Like the file format question, more of my initial apprehension about the Kindle are falling. Seems like it may be more open the suspected. How long, then, before it is hacked to open it up and away from Amazon’s captive service? To be fair, they may provide mechanisms I am not anticipating to load your own content.

Still, the price point and the EVDO deal seem targeted more at lock in. That and that the blogs supported do not seem to be through standard RSS subscription, rather through some Amazon jiggery pokery. Four hundred seems a lot to pay to try to hack what otherwise might be a suitable device. Well, that and the lack of WiFi that I already discussed.

Dose anyone know if there is an SD format WiFi card?

Jeff Atwood has another one of his infuriating pieces up. It is a comparison between installing an application bundle on a Macintosh and running the typical installer on Windows.

He quickly gets hung up on the number of manual steps involved in installing an application bundle and wonders why the convention on the Mac is not to use an installer. Sure, going be number of steps, the Mac is longer. I don’t think that makes it more complex or harder. And it completely misses a critical difference between an application bundle (which is not unique to the Mac by the way) and a typical Windows application.

The point of an application bundle is that it is self contained. No external pieces that must be set up just so in order for the application to run. Delete the bundle and the application is gone. No linger registry entries. Yeah, there may be some preference files but they are on the file system, in a standard location, where they can easily be found, identified and discarded if desired. And safely, too.

Application bundles are also usually agnostic of where they are installed. You can put them on your desktop, in your own folder or wherever you find them easiest to use. Granted, this seems to be something even seasoned Mac users miss. A very common issue I have seen with newer Mac users is they leave the applications in the disc image file, even if they keep it in their dock. Launching such an application bundle from the dock still just works, though, opening and mounting the disc image to get at the bundle. I’ll admit that I did this once or twice when I got my very first Mac.

Sure, Mac developers could use the very robust installer that is bundled with the OS X. Some kinds of software, like low level libraries and kernel extensions, do indeed use the installer to make sure all the pieces parts end up just so. The uninstaller could use some work, but the tools are there to build it out. From the command line, you can easily audit where all the parts of a .PKG file went. And as with application bundles, usually, it is safe to just go ahead and manually delete those files.

The installer, though, adds a speed bump to that assumption that the bundles and files are safely user modifiable. The choice to distribute Mac applications as bundles in disc images re-inforces the feeling that these are meant to be safely handle by the user at the expense of a few more steps.

Speaking of those steps for a moment what irks me is that the example Atwood references is not even typical. Most developers do not compress their disc images, so the silliness about digging out the image file is rarely an issue. More and more developers are also adding symbolic links in the disc image with a nice background to the folder that simplifies the process even further without preventing more advanced users for dragging the bundle off to a different, preferred location.

How many horror stories have you heard over the years of a Windows user trying to move or remove an application and disastrously harming their PC? There is no real reason this must be so other than convention and inertia. The Windows installer may be one click, but it is also a black box that band aids a process and end product that most Windows developers do not want the user touching.

Application bundles may seem “harder” to install to the uninitiated but re-inforces that the bundle is merely another kind of file that the user may safe move, remove or copy just like any other kind of file without worry.

And if you want to play a numbers game, how long does a typical setup.exe take to run compared to copying a bundle? All you have to do with the bundle is copy it. You get the same progress meter as any other kind of file copy. With an installer, other steps may be performed and you are limited to the feedback the developer chose to give. Is it copying files? Which ones and where? What does it mean when it says it is configuring?

Mac is only one example of different ways to get new software onto a system. Taking the installer forward to a more logical conclusion you arrive at the package management systems available as an integral part of Linux distributions. Wonder why Jeff didn’t take a swipe at say Ubuntu’s typical software installation? Nice golden hammer you have there.

Slashdot has the story, basically an announcement from AMD’s VP of sales and marketing following on from their acquisition of ATI. I have a distinct recollection of compiling ATI Radeon drivers under Debian, though, from a few years back. Weren’t ATI drivers available in some sort of source form, already? Were the drivers not comprehensive to all chipsets or were they functionally limited in some way?

Still, such an explicit commitment can only be good news. Too bad it is in a market that has basically only two players for discrete products and two more for integrated ones. It would be nice to see this happen elsewhere in the peripherals market where poor driver support is being felt much more acutely.

Let’s be honest, even though most of the desirable video drivers are closed, they work pretty well. I have an NVidia card at work and the driver has always worked supremely well. Sure, having in open form is morally and theoretically better, but I don’t feel terribly limited in my choice of GPU and display under Linux, today, versus say camera, scanner or printer support.

This is pretty preposterous. It is made worse by the fact that there was no indication when she bought the laptop of how installing Linux would affect her warranty support. Not that advance notice would have made it excusable, but it certainly would have affected her buying decision. According to the article, it looks like someone at HP is trying to help the consumer, here, but on an exceptional basis.

This doesn’t seem that exceptional to me. Sure, there are some support issues that HP cannot be expected to deal with when a user runs an after market OS, but those would seem to be clearly separable from issues of defective hardware manufacture. Even if the edge cases, like improper ACPI conflicting and causing battery damage for instance, at least being more clear up front would do everyone a favor.

I am simultaneously surprised and not by this piece over on EcoGeek. I am vicariously proud of Linux. I am not so sure I buy the competitive downside the article hints at if we all ran Linux. No doubt the slower obsolescence would alter the competitive nature of the PC business but I doubt it would have a huge, adverse impact. Perhaps we would have seen peripherals, like digital cameras, mature more swiftly as a consequence.

I hope there is a live CD for this release. As much as I like my Macs, I do get occasional pangs about lock in. It would be nice to have a solution waiting in the wings if Apple ever crosses my admittedly high threshold for shenanigans. I hope this also means they will sort USB and FireWire device support, since it isn’t just the end user applications that are critical for editing. If I cannot easily get video off of a DV camera or sound from an audio interface or mixer, well, then its not much of an alternative.

I hardly call this compelling proof, especially since there has not been any follow up since the posting. Still, I still hold that it is well in the realm of feasibility, it just wants for someone willing to do it. And possible have to fend of cease and desist. Or worse.

I was originally more optimistic, based on how quickly Linux was up and running on the latest generation iPods. But it occurred to me that despite the attraction of the wifi hardware, the ad-hoc DRM may make this a bit more of a snarl. Not technically but that the labels who are partially responsible for this scheme and in a later article that shows the DRM is even more crippled would undoubtedly not understand who running Linux is non-infringing and not a threat.

I think this may be the only good news I’ve read about the Zune, so far. I wonder what the Zune program manager will feel if folks buying Zunes just to install Linux ends up being a large share of whatever sales they manage to make.

I’ve stayed away form the Linux distros for the iPod because, at the moment, I’m pretty OK with the Apple software chain supporting my iPod. It is nice to know that I could switch away, if need be. The fact that this is possible is the only fact that would open up getting a Zune for any serious consideration.

The undertone of the article seems to be speculation about what the open source community could do better with the Zune’s wireless hardware than Microsoft’s initial effort. While there are any number of fascinating and fun possibilities, I doubt this is going to enable purchasing new music via the device’s wireless interface.

Now, a Songbird port to an embedded Linux distro running on a Zune would be an interesting little project, indeed.

I mentioned the Month of Kernel bugs during the security alerts in my last podcast. This interview with the project head, LMH, fills in quite a bit more information. Definitely worth a read.

Not hard to find much more details, just about everywhere. I’ve got a link to the story on The Register. From what I’ve gathered, Resier had been estranged from his wife for some time and there was some contention over the kids. This is an uncomfortable reminder that the technologists we read about, admire and whose work we use are human, too, and subject to the same problems, hassles and frailties.

Some are already speculating over the future of his file system. I guess it is a good thing, at the risk of sounding callous, that there are competing projects, like ext3 and XFS.

This case was brought by the GPL Violations Project against D-Link who claimed that the GPL is not legally binding. The project has been pretty successful so far, the slashdot story has links to their past successes, both in court and settlements.

When I ran my own mail server, I enjoyed running Postfix. It is highly configurable and quite capable. I am not the biggest fan of RBLs, which this article mentions, among other techniques. I was please, though, to see the article really focuses much more on taking advantage of Postfix’s advanced configuration than relying on RBLs and the like. The initial point of the article is that really solely on filters, like SpamAssassin, can be a bit to CPU intensive for high volume servers. I think the techniques discussed are a great example of defense in depth, a technique of which I am particular fan.

Stern’s rant is bombastic and monomaniacal, at best, but there is a kernel of a point with which I can agree. It seems that OSS should be able to genuinely improve faster than the rate at which most projects actually seem to do so. You do have wonder a little that the lack of a direct fiduciary consequence may take away some of the driving need to improve the user experience. Still, I generally prefer open source and free software to proprietary. I do have to admit to having a handful of must-have, smaller commercial applications for which I just haven’t found compelling free or open replacements.

From Digg:

Microsoft has hired one of the key figures behind a popular distribution of Linux in order to educate its in-house developers about open source.

read more | digg story

Please, Gentoo is so rice. I would have more respect for the story if a Debian maintainer or RedHat ex-employee were the one Microsoft hired. But Gentoo?! Come on.