June 26, 2007

AT&T might hurt Apple IPhone saes in the long run

Everyone knows that when the IPhone comes out that it will sell faster than they can be supplied. However in the long run being tied to AT&T exclusively is going to hurt Apple because AT&T's service sucks.

A friend of mine from Missouri came to visit me here in the San Francisco area a few weeks ago. He has AT&T and I have Verizon. I used to have AT&T in 2003 but I switched because the service sucked. But I had wondered if 4 years later if it was as bad as it was then. it was.

Everywhere we went I had signal and Phil didn't I remember that I used to have trouble getting calls in my apartment and he had the exact same problem. I can drive from san Francisco to San Jose down 280 and not lose the call. He can't. We even hiked in Yosemite and for 2/3rds of the hike I has signal. He only had signal when he was at Yosemite Lodge. Town after town I could make calls and he couldn't.

So even if the IPhone is great it's only going to be as great as AT&T. If they can't get signal then they can't make calls or surf the web. IPhone users migh find that all they have is a fat calculator. It will be interesting to see if people are actually happy with it once they buy it.

Posted by marc at 05:55 AM | Comments (2)

More confusion for school systems

Letter to the Editor

The announcement by Vice President Cheney that he is not part of the executive branch of government is going to be another burden on the school systems because text books will have to be rewritten. States that passed laws to remove evolution from science books and those who want to teach "Creation Science" and "Intelligent Design" will now have to revise text books so they can teach that the Vice President is not part of the Executive Branch of government.

After all "Checks and Balances" is just a theory because if there really were checks and balances in the Constitution the Congress wouldn't sit back and let Cheney declare he is above the law and get away with it. I think that Nancy Pelosi's decision to declare impeachment is off the table is as outrageous as Cheney's decision. Impeachment isn't an option. Impeachment is a duty the Congress is required to perform when Bush and Cheney declare themselves kings.

Posted by marc at 05:50 AM | Comments (1)

June 25, 2007

Cheney above the law?

Letter to the Editor

Vice President Cheney has declared that he doesn't have to comply with executive orders and that he is not part of the executive branch of government. But what's scares me more isn't just the lawlessness of it all, but the fact that we Americans stand back and allow it to happen. It blurs the line as to whether or not George Orwell's book "Animal Farm" was fiction or prophesy.

Posted by marc at 07:16 PM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2007

Eliminate Toll Booths to reduce Global Warming

Letter to the Editor

These days everyone talks about ways to reduce carbon emissions to fight global warming. One simple way to cut carbon emissions is to eliminate toll roads and toll bridges. Toll collection requires people sit in traffic with their engines running generating useless smog while waiting in line to pay a tax. If these tolls were eliminated then millions of tons of greenhouse gases would not be dumped into the air we breathe and it would reduce our need to buy Arab oil and avoid gas shortages that drive up prices.

A toll is a tax with a high cost to the environment. If we must pay a tax then we should raise the tax on gasoline to make up the difference. A gasoline tax doesn't require that we sit in traffic with our engines running to pay the tax. If we are going to fight global warming then we need to make changes in a carbon friendly way. So lets close down those toll booths before the ice caps melt and it's too late.

Posted by marc at 04:28 PM | Comments (1)

June 06, 2007

Republican Candidates Backpedal on Faith

Letter to the Editor

It was interesting to see the Republican candidates back pedal on their faith in the Bible. When asked if they literally believe that God created the world in 6 days thay all said that they didn't know. To me that means that they don't really believe in the Bible. The Bible says 6 days and that is what it means. If you believe in God you have to believe that God knows how long a day is and that those who don't believe it are rejecting the authority of the Bible.

The issue of faith is that you have to choose to believe in it regardless of the science and regardless of reason and evidence. It's a choice you have to make between faith and reality. You can't have it both ways. Science, reason, and evidence indicates the universe is about 15 billion years old. The Bible says it's 6000 years old. These views are incompatible. You have to either choose faith or reason, and when Republican candidates say they believe in the Bible but ignore what it says makes me think that they don't really have the faith they say they do.

Posted by marc at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2007

Why Gas Prices are so High

Letter to the Editor

People are asking why gas prices are up $1.00 a gallon over last year. Some say it's because there aren't enough refineries. Some say it's because China and India are using more gas. But the real reason gas is up is because last year was an election year and this year isn't. The lowest price that gas was last year was coincidentally on election day. Maybe the solution to keeping gas prices low is to have congressional elections every 6 months.

Posted by marc at 06:51 AM | Comments (1)

June 01, 2007

Fedora 7 is a flop

Every time Fedora comes out with a new version the usual suspects all write about how wonderful it is. I'm not one of those people. I'm the kind of guy who puts the DVD in and install it on a real computer and see if it works. If it doesn't, I slam it.

So I get it downloaded and try to install it on an Asus motherboard that's about 2 years old. It has a dual core Athlon processor (939 pip) so it's at the sweet spot of what Linux likes to run on. I ran the install and it came up in 800x600 mode. Not smart enough to figure out I'm running a 1024x768 screen, but what really bothered me was that the cursor was invisible. In order to get the cursor back I had to get rid of the graphical boot. (I didn't like the graphical boot anyhow but it should have worked).

After getting it to come up I tried to get it into 1024x768 mode. I'm running an older LCD generic monitor. It's a Samsung 570V. Every time I tried to set the configuration to 1024x768 it would change it so bizzare settings like 1300xsomething. I spent 2 hours screwing with it and failed to make it work. Nothing I did worked and if it doesn't work when I do the ordinary right thing then who's fault is that? Not mine. FC6 works.

The next thing I did was download the Live CD. I chose the x86_64 version with KDE because I like KDE. So when I go to burn the CD the ISO image is too big. The image is about 900 megs which is too big for the CD. So - I report it on Bugzilla and here's the response:

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional comments should be made in the comments box of this bug report.

Summary: 64 bit KDE live CD too big to fit on CD


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=242185


jkeating@redhat.com changed:

What |Removed |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Status|NEW |CLOSED
Resolution| |NOTABUG


------- Additional Comments From jkeating@redhat.com 2007-06-01 21:49 EST -------
It is not labeled or advertised as a "LiveCD". It is a Live Image, this particular image is for DVDs or usb sticks of appropriate size. We cannot fit it on a CD without sacrificing a bunch of applications. x86_64 hardware is far more likely to have a DVD reader in it.

------------------

Clearly they don't give a damn if it works so I'm not going to report any more bugs. The comment that assumes all 64 bit CPUs have DVD drives is beyond rediculous. Most of my servers neither have CDs or DVDs because servers don't need them. Why waste valuable power for equipment you don't need unless something is broken.

It also didn't work when trying to burn it on a DVD and it didn't work installing it to a USB stick. So I downloaded the 686 version which was smaller and it burned onto a CD. I booted it up. There are a lot of error message on the screen but it did come up. One of the things I wanted to do was get a good USB boot so I don't have to haul around a CD drive to boot from when I want to fix my servers. So after booting up I saw there was an option to install the Live CD on a hard disk. So I put my USB stick in, wiped out the partitions, and tried to do an install.

The install looked a lot like the regular Redhat installs. I chose to let the system choose the partitions automatically. It did, but after a few more dialog boxes it decided that the root partiton wasn't big enough to install. So instead of a 1 gig flash drive I tried a 4 gig drive. I got the same error, not enough space.

Then I tried out the CD to see how I liked it. Tried to run Firefox but it wasn't there. As far as being useful it have very little. It's definitely not a Knoppix. Even basic tools lik fdisk were missing. As far as I was concerned it wasn't as good as the rescue CD.

My conclusion, the folks are Fedora should at least test the release to see if it works. I say that they should show up at a Linux users group and pass out copies to see if real people can make the software work as it's supposed to. If they had tested this before they released it they would have known it was seriously broken.

Just because a product is free doesn't mean that if it's sucks that no one should complain. Being free doesn't lower the bar. The bottom like is that Fedora 7 doesn't yet work and it should be unrealeased and then rereleased when it passes the install test. F7 isn't done yet. Send it back to the kitchen and cook it some more.

Posted by marc at 07:55 PM | Comments (6)