You might need to dust your laptop or desktop monitor to see this one clearly. You see a tiny dot in the photo above? In the middle of that light colored line? That is Earth, how it looks from the edge of the solar system. This famous photograph, that I discovered only today is called the Pale Blue Dot (actually it is the representation of earth in the photo that they are talking about here, but you get my drift).

In early 1990, Voyager 1 spacecraft, after almost 12 years of its launch, was leaving the Solar System and was at a distance of 6 billion kilometers from Earth. It  was instructed by NASA at the request of the noted astrophysicist Carl Sagan, to turn its camera around to take one last photo of Earth before it was lost forever. The reason behind Sagan’s request was less about the astronomy and more about giving mankind a bit of a perspective about their existence.

And this is why, I think everyone should be asked to contemplate this photo at least once, if not occasionally to get a sense of their place in the Universe.

In Carl Sagan’s words:

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
…
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
…
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

(If you want, you can actually hear him say the full text of the excerpt on Youtube)

A life changing perspective, if there ever was one.

To summarise, in the new “advanced” Ubuntu releases, instead of clicking the traditional menus, you have to type in a few words in a special screen every time, and select from a drop-down which pops down.

What is the problem that they are trying to solve? – Well apparently, it is an awful nightmare to navigate deeply nested menu structures, and therefore, somewhat like the way you access history in the latest Firefox or Chrome browsers, you search the app menu text, and get what you want in a few keystrokes.

I cannot even start thinking about how all this can go wrong, and I am terribly afraid that I might sound like an old stooge who doesn’t like changes by saying this (comes from using Linux for quite a few years). But here is why I think this is a big problem:

Now as Mark himself has admitted, one of the first big problems with all this is app functionality discovery. What does this mean? Well, for anybody other than frequent users of an app, how do you search for something if you don’t whether it exists? If you are using a word app, for example, other than the very basic of formatting options, how do you know what other formatting options are offered by the app? Earlier, you used to browse through the menus to see that, but the biggest problem with the HUD is that, well, it doesn’t want you to browse. You can only search for exactly what you want.

I see the HUD as a great complementary navigation system for the desktop – one in which both menus and HUD exist. But Mark’s post suggest that they plan to replace the menus completely with HUD. Apparently, they are trying very hard to save some pixels, which sort of make some sense in a tablet, but is completely bewildering for a desktop – desktop and laptop resolutions are both only getting higher every year. And that is an indication of the underlying problem with Ubuntu:

Ubuntu sees a future where desktops and laptops are a minority, where most people are essentially consumers using a tablet. And Ubuntu is therefore, putting all its bets on that future. For people who don’t have hardware or form factor to match that future Ubuntu is moving on to, things are going to be increasingly difficult. Because of this onslaught of tablet oriented desktop experience, many people are moving to other Ubuntu variants like Kubuntu and Xubuntu, which might be the right directions for people like me to take. And I find all this as terribly sad, as I used to really like the distro.

To end my rant, I want to bring up another question that nobody in the commentators on that blog post seem to be asking:

Someone mentioned there about how is the HUD going to find out the intent of the user? If in the word app example I mentioned before, the user has selected a region of text and want to increase the font size, is he expected to search for “larger font”  or “bigger font”? Semantically there are the same, but the app will have only one of these options in the menu. So without the facility of browsing the menus, how is the user to guess what is the right variation of their intent to search for?

Mark’s reply was that (to paraphrase) “Yes, that is a valid problem, and we need to add semantic variation and fuzzy search to fix that problem“.

But the really important point to ask Mark is WHY? Why is the desktop trying to figure out how the user wants to use the app? Isn’t that the app’s job? Who is in a better position to determine the synonyms and semantically equivalent variations of the menu items – the desktop or the app? Making the desktop trying to do this on behalf of all the apps out there is the really fundamental mistake of this whole approach. It will always be doing a bit of a disservice to the app developers. All the effort put in by app developers to confirm to a menu driven world is being forced into a non-menu paradigm. Somewhere something is going to give.

Ideally, if you have apps cooperating with desktops like Unity, they should provide all the variations of their menu items. But till Ubuntu comes up with a way for apps to do that, and apps start supporting this Unity specific feature (and we all know how likely that is to happen in the near future) we are rushing into a period of extremely frustrating user experience.

(Photos by: Mark Shuttleworth, Dan Lynch, Elizabeth Krumbach)

Thankfully, there is a workaround which worked for me. Just putting it out there so that people can find about this more easily than I did (fume).
(Photo by Beate Firlinger)

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

Scary! And people called the Gmail ads intrusive!
(Photo by Janine on Flickr)

Microsoft for many years had convinced the world that, in order to get “real work” done, you needed Office.
…
Then, she explained, the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done. Android came. People got things done. All of those things that they, just a couple of years ago, were convinced they needed Office to do. They got them done without it. And thus, the truth was revealed.
…
Like the curtain finally falling from the Wizard of Oz to find just a small, frail, man pretending to be far more powerful and relevant than he really was. Microsoft’s biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done. Or anything done, really.

And that will be what ultimately kills them.
…

Via Gruber.

The original photo on the left of the western hemisphere is available on Flickr with a resolution of 8000×8000 or 64 megapixels! (link to the original, beware of the size!)
To top even that, NASA made available the second image of the eastern hemisphere on Flickr with a resolution of 11500 x 11500 or 132 megapixels! (link to the original, beware of the size!)

Credit: All photos and info from NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

A French laptop buyer has won a refund from Lenovo after a four-year legal battle over the cost of a Windows license he didn’t want. The judgment could open the way for PC buyers elsewhere in Europe to obtain refunds for bundled software they don’t want, French campaign group No More Racketware said Monday.

The first sane judgement against the fraud on consumers which has been happening for almost two decades – bundling the Windows OS with all new consumer laptops and desktops. Before others point out, let me emphasise that this doesn’t just affect Linux and other FOSS OSes, it affects Windows users as well.

Several years back, when I bought a laptop for my father, decent laptops were only available with Windows Vista on them – one of the most unusable versions of the Windows line. I wanted a Windows OS on the laptop for my dad, and I wanted it to be Windows XP, but even though Windows XP was being sold on retail at the time by Microsoft, the laptop manufacturers would force me to buy the laptop with Vista. I eventually had to shell out more money to buy a Windows XP licence and install it on the laptop.

This is pure and simple racketeering. Ostensibly, to “prevent piracy” of its OS on new hardware, Microsoft wants its OS to be preloaded on all new hardware. Of course, not any of its OS versions (even though it can be selling multiple versions of its OS at any point in time), but the “latest and greatest” version, whether the customer wants it or not.

How is this different from people paying extortion money to local thugs for their own “protection”?

Sadly, this business practice has been going on for years. While several other activities of Microsoft (and even Intel) have been subjected to anti-trust actions, the Windows OS bundling racket still affects all countries. Hopefully, France will show the way.

Even though, considering how cynical I have become of late, I won’t be holding my breath.

But no matter how small, every victory matters.

According to this post of the Software Freedom Law Center, Microsoft has recently revised it’s Windows 8 Hardware Certification requirements to lock out all alternative OSes from the ARM-based mobile devices that it ships on.

The Certification Requirements define (on page 116) a “custom” secure boot mode, in which a physically present user can add signatures for alternative operating systems to the system’s signature database, allowing the system to boot those operating systems. But for ARM devices, Custom Mode is prohibited: “On an ARM system, it is forbidden to enable Custom Mode. Only Standard Mode may be enable.” [sic] Nor will users have the choice to simply disable secure boot, as they will on non-ARM systems: “Disabling Secure [Boot] MUST NOT be possible on ARM systems.” [sic] Between these two requirements, any ARM device that ships with Windows 8 will never run another operating system, unless it is signed with a preloaded key or a security exploit is found that enables users to circumvent secure boot.

Upcoming devices running Windows 8 mobile including the increasingly popular tablets are soon going to be Windows only – that is, for example, you will not be able to run Android on them without an exploit.

But just yesterday, Qualcomm announced plans to produce Windows 8 tablets and ultrabook-style laptops built around its ARM-based Snapdragon processors. Unless Microsoft changes its policy, these may be the first PCs ever produced that can never run anything but Windows, no matter how Qualcomm feels about limiting its customers’ choices.

While someone may very well point out that because this is only restricted to mobile devices and since most folks, even most technically savvy ones rarely change the OS on their phone, the problem is the precedent this sets. Given some time of locking down the mobile platform to only run Windows, Microsoft can very well make a case to extend Secureboot to desktops that you buy as well, by giving the mobile platform experience as a “standard technical security procedure” to justify this to get around anti-trust issues.

And to reiterate this again, this will badly hurts the hardcore Windows users as well.

Microsoft’s idea is to control the OS running on the desktop, including which of their own OS will run on new hardware. So if you were not a fan of Vista and wanted to stay with Windows XP, like in the past, you will not have a choice in a similar situation in the future. For example, even if there is some widespread concern about a new Windows version in the future, Microsoft can arm-twist the hardware manufacturers to program the new desktops in the market to only work with the new OS of theirs, forcing all of their users to upgrade.

I personally feel that the point of deliberation out here is on thin ground. If you can get a magistrate’s order to get a search warrant for a house, I don’t see how that is different from a similar warrant to search your computer. The difference is that one key is physical and the other is not.

Article link

As Business Insider says it well:

Think about any other product that is so unreliable and degrades in performance with such predictable regularity that the next version will have a feature that makes it easy to WIPE IT CLEAN and start over. Is that a product you’d be super-excited to buy?

Looking forward to the future OS of choice for all the corporate IT environments out there.

To be fair, this was really my biggest request from Microsoft. Kudos for them for swallowing their ego and going ahead and giving customers what they want.