Sunday Paper

  • Dave Winer writes about advertising and product development at the Scripting News: "The current product development process, that focuses on a few supposed geniuses and ignores the intelligence that's in the user's minds, same as with unconferences, is about to run its course much as the old style conference can't possibly compete with one that involves the brains of the people formerly known as the audience."

Sunday Paper

  • Jeff Ventura writes about Apple's role in Microsoft's downfall. The agent is OS-X.
  • CrunchGear reports that Comcast thinks its best customers should get off its network. Broadband networks are not to be used to watch videos or download software.
  • Web Worker Daily wants to know what chores you outsource? I briefly outsourced housecleaning before my wife took personal offence.
  • And the Linux and Open Source Blog reports that GAIM makes nice with AOL and gets a new name. On my MacBook, I use AdiumX, which uses the GAIM libraries.

Jeff Ventura is wrong!!!!

[update: Correct spelling error]

Jeff Ventura, a blogger over at Graceful Flavor, has written an invective about the Linux desktop. He claims that Linux on the desktop is not viable and remain so for the foreseeable future.

LOTD is, and has always been, a total non-starter outside the hobbyist and tech-elite crowds, and it will remain so for quite some time, if not forever.

Well, Jeff, I think you are wrong and I will prove it.

About three years ago I converted my wife's Dell laptop into a Linux desktop. It took me a few hours to download and burn the ISO image of Fedora Core 3 to disk but installation progressed smoothly after that. I ran into a small snag with the drivers for the Linksys 802.11g wireless NIC but after a few weeks of lurking in the message boards I had successfully compiled and installed the driver code.

I went about the task of configuring her desktop environment. She was used to inserting movies into the DVD drive and Windows would launch her movie player software. After a few months I had that working quite well. It took a little less time to find a suitable media player that would launch and play her music CDs but once I had that working we were home free.

My wife was very happy with her Linux desktop. So Jeff, given enough time and effort and 247 tech support Linux is definitely a viable desktop alternative.

I am not quite sure why I switched her back to Windows. Now let me get back to reading the blogs. My MacBook is getting lonely.