Will Google ChromeOS compete with conventional operating systems?

Posted on November 20th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,968 views

Perhaps, but it’s too early to tell.

Earlier this year in July, Google announced on their blog that they were building a new operating system, The Google Chrome Operating System, or ChromeOS for short. Yesterday, Google announced on their blog that they are open sourcing ChromeOS and they published a whole bunch of videos to YouTube describing their vision and released their source code to the public.

Google’s idea, in a nutshell, is that they believe there is demand for an operating system that is really fast, really secure and exists purely to facilitate Internet access. All user created data is stored in the cloud, in fact on Google’s servers. All applications are web applications. So the only thing installed on the computer is the operating system. Everything else is accessed via the Internet.

Is such an operating system competition for Windows, Linux, Apple Macs?

Well, for starters, Google’s ChromeOS is not going to be designed to run on any old white box pc, like Windows and Linux are. ChromeOS is going to have custom firmware and a narrowly defined hardware specification, because that is necessary to achieve its goals of fast boot and security. Businesses which deployed ChromeOS based workstations, would have to be comfortable with storing their data on Google’s servers instead of their own, unless Google builds a ChromeOS server, but that is not currently envisaged.

So the market for ChromeOS seems to be people who are prepared to accept a machine that is very locked down, runs a limited set of applications and is tightly integrated with Google’s online services.

Personally, it doesn’t hold much appeal for me because I want to be able to play games on my PC for relaxation. Yes, it is true that a lot of what I do depends on having an Internet connection, but not everything. If my Internet connection is unavailable, I still have access to all my data, which allows me to continue developing applications, for instance. It seems to me, that ChromeOS is so tied to the Net, that if it loses it’s connection then the box running it reverts to being a giant paperweight.

If ChromeOS was developed to run on a wider range of hardware, store its data on user chosen servers and allow continued productivity if the Net connection is lost, it would be of greater interest.

UPDATE:
This Wired article (Why Google Should Cool It With Chrome OS) agrees with me and suggests that Google ChromeOS should be engineered to co-exist with other operating systems on NetBooks so that people can enjoy a hybrid experience.

Tags: ChromeOS, Google
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Suspended three times by iBurst

Posted on November 14th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,597 views

Since January 2008, I have been a subscriber of iBurst. The package I am on is called Xtreme and allows for 5GB of broadband traffic, when that limit has been reached, the speed is throttled to 64Kbps. The monthly charge for this package (including a desktop USB modem) on a 24 month contract is R639. I also subscribe to their iCall VoIP service which is R50 per month, for a total bill of R689 per month. My contract with iBurst expires on February 04 2010.

On Friday, October 24 2008 17h00 until Monday, October 27 2008 14h05, iBurst first suspended my account without contacting me first. When contacted on Friday evening, the support people at iBurst would not reinstate my account. I was told that I was in arrears and that the problem could only be attended to on Monday at the earliest. On Monday, it transpired after asking iBurst accounts department why the account was suspended, that in fact they had screwed up. We had to fax bank statements to them to prove that the subscription had been paid. Eventually they worked out that the error was wholly on their side and my account was reinstated.

Up until this day, I have never received an apology from iBurst for this suspension of my service over an entire weekend. Emails to them asking for compensation have been ignored. It is clear that iBurst doesn’t care about me, nor do they care about any of their subscribers. They do not care how much they inconvenience their customers. The lesson here is that YOU should not do business with iBurst.

On Friday July 17 until Monday July 20 2009 iBurst again suspended my account for being in arrears. The pattern repeated itself. iBurst failed to contact me to rectify the problem before it summarily suspended me. Support staff over the weekend at iBurst were wholly unable or unwilling to attend to my problem and restore my Internet access. Only on Monday once we were able to speak to the “right person” could the problem be remedied. Again my account was not in arrears. iBurst had erred again and suspended my account again without cause.

This time I didn’t bother emailing them to ask for compensation. I knew that they would ignore me again.

This past week, on Wednesday November 11 2009 after 17h00, iBurst suspended my account for the third time without contacting me first. Apparently my account was in arrears again. This time it turned out that their billing system had failed to debit September’s subscription, due wholly to an error on their part. They had put through the debit order for October and November (and received payment). It took them until November 11 to discover that September’s debit had not occurred and instead of contacting me to ask me to provide funds and authorise them to debit my account, they simply suspended my account. Because iBurst does not care if they inconvenience their customers. Contacting iBurst’s support staff after hours proved fruitless – none of them would reinstate my account.

The pattern should be clear to you by now: iBurst suspends accounts after hours, without having staff on hand who can deal with suspension queries, because iBurst doesn’t care how much they inconvenience their paying customers.

On Thursday, I was told that my account would only be reinstated once September’s subscription had been paid. Never mind that they caused this problem in the first place – that did not enter into the equation. Funds were duly provided, the debit went off, and my account was reinstated, for about an hour, then iBurst’s network went down. Support staff told me that my account was active, but their network was down. So after paying the subscription, iBurst couldn’t even deliver me service. The next day,  Friday November 13 2009, I found my service active, but again for only about an hour,  and then it went down again.

I was then told that my service was offline because I had exhausted my bandwidth for the month! While this was true (I have indeed used up my 5GB quota), my Xtreme account, which is the second highest account, is still entitled to remain connected at the throttled rate of 64Kbps.

If you are on a Giga package or higher, your service will be slowed down (throttled) to a maximum of 64 kbps once your cap is reached. – iBurst’s web site

I was told that an iBurst representative would call me back, but that never happened. Eventually, my account was reactivated without anyone calling me to apologise or notify me.

All these calls to iBurst’s support come at a price – iBurst does not have a toll free customer support line. You have to call 087 720 7200 and wait in a queue, while your telephone air time is eaten away. All because they screwed up.

iBurst is just as bad as Telkom, if not worse. At least with Telkom, you can call their support for free.

As I said above, my contract with iBurst expires on February 04 2010. At that time, I intend taking my business to Neotel. I hope that they turn out to be winners.

UPDATE:

Nov 14 2009 19h30: After writing this blog post, my iBurst Internet connection failed again in the early hours of Saturday morning. When I called iBurst support I was again informed that I had no access because my bandwidth was exhausted. The support personnel could not be made to understand that despite this, I was still entitled to remain connected at the throttled rate. They simply refused to help me. So in desperation to get their help, I added 3000MB to my account at a cost of R499. This I did via the iBurst.co.za web site which is the only site my iBurst connection could access. I again called Support and they were just simply unable to help me. This is because iBurst deploys support personnel who don’t know how to do their jobs.

At around 17h00 today I tried again to access the Internet and saw that I was still offline. Eventually, after numerous calls to iBurst support, someone called Jacky called me back and told me that she had reset my account by suspending it and then reactivating it. She asked me to switch my computer and iBurst modem off, bring it back up and then try logging in again. This worked and I am now reconnected. However, I do not consider this to be acceptable service. iBurst completely screwed up my connection this past week and I have been offline for most of this week as a result, which means that I have been completely unable to do my work, which is all conducted online. Furthermore iBurst does not provide a toll free support line so getting their mistakes corrected costs me a lot of wasted phone time. Finally iBurst does not train their technicians to know how to do their jobs. I was incorrectly told that I needed to purchase more bandwidth. If only one person at iBurst knows how to fix things, then they are doing it wrong.

My conclusion remains the same – I refuse to put myself through the wringer with iBurst for another month longer than the contract I have with them says I must.

UPDATE:

Email to both Sandra Smit and Shaun Green of iBurst asking for compensation have been ignored.

Lest you think I am the only person afflicted with an iBurst connection, here’s another South African blogger who received similar treatment. It seems to me that South Africans cannot run a First World quality Internet or telecommunications company. Maybe we’re just too pathetic to do anything right?

Tags: iBurst, Neotel
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British Burglar says, “I’m ready for my closeup now”

Posted on November 9th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,323 views

What would you do if you were wanted for breaking and entering and the newspapers published a ratty old mugshot of you that the police had provided them?

Thank your lucky stars that you no longer resemble your pic and go down to the local for a celebratory pint?

OR

Decide this will not do and send in a more recent cheesy snapshot of yourself standing brazenly in front of a police van so that everyone will know how handsome you really are?

A vain Welsh burglar from Swansea chose the latter option. Police have thanked him for his help in tracking him down and the South Wales Evening Post published his updated profile pic on its front page.

I think right about now is a good time for him to turn himself in and decide on a new career choice, because any guidance councilor could tell him that being a career criminal is not going to pay out for him.

via Reuters.

Tags: Crime
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Windows 7 is fantastic!

Posted on November 7th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,900 views

Like most avid computer users, the whole concept of trashing my computer and reinstalling everything from scratch is not something I relish doing because it is a task fraught with many technical difficulties that could easily leave one without a functional computer, which would be a major disaster, of course. So when Windows 7 was released on October 22 2009, I was in two minds about whether or not to upgrade to it.

Like many technically-minded persons, I have a long history of doing Windows installs, both for myself and for my customers, and let me tell you, Windows 7 is the least painful install I have ever done.

Back in 1994, before Windows 95 came out (in October 1995), I was running Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which was  really unstable and a very unreliable operating system to use. It frequently embarrassed presenters doing PowerPoint presentations on it at conferences, because it would often terminate with a GPF (General Protection Fault) in the middle of their presentation, usually at the point where they were boasting about how robust their new software was. The alternative at that time was Windows NT workstation 3.51, which was better in many ways. However, the biggest obstacle to running Windows NT was it’s huge memory requirement – 16MB! Okay, today that is a joke, but back in 1994, 16MB of memory was expensive, and only “high end CAD stations” had so much memory *rolls eyes*.

By the time Windows 95 came out, Windows NT 4.0 was also on the scene and there was some confusion about whether to run Win95 or WinNT. I eventually sided with Win95 and then later Win98SE because it boasted plug-and-play, a feature which only made it into the NT line in Windows 2000. Windows 98SE served as my operating system till October 2005 when I finally decided it was worth my trouble to upgrade to WinXP. I was supposed to have migrated to Windows 2000 in 2001 when I purchased a new PC from Siltek Dynamic Distribution (shortly before they went bust) which came with Win2000. However, Win2000 never worked on the supplied hardware. It continually froze the system and I was forced to downgrade to Win98SE in order to use the system.

In 2005, in order to install WinXP, I had to buy a new machine, because the hardware of 2001 was not good enough to run XP. I purchased an entry level Intel Celeron machine from LightEdge (which has also subsequently gone bust), which suffered continually from an overheating problem which would cause the PC to just turn itself off, often right in the middle of something important. In July 2008 its motherboard finally gave out, and I purchased a new Foxconn 45CMX motherboard, 1GB DDR2 667Mhz RAM, 160GB SATA2 HDD and Intel Celeron 440 2.0Ghz processor from Sahara. Sahara assembled the components for me. This system, although Celeron based, is fully capable of running Windows 7, both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

One might think that a mere Intel Celeron processor is not powerful enough to run Windows 7, but if you think that, then you are wrong. In fact, Windows 7 runs faster on this hardware than WinXP did. With 1GB of RAM, the 32 bit version of Windows 7 can be installed. If you want to install the 64 bit version, you just need another 1GB of RAM, which costs about R250. To install the 64 bit version, your processor must support 64 bit operation. There are two utilities you can use to check out whether your hardware is up to scratch: Belarc Advisor and Windows 7 upgrade advisor.

I never installed Windows Vista. After hearing about all the problems people were experiencing with Vista, I felt it really wasn’t worth the trouble to switch from XP, which was doing the job well enough.

In March this year, I purchased an external 1TB USB hard drive, which I use to store all my data on. At the time, WinXP was installed on a 20GB IDE drive, and I wanted to see if it would run any better on a faster SATA2 drive, so I did a reinstall of XP on the 160GB drive I had purchased last year from Sahara. However, something went wrong with the installation. I’m not sure what, but there was something about the new hardware configuration that XP didn’t handle well and some parts of XP remained broken (I managed to fix almost all the issues, but not all) until last Friday when I decided to install Windows 7.

The installation of Windows 7 was much easier than I anticipated. I expected to hit numerous driver issues, but I only had one (with getting my iBurst Desktop USB modem installed). Unlike with installing WinXP, Windows 7 didn’t ask me to feed it a driver disk for each bit of hardware in the system – Windows 7 came equipped to handle all of it (with the exception of my iBurst modem).

Before installing Windows 7, I knew the most important thing to me was that my Internet work right away. So a week before doing the install, I checked for drivers for my iBurst modem on iBurst’s web site, but did not find one for Windows 7 at the time. They only had the usual 32 bit WinXP drivers, a 64 bit driver and a 32 bit Vista driver. I downloaded all of them, just to be sure. They now have a 32 bit Windows 7 driver available for download, which is the correct one to use. I managed to get my iBurst modem working with the Vista driver, just to get online and then I got the Win7 version. The XP drivers do not work with Win7.

One of the questions I had to answer before installing Windows 7 was whether to install the 32 bit version or the 64 bit version. To get the full benefit of a 64 bit operating system, the software you use should be compiled to that platform. When I checked, I saw that there exist no 64 bit versions of Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome. There is a hacked 64 bit Firefox version, but no official 64 bit release. It seems likely that within the next 12 months, a lot more 64 bit software will be released, but right now there is still a dearth of 64 bit applications. 64 bit drivers are also scarce. Not every bit of hardware has a 64 bit driver, and if you are the owner of such hardware it means that you will not be able to use it with the 64 bit version of Windows 7. At this time, Linux has more support for the 64 bit platform, mainly because most of the software can simply be recompiled for the targeted platform. Doing that on Windows is only possible if you have access to the driver source code and the requisite compilers.

So my personal recommendation, after doing a lot of reading around, is that the 32 bit version is probably the “right version” to install for most people at this time. The nice thing about getting Windows 7 Ultimate edition is that it includes DVDs for both the 32 bit and 64 bit editions. So when my favourite web browsers are available for the 64 bit platform, I will be interested in giving 64 bit computing a try. But I will probably only do that on future new hardware. Without a doubt, the future of personal computing lies on the 64 bit platform and five years from now, new systems will install 64 bit operating systems without a second thought about it. If you do install Windows 7 64 bit, you will not be able to run any 16 bit software, which includes old DOS and Win3.x apps.

WinXP cannot be upgraded, so to install Windows 7, I booted from the 32 bit Windows 7 DVD. The installation process allowed me to delete the partitions on my 160GB SATA2 HDD that contained my WinXP installation and then recreate them for use by Windows 7. The whole installation process was fast, lasting about 20 minutes. It basically did everything and only asked me a few questions, such as my username, computer name, password to create, what country I lived in and what hard disk to install Win7 on.

If you only have one hard disk, upgrading will be painful, because you will have no choice but to back up all your data to CDs or DVDs before you trash your system and start over. A two disk system is much less hassle because then you just use a smaller hard disk for the operating system, and a larger one for your user data. A 1TB or 1.5TB hard disk for user data is a good option. I recommend an external USB hard disk for data, because you can take it anywhere with you.

So once its all installed what do you get that’s so fantastic?

Essentially, you get a very polished operating system that just looks great and works well from day one. Windows 7 seems to be on top of things from the start. It knows what hardware you have, knows what drivers to install to make it work and then gets everything setup right, so from the moment you first start using it, you don’t have to spend hours tweaking it.

For instance, WinXP didn’t know what to do with my Samsung SyncMaster 24″ LCD display, nor did it have the drivers to make my RADEON ATI HD3450 1GB display card work right. So I had to install drivers for both the display card and the LCD display panel and then with those great specs, XP thought it would be great to default to a screen resolution of 800×600. Like duh. Nobody installs a 24″ display to view the world in 800×600 resolution. Windows 7 has the sophistication to know that a screen like that should default to 1920×1080 resolution, with 32bit pixel colour. And it turned on the fancy new Aero desktop, without me having to tell it what refresh frequency to use etc.

Out of the box, Win7 has great support for multimedia applications. If you have a sound card and a DVD writer installed (like most systems do these days), you can start listening to music, watching DVDs, managing your library of movies and music without having to scramble for software disks, because Win7 installs both Windows Media Player and Windows Media Centre for you.

Navigating your hard disk with Windows Explorer is much easier than the old My Computer interface. I found the bread crumb navigation bar really effective, because you can jump back up the directory (folder) tree with one click. The bread crumb navigation style is found everywhere, even in applications, and in the Control Panel. The Control Panel interface is slick. It hides complexity from the non-technical user, but easily allows more advanced users to access the finer details.

Everywhere you look, you see enhancements – a better interface, an easier way of doing things, more eye candy. The built-in Calculator mini-app, for instance, now has options for programmers and statisticians in addition to the usual standard and scientific. I like the Sticky Notes app. Just write a short note to myself and stick it on my desktop. I like the built-in Chess game. I like how they have a desktop theme for South Africans which displays a gallery of photos of locations from around South Africa, including my home city, Cape Town. I like that I can go browse for more eye-candy laden themes online. When you have a huge LCD display, you can treat it like your very own personalised window on a world of beautiful art and natural beauty from all over. My personal preferences are for photos of beautiful landscapes. Windows 7 helps me to indulge this fetish.

Running on the same hardware, Windows 7 offers a more compelling user experience than Windows XP. Nevertheless, I will be installing an extra 1GB of RAM into my system (for a total of 2GB). Windows 7 will make good use of it. Windows XP would look at the extra RAM and wonder what to use it for.

So if you’re wondering if it’s worth it to switch to Windows 7, then my conclusion is a resounding YES. This is a good operating system, the best version of Windows to date. If you like using Windows, you will love Windows 7.

UPDATE:

Microsoft has two useful utilities for businesses wanting to deploy Windows 7 across their network. Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit and Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5.

Tags: Windows 7
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Is Eskom the new Telkom?

Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,064 views

Many South Africans are beginning to think so. Like telecommunications, electricity is a basic need for every South African. Even those without an electricity supply themselves, depend on the goods and services that are produced with electricity.

Eskom has already hit South Africans with two massive price hikes: 27% last year and 31.3% this year. Earlier this month, on October 14, Eskom CEO, Jacob Maroga, announced that he wants a 45% increase each year for the next 3 years. This outrageous demand has led to widespread shock and anger.

Today, it is rumoured that the board of Eskom has asked Maroga to resign. Could this be the beginning of a new more rational response to South Africa’s energy crisis?

In September 2009, the Mail & Guardian reported that the reason why South Africa experienced massive power outages and load shedding in January 2008 was because Eskom had totally bungled their management of coal. Furthermore, in an Eskom report dated mid 2007, this problem had already been reported to Maroga by an American consultant, Susan Olsen, but no action was taken to prevent what turned out to be a major national disaster and embarrassment for South Africa the following year.

As Harry Truman famously used, the buck stops at Maroga’s desk and it seems that that buck is now kicking the crap out of him. We can hope.

FURTHER READING:
Eskom board asks CEO Maroga to resign
Eskom board asks CEO Maroga to resign – report
Eskom’s proposed hike ‘a serious shock to economy’
Cosatu outraged over Eskom’s proposed 45% hike
CEO scores R5m amid new claims of incompetence

Tags: Eskom, Jacob Maroga
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