These Things Matter To Me

Some interesting thoughts over on Slashdot’s coverage of the Dell/ Ubuntu announcement.
For one user, the announcement is actually a deciding factor in a purchasing decision:

Personally, I have resisted the siren call of Dell for a long time. This changes my mind. I need a new machine and this could be just the ticket — it was either that or refurb an old HP with a new HD and a copy of Feisty Fawn. I like the idea of it pre-loaded.

And yeah, that’s the kind of response Dell and Ubuntu want to hear. But I think it’s time we really question the value and definition of support in the way it’s been thought of in the past. Support is extremely overvalued, and lack of support is too often used as a reason to squash a great tool or piece of software. Let’s examine our commercial support relationships and think of what we really get out of them. Are our bugs fixed faster? Features added more quickly? Do we find out about upcoming products from our vendros before the blogosphere does? When we have a configuration question, whose documentation is more helpful? Community sites and mailing lists, or the official documentation?

I’m very excited that Dell and Ubuntu have a relationship with each other now, and there’s no way it can hurt the quality of Linux on Dell hardware. But let’s not wait for announcements like this before we feel comfortable pursuing technologies that otherwise trump their commercially supported peers.

related:

Dell interview with Mark Shuttleworth about the announcement, how Linux gets adopted differently in different parts of the world.

Click To Play

Wowza… So… Parallels for Mac OS X has been out a for a bit. But it’s previously been best described as “…like VMware Workstation for a Mac.” In other words, cool, but nothing beyond VMware, and if VMware actually had a product out for OS X, then you’d probably grab that.

But last Friday Parallels released a new feature that is pretty compelling, and raises the bar for the concept of “abstraction.” Rather than having a parent window that hosts all of the guest OS’s windows, there is a “coherence mode” option that has each window of the guest OS appear as an individual window in the host OS, making itSO the experience of using an application in the either guest OS or host OS, is pretty darn similar. Certain keyboard commands and drag and drop is supported between the two environments. The video above demonstrates this better than all these words. Check it out!

Social news site Reddit was recently acquired by (mostly print media company) Condé Nast. In his personal blog (recommended!), Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz describes the how the bigger, more expensive I.T. and facilities infrastructure Condé Nast provides inhibits more than it helps.

… Nobody else seems to get work done here either. Everybody’s always coming into our room to hang out and chat or invite us to play the new video game system that Wired is testing. The upside is that while we haven’t gotten much of our work done, we have managed to do many other people’s. Various folks from around the office have shown up to have us help them with their technical problems, which we usually solve fairly quickly. We joked that we should get transferred to their IT department instead of Web development.

There’s a company Internet connection, which routes everything through the IT HQ in Delaware, presumably the better to spy on us on. On Day 1 they took our laptops and “backed up” the drives to ensure they had a copy of all our data. (We scurried to get our MP3 collections and worse off first.)

Then they issued us company-approved laptops: terribly-slow iBook G4s complete with Conde Nast desktop and screensaver with spy software pre-installed. When they gave us the machines we didn’t even have administrator access on them. The clock was set to the Eastern time zone; I needed an IT department person to change it to show me California time.

The company laptop is necessary to read our company email which, being on a Microsoft Exchange server, requires a special Microsoft email client to read. You also need to be on a company laptop to access the company network, where you can log into a maze of PeopleSoft web sites to file expense reports and change your health benefits.

• related blog post: Tim O’Reilly- The Future Ends at the Firewall