Ubuntu 12.04 - Gnome Shell or Unity?

Those of you that have read my rants about Linux in the past are probably thinking I'm a bit of a Windows fanboy. To be fair I do have a lot of experience with Windows so I'm kinda comfortable with it but I also use Linux quite a bit on servers and so I do appreciate its positive attributes. However, I never really thought Linux was ready for the mainstream desktop. It seemed to be almost there up until the point when Ubuntu released the first versions of Unity and Gnome 3 came out, then the whole thing appeared to me to take a huge step backwards. However all that may be about to change...

Posted by Daniel: 10:46, Wed 9th May 2012

Could it be Firefox not IE which holds back the Internet?

There's been a lot of complaints about Microsofts policy to not release newer browsers for older platforms, many saying this will hold back the Internet. But what is actually going on? Are there really more people on older versions of IE than other browsers?

If we look at the percentage of users of each browser which are using releases 2 or more out of date we get the following numbers:

% of Firefox users on version 5 or lower: 42.85%
% of IE users on version 7 or lower: 18.34%
% of Chrome users on version 12 or lower: 4.11%

Even if we are generous and include people on FF4 or lower (because FF7 has only recently been released) the story is still the same:

% of Firefox users on version 4 or lower: 37.32%

Even giving Firefox the benefit of the doubt you can see Firefox users are less than half as likely to upgrade from old versions than users of anything else.

This all shows that even though IE have a policy

Posted by Daniel: 11:17, Sat 1st Oct 2011

The Open Source Development Cycle Exposed

I seem to be doing this a lot recently but here's my tongue in cheek description of the open source development cycle. Hopefully you guys will find it amusing!

Step 1:

Version x of an open source project finally becomes stable enough to use. When looking at the original project plan much of the envisaged feature set has not yet been implemented and there are some niggling bugs which may be show stoppers for certain people, but for the majority it works OK (they have learnt to work around the bugs and missing features anyway). What's left to do wouldn't take long to implement but the few guys left working on the project have grown up and got real jobs so development has slowed to a crawl.

Posted by Daniel: 9:29, Mon 28th Mar 2011

My truth about Linux

I started this post out as a tongue in cheek overview of the Linux platform for the benefit of friends amusement, deliberately taking facts but displaying them in a provocative way for humorous effect. However after reading through it I felt that it was actually quite an eye opener to look at Linux from this angle so I thought I would post it on here.

Nothing said here is knowingly incorrect, its all the truth as I personally see it (to the best of my knowledge) but maybe taken ever so slightly out of its normal context to provide a different viewpoint and hopefully some humour.

I'm not aiming to start a flame war so please read this for your enjoyment rather than as a piece of documentation about Linux, and my apologies to any parties which might have innocently been trampled on during the process, such as Canonical who in reality have really done a great job of preparing the Linux desktop for the masses.

Posted by Daniel: 11:54, Fri 10th Dec 2010

The future of Linux

Over the years I've dabbled in and out of Linux and whilst I think that its a great OS, (especially for servers - I use it myself on my servers) I still personally prefer Windows on the desktop. Why? Well partly because its better the devil you know (and lets be honest all operating systems can be little devils at times) but also because up until recently Linux was lacking a bit of polish. Its starting to come on in leaps and bounds though so does it have a future?

Posted by Daniel: 17:53, Fri 3rd Sep 2010

How to grant "log on as batch job" in Windows 7 Home Premium

I just spent an hour trying to figure out this one so I thought I'd share the wisdom...

If you have been trying to schedule a task and run it as a regular user in Windows 7 you will probably have come across this...

This is due to a basic security measure implemented in all recent versions of Windows which requires users that run scheduled tasks to have a special security right. (A similar security measure is also used in the services system but when you change the user in  the services manager it automatically grants the user the right and tells you its done so.)

(Updated: 9:13, Fri 9th Jul 2010)
Posted by Daniel: 11:14, Mon 1st Mar 2010