it’s welcomed to see a tablet that can run as long a smartphone does but it’s still pretty much unrealistic and just a wishful thinking. A tablet is good enough if it could run continuously (with 3G/wi-fi on) for 6-8 hours with single full charge.

Actually what you do with a tablet is all that matters, not the OS inside it. If tablet is really the future of personal computing then doesn’t that means it would need the OS of personal computing know to everybody (Windows/Linux/BSD/OSX/etc.)? Really most people have fallen victim to the illusion made by Apple that now they believe the reason iPad is popular is because of its OS. They’re totally wrong. iPad was popular because it was from the “new” Apple (Apple under Steve Jobs management). Just a matter of fact, everything that comes from Apple since the return of Steve Jobs would sell, no matter how feature-poor they are.

I believe people would still buy the iPad even if it was loaded with OSX instead of iOS. Likewise, I don’t think Fujitsu’s tablets would become as popular as the iPad too, even if they had some mobile OS pre-installed. After all, reputation helps a lot here. Many people don’t know the truth behind the OS selection for iPad. The initial plan was to use OSX but they had a hard time to re-scale OSX’s kernel for lower-powered mobile use. Therefore they went to recreating/redesigning the OS again, and that explains why the earlier versions of iOS were all “unfinished products”, rolled out prematurely to meet its users with no copy-paste, no multitasking, etc.

Talking about reputation, since I’m anime fan too, I’d like to touch a bit about anime as well. It was reputation and hype that helped popularized Panty & Stocking anime a while back. People have known GAINAX for a long time, and people have known them for their good works. However I bet P&S would be as popular as we know it today if the exact thing was made by some American cartoon studio or even by some Asian animation studio outside Japan. Instead it might have ended up being known as yet another cartoon with Powerpuff Girls style animation, and wouldn’t make it to either Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon but would be aired in the midnight adult slot in some US TV channels due to its dirty jokes. In other words, people who have fallen for P&S is just like those people who have fallen victim of the illusion created by Apple as I explained in earlier paragraph.

The biggest lie the IT world have told me (resurfaced)

 

Image by scottpowerz via Flickr

 

My first experience with Linux was 10 years ago. Although I started my computing experience earlier than that (I attended computer classes since 1995) but I remain a n00b because the beige boxes scares me. I only started falling in love with computers and IT stuff when my father purchased our first family PC (powered by Pentium III) in year 2000. By having our own PC I can freely tinker around it without having to worry too much. Although the PC was pre-installed with Windows 98 SE, an article in local PC magazine drove my curiosity to try Linux and ended up installing RedHat in a dual-boot environment. I admit that I fell in love in Linux but I love Windows more because of it’s ease-of-use thus I set Windows as the default OS. Actually nobody in my family knows there’s Linux in the PC because it is only bootable via a boot diskette. Despite using Windows most of the time, I keep using Linux occasionally out of curiosity and started mastering it unknowingly in the process.

A couple of years since my introduction to Linux, I learned about the existence of special kind of software that would allow me to use Linux without having to set my beige box to dual-boot system. The software is known as virtual machine. I installed Connectix Virtual PC and began experimenting with various Linux flavors, often more than 2 at one time. Sure, having such load in a Pentium III box with maximum RAM of only 512MB is a pain but for a geek it was a pain worth bearing. However it still does not enough to make me a Linux convert because I still think that Linux was still immature for a beginner’s use. It was during the same time I introduced Linux to my family and nobody accepted it. Yes, the heavy reliance on CLI freaked my family members and unlike Windows which they can fix themselves, they’d left dumbfounded should they face problems in Linux. And I was more convinced that Linux is still not good as a beginner’s OS. Well, perhaps I’ve used the wrong distro but how should I know if the one I’m comfortable with may be too scary for others?

Fast forward a few years and I’ve almost gave up being a Linux evangelist to my family. Yeah, I know it wouldn’t succeed because I still not using Linux as my main OS up to that time. It’s not that I don’t want to but virtualization software consumed too much of my limited system resources, although my PC was among the most powerful of that time. Even if I set my PC into a dual-boot machine and dedicate all system resources to whatever OS I booted, it wouldn’t help either because I’m not happy with the hassle of having to reboot the machine just to switch the other OS. Then I think why not the computer developers simplify it? My computing knowledge were pretty much limited on that time. All that I could think for improvement is either to make the virtualization less resource hungry or something that I described as “hardware-level virtualization”. The former might be impossible because no matter how small footprint the virtualization software has, the overall system resources is still shared among the host SO and the guest OS. For the latter, I thought it was ridiculous until I read an article in another local PC magazine about the so-called “hardware-assisted virtualization” in 2005, around the same time of the emergence of multi-core consumer CPU.

From what I understood about hardware-assisted virtualization, it’s similar to my vision of hardware-level virtualization, where system resources are partitioned at hardware level instead of in software level as in the traditional software virtualization. In the article both AMD‘s “Pacifica” and Intel‘s “Vanderpool” were mentioned well. I thought the technology I’ve been waiting for has arrived but I was wrong. It’s all liars. The article mentioned about having a machine where we can boot into both system at one time without the need to install the virtualization software and we can switch between the OSes in real-time without having to reboot the system (let’s call it “double-boot” instead of dual-boot) or reloading the same OS without restarting it. Sounds nice because should the current working environment crashed, the loaded copy of the OS would take over and this could be done without the user noticing it. However I still haven’t seen my dream of “double-boot” system become true despite the technology is already available. The technology becomes useful only if the virtualization software is installed, which means it still need the host-guest relationship between the OSes, of which I think kills the purpose of having the hardware-level virtualization. I am highly disappointed. However there was one time in local PC expo where I saw an Apple representative demonstrated switching between Mac OS X and Windows XP in real-time using certain key combination. I asked him whether there are any virtualization software installed or not and he answered me the Mac only use Bootcamp. I’m not sure though whether it’s true or there were just some tricks because I never really have a chance to use Windows on Macs but whatever system it is, I only want to see the “double-boot” system become true.

SPAM comments are funneh (Part II)

Image via Wikipedia

I received average 1 spam comments for every article I posted here. Although Akismet spam catcher did a good job of capturing them all, it is still annoying to have to manually delete them. I know it is designed to work like that to reduce false positives but I still wish for wordpress.com to have a setting to auto-delete those spam comments because I don’t really mind even if they are legitimate comments thought to be a spam by the Akismet system. For me in false positive cases like this I’d not blame the system but rather the person who send comments that have spam characteristics. Actually having your ‘legitimate’ comments treated as spam is not a big deal. If you see the comments you posted before never appear, just post them again but with some difference. You know, when your comments got caught that way usually there are only 3 reasons behind it; the website owner are not professional enough and took offense of your comments and deleted it, or your comments are just deserved to be deleted because you said nothing but trolling, or it’s caught by the anti-spam system (either because it is an intended spam or you don’t know what you were doing is spamming). I believe I’ve seen this auto-delete spam feature in WordPress before (in the form of Akismet settings) but I can’t find the setting in wordpress.com. WordPress.com should really consider to make the option available to users if they can’t implement what I’m going to suggest below.

Now I think wordpress.com should take their spam prevention system to one step further. The existing system only catch spam only after they arrived at the comment inbox. I think the spam prevention should be done even before comments could be sent. Some websites use CAPTCHA/reCAPTCHA or similar system for this, which require the commenter to prove him/herself is a human first. So I think if Akismet could scan comments once they arrived at comment inbox, why can’t it try scanning the comments even before it was posted? Alright, I understand this might be hard to implement regardless what system is being used (CAPTCHA or Akismet). For example, wordpress.com allows comment to be posted via email which the system have no control at all. But still it’s better to have Akismet work before any spam is sent to prevent more spam rather than just working passively like it is right now, or at least eliminate them even before they could reach the comment inbox.

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I got my first Ubuntu live CD around 5 y…

I got my first Ubuntu live CD around 5 years ago which was distributed free in a local PC expo. When I tried to run it on my laptop, I waited for 15 minutes and nothing happen so I was badly disappointed. By that time I’m already have 5 years of Linux experience so I don’t mind at all installing Ubuntu but having to run it as a live CD first before I can install it is too much of a hassle. Why didn’t they make the CD starts with 2 options?; ie. to run as live CD or to install? If not I might have started using it since that time until today.

Gigapixel display, anyone?

Image via Wikipedia

In the past there used to be the vision of 3M computing (megabyte memory, megapixel display, and megahertz processing power). We’ve achieved that long time ago but now it’s quite impractical to have 3G* computing (>_<) (to have gigabyte memory, gigapixel display and gigahertz processing power, all in tandem). While gigabyte memory and gigahertz CPU clockspeed is already around for several years, gigapixel imaging is still in its infancy. We just got our hand on it very recently and it’s still impossible to implement it for daily/home/personal computing, yet.

So what about this “gigapixel display” I’m talking about? Let’s take the HD resolution that everybody is gaga over as a comparison. The Full-HD resolution (1080p) has around 2 megapixels (1920 x 1080 = 2073600) while most hi-end consumer DSLR cameras right now might have around 10 megapixels. That may not sound much but for most people even being slightly beyond-HD resolution standards are already overkill, so it’s quite unimaginable to have gigapixel monitor sitting in front of us.

Well, even if gigapixel display going to emerge anyway, how big it would be? Lets do some simple calculation here. Assuming that the imaginary gigapixel monitor has the 4:3 aspect ratio, to have a 1.2 gigapixels resolution is equivalent to 40000 x 30000 pixels! And if we’re to measure it in inches, let’s say we adopted 100 dpi here (normal monitor is somewhere between 96 dpi to 120 dpi), then the monitor will be 300” vertically and 400” horizontally, or 500” diagonally! (25-feet vertically, which is almost equivalent to a 3-storey building! That’s bigger than most silverscreen in cinemas!). Even the largest LCD/plasma TV right now only measured around 100” diagonally, and even with that ‘small’ size it’s  already hard to fit on any walls in most houses in the world! Unless we could fit 1000 pixels in an inch, only then we could make it much smaller, say 50” diagonally, which would be around the same size as most hi-end consumer LCD/plasma TV right now. However 1000 dpi is quite unviable with our current technologies. Anyways, seeing the rate of development in imaging technologies, I think it’s no surprise to see the world’s first working gigapixel display in ten years time, or even less.

*not to be confused with 3G networking

ERROR: The last ‘M’ in 3M computing is supposed to be million instructions per second (MIPS) instead of megahertz processing power. Sorry for the mistake.

p/s: I’d love to watch my favorite anime series on gigapixel display someday (>_<)

iFail: The “unlikeliness” of Apple

Apple used to be technologically champion in almost everything.

• They are the 1st to came up with a fresh GUI design when the rest of competing OSes still sporting the plain boxy chrome interface.
• They are the 1st to deliver multi-touch on laptop touchpad and phone/tablet touchscreen.
• They are the first to go with bold, revolutionary and radical yet simple, clean and artistic hardware design.

But all that is now history.

• Today despite of how many iterations they made to their products such as iPod/iPhone/iPad and the OS inside, people would mostly notice only flaws and what they are lacking.
• Apple, as a computer maker should have Macs as their no. 1 money generator, but the lack of new Macs explained otherwise.
• There is no USB and expandable drive on iPad.
• iPad is not recognized as a real tablet because it didn’t run the desktop OS.
• iPhone OS lacks “real” multitasking; something that has long been supported in competing OSes.
• With iPhone OS, Apple chose not to support Flash but only go for HTML5 instead, as if they are forcing everybody to go the Apple way although they could in fact support both standards.
• iPods still lack of advanced sound enhancement, making them more of a geek’s gadgets rather than an audiophile’s toy for their price.
• Not to mention iPods keep using proprietary connectivity cable instead of adopting standards like mini USB, which is very inconvenient to look for a replacement, especially as Apple store is not as widely accessible as other computer brands.
• And even worse Apple and their fanboys see the centralized online appstore as an advantage although things are not as beautiful as they think.

Appstore forces all iOS software developers to market their apps only via Appstore and does not allow to market the same apps outside the store (ie. hosting it in their own website) while having to pay some revenue to Apple for hosted apps. The fanboys keep bragging about the superiority of the Appstore but the same fanboys would think it’s ridiculous if rivaling companies like Microsoft forces all Windows software developers to market their apps only through Microsoft. Apple also bragging about the number of software being hosted in their Appstore although in fact other platform might have much more apps available throughout the net.

Truly a one-stop solution like Appstore might be a good idea but it’s not always a good idea. It might be convenient because people only need to go to place only but in return it gives both users and developers very little choice to tinker with, making it some sort of devilish move.

• Apple also used to be a ‘backward people’ in computing too but strangely die hard fanboys were OK with that (talking about blind loyalty).
• They were contradicting themselves by having a long time support for context menu in their OS but weirdly enough their line of mouse used to have only one button.
• Apple seems to don’t know about cheapness; even simple hardware like mouse and keyboards come with premium price tags.

Apple should change their business model if they really wish to take over the domination in PC market from the likes of Microsoft, Dell, HP-Compaq, etc. If they really think their Mac OS X is really superior than Windows and Linux then why not let the consumers choose by removing the vendor-locking strategy that has been protecting their reputation as hardware maker all this time? If they really confident with their own hardware then how about licensing clones and compete fairly in the open market?

The problem with Apple now is they are lacking originalities as the time goes by. They used to claim themselves as superior in terms of hardware when they used PowerPC chip in the old Macs but when they shifted to intel CPUs, their claim is now void. Before that they also used to claim that Mac OS X is superior than Windows. That maybe true in terms of good looking interface and less security threats, but that is not a fair comparison. Beauty is abstract, while security threats on Windows only shows that they are the more popular OS. In fact, Apple should not bragging about OS X. That OS is just a bunch of software package sits on top of BSD kernel. Even their hardware design also is not something to brag about anymore. If it’s design sure anybody or any company can come up with something as beautiful as theirs, if not better looking.

Mac OS X is also almost at the brink of stagnancy right now, added by the fact that no new Macs in this year, with exception of the recently updated Mac Mini. The technology used in the Cocoa API and Aqua GUI might not be supported anymore after the next few releases, which means Apple might have to adopt either Linux-flavored (rebadged Linux) OS or even Windows after a decade or two, or even earlier than we could predict. Wonder what would they brag about on that time other than their good looking hardware. Windows might be the last resort but a rebadged Linux, just like what Google did with their Chrome OS would be a really interesting idea. However, as usual with Apple, they might not adopting default GUI that always come with Linux like GNOME and KDE. Instead they might come up with their own proprietary window manager as the successor to the Aqua interface. It would not be surprising either if that GUI still retain the Aqua look.

Nokia and Symbian OS is not ready for smartphone business?

Just recently Apple has revealed their 4th generation of iPhone that comes with iPhone OS 4 which is now dubbed as iOS4. Google, another new player in the smartphone business on the other hand, is now working on the upcoming Andoid OS 2.2 “Froyo” which is due to be officially released anytime later this year. Qualcomm, the name behind the 1GHz Snapdragon CPU that powers devices like Google’s very own smartphone Nexus One, also now has their own smartphone platform called Brew MP. Intel also came up with the new Atom CPU made specific for smartphones, signifying their initial step into the business as well. Not to mention, Motorola that used to be one of Apple’s closest partners now goes the Android way by announcing a 2GHz processing power smartphone. The good old Palm also becoming stronger day bay day with their Web OS powered devices, signifying that they’re not dead yet.

We all have known business phones has always been dominated by Research In Motion (RIM) with their Blackberry handsets. However, that’s all about them, RIM is always about business phone and not personal phone. The first ‘real’ phone maker that I ever witnessed to enter the business phone field is Nokia, with their Communicator and E series. They managed to steal serious business from it but RIM is always ahead of them. Luckily they’e always backed-up by their personal phone business.

Since the recent years, Nokia has been venturing into smartphone business as well. Regardless whether the decision was made after they witnessed the success of the iPhone, the phone business of today is all about smartphone. In the past business phone and personal phone is a separate thing. When PDA was still a trend, it’s not unusual to see a businessman carrying a normal phone for contact purposess while the PDA serves as a business device on the go. Then come the smartphone. The earlier generation of smartphone marks a marriage between a cellphone and a PDA. By that time cellphone has been divided into 3 categories ie. smartphone, personal phone and business phone. Yes, business phone still exists today as the demand for it is still as strong as ever. Business cater unique and specific needs. It’s not necessarily means that smartphone doesn’t love businessman but usually businessman doesn’t need much of the bells and whistles on smartphone. But why do we need a smartphone anyway. Because today’s generation is not simply a marriage between cellphone and PDA anymore, it’s a bridge between business phone and personal phone.

Back to the Nokia story, sometime around earlier last year they launched their first consumer touchscreen smartphone, the XpressMusic 5800 a.k.a. “The Tube”. It may not their first touchscreen phone but it’s their first Symbian OS device to have that feature. It was quite a steal, especially after people had been anticipating it since they saw it in Britney Spears music video and the Batman movie. AS with many new products, it came with many notable flaws too. Once anybody who have experiences with iPhone would notice is the resistive touchscreen, as opposed to the iPhone’s capacitive touchscreen. It may not be a crucial feature but Nokia seems to have forgot that people were expecting multi-touch interface since Nokia has a strong reputation in mobile gaming, hence the N-GAGE service. A real gamer knows that a real game requires multi-touch controls, and Nokia should understand too that as an entertainment phone, The Tube should have extensive gaming features.

The laggy menu navigation also haunted The Tube. It is as if there’s a software between the touchscreen and the visual interface that translates touches, taps, swipes and gestures into instructions. It seems like Symbian OS in the device have no native support for touch interface and might have required special software to enable that, thus resulting the lags. Also the default Symbian OS interface is not ready for touchscreen operation just yet, despite is was optimized for single-handed operation. Well, with the advent of touchscreen technology on cellphone, the single-handed operation might have become the thing of the past.

However there are good points too for Symbian OS to be the OS of choice in smartphone. Symbian OS has always been supporting multitasking. Yes, you can listen to mp3 on your smartphone while browsing the internet at the same time, and you can even do this even on much older models that are released 5 years ago. Not only that Symbian OS is also extremely good as multitasking, where it clears the memory immediately after you terminate an application, leaving the the phone ready for you to load another apps. This also means lower memory error when compared to Windows Mobile and iPhone OS. Applications for Symbian OS also relatively easy to develop because the system is functioning as a group of services, similar to what we may find in POSIX-modeled OS. Also Nokia doesn’t restrict developers from marketing their own software, unlike the iPhone where developers have too place their apps in the App Store while forced to give a portion of their revenue to Apple by doing so. Nokia and Symbian OS is more of an open platform than most other phone makers (except for Android of course).

Today Symbian OS is open to all developers since it’s now completely open source. Seems like a good decision for Nokia to compete with another open source mobile platform, the mighty Google Android OS. So far we can’t see any significant changes resulting from that moves except that newer Symbian OS devices are having much lower price that they were. Also the UI seems to have been tweaked a bit to be more touchscreen friendly (as can be seen on the upcoming N8 pictured above). We also hear less complain about laggy many navigation too. Perhaps Symbian OS now have native touchscreen operation too. Knowing Nokia’s reputation in phone making, we hope to see more and more developers joining the league. We might also see lots of improvements in future Nokia releases as well as more price drops too.

I admit that I am a Nokia fanboy and I’m always siding with them regardless how bad their devices are in terms of performance and behavior. However this does not prevent me from criticizing them all the time. I remember when Symbian OS was still closed source (that was even before iPhone), they did open themselves for some sort of public submission for GUI design for future Symbian OS releases. On that time I saw quite a number of awesome submission too, but now it may not be necessary anymore. Anyway I wonder if it is still available for submission. If it is I think I’d like to submit mine too.